Truth and Lies: Who Killed JFK - Part 3
About halfway through the show, the focus shifts to Lee Harvey Oswald. There is a quick glide over his decision to join the Marines. There is no mention of his joining the Civil Air Patrol (CAP) and meeting David Ferrie in 1955. In fact, there is more in the Warren Report about this. At least the Commission mentions the CAP. (Warren Report, p. 679). It was just a couple of months after joining the CAP that Oswald dropped out of Warren Easton High School. He then tried to enlist in the Marines by claiming he was 17, when he was actually 16. In fact, Oswald’s mother was visited by someone who said he was a Marine recruiter. But since he asked her to let her son quit school, he almost had to be an imposter. (Destiny Betrayed, by James DiEugenio, second edition, pp. 125-26)
The Oswalds moved back to Fort Worth the next year, and the film misses another important point about Oswald. At the time he is reading the Marine Corps Manual, he is pushing communism on his acquaintances there. It got so bad that Richard Garrett reported him to the principal of the school Oswald briefly attended. (ibid) One would think that this apparent dichotomy would be worth noting.
There is very little, if anything, about Oswald’s service in the Marines. And again, that is a notable lacuna in the show. Because it is at this time that Oswald begins to learn the Russian language. He even gets tested in Russian. And he has an interesting meeting with a woman named Rosaleen Quinn. A relative of Quinn knew Oswald, and he told her about his acquisition of the language via listening to records and reading newspapers. Quinn had been formally studying Russian for over a year with a tutor in hopes of getting a translator job at the State Department. A meeting was arranged. Quinn came away quite impressed. Because Oswald spoke Russian as well or better than she did. (Philip Melanson, Spy Saga, p. 11).
II
The show very skimpily deals with Oswald’s defection to Russia. And I could detect no mention of the hardship discharge that was granted to Oswald so he could leave the service early. This is notable since it was granted in record time. They usually took 3-6 months. Oswald’s was done in two weeks. Further, there is evidence that his mother knew he was going to defect--six months before Oswald began the application process. (Op. Cit. DiEugenio, p. 136)
The program mentions that very few people defected to Russia at this time. Which is true. It fails to mention the uptick that took place in the mid to late fifties. And by 1960, the number had grown into the high teens. (Melanson, pp. 24-25; Probe Magazine, Vol. 4, No. 3, article by Lisa Pease) It also fails to mention that State Department employee Otto Otepka suspected that some of the defectors may have been ersatz, that is, agents of the CIA or the Office of Naval Intelligence.
The program deals rather briefly with Oswald’s stay in Russia. It mentions how he met Marina, they married, and then the couple moved out of Moscow to Minsk. There is no mention of KGB suspicions about Oswald being an intelligence agent, and that is why they shipped him out to Minsk. There, they surrounded him with a ring of intelligence agents and even placed a listening device in his kitchen. (Ernst Titovets, Oswald: Russian Episode, p. 62; DiEugenio, pp. 145-46; see also the work of Peter Vronsky on Oswald in Russia)
About Oswald’s return from Russia in the summer of 1962, I could not detect an important figure in Oswald’s life at this time, namely George DeMohrenschildt. He became Oswald’s best friend while he was in Dallas/Fort Worth. If one does not mention the man nicknamed The Baron, then one does not have to deal with the rather odd relationship of a Communist defector with the White Russian community in Texas. Or that the Baron proclaimed near the end of his life that he never would have met Oswald if it had not been for the instructions by the CIA station chief in Dallas. (Edward Epstein, The Assassination Chronicles, pp. 558-62)
The program mentions that Oswald, while in New Orleans, attempted to organize a Fair Play for Cuba group. But the program does not picture the pamphlet he handed out while in the Crescent City, which had the address 544 Camp Street stamped on it. This had been the home of a Cuban exile, CIA-backed group, the Cuban Revolutionary Council. (JFK Revisited, edited by James DiEugenio, p. 233) And in 1963, it had been the address of Guy Banister’s office. There was no mention of Banister, David Ferrie or Clay Shaw.
The program then makes a leap into Mexico City. They follow the whole Warren Commission scenario about Oswald riding on a bus down to Mexico City, visiting both the Cuban and Russian embassies, making scenes at both places and wanting to return to Russia via Cuba. When a producer on the program did a pre-interview with Oliver Stone and myself, she mentioned this controversial episode. I replied:
DiEugenio: Did you just say that Oswald was in Mexico City?
ABC: Yes, I did.
DiEugenio: Then why is there no picture of Oswald while he was there? The CIA had cameras in front of both embassies. So there should be ten pictures; he went in and out five times. But there are none.
ABC: Oh.
DiEugenio: And why is the tape that the CIA sent up to Dallas not his voice? The Dallas FBI agents who heard it said the man on the tape is not the man we are talking to.
ABC: I didn’t know that.
Well, they did know it at this point, and this was about two months before the airing of the program. But yet the show still says the CIA had Oswald under surveillance in Mexico City.
