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The Cold War Comes to Dallas October 24, 2013
"Oil Rig Workers" by Jerry Bywaters
A Cauldron of Right Wing
Americans, Right Wing Russians, and Nazis
In 1950, together with Poppy Bush’s old friend and former roommate Eddie Hooker, he launched a modest oil investment firm, Hooker and de Mohrenschildt, with "offices in New York, Denver, and Abilene."
At this time West Texas was the center of a new boom. Poppy Bush was working there in his role as a trainee for Neil Mallon’s Dresser Industries. Meanwhile, a vastly more ambitious enterprise was afoot in Dallas, where Mallon relocated Dresser Industries in 1950. At that time, Dallas was still a relatively modest-size city, but growing rapidly.
"Oil Girls" by Jerry Bywaters
Once primarily a banking center for wealthy
cotton farmers, it had become a center of petroleum finance and home to the
new breed of superrich independent oilmen. With help from House speaker Sam
Rayburn and Senate Majority leader Lyndon Johnson, Dallas had attracted a
number of defense contractors, which made it a growing hub of the nation’s
military-industrial complex.
They were drawn together by business interests, an anti-Communist worldview, and participation in a new church they had founded, though many were not religious.
Almost every week they attended social
gatherings at one another’s homes. George de Mohrenschildt developed ties
with the most important of them.
The man who would be considered the "godfather" of the émigré community was Paul Raigorodsky, a former czarist Russian cavalry officer who had fought against the Red Army.
After the Bolshevik victory, Raigorodsky came to the United States with the help of the Red Cross and the YMCA. Like many of the other émigrés, he married into American society at a high level: his new father-in-law had set up the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank. Before long, he was on the oil and military track, with important assignments in war and peace, including some from powerful figures in the Bush-Dresser orbit.
Some accounts have him serving in the OSS, the
forerunner of the CIA. He also became an acknowledged friend of FBI director
J. Edgar Hoover. Raigorodsky was a director of the Tolstoy Foundation, a
U.S. government-funded organization that assisted Russian exiles.
In the 1920s, while a high school student in Petrograd, Bouhe had worked for the American Relief Administration (ARA), a spy-cover charity that provided food aid to the Russian population via branch offices set up by American executives in various Russian cities. Bouhe’s supervisors, impressed with his work, urged him to come to the United States.
He crossed a river into Finland in the middle of the night and traveled to New York, where he went to work for the Rockefellers’ Chase Bank.
Then he moved to Dallas, where he became the
bookkeeper for Lewis W. MacNaughton, a partner in the highly influential
petroleum geology consulting firm DeGolyer and MacNaughton and a board
member of Dresser Industries.
Bouhe and Raigorodsky both would befriend de Mohrenschildt and remain in close contact with him during 1962 and 1963.
The Russian community as a whole bonded naturally with the city’s right-wing oilmen and bankers, and all clustered together under the remarkable leadership of Poppy Bush’s "uncle," Neil Mallon. In 1951, Mallon launched the Dallas Council on World Affairs.
Under this umbrella, Mallon brought together
many of Dallas’s most powerful citizens, from oilmen and titans of the
burgeoning military-contracting industry to German scientists who had fled
the wreckage of Hitler’s Germany to help fashion weapons against the
Communist threat.
One was the Texas chapter of the Crusade for
Freedom, a private conduit for laundered money to be sent to "freedom
fighters."
Backed by Secretary of State Dean Acheson
(Yale ’43, Scroll and Key), this group spawned a subsidiary, the Crusade for
Freedom, with General Lucius Clay, which proceeded to launch a series of
gigantic annual fund-raising campaigns.
One of the first events it funded was a nationwide radio address by General Dwight D. Eisenhower, urging Americans to support it.
The money raised went to entities connected with Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, which were centers of anti-Communist propaganda, and consequently home to many former Nazis and Nazi collaborators.
At the direction of Washington, these entities
laundered U.S. government funds (including monies from the CIA) for use by
Eastern European insurgents. This was a forebear of later CIA
money-laundering operations, including Iran-contra, in which Poppy Bush
played a hidden but significant role. Among the European immigrants who were
deeply involved in these operations were Dimitri von and George de
Mohrenschildt.
