Which JFK Assassination Conspiracy Theory Do You Prefer?

a reply to: CoriSCapnSkip

I'm afraid that is the problem. Most of the people alive and viable right now are so detached from the event that it doesn't really hold any importance to them. Sure, lots of things have happened in the world since we were kids to dull us to the shock of witnessing bloody gory murders and terrorist attacks and so forth, but hey, this was a US president that was removed from office by force. A coup, and it matters now just as much as it did then. The reason it is so important now is that there has really been no power shift since then, the same people pull the reigns now. If we can't even see why it is important to investigate this then I am afraid all is lost.

a reply to: CoriSCapnSkip

double post

The one where the driver shot him. Why do you think Jackie wanted to get out of the moving car instead of hitting the floorboard.

a reply to: LOSTinAMERICA

She was collecting bits of her husband's head. The driver did not shoot him. That's one of the silliest theories around, have you looked into the evidence much?

a reply to: DeadSeraph

-The driver killed JFK
-Jackie killed JFK (I've actually seen someone suggest this)
-Oswald was the lone gunman
-Castro killed JFK
-The Russians did it
-Oswald acted alone but an SS agent in the car behind Kennedy accidently fired the fatal head shot
-The mob did it single handedly

You left out the one most likely perpetuated by those involved in
the conspiracy to kill the President. That BTW, even a congressional
committee found to be the truth.

It was the Kennedy curse what did it esse!

This is pretty much the same deal with Princess Diana. On the one hand neither death could have been a conspiracy as it would be far too complicated to set up. On the other hand they had to be because there were so many weird things about both cases and too many people in high places who desired these high profile deaths benefited from them. In both cases screwups were made by those in charge of protecting the person who ended up dead. (The bodyguard should have insisted Diana and Dodi buckle their seatbelts and the driver slow down.)

originally posted by: CoriSCapnSkip
-- snip --
On the one hand neither death could have been a conspiracy as it would be far too complicated to set up. On the other hand they had to be because there were so many weird things about both cases and too many people in high places who desired these high profile deaths benefited from them. In both cases screwups were made by those in charge of protecting the person who ended up dead.
-- snip --

I can't really speak in an informed way as to the death of Princess Diana other than even a casual knowledge of the incident leaves one with an unpleasant smell... Nothing about it seemed right.

As to JFK and the intricacies of the conspiracy vs the on-the-fly screwups, I agree and say again that I am struggling to keep an open mind and give the benefit of doubt until there is enough to convince me otherwise.

Anything I post tonight that you'd like sourced, I'll gladly provide later. It's just a matter of not wanting to get all obsessed with sources to the point that I never post without a stack of books tabbed with Post-It notes an arms length away every time I try to contribute to this thread.

An easy one (that I never knew until I read Horne's book) is what I had always assumed was a hearse:

Actually, the light colored vehicle is a cardiac ambulance that was ordered to meet AF-1 because of Johnson's panic attack at Parkland. He'd already had one heart attack before he became vice president. Jackie commandeered it because she refused to be helicoptered straight back to the WH. (She had no way of knowing that the bronze casket did not contain the body of her husband and she stood her ground on not being separated. They were NOT expecting to take on the casket and entourage. If I remember correctly, Horne interviewed a pathologist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center that had been ordered to have everything ready for a craniotomy the instant the former president's body arrived.)

The elderly gentleman from Gawler's Funeral Home initially hadn't wanted to talk to the ARRB because of the client privacy aspect and was informed that they would let him wait for a subpoena, that way the funeral home was off the hook as far as confidentiality.

When he was deposed, he told them that the documentation they'd asked for had been destroyed years ago. Thankfully, they were prepared. Another assassination researcher had gotten a copy years ago and had made available to the ARRB. It is no longer a matter of speculation or a valid topic to ridicule David Lifton... The earliest instant possible, once the ambulance had left, JFK's body was taken from the luggage compartment of AF-1 and placed on a helicopter bound for Bethesda.

