Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery

by Norman Mailer

  There is another curious piece of business that took place between De Mohrenschildt and Moore. Sometime in September or October of 1962, during that period when De Mohrenschildt must have just acquired Oswald’s fifty-page manuscript about the Soviet Union, George went to Houston on a business trip and, on his return, discovered that someone had been looking over a travel journal that he had been writing about that two-thousand-mile walking trip he and Jeanne had taken through Mexico and Central America. Since he had spent a considerable amount of time in Guatemala during those winter months when the CIA was training its anti-Castro brigades in local jungles for the invasion of April 1961, and since George was now performing a function for the Agency, it might have been deemed prudent by some of his superiors to take a look at what he was writing. The act, however, as De Mohrenschildt describes it for the Warren Commission, makes no immediate sense:

  MR. DE MOHRENSCHILDT. . . . I left all my typewritten pages, some 150 typewritten pages, in my closet. When I returned from the trip and started looking through the pages . . . I noticed small marks on the pages . . . small marks with a pencil . . .

  I told my wife, “Jeanne, have you fiddled around with my book?” She said, “Of course not.” I said, “That’s impossible.” And I forgot it for a while.

  In the evening . . . the idea came back to me that somebody must have been in my apartment and . . . took photographs. And it was such a horrible idea that Jeanne and I just could not sleep all night. And the next morning we both of us went to see Walter Moore and [I asked] “Have you Government people . . . looked through my book?” He said, “Do you consider us such fools as to leave marks on your book if we had? But we haven’t.” . . . I never could figure out who it was. And it is still a mystery to me.3

  Of course, the marks on De Mohrenschildt’s papers may have been a diversion and the real interest have been in photographing Oswald’s manuscript and any additional notes that De Mohrenschildt might have written on the debriefing of Oswald. Information in the CIA, as in all intelligence organizations, is cloistered department by department, desk by desk, officer by officer, and considerable effort must sometimes be exercised to obtain information that is just across the hall.

  By the beginning of December there is a likelihood that Oswald is being paid either by De Mohrenschildt or by an associate (unless, of course—always the speculative trail divides—Oswald’s phantom boyfriend is giving him gifts of cash), but whatever the source, the fact is that Oswald, in debt since May of 1962 to the State Department to the sum of $435.71 for family transportation from Moscow to New York, first begins to repay that debt on August 13, 1962. At that time he sends $10 in cash from Mercedes Street and follows it with a money order for $9.71 on September 5, and another money order for $10 on October 10, and still another $10 on November 19, 1962, a picayune total of $39.71 eked out over fourteen weeks. Suddenly, he is able to pay off the rest of his debt—ten times as much—$396.00!—in the interval from December 11, 1962, to January 29, 1963—that is, in seven weeks: $190.00 in a money order purchased on December 11 (just twenty-three days after he sent $10), another $100 on January 9, and a last money order, purchased on January 29, for $106.00.

  There were balance sheets drawn up by the Warren Commission to attempt to explain how Oswald could have accomplished such a financial feat. His earnings at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall were never more than $70 a week and often ten or fifteen dollars less. His rent on Elsbeth Street was $69.50 a month, his family’s expenditures for food and other materials had to be calculated at $15 a week, and every small extra disbursement noted in various persons’ testimony was added to the figures, but it is one of those balance sheets that would fall apart with the loss of one pocketbook containing even ten dollars.

  Oswald earned $305, $240, and $247 in November, December, and January, and for living disbursed $182, $165, and $190 in those same months (both sets of figures from Warren Commission findings).4 So, for that period, Oswald has $805 in income, and expenses of $527, or a net gain of $278. As soon, however, as we take away $396 for the State Department debt, he is now $118 in arrears, and even this figure depends on there being no other expenditures than those that were noted by the Warren Commission. It is highly unlikely that every cent he spent in those three months was recorded.

  Perhaps it is worth taking a look again at Harlot’s precepts: The first step taken by the handler is to gain the confidence of the target. The second is to offer him money for his services.

  “It is easier,” said Harlot, “than you would suppose . . . Pay off, for instance, some old nagging debt of the client . . . Sooner than you would believe, our novice agent is ready for a more orderly arrangement. If he senses that he is entering into a deeper stage of the illicit, money can relieve some of his anxiety . . . a weekly stipend can be arranged . . . Questions?”

  “Can you afford to let the agent become witting of who he is working for?”

  “Never . . . the true purpose of the stipend is to give a sense of participation, even if the agent does not know exactly who we are . . .”5

  We have crossed over wholly into speculation, but the question remains vital: Was Oswald being groomed to become some sort of provocateur in left-wing organizations? That he was reasonably sincere in his Marxism would not have deterred him. Not Oswald. He would have been contemptuous of officials in the American Communist Party, seeing them as peons of the Soviets, and he would hardly be impressed by the Socialist Workers Party, which was Trotskyite and had no power. He would have seen his own role as double-edged. While working as a provocateur for U.S. intelligence, he could also learn much about the intelligence establishment, much that might be of use in some future time of upheavals and new revolutionary governments. Having negotiated his own double passage between the U.S. and the USSR, he had the confidence that he was not an ordinary mortal. Work as a provocateur could open many avenues.

