Bill Kelly: I wrote this one summer in the late 1970s, shortly after deMohrenschildt died. I don't remember the sources, but I think it stands up well today. Will post Part II when I have a chance.
GEORGE DEMOHRENSCHILDT
PART I
Volume XII, Section 111 of the House Select Committee on
Assassinations (HSCA) Reports is labeled “George DeMohrenschildt.” It is
divided into a forward, six sections on his background, a chronology of
important dates in his life and a 246 page manuscript DeMohrenschildt wrote
detailing his association with Lee Harvey Oswald. The manuscript –called “I’m a
Patsy! I’m a Patsy!” maintains Oswald was innocent of the assassination and
framed as the fall guy, just as he claimed.
The published report on DeMohrenschildt, submitted by Staff
Counsel Ms. Surell Brady is incomplete (p. 47-63), seemingly prepared from
published material rather than research, field investigations or government
files.
One significant item from intelligence files, indicates
DeMohrenschildt met with US Army intelligence officer Sam Kail while visiting Washington
DC . Kail had been stationed at the U.S.
Embassy in Havana at the time
Castro took power. He was contacted by Antonio Veciana Blanche at the request
of his case officer “Maurice Bishop.” DeMohrenschildt’s own visit to Cuba
not mentioned except in his manuscript.
The report by Ms. Brady ends with DeMohrenschildt and Oswald
visiting Admiral Chester Bruton, the significance of which is not elaborated on
and Bruton’s job with Collins Radio is not mentioned in Brady’s report.
Nor is there any mention in the HSCA reports as to whether
the committee found or tried to locate DeMohrenschildt’s government report on
his 1961 walking tour of Central America , or the
accompanying log book and film of that expedition, which arrived at the Guatemala
camp where Cubans bound for the Bay of Pigs were being
trained.
John Mecom is mentioned in the chronology and his manuscript
as one of DeMohrenschildt’s employers, but he is not mentioned again. From what
I understand, Mecom, whose son owned the New Orleans Saints NFL football team, was
on the board of directors of a New Orleans bank with Leon Trujaque, who
employed a teenage Lee Harvey Oswald as an import agent and delivery boy on the
docks. I find it interesting that years before they were to meet, in 1957, both
Oswald and DeMohrenschildt worked for men who sat on the board of the same
bank.
In the course of the HSCA public hearings Jacqueline Hess, a
committee researcher, asked about the “Strange Deaths Study,” told the
committee that DeMohrenschildt’s death was the subject of a “great
investigative effort,” but there is no mention of this great investigative
effort among the published reports of the committee.
GEORGE DEMOHRENSCHILDT
George DeMohrenschildt was described as a self-centered,
arrogant, but highly polished professional as well as an intelligent and
individualistic person with varied interest.
He is best remembered as a close friend and mentor to Lee
Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of President John F. Kennedy.
Born in Mozyr , Byelorussia
in 1911, George was the son of Sergi Alexander Von Mohrenschildt, the Minsk
Province representative of the
landowners to the Tsar. Byelo means “white” and the people from this area of
the Ukraine are
known as “White Russians,” many of them related to the nobility of Russia
and Europe . The term “White Russians” was also used to
identify those who fought the communist “Red Army” during the civil war that
followed the revolution of 1917.
Besides being the Minsk
Province representative to the
Tsar, Sergi Von Mohrenschildt held the title of “Marshall of Mobility of Minsk
Province,” and was a descendant of Russian royalty and was said to be of
Prussian, Polish, Swedish and Austrian royal blood. He was probably related to
Prince DeMohrny, heir of Nepoleon and related to Nicholas. George named his
daughter Alexandra, after the daughter of the Tsar.
As a youth, George lived in Minsk ,
Moscow and St.
Petersburg (Leningrad ),
where the Bolshevik Revolution began and eventually resulted in the
assassination of the Tsar and his family and the imprisonment of his ministers.
George’s uncle Ferdinand Von Mohrenschildt was a first secretary under the Tsar
and served as an officer in the White Russian Army.
