8

“Our Papa Is out of His Mind”

Oswald’s initial efforts on behalf of Fair Play for Cuba had not attracted a single recruit. While Marina found him somewhat disillusioned, he remained committed to his cause. But she was concerned because she thought he was increasingly disconnected from reality. He began telling her that he would be “prime minister” of the U.S. in twenty years, and she begged him to come down from his “castle of air.”1 Yet his exaggerated sense of self-worth received a boost during the first days of August, when he received a letter from Arnold Johnson, director of the Information and Lecture Bureau of the U.S. Communist party.² Johnson was responding to Oswald’s letter in which he sent honorary Fair Play membership cards to Communist party directors Gus Hall and Benjamin Davis. Johnson enclosed Communist literature on Cuba and congratulated Oswald, saying, “It is good to know that movements in support of Fair Play for Cuba has [sic] developed in New Orleans …”³ Johnson was one of the highest-ranking U.S. Communist officials ever to acknowledge one of Oswald’s letters. Later, when Marina and Lee argued over his Fair Play activities and she contended, “Has one person come to you as a result of them [the leaflets]? People don’t care about that here,” his response was often a tearful reading of the Johnson letter aloud. “See this?” he demanded, shaking the letter. “These are people who understand me and think I’m doing useful work. If he respects what I’m doing, then it’s important. He’s the Lenin of our country.”4

Convinced his work for Cuba was gaining the attention of national leftist leaders, Oswald was encouraged to embark on a new gambit. Having read only a week earlier about anti-Castro militants and their armed training camp, raided by federal agents across the river from New Orleans, Oswald was ready to infiltrate the “enemy.” On Monday, August 5, he walked into a Cuban-owned general goods store, Casa Roca.* Behind the counter was the co-manager, Carlos Bringuier, a twenty-nine-year-old Cuban lawyer who also was the New Orleans delegate for the anti-Castro Cuban Student Directorate. Casa Roca served as the Student Directorate’s unofficial headquarters, as well as a general clearinghouse for Cuban activities in New Orleans. Bringuier was explaining the Cuban fight against Castro to two fifteen-year-old Americans, Philip Geraci and Vance Blalock, when Oswald walked up to them. Geraci recalled that Oswald asked, “Is this the Cuban exiles’ headquarters?”⁵†

“He started to agree with my point of view and he showed real interest in the fight against Castro,” recalled Bringuier. “He told me that he was against Castro and that he was against Communism.”⁶ Then Oswald requested some literature, which Bringuier gave him. “After that, Oswald told me that he had been in the Marine Corps and that he had training in guerilla warfare and that he was willing to train Cubans to fight against Castro,” said Bringuier. “Even more, he told me that he was willing to go himself to fight against Castro.”7

Bringuier rejected the offer. “I had nothing to do with military operations, and the paramilitary training camp across the river had just been raided a few days earlier,” Bringuier says. “My first reaction was this guy could either be an FBI agent or an agent of Castro just trying to find out what we were doing. Something about his offer to train Cubans seemed strange to me.”⁸ Bringuier walked away from the counter, leaving Geraci and Blalock talking to Oswald. When they told Oswald they were interested in guerrilla warfare, he regaled them with stories of how to derail a train, blow up a bridge, and make a homemade pistol and gunpowder.⁹

The next day Oswald returned to Casa Roca. He left his Marine Corps training manual for Bringuier as evidence of his good faith.* But Bringuier remained uninterested in Oswald and did not try to contact him. Then, three days later, on Friday, August 9, one of his Cuban friends, Celso Hernandez, ran into the store. “He was upset and angry,” says Bringuier, “because when he got off the bus at Canal Street, he had seen an American with a sign that said ‘Viva Fidel! Hands off Cuba!’ Celso’s English was terrible, so he cursed the American in Spanish and then ran to tell me.”¹⁰ Bringuier grabbed a poster showing the Statute of Liberty with a knife in the back, proclaiming that “90 miles away Cuba lies in chains!” and left with Hernandez to find the American demonstrator. On the way, they stopped at a nearby restaurant and picked up another young Cuban, Miguel Cruz. “So the three of us went to Canal Street and couldn’t find the guy,” Bringuier says. “We went down the side streets, and no sign of him. We took a streetcar, even with our big sign, and stood up looking in every direction for that Communist, but he was nowhere.”¹¹

Bringuier returned to his store. A few minutes later Miguel Cruz dashed in with the news that the American was back at Canal and St. Charles. Again, they raced to confront him. “When the three of us approached him, the guy looked at me and I said, ‘That’s the same American who was in the store,’” says Bringuier. Oswald had a placard around his neck and was distributing Fair Play for Cuba leaflets. “He looked at me and smiled and he put his hand out to shake my hand, and I refused. I was angry and started to call him names, ‘Why, you are a Communist! You traitor! What are you doing?’”12 A crowd formed as the shouting started. Bringuier tried to incite the throng against Oswald, telling them he was a Communist who had pretended to befriend the Cuban movement when actually he was a friend of Castro. Some in the crowd began jeering at Oswald, telling him to go to Russia. The crowd’s reaction further provoked Bringuier, who later said, “I lost control and I took my glasses off as I was going to hit him—he saw that and put his arms down and said, ‘Hey, Carlos, if you want to hit me, hit me.’ That made me stop. He was smart. That would have made me the aggressor and turned the crowd against me.” Hernandez snatched the stack of Fair Play pamphlets from Oswald’s hands and tossed them into the air. “Then Oswald got mad,” says Bringuier. “But by that time the police had arrived. Oswald was accusing Celso of destroying his pamphlets, and the police just took all of us away.”*

At the jail, Bringuier was shocked to hear Oswald announce he was born in Cuba. Until his confrontation with Oswald, he had no idea that Fair Play was active in New Orleans—or that Oswald was its only member. Bringuier noticed that in the interrogation room, Oswald was “really cold-blooded.… [H]e was not nervous, he was not out of control, he was confident …”13 The three Cubans raised the $25 bail money and were told to return to court for a hearing on Monday, but Oswald had to spend the night in jail.

