Reclaiming History (135 page)

Liebeler informed Delgado of the name of the book.

“The
Animal Farm
,” Delgado mused. “Is that a socialist book?”

“No,” Liebeler said.

“That is just the way
you
interpret it, right?” Delgado said.

“Yes, I think so,” the Commission counsel replied. “It is actually supposed to be quite an anticommunist book…Didn’t Oswald tell you,” Liebeler asked, that after “the pigs took over the farm…they got to be just like the capitalists before?”

“No,” Delgado said. “Just that the pigs and animals had revolted and made the farmer work for them.”
³⁶⁸

If Oswald read the whole book, he almost undoubtedly would think about it when he eventually saw firsthand what happened to Lenin’s revolution of 1917—that the only solution was not revolution, but a surgical operation on human nature.

The book may have also contributed to one of the few jokes ever ascribed to Oswald. Master Sergeant Spar, Oswald’s section chief, in calling a bunch of marines to him, had said, “All right everybody, gather around.” Oswald muttered in a thick Russian accent, “Ah, ha, collective farm lecture.”
³⁶⁹

Of the many events under the rubric of foreign affairs that were current in 1958—the Algerian War, the coming to power of Archbishop Makarios against British rule in Cyprus, the bold new economic goals for overtaking the West by the Soviet Union’s premier and party secretary, Nikita Khrushchev—the one that absorbed Oswald most by far was Fidel Castro’s successful revolution in Cuba. Donovan found nothing untoward in Oswald’s sympathetic support of Castro (who at that time was not known as a Communist) and his burgeoning revolution—many Americans, including
Time
magazine and Harvard University, agreed with him in those first months that it was a godsend that somebody had overthrown the Cuban dictator, Fulgencio Batista.
³⁷⁰

Because of Oswald’s passion for the Cuban Revolution, he was interested in Delgado, the Brooklyn-born Puerto Rican who was a fellow radar operator, because Delgado was proficient in Spanish—he not only spoke it at home but also had studied it in high school. The first time they met, just before Christmas 1958, they talked about the news from Cuba, where the revolution coming down from the Sierra Maestra mountains was just coming to a head. On New Year’s Day 1959, Batista fled Havana, and Castro’s victorious forces rolled into the Cuban capital. The two young men, both nineteen, continued to discuss the Cuban Revolution and imagined going there to take part. They were particularly fascinated by an American adventurer, William Morgan, who had been dishonorably discharged from the American army but went on to become a hero of Castro’s revolutionary army, earning the battlefield rank of major.
³⁷¹

Delgado, Oswald’s squad leader, got to know Oswald well and described him (when he wasn’t fighting or arguing) as a “very quiet, intellectual young man. A loner, who liked to listen to classical music and play chess.” Someone who believed “our present form of government didn’t have anything to offer to the common people, and he resented our way of life, you know.”
³⁷²

That spring of 1959, on May 5, the men in the company who weren’t noncommissioned officers went out to the firing range to qualify again with the M-1 rifle. Oswald’s score dropped from a 212 (sharpshooter) two and a half years before to a 191, just barely qualifying him as a marksman. Throughout the years, most conspiracy theorists have ignored Oswald’s score of 212, only mentioning his 191 (which, after all, still meant he qualified with the M-1 rifle) for the proposition that Oswald was a poor shot and, hence, could not have achieved what the authorities said he did in Dealey Plaza. I wanted to put this in its proper perspective for the jury in London, particularly since I knew defense counsel Gerry Spence would call Delgado, if I didn’t, to repeat his Warren Commission testimony that Oswald’s performance “was a pretty big joke.” Delgado said that Oswald got a lot of “Maggie’s drawers” (when one misses the target completely, and at the pits behind the target they wave a red flag from left to right).
³⁷³
So I called Delgado as my own witness. Delgado conceded that although he viewed himself as a good shot, he had only fired a 192. More importantly, and as previously indicated, he acknowledged what is well known, that in the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps, one’s score on the rifle range when “shooting for the record” is very important, that promotion during one’s military career “is going to be based, in part, upon that.” It’s so important, in fact, that if you don’t qualify, “you have to start basic training all over again.” When Oswald fired for the record at the beginning of his military career, when his score would be very important to him, we know he fired a 212. But at Santa Ana, Oswald was about to be released from the Marines and therefore his performance on the range no longer meant anything to him. When I asked, “So you got the impression that he wasn’t even trying on the range, is that right?” Delgado answered, “Yes.” He said Oswald demonstrated his lack of interest by not taking care of his rifle like his fellow marines did, and he, as Oswald’s squad leader, would get in trouble because the gigs (demerits for minor infractions) Oswald got were a reflection on him. When I asked Delgado if he felt Oswald “could have done better [on the range] if he tried,” he responded, “Right,” and said that he did not attribute his relatively poor showing on the range in Santa Ana to his being a poor shot.
³⁷⁴

