Reclaiming History (239 page)

Indeed, some conspiracy theorists depart from the theory that Tippit was part of the plot to kill Kennedy
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and depict him, instead, as an unwitting pawn who, as a favor for Roscoe White, an ex-CIA friend, was supposed to pick up Oswald, a stranger, at Tenth and Patton to drive him to Redbird Airport. When Tippit noticed that Oswald fit the vague description of the presidential assassin sent out over the police radio, and threatened to arrest him, White, fearing that Tippit already had learned too much, jumped out of some nearby bushes and killed Tippit.
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But instead of the aforementioned plan that would thrust Tippit unknowingly into the assassination plot, why White himself wouldn’t simply drive Oswald to the Redbird Airport, the conspiracy theorists don’t say.
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Naturally, the conspiracy theorists would love to have some “evidence” to support this delicious Redbird Airport suspicion of theirs. And they got it when it surfaced publicly for the first time in 1966 in Richard Popkin’s book
The Second Oswald
. Conspiracy theorist Jones Harris told Popkin that one Wayne January, “the manager of the Redbird Air Field at the time of the assassination,” told him, Harris, that on Wednesday morning, November 20, 1963, three people turned up at the airport. Two of them, a heavy-set young man and a girl, got out of their car and spoke to him, leaving a young man sitting in the car. The couple inquired about the possibility of renting a Cessna 310 on November 22 to fly to Mexico, saying they would return the plane on Sunday, November 24. From their appearance and demeanor, January did not believe they could afford the flight and suspected they might want to hijack the plane and go on to Cuba. He decided not to rent them the plane even if they turned up with the money for the flight, which they did not do, and January never saw them again. However, when January saw Oswald on television he was “convinced” Oswald was the man seated in the car.
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One big problem with January’s credibility is that Alexander said that because he and Fritz had wondered if Oswald was on his way to Redbird Airport, “either one or two days after the assassination I know that Captain Fritz sent a couple of detectives out to the airport to speak to the people in charge and check all the records of the arrivals and departures for the days leading up to and including the assassination, and everything was negative.” (One can assume that either the detectives spoke to January or he at least was aware of their presence at the small airport, and he did not tell them the story about the three people.) Contrary to the allegation in several conspiracy books, Alexander also said that the Dallas police never impounded any plane at Redbird following the assassination, nor, to his knowledge, did anyone else in law enforcement.
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January’s biggest problem, by far, is that
after
the Dallas detectives had made their inquiries at the airport, he finally did tell his story to authorities. On November 29, 1963, he told FBI agents Kenneth Jackson and John Almon the same story he told Jones Harris in 1966, with these major exceptions: The incident occurred not on the morning of November 20, 1963, but “during the latter part of July, 1963.”
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Additionally, no mention was made of the man and woman wanting the plane for November 22, 1963, telling him only that they didn’t want to make the flight “for a couple of months.” And January said the man waiting in the car only “somewhat resembled Oswald.” What a difference a few years make. As indicated, when January spoke to Harris in 1966, “the latter part of July, 1963” had become “November 20, 1963”; “a couple of months” had become “November 22, 1963”; and January no longer only believed the man “somewhat resembled” Oswald, but now was “convinced” it was Oswald. When January told his story once again to conspiracy theorist Anthony Summers in 1978, he had one more important change to make: Oswald was no longer waiting in the car but instead approached January along with the other man and woman.
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On January 19, 1994, January told author Gus Russo that the three people who approached him at Redbird on November 18 were no longer two men and a woman (what he told the FBI in 1963 and author Popkin in 1966), but “three men,” one of the three apparently having metamorphosed from a woman into a man. And oh yes, Oswald was now back in the car, waiting for the two men who were talking to January.
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January was obviously having a difficult time remembering his story. And like so many invented tales, January’s story contained within it the evidence of its fabrication. Although the buffs, hanging on desperately to January’s story, have floated their stories that a Piper Cub was “revving” its engines at Redbird Airport waiting for Oswald to arrive on the afternoon of the assassination, January himself forgot to include in his obvious fable the assertion that the man and woman with “Oswald” on November 20 were at the airport on the afternoon of November 22 waiting for Oswald to arrive. (Nor did he say anyone else was there waiting for Oswald or anyone else.) And after all, since they weren’t, where does January’s story “go”?

