Crossfire

by Jim Marrs

  Could such a library card have disappeared from Oswald’s belongings while in Dallas police custody? It certainly would not be the only such incident—an incriminating photograph of Oswald was discovered after nearly fifteen years among the possessions of a retired Dallas policeman. And if such a card existed, it would have been strong evidence that a relationship between Oswald and Ferrie continued long after young Oswald moved away from New Orleans.

  In the fall of 1955, Oswald began the tenth grade at Warren Easton High School in New Orleans but dropped out soon after his birthday in October. He had his mother sign a false affidavit stating he was seventeen and he tried to join the Marine Corps. Undoubtedly he was looking forward to Marine training in San Diego. His brother Robert, who had joined the Marines three years earlier, had given Lee his training manual. His mother later recalled, “He knew it by heart.”

  His desire to join the Marines was decidedly odd if we are supposed to believe, as the Warren Commission did, that he was a full-blown Marxist by this time. It makes more sense to believe that Oswald eagerly looked forward to serving in the military because he already knew that plans were being made for his service in intelligence. But his hopes were dashed when the recruiting authorities failed to believe the affidavit. Oswald had to wait another year for his chance at the Marines. His mother noted, “Lee lived for the time that he would become seventeen years old to join the Marines—that whole year.” Yet, during that time, he continued to build an identity as a communist sympathizer.

  During a meeting of the New Orleans Amateur Astronomy Association, he began expounding on the virtues of communism, saying communism was the only way of life for the workers and that he was looking for a communist cell to join but couldn’t find one. Another time, he was kicked out of the home of a friend after the friend’s father overheard him praising the communist system.

  Some have interpreted this penchant for communism as sincere and as evidence of how deeply disturbed Oswald had become. However, when viewed from another side, there is the real possibility that—believing the promises of Captain Ferrie that the adventuresome world of spies lay ahead of him and visualizing himself as another Herbert Philbrick—Oswald was already concocting a procommunist cover. After all, to catch a communist, you had to play like one.

  Up until his meeting with Ferrie his interest in politics and ideology had been no different from that of any other bright kid. And his family had a tradition of honorable military service. The questions over Oswald’s regard for communism intensified after he entered the Marine Corps.

  Semper Fidelis

  Six days after his seventeenth birthday, Oswald was sworn into the US Marines, whose motto is Semper Fidelis, Latin for “always faithful.”

  On October 26, 1956, Oswald arrived at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego, California. Here he completed basic training with no apparent problems, although his marksmanship on the rifle range was less than what was desired by his fellow Marines. He failed to qualify on his first test.

  Former Marine Sherman Cooley recalled that Oswald was given the name “Shitbird” because on his first test he couldn’t qualify on the M-1 rifle. Cooley said, “It was a disgrace not to qualify and we gave him holy hell.” More than fifty Marines who served with Oswald were interviewed by author Henry Hurt in the early 1980s and all said Oswald’s proficiency with a rifle was laughable. In a later interview, Cooley was even more explicit: “If I had to pick one man in the whole United States to shoot me, I’d pick Oswald. I saw the man shoot. There’s no way he could have ever learned to shoot well enough to do what they accused him of doing in Dallas.”

  Another Marine buddy, Nelson Delgado, also has publicly spoken of Oswald’s ineptness with a rifle. After the assassination, Delgado told investigators that during his initial Marine training, Oswald was often “gigged” for having a dirty rifle and that when the unit went to the rifle range, Oswald got “Maggie’s drawers”—a red flag signifying that he hadn’t even hit the target, much less the bull’s eye.

  However, when Delgado tried to tell this to the FBI after the assassination, he claimed, “They attacked my competence to judge his character and shooting ability and criticized my efforts to teach him Spanish.” Hounded and fearful, Delgado finally moved his family to England because “the conspirators may think I know more than I do.”

  In a second round of testing, Oswald managed to qualify as a “sharpshooter” by only two points in December. Sharpshooter is the second of three grades of marksmanship. He did not do nearly so well when he tested a third time for the record shortly before leaving the Marines. Then, he barely made “marksman,” the lowest grade.

