Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  “Fortunately, I moved around, began visiting places where youngsters meet, and established contacts with some more progressive and thinking Japanese,” Lee told Dallas friend George de Mohrenschildt many years later, “and this is what led me to Russia eventually.” De Mohrenschildt remembered the conversation in a manuscript he was writing at the time of his death in March 1977, quoting Oswald as saying, “I also learned there of other, Japanese ways of exploitation of the poor by the rich. Semi-feudal, industrial giants which act paternalistically yet exploiting the workers—proletarians. The wages in Japan were ridiculously low.” Lee spoke glowingly of Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara, saying he, like Lee, had awakened to the fate of the poor in Central America.335

  On September 14, 1958, just a month after his release from prison, Lee was with his unit aboard an attack cargo ship, the USS Skagit, which steamed out of Yokosuka for the South China Sea.336 The occasion was the shelling of the disputed offshore islands Quemoy and Matsu by the Chinese army, who regarded them as Chinese territory although they were occupied by the Nationalist Chinese forces settled on Taiwan (or Formosa, the Japanese name it was often called then). A week later, Coffee Mill set up its radar bubble at P’ing-tung, North Taiwan, as part of an effort to forestall a major war between the two Chinese forces. Very little happened, although an air control officer at the site, Lieutenant Charles R. Rhodes, told author Epstein that MACS-1 soon discovered that their IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) codes had been seriously compromised. When Chinese pilots were challenged to identify themselves, they obligingly sent back codes that identified them as friendly, allowing them to sail right through the airspace MACS-1 was trying to control. “We really caught hell about that,” Rhodes told Epstein.337

  One night Rhodes, on duty as officer-of-the-guard, heard several shots from one of the guard posts. He ran to it, drawing his .45 caliber pistol, and found Oswald slumped against a tree with his rifle on his lap. “When I got to him he was shaking and crying,” Rhodes told Epstein. “He said he had seen men in the woods and that he challenged them and then started shooting.” Rhodes put his arm around Oswald and walked him slowly back to his tent. “He kept saying he just couldn’t bear guard duty.” A few days later, on October 6, Oswald was sent back to Japan by plane for “medical treatment.” Rhodes suspected that Oswald had staged the shooting incident with the hope of being sent back to Japan, which he liked. “There was nothing dumb about Oswald,” Rhodes said.338

  Oswald was also, however, trying to cope with a dose of the clap. On September 16, just after embarking from Atsugi for Taiwan on September 14, he had reported to sick bay with a discharge and slight burning sensation in the urethra. The doctor took a smear, and the official diagnosis was that organisms were detected “resembling neisseria gonococci” (almost certainly gonorrhea, a disease that was nearly a rite of passage for millions of young men in those years), and that Oswald had “urethritis, acute, due to gonococcus” with a “slight discharge and a stinging sensation on urination.” The origin was listed, strangely, as “in line of duty [in line of duty?], not due to own misconduct.” But the Marine captain who interpreted Oswald’s medical record on this matter for the Warren Commission was unable, either because of his lack of knowledge or the ambiguity of the records, to explicitly tell the Commission whether or not Oswald had actually contracted gonorrhea, though he said, “We assume he had gonorrhea,” and Oswald was given antibiotics for gonorrhea.339 The infection was tenacious, resisting treatment by several different antibiotics,340 and it is probable the doctor thought that Oswald would get better care in a hospital in Japan than could be provided in what was a very hastily assembled temporary camp in Taiwan.

  The day after Oswald’s arrival back at Atsugi from Taiwan on October 5, he was assigned to “Sub-Unit 1” of MAG-11, apparently a rear guard unit that had not gone with the rest of the squadron to Taiwan, and the following day Oswald entered the Atsugi Station Hospital, where he remained from October 7 to October 13 to receive treatment for his gonorrhea.341

  Two weeks later he departed Yokosuka, on November 2, aboard the USS Barrett, and arrived in San Francisco on November 15. His tour of foreign duty was over.342 He had about a year left to serve on his enlistment, but he had already hatched a new plan, one in accordance with his brother Robert’s perception of him: try a job, fail, do something dramatic. He was planning to defect to the Soviet Union.

