Lee Harvey Oswald in New York City and Elsewhere

Oswald, NYC and the Shadow of MK/ULTRA

Often overlooked in the chronology of Lee Harvey Oswald's early years is that when he was 12 years old he lived in New York City for a period of about eighteen months, in 1952-1954. Astute readers will also recognize these as critical years in the development and operation of the CIA's MK/ULTRA safe house in the city's Greenwich Village, operated by Federal Bureau Narcotics agent and covert CIA consultant George Hunter White. The first-floor safe house was located at the corner of Bedford and Barrow streets. According to a 1978 CIA document, "an elusive Frenchman who was engaged in the import-export business" owned the two-story, brick apartment house, just a short walk away from Chumley's, one of agent White's favorite watering holes and perhaps a primary reason for its selection. The building that housed the safe house was torn down several decades ago, but Chumley's, with all its ambiance and ghosts, is still there.

Marguerite Oswald and Lee moved to New York City from Texas in early August 1952. For several weeks, Lee and Marguerite lived in a small, fifth-floor apartment located at 325 East 92nd Street, Brooklyn. The cramped unit was shared with Lee's half-brother John Edward Pic, his 18-year old wife Margaret, and their newborn child. Pic's mother-in-law, Mary Fuhrman, a Hungarian immigrant, owned the triplex building that housed the apartment, and while away from the city for about eight weeks she allowed Margaret's family use of the space. Marguerite Oswald enrolled Lee in a private school, the Trinity Evangelical Lutheran School in the Bronx. Within days, Lee became chronically truant. After Marguerite learned that he had skipped nearly two weeks of classes, she placed him in a public school.

John Pic was a Hospital Corpsman and Radioman with the United States Coast Guard. Beginning in early January 1952, and continuing for about four months, Corpsman Pic was assigned to assist with an outbreak of streptococcal infection at a U.S. Navy installation in Bainbridge, Maryland.

Bainbridge is about 170 miles away from Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland, the Army's chemical and biological warfare center and, at the time, Dr. Frank Olson's place of employment. The outbreak occurred not long after the CIA had initiated top-secret Project MK/NAOMI, a joint program with Fort Detrick's Special Operations (SO) Division, headed by Dr. Olson. Project MK/NAOMI's objective was to aggressively develop a cornucopia of lethal biochemical weapons that the CIA could use in targeting people – both individually and in groups – for incapacitation or death.

Said one SO Division bacteriologist about MK/NAOMI: "Our mission was pretty simple and to the point: to provide the CIA with every means possible to maim or kill targeted groups or individuals through the use of toxic and lethal biochemical agents. We worked hard at it and delivered." One of the CIA's earliest documents on the program's genesis uncharacteristically lists some of its objectives: "How to knock off key people ... knock off key guys ... make death look as if from natural causes ... [such as a] method to produce cancer ... and to make it appear as heart attack."

The same document cites the case of an imprisoned "Russian ... who had been subjected to the routine administration of intimidation, bright lights and more severe roughing, followed by insulin shock."

On site for the Bainbridge outbreak, along with Oswald's half-brother Pic, were bacteriologists from the U.S. Army's biological warfare center at Fort Detrick, as well as physicians from the Armed Forces Epidemiological branch. Dr. Charles H. Rammelkamp, Jr., a member of the Armed Forces Epidemiological Board (AFEB), was also present during the outbreak. Readers knowledgeable about the findings of the President's Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1995, may recall that the committee took a cursory look at experiments approved, sponsored, and undertaken by the New York School of Medicine and AFEB on physically-healthy mentally retarded children at the Willowbrook State School in Staten Island, New York, done at the time of Rammelkamp's tenure.

The experiments centered on selected children being fed infected stool extracts obtained from individuals with hepatitis, thus infecting the children with the virus. Additionally, Dr. Rammelkamp was at the center of another controversial experiment conducted in the early 1950s. This experiment, conducted concurrently with the Bainbridge outbreak, involved American servicemen stricken with streptococcus, which can cause rheumatic fever and heart disease. The servicemen, hospitalized at Francis E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming, were intentionally not treated with penicillin, which at the time was still being investigated as an effective treatment for rheumatic fever.

In a 1966 Time magazine article, Harvard University's Dr. Henry K. Beecher (whose actual name was Henry K. Unangst), asked by the magazine to consider Dr. Rammelkamp's experiments, stated that he was "concerned about experiments that are designed for the ultimate good of society in general but may well do harm to the subject involved." Earlier Dr. Beecher had stated in the New England Journal of Medicine that since World War II, the numbers of patients used as unwitting experimental subjects was increasing at alarming rates. Beecher told Time's editors that the increase was causing "grave consequences," but he declined to name any physicians, hospitals, or universities involved in such experiments. Beecher also did not reveal to Time or to anyone else that he, too, like other Harvard officials of his day and today, was involved in such experiments. Nor did Beecher disclose that for the previous thirteen years or more, he had served the CIA as a covert asset and consultant on interrogation and mind-control techniques, including the use of LSD, as well as his specialty – anesthesia. (See my book, A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments, for details about Dr. Henry Beecher's work for the CIA overseas, which included several surreptitious meetings with Sandoz Chemical company officials. See NOTES section on Beecher's real name.)

We do not know if Dr. Frank Olson was among the Fort Detrick scientists who traveled to Bainbridge during the outbreak, but we do know that members of his Fort Detrick Special Operations (SO) Division were present, and that at the time, they were especially interested in creating a biological warfare weapon out of...