November 29, 2023 • 32 mins
Who was Lee Harvey Oswald? We dig deep into Oswald’s story. Starting with his childhood, talking directly to people who knew him, we explore his time in the military and his curious defection to the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. Was he just a disgruntled ex-Marine, a lone wolf who wanted to take down a president? Or was he part of something bigger?
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Speaker 1 (00:09):
On October twenty first, nineteen fifty nine, four years before
the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, an next marine
by the name of Lee Harvey Oswald sat alone in
a hotel room in Moscow, the heart of the Soviet Union,
just weeks shy of his twentieth birthday, Oswald was attempting
(00:30):
to renounce his American citizenship and defect to the Soviet Union.
After a few days of waiting, he finally received a
letter informing him that his request had been denied. A
Soviet official was on the way to escort him out
of the country. Disturbed by the news, Oswald made a decision.
He walked into the bathroom ran himself a bath. As
(00:53):
steam filled the room, he got into the tub, grabbed
a razor, and proceeded to carefully cut into his wrist.
As the bathwater turned red, Oswald closed his eyes and waited.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
This is who killed jfk Sixty years later? What can
we uncover about the greatest murder mystery in American history?
And why does it still matter today? I'm your host,
Solidad O'Brien.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
In the last episode, we heard about how the Warren
Commission had manipulated evidence in order to prove that Lee
Harvey Oswald was the lone gun since they claimed that
only three shots were fired from behind and one had missed.
That left two shots. The third shot was the fatal
shot to the President's head. The second shot came to
(01:47):
be known as the single bullet theory. The Warren Commission
claimed that this magic bullet entered the President's back, went
up and out his throat, then hit Connolly in his armpit,
then his ribs, then his wrist, and then his thigh.
The majority of the Parkland doctors who tended to Kennedy
(02:09):
contradicted this. They said that the President's wounds were a
result of shots that came from the front, which clearly
points to shooters in locations other than the sixth floor
of the Texas school Book Depository, and that would mean
that whatever Lee Harvey Oswald was doing that day, he
wasn't doing it alone.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Regardless, the record shows that on September twenty fourth, nineteen
sixty four, the Warren Commission presented their evidence and formally
named Lee Harvey Oswald the lone Gunman, which is the
story that persists today right.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
The Commission painted Oswald as a loaner a mentally ill
Soviet empathizer, an ex marine with an agenda. Even before
the Warren Commission report was released, the public was fed
a steady diet of press stories about Oswald the deranged
lone gunman.
Speaker 3 (03:07):
Less than forty eight hours after the shooting, Dallas District
Attorney Henry Wade boasted that he had quote sent men
to the electric chair with less evidence. He went even
further to say the following about Oswald quote, I would
say that without any doubt, he is the killer. There
is no question that he was the killer of President Kennedy.
(03:29):
And then on December tenth, less than three weeks after
the murder, the New York Times headline read quote Oswald
assassin beyond a doubt, FBI concludes.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
And here's where I think it's important to dig into
this historic moment. The only other murder of a president
that carries a similar historic weight is the murder of
President Lincoln, almost one hundred years earlier. But with Lincoln,
there were no TV cameras covering moment to moment updates
like there were in the Kennedy assassination. There were no
(04:03):
kids like Rob Reiner who were sent home from school
and then sat glued to their TVs to watch the
whole thing unfold. The public wanted answers, and in that vacuum,
a story began to unfold.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
And it wasn't until years later, after a great deal
of investigating, that a much different story would unfold. And
that story starts with the words of Lee Harvey.
Speaker 4 (04:30):
Oswell, I'm just a pat of President. I'm just a patsy.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
A patsy is a guy who takes the fall for
somebody else's scheme, a person who's manipulated into a position
that ultimately leaves them powerless.
Speaker 4 (04:46):
If you don't.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
Learn who Lee Harvey Oswell really was, there's no way
you can understand what happened on that day.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
I'd like to understand more about who Oswald was, his child,
what motivated him, But kind of like I guess I'm
asking for pop psych one oh one on Oswald.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
Oswald grew up in a broken home.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
That's Dick Russell.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
He never knew his father, who had died before he
was born in nineteen thirty nine. His mother, Marguerite, placed
him at a very young age in New Orleans with
his two older brothers, and so he spent time in
Foster care when he was very young.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
Did he stay in New Orleans his entire childhood?
Speaker 3 (05:32):
He ends up kind of bouncing around with his mother
between various places, and when he's thirteen years old, they
moved to New York City. Well, according to the official
Warren Commission record, he stayed away from school and there
were truancy charges that came.
Speaker 4 (05:45):
Up against him.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
So in the spring of nineteen fifty three he was
remanded to a place called the Youth House in New
York for psychiatric observation, and the chief psychiatrist there was
a man who would later testify before the Warren Committed.
His name was doctor Renatus Hartogs.
Speaker 5 (06:04):
Hello, doctor Harthogs. Yeah, oh, yes, this is Dick Russell.
I'm the writer who called you the other day. So
tell me what's on your mind. Okay, I'm as I said.
Doing some research.
Speaker 3 (06:15):
Into the Warrant Commission, a Heartthog said Oswald had a cold,
detached outer attitude and viewed his life in sort of
a non participating fashion. He had a vivid fantasy life
and turning around topics of omnipotence and power. So Heartog
said he had diagnosed the teenage Oswald as a kid
(06:36):
with personality pattern disturbance, schizoid features, and passive aggressive tendencies.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
Hearthogs testified that Oswald's psyche was so abnormal that he
wanted to continue to examine them, and he did so.
He placed the teenage Oswald in a three week study.
And here you have the beginning of a narrative that
starts to develop.
Speaker 3 (07:01):
But that narrative, and really everything we hear from Heartthogs
has to be understood through the lens of who Heartthogs
actually was. So let's look deeper into his past and
the people he associated with.
Speaker 5 (07:13):
Today's my eighty sixth birthday. So today is I'm an
happy birthday. I'm an old man. So see, I'd also
heard that you didn't you work in the fifties with
doctor Malletts. Doctor who Sidney Malletts. No, I didn't know
the name.
Speaker 4 (07:33):
Sounds familiar to me.
Speaker 5 (07:34):
But he worked at Columbia Presbyterian. Oh no, no, really not.
Speaker 3 (07:40):
Okay, all right, what Heartogs was telling me was not true.
Sydney Malletts, who was a professor of psychology at the time,
was under contract for the CIA, and evidence shows that
Hertogs worked closely with doctor Malletts on a hypnosis program
that was highly classified. Our dogs would tell the Commission
(08:02):
that he found Oswald's personality so intriguing that he chose
him for a seminar subject.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
What do you mean by the.
