Jim Hargrove

Mathias,

That's only a little bit of Oswald's full report.  It goes on and on.... You can read the full version here:

http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/thecollective.htm

P.S.  I haven't forgotten Thornley and several other topics we have going.  Hope to get back to them soon.

Sandy,

It's pretty obvious, at least to me, why the CIA refused to produce the "CIA contact report concerning the Minsk Radio Plant [that] was routed to the Foreign Documents Division in the Soviet Branch of the Directorate of Intelligence," as the HSCA letter put it.  The CIA wanted everyone to believe that it never had any contact with Oswald.  That field report would have proved otherwise.  Had Oswald been a mere contact, debriefed on his way home from his Russian assignment, I mean self-funded adventure, the Agency would surely have been unafraid to produce the document.

To Michael Clark,

Thanks for the warning on "cross-forum posting."  I'll certainly keep it in mind, but if the Admins here don't object, I'd like to keep this debate with Mr. Parker going.  This, apparently, is the only way to do it.
  

Documents that Federal agencies, probably for several different reasons, neglected to cover up can help us to understand this case.  Mistakes in the cover-up, especially by the FBI, are of vital importance!

One of the reasons an agency might neglect to suppress a document is if its personnel failed to understand the significance of the information being processed.

The most interesting file I found in the July 2017 NARA release included a lengthy series of docs about Collins Radio.  In the spreadsheet accompanying the file, the Collins Radio material was deemed “probably not relevant,” or words to that effect.

In future releases, I’d look to material deemed “probably not relevant” to discover hints about the truth.

Another installment in my long-distance debate with Greg Parker (my comments in black, his in blue):

10. FBI took Oswald off the watch list at the same time a CIA cable gave him a clean bill of political health, weeks after Oswald’s New Orleans arrest and less than two months before the assassination.

And your proof that this is linked to an "Oswald Project" is?

Mr. Parker doesn't seem to want to talk about the fact that the FBI cancelled the wanted notice on LHO just weeks before the assassination and that, at almost the same time, a CIA memo gave him a clean bill of political health.

The WC didn’t even bother to depose the Division 5 guy (Gheesling) who ordered the FBI's flash cancellation. “Lee Harvey Oswald” had been on that list for nearly four years, since the “defection.” Now that he was taken off it, he’d no longer be under FBI and SS surveillance on 11/22.

What’s really unnerving is that similar steps were taken right around the same time by Mexico City CIA personnel. Newman called this “turning down the lights” on “Oswald.” It’s enough to make a fellow feel paranoid.

At the very same time the FBI was taking “Lee Harvey Oswald” off the watch list, the CIA was publishing several confusing things about him. Responding to a query from the Mexico City station, four CIA officers signed a cable giving lots of accurate biographical data on our boy but calling him “Lee Henry Oswald.” The three page cable expressed no security concerns whatsoever about Oswald and, in fact, indicated the Moscow embassy felt “life in the Soviet Union had clearly had maturing effect on Oswald.” Nothing to worry about here!

This cable was signed by Jane Roman (Angleton’s assistant), William Hood (also close to Angleton),

Thomas Karamessines (assistant to Helms) and John Whitten who, according to Jefferson Morley, was the only CIA officer of the four signers who suffered any adverse consequences for this troubling cable. John Armstrong believes that Angleton ran the “Harvey and Lee” Oswald project.



At the very same time the FBI was taking “Lee Harvey Oswald” off the watch list, the CIA was giving “Lee Henry Oswald” (biographical data matching LHO’s) a clean bill of political health in the infamous cable of 10/10/63 (see above). It was now no longer officially necessary for the FBI to monitor “Oswald’s” activities in Dallas. And the Secret Service would no longer be expected to investigate him prior to a presidential visit to Dallas.

Some people want to chalk up the CIA memo to a relatively innocent mole hunt, but just look at how things worked out.

Although “Lee Harvey Oswald” had been arrested for a supposedly violent confrontation in support of Fidel Castro in New Orleans just two months earlier, the entire National Security apparatus of our Federal government now seemed to just stop worrying about him. What happened next, of course, has been documented by scores of writers and filmmakers for more than half a century.

“Lee Harvey Oswald,” or more likely someone who looked like him, began making all kinds of appearances in and around Dallas. These appearances were clearly designed to attract attention. Here are just some:

“Oswald” visits the Sports Drome Rifle Range on Oct. 26, Nov. 9, Nov. 10, and again on Nov. 17, several times creating a scene and once shooting at another guy's target;

On Nov. 2 “Oswald” visits Morgan's Gun Shop in Fort Worth.

