Crossfire

by Jim Marrs

  Almost immediately, Oswald was shipped back to Atsugi, arriving on October 5, 1958, according to official reports. Years later, Rhodes said he still believed that Oswald planned the shooting incident as a ploy to get himself transferred back to Japan. Rhodes never received any explanation for the willingness of the Marine Corps to go along with this “ploy” except that Oswald was being returned for “medical treatment.”

  Recall the medical records concerning Oswald’s gonorrhea contracted “in line of duty.” However, this record is dated September 16, 1958, two days after Oswald officially left with his unit for Formosa.

  This, as well as several other discrepancies in Oswald’s military service records, has caused some assassination researchers to believe that more than one man was using the name Oswald during this time. Perhaps more time was needed to prepare Oswald for upcoming intelligence missions.

  Back at Atsugi and with his unit gone, Oswald was temporarily assigned to a Marine squadron at Iwakuni, an air base about 430 miles southwest of Tokyo. Here, quite by accident, he came into contact with Owen Dejanovich, a Marine who had attended radar school with him. Dejanovich tried to renew the acquaintanceship but was rebuffed by Oswald, who avoided the one man who had known him previously. Dejanovich also found Oswald changed. He said Oswald kept referring to the Marines as “you Americans” and raving about “American imperialism” and “exploitation.” He also noticed that Oswald was keeping company with locals again, this time with a “round-eyed Russian girlfriend.”

  Oswaldskovich the Marine

  On November 2, 1958, Oswald boarded the USS Barrett for the two-week trip to San Francisco. On November 19, he took a thirty-day leave, traveling by bus to Fort Worth, where he stayed with his mother, but he spent most of his time hunting squirrels and rabbits.

  On December 22, he was assigned to Marine Air Control Squadron No. 9 at El Toro, California. Here he was one of seven enlisted men and three officers who formed a radar crew. According to the Warren Report, “This work probably gave him access to certain kinds of classified material, some of which, such as aircraft call signs and radio frequencies, was changed after his [attempted] defection to Russia.”

  It was here that Oswald’s public embracing of communism reached new heights. He would answer questions with da or nyet and address fellow Marines as “Comrade.” When playing chess, he always wanted the red pieces, which he referred to as the “victorious Red Army.” His Marine companions began calling him “Oswaldskovich.”

  One of his fellow Marines, Kerry Thornley, was so impressed by this “eightball” that he later wrote a novel using a character based on Oswald. He noted:

  What causes me to have second thoughts about his commitment to communism is his enthusiasm for a book unpopular with the few self-admitted communists I have known, for obvious reasons. The book is George Orwell’s 1984, a severe criticism in fiction form of socialist totalitarianism. . . . I read 1984 and for a while decided Oswald was not truly in sympathy with Marxism. It had to be a joke, I concluded.

  Marine Nelson Delgado also got along well with Oswald. Delgado, a Puerto Rican, said Oswald “treated him like an equal.” Oswald and Delgado talked at length about Cuba and Fidel Castro’s coming to power. After a while, Oswald began asking Delgado how he could get in touch with some Cubans.

  Delgado said one day he handed Oswald a note saying he should write the Cuban embassy in Washington, DC. Not long after that, Delgado noticed that Oswald, who previously received few letters, began receiving mail several times a week and that at least some of this mail came from the Cuban consulate.

  If Oswald was a genuine Marine communist, it beggars the imagination to think that his officers took no notice. In fact, Thornley told of an incident in which a young lieutenant did notice that Oswald was receiving a Russian newspaper in the mail. According to this story:

  The lieutenant grew very excited over his discovery and possibly made an open issue of Oswald’s probable sympathy to the communist cause. Most of the troops . . . were very much amused at the lieutenant’s having “pushed the panic button.” Oswald, of course, didn’t think it was so funny. But apparently the lieutenant’s warnings were ignored by the command.

  Were these warnings ignored or were higher-ups more knowledgeable about Oswald’s activities?

