The Oswald Project, Part 2: The Cuban Connection

True Spies, Episode 172 - The Oswald Project, Part 2: The Cuban Connection

NARRATOR: This is True Spies, the podcast that takes you deep inside the greatest secret missions of all time. Week by week, you’ll hear the true stories behind the operations that have shaped the world we live in. You’ll meet the people who live life undercover. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position?

RICARDO MORALES JR.: Growing up as a child, six, seven years old, every friend I made, once they found out who I was, they're, "You can't hang out with him. His dad killed Kennedy."

NARRATOR: I’m Daisy Ridley and this is True Spies from SPYSCAPE Studios. The Oswald Project, Part 2: The Cuban Connection. In June 1962 Lee Harvey Oswald, his wife Marina, and their baby daughter returned to the United States. In just over a year’s time, he would be arrested in connection with the assassination of President John F Kennedy. Ever since that fateful day, there has been controversy over the official account that Oswald acted alone.

JEFFERSON MORLEY: Oswald may have fired a gun. I don't think he fired the fatal shot. 

NARRATOR: For the three years prior to his return to American soil, Oswald had been a resident of Soviet Russia. He had gained entry by promising that he would share top-secret intelligence with the Russian security service, the KGB. But then, it appears Oswald had a change of heart. He was ready to return to the US, denying that he had ever shared secrets with the enemy. 

LEE HARVEY OSWALD: Not even Marina knows why I came home.

NARRATOR: Was he a loyal American after all? In the last episode, we established Oswald’s relationship with US intelligence - a relationship so special, his CIA file was buried deep within the organization with access tightly controlled by the Agency’s counterintelligence chief, James Angleton. In this episode, we try to unpick what happened in the years between Oswald’s return and Kennedy’s assassination. It’s the evening of April 11, 1962. We’re at No. 214 Neely Street, in Dallas, Texas, where Oswald and his family are now living. Marina Oswald has become increasingly concerned about her husband's erratic behavior. Then, on this April evening, home alone with their baby, she finds a note written in Russian. The words you are about to hear are voiced by an actor.

LEE HARVEY OSWALD: I left you as much money as I could, $60 on the second of the month. You and the baby can live for another two months using $10 per week. If I am alive and taken prisoner, the city jail is located at the end of the bridge through which we always pass on going to the city.

NARRATOR: Imagine what was running through Marina’s mind. What had he got himself involved in that could end in prison or death, even? Let’s pause for a moment. Because to understand why Lee Harvey Oswald writes this final-sounding note to his beloved Marina I need to introduce another character. A man called Major General Edwin J Walker.

JEFFERSON MORLEY: Walker was a right-wing general who had been forced to resign from the US Army after it was found that he was indoctrinating his troops with material from the John Birch Society, the ultra-right-wing organization. 

NARRATOR: That’s renowned journalist and JFK expert Jefferson Morley whom we met in Episode One. Edwin Walker was something of a folk hero to white segregationists, still determined to treat black Americans as second-class citizens in the southern states. 

JEFFERSON MORLEY: In 1962, Walker led a kind of mission to Oxford, Mississippi, to try and prevent the desegregation of the University of Mississippi, resulting in a big riot. A couple of people were killed.

NARRATOR: A year later, President Kennedy started ramping up his support for the Civil Rights movement. This included removing the infamous segregationist and rabble-rouser Walker from his Army role. Kennedy was determined to purge belligerent right-wingers from the military. But by the Spring of ‘63, Walker was fighting back, openly campaigning against the young, liberal President.

JEFFERSON MORLEY: He was on a speaking tour and looking to make his ultra-right-wing case against Kennedy. 

NARRATOR: But then, just as Marina Oswald reads the farewell note from her husband, an attempt is made on Walker’s life. 

JEFFERSON MORLEY: Walker reports that somebody took a shot at him. The police come in and they find a bullet lodged in the window frame of his study. And somebody had taken a shot at him that night.

