If you are one of the many Americans curious about Kennedys assassination, there is news for you.

[pcgeek11]

And even 11 mph from the 6th floor I don't think a single shot rifle is likely to be that accurate I don't care who's pulling the trigger.

As a general rule ( esp during this time period ) a single shot rifle is generally more accurate on average than an automatic or semiautomatic rifle.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

For those who question Oswald's ability...IIRC, during Oswald's time of service, Marines had to qualify at 200, 300, and 500 yards with open(iron) sights. 80 yards is nearly point blank.

JFC, 500 yards with iron sights? I'm not even good at 100 yards with iron sights. Thank god I never went in the military lol. And Oswald had a scope on that rifle too.

 

[shortylickens]

there were multiple shots and only one actually blew his head off. the third shot if I'm not mistaken.

And general consensus is Oswald was actually a pretty mediocre rifleman by marine standards. he was used for the intelligence and counter-intelligence community. Of course, THAT makes him a prime candidate for an assassination.

 

[BoomerD]

there were multiple shots and only one actually blew his head off. the third shot if I'm not mistaken.

And general consensus is Oswald was actually a pretty mediocre rifleman by marine standards. he was used for the intelligence and counter-intelligence community. Of course, THAT makes him a prime candidate for an assassination.

Oddly enough, before he could talk, he was killed by Jack Ruby...who subsequently died of cancer in prison waiting for a new trial. That closed the circle on the conspiracy. No more loose ends to talk.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

FACT: (1) The Oswald "CIA 201 file" -- 50 file boxes -- was released in 1995 as part of the AARB declassifications required by the 1992 JFK Records Collection Act. And -- yes -- Oliver Stone's "JFK" film has a special place in history: it was previewed to both houses of congress, which then passed the Records Collection Act. Those documents are kept in the National Archives -- College Park, MD.

If the files were sanitized -- and there may have been good reason for it as I will explain -- someone forgot to remove a note to file or memorandum to file. The 201 file was originated in James Angleton's office -- CIA Counterintelligence Director. (More on him . . . ) The "Kammer" memorandum was a short note placed in the file 5 days before Oswald journeyed to the Moscow US Embassy to initiate his return to the States. It says "This individual is to be reassigned to work in a counterintelligence project in the States under James McCord and David Atlee Phillips."

(2) There are at least two different sources for Oswald's CIA intelligence connection -- in addition to the verified Kammer document. [Another similar document, stating that Oswald was trained by CIA at Camp Peary, was (supposedly) written by the Director of CIA -- McCone -- to the Director of the Secret Service. Some researchers believe that it is fake, but it states boldly what the Kammer document implies. It may be that this story about the Secret Service document was promulgated to deflect attention from Oswald's real purpose in "defecting" to Russia.]
(a) There were about 2,000 US Marines who were prepared for infiltration projects and sent to the Monterey Language School. The USMC -- especially at that time -- doesn't grant an enlisted Marine a "privilege" to go to the language school and learn Russian because "he wants to be a communist." The 2,000 Marines were prepared to be kept "off the books" without a CIA file that identified them. Angleton's office created Oswald's file after Francis Gary Powers was shot down over Russia in his U-2 plane. Even at that time, the public never knew of Oswald -- and wouldn't -- if it weren't for the assassination. Angleton was clinically paranoid; his colleague, Frank Wisner, Sr., may also have been so. They followed a practice of keeping clandestine operations from being recorded on paper. The idea behind the USMC infiltration subjects was to assure that a mole (if there had been one) inside CIA would not be able to compromise them. So -- Oswald returned home, probably because he couldn't get inside KGB to report intelligence similar to that provided by Oleg Penkovsky about Soviet missile strength. Or -- perhaps he just wanted to come home. Do you think it would've been wise to prepare an infiltrator with the panache and tuxedo attire of James Bond?

(b) Richard Case Nagell -- main subject of Dick Russell's book "The Man Who Knew Too Much" -- was another discharged Marine. He went into a bank building around October, 1963, with a shotgun. He fired a blast into the ceiling. His purpose? He later said that he believed there was a plot to kill JFK, and he might be set up to take the fall for it. His credentials and other history point to the same program that Col. L. Fletcher Prouty mentioned in his "JFK: The CIA, Vietnam and the Assassination of . . . " published in the 1990s, when he and several others (see for instance Gaeton Fonzi, "the Last Investigation") were relieved of their non-disclosure agreements. Russell's book has gone through several revisions and printings.

After the assassination, people who have fallen under suspicion like Angleton and Helms followed behaviors of someone worried about Oswald for understandable reasons. Helms, for instance, put in a budget request for the MKULTRA program, possibly because he thought Oswald had been manipulated by a similar "hypno-assassin" project of the Soviets. Angleton became obsessed with the possibility of a Soviet mole within CIA, and went on a rampage destroying dozens of careers, the entire Russian Division, double-agents compromised in other countries. He was later forced to retire, as I said, for being clinically paranoid.