The following morning, Saturday, Lt. Francis Martello, the former deputy commander of the New Orleans police intelligence division, saw one of Oswald’s Fair Play leaflets and decided to interview him. Oswald lied throughout the interview, telling Martello that he had lived at Mercedes Street in Fort Worth since his honorable discharge from the Marine Corps in 1959. He said that besides Reily, he had worked at the city’s largest brewery, Jax. As for the New Orleans Fair Play for Cuba chapter, Oswald said it had thirty-five members, met monthly at locations he refused to disclose, and that the first name of one of the members was “John,” a student at Tulane University.¹⁴*

At the end of that interview, Oswald made the seemingly unusual request that Martello call the FBI. Oswald wanted to see an agent. Special Agent John Quigley arrived later that morning. Oswald had been worried about the FBI’s interest in him since the first interview in Fort Worth, and was convinced it had cost him at least two jobs with its inquiries. He was certain he was under active surveillance. If the FBI did not know he was arrested, he thought, it would shortly, and Oswald probably figured it best to summon the Bureau to him as if he had nothing to hide about his Fair Play for Cuba activity.

That Oswald called for an FBI agent is strong evidence there was no association between him and the Bureau. A confidential informant could never jeopardize his covert role by publicly dealing with the FBI. But Summers charges that the evidence of a special relationship is evident because it happened on “a Saturday morning, not the most likely time for an agent to respond speedily to a request by an insignificant prisoner. Nevertheless, Oswald asked and the FBI obliged.”15 Quigley was the Saturday duty agent at the New Orleans FBI office. According to another FBI agent who later worked on the Oswald file, Warren de Brueys, “Quigley would never have spoken to Oswald if it had not been a Saturday. One of the responsibilities of the duty agent is to check with the local police and see if there are any cases that might interest the Bureau. Once Oswald asked to talk to the FBI, Quigley had to go over there. If he hadn’t, he would have been kicked in the butt for failing to do it—he would have been censured because that was part of his duty. Quigley may not have even been aware we had a file on Oswald in our office, because 99 out of 100 times when they say someone is down there, you just go. If you don’t go right away the prisoner might be released, so you always go down and check it out.”¹⁶

Quigley’s meeting with Oswald was not a secret one as some have implied. In fact, Quigley typed a five-page, single-spaced report of his hour-and-a-half interview. Oswald repeated the lies he had told Lt. Martello, and then further embellished his story, especially regarding “Hidell.” While Oswald said he had spoken to Hidell several times on the telephone, he had never met him, his number had been disconnected, and he did not remember what the number had been.¹⁷ It was a note from Hidell, said Oswald, that told him to pass out the leaflets at the corner where he was arrested. He claimed he attended two Fair Play meetings at different apartments, had been introduced to five different members each time, only by their first name, but could not remember any of them.¹⁸ He said there were no regularly scheduled meetings, but someone would call him when one was planned. Once he said a meeting was held at his own house, but he could not explain how he had informed the other members since he claimed not to know their names or telephone numbers, and he had no telephone. Quigley’s report on his bizarre jailhouse interview quickly became part of Oswald’s growing FBI file.*

After Quigley left, Oswald called the Murrets to ask for help in getting out of jail. Uncle Dutz was out of town at a Catholic retreat, Aunt Lillian was in the hospital with an ear infection, and the only person at their house was his cousin Joyce Murret, who was visiting from Beaumont, Texas. She went to the jail and there met Lt. Martello. “She was clearly a concerned family member,” he recalls. “She stated she wanted to know the charge against Oswald and I told her … she became very reluctant to become involved … she did not want to get mixed up with it [Fair Play for Cuba] in any way.”¹⁹ Joyce told Martello about Oswald’s defection to Russia, that he only spoke Russian in his house, and that when she had asked Marina if she liked America, Marina had responded “yes” but told her that “Lee did not.”²⁰

Joyce Murret departed without bailing Lee out or seeing him. Martello, intrigued by Murret’s disclosures, returned for a second interview. That talk was much more productive. When asked if he was a Socialist, Oswald responded “guilty.” He said he was a Marxist, fully agreed with Das Kapital, but admitted Communism in Russia “stunk.”21 He told Martello that he did not teach his wife or child English “because he hated America and he did not want them to become ‘Americanized’ and that his plans were to go back to Russia” When Martello asked to which country he ascribed allegiance, Oswald replied, “I would place my allegiance at the foot of democracy.” “From the way he spoke,” recalled Martello, “the impression I received, it appeared to me that he felt that Russia was the lesser of the two evils.”²²

Oswald was furious that Joyce had not obtained his release. He telephoned again. “Come and get me out of here,” Lee commanded her.²³ Joyce said she did not have any money and added, “I don’t know. I’ll have to think this thing over.” He told her to get Marina, who had $70 in savings, and bring her to the station. When Joyce got off the phone with him, she instead telephoned her mother. She was afraid to leave her two children while she traveled across town to see Marina. Lillian suggested they call a family friend, Emile Bruneau, a state boxing commissioner, and ask for his help. Bruneau paid Oswald’s $25 bail, and he was released late Saturday afternoon.*

When he returned home, Marina was both furious and worried about his all-night absence. Troubled by her memories of Walker, she had checked the closet and was at least relieved to see the rifle leaning against the corner. She was angry when he told her of his arrest, but also so pleased he was home safely that she fed him and then helped him to bed. That night, Dutz Murret returned from his religious retreat. When he heard the news of his nephew’s arrest, he was “horrified” and promptly went to the Magazine Street apartment.²⁴ It was the first time he had visited the Oswalds’ home and he was shocked to see a picture of Castro hanging over the mantel.²⁵ Murret asked Lee if he was a “commie,” but Lee denied it. Dutz told him to get a job to support his family and to straighten out his life. He was angry over his nephew’s demonstrations on behalf of Castro, and the relationship between the Oswalds and the Murrets cooled considerably after Lee’s arrest.26

Monday, August 12, was the day scheduled for the court hearing for Oswald and Bringuier and his two associates. Early that morning Carlos Bringuier went to the National American Bank to make a deposit. There, he saw Bill Stuckey, a young journalist who had a weekly radio program on Latin American affairs, “The Latin Listening Post,” on station WDSU. Stuckey had previously done a newspaper interview about Bringuier and his anti-Castro efforts. “So when I saw Stuckey, I thought it was good public relations to let him know there was a Fair Play for Cuba branch in New Orleans,” says Bringuier. “So I told him about the trial later that day.”²⁷ Stuckey was “very, very interested.” He said there were many anti-Castro groups in New Orleans, but it had always been difficult to find pro-Castro advocates. “I regarded them [Fair Play for Cuba] as the leading pro-Castro organization in the country,” recalled Stuckey.²⁸

At the trial later that day, Stuckey sent a cameraman, Johann Rush, to get some film for the evening newscasts for the television branch of WDSU, but the judge refused to allow the short hearing to be filmed. Inside the courtroom, which was split into segregated white and black sections, “Oswald entered the room and sat in the black section,” says Bringuier. “As a representative of Fair Play for Cuba, it was a good propaganda move to sit with the blacks, with the oppressed people. It made me angry, because I thought this guy knows what he is doing. He is very clever.”²⁹ Bringuier’s attorney did not show up, so he defended himself and his friends, explaining to the judge how Oswald had first pretended to be an ally, and then later they caught him distributing Communist propaganda. Oswald pleaded guilty to disturbing the peace. The judge dismissed the charges against the three Cubans and fined Oswald $10. On the way out of the courtroom, Rush briefly interviewed Oswald, just enough time for Lee to say he was a Marxist.

Oswald was pleased that his efforts for Cuba had finally begun to receive public attention. Such coverage, he thought, would eventually help him gain a visa to Cuba, the place Marina said he spoke of increasingly during August.³⁰ In a letter, sent on August 13, to V. T. Lee, Fair Play’s president, Oswald wrote that he had “incured the displeasure of the Cuban exile ‘worms’ here,” and that three of them had attacked him. Enclosing a small article about the case from the Times-Picayune, Oswald said, “I am very glad I am stirring things up and shall continue to do so.” He claimed there was “considerable coverage in the press” and concluded “it will all be to the good of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.”31 The next day he sent a clipping to Arnold Johnson, of the American Communist party, with an honorary Fair Play membership card, and wrote, “I am doing my best to help the cause of new Cuba …”³²

Three days later he called the local television stations to inform them that he planned a Fair Play demonstration in front of the International Trade Mart for the following day. Friday, late in the morning, he went to the unemployment office, where he offered $2 to anybody who would help him distribute leaflets for half an hour. Two accepted his offer, and they walked to the Trade Mart, where cameraman Johann Rush captured Oswald’s demonstration for posterity on film for nearly twenty minutes.* Oswald was ecstatic. His new demonstration had attracted television coverage, and with two “volunteers,” it appeared that Fair Play was more than a one-person operation. That night he tried to encourage Marina to go to the Murrets’ to watch him on television, but she was appalled that he was seeking publicity for his radical politics and refused to leave the apartment.

Saturday was a surprisingly busy day for Oswald. It began at 8:00 A.M., when Bill Stuckey stopped by his apartment to ask if he wanted to tape a segment for that evening’s radio broadcast. Stuckey had received Oswald’s address from Bringuier. Oswald, woken from his sleep, had on just a pair of Marine Corps fatigue pants. Still, Stuckey was pleasantly surprised by his “clean-cutness” as he expected “a folk-singer type … somebody with a beard and sandals …”³³ Oswald showed him his Fair Play membership card and gave him copies of two Castro speeches, a pamphlet titled Ideology and Revolution by Jean-Paul Sartre, and another called The Crime Against Cuba by Corliss Lamont.34 Telling Stuckey that Fair Play had twelve to thirteen local members, and emphasizing that he was only the secretary, he agreed to meet at the WDSU station at five that evening to tape a show.