NARRATOR: We know the shooter was Oswald because he confessed later to both Marina and a close friend that he had pulled the trigger. So Oswald supposedly shoots at Walker, an anti-Kennedy activist, and then, seven months later supposedly goes on to kill Kennedy himself. Let’s break this down to the facts. We know Oswald owned a rifle. He had purchased one, via mail order, using a false name. He was so proud of it, he had his photograph taken with it: the famous ‘backyard photo’, taken at his house. In the picture, Oswald is holding the rifle in one hand, a communist newspaper in the other. It’s not a huge stretch to imagine why Edwin Walker would have been a target for Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald was a militant Marxist, sympathetic to the causes Walker opposed - civil rights, workers’ rights, that kind of thing. We also know Oswald had received training as a marksman in the Marines. But there’s another, more pressing detail we need to consider.

JEFFERSON MORLEY: There was an eyewitness. A kid across the alley in the back of Walker's house heard the shot, ran outside, and peered over the fence. And he saw two people get into two cars and drive away. 

NARRATOR: And this is where the story gets really interesting. Because, remember, what we’re doing here is trying to assess whether Oswald was capable of assassinating President John F. Kennedy in 1963. And whether, if he was, he was operating alone. The Oswald described in the Warren Commission couldn’t drive so it’s unclear who the first vehicle belonged to or indeed how he got to Walker’s property. The other car, however, was traced, long after the crime, long after Oswald’s death, to a guy called Robert Surrey. Surrey was another rabid right-winger, a member of the American Nazi Party, no less.

JEFFERSON MORLEY: Surrey was General Walker's political lieutenant, the guy who helped his campaign manager. Surrey told the Warren Commission that he was two miles away when the shooting happened.

NARRATOR: But this was a lie. Surrey’s sons both confessed, many years later, that they were at the Walker house that evening with their father. They also had information that was even more incendiary.

JEFFERSON MORLEY: That kid, David Surrey, says that his father would go on shooting expeditions with a man named Lee, and that was Lee Oswald.

NARRATOR: That’s right. The Marxist revolutionary, Lee Harvey Oswald, had been on shooting expeditions - was in fact friends - with Robert Surrey, a member of the American Nazi Party. So on the night of Walker’s shooting, Oswald was not alone.

JEFFERSON MORLEY: The fact that Robert Surrey lied to the Warren Commission strongly indicates that the shooting of General Walker was a setup and Oswald may well have been involved.

NARRATOR: A set-up by Walker with Oswald in on the plot. Walker’s motive for staging a fake assassination attempt is easy to explain. He’d received a fair bit of negative publicity and he wanted to appeal to his base and be able to say, “Look I told you. The commies are out to get us.” But Oswald was never linked to the shooting in his lifetime - he was never outed by Walker. It was the Warren Commission, the investigation into Kennedy’s killing, that connected our true spy to the Walker plot after interviewing Oswald’s widow, Marina. The committed Marxist was aiding a notorious white supremacist in a publicity stunt. So here we are again. With Lee Harvey Oswald, it seems that two opposing things are nearly always true at the same time. As we learned in the last episode, Oswald had cultivated some strange friendships on both sides of the ideological divide. As far back as his stint in the Civil Air Patrol, Oswald was hanging out with a notorious anti-communist, David Ferrie. At the same time, he was writing to the US Communist Party asking to join. And now, several years later, he’s at it again.

JEFFERSON MORLEY: And that is one characteristic that we see of Oswald's behavior when he goes to New Orleans in 1963. He's spending a lot of time - not with left-wingers, not with supporters of Castro. He's spending most of his time, to the extent that he's politically involved, with people who are anti-Castro. 

NARRATOR: So which role is the decoy, and which is the authentic Oswald? For the last 60 years, investigative journalists, lawyers, and historians have scoured the evidence to explain this, and so many other anomalies, in the Oswald story. As more and more files are declassified, a new perspective emerges. 

JEFFERSON MORLEY: A much clearer understanding of who Lee Harvey Oswald was and what the US government knew about him before November 22. And the story that you see is radically different from the story that was told to the Warren Commission. 

