Reclaiming History (35 page)

Although Hosty and Revill, a thirty-four-year-old veteran of the Dallas police narcotics unit who was recently promoted to head the intelligence unit, have disagreed and clashed a number of times over politics and police work, they have remained friends.
⁶²¹
Revill tells Hosty he’s got a “hot lead” on the Kennedy killing, an unaccounted-for employee at the Texas School Book Depository named Lee. Why Revill only knew Oswald’s first name when the full name of the unaccounted-for employee (Oswald) was known from the very beginning is not known. But in the frenetic exchange of information in these first minutes of the investigation, incomplete (and, indeed, incorrect) information was the norm.

“Jack, the Lee you’re talking about is Lee Harvey Oswald,” Hosty blurts out. “He was arrested an hour ago for shooting Officer Tippit. He defected to Russia and returned to the U.S. a year ago. Oswald is the prime suspect in the Kennedy assassination.”
⁶²²

A look of doubt crosses Revill’s face. Revill, a conservative who saw Kennedy as being soft on Communism, can’t believe what he’s hearing, particularly that a Communist, of all people, had killed the president. Revill explodes as they get on the elevator that will take them to the third floor. “Jim, if you
knew
all this [about Oswald’s background], why the hell didn’t you tell us?”

“I couldn’t,” Hosty replies, referring to the bureau’s long-standing need-to-know policy regarding espionage cases, in which local police were not considered by the FBI to be in the need-to-know group.
⁶²³

The third-floor hallway is in an uproar. Cameramen and reporters are crammed everywhere. The giant television cameras of the era are trained on newsmen as they broadcast live reports. Flashbulbs are going off continuously and people are moving quickly in opposite directions, bumping into each other. It’s a three-ring circus without a ringmaster.

The elevator doors open and Agent Hosty and Lieutenant Revill wade into the chaos and make their way toward room 317—Homicide and Robbery Bureau. As they push their way inside, they find that Captain Fritz is in his private office, behind closed doors. Revill leads Hosty into Lieutenant T. P. Wells’s office across the hall from Fritz’s private door, introduces Hosty to Wells, and leaves. FBI agent James Bookhout is already in Wells’s office when Hosty arrives.
⁶²⁴

2:58 p.m.

In Oak Cliff, Detectives Senkel and Potts and Lieutenant Cunningham bang on the door at 1026 North Beckley. The housekeeper, Mrs. Earlene Roberts, answers the door and invites the officers inside, where they meet the landlady and her husband, Mr. and Mrs. Arthur C. Johnson. The officers ask if they have a boarder registered under the name of Lee Harvey Oswald or A. J. Hidell.

“No,” none of them had heard of either name.

The officers ask to see the register. Earlene Roberts gets out the book and opens it on the table as Mrs. Johnson tells them that she has seventeen rooms and sixteen boarders at the moment. The officers quickly run down the list of names in the register. Neither name is listed. They run through the listings again, this time more carefully. Nothing. There is no record of either Oswald or Hidell.

“Can I use your telephone?” Detective Senkel asks.

“Sure,” Mrs. Johnson replies. The housekeeper leads him to a hall phone.

“What’s he look like?” Mrs. Johnson asks one of the other officers. He describes the man they have in custody.

“I do have two new tenants that fit that description,” Mrs. Johnson says. “Their rooms are around back, in the basement. Let me get the key.”
⁶²⁵

3:00 p.m.

A telephone rings inside the homicide office. Lieutenant T. L. Baker answers. It’s Detective Senkel out on North Beckley.

“There’s no one registered out here as either Oswald or Hidell,” Senkel tells him.

“Maybe it’s under a different name,” Baker says.

“She’s got sixteen boarders here,” Senkel replies.

“Sit tight, I’ll get someone out there with a search warrant,” Baker orders.
⁶²⁶

At the rooming house, Mrs. Johnson returns with a key to the basement rooms and offers to let the police look if they want. Mrs. Roberts and Mrs. Johnson lead the officers out the back door toward a separate entrance to the basement. Meanwhile, in the living room, Mr. Johnson is watching television coverage of the assassination when the screen flashes the image of Lee Harvey Oswald.

