Profile - George DeMohrenschildt

Bill Kelly: I wrote this one summer in the late 1970s, shortly after deMohrenschildt died. I don't remember the sources, but I think it stands up well today. Will post Part II when I have a chance. 

GEORGE DEMOHRENSCHILDT

PART I

Volume XII, Section 111 of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) Reports is labeled “George DeMohrenschildt.” It is divided into a forward, six sections on his background, a chronology of important dates in his life and a 246 page manuscript DeMohrenschildt wrote detailing his association with Lee Harvey Oswald. The manuscript –called “I’m a Patsy! I’m a Patsy!” maintains Oswald was innocent of the assassination and framed as the fall guy, just as he claimed.

The published report on DeMohrenschildt, submitted by Staff Counsel Ms. Surell Brady is incomplete (p. 47-63), seemingly prepared from published material rather than research, field investigations or government files.

One significant item from intelligence files, indicates DeMohrenschildt met with US Army intelligence officer Sam Kail while visiting Washington DC. Kail had been stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Havana at the time Castro took power. He was contacted by Antonio Veciana Blanche at the request of his case officer “Maurice Bishop.” DeMohrenschildt’s own visit to Cuba not mentioned except in his manuscript.

The report by Ms. Brady ends with DeMohrenschildt and Oswald visiting Admiral Chester Bruton, the significance of which is not elaborated on and Bruton’s job with Collins Radio is not mentioned in Brady’s report.

Nor is there any mention in the HSCA reports as to whether the committee found or tried to locate DeMohrenschildt’s government report on his 1961 walking tour of Central America, or the accompanying log book and film of that expedition, which arrived at the Guatemala camp where Cubans bound for the Bay of Pigs were being trained.

John Mecom is mentioned in the chronology and his manuscript as one of DeMohrenschildt’s employers, but he is not mentioned again. From what I understand, Mecom, whose son owned the New Orleans Saints NFL football team, was on the board of directors of a New Orleans bank with Leon Trujaque, who employed a teenage Lee Harvey Oswald as an import agent and delivery boy on the docks. I find it interesting that years before they were to meet, in 1957, both Oswald and DeMohrenschildt worked for men who sat on the board of the same bank.

In the course of the HSCA public hearings Jacqueline Hess, a committee researcher, asked about the “Strange Deaths Study,” told the committee that DeMohrenschildt’s death was the subject of a “great investigative effort,” but there is no mention of this great investigative effort among the published reports of the committee.

                                                       GEORGE DEMOHRENSCHILDT

George DeMohrenschildt was described as a self-centered, arrogant, but highly polished professional as well as an intelligent and individualistic person with varied interest.

He is best remembered as a close friend and mentor to Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of President John F. Kennedy.

Born in Mozyr, Byelorussia in 1911, George was the son of Sergi Alexander Von Mohrenschildt, the Minsk Province representative of the landowners to the Tsar. Byelo means “white” and the people from this area of the Ukraine are known as “White Russians,” many of them related to the nobility of Russia and Europe. The term “White Russians” was also used to identify those who fought the communist “Red Army” during the civil war that followed the revolution of 1917.

Mozyr, Byelorussia is approximately 240 miles east of Brest, Poland and about 220 miles sough of Minsk, the capitol of Byelorussia. Minsk, where Lee Harvey Oswald lived in the Soviet Union, is about 150 miles from the Polish border and about 450 miles west of Moscow.

Besides being the Minsk Province representative to the Tsar, Sergi Von Mohrenschildt held the title of “Marshall of Mobility of Minsk Province,” and was a descendant of Russian royalty and was said to be of Prussian, Polish, Swedish and Austrian royal blood. He was probably related to Prince DeMohrny, heir of Nepoleon and related to Nicholas. George named his daughter Alexandra, after the daughter of the Tsar.

As a youth, George lived in Minsk, Moscow and St. Petersburg (Leningrad), where the Bolshevik Revolution began and eventually resulted in the assassination of the Tsar and his family and the imprisonment of his ministers. George’s uncle Ferdinand Von Mohrenschildt was a first secretary under the Tsar and served as an officer in the White Russian Army.

