Oswald, Mexico, and Deep Politics

by Peter Dale Scott

  Not spelled out, but known to FBI Headquarters, was that this task would require the erasure of the phase-one story circulating on November 22: that Oswald was not just a Marxist, but a card-carrying Communist. As we shall see, FBI Agent Hosty in Dallas had called Oswald a Communist in an exchange with Dallas Police Detective Jack Revill. That same day, in Washington, Hoover had called Oswald a "Communist" in telephone calls to both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.19 Both men had reasons to say what they did.

  Throughout the country that first week-end, but especially in Dallas, New Orleans, and Miami, witnesses came forward who spoke of Oswald’s Communism. Most of them were swiftly brought within days into conformity with Belmont’s guideline ("Oswald was an avowed Marxist"). As will be seen from Appendix I, some of these witnesses were associated with organizations (such as military intelligence and Cuban anti-Castro groups like the DRE) from which other bellicose phase-one stories proliferated.

  A second category, much more important, were witnesses like Ruth and Michael Paine who were close to Oswald in 1963. As will be seen from Appendix I, these witnesses are consistent both in their initial claims, that Oswald said "I’m a Communist," and in their later corrections of them: when addressed as a Communist, Oswald said, "I am a Marxist."20

  Ruth Paine is the most important such witness. It seems clear that she told James Hosty before the assassination that Oswald "admitted to her being a ‘Trotskyite Communist’" (23 WH 508, 17 WH 777, 23 WH 459, etc.). Oswald probably did so; Ruth’s brother, a doctor in Cincinnati, later told the FBI that the husband of the Russian woman staying with his sister "was a Communist."21 Yet Ruth Paine assured the Warren Commission in March 1964 that "He always corrected anyone who called him a Communist and said he was a Marxist" (3 WH 108).

  No less than five credible witnesses in Dallas—Ruth and Michael Paine, Frank Krystinik, Florence ("Betty") McDonald, and Richard Pierce—described Oswald as a self-professed Communist. Three of these witnesses later corrected themselves; the last two were not followed up on by the Warren Commission.22 Even more interesting is that, in the passionately anti-Communist circle of emigre Russians among whom the Oswalds moved, none ever said they heard Oswald call himself a Communist. This suggests that in Dallas as in New Orleans, Oswald played different roles to different audiences, and that his professed Communism was in fact a fiction for another agenda.

  Oswald’s self-description as a Communist could of course have indicated a different identity, not as a Communist but as a potential penetration agent for the FBI or some other agency. The FBI’s zeal in "correcting" or suppressing this story by itself proves nothing. It is however interesting that Ruth Paine was asked by the Warren Commission if she had ever told anyone "that Lee Harvey Oswald in your opinion was doing underground work" (3 WH 108).23 This certainly was the opinion of Oswald’s mother (1 WH 162, 316, 325, etc.).

  It may also have been the opinion of Michael Paine. Without invitation, he recalled for the Warren Commission

  thinking to myself for a person who has a business to do he [Oswald] certainly can waste the time. By business I mean some kind of activity and keeping track of right-wing causes and left-wing causes or something. I supposed that he spent his time. . . trying to sense the pulse of various groups in the Dallas area. (2 WH 412)

  What else could Michael Paine have supposed? He himself had gone with Oswald to a meeting of the liberal ACLU, which Oswald told him "he couldn’t join" (2 WH 409), and heard Oswald describe to the ACLU an earlier right-wing meeting where General Walker had spoken (2 WH 403).24 Clearly Oswald could not have attended both meetings out of inner convictions, any more than in New Orleans he could have been sincerely both a pro-Castro and anti-Castro partisan.25

  By November 23 there were two types of phase-one stories for the FBI to eradicate: 1) those linking Oswald to Moscow or Havana or Peking (risking war), and 2) those linking Oswald to the FBI itself, which was said by Police Chief Curry to have been in contact with Oswald shortly before the assassination. For whatever reason, the FBI appears to have approached all the stories that Oswald was a Communist, or said he was a Communist, as high on its agenda of eradication.