In addition to Neil Mallon, members included,
Another member was D. Harold Byrd, who
owned the building in downtown Dallas that would become known as the Texas
School Book Depository. Still another was E.M. "Ted" Dealey,
publisher of the Dallas Morning News, who was a harsh critic of Kennedy.
Prescott Bush noted in a letter around this time that Mallon was,
Meanwhile, George de Mohrenschildt, thrice-married bon vivant, finally met his match, literally and figuratively in 1957 when he became involved with Jeanne LeGon, who would become his fourth wife.
Like George, Jeanne was Russian, and she had come to the United States and settled in New York City in the same year he did. In one of many extraordinary coincidences, they claimed to have lived next door to each other yet did not meet until years later.
Jeanne had been born Eugenia Fomenko in
1914 in Harbin, China, near the Russian border, to Russian parents. Her
father, Mikhail L. Fomenko, had run the Far Eastern Railroad for the Chinese
government until it sold the railroad to the Russian Communist government in
1925.
She would later tell the Warren Commission that she and her first husband, Robert LeGon, had fled Manchuria when it was under Japanese control because they feared that he would be killed due to his knowledge of a secret Japanese airfield he had worked on.
Eventually they made their way to New York, where brother Sergei was working on the top-secret Manhattan Project with J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Jeanne de Mohrenschildt
Her first job there was as a designer with Nardis Sportswear, which was owned by Bernard L. "Benny" Gold, a tough-talking Russian-born Jew who had started out as a Brooklyn cabdriver and ended up as a titan of the Dallas fashion scene.
By 1950, splashy Dallas fashions were all the rage, gobbled up by stores all over the United States, and Nardis was the top of the heap. The store shipped goods out on planes via Slick Airways, owned by the oilman and world-renowned explorer Tom Slick, a Dresser Industries board member and good friend of Prescott Bush.
Benny Gold knew everyone; he was president of
the Dallas Fashion Center and threw huge parties. When Jeanne first arrived
in town, Benny Gold put her up in his mansion.
A decade later, Zapruder, by then the owner of
his own company, would become world famous for his breathtaking home-movie
footage of the Kennedy assassination.
George de Mohrenschildt, who always seemed to move at the behest of people of higher rank than himself, turned to Cuba. He later told the Warren Commission that he left the Buckleys’ Pantepec Oil back in 1946 after a falling-out with a company vice president. Yet by 1950 he was working with his former boss, Pantepec president Warren Smith, on the latter’s new firm called the Cuban-Venezuelan Oil Voting Trust Company (CVOVT).
In passing, de Mohrenschildt mentioned to the
Commission that the CVOVT had managed to obtain leases covering nearly half
of Cuba. He appears to have been telling the truth, but Warren Commission
counsel Albert E. Jenner Jr. did not find this remarkable fact
interesting.
Meyer Lansky
Rather he was at the center of a major corporate
effort, involving many of America’s largest institutions. Through
connections in the Batista regime, the CVOVT had managed to corner exclusive
exploration rights to millions of acres on the island. Like all foreign
businesses operating in Cuba, it had to work through the dictator’s American
intermediaries, notably the mobster Meyer Lansky, who was de facto
representative of American "interests" on the island.
Though now almost completely forgotten, on many
days in the mid-1950s, it was one of the four or five most actively traded
issues on the American Stock Exchange. By November 30, 1956, the New York
Times had this announcement:
Stanolind has agreed to start drilling within
120 days and maintain a one-rig continuous drilling program [for] three
years.
According to its filings, it was formed in Havana in 1950,
That is, it was some kind of holding company
with a focus on "stability" in Latin American countries, which could
reasonably be assumed to refer to creating conditions of political stability
favorable to the exploration activities.
A short item in the New York Times of May 14, 1956, noted:
Empire Trust’s John Loeb had a network of associates that amounted to "something very like a private CIA," wrote Stephen Birmingham in Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York.
Empire worked hard to protect its foreign investments and especially its stake in the defense contractor General Dynamics. Empire entrusted its affairs in Texas to Baker Botts, the law firm of James Baker’s family.
Besides Rice, another Empire Trust director was Lewis MacNaughton, a Dresser Industries board member from 1959 to 1967. MacNaughton was the employer of George Bouhe, the Russian émigré who would later introduce George de Mohrenschildt to Lee Harvey Oswald.