There was a nexus of projects in CIA that contributed to Oswald's use as a "patsy". The MKULTRA program inspired rumors within CIA. Together with the rumors, CIA was assisting Hollywood with propaganda film projects, for instance the original "Manchurian Candidate".

There are indications that Oswald's "handler", to whom he'd been assigned in 1961 for counterintelligence against Castro, had been given the assignment to transform Richard Condon's book into John Frankenheimer's film. He was trained as a propaganda and psy-war specialist. He wanted a grand project, having concluded after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, that his big career had been shattered. So,, with the resources available to him under Operation Zapata, operating under pseudonyms which was a common practice in intelligence work, he arranged the assassination with perhaps two other people, to include David Sanchez Morales, who later conducted Operation Phoenix in Vietnam. Morales and "Colonel" Johnny Roselli later turned up dead in the mid-70s: Morales after shooting off his mouth during a drunken party in a hotel room a few nights before his body was found; Roselli found floating in an oil drum off the Florida coast.

The connection between Citizen X -- a man I have already named -- and the film project can be proven. You can't blame the author Condon or the movie people; they were just doing something they thought was patriotic. Citizen X had in mind something like Pygmalion and Galatea -- an artist creates a sculpture or work of art, and transforms it into something living and real. Think about the Reichstag fire. Sociologists use a measurement called "degrees of association": "You know somebody who knows somebody (x 5) who lives in China." Six degrees of association; 350 million people on one side of the Pacific; 1.3 billion Chinese. The statistical aspect of the model is implicit. So how is Lee Oswald, a product of the streets of New York and New Orleans, connected to a Hollywood milieu of maybe two dozen people, for a film that offers a parallel to his own story -- in two to four degrees of association? A former US Marine returns from a Communist country, prepared to be a hypno-assassin, and shoots -- either a presidential candidate (in the fiction) or a real President in Dallas? See Lee Server's biography of Robert Mitchum, and Richard Condon's autobiography "And Then We Moved to Rossenara". The connection between Mitchum, Condon and Citizen X is proven. But there are other spokes in that connection, 100% verifiable.

Could CIA just come out and say "OK! Oswald was one of ours! We got him into the USSR, and we got him out! Ha-ha!" Sources and Methods? Lives put at risk? Imagine the dilemma. Getting Oswald returned? He would have to continue his "communist" act as he took up residence in Dallas with Marina and kids.

As for documents withheld by the Biden administration, I can imagine there are similar dilemmas. And, frankly? The CIA itself -- all of the power-elite -- didn't know for sure. They can't tell you for sure.

The truth can be found in a $6 spy-novel, vetted by CIA colleagues, published at the very time Citizen X was under the spotlight scrutiny of an HSCA investigator in 1978. You can't figure it out if you had studied literature in college exclusively; you couldn't figure it out for just being familiar with probability and statistics; you couldn't figure it out if you had been exclusively an historian of the Cold War. It has to be all three.

But it wasn't "conspiracy-a-go-go" as people continue looking at Johnson, Bush, Angleton, Hoover, Helms and others -- the military industrial complex, the Illuminati -- Col. Mustard and Professor Plum with a candlestick in the 6th-floor of the TSBD. Nor would it be easy to prove conspiracy, unless you could match all the players with their real names and intelligence pseudonyms. And it certainly wasn't the whole CIA.

The irony? Citizen X was fingered as elemental to the JFK murder in the early 1980s by Washington Post, Washingtonian magazine and the London Observer. He hired Vicent Bugliosi to represent him in a lawsuit against the Observer, then coached Bugliosi for a BBC mock-trial of Oswald in the late 1980s with Gerry Spence as defense counsel, and convinced Bugliosi of the merit in writing "Reclaiming History" -- a 5-lb tome in which he cites Citizen X as a "reliable government witness."

Vincent Bugliosi, and everyone who reads his book as a final word, are the biggest fools in history.

And imagine! The entire American public, the CIA, too -- has been played by a narcissistically-disordered Donald Trump look-alike, who had desperately wanted to be an actor of stage and screen, but was mistakenly hired by CIA during a year when there was a dearth of psychologists and screeners to prevent it. Did he know Helms? Certainly -- they worked in Cuba together in 1954. Helms probably figured it out after Citizen X published. And, of course, E. Howard Hunt, Helms and anyone who wrote a memoir would say "Oswald was a communist." They had to continue that story. They didn't have the documents giving them absolute certainty about it anyway, and they surely weren't going to announce it to the public and the world in the earlier part of the Cold War.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I had a nationally syndicated columnist in the family based in Huston at the time, He always said Johnson did it.

This is again a case of speculation, wishing for someone in the power-elite to be the mastermind.

