Chapter Thirteen

The Man They Named

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Who he was before

He got out of the Marines early, on a hardship discharge, because his mother said she had been hurt at work and needed him. Six days later he was on a ship out of New Orleans bound for France. He was twenty years old. He had already applied for a passport, already had the fare saved, and he went London, Helsinki, Moscow. Whatever the hardship was, he did not go home to it.1, 2

On the last day of October he walked into the American Embassy in Moscow, put his passport on the desk, and said he wished to renounce his citizenship. Then he said something else. He told the consular officer that he had been a radar operator and that he intended to tell the Soviets what he knew. That is an offer to commit espionage, made in writing, inside a United States embassy, and it went into a cable the same day.3, 4

Here is the part that decides everything afterward. The consular officer did not process it. He told the young man to come back on a working day, and the young man never came back. So the renunciation was never completed, and he remained an American citizen for the entire time he lived in the Soviet Union. One official being slow on a Saturday is the reason he could come home at all.5, 6

Moscow’s answer was no. His visa was expiring and he was told to leave the country. That evening, in his room at the Hotel Berlin, he cut his wrist in the bath and was found by the guide who had come to collect him. He was hospitalized and put under psychiatric observation. After that, the Soviets kept him. He got in by making himself a problem that was easier to house than to deport.7, 8

They sent him to Minsk to work as a metal lathe operator in a radio and television factory. He got a subsidized apartment with a balcony over the river, better than his supervisors had. He got a factory wage, and on top of it a monthly payment from the Soviet Red Cross that roughly doubled it. He was, on paper, one of the better paid men in the building. Within a year his diary says he was bored out of his mind.9, 10

He met her at a trade union dance in March 1961. She was nineteen, trained as a pharmacist, and she lived with an uncle who was an officer in the Soviet interior ministry. They married about six weeks later. He had, by his own account, been in love with somebody else who turned him down that same spring. She would spend the rest of her life being asked, by lawyers and by strangers, what her husband was really doing.11, 12

He started writing to the embassy about coming back barely a year after arriving. It took eighteen months of paperwork, and then the State Department did something worth sitting with. It lent him the money. A repatriation loan of four hundred and thirty five dollars and seventy one cents, to bring home a man who had stood in that same embassy and offered his radar knowledge to the Soviet Union. He paid it back, in installments, by early 1963.13, 14

He landed in New York in June 1962 with a wife, a baby and no job. He was met by a caseworker from a travelers’ aid charity, who lent him more money for the flight to Texas. The FBI interviewed him twice and closed it. No prosecution, no charge, no revocation. A man who had publicly offered military information to a hostile power came home, got a room in Fort Worth, and started looking for work.15, 16

†You can read the whole three years as a confused young man who defected badly, hated it, and was quietly let back in because the government had no appetite for a show trial over a lathe operator. Or you can read it as a man who was never in any real trouble because he was never really a defector. The record supports the first and does not exclude the second, and anybody who tells you the paperwork settles it has not read the paperwork.17, 18

What he actually believed

Something odd about this case. The accused left more written material than most people in it, and it is the least quoted evidence there is. A diary kept in the Soviet Union. Essays he typed up on his return. Long letters to political organizations. Notes toward a book about life in Minsk. The man wrote, at length, about what he thought. And people who will argue about a bullet fragment for thirty years have never read a page of it.19

Here is why nobody quotes it. It is a mess. He is against American capitalism and he is also against Soviet communism, having lived under it and found it gray and dishonest. He sketches a third position of his own that never quite arrives. The spelling is bad, the grammar is worse, and the thinking circles. It reads exactly like what it probably was: a clever, badly educated young man working things out alone and getting nowhere.20

That is inconvenient for everybody and that is why it is worth having. It does not fit the lone communist fanatic, because he had contempt for the Soviet system and wrote it down repeatedly. And it does not fit the disciplined intelligence asset, because assets do not leave four years of muddled political notebooks lying around their rented rooms. The writing is the least useful evidence for any theory, which is usually a sign it is the most honest thing in the box.21

The money is worth saying out loud too. That fall he was earning around a dollar and a quarter an hour filling book orders. He paid eight dollars a week for a room in Oak Cliff, roughly the size of a large cupboard, and he did not live with his wife and children, who were staying with somebody else because he could not keep them. He did not own a car and could not drive one. He carried, on the day, about thirteen dollars.22

