Note: This story is a rearrangement of certain on-the-record statements. Some of these statements have been severely edited, reducing a great bulk to an essence. Some of them are presented almost verbatim. What follows is not now, nor has it ever been, a real conversation, yet all of it is honest and true; all of it has been jammed together, out-of-context, for the purposes of the author's rhetoric.
Earl Warren: The assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy on November 22, 1963, was a cruel and shocking act of violence directed against a man, a family, a nation, and against all mankind. A young and vigorous leader whose years of public and private life stretched before him was the victim of the fourth Presidential assassination in the history of a country dedicated to the concepts of reasoned arguments and peaceful political change.
James Reston: Private anger and sorrow were not enough to redeem the events of those few days in November of 1963. I suggested, in The New York Times, that an objective commission carry out a full inquiry, and make its findings public.
Anthony Lewis: On November 29--a week after the events in Dallas--President Johnson appointed such a body. Its formal title was the President's Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Harrison Salisbury: The Warren Commission, as the investigative body came to be known, spent the better part of a year in exhaustive investigation of every particle of evidence it could find.
Earl Warren: The shots that killed President Kennedy and wounded Texas Governor John Connally were fired from the sixth floor window at the southeast corner of the Texas School Book Depository Building. The weight of the evidence indicates that there were three shots fired. The shots were fired by Lee Harvey Oswald.
Harrison Salisbury: The evidence of Oswald's single-handed guilt was overwhelming.
Marguerite Oswald: I think my son was framed.
Earl Warren: The evidence of these issues has been set forth in great detail in the Commission's report.
Edward Jay Epstein: The Warren Commission investigation was by no means exhaustive, or even thorough.
Jim Garrison: As fate would have it, a lonesome warehouse employee happened along and, because of personal adjustment problems he was having, killed the President.
Marguerite Oswald: I think Lee was an agent. I cannot prove Lee was an agent. But I have facts that may lead up to them.
Allen Dulles: I wonder if we could not possibly explore this "agent" matter. I am very much interested in that.
Earl Warren: Mr. Dulles would like to know your reasons for believing that he was an agent, ma'am.
Marguerite Oswald: Yes, sir. I have two very long stories.
Allen Dulles: I would very much like to hear them.
J. Lee Rankin: If you could tell why you think your son was an agent, it will help to get that taken care of.
Marguerite Oswald: I received a letter from Lee--this one is going to be short, Chief Justice Warren. A letter from Lee asking me to go to the Red Cross, and asking me to show the letter to a lady at the Red Cross. This is a letter from Moscow. Telling her that all exit visas and everything had been documented and he is ready to come home, but he needs help financially to come home. But the lady wouldn't help. She said, What is your son doing in Russia? And she said, I think anybody who goes to Russia doesn't need any help to get back, they should stay over there. So I sent a telegram to the State Department, and they sent back the address for the International Rescue Committee...
J. Lee Rankin: You think that shows he was an agent?
Marguerite Oswald: Well, I am going to tell my story. I have as much circumstantial evidence that Lee was an agent, as the Dallas police have that he was a murderer.
J. Lee Rankin: All right.
Marguerite Oswald: Later she called me, the lady from the Red Cross, she called me and said she had received word from the International Rescue Committee. So I went back there, and she read me this letter. I said, Do you mind if I take this letter with me? So she took a scissors, gentlemen, and she cut this part out, her title and her address--it was addressed to her. This lady wanted no part of anybody in Russia, understand? So she cut this out.
J. Lee Rankin: What else can you tell us, Mrs. Oswald?
Marguerite Oswald: After the President was shot there were two Secret Service agents who came to my home. I am saying--and I am going to say it as strongly as I can--that I--and I have stated this from the beginning--that I think our trouble in this is in our own Government. And I suspect these two agents of conspiracy with my daughter-in-law in this plot.
Earl Warren: With who?
Marguerite Oswald: With Marina and Mrs. Ruth Paine.
