When they say "they all lied about Oswald" they most certainly include Marina, and I couldn't agree more.
This is a major piece of research. It is a major contribution to the body of knowledge about the Oswalds and especially about their ties to the "White" Russians of Texas (as opposed to Red Russians).
They All
Lied About Oswald
By Staffan H Westerberg & Pete Engwall
”We were repeatedly
amazed at the ease with which Marina left the USSR which we, who know the setup
on the other side, think is almost incredible. American, British and other
diplomats married Russian girls and it took them years to get their wife’s
out.”
George Bouhe of the White
Russian Community in Dallas
According to the official version, this 20-year-old kid, Lee Harvey Oswald, defected to
one of the most horrific place on earth, to the Soviet Union in the midst of
the Cold War in October of 1959. Supposedly, he met a Russian girl, Marina
Prusakova in Minsk, Belarus and within six weeks, he married her. In June of
1962, Oswald with wife and a four months old child returned to the United
States. We all know the story; it is almost carved in stone.
The question is, is it a
true story? Is any of it true?
The official version of events does not include that CIA debriefed
Lee Oswald after he stepped off the boat in New York City in June of 1962. As
far as the story goes, Lee, Marina and daughter June simply boarded a plane to
Dallas-Fort Worth, where his brother Robert would be waiting. However, there seems
to have been a group of people ready for the couple in Texas. This was an
organization Lee got in contact with during the first week while staying at his
brother’s house in Fort Worth. Apparently, Lee went to a local library to get the
phone number to a Fort Worth lawyer, Max Clark, who according to the official
story got Lee the job at Leslie Welding Company, while Clark’s wife, Gali
Sherbatoff Clark, took the Oswald couple under her wings.
Gali Sherbatoff Clark, or Princess Sherbatoff, had a high
position in the White Russian Community. She sent the word to several
anti-communist Russians to care for Lee and Marina. Soon Lee and Marina were
surrounded by a platoon of Russian speaking people eager to help the young
couple. Most researchers know of White Russians such as George de Mohrenschildt
and Abraham Zapruder, perhaps also of Ilya Mamantov and Ruth Paine (with Russian
connections). These people have been covered in detail elsewhere so we will
concentrate on the lesser-known Russians in Texas.
The White Russians
The National Alliance of Russian Solidarists in Dallas,
Fort Worth and Houston - or as they were called, the White Russian Community
(WRC) – were essentially a consequence of the Russian Revolution in 1917. These people were not
necessarily originating from Belarus (White Russia) but were more of a group
that in the beginning had fought with the Czar against the Bolsheviks. White’s against Red’s – from that the name White
Russians. After the revolution, in the 1920s and 1930s, over two million of
the White’s emigrated to the West, of those, circa 30 000 to the U.S. Then
after World War II, several hundreds more came to the States. Come 1962 in
Dallas/Fort Worth many of them belonged to a cohesive group organized through
the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia and the old Orthodox Catholic
Church of North America. Today we know that the WRC in Texas was funded by the
CIA through the Philadelphia based Catherwood Foundation and the Tolstoy
Foundation. It was Alexandra Tolstoy, the daughter of the great novelist Leo
Tolstoy, who organized the latter foundation, which took care of Russian
refugees throughout the world.
From the book The JFK
Conspiracy by David Miller:
”Most of the
Russians had come to Dallas through the auspices of the Tolstoy Foundation, a
right-wing lobby; which, for a time, received yearly subsidies from the U.S.
government (read: CIA) of 400,000 dollars. Life centered around the Orthodox
Church, another recipient of the CIA’s largesse.”
Strange
Churches
These Orthodox Churches would resemble some sort of
civilian regiments. Over time they would become part of a clandestine substructure
developed to serve the intelligence community’s concept of national security. Totally beyond suspicion, groups of
clandestine operateurs, priests and bishops, could be active in full view
without ever being questioned. But how did it all begin? In addition, when did
the U.S. intelligence forces start to use Catholic Churches as a cover of their
covert activities?
Researcher Peter Lavenda holds the idea that “it started a hundred years ago as a kind of
hobby with people breaking off from the traditional church, especially the
Orthodox Catholic Church, and then quickly during the Cold War became the
playground for the intelligence community”.
We are somewhat skeptical of that theory. Instead, we
believe that it goes back to the Russian Revolution and before. The Russian
Orthodox Church had close ties to the Czars up until 1917. After the Soviet
Union was established in 1922 the nations former State Church was forbidden to
engage in charity work or be present in schools or prisons. This was the time
when the Russian Orthodox Church outside of Russia was established. Then, when
Stalin seized power, many Christians were persecuted and killed; in 1939, only
four bishops remained alive and less than a hundred churches were open to the
public.
Since
religion was now on the brink of extinction in the Soviet Union, and the
bishops and priests stood on common ground with the White Czarists, one can
assume that the churches became the infrastructure that the resistance needed
to be able to organize for perhaps a counter-revolution, or simply just to get
help to escape to the West.
The
concept of using churches and false clergymen as covert operators was adopted
by the U.S. intelligence. For example, in 1960, a senior CIA officer from the Directorate of Plans was
dispatched to the Congo to aid in the assassination attempt against Patrice Lumumba,
according to researcher Lisa Pease. Justin O’Donnell, referred to in the Church
Committee records as "Father Michael Mulroney", planned to lure
Lumumba away from the U.N. protection and then turn Lumumba over to his enemies,
who would surely kill him, which is what happened. In New Orleans, two years
later, we had rogue agents like David Ferrie (priest) and Jack Martin (bishop).
Imported
Nazi’s
We
have identified well over twenty Russian individuals in the Dallas-Fort Worth
area who were in some way connected to Lee and Marina from 1962 and onward.
Many of these people were survivors from World War II and had ended up in
German prison camps before they came to the States. We can assume that the
hatred towards Stalin and the totalitarian regime had led several of the
White’s to work for the Nazis, acting as spies inside the Soviet Union. This
fact leads to another group of immigrants that more or less secretly came to
America after the war. All under the supervision of OSS Chief Allen Dulles – a
man with a long and deep history with the European aristocracy and ditto economic
power elite. Besides Hitler’s intelligence chief Reinhard Gehlen and his staff,
Dulles brought several hundred Nazi scientists to the U.S. (Operation Paperclip). After the war The Gehlen Organization was used by the
U.S. in the Cold War; Adolph Hitler's former chief intelligence officer still
had a vast underground network in place inside Russian frontiers.
