Reclaiming History (362 page)

^*
Film, which few Americans have ever seen, was shot of this incident. Sixteen-year-old Jim Doyle, walking with his parents on Canal Street, tried out his birthday present, an 8-millimeter camera. The film is somewhat murky, but the participants are clearly identifiable. The footage of Oswald passing out literature that is usually shown to illustrate this incident in television documentaries was actually shot a week later in a different location and without the involvement of any anti-Castro Cubans.

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Why Lee would want to talk to the FBI, whom he had tried to elude in Fort Worth and Dallas, and for whom he had a dislike, is not known. The FBI agent who interviewed him, when asked that question, could only say that “frequently, persons who are in custody of local authorities…like to talk to the FBI” (4 H 435, WCT John Lester Quigley).

† We have seen that, per Marina, Oswald’s alias Hidell was derived from Castro’s first name, Fidel. The “A.” on the membership card was the initial for Alek, which appeared on the forged Selective Service card Oswald had in his wallet at the time of his arrest (“Alex James Hidell”), and probably came from his Russian nickname Alik.

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Oswald’s choice of the Trade Mart, located on Camp Street in a busy part of downtown New Orleans, was a logical one, since his whole plea involved Cuba, and the Trade Mart housed many import and export companies that did business with Latin America. Before the trade embargo on Cuba by the American government, many of such companies did business with Cuba. (Letter from Johann Rush to author dated January 5, 2000)

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The frames of Oswald in front of the Trade Mart also show him shaven and clean-cut with a white shirt and tie and dark trousers (see photo section), clearly the old Oswald once again after the brief spell at the greasing job at the coffee company.

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Although it doesn’t make too much sense, I am forced by the evidence to conclude that Oswald probably wrote this letter
before
he even went on Stuckey’s show. Stuckey is positive that the taped interview with Oswald took place around 5:00 p.m. on Saturday, August 17, 1963, a few hours before his regular Saturday night show at 7:30 p.m. (11 H 160, 162, 165, WCT William Kirk Stuckey). Yet Oswald’s August 17 letter to Lee is postmarked, “New Orleans, L.A. 6:06 p.m. 17 AUG 1963” (Lee [Vincent T.] Exhibit No. 7, 20 H 531). There is no way Oswald could have had the long, thirty-seven-minute interview with Stuckey at 5:00 p.m., a discussion with him thereafter, gotten home (presumably by bus), written the letter, and had it postmarked 6:06 p.m. Either he wrote the letter before the interview (his saying the interview lasted only fifteen minutes when it lasted thirty-seven minutes is further evidence it was written before the interview), or Oswald was right about the interview being at 4:00 p.m., not 5:00 p.m. as Stuckey said, and Oswald, who would still, even with this additional hour, be very pressed for time, managed to get home on time to write the letter and get it off at a substation of the post office in his area for the postmarked time of 6:06 p.m. But this is still unlikely since it appears that the various post office substations in New Orleans closed at 5:45 p.m. (CE 2132, 24 H 716), the postmark being made at the post office after the mail was picked up. Oswald most likely put his letter in a mailbox or delivered it to a substation at some earlier time in the day.

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In 1985 and 1986, researchers for London Weekend Television interviewed Stuckey several times by phone at his hotel in Seattle. Stuckey had long since given up on his Latin America specialty and had become something of a gypsy, wandering from university to university in the land picking up stories to write in science journals. They asked him to be a witness in the trial, but he wanted to be paid a substantial fee, and the production company wasn’t paying witnesses. Indeed, he wanted $5,000 just to loan out his copy of the tape of the WDSU radio debate. Stuckey said if he were to testify he should be placed into the category of a “character witness for Oswald.” He was impressed by Oswald, believing him to be intelligent, sincere, and articulate, and called Oswald’s performance on the show “the best run-down of a national liberation philosophy I’ve heard in a long time.” Speaking of how conservative and anti-Communist New Orleans was at the time, and the fact that it was populated by many anti-Castro Cubans, he couldn’t get over how Oswald could “go handing out left-wing pamphlets downtown. He was begging for a bullet.” Stuckey himself felt isolated from the typical New Orleans scene. He and his French wife had wanted to see Oswald socially after the debate, and were going to invite him to the beach with them, but decided not to, as it would be inviting trouble. (Telephone interviews of Bill Stuckey by London Weekend Television researchers on September 4, 1985, and June 9 and 25, 1986)

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Priscilla McMillan, in talking over many years with Marina and others who knew Oswald, wrote, “Stingy as he was, and forever saving up in little ways, Lee did not want a lot of money for himself. That was not where his ambition lay. As with virtually everyone who knew him, Marina, too, believes that her husband could not have been ‘bought’” (McMillan,
Marina and Lee
, p.457).

