George de Mohrenschildt

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  George de Mohrenschildt was a Russian-born petroleum geologist who, as a young man in New York, let a girl named Jacqueline Bouvier sit on his knee and call him Uncle George. She grew up to become First Lady. He grew up to become one of the strangest figures in the story of her husband's murder. Alive, he was a friend of the man blamed for that killing. Dead, he became a source of suspicion for conspiracy theorists. His life raises several questions. How did the son of a Tsarist aristocrat end up among Texas oil barons? Why did the CIA keep turning up in his travels? Why did his descriptions of Lee Harvey Oswald change depending on who was asking? And what happened on the day a congressional investigator finally came looking for him?

  313242

• 2. Exile From Mozyr

  ›

  In the town of Mozyr, in the Russian Empire and now in Belarus, a boy was registered as Jerzy Sergius von Mohrenschildt. By the old Julian calendar his birthday was the 4th of April. By the modern calendar it was the 17th of April 1911. His father, Sergey Alexandrovich von Mohrenschildt, came from Baltic German, Swedish and Russian ancestry. His mother, Alexandra, came from Polish, Russian and Hungarian aristocratic families.

  The boy later described his father as the Marshal of Nobility of the Minsk Governorate from 1913 to 1917. That position vanished with the revolution. In 1920, during the Red Terror and the Russian Civil War, the Bolshevik secret police, the CHEKA, arrested Sergey for alleged anti-Soviet agitation. The sentence was internal exile for life in Veliky Ustyug, a town in the north of Russia.

  What happened next, as the son told it to the Warren Commission, reads like an escape story. While Sergey waited in jail for transport, he fell ill. Two doctors advised him to stop eating so that he would look sicker. They then told the Soviet authorities that he was too weak to survive the trip. The government agreed to let him recover at home, provided he reported in every week until he was fit to travel.

  The family used that grace period to run. Sergey, his wife and the young George hid in a hay wagon and crossed into the Second Polish Republic. George's older brother Dimitri was still awaiting execution at the time. He was later repatriated to Poland in a prisoner exchange. On the journey, George and both his parents caught typhoid fever. Alexandra died of it soon after they reached Poland.

  Sergey and his sons then made their way to Wilno, now Vilnius, in Lithuania, where the family owned a six-acre estate. George finished at the Wilno gymnasium in 1929. In 1931 he graduated from the Polish Army's Cavalry Academy. He also earned a master's degree at the Institute of Higher Commercial Studies. At the University of Liège in Belgium he wrote a dissertation on the economic influence of the United States on Latin America. That work earned him a doctor of science degree in international commerce in 1938.

  He sailed for America in May 1938. Once there, he legally changed the German "von" in his surname to the French "de."

  46578

• 3. Suspicion In America

  ›

  The summer of 1938 found the new arrival on Long Island, New York, staying with his older brother Dimitri. Dimitri was a committed anti-communist and also an anti-Nazi agent for General William J. Donovan's OSS. During the Cold War, he became one of the founders of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. The brothers shared a politics, but George's path would turn out to be far murkier.

  In New York, George met the Bouvier family. He became a close friend of Jacqueline's aunt, Edith Bouvier Beale. Professionally, he drifted. He tried the insurance business from 1939 to 1941, but he failed his broker's examination.

  In 1941 he became associated with Film Facts, a New York production company owned by his cousin Berend Maydell. Maydell, who went by Baron or Count, allegedly had pro-Nazi sympathies. That same year, de Mohrenschildt co-founded The Russian Review.

  In 1942, on his way to Mexico, agents of the US government stopped him and accused him of being a Nazi spy. They searched his car and let him go. A memo from the former CIA director Richard Helms later said de Mohrenschildt "was alleged to be a Nazi espionage agent." The same suspicion sank his 1942 application to join the OSS, his brother's own organization.

  De Mohrenschildt denied any Nazi sympathy. His own explanation was that he had helped raise money in America for the Polish resistance by making a documentary film about resistance fighters in Occupied Poland. He also testified that he had collected information on people involved in pro-Nazi activities, including those bidding for US oil leases on Germany's behalf. A further aim, he said, was to help French petroleum companies outbid the Germans. He claimed to have done this for French intelligence without being a member of it.

  His private life moved fast. In 1942 he married an American teenager named Dorothy Pierson. They had a daughter, Alexandra, known as Alexis, and divorced in early 1944. In 1945 he received a master's degree in petroleum geology from the University of Texas, and the state that degree pointed to would shape the rest of his life.

