Subject: Re: OSWALD's Phone Calls from Jail Date: 1 Feb 1999 00:23:32 GMT From: dreitzes@aol.com (Dreitzes) Organization: AOL http://www.aol.com Newsgroups: alt.assassination.jfk >Subject: Re: OSWALD's Phone Calls from Jail >From: jacob_w@geocities.com >Date: 1/31/99 6:30 PM Eastern Standard Time >Message-id: <792k8e$har$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> > >There's an interesting story about a phone call Oswald tried to make. > >While in jail he tried to make a call. One of the intelligence orgs.(I >think it may have been FBI or SS) made sure the operator didn't put him >through. The operator did write down the number she gave him, however, >and threw it out. The other operator retrieved the piece of paper with the >number as a souvinier. Years later when researchers learned of this story >they looked up the number. The person who it belonged to lived in West >Virginia, I think, and had no idea who Oswald was. But he was a former >member of the intelligence community. Some have speculated that he was >Oswald's cutout. (A cutout is someone who is a sort of go between who >really isn't a part of any operation or know the people involved, he just >gets people in touch with other people.) > > ****************************************************************** Dave Reitzes responds: This is excerpted from my Oswald series at the URL below: Oswald used the DPD pay phone to contact three people. One was Marina, who had left Ruth Paine's home in the custody of the Secret Service. Later he called Mrs. Paine and asked if she could try to locate a lawyer named John Abt in New York. (She made one cursory attempt.) He also "failed to complete" one other call. According to one of the DPD switchboard operators, he also tried to make a call later the night of November 22. The operator, Mrs. Alveeta A. Treon, remembers the incident because of the unusual circumstances. She says that her colleague, Mrs. Louise Swinney, had been forewarned that law-enforcement officers would be coming to listen in on an Oswald call. The two men soon arrived, showed identification -- she believes they were Secret Service agents -- and were shown into a room next to the switchboard. At about 10:45 pm a red light blinked on the panel, showing that someone was placing a call from the jail telephone booth. Both telephone operators rushed to plug in, and in the event Mrs. Swinney handled the call, with Mrs. Treon listening in avidly. Oswald asked to place a collect call to someone named John Hurt, and he gave two North Carolina numbers: (919) 834-7430 and (919) 833-1253. Mrs. Swinney wrote the numbers down, alerted the two officers eavesdropping in the next room, and began to put the call through to the first number. "I was dumbfounded at what happened next," Mrs. Treon says. "Mrs. Swinney opened the key to Oswald and told him, 'I'm sorry, the number doesn't answer.' She then unplugged and disconnected Oswald without ever really trying to put the call through. A few moments later Mrs. Swinney tore the page off her notation pad and threw it into the wastepaper basket." Mrs. Swinney left work at 11 pm. Mrs. Treon retrieved the note referring to the Oswald call, and copied the information onto a standard telephone operator's slip, to keep as a souvenir. The slip, which is reproduced on page 287 of Canfield and Weberman's Coup d'Etat in America, has the name "John Hurt," and the two numbers. The House Select Committee determined that the numbers were for two different Raleigh, North Carolina men named John Hurt -- John D. Hurt and John W. Hurt -- both of whom deny any knowledge of Lee Harvey Oswald or the phone call. There has been concern, however, because one of the two -- John David Hurt -- served in US military intelligence during World War II (Anthony Summers, Conspiracy, 145-46; Grover B. Proctor, Jr., "The Raleigh Call"). Anthony Summers spoke to HSCA Chief Counsel Professor Blakey in 1979, skeptically inquiring if the slip couldn't have reflected an incoming call. Blakey, who hardly went out of his way to uncover government complicity in the assassination, assured Summers, "It was an outgoing call, and therefore I consider it very troublesome material. The direction in which it went was deeply disturbing" (Ibid.). In sworn testimony, Secret Service Agent Abraham Bolden claimed that on November 23, 1963, someone with the Secret Service called him at the Chicago office and asked if Chicago had any information on someone named "Hurt" or "Heard" (Proctor, Ibid.). Researcher Grover Proctor asked Robert Blakey about the call. Blakey said, "I think the call occurred. Now whether it occurred to [John David] Hurt or not, I'm not sure. . . . I was not able to come up with anything sinister about Hurt" (Ibid.) Researcher Michael Canfield was the first to investigate the story. He couldn't locate John W. Hurt, but contacted John David Hurt in the summer of 1974. HURT. I never heard of Lee Harvey Oswald 'til the tragedy occurred. CANFIELD. But there's this document . . . HURT. Never heard of him 'til the tragedy occurred. . . . Had some conversations with Kennedy's assistants, though. I'd never talked to President or Mrs. Kennedy but I was greatly interested in them and a real Kennedyphile. . . . I was in the counterintelligence corps in the Army during World War II for about three years . . . CANFIELD. I wonder why they had this record down at the Dallas jail? HURT. I can't tell you to save my life . . . (Canfield and Weberman, Coup d'Etat in America, 148). Proctor spoke with Hurt recently and was told exactly the same thing. Summers and Proctor both connect this incident with the possibility of John David Hurt being a "cut-out" in a military intelligence. They theorize that Oswald had been given Hurt's name without the officer's knowledge. Oswald would have asked Hurt to relay a message to one of Oswald's true contacts. Hurt would be able to relay the message without having any knowledge of its meaning, and therefore would not be a witting accomplice to any criminal act that might result. Meanwhile, Oswald's true contact is insulated by one degree. Proctor and Summers also theorize that this incident may relate to something renegade CIA officer Victor Marchetti revealed to the HSCA, that in 1963 the Office of Naval Intelligence had an operation actively attempting to plant false defectors in the Soviet Union as potential spies. The project was run out of Nag's Head, North Carolina. Summers points out that between the end of World War II and 1959 only two American servicemen defected to the USSR or Eastern Europe; the number rose dramatically in 1959 and 1960. At least five Army men defected to West Germany, along with two Navy men who were both affiliated with the National Security Agency (the secret code-breaking agency), a former Air Force officer, a former official of the OSS (the predecessor of the CIA), Lee Harvey Oswald, and a Navy man named Robert E. Webster who arrived in Russia two weeks before Oswald, and returned to the US two weeks before Oswald returned (Summers, 146-47, Proctor article). (Note: Since writing this draft of my Oswald series, I have come to have some doubts Marchetti's credibility. Does anyone have anything to say about that?) Dave For my Oswald series featuring the research of John Armstrong, please see: gopher://freenet.akron.oh.us:70/11/SIGS/JFK/Only/JA/DR For my article, "Who Speaks for Clay Shaw?" please see: http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/shaw1.htm