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But of course someone had to unpack the package when Ruth arrived in Texas a few days later, and it was her husband Michael, whom she had called to help her. He was perplexed by the weight and feel of the contents of the package, thoughts like “camping equipment” and “an iron pipe” entering his mind. These guesses didn’t seem quite accurate to him, but being the “polite” Quaker he was, and aware of Oswald’s “rights to privacy,” he never snooped. He would later say he was satisfied it was Oswald’s rifle. (2 H 414–415, 417, 419, 9 H 436–441, WCT Michael R. Paine)

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When the FBI first ran Osborne down in February of 1964 near Russellville, Alabama, where he was staying at the residence of one Wylie Uptain, he was going under the name John Howard Bowen, with a bogus Social Security card as well as credit cards under that name, and said he was planning to leave for Laredo by way of New Orleans. He told them he had been born in Chester, Pennsylvania, in 1885 and raised in an orphanage in Philadelphia. That all of his relatives were deceased. That he completed the equivalent of two years of college by correspondence courses and completed a course in theology in 1914. He said he was ordained by the Plymouth Brethren in Trenton, New Jersey, and also by the Northern Baptist Convention in Binghamton, New York. And, he added, he was recognized as an ordained minister by the Missionary Baptist Convention. He said he worked for a time with juvenile delinquents in Knoxville, Tennessee, and had traveled extensively, but had never been to Canada or England. He considered his home to be the Saint Anthony Hotel in Laredo, Texas, where he had resided “intermittently” for twenty years. He told the FBI that Albert Osborne was another Baptist preacher he met in 1958 when they were staying at the same hotel in Oaxaco, Mexico. He said Osborne was about his same size and age.
It took a very long time and dogged footwork for FBI agents to sort out this convoluted fiction. They eventually turned up Albert Osborne’s birth certificate at Somerset House in England (where all births, deaths, and marriages in England are recorded) and a clutch of Osborne’s equally elderly brothers and sisters, all of whom readily identified him from photographs. However, many of the questions about Osborne-Bowen remain unanswered. (CE 2195, 25 H 25–74; CE 2196, 25 H 75)

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The other passengers on the bus were of the opinion that Oswald and Osborne did not know each other. For example, Pamela Mumford told the FBI it was her opinion that Oswald “had had no previous contact with any of the English-speaking people on the bus” including Osborne (11 H 220–221). And the McFarlands told me that from what they could gather from pieces of conversation they picked up between Oswald and Osborne, they got the “impression” the two didn’t know each other (Telephone intervew of the McFarlands by the author on May 12, 1986).

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Oswald probably gained admission by using Silvia Duran’s name when he spoke to the gatekeeper. It is not known where Oswald went to get his photographs. The FBI checked seven photo studios located within the vicinities of the Cuban and Russian embassies and could find no negative of Oswald. (CE 2449, 25 H 589–590) The negative for the photo stapled to Oswald’s application for a visa was found among his effects after the assassination. The Warren Commission speculated that Oswald may have had the photos with him when he came to Mexico. (WR, pp.304, 734)

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Duran gave her recollection of the incident to the Mexican Federal Security Police in 1963 and the HSCA in 1978. She said that when Azcue refused to give Oswald his visa, Oswald became “highly agitated and angry,” insisting that he “was a friend of the Cuban Revolution, that he had already been in jail for the Cuban Revolution…He was red and he was almost crying and, uh, he was insisting and insisting, so Azcue told him to go away because if he didn’t go away at that moment he was going to kick him, or something like that. So, Azcue went to the door, he opened the door and told Oswald to go away…I was feeling pity for him [Oswald] because he looked desperate.” Duran said that at some point during Azcue’s argument with Oswald, Azcue had told Oswald that “a person like you, [instead] of aiding the Cuban Revolution, are doing it harm.” (3 HSCA 47–49, 51; CE 2121, 24 H 589–590; CE 2445, 25 H 586; see also Interview of Duran, Transcript of “Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?”
Frontline
, PBS, November 16, 1993, p.28)
Before Oswald left, Duran gave him a piece of paper with her name and the Cuban consulate’s phone number so he could inquire at a later time about the decision in Havana regarding his visa application.

