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...if the official account is accepted, no known intelligence service found Oswald's thirty-one-month defection to the Soviet Union of sufficient interest to ask him about it, even though other American citizens --- simple tourists as well as defectors --- were being closely questioned upon their return from the USSR. Contradicting the official account, there is the veritable showcase of positive evidence suggesting a relationship between Oswald and some branch of the U.S. intelligence services.
The question of just what intelligence role Oswald might have played may never be settled with any wide acceptance. Even the possibilities of how he might have been used invite strenuous debate among experts. With this in mind, it is useful to consider some of the more conventional possibilities:
These possibilities are within the realm of theoretical connections with U.S. intelligence services. There is, of course, the scenario that calls for Oswald's recruitment by the KGB while a Marine in Japan and for his continuing his training as a Soviet agent during his defection. (This is given full treatment in Edward J. Epstein's Legend.) While this thesis may be true, Oswald's continuing posture as a pro-Soviet, according to most respected critics as well as a CIA analyst, is certainly a peculiar adornment for a spy of that stripe...
Next, a few general comments from Harold Weisberg. These come from the Introduction (p. 7) to Photographic Whitewash: Suppressed Kennedy Assassination Pictures, published in 1967.
I believe deeply that our society is not safe when a murdered President can be dishonored with a palpably inadequate and entirely unsatisfactory official investigation by the government that succeeded him, by a dubious inquest that is not unfairly designated a "whitewash." No president and the institution of the presidency are ever safe when this can happen, and it did happen. All of the basic institutions of our society are thus in jeopardy.
To write critically of this fake inquest is not an attack on society or what has come to be called "The Establishment." The contrary is true. Our society, our concepts of law and justice, presuppose error. We know that courts and judges will err. The organization of our justice, in acknowledgment, provides a mechanism for correction of error, for justice.
Is a president less in the eyes of the law of "The Establishment" than an outcast, a nobody, an unclaimed derelict, to find whose murderer authority never ceases searching? We assume that no murder may be unsolved --- except this President's. That the government never intended solving. It sought only explanation that it could persuade a world, already subject to monumental public relations persuasion, to accept. It substituted contrived statistics for reality, unwarranted speculation for fact...
What from the very first has been lacking in the aborted accounting of the assassination has been the working of normality. In every other crime the law can work its course. In our country, that requires two separate sides. The government is denied the right or power to pretend it alone protects the accused while prosecuting him. It did this with Oswald, unstintingly doing the opposite while proclaiming his rights were being safeguarded. It never at any time considered the possibility that anyone else may have committed the crime or was in any way involved in it. This, perhaps, is the greatest dishonor, the worst disgrace. When, as often happened, there was indication of proof of his innocence of the charge of murder or sign of his government connections, the investigators went suddenly blind, or walked past the open door to truth. At every turn in the investigation, there was abundant evidence of the innocence of the accused. It was avoided or ignored or, when this was impossible, twisted or misrepresented.
...Historians know no more than the information made available to them, and for many years the United States War Department kept the records on Lincoln's assassination locked in files marked "secret." The War Department was in charge of the manhunt for Booth and his accomplices. It also assumed charge of the subsequent conspiracy trials. Although trial proceedings were published at the time, the Bureau of Military Justice sat on a great deal of conspiracy information, and the Army chiefs refused to release much of the data on the assassination and the pursuit of the conspirators. Not until the mid 1930's were pertinent War Department records placed in the public domain.
Accordingly, all previous accounts of the assassination were based on official Government statements and press releases angled, slanted and otherwise doctored to suit popular consumption, and on the sketchy (although voluminous) trial reports published by the official court reporters. Thus a towering edifice of so-called history was erected on sand. It made popular reading, but it lacked the exacting foundations of true historicity. How could the facts be known or assessed when the War Department withheld them from inquiring historians and even from such authorized investigators as senators and congressmen on contemporary Congressional Committees?
...The military censors had a field day with the Lincoln Murder case. From the outset [Secretary of War Edwin] Stanton held that many of the facts relating to the assassination were "not in the public interest." Eventually so much of the truth was tampered with that no one could learn the truth. Thus an immense deception was imposed and a stupendous crime was covered.
Today the cover-up is conceded by at least one Government agency which tells us in its official literature that "confusion and mystery" cloak Lincoln's assassination and "we probably shall never know all the facts."
...For seventy years the War Department kept the official files on the assassination conspiracy, the pursuit and capture of John Wilkes Booth, and the trial of Booth's accomplices under lock and key. One might assume that during the Reconstruction Era some legitimate purpose was served in this. But in decades long after the Civil War, what "national security" was protected by the military censors? As of 1890, for example, what strategic plans, operations, or weapons were safeguarded by this secrecy?
...In respect to the Lincoln murder case no modern intelligence device could be compromised. What could be compromised is the security of a myth, or the reputation of an institution, or the concealment of some figure or group who had been party to a heinous crime.
...Says the pamphlet issued by the Medical Museum of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, D.C.: "Confusion and mystery still surround the shooting of Abraham Lincoln, and we probably will never know all the facts. One thing is sure...his murder was part of a larger conspiracy."
But the facts of the murder conspiracy are lost to history. Probably they will never be unearthed. All participants in the great conspiracy are now dead. The last surviving witness to Lincoln's assassination ... died in 1956. (He was five years old when his godmother took him to see the President at Ford's Theater...)
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