OSWALD’S INTELLIGENCE TRAINING
Billkelly3@gmail.com
Oswald in his Civil Air Patrol Cadet Uniform
Oswald in his Civil Air Patrol Cadet Uniform
Some of
those who interacted with Oswald claimed they believed he had been given
special training – intelligence training. Not just one or two buy many, and none
of them are silly conspiracy theorists.
In
looking at his short but active life, the first indication of his interest in
intelligence activities comes from his family saying that as a young boy he
took a keen interest in the book and TV show “I Led Three Lives,” - the story
of Herbert Philbrick, a real person who after being trained by the FBI,
infiltrated Communists groups in the United States as an undercover agent and
informant.
Oswald’s
next learning experience was to memorize his older brother Robert’s United
States Marine Corps (USMC) manual, that he later gave to anti-Castro Cuban
Carlos Bringuier in New Orleans, in an attempt to infiltrate Bringuier’s Cuban
Student Directorate (DRE) group, a manual that Bringuier tried to sell over the
internet a few years ago.
Then
Oswald enlisted as a cadet in the New Orleans Civil Air Patrol (CAP), an organization co-founded by early aviation
pioneers Cord Meyer, Sr. , the father of Cord Meyer, Jr., and D. H. Byrd, the
owner of the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD) at the time fo the
assassination. Oswald’s New Orleans
detachment included Captain David Ferrie, who Lone Nutters notoriously refused
to acknowledge any connection with Oswald until a photo surfaced of Oswald and
Ferrie together at a CAP picnic outing.
Oswald
again was reunited with Ferrie and his associates in New Orleans in the summer
of ’63 when Oswald tried to infiltrate Bringuier’s DRE group and got into a
scuffle with them while distributing Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) leaflets
outside the International Trade Mart. In New Orleans Oswald arrested with
Bringuier and then participated in a radio debate with him and another CIA
trained psychological warriors.
A
significant but little known aspect of CAP activities was their program to
indictrinate CAPA cadets like Oswald as full fledged spies.
Civil
Air Patrol - Plan for Loyalty Police Spies
In 1948,
Pennsylvania’s Civil Air Patrol issued a press release describing an ambitious
plan to meet the “possibilities of an attack on the peace of United States through
fifth column subversive activities,” which would involve selecting members for
intensive training in clandestine warfare, counter-insurgency, Communist
methods and ideology, and the Russian language: training would be coordinated
through an Army counter-intelligence school at Holabird Signal Depot in
Baltimore.
As the
CAP was a part-time organization, this plan would require the support of the
state’s private corporations and businesses, each of which was asked to enlist
at least one member of their firm in the CAP to take the counter-subversion
course, while private industry was asked to subsidize the scheme. Businesses
would “report via this enlistee all persons in their organization known to have
Communistic or subversive tendencies.” The military link with industry was
sensitive in a state that had less than twenty years ago rid itself of its
loathed Coal and Iron Police, an employers’ militia which appeared to be coming
back under a different guise. The….York Gazette and Daily saw the proposal
as “the frank bid of CAP to constitute itself as a form of loyalty police,”
while the Communist paper, The Worker, headlined “Industry Backs
Labor Spy Ring in Pennsylvania Factories.”13
[13.HCLA,
Josiah W. Gitt papers, Box 2, “Correspondence” Harry E Sharkey to Governor
Duff, Jan. 29, 1948; Harry E Sharkey to Senator Francis Myers, Jan. 29, 1948;
News release, from state Civil Air Patrol, no date, c.Jan. 1948; Walter
Lowenfels, “Industry Backs Labor Spy Ring in Pennsylvania Factories,” The
Worker, March 21, 1948.]
Oswald
received most of his training in the Marine Corps. Besides basic training,
Oswald took and passed a high school test, and received advanced
special training in radar, communications and the Russian language.
In a
transcript of a Warren Commission meeting an lawyer reviews a document and
asks the question as to what Oswald was learning at the Monteray Language
Institute – now the Defense Language Institute in Monteray, California where
soldiers are sent to learn a foreign language before being deployed overseas.
Whatever document the lawyer was reading it has since disappeared, and there is
no official record of Oswald attending that school, but the Marines did give
him a test in the Russian language before he defected to the USSR.
North
American Newspaper Alliance (NANA) correspondent in Moscow Priscilla Johnson learned
about the young ex-Marine defector from John McVicker, a US embassy assistant to
Richard Snyder. McVicker concluded that Oswald “…was following a pattern of
behavior in which he had been tutored by [a] person or persons unknown…, it
seemed to me that there was a possibility that he had been in contact with
others before or during his Marine Corps tour who had guided him and encouraged
him in his actions.” (24)
[24) With
Oswald in USSR State
Department Memorandum from John A. McVickar to Thomas Ehrlich, dated November
27, 1963, Warren Commission Hearings, vol. 18, p. 155, CE 941]
In her
notes Johnson wrote that she believed Oswald had help in defecting – and “He
seemed to hint at this.”
Another
reporter, Aline Mosby, UPI – “It sounded to me as if he had rehearsed these
sentences.”
The book
The Mole, about CIA-KGB double-agent Popov – details how agents are trained in
counter-surveillance techniques, the same techniques used by Oswald after he
left the Texas School Book Depository in the hour after the assassination.
After walking ten blocks east on Elm, Oswald got on a bus returning to the
scene of the assassination. Getting off the bus stuck in traffic, he got a cab
that he took five blocks past his rooming house and then walkded back. That’s
trained counter-intelligence craft.
The late
professor of political science Phil Melanson wrote a book “Spy Saga” that laid
out Oswald’s intelligence connections. Melanson said that years after the
assassination Dallas Police chief Jesse Curry was still “haunted” that “Oswald
was trained” in interrogation techniques and resisting interrogation
techniques.”
Asst.
Dallas DA William Alexander said Oswald had great self-control and that it
seemed that “…he had been rehearsed or programmed to meet the situation he
found himself in.”
Capt.
Fritz stated that Oswald was so good a answering and refusing to answer
questions that Fritz asked him if he had any training in interrogation techniques.
Fritz said that “I suspected that he had some training in sabotage from the way
he talked and acted. He acted like a person who was prepared for what he was doing.”
Dallas
D.A. Henry Wade himself said Oswald “had his inspiration from someone else.”
Former
CIA agent Bob Baer followed Oswald’s trail to Mexico City and said on his TV
Show – that Oswald was following trained intelligence crafts and techniques –
though Baer would hav you believe he was trained by the Russians or Cubans.
Since
all intelligence agencies practice the same basic intelligence techniques, the
fact that Oswald was trained in such crafts, as Allen Dulles called them, does
not betray who exactly trained him or which agency he was working for. In 1963
one would assume it was the CIA, but we now know there are dozens of federal
intelligence agencies, and as far as the JFK assassination narrative goes, it
is more likely Oswald was trained and working for either the Office of Naval
Intelligence (ONI) or the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intellilgence (ACSI) –
Army Intelligence, whose officers were all over Dallas and Dealey Plaza.
