Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination

by Anthony Summers

  Long before this catalog of evidence had been prepared, the Dallas authorities expressed great confidence in the case against Oswald. At 7:10 p.m. on the evening of the assassination, Oswald was charged with the killing of Police Officer Tippit. Later that night, Assistant District Attorney William Alexander and Captain Fritz of Homicide decided there were also grounds to charge Oswald with the President’s murder. In 1978, Alexander told the author that Oswald’s departure from the Depository after the assassination, coupled with the “curtain rods” story and the communist literature found among Oswald’s effects, was enough to justify the second charge. According to Police Chief Curry, Oswald was brought from his cell sometime after 1:30 a.m. and charged by Judge David Johnson that he “did voluntarily and with malice aforethought kill John F. Kennedy by shooting him with a gun.”2

  The former police chief, the late Jesse Curry, commented that Oswald’s reaction was “typical.” He said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. What’s the idea of this? What are you doing this for?” Judge Johnston said, “Oswald was very conceited. He said sarcastically, ‘I guess this is the trial,’ and denied everything.”

  All of Oswald’s denials were later to be dismissed as outright lies, and some of them certainly were. Yet wholesale rejection of Oswald’s statements may be ill judged. A reexamination of what he said may provide clues to his real role in the assassination story.

  Oswald and the Mannlicher-Carcano Rifle

  From the start, Oswald told his interrogators that he had never possessed a rifle of his own. In later interviews, after the FBI had traced the order for the rifle at the mail-order firm in Chicago, and asked Oswald directly whether he had bought the weapon, he denied it outright. He volunteered the fact, however, that he had indeed rented Dallas P.O. Box 2915, and had been using it at the time the rifle was allegedly sent to that box number. It was never established that it was he who picked up the package containing the rifle at the post office.3

  Oswald did admit to having used the name “Hidell”—the name in which the rifle had been ordered—saying he “had picked up that name in New Orleans while working in the Fair Play for Cuba organization.” At one stage, though, Oswald seemed to contradict himself, saying that he “had never used the name, didn’t know anybody by this name, and had never heard of the name before.” This, though, was probably truculent weariness, for he then snapped, “I’ve told you all I’m going to about that card. You took notes, just read them for yourself if you want to refresh your memory.” Why exactly was Oswald reluctant to discuss the fake I.D. card? As it turns out, his use of the name Hidell is intriguing.

  The Warren Report contained a statement on the subject that was untrue. It declared, “Investigations were conducted with regard to persons using the name ‘Hidell’ or names similar to it… . Diligent search has failed to reveal any person in Dallas or New Orleans by that name.” In fact, the Commission’s own files contain a statement by a John Rene Heindel. He said, “While in the Marine Corps, I was often referred to as ‘Hidell’—pronounced so as to rhyme with ‘Rydell.’ … This was a nickname and not merely a mispronunciation.” Heindel revealed, moreover, that he had served in the U.S. Marines with the alleged assassin. They had both been stationed at Atsugi Base in Japan. Finally, Heindel lived in New Orleans, where Oswald was born, spent part of his youth, and lived during the summer of 1963. All this, for the investigator, has potential significance.

  Any serious study of the Kennedy case must consider the possibility—many would say the probability—that Oswald had some connection with either the CIA or some other branch of U.S. Intelligence. If there was such a connection, it could perhaps have begun at Atsugi, where Oswald and Heindel both served and which was an operational base for the CIA. This period will be covered at length later in this book. We shall also see that, if Oswald was drawn into an assassination conspiracy by others—or framed—the process probably began during his New Orleans stay in 1963. These factors make it all the more disturbing that the Warren Report omitted altogether to mention that there was a real “Hidell”—and even untruthfully stated the contrary.

