4
The Social Triumphs of Lee Harvey Oswald
THE MORE I THOUGHT about it, the more the great disparity gnawed at me. There had been the Lee Harvey Oswald who, the government told us, was close to being the most rabid communist since Lenin. On the other hand, at our very doorstep, there had been a flesh-and-blood Oswald who used as the headquarters for his pamphleteering the office of Guy Banister—formerly of the F.B.I. and Naval Intelligence and, more recently, the Anti-Communist League of the Caribbean. As if that were not enough, Oswald had been on a first-name basis with that swash-buckling anti-communist soldier of fortune, David Ferrie, a man who had trained anti-Castro pilots for the Bay of Pigs in 1961 and by 1963 was giving guerrilla training to more Cuban exiles for some new venture against the island.
Which one had been the real Lee Harvey Oswald? It seemed to me that the best way to find out was to go back and study Oswald’s short but varied career. In its conclusions, the Warren Commission had seemed particularly taken with the idea that Oswald had a “commitment to Marxism.” Just how deep that commitment had been was what I was after.
I began with El Toro Marine Base in California, where Oswald was stationed from November 1958 to September 1959. I figured his fellow soldiers should have had a pretty good look at Oswald in the close quarters of military training.
Of all the Marines, Nelson Delgado had lived closest to Oswald and for the longest period, so I headed straight for his testimony. I found that Delgado, who bunked next door to Oswald for the better part of 11 months, had no recollection whatever of Oswald’s Marxist leanings. Under oath, Delgado swore that Oswald “never said any subversive things … and he didn’t show no [sic] particular aspects of being a sharpshooter at all.”
Delgado went farther than that. He volunteered that Oswald had been terrible when it came to shooting a rifle on the range and had difficulty meeting the minimum standard for qualifying. “It was a pretty big joke,” Delgado testified, “because he got a lot of ‘Maggie’s drawers,’ you know, a lot of misses, but he didn’t give a darn.” Oswald, he added, “wasn’t as enthusiastic as the rest of us. We all loved—liked, you know, going to the range.”
The following colloquy between Delgado and Warren Commission attorney Wesley J. Liebeler reinforced the fact that Oswald was inept with a rifle:
MR. LIEBELER: You told the F.B.I. that in your opinion Oswald was not a good rifle shot; is that correct?
MR. DELGADO: Yes.
MR. LIEBELER: And that he did not show any unusual interest in his rifle, and in fact appeared less interested in weapons than the average Marine?
MR. DELGADO: Yes. He was mostly a thinker, a reader. He read quite a bit.
At one point, the attorney switched away from Oswald’s lack of proficiency as a rifleman, only to end up more deeply in the mire.
MR. LIEBELER: This F.B.I. agent says that you told him that Oswald became so proficient in Spanish that Oswald would discuss his ideas on socialism in Spanish.
MR. DELGADO: He would discuss his ideas but not anything against our government or—nothing Socialist, mind you.
Daniel Powers, who had served with Oswald at the Naval Air Technical Center in Florida and Keesler Field in Mississippi and El Toro Marine Base and in Japan, was questioned closely about Oswald. His response is summed up in the following dialogue with Warren Commission counsel Albert E. Jenner, Jr.:
MR. JENNER: Did he ever express any sympathy toward the Communist Party?
MR. POWERS: None that I recall.
MR. JENNER: Toward Communist principles?
MR. POWERS: None that I recall.
MR. JENNER: Or Marxist doctrines?
MR. POWERS: None that I recall. No, sir.
I examined the testimony of John E. Donovan, who was a first lieutenant at El Toro when Oswald was there. His testimony about Oswald’s leftist leanings was explicit: “… I never heard him in any way, shape or form confess that he was a Communist, or that he ever thought about being a Communist.” The statements of Oswald’s other associates at the Marine base were almost uniform in their agreement that he had no inclination in the direction of communism or anything leftwing.[18]
Only one man who had been at the Marine base with him testified that Oswald had exhibited Marxist leanings. This man—Kerry Thornley—had not served with Oswald as long as a number of others and had not even lived on the same part of the base at El Toro. That seemed odd to me. Moreover, Thornley’s testimony was heard directly by the Warren Commission, and subsequently was given great attention by the media. I noticed, however, that in the Commission volumes, it was separated from the affidavits of the other Marines. This made me wonder if any members of the Warren Commission had actually read the other Marines’ affidavits, which overwhelmingly contradicted Thornley’s claims.
