Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination (33 page)

As early as 1961, documents show, Phillips had supervised the CIA’s propaganda efforts to counter the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. At that point, his fellow officer Howard Hunt was to testify, he “ran” the DRE—the anti-Castro group whose members were two years later to engage in a supposed clash with Oswald in New Orleans. An agent reporting to Phillips in 1961, documents show, spied on a young man who was “actively engaged in the organization of a local chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee”—a mirror image of the activity in which Oswald would seemingly engage in New Orleans.

In Mexico City, at the time of the Oswald episode in 1963, Phillips headed the unit responsible for surveilling the Cuban Consulate. He would later go public in saying that Oswald’s visits had not been caught on camera. He and his team, he wrote, “spent several days studying literally hundreds of photographs available to the CIA before and during Oswald’s trip to Mexico City. He did not appear in any of them.” As reported earlier, this Phillips claim conflicts with what is known of the camera surveillance. Assassinations Committee investigators did not believe it.

Phillips it was, too, who told the Assassinations Committee that recordings made during the Oswald
visit had been “routinely destroyed”—wiped—a week or two later and recycled. “There’s no question,” he told another interviewer, “that’s what occurred to Oswald’s conversations. They don’t exist anymore.” Oswald, Phillips wrote, had been “just another blip.” That, of course, is contrary to the statements of Station Chief Scott in his draft manuscript—“we kept a special watch on [Oswald] … he was of great interest to us.”

Phillips is known to have lied under oath about other matters. In 1975, in sworn testimony to a Senate committee, he would assert that the overthrow and death of Chile’s President Allende two years earlier had been the result of a home-grown coup, not because those involved were supported, encouraged, or even winked at by the CIA. In fact, the Agency long strove to engineer the coup. In 1999, a decade after Phillips’ death, the National Security Archive—an independent organization—obtained CIA records indicating that he had headed the Task Force involved in a plot to kidnap a Chilean general—even supplied machine guns for the operation. The general was killed by other plotters with whom the CIA had also been cooperating. Phillips’ statements in connection with the Kennedy assassination are highly controversial, and he will feature in these pages again.

The name of the overall head of CIA Counterintelligence, James Angleton, figures significantly in the mysteries of Mexico City—which was part of his fiefdom. Intent on bringing additional pressure on the Cubans and Soviets in Mexico City, he had pushed for the establishment of a special, independent undercover unit, clashing in the process with Station Chief Winston Scott. It was
Angleton who pushed, after the assassination, to “wait out” the Warren Commission on its query on the matter of the photographs of the man who was not Oswald.

When Scott died suddenly in 1971, retired but still living in Mexico, Angleton flew down from Washington, DC, the moment he heard the news. The day after the funeral, he turned up at the widow’s door accompanied by John Horton, the station chief of the day. Angleton wanted access to the dead man’s study, a holy of holies to which Scott had admitted no one, access to his papers and to “any classified material he kept.” Among the material found there, Horton was to recall, was a stack of reel-to-reel tapes labeled “Oswald.”
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The next day, after Angleton had left, a truck removed three large boxes and four suitcases containing the tapes, Scott’s draft memoir containing his account of the Oswald episode, and much else. All were shipped to Washington. A former CIA headquarters officer, Paul Hartmann, who for twelve years maintained the HQ file on Oswald, was to recall having received “a package of tapes concerning the Oswald case… .”

The story of the Mexico City tapes had a melancholy apparent ending in the 1980s, when Michael Scott, son of the deceased station chief, sent the CIA a Freedom of Information request for some of the material that had been taken from the family home. Months later, the record shows, the items seized by Angleton became the subject of a CIA destruction order. According to the order, they consisted of “operational research [including] activities of a sensitive nature or those which were transitory targets of opportunity.”

It is reasonable to speculate that the eventual fate of the remaining “Oswald”
tapes was their willful destruction.

If there was imposture in Mexico City, the CIA operatives involved must have had a motive for the deception. If there has been an Agency cover-up of events—one that includes the withholding and in the end the destruction of “Oswald” recordings—there has to have been a reason. Some possible explanations:

The Texan Eldon Hensen, who like Oswald offered his services in the Cuban cause, was apparently manipulated by a CIA impostor posing as a Cuban Embassy aide, both to thwart his activity and, perhaps, gauge the Cuban response to similar approaches. Was imposture also used in Oswald’s case, to counter his plans and monitor Cuban and Soviet responses?