Speaker 3 (08:10):
CIA was working with troubled kids, finding troubled kids in
various places and grooming them in different ways, and they
would track them over the years to see if at
some point they might be useful. Not too long before
he died, I had a long interview with Sidney Gottlieb,
who ran the CIA's Technical Services Division from the early
(08:31):
fifties into the nineteen seventies. He told me about how
the government experimented with LSD after it was introduced to
the States in nineteen forty eight, so.
Speaker 6 (08:42):
It's factly nothing known about it at this time. We
decided a group of people and myself that we needed
simply to find out a lot about this material in
a hurry, and that's what led.
Speaker 3 (08:57):
Kalpa Mkultra is a code name for an illegal human
experimentation program designed by the CIA. The goal was to
find a way to control the human mind, and they
were experimenting also with so called brainwashing.
Speaker 6 (09:13):
So it's like most government programs. It took off and
it got going, you know, and then it was hard
to stop it.
Speaker 3 (09:22):
They gave LSD to the subjects without their consent, along
with electroshocks, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse,
and other forms of torture. I ushed to muse a
lot about boy, this is the only place you can
do illegal things. Lee on in a way? Is this great?
And you got the whole blessings of this puncil gufflement?
Speaker 2 (09:45):
So are you saying you think Lee Harvey Oswald might
have been part of the MK ultra program.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
There's no way to know for certain, but it seems
this was the backdrop against which Oswald and other young
people were cultivated.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
What we know for sure is that Oswald had a
troubled past, and after being studied by doctor Hartogs, at
age sixteen, he tried to enlist in the Marines. He
wanted to serve his country. He was turned down, and
then the next year he tried again and this time
he got in.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
Where's he sent?
Speaker 3 (10:22):
First September of nineteen fifty seven, He's assigned to the
Atsugi Naval Air Base just outside Tokyo. In the years
after World War Two, Japan became ground zero for Cold
War espionage, and at Sugi was the American base in
the area. It was a hotbed of activity. There were
a number of intelligence groups operating out of Tokyo, including
(10:45):
the CIA and a group known as Field Operations Intelligence
or FOI. I'll get into FOI later. At Sugi is
where U two spyplanes were stationed to fly secret missions
over the Soviet Union. Oswald became a radar operator and
would certainly have been privy to the fact that these
U two planes were flying out of Atsugi and going
(11:09):
on these missions.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
Yeah, and even though he's just a radar operator, you know,
kind of a low level guy. Oswald is hanging out
at a place called the Queen Bee, which is one
of the most expensive exclusive nightclubs in Tokyo.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
Oswald was earning less than eighty five dollars a month
and take home pay. And typically you'd go to the
Queen Bee and it would cost you sixty five to
one hundred dollars for the night. Oswald he didn't have
any of the money to do that. I mean, it
was it was basically a night spot that catered to pilots,
including the U two officers, not marine privates.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
So you have this young marine who didn't finish high school,
this odd ball loaner, hanging out at an exclusive officers club.
Speaker 4 (11:54):
What is he doing there?
Speaker 2 (11:56):
What was he doing there?
Speaker 1 (11:58):
Well, one night, he's having a good time. I'm he's
spending time with a beautiful Japanese woman when he is
spotted by an intelligence officer named Richard case Nagel, someone
that we're going to hear a lot.
Speaker 4 (12:11):
About throughout the podcast.
Speaker 3 (12:13):
I interviewed Nagel throughout the nineteen seventies, eighties, and nineties,
and I eventually wrote a book about him called The
Man Who Knew Too Much For Now. All you need
to know is that in the late fifties he was
working for an intelligence group called Field Operations Intelligence, operating
out of Tokyo. Nagel told me that both he and
Oswald later became part of an operation that tried to
(12:35):
convince a Soviet colonel named Nikolai Erashkin to defect to
the United States. It was an intelligence priority to try
to get high level Soviets to defect, and Oswald was
part of this. Were they successful, No, But Oswald was
doing more than just trying to meet women at the
Queen Bee. His odd tenure in the Marines was just
(12:58):
getting started.
Speaker 4 (12:59):
After a SUGI, didn't he go back to the United
States for a little while.
Speaker 3 (13:04):
He goes home shortly before Christmas on nineteen fifty eight,
and he spends a month's leave with his mother and
then he reports to Marine Air Control Squadron number nine
in Santa Ana, California. The Marines who served with him
there said that they often called him Comrade Oswaldkovich because
he would you start talking about the wonders of Karl Marx.
(13:27):
Another Marine who was stationed with him by named David Bucknell,
said that Oswald told him he was going to be
discharged and he was going to Russia to go to
work on an assignment for American intelligence.
Speaker 4 (13:39):
And then there's Tosh Plumley.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
Tosh Plumley worked for the US Army and Military Intelligence
in the nineteen fifties. In the sixties he became a
CIA operative. He was a mercenary pilot.
Speaker 7 (13:53):
Nineteen fifty nine was the beginning of NIXA at North Carolina.
That was propaganda training operations, illusionary warfare training, and the
object there was training us to take over communication sites
and a spread propaganda.
Speaker 4 (14:10):
Was that the first time you met Oswald.
Speaker 7 (14:12):
Yeah, that's when I first run into Lee.
Speaker 4 (14:15):
And at that point you knew that you were an
operative for the CIA.
Speaker 7 (14:21):
I knew I was in special ops, but I wasn't
sure I knew something something funny was going on. Of course,
in those days, you got to take into account that
we figured whatever the government told us and whatever military
told us, and whatever was printed in the media was
gospel truth.
Speaker 4 (14:37):
Was Oswald part of that.
Speaker 7 (14:39):
I was under the impression that Lee he was an
operative and he was being trained for a specific operation.
I was under the impression at that point that this man,
this kid that I met my age, was part of
the old original recruitment of young teenagers getting in trouble.
Speaker 3 (14:57):
Now, it wasn't only Plumbley who said this, Victor Marquetti,
who was a CIA official who then wrote a very
well known book in the nineteen seventies that exposed a
lot of things as CIA didn't want out.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
The book is called The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence.
It refers to itself as quote the first book the
US government ever went to court to censor before publication.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
The program in North Carolina was designed to leave the
impression that these young, troubled men had become Communist sympathizers
to make them appear to be disenchanted with the American system.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
Marquetti's book alleges that in nineteen fifty nine, the US
was struggling to get information out of the Soviet Union,
so they ran this operation out of Nag's head on
about forty young men.
Speaker 1 (15:47):
The CIA was trying to gain an advantage against the Soviets.
They wanted to have a group of young men under
their control to be thought of as read so they
cultivated these young men to look like legitimate commune and
as sympathizers for potential use in covert operations.
Speaker 4 (16:04):
And Lee Harvey Oswald was.
Speaker 7 (16:06):
There primarily he was recruited I think at that point
in time to be a defector, disgruntled person to go
to Russia. And I think that you too, assignment was
a cover in order to get him into Russia.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
So two different people who knew him and the Marines
say the same thing that Oswald was preparing to defect
to the USSR as a fake defector. So how exactly
does the U two assignment factor into that?
