ASSASSINATIONS  AND THE NEWS MEDIA COVER-UP

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Assassinations and Cover-up

THE TWO OSWALDS

by Pat Shannan

One of the most revealing, yet little known, aspects of the plot to kill President Kennedy was the existence of two (or more) Lee Harvey Oswalds, one of whom was the designated "patsy." Investigative reporters were aware of this fact early but had no idea exactly who the imposter(s) might have been. We now know that these two men looked enough alike to have been (almost) twins. A third Oswald, who looked nothing like the others, appeared at the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City in September of 1963, attempting to get a visa to Cuba in the name of Lee Harvey Oswald. CIA surveillance photos clearly showed this man to be someone else both older and heavier than the other two.

Richard Popkin wrote a book in 1966 entitled The Second Oswald, in which he documents numerous occasions of a "duplicate" Oswald being in places where later evidence showed the real Oswald could not have been. The "Second Oswald" would often draw attention to himself by creating a disturbance with outrageous behavior and a conspicuous attempt to be remembered.

On November 9, 1963 and for several days following, when one Lee Oswald would have been at work or with his family, another one using that name appeared at a target range and often would make a pest of himself by shooting at targets of other patrons. And yet another fascinating incident took place on the same day. Someone appeared at a Lincoln dealership in Dallas to test drive a new car. He drove at high speeds up and down Stemmons Freeway, dropped hints about receiving "lots of money" in a few weeks, and told the credit manager that if he were not given credit, he would go back to Russia and buy a car. The most perplexing aspect of this episode is that the Lee Oswald the world was soon to learn about did not even drive. Indeed, it appears over and over throughout the weeks and months prior to Kennedy's murder that many persons unknown were setting one Lee Oswald up to take the fall.

"Harvey Oswald" cashed checks that Lee Oswald never had. Popkin's source is the voluminous Warren Report, and it lists numerous incidents of Oswald, his wife Marina, and two children of the identical age being in places where Marina later proved they could not have been at the time. Did the other Oswald have a double for Marina and the children as well?

Famed U-2 pilot, Francis Gary Powers, who was shot down over the Soviet Union on May 1, 1960, flew out of the Atsugi Base, where one of the Oswalds had been stationed. While it is likely that he and Powers knew each other, there is no record of their association. The military altered Oswald's service records to conceal the fact that he had been transferred out of his regular unit in 1958 and placed - with a new pay grade - in a different, unidentified unit in Taiwan.

The Merchants of Myth would like for us to swallow the story that the high school drop-out, loner, and ignoramus Lee Harvey Oswald, who may have studied the Russian language at Atsugi, Japan while in the Marines (although the military brass denied this), later went to the Soviet Union and denounced the United States of his own volition. He was then able to reverse his decision and return to the U. S., requiring but two days to acquire a visa and going through no bureaucratic red tape in order to do so. When his life since age 17 is closely examined, it becomes obvious that this Lee Oswald was getting inordinate and special attention and had unwittingly become a lackey-on-a-string being prepared for use somewhere else down the road, in the proper place at the proper time. A June 3, 1960, FBI memo signed by no less than J. Edgar Hoover himself shows that the Director had knowledge of "a possibility that an imposter is using Oswald's birth certificate." What significance could this have had to the FBI more than three years before the assassination? Just how long had Oswald been a player?

He also was no dummy but rather a brilliant young man - or at least one of them was. When his future wife, Marina, met him in Minsk in 1960, his capture of the Russian language was so perfect that she thought him to be a native. His quick placement in a job, his Russian contacts, and the ability of this "American dissident" to get a new passport issued within two days for his return to the United States after defecting all indicate that he had been sent by some bureaucratic entity - most likely the Central Intelligence Agency.

Oswald was demonized in the public's eye from the day of the assassination as a "communist defector." Yet there is much to suggest that Lee Oswald (in this case, both of them) was recruited by the CIA before he was a Marine, and probably sent to Russia either on a mission for the agency or to begin the charade of his "defection." Although his bank account showed a balance of $203.00, he was able to make a $1,500 sojourn across Europe and into the Soviet Union. He went to Russia with the approval of the State Department and, by some fortuitous windfall, received his Soviet Visa in Finland in only two days - another mystical trick, as this process usually requires two weeks or more - even for people who have no record of a treasonous past.

While it is ludicrous to even assume that Oswald was being groomed for the murder of John F. Kennedy in 1956 or even 1959, when Kennedy did not even take office until 1961, the whole scenario is indicative of the manner in which the shadow government works. Many military "stooges" are constantly being placed in various levels of society for future use and, certainly, many are never needed. Recent research by John Armstrong shows that the ploy in this case had been going on for much longer - probably since the early '50s when the two Oswalds were still young teenagers.

