The origines of the PO BOX and Hidell ID card

Fritz Notes written after the 23/11/63 interrogation of Lee Oswald;

Interestingly, as an aside here is an excerpt from the Quigley NO arrest report;

Mick_Purdy wrote:Fritz Notes written after the 23/11/63 interrogation of Lee Oswald;

Mick, my memory is that he denied making these notes during the interrogations, but were cribbed after Oswald's death from Bookhout notes/reports as an aid to write his own report after being requeste o do so.

I could be missremembering though...

Mick_Purdy wrote:Interestingly, as an aside here is an excerpt from the Quigley NO arrest report;

Yep, and I think that may well be true.

The description of the person who ordered the flyers was not Oswald. 

And the first flyers distributed were on the docks where the Wasp was berthed. And thse ones had the name Hidell stamped on them. Whoever that was was reported and escorted out of the area by a port police officer.

It was after this that "Hidell" contacted Oswald, flyers were delivered to Oswald and he took over the distribution with "Hidell" apparently going deep underground and this bactch of flyers being samped wit Oswald's name.

There is no logical alternative I can think of as an explanation for the series of events, Oswald's claim about beng contaced by Hidell, nor the change of names on the flyers.

greg_parker wrote:

Mick_Purdy wrote:Fritz Notes written after the 23/11/63 interrogation of Lee Oswald;

Mick, my memory is that he denied making these notes during the interrogations, but were cribbed after Oswald's death from Bookhout notes/reports as an aid to write his own report after being requeste o do so.

I could be missremembering though...

No, I don't think you're misremembering anything mate, I believe I've read somewhere that Fritz wrote these notes days maybe even weeks later from the various interrogation reports and his memory. It's interesting though if the notes are accurate at least with the day that events occurred then Fritz remembers talking to Oswald about the SS card on the 23rd.

The DOD and SS cards were not sighted by Police when they searched his wallet on the 22nd after Oswald's arrest, not made mention of and only later would they magically appear.

greg_parker wrote:

Mick_Purdy wrote:Interestingly, as an aside here is an excerpt from the Quigley NO arrest report;

Yep, and I think that may well be true.

The description of the person who ordered the flyers was not Oswald. 

And the first flyers distributed were on the docks where the Wasp was berthed. And thse ones had the name Hidell stamped on them. Whoever that was was reported and escorted out of the area by a port police officer.

It was after this that "Hidell" contacted Oswald, flyers were delivered to Oswald and he took over the distribution with "Hidell" apparently going deep underground and this bactch of flyers being samped wit Oswald's name.

There is no logical alternative I can think of as an explanation for the series of events, Oswald's claim about beng contaced by Hidell, nor the change of names on the flyers.

I do believe there was a person who contacted Oswald using the name Hidell and who was connected to or at least wanted it to appear that way to the FPCC - just prior to Oswald's arrest in NO.

Hidell is also listed as New Orleans Chapter on one of the cards in evidence. 

That’s interesting about the Hidell Selective Service card. I haven’t really looked at it much and wasn’t aware it doesn’t show up until the 23rd. It’s mentioned in the first memos discussing the findings at Klein’s Sporting Goods, and the earliest one I know of is the Rosen-Belmont memo which I included in original post on microfilm and timed around 8:10 a.m. CST, but I just assumed they actually did find it on Oswald. I’ll have to dig around MFF a bit and look at that more.

Shanklin giving that info on the card Saturday morning.

The HSCA was apparently suspicious, maybe because they also realized that the arresting cops had made no mention of it and it had not come up in any early media reports or the interrogations on Friday.

Yet Friday night, Clements allegedly pulls it out of Oswald's wallet.

But I digress. The HSCA went on a fishing expedition with Col. Jones by asking if he had advised his FBI contact about the card. Jones denied it. They also got him to admit that the FBI report could be mistaken insofar as it showing ANA HIDELL. He agreed he never said that and suggested what he had told them was AKA HIDELL - in other words Hidell as an alias (and I think here, Jones was going with what he believed from other other sources rather than what he knew).  To the credit of Dodd, he was not buying that either and suggested what he had actually told them was Oswald was an associate of AN A HIDELL. Again, Jones agreed that might be right.

I am certain Dodd was right. And the lesson here is that they turned a fuck-up into evidence against the accused. As they did with the fuck up over the name OH Lee. 

But I digress again!!!!! 

It is possible that Oswald had this in his wallet. According to Clements, it was a photograph of a card (as opposed to an actual card). Which to me is evidence that Oswald made it from his own card while practicing with photo equipment at JSC. If it was in his wallet, he had simply put it in there at work and forgot about it. I do that all the time --- but scraps of paper with phone numbers or whatever in my wallet and promptly forget about it. With his own name on it, it would not mean anything to the arresting cops, so no need to mention it.

Alternatively it was found at the Paine house on the Friday, though I am starting to lean toward having it on him. 

So... now we have at least two alternatives... 

1. The cops find out the weapons were ordered by Hidell and alter this card evidence by changing the name on it and adding the passport photo. Now it links him to using Hidell as an alias and the purchase of the weapons.

2. The cops find out about Hidell via Jones and the FBI - with the FBI mistakenly believing Hidell was an alias. They all then conspire to rig purchase records along with the card, to reflect HIdell is the man and Hidell is Oswald.

