Dick Russell
Carroll and Graf, New York, 1992
This is one of the most interesting JFK assassination books to have emerged from the movie and 30th anniversary tie-in crop. Given the vast amount of attention paid to Gerald Posner’s ‘Oswald did it after all!’ apologia, Case Closed, it is unfortunate that Russell’s book still hasn’t found a UK publisher.
The Man Who Knew Too Much has a unique take on the ‘whodunnit’ aspect of the assassination, a synthesis of the left and right wing conspiracy theories: Oswald was involved in the conspiracy to murder the President; and he was an FBI informant and a CIA or Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) agent; but he was also working for the communists as a double agent of the KGB or GRU!
Russell proposes that, having been sent to the USSR as part of a phony ‘military defectors’ programme run by the CIA or ONI, the ‘self-indoctrinated’ Marxist Marine Oswald actually did go over to the other side, returning to the U.S. as a spook of two masters — in the manner of Magnus Pym, the hero of A Perfect Spy. The Le Carre angle is plausibly presented — Russell relies not only on secondary sources but also on his personal interviews with assassination-linked figures such as George de Morenschild, Antonio Veciana, General Walker of Dallas, Ruth Paine, and Richard Case Nagell.
Nagell’s interviews and documentary material form the spine of the book. Nagell walked into a bank in El Paso, Texas, in September 1963 and fired two shots into the wall. Arrested and jailed, Nagell sent telegrams to J. Edgar Hoover and others, warning that President Kennedy was shortly to be killed by a New Orleans-based conspiracy of which Oswald was a part. Nagell, a former U.S. Army Intelligence agent, claimed that both he and Oswald were working as double agents for the Americans and the Soviets. He told Russell that his KGB control officer was a highly-placed CIA man, and that the Agency was riddled with Soviet infiltrators. James Angleton was right all along, it seems — assuming he wasn’t one of them!
Some of Nagell’s claims — that he was ordered by the KGB to murder Oswald, or that he was put in the same cell as jailed Secret Service officer Abraham Bolden (who claimed to have helped foil an attempted JFK hit on 2 October 1963, at Soldier Field, Chicago) — are impossible to verify. Others, such as his assertions that he was hired by the CIA to spy on Oswald in Mexico City, appear to be corroborated by documents he provided Russell — in this case, via the Freedom of Information Act.
In his preface Carl Oglesby refers to a ‘body of primary statements’ backing up Russell and Nagell’s claims. Is there such a body? Well, yes and no. Russell has done a tremendous amount of legwork, interviewing scores of subjects over more than a decade. While the Nagell-related material is well documented, some of Russell’s conclusions are quite unsubstantiated by his interview material. His reliance on the ‘Lincoln Lawrence’ document as evidence that Oswald was mind-controlled, for instance, seems capricious; and his reliance on Robert Morrow, author of Betrayal and The Senator Must Die!, does not inspire absolute confidence. Morrow is one of a number of characters who have come forward over the years purporting to offer first hand evidence of an assassination conspiracy — others include Robert Easterling, Ricky White, Chauncy Holt, ‘Saul’…. and Richard Case Nagell. In Betrayal, Morrow claims he purchased the rifles used in the assassination. He also claims to have been a personal acquaintance of New Orleans conspiracists David Ferrie, Guy Bannister… and Richard Case Nagell.
To be fair, Russell does not rely on Morrow’s dubious books, but interviewed him. Nagell’s story rings truer than Morrow’s — partially because Nagell admits to knowing only a small part of the big story, something Morrow cannot being himself to to. The Man Who Knew Too Much makes one regret that Oliver Stone and Zachary Sklaar removed Richard Case Nagell from their Jim Garrison movie, replacing him with the fictitious and omniscient ‘Mr X’. The chapter where Garrison flies from New Orleans to New York to meet Nagell in Central Park is one of the best scenes from Garrison’s On The Trail Of The Assassins.
Russell’s book is much more than the Nagell story. It is really two books interleaved: the spy story, incomplete as it is, that he was able to winkle out of Nagell, and the massive back-story Russell has pieced together.
His most valuable contributions seem to be:
- his synthesis of the left/right take on the JFK conspiracy — CIA undermined by Soviet moles; Oswald a Soviet agent and a CIA one, hence the perfect patsy for a conspiracy hatched by the far right;
- a good report on the United States’ ‘military defection’ plot in which several Russian-speaking soldiers and Marines ‘went over’ to the Soviets within a 12-month period, all to be repatriated to the U.S. within a couple of years (at one point, Marina — the niece of a high-ranking Soviet Intelligence Colonel — got her husband Lee’s cover story confused with that of another U.S. military ‘defector’, Richard Webster!);
- a comprehensive schedule of failed JFK assassination attempts, including one at the Beverly Hills Hilton, in June 1963, during a screening of the young JFK movie, PT-109!
Russell also claims that a prime mover in the JFK plot was one General Charles Willoughby (formerly Adolf Tscheppe-Weidenbach), assistant to General Douglas McArthur, till McArthur was fired by Eisenhower. A racist, born in Germany, Willoughby is a character worthy of further investigation. He was a member of the secret order of the Knights of Malta, whose august ranks also included Joe Kennedy, James Jesus Angleton, CIA chiefs John McCone and William Casey, Al Haig, Lee Iococca, William Buckley Jnr, Clare Booth Luce, Prescott Bush Jnr, and Hitler’s spymaster Reinhart Gehlen, who proved so helpful to American intelligence at the end of WW2.*
The Man Who Knew Too Much certainly doesn’t prove that Wiilloughby did it, but it does unearth several skeletal fingers pointed towards the military industrial camp. Those who believe the plot was hatched by Texas oil men will also find fuel for their views here.
The book provides a couple of weird parallels, too, between Nagell and General Willoughby as ‘patriotic’ military men who ‘drifted’ over to the other side; and, best of all, between the holiest President and his alleged killer, Lee — both of whom come off as pathetic fantasists who read James Bond books and yearned to hang around with spies — in JFK’s case, Ed Lansdale and David Attlee Philips; in Lee’s case, the rather more downmarket Ferrie and Bannister.
Alex Cox
* For further Knights of Malta information see Covert Action 25, pp 28-29. For late-breaking JFK hit info, you might try a subscription to The Fourth Decade, an excellent research journal, c/o Professor Jerry D. Rose, State University College, Fredonia, NY 14063, USA.
According to Jules Archer’s book The Plot To Seize The White House (Hawthorn, NY, 1973), General McArthur was the first choice of a right-wing coup plot hatched by J.P. Morgan and other U.S.industrialists (DuPonts, Rockefellers and Mellons among them) who opposed Franklin D. Roosevelt. McArthur was President Roosevelt’s Military Chief of Staff. The plot was exposed by General Smedly Butler and supposedly inspired the novel Seven Days in May.