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| George de Mohrenschildt with his fourth wife Jeanne |
The American George de Mohrenschildt who introduced himself to Haiti Commerce Bank president and Duvalier crony, Clémard Charles in August 1961 to discuss some business opportunities in the desperate country, was born Jerzy Sergius von Mohrenschildt in 1911 in Mozyr, Russia (now Belarus) to a family of privilege that was Swedish by heritage though Russian for generations. The family business was oil, which was why the von Mohrenschildts were in oil-rich Belarus when George was born (and not in elegant St Petersburg where his parents had met), but when the Bolsheviks confiscated oil companies' holdings in 1920, his father Sergius attempted to find a place in the new order by developing an interest in land reform. His aristocratic ways betrayed him, however, and he endured some arrests. Escaping with the help of two Jewish doctors from Siberia where he had been sent for life in 1922, he moved his family to Poland. Shortly after the family's arrival, de Mohrenschildt's mother died in an epidemic of typhoid. The details of George de Mohrenschildt's life from that point are shrouded in a cloud of shifting lies told by de Mohrenschildt himself, both to glamorize his past where glamor was called for and to obscure the details when secrecy suited the circumstances. As de Mohrenschildt chronicler Joan Mellen writes:
He was a tall, comely man over six feet tall with thick, wavy dark hair, (some remembered it as dark blond). His eyes were light blue – or, as he himself described them, green. He spoke with a pronounced accent that to some sounded German. There was nothing straightforward about him.
He was educated in turn at Polish Cavalry Academy, at the Institute of Higher Commercial Studies at University of Liège in Belgium and years later at the University of Texas at Austin. But he had other interests than academics. While in school in Belgium he had been arrested in Antwerp for public drunkenness, giving a false name to police and resisting arrest-- an incident that both followed him and set the tone for the rest of his life.
He was preceded to the US by his brother Dmitri von Mohrenschildt who had success as a professor of foreign language at Dartmouth where he also edited an anti-Soviet journal and had a side career in military intelligence. An early recruit of the CIA in 1950, Dmitri contributed to Reader's Digest -- the ubiquitous monthly that was the mass propaganda outlet of the organization-- and helped to start Radio Free Europe. de Mohrenschildt's father, Sergius von Mohrenschildt, too had done some intelligence work in Russia for the Abwehr, Hitler's Intelligence Service, in the 1930's and was briefly courted by the CIA in the 50's, though relocating the elderly man with the Nazi past proved too daunting for anything to come of it.
In 1938, George von Mohrenschildt set off by himself in a sailboat from Le Havre, France to New York, declaring his intentions to immigrate to the American officials who met him ashore at the North American end of his traverse. It didn't take long for him to make a splash in some circles of New York society. With a cosmopolitan sense of humor, he amused himself by shocking Americans with the fascist point of view in conversations, even taking it as far on occasion as giving a Heil Hitler and Nazi salute for emphasis. His politics were as fluid as the details of his history: in other circles, he extolled the benefits of communism. He was the kind of guest that would make you have to check your children afterward to make sure he hadn't said anything untoward or behaved inappropriately with them. At this stage of his time in America he replaced the 'von' in his surname with 'de' "to make it sound less German." Among those he was closest to were the Bouviers. Jacqueline recalled being bounced on his knee as a child and calling him Uncle George. But it was the future first lady's aunt, Edith Bouvier Beale (to be immortalized in the 1975 documentary Grey Gardens) with whom he was closest, and whose relationship he would mention when he needed to make an impression.
Ensconced in America, he had a knack for getting high paying jobs that indulged his aversion to work. For a time he was an insurance adjuster for a New York firm he was eventually asked to leave because he could not pass an insurance exam. In Texas, he did petroleum geology for Humble Oil. But his activities outside of work, sometimes got him in trouble. In 1941, he was spotted in a small boat off the coast of Corpus Christi, suspiciously close to a military installation. When the Coast Guard approached him, he greeted them warmly, told them he was fishing. When they asked him about his camera and some drawings he had been doing of the buildings on the shore, he told them it was just a hobby that kept him entertained when the fish weren't biting. The Coast Guard wasn't exactly biting either. The FBI began a file on him that was dutifully added to on reports of each new outlandish incident.
