Mrs. Ruth Paine,
probably knew the Lee Harvey Oswald family better
than anybody living today.
The fact that you sheltered the family
of the accused assassin of a United States president,
has this bothered you in any way?
Has this changed your own personal life very much?
Do you feel there is a lesson to be learned here
out of the tragic events which have happened?
And if so, what?
In a downtown building,
a gunman waits at a sixth-floor window,
a high-powered rifle by his side.
Ruth and Michael Paine are do-gooders
whom nobody would've ever heard of
if it hadn't been for the accident
that one of the people they helped out in life
was Lee Harvey Oswald.
I would say they were two
of the most innocent people I ever met.
Ruth was completely candid with the FBI.
I think most of the time she's telling the truth,
but I think there are certain soft spots
where she's lying because she has to.
If you would really examine the Paines,
who they really are, what they really did,
you might find one of the real keys to the Kennedy case.
- I will always have terrible, "if only", feelings
along with many Secret Service men
and many people of the nation,
anyone who's ever had any contact with these people.
Say, if only I had done something.
I probably should start with Thursday night,
or with the-I mean, with the night before.
I first became aware of Ruth Paine in 2008
after reading a popular new book on the JFK assassination.
I was surprised to find that this liberal Quaker woman
was suspected of playing a role in the assassination plot.
I was even more surprised to find that she was still living,
just 50 miles north of me,
and that she agreed to be interviewed for my film.
- Maybe when you went to school.
This is all very, very close to me.
I was there.
Of course, my life turned upside down.
I met Lee and Marina Oswald at a party in Dallas
in February of 1963,
so it was less than a year that I knew 'em.
I was interested in knowing her
simply because she was Russian and spoke the language well.
I've been trying to learn it, and of course the best way
is to speak with someone who does know it.
She was expecting a child
and was worried about the marriage.
So, we talked as women, and at that point I was separated
from Michael, so we were both having difficulty
with our marriages.
I said, well, why don't you come and stay with me,
at least until the baby's born?
Oswald just came out some weekends.
He did not live at my house.
He was not invited to.
A very small house.
- President John F. - Kennedy departed Washington
on Thursday morning, November 21st, 1963.
On Saturday morning, November 23rd,
his body was returned to the White House.
- Oswald usually came out for the weekend
to visit with his family and we'd have meals together.
But on Thursday the 21st, he came up in the late-afternoon.
And as we crossed paths, I said
which means, our president is coming.
And he just sorta brushed by.
He went to bed very early.
I didn't see him that morning.
He was already gone when I got up.
And then I went off to the dentist,
but I left the TV on for Marina.
And when I got back, it was like 11 something.
We both just sat and watched TV, prepared some lunch.
One of the newsmen said he saw a little cloud
of something pink coming up from the president's head.
There's numerous people running up the hill.
- She said to me,
"What a terrible thing this is for Mrs. Kennedy,
and how sad that now the children
will have to grow up without a father."
I was crying and she was very upset.
Indeed, this was our condition
when the men came from the police department in Dallas
and that was the first that we had any indication
that her husband was associated with this tragic event.
They wanted to know if he had a gun.
And foolishly, I said no 'cause that's what I thought
and translated to Marina, who said, "Yes, he had a gun."
And she led the officers to the garage,
and there on the floor was a blanket roll.
She had seen the gun in the blanket roll.
One officer picked it up
and it was so empty it just folded over his arm,
clearly it didn't have a gun in it.
I was just so shocked.
Mrs. Paine, you are obviously an intelligent person
and well read, apparently.
Do you believe, for example, that there was any conspiracy,
international communist conspiracy involved in this?
- No, I think there certainly was not.
- Kennedy was elected at the height of the Cold War.
Like most politicians of his day,
JFK talked tough on communism,
but his support for civil rights
and international dialogue earned him hatred
from many right wing corners of the country.
Kennedy inherited an escalating involvement in Vietnam
that went back to the Truman administration.
Cuba, after Fidel Castro's socialist revolution,
was becoming a new battleground in the Cold War.
The Red Scare was in full effect,
with many war hawks actively planning for a nuclear showdown
with the Soviet Union.
- Let both sides begin anew the quest for peace
before the dark towers of destruction,
unleashed by science,
engulf all humanity.
Let us never negotiate out of fear,
but let us never fear to negotiate.
If a free society cannot help the many who are poor,
it cannot save the few who are rich.
- Ruth and Michael Paine are very important
in the Warren Commission volumes.
They were asked a total over 6,000 questions.
Ruth herself was asked about 5,000 questions,
which is the most questions
that any single witness was asked, by far.
They asked a lot of questions.
But I did not feel there was suspicion of me
by anyone on the Warren Commission
'cause they were really looking into it thoroughly.
The suspicion comes from people who are looking for plots
and trying to figure out who...
It's so hard to feel that such a great man
could be brought down so easily by such a small person.
That's really hard to take in.
- I think the conspiracy theories did more harm
to the country than the assassination did.
It undermined trust,
not only in government but in institutions.
- To understand the assassination
is an enormous investment of time,
analyzing where the information is coming from,
who's saying it, whether it was corrected later.
- For people who do dedicate themselves to this,
the inescapable truth about the Kennedy assassination
is that the testimony, the evidence, do not add up
to the conclusion the Warren Commission came to.
- So...
Oh, they made sense to me.
- The Warren Commission withheld mountains of evidence
from the public.
The man who was most active on the Warren Report
was Allen Dulles, former head of the CIA,
who Jack Kennedy had fired
and who really hated Jack Kennedy.
J. Edgar Hoover, on the day of the assassination
and within two hours of Oswald's arrest,
was announcing that Oswald had done it and done it alone.
How could he have known that Oswald
did not have confederates who were still at large?
The FBI intimidated witnesses to stick right
with the official version.
Numerous leads were missed.
To the White House in Washington
comes the final verdict on the fateful tragedy
which engulfed the nation 10 months ago.
The US Chief Justice Earl Warren
is the bearer of the sad epilogue.
The report... - In 1964,
Earl Warren was asked if the commission's documents
would ever be released to the public.
His answer: "Yes, there will come a time,
but it might not be in your lifetime."
Over the last five decades, public outcry led to the release
of millions of pages of documents,
but many of the most sensitive files
were held back by the CIA and FBI.
For most Americans, the killing of John F. Kennedy
remains unsettled history.
- Finally, in the mid '70s,
the Zapruder film was shown to the public
that shows Kennedy going back to the left
and everybody goes, "Hey, wait a minute
if he's shot from behind,
why is he going back to the left?"
- This is very heavy.
It's the film shot by the Dallas dress manufacturer,
Abraham Zapruder.
At the bottom of the screen, the headshot.
So, then the House Select Committee looked
at it again and they concluded
that it's likely there was a conspiracy,
both in Kennedy's case and Martin Luther King's case,
and that was the official conclusion.
- I submit to you that what took place
on November 22nd, 1963, was a coup d'état.
- This was a package of unfathomable lies,
packaged together though with a cinema artist's great skill.
- It really illustrates how wrong that film was
or how fictitious it was
because there we were, but it was not us
and not even our names.
The Oswalds was introduced
to Janet and Bill Williams.
For all I can find out about the Williams
is that their tax returns are classified
and that Bill Williams has links through his family
to the CIA and does classified work for Bell Helicopter.
- I was surprised that he didn't try to reach me.
I guess he was nervous about me, I'm not sure.
- Oliver Stone is a wonderful filmmaker,
but he's used this to put certain myths
into the American bloodstream that abide to this day.
- Subcommittee will come to order.
Today, we consider legislation
that would publicly release the investigative files
and other documents relating to the assassination.
- Mr. Chairman, I am committed to the principle
that Americans are entitled
to know the truth about the assassination
of President Kennedy
and feel that Congress should do its best
to allay fears of the American people in this regard.
- The next witness is Oliver Stone,
one of our most successful film directors,
a Vietnam veteran.
Welcome, Mr. Stone.
You are probably the reason that we're all here today.
- Among some of the records
that we were dying to get hold of in order to elaborate
on our theories in the film
are the testimony of people like Richard Helms,
Howard Hunt, CIA agent at that time, Ruth Paine,
who knew the Oswalds very well in Dallas.
