CIA’s Cent and My Kopeck on JFK Assassination

US President Donald Trump declassified JFK assassination records, including those confirming that Lee Harvey Oswald was a poor marksman.

This was mentioned, for instance, in a report by CIA station chief in Moscow.

In November 1991, Vyacheslav Nikonov, the then assistant to the KGB head Vadim Bakatin and grandson of former Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov, disclosed the contents of KGB info on Oswald to his former American professor and friend Elbert Smith. They were acquainted since 1976 and Nikonov, having reviewed five thick volumes of KGB files, told Smith that “he was confident that Oswald was at no time an agent controlled by the KGB. From the description of Oswald in the files he doubted that anyone could control Oswald but noted that the KGB watched him closely and constantly while he was in the USSR [from 1959 till 1962 – A. P.]. The files also reflected that Oswald was a poor shot when he tried target shooting in the USSR”.

Elbert Smith volunteered that info to CIA officer Steven Heinberg. That’s how the above mentioned data ended up in the US archive.

And here is what I wrote in one of my own reports from Washington when I worked there as Izvestia’s bureau chief. One day in October 1981, at 4 a.m., mysterious individuals began to gather at Rose Hill Cemetery in Fort Worth, Texas. First, a dozen of men materialized, with guns protruding from their coats. An hour later, some more men joined them, armed with picks and shovels. Under the unblinking gaze of a man, dressed in everything black and standing at a distance, they started digging up one of the graves.

Only Hitchcock, the late master of the horror film industry, was missing. At dawn, however, cameras materialized, too. Choppers began to whirr over the cemetery, with reporters on their board trying to film the mysterious procedure. They had no luck, though, as the diggers covered their work area with a canopy.

Finally, the shovels and picks hit a concrete casing. It contained a half-rotten oak coffin. It was taken out of the grave and put into a black car. The car doors slammed, the tires squealed, and the cavalcade rushed off to Dallas, pursued by a swarm of reporters…

What happened almost 44 years ago in Texas was neither a treasure or vampire hunt, nor the filming of a new segment of the “Dallas” TV series, nor an attempt to kidnap a corpse in hopes of getting a ransom (such a criminal business was born in the USA then).

The said grave in Fort Worth was opened… to make sure that the person buried at Rose Hill Cemetery 18 years before was still there and that its remnants belonged to Lee Harvey Oswald. The man who, to believe the official version, shot John Kennedy and a few days later was shot himself by Jack Ruby, was still causing lots of rumors. Was he a “plant”? Did he act all by himself? Could he have been a secret CIA agent who killed the US President on orders from that agency? Each of these – and many other – assumptions had its supporters and opponents, on and on generating new investigations, because too many blank spots were left by the official investigation.

In 1975, Michael Eddowes, a British lawyer, author, and investigator, authored The Oswald File book. He claimed that a Soviet impostor replaced Oswald when the latter was in the USSR, came to the United States, killed John F. Kennedy, and was subsequently buried under Oswald’s name.

Eddowes challenged the results of Oswald’s autopsy performed by the Dallas County Medical Examiner. Even Oswald’s widow began to doubt: what if she had lived with Lee Harvey’s impostor? Eddowes sought action in Texas courts, insisting on exhumation. Oswald’s brother tried to prevent it to no avail.

The exhumation took place as mentioned above, costing Eddowes up to $15,000. The body, in an advanced state of decomposition, was taken to Baylor University Hospital, where trusted experts took charge of it. I won’t go into the sickening details of what happened next and was published by some American newspapers in front page reports.

Suffice to say that 3 hours and 50 minutes later Linda Norton, leader of the team of pathologists, said this to a crowd of journalists: “We now have no doubt whatsoever that the person buried at Rose Hill Cemetry with the name of Lee Harvey Oswald is Lee Harvey Oswald indeed.”