  Another hint as to Oswald’s true allegiances may be found in an odd incident involving his friend Thornley, with whom Oswald spent many hours in ideological and philosophical discussions.

  Thornley told the Warren Commission that one day while he and Oswald were preparing for a military parade and were remarking about the stupidity of the thing, Oswald said it made him angry. Thornley then said:

  “Well, come the revolution you will change all that” . . . at which time [Oswald] looked at me like a betrayed Caesar and screamed, “Not you, too, Thornley!” And I remember his voice cracked as he said this. He was definitely disturbed at what I had said and I didn’t really think I had said that much. . . . I never said anything to him again and he never said anything to me again.

  This sounds more like a person deeply hurt that a good friend would seriously believe him to be a communist than like a communist sympathizer angered over an innocuous jibe.

  James Botelho, today a California judge, was a roommate of Oswald’s during his stay at El Toro. Botelho even once took Oswald home to meet his parents. He has never bought the idea that Oswald turned communist. In an interview with author/researcher Mark Lane, Botelho stated, “I’m very conservative now and I was at least as conservative at that time. Oswald was not a communist or a Marxist. If he was I would have taken violent action against him and so would many of the other Marines in the unit.”

  Whatever his true beliefs about communism, Oswald at this time knew bigger things were looming on his horizon.

  In the spring of 1959, he had applied to study philosophy at the Albert Schweitzer College in Switzerland and had been accepted. In a cryptic letter to his brother, he wrote, “Pretty soon I’ll be getting out of the Corps and I know what I want to be and how I’m going to be it.”

  Years later, Marine Bucknell told Mark Lane that during 1959 he, Oswald, and other Marines at the El Toro base were ordered to report to the military Criminal Investigation Division (CID). There a civilian tried to recruit those present for an intelligence operation against “communists” in Cuba.

  Oswald was selected to make several more trips to CID and later told Bucknell that the civilian was the same man who had been his intelligence contact at Atsugi. Sometime later, Oswald confided to Bucknell that he was to be discharged from the Marines and go to Russia. Oswald said he was being sent there by American intelligence and that he would return to America in 1961 as a hero.

  Judge Botelho, Oswald’s former roommate, told of his reaction to Oswald’s trip to Russia:

  Well, when Oswald’s presence in the Soviet Union was made public, it was the talk of everyone who knew him at the base. First of all, I was aware of the fact that the radio codes and other codes were not changed and that Oswald knew all of them. That made me suspicious. I knew Oswald was not a communist and was, in fact, anti-Soviet. Then, when no real investigation about Oswald occurred at the base, I was sure that Oswald was on an intelligence assignment in Russia. . . . Two civilians dropped in [at El Toro], asked a few questions, took no written statements, and recorded no interviews with witnesses. It was the most casual of investigations. It was a cover-investigation so that it could be said that there had been an investigation. . . . Oswald, it was said, was the only Marine ever to defect from his country to another country, a communist country, during peacetime. That was a major event. When the Marine Corps and American intelligence decided not to probe the reasons for the “defection,” I knew then what I know now: Oswald was on an assignment in Russia for American intelligence.

  Plans for a trip to Russia apparently had been made for Oswald and the Marines, a branch of the US Navy Department, seemed oddly obliging.

  On Augus
t 17, 1959, Oswald applied for a dependency discharge on the grounds that his mother needed his support. This application was accompanied by affidavits from his mother, an attorney, a doctor, and two friends—all supplied by his mother—stating she had been injured at work in December 1958 and was unable to support herself. Later investigation showed a candy box had fallen on her nose and that she had not even bothered to see a doctor until well after the incident. Nevertheless, within two weeks, to the surprise of his fellow Marines, Oswald’s request was approved and he was released from service on September 11.

  On September 4, Oswald applied for a passport, plainly stating that he might travel to various countries including Russia and Cuba. This, of course, was in opposition to his claim that he was going home to care for his injured mother. His passport was “routinely” issued six days later, just in time for his exit from the Marines.

