LHO's Phone Calls

[Bernice Moore]

Another oldie post, originally from john armstrongs research...Subject: Re: OSWALD's Phone Calls from JailDate: 1 Feb 1999 00:23:32 GMTFrom: dreitzes@aol.com (Dreitzes)Organization: AOL http://www.aol.comNewsgroups: alt.assassination.jfk>Subject: Re: OSWALD's Phone Calls from Jail>From: jacob_w@geocities.com>Date: 1/31/99 6:30 PM Eastern Standard Time>Message-id: <792k8e$har$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>>>There's an interesting story about a phone call Oswald tried to make.>>While in jail he tried to make a call. One of the intelligence orgs.(I>think it may have been FBI or SS) made sure the operator didn't put him>through. The operator did write down the number she gave him, however,>and threw it out. The other operator retrieved the piece of paper with the>number as a souvinier. Years later when researchers learned of this story>they looked up the number. The person who it belonged to lived in West>Virginia, I think, and had no idea who Oswald was. But he was a former>member of the intelligence community. Some have speculated that he was>Oswald's cutout. (A cutout is someone who is a sort of go between who>really isn't a part of any operation or know the people involved, he just>gets people in touch with other people.)>>******************************************************************Dave Reitzes responds:This is excerpted from my Oswald series at the URL below:Oswald used the DPD pay phone to contact three people. One was Marina, whohad left Ruth Paine's home in the custody of the Secret Service. Later hecalled Mrs. Paine and asked if she could try to locate a lawyer named JohnAbt in New York. (She made one cursory attempt.) He also "failed tocomplete" one other call.According to one of the DPD switchboard operators, he also tried to make acall later the night of November 22. The operator, Mrs. Alveeta A. Treon,remembers the incident because of the unusual circumstances. She says thather colleague, Mrs. Louise Swinney, had been forewarned thatlaw-enforcement officers would be coming to listen in on an Oswald call.The two men soon arrived, showed identification -- she believes they wereSecret Service agents -- and were shown into a room next to theswitchboard. At about 10:45 pm a red light blinked on the panel, showingthat someone was placing a call from the jail telephone booth. Bothtelephone operators rushed to plug in, and in the event Mrs. Swinneyhandled the call, with Mrs. Treon listening in avidly.Oswald asked to place a collect call to someone named John Hurt, and hegave two North Carolina numbers: (919) 834-7430 and (919) 833-1253. Mrs.Swinney wrote the numbers down, alerted the two officers eavesdropping inthe next room, and began to put the call through to the first number."I was dumbfounded at what happened next," Mrs. Treon says. "Mrs. Swinneyopened the key to Oswald and told him, 'I'm sorry, the number doesn'tanswer.' She then unplugged and disconnected Oswald without ever reallytrying to put the call through. A few moments later Mrs. Swinney tore thepage off her notation pad and threw it into the wastepaper basket."Mrs. Swinney left work at 11 pm. Mrs. Treon retrieved the note referringto the Oswald call, and copied the information onto a standard telephoneoperator's slip, to keep as a souvenir. The slip, which is reproduced onpage 287 of Canfield and Weberman's Coup d'Etat in America, has the name"John Hurt," and the two numbers. The House Select Committee determinedthat the numbers were for two different Raleigh, North Carolina men namedJohn Hurt -- John D. Hurt and John W. Hurt -- both of whom deny anyknowledge of Lee Harvey Oswald or the phone call. There has been concern,however, because one of the two -- John David Hurt -- served in USmilitary intelligence during World War II (Anthony Summers, Conspiracy,145-46; Grover B. Proctor, Jr., "The Raleigh Call").Anthony Summers spoke to HSCA Chief Counsel Professor Blakey in 1979,skeptically inquiring if the slip couldn't have reflected an incomingcall. Blakey, who hardly went out of his way to uncover governmentcomplicity in the assassination, assured Summers, "It was an outgoingcall, and therefore I consider it very troublesome material. The directionin which it went was deeply disturbing" (Ibid.).In sworn testimony, Secret Service Agent Abraham Bolden claimed that onNovember 23, 1963, someone with the Secret Service called him at theChicago office and asked if Chicago had any information on someone named"Hurt" or "Heard" (Proctor, Ibid.).Researcher Grover Proctor asked Robert Blakey about the call. Blakey said,"I think the call occurred. Now whether it occurred to [John David] Hurtor not, I'm not sure. . . . I was not able to come up with anythingsinister about Hurt" (Ibid.)Researcher Michael Canfield was the first to investigate the story. Hecouldn't locate John W. Hurt, but contacted John David Hurt in the summerof 1974.HURT. I never heard of Lee Harvey Oswald 'til the tragedy occurred.CANFIELD. But there's this document . . .HURT. Never heard of him 'til the tragedy occurred. . . . Had someconversations with Kennedy's assistants, though. I'd never talked toPresident or Mrs. Kennedy but I was greatly interested in them and a realKennedyphile. . . . I was in the counterintelligence corps in the Armyduring World War II for about three years . . .CANFIELD. I wonder why they had this record down at the Dallas jail?HURT. I can't tell you to save my life . . . (Canfield and Weberman, Coupd'Etat in America, 148).Proctor spoke with Hurt recently and was told exactly the same thing.Summers and Proctor both connect this incident with the possibility ofJohn David Hurt being a "cut-out" in a military intelligence. Theytheorize that Oswald had been given Hurt's name without the officer'sknowledge. Oswald would have asked Hurt to relay a message to one ofOswald's true contacts. Hurt would be able to relay the message withouthaving any knowledge of its meaning, and therefore would not be a wittingaccomplice to any criminal act that might result. Meanwhile, Oswald'strue contact is insulated by one degree.Proctor and Summers also theorize that this incident may relate tosomething renegade CIA officer Victor Marchetti revealed to the HSCA, thatin 1963 the Office of Naval Intelligence had an operation activelyattempting to plant false defectors in the Soviet Union as potentialspies. The project was run out of Nag's Head, North Carolina. Summerspoints out that between the end of World War II and 1959 only two Americanservicemen defected to the USSR or Eastern Europe; the number rosedramatically in 1959 and 1960. At least five Army men defected to WestGermany, along with two Navy men who were both affiliated with theNational Security Agency (the secret code-breaking agency), a former AirForce officer, a former official of the OSS (the predecessor of the CIA),Lee Harvey Oswald, and a Navy man named Robert E. Webster who arrived inRussia two weeks before Oswald, and returned to the US two weeks beforeOswald returned (Summers, 146-47, Proctor article).(Note: Since writing this draft of my Oswald series, I have come to havesome doubts Marchetti's credibility. Does anyone have anything to sayabout that?)DaveFor my Oswald series featuring the research of John Armstrong, please see:gopher://freenet.akron.oh.us:70/11/SIGS/...y/JA/DRFor my article, "Who Speaks for Clay Shaw?" please see:http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/shaw1.htm

