Reclaiming History (182 page)

Oswald also told her he had visited museums
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and done some sightseeing.
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In
Esta Semana
, a guide to the week’s events in Mexico City, Oswald checked several films, American movies with Spanish subtitles or Mexican films with English subtitles.
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From a notation in his guide map of Mexico City, it appears that Oswald at least thought of going to a jai alai game, the ancient sport from Spain.
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Lee bought several postcards depicting bullfights and tourist attractions, which he brought back to Marina,
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but, with one small exception, that appeared to exhaust his interest in shopping. Marina had asked him to bring her some Mexican musical records, but he did not.
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She had also told him she would like a Mexican silver bracelet, and he did bring her a silver ID bracelet inscribed with her name, but she didn’t like it at all. And Marina suspected that the cheap Japanese bracelet did not even come from Mexico. Such jewelry was not sold in Mexico City because of high import duties, but it was common in five-and-dime stores in Dallas, and Marina had seen its like in New Orleans.
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Lee did buy Marina one gift from Mexico she hadn’t asked for, though after he was gone she would treasure it like nothing else he had ever given her—a miniature straw monkey he had paid only five cents for.
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With the new week, Oswald was making arrangements to return to the United States. On Monday, September 30, at the Agencia de Viajes Transportes Chihuahuenses, he bought two international exchange orders totalling $20.30 to pay for the trip on a Transportes del Norte bus from Mexico City to Laredo and by Greyhound directly from Laredo to Dallas. That same day he reserved a seat on the bus, which was to leave at 8:30 on Wednesday morning, October 2, giving him one more full day in the city. The travel agency reserved seat number 12 for him under the name “H. O. Lee.”
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This was another of Lee’s feeble attempts to be deceptive almost for its own sake, although if he had one-tenth the fear of the FBI that he expressed to the consular agents at the Russian embassy, it may have simply been an attempt to muddy his trail. Oswald would later use the name O. H. Lee, a variation of H. O. Lee, when he rented a room in Dallas in mid-October.
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On Tuesday, October 1, Lee’s last full day in the city, he paid his hotel bill in advance for the night.
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The next morning, the hotel’s night man went out about 6:30 or 7:00 to fetch him a cab.
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Transportes del Norte bus number 332 left as scheduled at 8:30 a.m.
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Arriving at Monterrey around 9:15 p.m., the passengers were shifted to another bus, number 373, which departed for Laredo at 9:50 p.m. that evening.
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A passenger on the bus recalled that Oswald annoyed him by keeping his overhead light on to read after ten at night.
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At the Mexican side of the border, Oswald was pulled off the bus by Mexican immigration officials, apparently over some question about his papers, but the questioning only lasted three or four minutes and he was soon back aboard the bus, grumbling about the Mexican authorities.
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At about 1:30 on the morning of October 3, Oswald crossed the International Bridge from Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, to Laredo, Texas.
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A couple of passengers recall that when the bus reached Laredo and the U.S. Immigration station, Oswald “gulped down” a banana, possibly for fear he could not take fruit into the United States.
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Lee, according to Marina, “loved bananas” and ate them often.
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From Laredo, Lee traveled to Dallas via San Antonio on Greyhound bus number 1265, following Interstate 35. The bus left Laredo about 3:00 in the morning and arrived in Dallas about 2:20 p.m. on the same day.
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Per the Warren Commission’s calculations, Oswald left New Orleans on his Mexican adventure with around $215, and when he arrived back in Dallas he had approximately $130. The entire trip, including transportation, lodging, food, and miscellaneous expenses, had cost him the grand total of $85.
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L
ee Oswald’s brief stay in Mexico City has become a happy hunting ground for dedicated seekers of a conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy. Less than two months before the murder, Oswald made contact with the embassies of two hostile Communist countries, the Soviet Union and Cuba, and, as would be the case with any ordinary citizen visiting Mexico, there can be no certainty about how he spent all of his time in Mexico City or whom he might have met there. It has been claimed that he met socially with Cubans in Mexico City, that he made open threats against President Kennedy in the presence of Cuban embassy officials, and most improbably of all, that someone else posed as Oswald for the visits to the embassies. All of these matters, and many more, of course, will be discussed in depth in the conspiracy section of this book.

