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Edited on Tue Jan-27-04 05:46 PM by 9215
In the book "The Man Who knew too Much" author Richard Russell discusses the name "Alek Hidell" which was used by Lee Harvey Oswald. This book is thoroughly documented. About Richard Case Nagell: "The late Bernard Fensterwald, Jr. a prominent Washington, D.C., Attorney and founder of the Assassination Archives Research Center, served for a time as Nagell's attorney. "Despite the fact that he was ignored by both the Warren Commission and the House Assassinations Committee," Fensterwald believed, "Nagell is probably the only vital individual who knew the details of the assassination and is still alive." Jim Garrison, the former New Orleans district attorney whose 1967 investigation was among the first to raise the specter of a conspiracy, said simply: "Richard Nagell is the most important witness there is." (pp.47)
Here is an excerpt from the first few pages largely taken from police records of the incident:
"Late on the afternoon of Sept. 20th 1963, in the West Texas city of El Paso, a man parked his yellow and cream-collored Ford Fairlane in an alley between Oregon and El Paso streets. He opened his trunk and took out a .45 Colt automatic pistol, tucking it inside his belt. he was tall and rangy, well dressed in a blue suit, white shirt, and red tie. He walked over to a nearby post office and took five crisp hundred-dollar bills from his pocket. Folding them inside a piece of paper, he slipped the package into an envelope and mailed it to an address in Mexico City.
At the counter, he registered another letter to an official of the Central Intelligence Agency. He carefully placed the receipt in his wallet and momentarily scrutinizing the circular-shaped ceiling, placed his hand on the pistol. Then, fearing a ricochet that might injure one of the customers, he changed his mind.
It was a sweltering ninety-one degrees as the man walked across the street toward an old gray stone building with a facade of roman columns with eagles above the doors. His mind raced; he was being followed, of this he was certain. Inside the State National Bank, it was now half our before closing time. He observed a young police officer standing guard beside a Treasury Department currency display, chatting with a woman. The man approached a teller's window and politely asked for one hundred dollars in American Express traveler's checks.
But as the teller laid the traveler's checks on the counter, the man made no move to pick them up . Instead, he reached inside his suit jacked, drew the pistol, turned, and deliberately aimed two shots into a plaster wall just below the bank's ceiling. Then he returned the revolver to his belt and, as calmly as he had entered, he walked out onto the street.
He stopped at the corner, looking back to see a few bank employees staring at him from the doorway. He headed down the alley, got into his car, and, for a moment, simply sat there. As he finally pulled out halfway into the street, antoher driver was motioning for him to pass when the man saw the young policeman, with the gun in his hand, looking for him in the traffic. He backed his car up onto the sidewalk. When the policeman came over to his window, he said, "I guess you've got me, I surrender." and raised his hands.
Nervously Jim Bundren put on the handcuffs and marched him back to the bank. As he led his prisoner up some stairs toward a set of offices, the man suddenly turned his head and cried out: "Capitalist swine!" The policeman frisked him in the upstairs office, finding a mere twenty-seven cents remaining in his pocket.
Bundren examined the contents of his wallet: a California driver's license, some kind of U.S. military certificate. There was also a mimeographed newsletter. It was addressed to Richard Case Nagell from something called the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.
Bundren picked up a telephone. Because a firearm had been discharged inside a federally insured building, the FBI would have jurisdiction. Two El Paso special agents arrived at the bank within ten minutes. when they asked what his intentions had been, Richard Case Nagel refused to respond. Then, as he was being led to a waiting FBI car, he turned to Officer Bundren and said: "Why don't yo check my car and get the machine gun out of there?"
On the way to the El Paso Federal Building for further questioning. Richard Case Nagell issued only one statement to the FBI: "I would rather be arrested than committ murder and treason." 1
Many years later, Jim Bundren, retired from the police force and teaching a course in criminal justice at an El Paso college, would look back and remember: "I was sitting next to Nagell at one of his preliminary hearings. I don't remember the exact date, but I know it was before the Kennedy assassination. Nagell looked over at me and said. "You're a pretty good cop, arent' you? You know, if I didn't want you to, you'd never have caught me."