NARRATOR: And to tell this story I need to introduce you to another new character, Fidel Castro. In the late ‘50s and early 1960s, the advance of communism in Asia - and with it, the expansion of Soviet and Chinese influence - caused panic in the West. And nowhere more so than within the US military establishment. From his first days in office, President Kennedy was relentlessly encouraged by his chiefs of staff to make pre-emptive military and nuclear strikes against targets in Vietnam, China, and even Russia. Yes, that’s correct. The chiefs of staff are on record advocating that the US starts a nuclear war. But the threat of communism was also much, much closer to home. Ninety miles off the coast of Florida, in Cuba, Castro and his deputy, Che Guevara, had overthrown the Batista dictatorship and installed a fully-fledged communist regime. The Cuban question - as it was known - was to become one of the defining themes of Kennedy’s presidency and of the final chapters in the Oswald story. So let’s have a quick 20th-century Cuban history lesson.

RICARDO MORALES JR.: Everybody left. Most of the people from Batista's reign and everybody just left the country. So you have millions of men who have left the country and are not fighting for their country anymore. You can't stay. That's why they all leave and they go to the United States. And then from there, they think, “Well, we can plan something here to get our country back.”

NARRATOR: The voice you have just heard belongs to Ricardo Morales Jr. Regular True Spies listeners will recall the episode Monkey Business, where we told the story of Ricardo’s father. He was a Cuban-exile-turned-CIA-trained assassin, an FBI informant, and a central figure in the Scarface-era cocaine boom in Miami, Florida. But back in the early 1960s, ‘Monkey’ Morales, as Ricardo’s father was known, was one of thousands of Cubans who fled Castro’s regime. These exiles longed for US assistance in ridding the country of its new communist rulers - assistance that President Kennedy and the CIA seemed more than willing to provide. In April 1961, an invasionary force of 1,500 CIA-trained Cuban exiles landed at Cuba’s Bay Of Pigs. Their mission was to assassinate Castro and inspire a popular uprising to establish a new government. But at the last minute, Kennedy realized he had been poorly briefed and was about to step on a political landmine. He immediately pulled the plug on military support for the operation. Some 114 fighters were killed. Over 1,000 were taken prisoner. Eventually, the Kennedy administration had to pay Castro’s government over $25m for their return. It was a public relations disaster for the new president.

RICARDO MORALES JR.: And there is where the hatred for JFK begins because he left them on the beach to die.

NARRATOR: An entire generation of exiles had counted on US support to depose Castro as quickly as possible. In fact, they believed they'd been promised it. From this day on, Kennedy would have a target on his back. And then, 18 months after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy’s Cuban problem becomes a global crisis when CIA spy planes take photographs of Soviet nuclear missile installations on Cuban territory. The ensuing Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world closer than it’s ever been to nuclear war. But rather than allow this catastrophic option, Kennedy managed to persuade the Russian leader, Nikita Khrushchev, to order the removal of the ballistic missiles from the island. 

RICARDO MORALES JR.: And then, afterward, makes an agreement with the Russians, with the Soviet Union - if you remove the nuclear weapons from Cuba, we will never invade Cuba. 

NARRATOR: This insight - from the son of one of Cuba’s most notorious exiles - tells us everything we need to know about the anti-Castro Cubans’ feelings toward JFK. To the world, the de-escalation of hostilities was a diplomatic triumph. To the Cuban exiles, it was yet another betrayal. This matters to our story because, for the majority of 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald was publicly allying himself to the pro-Castro cause. And then, in November 1963, Oswald transforms into the apparent lone assassin who killed President Kennedy which - in terms of motive - would ally him to the anti-Castro movement, the CIA-trained Cuban exiles like ‘Monkey’ Morales who felt so betrayed by Kennedy, and wanted him punished for selling them out. Unless - and stay with me here - unless a man who went to such lengths to proclaim himself to be such a fan of the Cuban leader was being co-opted into a CIA-controlled operation designed to frame him as a communist insurgent. A domestic terrorist, hellbent on killing Castro’s sworn enemy, the American president. 

JEFFERSON MORLEY: So Operation Northwoods was a plan to provoke a war with Cuba. And the idea was to stage a spectacular crime on US soil and arrange for the blame to fall on Castro. 

NARRATOR: Was this Oswald’s new mission? Was this why he had returned to US soil? 