Gehlen and a handful of close associates came to the U.S. on
September 20, 1945. The
Nazi Intel Chief stayed in America long enough to watch a baseball game or two
and perhaps attend some discrete cocktail parties before Dulles sent him back
to West Germany in July 1946 to continue the spying business towards the
Communist Block.
Between
the church going anti-communist Russians, the Nazi intelligence people and the
weird Nazi scientists arriving to the States after the war, we believe one man
could have had a pivotal role, namely a U.S. Army Colonel by the name of Boris
Pash.
Boris
Theodore Pashkovsky was born on June 20, 1900 in San Francisco. His father,
Theodore Pashkovsky, was an Orthodox priest who was sent to California by the
Russian Church in 1894. In 1912 the family moved back to Russia. During the
Russian Revolution Boris Pashkovsky served in the White Russian Navy. In 1920
he married Lydia Ivanova and would immigrate to the United States. In 1940 he
was called to active duty; to act as a security officer for the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos; towards
the end of the war he was the military leader of the Operation Alsos; among other duties, Pash had the task of capturing
the scientists working on the Nazi atomic project. After the war, the Colonel
was in charge of Operation Bloodstone,
which involved recruiting former German officers and diplomats who would be
used in the covert war against the Soviet Union.
Mae Brussel, 1973 in The Realist:
”The Gehlen
Organization, master spy outfit for Hitler’s hot war against Eastern Europe and
the USSR, moved many of their agents via Allen Dulles CIA into the Dallas-Fort
Worth-Houston area.”
Several
researchers also mention ”British
intelligence reportedly told the U.S. government that they suspected George de
Mohrenschildt was working for German intelligence”.
We would also imagine that it was from this flood of German
and Russian immigrants that CIA and Allen Dulles created the sinister program
MK/ULTRA.
Russians
in the background
Before
we get to Lee and Marina, we have to take a closer look at the team of
high-class women and well-educated and seemingly rich men in the Dallas-Fort
Worth White Russian Community. Who were they, why did they rush to assist Lee
and Marina in various situations, and what was their verdict of Oswald after
the assassination?
We
will start with the supposed leader of this secretive group – Paul
Raigorodsky. This 64-year old Russian expatriate was a Chemical Engineer and
millionaire oilman who had served both in the White Russian Army and the U.S.
Army; he was in fact the first White Russian immigrant to settle in Dallas (1920).
“Czar” Raigorodsky was also prominent board member of the Tolstoy Foundation.
On the female side, we have the Princess Gali Sherbatoff
Clark. She was the daughter of Prince and Princess Mikhail Mikhaïlovitch
Sherbatoff, exiled from Russia after the 1917 Revolution. Gali met her husband
Max Clark, a pilot in the US Army, during the war. Gali’s cousin Kyril
Scherbatow, who lived in New York and Jamaica, had invested with Paul Raigorodsky
in the Tryall Resort on Jamaica in 1957, where also the head of British
Security Coordination (BSC), William Stephenson had a residence. Gali’s
husband, Max Clark, became a Fort Worth lawyer and former industrial security
supervisor at General Dynamics as well as a mentor for George de Mohrenschildt
and the White Russian Community. Max Clark was supposedly the first person Lee
Harvey Oswald reached out to after the long journey from the Soviet Union.
Another central figure was George Alexandrovich Bouhe
from St Petersburg, Russia. Besides working as an accountant, Bouhe was also a
self-appointed ”nursemaid” in the community, as well as the secretary-treasurer
at the St. Nicholas Parish – even called ’Bouhe's Parish’.
Countryman Igor Voshinin did not care much for George
Bouhe.
”Bouhe is known to
be a little aggressive and stick his nose into people’s personal affairs”, Voshinin
told the Warren Commission.
Money coming into St. Nicholas Parish went through Bouhe.
This was also the same church where outspoken atheist George De Mohrenschildt sang
in the church choir. Actually, it was George Bouhe who brought Oswald to meet
de Mohrenschildt. Strangely enough, Bouhe also lived next door to Jack Ruby -
another person with a Russian background, who was a business associate with not
only Paul Raigorodsky, but also Baron Jean DeMenil.
Perhaps Ruby should be viewed as an errand boy for the CIA
via the White Russian Community, instead of someone who worked for the Mob?
Houston banker with Russian ties, Baron Jean DeMenil, was
married to Dominique Schlumberger. He definitely tied Jack Ruby to the rogue
outfit in New Orleans; DeMenil acted through the New Orleans office of the
Swiss-based company Permindex. The Baron had used the company’s organization in
1960 and 1961 to smuggle rifle grenades, land mines, missiles and other arms to
the forces invading Cuba. DeMenil had these arms boxed and transported by
Schlumberger with the company name and false labeling on the huge number of
containers. Gordon Novel, Guy Bannister, David Ferrie, Sergio Arcacha Smith and
others were all part of DeMenil’s network and worked closely with Schlumberger
in transporting these arms and ammunition. Further more, researcher Peter Lavenda writes that Guy
Banister was a man who had so many bishops working for him
he might as well have been the Pope: David Ferrie, Jack Martin, Fred Crisman, Thomas Beckham, Raymond Broshears and Thomas
Jude Baumler shared the same apostolic succession and had ties to Russian émigré Bishop Walter Propheta, a man who had
formed his own American Orthodox Catholic Church in New York City.
A side note: The idea of DeMenil running the show in New
Orleans could mean that when Lee and Marina separated in late winter of 1963, George
de Mohrenschildt turned over the responsibility of controlling the couple to Russian
speaking Quaker Ruth Paine and White Russian Jean DeMenil? While Paine oversaw
and kept Marina company, Baron DeMenil had Guy Banister and David Ferrie making
sure Oswald camouflaged himself as a communist with the fake task of rooting
out commies in New Orleans.
The White Russian women in Fort Worth and Dallas were all
eager to help the Oswald family, especially to attend to Marina. Besides
inviting Lee and Marina to a number of dinner parties and luncheon’s during the
summer and fall of 1962, they also let Marina and her child stay at their homes
when Lee allegedly had mistreated her or was out looking for low paying jobs. Marina
stayed with Elena Hall in Fort Worth through the month of October of 1962;
Elena bought clothes for Marina and June since she felt they were very poor.
