Assertions About Oswald Confronting House Group (Some background; excerpts)
(
By Martin Waldron Special to The New York Times April 4, 1977)
The “Hunt letter” first became known in the summer of 1975. A number of assassination students, most of them private citizens, got copies of it in the mail from Mexico City.
The letter has excited some interest in the last few days because Justice Department sources said the F.B.I. had confirmed that the letter was in Mr. Oswald's handwriting.
The 39‐word letter was dated Nov. 8, 1963, two weeks before Mr. Kennedy was slain. Mr. Oswald was living in Dallas and working at the Texas Schoolbook Depository.
The letter said: “Dear Mr. Hunt, I would like information concerning my position. I am asking only for information. I am suggesting that we discuss the matter more fully before any steps are taken by me or anyone else. Thank you. Lee Harvey Oswald.”
E. Howard Hunt, CIA, 1918-2007Mr. Jones said he received a photocopy of the handwritten letter in August or September, 1975, at his home in Midlothian, Texas, where he once ran a prizewinning weekly newspaper, The Midlothian Mirror.
Accompanying the photocopy was a typewritten note in Spanish, saying that the sender, who signed himself “P.S.,” had sent a photocopy of the letter to the F.B.I. in late 1974 and had not heard from the bureau.
“Senor P.S.,” as he became known, also wrote that he feared something might happen to him and that he was going into hiding for a time. On the back of the envelope containing the photocopy and the note was a return address: “Insurgentes Sud, No. 309, Mexico, Df, Mexico:”
Number 309 South Insurgentes in Mexico City is a four‐story white stone apartment house containing a number of lower‐middle‐class flats. On the first floor of the building are two low‐quality clothing stores and a small shop selling national lottery tickets.
Mr. Jones said that he gave his copy of the “Hunt letter” to The Dallas Morning News last month. The newspaper reported that it had had the letter analyzed by three independent handwriting experts who, like the F.B.I., concluded that it had been written by Mr. Oswald. The experts said they had compared the letter with others known to have been written by Mr. Oswald.
There was no indication of how “Senor P.S.” had come into possession of the Oswald letter.
Harold Weisberg of Frederick, Md., a former Senate investigator who has devoted the past 12 years to researching the Kennedy and King murders, said he got a copy of the letter in the mail in August 1975, as did Howard Roffman of Gainesvillle, Fla., a law school graduate.
Letters UnansweredMr. Weisberg and Mr. Jones said they had written to the address on the envelope and had not received answers, though their letters were not returned as undelivered.
The family of Mr. Hunt, who died Nov. 29, 1974, has protested published assertions that the letter was written to him.
In 1964, the F.B.I. checked the Hunt family in connection with the Kennedy assassination, but no member of the family testified before the commission headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren, which investigated the assassination. Several of Mr. Hunt's sons have called “ridiculous” the notion that any of the Hunts had been connected with the murder.
An associate of the Hunt family said yesterday that H.L. Hunt and members of his family “are not the only Hunts around.”
“Wasn't there a Hunt connected with the C.I.A. back in 1963?” he asked.
There has been no evidence linking E. Howard Hunt, a C.I.A. agent who was involved in the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, to Mr. Oswald. Mr. Hunt has just been released from Federal prison; he had been convicted of complicity in the burglary of the Democratic National Committee Headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington in 1972.
The Oswald “Hunt letter” aroused still more interest after Mr. de Mohrenschildt's death, when Mr. Oltmans came forward to say publicly that Mr. de Mohrenschildt had linked H.L. Hunt to Mr. Oswald.
(...)
Racist oil tycoon H.L. Hunt, 1889-1974
