Oswald's Game
Page 15
The young defector: Lee Harvey Oswald in September 1959, a photograph taken for Moscow newspapers. (SOURCE: National Archives.)
Marguerite Oswald and Edwin A. Ekdahl after their marriage in 1945. (SOURCE: National Archives.)
Oswald, in dark glasses, and several co-workers at the Minsk Radio factory. (SOURCE: National Archives.)
Lee and Marina Oswald after their wedding, April 1961. (SOURCE: National Archives.)
At the Minsk railroad station, the Oswalds are seen off by Russian friends as they leave for the United States in May 1962. (SOURCE: National Archives.)
March 1963: Posing in his backyard in Dallas, Oswald holds the rifle later found in the School Book Depository. (SOURCE: Jeanne de Mohrenschildt.)
The back of George de Mohrenschildt’s copy of this photograph, showing Oswald’s inscription, “To my dear friend George, from Lee,” and a message in Russian, apparently in Marina’s hand: “Hunter of fascists ha-ha-ha!!!” (SOURCE: Jeanne de Mohrenschildt.)
In August 1963 Oswald distributes Fair Play for Cuba leaflets in front of the New Orleans Trade Mart. (SOURCE: WDSU-TV, New Orleans.)
Two other views of the Trade Mart demonstration, showing Oswald with a Latin American helper (indicated by an arrow in top photo, at far left in bottom photo). This man has never been identified. (SOURCE: WDSU-TV, New Orleans.)
Ruth Paine’s home in Irving, Texas. (SOURCE: National Archives.)
The Dallas rooming house where Oswald was living at the time of the assassination. (SOURCE: Wide World Photos.)
The view from the sniper’s window on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. (SOURCE: National Archives.)
Oswald at the Dallas police station shortly after his arrest on November 22, 1963. (SOURCE: Wide World Photos.)
In a police station hallway on November 23, 1963. (SOURCE: Wide World Photos.)
Surrounded by law officers, Oswald answers questions at a midnight press conference, November 22, 1963. (SOURCE: Wide World Photos.)
Under arrest, Oswald appeared calm. (SOURCE: National Archives.)
Questioned by reporters in the hallway, Oswald claimed that he was innocent. (SOURCE: Wide World Photos.)
November 24, 1963: Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby rushes forward to shoot the accused assassin. (SOURCE: Wide World Photos.)
Oswald raising a clenched fist on November 22, a gesture he would repeat shortly before he died. (SOURCE: Wide World Photos.)
The House Assassinations Committee interviews Fidel Castro in Havana.
10 … “Street Agitation … Radio Speaker and Lecturer”
SUMMER, 1963: The Cuban exile community in New Orleans was the largest in the United States outside of Miami. One of the militant groups represented in the city was the Cuban Student Directorate, or DRE, which had claimed responsibility for an offshore shelling of Havana in 1962.
On August 1 the official crackdown on such raids, begun in April, reached New Orleans. A front-page story in the Times-Picayune announced that FBI agents had impounded a large cache of dynamite and bomb casings in nearby Mandeville. A follow-up story indicated that the ammunition belonged to an unnamed Cuban exile. The Picayune said that the FBI was investigating a possible plan “to carry out a military operation against a country with which the United States is at peace”—a violation of the U.S. Code. The implication was clear that there was Cuban exile paramilitary activity going on in the area. In fact, as it later came out, the cache had been earmarked for a ragtag group of volunteers who had assembled at a secret guerrilla training camp near Mandeville. After the FBI raid on their depot, the group quickly disbanded.
It was apparently common knowledge that some of the exile groups were looking for ex-GIs to train their guerrillas. In the June 8 Saturday Evening Post, for instance, a story called “Help Us Fight” reported that, following the Bay of Pigs, exile leaders had asked the CIA for money and “a few tough men in green berets from the U.S. Special Forces to train leaders in the techniques of guerrilla war.” The exiles complained about being turned down: “They told us that Fidel’s spies would infiltrate our movement.” The article concluded, “The pin prick raids have been outlawed.… There is still work, however, that brave men could do—as they were doing in small independent groups before the suppression came. It is the silent, dangerous work of organizing an underground.” (It isn’t known whether Oswald saw this article, but it’s conceivable that the Post’s cover photo of Fidel Castro with the caption “The Mounting Chaos in Castro’s Cuba” may have caught his eye.)
In any case, it was evidently the discovery of this exile ammunition dump near New Orleans that inspired Oswald’s next move.
Oswald made some inquiries. On page 87 of his notebook, there appears:
Cuban Student
Directorate
107 Decatur St.
New Orleans La.
Carlos Bringuier
This was followed by the names of a local “City Editor” and a reporter—and two other street addresses labeled “Cuban exile stores.”
Carlos Bringuier, the Directorate’s only official in New Orleans, ran the Casa Roca clothing store in the French Quarter. In the front window he displayed a 3 × 4-foot sign showing the Statue of Liberty being stabbed in the back. The hand holding the dagger was connected to a long chain wrapped around Cuba. The sign said, “Danger! Only 90 Miles from U.S.A., Cuba Lies in Chains.” Although his organization wasn’t associated with the Mandeville training camp, Bringuier had heard about it when two of their volunteers came to him seeking transportation back to Florida.
