The Devil's Chessboard

by David Talbot

  There was another reason he was drawn to Oswald, de Mohrenschildt later said. The scrawny young man with the big ideas about life reminded him of his only son, Sergei, who had died of cystic fibrosis a year earlier. Sweeping into Oswald’s life when he was still grieving the loss of Sergei, de Mohrenschildt came to think of Lee as “almost a son.”

  But there were less sentimental reasons why the baron befriended the wayward young American. De Mohrenschildt was minding the Oswalds for the CIA.

  George de Mohrenschildt came from that lost world of Russian cavalry officers and palace balls that had been vaporized by war and revolution. His father, Sergius, had been a czarist official and a director of Nobel Oil, the petroleum giant that struck fortune in the abundant Baku fields. When the Bolsheviks took power, Sergius was arrested and sentenced to a Siberian work camp, but the family fled to Poland. The de Mohrenschildts lost most of their old lives in exodus—including their land and their position, as well as George’s mother, who succumbed to typhoid fever. The surviving members of the family—especially Sergius and George’s older brother, Dimitri—developed a burning anti-Communist rage. His father “hated communism,” George later said. “That was his life’s hatred.”

  During World War II, as Poland became a “blood land” in the fighting between Hitler’s Wehrmacht and Stalin’s Red Army, Sergius fled west again, to Nazi Germany, where he was welcomed as a comrade in the war to the finish with Asiatic Bolshevism. Sergius was not a devoted Nazi, but he soon acclimated himself to his new fatherland, doing work for the Abwehr, the German military intelligence agency. “George,” he told his son, “the Nazis are no good, and Germany is going to lose the war, but I prefer to be in Germany than in Soviet Russia. At least I am free and nobody is bothering me.” But history finally caught up with Sergius—he was killed near the end of the war during an Allied bombing raid.

  Meanwhile, Dimitri von Mohrenschildt (George’s brother preferred the German version of the family name) emigrated to America, where he would prosper—one of the cultured White Russians who managed to work their way into East Coast high society. Dimitri married Winifred “Betty” Hooker, a divorced Park Avenue socialite, and became a prominent scholar, winning appointment in 1950 as the first chairman of Dartmouth’s Russian Civilization Department and launching the Russian Review, an anti-Communist journal. Dimitri moved in those circles where millionaires, academics, and spies commingled. He and his wife counted the Bouviers—the parents of future First Lady Jackie Kennedy—as well as the dynastic Bush family among their friends. Dimitri’s coeditor at the Russian Review—the conservative author William Henry Chamberlin—was a friend of Allen Dulles’s, with whom he worked on the Radio Liberty Committee, one of the Cold War propaganda projects launched by Dulles and his associates in the postwar period. Dimitri himself became a CIA asset in April 1950, when, according to an agency memo, he was approved as a contact for foreign intelligence purposes.

  Dimitri had brought his younger brother to America in 1938. George—who stayed for a time with Dimitri and his wife in their Park Avenue apartment and Long Island estate—envied their good life, but seemed uncertain how to achieve it for himself. George lacked his brother’s strong political convictions—veering between Nazi and Communist sympathies early in his life, and later between an aristocratic paternalism and a sentimental New Leftism. George was also missing Dimitri’s professional discipline and sense of direction. After arriving in America, George tried his hand at selling sports clothes with his girlfriend at the time, and when that venture flopped, he briefly became a perfume salesman. Later, he gave the insurance business a shot but failed to sell a single policy.

  Finally, George de Mohrenschildt settled on the oil business, figuring that he would follow in his father’s footsteps. He eventually wound up in Texas, where he got a petroleum geology degree from the University of Texas, after cheating his way through the final exams. In typical de Mohrenschildt style, he charmed his way out of trouble when he got caught, explaining with an aristocratic wink that everyone in life cheats.

  De Mohrenschildt—who sported the year-round tan of a yachtsman or skier—continued to rely on his good looks and old-world charm as he pursued his career in the oil business. He had a gift for bedding and wedding wealthy women—including an eighteen-year-old Palm Beach debutante—and then tapping their families for funds to launch his various oil ventures. The second of his four wives, Phyllis, was “a little bit wild—but very attractive and adventurous,” the baron told the Warren Commission. She was in the habit of walking around the rugged oil field in the Colorado Rockies where de Mohrenschildt was working at the time, wearing only a bikini—a new fashion item in those days that the roughnecks working their drills undoubtedly found intriguing.