Also on Nov. 2 “Oswald” visits the Downtown Lincoln Mercury dealership where he test drives a car at wrecklessly high speeds saying he would soon come into enough money to buy a new car.

On Nov. 6 or 7 “Oswald” visits the Irving Furniture Mart for a gun part and is referred to the shop where Dial Ryder works.

On Nov. 15, “Oswald” goes to the Southland Hotel parking garage (Allright Parking Systems) and applies for a job and asks how high the Southland Building is and if it had a good view of downtown Dallas.

On Nov. 20 “Oswald” hitch-hikes on the R.L. Thornton Expressway while carrying a 4 foot long package wrapped in brown paper and introduces himself to Ralph Yates as “Lee Harvey Oswald,” discusses the President's visit, and asks to be dropped across the street from the Texas School Book Depository (where Russian-speaking “Lee Harvey Oswald” is already working).

The set-up of “Lee Harvey Oswald” was almost complete. How could this possibly have been accomplished if the FBI and the Secret Service hadn’t been put to sleep just a few weeks earlier?

Mr. Parker would like us to believe that there is nothing to see here.  Just move on, eh?

I'm going to respond to Mr. Parker's rebuttals to my list of reasons LHO was a CIA spy one item at a time, and in no particular order.  In this post, my comments are in black, Mr. Parker's in blue.

6. CIA employee Donald Deneslya said he read reports of a CIA agent who had worked at a radio factory in Minsk and returned to the US with a Russian wife and child.

Utter rubbish. Deneslaya claimed to have read reports about someone wanting to redefect. - an ex-Marine who sounds like Oswald. Nowhere but nowhere does Deneslaya refer to this person as an agent. He does indicate he may have been a "contact" for intel on the Minsk factory. That, does not an "agent" make.

It would help others check and assess this information if Mr. Parker spelled Donald Deneslya’s name correctly.  D-E-N-E-S-L-Y-A.  Here is an HSCA document describing the report Deneslya read in the summer of 1962, 

from Harvey and Lee:

CIA Debriefing Report

In 1962 CIA employee Donald Deneslya received a debriefing report from the
New York City field office concerning a Marine "defector" who recently returned with
his family from the Soviet Union. The report was approximately four to five pages in
length and provided organizational details about the Minsk radio plant, where Harvey
Oswald worked for 2 1/2 years. 62-07108 The report was signed by Major Andy Anderson,
who conducted debriefings for the CIA's domestic contacts division, and was filed with
the Industrial Registry Branch in the Office of Central Reference.46

In 1978 Deneslya was interviewed by the HSCA, who then requested the
domestics contact report and any additional information the CIA had concerning the
Minsk radio plant. Following is the context of a letter from the HSCA to the CIA's Scott
Breckenridge.

September 27, 1978

Select Committee on Assassinations

U.S. House of Representatives
3331 House Office Building, Annex 2
Washington, D.C. 20515

Mr. Scott Breckinridge
Principal Coordinator, HSCA
Office of Legislative Counsel
Central Intelligence Agency
Washington, D.C. 20505

Dear Mr. Breckinridge:

In connection with its investigations into the circumstances surround­-
ing the death of President Kennedy, the Select Committee on Assassi­-
nations has been informed that during the summer of 1962, a CIA con­-
tact report concerning the Minsk Radio Plant was routed to the Foreign
Documents Division in the Soviet Branch of the Directorate of Intelli-­
gence. The source of this contact report is believed to have been a
former Marine and defector to the Soviet Union who returned to the
United States with his family during the summer of 1962. The source
is believed to have stated that he had been employed at the Minsk
Radio Plant. The Committee has been further informed that this con­
tact report was filed in a volume of material concerning the Minsk Ra­-
dio Plant, and that this volume is retrievable from the CIA's Industrial
Registry Branch which, in 1962, was a component of the office of Cen-­
tral Reference. The Committee therefore requests immediate and com­-
plete access to the above referenced contact report and the volume of
materials regarding the Minsk Radio Plant....

