by Jim Marrs
•In Warren Commission documents, including Marine and passport application papers, at least eleven give Oswald’s height as five-foot-eleven, while at least thirteen documents—all produced after Oswald’s return from Russia—give his height as five-foot-nine.
•During Oswald’s twenty-month disappearance in Russia, US government agencies—including the FBI and the State Department—expressed suspicions regarding Oswald’s identity.
•When Marina met Oswald at a dance in Minsk, she believed him to be a native Russian with a Baltic area accent. Since there is no doubt that the man she met in Russia was the man killed in Dallas, it should be understood that Marina knew only the one Oswald. But this fact does not eliminate the possibility that a substitution took place prior to their meeting.
There are a number of other intriguing hints that point toward substitution.
Just weeks before leaving Russia for home, Oswald wrote his mother and asked her to send him pictures of her and himself. Some researchers wonder if he needed such photos so he would know which woman to greet at the airport.
Jeanne DeMohrenschildt claimed that Oswald’s knowledge of Russia extended beyond just its language. Recall that native Russians thought he spoke the language better than they did. She said her husband, George, and Oswald would have lengthy discussions about Russian literature, including such authors as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky—an incredible feat for a high-school dropout whose Russian was self-taught.
She said Oswald even subscribed to a Soviet satirical journal titled The Crocodile and had a large collection of photographs he claimed to have taken in several different areas of Russia. Officially, Oswald never ventured outside Moscow and Minsk.
Gary Mack has reported that three language experts at Southern Methodist University in Dallas studied tape recordings made of Oswald. They were not told the identity of the man whose voice they heard. All agreed that the English words spoken seemed acquired later in life—that English was not the native tongue of the man on the tape.
This startling conclusion was supported by Mrs. DeMohrenschildt, who told this author she was more amazed by Oswald’s English than his Russian. She said he spoke in deliberate and precise terms, rarely ever using slang or curse words. She said, “Everybody always talks about how good his Russian was. I was always surprised at the English coming from this boy who was brought up in the South. I wondered, ‘Where did he learn such proper English—certainly not from his mother.’”
A particularly intriguing hint at impersonation came in the fall of 1963, when a letter was sent to the Russian embassy in Washington. It was signed by Lee Harvey Oswald, who was writing about his alleged travel to Mexico City. The second sentence of the letter—the Warren Commission published both his handwritten draft and the typed letter—reads, “I was unable to remain in Mexico indefinitely [sic] because of my mexican [sic] visa restrictions which was [sic] for 15 days only. I could not take a chance on requesting a new visa unless I used my real name [emphasis added], so I returned to the United States.”
Since his passport and visa forms—as well as the November 9, 1963, embassy letter—were in the name of Lee Harvey Oswald, researchers are left to wonder about the meaning of having to use “my real name.”
In 2003, researcher John Armstrong published a lengthy and heavily documented book advancing the theory that a second Oswald, rather than a Soviet agent, had been groomed at a young age by US intelligence with an eye toward sending him into Russia as a spy. Armstrong titled his book Harvey & Lee: How the CIA Framed Oswald. Meticulously footnoted and running to more than 1,000 pages, his book today is both costly and hard to obtain. His evidence, however, is compelling.
Under Armstrong’s theory, in the late 1950s a young man in New York City from a family with an Eastern European background who could speak Russian fluently was to be sent as a spy to Russia. But he would not go under his real name, so his background was merged with that of a patriotic American youth named Lee Harvey Oswald. A switch was made when both Lee and the New Yorker Armstrong identifies as Harvey were in military service. This identity switch very probably was accomplished with the knowledge and assistance of Lee Oswald.
Harvey went to Russia and eventually became the Oswald arrested in Dallas. He was the only Oswald known to his wife, Marina, and to his New Orleans coworker Judyth Vary Baker.
The real Lee Oswald was seen working with anti-Castro Cubans at a time when Harvey was in Russia and most probably was eliminated by the time of the assassination or shortly thereafter. Fantastic as this may sound, it fits all the known evidence and goes far in explaining the scramble by US intelligence agencies to cover up the truth of the legend that is Lee Harvey Oswald.
