Bottlefed By Oswald's NANA

BOTTLEFED BY OSWALD’S NANA – By Bill Kelly & John Judge

“Not even Marina knows why I went to Russia” – Lee Harvey Oswald

FROM RUSSIA, WITH LOVE

With the intent of returning to the United States, ex-Marine and American defector Lee Harvey Oswald wrote a letter from Russia to former Secretary of the Navy John Connally, whom he is later accused of shooting, trying to get his Marine discharged corrected.

After more than a year without communication, Oswald’s mother had written to tell him that his discharge had been downgraded from honorable to undesirable. Oswald drafted the letter to Secretary of the Navy Connally, attempting to appeal his status.

Oswald had defected to Russia shortly after being discharged from the Marines in 1959. He had a good record in the military, held a top-level security clearance, monitored the U-2 spy plane as a radar operator in Japan, and had good grades in a Russian language test after taking accelerated courses, apparently at the Monterey Language Institute (Now the Defense Language Institute).

The circumstances of his discharge from the Marines were unusual. A letter documenting an injury his mother had sustained (nasopharyngitus from a blow to her nose), used as a basis for his early dismissal, arrived several days after he was granted a “hardship discharge.” It had been a fully honorable discharge at the time, ostensibly allowing him to return home to support his injured mother.

Oswald returned home, however he shortly boarded a tramp steamer for Europe on the first leg of a journey that would take him behind the Iron Curtain from France and England to Helsinki and Moscow, where he turned over his passport to the US Embassy officer when announcing his defection.

After his defection received press attention in the United States, the Marines held a court-martial in Oswald’s absence, changing his discharge to undesirable. It was illegal to hold such a court martial “in absentia,” and improper to base the grade of discharge on events that occurred after his military service ended.

Oswald as later to assume an infamous position in American history as the alleged assassin of President John F. Kennedy, and is also alleged to have shot then Texas Governor John Connally. But whether the victim is the President of the United States or a bum in the street, every homicide investigation, in the approach to solving the murder, must address the means, motive and opportunity to commit the crime.

Determining Oswald’s motive would prove to be a key to implicating him in any role in the assassination, other than what he claimed to be – “a patsy.”

The actual motives and real behavior of Lee Harvey Oswald were never ascertained.

In this context, Oswald’s letter to Connally is revealing, especially as it pertains to his motive in going to Russia after leaving the Marines, and may be a critical clue to his real historical role. Although cryptic, it can be deciphered. Oswald wrote to Connally:

“I wish to call your attention to a case about which you may have personal knowledge since you are a resident of Ft. Worth as I am. In November of 1959, an event was well puplicated in Ft. Worth newspapers concerning a person who had gone to the Soviet Union to reside for a short time (much in the same way E. Hemingway resided in Paris).”

“This person, in answers to questions put to him by reporters in Moscow, criticized certain facets of American life. The story was blown up into another “turncoat” sensation, with the result being the Navy department gave this person a belated dishonorable discharge, although he had received an honorable discharge after three years of service on September 11, 1959 at El Toro Marine corps base in California.”

“These are the basic facts of my case. I have always had the full sanction of the U.S Embassy, Moscow, USSR, and hence the U.S. Government.”

By the time Oswald wrote this letter, Connally had been replaced as Secretary of the Navy by Fred Korth, a Fort Worth attorney. Oswald was not unknown to Korth, since Korth had represented Oswald’s stepfather in his divorce from his mother, Marguerite Oswald. Korth became embroiled in a scandal as Secretary of Navy in regards to the controversial TFX fighter, and later had to resign.

OSWALD THE WRITER

One of the reporters Oswald complained about in his letter to Connally was Priscilla Johnson McMillan.

In her book “Lee & Marina,” Priscilla Johnson McMillan notes that Oswald “went so far as to compare his sojourn in Russia with that of Hemingway in Paris in the 20’s.”

Indeed, Hemingway lived in Paris in the ‘20s as an expatriate writer, and later described the experience in is book “A Moveable Feast,” but Oswald didn’t say the “20s” in his letter, and perhaps he did have pretensions of becoming a writer in the Soviet Union. He did write voraciously, kept notes and a journal, took photographs and wrote a short story titled “The Collective.”

According to Priscilla Johnson McMillan, Oswald wrote in the style of one of his favorite authors, George Orwell, keeping a typewriter wrapped in a blanket so that the noise would not alert suspicions, and he went to great lengths to smuggle out manuscripts when he left the Soviet Union. She also notes that Oswald also took a fancy to Ian Fleming’s James Bond spy thrillers.

This rather romantic view of Oswald as a dissident writer may have more to do with Priscilla’s imagination than his own. She is also the author of “Khrushchev and the Arts: The Politics of Soviet Culture 1962-1964,” which presents embellished profiles of some Soviet writers as dissidents.

