Marine Oswald did rather well. He finished seventh in a class of thirty and qualified as an Aviation Electronics Operator—an assignment designed for those credited with above-average intelligence. This led to a foreign posting with MACS-1, Marine Air Control Squadron One in Atsugi, Japan. In 1957, Atsugi was a base for the now famous U-2 spy plane, and Oswald was entering a world of military secrets. In the controversy over the alleged assassin’s true colors, this period is pivotal.
Atsugi Air Base, a few miles southeast of Tokyo, had been inherited by the Americans from Japan’s World War II air force. When Oswald arrived, it had become a jump-off point for U.S. Marine Corps fighter jets and Navy Constellations equipped for detecting enemy radar. Atsugi was also the site of a radar “bubble” responsible for surveillance of a vast sector of air space. Its function, according to the Warren Report, was “to direct aircraft to their targets by radar, communicating with the pilots by radio.” The squadron also scouted for incoming foreign aircraft, mostly Russian or Chinese planes that had strayed.
Oswald worked in the radar bubble, gazing for hours at a time at the blips on the screen, plotting aircraft courses. The newcomer proved so good at his job that one officer wrote, “I would desire to have him work for me at any time… . He minds his business and he does his job well.” Sometimes, as the senior enlisted man, Oswald served as crew chief. One of the leading marines in Oswald’s group was to say of him, “He had the sort of intelligence where you could show him how to do something once and he’d know how to do it, even if it was pretty complicated.”
While Oswald worked in the radar room, he witnessed a phenomenon that mystified almost everyone. Sometimes, out of the ether, a pilot’s voice would request weather information for an altitude of ninety thousand feet. In 1957, no one had heard of a plane that flew that high. The mystery lasted only until the marines discovered they were living at close quarters with a newfangled aircraft called the U-2. The officers called it a “utility plane,” but the U-2 was a spy in the sky, perhaps the West’s most important single military intelligence asset.
As the weeks passed, Oswald and his friends saw the U-2 in action as it was wheeled out of a special hangar, as it rocketed aloft at astonishing speed, and as it returned from distant missions. Long and pencil-thin, the U-2 looked like something out of science fiction. There were no spy satellites then, and it was invaluable to the United States for penetrating Soviet and Chinese air space to return laden with telltale photographs. Army and air bases, seaports and factories, all were vulnerable to the high-altitude eyes of the U-2.
The beauty of it, for Western intelligence, was that the Communists were powerless to intercept the U-2. The superplane flew so high that no ground-to-air missiles or conventional aircraft could touch it. Its precise operational altitudes were top secret, as was any technical data that would teach the Russians how to knock the U-2 out of the sky. Oswald and his friends were left in no doubt about the secrecy. The hangar where the planes were kept was ringed by guards with submachine guns, and the marines were under orders to say nothing about what they saw and heard on the airfield and in the radar room.
It is probable that Atsugi also held another secret almost as sensitive as the U-2 project—a stockpile of nuclear weapons. According to the American agreement with Japan, no nuclear armament should have been stored on American bases, but personnel at Atsugi suspected the pact was violated.
One officer, Lieutenant Charles Rhodes, recalled having been taken by a colonel to a vast underground complex “at least three stories below ground.” On either side of a central thoroughfare, in deep alcoves, Rhodes observed huge armaments that he identified as bombs. The colonel did not say what they were and did not invite questions.2
The aura of military secrecy at Atsugi was fascinating for everyone, down to the lowliest marine, and some have suggested that for Oswald it was more than that. Lieutenant Charles Donovan, the officer in charge of Oswald’s radar team, said he remembered a day when Oswald discussed the U-2’s radar blips with him. One marine friend recalled Oswald wandering around Atsugi with a camera taking pictures. He later served at another U-2 installation, in the Philippines, where his duties included standing guard at a hangar that housed the airplane.
If Oswald’s photographs were of radar installations or of the U-2 in action, they would have been manna from heaven for Soviet intelligence. Some believe Oswald made sinister contacts who were just that—spies.
