Marine Lee Harvey Oswald(skovich?)

The next chapter of Marrs' book delves into the mysterious life of alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. I'm going to pass on discussing this in too much detail because I have another book that focuses solely on this issue. Yet, I will give an overview of the case that Marrs makes and the troubling questions he raises about Oswald's possible connections to US Intelligence and what that means about the assassination.

• When Oswald was sixteen years old, he joined the Civil Air Patrol where he met a Captain named David Ferrie. Ferrie was a known right-winger, and had connections with various anti-Castro groups as well as the CIA and FBI. It was after meeting Ferrie that Oswald began sharing his procommunist feelings, which many researchers have taken to mean that Ferrie may have influenced Oswald to act in such a way as a means of creating a cover to later be used as a US agent. 

More after the jump...

• Oswald's next move was to join the Marines, which seems strange for someone who, over the past year, had gone out of this way to profess his procommunist stance to everyone he could. It was at Marine basic training that Oswald was dubbed "Shitbird" because he initially failed to qualify on the M-1 rifle. This was particularly interesting to learn because of the extreme accuracy that would have been needed to fire the three shots from six stories up at a moving target, which the Warren Commission believed Oswald had, in fact, done. According to Vol. 7 of the Warren Commission, Oswald would eventually qualify as a "sharpshooter" by 2 points over the minimum. "Sharpshooter" is second in the marksman/sharpshooter/expert scale.
• Oswald went on to continue both his training and his procommunist sentiment, yet no note was ever made on his record by his superiors. Eventually, Oswald was sent to Japan to work on an air base where the top-secret U2 spy plane flights were taking place. This same base was the CIA's main headquarters in the far east. 
• While serving in Japan, Oswald would short visits to Tokyo, where he made friends with a hostess at one of the cities most expensive nightclubs. For a low-level enlisted Marine, this seemed like an awfully expensive venue to visit so often. Marrs points out that what may have been going on is that the CIA was using Oswald as a spy, believing that Japanese agents frequented the same nightclub in an effort to acquire intelligence from higher-level base personnel. 
• Perhaps the most concrete piece of evidence that Oswald may have been involved in the intelligence community are his medical records dated September 16, 1958. The records state "Urethritis, Acute, due to gonococcus #0303. Origin: In line of duty, Not due to own misconduct." In what line of duty would a young Marine be expected to contract a venereal disease? What is even more intriguing is that Oswald and his unit were transferred to Formosa (now Taiwan) on September 14th, two days before the date listen on his medical chart. 
• There was an incident earlier in 1957, shortly before Oswald's unit was to be transferred. Oswald claimed to have dropped his pistol, which accidentally discharged and grazed his arm. This required a seemingly excessive three weeks of medical treatment. Shortly after his official reprimand for the discharge incident in April of 1958, Oswald picked a fight with a non-commissioned officer and was sentenced to 45 days in the brig. Only one other Marine in the brig during that time  recalled seeing Oswald. Researchers believe that these two extended periods of time away from his unit were used to further train Oswald in the ways of espionage, which would later explain his seemingly sudden proficiency in Russian. 
• Oswald continued to public embrace communism. It reached the point where he would answer questions in Russian and he earned a new nickname: Oswaldskovich. Despite his court-martial for improper discharging of a weapon, his incident with the non-com, and his openness about his apparent support of communism, Lee Harvey Oswald was granted a dependency discharge so he could care for his mother. He also applied for a passport, where he stated that he "might travel to various countries, including Cuba and Russia." These claims don't do much to support the story that he was going home to care for his mother, yet his passport was issued less than a week later. 

Less than a month after returning home to care for his mother who, medically speaking, needed no care at all, Oswald boarded a ship and set sail for Europe. By the end of the year, Oswald would be in Moscow.