JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (103 page)

Whatever Oswald’s reason for requesting an FBI interview from jail, it would not have been, as FBI agent John Quigley, who met with him, said lamely to the Warren Commission: “to explain to me why he was distributing this literature.”
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As an agent provocateur, Oswald may have been reporting to the FBI as well as the CIA on his subversion of the public image of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. But given his closely held pro-Kennedy, anti-coup state of mind, he may also have decided to blow the whistle on the CIA’s deepening assassination plot.

As we saw, the Warren Commission in its January 27, 1964, meeting became acutely aware of what its general counsel J. Lee Rankin called “a dirty rumor” that Oswald was an FBI informant.
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The FBI denied it, but could the Bureau be believed?

Allen Dulles told the other commission members at their top-secret January meeting that if Oswald worked for the FBI and CIA, their officials would have to lie under oath if questioned about it.
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FBI clerk William Walter, who in 1963 worked in the Bureau’s New Orleans office, viewed the matter more independently. He told the House Select Committee on Assassinations that Oswald did indeed have “an informant’s status with our office.”
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Other witnesses have filled in this picture of Oswald and the FBI.

New Orleans bar owner Orest Pena, who was an FBI informant himself, stated “he had seen Oswald with FBI agent [Warren] deBrueys on ‘numerous occasions’ and that deBrueys had threatened him physically before his Warren Commission appearance, warning him to keep quiet about what he had observed.”
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Adrian Alba, a friend of Oswald who managed a New Orleans garage that looked after FBI and Secret Service cars, saw Oswald walk up one day to an FBI car that stopped outside his workplace. Through a window Oswald was handed a white envelope that he hid under his shirt. Oswald, Alba said, “met the car again a couple of days later and talked briefly with the driver,” who Alba knew was an “FBI agent visiting New Orleans from Washington.”
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From Oswald’s support for Kennedy and his expressed opposition to a coup, it is possible he was not only an FBI informant but also one trying to save the life of the president. He may have been alerting the Bureau as early as August 8 from jail about the actual coup against Kennedy, which he had warned against as a possibility only two weeks earlier.

If Oswald thought he could help the FBI stop a CIA plot to kill the president, he was seriously mistaken. At the time the FBI may not have known key details of the plot. Nevertheless, the plan to kill Kennedy and cover up the conspiracy went to the top ranks of our national security state, harnessing to its treasonous purpose not only the CIA but ultimately Hoover and the FBI as well, who were crucial to the cover-up. To appeal to the FBI against the CIA was only to crawl more deeply into the spider’s web.

However, Oswald’s path is too littered with disinformation for us to know yet what he really thought he was doing. At this point we are given nothing more than a few mid-summer hints as to his actual state of mind. As summer turns to fall and “Oswald” appearances proliferate, the evidence of one man’s thinking seems to disappear in smoke and mirrors.

We have seen already how the person Lee Harvey Oswald disappeared down a black hole during the Warren Commission–reported trip to Mexico City September 27-October 2, 1963. The CIA used “Oswald’s” highly dramatized visits to the Cuban and Soviet consulates, plus the Agency’s transcripts of fraudulent “Oswald” phone calls, to link him in retrospect with the KGB’s head of assassinations in the Western Hemisphere. The Oswald who in July read Kennedy books, listened to Kennedy speeches, and warned of a right-wing coup may not even have gone to Mexico City in September.
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If he did, he was given a less active role in the scenario than he had in New Orleans. He was replaced by impostors in many if not all of the phone calls and visits made in his name to the Communist consulates to implicate him, Cuba, and the Soviet Union in the assassination.

As we also saw, during October and November in Dallas, Oswald (or more likely someone impersonating him) engaged in a series of provocative actions that would incriminate him in retrospect: at a gun shop flaunting his self-proclaimed past as a Marine by rudely buying ammunition for his rifle;
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at a car dealership test-driving a Mercury Comet at high speeds, and when confronted by the absence of a credit rating, saying he might “have to go back to Russia to buy a car”;
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at a rifle range firing obnoxiously at another man’s target, then in response to the man’s objections giving him a look the man said he would never forget;
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at Red Bird Air Field showing up with two companions to charter a small plane “to the Yucatan Peninsula” for the afternoon of November 22, for what could be seen later as evidence of advance planning for an escape by air to Cuba.
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Yet the Warren Commission was forced to cover up all this planted evidence against Oswald. It proved too much—implicating Cuba and the USSR (both set up by the CIA but exonerated by the new president, Lyndon Johnson, as shown by his recorded phone calls). It went too far—revealing the activities of the CIA’s second Oswald (whom a CIA plane flew secretly out of Dallas on November 22, as witnessed by Air Force sergeant Robert Vinson). What the Oswald appearances conveyed willy-nilly was that, in an overambitious plot, the scapegoat wound up being in too many places at the same time. An Oswald other than the man working at the Texas School Book Depository and visiting his family at Ruth Paine’s home was simultaneously laying down an overly obvious, false trail of assassination evidence elsewhere. The FBI, on behalf of the Warren Commission, doubled back in its investigation to sanitize the unduly revealing story, as we saw in the case of the Red Bird Air Field incident. The FBI’s report pre-dated the incident to the previous summer to make it seem less likely Wayne January could have remembered and identified Oswald.
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In a more blatantly criminal act, FBI officials also ordered the destruction of a written note left at their Dallas office two weeks before the assassination by a man they identified as Lee Harvey Oswald.