On August 5 Bringuier was in his store speaking with two teenaged boys who had been trying to collect donations for his organization by selling so-called “war bonds.” The boys had brought the bonds back when they found out Bringuier didn’t have the required city permit. As they were talking, Oswald walked in and eased into their conversation. He introduced himself to Bringuier and said he was an anti-Castro ex-Marine who wanted to fight Castro. He said he had been trained in guerrilla warfare and was willing not only to train exile guerrillas but to lead their raiding parties into Cuba.
Bringuier was immediately suspicious. He thought Oswald might be an agent of either Castro or the FBI. He had heard rumors that there was a Castro agent in the Mandeville camp. Bringuier told him he wasn’t interested because he wasn’t involved in any paramilitary activity.
At some point, apparently while Bringuier was waiting on a customer, Oswald had a talk with the two anti-Castro boys. He told them how to make gunpowder and a zipgun, how to derail a train by locking a chain around one of the rails—and how to blow up the New Orleans Huey P. Long Bridge. One of the boys testified, “He told us to put powder charges at each end of the bridge from the foundation to where the foundation meets the suspension part… blow that part up and the center part of the bridge would collapse.”
Before he left, Oswald offered Bringuier a cash contribution, but the Cuban refused it by saying he had no city permit to accept money. The next day Oswald returned to the store and left his Marine Corps guidebook with Bringuier’s brother-in-law.
In his political résumé, Oswald wrote:
I infiltrated the Cuban Student Directorate and then harassed them with information I gained including having the N.O. City Attorney General call them in and put a restraining order pending a hearing on some so-called bonds for invasion they were selling in the New Orleans area.
So far as is known, there was no such restraining order. Oswald was puffing up his résumé with a false claim. The important thing here is that he stated his purpose: to infiltrate and harass the Directorate. This entry also seemed to explain why he offered Bringuier a contribution—that is, to get him into trouble with the law for raising money illegally.
The résumé didn’t mention the other tactics he used—posing as a guerrilla trainer and suggesting violent activities to the boys. Probably he didn’t want to put anything in writing that was potentially incriminating. But his evident intention
was to cause as much damage to the DRE as he could. The offer to lead guerrilla raids into Cuba may hark back to his old hero, William Morgan, who had posed as a counter-revolutionary to lead some anti-Castro rebels into a trap.1 Had Oswald gotten that far, he could have made himself a hero by turning the raiding party over to the Cubans—or so he may have imagined. And even if he only got as far as the training camp, he might have gained some information he could pass along to the Cubans when he went to Mexico City—a nice boost for his credentials.
In any event, practically every source agrees that Oswald’s approach to Carlos Bringuier was an infiltration attempt.
Oswald was not done with Bringuier yet, however. On August 9 a friend of Bringuier’s came into the store and told him he had seen someone with a sign saying “Viva Fidel” and “Hands off Cuba” passing out literature a few blocks away on Canal Street. Bringuier grabbed his sign from the window, and then went with his friend and another Cuban to confront the pro-Castro demonstrator. They finally located him near Walgreen’s Drug Store. To Bringuier’s surprise, it was the same Lee Harvey Oswald who had offered his services to fight Castro. When Oswald saw him coming, he smiled and offered to shake his hand. Outraged, Bringuier called him a Castro agent and began to “blame him in the street.” A crowd gathered and took Bringuier’s side. According to Bringuier “they started to shout to him, ‘Traitor! Communist! Go to Cuba! Kill him!’ and some other phrases that I do not know if I could tell in the record.”
A policeman came and asked Bringuier to keep walking and let Oswald hand out his literature, but Bringuier explained what Oswald had done to him a few days earlier and refused to go. When the policeman left to telephone headquarters, one of Bringuier’s friends took Oswald’s batch of handbills “and threw it on the air.” Carlos took off his glasses and was about to hit Oswald:
but when he sensed my intention, he put his arm down as an X.…
Q. He crossed his arms in front of him?
A. That is right, put his face and told me, “O.K. Carlos, if you want to hit me, hit me.” At this moment, that made me to reaction that he was trying to appear as a martyr if I will hit him, and I decide not to hit him, and just a few seconds later arrive two police cars.… When we were in the First District of Police, we were in the same room, one small room over there, and some of the policemen started to question Oswald … and Oswald at that moment—that was in front of myself—was really cold blood. He was answering the questions that he would like to answer, and he was not nervous, he was not out of control, he was confident of himself at that moment.…
The Cubans bailed themselves out, but Oswald spent the night in jail.2 Marina stayed up until 3 A.M. not knowing where he was. Worried, she checked the closet where he kept his rifle and was relieved to see it was still there.
The next morning Oswald was questioned by police lieutenant Francis L. Martello of the intelligence squad. Among the ID cards Oswald produced at his request was his New Orleans Fair Play chapter membership card with the signature of A.J. Hidell shown as chapter president. (Marina had signed the name at his insistence, after she commented that the name was obviously an “altered Fidel.”) Oswald led Martello to believe that the chapter was thriving. Oswald then asked to speak with someone from the FBI, and an agent named Quigley came over to see him. Oswald gave him a similar song and dance, showing him the card with Hidelll’s name.