The FBI and the CIA, the files clearly show, were both aggressively involved in countering the Fair Play for Cuba Committee at home and abroad. The object was to penetrate the Committee’s operations and damage it with black propaganda. The evidence of New Orleans may suggest that, wittingly or unwittingly, Oswald was used to exactly those ends before leaving for Mexico. Was that also the CIA’s purpose in Mexico City? If so, the concept can be seen as a legitimate operational sideshow that was harmless enough—until Oswald was named as President Kennedy’s alleged assassin. When catastrophe occurred, was there a rush to cover up the “harmless” operation?

The Agency’s greater purpose, of course, was to overthrow the Castro regime by almost any means short of overt military invasion. Activity to that end ranged from black propaganda to the assassination of Fidel Castro himself—and Castro knew it. Some of the information to be covered in these pages will suggest that there were those who sought to manipulate Oswald’s visit to
Mexico for a far more sinister purpose. And that renegade anti-Castro forces within the CIA or used by it sought to assassinate President Kennedy and by manipulation of Oswald, and through true or false facts that could be pinned on him, lay the blame on Castro. That done, they would have surmised, the United States would be almost bound to retaliate by invading and toppling the Cuban Communist regime.

Facts and Appearances

“
Truth: An ingenious compound of desirability of appearance.”

—Ambrose Bierce,
The Devil’s Dictionary

The real Lee Harvey Oswald made a mundane return to the United States. The trip home to infamy was another bone-shaking bus journey, not to New Orleans but to Dallas, Texas, and a night at the YMCA. He made a weekend visit to his wife, Marina, now awaiting the birth of a second child at the home of her friend Ruth Paine on the outskirts of the city—a contact that was to have a pivotal effect on Oswald’s destiny.

Ten days after his arrival in Dallas, Paine told a neighbor, Linnie Mae Randle, that Oswald was having trouble finding a job. There might be an opening, Randle thought, at her brother’s place of work. Oswald followed up and two days later started the last job of his life, as an order-filler at a warehouse that handled the distribution of educational books—the Texas School Book Depository.
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Superficially, the last forty days of Oswald’s life were unremarkable. After five days renting from a first landlady with whom he did not get on, he took a room at 1026 North Beckley—registering under the name “O. H.
Lee.” To the owners of the house and to fellow tenants, Oswald seemed quiet, lonely. He spent most evenings reading or watching television, rarely made conversation. He visited Marina almost every weekend.

The women made an occasion of Oswald’s twenty-fourth birthday, which fell on October 18. Ruth brought wine, decorated the table, and baked a cake. The cake was carried in aglitter with candles, and everyone sang “Happy Birthday, Lee.” Oswald was visibly moved, and his eyes filled with tears. He rejoiced when Marina gave birth two days later to their second child, another daughter. In some ways, it seemed, the rickety marriage was recovering a little. Oswald seemed interested in reestablishing a domestic life, and talked of their setting up house together again.

At work at the Book Depository, Oswald’s supervisor thought he “did a good day’s work” and deemed him an above-average employee. According to his wife, Oswald said he was saving money. He may have anticipated an early end to his employment. Around November 1, three weeks before the assassination, Oswald wrote in a letter to the Internal Revenue Service that he had “worked only six months in the fiscal year of 1963.” Days later, he supposedly told Marina that “there was another job open, more interesting work … related to photography.” There is no knowing what he meant, in the letter to the taxman or in the alleged remark to his wife.
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During the final two weeks of the saga, a new, unwelcome development occurred. There were visits that were reported to Oswald by Marina and her hostess, Ruth Paine, by a Dallas FBI agent named James Hosty. Seven months earlier, when routine reports had picked up Oswald’s subscription to the
The
Worker
, the American Communist Party newspaper, the record indicates,
Hosty had suggested the Oswald case be reopened. Now, on November 1, having learned from the CIA that somebody using the name Lee Oswald had visited the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, and on learning from New Orleans that the Oswald family had departed—leaving Ruth Paine’s address for forwarding purposes—Hosty turned up on Ruth Paine’s doorstep. By his account, and according to Ruth and Marina, he said merely that he would like to talk to Oswald and asked how to contact him. The women said Oswald worked at the Book Depository. When Hosty called by again, asking for the address of Oswald’s rented room, the women said they did not have the telephone number. Their accounts suggest that, though they did know it, they withheld it because Oswald had said the FBI was out to harass him.