Just as he had once gone off alone on trips to New Orleans, Oswald now went on two-day trips to Tokyo. He confided to a friend that he was having an affair with a Japanese nightclub hostess. That on its own would have been normal enough, but Oswald seemed to be living above his station. The hostess worked at the Queen Bee, one of the smartest clubs in the city. Its clientele were American officers rather than enlisted men, and a night with one of the hostesses cost more than Oswald earned in a month.3
Oswald and the hostess were sometimes seen together, and his mates marveled that a woman of her style and beauty had time for Oswald. Perhaps they simply underestimated Oswald’s amatory talents, but some have suspected that the Queen Bee hostess pumped Oswald for classified information. Loose talk in the Tokyo clubs, like soldiers’ bar talk anywhere, was known to cause security leaks, and the use of sex as bait for intelligence information is as old as spying itself.
Whatever the nature of the liaison, Oswald reacted miserably to news that his unit was to be transferred to the Philippines. It was then, in October 1957, that his early image as a model U.S. marine began to look tarnished. According to the record, Oswald shot himself in the arm, inflicting a minor wound, before the unit was due to leave Atsugi. He allegedly did so with a pistol he had purchased privately and kept in his locker. For possession of an unregistered weapon against service regulations, Oswald was fined and sentenced to twenty days’ hard labor.
If he had been trying to dodge transfer to the Philippines, he failed. Oswald was discharged from the hospital in time to leave Japan with his unit and did not return to Atsugi for several months. When he did get back, he got into trouble again, this time reportedly because he picked a quarrel at a party. A second court-martial acquitted him of deliberately having poured a drink over a sergeant, but found him guilty of using “provoking words.”
This time, Oswald spent eighteen days in the cells. From then on, former friends said, he spoke bitterly against the Marine Corps, which reinforced his reputation as a loner. He avoided marine associates and was again seen with Japanese acquaintances, both male and female.
In autumn 1958, during a crisis sparked by fighting between Communist and Nationalist Chinese forces, Oswald’s radar unit apparently moved to Taiwan. Oswald reportedly again drew attention to himself by loosing off four or five shots into the darkness, then claiming he had fired at “men in the woods” who had failed to answer a challenge. He was transferred shortly afterward back to Atsugi—once again to be seen with a striking woman—this time a Eurasian. Oswald told a friend she was half Russian.4
In December 1958, Oswald’s tour of duty in the Pacific ended, when he was transferred back to the United States, to the El Toro Air Station in Santa Ana, California. His unit’s function there, according to Lieutenant Donovan, was “to surveil for aircraft, but basically to train both enlisted men and officers for later assignment overseas.” Like other officers, Donovan found Oswald “a good crew chief,” “very competent,” “brighter than most people.” The lieutenant took Oswald on at chess and found him “very good” at the game. He noted, too, that the young marine “was particularly capable in the field of world affairs.” Oswald had a special interest—it became clear that he was preoccupied with things Russian.
At El Toro, Oswald applied to take a Marines proficiency examination in written and spoken Russian. He failed, but showed a knowledge of the basics of the language. He was observed in weeks to come to be laboring hour after hour over his Russian books, and to hav
e begun reading a Russian-language periodical. He played Russian records, so loudly they could be heard outside the barrack block, and began addressing people in Russian whether they understood it or not. Oswald even had his name written in Russian on one of his jackets.
Marine friends nicknamed him “Comrade Oswaldskovich,” and young Lee thought that as funny as they did. Fellow marine Kerry Thornley, noted later, “He often joked about Communism. I remember one time a master sergeant got up on the tailgate of a truck for a lecture of some type. Oswald put on a Russian accent to exclaim, “Ah! Another collectivist farm lecture.”
Oswald openly showed himself interested in socialist ideology and in Soviet politics in particular. He once again subscribed to the People’s World, the socialist newspaper he had first read as a youth in New Orleans. Marine Thornley, who discussed politics with Oswald, gained the impression that he thought “Marxist morality was the most rational morality to follow,” Communism “the best system in the world.”