  None of the thousands of Warren Commission documents reflects serious inquiry into whether or not there was any Heindel-Oswald association after the Japan period. Heindel himself was never called to testify before the Warren Commission. The evidence gathered by the House Assassinations Committee, as published in 1979, shows no investigation of Heindel. This is the more remarkable given the role played by U.S. Army Intelligence on the day of the assassination, and specifically concerning the Hidell alias.

  There were, from the start, curiosities about the way the name Hidell emerged after the assassination. According to later police testimony, a U.S. Army draft card in Hidell’s name was found in Oswald’s wallet immediately after his arrest. One of the first two detectives to question Oswald reported that Oswald actually pretended his name was Hidell at first. Yet, although the immediate rash of police press statements on the case included a mass of incriminating detail, the name Hidell did not come up publicly until the next afternoon, following the discovery of a mail order in that name for the rifle.4 The name “O. H. Lee,” an inversion of Oswald’s real name, in which he was registered at his Dallas rooming house, was provided to reporters within hours of the assassination. Hidell was not. Behind the scenes, however, official communication lines hummed with references to the name within a few hours of the assassination. It now appears that the police and the FBI were only fully alerted to the Hidell alias after contact with a third force—part of the U.S. intelligence apparatus.

  Army Intelligence agents were in Dallas on the day of the assassination, backing up the Secret Service in security operations for President Kennedy’s visit. At San Antonio, to the north of the Texas border with Mexico, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Jones was operations officer for the 112th Military Intelligence Group. As soon as he heard about the assassination, Jones said, he urgently requested information from his men at the scene of the crime. By early afternoon, he had received a phone call “advising that an A. J. Hidell had been arrested.” (Oddly, published information suggests that the call did not mention the name Oswald, although both names were on documents in Oswald’s wallet.) Jones said he quickly located the name Hidell in Army Intelligence files. It cross-referenced, Jones claimed, with “a file on Lee Harvey Oswald, also known by the name A. J. Hidell.” This, in turn, contained information about Oswald’s past, including his time spent in the Soviet Union and the fact that he had recently been involved in pro-Castro activities in New Orleans.

  Indeed, according to the Assassinations Committee summary of Jones’ testimony, the file had been opened in mid-1963, “under the names Lee Harvey Oswald and A. J. Hidell,” following a New Orleans police report of Oswald’s activities in support of Castro. With the file in front of him, said Lieutenant Colonel Jones, he promptly got on the telephone to tell the FBI in Dallas about the contents of the Oswald file. One person he spoke to was Agent in Charge Gordon Shanklin. That, Jones has testified, was the end of his role in the matter, apart from writing a report summarizing the day’s developments.

  It seems important to know everything possible about Oswald’s use of the name Hidell—not least because it was a mail order in that name which linked him in so damning a fashion to the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. The Warren Commission asked to see any Army documents that might be relevant to Oswald, but was never shown the file Jones described on oath. For years, independent researchers asked for them, only to be told they could not be found.

  In 1978, the Assassinations Committee was informed that the Army’s Oswald file had been destroyed in 1973—as a matter of “routine.” In a masterpiece of understatement, the Assassinations Committee report said it found the destruction of the Army Intelligence file “extremely troublesome, especially when viewed in the light of the Department of Defense’s failure to make this file available to the Warren Commission.” The Committee sa
id it found Lieutenant Colonel Jones’ testimony “credible.”

  It is apparent that Oswald used the name Hidell only on his pro-Castro propaganda leaflets, at one stage of his stay in New Orleans in the summer of 1963, and on mail-order forms when he sent for the rifle alleged to have been used in the President’s murder and the pistol allegedly used to shoot Officer Tippit. If Jones’ testimony is correct, Army Intelligence had its own independent information about some use of the name Hidell by Oswald.5 Document releases show this was the case, at least in New Orleans. There is no sign, however, that Army Intelligence advised the Warren Commission of the fact.

