Live by the Sword

by Gus Russo

  Under the Kennedy administration, the most extreme experiments were terminated, but more remained than changed. When John McCone became the new CIA director, Richard Helms persuaded him that the Agency was close to cracking the secret of mind control, and McCone was impressed enough to urge RFK to allow MK/ULTRA to continue. “The Agency may have acquired new heads, but the body politic remained as intact as it had been under Dulles.” (Gordon Thomas, 232)

  Behavioral research of this type was supposedly terminated in 1963 (Marks, 212)—but actually went on much longer under a different name. The records were destroyed in 1973.

  Many CIA officers have told the author that the technique was never perfected, let alone deployed. They have further stated that the research was inspired by fears that the Soviets had already perfected the technique. In typical Cold War paranoia, the Soviets pointed to equivalent fears about the U.S. as the basis for their experiments.

  One New York psychologist has said: “It cannot be done consistently, but it can be done.” (Marks, 187)

  (See also: Brackman, Arnold C, The Other Nuremberg, New York: Morrow, 1987; and Williams, Peter and David Wallace, Unit 731, New York: Free Press, 1989. For stories of extraordinarily cruel use of these experiments and techniques, see the bibliography under Bain and Bowart.)

  85 Interview of Ella Germann, 5 April 1993 (FL).

  86 Oswald’s Historic Diary (CE24), entry for 2 January 1961; cited in Posner, 60.

  87 Interview of Ella Germann, 5 April 1993 (FL).

  88 Ibid, 103.

  89 Interview of Yuri Merezhinski, 14 April 1993 (FL).

  90 Ibid, 55.

  91 Interview of Oleg Pavlovich Tarusin, 21 January 1993 (FL).

  92 Interview of Vanda Ivanova Kuznetsova, 21 January 1993 (FL).

  93 Interview of Galya Vasylievna Printseva, 21 January 1993 (FL).

  Many interviewees in 1993 were not so kind to Marina. A number of acquaintances claimed that she was “an easy lay” and that Oswald was her ticket out of the country. Many firmly believe that she was run out of Leningrad with a band of prostitutes. She was said to cheat on Oswald constantly, from the very beginning of their marriage. Marina admitted one such tryst to her biographer, Priscilla McMillan (McMillan, 129). After the assassination, with all Marina’s communication monitored, Marina earned the name “hot pants,” as the FBI agents in charge would later tell the HSCA. There are numerous stories of Marina’s many liaisons with government employees during the 1964 investigation. One reporter told the author that Buell Frazier, Marina’s young neighbor who gave Lee the ride to work on the fateful day, admitted to having an affair with Marina during her separation from Lee.

  94 Interview of Oleg D. Kalugin, 13 January 1993 (EL).

  95 McMillan, 39.

  On the surface, it may seem trivial to examine the background of Marina in a study of the death of President Kennedy. However, it will be one thesis of this work that the lack of communication between Lee and Marina would play a large role in Oswald’s desperation at the end of his life. This is not meant to imply that Marina was responsible for the events of 22 November 1963. Only a rare woman could have penetrated Oswald’s wall of emotional isolation. It is important to realize, however, that Marina Prusakova was in no way suited to the task.

  96 Ibid, 54.

  97 Interview of Vacheslav Nokonov, 12 April 1993 (FL).

  98 Interview of Vacheslav Nokonov, 12 April 1993 (FL).

  99 Quoted in Mailer, 285.

  100 Nechiporenko, 63.

  101 Ibid, 63.

  102 Broadcast on “Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?” Frontline (PBS), 16 November 1993.

  103 Interview of Vladimmir Semichastny, 6 April 1993 (FL).

  104 McMillan, 546.

  Chapter Five (Back in the USA)

  1 Interview of Jim Hosty, 25 April 1993 (FL).

  2 Interview of Edward Butler, 6 April 1993 (FL).

  3 Appendix A offers a summary of recent, conclusive evidence establishing that Oswald shot alone. Appendix B shows seemingly contradictory testimony to be mistaken conjecture.

