48 The handwritten draft of the 'Comrade Kostin' letter to the Soviet Embassy
Erasing the Past...DiscussionsMore framework:174 Ruth Paine's handwritten copy of handwritten draft of the 'Comrade Kostin' letter 196 The missing Mexico City transcript "The FBI is not now interested in my activities.""The Kostikov name, mentioned only in passing in one phone call, was connected to Oswald in another way.
Just a few days prior to the assassination, a letter to the Soviet Embassy in Washington was intercepted.
Purportedly written by Oswald, this letter referred to "my meetings with comrade Kostin" and noted that
"had I been able to reach the Soviet Embassy in Havana as planned, the embassy there would have had
time to complete our business."
Mysteries surround both the phone calls and the letter - there are indications that both may have been part
of a frame-up of Oswald. There are strong indications that an imposter used Oswald's name in tapped phone
calls. The letter, while apparently signed by Oswald, is typed and thus not amenable to a fuller authenticity
test. A handwritten draft subsequently entered the record, but the story of its origins is raises further
questions."
(Mary Ferrell website)
The typewritten letter (CE15) sent on November 9, 1963, was held and studied
by the FBI for a couple of days, and arrived at the Soviet Embassy on November
18, 1963.Mrs. PAINE - That is one incident. Another refers to a rough draft of a letter that Lee wrote and left this rough
draft on my secretary desk.
Mr. JENNER - Would you describe the incident? In the meantime, I will obtain the rough draft here among my
notes.
Mrs. PAINE - All right. This was on the morning of November 9, Saturday. He asked to use my typewriter, and I
said he might.
Mr. JENNER - Excuse me. Would you please. state to the Commission why you are reasonably firm that it was
the morning of November 9? What arrests your attention to that particular date?
Mrs. PAINE - Because I remember the weekend that this note or rough draft remained on my secretary desk. He
spent the weekend on it. And the weekend was close and its residence on that desk was stopped also on the
evening of Sunday, the 10th, when I moved everything in the living room around; the whole arrangement of the
furniture was changed, so that I am very clear in my mind as to what weekend this was.
Mr. JENNER - All right, go ahead.
Mrs. PAINE - He was using the typewriter. I came and put June in her high-chair near him at the table where he
was typing, and he moved something over what he was typing from, which aroused my curiosity.
Mr. JENNER - Why did that arouse your curiosity?
Mrs. PAINE - It appeared he didn't want me to see what he was writing or to whom he was writing. I didn't
know why he had covered it. If I had peered around him, I could have looked at the typewriter and the page
in it, but I didn't.
Mr. JENNER - It did make you curious?
Mrs. PAINE - It did make me curious. Then, later that day, I noticed a scrawling handwriting on a piece of paper
on the corner at the top of my secretary desk in the living room. It remained there.
Sunday morning I was the first one up. I took a closer look at this, a folded sheet of paper folded at the middle.
(...)
Mrs. PAINE - At the top of what I could see of the paper. In other words, it was just below the fold. It said,
"The FBI is not now interested in my activities."
Mr. JENNER - Is that what arrested your attention?
Mrs. PAINE - Yes.
Mr. JENNER - What did you do?
Mrs. PAINE - I then proceeded to read the whole note, wondering, knowing this to be false, wondering why he
was saying it. I was irritated to have him writing a falsehood on my typewriter, I may say, too. I felt I had
some cause to look at it.
(...)
Mr. JENNER - And you made a copy of the document?
Mrs. PAINE - And I made a copy of the document which should be among your papers, because they have that
too. And after having made it, while the shower was running, I am not used to subterfuge in any way, but then
I put it back where it had been and it lay the rest of Sunday on my desk top, and of course I observed this too.
(
Warren Commission testimony of Ruth Hyde Paine)
In March 1964, four months after the Soviet Embassy turned over the letter to the United States, identifying
it as a forgery or a deliberate provocation, Ruth Paine testified that on Saturday, November 9, 1963, she had
seen Oswald type the letter in her home on her typewriter. Besides giving an eyewitness account of Oswald
actually writing the letter, her testimony placed on record a different version of the letter from the one the
Soviets had received. The new, U.S.-government preferred version of the letter came, in Paine's testimony,
in the form of a rough draft that she said Oswald left accidentally on her secretary desk.
(...)
By reading the typed letter in terms of its very different draft, the Warren Commission tried to reduce the
explosive ,meaning of the letter sent to the Soviet Embassy to nothing more than an Oswald ego-trip. What
could be seen as a probably fraudulent, dangerously revealing letter was explained away in retrospect by
another probably fraudulent, also revealing draft of the same letter.
The equally suspicious, "original" handwritten note to the Soviet Embassy then became accessible to only one
person. The members of the Warren Commission decided to give the original document, supposedly written by
Oswald, back to Ruth Paine, at her request. They did so in May 1964, four months before they issued their
official report drawing on that same document as key evidence.
(James Douglass,
JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 233, 234)
For some incredible reason, by April 1964, the Warren Commission had accepted a Ruth Paine request to have
Oswald’s draft returned. However, when the Dallas FBI did return it to her, she decided to send it back to the
Commission, because, finally, she felt it would be more proper for it to be kept in the public archives, but would
take it in the event it would not be archived. Hoover said with finality that the Commission would not hold onto
it and, by May 1964, had the original sent back to Ruth Paine, which escaped further examination as to its
authenticity.
(
JFK and the Unspeakable, p.443)