The Cubans had only one question: Did I want to lose them? If this made me uncomfortable, they would help me get rid of these guys and we could go on about our business. I said, “No, we’re not going to even acknowledge that they’re here. Who cares, we’re not doing anything wrong. There’s nothing they’ll be able to blackmail me with, or take back to the U.S. about any misbehavior on my part. Let’s ignore them, they’re not going to ruin our night.”
So we ended up going to another club, and I don’t know if we were followed there or not. The subject was never brought up again. It could be the Cuban security team decided on a means to lose them on the way; I never inquired. What I did do was put this incident on file in the back of my mind.
When I came back to the States, a week or so later I had a two o’clock meeting penciled in on my schedule—but whom I was supposed to meet with was blank. That’s very unusual for a governor’s public schedule. So I asked my chief of staff, “What’s the deal with the two o’clock meeting?” He rolled his eyes and said, “CIA.”
I expected it, because they have their jobs to do. I had been with Castro and why wouldn’t they want to debrief me? And that’s precisely what it was. The two agents from the CIA came into my office—one of them I’d already met, shortly after I became governor—and they very respectfully gave me the old “Twenty Questions” routine. They went through their litany, and I answered them as honestly as I could. Typical intelligence questions: What did Castro’s health appear to be like? Was he in control of all his faculties? Did he seem bright for his age?
I said I felt that he was very much in control. His mental capacity seemed to be right-on. I offered a few opinions. I told them, “I know his mom lived to be a hundred, so it’s in his genes, and looks to me like he just might make it. Do I think this guy is gonna die within the next couple of years? I’d have to tell you no, he looks fit as a fiddle for his age.”
Their faces were expressionless. They said they were finished, and thanked me. I looked coldly at them and said, “You’re done. You’re all done?”
They said yes.
I said, “You’re sure? There’s no other question you want to ask me, there’s nothing you want to tell me, anything like that?”
“No, sir, we’re all done.”
In that case, I wanted to send them back with something to think about. “Well,” I said, “I have something that I want to tell you, and I’ll leave it up to your discretion who should hear this. You take it to whoever you think is appropriate. A need-to-know basis.”
They feigned being very surprised and said, “Governor, we don’t understand what you’re talking about.”
I said, “Well, here’s what I’m talking about. If you or your people ever put a tail on me again, and don’t tell me beforehand, and I discover it—you’re gonna find the tail floating in the river.”
They looked at me in seeming astonishment. They looked at each other and pretended they didn’t have a clue as to what I was talking about.
I said, “That’s fine. If you don’t get it, you can take it and tell it to somebody that does. I’m sure somebody upstairs, above you, knows exactly what I’m talking about—if you don’t. So you be the judge, like I say take it to where it needs to go.”
I’ve often wondered how far it went. Did it get to George Tenet, who was the director of the CIA at the time? To George Bush? Dick Cheney? Or maybe it didn’t even leave the room. Maybe they didn’t even bother with passing along my little message, I don’t know. But at least I got it off my chest, and let them know that the next time they try to fool me, they ought to do a better job.
One night after I got back to Minnesota, I had dinner with Jack Tunheim. He was a Minnesota federal judge who, after Oliver Stone’s JFK film came out, was put in charge by President Clinton of reviewing the still-classified assassination archives for potential release. Tunheim told me that, in following up on the intelligence side, he’d encountered some of the shadiest characters that he’d ever come across. The judge also told me I had great knowledge of the case, and that I was on the right track.
On the fortieth anniversary of the assassination on November 22, 2003, I decided to go to Dallas again to pay my respects. I’d left office the previous January. I was the only elected official who spoke in Dealey Plaza that day. No one else even bothered to show up. This speaks volumes to me. Does our government still have a collective guilty conscience when it comes to John F. Kennedy?
When I ended up teaching at Harvard in 2004, I decided to focus my next-to-last class on the Kennedy assassination. I knew that was a gutsy move to make at the Kennedy School of Government. I hadn’t wanted to try it too soon because, if Harvard objected, I didn’t want to go through a big fight. Anyway, I got away with it. My guest speaker was David Fetzer, a University of Minnesota Duluth professor and former Marine who’s an expert on the ballistics evidence that shows it had to be more than just Oswald shooting.
