Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  It took a very long time and dogged footwork for FBI agents to sort out this convoluted fiction. They eventually turned up Albert Osborne’s birth certificate at Somerset House in England (where all births, deaths, and marriages in England are recorded) and a clutch of Osborne’s equally elderly brothers and sisters, all of whom readily identified him from photographs. However, many of the questions about Osborne-Bowen remain unanswered. (CE 2195, 25 H 25–74; CE 2196, 25 H 75)

  *The other passengers on the bus were of the opinion that Oswald and Osborne did not know each other. For example, Pamela Mumford told the FBI it was her opinion that Oswald “had had no previous contact with any of the English-speaking people on the bus” including Osborne (11 H 220–221). And the McFarlands told me that from what they could gather from pieces of conversation they picked up between Oswald and Osborne, they got the “impression” the two didn’t know each other (Telephone intervew of the McFarlands by the author on May 12, 1986).

  *Oswald probably gained admission by using Silvia Duran’s name when he spoke to the gatekeeper. It is not known where Oswald went to get his photographs. The FBI checked seven photo studios located within the vicinities of the Cuban and Russian embassies and could find no negative of Oswald. (CE 2449, 25 H 589–590) The negative for the photo stapled to Oswald’s application for a visa was found among his effects after the assassination. The Warren Commission speculated that Oswald may have had the photos with him when he came to Mexico. (WR, pp.304, 734)

  *Duran gave her recollection of the incident to the Mexican Federal Security Police in 1963 and the HSCA in 1978. She said that when Azcue refused to give Oswald his visa, Oswald became “highly agitated and angry,” insisting that he “was a friend of the Cuban Revolution, that he had already been in jail for the Cuban Revolution…He was red and he was almost crying and, uh, he was insisting and insisting, so Azcue told him to go away because if he didn’t go away at that moment he was going to kick him, or something like that. So, Azcue went to the door, he opened the door and told Oswald to go away…I was feeling pity for him [Oswald] because he looked desperate.” Duran said that at some point during Azcue’s argument with Oswald, Azcue had told Oswald that “a person like you, [instead] of aiding the Cuban Revolution, are doing it harm.” (3 HSCA 47–49, 51; CE 2121, 24 H 589–590; CE 2445, 25 H 586; see also Interview of Duran, Transcript of “Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?” Frontline, PBS, November 16, 1993, p.28)

  Before Oswald left, Duran gave him a piece of paper with her name and the Cuban consulate’s phone number so he could inquire at a later time about the decision in Havana regarding his visa application.

  *In his 1995 book, Oswald’s Tale, Norman Mailer writes that an interviewer employed by him asked Nechiporenko how it was possible that a responsible KGB agent would give back not only a gun but also the bullets to someone as disturbed in appearance as Oswald. “Nechiporenko shrugged. It had happened, he said. He could not speak for why. Yatskov had done it, but it did not seem exceptional at the time. They just had not been afraid that this man Oswald would go out on the street and cause trouble with his gun.” Interestingly, when Nechiporenko was further asked if “this same episode had taken place in London, would any of you have returned the bullets?” Nechiporenko responded, “Never,” from which Mailer infers “that these three KGB men had served in Mexico long enough to feel it was wrong to deprive a man of his gun. That, by the Mexican logic of the cantinas, was equal to emasculation.” (Mailer, Oswald’s Tale, p.640)

  *One thing we do know he did (from CIA monitoring of telephone conversations at the Russian embassy) is that at 10:45 Tuesday morning, October 1, Oswald telephoned the embassy. After identifying himself by name, and saying he was at the embassy on Saturday, he said, “They said they’d send a telegram to Washington so I wanted to find out if you have anything new.” Oswald was informed that “nothing has been received as yet.” (CIA Document CSCI-3778826, November 25, 1963, JFK Document 000169) It is not known to whom in Washington the Soviets had told Oswald they would send the telegram, or for what purpose.

  *There is no record of any letter from the Soviets to Marina informing her of their decision.