The first option seems much less of a stretch. All else flows from finding the name Hidell linked to the purchase and that name being mistakenly thought to be an alias.  That would be enough to convince them they had the right man - and enough to justify rigging the rest of the case any way they could. At some point - and not that far down the track, they must have realized they had te wrong man. As if that mattered at all to any of these guys...

So if the NO FPCC card with the A J Hidell name on it as the NO Chapter was legit, would there not have been a record of such a person? Probably not given the rest of this case and the evidence surrounding it. Just curious.

Those Klein's orders seem to be the key. When were they written up and by whom? We'll probably never really know.

barto wrote:Fritz notes are not  contemporary, there is a mention of "the deceased". Also no one mentioned Fritz taking notes at all, it was not his way...he would fck you in court instead...with the backup of a detective.

And the Hidell ID, dead as a dodo.

HERE

Thanks for clearing up on Fritz's notes - and great job in putting all that together on the Hidell ID! Agree with the vast majority of it. Jones is the main sticking point.

 Jones flat out denied to the HSCA that he passed on any information about Oswald carrying Hidell ID. If he did do that, why would he deny it? Who is hurt by him having done that? No one! In fact, it helps the case against Oswald if he did because he could only get it from the cops and that would be evidence that Oswald had it on him (assuming he got the info AFTER the arrest).

The "Ana Hidell" vs "AKA Hidell" snafu was also cleared up during Jones' HSCA deposition. It was neither. Jones admitted that what he said may well have been something like "OSWALD WAS AOSSOCIATED WITH AN A HIDELL"

The problem seems to have been that the hand-witten notes taken during the call were misread when being typed. 

The other issue is that we don;t know when this memo was in fact typed. There is nothing to say it could not have been after the decision that night to alter the fake military card to reflect it belonging to "Alek James Hidell" which decision was made afte the rifle was traced to A Hidell.

The FBI imo, is using Jones to put distance beetween themselves and all the shenanigans. 

The negatives found are prima facie evidence that Oswald made the fake at JSC, but I don't think it was him that blocked his own name out to change it to Hidell. That happened later to make the card that we now see.

But I think we should from here, take any  further discussion on this to another thread so that this one can return to the issue of Klein's microfilm.

In fact I can split this discussion off if Tom thinks that's a good idea.

greg wrote:my memory is that he denied making these notes during the interrogations, but were cribbed after Oswald's death from Bookhout notes/reports as an aid to write his own report after being requested to do so.

Fritz told the Warren Commission that his "report was made from rough notes and memory" and that it might not have got all the details right (Warren Report, p.611). I think the idea that Fritz's "rough notes" were cribbed from Bookhout's notes was something Sean Murphy worked out. Bookhout's notes are lost (as far as I'm aware), but were used to form his solo report on the 25th (WR, p.621).

Sean argued that Fritz's notes were copied from Bookhout's by referring to a page of Fritz's notes of the 10.35 interview on the 23rd, which includes a list of those present. Fritz writes "B[ookhout], O[swald], + myself". Sean argues that:

Sean Murphy wrote:if these notes were really being written by Fritz in real time during the interrogation session, the last thing he would need to be noting down for future reference would be the duh-level-obvious fact that he himself is one of the people present in the room!

No, Fritz is copying from Bookhout's interrogation notes and, seeing the word 'Fritz', naturally translating it as 'myself'.

(https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/20354-oswald-leaving-tsbd/?do=findComment&comment=277498)

Greg,  I’m out of town hiking etc. so haven’t been able to comment much, but agreed that with all the info here a dedicated Hidell/SS Card thread would make for some great discussion. One question I have from reading this that’s relevant to the microfilm though is: why would a forged SS card even be necessary to tie Oswald to Hidell? The Klein’s order had P.O. Box 2915 on it, and regardless of the box shenanigans the FBI knew Oswald at least used the box since Friday night. Once the FBI Lab made their meaningless handwriting identification on the microfilm documents, Oswald ordering the rifle and Oswald = Hidell becomes official with or without the SS Card.

JFK_FNG wrote:Greg,  I’m out of town hiking etc. so haven’t been able to comment much, but agreed that with all the info here a dedicated Hidell/SS Card thread would make for some great discussion. One question I have from reading this that’s relevant to the microfilm though is: why would a forged SS card even be necessary to tie Oswald to Hidell? The Klein’s order had P.O. Box 2915 on it, and regardless of the box shenanigans the FBI knew Oswald at least used the box since Friday night. Once the FBI Lab made their meaningless handwriting identification on the microfilm documents, Oswald ordering the rifle and Oswald = Hidell becomes official with or without the SS Card.

Just quickly... the box belonging to Oswald (or his wife) is not proof that he was Hidell and picked it up.

Anyone with the notice placed in the box of a package being available at the service desk could pick it up. The only bone of contention is whether they would also need to show ID. I think Holmes denied that was the case, but I know I have had a different experience here, needing to show ID to collect.

So there is the possiblity that Oswald needed to have ID in the name of Hidell to pick it up... or he didn't, and anyone at all with the notice could pick it - and in that case, anyone could be "Hidell" if they had that notice. 

In either scenario, the fake ID settles the matter. A card in the name Hidell showing a photo of Oswald could be used to pick the rifle up OR if not needed for that, to prove that no one else except Oswald was pretending to be Hidell.