  4 McMillan, 340-341; also, interview of Priscilla McMillan (FL).

  5 Posner, 321.

  6 McMillan, 340.

  7 The Militant, 11 March 1963, 7.

  8 The New York Times, 17 October 1961.

  9 The Militant, 7 October 1963; Michael Paine, testimony, WC, 414.

  10 Meticulous examination after the assassination would show that Oswald almost certainly took some of the photographs to a local drug store for development. It is possible he developed one of them himself at the Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall Company, a commercial photography firm where he had been working as a trainee since the previous October, four months after returning from the Soviet Union.

  Using many techniques, including microscopic examination of the emulsion, which is impossible to fake, the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) decisively showed that the photos were not forged. Critics have also questioned the inscription on the back of one of the photos given to an Oswald friend, George DeMohrenschildt. After examining examples of his handwriting taken from all parts of his life, a panel of experts concluded with no qualifications that he had indeed written, “to my friend George, from Lee Oswald.” The puzzle was, who added “Hunter of fascists, ha-ha—ha!!!” in Russian—but in a hand unaccustomed to writing it—on the back with Oswald’s inscription? Experts established that that handwriting wasn’t Oswald’s. Neither was it the handwriting of Marina or DeMohrenschildt. Who, then, was the mysterious fourth person who had access to this incriminating photograph? Was it someone whose function was to set up Lee? If so, wasn’t that powerful evidence of a conspiracy? Over the decades, many researchers have suspected that this might be true. DeMohrenschildt’s wife Jeanne seems to provide the answer. In 1993, Ferris Rookstool, who inherited the DeMohrenschildts’ possessions (including the original photo), pointed out to the author that the handwriting is identical to Jeanne’s, and that among her favorite expressions was a protracted “Ha ha ha!”

  11 Interview of Michael Paine, 19 August 1993 (FL).

  Paine later took Oswald to a meeting of the American Civil Liberties Union “because I wanted him to see the activity of a group that was doing some of the things he wanted and doing them in a nonviolent way.” But Oswald said that that activity “wasn’t political enough. And he also said he didn’t want to be defending the right of people on the far right—fascists—to free speech.” Still later, when Paine was to learn that Oswald had in fact joined the ACLU, he assumed it was because Oswald thought that if he was a member, “they might more readily come to his defense if he ever needed them.”

  12 Interview of Dovid Ofstein, 16 June 1993 (FL).

  13 Oswald conceivably also sent a print to the Secret Service office in the White House, where an agent named John Norris would adamantly remember seeing it pasted on a wall before the assassination, then noticed it gone on November 22nd. That has not been confirmed by fellow agents, although Norris feels they too should be able to remember the photograph. It is almost unthinkable that Oswald was planning to kill the President in March or April (or even through the summer of 1963). Memories play odd tricks on people involved in celebrated cases. But if Oswald did, in fact, send a print to the White House, it would be further evidence not of his criminal intent at this time, but of his inordinate hunger for recognition and appreciation.

  14 Interview of Michael Paine, 19 August 1993 (FL).

  15 Interview of Sylvia Weinstein, 12 June 1993 (FL).

  Four months later, Weinstein would again hear about Oswald, after his arrest for handing out leaflets of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans. The “big worry” at The Militant’s office then was, “Who is this guy? Why is he causing all these problems?” After the assassination, Farrell Dobbs directed that the photograph, together with “every scrap of paper” mentioning Oswald, including his subscription plate, be swept from the files and given to William Kunstler, the well-known civil-rights att
orney who represented the publication.

  16 Interview of Volkmar Schmidt, 17 June 1993 (FL).

  17 Oswald would use the alias Alik Hidell on several forged documents as well. According to Marina, Oswald most likely would have pronounced the alias Heedel, the Russian pronunciation, which perhaps not coincidentally rhymed with Oswald’s hero Fidel.

  18 Interview of Volkmar Schmidt, 17 June 1993 (FL).

  About “logical suicide,” Schmidt said that a man who knows his powers but who hasn’t been given a good set of values to use them may eventually kill himself. Schmidt asserts, “Whatever happened, he would have found a victim because he was so obsessed with doing something. His assassinations were literally a means of substitute suicide: killing somebody else instead of killing himself.”