Meanwhile, Bringuier was afraid that the televised demonstration of the previous day might enhance the local standing of Fan Play for Cuba. He called Stuckey. “I told him I was thinking that it was not good to let a Communist go to a radio station and tell all his lies.”³⁵ Stuckey offered Bringuier rebuttal time the following week, but Bringuier asked for a live debate instead, something Stuckey said he would consider. Bringuier also embarked on an effort to infiltrate Fair Play’s local chapter to discover what he could about Lee Oswald. On Saturday, he sent a Cuban associate, Carlos Quiroga, who spoke excellent English, to Oswald’s apartment. Quiroga pretended to have been given a leaflet by Oswald and expressed his interest in joining Fair Play for Cuba. He was the first person who ever responded to Oswald’s public demonstrations, and they spoke for nearly forty-five minutes. “There is almost no question that Oswald must have known Quiroga was a plant from us,” says Bringuier. He was right. Marina later said, “I asked Lee who that was, and he said that is probably some anti-Cuban, or perhaps an FBI agent. He represented himself as a man who was sympathetic to Cuba, but Lee did not believe him.”

Oswald told Quiroga that Fidel Castro was not a dictator and that if the United States invaded Cuba, he would fight with Castro against America.³⁶ “Quiroga came back to us and said Oswald was a committed Communist, had a particular dislike for Somoza [Nicaragua’s right-wing dictator], and was quite militant,” says Bringuier. “At one point, Oswald’s child came onto the porch and he spoke to her in a foreign language. Quiroga asked him if that was Russian, and he said, ‘Yes, I’m studying Russian at Tulane University.’ He was really a pathological liar.”³⁷

That evening Oswald arrived at the WDSU studios, at 520 Royal Street in the French Quarter. There, he taped a thirty-seven-minute interview, which Stuckey, with Oswald’s suggestions, edited to a four-and-a-half minute program that was broadcast that evening.* Most of the interview consists of Oswald’s standard distinctions between Marxism, Socialism, and Communism. However, he also used this platform to more extensively reveal his views on Castro, calling him “an independent leader … who had not so far betrayed his country.”³⁸ Oswald kept the discussion simple, said he was honorably discharged as a sergeant from the Marines, and omitted any reference to his defection to Russia. He thought he had “scored a coup.”³⁹

At the end of the long day on Saturday, Oswald, in a euphoric mood, sat at his desk and wrote again to V. T. Lee. In an airmail envelope marked RUSH PLEASE, he informed Lee that “things have been moving pretty fast.”⁴⁰ Unable to write without embellishment, he boasted that his demonstration had “considerable [TV] coverage” and that he had been on a fifteen-minute WDSU television program, and “I was flooded with caller and invitations to debates, etc. as well as people interested in joining the F.P.C.C. New Orleans branch.”⁴¹

Stuckey thought Oswald was an “articulate” spokesman for his cause, and he liked the four-and-a-half-minute tape so much that he asked his WDSU news director if he could run the entire thirty-seven-minute interview, but was told no. That is when he considered Carlos Bringuier’s idea of a debate with Oswald. On Monday, August 19, Oswald, at Stuckey’s suggestion, called the radio station. Stuckey proposed the debate format for that coming Wednesday. Pleased to have another chance at publicity for his Cuban cause, Oswald instantly accepted.† The debate was scheduled for a twenty-five-minute public affairs program, “Conversation Carte Blanche.” To counter Oswald, Stuckey selected both Carlos Bringuier and Edward Butler, the executive director of the Information Council of the Americas (INCA), an anti-Communist propaganda organization.

Stuckey provided a copy of the thirty-seven-minute original interview tape to the local FBI office on Monday. While he was later talking to an FBI source, Stuckey said he was put through to either the chief or deputy chief of the New Orleans office.42 That agent read aloud portions of Oswald’s file regarding his dishonorable discharge, the defection to Russia, and his attempt to renounce his citizenship. Intrigued, Stuckey went to the FBI office the next day and examined the file personally. Meanwhile, Butler used his contacts at the House Un-American Activities Committee in Washington independently to uncover information about Oswald’s Russian venture.⁴³

Oswald appeared at 5:30 P.M. on Wednesday, in his thick flannel Russian suit, carrying a black looseleaf notebook and looking very uncomfortable in the sweltering August heat. He was nervous, though he had practiced throughout the day, walking around the apartment reading notes aloud. When Bringuier arrived, Oswald tried to shake hands, but Bringuier refused, instead trading jibes with him about his Communist beliefs.⁴⁴

At the outset of the show, Stuckey repeated Oswald’s statements from the past Saturday’s interview, in which he had claimed to have an honorable discharge from the Marines in 1959 and then lived in Fort Worth before moving to New Orleans. He then confronted him with the truth, armed with the information from the FBI file and what Butler had uncovered, about Oswald’s undesirable discharge and his Russian defection. Oswald was caught completely by surprise. Despite his attempt to fend off the attacks and bring the program back to a discussion of “the Cuban-American problem,” the personal attacks increasingly portrayed him not only as a liar but as a Communist and traitor.⁴⁵ By the time the show ended, Oswald was devastated.