  *As previously noted, the Beckley address, like the unit he rented on North Marsalis, was in the Oak Cliff area of Dallas, an area Oswald obviously showed a preference for, the two places on Elsbeth and Neely he lived in with Marina also being in Oak Cliff. His taste for Oak Cliff, apart from the rents being affordable to him, was understandable. For the most part Oak Cliff is a moderately hilly, homey, and pridefully old residential area of Dallas. Just across the Trinity River, the tall buildings of downtown Dallas appear to be quite close. Indeed, they are. Oswald’s rooming house was only 1.9 miles from where he worked at the Book Depository Building on the edge of downtown Dallas. (Assassination researcher Ken Holmes recorded 1.9 miles on the odometer in his vehicle on the evening of September 22, 2004, during my trip to Dallas.)

  *That Lee’s small Russian radio had a shortwave capacity was virtually confirmed in his letter to his brother Robert written when Lee was in Minsk, in which he said he had “heard a Voice of America” broadcast about “the Russians releasing [Gary] Powers” (CE 316, 16 H 875).

  *As with the decision by the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs on October 7 refusing Marina’s request to reenter the Soviet Union, the actual Soviet letter of rejection of Oswald’s request to reenter the Soviet Union has never surfaced. At least neither had been received by Marina and Lee as late as November 9. On this date, Oswald wrote, as we shall see, to the Soviet embassy in Washington asking the embassy to inform him and his wife of the arrival of their Soviet entrance visas “as soon as they come.” (CE 15, 16 H 33)

  *An insolvable mystery attaches to this book. The Shark and the Sardines is the only book Oswald failed to return to the Dallas library on time—it was due on November 13. It was not found among his possessions either at Ruth Paine’s house or at his North Beckley rooming house after the assassination. Three months after the assassination, the book had not been returned. (CE 2642, 25 H 901–902) Years later, author Albert H. Newman checked with the library and found to his astonishment that the book had indeed been returned; he had gone to the Oak Cliff branch of the library and held it in his hand. But the library kept no records of when and by whom. (Newman, Assassination of John F. Kennedy, pp.107–108) Either the library made a mistake when it listed the book as delinquent, which would not be an uncommon error, and is probably what happened, or someone returned it after Oswald’s death. The latter opens the possibility that Oswald himself passed the book on to an ideologically like-minded acquaintance who perhaps did not want his association with the assassin to become known but who was sufficiently civic-minded to return the book discreetly to the library long after the assassination. The question is unlikely to ever be answered.

  *Ruth Paine, after discussing the previous weekend of November 2 and 3, testified, “Then he told me, it must have been the following weekend, that same weekend of the 9th.” At this point, instead of letting her say what Oswald told her about the note he had left at the FBI office and trying to firm up the date, Warren Commission counsel completely changed the subject by asking her, “Did he say anything when you gave him Agent Hosty’s name on the telephone?” (Paine had handed Oswald the paper with Hosty’s name and phone number on it, not told him over the phone.) “No,” Ruth said. Question: “Nothing at all?” “I don’t recall anything Lee said.” Paine then returned, on her own, to relating what Oswald had told her about the note. (3 H 18)

  *He didn’t miss a day of work from the day he started, October 16, through November 22 (CE 1949, 23 H 749–751).

  *Though we were not present in the garage, when we look at all the evidence, we can know, with every confidence, that each of the above actions took place precisely as stated, for the simple reason they had to take place.

  *In a handwritten narrative prepared by Marina at the request of the Warren Commission, Marina, again displaying her brutal hones
ty, lamented, “Of course, if I had known what was going to happen, I would have agreed without further thought. Perhaps (if Lee was planning anything) he staked everything on a card. That is, if I agreed to his proposal to go with him to Dallas, he would not do what he planned, and, if I did not, then he would” (CE 994, 18 H 638).

