Was Oswald an Intelligence Agent?

[Thomas Graves]

Tommy...

There are 1050 pages in the book, A CD full of docs and images and 1100 folders at Baylor which took me 2 years and virtual constant discussion with John to understand the depth and breadth of the information. We did not agree on every detail... but we knew WTF we were talking about and refused to use boiler plate FBI reports as gospel.

Making fun of the man and his work is beneath you. If you disagree with something, show your work.

btw - We are not arguing. Mr. Tidd is a welcome presence here adding objectivity and common sense with intellect and curiosity. there is respect and discussion finally happening here again..

I think it's great

DJ

Jo Jo,

That's very impressive.

Unfortunately, quantity does not correlate with quality, except in ... hmmm.... let me think..... nope, not even in rock 'n roll. Too much volume just ruins it, IMHO.

--Tommy

[David Josephs]

Tommy...

There are 1050 pages in the book, A CD full of docs and images and 1100 folders at Baylor which took me 2 years and virtual constant discussion with John to understand the depth and breadth of the information. We did not agree on every detail... but we knew WTF we were talking about and refused to use boiler plate FBI reports as gospel.

Making fun of the man and his work is beneath you. If you disagree with something, show your work.

btw - We are not arguing. Mr. Tidd is a welcome presence here adding objectivity and common sense with intellect and curiosity. there is respect and discussion finally happening here again..

I think it's great

DJ

Jo Jo,

That's very impressive.

Unfortunately, quantity does not correlate with quality, except in ... hmmm.... let me think..... nope, not even in rock 'n roll. Too much volume just ruins it, IMHO.

--Tommy

I'd simply like to discuss Mozart with someone who is not deaf. H&L is not a jingle, it's a balls-out symphony and most who discuss it have barely listened to the tuning up of the instruments...

yet can declare with authority there are, "simply too many notes"

[Thomas Graves]

Tommy...

There are 1050 pages in the book, A CD full of docs and images and 1100 folders at Baylor which took me 2 years and virtual constant discussion with John to understand the depth and breadth of the information. We did not agree on every detail... but we knew WTF we were talking about and refused to use boiler plate FBI reports as gospel.

Making fun of the man and his work is beneath you. If you disagree with something, show your work.

btw - We are not arguing. Mr. Tidd is a welcome presence here adding objectivity and common sense with intellect and curiosity. there is respect and discussion finally happening here again..

I think it's great

DJ

Jo Jo,

That's very impressive.

Unfortunately, quantity does not correlate with quality, except in ... hmmm.... let me think..... nope, not even in rock 'n roll. Too much volume just ruins it, IMHO.

--Tommy

I'd simply like to discuss Mozart with someone who is not deaf. H&L is not a jingle, it's a balls-out symphony and most who discuss it have barely listened to the tuning up of the instruments...

yet can declare with authority there are, "simply too many notes"

Too much noise by all accounts, maestro.

Edited March 8, 2015 by Thomas Graves

[Thomas Graves]

Paul [Trejo] - I recall Simpich saying he was 'agnostic' on whether Oswald was ever in MC. Is that you memory as well? Simpich has given us his very valuable opinion that Morales is the likely suspect for arranging the Oswald impersonation. Paul [Trejo], you seem to have no trouble melding that with your Walker theory, despite the fact that there is zero evidence (anyone feel free to correct me on this) that Morales intersected with Walker, or even Banister. Meanwhile, we know for a certain fact that Morales worked for Phillips, and Angleton, and was the top operations officer in the CIA at that time, working out of Miami Station, no doubt well known to Shackley, Helms, JC King and the like.

Graves makes an excellent point, and comes up with a possibility I had not thought of. My suspicion, which Simpich never responded to when I queried him, was that the mole hunt was a misdirection, providing cover for Angleton and Goodpasture who themselves arranged the impersonation of Oswald. No one would ever suspect them if they left a paper trail suggesting that they were mystified at who impersonated Oswald. Graves [ actually Jon G. Tidd ; Paul B. mistook my flippant, rhetorical reply to Tidd as being sincere. --TG] suggests that the paper trail was laid after the fact. [i'm actually staying with the 'real time' scenario for now, just changing my focus from the mysterious 'usual suspects' to Angleton and Goodpasture and Phillips and Morales and their buddies. --TG] Perhaps we are saying the same thing, Paul [Trejo].

