The Patsy

On October twenty first, nineteen fifty nine, four years before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, an next marine by the name of Lee Harvey Oswald sat alone in a hotel room in Moscow, the heart of the Soviet Union, just weeks shy of his twentieth birthday, Oswald was attempting to renounce his American citizenship and defect to the Soviet Union. After a few days of waiting, he finally received a

This is who killed jfk Sixty years later? What can we uncover about the greatest murder mystery in American history? And why does it still matter today? I'm your host, Solidad O'Brien.

In the last episode, we heard about how the Warren Commission had manipulated evidence in order to prove that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gun since they claimed that only three shots were fired from behind and one had missed. That left two shots. The third shot was the fatal shot to the President's head. The second shot came to

Regardless, the record shows that on September twenty fourth, nineteen sixty four, the Warren Commission presented their evidence and formally named Lee Harvey Oswald the lone Gunman, which is the story that persists today right.

The Commission painted Oswald as a loaner a mentally ill Soviet empathizer, an ex marine with an agenda. Even before the Warren Commission report was released, the public was fed a steady diet of press stories about Oswald the deranged lone gunman.

Less than forty eight hours after the shooting, Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade boasted that he had quote sent men to the electric chair with less evidence. He went even further to say the following about Oswald quote, I would say that without any doubt, he is the killer. There is no question that he was the killer of President Kennedy. And then on December tenth, less than three weeks after the murder, the New York Times headline read quote Oswald assassin beyond a doubt, FBI concludes.

And here's where I think it's important to dig into this historic moment. The only other murder of a president that carries a similar historic weight is the murder of President Lincoln, almost one hundred years earlier. But with Lincoln, there were no TV cameras covering moment to moment updates like there were in the Kennedy assassination. There were no kids like Rob Reiner who were sent home from school and then sat glued to their TVs to watch the

And it wasn't until years later, after a great deal of investigating, that a much different story would unfold. And that story starts with the words of Lee Harvey.

Oswell, I'm just a pat of President. I'm just a patsy.

A patsy is a guy who takes the fall for somebody else's scheme, a person who's manipulated into a position that ultimately leaves them powerless.

If you don't.

Learn who Lee Harvey Oswell really was, there's no way you can understand what happened on that day.

I'd like to understand more about who Oswald was, his child, what motivated him, But kind of like I guess I'm asking for pop psych one oh one on Oswald.

Oswald grew up in a broken home.

That's Dick Russell.

He never knew his father, who had died before he was born in nineteen thirty nine. His mother, Marguerite, placed him at a very young age in New Orleans with his two older brothers, and so he spent time in Foster care when he was very young.

Did he stay in New Orleans his entire childhood?

He ends up kind of bouncing around with his mother between various places, and when he's thirteen years old, they moved to New York City. Well, according to the official Warren Commission record, he stayed away from school and there were truancy charges that came.

Up against him.

So in the spring of nineteen fifty three he was remanded to a place called the Youth House in New York for psychiatric observation, and the chief psychiatrist there was a man who would later testify before the Warren Committed. His name was doctor Renatus Hartogs.

Hello, doctor Harthogs. Yeah, oh, yes, this is Dick Russell. I'm the writer who called you the other day. So tell me what's on your mind. Okay, I'm as I said. Doing some research.

Into the Warrant Commission, a Heartthog said Oswald had a cold, detached outer attitude and viewed his life in sort of a non participating fashion. He had a vivid fantasy life and turning around topics of omnipotence and power. So Heartog said he had diagnosed the teenage Oswald as a kid with personality pattern disturbance, schizoid features, and passive aggressive tendencies.

Hearthogs testified that Oswald's psyche was so abnormal that he wanted to continue to examine them, and he did so. He placed the teenage Oswald in a three week study. And here you have the beginning of a narrative that starts to develop.

But that narrative, and really everything we hear from Heartthogs has to be understood through the lens of who Heartthogs actually was. So let's look deeper into his past and the people he associated with.