Gali Sherbatoff Clark also made a point of shopping for the Oswald family and
providing material support and brought groceries to Marina. Then on November 5,
Marina moved to Anna Meller, only to move to Katya Ford on the 10th
of the same month and then on to Valentina Ray on the 17th. Lydia
Dymitruk also helped Marina with her English and drove her with her sick
daughter to Parkland Hospital.
During this period, Lee had two jobs: In July of 1962, he
got a job to cut sheet metal at the Leslie Welding Company in Fort Worth. This
position had supposedly come via Virginia Hale (wife of FBI man IB Hale) at the Texas
Employment Commission and Princess Sherbatoff’s husband, Max Clark. This situation
was – however – not clear to the foreman on the job site, Tommy Bargas, who
thought that Oswald was a good employee. Then one day in late September, or
early October, Oswald did not show up for work. Bargas never knew why. Oswald
was not let go or fired; he just did not show up, according to Bargas.
For some reason Oswald started a new job on October 12 at
Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, a
graphic arts company in Dallas, where he would learn a simple photoprint
process; he operated a Photostat camera, which was a 1960s version of a copy
machine.
The
man who got him this position was Teofil “George” Meller, a packer at
the department store Sangers Harris in Dallas. Apparently, Meller had called a
friend of his, a Mrs. Cunningham, to help get Oswald the job. George Meller was married to Russian émigré Anna
Meller, who was very much involved with Marina and Lee.
However,
on April 6, 1963 Oswald was told by his boss John Graef that he (Lee) had made
too many mistakes and he was not particularly liked by his co-workers –
therefore he would have to go. Oswald went to New Orleans instead, where he
would seek another low paying job.
It
is interesting to follow Oswald and his “job hunting” for low paying jobs.
Perhaps he had a short concentration span or poor social skills and could not hold
a job? Or maybe this was all a front and that in reality he was directed and
redirected to different jobs by people in the White Russian Community? After
all, many low paying jobs gives a much
worse impression than one low paying
job does.
Supposedly,
a relative told Lee about a job advertised at Standard Coffee for a
Maintenance Man. This was on April 28. Two weeks later, he was hired as a machine greaser.
If
Jean DeMenil’s network in New Orleans (Guy Banister) in reality had something
to do with Oswald ending up at the Reily’s Coffee Company, where several
intelligence people allegedly worked, this would of course be pure speculation
on our part. In any case, Lee was allegedly fired on July 19 from Reily’s but
hung around with Guy Banister and the Cubans in New Orleans. Then it was Ruth Paine
who got him his final low paying job. He was hired at the Texas School Book
Depository on October 15, 1963.
One
way or another, all four low paying jobs that Lee Harvey Oswald had held after
coming home from the Soviet Union had been enabled through someone in the White
Russian Community, or someone close to the WRC. We believe that switching jobs
was part of the recoloring of Lee –
to become the lone, deranged communist that eventually would have the right
profile to kill the President.
The idea that young “Marxist” Lee Harvey Oswald would
have gotten this much help from people who more or less hated the communists
and the totalitarian system is ludicrous, even on the face of it. In fact,
these people were very right-wing-anti-Kennedy and would likely support a
removal of a president who would engage in peace talks with a Soviet president.
A
peculiar detail is that according to the official story, Lee allegedly spent
several days at Ruth Paine’s house the week before the assassination. Either
there with his wife and Mrs. Paine in Irving or in the rooming house at 1026
North Beckley Avenue. However, that was not what Mr. and Mrs. Ray explained in
a written statement to Jack Revill with the Dallas Police on February 10, 1964.
Thomas and Natalie Ray claimed that Lee Harvey Oswald in fact had stayed at
their home on Farm Road 1502 in Blossom, Texas for a few days prior
to the assassination. This fact was not mentioned during the Warren
Commission hearings – and certainly does not fit with the official
Oswald-chronology.
Natalie
was born in Stalingrad, Russia in May of 1922. She was taken (prisoner)
to Germany by the German Army in 1943. Natalie married an American soldier,
Thomas M Ray, and moved to the United States in 1946. In the fall of 1962 she
met Lee and Marina at a party and felt Lee spoke ”just perfect Russian”. Lee
had also told her that he learned to speak Russian in Russia… Really?
Fluent
in Russian
This
is the kind of backdrop that is needed when we view the story of Lee Harvey
Oswald going to the USSR and back. Let’s start with the one thing he definitely
needed in order to travel to the Soviet Union in 1959 – namely to be able to
communicate, to speak Russian.
They
all said it. Every single one in the Dallas-Fort Worth crowd of White Russians that
talked to the Warren Commission said it – Lee Harvey Oswald spoke a nearly
perfect Russian.
If
that really was the case, did he learn the language in the United States as he
grew up, or did he manage that in the Civil Air Patrol, or perhaps in the
Marines? If he was an all-American boy, he certainly could not be fluent in the
very difficult Russian language just by going to Military Language School for a
year or so – that would not do it by a long shot.
JFK researcher Walt Brown have made up his mind:
”It seems damn
peculiar that Oswald, while in the U.S. Marine Corps, (and at
Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall) would entertain
himself reading Russian newspapers, yet when he got to Minsk, the only way he
could fully comprehend what was going on was to read English language
newspapers.”
Walt Brown is not the only one doubting that Lee could
speak the language; many researchers believe he could not speak Russian at all.
However, if that was a fact, how could he have made it into Soviet-Russia? How
would he have landed a job? How would he have talked with Marina, who could not
speak a word of English?
However, as we have mentioned, in testimonies to the
Warren Commission in the spring of 1964 all of the individuals with Russian
background testified to his formidable touch with the Russian language. Here is
Russian born Mrs. Helen Leslie, who remember attending a dinner party at Mrs.
Anna Meller in the fall of 1962:
”I was introduced
to Oswald, he didn't impress me, you know, but the only thing - the only one
thing impressed me - he was talking quite fluently Russian language. He was
making some mistakes, grammar mistakes, in very good Russian language, because
I was born there and raised there, but he was talking fluently. Everything he
was talking in Russian language, but sometimes he was - he didn't use grammar
things or something, he wasn't quite good in grammar. I think he was doing some
mistakes, not in pronunciation but in grammar.”
Mrs.
Leslie was not the only one - they all appreciated Lee’s fine Russian. But,
they sure did not appreciate Lee, because he was not treating his wife right.
