by Jim Marrs
The erroneous information came from military intelligence files. In testimony to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, the 112th Military Intelligence Group’s operations officer, Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Jones, who was stationed at Fort Sam Houston, said the afternoon of the assassination he received a call from his agents in Dallas advising that a man named A. J. Hidell had been arrested.
Jones said he searched his intelligence indexes and located a file on A. J. Hidell that cross-referenced into one for Harvey Lee Oswald of 605 Elsbeth. He said he then contacted the FBI in both San Antonio and Dallas with his information.
However, in the vast documentation of Oswald’s life he used the A. J. Hidell alias only twice—when he mail-ordered the Carcano rifle and the pistol and when he used the name Hidell on Fair Play for Cuba literature.
This indicates that it was US military intelligence that tipped off the Dallas police as to the identity of their suspect and raises two possibilities. Either military intelligence had some independent knowledge of Oswald’s purchase of the weapons, which took place long before he arrived in New Orleans, or they were monitoring his Dallas post office box. Or did someone, perhaps even Oswald himself, inform the military of his purchases?
The files on Hidell and Oswald gave detailed information about Oswald’s trip to Russia as well as pro-Castro activities in New Orleans. Jones said he had become aware of Oswald in the summer of 1963 when information had been passed along by the New Orleans Police Department regarding his arrest there. He said the 112th Military Intelligence Group took an interest in Oswald as a possible counterintelligence threat.
The House committee, remarking on how quickly the military found files on Oswald, stated, “This information suggested the existence of a military intelligence file on Oswald and raised the possibility that he had intelligence associations of some kind.”
The Warren Commission specifically asked to see any military files regarding Oswald but never saw the files mentioned by Jones or others.
In 1978, when the House Select Committee on Assassinations learned of these files and requested them from the military, they were told the files had been “destroyed routinely” in 1973. The committee concluded:
The committee found this “routine” destruction of the Oswald file extremely troublesome, especially when viewed in light of the Department of Defense’s failure to make the file available to the Warren Commission. Despite the credibility of Jones’ testimony, without access to this file, the question of Oswald’s possible affiliation with military intelligence could not be fully resolved.
It appears that the US military knew more about Oswald and his weapons than has been made public yet destroyed all the files when talk of a reinvestigation began in the early 1970s. But does that mean the military orchestrated the assassination?
It is ironic that of all our modern presidents, it was John F. Kennedy who received the only full military funeral in recent history. Why Kennedy? Why not Eisenhower? Was this the military’s way of making atonement?
In early 2013, the Elsbeth apartment building was bulldozed on orders of Dallas officials despite protests by the owner, who said she tried to renovate it and preserve it.
The Man Who Was to Kill Oswald
[Since the first edition of Crossfire, readers have pondered the meaning of the heading above but that was followed by no copy. Apparently it was decided to delete the entire section in an effort to save costs but someone forgot to delete the heading. Here is the long-missing section. For an excellent and more detailed account of this story, see Dick Russell’s 1992 book The Man Who Knew Too Much.]
According to one soldier’s account, there was even an attempt to prevent the assassination by killing a key player—Lee Harvey Oswald.
The man’s name was Richard Case Nagell and he told one of the strangest and most sinister stories to come out of the Kennedy assassination. As pieced together from interviews and court documents and a national magazine article in 1981 by writer and researcher Dick Russell, Nagell’s story delved into the complex and murky world of military intelligence, the CIA, and the FBI.
Raised in an orphanage and foster homes, Nagell entered the Army in 1948 at age eighteen. During the Korean War, he was the youngest American to receive a battlefield commission. He was awarded three Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star while serving in Korea and honorably discharged in 1959 with the rank of captain.
Military papers disclosed that Nagell graduated from Army Military Intelligence School and a special leader’s course, and served in the Counterintelligence Corps. According to his records, he was given a top-secret security clearance in 1950. One of his commendation certificates described Nagell as a “perennial calm and level-headed officer of superior intelligence.”