  To implement this agenda, the number two man in the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division, James R. Malley, was dispatched urgently on November 24 to Dallas. He was followed within hours by two of his Supervisors, Richard Rogge and Fletcher Thompson (3 AH 464-65, 666). In 1978 Malley told the House Committee that his instructions from Alan Belmont (reflecting the new President’s comments to Hoover) were to contact District Attorney Wade, Chief of Police Curry, and the office of Sheriff Decker, "and see if I couldn’t put a stop to miscellaneous statements they were making" (3 AH 464; cf. 3 AH 171-73). Another Headquarters FBI Agent, Larry Keenan, was soon dispatched to Mexico City with a similar mission.

  This phase-two blitz was successful. Today it is hard to learn, at least from the otherwise exhaustive Warren volumes, what the offending statements from Wade and Curry were. A number of Wade’s and Curry’s televised interviews are transcribed; interestingly, as we have already seen, these largely contain soothing rebuttals of earlier phase-one rumors. For example, the Warren Commission did not reprint the front-page news story on November 24 (leaked by Curry) that the FBI had interviewed Oswald on November 16.26 Instead it reprinted the transcript of a late November 23 TV interview, where Curry, abjectly, said repeatedly he wanted to correct an earlier story "that the FBI did know this man was in the city and had interviewed him."27 Almost certainly the Commission never received the FBI account of how FBI SAC Shanklin and reporter Jeremiah O’Leary, one of the Hoover-approved "close friends of the Bureau," got Curry to retract the statement that the FBI had recently interviewed Oswald.28 In a later article I shall argue that the swiftly retracted statement was probably true, as a recent article about Ruby and gun-running would suggest.29

  Even the Dallas Police Report printed in the Warren volumes (Warren Commission Exhibit 2003) appears to have been edited, if not falsified, to conform closely to the Belmont guidelines.30 To judge from the DPD pagination, eight pages of the original Report are now missing.31

  In its section addressing the possibility of a Communist conspiracy, the published DPD Report includes two letters to Oswald from V.T. Lee of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and two from Arnold Johnson, Information Director of the Communist Party (24 WH 274-76).32 However the two letters from Arnold Johnson are both entirely innocuous and without interest. They do not fit the description of the letters "on Communist Party of America letterheads" which Bill Alexander told the press on November 26 "showed a ‘working friendly relationship’ between Oswald and the party."33 Still less do they fit the account apparently leaked by Alexander and the Dallas Police Department and reported by UPI and the New York World Telegram and Sun on November 26. According to the UPI account of Alexander’s remarks, these letters, found "in Oswald’s personal belongings. . . were written on official Communist. . . stationary [sic]." One "offered advice on how to set up a Dallas chapter of the Communist-inspired ‘Fair Play for Cuba Committee. . . .Another told him how to ‘keep nosy neighbors away.’"34 As described by Alexander, the leaked letters implied CP direction of both Oswald and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, an impression entirely at odds with the two letters published later by the DPD and Warren Commission.35

  There is no trace of these phantom leaked letters in the Dallas Police and Warren Commission records, and it is likely that they existed only in the fertile imagination of leakers like Bill Alexander.36 My point is rather that the DPD Report, as published, is at odds with what was leaked from Dallas in the first four days; and it reflects the more sober DPD view of Oswald-Communist relations taken after the FBI had got to Curry. Indeed the focus of the Oswald-Communist Party section is a belated right-wing column in December by Fulton Lewis, Jr. (one of Hoover’s press favorites), noting that "while the Johnson letters indicate Oswald was not under Communist discipline, they do show he was a dedicated Marxist."37


  Conversely, the DPD’s best documentary "evidence" that Oswald was a Communist is not to be found in the published DPD Report. Astonishingly, there is no mention of the Daily Worker or The Militant in the photograph showing Oswald with a rifle (WR 404, 16 WH 510, 17 WH 498), even though Police Chief Curry had on at least three different occasions drawn attention to the names of these two newspapers in his press conferences on November 23.38 Though Captain Fritz was one of those talking conspiracy on November 22, his published report of his interrogation of Oswald (written "several days later," 4 WH 209) is as anti-conspiratorial as the Warren Report. Noting that Oswald was shown a picture of himself "holding a rifle" (ignoring the newspapers, 24 WH 268), Fritz later erases the Communist issue by saying Oswald "repeated two or three times, ‘I am a Marxist, but not a Leninist-Marxist’" (24 WH 270). Although the newspapers are prominent in the enlarged version of the photo, the DPD Report never mentions The Daily Worker’s presence in the photo.39

  Indeed the whole of Fritz’s belated report seems designed to allay the phase-one rumors that may have provoked Malley’s visit to Dallas.

