THE
CONFESSIONS OF RUTH PAINE by Steve Jones
Oswald’s
family was brought to the Dallas area by Ruth Paine. Ruth Paine had been
instrumental in getting Oswald a job at the Texas Book Depository. The
Mannlicher-Carcano, the alleged murder rifle, had supposedly been stored in a
garage of the Paines. Following the assassination, Ruth Paine was called by
Oswald during his detention to have her obtain a lawyer for him, a task which
she failed to complete much to the benefit of the assassins.
Once a
conspiracy was deemed to exist, and even our government in the House Select
Committee concluded that there was a probable conspiracy, the Paines had to be
viewed as having been involved in it. An assassination Gestalt with the patsy
serving as a lightning rod, cannot be successfully completed unless the patsy
is delivered to the scene of the killing. Ruth Paine accomplished the crucial
twin assassination tasks of getting Oswald into the Dallas area and arranging
to get him a job in the Texas Book Depository Building. Therefore, the Paines,
albeit on a need-to-know basis, were involved in the plot.
In whose
service were the Paines?
Michael Paine came from families which were in the
Boston Brahmin society – the Cabot and Forbes families. He was an heir of his
maternal grandmother, Elise Cabot Forbes. He was not likely to be
controlled by the Soviets, Castro or the Mafia. He had top secret clearance in
his job at Bell Helicopter despite the fact that his father, George Lyman
Paine, had been a Trotskyist. In Cold War United States to get such
clearance when your father had been a Trotskyist, a quid pro quo had
to be provided. Ruth Paine’s father was William Avery Hyde, an official in
the Agency for International Development, which frequently provided cover for
overseas intelligence operations.
According to the excellent work of Steve Jones, Barbara LaMonica and Carol Hewett, Ruth Paine’s sister, Sylvia Hoke, had CIA affiliations. Ruth Paine was friendly with George DeMohrenshildt, a sophisticated White Russian exile and CIA operative who, although thirty-five years Oswald’s senior, became Oswald’s closest friend in Dallas. According to recent research in the 1980s Ruth Paine assisted illegal anti-socialist activity in Nicaragua.
According to the excellent work of Steve Jones, Barbara LaMonica and Carol Hewett, Ruth Paine’s sister, Sylvia Hoke, had CIA affiliations. Ruth Paine was friendly with George DeMohrenshildt, a sophisticated White Russian exile and CIA operative who, although thirty-five years Oswald’s senior, became Oswald’s closest friend in Dallas. According to recent research in the 1980s Ruth Paine assisted illegal anti-socialist activity in Nicaragua.
Ruth
and Michael Paine could not have been Soviet, Castro or Mafia agents. They had
to be agents of the killing force, our U.S. intelligence. If they had been
Soviet or Castro agents, an innocent government would have swooped down on them
and seen them as clear beacons leading to the killers. Our government did not
cause them any trouble. The Paines are criminal co-conspirators in the killing
of President Kennedy and would and should now be prosecuted by a guiltless
government.
As
some readers of the JFK/Deep Politics Quarterly may be aware, Carol
Hewett, Barbara Lamonica, and I have been conducting research on Ruth and
Michael Paine, arguably two of the most significant yet overlooked
individuals in the tapestry of people, places, and events that continue to
swirl around the vortex that we know as the assassination of President John
F. Kennedy. I would like to share with the Quarterly's readers some thoughts
that Ruth Paine revealed to a close personal friend of hers. This friend
subsequently discussed these thoughts with me, but sought from me a promise
[being kept] never to reveal her identity in order to protect her privacy.
In the
spring of 1997 Jim Douglass, a researcher and Christian peace worker, put me
in contact with Ruth's friend in the hope that she might be willing to give
me some valuable insights into the life of Ruth Paine, once a central figure
in the lives of Lee and Marina Oswald, and, by extension, their children.