- All these names that you're mentioning,
the ones that are living, did you contact them
or some of your representatives contact-
- None of these people would talk to us.
- Thank you so much, Mr. Stone.
We have 74 co-sponsors on the bill at this present time,
and we think that, a result
of the initiation of these hearings,
we will soon get the required number.
- The National Archives are prepared to release more
than 3,000 documents.
- President George H.W. Bush signed the JFK Records Act
in October 1992, which initiated the collection
of those mainly FBI and CIA documents
and called for their public release 25 years later,
which is October 26th of this year.
- Top-secret documents
about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy
are now public, 54 years after his death.
It is just a fraction of the documents.
Today, President Trump delayed the release
of many of the secret files following concerns
from national security agencies
over what should be made public.
- At the 11th hour here,
it appears that the CIA and the FBI said
there were concerns about national security.
Here is something that's been on the books
for more than 25 years, this release of documents.
We've known it's coming.
Everyone knew it was coming.
And with less than six hours left,
all of a sudden there's a new sense of,
"Well, no, we need to look at this further.
We haven't had enough time to look at it."
I'll guarantee you conspiracy theorists
are going crazy over that.
According to the two most basic theories,
Ruth Paine was either a CIA asset
who holds secrets to the biggest murder mystery
in US history or an innocent bystander who's been slandered
and harassed by people like me for the last 50 years.
For those of the conspiratorial persuasion,
there are more nuanced questions,
such as whether Ruth was an active member
of an assassination plot or just an unwitting pawn,
or whether she's in such deep denial
that she believes her own lies.
Of course, if you trust Ruth,
this all sounds like paranoid gibberish.
Michael Paine plays a smaller role in the story
because he wasn't living at the house at the time,
although the suspicions around Michael are just as intense.
Ruth and Michael Paine were not your typical family
living in the working-class suburb of Irving, Texas,
in 1963.
Both Paines were well-educated liberals
born in New York City to affluent families.
Ruth was a Quaker and Michael a Unitarian.
Despite the fact that Michael worked
for a military contractor,
the Paines both describe themselves as pacifists.
The first time I went to interview Ruth,
I discovered that Michael had just moved in
to the same retirement home,
even though they had been divorced for 40 years.
- That's Michael Paine.
Michael.
This is Max Goode.
I'm doing a documentary with Ruth.
I'd love to talk to you.
- Any time.
All right, a little poll here.
How many of you people think there was a conspiracy?
- No. - No.
- No, they're not here.
- Take your choice the CIA, the FBI, Johnson.
You know...
One right after another.
- Yeah, I...
With what has happened in this country over the years,
I wouldn't doubt it.
I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if there was a conspiracy.
- Yeah, well, you're one of my liberal friends, yeah.
- Well, I think that Oswald did it.
I don't happen to know anything else.
Here he has shot the president of the United States,
the biggest so-called democracy in the world.
That's going to go down in history,
and he was the one who did it.
I was only able to talk to Michael Paine
for half an hour.
It was clear that he was already beginning
to lose his memory.
- Because of that danger.
From what I was told,
he became increasingly incoherent
over the next few years.
I know it's hard, and thank you for revisiting this.
- It's all hard. It's always hard.
I was interviewed by the networks,
and they've done every 10th anniversary,
20th, 30th, 40th, 50th anniversaries.
ABC did one of the best,
which began by saying Oswald did it
and they were going to show you why.
- More than two-thirds of Americans
still believe there was a conspiracy
to kill the president.
But unless you are an irredeemable
conspiracy theorist, beyond the pale, so to speak,
what we will do tonight is demonstrate
that those theories are wrong.
- There was a televised mock trial in '86 of the JFK case
with Gerry Spence representing Oswald,
Vince Bugliosi, representing the prosecution.
Because Spence wasn't well prepared, Vince carried the day,
and one of his best witnesses was Ruth Paine.
Call your next witness.
This government calls Mrs. Ruth Paine.
Here, take the witness stand if you would, please.
Tell us your name.
I'm Ruth Paine.
Mrs. Paine, your occupation, ma'am?
- I'm a school psychologist.
I work with schoolchildren.
It was like a regular trial
and they brought in jurors and a judge from Dallas
and the real witnesses, including myself.
- Didn't you tell the Warren Commission
that you were impressed how calm Lee was
and how completely certain Lee was of his innocence?
You, of course, are not an agent for the CIA, are you?
- No. - You see, you laugh.
- Yes, I do.
- You are not an agent for the KGB, are you?
- No.
Are you laughing again?
- Well, you ridiculed me for laughing once, so-
- No, I don't mean to ridicule you for it.
I just want to know if you find the inquiry amusing.
No.
- The back bedroom is where Ruth Paine
stayed with her children.
The front bedroom's where Marina Oswald stayed
with her kids. - Okay.
- And the...
the famous garage is over here
- on the other side of the house. - Where the gun was.
Right, right, so let me know
if you have any questions. - Okay.
- The people that are suspicious of me
fortunately don't really come around
to talk to me.
That does not happen, and I'm grateful for that.
Paines were connected-
- They were? - To the CIA.
She was a Quaker.
- No. She said she was a Quaker.
- They were connected to the CIA before all this happened?
- Well, first of all, we try to be neutral
as far as all the different theories.
They might mention something like,
"I heard the Paines were working for the CIA."
And I might mention, well, it's pretty much impossible
to know if someone's working for the CIA or not
'cause that's the first rule of working for the CIA
is you don't let anyone know ever.
You know, so...
- The official story,
I don't like to offend anybody,
but if you believe it, you've got the IQ of an amoeba.
- See, you had the IQ of an amoeba
until yesterday. - Oh, I did not!
There are all kinds of claims
and rumors about the Paines,
but no concrete evidence
has ever directly linked them to the CIA.
Most of the suspicions revolve around
their immediate family.
- Everybody has connections of some sort.
My father did work for the USAID.
And some people who work for USAID are also in the CIA,
but that wasn't true of my father, I don't believe.
Your sister, was she?
- I think she worked briefly with an outfit.
All I really know, that she's told me about it,
is that she was helping develop questionnaires
for non-English speakers.
It's possible, but I think unlikely
that some of the contracts she may have been working on
could've been something the CIA wanted, but I don't know.
Researching online,
I was able to track down Ruth's sister, Sylvia Hoke.
She was still alive at age 90,
but unfortunately she wasn't interested in talking.
Would you be willing to answer a few questions?
- Every man, woman, and child
lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles
hanging by the slenderest of threads,
capable of being cut at any moment by accident
or miscalculation or by madness.
Each year of the Kennedy presidency
was marked by a major Cold War crisis.
In 1961, the CIA enacted a plan
that had been in the works long before Kennedy took office,
the Bay of Pigs invasion.
Kennedy went along with the covert operation
to overthrow Fidel Castro.
But when the CIA-trained anti-Castro guerrillas
were quickly overwhelmed by the Cuban army,
he rejected CIA demands to send in the Air Force
and finish the job.
Mistrust and resentment would mark Kennedy's relationship
with the military and CIA for the rest of his life.
After the Bay of Pigs fiasco,
Kennedy remarked that he wanted to, quote,
"Splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces,"
and he fired CIA Director Allen Dulles soon after.
The following year,
Cuba was again at center stage in the Cold War.
The US discovered that the Soviet Union
had stationed nuclear missiles on the island,
just 90 miles from Florida.
The resulting 13-day showdown
brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.
Somehow, Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev
were able to defuse the situation,
despite the influence of war hawks on both sides.
At the height of the crisis,
Attorney General Robert Kennedy
met with the Soviet ambassador and told him,
"We are under pressure from our military
to use force against Cuba.
If the situation continues much longer,
the president is not sure
that the military will not overthrow him and seize power."
- Mrs. Paine, what is the next thing that happened
pertaining to the assassination?
- Well, the next thing, they announced on the television
that the president had died.
And very shortly after that,
there were six officers that came to my front door.
There are those who feel they can just tell
that Ruth Paine is lying,
that it's written all over her face.
Some say that she's too articulate,
that she must be a CIA agent repeating rehearsed lines.
We can read into the accused whatever we like.
Ruth has given so many interviews,
and we expect her to perform
the appropriate emotions each time.
Shock, sadness, anger, regret.