JEFFERSON MORLEY: And the idea was Fidel Castro had been in power. Efforts to assassinate him or overthrow his government from within had failed. He was pretty popular. He had very strong security forces. He was able to keep the CIA from penetrating the island or organizing opposition. And so, he was settling into power after three or four years. This was intolerable to the American generals, that there was a communist socialist state in the Western hemisphere. And they said, "We have to get rid of it. And the only way to get rid of it is to provoke a war." 

NARRATOR: Operation Northwoods is not a conspiracy theory. It is well-documented. It was first disclosed in declassified files released after the publicity around Oliver Stone’s film, JFK, forced the government to pass the JFK Assassination Records Act in 1992. As far as we know, President Kennedy explicitly refused to authorize Operation Northwoods, much to the frustration of the military and the CIA. And they kept trying. ‘False flag operations’, as we know, were a key part of the CIA’s playbook. Bear in mind, too, that Kennedy had made some serious enemies in the CIA as well as among the Cuban exiles. Kennedy was convinced that the intelligence the Agency had shared before the Bay of Pigs invasion was deeply flawed, and had left him publicly exposed. In retaliation, he fired his CIA director, Allen Dulles, and several of his aides. It was a rift that would have severe consequences for the President, even after his death. There remained many agents inside the CIA who were unable to forgive Kennedy for his actions. And some of them had access to Oswald’s secret file. Was Operation Northwoods - or something like it - activated without Kennedy’s knowledge? Was he, in fact, the target? Was this what the so-called Oswald Project had been leading up to? In a case so riddled with contradictions and conjecture, it's always good to seek out the facts. Here’s what we know of this time in Oswald’s life. Fact: when Oswald and his young family returned from Russia, no formal debriefing took place. We know from CIA records that this was highly irregular. Especially given that Oswald had offered to disclose intelligence relating to the highly successful U-2 spy plane program. Oswald was concerned he would be detained, as he confessed in a letter to his brother:

LEE HARVEY OSWALD: Dear Robert… You once said that you asked around whether or not the US government had any charges against me. You said at that time, “No.” Maybe you should ask around again. It’s possible now that the government knows I’m coming, they’ll have something waiting.

NARRATOR: Fact: In January 1961, someone with a driver’s license bearing the name Lee Harvey Oswald visited a truck dealership in New Orleans. He claimed to be working for an outfit called the Friends of Democratic Cuba. But according to Oswald’s ‘historic diary’, he was still in Minsk. And, remember, he was apparently unable to drive. Why would someone go to the lengths of getting seen trying to get resources to Cuba? Fact: Oswald was extremely poor when he returned to America. He had been loaned money by the US government and his brother to pay for his passage home and set himself up with accommodation. The marriage soon got into trouble. Money - or lack of it - was a recorded factor in the breakdown of the relationship. However, despite the low wages he received from the various jobs he held, Oswald managed to pay off these substantial loans. Was he getting a paycheck from a secret source like an intelligence agency, for example? This leads us to the next twist in the Oswald tale. Upon their return to Texas, the Oswalds were quickly befriended by a strange character who called himself Baron George de Mohrenschildt. De Moherenshildt was a shady figure, a Russian aristocrat who’d had a long and complicated relationship with international intelligence agencies. Baron George de Mohrenschildt was a rich, handsome, swashbuckling type who had traveled extensively under the cover of being a ‘petroleum geologist’. He was also a conservative. On the surface, he had absolutely nothing in common with the poorly educated, left-wing Lee Harvey Oswald and his shy Russian wife. Nonetheless, once they had all been introduced through expat Russian circles, they immediately hit it off. 

JEFFERSON MORLEY: He liked Oswald and found him interesting. He also knew that he was having a lot of trouble with Marina and he counseled him. You know, “You can't mistreat your wife. You've got to be better than that.”

