But no one’s explanation encompassed all the available material. The authors of the Warren Report had emphasized Oswald’s personal life, while turning aside important questions about his political associations. Ed Butler ignored everything except Oswald’s evident obsession with left-wing politics. The shadowy aspects of his record were left to the Commission’s critics, who talked about little else.
Not that I was doing any better. Without ever having made a conscious decision to do so, I was becoming an assassination researcher. Reading the testimony, I was learning more about Lee Harvey Oswald than I ever wanted to know, and I couldn’t understand his motivations either. I began putting the details of his life into chronological order, hoping to catch the drift of his thinking in the way events unfolded. Leaning first toward one theory, and then another, I soon discovered that it was possible to manipulate the evidence to support any position I took (whether it was, for example, that Oswald worked for the FBI or that he did not work for the FBI.) Unfortunately, whichever stand I chose, there was always evidence left over that seemed to contradict it. The simple idea of coming up with a theory and finding evidence to support it was obviously the wrong way to go about finding out the truth.
I gave up the research for a while and turned to other things. When I went back to it I made a deliberate effort to cover as much ground as I could without looking for patterns of evidence to convince me of any particular theory. Eventually the research involved substantially more than the Commission’s twenty-six volumes. I read a biography of Oswald written by his brother and many other books and articles on the assassination. I went through contemporary newspapers and magazines, concentrating especially on those Oswald subscribed to and presumably read. I visited the National Archives to examine still other Commission records. Later, I read Senator Frank Church’s senate committee reports on the CIA plots to murder Castro, and the 1979 hearings and report of the House Assassinations Committee. In 1978, a new study describing the personality traits of career criminals gave me additional insight into Oswald’s character. The project, started on a whim, lasted, off and on, for thirteen years.
During that time, as I acquired more knowledge about Oswald and the times he lived in, explanations for some of his mysterious activities suddenly emerged. Since I had not been pursuing any particular theory by looking for evidence to support what I already believed, I was often surprised by what I found. I don’t claim to have solved all the questions surrounding the assassination, but I believe I have found an answer to one of the most elusive: Oswald’s motive.
The motive was one suspected by Lyndon Johnson, President Kennedy’s successor. Shortly before he died, Johnson told journalist Leo Janos that after he took office he discovered “we were operating a damn ‘Murder Inc’ in the Caribbean.” He said that a year or so before Kennedy’s death a CIA-backed assassination team had been picked up in Havana. Although he couldn’t prove it, Johnson believed that Dallas had been a retaliation for this thwarted attempt on Castro’s life. On another occasion Johnson told columnist Marianne Means that he thought Oswald had acted “either under the influence or the orders” of Cuban Premier Fidel Castro. More recently, several writers—former CBS reporter Daniel Schorr, among others—have echoed LBJ’s dreadful suspicion that American plots to kill Castro had somehow backfired in Dallas.
Writing in the New York Review of Books in 1977, Schorr pointed out that Oswald could have become aware of these plots, and Castro’s reaction to them, from an article that appeared in his local newspaper some ten weeks before the assassination. The article was based on an impromptu interview American reporter Daniel Harker had had with Castro in September 1963, and Castro was quoted as saying, “We are prepared to fight them and answer in kind. United States leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe.” (This newspaper article appears in the Warren Commission’s published exhibits. It wasn’t mentioned in the Warren Report, however.)
Is it possible that Castro’s warning to American leaders gave Oswald the idea that Kennedy should be killed? Daniel Schorr thought so. He revealed that just three weeks after the Harker interview was published, Oswald reportedly made threatening statements about Kennedy when he visited the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City to apply for a visa to enter Cuba. Oswald was quoted as telling a consular official that he wanted to “free Cuba from American imperialism.” Then he said, “Someone ought to shoot that President Kennedy. Maybe I’ll try to do it.” Schorr had uncovered two sources that reported Oswald’s threat. One was a top-secret letter FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had sent to the Warren Commission in 1964, the other a tabloid article in 1967 that quoted Fidel Castro.