Stuckey felt so sorry for him that he took him to Cameaux’s, a neighborhood bar, for some drinks. He remembered Oswald was “dejected,” and over some beers, he relaxed and opened up a little. He told Stuckey of his early attraction to Marxism and his subsequent disenchantment with Russia, but also about his unhappiness in the U.S.⁴⁶ “It was my impression Oswald regarded himself as living in a world of intellectual inferiors,” recalled Stuckey.⁴⁷ But most revealing was Oswald’s statement that the Russians had “gone soft” on Communism and that Cuba was the world’s only real revolutionary country.48

Marina could tell that Lee was in a terrible mood when he returned home that night. “Damn it. I didn’t know they realized I’d been to Russia. You ought to have heard what they asked me! I wasn’t prepared and I didn’t know what to say.”⁴⁹ His nearly four months of efforts, distribution of more than a thousand pieces of literature, and his media coverage still had not resulted in any followers. Vincent Lee, Fair Play’s national president, had not even answered any of his recent letters. Oswald feared the radio debate had so discredited him that his already lackluster organizing efforts might be permanently damaged.

Bringuier was ecstatic over the evening’s results. “After the debate, I thought Oswald was destroyed,” he says.⁵⁰ Now Bringuier attempted to finish him completely. He drafted a press release calling for a congressional investigation “of Lee Harvey Oswald, a confessed Marxist and an alien [sic] of Castro in the United States” and dropped copies off at newspapers and radio and television stations. He even considered dropping leaflets by plane over New Orleans, but discovered it was illegal.

Marina noticed a fundamental change in Lee after his radio humiliation. He seemed even more disconnected from reality. One of the most worrisome developments was that he began to focus on his rifle again. He brought it out of the closet and at night began taking it onto an unlit screened porch at the front of the apartment. There, Marina remembered watching him “open and close the bolt.”⁵¹ Sometimes while she was in the house, she could hear him practice for hours with the bolt action—what experts call dry runs, which greatly increase a shooter’s proficiency and speed with a bolt-action rifle.⁵² At other times, Marina saw him sitting in the dark aiming his gun at imaginary targets.⁵³ “Well, it was usually after dark, so if I go over there, you know, just see that he is there, and I come back in the apartment, so I just knew he was there with the rifle,” recalled Marina. “He always, most of the time, he said, ‘Just leave me alone … ’”⁵⁴ Once he said, “Fidel Castro needs defenders. I’m going to join his army of volunteers. I’m going to be a revolutionary.”⁵⁵

Soon, the dry sighting on the porch was not enough. “Before it gets very dark outside, he would leave [the] apartment dressed with the dark raincoat, even though it was a hot summer night … and he would be hiding the rifle underneath his raincoat,” recalled Marina. “He said he is going to target practice …”56 Several times he left the house with the rifle, each time disappearing for several hours.

Marina finally confronted him and asked why he was spending so much time with the rifle. “He was preparing to go to Cuba,” she recalled. “He very much wanted to go to Cuba and have the newspapers write that somebody had kidnaped an aircraft.” She was shocked that he was thinking of hijacking a plane. “And I asked him, ‘For God sakes, don’t do such a thing.’”⁵⁷

Oswald now felt that he had to get to Cuba at any cost. The State Department had banned travel there, and The Militant ran several prominent stories during the 1963 summer about Americans who visited despite the ban and faced imprisonment upon their return. Oswald did not worry about the sanctions, because he did not intend to return, and hijacking a plane seemed as convenient and revolutionary as any other means. “[In] his imagination, his fantasy, which was quite unfounded, [he thought] he was an outstanding man,” recalled Marina. “I always tried to point out to him that he was a man like any other who were around us. But he simply could not understand that.… I would say to Lee that [he] could not really do much for Cuba, that Cuba would get along without him, if they had to.”⁵⁸ Oswald began to study airline schedules departing New Orleans. For Marina, it was frighteningly like his preparation for the Walker shooting.

She argued with him over his hijacking plans. He answered her with details of how he intended to use the rifle to force the pilot to fly to Cuba while Marina held the pistol on the passengers and crew. “It was so ridiculous, it is even embarrassing to mention it right now,” Marina recalled. “He told me he would teach me what I am supposed to say, maybe hold the gun and tell the people, you know …”⁵⁹ Marina refused to listen, and said the very idea threatened her pregnancy. She finally told him to do it alone and not to count on her. He trained on his own for days, running about the apartment, clad only in his underwear, practicing leaps and trying to strengthen his legs and arms, things he considered necessary attributes to hijack a plane. “Junie,” Marina whispered to her daughter, “our papa is out of his mind.”60*

The next thing she knew, her husband abruptly dropped the hijacking talk and told her he instead planned to go to Mexico City and visit the Cuban embassy in order to get a visa to travel to Cuba.⁶¹ Mexico City had the nearest Cuban consulate from which he could obtain a visa, and he planned to go there by bus, swearing Marina to secrecy.⁶² Under his new proposal, Marina would return to Dallas with Ruth Paine when she visited New Orleans around September 20. After he got to Cuba, Oswald promised he would either arrange for Marina to join him, or he might return to Russia and meet her there.⁶³ He began studying elementary Spanish. She knew Cuba was his first choice, but if he failed to get there, she had no doubt he was willing to return to the USSR.⁶⁴ But Marina had also come to recognize how changeable he was. None of his convictions, even Cuba, would satisfy him long. “And I am convinced that as much as he knew about Cuba, all he knew was from books and so on. He wanted to convince himself. But I am sure that if he had gone there, he would not have liked it there either. Only on the moon, perhaps.”⁶⁵