George’s father Sergi Von Mohrenschildt, besides his official titles, was director of the rich Nobel oil fields in Baku, Azerbaydzhan, on the Caspian sea, 100 miles north of Iran and 300 miles east of Turkey.

According to the Encyclopedia Britantica, “The independent republic of Azerbaydzhan was formed in May 1918, it’s capitol being at Gandyha until Baku, which had been under the control of the communist council, was captured with the help of the Turkish army in 1918….In April 1920 Axerbaydzhan was invaded by the Red Army and the government surrendered to the communists and made part of the Soviet Union the same month. The oil fields were appropriated by the Soviets and the economy of the republic greatly developed…”

The Russians, Byelorussians and Ukranians make up only 10% of the population of the province and they are primarily located at Baku because of the oil fields. George’s father Sergi worked for Michael Breitman, who fled to the French colony of Haiti, while Sergi was imprisoned by the communists but then released and in an amazing turn of events, was made the director of the Soviet department of agriculture for Minsk Province.

Sergi’s other son, George’s brother Dimitri, was described as a “ferocious anti-communist” and was imprisoned as a spy, allegedly as an agent of Poland. Using his political muscle, Sergi arranged for him to be exchanged for another prisoner, much like the spy swap that returned Francis Gary Powers, the CIA’s U2 pilot shot down over the Soviet Union.

In July 1918, White Army Admiral A.V. Kolchak had established a counter-revolutionary government in Omsk, Siberia, on the Trans-Siberian rail line. The Russian royal family had unsuccessfully prepared to escape by way of the railroad, which was controlled by the White Russians. Jean LeGron DeMohrenschildt, George’s fourth and last wife, was born in Harbin, China, the last stop on the Trans-Siberian railroad, which her father was the director of, and responsible for the transport of over 100,000 White Russian refugees who fled the revolution.

Peter Gregory, the first member of the White Russian community in Dallas to meet Lee Harvey Oswald upon is return from the Soviet Union, was born in Siberia where the provincial White Russian government was established.

In 1919, the US State Department sent Gen. William “Wild Bill” Donovan to Siberia to report on the situation there. William Stevenson, in “A Man Called Intrepid” wrote, “Bill Donovan, who believed that a free society could only survive with an efficient intelligence service, had been sent to Siberia in 1919 to assess the beleaguered White Russians. He applied a rule of good intelligence: his report was free from personal prejudice, he reported from revolution-torn Russia to the state department that anti-communist forces were corrupt and divided. ‘We can prevent a shooting war,’ he wrote, ‘only if we take the initiative to win the subversive war.’”

Donovan was sent to Europe in 1920 on a private fact finding mission financed by the Rockefeller Foundation.

In the early 1920s, Sergi Von Mohrenschildt was imprisoned again, this time for opposing the communist campaign against religion.

According to one report, “The Russian Orthodox Church, which had a privileged status under the old regime, was extremely hostile to the Bolshevik revolution….issued a call to organize in defense of the church, for ‘the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.’”

In the early 1920s Sergi Von Mohrenschildt was arrested a second time for opposing the campaign against religion, which occurred at the same time the Soviet Union was at war with Poland. As the Soviets began to confiscate church property and wealth, Sergi escaped from jail and fled with his family to Poland. At the age of ten in Poland, young George was enrolled in an exclusive military academy founded by Napoleon where he learned to ride and play polo as well as command a cavalry regiment.

The hero of the exiled White Russians at this time was Boris Sovinkov, “the mad bomber,” who started the Social Revolutionary Terrorist Center, which specialized in assassination and sabotage against the communists.

Many White Russians remained behind however, and using what was left of the Russian Orthodox Church as an intelligence network, they infiltrated high into the Soviet bureaucratic structure, including the military, especially the navy. By 1924 the organized resistance broke down and the communists took over complete control.

