In addition to this background, there is one other detail about Marina that should be noted. It is not in the Warren Report, since it was deliberately excised. After the assassination, James H. Martin became Marina’s business manager. She told him about her life and activities in Leningrad prior to going to Minsk. She said she had known, and had access to, some of the important officials in Russia, and she also could frequent many government facilities. She said that she had once entertained the Ambassador of Afghanistan in his hotel room in Leningrad.188 Martin later told the HSCA that when he related this story about Marina and the Afghan ambassador to the Commission, at that point, the interview was stopped and those comments were stricken from the record.189 So in addition to not revealing anything about Marina and Webster, the Commission kept us in the dark about other possible interesting activities of Marina prior to her meeting Oswald.
Lee and Marina met at a trade union dance in mid-March of 1961.190 She thought he spoke Russian with an accent, perhaps from the Baltic area. They arranged to meet again and they did, about a week later. This time he walked her home from the dance. Oswald then called to say he was in the hospital. He was having his adenoids removed. Marina visited him often there and, just like that, they decided to marry. And the MVD colonel, Ilya, agreed to it.191 Although the Warren Report places this on April 20, the intent to marry notice was filed on April 10,192 which makes the affair even more rushed. Within seven days of this notice, Marina was given permission to marry Oswald. This is a very fast time to grant permission to marry a defector. But the marriage took place, after a required waiting period, on April 30.
Some friends of Oswald’s in Russia, the Ziger sisters—daughters of a foreman at the radio factory—had heard about Marina’s curious past in Leningrad.193 Whatever the reason, in a matter of weeks, Marina was allowed to marry a defector. And then she was allowed to leave Russia with him. George Bouhe was a member of the White Russian community in Dallas that befriended Oswald on his return to America. In an off-the-record conversation with the Warren Commission, he said that, after the assassination, he came to think of Marina as like a great actress; or perhaps he was fooled and she was a superagent of some sort. For he, and others, were “amazed at the ease with which Marina left the USSR, which we, who know the setup on the other side, is almost incredible. American, British, and other diplomats married Russian girls and it took them years to get their wives out.” Bouhe then said that he asked the couple how they did it. The reply was, “Well, we just went to the right office and they said: ‘All right, take it away.’”194 In light of what Bouhe had just said, this is not credible. It would appear that something was being hidden. And some members of the Warren Commissison understood that.
Contrary to popular belief, not all the members of the Warren Commission were actively participating in a cover up. The unfortunate thing is that those who weren’t were not in control of the Commission. Representative Hale Boggs, Senator John S. Cooper and, most of all, Senator Richard Russell, had real doubts both about what they were doing, and what their conclusions should be. They also had doubts about the Commission’s star witness, Marina Oswald. Therefore, on September 6, 1964 Russell led a small expedition to the hanger of a Naval Air Station in Dallas. Only three Commissioners were there. Let us call it the Southern Wing. Russell presided, with Boggs and Cooper in attendance. Chief Consul J. Lee Rankin was there with two interpreters. Notable by their absence were the three Commissioners who were, by far, the most active members of the Commission. Let us call them the Troika: Allen Dulles, John McCloy, and Representative Gerald Ford. These three clearly promoted Marina as the Commission’s number one witness.