J. Lee Rankin: What kind of a conspiracy are you describing that these men are engaged in?
Marguerite Oswald: The assassination of President Kennedy.
J. Lee Rankin: You think that two Secret Service agents and Marina and Ruth Paine were involved in that, in the conspiracy?
Marguerite Oswald: Yes, I do.
J. Lee Rankin: This is a very serious charge.
Marguerite Oswald: Yes. And it is also a serious charge to say my son is the assassin.
Allen Dulles: What is this conspiracy now, Mr. Rankin? Is this the conspiracy to do away with the President, or is it a different conspiracy?
J. Lee Rankin: The conspiracy I was asking about was the conspiracy, she said, about the assassination of President Kennedy. She said it involved two Secret Service agents and her daughter-in-law and her son.
Earl Warren: And Mrs. Paine.
Marguerite Oswald: And Mrs. Paine. But I certainly didn't mean to imply that I had proof. That is not my statement. I said I thought that we have a plot in our own government, and that there is a high official involved. And I am thinking that probably these Secret Service men are part of it. Now, I didn't say a conspiracy--make it as strong as you did. I have made it strong. But I am under the impression that possibly there is a leak in our own government.
J. Lee Rankin: A leak is so much different from a conspiracy to assassinate the President, though.
Marguerite Oswald: Yes, but this leak--this could be the party involved in the assassination--the high officials I am speaking of, I cannot pin it down to one sentence, gentlemen.
Edward Jay Epstein: Henry Wade, the District Attorney of Dallas, was a former FBI agent. And he had some reason to believe there might have been some connection between Oswald and the FBI. He had heard a government voucher for $200 was found in Oswald's possession.
Earl Warren: We concluded that Oswald was not, and had never been, an agent of any agency of the U.S. Government--aside from his service in the Marines--and was not and had never been used by any U.S. Government agency for any purpose.
Edward Jay Epstein: Wade also thought that Oswald's practice of setting up postal-box "covers" each time he moved--a practice Wade himself had used as an FBI agent--was an ideal way to handle undercover transactions.
Earl Warren: Oswald's frequent changes of address and receipt of Communist and other political literature would have provided him with a reason to have rented postal boxes. There is no evidence that any of the postal boxes was ever used for the surreptitious receipt of messages.
Lionel Mirthmint: Oswald supposedly told Pauline Bates, a public stenographer in Fort Worth, Texas, that he had become a "secret agent" of the U.S. Government and that he was soon going back to Russia "for Washington."
Earl Warren: Miss Bates denied a newspaper story reporting that Oswald had told her that he was working for the U.S. Department of State.
James B. Wilcott: The story I heard was that Oswald had been picked up by the CIA from the Marines after he'd been compromised somehow. In other words, he'd killed somebody and they found out about it, so the CIA had a handle on him.
Dick Russell: One of Oswald's fellow Marines died under strange circumstances while both were temporarily based in the Philippines. Private Martin Schrand was discovered lying on top of his M-12 "riot gun" at his guard post...it was determined that the fatal wound came from his own weapon.
Earl Warren: We found no evidence that Oswald had any connection with the fatal shooting of Private Schrand.
Jim Garrison: Oswald possessed the characteristics the military looks for in its intelligence recruits. He was from a military family. He was very close-mouthed by nature, and was well above average in intelligence.
Earl Warren: Marguerite Oswald frequently expressed the opinion that her son was such an agent, but she stated before the Commission that "I cannot prove Lee is an agent."
John J. McCloy: Do we have a statement from Mr. Hoover that this man was not an agent? Was that communicated in the record?
J. Lee Rankin: Yes.
John J. McCloy: It is an awkward affair. But as you said the other day, truth is our only client.
Hale Boggs: Yes.
John J. McCloy: This is going to build up. In New York I am already beginning to hear about it. I got a call from Time-Life about it.
Allen Dulles: There is a terribly hard thing to disprove, you know. How do you disprove a fellow was not your agent? How do you disprove it?
Hale Boggs: You could disprove it, couldn't you?