Today's my eighty sixth birthday. So today is I'm an happy birthday. I'm an old man. So see, I'd also heard that you didn't you work in the fifties with doctor Malletts. Doctor who Sidney Malletts. No, I didn't know the name.

Sounds familiar to me.

But he worked at Columbia Presbyterian. Oh no, no, really not.

Okay, all right, what Heartogs was telling me was not true. Sydney Malletts, who was a professor of psychology at the time, was under contract for the CIA, and evidence shows that Hertogs worked closely with doctor Malletts on a hypnosis program that was highly classified. Our dogs would tell the Commission that he found Oswald's personality so intriguing that he chose him for a seminar subject.

What do you mean by the.

CIA was working with troubled kids, finding troubled kids in various places and grooming them in different ways, and they would track them over the years to see if at some point they might be useful. Not too long before he died, I had a long interview with Sidney Gottlieb, who ran the CIA's Technical Services Division from the early fifties into the nineteen seventies. He told me about how the government experimented with LSD after it was introduced to the States in nineteen forty eight, so.

It's factly nothing known about it at this time. We decided a group of people and myself that we needed simply to find out a lot about this material in a hurry, and that's what led.

Kalpa Mkultra is a code name for an illegal human experimentation program designed by the CIA. The goal was to find a way to control the human mind, and they were experimenting also with so called brainwashing.

So it's like most government programs. It took off and it got going, you know, and then it was hard to stop it.

They gave LSD to the subjects without their consent, along with electroshocks, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, and other forms of torture. I ushed to muse a lot about boy, this is the only place you can do illegal things. Lee on in a way? Is this great? And you got the whole blessings of this puncil gufflement?

So are you saying you think Lee Harvey Oswald might have been part of the MK ultra program.

There's no way to know for certain, but it seems this was the backdrop against which Oswald and other young people were cultivated.

What we know for sure is that Oswald had a troubled past, and after being studied by doctor Hartogs, at age sixteen, he tried to enlist in the Marines. He wanted to serve his country. He was turned down, and then the next year he tried again and this time he got in.

Where's he sent?

First September of nineteen fifty seven, He's assigned to the Atsugi Naval Air Base just outside Tokyo. In the years after World War Two, Japan became ground zero for Cold War espionage, and at Sugi was the American base in the area. It was a hotbed of activity. There were a number of intelligence groups operating out of Tokyo, including the CIA and a group known as Field Operations Intelligence

Yeah, and even though he's just a radar operator, you know, kind of a low level guy. Oswald is hanging out at a place called the Queen Bee, which is one of the most expensive exclusive nightclubs in Tokyo.

Oswald was earning less than eighty five dollars a month and take home pay. And typically you'd go to the Queen Bee and it would cost you sixty five to one hundred dollars for the night. Oswald he didn't have any of the money to do that. I mean, it was it was basically a night spot that catered to pilots, including the U two officers, not marine privates.

So you have this young marine who didn't finish high school, this odd ball loaner, hanging out at an exclusive officers club.

What is he doing there?

What was he doing there?

Well, one night, he's having a good time. I'm he's spending time with a beautiful Japanese woman when he is spotted by an intelligence officer named Richard case Nagel, someone that we're going to hear a lot.

About throughout the podcast.

I interviewed Nagel throughout the nineteen seventies, eighties, and nineties, and I eventually wrote a book about him called The Man Who Knew Too Much For Now. All you need to know is that in the late fifties he was working for an intelligence group called Field Operations Intelligence, operating out of Tokyo. Nagel told me that both he and Oswald later became part of an operation that tried to convince a Soviet colonel named Nikolai Erashkin to defect to

After a SUGI, didn't he go back to the United States for a little while.

He goes home shortly before Christmas on nineteen fifty eight, and he spends a month's leave with his mother and then he reports to Marine Air Control Squadron number nine in Santa Ana, California. The Marines who served with him there said that they often called him Comrade Oswaldkovich because he would you start talking about the wonders of Karl Marx.

And then there's Tosh Plumley.

Tosh Plumley worked for the US Army and Military Intelligence in the nineteen fifties. In the sixties he became a CIA operative. He was a mercenary pilot.