“Hey!” he hollers at his wife as she heads out the door. Mrs. Johnson hands the keys to the housekeeper, “Go ahead, I’ll see what he wants.” Returning to the living room, her husband tells her, “Why, it’s this fellow that lives in here,” gesturing to the little room a few feet away. “Go tell them.”
⁶²⁷

Mrs. Roberts has unlocked the doors in the basement, and the officers have just stepped in, when Mrs. Johnson comes running up. “Oh, Mrs. Roberts, come quick. It’s this fellow Lee in this little room next to yours.”
⁶²⁸

They run back upstairs to the living room, where images relating to the assassination continue to flicker across the television screen. For a moment, they all stand transfixed on the screen. Suddenly, there he is again—Lee Harvey Oswald.

“Yes, that’s him,” Mrs. Roberts confirms. “That’s O. H. Lee. He lives right here in this room.”
⁶²⁹

Mrs. Roberts points to the two french doors off the main living room. There is no number on the door, just the designation “O.” The light, aqua-colored room, just five feet wide and thirteen and one-half feet long, is hardly more than a large closet.
*

The police return to the table and look back through the register. They quickly find the listing for “O. H. Lee,” now known to be Lee Harvey Oswald. He had rented the room under the fictitious name on October 14, 1963, and is paying eight dollars a week.
⁶³⁰

3:01 p.m. (4:01 p.m. EST)

In Washington, D.C., FBI Director Hoover calls Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy at his home to inform him he thinks they have the man who killed his brother in Dallas, that the man’s name is Lee Harvey Oswald, that he was working in the building from which the shots were fired, that he left the building and “a block or two away ran into two police officers and, thinking they were going to arrest him, shot at them and killed one of them with a sidearm.”
⁶³¹

Hoover may have been the head of the nation’s most famous law enforcement agency, but that doesn’t mean he knows what’s going on, in real time, in Dallas.

3:08 p.m.

Inside the inner sanctum of Captain Fritz’s private office, where the serious questioning of Oswald was just beginning, the telephone rings. It’s the Dallas FBI’s Gordon Shanklin and he wants to speak to Agent Bookhout. Fritz steps across the hall to Lieutenant Wells’s office and tells Bookhout he can take the call in Wells’s office, then quietly picks up an extension in his office to listen in.

“Is Hosty in that investigation?” Fritz hears Shanklin say.

“No,” Bookhout replies.

“I want him in that investigation right now!” Shanklin says angrily. “He knows those people [the Oswalds]. He’s been investigating them.” Shanklin finishes by telling Bookhout what he can do if he doesn’t do it right quick, using language that Fritz would later tell the Warren Commission, “I don’t want to repeat.” Fritz slips the receiver back into its cradle.
⁶³²
(Fritz was already aware that the FBI would be sitting in on the interrogations prior to the call from Shanklin. A few minutes earlier, Chief Curry had received a call from Shanklin requesting that they have a representative in on the interrogations. Curry had called Fritz and asked him to permit the FBI to sit in.)
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Bookhout hangs up. “We’d better get in there,” he tells Hosty.

Before they can make a move, Captain Fritz appears and invites the two agents to sit in on the interrogation.
⁶³⁴
Fritz leads the FBI agents back into his office. Bookhout and Hosty pull out their identification badges and lay them on the desk next to Oswald.

“I’m Special Agent James Hosty of the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” the agent begins, “and this is Special Agent James Bookhout.”

As soon as Oswald hears Hosty’s name, he reacts.

“Oh, so
you’re
Hosty,” Oswald snarls, clearly agitated. “I’ve heard about you.”

“You have the right to remain silent,” Hosty says as Oswald eyes him. “Anything you say may be used against you in a court of law.” Hosty can barely finish the words, when Oswald explodes. “You’re the one who’s been harassing my wife!”

Fritz and his detectives glance at one another. Oswald curses both agents with a string of profanities. Hosty tries to calm Oswald down, but only manages to whip him into a frenzy.

“My wife is a Russian citizen who is here legally and is protected under diplomatic laws from harassment by you or anyone else from the FBI,” Oswald argues, his face flush, his voice quivering. “You’re no better than the Gestapo of Nazi Germany! If you want to talk to me, you should come to me directly, not my wife.”
⁶³⁵

Fritz jumps in and tries to soothe Oswald with a calm voice. Hosty has struck a nerve, and Fritz doesn’t want to lose the trust he’s been working hard to establish with Oswald. The fact is, Fritz doesn’t like it one bit that the federal agents are horning in on his investigation. Anyone in law enforcement knows that when you conduct an interrogation with large groups of people present, you decrease the likelihood of satisfactory results. But, under the circumstances, Fritz knows he’ll have to put up with the unwelcome company.

