Authors: John Newman
Having disposed of Congressman Wright's inquiry, the bureaucracy at the State Department was free to return to its lethargy. Oswald's file landed on Henry Kupiec's desk in the passport office.' Kupiec passed it to the head of the adjudication section, G. W. Masterton, who passed it, with a quickly scrawled note, to his subordinate, Bernice Waterman. In classic bureaucratese, the note said, "Miss Waterman-I think [the] Embassy should not take any action in the case at this time. If you agree, please draft something for clearance through [the] PT/F [Passport Office]."' Masterson evidently thought that Oswald's brazen actions precluded any routine reentry to the U.S. and, further, that the embassy should not go out of its way to help him. Waterman, the most experienced adjudicator in the section, prepared a red refusal sheet requesting a lookout card for Oswald and put it on top of his file.' By taking this action, Waterman intended to "avoid the issuance of a passport routinely in the event Oswald should apply in the future."9
Marguerite's letter had raised the possibility that Oswald "might want to return to the United States," Waterman later testified, and "it was customary to make this red refusal sheet in our office.... In the adjudication part of the office, to put a flag on the case for future reference."10 The refusal sheet would normally have been indexed by another person and a red "lookout" card put in a file so that Oswald could not come back into the United States without the State Department's Passport Office knowing about it. But a lookout card was not filled out on Oswald. "Someone else was looking at it," Bernice Waterman later testified about the Oswald file's status in late March 1960. "It looks to me as if someone started to handle this for the refusal card, or lookout card as you call it," she explained. What Waterman was not saying was that she too had handled her part of the processing in an unusual way: She had failed to put the standard "disregard" mark on the red refusal sheet, a mark that would have given the authority to remove the lookout card if someone else decided that Oswald had not expatriated himself."
A "Very Surprising" Case
"All I could say is it is very surprising," Waterman testified, looking back on the Oswald case. Indeed, it was an unusual case from the start. She explained, "We had been requested not to forward any kind of classified files to the usual place for having these cards made-we should forward them to the Classified Files Section, which would take it up from there, and give them to the proper person to handle."" Of course the Oswald file was classified and, when it went to Classified Files Section, the normal procedure for indexing the refusal sheet-typing the person's name along the right-hand margin preceded by the number 130-was not followed. Instead, Oswald's name was handwritten and the number 130 was not entered. Six people were questioned about this, and the person who recognizes the handwriting as hers, Dorothy Carter, said that "it could safely be concluded that a lookout card was prepared and filed" [emphasis added].13 But the trouble with Carter's story is that she does not remember writing the notation she claims is in her own handwriting. A 1964 internal State Department investigation of this episode illustrates the problem:
Carter had no personal recollection of preparing or filing a lookout card in the Oswald case nor had she any recollection of removing the Oswald card from the file. With regard to the fact that the number 130 did not precede Oswald's name, Carter could offer no explanation other than the possibility the refusal sheet may have been indexed when the number 130 was dropped by the Passport Office. In interviewing the various Passport Office personnel, none could offer any explanation as to what may have happened to the lookout card had one been prepared. The majority of the persons interviewed were of the opinion that a card was never prepared because, among other reasons, the refusal sheet was not indexed. Mrs. Waterman, among others, offered the possible explanation that the refusal sheet was buried under subsequent correspondence and, as a result, missed when the file reached the Passport files."
Thus we do not know for sure whether a lookout card was prepared on Oswald in March 1960. However, contemporaneous State Department cables suggest that something like a lookout card-or a flag which functioned in much the same manner-had been prepared. Take, for example, this passage in a March 28 operations memorandum from the State Department to the embassy in Moscow:
Unless and until the Embassy comes into possession of information or evidence upon which to base the preparation of a certificate or loss of nationality in the case of Lee Harvey Oswald, there appears to be no further action possible in this case.
An appropriate notice has been placed in the lookout card section of the Passport Office in the event that Mr. Oswald should apply for documentation at a post outside the Soviet Union."