  Albert Jenner Jr., the Warren Commission co-counsel in charge of questioning de Mohrenschildt, displayed a keen interest in his active love life. The baron conceded that he was something of a ladies’ man. “I am not a queer, you know,” he testified. “Although some people accuse me of that even.” While he knew how to seduce women, de Mohrenschildt could also be cruel to them. Dorothy, his teenaged bride, later said that he manhandled her, once kicking her in the stomach and striking her on the head with a hammer. He also enjoyed “kissing and pawing other women” right in front of her. The baron’s sexual habits were “abnormal,” declared Dorothy as she fled the marriage.

  None of de Mohrenschildt’s oil ventures paid off particularly well, and he would soon drift away to try one more roll of the dice with the help of another rich relative or friend. His true skill was cultivating the wealthy and well connected. One of his first jobs in the oil business was working for Pantepec Oil—the petroleum company founded by the father of William F. Buckley Jr., the CIA-connected conservative publisher and pundit.

  Later, de Mohrenschildt proved adept at working his connections at the Dallas Petroleum Club, a hotbed of anti-Kennedy ferment, whose leading members—including oilmen Clint Murchison Sr., H. L. Hunt, and Sid Richardson—were tied to Dulles, Lyndon Johnson, and J. Edgar Hoover. The Petroleum Club also counted D. H. Byrd, the Texas School Book Depository owner, and Mayor Earle Cabell, brother of Dulles’s former CIA deputy, among its regulars. De Mohrenschildt put Byrd’s wife on the board of the charity that he had set up to fund cystic fibrosis research. It all came together at the Petroleum Club—the deals, the good works, and the darker stuff—over drinks in the club’s wood-paneled rooms, located downtown in the elegant Baker Hotel.

  The international oil business and the U.S. intelligence establishment were overlapping worlds, and de Mohrenschildt soon found himself with a foot in each one. He alluded cryptically to this early in his Warren Commission testimony, when he mentioned that he was involved in “a controversial business . . . international business.” But commission attorney Jenner quickly steered the conversation away from these dangerous shoals. “Also, I gather that you are a pretty lively character,” Jenner interjected inanely.

  De Mohrenschildt was indeed a colorful character, as Jenner observed more than once during the hearing. But this was a less relevant aspect of the baron’s life than his involvement with American espionage. In the late 1950s, de Mohrenschildt stopped drilling dry wells in Texas and Colorado and started spending more time overseas, as a consultant on petroleum projects in Latin America, Europe, and Africa. His work sometimes took him to Cold War hot spots such as Yugoslavia (which ejected him as a suspected spy) and Cuba. When he returned from his trips abroad, de Mohrenschildt was routinely debriefed by the CIA’s Dallas field agent, J. Walton Moore.

  The baron always insisted that he was not a CIA agent, though his denials could sometimes be convoluted. “I cannot say that I never was a CIA agent, I cannot prove it,” he wrote near the end of his life, in an unpublished memoir. “I cannot prove either that I ever was. Nobody can.” While it was probably true that de Mohrenschildt was not an official agent, he was most certainly an agency asset, gathering confidential information on his foreign busi
ness trips under what the CIA called “commercial cover.”

  De Mohrenschildt was not motivated by ideology or patriotism. He was not like his brother, whom he described almost bemusedly as “really a ferocious anti-communist.” The baron did “not believe in anything, either religious or political,” said his Dallas neighbor, a fellow White Russian named Igor Voshinin. De Mohrenschildt believed only in himself. He had learned from his rootless, stateless existence to ingratiate himself with whomever had power or money. He was at your service, if he could also serve himself. He wasn’t much of an oilman, but having friends in the spy world opened doors for him when doing business overseas.

  So it was not surprising when de Mohrenschildt showed up at the Oswalds’ front door that summer afternoon in the company of a man named Colonel Lawrence Orlov, a CIA informant who was a friend and frequent handball partner of J. Walton Moore, the agency’s man in Dallas. De Mohrenschildt himself had also become friendly with Moore, when the CIA “domestic contacts” agent began debriefing him after his overseas trips. The baron thought of his CIA handler as a “very nice fellow . . . and we got along well.” Moore, the son of missionary parents, had been born and raised in China, like de Mohrenschildt’s wife, Jeanne. “So I invited him and his wife to the house and he got along fabulously well with Jeanne,” the baron later recalled. “I used to see Mr. Moore occasionally for lunch. A cosmopolitan character, most attractive.”

