Was Lee H. Oswald a CIA Operative?

Was Lee Harvey Oswald an operative of the CIA? It’s a question that researchers into the assassination of John F. Kennedy have posed for 59 years now, one that has always appeared to be based in a wealth of circumstantial evidence supported by dozens of amazing coincidences one must accept in order to believe Oswald was somehow the “lone assassin” posed by J. Edgar Hoover and the Warren Commission.

The Daily Beast today reports on a new claim of proof of Oswald’s connection with the CIA being brought forth by former Washington Post reporter Jefferson Morley that the main reason why the CIA and the rest of the U.S. Intelligence Community continue to stonewall disclosure of all documents 59 years after the fact is that the agency retains at least 44 pages of documents that demonstrate Oswald’s connection as an operative.

Here’s an excerpt from that story:

The CIA holds documents that show presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was involved in an intelligence operation before the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a prominent Kennedy assassination reporter alleged Tuesday.

“We’re talking about smoking-gun proof of a CIA operation involving Lee Harvey Oswald,” reporter Jefferson Morley said.

Morley claimed the CIA operation involving Oswald took place in the summer of 1963, three months before the assassination. The allegation from Morley, who has written extensively about the CIA in the 1960s, could shake up the history of the Kennedy assassination if it proves to be true.

Kennedy investigators have long sought to investigate the extent of Oswald’s involvement with intelligence agencies, and whether that could reveal more about whether Oswald was the only person involved in Kennedy’s death. Despite decades of investigations from Congress and independent inspectors, the CIA has never disclosed any involvement with Oswald.

Morley claimed that Oswald, a former Marine who defected to the Soviet Union before returning to the United States as a supporter of Cuban communist leader Fidel Castro, was involved in a pre-assassination CIA operation meant to discredit American supporters of Castro. Morley’s allegations focused on files created by now-deceased CIA agent George Joannides, who was involved with anti-Castro exile groups. Morley said 44 documents in Joannides’s file are still being held by the CIA and could shed new light on the purported operation.

“No one outside of the CIA was any wiser,” Morley said of the effort, which he said involved work to promote Oswald as an unhinged pro-Castro figure.

The claim from Morley, a former Washington Post reporter, came at a press conference for Kennedy assassination investigators that includes a sitting federal judge. The event was organized by the Mary Ferrell Foundation, a nonprofit archive of Kennedy assassination materials. The group claims the release of new documents from the CIA and other federal agencies could shed new light on Oswald’s alleged ties to intelligence agencies before Kennedy’s death.

[End]

There is much, much more in the story, so go read it.

Oswald’s status as a formal operative for the CIA would help to explain so many of the odd “coincidences” that have always surrounded him and his years in the military and as a defector to Russia.

Among those ostensible amazing coincidences are:

• Why did the U.S. State Department pay for part, if not all of Oswald’s travel expenses to the Soviet Union and later, when he returned from there with his new wife and daughter?

• Why were Lee and Marina Oswald, upon their return to live in Fort Worth, almost immediately befriended by another known CIA asset, geologist George DeMohrenschildt? Despite his residence more than 30 miles away in Dallas, DeMohrenschildt is known to have driven all the way over to Fort Worth to visit the Oswalds several times every month.

• DeMohrenschildt, by the way, committed suicide just days before he was scheduled to testify before the House Assassinations Committee in 1977. His testimony before the Warren Commission is the longest of any witness.

• Why did J. Edgar Hoover maintain his own personal file on Oswald, dating all the way back to 1959?

• Why were the offices for the CIA front Fair Play for Cuba Committee, for which Oswald handed out leaflets in New Orleans, located in the same building at 544 Camp Street in which former FBI agent and known CIA asset Guy Bannister maintained another CIA front company? Bannister is known to have been helping to train a group of Cuban exiles in the countryside outside of New Orleans in preparation for what the CIA hoped would become a second attempted invasion of Cuba to depose Castro.

• Which brings us to David Ferrie, who “coincidentally” happened to be both a known associate of Bannister and participant in the Cuban exile training project, and the former leader of a Civil Air Patrol youth group in which Oswald was a member in the 1950s.

Then there is the fact that Oswald was able to mysteriously obtain a job at the Texas School Book Depository a few weeks before the assassination. It is now well known that the original route for JFK’s motorcade was for it to speed through Dealey Plaza on Main Street while taking no turns. But Main Street is a full block away from the TSBD.

By yet another very odd “coincidence,” the Secret Service agreed to change the route, supposedly at the request of the City of Dallas, so that it had to make a 90 degree turn onto Houston street and then, one block later, make the 120 degree turn onto Elm Street, right in front of both the TSBD and the Dal Tex Building.

Incredibly, the TSBD was owned at the time by a fellow named Col Harry D. Byrd, who happened to be the very good friend of former Dallas Mayor Earl Cabell. Earl Cabell just happened to be the brother of Charles P. Cabell, the former Deputy Director of the CIA who JFK fired along with then-CIA Director Allen Dulles. Odd.

There are hundreds more odd “coincidences” one must accept at face value in order to believe Oswald was the lone assassin, many of which at least imply Oswald must have had some association with not just the CIA, but the FBI as well. I could write about this stuff for days, but then, entire books have been written about this stuff over the years.

Bottom line: Believing Oswald acted alone - or at all - to kill JFK requires a suspension of disbelief and trust in the CIA and other government agencies and individuals who have proven time and again to not deserve to be trusted in any way, shape or form. It really is long past time for this farce of a coverup to be forced to end.

But don’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen.

That is all.