George’s father Sergi Von Mohrenschildt, besides his
official titles, was director of the rich Nobel oil fields in Baku ,
Azerbaydzhan, on the Caspian sea , 100 miles north of Iran
and 300 miles east of Turkey .
According to the Encyclopedia Britantica, “The independent
republic of Azerbaydzhan was formed in May 1918, it’s capitol being at Gandyha
until Baku, which had been under the control of the communist council, was
captured with the help of the Turkish army in 1918….In April 1920 Axerbaydzhan
was invaded by the Red Army and the government surrendered to the communists
and made part of the Soviet Union the same month. The oil fields were
appropriated by the Soviets and the economy of the republic greatly developed…”
The Russians, Byelorussians and Ukranians make up only 10%
of the population of the province and they are primarily located at Baku
because of the oil fields. George’s father Sergi worked for Michael Breitman,
who fled to the French colony of Haiti ,
while Sergi was imprisoned by the communists but then released and in an
amazing turn of events, was made the director of the Soviet department of
agriculture for Minsk Province .
Sergi’s other son, George’s brother Dimitri, was described
as a “ferocious anti-communist” and was imprisoned as a spy, allegedly as an
agent of Poland .
Using his political muscle, Sergi arranged for him to be exchanged for another
prisoner, much like the spy swap that returned Francis Gary Powers, the CIA ’s
U2 pilot shot down over the Soviet Union .
In July 1918, White Army Admiral A.V. Kolchak had
established a counter-revolutionary government in Omsk ,
Siberia , on the Trans-Siberian rail line. The Russian
royal family had unsuccessfully prepared to escape by way of the railroad,
which was controlled by the White Russians. Jean LeGron DeMohrenschildt,
George’s fourth and last wife, was born in Harbin, China, the last stop on the
Trans-Siberian railroad, which her father was the director of, and responsible
for the transport of over 100,000 White Russian refugees who fled the
revolution.
Peter Gregory, the first member of the White Russian
community in Dallas to meet Lee
Harvey Oswald upon is return from the Soviet Union , was
born in Siberia where the provincial White Russian
government was established.
In 1919, the US State Department sent Gen. William “Wild
Bill” Donovan to Siberia to report on the situation
there. William Stevenson, in “A Man Called Intrepid” wrote, “Bill Donovan, who
believed that a free society could only survive with an efficient intelligence
service, had been sent to Siberia in 1919 to assess the
beleaguered White Russians. He applied a rule of good intelligence: his report
was free from personal prejudice, he reported from revolution-torn Russia
to the state department that anti-communist forces were corrupt and divided.
‘We can prevent a shooting war,’ he wrote, ‘only if we take the initiative to
win the subversive war.’”
Donovan was sent to Europe in 1920 on
a private fact finding mission financed by the Rockefeller Foundation.
In the early 1920s, Sergi Von Mohrenschildt was imprisoned
again, this time for opposing the communist campaign against religion.
According to one report, “The Russian Orthodox Church, which
had a privileged status under the old regime, was extremely hostile to the
Bolshevik revolution….issued a call to organize in defense of the church, for
‘the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.’”
In the early 1920s Sergi Von Mohrenschildt was arrested a
second time for opposing the campaign against religion, which occurred at the
same time the Soviet Union was at war with Poland. As the Soviets began to
confiscate church property and wealth, Sergi escaped from jail and fled with
his family to Poland .
At the age of ten in Poland ,
young George was enrolled in an exclusive military academy founded by Napoleon
where he learned to ride and play polo as well as command a cavalry regiment.
The hero of the exiled White Russians at this time was Boris
Sovinkov, “the mad bomber,” who started the Social
Revolutionary Terrorist
Center , which specialized in
assassination and sabotage against the communists.
Many White Russians remained behind however, and using what
was left of the Russian Orthodox Church as an intelligence network, they
infiltrated high into the Soviet bureaucratic structure, including the military,
especially the navy. By 1924 the organized resistance broke down and the
communists took over complete control.
That same year in the United
States , J. Edgar Hover formed the General
Intelligence Division of the Justice Department, which used the Tzarist
Russians in tracing the Bolshevicks during the Red Scare and “Palmer Raids” of
that era. (See: The FBI Nobody Knows). The General Intelligence Division and
their files would later be reorganized as Division Five of the FBI.
