Why the CIA Assigned Ruth Paine to the Oswalds

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.

 

Reference

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.