Live by the Sword

by Gus Russo

  Without knowing Oswald’s entire background, the temperate Volkmar Schmidt understood, in February 1963, that Oswald “idolized Cuba”—and hated President Kennedy for attacking it:

  He also very much idealized the socialist government in Cuba, and he was just obsessed with what Americans did to support this invasion. . . He really felt very angry about the support which the Kennedy Administration gave to the Bay of Pigs. . . I noticed that he was really, really obsessed with this idea and with his animosity towards Kennedy, just obsessed with his anger towards Kennedy.22

  In the decades of speculation after the assassination, much attention would be given to Oswald’s reported affection for Jack Kennedy. It would be based chiefly on statements by his wife Marina. “I’ll go to the grave believing that Lee adored John Kennedy,” she would say 25 years later. “How do you think I learned to like John Kennedy?”23 But Marina’s testimony about her husband—who kept her ignorant of many of his stranger thoughts and activities—was often highly contradictory. Some have pointed to the fact that Oswald borrowed one book by the President, and one about him, from the Dallas public library.24 But Oswald also borrowed James Bond books—and one about the assassination of Huey Long.

  In any case, a person’s heightened interest in a public figure is no guarantee that the public figure is free from personal danger. Sometimes the contrary is true. John Lennon and Jody Foster are only two among many who were hunted by men whom they fascinated. One psychological theory has it that some disturbed people, with delusions of self-importance and a detachment from reality, imagine they will become the hero they kill. At least in passing, Oswald entertained notions that he or his children would serve in the White House.25

  There is also evidence that Oswald spoke well of President Kennedy to friends in the Soviet Union, describing him as progressive. But by that time, he was probably fed up with the “Motherland of Socialism.” And when his closest Russian friend, Pavel Golovachev, asked him how he would be able to satisfy his new (Russian) wife’s materialistic demands when he returned to his native land, Oswald said that Golovachev didn’t understand the United States. “You could always make a lot of money by shooting the President,” he was reported to have answered. If that was a joke, its impulse came from the mind that conceived it.26

  The host of the dinner party where Oswald unburdened himself was George DeMohrenschildt, a well-traveled oil geologist. DeMohrenschildt was a good friend of Schmidt—and also of Oswald. In fact, he was the only known friend of Oswald who might be called somewhat close after Oswald’s return from Russia. A suave businessman and world traveler, DeMohrenschildt would assert shortly before his death in 1977 that “they made a moron out of [Oswald], but he was really smart as hell—ahead of his time, really, a kind of hippie of those days. In fact, he was the most honest man I knew. And I will tell you this—I am sure he did not shoot the President.”27

  However, the same DeMohrenschildt had painted a very different picture to the Warren Commission a decade earlier. Testifying there about the possibility of Oswald serving an intelligence function, he called the assassinated assassin “mixed-up,” an “unstable individual” and a “semi-educated hillbilly,” and said he “never would believe that any government would be stupid enough to trust Lee with anything important.” And despite his later claim to be certain of Oswald’s innocence, DeMohrenschildt had also stated that on first hearing of the news about Dealey Plaza, he thought that his young friend was the killer.28

  Like thousands of other businessmen who traveled extensively, DeMohrenschildt was interviewed by CIA officers upon his return—a common practice by an agency desperate for Cold War intelligence. DeMohrenschildt was also known to socialize after hours with some of the Agency’s people. After the assassination, conspiracy-prone readers seized upon these points. Wasn’t there more to the relationship of the “Prince and the Pauper,” as one writer called them—a relationship between a prosperous businessman and a despairing, down-at-the-heels, Marxism-hectoring loner half his age? Even though they met accidentally, at an émigré party, didn’t DeMohrenschildt maintain the relationship with Oswald on directions from the CIA, in an attempt to debrief the returning defector?

