After studying the 26 volumes of the Warren Commission report in detail, businessman John Armstrong found so much information suggesting that there may have been an Oswald double that he launched a full-time investigation of his own.
The theory of an Oswald double had already been advanced in 1966 by Professor Richard H. Popkin in the book The Second Oswald. Popkin pointed to several details that, in his view, suggested the existence of a double and argued that all observations of a second Oswald constituted evidence of a conspiracy.¹
Armstrong, for his part, spent twelve years researching and reading everything he could find about Oswald and the Kennedy assassination. The project took him not only to the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington and to several U.S. states, but also to Switzerland and Argentina.
Armstrong tracked down and interviewed classmates, teachers, doctors, coworkers, friends, and acquaintances who had known Oswald. He concluded that the man who was shot by Jack Ruby on November 24, 1963—whom Armstrong refers to as “Harvey Oswald”—had been selected as early as the beginning of the 1950s to participate in a secret project.
MKULTRA was an illegal, top-secret behavioral modification research program launched by the Central Intelligence Agency in the early 1950s.
According to Armstrong, who presented his findings in the book Harvey and Lee,² the intelligence community had developed a plan to merge the identities of two physically similar individuals. Under this theory, the Russian-speaking Oswald would be placed in the Soviet Union as a spy, while the other Oswald, “Lee,” would serve as a covert operative in the United States.
According to Armstrong, Lee would later play a role in framing “Harvey” for the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
The theory may sound far-fetched, but, according to the author, there is considerable evidence suggesting it could be true.
As early as 1931, the Soviets had reportedly sent a nine-year-old Russian boy named Konon Molody to live with an aunt in California. He attended school in the United States, learned flawless English, and later returned to the Soviet Union as an adult to be trained as a spy.
In 1954, he was sent to Canada and assumed the identity of a deceased man named Gordon Lonsdale. The following year, he traveled to England as a businessman while simultaneously conducting espionage activities involving defense secrets.³
Armstrong wrote:
“If the KGB recruited young boys, can there be any doubt that our intelligence agencies had a similar operation?”⁴
Armstrong claimed that two boys named Lee Harvey Oswald, with similar appearances and each having a mother named Marguerite, had lived in different locations at the same points in time.
Although they allegedly looked very much alike, “Lee” was said to be at least ten centimeters (about four inches) taller than “Harvey” and more heavily built.
Myra DaRouse Larue, who had worked as a home-school teacher for Oswald when he was in the eighth grade in New Orleans, described him as short, thin, and lacking “an ounce of fighting spirit.”
She also stated that he preferred to be called Harvey.
On one occasion when Harvey injured himself, Myra accompanied him to a medical clinic and later went with him to his home on Exchange Alley.
The problem, according to Armstrong, is that the Warren Commission, along with testimony from Myrtle Evans and Julian Evans, indicated that Oswald and his mother were living in an apartment on St. Mary’s Street during that same period.
After Harvey completed the eighth grade, Myra never saw him again.
Armstrong later showed Myra a photograph of Oswald taken when he was in the ninth grade, in October 1954.
After studying the photograph carefully, she reportedly said:
“That’s not Harvey. That’s not the boy I knew from my home-school classes. I don’t know who this boy is.”⁵
Armstrong further claimed that there was a ”false Marguerite Oswald” and that she had been designated at an early stage by intelligence agencies to act as the guardian of Lee Harvey Oswald, whom Armstrong refers to as Harvey Oswald.
As evidence, Armstrong pointed to an interview conducted with this alleged ”false Marguerite” by John Carro, the director of a juvenile facility where Oswald had stayed. According to Armstrong, she made several mistakes when describing her family background—errors that the real Marguerite supposedly would never have made.
Among other things, she stated that she was the youngest of six children, despite the fact that the real Marguerite’s family had only five children.
She also claimed that Lee Harvey Oswald’s father was named Robert Lee Harvey, even though his actual name was Robert Edward Lee Oswald.
She said that he had died at the age of 45, although he was reportedly only 43 when he died.
In addition, she gave her wedding date as July 19, 1929, even though Marguerite had actually married in 1933.
