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.

The Death of Dorothy Hunt: An Exploration of the Assassination of JFK, Part 6

For some reason, Congressional supporters of the Pentagon forced the ouster of the first counsel, Richard Sprague. It was also known that the Army was in charge of the Kennedy autopsy and there is a great deal of evidence that it was , at the least, badly botched. A comparison of what the doctors in Texas and others there saw with the official autopsy leads to the conclusion that somethings were changed and that the head wound weas changed so it would appear that the bullet came from the back.

Much information has been lost, including tissue samples, and serious questions have been raised about the x-rays and photographs that have been purported to be those of the dead Kennedy. It also told that one doctor did not dissect the neck because he was ordered not to do so.

The investigation was hampered by many things—bickering over the hiring of staff, much time spent on writing operational procedures and working out delicate relationships with government agencies, and the purge of many staffers to save money at a crucial time. In the end, the committee decided that more people than Oswald were involved but it failed to put key witnesses to this fact on the stand. It also decided that at least four shots were fired. The holes in the back of Kennedy’s shirt and coat made the single shooter and magic bullet theories untenable. It found strong evidence that the FBI knew in 1963 that information that Lee Harvey Oswald had telephoned and visited the Soviet embassy in Mexico City was very doubtful. Yet the committee fudged its conclusion on this and did not pursue the matter. Studying what went on in the committee led many connected to it to wonder if those who led it really wanted to learn what had happened on November 22. An investigation conducted by the Attorney General of Texas, Waggoner Carr, was to show that Oswald was also acting as an FBI informer since 1962.

The committee wasted a great deal of time running down a red herring offered by Clare Booth Luce. The source of her information soon shot himself. She turned out to be an officer of the Retired Intelligence Officers Association. After November 22, Mrs. Marina Oswald broke off ties with her friend Ruth Paine on the advice of the Secret Service. They told her that Mrs. Paine was “sympathizing with the CIA.” George DeMohrenschildt was to later admit that a CIA man suggest he befriend Oswald. DeMohrenschildt shot himself before being called to talk to the House Select Committee on Assassinations.


The possible involvement of Cuban exiles was only traced around the periphery. Rolando Otero told an investigator that he had repeatedly heard that the CIA was involved and that about 30 CIA personnel were in Dallas that day. He was soon shipped off to prison with a forty year sentence. The chief witness against him was Ricardo “the Monley” Morales, a CIA hit man. A Treasury man from Minnesota came into Miami to instruct other witnesses, who had been rounded up and taken to a safe house, in what they should say in court. The committee investigator traced Otero’s two sources, “Carlos” and “Ten-One,” but he was forbidden to look closely into their backgrounds or what they were doing in the mid-1970s.

Fabian Escalante, probably a Cuban government asset, claims that Antonio Cuesta, while being held by the Cubans, confessed to being involved in the assassination. He named three others who were part of the Forty: Eladio Del Valle, Rolando Masferrer and Hermino Diaz Garcia. John Martino confessed to a Miami Newsday reporter that he had been involved in the logistics of the assassination, mainly making payments. He thought two Cubans were directly involved, one being Garcia. The other was Virgilio Gonzalez, who was also connected with the Forty. Florence Martino , wife of John, said her husband told her on the morning of November 22 that Kennedy would die that day. Fred Claasen told the House Committee that Oswald thought he was working for the Cubans. He was to meet a contact at the Texas Theater and helped to leave the country, but he made a mistake shooting the policeman. Ruby had to eliminate Oswald.


In the early nineties, it was learned that James E. Files ( John Sutton), a prisoner in the Joliet State Penitentiary, admitted to having been involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Files had long worked for Charles Nicoletti, an assassin for the Ginancona crime family. Files also implicates Johnny Roselli. For a few days before the murder, Files claimed he was with Oswald in Mesquite, Texas, and he added that Oswald may not have had a drivers license but he could drive an automobile. He also described some men giving Jack Ruby and others Secret Service identifications. On the day of the murder, Nicoletti asked him to be his back-up shooter, and Files claimed he was on the grassy knoll and that Oswald did not fire a shot. Sutton claimed that he had worked for David Atlee Phillips in training Cubans for the Bay of Pigs invasion and that he had met Oswald through Phillips. Through Phillips, he also met Clay Shaw. Witnesses have turned up who claim Files was at Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963. A former CIA agent/Army officer has also said Files ( then Sutton) was part of the Miami CIA operation in 1961. Though Files knew many details concerning the event, some aspects of his story seem inconsistent. It would make good sense for someone connected with the CIA to place Files at the murder scene. Likewise, the image of the mob as a powerful organization can only be enhanced by such claims.


In 1995, agent Gene Wheaton approached the Assassinations Information Review Board with the claim that he knew Cuban CIA assets participated in the assassination. He was boarding in the home of a retired agent, Carl E. Jenkins, who had been helping Cubans get in and out of Cuba and his host as well as several Cubans talked about their roles. In 2005, he said both Jenkins and Rafael ‘Chi Chi’ Quintero were involved.

The names of the people who shot Kennedy and the details on CIA involvement will never be known. The House Select Committee on Assassinations knew that the leader of Alpha 66, an extremist Cuban-American group said he saw Bishop with Lee Oswald in Dallas before the assassination. There is a great deal of evidence that the CIA people who worked with the Bay of Pigs Cuban-Americans shared with them an intense hatred of Kennedy. They were angry when Kennedy reacted to their refusal to obey some of his orders, and they believed that JFK had decided to shut down the efforts to assassinate Castro. Perhaps some in the CIA knew that Kennedy ordered McNamara to prepare a plan for withdrawal from Vietnam by late 1965. . Documents proving this surfaced in 1997. And of course there was a pile of evidence that Oswald was tied to the intelligence community. The committee never got beyond that, and it had in place institutional arrangements that prevented it from going farther—not that it wanted to. The CIA denied having an agent by that name or having a record of anyone using that alias. Later, a former investigator for the committee built a good case that David Atlee Phillips used that name, and that his close friend E. Howard Hunt also used it.