When Oswald arrived at the bus terminal in Dallas on Thursday afternoon, October 3, his financial predicament was tight but not desperate—he had enough, presumably, to rent an apartment, although he needed a job fast. He didn’t even take the time to call Marina at Ruth Paine’s house in Irving to let her know he was back from Mexico,
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instead going straight to the nearest office of the Texas Employment Commission to register for work
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and file another claim for unemployment compensation.
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That done, he spent the night at the YMCA, where he registered as a serviceman to avoid paying the membership fee.
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He also gave his last address as “Toro, Cal”—his last duty station in the Marine Corps had been at El Toro. He had no way of knowing that FBI agents were once again on his trail, but they were. On Tuesday, October 1, Jesse Garner had informed FBI agents in New Orleans that the Oswalds had left their Magazine Street apartment in New Orleans on September 25.
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The day that Lee arrived back in Dallas, FBI agent Jim Hosty, notified by the New Orleans office of the bureau that Marina had left New Orleans in a station wagon with Texas plates and driven by a woman who spoke Russian, launched a new search for the Oswalds in Dallas.

There wasn’t much to go on, but Hosty went to the immigration office to see if it had any information, and he tried to find out what Russian-speaking American with a station wagon might be a friend of Marina Oswald’s. He drove over to Fort Worth to check Lee and Marina’s old neighborhood and attempted to locate Robert Oswald, who, he learned, had moved to Malvern, Arkansas. He requested the Little Rock office of the bureau to contact Robert to see if he knew where his brother was. He doggedly searched whole neighborhoods in Dallas and Fort Worth where the Oswalds had been before. It was a lot of work but more or less routine for the FBI. It wasn’t particularly urgent and it wasn’t very successful. The Oswalds had, at least for the time being, disappeared.
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Hosty might have picked up Lee’s whereabouts earlier had he thought to check the records of the Texas Employment Commission in Dallas, since Lee had given the commission Ruth Paine’s address and phone number as his address. Oswald also truthfully told the employment commission that his last place of work was the “Wm. B. Reily Co.” in New Orleans. He more or less had to do that, since it was already in his record that he had been collecting his Texas unemployment compensation in New Orleans and he needed proof that he hadn’t been shirking work. At the same time, he lied and stated on his application for a work form that the type of work he did at the coffee company was “photography,” which certainly suggests that he was hoping for another job in that field. He noted his experience with radar in the Marine Corps and claimed four months of employment as a shoe salesman and a year as a general office worker in New Orleans in 1961.

Lee impressed the official who took his application, who noted that Lee was “well-groomed and spoken, business suit, alert replies. Expresses self extremely well.”
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The next day Lee responded to a newspaper ad for a trainee in typesetting at the Padgett Printing Company. The idea of the severely dyslexic Oswald working as a typesetter is startling, but it suggests that Lee may have been unaware of his own limitations. He claimed on his application that he had been a “cleark” at Louv-R-Pak. Oswald made a good impression on the department foreman at Padgett. However, unfortunately for Lee, the superintendent, Theo Gangl, was a good friend of Bob Stovall’s at Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall. He wrote on the bottom of Lee’s application, “Bob Stovall does not recommend this man. He was released because of his record as a troublemaker.—
Has communistic tendencies
.”
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That same day Lee enrolled at JOBCO, a private employment agency located in the Adolphus Tower in downtown Dallas. His application there, like the one at Padgett, omitted any mention of his work in New Orleans and listed Jaggers as his last place of employment. He said he had been in the Dallas area for the last fifteen years. He listed George de Mohrenschildt as his closest friend, although George had been in Haiti since June and could no longer be contacted at the Dickens Street address Lee gave for him.
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Later, in the early afternoon, Oswald finally called Marina in Irving to tell her he had arrived back in Dallas from Mexico City the previous day. He asked Marina to have Ruth pick him up in Dallas. Marina, who told Lee she was already upset with him for not calling as soon as he arrived, said that Ruth couldn’t come to pick him up. “Ruth has just been to Parkland Hospital this morning to donate blood. She shouldn’t be driving now to pick you up.”