All of them would offer a nasty scene of Lee cussing out his wife, beating her,
ignoring her etc. Lee was a very dislikable person, but who spoke Russian
impeccably.
White
Russian Peter Gregory in Fort Worth had a special encounter with Oswald.
Besides being a petroleum engineer, like many of the men in the White Russian
Community, he also worked as a Russian language teacher in Fort Worth. Gregory
rather strangely told the Warren Commission that he was “approached by Lee Harvey Oswald, who was looking for a job as a
translator or interpreter in the Russian and English languages; Oswald had asked
if Gregory could give him a letter testifying to that effect. Gregory thought
that Oswald spoke Russian well but with a Polish accent, and had asked him if
he were of Polish origin. Oswald had then stated that he was not, that he was
raised in Fort Worth, Texas, but that he had learned Russian in the Soviet
Union where he lived for 2 1/2 or 3 years.”
Here we have it again; Lee told people he learned Russian
in Russia. Now, if that was the case… no, that is just silly. Honey, I’m going to Greece to learn Greek! No
way. We also feel unsure of how lucrative that line of work would have been in
Texas in 1962. What Texan would need to translate, to or from, Russian at all,
much less with Oswald’s help, when they had the entire White Russian Community
available?
Then
there was Anita Zeger or Zieger in Argentina, an alleged co-worker from Minsk,
who told researcher John Armstrong in 1998 that Lee did not speak Russian at
all. Not much, anyway. If that were true, then how would he have communicated
with Marina who could not speak English?
Reading
through many WC-testimonies by members of the White Russian Community, almost all
of them would point out Oswald’s excellent Russian language skills. On the
other hand, when asked what they talked with Oswald about, many of them would
offer the image of a loner that did not say very much. If Oswald did not say
very much, how would they know he spoke such good Russian?
Oswald
in Soviet
“Could the Mob get
Oswald into the Soviet Union? Could the Mob get him back?” If Jim Garrison
ever really made these statements, perhaps he ended his line of thought too
quickly? The answer is of course: No, the Mob could not do any such thing. Nor
could anyone else beside the Soviet authorities.
What makes anybody (in the research community) believe
that the leaders and intelligence forces within the Soviet Union were not aware
that living conditions inside their empire was close to hell in comparison with
living in the West? We bet this is a thought that seldom or never enters any
American minds.
Coming from Sweden, we know more than a little bit about
the Soviet Union. Our country has fought this neighboring nation on numerous
occasions throughout history. In my family, way back in the early 1920s, there
was a young man who believed in the then new communist system. He was a very
naïve idealist that for some strange reason believed Stalin’s empire was the
new frontier, a paradise of sorts. Of course he was a crazy, other members of
my family tried to tell him, but it was a futile cause. He immigrated to the
Soviet Union and was more or less arrested upon arrival and immediately sent to
a labor camp. One of his friends managed to come back. He was full of regrets and
told anyone who would listen that the rest of his Swedish “comrades” had been
part of a work force that dug the Stalin White Sea-Baltic Canal. They had all been
killed with shovels in their hands…
Getting back to our point: The USSR was hardly a place
anyone in his or her right mind would want to emigrate to. The power in Moscow
was certainly fully aware of this fact.
Today we are more or less certain that Oswald was not a
real communist, only sheep-dipped as one. So, unless he was an agent on a
mission, why would he want to defect?
Had he really defected, the KGB would have been all over
him, worse than any Russian defector to the USA would have been treated. In
addition, to get an entry visa to the USSR was not an easy thing to accomplish.
Oswald wasn’t a Kim Philby type with lots of knowledge and experience that he
could use as currency. Oswald was only 20 years old. Most likely he would have
been tortured and tortured to death – not been given a nice apartment and a
cushy job in a radio/radar factory.
This part of the Oswald legend have so many faults piled
on top of each other it is silly. Then to top it off, getting a visa to get out
from the Iron Curtain during the hottest period of the Cold War - that is
simply crazy to believe. Even more unbelievable to get a Russian wife to tag
along.
The official narrative will have us believe that young
Lee, only 19, soon 20 years old, would leave the U.S. on a ship to Europe and
somehow know where the easiest entry into the Soviet Union was, namely via Helsinki,
Finland. We have been told that Lee checked in at the Savoy in the Finnish
capital, an expensive hotel. For information: there were several points of
entry to the Soviet Union around Europe and Asia that Oswald could have tried,
so how would he have known about the Helsinki port of entry?
Then he defected,
so to speak, to Stalin’s kingdom and got in! Allegedly, the Soviet authorities
sent Lee to Minsk in Belarus, halfway to Poland from Moscow. No KGB in sight.
This young fellow just moseyed on in and got a job at a radio factory in Minsk.
Nowadays we also know that was a factory that manufactured radars. Then they
supposedly gave him an apartment. A cozy apartment. First of all, apartments
were not easy to come by 1959 in the USSR. It was not like in the States.
Still, Lee was given a fine apartment in the middle of Minsk. No KGB in sight. He
then, allegedly, met Marina Prusakova and married her after he had, all in all,
spent six days with her – during a period of six weeks. When the HSCA asked
Marina what she knew about Lee, she was hard pressed for answers; for one
thing, she didn’t know if he was a spy or not.
The notion that Marina would marry a foreigner she knew
virtually nothing about, a person who she suspected could be a spy, and this
only after spending six whole days together, is far beyond unrealistic – unless
of course she was trying to get to the United States at any cost. But that
would on the other hand suggest that she knew beforehand that they would get a
Visa out of the Soviet Union, something unheard of outside of diplomatic
circles. Was she a spy for the KGB?
The Oswald we know most likely never went to the Soviet
Union, at least not in the way the story has been told, despite the fact that
he on the eve of the assassination told the U.S. press “they have taken me in for the fact that I have lived in the Soviet
Union”.
If the arrested Lee was coached, then he could have
maintained the role of being an agent – who knows.
But had he really defected to Soviet Russia then he would
not have been able to travel back in the way the official narrative will have
us believe.
In 1945 when the Russian Army captured Swedish diplomat
Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest, they thought he was a spy. Hours of interrogation
later they would have known he wasn’t; his mission was clearly only to save as many
Jews as possible. Still they tortured Wallenberg to death. And that was what
one could expect from the Soviets.
So what is wrong with the Oswald saga? We imagine just
about everything.
