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The Mysterious Mr. de Mohrenschildt October 14, 2013
George de Mohrenschildt
The letter was from a desperate-sounding man in Dallas, who spoke regretfully of having been indiscreet in talking about Lee Harvey Oswald and begged Poppy for help:
The writer signed himself "G. de Mohrenschildt."
by Edvard Munch
Just to be sure, however, they asked their boss:
Bush responded by memo, seemingly self-typed:
Not recall? Once again, Poppy Bush was having memory problems. And not about trivial matters.
George de Mohrenschildt was not just the
uncle of a roommate, but a longtime personal associate. Yet Poppy could not
recall - or more precisely, claimed not to recall - the nature of de
Mohrenschildt’s relationship with the man believed to have assassinated the
thirty-fifth president.
At that very moment, several federal investigations were looking into CIA abuses - including the agency’s role in assassinations of foreign leaders. These investigations were heading toward what would become a reopened inquiry into Kennedy’s death.
Could it be that the lapse was not casual, and
the acknowledgment of a distant relationship was a way to forestall inquiry
into a closer one?
Among them, though apparently eliciting no further inquiries on the part of the police, was an old entry for the current CIA director, with the Midland address where he had lived in the early days of Zapata:
De Mohrenschildt and the
Oswalds
De Mohrenschildt had helped Oswald find jobs and apartments, had taken him to meetings and social gatherings, and generally had assisted with the most minute aspects of life for Lee Oswald, his Russian wife, Marina, and their baby.
In 1964, de Mohrenschildt and his wife Jeanne testified to the Warren Commission, which spent more time with them than any other witness - possibly excepting Oswald’s widow, Marina.
The Commission, though, focused on George de Mohrenschildt as a colorful, if eccentric, character, steering away every time de Mohrenschildt recounted yet another name from a staggering list of influential friends and associates. In the end, the commission simply concluded in its final report that these must all be coincidences and nothing more.
The de Mohrenschildts, the Commission said, apparently had nothing to do with the assassination.
George and Jeanne de
Mohrenschildt
For most of his adult life, de Mohrenschildt had traveled the world ostensibly seeking business opportunities involving a variety of natural resources - some, such as oil and uranium, of great strategic value.
The timing of his overseas ventures was remarkable. Invariably, when he was passing through town, a covert or even overt operation appeared to be unfolding - an invasion, a coup, that sort of thing.
For example, in 1961, as exiled Cubans and their CIA support team prepared for the Bay of Pigs invasion in Guatemala, George de Mohrenschildt and his wife passed through Guatemala City on what they told friends was a month-long walking tour of the Central American isthmus.
On another occasion, the de Mohrenschildts
appeared in Mexico on oil business just as a Soviet leader arrived on a
similar mission - and even happened to meet the Communist official. In a
third instance, they landed in Haiti shortly before an unsuccessful coup
against its president that had U.S. fingerprints on it.
A series of strange coincidences providing the
only known link between the two families before Oswald fired the shot
killing Mr. Kennedy in Dallas a year ago was described in testimony before
The Warren Commission by George S. de Mohrenschildt.
As Norman Mailer noted in his book Oswald’s Tale, de Mohrenschildt possessed,
A Name Never Dropped
Nor did investigators uncover the fact that in the spring of 1963, immediately after his final communication with Oswald, de Mohrenschildt had traveled to New York and Washington for meetings with CIA and military intelligence officials.
He even had met with a top aide to Vice
President Johnson. And the commission certainly did not learn that one
meeting in New York included Thomas Devine, then Bush’s business colleague
in Zapata Offshore, who was doing double duty for the CIA.
George de Mohrenschildt’s uncle and father ran the Swedish Nobel Brothers Oil Company’s operations in Baku, in Russian Azerbaijan on the southwestern coast of the Caspian Sea.
