Thursday, September 26, 2019

Ruth Paine - Quaker or Svengali?

Ruth Paine – Case Study -

Quaker Samaritan or CIA Svengali?

Is she a modest Quaker Samaritan who took in strangers, or a CIA Svengali who played a key role in the plot to kill the President?

You make the call.

According to the Warren Commission, who treated her with kid gloves, she transported the rifle from Texas to New Orleans and back again, kept it in her garage and obtained the job at the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD) for the accused assassin.

If it happened today and she was ISIS instead of a Quaker, she would be arrested, waterboarded and indicted under the Pinkerton statute, as one of the House Select Committee on Assassination (HSCA) attorneys wanted to do, but in the end, they didn’t even bother to question her. 

As Vince Salandria put it, the assassination couldn’t have happened without Ruth Paine, and an innocent government would have recognized that.

[  (26) The JFK Assassination: A False Mystery Concealing State Crimes - YouTube /  False Mystery: The JFK Assassination: A False Mystery Concealing State Crimes, 1998  ]


Salandria: "Oswald’s family was brought to the Dallas area by Ruth Paine. Ruth Paine had been instrumental in getting Oswald a job at the Texas Book Depository. The Mannlicher-Carcano, the alleged murder rifle, had supposedly been stored in a garage of the Paines. Following the assassination, Ruth Paine was called by Oswald during his detention to have her obtain a lawyer for him, a task which she failed to complete much to the benefit of the assassins."

"Once a conspiracy was deemed to exist, and even our government in the House Select Committee concluded that there was a probable conspiracy, the Paines had to be viewed as having been involved in it. An assassination Gestalt with the patsy serving as a lightning rod, cannot be successfully completed unless the patsy is delivered to the scene of the killing. Ruth Paine accomplished the crucial twin assassination tasks of getting Oswald into the Dallas area and arranging to get him a job in the Texas Book Depository Building. Therefore, the Paines, albeit on a need-to-know basis, were involved in the plot."

"In whose service were the Paines? Michael Paine came from families which were in the Boston Brahmin society – the Cabot and Forbes families. He was an heir of his maternal grandmother, Elise Cabot Forbes. He was not likely to be controlled by the Soviets, Castro or the Mafia. He had top secret clearance in his job at Bell Helicopter despite the fact that his father, George Lyman Paine, had been a Trotskyist. In Cold War United States to get such clearance when your father had been a Trotskyist, a quid pro quo had to be provided. Ruth Paine’s father was William Avery Hyde, an official in the Agency for International Development, which frequently provided cover for overseas intelligence operations. According to the excellent work of Steve Jones, Barbara LaMonica and Carol Hewett, Ruth Paine’s sister, Sylvia Hoke, had CIA affiliations. Ruth Paine was friendly with George DeMohrenshildt, a sophisticated White Russian exile and CIA operative who, although thirty-five years Oswald’s senior, became Oswald’s closest friend in Dallas. According to recent research in the 1980s Ruth Paine assisted illegal anti-socialist activity in Nicaragua." 

"Michael Paine could not have been Soviet, Castro or Mafia agents. They had to be agents of the killing force, our U.S. intelligence. If they had been Soviet or Castro agents, an innocent government would have swooped down on them and seen them as clear beacons leading to the killers. Our government did not cause them any trouble. The Paines are criminal co-conspirators in the killing of President Kennedy and would and should now be prosecuted by a guiltless government."

"The Paines are criminal co-conspirators in the killing of President Kennedy and would and should now be prosecuted by a guiltless government." - Vince Salandria 

Ruth H. Paine and Marina Oswald became fast and very close friends from the moment they met at a house party on February 22, 1963 until the day of the assassination, after which they never met or spoke again.

When Marina was asked under oath by Jim Garrision in New Orleans why she broke off her friendship with Ruth Paine, she said she did it on the advice of the Secret Service, who said Paine was affiliated with the CIA.

CIA? If so how?

Well there’s her immediate family – her father who was a big national insurance executive who the CIA approched about doing humanatarian work in Southeast Asia much like John Hinckley’s dad did. Then there’s Ruth’s sister, who worked as a psychologist for the CIA.

Other possibilities include her attendance at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and the Quakers in Philadelphia.