The fact is, Lee, 19, would not have succeed in this kind
of defection operation even if the target had been France, let alone the Soviet
Union. World famous author Norman
Mailer, who wrote Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery suggested – very naively – that Lee wore
out the Soviet authorities with persistent visits and complaints etc. We say
that is pure hogwash; there is no way a 20-year old boy could win over the communist
hardliners in the USSR - just impossible. Or as White Russian Paul Raigorodsky
would put it:
“There are just so
many things that are unbelievable, that a person like Oswald was running around
in Russia, marrying a Russian woman, that she was allowed to go out of Russia.
I know several cases where they wouldn't allow a person whom Americans marry to
come for several years. Here, everything was (snapping his fingers) so - just
like that. It just reads too much like a fairy tale. I mean, as much as they
claim they don't trust him, they surely didn't show it by the action in
granting him different things which he received in Russia and in this country.”
Marina an Enigma
Very little of what we know of Lee Harvey Oswald’s life comes
from Lee Harvey Oswald himself. The bulk of information was told to us after
his death. All information we really have of Lee comes from other people, many
with ill intent. Consequently, what can we really know about his life and what
he did or did not do? For this reason, Marina Oswald’s testimonies at the
Warren Commission and the House Select Committee on Assassinations becomes the
foundation of how Lee is to be viewed; in there lays also innumerable
inconsistencies and irregularities that eventually will give us a hint of where
the truth might reside.
Let’s take a closer look at Marina Oswald. Who is she?
Where does she really come from? And when did she come from where?
As far as we are concerned – nothing pertaining to her
story seems trustworthy. On the one hand: Many JFK researchers don´t trust
Marina Oswald’s statements. On the other hand: Very few researchers think there
is something wrong with the Oswald in the Soviet Union saga.
Picture this: Remember when you were a young man or woman
and made your first trip to another country, or anywhere significant inside the
United States. Maybe you were 17, 18 or 19 years old when you did your first
trip without your parents. Perhaps you went to New York, London or Saigon. We
bet you remember this trip almost minute by minute.
In September of 1978 the House Select Committee on
Assassinations, HSCA, questioned Marina Porter Oswald for almost six hours.
When she was asked to recapitulate the journey from Minsk to the West she had a
hard time remembering any specific details. She remembered that she, Lee and
the baby traveled from Minsk by train, crossed the border to Poland at Brest
and then went straight to Rotterdam in Holland, where they stayed at some
house, unclear if it was one day or three.
This was the first time – allegedly – that she entered a
Western country. That in it self would have made her remember the episode,
especially since it was far from a common sort of journey for the average
Soviet citizen to embark on.
As for me, I went to New York when I was 21 years old,
and I remember every damn thing!
But Marina doesn’t remember.
The HSCA wanted to know who got the room at the
boardinghouse in Rotterdam. Marina couldn’t answer. However, she thought that Lee
perhaps could have arranged this with somebody. She explained she knew nothing because
she spoke no English. Apparently she couldn’t ask Lee in Russian what was going
on.
Reading through her testimony with the Warren Commission
in Washington on February 3, 1964 the following strange dialogue took place:
Mr. Rankin: “Do you recall the date that you arrived in the United States with your
husband, Lee Harvey Oswald?”
Mrs. OSWALD: “On the 13th of June, 1962. I am not quite certain as to the year - '61
or '62, I think '62.”
Mr. RANKIN: “How did you come to this country?”
Mrs. OSWALD: “From Moscow via Poland, Germany, and Holland we came to Amsterdam by
train. And from Amsterdam to New York by ship, and New York to Dallas by air.”
Mr. RANKIN: “Do you recall the name of the ship on which you came?”
Mrs. OSWALD: “I think it was the SS Rotterdam but I am not sure.”
Mr. RANKIN: “What time of the day did you arrive in New York?”
Mrs. OSWALD: “It was---about noon or 1 p.m., thereabouts. It is hard to remember the
exact time.”
Mr. RANKIN: “How long did you stay in New York at that time?”
Mrs. OSWALD: “We stayed that evening and the next 24 hours in a hotel in New York,
and then we left the following day by air.”
Mr. RANKIN: “Do you recall the name of the hotel where you stayed?”
Mrs. OSWALD: “I don't know the name of the hotel but it is in the Times Square area,
not far from the publishing offices of the New York Times.”
First, she did not know what year she arrived in the U.S.
Secondly, she did not think of noticing the difference between East- and West
Germany, which was major. Then she, for some strange reason, thought that she
and Lee came to Amsterdam instead of Rotterdam. That is like saying we arrived
at the harbor in New York when we really had arrived in Boston. The Oswald
couple had to pass through four borders that required clearing customs; still
Marina did not mention it. Finally, she did not remember passing through Europe
or how long she stayed at the first stop in Holland, but for some weird reason
she remembers the publishing offices of the New York Times!
We are sorry, but it sure seems as if she tried to
remember a manuscript, and she was really bad at it.
Amnesia and language skills
Through Black Op Radio we could listen to six hours of
Marina’s HSCA testimony. What is apparent is how strange her English was (in
1978). She claimed not to understand some fairly simple words, while she on the
other hand used very unusual and complicated words and sentences. She did not
know the word “devious”, but used words like “hostility”, “privileges”,
“customary”, “political asylum” and “habitual” etc.
Who the heck uses the word habitual in daily language?
JFK researcher George W. Bailey writes on his blog that Marina Porter
Oswald stated numerous times in her testimony that she didn’t speak
English at all in her first years in America. She also said in a Grand Jury
testimony back in 1963 that she was taking English lessons from Jack Ruby’s
next-door neighbor George Bouhe. However, her statements of not being able to
speak and understand English is at odds with the facts as we now know them.
Here is a list of
points that dispel this myth:
* In 1961 while still in Russia, Lee mails
Marina a letter written in English.
*
Robert Webster, another American defector, said he knew Marina and she spoke
good English with a heavy accent.
*
Descriptions on the back of photos taken in Russia are in Marina’s handwriting
in Russian and English.
*
Warren Commission, CE-100. Marina’s stenographic notebook found by the Dallas
Police written in English. They also found a second notebook with Marina’s
handwriting in English. There are other notebooks with her English writing in
the National Archives.
*
Business manager James Martin testified that she understood everything said to
her in English.