But Oswald never specified the 20’s in his analogy, and Priscilla Johnson McMillan’s conjecture on this point is speculative. A more convincing argument could be made that Oswald was referring to Hemingway’s stay in Paris in the 1940’s instead.

In 1944 Hemingway was in France, not just as a journalist, but as a war correspondent attached to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and a comparison of Oswald’s experiences and Hemingway’s activities is even more revealing.

Out of Key West, Florida and Havana, Cuba, Hemingway served as a special agent for the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), using his fishing boat “the Pilar,” to patrol for Nazi submarines.

While working as a war correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), Hemingway wrote about the war and life on the front lines, and sometimes behind the lines.

Hemingway’s son was a JEDBERG, a joint UK-USA detachment trained as commandos in England and parachuted behind the lines to organize resistance to the occupying Nazi armies. While Hemingway’s son was captured by the Germans and spent the rest of the war in a prisoner of war camp.

Hemingway himself organized a lose band of French resistance fighters and, along with OSS Col. David Bruce, participated in the liberation of Paris.

Bruce was the senior OSS officer on the ground in that theater of operations, and would later serve as best man at Hemingway’s wedding, and JFK’s Ambassador to the Court of St. James. Riding a jeep at the head of convoy of trucks of armed partisans, and while French General LeClerc accepted the surrender of the German general, Hemingway and Bruce liberated the bar at the Hotel Ritz, where Hemingway also lived on occasion.

Placing his gun on the bar, when asked what he wanted to drink, Hemingway looked around, counted heads and said, “Sixty vodka martinis.”

Of course that would be shaken’ and not stirred, as a strong case can be made that Oswald went behind the Iron Curtain in the same way as Hemingway went to Paris, when it was still “behind the lines,” and not as a writer, but as an agent.

A MOCKINGBIRD SINGS ON RED SQUARE

In his letter to Connally, Oswald complained that his story became another “turncoat situation” at the hands of journalists who interviewed him in Moscow. He had good reason to believe that the Hotel Metropole rooms were bugged for sound, and that what he told the press would also be reaching the ears of Soviet authorities. Soviet intelligence was quite suspicious of his “defection.”

The Warren Commission, appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate and report on the assassination of President Kennedy, automatically assumed that the Soviet journalists who interviewed Oswald in Russia were KGB agents, but they never voiced a similar suspicion that the American journalists who interviewed him had U.S. intelligence connections as well.

The idea of journalists being used as spies, or intelligence agents posing as journalists, is not a new one. The British circle of W. Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward, Malcolm Muggeridge, Kim Philby, Cyril Connally and Peter and Ian Fleming serves as a good example, especially because it comes into play here.

When information about the CIA’s “Family Jewels” was released in the late 1970s, the agencies use of journalists as spies was exposed, along with other nefarious activities, such as behavior modification, MKULTRA drug experiments and the attempted assassination of foreign leaders.

Carl Bernstein, in Rolling Stone Magazine, reported over 400 cases of such CIA journalist-spies working in the printed media alone, and the CIA’s network of media agents and assets, which covert action chief Frank Wisner said could be played like a Wurlwizter organ, has been referred to as “Operation Mockingbird.”

During World War II, when the British code-breaking detachment was located nearby, there was a popular dance tune, “A Mockingbird Sang on Barkley Square.”   

Former CIA director Richard Helms worked as a reporter for UPI in Germany before World War II, and managed an exclusive interview with Adolph Hitler, but is one of the few people who can’t remember where he was when John F. Kennedy was killed.

Penthouse revealed that the Copley News Service out of San Diego, California, was run by former OSS spies and actively used to promote CIA propaganda and disinformation, but it has since been learned that dozens of similar operations existed.

The University of Missouri School of Journalism produced “Soviet Affairs Expert” and “KGB” author John Barron, who worked with U.S. Naval Intelligence before joining Readers Digest, who published his book, and supported the research of Edward J. Epstein, author of “Legend: The Secret Life of Lee Harvey Oswald,” which makes the case that Oswald was more than just a crazy, lone-nut.

Readers Digest also supported Henry Hurt’s research for a book on the assassination of President Kennedy, but after it took such a conspiratorial bent he had to find another publisher.

The first American reporter to interview Oswald in Moscow, Aline Mosby, was also a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism and worked as a correspondent for UPI. Oswald and Mosby talked for two hours, while Oswald explained his reasons for defecting to her, and the listening Soviet ears.

Priscilla Johnson McMillan was another reporter who met Oswald in Moscow. She interviewed Oswald for five hours in a hotel room at the Metropole. Years later she wrote, “Lee looked and sounded like Joe College, with a slight southern draw. But his life hadn’t been that of a typical college boy…As we sat in my hotel room that evening and into the early hours of the morning, he talked quietly about his plans to defect to Russia. I soon came to feel this boy was the stuff of which fanatics are made.”