  In November of 1959, when he had been in Moscow for several weeks, Oswald told journalist Priscilla Johnson McMillan, “For two years I have been waiting to do this one thing”—that is, to defect.343 Two years before that date he was still with his unit in the Philippines, and even if the plan began in fantasy, he had plenty of time to brood over it, particularly during his weeks in the brig. McMillan says that he also told Marina that he had been exposed to Soviet propaganda in Japan, both in the form of people who were pro-Soviet and in Soviet magazines. “Soviet propaganda,” he would tell Marina, “works well.”344

  Though he may have begun laying his plans to defect while still in Japan, he kept the fact well to himself. Four days after he arrived in San Francisco for processing at the receiving station, he went on leave, taking a bus to Fort Worth. Again he stayed with Marguerite but spent a lot of time at Robert and Vada’s place on Davenport Street. He had just missed seeing his half brother John Pic and his family, who about a month earlier had passed through Fort Worth on their way to John’s new duty station in Japan.345 It had been six years since he had last seen John in New York, and it would be another three before the three brothers would be together again.

  The vacation was uneventful, and Lee apparently revealed nothing of his new cast of mind to his brother. He visited the farm at least twice and hunted squirrels and rabbits with a .22 rifle. Three days before Christmas, 1958, Lee arrived at his new duty station in El Toro, California. Lee’s new unit, Marine Air Control Squadron No. 9 (MACS-9), was attached to the Third Marine Aircraft Wing at Marine Corps Air Station at El Toro.346 He had once been stationed briefly at El Toro while awaiting transfer to Japan, but this time he went back to work in his specialty, aircraft surveillance, as an aviation electronics operator (“scope dope”), to use the jargon of the era.347 His actual duty station was an old blimp base, LTA (Lighter Than Air), under the administration of El Toro but about ten miles away in Santa Ana. Fixed-wing aircraft flew out of El Toro, while the old LTA base was now being used principally by helicopters, which were housed in two of the largest wooden hangars ever constructed.348 Oswald’s work there was the same as his work in Japan, with the significant difference being that no one expected enemy planes to penetrate the airspace of sprawling, wealthy, conservative Orange County, which bridged the tract home suburbs of San Diego to the south and Los Angeles to the north. With the exception of a few days when his squadron was sent to Yuma on the Arizona-California border for air defense exercises, Oswald would serve out the remainder of his enlistment at Santa Ana.349

  It was deadly boring duty. “All we did was look at radar screens,” a fellow marine named Mack Osborne commented. “It was the sort of work a left-handed monkey could do…The only thing to do at that base was to play around.”350

  It was clear to all of his mates that Oswald was now concentrating on learning Russian—he would sit in his room for hours on end poring over Russian newspapers bought in Los Angeles and a Russian-English dictionary,351 but when he took the Marine Corps proficiency test in Russian on February 25, 1959, less than two months after his arrival, he scored a minus 5 on understanding, which meant he got five more answers wrong than he got right; 4 on reading, four more answers right than wrong; and 3 on writing. His composite score for the entire test was 2. His marks were rated as “poor” in all categories.352 However, since the test was designed to assess the proficiency of native speakers and students at the military’s rigorous language schools, and Oswald had apparently acquired the language entirely on his own, his grades were not that bad. He apparently had the rudiments o
f the language and a base on which to build. It was also apparent that he must have been studying for some time before he arrived in Santa Ana, mainly in Japan. “I remember that Oswald could speak a little Russian,” says Paul Murphy, who served with Oswald at Atsugi.353 Most of the marines who knew him at Santa Ana were aware of—and amused or even awed by—his studies and predilection. They often kidded him, calling him “Oswaldovich,” and he enjoyed it, answering their questions with “da” and “nyet” and addressing them as “comrade,”354 while at the same time referring, seriously, to “American capitalist warmongers.”355 Oswald took it in good humor when some of the guys accused him of being a Russian spy.356 When he and Richard Call played chess, Oswald always took the red chessmen because he said he preferred the “red army.”357 On the other hand, one of Oswald’s superior officers said he never heard Oswald “confess” to being a Communist or say he “thought about being a Communist.”358*Many of the men who served with Oswald at LTA Santa Ana recalled a Russian-language paper Oswald read, and one was certain that Oswald read the American Communist Party paper, the Daily Worker.359

