by David Talbot
In another letter to Dulles, Mary summed up the privileged and politically eccentric world of the Paines by making a devastating comparison—one that had certainly already occurred to Dulles. “I would only like to point out that this is the same kind of ‘background’ that one runs into with both Noel Field and Alger Hiss—this Quaker–early American family thing.” Dulles knew this type well—he had a history of putting such people to good use. They were the blissful do-gooders who later wondered how they had stumbled into history’s grinder.
It was another striking “coincidence” in the endlessly enigmatic Oswald story. The housewife who took the Oswalds under her wing had married into a family whose foibles and weaknesses were well known to Dulles and his mistress. Ruth Paine was aware of her mother-in-law’s connection to Bancroft and Dulles. Her mother-in-law, in fact, had told her that she invited the couple to enjoy a get-away on the family island. But with typical obstinacy, Ruth refused to see any particular significance in this Dulles link to her family.
Dulles himself acknowledged the flat-out weirdness of these curious facts and, in his own characteristic fashion, simply laughed it off. The conspiracy-minded would have a field day, he chuckled, if they knew that he had visited Dallas three weeks before the assassination and that he had a personal connection to the woman whom he identified as Marina Oswald’s “landlady.”
But Ruth Paine was more than that. She was also the woman who—the month before JFK’s arrival in Dallas—informed Lee about the job opening in the Texas School Book Depository, the warehouse building that loomed over the final stretch of President Kennedy’s motorcade route. Ruth had been told about the warehouse job by a neighbor. The building was owned by yet another intriguing character in the Oswald drama, right-wing Texas millionaire, David Harold Byrd.
D. H. Byrd received scant attention after the Kennedy assassination, despite his building’s role in the crime. The Warren Commission never questioned him, and reporters did not profile him—even after the millionaire took the odd step of removing the eight-pane window from which Oswald allegedly fired his shots at Kennedy’s limousine and hanging it in his Dallas mansion. Byrd said he feared that souvenir hunters might steal Oswald’s so-called sniper’s perch from the book warehouse, but he displayed the infamous window in his own home like a trophy.
Byrd’s name was woven through the turbulent politics of the Kennedy era. He was a crony of Lyndon Johnson and a cousin of Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia, a white supremacist and a leader of the rising conservative movement. He also belonged to the Suite 8F Group, an association of right-wing Texas tycoons that took its name from the Lamar Hotel room in Houston where they held their meetings. The group included George Brown and Herman Brown of Brown & Root—a construction giant built on government contracts—and other military industrialists and oil moguls who had financed the rise of LBJ.
The owner of the Texas Book Depository was closely associated with a number of passionate Kennedy adversaries, including Curtis LeMay, the Air Force chief whose relentless quest for a nuclear showdown with the Soviet Union caused the president to question the general’s sanity. LeMay bestowed a glowing Air Force commendation on Byrd in May 1963 for his role in founding the Civil Air Patrol, the military auxiliary group that counted a teenaged Oswald among its cadets.
Did Byrd and his associates in the national security field use Ruth Paine to maneuver Oswald into the Texas Book Depository by passing word of the job opening to her through her neighbor? Always looking for ways to help the distressed couple in her care, Ruth quickly tipped off Lee about the job. The earnest Quaker might have played a pivotal role in unknowingly sealing his fate. But one way or the other, Oswald seemed doomed to end up in the building and to meet his date with infamy. By October 1963, when he went to work in the building, there were too many unseen forces at work on the young man—who turned twenty-four that month—for him to call his life his own.
In the months leading up to the Kennedy assassination, Oswald was moved here and there with the calculation of a master chess player. In April, he returned to his hometown, New Orleans, with Marina and the girls, where he called attention to himself by jumping into the combustible world of Cuban politics. He reached out to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, the leading pro-Castro group in the United States, which was the target of such heavy FBI and CIA pressure that its two founders later succumbed and offered their services as government informers. At the same time he was dallying with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, Oswald also made contact with the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE)—a group of young, militant, anti-Castro Cuban exiles overseen by the CIA’s point man on Cuba, David Phillips. Playing both sides of the Cuba fence, Oswald began passing out Fair Play leaflets in the streets while working out of the same building where Guy Banister, a former FBI agent who was involved in anti-Communist operations, maintained his office.