This was no small matter. In the early days of
the twentieth century, the region held roughly half of the world’s known oil
supply. By the start of World War I, every major oil interest in the world,
including the Rockefellers’ Standard Oil, was scrambling for a piece of
Baku’s treasure or intriguing to suppress its competitive potential. (Today,
ninety years later, they are at it again.)
President Woodrow Wilson had been reelected partly on the basis of having kept America out of the war.
But as with all leaders, he was surrounded by men with their own agendas. A relatively close-knit group embodying the nexus of private capital and intelligence-gathering inhabited the highest levels of the Wilson administration.
Secretary of State Robert Lansing was the uncle of a diplomat-spy by the name of Allen Dulles.
Wilson’s closest adviser, "Colonel" Edward House, was a Texan and an ally of the ancestors of James A. Baker III, who would become Poppy Bush’s top lieutenant. Czarist Russia then owed fifty million dollars to a Rockefeller-headed syndicate.
Keeping an eye on such matters was the U.S.
ambassador to Russia, a close friend of George Herbert Walker’s from St.
Louis.
Allen Dulles
during WW I
The Percy Rockefeller-headed Remington Arms
Company got the lion’s share of the U.S. contracts. It sold millions of
dollars worth of rifles to czarist forces, while it also profited handsomely
from deals with the Germans.
Not long after that, Ferdinand married the step-granddaughter of President Woodrow Wilson.
Dorothy Walker Bush
The von Mohrenschildt family fled Russia along with the rest of the aristocracy. Emanuel Nobel sold half of the Baku holdings to Standard Oil of New Jersey, with John D. Rockefeller Jr. personally authorizing the payment of $11.5 million.
Over the next couple of decades, members of the
defeated White Russian movement, which opposed the Bolsheviks and fought the
Red Army from the 1917 October Revolution until 1923, would find shelter in
the United States, a country that shared the anti-Communist movement’s
ideological sentiments.
What the von Mohrenschildts escaped.
His admission was likely smoothed by the connections of the Harriman family, which soon persuaded the Bolshevik Russian government to allow them to reactivate the Baku oilfields.
At that point, the Harriman operation was being directed by the brilliant international moneyman George Herbert Walker, the grandfather of Poppy Bush.
Baku Oil Rigs
by Konstantin Bogaevsky
Though ultimately willing to cooperate with some Western companies, the Communists had created an army of angry White Russian opponents, who vowed to exact revenge and regain their holdings. This group, trading on an American fascination with titles, was soon ensconced in (and often intermarried with) the East Coast establishment.
The New York newspapers of the day were full of
reports of dinners and teas hosted by Prince This and Count That at
the top of Manhattan hotels.
There, Dimitri became friendly with Roland and Winifred "Betty" Cartwright Holhan Hooker, who were prominent local citizens.
Roland Hooker was enormously well connected; his
father had been the mayor of Hartford, his family members were close friends
of the Bouviers (Jackie Kennedy’s father’s family), and his sister was
married to Prince Melikov, a former officer in the Imperial Russian Army.
Dimitri’s lengthy covert résumé would include
serving in the Office of Strategic Services wartime spy agency and later
cofounding Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. In 1941, Dimitri also
founded a magazine, the Russian Review, and later became a professor at
Dartmouth.
There, he shared a small cottage with George H. W. "Poppy" Bush. Bush and Hooker became inseparable. They worked together on Pot Pourri, the student yearbook, whose photos show a handsome young Poppy Bush and an even more handsome Hooker.
The friendship would continue in 1942, when both Bush and Hooker, barely eighteen, enlisted in the Navy and served as pilots in the Pacific. Afterward, they would be together at Yale. When Hooker married, Poppy Bush served as an usher.
The relationship between Bush and Hooker lasted for three decades, until 1967, when Hooker died of an apparent heart attack. He was just forty-three.
Six years after Hooker’s death, Poppy Bush would
serve as surrogate father, giving away Hooker’s daughter at her wedding to
Ames Braga, scion of a Castro-expropriated Cuban sugar dynasty.