E. Howard Hunt suspected "Citizen X". On his deathbed, interviewed by his son in 2007, he said that he was "a benchwarmer in the main Event." It is likely he didn't know what was going to happen until after. He was just part of an overall plan.

He also said that their intention was to "backtrack" culpability to Lyndon Johnson and Cord Meyer. Meyer was a CIA careerist and estranged husband of Mary Pinchot Meyer. JFK had been boinking Mary, so both Johnson and Cord Meyer had motives to raise suspicion. Johnson would then be eager to promote the Warren Commission and a coverup. People were told that they had to conclude Oswald as Lone Nut for national security reasons.

There has even been suspicion cast on Johnson because of a man named Malcolm Wallace -l- a convicted murderer and thug whose name was loosely associated with LBJ. Supposedly, one of his fingerprints was found on the TSBD 6th floor. Of course, Oswald's fingerprints were all over the book boxes, window-sills, door-knobs. But -- no fingerprints on the parts of the Mannlicher-Carcano indicative of holding and firing the weapon? None on the cartridge in the chamber, or the shells on the floor?

Mac Wallace is only consistent with a name in the spy-novel I mentioned -- "MacLendon". The relevant characters all have fictional cover identities -- for instance, David Sanchez Morales -- "Emilio Zapata Gonzalez" -- Gonzalez mentioned as Morales' cover-identity in David Corn's book on Ted Shackley. Then, there's "Mr. Rubbers." Check out Tarpley and Chaitkin's "Unauthorized Biography of George H. W. Bush" -- Chapter 10 -- "Rubbers Goes to Congress." So Johnson is just a cover-name for the real enchilada. Just my opinion, but Bush seems to just be a CIA asset -- not a Prime Mover -- who was an unwitting accessory after the fact.

 

[soundforbjt]

As a general rule ( esp during this time period ) a single shot rifle is generally more accurate on average than an automatic or semiautomatic rifle.

The rifle he used cost less than $50, iirc.

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

The rifle he used cost less than $50, iirc.

Pretty irrelevant. You can get a bolt action rifle today for $100-$200, from Walmart that'd be more than enough to kill a human at 100y. Guns are incredibly simple machines, they just don't cost that much to make.

 

[BoomerD]

The rifle he used cost less than $50, iirc.

$50 in 1963 was a lot of money, relatively speaking. Minimum wage was $1.25/hr. $50 was a week's pay. (Before taxes)

 

[pmv]

One thing I approve of about Oswald is that he was a non-driver. Of course, seems that's partly what got him caught - he made his escape by bus, and it got caught in traffic, and after he gave up and got out he encountered the cop who challenged him for acting suspiciously.

Seems it's difficult to be an environmentally-friendly assassin.

On the other hand, I wonder if he'd have gotten away if he'd just had a bicycle?

 

[Muse]

As a general rule ( esp during this time period ) a single shot rifle is generally more accurate on average than an automatic or semiautomatic rifle.

I figure this is dead on correct. I should/could have said it's not as apt to kill from 80 yards at a target moving 11mph than an automatic weapon, simply because 20 rounds are more likely to take out the target than a squeezed off single shot. That's exactly what I was and am now thinking.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I figure this is dead on correct. I should/could have said it's not as apt to kill from 80 yards at a target moving 11mph than an automatic weapon, simply because 20 rounds are more likely to take out the target than a squeezed off single shot. That's exactly what I was and am now thinking.

Everyone is still trying to get a handle on the forensics of the moment. Recently, Oliver Stone and Jim DiEugenio produced the premium-channel documentary -- "JFK Revisited". More work has been done to debunk Arlen Specter's "Magic Bullet" theory, and much of what the film provides is useful. But it still promotes the old "conspiracy-a-go-go" version, and the conspiracy-a-go-go version has led to distrust of government and cynicism over the last 55 years. It isn't -- nor can it be -- the truth.

Others have tried to re-enact the forensics of the moment, and one more recent re-enactment supposedly uses precise measurements and distances to "prove" that all the shots came from the TSBD. But the "Revisited" film documents the existence of a bullet that hit James Tague, and it didn't come from the TSBD. There is enough witness testimony, to include a US Army enlistee on his way to Alaska who was standing on the knoll, to suggest that there really was a shooter on the knoll. Other accounts purport that there was a shooter in the storm drain 15 feet from the car.

Johnny Roselli had told Bill Bonanno when they were in prison together that he was the man in the storm drain, but Bonanno's account in "Bound By Honor" comes at least a few years after the "home computer expert" attempts to prove from photos that there was someone in the storm drain. So it is possible that Bonanno concocted the story about Roselli, although Roselli might have told him about his own hand in arranging the actual shooters.

