What’s In a Name? “Harvey” and “Lee” &  Why It Matters

By James Norwood

Over many years, two boys using the same name and living in different families were participants in American intelligence operations.  It is likely that references to them in government records included separate identifications:  one boy was "Lee Harvey Oswald," born to Marguerite Claverie Oswald on October 18, 1939.  The other boy was "Harvey Lee Oswald," likely a Russian-speaking refugee from World War II, brought to this country with thousands of other refugees. 

Frank Wisner was a Wall Street lawyer and during World War II worked for the Office of Strategic Services (predecessor of the CIA).  After World War II ended, thousands of Eastern European refugees were brought to the United States under his supervision.  National Security Council (NSC) records show that Wisner, the CIA's director of clandestine operations, oversaw the relocation of thousands of anti-Communist exiles to the United States.  Wisner became the CIA and State Department’s expert on European war refugees, and he secretly subsidized the refugee relief organizations that brought these Eastern Bloc refugees to the United States throughout the 1940s and early 1950s.

Wisner recognized that he could use these Eastern European immigrants’ knowledge, customs, and familiarity with their respective homelands in the struggle against communism in the Cold War.  Wisner asked the National Security Council (NSC) to sanction the “systematic” use of such refugees, and they (the NSC) agreed. The NSC soon issued a top-secret intelligence directive (NSCID No. 14), which has been partially declassified:

https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1950-55Intel/d253

On multiple occasions, the document explicitly uses the expression “exploitation of aliens,” which was precisely Wisner’s goal in his massive project with the immigrants.  There were not merely thousands but likely tens of thousands of assignments that involved a quid pro quo arrangement.  In return for the promise of American citizenship, the immigrants would be required to perform tasks, utilizing their knowledge and experience as Eastern Europeans. 

With the authorization stipulated in NSCID No. 14, the FBI and the CIA were able to jointly exploit the talents of well over 200,000 Eastern European refugees resettled in the USA. The CIA soon contacted the Displaced Persons Commission (DPC), which worked closely with the leaders of refugee organizations in the USA.  DPC chairman Ugo Carusi (1902-94) sent a memorandum to all refugee organizations in the USA that read: “We would like to advise that the U.S. Commission [DPC] has a formal agreement with the CIA to cooperate in every possible way to facilitate their programs.  It is, therefore, altogether desirable that local representatives of the voluntary agencies and State Commissions and Committees make available to fully identified CIA agents the addresses of displaced persons.”

In one of these projects, a young Russian-speaking refugee was selected and given the name Harvey Lee Oswald, and his birthdate was often listed as October 19, 1939, whereas October 18 was the birthdate for the American-born Lee Harvey Oswald.  It is of paramount importance to understand that the original purpose of the merging of the two identities has nothing to do with the assassination of President Kennedy whose political career as a Congressman was just beginning at the time Wisner was recruiting the Eastern European refugees.  The fledgling Oswald operation was one of thousands conducted by Wisner with the overarching goal of winning the Cold War.  For this project, the idea was to place a Russian-speaking young man with the identity of an American citizen in the Soviet Union as a spy.  During his stay, he feigned his knowledge of the Russian language while listening to and observing his hosts.  His successful concealment of his Russian language proficiency while living in Minsk is covered in detail in the article “Oswald’s Proficiency in the Russian Language”:

https://harveyandlee.net/Russian.html

Two defining periods are at the heart of understanding the life story of the immigrant boy Harvey Oswald.  First, it was the carefully planned intelligence operation of merging his life with the American-born Lee Oswald between the late 1940s and the 1959 “defection” to the Soviet Union.  Second, the period of August-November 1963 is pivotal after Harvey Oswald had returned from the Soviet Union and was now being groomed by the CIA as the patsy in the assassination of President Kennedy.  It is likely that different CIA personnel were framing Oswald than those who originally conceived the Oswald Project as part of Frank Wisner’s refugee program.  In 1958, Wisner himself was diagnosed with manic depression and went into steep decline, retiring from the CIA in 1962 and dying by suicide in 1965.  Still, the entire life of this young immigrant was overseen by the CIA, first in the role of a patriot and later in the role of a patsy.

In the immediate aftermath of the assassination, there was a scramble to understand the background of the suspect killed while in custody of the Dallas police.  At the same time, there was a massive effort on the part of the FBI to suppress information about the Oswald project.  But much evidence slipped beneath the cracks, including a surviving teletype from December 4, 1963 that was sent by an aide to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.  The aide was William J. Vanden Heuvel, who was also President of the International Rescue Committee (IRC).  The teletype was intended to alert the FBI that “the files of the IRC contain information pertaining to Oswald”:

There would have been no reason why the American-born Lee Oswald would have been of interest to the IRC.  But it was entirely appropriate that the Russian-speaking immigrant Harvey Oswald would be identified by this organization if he were an immigrant from Eastern Europe recruited by American intelligence.