When the US entered the Second World War, de Mohrenschildt secured a 4F status on the basis of having "a weak heart". When asked, he made it clear he was not interested in helping out with the war effort. Instead he desired a re-entry visa to permit him to visit a married older woman he was having a torrid affair with in Mexico City. In light of the Corpus Christi incident, his request was denied. When he complained, the board was obliged to remind him he was lucky to not be deported altogether. In spite of his difficulties with the authorities, he carried on his affair until it stopped being to his benefit, at which point he entered his tumultuous first marriage to a teenage heiress. With de Mohrenschildt pursuing other women in front of his wife and perpetrating domestic abuse with a hammer in private, it ended in divorce in 1944, after two years.
In 1945, out of options in the east, he moved to Texas and entered the University at Austin to study petroleum geology. Scandal followed him there: womanizing, cheating on exams, publicly shaming his Czech born Russian professor over his poor Russian accent. As Joan Mellen put it, he acted like a man who "had nothing to lose." Nevertheless he earned his Master's Degree, and in 1946 began working as an officer for the Rangely Field Engineering Committee in Colorado, where he promptly returned to his pattern of shirking and bilking his employers, first of money in the form of a salary paid his second wife for a made-up job, and then in furniture which he had loaded up in a trailer and carted to his accommodations. Caught in the act, he lost his job and his wife, but back in Texas, he soon rebounded with wife number three, Wynne Sharples, his wealthiest yet, an oilman's daughter studying to become an MD. The usual volatility and physical abuse ensued. Of de Mohrenschildt's attitude in these years, Joan Mellen writes:
He resented the rich and successful, since he was neither, and periodically professed sympathy with Marxism. “Comes the revolution,” de Mohrenschildt told Sharples, “you and your family will be first to go.” Mannered, sly, he pretended to be sympathetic toward the poor and the marginalized. “The best people are the Negroes,” he said. “They are simple and good and not rich.” As if he were Levin in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, he said, “All we need is nature and the peasants.” Yet on occasion he slapped the servants.
To get away from his wife's complaints during the day, he used her money to start a business in 1954 developing oil deals, but the business hemorrhaged money. In 1956, Sharples filed for divorce. de Mohrenschildt contested it until his wife threatened to expose him as a homosexual. He settled for 100 shares of his father-in-law's oil company.
1956 was also notable as the year of his first visit to Haiti where he remained until his client Sinclair Oil gave up on the prospects for finding new sources.
In his capacity as a petroleum geologist in Texas in the 50s, de Mohrenschildt worked for several outfits with strong CIA connections: Brown & Root, Schlumberger, and Pantepec Oil for whom he did surveys in Venezuela. Moreover, even after his divorces he retained relationships with CIA-connected former in-laws. His second wife's uncle was in Guatemala for the CIA-backed coup that deposed the popularly elected, land reforming president Jacobo Árbenz in 1954. His former step-nephew who had been future CIA director George H.W. Bush's roommate at Andover Academy was a partner in several ventures. de Mohrenschildt had powerful connections in George Brown of Brown & Root and his former boss, the independent oilman John Mecom. According to the Los Angeles Times, Brown and Mecom were invested in a venture called the San Jacinto Fund, whose mission was to use business and government pretexts for CIA assets as a means of infiltration in foreign and domestic affairs, a program that was not subject to public approval or review. As the article stated:
The Americans thus involved made it possible for the CIA to penetrate, financially, the structure of private institutions here and abroad without public knowledge of what was going on. And they made it possible for the beneficiaries of this secret money to accept it without suspicion of taint.
The defects of de Mohrenschildt's personality -- recklessness, amorality, narcissism, facility with lying, tactlessness, objectionability, lack of ethics-- were assets in intelligence. The fact that he had apparently no one who'd be willing to protect him gave him the special quality of disposability which made him perfectly suited for the kind of work the agency was up to. He began his association in 1957.
That year, he was sent to Yugoslavia officially to advise the government on the management of oil resources, but was ejected after 8 months for making drawings of military fortifications. (In the typically perverse way his life worked, he would be back in Yugoslavia within 2 years without protest or incident). His next assignment was Ghana where he had more success, followed by several other trips to Europe, notably Hungary, yet another country under the purview of the Soviets, and the site of an unsuccessful insurrection in 1956.
