Authors: John Newman
A certain detail about the Oswald-Ella German relationship warrants our attention, for entirely different reasons. To understand its importance, we must first return to the continuing story of Oswald's files in Washington, D.C.
CHAPTER TEN
Journey into the Labyrinth
By the end of 1959, Marguerite Oswald was deeply concerned about the fate of her son. She had repeatedly and unsuccessfully tried to send him money. Her third-and last-such attempt, although an isolated and obscure event at the time, would eventually open a window through which we may now peer into the secret world of FBI and CIA operations. Her efforts to make sure that the money she sent reached her son set off an alarm in the FBI which, in turn, led to FBI interviews of herself and her son Robert in April 1960. These interviews culminated in a report on Oswald which the FBI sent to the CIA in May 1960.
This report, unlike the Oswald documents consumed by the "black hole" at the CIA immediately following Oswald's defection in 1959, took a lengthy and interesting ride through the Agency's Directorate of Operations. This journey through the "spook," or so-called "dark side" of the CIA included stops at several points in James Angleton's counterintelligence staff and at nearly half the branches and offices in David Murphy's Soviet Russia division.
This episode in Oswald's CIA files, however, ended just the way it had begun-in Angleton's CI/SIG unit. When the mole-hunting unit did open a 201 file on Oswald at the end of the year, it told a story about Oswald's defection in Moscow which it knew to be false. To find out why, we must first solve the riddle of the late 201 opening on Oswald.
A High-Interest Money Order'
On January 22, 1960, Mrs. Marguerite Oswald went to the First National Bank of Fort Worth, Texas, where she purchased a $25 money order which she posted via air mail that day to "Lee Harvey Oswald in care of Hotel Metropole, Moscow, Russia."' That was a Friday. "We determined on January 25, 1960," the FBI later explained to the Warren Commission, "that Mrs. Marguerite C. Oswald had transmitted the sum of $25 to `Lee Harvey Oswald in care of the Hotel Metropole, Moscow.' "3 How could the FBI have known by Monday what was inside the envelope Marguerite had put in the U.S. mail the previous Friday?
There is no way to avoid posing the question this way because Marguerite had tried to send money to her son only twice before: a $20 check on December 18, and a $20 bill on January 5.° The $25 money order nails down the sending date of her third communication to January 22, and the FBI's own record of the date they knew about it suggests the FBI had immediate access to this information. It seems reasonable to accept Marguerite's claim that the transaction was processed entirely through her bank; in a letter she wrote about it to Secretary of State Herter on March 7, 1960, she said, "I also sent a Foreign Money Transfer in the amount of $25. This draft was sent to him [Lee Oswald] thru my bank (against his receipt to be forwarded to my bank) but the receipt has not been received so I am paternally [sic] concerned about him."5 The failure of this particular transaction led Marguerite to make high-level inquiries about her son. It would also lead the FBI to make inquiries too.
It was ten days after his defection when the FBI entered a passive collection mode on Oswald. As of that date, this is how the FBI later described its interest in him:
A stop was placed in the files of the Identification Division of the FBI on November 10, 1959, so as to alert us in the event he [Oswald] returned to the United States under a different identity and his fingerprints were received. A file concerning Oswald was prepared and, as communications were received from other United States Government agencies, those communications were placed in his file. Our basic interest was to correlate information concern ing him and to evaluate him as a security risk in the event he returned, in view of the possibility of his recruitment by the Soviet intelligence services.'
In other words, the FBI had opened a case file on Oswald because he presented a potential espionage threat. Notice also the FBI's statement that Oswald as a "security risk" was something to be evaluated only "in the event he returned" to the U.S., an interesting declaration to which we will return after Oswald's decision to come home. For our present purposes, however, Marguerite's January 1960 $25 money order to the U.S.S.R. hit a sensitive trip wire in the FBI which led to a new active phase in the FBI's investigation of Oswald.