NARRATOR: However, de Mohrenschildt’s friendship takes on a new flavor when you add the fact that it was granted explicit clearance from the CIA via an agent named Moore. According to de Mohrenschildt, Moore was extremely well-briefed on Oswald’s Russian adventure. So we can only assume Agent Moore had been granted access to Oswald’s tightly controlled CIA file - information that he passed on to de Mohrenschildt. When hauled in front of the Warren Commission, de Mohrenschildt told a different story. He denied any relationship with Moore or anyone else from the intelligence services. And he also claimed that Oswald was a strong supporter of Kennedy. But in private, he is alleged to have said that Oswald told him he was going to take a shot at the president. In fact, de Mohrenschildt is the friend to whom Oswald also confessed that he’d fired at General Walker. In the late 1970s, the investigation into the Kennedy assassination was reopened. In 1977, the Baron was summoned to testify to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, as a ‘crucial witness’. Finally, de Mohrenschildt would be forced to set the record straight. It was clear de Mohrenschildt could no longer charm - or lie - his way out of having to tell the truth about Oswald and the CIA. So, he put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. And the truth was buried with him. But here’s the thing: it was a contact of de Mohrenschildt that gave Oswald the job at the Texas School Book Depository. The job that Oswald held on the day of the Kennedy assassination, and the same place where Oswald’s rifle and the three empty cartridges were discovered. The location from where the Warren Commission stated all three fatal shots had been fired. The de Mohrenschildt relationship is the strongest evidence we have so far that Oswald was being ‘handled’ once back in the US. De Mohrenschildt himself remains another enigma. Was he a willing participant in The Oswald Project? Was his role to nurture Oswald as a patsy, to help guide him toward Dallas and the Texas Book Depository? It’s time to assemble the last pieces of the puzzle. In the Summer of 1963, just a few months before the Kennedy assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald starts to make it known, to anyone who’ll listen, that he’s a big fan of Fidel Castro. 

JEFFERSON MORLEY: The purpose of this activity is to establish his bona fides as a leftist. 

NARRATOR: The Fair Play For Cuba Committee - the FPCC - was a pro-Castro organization under intense surveillance by the CIA and FBI at the time. There were rumors it was being funded by the Russians. Oswald had written repeatedly to the director of the FPCC declaring his intentions to set up a chapter of the committee in New Orleans. Desperate for work, he moved back to his hometown in June of 1963. Marina and their baby joined him a month later. The director of the FPCC wrote back warning Oswald against starting the chapter. The FPCC was extremely sensitive to negative publicity. Anti-communism was rabid at this time. Setting up a chapter in ultra-conservative New Orleans would draw unnecessary heat. But Oswald ignored him.

LEE HARVEY OSWALD: Dear Sirs. I do not like to ask for something for nothing but I am unemployed. Since I am unemployed, I stood yesterday for the first time in my life with a placard around my neck handing out Fair Play for Cuba pamphlets. I only had 16 or so. In 40 minutes they were all gone. I was cursed as well as praised by some. My homemade placard says “Hands off Cubas! Viva Fidel!” I now ask for 40 or 50 more of the fine, basic pamphlets. Sincerely, Lee H. Oswald.

NARRATOR: In true Oswald fashion, while setting himself up as a visible supporter of Castro, he was, once again, making friends with the other side.

JEFFERSON MORLEY: And so in the summer of 1963, that's when he approaches the Cuban Student Directorate office in New Orleans. The Cuban Student Directorate at this time is funded by the CIA through the CIA station in Miami. And the Cuban Student Directorate maintains a network of delegations throughout Latin America and North America. And that's why the CIA supported them, because they had this large, effective organization that could generate propaganda or demonstrations and generally show opposition to the Castro government

NARRATOR: Not only did he approach the anti-Castro Student Directorate members, but he gave them a Marine training manual, suggesting he was willing to teach them paramilitary tactics.

JEFFERSON MORLEY: So Oswald approaches the Cuban Student Directorate and offers his services. He says, "I was in the Marines. Do you want to go fight Castro? I can teach you how to blow up a bridge and that sort of thing." 

NARRATOR: In August 1963, Oswald writes again to the FPCC recounting an incident where he was attacked on the streets of New Orleans while handing out FPCC leaflets by the same Student Directorate members he’d been making friends with. But what makes this letter all the more remarkable is the incident he describes hadn’t happened yet. The ‘attack’ in question took place four days after the letter was mailed. Oswald was indeed attacked on the street - but only verbally - by the Student Directorate members he’d been so at pains to befriend. When they found out he was pro-Castro, they were furious. The police were called and Oswald was arrested and taken to the police station for questioning. It is clear this tactic was designed for maximum publicity. Oswald’s very own version of a false flag operation, no less.