†One more, and I have never known where to put it. That Thursday night he stayed at the house in Irving where his wife and daughters were living. In the morning, before he left, he took off his wedding ring and left it in a cup on the dresser. And he left a hundred and seventy dollars, which was very nearly every dollar he had in the world, on the chest of drawers for her. Then he got a ride to work carrying a long package.11, 23

People reach for that ring and that money as proof he knew he was not coming back, and it may well be exactly that. It is also what a man does when a marriage is failing and he has just been refused again, which is what had happened the night before. I cannot tell you which. It is the single most suggestive act in this entire story and it points equally at a man planning a murder and a man giving up on his life, and those are not always different people.21

The Russians in Dallas

Something people do not expect about Dallas and Fort Worth in 1962: there was a Russian-speaking community there, a few dozen families. Old emigres who had left after the revolution, and displaced people who had come after the war. They had a church, they had dinners, and they knew each other’s business. When a young American came back from the Soviet Union with a Russian wife who spoke no English, word went around that circle within weeks.24

Think about who those people were. They had fled the Soviet Union or been driven out of it. They were, almost to a person, fiercely anti-communist. And here was a young man who had gone the other way voluntarily, come back, and would not stop saying he preferred it there. They found him rude, arrogant and cheap. Most of them disliked him on sight. They kept coming anyway, and they came for her.25

The one who took it on was an accountant, a Russian-born man in his sixties who had made himself the community’s fixer. He organized clothes for the baby, a bed, English lessons, dental work for a young woman whose teeth had gone bad. He wrote it down and kept the receipts, which is why we know. He also came to fear the husband, and eventually pulled back. Ordinary kindness, withdrawn for ordinary reasons.26

In February 1963 a young German geologist gave a party at his apartment and invited the odd couple everyone was talking about. That is where the introduction happened. Out of a room full of people who found him tedious came the one man who did not: older, wealthy, well traveled, a petroleum geologist with a foreign accent of his own. Everything anybody argues about regarding Oswald’s last year runs through that living room.27, 28

One more thing about that circle. A petroleum engineer in Fort Worth had been teaching Russian at the public library, which is how the Oswalds first came to the community’s attention at all. After the assassination, when investigators needed somebody who spoke Russian and could be trusted around a frightened widow, they used him. The same small group that had fed her and judged her husband also supplied the words in which she was first questioned.29, 30

†It is tempting to look at a defector surrounded by well connected emigres and see a handling operation. The duller reading is stronger. A small immigrant community did what small immigrant communities do, which is take in the newcomer who speaks the language, and in this case they mostly regretted it. What is genuinely odd is not the colony. It is that one man in it stayed close long after everybody else had had enough.31

The summer in New Orleans

In the last week of April 1963 he left Dallas and went to New Orleans, which was where he had been born. He was twenty-three. He got a room, then an apartment on Magazine Street, and his wife and the baby came down to join him in May. For five months he lived there, and almost everything anybody argues about regarding who he was working for happened in those five months.32

The job he found was at a coffee company on Magazine Street. He oiled and greased the machinery that roasted and ground the beans. He was paid by the hour, he was not good at it, and he was let go in the third week of July for spending too much time away from his bench. Whatever else he was doing that summer, this is what he was doing between eight and five, and it is worth holding on to.33

He wrote to a pro-Castro group in New York called the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and told them he was opening a branch in New Orleans. They wrote back advising him not to, because a public office would attract exactly the wrong attention. He opened it anyway, on paper. He printed membership cards and handbills for an organization whose entire membership was himself, and he signed one card with a name that does not appear to have belonged to anybody.34

†Some of those handbills carry a rubber stamp with a street address. Five forty-four Camp Street. That is one entrance of a building whose other entrance, around the corner, housed the office of a private detective and former senior F.B.I. man who spent his time on anti-Castro work. A man handing out pro-Castro leaflets stamped them with the address of a building containing an anti-Castro operation. That much is documented, and it is where the documentation ends.35, 36

On the ninth of August he was handing out leaflets on Canal Street when a Cuban exile who ran an anti-Castro student group came up with two friends. The exile had met him before. A week earlier this same young man had walked into the exile’s store and offered to train his people in guerrilla fighting. Now here he was on the sidewalk supporting the other side. There was shouting, leaflets went in the air, and all four were arrested.37, 38