At the same time in Poland ,
Sergi Von Mohrenschildt “made deals for land and money that permitted the
family to live in the style to which they were accustomed.”
George served as an officer in the Polish cavalry and
attended a Belgium
business school and learned the French language at a private school where he
also studied “consular science” for the diplomatic service. At the University
of Liege, Netherlands, he received a Phd in international commerce in 1928,
doing his thesis on U.S.
economic interest in Latin America .
In 1930 the National Alliance of Solidarist (NTS) was
founded by a group of émigrés from Belgrade , Yugoslavia .
Through an underground network of White Russian and East-European anti-communists,
including the Russian Orthodox Church and the NTS, a quietly efficient network
was formed called “Nightingale,” which had succeeded in planting and recruiting
agents within the USSR, particularly in the military and state security. The
Nazis later accepted the Solidarists because of their ideological proximity to
fascism.
The White Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia was an
extension of the Russian Orthodox Church inside Russia ,
which was a tool of the Tsar until suppressed by the Soviets, and used to
recruit anti-Communist spies inside the state, and later received a subsidy
from the CIA .
George DeMohrenschildt’s fourth wife, Jean LeGron, was born
in Harbon , China ,
in Manchuria , near the Russian border, and after dancing
in nightclubs in Shanghai ,
emigrated to New York city , where
she danced under the name “Fomenko” at the historic Rainbow Room. Her two
brothers also came to America
around the same time, one an employee of Howard Hughes and the other ostensibly
for the CIA .
The same year George and Dimitri Von Mohrenschildt came to New
York , probably from Belgium ,
with $10,000 in cash. They rented a house on Long Island
and Dimitri got a job as a translator and foreign language examiner with the
Bureau of Censorship. George acted as an importer of women’s sportswear and
apparel, and probably met Jean, his future wife, who besides being a dancer was
also a designer of women’s sportswear.
The garment district of New York city was also the
birthplace of the relationship between Mafia dons Lucky Luciano and Meyer
Lansky, who tied up the military uniform contracts shortly before the outbreak
of World War II.
Before the war began George started working as a sales agent
for a French perfume company (Chevalier-Guarde) and actively worked with Pierre
Fraiss, who worked for the Vichy French Nazi collaborationists. Vichy
is a French resort town famous for its spas used by Caesar as well as Napoleon.
George DeMohrenschildt later admitted that he worked for
French Intelligence during the war through Pierre Fraiss, chief of export for a
French company that handled the purchase of oil for “French interests,” which
ostensibly included Nazi Germany. Fraiss frequently traveled to Algeria
and Morocco as
well as the French Caribbean islands, arranging for oil to be purchased from U.S.
owned companies (Standard Oil of NJ) in Venezuela
and Mexico .
[BK Notes: Alan Dulles was criticized by Arthur Goldberg
(OSS) for benefiting financially by the rise of the Nazis in Germany
-]
In New York in
1939 George began to sell insurance for one of John MacArthur’s – (brother to
the general) companies. The president of another John MacArthur’s companies
later helped finance one of Jack Ruby’s nightclubs in Dallas .
Both Oswald’s brother Robert, and his mother Margrette, sold
insurance in New Orleans and New
York , while Ruth Paine’s father was a chief officer
of a major insurance conglamorate.
While selling insurance in New York Barron George Von
Mohrenschildt, as he was known at the time, met Mrs. Janet Lee (Bouvier) Auchincloss,
mother of Jackie Bouvier Kennedy Onasis, a acquaintance that would last over
the years. They met in the summer of 1931 and probably spent time at
Hammersmith Farm, which the Auchincloss family recently sold to a group that
plans to make an historical museum. Jackie’s older sister, (Lee Radzwill?)
married an exiled Polish nobleman who knew DeMohrenschildt and they may have
attended school together.
After the assassination George DeMohrenschildt wrote Janet:
c/o American Embassy
Dear Janet:
….May I ask you to express my deepest sympathy to your
daughter and tell her that both my brother and I will always remember her as a
charming little girl from East Hampton . So many sorrows
have been ruining her young life.
