The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (6 page)

However, questions about that scenario—and Oswald’s motivation, or lack of it—surfaced soon after his murder by Jack Ruby, and they’ve been growing ever since.

The
Warren Report
’s depiction of Oswald as a teenage Marxist who grew into a troubled, murderous loner doesn’t stand up to modern scrutiny. In addition to the Warren Commission’s Report and twenty-six volumes of evidence, thousands of additional pages of Warren Commission documents were eventually released. These make it clear that the FBI—and especially Naval Intelligence and the CIA—withheld much crucial information about Oswald. Today we have thousands of pages of additional material from the House Select Committee’s investigation, and those have been supplemented by millions of pages of additional files. These documents help to cast Oswald in a very different light.

It’s shockingly easy to debunk the
Warren Report
depiction of Oswald as a teenage Marxist. How many teenage Marxists joined the Civil Air Patrol as Oswald did, especially in the McCarthy era? How many teenage Marxists in the 1950s joined the US Marines? Oswald had even been so desperate to join that he tried to enlist before he was legally old enough. How many US Marines in the conservative Nixon/McCarthy fifties were like Oswald, allegedly going around his base publicly spouting a supposed love of all things Russian and allegedly
teaching himself to speak fluent Russian? Even the
Warren Report
admits that his fellow Marines called him Oswaldskovitch. Yet not once was Oswald ever written up or disciplined for his outrageously pro-Russian behavior, not even when he was based at the sensitive U-2 spy plane base in Atsugi, Japan. G. Robert Blakey, the former Mafia prosecutor for Robert Kennedy who directed the House Select Committee on Assassinations, repeatedly asked during a PBS interview:

Why was no action taken against him? Why, when this came to the attention of his Marine superiors, was action not initiated? This man was a man with a security clearance; this man was a man who had access to highly sophisticated materials; and he is now showing an interest in Marxism.

Blakey was right to be concerned since Oswald had been a radar operator for the Marines at Atsugi, where the CIA’s supersecret U-2 spy planes were based for their flights over Russia.

Even more bizarre, soon after “defector” Oswald made a well-publicized 1962 return to the United States, with a Russian wife in tow, US authorities allowed him to get a job at a Dallas firm that made maps from U-2 spy plane photos for the US government—at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis! The firm made the lettering used on the large display maps shown in televised presentations by US officials, including President Kennedy. The Warren–Posner–Bugliosi–O’Reilly version asks us to believe that the FBI and CIA saw no problem with former defector Oswald working at the U-2 map firm at that dangerous time. Yet, later Congressional investigations showed that that was a time when thousands of American Communists, leftists, Socialists, progressives, and liberals in nonsensitive jobs were routinely subjected to domestic surveillance.

Oswald’s actions make perfect sense only when viewed in light of all the facts, not just a select few. To be fair, it’s also easier to evaluate Oswald accurately now that we’re decades removed from the Cold War and the “better dead than Red” mind-set of many, if not most, Americans of the early 1960s.

Before Oswald was born, his father died. He looked up to his older brothers, both of whom joined the military, with one serving in an intelligence service that ferreted out Communists. Oswald’s favorite TV show when he was young was
I Led Three Lives
, based on a true story about a seemingly ordinary American who went under deep cover for years as an apparent Communist only to emerge to fame and fortune when it was revealed that he was really a US government agent. Oswald had an above-average IQ, but learning disabilities apparently hindered his schooling, so his prospects were limited. He grew up in less-savory parts of New Orleans, where his mother knew members of the Marcello crime organization and where his only father figure was a favorite uncle—“Dutz” Murret—who worked as a bookie for Marcello. Oswald’s limited options apparently led him to follow in the footsteps of the protagonist of
I Led Three Lives
, and there is a great deal of evidence, including statements from fellow Marines, that he was recruited by military intelligence while in the Marines.

