This is the current draft of the talk I plan to give this coming Friday at the Wecht Conference in Pittsburgh marking the 60th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy.
~ Robert
The title of this talk is slightly misleading. An inside perspective. I am not an insider, I am an in-law. But that’s just a joke, and to be serious I have given a lot of thought and anxiousness to what can responsibly be my perspective. The best I can come up with is “personal “. I hope that will be interesting to this audience and shed a little ray of light on the mysteries and murk that we are all trying to see through.
I was married for 25 years to a first cousin of Michael Paine on the Forbes side. I am here today still processing the shock of finding out only when I saw Max Good’s film “ the Assassination and Mrs. Paine” that someone I had rubbed shoulders with, had seen, at family summer vacations, but did not know, had been so caught up in the drama of the assassination of our president.
I chose my words carefully; “caught up in” expresses my opinion that I know of no reason to believe that Michael Paine knowingly intended to facilitate the assassination of our president. But, then, I don’t believe that David Atlee Philips did either. So there is much to figure out.
I do believe that my acquaintance with a part of Michael and Ruth Paine’s world can contribute to our understanding of the crime. At a minimum add a bit of information worth building into the fact pattern we base our hypotheses on.
As far as acquaintance with his world is concerned, I have met or seen most of the family members who were at his wedding with Ruth Hyde Paine in Media, Pennsylvania. I have been a guest for tea at the home in Paoli, PA of his mother Ruth Forbes Paine Young and his stepfather, Arthur Young. I have been in the barn where Arthur developed his helicopter prototypes.
Strangely, I grew up three miles west of Media, in Lima, and know the Meeting House on Providence Road where they exchanged promises.
All of this is more motivation than explanation. Since I saw Max Good’s film I have sought to answer the question, “How did Lee Oswald come to be hanging out with Michael Paine in 1963? And, does insight into the possible answers to this question shed light on the larger question, “who is accountable for the murder of our president?”
No member or representative of the Forbes family has asked me to do this. Some have expressed discomfort. We all have biases, so I will state mine, despite my joke about being an in-law, an ex-in-law to boot, you may consider me a stakeholder in an understanding of that family’s place in history; my grandchildren are Forbes’ as well as Manz’s after all; and, you may consider me a stakeholder in our collective understanding of the fate of the president my mother took me to see campaigning on Middletown Road one Saturday morning in 1960.
There are three sections following
Information that may add to the profile of Michael Paine as a security risk
How J Walton Moore did his job
Who was Lee Oswald
Perhaps Vince Salandria took a first look at the question of Michael Paine’s profile as a security risk. Michael’s biological father was a leading American communist, Trotskyite branch. His stepfather was an inventor of helicopter design and co founder of Bell Helicopter. In 1963 Michael Paine was a design engineer for advanced aircraft at Bell Helicopter, working on vertical takeoff and landing craft precursors of the Osprey.
Not nuclear weapons, but still, secret military projects. Vince felt that the son of a communist would need to cut a deal to get his security clearance…. a little minding of a marxist defector. I wonder. Would not the stepson of the company founder have more pull? Presumably that’s what got him the job in the first place. I consider this an open question.
(I have recently learned from Nancy Wertz Weiford, who is working on an intensive study of Michael Paine, that the security clearance he held was at the middle level of a three stage scale)
So as a a holder of a security clearance one can see that questions of security risk might hover around Michael Paine. We have one element…. his father was a communist. I can add another. His uncle, his mother’s brother, my future father in law, was the past lover of and in regular correspondence with a Swedish leftist who had won the Stalin Peace Prize in 1953.
Michael’s maternal uncle, my father in law, William H. Forbes, was in regular correspondence with his former partner, Dr. Andrea Andreen, recipient of the Stalin Peace Prize in 1953. Dr. Andreen, a Swedish physician of repute and consequence - had received that award as an advocate for women’s rights as active professionals, as an advocate for nuclear disarmament and world peace, as an advocate for social justice, and as a member of the international team of scientists led by Joseph Needham to investigate North Korean and Chinese claims that the United States was waging biological warfare in that conflict.
They concluded in the affirmative, and as part of their investigation interviewed captured American airmen who had signed statements that they had engaged in acts of biological warfare.