  4267859

• 4. Oil Barons And Debriefings

  ›

  After the war, de Mohrenschildt took a job in Venezuela with Hampton Industries Oil, a company owned by the family of Preston A. Hampton. In 1947 he married Phyllis Washington, the stepdaughter of State Department diplomat S. Walter Washington. They divorced in 1949, the same year he became a naturalized US citizen. In 1950 he started an oil investment firm with his step-nephew Edward Hooker, with offices in New York City, Denver and Abilene.

  A third marriage came in 1951, to the physician Wynne Sharples, known as Didi. The next year they settled in Dallas, where he worked as a petroleum geologist for the oilman Clint Murchison. The couple had a son and a daughter, and both children were born with cystic fibrosis. Their son died of the disease in 1960 and their daughter in 1973. De Mohrenschildt and Sharples divorced in 1957.

  In Dallas, he moved comfortably among the powerful. He joined the Dallas Petroleum Club and the Dallas Council on World Affairs, and he taught at a local college. The offshore oil engineer George Kitchel told the FBI that de Mohrenschildt counted Clint Murchison, H. L. Hunt, John W. Mecom Sr. and Sid Richardson among his good friends. He also joined the right-wing Texas Crusade for Freedom, whose members included Earle Cabell, Everette DeGolyer, David Harold Byrd and Ted Dealey.

  Then came 1957 and Communist Yugoslavia. De Mohrenschildt went there to carry out a geological field survey for the International Cooperation Administration, a US State Department program. Yugoslavia's secret police, the UDBA, accused him of sketching military fortifications. Back in the United States, the CIA debriefed him in Washington and again in Dallas. In 1958 he traveled to Mexico and Panama and produced further intelligence reports for the agency.

  In June 1959 he married his fourth wife, Jeanne LeGon, a former dancer and model. She was born Eugenia Fomenko, and she was another Russian-American. Her father, a director of the Chinese Far East Railway, was later killed by communists.

  From late 1960 into 1961, the couple toured Central America and the Caribbean. De Mohrenschildt described his "walking trip" as a way to recover from the grief of losing his only son. Yet he also sent a written report on the journey to the State Department, and a photograph from the trip shows him meeting the American ambassador to Costa Rica. In October 1961 he moved to the Dallas area.

  810121617

• 5. The Oswald Friendship

  ›

  Fort Worth, Texas, in the summer of 1962, is where Lee Harvey Oswald and his Soviet-born wife Marina were introduced to de Mohrenschildt. He told the Warren Commission in 1964 that the link was George Bouhe, an oil accountant and prominent member of the local Russian-American community. De Mohrenschildt asked whether it was safe to help Oswald. Bouhe answered that he had checked with the FBI.

  De Mohrenschildt said he also raised Oswald with Max Clark, a Fort Worth attorney he believed worked for the FBI. The other man was J. Walton Moore, who had debriefed him after his foreign trips since 1957. De Mohrenschildt called Moore a government man, either FBI or Central Intelligence. A declassified CIA document later showed that Moore was an agent of the CIA's Domestic Contacts Division in Dallas.

  One of those men, de Mohrenschildt testified, said Oswald "seems to be OK" and was "a harmless lunatic." He could no longer say which one. When the House Select Committee on Assassinations interviewed Moore in 1978, Moore said he had periodic contact with de Mohrenschildt. He added that he remembered no conversation about Oswald.

  In October 1962, Oswald told him he had lost his job in Fort Worth. De Mohrenschildt suggested Dallas offered better odds, and Oswald was soon hired by the photographic firm Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall. De Mohrenschildt's wife and daughter later said he was the one who had secured that job.

  On the 14th of April 1963, the de Mohrenschildts visited the Oswalds' Dallas apartment. While Marina showed Jeanne around, Jeanne spotted a rifle leaning in a closet. George joked to Oswald, "Were you the one who took a pot-shot at General Walker?" General Edwin Walker was a politician whom de Mohrenschildt knew Oswald disliked. Asked by the Warren Commission how Oswald reacted, de Mohrenschildt said he "smiled at that."

  In an interview with the author Edward Jay Epstein, de Mohrenschildt went further. He said he had told the CIA he believed Oswald had tried to murder General Walker. "I spoke to the CIA both before and afterwards. It was what ruined me." The Warren Commission concluded that Oswald fired at Walker on the 10th of April 1963, four days before the joke.

  That same month, de Mohrenschildt left for Haiti. There he tried to strike a deal with President Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier for mineral and oil exploration. From 1964 to 1966, the US Embassy in Haiti opened and photographed his mail.

