Oswald and the CIA: The Documented Truth About the Unknown Relationship Between the U.S. Government and the Alleged Killer of JFK (43 page)

The above was not all of Oswald's mail activity. But it led to actions by the post office which Oswald protested. He had to execute a post office Form 2153-X, instructing them to "always" deliver foreign propaganda mailings. He added this comment to the form: "I protest this intimidation."" Oswald had more than paper delivered to his P.O. box. In January 1963, the February issue of American Rifleman had a coupon that Oswald used to order the alleged assassination rifle.72 He filled it out using the name of "A.J. Hidell," and Post Office Box 2915, Dallas." He also ordered the pistol that was allegedly used to murder Dallas policeman J. D. Tippit. He originally indicated he wanted to order a holster and ammunition, but he scratched out this part before mailing the coupon."

By March it was time for Hosty's first talk with Marina. Hosty had only just learned on March 4 of Oswald's apartment at 602 Elsbeth, Dallas.75 On March 10, Hosty visited Mrs. M. F. Tobias, the apartment manager.76 Oswald had moved to 214 West Neeley Street on March 3, Tobias told the FBI. This was only a week after Oswald had made the move, so Hosty had not wasted time finding out they had moved. Hosty then recommended that Oswald's case be reopened, which it was on March 26.77 The reason for reopening the file was because "of Oswald's newly opened subscription to the Communist newspaper," the Worker.78

On the previous occasion that the Dallas FBI office had learned of Oswald's subscription to the Worker (October 1962), they had closed his file. Now the same event was the stated reason for opening it again. This makes little sense. In fact, this reopening had a caveat. "Agent Hosty, deciding that the apparently tense Oswald domestic situation would not be conducive to a proper interview," Kelley explained, "jotted a note in his file to come back in fortyfive to sixty days."7° By that time, Oswald had skipped town.

A Castro Placard Around Oswald's Neck

In the first three months of 1963, Oswald's mail activity remained steady and his particular diet of literature resembled that of the previous fall. Oswald received the January 21, 1963, issue of The Militant by January 24,.80 Oswald received the March 11 issue of The Militant by March 14.81 On March 27 or 28, 1963, Oswald received the March 24 issue of The Daily Worker.82 On February 20, 1963, Oswald wrote to the Communist Party headquarters, New York, requesting information and asking to subscribe to two newspapers, the Worker and The Militant.83

On March 24, 1963, Oswald wrote to the Socialist Workers Party. Their copy of the letter and an enclosed newspaper clipping Oswald sent have been lost.14 On March 27, 1963, the Socialist Workers Party wrote back to Oswald, at his P.O. Box 2915 address. The Socialist Workers Party cannot find this correspondence either.85 According to the FBI, by this time the FBI Dallas office had finally decided to look into Oswald again, reopening his file on March 26. It was too late, however, as Oswald had less than a month left in Dallas. On March 31, 1963, Marina took photographs of Oswald in their backyard. He was holding a copy of The Militant' and the Worker in one hand,87 and the rifle alleged to have later killed the president in the other."

Meanwhile, Oswald had one more important composition to mail, one that was destined to become a catalyst in Oswald's CIA files. On April 18, 1963, Oswald wrote to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee New York office. At the end of the summer, the contents of this letter would finally land in Oswald's CIA files. In the April 18 letter, Oswald said that he had passed out FPCC literature on the street the day before, and he asked for more copies. The fact that Oswald used his Dallas address raises the possibility he may not have made final plans to move to New Orleans until the end: he left on April 24.89 On April 19, 1963, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee New York office sent Oswald more literature.90

Like the CIA, the FBI had a mail-reading capability of its own, and Oswald's correspondence would shortly generate a flurry of reporting on his activities by the New York office of the FBI. On April 6, 1963, Oswald lost his job at Jaggers-Chiles-Stoval because he could not do the work or get along with his coworkers. It is difficult to judge when Oswald began planning to move to New Orleans.91 Three days before his departure, the FBI intercepted Oswald's letter to the FPCC describing his public FPCC activities' The letter, which Oswald sent via air mail, was postmarked April 18.9J According to FBI records, on April 21, 1963, Dallas confidential informant "T-2" reported this letter to the FPCC, in which Oswald said he had passed out FPCC pamphlets in Dallas with a placard around his neck reading HANDS OFF CUBA, VIVA FIDEL.94 Actually, this Dallas T-2 source on Oswald was really a New York FBI source-NY-3245-S-as can be seen from newly released JFK files.91 Similarly, an earlier Dallas T-1 source who had spied on Oswald's letters to the Worker also turned out to be a New York source, NY-2354-S.96

