Dallas police headquarters November 22nd 1963
I don't know what this is all about.
I work in that building.
Naturally if I work in that building, yes sir.
They're taking me in because of the fact that I live in Missouri. I'm just a Patsy.
Tonight on Frontline
Lone Gunman
Conspirator
or Patsy
Who was Lee Harvey Oswald?
He was living a secret life.
Oswald looked very suspicious to the KGB.
He was in control of the FBI then. They didn't know for sure if he was an agent or not.
No sir, I'm not a communist.
He lives in this fantasy about being a great man.
He thought capitalism was wrong and it needed to be overthrown.
Here comes Oswald down the hall again.
No one saw him actually pull the trigger on the president.
I aesthetically deny these charges.
It was terribly important that he be silenced.
Tonight, a Frontline special report on the man at the center of the crime of the century.
The mysterious life of Lee Harvey Oswald.
Funding for Frontline is provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
and by annual financial support from viewers like you.
This is Frontline.
At the edge of downtown Dallas,
the Union Pacific Railroad crosses a triple underpass near a place called Dealey Plaza.
On the north side of Dealey Plaza are the Dallas County Jail, the courthouse, and the Texas School Book Depository.
In Dealey Plaza, it is always November 22, 1963.
I notice that there are a number of hidden zippers in these jackets.
Now, what are these for, Betsy? They can't be for... is it for mad money?
Well, it depends on where they're placed. They can be wherever you want them.
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. You'll excuse the fact that I'm out of breath,
but about 10 or 15 minutes ago, a tragic thing from all indications at this point has happened in the city of Dallas.
Let me quote to you this.
And I hope you'll excuse me if I am out of breath.
A bulletin, this is from the United Press, from Dallas.
President Kennedy and Governor John Connolly have been cut down by assassins' bullets in downtown Dallas.
They were riding an open automobile when the shots were fired.
...Texas School Book Depository headed for the Triple Underpass.
There were three loud reverberating...
...shots were fired. He happened to look up at about the fifth or sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository.
He said he saw the rifle being pulled back in.
That's what I'm coming in for.
Uh, Bert?
Let's see. Let's get reorganized here.
Grab that cable over there. We're on the air, Bert, and let's talk to you.
...as fast as they could get there, to Parkland Hospital.
This is what I've been told, N.J.
President was shot in the head. Connolly was shot in the chest.
Both of them are still alive when I left the hospital.
Do you have some film?
And, uh, yeah, I have film at the hospital.
Will you get the film and see if you can get it developed real quick and move around the area?
Yeah, I will. And, uh...
The priest has been ordered. Emergency supplies of blood also being rushed to the hospital.
Just a moment. Just a moment. We have a bulletin...
The gentleman just walked in our studio that I am meeting for the first time as well as you.
This is WFA TV in Dallas, Texas. May I have your name, please, sir?
My name is Abraham Zapruder.
Mr. Zapruder?
Zapruder, yes, sir.
Zapruder. And would you tell us your story, please, sir?
I got out about a half hour earlier and get to a good spot to shoot some pictures.
As the president was coming down from Houston Street making his turn,
it was about halfway down there I had a shot.
And he slumped to the side like this.
Then I had another shot or two. I couldn't say what it was, one or two.
And I saw his head practically open up.
All blood and everything.
And I kept on shooting. That's about all. I'm just sick again.
I think that pretty well expresses the entire feelings of the whole world.
Less than one hour after the president was pronounced dead, police had arrested a suspect.
Lee Harvey Oswald was a 24-year-old former Marine who had once defected to the Soviet Union.
Only weeks earlier he had visited the Soviet and Cuban embassies.
The original complaint that the police department filed on Lee Oswald
around midnight on the 22nd of November said that Lee Oswald did in furtherance of an international communist conspiracy assassinate President John F. Kennedy.
That night as Air Force One brought John Kennedy's body home to Washington,
the new president was afraid that Oswald's apparent communist connections could spark an international crisis.
