THE BABES OF DEALEY PLAZA
Whose
Sleeping With Whom at the Dealey Plaza Motel
FRANK AND JACK HAVE A PROPOSITION
Last week, when the Archivist had to give his recomendations to the President as to what JFK assassination records should remain withheld past the April 26 2018 deadline, the NARA had no comment and all the White House Press Corps wanted to talk about was Stormy Daniels.
Since sex sells, and is often a key determiner as to who is connected
to whom in a network web, sex is a key link that if positively established,
seals a known relationship and connection.
If
Playboy Magazine would run a photo feature on this it would be called The Babes
of Dealey Plaza.
Of the key
paramours of Dealey Plaza, who somehow got entangled in the JFK assassination
story, more than a few stand out and in fact, come into play in the overall
narrative as pretty significant relationships.
For
starters, was Clare Booth Luce?
CLARE BOOTH LUCE
Apparently
she was because when Old Man Joe Kennedy was the US Ambassador to the Court of
St. James at the beginning of World War II, his primary paramour was Claire
Booth Luce, the wife of Henry Luce, publisher of Time-Life. She was there, right
in the thick of things when JFK’s father sided with Nevell Chamberlain in his
appeasement of Hitler at Munich, in a last ditch effort to keep the United
States out of the war in Europe.
Luce
went on to become entangled in the JFK assassination story by co-sponsoring,
with the CIA, an anti-Castro Cuban commando team run by the CIA out of their
Florida JMWAVE station. Luce’s “boys,” as she called them, were featured in a
Life Magazine article she wrote about them, and their team leader, Julio
Fernandez, called Luce on the night of the assassination to tell her he had a
tape recording of the accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and other evidence of
his support of Fidel Castro.
At
the same time his dad was cavorting with Clare Booth Luce, JFK was working in
Washington in the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) until it became known that
his girlfriend at the time, Danish model Ingrid Avid, had accompanied Hitler to
the Berlin Olympics and was on good terms with other top Nazi officials and was
considered a spy for them. Kennedy was then reassigned from ONI to a desk job
at Charleston, South Carolina, where he continued to communicate with Avid,
phone conversations picked up by the FBI, and it was only when J. E. Hoover
threatned him did JFK break off his relationship with Avid.
While
he was President Kennedy had a few affairs, not only with White House
secretaries, but mob moll Judyth Cambell, and a Ellen Rometsch, the wife
of a German army officer whose affairs with English politicians caused a
scandal that took down some politicians because she was a Soviet spy.
ELLEN ROMETSCH before she lets her hair down.
LBJ’s
pal Bobby Baker, who hooked JFK up with Rometsch, a waitress at Baker’s Quorum
Club, was later quoted by Politico as saying, “She really loved oral sex…She
went to the White House several times and President Kennedy called me and said
it’s the best head-job he’d ever had, and he thanked me.”
It's a head job all right.
President
Kennedy was concerned enough that he would become publicly embroiled in the
affair that he asked his Ambassador to England former OSS officer David Bruce,
to keep him appraised of the news of the scandal in Britain. Rometsch also reportedly had
an affair, arranged by Baker, with Rep. Gerald Ford, who served on the Warren
Commission and authorized the Rockefeller Commission to investigate CIA
activities.
Then there’s
Judyth Campbell, who married golf pro Dan Exner, and was the key intermediary
in the Frank Sinatra – John Rosselli – Sam Giancana trio and President Kennedy.
JUDYTH CAMPBELL EXNER
Campbell,
a startling brunette with a classy style, first dated Sinatra but knew Rosselli
and Giancana and became Giancanna’s girlfriend at the same time she was bedding
President JFK, primarily at his New York City hotel apartment when Jackie was
out of town. She delivered sealed envelopes between JFK and Giancana – who was
instrumental in winning West Virginia and Illinois for JFK in the primaries and
the election. Kennedy only broke off the relationship when Sinatra fell out of
favor and J. E. Hoover warned him that the affair would go public if it didn’t
end.
Campbell
comes into the assassination story in other ways as well, as an FBI report of a stakeout of her Las Vegas apartment says that they saw it broken into by
two young men, Robert and William Hale. In fact they were twins, as their car
was traced to their father, former FBI agent Insall Bailey “I.B.” Hale – then
working for Dallas defense contractor General Dynamics. The boys weren’t
arrested or even questioned about the break in, as their father got them off
the hook. They later got into even more trouble though – as one of them
acidently killed a daughter of John Connally (I couldn’t make this stuff up).
