Who Really Killed Kennedy?: 50 Years Later: Stunning New Revelations About the JFK Assassination (25 page)

After he served in Japan, Oswald was assigned to Marine Air Squadron No. 9 at El Toro Air Base in Santa Ana, California, where he had access to U-2 radar and radio codes, as well as the then-new MPS-16 height finding radar gear.
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Pacepa also noted that during the summer of 1959, one year before the U-2 was shot down, Petr Semenovich Popov, a Soviet intelligence officer who was cooperating with the CIA, passed the CIA a message indicating the Soviets had “definite knowledge of the specifics of the U-2 program.”
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In a visit to the US embassy in Moscow on October 31, 1959, Oswald said he would tell the Soviets all the information he possessed concerning the Marine Corps and his radar operation specialty. When Pacepa was an intelligence officer for Romania, the KGB in the summer of 1959 pressed him for confirmation that the U-2 spy plane could fly at altitudes of about thirty thousand meters, approximately ninety thousand feet. Pacepa’s intelligence station in Romania was asked to make a special effort to check out that information and expedite to headquarters any confirmation or expansion of that information.

Pacepa has no doubt Oswald was the source of the Soviet’s U-2 intelligence. In exchange for providing the intelligence needed, the Soviet government richly rewarded Oswald. Pacepa wrote that the moment the U-2 was shot down, “Oswald must have been praised and feted beyond
his wildest dreams.” On that triumphant Moscow May Day, the U-2 became what Pacepa considered the crowning foreign policy success of Khrushchev’s career. However, the commonly accepted version of Oswald’s helping the Russians know the U-2 altitude because of his specialized knowledge has been questioned. Jack Swike, an intelligence officer in the US Marine Corps, who was also stationed in Atsugi, Japan with Marine Air Group 11 during the same period as Oswald, in his 2008 book,
The Missing Chapter: Lee Harvey Oswald in the Far East,
claims the Soviets had been tracking all U-2 flights from Atsugi. The extensive Soviet tracking of U-2 flights should have given them sufficient knowledge of the altitude at which the flights flew. Swike was confident Oswald’s appeal to the Soviets involved not specialized U-2 knowledge, but Oswald’s awareness of the nuclear possibilities the US government was considering for U-2 flights. Swike documented the presence of a Nuclear Weapons Assembly team on base at Atsugi, in addition to the U-2 program. Swike directly questioned how much detailed technical information Oswald obtained at Atsugi concerning the U-2 program. “Lee Harvey Oswald did see U-2 takeoffs and landings during 1957–1958, when his MACS-1 unit was stationed very close to the U-2 hanger,” Swike wrote. “Oswald was a plotting board crew member in the radar bubble. He didn’t speak with U-2 pilots and did not have anything to do with U-2 operations.”
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Swike speculated that prior to China successfully testing a nuclear weapon in 1964, while Oswald was yet at the base, there was discussion of modifying a U-2 to carry and drop an atomic weapon over China. He also suggests that Oswald’s interest to the Russians may have been because of Oswald’s knowledge of the marine’s secret atomic weapons facilities at Atsugi. In those years, the Soviets were intensely interested in tracking any and all US nuclear facilities that may have violated international agreements at the end of World War II to keep Japan nuclear free. This was an important subset of the larger interest the Soviets had in the 1950s in identifying and inventorying all US nuclear facilities wherever they might be found.