                 -----      ------

NOTE: The CIA responded by providing materials on the Minsk radio plant.  But the
contact report, which would have identified the name ofthe CIA agent who provided the
information (probably Oswald), was missing. The HSCA reported, "The employee ad­-
vised the committee that the contact report had been filed in a volume on the Minsk ra­-
dio plant that should be retrievable from the Industrial Registry Branch, then a compo­-
nent of the Office of Central Reference. Accordingly, the committee requested that the CIA
provide both the contact report and the volume of materials concerning the Minsk radio
plant. A review by the committee of the documents in the volumes on the Minsk radio
plant, however, failed to locate any such contact report. "48 Once again the CIA had ma­-
nipulated their records and was content to "let the records speak for themselves. "

The HSCA reported, "The CIA has denied ever having had any contact with Oswald, and
its records are consistent with this position. "49

According to former CIA officer Robert Morrow it was Tracy Barnes, the Assistant
Deputy Director of Plans (under Richard Helms), who received Oswald 's information
from Minsk. Barnes later became head of the CIA's Domestic Operations Division (DOD).

--from Harvey and Lee, pp. 396-397, Copyright © 2003 by John Armstrong.  All rights reserved.

Would anyone care to speculate who was "source of this contact report" since the CIA and the HSCA did not produce it? Could it be anyone other than Oswald? 

So we have a former Marine, who supposedly once worked in a radar facility monitoring, among other things, top secret U2 flights, who suddenly "defects" to an enemy nation, telling a U.S. representative in that nation he planned to tell the enemy everything he knows. Instead, he gives detailed information to the CIA on his more than 2-1/2 years of work in an electronics manufacturing plant in that enemy nation.  That's called SPYING!

And "The CIA has denied ever having had any contact with Oswald...." [HSCA Report p. 208]  Is there any other name for this than spying?  The evidence clearly shows "Lee Harvey Oswald" was a CIA spy!

On 8/2/2017 at 10:40 PM, Sandy Larsen said:

To anybody who doubts Oswald was a CIA spy . . . .

In this article regarding the recent release of JFK assassination documents, Dr. John Newman is quoted as saying

"And in the 20 years that have passed since [the first release of documents], our understanding of the Kennedy assassinations has moved significantly. My latest book contains definitive proof that Lee Harvey Oswald's defection to the Soviet Union was a false defection, and it was part of a larger hunt for a mole inside of the CIA. A Soviet mole."

A false defector would be an intelligence agent, probably of the CIA.

Lest you think Dr. Newman is just some average joe with an opinion to share, consider his credentials:

• He's a retired major in the United States Army.
• He was an intelligence analyst for twenty years.
• He served as executive assistant to the director of the National Security Agency.
• He was a professor at the University of Maryland Honors College for twenty years.
• He is currently an adjunct professor of political science at James Madison University.

 

Sandy's post above should be repeated.  Here's the first sentence in the description of Dr. Newman's latest book on Amazon:

The book’s first chapter contains new revelations about how Oswald was a witting false defector to the USSR in a CIA plan to surface a KGB mole in the CIA.

Mathias,

I agree with most of what you say above, and I'll try to get to some of your other points ASAP, but I wanted to point this out right away....

When you referred to "a disgruntled ex-employee" I assume you are referring to James Wilcott.  Of course, the fact that he said he was told by other CIA employees that he had himself paid the putative assassin of JFK might make an ex-CIA fellow a bit disgruntled, eh?  But Wilcott is hardly alone in accusing the Agency of employing the alleged assassin. From HarveyandLee.net:

• In 1996 former Deputy Counsel for the House Select Committee on Assassinations Robert Tanenbaum testified at the ARRB hearing in Los Angeles by saying, "the Attorney General of Texas, Henry Wade the District Attorney and Leon Jaworsky counsel to the Attorney General, on the transcript spoke to the Chief Justice and said in substance, as I recall, that they had information from unimpeachable sources that Lee Harvey Oswald was a contract employee of the CIA and the FBI."
• Richard Sprague, chief counsel to the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations said that "if he had it to do over again, he would begin his investigation of the Kennedy assassination by probing 'Oswald's ties to the Central Intelligence Agency.'"
• Sen. Richard Schweiker said, "We do know Oswald had intelligence connections. Everywhere you look with him, there're fingerprints of intelligence." 
• CIA Agent Donald Norton said, "Oswald was with the CIA....'
• Former CIA agent Joseph Newbrough said, "Oswald was an agent for the CIA and acting under orders."
• CIA employee Donald Deneslya read reports of a CIA agent who had worked at a radio factory in Minsk and returned to the US with a Russian wife and child--that agent could only have been Oswald.
• Marvin Watson, an adviser to President Lyndon Johnson, said that Johnson had told him that he was convinced that there was a plot in connection with the assassination. Watson said the President felt the CIA had something to do with this plot. 

