JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters

by James W. Douglass

Why was Lee Harvey Oswald so tolerated and supported by the government he betrayed?

Warren Report, “Oswald stated to Snyder that he had voluntarily told Soviet officials that he would make known to them all information concerning the Marine Corps and his specialty therein, radar operation, as he possessed.”[150] To the Soviet officials who received his offer, Oswald said he “intimated that he might know something of special interest.”[151]

From September 1957 to November 1958 Oswald had been a Marine Corps radar operator at Atsugi Air Force Base in Japan. Atsugi, located about thirty-five miles southwest of Tokyo, served as the CIA’s main operational base in the Far East. It was one of two bases from which the CIA’s top-secret U-2 spy planes took off on their flights over the Soviet

Union and China. The U-2 was the creation of the CIA’s Richard Bissell, also the main author of the Bay of Pigs scenario. Bissell worked closely on the U-2’s Soviet overflights with CIA director Allen Dulles. Radar operator Oswald was a small cog in the machine, but he was learning how it worked. From his radar control room at Atsugi, where he had a “crypto” clearance (higher than “top secret”), Oswald listened regularly to the U-2’s radio communications.[152]

After Atsugi, Oswald was reassigned as a radar operator to Marine Air Control Squadron No. 9 in Santa Ana, California, which was attached to the larger Marine Air Station in El Toro. Oswald continued to have access to secret informati...

Marine Corps Lieutenant John E. Donovan, who was Oswald’s officer in the Santa Ana radar unit, testified to the Warren Commission that Oswald “had the access to the location of all bases in the west coast area, all radio frequencies for all squadrons, all tactical call signs, and the relative strength of all squadrons, number and type of aircraft in a squadron, who was the commanding officer, the authentication code of entering and exiting the ADIZ, which stands for Air Defense Identification Zone. He ...

However, Donovan’s knowledge of Oswald’s connection to the top-secret U-2 was clearly off limits for his Warren Commission questioners. Their avoidance of the U-2 puzzled Donovan. Wasn’t Oswald’s possible access to top-secret U-2 information a critical issue to probe in relation to his defection? Donovan told author John Newman years later that, at the end of his testimony, he asked a Warren Commission lawyer, “Don’t you want to know anything about the U-2?” The lawyer said,...

there is anything else we want to ask you, we will.” Donovan asked a fellow witness who also knew Oswald’s U-2 connection, “Did they ask you about t...

On May 1, 1960, six months after Oswald defected to the Soviet Union, a U-2 was shot down by the Soviets for the first time. The downing of the U-2, piloted by Francis Gary Powers, wrecked the Paris summit meeting between President Eisenhower and Premier Khrushchev. Gary Powers later raised the question whether his plane may not have been shot down as a result of information Oswald handed over to the Soviets.[155] Powers’s question was at least reasonable. It reinforces the case that Oswald’s volunteering all the information he had as a

Marine radar specialist to the Soviets was an apparently criminal act.

Yet when Oswald returned to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow after working for over a year at a Soviet factory in Minsk, he was welcomed back by American officials with open arms. Not only did the United States make no move to prosecute him, but the embassy gave him a loan to return to the country he had betrayed.[156] The toleration of Oswald’s apparent treason extended to his later obtaining a new passport overnight. On June 25, 1963, Oswald was miraculously issued a pas...

After analyzing this strange history in her cla...

Warren Commission, Accessories after the Fact, Sylvia Meagher concluded: “Decision after decision, the [State] Department removed every obstacle before Oswald—a defector and would-be expatriate, self-declared enemy of his native country, self-proclaimed discloser of classified military information, and later se...

“Decision after decision, the [State] Department removed every obstacle before Oswald—a defector and would-be expatriate, self-declared enemy of his native country, self-proclaimed discloser of classified military information, and later self-appointed p...

Oswald would be arrested and killed quickly, before he could say what he knew of the president’s murder. In Dallas whatever light Oswald might cast on the assassination would be switched at once into darkness.

