For the Honorable Tom Graves---LHO Gets Russian Red Carpet?

[Benjamin Cole]

This is just a tidbit, but seems to lean in favor of LHO being a KGB asset.

From JFK Facts:

In October 1959, Bill Trousdale launched a journey of adventure that would take him throughout Asia for the next eighteen months. A 29-year-old Ph.D student at the University of Michigan, he planned to study the archeology of southwestern Afghanistan. He travelled from the United States to Helsinki, Finland, where he caught a night train for Moscow. The experiences of his pilgrimage would eventually help him to become a curator of Asian Art at the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery.

Trousdale was an avid diary keeper — daybooks, he called them. On October 15, 1959, he recorded his journey.

“Shared large comfortable compartment with Lee Oswald, a young Texan just out of the Marines on way to study philosophy in Switzerland via Russia for five days,” he wrote in his journal. “He’s going on to Moscow tonight.”

Four years later, when Oswald became world famous as the accused assassin who denied killing President Kennedy, Trousdale had forgotten all about his travel companion. It wasn’t until he re-read his journals in the 1980s that he realized he had travelled with Oswald.

[Trousdale died in 2025. His caregiver Randy Baer shared his journal entries with JFK Facts in the interest of history.]

Two Details

Two details of his account interested JFK researchers.

First, Oswald lied to Trousdale, just as he lied to his mother. He wasn’t going to study philosophy in Switzerland. He was moving to the Soviet Union out of sympathy for communism.

Second, Trousdale saw Oswald get special treatment from the Russian border guards.

“At border my bags were given pretty thorough going over,” he wrote, “but they scarcely looked at Lee’s.”

It was another one of the anomalies of Oswald’s journey to the Soviet Union.

In 2023, the Finnish intelligence service, known as Supo, declassified its file on Oswald, which included the passenger manifest listing Oswald’s and Trousdale’s names on the train to Moscow.

---30---

OK---sure it could have just been chance, the border guards checked Trousdale's baggage, but not LHO's.

Or maybe the border guards had been told to clear LHO through...one of their own....

[Tom Graves]

This is just a tidbit, but seems to lean in favor of LHO being a KGB asset.

From JFK Facts:

In October 1959, Bill Trousdale launched a journey of adventure that would take him throughout Asia for the next eighteen months. A 29-year-old Ph.D student at the University of Michigan, he planned to study the archeology of southwestern Afghanistan. He travelled from the United States to Helsinki, Finland, where he caught a night train for Moscow. The experiences of his pilgrimage would eventually help him to become a curator of Asian Art at the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery.

Trousdale was an avid diary keeper — daybooks, he called them. On October 15, 1959, he recorded his journey.

“Shared large comfortable compartment with Lee Oswald, a young Texan just out of the Marines on way to study philosophy in Switzerland via Russia for five days,” he wrote in his journal. “He’s going on to Moscow tonight.”

Four years later, when Oswald became world famous as the accused assassin who denied killing President Kennedy, Trousdale had forgotten all about his travel companion. It wasn’t until he re-read his journals in the 1980s that he realized he had travelled with Oswald.

[Trousdale died in 2025. His caregiver Randy Baer shared his journal entries with JFK Facts in the interest of history.]

Two Details

Two details of his account interested JFK researchers.

First, Oswald lied to Trousdale, just as he lied to his mother. He wasn’t going to study philosophy in Switzerland. He was moving to the Soviet Union out of sympathy for communism.

Second, Trousdale saw Oswald get special treatment from the Russian border guards.

“At border my bags were given pretty thorough going over,” he wrote, “but they scarcely looked at Lee’s.”

It was another one of the anomalies of Oswald’s journey to the Soviet Union.

In 2023, the Finnish intelligence service, known as Supo, declassified its file on Oswald, which included the passenger manifest listing Oswald’s and Trousdale’s names on the train to Moscow.

---30---

OK---sure it could have just been chance, the border guards checked Trousdale's baggage, but not LHO's.

Or maybe the border guards had been told to clear LHO through...one of their own....

Thanks.

It's interesting that former CIA officer Richard Snyder didn't have the Marine guards arrest Oswald at the Embassy when he threatened to him (and to the KGB's microphones in the walls) to commit espionage against the U.S.

