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 was later accused of shooting, trying to get his Marine
dischargecorrected.
After
more than a year without communication, Oswald’s mother wrote 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 (nasopharyngitis 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 afterward 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 Richard Snyder, 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
later assumed 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 and Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit. But whether the
victim is the President of the United States or a bum in the street, [in] every
homicide investigation, 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 had to resign a few weeks before
the assasination.
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 his book A Moveable Feast, 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 later 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 member of the JEDBERGs, a joint UK-USA detachment trained as
commandos in England and parachuted behind the lines to organize resistance to
the occupying Nazi armies. Hemingway’s son was captured by the Germans and
spent the rest of the war in a prisoner of war camp.
Hemingway
himself organized and led a lo[o]se 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 the European 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 a convoy of trucks of
armed partisans, 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 the bartender 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
intelligence agent.
A
MOCKINGBIRD SINGS ON RED SQUARE
In
his letter to Connally, Oswald complained that his story became another
“turncoat sensation” at the hands of journalists who interviewed him in Moscow.
He had good reason to believe that the Hotel Metropole rooms where he stayed
were bugged for sound, and that what he told the reporters 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
agency’s 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 there was a popular song, “A Mockingbird Sang on Barkley Square,” which was near the British code-breaking detachment.
Former
CIA director Richard Helms worked as a reporter for UPI in Germany before World
War II, managed an exclusive interview with Adolph Hitler, and is one of the
few people who can’t remember where he was when John F. Kennedy was killed.
Penthouse
magazine revealed that the Copley News Service out of San Diego, California,
was run by former OSS spies and was actively used to promote CIA propaganda and
disinformation. 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. That firm also 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
crazed lone-nut. Readers Digest also supported Henry Hurt’s research for
a book on the assassination of President Kennedy, but after it took 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
that, “Lee looked and sounded like Joe College, with a slight southern drawl.
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 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 [trial] of Oleg Penkovsky, an American double-agent
during the Cuban missile crisis, who was executed. If Snyder was an
intelligence officer, then so was McVicker, and if McVicker was Priscilla
Johnson’s “colleague,” it is likely so was she. In fact, the files released
under the JFK Assassination Records Act reveal that Johnson was a “witting
informant” if not an agent of the CIA.
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 covert operations against Cuba.
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[. ]Snyder also 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 person 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 [Oliver Hallet] who was apparently in the room at the time Oswald handed
over his passport and announced his defection – was [also] the Navy officer in
the White House Situation Room on November 22, 1963. Hallet relayed the wire
service reports to the Cabinet Plane and Air Force One that Oswald had been
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 in the 1970s, 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 [step] 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 Oswald 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. If Oswald was a patsy, it also means that Oswald was innocent of the
crimes attributed to him, and others have gotten away with murder.
The
task of the posthumous reconstruction of Oswald’s real background resembles
[]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 hit man, but
none of these portraits explain[s] 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 covert 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, 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
strengthen[] 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.
After
Johnson applied for employment with the CIA, she was at first rejected because
of her World Federalist associations, and 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.
Ivor
Bryce, an independently wealthy millionaire, and Cuneo, were both close friends
who knew Ian Fleming, so after the war, when they purchased NANA, they hired
Fleming to be the European Editor.
During
the war, Ian Fleming served as assistant to the chief of British Naval
Intelligence. Fleming came to America and met Cuneo while visiting Stephenson
at his New York apartment. While on a wartime mission to the United States,
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.
Donovan’s
OSS was patterned on the British Military Intelligence 6 – MI6 organization,
and its officers learned their spy tradecraft techniques from [their] British
mentors. The director of MI6, Sir Stewart Menzies, was known as “C“. Stephenson,
a Canadian based in New York City, had succeeded William Wiseman in his post as
liaison with the Americans.
Ernest
Cuneo, a New York attorney, had served
as an aide 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. The names of both
Fleming’s associates at NANA were to appear in the 007 novels, Cuneo as a Las
Vegas cab driver in “Diamonds Are Forever” and Bryce as an alias for
James Bond in “Dr. No.”
During
World War II, Ian 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. His brother, Peter Fleming outranked him in the Naval Intelligence
services and was part of Operation Sea Lion.
Fleming
had accompanied Ivor 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 homes along Jamaica’s north shore,
including Bryce, Stephenson and Noel Coward. Fleming’s house there was called
Goldeneye.
So
when Priscilla Johnson went to Moscow as a correspondent for NANA, where she
interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald at the time of his defection, Ian Fleming was
NANA’s European Editor and Ivor Bryce and Ernest Cuneo signed her checks.