It landed in the parking lot of the officer's lounge (if I remember correctly) and the shipping casket was loaded into a black hearse and driven a very short distance to the morgue’s loading dock. Dennis David and Donald Rebentisch were two enlisted Navy men who were tasked by the Secret Service with assembling a working party of sailors, so that JFK's casket could be unloaded, and taken into the morgue.

Source

Dennis David’s best recollection when interviewed by the ARRB staff in 1997 was that this event occurred at about 6:45 PM; the precise time of the event was fixed with precision in 1997 when the ARRB staff acquired the November 26th, 1963 typed after-action report of USMC Sergeant Roger Boyajian, whose Marine Barracks security detail had provided physical security during the autopsy. (Mr. Boyajian still had an onionskin carbon copy of the report in 1997, and sent the ARRB a high-quality photocopy, which he authenticated by letter.) In his after-action report, which pertained only to the physical security provided for President Kennedy’s autopsy, Boyajian wrote: “At approximately 1835 the casket was received at the morgue entrance and taken inside.” This pins down much more accurately Dennis David’s estimate to the ARRB staff that the shipping casket event had taken place at about 6:45 PM. The military time of 1835 hours (6:35 PM civilian time) in Boyajian’s report, which was a contemporaneous document typed four days after the autopsy, trumps Dennis David’sestimate in 1997 (very accurate, as it turns out) of 6:45 PM, and can be authoritatively considered the true arrival time of the shipping casket. Later on, during the night of the autopsy, after the autopsy had been concluded, in response to a question from HM1 Dennis David, Dr. J Thornton Boswell, one of the three pathologists who had conducted JFK’s autopsy, confirmed to David that JFK had indeed been in the shipping casket his working party had unloaded from the Hearse at the morgue loading dock hours earlier. [David told Lifton in 1979 that both Dr. Humes and Dr. Boswell (the two Navy pathologists who participated in the autopsy) had been present on the loading dock, along with their commanding officer, Captain Stover, and what he believed to be the Surgeons General of the Army and Air Force.]

And thus began an incredibly chaotic night in which one should be careful as to assuming anything about the motivations of those involved. Certainly some deserve no sympathy, but others almost surely believed the carefully built story line of Atwood and company and believed that they were doing what they had to do to prevent WWIII.

It's been on my mind a lot as to the safety of FBI agent's Sibert & O'Neill. In high stress situations even the strongest and highly trained can have their mind make memory conform to what expected if the only alternative is to admit failure... When O'Neill was deposed by the ARRB, he still maintained that they had never allowed the chain of custody of the former president's body to be broken, as per Hoover's instructions.

When he was being questioned about unloading the ornate casket with the honor guard, Horne kept pushing a slip of paper over to Jeremy Gunn. It said, "Ask what they were wearing." Gunn finally asked and O'Neill said they were wearing green. (The Joint Casket Bearer Team was made up of two service men from each branch of the service and would have had the corresponding dress uniform for each branch.) Horne then began pushing a slip of paper over that said, "Ask if they were armed!" (Gunn just kept pushing it back and never asked) That's because, in spite of what Agent O'Neill remembered, the ornate casket was set down in the morgue anteroom and then agents Sibert & O'Neill were "sequestered" outside the morgue with armed guards while CDR Humes and crew "prepared" for the official autopsy. Agent O'Neill remembered there being a glass panel of some sort that allowed them to maintain eye contact at all times.

I shudder to think what might have happened had they refused to leave the casket considering that the (modified) body was re-wrapped, put back in the ornate casket and put in the appropriate ambulance for the Joint Casket Bearer Team to finally "find" (damaging a handle in the process) and eventually unloaded for the THIRD time at "2000 hours," or 8:00 PM.

The so-called Official Autopsy could then begin.

I'm outta characters. Will post again tomorrow...

I need to make a bit of a correction...

