De Mohrenschildt, Onassis and Papa Doc
Peter Fokes
<quote on>
For the past nine months they [Onassis and Gratsos] had been putting
together a deal with Francois 'Papa Doc' Duvalier, president of Haiti,
to turn Port-au-Prince, the capital of the impoverished former French
sugar colony, into a Caribbean Monte Carlo, or a new Havana. The most
ambitious business transaction since his infamous Jiddah Agreement
eight years earlier, the deal would include an ultimate investment of
over $375 million (over two billion dollars today) in hotels, a new
casino, a harbor development scheme, an oil refinery, and the
establishment of a flag of convenience state in which to register his
tankers under even more favorable terms than he was getting in Panama.
They were also exploring the possibility of searching for oil and
natural gas reserves. It was a new venture for them, and they had
teamed up with George de Mohrenschildt, also known as Jerzy Sergius
von Mohrenschildt .... he had met Onassis three years earlier in
Panama at the home of Onassis's lawyer and friend, Dr. Roberto Arias.
De Mohrenschildt, who had already negotiated a geological survey
contract with Papa Doc ... claimed to have useful ties with the CIA,
who would be able to help them in Haiti when the time was right, he
told Onassis. De Mohrenschildt had also known Jackie and Lee since
they were young girls living in New York with their mother, Janet Lee
Bouvier. He claimed that he and Janet had been lovers....
Gratsos believed that de Mohrenschildt, in spite of his
aristocratic air of self-confidence, was in way over his head in
Haiti; there was something about the smooth petroleum engineer that
Gratsos could not pin down, and it nagged him. Gratsos suspected that
Onassis's enthusiasm for their putative Haiti partner had "more to do
with what de Mohrenschildt knew about Jackie than what he knew about
oil." ....
The deal was fraught with enough difficulties and risks anyways. Not
the least of these was the fact that the Kennedy Administration had
rejected the legality of Haiti's 1961 election, cut off U.S. aid, and
branded Papa Doc a murderous tyrant, which he clearly was. Moreover,
shaken by how much Onassis's affair with Lee [Jackie's sister] had
offended President Kennedy, and even more importantly, given the
nature of the man, by how deeply his invitation to Jackie [to sail
aboard his yacht in October 1963] had angered her brother-in-law, the
U.S. attorney general, Gratsos knew that "one sure way to lose the
Haiti deal was to win the battle with Robert Kennedy."
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Nemesis, Peter Evans, p. 92-94
Onassis ignored Gratsos and invited Jackie anyway.
PF
jpsh...@my-deja.com
De Mohrenschildt had some unkind words for
Onassis in his manuscript:
HSCA Report, Volume XII
p270
http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?absPageId=40474
Peter Fokes
De Mohrenschildt called Onassis in the spring of 1967 and wanted to
meet him. Onassis was reluctant to meet De Mohrenschildt himself so he
sent Johnny Meyer, according to Peter Evans:
<quote on>
But suspecting that the Americans were backing Rainier [in his attempt
to gain control of Monaco] -- and aware that de Mohrenschildt had good
connections with the CIA -- Onassis was also anxious to find out what
he knew. Since he also owed de Mohrenschildt a favor (for not dragging
Onassis's name into his testimony to the Warren Commission) and
guessed that de Mohrenschildt would sooner or later come to the same
conclusion, Onassis dispensed Johnny Meyer to Dallas with a bagful of
dollars to find out exactly what de Mohrenschildt knew.
The story Meyer brought back was more disturbing than Onassis could
possibly have imagined:
[One assumes then that De Mohrenschildt was not averse to taking some
of bills in the supplied "bagful of dollars.")
One of the key men behind Rainier's campaign to regain Monaco was
Robert Aime Maheu, who a decade earlier had organized the CIA plot
that destroyed Onassis's deals with the Saudis. Maheu's handling of
that operation had made him a legend in the Agency, and the first
choice to run a CIA plot to kill Castro -- which de Mohrenschildt
obligingly traced back through layers of obfuscation and cover-up,
through CIA agents, Mafia dons, and Cuban exiles, to the desk of then
attorney general Bobby Kennedy....
Onassis was pole-axed. Clearly, it was all connected: the CIA,
Niarchos, Maheu, Bobby Kennedy, a labyrinth of enemies, interests,
agencies, inextricably linked in a conspiracy to destroy him. How
could it not be? To Onassis's increasingly paranoiac mind it was all
too clear.
<quote off>
Nemesis , Peter Evans, p. 139-40
De Mohrenschildt was still willing to share secrets with Onassis in
1967.
It is rather odd that De Mohrenschildt starts discussing Onassis near
the end of his long manuscript on Oswald.
PF