Lee Harvey Oswald
18.
During the course of the interrogations, Oswald was repeatedly led
up and down very crowded corridors of the police headquarters with
no thought of security. This is an obvious breach of elementary
security that was noted at the time by reporters. It now appears
that Oswald’s killer was seen and photographed in the crowds in
the building.
19. The American Marine defector, Lee Harvey Oswald, entered
the Soviet Union in October of 1959. Initially, Oswald, who
indicated he wanted to “defect” and reside in the Soviet Union,
was the object of some suspicion by Soviet intelligence authorities.
He was at first denied entrance, attempted a “suicide” attempt
and only when he was more extensively interrogated by competent
agents was it discovered that he was in possession of material that
potentially had a great intelligence value.
20. Oswald, who as a U.S. Marine, was stationed at the Atsugi
airfield in Japan, had been connected with the Central Intelligence
Agency’s U-2 intelligence-gathering aircraft program and was in
possession of technical manuals and papers concerning these aircraft
and their use in overflights of the Soviet Union.
21. The subject proved to be most cooperative and a technical
analysis of his documentation indicated that he was certainly being
truthful with Soviet authorities. In addition to the manuals, Oswald
was able to supply Soviet authorities with a wealth of material,
much of which was unknown and relatively current. As a direct result
of analysis of the Oswald material, it became possible to intercept
and shoot down a U2 aircraft flown by CIA employee Gary Powers.
22. On the basis of the quality of this material, Oswald was
granted asylum in the Soviet Union and permitted to settle in Minsk
under the supervision of the Ministry of the Interior. This was
partially to reward him for his cooperation and also to remove him
from the possible influence of American authorities at the Embassy
in Moscow.
23. Oswald worked in a radio factory, was given a subsidized
apartment in Minsk and kept under constant surveillance. He was very
pro-Russian, learned to speak and read the language, albeit not with
native fluency, and behaved himself well in his new surroundings.
24. Although Oswald was a known homosexual, he nevertheless
expressed an interest in women as well and his several casual
romantic affairs with both men and women were duly noted.
25. Oswald became involved with Marina Nikolaevna Prusakova,
the niece of a Minsk-based intelligence official. He wished to marry
this woman who was attractive but cold and ambitious. She wished to
leave the Soviet Union and emigrate to the United States for purely
economic reasons. Since his marrying a Soviet citizen under his
circumstances was often most difficult, Oswald began to speak more
and more confidentially with his intelligence contacts in Minsk. He
finally revealed that he was an agent for the United States Office
of Naval Intelligence and had been recruited by them to act as a
conduit between their office and Soviet intelligence.
26. The official material on the CIA operations was entirely
authentic and had been supplied to Oswald by his controllers at the
ONI. It was apparent, and Oswald repeatedly stated, that the CIA was
completely unaware of the removal of sensitive documents from their
offices. This removal, Oswald stated, was effected by the ONI
personnel stationed at Atsugi air field. Oswald was unaware of the
reasons for this operation but had been repeatedly assured that the
mission was considered of great national importance and that if he
proved to be successful, he would be afforded additional and
profitable future employment. It appears that Oswald was considered
to be a one time operative and was expendable. His purpose was to
establish a reputation as a pro-Russian individual who would then
“defect” to the Soviet Union and pass over the U2 material. He
did not seem to realize at the time he “defected” that once he
had been permitted to live in the Soviet Union, on an official
governmental subsidy, returning to America would be very difficult,
if not impossible.
27. Now, with his romantic, and very impractical, attachment
to Prusakova, he was being pressured by her to marry and then take
her with him back to the United States. Oswald was informed that
this was not a possible option for him. He became very emotional and
difficult to deal with but finally made the suggestion that if he
were allowed to marry and return to the United States, he would
agree to work in reality for the Soviet Union.
28. After referring this matter to higher authority, it was
decided to accede to Oswald’s requests, especially since he was of
no further use to Soviet intelligence and might well be of some
service while resident in America.
29. Marriage was permitted and his return was expedited both
by the Soviet authorities and the Americans who were informed, via a
letter from Oswald, that he was in possession of intelligence
material of value to them. This valuable information was duly given
to him, a reversal to be noted on his original mission!
