LBJ

by Phillip F. Nelson

  One of the objectives of Bill Harvey and others from the military or intelligence agencies in the assassination was to trigger an invasion of Cuba. To achieve that, the planners at the operational level needed trails that would lead there when Oswald was killed at the scene or upon his arrest as he attempted to escape arrest. The idea was that the country would quickly get behind an invasion of Cuba once the trail of the assassin led back there, implicating Castro in the murder. The ensuing attack and invasion of Cuba would not only solve the “Castro problem” but it would return the island to the many people who had lost their property to Castro, including the many Americans and U.S.-owned corporations, which lost their factories, mines, plantations, casinos, bordellos, and factories, many of which had been headquartered in Washington DC.

  In the event “plan B” had been invoked, Oswald’s multiple IDs, wallets, sightings, and travel records were planted in the appropriate places; this created the necessary trails and would have enabled the government investigators to quickly establish a Cuban connection in order to assure this result. In fact, within hours of the assassination, news of Oswald’s associations with the Fair Play for Cuba group came from Miami and New Orleans, which quickly led to evidence of his trip to Mexico. It appears that this news was found so quickly because certain of the co-conspirators were growing anxious to put the investigation onto this track; however, the trail itself was one of the reasons this plan had to be discarded early on when Oswald was not killed immediately.

  The Designated “Patsy”: Lee Harvey Oswald

  The state of the U.S. culture in 1963 was influenced by the shadowy mystique of international espionage: James Bond spy novels, a weekly spy television show called I Led Three Lives, and a book and movie entitled The Manchurian Candidate. In that book, a candidate for the U.S. presidency is assassinated and the vice presidential candidate succeeds to the presidency amidst mass hysteria of the population, allowing the demagogic new president to rule over America, but on behalf of the Communists. Though it was sold in the “fiction” section, the book was based upon real attempts by the CIA to develop a behavior control research project code-named MK-ULTRA. Lee Harvey Oswald, who loved novels, television shows, and movies about spies, would have had many opportunities to see this movie at Dallas theaters as it was playing in the winter of 1962–1963, just before his move to New Orleans in the spring of 1963. If so, he no doubt realized that the movie might even have been made about experiences very similar to his own.

  Oswald’s “defection” to the Soviet Union in 1959, his return under the most expeditious circumstances despite his having (supposedly)19 renounced his citizenship, and his continuing involvement with the CIA in Dallas and New Orleans make it likely that his connections to the plot of the book and movie were more substantive than his being merely a fan of the genre. In fact, it is now clear, despite the CIA’s attempts to keep the covers on its association with Oswald, that he was being groomed for his role in the assassination by a number of “handlers”; it is logical to presume that he was subjected to an assortment of the latest techniques compiled by the psychological warfare unit. James Douglass, in JFK and the Unspeakable, best described the reality of Oswald’s life and how he had been manipulated from the time he was a teenager to the point where he was readied for his ultimate and final assignment:

  Lee Harvey Oswald, a young man on assignment in Russia for American intelligence … [whose life] trajectory … would end up meeting Kennedy’s in Dallas, was guided not by the heavens or fate or even, as the Warren Report would have it, by a disturbed psyche. Oswald was guided by intelligence handlers. Lee Harvey Oswald was a pawn in the game. He was a minor piece in the deadly game Kennedy wanted to end. Oswald was being moved square by square across a giant board stretching from Atsugi to Moscow to Minsk to Dallas. For the sake of victory in the Cold War, the hands moving Oswald were prepared to sacrifice him and any other piece on the board. However, there was one player, John Kennedy, who no longer believed in the game and was threatening to turn over the board.20

  The obvious question raised by this assessment is, “Why was Oswald so malleable as to allow himself to be used in this way, since it clearly wasn’t for pecuniary gain?” The answer begins with Oswald’s fatherless childhood and his early life with a cold and distant mother and siblings much older than himself. His brother, Robert, provided an interesting insight to Lee’s early years. Appearing on PBS’s Frontline show November 20, 2003, Robert said,

  Lee’s fantasy life, to me, became apparent in the 1948, 1949, 1950 period. “I Led Three Lives”—he became really engrossed in that particular TV show, and he was still watching it when I left to go in the Marine Corps in 1952… . . he just liked the atmosphere that you could do anything that you wanted to do, that you could imagine you could do… . The fact that he could put on a facade and pretended [sic] to be somebody he wasn’t—to me, it gets down to what happened later on. That was a training ground [for] his imagination.”

