Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy (112 page)

However, the Warren Commission noted that these witnesses were not
consistent in their descriptions of the rifle-range gunman or of the rifle and
scope. In addition, some of the gun-range witnesses said Oswald was
accompanied by a man in a late-model car. Since Oswald reportedly could
not drive and did not know anyone with a late-model car, the Commission
concluded:

Although the testimony of these witnesses was partially corroborated by
other witnesses, there was other evidence which prevented the Commission from reaching the conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the
person these witnesses saw.

Furthermore, Price remembered helping "Oswald" sight his rifle
on September 28, 1963, a time when Oswald reportedly was in Mexico
City.

In October 1963, Mrs. Lovell Penn heard shooting on her property
located just outside Dallas. Accosting three men shooting a rifle in a field,
Mrs. Penn ordered them to leave. After they left, she found a 6.5 mm
Mannlicher-Carcano rifle shell near where the men had been target shooting. After the assassination, she turned the shell casing over to the FBI and
told them that one of the men looked like Oswald while another was
"Latin, perhaps Cuban." However, the FBI reported that laboratory tests
showed the shell had not been fired from the Oswald rifle.

The reports of Oswald accompanied by Cubans came from many different sources.

Recall the incident of three anti-Castro Cubans-one by the name of
Leon Oswald-visiting Silvia Odio shortly before the assassination.

It becomes possible that someone was posing as Oswald in the days
preceding the assassination, carefully laying out a pattern of an irritating young man who was in possession of and practicing with a foreign-made
rifle.

As the Warren Commission itself pointed out: in most instances,
investigation has disclosed that there is no substantial basis for believing
that the person reported by the various witnesses was Oswald."

Of course, if the man in question was not Oswald, it means that
someone was laying a trail of evidence to the real Oswald. This gives great
credence to Oswald's cry to newsmen in the Dallas Police Station: "I'm
just a patsy!"

But the question of Oswald's identity leads to even stranger areas.

In recent years, questions have even arisen concerning the man killed by
Jack Ruby.

Was the Oswald killed in Dallas the same Oswald born in New Orleans
in 1939? Bizarre as it may sound, there is considerable evidence to suggest
that the man killed by Ruby was not the original Lee Harvey Oswald.

The first major publicity over this issue came in 1977 with the publication of The Oswald File by British author Michael Eddowes. Eddowes,
who acknowledged to this author his connections with British intelligence
dating back to World War II, advanced the following theory: "Lee Harvey
Oswald was captured by the Soviets after traveling to Russia in 1959 and a
look-alike substitute was returned to the United States in his place."

Eddowes said that after studying the issue of Oswald's identity, he
became "one-hundred-percent convinced" that President Kennedy was
killed by a Soviet KGB agent impersonating the real Oswald. The British
attorney offered the following evidence for his theory:

• A mastoidectomy scar that was noted on Oswald's Marine Corps
medical records was not mentioned in Oswald's autopsy report.

• Oswald's Marine records showed a vaccination scar on his arm, along
with other scars. No vaccination scar was noted in Oswalds autopsy
report and the location of scars differed from those in his military
records.

• In Warren Commission documents, including Marine and passport
application papers, at least eleven give Oswald's height as five-footeleven, while at least thirteen documents-all produced after Oswald's
return from Russia-give his height as five-foot-nine.

• During Oswald's twenty-month disappearance in Russia, U.S. government agencies-including the FBI and the State Department-expressed
suspicions regarding Oswald's identity.

• When Marina met Oswald at a dance in Minsk, she believed him to
be a native Russian with a Baltic area accent. Since there is no
doubt that the man she met in Russia was the man killed in Dallas, it
should be understood that Marina knew only the one Oswald. But
this fact does not eliminate the possibility that a substitution took
place prior to their meeting.

There are a number of other intriguing hints that point toward substitution.

Just weeks before leaving Russia for home, Oswald wrote his mother
and asked her to send him pictures of her and himself. Some researchers
wonder if he needed such photos so he would know which woman to greet
at the airport.