  According to Epstein, Oswald subscribed to a Russian-language newspaper as well as the People’s World—a publication of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party—and the arrival of the papers caused consternation in the mailroom. When mail clerks brought it to the attention of Captain Robert E. Block, the operations officer, Block asked Oswald about it. Oswald blithely explained that he was merely carrying out Marine Corps policy of getting to know the enemy. Block knew he was being conned but didn’t make an issue of it.360 The only conclusion one can come to is that Oswald’s Marine superiors, in never curtailing or giving Oswald any trouble over his Soviet affinity, must have concluded that the lowly, eccentric private, on his way out of the military anyway, could not possibly be a security risk. Besides, Oswald wasn’t being secretive. He was advertising his pro-Soviet sentiments.

  On March 9, Oswald was promoted back to private first class, the appointment retroactive to the first of that month,361 but it seems not to have encouraged him to make a fresh start in the corps. Although he would attract no further disciplinary action, the unofficial record is strewn with instances of his wiseguy attitude, almost always accompanied by pursed lips and a petulant expression on his face that people up until his death often referred to as a smirk. He frequently baited his superiors (noncommissioned officers and officers) by asking them questions on foreign affairs about which he already knew they were uninformed, all to demonstrate he knew more than they did; was deliberately sloppy, including not shining his shoes; would sleep late; wear his hat as low over his head as possible to avoid having to look at anyone; and engage in other acts of recalcitrance and rebellion against an existence in the Marines he analogized to being like George Orwell’s 1984 with its mythical leader Big Brother.362 Oswald’s marks for conduct and proficiency continued to hover during this period barely at the threshold of acceptability.363

  That spring a young officer, Lieutenant John E. Donovan, joined Oswald’s radar squadron. Donovan was a 1956 graduate of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, a background that attracted Oswald’s interest. Donovan often chatted with Oswald, especially on long night-watches, when they had to stay on duty until the last plane came in, often with little to do but talk. Donovan thought Oswald competent in all the jobs he was called on to do—surveilling unidentified aircraft or planes in distress, plotting on the board, relaying information to air force and navy radar sites, et cetera—and he did not hesitate to let Oswald serve as crew chief when neither of the two sergeants normally entrusted with that responsibility were available. He also found Oswald fairly bright and surprisingly well versed in foreign affairs, and Oswald would take great pride in his ability to mention not only the leader of a country but five or six subordinates in that country who held positions of importance. Donovan was less impressed by Oswald’s knowledge of philosophy, although he knew many philosophers’ names. “It was obvious,” Donovan said, “that he often knew the names and that was it.” Donovan was also aware of Oswald’s high opinion of himself and his sense of grievance that the Marine Corps did not recognize his talent, even without the magic college degree, and place him in a position of prominence in the corps. “There is something wrong,” he told Donovan, “when I have more intelligence and more knowledge” than the men “that are leading us.” Donovan suggested that if Lee felt he had the necessary qualities—and Donovan seemed to think he had—that he put in for noncommissioned officer leadership school, or even leave the corps, get a commission as an officer, and reenter the service.364

  Donovan said that Oswald played end on the squadron football team and would quite often argue with the quarterback in a huddle as to what play should be called. Some of the players reported to Donovan that if a play was called that was not to Oswald’s liking, he would slack off on that play. Because he was not getting along with the other players, Donovan had to drop Oswald from the team.365

  Another marine, Nelson Delgado, also saw Oswald in heated discussions with officers. “He didn’t like the immediate people over him…All of them weren’t as intelligent as he was in his estimation,” Delgado recalled. “They’d be talking about…politics, which came up quite frequently during the break…and I would say…Oswald had them stumped about four out of five times. They just ran out of words, they couldn’t come back, you know…He thought himself quite proficient with current events and politics…He used to cut up anyone who was high-ranking, and make himself come out top dog.”