  19 Max Clark, testimony, WC vol. VIII, 350.

  20 CE 100, WC vol. XVI, 437.

  21 Interview of Priscilla McMillan, 19 August 1993 (FL).

  22 Interview of Volkmar Schmidt, 17 June 1993 (FL).

  23 Myrna Blyth and Jane Farrell, “Marina Oswald: Twenty-Five Years Later,” Ladies Home Journal, November 1988, 237.

  24 The book by Kennedy was his Profiles in Courage. The book about him was William Manchester’s Portrait of a President. From an early age, Oswald’s reading set him apart from his schoolmates and others around him. A friend of his mother called him “a bookworm” at the age of seven (Marilyn Murret, testimony, WC vol. VIII, 51). While fellow Marines played cards or “shot the shit” or perhaps gawked at issues of a relatively new magazine called Playboy on a troopship delivering them to Japan in August and September, 1957, Oswald read Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, hardly typical Marine Corps reading. Oswald liked history, especially military history, but his interests also included biography and science fiction. As for his feelings about John Kennedy before 1963, the evidence is inconclusive. A Russian friend would remember that Oswald “liked” the President (Ernst Titovets, interview by author, 15 April 1993). Marina would tell the same thing to a Dallas friend named Ruth Paine (Ruth Paine, interview by author, 2 July 1993), but provide more details to Prisdlla McMillan, author of Marina and Lee, a book about their relationship and history. According to McMillan, Marina specifically praised Kennedy for his stance on civil rights—although, he added, Kennedy’s father had bought him everything and paved the way for him to become President. She also told McMillan that he expressly criticized the president for the Bay of Pigs invasion. When the Kennedys’ infant son Patrick Bouvier would die on November 7th, 1963, both Marina and Lee Oswald, whose second daughter had been born two weeks earlier, took the tragedy personally, suffering with the President and First Lady.

  Whatever Oswald’s feelings were for John Kennedy personally and as a fellow father, his political convictions and own personal ambition almost certainly superseded them. Oswald consistently argued that capitalism had to be destroyed. When the time came—a time when Oswald had almost certainly learned of new Kennedy threats to Cuba well after the Bay of Pigs—he no doubt concluded that the most any individual could do to destroy it was strike at the person on top, and the more effective leader he was, the harder the blow to capitalism.

  25 According to Priscilla McMillan, author of Marina and Lee, Lee told Marina that he would be President or Prime Minister in 20 years. She made fun of him for that claim, answering that right now, she needed a new pair of pants. Lee said that “the child they were about to have would be President or Prime Minister, and he didn’t seem to distinguish or realize that there’s no Prime Minister in the United States” (Interview of Marina, 19 August 1993 [FL]). A Dallas friend of Oswald’s named George DeMohrenschildt once asked him—teasingly, he thought, in response to Oswald’s Marxist pronouncements—whether he’d like to be a commissar in the United States. DeMohrenschildt saw that the idea delighted Oswald. “To me, it was a ridiculous question to ask. But he took me seriously” (George DeMohrenschildt, testimony, WC vol. IX, 241).

  26 Blakey and Billings, 147.

  According to a young man who did messenger work with a 15-year-old Oswald in 1955, Oswald said then that he would like to kill President Eisenhower—who “exploit[ed] the working people”—if he had the opportunity (FBI report about an affidavit of Palmer McBride, 26 November 1963).

  27 By that time, DeMohrenschildt’s mental state had deteriorated too badly to trust his memory about anything significant. But his clear-headed wife, Jeanne, disputed the description of Oswald by the Warren Commission and the mass media as “a complete loner, a total failure, both as a man and a father” (Jim Marrs, Crossfire: The Plot that Killed Kennedy, (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1989, 285).

  28 Hinckle and Turner, 406.

  29 It seemed incredible not only to proponents of conspiracy theories. FBI agent Jim Hosty, who looked after Oswald in Dallas for a time, would join the “anti-conspiracy-believers” who also doubted that a debriefing of Oswald hadn’t been conducted.