The assassination of John F. Kennedy was a huge historical event, and there still is not enough evidence to piece together what actually happened. There is more than enough evidence to suspect that the official story was essentially a fabrication, but it still proves very difficult to sort out all the contradictions and identify and deal with deliberate disinformation. This is probably true with the respect of many other contemporary events. For example, no one can prove for certain why the US invaded Iraq. Historians, due to a methodology inherited from Leopold von Ranke, may find themselves with no choices but to repeat the official or default stories about the assassination and Iraq, perhaps adding that some have questioned these accounts.

The people who planned Kennedy’s murder could have accomplished this
without so much fanfare. It could have been done in a way to arouse almost no suspicion. Rather it was accomplished in the Dealey Plaza shooting gallery, with all sorts of messy details, and an explanatory theory that would only be accepted by the weak-minded. It was a way of announcing to the citizens of a one-time democracy that other forces were now in control and that ordinary citizens might as well swallow hard and accept it.

The Death of Dorothy Hunt: Probing the Assassination of JFK, Part 5

Frank Sturgis answered her story by stating he had never met Oswald. Fonzi eventually claimed that the Lorenz story was disinformation intended to send the committee in a direction away from Hunt and the real action. There was no doubt that she had been Castro’s mistress or that she joined the agency in 1959 and later carried out two dangerous missions in Cuba. Her story was probably a CIA effort to mislead, but the usual formula for its disinformation is to include a great deal of true information with lies intended to misdirect. If that were the case, it can be assumed that the agency wanted to place Hunt somewhere other than Dallas on November 22.


In American Spy, Hunt’s memoir, Hunt speculated that LBJ was behind the murder of JFK. Hunt speculated that William K. Harvey of the CIA could have been involved in the assassination. He reasoned that Harvey was a very ambitious man who could use this involvement to his advantage. The memoir was not published while he was alive, and his speculations were superceded by what the dying spy told his son.
In 2007, Howard St. John Hunt told Rolling Stone that his father confessed indirect complicity in the death of John F. Kennedy. E. Howard Hunt also said Lyndon B. Johnson was behind the scheme. . However, we know that Hunt had no use for LBJ. St. John Hunt said his father wrote down that there was a French gunman on the Grassy Knoll. Most experts think this was a reference to Lucien Sarti, a famous assassin from the Corsican mafia. In 2003, the History Channel aired an interview with Christian David, a French prisoner, who named Sarti as one of three French criminals hired to kill Kennedy. However, the Frenchman was probably the late Jean Pierre Andre, who can be tied to the Miami scene. CIA records say French assassin Jean Soutre, a member of a violently anti-Kennedy organization, was in Dallas that day. Two days after the assassination, he was picked up and deported.
The senior Hunt drew a line connecting the name of Cord Meyer to LBJ. Meyer was a CIA man whose ex- wife, artist Mary Pinchot Meyer (1920-1964), was mysteriously murdered on October 12, 1964. She was a early peace activist, friend of Timothy Leary ,and her father had helped fund The Masses. She had been JFK’s main mistress for two years.

A day after Kennedy’s death , Mary Meyer called a friend in New York and said JFK was killed because he was changing too fast and could no longer be controlled. By this she meant he was souring on involvement in Vietnam and becoming more distrustful of the CIA. A year later she was murdered. She cried out when shot three times by what appeared to be a disturbed young man. Had it been a professional hit, it would have been quite different . She allegedly wrote that she and JFK took LSD before having sex. After her death, James Arrington a ranking CIA official and family friend was found in her house looking for her diary. Later, Arrington purged 150 pages from the autobiography of the late Winston Scott, CIA station chief in Mexico City. Also seized were tape recordings the agency had falsely claimed were of the voice of Lee Harvey Oswald.

In 2001, Cord Meyers told interviewers that she was killed by” the same sons of bitches …that killed John F. Kennedy." Meyers was known for his leftist leanings and had been appalled when the US dropped two atomic bombs on Japan. He was the kind of man Hunt would love to have framed. Cord Meyer played a major role in setting up and running Operation Mockingbird, a scheme to control what the press reported. Why would the CIA be interested in Kennedy’s death? He was blamed for the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, and it was feared that he would splinter the agency. Yet little seemed to have happened after the Bay of Pigs other than Kennedy keeping the agency under somewhat tighter reigns. Some suggest that the CIA disagreed with Kennedy’s intention of extricating the U.S. from the civil war in Vietnam.

The elder Hunt, while talking to Howard St. John Hunt, connected Meyer’s name to Morales with a pen. It was known that Morales had bragged, “ We took care of that son of a bitch, didn’t we?” A week later E. Howard Hunt gave his son another piece of paper that said: “Cord Meyer discusses a plot with [David Atlee] Phillips who brings in Wm. Harvey [ a CIA man tied to Santo Trafficante and Sam Giancante] and Antonio Veciana.[ a member of the exile community] He meets with Oswald in Mexico City. . . . Then Veciana meets w/ Frank Sturgis in Miami and enlists David Morales in anticipation of killing JFK there. But LBJ changes itinerary to Dallas, citing personal reasons." It went on to state that Hunt’s role was limited to attending a Miami meeting with Sturgis and Morales at which the murder of JFK was discussed. Hunt said he would not get involved in anything with Bill Harvey, “an alcoholic psycho.” Later, Hunt wrote an insulting letter to his son, and demanded a return of the JFK memo. St. John returned the original but kept a copy.. There is the possibility that Hunt could have been leading St. John on. He had long treated the club footed son with open contempt. Could it be true that even in death Hunt was covering his own tracks, shielding the people to whom he felt a lasting loyalty, and performing one last service to the CIA??