The Warren Commission dealt with the U.S. government’s odd toleration of the apparently treasonous Oswald, first of all, by a selective reading of his history. When the authors of the Warren Report mentioned Oswald’s work in the Marine Corps as a radar operator, they neglected to point out that the future defector had a “Crypto” clearance, which was higher than “Top Secret,” and that his work immersed him in information about the CIA’s super-secret U-2 flights.[160] By omitting such facts, the government’s story was able to sidestep questions arising from Oswald’s offer of U-2 information to the Soviet Union, his defection to that Cold War enemy, and his wondrous acceptance back into the good graces of the U.S. government.

When the authors of the Warren Report mentioned Oswald’s work in the Marine Corps as a radar operator, they neglected to point out that the future defector had a “Crypto” clearance, which was higher than “Top Secret,” and that his work immersed him in information about the CIA’s super-secret U-2 flights.[160] By omitting such facts, the government’s story was able to sidestep questions arising from Oswald’s offer of U-2 information to the Soviet Unio...

If we turn from Warren Report psychology to Cold War history, why was the ex-Marine Lee Harvey Oswald not arrested and charged a year and a half before the assassination when he came back to the United States from the Soviet Union, where he had announced at the American Embassy in Moscow that he would hand over military secrets (about U-2 flights) to the Soviets? Whereas in Dallas Oswald would be arrested and murdered before we knew it, on his preceding odyssey as a traitor in and out of Russia and back to the United States he

overcame government barriers with an almost supernatural ease. What was the secret of Oswald’s immunity to prosecution for having criminally betrayed the United States at the height of the Cold War? How did this unrepentant enemy of his country merit treatment as a prodigal son, embraced by his government with financial help and preferential passport rulings while he continued to proclaim allegiance to the USSR and Cuba?

Victor Marchetti, who resigned from the Agency in disillusionment after being executive assistant to the Deputy Director. The CIA fought a legal battle to suppress Marchetti’s book The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. In regard to Oswald, Marchetti told author Anthony Summers of a CIA-connected

[Office of Naval Intelligence] program which involved 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. Some of these people lasted only a few weeks.

The counterintelligence program described by Marchetti dovetails with the Oswald story. It provides an explanation for the U.S. government’s indulgence of his behavior. That Oswald was in fact a participant in such a program was the belief of James Botelho, his former roommate in Santa Ana. Botelho, who later became a California judge, stated in an interview with Mark Lane that Oswald’s Communism was a pose. Botelho said: “I’m very conservative now [in 1978] and I was at least as conservative at that time. Oswald was not a Communist or a

Marxist. If he was I would have taken violent action against him and so would many of the other Marines in the unit.”[165]

Judge Botelho said Oswald’s “defection” was nothing but a U.S. intelligence ploy: “I knew Oswald was not a Communist and was, in fact, anti-Soviet. Then, when no real investigation occurred at the base [after Oswald’s presence in the Soviet Union was made public], I was sure that Oswald was on an intelligence assignment in Russia . . . Two civilians dropped in [at Santa Ana], asked a few questions, took no written statements, and recorded no interviews with witnesses. It was the most casual of investigations. It was a cover-investigat...

to another country, a Communist country, during peacetime. That was a major event. When the Marine Corps and American intelligence decided not to probe the reasons for the ‘defection,’ I knew then what I know now: Oswald was...

Oswald was guided by intelligence handlers. Lee Harvey Oswald was a pawn in the game. He was a minor piece in the deadly game Kennedy wanted to end. Oswald was being moved square by square across a giant board stretching from Atsugi to Moscow to Minsk to Dallas. For the sake of victory in the Cold War, the hands moving Oswald were prepared to sacrifice him and any other piece on the board. However, there was one player, John Kennedy, who no longer believed in the game and was threatening to turn over the board.

“Peace need not be impracticable, and war need not be inevitable,”

The second point in Kennedy’s theme was that self-examination was needed with respect to our opponent: “Let us examine our attitude toward the Soviet Union.” We needed to examine the root cause of our despair, namely, our attitude toward our enemy. Kennedy cited anti-American propaganda from a Soviet military text and observed, “It is sad to read these Soviet statements—to realize the extent of the gulf between us.”

“No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue.”

Khrushchev displayed proudly to Communist Party co-workers the papal medallion that Pope John had sent him.[171]

He added, in an ironic play on Woodrow Wilson’s slogan for entering World War I: “If we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.”

now declare that the United States does not propose to conduct nuclear tests in the atmosphere so long as other states do not do so. We will not be the first to resume.”

