Saturday, March 14, 2015

Killing Bill O'Reilly

Killing Bill O'Reilly

Bill O'Reilly's "Killing Kennedy" is the Archie Bunker version of history, as is O'Reilly's claim to be knocking on George deMohrenschildt's door when "he heard the blast that marked the suicide of the Russian, assuring that his relationship with Lee Harvey Oswald would never be fully understood."

Rest assured we know all about deMohrenschildt's relationship with Oswald, the designated patsy, and it can be fully understood.

While much of this book can be attributed to or blamed on O'Reilly's co-author Martibn Dugard, this part of the book is all O'Reilly, and the key element in the story isn't that he exagerated or fabricated his presence at the scene at the time of death and was an ear witness to the gun blast, the key element in the story is deMohrenschildt's relationship with Oswald, the accused assassin, and that can be fully understood, as more is known now and we will learn more about it as the still secret records are released.

The key element in this story and what is wrong about "Killing Kennedy" is that the president was not the victim of a deranged loner, as disgraced Gerald Posner, John McAdams, Hugh Aynesworth and Bill O'Reilly would have you believe, but the alternative is more likely and that Lee Harvey Oswald was an intelligence operative framed as the designated patsy, as he claimed, and JFK was the victim of a covert intelligence operation, as deMohrenschildt, Fonzi, Fonzi's boss Sen. Richard Schewiker and others believe.

George deMohrenschildt is a colorful character and the subject of many books, however for our purposes we only need to know a few pertinent facts - who he was, how he met Oswald, how he assisted Oswald, how he introduced them to the Paines and what he did in Haiti at the time of the assassination.

The equation changes when we ask who was Lee Harvey Oswald, because its one thing if George deMohrenschilt assisted the lone assassin of the president and quite another thing if he helped set up the designated patsy in a much more complicated conspiracy.

The Belorussian son of a Russian Czarist oil minister, deMohrenschildt attended a Polish military academy, studied oil geology, played polo and was an international playboy who was married three times - the first to a young model, the second time to a Philadelphia physician Dr. De De Sharples, whose father owned an oil company that employed deMohrenschildt, and a third time to Jean, whose father ran the Trans-Siberian Railroad in China.

Two children from his second marriage were born handicapped, so they established a non-profit research foundation that enjoyed the support of deMohrenschildt's old family friend Jackie Bouvier Kennedy and her husband, then Senator John F. Kennedy, but deMohrenschildt isn't the only person who knew both JFK and his accused assassin, as Priscilla Johnson McMillan and the Moscow Navy attache present when Oswald defected also knew both men.

To celebrate his third marriage deMohresnchildt and his wife took a walkabout Central America writing reports that later ended up in government files and a documentary film that details their arrival in Guatemala as the Cuban exiles were getting ready to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.

In Texas deMohrenschildt worked for oil wildcat John Mecom, who established the San Jacinto fund, a CIA conduit, and sent deMohrenschildt to Europe, and when he returned deMohrenschildt was debriefed by J. Walton Moore, the head of the CIA's Domestic Contacts Division in Dallas. DeMohrenschildt would meet with Moore before and after he traveled overseas, and Moore became a friend and frequent dinner companion of the deMohrenschildt. A former OSS officer during World War II, Moore was sent on a mission to China with Charles Ford, an Atlantic City native and Princeton graduate who was a CIA training officer except for his one foray into CIA covert operations as a liason between the mobsters involved in CIA plots to kill Castro and RFK when he was head of the Cuban Task Force.

DeMohrenschildt also associated with others in government, defense industry security and the oil business, including Max Clark, who worked in security at General Dynamics, retired Admiral Chester Bruton, a Collins Radio executive, Jean deMenil, Sam Ballen and George Bouhe, "who kept the files on newcomers."

Among the "new comers" were Lee and Marina Oswald, who Moore encouraged deMohrenschildt to meet, and said Oswald was a "harmless lunatic."

White Russian Colonel Lawrence Orlov was with deMohrenschildt when he first visited Oswald and Orlov in turn, was a frequent racket ball partner of J. Walton Moore, the CIA's man in Dallas.

DeMohrenschildt tried to assist Oswald get a job, first with Sam Ballen, whose office Oswald visited at the Southland Center, the same high rise office building where Oswald was later seen in the lobby with the CIA spymaster David Atlee Phillips and anti-Castro Cuban terrorist Antonio Veciana. Ballen interviewed Oswald personally but declined to hire him, so deMohrenschildt introduced Oswald to retired Admiral Chester Bruton, an executive at Collins Radio, the Richardson, Texas company that supplied radios to the Air Force Strategic Air Command and Military Air Transport services - including Air Force one and the executive air fleet.

Bill O'Reilly credits deMohrenschildt with getting the job at Jaggers-Chiles-Stoval, a Dallas graphic arts company where Oswald was working when he ordered and allegedly received the pistol and rifle said to have been used to kill a Dallas police officer and the President. I say allegedly because on the day Oswald is said to have picked up the weapons and paid the balance he owned on delivery, no one at the Post Office recalls handing the weapons to him over the counter, and the J-C-S records indicate that Oswald worked that day from before the Post Office opened until after it was closed. These records also indicate that day Oswald worked on the account of a client - Sam Bloom Advertising agency, who handled the details of the President's motorcade.

At J-C-S in October 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Oswald placed arrows and captions on maps and U2 photos of Cuba and the Soviet Union, possibly on photos and maps that were used to brief the president and others about the Soviet missile in Cuba.