Considering the timing of Oswald’s outburst, Schorr concluded that it was likely Castro had influenced Oswald, as Lyndon Johnson had suspected. Schorr wrote, “The ‘influence’ may have been as simple as reading Castro’s public denunciation of attempts on him and the warning of possible retaliation.” Schorr believed that “the possibility Oswald acted on his own, inspired by Castro’s statement, cannot today be proved.” Even so, he ended by saying, “An arrow launched into the air to kill a foreign leader may well have fallen back to kill our own.”
By the time Schorr’s article appeared, my research had already led me to a similar conclusion. This book will present evidence that Castro’s public warning did, in fact, inspire Oswald to assassinate the president. Furthermore, the full context of Oswald’s life directed him toward this reaction. In the final analysis, the assassination was a natural outgrowth of Oswald’s character and background—and of the American-backed plots to kill Castro.
The reader will probably be skeptical, for there have already been two official investigations and scores of books, each claiming to have uncovered the truth about Dallas. He or she may well ask: If what you say is true, why hasn’t this solution been discovered before now? In large part, American authorities have been understandably reluctant to suggest that Cuba or any other foreign government was involved—however indirectly—in the assassination of the president.
One of the authors of the Warren Report, attorney Wesley J. Liebeler, told writer David S. Lifton in 1965 that he “suspected Cuban involvement.” Writing in Best Evidence, Lifton said that Liebeler then “dwelt at great length on a speech Castro had made in September 1963 and the possibility that this speech may have influenced Oswald.” (This “speech” was the newspaper article quoted above.) Lifton only mentioned this conversation in passing and said nothing further about it. But there was no hint of Liebeler’s suspicion in the Warren Report. According to records in the National Archives, Liebeler had argued that Castro’s warning should be included in the report, but he was overruled by the chief counsel of the investigation, J. Lee Rankin, who contended that there was no evidence Oswald had seen it. Liebeler wrote a memo protesting this decision, noting that the same could be said of certain anti-Kennedy propaganda distributed in Dallas, which was discussed in the report. Liebeler added, “Our discussion of the possible inclusion of the Castro quote had obvious political overtones.”
Hoover’s top-secret letter was also withheld from the report. After the assassination a Communist party informant for the FBI had gone to Cuba and met with Fidel Castro. The informant said that Castro had told him about a threat Oswald had made against the president in Mexico City—Castro explained that the Cubans had considered this a provocation and would have nothing to do with him. Hoover passed this information along in his letter to the Commission, but the matter was dropped. Nowhere in the report is there any indication that Oswald might have threatened Kennedy’s life in the presence of a Cuban official. On the contrary, the report states that the Commission had found no evidence “that Oswald’s trip to Mexico was in any way connected with the assassination of President Kennedy.” The author of that section of the report, W. David Slawson, apparently never saw Hoover’s letter.
Thus, the Warren Report omitted two significant pieces
of evidence: (I) Castro’s warning that he was ready to “answer in kind” to American-backed assassination plots, which appeared in Oswald’s hometown paper on September 9; (2) a report that some three weeks later Oswald told the Cubans he was ready to kill the president. Had the Warren investigation put together these and other clues available to it, Oswald’s probable motive might have been explained back in 1964.
However, there was one piece of information the Commission didn’t have. It didn’t know the CIA had been trying to murder Fidel Castro. If these plots had been common knowledge in November 1963, as they are today, the announcement that the accused assassin was a militant supporter of Castro would have suggested a retaliation from the start. But the Warren Commission investigators didn’t know about about our “Murder Incorporated” in the Caribbean—the CIA officials who had that knowledge didn’t tell them. With that path kept in the dark, the Commission looked for Oswald’s motivation down several better-lighted dead ends.
