American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [25]
This question of double identity has been around since 1967, when Richard Popkin published a little book called The Second Oswald. A decade after that came Michael Eddowes’s best-seller, The Oswald File. His hypothesis was that the Marine Oswald went to the USSR, but a different “Oswald” came back—actually a Russian spy who then killed the president. In 2003 came John Armstrong’s exhaustively researched Harvey and Lee, where the premise is that two males who looked very much alike were groomed from an early age as part of a CIA operation.
Here’s what Armstrong concluded was going on. “In the early 1950s, an intelligence operation was underway that involved two teenage boys—Lee Oswald from Fort Worth, and a Russian-speaking boy named Harvey Oswald from New York. Beginning in 1952, the boys lived parallel but separate lives—often in the same city. The ultimate goal was to switch their identities and send Harvey Oswald into Russia, which is exactly what happened seven years later.”
Armstrong’s evidence is impressive, including contradictions in Oswald’s school records between the Warren Commission and the New York courts; a “Lee Oswald” in New York simultaneously with a “Harvey Oswald” in Stanley, North Dakota; an Oswald employed at the Pfisterer Dental Lab in New Orleans while another was in the Marines in Japan. How else do you explain the FBI swooping down on Dallas’s Stripling Junior High the day of the assassination and seizing all “Oswald’s” school records, as assistant principal Frank Kudlaty remembered, during years when he was officially attending a different school?11
The way Armstrong pieced it together, when Harvey went to Russia, Lee stayed in New Orleans and Florida associating with Cuban exiles and their CIA handlers. And, as the fateful day approached in Dallas, Lee was used to impersonate Harvey in a series of events aimed at setting up Harvey as the assassin and falsely implicating Cuba as being behind the whole thing.
I realize this sounds like something out of the most bizarre sci-fi novel, but there’s quite a bit already in the existing record that supports such a possibility. It turns out the Warren Commission never saw a memorandum that Hoover sent to the State Department nine months after Oswald’s “defection,” dated June 3, 1960. Hoover wrote that “there is a possibility that an impostor is using Oswald’s birth certificate.”12 After this memo surfaced when a researcher stumbled across it in the National Archives in 1975, Warren Commission investigator W. David Slawson was asked about it by the New York Times. Slawson said: “I don’t know where the impostor notion would have led us, perhaps nowhere, like a lot of other leads. But the point is, we didn’t know about it. And why not? It conceivably could have been something related to the CIA. I can only speculate now, but a general CIA effort to take out everything that reflected on them may have covered this up.”13
Now think about this: there are almost 50 separate instances of U.S. government files—from the CIA, FBI, Secret Service, Military Intelligence, Dallas Police, and Warren Commission testimony—where “Lee” and “Harvey” are transposed. In quite a few of these, the original file identifying a “Harvey Lee Oswald” was altered after the assassination to read “Lee Harvey Oswald.”14 Which raises the obvious question: was there an intelligence operation involving one Oswald who identified himself as Lee, and another who called himself Harvey?
When Oswald