Paul Trejo ran with the discovery by Simpich, (credit to Scott and Newman as well) jumping immediately to the conclusion that the mole hunt proves that top level CIA brass were innocent, and that Morales must have gone rogue. Somehow this lead to Walker in Paul's mind. I argued with Trejo in the past that Morales was a loyal and trusted operational CIA officer, high up the chain, and that his possible involvement in setting up Oswald in MC, by linking him to Kostikov, implicated those above him in the chain if command. So like Graves [Tidd, actually, originally. But include me now, too. --TG] I am suspicious of the mole hunt itself. It's just another layer of the onion in my opinion.

[emphasis added by T. Graves]

Excellent post, Paul Brancato. You are very good at analyzing and synthesizing here.

I can't take any credit, however, because I was actually disagreeing flippantly with Jon for his suggesting that the impersonations themselves never took place over the phone. So if this particular theory turns out to have "legs," we're gonna be giving kudos to Mr. Jon G. Tidd for having suggested, although rather rhetorically, that the impersonations were themselves "faked" or "false". I.e., were not real impersonations, but impersonations of impersonations. I think that's brilliant, actually.

This thread is becoming very dialectical. And I like it...

--Tommy

PS I'm starting to like your emerging scenario in which Angleton and Goodpasture and Morales (and I'm thinking maybe Phillips, too) managed, for assassination purposes, "false" Oswald impersonations which were done not, I'm thinking, after the assassination, but before October 10, 1963, in order to give them a very convincing and difficult-to-penetrate layer of "plausible deniability." Who knows? -- They might even get lucky and catch a real "mole" in the double-faceted process of 1 ) patsying-up Oswald, and 2 ) planting the time-delayed Kostikov virus for cover up purposes (the creation and implementation of the FBI-run Warren Commission in order to save the lives of 40 million Americans).

Just think -- Three birds with one stone!

This ties in with the almost unthinkable question Newman briefly poses as to whether or not personnel in the Russian Mexico City Embassy were impersonated, along with "Duran" and the unnamed "American" guy in the Saturday, September 28, phone call. Saturday, a day of the week when the Russian Embassy was practically closed and incoming phone calls were restricted to family members or close friends, and which phone calls tended to be about such mundane matters as an upcoming family picnic and the fact that somebody's uncle had the flu.

Unthinkable because it would suggest that a small part of the the CIA was trying to fool the .... uh.... .......... CIA.

Bumped because Paul B's is the best post on this thread so far and because I've just now added a "PS" to my reply.

edited and bumped

Edited March 8, 2015 by Thomas Graves

[Paul Brancato]

Thanks for that Thomas. Newman has been making the point recently that CIA operations routinely had multiple layers. One way this is accomplished is by using multiple pseudonyms for operatives like Phillips.

David - I like your Mozart analogy. I mentioned to you before that I read some of Armstrong's book but had to stop because I found it impossible to follow. Even when you give short proofs of the two Oswald's my eyes glaze over.

[Greg Parker]

If Oswald was being used as an agent by some intelligence agency, his actions to an outside observer would not appear to be unusual for him. His actions would be in keeping with the pattern he had established. That way, nothing would easily catch the eye of a counter-intelligence operative.

Agreed, Jon

What catches my eye -- I was trained as an army counter-intel officer during the Viet Nam war -- is his fluency in Russian. How did a poor, relatively uneducated kid who moved around, acquire such fluency? The fluency needs explaining.

Asperger's explains it

I know, because I was trained in a language at the Defense Language Institute (DLI), that he didn't teach himself to speak and read Russian. You don't learn a language, especially a Level 5 (on a scale of 5) language like Russian, that way. It's impossible, unless you're a baby learning from your parents (or others) how to talk. In that situation, the learning is effortless. As an adult, one becomes a fluent speaker in another language only by listening and speaking to a speaker of that language.

It may well be impossible for a person with a normally wired brain... but imo, we are not talking about someone with a normally wired brain... we are talking about someone closer to Raymond Babbitt than to little brother Charlie.

When I was at DLI in 1970, the teachers were native speakers. The instruction was methodical and rigorous. Russian, one of the many languages taught at DLI, was a 47-week course. That's 5 days a week, 6 hours per day, another 2 hours at night, for 47 weeks. No way Oswald received such instruction. Just no way.

So as a counter-intel officer I would ask, how did he gain fluency, even with a Baltic accent? The only explanation is that he was a native speaker; that he learned to speak Russian as a baby; that he acquired written knowledge of Russian somehow and somewhere along the line, likely beginning in childhood.

Now as a counter-intel officer I'd ask, why did Oswald never admit he learned Russian from birth?