  His fantasies apparently extended to the books he read, including various Ian Fleming novels about James Bond’s exploits. According to the FBI’s investigation of his New Orleans library records and the testimony of an acquaintance of his and Marina’s, Katherine Ford, he tended to like books “about how to be a spy.” It is ironic that Oswald shared one thing in common with Lyndon Johnson, destined to become the new president of the United States: a determined obsession with fulfilling the fantasies which he dreamt about as a child. In Lee’s case, there is significant evidence that despite his young age, he had already achieved some success in his plan to become a spy, beginning with his recruitment initially by the ONI, subsequently with the CIA’s initial mission to the Soviet Union, and finally, most recently in 1962, when he became an FBI informant.21

  Oswald’s History in the Intelligence Business

  Despite the forty-plus years of CIA roadblocks and lies under oath by Richard Helms, James Angleton, Allen Dulles, and others, the general consensus among serious researchers is that Lee Harvey Oswald was in fact trained by the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), under the direction of the CIA, beginning in 1957 as a young enlistee in the Marine Corps. In 1989, Jim Marrs helped to establish, after years of obfuscation by the CIA, that Lee Harvey Oswald was recruited early on during his Marine Corps service, initially by the ONI, to become trained specifically for a future spy mission to the USSR.

  Marrs showed that Oswald’s service in the Marine Corps was riddled with inexplicable events; chief among them was how his supposed self-study of the Russian language led to his becoming so proficient—in such a linguistically dissimilar language than his native tongue—that some Russians stated that he spoke like a locally indigenous citizen, this despite his long-term documented learning disabilities. Men who knew him during his period at the Atsugi base in Japan—the largest CIA installation in the world at the time—have stated that Oswald worked for U.S. intelligence, beginning with the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). Marrs documented how Oswald travelled relatively easily in his journeys both to and from the Soviet Union, including getting passports and visas issued as rapidly as possible (a routine procedure for documentation done for intelligence agencies). Marrs also established that the Minox camera found by the Dallas police was quickly changed on the FBI’s records as being merely a “Minox light meter.” Detective Gus Rose apparently didn’t get the memo, however, telling the Dallas Morning News, “[The FBI] were calling it a light meter, I know that. But I know a camera when I see it … The thing we got at Irving out of Oswald’s seabag was a Minox camera. No question about it. They tried to get me to change the records because it wasn’t a light meter. I don’t know why they wanted it changed, but they must have had some motive for it.” Moreover, reporter Earl Golz determined that the serial number on the camera had not even been available for sale in the United States in 1963. In 1979, the lie started to unravel when the FBI released a number of photographs which they admitted were taken with Oswald’s Minox camera.22

 
After volunteering for the Marines, Oswald was assigned to Atsugi Air Force Base in Japan, which was also the largest CIA facility in the world outside of the United States. Oswald had a top secret clearance and access to the CIA’s U-2 spy planes, which flew spy missions and photographed military facilities over the Soviet Union and China.23 One of Oswald’s roommates from the Marine Corps was James Botelho, who later became a California judge. Botelho stated that Oswald was not a Communist or a Marxist and was in fact, anti-Soviet. After the assassination, a cursory investigation of Oswald’s background was made in which two civilians visited him but took no written statements, made no recordings, and only asked a few perfunctory questions regarding Oswald’s background. Judge Botelho said it was “a cover-investigation so that it could be said there had been an investigation … Oswald, it was said, was the only Marine ever to defect from his country to another country, a Communist country, during peacetime. That was a major event. When the Marine Corps and American intelligence decided not to probe the reasons for the ‘defection,’ I knew then what I know now: Oswald was on an assignment in Russia for American intelligence.”24