Oswald’s double-dealing was bound to lead to a blowup, and in August it did, when he was angrily confronted by DRE activists while passing out his pro-Castro flyers. A New Orleans police lieutenant who later investigated the tussle reported that Oswald seemed to have staged the whole thing “to create an incident—but when the incident occurred, he remained absolutely peaceful and gentle.” The New Orleans fracas recalled Oswald’s theatrics in the U.S. embassy in Moscow, where he had announced his defection.
In early September, Oswald popped up again in Dallas, where he and his family would move back later that month. This Oswald sighting is an extremely suggestive one, since he was spotted in the company of none other than David Atlee Phillips—one of the more glaring indications that the ex-marine was the focus of an intelligence operation. Oswald and Phillips were observed talking together in the lobby of a downtown Dallas office building by Antonio Veciana, a prominent Cuban exile leader whose violent group, Alpha 66, had come close to killing Castro with a bazooka attack. Veciana—who arrived at the Dallas building for his own meeting with Phillips, his CIA supervisor—would later recognize the slight, pale man he had seen with Phillips that afternoon, when Oswald’s face was splashed across front pages and TV screens. Phillips had trained him well, Veciana later said. “He taught me how to remember faces, how to remember characteristics. I am sure it was Oswald.”
Veciana told his story to House Assassinations Committee investigator Gaeton Fonzi in the late 1970s and later repeated it to journalists. But even when the aging exile leader climbed onstage at a Washington conference of JFK assassination researchers in September 2014 to retell his remarkable story, the mainstream press still did nothing to spotlight it. “I was trained by the CIA, as was Oswald,” said Veciana, who was the accounting manager for a Havana bank before he joined the anti-Castro movement. “Oswald and Fidel Castro were ideal scapegoats for the murder of the president. . . . It really was a coup d’etat.”
In late September, Oswald took a bus trip to Mexico City and again made a spectacle of himself while trying in vain to obtain travel visas for Cuba at the Cuban and Soviet embassies. While Oswald visited Mexico City, someone impersonating him made phone calls to the Cuban and Soviet embassies—calls that were intercepted on CIA surveillance tapes. The agency later claimed that these tapes were routinely destroyed. But J. Edgar Hoover himself listened to them immediately after the assassination and the FBI chief informed Lyndon Johnson, the new president, that the voice on the tapes was not Oswald’s. Both men knew the stunning significance of this audio fakery by the CIA—it showed that Kennedy’s alleged killer was somehow entangled in espionage business. He was not simply a deranged loner.
In the final weeks of his life, Oswald was the subject of particularly intense CIA coverage. Much of this scrutiny emanated from the offices of Jim Angleton and David Phillips. After sifting through declassified government documents from this period, John Newman—a University of Maryland history professor and former U.S. military intelligence officer—concluded that the agency had demonstrated “a keen operational interest in Oswald.” Newman’s skilled d
ecryption of the intelligent design behind Oswald’s activities—which he first outlined in his 1995 book, Oswald and the CIA—was a historical breakthrough in understanding the alleged assassin’s mysterious life.
Oswald was ostensibly being closely tracked by the CIA as well as by the FBI because he was a recent defector and a self-proclaimed revolutionary. But, as President Kennedy prepared to visit Dallas, something curious occurred within this surveillance labyrinth. On October 9, Oswald was suddenly removed from the FBI “FLASHLIST”—the bureau’s index of suspicious individuals to be kept under close watch. FBI officials took this surprising step despite Oswald’s suspicious behavior in Mexico City. The day after the FBI took Oswald off its watch list, the CIA also downgraded him as a security risk. On October 10, four senior counterintelligence officials who reported to Angleton and Helms signed off on a curious cable to the CIA station chief in Mexico City, assuring him there was no reason to be concerned about Oswald because his stay in the Soviet Union had a “maturing effect” on him.
These signals about Oswald circulating in the intelligence community had a fateful effect. By being downplayed as a security risk, Oswald became an unchecked pawn, free to be moved wherever he was useful.
Appearing before the Warren Commission, Ruth and Michael Paine seemed confused and tentative when it came to assigning guilt to Oswald. They both agreed that while he was a man of headstrong convictions, he did not impress them as a dangerous sort, and, like George de Mohrenschildt, they said Oswald rather liked Kennedy. “I had never thought of him as a violent man,” Ruth testified. “He had never said anything against President Kennedy. . . . There was nothing that I had seen about him that indicated a man with that kind of grudge or hostility.”
Michael—a lean man with sensitive eyes and a soft, watery demeanor—seemed particularly at sea when he tried to make sense of Oswald. When Dulles asked him if he was convinced that Oswald was the assassin, Michael launched upon a rambling, only somewhat coherent reply, winding up with this less-than-decisive conclusion: “I never did discover—and it didn’t quite make sense, but for the most part, I accept it, the common view that he did it.”
In truth, Michael never knew Oswald very well. They only talked at length on about four occasions, he told the Warren Commission. They would run into each other some weekends when they visited their wives and kids at the Paine family house in Irving. One evening, Michael took Oswald to a meeting of the local chapter of the ACLU, which the Paines belonged to. Afterward, Lee told Michael that he could never join a civil libertarian group like that because it wasn’t sufficiently militant.
Neither of the Paines was fond of Oswald. To Ruth, he was an opaque, self-involved, and ill-tempered man who could be cruel to Marina. He was just part of the equation that she had to put up with in order to have Marina in her life. “I would have been happy had he never come out, indeed happier had he not come out on the weekends,” she would testify.
Michael and Lee seemed to have more in common—two men who had grown up, for the most part, without fathers, and were now struggling to hold on to their own families. There was something lost about both young men, a searching quality that left them too open to new experience. But they never really hit it off with each other. Lee was too “dogmatic” for Michael, too set in his Marxist ways. He reminded him of his distant Trotskyite father, too wrapped up in his adamant political theories to connect with other people.
Apart from providing a few suspicious, circumstantial details, this was the Paines’ main contribution to establishing Oswald’s guilt. Guided primarily by Warren Commission lawyers Albert Jenner and Wesley Liebeler—as well as by Dulles—the couple painted a portrait of Oswald as a grim subversive.
But the Paines also confirmed Oswald’s guilt by just being themselves. Here were two left-wing oddballs—their appearance before the panel seemed to signify—a man and woman with peculiar and vaguely seditious family pedigrees. They were just the type whom you would expect to unwittingly harbor a dangerous man like Oswald. In their immaculate innocence, the Paines played right into the hands of those who were manipulating Oswald.
The Paines reunited for a time after the assassination but later divorced. In old age, they now live in the same Quaker retirement compound north of San Francisco, connected by the bonds of time. Not long ago, Michael sat down for an interview at the nearby commune where their middle-aged son, Christopher, and two dozen or so others live—a ramshackle collection of cottages in a green gulch near the Russian River that Ruth calls “a latter-day hippie ranch.” Sitting on a lumpy couch in one of the cottages, the retired engineer came across as boyishly charming and given to whimsical ideas—an “innocent,” as Ruth described him.
While serving with the Army in the Korean War, Michael mentioned at one point during the afternoon, “I thought of going over to the other side and saying to the Chinese, ‘We don’t have to fight like this.’ But I thought I’d be blown up if I did. I also thought it would be unlikely I could find someone I could talk to, and they’d put me in a concentration camp. I prefer democracy, but I thought communism for China was an appropriate thing—they needed to all go in the same direction.” This is the sort of idiosyncratic thinking that might well have made Michael Paine stand out to someone like Dulles.
The Paines seemed to grow more convinced of Oswald’s guilt over time. But nowadays Michael is not as cocksure as Ruth. As he talked about those ancient, catastrophic days, he seemed bewildered, like someone trying to explain a collision he had survived long ago. He still wavered back and forth, just as he did with the Warren Commission. “Oswald wanted to overthrow something, the enemies, capitalists, the oppressors . . . he wanted action, and you had to be tough, brutal.” But then again . . . he liked Kennedy. “Oh, he did! He said, ‘JFK is my favorite president.’”
