JFK and Oswald: The Enduring Attraction of ‘Harvey & Lee’
A prominent conspiracy theory about President Kennedy's accused assassin will live on until the CIA tells all it knows about him.
The vast work of JFK researcher John Armstrong includes the digitized John Armstrong Collection at Baylor University, a 1,110-page (with index) book entitled “Harvey & Lee: How the CIA Framed Oswald” (2003), and a big website that revises, augments and develops his book’s conclusions.
While focusing on anomalies and inconsistencies in the official biography of President John F. Kennedy’s accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, Armstrong puts forward a specific theory: Oswald was really two people, who both bore an uncanny resemblance to each other and went by the same name and identity as a matter of official record under a CIA “black op” at the height of the Cold War.
The author goes a step beyond that too, concluding that the man gunned down in Dallas police custody by Mob-connected nightclub owner Jack Ruby on November 24, 1963, was an imposter (“Harvey”), and that the fate of the real Lee Harvey Oswald, born in New Orleans on October 18, 1939 (“Lee”), remains unknown to this day.
Operation Oswald
The “Oswald Project,” Armstrong speculates, sprang from a U.S. intelligence program implemented after WWII to bring displaced East Europeans to the West. Frank Wisner, a senior officer of the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS), ran the program under National Security Council Intelligence Directive No. 14 (NSCID No. 14). From 1948 to 1950, Wisner headed the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), forebear of the CIA’s Directorate of Plans (today’s Directorate of Operations), which he headed until 1958.
Diagnosed as a manic depressive, Frank Wisner underwent electroshock therapy in the late 1950s. He became chief of the CIA’s London station, retired in 1962, and committed suicide by blowing his brains out with a shotgun two years after JFK’s death.
One provision of NSCID No. 14 called for “exploitation” of defectors for intelligence purposes. Wisner brought as many as 200,000 European immigrants to America, including tens of thousands of children. One child, Armstrong says, was “Harvey.” Another lookalike imposter, “Marguerite,” posed as his mother in America from 1947 onward.
According to Armstrong, the CIA moved the two boys and their respective “mothers” around geographically for over 16 years to “parallel” their lives — as if unidentified “chess masters” were laying an evidentiary trail plausibly attributable to a single mother-son pair if Soviet intelligence should ever look into them. “Harvey” defected to the USSR in 1959 and married Marina Prusakova in the Soviet Union. A year and a half after returning to the U.S. with his Russian wife in 1962, “Harvey” was framed for killing JFK.
Witnesses later swore they had seen Oswald (occasionally going by “Ozzie”) outside the USSR during the two and a half years when he was supposed to have been there. Alleged sightings of him in one place when the official narrative put him elsewhere would intensify in the weeks before the assassination and only cease on the day of the killing itself.
Armstrong believes that “Harvey” was originally Hungarian on the basis of a single, uncorroborated piece of information communicated to an extended family member of Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit — also allegedly killed by Oswald — in a single anonymous phone call several days after Oswald had been shot to death in Dallas police custody.
Mrs. Jack Tippit of Westport, Connecticut, said a woman with a heavy accent told her over the phone that the father and uncle of “Harvey” had once been her neighbors in New York and were Hungarian Communists. The caller wouldn’t identify herself, she said, out of fear for her life. But after Mrs. Tippit notified the FBI, the “G-Men” never followed up.
A handwritten note on the first page of an FBI teletype says, simply: “No reportable significance re Oswald.” Armstrong speculates that said Communists may have been FBI informants, as Director J. Edgar Hoover was then hunting for Reds under every bed.
While one anonymous phone call doesn’t merit a long, drawn-out theory involving Frank Wisner and NSCID No. 14 (it would make a great novel), it’s hard to read the whole epic “Harvey & Lee” tale without concluding — at very least — that there’s something to it.
The notion of intelligence agencies using doppelgängers isn’t preposterous. Many world leaders have used doubles for security, and intelligence agencies could obviously use them for operational purposes as well. Doubles aren’t as rare as one might imagine either, and a credible article on the subject can be found here. Some commentary has noted that long-serving CIA director Allen Dulles himself had a penchant for using doubles.