I thought about the Russian examination Oswald had taken at El Toro and began to look into his earlier Marine service for hints of possible intelligence work. By now I knew that Oswald possessed the characteristics the military looks for in its intelligence recruits. He was from a military family; one brother also had joined the Marines, another the Air Force. He was very close-mouthed by nature, and was well above average in intelligence.
Oswald’s assignment at Japan’s Atsugi Air Base in 1957 before he came to El Toro was consistent with the possibility that he had been working in military intelligence. Atsugi, I discovered, was the base for all of the daily super-secret U-2 intelligence flights over China. Oswald’s anti-aircraft unit, which required a highly classified security clearance, had the duty of guarding a U-2 hangar. It was surrounded by a high, heavily wired fence. Even the mail truck could not enter without a sergeant on foot in front of it giving the password for the day.
I thought Oswald’s possible intelligence role at Atsugi might be confirmed by two Central Intelligence Agency documents mentioned in the Warren Commission report: CD 931, “Oswald’s access to information about the U-2,” and CD 692, “Reproduction of C.I.A. official dossier on Oswald.” Unfortunately, these documents, along with many other C.I.A. files, were classified as secret following the Warren Commission inquiry, and I could not gain access to them.
But now I was curious to know just which subjects the government wanted the public to know the least about. I had one of my assistants get together a list of those files concerning Oswald that the government had classified as “unavailable.” Here is the list:
CD[19] 321 Chronology of Oswald in USSR (Secret)
CD 347 Activity of Oswald in Mexico City (Secret)
CD 384 Activity of Oswald in Mexico City
CD 528 re. Allegation Oswald interviewed by CIA in Mexico City
CD 631 re. CIA dissemination of information on Oswald
CD 674 Info given to the Secret Service but not yet to the Warren Commission (Secret)
CD 692 Reproduction of CIA official dossier on Oswald
CD 698 Reports of travel and activities of Oswald & Marina
CD 871 Photos of Oswald in Russia (Secret)
CD 931 Oswald’s access to information about the U-2 (Secret)
CD 1216 Memo from Helms entitled “Lee Harvey Oswald” (Secret)
CD 1222 Statements by George de Mohrenschildt re: assassination (Secret)
CD 1273 Memo from Helms re: apparent inconsistencies in info provided by CIA (Secret)
This provocative listing made it more apparent to me than ever that something was fishy.
Next I decided to focus my research on Oswald’s movements immediately after he left the Marines. In the summer of 1959—about five months after he had taken his Russian exam at El Toro—Oswald applied for a premature discharge from the Marine Corps. The reason he cited was that his mother was undergoing physical hardships that required his presence and care. In September 1959, he was given an honorable discharge four weeks early, for “hardship/dependency.” After spending three days with his mother in Fort Worth, he left for New Orleans.
Oswald’s journey out of New Orleans to the Soviet Union was somewhat confusing. His departure for Europe, I found, was by ship. His steamship ticket had been obtained at the Lykes office of New Orleans’s International Trade Mart, directed by Clay Shaw, whose name we would come to know only too well later in the investigation. Although Oswald sailed to England, he flew eastward from there. Precisely what kind of air service he used, however, was mysterious. The Warren Commission stated that Oswald flew straight on to Helsinki on October 9, the very day he arrived in England. However, Oswald’s passport showed that he did not leave England until October 10, the following day.
It was known that Oswald checked into his Helsinki hotel on October 10. But this would have been impossible considering the timetable of the only commercial direct route from London. Under the circumstances, the question arose whether he actually flew to Finland aboard a commercial airliner.
Much later, in 1978, James A. Wilcott, a former C.I.A. finance officer, told the House Select Committee on Assassinations that Lee Oswald had been recruited from the military by the C.I.A. “with the express purpose of a double agent assignment in the U.S.S.R.”[20]
Back in 1966 such clear-cut testimony was not in the public record, but the double-agent scenario had crossed my mind. The C.I.A., of course, had denied from the beginning that Oswald was ever employed by the Agency. However, I knew that was its standard position when asked about an employee executing any kind of intelligence assignment.[21]
After Oswald arrived in Moscow by train from Finland on October 16, 1959, he engaged in a series of contacts with Soviet officials. The initial response of the Soviets was cautious as they evaluated this young American who had not merely left his country behind, but brought the promise of gifts—the secret sweets of American anti-aircraft technology. The newcomer underwent extensive interrogation, although when, where, and under what circumstances have never been revealed.