The other night I wasn't exactly 100% and when I used the name Atwood I was meaning to refer to David Atlee Phillips, Chief of Covert Action for CIA operations in Mexico City Station. Too many things on my mind at the same time and my fingers apparently were on automatic.

Had they not over-played their hand in Mexico, the "sheep-dipping" of Oswald might have stuck. Creating a connection between the goto GUY for KGB assassinations in the Western hemisphere and Oswald would have looked very, very bad had they not gotten carried away. (My apologies on that one. I was referring to Mr. Valery Vladimirovich Kostikov, I'm not used to seeing the name Valery associated with men.)

Because of the JFK Act, the tapes of LBJ's conversations the day after the assassination are now in the archives. That morning at 9:20am the CIA's director, John McCone, briefed him on "information on foreign connections to the alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, which suggested to LBJ that Kennedy may have been murdered by an international conspiracy."

At 10:01am he got a briefing over the phone from FBI director Hoover.

From "JFK and the Unspeakable:Why He Died and Why It Matters":

LBJ: "Have you established any more about the visit to the Soviet embassy in Mexico in September?"

Hoover: "No, that's one angle that's very confusing, for this reason --- we have up here the tape and the photograph of the man who was at the Soviet embassy, using Oswald's name. That picture and the tape do not correspond to this man's voice, nor to his appearance. In other words, it appears that there is a second person who was at the Soviet embassy down there. We do have a copy of a letter in Washington [a November 9, 1963, letter that Oswald began by referring to 'my meetings with comrade Kostin in the Embassy of the Soviet Union, Mexico City, Mexico,' which was interpreted to mean Kostikov] ....Now if we can indentify this man who was at the ... Soviet embassy in Mexico City..."

It's long past time that America owned up to the fact that we had a president willing to give his life in order to buy enough time for the children of the world a chance live rather than die from nuclear war that nobody would win. The push for use of more nuclear weapons had been ever present since the temptation to use them in Korea.

As I've said before, Psychopathy applied to the Peter Principle means that those at the top will be the psychopaths who have been able to outmaneuver all the others.

It isn't a coincidence that Truman's article of regret was printed a month to the day after Kennedy's death. While the CIA was far from being the only actor in the assassination, CIA activities include non consensual human experiments, extraordinary rendition, enhanced interrogation techniques (torture), targeted killings, assassinations and the funding and training of militants who would go on to kill civilians and non-combatants.

His creation of a phantom intelligence/military that provided plausible deniability came at the expense of having an agency that had to answer to no one and could intentionally sabotage official American foreign policy.

The complexity of JFK's death is mind-numbing to try to wrap your head around, but then again James Angleton was known for what he liked to call "the wilderness of mirrors". (Again from JFK and the Unspeakable):

His friend e. e. cummings suggested the contradictions in James Angleton in a letter he wrote to Angleton's wife: "What a miracle of momentous complexity is the Poet."

The national military/intelligence organization wanted a war and Kennedy was in their way. Angleton was the one who had set the policy of opening a 201 SIG file on operatives "of active operational interest" that could be forged and backdated with provisions for laying blame at the feet of the Communists.

One last bit then I gotta go... From "JFK and the Unspeakable":

It was Angleton's staff member, Ann Egerter, who opened Oswald's 201 SIG file on Dec. 9, 1960. Egerter was questioned by the HSCA. They knew they could not expect her, as a CIA employee, to answer truthfully, even under oath, the question whether Oswald was a CIA agent. Allen Dulles, Kennedy's fired CIA director, had said in the January 27, 1964, closed-door Warren Commission meeting that no CIA employee, even under oath, should ever say truthfully if Oswald (or anyone else) was in fact a CIA agent.

Not going to flip through all of these pages at the moment. I subscribe to the theory that it was a CIA job led by E. Howard Hunt with LBJ's backing. The banking cartels/other PTB wanted JFK out of the way because he upset the balance of power.

originally posted by: Osiris1953
Not going to flip through all of these pages at the moment. I subscribe to the theory that it was a CIA job led by E. Howard Hunt with LBJ's backing. The banking cartels/other PTB wanted JFK out of the way because he upset the balance of power.