From the beginning of his examination of Marina, Russell makes two things clear. First, he has thoroughly digested the past record of her interrogations. This includes her relationship with Ruth Paine, who he once called Marina’s alter ego and “one of the most charitable people we have.”195 Secondly, he has real doubts about her testimony. Especially concerning her husband, and about Oswald’s real reason for going to Russia. He asked if Lee had told Marina that Russia was such a communist paradise, and that is why he was there, then why did he never attain Russian citizenship?196 Some of Marina’s answers not only make little sense, they are at odds with the record. She actually says that Oswald was unhappy with this living quarters and his wages.197 This is absurd since as far as wages and living quarters went, this is as good as it got for Oswald once he left the service. Russell also probed for any connections between Marina and the KGB or the Soviet military. It turns out George Bouhe was correct. The CIA had written a memo in March 1964 that stated, “In practice, permission for a Soviet wife to accompany her foreign national husband is rarely given. In almost every case available for our review, the foreign national was obliged to depart the USSR alone and either return to escort his wife out or arrange for her exit while he was still abroad. In some cases, the wife was never granted permission to leave.” Following this proven record, Russell asked Marina who she saw in the military to get her exit visa out of Russia. He then asked her: Did she know any other Russian citizen who left Russia with a foreign national?198 Russell is skeptical about why she was allowed to leave Russia at the height of the Cold War. In fact, this line of questioning got Marina so defensive that she actually volunteered that she was never given any assignment by the Soviets or the Americans! Even though she was never asked that specific question.199 In trying to discern a motive, Boggs asked her questions about how Oswald felt about Kennedy. He was so persistent in this line that he got her to admit she was thoroughly rehearsed on this point in her previous Commission appearance.200 The questions also focused on Marina’s facility with the English language. Russell seemed to doubt her need for an interpreter.201 This last was a key point. The evidence is that Marina attended a vocational school until June of 1959. There is no indication she attended any English classes.202 Yet, when she met Webster, Webster says she spoke to him in English. If this is so, the obvious question would have been: How did she acquire the language? And then: Why did she acquire it? For she was trained to be a pharmacist.203 And this is what she says she worked at. But it turns out Russell was correct. For Robert Oswald later revealed to FBI agent Bardwell Odum that Marina did speak and understand English. And she also wrote the language.204 That Russell could not fully demonstrate this is not his fault. His attempt here at a real cross-examination is the closest anyone came at the time to suggesting that Marina was a KGB agent who was planted on another agent, namely Oswald.205 And this interview gives us a taste of what the Commission could have been if it was a real inquiry.
Going Home
In July of 1961, Lee Oswald went to Moscow to talk to Snyder about leaving Russia. He was trying to make sure that he would not be prosecuted once he got to America. He said he had “learned a hard lesson the hard way.”206 Because— as Snyder had planned—Oswald had not become a Russian citizen, or formally renounced his American citizenship, the embassy returned his passport to him stamped only for the USA. The next day, Marina accompanied Oswald and was interviewed by McVickar. This was to initiate her admittance to America as an immigrant.207 They returned to Minsk to begin work with local authorities to leave the country. Because there were many others leaving the country, the couple was told it would take awhile to process their applications. In late December, Marina was called to the Passport Office and told the couple would be granted exit visas. From the time Oswald visited Snyder in July, to the time they got word they would be leaving, the process took less than six months. As George Bouhe said, in comparative terms, this was quite unusual.
The Oswalds had a child in February named June Lee. Although they had planned on leaving in March, they now postponed the voyage to take care of the infant.208 Oswald also was applying for a loan through the State Department for the return trip. In May, Oswald quit his job and went to Moscow to sign the final papers. On June 1, Oswald signed a promissory note for a 435.71 dollar loan from the State Departmen
t. They then boarded a train for Holland and crossed out of Russia on June 2.209 It should be noted here that Oswald’s passport was stamped “Netherlands” on June 3, and Marina recalled having spent some time in Amsterdam, even though they departed from Rotterdam.210 (Some commentators believe Oswald may have been debriefed in Amsterdam by the CIA.) On June 6, they boarded their ship the Maasdam and on the journey over, Oswald began to write a memoir about his time in Russia. Their ship landed in Hoboken, New Jersey on June 13. They were met by one Spas T. Raikin of the Traveler’s Aid Society. He had been contacted by the State Department to aid the Oswalds when they arrived.211 Raikin was also a former secretary of the American Friends of Bolshevik Nations, an anticommunist lobby with extensive ties to the CIA and other intelligence agencies.212 Raikin helped them apply for a federal loan, and took them to a hotel in Times Square. Robert Oswald wired Lee money for airline tickets. On June 14, Robert picked up the Oswalds at Love Field in Dallas.