Since we lived in
Dallas permanently last year and
before, we had the misfortune to have met Oswald and especially his wife Marina
sometime last fall. Both my wife and I tried to help poor Marina who could not
speak any English, was mistreated by her husband; she and the baby were
malnourished (sic) and sickly. We took them to the hospital.
Sometime last fall
we heard that Oswald had beaten his wife cruelly, so we drove to their
miserable place and forcibly took Marina and the child away from the character.
Then he threatened me and my wife, but I did not take him seriously. Marina
stayed with the family of a childless Russian refugees for a while, keeping her
baby, but finally decided to return to her husband. Somehow then we lost
interest in the Oswalds. It is really a shame that such crimes occur in our
times and in our country. But there is so much jealousy for success – and the
late president was successful in so many domains – and there is so much desire
for publicity on the part of all shady characters that assassinations are bound
to occur. Better precautions should have been taken.
Remember our
discussion one day on the plane from Dallas
to Washington ? We spoke of
criminal children and of the terrible problem of delinquency in the South.
Oswald is just an expression (of) that cancer which is eating American youth.
You will excuse
this rambling letter but I was just sitting in my office thinking of the
strange fate which made me know Jackie when she was a little girl – and which
made me also know the assassin (or presumable assassin) his wife and child. And
your daughter has been of such help to the Cystic Fibrosis Research Foundation
– which we had started in Texas
several years ago. She was an honorary chairman of the Foundation.
I hope that
Marina and her children (I understand she has two now) will not suffer too
badly throughout their lives and that the stigma will not inflect the innocent
children. Somehow, I still have a lingering dobut nothwithstanding all the evidence
of Oswald’s guilt.
I have just
received a letter from my bother (Dimitri) and he also recalls of our
friendship with you and extends his deepest sympathy to you and your daughter….
Please accept my
feelings of respect and consideration.
Sincerely
G. deMohrenschildt
(signed)
Dimitri, who at the time George met Janet Auchencloss, got a
job with the War Department and worked under John J. McCloy.
George traveled south for a period in 1939 and lived in New
Orleans , getting a job in the oil industry. A letter
from George Reyer, chief of Police, New Orleans ,
La. Dated July 29, 1939 advised “Von Mohrenschildt has been
residing in the city since March 1,
1939 .’ He was enroute to Columbia
and Venezuela .
In Mexico ,
DeMohrenschildt was taken into custody with Rodrick MacAuthor and accused of
being a spy.
GEORGE DEMOHRENSCHILDT Part 2
In 1939, while on a cross continental trek, George Von
Mohrenschildt and Rodrick MacArthur were taken into custody by Mexican
authorities, suspected of being spies because of their interest in uranium
resources and evicted from the country after protests from the American
embassy.
From Mexico ,
DeMohrenschildt went to Venezuela
where Jean DeMinel had taken up residence to take care of the Schullemberger
Company business there.. DeMinel had escaped Russia
shortly after the revolution and went to France
where he married into the wealthy Schulmberger company, which manufactured
machinery used in the oil industry. DeMohrenschildt became a salesman for the
company.
In 1939 Venezuelan oil (one third of which was controlled by
Standard Oil of NJ) was being routed thru Mexico
to German U-boats in the Caribbean .
When DeMohrenschildt worked for his uncle, Austrian baron
Constnace Meydel in New York City ,
Meydel passed himself off as a flagerant playboy and documentary film producer but was also an agent of the Abwehr, the Nazi German foreign intelligence
service. (See; The Game of the Foxes, Bantam, 1971). The films Meydel produced
and distributed from his New York City
storefront – “Facts on Film” included Nazi propaganda films.
Meydel became a German agent through an Austrian relative
(Lawrussen), an assistant to Admiral Canaris, chief of the Abwehr, who helped direct the Nazi blitzrige of Poland .
A specialist in sabotage, not unlike his British counterpart Col. Colin
Grubbens, Lawrussen trained IRA terrorists to sabotage American shipping to Britain
before the ONI hired the American Italian Mafia to secure the New York-New
Jersey docks. An explosion at a New Jersey
power facility that resulted in the deaths of 50 people was credited to this
network.
