Thursday, November 23, 2017

Possible Hijack Collaborator -- Jack Leslie Bowen

This article is the third in a series.

The first article was Lee Harvey Oswald's Activities During the Housemans' Vacation.

The second article was The Oswalds' Plan to Hijack an Airplane.

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From about August 9 to September 10, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald planned to hijack an airplane in order to fly himself, his wife Marina and his daughter June to Cuba. Marina tried to talk him out of the plan but reluctantly agreed to go along with him.

Lee did not have the money to buy the necessary airplane tickets. He took some ineffective actions to obtain money from family friend Ruth Paine, from his aunt's Murret family and from Marxist political parties.

At one point during this period, Lee told Marina that some other man -- Lee did not name the man to Marina -- had offered to help Lee take over the airplane. Lee considered the man's offer but ultimately rejected it. Lee explained to Marina that, "your accomplice is your enemy for life".

(Lee said those words in Russian, but I don't know the Russian words. The English words were stated in the book Marina and Lee, a biography of Marina Oswald written by Priscilla Johnson McMillan.)

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I think that it really did happen that another man did offer to help Lee hijack an airplane. Furthermore, I think that two different men might have offered separately. In this article here, I will that such an offer might have been made by a man named Jack Leslie Bowen.

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Oswald and his family moved from the Soviet Union to Fort Worth, Texas, in June 1962. Lee soon got a job at the local Leslie Welding Company. He quit that job, without explanation, on October 8, 1962.

On the following day, Lee began renting a post-office box under two names -- Lee Harvey Oswald and A. J. Hidell.

Three days later, on October 12, 1962, Oswald was hired by a local company called Jaggars-Chiles-Stoval in Dallas. The company's main business made graphic artworks for billboards, posters and advertisements, and Oswald's job was to process photographs.

One of Oswald's associates at his new employer was Jack Leslie Bowen. When Oswald applied for a library card, he named Bowen as a personal reference. After the assassination of President John Kennedy, the FBI wanted to question Bowen, but he had disappeared in January 1964, right when the FBI began trying to contact him. He remains disappeared to the present day.

I think that when Oswald was in New Orleans and trying to get money for airplane tickets during August and September 1963, he contacted Bowen, who probably still was living in Texas. Perhaps Bowen even traveled to New Orleans to discuss Oswald's hijack plan with him. Bowen even offered to board the airplane with Oswald's family and to help do the hijacking. Bowen's offer raised Oswald's suspicions about him, however, and so Oswald rejected the offer and broke off contact with Bowen.

Lee told Marina about Bowen's offer, but she would not have known who Bowen was even if Lee had named him to Marina.

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Oswald's switching his employment from the Leslie Welding Company to Jaggars-Chiles-Stoval in October 1962 seems to have something to do with Bowen, with Cuba, and with intelligence collection.

Bowen's middle name is Leslie, so he might have had some familial relationship with the owners of the Leslie Welding Company. At Jaggars-Chiles-Stoval, Bowen's position was "assistant art director", so he might have supervised Oswald.

Jaggars-Chiles-Stoval is said to have done some graphic-arts work for intelligence agencies. In particular, the company is said to have done some work involving aerial photographs of Cuba.

Two days before Oswald began working there, he began renting that post-office box under that false name Hidell. Marina explained later that Lee chose the name Hidell because it rhymed with the first name of Fidel Castro. That rental of that post-office box is Oswald's first known use of that false name.

In light of such considerations, I speculate that Bowen arranged for Jaggars-Chiles-Stoval to hire Oswald and that Bowen intended to use Oswald in some intelligence-collection work involving Cuba. Perhaps Bowen figured that Oswald's defection to Russia and his Russian wife might enable Oswald to befriend Communist sympathizers among Cuban exiles.

At the company, Bowen was able to train Oswald how to take, edit and process photographs -- skills useful in intelligence collection. In January 1963, Oswald enrolled in a typing class, and perhaps that too was part of Bowen's training of Oswald.

