Why did Oswald kill Kennedy? Files take us no closer to that truth
At first glance there is not much in the 80,000 documents about the Kennedy assassination that is new – but that won’t stop wild speculation.
America’s National Archives hosts the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection that includes six billion typed words in documents about the 20th century’s most infamous killing.
It also houses the Zapruder film, 486 Kodachrome frames that captured the event but not the facts. Not even the moon landing has been viewed as often.
Also there in temperature-controlled isolation is Jackie Kennedy’s bloodstained pink Chanel-style suit. It will not go on public display before 2103. The suit that doctors cut from the dying president in Trauma Room 1 at Dallas’s Parkland Memorial Hospital is boxed up and preserved nearby.
Also in the collection is the mail order Italian-made Carcano 91/38 model bolt-action rifle Lee Harvey Oswald bought for $US19.95, paying $US1.50 for it to be posted to him as a Mr A. Hidell. Its model number indicates that it was designed in 1891 and the production run was restarted in 1938. Oswald used it just after midday on Friday, November 22, 1963, changing the course of history. The .38 calibre pistol with which he murdered Dallas police officer JD Tippit at 1.14pm is also there.
There is a “frequently asked questions” page on the archive’s website. Among them are: Can I see the artefacts? Can I access the autopsy report? Can I get a copy of the Zapruder film? Why aren’t all of the records online?
As of Wednesday night AEDT they were. Well, all the ones not literally flushed down the toilet or thrown on a suburban fire. Or “lost”.
Of course the most frequently asked question since 1963 has been: “Who shot the president?”
The answer is simple enough: Oswald, whether as a lone gunman or not. The release of 80,000 documents on Wednesday AEDT appears to shed no more light on that.
But the fact is that the US National Archives stores everything but the truth. Why did Oswald kill the president?
In the hours after the tidal wave of hitherto secret cables, letters and reports smashed on media shores much was made of cables sent from Sir Charles Spry, the legendary head of ASIO for two decades up to 1970, to CIA director Richard Helms.
They referred to a document created by Spry’s office and sent to the CIA at the time of the 1964 Warren Commission investigation into Kennedy’s assassination. This discussed anonymous telephone calls to the US embassy before the event claiming the Soviet Union had offered a contract for the assassination. The man said he was a Polish driver working at the Soviet embassy in Canberra and handily supplied the model of car he drove and its number plate. Both were false.
He also warned that he knew a half-dozen Soviet submarines were on their way to Cuba. They were not, but this was in the days before Kennedy ordered a naval blockade of Cuba, but after tensions between the two counties had reached boiling point after a US spy plane photographed evidence of the Soviet Union building nuclear weapons launch sites on the island.
Across Cuba’s South American embassies there was fevered gossip about plots to assassinate Kennedy, who had deeply humiliated Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro during the Cuban missile crisis.
The Australians rightly considered the “Polish driver” to be a crank and may even have been embarrassed to have sent the cable about him on to the US. Spry was reported to have been drinking heavily at the time.
When it appeared the Polish driver cables might be released in 1968, Spry’s concerns had nothing to do with Kennedy’s assassination and everything to do with saving face, both for him and prime minister John Gorton’s government. The now notorious CD971 cable was discussed by Spry in a letter dated October 15, 1968:
“I would recommend strongly that CD971 (itself dated May 22, 1964) should not on any account be declassified or publicly released for reasons which include the following:
1. It has never been officially stated that there is a C.I.A.. Canberra Station or that there are C.I.A. officers in Australia. This has been avoided as a point of policy.
2. Publication of these facts would invoke a series of questions by the press in the Parliament, which would be contrary to the national interest, for example:
a) Who approved establishment of the “C..I..A.. Canberra Station”?
b) What is its composition and location?
c) What is its purpose in Australia? (Allegations have already been made that the C.I...A.. is interfering in Australian domestic affairs.)
d) With what Australian agencies does it deal? (A..S..I..S., which has not been publicly disclosed, could be brought into discussion.)
e ) With what other foreign agencies does A..S..I..O.. deal?
f) What ministerial control is there over such dealings?
g) Questions could be raised as to the investigation by the A..S..I..O.. of the anonymous telephone calls, the validity of its quoted conclusion and the result of its further inquiries.”
No mention of Kennedy there. The existence of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service – our foreign intelligence department – was not confirmed for another four years. Spry was asking his American intelligence counterpart to keep our secrets secret.
What the files read so far reveal is that, as we have known for more than 62 years, Oswald still did it. That is not to say that he was not involved in a conspiracy to kill the president – evidence sent to intelligence services from a former US agent who worked in Mexico suggests that is quite likely.
But there were thin pickings on Wednesday for conspiracy theorists. For a start, despite these documents being published from the National Archives “digital library”, they are in the main photocopies of photocopies of letters, documents and cables – some handwritten – almost a lifetime ago. Many are faded and difficult to decipher, which is why they were not able to be digitised by an optical character reader.
