Oswald in the doorway: the blog of the Oswald Innocence Campaign, by Ralph Cinque

So, the TSBD was a CIA front company. They had a public identity as a school book distributor to cover up what they were really doing. But, why get involved with school books?   Look at this stack here. It is 8 boxes high. Who would stack boxes of school books 8 high? First the weight of it all would crush the books on the bottom. But second, consider how dangerous it was. It could topple over and hurt somebody. There weren't any ladders there to get up to it, and we have never even seen a single forklift. So, how were they moved there in the first place. By hand? 

Did you ever see Three Days of the Condor starring Robert Redford? From the 1970s,  it's a good movie. In it, he plays a CIA researcher who works at a CIA front company, the "American Literary Historical Society," but what they really do is do research and intelligence gathering for the CIA. And then there are the Bourne movies, which make use of various CIA front companies. And Jason Bourne is a great character. He is right up there with Sheriff Joe Haladin from My Stretch of Texas Ground as a great screen character, in my humble opinion. But, in the case of the TSBD, what's with all the boxes? Would they go to all that trouble just for appearances? No one would. 

So, the boxes must have been useful. They must have contained things, and I don't mean books. They must have been moving some kind of contraband: drugs, weapons, ammunition. And that must be why they needed the guise of book distributing to account for all the boxes. 

But, what were the "order-fillers" doing? Well, it's likely that they had some real books there. But, did they get real orders? Again, there is no evidence of class-size orders being filled by those order-fillers and the one "mailer" Troy West. And remember that we have no evidence whatsoever of orders going out, or of parcels being ready to go out. Just read this testimony.

Mr. BELIN - Well I have a first floor map here of the Texas School Book Depository. Here is Elm Street and here is the front entrance. Here is Mr. Truly's office, and Here is Mr. Shelley's office. There is the stairway down to the basement, and there are the elevators and the back stairway. There are the toilets there. About where would you wrap mail there? Here is the Domino room and the shower. You are looking here, that is north Elm Street runs this way and Houston Street runs that way. It is shown on the diagram. Mr. WEST - Well, my place was in the west side of the other building.  

I have to laugh. It's like something out of Abbott and Costello. Belin did all that specifying and delineating only to hear Troy say he worked in another building. But, Belin just ignored it, and I think that Troy got the idea that he was expected to go along, and he did. And before that, here is how he described himself.

Mr. BELIN - What do you do for the Texas School Book Depository? 
Mr. WEST - Well, I am a mail wrapper. 
Mr. BELIN - You are a mail wrapper? 
Mr. WEST - I wrap mail all the time. 

If you were shipping books, would you describe yourself as a mail wrapper? Would you consider textbooks being sent to schools as mail?  Why wouldn't you say book wrapper? Why, if you were handling books all day long, would you refer to that as mail?

We know that Oswald was not comfortable at the TSBD. He was extremely anti-social there. And before you say that was his nature, don't; because it wasn't. If you talk to the people who knew him in Russia, he was nothing like that there. They said that he was very social, engaging, friendly, and talkative. And if you look at the photos we have of him from Russia, it shows that he wasn't like that, for instance, hugging Marina's aunt. But, Oswald was never friendly to anyone at the TSBD. And he was not friends with Frazier. He just rode with Frazier, to and from Irving, a few times, and other than that, he had no interest in getting to know him or doing anything with him, or even talking to him. So, why was Oswald that way at the TSBD? Did he have an uneasy feeling about the place? Did he have a sense that it wasn't what it appeared to be?  

And what were those "order-fillers" really doing?