Nineteen fifty nine was the beginning of NIXA at North Carolina. That was propaganda training operations, illusionary warfare training, and the object there was training us to take over communication sites and a spread propaganda.

Was that the first time you met Oswald.

Yeah, that's when I first run into Lee.

And at that point you knew that you were an operative for the CIA.

I knew I was in special ops, but I wasn't sure I knew something something funny was going on. Of course, in those days, you got to take into account that we figured whatever the government told us and whatever military told us, and whatever was printed in the media was gospel truth.

Was Oswald part of that.

I was under the impression that Lee he was an operative and he was being trained for a specific operation. I was under the impression at that point that this man, this kid that I met my age, was part of the old original recruitment of young teenagers getting in trouble.

Now, it wasn't only Plumbley who said this, Victor Marquetti, who was a CIA official who then wrote a very well known book in the nineteen seventies that exposed a lot of things as CIA didn't want out.

The book is called The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. It refers to itself as quote the first book the US government ever went to court to censor before publication.

The program in North Carolina was designed to leave the impression that these young, troubled men had become Communist sympathizers to make them appear to be disenchanted with the American system.

Marquetti's book alleges that in nineteen fifty nine, the US was struggling to get information out of the Soviet Union, so they ran this operation out of Nag's head on about forty young men.

The CIA was trying to gain an advantage against the Soviets. They wanted to have a group of young men under their control to be thought of as read so they cultivated these young men to look like legitimate commune and as sympathizers for potential use in covert operations.

And Lee Harvey Oswald was.

There primarily he was recruited I think at that point in time to be a defector, disgruntled person to go to Russia. And I think that you too, assignment was a cover in order to get him into Russia.

So two different people who knew him and the Marines say the same thing that Oswald was preparing to defect to the USSR as a fake defector. So how exactly does the U two assignment factor into that?

Well?

Having information about the United States top secret spy plane establishes him as a potential high value asset to the KGB. Now you combine that with the fact that he's learning Russian, he's preaching Mars, and he appears to be unhappy with America. Oswald then requests a dependency discharge to take care of his mother, where they grant the discharge to him three months ahead of when he's scheduled to be released from the Marines. And what does he do on the day

So he's about to go to Russia, yes, ma'am.

On September tenth, nineteen fifty nine, Oswald sails from New Orleans to London and then he catches a flight from London to Helsinki, Finland. After waiting five days for his passport to arrive, he takes a train from Finland to Moscow.

When Oswald leaves the US, he's got a bank account that has a little more than two hundred dollars and the trip is going to cost at least fifteen hundred dollars.

So is the assumption here that US intelligence is actually secretly footing the bill.

Not only footing the bill, but guiding him on where to go, how to cross the border, and he.

Seemed to know exactly what route to take.

According to people like David Talbot, all of this starts to paint a clear picture.

He was inserted, I believe as a spy. He was a false de factor. There's actual proof that Oswald was a spy.

You were told by people in the Tokyo station that Oswald had been sent to Russia on a CIA mission.

When I first heard this, I didn't really believe it, uh huh, And then I started getting curious.

Nineteen seventy six, I interviewed CIA officer James Wilcott at the time Oswald was there. He worked in the finance department of the CIA stationed in Tokyo. He issued checks to secret agents, although they were all listed under code names under oath. He told the House Select Committee on Assassinations that he was aware that Oswald was a paid agent for the CIA.

I paid out fun for Oswald over some period of time for the Oshald project, and the story I got was that he was sent to the Soviet Union as a double agent.

So there are marines saying Oswald told them he was going to be a fake defector and now a CIA accountant, saying he actually paid Oswald if Oswald was employed by the CIA, something they denied for decades. How was that not headline news?

The New York Time really really distorted and wanted my testimony that I gave before the House Cooler Committee.

The New York Times says that there are quote several discrepancies in the recollections of mister Wilcott. It describes Wilcott as quote support staff, a low level worker. It says he cracked Oswald's code name as a result of hearsay at the agency months after the assassination. It is a brutal write up.