30. Oswald was given prepared information of such a nature as
to impress American intelligence and permitted to contact
intelligence officials in the American Embassy in Moscow. He was
then permitted by the Americans to return to the United States with
his new wife.
31. In America, Oswald no longer worked with the ONI because
he was not able to further assist them. Besides, he was viewed as
dangerous because he had knowledge of the ONI theft and use of CIA
documents.
32. While in America, Oswald then worked as a paid informant
for the Federal Bureau of Investigation who had contacted him when
he returned and requested his assistance with domestic surveillance
against pro-Soviet groups. He was assigned, in New Orleans, the task
of infiltrating the anti-Castro groups which were nominally under
the control of the CIA.
33. It is noted that there exists a very strong rivalry
between the FBI and the CIA. The former is nominally in charge of
domestic counterintelligence and the latter in charge of foreign
intelligence. They have been fighting for power ever since the CIA
was first formed in 1947. Oswald has stated that the FBI was aware
of this ONI-sponsored defection with stolen CIA U2 documents but
this is not a proven matter.
34. Later, Oswald was transferred to Dallas, Texas, by the
FBI and he then secured a position at a firm which dealt in very
secret photographic matters. Here, he was able to supply both the
FBI and Soviet intelligence with identical data.
35. FBI reports, kept secret, show clearly that Oswald was
paid by the FBI as an informant.
36. In New Orleans, a center of Cuban insurgent activity,
Oswald was in direct contact with FBI officials and worked for a
Guy Bannister, former FBI agent. Oswald infiltrated the ranks of
Cuban insurgents and reported his findings to the FBI .
44. Oswald was a part of the FBI surveillance of the Cuban
insurgents in the New Orleans area.
45. Oswald made a number of public appearances passing out
pro-Castro leaflets in order to ingratiate himself with the
insurgents.
46. At the FBI request, a local television station filmed
Oswald passing out these leaflets and had this film shown on local
stations in order to enhance Oswald’s
image. When his mission was finished, Oswald was then sent to
Dallas to observe and penetrate the Russian colony there.
Lee Harvey Oswald was openly committed to Marxist
ideology; he defected to the Soviet Union in 1959, and resided there
until June of 1962, eventually returning to the United States with a
Russian wife. [WCR, p.
254]
According to Oswald’s diary he attempted suicide
when he learned his application for citizenship had been denied. [WCR,
p. 260]
While in Atsugi, Japan, Oswald studied the Russian
language, perhaps with some help from an officer in his unit who was
interested in Russian and used to “talk about it” with Oswald
occasionally. [WCR, p. 257]
He may have begun to study the Russian language when
he was stationed in Japan, which was intermittently from August 1957
to November 1958. [WCR, p. 256]
According to Oswald’s “Historic Diary” and the
documents furnished to the Commission by the Soviet Government,
Oswald was not told that he had been accepted as a resident of the
Soviet Union until about January 4, 1960. Although November 13 and
16 Oswald informed Aline Mosby and Priscilla Johnson that he had
been granted permission to remain in the country indefinitely, the
diary indicates that at that time he had been told only that he
could remain “until some solution is found with what to do with
me.” [WCR, p. 265]
Once he was accepted as a resident alien in the
Soviet Union, Oswald was given considerable benefits which ordinary
Soviet citizens in his position in society did not have. The
“Historic Diary” recites that after Oswald was informed that he
could remain in the Soviet Union and he was being sent to Minsk he
was given 5,000 rubles by the “Red Cross*** for expenses.” He
used 2,200 rubles to pay his hotel bill and another 150 rubles for a
train ticket. [WCR, p. 269]
[…] about 6 weeks after his arrival he did receive
an apartment, very pleasant by Soviet standards, for which he was
required to pay only 60 rubles ($6.00) a month. Oswald considered
the apartment “almost rent free.” Oswald was given a job in the
“Byelorussian Radio and Television Factory,” where his pay on a
per piece basis ranged from 700 to 900 rubles ($70-$90) a month. [WCR,
p. 269]
The Commission has also assumed that it is customary
for Soviet intelligence agencies to keep defectors under
surveillance during their residence in the Soviet Union, through
periodic interviews of neighbors and associates of the defector.