"I said. 'I saw the shots you fired in the bank. With your Army training and everything, I just felt like maybe it was some kind of diversionary tactic.'
"Nagell just smiled and said, 'Well, I'm glad you caught me. I really don't want to be in Dallas'
"I said, 'What do you mean by that?'
"'You'll see soon enough,' he said"
"The man who once arrested Richard Nagell shook his head. "When the assassination happened, I didn't think about it right away, because that was a pretty hectic time. We were all on alert, we had to closeoff the bridges.....Then a few days later when Lee Harvey Oswald was killed, what Nagell said came back to me. I thought, this had to be what he was talking about. How the hell would he have previous knowledge of it? How would he know what was coming down in Dallas?"
* * *
Then during the House Assassinations committee hearings of the 1970's:
"...There the matter rested , although both the Senate Intelligence Committee and the House Assassinations Committee also would take up the question of why the FBI had destroyed Oswald's note to Agent Hosty. Congress would question, as well, the Pentagon's "routine" destruction of Military Intelligence file that it admittedly once had on Oswald under his alias of "A.J. Hidell". (pp57)
"....The reader may also recall (see Chapter One) that it was the name "Joseph Kramer" with which Nagell signed his September 1963 letter to J. Edgar Hoover--alerting him to a conspiracy involving Oswald to assassinate Kennedy. .....he further described the contents of his personal property 'seized and confiscated" by the FBI on Sept. 20, 1963. It included two Mexican tourist cards (one of them for multiple entrance) made out to the names "Joseph Kramer" and "Albert" or Aleksei Hidel....." (pp.113)
"AlekHidell was also an alias known to have been used by Lee Harvey Oswald in many of his 1963 activities, Nagell was alleging that an Oswald tourist card had been in his possession." (pp. 113)
"Some researchers have speculated that "Hidell" was Oswald's own weird composite of "Fidel" and "Lee Harvey". Others think it might even be a combination of "Jekyll and Hyde". Warren Commission files contain a statement from a John Rene Heindel, who has been stationed with Oswald at Atsugi, saying that fellow Marines often referred to Heindel by the nickname "Hidell". The commission's conclusion was that he simply borrowed the name from his old acquaintance. (Footnote 38)(pp.170-71)
In my conversations with Nagell, it became clear that the "Hidell" alias had a particular significance. In fact, it was some kind of code name in an intelligence operation. Its origins, once again, track back to the Far East and go far beyond anything Oswald might have thought up on his own.
We were in Nagell's living room at our very first meeting when he volunteered that he knew "precisely where the name Hidell came from and why it was used". he went on to say that the Warren Commission was off-base but that neither did the "Hidell" usage emanate directly out of either CIA or FBI headquarters-- even though dossiers of both agencies would reveal Oswald's use of several variations of the name. (39)
" The pseudonyms 'Albert' and 'Aleksei Hidel' were given to Oswald." Nagell added, "by whom, could be discovered by CIA authorities by breaking the last name into two syllables and by determining precisely what those syllables meant. " (40)
After that I spent a long time puzzling over certain references made by Nagell in some of his correspondence:
-Is "Hidell" a name...or does it signify something else?"
-- "Who suggested the name "HIDell" for use by Oswald in his Fair Play for Cuba venture? Why? Did Nagell ever spell his name 'Nagel'? Was Oswald ever furnished a Mexican Tourist Card under the name of Albert Hidel? Why? Of what significance is the name 'Albert'? Alek? Aleksei?" (41)
Nagell seemed to be saying that if you dropped the last letter of the "Hidell" surname--or, for that matter, on his own name--it bore a different meaning. It was some kind of signal.
Then, in 1978, we had a short discussion about the language of intelligence, Nagell told me that the CIA generally used six-letter cryptonyms to designate certain operations, or even individuals within operations (42). Yet Nagell implied that the CIA did not know the real root of the six--letter HIDELL name. So it followed that some other agency, familiar with CIA cryptonyms, might have made it out to look like a CIA derivation.