JEFFERSON MORLEY: And he succeeds. He gets on TV. He gets on the radio. There are some newspaper stories.

NARRATOR: If Oswald wasn’t on the radar of the security agencies before, he sure was now. 

JEFFERSON MORLEY: In August or September of ‘63, he starts talking about going back to the Soviet Union.

NARRATOR: Correspondence with the Russian Embassy from that time confirms that Oswald and his wife Marina were looking for ways to return to Moscow. It seems that Marina was deeply unhappy with her American life. One way back was to get a transit visa via - you guessed it - Cuba. 

JEFFERSON MORLEY: In late September, he takes a bus and he goes to Mexico City and he goes to the Cuban Consulate and he applies for a visa. He wants to go to Cuba. 

NARRATOR: It’s in Mexico City that the various strands in the Oswald story finally meet, and what looks like a conspiracy starts to solidify.

JEFFERSON MORLEY: The important thing to understand about the Cuban Consulate in Mexico City is this is the locus of intense CIA operational activity, constantly.

NARRATOR: Remember James Angleton, the CIA director of counterintelligence who tightly controlled Oswald’s CIA file?

JEFFERSON MORLEY: And James Angleton in particular was interested in the Cuban consulate. He writes a paper in the summer of 1963 talking about Cuban intelligence operations. And he points out that American supporters of Castro are going to the island undetected because they go to the Cuban consulate and they get visas that are not stamped on their passports. 

NARRATOR: But in a bizarre rerun of history, Oswald is once again thwarted in his second attempt to defect.

JEFFERSON MORLEY: Oswald's attempt to get a visa from the Cubans fails because the Cubans say, “Well if you're going to go to the Soviet Union, you have to get that visa before you go.” And he goes to the Soviet Embassy and the Soviet embassy says, “No, you can't apply here. You have to apply in Washington.”

NARRATOR: Despite his efforts to prove his worth as a pro-Castro militant, Oswald seems to have been deliberately held back in his ambitions to defect to Cuba.

JEFFERSON MORLEY: Now, there's a bunch of anomalies about Oswald's visit which indicate that this was, again, if not planned, CIA activity, controlled CIA activity, closely observed, monitored, and acted upon. 

NARRATOR: Once again, the official record as laid down by the Warren Commission, is not to be trusted. We know from files declassified since, that the consulate was under constant surveillance at the time. The CIA had set up a pulse camera photographing everyone who entered the consulate 24 hours a day. Everyone, absolutely everyone, who entered that building would have been photographed. And this intelligence would have been shared and cross-checked against persons of interest under surveillance by the CIA. People like Lee Harvey Oswald.

JEFFERSON MORLEY: Oswald is coming and going to the Cuban consulate, walks in and out of that door three times on September 30 and October 1, 1963. So that's six opportunities for the pulse camera to take his picture. The story that they told was that the pulse camera wasn't working that day. 

NARRATOR: It was only when challenged, long after the Warren Commission’s investigation, that photographic evidence of Oswald’s visit was reluctantly produced. 

JEFFERSON MORLEY: The House Select Committee on Assassinations got the records and the Pulse camera was working that day. 

NARRATOR: But the photo supplied by the CIA, labeled as Lee Harvey Oswald, was of someone else. So what was going on? We now know that the CIA, who had received a report on Oswald’s contact with the consulate, neglected to share his file with their surveillance operation in Mexico City. They don't tell their colleagues in Mexico City about his activities with the FPCC or the Student Directorate. They don’t share the fact he has recently been arrested. And they don’t let them know that he has previously defected to Russia offering top-secret information to the KGB. And here he is again, a known, confessed traitor, showing up to get another visa. And yet, supposedly, no one in the intelligence community was joining the dots. 