The CIA has always denied Oswald was debriefed on his return from Russia—something that even Dan Rather finds hard to swallow. Their reply on this is that since he was a former Marine, it was the Navy’s assignment. But Oswald had been separated from the Marines for two and a half years at the time of his return. His discharge had been lowered to undesirable status. He was, and would remain, a civilian. It was the CIA that carried on intelligence and espionage wars with the KGB at the time. And there is evidence today that Oswald was debriefed by the CIA. In 1978, Donald Deneselya—a man we have met before—was interviewed by the HSCA. He recalled receiving a debriefing report from the New York City field office about a Marine defector in 1962 who had just returned from Russia. The man who wrote the report was Andy Anderson. The Agency, as mentioned above, was quite interested in the radio factory the defector had worked in while in Russia. Deneselya reported to Robert Crowley, a close friend of James Angleton. Crowley had handled the Webster case. Deneselya talked to both Richard Schweiker of the Church Committee and the HSCA. Deneselya saw the report since his job was monitoring technical and industrial progress in the USSR and filing reports with the CIA’s Industrial Registry branch.213 Deneselya was interviewed for the 1993 PBS Frontline episode on Oswald. But his voice was drowned out by Richard Helms who insisted that the CIA had not debriefed Oswald. What the show’s producers did not reveal is what happened when the cameras were turned off. John Newman was on the set that day. After Helms had delivered his speech about no CIA debriefing of Oswald, Newman asked him, “Mr. Director, what would be so bad about the CIA debriefing Oswald? Is that not your job? Doesn’t it therefore look bad when you say you did not?” Helms thought it over a bit. He then told the cameraman to start rolling again. This time he would say that the Agency did debrief Oswald.214 Unfortunately, PBS did not take him up on the offer.
PBS also did not reveal the text of a CIA memo that Newman discovered. At the end of a memo reviewing Oswald’s probable return, the chief of the Soviet Russia division wrote, “It was partly out of curiosity to learn if Oswald’s wife would actually accompany him to our country, partly out of interest in Oswald’s own experiences in the USSR, that we showed operational intelligence interest in the Harvey [Oswald] Story.” 215
CHAPTER EIGHT
Oswald Returns: Strange
Bedfellows
“The CIA claims not to have been concerned with Oswald prior to the assassination. But one thing is certain: Despite these pious protestations, the CIA was very much aware of Oswald’s activities well before the President’s murder.”
—Jim Garrison, Playboy, October 1967
Upon his return to Texas, Oswald looked up Peter Gregory, a petroleum engineer in Fort Worth. Gregory, who was born in Siberia, also taught Russian at the public library. Oswald got in touch with him since he sought help in getting his memoir about Russia published. According to Gregory, the reason Oswald contacted him was he wanted help in securing employment as a Russian translator or interpreter.1 On June 26, Oswald was interviewed by the FBI in Fort Worth. The interviewing agent was John Fain, who had tried to help Marguerite locate Oswald when she could not find him in Russia. Oswald was not cooperative or forthcoming. And unlike with the CIA, there was no discussion of the radio factory he worked at in Minsk.2 Quite naturally, the discussion centered on who his contacts were in Russia, any information exchanged with the Soviets, and any attempt by him to become a Soviet citizen. Oswald rightly said he had not become a Soviet citizen, but he also said he never offered the Russians any information—which, as we have seen, according to Richard Snyder, was not accurate.
Peter Gregory had Marina give his son Paul Russian lessons twice a week.3 In late August, Peter invited the Oswalds to his house for dinner and introduced them to George Bouhe. Bouhe was a leading light of the Dallas White Russian community. And here begins another oddity about Oswald that the Warren Report does not formally acknowledge. But Jim Garrison did. To the point that he ironically titled a chapter in his bestselling book, “The Social Triumphs of Lee Oswald.” That irony is the comingling of this ostensibly communist couple with the conservative White Russian community in conservative Dallas. Let us look at one excuse given for this: Why would Gregory need to pay Marina to teach her son Russian, if in fact, he himself taught Russian? Through Bouhe, the Oswalds were introduced to Anna Meller, who was born in Russia; to Declan Ford, a consulting geologist and his wife Katherine; to Elena Hall who was also of Russian parentage; and to Max Clark and his wife Katya. Max was a retired Air Force Colonel and former security officer for General Dynamics. His wife was born Princess Sherbatov, a member of the Russian royal family.4 The Clarks were once dinner guests at the Oswalds, with Marina cooking. It is hard to believe that no one at the Commission, in all the months they studied Oswald, ever raised an eyebrow to this jarring juxtapositon of warring ideologies that somehow was cozily conversing over dinner right in front of their rather incurious eyes. In fact, almost subconsciously, the authors of the report seem to realize that something is wrong here. For they begin to make excuses for why all these rightwing, traditional Russians would socialize with these leftist, revolutionary Russians. The report says Oswald became “increasingly unpopular” with this group. Why? Because of his self-centeredness and his treatment of Marina. Some even thought he was mentally disturbed. But they stuck it out because they felt sorry for Marina and her child.5 The report then gets even more curious.
