Robert Webster (left) and Lee Harvey Oswald (right)

Kit Klarenberg

Few things unite Americans like the certainty that John F. Kennedy was assassinated as the result of a conspiracy. This November 22, on the 60th anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination, polls show the overwhelming majority of US citizens do not believe accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald acted without accomplices. Many contend the Communist “lone nut” shooter was in fact merely an innocent “patsy”, as he himself proclaimed not long before being snuffed out by mafioso Jack Ruby.

That such skepticism overflowed in the aftermath of Kennedy’s assassination, and has endured ever since, is highly unusual. Almost without exception, mainstream politicians, pundits, and journalists have enforced the official narrative of a single bullet taking Kennedy down. Along the way, Western audiences have been deluged with articles, books, “documentaries” and more reinforcing the findings of the Warren Commission, a politicized whitewash set up by Kennedy’s successor Lyndon B. Johnson, specifically to convict Oswald, and Oswald alone.

This is despite the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) concluding Kennedy was “probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.” The CIA aggressively stonewalled that probe, and has since engaged in extensive information warfare efforts to publicly defend the Commission and its conclusions, while discrediting what it calls “conspiracy theories.”

In 1967, the Agency circulated an internal brief calling upon its operatives “[to] discuss the publicity problem with liaison and friendly elite contacts, especially politicians and editors [and] employ propaganda assets to answer and refute the attacks of the critics… Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose.”

The CIA’s concerns were well-founded, and remain so. The Warren Commission and HSCA each unearthed enormous amounts of primary source material and eyewitnesses pointing away from Oswald’s guilt, and towards the Agency and its assets. Both struggled to provide any satisfactory resolution to the innumerable discrepancies, anomalies, oddities and suspicions its own investigators uncovered, which have perplexed and bedeviled independent researchers ever since. Chief among them, incontrovertible indications Oswald was being impersonated at numerous junctures prior to Kennedy’s assassination.

Strikingly too, Oswald “doubles” were often found in close quarters with US intelligence operatives, and assets. The existence of these impersonators is evidenced by ample documentation. In its totality, the paper trail documenting Oswald’s doppelgangers may provide the best proof of a JFK assassination plot orchestrated by elements of the CIA.

A tale of two defectors

Lee Harvey Oswald defected to the Soviet Union in October 1959. Just weeks earlier, he had received a dependency discharge from active service in the Marines after three years, as his mother needed care. Despite espousing pro-communist sentiments and employing Russian phraseology so frequently his fellow soldiers nicknamed him “Oswaldskovich,” he was given clearance to operate at a secretive US naval base in Atsugi, Japan, a launching pad for U-2 spy flights over Moscow, and a hub for CIA psychedelic drug research, among other sensitive postings.

Oswald arrived in Moscow on October 16. His tourist visa, which was granted in Helsinki, Finland while en route, was set to expire five days later. But the US Marine had other ideas. He immediately applied for Soviet citizenship, and by his own account began telling any local official who would listen about his love for the “Grand Soviet Union.” The application was rejected on the day his visa expired, prompting him to slash his left wrist, which necessitated a hospital trip.

While recuperating, Oswald was allowed to remain in the country, and on October 31st, he marched into the US embassy in Moscow. There, he declared his intention to not only renounce his citizenship, but to also supply the Soviets with information “of special interest” acquired at Atsugi. As the building was extensively bugged and surveilled, his incendiary promise was inevitably heard loud and clear by the KGB.

Oswald’s defection also caught the attention of US and international media. A contemporary Associated Press report noted he was one of several Americans to apply for citizenship after arriving in Moscow “in recent months.” Another, AP noted, was Robert Webster. Unmentioned was that like Oswald, he was a US military veteran. He had renounced his US citizenship on October 17, a day after Oswald’s arrival.

After leaving the army, Webster worked for the Pentagon-funded RAND Corporation, and repeatedly traveled to Moscow to represent the organization at a Moscow trade exhibition. He later secured his Soviet citizenship by sharing secret RAND technology with Moscow. Along the way, he became romantically involved with a local waitress. He also met Marina Prusakova, the daughter of a KGB colonel, and Oswald’s future wife.

Officially, the Soviet Union’s population at this time was almost 209 million, meaning Marina crossing paths with both US defectors within weeks of each other was highly unlikely. The remarkable twist of fate ostensibly resulted from Marina being moved by authorities to Minsk, due to dating foreign visitors to Moscow. Oswald was then posted there by authorities to work in a radio and TV manufacturing plant and was under constant surveillance after his citizenship application was finally approved.

Even more peculiar was that Oswald and Webster were quite so similar in appearance, Marina and officials at the US embassy apparently mistook the former for the latter. Coincidentally too, they left the Soviet Union for the US within a month of each other – Webster in May 1962, and Oswald in June 1962 with Marina in tow. Their treatment upon arrival back home differed wildly.

As historian Chad Nagle and other analysts have noted, Webster was greeted at Greater Pittsburgh Airport by a 200-strong crowd of journalists, FBI officers, and State Department officials. The CIA then debriefed him in Washington over the course of two weeks, with 15 personnel representing several separate departments in attendance. This reflects his significant intelligence value – the Agency felt Webster could “provide a great deal” of invaluable “OI [Operational Interest] and realities data.”

By contrast, Oswald made his way back without any fanfare. Unable to fund the voyage himself, he approached the US embassy, suggesting he and Marina “could catch a military hop back to the States, from Berlin,” a strange belief for an individual who’d renounced his US citizenship and promised to share state secrets with an enemy power. As it was, he received a resettlement loan from the State Department and was not subject to a CIA debriefing upon arrival. Oddly, his return generated absolutely no press interest.

The CIA’s infamous counterintelligence agent James Jesus Angleton opened “201 files” on both Oswald and Webster following their defections. This designation applied to potential subjects of counterintelligence interest – individuals who represented potential security risks, or assets for recruitment. Webster’s was closed after his CIA debrief. Oswald’s remained open on November 22, 1963. Spanning eight volumes, and over 50,000 pages in length, it is among many JFK assassination-related papers the White House refuses to release in full to this day.

Researcher Gary Hill concluded in his 2020 book, The Other Oswald: A Wilderness of Mirrors:

“When [Oswald] the self-professed turncoat returned to the US no one was interested. No media, no debriefing, nothing…It seems clear to me US Intelligence was finished with Webster and Oswald was still working for them.”

Imposters, or doppelgangers, or both?

Complicating matters even further were the numerous instances of a Lee Harvey Oswald – or Lee Oswald, or Harvey Oswald – cropping up in the US while Oswald toiled in Minsk. In June 1960, longtime FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover issued concerns to the State Department (see below) that “there is a possibility that an imposter” was using Oswald’s birth certificate for nefarious purposes, and requesting any relevant information be forwarded to the Bureau.

In March 1961, a representative of the State Department’s passport division referenced this memo in a note to fellow staffers, asking if the FBI was “receiving information about Harvey [emphasis added] on a continuing basis” from their office. They enclosed a Bureau memo from February that year, the nature of which document has never been ascertained. In response, one of the recipients echoed Hoover’s concern about Oswald’s birth certificate being abused by an imposter.

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Via https://thegrayzone.com/2023/11/22/jfk-assassination-oswald-doubles-cia-plot/