President Johnson ordered the district attorney to drop any reference to a communist conspiracy.
This is a sad time for all people.
Johnson was fearful that if this had gotten out it would flame public opinion and could possibly lead to World War III.
This is exactly how World War I began, with an assassination.
Imagine the new president's predicament.
This was just a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis when the world came to the brink of nuclear war.
What does he do? He calls in Chief Justice Earl Warren, tells him that he must, as Chief Justice, chair the Commission of Investigation.
The Commission of Investigation goes ahead and effectively puts the lid on the whole thing, and that meant hiding things in order to keep the peace.
Nine months later, the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald had acted alone, but for 30 years its findings have been under attack.
In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassination said there was a probable conspiracy to kill the president.
And thousands of books and films have accused the Mafia, right-wing oilmen, anti-Castro Cubans, Fidel Castro, the Pentagon, the KGB, the FBI, the CIA, and even Lyndon Johnson of murdering John Kennedy.
Increasingly in the last 30 years, Oswald has become a footnote to the story.
He is lost under a deluge of details about trajectory angles and ballistics and forensics and possible plotters.
We have no understanding in this sterile presentation of him, of his real character, and what motivates him.
I'm here to shoot the president!
Lone gunman, conspirator, or patsy? Was Oswald controlled by private political passion, or by his apparent connections to virtually every group with a strong motive to kill President Kennedy?
Any effort to explain what happened in Dallas must explain Lee Harvey Oswald.
And Lee Harvey Oswald is a mystery wrapped up in an enigma hidden behind a riddle.
He is not, I put it in simple words, an easy man to explain.
Thirty years later, the many mysteries of Oswald's short life are still at the heart of the enduring question.
Who killed John Kennedy?
He was born October 18, 1939 in New Orleans, the son of Marguerite and Robert Oswald.
But his father died suddenly of a heart attack two months before Lee's birth.
Marguerite Oswald was left alone to care for Lee and his two older brothers, his half-brother John and Robert.
You go back to the death of the dad two months before he was born, that's a tremendous impact.
What Lee missed from his childhood in comparison to me was the whole family being together all the time, the continuity there.
The stability, the lack of stability I think entered into that to a large degree.
Marguerite sent the older boys into an orphanage and later to boarding school.
Lee stayed at home with his mother.
I don't know at what age mother verbalized to Lee the effect that she felt he was a burden to her.
Certainly by age three he had the sense that you know we were a burden.
When he was three years old Lee too was sent to the orphanage.
Like Lee, Marguerite herself grew up without a parent. It was their common bond.
She had certain characteristics that were so much like Lee.
The time and circumstances always seemed to be against her. The world over her living, she wanted to be somebody. I think this was passed on to Lee.
Later Lee summed up his own childhood.
The son of an insurance salesman whose early death left a far mean streak of independence brought on by neglect.
At twelve Lee and his mother moved to New York. They lived in a small apartment in the Bronx.
While Marguerite worked days in a dress shop, Lee spent his time alone.
He went often to the Bronx Zoo.
The zoo had become a haven for Lee who seemed to prefer the company of animals to that of people.
He was enrolled in the eighth grade but had not set foot in school for almost two months.
On March 11th he was noticed at the zoo by a truant officer and taken to court.
He was sent to a youth detention center for three weeks of psychiatric evaluation.
His social worker was Evelyn Siegel.
I remember him vividly. He was a skinny, unprepossessing kid.
He was not a mentally disturbed kid. As a matter of fact, his IQ was better than average.
He was just emotionally frozen. He was a kid who had never developed a really trusting relationship with anybody.
Lee thought he had better ways to spend his time than in school.
He spent his days at the public library and museums and endless hours learning the New York City subway system.
From what I could garner, he really interacted with no one.
He made his own meals. His mother left at around seven and came home at seven.
And he shifted for himself. You got the feeling of a kid.
Nobody gave a darn about him. He was just floating along in the world with no emotional resources at all.
This is the story, the fantastically true story of Herbert A. Filbrick, who for nine frightening years did lead three lives.