Another marine who became friends with Oswald around this time at Santa Ana was Kerry Thornley, an acting corporal who was in a different squadron (Thornley in MACS-4, Oswald in MACS-9) but barracked next to Oswald, and they’d talk off-duty. Thornley was someone on whom Oswald made a vivid impression. When, months later, news of Oswald’s defection to the USSR reached Thornley, he realized that he had the subject for a novel—the story of a marine disillusioned by experiences in Japan who defects to the Soviet Union. The novel,
The Idle Warriors
, was completed but still unpublished by the time of the assassination—and in fact it would not be published in full until 1991.

“My first memory of him,” Thornley told the Warren Commission, “is that one afternoon he was sitting on a bucket out in front of a hut, an inverted bucket, with some other marines. They were discussing religion…It was known already in the outfit that I was an atheist. Immediately somebody pointed out to me that Oswald was also an atheist.” Oswald took no offense at the remark. Instead, he asked Thornley with a little grin, “What do you think of Communism?” Being an atheist obviously didn’t necessarily mean one was a Communist (though the converse would almost necessarily be so), and Thornley told Oswald he “didn’t think too much of Communism.” Oswald replied, “Well, I think the best religion is Communism.” Thornley said he “got the impression that he said this in order to shock. He was playing to the galleries I felt.”
³⁷⁵

They were an odd couple, united by amorphous leftist views—by 1964 Thornley had no compunction about describing himself to the Warren Commission as an “extreme rightist” or libertarian, but at the time of his brief acquaintance with Oswald he was still thinking of himself as a radical leftist, an example of the observation that people on the opposite fringes of the political spectrum are closer to each other than to those in the middle. Thornley was under no illusions as to Oswald’s views. “Definitely he thought that Communism was the best—that the Marxist morality was the most rational morality to follow that he knew of. And that Communism was the best system in the world.”
³⁷⁶

For all of Oswald’s talk, Thornley thought that Oswald’s Communism was largely theoretical, even “idle.” Oswald, he judged, “‘was not militant,’ the type who would be ‘storming the Bastille, so to speak.’” In other words, he didn’t think Oswald would get personally involved in trying to overthrow this country by force or violence. “I don’t think he felt he had to do that. I think he felt that would inevitably happen some day and he was just getting into the swing of things by doing this his way. I don’t think he felt that he could do much to promote the Communist cause or hinder it.”
³⁷⁷

From a personal standpoint, Thornley thought Oswald to be “extremely unpredictable,” with a “definite tendency toward irrationality at times, an emotional instability.” He said Oswald “got along with very few people” in the unit and “seemed to guard against developing real close relationships.”
³⁷⁸

Throughout early 1959, Nelson Delgado shared Oswald’s enthusiasm for the Cuban Revolution and Castro, whom he wholeheartedly supported, and he played along with Oswald’s fantasies—they were going to leave the corps and go to Cuba, where, unlike their hero William Morgan, they would even have the benefit of honorable discharges. They believed Delgado’s speaking Spanish would be useful, and Oswald had ideas of how a government should be run much in tune with Castro’s, so they would become officers and lead expeditions to the other islands in the Caribbean still under the yoke of tyranny, get rid of Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, and so on.
³⁷⁹