  30 Not all Intourist guides fulfilled that role, but a great many did, one way or another.

  31 Anthony Summers, Conspiracy.

  32 Sober scholars of Cold War practices long speculated that the CIA could not and did not pass up its opportunity with Oswald. Many assassination researchers surmised that DeMohrenshildt was, at most, Oswald’s CIA handler, his contact and watcher in the middle, or his debriefer at the least. Edward Jay Epstein, for example, stated that DeMohrenschildt was Oswald’s debriefer, and strongly implied that a friend of DeMohrenschildt functioned as his case officer in the matter. That friend was J. Walton Moore, the CIA’s Domestic Contact officer in Dallas. Moore would not comment about this for 30 years, but recently denied any such thing to the author, saying he “never even heard of Lee Oswald until one night at dinner, when George mentioned he was helping a Russian woman named Marina, who was having marital problems [with Oswald]. I encouraged George to help her as a Good Samaritan. That’s the extent of it” (J. Walton Moore, interview by author, 25 April 1993).

  33 Casasin, HSCA Staff interview, 17 August 1978, and Walter P. Haltigan, HSCA Staff interview, 13 June 1978, in HSCA Staff Notes section of the JFK Collection, National Archives. The HSCA verified that Haltigan’s assistant, Robert G. Lamprell, in fact delivered the memo to CIA headquarters.

  34 Interview of Donald Denesleya, 10 May 1993 (FL).

  35 HSCA Outside Contact Report, 17 October 1978, HSCA Staff Notes Section of JFK Collection, National Archives.

  36 Interview of Michael Paine, 19 August 1993 (FL).

  37 Interview of Volkmar Schmidt, 17 June 1993 (FL).

  38 Interview of Volkmar Schmidt, 17 June 1993 (FL).

  39 “James Hepburn” [pseud.], 139.

  40 Max Holland, “Cuba, Kennedy, and the Cold War,” The Nation, 29 November 1993.

  41 Jim Hosty, interview by author, 22 June 1993.

  “This is a possibility,” Hosty would speculate, “just as I think Castro put the idea into Oswald’s mind to shoot President Kennedy for attempting to overthrow him (Castro).”

  42 Marina Oswald, testimony, WC vol. I, 17.

  Lee’s revelation that he had shot at Walker came the morning after the event, when he learned from the radio—to his disgust—that he had missed. At that point, Marina thought him “sick. . . not a stable-minded person.”

  43 General Walker’s own investigators, privately hired to find out who tried to kill him, tracked down a man named Bill Duff, who told them he had fired the shot. However, there is very little controversy about the conclusion that the shooter was actually Oswald. Marina would testify convincingly about his activities and statements both before and after the shooting, which leave little doubt that her husband was responsible. The bullet retrieved from General Walker’s dining room was too damaged to match ballistically to Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano 6.5 exclusively, but it was determined to be the same type of ammunition, made by the same manufacturer, as the bullets that killed President Kennedy (Posner, 116).

  44 Elmo Cunningham, interview by author, 8 December
1993.

  45 Larry Schmidt allegedly told Brad Angers that he and his brother Bob Schmidt gave Oswald the idea to shoot Walker when the three were driving around drunk. Later, according to Schmidt, Bob and Oswald did just that. This lends support to the eyewitness testimony of neighbor Kirk Coleman, who saw two men fleeing Walker’s house immediately after the shooting (Interview of Brad Angers, 19 March 1993 (FL); interview of Walter Kirk “Case” Coleman, 15 June 1993 (FL)).

  Hosty suspects the shooting might have been an inside job. (Some of Walker’s own people were angry with him because of his recent arrest in Oxford, Mississippi, for inciting a riot there—Hosty was in charge of that investigation, so he was familiar with the personnel. Bob Schmidt was his driver.) Hosty also suggests the shooting was arranged by Walker himself as a publicity stunt—in fact, the Dallas Police considered these as possibilities and were working on them.

  Mary Brengel, New Orleans detective Guy Banister’s temporary secretary, lived for a time in Dallas. She says Walker was gay and often had young boys from Europe at his house. Walker would twice be arrested and fined for making lewd sexual advances to undercover policemen in the men’s rooms in two Dallas public parks (Dallas Times Herald, 17 March 1977). Although they were American citizens, Bob and Larrie Schmidt were raised in Europe.

  46 Hinckle and Turner, 249.

  47 Kent Courtney, interview by author, 7 February 1994.

  Walker had described the incident in detail to Courtney, his fellow conservative from Louisiana.

  48 Elmo Cunningham, interview by author, 8 December 1993.

  49 When Schmidt had to go abroad soon afterward, he left money with friends for a large party for the Oswalds. After the assassination, Marina stayed for a time with one of the couples she would meet at that party.