Average citizen, high level member of the Communist Party, and counter spy for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
His favorite TV program was a saga of political intrigue and espionage.
I led three lives. He became really engrossed in that particular television show.
I think he just liked the atmosphere that you could do anything that you wanted to do that you can imagine you could do.
Herbert A. Filbrick, successful Communist, his party's pride.
He'll lie for the party, spy for the party, report his best friend to the party as a deviationist liberal.
At the same time, very real events were making a lasting impression on Lee.
In 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were sentenced to death as Russian spies.
Journalist Edward J. Epstein traces Lee's political awakening to this moment.
The first instance we have of Lee Harvey Oswald's politics is that he picked up a leaflet in New York City
about the coming execution of the Rosenbergs.
And as he reads this, it begins to show him that there's a way of finding himself by opposing the established order.
I was looking for a key to my environment, and then I discovered socialist literature.
I had to dig for my books in the back dusty shelves of libraries.
When the truant officer came after Lee again, he and his mother fled New York.
They moved back to New Orleans, to the edge of the French Quarter.
But their home was far from the tourists on Bourbon Street.
That street at that time was one den of iniquity after another.
Strip joints, gambling joints.
It was a place where every hustler and pimp in New Orleans plied his trade.
Oswald grew up in a community and environment of crime and corruption.
Dear sirs, I am 16 years of age and would like more information about your youth league.
His interest in socialism may have diverted Lee from the vices of his neighborhood.
He tried to join the Socialist Party's youth league, but there was no chapter in New Orleans.
I am very interested in your YPSL. Sincerely, Lee Oswald.
Instead, he joined the Civil Air Patrol, a youth auxiliary of the Air Force.
He tried to lie his way into the Marines, but he was rejected as too young.
Just after his 17th birthday, Oswald enlisted.
Hello Technic! Hello Technic! Get up there now!
It was 1956, the height of the Cold War.
And the young socialist had become an instrument of U.S. foreign policy.
To him, the Marine Corps was a vehicle for escaping from all the things that were holding him down in his life.
Look what he got as a Marine. He learned to use a rifle, he learned to travel, and he got away from his family.
What meter line are you on right now? Is that 200 meters?
Oswald received extensive training in marksmanship.
Fellow Marines remember him as a poor shot, but the record indicates otherwise.
He shoots on a rifle range 212, which means he qualifies for the second highest position in the Marine Corps, that of a sharpshooter.
Near the end of his stay in the Marines, in 1959, he went back to re-qualify himself in the range, still shot 191, and still qualified as a marksman.
A sergeant in charge of his training called Oswald a slightly better than average shot for a Marine, excellent by civilian standards.
Oswald requested to be a radar controller. He received training and then shipped out for what would be his first great foreign adventure, a posting at Atsugi, Japan.
What he arrived at, at Atsugi Air Base in Japan, wasn't simply an Air Force defense base. It was a CIA base.
And the CIA program taking place at that base involved one of America's most secret and important reconnaissance missions, the spy plane, which became famous as the U-2 plane.
The U-2's mission was to invade Russian airspace and photograph Soviet strategic sites.
Its flying altitude was a closely guarded secret, but one that radar operators like Oswald and his colleague Dan Powers could have learned.
On occasion, we would get aircraft calling into the bubble at Atsugi that would ask us for the winds aloft at 70 and sometimes 100,000 feet, and we just didn't realize we were aircraft at that particular point in time that could fly that high.
Oswald's posting at Atsugi and his later defection to Russia have fueled speculation that Oswald was recruited as a spy.
One of the things that I found out from questioning Oswald's associates in the Marine Corps was that he wasn't living the life of an ordinary Marine.
He was living what you might call a secret life. He was moving to a type of bars and nightclubs, which weren't for the purpose of socializing, but were for the purpose of making contacts.
One day, a fellow Marine noticed Oswald heading off limits with a Eurasian woman he assumed was a prostitute.