It should be noted that January, not content with only one fable about Oswald, came up with a second one he didn’t tell the FBI agents when they interviewed him. On December 20, 1963, January called the local UPI office in Dallas and told them that “last summer” a man who “looked like Oswald” approached him about chartering a plane in September or October (1963) for five passengers to fly to an island off the Mexican peninsula of Yucatán, but the flight never came about.
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No one can ever accuse January of not trying to make a name for himself.

I
n all the alleged Second Oswald impersonations, while the real Oswald is doing what we know he was doing—defecting to the Soviet Union, living on Beckley in Dallas, working at the Book Depository Building, visiting his wife and daughters on weekends in Irving, and so on—an Oswald look-alike was seen elsewhere during these times doing all types of other things. But a British solicitor (lawyer) named Michael Eddowes, in his 1977 book,
The Oswald File
, came up with a really wacky variation on the above theme. The Oswald who defected, worked at the Book Depository Building, and eventually murdered Kennedy was not the real Oswald. He was a member of the assassination squad of the KGB who looked like Oswald and was sent to this country to kill Kennedy. The real Oswald, after he defected to the Soviet Union, simply disappeared, never to be heard from again, being disposed of presumably at the hands of the KGB.

Why did the Soviets want to murder Kennedy? Eddowes really doesn’t concern himself with this unimportant issue, summarily disposing of it in one sentence by saying that because Kennedy “opposed the aggressive moves of…Khrushchev, the latter ordered his assassination” through the Soviet secret police. Eddowes also doesn’t concern himself with the problem Khrushchev would have in not knowing whether Kennedy’s successor would be just as bad as, perhaps worse than, Kennedy. (The whole notion of the KGB being behind Kennedy’s murder is discussed in depth in the KGB conspiracy section.) Eddowes doesn’t even try to prove that there was, indeed, a Soviet plot to kill Kennedy, offering naked conjecture and not one iota of evidence.

How was the real Oswald selected for his role in this endeavor? Per Eddowes,

The plot [was] that a young American serving in the Armed Forces of the United States would be selected (probably by the KGB) and persuaded to visit the Soviet Union at the termination of his military service. The selected American would have to be unmarried, and his immediate family would have to be somewhat disunited. He would have to…have exhibited some Marxist or pro-Soviet sympathies which would make it credible that he might visit the Soviet Union. He would have to be of average height, of normal physique, and with a face of regular and no distinguishing features, thus making it comparatively easy for the KGB or the MVD to find a dedicated Soviet look-alike from their hundreds of thousands of members…On visiting the Soviet Union, the American serviceman would be seized and his place taken by the look-alike already selected…After two or three years and having learned the American’s background, habits, gait, speech patterns, and handwriting…the look-alike would enter the United States in the identity of the American serviceman and…assassinate the President.
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Eddowes wants us to believe the absurd—that the imposture was so perfect (right down to getting the face, physique, mannerisms, and even the voice right) that the pretender actually succeeded in fooling Oswald’s own mother, brother, and half brother (though they might have noticed some understandable changes in Oswald after his being away for going on three years).
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Like all intelligent people with nutty ideas who set out to prove their particular “the earth is flat” theory, Eddowes comes up with evidence that the Oswald who shot and killed Kennedy was not the real Lee Harvey Oswald but a Soviet imposter: for example, at various times during his brief adult life, Oswald’s height is listed differently, such as five feet nine inches and five feet eleven inches.
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Eddowes isn’t troubled by the fact that this is a perfectly common phenomenon. Furthermore, after Eddowes’s trained Soviet look-alike for Oswald came to America in 1962, and the real Oswald was still in Russia, only the look-alike was being measured or giving his height on employment applications, et cetera, where those different heights turn up, so Eddowes automatically loses his argument that the real Oswald has one height and his imposter another. For example, in his application for employment at William B. Reily and Company in New Orleans on May 9, 1963, “Oswald” gave his height as five feet nine inches,
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but the next month, on June 25, when applying for a passport he gave his height as five feet eleven inches.
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Why would an Oswald imposter give two different heights for the person he was impersonating? Some Soviet spy and imposter. Eddowes points out that when the Oswald pretender came (not came back, since he apparently had never been here before) to the United States from Russia in 1962, the real Oswald’s mother noted that her son looked “very, very thin,” and in the close to three years since she had seen him last, he had lost some hair. Robert Oswald said his brother not only had lost a lot of hair but had a more “ruddy” complexion than the last time he saw him.
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However, neither gave the slightest indication that the man was not their respective son or brother.