There are political and other reasons why a faction wants the Lone Nut theory to stick. Thus, Bugliosi's 5-lb book; the attempt to engineer a physical proof of trajectories; the attempt to reinterpret the motion and blood spatter shown in the Zapruder film. And my guess -- yes, I have a guess -- is that some of these proponents of a single-shooter theory have just been manipulated to make their case, without a full understanding of why.

The entire history of research, investigation and publication has been buffeted by hurricane-force political winds. The Republicans want to prove that Johnson was behind it. Others, who know the history of GHW Bush in the Cuba operations, want to prove that a Republican or allied oil tycoon was behind it. The KGB thought that H. L. Hunt was behind it, so they planted a phony note supposedly written by Oswald to Hunt -- and it backfired when attention focused on E. Howard Hunt -- the Watergate burglar. Hunt himself in 2007 confirmed that he was a minor player. The KGB also subsidized Mark Lane's book "Rush to Judgment". They thought it would be a good idea to foster dissent in the American public, yet -- they had their own theories -- what they actually believed to be true about the murder.

Then, after the document declassifications of the '90s, Nigel Turner began to produce his "The Men Who Killed Kennedy" documentary, which anthologizes as much evidence coming to light as he could fit into a 2-hour movie. He revised the film every couple years, until the most recent ever aired in the early 2000's -- which tries to put a spotlight on Lyndon Johnson. So Gerald Ford -- who had sat on the Warren Commission -- got together with Jimmy Carter and Lady Bird Johnson to sue Turner and stop the film from being aired. This too was tragic, because Turner had finally put a spotlight on David Atlee Phillips, subject of HSCA investigator Gaeton Fonzi's 1994 book "The Last Investigation".

 

[BonzaiDuck]

One thing I approve of about Oswald is that he was a non-driver. Of course, seems that's partly what got him caught - he made his escape by bus, and it got caught in traffic, and after he gave up and got out he encountered the cop who challenged him for acting suspiciously.

Seems it's difficult to be an environmentally-friendly assassin.

On the other hand, I wonder if he'd have gotten away if he'd just had a bicycle?

Interesting you should bring that up, and I cannot resist the temptation to respond.

All the assassination books are either honest attempts to make sense of it and search for the Truth, or they are concoctions which, in their extreme, introduced document forgeries and other clutter. Suppose you were able to construct an AI program and database that would produce a limited number of scenarios to "solve the case"? You would create a table in the AI database of all the facts, people, places, events and so on. You could introduce "folklore", and tag it as such. The entire idea of such an AI program follows the similarities between a game of chess and the solution of a crime. Investigators know they have a crime. They compile a list of "persons of interest". They form initial hypotheses based on the facts and the people. Further hypotheses might take the form "if I suspect thus and so is true, I may find fact X. If I find fact X, then different things are true or false accordingly if I then look for Y -- finding it or not finding it." Dead-end trail? retreat to a prior node, formulate more hyptheses, and proceed.

Of course, the owners or creators of such a program and database would introduce features, allowing the user to tweak it with various parameters and assumptions toward producing a variety of scenario solutions. However, my point here is that facts, evidence, folklore, anecdotes can all be gathered from the wide field of "Assassination Lit 101" and entered into a database. One might then reject this or that book which fails to account for a related piece of evidence that would require a change in the theory of the case. One might identify someone whose guilt seems known, and if another book tries to present him as a "reliable government witness," then don't bother to read the book, unless you are dutifully verifying and cross-checking the facts and artifacts that it presents. A failed theory in its argument can provide additiional facts that support another theory.

In the mid-90's, Gus Russo -- a colleague with Seymour Hersh the intelligence journalist -- gathered whatever evidence he needed to "prove" that Oswald was an agent of Castro. He mentions the witness Constable Seymour Weizman, who gathered and informed of the bullet and cartridge evidence on the TSBD 6th floor. But he fails to mention that Weizman had also picked Bay-of-Pigs/Operation-Zapata agent Bernard Barker ( and later a watergate burglar like E. Howard Hunt) out of a police photo lineup as the man with dirty finger nails on the knoll. Not only did Weizman pick Barker once, but he picked the same face out of a photo-lineup ten years later. Such a fact or perception would require a radical twist to Russo's theory, or raise doubts about it.

However, Russo's book follows Oswald after leaving the TSBD. He notes that there was a DC-3, idling at Love Field in North Dallas, which was supposed to fly to Mexico, but was waiting the longest time and for someone or something. Russo weaves this into the plot-theory with Castro. The history of Oswald's visits to Mexico -- all of it -- suggests a different theory, and quite frankly my own.

With the shooting of Officer Tippett and the episode at the Texas Theater, Oswald -- possibly attempting to get to Love Field, was denied the chance to avoid being killed after his arrest.

There are facts, such as "some DC-3 delaying take-off at Love Field. there are all the possibilities in a sieve that have various likelihoods. There are interesting scenarios and speculations.