Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination

by Anthony Summers

  Lee Harvey Oswald

  Agent Hosty said Mrs. Fenner was wrong, that she was unreliable. Besides, he said, the note had been folded in such a way as to conceal the contents. According to him, it had read more or less as follows:

  If you have anything you want to learn about me, come talk to me directly. If you don’t cease bothering my wife, I will take appropriate action and report this to the proper authorities.

  There was nothing especially out of the ordinary about that, Hosty said, and the note remained in his work tray until after the President’s assassination. If the note was so innocuous, though, the rest of the story makes little sense. Within hours of the assassination, according to Hosty, he was called into the office of Special Agent in Charge Gordon Shanklin. Shanklin, “agitated and upset,” got Hosty to explain the recent contacts with Ruth Paine and Oswald’s wife and how the note had reached him. Then, after Oswald in turn had been murdered, he summoned Hosty again.

  According to the agent, his superior took the note from a desk drawer saying, “Oswald’s dead now. There can be no trial. Here—get rid of this.” Then, as Hosty tore the note up in front of him, Shanklin cried: “No! Get it out of here. I don’t even want it in this office. Get rid of it.” Hosty then took the note to the lavatory and—his words—“flushed it down the drain.” Days later, Shanklin asked for an assurance that he had done as ordered.

  Shanklin, for his part, flatly denied having known anything about the note. Former Assistant Director William Sullivan, however, said Shanklin had often mentioned an “internal problem” over a message from Oswald. A Dallas supervisor, Agent Howe, said he had taken the note to Shanklin after finding it in Hosty’s work tray after the assassination. Howe had the impression that Shanklin “knew what I had and—for what reason I don’t know—he didn’t want to discuss it with me.”

  Shanklin’s is the most dubious of the unsatisfactory FBI statements about the note. (He it was, the reader will recall, who initially said tapes of “Oswald” in Mexico City had arrived in Dallas and been heard to contain a voice that was not the real Oswald’s—only to retract the report hours later.) The House Assassinations Committee said it “regarded the incident of the note as a serious impeachment of [both] Shanklin’s and Hosty’s credibility.” During his testimony to the Judiciary Committee, Shanklin was warned that he might be open to prosecution for perjury.3

  A second piece of documentary evidence escaped yet another call for destruction by Agent-in-Charge Shanklin. On November 9, while visiting the Paine household, Oswald apparently wrote a letter to the Soviet Embassy in Washington, DC. It referred to having visited the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, and suggested that he and his wife still wanted to return to the Soviet Union. Oswald had had to curtail his trip to Mexico City, the letter said, because renewal of his visa would have involved using his “real name.” The FBI was no longer interested in Oswald’s Fair Play for Cuba Committee activities, it went on, but Agent Hosty had warned against him starting them again in Texas.4

  There is also a puzzling background to this document. We know of its existence from two sources—from a routine intercept of mail addressed to the Soviet Embassy and from Ruth Paine, who after the assassination passed Agent Hosty a copy of a draft she said she found. Oddities include the fact that Oswald had supposedly left the draft lying on Mrs. Paine’s desk, as though he wanted her to find it. As for the letter’s contents, there is the clear implication that Oswald used a false name in his travel to Mexico City (actually, the name on his Mexican tourist card —“Lee, Harvey Oswald”—reads more like a clerical error than a pseudonym). As for the suggestion that he wished to return to Russia, everything we know of Oswald’s actual attitude suggests he had no intention of doing so.

  The comments in the letter to the Soviets about the Dallas FBI, meanwhile, bear no relation to the known facts. According to the record, Oswald and Hosty had not met, and Hosty had not warned him against doing anything. When Hosty received the letter from Mrs. Paine and showed it to his boss, Gordon Shanklin, Shanklin reacted just as he had in the case of the note Oswald left at the FBI. He “became highly upset and highly incensed,” according to Hosty, and ordered the letter destroyed.5

  Why the rush to cover up? A plausible explanation is that Oswald may have been embroiled in U.S. intelligence activity, as he had perhaps been in New Orleans and in Mexico City. Some part of the intelligence apparatus may have been informed of—had perhaps even directed—what was going on. Far in the future, Hosty himself would strongly suggest that the order to destroy the Oswald note received at the Dallas office originated at FBI headquarters, perhaps at the top. He hinted darkly, too, at revelations to come.