According to Armstrong, the discrepancies did not end there.
She allegedly stated that her sister’s name was Lillian Sigouerette, when her sister’s real name was Lillian Murrett. She also gave Lee Harvey Oswald’s birthday as October 19, even though the correct date was October 18.⁶
Reasonably, the author argues, one would expect anyone to remember how many siblings they have, the name of their husband, the name of their sister, and the birth date of their child.
Armstrong also contended that while Oswald was beginning ninth grade in Texas in the fall of 1954, another boy of the same age named Lee Harvey Oswald appeared to be enrolled in a school in New Orleans.
Both boys reportedly had mothers named Marguerite.
Ordinarily, this might be dismissed as a coincidence. However, according to Armstrong, the situation becomes more difficult to explain by chance when one considers that the boys allegedly looked remarkably alike and that all school records relating to one of them have disappeared.
If two boys with the same name, the same birth date, and very similar appearances began attending different schools at the same time, and both had mothers named Marguerite, the author argues that it would seem highly unlikely for the entire situation to be merely a coincidence.
Much suggests, according to the author, that those behind the Kennedy assassination recognized this problem and solved it by destroying all records documenting the education of the Oswald who attended junior high school in Fort Worth immediately after the assassination.
Oswald’s mother, his brother Robert Oswald, and several of his classmates all testified that he had attended a school in Fort Worth. The assistant principal of the school, Frank Kudlaty, also confirmed that a student named Lee Harvey Oswald had attended the school.
The day after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Kudlaty received a phone call asking him to come to the school because the Federal Bureau of Investigation wanted to meet with him and examine Oswald’s enrollment records—which, according to the account, strangely contained no information about his previous schooling.
Because the school did not have a photocopier, Kudlaty handed the original documents over to the FBI without receiving a receipt.
According to the author, those documents have never been seen again.
Milton Kurian, a colleague of the psychiatrist at the juvenile facility where Oswald had stayed, spoke with Oswald in March 1953 after Oswald had attended school for only 24 days during the fall semester of 1952.
Kurian stated that Oswald was short for his age and described the thirteen-year-old as being approximately 1.18 meters (3 feet 10 inches) tall.⁷
However, according to Oswald’s school health records from New York, he was 1.37 meters (4 feet 6 inches) tall⁸—about 20 centimeters (8 inches) taller.
Kurian was therefore reportedly very surprised when he was later confronted with the fact that Oswald’s recorded height was 1.37 meters.
“Those figures must be wrong,” Kurian exclaimed. “He was a little guy and didn’t come any higher than the middle of my chest….”⁹
Kurian also stated that Oswald had told him that his mother had been married five times and that, with one exception, his stepfathers had been cruel to him.
In reality, Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother had not been married five times, and the only stepfather he ever had was Edwin Ekdahl.
Kurian further reported that Oswald had claimed that one of his brothers sometimes took his place at school.¹⁰ Since Oswald’s brothers were several years older than he was, it would have been impossible for them to pass themselves off as their younger brother.
According to the author, this suggests that Kurian and Hartogs may have encountered two different boys.
When the Warren Commission asked Oswald’s half-brother John Pic to identify an old photograph of a fourteen-year-old Lee at the Bronx Zoo in 1953, Pic was unable to do so because he did not recognize him.¹¹
Later, when Pic was asked whether he recognized Oswald in film footage showing him distributing leaflets in New Orleans, he replied that he did not recognize that person either.¹²
In fact, during his Warren Commission testimony, Pic was reportedly unable to identify his brother on seven separate occasions.¹³
Pic even stated outright that he would never have recognized his brother when he returned from Russia because his distinctive ”bull neck” was ”gone.”¹⁴
Armstrong and others who advocate the theory of an Oswald double also point to a more significant source: the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation himself.
J. Edgar Hoover evidently suspected that there might be an Oswald impostor.
On June 3, 1960, Hoover sent a memorandum to the State Department stating that someone was impersonating Oswald and might even be using his passport.¹⁵
After his schooling and his time in the Civil Air Patrol, Oswald applied to join the United States Marine Corps.