By 1959, he had married his 4th wife, Jeanne Le Gon another aristocratic Russian national who had been born in Harbin, China, a fact that de Mohrenschildt jokingly acknowledged in one of his CIA noms de guerre, "Phillip Harbin." In late 1960 through 1961, he and his new wife embarked on what they told friends in Dallas was a "walking tour" of Central and South America. The funding for what was described as a lark remained mysterious, as do details of what transpired for the 14 months that de Mohrenschildt and his wife went off the grid. Not much is known about the adventure, but at its conclusion, de Mohrenschildt entertained the idea of writing a book about it, and went as far as writing President John Kennedy to invite him to contribute an introduction to it, mentioning his friendship with the First Lady's mother, Janet Auchincloss and her aunt Edith Beale as enticement. The offer was declined, and no book was produced. What is known about the trip from CIA records is that along the way the couple encountered personnel in training by the CIA in Guatemala for the ill-fated top secret Bay of Pigs invasion intended to depose Fidel Castro in Cuba that the newly elected President Kennedy would green light in April 1961, and immediately come to regret. It's also known that the tour wound up in Haiti where de Mohrenschildt spent several weeks and met with Duvalier's banker Clémard Charles for the first time.
Charles was president of Haiti's first private financial institution, Banque Commercial D'Haïti or Haiti Commerce Bank. An early supporter of François 'Papa Doc' Duvalier's 1957 presidential campaign, Charles had used bribes to ensure that the Army would not stand in the way of a Duvalier victory-- something not to be taken for granted. As an unusually wealthy self-made man in Haiti and an unofficial officer of Duvalier's specially created volunteer secret police, the Tontons Macoute, he had Duvalier's ear. Furthermore, Duvalier preferred to deposit the millions received in foreign aid into the Commerce Bank rather than the National Bank of Haiti. (For his part, de Mohrenschildt used the services of the Haitian National Bank to procure no less than seven loans beginning in 1959.)
To Clémard Charles, George de Mohrenschildt was not merely a customer so much as a partner in the ventures he brought to him. As a business contact stemming from de Mohrenschildt's first meetings with him, Charles vouched for de Mohrenschildt to Haitian officials in his plan to conduct a geological survey of Haiti for petroleum and mineral resources, with de Mohrenschildt to provide the funding for explorations to minimize any interested investors' risk. Subsequently de Mohrenschildt shared an ambitious idea for Charles' consideration, the development of a Haitian Holding Company which de Mohrenschildt conjectured would do nothing less than re-structure Haiti's economy. According to Joan Mellen's description:
As outlined in a document generated in Dallas on de Mohrenschildt’s letterhead and dated August 1, 1962, the Haitian Holding Company would be incorporated in the state of Texas. It would provide the following to Haiti: increased tobacco planting; a new cigar factory; cheap housing; a new wharf; and a hydroelectric plant “in conjunction with the dam that had already been built in 1953 by Brown & Root.” It promised projects that included: canning lobster tails; marketing coconut candy; building a cotton wool plant; organizing a local insurance company (Papa Doc had already granted Charles a monopoly on automobile insurance on the island); operating a sisal plantation; hemp factories; several sugar plantations; a casino; a film production company – and more.
The prospectus for the company made mention of "Haiti's special geographical position" in a less than veiled reference to the strategic and economic counterpoint Duvalier's Haiti provided to Castro's Cuba.
But Clémard Charles had more in mind than the mere economic development of Haiti when he chose de Mohrenschildt's partnership over other prospects of the time. It was de Mohrenschildt's Texas connections that gave him special cachet. Texas itself was a powerful state that boasted petroleum money and outsize political influence in the US. The free wheeling nature of Texas ambitions were suited to the challenges of economically underdeveloped Haiti. Both Lyndon Johnson and George H.W. Bush were Texans who had profited from corruption in Haiti -- Johnson with kickbacks from the Haitian meat industry in return for pro-Haiti votes, and Bush from dealings in Zapata Oil. More importantly to Charles, Texas was the land of CIA, which everyone knew was capable of, and by all indications planning on, removing the erratic dictator Duvalier from such a geopolitically strategic vantage as Haiti. It was in his capacity as CIA asset that de Mohrenschildt stood to be more useful to Clémard Charles.