On August 28 the extent of Oswald’s frustration with his political activities showed in a letter he wrote to the Central Committee, the highest governing body of the American Communist party. He was frustrated by Vincent Lee’s failure to answer his Fair Play letters and felt that Arnold Johnson was not of a high enough rank to advise him on his new problem. He explained that he had lived in the USSR and had tried to become a Soviet citizen. Since returning from Russia, and having “thrown myself into the struggle for progress and freedom in the United States, I would like to know weather, in your opion, I can continue to fight, handicapped as it were, by my past record … to compete with anti-progressive forces above ground or weather … I should always remain in the … underground” (emphases in original).66 Oswald’s excuse for his failures had become the attacks of “anti-progressives” over his Russian defection. When he finally received a reply, three weeks later, he was advised to “remain, in the background, not underground.”⁶⁷

Although he was distressed over his botched Fair Play efforts, Marina noted that after he decided to go to Cuba, he “was not as brutal and violent …”⁶⁸ Their only disagreement during this period was over the name for their coming baby, which both were convinced would be a boy. They had earlier agreed that the name would be David Lee. But suddenly Oswald seriously suggested Fidel. Marina was adamantly against it. “There is no Fidel and there will be no Fidel in our family.”⁶⁹ Oswald then dropped the subject. He had also dropped his Fair Play for Cuba work. Although he wrote more letters to the Socialist Workers party and The Worker, they were only requests for information and assistance.⁷⁰ Further reports about anti-Castro attacks inside Cuba seemed to strengthen his resolve to go there but did not send him into a fury as sometimes had happened in earlier months. His appetite for serious political books from the public library ceased, and instead he devoured science fiction and spy novels.*

But while Oswald’s political activism appeared diminished, the controversy he had created continued without him. Lt. Francis Martello conducted his own investigation of Fair Play for Cuba and Oswald. “I checked the addresses on his pamphlets. I never could find anything connecting him to 544 Camp Street. I also could not find anything about ‘Hidell.’ The more I looked, the more I thought this local chapter might just be Oswald.”71 FBI agent Warren de Brueys undertook an extensive investigation. “I checked his employment at the Reily Coffee Co.,” recalls de Brueys, “checked with his landlady, as well as with local Cuban sources, and got negative from all of them. Then I contacted our sources for Communist party activity and they were all negative. Nothing indicated he had any connections. He was just a single person, a guy expressing himself and claiming to have a Fair Play for Cuba chapter, but in actuality he was the only member.”⁷² De Brueys did not consider Oswald a dangerous character or a subversive threat, and his report reflected that judgment. “I thought of Oswald as a weirdo,” says de Brueys. “I had several other cases at this time similar to him, where the guys had a fancy, some psychological bent, some aberration, they fancied themselves a poor man’s intelligence agent. They tried to involve themselves on the periphery of things. Usually, they were disturbed people of some kind. In the final report you just say that he does not have connections that call for further investigation. You don’t say in the report that the guy is a kook, even though I had decided Oswald was a nut.”⁷³*

Oswald began to compile a file of his life. The general headings included “Military and Far East,” “Resident of USSR,” “Marxist,” “Russian,” “organizer,” “Street Agitation,” “Radio Specker and Lecturer,” and “Photograpes.”74 He hand-wrote it on looseleaf paper, as part of a notebook he planned to take to Mexico City to convince Cuban authorities he was a bona fide Communist deserving an immediate visa.

On Labor Day, Oswald called the Murrets and asked if he and Marina could visit. It was the first time he had seen his family since the bailout nearly a month before. It was an uneventful afternoon except for when the Murrets pressed Oswald to teach Marina English, something he still adamantly refused. “I’ll tell you right now, I will never teach it to her,” he told Lillian and Dutz.⁷⁵ That afternoon get-together was the last time the Murrets ever saw or spoke to him.

The Oswalds’ final few weeks in New Orleans were uneventful. Lee spent many of the sweltering days naked, inside the house. In the evening, he put on a pair of trousers and sat on the porch, reading one of his library books or tinkering with the rifle. Marina, as well as neighbors, recalled that while he occasionally went to a local candy shop or a nearby Winn-Dixie store for groceries, he was generally at the apartment.⁷⁶ Mrs. Jesse Garner, his landlady, used to watch him, dressed only in rubber thongs and bright yellow shorts, stuffing all the garbage cans up and down the block with their refuse, since he was too miserly to buy his own garbage can.⁷⁷ Marina often chastised him for his stinginess, but he ignored her.*

He failed to pay Mrs. Garner the September rent of $65. He intended to save the money for his trip to Mexico. Marina started to worry that once she returned with Ruth Paine to Texas, she might not see him again. She begged to be taken along to Mexico, but he said it was impossible because of her pregnancy. He promised to summon her once he was settled in Cuba.