Speaker 4 (16:39):
Well?
Speaker 1 (16:39):
Having information about the United States top secret spy plane
establishes him as a potential high value asset to the KGB.
Now you combine that with the fact that he's learning Russian,
he's preaching Mars, and he appears to be unhappy with America.
Oswald then requests a dependency discharge to take care of
(17:00):
his mother, where they grant the discharge to him three
months ahead of when he's scheduled to be released from
the Marines. And what does he do on the day
he's discharged from the Marines. Does he go to take
care of his mother. No, he picks up a new passport.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
So he's about to go to Russia, yes, ma'am.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
On September tenth, nineteen fifty nine, Oswald sails from New
Orleans to London and then he catches a flight from
London to Helsinki, Finland. After waiting five days for his
passport to arrive, he takes a train from Finland to Moscow.
Speaker 3 (17:49):
When Oswald leaves the US, he's got a bank account
that has a little more than two hundred dollars and
the trip is going to cost at least fifteen hundred dollars.
Speaker 2 (17:58):
So is the assumption here that US intelligence is actually
secretly footing the bill.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
Not only footing the bill, but guiding him on where
to go, how to cross the border, and he.
Speaker 4 (18:13):
Seemed to know exactly what route to take.
Speaker 2 (18:16):
According to people like David Talbot, all of this starts
to paint a clear picture.
Speaker 8 (18:22):
He was inserted, I believe as a spy. He was
a false de factor. There's actual proof that Oswald was
a spy.
Speaker 5 (18:30):
You were told by people in the Tokyo station that
Oswald had been sent to Russia on a CIA mission.
Speaker 9 (18:38):
When I first heard this, I didn't really believe it,
uh huh, And then I started getting curious.
Speaker 3 (18:47):
Nineteen seventy six, I interviewed CIA officer James Wilcott at
the time Oswald was there. He worked in the finance
department of the CIA stationed in Tokyo. He issued checks
to secret agents, although they were all listed under code
names under oath. He told the House Select Committee on
Assassinations that he was aware that Oswald was a paid
(19:10):
agent for the CIA.
Speaker 9 (19:11):
I paid out fun for Oswald over some period of
time for the Oshald project, and the story I got
was that he was sent to the Soviet Union as
a double agent.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
So there are marines saying Oswald told them he was
going to be a fake defector and now a CIA accountant,
saying he actually paid Oswald if Oswald was employed by
the CIA, something they denied for decades. How was that
not headline news?
Speaker 9 (19:44):
The New York Time really really distorted and wanted my
testimony that I gave before the House Cooler Committee.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
The New York Times says that there are quote several
discrepancies in the recollections of mister Wilcott. It describes Wilcott
as quote support staff, a low level worker. It says
he cracked Oswald's code name as a result of hearsay
at the agency months after the assassination. It is a
brutal write up.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
The CIA immediately denied Wilcott's accusation, and after his testimony,
Wilcott was put under surveillance and harassed. His tires were slashed,
sugar was poured into his gas tank. He got a
new job, and then his new employer fired him because
even he was getting harassed, all to discredit him.
Speaker 3 (20:37):
The CIA has been doing this kind of stuff for years.
People like James Angleton made their way up the CIA
organizational chart by mastering the art of disinformation, So discrediting
Wilcott was just another flavor of the same manipulation that
they used on Oswald.
Speaker 9 (20:54):
He was just when he excited, he was a fancy.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
What's Oswald's first move when he gets to Russia.
Speaker 3 (21:03):
He goes into the American embassy and he throws down
his passport and he says, I want to dissolve my
American citizenship. So he's directed to a man named Richard Snyder,
who is a consular official in the embassy who used
to work for the CIA.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
Snyder testified to the Warren Commission that something was off
about Oswald.
Speaker 3 (21:25):
Oswald Hans Snyder a note affirming that his allegiances to
the Union of Soviet Socialist republics.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
Then Oswald makes this very public proclamation that he wanted
to defect and that he had top secret information about
the U two spy plane to offer to the Soviets,
And Snyder says, and this is a quote he would
make available to the Soviet Union, such knowledge as he
had acquired while in the Marine Corps.
Speaker 4 (21:51):
Concerning his specialty.
Speaker 3 (21:53):
Snyder said that quote this was part of a scene
he had rehearsed before coming into the embassy. It was
a pre planned speech. And it wasn't just Snyder who
thought it was weird. There was another official there named
John McVicker who testified to the Warren Commission that he
thought Oswald was following a pattern of behavior in which
(22:13):
he had been tutored by a person or person's unknown.
Speaker 4 (22:17):
This is a pivotal moment.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
One of the first things the American public was told
about Oswald after the assassination was that he was an
ex marine that had defected to the Soviet Union. It
was a huge part of the narrative. The Warren Commission
said that Oswald defected to the Soviet Union because he
was a troubled young man. They never reported the fact
(22:40):
that the CIA had a program to cultivate fake defectors.
This wasn't known until the Church Committee revealed it in
the mid seventies.
Speaker 4 (22:50):
So you have two competing narratives.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
One Oswald was interested in becoming a Soviet citizen, was
willing to betray America and become I'm a trader, Or
two he was instructed by the CIA as part of
an intelligence operation.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
I want to know how the embassy officials Snyder and
nick Vicker respond to Oswald.
Speaker 3 (23:15):
Snyder tries to talk Oswald out of renouncing a citizenship,
and then he sends a confidential telegram to the State Department,
which is forwarded to the CIA.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
You see, Oswald knows that US intelligence is going to
be made aware if he starts offering secrets and speaking
out loud like this to the Soviets.
Speaker 4 (23:36):
He's putting on a show.
Speaker 10 (23:38):
Those reports reached Engleton's office in early November nineteen fifty nine.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
That's Jefferson Morley again, creator of jfkfax dot Org.
Speaker 10 (23:49):
Angleton opens the CIA's first file in Oswald. He was
of interest to the highest counterintelligence officer in the CIA
for four years before President Kent he was killed.
Speaker 4 (24:00):
Did they track all of his movements during that period? Yes,
they did.
Speaker 10 (24:05):
All of his communications through the State Department were immediately
passed to the CIA.
Speaker 5 (24:10):
The FBI and j.
Speaker 10 (24:11):
Edgar Hoover had an interest in Oswald. All of their
paperwork on Oswald was forwarded to Engleton's people.
Speaker 3 (24:18):
The CIA had this pretty thick file on Oswald. This
is a fact that the CIA would spend decades denying.
It was only in nineteen seventy six when one of
Angleton's staff members revealed to the House Committee that she
was instructed to open a file on Oswald.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
They were watching him for four years before the assassination,
and there can only be two reasons for this. Either
he was in the Soviet Union on a mission or
he was a bona fide defector that had offered to
give the Soviet top secret information.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
Obviously, the Russians suspect something is going on with this.