Marina said that during this period Oswald often stayed late at work, was gone three evenings a week for his typing class, and spent time at home studying at maps and bus schedules.

When Oswald had worked six months at Jaggars-Chiles-Stoval, he was fired. That was when he moved to New Orleans and ended (as far as we known) his regular association with Bowen.

In August or September 1963, when Oswald was trying to get money for airplane tickets, he contacted Bowen, because Oswald's previous association with Bowen caused Oswald to think initially that he could trust Bowen to keep secret his plan to hijack an airplane to Cuba. However, Bowen's offer to collaborate in the actual hijacking caused Oswald to distrust him.

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I do not think that Bowen worked for a government intelligence agency such as the CIA or FBI. Rather, I think that he worked for a non-governmental, Masonic organization.

I am not going to write here a long description of the Masonic Order. Suffice it to say here that the organization is ancient, is secret, is based in Scotland but operates world-wide, and involves itself in the business of collecting intelligence. Bowen was one of this organization's intelligence collectors, and he tried to groom Oswald as a secret agent.

Bowen did not have anything to do with the assassination, but his Masonic intelligence organization told him to disappear and gave him a new identity.

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The person known to Oswald as Jack Leslie Bowen was born with the name John Caesar Grossi in Paterson, New Jersey. He spent time in several penitentiaries before moving to Ft. Worth in about August 1961 and becoming an assistant art director at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall in Dallas.

Bowen was married, but his wife, Patricia Gervan Bowen, lived in Ontario, Canada, with her mother, Mable Gervan, and near her sister, Edna (née Gervan) Elliott. Despite this distance, Bowen maintained frequent contact with his in-laws, the Elliott family.

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After Oswald gave up his hijack plan, he traveled to Mexico City to apply for a visa at the Cuban embassy there. On his bus ride to Mexico City in September 1963, Oswald sat next to a man who was named John (Jack) Howard Bowen.

This second Jack Bowen in Oswald's mysterious adventures had been born with the name Albert Osborne in 1888 in Grimsby, England. He immigrated to the United States in 1914 and later claimed that he was ordained that year as a minister in Trenton, New Jersey. In 1916, he moved to Canada, where he served as a soldier until about 1920.

He subsequently returned to the United States and settled in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1929. He lived there for the next 14 years and said that one of his closest friends there was a social worker named Mary Elliott (the same family name as that of the first Bowen's in-laws).

Still named Osborne, he  managed a boys club in Knoxville for a while, but was fired for encouraging homosexual and anti-American activities among the boys. In 1943, he left Knoxville and began to travel as a minister throughout the United States, Canada, and Mexico. By 1956, he had assumed two aliases -- John Howard Bowen and John H. Owen -- and was operating an orphanage in Mexico.

Albert Osborne, aka Jack Bowen,
Oswald's seatmate on the bus ride
to Mexico City in September 1963 
I suspect that both of those Jack Bowens worked for a Masonic intelligence service but misled Oswald into thinking that they were associated with the Cuban intelligence service.

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The Bowens might have helped Oswald to make secret trips. For example, Oswald's trip to Mexico City was a secret trip, and the second Jack Bowen sat next to him the whole way.

Below are a series of allegations about Oswald's whereabouts and about false evidence being planted about his whereabouts.

On March 29, 1963, Oswald was seen in a barber shop in Sparta, Wisconsin (a little east of La Crosse). He might have visited Sparta to meet some of the Bowen associates based in Ontario, which shares a border with Wisconsin. As Oswald's supervisor at Jaggars-Chiles-Stoval, the first Bowen might have been able to facilitate Oswald's absence from work without the knowledge of the company's other personnel.

On March 31, two days after Oswald was seen in Sparta, Wisconsin, he began his involvement with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee by writing a letter from his home in Dallas to the organization's president. Less than two weeks later, on April 10 Oswald tried to murder retired General Edwin Walker in Dallas. Perhaps this incident was the Bowens' test to verify whether Oswald would commit murder for them.

