Collection of Assorted Newspaper and Magazine Clippings: Jfk Assassination, Conspiracy Theories, Etc

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

# The CIA and the Man Who Was Not Oswald

Bernard Fensterwald and

George O'Toole

Six weeks before the association of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, the Central Intelligence Agency sent the following teletype message to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Departments of State and the Navy:

## Subject: Lee Henry OSWALD

1. On 1 October 1963 a reliable and sensitive source in Mexico reported that an American male, who identified himself as Lee OSWALD, contacted the Soviet

Embassy in Mexico City inquiring whether the Embassy had received any news concerning a telegram which had been sent to Washington. The American was described as approximately 35 years old, with an athletic build, about six feet tall, with a receding hairline.

2. It is believed that OSWALD may be identical to Lee Henry OSWALD, born on 18 October 1939 in New Orleans, Louisiana. A former U.S. Marine who defected to the Soviet Union in October 1959 and later made arrangement through the United States Embassy in Moscow to return to the United States with his Russian-born wife, Marina Nikolaevna Pusakova, and their child.

3. The information in paragraph one is being disseminated to your representatives in Mexico City. Any further information received on this subject will be furnished you. This information is being made available to the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Was the Lee Henry Oswald of the CIA message Lee Harvey Oswald? Yes, according to Richard Helms, then chief of the Agency's Clandestine Services. In a March 1964 memorandum to J. Lee Rankin, general counsel to the Warren Commission, Helms explained that "OSWALD'S middle name was erroneously given as 'Henry' in the subject line and in paragraph two of the dissemination. . . The maiden surname of Mrs. OSWALD was most seriously listed as 'PUSAKOVA.'"

But Lee Harvey Oswald was not "approximately 35 years old, with an athletic build", he was twenty three years old and slender. Apparently the CIA was concerned about the dis

crepancy for on October 23 . with the following message to the Department of the Navy

## Suspect Lee Henry OSWALD

Reference is made to CIA Our Teletype No. 71n73 [the earlier message] dated 10 October 1901, regarding possible presence of subject of Mexico City. It is requested that you forward to this office as soon as possible two copies of the most recent photograph you have of subject. We will forward them to our representative in Mexico, who will attempt to determine if the Lee OSWALD in Mexico City and subject are the same individual.

Since Oswald had served in the Marine Corps, which comes under the administration of the Navy, his personnel records would have included his photograph.

What the Agency did not say in this cable is that it had in its possession a photograph of the man who had apparently "identified himself" as Oswald. The man in the CIA photo was not Lee Harvey Oswald; he was, just as the Agency's "reliable and sensitive source" had described him, approximately thirty-five years old, with an athletic build and a receding hairline.

According to a memorandum by Helms, the CIA never received the Navy's pictures of Oswald and only concluded after the assassination that two different people were involved. $ ^{5} $ Meanwhile, the photograph was delivered to the FBI on November 22, 1963. $ ^{6} $

One can only guess at the confusion caused by the picture. The FBI needed no Navy photograph to establish that the mystery man was not Oswald-Lee Harvey Oswald was sitting hendcuffed in a third-floor office of the Dallas police headquarters. The next day Special Agent Bardwell D Odum was dispatched with the photograph to the motel where Oswald's wife and mother were hidden. He showed the picture to Mrs. Marguerite Oswald, mother of the accused assassin, Mrs. Oswald looked at the photo and told Odum she didn't recognize the man. The following day, however, shortly after her son was arrested in the basement of Dallas City Hall, Mrs. Oswald erroneously identified the mystery man. She told the press the FBI had shown her a mother of L.L. Robbe the master before

Mrs Oswald's mistress was under constant suspicion in the mystery man born a child to embark to Jack Ruby and in her registration of a brief glance at the photograph two faces became one. But the misidentification made it necessary for the Warren Commission to refer, however obliquely, to the affair of the mystery man. In the twenty-six volumes of published testimony and evidence supplementary to the Warren Report, the Commission printed the picture that was shown to Mrs Oswald. The Warren Report contains a very brief account of the incident.

According to the Report, the CIA had provided the FBI with a photograph of "a man who, it was thought at the time, might have been associated with Oswald." The Report quoted an affidavit by Richard Helms that "the original photograph had been taken by the CIA outside of the United States sometime between July 1. 1963 and November 22. 1963."

The Commission's explanation is both inaccurate and misleading. The implication that the CIA thought the mystery man was "associated with Oswald" only masks the true situation. On the basis of its own evidence, the Agency must have concluded either that the mystery man was impersonating Oswald or that an unlikely chain of errors had accidentally linked both the man in the photograph and the man who "contacted" the Soviet Embassy to Lee Harvey Oswald.

The truth was further obscured by the Report's reference to the Helms affidavit, which described the circumstances in which the mystery man was photographed only in the most vague and general terms. The affidavit was dated August 7, 1964. However, the Commission never mentioned in its Report or in its twenty-six supplementary volumes that it had obtained an earlier affidavit from Helms on July 22, 1964 in which he was much more specific. The original photograph. Helms testified, "was taken in Mexico City on October 4, 1963." (This earlier Helms affidavit was released in 1967 through the efforts of Paul Hoch, a private researcher.)

There is no available record that Richard Heims ever told the Warren Commission exactly where in Mexico City the mystery man was photographed but the circumstances in which the photo sample was given to the Commission offer a very plausible