The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (37 page)

It’s important to stress that, as with any successful intelligence or criminal operation, the participants would have been informed on a need-to-know basis. Few aside from Marcello, Trafficante, and Rosselli would have known the whole plan. Other participants would have been told only what they needed to know, when they needed to know it, to prevent leaks in case any of them were arrested.

ON OCTOBER 3, 1963, Lee Oswald returned to Dallas from Mexico City, but even that trip was anything but routine, indicating that Oswald’s legitimate work for a US intelligence agency continued. After Oswald’s death, the
New York Herald-Tribune
revealed that “US Customs official, Oran Pugh, had said that . . . ‘US Immigration has a folder on Oswald’s trip’” and that the way “Oswald had been checked by US Immigration officials on entering and leaving Mexico . . . was not the usual procedure.” Around the same time, the
New York Times
discovered that when Oswald first crossed the border from Texas into Mexico, his “movements were watched at the request of a ‘Federal agency at Washington,’” according to “William M. Kline, assistant United States Customs Agent-in-Charge of the Bureau’s Investigative Service” at Laredo, Texas. The following day, the
Times
reported from Mexico City that “there were reports here also that [Oswald’s] movements were followed in Mexico by an unidentified United States agency.” In addition, Warren Commission transcripts
show Senator Richard Russell saying that Oswald “came back in a car” from Mexico, although Oswald didn’t drive or even own a car and the official story in the
Warren Report
was that he returned by bus. All those reports are consistent with Oswald’s being under surveillance by Naval Intelligence while he was also involved in an ongoing CIA operation.

In Dallas, Oswald’s pregnant wife and young daughter lived with a family friend, Ruth Paine. The Oswalds had been introduced to Paine earlier in the year by Lee’s friend George DeMohrenschildt, the staunch anti-Communist and admitted CIA asset.

When Oswald arrived in Dallas, he moved into the YMCA on October 3, 1963. The former Marine soon moved to a rooming house and attempted, without success, to get a job at a printing company. Oswald was asked to leave his first Dallas rooming house, and he briefly returned to the YMCA. Using an assumed name—O. H. Lee—Oswald then moved to another rooming house, in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas.

On October 15, Oswald applied for a job at the Texas School Book Depository, an eight-story warehouse for textbooks in downtown Dallas. Marina’s friend Ruth Paine had heard about an opening there from a neighbor whose brother worked there. Oswald began work at the Depository the following day. However, Paine also received a call for Oswald, offering him a position at another firm at a much higher salary. It’s unclear if Paine passed the message along to Oswald or if Oswald preferred the Book Depository job for some reason. Keep in mind that JFK’s motorcade route through Dallas—and the fact that it would pass in front of the Book Depository—wouldn’t be announced until November 19. However, it was tradition for Presidential motorcades to pass through Dealey Plaza, which
was true for Franklin Roosevelt and for candidate John F. Kennedy in 1960. However, those motorcades had gone opposite the direction JFK would be traveling on November 22 and hadn’t taken the dogleg from Main Street—which bisected Dealey Plaza—to Houston and Elm Street, where the Book Depository was. As far as the plotters knew in October 1963, JFK’s motorcade would likely get close to the Book Depository, so Oswald was probably encouraged by his handlers—most likely still Banister and Ferrie—to take the position and not look for or take a more lucrative position.

Four days after Oswald began work at the Book Depository, Marina had their second daughter. They named her Audrey Marina Rachel. But Oswald and Marina continued to live apart, with Oswald visiting the Paine home weekends, sometimes riding there with Wesley Buell Frazier, who also worked at the Book Depository.

Oswald’s activities on weekday evenings and weekends that he did not visit the Paine home are largely undocumented, so it would have been easy for him to talk with individuals related to his intelligence work or his ongoing “tight” Naval Intelligence surveillance. One of Oswald’s coworkers at the Book Depository told police that “during the lunch breaks, Oswald usually made several phone calls, which were usually short in length.” However, Oswald’s only close friend in Dallas, George DeMohrenschildt, had left the country almost seven months earlier, so outside of Marina, it is not known who else Oswald could have been calling.

Oswald’s intelligence status had to be very closely held to remain secret, meaning that few federal agents in the field could be told about it. Even though at times the FBI assisted with the Naval Intelligence surveillance of Oswald, field agents would have been told little or nothing about where their routine reports about Oswald were going
after they were filed with FBI superiors. Oswald was apparently worried that a local Dallas FBI agent was going to blow his cover, which he had worked so hard to maintain for so many years, hoping he could make it pay off.

Dallas FBI agent James Hosty had visited Marina Oswald on November 1 and again on November 5. After Oswald heard about it, he wrote a note to Hosty warning him away; Oswald personally dropped it off at the Dallas FBI office on November 12. Shortly after Oswald’s death, Hoover ordered the Dallas FBI office to destroy Oswald’s note. The note and its destruction were kept secret from the Warren Commission and the American public. The contents of the note and the circumstances of Oswald’s visit were the subject of three conflicting stories when Congress finally investigated the note in the mid-1970s. The essence of Oswald’s note was that Agent Hosty should “stop bothering my wife [and] talk to me if you need to.” The secretary in the Dallas office testified that she recalled a phrase about “blowing up” the FBI office. However, surely a written threat to blow up the Dallas FBI office, delivered in person by a former defector to Russia, would have provoked a swift response in 1963, as it would today. Agent Hosty and his supervisor told different stories, with Hosty minimizing any threat or concern about the note. Based on all the evidence, it’s likely that Oswald was simply trying to keep the local FBI agent from “blowing” the deep cover Oswald had carefully maintained for so long.

Several odd sightings of someone later reported to be Oswald surfaced after JFK’s murder. These range from Oswald causing a disruption at a firing range to Oswald visiting a car dealership, where he (with no license or money to buy a car) drove a demonstration vehicle at a high rate of speed. The incidents usually had Oswald doing
something that called attention to himself. Some of those incidents could have involved the real Oswald, either doing something Ferrie or Banister had asked him to do or—in the case of the car—looking ahead to the money he hoped to make after his “big reveal” following his mission to Cuba. Some of the incidents might have involved someone posing as Oswald; others might have simply involved mistaken identities. The incidents have been investigated and written about for decades, with few definitive conclusions, so they are not detailed here.

SEVERAL OF OSWALD’S activities during the summer and fall of 1963 bore a remarkable similarity to those of another ex-Marine, Thomas Arthur Vallee—so much so that the Secret Service noted a few of them in a secret memo just three days after JFK’s murder. The Secret Service didn’t know about other similarities between the two men: In the summer, Oswald had visited a CIA-backed exile training camp and had met with a CIA official about killing Castro. Before moving to a new city in the fall, Oswald initially stayed at the YMCA before moving to a rooming house and getting a job at a large downtown warehouse that would overlook JFK’s motorcade route. Over the same time span, ex-Marine Thomas Vallee had done almost all the same things. Vallee was at a CIA-backed exile training camp and met with a CIA contact about killing Castro. Vallee then moved to a new city, got a room at the YMCA, and then moved to a rooming house. Like Oswald, Vallee then found a job at a large downtown warehouse overlooking a motorcade route for JFK—only in Vallee’s case it was JFK’s planned November 2, 1963, motorcade through Chicago.

There were other interesting similarities between Oswald and Vallee that could have made both men subject to the same type of manipulation. Like Oswald, a teenaged Thomas Vallee wanted so
desperately to join the Marines that he lied about his age. In Vallee’s case, he succeeded and served seven years, winning “the Purple Heart and oak leaf cluster for wounds suffered in the Korean War,” according to the
Chicago Daily News
.

Like Oswald, Vallee was often depicted by authorities as a troubled loner. Also like Oswald, that image might have served to hide covert activities that he didn’t want to share with his family. According to investigative journalist Edwin Black, Vallee later told him that he had spent part of his time in the Marines in Japan at the Camp Otsu U-2 base, one of several U-2 bases used by the CIA operation. Recall that Oswald had served at a U-2 base at Atsugi, Japan. Like Oswald—whose outrageously pro-Russian remarks were never reprimanded by his Marine superiors—Vallee appears to have gotten special treatment in the Marines. At a time when homosexuals were rarely given honorable discharges, Vallee was given an honorable discharge even though he was diagnosed by a Marine psychiatrist as “schizophrenic reaction, paranoid type . . . manifested by preoccupations with homosexuality and femininity.”

