Oswald's Tale (78 page)

So, his strongest remaining card (although he did not see that it could eventually prove to be his weakest) was his insistence that the event could not have taken place in September because it was not cool enough. Of course, if the visit had taken place in October, then the young man who presented an I.D. card to the registrar, Henry Palmer, was not Oswald. But in that case, who were the people who had come to Clinton in October, and why had they gone to the trouble of obtaining false credentials for Oswald? The difficulty with closing the case on Oswald is that every time one shuts the door, a crack opens in the wall.

It would be a great relief to terminate the case on the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, but one has to be certain the job is actually being accomplished. For example, Posner is too positive that Oswald and Ferrie never met at all:

Posner:
Ferrie was interviewed by the FBI on November 27, 1963, and denied ever knowing Oswald in the Civil Air Patrol. CAP records show that while Ferrie was a member through 1954, he was disciplined because he gave unauthorized political lectures to the cadets. When he submitted his 1955 renewal, he was rejected. Ferrie was not reinstated until December 1958. He was not even in the Civil Air Patrol when Oswald was a member in 1955.
⁸

In November 1993, however, the TV program
Frontline
showed a group photograph taken in 1955 of some sixteen men and boys on a picnic. Since Ferrie and Oswald are visible at opposite ends of the group, the most that Posner can now claim is that Ferrie may have believed he was telling the truth when he said that they never met.

In fact, the odds are great that, at the least, they were introduced to each other on the occasion. Since the pilot was having many sexual relations with teenagers in that period, he might (in the manner that a heterosexual who makes love to many women will often have difficulty bringing to mind every encounter) have had no recollection of sleeping with Oswald. Of course, if Ferrie did recall such an event, he would have denied it after the assassination. Posner, trying to seal everything, writes: “ . . . he told the truth.” A very large assumption.

This executive tendency to chop off nuances as if they are profitless distractions can be seen at its most dramatic in Posner’s treatment of Sylvia Odio, whom we will encounter in the next chapter. First, however, we have to deal with how Oswald gets out of the Big Easy. No literary vice is more damnable in a writer than needlessly irritating the reader, yet not even Lee Harvey’s departure from New Orleans is free of complications.

3

An Inexplicable Visit

After Marina left New Orleans to go to live in Irving, Texas, with Ruth Paine, Lee may or may not have remained at the apartment on Magazine Street for the next couple of days. Neighbors did see him, but their testimonies do not agree. He could have left on Monday or Tuesday evening. Come Wednesday, when Mrs. Garner looked into the apartment, Lee was gone.

By Wednesday morning, his $33 unemployment compensation check had been cashed at the Winn-Dixie store on Magazine Street, but it is possible some unknown person endorsed the check for him since the FBI could not authenticate the signature. Nor was anyone found who observed Oswald getting on any bus that left New Orleans on Wednesday for Houston—which was the most logical stop on the way to Mexico City, where he hoped to obtain a visa for Cuba.

We cannot be certain of his whereabouts until 2:35
A.M.
on Thursday. There, in the shank of the early morning hours, he did get on Continental Trailways bus no. 5133, which departed from Houston for Nuevo Laredo, then traveled south through Mexico all day Thursday, and by ten on Friday morning, September 27, he was in Mexico City, a bus trip of thirty-one and a half hours.

Still, the question poses itself: Did Oswald on Wednesday go directly from New Orleans to Houston? Or, did he leave New Orleans with one or two unidentified associates and drive with them all the way to Dallas, where he would become one of the three men who, about 9:00
P.M.
on Wednesday night, would knock on the door of an attractive Cuban lady named Sylvia Odio?

According to Sylvia Odio’s testimony, she was at that time getting dressed to go out on a date. Since, as she declares, she felt highly suspicious of her visitors, she kept her door on the latch. She had cause. Her father, once the trucking tycoon of Cuba, was now in jail on the Isle of Pines, imprisoned as a conspirator in a plot to kill Fidel Castro. Sylvia Odio had suffered the trauma of his arrest, then a divorce from her husband in Puerto Rico, and now she was under the care of a psychiatrist. Small surprise if her travails had left her naturally distrustful of strangers. The spokesman for these three men told her, however, that they were members of JURE ( Junta Revolucionaria), an anti-Castro group formed in part by her father.