On September 7, Castro appeared at a Brazilian embassy reception in Havana and submitted to a rare informal interview with Associated Press correspondent Daniel Harker. Castro was unusually outspoken, saying, “Kennedy is a cretin … the Batista of his times … the most opportunistic American President of all time.”78 Castro denounced recent U.S. attacks on Cuba and then threatened, “We are prepared to fight them and answer in kind. U.S. leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe.”⁷⁹ Castro, aware of the CIA attempts to assassinate him, had used a reporter to warn Kennedy that two could play such a dangerous game. Oswald, an avid newspaper reader, almost certainly saw the article.*

Oswald visited the Mexican consulate in New Orleans on Tuesday, September 17. He filled out an application for a tourist card, listing himself as a photographer with an office at 640 Rampart Street.⁸⁰ For a fee of 50c, he was issued a tourist card, No. 24085, which allowed him to stay fifteen days in Mexico.⁸¹†

On Friday, September 20, Marina came home from a grocery trip to the Winn-Dixie to find that Ruth Paine and her children had arrived at the apartment. Ruth recalled that she had never seen Lee in such a good mood.⁸² She spent the weekend, and he lied to her that he intended to look for work in Houston or Philadelphia, and then once he found a job, he would be back to fetch Marina. On Saturday and Sunday, Ruth “was impressed … with his willingness to help with the packing [of most of their meager goods]. He did virtually all the packing and all the loading of the things into the car.”83 At the time, she thought his actions were “gentlemanly,” but she is now convinced that he probably packed his rifle in one of the bags and did not want anyone else handling it.⁸⁴

Monday, September 23, was the day Marina left for Texas with Ruth. It was a difficult farewell for both Marina and Lee. Ruth remembered, “He kissed her a very fond goodbye, both at home and then again at the gas station [a couple of blocks away, where they changed a flat tire], and I felt he cared and he would certainly see her [again].”⁸⁵ Marina remembered his lips trembled when he kissed her, and he fought back tears. He looked at her “as a dog looks at its master.”⁸⁶ As she drove away with Ruth, Marina looked at him standing alone and wondered if she would ever see him again.

* Also on August 5, the Soviet embassy notified Marina that her request to enter the USSR had been forwarded to Moscow for processing. And unknown to the Oswalds, that same day, the FBI interviewed his landlady, Jesse Garner. She confirmed he was in the city. At that point, the New Orleans FBI office became chiefly responsible for Oswald. Special agent Milton Kaack was assigned to the matter.

† In his address book, Oswald had three addresses listed on the same page with Carlos Bringuier’s name: 117 Camp, 107 Decatur, and 1032 Canal. Harold Weisberg claimed the first address was a formal-dress shop and the second did not exist. He then juggled the numbers and determined that if Oswald had meant 107 Camp and 117 Decatur, that would lead to two anti-Castro militants. It shows the extent to which some will speculate. In fact, Weisberg searched the addresses when he helped Jim Garrison in his 1967 investigation. Instead, a review of 1963 records reveals there is no mystery or mixup. 117 Camp was the Hispanic-American Discount House, owned by two prominent Cubans (it was only a dress shop when Weisberg saw it years later). 107 Decatur was Bringuier’s Casa Roca 1032 Canal was at the corner of Canal and Ramparts, the New Orleans Discount Center, owned by a Jewish Cuban. The addresses were part of Oswald’s efforts to discover the headquarters of the Cuban exiles.

* Bringuier still has the manual, and showed it to the author. It is inscribed in pen on the inside front cover: “Private Lee H. Oswald.”

* Some suggest that the fight between Bringuier and Oswald was staged in order to enhance Oswald’s “cover” identity as a pro-Castro activist. Summers raises suspicions by saying Bringuier had “past contact with the CIA.” But it was with the Domestics Contact Division, which interviewed him after the assassination about a nephew who had defected from Cuba to America. “Except for that single interview,” Bringuier says, “it is a lie to say I had any CIA contact” (Interview with Bringuier, March 16, 1992). According to Summers, Bringuier also published a right-wing newsletter backed by the CIA-sponsored Crusade to Free Cuba. “Absolutely false,” Bringuier says. “Summers is mixed up. My paper was Crusado, but had nothing to do with the Crusade to Free Cuba, a completely different organization, to which I had no connection.” Summers also cites New Orleans police lieutenant Francis Martello as concluding, “He [Oswald] seemed to have them set up to create an incident.” “No, that is not true,” Martello told the author. “That is a fabrication. That fight was not set up. I didn’t believe it back then and I don’t believe it now—no way” (Interview with Francis Martello, March 16, 1992). Although the fight was not staged, it was certainly prompted by Oswald, and it was intended to enhance his legitimate pro-Communist credentials. In a ten-page biographical sketch written in late August, meant to impress the Cuban officials in Mexico City to whom Oswald intended to apply for a visa, he wrote, “I infiltraled the Cuban Student directorite and then harresed them with information I gained …” (CE 93, WC Vol. XVI, p. 341).

* A leftist professor at Tulane, Leonard Reissman, under surveillance by the New Orleans Police Department’s intelligence division, was later found to have one of Oswald’s handbills in his car. A Tulane graduate student, Harold Gordon Alderman, who had been involved in Fair Play activities elsewhere, had one of Oswald’s leaflets taped to his front door. Reissman and Alderman denied ever meeting Oswald. Another Tulane student, Vereen Alexander, thought she had met Oswald at a party with other pro-Castro students in the summer of 1963, but no one else confirmed her story. Though Oswald told his aunt that he visited a language professor at Tulane, subsequent investigations by the New Orleans police and the FBI could not uncover any evidence that he visited Tulane.