While in Russia Oswald declared that he was renouncing his U. S. Citizenship and intended to give the Soviets all the secret information he had access to as a radar operator at Atsugi Marine Base. Yet when he changed his mind two years later and decided to return to the U. S., he not only was not arrested for espionage but was granted a $435 loan by the State Department to aid with his return home with his wife and child. Lee Oswald was being handed special treatment, and it all reeked of CIA influence. When he took his job at the Texas School Book Depository only five weeks prior to the assassination, the designated patsy was in place.

But was this actually Lee Harvey Oswald? Today the question is more penetrating than ever before. It now appears that New Orleans-born Oswald, the gregarious, fun loving son of Marguerite, was deeply involved with the conspiracy but only from behind the scenes. The New York-born Oswald was a quieter introverted intellectual who went to Russia with a perfect capture of the language, married Marina, returned to Texas, took a job at the School Book Depository, was framed for the murder of the president, and was murdered by Jack Ruby.

Most of this aforementioned information was known and written in several books during the first decade following the assassination, and there the growth of information stopped for thirty years. But in the 1990s, John Armstrong of Tulsa, Oklahoma, with one of the most indefatigable pieces of research ever compiled, proved with irrefutable facts, figures, and testimony from government documents the absolute impossibility of the personage we knew as "Lee Harvey Oswald" being one solitary human being.

John Armstrong's Revelations

Armstrong dug into these facts more than anyone else had ever attempted, and his evidence is astounding. He shows that:

1] The killer of Officer J. D. Tippet dropped a wallet on the street at the scene. It conveniently held the identification cards of both Lee Harvey Oswald and his AKA, Alex Hidell, the name in which the alleged murder rifle of JFK - the Italian Mannlicher Carcano - had been ordered from the Chicago wholesale house. The problem is that when the next "Oswald" was arrested in the Texas Theater (downstairs, in a middle seat) only minutes after the Tippet murder, he, also, still carried a wallet with both I. D. cards.

2] Several witnesses, including the ticket seller, directed police to the balcony, where the first Oswald (who probably was at the Tippet murder scene and dropped the wallet) had run. Apparently, this Oswald and a couple of cops watched the arrest proceedings (of the second Oswald) below them. The original police report said that Oswald was arrested in the balcony of the Texas Theater. Yet this was contrary to all the news testimony given on camera by several of the arresting officers. Even the seat in the middle of one of the downstairs rows was labeled and made a shrine as "the seat where Lee Harvey Oswald sat when arrested by Dallas Police on November 22, 1963." It is now a valuable collectors item. Did the officers who made out the report not get the message in time?

3] Comparison of some 70 photos of "Oswald" indicate that pictures of the two men were severed vertically through the middle of the face in order to manufacture a composite ID of both - utilizing the left side of one pasted to the right side of the other. Both men carried the same ID cards for years. Only with close inspection can one discern the chubbier half of the chin, the different ears, and the slightly off-center hairline. The composite picture, first uncovered in the 1970s by Texas photo analyst Jack White, is a fake and a very good one.

After his arrest when "Oswald" was shown the famous pictures of himself at his backyard fence, wearing a holstered pistol and holding the Mannlicher/Carcano rifle and a communist newspaper, his immediate response to the police was, "It's a fake! That's my head pasted on someone else's body."

At the Warren Commission hearings, Lee Oswald's brother was shown the picture of Lee handing out "Fair Play for Cuba" leaflets on Canal Street in New Orleans and asked to identify him. He could not. When shown a school days picture of "Lee" in New York, again he said it was not his younger brother. Armstrong displays more convincing evidence that the CIA had groomed the men since puberty, at a time when someone had discovered the likeness (http://enteract.com/~hargrove/armstrong.html).

4] In one of the most revealing pieces, Armstrong cites the suppressed testimony of Laura Kittrell, who worked for the Texas Employment Commission and interviewed an Oswald before he began work at the Book Depository on October 15th. Only a week later, "Oswald" showed up for another interview, but Mrs. Kittrell realized it was not the same man she had interviewed before.

"The two Oswalds were very, very similar but different people," she said. "They were much alike in size, shape and outline, generally, yet there was a marked difference between them in bearing and manner. [The first]. . . was a trim, energetic, compact, well-knit person, who sat on the edge of his chair. [The second]. . . was sprawled over his chair and was rather messy looking."

After the assassination, Mrs. Kittrell wrote and phoned the FBI, but she was not interviewed until a year later, after the Warren Commission volumes were published.

This leads one to wonder about the real Oswald's mother and brothers. Had they met the imposter and failed to recognize him? Apparently, they had.