The FBI has never explained exactly how it came into possession of the $25 money order information on January 25, 1960. An obvious question is this: Are there any clues about this in the documentary record? The answer is yes. The details are complicated, but they deserve our careful consideration.
Four days after the FBI learned of the funds transaction, on January 29, its New York field office sent a letter to headquarters about it and related matters. This letter and another sent by the New York field office on January 18, 1960, along with a third headquarters document (a letter dated February 2, 1960), were all referenced in a thirty-two-page New York field office memorandum sent to headquarters on February 26, 1960. Only the first and last page of this memo have been released-the other thirty pages are still classified. The last page of this memo discussed "details of receipts and disbursements set out in aforementioned bank accounts," provided to Special Agents Robert S. Barnhart and Harold F. Good by a source whose identity is still withheld. "It is noted that the above information was furnished on a strictly confidential basis," the memo said, "and cannot be made public except upon the issuance of a subpoena duces tecum."'
Even though the American public has been allowed to see only fragments of this lengthy February 26 memo, we do know that it was filed in a special way in both Washington and New York. At Bureau headquarters, it was not placed in Oswald's counterintelligence file, 105-82555, although it might have been placed there unofficially with an "unrecorded" notation on it.' The first page of the February 26 memo is almost entirely blacked out, but some of the serial numbers under which it was filed can be seen: 65-6315 for the New York field office and 65-28939 for headquarters. The FBI 65- serial is used exclusively for espionage cases. The available data is insufficient to warrant any firm conclusion, but it is extraordinary news that the FBI was filing information on Lee Harvey Oswald at this point under espionage serial numbers. (All of these documents should be shown to the JFK Assassination Records Review Board so a determination on their relevance to this case can be made independent of the FBI.)
Strange things happened to the February 26 memo in the FBI. In the New York field office it was cross-filed into a counterintelligence file for Oswald, 105-6103, presumably because it contained information about Oswald deemed to be of a counterintelligence nature. On page thirty-two of the February 26 New York field office memo, a page that discusses bank accounts, we can still see the New York field office counterintelligence file number on Oswald, 105-6103, in the upper-left-hand corner. At Bureau headquarters it was not placed in Oswald's counterintelligence file, the file that had been open since his defection in October 1959. Instead, someone at headquarters opened a second file on Oswald, only this time it was a domestic security file: 100-353496.9 Today, Oswald's 105 New York file and his 100 Bureau file are not even listed in the National Archives. The information that was stored in these files was also stored in a similar file in the Dallas field office of the FBI. Today, with the exception of one document, this Dallas file is also missing.
Oswald's Missing FBI Files
When the FBI sent a list of Oswald documents-purporting to be its entire preassassination holdings-to the Warren Commission, the February 26, 1960, memo was missing. So was the entire story of what was in the FBI's 1960 Dallas field office files on Oswald. During 1960, the same Oswald information flowing into the nowmissing Bureau and New York files was also filed in the FBI field office in Dallas. There, the information was placed in Oswald's Dallas counterintelligence file: 105-976. This information included the record of Fain's April 1960 interview with Marguerite, one of the most extensive preassassination reports ever written on Oswald. Yet the Fain report was not in the FBI's list to the Warren Commission."
Even more intriguing is the fact this report was handed over to the Warren Commission near the end of the commission's deliberations. The Warren Commission dutifully published the Fain report, where it will stand for all time like a giant beacon, reminding us of the commission's failure to examine entire groups of FBI files containing preassassination information on the alleged assassin.
The FBI might be tempted to plead that these are special files and are not "Oswald" documents because the name "Oswald" does not appear in the subject line of the documents they contain. This argument would not look good in light of the fact that some of these documents were released by the FBI in 1978 in response to a JFK researcher's request. Until the FBI simply hands over the rest of these files, we can only look with wonder at what little they did let us see in 1978. What has not been blacked out of the few documents we have from these missing files leaves no question about the fact that they are relevant to the Oswald case.