The stranger who did most of the talking was tall and thin and called himself Leopoldo. The second man was squat and “greasy”—and by her description, both were “kind of low Cubans,” although the short one could have been Mexican. The third man was American and he “said just a few little words in Spanish, trying to be cute.”
¹

MR. LIEBELER.
Was the chain [on your door] fastened?

MRS. ODIO.
No; I unfastened it after a little while when they told me they were members of JURE, and . . . one of them said, “We are very good friends of your father.” This struck me, because I didn’t think my father would have such kind of friends unless he knew them from anti-Castro activities. He [Leopoldo] gave me so many details about where he saw my father and what kind of activities he was in. I mean, they gave me almost incredible details about things that [only] somebody . . . informed well knows . . . And he said, “We wanted you to meet this American. His name is Leon Oswald.” He repeated it twice. Then my sister Annie by that time was standing near the door. She had come [back] to see what was going on . . . And [Leopoldo] said, “We have just come from New Orleans and we have been trying to get this movement organized down there, and . . . we think we could do some kind of work.” This was all talked very fast, not slow as I am saying it now. You know how fast Cubans talk . . . And then I think I asked something to the American, trying to be nice, “Have you ever been to Cuba?” And he said, “No, I have never been to Cuba.”

And I said, “Are you interested in our movement?” And he said, “Yes.”

. . . I said, “If you will excuse me, I have to leave,” and I repeated, “I am going to write to my father and tell him you have come to visit me.” . . . And I think that was the extent of the conversation. They left, and I saw them through the window leaving in a car. I don’t recall the car. I have been trying to.

MR. LIEBELER.
Do you know which one of the men was driving?

MRS. ODIO.
The tall one, Leopoldo.

MR. LIEBELER.
Leopoldo?

MRS. ODIO.
Yes; oh, excuse me, I forgot something very important. They kept mentioning that they had to come to visit me at such a time of night, it was almost 9 o’clock, because they were leaving on a trip. And two or three times they said the same thing . . . The next day Leopoldo called me. I had gotten home from work, so I imagine it might have been Friday. And they had come on Thursday. I have been trying to establish that. He was trying to get fresh with me that [second time]. He was trying to be too nice, telling me that I was pretty . . . That is the way he started the conversation. Then he said, “What do you think of the American?” And I said, “I didn’t think anything.”

And he said, “You know, our idea is to introduce him to the underground in Cuba because he is great, he is kind of nuts.” . . . [Leon] told us [that we] don’t have any guts . . . because President Kennedy should have been assassinated after the Bay of Pigs, and . . . I started getting a little upset with the conversation.

And [Leopoldo] repeated again that they were leaving for a trip and they would very much like to see me on their return to Dallas. Then he mentioned something more about Oswald. [Leopoldo] said he had been a Marine and he was so interested in helping the Cubans, and he was terrific. That is the words [Leopoldo] more or less used in Spanish, that he was terrific . . . Three days later I wrote to my father after they came, and mentioned the fact that two men had called themselves friends of his. And later in December, because the letter takes a long time to get here, he writes me back, “I do not know any of these men. Do not get involved with any of them . . .”
²

At the end of the interview, Sylvia Odio is asked:

MR. LIEBELER.
Well, do you have any doubts in your mind after looking at these pictures that the man that was in your apartment was the same man as Lee Harvey Oswald?

