Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination (14 page)

Marine friends nicknamed him “Comrade Oswaldskovich,” and young Lee thought that as funny as they did. Fellow marine Kerry Thornley, noted later, “He often joked about Communism. I remember one time a master sergeant got up on the tailgate of a truck for a lecture of some type. Oswald put on a Russian accent to exclaim, “Ah! Another collectivist farm lecture.”

Oswald openly showed himself interested in socialist ideology and in Soviet politics in particular. He once again subscribed to the
People’s World
, the socialist newspaper he had first read as a youth in New Orleans. Marine Thornley, who discussed politics with Oswald, gained the impression that he thought “Marxist morality was the most rational morality to follow,” Communism “the best system in the world.”

With another marine,
Nelson Delgado from Puerto Rico, Oswald also held animated discussions about Cuba, where Fidel Castro had just seized power. Both young men said they supported the Castro revolution and discussed traveling to Havana together one day. Delgado suggested that Oswald write to the Cuban Embassy in Washington, DC, and Oswald later said he had made contact with Cuban diplomats. Delgado noticed that his friend started getting more letters than usual, some of which bore the Cuban official seal.

On trips into Los Angeles, with Delgado, Oswald would say he was on his way to “visit the Cuban Consulate.” One night, when an outsider asked for him at the camp entrance, Oswald was allowed to stand down from guard duty to see the visitor. He went to the gate, where Delgado saw him deep in a long conversation with a man he thought was Cuban.

“Delgado’s testimony has the cast of credibility,” a senior aide to the CIA’s James Angelton commented years later in a memorandum, “[and] says a lot more of possible operational significance than is reflected by the language of the Warren Report, and its implications do not appear to have been run down or developed by investigation.” After the Kennedy assassination, the aide observed, Soviet and Cuban cooperation with the American inquiry was minimal, “designed to cover up an admission of knowledge of, or connection with, Oswald.”

Who was the stranger who had reportedly visited Oswald at El Toro, Angleton’s aide wondered. And “was there reporting from Los Angeles to Washington and Havana that could, in effect, represent the opening of a Cuban file on Oswald?”
5

Shortly before the end of his Marine Corps service, Oswald asked Delgado to take a duffel bag to a bus-station locker in Los Angeles. Along with personal property, according to Delgado and another marine, it contained
photographs taken from various angles that showed a fighter aircraft. Oswald could have obtained the pictures legitimately, during training, but Delgado wondered later why he had kept them. Meanwhile, whatever his allegiance, Oswald was getting ready for a dramatic move.

Earlier, in spring 1959, Oswald had applied to study philosophy at the Albert Schweitzer College in Switzerland, and the college had accepted him. In a letter home to his brother, Oswald had written, “Pretty soon I’ll be getting out of the Corps and I know what I want to be and how I’m going to be it.” Now, in August, he behaved as though he were impatient to leave the Marine Corps. He asked for an early release on the ground that his mother, who had been injured at work some time earlier, needed him. He applied for a passport, openly stating in the application that he intended to travel to Russia and Cuba. This hardly squared with his pretense of going home to look after his mother, but there is no sign that the Marine Corps raised any query. The passport was forthcoming, and on September 11, 1959, Oswald was out of the U.S. Marines and on his way to Texas.

Twenty years later, in a superficial review of Oswald’s service record, the Assassinations Committee found nothing very out of the ordinary about this. There is no sign that the Committee talked extensively with Oswald’s former marine comrades. Nor, apparently, did it ponder the Marine Corps’ tolerance for his Russophilia or the lack of reaction to his plans for travel to the Soviet Union.

Once in Texas, Oswald told his brother he was going to New Orleans to “work for an export firm.” It was not true. Having reached New Orleans, he boarded a ship bound for Europe, disembarked at the British port of Southampton on October 9, then moved on rapidly. By midnight the next day, he was checking into a hotel in
Finland’s capital, Helsinki. Oswald was on the last lap of his journey to Moscow, and things continued to go smoothly.

Within two days, having had no advance notice that has ever emerged, the Soviet Consul in Helsinki granted Oswald a six-day tourist visa to enter the Soviet Union. His trip there, by train, was to be on the most expensive ticket available—“De Luxe,” an odd choice for a young man on a tight budget. Later, we shall consider whether he could have afforded the trip at all.

Oswald’s easy access to the Soviet Union has encouraged the suspicion that the Russians were expecting him. It is prompted by a claim that Swedish intelligence detected a flying visit by Oswald to Stockholm, where he may have visited the Soviet Embassy.
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Normal practice, CIA and State Department studies showed, was to keep visa applicants waiting for at least a week—and often as many as two.