Physical Discrepancies

We must remember that Lee Oswald had seen little of his family since joining the Marines in 1956, and human beings can and do undergo great physical change in those years of late teens and early twenties. This may account for the innocent comments from his family members on this subject. Assured by the State Department and the FBI that the real Oswald was returning, conditioned by their own pleasure at the thought of welcoming him home, conditioned by letters and presents received from the young couple, conditioned by the deceptive photographs received from the Soviet Union and the excited welcoming of the pretty young wife and infant daughter who had both appeared in photographs and looked and were the same; mother Marguerite and brother Robert never thought at the time to question that the man with Marina might not be their son and brother.

However, they did notice considerable differences between the previous and current Lee Oswalds. Marguerite commented that he had lost some hair, and he told her that it was caused by the cold weather. (?) Robert testified that his brother Lee's complexion had changed from fair to ruddy. . . "and that he had picked something of an accent." He, too, mentioned that Lee's hair ". . . used to be brown and curly, a full set of hair," and that he had "lost weight" and appeared "drawn."

John Pic, the older half brother of Robert and Lee, had his first reunion with (whom they thought was) Lee at a family Thanksgiving dinner in November of 1962. When asked how Lee looked physically as compared with when he had seen him last, Pic replied, "I never would have recognized him, sir." Pic also mentioned the weight loss, the lack of the "bull neck" Lee had acquired in Marine training, and the totally different hair. When a visitor arrived after dinner, Lee introduced Pic as his half brother, and this angered Pic because in the past they had never referred to each other with this term; always calling each other "brother." It should be emphasized that all of the Oswald family accepted rather than recognized the new Lee who had returned.

If the Oswald family had been more suspicious at the time, they might have examined the head behind the left ear of the new Lee, which should have but probably would not have exhibited the lifelong evidence of a mastoid operation at age six. Pictures of the arrested Oswald at the Dallas Police Station clearly show that there was no such scar on the left side of his head.

The new Oswald was in place, and the family members would never see their blood relative again. Whether or not Marina knew of the deception cannot be ascertained, although it must be assumed that she probably did not because there was no reason for her to know.

(After months of emotional battering by the FBI, Marina became a totally unreliable witness. She changed her story so many times that it became obvious that she had been frightened into saying whatever they wanted her to say. We have now learned that the "battering" may have been far more that just emotional. She has confided to her closest friends that for the months while she was kept in "protective custody," she endured constant sexual abuse by her guards. We have not confirmed whether this accusation refers to the Dallas policemen or the FBI agents, both of whom were "protecting" her.)

However, the aftermath shows that after much soul-searching, she, Marguerite, and Robert may have begun to figure it out. This would account for why "Uncle Robert" has never once visited Marina nor made himself known to her two daughters, June and Rachel, now nearly forty years old. He may be well aware that they are not his nieces. It would also account for Marina's agreeing to the exhumation of the Oswald body at the Fort Worth Cemetery for examination in 1981. Two years later, authorities finally confirmed that the body was that of Lee Harvey Oswald (why did this take two years?), but there are several mysterious discrepancies yet still outstanding.

For instance, the New Orleans-born son of Marguerite lost a front tooth at age 15. Life Magazine published a candid snapshot of Lee from his 1954 school yearbook, clearly showing the empty space in his smile. However, the teeth from the autopsy and x-ray pictures at the 1981 exhumation show no such tooth loss. Neither did the Marine dental records of the new Oswald.

Mortician Paul Groody was very concerned about the head on the body in the Oswald casket in 1981. When the casket was opened, the body was dressed in the same clothing that he remembered putting on "Oswald" in 1963. But the head bore no marks of the brain having been removed, as it had been for the 1963 autopsy. He suggests that the head of Oswald #2 may have been replaced with the head of Oswald #1 some time after the burial, thereby gruesomely solving the tooth and scar problems for the conspirators.

Macabre as this may sound; it really is not far-fetched. There was no way that either of these men could be allowed to live. Oswald #2 was rubbed out within 48 hours after the JFK murder in order to provide the scapegoat for the American people. But he did not harbor nearly the amount of facts and the names of the players as did #1, who almost certainly was quietly taken care of a very short time later. It is reasonable to assume that the switch in the coffin took place in the early days before the dirt had even dried and settled on the grave. The head of #2 and the body of #1 were then likely dropped into the Gulf of Mexico. Case closed. "Oswald did it," they said once more, "and he acted alone."

Consider the Rewards

Conspiracy scoffers are always quick to point out that any conspiracy of this size would be impossible to keep secret because too many people would know about it and eventually someone would come forward to spill the beans. However, the untimely deaths of so many witnesses and players during the first 18 months following the assassination must have had a lasting influence over the many others, perhaps much higher up, who did keep quiet.