  “I am the one,” Agent Hosty said of the House Assassinations Committee, “they are afraid is going to drop bombs—if they are going to try to contain this like the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Warren Commission, they don’t want me there.”

  As the weeks leading up to the assassination unrolled, real-life oddities continued. On November 1, the day of Hosty’s first visit to the Paine household, Oswald reverted to an old practice and rented a post-office box in downtown Dallas. The rental form authorized two nonprofit organizations to receive mail at the box—the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). This last was a new departure for Oswald. Unlike the FPCC, the ACLU existed not for a political purpose but to champion civil liberties—the rights of the individual, the right to fair trial, and freedom of speech.

  When a few days later Oswald became a member of the ACLU, he asked how he could get in touch with “ACLU groups in my area.” Neither the new membership nor the inquiry made any sense. Oswald had been to a local ACLU meeting ten days earlier in the company of Ruth Paine’s husband, Michael—the couple were members of the organization. He had himself spoken briefly at the meeting and chatted with other attendees afterward. So Oswald had no innocent need to write to the other end of the country for information on ACLU activities in Dallas. As for joining the ACLU, he had told Paine he would never do so—because it was too apolitical.

  A letter Oswald wrote to the U.S. Communist Party on the day he opened his post-office box, moreover, showed that he knew perfectly well where and when Dallas area ACLU meetings were held. He asked, too, for advice on how to heighten “progressive tendencies” in the local branch. Was Oswald launching off on some dark scheme involving the ACLU, similar to his seemingly staged activities in New Orleans? Whatever the purpose, a further clue throws a glimmer of light on Oswald’s last days, linking him—once again—to New Orleans.

  Before leaving for Dallas via Mexico, Oswald had himself arranged for the New Orleans post office to forward mail to Ruth Paine’s house. In the second week of October, however, some other person in New Orleans—someone whose handwriting was not Oswald’s—filed a second change-of-address card duplicating Oswald’s original request. A Warren Commission lawyer, alerted to the anomaly, saw the problem at once. “Let me come bluntly to the point,” he said, “Oswald wasn’t in New Orleans on October 11. He was in Dallas.” Someone else, identity unknown, was apparently taking the trouble to look after Oswald’s business in Louisiana. The New Orleans connection had not ceased with his departure.6

  The notion that one or more unidentified people were in touch with Oswald in the last weeks before the assassination does not stand alone—contrary to the impression given by the Warren Commission. On calls Oswald made and received at both Dallas boarding houses he used, witnesses recalled, he spoke in a “foreign language.” The party on the other end of the line, one might think, was usually his Russian wife, Marina—who did speak with him on the phone. People at both boardinghouses, however, would say that they thought a male caller had telephoned, and that Oswald also spoke in a foreign tongue on those calls.7

  There were other calls that were neither traced nor explained. The manager of an Enco service station, across the street from the second rooming h
ouse, recalled Oswald asking for “change with which to make long distance calls … from a coin telephone booth located at the side of his station.” He made at least two such calls, some six weeks before the assassination. Efforts to trace calls made from the booth failed to reveal whom Oswald had phoned.

