Flannel Shirt

Twins

Allen Dulles liked twins.

As told me by longtime JFK researcher Jones Harris, it was known around Washington that CIA Director allen Dulles had an interest in utilizing doubles for intelligence work.  The first opportunity, the story went, came when Dulles was at a party and met a young man at a party that was fresh out of college and spoke fluently in both Russian and Chinese.  Dulles reportedly learned that this young man also had a twin brother who was also fluent in both languages.  Dulles is  said to have remarked, “I must have this pair.”  

If true, this is an interesting confirmation to bolster the doppelgänger theory which has been explored on this blog and by others, such as John Armstrong in his book, Harvey and Lee.  It shows that Dulles knew more about the assassination than anymore else on the Commission and probably, as Jones Harris told me, knew the most about what really happened regarding the assassination of John Kennedy.

It it not unheard of for intelligence agencies to employ identical twins in operations.  Fidel Castro did when he utilized the DeLaGuardia twins.  The famous spy Mata Hari had a double that danced for her while she was doing espionage wok for the Germans during World War I.  Hence, is it not unknown for intelligence agencies to use doubles.  One man can be out on operations and if plans go unfavorably, then there is an alibi; just make sure the double is seen in a public place such as work, restaurant, a party, and so on.  When it comes to “plausible deniability,” the CIA are experts at it.

Another indication occurred during the Warren Commission hearings when Lee’s older brother, Robert Oswald was giving testimony and when it came to the summer of 1947, Dulles abruptly broke in and called for a break.  When the testimony continued, they picked up from the summer of 1948, which surprisingly, Robert Oswald went along with.  Was he coached to go along with this ignoring of the timeline?  Some researchers think so.  Regardless, his older brother John Pic, in earlier testimony, stated the Oswald family was living in Fort Worth, Texas, when other evidence points to an Oswald residence in the town of Benbrook, which was 18 miles west of Fort Worth.  Was Allen Dulles concerned about Robert mentioning the Forth Worth address as well?  Is Dulles familiar with two Oswald’s being involved in intelligence operations?  

This is murky area of the Kennedy assassination and deserves further research.

The Rosetta Stone

John Newman, who's written several books on the JFK assassination and Oswald, says that this is the Rosetta Stone. This is the clue that proves there was a conspiracy, and points a finger at who did it. Why? Because this man was photographed in Mexico City six weeks before the assassination. He was impersonating Lee Harvey Oswald, and was talking to people in both the Cuban consulate and the Soviet embassy, trying to arrange to travel to both places.

Six weeks before the assassination, nobody knew who Lee Harvey Oswald was. If someone were impersonating him and were trying to make it appear that Oswald was dealing with the Russians and Cubans, then who would benefit from making a nobody appear to be involved with America's two Cold War enemies?

Well, nobody if Lee Harvey Oswald continued to be a nobody. But who would gain if they knew that Oswald would be fingered as the assassin of President Kennedy?  

At this point it doesn't matter whether Oswald killed JFK or was part of a group of assassins or, as he put it after he was arrested, he was a patsy. Six weeks before the assassination someone knew that JFK would be killed and that Oswald would be blamed. 

Well, who took the picture of this Oswald impersonator? 

The CIA. The CIA had cameras and took photos of who went in and out of the Cuban consulate and the Soviet embassy. 

I've often wondered why the CIA would let this picture surface. Mistake, eh?

I. The Rosetta Stone

The Assassination Records Review Board finished its search more than a year ago—a search for records relating to the murder of a president thirty-six years ago. Surprisingly, the passage of time has not managed to erode or cover over all of the important evidence. On the contrary, the work of the Review Board has uncovered important new leads in the case. I will leave medical and ballistic forensics to others. I will confine myself to document forensics, an area for which the work of the board had been nothing less than spectacular. More specifically, I will confine myself to the documentary record concerning Lee Harvey Oswald’s 1963 visit to Mexico City.

In 1978, the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) completed its work, including a report on Oswald’s activities in Mexico written by Eddie Lopez and Dan Hardway. Our first glimpses of their report began shortly after the 1993 passage of the JFK Records Act. Not even all the redactions of those early versions could hide the seminal discoveries in that work. While Lopez couched his words in careful language, he suggested that Oswald might have been impersonated while he was in Mexico City just weeks before the assassination. Lopez was more forthright when I interviewed him about this in 1995. Armed with more CIA documents and the first Russian commentary (Nechiporenko’s book, Passport to Assassination), I went further in my own Oswald and the CIA (Carroll & Graf: 1995) in advancing the argument that Oswald was impersonated in the Mexican capitol. Specifically, someone pretending to be Oswald made a series of telephone calls between 28 September and 1 October, allegedly to and from the Cuban and Soviet consulates in Mexico City.