Many of the middle level players, who certainly had nothing to do with the original atrocity, were handsomely rewarded for their participation in the shielding of the facts from the people. A Michigan congressman by the name of Gerald Ford sat on the Warren Commission. In 1972, he was appointed to the office of Vice President, replacing Spiro Agnew, who had been forced to resign under fire. At the time, the behind-the-scenes wheels were already turning to impeach Richard Nixon over the Watergate fiasco. So in effect, it could be said, Ford was gifted with a brief residency in the White House by Nixon's resignation on August 9, 1974. At age 87, with occasional news interviews on the subject, Ford continues to deceive the people regarding the guilt of Oswald and the efficacy of the Warren Commission.

It was Adolph Hitler who offered this counsel on furthering deception: "If you tell a lie long enough, pretty soon you will believe it, and soon you will begin to think that everybody believes it."

Every November 22nd, Americans can watch and listen to Dan Rather babble on ad nauseam with his assassination falsehoods, as he laments about that dark day in history. But how many remember that he was the first newsman, a street reporter from Houston, to see the Zapruder film - on Friday night, only hours after the President's murder, at the first showing, immediately after the film was processed. Rather was one of the first to see the evidence that Kennedy was shot at least twice from the front - first when JFK grabs his throat and seconds later when he is rocked backwards by the devastating head shot. Yet Dan continues to perpetuate the prevarication that Lee Oswald killed JFK with three shots from behind - from the nearly impossible position at the sixth floor window of the School Book Depository building.

It could be surmised that Dan Rather has been richly rewarded for his continual participation in the cover-up. He has occupied the #1 news chair at CBS for the past 15 years or so - a position worth several million bucks a year.

In 1978, the government's second official cover-up occurred with the House Select Committee on Assassinations lengthy "investigation." Some of the new pieces explored included that of the acoustical evidence recorded at the Dallas Police Station dispatcher's desk because the handset on one of the police motorcycles had been stuck open during the Dealey Plaza attack. (Some investigators, including Dallas County Deputy Roger Craig and others not involved in the cover-up, believed that this was done intentionally to clog up communications and prevent Dallas officers from converging on the scene, which indeed was the situation for some 12 minutes.) The HSCA's conclusion was that at least four shots had been fired that day and at least one came from the front. The HSCA said that it ". . believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as result of a conspiracy." Then it diluted its own findings by ignoring the facts that were presented and went on

to say, "The Soviet Government, Cuban Government, and the national syndicate of organized crime, the Secret Service, FBI, and CIA were not involved." (Who is left?) Judge Jim Garrison's comments summed up the whitewash better than anyone: "The official position of the United States Government on the assassination now appears to be that Lee Harvey Oswald killed John F. Kennedy with three shots from the rear and one shot from the front!"

Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter is a beneficiary of government chicanery. In any other case, his Rube Goldberg design of the "Magic Bullet" theory would have been laughed out of the hearing room. Instead, when the Warren Commission was suddenly confronted with more wounds than shots (they would admit to) being fired, Specter, a young lawyer for the commission in 1964, came up with the answer. The only solution was for the Commission to portray one of the shots as having caused all the extra wounds - not two but five!

Specter's diagram was perhaps the most absurd lie of the whole case. In order to make all of the shots come from the rear, the "magic bullet," according to the ruse, entered Kennedy's back at a downward angle, turned upward for six inches and exited his throat; then it stopped in mid-flight and angled downward into Governor John Connally's back, exited his right chest, pierced and shattered his right wrist, before making another ninety degree turn and finally coming to rest in the governor's left thigh. And the commission members bought it!

(Were these exalted leaders in government really this stupid? Of course not. They simply had no other choice. If the American people could be sold on the theory that one bullet from the rear did all this damage, then the shots from the front and sides could be ignored. Only one man would be blamed, and there would be no conspiracy. History still records the "single assassin" and "magic bullet" theories as being "fact.")

A discharged bullet was found on a gurney at Parkland Hospital that day and was later determined to be this "magic bullet." However, the swept-under-the-rug fact was that Governor Connally walked around for the rest of his life with more lead remaining in his body than was missing from this pristine bullet.

Arlen Specter was soon appointed to the position of United States Attorney in Philadelphia and was eventually elected Senator from Pennsylvania. He occupies that seat today.

Conspirators take care of their own - one way or another.

Lee Oswald was totally, unequivocally, and completely innocent of the assassination. The fact that history, or rather in the re-writing of history, and this information that has made a villain of this young man, who wanted nothing more than to be a fine Marine, is in some ways the greatest injustice of all. New Orleans Judge Jim Garrison - New Orleans, 1988

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