Following the interview Priscilla said she, “asked him to please come back to see me before he became a Soviet citizen, or whatever was going to happen, just so that he would know somebody. It wasn’t very journalistic, I know, but I felt sorry for him.”

On the same day Priscilla Johnson spoke with Oswald in Moscow, his fingerprints were pulled from then FBI files in Washington.

Priscilla later admitted that she sought Oswald out “on the advice of an American colleague in Moscow.” The colleague turned out to be John McVicker, an Embassy officer and assistant to Richard Snyder, Oswald’s primary contact at the US Embassy. Snyder had connections to the CIA, and his intelligence background was later exposed at the spy trail of Oleg Penkovsky, an American double-agent during the Cuban missile crisis, who was executed. If Snyder was a CIA officer, then so was McVicker, and if McVicker was Priscilla Johnson’s “colleague,” so was she.

When Oswald renounced his citizenship he handed over his passport to Snyder, a passport that said Oswald was in the “import-export” business, just as Ian Fleming’s fictional 007 had the cover job of working for “Universal Export.” Actually Oswald did work in the “import-export” business shortly before he enlisted in the Marines. When he was only sixteen years old, Oswald worked as a messenger for Leon Trujague & Company, a New Orleans import-export company. Trujague was on the board of directors of the Friends for Democratic Cuba, an anti-Castro Cuban organization that used Oswald’s name, while he was in Russia, to purchase jeeps to be used for Cuban operations.

When he handed over his passport to Snyder, Oswald threatened to apply for permanent citizenship in the Soviet Union, but when his “stateless persons” permit expired, Oswald only applied to extend it. Snyder kept Oswald’s passport handy, in his desk drawer, and handed it back to him when Oswald told Snyder he was ready to return home with his Russian wife Marina, and Snyder assisted in getting them clearance and travel funds from the State Department.

After Priscilla Johnson interviewed Oswald, and told him to contact her before obtaining Soviet citizenship, she dined with Snyder’s assistant, McVickers, who later told the Warren Commission that he thought Oswald “followed a pattern of behavior which indicated that he had been tutored by persons or persons unknown, and that he had been in contact with others before or during his Marine Corps tour who had guided him in his actions.”

In an amazing coincidence, Oliver Hallett, the Navy attaché at the US Embassy in Moscow, who was apparently in the room at the time Oswald handed over his passport and announced his defection – was the officer in the White House Situation Room on November 22, 1963, who relayed the wire service reports to the Cabinet Plane and Air Force One, that Oswald was arrested as a suspect in the assassination. Hallett’s wife, a receptionist at the Embassy, also met Oswald in Moscow, and escorted him to Snyder’s office.

By another amazing coincidence, Priscilla Johnson McMillan, one of the first reporters to interview Oswald at the time of his defection in Moscow, was the only writer permitted to speak to Oswald’s wife Marina after the assassination in Dallas. Over the years, Priscilla Johnson would write periodic pieces on the assassination, always portraying Oswald as the archetypical “lone nut.” In a piece for the New York Times, she even suggested that by killing Kennedy, Oswald was fulfilling the “primal wish to kill the father.” More recently she wrote an article that questioned whether or not “assassination is contagious.”

In book reviews for the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer and New York Review of Books she consistently praised those who support the Warren Commission’s conclusions, such as David Belin’s “You Are the Jury,” while criticizing those who suggest there is evidence of conspiracy, like “The Fish Is Red” by William Turner & Warren Hinckle.

In a televised appearance on Tom Snyder’s TV show, Priscilla Johnson repeated her constant theme in relation to any belief in a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. “It’s hard for people to accept,” she claimed, “the idea that one person who is not so different from themselves, went off and did a thing like that. It threatens people’s sense of order about history.”

“You think that the President’s elected by the whole country,” she said, “and when one man can stop up there and nullify the will of an entire country, it makes life seem meaningless and without order, and I think conspiracy theorists want to give life an order and coherence that it lacks. It’s terribly upsetting to think that Oswald could do that.”

Of course if Oswald was the assassin, and not the patsy, and he was in fact a deranged lone-nut case who was acting on his own perverted, psychological motives, then there would be no meaning to what happened at Dealey Plaza. But if he was set up as the patsy, or was one of the snipers who was part of a well planned and executed covert intelligence operation, then the assassination, whatever you believe happened at Dealey Plaza, is infused with meaning and makes political and historic sense when placed in the proper context.

It also means that Oswald was innocent of the crimes attributed to him, and others have gotten away with murder.

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The task of the posthumous reconstruction of Oswald’s real background resembles the peeling the layers of an onion. Oswald has been variously portrayed as an agent of Cuban or Russian intelligence, a ‘lone nut’ and a Mafia hitman, but none of these portrayals explains his defection and subsequent activities in New Orleans and Dallas, his association with both the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) and Student Revolutionary Directorate (DRE), or his conduct and statements on the day and day after the assassination. In reality, Oswald, the alleged assassin, as a pawn in a much larger game, played only a small but critical role in the operation that left the President dead and a new government in power.