Yet Bush never mentions Hooker in his memoirs or
published recollections, even though he finds room for scores of more
marginal figures. Certainly his family was aware of Hooker.
Moreover, as a prominent Connecticut family with
deep colonial roots, the Hookers would have had great appeal for Prescott
Bush, an up-and-coming Connecticut resident with political aspirations and a
great interest in the genealogy of America’s upper classes.
By then, Dimitri had been hired by Henry Luce as
a stringer for Time magazine. Prescott would likely have been keen to know
his son’s roommate’s stepfather - this intriguing Russian anti-Communist
aristocrat, with a background in the oil business and a degree from Yale,
working for Prescott’s
Skull and Bones friend Luce.
Young George de Mohrenschildt came to America armed with the doctoral dissertation that reflected the future trajectory of his life: "The Economic Influence of the United States on Latin America."
The oil south of the border was certainly of
interest to Wall Street figures such as Prescott Bush and his colleagues,
who were deeply involved in financing petroleum exploration in new areas.
No one understood this better than Allen Dulles, the Wall Street lawyer, diplomat, and spy-master-in ascension.
Even in the period between the two world wars, Dulles was already molding Russian émigrés into intelligence operatives. He moved back and forth between government service and Wall Street lawyering with the firm Sullivan and Cromwell, whose clients included United Fruit and Brown Brothers Harriman.
The latter was at that time led by Averell and Roland Harriman and Prescott Bush.
W. Averell Harriman
He seemed to enjoy the clandestine work more than the legal work.
As Peter Grose notes in Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles, he worked during the 1940 presidential campaign to bring Russian, Polish, and Czechoslovak émigrés into the Republican camp.
Dimitri von Mohrenschildt was a star player in this game on a somewhat exalted level.
He found sponsorship for a role as an academic and publisher specializing in anti-Bolshevik materials, and later became involved in more ambitious propaganda work with Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe.
Younger brother George was more willing to get his hands dirty.
He took a job in the New York office of a French perfume company called Chevalier Garde, named for the Czar’s most elite troops, the Imperial Horse Guards. His bosses were powerful czarist Russian émigrés, well connected at the highest levels of Manhattan society, who worked during World War II in army intelligence and the OSS.
One of them, Prince Serge Obolensky, had escaped Soviet Russia after a year of hiding and became a much-married New York society figure whose wives included Alice Astor.
His brother-in-law Vincent Astor was secretly asked by FDR in 1940 to set up civilian espionage offices in Manhattan at Rockefeller Center.
Astor was soon joined in this effort by Allen
Dulles.
and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
1975
His boss there was a high-ranking French intelligence official, and together they monitored and blocked attempts by the Axis war machine to procure badly needed petroleum supplies in the Americas.
Young de Mohrenschildt then traveled to the southwest, where he exhibited still more impressive connections.
Ostensibly there to work on oil derricks, he landed a meeting with the chairman of the board of Humble Oil, the Texas subsidiary of Standard Oil of New Jersey, predecessor to Exxon.
Prince Serge Obolensky
circa 1943
Pantepec later had abundant connections with the newly created CIA and was deeply involved in foreign intrigue for decades.
The Buckley boys, like the Bushes, had been in Skull and Bones, and Bill Buckley, whose conservative intellectual magazine National Review was often politically helpful to Poppy Bush, would in later years admit to a stint working for the CIA himself.
William F. Buckley, Jr.
These incidents appear to have been deliberate provocations, such as his working on "sketches" outside a U.S. Coast Guard station. In many of these cases de Mohrenschildt would be briefly questioned or investigated, the result of which was a dossier not unlike that of Lee Harvey Oswald’s.
These files were full of declared doubts about his loyalties and speculation at various times that he might be a Russian, Japanese, French, or German spy. A classic opportunist, he might have been any or all of these.
But he also could have simply been an American spy who was creating a cover story.
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