Oswald's Game

by Davison, Jean

  The women were too afraid to go to the authorities with their story, but Sylvia told another sister about it, who told an American friend. Eventually the information made its way to the FBI, who came to question Sylvia in mid-December and then relayed her story to the Warren Commission.

  Odio’s account of her meeting with Oswald was arguably the most important new information given to the Commission. Here was a witness who said she had seen Oswald with two unknown companions, one of whom reported a threat Oswald had made against the president’s life—this scarcely two months before the assassination. Odio’s experience might well provide the key to the mystery of why Kennedy was killed.

  From the outset it was clear that Odio was a credible witness. The FBI checked her out, and her reputation was excellent. More important, her physician insisted that Sylvia had told him about her mysterious visitors soon after she saw them, well before the assassination. And she was able to produce the letter her father had written denying the visitors were his friends. Furthermore, the details of her account matched up with other evidence about Oswald she almost certainly couldn’t have known about.1 For instance, Leopoldo had said they had just come from New Orleans and were leaving on a trip—at a time when Oswald had left New Orleans and would soon be in Mexico. Her description of one of the Latin Americans was similar to that of the “Mexican” Oswald had reportedly been seen with in New Orleans. In short, Sylvia Odio’s story held up, and she was, and still remains, quite certain the man she saw that night was Lee Harvey Oswald.

  Even before Odio was called to testify before the Warren Commission, one of its staff lawyers, W. David Slawson, was trying to pin down Oswald’s movements from the time when he was last seen in New Orleans by Marina and Ruth Paine on Monday, September 23, to the time when he was next spotted on the bus heading for Mexico shortly after 6 A.M. on Thursday, September 26. If Oswald’s whereabouts during that period could be accounted for, Odio’s story—and its disturbing implications—could be quickly disposed of.

  As it turned out, this was not easy to do. There were no eyewitnesses who could establish Oswald’s presence in New Orleans after neighbors saw him leave his apartment on the afternoon of the 24th, and no evidence could be found that he left the city by bus, train, or commercial airline. Thus, the evening of the 24th and the entire next day and night were a blank. Slawson had one slim piece of paper with which to bridge the gap—Oswald’s weekly Texas unemployment check that was cashed at a Winn-Dixie supermarket on the 24th or 25th. The local postal officials told Commission investigators that the check probably would not have reached Oswald’s post office box before the early morning hours of Wednesday, September 25. Slawson reasoned that if Oswald stayed over somewhere in New Orleans until Wednesday morning to wait for this check, and was next seen on his way to Mexico, he must have caught the connecting bus that left New Orleans for Houston on Wednesday afternoon.2 And if he was on that bus, he could not have been at Odio’s apartment.

  Slawson’s analysis seemed reasonable enough on the surface, but there were problems with it. No witness could be found who saw Oswald on the 10-hour bus ride from New Orleans to Houston—an unusual circumstance, since there were passengers who had seen him on every other leg of his bus trip to Mexico City and back to Dallas. Furthermore, the driver of the connecting bus said he had never seen Oswald “at any time.”

  There was also good reason to believe that the postal authorities had for once underestimated the efficiency of the U.S. mails. Marina testified that Oswald always picked up his weekly Texas unemployment checks on a Tuesday. Indeed, elsewhere in the Warren Report (in knocking down a rumor that Oswald had been in Mexico the preceding week), the Commission asserted that Oswald “cashed a check from the Texas Employment Commission at the Winn-Dixie Store no. 1425 in New Orleans” on “Tuesday, September 17.” Thus it appears that Oswald could have cashed his next check on Tuesday the 24th and left town, perhaps in a private car, the same day.

  Meanwhile, another staff lawyer, Wesley J. Liebeler, had by now taken Sylvia Odio’s deposition, and Liebeler wasn’t satisfied with Slawson’s analysis. He wrote an internal memo saying, “There are problems. Odio may well be right. The Commission will look bad if it turns out she is.” Liebeler pointed to the testimony of lawyer Dean Andrews and the bartender at the Habana Bar, who each said he had seen Oswald with a similar-looking Latin American. Liebeler noted that Oswald would have had time to travel to Dallas to see Odio and still get to south Texas in time to catch the bus to Mexico.