The Warren Commission questioned the FBI about the April letter and its contents, asking, "Is this information correct as the date indicated and does it describe activities before Oswald's move to New Orleans?" The FBI's answer was vague, slippery, and paltry: "Our informant did not know Oswald personally and could furnish no further information. Our investigation had not disclosed such activity on Oswald's part prior to this type of activity in New Orleans."97

Special Agent Hosty, who barely expanded on this in his testimony to the commission on the Oswald placard-around-his-neck letter, added his disbelief of the story. Hosty explained: "We had received no information to the effect that anyone had been in the downtown streets of Dallas or anywhere in Dallas with a sign around their neck saying `hands off Cuba, viva Fidel.' " Thus Hosty links his belief to negative intelligence, i.e., no reports had come to their attention on Oswald, and Hosty was confident that the Dallas FBI had adequate surveillance and reporting mechanisms tight enough to catch any activity as flagrant and provocative as this. "It appeared highly unlikely to me," Hosty testified, "that such an occurrence could have happened in Dallas without having been brought to our attention."98

Hosty's argument suggests that Oswald made a false claim-apparently to impress the FPCC-that failed to fool the Dallas office of the FBI. If Hosty is correct, we should be impressed, not only with the Dallas FBI office's knowledge of what Oswald was doing, but also with their ability to figure out what he was not doing. As we have already seen, however, the performance of the Dallas FBI office was lackluster at best, where keeping track of Oswald was concerned.

Whether Oswald had stood on a street corner or not, important undercover FBI assets in New York were in motion against the FPCC during the time or shortly after Oswald wrote the letter. As we already know, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee was the subject for intense FBI and CIA interest and counterintelligence operations. A major FBI Chicago office investigation of the FPCC appeared on March 8, four days before Oswald ordered the rifle from Chicago. This study was transmitted to the CIA.90 By picking such an organization to correspond with and carrying out actions on its behalf, Oswald-by default or by design-had insinuated himself into the gray world of the watchers and the watched.

George deMohrenschildt and the CIA

In any discussion of Oswald in Dallas the name George deMohrenschildt arises because of the help he gave the Oswald family and his likely contacts with the CIA. DeMohrenschildt, to whose Dallas home the Oswalds made many visits,100 was a petroleum geologist. His travels overseas made him knowledgeable about the affairs of countries in which the CIA was interested. When introduced to Oswald in the fall of 1962 by a friend,10' deMohrenschildt asked, "Do you think it is safe for us to help Oswald?" DeMohrenschildt told the Warren Commission he worried that "Oswald could be anything" because he had been to the Soviet Union, and that another Dallas resident had refused to meet the Oswalds.102 After checking with FBI contacts,103 deMohrenschildt says he concluded, "Well, this guy seems to be OK." 104

One of the people deMohrenschildt checked with was J. Walton Moore. Moore was not in the FBI. He was the Dallas CIA Domestic Contacts Service chief at the time. In his testimony to the Warren Commission, deMohrenschildt described Moore in these words:

Walter [sic] Moore is the man who interviewed me on behalf of the Government after I came back from Yugoslavia.... He is a Government man-either FBI or Central Intelligence. A very nice fellow, exceedingly intelligent who is, as far as I know-was some sort of an FBI man in Dallas. Many people consider him the head of the FBI in Dallas. Now, I don't know. Who doesyou see. But he is a government man in some capacity. He interviewed me and took my deposition on my stay in Yugoslavia, what I thought about the political situation there. And we became quite friendly after that. We saw each other from time to time, had lunch. There was a mutual interest there, because I think he was born in China and my wife was born in China. They had been to our house once or twice. I just found him a very interesting person.'os

J. Gordon Shanklin was the head of the Dallas FBI office, and it is likely that deMohrenschildt knew that Moore was CIA. The point is that the Agency's Domestic Contacts person in Dallas was in frequent contact with deMohrenschildt during the period that he was helping Oswald.