According to courtroom testimony, in 1958 military intelligence “loaned” Nagell to “another intelligence agency” for assignments in Asia as part of a spy group called Field Operations Intelligence.
As a senior intelligence adviser in South Korea, Nagell admitted participating in political assassinations, kidnapping, blackmail, and counterfeiting operations. By 1957, he had told superiors he was “fed up” with committing crimes in the name of national security and was reassigned to counterintelligence duties in Japan. It was here, he said, he first met a young Marine stationed at Atsugi named Lee Harvey Oswald.
“We had a casual, but purposeful acquaintance in Japan,” Nagell told Russell. “My relationship with Oswald there, and later in the United States, was strictly with an objective.”
About this time, Nagell married a Japanese woman and, at her urging, resigned his commission, returned to the United States, and went to work for the State of California. In 1962, amid marital problems, he left his wife and two children and journeyed to Mexico City.
In Mexico, Nagell said, he contacted a CIA man he had previously known and signed a contract with the agency, becoming a double agent. He was to work for the Soviet KGB while actually serving the CIA.
The Soviets informed him of a plot to kill Kennedy involving the violent anti-Castro Cuban group known as Alpha 66 and ordered Nagell to return to the United States to learn more. The KGB even provided Nagell with a photograph of one of the plotters. Nagell was shocked to find it was his old acquaintance Lee Harvey Oswald.
Nagell echoed the story from Soviet defector Yuri Nosenko when he told Russell, “When he [Oswald] was in the Soviet Union, they suspected him as a spy and considered him emotionally unstable, prone to commit some act that could bring embarrassment to them.”
Nagell would not give details about what he discovered concerning Oswald in the fall of 1962, but he did say, “He was just being used—by a lot of people, for their own reasons.” Nagell said he became aware of at least two Kennedy assassination plots during this time, both involving Cubans, whose “war names” were “Angel” and “Leopaldo,” the same names given to Silvia Odio.
According to Nagell, the CIA-backed Alpha 66 Cubans convinced Oswald they were members of Castro’s intelligence service and solicited his help in assassinating Kennedy to avenge CIA assassination plots against Castro. Since the evidence suggests Oswald was actually playing as an undercover agent of the United States, he would, of course, have gone along with these schemes to learn all he could about the plots. Nagell said he actually got close enough to the plotting to tape a New Orleans meeting in late August 1963.
Nagell was then ordered by KGB officials fearful of being implicated in an assassination to disrupt the Kennedy plot. “[I was to] try to persuade Oswald that the deal was phony and if this didn’t work, and if it looked like things were going to progress beyond the talking stage, to get rid of him,” said Nagell, explaining that considering Oswald’s background in Russia, the Soviets “were the last people that wanted Kennedy dead” in a plot involving Oswald.
Nagell said he met with Oswald in early September in New Orleans’s Jackson Square. Unwilling to break his cover as a KGB operative, Nagell nevertheless tried to warn Oswal
d that “Angel” and “Leopoldo” were not Castro agents, but “counter-revolutionaries known to be connected with a violence-prone faction of a CIA-financed groupo.” Later, Nagell related:
He was informed that he was being “used” by fascist elements in an attempt to disrupt the Cuban revolution, and probably to incite the US Government to severe retaliatory measures against Cuba, etc. He denied that there had been any serious discussion to kill Kennedy. He seemed genuinely upset and visibly shaken. . . . He stated he was a friend of the Cuban revolution.
Frustrated that Oswald still maintained his own “cover,” Nagell then sent a registered letter to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, warning of the assassination plot and naming both Oswald and the Cubans but stating that the plot might occur in late September in Washington, DC.
After sending this letter, Nagell said, he again met with Oswald and told him a Soviet agent code-named “Oaxaca” wanted to meet Oswald in Mexico City. According to Nagell:
He (Oswald) was instructed not to go near the Cuban or U.S.S.R. embassies. Oswald agreed to do so when he was advised that he would be provided with more than sufficient funds to make the trip to and from Mexico City by plane. He was told where and how he was to pick up the money order on 9/24/63, his expected date of departure from New Orleans.