If that were the case, doesn't it strike you as a bit odd that E.H.H. would give his son a "death-bed confession" and say he was just a "bench-warmer" on that job?



I'm in complete agreement about Johnson. One of his closest associates, Bobby Baker, on the day of the '61 inauguration told Don Reynolds that, "JFK would never live out his term and that he would die a violent death."

Also, as I'll show shortly, it beggars the imagination that FBI Director Hoover (who sat on his trove of dirt on "anybody that was anybody" like Gollum clutching his "Precious") was in the least bit unaware that the assassination was coming.

As for TPTB... The last thing they wanted was president who fought for peace and compromise in the world.

Oswald had no reason to kill JFK, But LBJ Did, So did Bush and Big Oil. Johnsons Mistress Said he admitted it to her that Kennedy's were finished the night before the Assassination.

Kennedy was dying anyway, they really just ended his suffering. He may have even knew?

I'm trying to soak up as much as I can of three books I've started. I highly recommend "Oswald and the CIA" by John Newman. His approach is refreshing... The entire focus is on Oswald and the relationship he had as a (I kinda hate to put it this way) low level double agent for the CIA. As hard as it may be for many to accept after 50 years of propaganda, Oswald was far from the misfit loser that the official myth insists he was. Consider for a moment that he was the First marine to defect to the Soviets, the timing matches exactly to a CIA program of placing double agents into the USSR because we'd had such a hard time getting intelligence out of the country and he picked the easiest country in all of Europe to go to if you were wanting an entrance visa.

Here is some of the background I've gotten from the James Douglass book to give you an idea of how Oswald was placed in the thick of things. (Bear in mind that when he came back to the US, he and his new family were met by one of the most respected "white Russian, anti-Communists" and shepherded through customs and all the paperwork like a returning son.) His notoriety for being the only marine to ever defect didn't even rate a debriefing as far as anyone knows.

To step back in time a bit...

Richard C. Nagell was with U.S. Army counterintelligence from '55 to '59. His assignment had bet with Field Operations Intelligence at Far East Headquarters in Japan. His training had centered on "simple and intricate weapons to be used in assassinations." In Tokyo, Nagell (as a double agent in liason with Soviet intelligence crossed paths with Oswald to the point that if the word convergence isn't totally accurate, they were ships that "passed in the night") worked in counterintelligence with a code name that included "Hidell." Nagell's biographer, Dick Russell, believed that it was Nagell who gave Oswald the codename that helped make up his alias of "Alek James Hidell".

In early '63, D. A. Phillips deployed Alpha 66 for a handful of coordinated strikes on Russian ships in Cuban ports in yet another attempt to draw JFK into war with Cuba. Kennedy responded by putting even more pressure on the CIA. The move only served to increase the hatred for JFK in the exile community meaning that it was a win-win for the CIA. Nagell knew of two members named "Angel" and "Leopoldo" who met at the very least with Oswald a couple of times.

It's terrible to say, but the KGB knew more of what was going on behind the scenes than Kennedy. In September of '63 they ordered him to contact Oswald and convince him that "Angel" and "Leopoldo" were setting him up to take the fall in an assassination of the president. If he failed to convince him, he was to terminate Oswald and then quietly disappear somewhere abroad.

Although they met in New Orleans, Nagell was unsuccessful in convincing Oswald. Nagell wasn't able to reastablish contact with his CIA handler, Desmond FitzGerald. Rather than kill Oswald, he sent a registered letter to the FBI's Hoover on 8-17-'63 warning of a plot to kill the president. He included the codenames of "Angel" and "Leopoldo" and one Lee Harvey Oswald.

Feeling he'd done all he could, Nagell walked into the El Paso bank on 8-20-'63 and fired a couple of shots then waited for the police to arrive. He told the officers that he'd rather be in federal custody "than commit murder and treason." Hoover was well aware that Nagell knew that the CIA was planning on killing Kennedy in the Washington D.C.- Baltimore area in late September-early October, if possible.