The Soviet Consul in Helsinki at the time was believed to be an undercover KGB officer, and U.S. intelligence learned he could issue a visa in minutes if convinced the would-be traveler was “all right.” Oswald apparently came up to scratch. He arrived in Moscow by train on October 16, 1959, to be met by an Intourist representative and shepherded to the Hotel Berlin. He registered on check-in as a student.

After two weeks, and a series of contacts with Soviet officials, Oswald walked into the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. There, according to the consular officials who received him—Consul Richard Snyder and Vice-Consul John McVickar—Oswald declared his wish to renounce his American citizenship. He slapped his passport down on the table, along with a formal letter that ended, “I affirm that my allegiance is to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”

Oswald declared that he had “voluntarily told Soviet officials that he would make known to them all information concerning the Marine Corps and his speciality therein, radar operation, as he possessed.” He added, too, “that he might know something of special interest.” On the face of it, Oswald was now not only a defector, but also a self-declared traitor to his country.

Was it as simple as that? One of the American consular officials, John McVickar, felt that Oswald was “following a pattern of behavior in which he had been tutored by a person or persons unknown … seemed to be using words he had learned, but did not fully understand … in short, it seemed to me there was a possibility that he had been in contact with others before or during his Marine Corps tour who had guided him and encouraged him in his actions.”

As late as 1978, former Vice-Consul McVickar told the author he still had the nagging feeling that Oswald’s performance at the Embassy had not been spontaneous. If he was right, what “person or persons unknown” had coached Oswald?

Had Oswald been in contact with Communist agents in Japan or the United States, and perhaps defected at their urging? It would be said following the assassination—by a person with links to U.S. intelligence—that Oswald had himself had said he associated with Communists in Tokyo.
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If Oswald indeed had contact with Communist agents, however, they may not have been his only connection with the secret world.

Take a second look, and the picture blurs.

Cracks in the Canvas

“We
have not been told the truth about Oswald.”

—Senator Richard Russell, former Warren Commission member, 1970

B
ack on the Marine air station in California, Oswald’s roommate had been puzzled. Nelson Delgado had heard his friend talk of being in contact with Cuban officials—and knew he had been receiving a Russian newspaper. He had asked Oswald incredulously, “They let you get away with this in the Marine Corps, in a site like this?”

It was a good question. Oswald was openly dabbling with revolution while working in a sensitive area on an American military base at the height of the Cold War. Yet the nearest anyone came to blowing the whistle had been when mailroom workers reported the “leftist” nature of Oswald’s mail. An officer, Captain Block, raised the matter briefly with Oswald, who reportedly explained that he was “trying to indoctrinate himself in Russian theory in conformance with Marine Corps policy.” That was as far as it went, and Oswald went on playing Russian records, reading Russian books, generally flaunting his preoccupation with things Soviet. This failed, apparently, to trigger any official concern.

Another
Oswald acquaintance at the California base, Kerry Thornley, had also been doing his share of youthful talking about Communism. “Looking back,” he said long afterward: “I feel that both Oswald and I must have been put under surveillance by the Office of Naval Intelligence during our periods of active duty in the Marine Corps. The Cold War was raging then. He was widely regarded as a Communist.”

Thornley had a point; it is odd that Oswald’s indiscretions do not crop up in any Navy file—at least none that the public has been permitted to see. Omissions from official records sometimes turn out to be more significant than what is included.

Was no one alert enough to bother with Oswald’s socialist protestations? Did Naval Intelligence hear about Oswald but fail to take the matter seriously? Should we merely apply the human-error theory of history to the Oswald case?

Perhaps. If so, however, it was the start of an extraordinary chain of anomalies and official oversights, a chain that would last virtually without interruption until the day President Kennedy was assassinated. So many inconsistencies that even cautious researchers have come to suspect that—somewhere along the line—Oswald the youthful Socialist became a tiny cog in the machinery of American intelligence.

To pursue that thesis involves fumbling in the historical dark, persistent perusal of the documentary record, and an awareness that some documents may still be withheld or have long since been destroyed.

Those at the serious core of the critical community have lurched from theory to theory. In the end, though, they are left with these questions: Was Oswald diverted from his Marxist course and used for what some intelligence department construed as patriotic duty? Was he identified as a left-winger and then unwittingly exploited by
American intelligence? Was he recruited by Soviet or Cuban intelligence? Or was he, as official reports have insisted, just the confused disciple of the Left he appeared to be, controlled by nobody and no country, a scrap of flotsam on the political tide?

If Oswald was some sort of pawn on the intelligence chessboard, a logical place to start looking for oddities is in the record of his military service.