Around noon on a day estimated to be Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday, November 6-8, 1963, the receptionist for the Dallas FBI office, Nannie Lee Fenner, watched a man get off the elevator and approach her desk. The man, whom she would refer to later in a congressional hearing as “Mr. Oswald,” said to her, “S. A. Hosty, please.”
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“S. A.” was a shorthand designation for “Special Agent” that only someone familiar with the FBI would use. The man, Fenner said, “had a wild look in his eye, and he was awfully fidgety, and he had a 3 × 5 envelope in his hand.”
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Fenner noticed that a folded piece of paper extended from the envelope.

When she replied that S. A. Hosty was not in the office, the man threw the envelope on her desk, saying, “Well, get this to him.” He then turned and left.

Fenner could see the bottom part of a handwritten message sticking out of the envelope—a virtual invitation to read the last two lines. She did. They said: “I will either blow up the Dallas Police Department or the FBI office.”
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Since it was an obvious threat, Fenner took the letter out of the envelope and read it from the top. Twelve years later, she told members of Congress who were investigating the incident, “I don’t remember the exact words, but it was something about [them] speaking to his wife and what he was going to do if they didn’t stop”
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—“blow up the Dallas Police Department or the FBI office.” The letter was signed: “Lee Harvey Oswald.”
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The man to whom this threatening letter was addressed was FBI special agent James P. Hosty, Jr., who had been assigned to investigate Oswald as a possible Soviet agent.
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Hosty had visited Ruth Paine’s home on November 1 and 5 in Oswald’s absence. He questioned both Ruth Paine and Marina Oswald about Lee Oswald.
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The threat Nannie Lee Fenner read was apparently Oswald’s angry response to Hosty’s questioning of his wife.

In terms of the assassination plot, Oswald’s letter to Hosty served a deeper purpose. In keeping with other provocative Oswald scenes created in New Orleans, Mexico City, and Dallas, the letter’s dramatic delivery and contents were hard for a witness to forget. The letter thereby added to the false trail of evidence incriminating Oswald. Whether the man who threw it down on Fenner’s desk was Oswald or an impostor, the letter’s purpose was obvious from the words left visible extending outside its envelope. By threatening to blow up the Dallas Police Department or the FBI office, the letter’s signer, “Lee Harvey Oswald,” had documented his capacity for lethal violence—two weeks before the president’s trip to Dallas.
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In throwing down a written threat to the FBI in November, “Oswald” also dramatized a distinctly different attitude toward the Bureau than that of the prisoner in the New Orleans jail in August, who at his own request conferred privately with an FBI agent for an hour and a half.
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Oswald’s initiative in arranging a conference with the FBI in jail is consistent with the reports of witnesses who saw him meeting or accompanying FBI agents in New Orleans that summer.
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The Oswald–FBI connection had to be covered up. The assassin’s legend laid down after New Orleans therefore emphasized “Oswald’s” animosity toward the FBI.

For example, on September 28, 1963, during his visit to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, “Oswald” spoke of FBI surveillance and persecution. He then dramatically pulled out a revolver and put it on a table, saying, “See? This is what I must carry now to protect my life.”
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In the same vein, the “Oswald” letter dated November 9, 1963, received by the Soviet Embassy in Washington on November 18, devoted two paragraphs to alleged FBI harassment of the Oswalds, concluding, “I and my wife strongly protested these tactics by the notorious FBI.”
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In both cases, “Oswald” was simultaneously demonstrating his allegiance to the Soviet Union and his antipathy to the FBI. The anti-FBI statements attributed to Oswald were a necessary distancing of his public persona from the Bureau after the real Oswald’s cozy relationship with the FBI in New Orleans. The tracks of an FBI informant could be covered over by the legend of an anti-FBI assassin.

Yet both the delivery and contents of the Oswald-Hosty letter, like “Oswald’s” Mexico City activities, raised too many questions after the assassination. At an initial level, the evidence of the letter to Hosty implicated the FBI, which, after receiving a threat from Oswald, had failed to warn the Secret Service about a potential assassin in Dallas before the president’s visit. If one saw through the cover story and identified the “Oswald” in the incident as an impostor, the evidence of the letter could even expose the plot itself.

The FBI therefore destroyed the evidence.

On the afternoon of Sunday, November 24, three hours after Oswald died of a gunshot wound, James Hosty was summoned to the office of chief Dallas FBI agent J. Gordon Shanklin.

When Hosty entered the office, Shanklin reached into the lower right hand drawer of his desk. He took out Oswald’s letter and a memorandum Hosty had written about receiving it.

Shanklin told Hosty to get rid of the letter and the memorandum.

Hosty took the letter. He began tearing it up.

“No, get it out of here.” Shanklin said, “I don’t even want it in this office. Get rid of it.”
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Then, as Hosty told a Congressional investigating committee in 1975, he took Oswald’s letter and the memorandum into the washroom. There he flushed them down the toilet.
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Hosty also admitted to members of Congress that, when he testified before the Warren Commission, he did not divulge his destruction of the Oswald letter. When asked why not, Hosty said he had been instructed by FBI officials in Washington and Dallas to answer only the questions put to him by the Warren Commission, with no elaboration.
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He followed orders and maintained a discreet silence before the Commission about his destruction of critically important evidence.

Following the lead of a Dallas newspaper, an investigative reporter for the
New York Times
helped bring the letter’s destruction to light with a September 17, 1975, front-page article. Citing a high-level FBI source, the
Times
article said the decision to destroy the Oswald letter “was taken at a meeting of top FBI officials in Washington,” almost certainly including Director J. Edgar Hoover, “on the weekend after Kennedy was murdered in Dallas on Friday, Nov. 22, 1963.”
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