The Lancer Conference

In an essay included in the newly-published anthology Assassination Science, Jack White recounts a meeting with Penn Jones in the mid-70s that he said made a big difference in his assassination work. He quotes Mr. Jones as saying, "To do really good research, you need to specialize! Pick out one or two JFK subjects that really interest you, and then research the hell out of them!"

Specialized study is the hallmark of any good research, of course, and much was presented throughout the JFK Lancer weekend. But during the late afternoon and evening of November 21, it was especially startling in its scope, vis a vis Lee Harvey Oswald. By the time the evening was over, it was hard to say the words "Lee Harvey Oswald" and think you were referring to a single person.

The main event was John Armstrong's Harvey and Lee presentation --- his case for two Oswalds. A two and a half hour block of time was given to this topic. But Armstrong was preceded by Chris Courtwright and the aforementioned Jack White, both of whom have made Oswald one of their areas of expertise.

"Evidence is persuasive," Jack White said, "that while he was still a youth, his family volunteered to lend his identity to the U.S. government for use in a planned program of sending false defectors behind the Iron Curtain."

White's presentation was entitled "Too Many Oswalds: A Photo Essay." More on it shortly. But proceeding chronologically, I shall first recount Chris Courtwright's presentation, "Oswald in Aliceland."

As he began, Courtwright reminded the audience of George Michael Evica's comments of the day before, which echoed the Penn Jones quote above. "George Michael talked about the importance of focusing our research on certain very specific aspects of the case --- looking for the, quote, 'meaningful contradictions,' which often arise when we consider all the evidence." Courtwright was focusing on just two or three days in Oswald's life.

Chris's presentation was an expanded version of his article by the same name, which appeared in Lancer's Kennedy Assassination Chronicles. It examined possible sightings of Lee Oswald in and around the town of Alice, Texas in October of 1963, which don't conform to the official Warren Commission timeline of Oswald's movements.

First of all, location. Alice, Texas is a small town, some 400 miles south of Dallas, perhaps forty miles west of the Gulf city of Corpus Christi. Also figuring into Courtwright's account is the town of Freer, Texas, another forty miles or so west of Alice, and Pleasanton, Texas, some ninety miles north of Alice.

Most of what Chris presented was derived from material placed in the National Archives following the JFK Act of 1992. In the Alice sightings bulletted below, I have put the name Oswald in quotation marks since none of them are verified. The persons described more or less match the description of the Oswald arrested after JFK's assassination, with slight variations (hair color, etc.) which are not uncommon when multiple eyewitnesses describe the same thing.

According to the Warren Commission, during the period Chris examined, Oswald was returning from his Mexico City adventure. He crossed the border into the United States at Laredo, Texas in the wee hours of October 3, 1963. Then he took a Greyhound bus to Dallas via San Antonio, taking Interstate 35 the entire way.

The possible Oswald sightings, then, which don't mesh with that official story:

• On the afternoon of October 4, "Oswald" asked about a job at radio station KOPY, in Alice. He had been there the previous evening around 6pm. On Oct. 4, he left a woman and young child in his 10-year-old car, and said the woman spoke no English. Station employees later recalled the name "Lee Oswald."

• On an unknown date in October, "Oswald" applied for a job at the Hill Machinery Co. in Alice. One employee specifically remembered the name "Oswald." Another remembered a reference to the U.S. Marine Corps on the application. That same employee also recalled a woman waiting in the applicant's car.

• On an unknown date, again in Alice, "Oswald" asked for directions to the bus station, saying he needed to get to Dallas.

• The owner of KBOP said "Oswald" was looking for a job in early October in Pleasanton. The owner's wife said she got a phone call from the man before he stopped by the station.

• "Oswald" bought gasoline in Pleasanton, and asked the whereabouts of a pay phone. He was accompanied by a woman who spoke no English, and a child. Exact date unknown.

• In Freer, on October 3, "Oswald" was heard by a waitress in a cafe, between 6:30 and 7pm, asking about work. This man was accompanied by a woman resembling Marina Oswald, and a young child and infant. The man and woman were overheard conversing in a foreign language. The woman spoke only broken English.

• Early October, "Oswald" was seen by the wife of an attorney (who told the FBI) at a Corpus Christi shopping mall. The man she saw had a woman and small baby with him. The couple were conversing in a foreign language.

