The paper trail documenting Oswald’s look-a-likes may provide the best proof CIA elements orchestrated the JFK assassination plot.
Few things unite Americans like the certainty that John F. Kennedy was assassinated as the result of a conspiracy. This November 22, on the 60th anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination, polls show the overwhelming majority of US citizens do not believe accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald acted without accomplices. Many contend the Communist “lone nut” shooter was in fact merely an innocent “patsy”, as he himself proclaimed not long before being snuffed out by mafioso Jack Ruby.
That such skepticism overflowed in the aftermath of Kennedy’s assassination, and has endured ever since, is highly unusual. Almost without exception, mainstream politicians, pundits, and journalists have enforced the official narrative of a single bullet taking Kennedy down. Along the way, Western audiences have been deluged with articles, books, “documentaries” and more reinforcing the findings of the Warren Commission, a politicized whitewash set up by Kennedy’s successor Lyndon B. Johnson, specifically to convict Oswald, and Oswald alone.
This is despite the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) concluding Kennedy was “probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.” The CIA aggressively stonewalled that probe, and has since engaged in extensive information warfare efforts to publicly defend the Commission and its conclusions, while discrediting what it calls “conspiracy theories.”
In 1967, the Agency circulated an internal brief calling upon its operatives “[to] discuss the publicity problem with liaison and friendly elite contacts, especially politicians and editors [and] employ propaganda assets to answer and refute the attacks of the critics… Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose.”
The CIA’s concerns were well-founded, and remain so. The Warren Commission and HSCA each unearthed enormous amounts of primary source material and eyewitnesses pointing away from Oswald’s guilt, and towards the Agency and its assets. Both struggled to provide any satisfactory resolution to the innumerable discrepancies, anomalies, oddities and suspicions its own investigators uncovered, which have perplexed and bedeviled independent researchers ever since. Chief among them, incontrovertible indications Oswald was being impersonated at numerous junctures prior to Kennedy’s assassination.
Strikingly too, Oswald “doubles” were often found in close quarters with US intelligence operatives, and assets. The existence of these impersonators is evidenced by ample documentation. In its totality, the paper trail documenting Oswald’s doppelgangers may provide the best proof of a JFK assassination plot orchestrated by elements of the CIA.
A tale of two defectors
Lee Harvey Oswald defected to the Soviet Union in October 1959. Just weeks earlier, he had received a dependency discharge from active service in the Marines after three years, as his mother needed care. Despite espousing pro-communist sentiments and employing Russian phraseology so frequently his fellow soldiers nicknamed him “Oswaldskovich,” he was given clearance to operate at a secretive US naval base in Atsugi, Japan, a launching pad for U-2 spy flights over Moscow, and a hub for CIA psychedelic drug research, among other sensitive postings.
Oswald arrived in Moscow on October 16. His tourist visa, which was granted in Helsinki, Finland while en route, was set to expire five days later. But the US Marine had other ideas. He immediately applied for Soviet citizenship, and by his own account began telling any local official who would listen about his love for the “Grand Soviet Union.” The application was rejected on the day his visa expired, prompting him to slash his left wrist, which necessitated a hospital trip.
While recuperating, Oswald was allowed to remain in the country, and on October 31st, he marched into the US embassy in Moscow. There, he declared his intention to not only renounce his citizenship, but to also supply the Soviets with information “of special interest” acquired at Atsugi. As the building was extensively bugged and surveilled, his incendiary promise was inevitably heard loud and clear by the KGB.
Oswald’s defection also caught the attention of US and international media. A contemporary Associated Press report noted he was one of several Americans to apply for citizenship after arriving in Moscow “in recent months.” Another, AP noted, was Robert Webster. Unmentioned was that like Oswald, he was a US military veteran. He had renounced his US citizenship on October 17, a day after Oswald’s arrival.
After leaving the army, Webster worked for the Pentagon-funded RAND Corporation, and repeatedly traveled to Moscow to represent the organization at a Moscow trade exhibition. He later secured his Soviet citizenship by sharing secret RAND technology with Moscow. Along the way, he became romantically involved with a local waitress. He also met Marina Prusakova, the daughter of a KGB colonel, and Oswald’s future wife.
Officially, the Soviet Union’s population at this time was almost 209 million, meaning Marina crossing paths with both US defectors within weeks of each other was highly unlikely. The remarkable twist of fate ostensibly resulted from Marina being moved by authorities to Minsk, due to dating foreign visitors to Moscow. Oswald was then posted there by authorities to work in a radio and TV manufacturing plant and was under constant surveillance after his citizenship application was finally approved.
Even more peculiar was that Oswald and Webster were quite so similar in appearance, Marina and officials at the US embassy apparently mistook the former for the latter. Coincidentally too, they left the Soviet Union for the US within a month of each other – Webster in May 1962, and Oswald in June 1962 with Marina in tow. Their treatment upon arrival back home differed wildly.
As historian Chad Nagle and other analysts have noted, Webster was greeted at Greater Pittsburgh Airport by a 200-strong crowd of journalists, FBI officers, and State Department officials. The CIA then debriefed him in Washington over the course of two weeks, with 15 personnel representing several separate departments in attendance. This reflects his significant intelligence value – the Agency felt Webster could “provide a great deal” of invaluable “OI [Operational Interest] and realities data.”