If anyone actually reads the targets of Mr. Parnell's links above and finds an argument worthy of discussion, please post the argument here.

4 hours ago, Mathias Baumann said:

Sandy and David,

I think you cannot both be right at the same time. Because if BOTH Marina and Lee had been spies, don't you think one of them would've found out about the other sooner or later?

Hi, Mathias,

It’s funny how instincts work.  I’ve felt for a decade or more that Mr. and Mrs. Oswald were both spooks... sort of spying on each other.  He often pretended he didn’t speak Russian, and she seemed to indicate she didn’t speak much English.  If it all didn’t end in such tragedy, it would almost be funny.  My belief is that they suspected each other as being spies from the very beginning, and told their respective handlers so.

If she wasn’t associated with Russian intel, I can’t imagine them letting her out of the Soviet Union.  And if her husband hadn’t been an American spy, I can’t imagine State would have approved a passport so he could travel in 1963, AGAIN, to communist countries like Cuba and Russia.  This was still the height of the Cold War.  Can you imagine a civilian with his record (unpunished for promising to give the enemy military secrets and perhaps doing so) being allowed to return to enemy nations?

Did you ever see an old movie... a great satire... called "The President's Analyst?"  Whenever I think of Boris and Natasha, I mean Harvey and Marina, I often think of that movie.

Following is my gradually expanding list of reasons clearly suggesting "Lee Harvey Oswald" was a CIA spy.  Thanks to David Andrews for suggesting points 20 & 21 below.  The list will probably also be expanded based on observations by Paul Bleau in his new article on KennedysandKing.com.

22 Facts Indicating Oswald Was a CIA Spy

1. CIA accountant James Wilcott testified that he made payments to an encrypted account for “Oswald or the Oswald Project.”

2. Antonio Veciana said he saw LHO meeting with CIA’s Maurice Bishop/David Atlee Phillips in Dallas in August 1963.

3. A 1978 CIA memo indicates that a CIA operations officer “had run an agent into the USSR, that man having met a Russian girl and eventually marrying her,” a case very similar to Oswald’s and clearly indicating that the Agency ran a “false defector” program in the 1950s.

4. Robert Webster and LHO "defected" a few months apart in 1959, both tried to "defect" on a Saturday, both possessed "sensitive" information of possible value to the Russians, both were befriended by Marina Prusakova, and both returned to the United States in the spring of 1962.

5. Richard Sprague, Richard Schweiker, and CIA agents Donald Norton and Joseph Newbrough all said LHO was associated with the CIA. 

6. CIA employee Donald Deneslya said he read reports of a CIA agent who had worked at a radio factory in Minsk and returned to the US with a Russian wife and child.

7. Kenneth Porter, employee of CIA-connected Collins Radio, left his family to marry (and probably monitor) Marina Oswald after LHO’s death.

8. George Joannides, case officer and paymaster for DRE (which LHO had attempted to infiltrate) was put in charge of lying to the HSCA and never told them of his relationship to DRE.

9. For his achievements, Joannides was given a medal by the CIA.

10. FBI took Oswald off the watch list at the same time a CIA cable gave him a clean bill of political health, weeks after Oswald’s New Orleans arrest and less than two months before the assassination.

11. Oswald’s lengthy “Lives of Russian Workers” essay reads like a pretty good intelligence report.

12. Oswald’s possessions were searched for microdots.

13. Oswald owned an expensive Minox spy camera, which the FBI tried to make disappear.

14. Even the official cover story of the radar operator near American U-2 planes defecting to Russia, saying he would give away all his secrets, and returning home without penalty smells like a spy story.

15. CIA Richard Case Nagell clearly knew about the plot to assassinate JFK and LHO’s relation to it, but the CIA ignored his warnings.

16. LHO always seemed poor as a church mouse, until it was time to go “on assignment.”  For his Russian adventure, we’re to believe he saved all the money he needed for first class European hotels and private tour guides in Moscow from the non-convertible USMC script he saved. In the summer of 1963, he once again seemed to have enough money to travel abroad to Communist nations.

17. To this day, the CIA claims it never interacted with Oswald, that it didn’t even bother debriefing him after the “defection.” What utter bs….

18. After he “defected” to the Soviet Union in 1959, bragging to U.S. embassy personnel in Moscow that he would tell the Russians everything he knew about U.S. military secrets, he returns to the U.S. without punishment and is then in 1963 given the OK to travel to Cuba and the Soviet Union again!

