Collection of Assorted Newspaper and Magazine Clippings: Jfk Assassination, Conspiracy Theories, Etc

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

man is especially interested from

would did not drive. Second of N

ber 9, 1963, the day he was supposedly in

a car dealership in Dallas, the com-

mission puts him at home in Texas. Tex-

as writing a letter to the Selective Service

There are other inconsistencies. On sep-

tenber 25, 1963, for instance, O. will

according to the commission, was taking a bus to Mexico City. Yet, on the same day, a man calling himself Lee Harvey O.wald walked into the Selective Service Office in Austin. Texas, saying he wanted to discuss his dishonorable discharge.

In 1966 Richard Popkin, a college professor in St. Louis, concluded on the basis of these and other strange occurrences that there were two Oswalds, and that the phony Oswald had been employed to frame the real Lee Harvey Oswald. Popkin's thesis has a certain tidy logic to it. For one thing, it explains how Oswald could have been in two places at once. For another, it shows how a poor marksman could have hit a moving target at a range of 280 feet. For a third, it explains how Lee Harvey Oswald, a man who did not know how to drive, took a car for a test spin at speeds of up to 70 miles per hour.

The "two Oswald" theory also makes some sense out of the CIA's "mixup" in Mexico City. Interestingly, a man identified as "Leon" Oswald, but letting the description the CIA issued from Mexico City, showed up in the company of two other men at the home of Sylvia Odio, an anti-Castro Cuban living in Dallas, two months before the assassination. The men who passed themselves off as anti-Castroites said that it would be a good idea to have Kennedy assassinated. Two months later, when Sylvia Odio heard that a man named Lee Harvey Oswald had been arrested for President Kennedy's assassination, she fainted.

Now, Peter Dale Scott, a professor it Berkeley, and one of the most respected and meticulous of the assassination theorists, has come up with a new

winkle on the Depth these not two Owls it but several.

Norton lays this conclusion on a study of Oswald photographs collected by the commission. The photographs on the passport Oswald used to enter the Soviet Union is especially striking. It surely shows something, but it does not appear to be Lee Harvey Oswald. The skin, facial, nose and bone structure all are wrong.

Scott has also collected the records of Oswald's physical examinations from the time he enlisted in the Marine Corps to the autopsy following his murder. They reveal some seemingly inexplicable dissimilarities. A Marine Corps medical examination conducted on October 24, 1956, for instance, found that Lee Harvey Oswald was 5' 8" tall, 135 pounds, with hazel eyes. Three years later, on September 11, 1959, another Marine exam puts him at 5' 11" tall 150 pounds; with grey eyes. Of course, Oswald could have grown three inches, gained 15 pounds, and changed the color of his eyes in three years, but it seems unlikely. Altogether impossible is the change recorded on July 13, 1962, during a job physical Oswald took at Leslie Welding Co. That examination shows him to be 5' 9" tall—a loss of two inches in three years. In the arrest bulletin that went out for Oswald on November 22, he was described as 5' 10" tall and weighing 165 pounds—the description that is carried in the FBI files as well. At his autopsy, Oswald was found to be 5' 9" tall, 150 pounds, with grey-blue eyes.

One possible explanation for these differences is that there never was a real Lee Harvey Oswald, or, if there were, he died well before the first Lee Harvey Oswald entered the Marine Corps. From there on, the name and persona of Lee Harvey Oswald became an identity of convenience to be used by an intelligence agency or agencies unknown, a common enough practice among intelligence groups around the world.

Bizarre as the hydra-headed Oswald notion sounds, it was taken quite seriously by J. Edgar Hoover-two and a half years before the assassination. On June 3, 1960, Hoover sent a confidential memorandum to the Department of State, raising the possibility that an imposter might be using the credentials of Oswald, who was then living in the Soviet Union. The Hoover memo sparked other memos within the State Department. None of the correspondence on the possibility of an Oswald imposter was ever forwarded to the Warren Commission. Instead, it was buried in the National Archives and only uncovered recently. W.

David N. Sawson, a lawyer who cracked out rumors about Oswald the Killer, Warren Commission, offers no explanation as to how the life on the countertest Oswald managed to disappear. It conceivably could have been something related to the CIA." says Sawson. I can only speculate now—but a general CIA effort to take out anything that reflected on them may have covered this up."

It is a chilling thesis, and, like so much about Dallas, it makes just enough sense not to be ruled out.

## Who Done It?

There are no answers, of course only theories, and they range from the unlikely to the obscene. There is a conspiracy to fit every taste and prejudice. The trouble is that, since Dallas, Vietnam and Watergate, few of them can be easily dismissed out of hand. For a time, the CIA itself considered the possibility that Oswald was some sort of "Manchurian Candidate," a sleeper assassin planted to go off on command. The theory, like all the others, made for interesting conversation around the watercoolers at Langley, but, if the CIA ever followed up on the notion, there is no evidence. Within the last few months, a novel, entitled The Tears of Autumn, has been published, putting forward the supposition that Kennedy was the victim of a revenge killing for the CIA-approved assassination of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, who was slain in Saigon less than a month before Kennedy went to Dallas. One obvious problem with The Tears of Autumn plot is the timing. A few weeks' time seems hardly sufficient to concoct and execute as sophisticated a conspiracy as that which occurred November 22, 1963, in Dallas. Variations of "foreign agents did it" has long held considerable appeal for a number of Americans, including the unlikely duo of Lyndon Johnson and Jack Anderson, both of whom pointed the finger in the direction of Castro. Basically, the argument goes that Castro finally tired of the various U.S. attempts to rub

## The agency and the mob have enjoyed a cozy relationship since World War II, when the Cosa Nostra protected U.S. ports from Axis sabotage

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