MRS. ODIO.
I don’t have any doubts.
³

Sylvia Odio thinks the visit of those three men could have come no earlier than 9:00
P.M.,
Thursday, September 26, but by that hour Oswald had already been on his Mexico City bus for hours. There are any number of witnesses to testify to that. So, Sylvia Odio either misremembered a visit on Wednesday night and substituted Thursday or, once again, the American, whoever he was, was not Oswald. Indeed, he could have been Oswald only if he had been driven all the way (possibly by Leopoldo) from New Orleans on Wednesday to the Odio apartment in Dallas (which is at least a ten-hour drive). From there, either someone drove him south to catch a bus leaving Houston in the early morning, 2:35
A.M.,
Thursday, September 26 (which would arrive in Laredo, Texas, in time for an early-afternoon departure for Mexico City, twenty hours further down the road), or else he caught an 11:00
P.M.
bus in Dallas on Wednesday night that connected with the bus from Houston to Laredo in Alice, Texas, at 10:25 the following morning. The likelihood is that he was driven to Houston, since an English couple from Liverpool, Mr. and Mrs. McFarland, recollect seeing him on the trip from Houston to Laredo:

If Sylvia Odio was mistaken in her dates, then Oswald could have been at her door on Wednesday night at 9:00
P.M.
But if it was Thursday or Friday night, then the American who Leopoldo said was ready to fire at Castro or at Kennedy had to be an impostor familiar with Oswald’s name after Lee’s radio appearances on Stuckey’s show in New Orleans that summer. In which case, why was Sylvia Odio insisting the man was Oswald unless the resemblance was so close that Lee Harvey might indeed be some kind of patsy?

Odio was first interviewed on December 18, 1963, by FBI men James P. Hosty and Bardwell D. Odum, and they hardly had to have it underlined for them that her testimony, if verified, would seriously injure the unspoken Warren-Hoover-Dulles concordat that Oswald had done the job all by himself. The Warren Commission’s energies would then have to be directed toward exploring who Oswald’s associates were on this occasion—which was equal to investigating the pro-Castro and anti-Castro underground in Miami, New Orleans, Houston, and Dallas. The unspoken anxiety of the elders was that by the end of such an exploration, there would be sheer hell to pay for all the attendant discoveries: COINTELPRO, Giancana, Rosselli, and the numerous attempts to assassinate Castro.

By dint of adroit juggling, which we will have an opportunity to observe, the FBI was able to resolve a double dilemma. Indeed, which was worse for them: Oswald-at-the-door, or someone-impersonating-Oswald-at-the-door?

4

A Nimble Solution

In his book
The Last Investigation,
Gaeton Fonzi offers the following:

. . . On August 23rd, 1964, with the first drafts of the Warren Commission Report being written, Chief Counsel J. Lee Rankin wrote to J. Edgar Hoover: “It is a matter of some importance to the Commission that Mrs. Odio’s allegations either be proved or disproved.”

One month later, with the Report already in galleys, the Odio incident was still a critical concern for staffers. In a memo to his boss, Staff Counsel Wesley Liebeler wrote: “ . . . Odio may well be right. The Commission will look bad if it turns out she is. There is no need to look foolish by grasping at straws to avoid admitting that there is a problem.”
¹

Fifteen years later, the House Select Committee on Assassinations would
virtually
contradict the Warren Commission by declaring that Odio’s “testimony is essentially credible . . . there is a strong probability that one of the men was or appeared to be Lee Harvey Oswald.”
²

The investigator for the HSCA (the same Gaeton Fonzi just quoted) had been assigned to interview Odio and her sister Annie, but the HSCA was not prepared to follow his conclusions too far. They were going to declare that the assassination had probably been a conspiracy brought off by the Mafia. Odio, therefore, was still in the way, since her testimony pointed toward Cubans and their CIA handlers.

So the matter rested until
Case Closed
was published in 1993. Posner’s book is so concerted a validation of FBI work that it could not have served the Bureau’s need to dispose of conspiracy theories more if a committee of skilled FBI men had written it for him.