Allen Dulles: No.
Hale Boggs: I know, ask questions about something--
Allen Dulles: I never knew how to disprove it.
Hale Boggs: So I will ask you. Did you have agents about whom you had no record whatsoever?
Allen Dulles: The record might not be on paper. But on paper would have hieroglyphics that only two people knew what they meant, and nobody outside of the agency would know and you could say this meant the agent and somebody else could say it meant another agent.
Hale Boggs: Let's take a specific case. That fellow Francis Gary Powers was one of your men.
Allen Dulles: Oh yes...but he was not an agent. He was an employee.
Hale Boggs: There was no problem proving he was employed by the CIA?
Allen Dulles: No. He had a signed contract.
Hale Boggs: Let's say Powers did not have a signed contract but he was recruited by someone in the CIA. The man who recruited him would know, wouldn't he?
Allen Dulles: Yes, but he wouldn't tell.
Earl Warren: Wouldn't tell it under oath?
Allen Dulles: I wouldn't think he would tell it under oath, no.
Earl Warren: Why?
Allen Dulles: He ought not to tell is under oath. Maybe not tell it to his own government but wouldn't tell it any other way.
John J. McCloy: Wouldn't he tell it to his own chief?
Allen Dulles: He might or might not. If he was a bad one then he wouldn't.
Hale Boggs: What you do is make our problem utterly impossible because you say this rumor can't be dissipated under any circumstances.
Allen Dulles: I don't think it can, unless you believe Mr. Hoover, and so forth and so on, which probably most of the people will.
Jim Garrison: Allen Dulles said there was no point in publishing the Commission's material because the American people did not read. Other members similarly opposed publication of the material. Some of the evidence, the Chief Justice indicated, might not be made available to the American people during their lifetimes.
Allen Dulles: I think under any circumstances, I think Mr. Hoover would say certainly he didn't have anything to do with this fellow. You can't prove what the facts are. There are no external evidences. I would believe Mr Hoover. Some people might not.
J. Edgar Hoover: I can most emphatically say that at no time was Oswald ever an employee of the Bureau in any capacity. And, I have been unable to find any scintilla of evidence showing any foreign conspiracy or any domestic conspiracy that culminated in the assassination of President Kennedy.
J. Lee Rankin: Mrs. Oswald...on what do you base your assumption that your son was an agent? Are you claiming that there was something during the childhood of your son, in which you thought he was an agent?
Marguerite Oswald: Yes, sir--at age sixteen.
J. Lee Rankin: Well, why don't you start at age sixteen, then.
Marguerite Oswald: I can show a different side of Lee Harvey Oswald.
J. Lee Rankin: It would be helpful if you could tell us what you base this claim upon, that your son was an agent of the Government.
Marguerite Oswald: Lee, at age sixteen, read his brother Robert's Marine manual back and forth. He knew it by heart. And he started reading communistic material along with that. He lived for the time he would become seventeen, so he could join the Marines--which he did. He turned seventeen on October 18, 1956, and joined the Marines a few days later. That, Mr. Dulles, is the part you wanted to know.
J. Lee Rankin: Mr. Dulles wanted to know what you based this idea that he was an agent on.
Marguerite Oswald: That is the beginning of it, Mr. Dulles.
J. Lee Rankin: Now, up to this point you haven't told us anything that caused you to think he was an agent, have you?
Marguerite Oswald: Well, maybe I'm not doing a very good job of what I'm saying. A Marine recruiting officer came to my home, and Lee continued reading Robert's manual, and communist literature. He is preparing himself to go into the Marine service--at age seventeen--this year before he actually joined. I am saying he is already preparing himself.
J. Lee Rankin: To become an agent?
Marguerite Oswald: Yes, I think with the influence of this recruiting officer.
J. Lee Rankin: You think this recruiting officer inspired him?
Marguerite Oswald: He had the idea.
J. Lee Rankin: He was being prepared to become an agent and inspired by this recruiting officer?
Marguerite Oswald: Yes.