Then
comes the clincher – their mother Virginia Kingsbery Hale – worked at the Texas
Employment Commission – and was involved in helping Oswald obtain jobs at the welding company and Jaggers-Chiles-Stoval graphics arts firm, where he allegedly forged
the fake Alex Hidel ID and documents.
In April
1961, while Oswald was in Russia, Guy Bannister’s crew of
misfits was sent to Houma, Louisiana to retrieve some weapons, ammo and
dynamite that was stored in bunker owned by the Schlumberger, a French company
directed by Jean DeMenil, one of the White Russians who would take Oswald under
their wing when he returned from the Soviet Union. Among those who went on this
mission were David Ferrie, Layton Martins, Luis Rabel Nunes - a Cuban who borrowed a laundry truck from the
Catholic Welfare Society, Gordon Novel and his wife Marlene Mancuso - who takes their wife with them on a mission?
Joan
Mellen knew Marlene Mancuso, as she writes: "Another of my favorite
witnesses was Marlene Mancuso, former wife of Gordon Novel who had infiltrated
Garrison’s investigation at the request of Walter Sheridan, Bobby Kennedy’s
right hand man. Mancuso told Jim Garrison how Sheridan, under cover as a
journalist for NBC, had attempted to bribe her with a job in Los Angeles if
only she would lie to Garrison. Sheridan had gone to New Orleans to 'scuttle'
Jim Garrison’s investigation. He was one of many.
“'I told
Mr. Garrison that I wasn’t going along with any of that,' Marlene told me, as
she described the affidavit she signed against Sheridan. Given Sheridan’s
connections to Bobby Kennedy and to Herbert J. Miller, Jr., Sheridan wasn’t
going to jail, just as he wasn’t going to face charges for bribing witnesses in
the Hoffa trial in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Marlene came forward because it
was the right thing to do. When I went up to a nursing home in East Feliciana
Parish, tracking down Gladys Palmer, whom several witnesses had observed in
Oswald’s company during the summer of 1963, Gladys Palmer and Gloria Wilson,
Marlene went with me. Gladys’ Ragland sister felt more comfortable talking with
someone who was native to Louisiana."
This all deserves mention because Gordon Novel’s wife. Marlene Mancuso, was a real babe, a Miss America beauty pageant contestant – Miss New Orleans, but she didn’t make it to Atlantic City. Her family however, is said to be related to the Mancuso’s Restaurant in the same building that housed Bannister’s office and Oswald’s Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and where Bannister’s bozo crew hanged out when they weren't on a mission.
Bonus points and a feather in your cap for anyone who can come up with a photo of Marlene Mancuso.
And we have a Winner! Gary Shaw gets bonus points and a feather for his cap by providing a nice photo of Miss New Orlenes Marlene Mancuso, that I will post ASAP.
And it wouldn't be a covert crew on a mission without a guy like Andrew Blackmon,
an Oswaldian character – ex-USMC who dry fired his Mauser rifle and, on the
way back to Bannister’s office with the arms, threw let dynamite from the truck,
thinking that was funny. These bozos could not have pulled off the Dealey Plaza operation - a clean, well planned and executed and successful mission, though they somehow got entangled in it. But Blackmon was also good pals with the Air Force Colonel
who ran the Silver Dollar emergency communications and command plane that was
over Dealey Plaza at the time of the assassination.
Then
there’s Lee and Marina – Lee Oswald and his Russian wife Marina. Before Marina
Oswald dated – the daughter of his Minsk factory foreman, a Russian Jew who
immigrated to Russia from South America, where he had previously worked for an
American corporation.
Marina
raised by her uncle, a MDV – military officer, was familiar with another
American defector Robert Webster, and Marina is described in the files recently
released under the JFK Act as being a “Swallow,” as in the bird, intelligence
lingo for a women who uses her natural attributes to obtain otherwise hard to
acquire information, though she has denied it.
Besides
Marina, there’s Sylvia Odio and Sylvia Duran, both of whom had intimate
relations with key players in the JFK assassination story. In Odio’s case she
was intimate with the young and handsome Catholic Priest Father Walter Machann,
the patron of the Dallas Cuban community in exile. The good father, who shared
the stage with John Martino when Martino was promoting his book, “I was
Castro’s Prisoner.” Martino was in on the Bayo-Pawley mission, and expressed
foreknowledge of the assassination. Father McChann also played around with other young,
impressionable parishioners, including Maryanne Sullivan, whose book Kennedy Ripples was best described as the “Harlequin Romance,”
version of the assassination.
