American Conspiracies: Lies, Lies, and More Dirty Lies That the Government Tells Us (6 page)

Here's what Armstrong concluded was going on. “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, the boys lived parallel but separate lives—often in the same city. The ultimate goal was to switch their identities and send Harvey Oswald into Russia, which is exactly what happened seven years later.”

Armstrong's evidence is impressive, including contradictions in Oswald's school records between the Warren Commission and the New York courts; a “Lee Oswald” in New York simultaneously with a “Harvey Oswald” in Stanley, North Dakota; an Oswald employed at the Pfisterer Dental Lab in New Orleans while another was in the Marines in Japan. How else do you explain the FBI swooping down on Dallas's Stripling Junior High the day of the assassination and seizing all “Oswald's” school records, as assistant principal Frank Kudlaty remembered, during years when he was officially attending a different school?
¹¹

The way Armstrong pieced it together, when Harvey went to Russia, Lee stayed in New Orleans and Florida associating with Cuban exiles and their CIA handlers. And, as the fateful day approached in Dallas, Lee was used to impersonate Harvey in a series of events aimed at setting up Harvey as the assassin and falsely implicating Cuba as being behind the whole thing.

I realize this sounds like something out of the most bizarre sci-fi novel, but there's quite a bit already in the existing record that supports such a possibility. It turns out the Warren Commission never saw a memorandum that Hoover sent to the State Department nine months after Oswald's “defection,” dated June 3, 1960. Hoover wrote that “there is a possibility that an impostor is using Oswald's birth certificate.”
¹²
After this memo surfaced when a researcher stumbled across it in the National Archives in 1975, Warren Commission investigator W. David Slawson was asked about it by the
New York Times
. Slawson said: “I don't know where the impostor notion would have led us, perhaps nowhere, like a lot of other leads. But the point is, we didn't know about it. And why not? It conceivably could have been something related to the CIA. I can only speculate now, but a general CIA effort to take out everything that reflected on them may have covered this up.”
¹³

Now think about this: there are almost 50 separate instances of U.S. government files—from the CIA, FBI, Secret Service, Military Intelligence, Dallas Police, and Warren Commission testimony—where “Lee” and “Harvey” are transposed. In quite a few of these, the original file identifying a “Harvey Lee Oswald” was altered after the assassination to read “Lee Harvey Oswald.”
¹⁴
Which raises the obvious question: was there an intelligence operation involving one Oswald who identified himself as Lee, and another who called himself Harvey?

When Oswald's older brother, Robert, showed up at the Dallas Police station not long after he was told about Lee getting arrested, the very first question the FBI posed to him was: “Is your brother's name Lee Harvey Oswald or Harvey Lee Oswald? ... We have it here as Harvey Lee.” Robert replied, “No, it's Lee Harvey Oswald.”
¹⁵

The first Dallas Police memo generated that day also designated the fellow as “Harvey Lee Oswald.” An army cable sent from Fort Sam Houston to the U.S. Strike Command at McDill Air Force Base in Florida started out: “Following is additional information on Oswald, Harvey Lee.” By the time the Secret Service interviewed Oswald's widow, Marina, three days after the assassination, you'd think they'd have the name right. But the way they phrased it to Marina went: “After you married Harvey, where did you and Harvey maintain your address or residence?” And the Secret Service report of its interview with William Stout Oswald said he “stated that although Harvey Lee Oswald is said to be his second cousin, he had never met him nor had he known Harvey was also employed by the William B. Reily Coffee Company.”

This weird pattern had been going on for a long time. When Oswald was living in Russia, a March 2, 1961, memo from the U.S. Passport Office to the State Department Security Office “requested that the recipients advise if the FBI is receiving info about Harvey on a continuing basis.” Soviet records only deepen the mystery. Oswald was known to sometimes use the nickname of “Alik” with people he knew over there. When he was hospitalized in Minsk for an adenoid operation, he's variously listed as “Harvey Alik Oswald,” “Harvey A. Oswald,” and “H.A. Oswald.” The name “Lee” doesn't appear on any of the hospital files.