  After the Oswalds arrived in Texas from Russia, it was Moore’s turn to invite de Mohrenschildt to lunch. The CIA man had a request for his Russian-born friend. De Mohrenschildt was apparently tasked with keeping an eye on the young couple—a job he assiduously performed until the following spring, when he and his wife left on business for Haiti.

  Lee was in thrall to de Mohrenschildt, the big, suave man of the world—the father figure he never had. They swapped political jokes from either side of the Iron Curtain. The baron grilled him about his life in Minsk, as if he were conducting an agency debriefing. But Lee didn’t seem to mind—he glowed under the older man’s attention. “Oswald would do anything that de Mohrenschildt told him to do,” observed the baron’s son-in-law, Gary Taylor, who lived in Dallas with de Mohrenschildt’s daughter, Alexandra.

  Marina Oswald later agreed that de Mohrenschildt and her husband had been “fairly good friends” and that the baron was “a good humanitarian who was interested in other people.” But in an interview with FBI agents after the assassination, Marina added a provocative remark about the two men’s relationship. Oswald “was somewhat afraid of de Mohrenschildt, who was big in stature and talked loudly,” she reported. Her husband clearly knew who, between the two of them, had the power.

  In the end, no Warren Commission witness betrayed Oswald more deeply than George de Mohrenschildt. His testimony before the commission—the lengthiest of the hearings—did more to convict Oswald in the eyes of the press and the public than anyone else. He tied Oswald to the alleged murder weapon, telling the commission about the day when an agitated Marina showed him and his wife the rifle that Lee had stashed in a closet. And most important, de Mohrenschildt gave the Warren Commission the motive for killing Kennedy that the panel had sorely lacked. Oswald, the baron speculated with devastating effect, “was insanely jealous of an extraordinarily successful man, who was young, attractive, had a beautiful wife, had all the money in the world, and was a world figure. And poor Oswald was just the opposite. He had nothing. He had a bitchy wife, had no money, was a miserable failure in everything he did.” Shooting Kennedy, he concluded in one of the more memorable phrases produced by the official investigation, made Oswald “a hero in his own mind.”

  De Mohrenschildt had enough of a conscience to feel uneasy about his Judas-like performance before the commission, and—as if to make amends—he offered contradictory testimony about Oswald. “But what I wanted to underline, that was always amazing to me, that as far as I am concerned [Oswald] was an admirer of President Kennedy,” he told the panel. During a conversation they had about JFK, acknowledged de Mohrenschildt, Oswald described him as “an excellent president, young, full of energy, full of good ideas.” Oswald’s own words about Kennedy completely erased the motive that de Mohrenschildt proposed to the panel. But the Warren Commission simply glided over the glaring inconsistencies in de Mohrenschildt’s testimony. It was the baron’s unfounded and irresponsible remarks about the “crazy lunatic” Oswald—a man supposedly driven to kill by the resentments born of his pathetic life—that stuck with the commission. De Mohrenschildt took the young man with whom he had spent hours discussing politics and offering advice about love and marriage—the man who hung on his every word, whom he thought of as a son—and threw him under the wheels of infamy.

  On the morning of April 22, 1964, when he appeared at the Veterans Administration building in Washington—where the Warren Commission had set up shop—George de Mohrenschildt was not in possession of his customary smooth, self-composed demeanor. The months after the assassination had been extremely difficult ones for the baron and his wife. He had been summoned to the U.S. embassy in Port-au-Prince and treated like he was a suspect in the case. His business affairs in Haiti began to suffer as rumors spread about the mysterious Russian who had been Oswald’s closest confidant. It is highly unlikely that de Mohrenschildt knew in advance about how Oswald was to be used on November 22, 1963. This sort of messy business was not part of the baron’s portfolio. But he was sharp enough to quickly begin connecting the dots.

  De Mohrenschildt was not certain how he would come out of the Warren Commission hearings. Would his career be ruined? Would he be put on trial? Or did he face even more dire consequences? America was not Soviet Russia, but the baron had learned from his worldwide wanderings that power was capable of anything, no matter where it operated.