But a few of the files will reheat old conspiracy theories. It is said that everyone old enough remembers exactly where they were when Kennedy was shot. We also know where Oswald was: on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building where the murder weapon was found.
But some will believe one of the notes released on Wednesday will cast doubt on that. In late 1959, Oswald went via New Orleans by ship to France and England from where he flew to Helsinki, where the Soviet embassy gave him a visa to enter Russia. He spoke Russian crudely and while living there mail to and from Oswald was intercepted by the US intelligence services. So too by the KGB. The Russians assumed he was mentally imbalanced and watched him closely.
He tried to renounce his US citizenship but the Russians were coy about extending his visa. Eventually he met a student, Marina Prusakova, married her within weeks and she became pregnant. By then Oswald was jack of the place, which had no “nightclubs or bowling alleys”, just “trade union dances”. It turns out that he had been attending a shooting range.
Just on 30 years ago an American professor, Elbert B. Smith, who once taught American history at Moscow University, sat down with a Slava Nikonov to discuss what Nikonov knew about Oswald. Smith’s report on this conversation was released on Wednesday.
Nikonov claimed to have studied closely the Russian files on Oswald to try to discover if there had been any connection between the KGB and Kennedy’s killer. What Smith was told was much more prosaic: Not only had the KGB never controlled Oswald but they believed him unmanageable.
“Nikonov is now confident that Oswald was at no time an agent controlled by the KGB,” Smith’s memo read. “From the description in the files, he doubted anyone could control Oswald, but noted that the KGB watched him closely and constantly while he was in the USSR.”
Nikonov described the young lovers’ marriage as “stormy”. Marina “rode him incessantly”, and presumably also wanted out of the Soviet Union.
But Nikonov included one odd gem. When the KGB followed Oswald to firing ranges, he was seen to be “a poor shot when he tried target firing in the USSR”. Presumably he improved.
Another letter released on Wednesday was from a Sergyj Czornonoh, of whom I can find no evidence but for a sealed document in the file university archives of the California State University.
In the letter Czornonoh claimed he had warned an American consul in the Bulgarian capital Sofia as early as August 1963 that he had heard that Oswald planned to kill Kennedy.
Rather than a Polish driver being the informant, it had been the girlfriend of a contact at Bulgaria’s Soviet embassy. The contact told Czornonoh his girlfriend said in no uncertain terms that “Lee Harvey Oswald is assassin. He will kill President Kennedy.”
Czornonoh claimed the US official to whom he spoke dismissed his concerns. He wrote: “Director told me you too can have a weapon – so what if Oswald got a weapon.” Unfortunately, Czornonoh revealed his secret only in 1978.
What the files read so far reveal is (what) we have known for more than 62 years... That is not to say that Oswald was not involved in a consipitacy to kill the president... But there were thin pickings on Wednesday for conspiracy Theorists
Coincidentally, in August 1963, a week before Czornonoh claims he was told in advance about the crime of the century, Oswald was in New Orleans handing out pro-Castro leaflets and was attacked by some local Cuban anti-communists. The police became involved and they questioned Oswald, who told them he was part of the local chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which was headed by an A. Hidell. It turned out to have a membership of one: Oswald.
He agreed to take part in a local radio debate with his assailants days later and made clear he was a Marxist, but also that he was most concerned with the poor relations between the US and Cuba in which he hoped to settle: “We are striving to get the United States to adopt measures which would be more friendly towards the Cuban people and the new Cuban regime in that country.”
Authorities did not know it then, but it had been Oswald who in March 1963 shot at retired US Major General Edwin Walker, an avowed anti-communist, as he worked in the office of his Dallas home. The next time Oswald used the Carcano 91/38 it would make bigger headlines.
After New Orleans, Oswald moved to Mexico, meeting up there with Marina and their new child. It is well known that he applied for visas to Cuba and to the Soviet Union. By the time the Cubans issued him a travel visa he had given up and returned to the US.
But he did rather more in Mexico, attending parties and mixing with pro-Cuban locals, even having a fling with a Cuban woman. At one party he was among senior Cuban diplomats including Eusebio Azcue, who had reportedly said he hoped Kennedy – seen as a danger to the future of Cuba – would be assassinated. “The only solution is to kill him,” he was overheard to say. Now he was feet from that assassin. A coincidence?
In 1969, Charles William Thomas, who was unaccountably being managed out of the US State Department, sat down and wrote a last note to his boss explaining all the connections he had discovered between Oswald and the Cubans and Russians while he worked at the US embassy in Mexico City for three years from 1964.
A sober, considered and calm man – the real diplomat – Thomas wrote that “it would be easy and convenient to sweep all this matter under the rug … but on the basis of the facts I have presented, I believe that, on balance, the matter warrants further investigation.” The letter was passed to the CIA, which had so failed the dead president. It saw no need for further investigation. Two years later Thomas shot himself.
Ironically, the three main players in the events of November 22, 1963 – Kennedy, Oswald and Tippit – were all buried on the same day: Monday, November 25.
But the story was never going to end there.
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