  The CIA has long maintained that it never debriefed Oswald after his return from the Soviet Union. That assertion—originally made at a time when the CIA took great pains to debrief some 25,000 tourists a year after visits to countries that interested the Agency—has to prompt grave doubt. CIA interest in the Soviet Union was understandably second to none. It seemed almost incredible that the Agency would not try to glean information from a young man who had lived in Minsk, a city about which far less was known than about Moscow and Leningrad.29 The CIA even took the trouble to interview some tourists who had visited Minsk in 1961, and copied a photograph those tourists had taken because it showed an Intourist guide the Agency suspected was a KGB informer.30

  An unidentified American—the only one known to be in Minsk at the time—was also in that photograph. Though it happened to be Lee Oswald, the CIA said it realized that only after the Kennedy assassination.31

  Minsk was also known as the site of a Soviet espionage school. But even if Oswald had had no contact with that establishment—and official documents reveal that some American security personnel suspected that wasn’t the case — he had lived among Soviet citizens for 30-odd months. In Minsk, he had worked in a huge radio factory that employed as many as 10,000 people. The CIA was extremely keen to know not only about radios and possible other items of manufacture by ostensibly civilian Soviet plants, but also about plant rules, procedures, and conditions in general; daily routines, workers’ morale, everything. That kind of intelligence-gathering was supposedly the Agency’s primary mission. Why did it pass up such a rare opportunity with Oswald?32

  In fact, it did not pass it up at all, but George DeMohrenschildt clearly had nothing to do with it. Oswald almost certainly was debriefed by the CIA, as he was by the FBI, probably after he disembarked from the Maasdam, the ship on which he returned to America after his Russian stay.

  One month after Oswald’s return to the U.S., Thomas Casasin, the Deputy Chief of the CIA’s “6 Research Section” (specializing in the debriefing of returning defectors from the Soviet Union), wrote a memo to Walter P. Haltigan, Chief of the Soviet Section of the Paris Station, suggesting that Oswald be interviewed by the Office of Operations. Casasin also worried that Oswald “looks odd” and “may [have] been sent out of the Soviet Union by the KGB.” In later Congressional testimony, both Casasin and Haltigan stated that they had no idea if the debriefing ever occurred.33

  However, in 1978, an unnamed CIA officer testified to Congress that he remembered seeing a CIA debriefing report in 1962. It was about a Marine “re-defector” who was returning with his family from the Soviet Union, and it gave many details about the organization of a radio plant in Minsk, USSR—where Oswald worked.34

  In 1993, the author tracked down that anonymous witness. It turned out to be Donald Denesleya, who admitted that when he testified before Congresss, he had not revealed the name of the man who had conducted the Oswald debriefing. Persuaded to appear on Frontline, he finally revealed the name:

  I received across my desk a debriefing report. It was a debriefing of a Marine redefector. He was returning with his family from the Soviet Union and was back in the United States. The report was approximately four to five pages in length. It gave a lot of details about the organization of the Minsk radio plant It was signed off by a CIA officer by the name of Anderson.

  In 1993, several other CIA officers remembered a Major Andy Anderson who conducted debriefings for the CIA’s domestic contacts division, and two recalled the debriefing of Oswald. Still, only Denesleya would go public with the information. Then, in August of 1993, John Newman, the author of JFK and Vietnam (and then working under contract on the Frontline project), was examining boxes containing Oswald’s newly released CIA files. Among thousands of pages, he found traces of a notat
ion in Oswald’s 201 file—a personal record of people who interested the Agency. The traces were reversed, obviously bled-through from a document that wasn’t meant to be photocopied. Newman turned it over, held it up to the light, and deciphered handwriting that read, “Anderson OO on Oswald.” Barely legible, the writing that preceded “Anderson” appeared to read “Andy.” In CIA language, OO is the symbol for the Domestic Contacts Division.

  Years earlier, Denesleya told Congressional investigators that they might search a CIA volume on the Minsk Radio Factory in the CIA’s Industrial Registry Branch (a component of the Office of Central Reference.) The investigators located the volume but it failed to contain the Oswald debriefing.35

  Denesleya said in 1993, “My feeling at this point is the report is buried somewhere. I don’t know where it is, but I’m sure it is probably in the contacts division, somewhere, or in one of the other filing systems at the Agency.”

