Why didn't Hosty tail Oswald home?

[Steve Thomas]

I have two questions actually.

 

Number one would be why didn't Hosty make any effort to find out where Oswald lived?

He asked that the Oswald file be assigned to him.

He visited the Paine's twice and told Ruth Paine that he was most anxious to determine Lee Oswald's whereabouts. On November 1st he sat on her couch and together they looked in the phone book to get the address of the TSBD and on Monday the 4th he made a pretext call to find out if they had his address.

Two weeks later or so Oswald visited the FBI and left Hosty a note. Regardless of what the note said, if Hosty was so anxious to "determine his whereabouts", why didn't he just tail him home from work one day?

Was it because he didn't need to, because he already knew?

 

One clue might be in the address for Oswald that Hosty gave in his Report of Oswald's Interrogation on 11/22.

Hosty's Report of the Interrogation is CE 382

https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=1134#relPageId=811&tab=page page 785.

 

He gives Oswald's address as 1026 N. Beckley. He doesn't use the 605 Elsbeth that Revill was giving in his memos to Curry that afternoon; and he didn't give the 2515 W. 5th in Irving that was on Oswald's job application, or that Hosty himself had visited twice in early November. True, Hosty dictated his Report on the 23rd, after it had been established that Oswald had a room on Beckley, but still...

In his Report, Hosty wrote "...further, Oswald admitted that he was living at 1026 N. Beckley..." as though Oswald was confronted with this fact and admitted to it.

As an aside, why isn't this with the other Reports of the Interrogations of Oswald in Appendix XI of the Warren Report?

 

My other question was, why didn't Hosty attend any more interrogations of Oswald after the first one?

After the police started questioning Oswald on the afternoon of the 22nd, Gordon Shanklin got  call from Washington and called Fritz and asked that the questioning be stopped until Hosty could get there.

Hosty arrives about an hour after questioning started and asked Oswald 2 questions:

1) Did you go to Russia?; and,

2) Did you go to Mexico?

 

The first question is nonsensical. Hosty had known about Oswald for over a year. He'd been all the Fort Worth papers on his return from Russia in June of 1962. Hosty knew all about his Fair Play for Cuba Committee work in New Orleans and his radio appearances. Oswald's interrogation didn't need to be halted so that Hosty could rush in there and ask him a stupid question.

In his Report, Hosty wrote that Oswald said he had only been to Mexico once, to Tijuana. But there's got to be more to it.

 

If Hosty was in charge of Oswald's case file, why didn't he attend the later interrogations? Was it because Hosty's presence was so upsetting that Oswald wouldn't cooperate as long as Hosty was there? In his Report, Hosty wrote that Oswald was antagonistic toward both FBI Agent, both he and Bookhout. Bookhout, however, attended later interrogations, but not Hosty. Why?

Part of me wonders if Hosty had the hots for Marina. Fritz describes Oswald as getting angry because Hosty was bothering his wife, and in his "destroyed note", Oswald was supposed to have complained about Hosty harassing his wife. It makes me wonder... Maybe Hosty was pressuring Marina to become a source or she would be deported, or maybe he was pressuring her for a different reason.

 

And maybe I need to get my mind out of the gutter.

 

I don't know enough to know if the CIA had shared their Mexico City cable traffic from late September and early October with the FBI by then, but it just seems odd that the FBI would rush in their lead agent on Oswald over to the Friday interrogation, just so that he could ask a couple of stupid questions, and then not be seen again. Doesn't make sense.

 

Steve Thomas

 

 

 

 

[Paul Brancato]

Steve - really interesting questions. Perhaps the answer lies in Hoover's instructions. Hosty may have been told not to attend the later interrogations when Hoover and LBJ and others decided to stick to the story that Oswald was a lone nut. Oswald's relationship with FBI has never been fully explained. The Hosty note was destroyed, so we really don't know what was in it. Hosty was supposedly officially monitoring the right wing in Dallas, and also was a bridge partner with Robert Surrey, who lived with Walker and was a Nazi. You must be right when you assert that Hosty should have had no trouble knowing how to find Oswald.