Could deMohrenschildt have been a CIA "control" for Oswald, with Moore as the reporting channel? Almost certainly not in the traditional sense, unless Moore worked in more than the Domestic Contacts division, whose mission was routine contacts and debriefings. For his part, deMohrenschildt explicitly denied that Oswald would have been suited for intelligence work. "I never would believe that any government would be stupid enough to trust Lee with anything important," deMohrenschildt testified, "even the government of Ghana would not give him any job of any type."106 Of course this judgment would be untrustworthy if Moore and deMohrenschildt were pawns in a plot to murder the president, a highly circumstantial and speculative possibility at best.

Most of the deMohrenschildt's contact with Oswald took place during the six-month period when the FBI closed its books on himfrom October 1962 through March 1963. Wading through the morass of Oswald's personal relationships in Dallas in search of the deMohrenschildt story is outside the scope of this work. Several new works on Oswald presumably will add much to what we already know about this story. As previously stated, ours is a study focused not on Oswald "the person" but on Oswald "the file"-especially his CIA files. In that regard, looking for an operational CIA channel for deMohrenschildt is clearly in order. Before moving on, therefore, we must pose this question: Did deMohrenschildt have other contacts with the CIA?

"Yes, I knew George," says Nicholas M. Anikeeff. "From young manhood before World War II, back in the 30s, we were close friends." In a recent interview, Mr. Anikeeff acknowledged not only his close and continuous friendship with deMohrenschildt, but also his former employment with the CIA. Anikeeff, however, stubbornly refused to disclose what part of the Agency he had worked for, even when told it is publicly known. His reticence may be explainable by the traditional Agency intransigeance to reveal anything about its internal structure. But such resistence today simply raises our antennae.

"Yes, I believe I saw him," Anikeeff says of deMohrenschildt, "in the spring of 1963." That would have been during deMohrenschildt's travel to Washington, D.C., a stopover on his way to relocation in Haiti, where prospective business deals awaited him. Researchers have often wondered if deMohrenschildt called on someone from the Agency during this visit to Washington, and now we know that he did. Anikeeff, however, maintains that Oswald's name did not come up in the discussions. "I don't recall any specific instance of speaking with deMohrenschildt about Oswald prior to the assassination," Anikeeff insists. "Yes, I talked with deMohrenschildt," he concedes, "and may have spoken with him about Oswald." However, Anikeeff is adamant that he "never had said anything to the Agency" about these discussions.

Who was Nicholas Anikeeff? During the early 1950s, when the CIA dispatched two groups of Lithuanian infiltrators into Poland, Anikeeff was intimately involved. Tom Bower's study of the KGB and British intelligence, The Red Web, contains this interesting detail:

In preparing both operations, the CIA case officer Mike Anikeeff had liased in detail with the Reinhard Gehlen group which would become West Germany's foreign intelligence service and was sure that security was perfect. Yet the landings ended in swift disaster.107

Similarly, David Wise's Invisible Government names the chain of command for a CIA employee, John Torpats, who had become em broiled in a controversy after being fired by Allen Dulles. From the top down: Frank Wisner (the DDP), Richard Helms (the A/DDP), John Maury (chief of the Soviet Russia Division), and "N. M. Anikeeff." It would appear that Anikeeff was a branch chief in the Soviet Russia Division.

That deMohrenschildt had a close contact in the Soviet Russia Division of 1962-1963 is newsworthy. It does not, however, prove that Oswald or deMohrenschildt worked for the Agency or that deMohrenschildt was reporting to Anikeeff about Oswald's activities. For the time being, we will add this to the already large and growing pile of interesting coincidences in this case.

The Duran-Lechuga Affair

In the fall of 1962, a scandalous affair took place in Mexico City that bears on Oswald's visit there in September-October 1963. That visit, including the allegation that Oswald had sex with a married Mexican woman, is the subject of Chapter Eighteen. For now we consider what happened after the Cuban ambassador's wife decided not to return to Cuba in 1962. Intelligence acquired through very sensitive channels suggests that the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City resorted to an unusual measure to keep the ambassador "on the revolutionary path." The embassy used the sexual services of two young women to turn the ambassador against his wife. One of these women, Silvia Duran, is the same woman Oswald was later alleged to have had an affair with.