Perhaps the most curious of the Empire Trust
figures was Jack Crichton, a longtime company vice president who joined
Empire in August 1953 and remained through 1962.
These operated largely below the radar, and fronted for some of North America’s biggest names, including,
...family of financiers.
According to his former lawyer, Crichton traveled to the Middle East on oil-related intelligence business. On behalf of prominent interests, he was involved with George de Mohrenschildt in his oil exploration venture in pre-Castro Cuba.
In a 2001 oral history, Crichton volunteered that he was a friend of George de Mohrenschildt’s:
By 1956, in addition to his other duties, Crichton started a military intelligence reserve unit on the side.
On the day of Kennedy’s assassination, as will be elaborated upon in chapter 7, he would arrange for a member of the Dallas Russian community to rush to Marina Oswald’s side and provide translations for investigators - which were far from literal translations of her Russian words and had the effect of implicating her husband in Kennedy’s death.
Shortly after the assassination, Crichton would
become the GOP nominee for governor of Texas in a race against the incumbent
John Connally, who had recovered from his wounds of November 22. On
the same ticket was the Republican nominee for the United States Senate,
Poppy Bush.
These claims were now limited to twenty thousand
acres, a major setback for companies such as CVOVT, with its fifteen million
acres.
Standard Oil of New Jersey had, according to the
article, invested thirty-five million dollars in a Cuban refinery, and other
companies had invested comparable sums.
That story was summed up nearly in William A. Doyle’s syndicated advice column, "The Daily Investor," on August 14, 1961:
Brown Brothers Harriman also had a stake in Cuban affairs that went back at least to the 1920s. Its affiliate, the Punta Alegre Sugar Corporation, controlled more than two hundred thousand acres in the province of Camagüey.
Officials of the firm served on the board of
Punta Alegre up to the moment that Castro expropriated is land - and even
afterward, as the sugar company began moving its remaining assets to the
United States.
Sabotage, one of many OSS skills
passed on to the CIA.
He created the Cuban Task force, with teams in
charge of clandestine operations, psychological warfare, and economic and
diplomatic pressure. Out of these emerged Operation 40, an elite group of
Cuban exiles who, after specialized training, were to infiltrate Cuba and
deal a mortal blow to the revolution, including the assassination of its
principal leaders.
More than a decade earlier, Barnes’s first CIA job had been as deputy director of the Psychological Strategy Board, a little-known entity that explored everything from the use of psychotropic drugs as truth serum to the possibility of engineering unwitting assassins, i.e., Manchurian candidates.
Later, he worked on the successful 1954 operation to overthrow the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz.
Barnes had received propaganda support from
David Atlee Phillips and E. Howard Hunt, including the distribution of faked
photographs purporting to show the mutilated bodies of Arbenz opponents.
Escalante, whose service was vaunted for its U.S. spy network, claimed that the Texas group was headed by George H. W. Bush and Jack Crichton.
Escalante’s assertion cannot be easily dismissed:
Crichton’s role in covert operations, about which extensive new information
is provided in chapter 7, was little understood at the time Escalante
publishes his memoirs.
In March 1960, the Eisenhower administration signed off on a plan to equip and train Cuban exiles, and drills soon began in Florida and Guatemala.
One of Dulles’s top three aides, the covert
operations chief Richard M. Bissell (Yale ’32), was made director. Around
this time, George de Mohrenschildt happened to take a business trip to
Mexico City, where the CIA station was deeply involved in the coming
attractions.
One longtime buddy of his and of Poppy Bush’s, offshore drilling expert George Kitchel, would tell the FBI in 1964 that de Mohrenschildt counted among his good friends the oil tycoons,
Other Commission
testimony revealed that in the couple of years prior to the Kennedy
assassination, de Mohrenschildt had traveled frequently from Dallas to
Houston, where he visited with figures such as George Brown of Brown and
Root, the construction and military contracting giant that helped launch
LBJ’s career, and Jean de Menil of Schlumberger, the huge oil services firm.
George Brown had dispatched him to Mexico, where his mission seemed to be heading off a Mexican government oil deal with the Soviet deputy premier Anastas Mikoyan, who arrived at the same time. Murchison dispatched him to Haiti on several occasions.
In 1958, he went to
Yugoslavia on what was said to be business for Mecom - whose foundation, the
San Jacinto Fund, was later identified as a CIA funding conduit.
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