  When the Assassinations Committee complained about the U.S. Army’s destruction of its Oswald file, it noted that “without access to this file, the question of Oswald’s possible affiliation with Army Intelligence could not be fully resolved.” The suspicion that the alleged assassin had been somehow affiliated to an intelligence agency will be examined in depth in this book. The role of Army Intelligence in the early hours of the investigation remains obscure and poorly documented.

  One other source mentioned by Lieutenant Colonel Jones might have been able to throw more light on official knowledge of Oswald before the assassination. This was Dallas FBI Agent in Charge Shanklin, with whom Jones said he spoke on the afternoon of the murder. As will be discussed later, Shanklin has been widely held responsible for ordering the destruction of correspondence written by Oswald. A letter from Oswald to the FBI was deliberately destroyed after the assassination, when it should have been preserved as evidence. The Assassinations Committee called this “a serious impeachment” of Shanklin’s credibility.

  Oswald’s use of an alias—any alias—to buy a gun, remains perplexing. If this was an attempt to conceal his real identity, as protection against taking blame for future crimes involving the rifle, Oswald was indeed a foolish fellow. Hard though it may be for a European to comprehend, in Texas it is still as normal to own a gun as not. In 1963, a man could buy a rifle across the counter in dozens of stores with few or no questions asked. Oswald could have done so and risked nothing more than a future shaky visual identification by some shop assistant.

  As it is, Oswald not only gave his own post-office box number on the order for the gun, and committed his handwriting to paper, but also invited exposure—so we are told—by going out to murder the President with a Hidell identity card in his pocket and a Hidell-purchased rifle under his arm. One of the two policemen who first questioned him said Oswald gave his name as “Hidell.”

  It is said that criminal cunning is invariably flawed by stupidity, but other evidence suggests Oswald was far from stupid. School records show that in several subjects he was three years ahead of his class, and his intelligence was noted by his officers in the Marine Corps. How, then, to explain this next anomaly? While “frantically” denying any part in the assassination, it was Oswald who sent the police straight to some of the most incriminating evidence of all.

  On the morning of the day following the assassination, Oswald provided details of where he had stayed in Dallas and where his belongings were kept. Although some of his possessions were kept at his lodgings, Oswald volunteered the fact that he stored many items in the garage of the Paine house, where his wife was staying. Officers armed with a search warrant were soon on their way back to the Paine address, which had already been searched once the previous day. According to the police account, the officers returned triumphantly to headquarters with the enormously incriminating photographs of Oswald holding a rifle and with a pistol at his hip6

  At 6:00 p.m. that evening, when Oswald was confronted with an enlargement of one of the pictures, his reaction was confident. According to Captain Fritz, head of Homicide:

  He said the picture was not his; that the face was his face, but that this picture was not him at all, and he had never seen the picture before. When I told him that the picture was recovered from Mrs. Paine’s garage, he said that picture had never been in his possession… . He denied ever seeing that picture and said that he knew all about photography, that he had done a lot of work in photography himself, that the picture had been made by some person unknown to him. He further stated that since he had been photographed here at the City Hall and that people had been taking his picture while being transferred from my office to the jail door, that someone had been able to get a picture of his face and that, with that, they had made the picture. He told me that he understood photography real well, and that in time, he would be able to show that it was not his picture, and that it had been made by someone else.

  Oswald’s claim that the photographs were faked could reasonably be written off as desperate prevarication. Expert testimony that the pictures were taken with a camera believed to have been Oswald’s, and his widow’s statement that she took them for her husband, have been persuasive evidence that this was so. It may be no coincidence that one of the left-wing newspapers held by Oswald contained, in its correspondence column, a letter from Dallas signed “L. H.” The pictures of Oswald with the suspect rifle are probably what they appear to be. That probability, however, does not end the puzzle surrounding the photographs—why and when were they taken, and with what purpose in mind?