  Oswald and Walker

  “We didn’t know [that Oswald shot at Walker] until a week or two after Kennedy’s death. I didn’t have to hear that in order to believe he had shot at Kennedy. That fits with the kind of thing that may have been in his mind. I think he was trying to find things he could do to bring about the revolution or something—bring about change. I supposed [with Walker], he was trying smaller little missions.”

  —Michael Paine, Dallas friend of Lee Oswald36

  “Lee Harvey Oswald had, on his own, made the move to learn Russian, which is no small feat for a young, uneducated American Marine. And he had moved to Russia to see for himself what life in a socialist country was about. You must say that this young man had a lot of courage and a lot of determination.”

  —Volkmar Schmidt, Dallas acquaintance of Lee Oswald37

  At George DeMohrenschildt’s dinner party, which the oil man had arranged partly to introduce the struggling Oswald to people who might help him in Dallas, Volkmar Schmidt became “very concerned” about Oswald’s “personal anger” at President Kennedy. Schmidt tried to soften it. He said that the many good things the President was doing made him the best hope for the Western world and the world as a whole—and although the Bay of Pigs may indeed have been a mistake, he commended Kennedy for trying to cure the country’s domestic ills. In an attempt to “lure Oswald out of the emotional trap” he’d built for himself with his anger, he brought up something he believed truly deserved criticism: American bigotry and racism. Seeking to re-direct Oswald’s outrage to “a more reasonable object of criticism,” he mentioned General Walker as a personification of the bigotry and racism that had to be fought.38

  General Edwin Walker was the former commander of the 24th Army Division, stationed in West Germany. In that recently-held post, his zeal stood out even among the Army’s most vigorously anti-Communist officers during a powerfully anti-Communist time.

  “We must throw out the traitors,” he declared during the first spring of Kennedy’s presidency—and with more than a hint at Kennedy’s alleged softness on communism. “And if that is not possible, we must organize armed resistance to defeat the designs of the usurpers and contribute to the return of constitutional government.”39 The President forced Walker to resign in November 1961, after the general, among other unlawful political activities, distributed John Birch Society literature to his troops. Returning to the States, Walker was one of the leaders in the famous University of Mississippi integration riots in October 1962. Protesting the admission of black student James Meredith, Walker was arrested for inciting a riot. Walker eventually settled in Dallas. As a journalist would describe the radically conservative city, it was “the most appropriate command post for anti-Communist speaking tours and other right-wing activities.”40

  In February 1963, Walker joined extremist evangelist Reverend Billy James Hargis in “Operation Midnight Ride,” a five-week national tour to bolster popular spirits, resolve, and anger in the fight against Communism. The tour took them to the University of Mississippi in February 1963, where they railed against the Kennedy administration’s control of the press on the segregation issue. Some of the students Walker addressed became agitated enough to shoot and kill two reporters. Although Volkmar Schmidt did not believe that Walker had directly exhorted them to do this, he mentioned the violence to Oswald as illustration of bigotry’s path to bad acts and to make it clear that he and DeMohrenschildt considered the General’s racist views “very obnoxious.”

  After the 1963 incident in Mississippi, General Walker was charged with inciting a riot and Dallas-based FBI agent James Hosty supervised the FBI investigation. Coincidentally, he was also in charge of the Agency’s casual watch on Oswald, and would later play a minor role in Oswald’s life before the assassination. Hosty also learned later that George DeMohrenschildt had described Walker to Oswald as a “menace,” adding that if Hitler had been shot in the early 1930s, World War II might have been avoided.41 Marina’s recollection of her husband’s view of Walker supports Hosty’s speculation about DeMohrenschildt’s inadvertent stimulus. Lee told his wife that “[Walker] was a very bad man, that he was a fascist. . . the leader of a fascist organization. . . He said if someone had killed Hitler in time, it would have saved many lives.”42

  On the evening of April 10, 1963, Oswald shot at Walker with the intention of killing him.43 The General was at a desk on his ground-floor dining room, working on his income taxes. Taking up an excellent position in back of the house, Oswald fired into the brightly-lit room through a window less than a hundred feet away. Walker instantly fell to the floor, crawled to a gun of his own, and ran out of the house.44