The KGB, Nagell also imparted to me, sometimes used five-letter words as code name, Drop the "L" from Hidelll or Nagell and thas what you have. Since nagell, as a "double agent, " was working several sides of the street, might the variation on the alias depend upon which side he, or Oswald, were communictiong with? That is, if Oswald even knew show was really behind his use of the name.
I set about dividing the name into syllables. I also noted Nagell's deliberate underlining of the HID half. And, in perusing the documents he had filed with the Court of Claims about his early military career, I observed that he had underlined "HID" not only pertaining to Oswald. He also did so harkening back to his mid-fifties career with Militry Intelligence's intelligence outfit, the Headquarter Intelligence Division, or HID, forerunner of the Korean CIA.
Also , among the papers seized by the FBI after the bank incident was a typed slip of paper listing sixteen Korean names under the heading "H.I.D" And, as noted earlier in this chapter, Nagell's notebook accounting of 1962-63 meeting places in a number of cities had "JAPANEZE GOV'T--ROK." at the bottom.
Could this be the connection? I arranged to meet with Nagell at a place in Hollywood called the Raincheck. Early in our conversation, I said. "I think I know where the Hidell name came from" We were sitting a couple of feet apart at a corner table. Nagell looked at me with a quizzical expression.
"You gave Oswald that name to use," I continued. "HID is derived from the Korean intelligence outfit that you worked for the FOI. and 'ELL' are the last three letters of your own name."
Nagell did not reply. He stared back at me, did not deny it and quickly changed the subject. (43)......" (pp.170-72)
.................................
"In the labyrinth of counterespionage, searching for the truth becomes akin to a quest for the Holy Grail. But I have learned enough about Nagell to conclude that he did enter into a liaison with Soviet intelligence while stationed in Japan. Jim Garrison, who had two meetings with Nagell in 1968, recalls Nagell saying that "beginning in the late '50s" he had begun his role as an American "double agent". (footnote 14)
The first strong hints about this go back to a mysterious letter that arrived at Fensterwald's law office late in 1968. At the time, the attorney had not yet met Nagell but, as founder of the private Committee to Investigate Assassinations, he was already most curious about Nagell's past. The letter came form a Ricard von Kleist in Upland, California, specifying that his background on Nagell came from another source.
First it mentioned the warning letter that Nagell had written to the FBI in September 1963, which "contains information about Oswald, who was named and referred to as Alex Hydell, and advises Hoover that Kennedy would definitely be killed" Von Kleist then added: "The history of Richard Case Nagell is important. While a member of Counter Intelligence in Tokyo, he was dealing with Soviet attache' officer stationed with Russian Embassy in Tokyo at that time. He was approached several times and was said to have dealt with said Russian Officer as to vital information (classified). (15) (pp.159)
About two years after I confronted Nagell with my thoughts on the "HIDELL" matter, I found an astonishing document in Fensterwald's files. This was a notarized affidavit sworn to by Nagell on July 18, 1979, apparently in response to a letter the CIA had sent him eight days earlier. At the time Nagell was seeking his CIA files under the Freedom of Information Act, and there seemed to be a CIA "requirement" that Nagell list any other names under which his files about him might apear. After listing his true name, date, place of birth, and to passport numbers......Ben Blum , Robert C. Corsa , Alek Hidell, Aleksei Hidel, Joseph Cramer ....." (pp.173)
Reader: The names blanked out may have still been in use by the CIA at the time. Alek Hidell should be considered 'dead' for CIA purposes. Who are you Alek Hidell? One thing the reader should keep in mind. Lee Harvey Oswald and Richard Case Nagell are very similar in appearance.
Now for the good stuff:
As the Roman playwright Seneca warns us: "Cui prodest scelus, is fecit"-- the one who derives advantage from the crime is the one most likely to have committed it.
Did ex-president Bush know Lee Harvey Oswald?
By the early autumn of 1962, Lee and Marina Oswald's relationship was already devolving into constant bickering. Thirteen days before Nagell's arrival in Dallas from Mexico to make some inquiries about him, on Oct. 10 Oswald had suddenly left his job at a Fort Worth metal factory, bid a temporary farewell to his family, and traveled alone the thirty miles to Dallas. Staying for a few days at a YMCA, opened his first of several post office boxes, Box 2915. On October 12 he suddenly found new employment with the Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall (JCS) photo-lithography firm for $1.35/hour. ...
