George De Mohrenschildt and the JFK Assassination, Part 1

George De Mohrenschildt was a Dallas socialite and befriended Lee Harvey Oswald. He has been the object of much speculation, and his comments about Oswald and the assassinations of John F. Kennedy have often contradictory. The House Select Committee on Assassinations buried his most remarkabale claims about the assassination.

Jay Epstein was the last writer to see George DeMohrenschildt alive. Epstein, on behalf of Readers’ Digest, had paid him $4000 for a four day interview. At the time of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, De Mohrenschildt was in Haiti, where he would remain for ten years. He claimed that Division Five of the FBI was behind the assassination, and probably suspected that he would have been tied to shooting had he been in Dallas that day. He testified in 1964 that aside from working for the French in the late 1930s, he had never been an intelligence agent.

Born on April 17, 1911 ( his passports say different things), George DeMohrenschildt came to the United States from Russia in 1938. His father was a baron, czarist governor, a member of the Russian Duma when he was born. . His family feared and hated the Bolsheviks and was helped to escape by the Nazis. British intelligence believed he was a German intelligence asset. Before coming to the US, he acquired a doctorate in commerce from the University of Liege. While an employee of Shumaker Company in New York, he worked for French intelligence and later went to work for Humble Oil. In 1941, the OSS refused to hire him due to his association with Nazi intelligence agents. He would later do intelligence work for the US State Department, going to Yugoslavia in 1957 to search for oil . He did “favors” for the CIA but told Epstein that he was never a paid employee. For example he traveled Latin America for the agency in 1961. His travels took him to Guatemala City at a time when anti-Castro rebels were nearby preparing for the Bay of Pigs. Later Jerry Hemmings placed De Mohrenschildt at a 1962 meeting where the assassination of Castro was discussed. He brought piles of $100 bills to pay the assassins. When George flew from Haiti to Washington to testify before the Warren Commission, he was met by Dorothy Matlack of US Army Intelligence. She had long been one of General Lansdale’s top aids. George claimed he was not an intelligence agent but indications are he had been part of that world since his early days with the German Abwehr.

Janet Auchincloss almost married him, and her daughter Jackie grew up calling him “Uncle George.” He was also once engaged to Jackie’s aunt Michelle. In Dallas, he functioned as an oil geologist and knew many important people including George H.W. Bush, whose name was in his address book. He also knew H.L. Hunt and worked for Clint Murchison’ s Three States Oil and Gas Company. Bush acknowledged knowing De Mohrenschildt since Andover days, as he was the uncle of Bush’s roommate, Edward Gordon Hooker George De Mohrenschildt knew LBJ and sent him a letter on April 17, 1963, and he worked for LBJ backer and oilman John Mecom. Abram Zapruder, a White Russian, also traveled in this circle of Texas oil barons. In 1964, some of De Mohrenschildt’s CIA files were destroyed and James Angleton started monitoring his mail, even though the agency subsidized a periodical published by George’s brother Dmitry , a college professor.


In late 1961, J. Walter Moore, who in the CIA’s Domestic Contact Service, asked De Mohrenschildt to befriend Oswald when he returned to Dallas from Minsk. Moore said the agency wanted to learn about his experience in Minsk. George was then a leader of the Dallas White Russian community, and he introduced Oswald to Ruth Paine, another who was tied to the White Russian community due to her travels. Michael Paine, her husband, was an engineer who had been with ONI. Mrs. Paine’s sister, Sylvia Hyde Hoke, was a CIA officer operating under Air Force cover. Documents on Mrs. Paine have never been released. According to whistleblower Bill Tyree’s litigation, Ruth Paine had been a CIA agent from at least 1956, when Tyree brought her money on behalf of Bill Casey. In 1963, her contact was De Mohrenschildt , who , in turn, answered to George H.W. Bush. The Tyree litigation did not focus on the assassination of JFK; it dealt with other CIA operations. At the time George H.W. Bush was head of Zapata Oil, a firm that may have been partly owned by the CIA. The Bush family had strong business ties to t he former Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, and Jeb Bush would name Raul Cantero, Batista’s grandson, to the Florida Supreme Court. It might be recalled that the Bay of Pigs invasion had been named Operation Zapata.