Who Really Killed Kennedy?: 50 Years Later: Stunning New Revelations About the JFK Assassination (24 page)

According to Craig’s testimony, Captain Fritz explained to Oswald, “All we’re trying to do is find out what happened, and this man saw you leave from the scene.” Oswald interrupted Fritz: “I told you people I did,” Oswald said, seemingly suggesting he had previously described for the police that he left the Texas School Book Depository building after the shooting. Then Oswald added a cryptic comment, saying, “Everybody will know who I am now.”
³¹⁵

The comment somehow suggested the information about the Nash Rambler would blow his cover. Was Oswald suggesting that now everyone would realize he was an intelligence officer, or a government agent operating undercover? This is what Armstrong apparently believed, although we can only speculate what Oswald meant, as he did not expand on the comment.

Clearly, this version of how Oswald left the Texas School Book Depository contradicts the official version related by the Warren Commission, as explained earlier in this chapter. Lending support to Craig’s testimony, a photograph taken by freelance photographer Jim Murray shows a Nash Rambler passing in front of the Texas School Book Depository, exactly as Craig described in his Warren Commission testimony. In Murray’s photograph of the Nash Rambler, the Hertz rent-a-car sign on top of the School Depository building records the time as being 12:40 p.m.,
approximately ten minutes after the shooting.
³¹⁶

Just like walking home, hopping into the Nash Rambler heading west on Elm Street would have been a much more direct escape route for Oswald. After entering the Nash Rambler, Oswald and the driver needed only to drive a few blocks on Elm to arrive at Elm and Beckley, a short distance from Oswald’s rooming house at 1026 North Beckley. The problem was that if the Warren Commission accepted Officer Roger Craig’s testimony, then Oswald had an accomplice. Ruth Paine, it turned out at the time of the assassination, owned a Nash Rambler that Craig described.
³¹⁷

Although the Warren Commission did not ask Craig to identify the make of the rifle found on the sixth floor, he recalled deputy constable Seymour Weitzman declaring the weapon to be a 7.65 German Mauser and he remembered Captain Fritz agreeing.
³¹⁸
Until the end of his life, Craig never changed his story, always insisting he saw Lee Harvey Oswald fleeing the Texas School Book Depository immediately after the shooting by running down the grassy knoll and jumping into a waiting Nash Rambler. Craig’s testimony was also at odds with the testimony of fellow workers in the book depository that insisted Oswald was seen in the lunchroom in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, calmly drinking a soda. How could the witnesses that saw Oswald in the lunchroom and Craig who saw Oswald running down the grassy knoll both be right? The first inclination would be that both could not be right, or that the witnesses in the book depository and Craig were describing two completely different people that resembled one another. Is it possible that Oswald somehow had a double in Dealey Plaza that day?

Craig was fired from the Sheriff’s office on July 4, 1967 and afterward had difficulty finding steady work. After multiple documented but unsolved attempts made on his life that Craig suspected were attempts to silence him, Craig was alleged to have committed suicide on May 15, 1975.

In the next chapter, we will look at the involvement of intelligence agencies in the JFK assassination. In
chapter 5
, we will consider the creation by the CIA of an assassination model plan that dates back to Guatemala in the 1950s, involving the creation of a patsy to take the blame.

“Former marine, Lee Harvey Oswald gave up his American citizenship and moved to Russia.”

—Ronald Reagan, Radio Broadcast, 1979
³¹⁹

“All I know is that my son is an agent, and that he deserves to be buried in Arlington Cemetery.”

—Mrs. Marguerite Oswald, mother of Lee Harvey Oswald, Testimony to the Warren Commission, February 10, 1964
³²⁰

W
HEN LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON
was sworn in as president in Dallas on the afternoon JFK was murdered, the knee-jerk reaction of the new administration was to convene a public investigation to pin the blame on Lee Harvey Oswald acting as a lone-nut assassin, disavowing any involvement from either the CIA or the KGB.

But what was LBJ’s concern? Was he worried that an honest investigation would lead to war with the Soviet Union? Or was he worried that an honest investigation would disclose the CIA had gone rogue and participated in the assassination, if not masterminded it? Was it possible the
CIA had compromised Oswald, taking advantage of his role as a double agent to position him as the fall guy—the patsy—who would take the blame for a presidential assassination Oswald did not commit?