Because he didn't. The Armstrong theory has been torn apart here as to the "father" and "uncle"...

http://reopenkennedycase.forumotion.net/t87-the-mrs-jack-d-tippit-phone-call

Why did he keep this fact secret. Why did he lie about how he acquired facility with the Russian language? Big red flag here. Something important here.

No, Jon. Nothing of any importance here, except that he had the ability to learn languages quickly.

Next, if it were 1963 and I was trying to figure out Oswald, I'd take a look at his defection to Russia. That might make sense to me. A speaker of a language naturally wants to be among people and in a culture where the language is spoken.

Or he has learned the language in order to do so (live among them)... for purposes not of his own choosing....

It wouldn't puzzle me that he'd taken up with a Russian woman. Nor would it puzzle me that he didn't give up his U.S. citizenship. All of this would make sense to me.

It makes sense only in terms of being able to return.

If I somehow knew, as John Armstrong learned years later, that Oswald didn't go around speaking Russian in the Soviet Union but did converse with Marina in Russian, I would have wanted to know why.

Because you don't let people know you speak the lingo, thus encouraging them to say things in your presence which they may not otherwise say. Read the Soviet hospital reports. The doctor noted that Oswald claimed not to speak Russian, but gave every indication, he did in fact understand what was being said.

Was he some sort of controlling person? Was he encouraged by Russians to get along in English? Maybe so that they could sharpen their English speaking skills. Was there some extrinsic reason? Another red flag here, but not as big a flag.

Next, I'd want to check out his family situation and talk with some of the people who knew him. Standard counter-intel stuff. Here's where I'd get a shock: none of his family spoke Russian. Uh, oh. That big red flag has just become the overriding matter in my investigation of Oswald. Something's seriously incongruent. That's a signal Oswald is being used by some intelligence agency, His cover's just been blown.

More to come if readers here want more of the story.

Oswald was sent over as a courier, with a plan, possibly unknown to him, that he would also be expected to stay for a period of time. The courier component was completely legal, even though covert to hide it from Hawks on both sides. The operation/s were supported by CIA via existing ops known as REDSKIN and REDSOX/REDCAP.

What do you make of his risky early out? Why the rush when he had so little time left to serve in active component? It says to me there was a deadline to meet...

[David Josephs]

Thanks for that Thomas. Newman has been making the point recently that CIA operations routinely had multiple layers. One way this is accomplished is by using multiple pseudonyms for operatives like Phillips.

David - I like your Mozart analogy. I mentioned to you before that I read some of Armstrong's book but had to stop because I found it impossible to follow. Even when you give short proofs of the two Oswald's my eyes glaze over.

The result of the work I described is a large Spreadsheet by date showing side by side who was where and when...

If you IM me your email address I can send it to you. I posted it in a H&L Facebook group but you needed to be part of the group....

Doesn't explain everything yet makes what we do see much more understandable.

Thanks for your kind words

DJ

[Mark Knight]

This diary asks whether Oswald was an intelligence agent.

Intelligence agents become agents by being recruited by an intelligence service. They are recruited because they are able and willing to provide certain information.

Question: What valuable information did Oswald possess that some intelligence service wanted?

Much as William Jefferson Clinton pointed out, how we define words has everything to do with their meaning in a particular context. "Agent" may be the wrong word for Oswald's relationship. I believe that Lee Harvey Oswald was being directed by someone--an agent or an agency themselves, though we will probably forever debate who that agent or agency is or was--as he maneuvered his way from an early discharge from the Marines to the US Embassy in Moscow. He made too few "mistakes" forhis journey to, through, and from the USSR to have simply been the result an impulsive young man operating on his own. Helsinki, for example, isn't the shortest distance between London and Moscow; but he got there JUST AS a program was launched for an "instantaneous" visa was taking place. His "failure" to "properly" renounce his US citizenship seems also as if it was scripted by someone knowledgeable in the procedures.

Now, was Oswald an "agent" himself? Probably not. But it would appear that, for whatever purposes, he was being directed by an agent or an agency. It is NOT clear that he would have learned any of these things on his own from his formal education, or from personal research, or from the newspapers and books he was reading.

So I have my doubts that Ozzie was himself an "agent." "Marionette" seems to be the more correct term. So who was pulling the marionette's strings? That's where, after over 50 years of research, we are still wandering in the wilderness.

[Cliff Varnell]

There seems to be a widespread assumption that the people who handled Oswald were the same people who killed Kennedy.

Given the degree of compartmentalization in intelligence operations it makes more sense to me that there were two operations controlled from on high -- one operation was to sheep-dip Oswald as an agent of Fidel and then kill him shortly after Kennedy; the other was to assassinate JFK in Dealey Plaza.