On October 26, 1956, he reported to the Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego in San Diego, California, where he was assigned to recruit training with the Second Battalion.
According to military records, Oswald was then 1.72 meters (5 feet 8 inches) tall and weighed 61.2 kilograms (135 pounds).
His next assignment was Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi.
Oswald’s superior officer, Daniel P. Powers, testified that Oswald read frequently, did not play cards or work out in the gym with the other Marines, and often spent weekends alone away from the base.
Oswald completed the course in June of that year, graduating seventh in a class of thirty Marines. He qualified in his Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) and as an Aviation Electronics Operator (radar operator).
In July, he reported to Marine Corps Air Station El Toro in California.
When Oswald’s unit received its first weekend leave, the other Marines took a taxi to Mexico, while Lee Harvey Oswald left them and did not rejoin them until it was time to return to camp.
Oswald’s colleague Felde later stated that this pattern repeated itself on other trips. Oswald would travel with the group to and from the base but would not stay with them once they reached town.
The question, then, is:
If Oswald did not spend his leave time with the other Marines, what was he doing instead?
Could it be that during these periods he was receiving Russian-language training at the military language school in Monterey, California, as part of a program run by Naval Intelligence to prepare him for intelligence work?
Former FBI agent and researcher Harold Weisberg obtained, through the Freedom of Information Act, a document from a Warren Commission meeting held on January 27, 1964.
According to the document, the Warren Commission was aware that Oswald had received instruction at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center in Monterey, California.
He spent three months at a Marine facility near Monterey, and according to released Marine Corps records, he was tested in the Russian language and reportedly answered approximately half of the questions correctly on the examination.
Instruction in foreign languages and language testing were not part of the normal training of Marines unless they were being prepared for work in intelligence.
The document also indicated that Lee Harvey Oswald kept left-wing literature in his barracks and subscribed to the communist publication People’s World.
Henry J. Roussel was a friend of Oswald’s and had a relative who was studying Russian in preparation for a position with the State Department. After Oswald had taken his Russian-language examination, Roussel introduced him to her. According to her account, Oswald spoke Russian exceptionally well.¹⁶
The official explanation is that he learned the language on his own by listening to recordings and reading Russian newspapers.
Professor Philip Melanson, who taught at a college, once asked a colleague specializing in languages how difficult Russian was to learn compared with Italian, Spanish, and French. The colleague replied that it was at least twice as difficult and that it could not realistically be mastered merely by listening to recordings and reading newspapers.
Rather, it would require at least 1,200 hours of study and the assistance of an instructor.¹⁷
Accordingly, the claim that Oswald learned to understand and speak Russian fluently simply by listening to records and reading Russian newspapers in his spare time cannot, according to the author, be taken seriously.
Whether or not he possessed a special aptitude for languages, Oswald must have received some form of training in order to learn such a complex language.
The alternative, according to John Armstrong, is that he already spoke Russian from an early age because it was one of his native languages.
Armstrong’s theory is that ”Harvey” Oswald was born into a Hungarian immigrant family in which Russian was also spoken.
Shortly after the shooting of police officer J. D. Tippit—a crime for which Oswald was also accused—a woman in New York allegedly telephoned Tippit’s widow on the afternoon of November 22 and stated that the Oswald arrested for her husband’s murder came from a Hungarian immigrant family living on 77th Street and Second Avenue in the Yorkville neighborhood of New York City.
The woman claimed to know this because she was acquainted with both the man’s father and his uncle.
The call is reportedly documented in an Federal Bureau of Investigation memorandum that was withheld from the public for thirty years.¹⁷
Oswald’s manner of speaking has also attracted considerable interest.
When Gary Oldman, the British actor who portrayed Lee Harvey Oswald in JFK, was preparing for the role, he studied Oswald’s speech patterns extensively.
Oldman became deeply puzzled after listening to recordings of Oswald’s appearance on a radio program.
“I toyed with the idea that he might have been a double, an impostor,”
Oldman later recalled in an interview.
“His accent was the strangest cocktail of all sorts of things. Usually there’s some complementary rhythm or melody to an accent that gives you the key to it. Oswald never had that.”¹⁸
Instead, Oldman explained, Oswald’s pronunciation was inconsistent within almost every sentence. Some elements sounded Southern, resembling an imitation of a New Orleans accent, while others sounded distinctly New York in origin.
