Who Really Killed Kennedy?: 50 Years Later: Stunning New Revelations About the JFK Assassination (27 page)

Mr. DeMohrenschildt
: He [Oswald] said, “I go out and go target shooting. I like target shooting.” So out of the pure, really jokingly I told him, “Are you then the guy who took a pot shot at General Walker?” And he smiled to that, because just a few days before there was an attempt at General Walker’s life, and it was very highly publicized in the papers, and I knew that Oswald disliked General Walker, you see. So I took a chance and I asked him this question, you see, and I can clearly see his face, you know.

He sort of shriveled, you see, when I asked this question.

Mr. Jenner
: He became tense?

Mr. DeMohrenschildt
: Became tense, you see, and didn’t answer anything, smiled, you know, made a sarcastic—not sarcastic, made a peculiar face.

Mr. Jenner
: The expression on his face?

Mr. DeMohrenschildt
: That is right, changed the expression on his face.

Mr. Jenner
. You saw that your remark to him—

Mr. DeMohrenschildt
: Yes.

Mr. Jenner
: Had an effect on him.

Mr. DeMohrenschildt
: Had an effect on him. But naturally he did not say yes or no, but that was it. That is the whole incident. I remember after that we were leaving. Marina went in the garden and picked up a large bouquet of roses for us. They have nice roses downstairs and gave us the roses to thank for the gift of the rabbit.
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Pacepa takes these statements as further evidence Oswald was proceeding with his plan to assassinate Kennedy, despite Khrushchev’s change of heart, deciding the possible adverse consequences of assassinating JFK should the United States attribute guilt to Russia and decide to retaliate, were not the risk. “The fact that DeMohrenschildt was the only known individual to whom Oswald gave an autographed copy of one of his now-famous photographs showing him with a holstered pistol strapped to his
waist, holding a rifle in one hand, and in the other copies of Communist publications, provides one more reason to believe that George DeMohrenschildt knew a lot more about that rifle and the attempt to kill General Walker than he ever admitted,” Pacepa wrote.
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Pacepa also found telltale clues in Oswald’s note to Marina providing evidence Oswald was a KGB agent. Pacepa explains:

In an April 10, 1963, note Oswald left for his wife, Marina, before he tried to kill American General Edwin Walker in a dry run before going on to assassinate President Kennedy, I found two KGB codes of that time:
friends
(code for support officer) and
Red Cross
(code for financial help).… In this note, Oswald tells Marina what to do in case he is arrested. He stresses that she should contact the (Soviet) “embassy,” and that they have “friends here,” and that the “Red Cross” (written in English, so that she will know how to ask for it) will help her financially. Particularly significant is Oswald’s instruction for her to “send the [Soviet] embassy the information about what happened to me.” At that time, the code for embassy was “office,” but it seems Oswald wanted to be sure Marina would understand what she should immediately inform the Soviet embassy.
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Pacepa also found it noteworthy that Marina did not mention this note to US authorities after Oswald’s arrest. The note was found at the home of Ruth Paine.

The ace in the hole for Pacepa involves his personal experience operating in the upper ranks of the Soviet’s Eastern Bloc intelligence network. What makes Pacepa’s claims about Oswald and DeMohrenschildt so credible is that Pacepa was there. What he reported, he knew from what he saw and heard in person operating as a Soviet Bloc intelligence operative. For instance, he knew for a fact that DeMohrenschildt was in contact with the KGB in 1957. Pacepa further concluded that de Mohrenshildt’s efforts to minimize and distort his contact with Oswald suggest DeMohrenschildt was still acting under PGU guidance during the time he was in contact with Oswald in Texas.
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Seen through Pacepa’s eyes, the involvement of DeMohrenschildt in Oswald’s life confirms both were Soviet intelligence operatives.

The attempt on General Walker played an important role in the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Oswald was the sole shooter in the
JFK assassination, not only because of the physical evidence involved, but also because it provided insights into Oswald’s motivation. That Oswald left the photographs of him with the rifle and Communist papers at home when he made his attack on Walker suggests the he may have been concerned about his place in history. If the attack had succeeded and Oswald had been caught, the photos would probably have appeared on the front pages of newspapers and magazines all over the country. The Warren Commission concluded: “The circumstances of the attack on Walker, coupled with other indications that Oswald was concerned about his place in history and with the circumstances surrounding the assassination, have led the Commission to believe that such concern is an important factor to consider in assessing possible motivation for the assassination.”
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But the linchpin in the Walker shooting case was DeMohrenschildt’s testimony that he saw the rifle and confronted Oswald about shooting at Walker.