In “Harvey & Lee,” I counted about three dozen instances of witnesses (very few corroborated) saying they’d encountered a person using some variant of the “Lee Harvey Oswald” name and bearing at least a passing resemblance to the accused at a time and place that the official record precluded. Maybe several Oswald lookalikes were running around in the weeks before Nov. 22, 1963, but Armstrong focuses on only two — “Harvey” and “Lee” — who were dead ringers for each other and used the same ID for years.
Ultimately, Armstrong’s thesis doesn’t take us much closer to the “who” or the “why” of the assassination. In fact, it only partially explains the “how.” As a self-confessed “ex-prisoner of Harvey & Lee,” I no longer dwell endlessly on Armstrong’s grand theory. But the certainty with which he repeats his conclusions in print and interviews almost makes me think that — like an investigative journalist unable to reveal a source — he received a tip from someone “in the know” decades ago, and that shaped his findings decisively.
Whatever the case, the core idea of Oswald doubles or lookalikes as a key aspect of the assassination mystery endures with or without Armstrong’s refinement. For me, the general value of his work lies in deconstructing Warren Commission orthodoxies, sometimes in granular detail. For example, no researcher has done more to persuade me that JFK’s accused assassin could not have killed Officer J. D. Tippit.
The Cop Killer
Warren Commission attorney David Belin described the murder of Officer Tippit as the “Rosetta Stone” of the JFK assassination. In other words, if it could be demonstrated that the accused had murdered a policeman between the time he left the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD) and the time of his arrest at the Texas Theatre about an hour later, it would be “case closed” in the investigation of JFK’s murder. Hoping to avoid arrest for assassinating JFK, Belin’s flawed logic went, Oswald obviously killed a cop.
The official record says Oswald left the TSBD minutes after JFK was fatally shot, and that he went directly to his rooming house at 1026 North Beckley Avenue, grabbed his revolver, and headed off to shoot a policeman. According to the accused’s housekeeper, Earlene Roberts, Oswald arrived around 1:00 p.m. and left within 3 or 4 minutes. When she looked out the window moments later, she saw her tenant standing at a bus stop on the northbound side of North Beckley Ave. The corner of East 10th Street and Patton Avenue in the Oak Cliff neighborhood, where Tippit was killed, was close to a mile south.
The waitress Helen Markham was the sole witness who claimed to have actually watched both all the shots being fired at Tippit, and Tippit falling to the ground. But in her sworn affidavit, Markham said she saw the killer shoot Tippit moments after she arrived at the intersection at about 1:06. This was highly reliable: she was on the way to catch her bus to work, which meant it was part of her daily routine.
The accused couldn’t possibly have made it from 1026 North Beckley to the corner of 10th & Patton in 2-3 minutes on foot, and Armstrong cites Dallas Police transcripts to prove that Tippit’s killing couldn’t have occurred later than 1:06. Unsurprisingly, Markham couldn’t pick “Harvey” out of a police lineup that day.
Other discrepancies absolve “Harvey.” The accused left his rooming house wearing a dark blue-grey work jacket over a reddish-brown shirt, and not one witness’s original testimony testified that the killer was wearing either of those at the scene of the crime.
Warren Report defenders point to the light-colored jacket found in a parking lot after the Tippit slaying as proof that the man accused of murdering JFK also killed the cop. But although Tippit’s killer was evidently wearing a light, Eisenhower-type jacket over a white t-shirt, there is no proof that JFK’s accused assassin ever even owned such clothing.
“Harvey” was wearing a dark blue-gray, heavy work jacket and a reddish-brown shirt when he left his rooming house at 1026 North Beckley. He probably went directly to the Texas Theatre, without taking any detour to East 10th & Patton. At the cinema, he was arrested wearing the same reddish-brown shirt, but his jacket was gone.
The Warren Commission engaged in a deliberate deception. It had no evidence Oswald had put on a different jacket in the moments he was in the house, so it claimed that the accused’s housekeeper “was not certain” about the color of the jacket he was wearing when he left. The Commission then “merged” the two — a dark blue-grey, heavy work jacket (CE 163), and a very light colored (white or off-white) Eisenhower-type jacket (CE 162), arriving at “gray.” It was a cheap, patently fraudulent ploy — for the pat, official history — to dress Oswald in CE 162 from the time he left his rooming house.