Little known even today, the United States foreign policy in 1963 was obsessed not only with Cuba and the threat of Soviet nuclear weapons being deployed only ninety miles from US soil, but also with the mounting concern that Mao Tse-Tung and the Communist Chinese were on the fast track to testing an atomic weapon. As documented by historian Gordon H. Chang, “the liberal president John F. Kennedy and his closest advisors, in their quest with a nuclear test ban, not only seriously discussed but also actively pursued the possibility of taking military action
with the Soviet Union
against China’s nuclear facilities.”
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By January 1963, Sino-Soviet relations had reached a “new crisis” in which ideological and national differences between Russia and China caused the CIA to warn the White House a separate Asian Communist Bloc under Beijing would have grave implications for the United States in the Far East.
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JFK also realized the test ban treaty he was contemplating with the Soviets would not stop China from developing a nuclear weapon if China refused to sign the treaty. Finally, JFK selected veteran US diplomat and Soviet expert W. Averell Harriman to push forward with Moscow the idea the United States and the USSR would jointly launch a military attack on China’s atomic facilities to prevent or at least to slow China from advancing with atomic weapons. According to Assistant Secretary of State Benjamin H. Read, who was responsible for communications during the Moscow talks, Kennedy “required unusual precautions to ensure complete secrecy in the communications between Washington and Harriman,” and he “followed the negotiations with ‘a devouring interest’,” Chang wrote.
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While JFK ruled out attacking China unilaterally, a joint American-Soviet preemptive nuclear attack on China was actively discussed at the top levels of the Kennedy administration. “One idea was to have a Soviet and an American bomber fly over the [Chinese] nuclear facilities at Lop Nor, with each dropping a bomb, only one of which would go off,” Chang noted.
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These discussions were going on at the US base in Atsugi, Japan, while Oswald was stationed there. At the time the United States was flying clandestine U-2 flights from Japan over China, so how difficult would it have been to have one of the high-altitude U-2 spy planes drop an atomic bomb on a key Chinese atomic weapons facility? Chang documented that
discussions continued within the White House even as LBJ assumed the presidency.

This puts an entirely different spin on what the CIA possibly may have had in mind for Lee Harvey Oswald. First, it is important to recall that on August 16, 1963, just a few months prior to the JFK assassination, Oswald was filmed on the street in New Orleans handing out leaflets for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. In 1963, the Progressive Labor Party, an American communist organization, began backing China in the Sino-Soviet split, believing that Moaist principles more precisely articulated the proper role the Cuban revolution had played in the international class struggle.
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Following up on the efforts of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, the Progressive Labor Party had announced in late 1962 its intention to organize groups of US students to travel to Cuba, despite the State Department’s ban on US citizens traveling to Cuba. By traveling to Cuba the students risked losing their passports, facing long court battles in the United States, and facing fines up to $5,000 plus five years in jail.
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In 1963 Oswald began corresponding with Vincent T. Lee, the national director of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee who was also a member of the Progressive Labor Party, by then fully recognized as a Maoist organization. In his testimony to the Warren Commission, Lee tried to deny any knowledge of Oswald, claiming many people wrote letters to him that he did not personally know.
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Yet, when shown the letters Oswald had mailed to Lee as head of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, Lee finally was forced in an affidavit prepared for the Warren Commission to admit Oswald’s membership card was authentic and was sent to Oswald on or about May 29, 1963.
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It is possible that had Lee Harvey Oswald been killed immediately after the assassination, either by Officer J. D. Tippit or an officer that apprehended Oswald at the Texas Theater, the CIA might have claimed that Oswald was not specifically a KGB agent, but a KGB agent who had evolved into a Maoist, following the Progressive Labor movement’s decision to embrace Chinese Communism in their support of Castro’s revolution in Cuba. The storyline could have been that Oswald was a Marxist who became a KGB agent after he defected to Russia, but once in Russia, Oswald became disillusioned with Russian Communism, as he sided ideologically increasingly with China.

Realizing JFK was not going to launch a unilateral atomic attack on China’s nuclear facilities, the CIA’s goal could have been to cause the American people to rise up, not just against Castro’s Cuba for being responsible for JFK’s assassination, but also against Communist China. Identifying Oswald as a Maoist would have focused public anger on China, allowing the CIA and State Department to leverage the US resentment against China as a means of widening the Sino-Soviet split and possibly pressuring LBJ into launching a nuclear attack on China and maybe even invading Cuba just as the uprising after 9/11 allowed President George W. Bush to invade Afghanistan and Iraq.

However, the CIA could not spread the disinformation that Oswald was a Maoist if Oswald remained alive. Sooner or later, Oswald was likely to break his cover and pronounce that his support for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee had been a strategy dictated by someone from within the government, most likely from the CIA. With a lawyer’s assistance, Oswald might have exposed an intelligence operation that extended back into the 1950s, and likely with culpability of both the USSR and the United States. But with Oswald dead before being arrested, the press would have had no chance to hear anything Oswald may have wanted to say.

Oswald never got the chance to make his criminal defense, or to give his explanation of how he had been manipulated in the run-up to the assassination. Clearly, he appeared surprised, if not also disgusted, when a reporter shouted out to him the fact that he had been charged not only with the shooting of Officer Tippit but also the murder of the President of the United States. Oswald had been set up. The Mannlicher-Carcano mail-order rifle and pistol could easily have been ordered in the name of A. Hidell without Oswald’s knowledge, and the rifle could have been planted on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. CE399, the “magic bullet,” which likely was planted on the stretcher, could have been linked to the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. With the likelihood the wallet found at the Tippit murder scene was planted there, the evidence against Lee Harvey Oswald was circumstantial at best. The only eyewitness that positively identified Oswald was Howard L. Brennan and, as we saw in
chapter 2
, Brennan’s testimony would have been easy to challenge in court. There was not proof beyond a reasonable doubt that Oswald shot anyone on November 22, 1963, and there never was a criminal trial at
which Oswald had an opportunity to defend himself.

At any rate, if the plan was to gain public support against Cuba and China, once Oswald survived the post-assassination chaos and was in police custody, the CIA had to back off all attempts to leverage the assassination against China. With the huge success of JFK’s assassination turning into a huge disaster with Oswald arrested, the CIA masterminds had no alternative but to frame Oswald as the lone-gun assassin, while simultaneously implementing the back-up plan to silence Oswald. Jack Ruby would silence Oswald once and for all. Not accidentally, Ruby had a history of working with both the mob as a young man in Chicago and then as a Dallas nightclub manager who ran a strip joint, as well as with the CIA as a gunrunner to Cuba. While Ruby burst into the JFK assassination drama as if he were acting on his own, perhaps out of sympathy with JFK’s widow and children, one look at Ruby’s background quickly cast that myth into doubt.

Researcher Jones Harris has noticed a largely overlooked and seemingly out of context statement former CIA director Allen Dulles made during the Warren Commission hearings. The date was June 9, 1964, and the witness was Abram Chaynes, a legal advisor to the State Department. The issue before the Warren Commission was whether or not Oswald’s 1959-issued US passport should have been returned to him in July 1961 for the purpose of returning to the United States, and even more specifically, whether Oswald should have been re-issued his US passport in 1963, when Oswald applied to renew it on June 24. Chayes had just testified as follows: “[Lee Harvey Oswald] applied for the passport in June of 1963. He got it in June of 1963, and he made no effort to use the passport, nor did he have any occasion to use it, until he died.” This prompted Allen Dulles to respond as follows: “It would have been a blessing for us if [Lee Harvey Oswald] had used it, say, in the sense that the assassination might not have taken place, if he had taken the passport and gone to China as he may have contemplated.”
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The problem is nothing in the Warren Commission’s extensive twenty-six volume records indicates Oswald ever planned to visit China. Yet, the record clearly shows Allen Dulles was thinking about the possibility and had no problem pointing out the possibility to the Committee.

In 1994 an FBI memorandum dated November 26, 1963, four days
after the JFK assassination, surfaced.
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The memo was written by FBI agent W. R. Wannell and addressed to William C. Sullivan, then the head of FBI intelligence operations. It referenced information provided by Bernard Weisman, an employee of the United States Information Agency, or USIA, that suggested the Communist Chinese were behind the JFK assassination. The first paragraph of the memo read as follows:

“On 11/22/63 a U.S. Information Agency (USIA) employee, Bernard Weisman, furnished the Bureau a four-page memorandum concerning the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) in which Weisman raised a question as to whether Communist China was possibly involved indirectly in the assassination of President Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald. Weisman indicated he was making copies of his memorandum available to USIA and State Department.”
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The body of the memorandum referenced Oswald’s connection with Vincent Theodore Lee, the national director of the FPCC, as well as several other prominent US citizens who had supported Communist Chinese ideologies. The third paragraph of the memo indicated that “Oswald’s disillusionment with the Soviet Union, his recent activities in connection with the FPCC and the fact that he still reportedly held Marxist ideas” indicated that President Kennedy’s assassination could have at least advanced the interests of Communist China. The memo leaves little doubt the Communist China angle. Assassination researcher Jerry Rose characterized William Sullivan as “J. Edgar Hoover’s chief red-hunter” and he described W. R. Wannell as a “diehard Hoover loyalist, who was one of the few FBI agents who “handled the Oswald case.” As assassination researcher Rose pointed out, J. Edgar Hoover enjoyed juggling both the “lone nut” and “communist conspiracy” angles of the assassination.
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