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, ther
e 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:
Senator Morgan:You were charged with furnishing the Warren Commission information from the CIA, information that you thought relevant?
Helms:No, sir, I was instructed to reply to inquiries from the Warren Commission for information from the Agency. I was not asked to initiate any particular thing.
Senator Morgan:… in other words, if you weren’t asked for it, you didn’t give it.
Helms:That’s right, sir.
A few years later Helms, pressed by the House Assassinations Committee to explain why the Warren Commission had not been told about CIA efforts to murder Fidel Castro, Helms shrugged off the omission. “I am sorry,” he said, “It is an untidy world.”
Some of Helms’ “untidiness” had by that time become very apparent. In 1977, having pleaded nolo contendere to charges concerning testimony to another Senate committee, he had been fined and handed a two-year suspended jail sentence for making misleading statements on oath about the CIA’s operations against President Allende of Chile. Helms said he had merely been obeying the higher authority of his Intelligence loyalty oath. In his only public speech as CIA Director, he said the nation “must to a degree take it on faith that we, too, are honorable men.”
CIA Chief of Counterintelligence James Angleton, documents show, offered the FBI Assistant Director William Sullivan advice as to how the Bureau should deal with the Warren Commission. The Commission, he wrote, would likely put the same questions to both the CIA and the FBI. Two, he foresaw, would be:
1.Was Oswald ever an agent of the CIA?
2.Does the CIA have any evidence showing that a conspiracy existed to assassinate President Kennedy?
He proposed the concise replies:
1.)No
and
2.)No.
Angleton, who had primary responsibility for CIA dealings with the Warren Commission, would testify that he “informally” discussed the assassination with Commissioner—and former CIA Director—Allen Dulles. Dulles, for his part, privately coached CIA officers on how best to field the question as to whether Oswald had been an agent.
According to a CIA internal memorandum, Dulles “thought language which made it clear that Lee Harvey Oswald was never an employee or agent of CIA would suffice… . Mr. Dulles did not think it would be a good idea to cite CIA procedures for agent assessment and handling for Oswald to have been chosen as a CIA agent to enter Russia. There are always exceptions to every rule.” The CIA memo’s author agreed, noting that “a carefully phrased denial [author’s emphasis] of the charges of involvement with Oswald seemed most appropriate.” Did the Agency have special reasons to be careful in the phrasing of its denial?
The Agency readily acknowledged having held a “201” file on Lee Oswald—“201” being the generic description for a file opened on anyone in whom the CIA had taken an interest. Oswald’s 201 was the “principal repository” for documents on the alleged assassin. The fact that there was one did not mean he was an agent—nor that he was not.
The CIA said it had 1,196 documents on Oswald, some hundreds of pages long, almost all of which have since been declassified. How the 201 file was handled before the assassination, what was put in it and what was not, and when, may tell us more than the contents of the documents themselves.
The file was opened on December 9, 1960, more than a year after Oswald’s defection—a delay that rang alarm bells in the minds of Assassinations Committee staff. The Agency, staffers reasoned, would have become interested in Oswald a year earlier, the moment it learned he was in Moscow declaring his readiness to give the Soviets radar information of “special interest.” His defection had been reported in the New York Times, in the Washington Post, and across the country
Why would the CIA not have opened a 201 file at once?
Another factor fueled the Committee’s suspicions. As at all or most diplomatic missions, U.S. embassies around the world were then as now peppered with intelligence officers, just as Moscow’s embassies were filled with “Secretaries” and “Attachés” working for Soviet intelligence. The record said that Consul Richard Snyder, one of the two officials who interviewed Oswald at the U.S. Embassy, had worked for the CIA in the past—for a year, much earlier. The Assassinations Committee found, however, that his CIA file had been “red-flagged because of a ‘DCI [Director of Central Intelligence] statement and a matter of cover.’ ” The reference to cover, the Assassinations Committee felt, remained unexplained and “extremely troubling.”
Today, there is something else. The official account had it that Oswald went to the American Embassy in Moscow just once at the time of his defection, and that he visited only the consular office on the ground floor. Joan Hallett, who worked as a receptionist at the Embassy—she was married to the then Assistant Naval Attaché—recalled years later that Oswald went to the Embassy “several times.” She said, too, that Consul Snyder and the security officer “took [Oswald] upstairs to the working floors, a secure area where the Ambassador and the political, economic, and military officers were. A visitor would never, ever get up there unless he was on official business, I was never up there.”
The full picture of the CIA’s interest in Oswald may not be in his 201 file at all. “Agency files,” the Assassinations Committee noted, “would not always indicate whether an individual was associated with the Agency in any capacity… .”
Intelligence agencies regularly use false names in documents—on occasion to mislead enemy agents, at other times to protect the secrets of one department from another. Sometimes, while the name on a file may be real, its contents have been falsified to divert attention from the subject’s real activity.
A set of notes on “cover,” prepared by senior CIA official William Harvey, reflected his wish that subjects “should have phony 201 in LRG [Central Registry] to backstop this, documents therein forged and backdated.”4
The following exchange took place between former CIA Director Allen Dulles and Congressman Hale Boggs during an executive session of the Warren Commission:
Dulles:There is a hard thing to disprove, you know. How do you disprove a fellow was not your agent? How do you disprove it?
Boggs:You could disprove it, couldn’t you?
Dulles:No… . I never knew how to disprove it.
Boggs:Did you have agents about whom you had no record whatsoever?
Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination Page 14