  Marina Oswald, the reader will recall, first claimed she remembered taking only one photograph of Oswald with the rifle, in the backyard. Then, when there turned out to be two different poses, she said she might have taken two. Later, in 1978, she said she could not remember how many had been taken, and that seems to be her safest tack. Oswald’s mother Marguerite referred in her testimony to seeing another photograph, in which Oswald held the rifle over his head with both hands. That picture, said Marguerite, was destroyed by her and Marina just after the assassination to protect Oswald. Marina was never asked by the Warren Commission about this third photograph, though it made her claim to have “forgotten” taking more than one photograph less plausible. In fact, there was a fourth photograph.

  In 1976, when the Senate Intelligence Committee was probing the role of the intelligence agencies in investigating the assassination, it found another pose in the same series of pictures. This was in the possession of a Dallas policeman’s widow, the former Mrs. Roscoe White. She said her husband had told her it would be very valuable one day. As the polite prose of the Assassinations Committee was to put it later, Policeman White had “acquired” the picture in the course of his duties after the assassination. A fellow officer has mentioned having made “numerous” copies of the Oswald pictures for his colleagues. However, even if this particular print was intended merely as a keepsake, why was there no copy of it in the evidence assembled for the official inquiry? It reflects, at best, sloppy handling of evidence. Several officers must have known about this version of the photograph in 1963, for it shows Oswald in a stance that was copied in police reenactment experiments. Perhaps, indeed, they once knew of more copies. The last act of this comedy of police work did nothing to still the suspicions of those who suspected hanky-panky with the rifle poses.

  Oswald’s outburst suggesting that the Dallas police were trying to frame him with the photograph remains just that—an accusation. Yet there is the nagging possibility that there was some sort of cover-up—not necessarily involving the police but other, possibly unknown, Oswald associates.

  The backyard photographs raise the ambivalent role of Oswald’s Russian-born wife, Marina. In 1977, her authorized biography suggested that the deliberate destruction of copies of the pictures was the act of a loyal wife misguidedly trying to protect her husband—not knowing whether he had really killed the President or not.

  Before burning the pictures, however, Marina did tell the police that Oswald owned a rifle. As the weeks went by, she was to be responsible for a mass of testimony incriminating her husband.7 As Oswald’s wife, of course, she was potentially in an excellent position to supply information about him. As a frightened foreigner caught in the eye of the cyclone of America’s tragedy, she
may have felt bound to cooperate in every way possible.

  Nevertheless, while the Warren Commission used her testimony to help convict her husband in the public mind, its staff did not trust her. They felt, sometimes knew, that Marina had on occasion deceived them. One Commission lawyer wrote in a memorandum, “Marina Oswald has lied to the Secret Service, the FBI, and this Commission repeatedly on matters which are of vital concern to the people of this country and the world.” As late as 1979, the Assassinations Committee wrote caustically of her professed ignorance of Oswald’s activities. It referred to her past testimony as “incomplete and inconsistent” and noted that it had not relied on her during its investigation. Marina tended to have lapses of memory on the most improbable subjects. Asked if her husband liked photography, Marina said she did not think so. Asked whether he owned a camera, she said she could not remember.

  Asked if Oswald once did a job involving photography, she pleaded ignorance. That was odd, given that Oswald did possess cameras and had had employment that involved photographic equipment. On account of that job, Oswald provided yet another tantalizing thought about those rifle pictures.

  In March 1963, when the rifle photographs were allegedly taken, Oswald was working in the photographic department of Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, a Dallas graphic-arts company that did work for the U.S. Army. According to a former colleague, “About one month after he started … he seemed interested in whether the company would allow him to reproduce his own pictures, and I told him that while they didn’t sanction that sort of thing, people do it now and then.” With that in mind, it has even been suggested that Oswald himself—perhaps with assistance—doctored his own incriminating pictures. Then, if caught committing mayhem with his newly acquired gun, he would be able to show that the photographs were fakes. It would thus appear that he had been framed—just as Oswald claimed at the police station—and he would be on the way to escaping a murder charge. A scenario worthy of Agatha Christie—though she might have deemed it too far-fetched.