Attorney Ed Buck told a remarkable story about his run-in with "a tall
slender man"about 6'2", 160 pounds" at Luby's Cafeteria, and how the unknown
man mentioned his friendship with Lee Oswald.
The man also told Buck that he used to work with books before he went to
work at Bell Helicopter.
The FBI Albequerque
office concluded that the unknown man could only be Michael Paine. [xi] Paine was interviewed and agreed that it was probably him. Robert Gemberling, a prominent FBI
investigator of Oswald, omitted from his reports Buck's perfect physical
description of Paine. [xii]
Michael is described as looking like Oswald in 1963 -- Paine had a similar slender frame as Oswald, but quite a bit taller, 35 years old, standing 6'2 and weighing 160 -- here is a picture of Michael and Ruth during that time. [xiii] People who have seen film of Paine during 1964 say that he was not an Oswald look-alike, but that there was a resemblance. [xiv]
Michael Paine' stepfather was the reason Bell Aircraft became Bell Helicopter
Before going any farther with the story, this is a good time to stretch out
and take a long look at just who is Michael Paine. The man presents a sea of
contradictions. Like Oswald, he combines
some left-wing and some right-wing tendencies.
He is a descendant of Robert Treat Paine, one of the signers of the
Declaration of Independence. [xv] His mother was Ruth Forbes Paine; Michael
virtually never saw his father Lyman Paine from age 4 until his wedding. [xvi]
Michael always considered himself more a
member of the Forbes family than the Paine family. [xvii] Michael sang in the choir of the First
Unitarian Church, and pastor Byrd Helligas described him as an active member. [xviii] An avowed pacifist, Michael served in the 40th
Division in Korea between 1952-54 as an artillery infantryman,[xix]
even though he refused to take the oath of allegiance when inducted in 1952. [xx] Paine proceeded to win two Bronze Stars. [xxi]
Paine worked for Bell Helicopter, with ex-Nazi Walter Dornberger as the supervisor of Paine's division of classified projects for Bell Aerospace. Dornberger was the former head of the Nazi Peenemunde rocket center, and surrendered to the US Army with his compatriot Wernher von Braun as part of the infamous Project Paperclip. [xxii]
Michael's stepfather, Arthur Young,
invented the original Bell Helicopter. [xxiii] Young was proud of the uses of the helicopter
in fighting forest fires and in MASH evacuations in Korea, but didn't like its
conversion into an attack weapon in Vietnam. [xxiv] After
Michael flunked out of Harvard in 1949, he increasingly spent time in the barn
of the Young place in Paoli, PA, where he experimented with new types of
aeronautical vehicles. [xxv] Michael was apparently trying to emulate
Arthur. The helicopter was so successful that the company changed its name from Bell Aircraft to Bell Helicopter.
Michael's birth father Lyman Paine was
a well-known architect. A lifelong
left-wing Trotskyist, Lyman Paine got into a political battle with fellow party member James
Burnham over the direction of the communist movement - until Burnham joined the
CIA and postwar right-wing activists such as William Buckley.
Lyman and his wife were on the Security Index, while Michael had a confidential clearance to work at Bell Helicopter. Michael and Lyman rarely saw each other after Lyman divorced Michael's mother. Michael's brother Cameron did not believe that their father had been a major influence on either of them.
Michael's mother was Ruth Forbes, later known as Ruth Forbes Paine Young after her two marriages to George Lyman Paine and Arthur Young. The Youngs were Quakers and prominent in Philadelphia circles.
Ruth Paine was active in bringing Soviets and Americans together
Who is Ruth Paine, formerly married to Michael? Like Michael, Ruth Hyde Paine s an avowed pacifist. Her parents were Unitarians, and her mother was a minister. She joined the Quakers in 1951. Ruth became active with the East-West Contacts Committee through the Quakers, a society of pen pal correspondence with the Soviet Union that led her to the study of Russian in 1955. [xxvi] Ruth's activity with the East-West Contacts Committee led her to organize a 2500 mile walk in 1957 by five Americans and three Russians. This included working with the Committee of Soviet Youth Organizations. [xxvii]
Ruth also worked on an American-Russian
student exchange organized by this committee in 1958, taking
an active role in making the travel arrangements for the Russian visitors. The Paines told the Warren Commission that
Ruth was a prominent committee member, but never addressed who was Ruth's contact
with the State Department to get the travel arrangements done.
I think she had such a contact, and the contact's probable identity tells us a lot. The Director of East-West Contacts within the State Department, Frederick Merrill, stated his approval of this 1958 exchange. [xxviii] Merrill worked with the Free Europe Committee, which funded Radio Free Europe and other projects to ensure the flow of funds to Soviet exile groups. [xxix] Michael Paine allowed that Ruth may have written the State Department to set up this exchange. [xxx] The next year, Merrill informed the chief of CIA East-West Contacts that the Rand Corporation was asking the State Department about Robert Webster's whereabouts when he defected to the Soviet Union. [xxxi] Oswald was to follow in Webster's footsteps just days later.
While Ruth attended Russian classes
for seven weeks during the summer of 1959 at Middlebury College in Vermont,
Michael landed his classified job at Bell Helicopter in Irving, Texas. Curiously, sources differ on whether it was
during January or July 1959. [xxxii] This should have set off alarm bells
throughout the intelligence agencies.
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