by Tim Kring
13. Jack Ruby. The man who shot Lee Harvey Oswald to save Jackie the trauma of a trial is almost as mysterious as the assassin he murdered. His ties to organized crime, including Sam Giancana, have been well documented, but whether Giancana put him up to the shooting is unknown. At one point, he claimed Oswald was the gunman of a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy, and he also claimed that he was framed to kill Oswald; he also claimed he was injected with the cancer cells that claimed his life in 1967. Shortly before he died, however, he recanted everything, and claimed he had acted alone.
14. Lee Harvey Oswald. Few lives in history have been more documented than Lee Harvey Oswald’s, yet few are as shrouded in mystery. An avowed Communist from early childhood, he also joined the U.S. Marines a few days before his seventeenth birthday—where, despite the fact that he read the Communist Manifesto in boot camp, he was still stationed at the Atsugi Air Force Base in Japan, the base of the U-2 spy plane program, then the single most important weapon in the U.S. espionage arsenal. When he told his superiors that he was going to defect to the Soviet Union and tell them everything he knew about the U-2 program, he wasn’t arrested but was sent on his way. In the Soviet Union, he lived a lavish life and married a woman he knew for less than a month, only to suddenly declare himself disillusioned with Russian Communism and ask to be allowed to return to the United States, with his wife and child. Not only was this request granted by Soviet authorities, but American intelligence allowed Oswald back into the country with little more than a routine interview. All of which generates a thousand questions: Was Oswald a troubled young man whose intense Communist beliefs led him to shoot the president of the United States? Or was he actually an agent of the Soviet Union who was directed to assassinate Kennedy after being recruited into the KGB in his late teens? Or, even more nefariously, was he actually an agent of the CIA whose Communist sympathies were a cover designed to get him into the KGB, where he could spy for America, and who later collapsed beneath the burden of his fractured identity? Or did he even pull the trigger? There’s evidence—much of it contradictory—for every theory, and it’s doubtful we’ll ever be satisfied with any single answer.
15. Umbrella Man and Dark-Complected Man. Umbrella Man and Dark-Complected Man are a pair of individuals present at Dealey Plaza who figure prominently in some of the JFK conspiracy theories. Umbrella Man, so named because he was carrying an umbrella on a sunny morning (although it had been raining earlier in the day) can be seen in various photographs and the Zapruder film opening his umbrella right after Oswald fired the first of his three shots; conspiracy theorists see this as a signal to Oswald that he had missed and needed to fire again. Dark-Complected man, seated near Umbrella Man, can be seen carrying a dark rectangular object that some conspiracy theorists believe to be a walkie-talkie, with which he is communicating with other conspirators. Neither man’s real name has ever been confirmed.
16. MK-ULTRA. A top secret program of the CIA, along with Projects Bluebird, Chatter, and Artichoke, which researched brainwashing, mind-control, and interrogation, including the use of drugs and other techniques to influence human behavior. At its most basic level, MK-ULTRA investigated drugs such as Sodium Pentothol, MDSM, LSD, and BZ for use as incapacitants and truth serums; at its most far-fetched, the program seriously investigated various forms of ESP, including telepathy and remote viewing, and possible ways to create these abilities.
17. Joseph Scheider. The real name of Sidney Gottlieb, the leader of the chemical division of the CIA’s Technical Services Section. Scheider, aka Gottlieb, was the head of MK-ULTRA and also worked on various poisons and poison-delivery systems in the CIA’s decades-long plot to assassinate or otherwise remove Fidel Castro from power, including a plan to spray his shoes with thallium so that his beard would fall out—Gottlieb seeming to believe that Castro’s power, like Samson’s, was vested in his hair.
18. LSD. Lysergic acid diethylamide was synthesized in a Swiss laboratory in 1938 as a potential treatment for heart problems. At the time, it was by far the most powerful hallucinogen that had ever been discovered, and concomitant with its extreme power came extreme claims about its potential: from cures for schizophrenia to a life-empowerment tool to a means for creating new mental states and even abilities, LSD was a compound of intense scientific and social scrutiny.
19. The Truman Doctrine. Harry Truman’s corollary to the Monroe Doctrine stated that it was necessary for the United States to do everything within its power economically and militarily to prevent countries from “going Red,” be it voluntarily or as a result of Soviet aggression. As part of the U.S. policy of containment, the most famous applications of the doctrine were, first, in Korea and, later, in Vietnam. Although the Korean and Vietnam wars failed to save either country from partial or total Communist victory, Cold War historians believe that the expense of these and other wars contributed to the economic fragility of the Soviet Union, which led to its collapse in 1989.
20. The Daylight Test. A catchphrase in the espionage community, the Daylight Test refers to the criterion by a particular intelligence operation is judged—that is, would you perform the same action in broad daylight that you would under cover of darkness? Although idealists see it as a moral yardstick prohibiting actions that wouldn’t stand up to direct scrutiny, pragmatists see it instead as an admonition to prepare for eventual discovery and have strategies for disavowal or plausible deniability ready to hand.
Background reading:
John Armstrong. Harvey and Lee: How the CIA Framed Oswald. Quasar Books, 2003.
Erik Hedegaard. “The Last Confession of E. Howard Hunt.” Rolling Stone, Apr. 5, 2009.
John Clellon Holmes. “This Is the Beat Generation.” New York Times Magazine, Nov. 16, 1952.
George Kennan. The “Long Telegram,” http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar/documents/episode-1/kennan.htm.
Norman Mailer. “The White Negro.” Dissent, Summer 1957; reprinted in Advertisements for Myself (New York: Putnam’s, 1959, and subsequent reprints).
About the Authors
TIM KRING is one of the creative community’s original transmedia storytellers using film, TV, broadband, computers, mobile devices, and the printed page to engage audiences around the world in narrative and immersive story arcs. Internationally, 76 million fans know Tim’s work as the creator and executive producer of Heroes, NBC’s Emmy-nominated epic saga that chronicles the lives of ordinary people who discover they possess extraordinary abilities.
Kring has written numerous feature films, series pilots, and television movies. Before creating Heroes, he was a producer for television shows including Chicago Hope and Providence. He also created the procedural drama Crossing Jordan.
Kring studied film at Allan Hancock Junior College and then the University of Southern California’s renowned film school. After graduation he worked his way up in production as a grip, a gaffer, and on camera crews.
Kring resides in Los Angeles with his wife Lisa, a social worker, and their two children. In his spare time, he enjoys photography and collecting acoustic guitars.
DALE PECK is the author of nine books, including, most recently, Body Surfing and Sprout, both novels. His fiction, essays, and criticism have appeared in numerous publications, including Atlantic Monthly, the London Review of Books, and the New York Times. Since 1999, he has taught in the New School’s Graduate Writing Program. A co-founder of the Mischief and Mayhem writing collective, he lives in New York City.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2010 by Tim Kring
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
CROWN and the Cr
own colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kring, Tim, 1957–
Shift / Tim Kring and Dale Peck.—1st ed.
p. cm.—(Gate of Orpheus trilogy ; part 1)
I. Peck, Dale. II. Title. III. Series.
PS3611.R547S55 2010
813′.6—dc22 2010005470
eISBN: 978-0-307-45347-1
v3.0