  In November 1963, Kennedy was assassinated and Oswald was murdered. In April 1964, de Mohrenschildt gave the Warren Commission one of the longest testimonies of any witness, while playing down how close he had been to Oswald. He and his wife said they had the impression Oswald admired Kennedy. Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, then the Pentagon's chief liaison to the CIA, said de Mohrenschildt had several private lunches with Allen Dulles during that testimony. Dulles was a former CIA director and a member of the commission.

  In November 1966 de Mohrenschildt left Haiti and returned to Dallas. In 1967, Orleans Parish District Attorney Jim Garrison interviewed him and his wife while prosecuting Clay Shaw. Garrison said both insisted Oswald had been a scapegoat. He concluded that de Mohrenschildt had been one of Oswald's unwitting "baby-sitters... assigned to protect or otherwise see to the general welfare of Oswald."

  1518212252

• 6. Last Letters, Last Days

  ›

  On the 3rd of April 1973, George and Jeanne de Mohrenschildt were divorced in Dallas after nearly 14 years of marriage. No local newspaper reported it, and the couple kept presenting themselves as husband and wife.

  On the 5th of September 1976, he wrote a handwritten letter to the director of the CIA, George H. W. Bush. The two had a link: Bush had roomed with de Mohrenschildt's nephew, Edward G. Hooker, at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. The letter described a couple surrounded by vigilantes, with a bugged phone and followers everywhere. "We are driven to insanity by the situation," he wrote. He blamed himself for the trouble, saying he had tried to write about Oswald and must have angered a lot of people. He closed by asking, "Could you do something to remove the net around us?"

  On the 17th of September, the CIA asked the FBI to locate him, because he had tried to reach the director. Bush replied with sympathy, mentioning the death of de Mohrenschildt's daughter and his wife's poor health. Bush wrote that his staff had found no sign of federal interest in recent years. The flurry that followed the Warren Commission testimony had long faded. Bush guessed that renewed interest in the Kennedy assassination might have made de Mohrenschildt "newsworthy" again.

  On the 9th of November 1976, Jeanne had her husband committed to a mental institution in Texas. In a notarized affidavit she listed four earlier suicide attempts in the Dallas area. She stated that he suffered from depression, heard voices, saw visions, and believed the CIA and the Jewish Mafia were persecuting him. He was released at the end of the year.

  The Dutch journalist Willem Oltmans told a different story about 1977. In his account, a famous Dutch clairvoyant named Gerard Croiset had a vision in 1967 of a conspirator who had manipulated Oswald. The description led Oltmans to de Mohrenschildt, and the two stayed in touch. In 1977 Oltmans traveled to Texas and brought him to the Netherlands. Oltmans claimed he had rescued him from a mental institution so that Croiset could meet him.

  Oltmans said that after reaching the Netherlands, de Mohrenschildt went to Brussels with Russian friends. They planned to continue to Liège, where he had studied in the 1930s. Back in Brussels, de Mohrenschildt left for a short walk and did not come back for a lunch he had agreed to attend.

  He returned to the United States on the 16th of March 1977. His daughter talked with him at length and found him deeply disturbed. She reported that he had spoken of wanting to kill himself.

  On the 29th of March, he gave Epstein an interview. He claimed that in 1962 J. Walton Moore and an associate had handed him Oswald's address in Fort Worth and suggested he meet the man. "I would never have contacted Oswald in a million years if Moore had not sanctioned it," he said. "Too much was at stake."

  The same day, he received a business card from Gaeton Fonzi, an investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, saying Fonzi wanted to see him. The committee considered him a "crucial witness." That afternoon he was found dead from a shotgun wound to the head in a house in Manalapan, Florida, where he was staying. Police said he left no suicide note. The coroner ruled it suicide.

  Years later, a famous claim about that afternoon fell apart. In Killing Kennedy, published in 2012, the television personality Bill O'Reilly wrote that he had been knocking on de Mohrenschildt's door when he heard the shotgun blast. A recorded phone call between O'Reilly and Fonzi proved otherwise. O'Reilly learned of the death from Fonzi, and he was in Dallas, not Florida.

  135872263

• 7. Witness After Death

  ›

  Four days after the death, on the 2nd of April 1977, Willem Oltmans sat before the House Select Committee on Assassinations. He testified for three hours behind closed doors. According to Oltmans, de Mohrenschildt had said he discussed every aspect of the assassination with Oswald. Oltmans quoted him: "De Mohrenschildt told me that Oswald acted at his (de Mohrenschildt's) instructions and that he knew Oswald was going to kill Kennedy." Pat S. Russell, de Mohrenschildt's attorney, said he definitely felt there was a conspiracy and that this was George's opinion too.