Jeanne DeMohrenschildt claimed that Oswald's knowledge of Russia
extended beyond just its language. (Recall that native Russians thought he
spoke the language better than they did.) She said her husband George and
Oswald would have lengthy discussions about Russian literature, including
such authors as Tolstoy and Dostoevski-an incredible feat for a highschool dropout whose Russian was self-taught.

She said Oswald even subscribed to a Soviet satirical journal entitled The
Crocodile and had a large collection of photographs he claimed to have
taken in several different areas of Russia. (Officially, Oswald never ventured outside Moscow and Minsk.)

Researcher Gary Mack has reported that three language experts at
Southern Methodist University in Dallas studied tape recordings made of
Oswald. They were not told the identity of the man whose voice they
heard. All agreed that the English words spoken seemed acquired later in
life-that English was not the native tongue of the man on the tape.

This startling conclusion was supported by Mrs. DeMohrenschildt, who
told this author she was more amazed by Oswald's English than his
Russian. She said he spoke in deliberate and precise terms, rarely ever
using slang or curse words. She said: "Everybody always talks about how
good his Russian was. I was always surprised at the English coming from
this boy who was brought up in the South. I wondered, `Where did he
learn such proper English-certainly not from his mother.'

A particularly intriguing hint at impersonation came in the fall of 1963,
when a letter was sent to the Russian embassy in Washington. It was
signed by Lee Harvey Oswald, who was writing about his alleged travel to
Mexico City.

The second sentence of the letter-the Warren Commission published
both his handwritten draft and the typed letter-reads:

I was unable to remain in Mexico indefinitely [sic] because of my
mexican [sic] visa restrictions which was [sic] for 15 days only. I could
not take a chance on requesting a new visa unless I used my real name
[emphasis added], so I returned to the United States.

Since his passport and visa forms-as well as the November 9, 1963,
embassy letter-were in the name of Lee Harvey Oswald, researchers are
left to wonder about the meaning of having to use "my real name."

Based on these points, Eddowes went into a Texas court on January 10,
1979, and asked that the grave of Oswald be opened. He had the support
of the Dallas County Medical Examiner's Office, which was convinced there was enough question about the identity of the body to warrant
an exhumation.

Soon after Eddowes asked to have Oswald's body exhumed, political
fights sprang up between conflicting jurisdictions. Oswald had been killed
in Dallas County, but his body was buried in Rose Hill Cemetery, which is
in nearby Tarrant County. While the Dallas Medical Examiner's Office
had authorized an exhumation, Tarrant County officials balked.

On June 1, 1979, Texas District judge James Wright denied Eddowes's
exhumation request. Dallas County assistant medical examiner Dr. Linda
Norton told newsmen. "I feel it would be in the public interest to conduct
the exhumation. However, there are apparent legal disagreements . . . and
political forces who do not want this body dug up."

Norton said her efforts to exhume the body were being thwarted by
Tarrant County district attorney Tim Curry, an elected official. The case
dragged on.

Eddowes was not the first person to seek an exhumation of Oswald's
body. A Warren Commission document declassified only in 1975 revealed
that CIA officials were suspicious of Oswald's true identity as early as
1964. In a Commission memorandum dated March 13, 1964, staff member
W. David Slawson wrote about a letter from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover
on February 26, 1964. In this memo, Slawson quoted Hoover as writing:
"The CIA is interested in the scar on Oswald's left wrist . . . The FBI is
reluctant to exhume Oswald's body as requested by the CIA." In this same
memo, Slawson expressed his own questions about what may have happened to Oswald in Russia:

This whole aspect of Oswald's life and especially our attempt to authenticate it are highly secret at this point. . . . [Slawson mentions the
reported suicide attempt by Oswald shortly after arriving in Russia]
Therefore, if the suicide incident is a fabrication, the time spent by
Oswald recovering from the suicide [attempt] in a Moscow hospital
could have been spent by him in Russian secret police custody, being
coached, brainwashed, etc.