The Russian authorities tell him your visa has expired and
you've got to leave Moscow right away.
Speaker 4 (25:06):
So what does he do.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
He goes into his hotel room and he fakes a
suicide attempt and creates an incident.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
You think he faked his suicide in order to force
the Soviets to keep him there.
Speaker 5 (25:18):
I do.
Speaker 1 (25:20):
He's a low level marine on assignment and he just failed.
He's got to do something drastic in order to stay
in the country.
Speaker 3 (25:28):
They rush him into a psychiatric hospital for observation and
he stays there for a week. I was told that
the KGB thought that he fit the profile for psychologically
conditioned agents. They decided to study him further so he
didn't have to leave.
Speaker 4 (25:44):
And they say, all right, you can stay and we'll
just keep an eye on you because they don't want
this international incident to be on their watch.
Speaker 3 (25:51):
And then he drops out of sight in December, and
nobody in the US here's from him for over a year,
which starts to raise concerns for a certain person. Oswald's mother, Marguerite,
(26:17):
goes to see Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State in
the US. Somehow gets in to see him. This is
all on record too, and shouts that her son was
a government agent. And how comes she hasn't heard from
him in almost a year.
Speaker 2 (26:31):
How does Oswald's mom just get in to see Dean Rusk?
Speaker 3 (26:35):
Like Marv Williams, I've wondered that too.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
Who gets access to Rusk like that? Does Rusk do anything?
Does Oswald know about this?
Speaker 3 (26:47):
Word gets back to him somehow in the Soviet Union
that mom is worried about it. Two days later, Oswald
writes her a letter.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
As it turns out, he was living pretty comfortably in
the Soviet Union for the last year by Communist standards.
Speaker 3 (27:02):
Anyway, they sent him to Minsk, a whole different part
of the Soviet Union, where he's greeted by the mayor personally,
and they promise him a free apartment while he works
at a radio TV factory where he earns as much
money as the director.
Speaker 1 (27:17):
In Minsk, he meets a teenager named Marina. Her uncle
is a colonel in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which
is basically the Soviet version of the FBI. They work
closely with the KGB.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
So wait a minute, her uncle is a colonel in
their FBI. That's the girl that Oswald just happens to meet.
Speaker 3 (27:37):
He meets Marina at this dance. He introduces himself as Alec.
She thinks he's a Russian citizen because he speaks Russian
so well.
Speaker 4 (27:45):
It is suspected that Marina's uncle encouraged her to go
to the dance that night.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
Here's journalist David Talbot again.
Speaker 8 (27:54):
That was basically an espionage operation. It was a way
to keep tabs on him. So I think the Soviet
authorities were onto him right away and watch him very carefully.
Speaker 3 (28:06):
After only a few weeks of knowing Marina, he proposes
to her.
Speaker 2 (28:10):
So now Oswald finds himself married into the network of
the KGB.
Speaker 4 (28:17):
And all while the CIA is watching him.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
So with all these interests converging on him, this guy's
got some baggage.
Speaker 4 (28:24):
Which is why his next move is pretty shocking.
Speaker 3 (28:28):
He writes to the American Embassy asking for arrangements to
be made for him to return to the United States
with Marina.
Speaker 2 (28:36):
Isn't it weird that he's coming back to the US,
given that he defected and denounced the US, I asked
David Talbot, So what happened when he left the Soviet Union?
Speaker 8 (28:47):
He came home to the US with great ease. He
was not molested by the authorities when he came here.
In fact, he was given a loan by the State
Department to come back from Russia.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
Wait, they gave him money.
Speaker 1 (28:59):
The I S even offered Marina an exemption from the
standard immigration quotas, so she came with him, along with
their baby daughter June.
Speaker 3 (29:08):
Well, they never asked him anything about, you know, but
what he might have been involved in over there, or
did he give secrets away? What about the U two?
None of these things came up.
Speaker 8 (29:18):
Anyone who claimed to be a defector said he was
going to give military secrets to the Union height of
the Cold War would have been clamped in irons unless
they knew he was an espionage agent.
Speaker 2 (29:31):
All right, So Rob, I'm going to need you to
speak very slowly and very clearly, what the hell is
going on?
Speaker 4 (29:39):
I'll try to make it as simple as that can.
Speaker 1 (29:41):
First, as a misfit kid, he's welcomed into the Marines,
and then he shipped to Japan, where he gets a
security clearance to be a radar plane operator on the
U two spy plane. He learns Russian. He defects to Russia.
Then after two years, he turns to the US with
(30:01):
his Russian wife and is welcomed with open arms. The
obvious explanation this is all done on behalf of the CIA,
and in less.
Speaker 2 (30:11):
Than eighteen months of his return to the United States,
he'll take a job at the Texas school Book Depository
in Dallas, Texas.
Speaker 4 (30:20):
Right, But a lot would happen in those eighteen months.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
On the next episode of Who Killed JFK? We uncover
secrets in a place known as the Wilderness of Mirrors.
What does sheep dipping mean?
Speaker 3 (30:36):
It's somebody who is inserted into an operation to make
it look like they're part of it, but they may
not even know why what's happened to them.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
We follow Oswald through the eyes of those who are
watching him, Like Richard K. S Nagel.
Speaker 3 (30:52):
He tried to warn Oswald that he was being used
that people he thinks or his friends are not.
Speaker 7 (30:58):
By sure Ecient struggled on the fact that it was
an assassination.
Speaker 4 (31:03):
Sits a plan, and because of that knowledge he was in.
Speaker 2 (31:07):
Jeffardy Who Killed JFK is hosted by Rob Reiner and
Me Solidad O'Brien and Our executive producers are Rob Reiner,
Michelle Reiner, Matt George, Jason English, David Hoffman, and me
Solidad O'Brien. Our writer is David Hoffman, with research by
(31:27):
Dick Russell. Our story editors are Rob Reiner and Julie Pinneto.
Our senior producer is Julie Pinneto. Our producers are Tristan Nash,
Dick Russell, Michelle Goldfein, and Amari Lee. Our editors are
Tristan Nash, Julie Pinneto, and Marcus de Laudo. Our project
manager is Carol Klein. Archival audio in this episode thanks
(31:52):
to Getty Images Dick Russell and Rob Reiner. Our associate
producer is emilse Kios. Sing mastering and sound design by
Ben la Julier, Music by APM, Research and fact checking
by Girl Friday and emilse Kiros. Business affairs by Hennan
Nadea and Jonathan Furman. Our consulting producer is Razanne Gallillini.
(32:16):
Record it in part at CDM Studio and Fourth Street
Recording Studio. Show logo by Lucy Quintanilla. Production assistants by
Rocco Deel Prior and Grace Barron. Special thanks to Johenig
rose Arse and Dan Storper. If you're enjoying the show,
leave us a rating and review on your favorite podcast platform.