That store is worth naming now, because it turns up later in this story wearing a disguise. It was a clothing store, and the sign above the door said Casa Roca. Fifteen years of writing had Oswald walking into a store and asking a Cuban whether he belonged to the Cosa Nostra. He was not asking about the Mafia. Somebody had misheard the name of the store he was standing in.39

He spent the night in a cell, and in the morning he asked to speak to the F.B.I. That is not what a young man arrested for a scuffle usually asks for. An agent came down to the station and sat with him for over an hour. Nobody has ever produced a satisfying explanation for why a self-declared communist in a Louisiana jail would send for the Bureau and expect it to come. It came.40, 41

Twelve days later a local station put him on the air to debate the exile he had scuffled with, and a third man who ran an anti-communist information outfit. The third man had done his homework. On air, he asked about the years in the Soviet Union. It was the first time most of New Orleans learned that this leafleter had defected and come back. Somebody had pulled his file. In 1963 that file was not sitting in a public library.42, 43

†You can read those five months two ways and both readings are respectable. One: a lonely young man built a paper organization, picked a fight, got beaten in a debate and left town. Two: somebody was constructing a public record of a pro-Castro agitator, and doing it in front of cameras. What the documents will support is that by September there existed a thick, photographed, broadcast file on a man nobody had heard of in April. Who benefited from that file is not something paper can tell you.44, 45

The people who knew him

The closest thing he had to a friend in Dallas was a wealthy Russian-born petroleum geologist thirty years older than him. George de Mohrenschildt spoke five languages, moved among oil men and diplomats, and for about a year took an interest in a twenty-three-year-old warehouse worker with a defection behind him. Nobody has ever produced a satisfying explanation of what the older man was getting out of it.46, 47

Except that there is a partial answer and I should give it to you. There was a Central Intelligence Agency officer in Dallas whose job was the Domestic Contacts Division: not spies, but American businessmen and travelers who came back from abroad with something worth hearing. He had been debriefing this geologist since 1957, after a trip to Yugoslavia. That relationship is documented and the Agency has never disputed it.48, 49

†It goes further, on his own account. In an interview in 1977, weeks before he died, the geologist said that he had raised the young defector with that officer, and that he had been given a go-ahead before he made contact. That is his word for it, given fourteen years later by a man in poor mental health, and it has never been corroborated by any document. But he said it, and it is on the record, and it is the only explanation anybody has offered that fits the behavior.48, 49

Now the deflation, because the phrase C.I.A. contact does a great deal of unearned work. Thousands of Americans were Domestic Contacts sources. It meant an officer bought you lunch when you got back from somewhere interesting and wrote up what you said. It is not employment, it is not tasking, and it does not make a man an operator. What it does mean is that the one person who befriended Lee Oswald in Dallas had a standing relationship with the Agency, and the Warren Commission was not told the shape of it.48, 49

In March 1977 an investigator for the House Select Committee drove to Florida to find de Mohrenschildt and left a card at the house where he was staying. That afternoon de Mohrenschildt was found dead of a gunshot wound. It was ruled a suicide, and he had been seriously ill and hospitalized for depression. Both of those things are true on the same day, and the coincidence is genuine.47, 50

His wife and two small children were not living with him. They were staying in a suburb with Ruth Paine, a Quaker woman learning Russian who had befriended them and taken them in. He came out on weekends. Every object that matters in the physical case against him, the rifle, the blanket, the photographs, sat in or passed through that house, belonging to a woman who had no part in any of it.51

The same suspicion attaches to the woman who took his family in, and it should be dealt with rather than left hanging. Every physical object in the case against him was in her house. She made the telephone call that got him the job in that building. People have therefore spent sixty years asking whether she was placed there. There is one fact underneath all of it, and it is worth stating precisely, because it is real.52, 21

Her sister was employed by the Central Intelligence Agency. That is established, it is in the record, and nobody disputes it. And that is the entire foundation of the theory. Not a document about her, not a payment, not a contact report, not a cryptonym, not one line in sixty years of releases including the 2025 files. A sibling with a job.52, 21

So hold the two of them side by side, because they are not equivalent and the difference is the whole discipline of this book. The geologist has a documented relationship with an Agency officer and said himself that he cleared the contact. The Quaker woman has a sister. One of those is evidence about a person. The other is evidence about a family tree, and if it were enough, a great many of us would be implicated in something.52, 21

