In July 1961, the Joint Chiefs had presented Kennedy with a plan for a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union “in late 1963, preceded by a period of heightened tensions”. Kennedy was assassinated in late 1963, and there is every reason to believe that his assassination was intended to generate such “tensions” with the Soviet bloc. The same day, the United Press International revealed that the alleged offender, Lee Harvey Oswald, had Marxist convictions and connections with the pro-Soviet regime in Cuba: “The assassin of President Kennedy is an admitted Marxist who spent three years in Russia trying to renounce his U.S. citizenship”. “After changing his mind and returning to the United States last year, Oswald became a sympathizer of the Cuban prime Minister, Fidel Castro”. This news release strategically casts suspicion outside American borders, keeping attention fixed on foreign threats and communist conspiracy; presenting the Kennedy assassination as an act of war committed by the enemy would thus legitimize retaliation, namely in the form of the invasion of Cuba.

To strengthen the suspicion, much was made of a statement by Castro during the summer of 1963, in relation to recent assassination attempts against his life: “U.S. leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe”. The militant groups of anti-Castro Cuban exiles were quick to promote the “Castro” conspiracy theory and call for vengeance. Immediately after the assassination, the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE), better known as the Cuban Student Directorate, released a special edition of their newspaper: the front page linking photos of Oswald and Castro under the heading, “Presumed Assassins”.  The DRE was funded by the CIA, up to 25,000 dollars per month, and was supervised by George Joannides under the command of Richard Helms. According to a report by the HSCA, “the DRE was, of all the anti-Castro groups, one of the most bitter toward President Kennedy”.

Ironically, these alleged links between Oswald and Cuba are the very things that provide conclusive evidence of the CIA’s guilt. To understand who Oswald really was, we need to look at his “legend” manufactured by the CIA. Oswald enlisted in the Marines in 1956 at the age of 17, and, two years later, received training at the military base at Atsugi in Japan, one of the outposts of the CIA. He learned Russian. Back in the United States, he subscribed to the journal of the Communist Party and in 1959 went to the USSR with a 60-day visa. Upon his arrival in Moscow, he solemnly renounced his American nationality and affirmed, “my allegiance is to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics”. He further declared his intention to hand over to the Soviets any information known to him as a specialist in radar operations in the Marines. He spent two and a half years in the USSR, where he married Marina Prusakova. According to Victor Marchetti, a CIA agent since 1955 and assistant to Richard Helms during the three years prior to his resignation in 1969, in 1959 the CIA launched a program of false defectors comprising “three dozen, maybe forty, young men who were made to appear disenchanted, poor American youths who had become turned off and wanted to see what communism was all about”. It was hoped that these young men, apparently lost to the USSR, would be recruited by the KGB and serve as double agents for the CIA. Yuri Nosenko, a soviet diplomat who defected in Geneva in 1964 after eight years as a KGB, two of which served as a double agent, said that the KGB determined Oswald too mentally fragile to recruit.

It was then, in all likelihood, that his mission changed. In June 1962, Oswald appears again at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, this time for a return visa. Far from being arrested or harassed, he received a new passport in less than 24 hours, and even a loan. Upon his return, he moved to Fort Worth, Texas with his Russian wife and their child. He was soon chaperoned by George de Mohrenschildt, who brought him to Dallas. De Mohrenschildt was the son of a tsarist officer, consultant and marketing agent for Texan oilmen, occasionally rendering his services to the CIA in exchange for foreign contacts. Four days after his installation in Dallas, Oswald was hired by Jaggars-Chilles-Stovall, a graphic arts company under contract with the Army Map Service. From June 1963, he is often seen ─ and twice filmed ─ handing out leaflets for the pro-Castro association Fair Play for Cuba on the streets of New Orleans. He even attracted enough attention to be interviewed by television reporters, expressing to them his Marxist convictions. In October 1963, he returned to Dallas and took a job in the School Book Depository, the building where he’ll be on November 22 at 12:30.

It’s an all-too-likely story. Oswald, a good soldier, probably believes that his mission is to infiltrate pro-Castro groups, perhaps discredit them. But unbeknownst to him, he is being prepared for his role as a scapegoat. Placed in memorable situations pre-fit to construct the identity of a political enemy, Oswald could be pinned as a conspirator. His “legend” as the pro-Soviet defector and Castro-friendly activist that he believes to be his undercover protection, will actually be his assassin back-story. It was a narrative never intended to deceive the communist circles he had infiltrated, but rather the American public. Six months at the latest before the Kennedy assassination, and probably before, on his return from the USSR, Oswald was selected as potential patsy (perhaps among other candidates), and exhibited to the press in a tailor-made Communist suit that would implicate him as the instrument of a Cuban conspiracy. With a cynicism that goes beyond measure, the conspirators, who hated Kennedy for his sympathy for Castro, hoped to blame Castro for Kennedy’s assassination, and thus construct the pretext for the invasion of communist Cuba, perhaps making real the nuclear nightmare Kennedy had once prevented.

