50 Years Since JFK Assassination Retrospective: Did Oswald Work For U.S. Intelligence?

In Chapter 1 of the Report of the President's Commission On The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, entitled "Summary and Conclusions," the Warren Commission stated that "All of the evidence before the Commission established that there was nothing to support the speculation that Oswald was an agent, employee, or informant of the FBI, the CIA, or any other government agency."

Yet in his 1990 book Spy Saga: Lee Harvey Oswald and U.S. Intelligence, Southeastern Massachusetts University Professor of Political Science Philip Melanson stated the following:

"Lee Harvey Oswald spent nearly all of his adult life working for U.S. intelligence--most likely for the CIA--as agent-provocateur. He did so in both the domestic and international arena, right up to his involvement in the assassination.

"Oswald is enigmatic partly because he spent so much of his life in the shadowy, compartmentalized world of U.S. intelligence...He maintained a facade of leftism...In contrast, his associations and contacts were decidedly right-wing and anti-communist...False information was purposely created about Oswald...

"This analysis will reach a conclusion about a conspiracy in John F. Kennedy's assassination. It will demonstrate that Oswald's movements were still being choreographed by his handlers in U.S. intelligence--however fringe or renegade they may have been--at the time of the assassination...Persons who knew his background were fabricating...evidence of his guilt in the assassination. Such activity...constitutes conspiracy...

"In Oswald's case, the conclusion that he was a U.S. intelligence agent is not a footnote to the crime of the century but rather a window onto the conspiracy behind President John F. Kennedy's assassination..."

Professor Melanson also asserted that "The CIA has continuously obstructed pursuit of the truth about Oswald" and "The mainstream media remains captive to decades of secrecy and disinformation regarding Oswald: much of it emanating from the CIA." Spy Saga: Lee Harvey Oswald and U.S. Intelligence noted that "Intimations by CIA officers that the only missing piece of the Oswald puzzle and the only valid question of conspiracy related to the Soviet Union was endorsed on January 7, 1990 by the New York Times..."

(Downtown 6/23/93)