By Andy Ford
Last month saw the sixtieth anniversary of the assassination of US President, John F Kennedy, in Dallas Texas. The local police and then the FBI, and finally the Warren Commission, not to mention the whole of the mainstream media, pointed the finger of guilt at one man, Lee Harvey Oswald. In this second article on the anniversary, Andy Ford looks at Oswald’s suspicious life history.
Over the years since, the US government and the mainstream US media have spent a huge amount of ink in painting Oswald as a ‘lone nut’ who somehow decided to kill the most powerful man in the world for no particular reason, just to “go down in history”. It didn’t really make sense, so they had to drag in all the pseudo-Freudian psychology in vogue at the time, to paint him as a disturbed and artful loner, who also happened to be a crack shot, and who suddenly saw his opportunity.
But painstaking research over the intervening 60 years, mainly by amateurs, has uncovered the real Oswald. It is an intriguing story, which shows linkages with the sinister world of US intelligence and Cold War spying, domestic and foreign, at almost every turn. What we are left with, is a huge amount of peripheral clues, but a missing central narrative, due to destroyed or withheld files and ‘lost evidence’.
Anti-communist paranoia in New York
Oswald was born in the south, New Orleans, in October 1939 to Marguerite Oswald, the widow of insurance salesman Robert Oswald. She had previously been briefly married to a shipping clerk, John Pic, and after the death of her second husband Robert Oswald (two months before Lee’s birth), she had married Edwin Ekdahl, an American of Danish Lutheran background, who was employed by a military contractor. She divorced him in 1948, reverting to her previous name of Oswald but for Lee, who never knew Robert Oswald, Edwin Ekdahl was the closest to a father he ever had.
In 1952 Lee’s mother moved to New York “to be near family”, which would mean her eldest son John Pic, but also near to where her ex-husband Edwin Ekdalhl was living. John Pic was enrolled in the US Coastguard Port Security Unite (PSU), tasked with “eliminating risks from suspected communist merchant seamen and waterfront workers”.
To this end the PSU worked with the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) and the FBI, running networks of informants in the Port of New York and dismissing port workers from their jobs on mere suspicion or anonymous denunciation. In 2002, it was admitted that the information was usually not checked and that most of those sacked were innocent.
Edwin Ekdahl’s Lutheran connections may have helped Lee enrol in a Lutheran school, even though not resident in the area. The Oswalds arrived in New York just as its education system was in the grip of a full on red scare and anti-communist witch hunt, co-ordinated by a Danish-Lutheran teacher, William Jansen, who was New York superintendent of schools from 1947 to 1958.
Teachers witch-hunted out of schools
Under the New York ‘Feinberg Law’, teachers could be disciplined or dismissed for being “seditious or treasonous”. In April 1950, industrial action by teachers had led to student demonstrations of up to 20,000 at the mayor’s office. The authorities’ response was another witch hunt – eight teachers were suspended without pay as suspected ‘Communists’, and a scare was got up about “5,000 teenage dope addicts”.
The State Attorney-General called for student vigilante squads to be formed and for the police to “declare war” on dope pushers and subversives, and Jansen ordered teachers to report on any suspicious conduct by students. This developed into an organised clean-out of alleged Communists from the ranks of New York’s teachers.
Lists of names were collected off nominating petitions, car number plates were recorded at left-wing rallies and an informant network was set up, based on teachers, trade union officials, undercover police – and maybe students. Of 447 teachers questioned, 38 were sacked, and 238 ‘chose to leave’. There was one documented suicide. Resignations meant no need to present evidence and protected the identities of the informants.
Both Jansen, the witch hunter, and Ekdahl, Lee Harvey Oswald’s adoptive father, were of good standing in the Lutheran Church in the Bronx and both were involved in the American Missions organisation. It is very likely they knew each other, which might explain young Lee’s sudden change of behaviour.
In January 1953, the Oswalds moved again within New York and Lee was enrolled in Public School 44. He was noted as very intelligent, but with deficient hearing. He passed all his 7th grade exams, was rated “satisfactory” for conduct and outstanding in social participation, in contradiction to the laborious exposition of the Warren Report of Oswald as a ‘loner’.
However, from March 1953 “excessive absence” from school was noted. He was 13 years old, the age at which a juvenile could be taken on as an informer. With his military family, southern background and Lutheran connections, Lee would have been a prime candidate for such work. For the first time, we see Oswald’s apparently contradictory actions.
