Lee Harvey Oswald - Born 85 Years Ago
While my book, ‘Death to Justice: The Shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald’ is not devoted to the life of President Kennedy’s alleged assassin, Lee Oswald, I do provide an overview of his turbulent upbringing as a child, his entry into the U.S. Marines and subsequent, suspicious, Cold War activities including his time in the Soviet Union (during which time he never actually defected) to his return to Texas and time in New Orleans in the summer of 1963.
My book lays down how he came to be arrested on November 22nd 1963 for the murder of Police Officer, J.D. Tippit and subsequent, alleged, charging of for the president’s murder. It is all context that makes his own brutal murder on November 24th 1963 while in police custody at the beginning of his transfer to the County Jail, and in full view of the media, all the more compelling.
I have provided an excerpt of my chapter in the book on Lee Oswald’s background below. One of my intentions for writing this book was to respectfully highlight how open and shut Oswald’s murder was not. And in doing so, elevate it to a case worth of its own research:
CHAPTER TWO: LEE HARVEY OSWALD
Lee Oswald no doubt was a fascinating figure across all phases of his life. Yet you will not find a bestseller mainstream biography that dares apply any objectivity to the question of if he had any involvement with the Kennedy and Tippit murders. This runs consistent with the Oswald-did-it orthodoxy that is the most lucrative for the authors who espouse as much. Norman Mailer’s ‘Oswald’s Tale’ is a good example of a voluminous take on Oswald’s life complete with detailed and extensive coverage of events at most stages that all but gave up on applying any critical thinking when it came to Oswald in Dealey Plaza. Reasons why there isn’t a credible biographical source on Lee Oswald are bolstered by the simple facts that he only lived to the age of twenty four and his entire adult life is virtually shrouded in secrecy. This book does not seek to devote too much focus on Lee Oswald’s background – but it is important to provide some context.
Lee Oswald was employed as an order filler at the Texas School Book Depository at the time of President Kennedy’s assassination. He started working there on October 16th 1963, two days before his twenty forth birthday, with the help of Ruth Paine - the woman with whom his wife, Marina, was friends and living with at the time. Paine, according to her Texas Grand Jury testimony, contacted the Book Depository’s superintendent, Roy Truly, herself to canvas for any work there on Lee’s behalf. She secured an interview for him the next day and as a result, Oswald was asked by Truly to start the following day. However, like most things in the Lee Oswald narrative, it wasn’t quite as simple as that.
To begin with, Linnie Mae Randle, who was a neighbour of Ruth Paine’s and whose brother, Buell Frazier worked at the Book Depository, testified to the Warren Commission, that she told Paine there were not any job vacancies at the time she was focused on helping Oswald get a job. Yet, with the help of a cold call from Ruth Paine to the superintendent at the Book Depository, Lee was secured an interview. Add to this the fact that Ruth Paine had clear connections on both sides of her family with U.S. Intelligence, namely the CIA, which led all the way up to former Director Allen Dulles, and she quickly became a very compelling figure of interest. Furthermore, when it was established that Robert Adams of the Texas Employment Commission (TEC) testified in an affidavit to the Warren Commission that he telephoned the Paine residence, where Oswald had all correspondence directed to despite living in a nearby rooming house, on October 15 to notify him about a job opening that paid more than the one at the Book Depository as a baggage handler at Love Field Airport. The fact that Oswald in all probability didn’t receive the message from Paine adds to the question of whether her helping him find work at the Book Depository was her participating (wittingly or unwittingly) in a plot to frame him as part of the overall assassination plan. This episode just typifies the myriads of questions and rabbit-hole-esque nature of just who Lee Harvey Oswald was and how he came to be thrust forward as the alleged killer of President Kennedy and Dallas Police Officer J.D. Tippit.