The framing of Oswald was a critical part of the cover-up. Establishing possible false motives for his actions, especially after he was dead, became the primary occupation of the Warren Commission and the media, while subsequent psychological profiles of Oswald, assuming he was the killer, ignore the political power plays and the broader context in which he moved. Some of these “studies” especially those that maintain Oswald was the lone assassin and acted on psychological motives alone, are deliberately deceptive; and journalists who played more than a passive role in this endeavor must be held suspect and accountable.

Oswald seemed doomed to a succession of negative characterizations from supposed friends and seemingly sympathetic acquaintances who were later to denigrate him and implicate him in the murder of Kennedy. Priscilla Johnson McMillan was merely one of the first.

 Priscilla Johnson was a Russian major at Bryn Mawr College, on the Main Line in Philadelphia, and was intimately entwined with the US intelligence community. While a college student she was a World Federalist, an organization that tried to persuade the nations of the world to form a “world government” and strengthening the United Nations.

Cord Meyer, Jr., one of the founders of the World Federalists, and a former New York neighbor of Johnson, went on to become a deputy to CIA director Allen Dulles and the head of the CIA’s International Organizations Division. 

Priscilla Johnson, after she applied for employment with the CIA, and was at first rejected because of her World Federalist associations, worked for awhile for Senator John F. Kennedy while he was recuperating from a back operation and writing “Profiles In Courage,” which would win him a Pulitzer Prize.

In 1991 Priscilla Johnson appeared on a television program with former CIA director William Colby, who also continued to portray Oswald as the lone assassin and lone nut, while she played up her association with both Oswald and Kennedy, and intimated that Kennedy flirted with her during her short period she was with him, playing up on his “womanizing.”

While Kennedy went on to become President, Priscilla Johnson worked as a translator for the State Department and the New York Times. She has threatened libel suits against publications that claim she worked for the CIA, but has never followed up on these threats.

Priscilla Johnson claimed that because she couldn’t get a security clearance for government work, she went to Moscow as a correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA). NANA was a large and prominent American news and feature service syndicate that once competed with Associated Press (AP) and United Press International (UPI) wire services, and included Ernest Hemingway as one of its correspondents. In the mid-nineteen fifties, NANA was purchased by former British Intelligence officer Ivor Bryce and his American associate Ernest Cuneo, who served in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).

The funds for the purchase of NANA reportedly came from the proceeds of the sale of one of Bryce’s Texas oil wells.

Cuneo, a New York city attorney, had served as an aid to New York mayor LaGuardia and as a wartime assistant to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, with an officer’s rank in the OSS. Cuneo was one of the main liaisons between President Roosevelt, William “Big Bill” Donovan, chief of the OSS, and William “Little Bill” Stephenson, aka “A Man Called INTREPID,” the representative of British Intelligence in the United States.

Donovan’s OSS was patterned on the British Military Intelligence 6 – MI6 organization, and its officers learned their spy tradecraft techniques from the British veterans. The director of MI6, Sir Stewart Menzies, was known as “C,” while Stephenson, a Canadian based in New York City, had succeeded William Wiseman in his post.

During the war, Ian Fleming, as assistant to the chief of British Naval Intelligence, had come to America and met Cuneo while visiting Stephenson at his New York apartment.

Bryce, an independently wealthy millionaire, and Cuneo, were both close friends who knew Fleming, so after the war, when they purchased NANA, they hired Fleming to be the European Editor. Fleming had also accompanied Bryce to Jamaica for a wartime conference on U-boat warfare in the Atlantic, and after the war, Fleming became Jamaican neighbors with others who maintained vacation home along Jamaica’s north shore, including Bryce, Stephenson and Noel Coward.

During the war Fleming had helped organize Operation Goldeneye, a plan for the defense of Gibraltar, and parachuted into France during the Nazi blitzkrieg on a mission to convince French Admiral Darlan to move his fleet to a neutral or English port. Fleming was unsuccessful, and Darlan’s fleet fought the Allied armies in North Africa and Darlan himself was assassinated, probably by British agents.

Fleming was more successful in helping Yugoslavian King Zog to escape the Nazis.

While on a mission to the United States during the war, Fleming wrote out an outline for the establishment of a permanent American intelligence agency, based on the British model, and was given a gun, a .38 Police Positive revolver from Donovan for his efforts.

The names of both of Fleming’s NANA associates were to appear in the 007 novels, Cuneo as a Las Vega cab driver in “Diamonds Are Forever” and Bryce as an alias for James Bond in “Dr. No.”

So when Priscilla Johnson went to Moscow as a correspondent for NANA, when she interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald at the time of his defection, Ian Fleming was the European Editor and Ivor Bryce and Ernest Cuneo signed her checks.