The eyewitness closest to the killer at the Tippit murder scene — Domingo Benavides — surely saw someone other than “Harvey” too. Benavides pulled his truck to the curb as soon as he heard gunfire, then ducked down fearfully in his seat. A few moments after the gunshots ended, he raised his head and saw the killer 15-20 feet away, in a “light-beige jacket.” Benavides (a barber) would say he saw him walking away and noticed his hair was squared off at the neck, unlike Oswald’s as seen in the Dallas police station.
In focusing on this diabolical moment, Armstrong invites us to stare into precisely the kind of historical abyss of evil in which the assassination of President Kennedy still resides.
Benavides told David Belin in his Warren Commission testimony that he “got a really good view” of the gunman from the front before the murderer turned and walked off, unloading his pistol and throwing spent shells in the air. But Belin never asked point-blank whether that man was Lee Harvey Oswald, and Benavides never positively identified the cop killer as the accused assassin of JFK.
Belin was afraid to press the point. He knew it wasn’t “Harvey” who had shot Tippit to death. It was someone else, and to this day, we don’t know who.
Exiting the Book Depository
In a link on the “Harvey & Lee” website, “Escape from the 6th Floor,” Armstrong deals astutely with how the men spotted on the 6th floor of the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD) by witnesses on the street might have left the building after the shooting.
On the 5th floor, between floor and ceiling, a door in a column gave maintenance personnel access to the passenger elevator’s “car top station” when the lift was parked on the 4th floor. On the 6th floor, floorboards were being replaced. Right above the shaft of the elevator, offering transport between 1st and 4th floors, was a gaping hole.
The men in the 6th-floor “sniper’s nest” were steps away from a hole allowing them to drop down onto the top of the elevator. The electricity outage minutes before the shooting would have kept the elevator stationary, allowing assassins to escape through the shaft and descend to a lower floor once the power was back on, soon after the shootings. If this was a professional hit, as most sensible researchers believe, is this at all far-fetched?
The accused’s insistence that he “didn’t shoot anybody, no sir,” was likely true. But if he had “guilty knowledge” of some kind, was it that his alter ego (“Lee”) was in the building when JFK was shot? Quickly realizing things hadn’t gone the way he’d expected, did “Harvey” decide he should depart quickly? At the same time, was “Lee” on his way to Oak Cliff for a deadly rendezvous with Tippit?
Mexico City Mystery
An enduring source of agonizing uncertainty for researchers concerns Oswald in Mexico City. We ask: if a cover-up aimed to establish that the accused dead man was a violent Marxist motivated by Soviet and Communist sympathies, why would the CIA conceal evidence that he visited the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico?
Not a single audio recording or photograph of Oswald on his Mexican sojourn survived despite the CIA’s vast audiovisual surveillance of those two facilities, unrivaled anywhere in the world in 1963. Many thus believe Oswald never even visited Mexico, never mind the embassies of America’s Cold War rivals.
John Armstrong believes the entire Mexico City episode was a “hoax.”
However, his own theory might explain the mystery. If there were actually two Oswalds, could one have been there, captured on film going in and out of the Soviet Embassy? Might it have been “Lee” instead of “Harvey”? Did one person visit the Soviet Embassy, and another its Cuban counterpart?
In the introduction to “Oswald, the CIA, and Mexico City” (2007), a republication of a long-classified report for the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the late 1970s, Mary Ferrell Foundation President Rex Bradford enumerates the CIA’s possible motives to conceal photographic evidence of “Oswald” visiting the Soviet and/or Cuban embassies:
Oswald was accompanied by another person and was not a “loner.” However, the CIA officers who claimed to have seen a picture said Oswald was alone.
The person in the photo strongly resembled Lee Harvey Oswald, but close inspection would reveal it was not in fact Oswald.
The photo was taken outside the Cuban Embassy, and the CIA initially hid the photo in order to maintain the fiction that Oswald’s contacts with that Embassy were unknown until after the assassination. Afterwards, it would be too late to produce the photo and offer a plausible story. (“Oswald, the CIA, and Mexico City,” p. xi)
Honestly, I lean toward (3), but that doesn’t preclude (2). Witnesses in the Soviet and Cuban embassies who interacted with “Oswald” gave inconsistent descriptions of his appearance. A Mexican CIA agent said she’d photographed Oswald going in and out of the Soviet Embassy but never saw the prints. In his memoir, the CIA’s station chief in Mexico City wrote that his cameras had captured Oswald. CIA officers said they saw photos of Oswald briefly, but that they disappeared and were destroyed.