With another marine, Nelson Delgado from Puerto Rico, Oswald also held animated discussions about Cuba, where Fidel Castro had just seized power. Both young men said they supported the Castro revolution and discussed traveling to Havana together one day. Delgado suggested that Oswald write to the Cuban Embassy in Washington, DC, and Oswald later said he had made contact with Cuban diplomats. Delgado noticed that his friend started getting more letters than usual, some of which bore the Cuban official seal.
On trips into Los Angeles, with Delgado, Oswald would say he was on his way to “visit the Cuban Consulate.” One night, when an outsider asked for him at the camp entrance, Oswald was allowed to stand down from guard duty to see the visitor. He went to the gate, where Delgado saw him deep in a long conversation with a man he thought was Cuban.
“Delgado’s testimony has the cast of credibility,” a senior aide to the CIA’s James Angelton commented years later in a memorandum, “[and] says a lot more of possible operational significance than is reflected by the language of the Warren Report, and its implications do not appear to have been run down or developed by investigation.” After the Kennedy assassination, the aide observed, Soviet and Cuban cooperation with the American inquiry was minimal, “designed to cover up an admission of knowledge of, or connection with, Oswald.”
Who was the stranger who had reportedly visited Oswald at El Toro, Angleton’s aide wondered. And “was there reporting from Los Angeles to Washington and Havana that could, in effect, represent the opening of a Cuban file on Oswald?”5
Shortly before the end of his Marine Corps service, Oswald asked Delgado to take a duffel bag to a bus-station locker in Los Angeles. Along with personal property, according to Delgado and another marine, it contained photographs taken from various angles that showed a fighter aircraft. Oswald could have obtained the pictures legitimately, during training, but Delgado wondered later why he had kept them. Meanwhile, whatever his allegiance, Oswald was getting ready for a dramatic move.
Earlier, in spring 1959, Oswald had applied to study philosophy at the Albert Schweitzer College in Switzerland, and the college had accepted him. In a letter home to his brother, Oswald had written, “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.” Now, in August, he behaved as though he were impatient to leave the Marine Corps. He asked for an early release on the ground that his mother, who had been injured at work some time earlier, needed him. He applied for a passport, openly stating in the application that he intended to travel to Russia and Cuba. This hardly squared with his pretense of going home to look after his mother, but there is no sign that the Marine Corps raised any query. The passport was forthcoming, and on September 11, 1959, Oswald was out of the U.S. Marines and on his way to Texas.
Twenty years later, in a superficial review of Oswald’s service record, the Assassinations Committee found nothing very out of the ordinary about this. There is no sign that the Committee talked extensively with Oswald’s former marine comrades. Nor, apparently, did it ponder the Marine Corps’ tolerance for his Russophilia or the lack of reaction to his plans for travel to the Soviet Union.
Once in Texas, Oswald told his brother he was going to New Orleans to “work for an export firm.” It was not true. Having reached New Orleans, he boarded a ship bound for Europe, disembarked at the British port of Southampton on October 9, then moved on rapidly. By midnight the next day, he was checking into a hotel in Finland’s capital, Helsinki. Oswald was on the last lap of his journey to Moscow, and things continued to go smoothly.
Within two days, having had no advance notice that has ever emerged, the Soviet Consul in Helsinki granted Oswald a six-day tourist visa to enter the Soviet Union. His trip there, by train, was to be on the most expensive ticket available—“De Luxe,” an odd choice for a young man on a tight budget. Later, we shall consider whether he could have afforded the trip at all.
Oswald’s easy access to the Soviet Union has encouraged the suspicion that the Russians were expecting him. It is prompted by a claim that Swedish intelligence detected a flying visit by Oswald to Stockholm, where he may have visited the Soviet Embassy.6 Normal practice, CIA and State Department studies showed, was to keep visa applicants waiting for at least a week—and often as many as two.