  A further credible report about a phone call reached the FBI within days of the assassination—one that has received little if any notice. A Louisiana operator drew her supervisor’s attention to a call she had handled just a day—perhaps two—before President Kennedy was killed. It had been, she said, a “prepaid, long distance, person-to-person call to Lee Harvey Oswald at the Texas School Book Depository.” The caller had been “an adult female,” believed to have been phoning from Slidell, Louisiana. Slidell is thirty-one miles from New Orleans, scene of Oswald’s Cuba-related doings that summer, and just ten miles from a camp where anti-Castro exiles had been training. Carlos Bringuier of the DRE, with whom Oswald had his suspect street encounter in New Orleans, had been involved with the exiles in question. The identity of the person who called Oswald from that location just before the assassination, and the reason for the call, remains unknown.8

  After any crime that makes news, anywhere in the world, police reports flood in from people who claim to have seen or have information on the chief suspect. Some turn out to be genuine cases of mistaken identity, others mischievous. The Kennedy assassination sparked hundreds of Oswald sightings, most of which were eventually discounted. Some were of potential significance, either because of the apparent integrity of the witness reporting or because the detail provided appeared credible. Most of those sightings, though, were also eventually discarded, like jigsaw pieces that get into the wrong box.9

  In light of all the information now available, however, a recurring feature of such “Oswald” reports deserves attention. Several of them stated that a man accompanying “Oswald” had looked Hispanic—perhaps Cuban. In some of the reports, the reference was specific.

  A former New Orleans immigration inspector, testifying years later to the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he was “absolutely certain that he interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald in a New Orleans jail cell” before April 1, 1963—before the authentic Oswald even arrived in New Orleans that year. The inspector was sure of the time frame and sure, too, that the man had been “claiming to be a Cuban alien.” Having established that this was a false claim, he pursued the matter no further.10

  In the second week of October in Dallas, just weeks before the President was killed, according to a Dallas citizen, a man described as “identical” to Oswald was present at a local meeting of the DRE, the anti-Castro group that crops up so frequently in this story. Also attending, apparently, was the extreme right-wing General Walker, whom the real Oswald had allegedly tried to kill several months earlier.

  A mere five days before the assassination a citizen of Abilene, two hundred miles west of Dallas, picked up a note left for one of his neighbors, Pedro González. It was, the citizen was to recall, an urgent request to call one of two Dallas telephone numbers, and the signature read “Lee Oswald.” González appeared nervous when handed the note, and minutes later was seen using a public telephone. Previously, the citizen said, he had seen a man resembling Oswald at González’s apartment, accompanied by a second, older American from New Orleans. González, who headed a local anti-Castro group called the Cuban Liberation Committee, was known to be a friend of Antonio de Varona, leader of the CIA-backed Cuban Revolutionary Council.11

  De Varona had, within days of the Abilene incident, stayed at the home of a close relative of a woman whose Oswald sighting troubled official investigators and remains a focus of research to this day. The sighting is troubling because—if it occurred as reported—it linked Oswald indisputably to the anti-Castro movement, to CIA operatives, and to New Orleans.12

  The Odio Incident

  It had been evening in Dallas, in late fall, when someone rang the doorbell at Apartment A, Crestwood Apartments. Inside, Silvia and Annie Odio were not expecting visitors. Annie went to the door first, peered out without releasing the night chain, then called to her elder sister. Silvia, glancing through the crack, saw that there were three men standing there—two Hispanics and an American. Though they were strangers, the way they introduced themselves—showing knowledge of her family and an associate—led her not to turn them away. The conversation that followed marked the start of a tantalizing puzzle. The Odio incident has been called “the proof of the plot.”

  Silvia and Annie Odio came from a wealthy upper-class family that had long been prominent in revolutionary politics in Cuba. Their father, Amador, supported Fidel Castro in the underground fight to overthrow the Batista dictatorship, hoping that the outcome would be democratic government in his country. When Castro delivered communism, however, Amador had begun working against the new regime. Arrest followed, for harboring on his estate a man wanted for involvement in a plot to kill Castro. By 1963, Odio and his wife were political prisoners, their family scattered in exile. Silvia, twenty-six years old, and Annie, seventeen, had joined the growing exile community in Dallas.

  There, following in her father’s footsteps, Silvia had become politically active and joined the group Junta Revolucionaria (JURE). Though its members opposed Castro and communism, many in exile politics considered the group dangerously leftist. The men who came to the Odio sisters’ apartment in fall 1963 said they were members of JURE, which was why she agreed to talk to them.

