Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination (13 page)

Whatever his skills as a newsman, Hendrix reportedly had the advantage of having access to a CIA source at Homestead Air Force Base, south of Miami. In the months and years to come, he would become known to his Washington colleagues as “The Spook”—because, in Kantor’s words, “of the handouts he reputedly took from the CIA.” In 1976, Hendrix would plead guilty to having withheld information from a Senate committee probe into multinational corporations and the CIA. He had lied to the committee with the collusion of the CIA, and had concealed his access to CIA information. This was the man who “had some background” on Lee Oswald to give Kantor in the early evening of November 22, 1963.

As previously mentioned in the context of Oswald’s “Hidell” alias, U.S. Army Intelligence had a file on Oswald before the assassination. As a result, a colonel was feeding information to the FBI within an hour of Oswald’s arrival at the police station. It would be good to satisfy oneself that this was just an example of the efficiency of Army Intelligence. That, however, became impossible when the Army applied the ultimate censorship and destroyed its Kennedy files.

Soon after the
Assassinations Committee learned the military records had been shredded, Congressman Richardson Preyer told the author: “There have been instances of files being, I guess you could say, maliciously withheld or even destroyed… . We don’t know what the motive is.”

It is hugely improbable that any U.S. agency—or top leadership of an agency—had any part in the assassination. The Assassinations Committee concluded in 1979 that neither the Secret Service, nor the FBI, nor the CIA, were involved as organizations. On the other hand, the Committee considered evidence indicating that individual members of agencies might have had prior covert associations with Oswald and might have even played a role in the assassination. One particularly serious allegation remains, as the Committee’s Chief Counsel put it, “undiscredited.”
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Yet the shifty behavior of the intelligence organizations may conceal—inefficiency aside—an embarrassing truth less heinous than actual involvement in the assassination.

The Warren Report stated, “Close scrutiny of the records of the federal agencies involved and the testimony of the responsible officials of the U.S. government establish that there was absolutely no type of informant or undercover relationship between an agency of the U.S. government and Lee Harvey Oswald at any time.” Today, with Watergate and a string of CIA scandals behind us, we know such all-embracing trust was naïve—the Warren Commission staff did not see all the records in 1964. In 1979, the House Assassinations Committee was careful not to express confidence that no agency had any type of relationship with Oswald.

The transcript of one Warren Commission executive session, throws an interesting light on the CIA’s attitude to the ethics of disclosure in the early 1960s. Commission member Allen Dulles, himself a former CIA Director, briefed colleagues on how a CIA official would deal with inquiries about an agent he had recruited.

Dulles: He wouldn’t tell.

Chief Justice Warren: Wouldn’t he tell it under oath?

Dulles: I wouldn’t think he would tell it under oath, no.

Chairman: Why?

Dulles: He ought not to tell it under oath. Maybe not tell it to his own government, but wouldn’t tell it any other way [
sic
].

Chairman: Wouldn’t he tell it to his own chief?

Dulles: He might or he might not.

Whatever Lee Oswald might eventually have revealed about himself and U.S. intelligence was lost to history forever two days after his arrest. In the late morning of November 24, the Dallas police chief decided to move his prisoner to the county jail. In the basement of City Hall, as Oswald was being led to a police car, a bystander with a revolver lunged forward to fire a single lethal bullet into Oswald’s stomach (see Photo 44). Jack Ruby, a local club owner with Mafia connections, had silenced Oswald once and for all. The last words the accused assassin had heard before being shot were a newsman’s shouted question: “Have you anything to say in your defense?”

Oswald was conscious for a few minutes after being shot. Police officers laid him down on the front floor of a nearby office, and one tried to talk to him. Detective Billy Combest told the author of Oswald’s dying response to questioning about the assassination: “At that time, I thought he was seriously injured, so I got right down on the floor with him, just literally on my hands and
knees. And I asked him if he would like to make any confession, any statement in connection with the assassination of the President… . Several times he responded to me by shaking his head in a definite manner… . It wasn’t from the pain or anything—he had just decided he wasn’t going to correspond with me, he wasn’t going to say anything.”
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Before Oswald was carried to an ambulance, someone applied artificial respiration—the worst possible treatment for an abdominal wound because it multiplies the chances of severe internal bleeding. At Parkland Hospital, the doctors who two days earlier had tried to save the President’s life now worked in vain over Oswald.