Dr. Andreen therefore was in the middle of the single most embarrassing incident for the US military in that conflict, one that gave rise to the term “brainwashing “ and probably to the infamous mind control project of the CIA, MKULTRA . For her trouble, according to her biographer, Ulrike Nilsson, she became a target of Swedish Intelligence SWAPO, for the rest of her life.
I assume they were reading her mail. I assume James Angleton was too.
All of this would make Andrea Andreen a character in one of Allen Dulles’ biggest dreams or nightmares.
My father-in-law, William H. Forbes, was a regular correspondent of Andrea Andreen from at least 1951 to 1968. His letters to her are preserved in the Archives of the Humanities Library of Göteberg University in Sweden. I have been there to read them.
They had formed a relationship in the 1930’s. He was the eldest son of a prominent Brahmin family, the namesake grandson of a cavalry officer in the Union Army who had married a daughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Graduated from Harvard, he declined to study business as his father wished, spent a year teaching at the American University of Beirut and then did a doctorate in Physiology at Cambridge . Andrea Andreen studied medicine, had two children with Theo Svedberg, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, but the marriage foundered, perhaps because she declined his request to assist in his laboratory and decided to pursue her own research in hers.
That brought her to Boston to Massachusetts General Hospital and work with Elliott Joslin on the use of insulin as a therapy for diabetes.
It was in this period that they were romantic partners, his mother disapproved. She returned to Sweden and he married another to be prominent research physician at Mass General Anne Pappenheimer, who became a major contributor to the field of endocrinology.
The split was amicable, they were friends for the rest of their lives, the families traded visits of children.
Not surprisingly I found no clear indication that he felt anyone was looking over their shoulders as they corresponded, although, knowing that he enjoyed a subtle dig, I did note that just about every other letter expressed despair at the foreign policy of “that damn Dulles”. I paraphrase. I did note that he broke his usual pattern of writing around the New Year, and sent a letter four days after the assassination, a few pages on career issues preceded an account of the disaster, and a conventional conclusion of the lone nut gunmen. No mention of the Paines.
I went to Sweden to read the letters of William H Forbes to Andrea Andreen his romantic partner in the 1930’s and winner of the Stalin Peace Prize in 1953. Was James Angleton reading their letters? I haven’t found the answer to that question yet, but I do know that the CIA read his memo. I thought of entitling this part “Science attaché? - No spying “
From 1954 to the end of 1955, William H Forbes was Science Attaché to the American embassy in Paris. He had been preceded in the position by his good friend and cousin in law, Jeffries Wyman, an expert in form and function of proteins, particularly hemoglobin. I knew Wyman’s daughter well, I was surprised to find out recently in reading Oppenheimer, that Wyman was a good friend of his. We are in some rarified circles of science here, and of national security paranoia.
In the correspondence folder I found an off print of an essay Forbes wrote in 1957 for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on the proper role and definition of the position of Science Attaché . He had initialed and addressed the copy to Andrea Andreen.
Presumably his essay was part of a larger effort by the State Department to examine this question, and presumably that was a reboot of the Second Hoover Commission on the Reorganization of the Executive Branch section on Scientific Attachés that ended disastrously when someone forgot to classify its recommendation that all information gathering by the science attachés be at the direction of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Oops. That revelation discredited the half dozen or so attachés in place and they were all hastily removed about the same time as his tenure ended.
Forbes’ position in his recommendations for the position was different: it is a vital position in an age where science has become a strategic component, it is very useful for promoting peaceful exchanges and personal connections; information gathering and exchange yes, but NO SPYING.
That is a summary of my reading of his memo.
We have a little history about the fate of the position of Science Attaché from a later CIA internal memorandum recounting bureaucratic infighting between the State Department and the Intelligence Community. The position of this memo, written in 1966, and declassified in 1994 was essentially this - IF NO SPYING, SCIENCE ATTACHÉ IS A WASTE OF TIME AND EFFORT.
The author of the CIA memo, one Wilton Lexow, presumably not on the clandestine side of the Agency, included a dozen or so references in his footnotes and there, item 8, was the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists article from 1957, written by William H Forbes.
It remains to be seen whether the CIA were reading his mail, but it is crystal clear that they read his memo.
They knew who he was.
And they knew who Andrea Andreen was.