The Soviet Consul in Helsinki at the time was believed to be an undercover KGB officer, and U.S. intelligence learned he could issue a visa in minutes if convinced the would-be traveler was “all right.” Oswald apparently came up to scratch. He arrived in Moscow by train on October 16, 1959, to be met by an Intourist representative and shepherded to the Hotel Berlin. He registered on check-in as a student.
After two weeks, and a series of contacts with Soviet officials, Oswald walked into the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. There, according to the consular officials who received him—Consul Richard Snyder and Vice-Consul John McVickar—Oswald declared his wish to renounce his American citizenship. He slapped his passport down on the table, along with a formal letter that ended, “I affirm that my allegiance is to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”
Oswald declared that he had “voluntarily told Soviet officials that he would make known to them all information concerning the Marine Corps and his speciality therein, radar operation, as he possessed.” He added, too, “that he might know something of special interest.” On the face of it, Oswald was now not only a defector, but also a self-declared traitor to his country.
Was it as simple as that? One of the American consular officials, John McVickar, felt that Oswald was “following a pattern of behavior in which he had been tutored by a person or persons unknown … seemed to be using words he had learned, but did not fully understand … in short, it seemed to me there was a possibility that he had been in contact with others before or during his Marine Corps tour who had guided him and encouraged him in his actions.”
As late as 1978, former Vice-Consul McVickar told the author he still had the nagging feeling that Oswald’s performance at the Embassy had not been spontaneous. If he was right, what “person or persons unknown” had coached Oswald?
Had Oswald been in contact with Communist agents in Japan or the United States, and perhaps defected at their urging? It would be said following the assassination—by a person with links to U.S. intelligence—that Oswald had himself had said he associated with Communists in Tokyo.7 If Oswald indeed had contact with Communist agents, however, they may not have been his only connection with the secret world.
Take a second look, and the picture blurs.
Chapter 9
Cracks in the Canvas
“We have not been told the truth about Oswald.”
—Senator Richard Russell, former Warren Commission member, 1970
Back on the Marine air station in California, Oswald’s roommate had been puzzled. Nelson Delgado had heard his friend talk of being in contact with Cuban officials—and knew he had been receiving a Russian news
paper. He had asked Oswald incredulously, “They let you get away with this in the Marine Corps, in a site like this?”
It was a good question. Oswald was openly dabbling with revolution while working in a sensitive area on an American military base at the height of the Cold War. Yet the nearest anyone came to blowing the whistle had been when mailroom workers reported the “leftist” nature of Oswald’s mail. An officer, Captain Block, raised the matter briefly with Oswald, who reportedly explained that he was “trying to indoctrinate himself in Russian theory in conformance with Marine Corps policy.” That was as far as it went, and Oswald went on playing Russian records, reading Russian books, generally flaunting his preoccupation with things Soviet. This failed, apparently, to trigger any official concern.
Another Oswald acquaintance at the California base, Kerry Thornley, had also been doing his share of youthful talking about Communism. “Looking back,” he said long afterward: “I feel that both Oswald and I must have been put under surveillance by the Office of Naval Intelligence during our periods of active duty in the Marine Corps. The Cold War was raging then. He was widely regarded as a Communist.”
Thornley had a point; it is odd that Oswald’s indiscretions do not crop up in any Navy file—at least none that the public has been permitted to see. Omissions from official records sometimes turn out to be more significant than what is included.
Was no one alert enough to bother with Oswald’s socialist protestations? Did Naval Intelligence hear about Oswald but fail to take the matter seriously? Should we merely apply the human-error theory of history to the Oswald case?
Perhaps. If so, however, it was the start of an extraordinary chain of anomalies and official oversights, a chain that would last virtually without interruption until the day President Kennedy was assassinated. So many inconsistencies that even cautious researchers have come to suspect that—somewhere along the line—Oswald the youthful Socialist became a tiny cog in the machinery of American intelligence.
Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination Page 13