The corpse was taken to a mortuary, where an FBI team photographed Oswald and took his fingerprints for the last time. Late on November 25, the same afternoon that President Kennedy was laid to rest in Arlington, the alleged assassin was buried in a cemetery outside Dallas, in a moleskin-covered coffin, within a sealed concrete vault, beneath a black slab bearing only the word OSWALD. No details, not even dates of birth and death.

Today, we still have only glimpses of who he really was in life.

OSWALD
Maverick or Puppet?

Red Faces

“
Ask me, and I will tell you I fight
for Communism.”

—Lee Harvey Oswald, in a letter from Russia, 1959

T
he reaction in Dallas to the capture of Oswald could aptly be described as Pavlovian. The moment local officials realized he had been in Russia, and discovered armfuls of Communist propaganda amongst his belongings, they began sounding off about an international Communist conspiracy to kill the President.

Far away in Washington and Moscow, a different breed of official reacted with more sophistication. CIA and the KGB officers knew full well the questions that would soon be asked: Was Oswald an agent? Was he one of ours or one of theirs? These questions still await satisfactory answers; those that have been given are riddles in the sand.

In a 1975 memorandum, then CIA Director William Colby recalled how in November 1963 he had hurriedly consulted the files because “we were extremely concerned at the time that Oswald, as an American returning from the USSR, might have been routinely debriefed by DCD [Domestic Contacts Division].” None of the subsequent traces, Colby wrote, revealed Agency contact with
Oswald.

In February 1964, a Soviet intelligence officer defecting to the United States gave a glib account of Moscow’s reaction to the assassination. This was Yuri Nosenko, who claimed that within hours of the news he had himself been ordered to investigate the Soviet end of the Oswald case. A special plane had been dispatched to Minsk, where Oswald had lived, to collect all official papers on the alleged assassin’s stay in Russia. The results, Nosenko insisted, had been negative, because the KGB had “decided that Oswald was of no interest.” “I can unhesitatingly sign off,” he claimed, “to the fact that the Soviet Union cannot be tied into this in any way.”

Neither the CIA nor the Soviet disclaimers convinced the Senate Intelligence Committee when, in 1975, it looked into the performance of intelligence agencies at the time of the Kennedy assassination. Senator Richard Schweiker, who was prominent in that inquiry and had access to many classified U.S. intelligence files, said of Oswald in an interview: “Either we trained and sent him to Russia, and they went along and pretended they didn’t know—to fake us out—or in fact, they inculcated him and sent him back here and were trying to fake us out that way.”

Oswald did move in a mysterious way. And, in the effort to bring his shadowy profile into focus, the outsider labors under an enormous handicap. His main sources are people for whom untruth is a way of life—officials of the intelligence community.

The author Edward Epstein caused a stir in 1978 with a book suggesting that Oswald may have been recruited by the KGB, though not with assassination in mind. Epstein drew heavily on interviews with former CIA Counterintelligence chief James Angleton—long unrivaled as an interpreter of Soviet skullduggery and also, famously, a master of deception and disinformation.

In 1975, at a Senate
Intelligence Committee hearing, Angleton was asked to verify a quotation of something he had reportedly said earlier. Angleton responded in characteristically opaque style: “Well, if it is accurate, it should not have been said.”

By the time Oswald defected to the Soviet Union in 1959, Angleton was already embarked on the course that would define the rest of his career—and in a sense the Agency’s ability to operate effectively—the obsessive hunt for a mole. Angleton believed that an agent who answered to the Soviets had penetrated the CIA, and specifically the Soviet Russia Division. He was obsessed with the notion, an obsession that effected his every response to the defection to Russia of an insignificant young man called Oswald, and, in the long run, to the assassination itself.

Our look at the world as seen by Angleton first follows the proposal that the youthful former marine Oswald was recruited by the Communists—bearing in mind always that he may also have been the tool of others with very different loyalties and purposes.

The fledging Oswald was a contradiction. At sixteen, in New Orleans, he was reportedly devouring communist literature from the library and apparently writing to the Socialist Party of America for information.
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According to one high school friend, he began spouting about Socialism, declaring that he was “looking for a communist cell in town,” that “communism was the only way of life for the
worker.”