This communication crossed in the mail with an operations memorandum from the embassy in Moscow which was also written on March 28. Both messages arrived at their respective destinations on April 5.
A close look at these two operations memorandums in the light of Waterman's 1964 testimony suggests an unusual journey for Oswald's file in the Adjudication Section and Classified Files Section of the State Department's Passport Office. It appears that the final leg of that journey-the filling out of the lookout card itself-was interrupted by this "new communication coming in from our Embassy in Moscow." This March 28 Moscow operations memorandum stated, "The Embassy has no evidence that Oswald had expatriated himself other than his announced intention to do so," a technicality which the embassy felt left its options open.16 In essence, they felt free to give Oswald his passport back at their own discretion. That same logic-that Oswald was still technically an American citizen-might also explain why the final step of creating a lookout card was never completed back at the State Department in Washington.
Far from setting up roadblocks to Oswald's routine access to his passport should he want to reclaim it, the American Embassy in Moscow was thinking of ways to locate him. The March 28 memorandum from Moscow floated a plan for the State Department's consideration, a plan which they said had been "effective" in previous cases. The plan was to have Marguerite Oswald write a personal letter to her son which the embassy would then forward to the Soviet Foreign Ministry on her behalf. Such a tactic would almost certainly have led the Soviets to provide a mailing address for Oswald. But the State Department did not respond to the plan until May 10, at which time they rejected it. They changed their minds a year later when Marguerite flew to Washington, but during all of the intervening months of her dealings with the FBI, the Marine Corps, and the State Department, Marguerite had no idea what fate had befallen her son.
"No Clew as to His Present Whereabouts "
The State Department finally sent a short letter to Marguerite, who was, after all, the distraught mother who had started all of the paperwork in the first place." George Haselton, the chief of the Protection and Representation Division, explained to Marguerite that her March 7 letter had been forwarded to the embassy in Moscow with a request that they "endeavor to obtain a report concerning your son's present welfare and inform him of your continuing desire to help him." Haselton's letter was mailed to Mrs. Oswald on March 30. To confound matters, Marguerite also received a strange letter about her son from, of all places, Switzerland. A Professor Hans Casparis had written Oswald on March 22, asking him to make an adjustment to his "travel plans."" Professor Casparis was an administrator at the Albert Schweitzer College in Churwalden, Switzerland, and his letter indicated that Oswald was due to attend the college from April 19 through July 20. Marguerite, relieved to know something about Lee's plans, immediately sent an inquiry to Professor Casparis to find out more. She sent the letter on April 6 and, not knowing if Lee wanted this trip kept secret, did not tell the State Department what she had discovered.'9
Meanwhile, the State Department had learned nothing in its rather lackluster search for Oswald. When the operations memorandum from Moscow arrived at the Department on April 5, it said, "The Embassy has had no contact with Oswald since his departure from the Metropole Hotel in Moscow in November 1959, and has no clew as to his present whereabouts."20 The State Department did not pass on this disappointing detail to Mrs. Oswald, nor did they inform her of the embassy's suggestion that she write a letter to Lee which the embassy could use as a lever with the Soviet Foreign Ministry. For her part, Marguerite's attention was trained on her mailbox, but not for a new plan of attack from the State Department. She was eagerly awaiting a response from the Albert Schweitzer College. However, the next person who contacted her was not from Switzerland or the State Department. He was Special Agent John W. Fain of the FBI's field office in Dallas. He had just finished interviewing Robert Oswald the day before, and had tracked Marguerite down to ask her some questions about that $25 money order she had sent Lee in January.