This fact was tacitly acknowledged by the FBI when it belatedly turned over Dallas FBI Special Agent John Fain's lengthy reportthe Dallas 105 file-to the Warren Commission. This document was published in the Warren Commission volumes with the Dallas 105-976 file number still visible. The current release of JFK files has done little to diminish the curiosity aroused by these separate stashes of Oswald information in the dark recesses of FBI safes. It seems reasonable to ask this question: If these documents were released as JFK documents in 1978, why are they not still JFK documents in 1994?
What are we to make of the few fragments we have seen from these missing files? A preliminary analysis of the FBI's numbers that we do find on the documents the FBI released to researcher Paul Hoch in 1978, which are still not in the National Archives, is tantalizing. Moving back in time from the February 26, 1960 memo, we find another FBI document that has the identical 65 [espionage]series file numbers that are on the February 26 memo. This document is also from the FBI's New York field office. It is dated October 13, 1959, and is almost completely blacked out, except for the espionage file numbers, a reference to a September 11, 1959, letter from the New York office to headquarters, and one sentence: "WFO [Washington Field Office] is being furnished one copy since that office is currently conducting [an] investigation under subject caption."
While the September 11 and October 13 New York disseminations may not relate to Oswald, these dates are provocative for veteran researchers of the Oswald case. In both instances these dates fall on the days immediately following the passport and visa actions Oswald had to undergo in order to gain entry to the Soviet Union. September 11 just happens to be the day after Oswald's passport was issued in California (he had included travel plans to Russia in his application)." October 13 just happens to be the day after Oswald applied for a Soviet visa in Helsinki, Finland."
These dates in the October 1959 memo may be a coincidence unrelated to Oswald. Yet, strangely, while this memo was sent to the CIA, the related February 26, 1960, memo-which contained the cross-referenced file numbers to Oswald-was not. Thus, the February 26 memo linking Oswald to an espionage investigation in the FBI is missing in the National Archives today and was missing from the material the FBI sent to the CIA in 1960. Wherever the tantalizing paths-if we ever will be allowed to see them-lead backward in time, there can be no doubt about where the February 26 memo leads. It takes us to a March 9, 1960, FBI document asking that Marguerite Oswald be interviewed about the money she was sending to her son." "Your office is requested to identify and interview the remitters in your area," the FBI's New York field office asked the field office in Dallas, "in accordance with Bureau instructions set forth below."
"Funds Transmitted to Residents of Russia"
The February 26 New York memo was not the only item missing from the list of Oswald-related documents which the FBI sent to the Warren Commission. The March 9 request for an interview with Marguerite is missing too. These documents, along with Fain's report on the interview with Oswald's mother and brother Robert, which followed, were all absent from the list of Oswald documents that the FBI sent to the Warren Commission. Fain's interviews with Oswald's family produced a seven-page document (not including cover sheets) on the life and times of Lee Harvey Oswald.
The March 9 FBI instructions to Dallas on how to handle the interview with Marguerite Oswald included at least six, and possibly eight, guidelines or "points." Only four were declassified in the FBI's heavily redacted version of the memo released to researcher Paul Hoch. The instructions from headquarters, which were relayed through the New York field office to the Dallas field office, were as follows:
The Bureau has furnished the following instructions to be observed in this program:
It is desired that the following points be specifically covered when conducting interviews in captioned matter.
1. Reasons for transmittal of funds.
2. Identity and relationship, if any, between the purchaser of the remittance order and the payee.
[3.] [paragraph completely redacted]
[4.] [paragraph completely redacted]
5. Interviews should be designed to obtain cooperation of these individuals, and the impression should not be created that the Bureau is investigating the persons being interviewed, or that their action is, in itself, derogatory as in regard to their loyalty to the Us.
6. The individuals interviewed should be questioned as to whether or not they have been requested to furnish items of personal identification to their relatives abroad.