Despite the lunacy of Eddowes’s theory, the HSCA addressed itself to the “assertion by some critics that the Lee Harvey Oswald who returned from Russia in 1962 was a different person than the Lee Harvey Oswald who defected to Russia in 1959.” When I met with Second Oswald proponent John Armstrong in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on January 21, 1994, he assured me he had photographic evidence of two separate and distinct humans, one the real Oswald, the other an imposter. Armstrong proceeded to send me a collage of sixty photographs, claiming the “two” Oswalds were represented therein. However, the HSCA employed forensic anthropologists to analyze and compare photos of Oswald from the time he was in the Marines (which was before he went to Russia) until the assassination, and they concluded that all the photographs were “consistent with those of a single individual,”
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and there were “no biological inconsistencies in the Oswald photographs examined that would support the theory that a second person, or double, was involved. The variation observed is that expected in an array of photographs taken by different cameras with varying lens, camera angles, lighting, and other technical differences.”
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The HSCA could have added that the photos the experts examined were taken between 1956 and 1963,
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a seven-year period, and people’s appearances do tend to naturally change over time.

Handwriting experts for the HSCA also examined several known handwriting exemplars of Oswald’s (e.g., application for a passport in 1959, purchase order for Carcano in 1963, etc.), and found them all to have been written by the same person.
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Additionally, the HSCA’s fingerprint expert, Vincent Scalice, compared Oswald’s fingerprint and palm print exemplar taken when he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps on October 24, 1956 (before he left for Russia), with those taken on November 22, 1963, and November 25, 1963, of the Lee Harvey Oswald who was arrested for the assassination of Kennedy, and found that the prints were “identical.”
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The HSCA concluded that “accordingly, on the basis of the committee’s scientific analysis, there was no evidence to support the allegation that the Lee Harvey Oswald who returned from Russia in 1962 was a different person than the Lee Harvey Oswald who defected to Russia in 1959.”
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Even without the findings of the HSCA, it is interesting that this Soviet pretender, meticulously trained and sent to the United States for the sole and specific purpose of assassinating President Kennedy, decided, apparently on his own, that he’d like to try to murder Major General Edwin Walker too. I guess he felt he needed some target practice for the big day coming up. Also, the Russian agent-imposter, whose real name Eddowes never gives his readers, showed just how professional he was at convincing the world that he, the man who killed Kennedy, was really Lee Harvey Oswald, by ordering the rifle he used to kill Kennedy and the revolver he used to kill Officer Tippit under the alias A. Hidell.
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And at the time of his arrest on the afternoon of November 22, 1963, he had in his possession a counterfeit Selective Service System Notice of Classification listing his name as Alek James Hidell.
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You see, although the KGB wanted its agent-imposter to convince people he was Lee Harvey Oswald, and he was willing to murder Kennedy and possibly die in the process to accomplish his goal for his KGB superiors, he apparently felt he could convince people he was really Lee Harvey Oswald by frequently using the alias A. Hidell. It certainly makes sense to me.