  After a brief stopover in Texas with his mother, Oswald withdrew $203 from his only known bank account and continued on to New Orleans, where he purchased a ticket for Le Havre, France, on the freighter Marion Lykes for $220.75.

  He had told his mother he was going to New Orleans to work for an import-export firm, but in a letter mailed just before he sailed, he wrote:

  I have booked passage on a ship to Europe. I would have had to sooner or later and I think its best I go now. Just remember above all else that my values are different from Robert’s or yours. It is difficult to tell you how I feel. Just remember, this is what I must do. I did not tell you about my plans because you could hardly be expected to understand.

  Until the day she died, Oswald’s mother maintained her son was an agent of the US government.

  On September 20, 1959, Oswald left on the first leg of a journey that would take him to his destiny—via Russia.

  Russians

  In the summer of 1959, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev visited the United States. Both Khrushchev and his Western counterpart, US president Dwight Eisenhower, seemed sincere in wanting to ease the tensions between their two countries.

  A summit meeting was scheduled for mid-May 1960. It might have produced a limited nuclear-test-ban treaty, already foreseen as the first major accord of the Cold War.

  But it was not to be. On May 1, traditionally celebrated in Russia as May Day, CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers was captured alive after his U-2 spy plane crashed in the Soviet Union following an explosion.

  Khrushchev was furious, yet he tried to give Eisenhower latitude in disclaiming any knowledge of the incident. He stated that the U-2 flight may have been the work of “American aggressive circles” trying to “torpedo the Paris summit, or, at any rate, prevent an agreement for which the whole world is waiting.”

  After days of half-truths and evasions, Eisenhower finally admitted that the spy plane was acting on his orders and took responsibility for the fiasco, just as John Kennedy would take responsibility for the disastrous Bay of Pigs Invasion a year later. It has been reported that Eisenhower actually had ordered the U-2 overflights halted but this order was thwarted within his own command structure.

  And questions still surround the U-2 incident, especially with students of history. For example, in The People’s Almanac David Wallechinsky and Irving Wallace note, “It is possible that certain US military leaders deployed Powers purposely to sabotage the peace talks which Eisenhower himself acutely desired.”

  Oswald and the U-2

  Francis Gary Powers and his ill-fated U-2 spy plane were brought down six months after a former Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald arrived in Moscow and told an American embassy official he planned to give the Soviets classified information he had gained as a radar operator in the Marine Corps.

  Richard E. Snyder, a CIA intelligence operative serving as senior consular officer at the Moscow embassy, recalled that Oswald went so far as to state that he knew something that would be of “special interest” to Soviet intelligence.

  What “special interest” information did Oswald have? The Russians had known about the U-2 program for some time and their antiaircraft missiles were capable of shooting down the high-flying craft. What the Soviets lacked was detailed altitude information on the U-2 that would have allowed them to accurately control their missiles at great altitudes. Oswald, who served as a radar operator at Atsugi, Japan, one of the staging bases for the U-2 flights, had that information.

  After being swapped for a Soviet spy, Powers returned to the United States and wrote a book about his ordeal titled Operation Overflight. He pointed out Oswald’s claim that he had information for the Soviets and implied that if indeed Oswald gave information pertaining to U-2 operational altitudes and radar techniques used during its flight, the Russians may have learned enough to enable them to shoot down the U-2. Powers also said his Soviet interrogators seemed to have special knowledge about the Atsugi base, although Powers maintained he had never been stationed there.

  For years the Warren Commission withheld from the American public files detailing Oswald’s connection with the U-2 flights.

  Some people familiar with the U-2 incident believe the plane may have been downed due to sabotage. In 1977, Powers was killed when his helicopter, used to report news for a Los Angeles television station, ran out of gas and crashed. His death was ironic in that fuel consumption was of critical importance to U-2 pilots.

