Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years (16 page)

A Legend in the Making

More than anything, George de Mohrenschildt helped Lee Harvey Oswald secure employment. Apparently with Oswald’s full cooperation, he subjected the returnee to a kind of reverse laundering. With each pass through the machine, another layer of soil stuck to him. An improbable sequence of jobs and living arrangements made Oswald seem more and more unstable—not unlike the classic misfits who throughout history have attempted to assassinate national leaders. And because Oswald was involved in such a range of activities in so short a time (less than a year and a half ), investigators would later find it difficult to follow all the twists and turns.

Under de Mohrenschildt’s tutelage, “Agent Oswald,” having clawed his way out of the Soviet Union, began dropping hints everywhere that he was a Communist stooge. As Bouhe would tell the Warren Commission: “Oswald had a little table in his apartment on Mercedes Street in Fort Worth. I cannot remember the exact names, but certainly Karl Marx, Lenin and his works, and similar things which I do not remember. And I positively, being aghast at such an assortment, flipped over the first two-three pages, and I think in two out of three I saw the stamp of the Fort Worth Public Library.”
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Oswald worked for a spell at a mapmaking company that handled classified work, including military diagrams of Cuba. The owner would later explain that a friend had asked him to hire Oswald. The de Mohrenschildts also took Oswald to anti-Castro meetings in Dallas. This was a prelude to the next step in Oswald’s reverse laundering, a move to New Orleans, where he behaved in a bizarre manner. At various points he appeared to be pro-Castro and then either anti-Castro
or
a pro-Castro person infiltrating anti-Castro groups.

And there was even Oswald’s purported trip in September 1963 to Mexico City, where he supposedly visited the Cuban and Soviet embassies in attempts to acquire travel visas. Most researchers now believe that this was an impostor pretending to be Oswald—which itself seems to establish a larger plot.

The picture became still murkier when FBI agents were ordered—by some unknown higher-up—to keep an eye on Oswald. Their intrusive inquiries with his employers created yet more static, and helped ensure that Oswald’s tenure at each of these jobs was brief.

More than half a year before the assassination, on April 10, 1963, someone shot a rifle through the Dallas window of right-wing firebrand General Edwin A. Walker. Marina Oswald later told the Warren Commission that the shooter had been her husband, an assertion with which she seemed palpably uncomfortable. She described how, a few days after she heard about the Walker shooting, George de Mohrenschildt had climbed the stairs of their house, calling out, “Lee, how did you miss General Walker?” For his part, de Mohrenschildt insisted that he had not actually known whether his friend was the triggerman; he shrugged off his role in the incident as an ill-timed “joke.”

Shortly after this, de Mohrenschildt handed Oswald off to yet another person, Ruth Paine, a Quaker housewife who would even chauffeur Marina from Dallas to New Orleans and back. By passing Oswald along to Paine, de Mohrenschildt could truthfully assert that he had been neither the first person in contact with Oswald upon his return from Russia nor the final person in his life before the assassination. That Paine’s mother-in-law, Ruth Forbes Paine, was a close friend of one Mary Bancroft, former OSS spy and the mistress at varying times of both Allen Dulles and Henry Luce, was probably not known to Dulles’s fellow Warren Commission members. One wonders what they would have made of this connection, certainly an indirect one yet suggestive nevertheless.

If someone really was “setting up” Oswald, getting him out of Dallas to New Orleans would have been a brilliant stroke. It diverted attention from Dallas and onto a steamy locale with an irresistible cast of characters—the mob-connected ex-G-man Guy Banister, the flamboyant businessman Clay Shaw, and the lecherous gay pilot David Ferrie, to name just a few. Evidence of this is the ample number of books devoted to Oswald’s New Orleans period. Compared with the cast from the Big Easy, Texans like de Mohrenschildt, Poppy Bush, and Jack Crichton would have seemed white-bread respectable. Various middlemen even arranged for Oswald to be in the public eye while in New Orleans—on a radio debate, handing out leaflets, involved in a scuffle that made it onto TV. This opera buffa would later be portrayed as the spontaneous doings of a confused (or incredibly devious) twenty-two-year-old.