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In his 1995 book,
Oswald’s Tale
, Norman Mailer writes that an interviewer employed by him asked Nechiporenko how it was possible that a responsible KGB agent would give back not only a gun but also the bullets to someone as disturbed in appearance as Oswald. “Nechiporenko shrugged. It had happened, he said. He could not speak for why. Yatskov had done it, but it did not seem exceptional at the time. They just had not been afraid that this man Oswald would go out on the street and cause trouble with his gun.” Interestingly, when Nechiporenko was further asked if “this same episode had taken place in London, would any of you have returned the bullets?” Nechiporenko responded, “Never,” from which Mailer infers “that these three KGB men had served in Mexico long enough to feel it was wrong to deprive a man of his gun.
That
, by the Mexican logic of the cantinas, was equal to emasculation.” (Mailer,
Oswald’s Tale
, p.640)

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One thing we do know he did (from CIA monitoring of telephone conversations at the Russian embassy) is that at 10:45 Tuesday morning, October 1, Oswald telephoned the embassy. After identifying himself by name, and saying he was at the embassy on Saturday, he said, “They said they’d send a telegram to Washington so I wanted to find out if you have anything new.” Oswald was informed that “nothing has been received as yet.” (CIA Document CSCI-3778826, November 25, 1963, JFK Document 000169) It is not known to whom in Washington the Soviets had told Oswald they would send the telegram, or for what purpose.

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There is no record of any letter from the Soviets to Marina informing her of their decision.

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As previously noted, the Beckley address, like the unit he rented on North Marsalis, was in the Oak Cliff area of Dallas, an area Oswald obviously showed a preference for, the two places on Elsbeth and Neely he lived in with Marina also being in Oak Cliff. His taste for Oak Cliff, apart from the rents being affordable to him, was understandable. For the most part Oak Cliff is a moderately hilly, homey, and pridefully old residential area of Dallas. Just across the Trinity River, the tall buildings of downtown Dallas appear to be quite close. Indeed, they are. Oswald’s rooming house was only 1.9 miles from where he worked at the Book Depository Building on the edge of downtown Dallas. (Assassination researcher Ken Holmes recorded 1.9 miles on the odometer in his vehicle on the evening of September 22, 2004, during my trip to Dallas.)

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That Lee’s small Russian radio had a shortwave capacity was virtually confirmed in his letter to his brother Robert written when Lee was in Minsk, in which he said he had “heard a Voice of America” broadcast about “the Russians releasing [Gary] Powers” (CE 316, 16 H 875).

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As with the decision by the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs on October 7 refusing Marina’s request to reenter the Soviet Union, the actual Soviet letter of rejection of Oswald’s request to reenter the Soviet Union has never surfaced. At least neither had been received by Marina and Lee as late as November 9. On this date, Oswald wrote, as we shall see, to the Soviet embassy in Washington asking the embassy to inform him and his wife of the arrival of their Soviet entrance visas “as soon as they come.” (CE 15, 16 H 33)

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An insolvable mystery attaches to this book.
The Shark and the Sardines
is the only book Oswald failed to return to the Dallas library on time—it was due on November 13. It was not found among his possessions either at Ruth Paine’s house or at his North Beckley rooming house after the assassination. Three months after the assassination, the book had not been returned. (CE 2642, 25 H 901–902) Years later, author Albert H. Newman checked with the library and found to his astonishment that the book had indeed been returned; he had gone to the Oak Cliff branch of the library and held it in his hand. But the library kept no records of when and by whom. (Newman,
Assassination of John F. Kennedy,
pp.107–108) Either the library made a mistake when it listed the book as delinquent, which would not be an uncommon error, and is probably what happened, or someone returned it after Oswald’s death. The latter opens the possibility that Oswald himself passed the book on to an ideologically like-minded acquaintance who perhaps did not want his association with the assassin to become known but who was sufficiently civic-minded to return the book discreetly to the library long after the assassination. The question is unlikely to ever be answered.