Madeleine Duncan Brown, LBJ’s mistress , told about Johnson emerging from a conference of Mafios , FBI officials, and Dallas industrialists, and saying, "those SOB's" would never embarrass him again However her comments are not inconsistent with another scenario. It has been well established that J. Edgar Hoover was close to LBJ and that the Director knew about the plot, did not warn the Secret Service, and obliquely let the mob know that Kennedy’s passing would be good for the country. It could be that LBJ just learned about the plot when he spoke to his mistress over twenty years. As for the presence of the mob at the meeting, it is now known that Hoover had many social contacts with mob people and that the CIA worked hand in glove with the mob on numerous occasions. She insisted the confab occurred on November 21, but there are evidenciary matters that suggest she had the wrong date.

In a recent book, Barr McClellan claims that LBJ, one month before his death, told his friend Don Thomas that ha instructed Edward A. Clark to arrange Kennedy’s assassination. It should be noted that Clark was an enemy of McClellan. A Clark operative recruited Lee Harvey Oswald as a shooter and patsy. Clark and Johnson were also responsible for the murder of the Department of Agriculture agent who was investigating Billy Sol Estes. Even if this scenario has value, the CIA would have had knowledge of the plot through Oswald and could have acted to make certain it was successful. The account’s only strength is that a 14 point identification of a print belonging Clark’s shooter has been found on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. A letter on behalf of Billy Sol Estes by his attorney seems to confirm parts of the McClellan theory.

Gaeton Fonzi, who has written on the subject and once did investigative work for Senator Richard Schweiker, when the Pennsylvanian was part of a two person subcommittee of the Church Committee, entrusted with looking into the murder of JFK. Richard Schweiker, was sure that David Atlee Phillips, the Miami Station chief, and David Morales were deeply involved. Shawn Phillips said his father David Atlee Philllips was in Dallas that day. . Morales was head of operations at the Miami station, which was also the headquarters for The Forty, an assassins squad formed in 1959. Edwin Wilson, Barry Seal, William Seymour, Frank Sturgis and Gerry Hemming were early members. It was later expanded to 70 agents. Morales allegedly confessed to a friend in 1973, ““Well, we took care of that son of a bitch, didn’t we?” He died before he could testify. Had he lived he would have said nothing as he feared being killed by the agency.

Fonzi went on to be an investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, 1976-1978. In fact he was one of only two investigators who regularly in the field. The Committee was poorly funded and its very existence was precarious because few in Washington really wanted to look carefully into the deaths of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. It went through three chief counsels, the last of whom told the press that the report established that the mob was behind the death of Kennedy. In fact the report did not establish this; although, mobster Jack Ruby did enter the story, probably as a hired CIA cut out, by eliminating Lee Harvey Oswald. If the mob played a larger role, it was probably because it had a long established relationship with the CIA.

Ruby’s testimony to Earl Warren leaves other matters unanswered. He seemed to realize that the death of Kennedy and his action would bring rightists to power, and that would hurt a lot of people. He begged be moved to Washingtron, where he could tell his whole story. Of course, what he said is not inconsistent with the postulate that conservatives within the agency did in Kennedy.

The DEath of Dorothy Hunt: Probing the Assassination of JFK, Part 4

There is also a well-known picture of a young George H.W. Bush standing to the right of the main entrance of the Texas School Book Depository that gives pause because the resemblance is so strong. Like Nixon, Bush has offered different stories of where he was that day. According to a memorandum written by SAC Grasham W. Kitchel, Bush was in Dallas on November 22 and stayed at the Sheraton-Dallas Hotel. A November 29, 1963 J. Edgar Hoover memo refers to George Bush as a CIA man.

Bush had ties to George DeMohrenschildt, a fervent anti-Communist and Texas oil man , was one of Oswald’s close friends and possibly a CIA handler. DeMohrenschildt’s son-in-law told the Warren Commission that it was likely he was somehow involved in Kennedy’s death. . A November 29, 1963 J. Edgar Hoover memo refers to George Bush as a CIA man.

A March 3, 1964 memo from John McCone to James J. Rowley proves that Oswald had been trained by ONI for service in the Soviet Union. Oswald’s Marine Corps G-2 files remain classified as do some FBI materials. It is also clear that for some reason the CIA suppressed records about Oswald’s visit to Mexico City and that the FBI knew about this and went along. It was known for certain that someone impersonating Oswald called the soviet mission in Mexico City and that the photos of Oswald entering the embassy were not reliable. As late as January, 1964 CIA Counterterrorism Chief James Angleton was using this discredited evidence to attempt to sell the Warren Commission on the idea that Oswald worked for the KGB.


. On March 28, 1878, the House Select Committee on Assassinations learned from former CIA accountant that Lee Harvey Oswald was on the CIA payroll. Hunter Leake, number two man in the CIA station in New Orleans, told historian Michael Kurtz, that the station used Oswald as a courier. He told Kurtz that a trailer would have to be used to transport all the paperwork on Oswald’s involvement with the agency . Evidence developed later that Oswald was also an FBI informer.