That same year in the United States, J. Edgar Hover formed the General Intelligence Division of the Justice Department, which used the Tzarist Russians in tracing the Bolshevicks during the Red Scare and “Palmer Raids” of that era. (See: The FBI Nobody Knows). The General Intelligence Division and their files would later be reorganized as Division Five of the FBI.

At the same time in Poland, Sergi Von Mohrenschildt “made deals for land and money that permitted the family to live in the style to which they were accustomed.”

George served as an officer in the Polish cavalry and attended a Belgium business school and learned the French language at a private school where he also studied “consular science” for the diplomatic service. At the University of Liege, Netherlands, he received a Phd in international commerce in 1928, doing his thesis on U.S. economic interest in Latin America.

In 1930 the National Alliance of Solidarist (NTS) was founded by a group of émigrés from Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Through an underground network of White Russian and East-European anti-communists, including the Russian Orthodox Church and the NTS, a quietly efficient network was formed called “Nightingale,” which had succeeded in planting and recruiting agents within the USSR, particularly in the military and state security. The Nazis later accepted the Solidarists because of their ideological proximity to fascism.

The White Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia was an extension of the Russian Orthodox Church inside Russia, which was a tool of the Tsar until suppressed by the Soviets, and used to recruit anti-Communist spies inside the state, and later received a subsidy from the CIA.

George DeMohrenschildt’s fourth wife, Jean LeGron, was born in Harbon, China, in Manchuria, near the Russian border, and after dancing in nightclubs in Shanghai, emigrated to New York city, where she danced under the name “Fomenko” at the historic Rainbow Room. Her two brothers also came to America around the same time, one an employee of Howard Hughes and the other ostensibly for the CIA.

The same year George and Dimitri Von Mohrenschildt came to New York, probably from Belgium, with $10,000 in cash. They rented a house on Long Island and Dimitri got a job as a translator and foreign language examiner with the Bureau of Censorship. George acted as an importer of women’s sportswear and apparel, and probably met Jean, his future wife, who besides being a dancer was also a designer of women’s sportswear.

The garment district of New York city was also the birthplace of the relationship between Mafia dons Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky, who tied up the military uniform contracts shortly before the outbreak of World War II. 

Before the war began George started working as a sales agent for a French perfume company (Chevalier-Guarde) and actively worked with Pierre Fraiss, who worked for the Vichy French Nazi collaborationists. Vichy is a French resort town famous for its spas used by Caesar as well as Napoleon.

George DeMohrenschildt later admitted that he worked for French Intelligence during the war through Pierre Fraiss, chief of export for a French company that handled the purchase of oil for “French interests,” which ostensibly included Nazi Germany. Fraiss frequently traveled to Algeria and Morocco as well as the French Caribbean islands, arranging for oil to be purchased from U.S. owned companies (Standard Oil of NJ) in Venezuela and Mexico.

[BK Notes: Alan Dulles was criticized by Arthur Goldberg (OSS) for benefiting financially by the rise of the Nazis in Germany -]

In New York in 1939 George began to sell insurance for one of John MacArthur’s – (brother to the general) companies. The president of another John MacArthur’s companies later helped finance one of Jack Ruby’s nightclubs in Dallas.

Both Oswald’s brother Robert, and his mother Margrette, sold insurance in New Orleans and New York, while Ruth Paine’s father was a chief officer of a major insurance conglamorate.

While selling insurance in New York Barron George Von Mohrenschildt, as he was known at the time, met Mrs. Janet Lee (Bouvier) Auchincloss, mother of Jackie Bouvier Kennedy Onasis, a acquaintance that would last over the years. They met in the summer of 1931 and probably spent time at Hammersmith Farm, which the Auchincloss family recently sold to a group that plans to make an historical museum. Jackie’s older sister, (Lee Radzwill?) married an exiled Polish nobleman who knew DeMohrenschildt and they may have attended school together.