I looked around for more SS Card info and I found some interesting stuff. First off, immediately after the initial teletype from San Antonio reporting that Jones advised Oswald had the Hidell card, it appears that San Antonio sent a letterhead memorandum clearing up the Ana Hidell issue:



But the plot thickens. The original San Antonio teletype was sent at 4:25 PM CST to Headquarters and Dallas. It appears that nothing happened on the SS Card for another five hours, when Headquarters finally responded reporting Hidell information from New Orleans and ordering Dallas to "immediately obtain full information concerning selective service card in name of Alex Hidell which was allegedly in possession of Oswald". So by 9:30 Friday night the FBI still had no idea the card existed. Also interesting is the note to attempt to track down Ana Hidell in addition to Alex and A.J., which makes sense if the San Antonio memo was submitted via airtel and Headquarters had only seen the 4:25 PM teletype. 



After this I cannot find any teletype response from Dallas concerning the SS Card. The next report I can find is a summary of the investigation from Dallas sent at 5:39 a.m. which contains a very weird statement:







All of a sudden it's Lee Harvey Oswald AKA Alexk James Hidell. There is no mention of the SS card being found in this report though. Interestingly, this report from Dallas is only a few minutes after the discovery of the Hidell sales record in Chicago, but there is no record of any communication from Chicago to Dallas concerning the rifle order until 8:01 AM. 

The first reference to the card being found on Oswald "confirmed" by the FBI I can find is Alex Rosen's memo to Alan Belmont which if my microfilm analysis is accurate was written just after 8:00 AM. Either way Belmont was supposedly told the same thing by Gordon Shanklin in a phone call at 8:15 AM. Interesting though is Rosen says the card was in the name of "Alex Hidell", whereas Shanklin supposedly told Belmont it was "A.J. Hidell":



The only other thing I could find which was kind of interesting is this teletype from New Orleans sent at 6:06 PM, which says investigation has associated the name Ana Hidell with Oswald, which almost surely came from the 11/22 9:21 PM teletype to New Orleans and Dallas. Still though you'd think someone would have figured out the typo over 24 hours later:



Here's the San Antonio teletype for reference:




Does anyone know of a reference to the SS card between 9:21 PM CST Friday night and 5:39 AM the next morning (the 5:39 AM teletype just says Oswald = Hidell but still)? Maybe in Dallas Police records? Otherwise it sure looks like the card is not "verified" until after discovery of the rifle order in Chicago.

I finally got around to reading that article. Great stuff. I’m left with a few lingering questions about the SS Card though. If the card didn’t exist until Saturday morning, and a supposed military intelligence “source” in the DPD mentions the card to Robert Jones early Friday afternoon, wouldn’t that indicate that forgery of the card was pre-planned, or somebody already had it, instead of it being created after discovery of the Klein’s mail order? What would be the point of that, and why a selective service card? It sure looks like nobody else mentions it until Friday morning, but where would the Jones information come from if the card wasn’t actually found on Oswald? Does anyone have a theory for that?  

The FBI Lab documents are particularly revealing and lend credence to the idea that the card was created after the fact, but I still can’t think of a reasonable explanation for the information attributed to Jones. One interesting detail is Jones said his MI file was for Alex James Hidell AKA Lee Harvey Oswald, and that he spoke with the Dallas FBI on Friday. The Dallas teletype I included above from 5:39 AM Saturday says Lee Harvey Oswald AKA Alek James Hidell, but doesn’t mention the SS Card. Did they get that information from Jones?

Another thing is that DPD inventory sheet listing the SS Card being found on Oswald twice. It also says P.O. Box 2915 was in the name of A.J. Hidell, which is exceptionally weird. I’ll add some P.O. Box stuff to this thread at some point.

Also just a side-note, the secret Belmont-Tolson memo mentioning the 9:15 AM phone call with Shanklin you included from Malcom Blunt’s archive is available in full online. I’m pretty sure the full version was also in the google drive you posted. I haven’t seen that particular version in your article, but I actually pasted the entire unredacted memo in the Richmond thread. I got it from the Armstrong archive:

https://digitalcollections-baylor.quartexcollections.com/Documents/Detail/fbi-sullivan/679695?item=679733

EDIT: The version you have of that memo has a handwritten notation that looks like it says something like “mother turned”. Am I reading that correctly? Kind of interesting considering the memo has the statement from Shanklin that agents had checked with the Post Office and box 2915 was in the name of Oswald’s mother. As far as I can tell that memo is the last reference to the box and Mrs. Lee H. Oswald and/or Oswald’s mother on record. Belmonts next memo to Tolson discussing a 10:50 a.m. phone call with Shanklin is where Belmont orders Shanklin to obtain the box application and other correspondence to “further tie it to Oswald”. THAT memo is not available online as far as I can tell, and the first I saw of the phone call time and anything besides the paragraph discussing the box application was Ed providing a reference to the memo in the Lopez report. Maybe it’s in Blunt’s archive somewhere?

https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=62251#relPageId=83&search=%22Sporting_Goods%22

This is from the testimony of John Graef from JCS:

Mr. GRAEF. I believe so; So I called--but to reiterate mainly our best source of employees has been the Texas Employment Commission. They have a larger pool to draw from, so I called--in the course of my dealing with them they have various departments and in the course of dealing with them, I became familiar with one person.