I concluded then, that, based on the content of the CIA Mexico City telephone transcripts alone, the speaker purporting to be Oswald was probably an impostor. I will not repeat my lengthy discussion here, other than to summarize it in this way: the speaker’s words were incongruous with the experiences we can be reasonably certain Oswald underwent. For reasons still obscure, the CIA has lied consistently for these past several decades about the tapes from which those transcripts were made. The Agency concocted the story that the tapes were routinely destroyed before the assassination. It is perhaps true that some tapes were destroyed before the assassination. But Lopez uncovered FBI documents containing detailed accounts of how two of the tapes were listened to after the assassination by FBI agents familiar with Oswald’s voice.

More evidence would come in time. Shortly after the passage of the JFK Records Act, the public gained access to a telephone transcript the day after the assassination in which FBI Director Hoover informs President Johnson that it is not Oswald’s voice on the tapes. The Review Board diligently followed these leads and settled the matter when they found CIA documents in which the Agency itselfexplicitly states that some of the tapes were reviewed after the assassination. The CIA’s continued silence on the matter of the tapes stands, like a giant beacon, pointing the way forward to the investigator. The impersonation of Oswald in Mexico by someone who drew attention to an Oswald connection to a KGB assassination officer may prove to be the Rosetta stone of this case.

Before going further, I once again pay tribute to Peter Dale Scott, who wrote of these matters as early as 1995, advancing his "Phase I-Phase II hypothesis" on largely deaf ears. I will not repeat his lengthy discussion here, other than to summarize it in this way: In Phase I, immediately after the assassination, previously planted evidence of a Cuban/Kremlin plot surfaced in Oswald’s files; this, in turn, precipitated Phase II, in which a lone-nut cover-up was erected to prevent a nuclear war.

In Oswald and the CIA, I deliberately steered clear of the conspiracy-anti-conspiracy vortex in order to set out some of the facts concerning Oswald’s pre-assassination files. Since then, the cumulative weight of the evidence uncovered by the Review Board has led me to the conclusion that the Oswald impersonation can best be explained in terms of a plot to murder the president. I remain open to other interpretations and fresh analyses by fellow researchers, and I understand that new evidence could corroborate or undermine this hypothesis. What follows is a first stab at explaining, in a short and simple way, how those plotting the president’s murder may have left their fingerprints in the files.

II. Puzzles and Pieces

Since Oswald would have no reason to arrange for his own impersonation, there are three possibilities concerning the purpose of this impersonation: it was only part of a legitimate intelligence operation; it was only part of a conspiratorial plot; or, the third alternative which combines both: it was part of a legitimate intelligence operation manipulated by a plotter or plotters. These are three distinct puzzles. Into which one do the pieces fit most easily?

For the purposes of this discussion I will reject the proposition that it was only part of a crude conspiratorial plot, carried out by schemers unfamiliar with the inner-workings of the U.S. intelligence community. By exposing themselves to such intense U.S. intelligence scrutiny, the conspirators would have put themselves at unacceptable risk and raised the chances that Oswald would not be in the Texas School Book Depository when the president’s motorcade drove by. Thus we are left with two puzzles: an intelligence operation or a legitimate operation manipulated by plotters. Before deciding, let us examine the characteristics of some of the more unique-looking pieces.

The weirdest, most gangly piece is the 28 September phone transcript. In addition to the Oswald impersonator, there are two more speakers on this one. The phone call is between the Cuban Consulate and the Soviet Embassy at a time when no one was in the Cuban Consulate and the Soviets were in the middle of preparing a report to KGB HQ on Oswald’s activities. The FBI confirmed that the Oswald character was played by someone else. Another speaker in this transcript, the secretary in the Cuban Consulate, Silvia Duran, had to have been impersonated if, as she and her colleagues have repeatedly claimed and testified, the Cuban consulate was closed at the time of the telephone call.

This only leaves one other person, the man allegedly in the Soviet Embassy. If he is truly in the Soviet Embassy, then one could advance the argument that this was some sort of CIA penetration operation. If the Soviet man, too, was impersonated, then there was no legitimate intelligence operation even though it was probably designed to look like one. We should bear in mind that the CIA has never publicly claimed these phone calls were part of any intelligence operation and the Russians have no recollection of such a call. In fact, at the very time this phone call was supposed to have been made to the Soviet Embassy, the three staff members with whom Oswald had visited for an hour were still in the building and in the process of assembling all of the details for a cable to KGB Central in Moscow. It is frustrating that, in 1999, when Boris Yeltsin handed over KGB files on Oswald to President Clinton, they did not include the Soviet Embassy cables that were sent at the time of this bogus 3-person telephone call. Those contemporaneous cables could provide corroboration for the later Soviet (Nechiporenko- Kostikov) account.