  As a fatherless boy with a loveless mother and an absent brother, Oswald began disassociating himself from the daily monotony and boredom that had started to become the norm. He had been tapped by someone he had known since he was an adolescent, David Ferrie, when in 1956 he joined the Civil Air Patrol in an effort to begin acting out his boyhood dreams of being a spy and living his life on the outer boundaries of reality. He found more enjoyment in pretending that his role in life would be much more than the other people he came into contact with in the “real world.” His fascination with I Led Three Lives may have started out as a diversion—but it grew into an obsession.

  Although he did not live long enough to stand trial, and his CIA, ONI, and FBI files were laundered in the days just before and after the assassination, there were still numerous trails that end at their doorsteps: Oswald’s advanced language training in Japan and California, his early “honorable” separation from the Marine Corps (subsequently changed to dishonorable), the financial help and expedited passport and travel visas he was able to secure, his trip via Helsinki (apparently by military aircraft since there was no commercial flight available at that time) for his debriefings, his contacts with CIA personnel as he entered and exited the Soviet Union and his contact with a number of CIA operatives, including his Dallas handler George de Mohrenschildt, and his New Orleans handlers (Clay Shaw, Guy Bannister, and David Ferrie) are all chronicled in meticulous detail by Philip H. Melanson.25

  Oswald tried to leave home and join the Marine Corps, as his brother had done, but found that the marines were not interested in sixteen-year-olds as recruits. After waiting a year, he joined the marines and wound up in Japan where he became involved with the top secret air force spy plane called the U-2. While he was there, his interests in the intelligence field caught the attention of the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), which subsequently referred his name to the appropriate counterintelligence officials in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Oswald had been given very special treatment to facilitate his desire for intelligence work, including the assignment of a very attractive female tutor to help him learn Russian on a fast-track basis. He was given extra leave so he could spend more time with her, mostly in bars in the area around the Atsugi Air Force Base, which was one of the biggest CIA installations outside the United States due to its use as the base of the supersecret long-range U-2 reconnaissance plane from which it flew missions over both the Soviet Union and China. Near the end of his term of service, Oswald was given an early “hardship” discharge in September 1959, which intended to help establish that he was no longer associated with the U.S. military; he would request asylum in Russia on the basis of his disillusionment with life in the capitalist world. He had inserted himself into Russia by way of a mysterious journey through Finland where he was first given infiltration instructions and briefings by the CIA. Similarly, when he left Russia, he was given expedited service for a new passport and then subsequently debriefed in Helsinki. Moreover, using Philip Melanson’s and John Newman’s original research as the basis for the charge, it is also reasonable to state that it appears that Oswald furnished too much information to the Soviets regarding the U-2, which helped them to shoot down the spy plane piloted by Francis Gary Powers on May Day 1960, six months after Oswald’s arrival.

  When Oswald and his family were welcomed back into the country, they were met on arrival by a representative of the Travelers’ Aid Society, who also happened to represent the rabid anticommunist organization, “American Friends of the Anti-Bolshevik Nations” (ABN), Spas T. Raikin26 (the latter association was kept from the public by the Warren Commission).* Oswald was then given advance funds to resettle and was shortly befriended in Fort Worth by the unlikeliest of new friends, the urbane, well-educated (and CIA connected) George de Mohrenschildt who assisted him in getting employment at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall in Dallas, a company doing top secret work for the U.S. Army, including processing reconnaissance photographs of Cuba, among other things.

