Oswald's Tale (51 page)

It could have been calculated; it could have been honest panic. If he was giving or selling secrets to Japanese Communists, he might have been full of the fear of being found out. On guard duty in the dark in a strange land, it would not take a great deal of imagination to begin to feel that retribution was stealing up on him for his misdeeds.

Returned to Atsugi, with his outfit still in Taiwan, Oswald was soon transferred hundreds of miles south to an airbase at Iwakuni.

Epstein:
Owen Dejanovich, a tall, lanky native of Chicago who went on to play professional football, immediately recognized Oswald . . . as someone he had gone to radar school with at Keesler Air Base and tried to renew the acquaintanceship. He quickly found that Oswald had grown enormously bitter since he had last known him.

“He kept referring to the Marines at the center as ‘You Americans,’ as if he were some sort of foreigner simply observing what we were doing,” says Dejanovich. His tone was definitely accusatory. He spoke in slogans about “American imperialism” and “exploitation” . . .
²⁹

As Oswald would remark to reporters in Moscow in the fall of 1959, he had by October of 1958 decided to defect and become a citizen of the Soviet Union.

Of course, it is not quite so pat as that. Stationed in California for much of the intervening time, he would also think of going to Cuba and becoming one of Castro’s lieutenants.

7

The Man Who Would Take Over the Team

After his thirteen-month stint in Japan, Oswald was given a thirty-day leave and spent it with his mother at her small apartment in Fort Worth. Robert Oswald, newly married, took Lee out hunting with .22s for squirrel and rabbit—by all accounts, an uneventful leave.

Then, he reported to another Marine Air Control Squadron, MACS-9, in California at Santa Ana, near San Diego, and worked in still one more fenced-off radar bubble.

Epstein: . . .
unlike Atsugi, where occasional enemy planes strayed into the allied Air Defense Identification Zone, causing alerts to be sounded and intercept paths plotted on the board, little happened in California to break the tedium . . .
¹

Oswald, however, was busy trying to learn Russian. As we know from every report of his early lack of proficiency in Moscow, the conversational levels he attained in America had to be rudimentary, but he did study while at Santa Ana, California. Two months after his arrival, he took a Marine Corps proficiency examination and scored a plus 4 in reading Russian (that is, he had four more answers right than wrong) was a plus 3 in the writing of Russian, but in comprehension of spoken language was minus 5—all in all, a mediocre performance. It only seemed to inspire him to study further with a Russian-English dictionary. He also subscribed to a newspaper printed in Russian and to
People’s World,
which was put out by the Socialist Workers Party.

Epstein:
When astonished clerks in the mailroom reported the fact that Oswald was receiving this “leftist literature” to their operations officer, Captain Robert E. Block, he questioned Oswald [who] explained that he was only trying to indoctrinate himself in Russian theory in conformance with Marine Corps policy. Although not entirely convinced by Oswald’s answer, Block did not press the matter.
²

The lack of more serious inquiry by Captain Block and other Marine officers has been a cause of much suspicion after the fact. The likelihood, however, if one is to guess, is that Oswald was not being taken too seriously. Known already as a clown, he may have been doing his best to fortify such impressions.

From the affidavit of Richard Dennis Call to the Warren Commission:

During this time . . . many members of the unit kidded him about being a Russian spy; Oswald seemed to enjoy this sort of remark. At that time I had a phonograph record of Russian classical pieces entitled, “Russian Fireworks.” When I would play this record, Oswald would come over and say, “You called?” I had a chess set which contained red and white chessmen; Oswald always chose the red chessmen, making some remark to the effect that he preferred the “Red Army.” In connection with this general joking about Oswald’s interest in Russian, he was nicknamed “Oswaldskovich.”
³

From an affidavit to the Warren Commission from Mack Osborne:

I once asked Oswald why he did not go out in the evening like the other men. He replied that he was saving his money, [because] one day he would do something which would make him famous. In restrospect, it is my belief—although he said nothing to that effect—that he had his trip to Russia in mind when he made that statement . . .
⁴

He rarely moves in one direction, however, without exploring another. Cuba also appeals to him, and he proceeds to talk about it with a Puerto Rican—Corporal Nelson Delgado.