The Warren Report skated quickly over the details of Oswald’s progress in learning Russian, saying only that—in a test he took after being transferred from Japan to California—he rated “poor.” In fact, Oswald scored +4 in Russian reading, meaning that he got four more answers right than wrong. He scored +3 in written Russian, and −5—indeed a low result—in understanding spoken Russian. Though qualified as “poor,” the results show that Oswald had grasped the basic principles. They indicate that he had been working on his Russian before leaving Japan.

Marine Dan Powers, one of his comrades, saw Oswald outside the base in the company of a Eurasian woman. He gathered that she was half-Russian and was teaching Oswald the Russian language. We know nothing of the woman’s political allegiances.

What may also be significant, something the Warren Report skipped quickly past, is that Oswald somehow made remarkable progress in Russian between late February 1959, when he failed the U.S. Marine Corps test, and the summer of that year in California. A friend, knowing of Oswald’s interest in Russian, arranged for him to meet his aunt, who was studying Russian for a State Department examination. Oswald and the aunt, Rosaleen Quinn, had supper together in Santa Ana, and he conversed with her in Russian for about two hours. According to Quinn, Oswald spoke Russian better, and with much more assurance, than she did after
working with a teacher for more than a year. Oswald explained his progress by saying he had been listening to Radio Moscow.

This was the man who only months earlier had achieved a miserable −5 in understanding spoken Russian, let alone speaking it. The Warren Report skipped past the inconsistency, but there is a morsel of information that may explain it—and open a Pandora’s box of further questions.

Two months after the assassination, at a closed executive session of the Warren Commission, Chief Counsel Lee Rankin outlined areas of the case that required further investigation. He said: “We are trying to run that down,
to find out what he studied at the Monterey School of the Army in the way of languages
[author’s emphasis].”

The Army Language School in Monterey, California, now the Defense Language Institute, has long provided highly sophisticated crash courses in languages ranging from European languages to the most obscure dialects. It was, and is, used by U.S. government and military agencies to familiarize personnel with languages ranging from Swahili to Mandarin Chinese. The School was functioning and teaching foreign languages to members of the military in 1959, when Oswald was based in California. The official record makes no mention of Oswald ever receiving instruction in Russian, or any language, during his Marines service, at Monterey or anywhere else. Yet the Rankin reference to finding out “
what he studied
[author’s emphasis] at the Monterey School of the Army” suggests that, at one stage anyway, Commission staff thought Oswald had studied at the School.

Other episodes during Oswald’s service as a marine deserve reflection. There may be something strange about the incident at Atsugi when Oswald is said to have shot himself in the arm. Some
marines present at the time did say Oswald was slightly wounded. Two others who were also there, Thomas Bagshaw and Pete Connor, recalled that the bullet missed Oswald and hit the ceiling. None of the three unit doctors who would have been involved, meanwhile, remembered treating a marine who had suffered a self-inflicted wound in the arm. Is it a little odd that all three medics failed to recall the bizarre incident?

Another curious detail of Oswald’s tour of duty in the Far East relates to the stint he and his unit did on Taiwan in fall 1958. Lieutenant Charles Rhodes recalled that, during that phase, Oswald was suddenly flown from Taiwan to Atsugi. The explanation in the record is that he was transferred for “medical treatment”—the nature of which raises a further question mark.

Oswald supposedly had urethritis, a mild venereal ailment incurred—the Marine Corps file comically tell us—“in line of duty, not due to own misconduct.”

One of the doctors on record as having treated Oswald, interviewed by the author, did not recall the episode. The “line of duty” notation had probably been a routine device, he said, used to avoid jeopardizing Oswald’s pay. (A similar note had been entered in the record in connection with Oswald’s supposed self-inflicted bullet wound.)

What does seem strange is that urethritis, the mildest of the venereal illnesses, should have been judged sufficient cause to fly Oswald to another base far across the China Sea. Urethritis can be a nuisance, but thousands suffer from it while going on with their everyday lives.

Given the various imponderables, and given the saga to come, could the bullet wound the doctors cannot remember, and the minor ailment that required transoceanic travel, have been a pretext to cover the removal of
Oswald from circulation for some other purpose?

While doing research for another book, the author puzzled over a contradiction between the official record and the personal history—available only much later—of an officer in Britain’s Royal Navy in World War I. The contemporary record had the officer in a Navy hospital on the island of Malta when his later recollections had him running around bursting with health on the Russian mainland. The author later discovered the officer had at the time been an ace British intelligence operative. The hospital record had been merely a cover, fabricated to hide his part in a sensitive operation.