I have reviewed publicly available records turned up by a search of cia.gov for Andrea Andreen. She showed up as a senior officer in two organizations that made their top ten of Communist Front Organizations around the globe - Women’s International Democratic Foundation, World Peace Council.
So perhaps, in 1955, as his time as science attache wound up, the intelligence services were interested as letters went back and forth arranging a visit to Sweden by Forbes before the family moved back to the States.
To Summarize Michael Paine’s security risk profile
Position: advanced military aircraft development . Cleared for “secret”
Background:
Father a communist
Uncle corresponding with a Swedish Soviet sympathizer of global stature
This may have been of interest to James Angleton. It was surely of interest to J Walton Moore; knowing about this was in his job description.
Section II. A broad view of Domestic Services
The head of the Domestic Contact Services division in Dallas/Fort Worth/Houston/New Orleans had an incredibly useful cover. Debrief American professionals on their return from abroad. Thousands of them were interviewed by the Domestic Contacts program. Richard Helms could claim innocently that that is all there was between Moore and de Mohrenschildt in the early 60’s. We know that was bullshit. But in addition to the famous admission by de Mohrenschildt to Epstein hours before he (or someone) shot himself that Moore had asked him to watch over the returning defector Oswald, we have more on Moore. We have a job description that surfaced in an award letter to Moore.
Put bluntly it was Moore’s job to know everything about everyone of intelligence interest in his area, and, I add, to be a resource for clandestine services. I have included a copy of that award document.
I submit that Michael Paine was someone of intelligence interest.
How might Moore keep an eye on Paine?
Volkmar Schmidt, Everett Glover, and….
Lee Oswald.
I just gave a short form reassessment of the Magnolia Party. It is an event worthy of Kurosawa to tell, but today I want to jump to Lee.
Section III. Who was Lee Oswald?
In looking at how Lee came to connect with the Paines the usual line of inquiry is that they were signed on as minders somehow. Perhaps through her sister who worked for the CIA, perhaps through his mother’s friendship with Mary Bancroft, past mistress and still family friend of Allen Dulles? Or, pressure through Michael’s job, Salandria’s quid pro quo. And, of course through George de Mohrenschildt, but I know of no connection between them and him, except of course, Everett Glover. All of this is much worked over ground, and, worth working over. But….
I suggest looking at the flip side. Rather than Lee being their assignment, maybe they were Lee’s assignment. Or, of course, both.
I see Lee as a false defector, an intelligence asset, some kind of counterintelligence troll.
After Lee returned from Russia everything he did can be looked at as work of an intelligence asset in training.
His project to type up his notes about industry in Minsk.
His job at Jaggars Chiles Stovall that began at the same time as the Cuban missile crisis.
His participation in the Walker stunt.
His placement at Reily Coffee where he did the minimum of work and hung around the garage where agents came and went.
His elaborate provocation as a “founder” of FPCC in New Orleans culminating in his arrest and the radio debates with DRE that publicized his Marxist credentials.
His trip to Mexico City seeking to capitalize on same to gain entry to Cuba.
And back in Dallas his participation in what he believed was yet another provocation, only it wasn’t.
To define Lee I go back to information provided by Robert Oswald about Lee’s obsessive youthful viewing of “ I led three Lives”. Herbert Philbrick was not a communist, he was a mole.
Lee Oswald was not a Marxist he was a provocateur.
But like Philbrick his life work was outing communists. I submit that his acquaintance with Michael Paine was such an assignment. When they first met, Lee showed Michael the famous photograph of Lee channeling Che Guevara. He wanted to get a rise out of Michael.
When Lee and Michael went to an ACLU meeting together, Lee effectively played a game with Michael that could be called “let’s spot the Commie”.
On the night of November 23 when Lee requested John Abt as his attorney, he was still playing the provocateur. It was his last such gambit.
For me this process has become a journey to understand Lee Oswald. That is a personal quest and not easily documented. I am working on dramatizing his story, but this is not the appropriate venue for that. I will just conclude by saying that I believe that there was a continuous thread in Lee’s life from his adulation of Herbert Philbrick to his connection with Michael Paine to the presence of his rifle on the fifth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.
Thank you
William Forbes
Andrea Andreen
captured USAirmen. Commission with North Korean hosts. Andrea Andreen in front row far left