Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy (58 page)

By the end of 1962, oilmen estimated their earnings on foreign investment capital would fall to 15 percent, compared with 30 percent in
1955.

One of the most sacred of provisions in the eyes of oilmen was the oil
depletion allowance, which permitted oil producers to treat up to 27.5
percent of their income as tax exempt. In theory this was to compensate
for the depletion of fixed oil reserves but, in effect, it gave the oil industry
a lower tax rate. Under this allowance, an oilman with a good deal of
venture capital could become rich with virtually no risk. For example, a
speculator could drill ten wells. If nine were dry holes and only the tenth
struck oil, he would still make money because of tax breaks and the
depletion allowance.

It was estimated at the time that oilmen might lose nearly $300 million a
year if the depletion allowance was diminished.

Attempts to eliminate or reduce the depletion allowance were rebuffed
year after year by congressmen, many of whom were the happy recipients
of oil-industry contributions.

Speaking of his tax reform act of 1963, President Kennedy pointed the
finger at the oil companies, saying: ". . . no one industry should be
permitted to obtain an undue tax advantage over all others."

Included in Kennedy's tax package were provisions for closing a
number of corporate tax loopholes, including the depletion allowance.
Needless to say, oilmen both in Texas and elsewhere felt threatened by
Kennedy and his policies. Kennedy's use of his personal power against the
steel manufacturers had shown them that the young President meant to
enforce his will in these matters.

John W. Curington, who for twelve years was special assistant to Dallas
oil billionaire H. L. Hunt, reported in 1977: "Hunt was often heard by top
aides and followers to say that America would be much better off without
Kennedy." Curington, whose statements were assessed truthful by Psychological Stress Evaluator (PSE) analysis, also said the oilman sent him
to check on Oswald's police security while in custody and was "elated"
to find it was lax. Curington also is convinced that he saw Marina
Oswald coming from Hunt's private offices several weeks after the
assassination.

Hunt's former assistant said he believes that the wealthy oilman unwittingly influenced right-wing followers to participate in a conspiracy to kill
Kennedy. He added that in later years, Hunt admitted that he knew an
assassination conspiracy existed.

Angry talk in the corporate boardrooms may have grown into deadly
plots on golf courses and at private parties. But oilmen, despite their
unparalleled wealth and power, could not have moved against Kennedy on
their own. They needed allies within government and within the intelligence community. Such allies were there-among the anti-Castro Cubans,
in the CIA, organized crime, and within the federal government-all were
most receptive to the idea of a change of leadership.

One man with connections to government, intelligence, and the oil
industry was George DeMohrenschildt, identified by the Warren Commission as the last-known close friend to Lee Harvey Oswald.

Perhaps the most intriguing person in the entire cast of characters
connected with the Kennedy assassination was oil geologist George S.
DeMohrenschildt-a man who was friends with both Jackie Kennedy's
family and the alleged assassin of her husband, Lee Harvey Oswald.

Despite this fascinating link, little was said about DeMohrenschildt at
the time of the assassination. Both he and his wife, Jeanne, were in Haiti
during the events in Dallas.

A close study of DeMohrenschildt's life shows a string of intelligence
connections, raising the possibility that DeMohrenschildt may have played
a role-perhaps unwittingly-in furthering plans for the assassination.
This possibility came to haunt DeMohrenschildt in the days just prior to
his suspicious death in 1977.

DeMohrenschildt-his family, originally named Mohrenskuld, was of
Swedish extraction-was born April 17, 1911, in Mozyr, a small Baltic
town in czarist Russia near the Polish border.

An educated, sophisticated young man, DeMohrenschildt was introduced to many wealthy and influential Americans. He later told the
Warren Commission:

[I met] lots of people, but especially Mrs. [Janet] Bouvier . . . Mrs.
Bouvier is Jacqueline Kennedy's mother, also [I met] her father and her
whole family. [Mrs. Bouvier] was in the process of getting a divorce
from her husband [Jackie's father, John V. "Jack" Bouvier]. I met
him, also. We were very close friends. We saw each other every day. I met Jackie then, when she was a little girl. [And] her sister, who was
still in the cradle practically.

