Ruth (b. 1932) and Michael Paine (b. 1928) were a CIA couple
assigned to babysit another CIA agent Lee Oswald and family while they resided
in Dallas. We believe that the primary reason for the association was
James Angleton’s plan to murder Oswald.
When Oswald returned from the USSR in 1962 under eyebrow raising
circumstances with a Soviet wife, James Angleton was all beside himself,
fearing that Oswald had been compromised or was a double agent. To limit his
perceived losses, he spawned an elaborate plan to murder Oswald.
Shortly after returning to the US, CIA operative George
DeMohrenschildt introduced Oswald to Michael and Ruth Paine at a party given by
an employee of the Magnolia Oil Company, Volkmar Schmidt. Ruth Paine, allegedly
a Quaker, claimed that she wanted to help the beleaguered young couple
establish themselves in Dallas, in return for which Oswald’s wife, Marina,
would give Russian language lessons to Ruth, who claimed that she wanted to
learn the language.
The main problem with her story is that Ruth already knew
Russian for she was teaching it at a school in Dallas. Furthermore, we know
that she had family connections to the CIA, including associations with Allan
Dulles, director of the CIA until 1961 when Kennedy fired him for his bungled
Bay of Pigs disaster.
The salient point of interest is that Paine knew Russian and
would be the ideal babysitter for Oswald as she could monitor Lee’s and Marina’s
conversations when staying at her house – something which she insisted that
Marina do from the beginning. It is well known that the CIA sent Ruth Paine to
many foreign and domestic locations to gather intelligence. So her work with the
Oswalds was fully consistent with her job as spy.
Paine was also used to plant false evidence on Oswald,
including the famous backyard photos of him holding a rifle. We also speculated
with good reason elsewhere that Paine was the one who used the fake identity of
Alek Hidell to order a rifle from Klein mail order, an identity which was subsequently
planted on Oswald after his arrest.
In addition to these connections, Dallas Police Officer
Roger Craig noted in early 1968, when he finally saw his testimony to the
Warren Commission, that the Commission altered his statements concerning Ruth
Paine – a clear indication that she was far more important than most anyone
knew.
Craig had observed Oswald enter a light green Nash Rambler which,
he stated to the Warren Commission and
in his memoirs, did not have a license plate matching Texas plate
colors. According to Craig “The driver
of the station wagon was a husky looking Latin, with dark wavy hair, wearing a
tan wind breaker type jacket” who had been arrested immediately after
the assassination but just as quickly released because he did not speak
English!
But the point about the Rambler is extremely important
because it appears in 2 more instances of the investigation. Edgar Eugene
Bradley, whom Craig said claimed to be a Secret Service agent, stopped him for
information about the Rambler into which Oswald entered – in fact he was
obsessed with the details about it.
The reason for his interest in the Rambler was undoubtedly
because Ruth Paine owned such a vehicle of the same color, a fact which police
officer Buddy Walthers confirmed when he and “Harry Weatherford, and we met Officer Adamcik
that works for the city [Irving] and Officer Rose and another one of their
officers…” went to Ruth Paine’s home in Irving, Texas where they saw a similar
vehicle. Our speculation is that it was the same one.
Paine told the Walthers that she was expecting them, yet the
news of Oswald’s arrest had not been made public and Marina did not seem to
know that he had been arrested. Thus, Paine let slip very incriminating
evidence that she knew Oswald was being framed as the patsy.
If the vehicle which the “husky Latin” was driving was
indeed Paine’s vehicle, he had completed his errand by the time police arrived
at the Paine’s. We believe that his assigned task was to take Oswald to the
Texas Theater where he was caged like a trapped rat.
The man claiming to be a Secret Service agent – Bradley –
was in reality a right winged preacher from North Hollywood and closely
associated with Carl McIntire, both of whom we believe were involved in the
assassination conspiracy.
Later in life when Paine was on assignment in Nicaragua during
the 1990s, she very briefly and opaquely opened up to a friend concerning the
murder and her part in it:
There was, however, one occasion when the friend tried to
bring up the assassination when Ruth began to say how sad she was that her
daughter (then about 40) was estranged from her. Ruth said that her daughter
told her that she refused to talk to her until “she came to grips with the evil
that she had been associated with.” The friend said that Ruth had tears in her
eyes when she said this and was certain that this was a veiled reference to the
Kennedy assassination.
Of course we have no sympathy for Paine who is indeed an
evil woman who framed an innocent man and assisted the assassins in their goals
of murdering a president.
But in 1963, Paine’s largest value to the CIA was her knowledge of Russian which made her the perfect babysitter for the Oswalds. Her avid interest in an ostensibly non-descript, returning defector, can only mean that she was eye ball deep in the CIA, and assisting Angleton in the murder of Oswald.
Steve Jones, New Evidence Regarding Ruth and Michael Paine, Kennedy Assassination Chronicles, Winter 1998
Bill Kelly, Ruth Paine's Garage, JFKCountercoup, December 9, 2009
Various, Ruth Paine's Station Wagon, Education Forum thread, started April 28, 2006
Roger Craig, When They Kill a President, 1971, republished electronically ratical.org
Copyright 2013 Tony Bonn. All rights reserved.