In October 1939 Colin Grubins escaped from Poland, overrun
by both the Nazis and Soviets, and traveled through the Balkins to the Mideast,
bringing with him “the nucleus of a Polish Secret Army” (A Man Called Intrepid,
p. 59), as well as a German cipher machine.
The Nazi Blitzrig – lightning warfare – was directed by
coded orders sent to the field marshals on unique “Enigma” cipher machines.
Grubins had met a Polish engineer who helped construct the Enigma machines in
their factory on the Polish-Czech border, and built one for the Allies.
Grubbins, credited with inventing the “Molotov Cocktail,”
wrote “The Art of Guerilla Warfare,” “The Partisan Leader’s Guide” and “The
Housewife’s ABCs of Home Made Explosives.”
Grubbins, in August 1939, with the assistance of the Polish
underground and the anti-Communist Nightingale network, obtained a complete German
Enigma Cipher machine, which permitted the Allied leaders and commanders to
read the Nazi German orders as they were sent, a secret that was maintained for
decades after the war and only revealed in The Ultra Secret (Winterbottom) in
the 1970s.
In April of 194, before embarking to South America, DeMohrenschildt obtained letters of
introduction from Nelson Rockefeller and $1250 line of credit from Rockefeller’s Chase
Manhattan bank, as well as more credit from Houston ’s
Texas First National Bank.
After the United States
entered the war, George Von Mohrenschildet (and apparently his brother) changed
their names to de Mohrenschildt, so they would not be viewed as German.
George also applied for a job with the Office of Strategic
Services (OSS), headed by William Donovan and supported by the British Security
Coordination (BSC ), the American arm of the
British Secret Intelligence Service in the United
States . Previously headed by William Wiseman,
the BSC in the USA
was headed by Canadian Sir. William Stephenson, whose New
York City offices were provided by Nelson Rockefeller
at Rockefeller Center .
The biography of Stephenson (A Man Called Intrepid) notes:
“Some old guard civil servants whispered that Hugh Dalton of the Ministry of
Economic Warfare would run an ‘ministry of ungentlemanly warfare,’….one recruit
was Eric Maschwitz, who composed the wartime song, ‘A Nightingale Sang in
Berkely Square.’ The Ministry of Economic Warfare was headquartered in Berkely
Square and quietly sucked in poets and professors,
sportsmen and journalists and others not already equipped with a cloak and
dagger. Those who really occupied Berkely Square
adopted the Maschwitz song as their theme.”
The Nightingale is singing
It’s small mouth
Open
Chinese
Haiku by Buson (1715-1783)
Nightingale was also the code name given to the
anti-Communist spy network set up in Russia
following the Bolshovik revolution in 1917, which by 1941, was one of the
oldest, intricate, disciplined and largest espionage networks ever devised by
man. Initially established by supporters of the last of Europe ’s
functioning monarchs, it still function, especially among those affiliated with the old Russian Orthodox Church, it spread among the
laymen, many of whom were ordained and initiated into the spy network as an
informant, agent or courier. Although many of those who stayed infiltrated high
into the echelons of the Soviet state, those who fled traded off information to
anti-communist governments who gave them refuge, including Nazi Germany.
While working in New York
for his uncle Meydel and the Abwher, George deMohrenschildt collected,
catalogued and analyzed documentary films, especially those that were concerned
with the German/Polish/Russian situation since George and his brother Dimitri, with
their family, had fled the Communist revolution in Russia
and were educated in Poland
before emigrating to America .
Jack Ruby was a second generation Polish emigrant from the
“White Russian” area of Poland
(Eastern Ukaraine ) whose brother Hymen Rubenstine was
born in Poland
and whose business financer Ralph Paul was born in Kiev ,
Russia . During World War
II Jack Ruby occasionally attended “Russian” meetings at the union hall above
the Jaffe Jewelry store in Muncie , Indiana .
Ruby continued to visit Jafe after the war.
On April 6, 1941
the German Army invaded Yugoslavia .