JEFFERSON MORLEY: So on October 10, the day that the CIA people are sending this cable to Mexico City, omitting the important information about Oswald's recent arrest, fighting with CIA-funded Cubans, they also take his name off of the security index, basically lowering the threshold of scrutiny of Oswald. 

NARRATOR: You heard that right. At the very point at which Lee Harvey Oswald is making it clear he is going to attempt a second defection to a communist country, he is removed from the security index. This means that Oswald’s activities from this moment on would not trigger any of the usual alerts necessary to track the movements of a known enemy of the state.

JEFFERSON MORLEY: And that's significant because the president only has 42 days to live. So is it a cover-up of incompetence or is it a cover-up of complicity? 

NARRATOR: We finally return to where we started all this - to that fateful day in Dallas, November 22, 1963. Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested at 2 pm, one hour after President Kennedy had been declared dead. At this stage, he was wanted in connection with the shooting of a police officer, who had, allegedly, pulled up alongside Oswald just after the assassination. The police officer had recognized Oswald from a description of a suspicious person that had been circulated by eye-witnesses present in Dealey Plaza. It was only when it was discovered that Oswald worked for the Texas School Book Depository - one of the locations that yet more eye-witnesses had seen shots come from - that Oswald was connected with the killing of JFK. Within hours, his defection, his FPCC links, and his Marxist profile had been released to the public. Suddenly all that ‘hidden’ information comes flooding out.

JEFFERSON MORLEY: All of the evidence, with one exception, all of the evidence that he was a public supporter of Castro, was generated by his contacts with a CIA-funded organization, the Cuban Student Directorate.

NARRATOR: If this was a false flag operation, it was on the brink of success. With a pro-Castro assassin under arrest for the murder of the US president, it was only a matter of time before the chiefs of staff could have their way and an all-out invasion of the island would be green-lit. And to have got to this first stage of success, it needed to be guaranteed that the bullets hit their target. Ricardo Morales Jr., whose father was a crack marksman employed by the CIA, takes the story from here.

RICARDO MORALES JR.: After the assassination is when he realizes, when he sees the picture of Oswald, “I've seen this guy, I’ve seen him at a camp that I was at training people”. And he also knows the person's capabilities, which he said were miserable. Terrible shooter. There was no way that man could have done it. And that's what he said.

NARRATOR: Remember, Oswald was granted ‘sharp shooter’ status in the Marines. Now we have Morales contradicting this, from conversations he had with his father, insisting that Lee Harvey Oswald was, in fact, a lousy aim. Which adds further doubt to the ‘lone gunman’ narrative. According to Morales, there were, in fact, multiple CIA operatives in Dallas that day. 

RICARDO MORALES JR.: He explained to us that his cleaning crew -  which was him, two of his best friends, and another person - were sent to Dallas ahead of time just in case something went wrong with whatever was being planned, so that they could go in and mop up the operation. He was called two days before, and told, “Get to Dallas. Get your team to Dallas and wait for further instructions.”

NARRATOR: Morales’ cleaning crew were all Cuban, anti-Castro Cubans. 

RICARDO MORALES JR.: Nobody ever talks about how he missed the first shot by a mile. I mean, he wasn't even close and it was the easiest shot to take. And then the other two are perfectly positioned shots. 

NARRATOR: For Ricardo Morales, the only way the assassination could have been successful is if there was more than one shooter.

RICARDO MORALES JR.: Usually CIA sniper teams work in pairs, spotters, shooters, whatnot. But there were two shooters in this.

NARRATOR: Of course, Morales is not alone in his assessment. And Oswald, as we know, strenuously denied shooting Kennedy.

LEE HARVEY OSWALD: I’d like some legal representation. These police officers have not allowed me to have any. I don’t know what this is all about. They’re taking me in because of the fact that I lived in the Soviet Union. I’m just a patsy!

NARRATOR: Shortly after uttering these words, Oswald was murdered in broad daylight as he was being transferred to the county jail. So if there were two gunmen in Dallas that day, who fired the fatal shots? 

RICARDO MORALES JR.: Growing up as a child, six, seven years old, every friend I made, once they found out who I was, they're "You can't hang out with him. His dad killed Kennedy." That was my entire childhood growing up - everybody thinking that my dad had killed Kennedy.

