Anna Luna's JFK Conspiracy Circus
- Fred Litwin
- 5 hours ago
- 2 min read
Michael Isikoff has written an excellent article on the circus this week in Congress. I was privileged to be part of the conversation.
In fact, the declassified Oswald dossier isn’t all that new—much of it had been released with minimal redactions years ago. And it proves virtually nothing: It consists largely of newspaper clippings about Oswald’s 1959 defection to Russia, cables from the State Department about his interactions with the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, and FBI reports about his arrest in New Orleans (where he got into a scuffle with anti-Castro Cubans.) All this was material in which the CIA was routinely copied, along with the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Department of the Navy (Oswald had been a Marine).
“Well, I've always said the JFK assassination is the Rosetta Stone of conspiracy theories because you could use it for whatever you want to prove,” said Fred Litwin, a blogger and historian who has written multiple books debunking Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories.
There are also, to be sure, several cables from the CIA’s station in Mexico City about Oswald’s visits to the Soviet and Cuban Embassies in October 1963 seeking visas so he could return to Russia. But as Litwin notes, this wasn’t CIA surveillance of Oswald: It was surveillance of the embassies where Oswald happened to show up.
“Why are all these documents in the hands of the CIA before the assassination?” he said on the SpyTalk podcast. “Well, if you go to the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City at the height of the Cold War, guess what? Your name is going in a CIA file. If you defect to the Soviet Union, yeah, you're going to be in a CIA file. So Oswald was always brushing up against American intelligence, but he wasn't under constant surveillance.”
Peter Kornbluh was the other guest on Michael's podcast, who is a senior analyst at the National Security Archive.
”There are smoking guns in these documents, but they're about the history of CIA covert operations around the world, not about the Kennedy assassination,” said Peter Kornbluh, an analyst for the National Security Archive, a research group that pushes for greater transparency over government secrets.
Previous Relevant Blog Posts
My analysis of Luna's hearings in Congress.
My Five-Part Series on Jefferson Morley's Allegations
An FBI memo that quoted James Angleton is used by Morley to reach an unwarranted conclusion.
Morley misreads Angleton's testimony before the HSCA.
Morley believes a document proves the CIA did not believe that a lone gunman killed JFK.
Morley claims that there is some connection between the suicides of Gary Underhill, Charles Thomas, George de Mohrenschildt, and the overdose death of Dorothy Kilgallen.
Morley believes that Agustin Guitart was spying on pro-Castro forces in New Orleans