News of Hosty’s visits plunged Oswald into a black mood, according to Marina. The day after the second one, he apparently appeared at the FBI office in Dallas asking to see Hosty. Told the agent was out to lunch, according to a receptionist, he produced an envelope, said “Get this to him,” and departed. After the assassination, however, the FBI would conceal not only the contents of the envelope, but also its very existence. What the note contained remains uncertain even today.

The note’s existence remained unknown until 1975, when a journalist learned of it from an FBI contact. The sorry story was eventually pieced together by the House Committee on the Judiciary, the Senate Intelligence Committee, and then the Assassinations Committee. Former FBI staff, including Agent Hosty, admitted that there had not only been a note but that it had been destroyed within hours of Oswald’s death. The receptionist who had taken delivery of it, Nannie Fenner, made a dramatic claim. She said she had gotten a look at the note and that it read roughly:

Let this be a
warning. I will blow up the FBI and the Dallas Police Department if you don’t stop bothering my wife.

Lee Harvey Oswald

Agent Hosty said Mrs. Fenner was wrong, that she was unreliable. Besides, he said, the note had been folded in such a way as to conceal the contents. According to him, it had read more or less as follows:

If you have anything you want to learn about me, come talk to me directly. If you don’t cease bothering my wife, I will take appropriate action and report this to the proper authorities.

There was nothing especially out of the ordinary about that, Hosty said, and the note remained in his work tray until after the President’s assassination. If the note was so innocuous, though, the rest of the story makes little sense. Within hours of the assassination, according to Hosty, he was called into the office of Special Agent in Charge Gordon Shanklin. Shanklin, “agitated and upset,” got Hosty to explain the recent contacts with Ruth Paine and Oswald’s wife and how the note had reached him. Then, after Oswald in turn had been murdered, he summoned Hosty again.

According to the agent, his superior took the note from a desk drawer saying, “Oswald’s dead now. There can be no trial. Here—get rid of this.” Then, as Hosty tore the note up in front of him, Shanklin cried: “No! Get it out of here. I don’t even want it in this office. Get rid of it.” Hosty then took the note to the lavatory and—his words—“flushed it down the drain.” Days later, Shanklin asked for an assurance that he had done as ordered.

Shanklin, for his part, flatly denied having known anything about the note. Former Assistant Director William
Sullivan, however, said Shanklin had often mentioned an “internal problem” over a message from Oswald. A Dallas supervisor, Agent Howe, said he had taken the note to Shanklin after finding it in Hosty’s work tray after the assassination. Howe had the impression that Shanklin “knew what I had and—for what reason I don’t know—he didn’t want to discuss it with me.”

Shanklin’s is the most dubious of the unsatisfactory FBI statements about the note. (He it was, the reader will recall, who initially said tapes of “Oswald” in Mexico City had arrived in Dallas and been heard to contain a voice that was not the real Oswald’s—only to retract the report hours later.) The House Assassinations Committee said it “regarded the incident of the note as a serious impeachment of [both] Shanklin’s and Hosty’s credibility.” During his testimony to the Judiciary Committee, Shanklin was warned that he might be open to prosecution for perjury.
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A second piece of documentary evidence escaped yet another call for destruction by Agent-in-Charge Shanklin. On November 9, while visiting the Paine household, Oswald apparently wrote a letter to the Soviet Embassy in Washington, DC. It referred to having visited the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, and suggested that he and his wife still wanted to return to the Soviet Union. Oswald had had to curtail his trip to Mexico City, the letter said, because renewal of his visa would have involved using his “real name.” The FBI was no longer interested in Oswald’s Fair Play for Cuba Committee activities, it went on, but Agent Hosty had warned against him starting them again in Texas.
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There is also a puzzling background to this document. We know of its existence from two sources—from a routine intercept of mail addressed to the Soviet Embassy and from
Ruth Paine, who after the assassination passed Agent Hosty a copy of a draft she said she found. Oddities include the fact that Oswald had supposedly left the draft lying on Mrs. Paine’s desk, as though he wanted her to find it. As for the letter’s contents, there is the clear implication that Oswald used a false name in his travel to Mexico City (actually, the name on his Mexican tourist card —“Lee, Harvey Oswald”—reads more like a clerical error than a pseudonym). As for the suggestion that he wished to return to Russia, everything we know of Oswald’s actual attitude suggests he had no intention of doing so.