It may not have been enough to save JFK but it was enough for Oswald to be relocated to Dallas. He'd at least created an inconvenience for the plotters and given the president a couple of months more with his wife and kids.

In spite of having a tape recorded conversation that included his voice, Oswald's, Angel and a man he called "Arcacha" (thought to have been a Cuban named Sergio Arcacha Smith who had worked with Guy Banister) he called off his planned meeting with New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison upon finding out that the go-between had formerly worked for the CIA. Later Garrison would regret his association with Bill R. Martin...

Nagell served his time and kept his mouth shut. That kept him alive for many years. On 11-2-'95, the day after the ARRB mailed a letter from Washington D.C. requesting his testimony, he was found dead in the bathroom of his L.A. home. (Yet another coincidence for the incredibly "Smart" people at Skeptic magazine...)

I think that a lot of the people that were hit after Kennedy's death were mostly innocent targets to keep the distance of the Conspiracy going Elsewhere

a reply to: CornShucker

Man, so many tidbits I had never been aware of before. Every time you post you add to my reading list. I'm currently reading a book about Johnson, "The Dark Side of Lyndon Baines Johnson" I believe it's called. Rather boring in parts because it ties so many unrelated or seemingly unrelated events and people together. I mean unrelated to the assassination, that is. If I can get through it I think it might help me to get a feel of the players back then and how they worked together to get things done. Might be helpful, but I can't wait to get on to some of the books you refer to.

originally posted by: wtbengineer
a reply to: LOSTinAMERICA

She was collecting bits of her husband's head. The driver did not shoot him. That's one of the silliest theories around, have you looked into the evidence much?

You mess with the bankers, you get shot.

originally posted by: SPECULUM
I think that a lot of the people that were hit after Kennedy's death were mostly innocent targets to keep the distance of the Conspiracy going Elsewhere

I had put it off because I expected to read a lot of what I'd already seen before, I was more than pleasantly surprised at how wrong I was. Here is a book that will astound you. It's not just the staggering body count but also the incredible "coincidental" timing of all the deaths. For some strange reason they tend to cluster in time periods that are just days before giving testimony to investigations into the assassination.

This is a five star book, for sure:
"Hit List: An In-Depth Investigation Into the Mysterious Deaths of Witnesses to the JFK Assassination" by Richard Belzer and David Wayne

From the Foreword:
Richard Belzer and David Wayne are back to set the record straight after "Dead Wrong"; this time they’re going to uncover the truth about the many witness deaths tied to the JFK assassination. For decades, government pundits have dismissed these “coincidental” deaths, even regarding them as “myths” as “urban legends.”

Like most people, Richard and David were initially unsure about what to make of these ‘coincidences’. After all, events don’t “consult the odds” prior to happening; they simply happen. Then someone comes along later and figures out what the odds of it happening were. Some of the deaths seemed purely coincidental; heart attacks, hunting accidents. Others clearly seemed noteworthy; witnesses who did seem to know something and did seem to die mysteriously.

Hit List is a fair examination of the evidence of each case, leading to (necessarily) different conclusions. The findings were absolutely staggering; as some cases were clearly linked to a “clean-up operation” after the murder of President Kennedy, while others were the result of ‘other forces’. The impeccable research and writing of Richard Belzer and David Wayne show that if the government is trying to hide anything, they’re the duo who will uncover it.
100 b/w photographs

originally posted by: LOSTinAMERICA

originally posted by: wtbengineer
a reply to: LOSTinAMERICA

She was collecting bits of her husband's head. The driver did not shoot him. That's one of the silliest theories around, have you looked into the evidence much?

You mess with the bankers, you get shot.

Yeah, he and his brother ruffled a lot of feathers, indeed.

Someone just surfing YT would get the wrong impression about Kennedy's confrontation with the steel industry (which of course means he also upset the military establishment, the large arms industry, the major banks and Wall Street) highlighted in this video.