Oswald’s unexplained absences from school
At school, he very ostentatiously refused to salute the US flag, but at home he addressed the black house keeper with “Hey Nigger”. And just as in his later life, his apparent ‘seditious or treasonous’ action was treated as of no significance – in a school system run on red-scare paranoia and suspicion. No-one knows what Lee did during his absences from school, except for the famous picture taken at Bronx Zoo, just before Lee called the School Attendance Officer a “Dammed Yankee”.
It is at least possible that through his adopted father, he was involved in the New York schools witch hunt, his first brush with undercover work. Lee’s brother testified that at this time Lee’s favourite TV programme was “I Led Three Lives”, which was a series about how an advertising executive infiltrated the Communist Party to feed information back to the FBI in order to foil dastardly communist plots – like using modified vacuum cleaners to sabotage the US missile fleet.
By November, Lee was back in school as a model student, even being elected class president. But too late – he was now caught up in the New York youth justice system as a ‘persistent truant’, looking at a stretch at a Corrective Farm. Marguerite Oswald left town and went back south; strangely no-one followed up on Lee and his ‘anti-social tendencies’.
Lee may or may not have been an informant for Jansen’s anti-union and anti-communist witch hunt, but the evidence is suggestive. And even if he wasn’t, being exposed to such a carnival of right-wing propaganda would have made quite an impression.
New Orleans and the Civil Air Patrol
The Oswalds turned up without notice at Marguerite’s sister’s house in New Orleans in January 1954, telling her that she had got legal advice “To get out of New York City as fast as she could with this boy”. Lee entered Beauregard High School and also in July 1955, he enrolled in the Civil Air Patrol (CAP).
The CAP was ignored as much as possible by the Warren Commission and presented as a sort of Boy Scouts, but the reality is far more sinister. It was set up as a civilian adjunct to the US Air Force in 1941 after Pearl Harbour, and in 1946 became an official auxiliary of the USAF. A 1948 newspaper article, basing itself on a press release from the Pennsylvania CAP described the CAP as a “Loyalty Police” with “Overtones of a strong-arm squad for American industry”.
Recruits were to be sent to an Army counter-intelligence school in Baltimore. One Colonel Neuweiler was quoted as saying that industrialists should “enlist at least one man in their firm into the CAP” and to get them to organise reporting of any employees “known to have Communistic leanings” and to support the CAP financially. David Harold Byrd, owner of the Texas Book Depository, was a senior member of the CAP with responsibility for Louisiana and Texas from 1948 onwards.
Another member of the CAP was David Ferrie, who was later a suspect in the Garrison investigation of an alleged conspiracy to assassinate JFK. Ferrie was a gifted pilot, but also the holder of extreme right wing views who seems to have used the CAP to influence young men politically, but also to exploit them sexually. He had to leave his first CAP unit after he took a group of CAP cadets to a brothel.
Later, in 1951, he became a pilot with Eastern Airlines based in New Orleans and at the same time he became an instructor with the New Orleans CAP. In 1955 he failed to be reappointed after complaints from some of the cadets’ parents, and then transferred to a different squadron, but this was also terminated after a year.
He was readmitted to the New Orleans squadron in 1958, but told to leave again in 1960. Thereafter he set up own “unofficial” squadron, but somehow was still allowed to operate out of CAP premises in Moisant Airport, New Orleans. In August 1960 a cadet’s mother, Mrs Barrrett, complained that her 14 year old son had been influenced to join a secret anti-subversion organisation, and to swear allegiance and obedience to “Dr Ferrie”.
Oswald’s associate known to have worked for the Mafia
In 1968 a Marine who as a boy had been in the CAP with Ferrie, testified that he had been used by him as a messenger and delivery boy for the anti-Castro ‘Cuban Democratic Revolutionary Front’ around New Orleans. Lee, from November 10 1955, was also employed as a ‘messenger’ around the Port of New Orleans by a shipping firm tied to anti-Castro organisations.
Ferrie is known to have worked with and for the Mafia, anti-Castro Cubans and for US intelligence operative Guy Banister. And when Ferrie was dismissed by Eastern Airlines on ‘morals charges’ (ie homosexuality), it was Guy Banister who appeared as his character witness.
Marguerite Oswald, Lee’s mother, testified before the Warren Commission that she came home one day to find a ‘Marine recruiting officer’ trying to get Lee to enlist in the Marines aged 16, which was underage. This was probably Ferrie, as this occurred right after a CAP meeting.