• Early October, "Oswald" attempted to rent a car at the San Antonio International Airport between 8 and 9pm. Yet again, he was accompanied by a woman with a baby. A corroborating statement was offered by an employee at another car rental counter.

• October 5, at around 7am, a motorist picked up a hitchhiking "Oswald" along Loop 281 in southern San Antonio, and drove him about thirty miles.

"What are we to make of all these reports?" Courtwright asked. "Marina and Ruth Paine have maintained consistently over the years that they did not see Oswald from the time he departed New Orleans until he turned up in Dallas prior to the October 5-6 weekend. Moreover, Rachel Oswald was born on October 20, and in none of these accounts is the woman with 'Oswald'" described as being pregnant. The descriptions of the wife are not always consistent, and -- except for the radio-station sighting in Alice -- the FBI reports on the sightings fail to provide any information on the sex of the child or children. Finally, under most circumstances, the varying descriptions of the age of the child or children with our south Texas Oswalds do not appear to match demographically with June Oswald."

There is the additional problem of this "Oswald" consistently seen driving a car. Officially, Oswald could not and did not drive. But Courtwright cited the research of Ian Griggs (see Fair Play #14, "Oswald: A Driving Force?") and an internal Warren Commission document released by the ARRB, written by W. David Slawson, which stated, "We are beginning to uncover bits of evidence which indicate that Lee Harvey Oswald may have been better able to drive a car than we previously believed. If this is so, it is significant primarily because he must have had a motive for keeping his ability secret."

"Just to heap a few extra layers of confusion on top of all of this," Courtwright said, "consider now that there appears to be an inordinate number of other Oswald sightings during this early October period." Here, Courtwright cited no fewer than nine more unexplained sightings of an "Oswald," who was staying at motels, applying for jobs, chatting merrily with Jack Ruby, and taking target practice without permission on private property.

"When we consider the possibility of a second Oswald or of Oswald's having been impersonated in these southern Texas sightings in early October, we need to note that whoever this was did not appear to have been behaving in an especially suspicious or violent manner ... In fact, the 'Oswald' seen in Alice and neighboring cities and towns appears to have been doing nothing more than what he would have been expected to be doing had he not already caught a bus back to Dallas: looking for a job. So it is important to recognize that the Oswald 'family' sightings appear to be in a second category of possible attempts to impersonate Oswald which may NOT be directly related to the assassination."

A third type of impersonation, Courtwright said, are those reports of an "Oswald" active in the United States at a time he is known to have been in the Soviet Union. "Someone tried to link Oswald's name with the purchase trucks from a New Orleans Ford dealer on behalf of an anti-Castro group, the Friends of Democratic Cuba, prior to the Bay of Pigs in early 1961."

Each of these categories, Courtwright says, only deepens the mystery of who Oswald really was. "It is my belief," he said, "that these categories are indicative of deep intelligence connections, only some of which may relate directly to the assassination."

Jack White's presentation was entitled "Too Many Oswalds: A Photo Essay," augmented by numerous slides and photographs, mostly of Lee Harvey Oswald.

White said he began studying the assassination right off the bat in 1963. But over the years, he noticed problems with some of the photographs of the alleged assassin, in that they seemed to be of different people. And some of them, moreover, seemed not to be genuine. One of the best known examples of this are the "backyard photos," which Oswald himself branded as false when confronted with them during his brief, post-assassination incarceration.

Even Oswald's own half brother, John Pic, told the Warren Commission that he wouldn't recognize certain pictures of the alleged assassin as his own brother.

Jack White's conclusion, after many years of study, is that there is "a distinct possibility" that there was more than one Lee Harvey Oswald. Moreover, the real Lee Oswald may still be alive. He said that Mae Brussell, the late California researcher, said she had met a mystery man claiming to be the "real" Oswald. White arranged for photographs of this man to be compared to a series of photographs purporting to be "Lee Harvey Oswald." The conclusions: while some of the photos matched police mug shots of Lee Oswald, some of the photos were fakes --- and the mystery man was identical to some of the "Lee Harvey Oswald" photographs.

White had earlier quoted Tony Mendez, a CIA "All-Star" on false identities during the 1950s: "The essence [of intelligence] is illusion and deception." White added that he wholly endorses John Armstrong's work.