  Delgado, who said Oswald always had a “very sarcastic sneer” on his face, also noticed that Oswald was a poor loser. “Whenever he got in a conversation that wasn’t going his way he would just get mad, he’d just walk off, you know, and leave.” When Warren Commission counsel asked Delgado if he spotted “any homosexual tendencies” in Oswald, Delgado responded, “No, never once…In fact we had two fellows in our outfit that were caught at it, and he [Oswald] thought it was kind of disgusting that they were in the same outfit with us.”366

  Delgado told the Warren Commission that “anything, anything that [Oswald’s superiors] told him to do, he found a way to argue it to a point where both him and the man giving him the order both got disgusted and mad at each other…For him there was always another way of doing things.”

  Question: “He didn’t take too well to orders that were given to him?”

  “No, he didn’t.”367

  In addition to reading Mein Kampf and Das Kapital, Oswald told Delgado about this other unnamed book he was reading, one that provided one of the few lighthearted moments at the hearings of the Warren Commission. Delgado told an amused Wesley Liebeler, who was questioning him, that the book was “about a farm, and about how all the animals take over and make the farmer work for them. It’s really a weird book, the way he was explaining it to me, and that struck me as kind of funny. But he told me the farmer represented the imperialistic world, and the animals were the workers, symbolizing that they are the socialist people, you know, and that eventually it will come about that the socialists will have the imperialists working for them.”

  Liebeler informed Delgado of the name of the book.

  “The Animal Farm,” Delgado mused. “Is that a socialist book?”

  “No,” Liebeler said.

  “That is just the way you interpret it, right?” Delgado said.

  “Yes, I think so,” the Commission counsel replied. “It is actually supposed to be quite an anticommunist book…Didn’t Oswald tell you,” Liebeler asked, that after “the pigs took over the farm…they got to be just like the capitalists before?”

  “No,” Delgado said. “Just that the pigs and animals had revolted and made the farmer work for them.”368

  If Oswald read the whole book, he almost undoubtedly would think about it when he eventually saw firsthand what happened to Lenin’s revolution of 1917—that the only solution was not revolution, but a surgical operation on human nature.


  The book may have also contributed to one of the few jokes ever ascribed to Oswald. Master Sergeant Spar, Oswald’s section chief, in calling a bunch of marines to him, had said, “All right everybody, gather around.” Oswald muttered in a thick Russian accent, “Ah, ha, collective farm lecture.”369

  Of the many events under the rubric of foreign affairs that were current in 1958—the Algerian War, the coming to power of Archbishop Makarios against British rule in Cyprus, the bold new economic goals for overtaking the West by the Soviet Union’s premier and party secretary, Nikita Khrushchev—the one that absorbed Oswald most by far was Fidel Castro’s successful revolution in Cuba. Donovan found nothing untoward in Oswald’s sympathetic support of Castro (who at that time was not known as a Communist) and his burgeoning revolution—many Americans, including Time magazine and Harvard University, agreed with him in those first months that it was a godsend that somebody had overthrown the Cuban dictator, Fulgencio Batista.370

  Because of Oswald’s passion for the Cuban Revolution, he was interested in Delgado, the Brooklyn-born Puerto Rican who was a fellow radar operator, because Delgado was proficient in Spanish—he not only spoke it at home but also had studied it in high school. The first time they met, just before Christmas 1958, they talked about the news from Cuba, where the revolution coming down from the Sierra Maestra mountains was just coming to a head. On New Year’s Day 1959, Batista fled Havana, and Castro’s victorious forces rolled into the Cuban capital. The two young men, both nineteen, continued to discuss the Cuban Revolution and imagined going there to take part. They were particularly fascinated by an American adventurer, William Morgan, who had been dishonorably discharged from the American army but went on to become a hero of Castro’s revolutionary army, earning the battlefield rank of major.371