  Somewhere along the line, Oswald had obviously caught the attention of a lot of highly placed people. But at least one man had known all about Oswald well before his staged “defection” to the Soviet Union; James Jesus Angleton was his chief “handler” all along.27 Evidence provided by Gerry Hemming indicated that Angleton had “discovered” Oswald while he was serving in Japan and had secretly recruited him (unbeknownst to the entire CIA hierarchy at Langley) to go to the Soviet Union in the first place, “dangling” him as an ex-Marine malcontent, ready to divulge top secret U.S. military information.28 According to John Newman, Oswald was only one of twelve to seventeen other infiltrators,29 and according to Victor Marchetti, a former CIA officer, in his book The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, the program originally “involved three dozen, maybe forty young men who were made to appear disenchanted, poor, American youths who had become turned off and wanted to see what communism was all about. Some of these people lasted only a few weeks. They were sent into the Soviet Union, or into Eastern Europe, with the specific intention the Soviets would pick them up and ‘double’ them if they suspected them of being U.S. agents, or recruit them as KGB agents. They were trained at various naval installations both here and abroad but the operation was being run out of Nag’s Head, North Carolina.” (The reference to North Carolina begs the question of whether Lee Harvey Oswald’s 10:45 p.m. telephone call after he was arrested to a “John Hurt” in that state had anything to do with the naval installation located there).

  It was likely that the shoot-down of the U-2 incident caused Angleton to facilitate Oswald’s quick reentry into the United States in 1962 for the express purpose of using him as a “patsy” for the original plan to simulate an assassination of Kennedy as a pretext for an invasion of Cuba. What apparently occurred was that the original plan evolved and eventually morphed into an amalgamated, and real, assassination plot; Oswald’s role simply morphed with it, but he was never apprised of the change in plans, where he became the sacrificial lamb as the “lone nut” shooter of the president in a general plot originally initiated by Lyndon B. Johnson, which was extended, modified, and customized by Bill Harvey and given life by James Jesus Angleton. Given that Angleton’s files were not accessible to anyone else at Langley and that he destroyed many of them in the weeks before he was fired in 1974, the answer to this piece of the puzzle will probably forever remain lost in the Wilderness of Mirrors of Langley Virginia.

  The pilot of the U-2 shot down over Soviet territory, Gary Powers, raised the question about whether the shoot-down of his aircraft might have been the result of information the Soviets obtained from Oswald. Yet in 1962, when Oswald returned to the U.S. embassy in Moscow, he was welcomed back, given his passport and entry visas for his family, and even a loan to return to the country he had supposedly betrayed. Despite Oswald’s supposed “defection,” the CIA professed to have no i
nterest in him. It maintained that it did not contact him or attempt to debrief him, and it did not place him on a watch list.* The Agency was simultaneously spinning an oddly solicitous and forgiving view of Oswald’s record and reputation on the one hand while implicitly confessing to a prima facie case of their own dereliction of duty on the other. A larger picture of the potential uses the Agency might have for Oswald was slowly emerging despite the cloud of purposely created ambiguity into which he had been placed.

  There were indications in 1964 that the Warren Commission was fully aware of possible connections between Oswald and the CIA and FBI. Two Warren Commission staff lawyers, W. David Slawson and William T. Coleman, wrote a report, which was withheld from the public until 1975, that portrayed Oswald as possibly having been manipulated by some of the exiles (or, by extension, their CIA handlers—ed.) into a position as the alleged killer of JFK for the very purpose of blaming the assassination on Castro, thus creating a basis for his overthrow.30 The CIA’s lies about having no connection to Oswald’s handlers—Guy Bannister, Clay Shaw, and David Ferrie—were revealed by a former high-ranking CIA staff officer, Victor Marchetti, who said in an interview with Anthony Summers, he “‘observed consternation on the part of then CIA Director Richard Helms and other senior officials when Ferrie’s name was first publicly linked with the assassination in 1967.’ Marchetti claimed he asked a colleague about this and was told that ‘Ferrie had been a contract agent to the Agency in the early sixties and had been involved in some of the Cuban activities.’”31