The second puzzle piece is the 1 October telephone transcript, wherein the Oswald impersonator mentions a meeting with Valery Kostikov—a man known to the CIA as the chief of KGB assassination operations for the entire Western hemisphere. In fact, according to CIA cables and Kostikov himself, the real Oswald did meet Kostikov in Mexico. What, then, was the purpose of this impersonation? When we hold this second piece side-by-side with the first piece, we are drawn to the possibility of a plot to murder the president, an integral part of which was planting—in CIA channels—evidence of an international communist conspiracy.

The third piece is a missing transcript. We know there was a 30 September tape because of the recollection of the CIA translator who transcribed it. Her name is Mrs. Tarasoff and she remembers not only transcribing it but also the fact that the Oswald voice was the same as the 28 September voice—in other words the same Oswald impostor. This piece is all the more unique because Mrs. Tarasoff remembers the Oswald character asked the Soviets for money to help him defect, once again, to the Soviet Union.

Finally, this piece has another side to it as well: it concerns what a CIA officer at the Mexico City station had to say about it. His name was David Atlee Phillips and, in sworn testimony to the HSCA, he backed up Mrs. Tarasoff’s claim about the tape and the request for money to assist in another defection to the Soviet Union. But the Phillips story has another twist. The day before his sworn testimony, Phillips told a different, more provocative version to Ron Kessler of the Washington Post. He told Kessler that on this tape Oswald asked for money in exchange for information. Why was this crucial transcript destroyed? What motivated Phillips to tell two different stories about this piece in less than 24 hours?

This third piece not only reinforces the likelihood that the plotters were seeking to ensure CIA sources would reveal a link between Oswald and the Soviets, but also invites us to ask questions about David Phillips. Indeed, one might ask, in view of the foregoing, what was Phillips doing during Oswald’s visit and the subsequent exchange of cables with CIA HQ concerning Oswald’s activities in Mexico?

Just a reminder

One of the most important books on the JFK assassination is Harvey and Lee, by John Armstrong. It's out of print and will cost you around $200 used on the internet. 

But today's your lucky day. Armstrong has posted his book as a .pdf file online, and you can download it to your computer. Just go here. It's over a thousand pages, and well worth the time to read it. Find out what happened to your country fifty years ago.

JFK: Interesting report from November 30, 1963

This:

URGENT 11-30-63 7-37 PM EST MB
TO DIRECTOR, AND SACS DALLAS AND NEW YORK
FROM SAC, NEW HAVEN /100-18158/
NEW YORK VIA WASHINGTON
LEE HARVEY OSWALD, IS - R
ON NOV. THIRTY INSTANT, JACK D. TIPPIT, SELF EMPLOYED
CARTOONIST FOR NATIONAL MAGAZINES AND WIFE, ONE SIX FOUR
NEW TOWN TURNPIKE, WESTPORT, CONN., ADVISED AS FOLLOWS. AT
APPROXIMATELY ELEVEN THIRTY AM ON INSTANT DATE MRS. TIPPIT
RECEIVED A TELEPHONE CALL FROM UNKNOWN WOMAN WHO ASKED IF
MR. TIPPIT WAS A POLICEMAN AND IF HE WAS RELATED TO THE POLICE-
MAN TIPPIT WHO WAS SHOT IN DALLAS. MRS. TIPPIT REPLIED HER
HUSBAND WAS NOT A POLICEMAN, WAS DISTANTLY RELATED TO OFFICER
TIPPIT AND ASKED IDENTITY OF CALLER. ON ANOTHER EXTENSION
JACK TIPPIT LISTENED TO BALANCE OF PHONE CALL. THE WOMAN SAID
SHE COULD NOT GIVE HER NAME AS SHE WAS AFRAID OF BEING KILLED,
THAT SHE WAS FROM NEW YORK AND HAD TO COME "HERE" TO MAKE THE
CALL SO THAT SHE COULD NOT BE TRACED AS SHE WAS IN FEAR OF HER
END PAGE ONE

PAGE TWO:

