Was Steve Landesberg working with Lee Oswald?

With the news of Steve Landesberg's death, I was reminded of the curious story involving him and Lee Harvey Oswald.

If you go here and continue reading, you'll see that a Steve Landesberg/Steve Landes/Stephen L'Eandes was in New York City representing himself as a member of a segregationist group known as the "Magnolia Rifles". He seemed to intentionally disrupt public gatherings. After the assassination in 1963 Landesberg went to the FBI to report that Oswald was a roommate with him in an apartment at 8th and MacDougall Street in Greenwich Village in late 1961 and early 1962. The two and a third ex-Marine named Earl Perry were apparently paid to disrupt "liberal" gatherings like an NAACP meeting. Landesberg appeared to be doing some sort of government informant work, either for the FBI, or more likely, for the CIA.

For his troubles going to the FBI to tell what he knew about Oswald Landesberg was arrested for lying to the FBI and put into Bellevue Psychiatric Center for several weeks.

It's interesting that both Landesberg and Oswald served in the Marines and got out early, a path for intelligence operatives, and that both seemed to be "performers", creating public disturbances, although Landesberg portrayed a Southern segregationist and Oswald portrayed a Communist.

The obvious question is "How can this be Lee Harvey Oswald when Oswald was in the USSR at the time?" Well, if you go here I give a brief glimpse into John Armstrong's Harvey and Lee, which in the course of a thousand pages documents two and at some times three different people using the Oswald identity. While one Oswald was in the USSR there was this different Oswald in New York City, also ordering trucks in New Orleans for an anti-Castro group and meeting with anti-Castro Cubans in Florida. This is also an intelligence strategy, having several people using the same identity.

Is this the same Steve Landesberg who later was in the cast of "Barney Miller"? There are plenty of parallels. There has been some discussion that at 65 he was too young to be the same guy, although I note that his age is reported as 74 in the NYT article cited at the beginning of the article. The Landesberg saga is best understood within the context of Armstrong's book. Still, here is a reprint from a Village Voice article on Dec. 5, 1963 about "Stephen L'eandes". 

The Voice has learned that a number of proprietors of Greenwich Village establishments have been given photographs by the FBI of a youthful right-winger who has spent considerable time in the Village.

 

The subject of the photographs has been identified as Stephen L'eandes, a native of Wiggins, Mississippi. The FBI is checking out information that Lee Harvey Oswald, alleged assassin of President Kennedy, had spent time in Greenwich Village reputedly in the company of L' eandes. L' eandes has not yet been located. The FBI is apparently eager to fill out the details of Oswald's life.

Meanwhile, reports have been snowballing that Oswald actually lived in the Village for a time since his return from Russia. A number of people insist they knew Oswald, but informants present their story via the telephone and have generally avoided direct contact with the FBI and the newspapers. One rumor links Oswald with a Village psychotherapist whose card Oswald was allegedly carrying at the time he was picked up by the Dallas police.