  De Mohrenschildt was quite anxious when he entered the hearing room that morning. His eyes fixed immediately on Allen Dulles. The spymaster “did not interfere in the proceedings” that day, observed de Mohrenschildt, letting Jenner handle the interrogation. But the baron found Dulles’s silent presence to be unnerving. “[He] was there as a distant threat,” de Mohrenschildt later wrote in his memoir—a provocative remark that he did not explain further. Was the mere presence of Dulles, looming over the proceedings, a reminder that de Mohrenschildt must carefully mind his words?

  The baron found his entire experience as a star witness for the Warren Commission—which dragged on for two days—to be a grueling exercise in “intimidation.” As he prepared to begin his testimony, de Mohrenschildt later claimed, Jenner put him on stern notice. “We know more about your life than you yourself, so answer all my questions truthful[ly] and sincerely,” Jenner warned him. Over the next two days, Jenner switched between chilly aggressiveness and ingratiating flattery as he worked over de Mohrenschildt. Afterward, Jeanne de Mohrenschildt followed her husband to the witness table, bringing along their two Manchester terriers, Nero and Poppaea, for emotional support. When the de Mohrenschildts’ interrogation was all over, the baron told his wife, “It was an unpleasant experience, but in Russia we would have been sent to Siberia for life.”

  Jenner raked over the most embarrassing details of de Mohrenschildt’s private life, but he stayed resolutely clear of his espionage connections. The baron realized just how thoroughly the commission had penetrated his personal life when Dulles got his hands on private correspondence that de Mohrenschildt had exchanged with the First Lady’s mother, Janet, following the Kennedy assassination. After divorcing Jackie’s rakish father, “Black Jack” Bouvier, Janet had married Washington stockbroker Hugh Auchincloss, whose family fortune derived from his grandfather’s Standard Oil partnership with John D. Rockefeller. De Mohrenschildt was forced by the Warren Commission to read out loud from his own letters to Janet Auchincloss, whom he had known from the time that her daughter Jackie was a girl, romping on the sands of Long Island’s Gold Coast. Jenner put the baron on the spot, asking him to explain why he had questioned Osw
ald’s guilt in one letter he sent Jackie Kennedy’s mother. “Somehow,” he wrote Mrs. Auchincloss three weeks after the assassination, “I still have a lingering doubt, notwithstanding all the evidence, of Oswald’s guilt.” Since his letter obviously undermined his own testimony about Oswald as the “crazy lunatic” who killed the president, de Mohrenschildt was put in the awkward position of trying to clarify his contradictory remarks.

  After the de Mohrenschildts concluded their Warren Commission “ordeal,” they were invited by Janet Auchincloss and her husband to their home on O Street in Georgetown. Relaxing with his old friend in the comfortable splendor of her home, the baron and his wife felt confident enough to voice their true feelings about the assassination. By now, it was dawning on the couple that the Warren Commission was not interested in the real story of the president’s murder. They suspected that the true purpose of the investigation was “to waste the taxpayers’ money and to distract [the] attention of the American people from the [real culprits] involved in the assassination.”

  Jeanne de Mohrenschildt risked upsetting the civility of the gathering by directly challenging Mrs. Auchincloss. “Why don’t you—the relatives of our beloved president, you who are so wealthy—why don’t you conduct a real investigation as to who was the rat who killed him?”

  Mrs. Auchincloss regarded Jeanne coldly. “But the rat was your friend Lee Harvey Oswald.” She was in no mood to be lectured by friends of Oswald. Upstairs in her attic, Mrs. Auchincloss was still keeping the blood-spattered pink Chanel suit that her daughter had worn in Dallas.

  Jackie Kennedy’s mother had no doubt arrived at her conviction about Oswald’s guilt with the help of her neighbor and family friend, Allen Dulles. Her husband, Hugh—who had served in Navy intelligence before pursuing his investment banking career—and Dulles were from the same world. The Auchinclosses, in fact, had more in common politically with Dulles than they did with the late president. When de Mohrenschildt had bumped into JFK’s mother-in-law on a plane trip during the 1960 campaign, he was surprised to hear Mrs. Auchincloss tell him that she was a staunch Nixon supporter and that Jack did not stand a chance.