LIFE. THE WOMAN REQUESTED THAT NOTHING BE SAID TO THE PRESS
ABOUT A WOMAN CALLING AS THEY WOULD KNOW HER IDENTITY AND SHE
WOULD BE KILLED.
THE WOMAN SAID SHE KNEW OSWALD-S FATHER AND UNCLE WHO
WERE HUNGARIANS AND COMMUNISTS. THE WOMAN CONTINUED THAT
OSWALD-S FATHER AND UNCLE HAD LIVED AT SEVENTY SEVENTH AND SECOND
AVENUE, YORKVILLE, NYC, THAT WHILE LIVING THERE BOTH WERE
UNEMPLOYED, GOT THEIR MONEY FROM COMMUNISTS AND SPENT ALL THERE
TIME IN COMMUNIST ACTIVITIES.
THE WOMAN THEN BEGAN SPEAKING INDISTINCTLY, DISJOINTEDLY,
AND NERVOUSLY. SHE STATED SHE HAD TWO NAMES TO GIVE AND
MENTIONED THE NAME EMILE KARDOS AND SAID SOMETHING ABOUT A
BROTHER IN LAW. WHEN MRS. TIPPIT TRIED TO FIND OUT WHOSE
BROTHER IN LAW THE WOMAN KEPT REPEATING THE WORD BROTHER IN LAW.
THE WOMAN STATED KARDOS IS HEAD OF THE COMMUNISTS AND THAT THIS
GROUP IN NEW YORK NOW HAS CHARTS AND MAPS. THE WOMAN SAID
SOMETHING ABOUT WEINSTOCK THE EDITOR OF QUOTE WOMAN-S WORLD
UNQUOTE BUT DID NOT GIVE FURTHER DETAILS.. THE WOMAN SAID THE
END PAGE TWO

PAGE THREE:

GROUP IN NEW YORK PLANS TO TAKE OVER THE GOVERNMENT, THAT OF
COURSE THEY WOULD DENY THIS BUT SHE KNEW IT TO BE TRUE.
SHE THEN HUNG UP ABRUPTLY. THE WOMAN NEVER GAVE ANY REASON
FOR HER CALL WHICH SOUNDED LOCAL. MRS. TIPPIT THOUGHT THE
WOMAN HAD AN AUSTRIAN OR GERMAN ACCENT WHILE MR. TIPPIT
BELIEVED IT WAS SPANISH. BOTH FELT THE WOMAN SOUNDED LIKE
A MATURE ADULT AND DID NOT HAVE A YOUTHFUL VOICE.
MR. TIPPIT EXPLAINED WOMAN MAY HAVE OBTAINED HIS IDENTITY
FROM AN ARTICLE ON PAGE ONE OF NORWALK, CONN. QUOTE HOUR
UNQUOTE FOR NOVEMBER TWENTYFIVE LAST, WHICH STATED THAT WE MAY
BE A DISTANT RELATIVE OF THE DALLAS POLICEMAN. TIPPIT SAID
ARTICLE RESULTED FROM TELEPHONE CALL FROM REPORTER WHO WAS
CHECKING ALL TIPPITS IN LOCAL TELEPHONE DIRECTORIES.
BUREAU REQUESTED TO COORDINATE ABOVE WITH ANY OTHER
INFORMATION TO DETERMINE IF PERTINENT AS NEW HAVEN HAS NO
KNOWLEDGE OF THE RESIDENCE AND ASSOCIATES OF OSWALD-S FATHER
AND UNCLE.

END AND ACK PLS
7-45 PM OK FBI WA LLD FOR RELAY
6-47 PM CST OK FBI DL FL
TU PLSDISC M
CC-MR_ROSEN

Oswald's magical tooth

John Armstrong is a JFK assassination investigator who has worked on the theory that there were two Oswalds. Here's just one piece evidence: Oswald's magical tooth.

Here's a picture, shown in Life Magazine, of Oswald clowning around in his 9th grade class.

This closeup shows the missing tooth.

However, when he was in the Marines he had his tooth back.

When Oswald's body was exhumed in 1981 it had the missing tooth. 

So how did Oswald lose a tooth in high school (in a fight which was witnessed) and then get it back? 

Bruce Ivins still didn't do it

Five years ago scientist Bruce Ivins, who worked at facilities at Fort Detrick, committed suicide. The FBI, after blaming a former colleague of his, blamed Ivins for sending out those anthrax letters in the weeks after 9/11. Because he was dead there was no need for a trial. Unfortunately for the FBI, the facts of the case show that he was innocent.

Scientists who worked with Bruce Ivins said it would have been impossible for him to produce the amount of spores necessary to carry out deadly anthrax attacks given the time frame and equipment available to him at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases.

Ivins died five years ago today as the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice prepared to formally charge him with carrying out the 2001 anthrax mailings that killed five and injured 17 others in the wake of the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. He had worked as a top government anthrax researcher at USAMRIID since December 1980.

Ivins died from an apparent suicide as the result of acetaminophen overdose.

A National Research Council committee in 2011 said conclusions reached by the FBI about the 2001 anthrax attacks were not fully supported by science.