Some examples of Armstrong’s findings include:
•Statements by New Orleans resident Ed Voebel, who claimed to have befriended Oswald while both were attending Beauregard Junior High School in that city, at a time in 1954 when both his mother and brother said Oswald was attending Stripling Junior High in Fort Worth.
•Frank Kudlaty, former assistant principal of Stripling, recalled that the day after the assassination, he was ordered to retrieve Oswald’s records from the school and hand them over to FBI agents. Neither Oswald’s records nor any mention of Kudlaty has been found in the National Archives.
•FBI records show information was developed that an Oswald lived with his father and two uncles, who were Hungarian communists, at 77th and 2nd Avenue in New York City. Oswald, whose father died before he was born, grew up in Fort Worth.
•In Warren Commission Exhibit 1384 are New York school records showing Oswald attended 171 days at Public School No. 44. Yet, New York City attendance officer James Brennan reported Oswald was excessively absent from PS No. 44, more than forty-six days. Armstrong concluded, “These contradictory records appear to reflect the activities of two different people—both named ‘Lee Harvey Oswald.’ The short, malnourished Oswald truanted [often] and was remanded to the Youth House, while the tall, well-built Oswald attended PS No. 44 regularly.”
•In December 1963 as requested, Administrative Judge Florence Kelley of the Family Court of the State of New York personally handed over Oswald’s New York school (Case File 23979) and psychiatric records to FBI special agent in charge John Malone with the condition he give the files directly to the Warren Commission. Later, the original documents turned up missing and only photographic copies were available prompting Armstrong to conclude, “Whenever original records are destroyed and only copies or photographs remain, it is probable that the original documents were altered and then photographed.”
•Palmer E. McBride told the FBI he had worked with Oswald in 1957–1958 at the Pfisterer Dental Lab in New Orleans. Military records showed Oswald was serving in the Marines in Japan at this time.
•Although records show five-year-old Oswald had his tonsils removed in 1945, military records noted he was treated for tonsillitis while in the Marines.
•The husky, older Oswald photographed and tape recorded in Mexico City in 1963 obviously was not the Oswald arrested in Dallas.
•Deputy sheriff Roger Craig claimed he witnessed Oswald getting into a station wagon moments after the assassination. His account was supported by passing motorists Roy Cooper and Marvin Robinson. Yet, officially, Oswald was boarding a city bus driven by Cecil McWatters.
Based on indisputable evidence of impersonation if not a physical switch, author Eddowes went into a Texas court on January 10, 1979, and asked that Oswald’s grave be opened. He had the support of the Dallas County Medical Examiner’s Office, which was convinced there was enough question about the identity of the body to warrant an exhumation.
The Oswald Exhumation
Soon after Eddowes asked to have Oswald’s body exhumed, political fights sprang up between conflicting jurisdictions. Oswald had been killed in Dallas County, but his body was buried in Rose Hill Cemetery, which is in nearby Tarrant County. While the Dallas County Medical Examiner’s Office had authorized an exhum
ation, Tarrant County officials balked.
On June 1, 1979, Texas district judge James Wright denied Eddowes’s exhumation request. Dallas County assistant medical examiner Dr. Linda Norton told news reporters, “I feel it would be in the public interest to conduct the exhumation. However, there are apparent legal disagreements . . . and political forces who do not want this body dug up.”
Norton said her efforts to exhume the body were being thwarted by Tarrant County district attorney Tim Curry, an elected official. The case dragged on.