In August, 1978, Victor Marchetti, a former CIA agent, wrote in the Liberty Lobby’s Spotlight that Hunt, Frank Sturgis, and Gerald “Jerry” Patrick Hemming were involved in the plot to kill Kennedy. Hemmings was a soldier of fortune and gun-runner with ties to Santo Trafficante. In 1978 testimony that was sealed until 1993, Hemmings said that he distrusted Sturgis and thought he was tied to military intelligence. He also described a 1962 meeting in the home of Louis Rabel, where the assassination of Castro was present and De Mohrdenschildt was present with piles of hundred dollar bills. Hemmings said he was home in Miami when Kennedy was killed and he insisted that the Lorenz story was false.It was his impression that Sturgis was in Dallas as were some other Miami people. He had met Oswald twice and was surprised by how much Oswald knew about him. At one point, Oswald was trying to infiltrate a team that was to kill Castro. He met Ruby in 1959.

Marchetti said that Marita Lorens provided information on this. Later two other writers repeated the story. His claims about the three men was based on a CIA memo which the House Special Committee on Assassinations chose not to publish. In the ensuing litigation over the article, Mark Lane represented the Liberty Lobby at one time.. In 1995, he convinced a jury that the CIA been involved in the assassination. It developed that Marchetti had consulted Alan Weberman, James Angleton, William Corson, Richard Helms, Stansfield Turner, G. Gordon Liddy, Martina Lorenz, and David Atlee Phillips.

Marita Lorenz , told Gaeton Fonzi “A month or so prior to November 22nd, 1963, I joined Frank Fiorini ( aka. Frank Sturges), Ozzie (Lee Harvey Oswald), others, Cubans in our group and drove in two cars to the home of Orlando Bosch . This… “highly secret meeting” in Bosch’s home was to discuss certain streets in Dallas, Texas… There was talk of a “highly powerful rifle” and discussions of “feet,” “building,” “timings,” “contacts,” “silence,” etc.” She added that just before the assassination she drove to Dallas with Bosch, Strugis, Pedro Diaz Lanz , another exile leader, and “two Cuban brothers whose names she does not know”. Fonzi argues that in this interview “Marita Lorenz had impressed me as a fairly credible witness”. Her account also appeared in the New York Daily News, November 3, 1977.

The Death of Dorothy Hunt: Probing the Assasination of JFK, Part 3

Brigadier General Russell Bowen, in Immaculate Deception, analyzed key Nixon tapes in which he referred to “Texans,” “the Texans,” “Cubans,” “the Bay of Pigs,” and “some Texas people.” One of the “brown shoe boys” of the OSS and decades of intelligence work, Bowen saw the references as referring both to recent money laundering and to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. When the most relevant of these tapes was released, Nixon advisor Dean Burch said of George H.W. Bush: “He broke out in a**holes and sh*t himself to death…” The Warren Commission Report documents included a memo in which J. Edgar Hoover said he gave a full briefing on the assassination to Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency, and there in a photograph of someone who looks very much like Bush standing in front of the Texas School Book Depository on November 22, 1963. Comparison of that image with known photographs of the young Bush only strengthen the impression that it he was there that day. In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations found that the FBI had numerous recordings of mafia people threatening to kill JFK. There is no evidence Hoover ever tried to warn the Secret Service. Maybe Hoover simply agreed with subsequent researchers who thought the mob had enough on Kennedy that a hit was unnecessary. However, this would not have prevented the mob from accepting payment for assisting in an effort initiated by others.

Nixon was in a position to know what happened on November 22, 1963, but that does not mean he was involved. Probably by coincidence, Nixon had just returned to New York from a conservative meeting in Dallas when he learned of the assassination. Initially, Vice President Richard Nixon oversaw Operation 40, an assassins unit, which was first aimed at Cuba to appease businessmen complaining about lost property. .Nixon got a committee of businessmen under Jack Crichton and George H.W. bush to fund the operation. These men were also entrusted with enlisting Cubans to invade Cuba. Frank Sturgis, Howard Hunt, Bernard Baker and Rafael Quintero were among those recruited for the invasion. Orlando Bosch, Luis Posada Carriles, and Antonio Veciana Felix Rodriguez was serving as an aid to Bush. After the failed Bay of Pigs Operation, these people detested Kennedy.


E. Howard Hunt always insisted he was in Washington, D.C. the day Kennedy died. However, the picture of three bums picked up in Dallas that day has fueled speculation that one of them was Hunt. Another looked like Frank Sturgis, who was never directly employed by the CIA. The picture allegedly showing Sturgis is convincing. Sturgis, who was murdered in 1992, told investigator Henegan that the three hoboes were Sturgis, Hunt, and Charles Harrelson. Sturgis said that his job that day was to act as a spotter for “sewer assassins,” and added that there was more than one hit team there. Investigator Jim Fetzer also identified Harrelson, but substituted Charles Rogers ( aka Charles Montoya) for Sturgis

Harrelson, the tallest of them, was an organized crime figure later sent to prison for killing a San Antonio judge John Wood with a high powered rifle. Anthropologist Gary Mack studied the photographic evidence and said Harrelson was likely the tall tramp. Harrelson once confessed to being involved in the assassination of Kennedy but later retracted his comments, saying they were made under the influence of cocaine., Carlos Marcello’s brother was convicted of hiring Harrelson to shoot Wood. .

Hunt testified to the House that he had never met Frank Sturgis until late 1972—something that seems very unlikely. Sturgis had been very active in the Miami anti-Castro movement and had heard of a CIA named “Eduardo” but he had not met Hunt or “Eduardo” until late Hunt had bragged that he often used disguises, and it is possible that he used some slight disguise then. Likewise David Atlee Phillips, an actor by avocation, admitted to using disguises.