On April 6, 1962 the United Steelworkers union accepted a contract with United States Steel company that had been brokered by JFK. The union agreed to a more modest agreement in return for the company not raising prices in order to help keep inflation down.

The steel industry was about to find out what Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev did, Kennedy was willing to listen with an open mind and compromise when it was within reason. He did NOT like being bullied!

Just four days later, Roger Blough (chairman of U.S. Steel) requested a meeting with the president. That evening at 5:45pm Blough said, "Perhaps the easiest way I can explain the purpose of my visit...," and then handed a four page press release to JFK at, more or less, the exact moment that the MSM was reporting from the exact same release, apparently assuming it was a fait accompli.

"U.S. Steel, effective at 12:00am tomorrow, will raise the price of the company's steel products by an average of about 3.5 percent..."

Kennedy, realizing that he had been part of a double-cross of not only his office but the steelworkers, looked up and said, "You've made a terrible mistake."

Once Blough had left, Kennedy told a group of his advisers what had just happened. None of them had seen him express the intensity, the anger that was obvious.

He called David McDonald, president of the steelworkers union, and told him, "Dave, you've been screwed and I've been screwed."

The next morning U.S. Steel was joined by Bethlehem Steel (#2 producer) and shortly thereafter by four more steel companies.

(April 23, 1962, the president's words directly after the 4 -10 -'62 meeting with Mr. Blough were printed in the New York Times. "My father always told me that all businessmen were sons-of-b*tches, but I never believed it until now!")

In the face of the embarrassing betrayal, Kennedy began a systematic effort to force the steel companies to roll their prices back to what they had agreed on.

First stop was the Defense Department. "Big Steel" was one of the industries making up the web of incestuous connections to the Pentagon that Eisenhower admonished the country to be cautious of. In response to a request from the president, Defense Secretary McNamara had the numbers crunched and reported the price increase would result in an additional billion dollars in cost. Kennedy ordered an immediate shift of steel purchases to be spread over the smaller companies that hadn't participated in the price increase. A contract that had originally been split between U.S. Steel and Lukens Steel, a much smaller company, would now be going to Lukens completely. Walter Heller, chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, reported that it would be possible to move as much as nine percent of total business from the six companies who'd raised prices to six that had held to the agreed prices. Kennedy even ordered the Defense Department to look into overseas producers in case that became necessary in order to keep the government contracts out of the hands of the six companies that had colluded to raise prices. "Big Steel" saw Cold War profits slipping through their fingers because of their arrogance.

Much more was to come...

A.G. RFK convened a federal grand jury to look into price fixing on the part of "Big Steel." An investigation into possible violations of anti-trust laws had actually begun before the crisis. The FBI was now ordered to make a "Fast & Thorough" move on steel executives. The effort was nationwide and began the morning after the order. Offices got visits from the FBI and records regarding expense accounts, where and when meetings were held and what was discussed were subpoenaed. The FBI held lengthy interviews, steel executives found themselves in a situation that certainly hadn't been expected.

On April 12, 1962 Clark Clifford, Kennedy's lawyer, was tasked with being the mediator with U.S. Steel. The steel men tried to float a compromise... Clifford called the WH and told JFK that, "Blough and his people want to know what you would say if they announce a rollback in prices of, say 50 percent?"

Kennedy was crystal clear in his reply, "I wouldn't say a d*mned thing, it's the whole way."

Clifford was to convey the message that, "if U.S. Steel persisted, the President would use every tool available to turn the decision around." The steel heads were told that, "the President was already setting in motion to use the full power of the Presidency to divert contracts from U.S. Steel and other companies, as well as holding several actions in reserve, including tax audits, antitrust investigations, and a thorough probe of market practices." The president was prepared to pull out all the stops to break the will of "Big Steel's" double-cross.

On April 13, 1962, they saw the writing on the wall and surrendered. Bethlehem buckled first followed by U.S. Steel. The other four quickly followed suit.