What did the killers of Kennedy -- the men who pulled the triggers and their immediate superiors -- "need to know" about Oswald?

What did Oswald's manipulators "need to know" about the assassination beyond time and place?

Is a study of Oswald and his movements and associates a study of the JFK assassination -- or more properly regarded as a study of the cover-up?

Edited March 8, 2015 by Cliff Varnell

[Jon G. Tidd]

Greg Parker,

You write @ post #546:

"What do you make of his risky early out? Why the rush when he had so little time left to serve in active component? It says to me there was a deadline to meet..."

His early departure from the Marines is puzzling if we expect him to act in a way that's rational, understandable. What if he's given to acting irrationally, even impulsively, at times? Or acting in some way for no other reason than a desire to obtain what he wanted immediately?

From what I've learned of Oswald I've come to the conclusion that if he wasn't being manipulated at times by a hidden third party, he behaved as an odd duck. An intelligent odd duck. You claim he had Aspergers. As I mull over your claim and think about the little I know of Aspergers, I'm leaning toward buying your claim -- not as to his alleged Russian language ability but as to the oddness of his behavior. But I still want to know, and I ask you again, what specific reasons apart from his alleged Russian language ability do you have for believing Oswald had Aspergers?

[Jon G. Tidd]

Mark Knight,

As I think about your comment @ post #548 and also about Greg Parker's claim Oswald had Aspergers, I think about two individuals who crossed my path.

The first individual was a boy in my 1955 fifth grade class. A sort of clever boy who would inexplicably fall to the classroom floor, roll around, and make animal noises. The teacher didn't know what to do. The other students avoided this boy because he was so odd. I befriended the boy because I was drawn to the fact he had an intelligent but completely unconventional mind. That was 1955 in an Illinois public school.

The second individual was a young man in my summer 1968 ROTC summer camp at Fort Riley, Kansas. This young man lay in his bunk in the barracks at night and mooed like a cow. A few of us in the barracks thought this odd behavior was funny as hell, given the strict order and discipline to which we had to adhere during training. Many in the barracks were not amused. That was summer 1968, at the height of the Vietnam war, when the army was so hungry for young officers it pretty much took anyone.

As I think back on these two individuals, I think about their senses of humor (or what I thought was a sense of humor) and the fact that they were wired differently from regular folks.

Maybe Oswald was wired differently too, in his own way. Maybe any perceived marionette quality to his behavior was simply his own way of dealing with life.

In this regard, I've thought a lot about his seeming inability to hold a job in the U.S. I've wondered whether he didn't do his job well, and if not, why not. I've wondered whether the work he did bored him. Whether he did odd things his supervisors didn't understand and found troubling. I'd be grateful for any light anyone can shine on Oswald's work behavior and his relationships with his work supervisors.

If Oswald was simply wired differently, there's no need to posit he was being manipulated. He was being observed by the CIA and the FBI, that's clear; but that doesn't mean necessarily that the CIA, FBI, or anyone else was pulling his strings.

[Greg Parker]

Greg Parker,

You write @ post #546:

"What do you make of his risky early out? Why the rush when he had so little time left to serve in active component? It says to me there was a deadline to meet..."

His early departure from the Marines is puzzling if we expect him to act in a way that's rational, understandable. What if he's given to acting irrationally, even impulsively, at times? Or acting in some way for no other reason than a desire to obtain what he wanted immediately?

From what I've learned of Oswald I've come to the conclusion that if he wasn't being manipulated at times by a hidden third party, he behaved as an odd duck. An intelligent odd duck. You claim he had Aspergers. As I mull over your claim and think about the little I know of Aspergers, I'm leaning toward buying your claim -- not as to his alleged Russian language ability but as to the oddness of his behavior. But I still want to know, and I ask you again, what specific reasons apart from his alleged Russian language ability do you have for believing Oswald had Aspergers?

Jon, his (contrived) early out was ably assisted by the USMC. It doesn't happen otherwise.

I have already given other reasons for belief he had Asperger's.