- One of the officers asked if he had any guns
and I said no.
Translated the question to Marina.
And she said, "Yes, he did."
And she led the policeman into the garage.
And there on the floor was a blanket roll.
And the officer picked up the blanket roll
and it was so clear right away,
that there was nothing in it.
And it folded over his arm.
It was clearly an empty blanket.
And that was the point at which I felt,
"Oh, it could have been Lee."
"It could have been Lee."
And it was at that point that I thought,
"It could have been Lee."
And this was the worst moment ever
because I thought,
"Oh my God, it could have been Lee.
It could have been Lee."
- Conspiracy theorists must explain the Paines away.
They must be wrong.
And guess what, you can't say they're lying,
'cause they're meticulously honest.
They haven't changed their story from day one.
Their core is about telling the truth.
Since the release of his 1993 bestseller,
"Case Closed," author and former attorney Gerald Posner
has been the go-to expert representing the official story.
- The record is now abundant with the evidence
and original material that you can draw the conclusion
that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
On the other side,
you have a 92-year-old Philadelphia lawyer,
Vince Salandria, a legend among conspiracy researchers.
In 1964, he was among the first to publicly challenge
the conclusions of the Warren Commission.
For over 50 years, his analysis of the case
has been considered to be the most cutting edge
or the most extreme, depending on your persuasion.
- It wasn't a Castro conspiracy.
It wasn't a Soviet conspiracy.
It wasn't a mafia conspiracy.
Our institutions did it.
Our government did it.
In order to have a conspiracy,
you've got to complete a circle.
In this case, you've got to get the Oswalds
into the Dallas area.
You got to get Oswald into the Texas Book Depository in time,
people with garage
where the so-called murder weapon can be stored.
Suppose this conspiracy says, why don't we just wait.
Somebody will get Oswald and his family into Dallas.
We'll just wait, maybe he'll happen to find a job
in the Texas Book Depository.
Once you see a conspiracy, it's over for the Paines.
You can't close the circle without the Paines.
There's no way they could be innocent, no way!
- I didn't get into the conspiracies at all
because I don't have a paranoid bone in my body.
I just don't see ghosts anywhere.
The other side of that is I'm kind of naive,
and it has been a blessing, frankly, to be naive.
- It was through the auspices of George de Mohrenschildt
that Ruth and Michael Paine are introduced to the Oswalds.
- Oswald becomes chummy
with the white Russian community of Dallas,
all rabid anti-communists; it's odd.
His closest friend is an oil man
named George de Mohrenschildt,
who's about 35 years older than Oswald,
who is only 23 and supposedly broke.
- I think the only time I met George de Mohrenschildt
was at this party in February,
and he and his wife Jeanne were there.
But I didn't...
I wasn't... didn't hear much from them
because I spent most of the evening with Marina
in a bedroom with the baby.
- De Mohrenschildt is a member of the Dallas Petroleum Club,
speaks five languages,
and was French Vichy intelligence during the war,
also rumored to have been a Nazi sympathizer.
We met the Oswalds in the summer of 1962
when we heard that
there was a young couple who arrived from Russia
and were in very difficult financial condition.
Why would a white Russian
who is vehemently anti-communist associate with Oswald?
- I don't know, good question.
Not one I asked.
- Shortly after this, in about April of 1963,
George de Mohrenschildt leaves the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
Then he goes on to Haiti.
And reportedly there is $300,000 deposited into his account.
- Before he went to Haiti, he went to Washington
and sat down in a secret meeting
with Army intelligence and the CIA,
so you can see that de Mohrenschildt
is somebody with a kind of spook background.
- So, the question then becomes,
was de Mohrenschildt being paid off
for doing his escort services with Oswald
and then leaving them with Ruth and Michael Paine?
That's a question we can't answer
because unfortunately when the House Select Committee
was trying to serve a subpoena, he was either murdered
or took his own life with a shotgun blast.
There've been allega- tions that de Mohrenschildt
was somehow connected to the CIA.
Is that possible?
- I think it's possible, but it's an allegation.
You know...
- It's only a theory, but we have to take it very seriously
that Ruth Paine was acting as a babysitter for Marina.
She's arranged to do all kinds of things for Marina
the way that George Mohrenschildt used to do,
take her to medical appointments and so on.
- I was lonely and this was somebody to talk to,
somebody that could help me with Russian,
and that's really why I invited Marina
to stay at the house when I did.
From the time Ruth met the Oswalds
until the assassination was exactly nine months,
from February 22nd to November 22nd, 1963.
For nearly half that time,
the Oswalds actually lived in New Orleans.
It wasn't until late-September
that Marina moved in with Ruth,
just two months before the assassination.
- At the end of Lee's New Orleans stay,
it was arranged for Ruth Paine to travel
with Marina all the way from New Orleans back to Dallas.
And you have to ask: Was that simply done
out of the goodness of Ruth Paine's heart?
You are supposed to have brought Marina
and the gun from New Orleans to Dallas.
Was there any such gun that you traveled with Marina with?
- I was certainly unaware of there being a gun at all,
either in my car or in the garage.
I didn't know that Oswald had one,
but I can read the papers.
I can judge that he must have had one.
And as near as I can figure out,
it's possible it was in my car
when I took Marina and her baby
and most of their worldly goods
from New Orleans in September of '63.
- I've always called Oswald a politicized sociopath.
Had Oswald lived, I think he would've been upset
that people took the credit away from him for doing it.
He had that kind of mentality.
- He suddenly realized he had an opportunity
to no longer be a little guy,
but to be someone extraordinary.
Did you kill the president?
- No, I've not been charged with that.
In fact, nobody has said that to me yet.
First thing I heard about it
was when the newspaper reporters
in the hall asked me that question.
- Okay.
What did you do in Russia?
- Lee resented that people didn't see in him his potential,
how great he was.
He's a kid who just turned 24 years old
who has defected to Russia in the heart of the Cold War,
goes to New Orleans and forms a pro-Castro organization,
goes to Mexico City
and tries to get to the revolution in Cuba.
He's done a lot by 24.
- I think it's a lone wolf thing,
that he probably wanted to make a mark on society.
Suddenly occurred to him that he could.
- He was proud of what he had done.
- He was intelligent.
He was dyslexic.
- He believed violence was the only effective tool.
- Almost from the beginning of this case,
her and Michael are always there
to discredit Oswald, to caricature Oswald,
to say he wanted to be a big man in history,
which of course makes no sense at all.
Because if that's what Oswald was doing,
then he would've admitted that he did it!
But he never did!
And in fact, he said just the opposite. "I'm just a patsy."
Did you shoot the president?
No, they've taken me in
because of the fact that I lived in the Soviet Union.
I'm just a patsy! - Did you shoot the president?
- Here's a man who feels that life has been tough
and he hasn't got a proper deal.
- I don't know what kind of facts
you people have been given,
but I emphatically deny these charges.
- Here's a guy who learns Russian in the marines,
leaves the marines under false pretenses,
goes to the Soviet Union,
supposedly gives away secrets to the Soviets,
gives up his citizenship, decides he wants to come back,
the government pays his way back.
- This is a guy who had worked at a CIA U-2 spy base
as a radar operator.
He knew a lot of the codes.
He then defects to Russia,
promises to turn over state secrets
at the height of the Cold War.
He's there for 20 months, returns with a Russian wife,
and he's not arrested?
Who's he working for?
- He's a communist in Dallas,
but all of his friends are white Russian anti-communists
or people connected with the CIA.
Central to many of the theories
is the idea that Oswald was actually a fake defector
sent to the Soviet Union as a spy.
Seen through that lens,
everything Oswald does leading up to the assassination
has a different meaning.
Was he continuing to do intelligence work,
infiltrating radical groups?
Was he manipulated into place by larger forces?
Are you a Marxist?
- I would very definitely say
that I am a Marxist, that is correct.
But that does not mean, however, that I'm a communist.
What is the difference between the two?
- Well, there's a great deal of difference.
Several American parties in several countries
are based on Marxism, such as Guyana, Ghana.
Certain countries have characteristics
of a socialist system,
such as Great Britain with its socialized medicine.
These then are the differences
between an outright communist country
and countries which adhere to leftist or Marxist principles.
- My guest this morning is Priscilla Johnson McMillan,
author of "Marina and Lee."