As he had done after the Missile Crisis, Kennedy put the word out that there was to be, "no gloating by any administration spokesman and no talk of retribution."

While JFK might have been insistent about his administration being diplomatic about the victory, he had made many powerful enemies. The executive committee of U.S. Steel's board of directors included top-level management from Morgan Guaranty Trust Company, First National City Bank of New York, Prudential Insurance Company, the Ford Foundation, and AT&T.

RFK's Justice Department would eventually levy maximum antitrust fines against U.S. Steel and seven other companies in 1965 for price-fixing activities from 1955 - 1961.

So, YEAH, they made many powerful enemies. John F. Kennedy acted like an active representative of the American people rather than a "Business-As-Usual" placeholder like the powerful were used to...

In a way I have always felt RFKs story was undersold, more significant, and far greater reaching.

His brother was the star, Bobbie was a genuine good moral man, that worked harder than his brother ever did.

originally posted by: zazzafrazz
In a way I have always felt RFKs story was undersold, more significant, and far greater reaching.

His brother was the star, Bobbie was a genuine good moral man, that worked harder than his brother ever did.

I'll never forget his whistle stop in my little hometown during his run for president. Our cross-country coach let us all go to the city park for his speech and I got to shake his hand and share a few sentences with him. One on one eye contact with him left you feeling like you'd just talked to someone that was a genuinely good man. It was a real punch to the gut when I heard of his death.

A couple of things I need to go over first...

#1. Although I am learning new info, my recommendation of "Oswald and the CIA" by John Newman deserves the caveat that it was just going to press as the Assassination Records Review Board was created to implement the directives of the JFK act was starting up. Newman was actually invited to the very first meeting of the board along with Robert Blakey (head of the HSCA) and David Slawson (one of the Warren Commission lawyers). There IS valuable info in the book, but don't expect anything cutting edge...

#2. I want to say in advance that what I am about to post is sourced from:
* ""JFK and the Unspeakable" by James W. Douglass.
* ""Oswald and the CIA" by John Newman.
* ""The Assassination Chronicles" by Edward Jay Epstein pp. 559, 564, 566-567.
* ""Appendix to Hearings before the HSCA", vol. 12, pp. 56-57.
* J. Edgar Hoover Letter to J. Lee Rankin, October 23, 1964, FBI Record Number 124-10147-10006, Agency File Number 105-126128-1st NR. 120.
* Warren Commission Hearings, vol. 2, pp. 385-386, 436.
* ""Oswald's Closest Friend: The George de Mohrenschildt Story, 11 volumes" by Bruce Campbell Adamson (Aptos, Calif.: self-published, 1993, 1995), vol. 6, pp. 1, 31-35.
* ""Arthur Young and Ruth Forbes Young--the Crux of the Matter" by William Kelly, Conference Abstract, Coalition on Political Assassinations, ""Opening the Files: JFK, MLK, RFK"; Washington, D.C., October 18-20, 1996.
* ""Autobiography of a Spy" by Mary Bancroft
* ""Oral History of Mary Bancroft", p. 243, cited by Adamson in ""Oswald's Closest Friend", p. 34. Bancroft also refers to her friendships with Ruth Forbes Paine (later Young) in ""Autobiography of a Spy", pp. 54-61.
* Warren Commission Hearings, vol. 3, p. 3.
* ""All in the Family (the Paines)" by Barbara LaMonica, Conference Abstract, Coalition on Political Assassinations, ""Opening the Files: JFK, MLK, RFK"; Washington, D.C., October 18-20, 1996.
* ""Oswald, the CIA and Mexico City: Fingerprints of Conspiracy" by John Newman, Probe (September- October 1999), p. 4.
* Warren Commission Hearings, vol. 9, pp. 257-258.
* Warren Commission Hearings, vol. 11, p. 396. See also transcript of Ruth Paine's testimony before the Orleans Parish Grand Jury, April 18, 1968, pp. 2-4
* ""Spies, Strings and Missionaries" by George Cotter, The Christian Century (March 25, 1981), p. 321
_____________________

