Intelligence operations follow patterns and the most complex ones deploy diversions. It’s what a stage magician does when needing to hide something. First, he attracts attention to the other hand.
On 9/11, for example, it appears nearly simultaneous to turning off the transponders, the hijacked planes crossed paths with other planes, which may have been done to swap the two out, or just to muddy their trail.
It was a huge problem that no photo of Oswald entering the Cuban and/or Russian embassy could be found. And neither did a voice recording emerge. Hard evidence on anyone who walked into and/or called the Cuban or Russian embassies in Mexico should have been easy to relocate, and if it did exist, it mysteriously disappeared. Of course, having a tape of someone impersonating Oswald on the phone would have been irrefutable proof of a larger conspiracy.
Minutes after the assassination, Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig saw Oswald exit the Texas Schoolbook Depository and enter a light-green Rambler station wagon driven by a stocky Cuban (probably David Morales) before speeding off in the direction of Oak Cliff.
The CIA had a safe house in Oak Cliff stuffed with anti-Castro Cubans. Oswald had recently left his wife and child at Ruth Paine’s in Irving, while renting a room in Oak Cliff over 12 miles away, perhaps because operations were heating up and becoming dangerous and he wanted to distance himself from his family and shield them from potential blowback. He’d spent the previous night at Paine’s with Marina.
Officer J.D. Tippit was involved somehow in this operation and was aware of the danger because he told his son that morning, “No matter what happens today, just remember I love you.” That was the last time his son saw his dad alive. It seems possible Tippit may have been one of the few policeman who knew Oswald’s true identity as a CIA/FBI undercover informant. He knew something big was happening that day, and he seems to have become panicked after he learned JFK was dead.
Tippit was driving frantically around Oak Cliff looking for someone, probably Oswald. A police car, perhaps Tippit’s, pulled up in front of Oswald’s rooming house right after he arrived home to retrieve his revolver. The car honked twice and then moved on, an obvious signal of some sort. Since two patrolmen had escorted the three tramps to anonymity earlier that day, however, I have to suspect those two cops could have been the same spooks who honked their horn, signaling it was time to go to the next stage of operations. I’ll always wonder if those fake cops circled the block and then picked Oswald up at some prearranged location to deposit him at the Texas Theater, and then rushed off to 10th Street to plant Oswald’s wallet at the Tippit murder scene.
Tippit was blocking an alley on East 10th Street seven blocks from the theater when he rolled down his passenger side window to speak to a pedestrian. It seems a police car may have already been in that alley nearby as police were on the scene almost immediately after the shooting. When Tippit exited his car and came around to talk further, or perhaps to take the pedestrian into custody, the pedestrian shot him four times, including two point-blank shots to the head. Obviously, the shooter wanted insurance Tippit would not survive. Some sort of conversation took place and escalated from there and Tippit apparently didn’t comprehend the danger he was in or he would not have left his vehicle without drawing his gun. It was a mob-style execution and not a gun fight.
The first cop on the scene picked up a wallet next to the spreading pool of Tippit’s blood, and it had Lee Harvey Oswald’s military ID. There were also four empty cartridges discovered at the scene as the shooter had emptied his revolver while walking away. How convenient! It’s not often a murderer leaves his ID and spent cartridges like a trail of breadcrumbs to the magic kingdom. At this point there were zero suspects in JFK’s assassination, but immediately after Tippit’s murder, the story went out Lee Harvey Oswald was a suspect and had just murdered a policeman possibly as part of his getaway. Officer down! The response was staggering and almost every patrol car in Dallas converged on Oak Cliff. The focus was instantly concentrated entirely on Oswald and that focus never wavered.
By the time Tippit was shot, Oswald was already inside the Texas Theater. He’d been directed there by someone and was likely supposed to make contact with someone he didn’t know. A theater is a logical location for a clandestine rendezvous because safe houses need to stay safe and we know there was a CIA safe house nearby. Oswald sat first in the balcony, but soon bought popcorn and moved down to the main floor, sitting for a few minutes right next to someone before moving on to another person. After he sat right next to a pregnant woman and had a brief conversation, she got up and moved to the balcony while Oswald moved again to sit next to another.
Whoever shot Tippit also came to the theater, but not before dumping a windbreaker under a vehicle behind a gas station. Suddenly, like those planes crossing as transponders go off, the two Oswalds came in close proximity for maybe the first time, and one of them had the entire Dallas police force on his tail. My best guess is the double came in a few minutes after Oswald, and he went unseen up into the balcony where the pregnant woman was now seated.
When the police arrived, they stopped the film, turned on the house lights and approached the audience from the stage and began inspecting everyone’s IDs. When they got to Oswald, he allegedly jumped up and shouted, “It’s all over now,” and punched the nearest officer, who fell into the seats. He then pulled out his revolver and pointed it at the ceiling, or perhaps the floor, or maybe at the officer. Eyewitness testimony conflicts from this point. Witnesses claim to have heard the gun click, but no shots were fired. The arresting officer later somewhat absurdly claimed he’d placed his thumb on the hammer to prevent it from going off. Perhaps the revolver had a bent firing pin or was unloaded. Perhaps the speech was part of a script fed to him by his handler. Oswald was pummeled by many officers, handcuffed and taken out the front entrance to be greeted by an immense mob that included some media. He was not assassinated in the theater as might have been expected from flourishing a revolver shouting, “It’s over.” But then later on, some witnesses would say Oswald uttered those words while being led out of the building in handcuffs, and that’s the problem: the most theatrical version possible often gets written in stone.