Our particular photographic department is not one that we find experienced personnel readily, and the work we do is, I would say, quite different in variou ways from ordinary photography, as most people know it. I will enlarge on that slightly by saying we do many, many things with letters. For example, we can take a straight line of type and we can curve it or bend it or twist it or put it in a circle, for example, and so, rather than just taking pictures of people as ordinary photographers do, this work which we perform for advertising agencies and artists in this area is a matter of training, learning first to use the equipment we have which takes some time, and then the differences in the material that we use.


For example, the characteristics of photographic paper, the characteristics of chemicals that we use, and it is only after learning and becoming familiar with the equipment and the materials that then you find out whether an employee will produce the work properly, on time, and well, and so, it is usually some time before an employee develops into or either becomes the kind of employee you want.

In other words, after this training period, and you have spent time with him teaching him the equipment and the material, perhaps at this late date, many months by now may have gone by--perhaps he can't--he isn't careful enough in the job--he begins producing, but perhaps we will say he doesn't work as hard as you would like, so quite often we spend a great deal of time teaching someone, only to find out after some months have passed that he isn't a desirable employee, but is just one of those things.

We must, of course, in order to find out if they will do the job, go through the process of teaching him the equipment and about the materials, so I've gone into this because it will help later on in explaining the termination of Lee Oswald with us, but because of these various facts that I have mentioned, I became familiar with one person in particular down at the employment office, the Texas Employment Commission--the agency.
-------------------------

You can bet a lot of that "teaching" consisted of a quick demonstration followed by istructions to play around with the equipment to get used to using it. This would mostly be solo.

And that is precicely what we see with these cards. One does show an attempt to "bend" letters and numbers to look like it had been stamped. 


You can see in this card that the lettering is not "bent" properly.

These cards were made practicing with the equipment. Either Oswald stuck them in his wallet and forgot about them or they were found in the Paine garage on Friday. Either way, nothing was thought of them because they were all in Oswald's name - until it was discovered that the weapons were in the name of Hidell. The cops had their own photo lab. I imagine it was not difficult for them to alter the name and other details on one of those cards.

As for Jones, he denied that he passed any information on about any Hidell card. It comes down to when that FBI report was typed up. 

Thomas Dodd got to the bottom of the ana vs aka snafu while deposing Jones. It was neither, It was "...an A Hidell" and Jones agreed that could have been it. I just think that the FBI later put this on Jones to throw any suspicion off themselves about how/when the card comes into it. None of them thought the deception would ever come out and that Jones' name would never come into it.

What we are talking about here is an FBI agent or typist not being able to read possibly very messy hand-written notes.

The evidence to me screams of a mad scramble to make a case and continually morphing fuck-ups into possitives.

The cops did something similar when they read the ledger at 1026 N Beckley for the lodger identified wrongly as Oswald, and saw "Room 0 H Lee". What that ledger indicated was H (Herbert) Lee was living in room 0. But what the cop thought he was looking at was "O H Lee" and so an alias that never existed was suddemly thrust on Oswald.

One of this issues with this case is that we can get caught up in trying to fit everything into a plot that is hatching - when quite often it is simply bing ad-libbed. They are playing what is in front of them and somehow turning a swing and a miss into a home run.

As for Jones, he denied that he passed any information on about any Hidell card. It comes down to when that FBI report was typed up. 

This is exactly what's bugging me. Jones' statement to the HSCA is flaky yes but doesn't seem like a hard denial, he just says he didn't recall and if he did made that statement he would have obtained the information from his source in the DPD. Since this was a decade and a half later it wouldn't be crazy to think he actually didn't recall:





Also, with how ridiculously incriminating the first 48 hours of teletypes are to the FBI as a whole, I find it hard to believe any of them are flat out fabricated. If we assume the timestamps are legitimate, someone had information regarding a Hidell SS card prior to the San Antonio teletype at 4:25 PM. 

Headquarters finally responds at 9:21 PM asking the Dallas FBI to find out about this SS Card allegedly in the possession of Oswald, with the direction to reply back with info: 




As far as I can tell, Dallas never replied back, and the investigative summary report of 5:39 AM Saturday (same report that says Oswald's alibi was that he went outside after lunch for 5-10 minutes) mentions nothing of the SS Card or anything else found on Oswald, but does say the following:




Jones told the HSCA he spoke with the Dallas FBI on Friday afternoon in addition to San Antonio, yet we get nothing from the Dallas FBI at all on the SS Card until later on Saturday. He also testified that military intelligence knew Hidell was an alias, so if he told that to Dallas it could possibly explain the above statement. 

I'm not sure where I'm going with this but the gist of it is: if we take the San Antonio and Headquarters teletypes at face value, information about the SS Card indeed existed on Friday afternoon. Whether that information came from Jones or not is debatable based on his HSCA testimony, but either way it somehow was included in an FBI teletype at 4:25 PM. 

If we also assume the card was not found on Oswald, for which there is persuasive evidence (those lab documents in Bart's article are about as bad as it gets: not Oswald's signature, not initially turned over to the FBI in Oswald's wallet, etc.), how do we explain the information attributed to Jones?

Maybe I'm going off the deep end here, but I just read this in Jones' HSCA testimony and had to do a double-take:



So he doesn't recall hearing about the SS Card, but does recall his military intelligence source in the DPD telling him about a RIFLE MAIL ORDER on FRIDAY AFTERNOON? 

How on earth was a follow-up question never asked about this?

Credit B Kamp / M Blunt.

Don Stringfellow of the  DPD phoned to R E Jones.