Oswald told a fellow Marine that he had a “civilian . . . intelligence contact at the Atsugo (U-2) base” who was “believed . . . to be [in] with the CIA.” Also, author Dick Russell points out that when Oswald went to Russia in 1959, he was one of seven young American men who “defected” around the same time, and six of those later returned to the United States with Russian wives. For years the CIA denied debriefing Oswald when he returned to the
United States, even though the Agency routinely debriefed other far less potentially damaging travelers to Russia. After all, Oswald did have high security clearances in the Marines. Wouldn’t the CIA want to at least ask Oswald if he shared any information with the Soviets?

Years later, after decades of denial, former CIA Director Richard Helms admitted to historian (and retired military intelligence Major) John Newman that Oswald had been debriefed by the CIA. Helms and other officials had lied about that to government committees from the Warren Commission to the House Select Committee on Assassinations. But why?

Bill O’Reilly’s book
Killing Kennedy
acknowledges that an unusual Dallas man—an erudite and sophisticated anti-Communist White Russian named George DeMohrenschildt—helped Oswald get his job at the U-2 map firm in Dallas. But O’Reilly leaves out the well-documented fact that DeMohrenschildt was an admitted and well-documented CIA asset who was in contact with the head of the CIA office in Dallas about Oswald’s activities.
*

As I first disclosed in 2005, using information mostly withheld from the House Select Committee on Assassinations, Oswald was under “tight” surveillance by Naval Intelligence from the time he returned from Russia until he was arrested for JFK’s murder. According to my source, who helped file reports of that surveillance, the CIA assisted in tracking Oswald’s movements and associates,
as at times did the FBI. In addition, one of Oswald’s files prominently included a CIA phone number to call in case he was ever in trouble, indicating that the CIA was utilizing or planning to utilize Oswald in some fashion. The monitoring of Oswald couldn’t be obvious, because Naval Intelligence wanted to see how the KGB might try to recruit Oswald or his wife. That was probably also true for most of the other recently returned defectors.
*
CIA asset George DeMohrenschildt apparently helped Oswald get the job at the U-2 map firm to make him more attractive for the Russians to recruit. Because Oswald was working for Naval Intelligence and had some CIA role, Helms and the Agency used that justification to essentially lie to the Warren Commission and Congressional investigators about debriefing Oswald—and, as Newman learned, about other matters as well.

However, just as it had in Russia, the KGB saw through the ruse of having Oswald work at the U-2 map firm and made no contact with Oswald. Perhaps the KGB noticed what stands out today when we look back at Oswald’s activities once he returned to the United States: that Oswald avoided real American Communists, Marxists, and Socialists like the plague, even though he could have easily found them around the colleges and hipper parts of New Orleans and Dallas. That Oswald was willing to contact such people and organizations only by mail smacks of building a cover for himself by leaving a paper trail at the direction of his handlers. That’s especially true when we consider that his best friend in Dallas was the staunchly anti-Communist George DeMohrenschildt and that Oswald would soon find
himself working for two men who were stridently anti-Communist and anti-Castro.

By early 1963, Oswald was no doubt looking for another assignment. Ironically, buried in the twenty-six Warren volumes are Oswald’s own notes for his “big reveal,” in which he admits hating Communism, something he could publicly proclaim only after the success of his anti-Castro work, when he emerged from his deep undercover work to (hoped-for) fame and fortune.

After being fired from his job at the map firm on April 6, Oswald made a well-documented move to New Orleans on April 24, 1963. He left Marina in Dallas and went to live with his uncle Dutz Murret, a bookie for Carlos Marcello. However, even before his move to the Crescent City, an INS agent interviewed Oswald in the New Orleans jail. The interview had to have been in February or March—and before Oswald’s move and even before he lost his job—because the INS agent was transferred away from New Orleans on April 1, 1963. The INS agent didn’t recall why Oswald was in jail, but the charge—if any—must have been minor, since no record of it was kept. During the interview, Oswald, probably using a Hispanic-sounding alias, pretended to be a Cuban national even though he couldn’t speak Spanish. It sounds absurd, except that Oswald would soon join (by mail) the tiny national pro-Castro organization known as the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, a group that the CIA had targeted for harassment and penetration since at least 1961.

Also in early 1963, Oswald ordered through the mail the cheap rifle and pistol he would later be accused of using to kill JFK and Officer Tippit. Conveniently, Oswald had photos taken of himself holding each weapon, along with copies of two Communist newspapers of opposing views:
The Worker
of the Communist Party USA
and the Trotskyite paper
The Militant
. The late Dr. Philip Melanson, Chairman of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts–Dartmouth, wrote that holding two such opposing papers would be like trying to present a coherent American political view by holding up copies of the conservative
National Review
and the liberal icon
The Nation
. For any type of true believer—especially someone like Oswald who had lived in Russia—it made no sense.

However, here and throughout his life, all of Oswald’s activities (and claimed activities) related to Communism and Marxism are consistent with someone building and maintaining a cover, like his childhood idol who inspired
I Led Three Lives
. Who could have been directing Oswald’s activities in 1963? It’s well documented that a few months after his April move to New Orleans, Oswald worked at least part-time for and with two associates of Carlos Marcello: Marcello’s private detective, Guy Banister, and Marcello’s pilot and investigator, David Ferrie.

Both loom large in assassination literature, yet much of it ignores their connection to Carlos Marcello, who admitted to Congressional investigators that he knew both men. Ferrie had been an Eastern Airlines pilot who had known Oswald as a teenager, when Ferrie helped supervise Oswald’s Civil Air Patrol unit. There is also some evidence that Ferrie originally encouraged Oswald to join the Marines. By 1963 Ferrie had lost his job at Eastern Airlines because he had been accused of molesting a fifteen-year-old boy. Ferrie officially worked for Marcello’s New Orleans attorney, but Marcello admitted working with Ferrie directly on the two weekends prior to JFK’s assassination. In addition, Victor Marchetti, former Executive Assistant to the Deputy Director of the CIA, confirmed that “Ferrie had been a contract agent to the Agency in the early sixties . . . in some of the Cuban
activities.” Marchetti said that his boss “[Richard] Helms stated that David Ferrie was a CIA agent” in the fall of 1963. According to historian Dr. Michael Kurtz, Deputy Chief of the New Orleans CIA Station Hunter Leake confirmed Ferrie’s 1963 CIA work to him. Leake also confirmed that Guy Banister performed work for the CIA related to Cuba.

Banister had many more, and more highly placed, intelligence connections than his associate David Ferrie, and they were developed before both men began working for Carlos Marcello. A former FBI Chief of Chicago in the early 1950s, the hard-drinking Banister had been Assistant Superintendent of the New Orleans Police Department for two and a half years before being fired for erratic behavior caused by his drinking.

Banister then opened a detective agency, though he focused far more on intelligence work, strident anti-Communism, and white supremacist causes than any traditional private detective. He maintained good relations with the New Orleans office of the FBI and with Naval Intelligence, as well as taking on work for the CIA—tasks that revolved around Cuba. The New Orleans
States-Item
newspaper reported that Banister “participated in every anti-Communist South and Central American revolution that came along, acting as a key liaison man for the U.S. government-sponsored anti-Communist activities in Latin America.” Banister led his own group, the Anti-Communist League of the Caribbean, which was involved in a plot against Fidel Castro in December 1960. Four months earlier, when the CIA–Mafia plots with Trafficante and Marcello were in the planning stage, the CIA had considered Banister for a covert assignment providing cover for a sensitive CIA operation. That job went instead to Howard Hughes aide Robert Maheu, who only a few years earlier had been
Banister’s partner, before Banister went to New Orleans. (Their other partner had been Carmine Bellino, by 1963 a close Kennedy aide in their fight against the Mafia.) While in the FBI in the 1930s, Banister had even served on two cases with General Joseph Carroll, who in 1963 was heading the recently created Defense Intelligence Agency, which was supposed to oversee Naval Intelligence and the other military intelligence agencies.

Banister and Ferrie are both said to have helped with the CIA’s Bay of Pigs operation in early 1961, when New Orleans was a little-known site for one of the operation’s Cuban-exile training camps, run by the CIA. On January 20, 1961 (three months before the Bay of Pigs), one of Banister’s organizations even bought trucks in New Orleans for an anti-Castro operation using the name “Oswald,” a safe alias since the real Oswald was still in the Soviet Union.