The military-industrial complex did not receive his swords-into-plowshares vision as good news.

Kennedy identified “peace and freedom here at home” as a critical dimension of world peace, he went on to identify peace itself as a fundamental human right:

“And is not peace, in the last analysis, basically a matter of human rights—the right to live out our lives without

fear of devastation—the right to breathe air as nature provided it—the right of future generati...

“Confident and unafraid, we labor on—not toward a strategy of annihilation but toward a strategy of peace.”

“The full text of the speech was published in the Soviet press. Still more striking was the fact that it was heard as well as read throughout the U.S.S.R. After fifteen years of almost uninterrupted jamming of Western broadcasts, by means of a network of over three thousand transmitters and at an annual cost of several hundred million dollars, the Soviets jammed only one paragraph of the speech when relayed by the Voice of America in Russian (that dealing with their ‘baseless’ claims of U.S. aims)—then did not jam any of it upon rebroadcast—and then suddenly stopped jamming all Western broadcasts, including even Russian-language newscasts on foreign affairs. Equally suddenly they agreed in Vienna to the principle of

Nikita Khrushchev was deeply moved. He told test-ban negotiator Averell Harriman that Kennedy had given “the greatest speech by any American President since Roosevelt.”[174] Khrushchev responded by proposing to Kennedy that they now consider a limited test ban encompassing the atmosphere, outer space, and water, so that the disputed question of inspections would no longer arise. He also suggested a nonaggression pact between NATO and the Warsaw Pact to create a “fresh international climate.”[175]

The New York Times reported his government’s skepticism: “Generally there was not much optimism in official Washington that the President’s conciliation address at American University would produce agreement on a test ban treaty or anything else.”[176]

In contrast to the Soviet media, which were electrified by the speech, the U.S. media ignored or downplayed it. For the first time Americans had less opportunity to read and hear their president’s words than did the Russian people.

A turnabout was occurring in the world on different levels. Whereas nuclear disarmament ha...

Nikita Khrushchev began to act like competitors in peace. They were both turning. However, Kennedy’s rejection of Cold War politics was considered treasonous by forces in his own government. In that context, which Kennedy knew well, the American University address was a profile in courage with lethal consequences. President Kennedy’s June 10, 1963, call for an end to the Cold War, five and one-half months before his assassination, anticipates Dr. King’s courage in his April 4, 1967, Riverside Church address calling for an end to the Vietnam War, exactly one year before his assassination.

John Kennedy’s American University address was to his death in Dallas as Martin Luther King’s Riverside Church address was to his death in Memphis.

On June 13, 1962, Lee Harvey Oswald returned to the United States after his defection to the Soviet Union. He was not met by arrest and prosecution. Nor was he confronted in any way by the government he had betrayed. Instead Oswald was welcomed by order of the U.S. government, as he and his Russian wife Marina disembarked with their infant daughter June from the ocean liner Maasdam in Hoboken, New Jersey. The Warren Report tells us that, on the recommendation of the State

Instead Oswald was welcomed by order of the U.S. government, as he and his Russian wife Marina disembarked with their infant daughter June from the ocean liner Maasdam in Hoboken, New Jersey. The Warren Report tells us that, on the recommendation of the State Department, the Oswalds were greeted at the dock by Spas T. Raikin, a representative of the Traveler’s Aid Society.[177] The Warren Report does not mention, however, that Raikin was at the same time secretary-general of the Am...

Department, the Oswalds were greeted at the dock by Spas T. Raikin, a representative of the Traveler’s Aid Society.[177] The Warren Report does not mention, however, that Raikin was at the same time secretary-general of the American Friends of the Anti-Bolshevik Nations, an anti-communist organization with extensive intelligence connections[178]—like the American government, an unlikely source of support for a traitor. The Warren Rep...

Lee was befriended by George de Mohrenschildt, the son of a czarist official.

In 1957 the CIA’s Richard Helms wrote a memo saying that de Mohrenschildt, after making a trip as a consultant in Yugoslavia, provided the CIA with “foreign intelligence which was promptly disseminated to other federal agencies in 10 separate reports.”[179]

De Mohrenschildt would admit in a 1977 interview that he had been given a go-ahead to meet Oswald by J. Walton Moore, the Dallas CIA Domestic Contacts Service chief.[180]