007 and Lee Harvey Oswald

  

007, LHO and JFK 

According to the myth, in early 1954, in order to take his mind off impending marriage, Ian Fleming sat down at his typewriter in his Jamaican beach house and began “Casino Royale,” a paperback spy thriller novel, that he called “the spy story to end all spy stories.”

The chief of British Naval Intelligence christened his secret agent Double-Oh Seven - 007 - James Bond, who was licensed to kill on behalf of her majesty’s secret service, while having the cover job of an import-export agent for Universal Export. 

Writing a book a year, by 1957 he had a few novels under his belt when he wrote what some considered his finest, “From Russia with Love,” about the theft of a Soviet cipher and the defection of a young and beautiful Russian embassy clerk.

A few years later, Lee Harvey Oswald, just out of the US Marine Corps, boarded a tramp steamer in New Orleans and sailed for Europe on the first leg of a journey that would take him behind the Iron Curtain as a “defector” to the Soviet Union. The passport that Oswald turned over to the US Embassy in Moscow when he announced his defection indicated that his profession was “Import-Export” agent.

In fact, Oswald, before enlisting in the US Marines, did work at an import and export firm in New Orleans. As explained by his brother Robert (Lee – A Portrait of Lee, Coward-McCann, 1967, p. 74), “In November (1955) he (Lee) went to work as a messenger and office boy for a shipping company, Gerald F. Tujague, Inc. He made only $130 a month, but it must have seemed like a lot of money to him, since it was his first full-time job. Mother said he was generous with his money…Feeling prosperous, now that he had a regular income, Lee bought other things, too. Mother said he paid $35 for a coat for her, bought a bow and arrow set – and guy…I remember that gun…Lee really seemed to enjoy his work at Tujague’s for a while. He felt more independent than ever before, and he liked the idea of working for a shipping company. When he first told me about it, he was eager, animated and genuinely enthusiastic. ‘We’re sending an order to Portugal this week,’ he’d tell me. Or, ‘I received a shipment from Hong Kong, just this morning.’ It was a big adventure to him – as if all the company’s ships were his and he could go to any of the places named on the order blanks he carried from one desk to another. It made him feel important, just to be on the fringes of something as exciting as foreign trade.” 

Tujague later came back on the record as a leading member of one of the Free Cuba Committees in New Oreleans and was said to be on the board of directors of a bank that also included John Mecom, who employed George DeMohrenschildt and sent him to Europe, which led to him being debriefed by the CIA. So both Oswald and DeMohrenschildt, although their lives wouldn’t entwine until years later, were both employed by directors of the same bank, an indication they were both working for the same economic interests years earlier.

Was there a reason for Oswald to list his occupation as “import-export agent” on the passport he used to defect to Russia, and was it in any way associated with import-export agency he worked for in New Orleans shortly before enlisting in the Marines?

Or was it some kind of inside joke, tongue in cheek reference to James Bond’s occupation as an import-export agent for Universal Export?