  The response of the Commission’s chief counsel, Lee J. Rankin, has often been quoted by critics of the Warren Report. He told Liebeler, “At this stage we are supposed to be closing doors, not opening them.” The Commission’s work was winding down, and President Johnson was pushing for the release of their report well before the November election to avoid having the investigation become a campaign issue.

  Nevertheless, in August 1964 Rankin wrote FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover: “It is a matter of some importance to the Commission that Mrs. Odio’s allegations either be proved or disproved.” Rankin suggested that the two Latin Americans might have been either members of an anti-Castro group other than JURE or “pro-Castro individuals attempting to infiltrate the anti-Castro groups in Dallas.”

  Rankin asked Hoover to conduct the investigation necessary to find out who these men were. He continued, “We are also concerned about the possibility that Oswald may have left New Orleans on September 24, 1963 instead of September 25, 1963 as has been previously thought. In that connection Marina Oswald has recently advised us that her husband told her he intended to leave New Orleans the very next day following her departure on September 23, 1963.” Rankin concluded that since Oswald was in Mexico after the 26th, “the only time he could have been in Odio’s apartment appears to be the nights of September 24 or 25, most likely the latter.”

  Hoover subsequently reported back, saying the FBI had located an anti-Castro activist named Loren Hall who claimed that he had visited Mrs. Odio that September in the company of Lawrence Howard, a Mexican-American from East Los Angeles, and William Seymour from Arizona. Seymour was said to resemble Oswald. When the Warren Report was published a few days later, the doubts expressed in Rankin’s letter were nowhere to be seen. Even though no other new evidence had turned up, the report asserted that Oswald probably left New Orleans by bus on the 25th. Its discussion ended: “While the FBI had not yet completed its investigation into this matter at the time the report went to press, the Commission has concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was not at Mrs. Odio’s apartment in September of 1963.”

  Before the ink was dry, the FBI’s explanation collapsed. After both Lawrence Howard and William Seymour denied having visited Odio, Loren Hall retracted his story (he later claimed the FBI had misquoted him in the first place), and Mrs. Odio failed to recognize pictures of any of them.

  The Warren Commission had not succeeded in closing the doors against its critics. Sylvia Odio’s testimony, and its handling by the authorities, would be a central issue in nearly every conspiracy book. Clearly, the Odio incident—as it came to be called—could not be explained away as a simple case of mistaken identity because, as the critics were quick to point out, the report had left a huge question dangling in mid-air: If Oswald wasn’t at Odio’s apartment, why was a look-alike using his name?

  The critics believed they knew the answer. In Accessories After the Fact, Sylvia Meagher presented a careful analysis of the Commission’s evidence and demonstrated, almost beyond question, that Oswald could have been at Odio’s apartment on the night of September 25. And since Odio’s account “coincided with facts to which she had no access,” the likelihood of fabrication was “thus virtually destroyed.” However, Meagher then proceeded to a strangely narrowed conclusion. She wrote, “That leaves two possibilities open: that the real Oswald visited Mrs. Odio with two companions, one of whom deliberately planted highly incriminating information about him without his knowledge; or that a mock-Oswald visi
ted her, to accomplish the same purpose.” Either way, it was a frame-up, for, as she saw it, Leopoldo “took pains to plant seeds which inevitably would incriminate Oswald in the assassination carried out on November 22, so that an anonymous phone call would be enough to send police straight after him even if he had not been arrested within the hour.”

  Who was behind this scheme to frame Oswald? In Meagher’s hypothesis, they were probably Cuban counter-revolutionaries and their ultra-right associates, who may have taken notice of Oswald after his attempt to infiltrate Carlos Bringuier’s organization in New Orleans. Their purpose would have been “to revenge themselves not only against the President whom they considered a Communist and a traitor but also against a Marxist and suspected double-agent who had tried to infiltrate the anti-Castro movement.”