So if the card wasn’t reported on by anyone else in the DPD or FBI until Saturday, but military intelligence agent Stringfellow told Jones about it right after Oswald was arrested, what are the alternatives to:

1. The card actually being found on Oswald and the DPD being sloppy and failing to report on it until its significance becomes apparent from the mail order.

2. Stringfellow having knowledge of a complicated frame-up plot in advance?

Just trying to play devil’s advocate here. If Jones is right and he was told about the mail order Friday afternoon that’s as incriminating as it gets.

Mick_Purdy wrote:Fritz Notes written after the 23/11/63 interrogation of Lee Oswald;

Mick,

What interests me is not so much the line you highlighted, as the line that follows:
"Admits having it. would not admit signature."

Why would Oswald freely admit to having the card, but deny the signature was his. What is the significance to that?
For various reasons, I have come to believe that Marina signed that card, and subsequently, it was she who ordered the rifle.

1. Oswald admitted he had the Alek James Hidell Selective Service card, bur either “denied” or “declined to admit” that the signature was his.
   
2. Marina admitted to signing the name “Hidell” to “two or three things” with the name “Hidell” that were not pamphlets.
   
3. Marina said on at least four occasions that they were living on Neely St. in January, and initially, that she had seen Lee cleaning the rifle in January (which she later corrected to mean she saw it for the first time in March).
   
4. The handwriting experts commissioned by the HSCA were not asked to analyze the signature on the Hidell Selective Service card, or to compare the signature on the rifle order form with the signature on the DeMohrenschildt rifle photo.
   

What I am trying to figure out, is why Oswald didn't denounce the Hidell ID in as strong a terms as he denounced the photos of him with a rifle.
He didn't say, "The card's a fraud and I'll be able to prove it at a later time."

Supposedly, Oswald:

1) Admitted the card was in his possession;
2) Denied that the signature was his; and,
3) Refused to discuss it further

Is Oswald trying to tell us something?
Was he covering for someone?
Does the significance of the card lie not in the card itself, but the signature on it?
If the card was supposed to be used for identification purposes, do we know of any case where it was used as a form of ID?
If not, then what was its purpose?


Steve Thomas

What you want to read is the HSCA interview of RE Jones  
Thanks to Malcolm Blunt, this is not officially online at any of the archival sites.

I am not very talkative on these matters since I have been working on this part for my paper and it is just one giant enigmatic clusterfck..............soz

Steve Thomas wrote:

Mick_Purdy wrote:Fritz Notes written after the 23/11/63 interrogation of Lee Oswald;

Mick,

What interests me is not so much the line you highlighted, as the line that follows:
"Admits having it. would not admit signature."

Why would Oswald freely admit to having the card, but deny the signature was his. What is the significance to that?
For various reasons, I have come to believe that Marina signed that card, and subsequently, it was she who ordered the rifle.

1. Oswald admitted he had the Alek James Hidell Selective Service card, bur either “denied” or “declined to admit” that the signature was his.
   
2. Marina admitted to signing the name “Hidell” to “two or three things” with the name “Hidell” that were not pamphlets.
   
3. Marina said on at least four occasions that they were living on Neely St. in January, and initially, that she had seen Lee cleaning the rifle in January (which she later corrected to mean she saw it for the first time in March).
   
4. The handwriting experts commissioned by the HSCA were not asked to analyze the signature on the Hidell Selective Service card, or to compare the signature on the rifle order form with the signature on the DeMohrenschildt rifle photo.
   

What I am trying to figure out, is why Oswald didn't denounce the Hidell ID in as strong a terms as he denounced the photos of him with a rifle.
He didn't say, "The card's a fraud and I'll be able to prove it at a later time."

Supposedly, Oswald:

1) Admitted the card was in his possession;
2) Denied that the signature was his; and,
3) Refused to discuss it further

Is Oswald trying to tell us something?
Was he covering for someone?
Does the significance of the card lie not in the card itself, but the signature on it?
If the card was supposed to be used for identification purposes, do we know of any case where it was used as a form of ID?
If not, then what was its purpose?


Steve Thomas

All good points Steve,

If Fritz' notes are a collection of what he remembered and gleaned from Bookout's interrogation report in the days, weeks and months after the fact I guess the notes are only as accurate as that might be.

I would need to go back over Bookout's interrogation report to see if anything about the Hidell card is mentioned in there.
Of course if Fritz was lying, it maybe a simple case of Oswald never having had the card on his person at least not the fake SS card...he did have his own as written up in the Clemont's inventory on 23/11/63?

I agree with you that Marina was most likely involved in the order of the weapon. And that she had ample opportunity to slow burn Oswald over many months. 

If Greg is correct and Oswald made that card at Jaggars in an attempt to learn how to use the equipment then he may have made the card (without the Hidell name) and carried it around on his person or left it at home. Either way if Marina was involved in some way in assisting with his frame then it's not hard to imagine her signing an alias on the card without Oswald's knowledge. 

It's intriguing because the San Antonio communication about the card was electronically sent via the wires at 4.25pm CST 22/11/63. Allegedly quoting or paraphrasing Col Jones about intel on Oswald and the Hidell name and makes mention of the card as well. I'm assuming the teletype is authentic as it appears to be timestamped. Notwithstanding Col Jones's HSCA testimony/interview the 4.25pm teletype is evidence that someone knew of the card and the name Hidell at that time.