The committee said that “it is not possible to reach a definitive conclusion about the origins of the anthrax in letters mailed to New York City and Washington, D.C., based solely on the available scientific evidence.”

The NRC’s report was not intended to prove Ivins’ guilt or innocence in the attacks. The FBI requested its help in September 2008. The report said that while genetic evidence linked the attack spores to Ivins’ RMR-1029 flask at USAMRIID, an additional growth step between the flask and the spores used in the attack was necessary.

At USAMRIID, Gerard Andrews, Jeffrey Adamovicz and Henry Heine all worked with Ivins. USAMRIID did not have the equipment necessary to dry the amount of spores contained in the letters, said Heine, who was a friend of Ivins. Heine estimated it would have taken Ivins months to grow the volume that was sent.

The quantity used in the mailings would have translated to about 30 gallons of anthrax culture, Heine said. USAMRIID didn’t have a fermenter that could have handled that amount, and the one the lab did have was broken, he said.

“The only thing Bruce had available was shake flasks of which he could do a couple liters at a time,” Heine said.

Andrews and Adamovicz, who both served as Ivins’ supervisors, said the FBI failed to address silicone and tin found in the FBI’s samples but not in those provided to the bureau by Ivins. The anthrax may have been genetically similar, but it was not so chemically.

Another bacteria, Bacillus subtilis, was not found in Ivins’ flask of anthrax spores, though it was found in letters sent to the media outlets, Andrews said.

“Additionally, it is a genetically unique strain that was not worked with at USAMRIID, let alone Ivins’ lab,” Andrews said.

That forensic marker “is critical to exonerating USAMRIID and Bruce Ivins,” Andrews said.

Several lawmakers have pushed for a deeper investigation over the years, including Rep. Rush Holt, a New Jersey physicist who represents the area from which the anthrax letters were postmarked, and former U.S. Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, whose district included USAMRIID.

Patrick Eddington, a senior policy adviser to Holt, said the office is expecting a Government Accountability Office report about the FBI’s investigation, possibly sometime next year.

“There needs to be an exhaustive explanation of how the FBI handles cases like this generally,” Eddington said.

Eddington pointed to other blunders by the FBI: The government’s focus on former USAMRIID scientist Steven Hatfill as a suspect in the anthrax case, and a more recent example in which the FBI initially charged Paul Kevin Curtis as the person responsible for April’s ricin letter case before arresting James Everett Dutschke. Charges against Curtis were dismissed.

The bureau is “still out of their depth when it comes to dealing with cases with this kind of science,” Eddington said.

The FBI has said it relied on the totality of its investigation — not science alone — to lead it to Ivins.

FBI spokeswoman Ann Todd said she had no comment “beyond what’s already available in the public domain.”

What did Robert Oswald know?

Interesting article.

A number of researchers have wondered if Lee Oswald's brother Robert knew more that he ever admitted to.  Indeed, his half brother John Pic told the FBI that Robert knew more that he was letting on.  As one researcher told me, Robert wasn't going to be doing any talking from early on to this day.  Robert did publish a book in 1967 regarding his relationship with his brother (Lee: A Portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald by His Brother) and did appear in the several documentaries.  Publicly, he has always stood by the official story and kept a low profile over the years.  

However, his testimony to the Warren Commission, conducted in 1964, reveals Robert's contradictory accounting of events.  A careful reading of the transcript makes it apparent that Robert is not being forthright regarding many issues and this opens up other unexpected mysteries.

The Oswald Trust

Early on, much attention is given to a trust fund set up to accommodate donations given to Marina Oswald, Lee's widow after his death.  The amount was $25,000, supposedly donated from people around country.  Robert was one of the signatories to the trust.  However, this was not the only amount of money Marina received.  Before she was called to give testimony,  in February of 1964, Marina signed a contract with Tex-Italia Films and Cinema International Productions, to appear in a movie about her life.  She was paid a flat fee of $132,350.  Soon after signing the contract, the Tex-Italia Film company shut their doors in Hollywood, never to be heard from again.  No movie about Marina was ever made.  How's that for taking care of the star witness in the case?

However,  it's unlikely that Robert would not have known something about the details of this transaction as close as he was to Marina.  In fact, it's hard to see how the Commission lawyers didn't know about it either.  FBI Director Hoover must have known as he told lead council, J. Lee Rankin, that the FBI was not going to be investigating any of Marina Oswald's financial dealings.  Rankin must have breathed a sigh of relief!  So the kabash was put on this from the beginning and was to be mentioned again, no more.  

It's unknown what Marina Oswald did with this large amount of money or for that matter, where the mysterious men of Tex-Italia Films acquired the funds. 