[Benjamin Cole]

And when LHO came back to the US, he got the kid gloves treatment.

The question is: Did Solie tell Snyder to let LHO pass...or someone else at CIA?

Was LHO Solie's dupe? Witting accomplice?

[Tom Graves]

And when LHO came back to the US, he got the kid gloves treatment.

The question is: Did Solie tell Snyder to let LHO pass...or someone else at CIA?

Was LHO Solie's dupe? Witting accomplice?

1) IDK

2) IDK

3) IDK

4) Although I think Solie was "mole," the biggest problem I have with John Newman's theory that he sent (or duped his confidant, mentor, and mole-hunting subordinate, Angleton, into sending) Oswald to Moscow as an ostensible "dangle" in an unbeknownst to Angleton and Oswald planned-to-fail hunt for "Popov's U-2 Mole" is that it took Solie 17 months to send Oswald there. Was that because, as Newman says, Oswald had to learn Russian first? I don't see why that was necessary if all he was going to do was go to the American Embassy in Moscow and say to the Consul and the hidden KGB microphones that he was going to tell the Soviets everything he knew about Marine Corps radar and "something of special interest."

[Benjamin Cole]

TG-

Thanks for your replies, and I don't know either.

LHO as a de facto KGB asset is an interesting inquiry.

It somewhat answers why, on a Saturday, three KBG agents would meet with LHO in MC. That meeting has always struck me as very fishy.

[Tom Graves]

TG-

Thanks for your replies, and I don't know either.

LHO as a de facto KGB asset is an interesting inquiry.

It somewhat answers why, on a Saturday, three KBG agents would meet with LHO in MC. That meeting has always struck me as very fishy.

According to an article by KGB General Nikolai Leonov (aka "The Blond Oswald in Mexico City") in the 11/22/93 edition of National Enquirer, Oswald showed up at the Soviet Embassy's volleyball court on Sunday, 9/29/63, and he and Oswald retired to his office in the embassy (Kostikov, a KGB colonel, was working under cover of Third Secretary / Assistant Cultural Attache), and Oswald started weeping, brandishing his revolver, and complaining about the FBI, etc., etc., just as he had allegedly done the previous day in front of Nechiporenko, Yatskov and/or "Department 13" Kostikov at the consulate, but interestingly Leonov makes no mention of that Saturday meeting in his article.

Factoid: Leonov had turned Raul Castro and Che onto Soviet Communism in the mid-1950s, and the Mexican Police allegedly found one of his calling cards in Fidel's notebook when he was arrested in Mexico City in 1956.

FWIW, James Angleton talks about Leonov a few times in his June 1975 and February 1976 Church Committee testimony, but the transcriptionist never did get his name right.

Angleton also told the Committee that Ivan Obyedkov -- misspelled "Byetkov?"; the KGB officer / security officer who volunteered to a forgetful Oswald or "Oswald" over a sure-to-be-tapped-by-CIA phoneline on 10/1/63 the Department 13-radioactive name "Kostikov" -- was a Kremlin-loyal triple agent, i.e., the Agency mistakenly believed it had successfully recruited him.

It's interesting to note that the only reason the CIA and the FBI believed on 11/23/63 that KGB Colonel Kostikov was Department 13 was because a Kremlin-loyal triple agent at the FBI's NYC field office -- KGB Major Aleksey Kulak, aka FEDORA -- had told the FBI and/or the CIA in 1962 that Kostikov's charge at the U.N., Igor Brykin, was Department 13.

Don't even get me started on AEBURBLE / TUMBLEWEED -- a German national crop-duster from Snyder, Oklahoma, by the name of Guenter Heinz Schulz who had been a reconnaissance pilot for Hitler, a British POW, an NKVD agent or officer (either for a few years or forever), and who was ostensibly recruited by the OSS / CIA after the war and sent by the FBI and the CIA to penetrate Kostikov and his KGB buddies (or some such thing) in Mexico City.

[Frederick Clements]

He was quite likely a part of the fake defector program.

Fred

[Tom Graves]

He was quite likely a part of the fake defector program.

Fred

He may have thought that was what he was.