JFK: The two Oswalds. One Hell of a Gamble

JFK: The two Oswalds

Anthony Frewin

Those of you who missed the two articles by John Armstrong on ‘the two Oswalds’ in recent issues of Probe magazine, don’t despair: Armstrong has rewritten and considerably enlarged them as a two volume DTP work.

Armstrong’s finding may be the most significant research breakthrough in years. But we’re not talking about the immediate pre-assassination ‘second Oswald’ who went around rather clumsily impersonating the real LHO, we’re talking about a shadow Oswald who can be documented from the early 1950s onwards. As Armstrong states:

In the early 1950s an intelligence operation was underway that involved two teenage boys: Lee Oswald from Fort Worth and a Russian-speaking boy named ‘Harvey Oswald’ from New York. Beginning in 1952 these boys lived parallel but separate lives, often in the same city.

Sounds incredible, eh? Well it is. But Armstrong scrupulously documents his case, largely with government material and records from the Warren Commission. For example:

….we have two contradictory Warren Commission exhibits. The top [reference to supporting documents] shows ‘Oswald’ (Harvey) attended Beauregard [school] for 89 days during the Fall term in 1953 in New Orleans. The bottom one shows Oswald attended 62 days of school during the Fall term of 1953 in New York. If both Warren Commission documents are correct, you have two Oswalds, LEE in New York, HARVEY in New Orleans – in the Fall of 1953.

Now, one could dismiss this as some sort of grand clerical error, but Armstrong uncovers so many more examples of ‘Lee’ and ‘Harvey’ that there can be little doubt as to the existence of two discrete entities weaving in and out of the Eisenhower years, passing close but never touching.

Armstrong believes that this intelligence operation’s ultimate goal was to switch their identities and send ‘Harvey’ to the Soviet Union as a fake defector. Here he is on shakier ground: it may have been it or it may have not have been. We don’t know.

So much crap is published on the assassination, but here is a work of real substance – as essential as Sylvia Maegher’s was all those years ago. My only criticisms are that Armstrong does not always organise the material as well as he should, particularly towards the end, and the production is a real DTP typographic horror-show.

The two volumes of The John Armstrong Research cost $20 and are published by Jerry Robertson, 2404 Lafayette Drive, Lafayette, IN 47905, USA (). They are also available from Andy Winiarczyk at the Last Hurrah Bookshop, 849 West Third Street, Williamsport, PA 17701, USA. Tel: (international code +) 717.321.1150

NOTE: Here is something scary to which Armstrong draws attention: the Assassination Records Review Board cut a swathe through federal agencies and released thousands and thousands of documents. They had clout and used it. But what were the two things that were out-of-bounds to them? What was strictly verboten even for the Board? The tax returns of Oswald and his mother. These returns are still under lock and key forty years later. We have had Jack Ruby’s IRS returns and those of the brother of the guy he once lent a dime to in 1953, but Oswald and Marguerite’s? Always follow the money trail……

---

A message from Moscow

One Hell of a Gamble: Kruschev, Castro and Kennedy

Alexander Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, Norton, 1997

Alex Cox

I bought this book because of a review in The Nation (14 July 1997) by one Max Holland, described as a contributing editor and the compiler of a history of the Warren Commission, for Houghton Mifflin, entitled A Need to Know. The authors are Aleksandr Fursenko, a Russian historian, and Timothy Naftali, a ‘fellow in International Security Studies’ at Yale. It’s mainly about the Cuban Missile Crisis, drawing on what are described as declassified KGB and other Soviet intelligence materials. The Nation review was generally favourable, with the exception of references to a chapter entitled ‘Dallas and Moscow’ –

‘… according to KGB analysts, an anti-Soviet coup d’etat had in fact occurred, “organized by a circle of reactionary monopolists in league with pro-fascist groups of the US with the object of strengthening the reactionary and aggressive aspects of US policy.”

It’s one thing to convey what ruling circles in the Soviet Union thought about the assassination. But the authors make almost no effort to distance themselves from the tripe about an oil depletion allowance conspiracy, nor do they stop to consider the implications of an intelligence service so hidebound by ideology that it cannot report objectively on the adversary’s camp.’

Verrrryyy interesting. The notion of a Texas-based assassination conspiracy always made sense to me: many of the players involved in ‘intelligence’ skull-duggery and extreme right-wing politics were either Dallas residents (the Hunt brothers, the Murchisons, Charles P. Cabell) or recent visitors to the city (J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, Madame Nhu). It doesn’t take much brains to posit a Texas-based hit a la Farewell America, authored by the pseudonymous ‘James Hepburn’ and reputed to be the product of French intelligence.

The Nation has a long history of slagging off conspiracy theorists: its liberal slant is that political assassinations only occur abroad, never at home – unless, as with Letelier, they are of foreigners, by foreigners.

So I got the book in question, ignored all the Missile Crisis stuff, and turned immediately to what are supposed to be Soviet intelligence files on the JFK hit. This is what I found.

On November 25 1963, the Mexican ambassador to Cuba reported to his embassy’s political section that an ‘extensive conspiracy’ had been behind the assassination. This report likely came from Cuban intelligence. The leader of the Mexican senate quoted President Lopez Mateos as saying that Kennedy had died at the hands of ‘extremely right-wing elements that did not like his policies, especially his policy toward Cuba’.

KGB sources in the French government reported: ‘The Quai d’Orsay…. has come to the conclusion that Kennedy’s assassination was organized by extremely right-wing racist circles, who are dissatisfied with both the domestic and foreign policies of the slain president, especially his intention of improving relations with the Soviet Union.’ The footnote for this is: F. Mortin [head of the KGB’s Information Department], ‘Some Intelligence Information on the Political Objectives and Immediate Consequences of the Assassination of US President J. Kennedy’, December 21 1963, File 90486 (Special Political Reports, Oct 18, 1963-June 1964), pp. 139-43, Archive of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR).

In the first week of December 1963, William Walton, a friend of the Kennedys, met Georgi Bolshakov, a Russian intelligence officer, at the Sovietskaya Restaurant in Moscow. Walton told Bolshakov that the Kennedys believed JFK had been murdered by a right-wing, domestic conspiracy. The source for this is Comrade Bolshakov’s December 1963 memo to the GRU; and the authors’ interview with Bolshakov in January 1989.

Such information, they report, caused the Soviets to distrust Lyndon Johnson as the Texan beneficiary of the conspiracy. ‘By the end of December, KGB analysts had concluded that an anti-Soviet coup d’etat had occured.’

They quote again from F. Mortin’s File 90486 report:

‘The assassination of JFK on November 22 of this year in Dallas was organized by a circle of reactionary monopolists in league with pro-fascist groups of the U.S. with the objective of strengthening the reactionary and aggressive aspects of U.S. policy. The aforementioned circle was dissatisfied with the independent features of Kennedy’s foreign and domestic policies, in particular, various measures to normalize U.S.-Soviet relations, the broadening of civil rights of the Negro population, and also a significant limitation of the interests of a part of the American bourgeoisie, above all the oil and metallurgical monopolies.’

So this is sensational stuff, right? Soviet documents confirm fascist coup in America in 1963! But wait. There’s more. The authors quote File 90486, as follows:

‘The KGB now had some details as to which members of the American right had been behind the murder. In late November a highly regarded Polish intelligence source, an American businessman who owned a series of companies, informed the Poles that three wealthy Texas oil wildcatters – SID RICHARDSON, CLINT MURCHISON, and HAROLD LAFAYETTE HUNT [my capitals] – had sponsored the plot against President Kennedy. All three were noted sponsors of southern racist and “pro-fascist” organizations.’

At last – the smoking gun! The names of the men behind the hit! H. L. Hunt hated JFK (and Jack Ruby visited his brother’s offices on 21 November 1963); Clint Murchison Sr. hated JFK and was a financier of the Minutemen and the Klan; and Sid Richardson might have hated JFK, too……. if he hadn’t died in 1959.

This reference to Richardson makes smokin’ File 90486 extremely suspect. What kind of ‘highly regarded intelligence source’ in 1963 would have accused a dead man of the crime? Years later, of course, somebody could phoney-up a file and make a sloppy job of it. Second-rate fakes are one of the hallmarks of the JFK hit conspiracy.

Or maybe the file is genuine and there’s another reason for the mystery. I think the authors owe it to us to publish File 90486 and the Bolshakov Memo in their entirety.

---