Was Mary Ferrell A Disinfo Agent?

First topic message reminder :

According to researcher Joe McBride,Ferrell was a disinfo agent.Here is an excerpt from his book "Into The Nightmare".

THE GATEKEEPER

After it became clear to me that the introduction into evidence of the audiotape on which the HSCA
based its halfhearted conclusion of conspiracy was designed to discredit the whole investigation, I
became keenly interested in tracing the provenance of the tape to see how this could have happened.

According to Fort Worth researcher Jack D. White, the tape was first brought forward by Gary
Mack, who took it to Mary Ferrell, the supposedly self-appointed den mother of assassination researchers in Dallas (Dallas Tippit researcher Greg Lowrey called her “The Gatekeeper”). But according to Mack, who worked with Penn Jones on The Continuing Inquiry, Jones gave him the original clue and a copy of the tape. Mack, a former Fort Worth NBC-TV announcer who changed his name from Larry Dunkel while working as a disk jockey, eventually turned into a lone-nut theorist after he became the curator of The Sixth Floor Museum at the former Texas School Book Depository
in Dealey Plaza, which exists primarily to debunk conspiracy theories while misleading and distracting tourists at the site of the murder. Its raison d’être seems to be to protect the image of Dallas by attempting to perpetuate the Warren Commission’s version of events.

Mack’s ally Ferrell supplied favored researchers with documents from her ample files (since her death in 2004, available
online at maryferrell.org), and she has been hailed by many researchers for her supposedly selfeffacing generosity toward the cause of history. In an article on the acoustics evidence, Dale K. Myers discusses the provenance of the tape and cites Mack’s 1979 report that Jones originally suggested they look into the question of a stuck microphone on a police motorcycle that blocked a radio channel during the motorcade. “Penn was of the opinion that the communications were jammed on purpose,” Mack wrote. Mack thought such a police radio tape might contain sounds of shots. Jones provided a tape that was of insufficient quality to work with, but Ferrell came up with a better one. Ferrell, White said, tracked down a first-generation copy of the tape made from a police Dictabelt and presented it to
the HSCA.

As I later found after making contact with Mary Ferrell myself, she actually had deep connections with U.S. intelligence. She was a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO), founded by CIA agent David Atlee Phillips, who many researchers believe helped organize the Kennedy assassination plot and the framing of Oswald in particular. Ferrell’s excuse for being a member, that she was infiltrating the organization to learn more about U.S. intelligence, seems laughably transparent. “We know Mary Ferrell has many contacts with the FBI and other government agencies,” Lowrey told me. “I’m also suspicious of her association with Hugh Aynesworth,” the
Dallas reporter who covered the case from the first day and has long been an opponent of conspiracy theorists, as well as serving as an FBI informant during the Garrison case. “You can start in any direction,” said Lowrey, “and ultimately it will lead you to [Ferrell]. You will come back to her.”

Ferrell was a legal secretary for the Socony Mobil Oil Company in Dallas at the time of the assassination. As well as putting her in the circle of big oil in Dallas, the Mobil association gives Ferrell at least a tangential link to some key Kennedy assassination characters, including people involved in oil, the White Russian community, and U.S. intelligence. Volkmar Schmidt, a Germanborn Dallas petroleum geologist who claimed he tried to turn Oswald against General Walker and therefore felt “a terrible responsibility” for the Walker assassination attempt and the Kennedy assassination, told researcher William E. Kelly in a 1995 interview that in 1963 he worked for a Dallas branch of Mobil, the Field Research Laboratory of the Magnolia Petroleum Company. Schmidt said he met George de Mohrenschildt and Ruth Paine, the Oswalds’ CIA handlers, and Paine’s husband, Michael, “through the circle of young professionals at the Magnolia labs.”

It was at a February 22,1963, party arranged by Everett D. Glover, a chemist with the labs, at a house he shared with Schmidt,that Schmidt had a long talk (“about two solid hours”) with Oswald about Walker and other political
topics, including Kennedy and Cuba (Schmidt claimed Oswald was “hateful” toward Kennedy, and that he tried to turn that feeling against Walker, telling Oswald the general was a racist and “kind of a Nazi”). At the same party the Oswalds were introduced to Ruth Paine; Glover told the Warren Commission that Ruth spent most of her time that night speaking with Marina in Russian. As well as by George de Mohrenschildt and his wife, Jeanne, the party was attended by others from the Magnolia labs and by George’s oil industry friend Samuel Ballen. Armstrong writes in Harvey & Lee, “There is little doubt the purpose of this social gathering was to provide CIA operative George DeMohrenschildt the opportunity to introduce Lee Harvey Oswald and Marina to CIA operative Ruth Paine. During the next 10 months, until November 22, 1963, Oswald’s activities were closely monitored by either DeMohrenschildt or Mrs. Paine” .