Oswald once mentioned that the Soviet police questioned his
neighbors occasionally.
Moreover, it is from Oswald’s personal writings
alone that the Commission has learned that he received supplementary
funds from the Soviet “Red Cross.” In the notes he made during
the return trip to the United States Oswald recognized that the
“Red Cross” subsidy had nothing to do with the well-known
International Red Cross. He frankly stated that the money had come
from the “MVD.” [WCR, p. 272]
Marina Oswald said that by the time she met him in
March 1961 he spoke the language well enough so that at first she
thought he was from one of the Baltic areas of her country, because
of his accent. She stated that his only defects were that his
grammar was sometimes incorrect and that his writing was never good.
[WCR, p. 257]
Oswald’s marriage to Marina Prusakova on April 30,
1961, is itself a fact meriting consideration. A foreigner living in
Russia cannot marry without the permission of the Soviet Government.
[WCR, p. 274]
When Oswald arrived at the Embassy in Moscow, he met
Richard E. Snyder, the same person with whom he had dealt in October
of 1959. Primarily on the basis of Oswald’s interview with Snyder
on Monday, July 10, 1961, the American Embassy concluded that Oswald
had not expatriated himself. On the basis of this tentative
decision, Oswald was given back his American passport, which he had
surrendered in 1959. The document was due to expire in September
1961, however, and Oswald was informed that its renewal would depend
upon the ultimate decision by the Department of State on his
expatriation. On July 11, Marina Oswald was interviewed at the
Embassy and the steps necessary for her to obtain an American visa
were begun. In May 1962, after 15 months of dealing with the
Embassy, Oswald’s passport was ultimately renewed and permission
for his wife to enter the United States was granted. [WCR, p. 277]
The Director of the FBI J. Edgar Hoover, Assistant to
the Director Alan H. Belmont, FBI agents John W. Fain and John L.
Quigley, who interviewed Oswald, and FBI Agent James P. Hosty, Jr.,
who was in charge of his case at the time of the assassination, have
testified before the Commission. All declared, in substance, that
Oswald was not an informant or agent of the FBI, that he did not act
in any other capacity for the FBI, and that no attempt was made to
recruit him in any capacity. [WCR, p. 327]
On October 4. 1963, Oswald applied for a position
with the Padgett Printing Corp., which was located at 1313
Industrial Boulevard, several blocks from President Kennedy’s
parade route. Oswald favorably impressed the plant superintendent
who checked his prior job references, one of which was Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall,
the firm where Oswald had done photography work from October 1962 to
April 1963. [WCR, p. 246]
30.
Soviet commentary on Oswald is basically verified from both KGB and
CIA sources. Oswald, however, was not being run by the ONI (note
here that the USMC is under the control of the USN and that ONI
would be the appropriate agency of initial contact) but instead by
the CIA. Their personnel files indicate that Oswald was initially
recruited by ONI for possible penetration of the very pervasive
Japanese communist intelligence organization. Atsugi base was a very
important target for these spies.
31. Because of a shift in their policy, the CIA found it
expedient to exploit their U2 surveillance of the Soviet Union as a
political rather than an intelligence operation.
32. The Eisenhower administration’s interest in the
possibility of achieving a rapprochement with the Soviet Government
created a situation that might have proven disastrous to the CIA
continued functions.
33. Internal CIA documents show very clearly that as their
very existence was dependent on a continuation of the Cold War, any
diminution of East-West hostility could easily lead to their
down-sizing and, more important, to their loss of influence over the
office of the President and also of U.S. foreign policy.
34. It was proposed, according to top level CIA reports, to
somehow use their own U2 flights to create an increase in tension
that could lead to a frustration of any detente that might result
from a lessening of international tensions.
35. It was initially thought that certain compromising
documents could be prepared, sent to the CIA base at Atsugi, Japan,
and then somehow leaked to the aggressive Japanese communists.
However, it was subsequently decided that there was a strong
possibility that the documents might not be forwarded to Soviet
Russia and kept in Japan for use in the anti-West/anti-war domestic
campaigns.
