TIME MAGAZINE
CRIME
Former CIA Operative Argues Lee
Harvey Oswald's Cuba Connections Went Deep
Olivia B. Waxman
Apr 25, 2017
After Lee Harvey Oswald shot
President John F. Kennedy shortly after noon on Nov. 22, 1963, things
moved quickly. About an hour later, Oswald fatally shot Dallas police officer J.D.
Tippit. Thirty minutes after that, police found Oswald and arrested him.
Two days later, on Nov. 24, Jack Ruby shot Oswald. And just a day
after the assassination, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had already
expressed his preliminary finding that Oswald had acted alone.
The full Warren Commission
report would later back up that finding — but more than a half-century
later, polls have found that most Americans are not convinced of that fact.
That's why former CIA operative Bob
Baer launched an investigation into the declassified government files on the
case. As the above clip shows, on his six-part series JFK Declassified:
Tracking Oswald — debuting Tuesday night on the History channel — Baer
(seen in the clip above with former LAPD police lieutenant Adam Bercovici)
attempts to demystify the link between Oswald and Cuban and Soviet operatives.
It's no secret that, for example, Oswald went to a meeting at the Soviet embassy
in Mexico eight weeks before he assassinated JFK, or that he tried to defect to
the Soviet Union in 1959. But Baer pursues those leads, and further
investigates Oswald's connections to the Cuban dissident group Alpha 66, which
had been infiltrated by Cuban intelligence officials who were reporting their
activities back to Fidel Castro's government. His conclusion is that, while
Oswald acted alone when he fired the bullets that killed the President, his
connections to Cuban and Soviet officials were deeper than is often assumed.
Ahead of the debut of his series,
Baer spoke to TIME about why Oswald could have wanted to work with the Soviets
and Cubans:
TIME: Why did you start looking into
declassified government files on Lee Harvey Oswald?
BAER: I went through CIA files on it
when I was working there, and there was Cuban-related stuff that didn’t make a
whole lot of sense to me. When I got into the CIA, George H.W. Bush signed a
release [of files] to me, and the archives came back and said they couldn’t
find [the files I requested] anymore. Documents on it that shouldn't have
disappeared had disappeared. So that raised an alarm bell. But what really got
me into it was meeting a defector from Cuba and one of the best agents the CIA
has ever had. He said that on the 22nd of November 1963, four hours before the
assassination, he was at an intelligence site in Havana when he got a call from
Castro's office, saying, "Turn all of your listening ability to high
frequency communications out of Dallas because something's going to happen
there."
What are the biggest revelations in
the documentary?
Our hypothesis was that the Cubans
knew [about Oswald's plan] in advance. We have eyewitnesses putting Oswald with
Cuban intelligence in Mexico City. And the last people that Oswald was hanging
out with before the assassination were Alpha 66. I do believe that, after the
assassination, Oswald was heading for a safe house that was owned by Alpha 66.
Now, according to the FBI, CIA and Cuban intelligence sources we talked to, in
November 1963, info about anything that Alpha 66 did in the U.S. was sent back
to Cuba. So if, in fact, Oswald told Alpha 66 he was going to kill the president
— and we do have witnesses saying he told them this — then Castro knew. And the
borders were all shut down at that point, so our assumption is he was going to
this Cuban safe house, where he had been before. Whether the Cuban dissidents
of Alpha 66 knew he was coming or not, we don’t know.
But I do not think that [Castro]
furthered the plot. I think the Cuban dissidents reporting back to Havana
informed him that there’s this American, Lee Harvey Oswald, who says he’s going
to kill the president. The fact that this stuff has never been looked into I
find extraordinary.
Why didn’t they?
The Warren Commission did mention it,
but they just said that it was a coincidence that he met with the KGB's head of
assassinations for North America in Mexico City. They didn’t look into how
peculiar it is for an American, on a weekend, to meet with three KGB officers
during their time off. The Warren Commission said he only went to the Cuban
consulate in Mexico City and met a local employee. But I believe his Cuban
connections are much deeper than the Warren Commission shows. I think [the
commission] just didn't want to make that public. Johnson told the FBI that if
they can't prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the Russians and the Cubans
were involved in this, then they shouldn't drag their suspicions into the
public eye. But they sort of suspected it.
That reminds me of the discussion
of whether the FBI should have shared its news from its investigations into
Hillary Clinton's email use or possible Russian involvement in the
campaign prior to the election last fall. It's this question of how and whether
intelligence officials should talk about something that's still ongoing.
Yeah it’s exactly like that; If you
can’t prove it, don't drag it out to the public. Except the [Oswald] evidence
is stronger than so far what we've seen on Russia and its connections to the
Trump campaign.
What was going on in Cold War
history at this point that caused this controversy to play out the way that it
did?
My assumption at the end is that
Castro had every reason in the world to [want to] kill Kennedy. It's risky if
there are actual Cuban agents shooting the President, that’s Armageddon,
nuclear war. But if you simply hear rumors of this, you don't do anything. I’ve
seen that happen in the CIA, where we heard stuff and didn’t pass the details
to another government because it was a hostile government.
What about the Soviet side? Did you
find any evidence that they encouraged Oswald?
There’s no evidence that the
Russians took that risk, providing him money weapons or training, and I don't
think the Russians encouraged him. What we think is that they were like three
times removed. I think they simply monitored Oswald as best they could. The
Russians probably thought, "We can't afford to deal with an American crazy
person," but Cuban intelligence deals with a lot of crazy people. The
Cubans didn’t give money or guns to agents; they were just looking for fellow
believers.
Why did Oswald want to defect to the
Soviets in the first place?
I think he was at a dead end. He had
a broken childhood, and he joined the Marines to become somebody. He wanted to
become a historical figure, and he thought he deserved to be one. He needed
some sort of anchor to his life and that thing in 1959 was communism. When he
gets there [to the Soviet Union], they don’t want him at first. And when they
have to accept him after he attempts suicide, they send them to Minsk. It’s
sort of the end of the earth. He’s a factory worker, not what he expected at
all, so he comes back. That’s the context of the whole series, what was going
through his mind at each one of these steps.
Are there any unanswered questions
you still have or now have after doing the documentary?
I’d look for further confirmation
that Cubans knew about this to confirm our thesis. We don't know exactly what
the Cubans told him in Mexico City — was it to go back to Louisiana and Dallas
and tell us what Cuban dissidents there were doing? And what did Oswald mean
when he said he was a "patsy" when he was being questioned by the
Dallas police? A patsy for whom?
I know the general relationship was
that Russians and Cubans shared everything in those days. So did this get back
to Moscow? I don't know, I don’t have the evidence. Do I suspect it did? Yes.
It’s sort of like if an American went to Syria, spent a month with the Islamic
State, and came back and assassinates the President. Would anyone call him a
lone wolf? That's what happened with Kennedy.
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