Not Oswald’s Bag: FBI Recordings of Marina Oswald Reveal Widow's Doubts in 1964

Wiretaps show she questioned her husband’s guilt months after JFK's assassination

Lee and Marina Oswald, April 20, 1961, in Minsk, U.S.S.R. (Credit: Warren Commission)

JFK assassination researcher Mark Bujdos has shared nine audio files with JFK Facts containing recordings that the FBI made of Marina Oswald on the phone with friends and acquaintances between her first and second set of sessions testifying to the Warren Commission investigating President John F. Kennedy’s murder. Bujdos is unsure of the exact provenance of the tapes, but they appear unconnected to the current releases of JFK assassination records. They certainly appear to be authentic.

On Feb. 24, 1964, Warren Commission Chief Counsel J. Lee Rankin spoke to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and asked that the FBI “step up [its] coverage of Marina Oswald.” He suggested a “stake out” of Marina’s home but gave few specifics, only expressing his hope that Marina did not “run out on us” before the Commission could interview her again and suggesting that the Bureau “consider getting a telephone tap on her.”

On Feb. 28, the Bureau installed surveillance equipment and microphones at Marina’s home at 629 Beltline Road in Richardson, Texas, in the telephones and light fixtures of her kitchen, living room, bedroom and attic. From Feb. 29, the FBI conducted electronic surveillance of Marina from a 614 Beltline Road, terminating the operation on Mar. 12.

The FBI’s 84-page summary of its surveillance of Marina Oswald was made available to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in the 1970s and declassified in the 1990s. But the recordings themselves have apparently only now somehow appeared.

They depict a young mother unsure about her late husband’s culpability in the killing even as she was testifying to investigators. About 30 years after the assassination, Marina would come forward publicly to tell the world she no longer believed the official verdict on Lee’s guilt. What the recordings make clear is, she had always had her doubts.