On September 17, the day Oswald picked up his Mexican tourist card in New Orleans, Nagell was already on his way to Mexico City, carrying a .45-caliber Colt pistol to use on Oswald.
But Nagell began to have second thoughts about his role as a double agent and as an assassin. On September 20, he instead drove to El Paso and entered the State National Bank. According to Russell, “He had decided he could not go through with the KGB’s assignment. Doubtful about which master he was really serving, unable to kill a man and then face life abroad without his children, he chose instead to get himself placed in federal custody.”
After all, he had alerted the FBI, although the bureau predictably denied ever having received his letter. The matter was out of his hands. While in jail awaiting trial for bank robbery, Nagell was visited often by both FBI and Secret Service agents, according to jailer Juan Medina. Two FBI agents visited Nagell on November 19, only three days before the assassination. Early in 1964, Nagell was brought before US district judge Homer Thornberry in El Paso. The El Paso Times reported, “Instead of asking for a plea, Fred Morton, assistant US District Attorney made a motion to put Nagell in a federal institution in Springfield, Mo., for psychiatric observation. The motion was granted over Nagell’s vigorous objections.”
The newspaper also reported that FBI and Secret Service agents had questioned Nagell about Oswald and “subversive activities.” On March 20, 1964, Nagell tried to communicate with the Warren Commission, writing, “Has the Commission been advised that I informed the Federal Bureau of Investigation in September 1963 that an attempt might be made to assassinate President Kennedy?”
Despite this letter and the attention paid to Nagell by the FBI and Secret Service, there is no mention of him in the Warren Report or its attendant twenty-six volumes. Nagell again wrote to Hoover:
My responsibility concerning the then prospective action of Lee H. Oswald (alias) Albert Hidell, terminated with the dispatch of the registered letter from Richard Nagell to the FBI in September 1963. Since the information disclosed in that letter was judged to be mendacious by the FBI, as is quite evident, then with whom the responsibility lies for what subsequently happened in Dallas is rather obvious.
In March 1964, Nagell was declared competent to stand trial and, although he had no previous criminal record and the holdup was obviously faked, he was convicted of two counts of entering a bank with intent to rob and given the maximum sentence of ten years in the US Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas.
His conviction was overturned in 1966 and a new trial ordered. Again he was found guilty and again drew a ten-year prison term. However, this was reversed in 1968 by the US Court of Appeals “in view of strong evidence that defendant was insane at time of offense.” Nagell finally was set free.
But he was not truly free. He claimed he was followed and hounded and that attempts were made on his life. Nagell died of heart disease in 1995 at the age of sixty-five. It should be noted that the government has often used criminal and medical history documents, whether real or otherwise, to discredit testimony from people who might challenge the official version of an event.
But other military men apparently did not have such benign intentions toward President Kennedy and assassination.
Lone Gunmen on the Grassy Knoll
By 2013, numerous people had been identified as a possible Grassy Knoll gunman. But to this author’s knowledge only four identified persons have actually confessed and all started out as American GIs. Of these four, only two offered any real evidence and even this was contradictory and far from conclusive.
The story of one of these men, Loy Factor, became public when researchers Mark Collom and Glen Sample self-published the 1995 book The Men on the Sixth Floor. Collom had met Lawrence Lloyd Factor when both were hospitalized in 1971. Factor’s story seemed so farfetched that both the publishing world and most researchers ignored it.