Another piece of tantalizing evidence is the subject of an anonymous phone conversation to Mrs. Jack Tippit of Westport, Connecticut on the day following the assassination.  Mrs. Tippit’s husband, a self-employed cartoonist for national magazines, was a distant relative of Officer J.D. Tippit, who was shot to death in Dallas on the afternoon of November 22.  The anonymous caller indicated that she personally knew Oswald's father and uncle in New York City, who were from Hungary, promoted communism, and resided at 77th and 2nd Avenue in Yorkville (NYC).  On multiple occasions during the call, the woman on the line indicated that she was fearful for her life in revealing this information.  The text of a long suppressed November 30 FBI teletype describing the phone call, as well as John Armstrong’s analysis of the call, may be read in the article entitled “Who Was Harvey?”:

https://harveyandlee.net/Harvey%20Who/Harvey_who.htm

The surviving evidence points to the unidentified refugee, who was given the name Harvey Oswald, being placed with a caretaker who was given the name "Margaret” (as opposed to Marguerite) Oswald.  The similarity in the names of Harvey Oswald and Margaret Oswald was of critical importance administratively to distinguish the young immigrant and his caretaker mother from the real Marguerite Claverie Oswald and her young son Lee Harvey Oswald. At the height of the McCarthy era, a House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) file in New York City made reference to a "Mrs. M. Oswald" in a CIA Office of Security file.  The date of the file in 1953 would have coincided with the early phase of the Oswald Project.  During the deliberations of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) in the 1990s, Judge John Tunheim wrote to Congressman Henry Hyde (R, Illinois) and requested the HUAC file on "Mrs. M Oswald."  Despite the fact that the JFK Records Act mandated the release of the documents, the request was denied the ARRB.  It is conceivable that this file may be among the records still being withheld from the American public by the CIA.  If released, it could potentially expose the story of the two Oswalds.

Both Harvey and Lee enlisted in the Marines where they served between 1956-59.  The Marine enlistment card for Harvey Oswald, dated October 24, 1956, was recently discovered and was published for the first time on this website.  The name that first appeared on the card was “Harvey Lee Oswald.”  It was subsequently scratched off and re-entered as “Lee Harvey Oswald.”  The card also indicates that both of the parents of the recruit are deceased, yet it identifies Marguerite Oswald as the recruit’s mother.  It also indicates that the parents were not divorced; but the real Marguerite Oswald was divorced and was living at the time at a different address than the one indicated on the card.  If there had been only one Lee Harvey Oswald, there never would have been the set of anomalies evident on the enlistment card.  Shortly after Harvey Oswald enrolled in the Marines, he was sent to San Diego for boot camp.  But at the same time, Lee Oswald was receiving his training at the Marine Corps Air Facility in El Toro, up the California coast near Irvine in Orange County.  Images of the two-sided enlistment card of Harvey Oswald along with detailed analysis appear in the article “Marine Corps and the Soviet Union”:

https://harveyandlee.net/Marines/Marines.html

The final assignment for Harvey Oswald during his stint in the Marines was for him to be stationed at the ninth Marine Air Control Station (MACS 9) in Santa Ana, California.  Around the same time, Lee Oswald was once again assigned to the nearby El Toro Marine Corps Air Facility (MCAF).  The Warren Commission failed to identify the two distinct bases, which were approximately ten miles apart in Orange County.  The Commission selectively focused on interviewing Marines in the smaller MACS 9 base for first-hand accounts about Harvey Oswald when he was preparing for his “defection” to the Soviet Union and was all but advertising his love of Russian culture and fascination with Marxist ideology.  For his fellow Marines, he was putting on quite a show in playing a recording of Tchaikovsky’s “Russian War Dance,” reading Russian-language newspapers, addressing his buddies as “Comrade,” and asking his roommate James Botelho to call him “Oswaldovich.”  When he applied for a dependency discharge to help his allegedly injured “mother,” the accompanying parent’s affidavit form lists the same Marine ID number of 1653230 that corresponds to the number on his original enlistment card.  But in the box entitled “My Children Currently Serving in the Armed Forces,” the applicant lists as her son “Oswald, Harvey Lee,” who was currently stationed at the MACS 9 base.