Could a doppelgänger scenario clear any of this up?
Motive for the Cover-Up
Armstrong’s thesis runs that Hoover’s FBI engaged in an intensive effort to erase all traces of the Oswald Project, likely at the CIA’s behest. Making sense of “Harvey & Lee,” those wanting to murder President Kennedy (e.g., rogue CIA operatives) had learned of the Oswald Project and knew that — if one of the doubles was set up to take the fall — the “Deep State” would close ranks to cover up the entire operation and protect its power.
One bit of “evidence” the conspirators needed to eradicate was the accused himself, the man we’ve all come to know as Lee Harvey Oswald. But after that was done, the FBI — in merging the two men by suppressing, altering, and destroying evidence — failed to eliminate all evidentiary strands of the “Two Oswalds.” That’s according to John Armstrong, who bases “Harvey & Lee” on the surviving evidence.
As an “overlay” on the assassination mystery, “Harvey & Lee” augments the undeniable sense of a top-down cover-up motivated by a need to keep a perverse intelligence “method” hidden from the world. But perhaps the most important aspect of the thesis is simply what it signifies when we ponder it long enough. That is, it exemplifies why the official version of the assassination might have endured so long, even in the face of so much evidence of its implausibility in intervening decades.
If Harvey’s doppelgänger (i.e., Lee) was involved in the assassination — as active conspirator or gunman (or both) — then the official version contains a grain of truth. That is, even if the man Ruby killed didn’t murder JFK, maybe Lee Harvey Oswald did. So even if few honest, erudite people believe the Warren Report in light of all the facts, Warrenites have something quasi-vindicatory of their bible. “Harvey & Lee” has a “karmic” element that works in the Warrenites’ favor, while helping Warren Report critics to understand why.
What is certain is that the CIA has concealed the nature and extent of its relationship to the accused assassin since long before JFK’s death and continues to do so today. Quite possibly, the “Harvey & Lee” thesis will maintain traction in the research community whether we achieve full disclosure or not. But without full transparency from the CIA concerning its ties to Lee Harvey Oswald, it will surely live on.
Many Hungarians sided with Hitler as the lesser evil. At the end of the war the Red Army came from the east and Hungarians facing vengeance fled west. The most active needed badly to defect to the west. A couple of the Murrets were in Europe in the OSS, and the chances are about 99.9999% they had to have been the ones who spotted a dead ringer for Marguerite's little boy. That was an immediate ticket into Allen Dulles's OSS twins project, thence to Angleton and Wisner in the CIA.
The boy must have done well learning English, they found a fake mother for him, and by 1947 the two were living in Benbrook, Texas near the real Oswalds-- learning how to be pretend Oswalds. Brother Robert was in on it from the beginning, but not John Pic. Which is why Robert never was nice to Rachel and June with birthdays or Christmas presents. Also why John Pic was not allowed to LHO graveside services to notice Marguerite on TV was not Marguerite his mother. John Pic got to see fake Hungarian Oswald for the first time in 9 years at the 1962 Thanksgiving in Fort Worth. None of the Marguerites were there to avoid confusion. It was Robert at home testing John Pic to see if he could spot the Hungarian was a different person. Nope, he swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. The only thing that puzzled him was that Lee used to call him brother but was now calling him half-brother.
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Thanks for the overview, Chad. I first became interested in the double Oswald scenario when I read Richard Popkin's book. I think the double Oswalds and whatever happened in Mexico City are the keys to solving the Oswald mystery. I do not believe Lee Harvey Oswald ever went to Mexico City. I agree with Armstrong's assessment that Oswald never shot Tippitt or Kennedy. I never heard about the elevator theory before, but didn't the police discover a British rifle on top of the Texas Book Depository? There are a lot of intriguing things about the Armstrong book. The military intelligence photographer in Dallas that fateful day leads me to believe that Kennedy's murder was planned by operatives of multiple government agencies beyond the CIA. The double Oswald families theory is intriguing and I know that the FBI visited several elementary schools to track down Oswald's records, but it is mind bowing if true that two Oswalds were groomed since their childhood. LHO did have a cousin in the CIA, but I know little about the dobbleganger. I wish researchers would move beyond the CIA and FBI to see what they could uncover in the military and naval intelligence.