After the assassination George DeMohrenschildt wrote Janet:

Poty-au-Prince, Haiti

Dec. 12, 1963

c/o American Embassy

Dear Janet:

….May I ask you to express my deepest sympathy to your daughter and tell her that both my brother and I will always remember her as a charming little girl from East Hampton. So many sorrows have been ruining her young life.

     Since we lived in Dallas permanently last year and before, we had the misfortune to have met Oswald and especially his wife Marina sometime last fall. Both my wife and I tried to help poor Marina who could not speak any English, was mistreated by her husband; she and the baby were malnourished (sic) and sickly. We took them to the hospital.

    Sometime last fall we heard that Oswald had beaten his wife cruelly, so we drove to their miserable place and forcibly took Marina and the child away from the character. Then he threatened me and my wife, but I did not take him seriously. Marina stayed with the family of a childless Russian refugees for a while, keeping her baby, but finally decided to return to her husband. Somehow then we lost interest in the Oswalds. It is really a shame that such crimes occur in our times and in our country. But there is so much jealousy for success – and the late president was successful in so many domains – and there is so much desire for publicity on the part of all shady characters that assassinations are bound to occur. Better precautions should have been taken.

      Remember our discussion one day on the plane from Dallas to Washington? We spoke of criminal children and of the terrible problem of delinquency in the South. Oswald is just an expression (of) that cancer which is eating American youth.

      You will excuse this rambling letter but I was just sitting in my office thinking of the strange fate which made me know Jackie when she was a little girl – and which made me also know the assassin (or presumable assassin) his wife and child. And your daughter has been of such help to the Cystic Fibrosis Research Foundation – which we had started in Texas several years ago. She was an honorary chairman of the Foundation.

     I hope that Marina and her children (I understand she has two now) will not suffer too badly throughout their lives and that the stigma will not inflect the innocent children. Somehow, I still have a lingering dobut nothwithstanding all the evidence of Oswald’s guilt.

     I have just received a letter from my bother (Dimitri) and he also recalls of our friendship with you and extends his deepest sympathy to you and your daughter….

     Please accept my feelings of respect and consideration.

Sincerely

G. deMohrenschildt

(signed)

Dimitri, who at the time George met Janet Auchencloss, got a job with the War Department and worked under John J. McCloy. 

George traveled south for a period in 1939 and lived in New Orleans, getting a job in the oil industry. A letter from George Reyer, chief of Police, New Orleans, La. Dated July 29, 1939 advised “Von Mohrenschildt has been residing in the city since March 1, 1939.’ He was enroute to Columbia and Venezuela. In Mexico, DeMohrenschildt was taken into custody with Rodrick MacAuthor and accused of being a spy.

GEORGE DEMOHRENSCHILDT Part 2

In 1939, while on a cross continental trek, George Von Mohrenschildt and Rodrick MacArthur were taken into custody by Mexican authorities, suspected of being spies because of their interest in uranium resources and evicted from the country after protests from the American embassy.

From Mexico, DeMohrenschildt went to Venezuela where Jean DeMinel had taken up residence to take care of the Schullemberger Company business there.. DeMinel had escaped Russia shortly after the revolution and went to France where he married into the wealthy Schulmberger company, which manufactured machinery used in the oil industry. DeMohrenschildt became a salesman for the company.

In 1939 Venezuelan oil (one third of which was controlled by Standard Oil of NJ) was being routed thru Mexico to German U-boats in the Caribbean.

When DeMohrenschildt worked for his uncle, Austrian baron Constnace Meydel in New York City, Meydel passed himself off as a flagerant playboy and documentary film producer but was also an agent of the Abwehr, the Nazi German foreign intelligence service. (See; The Game of the Foxes, Bantam, 1971). The films Meydel produced and distributed from his New York City storefront – “Facts on Film” included Nazi propaganda films.

Meydel became a German agent through an Austrian relative (Lawrussen), an assistant to Admiral Canaris, chief of the Abwehr, who helped direct the Nazi blitzrige of Poland. A specialist in sabotage, not unlike his British counterpart Col. Colin Grubbens, Lawrussen trained IRA terrorists to sabotage American shipping to Britain before the ONI hired the American Italian Mafia to secure the New York-New Jersey docks. An explosion at a New Jersey power facility that resulted in the deaths of 50 people was credited to this network.