III
There are many other problems with the Warren Commission story about Mexico City, too many to go into here. But to name just three, the receptionist at the Cuban desk who had the most interaction with Oswald, Silvia Duran, told the HSCA that the man she saw was short and blonde, which would not match Oswald. Also, two CIA plants who worked in the Cuban embassy were interviewed by HSCA investigator Ed Lopez in 1978. They both said that they did not see Oswald inside the building. Finally, there was Oscar Contreras, a student active in pro-Castro politics at National University. Contreras met Oswald outside the embassy, and he told Oscar about his attempt to get to Russia through Cuba and asked for help. Again, the description by Contreras did not match the real Oswald. (James DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, p. 293; for a full discussion, see Chapter 10 of that book)
But the show avoids all of these and even uses a dubious story from an FBI informant. Namely, that Oswald talked about killing Kennedy while there. John Newman later showed that this had all the indications of being a fabrication. One problem being that it was from a notorious J. Edgar Hoover sycophant, Morris Childs, and it was third-hand. The original source being unnamed Cuban diplomats. But, for example, neither Sylvia Duran nor Eusebio Azcue, two such diplomats, heard it. (John Newman, Oswald and the CIA, p.428) Further, the CIA had the Cuban embassy bugged, and there is nothing yet declassified resembling this.
From here, the show now begins to shift into 4th gear to back the Warren Commission. Their FBI man, Brad Garrett, says that Oswald was proficient with a rifle and was a good shooter. To say this is an exaggeration is too mild. Author Henry Hurt located fifty of Oswald’s former Marine colleagues. Virtually all of them said Oswald was a poor marksman. Sherman Cooley was a good example. He said he saw Oswald shoot, and there was no way he could have pulled off the JFK assassination. He then added: If I had to pick one guy to shoot me, it would have been Oswald. (Hurt, Reasonable Doubt, p. 99)
On top of that, there is the problem of the rifle in evidence. The Mannlicher Carcano was a poorly designed bolt-action rifle. One with a significant recoil, which made it unreliable on repeat shots. (ibid., p. 100) And Garrett does not mention the Warren Commission scenario of Oswald getting off three shots—with two direct hits—in six seconds. Which is something that no professional rifleman has been able to duplicate without cheating. (Click here https://consortiumnews.com/2016/04/22/how-cbs-news-aided-the-jfk-cover-up/)
To pile more questionable information on top of all this, the program now states that Oswald was going to shoot both Nixon and Eisenhower. These are items that not even the Warren Commission bought into. And predictably, the show makes no mention of the prior plots to kill JFK in November, one in Chicago and another in Tampa. Or that the failed Chicago plot—on which Oswald may have been the informant-- closely resembled the successful one in Dallas. (Edwin Black, Chicago Independent, November 1975)
IV
In addition to the dubious accusations about Oswald threatening Kennedy and wanting to shoot Eisenhower and Nixon, the program goes along with the whole Oswald took a shot at General Edwin Walker scenario. Again, it just states this without providing any backup for it. This accusation was not made against Oswald until over seven months after it happened. The local authorities never considered Oswald a suspect in that case. (Gerald McKnight, Breach of Trust, p. 48) It was only after Oswald was dead that the FBI felt compelled to create this charge.
The reason the local police did not suspect Oswald in that case was simple: the information they had pointed to at least two plotters with at least one car. Oswald did not own a car, and according to the official story, he did not drive. Further, who would have been his Dallas associates in the crime?
The best witness was Kirk Coleman, who was a Walker neighbor. He ran out right after the shot and saw two men running to two cars. (ibid., p. 57) When he was shown pictures of Oswald by the FBI, he said neither of the men he saw resembled him. Further, he had never seen Oswald on or around the Walker residence before the day of the shooting, which was April 10, 1963. Robert Surrey, an aide to Walker, said he had seen two men in a car behind Walker’s house a couple of days before the incident. They got out and walked around the place. This looked suspicious, so he followed the car for a while before losing it. The car had no license plates. Again, he said neither man resembled Oswald. (Michael Benson, Who’s Who in the JFK Assassination, p. 440)
But further, the bullet recovered from the Walker shooting was a steel-jacketed 30.06 projectile. (John Armstrong, Harvey and Lee, p. 507) On November 30, 1963, the FBI requested this bullet from the Dallas Police. Local agent Bardwell Odum sent it to FBI HQ on December 2nd. In a very short time, the FBI turned this bullet into a 6.5 copper-jacketed Mannlicher-Carcano bullet in order to pin the Walker case on Oswald and his rifle.
All of this strong evidence was tossed aside due to the questionable and inconsistent testimony of Marina Oswald, and an undated note and pictures of Oswald’s house. The latter two were surfaced by Ruth Paine. Interestingly, when first told about the note, Marina said she knew nothing about it. Like many things in her testimony, that changed. (Armstrong, p. 513)
Would any of this have held up under cross-examination in court? Highly doubtful. But, for ABC, that does not enter into the journalistic equation.