The plan was thwarted by Lyndon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover, who chose instead to impose the theory of the disturbed solitary gunman. They forced the CIA to abandon plan A by threatening to make public vulnerabilities in the plot that might expose their complicity in the assassination. In its staging of the Oswald patsy scheme, the CIA was indeed overzealous, manufacturing evidence that Oswald had stayed in Mexico City between September 27 and October 2, 1963, to go to the Soviet Embassy (twice) and Cuban Embassy (three times), to whom he would have also placed calls (seven to the first, three to the second). The object of his calls and visits would be to obtain a Cuban visa. At the Soviet Embassy, Oswald had met, telephoned, and later wrote Valery Kostikov, a KGB officer known to the CIA as “the officer-in-charge for Western Hemisphere terrorist activities – including and especially assassination”. The CIA claimed to have a photograph of Oswald entering the Soviet Embassy, and a recording of a telephone conversation between Oswald and an employee of that embassy. This was meant to show that Oswald had acted with the support of Cuba and the Soviet Union, and that he had prepared his escape in advance. It could have worked if Hoover and Johnson had not decided otherwise. Seven FBI agents that listened to the CIA’s recording after interviewing Oswald on the 22nd and 23rd of November agreed, according to a memorandum signed by Hoover, that the person identifying himself on the phone as “Lee Oswald” “was NOT Lee Harvey Oswald”; the voices did not match. In a recently declassified, recorded telephone conversation with Johnson, Hoover said that the photo was also not a match: “that picture and the tape do not correspond to this man’s voice, nor to his appearance. In other words, it appears that there is a second person who was at the Soviet embassy down there”. He added, without finishing: “Now if we can identify this man who was at the Soviet embassy in Mexico City…” Seven weeks later, Hoover wrote a note in the margin of a report, “false story regarding Oswald’s trip to Mexico”. Oswald had never been to Mexico, as his wife never ceased to assert. The Agency’s fabricated evidence against Oswald had backfired. The connections were too obvious, and an investigation of the relationship between Oswald, Cuba and the Soviet Union would risk their disclosure. It will be shown before the HSCA that Oswald’s false visit was staged by David Atlee Phillips, who worked under the direction of Richard Helms as Chief of Covert Action of the Northern Hemisphere, headquartered in Mexico.

While Hoover compromised CIA plans by neutralizing the links they’d forged between Oswald and communism, Johnson enacted another blackmail, intended to curb the combat ambitions of a fervent military, which was more than eager to consider the Kennedy assassination a declaration of war by the Soviets. Beginning the afternoon of November 22nd, Johnson used the threat of national destabilization to coerce the authorities at Dallas to cease the investigation and expedite confirmation that Oswald had acted alone. Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade, Texas Attorney General Waggoner Carr, and Police Chief Jesse Curry all received phone calls from the right-hand to Johnson, Cliff Carter, issued directly from Air Force One and then the White House. According to Wade, “He said that President Johnson felt any word of a conspiracy — some plot by foreign nations — to kill President Kennedy would shake our nation to its foundations. […] Washington’s word to me was that it would hurt foreign relations if I alleged conspiracy, whether I could prove it or not. I was just to charge Oswald with plain murder and go for the death penalty. Johnson had Cliff Carter call me three or four times that weekend”. Johnson continued to use the specter of nuclear war to silence the “rumors” of a communist conspiracy: “40 million American lives hung in the balance”, he often repeated. He used the same argument to direct the hand of the members of the Warren Committee: “We’ve got to be taking this out of the arena where they’re testifying that Krushchev and Castro did this and did that and check us into a war that can kill 40 million Americans in an hour”, he explained to senator Richard Russell in a telephone conversation on November 29th, in an effort to persuade him to join the Committee. An internal memo, dated February 17th 1964 refers to the first meeting of the Committee on January 20th1964, during which Warren, after being briefed by the CIA and the President, explained to all members that their mission was to destroy all the “rumors” that, “if not quenched, could conceivably lead the country to war which would cost forty million lives”. “No one could refuse to do something which might help prevent such a possibility”, Warren insisted. It would appear that the perceived threat of nuclear war morally forced every American to avoid asking the critical questions: if the state is hiding something, it must be in the interests of national security, people surmised.