JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (56 page)

When Michael Paine testified before the Warren Commission, Allen Dulles asked one question that veered perilously close to relevance. He said to Michael Paine, “Is this Mr. Young your stepfather?” Paine said, “That is right.”
[208]
Dulles retreated quickly into silence, allowing a commission lawyer to continue the questioning. Allen Dulles had ample reason not to ask follow-up questions about Arthur Young. Such queries might have surfaced Michael’s stepfather’s fame in the military-industrial complex as the inventor of the Bell Helicopter. Michael Paine’s mother was even more dangerous territory for Dulles. He asked nothing at all about her. Least of all did Allen Dulles want it to emerge that the mother of the Oswald sponsor they were questioning lightly was a very good friend of his wartime mistress, with whom he maintained close contact.
[209]

Ruth Hyde Paine, Michael’s wife and Marina Oswald’s caregiver, was the daughter of William Avery Hyde. To the Warren Commission Ruth Paine described her father’s occupation in modest terms: “He is an insurance underwriter; he composes the fine print.”
[210]
William Avery Hyde was at the time an insurance executive destined for an influential government post.

In October 1964, right after the publication of the
Warren Report
featuring his daughter Ruth as the government’s key witness (other than Marina Oswald) to the guilt of Lee Harvey Oswald in murdering John Kennedy, William Avery Hyde received a three-year government contract from AID (Agency for International Development). From October 1964 to August 1967, William Avery Hyde was AID’s Regional Insurance Adviser for all of Latin America.
[211]
Hyde’s job description was to provide technical assistance from the U.S. State Department to insurance cooperatives being launched throughout the region. At the same time, the reports Hyde filed from his time in Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Panama can be seen in the context of what a later AID director, former Ohio governor John Gilligan, admitted frankly was AID’s collateral CIA function:

“At one time, many AID field offices [under the auspices of the State Department] were infiltrated from top to bottom with CIA people. It was pretty well known in the agency who they were and what they were up to . . . The idea was to plant operatives in every kind of activity we had overseas, government, volunteer, religious, every kind.”
[212]

If William Avery Hyde was acting as a CIA “executive agent,”
[213]
then his expertise in helping to provide lower-cost insurance in Latin American countries was his cover for gathering information on people the CIA was watching carefully in the ferment of the sixties. While it was to the State Department’s AID office that William Avery Hyde made his August 8, 1967, end-of-tour report from Lima, Peru, still as noted explicitly on its cover page, Hyde’s report went to the CIA as well.
[214]

Ruth Hyde Paine was also the younger sister of Sylvia Hyde Hoke, who in 1963 was living in Falls Church, Virginia. Thirty years after John Kennedy’s assassination, a CIA Security File Memorandum on Sylvia Hyde Hoke was declassified at the National Archives. The CIA memorandum noted that Sylvia Hoke was identified as a CIA employee in the 1961 issue of the Falls Church, Virginia, City Directory. The memorandum warned: “Since it is known that opposition intelligence services have in the past checked similar publications, it should be presumed that the indicated employment of Subject by CIA is known to other intelligence organizations.”
[215]

However, Sylvia’s CIA employment—in its eighth year in 1963
[216]
—was not known to her sister Ruth, at least according to Ruth’s later testimony.

Ruth stayed with Sylvia at her Falls Church home near CIA headquarters in September 1963.
[217]
After her visit at Sylvia and John Hoke’s CIA-related household (as his father-in-law would soon, John worked for the agency’s front, AID),
[218]
Ruth drove to New Orleans to meet the Oswalds. Ruth then drove Marina back to Dallas, so Marina could settle more permanently into the Paines’ home while awaiting the birth of her second child. In October, Ruth arranged Lee Oswald’s employment at the Texas School Book Depository overlooking Dealey Plaza.

With this sequence of events as the background, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison questioned Ruth Paine before a grand jury in 1968. Garrison asked Paine if her sister Sylvia did any work in connection with the U.S. government in 1963.

Paine: “She has worked . . . she did something with G9, what is this . . . well, it would be a government job.”

Garrison: “What did she do with the government?”

Paine: “She majored in psychology, one of the things I recall is making testing angles, how to test a Bedouin to know whether he can be a good oil drill operator, this kind of thing.”

Garrison: “Do you know what government agency she has worked for?”

Paine: “No, just worked for the government.”
[219]

Without access to government documents identifying Ruth Paine’s sister as a CIA employee, Garrison asked Paine: “Do you know why the investigative file on Sylvia Hyde Hoke is still classified in the archives as secret?”

Paine: “No, is it?”

Garrison: “. . . Yes, most of the file’s still classified. Do you have any idea why they would do that? It seems there is no reason.”