  There are two tantalizing clues that Oswald may have indeed had some connection with the U-2 incident. In a letter to his brother, Oswald wrote regarding Powers, “He seemed to be a nice bright American-type fellow when I saw him in Moscow.” There is no explanation of how or when Oswald might have seen Powers, particularly since officially Oswald never returned to Moscow after being sent to Minsk in 1960.

  After his return to the United States, Oswald told former Army security employee Dennis Ofstein, a fellow worker at Jaggers-Childs-Stovall, the Dallas graphic arts firm with government contracts where Oswald worked in the fall of 1962, that he had viewed Russian jets in Moscow on May Day. Of Oswald’s three May Days spent in Russia, the only one unaccounted for is May 1, 1960—the day the U-2 was captured.

  Because of the U-2 flights during this time, Soviet intelligence was extremely interested in American defectors, because of both the knowledge they might have and the suspicion that most, if not all, were spies trying to infiltrate the country.

  Apparently American intelligence was equally curious to learn about the Soviets. According to author Anthony Summers, who studied documents from both the State Department and the House Select Committee on Assassinations, only two US enlisted men defected to Russia between 1945 and 1959. Yet in the eighteen months prior to January 1960, no fewer than nine defected, five of them US Army men from West Germany and two Navy men.

  All these defectors, including at least three civilians, had backgrounds in the military or in sensitive defense work. It is known that, like Oswald, at least four of these returned to the United States after a few years.

  Robert E. Webster—Another Oswald?

  The case of Robert E. Webster, an American who told officials he was defecting to Russia less than two weeks before Oswald, is worth considering since there appear to be similarities between the two.

  Webster, a former Navy man, was a young plastics expert who simply failed to return home with colleagues after working at an American trade exhibition in Moscow. He had been an employee of the Rand Development Corporation, one of the first US companies to sell technical products to Russia.

  Although Rand Development was thought to be separate from the more notorious Rand Corporation—the CIA think-tank front where Daniel Ellsberg copied the Pentagon Papers—there is some evidence of connections between the two. The firms were at one time located across the street from each other in New York City; Rand Development held several CIA contracts; and several top officials of Rand Development—president Henry Rand, George Bookbinder, and Christopher Bird—were later connected with the CIA.

  While in Russia, Webster took a Soviet girl as common-law wife (he w
as already married to a woman in the United States) and the couple had a child.

  Like Oswald, Webster claimed to have become disenchanted with Soviet life and he returned to the United States about the same time as Oswald. But now the story turns even stranger. Although Webster is said to have told American officials he never had any contact with Lee Harvey Oswald, when Oswald was arranging his return to the United States in 1961, he “asked [US Embassy officials] about the fate of a young man named Webster who had come to the Soviet Union shortly before he did.”

  And there are some intriguing connections between Webster and Oswald’s wife, Marina. Years later in America, Marina told an acquaintance that her husband had defected after working at an American exhibition in Moscow. This, of course, reflects Webster’s story, not Oswald’s. After the assassination, when American intelligence was looking into Marina’s background, they discovered an address in her address book was that of Webster’s Leningrad apartment.

  Were Webster and Oswald two of several fake defectors being sent into Russia during 1958 and 1959? The parallels of their stories are striking. Author Summers talked with former CIA officer Victor Marchetti, who analyzed Soviet military activities during the time Oswald went to Russia, and was told:

  At the time, in 1959, the United States was having real difficulty in acquiring information out of the Soviet Union; the technical systems had, of course, not developed to the point that they are at today, and we were resorting to all sorts of activities. One of these activities was an ONI [Office of Naval Intelligence] program which involved three dozen, maybe forty, young men who were made to appear disenchanted, poor, American youths who had become turned off and wanted to see what communism was all about. They were sent into the Soviet Union or into Eastern Europe, with the specific intention the Soviets would pick them up and “double” them if they suspected them of being US agents, or recruit them as KGB agents. They were trained at various naval installations both here and abroad, but the operation was being run out of Nag’s Head, North Carolina.