Lee Harvey Oswald was born on October 18, 1939, in New Orleans. His mother was Marguerite Oswald (nee Claverie), and his father was Robert Edward Lee Oswald Sr., who died of a heart attack just two months prior to Lee’s birth. Lee had one brother, Robert, and a half-brother, John Edward Pic who were both older than he. Oswald’s youth was spent moving between New Orleans and the Dallas-Fort Worth area depending on his mother’s current situation. Combinations of troubles of his mother’s with jobs, family friends and men all made for a turbulent and chaotic upbringing for Lee that included a stint in a New Orleans orphanage when he was four years old. He came close to some normalcy when Marguerite married John Ekdahl. He was the closest to a father figure young Lee had until John and Marguerite divorced. The instability of living and schooling arrangements continued for Lee right the way through his childhood and teen years. So much so that he and his mother travelled as far to New York’s Upper East Side, without notice, showing up on John Pic’s doorstep and in need of a place to stay. The entire time they stayed with him and his wife, Margy in their cramped apartment, was mired in tension - Marguerite’s pernicious and irrational ways no doubt a lead contributor. After a fight between Marguerite and Margy, during which Lee hit Marguerite and pulled a knife on Margy, Oswald and his mother moved out and into their own apartment. Lee was sent to two schools, but he barely attended either, preferring to roam the streets and subways of New York City. He was soon declared truant and referred to Youth House for psychiatric evaluation. The social worker there, Evelyn Siegel, declared Lee to be pleasant and that he had an ‘appealing quality about his emotionally starved, affectionless self which grows as one speaks to him.’ (*)
If Oswald was lonely and rudderless as a child, his inherent curiosity would lead him to an interest in Marxism and Socialism. Both gave him a newfound sense of guidance and structure that he so badly lacked with to look at and understand the world that seemed so against him. Moving back to New Orleans from New York with his mother didn’t improve his schooling but he would immerse himself in any socialist literature he could find. He would later write in his diary that ‘I had to dig for my books in the back of dusty shelves of libraries.’ His interest gave him a sense of purpose which, combined with a likely lust to break away from his domineering mother, saw him follow his brother, Robert by enlisting in the U.S. Marines at the age of seventeen. There he maintained his interests in Marxism and Socialism to the point that he earned the nickname ‘Oswaldovich’ from his fellow marines.
We come to yet another chapter of Lee Oswald’s life that has been subject to much conjecture over the years. What’s established is that he was a mediocre shot at best with a rifle having scored just over the ‘sharpshooter’ requirement after intensive training but dropped down to the lowest grading of ‘marksman’ when tested six months later. Beyond his time in the Marines, Oswald was only seen using firearms a couple of times. According to his brother, Robert, in his testimony for the Warren Commission, he recalled that he and Lee using rifles when they took a hunting trip in 1959. The next time was in the Soviet Union when Oswald was also taken on some hunting trips in the countryside there by friends.
In March of ’57, Oswald commenced training as a radar controller, an opportunity that only Marines with an above-average IQ could gain. He was soon promoted to Private First Class, but it was also around this time that he is alleged to have first publicly expressed interest in communist literature despite having received a promotion and higher level of security clearance. By that September, Oswald would ship out to Japan and serve as a radar operator at Atsugi Naval Air Station. It was from there that the highly classified U-2 surveillance spy planes were based to make flights over the region and as far as the Soviet Union.
By this point you may already know, or be beginning to understand, that the more that is written about Lee Oswald during the years of his service in the U.S. Marines, predominantly in East Asia, the more enigmatic he appears. To further the point, the next two years would see Oswald:
- undergo intelligence work in nearby Tokyo to pass on fake intelligence to KGB agents.
- learn to understand and speak Russian
- accidentally shoot himself only to have the bullet graze his left elbow and be court-martialled for possessing an unregistered weapon (a Derringer pistol)
- be promoted to Corporal
- assault a fellow marine and be sentenced for up to forty five days in the brig (the equivalent of jail on a military base)
- continue in his classified radar operator duties
- enrol into the Albert Schweitzer College in Switzerland (but never attend) and, apply for a passport stating he intended on visiting Cuba and Russia.