After two weeks, Oswald made a dramatic appearance at the American Embassy. He flamboyantly handed over his passport and a letter that concluded that his allegiance was with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. He also announced that he had told Soviet officials he would give them information about the Marine Corps and the highly secret radar operations he had been involved in.
As Oswald’s dramatic defection hit the world media, the F.B.I., after making a study of Oswald’s Marine Corps files, stated that “no derogatory information was contained in the U.S.M.C. files concerning Oswald, and O.N.I. [Office of Naval Intelligence] advised that no action against him was contemplated in this matter.” J. Edgar Hoover later explained the F.B.I.’s failure to investigate the Oswald “defection” any further, stating that the American Embassy in Moscow had given Oswald a “clean bill.”
In early January of 1960, Oswald was sent to Minsk—one of six Soviet cities to which defectors customarily were sent—and given a job as a metal worker in a radar factory. In a clear demonstration that the Soviet system looks kindly upon defectors, he was given a number of privileges not available to the average Russian worker, including a comfortable apartment and a relatively high salary.
In February 1961, after 15 months in the Soviet Union, Oswald applied at the American Embassy in Moscow to return to the United States. The following month he met Marina Prusakova, a lovely woman with eyes of cornflower blue and also the niece of a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Union’s domestic intelligence service. In April 1961, less than two months after they had met, they were married.
Surprisingly, neither government objected to Oswald’s return to America or to Marina’s coming with him. It was as if the unending ice of the Cold War had suddenly thawed. Perhaps it was the arrival of spring.
It is noteworthy, for example, that the State Department approved Oswald’s return, although it easily could have refused a defector’s request. The department’s report stated that Oswald “had not expatriated himself’ by his actions upon arriving in the Soviet Union in 1959. It added that there was no indication in F.B.I. reports that Oswald was a communist. It authorized the American Embassy in Moscow to lend him the money, on behalf of State, for his return.
Such a repatriation loan, according to State Department regulations, cannot be made unless the recipient’s “loyalty to the United States” has been established “beyond question.” Considering that Oswald had supposedly defected and handed military secrets to the Soviet Union, his loyalty hardly would appear to have been “beyond question.” Yet the loan of $436 was granted after a few months’ delay.
Similarly, the State Department’s Passport Office found no reason why Oswald’s passport should not be renewed and authorized the American Embassy to renew it in August 1961.[22] Ordinarily, when a U.S. citizen goes abroad and commits an act indicating allegiance to another country, particularly the Soviet Union, the Passport Office automatically prepares a “lookout” card in case the party ever attempts to renew his passport. No such “lookout” card ever was prepared for Oswald. Like the American Embassy, the Passport Office gave this defector a clean bill of health.
These United States government actions demonstrating almost paternal solicitude for Lee Oswald’s welfare even while he was in the Soviet Union comprised, to my mind, a steady, uninterrupted pattern. And the preferential treatment did not end with the arrival of Lee and Marina and their young daughter in New York in June 1962.
Meeting the Oswalds at the New York pier were no agents of the F.B.I. or any other law enforcement agency. There was only Spas T. Raikin, the secretary-general of the American Friends of the Anti-Bolshevik Nations, Inc., a private anti-communist operation with extensive intelligence connections. Raikin also was employed by the Traveler’s Aid Society, under whose aegis, according to the Warren Commission, he had been asked by the State Department to meet the returning Oswalds and give them any help they needed.
The government never prosecuted Oswald for his alleged defection. Immediately upon his return to the U.S., Oswald, along with Marina and their daughter, moved to Fort Worth, Texas. There he worked at the Leslie Welding Company until October 7, 1962, when George de Mohrenschildt and his wife came over from Dallas to spend the evening as guests of Lee and Marina at their modest apartment.
Anyone aware of the comparative lifestyles and personal histories of Lee Oswald of the Leslie Welding Company and Baron George de Mohrenschildt of the Dallas Petroleum Club would have to see that scene as discordant, an anomaly. While Oswald was quite able to take care of himself intellectually in almost anyone’s company, it was also plain that he and de Mohrenschildt had mutual interests, not yet officially revealed, that caused them to find each other’s company interesting.
The following day, October 8, Lee packed up and moved to Dallas, 30 miles away, where de Mohrenschildt lived. Oswald wasted no time in seeking a new job at the Texas Employment Office in Dallas.