  On January 20, 1957, he completed basic training and went on to Camp Pendleton, California, where he completed advanced infantry training. While learning combat skills, Oswald reportedly continued to speak favorably of communism—an odd circumstance for the Marines in the 1950s unless he was still trying to establish a procommunist cover. Odder still is that at no time did any of Oswald’s Marine superiors note for the record his displays of procommunist sentiment.

  During this time, despite his procommunist provocations, Oswald apparently was liked well enough by his fellow Marines, who called him “Ozzie Rabbit” after a TV cartoon character “Oswald the Rabbit.”

  In March 1957, Oswald reported to the Naval Air Technical Training Center in Jacksonville, Florida, although other evidence indicated an Oswald remained at Camp Pendleton until May. The Oswald in Florida studied to be a radar air controller, a job given only to men with higher-than-average intelligence. This job also required a security clearance of “Confidential,” which Oswald obtained at the time he was promoted to private first class.

  Daniel Patrick Powers, who was with the Oswald in Jacksonville, recalled that Oswald used almost all his weekend passes to go to New Orleans, presumably to visit his mother. However, Mrs. Oswald was in Texas at the time and relatives in New Orleans could recall only one phone call from Oswald.

  Could he have been gaining more advice from Captain Ferrie or someone else on how to concoct a procommunist cover in preparation for becoming a spy?

  According to military records, Oswald graduated May 3 and was sent to Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi, where he completed an Aircraft Control and Warning Operator Course.

  After finishing seventh in a class of fifty, Oswald was given a Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) of Aviation Electronics Operator and, after a brief leave, was sent to the Marine Corps Air Station at El Toro, California. He stayed there until shipped to Japan aboard the USS Bexar on August 22. Shipmates noticed that Oswald read Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, and other “good type of literature.”

  Oswald Overseas

  Upon arriving in Japan, the young Marine was sent about twenty-five miles southwest of Tokyo to the air base at Atsugi, home of the First Marine Aircraft Wing—and one of two bases where the then top-secret U-2 spy plane flights were originating. Also at Atsugi was an innocuous group of buildings housing what was known only as the “Joint Technical Advisory Group.” In reality, this was the CIA main operational base in the Far East and speculation has arisen that this was where the young Oswald entered the real world of spying.

  During his duty hours, Oswald sat in a hot, crowded, semicircular radar control room known as the “bubble” and intently watched his radarscope for signs of Russian or Chinese aircraft crossing into Allied airspace. The job’s monotony was broken only by an occasional unidentified aircraft and the strange plane code-named “Race Car.”

  The radar operators would overhear Race Car asking for wind information at 90,000 feet. They at first thought this was some sort of joke, since the world altitude record at that time was only slightly more than 65,000 and the radar height-finding antenna read only up to 45,000.

  However, slowly the men of Oswald’s unit, Marine Air Control Squadron No. 1, realized that they were overhearing conversations from the strange-looking aircraft that they would see wheeled out of a l
arge nearby hangar and scream into the air. When asked about the craft, the officers would say only that it was a “utility plane.” The men didn’t know this utility plane, or U-2, was being used to penetrate Soviet and Chinese airspace to photograph military and industrial targets.

  Oswald seemed to show particular interest in Race Car and other “secrets” of Atsugi. One Marine recalled seeing Oswald taking photographs of the base and he showed special interest during unit briefings on classified material.

  Just as he had gone off alone to New Orleans, Oswald began making two-day visits to Tokyo. Years later, Oswald reportedly confided that he made contact with a small group of Japanese communists in Tokyo while in the Marines. Even Warren Commission lawyers W. David Slawson and William T. Coleman Jr. stated in a report that was classified for a time, “There is the possibility that Oswald came into contact with communist agents at that time.”

  Oswald told a friend at the time that he was having an affair with a Japanese girl who worked as a hostess in a Tokyo nightclub called the Queen Bee.