I noticed there were people in my class that day who’d never attended any of the others. They were too old to be students. Their sole purpose in being there was apparently to debunk any conspiracy theories. They didn’t completely disrupt the class, but they would speak out of turn and insinuate that it was un-American and undermining our great country by bringing up the past and questioning the integrity of all those great men on the Warren Commission. Never question your government was the message. So where did these people come from? I suspect they were plants, sent in by somebody in the Bush Administration.
So that’s my personal experience with the assassination of JFK. What I respect most about the man is that he was willing to grow and change his views while in office, for the sake of the greater good. Without his going up against the generals who wanted to attack Cuba and take out the Soviet missiles in the fall of 1962, I wouldn’t be sitting here today writing this book. We’d have all been victims of a nuclear holocaust. But because Kennedy wasn’t afraid to take on the powers-that-be—not just the military madmen but the CIA, the Mafia, and the right-wing Texas oilmen, among others—he made enemies. So many enemies that it’s almost impossible to sort out which one eventually killed him.
The conclusion of Robert Blakey, who ran the House investigation back in the late 1970s, was that the Mob was most likely behind the assassination. On this question, I have to defer to what Kevin Costner said in Oliver Stone’s JFK movie: “I don’t doubt their involvement ... but at a lower level. Could the Mob change the parade route ...? Or eliminate the protection for the president? Could the Mob send Oswald to Russia and get him back? Could the Mob get the FBI, the CIA, and the Dallas Police to make a mess of the investigation? Could the Mob get the Warren Commission appointed to cover it up? Could the Mob wreck the autopsy? Could the Mob influence the national media to go to sleep?”
Now let’s run down some comments made by government officials at the time, most of which haven’t been made public until recent years.
President Johnson, on the telephone recordings made of his White House conversations: “I never believed that Oswald acted alone, although I can accept the fact that he pulled the trigger.”6 However, he also told his friend and Warren Commission member Richard Russell, the senator from Georgia, that he didn’t believe in the single-bullet theory.
President Nixon, on the White House tapes, talking about the Warren Commission: “It was the greatest hoax that has ever been perpetuated.”7
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, responding to the question, “Do you think Oswald did it?”: “If I told you what I really know, it would be very dangerous to this country. Our whole political system could be disrupted.”8
Warren Commission member Hale Boggs: “Hoover lied his eyes out to the Commission—on Oswald, on Ruby, on their friends, the bullets, the gun, you name it.”9
Senator Russell: “[I] never believed that Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President Kennedy without at least some encouragement from others ... I think someone else worked with him on the planning.”
&nbs
p; Who was this guy Oswald anyway? A lot more than a 24-year-old loner, that’s for sure. Does it make sense that this Marine radar operator who arrives in Moscow in 1959 offering secrets to the Russians then comes home married to a colonel’s niece and never gets debriefed by the CIA—let alone charged with a possibly treasonous act? The Warren Commission knew, from Texas Attorney General Waggoner Carr and District Attorney Henry Wade, that Oswald apparently was FBI informant No. 179 and was making a couple hundred dollars a month in wages from the Bureau!10 Wade’s source said that Oswald had a CIA employment number as well.
Of course, we can’t know for sure which Oswald this was. Let me explain. At the time the Warren Commission places Oswald on a bus heading to Mexico City to try and get a visa to Cuba, he was also in Dallas with two Latinos at the door of Silvia Odio. Later on, as the assassination date approaches, he’s supposedly target-practicing at firing ranges and driving a car like a maniac—except he doesn’t know how to drive or have a license. Well, how could Oswald be in two places at once? Maybe there were two men, and one of them was setting up the other as the fellow who’d take the rap for the assassination.
This question of double identity has been around since 1967, when Richard Popkin published a little book called The Second Oswald. A decade after that came Michael Eddowes’s best-seller, The Oswald File. His hypothesis was that the Marine Oswald went to the USSR, but a different “Oswald” came back—actually a Russian spy who then killed the president. In 2003 came John Armstrong’s exhaustively researched Harvey and Lee, where the premise is that two males who looked very much alike were groomed from an early age as part of a CIA operation.
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
American Conspiracies Page 6