* William Walter, a security clerk in the New Orleans FBI office, claimed five years after the assassination that there was both a security and an informant file on Oswald. He also asserted that while he was on night duty on November 17, 1963, he witnessed an incoming teletype from FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., warning of a possible assassination attempt against JFK on either November 22 or 23. He contended that the original had been destroyed, and he later produced a version he said was a replica he had personally typed from the purported original (Marrs, Crossfire, pp. 228–29). However, Walter’s “copy” varied in format and wording from FBI communications. More than fifty other employees of the New Orleans office repudiated his story. Walter claimed that his own wife, who also worked in the New Orleans FBI office, would confirm his story. She did not, and said he never even mentioned the alleged incident during their marriage (HSCA Rpt., p. 192). None of the other fifty-nine FBI field offices ever received such a teletype, although Walter said it was addressed to all of them. The House Select Committee on Assassinations investigated both of his claims and “was led to question Walter’s credibility” and finally “rejected[ed] his testimony in its entirety” (HSCA Rpt., pp. 191–92).

* Since Bruneau apparently knew Nofio Pecora, an associate of New Orleans crime boss Carlos Marcello, some try to stretch the incident to become an organized-crime bailout of Oswald, which in turn earned them a favor. Yet the testimony and evidence show that Bruneau acted, as a personal favor, at the behest of the Murrets and was later reimbursed by Oswald’s uncle. Bruneau had no direct contact with Oswald.

* One of the youngsters who helped Oswald was later identified as Charles Hall Steele, Jr. He had never met Oswald before that day and never saw him again. The other unemployed helper was never identified, although Steele testified the man volunteered from the unemployment line, the same as he had.

* The transcript of the entire thirty-seven-minute interview is presented as Stuckey Exhibit 2, WC Vol. XXI, pp. 621–32.

† It was the same day that Radio Havana and the newspaper Revolución reported air attacks on oil storage tanks, the third raid in four days, and one blamed on “pirates, organized, armed, and directed by the CIA.” American wire services picked up the story the next day.

* Almost none of the best-selling conspiracy books mention Oswald’s hijacking plans.

* In sharp contrast to Marina’s description of this period (late August-early September) as a quiet one for Oswald, Antonio Veciana Blanch, the founder of a radical anti-Castro group (Alpha 66), claimed ten years after the assassination that he had seen Oswald in downtown Dallas meeting with a CIA operative. Veciana, who claimed to have worked for thirteen years for a CIA case officer known only to him as “Maurice Bishop,” told the House Select Committee that it was Bishop he saw with Oswald. There are no other witnesses to the meeting, although Veciana claimed it happened in a busy office building. Veciana, a convicted drug dealer, claimed that Bishop (whose real name he never discovered) paid him $253,000 in cash in 1973 to end his relationship with the CIA (Reasonable Doubt, p. 328). Veciana could not supply any proof of that payment (HSCA Rpt., p. 137). Some, including Select Committee investigator Gaeton Fonzi, believe that Maurice Bishop was actually David Atlee Phillips, a CIA officer who had been in charge of the Agency’s Mexico City station at the time Oswald visited that city later in 1963. The CIA denied that any case officer had ever been assigned to Veciana (HSCA Rpt., p. 134). David Phillips sued a number of journalists who printed the accusation for libel. Some of the suits were unsuccessful and others were settled out of court. There are still doubts not only about Maurice Bishop’s identity, but whether he ever existed. In addition, Oswald was in New Orleans every day at the time Veciana claimed to have seen him in Dallas. The Select Committee thoroughly investigated Veciana’s claims and found several reasons to believe he “had been less than candid,” and that it “could not, therefore, credit Veciana’s story .…” (HSCA Rpt, p. 137).

*De Brueys was later at the middle of a controversy when a Cuban bar owner, Orest Pena, said that Oswald had frequented his place with a Mexican and at other times had met de Brueys there. Pena’s story is still cited as evidence of an FBI-Oswald connection. What is often not disclosed is that Pena recanted his story both in an FBI interview and before the Warren Commission. De Brueys and Pena strongly disliked each other, and the postassassination story was evidently Pena’s means of revenge. When, in the late 1960s, Pena faced criminal charges connected to an illegal house of prostitution, his defense lawyer was leading conspiracy buff Mark Lane. “I never even met Oswald,” de Brueys told the author. “It’s preposterous to say he was my informant. It’s not my nature to malign a person, but Pena is a propagating liar.”

* Although this was a quiet time, and the one in which Oswald was at home the most, some assert that during the same period he visited the office of a New Orleans assistant district attorney, Edward Gillin. For over an hour, Oswald allegedly praised the wonders of a new drug, LSD, and asked if it was legal to import. Gillin suggested his visitor check with the city’s police chemist. After the man left the office, Gillin never again had contact with him, but over the assassination weekend of November 22, 1963, Gillin identified his visitor as Lee Oswald. Since the CIA was experimenting with LSD during the early 1960s, the incident might be evidence of an intelligence link to Oswald. The problem is with Gillin’s identification, which has been offered as evidence of another eyewitness account of Oswald’s suspicious behavior. “I was then, and still am now, legally blind,” Gillin told the author. “I could never have been sure of the identification of Oswald under oath.” Gillin had only identified Oswald from the sound of his voice over the television.

* The interview was prominently covered in the New Orleans Times-Picayune on September 9, under a three-column headline on page 7.

† The man who was issued tourist card No. 24084, the one directly before Oswald’s, was William Gaudet, a newspaper editor. Until 1961, he was a source of information for the CIA’s Domestic Contact Division. He did not know Oswald, did not travel to Mexico with him, and had no other association with the case except for the coincidence that they both applied for Mexican tourist cards. The House Select Committee reviewed Gaudet’s CIA file and determined he had no clandestine relationship with the Agency (HSCA Rpt. p. 219).