JFK Assassination Discussion & Debate => JFK Assassination Discussion & Debate => Topic started by: Tom Graves on August 24, 2026, 06:37:09 AM
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At the conclusion of a March 2018 presentation by John M. Newman on Tennent H. Bagley's book, Spy Wars, Peter Dale Scott asked him if he was convinced that the Oswald who "returned" to the U.S. from Russia in June 1962 was the same one who had "defected" to it in October 1959.
Then he shared the following anecdote:
He was talking with Marina on the phone one day when he happened to mention the Russian writer, Turgenev, and Marina exclaimed, "Oh! Alek LOVED Turgenev!"
In a conspiratorial tone of voice, Scott told the assembled group, "Oswald didn't check out any books by Turgenev from the library."
You can read into it what you will.
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well maybe he just borrowed a copy from DeMo when he was asking’ about that rifle in the closet. I don’t think the little sh*t ever read a book from cover to cover in his life. too busy thinking about stuff every five seconds. what do they call that?
I mean, I checked out that big book ‘The Code Breakers’ by David Kahn from Little Falls Library, but I never finished it, let alone grok it.
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well maybe he just borrowed a copy from DeMo when he was asking’ about that rifle in the closet. I don’t think the little sh*t ever read a book from cover to cover in his life. too busy thinking about stuff every five seconds. what do they call that?
A tinfoil-hat JFKA conspiracy theorist?
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At the conclusion of a March 2018 presentation by John M. Newman on Tennent H. Bagley's book, Spy Wars, Peter Dale Scott asked him if he was convinced that the Oswald who "returned" to the U.S. from Russia in June 1962 was the same one who had "defected" to it in October 1959.
Then he shared the following anecdote:
He was talking with Marina on the phone one day when he happened to mention the Russian writer, Turgenev, and Marina exclaimed, "Oh! Alek LOVED Turgenev!"
In a conspiratorial tone of voice, Scott told the assembled group, "Oswald didn't check out any books by Turgenev from the library."
You can read into it what you will.
Humm, so I take it you find the idea that Oswald was impersonated to be some wild and specious theory? Are you aware that the two HSCA investigators who investigated Oswald's activities in Mexico City (Ed Lopez and Dan Hardway) came away convinced that someone was impersonating Oswald in Mexico City? Have you read the Lopez-Hardway Report?
How about the several reports from credible witnesses, one of whom was a doctor, who reported seeing Oswald at certain locations in Dallas when the real Oswald was positively known to be elsewhere at those times? Let me guess: All the witnesses were "mistaken," right?
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All the ["Harvey and Lee"] witnesses were "mistaken," right?
Dear Comrade Griffith,
Sure, why not?
-- Tom
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The Manhattan-based Harvey was educated and intellectual as city people are...He spoke Russian...City people don't drive because they have mass transit...
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Humm, so I take it you find the idea that Oswald was impersonated to be some wild and specious theory? Are you aware that the two HSCA investigators who investigated Oswald's activities in Mexico City (Ed Lopez and Dan Hardway) came away convinced that someone was impersonating Oswald in Mexico City? Have you read the Lopez-Hardway Report?
How about the several reports from credible witnesses, one of whom was a doctor, who reported seeing Oswald at certain locations in Dallas when the real Oswald was positively known to be elsewhere at those times? Let me guess: All the witnesses were "mistaken," right?
Nowhere in the report does it say they were "convinced" that an impersonation took place. The document says "the possibility" of an impersonation cannot be dismissed not that one did occur.
Here is what it directly says about a possible - possible - impersonation (this is from the section looking into the question):
(https://www.drivehq.com/file/DFPublishFile.aspx/FileID13738760671/Key733xm867uqh4/lopez.jpg)
Saying "a possibility cannot be dismissed" is not saying they were convinced one took place.
Dan Hardway says that Oswald, the real one, was sent to Mexico City by his CIA handler David Phillips as part of an operation to embarrass the FPCC. He says Oswald was pretending to be a pro-Castro supporter on behalf of the CIA. Here is Hardway's claims: https://aarclibrary.org/dan-hardway-blog-sapere-aude/
Report is here: https://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/hsca/lopezrpt_2003/html/LopezRpt_0264a.htm
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If you have a good sense of Harvey & Lee you will see that both Marina and Judyth Baker would not have likely missed the fact there were two Oswalds...
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If you have a good sense of Harvey & Lee you will see that both Marina and Judyth Baker would not have likely missed the fact there were two Oswalds...
Dude, come on. Now Marina and Baker BOTH are in on the doppelganger secret? How can you possible believe this.
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Nowhere in the report does it say they were "convinced" that an impersonation took place. The document says "the possibility" of an impersonation cannot be dismissed not that it did occur.
Here is what it directly says about a possible - possible - impersonation (this is from the section looking into the question):
(https://www.drivehq.com/file/DFPublishFile.aspx/FileID13738760671/Key733xm867uqh4/lopez.jpg)
Saying "a possibility cannot be dismissed" is not saying they were convinced one took place.
Report is here: https://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/hsca/lopezrpt_2003/html/LopezRpt_0264a.htm
Dear Steve M.,
The statement you've quoted is about Oswald and/or "Oswald" in Mexico.
Let us not forget that 5' 3.5" Silvia Duran at the Cuban Consulate described the Oswald she'd dealt with as being short, blond-haired, and green-or-blue-eyed, and that Consul Eusebio Azcue described him as being 35-ish, thin, blond-haired, very-thin-faced, and wearing a blue Prince of Wales suit with reddish highlights.
Factoid: KGB Colonel Nikolai Leonov, the Third Secretary and Assistant Cultural Attache at the Soviet Embassy, was 35, thin, blond-haired, blue-eyed, 5' 6" or 5' 7", and had a very thin face.