I find them repulsive. I think he is a sensationalist.

Damned dishonest too, yes? Most people wouldn't catch the incongruous quality of Robert Kennedy referring privately to President Johnson as "Lyndon," would they?

An old thread about McBride's book. Bumped since we are discussing MC bride's Tippit theories .

Vinny wrote:The writer, Brad Bailey, hinted at the strangeness of this paradox in her career: “Mrs. Ferrell didn’t particularly like Kennedy as a president or as a fellow Catholic. . . . So she has a hard time explaining the fireproof library building in her Oak Lawn backyard with floor-to-ceiling shelves containing virtually every document ever published on the assassination. Nor can she easily explain the additional 25,000 pages of FBI documents spread across her living room floor or the clippings and papers that fill another room.”

The most I could get from Ferrell when I asked about her motivation, a question that seemed to momentarily take her aback in our last conversation in December 1992, was the vague response, “I just didn’t think they went to Oak Cliff and picked up the man who did it in a darkened theater.Somehow it just didn’t make sense.” Ferrell was surprisingly equivocal on some of the most-discussed topics surrounding the assassination. She said she refused to see Oliver Stone’s JFK because when reporters called her, “I was really glad I didn’t have to lie and say I didn’t like it or I did like it.” As for New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison himself, she told me, “I loved Jim Garrison -- I wavered between thinking he’s insane and thinking he’s a genius.” And as for Oswald, she said that if people “come to me and say, ‘I think Oswald acted alone, and do you have documentation?,’ I just politely say, ‘Go somewhere else.’ Everything I do is based on Oswald did not act alone. Not that he didn’t act. I don’t know.” And the Morning News reported in 1983 that despite all her research, she had “given up hope of deciding what really happened that day in Dallas. ‘We have now had about four major investigations, and I consider that the truth is still hidden from us,’ she says.”

Thanks for bumping this, Vinny. I remember reading the passages about Ferrell in McBride's book when it came out circa 2014 and thinking they were very compelling. Not so much anymore. I've seen too many book hoarders' houses in the meantime to think that the urge to compile material, to build a collection is suspect.

One book hoarder I knew was obsessed with Napoleon, coconut-eating crabs, and the actress Jayne Mansfield in no certain order. To carry his books he would drag around a garbage can with no wheels that made a terrible racket as it scraped across the sidewalk. He used a garbage bag rung up like a towel for a belt. In his house were untold amounts of books and periodicals, mostly rescued from the recycling center down the street or bought from the nearby used book store where the manager would continually cut him off because she knew he needed to save his money for food and to keep the heat on.

A different book hoarder in Portland, Oregon had no heat. There were two tunnels through the wall-to-wall books, artwork, and ephemera: one going from the front door to a tiny bed, another going from the bed to the bathroom.

I would imagine if you asked either one of these people WHY they got started "collecting" materials they would give you a very vague answer like Mary Ferrell gave. What do you mean, "Why?" You don't know?

T F Bowley

https://drive.google.com/file/d/10nEm2W3x-aMuK4DVITxF9KdeJNwu0vGa/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/16c_oD6WTY3yMz4SYHN-ehfyKlT65O2hQ/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gagA1CuQkjRQ3vxHWuzHGoe5sK2KUsrx/view?usp=sharing

Grandmother of JFK Assassination Research Lived a Double Life.

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2022/04/08/grandmother-of-jfk-assassination-research-lived-a-double-life/

Thanks, Vinny. That Covert Action article on MF is a snippet of:


[url= https://lbjthemasterofdeceit.com/2022/02/15/mary-ferrells-enigmatic-past-and-how-her-namesake-foundation-added-even-more-enigmata-to-the-mix/]https://lbjthemasterofdeceit.com/2022/02/15/mary-ferrells-enigmatic-past-and-how-her-namesake-foundation-added-even-more-enigmata-to-the-mix/[/url]


I was reading along and seeing basically a repeat of what Joseph McBride wrote about her and then...

"An illustration of how the MFF made revisions to certain documents was how they removed Judyth Vary Baker’s initials from Lee Oswald’s timecards as a way to eliminate that vital evidence of her presence at Reily Coffee Company."

The sneaky bastards, always trying to make Judyth look less than credible. How do these elves do their dastardly subterfuge so efficiently?

Judyth later takes center stage in the article as witness to Mary's supposed sketchiness and I stopped reading. I still don't know if Mary Ferrell was a "master of deceit" but I know that Judyth Vary Baker is a waster of time.

Judyth later takes center stage in the article as witness to Mary's supposed sketchiness and I stopped reading. I still don't know if Mary Ferrell was a "master of deceit" but I know that Judyth Vary Baker is a waster of time.

Fully agree.