When I traveled to the friend's home and knocked on her door, she greeted me
by saying that we should go somewhere else to talk because she feared that
her home might be subject to electronic surveillance. When we did finally sit
down to talk, she apologized for seeming paranoid, but quickly gave me reason
to believe that her fears were not unfounded. She explained that she had been
a Christian peace worker during the turbulent Reagan-Bush years when the
United States government was heavily funding the Contras in their efforts to
overthrow the populist Sandanista government. Since the peace workers helped
the poor and the oppressed natives who generally sided with the Sandanistas,
United States intelligence agencies made life very difficult for them.
Ruth's
friend explained to me that she had recently returned from her fourth (that
is my best recollection of the number...) tour of duty in Nicaragua. Since
she had returned to the States, she had been openly followed in the streets
by federal law enforcement agents in a manner that was obviously meant to
intimidate her. FBI agents had visited her home on several occasions. Her
mail had been opened and her phone had been tapped. If anyone doubts that the
United States government really does this sort of thing to people who openly
oppose the agenda of the national security state, I highly recommend the
book Resisting Reagan by Christian Smith. [ed. note: Steve's point
is well taken here].
This
friend got to know Ruth in 1990 when they were both working for pro-Nica, one
of the various peace organizations that was involved in that beleaguered
Central American country. She went on to explain to me that when Ruth first
showed up at the camp, everyone began to distrust her because of her
behavior, which overlapped every characteristic of a CIA infiltrator. Ruth
was taking notes off of bulletin boards, asking people many personal
questions, and taking photographs for supposed purposes that turned out to be
false. In fact, Ruth never went anywhere without a notebook handy, ready to
jot down anything and everything she saw or heard. The rest of the group had
gotten very good at spotting infiltrators, because the CIA was always sending
people down there either to gather information or to act as agent provocateur
to disrupt their efforts.
One
evening when volunteer Sue Wheaton told the group about Ruth's connection to
the Kennedy assassination, the suspicion intensified to the point of
paranoia. Based on what the volunteers had seen the CIA do in Nicaragua, none
of these people would hesitate to question whether or not it was possible for
the agency to assassinate an American president. Because of the volunteers'
conviction in that regard, Ruth became ostracized except for one woman who,
though she maintained a distrust for Ruth, took a personal liking toward her
and began to develop a friendship with her.
The
group openly confronted Mrs. Paine with their suspicions, but she would
adamantly deny any connection to the CIA (or, one presumes, other 'initial'
agencies), and steadfastly stuck to her Warren Commission testimony of being
an innocently maligned do-gooder regarding the assassination. When confronted
so openly it was common 'agent' behavior to quietly depart, based on the
assumption that the 'cover' had been blown. But because of Ruth's persistent
denials and the group's unwillingness to kick someone out who had been
wrongfully accused, Ruth was asked to take a leave of absence from the group
instead of being summarily dismissed.
Her
friend was given the assignment of driving her across the border into Costa
Rica to a retreat center where peace workers sometimes went for badly needed
R & R. When they approached the camp and were getting out of their car,
several others came up to greet them and help them with their luggage. As
those people approached the car and saw who it was they started screaming,
"Oh my God, it's Ruth Paine, she's CIA -- get her away from us!!"
Ruth Paine's reputation had somehow preceded her and they were forced to
return to the volunteer camp where Ruth bravely, and without complaint,
finished out her year before returning to the United States.
Upon
returning to America, Ruth and the woman-source of this story continued the
friendship that they had begun in the jungles of Nicaragua. The friend
explained to me what a strange feeling it is to care about someone, to find
someone likable and personable yet to not completely trust them. The friend
always had the feeling that Ruth Paine was hiding something, that she was
holding something back and that she wasn't being totally honest about her
connections to the CIA or her involvement with Lee Harvey Oswald. The two of
them could sit around the kitchen table drinking coffee and discussing any
topic under the sun, except for two: the CIA and the Kennedy assassination.
Yet
the friend continued to gently press Ruth, reminding her that confession is
good for the soul. At one point, Ruth became irritated about the constant
inquiries into the assassination and told her friend, "If you want to
know about the Kennedy assassination, I have old issues of Life magazine that
I can give you. That will tell you everything you need to know."