The Haitian Laundromat

The next individual to take a trip through a reverse laundry was de Mohrenschildt himself. Given his connections to prominent people, in particular Poppy Bush, if de Mohrenschildt
was
involved in a plot, it would be especially important to create a benign explanation for his interactions with Oswald. And more important, it would be necessary to demonstrate that taking care of Oswald was not de Mohrenschildt’s principal occupation at the time. In other words, de Mohrenschildt would have needed his own “legend,” as a cover story is known in the spy trade. The facts—as they have been presented thus far—may suggest that de Mohrenschildt himself was something of a pawn, steering Oswald but unaware of the larger picture or of Oswald’s fate. However, further material, which will be presented below and in chapter 12, suggests a greater degree of knowledge on de Mohrenschildt’s part.

That a cover was created for de Mohrenschildt—indeed an oversize umbrella that could encompass all the powerful people he knew—is suggested by a series of events that began right when de Mohrenschildt first met Oswald in October 1962.

On October 19, de Mohrenschildt wrote to George McGhee at the State Department, offering a slide show of the “walking tour” of Latin America that had taken him—coincidentally, of course—near a CIA training camp in Guatemala just before the Bay of Pigs invasion. De Mohrenschildt indicated in his letter that if the government was not interested in his Guatemalan experiences, he might just forward the material to some European friends who thought the Soviet Union was a place “where there is a great demand for travelogues and adventure stories.”
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Anyone finding this document in government records would naturally assume that de Mohrenschildt was some kind of freelancer of intelligence, if a seemingly goofy one, obviously neither loyal to the United States government nor in its employ. The document would also provide a cover explanation for contacts between de Mohrenschildt and McGhee, mentioned earlier in this chapter as one who intensely disliked the Kennedys and who would be moved out of the State Department by a disrespectful Bobby Kennedy.

On February 16, 1963, de Mohrenschildt wrote to JFK personally, again offering his travelogue. He went out of his way to say that he had also discussed the travelogue with McGhee.
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In April, 1963, de Mohrenschildt traveled to the East Coast for a series of meetings that, while supposedly secret, were nevertheless strikingly well documented. Thus, if anyone were to realize that de Mohrenschildt had important connections, those connections would appear to relate to the business transacted on the East Coast, and not to Oswald. Everyone associated with de Mohrenschildt would have a good explanation for why they knew everyone else. And, to make it more confusing still, this cover story would be layered over another one that was even more intriguing, and that would itself lead to a dead end.

Allen Dulles once called CIA documents “hieroglyphics.” Like the old lion surrounded by his adoring cubs, Dulles used to expound on such elements of tradecraft to his fellow Warren Commission members. On one occasion, he told them that no one would be able to grasp an intelligence memo except for those involved in its creation and their colleagues.

This creates endless, perhaps deliberate, obstructions for someone trying to piece together the story of the Kennedy assassination. When Thomas J. Devine, Poppy Bush’s business partner and a former CIA agent, coyly suggested to me that the problem with journalists like myself is that “you believe what you read in government documents,” he was referring to such deeply coded disinformation. Devine’s warning about CIA documents is especially interesting in light of the way two agency reports from April 1963 portray Devine himself. Both describe preparations for, and then a meeting with, George de Mohrenschildt as he comes to New York from Dallas and then moves offstage to Haiti. At first glance, the documents seem routine. Here’s what they purport to say:

On April 25, 1963, at three thirty in the afternoon, a CIA operative code-named WUBRINY/1 held a meeting in the library of the Knickerbocker Club, one of New York City’s most exclusive men’s clubs, on East Sixty-second Street, just off Fifth Avenue.
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There were two others present. One was C. Frank Stone III, chief of operations for the Europe an section of the CIA’s clandestine wing. The other was M. Clemard Joseph Charles, the general manager of the Banque Commerciale D’Haiti.

