November 23, 1963: Oswald's Last Phone Calls

The suspected assassin who denied killing Kennedy dialed up a communist contqact and a former Army counterintelligence officer

After his arrest for killing President John F. Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald was held in the Dallas jail, where he was allowed to make at least three phone calls.

The first is well-known. Oswald sought to contact a prominent civil liberties attorney. Less well-known is the fact that the accused assassin made two other calls in the last hours of his life: one to the New York City headquarters of the Communist Party USA, the other to a former Army counterintelligence officer in North Carolina.

If nothing else, these well-documented phone calls are evidence of the accused assassin’s state of mind shortly before he was silenced.

Lee Oswald, center, was arrested on November 22, 1963.

First Call: 1:30 p.m.

Oswald was booked in Cell F-2 at 12:23 a.m. on Nov. 23. 

That afternoon, around 1:30 p.m., he made a collect call to New York City, according to police officer Arthur E. Eaves. Fellow officer Buel Beddingfield said the same. Oswald was trying to reach John Abt, an attorney known for his defense of communists and leftists. Abt was at his country house and unavailable.

Second Call: 8 p.m.

At 8 p.m., Dallas police officer J. Popplewell saw Oswald make another call that lasted a half hour. Patrolman Thurber Lord affirmed Popplewell's story, adding that another officer, M.G. Hall from Homicide and Robbery, approved the call and said the men should give Oswald privacy.

With whom Oswald spoke for that half hour is not known.

The next day an FBI agent asked Popplewell if prisoners were allowed to keep phone numbers in their possession. Popplewell told him yes. A slip of paper found by the FBI had four phone numbers. One was the number of the Dallas jail and two were for attorney Abt. The fourth number was for the New York City office of The Worker, a publication of the the Communist Party USA. 

So one obvious possibility is that Oswald talked to a communist contact for a half hour the day after he supposedly killed the president of the United States. You might think the U.S. government would be interested. Think again.

The FBI was puzzled but not very interested in pursuing Oswald’s communist contacts. Director J. Edgar Hoover said from the start that Oswald was the “lone gunman” who had no co-conspirators. The Warren Commission, created in large part to head off rumors of communist involvement in Kennedy’s murder, was similarly disinterested. The Commission attached no significance to Oswald’s apparent desire to call the office of The Worker.

Some JFK conspiracy theorists suggest Oswald was trying to contact his KGB handlers for guidance. There’s no evidence to support the claim.

The lack of interest by U.S. officials is bizarre. It suggests they didn’t want to know about any kind of conspiracy to kill JFK, no matter who did it, even the hated communists.

Third Call: 10:45 p.m.

Telephone operator Louise Swinney gave a statement saying she was told by the Dallas police officers that if Oswald tried to make any phone calls, they would send two men to "tap in on the line." Around 10 p.m. that evening, she said, two homicide detectives came to the telephone room and identified themselves to her.

Lee Harvey Oswald, right, in custody in Dallas, Nov. 23, 1963.

At about 10:45 p.m., Oswald was allowed to make another call. He gave Swinney a name, Hurt, and a number in Raleigh, North Carolina. The number was associated with a former U.S. Army counterintelligence officer named John David Hurt. The call apparently did not go through. 

Oswald went back to his cell.

In Chicago, Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden said the office was asked to run a phonetic check on the names "Hurt" and "Heard” on the night of Nov. 23.

Hurt denied getting a call or knowing Oswald. He had not been involved in counterintelligence work since 1954 when he left the Army. In 1963 he was working for the North Carolina Division of Motor Vehicles. He suffered from bipolar disorder.

Why Oswald knew Hurt’s name and tried to call his number remains a mystery that the U.S. government never tried to solve.

Oswald’s Handler?

Was John Hurt Oswald’s handler?

JFK researchers have asked the question without reaching a definitive answer. There is no proof, only evidence that can be interpreted in different ways.

After Oswald joined the Marines in 1956, one of his first assignments was at Marine Air Corps Squadron 9 at El Toro base in Santa Ana, California. One of his bunk mates, David Bucknell, told author Mark Lane that he and Oswald and others were ordered to report to the counterintelligence division, where a civilian was recruiting those present for an operation in Cuba. 

According to Bucknell, Oswald later told him that his civilian contact during his assignment at the Atsugi airbase in Japan had taken over a similar role in Santa Ana. Still later Oswald told Bucknell he was being discharged very soon and would resurface in the USSR — that he was being sent by American intelligence and would return as a hero.

Former CIA Agent Comments

Victor Marchetti, a former CIA agent, told researcher Grover Proctor that he believed that Oswald, in making the call to Raleigh, was following a standard set of tradecraft practices.

Here’s how it works, he said. An agent or NOC (non-official cover, meaning someone doing covert work but without any ties to the government) can contact his case officer through what is known as a cutout, a "clean" intermediary who can act as a conduit between agent and officer without ever getting involved in the intelligence operation itself. All the cutout knows is that if anyone ever calls asking for a certain officer's real name, or pseudonym, he's then to contact a predetermined person or agency. The cutout can legitimately say he has never heard of the person calling.

Marchetti also said that the Office of Naval Intelligence, a component of the Marines Corps, ran a training base in Nag's Head, North Carolina, to send American "defectors" into the USSR.

Marchetti was a well-placed insider, a career CIA officer, with major responsibilities as a young man. In the late 1960s, he served as executive assistant to the deputy director of operations Thomas Karamessines, who was the right-hand man of director Richard Helms, the only CIA director ever convicted of a crime.

In the 1970s, Marchetti became disenchanted with the Agency and wrote a memoir, “The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence,” which became the first book in the history of the United States subject to pre-publication censorship.

That said, there’s no evidence Hurt was involved in counterintelligence work in 1963. And the only evidence Hurt might have known Oswald is the phone slip showing that Oswald knew his phone number.

No tapes of Oswald’s phone calls from jail have ever surfaced.

After the last call, Oswald went to sleep in cell F-2. In the morning he would be transferred to the county jail, which was said to be more secure.

NEXT: November 24, 1963: Dead Men Tell No Tales