However, that disclaimer not withstanding, the friend did tell me that over
the years there were a few times that Ruth did open up ever so slightly about
both the CIA and the assassination. These comments, along with some other
general information that the friend shared with me helped to both confirm and
to dismiss some of the previous thoughts that we 'Paine researchers' had
developed.
One
hypothesis that can now be dismissed is that Ruth Paine's long vacation in
the summer of 1963 had any sinister or clandestine purpose. In July, 1963,
she drove her 1955 Chevy station wagon on a whirlwind tour of the eastern
United States, culminating in her picking up Marina Oswald in New Orleans and
bringing her and one child (Marina was expecting their second child in
October) back to Texas in late September, as Lee was about to embark (unknown
to them) on his adventures in Mexico. At the 1995 COPA conference, I gave a
presentation in which I hypothesized that Ruth may have been involved in
helping to impersonate Oswald on this trip, or even that Lee may have joined
her in order to be seen at several demonstrations that Ruth attended during
the trip, such as Dr. King's "I have a dream" speech/protest march
in Washington in late August, 1963. But her friend informed me that Ruth
takes those long cross-country journeys every summer, that she loves to
drive, and that on those trips she has been visiting the same people for
years, including her ex-husband Michael, whom she divorced in 1971.
What
has been corroborated beyond any doubt is that Ruth has immediate family
members who were employed by the CIA. Documents have been located at the
Archives showing that her sister was a staff psychologist for the CIA as of
1961 and that her father had been approached by the Agency to run an
educational co-operative alliance in Vietnam in 1957.
Though refusing to
admit that she herself ever had anything to do with the CIA, she admitted to
her friend that her father had been in their employment. She said that while
working as an insurance executive for Nationwide Insurance, and later for the
Agency for International Development, her father had often gathered
intelligence for the CIA. But she was quick to add that he would never have
done so if "he had known what the CIA was really all about." By
this she meant that her father was serving in the capacity of a genuine
patriotic, anti-Communist fervor and did not really understand how the CIA
used such intelligence gathering to undermine local economies and suppress
indigenous people so that American corporations could move in and exploit
local cheap labor. The fact that Ruth understands this showed that she was
quite attuned to the motivations, methods, and purposes of the Central
Intelligence Agency.
The
one and only time Ruth showed any cracks at all regarding the assassination
itself was when she was having difficulties with her now 40-year-old
daughter. With tears in her eyes, Ruth stated that her daughter did not want
to speak to her any more until she came to grips with "the evil that I
have been associated with in my life." When the friend gently pushed
further and asked, "What evil?" Ruth clammed up. But the friend
assured me that she was convinced this was a veiled reference to the Kennedy
assassination and that Ruth was not talking strictly about Lee Oswald. The
friend firmly believes this because the comment was made in the context of a
brief discussion about the assassination. I learned this after several
lengthy visits with the friend and decided that it was time to take things
one step further. I asked the friend if she would be willing to act as an
intermediary between interested researchers and Ruth Paine, and the friend
accepted the challenge.
Ruth
was going to be making one of her yearly summer trips and would stop to visit
the friend. The arrangement was that I would give her articles that Barbara,
Carol, and I had written for PROBE along with some documentation.
The friend was to 'confront' Ruth with the information and ask her to explain
it. Depending how this went, the friend would consider arranging a meeting
between the researchers cited and Mrs. Paine.
Predictably,
things fell apart at this point. A week before the scheduled arrival, the
friend called me and told me that Ruth had canceled out, calling and saying
that she was very busy and would have to cut her trip short and thus wouldn't
have time for the visit. The friend noted that this was out of character
because Ruth had been especially looking forward to the visit for a reason
that cannot be divulged here. I could not help but think that someone had
been listening to our phone conversations and that Mrs. Paine had been tipped
off.
The
friend then began to distance herself from me. Phone messages were not
returned and letters went unanswered. After several months, I decided to
leave her alone. I determined that for her own reasons, she desired no more
contact with me. But I cannot help but surmise that her abrupt dismissal of
me, and the work I was seeking to enlarge or corroborate, was out of a
genuine sense of fear.