Oswald’s visit to the employment office may well have been an obligatory gesture in accordance with the Golden Rule of the Intelligence Community that the pre-existing economic circumstances of an individual entering clandestine intelligence work are rigidly maintained in appearance after he becomes an intelligence agent. For example, if a newly recruited, previously poor deep-cover agent were to abandon his long-familiar threadbare wardrobe overnight and begin wearing Brooks Brothers suits and driving, perhaps, a new Chrysler LeBaron convertible, he never again would be that same fellow so long undeserving of a second glance and, consequently, so productive to clandestine operations.
In any event, before October 1962 was over, Oswald had obtained a job that, for a former defector to the Soviet Union, seemed quite unlikely. Jagger-Stovall-Chiles, under a contract with the Pentagon, was engaged in the production of charts and maps for military use. Writer Henry Hurt has observed that “part of the work appeared to be related to the top-secret U-2 missions, some of which were making flights over Cuba.” This job required an extremely high security classification. Lee Harvey Oswald not only was given the job within one week of his arrival in Dallas, but also had access to a variety of classified materials.
October 1962 was the famous month when, as former Secretary of State Dean Rusk put it, “our government and the Russians were eyeball to eyeball.” Our U-2’s were making frequent flights over Cuba, and an Air Force plane was even shot down. If Oswald truly had no connection with our intelligence community, if he truly had leanings toward communism—as our government had assured us—then the nonchalance of the security clearance operation of Jagger-Stovall-Chiles (which even then may have been setting the type for names used on maps used by U-2’s looking for Soviet missile sites in Cuba) represented great comic movie material gone to waste.
Socially, despite his “defection” and his ostensibly vocal allegiance to communism, Oswald and his family were welcomed with open arms by the White Russian community of Dallas. It should be noted that most of the White Russians shared a political philosophy somewhat to the right of the late Czar Nicholas. A number of them were blue-blooded Russian nobles or large landholders who had been forced by the Bolshevik government to leave their ancestral estates. They lived for the day when the communists would be driven from Russia and they could return to their homeland. Others were of less patrician background, being simple émigrés who had fled from the communists, but their loathing for communism was just as bitter.
Strangely, though, these were the people who helped Lee and Marina find lodging. They saw to it that there was sufficient milk for the baby and that it was taken to the hospital when its temperature was too high. From time to time, they bought pretty dresses for Marina and made her the object of their attention in every way.
Oswald’s most frequent associate in Dallas, I discovered, was George de Mohrenschildt. He had been in the United States longer than most of the White Russians and was hardly an ordinary émigré. His father, Baron Sergius de Mohrenschildt, had been governor of the province of Minsk for the czar. The family had fled from the communists after the 1917 revolution. De Mohrenschildt spoke Russian, French, German, Spanish and Polish. In World War II he had worked for French intelligence. This polished member of the international polo-playing set possessed a doctorate in international commerce and a Master’s degree in petroleum engineering and geology.
De Mohrenschildt had become a consulting geologist and was a member of the exclusive Dallas Petroleum Club with extremely affluent contacts in the business world. Among his close friends, one of the more interesting was Jean de Menil, the president of the mammoth international Schlumberger Corporation, which had close ties with the Central Intelligence Agency.[23]
De Mohrenschildt had traveled to the far corners of the world. He had visited Ghana in the role of a stamp collector, although he was actively in the oil business at the time and did not collect stamps. In Yugoslavia he had spent an entire year representing the International Cooperation Administration, a well-known Central Intelligence Agency front based in Washington. He had been in Guatemala when, coincidentally, much of the C.I.A.’s combat training of the anti-Castro Cubans who invaded at the Bay of Pigs took place. And later he moved to Haiti, where he became involved in a “government-oriented” (to borrow the Warren Commission report’s phrase) business venture.
This man, obviously a capitalist and very much an anti-communist, was the closest friend in Dallas of the young man whom the Warren Commission had found to have a “commitment to Marxism.”
Oswald’s charisma seemed to have won over other unlikely friends in the White Russian community as well. Among the first dinner guests to the Oswald apartment in Dallas was Max Clark, a retired Air Force colonel and, at that time, an attorney. Colonel Clark had served as a security officer for General Dynamics, a major contractor for the Defense Department and the world’s largest aircraft manufacturer. His wife, Katya—who was also present at the dinner prepared by Marina Oswald—was a member of the royal family of Russia, born Princess Sherbatov. Surely, for a Marxist like Lee Oswald this was a social conquest of the highest order.