Some thought the third person was Edward Lansdale. This association was probably made because probably design of the assassination looked like Lansdale’s work. General Lansdale was committed to the US effort in Vietnam and had great influence within the CIA because he helped control the gold the Japanese had hidden in the Philippines during World War II . .Experts like Mike Sparks and Fletcher Prouty saw the design as classic Lansdale. The great skill in removing conspirators from Dallas and the subsequent cover-up reflect the work of a man of his expertise. The general had many reasons to despise Kennedy, including what he thought were promises of high office in Vietnam. The Army had an anti-Kennedy think tank at the American University called “Camelot,” and another nest of anti-Kennedy people was Operation Mongoose, a CIA unit in Miami dedicated to killing Castro. It had a stable of capable hit men. In the view of all these people, Kennedy had made terrible blunders in planning to bring 1000 troops home from Vietnam by Christmas and by signing National Security Action Memorandum 263, which would reorient US policy from Asia to Europe.

However, investigator Jim Fetzer makes a good case that the third hit man was Chauncey Holt, a contract CIA killer and a very interesting man. At one time he was Meyer Lansky’s accountant. He was also a counterfeiter and once ran a school for assassins.

The alleged photograph of Hunt shows a resemblance but is a bit fuzzy. St. John Hunt, Howard’s oldest son, also saw the picture: "Around 1975, I was in a phone booth in Maryland somewhere, when I saw a poster on a telephone pole about who killed JFK, and it had a picture of the three tramps. I saw that picture and I fucking -- like a cartoon character, my jaw dropped, my eyes popped out of my head, and smoke came out of my ears. It looks like my dad. There's nobody that has all those same facial features. People say it's not him. He's said it's not him. But I'm his son, and I've got a gut feeling." He added that he did not remember his father being in D.C. that day. E .Howard Hunt said under oath he was home chopping vegetables with his wife. 1972 In the 1975 trial, attorney Marc Lane pointed out that Hunt had to carefully remind his children that he was home on November 22, 1963. The jury did not believe Hunt.

Lois Gibson, a visual identification expert with the Houston Police Department, has made a good case that the three tramps were three entirely different men, whose identities were known. One of them, coincidentally, was also photographed near Oswald when he was passing out Fair Play for Cuba pamphlets. This is not a matter that is easily resolved. If Hunt and other CIA operatives were in Dealey Plaza, it is very possible that they were not there as tramps. On the other hand, technical experts from 3M's Comtal Corporation in 1988 concluded there was a strong resemblance between Hunt and the third tramp. Earlier, others had reached a similar conclusion by using photo overlays.

The Death of Dorothy Hunt: Probing the Assassination of JFK, Part 2

Chicago legal reporter Sherman Skolnik received a telephone call urging him to look into the crash. He found that 150 federal personnel converged on the accident site and prevented anyone else from getting to the wreckage. An ambulance driver was outraged that rescuers were held back. On June 13, 1973 John Reed, chairman of the NTSB, told the House Government Activities Subcommittee that about 150 federal personnel were at the scene after the crash. Reed added that he complained to the FBI that they had kept rescue personnel away. There were fifty FBI agents there, and one went into the Midway Tower and seized the tape relating to Flight 553. Up to that time, the mainline press supported federal claims that Skolnich had lied about all the federal personnel being there. Skolnick marveled that many of the feds arrived at the scene before the Chicago firemen and police. A Chicago Congressman learned they were surveiling the plane because of claimed “air piracy.” Skolnich learned from other sources that the DIA and CIA had been ordered to arrest Dorothy Hunt. The day after the crash, the airplane fuselage was buried in a Chicago dump. So much for a careful study of the crash .

Activist Dick Gregory later told Skolnich there had been several efforts to get him onto that flight. Eventually someone slipped him a copy of the 1300 page NTSB document on the crash. Skolnich concluded that the plane had been sabotaged. On June 13 and 14, 1973, the NTSB heard his testimony and that of his eight witnesses. His case was that tower instruments monitoring the plane’s approach were turned off just before the approach and turned back on just after it got on the wrong runway. He thought the evidence suggested that the plane’s electronic buss bar was set to short out, thus disabling key instruments. The NTSB said crew errors caused the accident.

Skolnich was told that a government assassin using the name Harold R. Metcalf sat in seat B 17 and was seen exiting the crash. The NTSB report showed that he told the pilot he was a narcotics agent carrying a gun. One of Skolnich’s people later talked to Metcalf and Skolnick concluded that Metcalf was supposed to be a “double cut-out,” he was to make sure Mrs. Hunt was dead and then someone was supposed to kill him. Metcalf survived.


Later Skolnick interviewed Chuck Colson, who told him that Mrs. Hunt “was murdered by the FBI and the CIA." Colson added that he had already said too much. Colson also told Time, “I think they killed Dorothy. Hunt.” .Writers who agree are Robert J. Groden, Peter Dale Scott, Alan J. Weberman and Carl Oglesby.

Skolnick and some others have assumed that E. Howard Hunt was also in a position to reveal a great deal about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Nixon was heard to complain a few times that Hunt’s demands for hush money on Watergate was likely to expose "the whole Bay of Pigs thing," H.R. Haldeman , Nixon’s chief of staff, wrote that this was a somewhat veiled reference to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Some investigators believe the DNC had a reel of film showing Oswald with some CIA operative, but this writer has not been able to find much evidence for this other than a Los Angeles Times story. Frank Sturgis, told the San Francisco Chronicle (May 7, 1977) that "the reason we burglarized the Watergate was because Nixon was interested in stopping news leaking related to the photos of our role in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy."

The Death of Dorothy Hunt: Probing the Assassination of JFK, Part 1

A useful way of approaching the assassination of John F. Kennedy is to examine two men named Hunt, Howard, a career CIA man and oil billionaire H.L. Establishing who exactly killed Kennedy is nearly impossible. But the stories of these two men will shed light on the forces at work in 1963.