All these possibilities frightened LBJ. He realized KGB involvement in the assassination, if proved, could well lead to a nuclear war with Russia. If the CIA were involved, LBJ realized immediately the JFK assassination amounted to nothing less than a coup d’état. But an official blue-ribbon commission packed with respected government officials with distinguished histories of service to the United States could put an end to the speculation, provided the commission concluded Lee Harvey Oswald was the assassin and that Lee Harvey Oswald had no accomplices in committing his crime. This was an especially convenient solution because Lee Harvey Oswald was dead. With Oswald already framed as the assassin, no trial would ever challenge a verdict already reached in the court of public opinion.

On November 25, 1963, the Monday following Friday’s assassination, Deputy Attorney General Nicholas deB. Katzenbach wrote LBJ presidential assistant Moyers a famous memo stating, “The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are still at large; and that the evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial.” Katzenbach’s second point was aimed at the possibility Moscow was responsible:

Speculation about Oswald’s motivation ought to be cut off, and we should have some basis for rebutting thought that this was a Communist conspiracy or (as the Iron Curtin press is saying) a right-wing conspiracy to blame it on the Communists. Unfortunately the facts on Oswald seem about too pat—too obvious (Marxist, Cuba, Russian wife, etc.). The Dallas police have put out statements on the Communist conspiracy theory, and it was they who were in charge when he was shot and thus silenced.
³²¹

The world of Cold War espionage was a world of smoke and mirrors. While there is credible evidence Oswald was a KGB agent, strong arguments can be made that Oswald was a double agent, actually working for a combination of naval intelligence and the CIA when he defected to the Soviet Union, a cover that permitted Oswald to penetrate Soviet intelligence. The problem with Oswald is determining whether he was
a committed Marxist or whether he was just pretending to be a committed Marxist. Was Oswald’s openly expressed support for Castro’s Cuba genuine, or was it merely a cleverly crafted cover story designed to permit Oswald to gain KGB acceptance and an invitation to the Soviet Union? After Oswald returned to the United States, how did he avoid CIA scrutiny? Or, once back in the United States, did Oswald resume working directly with the CIA, just as he did before he defected? Was Oswald’s defection to the Soviet Union a CIA plan from the beginning?

To complicate the matter even more, assassination researchers in recent years have discovered credible evidence to suggest that the assassination in Dallas was the third in a series of “trials,” the other two being in Chicago on November 2, 1963, and Tampa on November 18, 1963, which I discuss later. The similarities between the three plots leaves no doubt it was a conspiracy that involved the KGB, the CIA, the mob, or some combination of all three. That the assassination of JFK was a conspiracy becomes inevitable once we realize two counterparts with remarkable parallels to Lee Harvey Oswald had been setup equally as patsies, one positioned in Chicago and the other in Tampa. Dallas, then, was not a unique event.

Ian Mihai Pacepa, the highest ranking Soviet Bloc intelligence officer ever to defect to the United States, has provided highly credible evidence and arguments that Lee Harvey Oswald was a KGB operative sent back to the United States with a mission to assassinate JFK. Pacepa, one of three deputy chiefs of the
Departamentul de Informatii Externe
(DIE), Romania’s Department of Foreign Intelligence, was living in his native Bucharest when JFK was assassinated. At that time the DIE was a subsidiary of the Soviet espionage service, the
Pervoye Glavnoye Upravleniye
(PGU), the First Chief Directorate of the KGB. (As a side note, I began communicating with Pacepa by e-mail in November 2011 regarding intelligence activities and intelligence disinformation for various articles I was writing. In January 2013, I e-mailed Pacepa specifically regarding his direct experience in Romania’s intelligence operations. Much of the information in this section comes from either the books Pacepa has authored or from my
e-mail exchange with Pacepa.)

In his 2007 book,
Programmed to Kill: Lee Harvey Oswald, the Soviet KGB, and the Kennedy Assassination
, Pacepa makes a convincing argument that Oswald was a KGB agent.
³²²
In one of my e-mail exchanges, Pecepa told me that “during the years when [he] was the chief of Romania’s espionage station in West Germany, going back to the late 1950s, [he] became involved in a joint Soviet KGB-Romanian DIE operation that would, eventually, crack open the dark window concealing the super-secret web of connections between Oswald and the KGB.”
³²³
In 1990, after he became a US citizen, Pacepa began examining the documents on the JFK assassination published by the US government. He was impressed with the wealth of Soviet operational patterns visible throughout the material on Oswald that had been turned up by US investigators who lacked the experience and familiarity with Soviet intelligence operations to recognize the telltale patterns that Oswald was a KGB agent.

