In response to Vladimir Kryuchkov’s telegram of 18 July 1962, Cuba’s Interior Minister Ramiro Valdés had appointed Major Rolando Cubela of Cuban Intelligence (G-2) as Lee Harvey Oswald’s case officer. Cubela had contacted Oswald in November and Oswald had embarked upon an overt campaign to gain support for Castro through the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC). He contrived to work hard on this but in the end his personal contribution was relatively ineffectual. It did, however, give him cover for contact with the Communist world.
He wrote letters to the Information Section at the Soviet Embassy in Washington asking about the availability of Soviet magazines in the United States and subscribed to several of them. He also had a subscription for The Worker, the newspaper of the American Communist Party.
A front page story in The Worker on 7 October 1962 warned the Kennedy administration and the American people of the need for action against General Edwin Walker and his followers. General Walker had left the US Army in 1961 after being criticised at the highest level for right-wing indoctrination of soldiers under his command. After leaving the military, Walker attempted to launch a political career as a hard-right segregationist and McCarthyite anti-Communist, running for Governor of Texas in 1962 (he finished last in a primary election field of six candidates).
Perhaps it was this article that led Oswald to purchase a Smith and Wesson revolver, using a post-office box address under an assumed name (A. J. Hidell), at the end of January 1963. Or maybe a KGB agent, or a representative of some other group, encouraged him to do so.
Oswald decided – or was instructed by someone else – to kill Walker.
He discovered as much as he could about Walker’s daily routines, and reconnoitred his house, creeping round the back of it and taking photographs of the view into Walker’s study. His best opportunity, he decided, would be to shoot Walker in his study on a Wednesday evening. Oswald would not be seen at the back of the house and he could make a relatively easy escape by blending into the numbers of good people making their way to the local Wednesday evening church service.
The revolver, however, would not be a suitable weapon for shooting over this distance so, on 12 March, he ordered a Carcano 6.5mm rifle, again using the alias Hidell and the post-office box address.
On Wednesday 10 April, he shot at General Walker, made a safe escape, and hid the rifle near a railway line. Regrettably, from Oswald’s point of view, the bullet hit a part of the window frame, leaving Walker with only minor injuries from shrapnel.
Oswald was never suspected of this attempt on Walker’s life until after the assassination of President Kennedy. There was plenty of evidence against him because he had left a note for his wife, Marina, before he went out, telling her what to do with herself and their daughter if he failed to return. Marina was also pregnant with their second child at the time. She found the note before he returned and asked him what it was all about. He told her he had shot Walker.
Within two weeks of the assassination attempt on Walker, Oswald moved to New Orleans with his family, leaving no forwarding address. The decision to move and the actual move took place within a few days. On 18 April – just ten days after the shooting – Oswald wrote to the FPCC reporting that he had handed out some of their leaflets on the 17th and requesting more. He gave his Dallas address, so he appears not to have been preparing to relocate; yet less than a week later, on 24 April, he moved to New Orleans.
It is difficult to understand why he would have made such a precipitate move unless he had been encouraged or instructed to do so. One thing is known: the FBI, who had been able to maintain checks on him in Dallas, lost track of him for two months when he moved to New Orleans. They did not discover his presence in the city until 26 June and did not verify his residence there until 5 August.
In New Orleans Oswald discovered there was no local chapter of the FPCC, so he wrote to the national director offering to start one. He asked for a charter for the new branch and suggested that he rent an office at his own expense. He also asked for advice about buying large quantities of pamphlets and FPCC application forms.
He was not given a charter, though his pamphlets said he had one. The national director advised him not to rent an office, but he went ahead and did so.
He had managed to get a low-wage job in New Orleans, but he had a wife and child to keep and another child on the way. How was he going to be able to afford to rent a small office and pay for printing large quantities of pamphlets?
Oswald used a post-office box address (No. 30061) which was also accessible by A. J. Hidell and Marina Oswald. He used this address correctly for all correspondence and for delivery of the magazines to which he subscribed. However, he intentionally put ‘Box 30016’ (last two digits transposed) on his pamphlets so that he would neither receive any written expressions of interest nor applications to join the FPCC. He also used the name A. J. Hidell on the pamphlets.
On 19 July Oswald was sacked from his menial job with the Reily Coffee Company. At about the same time, he started to use his real name and correct address on the pamphlets he distributed.