(32:37):
Who Killed JFK as a production of Solidad O'Brien Productions
and iHeart Podcasts
On October twenty first, nineteen fifty nine, four years before
the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, an next marine
by the name of Lee Harvey Oswald sat alone in
a hotel room in Moscow, the heart of the Soviet Union,
just weeks shy of his twentieth birthday, Oswald was attempting
(00:30):
to renounce his American citizenship and defect to the Soviet Union.
After a few days of waiting, he finally received a
letter informing him that his request had been denied. A
Soviet official was on the way to escort him out
of the country. Disturbed by the news, Oswald made a decision.
He walked into the bathroom ran himself a bath. As
(00:53):
steam filled the room, he got into the tub, grabbed
a razor, and proceeded to carefully cut into his wrist.
As the bathwater turned red, Oswald closed his eyes and waited.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
This is who killed jfk Sixty years later? What can
we uncover about the greatest murder mystery in American history?
And why does it still matter today? I'm your host,
Solidad O'Brien.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
In the last episode, we heard about how the Warren
Commission had manipulated evidence in order to prove that Lee
Harvey Oswald was the lone gun since they claimed that
only three shots were fired from behind and one had missed.
That left two shots. The third shot was the fatal
shot to the President's head. The second shot came to
(01:47):
be known as the single bullet theory. The Warren Commission
claimed that this magic bullet entered the President's back, went
up and out his throat, then hit Connolly in his armpit,
then his ribs, then his wrist, and then his thigh.
The majority of the Parkland doctors who tended to Kennedy
(02:09):
contradicted this. They said that the President's wounds were a
result of shots that came from the front, which clearly
points to shooters in locations other than the sixth floor
of the Texas school Book Depository, and that would mean
that whatever Lee Harvey Oswald was doing that day, he
wasn't doing it alone.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Regardless, the record shows that on September twenty fourth, nineteen
sixty four, the Warren Commission presented their evidence and formally
named Lee Harvey Oswald the lone Gunman, which is the
story that persists today right.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
The Commission painted Oswald as a loaner a mentally ill
Soviet empathizer, an ex marine with an agenda. Even before
the Warren Commission report was released, the public was fed
a steady diet of press stories about Oswald the deranged
lone gunman.
Speaker 3 (03:07):
Less than forty eight hours after the shooting, Dallas District
Attorney Henry Wade boasted that he had quote sent men
to the electric chair with less evidence. He went even
further to say the following about Oswald quote, I would
say that without any doubt, he is the killer. There
is no question that he was the killer of President Kennedy.
(03:29):
And then on December tenth, less than three weeks after
the murder, the New York Times headline read quote Oswald
assassin beyond a doubt, FBI concludes.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
And here's where I think it's important to dig into
this historic moment. The only other murder of a president
that carries a similar historic weight is the murder of
President Lincoln, almost one hundred years earlier. But with Lincoln,
there were no TV cameras covering moment to moment updates
like there were in the Kennedy assassination. There were no
(04:03):
kids like Rob Reiner who were sent home from school
and then sat glued to their TVs to watch the
whole thing unfold. The public wanted answers, and in that vacuum,
a story began to unfold.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
And it wasn't until years later, after a great deal
of investigating, that a much different story would unfold. And
that story starts with the words of Lee Harvey.
Speaker 4 (04:30):
Oswell, I'm just a pat of President. I'm just a patsy.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
A patsy is a guy who takes the fall for
somebody else's scheme, a person who's manipulated into a position
that ultimately leaves them powerless.
Speaker 4 (04:46):
If you don't.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
Learn who Lee Harvey Oswell really was, there's no way
you can understand what happened on that day.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
I'd like to understand more about who Oswald was, his child,
what motivated him, But kind of like I guess I'm
asking for pop psych one oh one on Oswald.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
Oswald grew up in a broken home.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
That's Dick Russell.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
He never knew his father, who had died before he
was born in nineteen thirty nine. His mother, Marguerite, placed
him at a very young age in New Orleans with
his two older brothers, and so he spent time in
Foster care when he was very young.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
Did he stay in New Orleans his entire childhood?
Speaker 3 (05:32):
He ends up kind of bouncing around with his mother
between various places, and when he's thirteen years old, they
moved to New York City. Well, according to the official
Warren Commission record, he stayed away from school and there
were truancy charges that came.
Speaker 4 (05:45):
Up against him.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
So in the spring of nineteen fifty three he was
remanded to a place called the Youth House in New
York for psychiatric observation, and the chief psychiatrist there was
a man who would later testify before the Warren Committed.
His name was doctor Renatus Hartogs.
Speaker 5 (06:04):
Hello, doctor Harthogs. Yeah, oh, yes, this is Dick Russell.
I'm the writer who called you the other day. So
tell me what's on your mind. Okay, I'm as I said.
Doing some research.
Speaker 3 (06:15):
Into the Warrant Commission, a Heartthog said Oswald had a cold,
detached outer attitude and viewed his life in sort of
a non participating fashion. He had a vivid fantasy life
and turning around topics of omnipotence and power. So Heartog
said he had diagnosed the teenage Oswald as a kid
(06:36):
with personality pattern disturbance, schizoid features, and passive aggressive tendencies.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
Hearthogs testified that Oswald's psyche was so abnormal that he
wanted to continue to examine them, and he did so.
He placed the teenage Oswald in a three week study.
And here you have the beginning of a narrative that
starts to develop.
Speaker 3 (07:01):
But that narrative, and really everything we hear from Heartthogs
has to be understood through the lens of who Heartthogs
actually was. So let's look deeper into his past and
the people he associated with.
Speaker 5 (07:13):
Today's my eighty sixth birthday. So today is I'm an
happy birthday. I'm an old man. So see, I'd also
heard that you didn't you work in the fifties with
doctor Malletts. Doctor who Sidney Malletts. No, I didn't know
the name.
Speaker 4 (07:33):
Sounds familiar to me.
Speaker 5 (07:34):
But he worked at Columbia Presbyterian. Oh no, no, really not.
Speaker 3 (07:40):
Okay, all right, what Heartogs was telling me was not true.
Sydney Malletts, who was a professor of psychology at the time,
was under contract for the CIA, and evidence shows that
Hertogs worked closely with doctor Malletts on a hypnosis program
that was highly classified. Our dogs would tell the Commission
(08:02):
that he found Oswald's personality so intriguing that he chose
him for a seminar subject.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
What do you mean by the.
Speaker 3 (08:10):
CIA was working with troubled kids, finding troubled kids in
various places and grooming them in different ways, and they
would track them over the years to see if at
some point they might be useful. Not too long before
he died, I had a long interview with Sidney Gottlieb,
who ran the CIA's Technical Services Division from the early
(08:31):
fifties into the nineteen seventies. He told me about how
the government experimented with LSD after it was introduced to
the States in nineteen forty eight, so.