“Eventually I developed an approach that has never before been used in any of the many studies of the Kennedy assassination,” Pacepa wrote in his book, describing his investigative methodology. “Taking the factual material on Oswald developed by official and private U.S. investigators, I stacked it up against the operational patterns used in Soviet espionage—patterns little known to outsiders because of the utter secrecy endemic to that community.”
³²⁴
After many years of studying evidence on the JFK assassination, Pacepa found a wealth of information that dovetailed with Soviet operational patterns. He became convinced Oswald was recruited by the Soviets when he was a Marine stationed in Atsugi, Japan, outside Tokyo.

Edward Jay Epstein, for his 1978 bestselling book,
Legend: The Secret War of Lee Harvey Oswald
, interviewed some four hundred people who knew Oswald, including Zack Stout, a Marine stationed with Oswald at the top secret U-2 Navy base at Atsugi, Japan. Stout told Lipton that Oswald was spending time with an attractive girl who “worked” at the Queen Bee, one of the three most expensive nightclubs in Tokyo, and one that catered to American senior air officers and U-2 pilots. The Queen Bee, Stout noted, had more than one hundred strikingly beautiful Japanese hostesses. It was expensive. To take a hostess out of a nightclub required paying not only for the girl and for a hotel room, but also compensating the nightclub for the bar business lost during her absence. A “date” at
the Queen Bee could cost anywhere from sixty to eighty dollars a night, at a time when Oswald was earning less than eighty-five dollars a month. Still, Oswald saw her regularly, reportedly even bringing her back to the base area several times. “He was really crazy about her,” Stout told Lipton, commenting he met the woman with Oswald at local bars around the base. Other Marines less friendly to Oswald were astonished someone of her “class” would go out with Oswald at all.
³²⁵

Pacepa credits Lipton’s 1978 book with being well-documented; he only faults Lipton for “lacking the inside background knowledge that would have helped him to fit his bits and pieces together into one whole, and to reach a firm conclusion.
³²⁶
Pacepa noted the Soviet PGU (
Pervoye Glavnoye Upravleniye
), the First Chief Directorate of the KGB, would clearly have had an interest in Oswald if only because he was a marine assigned to a super-secret U-2 Navy base in Japan at a time the U-2 was the most advanced spy airplane technology in the world. “Could it really have been possible for a US serviceman who often spent his evenings socializing in bars around his base and loudly proclaiming his sympathy for Marxism to escape the spider’s web stretched across such target areas by the Soviet-bloc espionage community?” Pacepa asked. “Possibly, but not likely. Based on my twenty-seven years’ experience with Soviet intelligence, I am convinced that the PGU’s eye fell on Oswald soon after he began frequenting the bars around the base. There, after a couple of drinks, he would almost certainly have launched into his favorite subject, the virtues of theoretical Marxism.”
³²⁷

Pacepa insists the KGB must have been financing Oswald and manipulating the Queen Bee hostess who began spending her days and nights with Oswald. It was only a matter of time before the KGB recruited Oswald. “With the help of that Queen Bee girl, the PGU officer responsible for that night spot could assess Oswald for vulnerabilities and simultaneously smooth the way for his recruitment by making him the envy of his admiring fellow marines, with free sex with a beautiful Japanese girl thrown into the bargain,” Pacepa observed. “The scenario follows the usual KGB pattern.”
³²⁸

On May 1, 1960, Gary Powers, a former air force pilot recruited by the CIA, was shot down over the Soviet Union in a U-2 spy flight that took off from Peshawar, Pakistan. The incident was a severe embarrassment to the Eisenhower administration that was forced to admit the operation of the secret US spy planes over Russia after the Soviet Union produced intact pieces of the U-2 airplane as well as Gary Powers, the surviving pilot, for the world press. Edward Jay Lipton wrote that after Powers was returned to the United States he suggested it might have been Oswald who provided the Soviets with the secret information about his flight.
³²⁹
Pacepa agreed that Oswald’s specific knowledge about the altitude at which the U-2 flew would have more than qualified as Oswald’s ticket to defect to the Soviet Union, since in 1959, when Oswald defected, information about the U-2’s flying altitude was “the number one Soviet intelligence priority.”
³³⁰