A serious problem remains is trying to reconcile why Oswald would have been equally enthusiastic to murder General Walker, a right-wing member of the John Birch Society, and President John F. Kennedy, a moderate Democrat who right-wing extremists in Dallas at the time tended to view as being virtually a Communist himself. The Warren Commission’s determination to use the attempt on Walker as proof that Oswald was the JFK assassin demands we accept Oswald as an equal opportunity murderer.

Unless the Warren Commission could establish motivation for Oswald, the question remained: why would a loser, as the Commission had painted Oswald to be, care enough to assassinate JFK? The Commission had the final piece when Marina Oswald testified her husband claimed that Walker “was a very bad man, that he was a fascist, that he was the leader of a fascist organization, and when I said that even though all of that might be true, just the same he had no right to take his life, he said if someone had killed Hitler in time it would have saved many lives.”
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Still, the question remains as to how Lee Harvey Oswald was such an expert marksman that he assassinated JFK with a shot to the back of his head in a limo heading down a declining, twisting road receding into the
distance, and yet, he failed to hit General Walker, taking a shot from the alley with ample time to position himself and aim. Even if Oswald were an expert shot, he never had any military sniper experience. An expert sniper is more than an expert shot. An expert sniper understands how to succeed, choosing a high probability shot that takes the best advantage of the physical circumstances of the setting. Obviously Oswald was no expert, having missed an unsuspecting older man sitting largely stationary in a chair with all the time in the world. Further, an expert sniper not only would have no trouble hitting such an easy target, he wouldn’t brag about having taken it. If anything, the conclusion from hearing that Oswald shot at General Walker but missed would have been to assume JFK had nothing to worry about.

That DeMohrenschildt’s testimony before the Warren Commission was one of the most extensive sworn testimonies taken indicates the importance the Commission believed it was to providing insight into Oswald’s psychological state and motivations at the time of the assassination. Although DeMohrenschildt was questioned by the Warren Commission about his complex life history, there is no suggestion in the record that the Commission considered him to be an intelligence asset with connections to the CIA or the KGB. Subtly, DeMohrenschildt’s testimony supplied the basis for the Warren Commission to conclude Oswald was a lone loser. “His mind was of a man with exceedingly poor background, who read rather advanced books, and did not understand even the words in them,” DeMohrenschildt testified to the Warren Commission describing Oswald.
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He described Oswald as “an unstable individual, mixed-up individual, uneducated individual, without background.”
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He claimed no government would be stupid enough to trust Oswald with anything important. DeMohrenschildt told the Warren Commission that Oswald was unhappy in his marriage. “There was bickering all the time,” he testified. “But as I said before, the bickering was mainly because Marina smoked and he didn’t approve of it, that she liked to drink and he did not approve of it. I think she liked to put the makeup on and he didn’t let her use the makeup.”
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Jeanne DeMohrenschildt advanced the same themes, claiming Oswald was “cruel” to his wife. “Any little argument or something—like once something—she didn’t fill his bathtub, he beat her for it.”
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This, after
George DeMohrenschildt testified that in their arguments Marina became so enraged she scratched Oswald with her fingernails. Jeanne DeMohrenschildt told the Warren Commission that Marina found Oswald sexually unsatisfying, adding shocking details that Marina had a wild past in Minsk, enjoying sexual orgies before meeting and marrying Oswald.
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In contrast, she reinforced the stories that Lee Harvey Oswald beat his wife, and she painted him as a small man, filled with envy and resentment. “Everything went wrong for Lee,” she testified, “starting with his childhood.” Everything he did ended up in failure, and Jeanne contrasted Oswald’s life with JFK’s. “Anything that seems to be President Kennedy was turning into gold, he was so successful in his marriage.” She suggested that Oswald could have been jealous of the President.
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To an expert like Pacepa, the DeMohrenschildts were building the case that Oswald was an intelligence operative who was given his wife Marina in an arranged marriage that was part of a cover story. For the Warren Commission, the testimony George and Jeanne gave reinforced their impression of Lee Harvey Oswald as a misfit, a loner, a loser who made a pathetic husband to his young, attractive but neglected Russian wife. Reading the extensive testimony given by George and Jeanne DeMohrenschildt conveys the impression the pair were engaged in a classic example of intelligence disinformation, as if their goal was to build a story that would frame Oswald as being a confused, Communist-sympathizing misfit who was capable of a violent act, such as killing the President. If this was the assignment the KGB gave George and Jeanne DeMohrenschildt, the husband-wife pair did an excellent job befriending the Oswalds from out of nowhere and getting to know them well enough that their testimony to the Warren Commission would convey at least surface credibility.