  For many years, some students of the Kennedy assassination would question whether it was actually Oswald who made the attempt on Walker. Others would doubt that Oswald shot the President, or that the fatal shots came from him rather than one or more accomplices. In support of this, they would cite the failure to kill Walker from such close range.45 How, they ask, could Oswald have hit the moving target in Dealey Plaza from a perch in the Texas School Book Depository when he missed the stationary, much closer Walker from ground level? That was evidence, the skeptics submitted, that Oswald’s abilities with his rifle were too feeble to have allowed him to perform the more difficult Kennedy killing. “All it proved,” two respected experts concluded in 1992, “was that Oswald couldn’t hit a sitting target, much less a moving one.”46

  More evidence of Oswald’s ineptitude with guns seemed to support their claims. For instance, his shooting amused and appalled his Russian friends. After an outing where he could hit nothing at all, his fellow hunters gave him rabbits to save him embarrassment when going home to Marina. His carelessness with his weapon made one member of a hunting party unwilling to go out with him again. That was how he handled a shotgun, but his record with the standard Marine Ml rifle seemed even more telling. Many of those who doubt he shot or shot alone have stressed that he was a poor rifleman who had to repeat his Marine test in order to attain the lowest score that would permit him to handle the weapon.

  Examined more closely, however, the evidence points to the contrary. He was familiar with guns, had liked and played with them from an early age, and was competent or more in their use.

  As for Oswald’s inability to hit Walker with his Italian-made rifle, that was also subject to misinterpretation. Oswald had trained with his Mannlicher-Carcano in preparation for the attempt at Walker and would intensify his training in the weeks prior to shooting President Kennedy. Missing the reviled right-wing leader was no indication of poor marksmanship. Just at the instant of firing, Walker leaned forward at his desk to pick up a piece of carbon paper for his tax form, and the bullet whizzed directly above him.47 (Kennedy would be an easier, more predictable target, in that he made no unexpected moves in his car. And although the presidential limousine was moving at the time Oswald fired, the limousine driver, after the first two shots, slowed it almost to a stop. In this sense, at the moment of the most accurate head shot, Kennedy was almost stationary.)

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sp; A police officer who conducted the Walker investigation concluded that “had he not moved at that instant, [the bullet] would have gone in one ear and out the other.”48 At the same time, a slat of the wooden window frame deflected Oswald’s bullet slightly upward, causing the bullet to pass through the General’s hair instead of his head. (For details of Oswald’s true shooting abilities, and a more thorough discussion of the physical evidence in the Kennedy shooting, see Appendix A.)

  Later, Volkmar Schmidt would be distressed by the thought that he may have unconsciously inspired Oswald to hunt down Walker.49 Schmidt was probably wrong. He did not plant the idea in the future assassin. At most, he gave Oswald a push in the direction he was already taking. For one thing, Michael Paine found him “familiar with Walker. . . quite familiar” two days later.50 And he had ordered his rifle on March 12th, not, as Schmidt believed, shortly after their conversation at DeMohrenschildt’s party. Oswald told Marina that, two days prior to ordering the rifle, he had taken surveillance photos of Walker’s home.

  The Dallas media carried extensive stories about the city’s most visible representative of the far right and his participation in “Operation Midnight Ride.” The Dallas Morning News, for example, ran a front-page article about Walker and the Operation on February 14th, and there is evidence that Oswald—who liked to read newspapers and listen to broadcast news—was disturbed by Walker and his activities even then. The likelihood is that he had Walker in mind when he ordered his weapons. He told Marina that he had planned to kill him for two months.51 Much has been written about the role of chance in Kennedy’s killing, about the President becoming an unlikely target of opportunity for Oswald when he would hear, at almost the last minute, of the motorcade in Dallas that would pass the Texas School Book Depository where he worked. Actually, his activities earlier in November cast doubt on the supposition that his decision to act against Kennedy came quite so late. And the Walker attempt reveals he was determined to kill as early as April. At least as far as Oswald’s ability to murder is concerned, there is no doubt that it was in place more than five months before it focused on Kennedy.