36. CIA personnel stationed at Atsugi conceived a plan to
then arrange for select documents to be given directly to the
Soviets via an American defector. It was at this point that
Oswald’s name was brought up by an ONI man. A CIA evaluation of
Oswald convinced them that he would be the perfect defector.
Psychological profiles of Oswald convinced them that he was clever,
pro-Marxist, a person of low self-esteem as manifested in his
chronic anti-social attitudes coupled with homosexual behavior.
37. As Oswald had developed a strong friendship with his ONI
control, it was decided to allow him to think that he was working
for the U.S. Navy rather than the CIA. (Note: This has always been a
hallmark of CIA clandestine operations. Source agents are always
considered expendable by that agency and their record of abandonment
of these non-CIA agents if felt necessary is well-known to the
intelligence community.)
38. Oswald was told that he was performing a “special,
vitally important” mission for the ONI and would be given a very
good paying official position when he “successfully returned”
from the Soviet Union. CIA and ONI reports indicate that he was
never expected to return to the United States after he had fulfilled
his function of passing the desired documentation to the Soviet
intelligence community.
39. The subsequent interception and shooting down by the
Soviets of a U2 piloted by CIA agent Gary F. Powers using the leaked
CIA material was sufficient to wreck the projected
Eisenhower/Khrushchev meetings and harden the Soviet leader’s
attitude towards the West.
40. It should be noted that the Powers U2 was equipped with a
delayed action self-destruct device, designed to be activated by the
pilot upon bailing out. This device was intended to destroy any
classified surveillance material on the aircraft. In the Powers
aircraft, the device was later disclosed to have been altered to
explode the moment the pilot activated it. This would have resulted
in the destruction of both the pilot and his aircraft.
41. After his return to the United States, Oswald was a
marked man. He was a potential danger to the CIA, whose unredacted
personnel reports indicate that Oswald was considered to be
unstable, hostile, intelligent and very frustrated. He was, in
short, a loose cannon.
42. While resident in Dallas, Oswald became acquainted with
George S. DeMohrenschildt, a CIA operative. DeMohrenschildt, a Balt,
had family connections both in Poland and Russia, had worked for the
German Ausland Abwehr and later the SD during the Second World War.
He “befriended” Oswald and eventually an intimate physical
relationship developed between the two men. This infuriated Marina
Oswald and their already strained relationship grew even worse. She
had come to America expecting great financial rewards and instead
found poverty, two children and a sexually cold husband.
43. It was DeMohrenschildt’s responsibility to watch
Oswald, to establish a strong inter-personal relationship with him
and to learn what information, if any, Oswald might possess that
could damage the CIA if it became known.
44.
The CIAs subsequent use of Oswald as a pawn in the assassination was
a direct result of this concern
Author’s
comments
On November 25, 1963, three days after Kennedy’s
assassination, U.S. Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach,
later a high Department of State official under Lyndon Johnson,
wrote the following memorandum to Bill Moyers, aide to President
Lyndon Johnson:
“It is important that all of the
facts surrounding President Kennedy’s assassination be made public
in a way which will satisfy people in the United States and abroad
that all the facts have been told and that a statement to this
effect be made now.
1. The public must be satisfied that
Oswald was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are
still at large; and that the evidence was such that he would have
been convicted at trial.
2. Speculation about Oswald’s
motivation ought to be cut off, and we should have some basis for
rebutting thought that this was a Communist conspiracy or (as the
Iron Curtain press is saying) a right-wing conspiracy to blame it on
the communists. Unfortunately the facts on Oswald seem too pat—too
obvious (Marxist, Cuba, Russian wife, etc.). The Dallas police have
put out statements on the Communist conspiracy theory, and it was
they who were in charge when he was shot and thus silenced.
3. The matter has been handled thus far
with neither dignity nor conviction. Facts have been mixed with
rumor and speculation. We can scarcely let the world see us totally
in the image of the Dallas police when our President is murdered.