The thirty-year-old Vallee spent part of the summer of 1963 helping train CIA-backed Cuban exiles in Long Island for “the assassination of Castro.” That evokes Oswald’s visit to Manuel Artime’s exile training camp and his meeting with David Atlee Phillips and exile Antonio Veciana, where the assassination of Castro was discussed.

In the fall of 1963, both ex-Marines moved to new cities, with Oswald returning to Dallas and Vallee returning to his hometown of Chicago. As the Secret Service noted, both men lived at the local YMCA before moving to a rooming house. Both men first tried to get jobs at printing companies. Vallee succeeded and began working at IPP Litho-Plate on West Jackson Boulevard in Chicago. Vallee’s job
was at a seven-story building that overlooked what has been described as a “slow turn” for JFK’s upcoming November 2 motorcade through Chicago. As with the Texas School Book Depository, JFK’s motorcade would pass directly in front of Vallee’s workplace. Also like Oswald, Vallee would be arrested on the day of JFK’s motorcade through his city, and he would have a weapon and ammunition with him.

It’s clear that Thomas Vallee would have made an excellent fall guy if the mob bosses had assassinated JFK during the President’s visit to Chicago. Just as Oswald worked for the far-right racist Guy Banister, Vallee also had a far-right connection. The
Chicago Daily News
said that Vallee’s “apartment contained John Birch Society literature” and that Vallee claimed “he is a ‘disaffiliated’ member of the John Birch Society.” In the fall of 1963, Trafficante and Marcello associate John Martino was a member of the John Birch Society’s speakers’ bureau. He was featured in the society’s September 1963 newsletter as he toured the country promoting his book,
I Was Castro’s Prisoner
. Martino later confessed his role in JFK’s murder and told associates what Oswald had been instructed to do on November 22. Martino could have had a similar role with Vallee.

How Vallee came to be working for the CIA, training Cuban exiles to assassinate Fidel Castro, has never been explained. However, when confirming that Vallee had lived on Long Island in the summer of 1963, researcher Bill Adams discovered that Vallee had a former housemate who had been arrested for gun dealing. Given the numerous ties between gunrunning, mobsters, and Cuban exiles, ex-Marine Vallee might have come to the attention of the exiles or their CIA handlers that way. Exiles known to have operated in the New York City area include CIA asset Tony Varona and Rolando Masferrer, both Trafficante associates. Vallee himself recognized that he had
undertaken activities that would have made him look guilty if JFK had been killed in Chicago. According to Edwin Black, “Vallee claimed he was framed by someone with special knowledge about him, such as his ‘CIA assignment to train exiles to assassinate Castro.’”

Vallee didn’t have the seeming pro-Castro connections that distinguished Oswald, but there was an attempt to link Oswald to Chicago via reports of a little-known trip that he—or someone pretending to be Oswald—made prior to the attempt to kill JFK in that city. The apparent trip to Chicago, in the weeks after Oswald’s well-publicized New Orleans incident, is supported by evidence from several independent sources. The trip seemed designed to ensure that several people would remember him; it would also link him to the Chicago assassination attempt and make it appear as if he had been stalking JFK.

The head of the Ku Klux Klan told veteran newspaper reporter and editor Patsy Sims that he had met with Oswald in Atlanta. In her definitive history of the Klan, Sims writes that “one of her sources told her that Oswald, in the summer of 1963, had called on [Klan] Imperial Wizard James Venable in his office in Atlanta seeking the names of right-wing associates. Venable confirmed [to Sims] that he was fairly sure that Oswald had been there for that purpose.” Oswald indicated to Venable that he was on his way to Chicago. Klan leader Venable made his statement to Sims in the 1980s, and it’s difficult to see why Venable would make up an Oswald encounter since it tended to link Oswald with Venable’s “right-wing associates,” thus potentially giving the FBI reason to interview or investigate them.

In the 1960s, Klan leader Venable was close to an associate of Guy Banister, white supremacist Joseph Milteer, who lived in Georgia and visited Atlanta frequently. As detailed later, shortly after the Chicago attempt, almost two weeks BEFORE President Kennedy was
murdered in Dallas, Milteer accurately described JFK’s assassination to an informant on a Miami police undercover tape. Milteer had been seen meeting with Banister in New Orleans in the summer of 1963, when Oswald was reportedly working for Banister and with David Ferrie.