Speaker 6 (08:42):
It's factly nothing known about it at this time. We
decided a group of people and myself that we needed
simply to find out a lot about this material in
a hurry, and that's what led.
Speaker 3 (08:57):
Kalpa Mkultra is a code name for an illegal human
experimentation program designed by the CIA. The goal was to
find a way to control the human mind, and they
were experimenting also with so called brainwashing.
Speaker 6 (09:13):
So it's like most government programs. It took off and
it got going, you know, and then it was hard
to stop it.
Speaker 3 (09:22):
They gave LSD to the subjects without their consent, along
with electroshocks, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse,
and other forms of torture. I ushed to muse a
lot about boy, this is the only place you can
do illegal things. Lee on in a way? Is this great?
And you got the whole blessings of this puncil gufflement?
Speaker 2 (09:45):
So are you saying you think Lee Harvey Oswald might
have been part of the MK ultra program.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
There's no way to know for certain, but it seems
this was the backdrop against which Oswald and other young
people were cultivated.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
What we know for sure is that Oswald had a
troubled past, and after being studied by doctor Hartogs, at
age sixteen, he tried to enlist in the Marines. He
wanted to serve his country. He was turned down, and
then the next year he tried again and this time
he got in.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
Where's he sent?
Speaker 3 (10:22):
First September of nineteen fifty seven, He's assigned to the
Atsugi Naval Air Base just outside Tokyo. In the years
after World War Two, Japan became ground zero for Cold
War espionage, and at Sugi was the American base in
the area. It was a hotbed of activity. There were
a number of intelligence groups operating out of Tokyo, including
(10:45):
the CIA and a group known as Field Operations Intelligence
or FOI. I'll get into FOI later. At Sugi is
where U two spyplanes were stationed to fly secret missions
over the Soviet Union. Oswald became a radar operator and
would certainly have been privy to the fact that these
U two planes were flying out of Atsugi and going
(11:09):
on these missions.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
Yeah, and even though he's just a radar operator, you know,
kind of a low level guy. Oswald is hanging out
at a place called the Queen Bee, which is one
of the most expensive exclusive nightclubs in Tokyo.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
Oswald was earning less than eighty five dollars a month
and take home pay. And typically you'd go to the
Queen Bee and it would cost you sixty five to
one hundred dollars for the night. Oswald he didn't have
any of the money to do that. I mean, it
was it was basically a night spot that catered to pilots,
including the U two officers, not marine privates.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
So you have this young marine who didn't finish high school,
this odd ball loaner, hanging out at an exclusive officers club.
Speaker 4 (11:54):
What is he doing there?
Speaker 2 (11:56):
What was he doing there?
Speaker 1 (11:58):
Well, one night, he's having a good time. I'm he's
spending time with a beautiful Japanese woman when he is
spotted by an intelligence officer named Richard case Nagel, someone
that we're going to hear a lot.
Speaker 4 (12:11):
About throughout the podcast.
Speaker 3 (12:13):
I interviewed Nagel throughout the nineteen seventies, eighties, and nineties,
and I eventually wrote a book about him called The
Man Who Knew Too Much For Now. All you need
to know is that in the late fifties he was
working for an intelligence group called Field Operations Intelligence, operating
out of Tokyo. Nagel told me that both he and
Oswald later became part of an operation that tried to
(12:35):
convince a Soviet colonel named Nikolai Erashkin to defect to
the United States. It was an intelligence priority to try
to get high level Soviets to defect, and Oswald was
part of this. Were they successful, No, But Oswald was
doing more than just trying to meet women at the
Queen Bee. His odd tenure in the Marines was just
(12:58):
getting started.
Speaker 4 (12:59):
After a SUGI, didn't he go back to the United
States for a little while.
Speaker 3 (13:04):
He goes home shortly before Christmas on nineteen fifty eight,
and he spends a month's leave with his mother and
then he reports to Marine Air Control Squadron number nine
in Santa Ana, California. The Marines who served with him
there said that they often called him Comrade Oswaldkovich because
he would you start talking about the wonders of Karl Marx.
(13:27):
Another Marine who was stationed with him by named David Bucknell,
said that Oswald told him he was going to be
discharged and he was going to Russia to go to
work on an assignment for American intelligence.
Speaker 4 (13:39):
And then there's Tosh Plumley.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
Tosh Plumley worked for the US Army and Military Intelligence
in the nineteen fifties. In the sixties he became a
CIA operative. He was a mercenary pilot.
Speaker 7 (13:53):
Nineteen fifty nine was the beginning of NIXA at North Carolina.
That was propaganda training operations, illusionary warfare training, and the
object there was training us to take over communication sites
and a spread propaganda.
Speaker 4 (14:10):
Was that the first time you met Oswald.
Speaker 7 (14:12):
Yeah, that's when I first run into Lee.
Speaker 4 (14:15):
And at that point you knew that you were an
operative for the CIA.
Speaker 7 (14:21):
I knew I was in special ops, but I wasn't
sure I knew something something funny was going on. Of course,
in those days, you got to take into account that
we figured whatever the government told us and whatever military
told us, and whatever was printed in the media was
gospel truth.
Speaker 4 (14:37):
Was Oswald part of that.
Speaker 7 (14:39):
I was under the impression that Lee he was an
operative and he was being trained for a specific operation.
I was under the impression at that point that this man,
this kid that I met my age, was part of
the old original recruitment of young teenagers getting in trouble.
Speaker 3 (14:57):
Now, it wasn't only Plumbley who said this, Victor Marquetti,
who was a CIA official who then wrote a very
well known book in the nineteen seventies that exposed a
lot of things as CIA didn't want out.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
The book is called The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence.
It refers to itself as quote the first book the
US government ever went to court to censor before publication.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
The program in North Carolina was designed to leave the
impression that these young, troubled men had become Communist sympathizers
to make them appear to be disenchanted with the American system.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
Marquetti's book alleges that in nineteen fifty nine, the US
was struggling to get information out of the Soviet Union,
so they ran this operation out of Nag's head on
about forty young men.
Speaker 1 (15:47):
The CIA was trying to gain an advantage against the Soviets.
They wanted to have a group of young men under
their control to be thought of as read so they
cultivated these young men to look like legitimate commune and
as sympathizers for potential use in covert operations.
Speaker 4 (16:04):
And Lee Harvey Oswald was.
Speaker 7 (16:06):
There primarily he was recruited I think at that point
in time to be a defector, disgruntled person to go
to Russia. And I think that you too, assignment was
a cover in order to get him into Russia.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
So two different people who knew him and the Marines
say the same thing that Oswald was preparing to defect
to the USSR as a fake defector. So how exactly
does the U two assignment factor into that?
Speaker 4 (16:39):
Well?
Speaker 1 (16:39):
Having information about the United States top secret spy plane
establishes him as a potential high value asset to the KGB.
Now you combine that with the fact that he's learning Russian,
he's preaching Mars, and he appears to be unhappy with America.
Oswald then requests a dependency discharge to take care of
(17:00):
his mother, where they grant the discharge to him three
months ahead of when he's scheduled to be released from
the Marines. And what does he do on the day
he's discharged from the Marines. Does he go to take
care of his mother. No, he picks up a new passport.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
So he's about to go to Russia, yes, ma'am.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
On September tenth, nineteen fifty nine, Oswald sails from New
Orleans to London and then he catches a flight from
London to Helsinki, Finland. After waiting five days for his
passport to arrive, he takes a train from Finland to Moscow.
Speaker 3 (17:49):
When Oswald leaves the US, he's got a bank account
that has a little more than two hundred dollars and
the trip is going to cost at least fifteen hundred dollars.
Speaker 2 (17:58):
So is the assumption here that US intelligence is actually
secretly footing the bill.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
Not only footing the bill, but guiding him on where
to go, how to cross the border, and he.
Speaker 4 (18:13):
Seemed to know exactly what route to take.
Speaker 2 (18:16):
According to people like David Talbot, all of this starts
to paint a clear picture.
Speaker 8 (18:22):
He was inserted, I believe as a spy. He was
a false de factor. There's actual proof that Oswald was
a spy.
Speaker 5 (18:30):
You were told by people in the Tokyo station that
Oswald had been sent to Russia on a CIA mission.
Speaker 9 (18:38):
When I first heard this, I didn't really believe it,
uh huh, And then I started getting curious.
Speaker 3 (18:47):
Nineteen seventy six, I interviewed CIA officer James Wilcott at
the time Oswald was there. He worked in the finance
department of the CIA stationed in Tokyo. He issued checks
to secret agents, although they were all listed under code
names under oath. He told the House Select Committee on
Assassinations that he was aware that Oswald was a paid
(19:10):
agent for the CIA.
Speaker 9 (19:11):
I paid out fun for Oswald over some period of
time for the Oshald project, and the story I got
was that he was sent to the Soviet Union as
a double agent.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
So there are marines saying Oswald told them he was
going to be a fake defector and now a CIA accountant,
saying he actually paid Oswald if Oswald was employed by
the CIA, something they denied for decades. How was that
not headline news?
Speaker 9 (19:44):
The New York Time really really distorted and wanted my
testimony that I gave before the House Cooler Committee.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
The New York Times says that there are quote several
discrepancies in the recollections of mister Wilcott. It describes Wilcott
as quote support staff, a low level worker. It says
he cracked Oswald's code name as a result of hearsay
at the agency months after the assassination. It is a
brutal write up.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
The CIA immediately denied Wilcott's accusation, and after his testimony,
Wilcott was put under surveillance and harassed. His tires were slashed,
sugar was poured into his gas tank. He got a
new job, and then his new employer fired him because
even he was getting harassed, all to discredit him.
Speaker 3 (20:37):
The CIA has been doing this kind of stuff for years.
People like James Angleton made their way up the CIA
organizational chart by mastering the art of disinformation, So discrediting
Wilcott was just another flavor of the same manipulation that
they used on Oswald.
Speaker 9 (20:54):
He was just when he excited, he was a fancy.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
What's Oswald's first move when he gets to Russia.
Speaker 3 (21:03):
He goes into the American embassy and he throws down
his passport and he says, I want to dissolve my
American citizenship. So he's directed to a man named Richard Snyder,
who is a consular official in the embassy who used
to work for the CIA.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
Snyder testified to the Warren Commission that something was off
about Oswald.
Speaker 3 (21:25):
Oswald Hans Snyder a note affirming that his allegiances to
the Union of Soviet Socialist republics.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
Then Oswald makes this very public proclamation that he wanted
to defect and that he had top secret information about
the U two spy plane to offer to the Soviets,
And Snyder says, and this is a quote he would
make available to the Soviet Union, such knowledge as he
had acquired while in the Marine Corps.
Speaker 4 (21:51):
Concerning his specialty.
Speaker 3 (21:53):
Snyder said that quote this was part of a scene
he had rehearsed before coming into the embassy. It was
a pre planned speech. And it wasn't just Snyder who
thought it was weird. There was another official there named
John McVicker who testified to the Warren Commission that he
thought Oswald was following a pattern of behavior in which
(22:13):
he had been tutored by a person or person's unknown.
Speaker 4 (22:17):
This is a pivotal moment.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
One of the first things the American public was told
about Oswald after the assassination was that he was an
ex marine that had defected to the Soviet Union. It
was a huge part of the narrative. The Warren Commission
said that Oswald defected to the Soviet Union because he
was a troubled young man. They never reported the fact
(22:40):
that the CIA had a program to cultivate fake defectors.
This wasn't known until the Church Committee revealed it in
the mid seventies.
Speaker 4 (22:50):
So you have two competing narratives.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
One Oswald was interested in becoming a Soviet citizen, was
willing to betray America and become I'm a trader, Or
two he was instructed by the CIA as part of
an intelligence operation.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
I want to know how the embassy officials Snyder and
nick Vicker respond to Oswald.
Speaker 3 (23:15):
Snyder tries to talk Oswald out of renouncing a citizenship,
and then he sends a confidential telegram to the State Department,
which is forwarded to the CIA.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
You see, Oswald knows that US intelligence is going to
be made aware if he starts offering secrets and speaking
out loud like this to the Soviets.
Speaker 4 (23:36):
He's putting on a show.
Speaker 10 (23:38):
Those reports reached Engleton's office in early November nineteen fifty nine.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
That's Jefferson Morley again, creator of jfkfax dot Org.
Speaker 10 (23:49):
Angleton opens the CIA's first file in Oswald. He was
of interest to the highest counterintelligence officer in the CIA
for four years before President Kent he was killed.
Speaker 4 (24:00):
Did they track all of his movements during that period? Yes,
they did.
Speaker 10 (24:05):
All of his communications through the State Department were immediately
passed to the CIA.
Speaker 5 (24:10):
The FBI and j.
Speaker 10 (24:11):
Edgar Hoover had an interest in Oswald. All of their
paperwork on Oswald was forwarded to Engleton's people.
Speaker 3 (24:18):
The CIA had this pretty thick file on Oswald. This
is a fact that the CIA would spend decades denying.
It was only in nineteen seventy six when one of
Angleton's staff members revealed to the House Committee that she
was instructed to open a file on Oswald.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
They were watching him for four years before the assassination,
and there can only be two reasons for this. Either
he was in the Soviet Union on a mission or
he was a bona fide defector that had offered to
give the Soviet top secret information.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
Obviously, the Russians suspect something is going on with this.
The Russian authorities tell him your visa has expired and
you've got to leave Moscow right away.