*
Robert Oswald in an FBI affidavit said Marina spoke to him in English, without
a translator, in regards to a business contract with James Martin. A contract
written only in English.
*
Marguerite Oswald in Warren Commission testimony mentions numerous
conversations with Marina—all in English.
* Marina
gets trapped in Garrison Grand Jury testimony saying she called Reilly Coffee
Company looking for Lee. She was asked how could do that, she replied she knew
“a few words.
Bailey indicates that he does not believe Marina Oswald
when she claimed not to be able to speak English prior to arriving in the
States. This shines through in small details, such as Lee’s alleged rifle.
Marina explained (1978) that she could not tell the difference between a rifle
and a shotgun, meaning she did not know the first thing about weapons. Then, when
the HSCA asked her whether she saw a scope or not… did she even know what a
scope was?
Yes, she said it was “an
attachment to make the target more visible”. Again, a very precise and
advanced sentence for someone who even in 1978 spoke poor English.
Getting back to Marina’s equally poor sense of memory.
When the HSCA wanted to know what Lee and Marina had talked about as a married
couple she could not really remember. This whole line of questioning from the
HSCA panel leads her straight into some form of amnesia.
Did Lee talk politics with her? No, she being a woman -
what would a woman know about politics? In Dallas-Fort Worth – what did Lee
work with, what did he do at work? She did not know. They never talked about
work or politics. In Russia Marina had not known if Lee had a mother or not,
she did not really trust him; she thought he could be a spy.
Again, why marry a guy you knew nothing about and did not
trust?
According to pure mathematics (and Mae Brussel) Marina
and Lee only spent six whole days together before they got married – and she
knew nothing of him?
HSCA: “How come you
(and Lee) were living under better living conditions than the average Soviet
citizen? You were only 19 and 21?”
Marina could not tell how come they could get such a fine
apartment; perhaps it had to do with Lee being a foreigner, she didn’t know.
HSCA: “Before
departure to the USA, did the KGB ever question you?”
Marina: “No.”
Marina did not know if the KGB ever questioned Lee. Marina
knew nothing.
Memory Returns
All of a sudden Marina’s lack of memory ceased. When the
HSCA brought up Oswald’s rifle she suddenly woke up.
HSCA: “When did you
see ‘his weapon’ for the first time, and where did you see it?”
Marina: “I don’t
remember when, but I wasn’t pleased of having the rifle in the house.”
Marina explained that Lee hid the rifle in a closet. This
was apparently on Neely Street. She said that Lee used to clean his weapon once
a week and that he liked to do it alone by himself. In New Orleans he would sit
on the porch in the dark occupied with cleaning the weapon. Marina would also
tell the Committee that when they lived in Dallas, Lee would go to target
practice once a week somewhere in the Love Field area. For those occasions he
would put on a raincoat and hide the rifle underneath, then take the bus to the
rifle range. Marina thought it was ridiculous that he would use the raincoat
even on sunny days.
This whole rifle story cannot be anything but bogus, in
our opinion. Researcher John Armstrong, among others, have proven that the
weapon allegedly found on the 6th floor at the Texas School Book
Depository, CE 139, never belonged to Lee Oswald. But since Marina could not
tell the difference between weapons, or whether CE 139 was Lee’s rifle or not,
there is always a possibility she saw a different rifle.
To us, this is the first concrete lie on Marina’s behalf.
Talking about details that makes Lee look very bad seems very well remembered by
Marina. She remembered a lot when it came to the rifle, she saw the scope, and she
did not forget the revolver. Remember Lee never told her about his jobs, what
he did etc; he kept much to himself and lived a secret life. However, when it
came to the alleged Walker shooting, Marina suddenly seemed to know an awful
lot of what Lee supposedly did, what went through his mind and so fort. It was
almost like he had gone on a mission and reported back to her afterwards.
Here are a few examples from her testimony:
Mr.
RANKIN: “Did you ever observe your husband
taking the rifle away from the apartment on Neely Street?”
Mrs.
OSWALD: “He (Lee) would say, ‘Well, today
I will take the rifle along for practice.’ Therefore, I don't know whether he
took it from the house or whether perhaps he even kept the rifle somewhere
outside. There was a little square, sort of a little courtyard where he might
have kept it. When you asked me about the rifle, I said that Lee didn't have a
rifle, but he also had a gun, a revolver.”
Mr. RANKIN: “Do you recall seeing the rifle when the telescopic lens was on it?”
Mrs.
OSWALD: “I hadn't paid any attention
initially. I know a rifle was a rifle. I didn't know whether or not it had a
telescope attached to it. But the first time I remember seeing it was in New
Orleans, where I recognized the telescope.”
Mrs.
OSWALD: “When he fired, he did not know
whether he had hit Walker or not. He didn't take the bus from there. He ran
several kilometers and then took the bus. And he turned on the radio and
listened, but there were no reports. The next day he bought a paper and there
he read it was only chance that saved Walker's life. If he had not moved, he
might have been killed.”
Read the statement about the Walker shooting again. Does
that seem like something Lee would have told his wife? Several kilometers? Hardly. Marina continued telling the Committee
that Lee (after the Walker shooting) had turned up white in the face and had acted
nervous. This behavior was of course contrary to his behavior after killing
Kennedy. Today most of us do not think Lee had anything to do with firing at the
General either.
Still, Marina really buried Lee: She told the HSCA that Lee
had planned to highjack a plane to Cuba. She said Lee had asked her to help him.
With what exactly? She didn’t remember. But he wanted her to hold the weapon.
Marina added that it would look ridiculous with a pregnant woman high jacking a
plane. Even if Marina didn’t remember anything that would explain just about
anything, she remembered things that made Lee out to a lone nut:
Lee went to Mexico
City
Lee had a rifle
Lee had a revolver
Lee shot at General
Walker
Lee planned to
shoot Richard Nixon
Lee planned to
highjack a plane to Cuba
Lee practiced at a
rifle range
Lee liked to be
alone by himself
Lee mistreated her
After the assassination of President Kennedy, Marina
allegedly destroyed incriminating photos of Lee. However, she does not know when she destroyed them, where she destroyed them or even how she destroyed them. Again, she had
some sort of amnesia or was drunk out of her mind. We would say that a human
brain cannot function this way; no image or memory of something you did
whatsoever, but still remember – remember what?