After deMohrenschildt got a job in Haiti, it was arranged for him to introduce Oswald to Ruth and Michael Paine, who would then pick up where deMohrenschildt left off as Oswald's "babysitter," so a party was arranged for the Oswalds to meet the Paines at the home of Volkmar Schmidt, a Magnolia Oil company employee from Germany who also met Oswald. Schmidt's room mates at this home and party include the son of Radio Free Europe executive and they all supported the Texas CIA front that funneled money to Radio Free Europe.

Schmidt had lived with a German doctor who was involved in the Valkyrie plot to assassinate Hitler, and acknowledged using reverse psychology techniques on Oswald that were taught to him by the doctor, and in their two hour beer drenched conversation, Schmidt also mentioned the Valkyrie plot and neo-Nazi General Edwin Walker, suggesting that he should be assassinated as Hitler should have been before taking power.

We are then led to believe that Oswald stalked, photographed his house and took a pot shot at Walker and missed, then flushed down a toilet the notebook of evidence he kept on the attack. The April 10, 1963 attack on Walker took place a the same time Admiral Bruton at Collins Radio was busy as the nuclear sub USS Thresher disappeared with all hands. Later a group Justice for the Crew of the Thresher (JFCOTT) would threaten the life of the President and attempt to link Oswald.

A few days later, shortly before leaving for Haiti, deMohrenschildt stopped by to say goodbye to Oswald and his wife, saw the rifle in the closet and jokingly remarked, "How did  you miss Walker?"

Oswald then moved to New Orleans, where he engaged with both the anti-Castro DRE and the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee, while deMohrenschildt went to Haiti, via New York City and Washington D.C.

In New York deMohrenschildt met CIA officers at the private Knickerbocker Club and the offices of Train-Cabot, where John Train handled CIA propriety companies. While the meeting was supposed to be about Haiti, did deMohrenschildt tell them the most significant piece of intelligence he had - that Oswald had a rifle and probably took the shot at Walker?

In Washington D.C. deMohrenschildt met with Military Intelligence officers Col. Sam Kail and Dorothie Matlack. Kail had previously served at the US Embassy in Havana where he associated closely with David Atlee Philips and other CIA offices, while Matlack worked for the same Pentagon office that the Texas Army Intelligence officers reported to including Col. Crichton, Col. Brandy and the Colonel who rode in the pilot car of the motorcade.

Oswald stayed in New Orleans until September 24, 1963, the day after Ruth Paine picked up Marina, the baby and their belongings, including the rifle, and drove them to Texas while Oswald went to Mexico. Ruth Paine had arrived in New Orleans from Philadelphia where she visited her husband's mother Ruth Forbes Paine Young and Arthur Young, the inventor of the Bell Helicopter. Michael Paine had lived with the Youngs in Philadelphia when he met Ruth Hyde and married her, and it was Art Young who arranged for Michael to work at the Bell Helicopter plant in Texas.

It is Michael Paine's mom - Ruth Forbes Paine Young who supplies the key link in the network, as she was close friends and traveling companion with Mary Bancroft, whose book "Autobiography of a Spy," chronicles her OSS work in Bonn with paramour Allen Dulles, as a chief contact with those involved in the Valkyrie plot to kill Hitler.

On September 24th, the same day Oswald left New Orleans for Mexico, Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay chaired a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff while General Maxwell Taylor was in Vietnam. This meeting, as detailed in the Higgins Memo, indicates that they were briefed on CIA Cuban operations by Desmond FitzGerald, who informed them of the CIA attempt to adapt the Valkyrie plot to Castro and Cuba. Except instead of a bomb, it appears that they intended to use a sniper with a high-powered rifle and shoot Castro as he drove along in an open jeep, and blame the assassination on communists, the plan that was used at Dealey Plaza.

We certainly have learned a lot of things since the death of deMohrenschildt, and his relationship to the designated patsy, and we will learn a lot more if the remaining sealed records are released, but we know that there were shennagans at the crossroads all along the way and the story doesn't end at deMohrenschildt's doorstep and death, nor with the suspicious death of Charles William Thomas.

Among the records we should expect are the June Cobb memo about the Oswald-Duran Twist Party, and the role Charles William Thomas played for the CIA as a Covert Action agent in Haiti at the time of the assassination as well as his association there with deMohrenschildt.

In the end, the key element in this story is not Bill O'Reilly's fabrications of being there at the time of deMohrenschildt's death, but that O'Reilly is wrong about Oswald being the lone assassin, that he was a covert intelligence operative who deMohrenschildt knowingly or unwittingly helped frame as the designated patsy in the assassination, which was a plan successfully executed and adapted from the failed Valkyrie plot to kill Hitler.

One part of the Valkyrie plan that was adapted to the Dealey Plaza operation was the psychwar black propaganda campaign to blame the assassination on Castro.

While Shenon is more sophisticated in his style and connected to the orchestrated Wurlitzer and O'Reilly appears not, he does join the Mockingbird choir when he falsely says:

"Unlike the majority of his peers, Oswald believed that the Soviets have every right to be on Cuba. From his perception, the Russians must protect Castro's people against terrorist backed by the United States. Oswald is firmly convinced that President Kennedy is putting the world on the brink of nuclear war by taking such an aggressive stance against the Soviets. To him, JFK is the villain." ( Killing Kennedy p.  117)

Oswald never considered JFK a villain, was saddened at the death of JFK's son Patrick and always talked highly of the President as a man and a person, and had no motive to kill him.



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