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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 12/31/14

THE JFK CASE: THE TWELVE WHO BUILT THE OSWALD LEGEND (Part 12: The Endgame)

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Message Bill Simpich

The most famous example of a CIA man that used AID as cover was Dan Mitrione, who tortured the Tupamaros of Uraguay until he was kidnapped in a famous standoff that inspired Costa-Gavras' movie State of S iege.

Hyde was no Dan Mitrione. The CIA admitted on 12/3/63 that the International Organizations division of the CIA was considering using William Hyde for covert use in 1957; however, it claims that he didn't "receive a security clearance". This was the terrain of Cord Meyer, who was the IO chief for years and oversaw the division's name change to "Covert Action".

Based on information from the CIA's molehunting unit CI/SIG, the FBI wrote a telling report on William Hyde: "On December 4, 1963, CIA made available information to the Bureau Liaison that in 1957 CIA considered using this individual to operate a cooperative educational center in Vietnam but he was not used by the CIA. Investigation by CIA at that time concerning William Avery Hyde was favorable."

Ruth Paine commented: "The information about the CIA considering my father for Vietnam was a surprise. I doubt if he would have accepted such an invitation, if it was offered. He certainly didn't go. He went to Peru. He was working with the Agency for International Development. He helped to develop rural credit unions for the compasinos so that they could save enough money to make loans to themselves, instead of always paying the huge bank rates. He loved it. I know that USAID asked my father to appraise a situation in Georgetown, Guiana. He recommended against starting a project there, as he thought the local officials corrupt."

Bill Hyde was also a strong anti-communist. Dr. Richard Jenkins of the Psychiatric Evaluation Board in Washington DC went to Stanford with the Hydes, and said that "Bill Hyde had been active in the cooperative movement and therefore was aware of the attempts of the Communists to infililtrate the cooperative movement."

Like Hyde, the Hoke family was also involved in looking for communists. There is a 1955 memo to the CIA's Office of Security, discussing how William Avery Hyde was back in his hometown of Palo Alto visiting the Hokes. Brought into the circle was Dr. Jenkins and also Taylor Bielefeldt,

Bielefeldt was the CIA chief of the USSR Division of the Foreign Documents Division, who had spent a lot of time with Ruth's parents William and Carol Hyde in the 1920s and 1930s. Bielefeldt's division worked with the Joint Publications Research Service, a CIA unit that monitored public documents to study scientific and technical developments in the Soviet bloc.

Several people close to Oswald were also active in the Joint Publications Research Service. These people include legend maker #3 Priscilla Johnson, the NANA reporter in Moscow who befriended the Oswald family; legend maker #4 Richard Snyder, the American consul in Moscow; and the allegedly unwitting Spas Raikin, who greeted the Oswald family when they arrived in New York City from the USSR in 1962.

The 1955 memo mentions that Hoke, Bielefeldt and the aforementioned Dr. Richard Jenkins were all Stanford graduates. Hoke has been described as "a very brilliant person who is not very stable but who is very creative."

The focus of the 1955 meeting was about Paul and Violet Orr. Both were Communist Party members in the San Francisco Bay Area. Paul had just been harshly interrogated by HUAC earlier that year. Violet had worked in the 1930s in the CP-friendly American League Against War and Fascism, just as Harvey's informant Elizabeth Bentley had done. In more recent years, Violet had been part of the visible Communist Party leadership.

Two days after the memo, a wiretap revealed that former CP member Dorothy Wilson allegedly claimed that Ruth Paine's mother Carol Hyde - the aforementioned Unitarian minister - admitted to being a communist. Another neighbor later reported hearing this rumor.

Ruth's sister Sylvia admitted a year later that Dorothy Wilson worked at the publishing company run by her mother-in-law Helen Hoke Watts, and that Wilson had edited a book jointly written by her husband John Hoke and Mrs. Watts. Sylvia denied that her mother Carol Hyde was a communist, saying that her mother was suffering from a mental disorder.

At the time, Sylvia was supposedly working as a personnel research technician for the Air Force. However, a February 1957 memo revealed that Sylvia had been working in a semi-secret position for Naval Intelligence, and had lost her shot at a top secret position because of the Dorothy Wilson-Helen Hoke Watts relationship.

Ruth Paine made a point of telling FBI agent Jim Hosty in the weeks before the assassination that Oswald was a "Trotskyite communist". Although Oswald subscribed to both the Trotskyist newspaper and the Communist Party newspaper, he maintained that he was not a follower of either ideological persuasion.

It is reasonable to judge Ruth Paine by her family ties. Like legend maker #3 Priscilla Johnson and legend maker #9 George de Mohrenschildt, Ruth's family may have triggered too many security disapprovals for her to be put directly on the CIA payroll as an informant. Nonetheless, she had substantial ties to men such as Frederick Merrill and Fred Osborn at the State Department, and friends in common with Allen Dulles and Cord Meyer at the CIA.

There was nothing illegal about the Paines acting as an intelligence source about Soviet-related activities during the Cold War; or, at a minimum, being used as a witting or unwitting asset. That's why Hoover and the CIA treated Ruth and Michael with kid gloves, despite the Hyde family's deep left-wing background and the high-profile history of Lyman Paine in the Trotskyist movement.

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Bill Simpich is a civil rights attorney and an antiwar activist in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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