Trail of Destruction, Pt. 3: Lee Harvey Oswald's Note to the FBI

G-men eliminate a clue to the accused assassin’s mental state

[Editor’s Note: This is the third installment in the JFK Facts series, “Trail of Destruction.” New installments will appear every Wednesday.]

FBI Special Agent James P. Hosty (center, holding newspaper) speaks to Dallas Assistant District Attorney Bill Alexander at the Dallas Police Department. (Credit: Jim Murray/prayer-man.com)

On the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Dallas office, J. Gordon Shanklin, ordered Special Agent James P. Hosty to the Dallas police station to sit in on the interrogation of Lee Harvey Oswald. Under arrest for killing Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit, Oswald soon would be formally charged with having murdered President John F. Kennedy earlier that same day.

“Oh, so you’re Hosty, the agent who’s been harassing my wife!” Hosty remembered Oswald saying angrily when they were introduced.

Oswald recalled Hosty’s name even though he’d never met him. Ruth Paine, Oswald’s friend, had written it down when Hosty — under assignment to monitor the young former defector to the Soviet Union — came to her home in the first week of November looking for him. Instead, Hosty had confronted Marina, Oswald’s Russian spouse.

Days later, Oswald came looking for the FBI agent at the Bureau’s Dallas field office, hoping to confront him face to face. When the surly 24-year-old learned that Hosty was out, he left a note in an envelope with a receptionist, Nannie Lee Fenner, who passed it to Hosty later in the day. Neither Hosty nor Fenner could remember the exact date all this happened, but it was evidently a week to two weeks before Kennedy was killed.

It was during Oswald’s interrogation at Dallas police headquarters on the afternoon of Friday, Nov. 22, that Hosty first connected the young ex-Marine to the note Fenner had handed him, because the note was unsigned. At least, that’s what Hosty would tell a congressional committee many years later.

Fenner, by contrast, told Congress that the note had been signed: “Lee Harvey Oswald.” She said, “the bottom portion of the letter was visible the whole time he was standing there,” but she couldn’t “remember the exact words” of the rest of it.

Still, all three of those who testified under oath that they had read all or part of the short letter agreed that it seemed to threaten retaliation against the Bureau if Hosty continued to harass Marina, who was also an FBI “case” for being a Soviet citizen living in America.