Connecting the Dots

As promised, this will be the first in a series of posts leading up to the November anniversary, my goal is to lay out in a focused manner what I feel are the primary events and incidents that would trace the evolution of the conspiracy to murder President Kennedy,  the conspiracy which led to the actual attack in Dallas.  Having written something like 600 pages on this I’m not going to duplicate all my sources and proofs for this chain of events – the books do that.  Since this is a blog I will sometimes add the sort of personal commentary I don’t do in my books.

Actually one of the things that has motivated me to jump back in with both feet, at least for a few weeks, is my response to a number of the book reissues coincident with the 50th anniversary.  I was particularly struck by Tony Summers reissue “Not in  your Lifetime”.  Now I’m a big fan of Summers and he produces some great data, my problem is that its never wrapped it up into a specific scenario, a hypothesis or even a position.  And actually Summers has not taken a firm position himself, the most he does is revisit and end with Blakey’s opinion and the generic HSCA conclusion.  Indeed in his most recent work ( and it may just be me) he seems to point the reader towards a Mafia driven conspiracy as Blakey did, a view I strongly reject.  In doing that he makes a number of associations between individuals and groups as being Mafia driven or funded;  personally I think he pushes a lot of those associations to a much higher level than can be substantiated – as did Blakey.   Having gotten that off my chest, back to the point.

Before I begin connecting dots, it seems proper to begin with a very fundamental disconnect that is basic to following Lee Oswald in the year before the shooting in Dallas.

Lee Oswald’s return to the United States was facilitated in many ways, perhaps one of the most important was that his passport had been listed as “Classified” and forwarded to a special section of the Passport Office.  The Passport Office had been notified that he was a “defector” and had even begun preparation of a special sheet which would have flagged him and resulted in a refusal of his return to the United States.  However the “lookout/refusal card” was aborted due to some unknown party who issued the “Classified” designation.  This incident was reported to the Warren Commission, which made no further inquiry as to why Oswald’s passport had been “Classified”.   (SWHT p. 83-84).

Upon his return to the Dallas/Fort Worth area, Oswald approached a Fort Worth stenographer and began preparation of a manuscript about his time in Russia. This followed the contact between a CIA domestic operations officer and George de Mohrenschildt,  an individual well placed in the local Russian emigre community.  De Mohrenschieldt was asked to watch for the return of Oswald and his Russian wife and rather obviously to follow their their activities – which he most certainly did.  There are several notable points about Oswald’s manuscript, including the fact that it would have served as a very well done debrief on his activities including his observations on the electronics factory in which he worked in Minsk. SWHT p. 84-85 discusses the likelihood that Oswald’s information had indeed been provided to the CIA, specifically to the Foreign Document Division of the CIA’s Soviet Branch of the Directorate of Intelligence.

For our purposes, the manuscript contains something even more immediately relevant, it expresses Oswald’s dissatisfaction with the Soviet System, an accusation that the Soviet Union “has committed crimes unsurpassed”,  his view that Russia was using communist parties worldwide to forward its own geopolitical aims and that in particular the Communist Party of the United States had “betrayed” itself – becoming nothing more than a tool of a foreign power. Oswald’s language on the subject is stringent – he essentially accuses the CPUSA of treason, intending to overthrow the government of the United States solely at the request of and in the interests of a foreign nation. He concludes by saying that he has “personal reasons to know and therefore hate and mistrust communism.

This is extremely strong language, if used in the correct fashion it could have made Lee Oswald an extremely valuable propaganda source against both Soviet communism and in particular the Communist Party of the United States.   However, when we pick up this story line again in New Orleans, a major disconnect will have occurred.  Lee Oswald will be writing both the CPUSA and the Socialist Workers Party (ingrained ideological opponents) and asking CPUSA if he should go “underground” to support the revolutionary struggle.  And by the way, by the time we join him months later in Mexico, he will be claiming membership in the CPUSA – the organization that he so dramatically castigated in his manuscript.

Clearly something is going on with Lee Oswald in 1963 and its something the Warren Commission had to work really hard to avoid.

Larry