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

by Anthony Summers

  There is no known evidence to indicate that the U.S. Navy considered prosecuting Oswald, a Marine Corps reservist who was by his own account a traitor. The form Oswald signed on leaving active duty had said clearly that personnel could “be recalled to duty … for trial by court-martial for unlawful disclosure of information” and listed the penalties for doing so. Oswald’s defection, and his talk of having given the Soviets radar data, had supposedly caused the American military to expedite changes in its secret codes. Even so, the Marine Corps record reflects no interest in even talking with the prodigal on his return from Russia, let alone putting him on trial. The Office of Naval Intelligence contemplated no action against Oswald, it told the FBI. It merely asked instead to be informed of the results of a Bureau interview with him.

  The FBI, for its part, had not placed Oswald on the list of the thousands of people categorized by the Bureau as potentially disloyal. It had opened a “security case” on him in light of his defection to Russia, and FBI agents in Texas did seek him out on his return. They asked Oswald whether he had been approached by Soviet intelligence while in the USSR, and Oswald said he had not. When he declined to take a lie-detector test, that, effectively, was that. The Oswald “security case” was closed shortly afterward.9

  Yet in March 1961, as soon as he showed signs of wanting to return to the United States, a senior State Department official had written that any risk involved in returning Oswald’s passport “would be more than offset by the opportunity provided the United States to obtain information from Mr. Oswald concerning his activities in the Soviet Union.” It makes no sense that, according to the record, Oswald was never comprehensively debriefed.

  Thomas Fox, former Chief of Counterintelligence at the Defense Intelligence Agency, found it “inconceivable,” he told an interviewer, that U.S. intelligence would not have wanted to ask Oswald how he had been handled by the KGB. Some former defectors were interviewed by the CIA on their return. Robert Webster, a former Rand Development Corporation employee who defected at the same time as Oswald, had been brought to Washington and debriefed by CIA officers and U.S. Air Force personnel for two weeks. Notwithstanding official denials that Oswald faced similar questioning, tantalizing leads suggest that he did.10

  One CIA memorandum indicates that CIA officials at least discussed “the laying on of interviews” with Oswald on his return to the States. Its author, Thomas Casasin, who had been a senior member of the Soviet Russia Division department responsible for “research related to clandestine operations” in the USSR, recalled having discussed Oswald with two senior colleagues in 1962. In his memo, written three days after the assassination, Casasin wrote:

  1.It makes little difference now, but REDWOOD had at one time an OI interest in Oswald. As soon as I had heard Oswald’s name, I recalled that as Chief of the 6 Branch I had discussed … the laying on of interview(s) through KUJUMP or other suitable channels. At the moment I don’t recall if this was discussed while Oswald and his family were en route to our country or if it was after their arrival.

  2.… We were particularly interested in the OI Oswald might provide on the Minsk factory in which he had been employed, on certain sections of the city itself, and of course we sought the usual BI that might help develop target personality dossiers.

  “REDWOOD,” we now know, was a CIA cryptonym for “action indicator for information” for the CIA’s Soviet Russia Division. “KUJUMP” was the cryptonym for the Agency’s “Domestic Contact Division.” “OI,” which occurred twice, stood for “Operational Intelligence.”11

  The recollections of another former CIA officer indicate—if truthful—that Oswald was indeed debriefed after coming home. Donald Deneselya, who in 1962 worked in the Soviet branch of the Directorate of Intelligence, was fired by the CIA in 1964—and is thus a controversial figure. According to Deneselya, as reported by the Assassinations Committee, he “reviewed a contact report from representatives of a CIA field office who had interviewed a former U.S. marine who had worked at the Minsk radio plant following his defection to the USSR.” The marine, who Deneselya thought may have been Oswald, had been living with his family in Minsk. The contact report he saw, he said, had been four or five pages long.