The sickness ploy, it turns out, is a fairly common intelligence technique. Without for a moment comparing young Oswald to a top World War I agent, is it possible that he, too, had ailments of expediency?

Since his arrival in Japan, Oswald had lived literally in the shadow of American intelligence operations. At Atsugi, where he witnessed the U-2 spy flights, there had been a cluster of some two dozen buildings bearing innocent-looking signboards that read “Joint Technical Advisory Group.” This was the euphemistic title used for one of the CIA’s largest bases in the world, one that oversaw covert operations in Asia.

The official account asserts only that Oswald, like other marines working in the Atsugi radar room, had a “Confidential” clearance. Lieutenant Donovan, who commanded Oswald’s radar team in California, was to say, however, that Oswald gained a higher rating. “He must have had ‘Secret’ clearance to work in the radar center,” Donovan insisted, “because that was a minimum requirement for all of us.” Oswald’s comrade Nelson Delgado said, “We all had access to
classified information. I believe it was classified ‘Secret.’ ”

While some enlisted men who served with Oswald did have only “Confidential” ratings, another of his closest associates said he heard a “rumor” at the time that Oswald was an exception. “Oswald, I believe, had a higher
clearance,” said Kerry Thornley, who served with Oswald in California, “I believe that he at one time worked in the security files; it is the S and C files, somewhere at LTA or at El Toro … probably a ‘Secret’ clearance would be required.”

A report by the Marine Corps Director of Personnel, written after the assassination, appears to say Oswald may have had a “Secret” clearance when carrying out certain duties.

Whatever his precise status, there is no sign that the Marines command doubted Oswald’s reliability—in spite of two court-martial offenses—or questioned his loyalty when he started openly flaunting Marxist convictions and Russophilia. The future alleged assassin kept his security clearance.

The next puzzle is a financial one. As a lowly enlisted man, could Oswald have saved enough money from his pay as a marine to make the roundabout trip to Moscow that followed? The record suggests not, for his only bank account, which he emptied on leaving, contained a paltry $203.
1

There is a logistical hiccup, meanwhile, in the conventional account of Oswald’s journey to Moscow, one that floored Commission staff. The Warren Report stated that Oswald arrived in England on October 9, 1959, and, “the same day, flew to Helsinki, Finland, where he registered at the Torni Hotel.” This ignored the apparent problem of a British date stamp in Oswald’s passport, a stamp indicating that—though Oswald did arrive at Southampton on October 9—he did not leave until the
next day
. The
record of exit, stamped by an immigration officer at London Airport, reads, “Embarked 10 Oct 1959.”

That raises a question, for the only direct flight from London to Helsinki on October 10, Flight 852, did not get on to the ground at the airport for the Finnish capital until 11:33 p.m.—hardly allowing Oswald time to check in at Helsinki’s Torni Hotel by midnight, as recorded in the hotel’s registration book.
2

The day after arriving in Helsinki, for no apparent reason, Oswald checked out of the Hotel Torni—a first-class, downtown hotel—and into the Hotel Klaus Kurki, also downtown and also first class.

Do the oddities and anomalies noted in this chapter suggest that young Oswald was used as some sort of tool of U.S. intelligence, wittingly or unwittingly?
3

The CIA, of course, consistently denied any involvement with him. In 1964, its then Director, Kennedy appointee John McCone, testified that: “My examination has resulted in the conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was not an agent, employee, or informant of the CIA. The Agency never contacted him, interviewed him, talked with him, or received or solicited any reports or information from him, or communicated with him directly or in any other manner.”

The Assassinations Committee received similar assurances from CIA chiefs in 1979—including Richard Helms, who in 1963 had been Deputy Director for Plans responsible for activity involving agents and informers. Helms had sworn as early as the year after the assassination that there was “no material in the Central Intelligence Agency, either in the records or in the mind of any of the individuals, that there was any contact had or even contemplated with him [Oswald].” He also assured the Commission that a member of its staff had been welcomed at CIA
headquarters and given access to “the entire file.”

Assurances given by Helms, however, may today seem less than convincing. In 1975, when the Senate Intelligence Committee investigated CIA plotting to murder Cuban leader Fidel Castro, Helms was pressed as to why he had not told even Director McCone about the assassination schemes. He responded lamely. “I guess I must have thought to myself, ‘Well this is going to look peculiar to him… .’ This was, you know, not a very savory effort.” In 1964, when McCone had assured the Warren Commission that the Agency had no links to Oswald, he did so on the basis of a briefing provided by Helms.

The most charitable interpretation of Helms’ statements to official inquiries may have been encapsulated by Helms himself, in this exchange with the Senate Intelligence Committee: