In the days following the Kennedy assassination, the CIA and the FBI immediately went to work to portray Oswald as a “lone nut.”
This was a coordinated effort to erase any connections between Oswald and his now-known CIA handlers, and his likely parallel connections with the FBI. According to one FBI source, the FBI was paying him $200 a month as an informant on “subversive activities.”[1]
In fact, on the first day of the Warren Commission hearings, Allen Dulles, passed out leaflets to the other Commission members declaring that all previous presidential assassins were “lone nuts,” implying Oswald was one as well.[2]
Except Mr. Dulles wasn’t exactly an impartial observer. He had been fired as CIA director by Kennedy but hired by new President Johnson to “oversee” the investigation into the assassination.
There is still an effort by many to portray Oswald as the only person involved in the assassination. An as the killer of Officer J. W. Tippett, despite the fact that when the Dallas Police performed a paraffin test, they found no gunshot residue on Oswald.
Nor did they find any prints on the supposed Mannlicher-Carcano murder weapon.[3] It was only when four days had passed, did the Dallas police belatedly announce they’d found a palm print on the rifle.
That was after Oswald had been killed, and some unidentified government agents had paid a suspicious late-night visit to the funeral home where Oswald’s body was being kept.[4][5]
Consider also just a few of the details we now know to be true, that have been kept secret or covered up at the time of the assassination.
Oswald worked at a highly classified role at the Atsugi Naval facility in Tokyo involving radar operations for the U-2 spy plane overflights of the Soviet Union up until 1957.[6]
He also spoke fluent Russian. That’s not something easily learned on one’s own, and highly unusual for a Marine, even during the Cold War, especially at the young age of nineteen.
There are theories that after leaving Tokyo and while he was stationed in California, he was taught Russian at Monterey School of the Army, often used by the CIA to recruit possible future agents.[7]
He appeared to defect to the Soviet Union in 1959, but was quickly identified as a possible mole by the Soviets. He was sent off to a do-nothing position far from Moscow, at a Minsk factory.[8]
What’s interesting to note is that he never completed the necessary paperwork given him by the US Embassy in Moscow, and therefore, never became an actual defector.[9]
Oswald married a Russian woman, had a child with her, and was allowed to return to the US in 1962 without any difficulty. Oswald was even given some start-up cash by the US government so he could afford to return.[10]
None of his promises to reveal secrets of the U-2 program seemed to have caused any difficulties with US authorities. That wouldn’t have been possible unless he was already a known US asset.
There is evidence released in just the past ten years that proves the CIA had already opened a file called a 201 file, reserved for people of special interest. By the time of the assassination just a year later, the Agency had already amassed a file of over 180 pages involving five different government agencies.[11]
One of his first jobs back in the States was working at Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall, a company that developed classified film from the U-2 flights. This level of secret work would have been prohibited to him, unless Oswald still retained his clearance for handling classified material.[12]
There were reports that Oswald was being paid $200 a month by the FBI as an informant. But when those reports were introduced to the Warren Commission, they went into a closed session, and all notes and transcripts of that session were destroyed.[13]
That suggests quite strongly that he was an FBI informant, and the Warren Commission didn’t want that connection to be made public.
When Oswald and his little family moved to Dallas in the summer of 1962, they met George de Mohrenschildt, a conservative “White Russian,” a Texas oilman and also a paid CIA asset.
He became a close friend to Oswald in the year before the assassination.[14] De Mohrenschildt introduced Oswald to a woman, Ruth Paine, who inserted herself into the Oswald family plans.
She invited herself unannounced to their home on multiple occasions during the spring and summer of 1963. She even allowed Oswald’s wife and infant daughter to stay with her in Dallas while Oswald went off to New Orleans.[15]
It should be noted that after the assassination, when he was in a spot of trouble, de Mohrenschildt turned to a friend at the CIA to help bail him out.[16] That friend was George H. W. Bush, one of the key operators of the CIA’s operation at the Bay of Pigs.[17]
De Mohrenschildt was not just a friend of Bush’s, he was the uncle of “Poppy” Bush’s roommate at Andover.[18]
While in Dallas, de Mohrenschildt introduced the Oswalds to Ruth Paine, also a CIA asset, whose sister worked as a stenographer for the CIA in Washington, DC.[19] Despite Ruth being asked hundreds of questions over multiple hours about her family and friends by the Warren Commission, the connection with her sister at the CIA was never brought up.