On December 8, 1972, a United Airlines Flight carrying the wife of E. Howard Hunt crashed near Chicago’s Midway Airport . She bought an extra first class seat for her luggage. It is not known what happened to it. Did it contain the $1, 900,000 in negotiables ands $10,000 in untraceable cash that CREEP paid to buy the silence of the Hunts ? Some calculate that there was less, perhaps between $100,000 and $250,000. There is strong evidence, that CREEP was also buying silence about what Hunt could say about the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

. E. Howard Hunt ( 1918-2007), G. Gordon Liddy, and James McCord had masterminded the famous Watergate break-in. Hunt was a member of the insiders’ circle of old boys, close to former director Allen Dulles; and Hunt’s protégé was David Atlee Phillips. He was Chief of Cuban Operations and Covert Action at the Mexico City station at the time of the Kennedy assassination and had been involved in an effort to falsely sell the idea that Lee Oswald worked for the Soviets. Hunt was probably also involved, having been assigned to Mexico City in August and September, 1963. In 1963, Hunt was Chief of Covert Operations for the Domestic Operations Division. There are controversial allegations that Hunt was in Dallas on November 22, 1963 and a 1966 memo initialed by Richard Helms and James Angleton stating it was important to conceal Hunt’s presence in Dallas that day. Helms was another member of the charmed circle of CIA insiders. Helms and Dulles worked together to prevent the Warren Commission from knowing about plots, in league with the Mafia, to kill Castro.


Hunt officially left the agency in 1970 and became part of a secret White House Investigative Unit that carried our a few burglaries. Dorothy Hunt was also a CIA agent and met her husband when they were working in China in the late 1940s. She was unhappy about flying around the country paying off Watergate figures and the way the payoffs were handled. Hunt demanded money in return for silence about who ordered the Watergate break-in, and Dorothy Hunt , also a CIA agent, also participated in the negotiations with White House aid Charles Colson. James McCord claimed that Dorothy told him and her husband’s attorney that they had evidence that would "blow the White House out of the water. ".John Wesley Dean told Nixon on the famous tapes that Mrs. Hunt was “the savviest woman alive.” She had put the whole picture together. A month after her death, Hunt pleaded guilty to conspiracy and burglary and spent 33 months in prison.

Michele Clark of CBS News was also on the plane. She was doing a story on Watergate and may have had inside information, as her boyfriend was a CIA agent. CBS insisted that her body be cremated; although, her family opposed this. The mortician who did the job was later killed in an apparent burglary. Chicago Representative George Collins was also with Ms. Clark and Mrs. Hunt. There were 45 dead, including Collins and 42 other passengers.

Portrait of an ONI Spy, Part 3

Captain Russbacher defected from the CIA sometime around this. Maybe he was concerned with abuses of power and maybe it was all about obstacles to his second marriage. In any event, he took a Seal unit with him that had a dozen members.

Two days after the wedding he was arrested and held for several months on trumped up charges. Some months after his arrest, he was released to fly a mission to Moscow and immediately rearrested. In order to save his bride from threatened imprisonment, he pled guilty to impersonating a US attorney and fraud and was sentenced to 21 years. Much of this went back to his operating a CIA proprietary. His ONI boss, who tried to help him , was killed in a plane crash . Paul Wilcher, his lawyer, was soon suicided July 1, 1993. Wilcher was found dead on his toilet but there was no fecal material in the bown and no urine. His papers and 55 audio tapes of Russbacher were gone. Russbacher was told that Wilcher was taken to Venice, Virginia wherer he was given pizza and questioned about what he knew about the accounts of politicians in BCCI. He was handed a can of pop that was coated with 025 mg of Curare via DSMO. When he weas about to die, he was beaten in the fce to make it appear he had bee mugged. The body was returned to his apartment and because he was in rigor mortis, he was set on the toilet.

His wife embarked on speaking tours trying to get him freed but was nearly killed herself several times between 1990 and 1992. In the first attempt on her life, Gunther’s old Seal team saved her by ramming the car carrying men firing at her.


Missouri released him on probation in December, 1993, after he had been tortured and kept in the hole. Michael W. Brown, the judge who forced his release, died in a head on accident three years later. He had also been subjected to botched heart surgery that left the lower part of his heard dead. Once he had been forced to pull his own tooth and his heart medeicine was often withheld. The ONI then had him orchestrate the transfer of gold from the Philippines to Austria, returning that country gold Hitler had seized in 1938. This was called Operation White Robe. When he completed it, General Hugh Shelton called Gunter to tell him he was reactivated. But he was sent to an Austrian prison for not paying a hotel bill.

. In Austria, he ended up in a prison hospital where doctors were appalled by the signs of torture he had endured in the US. Austrian psychiatrists claim to have removed his hospital mind control program. When released from the Austrian hospital December 23, 1996, he had a heart transplant . He resurfaced in a New Mexico hospital with heart complications, and with a beautiful young woman who was not his wife. Because he has skipped out on Missouri probation, he was taken to a Los Alamos jail cell covered with fecies and urine.

When he talked to his wife via telephone he seemed ,, possibly drugged and still under mind control. He was not the same person and did not seem to remember his wife. He did tell her that the young woman met him at the prison door. After a few calls to his wife,. He vanished for a month. He resurfaced in a New Mexico hospital with heart complications, and with a beautiful young woman who was not his wife. Because he has skipped out on Missouri probation, he was taken to a Los Alamos jail cell covered with fecies and urine.


FBI chief William Sessions told his second wife that Russbacher was back at work running intelligence operations for Group 26 ( Defense Intelligence Services—not same as DIA ) out of Bristol England. He had a new wife, Jane Ryder, and his father in law was a former MI 6 agent., who freelanced for the CIA and the Vatican Intelligence Service. Allan Frankovich, her former lover who had some intelligence connectiond )died of a sudden heart attack a few months before Jane and Gunther began to cohabit. Jane, a respected film producer, says that Father Malachi Martin taught her everything she knows. Martin was a former Vatican Jesuit known for an immoral lifestyle who became an important figure in American right-wing circles.