The entire Modus Operandi (by the HSCA) seemed to confirm
and establish the Lone Nut. Actually,
the Committee only stepped in the preexisting footsteps of the Warren
Commission – with the purpose of making them deeper and wider, because that is
what it really looks like.
HSCA: “Can you see
him working with an accomplice?”
Marina: “No I cant.
He wasn’t a very trustworthy and open person. Lee had no friends in Dallas
during October and November (1963).”
Even if Lee acted secretive and did not talk to Marina
about things, he seemed to talk to her about anything that made him look bad,
criminal actions. And how would she know if he had any friends if he was so
secretive?
Marina was asked if Lee had any Cuban friends. First she
said no, seconds later she corrected her self and said that Lee got these Fair Play For Cuba-leaflets from a Cuban
in the streets of New Orleans. But she did not know who it was.
Now, why would Lee tell her something like that? And why
would she remember it? Lee did a lot of things during the day – most that he
did not tell Marina about. But apparently he felt the need to inform her of
having met a random Cuban person that had given him flyers to spread around. (This
is another apparent lie on her part, since we know the leaflets came from
Banister’s office.)
Lee certainly had a lot on his plate - if Marina is to be
believed. While he planned and executed the attack on General Walker, planned
to assassinate Richard Nixon and highjack a plane to Cuba with a wife ready to
give birth to a child, he was also taking typewriting lessons every Monday,
Tuesday and Thursday evenings. If we are to understand Marina correctly, a week
could entail this for Lee: He worked through the day, went home to eat, then
between 7-9 PM he went away to learn how to use a typewriter, then home to continue
studying a book about typewriting, then on perhaps Wednesdays he would dress up
in a raincoat, come rain or shine, and take the bus to Love Field somewhere,
where he would practice with his Carcano rifle for a few hours, only to return
and sit by himself on the porch (on Nealy Street) and clean his rifle.
Going through 120 pages of Marina's WC testimony and six
hours of her HSCA testimony almost makes one mad. We dont know what is worse,
Marina's lies or HSCAs cover-up-questions? It sure can be viewed as a sort of
rape on the American people.
We don’t know why Lee told the Press that he had lived in
the Soviet Union, when it really does not look like he had - at least not in
the way the story has been told. Perhaps he was part of a U.S. diplomat
contingent in the USSR; perhaps he followed a deceitful script that was part of
his fake persona? The pattern is so obvious: Almost all of the people in the
White Russian Community testified that he was a secretive loner that treated
his wife bad - but he did speak excellent Russian. Marina remembered nothing
about Lee's everyday life, what was on his mind, what political views he held,
besides liking Kennedy, what he did at work, where he got money from - but she
sure remembered anything that would incriminate her husband. That becomes even
clearer when the HSCA and Marina started talking about a possible motive, Lee's
motive for killing Kennedy. Talk about speculating to Lee’s disadvantage!
HSCA: “Oswald
wanted to make himself a hero to the American left?”
Marina: “I think it
was a mental reason, not a political reason.”
HSCA: “Lee just
wanted to kill the man at the top?”
Marina: “I think
you are right.”
However, when Lee supposedly tried to kill General Walker
and planned to kill Richard Nixon, it was for political reasons, but then he
supposedly became mentally instable before killing Kennedy?
Years later Marina would come on TV and tell Tom Brokaw that she
no longer believed Lee was guilty. Does this mean that Lee never shot at
General Walker, didn’t have a rifle with a scope, didn’t practice shooting out
at Love Field, or what? Actually, those statements to the WC and HSCA
disqualified her from ever retracting her story. The only way for Marina to begin
to clear her name is to explain why she told all the lies she did about Oswald
in the first place. Because that is just it: The only thing Marina really did with the 1993 NBC interview
was to reinforce the uncertainty of her guilt and make the listener rethink her
precarious position in 1963. It was simply another lie.
Speculation
So what was the truth about Lee and Marina? What was the
truth about the White Russians and their churches? The latter had intricate
ties to the Kennedy assassination: George de Mohrenschildt befriended and
controlled Oswald, Abraham Zapruder allegedly filmed the murder and Ilya
Mamantov sat in as a translator in the first questioning of Marina Oswald. Max
Clark, George Meller and Ruth Paine helped Oswald get jobs, perhaps also Jean
DeMenil. Ruth Paine further more made sure Marina and Lee were living apart. They
all contributed to the profile of the Lone Assassin. The other side of this
coin is that de Mohrenschildt was connected to George Bush and J. Walton Moore
of the CIA, Zapruder belonged to the Dallas Petroleum Club (where also Bush,
Atlee Phillips and de Mohrenschildt were members) and also had worked with
George de Mohrenschildt’s wife Jeanne, while Ilya Mamantov was called in by
George Bush’s colleague Jack Crichton to translate for Marina to Dallas
detective Rose. In Jean DeMenil’s network of people we find Guy Banister, David
Ferrie, Jack Ruby and Jack Martin. If
de Mohrenschildt and his Russian friends in the Dallas/Fort Worth area in fact
had some form of ties to Gehlen’s network and Boris Pash then we certainly have
to view the story of Lee and Marina differently, perhaps something out of
MK/ULTRA or a weird James Angleton-operation?
It all ties back to Allen Dulles, who was a friend of Ruth Paine’s
father in law, Arthur Young, and thus had an affair with Michael Paine’s
mother’s best friend. We also know that Ruth Paine’s own family had ties to the
CIA; her sister worked there and lived next door to CIA Headquarters and her
father worked for a company supposedly controlled by the CIA. Further more, in December
of 1963 the FBI interviewed Fred and Nancy Osborn, two friends of Ruth and
Michael Paine, who vouched for their innocence. Fred’s father was a friend and
associate of Allen Dulles. The Paine’s were equally involved with the White Russians
and the catholic church; Ruth was allegedly devoted
to the Quaker religion and Michael attended a Unitarian Church.
Oswald in Russia or not?
So, did Oswald really travel to the Soviet Union in 1959,
and did he leave to return to the USA in the summer of 1962? Did Marina really come
to the States with him?
We don’t know the answer to this, but if that really
happened, it sure was some kind of world record in venturing outside the box. Marina
would tell the HSCA that it was hard for her to leave her country:
“To leave
everything behind was quite hard”, she said.
What “everything” meant was of no apparent interest to
the HSCA. Whatever she left behind it was clearly not enough for her to
contemplate returning to Russia after the fall of the Berlin wall and the end
of the Cold War. Russia has been open for 25 years now and we have never heard
anything pointing to Marina traveling back to reconnect with her relatives.