A CIA document dated three days after the assassination says: “It was partly out of curiosity to learn if Oswald's wife would actually accompany him to our country, partly out of interest in Oswald's own experiences in the USSR, that we showed intelligence interest in the Harvey story.” I found that phrasing rather odd. Back in Texas on Thanksgiving Day, 1962, Oswald entered his name as “Harvey” in his half-brother John Pic's address book. This is despite the fact that a guy named J.E. Pitts who served with him in the Marines remembered that Oswald “had an intense hate for anyone that called him by the nickname of ‘Harve' or by his middle name of ‘Harvey' and he wanted to fight anyone that did it.”
¹⁶

Okay, now let's turn to the question of Oswald's height. The
Warren Report
has Oswald standing 5-feet-9-inches tall, the height recorded by the Dallas police after his arrest and during the autopsy on his body after Ruby shot him. The commission's 26 volumes of testimony and exhibits have 12 different documents recording that same height. These are all heights for Oswald in the United States after he came back home in 1962. The 5-foot-9 is on all of his employment applications, including the one at the Texas School Book Depository, and also how he was measured by the New Orleans police after getting arrested during a street confrontation with some anti-Castro Cuban exiles on August 9, 1963. It's also the height listed earlier when he finishes his Marine boot camp, on December 28, 1956.

But what the Warren Report
doesn't
say is that, on documents concerning his discharge from the Marines and his travels overseas after that, he's listed as 5-foot-11. Not just once, but three times over 11 days in September 1959 by a doctor and two other Marines. He's 5-foot-11 on his passport when he goes to Russia, and an application he makes to get admitted to Albert Schweitzer College in Switzerland. A total of eight documents in the Warren volumes have an Oswald two inches taller than the guy who got arrested on November 22, 1963.

When the police checked Oswald's wallet on the afternoon of the assassination, they found both a 1959 Marine Selective Service System Registration card and a Department of Defense Identification Card listing his height as 5-11. In the same wallet was a counterfeit Selective Service System Registration card under the fictitious name of “Alek James Hidell.” Hidell's height was listed as 5-9.
¹⁷

It gets stranger. Before he was buried, Oswald's body was unattended when an FBI team came to spend quite a bit of time checking it over carefully and taking another set of prints, according to the
Fort Worth Press
. When an FBI agent looked up Oswald's early medical history, a mastoidectomy and operation scar were noted on his Marine Corps health records, from a procedure he'd undergone at the age of six. But the post-mortem report of November 24, 1963, didn't list any scar or bone removal. Paul Groody, the funeral director who buried Oswald, recounted a story years later. Secret Service agents, he said, had come to ask him questions about some marks on Oswald's body and told Groody, “We don't know who we have in that grave.”
¹⁸

Richard Helms, who was then in charge of clandestine operations for the CIA, sent a memo to the FBI on February 18, 1964. Helms was interested in a scar that Oswald was supposed to have had on his left wrist, after he allegedly attempted suicide in Moscow in 1959. Helms requested any FBI information, “including the undertakers, copies of any reports, such as autopsy or other, which may contain information pertinent to this point.... The best evidence of a scar or scars on the left wrist would of course be direct examination by a competent authority and we recommend that this be done and that a photograph of the inner and outer surfaces of the left wrist be made if there has been no other evidence acceptable to the [Warren] Commission that he did in fact attempt suicide by cutting his wrist.” A week later, two Dallas FBI agents contacted C.J. Price, the administrator at the Parkland Memorial Hospital where Oswald's autopsy took place. Price said “he failed to observe any scar on Oswald's wrist.” Nor did anyone else, as far as he knew. According to a memo by Warren Commission investigator Slawson (March 13, 1964): “The CIA is interested in the scar on Oswald's left wrist.... The FBI is reluctant to exhume Oswald's body as requested by the CIA.”
¹⁹

The new book,
JFK and the Unspeakable,
contains a fresh interview that brings even more credence to the “double Oswald” scenario. Author Jim Douglass tracked down a fellow named Warren (Butch) Burroughs, who was running the concession stand at the Texas Theater where Oswald was apprehended. He says Oswald came in sometime between 1:00 PM and 1:07 PM, which is several minutes
before
Oswald supposedly shot and killed policeman J.D. Tippitt seven blocks away. Burroughs sold him popcorn at 1:15 (the very moment of Tippitt's slaying).

