Note: in this teaser article, the source (an older man who is still alive in 2022) is not named. It will be in a new book called the Oswald Letter by Thomas Lipscomb and Jerome Kroth. If true, this is absolutely BLOCKBUSTER!
A new source says: Oswald learned Russian at a secret CIA base before his “defection” to the USSR
Web link:
[Note from Robert Morrow: Oswald was shot a 11:21AM
Central Standard Time on 11-24-1963. There seems to be a typo in this article.]
The call was made to a “John Hurt” in Raleigh, North Carolina. The
operator handling the call claimed in testimony she was
instructed by her superiors not to put the
call through — so it was never completed.
But just who “John Hurt”
was, and why Oswald called him, has been a matter of interest, speculation, and
misinformation ever since. He was certainly important enough that Oswald’s
jailers wanted to prevent Oswald’s making contact with him. A
new source in the forthcoming book The Oswald Letter finally clears
up the mystery with a stunning resolution only hinted at previously.
The source, who worked with the CIA for more than 25 years, had
first heard John Hurt’s name at a secret CIA/ONI (Office of Naval Intelligence) training
base at Nags Head, North Carolina in 1959. “Nobody knew what he
did, but we all knew who he was.” Training at the base with him and 40 to 50 other
young men (many still in uniform) was a Marine about his own age.
His name was Lee Harvey Oswald.
Curiously, the name “John
Hurt” never appears in the 27 volumes of The Warren Report. The
Dallas operator call slip from Oswald’s last phone call was
published ten years later, in 1975, as the result of a Freedom
of Information request. It
was in the appendix of a book called Coup d’Etat in America. The
first time it appeared of any public interest is during the hearings
of the House Select Committee on Assassinations which opened in
1977, as it reviewed the findings of The Warren Report.
On April 11, 1978 three HSCA investigators were
sent to Raleigh to interview a “John David Hurt.” He
still had the same phone number that was used for the Oswald call — unchanged
since at least 1958. They also learned that Hurt was a
former Special Agent of US Army Counterintelligence.
Hurt was on full
disability pay, badly crippled by arthritis. He claimed to have
worked for the State of North Carolina for a few years after leaving
the Army, primarily as an insurance claims adjuster. The first time he said he
had even heard Oswald’s name was after the assassination.
Hurt said he had
never called Oswald or received a call from him. He had apparently been
contacted several times by members of the press who became aware of the
mysterious phone call over the years. The investigators found Hurt had a patchy work
history and recorded episodes of mental illness and alcoholism,
but they couldn’t access Hurt’s military records because they had been
destroyed in a famous military records fire at the St.
Louis storage depository.
In 1981, after Hurt’s death, his wife revealed the “true”
story she claimed he had finally confessed to her.
She said one of his bouts of alcoholism was set off when he
became terribly upset at JFK’s death. Hurt had drunkenly called
the Dallas jail and asked to speak to Oswald. When they wouldn’t put him
through, Hurt left his name and number and instructions to call him
back. That had to be the only reason Oswald placed the
call.
There are many
difficulties with this “true story” — the most glaring one being
why Hurt’s wife seemed to find it necessary to tell it at all, after her
husband’s death, apparently to the first researcher who called
her. (Grover Proctor’s website does a superb job reviewing
the details. )
British reporter
Anthony Summers was surprised to learn that no less than the HSCA Executive
Director himself, G. Robert Blakey, concluded after studying this
episode: "The call apparently is real and it goes out.
It does not come in. That's the sum and substance of it […]. It was an
outgoing call, and therefore I consider it very troublesome material. The
direction in which it went was deeply disturbing."
For Senator
Richard Schweiker, there was nothing surprising about it. He was famous for
his 1975 statement on CBS’s Face the Nation "We
don't know what happened, but we do know Oswald had intelligence
connections. Everywhere you look with him, there are the fingerprints
of intelligence." Schweiker had been chairing a
subcommittee looking into possible CIA involvement with the JFK assassination
and had helped bring Blakey’s HSCA into existence. The source for this
account in The Oswald Letter was
also Schweiker’s source at the time.
Nobody was better able to confirm those “fingerprints”
than the CIA’s Victor Marchetti (who was Richard
Helms’ former executive assistant). Marchetti worked at the CIA
for 14 years in various positions. Marchetti was also an author of the
bestseller The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. (The CIA did
everything it could to prevent the publication of that book.)
Marchetti’s conclusion from
his CIA experience was that “John Hurt” was the CIA contact
name Oswald had been given to call if he was in trouble, and
unable to get out of it on his own. The contact would have been given to
Oswald so he could alert the Agency without directly contacting it. Oswald may
have expected help by making the contact, but in Marchetti’s opinion, making the call to
Hurt directly led to the decision to kill Oswald.
Marchetti was well aware of the Nags Head/ONI base run by the
CIA where Oswald had been sent. Marchetti knew it as a training base
for false “defectors” who were being sent into the Soviet Union with the hope that the KGB would
try to turn them into its agents. Senator Schweiker knew of it
as well. The CIA then planned to turn
the “defectors” into double agents who would feed the Soviets false
information. And just a few months after leaving Nags Head, Oswald was
discharged from the Marines only to head to Russia
to “defect” and renounce his citizenship.
One thing that puzzled the Warren Commission was Oswald’s
superb Russian. Witness after witness testified Oswald spoke like a
native. On first meeting
him in Minsk, his wife Marina thought that Oswald was a Russian
with a Baltic accent. At one of the first top secret Executive Sessions of
the entire Warren Commission, General Counsel J. Lee Rankin confessed his
frustration at being unable to account for it: “we are trying to find out
what [Oswald] studied at the Monterey School of the Army in the way of
languages.”
They never did account for
it. Each Monterey language course is almost a year long
and, in the Commission’s 70-page biography of Oswald’s short
life, there is no time available for it. Oswald was only 24 when he
died. But the former
CIA operative who was the source for The Oswald Letter knew what
Rankin never learned — because Oswald told him.
While the source was studying
a CIA MK Ultra training program on “illusionary
warfare,” his Nags Head classmate Lee Harvey Oswald told
him he was in another intensive CIA training course: learning
Russian.
So Lee Harvey Oswald — the
man who the Warren Commission Report concluded was JFK’s pro-Communist,
pro-Castro lone nut assassin — had been an active-duty Marine who had volunteered to
risk his life in a CIA program using fake defectors to infiltrate the
Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. And Allen Dulles (the former
head of the CIA who ran the program Oswald had joined) never said a word
about it to the Warren Commission — even though he was one of the
commissioners appointed to it.
(This
excerpt from the unpublished book The Oswald Letter by Thomas
Lipscomb with Jerome Kroth appears courtesy of Don Fehr at Trident Media Group.
Inquiries may be sent to: dfehr@tridentmediagroup.com)
n 1060 while in the Mmrines at El Toro I attended briefly the Army language school in Monterey. I donated the Russian audio tapes and Manual to Baylor. I had catch three buses to go there. LTA, Santa Ana to L.A.
ReplyDeleteI was transferred so I couldn't finish the course. Instructors were at H&S headquarters at El Toro. There Alphabet was based phonic sounds so speaking it is much easier
that writing it.
Hopefully, more pieces of the puzzle will come out. This new info would bolster the suspicion that Oswald was an intelligent asset or false defector. Let's hope the source is credible.
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