JCS was an interesting place for a 'redefector' from the USSR to find a job. One of the company's contracts was doing classified work for the U.S. Army Map Service. In this context, employees set type for place names on maps of Cuba. Just days after Oswald arrived JCS, pictures taken by an American U2 spy plane would confirm the existence of Soviet missile launching pads.....
....Hundreds of dollars worth of photographic equipment were discovered by the Dallas police in Oswald's apartment ....
Oswald himself was never known to have been fond of taking long cross-country camera hikes in foreign lands. But someone else was. This was a well-connected Russian e'migre' some thirty years Oswald's senior,....Both the wife and daughter would tell the Warren Commission that it was he who had arranged for Oswald's employment at Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall. Not the Texas Employment Commission, as official records would have us believe.....
George Sergei de Mohrenschildt is another of those remarkablely enigmatic characters whom we find permeating the assassination's landscape. He was born in Czarist Russia in 1911, his father a "marshal of nobility" who served as director of Nobel oil interests--hence his own title of "baron." He was a world traveler who spoke six languages and boasted membership in both the exclusive Dallas Petroleum Club and the World Affairs Council....
..."He was traveling extensively ..." one of his friends Mrs. Igor Voshinin, would tell the Warren Commission.
The commission took notice that de Mohrenschildt was acquainted with several powerful people in Houston.....Lyndon Johnson: oil millionaire John Mecom...Another friend of de Mohrenschildt was Jean De Menil of Schlumberger Wells Services Company, who in 1961 permitted his New Orleans branch to be used as an ammunition conduit for the CIA.
The baron's affinity for people in high places even extended as far as LBJ and another future American president, George Bush....
De Mohrenschildt's personal telephone book, discovered after his alleged suicide in 1977, contained this entry: "Bush, George. H. W. (Poppy) 1412 W. Ohio also Zapata Petroleum Midland." (Footnote: "Bush name in de Mohrenschildt notebook: Mark Lane, Plausible Denial p. 332. Lane also notes odd similarities among Bush's Zapata Offshore oil company, the "Operation Zapata" code name given to the Bay of Pigs invasion, and the names of the invasions ships "Barbara" (Bush's wife's name) and "Houston" (Bush's business abode).
....deMohrenschildt later told his wife Jeanne, he was "playing a double game". (pp.273)
...In the summer of 1962, de Mohrenschildt maintained that an associate of J. Walton Moore provided him Oswald's address in Fort Worth, suggesting he might want to meet him. De Mohrenschildt called Moore, noting that in exchange for his services with Oswald, the State Department might assist him with an oil exploration deal he was trying to make in Haiti. (pp.274)
...As de Mohrenschildt eventually wrote in a manuscript about Oswald (reprinted in entirety by the House Assassinations Committee in 1979), his wife, Jeanne, particularly hit it off with the returning defector....(pp.275)
When I told de Mohrenschildt I was a writer, his response was quick. "And I'll bet you want to talk about Lee Harvy Oswald."..."It is all in the Warren Commission. All this new talk is so much lies and bullshit. Nothing will ever be solved, unless somebody comes up with a confession."
"Whatever you write ," he said abruptly, "Lee Harvey Oswald was smart as hell. They make a moron out of him."..."Lee was the most honest many I knew. He was--what?"--deMohrenschildt raised his hand dramatically--"he was ahead of his time really, a kind of hippie of those days....I'll tell you this he did not shoot the President". ..."You hear the way I speak English. I've been here thirty-five years and still I have a foreign accent. And Lee hardly had a foreign accent in Russian, a much more difficult language than English. (pp.278)
I explained I had heard a rumor about twelve hours of taped interviews that George (de Mohrenschidlt) was suppose to have given a Dutch journalist friend named Willem Oltmans.....Jeanne was adamant that she didn't want them out....they decided to write their journalist friend and tell them not to release them under any circumstances.... .