  Since it’s true that the Far Right and many Cuban exiles were bitter about Kennedy’s performance at the Bay of Pigs, this hypothesis has a certain appeal. But take a closer look.

  What would Meagher’s anonymous caller have told the police? Presumably, that they should question a woman named Sylvia Odio—who would then tell them what she later told the Warren Commission: that Oswald and his companions claimed to be members of an anti-Castro organization, that Oswald had been offered as a potential assassin of Castro, and that he said the exiles should kill the president because of the Bay of Pigs. How could this revelation, coming in the heat of the moment following Kennedy’s death, have helped the anti-Castro movement or the Far Right? Indeed, Meagher’s plotters had painted Oswald as a violent ally of the very factions that were supposedly trying to frame him. Meagher herself noted that Odio didn’t call the police, perhaps because she “feared that the Cuban exiles might be accused of the President’s death.”

  If this was an attempt by Cuban counter-revolutionaries to implicate a Marxist, it was a peculiar way to go about it.

  Nevertheless, almost all of the theorists who came after her have followed the direction of Meagher’s accusing finger. For the critics, the Odio incident could only have been an effort to frame Oswald. They assume that since Leopoldo’s report of Oswald’s remark about killing Kennedy was incriminating, it must have been intended as incriminating. This is a natural, common-sense view, and it’s probably wrong. It’s easy to forget that these events from the past, which are now set in concrete from our point of view, actually took place in the uncertain flux of the present. For some reason, since we know what was going to happen on November 22, we tend to assume Leopoldo did, too. But when these men visited Odio’s apartment, Kennedy’s trip to Dallas had not even been scheduled, let alone announced. Strange as it may seem, no one on earth could have known that Oswald would ultimately land a job in a building that would overlook a Kennedy motorcade.

  But the frame-up theory’s ultimate weakness involves the critics’ conception of Lee Harvey Oswald. In every conspiracy book, Oswald is a piece of chaff blown about by powerful, unseen forces—he’s a dumb and compliant puppet with no volition of his own. If the man Odio saw was an impostor, how could the plotters be certain no witnesses would be able to establish Oswald’s presence somewhere else that evening—unless they ordered the unsuspecting patsy to stay out of sight? And if the real Oswald was used, how did the anti-Castro plotters get their Marxist enemy to stand at Odio’s door to be introduced as a friend of the Cuban exiles? No one has come up with a plausible scenario that can answer those questions.

  In years to come, Odio would be interviewed by two other government commissions—the Church committee and the House Assassinations Committee—and those investigators would also conclude that she was a truthful witness. After its relatively brief examination of the president’s assassination, the Church panel reached no public conclusion—Odio’s testimony wasn’t mentioned in its final report. The Assassination Committee’s report was hardly more helpful. It said, “The committee was inclined to believe Silvia [sic] Odio” and “did not agree with the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Oswald could not have been in Dallas at the requisite time.” But it could go no farther: “Based on a judgment of the credibility of Silvia and Annie Odio, one of these men at least looked like Lee Harvey Oswald and was introduced to Mrs. Odio as Leon Oswald.” A fuller account of their indecision was later given by the Committee’s chief counsel and director, G. Robert Blakey, who wrote:

  Based on all [the] evidence, we believed Silvia [sic] and Annie Odio: three men, who identified themselves as members of an anti-Castro organization, did visit their apartment in Dallas about two months prior to the Kennedy assassination; and one of them, who was either Lee Harvey Oswald or his look-alike, was introduced to them as Leon Oswald. Rather than dismiss the incident, as the Warren Commission had, we considered it a significant, if mysterious association of Oswald (or someone posing as Oswald) with two individuals who were engaged in anti-Castro activities, or acting as if they were.

  To sum up, there have been only two explanations for Odio’s disturbing testimony. It was a case of mistaken identity, as the Commission said, and a “Leon Oswald” and two other men visited her for unknown reasons. Or it was an attempt to frame Oswald by planting incriminating statements. The first is no explanation whatsoever, and the second is based on several unreasonable assumptions. The point to be stressed is this. Sylvia Odio gave testimony of obvious, even crucial importance, and no one could explain what it meant.