On July 26 someone signed the register of the Atomic Energy Museum in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, with the words "Lee H. Oswald, USSR, Dallas Road, Dallas Texas." The FBI later determined that this entry was not made in Oswald's handwriting.

In some paperwork for unemployment benefits he wrote that he had applied for jobs with a series of employers from July 29 to August 3, but all those employers later denied that he had indeed applied. On July 31 the New Orleans library recorded that he had returned two books and checked out two others, but other witnesses claimed he visited the Selective Service office in Austin, Texas, on that day to ask about changing his undesirable discharge from the Marines. The library transactions may have been performed for the specific purpose of documenting Oswald's presence in New Orleans on days when he was not in fact there.

On September 5, the Oswald family was seen at the airport in San Antonio, Texas, according to the statements of two women, Martha Doyle and Joanne Dunsmore, who worked for car-rental companies there. Doyle remembered the date precisely because the incident happened on her birthday. The two women described the family and said that Lee Harvey Oswald tried to rent a car from them. During the course of the conversation, he mentioned that his family had come to the airport "in a friend's car" and that he worked in a "publishing business" involving schoolbooks. These two women tell a story that is detailed and compelling.

At another time -- estimated to be the "late summer of 1963" -- Oswald was seen near Brady, Texas, which is on a fairly direct highway route from Ft. Worth to San Antonio (via U.S. Highways 67, 77, 87). This report was provided by a gun dealer named Robert Ray McKeown, who claimed that Oswald and someone named "Hernandez" visited him near Brady "in the late summer of 1963." There, Oswald asked McKeown whether he was interested in a deal to supply weapons to an unidentified group that intended to take over [El] Salvador. McKeown turned the offer down. Hernandez and Oswald departed and then returned about a half hour later. This time, Oswald more specifically offered $10,000 for four .300 Savage semi-automatic rifles with telescopic sights. McKeown turned down that offer too. McKeown's story is detailed and compelling.

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I speculate that after Oswald was fired from Jaggars-Chiles-Stoval in Dallas and moved to New Orleans, he and that first Jack Bowen continued occasional secret contacts. Bowen sometimes enabled Oswald to make secret trips and planted false evidence about Oswald's whereabouts.

 Therefore, when Oswald decided in August 1963 to hijack an airliner, he contacted that Jack Bowen to discuss the plan and to ask for money. Bowen did not want Oswald to commit such a stupid crime, and so he gradually manipulated Oswald into giving up that plan and traveling instead to Mexico City to apply for a visa in the Cuban embassy there. On that bus trip, Oswald was accompanied by the second Jack Bowen.

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I don't think that this Masonic intelligence service ever intended that Oswald would assassinate President Kennedy or expected him to do so. Oswald was an occasionally employed asset who might be useful in the future. Oswald wanted to work as a spy, and so maybe he might be used as a spy in some situations.

The Masonic Order has its own agenda, its own activities, its own goals. Sometimes the Masonic Order wants to collect information and accomplish actions secretly. Therefore the Masonic Order develops a network of secret operatives. Oswald was being developed.

When Oswald unexpectedly (for them) assassinated Kennedy, they did not want to be questioned in the subsequent investigation. The first Jack Bowen evaded questioning completely, and the second Jack Bowen evaded and lied.

I have written much more elsewhere about the Masonic Order and about the false name Jack Bowen, but I will limit myself to the above information in this blog about the movie Dirty Dancing.

My main here is that during the Kellerman's vacation, Lee Harvey Oswald was planning to hijack an airplane to Cuba with his wife Marina's reluctant agreement. During that period, Oswald might have discussed his plan with the Jack Bowen whom he knew from his earlier employment at Jaggars-Chiles-Stoval in Dallas.

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My next article in this series will be titled "Possible Hijack Collaborator -- Richard Case Nagell".

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