Lee Oswald: The Fingerprints of Intelligence

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 5^th 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.

Reference
Grover 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.