  Some mysteries defy rational analysis. It takes a moment of unearned insight—or what has been called the Aha! reaction—to understand them. There is a picture psychologists use showing a white goblet on a black background. Stare at it long enough and, with lightning speed and no conscious effort, one sees that the background is actually the silhouette of two people facing one another. The goblet becomes merely the white background between them. (Aha! Why didn‘t I see it before?) When I first read Sylvia Odio’s testimony, I was a long way from understanding Oswald’s thinking, and no matter how I turned it, her testimony made no sense. All the other evidence said Oswald was a supporter of the Castro revolution. Yet here he was, apparently teamed up with two counter-revolutionaries.

  One day I was reading a Secret Service report describing their questioning of Marina Oswald shortly after Oswald’s death, when a single sentence brought me up short. Marina had remarked that her husband “was boastful that he was a good shot and that he learned this while in the military service.” That was exactly the way Leopoldo had described “Leon Oswald” to Sylvia Odio: “He’s a Marine, an ex-Marine, and an expert marksman.” They were talking about the same man.

  There was just one other witness who spoke of Oswald as an ex-Marine who bragged about his military expertise—and that was Carlos Bringuier, the exile leader whose organization Oswald had tried to infiltrate. I began to see how similar his encounters with Bringuier and Odio were. Oswald had approached each of them as an eager volunteer. With Bringuier, he was an ex-Marine who could train guerrillas and lead raids against Cuba. With Odio, he was an ex-Marine marksman who could knock off Fidel. (Although it was Leopoldo who voiced this proposal, it was the same general line Oswald had used with Bringuier.)

  There were other similarities. Oswald had offered Bringuier a contribution, hoping to draw the exiles into a violation of the law. Odio’s visitors asked her to distribute a letter appealing for funds to buy arms for the war on Cuba. A letter of this kind would probably have been illegal. Infiltration and harassment—this was how Oswald had described his encounter with Bringuier. (“I infiltrated the Cuban Student Directorate and then harassed them with information I gained including having the N.O. City Attorney General call them in and put a restraining order … on some so-called bonds for invasion they were selling in the New Orleans area.”)

  But a third tactic was used. While Oswald was in Bringuier’s store, he gave two anti-Castro teenagers specific instructions on derailing trains and blowing up the Huey P. Long Bridge. With Sylvia Odio, he allegedly proposed a still more outrageous act of violence. It had been put almost in the form o
f a dare: the exiles “didn’t have any guts.… It is so easy to do it.” The age-old role of the provocateur is to encourage acts of violence that will discredit the group he has infiltrated. By goading the exiles into attacking the president, a pro-Castro provocateur might have hoped to destroy two threats to Cuba with one blow.

  For a police detective, a criminal’s M.O., his method of operating, is nearly as distinctive as his fingerprints. The Odio episode followed Oswald’s M.O. In other words, the mysterious Odio incident was another of Oswald’s attempts to infiltrate the anti-Castro underground. The intended victim of this enterprise was not Lee Harvey Oswald, but Sylvia Odio and the Cuban exiles. Oswald was plotting against the exiles, not the other way around. Unlike the explanations offered by the Warren Commission and its critics, this solution fits the rest of the evidence about Oswald. And it makes better sense, after all, that Oswald went to see Odio for some reason of his own, than that he was impersonated or duped by his enemies.

  Having caught a glimpse of what Oswald was up to, I still had to ask why. Why was Oswald put forward as a potential assassin of Castro, and why the talk about killing Kennedy, as well? Again, Oswald’s similar approach to Carlos Bringuier provides a clue. In August Oswald was already planning to go to Cuban officials in Mexico and show them “how much he’d done to help Cuba.” When he learned about the FBI raid on an exile arms cache, he saw a chance to bring the Cubans something special: valuable intelligence about the inner working of an exile training camp. But his infiltration attempt failed when Bringuier turned him down.