Speaker 4 (25:06):
So what does he do.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
He goes into his hotel room and he fakes a
suicide attempt and creates an incident.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
You think he faked his suicide in order to force
the Soviets to keep him there.
Speaker 5 (25:18):
I do.
Speaker 1 (25:20):
He's a low level marine on assignment and he just failed.
He's got to do something drastic in order to stay
in the country.
Speaker 3 (25:28):
They rush him into a psychiatric hospital for observation and
he stays there for a week. I was told that
the KGB thought that he fit the profile for psychologically
conditioned agents. They decided to study him further so he
didn't have to leave.
Speaker 4 (25:44):
And they say, all right, you can stay and we'll
just keep an eye on you because they don't want
this international incident to be on their watch.
Speaker 3 (25:51):
And then he drops out of sight in December, and
nobody in the US here's from him for over a year,
which starts to raise concerns for a certain person. Oswald's mother, Marguerite,
(26:17):
goes to see Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State in
the US. Somehow gets in to see him. This is
all on record too, and shouts that her son was
a government agent. And how comes she hasn't heard from
him in almost a year.
Speaker 2 (26:31):
How does Oswald's mom just get in to see Dean Rusk?
Speaker 3 (26:35):
Like Marv Williams, I've wondered that too.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
Who gets access to Rusk like that? Does Rusk do anything?
Does Oswald know about this?
Speaker 3 (26:47):
Word gets back to him somehow in the Soviet Union
that mom is worried about it. Two days later, Oswald
writes her a letter.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
As it turns out, he was living pretty comfortably in
the Soviet Union for the last year by Communist standards.
Speaker 3 (27:02):
Anyway, they sent him to Minsk, a whole different part
of the Soviet Union, where he's greeted by the mayor personally,
and they promise him a free apartment while he works
at a radio TV factory where he earns as much
money as the director.
Speaker 1 (27:17):
In Minsk, he meets a teenager named Marina. Her uncle
is a colonel in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which
is basically the Soviet version of the FBI. They work
closely with the KGB.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
So wait a minute, her uncle is a colonel in
their FBI. That's the girl that Oswald just happens to meet.
Speaker 3 (27:37):
He meets Marina at this dance. He introduces himself as Alec.
She thinks he's a Russian citizen because he speaks Russian
so well.
Speaker 4 (27:45):
It is suspected that Marina's uncle encouraged her to go
to the dance that night.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
Here's journalist David Talbot again.
Speaker 8 (27:54):
That was basically an espionage operation. It was a way
to keep tabs on him. So I think the Soviet
authorities were onto him right away and watch him very carefully.
Speaker 3 (28:06):
After only a few weeks of knowing Marina, he proposes
to her.
Speaker 2 (28:10):
So now Oswald finds himself married into the network of
the KGB.
Speaker 4 (28:17):
And all while the CIA is watching him.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
So with all these interests converging on him, this guy's
got some baggage.
Speaker 4 (28:24):
Which is why his next move is pretty shocking.
Speaker 3 (28:28):
He writes to the American Embassy asking for arrangements to
be made for him to return to the United States
with Marina.
Speaker 2 (28:36):
Isn't it weird that he's coming back to the US,
given that he defected and denounced the US, I asked
David Talbot, So what happened when he left the Soviet Union?
Speaker 8 (28:47):
He came home to the US with great ease. He
was not molested by the authorities when he came here.
In fact, he was given a loan by the State
Department to come back from Russia.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
Wait, they gave him money.
Speaker 1 (28:59):
The I S even offered Marina an exemption from the
standard immigration quotas, so she came with him, along with
their baby daughter June.
Speaker 3 (29:08):
Well, they never asked him anything about, you know, but
what he might have been involved in over there, or
did he give secrets away? What about the U two?
None of these things came up.
Speaker 8 (29:18):
Anyone who claimed to be a defector said he was
going to give military secrets to the Union height of
the Cold War would have been clamped in irons unless
they knew he was an espionage agent.
Speaker 2 (29:31):
All right, So Rob, I'm going to need you to
speak very slowly and very clearly, what the hell is
going on?
Speaker 4 (29:39):
I'll try to make it as simple as that can.
Speaker 1 (29:41):
First, as a misfit kid, he's welcomed into the Marines,
and then he shipped to Japan, where he gets a
security clearance to be a radar plane operator on the
U two spy plane. He learns Russian. He defects to Russia.
Then after two years, he turns to the US with
(30:01):
his Russian wife and is welcomed with open arms. The
obvious explanation this is all done on behalf of the CIA,
and in less.
Speaker 2 (30:11):
Than eighteen months of his return to the United States,
he'll take a job at the Texas school Book Depository
in Dallas, Texas.
Speaker 4 (30:20):
Right, But a lot would happen in those eighteen months.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
On the next episode of Who Killed JFK? We uncover
secrets in a place known as the Wilderness of Mirrors.
What does sheep dipping mean?
Speaker 3 (30:36):
It's somebody who is inserted into an operation to make
it look like they're part of it, but they may
not even know why what's happened to them.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
We follow Oswald through the eyes of those who are
watching him, Like Richard K. S Nagel.
Speaker 3 (30:52):
He tried to warn Oswald that he was being used
that people he thinks or his friends are not.
Speaker 7 (30:58):
By sure Ecient struggled on the fact that it was
an assassination.
Speaker 4 (31:03):
Sits a plan, and because of that knowledge he was in.
Speaker 2 (31:07):
Jeffardy Who Killed JFK is hosted by Rob Reiner and
Me Solidad O'Brien and Our executive producers are Rob Reiner,
Michelle Reiner, Matt George, Jason English, David Hoffman, and me
Solidad O'Brien. Our writer is David Hoffman, with research by
(31:27):
Dick Russell. Our story editors are Rob Reiner and Julie Pinneto.
Our senior producer is Julie Pinneto. Our producers are Tristan Nash,
Dick Russell, Michelle Goldfein, and Amari Lee. Our editors are
Tristan Nash, Julie Pinneto, and Marcus de Laudo. Our project
manager is Carol Klein. Archival audio in this episode thanks
(31:52):
to Getty Images Dick Russell and Rob Reiner. Our associate
producer is emilse Kios. Sing mastering and sound design by
Ben la Julier, Music by APM, Research and fact checking
by Girl Friday and emilse Kiros. Business affairs by Hennan
Nadea and Jonathan Furman. Our consulting producer is Razanne Gallillini.
(32:16):
Record it in part at CDM Studio and Fourth Street
Recording Studio. Show logo by Lucy Quintanilla. Production assistants by
Rocco Deel Prior and Grace Barron. Special thanks to Johenig
rose Arse and Dan Storper. If you're enjoying the show,
leave us a rating and review on your favorite podcast platform.
(32:37):
Who Killed JFK as a production of Solidad O'Brien Productions
and iHeart Podcasts
Hosts And Creators
Soledad O’Brien
Rob Reiner
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