I think this objective may be satisfied
by making public as soon as possible a complete and thorough FBI
report on Oswald and the assassination. This may run into the
difficulty of pointing to inconsistencies between this report and
statements by Dallas police officials. But the reputation of the
Bureau is such that it may do the whole job.”
On
November 29, FBI Director Hoover wrote an in-house memo that, in
part, stated:
“I told him [President Johnson] I
thought it would be very bad to have a rash of investigations. He
then indicated the only way to stop it is to appoint a high-level
committee to evaluate my report and tell the House and Senate not to
go ahead with the investigation. I stated that would be a three-ring
circus.”
And, in fact, the reputation of the Bureau was such
that the whole job was well and truly accomplished. The FBI was in
sole charge of assembling evidence for the Warren Commission and,
almost simultaneously with the Katzenbach letter, Director Hoover
had been committing himself on paper to express his firm
determination that Oswald, and Oswald alone, was responsible for the
assassination.
This determination was reflected in a flood of
teletypes from FBI headquarters to the agency offices in Dallas, New
Orleans, Miami, and Chicago. Regardless of what information was
uncovered by local agents, all of it had to be given to the local
agent-in-charge who then forwarded it to Washington. There, the
numerous reports on Oswald’s activities and personal connections,
along with reports on the Chicago mob, the CIA activities in
Louisiana and Florida, and the late President and his activities and
personal connections, were skillfully tailored to present a seamless
series of reports, interviews, photographic and other forensic
evidence for presentation to the waiting commission.
Any witness statements that contradicted the official
version of events were excluded from this presentation, as were
photographs that might have contradicted the lone-assassin theory.
The Soviet intelligence report mentions the discovery
of Oswald in the second floor employee’s lounge by a Dallas police
officer immediately after the shooting. It is commented by them, and
reflected in the official report, that Oswald appeared to be very
calm and certainly not out of breath as he would have been from
running down four flights of steps only moments before. Further,
other employees of the Texas Book Depository who had been using the
stairs had not seen Oswald rush down past them. He could not have
used the building’s elevators to go from his work area on the
sixth floor to the lunchroom because persons unknown stopped one on
the sixth floor and the other was on another floor. There were no
elevators stopped on the second floor near the employee lunchroom.
The forensics have been equally confusing. Dallas
Deputy Sheriff Seymour Weitzman was one of three deputy sheriffs who
discovered a rifle on the sixth floor of the Book Depository.
Weitzman was a firearms expert and owned two gun shops. He
initially, and positively, identified the rifle as a German Mauser,
7.65-millimeter weapon. This is the so-called Argentine Mauser,
which was manufactured by the Germans for the Argentine army. Unlike
later models of the Mauser, it has a straight bolt handle and the
top of the receiver is plainly marked with the coat of arms of
Argentina. The Argentine Mauser, a very well built and easy to use
weapon, had been offered as military surplus to the buying public
for some years previously and was easily available to collectors,
gun shops, and hunters.
The physical differences between the 7.65-mm
Argentine Mauser surplus rifle and the 6.5-mm Italian
Mannlicher-Carcano surplus rifle are very evident and no one with
the professional background of Deputy Weitzman could possibly mistake one
for the other.
In his book, Case
Closed, New York author and avid Warren Commission supporter
Gerald Posner states:
“Seymour Weitzman and
Luke Mooney, two
Dallas policemen [sic], thought at first glance that the rifle was a
7.65 [mm] bolt action Mauser. Although the officers quickly admitted
their mistake, that initial misidentification led to speculation
that a different gun was found on the sixth floor and that Oswald’s
Carcano was later swapped for the murder weapon. There are
considerable similarities between a bolt-action Mauser and a Carcano.
Firearms experts say they are easy to confuse without a proper exam.”
[Emphasis added]
Aside from his slavish adherence to the conclusions
of the Warren Commission Report, Posner has obviously no knowledge
of firearms whatsoever. The immediate visual differences between the
two weapons are very clear and obvious. The Carcano has a
distinctive box magazine protruding in front of the trigger guard
and the Mauser has none. The Mauser has a straight bolt handle and
the Carcano has a turned-down bolt handle.