  One well-recognized exception to the rule of evidence that hearsay (a statement made outside of court that is offered into evidence to prove not merely that the statement was made but that it is true) is not admissible in a legal proceeding because of its untrustworthiness (not under oath, not subject to cross-examination at the time the statement was made) is when the statement made is against the declarant’s own interest, the reasoning being that people may lie to hurt others, but not themselves, thereby investing the statement with an inherent trustworthiness. If saying something (as Marina did) that, in effect, places the blame for the murder of a president on your shoulders is not a sufficient reason to believe it, few other things would be. And if we believe Marina’s rendition of what took place the evening before the president’s murder, as all sensible people must, then two things would necessarily seem to follow: one, that Oswald’s decision to kill Kennedy was tentative—that he would not have killed Kennedy if Marina had agreed to come back to him; and two, by this fact alone, the likelihood of his being a part of a conspiracy to murder Kennedy, in which others got him to do what he did, is virtually nonexistent.

  *At the London trial, Ruth Paine testified that when she entered the garage around 9:00 p.m. and saw the overhead light on, she knew it wasn’t she who had left it on because she hadn’t been in the garage earlier in the evening. What about the possibility of Marina? I asked. She answered, “It couldn’t have been Marina. She was very good at turning out the lights whenever she went in there, and then I could hear her moving about. I knew where she was during the evening. So as I walked into the garage and found the light on, it was my clear impression that Oswald had been there and left it on carelessly.” (Transcript of On Trial, July 24, 1986, pp.617–618)

  *In America, the caliber of a firearm is the diameter of the interior of its barrel, and with American weapons it is expressed in inches. Thus, a .30 caliber weapon is one whose interior barrel is thirty-hundredths, or three-tenths, of one inch in diameter. The caliber of continental European weapons like Oswald’s is measured not in inches but in millimeters. Therefore, his 6.5-millimeter Carcano would be the same as an American .257 caliber weapon, the interior barrel diameter being about one-fourth of an inch.

  Oswald’s bolt-action, clip-fed military rifle had many markings on it, among which were “MADE IN ITALY”; “TERNI,” referring to being manufactured and tested at the Terni Army Plant in Terni, Italy; “CAL. 6.5,” to the rifle’s caliber; “1940” and “40,” to the year of manufacture; and “2766,” to the weapon’s serial number. The scope was stamped “4 × 18 COATED,” “ORDNANCE OPTICS INC,” “HOLLYWOOD CALIFORNIA,” and “MADE IN JAPAN.” The ammunition clip, which did not come with the rifle, bore the letters “SMI” (for “Soc. Metallurgica Italiana”) and the number “952” (a part of the full code number “Partita No. 1A/1/1952”).

  After the Second World War, when the Italian army switched to a different rifle, the Carcano was imported into this country from Italy as surplus military equipment and was fairly common in America at the time. (WR, pp.81, 553–555; 3 H 392–396, 398, WCT Robert A. Frazier; Trask, Pictures of the Pain, pp.549–550; clip did not come with rifle: 3 H 398, WCT Robert A. Frazier); Fuhrman, Simple Act of Murder, p.46)

  *Handwriting identification, though not as conclusive as fingerprint identification, is nonetheless considered to be definitive when done by qualified experts, and is “based upon the principle that every handwriting is distinctive.” However, since any single distinctive characteristic in handwriting as well as hand printing may not be unique to one person, in order to make an identification the handwriting expert (normally referred to as a “questioned-documents” expert or examiner) must find a sufficient number of corresponding distinctive characteristics (and a general absence of distinctive differences) between the known writing of the person and the writing on the document in question. The possibility that one person can imitate the handwriting of another and successfully deceive an expert document examiner is considered to be very remote, though it has been done. Not only does the forger have the problem of simulating every distinctive characteristic, but the forger is drawing, not writing. Forged writing is therefore distinguished by defects such as “tremor, waver, patching, retouching, noncontinuous lines, [and] pen lifts in awkward and unusual places.” (4 H 364, 372, WCT Alwyn Cole)