After failing in his attempts to sell insurance and perfume, DeMohrenschildt traveled by bus to Texas, where he got a job with Humble Oil
Company in Houston, thanks to family connections. Despite being friends
with the chairman of the board of Humble, young DeMohrenschildt was
confined to working as a "roughneck" in the Louisiana oil fields. He quit
after being injured and contracting amoebic dysentery.

Although for years he claimed to have worked for French intelligence
during the early years of World War II-he said he was never an official
agent but had helped a good friend, Pierre Freyss, the head of French
counterintelligence-in later years he confessed to his wife that he had
briefly worked for the Germans.

DeMohrenschildt also became closely connected with many exiled Russians who joined with the General Vlassov movement, anticommunist
Russians who fought with the Nazis in hope of recovering their homeland.
Springing up in cities where there were large Russian exile communities,
these people referred to themselves as "solidarists," indicating the solidarity of their purpose. One of these groups existed in Dallas during the early
1960s, although DeMohrenschildt disclaimed being a member.

The Vlassov organization was eventually absorbed by the Nazi spy
system under General Reinhard Gehlen, which at the end of the war
became a part of U.S. intelligence. Many members of this apparatus ended
up working for the CIA.

His oil-related travels took him to France, Nigeria, Ghana, and Togoland.

In 1957, despite an unflattering background check by the CIA, he
journeyed to Yugoslavia for the International Cooperation Administration,
a branch of the U.S. government's Agency for International Development.
By this time, DeMohrenschildt apparently had some association with the
Agency, according to documents which became public in the late 1970s.

Researcher Michael Levy obtained one CIA memo from former Agency
deputy director Richard Helms that states that DeMohrenschildt's trip to
Yugoslavia provided "foreign intelligence which was promptly disseminated to other federal agencies in 10 separate reports." Another CIA memo
indicated that DeMohrenschildt also furnished lengthy reports on his later
travels through Mexico and Central America.

Shortly before leaving for Yugoslavia, DeMohrenschildt met another
Russian exile who lived in the same Dallas hotel with him. Jeanne
Fromenke LeGon had already established a career as a dancer and clothing
designer. Her family, too, had strong political and defense-related connections. Her Russian father had built the first railroads in China and was
connected with Nationalist politics there while her brother, Sergio, had
worked on the supersecret Manhattan atomic bomb project. Her former
husband, Robert LeGon, was connected to security work for Douglas Aircraft and their daughter, Christiana, was married to a vice president of
Lockheed Aircraft Corporation.

Jeanne and the outgoing DeMohrenschildt hit it off right away and she
joined him in Yugoslavia. In a curious incident there, the couple were
boating when they were shot at by Communist guards who became anxious
when they came too close to Marshal Tito's summer home. DeMohrenschildt
claimed to have been simply sketching the shoreline.

Returning to the United States, George and Jeanne were soon married
and shortly set off on an incredible odyssey through Central America.

Back in Dallas in late 1961, the DeMohrenschildts were at the center of
prominent Dallasites. His business and social contacts read like a who's
who of the Texas oil community. DeMohrenschildt knew Dallas oil millionaires H. L. Hunt and Clint Murchinson, John Mecom of Houston,
Robert Kerr of Kerr-McGee, and Jean De Menil, head of the worldwide
Schlumberger Corporation.

(According to former New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, arms
and explosives supplied by the CIA to the anti-Castro Cuban exiles were
hidden away in a Schlumberger facility near New Orleans in the summer of
1963.)

But most intriguing was DeMohrenschildt's friendship with J. Walter
Moore, a member of the CIA's Domestic Contact Service.

Moore, whom DeMohrenschildt described to the Warren Commission as
"a government man-either FBI or Central Intelligence," debriefed the
geologist upon his return from Yugoslavia and thereafter met with the
DeMohrenschildts socially on many occasions.