Since Sylvia
Odio had confessed to Father McChann that two Cubans and Oswald had visited her
apartment, and talked about killing the President, after the assassination the
Secret Service had Father McChann (then hiding out at a Seminary in New Orleans)
call Sylvia Odio on the phone and ask her to identify the two Cubans while a
Secret Service agent listened in. [The SS agent said she identified one of the
Cubans as Eugenio Cisneros, but later recanted that ID]
Then
there is Sylvia Duran, the Mexican national who worked at the Cuban Embassy in
Mexico City, who Oswald dealt with when he asked her for a visa to Cuba,
enroute to Russia.
After
the assassination it was alleged by Viola June Cobb – another Swallow – this
time a CIA one, that Oswald had an affair with Duran and she introduced him to Cuban embassy officials who encouraged him to kill JFK.
You can read more about June Cobb and her entanglements with the CIA and Castro in John Newman's new series of books on the JFK Assassination - Where Angels Tread Ligtly and especially Countdown to Darkness.
CIA Agent June Cobb
Among other intrigues, Cobb alleged that the accused assassin
LHO attended a twist party hosted by Sylvia Duran that included an American
film actor and Cuban embassy personnel - who could have encouraged Oswald to
kill the President, as former New York Times reporter Phil Shennon would have
you believe.
While
Duran herself publicly says that she never met Oswald outside of the Embassy,
others who know her say that besides the twist party, Duran privately confessed
that she was intimate with Oswald, met him for lunch at Sanborns Restaurant, a
place Oswald was known to frequent, and she took
Oswald to a very fancy restaurant where he personally met the Cuban Ambassador
to Cuba, who encouraged him to kill Kennedy.
Of course these are all extensions of the black propaganda operation, a very distinct disinformation campaign to frame Oswald and blame the assassination conspiracy on Castro, an aspect of the Dealey Plaza operation that fail and has been exposed, giving us some insight into the intelligence network that was behind the murder.
It was
also alleged that during her violent interrogation by Mexican police Duran
admitted she had a sexual affair with Oswald, but she has denied that to
journalists who have questioned her.
It is
unlikely she had an affair with Oswald but it is possible she was intimate with
the American film actor who is said to have attended one of her twist parties, Richard Beymer, the
star of the movie West Side Story where he played opposite Natalie Wood.
While
Beymer recently acknowledged being in Mexico at the time, attending a film festival and trying to get a visa
to Cuba, he doesn’t recall a twist party, -
though that is something he would have done. Nor did he recall Sylvia Duran,
who he dealt with at the Cuban embassy in his quest, ala Oswald, in getting a
visa to Cuba.
In her
interviews with reporters – Anthony Summers – Phil Shennon and others, she
denied seeing Oswald outside the embassy but acknowledge hosting twist parties,
and that at the one Oswald was alleged to have attended, there was an American
film actor present, but she refused to name him because he was still alive and
she didn’t want to get him involved. So she tried to protect him.
But CIA
records recently released under the JFK Act say that the American film actor
Richard Beymer requested a visa to Cuba, and CIA wiretaps picked up his phone
conversations with Duran.
While
Duran tried to protect Beymer, and he failed to recall her by name, CIA
documents released in the last batch of records in 2017, indicate that Beymer did
know Syliva Duran by name, because after the assassination, while he was still
in Mexico City, he called the Cuban embassy, asked for her by name, and asked if she
was all right, apparently knowing she was taken into custody by the Mexican
police and violently interrogated.
It may
be of no significance at all if Duran and Beymer had a twist at a twist party,
that may be personal information that has no bearing on the story, except for
the fact that Duran tried to protect Beymer from getting involved in all this
assassination stuff, and Beymer denied recalling her name at all, when in fact,
as another record anayst put it – “he lied.”
Was she trying to protect him and did he deny knowing her personally because of their possible trist, or something more?
Some of
the relationships are key to really understanding the assassination. Like to
you think it was just a coincidence that Oswald was sent to request a visa to Cuba from
Duran? Or was it a set up? I ask this because, Syliva Duran definitely had an
affair of significance with Carlos Lechuga, the former Cuban Ambassador to Mexico who went on to New York to serve as the chief middle-man in the top secret JFK-Castro back channel
communications that were in progress at the time of the assassination.