Sydney
Goldberg was in charge of the Russian desk at the time, also. He and his wife Lucianne
have a long history linking journalism, intelligence and political attacks.
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 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,
President Kennedy’s director of the CIA. 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.
Priscilla
Johnson began her book publishing career while at the Russian Research Center.
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.
In
addition to 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.
Victor
Marchetti in his book The CIA and the
Cult of Intelligence 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.
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 Stewart 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 to 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 Ragoridsky in
Dallas, and fanatic anti-Communists like Guy Banister, David Ferrie and Carlos
Bringuier 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 a 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 a similar “defector,” his factory 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 reportedly gave
him an envelope to smuggle to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, which was addressed
to CIA director Allen Dulles.
Oswald
once 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.
Oswald
applied to the US Embassy to leave the USSR in the same month that many other
Office of Naval Intelligence “defectors” also returned. Marina Oswald, in her
testimony to the Warren Commission about how Oswald came to Russia and where he
lived gave the details of another ONI false defector instead, Robert Webster.
Eventually
arriving in New York with his Russia[n] 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. The couple were taken to a house overnight in New York
City, and doubtless debriefed.
VIRGINIA
PREWETT
In
the summer of ’63 Oswald became involved with both the Fair Play for Cuba
Committee (FPCC) and the DRE – an anti-Castro Cuban student group, both of
which were subjects covered by NARA reporter Virginia Prewett and monitored if
not controlled by David Atlee Phillips, a CIA officer from Oswald’s old Fort
Worth neighborhood.
Oswald
was seen meeting with Phillips shortly before Oswald was ostensibly in Mexico
City visiting the Cuban and Russian embassies monitored by Phillips’
surveillance teams.
Virginia
Prewett was one of Phillips’ media assets who often wrote news articles in
support of CIA operations. Prewett was interviewed by author Anthony Summers
and British journalist David Leigh. Although Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post
commissioned Leigh to write an article about Phillips and Prewett, he refused
to publish it.
Summers
reported that Prewett confirmed the existence of “Maurice Bishop” and his
association with both David A. Phillips and Tony Veciana, one of the leaders of
the anti-Castro Cuban Alpha 66 terrorist group. Prewett was also one of the
founders of the Friends of Democratic Cuba, along with other friends and media
assets of David Atlee Phillips. Many researcher believe that Maurice Bishop was
a pseudonym used by David Phillips, and at least one former CIA operative has
confirmed it.
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. []One protagonist in George Orwell’s 1984, a
favorite novel of Oswald’s, is Emmanuel Goldberg, the supposed Party traitor
who writes the Book of Revolution.
When
Bill Kelly talked with Sidney Goldberg on the phone in the early 1990s, he said
he knew Ian Fleming from working at NANA but that Fleming left the organization
around the time Goldberg became affiliated with it in 1963.
Lucianne
and Sidney Goldberg were not only associated with NANA in regards to Oswald in
the Soviet Union. Luci later posed as a reporter covering the McGovern
campaign, while actually working as a “dirty trickster” for the Republicans.
The Goldbergs were also mentioned in regards to the Eagleton scandal. Then Luci
became entangled in the Monica Lewinski affair. It was Luci Goldberg who
encouraged the Pentagon secretary Linda Tripp to secretly and illegally tape
record Lewinski detailing her relationship with President Clinton. Lucianne
Goldberg still identified herself as associated with NANA at that time. Her
son, Jonah Goldberg continues in the tradition as a vehement right-wing propagandist.
He somehow recently secured an exclusive interview with Fidel Castro.
CONCLUSION
As
exemplified by the North American Newspaper Alliance (NASA), the corporate
connection between the CIA and the US 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, and micro-dot photography. He was multi-lingual in Russian and
English, and could converse in basic 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 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.
Lee
Harvey Oswald went to Russia like Hemingway went to Paris in 1944 – not as a
writer but as a war-time penetration agent operating behind the lines.
Set
up as a patsy, Oswald’s presence at the scene of the murder of President
Kennedy served as a 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 that 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, it is clear the media response to the assassination of
President Kennedy can be shown to have been influenced if not entirely
controlled from the very moment of the assassination by the CIA, and they did
this through the utilization of their media assets, particularly those at
Time-Life, CBS News and NANA – the North American Newspaper Alliance.
[NOTES
AND SOURCES]
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)
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.”
LUCI
GOLDBERG
From
the San Francisco Chronicle, January 23, 1998: “In 1972, ([Lucianne]) 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 correspondents 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.