MR. DELGADO.
. . . we got along pretty well. He had trouble in one of the huts, and he got transferred to mine.

MR. LIEBELER.
Do you know what trouble he had in the other hut?

MR. DELGADO.
Well, the way I understand it, he wouldn’t hold his own. Came time for cleanup, and general cleanliness of the barracks, he didn’t want to participate, and he would be griping all the time. So the sergeant that was in charge of that hut asked to have him put out, you know. So consequently, they put him into my hut . . .

MR. LIEBELER.
Did you ever notice that he responded better if he were asked to do something instead of ordered to do something?

MR. DELGADO.
Right . . . that’s what worked with him. I never called him Lee or Harvey or Oswald. It was always Oz.

MR. LIEBELER.
Oz?

MR. DELGADO.
Ozzie. I would say, “Oz, how about taking care of the bathrooms today?” Fine, he would do it. But as far as somebody from the outside saying, “All right, Oswald, I want you to take and police up that area”—“Why? Why do I have to do it? Why are you always telling me to do it?” Well, it was an order, and he actually had to do it, but he didn’t understand it like that.
⁵

Liebeler brings the conversation back to Cuba, and reminds Delgado that he and Oswald had spoken of going there to fight for Castro in future battles now that Fidel had entered Havana.

MR. DELGADO.
. . . it just so happened that my leave coincided with the first of January, when Castro took over. So when I got back [Oswald] was the first one to see me, and he said, “Well, you took a leave and went there and helped them, and they all took over.” It was a big joke . . . We are dreaming now, right? . . . I speak Spanish and he’s got his ideas of how a government should be run . . . we could go over there and become officers and lead an expedition to some of these other islands and free them too . . .

MR. LIEBELER.
That is what you and Oswald talked about?

MR. DELGADO.
Right . . . how we would do away with Trujillo, and things like that, [but] he started making plans, he wanted to know, you know, how to get to Cuba . . . like how can a person in his category, an English person . . . be part of that revolution movement?

I told him, to begin with . . . the best way to be trusted is to know their language, know their customs, you know; so he started applying himself to Spanish, he started studying. He bought himself a dictionary, a Spanish-American dictionary. He would come to me and we would speak in Spanish. You know, not great sentences but enough. After a while he got to talk to me, you know, in Spanish.
⁶

That project goes nowhere. As the American media become more and more critical of Castro and his growing ties with the USSR, Delgado develops some second thoughts about endangering his future years in the military by such a move, and draws away from Oswald.

During this period in California, there are other assessments of Oswald. To the degree that he is preparing to defect to Russia, he seems to become proficient at work. One of the officers in his control center gives him good marks on the job.

MR. DONOVAN.
. . . Sometimes he surveilled for unidentified aircraft. Sometimes he surveilled for aircraft in distress. Sometimes he made plots on the board. Sometimes he relayed information to other radar sites of the Air Force or Navy. And sometimes he swept the floor when we were cleaning up and getting ready to go home. I found him competent in all functions.

Sometimes he was a little moody. But . . . in working with most people, as long as they do their job, if they are moody, that is their business . . . I have been on watch with him when an emergency arose, and in turning around and reporting it to the crew chief and to myself . . . he would tell you what the status of the emergency was . . . and what he thought the obvious action we should take . . . Then he waited for you to tell him what to do, and he did it, no matter what you told him.
⁷

Sometimes, they played chess together.

MR. DONOVAN.
. . . as a matter of fact, he was a pretty good player. I won the base championship that year in chess. I know that on occasion he beat me. That was not a very big base. But he and I were comparable players.
⁸

His relation with Lieutenant Donovan warmed up to the point where they would enter discussions during quiet times on duty.