In October 1939 Colin Grubins escaped from Poland, overrun by both the Nazis and Soviets, and traveled through the Balkins to the Mideast, bringing with him “the nucleus of a Polish Secret Army” (A Man Called Intrepid, p. 59), as well as a German cipher machine.

The Nazi Blitzrig – lightning warfare – was directed by coded orders sent to the field marshals on unique “Enigma” cipher machines. Grubins had met a Polish engineer who helped construct the Enigma machines in their factory on the Polish-Czech border, and built one for the Allies.

Grubbins, credited with inventing the “Molotov Cocktail,” wrote “The Art of Guerilla Warfare,” “The Partisan Leader’s Guide” and “The Housewife’s ABCs of Home Made Explosives.” 

Grubbins, in August 1939, with the assistance of the Polish underground and the anti-Communist Nightingale network, obtained a complete German Enigma Cipher machine, which permitted the Allied leaders and commanders to read the Nazi German orders as they were sent, a secret that was maintained for decades after the war and only revealed in The Ultra Secret (Winterbottom) in the 1970s.

In April of 194, before embarking to South America, DeMohrenschildt obtained letters of introduction from Nelson Rockefeller and $1250 line of credit from Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan bank, as well as more credit from Houston’s Texas First National Bank.

After the United States entered the war, George Von Mohrenschildet (and apparently his brother) changed their names to de Mohrenschildt, so they would not be viewed as German.

George also applied for a job with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), headed by William Donovan and supported by the British Security Coordination (BSC), the American arm of the British Secret Intelligence Service in the United States. Previously headed by William Wiseman, the BSC in the USA was headed by Canadian Sir. William Stephenson, whose New York City offices were provided by Nelson Rockefeller at Rockefeller Center.

The biography of Stephenson (A Man Called Intrepid) notes: “Some old guard civil servants whispered that Hugh Dalton of the Ministry of Economic Warfare would run an ‘ministry of ungentlemanly warfare,’….one recruit was Eric Maschwitz, who composed the wartime song, ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkely Square.’ The Ministry of Economic Warfare was headquartered in Berkely Square and quietly sucked in poets and professors, sportsmen and journalists and others not already equipped with a cloak and dagger. Those who really occupied Berkely Square adopted the Maschwitz song as their theme.”

                    The Nightingale is singing

                     It’s small mouth

                     Open 

                                     Chinese Haiku by Buson (1715-1783)

Nightingale was also the code name given to the anti-Communist spy network set up in Russia following the Bolshovik revolution in 1917, which by 1941, was one of the oldest, intricate, disciplined and largest espionage networks ever devised by man. Initially established by supporters of the last of Europe’s functioning monarchs, it still function, especially among those affiliated with the old Russian Orthodox Church, it spread among the laymen, many of whom were ordained and initiated into the spy network as an informant, agent or courier. Although many of those who stayed infiltrated high into the echelons of the Soviet state, those who fled traded off information to anti-communist governments who gave them refuge, including Nazi Germany.

While working in New York for his uncle Meydel and the Abwher, George deMohrenschildt collected, catalogued and analyzed documentary films, especially those that were concerned with the German/Polish/Russian situation since George and his brother Dimitri, with their family, had fled the Communist revolution in Russia and were educated in Poland before emigrating to America.

Jack Ruby was a second generation Polish emigrant from the “White Russian” area of Poland (Eastern Ukaraine) whose brother Hymen Rubenstine was born in Poland and whose business financer Ralph Paul was born in Kiev, Russia. During World War II Jack Ruby occasionally attended “Russian” meetings at the union hall above the Jaffe Jewelry store in Muncie, Indiana. Ruby continued to visit Jafe after the war.