In a political trial at the end of 1962, the West German Supreme Court mounted a public trial of Bogdan Stashinsky, a Soviet intelligence officer who had been decorated by Khrushchev for assassinating two enemies of the Soviet Union living in the West. By 1963, Khrushchev was no longer in firm control of Russia, such that Pacepa judged the “slightest whiff of Soviet involvement in the Kennedy assassination would have been fatal
to Khrushchev.”
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All Khrushchev’s political enemies needed to secure Khrushchev’s demise would have been proof Khrushchev had supported or promoted an assassination attempt on the US president. Having backed down in the Cuban missile crisis, the last thing top Soviet officials wanted was to cause another provocation that could bring the United States and the Soviet Union into direct confrontation.

Shortly after the attempt on Walker, on April 19, 1963, DeMohrenschildt and his wife abruptly left Dallas for Haiti. Papeca attributes this to a decision Khrushchev made that he was no longer interested in having Kennedy assassinated. Papeca concluded the DeMohrenschildts’s decision to leave Dallas was prompted by an order from the Thirteenth Department, writing, “The PGU should also have arranged an emergency contact with DeMohrenschildt and ordered him immediately to break off all relations with Oswald and return to Haiti.” The DeMohrenschildts returned to Dallas only briefly, at the end of May, to pack up their household belongings in two days and leave again, without saying good-bye to the Oswalds. From Dallas, the DeMohrenschildts drove to Miami, to fly on to Haiti, where they arrived on June 2, 1963. They remained in Haiti until April 1964, when the Warren Commission called them to testify.

Pacepa reported that a short time after the Kennedy assassination, a “substantial” sum of money, in the range of $200,000 to $250,000 had been deposited in the DeMohrenschildts’s account in a Port-au-Prince bank. After the money was withdrawn the DeMohrenschildts left Haiti. Pacepa considered the information credible because it made “operational sense,” in that it “tallies with the PGU concept of keeping a close hold on those illegals who were no longer useful, in order to prevent them from ‘betraying’ what they knew and later to be able to refer to their cases as examples for others.”
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After the Warren Commission absolved George DeMohrenschildt of any subversive or disloyal activity in his interactions with Lee Harvey Oswald, the KGB put together a retirement package for George and Jeanne, Pacepa concluded. “Because for operational and security reasons neither of them would ever be able to retire to the Soviet Union, the PGU must have put together a retirement package for them in the West,” Pacepa wrote. “To be on the safe side, the PGU waited a couple of years, keeping the DeMohrenschildts on the sidelines in Haiti. Then the PGU maneuvered to transfer ‘laundered’ funds into the DeMohrenschildt’s
account(s) and instructed the couple to leave the small world of Haiti where they were too well known.”

Yet, all did not end well for DeMohrenschildt. Epstein, evidently determined to confront DeMohrenschildt about serving as Oswald’s KGB handler, was in the process of interviewing DeMohrenschildt at the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach, Florida, on March 29, 1977, when they broke for lunch. Planning to meet again at 3:00 p.m., DeMohrenschildt returned to the Palm Beach where he was staying. He found a card informing him that he had been subpoenaed to testify before the House Select Committee on Assassinations. A few hours later, DeMohrenschildt was dead. Allegedly, he killed himself with a shotgun blast to the head. Even though shotguns are not typically used in suicides, the death was ruled a suicide and never investigated. “What terrible secret was DeMohrenschildt so eager to protect?” Pacepa asked.
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Jeanne DeMohrenschildt could not accept that her husband had committed suicide, and for the rest of her life she believed Lee Harvey Oswald was a CIA agent who was set up as a patsy and had no direct role in assassinating JFK.