Another contemporary said that reports that the young Oswald had been “studying communism” were nonsense, that Oswald had a funny way of showing that communism was the only course for him. For he was simultaneously trying to join the U.S.
Marine Corps, a potent symbol of American “imperialism”—if you happened to be on Oswald’s professed side of the political fence.

Oswald tried to cheat his way into the Marine Corps while still under enlistment age and—when he failed—began devouring his elder brother’s Marine Corps manual as avidly as he had reportedly been studying Marxist tracts. According to his mother, Oswald learned the handbook until he “knew it by heart” and finally succeeded in joining up six days after his seventeenth birthday. The shapes in the fog around Oswald will suggest, though, that his zeal to become a U.S. marine, like his socialist bent, may have been less than spontaneous.

During basic training, recruit Oswald declared an interest in aircraft maintenance and repair, and spring 1957 saw him learning radar and air-traffic control. These and further assignments called for a security check, which Oswald passed. According to the official record, he was granted clearance at a “Confidential” level. Over these months, Oswald emerged as a loner who kept apart from his marine buddies. He did not always run with the pack when the unit was allowed out of camp, and some of his actions seem to have been a little mysterious. While at Keesler Air Force Base, friends thought Oswald used his weekend passes to go “home” to New Orleans, a hundred miles away. As we now know, however, his mother had moved to Texas. Other relatives, who did live in New Orleans, said Oswald did not come visiting.

Marine Oswald did rather well. He finished seventh in a class of thirty and qualified as an Aviation Electronics Operator—an assignment designed for those credited with above-average intelligence. This led to a foreign posting with MACS-1, Marine Air Control Squadron One in Atsugi, Japan. In 1957, Atsugi was a base for the now famous U-2 spy plane, and Oswald was entering a world of
military secrets. In the controversy over the alleged assassin’s true colors, this period is pivotal.

Atsugi Air Base, a few miles southeast of Tokyo, had been inherited by the Americans from Japan’s World War II air force. When Oswald arrived, it had become a jump-off point for U.S. Marine Corps fighter jets and Navy Constellations equipped for detecting enemy radar. Atsugi was also the site of a radar “bubble” responsible for surveillance of a vast sector of air space. Its function, according to the Warren Report, was “to direct aircraft to their targets by radar, communicating with the pilots by radio.” The squadron also scouted for incoming foreign aircraft, mostly Russian or Chinese planes that had strayed.

Oswald worked in the radar bubble, gazing for hours at a time at the blips on the screen, plotting aircraft courses. The newcomer proved so good at his job that one officer wrote, “I would desire to have him work for me at any time… . He minds his business and he does his job well.” Sometimes, as the senior enlisted man, Oswald served as crew chief. One of the leading marines in Oswald’s group was to say of him, “He had the sort of intelligence where you could show him how to do something once and he’d know how to do it, even if it was pretty complicated.”

While Oswald worked in the radar room, he witnessed a phenomenon that mystified almost everyone. Sometimes, out of the ether, a pilot’s voice would request weather information for an altitude of ninety thousand feet. In 1957, no one had heard of a plane that flew that high. The mystery lasted only until the marines discovered they were living at close quarters with a newfangled aircraft called the U-2. The officers called it a “utility plane,” but the U-2 was a spy in the sky, perhaps the West’s most important single military intelligence asset.

As the weeks passed, Oswald and his friends saw the U-2 in action as it was
wheeled out of a special hangar, as it rocketed aloft at astonishing speed, and as it returned from distant missions. Long and pencil-thin, the U-2 looked like something out of science fiction. There were no spy satellites then, and it was invaluable to the United States for penetrating Soviet and Chinese air space to return laden with telltale photographs. Army and air bases, seaports and factories, all were vulnerable to the high-altitude eyes of the U-2.

The beauty of it, for Western intelligence, was that the Communists were powerless to intercept the U-2. The superplane flew so high that no ground-to-air missiles or conventional aircraft could touch it. Its precise operational altitudes were top secret, as was any technical data that would teach the Russians how to knock the U-2 out of the sky. Oswald and his friends were left in no doubt about the secrecy. The hangar where the planes were kept was ringed by guards with submachine guns, and the marines were under orders to say nothing about what they saw and heard on the airfield and in the radar room.

It is probable that Atsugi also held another secret almost as sensitive as the U-2 project—a stockpile of nuclear weapons. According to the American agreement with Japan, no nuclear armament should have been stored on American bases, but personnel at Atsugi suspected the pact was violated.