Loy Factor was a Native American who claimed to have suffered brain damage while serving in the military during World War II. His story, as recounted by author Robin Ramsey in the 2007 book Who Shot JFK?, was this:
Factor met a man he knew only as Wallace in 1962 at the funeral of a Texas politician. Factor said he went along just to see some famous people. In the course of their conversation, Factor boasted to Wallace of his shooting and hunting skills. Wallace was interested and asked for Factor’s address. A year later he turned up and asked for a demonstration of Factor’s shooting ability. Having seen it, the man told Factor that he might have a job for him in the future using his rifle, a job worth $10,000—$2,000 immediately and the rest when the job was done. Factor accepted the $2,000. . . . Later the man sent for Factor to do the job. Factor was taken to a house in Dallas where he met Jack Ruby, the man called Wallace, Lee Harvey Oswald and a young Hispanic woman, Ruth Ann. They ended up on the sixth floor of the book depository. [After firing coordinated shots at Kennedy, the group] fled quickly down the stairs—Ruth Ann and Factor to their parked car, Oswald and Wallace in different directions. Loy was driven to the bus depot, a few blocks away where he was to catch a bus back home. But in a short while Ruth Ann and Wallace both returned to the depot to pick up Factor and drive him out of town.
It would be easy enough to dismiss Factor’s story, especially since he claimed to have collected $10,000 for his role yet never fired a rifle, except for the fact that years after publishing their book, Collom and Sample learned Wallace’s first name was Malcolm or Mac and in 1998 heard that a group of Texas researchers had identified fingerprints found on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository the day of the assassination could be traced to Malcolm “Mac” Wallace, a convicted killer for hire, a longtime associate of Lyndon B. Johnson’s, and the man at the center of Factor’s story. Factor also correctly recalled that the rear of the Depository faced north and there was a wooden loading dock there that was taken down not long after the assassination.
Wallace, who died in a car accident in 1971, was elected president of the Student Union at the University of Texas at Austin after returning home from the Marines during World War II. In 1950, he was introduced to Lyndon Johnson by Johnson’s attorney Ed Clark and soon was working for the US Department of Agriculture in Texas. In October 1951, Wallace was arrested and convicted in the murder-for-hire death of Austin miniature golf course owner John Kinser, who reportedly was in ill favor with Johnson due to his dating Johnson’s sister, Josefa. Represented by Johnson’s attorneys, Wallace nevertheless was convicted, with eleven of the jurors calling for the death penalty. However, the trial judge overruled the jury and announced a sentence of five years’ imprisonment, which he immediately suspended.
This was not the only murder attributed to
Wallace. Several deaths occurred during government investigations into Johnson’s business dealings but the one that gained the most attention was the shooting death of Henry Marshall, the Agriculture Department official looking into illegalities by Texas cotton allotment kingpin Billie Sol Estes. Estes died in 2013 at age eighty-eight.
The Marshall case came to a climax in August 1984 when, after hearing Billie Sol Estes relate that he was present when Johnson, Wallace, and Johnson aide Cliff Carter plotted to “get rid” of Marshall, a Robertson County grand jury changed the Marshall suicide ruling to one of homicide.
On the day of the assassination, some twenty-odd fingerprints recovered from the sixth floor of the Depository could not be connected to either Oswald, other Depository employees, or investigators. These prints were placed in the National Archives and generally forgotten except by John F. “Jay” Harrison, a Dallas police reservist and JFK assassination researcher. Harrison arrived on the scene of the assassination within minutes and maintained his research until his death in May 2005.
In the late 1990s, Harrison enlisted the aid of Nathan Darby, the retired head of the Austin, Texas, Police Department’s Identification and Criminal Records Section, in matching the Depository prints with a jail card belonging to Mac Wallace. According to Darby, there was a fourteen-point match between the prints. US courts generally accept a ten-to twelve-point comparison as proof of a match. These results were made public at a news conference in May 1998, where it was announced there was no doubt that Wallace was one of the shooters.
Naturally, opposition to any idea other than that of a lone assassin swung into gear, and controversy still reigns over the Wallace-fingerprint issue, especially since both Harrison and Darby are now deceased and cannot counter any accusations. Darby’s analysis was submitted to the FBI for comment. Predictably, after dragging their feet for more than a year, bureau officials stated the print match was in error but failed to produce any supporting data or their own analysis.