In August of ’59, Oswald applied for a discharge from the Marines to support his mother. It was granted the next month, but he only stayed with her in Fort Worth for two days before leaving for New Orleans. From there, he would sail to England. By the time he turned twenty that October, Oswald had already arrived in Moscow having travelled through England and Finland – where he obtained a six day holiday Soviet visa. During that time, he expressed his desire to local authorities to apply for citizenship. When his six day visa was about to lapse and having not heard back about his bid for Soviet citizenship, Oswald cut his left wrist and was admitted to a local hospital for eleven days. His request for citizenship remained open for consideration so he visited the local American Embassy and stated that he wished to revoke his U.S. citizenship. This was never actioned. Instead, his passport was retained by the American Embassy and in the following January, he was given ‘residency’ status by the Soviets.
Lee Oswald’s time in the Soviet Union remains a mystery. It was never conclusively established if he had been recruited whilst there by Soviet intelligence or that they did or did not act on the, most likely, conclusion that he was sent there on a U.S. intelligence objective. Both the United States and Soviet governments denied both scenarios then and do so until this day. What is clear is that Oswald was transported to Minsk and provided free accommodation in an upmarket apartment and provided a job in a local radio factory.
From a U.S. perspective, it is suspicious that a 201 file wasn’t opened by the CIA the moment Oswald arrived in the Soviet Union. Per the CIA’s Clandestine Services Handbook(*), these are opened to collect all records and documents relating to ‘subjects of extensive reporting and CI (Counterintelligence) investigation, prospective agents and sources, and members of groups and organisations of continuing interest.’ Therefore, in the case of Oswald, a former marine who worked in a classified position that was nestled within operations aimed squarely at the Soviet Union, it ought to have been standard operating procedure that a 201 folder be opened on him. Yet it was not done until December 1960, fourteen months after his arrival there, which compels the conclusion that Lee Oswald was sent to the Soviet Union for a reason, or reasons, by U.S. intelligence.
But one episode during 1960 that has so fuelled this speculation is the crash of the United States’ U-2 spy plane piloted by Gary Powers over the Soviet Union. Effectively destroying the foundations for President Eisenhower and Soviet Premier Khrushchev’s scheduled peace talks in Paris within a matter of weeks, the incident is more mysterious given the fact that Lee Oswald was in the Soviet Union at the time. Having worked in radar operations monitoring U-2 spy planes, the question continues to linger if the downing of Powers’ plane was helped through intelligence that Oswald provided Soviet intelligence or not?
While not entirely relevant to the premise of this book the reasons Oswald could have been sent to the Soviet Union by U.S. intelligence have been speculated as everything from feeding false or accurate information on the soon to be decommissioned U-2 spy plane to the Soviets, to help weed out Soviet infiltrators within U.S. intelligence to simply being a dangle for whatever Soviet intelligence interest is shown in him. Or a combination of all the above. The evidence suggests that the Soviets were suspicious of Oswald from the very beginning so it is likely that they would not have regarded anything he would have been willing to tell them because they had him pegged as some kind of plant, whom they codenamed ‘Likhoi’.
Aside from the Oswald – U.S. intelligence angle, conjecture continues that Powers’ U-2 plane was sabotaged or had simply experienced engine faults that meant it lost enough altitude to be detected by Soviet radar and therefore in missile range to be shot down.
Another interesting and similar case to Oswald is Robert Webster, a U.S. citizen whose story of defecting to the Soviet Union only to return 2 years later, almost overlaps Oswald’s as he arrived in the Soviet Union two weeks prior to Oswald and left to return to the United States - two weeks before Oswald would do so as well. See Gary Hill’s ‘The Other Oswald’ for more.