In 1943, American OSS officer Major Linn Farrish, attached to the British
Mission, parachuted into Yugoslavia
with three other high ranking officers with orders to locate, contact and
protect Josip Bray, the Croatian communist and leader of the anti-German forces
in the mountains. Farrish was an Olympic athlete at Stanford
University and like deMohrenschildt, an oil geologist by profession. Dimitri deMohrenschildt would later become affiliated with the Hoover Institute at Stanford.
Bray, who later became known as “Tito,” was persuaded by
Farrish “to keep the direction of commerce towards Vienna
and Trieste ,” rather than towards
the Soviet block. In 1952 a new constitution was developed and in 1954 the
Balkin alliance was formed between Great Britain ,
Turkey and Yugoslavia .
In 1955 John Foster Dulles visited Tito, and in 1957 Tito recognized the
Oden-Neisse line as the frontier border between Poland
and Germany , a
subject George DeMohrenschilt studied during the war.
A Soviet trade boycott of Yugoslavia
forced Tito to do business with the United
States , just as the US
trade embargo forced Cuba
to do business with the Soviet Union . As a result much
of the total deficit in Yugoslavia
was covered mainly by US
aide.
George DeMohresnschildt went to Yugoslavia
twice, once for the International Cooperation Administration (ICA ),
a US federal
government agency, and then on behalf of John Mecom, a New
Orleans oil man.
Mecom was on the board of directors of a New
Orleans bank (Possibly the Bank of the Southwest) with Leon Trujaque, an import-export agent who a
teenage Lee Harvey Oswald worked for on the docks around the same time.
Upon his first return from Yugoslavia ,
DeMohresnchildt was interviewed and debriefed by J. Walton Moore, who would
become his chief CIA contact and case
officer.
As a representative of the Lehman Trading company of New
York DeMohrenschildt traveled to Iran ,
Egypt , Indonesia ,
Panama , Guatemala ,
Nicaragua , San
Salvador , Hondoras , Nigeria
and Togo , Ghana ,
where he claimed to be a philatelist (stamp collector).
In 1958 DeMohrenschildt began to work for the International
Cooperation Administration (ICA ), which officially
comes under the Agency for International Development, but many believe to be a
front for the CIA .
According to the pseudonamous “James Hepburn” in the book
“Fairwell America,” (published in Liechtenstein where there are no libel laws),
“…Under the Eisenhower administration, financial agreements, particularly in
the domain of oil were under discussion between American firms and the
Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic, which had been in turmoil
since the first coup in 1954."
Among those involved in the “discussions” were Pierre Fras,
DeMohrenschildt’s old business associate and French Intelligence agent, Jacques
Soustelle - who received money from PERMINDEX, and Jean DeMinel,
DeMohrenschildt’s friend and former business partner.
On April 22, 1961
four French generals in Algeria
began a coup and revolted, but the uprising collapsed on April 25, when
President De Gau assumed extraordinary powers. The French Generals’ revolt was
overshadowed by the CIA ’s Bay of
Pigs invasion of Cuba
on April 17.
At the same time – April 1961, Carlos Marcello, the New
Orleans mafia boss, was deported to Guatemala
by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. Pilot David Ferrie reportedly flew
Marcello back into the country. Ferrie had also reportedly trained some of the
Cuban pilots for the Bay of Pigs, who were trained in Guatemala.
The link between the two events – the revolt of the French
Generals in Algeria
and the Bay of Pigs - was a cache of arms and munitions
that were stored in an unused former blimp base in an explosives bunker owned by
Jean DeMenil’s Schlumberger Wells Service Company of Houston ,
Texas . The arms and munitions in the Huma,
Louisiana bunker were going to be used by the French General’s in their coup,
but after that failed they were to be transferred to the anti-Castro Cubans.
Although branded a theft, ostensibly for insurance purposes,
the key to the bunker was given to Gordon Novel by New
Orleans oil geologist William Dolzell, and Novel led a
number of trips to the bunker to remove the cache. Novel owned a bar in the
French Quarter and operated an electronics factory that primarily produced
bugging equipment.