When Fain interviewed Marguerite on April 28, three weeks had passed since her letter to the Schweitzer College. She told Fain more than the details of the money order. She told him all about Lee Harvey Oswald's family background, his service in the marines, and his recent defection to the Soviet Union. She told Fain she had written her congressman and the State Department because she was "very much alarmed for fear that something might have happened to Lee." Marguerite told Fain about the letter from the Albert Schweitzer College, and how "the receipt of this letter had raised her hopes to cause her to feel that he might actually be en route to this college in Switzerland and that she intends to write this college to see if they have received any word from Lee."Z'
Marguerite avoided mentioning the fact that she had written that letter several weeks before. After all, the April 20 date for Oswald's arrival at the college had come and gone, and still there was no word from Professor Casparis. Fain asked Marguerite if she had been asked to send "any items of personal identification" to Oswald in Russia. The answer was no, but she added that Oswald had taken his birth certificate with him when he left Fort Worth. Ironically, the very day that Fain interviewed Marguerite, Professor Casparis mailed a letter to her with bad news. While that letter was on an airplane over the Atlantic, another government organization with bad news intruded into Marguerite's life. A letter would arrive shortly in her mail, and it would not be from the Schweitzer College, the State Department, or the FBI. It was from the Marines Corps Reserve, in which Lee Harvey Oswald was still a private with obligated duty.
"Due to your recent activities," Oswald's Marine Reserve commander wrote on April 26, "this headquarters will convene a board of officers, to determine your fitness for retention in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve."22 The notification said there were just two options to choose from: retention in the reserves or "undesirable discharge." Oswald was invited to appear at the board or have someone appear for him within forty-five days. Marguerite, with no way of contacting Oswald, did not know how to respond, and so she did not react immediately. She had until June 10 to decide what to do about this threat, and in any case had still not heard back from Switzerland, where she had a reason-albeit a long shot-to hope that Oswald might be at that very moment. There was also the possibility that the embassy might locate him in time for the board. It must have been an awful moment for Marguerite, who had been embarrassed to ask the government for help and now learned that the marines were holding a board to give him the boot.
While Marguerite was holding out for the news from Switzerland, the State Department sent a new operations memorandum to Moscow saying they were not going to do anything at all unless they received something "specific" from Oswald's family. Therefore, the department said on May 10 that Moscow's suggested plan to prompt Mrs. Oswald to write a personal letter to her son would not be "pursued further."23 This foreclosed any real possibility of finding Oswald in Russia unless he broke his own silence by writing. The State Department search was thus effectively over unless Marguerite forced a new move by some action of her own. With the days ticking away toward the imminent convening of the Marine Corps board on Oswald's undesirable discharge, news finally arrived from the Albert Schweitzer College in Switzerland.
"It is with great regret that we have to tell you," Professor Casparis wrote Marguerite, "that we have not had any word from your son Lee since his application for the third term of a few months ago." This could mean only that Lee had, for his own reasons, decided to excommunicate himself from his family. With no way of contacting Oswald before the Marine Corps hearing, Marguerite had to handle the matter alone. She decided to act, but elected to wait until the very last moment to do so. "I am writing you on behalf of my son Lee Harvey Oswald," she wrote to the Marine Corps on June 10. "He is out of the country at present and since I have no contact with him I wish to request a stay of action concerning his discharge. Also I desire to be informed of the charges against him."24 At the same time, she wrote a letter to the State Department on June 8, asking for a determination as to whether Lee had in fact "signed the necessary papers renouncing his citizenship," and adding her own analysis that he had not and that he was in Russia as a "resident alien."25 This was an excellent question that had bearing on the circumstances under which he might return to the U.S., but it would be of little use in preventing an unfavorable decision by the marine board.
The Marine Corps responded first, with a letter on June 17 saying that the investigation into Oswald "was prompted by his request for Soviet citizenship." This letter said that sending a certified letter to Oswald's last known address announcing the date of the board was all the marines needed to do, and added, "It is regretted that action of this nature must be taken in your son's case."26 The Marine Corps did not tell Marguerite that they had already read the FBI report of her April 28 interview with Special Agent Fain.27 The June 17 Marine Corps letter to Marguerite also did not tell her what else they had learned from the FBI. It was an FBI suspicion which would have added considerably to Marguerite's anxiety about her son had she known about it. The FBI had concluded-based on Fain's interview with Marguerite and a general analysis of the situation-that there might be an impostor using Oswald's birth certificate.