Antioch was founded by Horrace Mann in the 19th century as a radical college that entwined school classes with work in the real world. They did away with grades and had co-ed classes decades before it became popular. Among those who attended Antioch you have Coretta Scott King, Rod Serling of the Twilight Zone, who did a show on Fidel Castro seeing assassins in a mirror, and was himself impersonated in letters to major media outlets during the aftermath of the assassination.

Oh, yea, Max Holland attended Antioch and so did I, as an occassional transfer student from the nearby University of Dayton. I took a class in 1970 on the history of Vietnam, which was taught by a former CIA Chief of Station Siagon, who said Ho Chi Min was the George Washington of Vietnam, and we were backing the wrong side. That was my first indication that Antioch was somehow wired and spooky.
Ruth Paine’s brother, a physican, lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and she must have visited him there.

And Oswald is said to have been there too, applying as a student just before he enlisted in the Marines. And Antioch is the only college I know that wouldn’t require a high school diploma. There were Oswald sightings there too, as reported by the Dayton Police Intelligence Squad who investigated after the assassination.

I also attended the Antioch graduate school – the Center for Social Research and Action in Baltimore, where the chief professor was then involved in the Polish Solidarity Union uprising, and one of the students returned from the USSR with early reel to reel video tapes of his Russian wanderings. Another professor got me into the Bethesda Naval hospital, where the autopsy was performed, late at night when it was closed, to attend a board room radio conference call with teachers on South Pacific islands.

The Philadelphia based Society of Friends – aka Quakers – also run a hostel for travelers in Mexico City where Oswald is said to have visited. And when Ruth Paine lived in Philadelphia she occasionally called the Quaker Peace Center where John Judge worked, and they had pleasant conversations over the phone.

Antioch is not your normal college, and when Ruth Paine went to a Quaker center in Nicaragua, keeping tabs on the Sandinistas at the same time the JMWAVE trainers – including John “I.F.” Harper were training the Contras like they had trained the Cuban Pathfinders, she did so with a guy from Antioch. So Ruth Paine was called out of retirement to work with the same team again twenty years later.

[For more on Ruth Paine in Nicaragaua:JFKCountercoup2: Steve Jones - The Confessions of Ruth Paine]

But I don’t think Antioch or the Quakers make the CIA connection, which is much more tight.

As Allen Dulles told one of his biographers, his association with Mary Bancroft and the patrons of the accused assassin would give conspiracy theorists a field day. Well now, fifty years later, we are having that field day.

As detailed in Mary Bancroft’s book “Autobiography of a Spy,” she was a close personal friend of Michael Paine’s mother Ruth Forbes Paine Young. They spent time together at the Forbes family island off Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and traveled together to Europe by steamship before Bancroft moved to Switzerland and began to work with Dulles as his secretary and principal agent in the July 20, 1944 Valkyrie attempt to kill Hitler.

Besides Bancroft’s book, we have other sources for information on the Paine-Bancroft connection, that is mentioned in the Paine Project – that a number of researchers undertook in the 1990s, and should be referenced in a new movie project – a documentary film about Ruth Paine.

In any case Ruth H. Paine visited the Forbes island and Michael’s mother at her farm outside of Philadelphia before driving to New Orleans to pick up Marina, the daughter and the Oswald’s belongings and taking them to Texas while Oswald ostensibly went to Mexico.

While Michael’s mother – Ruth Forbes Paine Young was certainly in the loop, and knew what was going on – was Mary Bancroft and Allen Dulles also “in the loop”?

When I was working at the Archives II in College Park one day, I sat next to former White House lawyer and Watergate celebrity John Dean, who said he was working on a biography of President Warren G. Harding. I asked Dean if he thought Harding’s death of food poisoning on a train was suspicious, and surprisingly he didn’t.

Mary Bancroft’s primary mentor was not Allen Dulles but “C.W.” Barron, who started the Wall Street Jouranl and Barrons magazine, who was certainly suspicious of Harding’s sudden death, as Bancroft relates.


For more from Bancroft and “Autobiography of a Spy” see:

As Bancroft wrote:  “As I come to the end of this story about the first fifty years of my life, I can’t help wondering what….CW…would have to say about it all. CW…would advise, ‘Write it up, Mary! Write it all up!. Then he would add his usual admonition, ‘But remember that facts are not the truth. They only indicate where the truth may lie!’”


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