I wanna talk to you about the time
you interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald in Russia.
- Yes. - What kind of a man was he?
- Forlorn, lonely, pathetic, lost, seeming to need help.
I returned to Russia in 1958.
It was during that time that I met Lee Harvey Oswald.
I wrote a story about him as a defector
who was very unusual, if not nonexistent at that time,
someone who claimed that he wanted to live permanently
in the Soviet Union because he was a Marxist.
He said he hated the United States
and that the Russians he dealt with
had all treated him very well.
He did tell me that he would give the Russians
any secrets that he possessed,
but I assumed he didn't possess any.
I could see that he was angry, but not off-the-scale angry.
In fact, I thought it might be acting a little bit.
- It's just a little too contrived
that you happened to know Oswald in Russia,
you then wrote a book absolving all of those people
who were suspected in conspiracies,
that you happened to work for the State Department,
and that you-
- Well I didn't- - Happened to notice
the initials CIA tattooed on your back-
- Well, I translated for the State Department
for a month in 1956- - Aha.
- But three years before I became a journalist.
And I would never have done such a thing, wear two hats.
In 1967, Joseph Stalin's daughter
defected to the US.
The person the CIA selected to help her put out a book
on the horrors of Russian communism
was Priscilla Johnson McMillan.
- I did translate Svetlana Alliluyeva's book.
And I didn't know it at the time,
but that was a CIA operation from the get-go.
You didn't need to know that story,
but I certainly wouldn't tell it
to the conspiracy theorists either.
They might make something-
They wouldn't know what to make of it,
do you know what I mean?
It's too complicated.
- According to polling by Gallup,
a majority of Americans have always believed
assassin Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone.
The number peaked at a whopping 81% of Americans in 1976.
That was shortly after the Zapruder film was released.
A majority of nearly every
demographic group across the country
believes others were involved in the killing,
with the exception of one group
whites with a college degree.
- The principal argument
in defense of the Warren Commission conclusion
is an argument from authority.
And invariably, you're asked to weigh the differences
between the sources.
On the one hand, you have
the chief justice of the United States,
the former head of the Central Intelligence Agency,
Allen Dulles.
You have congressmen and senators
serving on the Warren Com- mission, including Gerald Ford.
These are the people who have come up
with the facts and conclusions that proved Oswald did it.
And on the other hand,
you have these kinda crackpot skeptics out there,
can't get a job, disaffected, hate America, commie leftists.
Who are you going to believe?
I mean, really!
- There have been different generations
of conspiracy thinking.
At the very beginning,
there were about a half-dozen people
and they were very savage.
It makes life much simpler
if you think that events of great importance happened
because they was a conspiracy.
It's very threatening to think
they can happen for trivial reasons.
Who is likely to have wanted Kennedy dead?
You'd have to say the CIA,
but perhaps also the military as well.
- What kind of a peace do I mean
and what kind of a peace do we seek?
Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world
by American weapons of war.
Both the United States and its allies
and the Soviet Union and its allies
have a mutually deep interest in a just and genuine peace
and in halting the arms race.
We are both devoting massive sums of money to weapons
that could be better devoted
to combat ignorance, poverty, and disease.
We are both caught up in a vicious and dangerous cycle.
- Kennedy was telling people privately
that once he got re-elected,
he was going to back out of Vietnam
and he was not going to commit forces of the United States
to a land war in Asia.
He had infuriated them with the Bay of Pigs.
He infuriated them with the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
He infuriated them during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
And he was not gonna let them have their war.
Next.
Very, very few people were ever allowed
the intimate details I'm sure Kennedy was taken out,
and anyone who doubts the official statements
of US government is crazy!
- When you do look into the issues
conspiracy theorists raise,
sometimes you find a good answer,
but conspiracy theorists are unwilling to accept it.
And this includes everything from the shooting sequence
to Oswald's relationship with the CIA
and the FBI and the Cubans.
The Warren Commission wasn't perfect.
But for a lot of the conspiracy theorists,
it approaches a faith.
It's a belief system.
- You'll see that your own patriotic view
and faith in America may strongly color your view
of the Kennedy case.
If you're a believer in America's good faith,
the integrity of its fundamental institutions,
you're liable to try to filter your understanding
of the Kennedy case and much else through that prism.
- Well, I think it's healthy
to be skeptical about the government.
But to believe that there could be a coup d'état
in the United States carried out
or at least tolerated by the government
against the president,
that's a very cynical view of the government
and I think that that's corrosive.
Just north of Martha's Vineyard,
off Cape Cod, lies Naushon Island.
This seven mile long island
has been a privately owned getaway
for the Forbes family for more than 150 years.
Naushon Island is the stuff
that conspiracy dreams are made of.
Among the many members of the Forbes clan
who have vacationed on the island over the years
are Michael and Ruth Paine.
Michael Paine's mother was a Forbes,
and he spent summers on Naushon Island since childhood.
One of his mother's closest friends
was a woman named Mary Bancroft.
Bancroft was a spy
and longtime mistress of CIA Director Allen Dulles.
Dulles and Bancroft were invited to stay on Naushon Island.
- Mary Bancroft knew the Paines intimately
and saw Michael at a young age,
and so she could turn to her partner, Allen Dulles,
and tell him, "You want some people on the left?
I know some people on the left
that could be a big help to you."
So, you got a direct line to the top of the CIA right there,
which I think is the most telling thing of all
of the Paine saga.
- Naushon Island was kind of a hideaway
for these extraordinarily wealthy people.
People with tens of millions
if not hundreds of millions of dollars.
Ruth Paine visited Naushon Island that summer of 1963,
even though she's supposed to be estranged from her husband.
- While you're making connections,
my mother-in-law knew Allen Dulles,
so obviously there's a plot.
Michael has a long list of relatives and goes back
and he's got somebody that signed
the Declaration of Independence in his forebears.
In fact, Michael Paine traces his lineage
to several famous elite Boston families,
not only the Forbes and the Paines
but also the Cabots and the Emersons.
His great-great-grandfather was Ralph Waldo Emerson.
- His great-uncle, who was a really lovely man,
was the governor general of the Philippines
when the Philippines came to us
after the Spanish-American War.
More conservative, I guess, but very interesting people
and concerned also about the world.
Michael's father was a declared Trotskyite,
met with a little group of people
that wanted society to change
and were working on how to do that.
They were at no point interested in violent actions.
But there's two branches of the Forbes.
There's the guys who put out the magazine
and are sort of the wealthier brand,
and then the ones that had an island
off the coast of Massachusetts, what's Michael's group.
So, yeah, I spent a few summers there.
Nice folks. I liked the family.
So, Michael comes from a very rich family,
but you guys lived pretty modestly in Dallas?
Yes, exactly.
Did he have any sort of trust fund
from the Forbes family?
- Well, he had an account.
There's a...
investment company
that holds accounts for anybody,
but a number of members of the family were invested there,
and it's called the JM Forbes and Company.
So, yeah, he had an account there.
Michael felt it wasn't money he earned, just came to him.
And I think we've forgotten the whole concept
of noblesse oblige.
If much is given to you,
there's much you should be giving back.
But that was definitely a feeling of the family.
- When I first heard of Lee,
I was sort of looked forward with eagerness
to an opportunity to talk with someone
with whom I didn't believe I would agree,
but at least it was interesting to talk to a man
who had been to Russia and who apparently had his own opinions.
I would say he was the kind of person
who likes to put himself in a position of a belligerence.
- Michael claimed he only met with Lee Oswald six times.
They went to both left wing and right wing meetings
during those six times,
which is probably some kind of record.
- All I want to say is this about Michael Paine.
I met him only once.
He didn't make any pretense.
He told me that he and Oswald would go
to right wing meetings.
- We discovered we were both interested in the activities
of right wing groups in Dallas,
which were common, numerous, at that time.
And I think he described his activities as spying on them.
Did you ever have a chance to talk about,
Cuban communism or Castro communism?
- He did mention that and it was unfamiliar to me,
so I didn't, didn't take it up.
He just happened to mention it briefly
and when it was brought to my attention I did recall
that he had said something to me.
- Michael liked to pose provoking students
to talk about their Cuba beliefs,
portraying himself as a pro-Cuban guy,
which he certainly was not.