NARRATOR: While he confessed to being in Dallas, Ricardo Jr. is certain his father did not fire at the president. 

JEFFERSON MORLEY: I think that if we understand the Kennedy assassination as a result of a covert operation, there were two aspects to the operation. One was the operation, the kinetic operation to kill the president, the gunfire that killed the president to arrange that. And the other was to arrange for the blame to fall on Cuba.

NARRATOR: And what of the CIA’s role in all this? Can it ever be proved? This is where the meticulous research of journalists like Morley and hundreds of others comes into play. In the 30 years since the JFK Assassination Records Act, this dedicated army of investigators has pored over literally millions of documents.

JEFFERSON MORLEY: What have we learned recently? People in the CIA were far, far, far more interested in Lee Harvey Oswald than they ever told the Warren Commission. 

NARRATOR: The CIA knew exactly who Oswald was and what he was capable of but they lied to the Warren Commission, dismissing their contact with Oswald as minimal. Why didn’t the Commission challenge them? Well, one reason might be that one of the commissioners was ex-CIA chief Allen Dulles. The same Allen Dulles that Kennedy had fired after the Bay Of Pigs invasion went so horribly wrong. If ever someone was motivated to keep false flag CIA operations away from public scrutiny, it was Dulles. But there’s more. Since the Warren Report was published, we have learned that one of the people investigating Oswald - a CIA agent called John Whitten - disagreed with the Agency’s conclusions.

JEFFERSON MORLEY: When the FBI issues their report in December that Oswald did it alone, he reads it and he's like, it raises all sorts of questions to him about Oswald's Cuban connections. Helms and Angleton call him on the carpet on Christmas Eve 1963, and they fire him. They do not want any investigation of Oswald's Cuban contacts, and Angleton takes over the investigation. 

NARRATOR: You heard that right, James Angleton.

JEFFERSON MORLEY: So Angleton, the guy who controlled the Oswald file for four years, who defenders of the official story say was completely incompetent and didn't understand the threat that Oswald presented, he is now in charge of the investigation, the CIA's internal investigation of Oswald.

NARRATOR: And it’s here that, for years to come, knowledge of the CIA’s involvement with Oswald, their possible recruitment of him as a key player in a complex false flag operation to provoke war with Cuba, stays buried.

JEFFERSON MORLEY: He doesn't investigate at all. He never even issues a report. He just sits on it. And when the Warren Commission comes asking questions, he tells his aides, “I want to wait out the Commission.” And we have the memo in which Angleton is quoted as saying, "Jim wants to wait out the Commission." Well, why would your counterintelligence chief wait out investigating the murder of a president? There's only one explanation. He had something to hide. 

NARRATOR: Lee Harvey Oswald’s funeral took place at Rose Hill Cemetery, Fort Worth, Texas on November 25, 1963. A local pastor refused to show up and another priest volunteered at the last minute. Reporters in attendance had to be drafted in as pallbearers because no one else would agree to help. We never got to hear Oswald’s side of the story. He was denied counsel while being interrogated and the transcript of his police interview was destroyed, as was his FBI file. With a few thousand documents still to be released, some hope that the final clues will be revealed as to the true extent and nature of The Oswald Project. Ricardo Morales is not so sure.

RICARDO MORALES JR.: In the amount of time that has gone by, do you think any incriminating documents still exist?

JEFFERSON MORLEY: Oswald was not the intellectual author of Kennedy's death.

NARRATOR: Not the intellectual author, and quite possibly, from what we’ve learned, not the man who shot the bullet that killed Kennedy, either. Whatever the truth about Lee Harvey Oswald and the Oswald Project, it is beyond doubt that the official account of his actions remains inadequate and, for Jefferson Morley, the coverup is unequivocal. 

JEFFERSON MORLEY: To me, there's no other plausible explanation for this continuing series of deceptions mounted by people in the CIA, even against their colleagues and against the public. They're hiding operational activity around Oswald. And that's true to this day. 

NARRATOR: I’m Daisy Ridley. Join us next time for another secret rendezvous with True Spies.

‍