Eddowes was not the first to seek an exhumation of Oswald’s body. A Warren Commission document declassified only in 1975 revealed that CIA officials were suspicious of Oswald’s true identity as early as 1964. In a Commission memorandum dated March 13, 1964, staff member W. David Slawson wrote about a letter from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover on February 26, 1964. In this memo, Slawson quoted Hoover as writing, “The CIA is interested in the scar on Oswald’s left wrist. . . . The FBI is reluctant to exhume Oswald’s body as requested by the CIA.” In this same memo, Slawson expressed his own questions about what may have happened to Oswald in Russia:
This whole aspect of Oswald’s life and especially our attempt to authenticate it are highly secret at this point. . . . [Slawson mentions the reported suicide attempt by Oswald cutting his wrist shortly after arriving in Russia.] Therefore, if the suicide incident is a fabrication, the time spent by Oswald recovering from the suicide [attempt] in a Moscow hospital could have been spent by him in Russian secret police custody, being coached, brainwashed, etc.
Funeral director Paul Groody, who buried Oswald in 1963, told this author that Secret Service agents came to him three weeks after Oswald’s burial asking questions about marks on the body. Groody said, “They told me, ‘We don’t know who we have in that grave.’”
Furthermore, Oswald’s own mother asked for an exhumation in 1967, expressing questions as to the identity of the body in her son’s grave. Marguerite Oswald told local news reporters that she did not believe her son had scars on his body as described by the Warren Commission.
Mrs. Oswald previously had told the Warren Commission how her son had seemed changed after arriving back in Fort Worth from Russia. She said she noticed he was losing his hair and that Oswald told her he was going bald “because of the cold weather in Texas.” She also noted, “And Lee was very, very thin when I saw him.”
Oswald’s brother Robert also noted changes in Oswald when he arrived back in the United States. He told the Warren Commission:
His appearance had changed to the extent that he had lost a considerable amount of hair; his hair had become very kinky in comparison with his naturally curly hair prior to his departure to Russia. . . . He appeared the first couple of days upon his return . . . to be rather tense and anxious. I also noted that his complexion had changed somewhat to the extent that he had always been very fair complected—his complexion was rather ruddy at this time—you might say it appeared like an artificial suntan that you get out of a bottle, but very slight—in other words, a tint of brown to a tint of yellow. . . . He appeared to have picked up something of an accent.
Oswald’s half-brother, John Edward Pic, was even more pointed in his comments to the Warren Commission concerning Lee’s appearance after returning from Russia:
I would have never recognized him, sir. . . . He was much thinner than I remembered him. He didn’t have as much hair. . . . His face features were somewhat different, being his eyes were set back maybe, you know like in these Army pictures, they looked different than I remembered him. His face was rounder . . . when he went in the Marine Corps [Oswald had] a bull neck. This I didn’t notice at all. I looked for this, I didn’t notice it at all, sir.
Pic went on to tell how he became angered when Oswald introduced him to a visitor as his half-brother. He said Oswald had never previously mentioned that Pic was only a half-brother.
Shown a photo reportedly taken of young Oswald in 1953 at the Bronx Zoo, Pic told Warren Commission attorney Albert Jenner, “Sir, from that picture, I could not recognize that that is Lee Harvey Oswald.” Jenner queried, “He doesn’t look like you recall Lee looked in 1952 and 1953 when you saw him in New York City?” Pic replied, “No, sir.”
In August 1979, Dallas County medical examiner Dr. Charles Petty formally called for an exhumation and asked his counterpart in Tarrant County to order it. However, this request, along with Eddowes’s offer to pay the premium on a $100,000 indemnification bond to allow the exhumation to proceed, was rejected by District Attorney Curry.
Then in February 1980, Dr. Petty reversed himself and said he would not order an exhumation. Meanwhile, the court found that Eddowes, being a British citizen, lacked any legal standing in a Texas court.
By the summer of 1980, Eddowes was joined in his exhumation efforts by Marina Oswald, who provided the necessary legal standing.
As the foot-dragging of Tarrant County officials to an Oswald exhumation began to ease, another roadblock was thrown in the way of an exhumation—this time by Oswald’s brother Robert. On August 15, 1980, Robert Oswald won an injunction against the exhumation, saying it would cause his family anguish. This was considered very odd by assassination researchers because if the exhumation showed the man in the grave was not Oswald, it would have exonerated his brother as a presidential assassin. If the exhumation proved the body was Oswald, nothing would have changed. So what harm could be done?