Somehow he ended up in a Los Alamos jail, rational sometimes and a little demented at other times. It is believed that Jane worked for the CIA and induced him to return to the US. He and Jane returned to England the same year and married, a year before his second wife obtained a divorce in the US.


In 1996, Russbacher published a piece on Jonestown in which he claimed it was a government operation and that members of the cult had been subjected to various degrees of mind control. Wesley Baker of the Department of State headed the project. The programming proved less than effective and there was a revolt followed by as massacre. In another article, the Captain said that Congressman Leo Ryan knew Jonestown was a government operation and was concerned that it was out of control. He has also written about how subjects are found for mind contro in Project Open Eyes and about five levels of training. Some public figures have been subjected to mind control, and he thinks they include Bill Clinton, John McCain, and Madeline Albright.

Captain Russbacher wrote that there were seven sleepers in the Branch Davidian compound at Waco, but he did not think their programming was sufficient that they could be triggered to carry out any specific actions. Dr. Chomg Sun Kim of the Stone Mountain facility had programmed them. The Davidian Group had been created with the intention of using it to carry out terrorist actions. For some reason, a Delta Group Force was sent to neut4ralize the seven sleepers only, and something went wrong. Somehow the seven sleepers had been prematurely set off and they were building some kind of nerve gas device for mass destruction. Triggers appear in TV advertisements and in newspapers.

Gunther claimed to have taught mind control at the Life Management Institute outside Waco in the early 60s. He said Mark Phillips and David Koresh were students there. Interestingly, he claims that Charles Keating and William Sessions ran an operation against pedophiles out of the LMI. Elsewhere, Gunther called this Operation Cyclone. It was shut down when it began to threaten prominent people.

Captain Russbacher opposed government drug dealing and claimed that the CIA helped organize the Cali drug cartel. The captain claimed to be at a meeting with the Columbians and said that Columbia was divided between the two cartels. The overall name for CIA drug operations in Latin America was Operation Snow Cone. His sotry was independently corroborated by former CIA agent Trenton Parker, who went into greater detail on the meetings and the role of the Agency. In 1976-1982, Parker was giving evidence of governmental corruption to Congressman Larry McDonald of the Joint Armed Services Committee, and McDonald subsequently died in a plane crash.

Russbacher also claimed there was a plan to “sanction” Bill Clinton in San Francisco during the 1992 campaign. He was obviously in prison at the time, so his information had to have come from friends in the intelligence network. This Operation Mount Rushmore was to be spearheaded by a Lt. Commander. From ONI, but the CIA and Mossad were also involved. Clinton was saved by a leak within the organization, but several people lost their lives. Rodney Stich obtained information from the Lieutenant Commander and other sources than Russbacher to confirm the plot. Also named in the plot were two men with Chinese names and a major San Francisco law firm.

Russbacher told his second wife that the Murrah Federal Building was bombed on April 19, 1995 to distract attention from an airplane crash that killed 17 high ranking military officers who were plotting against Bill Clinton. Sherman Skolnick had written about the plotters before the plane crash. The press reported that eight died.

Russbacher has been framed in a bizarre scenario, claiming he was behind the killing of Princess Diana. The point was not to convict him of anything but to cast doubt on anything he has said. Russbacher blamed his fate on the activities of a faction within the intelligence community that has placed the interests of George H.W. Bush above those of the nation. He was part of a second faction, mainly ONI, that tried to place the national interest first. Who knows if there re such factions. While in prison, he did historical research and came up with some odd economic theories and the belief that some sort of international conspiracy dating back to the Bavarian Illuminati are behind many human problems. Most of his testimony can be verified, but his historical and economic theories are another matter.

Portrait of an ONI Spy, Part 2

Gunther came to Oklahoma as a child his mother. After two years in the Army, he joined the CIA in 1963 which quickly placed him in the navy and flight training. He soon joined the ONI in 1968. In Viet Nam he was wounded and tortured as a prisoner. When he returned to the US, he became qualified to fly the most advanced aircraft. He was involved in black ops in Europe, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, as well as the United States. He was apart of a team skilled at murder via car accident and he was also very good at sanitizing intelligence crime scenes here and in Germany. He told his second wift that he attended assassin school outside Phoenix at Center Point, and that George H.W. Bush was a classmate. He was later called the Ice Pick because that was his favored tool.

For a time he was on loan to the Department of State for black ops. He infiltrated the Pipefitters Union and even worked for it St. Louis for a time. Gunther also infiltrated criminal and narcotics rings as well as Italian and German terrorist operations. He ran a CIA owned insurance investment advisory service, helped CIA connected companies find tax loopholes, built developments through CIA-financed Crystal Shores Group. All thos was part of Operation Cyclops , an effort to put more agents in the business world and expand the number of proprietaries. Gunther has said that Congressman Roy Blunt has repeatedly help the CIA charter proprietary companies in Missouri, and of course this involved pay-offs. Blunt would play a major role arranging Russbacher’s second imprisonment.

Russbacher first served a brief prison sentence in Texas when he was caught moving bags of bearer bonds for the agency. Sometimes he taught languages for the military. He also established a CIA savings and loan that collapsed in Pennsylvania. Within CIA circles he was called “the banker,” because he handled secret accounts and funded black ops. Captain Russbacher also worked with Robert L. Corson, a known CIA money mule, who was involved in defrauding over twenty savings and loans in Texas and elsewhere, according to the Houston Post sries on the S and L series. To complicate things, Russbacher sometimes even used Corson’s name. He was also involved in assisting the counterrevolutionaries in Central America. Russbacher headed an operation in 1983 that turned sour trying to extricate a Stassi defector from East Germany, lost a close friend in the process, and took a little time off. In the eighties, he also carried PROMIS software to Australia.