  Let it be understood that after Kennedy curtailed Operation Mongoose and the most gung-ho anti-Castro forces were in disarray, an unspecified zone developed. Militant but now covert enclaves began to bivouac on the borders of the American intelligence establishment, and we may even obtain glimpses of such a presence when Oswald gets to New Orleans.

  For now, we can try to answer one question. Why was Oswald so intent on discharging his debt to the State Department? More than once in KGB surveillance reports he is described as slipping off a Minsk bus without paying. A man who would cheat on a petty fare is not likely to honor a State Department loan unless he has a reason. He does. It is to acquire a new passport. He cannot travel out of America until he pays off his loan. So he pays it off. Perhaps others are also encouraging him to travel.

  6

  Trouble at Work

  In the narrative Marina wrote for the FBI, she remarks that “New Year’s was very dull for us and we stayed home. Lee went to bed early.”1

  The Russian community was having parties, she knew, and it was New Year’s Eve, but the Oswalds had not been invited to anything. She had done her best to be witty at the Fords’ house, and she had succeeded. People had been charmed by her. No returns. She recalled the animation she had seen on Lee’s face when he had been speaking to Yaeko. He did not show happiness like that when he spoke to her:

  . . . I sat up and thought about Russia and my friends there. It was very depressing, especially when I thought of my home, my relatives, who were making merry and I was not with them, but sitting alone and unhappy.2

  In the depths of a mood such as this, she began to think of her old boyfriend Anatoly, who was tall but not good-looking and wore outlandish clothes. In Minsk she had been so ashamed of his lack of elegance that she used to steer him along back streets when they were out on a date so that her girlfriends would not see him. But then they would stop to kiss in empty courtyards on winter nights, and there had never been anyone like him when it came to that.

  She wrote a letter on this New Year’s Eve of 1963:

  Anatoly dear,

  . . .
I want to wish you a Happy New Year.

  It is not for this I am writing, however, but because I feel very much alone. My husband does not love me and our relationship here in America is not what it was in Russia. I am sad that there is an ocean between us and that I have no way back . . . .

  I regret that I did not appreciate the happy times we had together and your goodness to me. Why did you hold yourself back that time? You did it for me, I know, and now I regret that, too. Everything might have turned out differently. But maybe, after the way I hurt you, you would not have me back . . .

  I kiss you as we kissed before.

  Marina

  P.S. I remember the snow, the frost, the opera building—and your kisses. Isn’t it funny how we never even felt the cold?3

  She obviously debated the propriety of her act, because she did not mail her letter for several days. Then it came back for lack of postage. Lee read it to her aloud.

  McMillan: He slumped on the sofa and sat there, his head in his hands, for a long time. Finally he straightened up. “Not a word of it is true,” he said. “You did it on purpose. You knew they changed the postage and that the letter would come back to me. You were trying to make me jealous. I know your woman’s tricks. I won’t give you any more stamps. And I’m going to read all your letters. I’ll send them myself from now on. I’ll never, ever trust you again.” He made her get the letter and tear it up under his eyes.4

  One night in bed, in the middle of January, there on Elsbeth Street, Lee asked her if she had been with any other man since their marriage. And she said yes. She told him how she had seen Leonid Gelfant when Lee had gone to Moscow, and how she ran home and felt dirty. Lee kept saying, “You’re putting me on.” He didn’t believe her. She was young and no expert on life, but she didn’t understand why he would not believe her.

  By the end of January, their marriage was not as affectionate as it had been in December. He was preoccupied. Soon he began to be away from home for an hour or two every evening—he had signed up, he told her, for a course in typing that he took after work.

  There is nothing he does in January that would prove he is some kind of petty provocateur-in-training, and if not for his sudden ability to pay off the State Department, one could even be comfortable with the notion that everything he does is on his own; but still, there is that mysterious money, never accounted for, and now he goes on a spree of purchasing left-wing pamphlets and magazine subscriptions as if to establish a radical name for himself on a few lists.

  Epstein: From Pioneer Publishers . . . connected with the Militant (to which he was a subscriber), he ordered these political tracts: The Coming American Revolution, The End of the Comintern, and the Manifesto of the Fourth International, [plus] the English words to the song “The Internationale.” From the Washington Book Store in Washington, D.C., he asked for subscriptions to . . . Ogonek, Sovietskaya Byelorussia, Krokodil and Agitator. From the Dallas library . . . he took out books about Marxism, Trotskyism and American imperialism in Latin America, particularly Cuba.5

  It is a flurry but not an isolated burst of activity. In late November and in December he had already written to the Communist Party headquarters in New York and volunteered to help them on their publications, presenting samples of his output at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, including a poster: “Read The Worker If You Want to Know about Peace, Democracy, Unemployment, Economic Trends,” a printing job done with company equipment. He had received friendly answers. He was being treated like a responsible man. From The Worker, on December 19, he had been told, “Your kind offer is most welcome and from time to time we shall call on you. These poster-like blow-ups are most useful at newsstands and other public places . . .”6

  From Bob Chester at the Socialist Workers Party came a comradely letter full of technical questions:

  116 University Place

  New York 3, New York

  Dec. 9, 1962

  Mr. Lee H. Oswald

  Box 2915

  Dallas, Texas

  Dear Mr. Oswald:

  . . . I am familiar with reproductions and offset printing processes. It is clear from your work that you are skilled at blow-ups, reversals, and reproduction work generally. Do you do any other phases of the process as well as photography? What about layout and art work?