Paine: “No.”
[220]

The
Warren Report
states that on October 14, 1963, “at the suggestion of a neighbor, Mrs. Paine phoned the Texas School Book Depository and was told that there was a job opening. She informed Oswald who was interviewed the following day at the Depository and started to work there on October 16, 1963.”
[221]

However, the Warren Commission also knew that on October 15, the day before Oswald began work at the Texas School Book Depository, Robert Adams of the Texas Employment Commission phoned the Paine residence with a much better job prospect for Oswald. Adams spoke with someone at the Paines’ number about his being prepared to give Oswald a referral for permanent employment as a baggage or cargo handler at Trans Texas Airways, for a salary $100 per month higher than that offered by the Book Depository’s only temporary job. Adams told the Warren Commission, “I learned from the person who answered the phone that Oswald was not there. I left a message with that person that Oswald should contact me at the Commission.”
[222]

Adams tried phoning the Paine residence about the higher-paying job again the next morning. He said he “learned from the person who answered that Oswald was not there and that he had in the meantime obtained employment and was working.”
[223]
Adams accordingly cancelled Oswald as a referral for the more lucrative job.
[224]

Ruth Paine was questioned by a sympathetic Warren Commission lawyer, Albert Jenner, about this more promising job possibility. She first denied knowing anything about it, then recalled it vaguely, and finally said she knew about it from Lee himself:

Jenner: “Did you ever hear anything by way of discussion or otherwise by Marina or Lee of the possibility of his having been tendered or at least suggested to him a job at Trans-Texas, as a cargo handler at $310 per month?”

Paine: “No; in Dallas?”

Jenner: “Yes.”

Paine: “I do not recall that. $310 a month?”

Jenner: “Yes. This was right at the time that he obtained employment at the Texas School Book Depository.”

Paine: “And he was definitely offered such a job?”

Jenner: “Well, I won’t say it was offered—that he might have been able to secure a job through the Texas Employment Commission as a cargo handler at $310 per month.”

Paine: “I do recall some reference of that sort, which fell through—that there was not that possibility.”

Jenner: “Tell us what you know about that. Did you hear of it at the time?”

Paine: “Yes.”

Jenner: “Now, would you please relate that to me?”

Paine: “I recall some reference to—”

Jenner: “How did it come about?”

Paine: “From Lee, as I recall.”

Jenner: “And was it at the time, or just right—”

Paine: “It was at the time, while he was yet unemployed.”

Jenner: “And about the time he obtained employment at the Texas School Book Depository?”

Paine: “It seemed to me he went into town with some hopes raised by the employment agency—whether a public or private employment agency I don’t know—but then reported that the job had been filled and not available to him.”

Jenner: “But that was—”

Paine: “That is my best recollection.”

Jenner: “Of his report to you and Marina?”

Paine: “Yes.”

Jenner: “But you do recall his discussing it?”

Paine: “I recall something of that nature. I do not recall the job itself.”
[225]

Robert Adams concluded from his own efforts to notify Oswald of the Trans Texas job by phoning the Paine residence: “I do not know whether he was ever advised of this referral, but under the circumstances I do not see how he could have been.”
[226]

The same New Orleans grand jury that heard Ruth Paine’s testimony about the Oswalds also heard Marina Oswald’s testimony about Ruth Paine. A juror asked Marina if she still saw Ruth in 1968.

Marina answered, “No, I like her and appreciate what she did. I was advised by Secret Service not to be connected with her.” Marina said the reason she was advised by the Secret Service to stay away from Ruth was “she was sympathizing with the CIA.”

Could she elaborate, she was asked, on what the Secret Service told her about Ruth Paine and the CIA?

Marina: “Seems like she had friends over there and it would be bad for me if people find out connection between me and Ruth and CIA.”

Question: “In other words, you were left with the distinct impression that she was in some way connected with the CIA?”

Marina: “Yes.”
[227]

As a consequence of both Lee Harvey Oswald’s successful referral by Ruth Paine to the Texas School Book Depository and his missed opportunity for a better job at Trans Texas Airways, Oswald began work on October 16, 1963, at the Book Depository. The scapegoat was now in place at an ideal ambush site. It was five weeks before President Kennedy’s motorcade would pass through Dealey Plaza.

NOTES

[
1
]. Robert F. Kennedy, “Foreword to the Memorial Edition,” December 18, 1963; John F. Kennedy,
Profiles in
Courage
(New York: Harper Perennial, 1988), p. xii.

[
2
]. Benjamin C. Bradlee,
Conversations with Kennedy
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), p. 150.

[
3
]. RFK, “Foreword,” p. xi.

[
4
]. Ibid., p. xv.

[
5
]. JFK,
Profiles
, p. xix.

[
6
]. Ibid., p. 244.

[
7
]. Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Farewell Address”; Louis Filler, editor,
The President Speaks: From William McKinley
to Lyndon B. Johnson
(New York: Capricorn Books, 1965), pp. 367-68.

[
8
]. Hugh Brogan,
Kennedy
(Harlow, England: Pearson Education Limited, 1996), p. 105.