On the face of it, the assertions of John Armstrong are so fantastic they can scarcely be believed. Two people raised separately but with the same identity, one of them an agent for the Soviet Union, both drawn into an assassination plot. It is beyond James Bond; it is, using the popular phrase, through the looking glass.

As more than one attendee to the November in Dallas conference remarked, Armstrong's work has not been subjected to peer review, and so must be regarded cautiously. And yet...

And yet there is the evidence that mounts steadily --- photographs, the recollections of dozens of witnesses, a long paper trail. Clearly, something doesn't add up. I Led Three Lives...

Armstrong was introduced to the audience at the Lancer conference by author Jim Marrs, who related how Armstrong had been in a class of his at the University of Texas, Arlington, in the late 1980s. "So John comes to me and starts talking about these 'two Oswalds', whom he has now labled 'Lee' and 'Harvey' to [distinguish between] the two. And I was going, 'Yeah John, that's great, sure, all right,' because it really sounded so far out. But then, a coup d' é tat in the United States sounded pretty far out in 1970.

"John kept working, kept dogging the trail, and came up with so much information, that pretty soon I was going, 'You know, I believe the boy's on to something...' And then he kept coming up with more, and more, and more ... and so, I just want to say that I think you should pay close attention here. Because I think the scenario that John Armstrong can present to you here, while maybe not one hundred percent on the target, is close enough that it may fill in some of the gaps and the inconsistencies that we've all been plagued with over the years."

A rapt audience at a 1996 John Armstrong presentation

Armstrong proceeded to deliver a spellbinding two and a half hour talk, complete with photographs, video inserts, and official documents on overhead projector. To reduce it to a series of highlights here would be an injustice, and yet the full text is far beyond the scope of this narrative. Harvey and Lee has been published by JFK Lancer and is available via mail order. It was also published, in two parts, in PROBE, the newsletter of the Citizens for Truth in the Kennedy Assassination (PROBE, Vol. 4, No. 6, and Vol. 5, No. 1). After his presentation I asked Armstrong if there is a significant difference in the two texts. He said no, there is not. The Lancer version is a little tighter, a little less redundant, he said. When I said I already had the PROBE copies, he suggested I save myself eight bucks. The differences are too slight.

Armstrong began by recounting the story of one Gordon Lonsdale, who to all appearances was a Canadian living in England --- but who was exposed as a Russian spy in the early 1960s. Lonsdale, whose true name was Konan Molodi, "had fake birth certificates, fake passports, and dual identities ... [he] was created by the Russian intelligence services. He was first 'handled' at age 9..."

Obviously, Armstrong began with this documented case to demonstrate there is a precedent for what we were about to hear: that the man known to history as Lee Harvey Oswald was, in fact, the same sort of creature of the Intelligence world as Gordon Lonsdale was. One critical difference is that "Lee Harvey Oswald" --- who I began referring to as "L/HO" in my notes --- may have been the product of American intelligence agencies.

If the KGB recruited young boys, Armstrong wondered, can there be any doubt that U.S. intelligence agencies ran similar operations? "In the early 1950s," he said, "an intelligence operation was underway that involved two teenage boys --- Lee Oswald from Fort Worth, and a Russian-speaking boy named Harvey Oswald from New York.

"Beginning in 1952, the boys lived parallel but separate lives --- often in the same city. The ultimate goal was to switch their identities and send Harvey Oswald into Russia, which is exactly what happened seven years later."

Evidence supporting this "parallel lives" theory included discrepencies in a wide range of records. Just a few examples:

• Contradictions in New York school records as published by the Warren Commission, and those of the New York courts;

• Apparent disagreement in Oswald's height, as reported by a court-employed psychiatrist, and as noticed by acquaintences in Texas just a few months later;

• Discrepancies over the number of times the youthful Oswald was confined in a youth home;

• "Lee Oswald" known to be living in New York, while a "Harvey Oswald" is known to be living in Stanley, North Dakota;

• A friend's recollection that Oswald had a tooth knocked out when he was slugged in the mouth, but dental records of the "Oswald" exhumed in 1981 showing no missing teeth, nor evidence of teeth being chipped or capped.

And on and on it went. A few such discrepencies might be explained away as bureaucratic blundering, the sort of inconsistency likely to crop up if any seemingly ordinary life is intensely scrutinized. But the examples Armstrong presented were more than just a few; they just kept piling up.