This
episode only served to convince me even more that Ruth Paine was, and still
is, working in some type of intelligence capacity. It also showed me what a
determined, poised, and tough lady she truly is. Though she was under the
most intense pressure in Nicaragua and was surrounded by people who
distrusted her, she kept her cool. And later, when in the relaxed company of
a genuine friend who truly cared about her, Ruth still refused to let down
her guard for a brief moment.
If
Ruth Pain is an agent, and I still firmly believe she is, she is a damn good
one.
Vincent
Salandria once told me that the Paines, whether unwitting or not, played a
key role in the assassination conspiracy by getting Oswald into the Texas
School Book Depository. The conspirators knew that the people they chose for
such a vital role had to be rock solid individuals who would never crack.
After
my experience with Ruth Paine's friend, I would have to say that Salandria
was absolutely right.
BILL KELLY
NOTES:
I
too have talked to Sue Wheaton about the Nicaragua episodes, and Sue said
that Ruth Paine traveled with a man who said he was from Antioch College in
Yellow Springs, Ohio, where Ruth (and I, and Coretta Scott King and Rod
Serling) attended school.
When I
was a student at nearby University of Dayton in 1969-71 I took some classes
at Antioch, including a history of Vietnam that was taught by a former CIA
Saigon Station Chief.
As a
graduate student at the Antioch Center for Social Research and Action in
Baltimore in 1973-4 my primary professor was active in the Polish union
movement, and once brought in a young guy who just returned from the Soviet
Union where he traveled around video taping whatever he came across,
including the May Day parade of military hardware and leadership.
This kid
showed us what he had recorded a few days after showing the CIA.
In
addition, as I worked closely with Carol Hewett and met Barbara Lamonica and
Steve Jones at the COPA conferences in Washington and Dallas, I was aware of
their detailed research, that Carol shared with me, as I shared with her what
I learned about Michael's mom, Ruth Forbes Paine Young and my recorded
interview with her husband Arthur Young, the eccentric inventor of the Bell
Helicopter.
While
this article is accurate, I thought I would add the Antioch connection, and
note the fact that I do take exception to Steve's determination that the
summer vacation of 1963 is, as he puts it:is "one hypothesis that can
now be dismissed."
"One
hypothesis that can now be dismissed is that Ruth Paine's long vacation in
the summer of 1963 had any sinister or clandestine purpose. In July, 1963,
she drove her 1955 Chevy station wagon on a whirlwind tour of the eastern
United States, culminating in her picking up Marina Oswald in New Orleans and
bringing her and one child (Marina was expecting their second child in
October) back to Texas in late September, as Lee was about to embark (unknown
to them) on his adventures in Mexico. At the 1995 COPA conference, I gave a
presentation in which I hypothesized that Ruth may have been involved in
helping to impersonate Oswald on this trip, or even that Lee may have joined
her in order to be seen at several demonstrations that Ruth attended during
the trip, such as Dr. King's "I have a dream" speech/protest march
in Washington in late August, 1963. But her friend informed me that Ruth
takes those long cross-country journeys every summer, that she loves to
drive, and that on those trips she has been visiting the same people for
years, including her ex-husband Michael, whom she divorced in 1971."
The
reason this trip cannot be dismissed just because she took the trip every
year because it was the trip that led to her meeting not Michael but
Michael's mom Ruth Forbes Paine Young, who was best friends and - traveling
companion of Mary Bancroft, Allen Dulles' agent and mistress, and it was on
the return leg of this trip that Ruth Paine picked up Marina, the oldest
daughter and the rifle and delivered them to Texas while Oswald went to
Mexico. That was a significant side trip that she didn't make on any of the
other trips.
Steve
Jones' article is important however, for bringing out the fact that the
eldest daughter is estranged from her mother and would remain so until
"she came to grips with the evil" that she was associated with in
her life," presumably her role in the assassination drama.
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