  I asked him what his political beliefs were, and he said he had none but that he belonged to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. . . .! asked him if he owned a rifle in Russia, and he said, ‘You know you can’t buy a rifle in Russia, you can only buy shotguns.’ ‘I had a shotgun in Russia and hunted some while there.’. . . I asked him if he belonged to the Communist Party, but he said that he never had a card, but repeated that he belonged to the Fair Play for Cuba organization. (24 WH 265-67)

  So much for the stories, false but circulating and already spuriously documented, that Oswald was a card-carrying Communist who had brought his murder weapon with him from Russia.40

  Suppressed Official Evidence (Whether True or False) that Oswald Was a Communist

  Missing from the published DPD Report was clear (though later disputed) documentary evidence that Oswald was a Communist, not just a Marxist. This was a November 22 memo from Dallas Police Lieutenant Jack Revill, which only came to light after a misleading article about it by Hugh Aynesworth in the Dallas Morning News of April 24, 1964.41 Revill’s memo told his superior, Captain W.P. Gannaway of the DPD Special Service Bureau, that at about 2:50 PM on November 22, he had met FBI Agent Hosty in the Dallas police basement, where Hosty told him that Oswald "was a member of the Communist Party."42 About 30 minutes later, at "approximately 3:30, 3:35" (5 WH 40), Revill prepared a memo containing these words, for his superior to take to Police Chief Curry (5 WH 39). Thus it is more than likely that Revill’s memo contributed to the conspiracy flap generated the same day by Fritz, Curry, and Alexander.

  Hosty for some years has conceded that he did say Oswald was a Communist; he has since admitted it both to interviewers and in the book by his friend and superior, former FBI Director Clarence Kelley.43 Kelley’s book tells us that "Jim based his statement" ("His name is Lee Harvey Oswald. . . and he’s a Communist") "on information he learned from 12:30 to 3:00 [on November 22], not on what he knew from Oswald’s file."44 Malley later told the House Committee that Hosty had been reprimanded for "some loose, unnecessary statements he made the day of the assassination" (3 AH 491). He did not say that Hosty’s statements had been untrue.

  Unfortunately Hosty’s admission that he called Oswald a Communist is not consistent with the rigorously "phase-two" denial of Revill’s claim which Hosty prepared and swore to in an affidavit for the Warren Commission (WCE 831, 17 WH 780-84). That affidavit is silent on the question of Oswald’s alleged Communist status. Instead it mentions that Hosty told Revill of Oswald’s defection to Russia and return, of his employment at the Texas School Book Depository, and that he "was the main suspect in the assassination of President Kennedy." "The above," Hosty then stated, "constitutes the entire contents of my conversation with Lieutenant Revill" (17 WH 782).

  One has to have some sympathy for the situation Hosty was in, both on November 22 when he called Oswald a Communist, and on April 24 when he implicitly denied having done so. His April affidavit was in response to Aynesworth’s news story, which had Hosty saying "we knew he was capable of assassinating the president" (17 WH 779). This had infuriated Hoover, and moved him to have his aides "tell Dallas to tell Hosty to keep his big mouth shut. He has already done irreparable harm."45

  His situation on November 22 was even less enviable. Twenty minutes before encountering Revill, Hosty had had just enough time at the office to call up the Oswald file. There he learnt for the first time that two new items had reached Dallas. One was a change of origin notice from New Orleans, making him again responsible for the Oswald file.46 The other was an Airtel from the Washington Field Office, summarizing the content of Oswald’s November 9 letter to the Soviet Embassy.47 In that Airtel there were provocative and unexplained statements about "time to complete his business" in Havana, and "that he could not request a new visa unless he used his real name."48 Still to come was the actual text of the letter, much worse than the FBI’s bowdlerized summary of u. Oswald had actually written to the Soviet Embassy about "time to complete our business" in Havana. And there was an equally provocative reference to a meeting on November 1, not documented elsewhere, between Oswald and FBI "Agent James P. Hasty" (16 WH 33).