It was Harvey Oswald, John Armstrong said, who left for Russia in September 1959. Lee Oswald was in New Orleans and Florida around the same time, and soon began associating with Cuban exiles --- and their CIA handlers.

"Through early 1963, the activities of Harvey and Lee had no apparent relationship to the assassination," Armstrong told the Lancer audience. "But in the summer of 1963, things changed. Antonio Veciana observed his longtime associate, 'Bishop,' with Lee Oswald at the Southland Building in Dallas. 'Bishop,' also known as David Atlee Phillips, was head of Cuban propaganda for the CIA. Why would the head of CIA Cuba propaganda operations meet with Lee Oswald? Because the plot as we know it could not have succeeded without Lee Oswald.

"During the next two months, Lee Oswald was used to impersonate Harvey, in a series of events that were designed to set up Harvey as the assassin, and implicate Cuba as his sponsor. It is not unreasonable to speculate that David Phillips masterminded this plan."

As his long presentation drew to a close, John Armstrong said: "The full extent of this coverup remains hidden within classified documents at the National Archives ... most of the coverup has to do with protecting the identity of Oswald. He was not created by the Mafia, or Cubans, or Russians, or Dallas Police. He was the creation of the CIA, years before the assassination...

"Exposing and understanding the two Oswalds will not solve the Kennedy assassination. But it does give us insight to the capabilities of our intelligence operations. It allows us to understand why our government agencies conceal their knowledge of involvement with Oswald. It helps us understand why witness testimony was ignored, altered, and in some cases omitted. It helps us understand why evidence was altered, fabricated and destroyed. We finally know why Harvey Oswald was not allowed to stand trial and had to be eliminated.

"After thirty-four years, many pieces to this puzzle are still missing --- but if you understand who Harvey and Lee Oswald really were, who created them and who directed them, then you will know who was responsible for the assassination of John Kennedy."

Following Armstrong to the speaker's dais was Deep Politics author Peter Dale Scott. His topic, as published in the conference program, was "New Evidence." Much of what he had to say concerned --- we return now, somewhat cautiously, to the more common use of the name --- Lee Harvey Oswald.

Scott said: "Every U.S. agency that had files on Oswald --- and there was somewhere between, probably about a dozen --- whenever you look at them, there are always anomalies. Things that you can't explain...

"The State Department, at the time of the assassination, was perhaps the most forthcoming. They produced twelve files on Oswald right away --- solid files, most of them --- and then there was a problem with one of the things, they said, 'Whoops! We've got a thirteenth file!' That cleaned up one of the problems. But the most important files that we should have had from State, and never saw, were first of all the INR file on Oswald, which again is the Intelligence of State. They did have a file on Oswald, they never produced it --- and of course, we would dearly love to see the file on defectors..." That file was kept under lock and key in the office of Otto Otepka, Scott said, and on orders of the Kennedy government were taken away.

(Otepka served in the State Department during the Kennedy years, and oversaw a study aimed at determining which U.S. defectors to the Soviet Union were genuine, and which were Intelligence plants. One of the subjects of the study was Lee Harvey Oswald. Otepka was removed from his job, the study incomplete, in June of 1963.)

In a summary of his presentation published in the conference program, Scott writes,

In at least one CIA case, sanitization of files went to the lengths of creating a completely false document. We can speculate further that a number of other documents were rewritten, changing references to "Harvey Lee Oswald" (a widely recurring name in the files of at least nine agencies). We know that in some documented cases original file numbers were also altered. At least three federal files on "Harvey Lee Oswald" have never been released.

Establishing the true relationship between these agencies and Lee Harvey Oswald is a matter of immense historical importance, whether or not this discovery would tell us anything about the killing of President Kennedy. But it is a matter of current significance as well.

Since the first public meeting of the ARRB, I have been repeatedly alterting them to the existence of this cover-up. A year ago I appealed to them to depose, and if necessary subpoena, some of the individuals who can be identified as having participated in it. In a reply to my question at COPA in 1996, David Marwell indicated that as of that time the Board had not yet done so. Time is running out...

"That is a different thing from what Samoluk said they were going to do. And they should be doing both, in my mind, and if you agree with me --- that if we really want to understand this case, we have to understand the government's relationship to Oswald --- then perhaps you will add your voices to mine, in saying that they should go after these people, depose them, and if necessary subpoena them, to find out [what] it was, that made all these people, through a course of months, generate an awful lot of paper..."

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