Very weird and suspicious activity.
That's what you do when you're trying to smoke somebody out.
- His father was George Lyman Paine,
a leading Trotskyist on the West Coast.
Michael Paine works for Bell Helicopter,
has secret clearance.
You don't get that without a quid pro quo.
He's an agent.
You know that immediately.
Is it true he had a security clearance there?
It was a military contractor.
- Well, I would think it would be, have to be, yeah.
He had been working for his father-in-law
who invented the Bell Helicopter
and was doing research on vertical takeoff and landing.
Bell Helicopter has been a major military supplier
since the 1940s.
Their model UH-1 Huey became an icon of the Vietnam War.
As the war expanded under the Johnson administration
sales skyrocketed.
- Something big about the Ruth Paine story
simply doesn't gel.
My thinking about the Paines is you'll never find a piece
of paper 'cause they weren't formally hired.
I think they would do little favors
for someone like Allen Dulles, out of patriotism.
I don't know anybody who thinks
they were part of the plot to kill the president.
But a lot of us, including me,
think that they might have been manipulated
to do certain things like invite Lee to a job
at the book depository a month before the assassination.
Mrs. Paine, did you help him obtain the job
that he had at the Texas School Book Depository?
- Well, it came about through a coincidence.
I was having coffee with a neighbor.
Marina was there also.
- She was still trying to learn English.
So I knew that she really didn't follow the conversations.
So when we went home, I said that my neighbour mentioned
that there might be still some hiring
at the School Book Depository.
And she said, "Oh, could we find out?
Could you call and see whether they are hiring?"
- She makes the phone call on Monday.
And then he goes in for the interview on Tuesday
and he starts work on Wednesday.
The people involved in this plot
have done site selection in advance.
They're planning to murder President Kennedy on this trip.
Oswald is going to get a job at that building.
That's the set up.
- There have been published reports,
supposing that he may have been planted in that building,
by conspirators who wanted him there,
where he could fire at the president
or to get others in positions to do so.
But these witnesses before the Warren Commission,
told another version
of how and why Oswald was employed.
Mrs. Paine, who knew Oswald needed a job.
Mrs. Linnie Mae Randle, who knew where he might get one:
from Roy S. Truly, at the Texas School Book Depository.
- So I did call School Book Depository,
talked to Roy Truly and said,
there's this young man, has a wife and another baby
on the way and he's looking for a job,
and he doesn't drive which limits what he can do.
And I was wondering if there was an opening
and he wouldn't say whether there was an opening,
but he said, "Go ahead and let the young man come by."
So that's what I relayed to Lee
and then he did go to the School Book Depository
and ask for work.
You had made the comment,
I believe last week, if I'm not mistaken
that the FBI had been here,
is that correct, at your residence?
- Mm-hmm.
To visit apparently either Marina Oswald
or Lee Harvey Oswald or both.
What was the occasion of their visit?
- Well, the agent expressed to me
that it was routine for them to come to people
who had come to live in this country
from countries behind the iron curtain.
- At the time that Kennedy was killed,
the FBI had just received a letter postmarked from Dallas,
which was purported to be from Oswald,
was addressed to the Soviet Embassy in Washington.
This was an explosive conspiratorial letter.
There was actually a warrant drawn up
for his arrest for the murder of the president
as part of an international conspiracy.
- Lee asked to borrow my typewriter
and typed out a letter.
I went by and he sort of hid it
like he didn't want me to read it.
I thought that's kind of weird.
Later that evening, Michael came for dinner
and it gave us a chance to move some furniture.
I noticed Lee had left this letter
that it seemed like he didn't want me to read on my desk
and the desk was open, a little flip top secretary desk.
As we walked in to move furniture around,
I just closed the desk in it and had that letter in it.
- It was a letter that he was writing
to the Soviet Embassy in Washington,
trying to push for him and Marina to get a ticket
to go back to the Soviet Union.
- And he was saying that Comrade Kostin
with whom he had had meetings in Mexico City
and regrettably hadn't had time to complete our business.
According to a declassified CIA report,
the Comrade Kostin mentioned in Oswald's letter
is Valery Kostikov, a KGB agent,
believed to be involved in, quote, "executive action,
including sabotage and assassination."
The circumstances of the Kostin letter
are highly controversial
and many researchers believe this link
between Oswald and a communist assassin
was planted by the true conspirators.
So you talked to the FBI
on at least a couple of occasions about Oswald.
- Yes, earlier in October.
And then I was disturbed enough about this letter
that I made a copy of it
and thought, well, I'll just show it to the FBI guy
when he comes out next.
- You did give the FBI a letter
that was supposed to have been written
by a Lee to the Soviet Embassy, didn't you?
- This was a draft of a letter that he left on my desk
that concerned me very deeply
because I could see he was lying in it.
And he'd used my typewriter and that offended me deeply.
He left, it offended you that he lied
on your typewriter? - That he'd been lying
on my typewriter, that's right.
I didn't know who he was writing, the letter just said,
"Dear Sirs."
- Ruth took that rough draft
without his knowledge or permission
and gave it to the FBI.
- Actually, I had this conversation with the FBI man.
He also was interested in preserving our rights
as outlined in the constitution.
And so he and I had a real understanding.
- Ruth plays a strange role in this letter.
The Soviets got the letter
and were convinced the letter was a phony.
Either he was making it up or it was a forgery.
They went so far as to accuse Ruth of having forged it.
Less than two weeks
after Ruth takes Oswald's letter,
President Kennedy is killed.
- We were both sitting here on the sofa,
watching the television when the news came
that he had been shot.
And I translated that to Marina
and we watched anxiously with the rest of the world
to hear what would happen.
And finally, we did hear that the president...
Soon after the assassination,
Michael calls Ruth from his job at Bell Helicopter.
Declassified FBI documents revealed
that their conversation was being monitored.
An informant reported that Michael was overheard
to comment that he felt sure Lee Harvey Oswald
had killed the president,
but did not feel Oswald was responsible and further stated,
"We both know who is responsible."
- According to the records, that phone call was made
about an hour after the assassination,
which means it was a few minutes before Oswald
was actually arrested for the crime.
- Pure, garbage. Pure garbage.
I did describe the phone call that Michael
and I had after the assassination,
when we were kind of commiserating with each other
about the Kennedy's killing
and thinking that it was a conspiracy
of right wing radicals, who'd done it.
So we both thought we knew
but we didn't know who had done it.
I hear that every now and then that one comes up.
Yeah, but...
just nothing to it.
On the morning after the assassination,
the first call the new president took
was from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.
While we have the audio for all the other calls
from this period, for some reason this one was erased.
Luckily, a transcript of this call was declassified in 1993.
The topic of conversation was the evidence
against Lee Harvey Oswald.
"Have you established any more
about the visit to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico
in September?"
Hoover: "No, that's one angle that's very confusing
for this reason.
We have up here, the tape and the photograph of the man
who was at the Soviet Embassy, using Oswald's name.
That picture and the tape do not correspond
to this man's voice nor to his appearance.
In other words, it appears that there is a second person
who was at the Soviet Embassy down there."
- Lee was...
In my opinion,
not somebody a spy agency would hire.
I couldn't see him as connected to the Soviet Union.
I think they were very happy to see him leave actually.
The possibility of a communist conspiracy
involving Oswald could have triggered World War III.
This was taken very seriously at the
highest levels of the government.
- Dick? - Yes?
You're my man on that commission.
And you're gonna do it and don't tell me what you can do
and what you can't.
This is a question that has a good many more ramifications
than on the surface.
We got to take this out of the arena
where they're testifying that Khrushchev and Castro did this
and did that and kicking us into a war
that can kill 40 million Americans in an hour.
Now, the reason I asked Warren is
because he's the Chief Justice of this country.
He came down here and he told me, "No," twice.
And I just pulled out what Hoover told me
about a little incident in Mexico City
and I said, now I don't want Mr. Khrushchev to be testifying
before camera that he killed this fella.
And he started crying and he said,
"Well I won't turn you down, I'll just do whatever you say."
It appears that LBJ bullied Earl Warren
into heading the commission
by giving him the impression
that there was evidence for a communist conspiracy,
painting Oswald as a lone nut may have been seen
as a moral imperative to avoid nuclear war.