The CIA immediately denied Wilcott's accusation, and after his testimony, Wilcott was put under surveillance and harassed. His tires were slashed, sugar was poured into his gas tank. He got a new job, and then his new employer fired him because even he was getting harassed, all to discredit him.

The CIA has been doing this kind of stuff for years. People like James Angleton made their way up the CIA organizational chart by mastering the art of disinformation, So discrediting Wilcott was just another flavor of the same manipulation that they used on Oswald.

He was just when he excited, he was a fancy.

What's Oswald's first move when he gets to Russia.

He goes into the American embassy and he throws down his passport and he says, I want to dissolve my American citizenship. So he's directed to a man named Richard Snyder, who is a consular official in the embassy who used to work for the CIA.

Snyder testified to the Warren Commission that something was off about Oswald.

Oswald Hans Snyder a note affirming that his allegiances to the Union of Soviet Socialist republics.

Then Oswald makes this very public proclamation that he wanted to defect and that he had top secret information about the U two spy plane to offer to the Soviets, And Snyder says, and this is a quote he would make available to the Soviet Union, such knowledge as he had acquired while in the Marine Corps.

Concerning his specialty.

Snyder said that quote this was part of a scene he had rehearsed before coming into the embassy. It was a pre planned speech. And it wasn't just Snyder who thought it was weird. There was another official there named John McVicker who testified to the Warren Commission that he thought Oswald was following a pattern of behavior in which he had been tutored by a person or person's unknown.

This is a pivotal moment.

One of the first things the American public was told about Oswald after the assassination was that he was an ex marine that had defected to the Soviet Union. It was a huge part of the narrative. The Warren Commission said that Oswald defected to the Soviet Union because he was a troubled young man. They never reported the fact that the CIA had a program to cultivate fake defectors. This wasn't known until the Church Committee revealed it in the mid seventies.

So you have two competing narratives.

One Oswald was interested in becoming a Soviet citizen, was willing to betray America and become I'm a trader, Or two he was instructed by the CIA as part of an intelligence operation.

I want to know how the embassy officials Snyder and nick Vicker respond to Oswald.

Snyder tries to talk Oswald out of renouncing a citizenship, and then he sends a confidential telegram to the State Department, which is forwarded to the CIA.

You see, Oswald knows that US intelligence is going to be made aware if he starts offering secrets and speaking out loud like this to the Soviets.

He's putting on a show.

Those reports reached Engleton's office in early November nineteen fifty nine.

That's Jefferson Morley again, creator of jfkfax dot Org.

Angleton opens the CIA's first file in Oswald. He was of interest to the highest counterintelligence officer in the CIA for four years before President Kent he was killed.

Did they track all of his movements during that period? Yes, they did.

All of his communications through the State Department were immediately passed to the CIA.

The FBI and j.

Edgar Hoover had an interest in Oswald. All of their paperwork on Oswald was forwarded to Engleton's people.

The CIA had this pretty thick file on Oswald. This is a fact that the CIA would spend decades denying. It was only in nineteen seventy six when one of Angleton's staff members revealed to the House Committee that she was instructed to open a file on Oswald.

They were watching him for four years before the assassination, and there can only be two reasons for this. Either he was in the Soviet Union on a mission or he was a bona fide defector that had offered to give the Soviet top secret information.

Obviously, the Russians suspect something is going on with this. The Russian authorities tell him your visa has expired and you've got to leave Moscow right away.

So what does he do.

He goes into his hotel room and he fakes a suicide attempt and creates an incident.

You think he faked his suicide in order to force the Soviets to keep him there.

I do.

He's a low level marine on assignment and he just failed. He's got to do something drastic in order to stay in the country.

They rush him into a psychiatric hospital for observation and he stays there for a week. I was told that the KGB thought that he fit the profile for psychologically conditioned agents. They decided to study him further so he didn't have to leave.

And they say, all right, you can stay and we'll just keep an eye on you because they don't want this international incident to be on their watch.