By contrast, Oswald made his way back without any fanfare. Unable to fund the voyage himself, he approached the US embassy, suggesting he and Marina “could catch a military hop back to the States, from Berlin,” a strange belief for an individual who’d renounced his US citizenship and promised to share state secrets with an enemy power. As it was, he received a resettlement loan from the State Department and was not subject to a CIA debriefing upon arrival. Oddly, his return generated absolutely no press interest.
The CIA’s infamous counterintelligence agent James Jesus Angleton opened “201 files” on both Oswald and Webster following their defections. This designation applied to potential subjects of counterintelligence interest – individuals who represented potential security risks, or assets for recruitment. Webster’s was closed after his CIA debrief. Oswald’s remained open on November 22, 1963. Spanning eight volumes, and over 50,000 pages in length, it is among many JFK assassination-related papers the White House refuses to release in full to this day.
Researcher Gary Hill concluded in his 2020 book, The Other Oswald: A Wilderness of Mirrors:
“When [Oswald] the self-professed turncoat returned to the US no one was interested. No media, no debriefing, nothing…It seems clear to me US Intelligence was finished with Webster and Oswald was still working for them.”
Imposters, or doppelgangers, or both?
Complicating matters even further were the numerous instances of a Lee Harvey Oswald – or Lee Oswald, or Harvey Oswald – cropping up in the US while Oswald toiled in Minsk. In June 1960, longtime FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover issued concerns to the State Department (see below) that “there is a possibility that an imposter” was using Oswald’s birth certificate for nefarious purposes, and requesting any relevant information be forwarded to the Bureau.
In March 1961, a representative of the State Department’s passport division referenced this memo in a note to fellow staffers, asking if the FBI was “receiving information about Harvey [emphasis added] on a continuing basis” from their office. They enclosed a Bureau memo from February that year, the nature of which document has never been ascertained. In response, one of the recipients echoed Hoover’s concern about Oswald’s birth certificate being abused by an imposter.
The February memo’s timing may be significant. A month earlier in New Orleans, a Lee Oswald attempted to purchase 10 trucks on behalf of “Friends of a Democratic Cuba” (see below).
According to an October 1967 CIA report, this organization served as the anti-Castro Cuban Revolutionary Council’s fundraising arm, “created by several New Orleans business and political figures, including the deceased former FBI agent, Guy Banister, to collect money to aid Cubans in their fight against Communism.”
Banister was a Bureau veteran, at one stage a key figure within the FBI’s Security Matter X division, which investigated paranormal phenomena such as UFOs, and later inspired the popular X-Files TV serial. After losing his job due to violent, aggressive behavior towards members of the public, he founded a private detective agency, conducting covert, arms’ length work for the Bureau, CIA and other US government agencies. It operated out of 544 Camp Street in New Orleans, which from 1961 to ’62 housed the Cuban Revolutionary Council.
Lee Harvey Oswald moved to New Orleans in April 1963, ostensibly to find work. There, he set up a local wing of the Fair Play For Cuba Committee (FPCC), a longstanding target for infiltration and destruction by US intelligence. In an attempt to attract new members in the virulently Castro-hating city, he publicly distributed leaflets promoting the group’s work, declaring “hands off Cuba!” Bizarrely, some listed the chapter’s address as 544 Camp Street (see below).
Gerry Patrick Hemming, a longtime CIA asset who was heavily involved in the Agency’s covert operations against Cuba, claimed that in 1962 Banister told him “a considerable sum of money could be had immediately” if he and his confederates “did a direct hit on both Castro and JFK.” He also alleged that he met Oswald on multiple occasions, from January 1959 onwards.
Marita Lorenz, a former lover of Fidel Castro who failed to assassinate the Cuban leader in a CIA-sponsored hit, purported to have traveled with Hemming and Oswald to Dallas in the days before John F Kennedy’s assassination, along with armed anti-Castro militants. Invited to testify before the HSCA under oath, she stuck to her story, while making a number of other remarkable disclosures. She claimed to have crossed paths with Oswald repeatedly in 1960 and ’61 in various locations across Florida.
Lorenz placed Oswald both at CIA safehouses and training camps in Miami and the Everglades, in the leadup to the Agency’s botched Bay of Pigs invasion, in April 1961. Repeatedly threatened with perjury and invited to withdraw her testimony by the HSCA panel, due to “adequate documentary evidence” Oswald had not returned from the Soviet Union at that time, meaning she “could not have seen him” at the locations and on the dates she cited, Lorenz refused:
“I know I am telling the truth. If you don’t want it, that’s too bad…I am here to gain nothing, you know. Nothing. Nothing at all. I have nothing to lose and nothing to hide…I know the man I met; he was a creep. I didn’t like him. I don’t have to be here at all.”
When exasperatedly asked, “do you have any explanation for how we come up with two Lee Harvey Oswalds during this period?” Lorenz had no answer. The HSCA itself was also unable to resolve the sinister riddle. This is no small wonder. After all, “lone nut” assassins never have doppelgangers before they strike.
Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions.