One of the more intriguing and mysterious elements of Lee
Oswald’s (1939-1963) incarceration at the Dallas Police Department jail is a
couple of telephone calls he attempted to make, one in particular to John David
Hurt (1909-1981) of Raleigh, North Carolina on November 23, 1963. This call is
yet more evidence of Oswald’s involvement with CIA at the very highest levels of
operation.
The story of what has become known as the Raleigh Call begins, for
our purposes, on the 5th floor of the Dallas Municipal Building
where Alice Swinney (b. 1919) worked as a telephone operator. She had been
informed by Dallas Police around 7p that 2 men would visit her if Lee Oswald
attempted to make a telephone call.
At around 10:15p a co-worker, Alveeta Treon (1920-1999),
arrived to relieve Swinney earlier than her normal 11p. About 10 minutes later
2 unidentified men entered the switchboard room, and setup in the equipment
room.
Sometime after 10:30p, a call from Oswald came through the
switchboard which both women answered simultaneously. Swinney took charge of
the call, but put Oswald on hold while she communicated with the 2 men in the
equipment room. They told her not to place the call and to tell Oswald that
there was no answer. After returning to Oswald, she informed him that there was
no answer.
The details of the requested call from Oswald were preserved
by Treon including the annotation
that the call was outbound to a John Hurt in Raleigh, NC for which 2 numbers in area code 919 were provided by the caller. Treon saved the card because her
daughter, who was with her that night, wanted a souvenir of the historic event.
Word about the call and Treon’s memento surfaced in 1968 and
was eventually investigated by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, at
which time the 2 operators were interviewed again. Surrell Brady, an attorney
working for Robert Blakey, chief counsel for the Committee, investigated the
event in greater detail, locating John David Hurt, a non-commissioned
officer veteran of World War 2 who had worked in counter intelligence.
He indeed had the number provided by Oswald, but claimed
complete ignorance of why he was named by Oswald or why Oswald would have even
called. Hurt had fallen on hard times, having lost his job in 1955 and suffered
severe psoriasis and arthritis, going on 100% government disability in 1963.
Thus Hurt seems an unlikely candidate as an intelligence
operative. However, the significance is not that Oswald tried to contact John
Hurt, but that Oswald was attempting to contact a cut-out, a man who in this
case was useless. Former CIA agent Victor Marchetti informed Grover Proctor, who
has conducted extensive research on the Raleigh Call, that Oswald was
attempting to call someone who could put him in touch with people who could
help him.
More than likely the man who could help was New York
attorney John Abt whom he had attempted to contact earlier that afternoon or
evening – sometime during Louise Swinney’s shift and prior to Oswald’s
attempted call to Hurt.
Not surprisingly, Oswald could not reach Abt, most likely
for the same reason that he could not reach Hurt – Swinney failed to place the
call.
Interestingly enough, North Carolina was not terra incognito
for Oswald. Proctor uncovered additional evidence showing that Nag’s Head,
North Carolina was home of an Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) training site
for fake defectors, of whom Oswald was one from 1959-1962 while stationed in the USSR.
Oddly enough, Proctor makes the idiotic, and demonstrably false, claim that there is no evidence of Oswald being involved
with the CIA. The facts speak otherwise, beginning with his tour of duty with
the US Marines, especially in Japan, then USSR, New Orleans, Dallas, and Mexico
City. Oswald worked not only for the CIA, but ONI, FBI, and other US
intelligence agencies, possessing the very highest of security clearances. His
file at the US State Department eventually caused Otto Otepka to be fired from
his job where he had built a sterling reputation until such time as he
attempted to follow Department policies in handling Oswald’s highly
confidential file.
While many are puzzled by the Raleigh Call, it is not so
mysterious. Oswald had been given a bogus cut-out. It is as simple as that.
Oswald’s handlers had no intention of giving their agent any help in his
framing as the patsy. The operator handling Oswald’s calls was instructed not
to place them, and Oswald was given a useless cut-out. He was a doomed man long
before November 24, 1963.
ReferenceGrover Proctor, Jr, The Raleigh Call AND THE Fingerprints of Intelligence, groverproctor.us, November 23, 2014, accessed 1/28/2017
Copyright 2017 Tony Bonn. All rights reserved.
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