So if Oswald had this card on his  person at the time of his arrest then the timeline fits and would corroborate the info which is carried in the San Antonio teletype. It then inexplicably doesn't account for the Police not having made sight of it when they searched his wallet at or around the time of his arrest. But if Greg's theory is correct about the SS card having been an exercise in learning about the equipment in at Jaggar's then Oswald may have had a fake SS card with him with or without the PP photo and Blank spaces to fill in names etc. That would explain Fritz's notes a little?

Or the card was left at the Paines house to be found on the first search of the residence by Police. It's not hard to imagine either Ruth Paine or Marina making sure the police located it.

Steve, 

It funny you commented this. Not 10 minutes before I saw this I was reading an Ed forum thread from 2019 by you where you make the same argument about Marina ordering the rifle, and with how the FBI and WC handled P.O. Box 2915 I think you might be right. The FBI Lab was unable to match the signature on the Hidell ID card to Oswald, but they never compared it to Marina's known handwriting:



This is the comparison of the Marina signature on the FPCC Card to the rifle order form you included in that Ed forum thread. It's pretty compelling: 





Since Greg made this an origins of the P.O. Box thread in addition to the SS Card, and you gave a perfect lead-in, I'll try to contribute something on P.O. Box 2915. I don't know how to say what I want to say without including a whole bunch of documents, so this is going to be pretty long but I'll try to be as concise as I can. The point is that the FBI and WC deliberately concealed the fact that Marina Oswald, at minimum, was listed on the "missing" section of the box application, and there's a strong case the box was actually in her name. 

,At 10:29 PM CST, Dallas sent what I think is one of the most significant teletypes of the early investigation. This teletype mentions Harry Holmes discovering two change of address orders for Mrs. Lee Harvey Oswald relating to box 2915, plus a forwarding cancellation. Holmes also mentions information obtained from the box application of P.O. Box 6225, but nothing regarding the application for Box 2915:




Alex Rosen refers to the 5/10/63 COA order for Mrs. Oswald in his memo to Alan Belmont on Saturday morning, but mentions nothing regarding Lee. The FBI for some crazy reason considers Mrs. Lee H. Oswald Oswald's mother and not Marina:




Then Belmont calls Gordon Shanklin at 8:15 AM and all of a sudden the box is in the name of Oswald's mother:





Belmont calls Shanklin again at 10:50 a.m. and now wants Shanklin to obtain the box application and all correspondence dealing with box to further tie it to Oswald:



Shanklin complies, and according to his memo turns over two copies of the application for box 6225, and the application for 2915 which is now in Lee's name alone and was opened on 10/9/62. Note Shanklin's description of the application for box 6225, which we know was seen by Holmes on Friday from the 10:29 PM teletype. Shanklin mentions the initials and date 11/22/63, but mentions no such thing for box 2915:




This is where things get especially screwy, because the "box correspondence" as shown in the 11/22 10:29 PM Dallas teletype included two COA orders for Mrs. Lee H. Oswald plus a forwarding cancellation. The only COA order supposedly submitted to the lab was the 5/14/63 COA for Lee to Magazine St. Two days later on 11/25 the lab receives the Post Office documents and identifies the handwriting on the applications as belonging to Lee Oswald:





I'm not sure how the lab could know the signature on the 5/14/63 COA was Oswald's without comparing it, but we'll go with it. Next we get some shenanigans with what was even turned over to the FBI to begin with. The Postal Inspectors put together a report that says the following:




So according to the Postal Inspectors the original box applications were turned over to the FBI but the original 5/14/63 COA was sent to the Secret Service. So did the FBI Lab just get a copy? According to this report the FBI didn't get the COA order at all. Also, the lab designation for the COA is just K18, not Kc18, which indicates an original document. What's even more messed up is the original draft of the Postal Inspector report says this:



So the first draft of this report before it was "corrected" said that Dallas Postal Inspectors turned over copies of the two box applications and the original COA order to the FBI, and nothing was given to the Secret Service. This actually jives better with Shanklin's submittal memo and the lab report, but if the FBI only got copies of the box applications, what happened to the originals? 

The same PI report mentions another COA order found in Irving on 11/22:



So this COA, one day after Lee Oswald's COA from P.O. Box 2915 to 4907 Magazine St. allegedly forwards Lee's mail from Ruth Paine's house also to 4907 Magazine St. The problem is there is no documentation anywhere supporting Lee Oswald using Paine's house for mail prior to Sept. 63. Marina however had just changed her address on 5/10/63 to Paine's house from box 2915. According to the WC, Paine brought Marina to New Orleans the next day on 5/11 and went back to Irving on 5/14/63. Therefore I think this COA order (which doesn't exist in evidence), was for Marina. The COA for Mrs. Lee H. Oswald with the unknown date mentioned in the 11/22 Dallas teletype, which doesn't mention where the mail was forwarded from to P.O. Box 30061, would have thus been from 4907 Magazine St. Sure enough the first draft of the PI report mentions nothing about the 5/15 COA belonging to Lee:



So now we are in New Orleans. Lee Oswald supposedly opens box 30061 on 6/3/63 and subsequently closes the box on 9/24/63 and changes his address to Ruth Paine's house. The NO FBI gets ahold of these documents and submits them to the lab on 11/23/63:



This is the box application that shows Marina and A.J. Hidell were entitled to receive mail. A 302 report is put together describing the documents from New Orleans, and it has some interesting details:



So according to NO informant T-1, everything besides the signatures and date of application might have been written by substitute postal clerk, Richmond Tankersley, who is an interesting character we'll run into again in a minute. Apparently though, the FBI Lab disagreed and said on 11/25/63 (when the NO documents were received) that all the handwriting was done by Lee Oswald himself. 