By far, the most jaw-dropping thing I've come across in my ongoing research into the assassination is what I'm about to post. Considering all that I've learned from the massive account Doug Horne produced regarding his work as part of the ARRB, that's quite a statement. It is NOT, however, an overstatement. This is something that I would hope everyone who cares about the assassination would retain and pass on every time they run into someone who thinks the official story is written in stone and any argument against Lee Harvey Oswald being a lone nut H*ll-bent on finding a way to kill Kennedy is a vacuous endeavor.

The more I learn about Oswald the more I am becoming convinced that his intent was to serve his country but he was a complicated mixture of intelligence in some ways yet naive and not especially educated in others. A good example is his defection to the Soviets...

Having just been discharged by the marines on September 11, 1959 and making his way to Helsinki, the one country in Europe where the visitor visa process was most likely to make exceptions (the average turnaround was 7 to 14 days), and basically going straight into the Soviet Union's American Embassy in Moscow by mid-October, 1959, his Saturday visit struck American Consul, Richard Snyder, as "odd" before Oswald had even sat down. His appearance and demeanor were quirky enough that the other consul, John McVickar, noticed and continued working with one eye & ear on their unusual visitor.

Snyder got the feeling that Oswald was walking his way through a script that had been rehearsed (and coached) many times, including his physical mannerisms. He made several comments and asked questions meant to find a chink in the stranger's performance and was finally successful in getting Oswald to blurt out, "I was warned you'd try to talk me out of defecting!" Oswald went on to say and do some things Snyder found very suspicious for someone attempting to renounce his citizenship and disappear into the Soviet Union. When asked if he would serve for the Soviets, Oswald boasted of the information he'd aquired while working at the Atsugi Naval Air Station, Japan. Atsugi was not only the home of and radar station for the U2 spyplane, but was also a CIA hub for numerous operations in Southeast Asia.

In the end, Oswald's game-playing worked against him (possibly), because the office closed at noon on Saturdays. I'll skip past his hissy-fit, the attempts of his family to contact him from the States and the request for interviews at his hotel room. He'd been told he would have to come back to sign his paperwork and his refusal wound up being the reason he was later able to move his new family back to America.

He wasn't exactly in line for a warm welcome as a hometown boy, however... On October 13, 1959, the Corpus Christi Times ran this item:

As far as we are concerned, any American citizen, male or female, who renounces his citizenship in favor of the Soviet Union, is entitled to the protection of this government in two particulars only. The State Department should ask him two questions: Was he drunk or sober when he did it? Did he seem to have all his marbles with him at the time?"

Having settled these questions to its own satisfaction, the goverment and people of the United States should wave him good-bye and see to it that his name is wiped off our national books forever, and he never be allowed to set foot in this country again, dead or alive.

That little newspaper article would become the first record in Oswald's official FBI headquarters file #105-82555.

The point I'm trying to make is that Oswald may have been smart in some ways, but not as smart as he thought. Circumstantial evidence is piling up to show that he was unwittingly moved around like a pawn on a chessboard.

He and his family lived a spartan lifestyle because he willingly went where he was told and did what he was assigned.

One more bit of info up front....

If you've had an interest in the assassination, I'm sure you're familiar with the name George de Mohrenschildt. Pretty well everyone has written of his March 29, 1977, "suicide" by shotgun the day before he was due to testify before the HSCA. What I didn't know was that Gaeton Fonzi, the committee’s Miami-based investigator and stopped by where Mr. de Mohrenschildt was staying temporarily in the morning. Fonzi was told by his daughter that her father had an interview and would be back that night.

By 1:00 p.m., de Mohrenschildt returned. By 2:21 p.m., he was dead. Authorities determined the time by listening to a tape on which de Mohrenschildt’s daughter was recording a TV soap opera while she was at work.

Continued below...