Before leaving, Lee put his hand in his pocket and offered to contribute to Bringuier’s cause. Bringuier was skeptical because he had been warned that the FBI might try to infiltrate his organization and he was not sure what breed of cat Oswald was, whether he was from the FBI or whether he might, on the other hand, be pro-Castro. He refused Oswald’s money. Undaunted, Lee returned to the store the next day and left his Guidebook for Marines.
A few days later, on Friday, August 9, Bringuier received word that a young man was demonstrating on Canal Street, wearing a homemade placard that said “Viva Fidel!” and passing out handbills. Bringuier and two friends went in search of the man and found themselves face to face with Lee Oswald. Lee looked surprised, then smiled and held out his hand to Bringuier. Bringuier exploded. He explained to the crowd that this man had presented himself a few days earlier as an anti-Castro volunteer; now it turned out that he was a Castro agent and a Communist. Bringuier’s Latin anger had its appeal, and the crowd began shouting at Oswald: “Traitor! Communist! Go to Cuba!” and, to each other, “Kill him!”
A policeman told Bringuier to keep moving and let Oswald hand out his literature. But one of Bringuier’s companions grabbed a handful of Oswald’s leaflets, tore them up, and hurled them in the air. Bringuier removed his eyeglasses and went up to Oswald as if to hit him. Lee crossed his arms in front of his face and said quietly: “Okay, Carlos, if you want to hit me, hit me.”
Just then two patrol cars arrived and took all four of them, Oswald and the three exiles, to the police station. Bringuier noticed at the station that Oswald appeared confident, cool, very much in command of himself. Bringuier and his friends each put up $25 bond and were told to show up in court on Monday. Oswald did not put up bond and stayed overnight in jail.
On arriving for work the next morning, Francis Martello, a lieutenant in the Intelligence Division of the police department, decided to have a talk with Oswald.[16] Lee was flattered that Martello listened seriously to his views about Russia and Marxism. He claimed that the New Orleans “chapter” of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee comprised thirty-five members and met monthly at various addresses, which he declined to divulge, with about five in attendance each time. Martello’s later account suggests that Lee was in a grandiloquent frame of mind, but his response to one question was striking succinct. Asked his opinions of Kennedy and Khrushchev, Lee said tersely: “They seem to get along very well together.” Martello was impressed by Lee’s calm, his almost professorial demeanor, his lack of aggressiveness or emotional outbursts, and the fact that Bringuier, for all his efforts, had been unable to taunt him into physical combat. Martello later called Oswald “a very passive type.”
On the telephone Lee was his old, demanding self. He called the Murrets several times and ordered them to bail him out. Dutz was away on a religious retreat, and Lillian was in the hospital, recovering from an ear operation. The only member of the family on the spot was the older daughter, Joyce Murret O’Brien, who was on a visit from Beaumont, Texas. She came to the jail, but when she learned that her cousin’s trouble had to do with politics, with helping Castro in some way, she became frightened and did not want to bail him out. Martello assured her that the offense was mild. Joyce conferred with her mother, and they decided that the best course was to call Emile Bruneau, a politician of their acquaintance, and ask his help. Apparently, it was Bruneau who sprung Lee.
Lee, meanwhile, had made an unusual request. He told Lieutenant Martello that he wished to speak with someone from the FBI. It was Saturday morning, and the agent who came to the police station, John Quigley, had never seen Oswald’s file, did not recognize the name nor realize that another FBI agent, Milton Kaack, was already engaged in a mild investigation of this very man. Kaack had visited Oswald’s landlady and the Reily coffee company only a few days before, on August 5.
In an hour and a half interview with Quigley, Lee told a number of lies that was unprecedented even for him.[17] But why, given his fear and hatred of the organization, did Lee ask to see someone from the FBI? No one from the agency had been to see him in a year, and there is every reason to suppose that Lee would stay as far away from the FBI as he possibly could.
Perhaps, as Lee’s brother Robert has suggested, it was part of Lee’s continuing effort to create mystery and drama around himself. Perhaps he wanted to impress the officers at the police station, encourage them to think that he had been acting as an FBI provocateur and thereby secure an early release. Or perhaps, finding himself in jail for the first time, Lee needed to feel singular and important, and summoning the FBI gave him that feeling. It is even possible that the FBI’s lack of overt attention over the past year, relief though it was, had created a feeling of suspense in him and had strained his sense of self-importance.
Lee may also have anticipated that local FBI officers would read about his street scene in the newspapers. By being the first one to tell them about it, and in his own terms, he may have felt that he could control the situation. Lee knew, moreover, that the FBI would have been most interested in his recent attempt on General Walker. Now that he was in a police station, obviously up to no good, he may, without quite knowing it, have hoped to catch the eye of someone who would stop him before he did anything worse. Finally, after the anticlimax of the Walker affair, Lee still wanted, in a way, to be punished. By deliberately inviting the FBI into his life again, perhaps he thought he could control even his own punishment.
The lies he told Agent Quigley did help revive the FBI’s interest in him. But for the moment what Lee carried away from his incarceration was a brief but exhilarating memory. He had been locked up just long enough so that he could later claim to have paid a price for the pro-Castro cause. He had turned the tables on the FBI, summoning an officer at his pleasure rather than being summoned at theirs. And by far his happiest recollections were his talks with Lieutenant Martello. From them he learned that prison need not be all bad. Prison can provide a forum for your ideas. People pay attention and listen to you there.
Lee arrived home in scapegrace good spirits, dirty, rumpled, unshaven, with a glint of humor in his eye and an air of gaiety about him. “I’ve been to the police station.”
“I thought so,” said Marina. “So that’s the way it turned out.”
She wanted to know where he slept. He explained that the beds had no mattresses, so he had taken off all his clothes and made a mattress of them.
“You slept without any pants on?”
“It was hot. And it was just men, anyway. If they didn’t like it, they could have let me out sooner.”
He added that in the morning he had been taken to see a police officer, a good man and “a kindly uncle,” to whom he explained his theories. “He listened to my ideas and let me out.”
Marina had been worried when Lee failed to come home the night before. She knew that he was out with his leaflets and guessed that he was in trouble with the police. At least he was not with another woman. She had memories of the Walker evening, however, and so she had checked Lee’s closet. The rifle, thank God, was in its place. Even so, Marina had not been able to get to sleep until three o’clock in the morning.
17
Testimony of John Lester Quigley, Vol. 4, pp. 431–440; Quigley’s report on the interview is part of Exhibit No. 826 and appears in Vol. 17, 758–762.