After DeMohrenschildt first met Lee Harvey Oswald, he checked on the
ex-Marine with Moore, who he said described Oswald as simply a "harmless lunatic."

In another incident, DeMohrenschildt wrote to friends less than two
months after the assassination expressing shock and disbelief over Kennedy's death. He wrote: ". . . before we began to help Marina and the child,
we asked the FBI man in Dallas . . . about Lee and he told us that he was
"completely harmless."

These letters are part of DeMohrenschildt's FBI file, indicating the
Bureau was monitoring him during this time. His statements that he had
checked on Oswald with the Bureau apparently caused great consternation.
Dallas FBI chief J. Gordon Shanklin even ordered Agent James Woods to
go to Haiti and obtained a lengthy statement from DeMohrenschildt denying that he had ever spoken about Oswald to the Bureau.

DeMohrenschildt himself may have been the object of a secret investigation in the months preceeding Kennedy's death. Once DeMohrenschildt
noticed small pencil marks on some of his papers and, convinced his home
had been secretly entered, questioned Moore about it. Moore denied that
government people had broken into DeMohrenschildt's home.

Another close friend of DeMohrenschildt was Fort Worth attorney Max
Clark, who at that time was connected with security at General Dynamics.

In later years, neither George nor Jeanne DeMohrenschildt could recall
exactly who first mentioned the Oswalds to them. But in the summer of
1962, DeMohrenschildt and a Colonel Lawrence Orlov went to nearby
Fort Worth on business and DeMohrenschildt decided to visit the Oswalds.
He had heard through the Russian community in Dallas that the Oswalds
had recently arrived in this country from Minsk and he was eager for news
about the city of his youth.

DeMohrenschildt was appalled at the poorly furnished "shack" in
which the Oswalds lived, but was impressed by Oswald's command of
Russian. He told the Warren Commission:

... he spoke fluent Russian, but with a foreign accent, and made
mistakes, grammatical mistakes but had remarkable fluency in Russian.... Remarkable-for a fellow of his background and education
.. . he preferred to speak Russian than English any time. He always
would switch from English to Russian.

He said both his first impression of Oswald and his last were the same:

I could never get mad at this fellow.... Sometimes he was obnoxious.
I don't know. I had a liking for him. I always had a liking for him.
There was something charming about him, there was some-I don't
know. I just liked the guy-that is all. ... with me he was very
humble. If somebody expressed an interest in him, he blossomed,
absolutely blossomed. If you asked him some questions about him, he
was just out of this world. That was more or less the reason that I think
he liked me very much.

The DeMohrenschildts soon embraced the Oswalds and visited them
with an idea of helping the struggling couple.

It is interesting to note how the Dallas Russian community split in their
reactions to the Oswalds. Most of them-being staunch anticommunistswanted nothing to do with a man who had tried to defect to Russia. But
some of the emigre members-especially those with intelligence connections, such as DeMohrenschildt-seemed quite at ease with the young
would-be defector. Perhaps they, too, had been assured that Oswald was
just a ''harmless lunatic.''

In October 1962, DeMohrenschildt managed to move Oswald to Dallas,
where he dropped out of sight for nearly a month. Marina was left with
DeMohrenschildt's daughter and son-in-law, the Gary Taylors.

Something was going on because Oswald did not even inform his
mother of the move and he told friends he had been fired from his job at
Leslie Welding in Fort Worth when actually he had quit.

Furthermore, during this time DeMohrenschildt was making regular
trips to Houston, according to his friends Igor Voshinin and Paul
Raigorodsky. Raigorodsky, a wealthy oilman and a director of the Tolstoy
Foundation-an anticommunist organization of Russian exiles that was
funded by the U.S. government-told the Warren Commission he asked
DeMohrenschildt about his frequent Houston trips. Raigorodsky stated:
"He told me he was going to see Herman and George Brown. They are
brothers." The Brown brothers were owners of Brown and Root Construction and close friends and financial contributors to Lyndon Johnson.