At the beginning of August, he started to play a double-agent role, continuing his overt pro-Castro FPCC activities but behind the scenes posing as an anti-Castro agent.
On 5 August he visited Carlos Bringuier, the New Orleans delegate of the Cuban Student Revolutionary Directorate (DRE), an anti-Castro organisation part-financed by the CIA. Oswald told Bringuier he wanted to help the DRE to depose the Castro regime. He said he had been a Marine and offered to give military training to DRE members and even to go to Cuba himself and join the anti-Castro resistance.
Bringuier declined the offer, saying that his job with the DRE was to disseminate anti-Castro propaganda and information, not to become involved in military activities. Oswald persevered, promising to give Bringuier a Marine training manual, and also offering a financial donation. Bringuier refused to accept any money on the grounds that the DRE in New Orleans did not have a permit to collect money.
Oswald delivered the Marine training manual the next day, in spite of Bringuier’s negative response to his overtures.
On 9 August Oswald went to a corner close to Bringuier’s shop and began distributing pro-Castro FPCC leaflets. Word of this reached Bringuier, who came to confront Oswald, accompanied by two friends. There was a scuffle and all four were arrested for disturbing the peace.
Bringuier was convinced that Oswald had gone to that particular corner purely to provoke an altercation with him.
At the police station Oswald was interviewed by Lieutenant Frances Martello, but he also asked to be interviewed by an FBI officer. In the interview with Martello he refused to give the names of any members of his FPCC branch, but he did say that only five or so people attended the monthly meetings, held in private homes.
He was then interviewed by FBI agent John Quigley to whom he gave a number of silly answers. He said he had married in Fort Worth; that there had been a branch of the FPCC in New Orleans when he arrived; that he had had telephone conversations with A. J. Hidell and took instructions from him; that he had received his FPCC membership card from Hidell. He even gave the wrong date for his own birth.
In court on 12 August, Oswald was fined $10.
On 21 August Oswald participated in a live debate on Cuban–American relations on WDSU, a local radio station. The programme host was Bill Stuckey. There was a co-host called Slatter and two other participants: Ed Butler, who ran an anti-Communist organisation called ‘The Information Council of the Americas’, and Carlos Bringuier.
The debate was a disaster for Oswald. He had expected questions about his pro-Castro activities with the FPCC. Instead, Stuckey asked leading questions about his time in the Soviet Union. Oswald eventually admitted that he was a Marxist.
Oswald’s usefulness to the FPCC was over. At that time, Castro maintained that Cuba was a socialist country; he kept Communism and the Soviet Union at arm’s length. As a self-professed Marxist, Oswald could no longer promote Castro’s Cuba.
Bringuier, as the DRE’s delegate, reported all of Oswald’s strange behaviour in New Orleans to the CIA through his contact at Bill Harvey’s JM/WAVE station in Miami, but this would have been just one of many reports they received from the variety of anti-Castro organisations financially supported by the CIA. It may not have been forwarded to headquarters and thence to Oswald’s file.
Oswald’s five-month stay in New Orleans had been surreal. Why had he been so anxious to get there, deciding to go and arriving in the course of less than a week? Why had he set up a branch of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and then put a false name and address on the leaflets? He clearly had not wanted to recruit any members and this was borne out during the interview with police Lieutenant Frances Martello when he had been unable to name any members and said that only five people attended monthly meetings. Why had he asked to be interviewed by an FBI agent and then told him a pack of lies that he knew would be uncovered?
Why had he gone to Bringuier’s store pretending to be anti-Castro and then inspired a confrontation with Bringuier over the distribution of FPCC leaflets? He would have known that Bringuier’s DRE organisation was supported by the CIA and that Bringuier would file a report on him.
Who had fed Stuckey, the programme host at Radio WDSU, all of the detailed background about Oswald’s connections with the Soviet Union so that he could ask pertinent questions on the live programme? Oswald had kept calm throughout this surprising line of questioning and, on the whole, had given truthful answers that could have damaged the FPCC’s image; that was not natural for Oswald who regularly lost his temper and was never averse to telling lies.
Oswald’s encounters with Bringuier had a lasting effect on the man. Bringuier campaigned for the rest of his life to prove that Fidel Castro was responsible for the assassination of President Kennedy, and the articles he wrote nearly always cited Oswald’s activities in New Orleans as evidence.
Oswald was simply not capable of orchestrating such a series of events and actions of his own volition, and none of them were accidental. Someone, or some organisation, was pulling Oswald’s strings.
The aim could only have been to generate total confusion about Oswald, what motivated him and where his life was heading.
The FPCC, as a pro-Castro organisation, were never enamoured with Oswald’s efforts on their behalf. They did not give him money to rent an office, print FPCC pamphlets and pay people to distribute them, only for him to take action that ensured he would not be burdened with a bunch of enthusiastic Castro supporters. The FPCC did not orchestrate any of Oswald’s activities in New Orleans.
The FBI found Oswald exasperating. Their scheduled interviews in the past had been stormy events and at one point they had closed his file. In New Orleans, he had asked to be interviewed by an FBI agent and then made a total nonsense of the interview. The FBI had no use for him.
The CIA had been copied in on some of the FBI’s documentation on Oswald and they would have received a report on him from Bringuier, but these sources would likely have portrayed him as a useless and aggravating eccentric. Besides, the CIA was not permitted to operate within the United States.
Anti-Castro organisations were busy working with the CIA on strategies and training that might lead to the overthrow of his regime. They may have had some interest in Oswald in relation to monitoring his FPCC activities, but they could ill afford to use their limited resources on that task and would have left it to the FBI/CIA.
That left the KGB. They had the resources and the ability to control Oswald. He had spent nearly three years in the Soviet Union, returning to America with a Soviet wife and a child. He had declared himself a Marxist. He was regularly in correspondence with the Soviet Embassy in Washington, usually asking for information about Communist newspapers and magazines. The only rational explanation for Oswald’s sudden, unpremeditated departure for New Orleans is that the KGB asked him to go there. They then orchestrated his sometimes bizarre conduct. The KGB were more likely than any other organisation to have given an anonymous tip-off to the radio station about Oswald’s Soviet Union connections. They must have warned him they were doing so, because he did not falter in answering questions that would otherwise have caused him to lose his temper, lie, or both.
There is also the conundrum of the KGB’s Vladimir Kryuchkov sending a telegram to Cuba’s Interior Minister, Ramiro Valdés, suggesting that Cuban Intelligence might wish to contact Oswald in the United States. It would have been easier and more fitting for KGB agents to do so themselves. The telegram set a false trail.
The KGB have always claimed that Oswald was of no interest to them: he did not have the right background, intelligence or mental stability to be of any real use. Were that true, they would not have sent a telegram at ministerial level to Cuba.
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There was clearly no future for Oswald in New Orleans, at least not as an FPCC agent. Marina was eight months pregnant and their relationship was deteriorating. She told Oswald she was going to live with her friend Ruth Paine in Irving, not far from Dallas. Marina and Ruth had been close friends for some time and Ruth was now separated from her husband and living alone. The invitation to Marina was not extended to Oswald on the pretext that there was not enough room for everyone, but Marina knew Ruth did not like or trust him.
Oswald decided to apply for visas for himself and his family to return to the Soviet Union, stopping in Cuba for a while on his way there. If this decision were an attempt to save his marriage it is strange he did not discuss it with Marina or even inform her of it. It is more likely to have been a suggestion or an instruction from the KGB.
By now, Oswald was well versed in the red tape of passports and visas: where to apply, how to apply and how long it was likely to take. He would have known, for example, that as an American citizen residing in America he would have to apply to the Soviet Embassy visa section in Washington for a visa to enter the Soviet Union.
Instead, he went to the Soviet Consulate in Mexico City. Perhaps this was down to his not particularly intelligent and often confused mind, but would he not have telephoned the consulate first to check that it was possible to obtain a visa from them, or to ask for a blank visa application form that he could complete before travelling that considerable distance in an uncomfortable bus? Perhaps he was instructed to go to Mexico City.
On 17 September he visited the Mexican Consulate in New Orleans and obtained a fifteen-day tourist visa for Mexico. He set off for Mexico City by bus on 26 September. Marina had already gone to Irving to stay with Ruth Paine.
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For more than a month before this there had been reports that President Kennedy would make a campaign visit to the electorally crucial State of Texas, then consumed by internal strife among the Democratic Party establishment. On the day of Oswald’s journey to Mexico City, 26 September, the Dallas Morning News announced that the President would be visiting Texas on 21 and 22 November and that Dallas might be on the itinerary.