  We have access to a small offset shop here in New York.

  Generally, when we need any copy work done we have taken it there directly. However there might very well be occasions when we could utilize your skill for some printing project. It would, of course, necessarily have to be a project in which we would have flexibility as to time . . .

  I would like to know what size camera you have; how large a paper print you can make; how large a negative; and any other technical information that you can give us that would help us judge how your aid would be most effective . . .

  With best wishes for a year of progress,

  Bob Chester7

  Who can calculate the fresh energy released by being taken seriously? Yes, December was a good month. January, however, is plagued by thoughts of Anatoly plus other distractions.

  De Mohrenschildt weighs in on this in his manuscript:

  . . . I wouldn’t have known about it had it not been for Marina who came over one day furious and told me: “I found in Lee’s pocket this Japanese girl’s address. What a bastard, he is having an affair with her.”

  I did not say anything but just smiled and thought: “good for him.”

  “That Japanese bitch,” she cried bitterly, “we had a fight over her—and look at the result.”

  She sported a new black eye.8

  By the end of January, he was also having trouble at work. If he liked his job at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall more than any other he had ever had, that was back in the fall. For three months he had been essentially a trainee, learning new techniques as well as enjoying unofficial perks: On company time he could make enlargements from his negatives of his own photographic work. If, in his boyhood, I Led Three Lives for the FBI had been his favorite TV show, now he had the capacity, so invaluable for anyone who has a taste for living with more than one identity, to produce calling cards, birth certificates, and other varieties of I.D.

  By the middle of January, however, inexplicable tensions have come into his job. In the narrow corridors of the darkroom, he has begun to push past other workers, jostling them as they adjusted delicate enlarging machines:

  MR. JENNER. . . . he was inconsiderate? . . . and selfish and aggressive?

  MR. OFSTEIN. Yes; I think he thought he had the right of way in any case, either that or he was just in a hurry to get through, [but] through his hurrying he made no regard for anyone else’s well-being . . . 9

  MR. JENNER. What about his aptitudes with respect to the work for which he was being trained?

  MR. OFSTEIN. . . . he was fast, but I noticed that quite a few of his jobs [came] back within a normal working day . . . he was turning out a lot of work [which] had to be redone.10

  Oswald’s floor boss offers a similar appraisal:

  MR. GRAEF. . . . Whenever he was asked to do a job over, he would do it willingly for me, [and was] perturbed at himself that he had made an error . . . It wasn’t that he wasn’t trying or didn’t work hard to do the job, but . . . there were too many times that these things had to be made over.11

  Perhaps he has a good deal on his mind. On January 27, two days after he pays off the State Department debt, he fills out a coupon, using the name Alik Hidell, and sends $10 in cash as down payment on a $29.95 purchase to Seaport Traders, Inc., in Los Angeles. It is for a .38 special caliber Smith & Wesson revolver with a five-inch barrel cut down to 2¼ inches.

  Sawed-off pistols are tailored for very close range—one is looking into the eye of the enemy as one squeezes the trigger. So, such a weapon has more impact upon the owner’s imagination than a long-barreled pistol or a rifle.

  Probably he had already decided to kill General Edwin A. Walker. Or—let us bear the full exist
ential weight of such a resolution—he was going to try. Head-on and at close range with a pistol. How could he know that he had the will to do it? He had never fired a shot in anger at a human being whom he could see (unless he was indeed the man who had killed Marine Private Martin Schrand.) So, by all odds, he was facing the largest gamble of his life. Then he waited all through February for the pistol to arrive C.O.D., but it never did, not in February. He was on edge. Of course he was on edge, and bumping into people while at work.

  7

  In Order to Feel a Little Love

  On February 13, De Mohrenschildt arranged an evening in his home between Oswald and a young geologist named Volkmar Schmidt, who had studied psychology at Heidelberg. The two men, having been brought together, talked for hours over the kitchen table.

  Epstein: Schmidt . . . tried to win his confidence by appearing to be in sympathy with his political views and making even more extreme statements . . .

  In an intentionally melodramatic way Schmidt brought up the subject of General Edwin A. Walker, who had been forced to resign from the Army because of his open support for the John Birch Society . . . He suggested that Walker’s hate-mongering activities at the University of Mississippi, which the federal government was then trying to desegregate, were directly responsible for the riots and bloodshed—including the deaths of two reporters—on that campus. He compared Walker with Hitler and said that both should be treated as murderers at large.