  Deneselya’s claim does not stand entirely alone. A Washington psychiatrist once employed by the CIA recalled having been asked to meet a young American just back from Russia. This had been in mid-1962, and the subject was married to a Soviet wife. The psychiatrist thought, after the assassination, that he recognized photographs of Oswald as the man he had questioned for the CIA.12

  Donald Deneselya, for his part, added a further potential clue. In a 1993 interview with the Public Broadcasting System’s Frontline program, Deneselya said that the debriefing report he saw had been “signed off to by a CIA officer by the name of Anderson.” Other former officers questioned by Frontline said they remembered a colleague—known by the name of “Major Andy Anderson”—who conducted debriefings for the Domestic Contact Division.

  Months later, while working on newly released files, a Frontline consultant came upon a handwritten notation in Oswald’s 201 file that read “Anderson OO on Oswald.” “OO” was the CIA’s numerical code for the Domestic Contact Division.13 Finally, a former Deputy Chief of the Domestic Contact Division, speaking on condition that he not be identified, told Frontline that the CIA did indeed debrief Oswald.

  John Newman, the former U.S. Army intelligence officer who located the Anderson document, noted that questioning Oswald would have been a perfectly normal thing for the CIA to have done. The Agency’s denial of interest in Oswald, Newman thought, was “a big billboard saying there’s something else… . There’s an unexplained anomaly, and among the questions it poses is whether or not the Agency had an association with Oswald.” The Anderson notation and the apparent debriefing, Newman said, was on a memorandum from CI/SIG—the Counterintelligence Special Investigation Group—run by James Angleton.

  In Dallas in 1962, the CIA’s Domestic Contact Division was represented by an officer named J. Walton Moore. He was reportedly to say—apparently with knowledge—that the young man just back from Russia was “perfectly all right.”

  Chapter 12

  Oswald and the Baron

  “He checked with J. Walton Moore about Oswald.”

  —Jeanne de Mohrenschildt, 1977

  In June 1962, less than a week after arriving in Texas, Oswald made a telephone call to a Russian exile living in Fort Worth. What he wanted, apparently, was a letter of reference vouching for his competence in spoken Russian. What came of the call, made to Peter Gregory, an engineer in the oil business, was an entrée to the world of Russian and East European émigrés who lived in Dallas. In the weeks that followed, Lee Oswald and his wife regaled a bevy of exiles with their accounts of current everyday life in the Soviet Union. The couple seemed shabby, incongruous in the smart drawing rooms of their affluent new friends.

  In this improbable milieu, Oswald met a man who would soon become his confidant. Fifty-one-year-old oil geologist George de Mohrenschildt was, in the Warren Commission’s notable understatement, a “highly individualistic person of varied interests.” The man who took the Marxist defector under his wing had been born before World War I into a Russian aristocratic family and technically had the right to call himself “Baron.”1 By 1962, he had been in the United States for more than two decades, held a master’s degree in petroleum geology, and was on his fourth wife. He was the archetype of the prosperous White Russian exile of the period, a well-traveled sophisticate with entrée to affluent society (see Photo 12).

  Along the way, the Baron had acquired connections to the world of intelligence that remain blurred to this day. During World War II, by his account, he had cooperated with French intelligence “collect[ing] facts on people involved in pro-German activity.” In 1942, records show, he had expressed a desire to work for the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner o
f the CIA. In Washington, DC, that year, he lived in the same house as a British intelligence officer and a senior American naval officer. In the 1950s, at New York’s exclusive Racquet Club, de Mohrenschildt was often seen with Jake Cogswell, who would reportedly become a CIA operative. Later, back in the States from a stay in Yugoslavia during which he was accused of making drawings of military fortifications, the CIA debriefed him. Over several meetings, the subsequent report said, the CIA debriefer “obtained foreign intelligence which was promptly disseminated to other federal agencies in ten separate reports.”

  From late 1960 until autumn 1961, following travel in Central America and the Caribbean with his fourth wife Jeanne, de Mohrenschildt offered the State Department a written record of the journey. The couple had been in Guatemala, a major jumping-off point for CIA-backed Cuban exiles, during the Bay of Pigs invasion. Following his association in Dallas with Lee Harvey Oswald, de Mohrenschildt was to be involved in activity in the Caribbean that—his CIA file shows—involved both Agency and Army Intelligence personnel.