This “contact report” was declassified in 1998 but went unnoticed at the time. The purpose of the 1963 meeting, it said, was to prepare for the impending arrival from Dallas of George de Mohrenschildt, who is described as a business contact of a Haitian banker identified as “Mr. Charles,” i.e., Clemard Charles. De Mohrenschildt was coming to New York to discuss mineral concessions in Haiti and the establishment of a sisal plantation there, the report goes on to say. It mentions nothing about de Mohrenschildt’s vast intelligence connections and makes only passing reference to his dealings in other natural resources such as oil and uranium. Nor is there mention of his long-standing ties to George H. W. Bush, nor of the fact that he periodically provided briefings to intelligence agencies on his return from trips abroad, as other government records show.
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Nevertheless, talking about sisal fit de Mohrenschildt’s normal cover: traveling in pursuit of strategic resources. Sisal was used in the manufacture of rope—a critical supply on naval and commercial vessels. Haiti was a good choice because it was of strategic importance to the United States as a point close to Cuba and therefore perfect for monitoring Castro and launching covert operations at the island. And de Mohrenschildt was perfect because he had a prior history with Haiti, having traveled there during the fifties, ostensibly to conduct business on behalf of various powerful oilmen.

The second document describes de Mohrenschildt’s arrival the next afternoon, at the New York offices of the investment banking firm of Train Cabot, inside an entity code-named SALINE.
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This was in fact the covering organization for operation WUBRINY, and WUBRINY’s chief agent and operator, WUBRINY/1—who was none other than Thomas Devine.
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(In a 2008 interview, Devine declined to say whether he was involved with WUBRINY, but in a separate 2008 interview, retired CIA officer Gale Allen told me he remembers both WUBRINY and Devine.)
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According to WUBRINY/1’s report to his superiors, when de Mohrenschildt mentioned his work on behalf of a particular small oil company, he “looked around the room and over his shoulder and said that ‘my connection with this is, of course, confidential.’ ”

Were this CIA report to pass into the hands of, say, a congressional committee, the staffer likely would skim it and move on. Nothing much seems to be happening. Indeed, one almost has the impression that the CIA officer and de Mohrenschildt were performing a piece of theater, with de Mohrenschildt hamming it up a bit with the over-the-shoulder glance. Or perhaps the officer made that up to enhance the overall effect, which is to establish distance between the agency and this supposed sisal investor.

De Mohrenschildt comes off as a bit of a rube, fooled by the CIA man’s cover and believing that a legitimate business deal is on the table. The CIA document casts its own operative, the author of the memo, as dubious of de Mohrenschildt and his motives—and in no way involved with him. The result is a paper trail that acknowledges contact with the man who was also Oswald’s mentor, but in a totally different context, and in a way that permits complete deniability of the Oswald connection.

The Potomac Two-Step

De Mohrenschildt had just spent the last half year in almost constant contact with Lee Harvey Oswald, who had recently returned from several years in Soviet Russia. De Mohrenschildt had done so, moreover, at the CIA’s request, or so he claimed. It seems unlikely that the sole topic of the New York meeting with WUBRINY/1 would have been sisal in Haiti. Nevertheless, in the minds of these people, sisal was apparently enough to hang a legend on. Now there was a documented and apparently benign reason that Thomas Devine (and by implication, Devine’s longtime associate George H. W. Bush) knew a man about to be under fierce scrutiny for his own ties to the alleged killer of the president of the United States.

In case the “sisal” document of April 1963 was not enough, de Mohrenschildt next traveled to Washington, D.C., where he and his friend Mr. Charles met with other government figures, ostensibly to talk about sisal. Here the story gains a more intriguing layer—namely, the suggestion that de Mohrenschildt’s real purpose was to secure U.S. government backing for a coup d’état against the Haitian dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier. De Mohrenschildt and Charles appear to have obtained an audience with none other than Howard Burris, military adviser to Vice President Lyndon Johnson, with the prospect of meeting LBJ himself.
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