THROUGH THE WRINGER

After leaving NANA, Priscilla Johnson became an associate at the Harvard University Russian Research Center and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for International Studies. The Russian Research Center was set up to “carry out interdisciplinary study of Russian institutions, behavior and related subjects.” 

One of the most important operations at the Center was the CIA sponsored refugee interview project, which “debriefed” émigrés from Communist Russia, Poland, Yugoslavia, Hungry, Rumania and East Germany. Code named Operation WRINGER, the Harvard Center worked closely with the West German Intelligence (BND), which was directed by former Nazi General Reinhard Gehlen. It was Gehlen who supervised WRINGER, attempting to penetrate the Soviet Union and reinforce his spy network inside Russia.

Gehlen had been Hitler’s intelligence chief for the Nazi German “Armies East,” the Russian front. His files and network, turned over to the Americans at the end of the war, served as the foundation for the American CIA files and operations against the Soviets.

The Russian Research Center itself was bankrolled by CIA funds through the Ford Foundation, whose board of directors included McGeorge Bundy, President Kennedy’s national security advisor, and John McCone, director of the CIA. 

Priscilla Johnson began her book publishing career while at the Russian Research Center, with her first book, about the persecution of Russian writers, was published by MIT Press with the assistance of the Center for International Studies.

In their book, “The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence,” Victor Marchetti and John Marks reveal that, “…in 1951, CIA money was used to set up the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”

Max F. Millikan, then the Center’s director said, “The Center is a remarkable institution devoted to inquiry into current affairs of man, especially of American man and the multitude of new affairs that have pressed so hard and swiftly in upon him in these years.”

Marchetti and Marks also note that, “In 1952, Max Millikan, who had been Director of the CIA’s Office of National Estimates, became the head of the Center….in 1953 the MIT Center published “The Dynamics of Soviet Society”…(but) there was no indication to the reader that the work had been financed by CIA funds.”

The Center actually published two versions of “Dynamics,” written by Walt Rostow, one for government policy makers and CIA readers and the other for the general public.

According to “Cult of Intelligence,” the MIT Center also assisted Rostow in other ways. Rostow was a political scientist with intelligence ties that date back to his OSS service during World War II. Rostow went on to become an assistant for national security affairs under both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. It is also interesting to note that LBJ claims it was Walt Rostow who first recommended that he appoint a commission to investigate the assassination of President Kennedy.

Besides Priscilla Johnson’s affiliation with the MIT CIS, Oswald’s cousin Dorothy Murret had a curious connection to the Institute. According to some Warren Commission and FBI documents Murret, “was linked in some manner with the …. Apparatus of Professor Harold Isaacs.” Issacs was an MIT professor and CIS associate who had resided in China from 1931 to 1936 where he edited a local English language newspaper, The China Forum, and contributed to Newsweek and the Christian Science Monitor on Far Eastern affairs. Much of his work took him away from MIT, and it is possible he met Murret during the course of her travels.

“Cult of Intelligence” also notes that the CIA “also used defectors from communist governments for propaganda purposes. These defectors…are immediately taken under the CIA’s control and subjected to extensive secret debriefings. The Agency encourages and will help the defector write articles and books about (their) past life.”

Even Priscilla’s family seems to have been involved in the tangle of Soviet émigrés, American spies and intelligence agency run publishing efforts. One of the most important keys to the real history of Soviet leadership, Svetlana Stalin, the daughter of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, defected to the United States through India with the assistance of the CIA. Stalin had died mysteriously of a blood clot to the brain after being given drugs by his new doctors, drugs that were supplied by outside interests, possibly even the CIA.

[See: Did the CIA kill Stalin? ]

When Stalin’s daughter arrived in the United States, she was a prime candidate for debriefing and funneling through Operation WRINGER, and soon after her defection she was taken to the home of Steuart H. Johnson of Locust Valley, New York, Priscilla Johnson’s father. Priscilla then returned home and helped to translate Svetlana’s memoirs and two other books, including “Twenty Letters to a Friend,” which the CIA helped publish.

After the murder of Oswald, Priscilla Johnson McMillan was one of the only writers allowed to have access to Oswald’s wife Marina, and she obtained the exclusive contract to write Marina’s story, for which they both got paid. That book, fifteen years in the research and writing, was eventually published as “Lee and Marina.” As Marina’s friend, advisor and ghost writer, Priscilla communicated with and coached Marina’s testimony before the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in 1978. 

OSWALD THE RED HERRING  

Both the Warren Commission and Priscilla Johnson McMillan suggest, in their portrayals of Oswald, that he held the personal political beliefs of a communist, while Oswald actually associated with rich, right wing oil executives like George Bouhe, George DeMohrenschildt and Paul Raoridsky in Dallas, and fanatic anti-Communists like Guy Banister, David Ferrie and Carlos Brinugier in New Orleans. 