So where am I going with this? Here are the Post Office documents from Dallas and New Orleans. 

Dallas Box Applications:



Note the initials H.H. and date 11/22/63 on the application for box 2915. Recall that these markings were not mentioned in the description sent from Dallas, but they were mentioned for the box 6225 application. 


5/14/63 COA Order:




This COA also has Holmes initials and date which were not mentioned in the Dallas description. Also note the handwriting comparison arrows. According the the FBI Lab report this handwriting was never actually compared to anything, it was considered a "known" document. Also this COA was apparently never endorsed by a Post Office clerk. I'm not sure the significance of that, but all the other COA orders on record have a clerk endorsement. 

Box 30061 Application: 



Note the initials R.T. for Richmond Tankersley. Apparently substitute clerk Tankersley was also working when Oswald closed the box:

9/24/63 COA Order:



So why am I talking about New Orleans in a thread on P.O. Box 2915? Let's see what Harry Holmes has to say. This is from his 12/17/63 report discussing his interview with Oswald:


So according to Holmes, Oswald confirmed he had rented box 2915 in his name, but had two keys, and occasionally might have given one to Marina. He denied ordering a rifle, and also denied putting Hidell on the box 30061 application. The key statements here however are that Oswald allegedly confirmed that when he closed box 2915 he had his mail forwarded to his street address in New Orleans, AND that it was more practical for him to keep up with publications to just forward mail from one P.O. Box to the next instead of filing COA orders with publishers. As we've seen, Oswald never filed a COA for his mail from box 2915 to box 30061, but "Mrs. Lee H. Oswald" did, through Paine's house on 5/10/63 and 4907 Magazine St. on 5/15/63. The proof of this is that Oswald DID file COA orders directly with publishers for box 30061, like this example for The Worker:




If Oswald had filed a form 3575 with the New Orleans Post Office forwarding his mail from 4907 Magazine St. to box 30061, there would be no need for him to file this form 3573 with The Worker. So far Oswald's mail forwarding looks like this: 

Box 2915 (10/9/62) > Magazine St. (5/14/63) 

Box 30061 (6/3/63) > Paine's house (9/24/63)

All mail Oswald received at Box 30061 was arranged separately. Why does this matter? The Warren Commission ran into a problem when a forwarding cancellation order sent from New Orleans showed up months later with a postmark for a date Oswald was not in New Orleans. I'm sure everyone here is familiar with the Holmes-Liebeler testimony where Holmes perjured himself regarding postal regulations and the second section of the Box 2915 application, but perhaps even more interesting is his testimony regarding Holmes Exhibit 3-A, the forwarding cancellation dated 10/11/63:








Oswald was not in New Orleans on Oct. 11, and Exhibit 3-A is obviously not in Oswald's handwriting, so Holmes suggests it was filled out for him at the NO Post office based on the records in their possession. Note the initials R.T., once again for substitute clerk Richmond Tankersley.

Holmes 3-A is cancelling a forwarding order from box 2915 to box 30061, instead forwarding the mail to Paine's house. However, as we have seen, Oswald never had his mail forwarded between those two boxes, even through an intermediate address. Guess who did, and had the forwarding cancelled on October 11, 1963? Let's jump back to the 11/22 Dallas teletype:



So what's the deal with Holmes Exhibit 3-A and the incredibly "lucky" substitute clerk Richmond Tankersley, who was substituting every time a significant Oswald Post Office document was submitted in New Orleans? Unbelievably, not a single official government investigation ever spoke with Tankersley, but Jim Garrison did, on direction from Harold Weisberg who realized how incredibly weird it was that the FBI never spoke with Tankersley:



So Tankersley told James Alcock that he filled out the form because the box was still receiving mail for Oswald addressed to box 2915. We've seen the problem with this already: the only mail originally addressed to box 2915 that would have ended up in box 30061 would have been for Mrs. Lee H. Oswald. Alcock had Tankersley fill out a blank form 3546 for handwriting comparison. Garrison's note at the bottom says the handwriting looks at a glance quite different from Tankersley's, but I cannot find the comparison form anywhere online, or any evidence Garrison ever had an actual handwriting analysis performed. This would be something interesting to look for in Garrison's ARRB files. 

Here's a recap of the mail forwarding for Lee and "Mrs. Oswald" based on the documents mentioned in the FBI HQ file, FBI Oswald file, and WC volumes. Documents NOT actually in evidence will be in bold. 

Mail forwarding for Lee Harvey Oswald:

Box 2915 (10/9/62) > 4907 Magazine St. (5/14/63) 

Box 30061 (6/3/63) > 2515 W 5th St. (9/24/63)

Mail Forwarding for "Mrs. Lee H. Oswald"

Box 2915 (10/9/62) > 2515 W. 5th St (5/10/63) > 4907 Magazine St. (5/15/63) > Box 30061 (after 6/3/63?) > 2515 W. 5th St. (10/11/63)[Holmes 3-A?] 

