Photo Back Story #2, Oswald's radio

I was well into my research for the book when I read in Brian Latell’s Castro’s Secrets that Lee Harvey Oswald owned a Russian radio.  The photograph of his Turist PMP-56 pictured above was provided by the National Archives.  Spy agencies around the world give agents one-way-listen (“OWL”). Since the radios don’t transmit, they can’t be picked up by security forces in a country.  Oswald’s ownership of a Russian radio was, therefore, suspicious in the least.

            The Turist was the first portable radios with rechargeable batteries made behind the Iron Curtain in Latvia.  It picked up the two broadcast radio bands in Europe, the long-wave and the medium-wave.  The former is not used for broadcasting in the Western Hemisphere, but the medium-wave band is the same as the AM radio band in the United States.  The radio was named Turist because it was portable and because it had an external antenna attachment that the owner could use to pick up distant stations when he was traveling.

            After Oswald’s arrest on the afternoon of the assassination, Dallas police went to his rooming house with orders to collect his possessions as evidence.  They cooled their heels there waiting for a justice of the peace to show up with a search warrant.  They then boxed up everything in Oswald’s room, took it to the police station, and photographed his possessions.  In addition to the radio itself, they had the external transformer that served as a base for the radio and recharged the batteries.  There is no mention or photograph of an external antenna or wire.  In this police photograph, the radio is tuned to about 1330 KHz on the AM band.  Presumably, this was the last station Oswald listened to.

            Dallas News reporter Lee Aynesworth went to Oswald’s rooming house after the search and interviewed Arthur and Gladys Johnson, who owned the rooming house.  When asked what Oswald did in the evening, they told Aynesworth that Oswald would retire to his room early and listen to the small radio.  The Warren Commission did not mention the radio in its report, choosing instead to say that Oswald watched television in the evenings. 

            The Warren Commission did ask NSA to look at the radio.  NSA reported that it found nothing “of cryptological significance.”  This tends to suggest the NSA only looked at the radio to see if had decoding electronics. In response to my Freedom of Information Act request, NSA wrote me that it could not locate the report of the individual who had actually inspected the radio.  Thus, there is no way to know what the inspector looked for, but according to a later FBI report, the radio didn’t work when it got it from Dallas police, and this was before the FBI sent it to NSA.  The NSA’s internal documents, not furnished the Warren Commission, mentioned NSA had a report from British intelligence about the Turist.  This suggests that British intelligence was interested in the Turist as something the Soviets and their clients might give spies as OWL radios.  But NSA claims that today it has nothing on this subject.

            A radio engineer told me that an AM signal from Cuba could easily be heard on the coast of Texas at night but that Dallas was too far inland to pick a signal up without an external antenna.  A shortwave broadcast from Cuba would reach Dallas though.  A ham operator in Dallas said a signal on the upper part of the AM band, such as 1330 KHz, might be heard in Dallas because he had once picked up a Cuban broadcast on a slightly higher frequency in the shortwave band. 

            The radio is now in the possession of the National Archives, so I asked to be allowed to inspect it.  I planned to take along someone who knew about radios.  Although the National Archives allowed me to inspect some of Oswald’s books, it refused to let me see the radio, giving the odd reason that the radio was evidence in a criminal case.  The Archives did agree to take photographs of the radio, inside and out, and send them to me. Comparing the photograph (below) with those of the standard Turist that I found online, I could see the internal ferrite antenna was broken off at one end and the copper coil moved.  Did this allow it to pick up shortwave?  Experts say the only way to know is to test it, something no one has ever done. 

            AM signals travel farther at night because the sun’s heating of the atmosphere during the day interferes with signals.  Because of this, the Federal Communications Commission in the 1960s required most AM stations to reduce power at night but allowed a few “clear channel” stations around the country to boost power.  The clear channel stations could be picked up hundreds of miles away. One in Texas had listeners all over the Plains States.  The FCC obviously could not control Cuban stations, and, oddly given the Kennedy administration’s hostility toward Cuba, did not even keep data on Cuban stations.  However, a world radio publication of the time said that in 1961, the Cuban station on frequency 1330 was operating at 1,000 watts of power.  This was high power since non-clear channel stations in the U.S. had to reduce power to less than 10 watts, and Cuba may have increased power by 1963.