so, who was running Oswald, and why?

Who was running Oswald? Military intelligence? The CIA? Guy Banister? Some Cubans? The Mafia? Or was Oswald running himself? What's your theory?

That's one of the core issues in the JFK assassination mystery, yes? The other one is the Tippit murder, which someone described as the Rosetta Stone of the investigation.

Here's my take: the Russians weren't interested in anything Oswald had to sell. He tried real hard too - listen to what he said to his brother in a letter from Moscow:

"I want you to understand what I say now, I do not say lightly, or unknowingly, since I've been in the military .... In the event of war I would kill any American who put a uniform on in defense of the American Government --", and then ominously added for emphasis, " Any American."               

This letter was microfilmed by the CIA. Just a little while later, J Edgar Hoover sent around the memo expressing concern that someone in the US was using Oswald's identity (while he was still in Russia). And, it's not entirely clear whether both Hoover and Dulles knew about the very specific threat, it's not entirely clear whether they shared information. (Or, "all" the information).

So, if Oswald was planted as a mole, he'd washed out by the end of it, and he got married and came back. He barely made it back, the State Department had to loan him 700 bucks which today would be like 7 thousand, and they gave it to him in spite of the fact that they too could have known about the specific threat.

The next logical "work" for a self-professed Marxist would be to accept the minority view (call it Trotskyist, or whatever it happened to be at the time), and use it as an entree into Cuba. And, the way you got into Cuba, was legitimately with a visa, or illegitimately without. Castro is what was going on at the time, they already had plenty of employees over at JM/WAVE and they had plenty of budget. And, they had the mob. They'd been "penetrated", as it were. By the Cubans, and by the mob, and by some other people too.

If it was DIA, the only logical role for Oswald would have been counter-intelligence, the ferreting out of Castro's spies. The record shows it probably wasn't the CIA.

Banister makes the most sense - which means Marcello. Which "may" mean Giancana and Trafficante too, who knows. Probably does.

Ha ha - no one wants to get involved in contentious debates, is that it?

I get the view that Oswald was more-or-less running himself. He got involved with some nasties towards the end, though.

And, I got to thinking about that... y'know... the concept of "Oswald as non-uniformed combatant".

The political... I dunno... "principle" that each individual acts alone, was pretty common in the early 60's. There was a lot of that going around. Even in a broad range of diverse political contexts, like the world federalists and such.

My view so far, based on very limited research time, is that... how can I say this... in the game of anti-Castro operations, in the global scheme of what was going on there, there were amateurs, and there were some real serious professionals with lots of money and power and big-time business interests. If there's an amateur running around poking sticks into hornet's nests, he's going to get noticed.

So whatever Oswald got himself into, whatever he had "knowledge of", it was important enough to get killed over. Maybe someone finally showed him the real deal, or maybe they were just re-starting the larger scale gun-running (meaning they needed a whole new crowd of people like Nontes, or whatever that guy's name was at the military base who was giving 'em all the stolen weapons) - in either case, it seems the discovery of Oswald was fortuitous and there was no particular reason he was "chosen".

That's why I'm interested in the last month and a half. It's a very twisted tale, beginning in Mexico City. Lots of data points.

nonsqtr wrote:Who was running Oswald? Military intelligence? The CIA? Guy Banister? Some Cubans? The Mafia? Or was Oswald running himself? What's your theory?

That's one of the core issues in the JFK assassination mystery, yes? The other one is the Tippit murder, which someone described as the Rosetta Stone of the investigation.

Here's my take: the Russians weren't interested in anything Oswald had to sell. He tried real hard too - listen to what he said to his brother in a letter from Moscow:

"I want you to understand what I say now, I do not say lightly, or unknowingly, since I've been in the military .... In the event of war I would kill any American who put a uniform on in defense of the American Government --", and then ominously added for emphasis, " Any American."               

This letter was microfilmed by the CIA. Just a little while later, J Edgar Hoover sent around the memo expressing concern that someone in the US was using Oswald's identity (while he was still in Russia). And, it's not entirely clear whether both Hoover and Dulles knew about the very specific threat, it's not entirely clear whether they shared information. (Or, "all" the information).

So, if Oswald was planted as a mole, he'd washed out by the end of it, and he got married and came back. He barely made it back, the State Department had to loan him 700 bucks which today would be like 7 thousand, and they gave it to him in spite of the fact that they too could have known about the specific threat.

The next logical "work" for a self-professed Marxist would be to accept the minority view (call it Trotskyist, or whatever it happened to be at the time), and use it as an entree into Cuba. And, the way you got into Cuba, was legitimately with a visa, or illegitimately without. Castro is what was going on at the time, they already had plenty of employees over at JM/WAVE and they had plenty of budget. And, they had the mob. They'd been "penetrated", as it were. By the Cubans, and by the mob, and by some other people too.

If it was DIA, the only logical role for Oswald would have been counter-intelligence, the ferreting out of Castro's spies. The record shows it probably wasn't the CIA.

Banister makes the most sense - which means Marcello. Which "may" mean Giancana and Trafficante too, who knows. Probably does.

Re "killing any American"... this may be of some interest https://reopenkennedycase.forumotion.net/t59-william-morgan-lee-oswald

Re Hoover's memo -- this is what I said in response to someone else recently...
The Hoover Memo has been taken way out of context. There is background to this which apparently Armstrong is unaware of, or would rather his readers did not know about. Marguerite had sent 3 letters to Lee. Those letters got returned unopened. Marguerite wrote to State. She then got interviewed by SA John Fain. The New York Field office then summarized Fain's report and sent it to HQ. In that summary, they advised of the returned mail and opined that Oswald may in fact be elsewhere in Europe (Albert Schweitzer College) and that since he had taken his Birth Certificate, there is a possibility it was stolen and is being used by another in the Soviet Union.