Marina Speaking English

Robert told the Warren Commission that his sister in law Marina had "limited knowledge" of English and he would communicate with her via hand signals.  As we shall see in the section, this is not true–Marina was a very good English speaker and before he spoke to the Commission, Robert Oswald actually admitted to it.

In December of 1963 Robert gave SA Barnwell Odom a 14-page statement and in it he notes meeting with Marina to discuss a management contract she was about to sign with Jim Martin.  There was a discrepancy in the contract that Marina noted–since she could read English–and discussed this issue in English with Robert.  He'll deny her language skills later.  It should be noted that Jim Martin told the HSCA in 1978 that Marina could understand English quite well (Armstrong p. 340-341). 

And there are other sources regarding Marina and her English speaking.  Robert’s mother Marguerite Oswald said in her Commission testimony that Marina could speak English.  Lee wrote Marina letters in English while in the Soviet Union (Armstrong, p. 339). The so-called "other defector" Robert Webster (who I might add is the spitting image of Lee) said he met Marina while in Moscow in 1959-60 and she spoke in English to him (she denies knowing him).  Also, Marina’s stenographic notebook (CE100) that was found by the Dallas Police is written in English.  They also found other notebooks with her English writing that are now in the National Archives (Armstrong p. 340-341).

So why is Robert Oswald obviously covering for Marina?  He's speaking under oath and perjuring himself in the process.  And no one on the Warren Commission or their staff attorneys outs him on this.  Marina meanwhile, requires the use of an interpreter to answer questions from the Commission during her testimony.  Many researchers consider Marina to be a KGB agent and speaking English too well would be a dead giveaway to the CIA.  Conversely, Lee spoke excellent Russian yet rarely spoke it in Russia.  Likewise, that would give him away to the KGB if he were operating as an agent.  

Basically, Marina had excellent English language skills and was allowed to pull the wool over everybody's eyes.  Robert helped facilitate this charade.   

The  Strange 1947 to 1948 Jump

During the Robert Oswald's questioning by assistant counsel Albert E. Jenner, Jr., the following happens:

Mr. Oswald.  No, sir. I would say at no time it was. In moving up perhaps there to the time of the divorce and everything, I don't remember when Mr. Ekdahl moved out of the house. At that time we were living on Eighth Avenue in Fort Worth. This was during a summer period there. And I think this was the summer after the second year that we attended there this would be the summer of 1947.

Mr. Dulles.  If it is agreeable, I think we will adjourn for just a minute. It is now 11 o'clock.

Coming back from the break, the Commission starts qualifying the exhibits.  When finished, they resume the testimony: 

Mr. Jenner.  At the recess, Mr. Oswald, we were dealing with excuse me. We were dealing with the period of time that you and your mother and your two brothers lived in Benbrook, Tex. This brought us through the summer of 1948, I believe. Am I correct?

Mr. Oswald.  That is correct, sir.

So, a year is lost from the summer of 1947 to the sumer of 1948.  It's unknown what is happening here.  Is this an edit?  And if so, then why?  If not, then Robert is going along with something that he has to know is not true, unless they questioned him about this time span and edited it out of the transcript.  They obviously did not end in 1948 before the break.  

Stripling Junior High

Probably the most controversial part of Robert Oswald's testimony to the Commission.  While talking of Lee's early life, and school attendance, Robert mentions Lee attending W. C. Stripling in Irving, Texas.  However, under the official story, neither Lee nor his mother are supposed to be living there at that time and existing school records have him attending Beauregard Junior High in New Orleans in the fall of 1954.  And this is not the first time Robert makes a mention of Stripling.  In fact, he mentions it three times.  The first is in 1959 to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram upon Lee's defection to the Soviet Union; the second instance is to the Star-Telegram in 1962 upon Lee's return, and the final time in front of the Warren Commission.

In fact, it would have been difficult for any one to have known of this except for Robert mentioning these three times.  Researcher John Armstrong started digging into this and ran across a Frank Kudlaty, the assistant principle at Stripling.  When asked, Kudlaty said he remembered Lee Oswald attending because he was called by the Principle to head to the school Saturday morning (the 23rd) and hand over all records pertaining to Lee Oswald to the FBI agents who were on their way.  This he did, but did not get a written receipt nor did he have the ability to make a photostat of the records.  Lee Oswald apparently was only there for about six weeks in the fall of 1954.  Kudlaty noticed an interesting fact–there was no letter stating where the records were sent to upon Lee Oswald leaving.   Also, there were no loss of six weeks from his records at Beauregard in New Orleans during this time (Armstrong, p. 97-101).

Frank Kudlaty wasn't the only witness either, faculty and former students remembered Lee Oswald attending Stripling.  He lived across the street from the school.  It's easy to remember the kid that gets to go home for lunch. 

It's quite surprising that the attorney  Albert Jenner allowed Robert to pass this by without correction.  The Commission and staff had the records and they knew the answers beforehand; that’s basic lawyering.  Robert was never corrected.  Never the less, it's not the only instance of Lee's school records contradicting.  His records from the fall of 1953 do as well.  One set has him in PS #44 in New York and the other set has him in Beauregard Junior high in New Orleans at the exact same time.

Evidence of Lee Oswald being doubled?

Thanksgiving 1962

This is also known as "family reunion" before the Big Event that occurs a year later, to the day.  It's also an example of odd family behavior.  Gathering for the holiday dinner are Robert, his wife Vada and kids, Lee and Marina and their child June, and half brother John Pic, his wife Margret, and their kids.  Robert would say in an interview years later that it was a "Typical Thanksgiving day for any family."  But there is one person missing.  Their mother, Marguerite.  As Robert stated to the Commission, their mother was not invited, never knew of the gathering, and according to him, her name was never mentioned.

Imagine you have one living parent, she lives nearby and you never invite her to Thanksgiving day dinner.  This has the appearance of deeper levels of family intrigue.  

There are other instances before and after showing Robert's aloofness for his mother.  For example in the summer of 1956 he was engaged to Vada.  He never introduced to her his mother or Lee before the wedding. Vada only met them a few years later.  When Robert was being interviewed in 1959 by Star-Telegram, he was asked where they could get in touch with his mother.  Robert was evasive saying that Marguerite was in seclusion and under a doctor's care.  This is not true and there is no evidence to support this.  The reporter eventually found her and she wasn't tucked away.  

Through these actions, Robert displays an apparent aversion to talking about his mother or associating with her.  It's as if he is ashamed of her.  Others who believe that Marguerite was being impersonated (along with Lee) believe Robert's aversion is to an impostor.  And it's not just his mother, in later years he will have nothing to do with Lee's two daughters either.  

Visiting Lee In Jail

Robert going to visit Lee in jail will be the first time he has seen him since the Thanksgiving gathering from the previous year.  Robert had also experienced more than one shock this day.  Other than seeing his brother arrested for the murder of a police officer and the President of the United States, he also was to learn that Marina had given birth to a second child, Rachel.  Robert never knew that Marina was pregnant, let alone had given birth to a new child.

Most striking is Robert's comments that when get finally to speak to Lee.  He noticed that Lee seems to speak in a "mechanical" way with little visible emotion.  That erie calm that he possessed that all around him noticed.  Robert did too.  Even more striking is Robert's observation, "I was not talking to the Lee I knew."  That Lee was long gone, replaced by another spirit.  Maybe even a different Lee altogether that wanted to be called Harvey.  And maybe it dawned on Robert at some point what had happened.

So What Did Robert Know?

There are hints here and there which are never followed up on such as Robert admitting that he thought Jack Ruby knew Lee before he shot him on live TV.  An interesting line of thought never explored.  Odd things stick out.  Such as in his book on Lee, Robert stated that Lee came home on leave in February 1958 and they went hunting.  But his released Marine leave records show no such occurrence in February of that year.  It’s quite telling when Robert speaks of Lee seeming like a different person altogether.  The brother who he had grown up with, suffered hardships with, who had idolized him, following in his footsteps into the Marines and beyond, was now a totally different man sitting on a barbed-wire fence.

These brothers loved each other.  The drift probably started when Lee went to  Soviet Union, what Robert would later say with a grin as "sowing his oats."  As a former Marine, and no doubt a patriotic American, Robert should have been appalled at this event.  If he was, he's not telling us.  

So Robert Oswald remains a mystery in this affair.  If he has been charged with retaining secrets, along with the burden that must have been, he has done his job well.  Like a good soldier does.

Who is in control?

Tom Hayden opines.

It seemed weird, off-handed, President Obama's comment that he "wouldn't scramble jets against a 29 year old hacker," just two days before the U.S. forced down a Bolivian plane carrying Evo Morales on the suspicion that Edward Snowden was smuggled aboard. Diplomatic hell broke loose, with Brazil, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Ecuador, and others all accusing the U.S. of violating their sovereignty. 

With all the talk of Big Data, it's hard to believe that Snowden couldn't be detected enroute from the Moscow transit lounge to the departure gate for a Bolivian airliner. That aside, one wonders what if any was the connection between Obama's remark and the forcedown which subsequently happened.