Of all
the sparrows in this nest and network, Mary Bancroft is the key link to
everything.
While
Wiki isn’t a normally a source worth citing, this from Wiki says it all, though
they don’t bother to tell you that Ruth Forbes Paine (Young), Mary Bancroft’s
best friend and traveling companion, is the mother of Michael Paine, the
accused assassin’s chief benefactor.
According
to Wiki: Mary Bancroft (October 29,
1903, Boston – January 10, 1997, New York City was an American
novelist and spy and a member of the Bancroft family, which at one time
owned Dow Jones & Company. In 1942, while living in Switzerland,
Bancroft was recruited by the Office of Strategic Services, and both
worked and had a romantic relationship with Allen Dulles. Her most
important work was with Hans Bernd Gisevius, a German military
intelligence officer who supplied her with details of the 20 July plot to
assassinate Hitler. After the war, Bancroft settled in New York and became a
novelist.
Born in Boston and
brought up there by her stepgrandfather Clarence W. Barron, Bancroft
studied at Smith College in Massachusetts, but dropped out after a
year.
During 1926-1932, Mary Bancroft
resided in New York City, New York and spent some of that time
attending socials at the apartment of her friend from Massachusetts, Ruth
Forbes Paine, and Paine's husband, George Lyman Paine Jr. After
divorcing her first husband Sherwin Badger she went on a boat trip to
Europe in summer 1933 together with her still married - but now separated -
friend, Ruth Forbes Paine known more simply as Ruth Paine, where she
met a Swiss accountant, Jean Rufenacht, who became her second husband. She
moved to Zurich, Switzerland in 1934, where she learned excellent French
and German, and became a close friend and student of Carl Jung, who cured
her of chronic attacks of sneezing.
Following the US entry into World
War II, Bancroft was recruited by the Office of Strategic Services,
although she was not initially aware of the fact, being asked by a US Embassy
contact to write analyses of German policy based on German public sources for
Swiss and American newspapers.She was then introduced to (Allen) Dulles in Zurich
in December 1942 and went on to have a romantic relationship with him, based on
Dulles' proposition that "We can let the work cover the romance, and the romance cover the
work." Dulles assigned Bancroft to work with Hans Bernd Gisevius,
a German military intelligence officer who supplied her with details of the
planned 20 July plot to assassinate Hitler; Bancroft soon developed a
romantic relationship with Gisevius too. After the war, with her
relationship with Dulles cooling, Bancroft became close friends with Dulles'
wife Clover, who told her she was aware of their relationship and approved. She
remained close friends with Clover until the latter's death in 1974.
After the war Bancroft settled in
New York and became close friends with Henry Luce….(End Wiki)
Ah, yes,
Henry Luce, the publisher of Time-Life whose wife fooled around with Old Man Joe in London and published Clare Booth Luce’s article
about her anti-Castro Cuban “boys” who ran commando missions to Cuba, attacked
Russian ships in the Havana harbor and had a tape recording of the accused
assassin on the night of the assassination. Oh yea, he’s the guy who bought the
Zapruder film and suppressed it for a decade.
Bancroft also admitted to bedding Gisevious, the German Gestapo officer who she helped escape from Germany after the failure of the July 20, 1944 Valkyrie plot to kill Hitler, which the CIA "studied in detail" to develop a similar plan to use against Castro.
And it
isn’t just the assassination of President Kennedy that these events are
entangled with. In her book “Autobiography
of a Spy,” Bancroft notes that her first husband worked for United Fruit
and they spent a year in Batista’s Cuba, that set the stage for the United
Fruit in Guatemala to seek U.S. intervention in Operation Success in 1958.
And according to Bancroft, her stepgrandfather Hugh Bancroft, publisher of the Wall
Street Journal, expressed foreknowledge of the sudden death of President Warren
G. Harding, who it is believed, was poisoned in the dining car of a train.
In any
case, the intimate relations exhibited by the players in this
drama say a lot for understanding the big picture, as we try to put it all together.
And if
it is sex that sells the news, then these interlocking relationships should be
of interest to more than those who read Playboy or the National Enquirer, and we should pay more attention to the still sealed records that can fill in some of the blanks to these stories.