One officer, Lieutenant Charles Rhodes, recalled having been taken by a colonel to a vast underground complex “at least three stories below ground.” On either side of a central thoroughfare, in deep alcoves, Rhodes observed huge armaments that he identified as bombs. The colonel did not say what they were and did not invite questions.
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The aura of military secrecy at Atsugi was fascinating for everyone, down to the lowliest marine, and some have suggested that for
Oswald it was more than that. Lieutenant Charles Donovan, the officer in charge of Oswald’s radar team, said he remembered a day when Oswald discussed the U-2’s radar blips with him. One marine friend recalled Oswald wandering around Atsugi with a camera taking pictures. He later served at another U-2 installation, in the Philippines, where his duties included standing guard at a hangar that housed the airplane.

If Oswald’s photographs were of radar installations or of the U-2 in action, they would have been manna from heaven for Soviet intelligence. Some believe Oswald made sinister contacts who were just that—spies.

Just as he had once gone off alone on trips to New Orleans, Oswald now went on two-day trips to Tokyo. He confided to a friend that he was having an affair with a Japanese nightclub hostess. That on its own would have been normal enough, but Oswald seemed to be living above his station. The hostess worked at the Queen Bee, one of the smartest clubs in the city. Its clientele were American officers rather than enlisted men, and a night with one of the hostesses cost more than Oswald earned in a month.
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Oswald and the hostess were sometimes seen together, and his mates marveled that a woman of her style and beauty had time for Oswald. Perhaps they simply underestimated Oswald’s amatory talents, but some have suspected that the Queen Bee hostess pumped Oswald for classified information. Loose talk in the Tokyo clubs, like soldiers’ bar talk anywhere, was known to cause security leaks, and the use of sex as bait for intelligence information is as old as spying itself.

Whatever the nature of the liaison, Oswald reacted miserably to news that his unit was to be transferred to the Philippines. It was then, in October 1957, that his early image as a model U.S. marine
began to look tarnished. According to the record, Oswald shot himself in the arm, inflicting a minor wound, before the unit was due to leave Atsugi. He allegedly did so with a pistol he had purchased privately and kept in his locker. For possession of an unregistered weapon against service regulations, Oswald was fined and sentenced to twenty days’ hard labor.

If he had been trying to dodge transfer to the Philippines, he failed. Oswald was discharged from the hospital in time to leave Japan with his unit and did not return to Atsugi for several months. When he did get back, he got into trouble again, this time reportedly because he picked a quarrel at a party. A second court-martial acquitted him of deliberately having poured a drink over a sergeant, but found him guilty of using “provoking words.”

This time, Oswald spent eighteen days in the cells. From then on, former friends said, he spoke bitterly against the Marine Corps, which reinforced his reputation as a loner. He avoided marine associates and was again seen with Japanese acquaintances, both male and female.

In autumn 1958, during a crisis sparked by fighting between Communist and Nationalist Chinese forces, Oswald’s radar unit apparently moved to Taiwan. Oswald reportedly again drew attention to himself by loosing off four or five shots into the darkness, then claiming he had fired at “men in the woods” who had failed to answer a challenge. He was transferred shortly afterward back to Atsugi—once again to be seen with a striking woman—this time a Eurasian. Oswald told a friend she was half Russian.
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In December 1958, Oswald’s tour of duty in the Pacific ended, when he was transferred back to the United States, to the El Toro Air Station in Santa Ana, California. His unit’s function there, according to Lieutenant
Donovan, was “to surveil for aircraft, but basically to train both enlisted men and officers for later assignment overseas.” Like other officers, Donovan found Oswald “a good crew chief,” “very competent,” “brighter than most people.” The lieutenant took Oswald on at chess and found him “very good” at the game. He noted, too, that the young marine “was particularly capable in the field of world affairs.” Oswald had a special interest—it became clear that he was preoccupied with things Russian.

At El Toro, Oswald applied to take a Marines proficiency examination in written and spoken Russian. He failed, but showed a knowledge of the basics of the language. He was observed in weeks to come to be laboring hour after hour over his Russian books, and to have begun reading a Russian-language periodical. He played Russian records, so loudly they could be heard outside the barrack block, and began addressing people in Russian whether they understood it or not. Oswald even had his name written in Russian on one of his jackets.