Having failed to provide a motive, the Warren Report soon fell prey to the proponents of a conspiracy, who dismissed Oswald as a pawn and looked for a motive in the minds of Mafia dons and CIA operatives. It is one purpose of this book to show how some of the most widely read conspiracy books have presented what amounts to an imaginary history. The argument that Oswald was the tool of a high-level conspiracy does seem plausible, until one tries to fit it into the context these theorists always leave out—the personality and background of Lee Harvey Oswald, the individual.
Jean Davison
1 … A Most Unusual Defector
ON a crisp, clear day in October, 1959, advisers and allies of the Kennedy family gathered for an important meeting at Robert Kennedy’s house on Cape Cod. Seated in front of a fireplace, they listened as Senator John Kennedy talked about his decision to make a run for the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination. This election would mark the end of the Eisenhower era, a period of deceptive tranquillity compared to the raucous decade that lay ahead. The country was at peace, although the Cold War continued, as both sides tested intercontinental ballistic missiles and began putting unmanned satellites into orbit. In Cuba, Fidel Castro’s revolution was less than a year old. There was a small group of U.S. military advisers in South Vietnam, but this would not be a campaign issue. Earlier that year the milestone of first American casualties—two GIs killed by a Vietcong bomb—made front-page news. However, the conflict there soon dropped to the back pages. At home, the civil rights movement was quietly gaining momentum. It was the year of “Father Knows Best” and “Leave It to Beaver,” the TV quiz show scandals, and the kitchen debate between Premier Nikita Khruschev and Vice-President Nixon.
During the same month the Kennedy forces assembled to map strategy, a young ex-Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald entered the Soviet Union on a six-day visa. Soon after he reached Moscow he informed his female Intourist guide that he wanted to become a Soviet citizen. She helped him draft a letter to the Supreme Soviet and put him in touch with the appropriate officials—who were not encouraging. On October 21 he was informed that since his visa had expired, he would have to leave the country that evening. Oswald went back to his hotel room and cut his left wrist about an hour before his guide was scheduled to arrive. She found him in time, and he was taken to a hospital where his minor wound was stitched up and he was held for observation. The ploy of a suicide attempt apparently turned the Soviet bureaucracy around. According to Oswald’s Russian diary, a new group of officials interviewed him and told him that his request to stay in the country was being reconsidered and that he would hear from them, but “not soon.”
After waiting in his hotel room for three days, Oswald decided a “showdown” was needed to give the Russians a sign of his faith in them. On October 31 he took a taxi to the American Embassy, slammed his passport down on Consul Richard Snyder’s desk, and announced that he wanted to give up his American citizenship. Oswald gave Snyder a signed, handwritten note:
I, Lee Harvey Oswald, do hereby request that my present citizenship in the United States of America be revoked.
I have entered the Soviet Union for the express purpose of applying for citizenship in the Soviet Union, through the means of naturalization. My request for citizenship is now pending before the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.
I take these steps for political reasons. My request for the revoking of my American citizenship is made only after the longest and most serious consideration.
I affirm that my allegiance is to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.1
The note showed that Oswald understood the legal procedure for renouncing his citizenship. Snyder observed at a glance that Oswald was “wound up like six watch springs.” He later said, “You could tell he’d been rehearsing this scene for a long time.”
When Oswald demanded that he be allowed to sign the necessary papers then and there, the consul stalled. The month before, another American had formally renounced his citizenship and had been accepted by the Soviets. It turned out that the man had been discharged from the armed forces with a 100% mental disability. When the mental problem became obvious, the Soviets had reacted as though they had purchased damaged goods. They contacted the embassy and ordered the Americans to “get him out of here.” With that incident in mind, Snyder, who had once worked for the CIA, tried to get more information from Oswald. He asked his reasons, and Oswald launched into a condemnation of American military imperialism.