But a cover up of Oswald's supposed communist ties
may actually have served as a cover up
for something even more sinister and closer to home.
- When the Dallas police went to the Paine household,
one of the detectives wrote a report
about taking out
several filing cabinets
of notations and cards and maps, et cetera,
of Castro sympathizers.
This makes a very good case.
I believe that Michael and Ruth were involved
in surveillance activities of the American left.
These cabinets existed until the Warren Commission
because there's several exhibit numbers
in the Warren Commission that referred to them.
But the big difference is
when the Warren Commission went through them,
they only found something like one letter
from Ruth to one of her relatives.
So in other words, if the original report is accurate,
somebody fiddled with the contents of those file cabinets.
- I learned a lot about what's written
isn't always true in newspapers and magazines.
One magazine said the police took out seven file boxes
of Cuba sympathizers' names.
Well, there were my three boxes of folk dance records,
my three little file boxes of my college papers
and a projector for a 16 millimeter camera.
Those with the seven boxes of Cuban names.
This is one of the so-called filing cabinets
that contained there's a report that they contain names
and info on Cuban sympathizers.
- Yeah, I think that's nonsense.
This is who I used to work for years ago.
I was a special agent, did background investigations
for the government and just, for security clearances.
So I've got an natural curiosity in 2013,
I found out that Ruth Paine was living right here
in Santa Rosa and a friendship developed.
We're not best of friends, but she knows me well
and she likes me enough
that she's given me some very interesting items.
This entire album here is relating to the Paines
and the many things they've signed for me.
This is Ruth's box of FBI investigative reports
that she obtained under the freedom of information act.
She's read books, she's got a collection.
Her notes are on here.
And certainly I'm sure she went through all of this
and read all of it.
She's an avid student of the assassination herself.
This is Ruth speaking to me back in August of 2017,
says, "Thanks for all the work investigating,
what was available on the internet."
She wanted me to find out
about this particular Warren Commission exhibit.
It says Commission Exhibit Number 458.
"There is certainly a lot of misinformation traveling
around the internet.
All of the things the police took
were taken without my permission."
When the issue of the contents
of the file cabinets came up,
Ruth's testimony was taken off the record
and the exhibit numbers were omitted without explanation.
- I don't think the Paines are hiding anything.
I really don't.
She hasn't shied away from talking about the assassination.
I think she feels a little bit of celebrity in herself.
She's an historical figure in terms of the assassination.
You know, she can't avoid that.
- The main accusation against the Paines
is that they were used in some way,
but they were doing intelligence work looking
after radicals and communists.
And that looking after the Oswald's was part of that?
- I don't know, there's so much
that just all of it can't be true.
I have a sense that the Paines, when I talk to them
were speaking from the heart
and talking truthfully, speaking truthfully,
but can I say a hundred percent, no.
- She expressed to me Friday evening
after we had come from the police station
that she was very worried
that this might prevent her staying in the United States.
She could not imagine her husband doing anything
of this sort, he...
never said anything, that she heard,
derogatory about the president.
Marina's mother-in-law, that is his mother,
Marguerite, invited this photo- grapher to come to the house
and that's why there are pictures.
And this picture was taken as they were getting ready
to go in to try to see Lee at the police station.
I did see Marina later but really the last contact I had
was the day after the assassination.
I guess the hardest part was not knowing
what was going on with Marina and how she was
and what she needed.
Marina was held in federal protective custody
for two months following the assassination.
There are reports that she was coerced
into cooperating with the FBI under threat of deportation.
- Marina, do you believe
that your husband killed President Kennedy?
- I don't want to believe, but I have too much facts
and facts tell me that Lee shot Kennedy.
- Who gets two telephone calls on Sunday,
two days after the assassination from Lee Oswald in prison?
Ruth Paine.
- He telephone twice.
The first call, he was asking me to contact a lawyer
in New York and gave me a phone number.
I was quite surprised that he was asking anything
of me at this point.
And I was not terribly keen
on doing anything for him,
but I thought, yeah, he needs representation.
And so I said I would call.
I did, but I didn't get any answer.
I mean, it just rang.
- These people have given me a hearing
without legal representation or anything.
- Did you shoot the president? - I didn't shoot anybody.
And then he called again later in the evening
to ask to speak to Marina.
'Cause he didn't know where she was.
I said, well, she's not here.
- Those calls would've been a footnote to the entire story.
They became important
only because they were the last telephone calls
that Lee Oswald made to anybody in the world
and they were to Ruth Paine
and the only person who can say what Oswald said is Ruth.
He's been shot! He's been shot!
Oswald was in custody for 48 hours.
But authorities denied that any official records
or recordings were kept during his interrogations.
Millions watched on live TV as he was killed by Jack Ruby,
a local strip club owner
with connections to both the mob and the police force.
- My first thought was,
oh, and Marina won't have to go
to trial, it'll be simpler.
So it wasn't really a good thought.
- Mrs. Paine, you have been reluctant to speak
to television cameras before this evening.
Is there any particular reason for that?
- Yes. I think it's a terrible thing
to judge a man before he is brought to trial.
And in this case, it's a very difficult thing not to do.
The evidence was so incriminating.
Just as we, all of us, the nation, saw it
on the television,
but now of course he's dead.
He has in effect been judged quickly and hanged
and there's no question of prejudicing people
by what we say now.
- The world will never know the true facts
of what occurred, my motives.
The people that had so much to gain
and had such a material motive
to put me in the position I'm in
will never let true facts
come above board to the world.
Are these people
in very high positions, Jack?
- Yes.
- Since 1959, I felt and knew that Lee was not a defector,
that he was a government agent.
And I still believe and still say that Lee Harvey Oswald
was set up.
We are all Marines family.
My oldest boy is in the air force
and Robert, Lee's brother, was a marine and Lee was a marine
and I know that this boy loved the marines
and could not have been a defector.
This is a frame up.
- Marguerite Oswald was convinced that he was an agent,
US agent, said that when he "defected,"
she went to the State Department,
got red carpet treatment, they assured her not to worry.
- The Zapruder film is a visual record
of the assassination.
To think that if the film did not exist,
that home movie of the assassination did not exist,
we would never be able to prove with any certainty
what happened at Dealey Plaza.
The president was hit in the head.
That's an unconfirmed report
that the president was hit in the head.
President's wife Jackie Kennedy was not hurt.
She walked into the hospital
at her husband's stretcher's side.
- I'm a native of Dallas. November 22nd, 1963,
I was downtown cheering for my president.
My roommate was teaching at an elementary school
and when it came on over the PA system
that the president had been shot,
the fifth-graders in her class cheered.
These kids were hearing at home that Kennedy was a communist
and that's what was said everywhere in Dallas.
Ladies and gentlemen,
welcome to the famous Grassy Knoll area
here in Dealey Plaza.
This is the infamous location
where president Kennedy was assassinated.
That happened 51 years ago today.
- Officer Harget ran up here, when we got up here,
I was standing about right here.
He had blood on his helmet, his face, his shirt.
He had blood and brain.
He was just covered with blood and brain.
- This, I got it from Arlington National Cemetery actually,
when I went to see President Kennedy's grave site.
I'm more inclined to believe that Oswald didn't act alone.
Yeah.
- This man did it, Lee Harvey Oswald in my opinion.
I mean, all the evidence points to him.
It was him, he tried shooting a general down here,
maybe months before this,
they found out it was the same rifle he had.
- Looking the situation over back there 40 steps behind me,
a bullet crashed through the window
and just missed me.
And my arm was laying on the desk
and it was bleeding in three places
which turned out to be fragments
from the shell casing.
- He had decided to take a shot and try to kill Walker,
who was a John Burr Society leader.
Very right wing.
- Walker made sense for him
that photograph of him with the guns.
That was to say about Walker,
I did it, and I'm glad.
- Seven or eight days after the assassination.
Ruth Paine says she has to return
a couple of books to Marina.
Out of nowhere, in one of those books,
she accidentally finds this note,
which the FBI turns into a piece of evidence
about the Walker shooting.
By the time that gets to the Warren Commission,
this is supposed to be a precedent
for Oswald shooting Kennedy.
- If I hadn't taken that book to Marina,
we might not even know
that he had made the attempt on Walker.