Oldman’s dialect coach, Timothy Monich, claimed that Oswald’s accent was entirely unique.
“It doesn’t sound like anything you’ve ever heard,”
he said.
“It has American, Russian, and Spanish elements in it, and he also had a speech impediment.”¹⁹
When three language experts at Southern Methodist University analyzed recordings of Oswald’s voice—without being told whose voice it was—they reportedly all agreed that English did not appear to be the speaker’s native language and that he must have learned English later in life.²⁰
Having access to individuals with extensive knowledge of the Russian language was, of course, a major asset for American intelligence services during the Cold War.
There has been endless speculation about whether Lee Harvey Oswald was a Central Intelligence Agency agent or not.
According to the author, a more likely possibility is that he may have been an agent of the Office of Naval Intelligence, the U.S. Navy’s intelligence service, and that he was subsequently utilized by the CIA.
Michael Delavante, The Assassination of John F. Kennedy – Part 6
Also read part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4 and part 5
Sources:
- Richard Henry Popkin, “The second Oswald”, Avon Books, 1966
- John Armstrong, ”Harvey and Lee: How the CIA Framed Oswald,”, Qasar ltd, 2003
- John Armstrong, ”Harvey and Lee: How the Cia framed Lee Harvey Oswald”, Quasar, ltd, 2003, (page 10-11)
- Allen Dulles And The Doppelgängers, George Bailey, oswaldsmother.blogspot.se/ Saturday, September 7, 2013. Also see: Allen Dulles liked twins, http://southofheaven.typepad.com, 09/10/2013
- John Armstrong – Myra DaRouse Larue Interview Part 2, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gydTxr_ed8o
- The Two Marguerite Oswalds The Two Marguerite Oswalds by John Armstrong. http://harveyandlee.net/Moms/Moms.html
- John Armstrong ”Harvey and Lee: How the CIA framed Oswald”, Qasar ltd, 2003, (sidan 59) Also see: James DiEugenio, Lisa Pease, ”The assassinations: Probe magazine on JFK, MLK, RFK and Malcolm X”, Feral House, 2003, (page 95)
- Tall Lee and Short Harvey–School Days, by John Armstrong. https://harveyandlee.net/School/School.htm
- John Armstrong ”Harvey and Lee: How the CIA framed Oswald”, Qasar ltd, 2003, (page 58)
- John Armstrong ”Harvey and Lee: How the CIA framed Oswald”, Qasar ltd, 2003, (page 58)
- Tall Lee and Short Harvey–School Days, by John Armstrong. https://harveyandlee.net/School/School.htm
- Warren Commission Hearings: Vol. XI, Testimony of John Edward Pic Resumed, (page 65)
- John Armstrong’s University of Minnesota Speech, Minneapolis, May 15, 1999.
- Warren Commission Hearings: Vol. XI, Testimony of John Edward Pic Resumed, (page 56)
- Comrade HARVEY AND Agent LEE. http://harveyandlee.net/Comrade/Comrade_boy.htm. Se även: Scott P. Johnson,” The Faces of Lee Harvey Oswald: The Evolution of an Alleged Assassin”, (page 89)
- Spy Saga: Lee Harvey Oswald and U.S. Intelligence,” (page 11) Also see: Anthony Summers, “Not In Your Lifetime: The Assassination of JFK ,”Headline, 2013, (page 140)
- John Armstrong, ”Harvey and Lee: How the CIA framed Oswald,” Quasar Ltd, 2003, (page 67)
- Tongues on Wry Lend Special Flavor to Movies By JUDITH SHULEVITZ, The New york Times, February 09, 1992
- Tongues on Wry Lend Special Flavor to Movies By JUDITH SHULEVITZ
The New York Times, February 09, 1992. - Jim Marrs, ”Crossfire: The Plot To Kill Kennedy”, Carroll and Graf: NY) Jim Marrs, 1988, (page 547) Also see: Did Oswald Come Back? by Peter R. Whitmey, 1991.
