Was Oswald To "Hit" Castro For CIA?

[Larry Hancock]

Yes, I definitely meant New Orleans. However I suspect that he pursued his self adopted role in Dallas to a great extent than we know. There were some great studies of this in the old Third and Fourth Decade magazines but if you check out his notebook, his letter writing and magazines, then the array of people he mingled with in both New Orleans and Dallas you find virtually every target group that the Bureau would have been interested in - from CPUSA and SWP, pro and anti Castro Cubans, ultra right figures and even the ACLU. Take a former Marine, married to a Russian wife, a socialist if not a full fledged Marxist, a Cuban revolution advocate and dangle him in front of that range of targets and see who approaches him about what. Classic. It doesn't matter if he is taking orders, general directions or just doing what interests him. Yet we are supposed to believe that the FBI subversive division lost track of him for months at a time.....

[Thomas Graves]

Yes, I definitely meant New Orleans. However I suspect that he pursued his self adopted role in Dallas to a great extent than we know. There were some great studies of this in the old Third and Fourth Decade magazines but if you check out his notebook, his letter writing and magazines, then the array of people he mingled with in both New Orleans and Dallas you find virtually every target group that the Bureau would have been interested in - from CPUSA and SWP, pro and anti Castro Cubans, ultra right figures and even the ACLU. Take a former Marine, married to a Russian wife, a socialist if not a full fledged Marxist, a Cuban revolution advocate and dangle him in front of that range of targets and see who approaches him about what. Classic. It doesn't matter if he is taking orders, general directions or just doing what interests him. Yet we are supposed to believe that the FBI subversive division lost track of him for months at a time.....

Good stuff, Larry.

Carrying it a step further, I suppose it's possible that after Oswald was "outed" as a putative Marxist / Communist and former "defector" on Stuckey's radio program, Oswald decided to try to make "lemonade out of a lemon" and agreed to let Phillips use him in some kind of an anti-FPCC operation in Mexico City (which was probably piggybacked by Morales). This might explain Oswald's meeting with Phillips in August or September in Dallas, as well as Oswald's misadventures in Mexico City in late September.

What I'm trying to figure out now is how Oswald could have damaged the FPCC by going to Mexico City...

--Tommy

Edited December 15, 2014 by Thomas Graves

[Larry Hancock]

If nothing else, his activities in NO - whatever the motives - would have made him an potential candidate for AMSANTA. For all we know a brief meeting with Phillips might have been no more than a screening interview. And at its most basic, if Oswald had somehow managed to leverage his mediocre FPCC history to get a Cuban visa, it would have posed all sorts of opportunities. In fact it might have set Oswald up to be in the same position he was in when he drafted his Soviet manuscript upon his return from Russia. That could have been a beautiful anti-Soviet propaganda piece if he had not suddenly changed direction - former Marine reports on "Soviet treachery in worldwide communist movement". Who knows what sorts of options might have been dangled to him.

If we knew what the CIA memo that Bill Simpich really meant, the one that refers to Oswald "maturing", we might get a lot closer to the truth.

[Larry Hancock]

Carmine, the full and accurate text of that Marine Corps information can be found on:

http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=36&relPageId=306

I think you will find the full quotation of interest, including the fact that the call signs and other tactical identification information are routinely changed, for standard security purposes. So, certain of what she is quoting is correct although it needs to be taken in full context.