When Oswald asked Delgado how one could get close to the Cubans, and Delgado told him, “The best way to be trusted is to know their language, know their customs,” and offered to teach him Spanish, Oswald took him up on it, bought a paperback Spanish-English dictionary, and really worked at it. Before long, he was speaking and understanding at least rudimentary Spanish. “He could speak a common Spanish like ‘How are you? I am doing fine. Where are you going? Which way is this?’”
³⁸⁰
When Oswald kept asking Delgado further questions on how to get in touch with the Cubans, Delgado, at a loss, suggested the Cuban embassy. Eventually, Oswald told him that he had, indeed, gotten in touch with the Cubans, but Delgado thought Oswald was fibbing—that is, until one day when he went into Oswald’s room to borrow a tie and noticed a letter from Los Angeles addressed to Oswald in his open footlocker. It had an official Cuban government seal and “he was telling me there was a Cuban Consul [there]” and he “was in contact with them.”
³⁸¹

One Friday night shortly thereafter, Delgado was waiting for his train to Los Angeles in the Santa Ana station when Oswald walked in. Delgado spent every other weekend in Los Angeles, but to his knowledge Oswald never left the base—“He always had money, you know, he never spent it. He was pretty tight.” Delgado recalled that when they went to movies on the base, “nine times out of ten I ended up paying for it.”
³⁸²
The two chatted amiably on the trip up to Los Angeles but never discussed where Oswald was going or why, and they parted company on arrival. Later Delgado learned that Oswald did not stay for the weekend but returned on Saturday night. Delgado was curious about where Oswald had gone because he normally dressed casually in sport shirts, but on that occasion he wore a dark suit, white shirt, and tie.
³⁸³

Around the same time that Oswald began to receive much more mail than he had before, he had an odd visitor at the main gate. The man must have been a civilian, otherwise the guards at the gate would have let him in, and it must have been after nine at night, because civilians could not come on the base after that hour. Delgado and Oswald were both on guard duty that night, so Delgado had to persuade a marine to relieve Oswald for a few minutes. Oswald spent a very long time in conversation with the visitor at the gate, a lot more than an hour, while the marine who relieved Oswald bitched constantly at Delgado to get Oswald back on the job. Delgado connected this visit in his mind to Oswald’s letters from the Cuban consulate, although he had no real evidence for that.
³⁸⁴

It wasn’t too long before Delgado started to have questions about Castro. Like many Americans, Delgado was increasingly disturbed by the direction the Cuban Revolution was taking, and the show trials and executions reported in the American press rapidly cooled his ardor for Castro. “I couldn’t see that,” Delgado said, “when they started executing these people on just word of mouth.”
*
Oswald, though, dismissed the news reports as biased, distortions of the facts, retaliations for the fact that the Cubans had stemmed the outflow of profits to the United States. Delgado didn’t buy that.
³⁸⁵
It was clear to Delgado that Oswald revered Castro, was obsessed with him, and thought he was a great man.
³⁸⁶

Some of the things Oswald wanted to talk about were becoming distinctly odd. He wondered where someone who committed a crime in the United States might be safe from extradition—although why he thought nineteen-year-old Delgado could provide sound advice on that score is a question. Delgado guessed that, apart from Cuba and the Soviet Union, a criminal might be safe in Argentina. Oswald then showed him a safe route for defecting to the Soviet Union—he believed you could evade official interference by going through Mexico and Cuba, something that he had apparently learned from stories about two other defectors. He even sketched a map of the route on a piece of scrap paper.
³⁸⁷

It finally dawned on Delgado that all this was something more than the usual barrack’s bull. Oswald was really making plans, and “that’s when I started getting scared.” Delgado even put in for a transfer to another barrack in order to put some distance between himself and Oswald, although Oswald was gone before any such change came through.
³⁸⁸

There was one other incident that stuck in Delgado’s mind, a trip to Tijuana, the big border town in Mexico just south of San Diego that was a favorite haunt for randy servicemen. In late May or early June, a couple of marines offered to pay for the gas if Delgado would drive them down there. To his surprise, Oswald agreed to go along—he had never taken up any of Delgado’s invitations to accompany him to Los Angeles or anywhere else. After wandering around and drinking in a few of the night spots in downtown Tijuana, Oswald said, “Let’s go to the Flamingo.” The club was about two miles out in the country, but Oswald was able to tell Delgado how to get there and where to turn, as though he had been there before. No one recognized Oswald there, but he did seem to know his way around, which was odd because it was Delgado’s impression that his buddy, who was so assiduously trying to save money, never left the base.
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