Ruth left to go grocery shopping, returned in something less than an hour, and was astonished to find Lee already there—he had hitched a ride with an accommodating black man who had gone out of his way to drop him at Ruth’s, where he spent the weekend.
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The Oswalds took care to conceal Lee’s Mexican excursion from Ruth. He told her that he had been to Houston but had not been able to find work there, so he was now looking for employment in Dallas.
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To Marina he told all, about all the places he had been to in Mexico City, and including the fact that he did not like Mexican girls. He told her that the officials at the Soviet embassy refused to have anything to do with him. And he referred to the officials at the Cuban embassy with whom he had dealt as “bureaucrats” and said their system was similar to the Russians—“too much red tape.”
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Although Lee, Marina said, had always been “crazy about Cuba,” they didn’t talk about Cuba any longer after the Mexican trip because, as Marina put it, “I was just sick and tired of this.”
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They talked about their living arrangements for the next couple of months. Marina, nearing the term of her pregnancy, did not really want to live with Lee for the time being—she preferred to be with “a woman who spoke English and Russian.” Lee was not invited to move into the house, which was already sheltering two adult women and their three children, as well as, from time to time, Ruth’s husband Michael, a frequent visitor. Lee told Marina he would look for a furnished room in Dallas, as it would be considerably cheaper than renting an apartment until she came back to live with him.
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In the meantime, Ruth was content for him to stay with them that weekend as well as subsequent weekends, even finding Lee to be a welcome visitor. Either that weekend or the next, he planed down some doors that had been sticking and generally ingratiated himself, adding “a needed masculine flavor.” Ruth, realizing that Lee had to be depressed about looking for work, came to like him better than she had before and described him in a letter to her mother as a “happy addition to our extended family.” He played with her little boy, Chris, watched football on TV,
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and read the papers, in one of which, the
Dallas Morning News
of Sunday, October 6, he probably noticed the ad “Furnished Rooms Oak Cliff,” reading beneath, “GOOD HOME—Bedroom, living room privileges, café, washateria, cleaner, bus door, $7 up, 1026 N. Beckley.”
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Oak Cliff was their old neighborhood in Dallas, and the reference to this rooming house attracted him.

On Monday morning, October 7, around noon, Ruth obligingly drove Lee to the intercity bus terminal in Irving, two or three miles he would otherwise have had to walk given the paucity of public transportation in the suburb.
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On the way to the bus station, Lee asked Ruth if Marina could stay with her until he found work. Ruth answered that Marina was welcome to stay as long as she liked.
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Inasmuch as his Cuban plans had been dashed, it is unknown at this point what Oswald intended to do with Marina. However, unbeknownst to him, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Moscow would narrow, if not eliminate, his options. The same day Ruth drove him to the bus station, October 7, the ministry, acting on the recommendation of the Leningrad KGB (Marina’s Leningrad relatives did not want to take her in, her stepfather telling the KGB she was a person of loose morals), refused her request to reenter her homeland.
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*

Back in the city, Lee’s first order of business was to get out of the YMCA, which he thought too expensive.
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He turned up at the rooming house on 1026 North Beckley, but there were no vacancies. Mrs. A. C. Johnson, who owned the place, had just rented her last room, but Lee apparently liked the location, so Mrs. Johnson told him to keep an eye out for the “For Rent” sign she posted whenever she had a vacancy.
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Later that afternoon Lee found another place at 621 North Marsalis in the Oak Cliff area of Dallas. It was about a mile southeast of the Beckley address that had caught his fancy and farther from the city center, but it too was on a bus route. He found Mrs. Mary Bledsoe in the backyard, told her he was just out of the Marine Corps, showed her snapshots of Marina and June, and gave her seven dollars for a week’s rent in advance.
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About forty minutes later he reappeared with the larger of his two bags and moved in, bringing with him his shortwave radio (which Ruth Paine had recognized as of Russian manufacture), which he apparently retrieved from Irving that first weekend. Mrs. Bledsoe recalled that Oswald came with “a clock wrapped up,”
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but there is no record of a clock among his possessions, and the radio was found at Beckley Street after the assassination. With his shortwave radio, Lee was capable of listening to the nightly propaganda broadcast in English emanating from Havana.