  The two experts who compared handwriting and printing exemplars or “standards” of Oswald’s (i.e., known writing of Oswald’s, such as endorsements on his payroll checks, applications for employment, for a passport, for membership in the American Civil Liberties Union, and letters to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Marine Corps, the State Department, and the American embassy in Russia) with the writing on the postal money order were Alwyn Cole, a questioned-documents examiner for the U.S. Treasury Department with twenty-eight years of experience, and James C. Cadigan, an FBI agent and examiner of questioned documents in the FBI laboratory in Washington, D.C., for over twenty-three years. (WR, pp.566, 569)

  *In one of the leading books on rifles and other small arms, the author writes that the Mannlicher-Carcano is even “known occasionally as the Mauser Paravicino” and is, in fact, “a modified Mauser” (Smith, Small Arms of the World, p.474). FBI firearms expert Robert A. Frazier testified that “the Mauser was one of the earliest, if not the earliest,” of “bolt-action” rifles “from which many others were copied. And since [the Mannlicher-Carcano] uses the same type of bolt system, it may have been [erroneously] referred to as a Mauser for that reason” (3 H 394, WCT Robert A. Frazier).

  *Although the HSCA did not exclude Oswald, the committee was unable to conclude whether it was he, Marina, or de Mohrenschildt who had written the phrase “Hunter of Fascists, ha, ha, ha” (12 HSCA 52–53).

  † The HSCA was careful to point out that Groden was “not a member of the committee’s photographic evidence panel,” but was a consultant (unpaid at that) providing background information on the issues that had been raised by Warren Commission critics in the area of photographic evidence (6 HSCA 294; unpaid: Trask, National Nightmare, p.208).

  ‡ The killer of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman had left bloody shoe prints as he walked away from the murder scene on the evening of June 12, 1994. The shoe (sole) prints were those of the rare, Italian-made Bruno Magli shoe.

  *Simpson’s dismissive characterization of the shoes, saying he’d never wear such shoes.

  *The only other time Oswald had come out to Irving on a day other than Friday was on Monday, October 21, but that was when he visited Marina in the hospital after the birth of their second child (3 H 40, WCT Ruth Hyde Paine).

  † The overall length of the Carcano rifle, when fully assembled, is 40 1/5 inches (3 H 395, WCT Robert A. Frazier).

  *Further evidence showing that Oswald was in physical possession of the Carcano is that a tuft of several cotton fibers of dark blue, gray-black, and orange-yellow shades were found in the crevice of the butt plate of the rifle, and the FBI laboratory found that the colors and even the twist of the fibers matched perfectly with the shirt Oswald was wearing at the time of his arrest, the same shirt the Warren Commission believed he was wearing when he was on the sixth floor in the sniper’s nest.

  The FBI expert testified that the fibers “were clean, they had good color to them, there was no grease on them and they were not fragmented,” causing him to conclude they “had just been picked up…in the recent past,” although at another point he couldn’t categorically say they had not been there for a long time. However, the Warren Commission noted that “the fact that on the morning of the assassination Oswald was wearing the shirt from which these relatively fresh fibers most probably originated pr
ovides some evidence that they transferred to the rifle that day since there was limited, if any, opportunity for Oswald to handle the weapon during the two months prior to November 22.” (WR, pp.124–125; 4 H 82–87, WCT Paul Morgan Stombaugh; CE 673, 17 H 330; CE 674, 17 H 331) Indeed, when Marina was first asked whether she knew what shirt her husband was wearing on the morning of the assassination, she answered, “I don’t remember.” But when she was shown Commission Exhibit No. 150, the shirt he was wearing at the time of his arrest, and was asked if she recalled him wearing it on the morning of November 22, she answered, “Yes, it was a dark shirt” (which Commission Exhibit No. 150 is). Question: “You think that was the one?” Answer: “Yes.” (1 H 121, WCT Marina N. Oswald) In any event, the tufts of fibers certainly are further substantive evidence that Oswald was at least in possession of the Carcano at some point, as opposed to merely owning it.