Since the key to closing the case on Oswald is to discredit Odio, Posner sets out to accomplish this by eroding her credentials as a witness:

Posner:
By the time of her Oswald story, she had a history of emotional problems. In Puerto Rico, where she had lived before moving to Dallas in March 1963, she had seen a psychiatrist over her fractious marriage. According to FBI reports, he decided she was unstable and unable, mentally or physically, to care for her children.
⁽⁴¹⁾
A doctor who was called to treat her once for an “attack of nerves” discovered she had made it up to get the attention of her neighbors. He described her as a very mixed-up young lady, and was told by others that she had also been under psychiatric care while living in Miami, when she moved to the States in 1961.
⁽⁴²⁾

In her divorce proceedings of 1963, she lost custody of her four children, because of charges of neglect and abandonment.
^(43)
3

The three endnotes, (41), (42), (43), all refer to FBI memoranda concerning her condition
before
coming to Dallas. But Odio was not neglecting or abandoning her offspring on the night that she spoke to the three visitors. Indeed, all four of her children were living with her in a small apartment. Posner could have detected as much from such references in her Warren Commission testimony as: “my sister Annie . . . had come over . . . to babysit for me.”
⁴
Or, one page earlier, “I told them at the time I was very busy with my four children.”
⁵
But then, Posner would have had to give as much attention to her testimony as to FBI memoranda. Later, in one more section attributed to FBI sources, Posner writes that Silvia Herrera, her mother-in-law, “went so far as to say that Odio was an excellent actress who could intelligently fabricate such an episode if she wished.”
⁶
Posner is not even calling on a mother-in-law to make his case but an
ex-
mother-in-law!

Or, again: “By the time of the assassination, she had been seeing [her psychiatrist] for more than seven months, at least weekly, sometimes more frequently.”
⁷

Once a week or, as Posner adds hopefully, “sometimes more frequently,” would suggest a woman who is looking for mental and emotional support; what Posner really needs to make his case is a patient who is closeted with her doctor five times a week.

In an interview that Posner conducted with Carlos Bringuier (Oswald’s old foe), a telling accusation against Odio is brought in. “I believe it is possible,” says Bringuier,

that she was visited by someone—there were a lot of people with different organizations out there. But after the assassination, I believe her immediate reaction would have been the same as mine, to have jumped up and called the FBI and say, “Hey, that guy visited me!” Instead [after being released from the hospital], she casually told a neighbor, and that neighbor told the FBI, and that’s the only reason it came out. That makes me suspicious of her story. It doesn’t sound right, and I know from my own personal experience on what I did and how I felt when I realized I had some contact with the man who killed the President of the United States. I heard the name Lee Harvey Oswald and I jumped from my seat. I didn’t finish my lunch—I called the FBI immediately. Maybe with all the news after the assassination she became confused and put Oswald’s face and name onto the person she actually met. I have seen this as a lawyer in criminal cases. There is an accident with four witnesses and they give four different versions and they all believe they are telling the truth, and could even pass a lie detector. She thinks she is telling the truth. I hate to say she is lying, but she is mistaken.
⁸

What Bringuier leaves out of his otherwise convincing analysis is that while he felt full of virtue and vindication as he leapt out of his chair to call the FBI, Odio was terrified. She didn’t know the men who had been at her doorway or whether they might come back if she called attention to herself. In fact, twelve years later, when Fonzi located her in Miami, she was still afraid.

Case Closed,
however, keeps going back to the FBI reports rather than taking a look at the Warren Commission testimony:

Posner:
Odio insists that she told at least two people, before the assassination, that three men, including Oswald, had visited her apartment. One of the people she told was Lucille Connell. But when the FBI questioned her in 1964, Connell said that Odio only told her about Oswald after the assassination, and then said she not only knew about Oswald, but he had given talks to groups of Cuban refugees in Dallas.
⁹

That last sentence, if true, is wholly damaging to Odio. But Posner does not let Sylvia Odio speak for herself:

MR. LIEBELER.
Did you tell Mrs. Connell that you had seen Oswald at some anti-Castro meetings, and that he had made some talks to these groups of refugees, and that he was very brilliant and clever and captivated the people to whom he had spoken?

MRS. ODIO.
No.

MR. LIEBELER.
You are sure you never told her that?

MRS. ODIO.
No.

MR. LIEBELER.
Have you ever seen Oswald at any meetings?

MRS. ODIO.
Never . . . she probably was referring [to] John Martino [who] was in Isle of Pines for 3 years . . . [Mrs. Connell] did go to that meeting. I did not go, [but Martino] came to Dallas and gave a talk to the Cubans about conditions in Cuba, and she was one of the ones that went to the meeting.

