Read American Conspiracies: Lies, Lies, and More Dirty Lies That the Government Tells Us for Free Online Page B

brother’s name Lee Harvey Oswald or Harvey Lee Oswald? ... We have it here as Harvey Lee.” Robert replied, “No, it’s Lee Harvey Oswald.” 15
    The first Dallas Police memo generated that day also designated the fellow as “Harvey Lee Oswald.” An army cable sent from Fort Sam Houston to the U.S. Strike Command at McDill Air Force Base in Florida started out: “Following is additional information on Oswald, Harvey Lee.” By the time the Secret Service interviewed Oswald’s widow, Marina, three days after the assassination, you’d think they’d have the name right. But the way they phrased it to Marina went: “After you married Harvey, where did you and Harvey maintain your address or residence?” And the Secret Service report of its interview with William Stout Oswald said he “stated that although Harvey Lee Oswald is said to be his second cousin, he had never met him nor had he known Harvey was also employed by the William B. Reily Coffee Company.”
    This weird pattern had been going on for a long time. When Oswald was living in Russia, a March 2, 1961, memo from the U.S. Passport Office to the State Department Security Office “requested that the recipients advise if the FBI is receiving info about Harvey on a continuing basis.” Soviet records only deepen the mystery. Oswald was known to sometimes use the nickname of “Alik” with people he knew over there. When he was hospitalized in Minsk for an adenoid operation, he’s variously listed as “Harvey Alik Oswald,” “Harvey A. Oswald,” and “H.A. Oswald.” The name “Lee” doesn’t appear on any of the hospital files.
    A CIA document dated three days after the assassination says: “It was partly out of curiosity to learn if Oswald’s wife would actually accompany him to our country, partly out of interest in Oswald’s own experiences in the USSR, that we showed intelligence interest in the Harvey story.” I found that phrasing rather odd. Back in Texas on Thanksgiving Day, 1962, Oswald entered his name as “Harvey” in his half-brother John Pic’s address book. This is despite the fact that a guy named J.E. Pitts who served with him in the Marines remembered that Oswald “had an intense hate for anyone that called him by the nickname of ‘Harve’ or by his middle name of ‘Harvey’ and he wanted to fight anyone that did it.” 16
    Okay, now let’s turn to the question of Oswald’s height. The Warren Report has Oswald standing 5-feet-9-inches tall, the height recorded by the Dallas police after his arrest and during the autopsy on his body after Ruby shot him. The commission’s 26 volumes of testimony and exhibits have 12 different documents recording that same height. These are all heights for Oswald in the United States after he came back home in 1962. The 5-foot-9 is on all of his employment applications, including the one at the Texas School Book Depository, and also how he was measured by the New Orleans police after getting arrested during a street confrontation with some anti-Castro Cuban exiles on August 9, 1963. It’s also the height listed earlier when he finishes his Marine boot camp, on December 28, 1956.
    But what the Warren Report doesn’t say is that, on documents concerning his discharge from the Marines and his travels overseas after that, he’s listed as 5-foot-11. Not just once, but three times over 11 days in September 1959 by a doctor and two other Marines. He’s 5-foot-11 on his passport when he goes to Russia, and an application he makes to get admitted to Albert Schweitzer College in Switzerland. A total of eight documents in the Warren volumes have an Oswald two inches taller than the guy who got arrested on November 22, 1963.
    When the police checked Oswald’s wallet on the afternoon of the assassination, they found both a 1959 Marine Selective