It appears the police may have continued inspecting IDs after Oswald was removed from the theater and may have gone up into the balcony where a man who looked somewhat like Oswald was also taken into custody and also handcuffed, only this person was taken out the back door and never showed up at the police station. And I say this because we have many witnesses to an Oswald coming out the front and one witness to an Oswald coming out the back. One of the oddest points of this case is we only know the names of a few people who were in that theater out of more than two dozen who bought tickets that day.
It’s worth noting Oswald had a wallet on him when he was in the theater, leading to speculation about the mysterious wallet dropped at the scene of Tippit’s murder, the wallet that put Oswald on the map in the first place. Sorta like the passport found at the World Trade Center that was disappeared from the story later on.
But perhaps the most bizarre saga of the two Oswalds is the story told by a refrigerator mechanic to the FBI four days after the assassination.
On November 20th, at 10:30 AM, Ralph Leon Yates was driving through Oak Cliff and stopped to pick up a hitchhiker near the Beckley Avenue, where Oswald lived. The hitchhiker carried a package wrapped in brown wrapping paper about 4 foot to 4½ feet long, saying it contained curtain rods. Yates mentioned the upcoming presidential visit and the hitchhiker responded by asking if he thought a person could assassinate the president and whether that might be best accomplished from the top of a building or out a window high up with a rifle. The man then asked about the President’s parade route and whether that might be changed in the next few days.
When Yates got to work, he told his coworker about this strange incident and later gave his story to the FBI on November 26, and again on December 10, January 3 and 4, concluding with a polygraph test, which he passed.
According to JFK the Unspeakable, Yates was soon committed to Woodlawn Hospital for an evaluation and then moved to Terrell State Hospital for eight years, and then placed in two different hospitals for another three years. He never abandoned his story about giving Oswald a ride to work with the murder weapon, no matter how many electric shocks he got. The Warren Commission dismissed his story as a fantasy, probably because they had a better version for how the rifle got into the building from Frazier, although Frazier never believed the two-foot long package he saw on the back seat of his car was a 36-inch carbine, no matter how long they interrogated him, and Frazier was badgered for nearly 12 hours, and only released after he demanded (and passed) a lie detector test, which was pretty savy for a 19-year-old kid. To this day, Frazier believes Oswald was framed.
Yates, on the other hand, died in a psyche ward of congestive heart failure at age 39.
Mark Lane was one of the few skeptics allowed to testify at the Warren Commission, and could have easily shredded the official story had he brought attention to the Odio affidavit and a few others. Instead Lane launched into a bizarre attack on the backyard photo of Oswald as being a fake and also claimed the rifle in the photo was not the same as the rifle as found at the Texas School Book Depository because it had no scope. Lane had sought to examine the rifle in custody and complained bitterly about not being allowed to.
I find this fascinating because Lane was certainly aware of Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig’s testimony stating the rifle found on the sixth floor was a German Mauser. Why would he need to examine the highly inferior Carcano when obviously it was a swap-out? Before Lane appeared in Dallas, newspaperman Penn Jones was already on the scene, and highly suspicious of a military intelligence operation. Jones, however, was elbowed out of the spotlight and replaced by Lane. Apparently, seizing the center of gravity on a conspiracy is standard ops for counterintelligence, and they do it with every major conspiracy.
Even more suspicious is Oswald’s wife admitted taking the backyard photo, and a different take from same the photo shoot signed by Oswald had been presented to George de Mohrenschildt, a man who started out spooking for the Nazis. So why would Lane make this photo the crux of a conspiracy case, unless he was intentionally planting a rabbit hole with a time bomb?
Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig is one of the greatest unsung heroes who sought justice after JFK’s murder in Dallas. Craig arrived at Dealey Plaza seconds after the shooting and raced to the picket fence at the top of the knoll, closely following the motorcycle cop who’d ditched his bike to run up the hill. The scene behind the fence was chaotic because a large number of people had already gathered. There were footprints and cigarette butts near where many witnesses saw a plume of smoke appear as the shots rang out.
Suddenly, a shrill whistle sounded and Craig noticed a man in his twenties run down the knoll from the direction of the depository. A green Rambler station wagon slowed and the man jumped inside. Craig wanted to detain this vehicle, but traffic was intense and he failed to cross in time. When he did make it across, Craig went to the depository steps and was greeted by a man claiming to be a Secret Service agent. Craig began talking about the suspicious Rambler, but the agent seemed little interested. Craig’s boss, Sheriff Decker appeared and told Craig the suspect had left the scene and someone should search inside the depository.