Just after his sixteenth birthday, Lee did indeed try to enrol in the Marines after being advised by the ‘recruiting officer’ how to falsify his birth record. Marguerite played along, but ensured that the deception was discovered, and the enlistment failed.
From the shipping company, Lee moved to be a messenger for a dental lab in February 1956. It was a perfectly normal job, but Lee’s behaviour had odd aspects. He stated an intention to join the Communist Party of the USA and asked a fellow employee, Palmer McBride, to do so with him. And when McBride took him to an astronomy club he told the club members that he was looking for a Communist organisation “if he could find one”.
But there is no evidence that he ever did such a thing or tried to. It looks very much like a provocateur trying to trap others into confessing to “communist sympathies” so they could be reported to the CAP. And after Lee moved to Fort Worth, Texas, he wrote to McBride describing how he had been involved in a violent right-wing protest against schools integration in September 1956.
Just one month later, in October 1956, he wrote to the Socialist Party of America to find a branch in his area. This was a mere 15 days before he actually joined the Marines! The pattern of contradictory behaviour used by the Warren Commission to tar Oswald as a ‘lone nut’ is already apparent by the time of his seventeenth birthday. But an alternative explanation is that he was being used in various undercover operations directed against left-wing and socialist groupings, real or imagined. The oddities of his recorded behaviour make perfect sense, viewed from this angle.
On October 24 1956 Lee Harvey Oswald signed the Loyalty Certificate of the Armed Forces, as required of all Marine recruits. The Socialist Party of America was specifically listed as a subversive organisation. In the paranoia of the times recruits were supposed to have background checks of school records and contact with ‘subversive organisations’. This does not appear to have been done.
Oswald in the US Marine Corps
In his Marine training, Oswald proved only a mediocre shot, barely qualifying as ‘sharpshooter’ the middle rank of the three awarded to Marines. This was after hours of practice and instruction. Oswald was deployed to Japan after his Marine training, working as a radar operator at the Atsugi naval base, home to the top secret U2 spy plane.
During his Marine service, Oswald began to avow support for Castro and Moscow, learn Russian and receive a Russian newspaper on a regular basis. All this happened without provoking any investigation by the Marine Corps, the most rabidly anti-Communist wing of the US military. Again, we see the same curious lack of official interest in Oswald’s ‘subversive actions’.
On August 7, 1959, Oswald applied for a hardship discharge from the Marines as his mother – he said – had injured herself at work. He also applied for a passport, stating an intention to visit Cuba and the USSR! The passport was ‘routinely issued’ in time for an honourable discharge from the military. He only stayed with his mother for 2 days – her injury consisted of a chocolate box hitting her on the nose.
He withdrew all $203 from his only known bank account and bought a ticket for Europe on a freighter for $220. Just before leaving the Marines, he had told a fellow Marine, David Bucknell, that he was going to leave the Marines and go to Russia “on a top secret mission that would make him a hero”. He left the US by ship on September 20, 1959.
A Marine colleague, James Botelho, later said that he thought it was strange that the investigation into the ‘defection’, one of only two ever by a US Marine, was extremely lackadaisical. He had concluded that Oswald was “on a mission”. Botelho said that the Oswald he knew was extremely anti-Communist. The Department of Defence destroyed Oswald’s military files in1973 as “a matter of routine”.
The ‘defection’ that counted for little
Lee Harvey Oswald reached the Soviet Union on October 16, 1959. He was 19, and about to turn 20. He had arrived in England on October 9, yet checked into his hotel in Helsinki by midnight the next day. Using scheduled flights this was impossible and there is no record of him flying anywhere, raising suspicion that he was taken on a military flight.
In Helsinki he stayed in the two most expensive hotels in town. How? His visa to visit Russia was granted in two days instead of the usual two weeks. Two weeks after arriving in Moscow, Oswald walked into the American embassy announcing a wish to renounce his US citizenship.
Miraculously, an American press correspondent appeared soon after to broadcast the news. If he had succeeded, it would have been a near irrevocable step, with no easy way back. But the embassy refused “Because it was a Saturday”, and the Consular official, John VcVicar, stated that Oswald “seemed to be following instruction… from persons unknown”.
Then, when he wrote a letter repeating his renunciation, it was refused – as he was “not there in person”. This meant that Oswald retained the option to return. After being hospitalised following a suicide attempt (in protest at his defection not being accepted) and giving an interview to Priscilla Johnson, a journalist used by the CIA, Oswald disappeared for six weeks.