From a military family, Oswald was determined to become a Marine like his older brother Robert. Another half-brother, Edward Pic served in the Coast Guard before enlisting in the Air Force.

Oswald’s favorite book and TV program, “I Led Three Lives,” by Herbert Philbrick, concerned an undercover FBI agent who infiltrated communist groups for a decade before exposing his true beliefs when testifying against his former friends in court.

It is possible that Oswald was recruited and trained for counter-intelligence work while serving as a Marine in Japan and California, possibly by the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), the American intelligence agency that was reportedly responsible for the fake defector program that Oswald may have been a part of.

The circumstances of Oswald’s “defection” clearly suggest that he was sent as a military intelligence agent to penetrate the Soviet Union and test and monitor their response to his defection. In Russia, he became affiliated with another anti-communist network that included another, similar “defector,” his factor foreman Alexander Ziegler and his family.

Ziegler, a Jewish émigré during World War II, left Argentina, where he had worked for an American company, and resettled in Byelorussia. Ziegler was Oswald’s nominal boss at the radio factory where they worked in Minsk, and he encouraged Oswald to marry Marina.

When Oswald was ready to leave Russia, Ziegler ostensibly gave him an envelope to smuggle to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow that was addressed to CIA director Allen Dulles.

Oswald traveled to Moscow alone and met some American tourists, two young women and an older lady who had lost their official Intourist guide and were traveling unescorted around Russia. A few weeks later Oswald met the same trio in Minsk, and can be seen in a photo of them together, a photo that ended up in the files of the CIA.

Eventually arriving in New York with his Russia wife and child, Oswald and his family were met by Spas T. Raiken of Traveler’s Aid. Raiken was also the secretary-treasurer of the American Friends of the Anti-Bolshvik Block of Nations, a CIA front group, part of the World Anti-Communist League and an arm of Operation WRINGER.

SYDNEY AND LUCI GOLDBERG

“Goldberg” is one of the names Oswald wrote in his notebook while in the Soviet Union, ostensibly a Moscow correspondent he had met, and not either Sidney or Luci Goldberg, who worked for NANA.

When I talked with Sidney Goldberg on the phone in the early 1990s, he said he knew Ian Fleming from working at NANA but Fleming left the organization around the time he became affiliated with it in the early 1960s.

Both Lucy and Sidney Goldberg were not only associated with NANA in regards to Oswald in the Soviet Uniont, but Lucy also posed as a reporter covering the McGovern campaign while working as a “dirty trickster” for the Republicans, were mentioned in regards to the Eagleton incident and then they became entangled in the Monica Lowinski affair.

Namebase:

NORTH AMERICAN NEWSPAPER ALLIANCE
Blumenthal, S. Yazijian, H. Government by Gunplay. 1976 (163, 220)
Lane, M. Gregory,D. Murder in Memphis. 1993 (245)
Marrs, J. Crossfire. 1990 (120)
Newman, J. Oswald and the CIA. 1995 (62, 67, 71)
Piper, M.C. Final Judgment. 1993 (258)
Summers, A. Conspiracy. 1989 (515)

Comment:  “Alongside Goldberg’s possible acquaintance with confirmed CIA agent Seymour Freidin, her 1972 claim to be affiliated with the North American Newspaper Alliance takes on additional significance. NANA actually existed, but it was infested with CIA connections, as JFK assassination researchers eventually discovered. Priscilla Johnson McMillan, who had numerous CIA and State Department links, was working for NANA when she interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald in Moscow in 1959. Another NANA reporter, Virginia Prewett, was an anti-Castro activist recruited by NANA founder Ernest Cuneo, a high-ranking OSS veteran. In the mid-1960s, NANA was acquired by a partnership between Leonard Marks, Drew Pearson, and Fortune Pope. In 1952, Fortune Pope’s brother, Generoso Pope, Jr., bought the National Enquirer. The previous year Generoso was a CIA officer (according to Generoso’s listing in Who’s Who in America, 1984-85). Marks and Pearson were also friendly with the CIA.”

Reader’s note: “Although Luci is usually identified as having worked for NANA, she was actually a reporter for a subservice called the Women’s News Service. … Her husband Sidney Goldberg, was at NANA.”