  This was an intriguing connection indeed, for the Queen Bee was one of the three most expensive nightspots in Tokyo. An evening at the Queen Bee could cost up to $100. It catered especially to officers and pilots—including U-2 pilots, according to author Edward Jay Epstein. It was believed that the hostesses of the Queen Bee, one hundred of the most beautiful women in Tokyo, were using their charms to gain information from American servicemen.

  It was a decidedly odd meeting place for Oswald, who was making less than $85 a month, with much of that being sent back to help support his mother.

  Was the poor Marine private Oswald being used to gather intelligence or was Oswald testing his intelligence abilities to infiltrate communist agents in the Queen Bee? The answer to this question may have come when author/researcher Mark Lane interviewed one of Oswald’s former Marine pals from Atsugi.

  David Bucknell, who was never interviewed by the Warren Commission, told of an incident in which he and Oswald went for beers at a bar near Santa Ana, California, where they were both stationed in 1959. While sitting there, the two Marines were approached by two women who engaged them in conversation. According to Bucknell, later that day Oswald said this incident reminded him of a similar experience at Atsugi. According to Oswald’s story, he was sitting alone in a Japanese bar when an attractive woman joined him and began asking questions regarding his work at Atsugi. Since his work involved the highly secret U-2 plane, Oswald reported this meeting to his superior officer. Soon this officer arranged a meeting between Oswald and a man in civilian clothes. Oswald told Bucknell the man explained that Oswald could do his country a great service by giving false information to the woman, a known KGB agent. Oswald agreed and thus became an intelligence operative. Oswald said he had been encouraged to continue meeting the woman and was given money to spend at the Queen Bee.

  While no US intelligence agency has admitted it, there is further evidence to suggest that he was indeed used as an agent. Sergeant Gerry Patrick Hemming, who served in Japan with Oswald and later joined anti-Castro Cubans, said he was recruited into the CIA while in Japan and, while Oswald never said so, based on conversations between the two, he believed the same thing happened to Oswald.

  A former CIA finance officer, James Wilcott, testified to the House Select Committee on Assassinations that colleagues told him that Oswald was a secret operative for the spy agency in Japan. Wilcott, who served in the CIA from 1957 through 1966, said after Kennedy’s assassination he had several conversations with CIA personnel involved in covert operations. He said, based on these conversations and his experience of paying CIA funds to secret operations through the use of code names, or “cryptos,” he became convinced that Oswald was brought into the CIA while serving as a radar operator in Japan and later was sent to infiltrate Russia as a spy.

  When CIA officials denied these charges—one went so far as to suggest that Oswald was actually recruited by the Soviet KGB while in Japan—the committee decided not to believe Wilcott.

  Another tantalizing piece of evidence that Oswald was involved in intelligence work while stationed in Japan comes from his Marine Corps medical records. Those records show that on September 16, 1958, Oswald was treated for “urethritis, acute, due to gonococcus.” Gonorrhea is a venereal disease condemned loudly by the military. For servicemen, a case of gonorrhea often results in disciplinary measures. However, Oswald’s medical record states, “Origin: In line of duty, not due to own misconduct.” The fact that Oswald was absolved of any responsibility in contracting gonorrhea astounds service veterans and is strong evidence that his extracurricular activities had the blessings of the military, if not of the CIA.

  Another small but eye-opening revelation came from secret meetings of the Warren Commission. General counsel J. Lee Rankin—armed with initial reports from the military—told Commission members two months after the assassination, “We are trying to run that down, to find out what he studied at the Monterey School of the Army in the way of languages.” The Monterey School, now called the Defense Language Institute, is one of the government schools for giving sophisticated and rapid language courses. Rankin’s remark, made public only after a Freedom of Information Act suit, seems to imply that the Commission had knowledge of Oswald’s attending courses at Monterey.

  And it is certainly easier to believe that Oswald got a crash course in the Russian language in the military than to believe that this high-school dropout learned one of the world’s most difficult languages by reading books and listening to records, as implied by the Warren Commission. Fellow Marines testified they could not recall Oswald listening to any language records.