  These connections did not escape those who knew de Mohrenschildt in Dallas. One acquaintance gathered he did something for the State Department. His attorney and friend, Patrick Russell, told the author he got the feeling de Mohrenschildt might himself have been a CIA agent.2 He knew, he said, that his client would “undergo debriefing” each time he returned to the States from abroad. Russell felt de Mohrenschildt’s association with Oswald “went a little deeper than friendship.”

  The de Mohrenschildts were to claim they encountered the Oswalds by chance, in the fall of 1962, as the result of a casual introduction by friends in the Russian community. One early account had it that they were taken to see the couple by a Dallas businessman of Russian extraction, Colonel Lawrence Orlov. Orlov, though, told an interviewer that it was obvious at the meeting that the Oswalds and the de Mohrenschildts had met before. De Mohrenschildt was to tell the FBI that they had been introduced by the doyen of the affluent Russian colony in Dallas, George Bouhe. Bouhe said it did not happen that way. De Mohrenschildt’s widow Jeanne told the author: “My husband and I heard from the Russian community of an American marine that defected to Russia and returned bringing a young wife and daughter… . He needed a job and she needed help with the child. So we decided to take them under our wing.”

  The de Mohrenschildt-Oswald friendship that ensued has raised a major question because of something de Mohrenschildt said during his Warren Commission testimony. He asked a couple of people, he said, whether it was “safe”—given the young man’s background as a former defector—for him and his wife to associate with Oswald. One of the people, he said rather vaguely, could have been “Mr. Moore, Walton Moore … He is a government man—either FBI or Central Intelligence… . We saw each other from time to time, had lunch … a very interesting person.”3

  J. Walton Moore was indeed with the CIA. He was employed by the CIA’s Domestic Contact Division in Dallas, charged with making contact with people who had information on foreign matters. Moore’s supposed response, when asked by de Mohrenschildt about Oswald, has sensational implications.

  In her interviews with the author, de Mohrenschildt’s widow Jeanne said she had been present during the exchange with the CIA man. When Oswald’s name was brought up, she said, Moore “seemed to be aware of Oswald. He knew who we were talking about. He said the CIA had absolutely no trace on him, that he was perfectly all right and clear. The CIA had nothing on him in the records.”4

  If Moore did say that, de Mohrenschildt’s CIA friend was spinning a line. Agency files did, of course, contain information on Oswald’s defection to the Soviet Union. An even more discordant note is Jeanne’s allegation that Moore was at once familiar with the Oswald case when the subject was brought up. If the CIA had nothing on Oswald, how was its employee in Dallas qualified to comment without even checking?

  The reference to Moore in de Mohrenschildt’s testimony, and the fact that Moore was with the CIA, remained unnoticed for years. When it did surface, in the 1970s, the CIA said it was “no commenting” the matter. Moore himself fobbed off a reporter, declaring airily, “To the best of my recollection, I hadn’t seen de Mohrenschildt for a couple of years before the assassination. I don’t know where George got the idea that I cleared Oswald for him. I never met Oswald. I never heard his name before the assassination.”

  Questioned by the Assassinations Committee as to when he had last seen de Mohrenschildt before the murder of the President, Moore was more careful about his “best recollection.” While still denying that Oswald was discussed, Moore indicated that from 1957 on he “had ‘periodic’ contact with de Mohrenschildt for ‘debriefing’ purposes over the years.” Jeanne de Mohrenschildt responded to that assertion with scorn. At the relevant time, she told the author, the CIA man was so close an associate that he and his wife were dining with the de Mohrenschildts once a fortnight.

  The truth about the alleged exchange about Oswald between J. Walton Moore and George de Mohrenschildt remains unclear—another of those question marks hanging over the Agency’s role in the case. De Mohrenschildt’s association with Oswald, meanwhile, plays a significant part in this history.