Most stunning of all was Burroughs's revelation that, a few minutes after the cops came rushing in to surround Oswald and half-drag him out the front of the theater, a second man who “looked almost like Oswald, like he was his brother or something,” was arrested and taken out the
back
of the theater.
²⁰

Burroughs wasn't the only witness to this. Bernard Haire, who owned Bernie's Hobby House two doors east of the theater, had also seen police bring “a young white man ... dressed in a pullover shirt and slacks” out the rear door of the theater, where he was driven off. Told that Oswald had been brought out the front, Haire was bewildered and said “I don't know who I saw arrested.”
²¹

You've also got witnesses at the Book Depository building seeing Oswald walk out the front and get driven off in a car, and more witnesses seeing him go out the back and take a bus. There are more witnesses inside the building who claim to have seen Oswald in two places at once. So there's quite the possibility that both of them, Lee and Harvey, were in the book depository at the same time.

My hunch is that they were both part of a false defector program that James Angleton and his friends in counterintelligence were running out of the CIA. While Harvey was over in Russia, Lee was working with anti-Castro Cubans in Florida planning to bump off Castro (he was seen by a number of people down there at the same time). Harvey, the wimpy-chinned one in the photographs, was married to Marina. Lee, the thick-necked one, was used to set up Harvey. I believe it's Harvey laying in the grave, and whatever happened to Lee, I have no idea.

In Armstrong's book, there's also the matter of the two mothers. Apparently the real Oswald mother was quite an attractive tall woman, but then you've also got short, dumpy Marguerite. What proves to me that she was a fraud? In one interview she gave, she had Lee's birthday wrong. I don't know of a woman who's ever given birth to a child that can't remember the day.

I can't end this chapter without a few words about the national media's role in the cover-up.
²²
The very first dispatch out of Dallas on November 22, 1963, came from the
Associated Press
: “The shots apparently came from a grassy knoll in the area.” That was the news in most of the early reports, though it was soon replaced by the Texas School Book Depository.

Dan Rather, who was a local newsman in Dallas at the time, was the first journalist to see the 20-second-long “home movie” taken by dressmaker Abraham Zapruder. Rather then told a national TV audience that the fatal shot drove the president's head “violently forward,” when the footage showed just the opposite! Later on, in his book
The Camera Never Blinks
, Rather defended his “mistake” saying it was because his watching the film had been so rushed.

But nobody could question this at the time, because Time-Life snapped up the Zapruder film for $150,000—a small fortune back then—and battled for years to keep it out of the public domain. The
Life
magazine publisher, C.D. Jackson, was “so upset by the head-wound sequence,” according to Richard Stolley, who was then the magazine's L.A. bureau chief, “that he proposed the company obtain all rights to the film and withhold it from public viewing at least until emotions calmed.”

We didn't find out until 1977, when Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame wrote a piece for
Rolling Stone
on “The CIA and the Media,” why
we
should have been upset about C.D. Jackson. Bernstein explained: “For many years, [Time-Life founder Henry] Luce's personal emissary to the CIA was C.D. Jackson, a Time, Inc., vice president who was publisher of
Life
magazine from 1960 until his death in 1964. While a
Time
executive, Jackson coauthored a CIA-sponsored study recommending the reorganization of the American intelligence services in the early 1950s.” He also “approved specific arrangements for providing CIA employees with Time-Life cover. Some of these arrangements were made with the knowledge of Luce's wife, Clare Boothe.” (Mrs. Luce was a member of the Committee to Free Cuba, and right after the assassination started putting out information connecting Oswald to Cuba—information she received from a group of CIA-backed Cuban exiles that she supported. The CIA still won't release its files about that group.)