In 1989 he married ,Rayelan Allan Russbacher, his second wife, disregarding the CIA order that he wait two years to remarry. Her late husband was dean of science and engineering at the Naval Postgraduate School, where she first met Gunther. He knew he would never be given permission to marry her because she was a liberal activist, intent on learning about the October Surprise. She had lobbied against the appointment of Donald Gregg as ambassador to South Vietnam, and did not know he then headed the CIA disciplinary committee.

Portrait of an ONI Spy: Part 1

An August 22, 1985 memo from Admiral John Poindexter to National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane states that Captain Gunther Karl Russbacher ( 1942-2005) and piloted a DC 6 taking Tow missiles[ part of eventual 408] to Iran as part of what was known as the Iran-Contra deal. Oliver North was aboard, and the missiles wre mistakenly taken to the wrong Iranian unit. Robert Hunt(ONI and NSC) was also aboard. [ Hunt is now in prison.] Another of the admiral’s memos describes large deposits made in the accounts of those involved. A May 30 Oliver North memo to the admiral describes a snag in further negotiations with the Iranians, which Russbacher attended. A June 16 memo from Vice President Bush to the admiral asks him to thank Hunt and Russbacher for their efforts. A November 11, 1993 letter from Mossad agent Moshe Ben-Manash confirmed the facts of the Iran/Conra exchange of missiles and Russbacher’s role.

Captain Russbacher claims that he was the command pilot on the plane that
brought George H. W. Bush to Paris on October 19, 1980 to negotiate the October Surprise at the Hotel Crillion in Paris, an arrangement whereby the Iranians agreed to hold 52 American hostages until after the presidential election. Richard Brenneke, Russbacher’s cousin and also an arms dealer, was another pilot , and the third was Heinrich Rupp. Bush was there only a few hours—long enough to see the deal cemented, and Russbacher shuttled Bush back to the US aboard an SR –71, the Blackbird needle nosed spy plane. Adnam Khashoggi, the arms dealer, paid for the return flight’s fuel with his credit card. George H.W. Bush rambled on about Russbacher’s claim at a 1992 news conference. Brenneke was later jailed when he discussed the flight but a jury believed his story and released him.

“I wonder whether they're going to use the same prosecutors that are trying out there to see whether I was in Paris in 1980 and flew home in an SR-71 Blackbird. I mean, where are we going with the taxpayers' money in this political year? So, let them look at it. It's no problem to me. But I think at some point somebody ought to say where is all this money going that goes to pay for these special prosecutors, rummaging through files and proving nothing. I was not in Paris, and we did nothing illegal or wrong here. We tried, and it didn't work, and we moved. And that's the answer to it..." (Times June 5, 1992)



Unfortunately, there is not a solid evidentiary trail for his involvement. The evidence is amply clear that the October Surprise was negotiated. It is doubtful if Russbacher would have had so many problems in his later life had he not been involved. He has produced flight logs to prove many claims, but there are no logs for the October Surprise.

Russbacher, the scion of an Austria noble family, was born July 1, 1942 amid a strange Teutonic Knights ceremony. Ernst Kaltenbrunner, his grandfather, was head of Austrian intelligence in World War II. .Baron Karl Russbacher was allegedly part of the plot to kill Hitler and had to fake his own death. After the war, he worked for the US government under a different name.

The Death of James Sabow: A Soldier who Objected to the Government Drug Trade

In January, 1991 Colonel James T. Sabow and Colonel Colonel Joseph Underwood were relieved of their commands at the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station. Sabow was assistant chief of staff and Underwood was his boss. General Wayne T. Adams accused them of falsifying flight records, abusing training flights, and taking too much luggage with them on training flights. The Corps’ inspector general, General Hollis Davison accompanied by three assistants , immediately appeared at the base to personally look into these grave charges. Two days later, on January 22, Sabow was found dead in his backyard. He had apparently shot himself with a valuable shotgun, but there was a pea sized bulge on back of his skull. His daughter said he had been in a good mood and that he was answering the telephone when she left for St. John Neumann High School. There was a small puddle of blood and no splatter. The coroner said he died of a blast to the mouth.

Dr. John David Sabow, Jim’s brother, had doubts about the coroner’s verdict, but the military warned that an investigation would show that the deceased was both a felon and a crook. The family eventually concluded that James was threatening to reveal the arrival at night of cargo planes from Latin America carrying drugs. Dr. Sabow ‘s own forensic team raised questions about the mode of death, why the lungs were filled with blood when the medulla had already beeen destroyed, and why James’s prints were not on the shotgun. The prints found on it were those of Sabow’s son who last cleaned it. They concluded the colonel was hit on the back of the head and then the gun was jammed into his mouth.

The family initiated a legal claim against the Marine Corps, but it could not be proven that he was murdered. A Lt. Col Gary Albin approached Sabow’s house at the time of the murder. Underwood, a neighbor said Sabow was not home. Someone gave the family lawyer material on a Marine strategy meeting designed to scare off the Sabows as well as copy of an order to a legal officer to take steps to strip Dr. Sabow of his medical license. They did establish that black, unmarked planes came into the base, flown by what appeared to be civilians. The planes stopped at the end of the runway and left soon after that. Colonel Underwood had forbidden the MPs from getting near the planes. Private investigators told Dr. Sabow that El Toro was a hub in the government’s Latin American drug trade. The former chief of the county forensic squad believed the colonel was murdered and that the scene was rearranged to look like a suicide. Pursing this case is complicated by the many deaths of Sabow witnesses and the imprisonment of others. One witness was imprisoned when he shot a hit man sent to take him out.