Also interesting is the fact that, as John M. Newman points out in Oswald and the CIA, the Oswald who spoke on the phone with people at the Soviet Consulate/Embassy on 9/28 and 10/1 didn't seem to know what real-deal Oswald had done inside said Consulate during his two visits there.
-- Tom
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Harvey has a good appreciation and reading record of Turgenev (in Russian)...
Lee had zero on the same account...
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DeMohrenschildt wrote that Oswald told him he had read Turgenev and other famous Russian authors. Marina's favorite writer was also Turgenev.
DeMohrenschildt: "Incidentally I never saw him interested in anything else except Russian books and magazines. He said he didn't want to forget the language - but it amazed me that he read such difficult writers like Gorki, Dostoevski, Gogol, Tolstoi and Turgenev - in Russian."
This account was from his very questionable manuscript "I'm a Patsy."
Here: https://www.jfk-assassination.net/russ/jfkinfo4/jfk12/hscapatsy.htm
Remember DeMohrenschildt testified that he viewed Oswald as a "semieducated hillbilly" that he had pity for. That's a completely different Oswald than the one he portrays in the above essay where he is "amazed" that Oswald read such sophisticated works.
GDM: "Well, he was not sophisticated, you see. He was a semieducated hillbilly... All his opinions were crude .. .'’ His mind was of a man with exceedingly poor background, who read rather advanced books, and did not even understand the words in them . .. So how can you take seriously a person like that? You just laugh at him. But there was always an element of pity I had, and my wife had, for him."
I'm sure Oswald read serious works - he thought he was an intellectual - but I don't think he had a clue as to what they were really about, that he had a deeper understanding of them. Recall what Thornley said when he tried discussing "1984" with Oswald? Oswald had no idea it was about the Soviet Union.
And from "Marina and Lee": "But her [Marina's] favorites were the novels of Turgenev, with their splendidly idealistic young women and their stories of life in the Russian countryside. These books stimulated her imagination and sharpened her perceptions, and that, in turn, increased her awareness that she was somehow different from her brother and sister, somehow different from her friends."
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DeMohrenschildt wrote that Oswald told him he had read Turgenev and other famous Russian authors. Marina's favorite writer was also Turgenev.
DeMohrenschildt: "Incidentally I never saw him interested in anything else except Russian books and magazines. He said he didn't want to forget the language - but it amazed me that he read such difficult writers like Gorki, Dostoevski, Gogol, Tolstoi and Turgenev - in Russian."
This account was from his very questionable manuscript "I'm a Patsy."
Here: https://www.jfk-assassination.net/russ/jfkinfo4/jfk12/hscapatsy.htm
Remember DeMohrenschildt testified that he viewed Oswald as a "semieducated hillbilly" that he had pity for. That's a completely different Oswald than the one he portrays in the above essay where he is "amazed" that Oswald read such sophisticated works.
GDM: "Well, he was not sophisticated, you see. He was a semieducated hillbilly... All his opinions were crude .. .'’ His mind was of a man with exceedingly poor background, who read rather advanced books, and did not even understand the words in them . .. So how can you take seriously a person like that? You just laugh at him. But there was always an element of pity I had, and my wife had, for him."
I'm sure Oswald read serious works - he thought he was an intellectual - but I don't think he had a clue as to what they were about. Recall what Thornley said when he tried discussing "1984" with Oswald? Oswald had no idea it was about the Soviet Union.
And from "Marina and Lee": "But her [Marina's] favorites were the novels of Turgenev, with their splendidly idealistic young women and their stories of life in the Russian countryside. These books stimulated her imagination and sharpened her perceptions, and that, in turn, increased her awareness that she was somehow different from her brother and sister, somehow different from her friends."
Dear Steve M.,
IMHO, the interesting thing about DeMohrenschildt is that in the early 1970s, CIA Counterintelligence analyst Clare Edward Petty determined, by reading some WW II VENONA decrypts, that he probably was a long-term KGB "Illegal."
Born in Poland (300 miles away, in Belarus)
Emigrated to the U.S. before WW II
Lived in Mexico during WW II
Was a real wheeler-dealer
-- Tom
PS Have you come to realize, yet, that Yuri Nosenko was a false defector-in-place in Geneva in June 1962 and a false (or perhaps rogue) physical defector to the U.S. in February 1964?
https://archive.org/details/SpyWarsMolesMysteriesAndDeadlyGames
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Nowhere in the report does it say they were "convinced" that an impersonation took place. The document says "the possibility" of an impersonation cannot be dismissed not that one did occur.
Here is what it directly says about a possible - possible - impersonation (this is from the section looking into the question):
(https://www.drivehq.com/file/DFPublishFile.aspx/FileID13738760671/Key733xm867uqh4/lopez.jpg)
Saying "a possibility cannot be dismissed" is not saying they were convinced one took place.
Dan Hardway says that Oswald, the real one, was sent to Mexico City by his CIA handler David Phillips as part of an operation to embarrass the FPCC. He says Oswald was pretending to be a pro-Castro supporter on behalf of the CIA. Here is Hardway's claims: https://aarclibrary.org/dan-hardway-blog-sapere-aude/
Report is here: https://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/hsca/lopezrpt_2003/html/LopezRpt_0264a.htm
Both Lopez and Hardway made it clear in later years that they firmly believed Oswald was impersonated in Mexico City. They did not dare express their views so bluntly in their report. Even with the report's ultra-cautious wording, it still got suppressed.
So, no, I was not wrong one bit to say that Lopez and Hardway came from their investigation convinced that someone impersonated Oswald in Mexico City. They did, and they said so plainly in later years when they felt free to speak more openly.