The Strange Case of Lee Harvey Oswald
“Sen. Russell Long (D-La.) has told us that Lee Harvey Oswald. . . trained with Castro revolutionaries in Minsk during his Soviet stay” Jack Anderson, Washington Post, March 7, 1967
Ion Mihai Pocera defected to the West in 1978. He was head of Communist Romania’s foreign intelligence service, and was responsible for recruiting foreigners – particularly disaffected, low rank American soldiers like Lee Harvey Oswald. In Programmed to kill: Lee Harvey Oswald, the Soviet KGB, and the Kennedy Assassination, 2007, he finds that the Oswald story has very strong signs of Soviet Foreign Intelligence involvement.
Procera proposes that Oswald was likely recruited while stationed at the U-2 Atsugi base, and that Oswald’s information was instrumental in shooting down U2 pilot Francis Gary Powers, which resulted in a great PR triumph for Khrushchev. This made Oswald a hero to Soviet foreign intelligence and his visit to the Soviet Union was likely his reward (this being a common practice). They wouldn’t have wanted him to stay, his cover would be suspect and he would be more useful in the U.S., but he forced them to acquiesce – ever the loose canon – by publicly revoking his U. S. citizenship at the U.S. embassy in Moscow. While living in Russia, he received extensive espionage training, and was then sent back to the U.S. with an arranged Russian agent wife (another common practice), to function (both of them) as sleeper agents in the U.S.
Pocera doesn’t believe that the Soviet Union ordered Oswald to murder President Kennedy, but he emphasizes that Oswald was a difficult, restless agent, a true believer wanting more heroic work, who became more and more intent on getting into ‘revolutionary’ Cuba. He spun out of control, and possibly into the hands of pro-Castro Cuban agents (whom he met in Minsk?) working in the U.S. Oswald was both deluded enough to allow himself to be lured into shooting Kennedy in order to help Cuba, and gullible enough to allow himself to be set up to play the patsy role in a plot. Adult fetal alcohol syndrome?
Before November 22, Oswald mysteriously does pro-Castro advocacy, and then also mingles with anti-Castro Cubans. He visits Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico. He carries out noticeable and self-incriminating actions – shooting practices, meeting prominent Cuban exiles, hinting at planned assassination, seeking to buy a get-a-way car.
Lee Harvey Oswald was the only employee of the Texas School Book Depository not accounted for during time the shots were fired.
After the shooting, he seems to improvise an escape from the scene, as if a planned meeting doesn’t occur. He returns to his apartment for his gun – he must have thought he wouldn’t need it, but now clearly thinks that he may. He seems to head in the direction of a small airport nearby, or to a bus station to take him to Mexico (he had made that same bus trip one month before). He calmly murders Dallas police officer Tippett, who alone has threatened his movements. He brazenly re-loads his gun in front of numerous eye witnesses.