On April 6, 1941 the German Army invaded Yugoslavia. In 1943, American OSS officer Major Linn Farrish, attached to the British Mission, parachuted into Yugoslavia with three other high ranking officers with orders to locate, contact and protect Josip Bray, the Croatian communist and leader of the anti-German forces in the mountains. Farrish was an Olympic athlete at Stanford University and like deMohrenschildt, an oil geologist by profession. Dimitri deMohrenschildt would later become affiliated with the Hoover Institute at  Stanford. 

Bray, who later became known as “Tito,” was persuaded by Farrish “to keep the direction of commerce towards Vienna and Trieste,” rather than towards the Soviet block. In 1952 a new constitution was developed and in 1954 the Balkin alliance was formed between Great Britain, Turkey and Yugoslavia. In 1955 John Foster Dulles visited Tito, and in 1957 Tito recognized the Oden-Neisse line as the frontier border between Poland and Germany, a subject George DeMohrenschilt studied during the war.

A Soviet trade boycott of Yugoslavia forced Tito to do business with the United States, just as the US trade embargo forced Cuba to do business with the Soviet Union. As a result much of the total deficit in Yugoslavia was covered mainly by US aide. 

George DeMohresnschildt went to Yugoslavia twice, once for the International Cooperation Administration (ICA), a US federal government agency, and then on behalf of John Mecom, a New Orleans oil man.

Mecom was on the board of directors of a New Orleans bank (Possibly the Bank of the Southwest) with Leon Trujaque, an import-export agent who a teenage Lee Harvey Oswald worked for on the docks around the same time.

Upon his first return from Yugoslavia, DeMohresnchildt was interviewed and debriefed by J. Walton Moore, who would become his chief CIA contact and case officer.

As a representative of the Lehman Trading company of New York DeMohrenschildt traveled to Iran, Egypt, Indonesia, Panama, Guatemala, Nicaragua, San Salvador, Hondoras, Nigeria and Togo, Ghana, where he claimed to be a philatelist (stamp collector).

In 1958 DeMohrenschildt began to work for the International Cooperation Administration (ICA), which officially comes under the Agency for International Development, but many believe to be a front for the CIA.

According to the pseudonamous “James Hepburn” in the book “Fairwell America,” (published in Liechtenstein where there are no libel laws), “…Under the Eisenhower administration, financial agreements, particularly in the domain of oil were under discussion between American firms and the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic, which had been in turmoil since the first coup in 1954."

Among those involved in the “discussions” were Pierre Fras, DeMohrenschildt’s old business associate and French Intelligence agent, Jacques Soustelle - who received money from PERMINDEX, and Jean DeMinel, DeMohrenschildt’s friend and former business partner.

On April 22, 1961 four French generals in Algeria began a coup and revolted, but the uprising collapsed on April 25, when President De Gau assumed extraordinary powers. The French Generals’ revolt was overshadowed by the CIA’s Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba on April 17.

At the same time – April 1961, Carlos Marcello, the New Orleans mafia boss, was deported to Guatemala by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. Pilot David Ferrie reportedly flew Marcello back into the country. Ferrie had also reportedly trained some of the Cuban pilots for the Bay of Pigs, who were trained in Guatemala. 

The link between the two events – the revolt of the French Generals in Algeria and the Bay of Pigs - was a cache of arms and munitions that were stored in an unused former blimp base in an explosives bunker owned by Jean DeMenil’s Schlumberger Wells Service Company of Houston, Texas. The arms and munitions in the Huma, Louisiana bunker were going to be used by the French General’s in their coup, but after that failed they were to be transferred to the anti-Castro Cubans.

Although branded a theft, ostensibly for insurance purposes, the key to the bunker was given to Gordon Novel by New Orleans oil geologist William Dolzell, and Novel led a number of trips to the bunker to remove the cache. Novel owned a bar in the French Quarter and operated an electronics factory that primarily produced bugging equipment.