  Hosty might well have felt that he himself was being made something of a patsy.49 Indeed Hoover might well have suspected a concerted and cunning effort to embarrass the whole FBI, and coerce it into cover-up. If Oswald, as some alleged, were actually a self-professed Communist, then the FBI should have pursued a whole schedule of statutory and administrative requirements which it took most seriously, and which had not been followed in this case.

  It would appear, moreover, that Kelley’s source for Hosty’s statement ("he’s a Communist") is not the whole truth. Hosty himself reported, and later testified to, the November 5 statement by Marina Oswald’s host, Ruth Paine, that Oswald had "admitted to her being a Trotskyite Communist.’"50 Hosty’s report of November 24, 1963, to FBI Bureau Chief Gordon Shanklin, incorporated Ruth Paine’s statement that "he admitted to being a ‘Trotskyite Communist.’"51 We have already seen that in all probability Oswald had said something like this to the Paines.52

  The Commission’s lack of interest in the "Communist" charge is clear from their silence about it, when interrogating Curry and Hosty about the Revill memo (4 WH 194, 464, 474). With Curry and Hosty the loaded word "Communist" was not once asked about or mentioned. It did come up with Revill, in a leading question which gave Revill a chance to deny his own affidavit.53

  Mr. RANKIN. Now, you say here that you were told that the subject was a member of the Communist Party. Is that right?

  Mr. REVILL. This might be my interpretation of Mr. Hosty saying a Communist killed the President. . . .He did not say that he was a member" (5 WH 41-42).

  This erasure of Hosty’s admitted statement ("He’s a Communist") suited the Commission’s "phase-two" agenda in 1964, but in 1994 we can afford to be more curious. No nuclear war now threatens if we point out that Oswald may very well have told the Paines he was a "Communist," who in turn told Hosty. We shall see that in Mexico Oswald (or someone calling himself Oswald) did tell others this.

  We should also pursue the matter of Oswald’s alleged membership in the Communist Party. Regardless of what Hosty actually said, it is possible that Revill actually heard this (either from Hosty or someone else). Don Stringfellow of Revill’s Criminal Intelligence Section (the DPD subversive or Red squad) reported at 5:05 PM CST to Fourth Army Intelligence, Region II

  that Oswald had confessed to the shooting of President Kennedy and Police Officer Tibbets. The only additional information they have obtained from Oswald at this time is that he defected to Cuba in 1959 and that he is a card carrying member of the Communist Party.54

  Army Intelligence was clearly receptive to this phase-one story, however improbable.55 At 10:05 that night a provocative cable, with the kind of message the White House had been concerned about, was sent from Fo
rt Sam Houston in Texas to the U.S. Strike Command at McDill Air Force Base in Florida, the base that had both the capacity and the location for a swift retaliatory attack against Cuba.

  This cable read, in part:

  Following is additional information on Oswald, Harvey Lee. . . . Don Stringfellow, Intelligence Section, Dallas Police Dept., notified 112th Intc Gp, this HQ, that information obtained from Oswald revealed he had defected to Cuba in 1959 and is card carrying member of Communist Party.56

  Stringfellow, in spreading this story, was not acting alone. Dallas Police Captain Westbrook reported on the afternoon of November 22 that "our suspect had admitted being a Communist" (7 WH 59). The memo from Stringfellow’s superior, Jack Revill ("the Subject was a member of the Communist Party") would have struck the phase-one audience as further corroboration. All these documents are assassination-related, not in the sense that their content is true, but that they are part of the phase-one case which was used to justify the phase-two Warren Commission.

  The best corroboration of all for Stringfellow and Revill came from Mexico City. It was there in September, not in Dallas on November 22, that we have persuasive documentary evidence Oswald (to quote the Warren Report) "apparently also stated that he was a member of the Communist Party and displayed documents which he claimed to be evidence of his membership" (WR 734).

  Oswald in Mexico: He Did Present Himself as a Card-Carrying Communist

  The document in question is the visa application which Oswald submitted to the Cuban consulate in Mexico City. Unambiguously, that application has the following "Observations" typed on it in Spanish:

  The applicant states that he is a member of the American Communist Party and Secretary in New Orleans of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. . . .He displayed documents in proof of his membership in the two aforementioned organizations and a marriage certificate."