He got the job at the Depository because a neighbor mentioned over coffee that her brother worked there and they were taking people on. Ruth Paine made a telephone call. He was hired in the middle of October, about five weeks before the motorcade route was decided, for a building nobody yet had a reason to care about. If you want a conspiracy to have placed him there, you have to place it in that conversation.53

†A nineteen-year-old colleague, Wesley Frazier, drove him to work that morning and remembered him carrying a long paper package he said held curtain rods. Frazier and his sister both described the package as too short for the rifle. Frazier passed a polygraph, was never charged, and never changed his account. The Commission concluded he had simply misjudged a length, which is an entirely ordinary thing to do and is also the thing the case needs him to have done.54, 55

†Silvia Odio was a Cuban exile living in Dallas. She said three men came to her door in late September, two of them Latin, one American, and that the American was introduced to her as Leon Oswald. Her sister was there and said the same. This is not a stranger identifying a face on television afterwards. It is a name, given at the door, before anybody had heard of him.56, 47

†The problem is arithmetic. On the days Odio places that visit, the record has him traveling to Mexico. The Commission looked for a way to dissolve it and could not. The House Select Committee, fourteen years later, went back over her account and called her credible. So there is a documented person, corroborated by her sister, believed by a Congressional committee, describing something the timeline says could not have happened.57, 58

Look at the adults in his life in 1963 and none of them is sinister. A Quaker housewife learning Russian. A teenage colleague with a car. An oil geologist who liked odd company. A neighbor who mentioned a vacancy. The case against him runs almost entirely through people with no stake in it at all, and that is either the strongest thing about it or the strangest, depending on where you already stand.59, 47

His mother, his brother, his wife

Before her son had been buried, his mother was telling reporters that he had been an agent of the United States government, and that he had died for his country. She said it in November 1963 and she was still saying it twenty years later. She had no documents. What she had was a certainty that arrived immediately and never moved, and the fact that she was first does not make her right or wrong.60, 61

He was buried in Fort Worth on the same afternoon the President was buried in Arlington. Almost nobody came. There were no pallbearers, because there was nobody to be one, so the police asked the reporters who had come to cover it. Newspapermen put down their notebooks and carried the coffin. Whatever he did, that is how the most hated man in America went into the ground, carried by people sent to watch.62

She testified for days. She gave lectures, sat for interviews, and charged for some of them, which made her easy to dismiss and often she was dismissed. She was difficult, she contradicted herself, and she believed absolutely. When she died in 1981 she was still working on it. It is worth being careful here, because a mother who is impossible to interview is not thereby wrong, and a great deal of what she claimed has never been tested.63

The brother went the other way. He visited the jail, sat across from him, and asked him directly. He said afterward that he looked into his brother’s eyes and found nothing there to hold on to. He testified, he wrote a book about it, and for more than fifty years he said the same thing: that his brother did it, that he did it alone, and that there was no more to find. He died in 2017 still saying it.64, 65

Now consider the position the widow was in. She was twenty-two years old. She had two babies, one of them a month old. She spoke almost no English. She was a Soviet citizen in the United States, in the custody of the government whose President her husband was accused of killing, and that government could send her back. Then she was questioned for months. Everything the case rests on from her was said under that.66, 67

†By the 1990s she was saying she no longer believed her husband had killed anybody. She said she had been frightened, that she had told them what she thought they wanted, and that she had come to think he was set up. You can treat that as a woman freed at last to say what she always thought, or as thirty years of reading and grief rearranging a memory. Both happen to real people. The book cannot have it both ways.68, 69

So the three human beings closest to him ended up in three different places and stayed there. His mother said the government used him. His brother said he did it alone. His wife said one thing under pressure in 1964 and something close to the reverse in freedom thirty years later. They shared a kitchen table. They cannot all be right, and there is no version of this where somebody’s family is not wrong about the most important thing in their life.70

† disputed   ‡ theory   § reconstructed — everything unmarked is established. Superscript numbers key to the sources below. Corrections

Sources for this chapter

70 sources. Every claim above is keyed to one of them. The complete list for the whole book runs to 1,276.