Of the many Dallas anti-communist Russians welcoming the Oswalds, only Anna and Teofil Meller had any serious reservations about the couple. This was because Anna, while visiting the Oswalds’ apartment, had seen a copy of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital on a table. She seems to have been unaware that Teofil, her husband, later called the F.B.I. and reported the fact. He was informed by the Bureau’s spokesman that Oswald was “all right.”[24]
The Warren Commission handled this potential problem of the F.B.I.’s protection of Oswald with its usual elán. It simply did not call Meller as a witness or even take his affidavit.
Oswald’s treatment following his return, both by the intelligence community and by dedicated anti-communist individuals, led me to a single, unavoidable conclusion: that in the Soviet Union Oswald had been engaged in a clandestine intelligence mission for the United States government.
And I was rapidly becoming aware that in the period after his return from the Soviet Union, anti-communist exiles and parts of the U.S. intelligence community seemed to have a converging interest in the potential value of Lee Oswald. It was no coincidence that Oswald was surrounded by White Russian émigrés in Dallas and anti-Castro Cuban exiles in New Orleans. I had found that the guerrilla training of the anti-Castro exiles was within the exclusive province of the C.I.A. This had a far-reaching pragmatic effect. The F.B.I., ordinarily the most perspicacious of our investigative agencies, seemed careful not to observe what the Agency was doing—nor to whom.
Although most of the government was aware that the C.I.A. had been operating domestically for a long time, I knew that the Agency kept such operations clandestine. The Agency operatives manipulating the émigrés, for example, did not wear uniforms and badges with the emblem “C.I.A.” on them. Under deep cover, they were quite indistinguishable from other lawyers, businessmen, engineers, housewives, private detectives, or whatever. At the time I could not be sure just who was guiding Lee Oswald and the exiles surrounding him, but now, with the benefit of hindsight, it seems pretty evident.
Although George de Mohrenschildt probably had been given no indication of the catastrophe waiting down the road, there is now little doubt that he had been operating under deep cover as an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency.[25] It is equally apparent that his assignment was to bring Oswald from Fort Worth to Dallas and thereafter to serve as one of his “baby sitters.”[26]
My conclusion that de Mohrenschildt was an unwitting baby sitter for Oswald came not only from publicly available evidence but from my conversations with him and Mrs. de Mohrenschildt. Some years after the assassination, after my investigation was well under way, I established phone contact with de Mohrenschildt. To avoid monitoring, we developed a routine of my calling him at the Petroleum Club in Dallas or his leaving a call for me at the New Orleans Athletic Club. Both de Mohrenschildt and his wife were positive that the shooting of the President, or even of a rabbit for that matter, simply was not in Lee Oswald’s make-up. They were vigorous in their insistence that Oswald had been the scapegoat. I was particularly affected by the depth of their unhappiness at what had been done not only to John Kennedy but to Lee Oswald as well.
Spring of 1963 arrived and Lee Oswald—as usual, without fanfare or any other preliminaries—left Dallas in late April for New Orleans. His wife and daughter arrived there shortly afterwards. By May 9, Oswald had obtained a job in New Orleans at the Reily Coffee Company, just on the other side of the post office building from Guy Banister’s office.
I already had reviewed many of Oswald’s activities in New Orleans that summer. Now I was interested in taking a closer look at how he found his way to employment at the Reily Coffee Company. This was a very confusing question because among the Warren Commission exhibits were dozens of photostats of job applications that Lee Oswald apparently filed at one place after another before landing his job at Reily. Oswald’s familiar chicken scrawl handwriting was apparent at first glance on every application. Judging by this lengthy series of Commission exhibits, he had sought employment at half the businesses in the city of New Orleans.
However, the more I pored over these applications, the more puzzled I was. On every one of them the applicant had listed his height as “5 feet 9 inches.” The problem was that Lee Oswald happened to have been five feet eleven inches tall. Why, then, should he repeatedly be writing down his height as five feet nine inches?[27]
I was due to get together the next day with some of the staff for some overdue brainstorming on a number of items, and I added this one to the agenda. The next morning I had hardly arrived at the office when Lou Ivon came in with a lead—picked up by one of his police investigators on the street—that Oswald had visited the Bolton Ford dealership on North Claiborne Avenue. We followed this up as we did with even the thinnest of leads and, although the rumor turned out to be false, we ended up finding something potentially more important.
As we later learned from salesmen Fred Sewall and Oscar Deslatte, two men claiming to represent an organization called Friends of Democratic Cuba arrived at the Bolton dealership on January 20, 1961. This was only three months before the abortive Bay of Pigs attempt to invade Cuba, the great turkey that Kennedy had inherited from the preceding administration. One of the men was a powerfully built Latin with a thick neck and a distinct scar over his left eyebrow.[28] The other was a thin, young Anglo-Saxon who obviously was in charge.