19. Allen Dulles, the CIA director fired by JFK, and the Warren Commission clearly wanted the truth hidden from the public to protect sources and methods of intelligence agencies such as the CIA. Earl Warren said, “Full disclosure was not possible for reasons of national security.”

20. He associated with US intel-friendly figures such as George DeMohrenschildt, Michael Paine, Ruth Paine, Guy Banister, David Ferrie and others.

21. His alleged movements after the assassination suggest tradecraft-like behavior, including his movements at the Texas Theater seeking a "contact" and apparently carrying two torn-in-half dollar bills.

22. President Kennedy and the CIA clearly were at war with each other in the weeks immediately before his assassination, as evidenced by Arthur Krock's infamous defense of the Agency in the Oct. 3, 1963 New York Times. “Oswald” was the CIA’s pawn.

Mathias,

Thank you for your post.  I’m enjoying our discussion.

Oswald’s height is listed at 5’ 11” (a total of 71 inches) in nearly as many documents at the National Archives as list his shorter, 5’ 9” height, including some in which his height would have been measured. 

For example, his 9/3/59 Marine Corps medical report and well as his 10/12/59 Armed Forces Report of Transfer or Discharge BOTH list his height at 5’ 11” and his weight as 150 lbs.  Are we really to believe that USMC allows soldiers to “exaggerate” their heights like that?   

Here’s the September ‘59 report:

And here’s the October ‘59 report:

The same 5’ 11” height is listed on LHO’s 1959 passport, his 1963 passport, his 9/14/59 Selective Service Registration card, and many other places.  As I said, the public record contains nearly as many references to a 5” 11” Oswald as to a 5’  9” Oswald.  Strikes me as evidence that two different people were sharing the identity of Lee Harvey Oswald.  I sincerely doubt the Agency reached back to fake all these documents on a mole hunt, or that Oswald would be allowed to exaggerate his height and weight on his USMC medical records.

I’ll have more to say ASAP about letting the CIA off the hook by saying Oswald was a spy “in his own mind.”  In my opinion, at least, the evidence after more than 50 years strongly suggests otherwise.

It's hard to be definitive about this, Mathias, because the Minox camera now in the JFK Collection at NARA has been filled with some sort of heavy substance, apparently cementing it shut. The case of this camera needs to slide open both to take a picture or to see the serial number.  John reports it feels MUCH heavier than his own similar Minox camera.

Are you sure Webster and Oswald's identities were merged by CIA, or were there just striking similarities in their Russian trips?  Webster told Dick Russell, by the way, that he and Marina spoke ENGLISH in Russia.  

From Harvey and Lee....

12 minutes ago, Tom Hume said:

In the third post on the thread linked above, Jim posted what appears to be a Dallas Police note pertaining to the two half dollar bills. My take on the bills is different than Jim’s. I think they are a puzzle and I’ve have done a couple of lengthy posts on the topic.

Tom,

I know you’re interested in Igor Vaganov.  I was going through the John Armstrong online collection at Baylor and accidentally came across a lengthy article about Vaganov by John Berendt.  Have you read it?  Here’s the link:

http://digitalcollections.baylor.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/po-arm/id/28787/rec/5

Easiest way to read it is to click the “Download” button toward the top right of the page and save it to your local machine.
 

2 hours ago, David Andrews said:

Is the dollar bill half substantiated among his effects?

Yes and no....  The image below is from the Dallas Municipal Archives and Record Center.

The text in the bottom box may be a little hard to read.  It begins with this sentence: “Found in Oswald’s wallet when he was arrested were two halved dollar bills with different serial numbers.”

John wrote on our website: “Curiously, neither of these items were listed on the police inventory of 11/23/63, the joint FBI/DPD inventory of 11/26/63 (Oswald's so-called possessions), nor were they photographed. At the National Archives, in Adelphi, MD, I inspected and handled each item of inventory listed on the joint FBI/DPD inventory of 11/26/63. These items were not among the inventory.”

9 hours ago, Mathias Baumann said:

Jim,

not all points on your list sound convincing to me. But I think this is a good one. I remember reading in Gaeton Fonzi's book that years later the FBI claimed they had found photos of a military installation taken with Oswald's camera. Do you know more about this?

Mathias,

John Armstrong personally examined every photograph at the National Archives in the middle and late 1990s that was apparently taken with Lee Oswald’s Minox III camera.  Here’s what John wrote about them: “The National Archives has several "Minox" photographs of scenes in Japan, Philippines, Atsugi, and Hawaii, and of Lee Oswald and his Marine buddy, George "Hans" Wilkins. The only "Minox" photographs in the JFK Collection in the National Archives are those taken in the Far East--there are no Minox photos either prior to or after Lee Oswald's military service in Japan.”