MR. DONOVAN.
. . . His bond with me was that I was a recent graduate of the Foreign Service School, at least fairly well acquainted with situations throughout the world. And he would take great pride in his ability to mention not only the leader of a country, but five or six subordinates in that country who held positions of prominence. He took great pride in talking to a passing officer coming in or out of the radar center, and in a most interested manner, ask him what he thought of a given situation, listen to that officer’s explanation, and say, “Thank you very much.”

As soon as we were alone again, he would say, “Do you agree with that?”

In many cases it was obvious that the officer had no more idea about that than he did about . . . polo matches in Australia.

And Oswald would then say, “Now, if men like that are leading us, there is something wrong—when I obviously have more intelligence and more knowledge than that man.”

And I think his grave misunderstanding that I tried to help him with is that these men were Marine officers and supposed to be schooled in the field of warfare as the Marine Corps knows it, and not as international political analysts . . .
⁹

Donovan also coached the squadron team in touch football. Oswald tried out for end.

MR. ELY.
Was Oswald a proficient football player?

MR. DONOVAN.
No; . . . I think the boy only weighed about 125, 130 pounds, as I remember. He had a slender build.

MR. ELY.
Would you say, however, that he was normal in terms of speed and agility?

MR. DONOVAN.
Oh, yes; he was fast enough.

MR. ELY.
So would you characterize him as athletic, but too light to be a really good football player?

MR. DONOVAN.
I don’t think he would ever make first string high school in a good high school. [On the other hand] he often tried to make calls in the huddle—for better or for worse, again, I should say, a quarterback is in charge of the team and should make the calls. A quarterback did. And I don’t know if [Oswald] quit or I kicked him off. But, at any rate, he stopped playing.
¹⁰

If he will always pretend to be as cool as the injunctions of reason itself, his emotions, on the rare occasions that he permits them to show, suggest other states of feeling.

We obtain some insight from the testimony of Kerry Thornley, who was one of the brightest Marines on the base.

Thornley was neither bewildered nor particularly impressed by Oswald’s presence, but then Thornley may have been Lee’s equal as a maverick in the service, since he subscribed to I. F. Stone’s newsletter. In those days, by leatherneck standards, that was a Red sheet right next to
The Worker.

MR. THORNLEY.
My first memory of him is that one afternoon he was sitting on a bucket out in front of a hut, with some other Marines. They were discussing religion. I entered the discussion. It was known already in the outfit that I was an atheist. Immediately somebody pointed out to me that Oswald was also an atheist . . .

MR. JENNER.
What reaction did he have to that?

MR. THORNLEY.
. . . he wasn’t offended by this at all . . . he said to me with his little grin . . . “What do you think of communism?” And I replied that I didn’t think too much of communism in a favorable sense, and he said, “Well, I think the best religion is communism.” And I got the impression at the time that he said this in order to shock. He was playing to the galleries, I felt.

MR. JENNER.
The boys who were sitting around?

MR. THORNLEY.
Yes, sir . . . He was smirking as he said this and he said it very gently. He didn’t seem to be a glass-eyed fanatic by any means.
¹¹

Soon enough, Albert Jenner becomes interested in Thornley’s opinions on many a matter:

MR. JENNER.
What habits did he have with respect to his person—was he neat, clean?

MR. THORNLEY.
Extremely sloppy.

MR. JENNER.
Extremely sloppy?

MR. THORNLEY.
He was. This, I think, might not have been true of him in civilian life [but] it fitted into a general personality pattern of his: to do whatever was not wanted of him, a recalcitrant trend in his personality. [Oswald would] go out of his way to get into trouble, get some officer or staff sergeant mad at him. He would make wise remarks. He had a general bitter attitude toward the Corps. He used to pull his hat down over his eyes . . . and you got the impression he was doing this so he wouldn’t have to look at anything around him.

MR. JENNER.
. . . so he would not be assigned additional work or—

MR. THORNLEY.
No . . . this was just an attempt, I think, on his part, to blot out the military . . . he made a comment to that effect at one time; that . . . he didn’t like what he had to look at . . .