The two men indicated that they wanted to buy ten Ford pickup trucks. They wanted a bid from Bolton Ford on the price. The Latin identified himself as “Joseph Moore” but said the bid had to be in the name of “Oswald.” The young Anglo-Saxon confirmed this, explaining, that “Oswald” was his name and that he was the one with the money. Instead of asking the buyers to sign, Deslatte himself printed the name “Oswald” on the form.[29] Of course, as all the world now knows, the real Lee Oswald was in the Soviet Union that day and would be for more than another year.
Following President Kennedy’s assassination, Sewall and Deslatte remembered “Oswald’s” visit and called the F.B.I. When the F.B.I. agents saw the bid form with Oswald’s last name on it, according to the two salesmen, they picked it up carefully with solenoid tongs.
After hearing of the Bolton Ford incident, I became very interested in Friends of Democratic Cuba. I obtained a copy of its articles of incorporation. There, among the organization’s incorporators, was the ubiquitous name of Guy Banister.
I pondered the implications of this staggering information. In the very month that John Kennedy was inaugurated, an intelligence project being run by Guy Banister was using the name “Oswald” in bidding for pickup trucks for apparent use in the Bay of Pigs invasion. More important, the thin young American who had done the bidding either knew Lee Oswald or knew his name. In either case, Oswald was far off in the Soviet Union at the time. At the very least, this strange incident seemed to make Oswald’s actual appearance at Guy Banister’s operation in the summer of 1963 something less than sheer happenstance.
I called Frank Klein into my office for a long overdue brainstorming session. I summarized the facts of the Bolton Ford incident, and Klein said, “You don’t think Sewall and Deslatte were lying, do you?”
“No.”
“But the story doesn’t make sense,” he continued. “Oswald was in Russia in January 1961. He couldn’t possibly have been at Bolton Ford.”
“Someone was playing Oswald’s part,” I said.
“Playing Oswald’s part?” said Klein. “But why?”
“I don’t know yet,” I replied. “But the important point is we now know that whoever was behind the assassination was inclined to have someone impersonate Lee Oswald.”
“You’re headed somewhere,” said Klein, “but I don’t know your direction yet.”
I pushed the thick volume of Commission documents forward and showed him the job applications. “Notice anything odd?” I asked.
He leafed through them awhile, then looked up. “That’s the wrong height,” he said. “In every one of these applications he’s got the wrong height down.”
“Exactly,” I said. “If they’ll impersonate you in 1961, they’ll impersonate you in 1963.”
“But why would someone fill out these applications at all these places and continually put down the wrong height?” Klein asked.
“Because the impersonator was only five feet nine,” I said. “Since he was being interviewed in person, he had to put down his real height or close to it. Just because someone could imitate Oswald’s handwriting perfectly doesn’t mean he could stretch himself to Oswald’s real height.”
Frank agreed with me on the probability of Oswald’s impersonation in the job applications. What it amounted to, of course, was that Oswald had been destined from the outset to go to work at the Reily Coffee Company, close by Guy Banister’s office. All these applications by someone impersonating him were intended to obscure that.
“You know,” said Klein, “you haven’t mentioned the most significant thing of all.”
“What’s that?”
“The time of the visit to Bolton Ford. Using Lee Oswald’s name as early as January 1961. That was the month of Kennedy’s inauguration.”
I paused, considering the enormity of what Frank was suggesting.
“You’re asking me if I think the plan to eliminate John Kennedy had begun as early as January 1961,” I said.
Frank nodded.
“I would find that hard to believe,” I said. “My answer would have to be no.”
Many years after that discussion with Frank, I happened to come across a fascinating book about the U.S. intelligence community called The Armies of Ignorance, published in 1977. In it, I stumbled upon a fact that stunned me. According to the book’s author, William R. Corson, shortly after Kennedy’s election in November 1960 the C.I.A. quietly began to put together a “dossier analysis,” including a psychological profile, of the President-elect. Its purpose, among other things, was to predict the likely positions Kennedy would take if particular sets of conditions arose. The existence of this study was not made public.
Nowadays I often think back to Frank’s question about the implications of the 1961 impersonation of Oswald. And when I do, I wonder—if I had known then about the C.I.A.’s remarkably early psychological profile of Kennedy—whether my answer would have been the same.