Despite the tensions that arose between the Soviet Union and the United States over the U-2 affair, life continued as normal for Oswald in Minsk. There is relatively little on record for Oswald’s time in the Soviet Union in general. His known movements are mundane and routine. For all intents and purposes, he appeared to be living the life of any regular man barely in his twenties. He formed friendships, worked a full time job, took vacations, and had romantic interests including a local woman, Marina Nikolayevna Prusakova, who he married in April of ’61, only six weeks after meeting her. In fact, before she met Lee Oswald, Marina had a relationship with Robert Webster, as detailed in Gary Hill’s ‘The Other Oswald’. Either she had a particular fondness for American men who happened to be in town or her attraction was something more nefarious e.g. as a plant or as a spy. Curiously but perhaps not coincidentally, Marina had an uncle who was employed by the KGB at the time.
Later that year, Oswald began to make it known that he wished to return to the United States, providing he not be prosecuted for any crimes. With Marina in the picture, he intended on bringing her with him. In February of ’62, Lee and Marina would welcome their first child, a girl named June Lee and make the long journey to the United States the following June. However, it has never been adequately addressed how Marina could ever have been allowed into the U.S at all given she was had a relation in the KGB and how close in time she had relations with two U.S. citizens in the Soviet Union given the current climate of the Cold War. Lee Oswald, former-Marine turned wannabe-Soviet defector, returned to the U.S. aboard the ‘S.S. Massadam’ with Marina and their daughter. There they were met with no fanfare and only a representative from the ‘Traveller’s Aid Society,’ an organisation with CIA and right-wing linkages, before flying to Dallas, via Atlanta. Reunited with family, the Oswald’s stayed with his mother in Fort Worth however the local FBI would not interview Lee until two weeks after his return. The coming home of a self-declared defector to the Soviet Union back in the United States, with a Soviet-born wife, was, publicly, strangely, and suspiciously low-key. When Robert Webster had returned, two weeks earlier than Oswald, there were news articles reporting on it but in Oswald’s case there was no coverage at all. The only time he had made the newspapers was when he first arrived in the Soviet Union three years prior.
Oswald started a job a month after his return to Texas at the Leslie Welding Company assembling doors and windows, but it would be his next job which would was more interesting. It was as an assistant at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, a company on contract to the United States government to produce typeface for U-2 surveillance photographs and maps, among other documents. That Oswald was able to acquire this job, having lived in the Soviet Union for most of the previous three years and the timing of when he started, just prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis, is another ‘beyond coincidence’ type of event in the Oswald lexicon.
It was around this time that a mysterious figure would come to prominence in the Oswald story. George de Mohrenschildt was a Russian-born man of nobility who fled with his family from there during the outset of the Russian Revolution. A journeyman through various business interests, de Mohrenschildt would zero in on geology and come to be based in Dallas. He soon became a doyen of the local White Russian community who were staunch anti-communists. The fact that de Mohrenschildt became friends with Oswald, who appeared to be, broadly speaking, a student of the very left wing principles and systems that White Russians like de Mohrenschildt vehemently opposed, sounds like yet another curiosity. However, de Mohrenschildt had long been linked to the CIA, who would use him to gather and report local intelligence on his travels around the world since at least the late 50’s. According to Greg Poulgrain’s ‘JFK vs. Allen Dulles’(*), de Mohrenschildt’s connections included CIA Director, Allen Dulles. And, unlike Ruth Paine – with her own intelligence ties, George de Mohrenschildt would confess to being contacted by local Dallas CIA agent, J. Walton Moore, to making contact with Lee Oswald. In 1977, soon after admitting his assignment from the CIA to effectively ‘mind’ Oswald, George de Mohrenschildt was found dead from a self-inflicted shotgun blast to the head. His death joined the long list of suspicious deaths relating to the Kennedy assassination. Ruth Paine, who is alive at the time of the writing this book, has never admitted to any actions on her part in regard to ‘minding’ Lee or Marina Oswald on behalf of U.S. Intelligence.
Lee and Marina would remain in Dallas until April of 1963 before he would relocate to New Orleans in search of work. Two weeks prior to his leaving Dallas, an event would take place that would be linked to Lee Oswald only after his death - the shooting at General Edwin Walker.