(Perhaps they all came to the U.S. long before Kennedy was killed?)
Actually, we know very little about Marinas past in the
USSR. The HSCA and the WC before them didn’t ask her too many questions of her
past. That is not what we see in the questioning of Larry Crafard, who had to
answer almost 4 000 questions about everything under the sun.
If Marina was an agent working for the KGB, then that
could certainly explain why she would be allowed to leave. She told the HSCA
that the KGB never questioned her prior to leaving Russia. Actually, an
ordinary Soviet citizen like her getting a visa to travel abroad from the
Soviet Union had seldom or never happened before.
JFK researcher Greg Parker:
”Now in a sense, it should be noted that Marina Oswald was a
White Russian, too. According to the testimony of George Bouhe, she spoke
a very grammatically correct Russian, probably learned from her grandmother who
was a graduate of the Smolny Institute, a school for noble girls. In
other words, Marina may well have had aristocratic roots. So one
interpretation of Marina might be that she was a member of some noble family
“smuggled” out of Russia by the White Russian community, assisted by Lee Harvey
Oswald.”
When it comes to Lee Oswald… well, we just don’t know who
he really was. One statement sticks out:
“Everybody will
know who I am now!”
What laid behind that statement? Was Oswald afraid of
being outed as a… what exactly? As an agent or asset for the FBI, or the CIA,
or the ONI? Why would that be a problem when none of these entities would have
the least bit of problem suppressing information like that?
To our mind, this cannot be what Lee was worried about.
It has to be something else. Actually, we sense there is something much bigger behind
the man. Was he really 24 years old? He looks much older, perhaps even ten years
older, around Michael Paine’s age. How could a 20-year old boy defect to the worst place on earth and walk between the
raindrops as far as the KGB was concerned? Get a well payed job and a cushy
apartment; get out with a Russian wife and child with no interrogation whatsoever?
That is unheard of.
No, we believe that there must be something we don’t see
in this scenario, something well hidden. The statement he made to Captain Fritz
and Roger Craigh has the wrong proportions. Maybe Oswald from the beginning was
some sort of Concept/Project? Coming back to the States he was not debriefed by
the CIA – but he was getting assistance from the White Russian Community. These
Russians had ties to CIA and to the old Nazi spy network from World War II,
people like Boris Pash, Reinhard Gehlen, Arthur Young, Allen Dulles, George de
Mohrenschildt, George Bouhe, “Czar” Raigorodsky, Peter Gregory, Princess
Sherbatoff, Baron DeMenil, Guy Banister, Ruth Paine, David Ferrie, Jack Ruby
and perhaps even Abraham Zapruder.
They were all connected some way or another. It is when
you take a hard look at the people around Oswald, and what they all had to say
in their testimonies; it becomes obvious that they all lied about him. Marina
lied on so many accounts that she cannot possibly start talking about Lee’s
innocence. Think if Oswald could have heard her, how would he have reacted? Her
endless talk about the weapon here and the weapon there, and the utterly stupid
story – which nobody buys - about Lee dressing up in a raincoat and take the
bus to target practicing. This should expel her from any respect and trust
whatsoever. Remember, first she told the Dallas Police that Lee didn’t have a
rifle, then he not only had a rifle but also a revolver and Marina saw him with
that rifle all the time almost, and he fired it at General Walker, then she
suddenly voiced the opinion that he could have been innocent. No, sorry, there
is no way for her to ever become trustworthy. The truth is, she turned her
husband over to a wolf pack that tore him to pieces. The argument is that she
did that because the U.S. could deport expel and send her back to the Soviet
Union. On what legal ground would that take place, when she had not committed a
crime? The Warren Commission did not conduct a murder investigation, as part of
any justice system, there was no District Attorney and no Court waiting at the
end.
No, they all lied. The Russians around Lee lured and
herded him right into a vicious trap - that we can see a mile away. They all
not only had the exact same opinion about Lee, being a loner who hit his wife,
but spoke excellent Russian, the words they used were too similar not to follow
a pattern; as if they had gotten instructions, or a script to follow. George de
Mohrenschildt lied, that becomes equally clear when he said he saw Oswald with
the rifle. The same goes double for Ruth Paine; we do not think she was a
nickel-and-dime person in all of this. Not in a million years. We would bet she
was briefed by Allen Dulles himself, or at least someone high up in the murder organization.
The people in New Orleans, Banister, Ferrie and Martin - they all lied too.
We will end this essay with something White Russian
Alexander Kleinlerer made clear to the Warren Commission: He could not understand
how Oswald had been able to go to Russia and return with seeming ease,
especially since he had attempted to defect and because Kleinlerer was aware
that his cousin had not been able to get his wife and child out of Russia
although he now lives in Poland.
Only one problem remain: Why did the Soviets never questioned or contradicted the
official story of Lee Harvey Oswald in the Soviet Union?
White Russians and
people connected to the WRC that I some way or another had ties to the JFK
assassination
Lee Harvey Oswald
Marina Oswald
Paul Raigorodsky
George Alexandrovich Bouhe
George de Mohrenschildt
Jeanne de Mohrenschildt
Ruth Paine
Michael Paine
Abraham Zapruder
Ilya Mamantov
Anna Meller
Teofil “George” Meller
Katya Ford
Declan Ford
Lydia Dymitruk
Peter Paul Gregory
Valentina Anna Ray
Frank Ray
Natalie Ray
Thomas M Ray
Elena Hall
John Hall
Gali Clark Sherbatoff
Max Clark
Baron Jean Marie Joseph Menu DeMenil
Dominique Schlumberger
Dmitri Robert R Royster
Lev Aronson (Aronov)
Jacob Rubenstein (Jack Ruby)
Boris T Pash (Pashkovsky)
Walter Propheta
Alexander Kleinlerer
Igor Vladimir Voshinin
Helen Leslie
Samuel B. Ballen
William Dalzell
Names not
researched
William Dalzell
Count Orloff
Warren C. De Brueys
Basil Zavoiko
Vlassov
Henry Rogatz
Vonsiatsky
Baron Charles Wrangel
Paquita de Shishmareff, big money White Russian
financiers
Gary Taylor
Peter Lavenda talking about the strange churches with Jim
Fetzer:
Black Op Radio interview with John Armstrong:
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.