Gerald Ford: When did you first think he was an agent?
Marguerite Oswald: When he defected. And I have always said, a so-called defection.
J. Lee Rankin: Did you think he was a Russian agent at this time?
Marguerite Oswald: No, sir; I did not think he was a Russian agent.
Gerald Ford: I thought you answered in response to a question I asked--when you thought he was an agent, you said when he defected.
Marguerite Oswald: I might have said defected to Russia. No, sir; I never thought Lee was a Russian agent.
Gerald Ford: I meant an agent of the United States. You said when he defected to the Soviet Union, you thought he was an American agent?
Marguerite Oswald: Yes, that is right. That is correct.
J. Lee Rankin: What else caused you to think that he was an American agent?
Marguerite Oswald: Lee was in Russia. I didn't know if he was living or dead. So I made a personal trip to Washington. I then called and asked to speak to the President, but was told Mr. Kennedy was in a conference. Finally I got ahold of somebody's secretary, and I said, "I have come to town about a son of mine who is lost in Russia." She gave me to a man in the State Department, in charge of Soviet affairs, a Mr. Boster. And he told me, "I'm familiar with the case, Mrs. Oswald." I said, "I am under the impression my son is a U.S. agent. And if he is, I don't appreciate it too much."
J. Lee Rankin: Do you recall that they assured you there was no evidence he was an agent?
Marguerite Oswald: No, sir, there was no comment to that effect.
J. Lee Rankin: And they told you to dismiss any such ideas from your mind?
Marguerite Oswald: No, sir.
J. Lee Rankin: You're sure they didn't tell you that?
Marguerite Oswald: I'm positive. So, anyway, approximately eight weeks later I got a letter from the State Department giving me my son's Russian address. Five weeks after that, he marries a Russian girl. Now, why does a man who wants to come back to the United States marry a Russian girl? Because, I say--and I may be wrong--the U.S. Embassy ordered him to. And he gets out of the Soviet Union with a Russian girl, with money loaned to him by the U.S. Embassy.
Earl Warren: From the time of his release from the Marine Corps until the assassination, Lee Oswald dealt in various transactions with several agencies of the U.S. Government, including Immigration, the FBI, and the Department of State. These dealings have given rise to rumors...
Marguerite Oswald: All right. I am a little excited now, because I meant to go story by story. Gentlemen, I have at least four more stories to tell--two I don't think there are some parts you possibly can know about.
Earl Warren: Let's stay on one thing, please.
J. Lee Rankin: If you could tell why you think your son was an agent.
Marguerite Oswald: Fine. And I want to. Lee's letters--and I have them in the hotel--if you will read every letter--if you think he was an agent--every letter is telling his mother, "If something happens to me, these are the facts." I might be elaborating. But I think my son was an agent. And these things piece by piece are going together, as far as I am concerned.
J. Lee Rankin: Mrs. Oswald, would you like to turn now to telling us about your life? We would appreciate that if you would do that.
Marguerite Oswald: Yes.
Earl Warren: Mrs. Oswald, if you would prefer not to tell the story of your life, that is perfectly all right.
Earl Warren: We haven't at the present time, Allen. This is all we have to present to you today.
Hale Boggs: It is a very fine presentation.
John J. McCloy: February fifth I go out of the country for a week. The plot thickens, doesn't it?
J. Lee Rankin: Would you have time tomorrow?
Allen Dulles: Yes.
J. Lee Rankin: About the meeting with the CIA and the FBI and the State Department, would you have time tomorrow if I can set that meeting up?
Earl Warren: Yes, I'll do it. All right, gentlemen, thank you. The meeting is adjourned.
The dialogue in this story comes from various sources, including the Warren Commission testimony of Marguerite Oswald and a once-Top-Secret transcript of an Executive Session of the WC (cribbed from Weisberg). Some of Earl Warren's lines are paraphrased from the Warren Report. Others' lines were lifted from books critical of the Warren Commission and its findings.
Copyright © 1993 by John Kelin
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