George DeMohrenschildt was also born in Russia of an upper class family. His father, a “marshal of nobility” served as both the czar’s governor of Minsk, and director of the Nobel oil interests there before the revolutions of 1917. Hence George was sometimes called the Baron. He came to America in 1938 and spent the summer in Long Island, where he met the mother of Jackie Kennedy. He also was an oil geologist and member of the Dallas Petroleum Club. DeMohrenschildt was acquainted with George H. W. Bush. His acquaintance with Bush was through a man named Eddie Hooker, who the Baron had partnered with in an oil investment firm. Hooker was Bush’s former roommate at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.6 DeMohrenschildt was a regular CIA contact from at least 1957. This was when he was interviewed by Dallas CIA station Chief J. Walton Moore about a journey to Yugoslavia that he had just returned from. Moore tried to cover up his long and diversified relationship with DeMohrenschildt by writing a memo saying he only met with the Baron twice, once in 1958 and once in 1961.7 But the HSCA found out then Moore had periodic contacts with George and saw him several times in 1958 and 1959.8 The two actually socialized together. It was through Moore and Max Clark that DeMohrenschildt decided to befriend Oswald. For, as George told the Commission, he suspected that Clark was somehow connected with the FBI in his security work. And Bouhe confirmed this to him.9
Just before he passed away, DeMohrenschildt went further. He told author Edward Epstein that he had met Moore over lunch in late 1961. Moore had told him about an ex-Marine who worked at an electronics factory in Minsk. He would soon return to the USA and the CIA had an interest in him. In the
summer of 1962, George said that an associate of Moore’s provided him with Oswald’s address in Fort Worth, suggesting he should meet him. DeMohren-schildt called Moore and asked that in exchange for his utility with Oswald, the State Department should assist him with an oil exploration deal in Haiti. Which later on, he received. Moore then encouraged him to go ahead and meet up with Oswald.10 Which George then did. And although DeMohrenschildt denied this was a quid pro quo arrangement, this is what it appears to be. For as DeMohrenschildt said, “I would never have contacted Oswald in a million years if Moore had not sanctioned it.”11
The Baron encouraged Oswald to continue writing his memoir about Minsk. And in the fall of 1962, he urged the communist defector to move to Dallas. So that he would be in closer proximity to the White Russian community. Oswald then quit his job at a welding factory to facilitate the move. According to George’s family, it was he who helped secure Oswald’s next job at the graphic arts house in Dallas called Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall.12 DeMohrenschildt told Moore that a typed draft of Oswald’s memoir was now at his home. Not long after, there was a break-in at the Baron’s apartment.13
Oswald’s position at the graphics art company is another of the myriad examples of the Warren Commission camouflaging the almost mad paradox of Oswald’s life. Consider his relationship with co-worker Dennis Ofstein. While there, Oswald developed a friendship with Ofstein, who knew a bit of Russian. Oswald showed Ofstein photos of military headquarters he had taken while in the Soviet Union. Oswald commented on them, making detailed remarks about ammunition, orders given the guards, and the deployment of armor, infantry, and aircraft in divisions. Even more revealing are the following notations in Oswald’s address book alongside the address and phone number of JCS: “TYPOGRAPHY” and “micro dot.” As Philip Melanson has noted, typography was a sophisticated technique of photographic reduction used by JCS in its advertising work. A micro dot is a method employed in espionage to reduce large amounts of printed information photographically down to the size of a period. The dot is then passed on in the text of a letter or document. This last process was unknown to the employees at JCS. It was explained to Ofstein by Oswald as “the way spies sometimes sent messages and pictures and so on, was to take a micro dot photograph of it and place it under a stamp or send it.” Ofstein actually testified about this exchange to the Commission.14 He came to believe that Oswald was with the U.S. government when he was in the Soviet Union. He deduced this because of Oswald’s keen eye for detail in pointing out things in his photographs and also because of the above noted knowledge of comparative styles of military disbursements. He also told Ofstein that he never observed a vapor trail in Minsk, demonstrating the lack of jet aircraft there. But he did know that the Russians kept tanks north of the city. Ofstein deduced that Oswald’s knowledge of Soviet military logistics was not confined to Minsk but extended to Moscow also.15 Ofstein’s fascinating testimony is not mentioned in the Warren Report.
Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, & the Garrison Case Page 23