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
Lewinski relat[ing] her sexual dalliances with President Clinton, and advised
her to preserve her dress as evidence [which] 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 …”
PARTING SHOT - Inga Avid and the Cowboy
Burlington
County Times (Sunday, March 29, 2009) Commentary
Admired by Hitler, dated by JFK, She Chose a Cowboy
Admired by Hitler, dated by JFK, She Chose a Cowboy
By Jerry Jones Correspondent
During the past couple of years, the local newspapers have been [filled] with stories about a small and relatively unknown area of Bucks County (Pennsylvania) known as Dolington.
After a long and drawn-out battle among land developers, local officials and groups of private citizens, the tiny community, situated about halfway between Newtown and Washington Crossing, was eventually chosen as the site of the new National Veterans Cemetery.
While it didn't make headlines at the time, for a couple of years following World War II, Dolington was the home of one of the most controversial figures in recent American history.
Her name was Inga Arvad, and at the time, she was married to former cowboy movie actor and real-life Western legend Tim McCoy.
While most of their Bucks County neighbors were long familiar with McCoy's exploits - both on screen and in real life, few if any of them realized that his wife had once been an internationally known and controversial celebrity in her own right.
Born Inga Maria Peterson in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1913, she changed her name to Arvad in 1931 after being named a major Danish Newspaper's annual "Beauty Queen."
By the time the extremely bright and beautiful young women had finished school, she could speak three languages fluently: English, French and German.
Inga's real rise to fame began during a visit to Germany in 1935, when she attended a luncheon at the Danish embassy in Berlin.
There, the then 22-year-old beauty heard a rumor that Herman Goering, the field marshal of the German Luftwaffe, was engaged to be married.
Pretending to be a news reporter, she obtained an interview with his fiancee and sold it to a Danish newspaper. The paper's editor was so impressed that he hired her as a foreign correspondent and assigned her to cover the wedding.
It was there that Inga met Adolf Hitler, Goering's best man. Through her contacts with Goering's wife, she [was] later granted several exclusive interviews with Hitler, who apparently was smitten by what he often referred to in press accounts of the time as Inga's "perfect Nordic beauty."
As a member of the foreign press, Inga covered the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, where she again interviewed Hitler, who also posed with her for photographs. According to Inga, the German foreign minister approached her in 1936 about becoming a spy for Germany in Paris. Frightened, she refused the request and immediately fled Germany.
Arriving in the United States in 1940, she quickly landed a job as a columnist for the Washington Times Herald.
In January 1942, barely a month after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and America's entry into the war, nationally known radio commentator Walter Winchell broke the story that a young naval officer - the son of a former ambassador - was dating a young woman whom many suspected of being a Nazi spy.
The naval officer was future U.S. President John F. Kennedy. His father, Joseph Kennedy, was the former ambassador to Great Britain. The women was Inga.
At that period in our history, government agencies were looking for spies under every bedcover, and gossip columnists like Winchell often helped them fuel the flames.
What had apparently sparked Winchell's suspicions was the discovery of one of the photographs of Inga with [Hitler] . But since it was later learned that the FBI had bugged Inga's apartment and monitored all her conversations - including those with Kennedy - it's probable that much of Winchell's information came from an FBI informant. Most assume that informant was FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover himself.
Although Hoover later admitted that his investigation found that Inga was not a German spy and had never worked for the Nazis, he refused Kennedy's request to acknowledge that publicly.
At the time the story broke, Kennedy was serving in Naval Intelligence and one of his superior officers, concerned that he might inadvertently be feeding Inga secrets, wanted him thrown out of the service.
Since Kennedy did not have access to critical intelligence information, and since his father was a former ambassador with White House connections, the young officer was merely relocated instead of being sacked.
Only two days after Winchell's column appeared, Kennedy was transferred out of Washington and ultimately sent to the South Pacific, where he wound up commanding the ill-fated PT-109.
At war's end, Kennedy left the Navy and entered politics. Inga became a screenwriter at MGM and occasionally filled in for Hollywood gossip columnist Sheila Graham.
In 1946, when she was editor of Harper's Bazaar magazine, Inga met McCoy - then 55 - at a Hollywood luncheon. McCoy, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army during World War II, by then was a longtime veteran of Western films and a respected authority on both the Old West and Indian sign language.
The two hit it off and were soon married. They settled for a while on a 27-acre estate they called Dolington Manor. During the time they spent there, their son, Ronald was born at Abington Memorial Hospital. However, the McCoy's stay in Buck's County was short-lived. When McCoy was offered a TV documentary on the Old West that was being produced in Hollywood, they returned to California.
Following a long and sometimes controversial career, Inga lived out her final years in quiet retirement with McCoy at their ranch home in Nogales, Ariz.
[Burlington
County (NJ) Times, Sunday March 29, 2009]