The case dragged on for more months. Finally, on August 20, 1981, Marina filed suit to have the grave opened. And on October 4, 1981—nine months after Marguerite Oswald died from cancer in a Fort Worth hospital and was quietly buried alongside her son Lee—the exhumation of the Oswald grave took place. Opposition to the exhumation had suddenly vanished. Robert Oswald said he could not afford to fight the issue further in court.
The body was taken from Rose Hill Cemetery in the early morning hours and driven to Baylor Medical Center in Dallas for study. A team of four forensic pathologists compared the teeth of the corpse brought from the Oswald grave with Oswald’s Marine Corps dental records.
Almost four hours after the study began, the results were in. Dr. Norton, who headed the exhumation study, stated, “Beyond any doubt, and I mean any doubt, the individual buried under the name Lee Harvey Oswald in Rose Hill Cemetery is in fact Lee Harvey Oswald.”
Within hours, local newspapers carried the headlines:
—DOCTORS IDENTIFY BODY AS OSWALD,
—AUTOPSY PROVES BODY IS OSWALD’S and
—OSWALD ISSUE FINALLY AT REST
While some discrepancies were found between the corpse’s teeth and Oswald’s military dental records, the doctors were satisfied that enough similarities remained to warrant their conclusion. Also, a hole was discovered behind the left ear, which corresponded to Oswald’s known mastoid operation.
The issue appeared to be settled. But, as with so much else in the Kennedy assassination, this was not to be.
A few weeks after the Oswald exhumation, the two funeral home directors who prepared Oswald’s body for burial in 1963 got together and talked. Paul Groody and Alan Baumgartner were troubled. They were not supposed to have been at the post-exhumation examination. But at the last minute, Marina Oswald had asked them to be present and identify rings on the corpse.
Entering the autopsy room in Dallas, both men confirmed that the rings were on the corpse in the same location they had placed them in 1963. However, as the forensic examination continued, both Groody and Baumgartner noticed that the skull of the corpse under examination was in one piece—completely intact.
Weeks later, after discussing the matter between themselves, the funeral home directors discussed the situation with Texas assassination researchers and gave startling information—the body that was exhumed in 1981 was not the same body they buried in 1963.
What confirmed this idea in their minds was the absence of signs of a craniotomy, a normal autopsy procedure. A craniotomy involves drawing the skin off the
human skull and cutting off the top of the skull with a bone saw, usually in a V-shaped cut. This allows forensic pathologists to view the brain. There can be no question that this procedure was performed on Oswald’s body since the weight of his brain was recorded in the autopsy report. Furthermore, both funeral home directors recalled the craniotomy in preparing the body for burial. Groody said, “I put the skull back together and sewed up his scalp.”
Yet both men have said they noticed no sign of the craniotomy on the skull they viewed during the 1981 exhumation study. If there was no craniotomy performed on the skull in Oswald’s grave, it is proof that the body is not the same one buried there in 1963.
There are other indications that some manipulation may have taken place with the body. To begin with, Marina Oswald told news reporters that she received a telephone call around Easter 1964 from government officials asking her to sign papers authorizing the installation of an electronic alarm system at the Oswald grave. She said a “respectful” man in a gray suit came to her home shortly after the call and had her sign some papers. She told United Press International, “I signed lots of papers and they were never translated or explained to me. I didn’t even speak English. I just did what I was told.”
Prior to the exhumation, Marina was nearly convinced that Oswald’s body had been removed from the grave, most probably after the signing of the papers in 1964.
As far as is known, no electronic alarm system was ever installed at the Oswald grave.
Prior to the exhumation, mortician Groody told reporters how carefully Oswald had been embalmed. He also described how the body was placed in an airtight coffin that was placed inside an airtight cement vault. Groody said that upon exhumation Oswald’s body should look exactly as it had the day he was buried.
However, when workers exhumed the grave, they found the cement vault in pieces and the seal on the coffin broken. Water and air had gotten into the coffin and Oswald’s body had deteriorated to skeletal remains.