In 1974 de Mohrenschidlt had written the journalist a letter that said in part: "In case of my removal from the scene--by assassination or otherwise--you will be able to sell the tapes.....According to Oltmans, in 1975 the finished film would mysteriously disappear from the Dutch Broadcasting Corporation's archives..... (279)
A few days after de Mohrenschildt's death, Oltmans told newsmen in Washington that de Mohrenschildt had revealed to him: (1) Cubans "who thought that President Kennedy had betrayed them at the Bay of Pigs" had fired at the same time as Oswald and (2) deMohrenschildt had served as a middleman between Oswald and Dallas's wealthy H.L. Hunt oil family . " Mr. deMohrenschildt indicated to me very strongly that his ties upward were toward H. L. Hunt and dowstairs to Lee Harvey Oswald." (pp281)
"Billionaire Texas oilman H.L. Hunt, said by ex-employees to have purchased first copy of the Zapruder film and ordered a check on security surrounding Oswald in custody..... (pp.410)
...via the Oltman's account, de Mohrenschidlt was murdered by two men. They first offered him safe passage to Mexico, and they also asked him to sign a false document draw on up by the CIA. ...these experts know only too well how to make it look like a suicide." pp.282
After I alerted Nagell to the impending publication of Morrow's book, in mid-May of 1976 he sent a certified letter to then CIA director George Bush. Nagell wrote: "I am now advised by a 'most reliable source' that while Mr. Morrow claims to have received much of his information about me from people in the Cuban exile community, a substantial portion of his account actually is based on an unsupported allegations furnished to him by a CIA official who retired in 1974. (pp.409)
Five hours after the assassination, Ily Mamantov, who had never seen Oswald, received a phone call from Jack Crichton asking him to serve as interpreter for the interrogation of Marina. Crichton was in 1963 the president of Nafco Oil & Gas, Inc., and a former head of Military Intelligence. According to information uncovered by the Garrison investigations, Crichton had been among a small group of Army Intelligence officials who met with H.L. Hunt soon after the assassination.
.....George de Mohrenschildt, in his Warren Commission testimony, would describe Mamantov as the one "excessive rightist" of the Dallas's Russian e'migre' community.
Interestingly Mrs. Igor Voshinin told me in 1992 that Mamantov "knew George Bush very well". Bush was president of Zapata Oil in Houston in 1963. "Mamantov died recently," said Voshinin, "but he told me that he had received a very charming letter from President Bush. I remember one line: 'You and I did it'." (She could not recall the context.) pp680
.....After the Watergate break-in where several ex -CIA men and Cuban exiles were caught in 1972, Richard Nixon expressed worry on the White House tape-recording system that this might open up "the whole Bay of Pigs thing." Nixon's chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman later wrote of his belief that the president was really talking about the Kennedy assassination.
George Bush, a Texas oilman in 1963, is also found on the periphery of the assassination. As noted earlier in this book, his name appeared in George de Mohrenschildt's personal notebook and
bush was a friend of Marina Oswald's translator, Ilya Mamantov. When George Bush became CIA director (1976-78), Nagell is on record as having written to him about Robert Morrow's book "Betrayal"
The White House has denied that the president was the "Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency" idntified in a Novermber 1963, FBI memorandum as having been briefed by the FBI on the reacton of Miami's Cuban exiles. But there is no denying the existence of another recently released FBI memo, which begins:
"On Novermber 22, 1963, Mr. George H.W. Bush, 5525 Briar, Houston, Texas, telephonically advised that he wanted to relate some hearsay that he had heard in recent week, date and source unknown. He advised that on James Parrott had been talking of killing the President when he comes to Houston."
An FBI investigation into Bush's charge failed to turn up any connection whatsoever tying James Parrott to the assassination. Parrott was then an active member of Houston's Young Republicans, who had been involved in picketing members of the Kennedy administration. Bush was then serving as campaign manager for future Republican senator John Tower. Since Parrott's group had come out strongly against a then nascent alliance between Texas Republicans and representatives of the petroleum industry, Bush and Parrott were political enemies..... (pp. 709-10)
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