With a different camera, however, Russian-speaking Harvey Oswald clearly took photographs of military installations while he was stationed with MAG II near Ping Tung, Taiwan (at the same time USMC medical records clearly indicate that American-born Lee Oswald was in Atsugi, Japan).

A couple of things about Russian-speaking Harvey Oswald’s work in the USSR:  When he first arrived in Moscow, it was quite obvious the Russians didn’t buy his story because they were preparing to send him packing almost immediately.  But then he slit his wrist in an alleged suicide attempt and was hospitalized.  Dedicated spy that he was, he used the incident to prolong his visit for more than two years.

I do believe his beautifully written CIA report has been hiding in plain sight in the Warren Volumes for more than 50 years.  It’s called The Collective—Life of a Russian Worker.  Can you imagine how valuable information like this would have been in the days before sophisticated satellites and the Internet?
 

2 hours ago, Sandy Larsen said:

Jim,

Had a Marine scored an A+ on a Russian test, I believe the CIA would have tried to recruit him. And I'm pretty sure that his high score would not have been made public.

Had the FBI seen such a high score on Oswald's Marine records, I'm quite sure they would have either lowered the score or suppressed it. Because otherwise they would have had to explain it.

That’s exactly what I think, Sandy, elegantly stated as always.  I’ll bet your new website is going to be terrific!  Please hurry up!  Our side needs a shot in the arm to counteract our sorrow over the pitiful new doc releases.
 

5 hours ago, David Andrews said:

I would add:

• No serious interest in Marxist activities in US after defection, yet association with US intel-friendly figures such as George DeMohrenschildt, Michael Paine, Ruth Paine, Guy Banister, David Ferrie.
• Tradecraft-like behavior after leaving Dealey Plaza and while in the Texas Theater.

Surely Jim's list could be doubled

 

Both your points sound like winners to me, David.  On his trade-craft like behavior on 11/22/63….

At the theater I assume you’re referring to the dollar bills torn in half and Harvey’s behavior sitting next to various theater patrons as if seeking a contact.  (No doubt had one really been present, matching halves of the dollar bills would have sealed the deal for the encounter.)  Too bad for him the poor schmuck was just being played.

Can you explain your reference to his behavior leaving the TSBD?  Whether you believe in the bus and taxi ride or the Nash Rambler pickup (or, better yet, both!) I’m not sure how either relates to spycraft

7 hours ago, Mathias Baumann said:

I guess if Oswald had scored an A+ we would never have heard of him. They'd have recruited him for some sort of super secret intelligence work. They would not have sent him to Russia because they had to know the KGB would not be fooled by such a threadbare ruse. Whatever the reason was they sent Oswald to Russia for it did not involve any spying.

Mathias,

I worked up this list a year or two ago....

20 Facts Indicating Oswald Was a CIA Spy

1. CIA accountant James Wilcott testified that he made payments to an encrypted account for “Oswald or the Oswald Project.”

2. Antonio Veciana said he saw LHO meeting with CIA’s Maurice Bishop/David Atlee Phillips in Dallas in August 1963.

3. A 1978 CIA memo indicates that a CIA operations officer “had run an agent into the USSR, that man having met a Russian girl and eventually marrying her,” a case very similar to Oswald’s and clearly indicating that the Agency ran a “false defector” program in the 1950s.

4. Robert Webster and LHO "defected" a few months apart in 1959, both tried to "defect" on a Saturday, both possessed "sensitive" information of possible value to the Russians, both were befriended by Marina Prusakova, and both returned to the United States in the spring of 1962.

5. Richard Sprague, Richard Schweiker, and CIA agents Donald Norton and Joseph Newbrough all said LHO was associated with the CIA. 

6. CIA employee Donald Deneslya said he read reports of a CIA agent who had worked at a radio factory in Minsk and returned to the US with a Russian wife and child.

7. Kenneth Porter, employee of CIA-connected Collins Radio, left his family to marry (and probably monitor) Marina Oswald after LHO’s death.

8. George Joannides, case officer and paymaster for DRE (which LHO had attempted to infiltrate) was put in charge of lying to the HSCA and never told them of his relationship to DRE.

9. For his achievements, Joannides was given a medal by the CIA.

10. FBI took Oswald off the watch list at the same time a CIA cable gave him a clean bill of political health, weeks after Oswald’s New Orleans arrest and less than two months before the assassination.