Paine winds up allowing Marina Oswald and her daughter to stay at her house, while Lee lived in a one-room boarding house not far away.[20]
Incredibly, Ruth Paine also had connections with Allen Dulles, through Dulles’ mistress Mary Bancroft, who had a home on Naushon Island in Massachusetts.[21] Ruth’s mother and Mary were best friends, and Ruth spent time there in August of 1963.[22]
Again, this amazingly close connection with the CIA was never investigated by the Warren Commission.
It should be remembered that it was Ruth Paine who got Oswald his job at the Texas School Book Depository. And it was Ruth Paine who “found” a letter where Lee admitted trying to kill General Walker, in a book of Russian recipes she had loaned to Marina.
It was Ruth Paine who also found the camera that took the famous backyard photos of Lee, in a bag that had already been searched by the FBI days earlier.
From Naushon Island, Ruth travels to visit with her sister the CIA stenographer, in Falls Church, VA. Ruth’s brother-in-law is also employed by the CIA.
Ruth spends a few weeks there in September, then returns to New Orleans to pick up Marina and her daughter. She then drives them directly back to Dallas to stay with her, while Lee stays on in New Orleans.[23]
In 1963, while in New Orleans, Oswald worked out of the office of Guy Bannister, a local private investigator and paid FBI contact. He handed out leaflets with Bannister’s office’s address stamped right on them.[24]
That same building also housed a CIA office. Though whether the FBI and CIA knew of each other’s close proximity has never been confirmed.
According to one witness, it was Bannister who suggested to Oswald that he open a chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans, where Lee would be its one and only member.[25]
Beginning in 1962, when Oswald returned to the US, a certain group of CIA officers began targeting Oswald for special observation. That included reading his mail, which was against the law for the CIA to be doing.[26]
There is so much more that we now know about Oswald, and how he was being set up by CIA assets than was publicly avowed in 1963. What’s even more amazing is how much we also now know about the files concerning Lee Oswald and the other elements of the assassination that have since gone missing.
We’ll cover them in the next article.
1 https://www.nytimes.com/1976/05/13/archives/oswald-not-in-1963-millionname-secret-service-file.html
2 https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-most-compelling-evidence-that-there-was-a-broader-conspiracy-behind-the-JFK-assassination
3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pSFb-krP5E&t=160s
4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pSFb-krP5E&t=294s
5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pSFb-krP5E&t=450s
6 http://theintercept.com/2022/12/19/lee-harvey-oswald-cia-lsd-jfk/
7 https://www.quora.com/Who-taught-Lee-Harvey-Oswald-Russian
8 https://www.biography.com/crime/lee-harvey-oswald
9 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHQe5ZrSVbU&t=44s
10 https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP75-00149R000600160130-8.pdf 11 https://jfkfacts.substack.com/p/before-jfks-death-the-cia-compiled
12 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0aS0DZgQVo&t=420s
13 http://22november1963.org.uk/memo-was-oswald-an-fbi-agent
14 https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/10/27/russian-born-oilman-real-international-man-mystery-vivid-presence-jfk-files/807303001/
15 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blxwqiP7m9Q&t=170s
16 https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/10/27/russian-born-oilman-real-international-man-mystery-vivid-presence-jfk-files/807303001/
17 https://whowhatwhy.org/politics/government-integrity/cia-bush-senior-oil-venture/
18 https://whowhatwhy.org/politics/government-integrity/bush-and-the-jfk-hit-part-5-the-mysterious-mr-de-mohrenschildt/
19 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blxwqiP7m9Q
20 https://theberkshireedge.com/a-review-and-commentary-about-the-documentary-the-assassination-and-mrs-paine
21 https://theberkshireedge.com/a-review-and-commentary-about-the-documentary-the-assassination-and-mrs-paine
22 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blxwqiP7m9Q&t=210s
23 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blxwqiP7m9Q&t=240s
24 https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKbannister.htm