  1. Warren Commission Report, chapter VI, Oswald's travel to the Soviet Union
  2. United States Marine Corps discharge record, 11 September 1959
  3. State Department cable, American Embassy Moscow, 31 October 1959
  4. Warren Commission Exhibit, memorandum of conversation, Richard E. Snyder
  5. Warren Commission testimony of Richard E. Snyder
  6. State Department file on the citizenship status of Lee Harvey Oswald
  7. Oswald's Historic Diary, October 1959
  8. KGB file materials on Oswald released via the Russian government, 1990s
  9. Oswald's Historic Diary, 1960 to 1962
  10. Warren Commission Report, chapter VI, the Minsk period
  11. Warren Commission testimony of Marina Oswald
  12. Oswald's Historic Diary, March and April 1961
  13. State Department repatriation loan record, Lee Harvey Oswald, 1962
  14. Warren Commission Exhibits, loan repayment schedule
  15. FBI reports of interview with Lee Harvey Oswald, Fort Worth, June and August 1962
  16. Warren Commission Report, chapter VI, return to the United States
  17. Warren Commission Report, chapter VI
  18. HSCA final report 1979, review of Oswald's Soviet period
  19. Oswald's Historic Diary and other writings, Warren Commission exhibits
  20. Oswald's political writings, Warren Commission exhibits
  21. the author's assessment
  22. Warren Commission Report, chapter VII, Oswald's employment and finances
  23. Warren Commission Report, chapter VII
  24. Warren Commission Hearings, testimony of members of the Dallas Russian community
  25. Warren Commission Hearings, testimony of George Bouhe and others
  26. Warren Commission testimony of George Bouhe
  27. Warren Commission testimony of Volkmar Schmidt
  28. Warren Commission testimony of George de Mohrenschildt
  29. Warren Commission testimony of Peter Paul Gregory
  30. Secret Service and FBI records of early interviews with Marina Oswald
  31. Warren Commission Report, appendix on Oswald's associates in Dallas
  32. Warren Commission Report, chronology of Oswald's residence, April to September 1963
  33. Warren Commission Hearings, employment records of the William B. Reily Company
  34. Warren Commission Hearings, correspondence between Oswald and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, New York
  35. Fair Play for Cuba Committee handbill bearing 544 Camp Street stamp, Warren Commission exhibits
  36. HSCA volume X, investigation of the Newman Building tenancies
  37. New Orleans Police Department arrest records, 9 August 1963
  38. Warren Commission testimony of Carlos Bringuier
  39. HSCA interview re-examining the Casa Roca account, 1978
  40. Warren Commission testimony of Special Agent John L. Quigley
  41. FBI report of interview, New Orleans, 10 August 1963
  42. WDSU radio broadcast recording, New Orleans, 21 August 1963
  43. Warren Commission Hearings, testimony regarding the Conversation Carte Blanche debate
  44. Warren Commission Report, chapter on Oswald's activities in New Orleans
  45. HSCA final report 1979, review of the New Orleans period
  46. Warren Commission testimony of George de Mohrenschildt, volume IX
  47. HSCA final report 1979
  48. House Select Committee on Assassinations, staff report on George de Mohrenschildt
  49. de Mohrenschildt interview, March 1977
  50. Palm Beach County medical examiner ruling, March 1977
  51. Warren Commission testimony of Ruth Paine, volumes III and IX
  52. Warren Commission testimony of Ruth Paine
  53. Warren Commission testimony of Ruth Paine (volume III) and Linnie Mae Randle
  54. Warren Commission testimony of Buell Wesley Frazier
  55. Warren Report, chapter IV
  56. Warren Commission testimony of Silvia Odio, 22 July 1964
  57. Warren Report, appendix XIII
  58. HSCA final report 1979, section on the Odio incident
  59. Warren Commission testimony of Ruth Paine, de Mohrenschildt and Silvia Odio
  60. Warren Commission testimony of Marguerite Oswald
  61. contemporary press reports, November 1963
  62. contemporary press accounts of the burial at Rose Hill Cemetery, Fort Worth, 25 November 1963
  63. Warren Commission Hearings, volume I, testimony of Marguerite Oswald
  64. Warren Commission testimony of Robert Oswald
  65. Robert L. Oswald, Lee: A Portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald, 1967
  66. Warren Commission Hearings, testimony of Marina Oswald
  67. Secret Service records of the protective custody of Marina Oswald, November 1963
  68. published interviews with Marina Oswald Porter, 1990s
  69. ARRB-era press accounts of her changed position
  70. Warren Commission Hearings, testimony of Marguerite, Robert and Marina Oswald