[Trowbridge H. Ford]

Maybe I am missing something here, but all I can recall about the third call that LHO made was, according the operator's thrown away note, to someone with a 919 area code number, and the person he was calling was named either "Herty" or "Hertig".

Sounded funny when the whole number was not written down when the later ones are more apt to be forgotten.

And now it has become someone named "John David Hurt", someone apparently living in Raleigh who had served apparently in CIC in WWII?

And Oswald's only known connection to NC is at Nag's Head, quite a distance from Raleigh.

Smacks of some kind of cover up to me which has resulted in Summers scrubbing the original bit.

[Albert Doyle]

The story I heard was the telephone operator threw the phone number in the trash and retrieved it later intact and whole.

I think you're way behind on this Mr Ford. The number was confirmed because Hurt had to make-up a phony story that he called Oswald after getting drunk and losing his temper and wanting to call Oswald at the jail to condemn him. An obvious cheap excuse that sounds as phony as it is. The operator said the call was from Oswald to Hurt, as the written-down number confirms.






.

[Trowbridge H. Ford]

So you are saying that there was no third call?

It was just something that the telephone operators cooked up after the fact, and John David Hurt participated in the false story? Where did the operators get the numbers from?

Now why would they do that?

Was Oswald supposed to make some such call if the assassination had worked out as planned - what was intended to set him up as some kind of communist assassin?

Sounds like more of the apparent plot.

[Bernice Moore]

Would these help....http://www.groverproctor.us/jfk/

[Trowbridge H. Ford]

Yeah, thanks Bernice, especially since the claim that there was probably never any call either way was not seriously pursued.

Looks like my claim might have a lot of credibability, helping explain why cover-up artist Blakey never pursued it.

The House investigation was a complete fraud, as it never pursued the four-page outline that I provided Representative Henry Gonzalez on request to help get it going, never contacted me seriously after Chief Counsel Richard Sprague was dropped for wanting to use lie detectors on the conspirators, and never acknowledged the three-part series that I wrote for Tom Valentine's The National Exchange in 1978 - not even in its bibliography.

The only thing I heard was a call from one of his investigators, Mickey Goldsmith?, after the investigation had been completed that my concerns had been seriously investigated - a complete lie.