11. Oswald’s lengthy “Lives of Russian Workers” essay reads like a pretty good intelligence report.

12. Oswald’s possessions were searched for microdots.

13. Oswald owned an expensive Minox spy camera, which the FBI tried to make disappear.

14. Even the official cover story of the radar operator near American U-2 planes defecting to Russia, saying he would give away all his secrets, and returning home without penalty smells like a spy story.

15. CIA Richard Case Nagell clearly knew about the plot to assassinate JFK and LHO’s relation to it, but the CIA ignored his warnings.

16. LHO always seemed poor as a church mouse, until it was time to go “on assignment.”  For his Russian adventure, we’re to believe he saved all the money he needed for first class European hotels and private tour guides in Moscow from the non-convertible USMC script he saved. In the summer of 1963, he once again seemed to have enough money to travel abroad to Communist nations.

17. To this day, the CIA claims it never interacted with Oswald, that it didn’t even bother debriefing him after the “defection.” What utter bs….

18. After he “defected” to the Soviet Union in 1959, bragging to U.S. embassy personnel in Moscow that he would tell the Russians everything he knew about U.S. military secrets, he returns to the U.S. without punishment and is then in 1963 given the OK to travel to Cuba and the Soviet Union again!

19. Allen Dulles, the CIA director fired by JFK, and the Warren Commission clearly wanted the truth hidden from the public to protect sources and methods of intelligence agencies such as the CIA. Earl Warren said, “Full disclosure was not possible for reasons of national security.”

20. President Kennedy and the CIA clearly were at war with each other in the weeks immediately before his assassination, as evidenced by Arthur Krock's infamous defense of the Agency in the Oct. 3, 1963 New York Times. “Oswald” was the CIA’s pawn.

Here is a one-page example of what, for me, typifies the July 2017 release of JFK assassination materials from NARA:

It’s supposedly from the CIA, of course, but what are we to make of the fact that SO MANY PAGES in this so-called release look just like this? 

• Were worthless copies like this preserved to make the archival process seem more thorough?
• Were the actual documents on file at NARA more readable than what we’ve been given?
• Did the government committees created to cover-up… I mean investigate JFK’s murder actually accept this garbage?  Did they demand better copies?  If there are better copies, will we ever see them?

Is anyone here aware of anyone from the WC, HSCA, or ARRB publicly complaining about reams of completely illegible documents from the CIA?

Are we to believe this worthless crap was hidden from the American public for as long as 54 years for any reason whatsoever?  Or were these fuzzy wonders created more recently from docs that actually contained relevant evidence?

Dare we hope for better releases in the weeks to come?

Anyone who reads this discussion should be advised that Mr. Parnell, by his own admission, believes the Warren Report accurately described the assassination of President Kennedy.

Right!  He mastered Russian by reading difficult Russian texts and telepathically translating them by channeling great Russian authors!  Without ever taking a language course, you want us to believe "Oswald" became amazingly proficient in Russian.

Do you believe this was a fake?

And De Mohrenschildt was making this up?

Natalie Ray was asked by Commission attorney Wesley Liebeler, "Did he (Oswald) speak to you in Russian?" Mrs. Ray replied, "Yes; just perfect; re­ally surprised me ... it's just too good speaking Russian for be such a short time, you know.... I said, 'How come you speak so good Russian? I been here so long and still don't speak very well English."

Mrs. Teofil (Anna) Meller was asked by Liebeler, "Do you think that his com­mand of the Russian language was better than you would expect for the period of time that he had spent in Russia?" Mrs. Meller replied, "Yes; absolutely better than I would expect."

Peter Gregory told Warren Commission Representative Gerald Ford, "I thought that Lee Oswald spoke (Russian) with a Polish accent, that is why I asked him if he was of Polish decent."

She said "he read a lot when he was in the Soviet Union," Tracy, and in Russian.

Mr. McDONALD. Did Lee read books often?
Mrs. PORTER. Yes.
Mr. McDONALD. Did he read a lot when he was in the Soviet
Union?
Mrs. PORTER. Yes.
Mr. McDONALD. What kind of books did he read there?
Mrs. PORTER. Novels mostly.
Mr. McDONALD. What kind of novels?
Mrs. PORTER. What you call maybe as classical novels, some
Russian classic writers.
Mr. McDONALD. The novels or the books that he read in the
Soviet Union, were they in Russian?
Mrs. PORTER. They were in Russian ; yes.