  In July 1978, a man named Joseph Dryer gave the committee another thread. He said he and de Mohrenschildt were both connected with a woman named Jacqueline Lancelot. Dryer passed messages for her to people in the United States whom he assumed had some tie to the CIA. According to Dryer, Lancelot told him that soon after the assassination a substantial sum had been deposited in de Mohrenschildt's account. The figure was $200,000 or $250,000. Dryer said de Mohrenschildt claimed to be scouting oil in Haiti, but "I could never figure out what he did."

  Gaeton Fonzi added his own finding about the Haitian bank account. In late 1963, he noted, several large deposits appeared, including one for two hundred thousand dollars from a Bahamian bank. At that time, de Mohrenschildt and Clemard Joseph Charles, an adviser to Papa Doc Duvalier, were supposedly running a sisal plantation. Fonzi called it a derelict operation they never went near. A 1976 CIA internal memo from Director Bush on de Mohrenschildt said: "At one time he had/or spent plenty of money."

  On the 1st of April 1977, Jeanne de Mohrenschildt handed the committee a photograph that had never been seen before. It showed Oswald in his Dallas backyard holding two newspapers and a rifle, with a pistol on his hip. Marina had taken the picture. Similar prints had turned up among Oswald's belongings on the 23rd of November 1963, but this one was new.

  The back carried handwriting. One line read "To my friend George from Lee Oswald," with the date 5/IV/63, or the 5th of April 1963. Another read "Copyright Geo de M." A Russian phrase was translated as "Hunter after fascists, ha-ha-ha!!!" Handwriting specialists concluded that Oswald himself wrote the "To my friend George" line and his signature. They could not tell whether Oswald, Marina or de Mohrenschildt wrote the rest. De Mohrenschildt assumed Marina had written her part sarcastically.

  He wrote in his manuscript that he had missed the photo while packing for Haiti in May 1963. That, he said, was why he never mentioned it to the Warren Commission. He and his wife did not find it among his stored papers until February 1967. When the committee analyzed it in 1977, it proved to be a first-generation print of the backyard photograph the Warren Commission knew as CE-133A. That picture had probably been taken on the 31st of March 1963.

  7951824857

• 8. A Memoir And Its Echoes

  ›

  In the summer of 1976, de Mohrenschildt finished a manuscript called I Am a Patsy! I Am a Patsy! It was about his "dear, dead friend" Oswald. Jeanne gave the committee a draft copy. In it, he described the Oswald he knew as rarely violent, and not the kind of man to kill Kennedy. He based that judgment partly on his reading of Oswald's politics and of Kennedy's liberal ideas.

  The text centers on the stretch from September 1962 to April 1963, when the de Mohrenschildts knew the Oswalds. A smaller thread reflects on the damage that acquaintance did to their lives. "It must be acknowledged that our brief friendship with the Oswalds had strange and adverse effects on our lives." The manuscript cares less about whether Oswald was guilty than about who the real criminals might be. It calls Oswald a "patsy not involved in any revenge" and points to articles describing "organized murder for profit." Readers, he suggests, should make up their own minds.

  For decades the memoir existed only as an appendix. The entire typescript was printed in the committee's report. In November 2014 the University Press of Kansas released it as a book, Lee Harvey Oswald as I Knew Him, edited and annotated by Michael A. Rinella.

  Fiction has found him too. Don DeLillo's 1988 novel Libra portrays the assassination as a conspiracy. Hans Christoph Buch's 1990 novel Haïti Chérie draws on de Mohrenschildt's Haitian experience. He appears as a character in the manga series Billy Bat, published from 2008 to 2016. In Stephen King's time-travel novel 11/22/63, he appears in a world where Oswald acts alone.

  On screen, he has been played by several actors. Bill Bolender played him in the 1993 TV movie Fatal Deception: Mrs. Lee Harvey Oswald, and Demosthenes Chrysan did so in the 2013 film Killing Kennedy. Jonny Coyne played him in the miniseries 11.22.63. In the 1991 film JFK, the part went to Willem Oltmans himself, the journalist who befriended him.

  In 1997, the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh released Willem Oltmans, De Eenmotorige Mug. The title means "the single-engined mosquito." In it, Oltmans repeats his claims about his contacts with de Mohrenschildt, and with Oswald's mother, Marguerite Oswald, up to de Mohrenschildt's death in 1977.

  8682878889