Michael Paine still does not know what to think. But perhaps, like the rest of the country, he has found a kind of comfort in his confusion.
As November 22, 1963, dawned—the day John F. Kennedy would die—Allen Dulles was away from Washington, as he typically was at the outset of major operations. In September and October, Dulles had maintained the busy schedule of a man still in the thick of clandestine affairs, meeting with key officials from the CIA’s covert action side such as Desmond Fitzgerald, who—along with David Phillips—oversaw the violent intrigue swirling around Cuba; Angleton and his deputy, Cord Meyer; and a top Helms aide, Thomas Karamessines. All of these men would later be connected by investigators, in one way or another, to the Kennedy assassination.
But as Friday, November 22, drew near, Dulles spent much of his time away from his Georgetown home base. His book tour for The Craft of Intelligence provided the spymaster with a good excuse to get away from home. In the days leading up to the assassination, he made bookstore and media appearances in Boston and New York. Early on the morning of November 22, Dulles caught a Piedmont Airlines flight back to Washington, landing at National Airport around 8:30 a.m. He was then driven to a hotel in Williamsburg, Virginia, where he addressed a Brookings Institution breakfast meeting. After receiving the news from Dallas, around 1:30 that afternoon, Dulles took a car back to Washington with John Warner, a CIA attorney.
But, according to Dulles’s date book, he did not spend the evening at home in Washington. He headed back to the northern Virginia countryside, where he would spend the entire weekend at a top secret CIA facility known officially as Camp Peary, but within the agency as “the Farm.”
At the time of the Kennedy assassination, Dulles had no formal role in government. As far as the public knew, he was a figure of the legendary past, a graying gentleman who supplemented his civil service pension by recycling colorful espionage tales of yesteryear and by delivering sobering Cold War speeches. But the Farm was not a club for CIA retirees. It was a bustling clandestine center that Dulles himself had inaugurated soon after taking over as CIA chief, and it served a variety of tightly guarded functions.
Before the CIA took over
Camp Peary—a sprawling compound in the densely wooded tidelands near Williamsburg—it was used as a Navy Seabees base and then as a stockade for captured German sailors. Dulles turned it into a spy training base for recruits who were headed overseas. According to former CIA agents Philip Agee and Victor Marchetti, among the well-trained professionals turned out by the Farm were skilled assassins. The facility was also what would later be termed a “black site”—a secure location where enemy captives and suspicious defectors were subjected to extreme interrogation methods.
As CIA director, Dulles had built himself a comfortable home at the Farm. Years later, consultants like Chalmers Johnson—an Asian affairs expert who became a scorching critic of U.S. empire—would be housed there during agency conferences. Johnson recalled the retired spymaster’s well-stocked library, which—as late as 1967—still contained the latest CIA reports, intelligence estimates, and classified journals.
“The Farm was basically an alternative CIA headquarters, from where Dulles could direct ops,” said former congressional investigator Dan Hardway.
This is the CIA command post where the “retired” Dulles situated himself from Friday, November 22, through Sunday, November 24—a highly eventful weekend during which Oswald was arrested and questioned by Dallas police, Kennedy’s body was flown back to Washington and subjected to an autopsy riddled with irregularities, and Oswald was gunned down in the basement of the Dallas police station by a shady nightclub owner.
A year after the assassination, Dulles was interviewed by an old CIA colleague, Tom Braden, for the oral history project at the JFK Library in Boston. Braden asked Dulles what he had thought of Kennedy “as a man.” Dulles put on his mask of mourning and sympathy, as he could do in an instant. “Oh, I rated him high. . . . I shall never forget when I first heard the news of the Dallas tragedy. I felt that here is a man who hadn’t had the chance really to show his full capabilities, that he was just reaching a point where his grasp of all the intricacies of the presidency were such that now he could move forward.”