To this day no-one knows what he did, or where he was, between November 16 and December 29, 1959, although his “Historic Diary” says that he stayed alone in a hotel, learning Russian from a book. After that date, the Soviets shipped him out to Minsk with a flat and an allowance. They appear to have never treated his defection seriously, as they never granted him Soviet citizenship.
But neither did Oswald. When his Marine discharge was changed to ‘Dishonourable’ in view of his defection, he wrote to the Secretary of the Navy, protesting, “I have and always had the full sanction of the US Embassy in Moscow, USSR, and hence the US government”.
American U2 spy-plane shot down over the USSR
As for that government – didn’t take it seriously either. Oswald was one of only two Marines to ever defect to the Soviets, and yet he had no problem with his citizenship, he was never prosecuted or even seriously investigated, and they even paid his fare home. And yet his old Commanding Officer, Lieutenant Donovan, gave a press interview where he described how all the codes at Atsugi relating to the U2 were changed, which took hundreds of man-hours.
Six months after Oswald defected, a U2 spy plane was shot down near Sverdlovsk, central Russia. This happened just two weeks before a meeting between President Eisenhower and Soviet leader Khrushchev, arranged to discuss easing tensions; the crash ruined the talks. The pilot, Gary Powers, was captured and he himself later said that maybe Oswald’s defection had something to do with his crash and capture. Could a faction of US intelligence have arranged the whole thing to prevent any progress towards disarmament?
Back home, some other wierd events were taking place. On January 20, 1960 someone using Oswald’s identity purchased some trucks for the use of a Cuban group, “The Friends of Democratic Cuba”, who were working very closely, or run by, Guy Banister, who later employed David Ferrie (and also Lee Harvey Oswald) in New Orleans.
This was in the build up to the later Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, sponsored by the CIA and ending in a fiasco. Following this incident, on June 3, 1960, J Edgar Hoover issued a notice to warn FBI agents that “There is a possibility that an imposter is using Oswald’s birth certificate” and his mother went to Washington, convinced that her son was following orders from the US government.
This took place in January 1961. She met with the White House Soviet Affairs Officer and a week later the Moscow Embassy was ordered to locate Oswald. He then wrote to them, February 13 1961, asking to return home. In a further bombshell, he calmly announced he now had a Russian wife and needed to bring her back to the US as well.
The government assisted Oswald’s return to the USA
The embassy acknowledged that Oswald had not actually renounced his US citizenship and recommended that he and his wife, Marina, be accepted for return. In July 1961, Oswald convinced them that he had shared no secrets with the Russians, and after that the US State Department pressured the Immigration Service to waive any objections. They then issued him with a 30-day passport and $435 dollars to come back home.
Somehow, he had repaid this by January 1963. The couple arrived back in the US by ship on June 13 1962. Over the years, Marina herself became increasingly convinced that Oswald was some kind of US government agent. How else to explain how easily he went to, and returned from, the USSR, at the height of the Cold War and how, despite the secret information he took to the Soviet Union, he faced no sanctions at all. Far from it, he was given every assistance.
All the indications are that Lee Harvey Oswald was a low level operator, contact or agent of a US government intelligence agency – whether the FBI, the CIA or the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). He may have begun his journey in the midst of the New York schools anti-communist witch hunt, or maybe his truancy was just due to being bullied: a new kid in school with an unusual accent and clothes.
But by the time of his membership of the CAP in New Orleans, the signs are clear. In the Marines it very much looks like his undercover work continued, maybe through the ONI, leading up to the ‘defection’ to the USSR. The way the defection, and more clearly, the return, were handled by the US authorities, is a dead giveaway of some sort of false defection, maybe to scupper disarmament talks, or perhaps just to gather general intelligence.
His “Historic Diary”, written shortly after his return from Soviet Russia, does read very much like the report of an agent on daily life on Stalinist Russia. But as so often with Lee Harvey Oswald, the “Historic Diary” is open to question. A significant number of researchers identify it as an elaborate forgery, although most, including the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HCSA), accept expert views that it was indeed written by Oswald.
On his return from the Soviet Union, in June 1962, an even more suspicious pattern of events followed Lee Harvey Oswald’s every move (which would need a further article). Just seventeen months later, In November 1963, he was publicly identified and charged as the assassin of President Kennedy, and two days after that, he was shot by Jack Ruby, a long-standing Mafia operative, and close contact of the Dallas Police Force. Silenced forever.
An earlier introductor article to this one, Sixty years on: Lee Harvey Oswald, the impossible assassin, can be found here.