  Although Odio was to tell her story repeatedly to the authorities, she gave no press interviews until 1978, when she spoke with the author. Then, and on numerous occasions later, she relived a frightening experience. The author also interviewed her sister.

  It had swiftly become clear during the conversation at the Odio apartment that one of the two Hispanics was the group’s leader. He was tall, looked about forty, and said his “war name” was Leopoldo. The second Hispanic, who was shorter and wore glasses, was addressed as “Angelo” or “Angel.” Like Leopoldo, he had an olive complexion and could have been either Cuban or Mexican. The third, much younger, man was American. He stood quietly by, saying little or nothing, as Leopoldo explained why they had come.

  They had traveled from New Orleans, he said, and the three men did look weary and unshaven, as if after a long trip. As well as being JURE members, Leopoldo asserted, they were working with the blessing of the Cuban Revolutionary Council, the government in exile. The men, who knew the underground name of Silvia’s father, mentioned details about events in Cuba that only an insider was likely to know. They were evidently familiar with recent plots to assassinate Castro. Leopoldo and his comrades were trying to raise funds for anti-Castro operations, he said, and wanted Silvia’s help—specifically, in translating fund-raising letters to U.S. businessmen into English.

  Impressed though she was by the visitors’ knowledge, Silvia Odio felt uneasy, leery of dealing with people she did not really know. She told the visitors she wanted no part in a campaign of violence, and the discussion ended inconclusively. The men left in their red car, supposedly to begin another long journey.

  All the time the men had been at the apartment, the young American had said hardly a word. He had merely stood watching and listening, in Odio’s words, “sort of looking at me to see what my reaction was, like somebody who is evaluating the situation.” Eight weeks later, Silvia—and her sister Annie—were to react with fear and bewilderment when they saw pictures of the man arrested for shooting President Kennedy. The American in the group that came to their door, Silvia would say she recalled with a jolt, had been introduced as “Oswald”—“Leon Oswald.” She had a further, sinister, reason to remember him.

  Leopoldo, who had introduced “Oswald” when the men came to the door, had telephoned Silvia less than forty-eight hours later. He again brought up the request for assistance, but also seemed keen to discuss something else. “What,” he asked, “did you think of th
e American?” Remembering how quiet the American had been, Silvia said she had not really formed an opinion. Leopoldo then made a number of remarks that Silvia found chilling at the time and more so, obviously, later.

  He said of Oswald: “Well, you know, he’s a marine, an ex-marine, and an expert marksman. He would be a tremendous asset to anyone, except that you never know how to take him.” As she listened, Silvia Odio wondered what she was expected to say. Then Leopoldo went on: “He’s kind of loco, kind of nuts. He could go either way. He could do anything—like getting underground in Cuba, like killing Castro.” Then: “The American says we Cubans don’t have any guts. He says we should have shot President Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs. He says we should do something like that.”

  That was all. Leopoldo appeared to have little else to say, and the conversation ended. Silvia Odio never heard from him again. She had felt even during the phone call, she told the author, that there was something wrong, something sinister and deliberate about it. “Immediately,” she said, “I suspected there was some sort of scheme or plot.”

  Silvia was at work when, just weeks later, news broke that the President had been shot in the city in which she and her sister lived. Her head filled with frightening thoughts. When broadcasts confirmed that President Kennedy was dead, her boss decided all the staff could go home. Silvia, who was prone to fainting fits, passed out on her way to the parking lot and was taken to a hospital.13

  Across the city, her sister Annie had watched the President drive past, waving to spectators, before the shooting. That afternoon, when she saw Oswald’s picture on the television, her first thought was, “My God, I know this guy and I don’t know from where… . Where have I seen this guy?” Soon, on being told her sister had been taken ill, Annie visited Silvia in the hospital—and at once said that she knew she had seen Oswald somewhere before but at first could not quite place him. Silvia, who had begun to cry, reminded her of the three men who had visited their apartment. She told Annie, too, about the disturbing call from Leopoldo.