The comments in the letter to the Soviets about the Dallas FBI, meanwhile, bear no relation to the known facts. According to the record, Oswald and Hosty had not met, and Hosty had not warned him against doing anything. When Hosty received the letter from Mrs. Paine and showed it to his boss, Gordon Shanklin, Shanklin reacted just as he had in the case of the note Oswald left at the FBI. He “became highly upset and highly incensed,” according to Hosty, and ordered the letter destroyed.
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Why the rush to cover up? A plausible explanation is that Oswald may have been embroiled in U.S. intelligence activity, as he had perhaps been in New Orleans and in Mexico City. Some part of the intelligence apparatus may have been informed of—had perhaps even directed—what was going on. Far in the future, Hosty himself would strongly suggest that the order to destroy the Oswald note received at the Dallas office originated at FBI headquarters, perhaps at the top. He hinted darkly, too, at revelations to come.

“I am the one,” Agent Hosty said of the House Assassinations Committee, “they are afraid is going to drop bombs—if they are going to try to contain this like the Senate
Intelligence Committee and the Warren Commission, they don’t want me there.”

As the weeks leading up to the assassination unrolled, real-life oddities continued. On November 1, the day of Hosty’s first visit to the Paine household, Oswald reverted to an old practice and rented a post-office box in downtown Dallas. The rental form authorized two nonprofit organizations to receive mail at the box—the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). This last was a new departure for Oswald. Unlike the FPCC, the ACLU existed not for a political purpose but to champion civil liberties—the rights of the individual, the right to fair trial, and freedom of speech.

When a few days later Oswald became a member of the ACLU, he asked how he could get in touch with “ACLU groups in my area.” Neither the new membership nor the inquiry made any sense. Oswald had been to a local ACLU meeting ten days earlier in the company of Ruth Paine’s husband, Michael—the couple were members of the organization. He had himself spoken briefly at the meeting and chatted with other attendees afterward. So Oswald had no innocent need to write to the other end of the country for information on ACLU activities in Dallas. As for joining the ACLU, he had told Paine he would never do so—because it was too apolitical.

A letter Oswald wrote to the U.S. Communist Party on the day he opened his post-office box, moreover, showed that he knew perfectly well where and when Dallas area ACLU meetings were held. He asked, too, for advice on how to heighten “progressive tendencies” in the local branch. Was Oswald launching off on some dark scheme involving the
ACLU, similar to his seemingly staged activities in New Orleans? Whatever the purpose, a further clue throws a glimmer of light on Oswald’s last days, linking him—once again—to New Orleans.

Before leaving for Dallas via Mexico, Oswald had himself arranged for the New Orleans post office to forward mail to Ruth Paine’s house. In the second week of October, however, some other person in New Orleans—someone whose handwriting was not Oswald’s—filed a second change-of-address card duplicating Oswald’s original request. A Warren Commission lawyer, alerted to the anomaly, saw the problem at once. “Let me come bluntly to the point,” he said, “Oswald wasn’t in New Orleans on October 11. He was in Dallas.” Someone else, identity unknown, was apparently taking the trouble to look after Oswald’s business in Louisiana. The New Orleans connection had not ceased with his departure.
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The notion that one or more unidentified people were in touch with Oswald in the last weeks before the assassination does not stand alone—contrary to the impression given by the Warren Commission. On calls Oswald made and received at both Dallas boarding houses he used, witnesses recalled, he spoke in a “foreign language.” The party on the other end of the line, one might think, was usually his Russian wife, Marina—who did speak with him on the phone. People at both boardinghouses, however, would say that they thought a male caller had telephoned, and that Oswald also spoke in a foreign tongue on those calls.
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There were other calls that were neither traced nor explained. The manager of an Enco service station, across the street from the second rooming house, recalled Oswald asking for “change with which to make long distance calls … from a coin telephone booth located at the side of his
station.” He made at least two such calls, some six weeks before the assassination. Efforts to trace calls made from the booth failed to reveal whom Oswald had phoned.

A further credible report about a phone call reached the FBI within days of the assassination—one that has received little if any notice. A Louisiana operator drew her supervisor’s attention to a call she had handled just a day—perhaps two—before President Kennedy was killed. It had been, she said, a “prepaid, long distance, person-to-person call to Lee Harvey Oswald at the Texas School Book Depository.” The caller had been “an adult female,” believed to have been phoning from Slidell, Louisiana. Slidell is thirty-one miles from New Orleans, scene of Oswald’s Cuba-related doings that summer, and just ten miles from a camp where anti-Castro exiles had been training. Carlos Bringuier of the DRE, with whom Oswald had his suspect street encounter in New Orleans, had been involved with the exiles in question. The identity of the person who called Oswald from that location just before the assassination, and the reason for the call, remains unknown.
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