  It is possible that undercover work was behind a strange shooting incident that took place just as his unit was scheduled to be transferred to the Philippines in late 1957. On October 27, Oswald was gathering gear from his locker when reportedly a .22-caliber derringer fell onto the floor and discharged, grazing his left elbow. As nearby Marines rushed into his room, all Oswald would say was, “I believe I shot myself.”

  Before the incident, Oswald had told a friend, George Wilkins, that he had bought the derringer from a mail-order firm in the United States. At least two of the Marines present, Thomas Bagshaw and Pete Connor, now claim the bullet missed Oswald altogether. Others at the time had the impression that Oswald shot himself in an attempt to prevent being transferred to the Philippines. If that was the case, it failed. Although absent almost three weeks for medical treatment, he was returned to duty just in time to ship out with his unit on November 20.

  The maneuvers of Oswald’s unit in the Philippines and South China Sea were largely uneventful. While the unit was on Corregidor Island, actor John Wayne stopped in briefly and a photograph was taken of him. In a background doorway stands Marine Oswald, who was serving his third straight month on mess duty.

  His lengthy hospital stay following the derringer incident and the amount of time he spent pulling KP (kitchen police) may indicate time away from his regular unit spent in intelligence training. According to witnesses, his elbow wound was very minor, yet Oswald spent nearly three weeks in a hospital. More time gaps in his military career were to come.

  Back at Atsugi, Oswald was court-martialed for possessing an unregistered weapon—the derringer. On April 11, 1958, he was found guilty and sentenced to twenty days at hard labor, forfeiture of $50 in pay, and reduced back to the rank of private. His confinement was suspended for six months on the condition that he stay out of trouble.

  It was about this time that Oswald put in for a hardship discharge. As this application was being processed, there apparently was a need for more time away from his unit for additional intelligence training. This may have been accomplished by an incident that began in the Enlisted Men’s Club at Atsugi. Oswald, who heretofore had not been known as violent, tried to pick a fight with Technical Sergeant Miguel Rodriguez, allegedly the man who had assigned him to so much KP duty. Rodriguez failed to rise to the bait
.

  On June 20, Oswald sought out Rodriguez at the Bluebird Club in Yamato and again tried to fight with the sergeant. After Oswald poured a drink on Rodriguez, military police intervened, and the next day, Rodriguez signed a complaint against Oswald. At the court-martial, Oswald acted as his own defense, claiming he was drunk and spilled the drink on Rodriguez accidentally. Rodriguez said then—and after the assassination—that Oswald had not been drunk and had poured the drink on him deliberately.

  The judge ruled that Oswald was guilty of using “provoking words” to a noncommissioned officer and sentenced him to twenty-eight days in the brig and forfeiture of $55. Furthermore, his previous suspension of sentence was revoked and Oswald supposedly went to the brig until August 13, a period of more than forty-five days. Only one Marine who was in the Atsugi brig during this time recalled seeing Oswald and he said during this brief encounter Oswald was wearing civilian clothes.

  After his release, several Marines commented that Oswald seemed different. Joseph D. Macedo said he found him “a completely changed person.” Others said that where “Ozzie Rabbit” had been extroverted and fun-filled, this new Oswald was cold and withdrawn. It may well be right here that a new Oswald—an entirely different man—was substituted for the New Orleans–born Marine. See the section “Was Oswald Really Oswald?”

  Meanwhile, a previously granted extension of overseas duty was canceled and it appeared that Oswald would soon be on his way home. However, in September 1958, the Chinese communists began making moves against the Nationalist Chinese islands of Quemoy and Matsu and there was a general mobilization. Oswald accompanied his unit to Formosa (now Taiwan). Not long after their arrival on the island, Oswald was assigned guard duty. About midnight, the officer of the guard, Lieutenant Charles R. Rhodes, heard several shots. Running to the scene, Rhodes found Oswald slumped against a tree holding his M-l rifle in his lap. Rhodes recalled, “When I got to him, he was shaking and crying. He said he had seen men in the woods and that he challenged them and then started shooting. . . . He kept saying he couldn’t bear being on guard duty.”