Here are more. Your reluctance to accept he could learn Russian quickly is just wrong-headed

Patient No. 2

This patient was a white male born in 1937 in Utah, the father of five autistic children (daughter born 1957, IQ 25; son born 1964, IQ 23; son born 1966, IQ 27; daughter born

1968, IQ 25: son born 1971, deceased 1987. IQ 35) and one nonautistic son. He had a high school education and 1 year of trade school. He was a clerk in a tool room for a railroad, working the midnight to 8 AM shift for more than 15 years. His income was always marginal, and he periodically required welfare assistance. His spouse was uncooperative. disheveled, withdrawn. and reported by a welfare worker to be borderline mentally retarded and depressed. At the time of the mental status examination, he was disheveled and obese, maintained a constant vacuous smile, had a flat affect. was socially inappropriate, had no sense of humor, and had an excellent rote memory. He spoke to his autistic children in Dutch and English. He knew three other languages and was learning Russian “just because I like languages". He was completely unaware of the social implications of his children’s disabilities and was falsely accused of molesting his autistic daughter. He attended only to concrete issues.http://reopenkennedycase.forumotion.net/t44-why-oswald-was-more-likely-to-have-suffered-aspergers-than-dyslexia

[Greg Parker]

Mark Knight,

As I think about your comment @ post #548 and also about Greg Parker's claim Oswald had Aspergers, I think about two individuals who crossed my path.

The first individual was a boy in my 1955 fifth grade class. A sort of clever boy who would inexplicably fall to the classroom floor, roll around, and make animal noises. The teacher didn't know what to do. The other students avoided this boy because he was so odd. I befriended the boy because I was drawn to the fact he had an intelligent but completely unconventional mind. That was 1955 in an Illinois public school.

The second individual was a young man in my summer 1968 ROTC summer camp at Fort Riley, Kansas. This young man lay in his bunk in the barracks at night and mooed like a cow. A few of us in the barracks thought this odd behavior was funny as hell, given the strict order and discipline to which we had to adhere during training. Many in the barracks were not amused. That was summer 1968, at the height of the Vietnam war, when the army was so hungry for young officers it pretty much took anyone.

As I think back on these two individuals, I think about their senses of humor (or what I thought was a sense of humor) and the fact that they were wired differently from regular folks.

Maybe Oswald was wired differently too, in his own way. Maybe any perceived marionette quality to his behavior was simply his own way of dealing with life.

In this regard, I've thought a lot about his seeming inability to hold a job in the U.S. I've wondered whether he didn't do his job well, and if not, why not. I've wondered whether the work he did bored him. Whether he did odd things his supervisors didn't understand and found troubling. I'd be grateful for any light anyone can shine on Oswald's work behavior and his relationships with his work supervisors.

If Oswald was simply wired differently, there's no need to posit he was being manipulated. He was being observed by the CIA and the FBI, that's clear; but that doesn't mean necessarily that the CIA, FBI, or anyone else was pulling his strings.

Jon, later the year, I will be publishing who recruited him, how it was done, under what program it came under, what his mission was to the Soviet Union, how it was supported, why it ended, and more names of those involved in the background.

[Jon G. Tidd]

Greg Parker:

You write @ post #553:

"Jon, later the year, I will be publishing who recruited him, how it was done, under what program it came under, what his mission was to the Soviet Union, how it was supported, why it ended, and more names of those involved in the background."

I'll be interested in your writing. I never recruited an agent. The agent net with which I worked in Viet Nam was handed off to me. I worked with two levels of agents who had been recruited by U.S. Special Forces.

Truth is, Greg: I believe you are given to speculation. Which is OK. Speculation is just speculation.

[Paul Trejo]

While I think Bill has done an amazing job, it's a theory. A well sourced and wonderfully presented possibility. There are other explanations which fit the evidence..

All depends on your perspective which is why it's so hard to agree on a single explanation. I think we greatly underestimated what the FBI really knew about mexico

Well, David, IMHO, Bill Simpich has done more than an "amazing job." Bill Simpich has provided a paradigm shift for the CIA-did-it theory of the JFK murder.

Nobody has delved deeper into the CIA documents (not even Newman or Scott) than Bill SImpich.

Nobody has connected more dots of the Mexico City episode of Lee Harvey OSWALD than Bill Simpich.

The big difference between Bill's own hypothesis about the data and mine, is that Bill is willing to consider that David Morales' Impersonation of Lee Harvey OSWALD was performed in order to Blackmail the CIA. Those dots don't connect for me. It is gilding the lily. It is putting legs on a snake. It is a superfluous hypothesis.

IMHO, the Impersonation of Lee Harvey OSWALD in Mexico was completely transparent -- it was done to Link the Names of OSWALD and KOSTIKOV. I think that should be intuitively obvious to the casual observer. I don't see any other rational explanation -- it's obvious and simple, IMHO.

Bill SImpich generously invited alternative interpretations to the data -- this tells me that Bill wasn't entirely sold on his own hypothesis.

Regards,

--Paul Trejo

Edited March 9, 2015 by Paul Trejo