Implicated in the New Orleans investigation into the assassination by District Attorney Jim Garrison, Novel fled Louisiana to avoid a subpoena to testify before the grand jury, but when he left his apartment at 336 Exchange Place, he left behind a letter found by the next residents – two college girls, under a rubber sink mat. The letter was addressed to a  “Mr. Weiss,” Novel’s CIA case officer, and read in part: “….I have been questioned extensively by local FBI recently as to whether or not I was involved with Double-Check’s parent holding company during that time. My replies on five queries were negative. Bureau unaware of Double-Check association in this matter.”

In the book “The Invisible Governemnt,” Thomas Ross and David Wise expose Double-Check corporation, based in Miami, as a CIA front company that recruited pilots and commandos for the invasion of Cuba, and paid off the families of the American pilots from the Alabama Air National Guard who were killed during the Bay of Pigs.

In late 1960 Novel had created cryptic radio commercials from his Evergreen Advertising Agency for artificial Christmas trees that were said to contain the supposedly secret date of the Bay of Pigs invasion, and $70,000 in CIA money was used to pay radio stations to carry the commercials.

George DeMohrenschildt, after marrying and divorcing two rich party girls, married Dr. De De Sharples, whose father owned a Colorado oil company that DeMohrenschildt worked for. When their child was born disabled, they formed the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, which included DeMohrenschildt’s friend Jackie Bouvier as an honorary chair person. Dr. Sharples, who lived in Philadelphia, was a Trustee of Temple University.

After divorcing Sharples, DeMohrenschldt married his fourth wife, Jean (Fromenco?), who he had known since they both worked in the garment industry in New York City in 1938. In early April 1961 George and Jean began a cross continental walking tour from Mexico through Central America.

On a similar walk about Texas and Mexico in 1945, DeMohrenschlt came to the attention of the authorities for sketching coast guard and military instillations, and was also once evicted from Yogoslavia for suspect activities.

While walking through Guatemala in 1961 DeMohrenschildt and his wife came across the camps where anti-Castro Cubans were training for the ill fated Bay of Pigs invasion. Once they got to Guatemala City the DeMohrenschildts stayed at the home of a friend who was away at the time, and quite surprised when they showed up to find the DeMohrenschildts entertaining guests in their home.

On returning to Texas, DeMohrenschildt wrote a report on the trip that was supplied to a US government agency, a report that has never surfaced. He also wrote a manuscript, that he hoped to develop into a book and wrote to Sen. John F. Kennedy, the physical fitness buff, to ask if he would write an introduction. He also made a documentary home movie of the expedition that he often showed to friends at Texas dinner parties.

It was at one such dinner party where DeMohrenschildt’s CIA case officer J. Walton Moore saw the film.Oswald also saw the film. 

In 1962, shortly after  former Marine defector  Lee Harvey Oswald returned from the Soviet Union with his Russian wife, George DeMohrenschildt went knocking on Oswald’s door, hoping to obtain some new information about his old childhood stomping grounds, Minks, where Oswald had lived and met his wife Marina.

DeMohrenschildt wasn’t alone when he first visited Oswald, but was accompanied by a Col. Orlov, who may have been a White Russian Colonel.

DeMohrenschildt eventually developed a close relationship with the Oswald, and became something of a mentor to the troubled and sometimes confused young  husband and father. DeMohrenschildt’s daughter, Alexandra, married Gary Taylor, who testified about the close relationship between Oswald and his father-in-law. Oswald used Taylor’s address to take out a post office box where the rifle said to be used to kill Kennedy was sent, as well as the pistol reported to have been used to kill Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit.

DeMohrenschldt claimed that he checked with both J. Walton Moore, his CIA contact, and Max Clark, who maintained a close relationship with the FBI, about Oswald, and both said he was “okay.”

DeMohresnschildt arranged for Marina and the baby to live with some friends when Oswald lived at the YMCA, and he also got Oswald a job a Jaggers/Chiles/Stoval, a photo graphic arts firm that did map work for the US military, including the posting of arrows and captions on U2 photos taken over the Soviet Union and Cuba.

 Part 3 - To Be Continued -