Her husband is in Who’s Who in America, 1984-85 (note the extensive, high-level association with NANA): GOLDBERG, SID editor; b. N.Y.C. Mar. 1, 1931; s. Emmanuel and Florence (Fischbein) G.; m. Lucianne S. Cummings, April 10, 1966; children: Joshua John, Jonah Jacob. B.A., U.Mich., 1950, M.A., 1952; student, N.Y.U., 1952-53. Editorial asst. Washington Post & Times Herald, 1955-56; fgn. affairs editor World Week mag., N.Y.C., 1955-57; asst. editor North Am. Newspaper Alliance, 1957-58, news editor, 1958-60, editor, 1960–, gen. mgr., v.p., 1964–; editor Women’s News Service, 1964-81; pres. N.Am. Newspaper Alliance, Inc., Bell-McClure Syndicate, 1972, exec. editor, 1973-81; gen. exec. United Feature Syndicate, 1973, mng. editor, 1974-78, v.p., exec. editor, 1978–, Newspaper Enterprise Assn., 1979–; exec. editor Ind. News Alliance, 1980–. Served with AUS, 1953-55. Mem. Nat. Cartoonists Soc., Soc. of Silurians, Sigma Delta Chi. Clubs: Overseas Press Am., Dutch Treat, Hudson Harbor Yacht (N.Y.C.). Home: 255 W 84th St, New York NY 10024 Office: 200 Park Ave, New York NY 10166.

From an article by Frank Greve and Ron Hutcheson, Knight-Ridder/Tribune Information Services, February 6, 1998: “(Luci) Goldberg came to share her husband’s conservative views, and his close friendship with Victor Lasky, a stridently anti-Kennedy, anti-Communist columnist that Mr. Goldberg’s syndicate published. In 1972, Lasky introduced Mrs. Goldberg to Murray Chotiner, Richard Nixon’s first dirty trickster. He’d directed Nixon’s 1946 smear campaign against Rep. Helen Gahagan Douglas, claiming she was a “pink lady” – a communist sympathizer. Chotiner recruited Goldberg to spy on McGovern. To gain press credentials, she said she was writing for the Women’s News Service, edited by her husband, to which she had sometimes sold freelance stories. After the caper was exposed, both Goldbergs offered to sever their ties to the wire service. Mrs. Goldberg’s offer was accepted. Her husband’s wasn’t.”

“Comment:  Victor Lasky, who died on February 22, 1990, was more than a simple right-wing columnist. From 1956-1960 he was a public relations executive for Radio Liberty, which was one of the CIA’s two largest propaganda operations at the time (the other was Radio Free Europe). Starting just two years later and continuing until 1980, the North American Newspaper Alliance distributed his syndicated column. It was revealed during Watergate testimony that Lasky was secretly paid $20,000 by Nixon’s Committee to Re-elect the President while he was writing his column. CREEP included a number of CIA operatives. In the mid-1980s, Lasky was close to CIA director William Casey.”

LUCY GOLDBERG

From the San Francisco Chronicle, January 23, 1998: “In 1972, (Lucy) Goldberg told the McGovern campaign that she worked for the North American Newspaper Alliance and later for Women’s News Service. The addresses she listed for both agencies then is the same as her current residence on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.”

Petrusenko,V. A Dangerous Game: CIA and the Mass Media. 1977 (53)

From Petrusenko: In August, 1973, it was learned that a free-lance writer, Lucy Goldberg was paid $1,000 a week by the Republican Party during the 1972 presidential election campaign to keep tabs on the Democratic Party’s candidates. Miss Goldberg is said to have received a total of more than $10,000 plus expenses. Another free-lance journalist, Seymour Freidin was paid over $10,000 by the Republicans for similar services. Then Jack Anderson wrote in his column that Seymour Freidin was a CIA agent. Freidin apparently realized that Anderson had the proof, so, when other wire service corespondents asked him whether this was true or not, he did not deny it. “I gave my word to Dick Helms,” he said, meaning Richard Helms, CIA director 1966-1973.

Weissman,S. - Big Brother and the Holding Company. 1974 (42) Re: Eagleton affair.

From Weissman: “It was a remarkable operation, and it ran on information. According to Strachan, it was common knowledge in the Nixon camp that they were getting information from Senator Muskie’s driver. ‘Fat Jack’ (John Buckley) covered Muskie’s Washington headquarters. ‘Chapman’s Friends’ (Seymour Freidin and Lucy Goldberg) posed as reporters on the campaign planes, and ‘Sedan Chair II’ (Michael W. McMinoway) posed as a volunteer security guard at the Democratic convention. It was ‘Sedan Chair II’ who reportedly overheard Mankiewicz discuss the health problems of Senator Thomas Eagleton. (Eagleton subsequently left the VP slot on the Democratic ticket because of questions over his mental health).

Then Lucy Goldberg became acquainted with Linda Tripp, the secretary at the Department of Defense who illegally tape recorded White House intern Monica Lowinski relate her sexual dalliances with President Clinton, and advised her to preserve her dress as evidence and helped inflame that scandal.