Was this a slip on the part of “Margaret” Oswald, who habitually referred to her “son” as Harvey?  Or, was it a conscious choice in bookkeeping in order to distinguish Harvey Oswald from the other Marine, Lee Oswald, who was also recently discharged?  It is clear that this was more than a mere clerical error due to the pattern of references to Harvey Lee Oswald that show up time and again in the documentary record.

Specialists in linguistics have also weighed in on the writing and speaking patterns of Harvey Oswald.  In December 1963, Vladimir Petrov, head of the Slavic Language Department at Yale University, read a copy of a letter Oswald had written to Senator John Tower.  Petrov stated that “I am satisfied that the letter was not written by him [Harvey Oswald].  It was written by a Russian with an imperfect knowledge of English."  In an unrelated study, a professor at Southern Methodist University listened to the voice of Oswald from the 1963 New Orleans radio interview without being told that it was Oswald speaking.  The expert concluded that the man was not a native-born American; rather, he was speaking English as a second language.

The New Orleans born Lee Harvey Oswald preferred to be addressed as "Lee," while the young Eastern European immigrant identified himself as “Harvey.”  As early as 1953-54 there are four witnesses in three different locations that identified one of the boys as Harvey:  Psychiatrist Dr. Milton Kurian interviewed Harvey Lee Oswald in New York in March, 1953; William Henry Timmer met Harvey Oswald in Stanley, North Dakota in the summer of 1953; and when Oswald entered Myra DaRouse's home room class in New Orleans in early 1954, he asked Myra to call him Harvey.  Harvey's best friend in the spring semester of the 8th grade at Beauregard Junior High in New Orleans was Ed Voebel, who knew young Oswald as Harvey.

In each instance of a reference to "Harvey Lee Oswald" in the documentary record, there is a story behind the name "Harvey" which precedes "Lee."  One very important reference is found on the typewritten sheet of employees of the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD) prepared by Lieutenant Jack Revill, intelligence officer of the Dallas police, on the day of the assassination:

Revill, however, was not typing from records provided to him by the TSBD.  Instead, he had in all probability received information about Oswald from an officer of Naval Intelligence with whom he rode back to the station after a short trip to Dealey Plaza.  It may be significant that the name "Harvey Lee Oswald" is at the head of Revill's list.  Additionally, Oswald's address of 605 Elsbeth is inaccurate; the correct location was 602 Elsbeth.  That address was not found in any records of the TSBD.  In an unrelated document discovered in the 1980s, a file from the 112th MI (Military Intelligence) group listed a man named Harvey Lee Oswald, who was "a procommunist who had been in Russia and had been involved in pro-Castro activities in New Orleans."  That document listed the man's name as "Harvey Lee Oswald" with the same incorrect address of 605 Elsbeth.

Taken together, the two documents identifying "Harvey Lee Oswald" residing at an incorrect address point to the intelligence network implicating Oswald in the assassination of President Kennedy almost instantly after the shooting.  Author Jim Marrs offers a detailed overview of the multi-faceted circumstances of an immediate identification of Harvey Oswald as the suspect in the following video from Len Osanic's series Fifty Reasons for Fifty Years:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzrDxSTAvOc&list=PLT8L13rH2ZvtyvDz01EuLznX0Bpz_0wwu&index=23


As researcher Peter Dale Scott observes, the usage of the name Harvey Lee Oswald "is no accidental anomaly, but part of an organized pattern, widely dispersed, that suggests an official intelligence deception (and possible dual filing system)....A consistent pattern of behavior in these agencies since the assassination has been the tendency to suppress references to 'Harvey Lee Oswald' and replace them by the more standard 'Lee Harvey Oswald.'"  The suppression of references to “Harvey Oswald” was the exact function of the FBI and the Warren Commission, which were both instrumental in concealing the identity of the two Oswalds.  The backgrounds of the two young men were combined into a single biographical profile.  That manufactured biography of a composite of two men was the centerpiece of the Warren Report published on September 24, 1964.

The man who was accused of killing JFK was not American-born Lee Harvey Oswald, but was an unknown refugee brought to this country as a child.  Due to his fluency in the Russian language, he was monitored, directed, and trained during his formative years for the express purpose of "defecting" to the Soviet Union while working for the CIA.  At a later time, this man who had served his new country in the area of espionage was targeted by his handlers to be the scapegoat in the assassination of JFK.  For nearly his entire life, the experience of the immigrant Harvey Oswald was circumscribed by the CIA.  The government’s staunch reluctance to release documentary evidence in the assassination of President Kennedy is almost certainly tied to the coverup of the existence of the two Oswalds that has been suppressed from the American public for nearly sixty years.