Funeral director Paul Groody-who buried Oswald in 1963-told this
author that Secret Service agents came to him three weeks after Oswald's
burial asking questions about marks on the body. Groody said: "They told
me, We don't know who we have in that grave.'

Furthermore, Oswald's own mother asked for an exhumation in 1967,
expressing questions as to the identity of the body in her son's grave.
Marguerite Oswald told local news reporters that she did not believe her
son had scars on his body as described by the Warren Commission. She
said: "I think now would be the time to exhume this boy's body and see if
he has these scars."

Mrs. Oswald previously had told the Warren Commission how her son had seemed changed after arriving back in Forth Worth from Russia. She
said she noticed he was losing his hair and that Oswald told her he was
going bald "because of the cold weather in Texas." She also noted: "And
Lee was very, very thin when I saw him."

Oswald's brother, Robert, also noted changes in Oswald when he
arrived back in the United States. He told the Warren Commission:

His appearance had changed to the extent that he had lost a considerable
amount of hair; his hair had become very kinky in comparison with his
naturally curly hair prior to his departure to Russia. . . . He appeared
the first couple of days upon his return . . . to be rather tense and
anxious. I also noted that his complexion had changed somewhat to the
extent that he had always been very fair complected-his complexion
was rather ruddy at this time-you might say it appeared like an
artificial suntan that you get out of a bottle, but very slight-in other
words, a tint of brown to a tint of yellow. . . . he appeared to have
picked up something of an accent.

Oswald's half-brother, John Edward Pic, was even more pointed in his
comments to the Warren Commission concerning Lee's appearance after
returning from Russia:

I would have never recognized him, sir. . . . He was much thinner than
I remembered him. He didn't have as much hair. . . . His face features
were somewhat different, being his eyes were set back maybe, you
know like in these Army pictures, they looked different than I remembered him. His face was rounder . . . when he went in the Marine Corps
[Oswald had] a bull neck. This I didn't notice at all. I looked for this, I
didn't notice it at all, sir.

Pic went on to tell how he became angered when Oswald introduced
him to a visitor as his half-brother. He said Oswald had never previously
mentioned the fact that Pic was only a half-brother.

In the book The Two Assassins by Renatus Hartogs, Pic was quoted as
saying: "The Lee Harvey Oswald 1 met in November 1962, was not the
same Lee Harvey Oswald I had known ten years previously."

In August 1979, Dallas medical examiner Dr. Charles Petty formally
called for an exhumation and asked for his counterpart in Tarrant County
to order it. However, this request, along with Eddowes's offer to pay the
premium on a $100,000 indemnification bond to allow the exhumation to
proceed, was rejected by District Attorney Curry.

Then in February 1980, Dr. Petty reversed himself and said he would
not order an exhumation. Meanwhile the court found that Eddowes, being
a British citizen, lacked any legal standing in a Texas court.

By the summer of 1980, Eddowes was joined in his exhumation efforts
by Marina Oswald, who provided the necessary "legal standing."

As the foot-dragging of Tarrant County officials to an Oswald exhumation began to wane, another roadblock was thrown in the way of an
exhumation-this time by Oswald's brother Robert. On August 15, 1980,
Robert Oswald won an injunction against the exhumation, saying it would
cause his family anguish. This was considered very odd by assassination
researchers because if the exhumation showed the man in the grave was
not Oswald, it would have exonerated his brother as a presidential assassin. If the exhumation proved the body was Oswald, nothing would have
changed. So what harm could be done?

The case dragged on for more months. Finally, on August 20, 1981,
Marina filed suit to have the grave opened. And on October 4, 1981-nine
months after Marguerite Oswald died from cancer in a Fort Worth hospital
and was quietly buried alongside her son Lee-the exhumation of the
Oswald grave took place. Opposition to the exhumation had suddenly
vanished. Robert Oswald said he could not afford to fight the issue further
in court.

The body was taken from Rose Hill Cemetery in the early morning
hours and driven to Baylor Medical Center in Dallas for study. A team of
four forensic pathologists compared the teeth of the corpse brought from
the Oswald grave with Oswalds Marine Corps dental records.