I was sending things to Marina
and of course they looked through a book to see
what might fall out and out fell
this note that I didn't know was there.
A couple of people from secret service came to me
and said, "Mrs. Paine, do you recognise this note?"
No, I didn't recognise it.
"Do I know the handwriting?"
No. Didn't know the handwriting.
She had hidden the note that he wrote her that April,
when he went out to try to shoot Edwin Walker.
- The Secret Service returned that note to Ruth saying,
"This is yours, isn't it?"
That's how suspicious Secret Service was of Ruth Paine.
They thought she wrote the note.
- Of all the defeats in the cold war,
the capture of Cuba by the communists
is the most unacceptable.
- The best witness on the Walker case
said he saw two people there.
And it didn't seem like either one of 'em was Oswald.
A lot of people think, frankly, that Walker set up
this shooting himself.
- The shooter was 30 yards away from a stationary target
and he missed,
but yet we're supposed to believe
that Oswald hit a moving target from as far away as 270 feet.
There were seven fingerprints taken
off the so-called Walker note.
None of 'em matched Lee.
None of 'em matched Marina.
Other than Marina, Ruth Paine
has been history's most important witness
against Lee Harvey Oswald.
Ruth and her garage provided much
of the incriminating evidence and the Walker note
wasn't the only piece that curiously popped up
after the initial police search of Ruth's home.
The infamous backyard photos were found
in the second police search.
The day after the assassination and Ruth later handed
over two cameras that had supposedly been overlooked.
One was matched to the backyard photos.
The other was a miniature spy camera,
which has intrigued researchers for decades.
Two weeks after the assassination,
as doubts about Oswald's trip to Mexico were surfacing,
Ruth miraculously found several incriminating items
sitting in a drawer in the room
where the Oswalds had stayed.
- You studied Russian?
- Yes.
When did you first begin to study Russian?
- I think it was around '57,
I had been working with a young Quaker group
that was interested in cultural exchange.
- Yeah, so it just happened or just a coincidence,
that you chose Russian
as a language of your interest? That's just a coincidence?
- No, it wasn't a coincidence at all.
I'm telling you that's because I felt
it was really important to communicate among,
between our countries in particular.
This was the era of the Cold War, so-
- Well, okay.
And is it a coincidence that it was you, Mrs. Paine?
- Yeah.
Yes, who directed Lee to the job
that put him in the Texas School Book Depository?
- Yes. I think that was clearly a coincidence.
- And it's just a coincidence that the gun
that supposedly killed the president
was located in your house?
- What do you mean coincidence?
- I mean, it just happened.
It's just, all of these things just sort of happened
all around you.
That's a coincidence?
Now, Mrs. Paine, I want to tell you something,
I've talked to you
about mere coincidences, but you can see-
- No... guilt by association-
- Yes. You can see how,
when I place questions to you like this,
that people can come
to conclusions that you feel are wrong
about you. - That's true, they could.
In the late '50s, Ruth Paine was in charge
of a Quaker cultural exchange program.
The East West Contacts Committee
set up pen pal correspondence
between young Soviets and Americans.
Ruth's group had a liaison in the state department
who was in close communication with the CIA.
Some researchers believed that Ruth may have been recruited
as an intelligence asset during this time.
- The CIA was careful not to be directly involved
in that, but I think was in fact giving a certain amount
of support to that sort of thing.
- I think the story is the Paines were used.
- I think they were given very little information
and I think they were very real sense victimized.
How do you feel about this stuff proliferating
on the internet?
- Well, I don't look, that's how I feel about it.
Just live my life separate from that as best I can.
I was surprised after there was a little article
in the local paper about me
and some of the comments were horrible.
It's an open internet.
So it has a lot of things that are not true.
Either take it now.
- Yes. Yes.
- All right. - You bid close first?
- I did bid close first.
- Okay, so there you are.
I think so.
We don't get photographed every day.
- You don't?
No.
- I think Ruth does, much more than I do.
Look at that.
In the aftermath of the assassination,
Ruth and Michael patched up their marriage.
Michael moved back in and they stayed together until 1970,
when they finally did divorce for good.
Over the following decades,
Ruth worked in various schools as a principal
and psychologist.
She raised two children, mostly on her own
and went to graduate school for her Masters
in Child Psychology.
- So it's over? So you got a 40 above the mark.
- Later on in her life,
Ruth Paine goes down to Nicaragua
and there were reports of her going
to Sandinistas sympathizer meetings
and taking notations of what went down.
For many, many people, the veneer's come off,
Ruth and Michael Paine.
I mean, they're just not credible anymore.
- I know a woman who in the early 1990s worked
with Ruth Paine as a Christian peace activist in Nicaragua.
This was during the time of the civil war in Nicaragua
during the Reagan and Bush I years.
- It was a contentious time down there.
It was very clear that the CIA
was supporting the so-called Contra freedom fighters
all the way.
The Contras were the ones opposing
the Sandinista revolution.
The Christian group that this woman
and Ruth were involved with was called ProNica.
And they were helping the poor people of Nicaragua
who naturally sided with the Sandinistas.
And because of this,
these Christian peace groups were often heavily monitored
by our US intelligence agencies.
- My work in Nicaragua was with a Quaker organization.
We had a project to help the poorest of the poor
in Nicaragua.
And at one of these meetings, a woman showed up
and proceeded to accuse me of a lot of things.
- She introduced herself as Ruth Paine,
representing the Quakers.
And I said, well, you're not the Quaker Ruth Paine
who knew Marina Oswald are you?
- This woman told me that after Sue Wheaton
had told people about Ruth's association
with the assassination,
which they did not know about,
then they became even more suspicious of her.
She and others in their organization believed
that Ruth was a CIA agent
or asset who was down there
for the purpose of gathering information about the group.
- So Ruth had a photographer that came and was with her.
He was there snapping everybody.
And that's when they said,
"Well, we're doing this article for the Nicaragua Network."
But Nicaragua Network had never heard of such a story.
They were taking everybody's picture at a meeting
and we tried to take their picture and they left.
I think in her being one of the primary defenders,
if not the primary defender of the official story,
she's been a disinformation agent
about the Kennedy assassination.
So even if she didn't have prior knowledge,
she continued for whatever her motives were,
whether threat or pure belief, to go along with it.
It's so easy to justify what you do.
You know, it is for any of us.
Ha ha!
You want a turn?
I knew that eventually I had to start
asking Ruth some even more uncomfortable questions,
even if it could jeopardize our relationship.
To let her story go unchallenged
would be a disservice to history.
Ready? - Yes.
I've been studying this case
for the last few years
and trying to be objective
and taking all different viewpoints.
- Oh really? Okay.
Trying not to be biased-
- Shucks.
It seems maybe a little extreme
to completely dismiss the questions
of conspiracy with all that's come out
over the years.
- To you it's extreme?
- Yeah. - To dismiss the idea of
conspiracy to me, it's not extreme
because the things I saw were so telling.
Everything I saw pointed to him
and him alone.
- What's this? - This is some sort of
CIA declassified document about your sister.
- Yeah,
okay it's possible.
Researchers have determined
that Ruth's sister, Sylvia Hoke, worked as a psychologist
for the CIA
likely beginning in 1954.
The document indicates that she was still working there
as of 1961.
- She had studied psychology I guess,
and she was helping to develop tests
of intelligence that didn't involve language
because they wanted to get bright people working
on the oil fields.
So that's all I know about what she did.
Ruth's father, William Avery Hyde
did extensive work for the Agency
for International Development in Latin America.
AID was a well-known cover for CIA personnel
and Hyde filed reports that were directly routed to the CIA.
This document reveals that he was under consideration
by the CIA for covert use in Vietnam.
- My family had a hostility to communism
because my parents had been active
in the cooperative movement.
This was New York city
where the local communist party people wanted to take over.
One of the things I was raised up knowing
is that communists would
think that the end justifies the means
and my folks didn't feel that way at all, nor do I.
During the cold war,
the government recruited many informants and agents
among liberals who saw communism
as the great threat to freedom and democracy.
Ruth's family seems to fit this description.
It seems that sometimes it's families
that are employed within the intelligence community.
- Whole families?
Yeah, multiple members of the family.
You mean therefore, I was... also.
That's one of the accusations.