And then he drops out of sight in December, and nobody in the US here's from him for over a year, which starts to raise concerns for a certain person. Oswald's mother, Marguerite, goes to see Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State in the US. Somehow gets in to see him. This is all on record too, and shouts that her son was a government agent. And how comes she hasn't heard from him in almost a year.

How does Oswald's mom just get in to see Dean Rusk?

Like Marv Williams, I've wondered that too.

Who gets access to Rusk like that? Does Rusk do anything? Does Oswald know about this?

Word gets back to him somehow in the Soviet Union that mom is worried about it. Two days later, Oswald writes her a letter.

As it turns out, he was living pretty comfortably in the Soviet Union for the last year by Communist standards.

Anyway, they sent him to Minsk, a whole different part of the Soviet Union, where he's greeted by the mayor personally, and they promise him a free apartment while he works at a radio TV factory where he earns as much money as the director.

In Minsk, he meets a teenager named Marina. Her uncle is a colonel in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which is basically the Soviet version of the FBI. They work closely with the KGB.

So wait a minute, her uncle is a colonel in their FBI. That's the girl that Oswald just happens to meet.

He meets Marina at this dance. He introduces himself as Alec. She thinks he's a Russian citizen because he speaks Russian so well.

It is suspected that Marina's uncle encouraged her to go to the dance that night.

Here's journalist David Talbot again.

That was basically an espionage operation. It was a way to keep tabs on him. So I think the Soviet authorities were onto him right away and watch him very carefully.

After only a few weeks of knowing Marina, he proposes to her.

So now Oswald finds himself married into the network of the KGB.

And all while the CIA is watching him.

So with all these interests converging on him, this guy's got some baggage.

Which is why his next move is pretty shocking.

He writes to the American Embassy asking for arrangements to be made for him to return to the United States with Marina.

Isn't it weird that he's coming back to the US, given that he defected and denounced the US, I asked David Talbot, So what happened when he left the Soviet Union?

He came home to the US with great ease. He was not molested by the authorities when he came here. In fact, he was given a loan by the State Department to come back from Russia.

Wait, they gave him money.

The I S even offered Marina an exemption from the standard immigration quotas, so she came with him, along with their baby daughter June.

Well, they never asked him anything about, you know, but what he might have been involved in over there, or did he give secrets away? What about the U two? None of these things came up.

Anyone who claimed to be a defector said he was going to give military secrets to the Union height of the Cold War would have been clamped in irons unless they knew he was an espionage agent.

All right, So Rob, I'm going to need you to speak very slowly and very clearly, what the hell is going on?

I'll try to make it as simple as that can.

First, as a misfit kid, he's welcomed into the Marines, and then he shipped to Japan, where he gets a security clearance to be a radar plane operator on the U two spy plane. He learns Russian. He defects to Russia. Then after two years, he turns to the US with his Russian wife and is welcomed with open arms. The obvious explanation this is all done on behalf of the CIA, and in less.

Than eighteen months of his return to the United States, he'll take a job at the Texas school Book Depository in Dallas, Texas.

Right, But a lot would happen in those eighteen months.

On the next episode of Who Killed JFK? We uncover secrets in a place known as the Wilderness of Mirrors. What does sheep dipping mean?

It's somebody who is inserted into an operation to make it look like they're part of it, but they may not even know why what's happened to them.

We follow Oswald through the eyes of those who are watching him, Like Richard K. S Nagel.

He tried to warn Oswald that he was being used that people he thinks or his friends are not.

By sure Ecient struggled on the fact that it was an assassination.

Sits a plan, and because of that knowledge he was in.

Jeffardy Who Killed JFK is hosted by Rob Reiner and Me Solidad O'Brien and Our executive producers are Rob Reiner, Michelle Reiner, Matt George, Jason English, David Hoffman, and me Solidad O'Brien. Our writer is David Hoffman, with research by Dick Russell. Our story editors are Rob Reiner and Julie Pinneto. Our senior producer is Julie Pinneto. Our producers are Tristan Nash, Dick Russell, Michelle Goldfein, and Amari Lee. Our editors are