If the CIA wanted to remove Duvalier, then Charles wanted to be the replacement. He expressed the ambition to de Mohrenschildt who made it a project to see that Charles' proposition got a hearing in the right channels. Letters were exchanged between de Mohrenschildt, Charles and officials in Washington, and meetings were arranged. In May 1963, Charles flew to the US under the pretext of government business and met with officials in New York and Washington to discuss his qualifications and his serious intentions. In Washington, officials were dismayed when Charles was joined by de Mohrenschildt whose reputation preceded him, and who in typical overbearing fashion managed to alienate the Department of Defense personnel in attendance to the point that Charles' name was unceremoniously scuttled down the list of potential horses to back in anti-Duvalier schemes. Charles and de Mohrenschildt didn't know that, however, and de Mohrenschildt continued to insinuate himself into Charles' campaign, at one point stealing stationery from the exclusive Tennis and Racquet club in New York in an effort to impress would-be investors in the Haitian Holding Company.
Charles' ambitions were not de Mohrenschildt's only preoccupation in the spring of 1963. The previous summer he had returned to Fort Worth for one last order of business. de Mohrenschildt the snobbish cosmopolitan socialite was now with his wife squiring a recently arrived rough and unpleasant young American ex-marine who had recently reversed a defection to the Soviet Union, returning to the States with his Russian bride after nearly 3 years. Lee and Marina Oswald were not the usual sort that de Mohrenschildt associated with but suddenly they were very much travelling in the same circles that fall. The attentions de Mohrenschildt lavished on the couple included paying outstanding bills, providing a place for Marina to stay when Lee was in a violent mood, offering job counseling and sheparding the couple around town to one function or another. In February 1963, the de Mohrenschildt's hosted a party for the Oswalds attended by among others the son of one of Voice of America's executives, and by Ruth Paine who would take Marina and the Oswald's newly born baby daughter June in later that spring while Lee went to New Orleans for the summer. One spring night while de Mohrenschildt was sharing home movies of his Latin American walking tour with neighbors, Oswald showed up. When asked about this unlikely friendship, de Mohrenschildt described it as charity toward an emigrée and her American husband. In actuality his role was -- to use a CIA term-- to "babysit" Oswald; to groom and tend to an asset for whom someone had plans. Oswald's time in Russia had been spent as part of a "false defector" program used as a cover by operatives expected to infiltrate Soviet society for intelligence. Marina, whom Oswald married after only 6 weeks of courtship was the niece of an employee in the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Minsk -- the setting of de Mohrenschildt's early childhood-- where she and Oswald had met. Back in the states following his Soviet mission, Oswald's time was managed by de Mohrenschildt in Fort Worth and by Clay Shaw, immortalized in the movie JFK, in New Orleans.
A relic from the time was a souvenir photograph Oswald had given de Mohrenschildt and inscribed "To my friend George, from Lee Oswald". Taken in Oswald's backyard it shows Oswald brandishing his soon-to-be infamous Mannlicher-Carcano rifle in one hand and holding copies of The Militant and The Worker rival communist newspapers in the other, with headlines referring to a recent unsuccessful attempt by an unknown assailant to kill the staunch anti-communist conservative General Edwin Walker through a window of his East Texas home. On receiving the photograph, de Mohrenschildt joked: too bad that Oswald had missed. A second inscription on the back of the photograph, written in Russian, ostensibly by Marina, read: "Killer of fascists. Ha-ha-ha!"
By June of 1963, de Mohrenschildt was ready to move to Haiti permanently. He had already said goodbye to Lee and Marina in April, and would be gone when Oswald returned to Texas from New Orleans to rent an apartment by himself in Dallas. It seemed that de Mohrenschildt's work with Oswald was done. Back in Haiti, Papa Gede, the vodou loa of President François 'Papa Doc' Duvalier, the sworn enemy of President John F. Kennedy, had other ideas.
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Umbrella Man:
Part 3: The Émigré
