JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (110 page)

Lee Harvey Oswald and Thomas Arthur Vallee had traveled the same, punishing road of CIA covert action. They were disposable pawns in a high-risk game. As a result of his medical history, Vallee was the more disposable of the two. As Mary Vallee-Portillo told me, “My brother probably was set up. He was very much used.”
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Thomas Vallee like Lee Oswald was a vulnerable, low-level intelligence asset, intensely loyal to the government he served, on the verge of being jettisoned alongside the president. However, unlike Oswald, Vallee survived. Whoever informed on the Chicago plot’s sniper team, saving Kennedy’s life for three more weeks, was, like Berkeley Moyland, someone who saved Vallee’s life in the process.

If the FBI informant named “Lee” who blew the whistle on the Chicago plot was indeed Lee Harvey Oswald, it would help explain why Oswald was, at least on the surface, such a pliant patsy prior to the assassination. If he knew he had already succeeded in stopping the Chicago plot at the eleventh hour, he would have expected to do the same in Dallas. Even while he was eating lunch in the Book Depository on Friday, November 22, at 12:15 p.m.—“alone as usual,” as Carolyn Arnold described him
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—Oswald may have anticipated the imminent arrest of assassins whom he had identified to the FBI. Any such hopes were in vain. The FBI had become part of the plot. If he was the “Lee” who saved Kennedy and Vallee in Chicago, Oswald had risked becoming what he in fact became—the ultimate scapegoat in Dallas, where there was no one to save Kennedy and himself. The young man who was “alone as usual” in the Depository lunchroom had become totally alone.

While being questioned as a prisoner at Dallas Police headquarters, Oswald acted as if he had suddenly lost his cover as a U.S. agent. The turning point was his confrontation by Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig. With several other witnesses, Craig had seen Oswald (or more likely, a man looking just like him) run down the grassy knoll to the Rambler station wagon, scramble in, and be driven away by “a husky looking Latin.”
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Oswald had already told Captain Will Fritz he rode the bus home, until a traffic tie-up forced him to switch to a taxi.

When Craig joined Fritz outside his Homicide Bureau office shortly after 4:30 p.m., the Deputy Sheriff looked through the open door at the prisoner. He told Fritz that Oswald was the man he had seen run down the grassy knoll and depart in the station wagon. Fritz and Craig then entered the office together. When Fritz told Oswald that Craig had seen him leave, he asked his prisoner, “What about the
car
?” Oswald said defensively, “That
station wagon
belongs to Mrs. Paine. Don’t try to drag her into this.”
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Oswald then said dejectedly, “Everybody will know who I am now,”
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with the implication that a double’s (or less likely, his) departure in the station wagon, and the vehicle’s association with Mrs. Paine, were keys to his real identity. Given what Craig had seen, Oswald thought his cover was blown.

Oswald then began to resist the role he had been given that was assuming overwhelming scapegoat proportions. At 6:00 p.m. Friday when Captain Will Fritz showed him a picture of himself holding a rifle in one hand, Communist publications in the other, and wearing a pistol on his hip, Oswald said the ridiculously incriminating photo (which would soon appear on the cover of
Life
magazine) was not of him. Fritz told Oswald the picture had been found in the garage at Mrs. Paine’s house. Oswald said it had never been in his possession. He had never seen it before. The face was his, he said, but someone had superimposed it on another man’s body. Oswald said he knew a lot about photography, and that in time, he would show how it was not his picture. He would never have that time.
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At 7:55 p.m., as Oswald was being taken down a hall in Dallas Police headquarters, he made it clear—to those who had ears to hear—that he was not going down quietly. He called out to reporters, “I’m just a patsy!”
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That rebellious shout may have been the immediate source of the decision to give Ruby his first chance to kill Oswald, on the prisoner’s way into the hastily called press conference four hours later. However, when Oswald was led to his armed assassin at the doorway, Ruby froze. Oswald in passing was given another few hours of life.

From his arrest Friday afternoon until he was shot to death late Sunday morning, he sought legal counsel he could trust. He appealed repeatedly for the help of New York lawyer John Abt, well known for his defense of political prisoners in Smith Act cases.
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If Abt was not available, as proved to be the case, Oswald said he wanted to see a member of the American Civil Liberties Union. ACLU representatives came to the jail Friday night but were then told wrongly that Oswald did not want an attorney.
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As his situation grew more desperate, on late Saturday night Oswald tried to make a mysterious long-distance phone call to Raleigh, North Carolina.

That night in the Dallas City Hall, Mrs. Alveeta A. Treon and Mrs. Louise Sweeney were working as switchboard operators when two law enforcement officials came into the room. The men said they wanted to listen to a call Oswald was about to make. They were shown to an adjoining room where they could monitor the prisoner’s conversation.
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At 10:45 p.m. Mrs. Sweeney took a call from the jail. Notifying the men in the next room that it was Oswald, she wrote down the information he gave her on the number he wanted to reach. What transpired then, apparently in obedience to the men’s orders, has been described by Sweeney’s co-worker, Alveeta Treon:

“I was dumbfounded at what happened next. Mrs. Sweeney opened the key to Oswald and told him, ‘I’m sorry, the number doesn’t answer.’ She then unplugged and disconnected Oswald without ever really trying to put the call through. A few moments later, Mrs. Sweeney tore the page off her notation pad and threw it into the wastepaper basket.”
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After Mrs. Sweeney left work at 11:00 p.m., Mrs. Treon retrieved the slip of paper. She copied the information onto a message slip as her souvenir of the event. In 1970, a copy of the slip came into the possession of Chicago researcher Sherman H. Skolnick during a Freedom of Information Act suit.
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According to the phone message, Oswald was trying to call a “John Hurt” in Raleigh, North Carolina, at “834-7430 or 833-1253.” In November 1963, John David Hurt was listed as having the first number in Raleigh, and John William Hurt as having the second. Of the two Hurts, the first, John David Hurt, had a military intelligence background. During World War II, John David Hurt served as a U.S. Army Counterintelligence Special Agent.
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House Select Committee on Assassinations lawyer Surell Brady, who was in charge of investigating the Raleigh call, described the fact that John David Hurt had served in U.S. Army Counterintelligence as “provocative.”
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In a brief 1980 interview, John David Hurt denied knowing why Oswald was trying to phone him on the night of November 23, 1963.
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Although Oswald’s purpose in making the Raleigh call has never been disclosed, former CIA officer Victor Marchetti thought he knew why. After fourteen years with the CIA, during which he became executive assistant to the Deputy Director, Victor Marchetti resigned in disillusionment in 1969.
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He then co-authored
The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence
, a Book-of-the-Month Club Alternate that the CIA censored, leaving 339 blank spaces in the text.
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Marchetti said he thought Oswald was following the standard intelligence practice of trying to contact his case officer through a “cut-out,” a “clean” intermediary with no direct involvement in an operation. As to why Oswald’s call was made to North Carolina, Marchetti pointed out that the Office of Naval Intelligence had an operations center in Nags Head, North Carolina, for agents who had been sent as fake expatriates to the Soviet Union—corresponding to Oswald’s background.
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In an interview, Marchetti said, “[Oswald] was probably calling his cut-out. He was calling somebody who could put him in touch with his case officer. He couldn’t go beyond that person. There’s no way he could. He just had to depend on this person to say, ‘Okay, I’ll deliver the message.’ Now, if the cut-out has already been alerted to cut him off and ignore him, then . . .”
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The interviewer asked Marchetti about the plight of an undercover agent in trouble who was desperately seeking help, as Oswald seemed to be doing:

Interviewer: “Okay, if someone were an agent, and they were involved in something, and nobody believes they are an agent. He is arrested, and trying to communicate, let’s say, and he is one of you guys. What is the procedure?”

Marchetti: “I’d kill him.”

Interviewer: “If I were an agent for the Agency, and I was involved in something involving the law domestically and the FBI, would I have a contact to call?”

Marchetti: “Yes.”

Interviewer: “A verification contact?”

Marchetti: “Yes, you would.”

Interviewer: “Would I be dead?”

Marchetti: “It would all depend on the situation. If you get into bad trouble, we’re not going to verify you. No how, no way.”

Interviewer: “But there is a call mechanism set up.”

Marchetti: “Yes.”

Interviewer: “So it is conceivable that Lee Harvey Oswald was . . .”

Marchetti: “That’s what he was doing. He was trying to call in and say, ‘Tell them I’m all right.’”

Interviewer: “Was that his death warrant?”

Marchetti: “You betcha. Because this time he went over the dam, whether he knew it or not, or whether they set him up or not. It doesn’t matter. He was over the dam. At this point it was executive action.”
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“Executive action” was a CIA code phrase for assassination.

Lee Harvey Oswald had been going over the dam for months, possibly years. As we saw, James Jesus Angleton’s Special Investigations Group (SIG) in CIA Counterintelligence held a 201 file on Oswald in the three years leading up to JFK’s assassination. That meant, as we learned from Angleton’s assistant, Ann Egerter, in her House Select testimony, that Oswald was a CIA employee or asset who had come under suspicion by the Agency as a counterintelligence risk.
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Angleton apparently had Oswald under internal CIA investigation. Former CIA finance officer Jim Wilcott confirmed that Oswald was indeed a CIA double agent to the Soviet Union. Wilcott had issued the paychecks for Oswald’s counterespionage project under a cryptonym.
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Moreover, as Wilcott’s Tokyo CIA station knew, Oswald was a disgruntled spy.

“One of the reasons given for the necessity to do away with Oswald,” Wilcott said, “was the difficulty they had with him when he returned. Apparently, he knew the Russians were on to him from the start, and this made him very angry.”
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In short, Lee Harvey Oswald was a questioning, dissenting CIA operative, who had become a security risk. His investigation by assassinations specialist Angleton was the beginning of his end. Oswald thereby became the ideal scapegoat for the president’s assassination. From the standpoint of the assassins, Dallas eliminated two Cold War security risks, Kennedy and Oswald, in the same weekend, blaming the second for the murder of the first. Drawing CIA dissenter Oswald into the plot in such a way that he thought he was blowing a whistle on the CIA to the FBI would, from Angleton’s standpoint, have made for poetic counterintelligence irony. As a soon-to-be-murdered scapegoat, Oswald would become a double victim of the conspiracy.

Although Jack Ruby was being given easy access to Dallas Police headquarters—and at the Friday night press conference even proximity to Oswald—he seemed reluctant to shoot him. Ruby knew that by following orders (funneled to him from powerful forces) and killing Oswald, he, too, would likely become a disposable shield of those forces. Only hours before he did shoot Oswald, Ruby was apparently trying to make that murder impossible by warning law enforcement authorities that it was about to happen.

At 3:00 a.m. Sunday a phone call was received by Dallas Police Officer Billy Grammer. He later identified the voice as Ruby’s. The caller said, “If you move Oswald the way you are planning, we are going to kill him.”
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Billy Grammer knew Jack Ruby. On a Central Independent TV program broadcast in England, Grammer said in an interview that Ruby was warning the police to transfer Oswald secretly to the county jail: “He knew me, and I knew him. He knew my name,” Grammer said. “It [Oswald’s shooting] was not a spontaneous event.”
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