- I see.
In the summer of 1963,
Ruth Paine set out on a long road trip
to visit friends and relatives.
She stayed on Naushon Island
and later spent several days at her sister's house
in the Washington, DC area.
Her last stop in late September
was to pick up Marina Oswald in New Orleans
and bring her and the Oswalds' belongings back to Dallas.
It's right around this time that Lee Oswald allegedly visits
the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City.
Although we know that even J. Edgar Hoover
had doubts about that.
By early October, Oswald is back in Dallas
where Ruth helps him get the job
at the book depository.
Five weeks later, the president is dead.
Do you see why people take these connections
as being suspicious?
- Sure. Yeah.
Long term, I'm hoping that real history will prevail.
Max Holland has been a researcher,
especially looking at what the Warren Commission did
and what they didn't do, what they knew
and what they didn't know.
That's good research.
- I have met Ruth.
I instantly felt an affinity for her
because I went to the same college, Antioch College.
And I also worked for the Quakers for a couple years
in Washington.
I knew her mentality.
She's not duplicitous or there's not a person hiding
behind the person she presents.
She's probably one of the most
above board people I've ever met.
Quakers often tend to be like that.
- They were very, very good people
and therefore so ironic that they were caught up in it,
but in a way, thank goodness it was them
and not somebody else.
Ruth has behaved awfully, awfully well.
She handled it just by being honest,
every step of the way,
I think that they were very, very innocent
and maybe their innocence was a kind of shield.
- A favourite tactic of conspiracy theorists
is to make accusations that anybody who they disagree with
has a connection with intelligence community,
it's been made against me,
it's been made against Ruth and Michael.
The only explanation could be
that we're part of the cover up, paid by the CIA, or...
For better or worse I did write one article
for a CIA-published journal.
So people have turned that
into the fact that I work for the CIA.
I was aware they gave monetary awards
for the best articles of the year.
That's how I earn my living is getting paid for my writing.
So I accepted the award of course,
because it was a thousand dollars.
- Priscilla McMillan had remarkable connection
because she was chosen to interview Oswald
then because she was good in Russian,
she was able to talk with Marina after the assassination.
Then they became friends
and then she wrote a book called "Marina and Lee."
And it's very personal about the two of them.
- She gave me the right to write the truth
as I saw it, no matter how unfavorable it might be.
They say, there's a document that calls you
a witting collaborator of the CIA.
What do you make of that?
Witting.
- A witting. - Asset,
an unwitting asset?
I think they say witting,
so I guess that means...
Witting no, I just, witting around me.
No.
You applied to work for the CIA?
- Apparently I did in the summer of 1953, was it '53?
I've seen that date, but I think while I was in college,
which would've been summer of '49, I might have.
Not only was Priscilla Johnson McMillan
classified as a witting collaborator.
She was also debriefed by the CIA on multiple occasions.
In a 1962 contact report, the CIA officer writes,
"I think that Ms. Johnson can be encouraged
to write pretty much the articles we want.
- I was convinced that she will be the right person
to work with.
She convinced me that it would be very important
for history.
Try to explain why such a thing happened.
- Marina Oswald Porter, good evening, Marina.
- Hello, good evening to you too.
Marina Oswald a hard-
- There is one person's voice,
obviously missing from this story.
Marina Oswald was only 22 at the time of the assassination.
She's in her eighties now, still living in the Dallas area.
Marina had long been a convincing witness,
proclaiming Oswald's guilt.
But in the '80s and '90s,
she became an outspoken critic of the official story.
She did a few interviews during this time,
but it was clear that most of the media
had no intention of taking her seriously.
And she has refused all requests for the last 25 years.
- According to all the evidence of that...
- Conspiracy theories are intact, questions do remain
and people don't believe.
Among those who don't believe are Mrs. Kenneth Porter,
the former wife of Lee Harvey Oswald.
Do you believe that he did not pull the trigger
that he did not fire the fatal shots?
- Well, he definitely did not fire the shots,
according to all the evidence that I have right now.
- You acknowledge that Lee Harvey Oswald
was a man who had been abusive to you.
You have said recently that you did not love him in any way.
- I never said I did not love him.
Did you love him?
- Of course I did.
Why are you so eager now
to protect his memory when at the time you agreed
that very likely he was the assassin.
- Yes, I did believe in government of this country
and the law and I assumed blindly
that what I have been told must be correct.
- But the fact is that there have been a number
of independent investigations now
by independent journalists and by independent authors.
And they also also have come to the conclusion.
They have come to the conclusion-
- No, no, they come to the conclusion...
In 1968, Marina testified
that the Secret Service told her
you were associated with the CIA.
- Yeah, well, so what am I supposed do with this?
What's your reaction?
Why would they tell her that?
- I had the impression it was more brother-in-law
rather than Secret Service or somebody
that told her to stay clear of me.
Did you stay in touch with Marina
after the assassination?
- We arranged twice to get together.
Once was after she had testified
at the Warren Commission, then one other time
after she bought a house,
she wanted to show it to me.
And I went over and we visited with our children.
You know, it was just very sad
because what had happened... in the Kennedy being killed
was the biggest thing in either of our lives
and it was just an awful, awful thing.
So I didn't pursue seeing her more.
And then, she got taken up by the people
who thought there was a conspiracy.
Wouldn't it be nice to think it wasn't he,
if you're the wife.
- I finally did get a hold of Marina's phone number.
And she actually answered.
Marina was very friendly, but she still declined an interview.
She told me not to waste my life on this, that it's too late,
and that the truth will never come out.
- The official story just does not stand up
to scrutiny at all
and those who believe it are not invested enough
and I'd even go so far as to say,
they're not patriotic enough
to try to learn a little bit of very important history.
It's all out there now.
One of the things that you study,
if you try and take in the big picture,
is what happened to American foreign policy after.
When Kennedy was assassinated,
there was not one American combat troop in Vietnam.
By 1967, there were over half a million there.
American foreign policy becomes much more militant,
much more violent in a third world.
- In the coming years,
as the Kennedy case is better understood
we'll have a less exceptionalist view of ourselves.
We don't want to look at ourselves
as a shining city on a hill.
That's simply a fantasy.
The failure of the Warren Commission
truly did contribute to the decline of America democracy
and belief in the government.
And as cynicism that permeates the system today.
- The direction we're heading now
is this one that's quite terrifying, endless war,
the militarization of our own police,
the huge incarceration state we have.
It's a frightening situation we're in.
It's part of our national legacy,
what happened here.
It's part of what steered us in the direction
of the national security state we have today.
We're not told the truth about major policy decisions
for decades afterwards, if ever,
and as a result, we have a hidden history
of the United States.
- There's no mystery here.
It's all self-evident.
There was a coup,
it was designed to be a false mystery
and the debate would be eternal
and the focus on why it was done forgotten.
There's a lot of people
who don't like to think the worst about their government.
Who don't wanna believe that the Warren Commission
was a deliberate cover up
and that Oswald was really an agent of this government,
and the people around Oswald framed him
for a crime he didn't commit.
It's not "mom apple pie in America"
to think things like that.
- In order to commit yourself to truth here,
you're changing your very identity
from a citizen of a democracy
to a subject of a military empire.
It's a big step.
Their theory is that you
and Michael were involved in surveillance activities
of the radical left.
What?
- That you and Michael were involved in
surveillance activities of the radical left
and that watching-
- Who would be the radical left?
Cuban sympathizers.
- Oh.
Communists.
- Oh, absolute news to me,
I wasn't-was not aware of surveilling anybody
or watching Oswald.
Maybe watching Oswald was a job you had
to keep an eye on this, young communist defector
who had returned?
- Nonsense, absolute nonsense.
Have you ever done any work for the FBI or CIA?
- No, I haven't. No, I was not Oswald's sitter
for the CIA or whatever kind of story
they're trying to tell.
One of the things that I have felt very strongly
is that it was important for me to answer questions
and to say what I knew, because I'm interested in truth.
I have really less and less patience
with the people who are still looking for a conspiracy.
It's great that we live in a country
that where people can put out their false notions freely.
That doesn't happen in much of the world
and we can be proud that people can write books
that are full of falsehoods
and print 'em and not get jailed.
I'm a very independent person, nobody tells me what to do.