Weitzman was a gun dealer and both
surplus weapons were very common in the trade at the time of the
assassination. The supporting comments by Posner attributed to government
experts are obviously self-serving, like the majority of such
statements found in the Warren Commission Report, and have
absolutely no probative value whatsoever.
After the Mauser was turned in to local authorities,
it suddenly was transformed into a Carcano rifle, one that allegedly
had been purchased by Oswald using an alias. The Mauser
vanished from the sight of living men but the Carcano was presented
to the world as the murder weapon.
The so-called “magic bullet” was certainly fired
from the suspected Carcano but by whom, and when, is certainly not
known at this remove. Because of the pristine condition of the
bullet, it is clearly evident that it had never, under any remote
circumstances, been fired into or passed through a human body.
In his November 29, 1963 report, FBI Director Hoover
said:
“I said no, that three shots were
fired at the President and we have them. I stated that our ballistic
experts were able to prove the shots were fired by this gun; that
the President was hit by the first and third bullets and the second
hit the Governor; that there were three shots; that one complete
bullet rolled out of the President’s head; that it tore a large
part of the President’s off; that in trying to massage his heart
on the way into the hospital they loosened the bullet which fell on
the stretcher and we have that.”
When he was arrested, Oswald proclaimed to the media
that he was a patsy and had nothing to do with the killing of John
F. Kennedy. Katzenbach’s dictum that the evidence had to be such
as to secure a conviction was certainly quickly and officially
implemented.
Since
Oswald was very shortly, and most conveniently, dead, all manner of
innuendo, deliberate error, and patently manufactured evidence was
put together into a pastiche that never needed to be examined and
cross-examined in a court of law. Oswald had been tried and found publicly guilty in absentia, and in the event that there existed other, even more
provable suspects, they were entirely safe in the knowledge that
they had escaped whatever manipulated creativity had passed for the
process of justice and were certainly well protected.
The few works that support the findings of the Warren
Commission contain a number of errors, which strongly indicate that
their authors have done little research and have no genuine
understanding of their subjects. As a case in point, referring once
again to the Posner book, this author shows an appalling lack of
knowledge of the Soviet intelligence structure in the 1950s and
1960s.
Posner comments on a statement allegedly made by a faux
Soviet defector that the uncle of Marina Oswald was “MVD. It’s
like being a local policeman, nothing more. He was completely
unimportant.”
At another point, Posner shows a picture of Oswald and his wife’s
relatives with the comment that Colonel Ilya Vasillyevich Prusakova,
her uncle, was mistakenly believed to have been a KGB officer when
he was “actually the equivalent of a local U.S. policeman.”
Posner is referring here to the
false Soviet defector Nosenko who was sent by the Soviet
government to the United States immediately after the assassination
to allay American fears that the Soviets had been involved with the
Kennedy assassination via Oswald. He very obviously had no knowledge of the intelligence agencies he
purported to have served. The MVD was, at that time, the name of the
Soviet secret police controlled by the State Security Committee. It
was later renamed into KGB.
A serving colonel in the Minsk office of the MVD was most certainly
not the “equivalent of a local U.S. policeman.”
The Warren Report and its supporters have attached a
considerable amount of importance to the comments and very
supportive testimony of Oswald ’s Russian wife, Marina On this subject, Hoover wrote in his November 29
memo:
“I advised the President that his
wife had
been very hostile, would not cooperate and speaks only Russian; that
yesterday she said, if we could give assurance she would be allowed
to remain in the country, she would cooperate; and that I told our
agents to give that assurance and sent a Russian-speaking agent to
Dallas last night to interview her.”
The excerpts from the Warren Commission Report are
designed to reflect the paragraphs in the Soviet Intelligence
Study, hence are out of sequence on a number of occasions, but
not out of context.
House Select Committee on Assassinations, HSCA
567, vol. 3, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office,
1976.
Memo of J. Edgar Hoover to Staff, 29 November 1963,
Crowley Papers. See Appendix.
G. Posner, op. cit.
p. 270n.
See footnote
Hoover letter, op. cit. (note 3), p. 3.
G. Posner, op. cit. p. 54n.
Ibid., Plate
iii.
See footnote
Hoover letter, note (3), p. 4.
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