“What do you mean, he accosted your wife?” Fritz asks, thinking he meant some kind of physical abuse.

“Well, he threatened her,” Oswald snaps. “He practically told her she’d have to go back to Russia. He accosted her on two different occasions.”
⁶³⁶

Agent Hosty had indeed spoken briefly to Marina, and at somewhat greater length to Ruth Paine, early in November when, in the course of trying to determine where Lee and Marina were living, he located the two women living together out in Irving. But he’s never laid eyes on Oswald before, and knows him only from the FBI file, which has been building up ever since he attempted to defect to Russia in 1959.
⁶³⁷

What strikes Hosty at the moment is the realization that it might have been Oswald who had left an angry note for him at the FBI office about ten days earlier. The note was unsigned, but Hosty recalled that it stated in no uncertain terms that Hosty should not “bother my wife,” and threatened to “take action against the FBI” if he didn’t stop.
⁶³⁸
*
At the time, Hosty, who was juggling thirty-five to forty cases simultaneously, had no idea who had written the note and simply put it in his file drawer. Now, it seems Oswald may have been the author.

Oswald asks Fritz to take off his handcuffs.

“That sounds reasonable,” Hosty quickly interjects, hoping to buddy up. Oswald can only glare at him.

Detectives Sims and Boyd look at Fritz. They know who’s in charge here. Fritz tells them he wants Oswald to remain in handcuffs, but tells the detectives Oswald’s hands don’t need to be cuffed behind his back. As they make the adjustment, Oswald starts to settle down.

“Thank you, thank you,” he says to Captain Fritz. He turns to Agent Hosty, and offers an apology, “I’m sorry for blowing up at you. And I’m sorry for writing that letter to you.”

Hosty now knows that Oswald was the author of the note. Captain Fritz and the detectives in the tan Stetson hats are wondering just what kind of relationship exists between Oswald and FBI agent Hosty.
⁶³⁹
As Oswald begins to relax, Captain Fritz turns back to the matter at hand. “Do you own a rifle, Lee?”

“No,” Oswald says dryly. “But I saw Mr. Truly, my supervisor at work, he had one at the Depository on Wednesday, I think it was, showing it to some people in his office on the first floor.”

“Have you
ever
owned a rifle?” Fritz asks.

“Oh, I had one a good many years ago,” Oswald says. “It was a small rifle, a twenty-two or something, but I haven’t owned one for a long time.”
⁶⁴⁰

Hosty is eager to find out about Oswald’s contacts with the Soviet embassy in Mexico City, which were discussed in the communiqué received by his office that morning. Now that Oswald is somewhat relaxed, Hosty decides to broach the subject.

“Ever been in Mexico City?” Hosty asks, interrupting Captain Fritz’s line of questioning.

Oswald hesitates for just a moment, one of the few times he doesn’t have an immediate answer.
⁶⁴¹

“Sure,” he says. “Sure, I’ve been to Mexico. When I was stationed in San Diego with the Marines, a couple of my buddies and I would occasionally drive down to Tijuana over the weekend.”
⁶⁴²

Hosty knows he dodged the question, but lets it go, for the moment.

“You said you have a wife who is a Russian?” Fritz asks.

“That’s right,” Oswald says.

“Have you been to Russia?” Fritz asks.

“Yes,” Oswald replies, slightly annoyed. “My wife has relatives over there, and she and I still have many friends.”

“How long were you in Russia?” Fritz asks.

“About three years,” Oswald says, growing increasingly edgy every time Agent Hosty asks a question.

“Ever own a rifle in Russia?” Fritz asks.

“You know you can’t own a rifle in Russia,” Oswald smirks, figuring that Fritz probably knows nothing about life in the Soviet Union. “I had a shotgun over there. You can’t own a rifle in Russia.”
⁶⁴³

“Do you have any political beliefs, Lee?” Fritz asks.

“No,” Oswald replies, “but I’m a supporter of the Castro revolution.”
⁶⁴⁴

Captain Fritz picks up a piece of paper from his desk that was found in Oswald’s wallet.

“What is the Fair Play for Cuba Committee?” he asks.

“I was the secretary of that organization in New Orleans a few months ago,” Oswald says.

“What is the organization about?” Fritz probes.

“Why don’t you ask Agent Hosty?” Oswald replies.
⁶⁴⁵