MR. LIEBELER.
Mrs. Connell?

MRS. ODIO.
Yes. And my sister Annie went too . . .
¹⁰

Gaeton Fonzi interviewed Annie Odio in 1975 about her meeting with Sylvia a few hours after the assassination of the President. In the next passage, Fonzi is quoting Annie:

“The first thing I remember when I walked into the room was that Sylvia started crying and crying. I think I told her, ‘You know this guy on TV who shot President Kennedy? I think I know him.’ And she said, ‘You don’t remember where you know him from?’ I said, ‘No, I cannot recall, but I know I’ve seen him before.’ And then she told me, ‘Do you remember those three guys who came to the house?’” That’s when, Annie said, she suddenly knew where she had seen Lee Harvey Oswald before.
¹¹

We can continue with Fonzi’s account:

Both Sylvia and Annie . . . decided not to say anything to anyone about it. “We were so frightened, we were absolutely terrified,” Sylvia remembered. “We were both very young and yet we had so much responsibility, with so many brothers and sisters and our mother and father in prison, we were so afraid and not knowing what was happening. We made a vow to each other not to tell anyone.” [Of course, they did tell Lucille Connell, who] told a trusted friend and soon the FBI was knocking on Sylvia Odio’s door. She says it was the last thing in the world she wanted, but when they came she felt she had a responsibility to tell the truth.
¹²

Gaeton Fonzi’s interviews with the Odio sisters took place between 1975 and 1979, but back in 1964, the FBI was looking for and found a way to discredit Odio’s testimony.

Posner:
The FBI thought it had solved the Odio mystery when it found three men who might have visited her apartment near the end of September. Loran Hall, a prominent anti-Castroite, bore a marked resemblance to the man Odio described as the leader, Leopoldo. Hall told the FBI on September 16, 1964, that he was in Dallas soliciting funds during September 1963 and had been to the Odio apartment. He named his two companions as Lawrence Howard and William Seymour.
¹³

Let us move over to Fonzi for the rest of this account:

. . . Hall claimed he had been . . . trying to raise anti-Castro funds with two companions, one of whom might have looked like Oswald. The Warren Commission grasped at that straw and detailed that interview in its final report, giving the impression that Hall and his companions were Odio’s visitors . . .

Neither did the Warren Commission [however] note in its final Report—even though it
knew—
that the subsequent FBI interviews revealed that Hall’s two companions denied being in Dallas; that neither looked at all like Oswald; that Sylvia Odio, shown their photographs, did not recognize them; and that Loran Eugene Hall, when questioned again by the FBI, admitted he had fabricated the story. (Still later, when questioned by the Assassinations Committee, Hall denied he had ever told the FBI he had been to Odio’s apartment.)
¹⁴

The timing, however, had been serviceable. Loran Hall visited the FBI on September 16, 1964, and the Warren Report came out eight days later. Apprised of Hall’s contributions, the Warren Commission rushed to include Hall’s first interview in the final Report, and it supplied their definitive conclusion: “Lee Harvey Oswald was not at Mrs. Odio’s apartment in September of 1963.”
¹⁵

Four days later, on September 20, Hall recanted his story, and the rest of his tale fell apart. However, the Warren Commission, having stopped the presses on September 16, was not about to stop them again. The Warren Commission did not call attention to the error.

There is a maneuver in rock climbing that only the most skillful can employ. It consists of using several tenuous grips in a quick continuous set of moves. Not one of the grips will support your hands or your feet for more than a moment, but in that interval you can gain a crucial few feet, and reach the next half-grip, then the next, until your momentum has carried you to a place where you can stop in safety. Let us give credit to a master. If J. Edgar Hoover did not have the body of such a rock climber, he had the mind.

On to Mexico. We may never learn definitively how much or how little Lee Harvey Oswald had to do with the visit to Sylvia Odio’s apartment, but there is new material available on what happened to him at the Russian Embassy in Mexico, and it comes from a book written by a KGB man who was on the premises.