There may be other reasons to distrust Marina's testimony, but not for any reason you're offering here.

6 hours ago, Sandy Larsen said:

"Classic Oswald"... a registered trademark? Ha! I like it.

Jim,

You make a good point, and I agree with you. The only reason I am assuming that Felde's story is a cover in my little analysis is because it allows me to consider the possibility that Oswald actually took secret Russian language classes  while in the Marines. If I were to accept Felde's story at face value, then I'd know that Oswald couldn't have taken secret classes and must have known the language prior to entering the Marine Corp. (Either that or he was some kind of language-learning genius.)

To be honest, I do believe Felde 's story is true. And because of that, I don't believe Oswald took secret Russian classes while in the Marines. And therefore Oswald must have known Russian before joining the Marines. In other words, I believe that Oswald was probably a Russian speaking immigrant. (And because of other evidence, I believe there was another Oswald who didn't speak Russian.)

That’s been pretty much my take on this for many years.  It may not be proof that Harvey Oswald was a Russian-speaking immigrant, but it strikes me as the most logical analysis of the evidence we’ve been given.  And it explains several anomalies beyond his comfort with the language even before the so-called “defection.”

For example, the white Russians in Dallas in 1962/63 were surprised by his fluency in their native tongue, although he had spent only two and a half years in the USSR, and had taken no known language courses.  Yet DeMohrenschildt pointed out that, despite the fact that he preferred to speak Russian over English, he made some grammatical mistakes in the Russian language.

Does that not seem entirely consistent with someone who learned Russian as a child and was then brought to America?  Marina said under oath that he was reading classic Russian novels in Russian when she met him.  I remember in high school that Dostoevski and Tolstoi were hard enough for me to read in English, and I had been formally studying English in an English-speaking environment for a decade and a half!  Marina and DeM were not the most reliable witnesses over the years, but how can we ignore their observations not directly related to Oswald’s guilt or innocence?

What has surprised me more than anything else about this, though, is the amount of vitriol that has been directed at this analysis, which strikes both of us as entirely possible and even probable.  Where does all that anger come from?  I’ve had an email address in little tiny letters up on the website for years, and you wouldn’t believe some of the hate mail I’ve received. 

Why?  

Sandy,

Sorry for the delay.  I’ve been wasting my time trying to find a legible document among the new “releases.”

If Felde’s real job was to ‘splain why the one-and-only-LHO simply didn’t have time to study Russian, you’d think the powers-that-be would have made some sort of effort to have his story match the official USMC chronology of Classic Oswald®.  Felde’s FBI statement, however, causes real problems.

At Camp Pendleton, Jacksonville, and Memphis, Felde and Oswald were together for about 10 months. Felde’s description clearly matches our understanding of Harvey Oswald: interested in politics and debate, smart, and “left-winged.”  And yet he told the FBI, for example, that he was with Oswald in Memphis until well into September 1957.  Troublesome, since Lee Oswald boarded the USS Bexar in San Diego bound for Japan on August 21, 1957.  There are other problems.

WC apologists will just claim that Felde’s recollections were incorrect, even though many USMC docs actually back up his chronology.  We must also wonder why the Warren Commission didn’t even bother to interview Felde, nor did the HSCA or the ARRB.  The WC did take testimony from Marines who had known Lee Oswald for just a couple of days in Japan, but didn’t want to talk to the only soldier who had been with Oswald the full first 10 months of his abbreviated Marine Corps career.

7 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

JIm,  what was that document about?  Does it tell you anywhere?

No.  There is a pretty good "Metadata" spreadsheet that accompanies each download, but in this case (from memory) it just says it was from the CIA's Segregated Collection (HSCA), that it is "Sensitive Original Withheld by CIA" with a doc date of "00/00/0000" and no clue as to the title or contents.  My guess is that no one at the HSCA ever saw this doc.

BTW, NARA has reorganized this release since yesterday.  Instead of the nine different file downloads of "Formerly Withheld in Full" files, there are now 18.  In the early morning hours (before 8 am EDT) today (7/25/17) the download speeds are fine.  I've already got 12 of the 18 files.

Too bad the vast majority of them appear to be redacted or completely illegible.  Nice game they play, eh?  

EDIT: At just about 8 am EDT, my 13th download failed and the site appears to have slowed.  You may have to download this stuff in the wee hours.

1 hour ago, James DiEugenio said:

They are releasing documents in redacted form?  

With RIFs on them?

ABSOLUTELY!!!