In closing, I'll add a couple extra tidbits. Marina Oswald listed P.O. Box 2915 as her address in her letters to the Russian Embassy:



Let's also take a look at Harry Holmes first WC testimony. Here's what he says regarding the Box 6225 application:



Note that Belin mentions the 11/22/63 date and initials. Now lets take a look at what Holmes says about the application for box 2915:




Holmes is not asked to authenticate the evidence, doesn't even remember how he found out about the box, and doesn't say anything about giving the box application to the FBI. Belin does NOT mention the 11/22/63 date or initials, even though they appear on the application in the WC Volumes. Recall that the initials and date were only mentioned for box 6225 in the 11/23 Dallas submittal memo. Holmes was also not even asked about the 5/14/63 Oswald COA order, which also shows his initials H.H. and the date 11/22/63 in the W.C. volumes. Also note that both box applications submitted as exhibits are referred to as photostatic copies. 

This one is my personal favorite: here's what happens when Holmes starts talking about giving COA orders to the FBI:



Holmes eventually goes into talking about the interview with Oswald he sat in on on Sunday morning. Poor Harry might have slipped up a bit on this one:



So Holmes says he had the ORIGINAL box applications in his possession on Sunday morning. We should backtrack a bit for this one. Recall that the "official" Postal Inspector report says that the original Dallas box applications were turned over to the FBI on 11/23, which were then forwarded to the FBI lab, and the original COA order was given to the Secret Service. The first draft of the PI report says that copies of the box applications were given to the FBI along with the original 5/14/63 COA order. It looks like draft one might have been a bit more accurate. The implications of this are that the FBI NEVER obtained the original box applications for box 2915 and box 6225, and the handwriting analysis was performed on copies. 

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I know that was long but if anyone reads this whole thing the basic point is that the P.O. Box documents in evidence are dubious at best, the FBI and WC deliberately suppressed Marina Oswald's connection to P.O. Box 2915, and Harry Holmes is a lying P.O.S. 

This is just a "brief" overview of my own incomplete understanding. There is so much more bizarre stuff going on with Oswald's addresses, the P.O. Boxes, and the handwriting analyses. It's just way too much to put in a forum post. 

A few of my lingering questions would be:


1.) Why would Holmes 3-A say "Lee H. Oswald" but the 11/22 Dallas teletype says the 10/11/63 forwarding cancellation was for Mrs. Lee H. Oswald? 

2.) Why didn't the FBI ever speak with Richmond Tankersley? Did Jim Garrison ever verify his handwriting on Holmes 3-A?

3.) Why the hell would the FBI think Mrs. Lee H. Oswald was "Oswald's mother" and not Marina?

4.) Why was not a single COA order for Marina Oswald entered into evidence, when the WC volumes include random stuff like COA orders for Marguerite from 1961? 

One answer I can think of to number 4, is that Marina or "Mrs. Lee H. Oswald aka Oswald's mother" ordered the rifle, and the WC didn't want to have to question her about using P.O. Box 2915.

WC testimony of Marina Oswald February 3, 1964
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/russ/testimony/oswald_m1.htm


Mr. RANKIN. Did you ever observe your husband taking the rifle away from the apartment on Neely Street?
Mrs. OSWALD. Now, I think that he probably did sometimes, but I never did see it. You must understand that sometimes I would be in the kitchen and he would be in his room downstairs, and he would say bye-bye, I will be hack soon, and he may have taken it. He probably did. Perhaps he purely waited for an occasion when he could take it away without my seeing it.


However, on March 3, 1964 Marina told FBI Agents, Wallace Heitman and Anatoly Boguslav that not only had she seen Oswald take the rifle out of the apartment in March, 1963, but that she had gone with him! This is CE 1838.


https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=1139#relPageId=549&tab=page
March 3, 1964


Mr. RANKIN. When you saw the rifle assembled in the room, did it have the scope on it?
Mrs. OSWALD. No, it did not have a scope on it.


Mr. RANKIN. Do you recall seeing the rifle when the telescopic lens was on it?
Mrs. OSWALD. I hadn't paid any attention initially.
I know a rifle was a rifle. I didn't know whether or not it had a telescope attached to it. But the first time I remember seeing it was in New Orleans, where I recognized the telescope. But probably the telescope was on before. I simply hadn't paid attention.
I hope you understand. When I saw it, I thought that all rifles have that.


I don't know whether he took it from the house or whether perhaps he even kept the rifle somewhere outside. There was a little square, sort of a little courtyard where he might have kept it.


So, let me see if I've got this straight.
Marina first saw the rifle in February, before it had even been purchased.
She first told the FBI that she saw Lee cleaning the rifle in January, but then later told them that she was mistaken and that the cleaning had taken place in March.
It was kept out in the open, but maybe he kept it outside.
She never actually saw him take the rifle away from the apartment and never talks about seeing him bring it back, but traced for the FBI that he took.
Lee took the rifle on Sunday, but the shooting [of Walker] wasn't until Wednesday. Where was the rifle in the meantime?
She said that Lee had told her her buried the rifle after the shooting. When did he go back and dig it up?
When she saw the rifle, it didn't have a scope on it, but knew it had a scope because she recognized it.
I read that Love Field is something like six miles from where they lived on Neely St., so he would have had to have taken the bus, unless someone was giving him rides – all the time while he working at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall.


Lee was riding a bus for six miles with a rifle, several times.
The Walker note from Lee to Marina wasn’t discovered until it fell out of a book after their belongings has been seized and searched by the police.

Steve Thomas