When Oswald declared, “I am a Marxist,” Snyder joked that he was going to be a very lonesome man in the Soviet Union. Evidently, Oswald didn’t get it. He replied that he had been warned the consul would try to talk him out of his decision, and he didn’t want any lectures. Snyder quizzed him about his knowledge of Marxist theory. He later remembered asking him “if he could tell me a little bit about the theory of labor value.” Oswald didn’t have the faintest notion of what he was talking about. When he wrote to Washington about this incident two days later, he said that Oswald had “displayed all the airs of a new sophomore party-liner.” The overall impression Snyder got was one of “overbearing arrogance and insufferable adolescence.” He thought Oswald was intelligent and mentally competent—but unintellectual, intense, and humorless.
Sometime during their conversation, Oswald dropped another hot potato in his lap. While Oswald was in the Marines he had been a radar operator at a U.S. base in Japan from which America’s secret U-2 planes made reconnaissance flights over the Soviet Union. He had tracked the high-altitude U-2S on his radar screen. When Snyder asked him if he was actually prepared to serve the Soviet state, Oswald told him about his duty as a radar operator and that he had informed Soviet officials he was ready to give them any military information he could recall concerning his specialty. He hinted he might know something of special interest.
Richard Snyder’s assistant, John McVickar, was in the same room listening to this. The business about giving away secrets “raised hackles,” he later testified. He thought Oswald made the threat in order to shock Snyder into taking prompt action on his renunciation of citizenship. The tone of the meeting was so unpleasant that McVickar and two other people who were in and out of the room during part of it—a receptionist and an American exchange student—still remembered it years later.
Finally Snyder told Oswald that the embassy staff would need some time to prepare the necessary papers and that he would have to come back. Oswald stalked out, leaving his passport behind. Snyder immediately drafted a wire to the Department of State reporting Oswald’s visit, including his threat to reveal military information. Copies of the telex were sent to the CIA, FBI, and the Office of Naval Intelligence.
Someone at the embassy alerted the press, and the next day the New York Times ran a small story at the top of page 3:
EX-MARINE REQUESTS SOVIET CITIZENSHIP
MOSCOW, Oct. 31 (AP)—A former marine from Texas told the United States Embassy today that he had applied for Soviet citizenship.
“I have made up my mind, I’
m through,” said Lee Harvey Oswald, 20 years old of Fort Worth, slapping his passport on the desk.
The embassy suggested that he withhold signing papers renouncing his citizenship until he was sure the Soviet Union would accept him.
Mr. Oswald is the third American in recent months to apply for Soviet citizenship upon arriving in Moscow.…
Mr. Oswald’s mother, Mrs. Marguerite Oswald, lives in Fort Worth. His sister-in-law, Mrs. R. L. Oswald of Fort Worth, said he got out of the Marines about a month ago and returned to Fort Worth for a visit.
After the news broke, Oswald was besieged by reporters at his hotel room. He refused all interviews, as well as telephone calls from his mother and brothers back home. His brother Robert found out when a reporter from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram confronted him at work with a telex from Moscow. He told the reporter, “Lee is awfully young, looking for excitement. I don’t believe he knows what he is doing.” As soon as Robert got home he telegraphed his brother: “Through any possible means contact me. Mistake.”
On November 3 Oswald wrote to the American ambassador, going over Snyder’s head as it were, to repeat his request for a revocation of his citizenship and to protest Snyder’s refusal to grant his “legal right” to sign the papers. The letter concluded by saying that in the event his application for Soviet citizenship was accepted, “I will request my government to lodge a formal protest regarding this incident.”
Five days later, he wrote Robert:
Well, what shall we talk about, the weather perhaps? Certainly you do not wish me to speak of my decision to remain in the Soviet Union and apply for citizenship here, since I’m afraid you would not be able to comprehend my reasons. You really don’t know anything about me. Do you know for instance that I have waited to do this for well over a year, do you know that I [phrase in Russian] speak a fair amount of Russian which I have been studying for many months.
Oswald's Game Page 2