  They made a strange pair. De Mohrenschildt, thirty years older than Lee Oswald, was swashbuckling, sophisticated. Oswald, by contrast, was introverted, consumed with idealistic notions, grindingly poor. Yet just as George de Mohrenschildt played the Germanophile during the war, infuriating friends with sardonic “Heil Hitler” salutes while privately working for the Allies, so now was he well equipped to cultivate Oswald. He was a maverick among his Dallas friends, an articulate champion of minority causes, a liberal who loved to flout convention. He had no trouble building a bridge to Oswald and seems genuinely to have liked him. “Oswald was a delightful guy,” he would say years later. “They make a moron out of him, but he was smart as hell. Ahead of his time really, a kind of hippie of those days.”

  The Soviet episode aside, the Baron and the “hippie” covered a lot of ground together. In an unfinished manuscript de Mohrenschildt wrote before he died, he portrayed Oswald as a young man whose ideas would today raise few eyebrows. Oswald shared with de Mohrenschildt a sense of outrage over racial discrimination in the United States—he spoke admiringly of Martin Luther King. Most poignant of all are Oswald’s comments to him about President Kennedy. As reported by de Mohrenschildt, Oswald repeatedly praised the President for his efforts both to improve the racial situation and to reach an understanding with the Communist nations. De Mohrenschildt quoted Oswald, who within a year would be accused of killing Kennedy, as saying of him, “How handsome he looks, what open and sincere features he has! How different he looks from the other politicians! … If he succeeds he will be the greatest president in the history of this country.”

  The two new friends talked hour after hour about Oswald’s experiences in the Soviet Union. When Oswald arrived in the United States, he had started collecting notes on his stay in Russia and had spoken briefly of getting them published. He now handed the notes to de Mohrenschildt, respectfully asking for his opinion. According to de Mohrenschildt’s son-in-law Gary Taylor, Oswald became putty in de Mohrenschildt’s hands, “Whatever his suggestions were, Lee grabbed them and took them.”

  In October 1962, when de Mohrenschildt and Russian friends visited the Oswalds at their run-down apartment in Fort Worth, he suggested Oswald would have better work opportunities in Dallas, thirty miles away, and that Marina would be better off staying with one of the émigré families for a while. There was evident tension between Oswald and Marina, and some thought Oswald had been beating his wife. De Mohrenschildt’s proposal was accepted. Later, some of those present would say de Mohrenschildt had seemed oddly clear about Oswald’s job prospects in Dallas, that he was possibly supplying Oswald with money.5 The day after the meeting at his apartment, Oswald followed de Mohrenschildt’s advice, quit his job in Fort Worth without notice, and made his
way to Dallas. Apart from a few days at the city YMCA, it is not known where Oswald stayed for the best part of the next month.

  He rented a post-office box, a system that—assuming no official surveillance—ensured the receipt of mail with absolute privacy. Oswald used a post-office box wherever he went from then on. He did land a new job, meanwhile, one that paid within a few cents exactly the same as his old job in Fort Worth. George de Mohrenschildt’s wife and daughter would both say that, though technically Oswald got the work through the Texas Employment Commission, it was de Mohrenschildt who fixed it for him. The job involved photography, a skill Oswald was keen to learn. The firm he joined was an odd setting for a former defector to the Soviet Union who had, by his own account, given away U.S. military secrets.

  Oswald’s new employment was with a graphic-arts company called Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall which, along with advertisements for newspapers and trade catalogs, handled contracts for the U.S. Army Map Service. Much of the work involved material obtained by the very U-2 planes Marine Oswald had once watched in Japan, and only employees with a special security clearance were supposed to see it. In practice, the staff worked in cramped conditions that made secrecy impossible. Oswald worked side by side with a fellow employee, Dennis Ofstein, who had previously worked in the Army Security Agency. Though closemouthed at first, Oswald loosened up a little when he realized Ofstein knew some Russian.

  Ofstein would recall the surprisingly professional way his new colleague discussed matters of Soviet military interest. Oswald mentioned “the dispersement of military units, saying they didn’t intermingle their armored divisions and infantry divisions and various units the way we do in the United States, and they would have all of their aircraft in one geographical location and their infantry in another.” Once, when Ofstein helped Oswald enlarge a picture, he said it had been taken in Russia and showed “some military headquarters and that the guards stationed there were armed with weapons and ammunition and had orders to shoot any trespassers.”