Obama presumably was trying to squelch rumblings coming from within the national security state. After all, if some of the U.S. hardliners want Julian Assange, Snowden, and their ilk executed, or tried for treason before being executed, the same types might contemplate a Special Operation to render Snowden off a foreign airliner.

As for Evo Morales, I was told by a U.S. ambassador during the Clinton administration that he was a "very bad guy" who had tried to kill American diplomats, a good example of our intelligence demented.. 

The problem revealed by the incident is not a new one, and not for this president alone. Can we be confident that the president controls the permanent executive branch, especially the "intelligence" apparatus? Or is it not possible that key elements of the apparatus have been fabricating intelligence, pulling strings, "working the refs," boxing in the White House, asking forgiveness rather than permission, whatever one calls it, and running a foreign policy of their own? 

If anyone is shocked by this, it's all happened before. Several presidents were threatened with blackmail by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover who ran what one U.S. senator called a "Gestapo-operation." John and Robert Kennedy had to go around their own generals and conspire with the Soviets to cool down the Cuban missile crisis when it was at the brink.

JFK circumvented the generals and CIA by fudging an agreement in Laos. Richard Nixon and the China Lobby foiled Lyndon Johnson's election-year plan for peace talks by getting the Saigon generals to hold out until after the election. Jimmy Carter was forced to keep diplomacy with Cuba secret from his own State Department negotiators in the late Seventies. Bob Woodward's Obama's Warsdocuments how generals Petraeus and McChrystal tried to trap the president into a "forever war."

And before all of them, President Eisenhower warned that, "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." [1961]

And now this: starting with the Bush era, the top-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court [FISA] has morphed into a de facto parallel Supreme Court writing and implementing a virtual constitution for the War on Terrorism era. This secret court, appointed in its entirety by the right-wing Supreme Court Justice John Roberts, has approved 1,800 surveillance orders during the past year alone, while rejecting none.

There is no adversary proceeding in this new equivalent of a Star Chamber. There are virtually no public findings. The FISA court has ruled, in secret proceedings, that the vacuuming up of "meta data" on many millions of citizens is a "special needs" exception to the Fourth Amendment ban on state searches and seizures without a warrant.

Some of the secret court's opinions are said to be nearly 100 pages in length, issued without adversarial proceedings and virtually beyond appeal. Just because Obama is a constitutional lawyer doesn't mean that he's devoted detailed attention to this runaway construction of a new constitution -- until something like the Snowden revelations force his attention.

"It has quietly become almost a parallel Supreme Court," according to Eric Lichtblau in The New York Times [July 7], providing a veritable new constitutional framework for every agency engaged in activities under the umbrella of "national security." A similar extra-constitutional project has been underway for decades to rewrite the rules of private marketplace governance in the era of corporate globalization.

Both thrusts, toward privatization and intelligence wars, represent a gradual movement towards a new legal framework for Empire which minimizes or circumvents democratic processes. The NSA plus the WTO are the "new world order" that George Bush I mused about. 

Obama, who is responsible for this mushroom cloud of secrecy, seems occasionally to cry for help at his recognition that it's spiralling out of control. Since 2012, Obama has officially "welcomed" public conversation, debate, and Congressional drafting of a "new legal architecture" in order to "rein in" his growing imperial presidency and those which are likely to follow.

His inability to implement meaningful change, however, is a remarkable illustration of the limits of the presidency. There is no sign either of Congressional willingness to re-draft the 1973 War Powers Act to cover drones, secret wars like Libya, or the growth of executive-branch cyberwar. The federal courts are complicit in the private rewriting of the Fourth Amendment and the democratic guarantees of the Constitution.

It is not only the shadow of secrecy over democracy, but the apparent grip of secret forces in the executive branch over public policy. Last week the U.S. supported a military coup in Egypt in express violation of Congressional funding restrictions, and without public hearings. Last month, the President reiterated his five-year old pledge to close Guantanamo, get detainees off life-threatening hunger strikes, and repatriate many who already are cleared for release.

As of now, those straightforward orders have not been carried out. Someone is blocking them. 

A secret coup hasn't fully happened yet, and may not, given the nature of American pluralism. But the executive branch has aided in the unaccountable growth of a Frankenstein-like Leviathan which now is beyond the control of its own makers, operating outside the levers of democratic oversight and control.

Obama's occasional comments welcoming a "conversation" may be seen as muted alarms. If he cannot "rein in" the new Imperial Presidency, a populist protest could be slowly building toward either an insurgency presidential campaign, an uprising, or both.

Lee Harvey Oswalds

Or, more specifically, Lee and Harvey Oswald.

That's Lee on the top, Harvey at the bottom, and at the right end a Marine ID using both faces. Follow the link.

Snowden's predecessor