So there it is - there was never any evidence the birth certificate was stolen or that anyone else was using it... it was all looking at worst case scenarios based on the returned mail. By the time Hoover wrote his memo to state "the Chinese Whispers-like effect had kicked in... what was no more than a vague thought was transformed into a major possibility. 

Re: who was running Oswald... this is one of those points that I have flip-flopped on over the years... and one of the reasons is because various ruses are used as cover to protect one's real employer... right now, I'm back with the CIA... at least for a part of the time... but that doesn't necessarily mean the CIA pulled off the assassination - it's just as possible that using someone who the plotters knew had a relationship with the CIA - was part of the plan - in order to help mute any proper investigation.

I believe Oswald was an intelligence asset but I also think it's possible that even he may not have been sure who he was working for.

I think Naval Intelligence recruited Oswald while he was in the Marines and made him a false defector. On the otherhand, his antics in New Orleans and Mexico City years later have the CIA's fingerprints all over them.

I dont think the fact that Oswald was a US intelligence asset proves JFK's assassination was a conspiracy. However, I understand why advocates of the "Oswald did it alone" brigade would want to avoid answering this question. If it's confirmed that Oswald was an operational asset for the CIA, FBI, or any other government agency, the idea that conspirators against JFK could've framed Oswald or "turned" him against Kennedy becomes much more plausible.

IF Oswald was really a Marxist, then it wouldn't make sense that he'd want to kill Kennedy. First of all, it had been in the papers that Kennedy was possibly attempting some kind of rapprochement with Castro, even that week (and the week before). Second, if Kennedy's gone then Johnson becomes president, and Oswald said it himself "some other person would just carry on the same policies" - and in Johnson's particular case, the outcome of those policies would be worse for Cuba, and I think everyone could have predicted that, even at the time. Thirdly, there was "weather" in Cuba just a couple weeks before, there was a hurricane and Kennedy had helped organize some relief efforts and some aid, and that was in the papers too. And fourth, if Oswald was intelligence-connected then he would have known about Paulino Sierra, and yet there is absolutely no evidence (that I know of) that Mr. Sierra was even a blip on Oswald's radar screen.

Seems to me, if Oswald was being "run", it was was several layers down. How can I say this - if someone really wanted to kill the prez, they wouldn't and couldn't have known exactly which city and at what time. They would have had to have a fortuitous set of circumstances where everything came together - however they would have had to plan for this possibility in multiple places at the same time. So, we know of the Tampa thing, and the Chicago thing, and there are a number of ways in which they might possibly be linked, and in each case it's the mafia that seems to play a central role. I'm not sure the CIA had "enough" assets in all those places that they could have planned something like that - but the mob did. And the FBI did too... there was probably someone like a Guy Banister in Tampa, and in Chicago too.

So now, the possibility that the "running" might have been done through a private cabal of some sort, other than the mafia (or, with the cooperation of the mafia, in a financial role or any other way), is still intriguing. People like William Pawley could have done something like that, Howard Hughes through his reliable go-to guy Robert Mahue (who was well aware of most everything that was happening in CIA-land), and so on. Pawley was connected with just about every right-wing dictator on the planet, and shared many common interests with the mafia relative to Cuba.

The issue of other teams in other cities (or let's say, even other "lone patsies" in other cities) would seem to be very important, I'm not sure it's been researched enough. The logistics of such an operation.... I mean, what we know about the JFK assassination is that people were converging on Dallas from all over the country, you have John Roselli going from LA to Arizona to Vegas to Tampa to Dallas, and there's all kinds of travel like that. Ferrie's going to Houston, we have the planes at Redbird, we have businessmen (and even Richard Nixon) at the bottler's convention, there's all kinds of traffic going on there. So, if the hit needed to be called off for some reason, and they had to do it somewhere else, where would have been the next place? And who would have been the "Oswald" in that place?

Guy Banister & Associates seems like the type of organization that could "run" Oswald for the CIA without being linked directly to the CIA.

capone81 wrote:Guy Banister & Associates seems like the type of organization that could "run" Oswald for the CIA without being linked directly to the CIA.

Yes indeed. We have this activity in Dallas, of everyone in underworld-and-spook-land converging on Dallas, and then just as quickly melting away. I find myself wondering whether there are any similar patterns in these other places. In Miami, perhaps. Or in Chicago? A whole ton of Cubans converge on the place, along with a whole bunch of spooks who have no real reason for being there, and many mysterious fellows from out of town, and we have the whole deal with fake Secret Service people and the rest - think of the logistics involved in setting all that up, and the complexity and expense of getting all those people converged at the same time.

Say, for example, we go with the Chauncey Holt story for starters. That's 20 secret service badges, a whole bunch of fake ID's, some other supporting documents... was this done for Miami and Chicago too? I don't see the same kind of converge-and-melt-away behavior taking place in those cases, although I'm sure they haven't been as thoroughly researched. It looks to me as though there must have been something special about Dallas, and not only that I'm thinking there might have been some kind of backup plan just in case the shooter missed. After all, convincing fake Secret Service agents are probably hard to come by, it's not everyone who can flash a badge and gain instant trust.