VIRGINIA PREWETT

Gaeton Fonzi, Last Inv. p319; HSCA OCR :

“Veciana told the HSCA that he had no way of getting in touch with BISHOP and that all meetings were instigated by BISHOP, a procedure BISHOP established early in their relationship. To set up a meeting, BISHOP would call Veciana by telephone, or, if Veciana was out of town, call a third person whom Veciana trusted, someone who always knew his location. Veciana said that this third person never met BISHOP but, "knew that BISHOP and I were partners in this fight because this person shared my anti-Communist feelings." Author Tony Summers found this intermediary. Her name was Delores Cao of Barrio Obrero, Puerto Rico. She was the wife of Sergio Arias.She had been Veciana's personal secretary at the Banco Financiero, where Veciana worked in Havana. Delores Cao left Cuba for Puerto Rico, where she became involved in anti-Castro activities. Veciana had recontacted her in Puerto Rico, and asked her to provide secretarial services, and to act as his answering service when he was out of town. She agreed, and in the months that followed she became familiar with the name of a man who called from the mainland. His name, she recalled, was BISHOP. Delores Cao also knew Victor Espinosa. Delores Cao mentioned that the name ‘Prewett was associated with ‘MAURICE BISHOP.’ Journalist Virginia Prewett (died April 1988 at age 66) was a media asset of PHILLIPS. PHILLIPS admitted this to David Leigh. (In his offensive against Tony Summer's book, PHILLIPS had approached the Washington Post's Executive Editor, Ben Bradlee. Bradlee assigned David Leigh, an English exchange reporter, to look into the story).Virginia Prewett's columns were syndicated by North American Newspaper Alliance and she was a member of the Free Cuba Committee.”

 “One of the more interesting interpretations of the case came from a ‘Special Report’ produced by the Council for Inter-American Security, a right-wing think tank, and distributed to the national media. It was written by Virginia Prewett, the journalist who had a special relationship with David Phillips. The piece Prewett wrote about the Letelier bombing indicates why she was one of Phillips's most effective media assets.”

Prewett's ‘Special Report’ was actually a diatribe against the Washington press for initially assuming that Chilean generals were involved in murdering Letelier. She, too, suggested that Letelier may have been sacrificed by leftists to turn world opinion and U.S. policy against the Pinochet regime. ‘Letelier was headquartered at and operated under the aegis of the radical leftist Institute for Policy Studies,’ she noted darkly. ‘Since the days of Stalin and Trotsky, intramural strife and expenditure of human life for political ends have been commonplace within the left.’”

Virginia Prewett is the author of “Beyond The Great Forest” 

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/c/virginia-prewett

Examples of her work include:

Rumor of Duvalier’s Death Agitates Exiles from Haiti 

By Virginia Prewett North American Newspaper Alliance

June 10, 1965, p. 8

Three Possible Coups Taking Shape in Panama

June 22, 1979 NANA

Virgin Island Daily News

Obit

Virginia Prewett Mizelle, Newsletter Publisher, Dies

The Washington Post April 10, 1988

“Virginia Prewett Mizelle, 69, publisher of "The Hemisphere Hotline," a Washington newsletter on inter-American affairs, for the past 18 years and a former newspaper  columnist, died April 7 at the Washington Hospital Center after surgery for a heart ailment. Mrs. Mizelle, who specialized in Latin American affairs, published her work under the name Virginia Prewett. She wrote a syndicated column for the North American Newspaper Alliance from 1959 through the 1960s and published a column in the Washington Daily News in the 1960s and 1970s. She also contributed articles on Latin America to The Washington Post. Her work also had appeared in such publications as the Wall Street …”

 The corporate connections between the defense industry and the corporate media is at the heart of the psychological warfare campaign that has portrayed Oswald variously as a Soviet or Cuban agent, deranged lone nut or mob hit-man, rather than what he clearly was – an expendable agent for a domestic military-intelligence network.

Oswald used aliases, forged identity papers, post office boxes, pay phones, dead letter drops, micro-dot photography and was multi-lingual in Russian and English, and could converse in basis Spanish. He traveled widely, primarily using public transportation, and was educated by a specialist in the crafts of intelligence practices and techniques. As they used to say about Communists in the fifties, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. Oswald was a covert intelligence operator and agent for some domestic anti-communist network.

And Lee Harvey Oswald went to Russia like Hemingway went to Paris in 1944 – not as a writer but as a war time agent operating behind the lines.

Whether an assassin or patsy, Oswald’s presence at the scene of the murder of President Kennedy served as a clear message – that the murder of the President was not only a conspiracy but a more specific covert intelligence operation designed to shield those actually responsible. It was a plot that originated within the heart of the federal government itself and showed those who killed the President can get away with anything.

At a COPA conference on the assassination in Dallas in October 1992, a workshop panel on the role of the media in the assassination concluded that the most significant facts have not been the subject of news stories because of negligence on the part of the media.

Rather than negligence however, the media response to the assassination of President Kennedy can be shown to have been influenced and controlled from the very moment of the assassination, by “the intelligence community,” and they did this through the utilization of their media assets, particularly those at CBS News, Time-Life and NANA.