Implicated in the New Orleans
investigation into the assassination by District Attorney Jim Garrison, Novel
fled Louisiana to avoid a
subpoena to testify before the grand jury, but when he left his apartment at 336
Exchange Place , he left behind a letter found by
the next residents – two college girls, under a rubber sink mat. The letter was
addressed to a “Mr. Weiss,” Novel’s CIA
case officer, and read in part: “….I have been questioned extensively by local
FBI recently as to whether or not I was involved with Double-Check’s parent
holding company during that time. My replies on five queries were negative.
Bureau unaware of Double-Check association in this matter.”
In the book “The Invisible Governemnt,” Thomas Ross and
David Wise expose Double-Check corporation, based in Miami ,
as a CIA front company that recruited
pilots and commandos for the invasion of Cuba ,
and paid off the families of the American pilots from the Alabama Air National
Guard who were killed during the Bay of Pigs .
In late 1960 Novel had created cryptic radio commercials from
his Evergreen Advertising Agency for artificial Christmas trees that were said
to contain the supposedly secret date of the Bay of Pigs
invasion, and $70,000 in CIA money was used
to pay radio stations to carry the commercials.
George DeMohrenschildt, after marrying and divorcing two
rich party girls, married Dr. De De Sharples, whose father owned a Colorado
oil company that DeMohrenschildt worked for. When their child was born
disabled, they formed the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, which included
DeMohrenschildt’s friend Jackie Bouvier as an honorary chair person. Dr.
Sharples, who lived in Philadelphia ,
was a Trustee of Temple University.
After divorcing Sharples, DeMohrenschldt married his fourth
wife, Jean (Fromenco?), who he had known since they both worked in the garment
industry in New York City in 1938.
In early April 1961 George and Jean began a cross continental walking tour from
Mexico through Central
America .
On a similar walk about Texas
and Mexico in
1945, DeMohrenschlt came to the attention of the authorities for sketching
coast guard and military instillations, and was also once evicted from
Yogoslavia for suspect activities.
While walking through Guatemala
in 1961 DeMohrenschildt and his wife came across the camps where anti-Castro
Cubans were training for the ill fated Bay of Pigs
invasion. Once they got to Guatemala City
the DeMohrenschildts stayed at the home of a friend who was away at the time,
and quite surprised when they showed up to find the DeMohrenschildts
entertaining guests in their home.
On returning to Texas, DeMohrenschildt wrote a report on the
trip that was supplied to a US
government agency, a report that has never surfaced. He also wrote a manuscript, that he hoped to develop into a book and wrote to Sen. John F. Kennedy, the physical fitness buff, to ask if he would write an introduction. He
also made a documentary home movie of the expedition that he often showed to
friends at Texas dinner parties.
It was at one such dinner party where DeMohrenschildt’s CIA
case officer J. Walton Moore saw the film.Oswald also saw the film.
In 1962, shortly after former Marine defector Lee Harvey Oswald returned from the Soviet Union with his
Russian wife, George DeMohrenschildt went knocking on Oswald’s door, hoping to
obtain some new information about his old childhood stomping grounds, Minks,
where Oswald had lived and met his wife Marina.
DeMohrenschildt wasn’t alone when he first visited Oswald,
but was accompanied by a Col. Orlov, who may have been a White Russian Colonel.
DeMohrenschildt eventually developed a close relationship
with the Oswald, and became something of a mentor to the troubled and
sometimes confused young husband and father. DeMohrenschildt’s daughter, Alexandra,
married Gary Taylor, who testified about the close relationship between Oswald
and his father-in-law. Oswald used Taylor ’s
address to take out a post office box where the rifle said to be used to kill Kennedy was sent, as well as the pistol reported to have been used to
kill Dallas police officer J.D.
Tippit.
DeMohrenschldt claimed that he checked with both J. Walton
Moore, his CIA contact, and Max Clark, who
maintained a close relationship with the FBI, about Oswald, and both said he
was “okay.”
DeMohresnschildt arranged for Marina and the baby to live
with some friends when Oswald lived at the YMCA, and he also got Oswald a job a
Jaggers/Chiles/Stoval, a photo graphic arts firm that did map work for the US
military, including the posting of arrows and captions on U2 photos taken over
the Soviet Union and Cuba .
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