Albert Newman has pointed out that Oswald told both Martello and Quigley that he had moved to New Orleans from Fort Worth about four months before. Oswald apparently wanted to accomplish several things by talking to Quigley: he wanted to be sure the FBI knew he was now living in New Orleans and that he had been in Fort Worth, not Dallas, when the Walker shooting occurred, and he wanted to give the impression that A. J. Hidell was a real person, not an alias.
After speaking to Quigley, he called the Murrets’ number and reached his cousin Joyce, who came down to the police station but decided not to post bail when she realized what he was in for. But she did speak to Lt. Martello and told him that her cousin Lee had been in Russia and wouldn’t let his wife learn English. That was the first Martello had heard about Oswald’s stay in Russia, and he decided to question him again. Oswald admitted that he had lived in the Soviet Union, and when Martello asked him his opinion of Russian communism, he replied, “It stunk.” Martello reported:
He said they have “fat, stinking politicians over there just like we have over here” and that they do not follow the great precepts of Karl Marx, that the leaders have everything and the people are still poor and depressed. I asked Oswald why he would not allow members of his family to learn English.… He stated the reason why he did this was because he hated America.… I then spoke to him about the Fair Play for Cuba Committee again and asked him if he knew that Castro had admitted he was a Marxist-Leninist and he said he did. He was then asked if he truly believed Castro was really interested in the welfare of the Cuban people and he replied that he was not going to discuss the merits and demerits of Castro but was primarily concerned with the poor people of Cuba and that if this country would have good relations with the poor people of Cuba and quit worrying about Castro, that was his main concern.…
In two other comments Oswald seemed to be following his old practice of telling the literal truth, but with a secret twist. Martello asked him which country he would choose, Russia or America, if he had to place his allegiance and Oswald told him, “I would place my allegiance at the foot of democracy.” As an example of Oswald’s Marxist bias, Kerry Thornley mentioned that “he could look upon the Soviet system today as a democracy by, of course, giving a completely different definition to the word ‘democracy.’” When Martello asked him what he thought about Kennedy and Khrushchev, he said he thought “they got along very well together.” Khrushchev had recently come to an agreement with Kennedy on the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, a conciliatory move that both China and Cuba had criticized.
After he got out of jail later that day, his uncle Charles (“Dutz”) Murret paid him a visit and noticed a picture of Fidel on his living room mantel. As Lillian recalled it, Murret “asked Lee in a fatherly way, what was he doing, you know, who he was connected with, and so forth, and whether he was with any Commie group, and Lee said no, he wasn’t, and Mr. Murret told him, he said, ‘You be sure you show up at that courthouse for the trial,’ and Lee said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll show up,’ and he told Lee, he said, ‘You ought to get out and find yourself a job.’” Oswald didn’t attempt to argue, but after Murret left he told Marina, “Well, these are just bourgeois … only concerned with their own individual welfare.”
Carlos Bringuier described their court appearance on August 12: “I came first with my friends, and there were some other Cubans over there and I saw when Oswald came inside the court.… See, here in the court you have two sides, one of the white people and one for the colored people, and he walked directly inside of the colored people and he sat directly among them in the middle, and that made me to be angry too, because I saw that he was trying to win the colored people for his side. When he will appear in the court, he will defend Fidel Castro, he will defend the Fair Play for Cuba, and the colored people will feel good for him, and that is a tremendous work of propaganda for his cause. That is one of the things that made me to think that he is really a smart guy and not a nut.”
Oswald pleaded guilty and paid a $10 fine. He came home smiling. The next day the Picayune gave him a small write-up:
PAMPHLET CASE SENTENCE GIVEN
Lee Oswald, 4907 Magazine, Monday was sentenced to pay a fine of $10 or serve 10 days in jail on a charge of disturbing the peace by creating a scene.
Oswald was arrested by First District Police at 4:15 P.M. Friday in the 700 block of Canal while he was reportedly distributing pamphlets asking for a “Fair Play for Cuba.”
Police were called to the scene when three Cubans reportedly sought to stop Oswald. Municipal charges against the Cubans for disturbing the peace were dropped by the c
ourt.
He cut clippings and sent one to Arnold Johnson, the information director of the Communist party, and another to Vincent Lee. To the latter, he wrote:
Continuing my efforts on behalf of the F.P.C.C. in New Orleans I find that I have incurred the displeasure of the Cuban exile “worms” here [the Cuban government’s term for the exiles].…
I am glad I am stirring things up and shall continue to do so. The incident was given considerable coverage in the press and local T.V. news broadcast.
I am sure it will be all to the good of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.
Another clipping went into his pro-Castro file.
When Marina was questioned about the purpose of his pro-Castro activities in New Orleans, she said, “I think that Lee engaged in this activity primarily for purposes of self-advertising. He wanted to be arrested. I think that he wanted to get into the newspapers.…”
Q. Do you think that he wanted to be advertised and known as being in support of Cuba before he went to Cuba?