There's a small business section across one bridge that was called Skivvy Bridge. We were allowed as Americans to go into that sector of the residential portion of Iwakuni.
The other sector was considered to be communist, Japanese communists, and it was an off-limits area that we were not allowed to go in as Americans.
The first time I saw Oswald with the round eye, she was a beautiful white Russian. He was walking with her. They were going across the bridge into the section that was off limits to us.
Lee ventured off base often and later claimed he met with radical Japanese students.
But U.S. intelligence says he never contacted the Soviets directly, and there's no hard evidence he was part of an American spy mission.
So what was Oswald up to?
I think from the entire pattern of Oswald's life, he was trying to find people who could use the information he was acquiring to Marines, which he thought was valuable, whether or not it was.
He was trying to find another way of moving his life a step ahead. And he saw these Japanese contacts as he later saw contacts elsewhere as a way of getting him to the next stage of his journey.
But Oswald's Marine career kept running into roadblocks. He found himself increasingly at odds with his superiors.
Oswald enters the Marines with such high hopes, but it quickly unravels for him.
Just a year after entering, he wounds himself with a pistol that he's not supposed to have. And as a result, he's court-martialed. And then he's put on KP duty for a very long stint. He's very dissatisfied with it.
Eventually, he attacks the sergeant that he believes is responsible for his long KP service in a bar and challenges him to a fight.
Then he's court-martialed a second time. This time he's put into the brig. And this has an effect on him. The brig is very hard. And when he comes out, he's now an embittered person.
Oswald started learning Russian, and he began openly espousing the virtues of Marxism to fellow Marines.
If he complained about, oh, we've got to go on a march this morning, or we've got to do this this morning, scrub barracks, whatever we had to do, if you were complaining about it, he would say that that was the capitalist form of government making us do these things. Karl Marx and his form of government would alleviate that.
Questions have been raised about why Oswald was never disciplined for such un-American activity.
This man was a man with a security clearance. This man was a man who had access to highly sophisticated materials. And he is now showing an entrance in Marxism.
In retrospect, I think that what this indicates, and this was the judgment of the committee, is that our own people aren't as efficient as we might think they ought to be.
That more often than not, it's keystone cops and not stainless steel efficiency. And that we drew ultimately no sinister inference from our own people's failure to take action or even to investigate Oswald and any one.
Sir, get out on deck and 45 United States Marine Corps and 16827 run, sir.
During the end of his duty in California, Oswald carefully prepared his next move. First he applied to a college in Switzerland.
Then he applied for an early discharge. The day after it was approved, he applied for a passport.
He secretly planned to go to Russia.
Oswald didn't defect to the Soviet Union on a sun impulse. We know that. This was well planned. And the question is, could Oswald have planned this alone or did he have help?
Oswald's route to Moscow was complicated. He journeyed from New Orleans to Europe, where he moved quickly from France to England, then to Finland.
Helsinki was one of the few cities in the world where an American could get a visa to Russia on short notice. From there, Oswald boarded a train from Moscow.
Where did he get the money for his extensive travels? He later claimed he had saved over $1,000 while in the Marines, but records show he had only $200 in his bank account.
As a deluxe class tourist, Oswald received the personal attention of his own in-tourist guide, Rima Shirakova.
I took him for an excursion around the city. We went to the most important sites of Moscow, such as the Tritikov Art Gallery, the cathedrals, and the treasury of the Moscow Kremlin.
But Oswald seemed uninterested in the sites. On their second day, he told Rima his real reason for coming. He wanted to defect.
I was shocked. I asked his motives, his reasons, and he said that it was his political views. He said that he was a communist. He doesn't approve of the American way of life.
With Rima as their go-between, the KGB considered Oswald's request. The former head of the KGB, who handled Oswald's case, is Vladimir Samichastny.
It's only now that men like Samichastny can tell the KGB's version of events.
When he came to us and began to ask for asylum here so insistently, the first reaction was to refuse and not to give him permission to stay in the Soviet Union, let alone to give him political asylum.
Later, Oswald recorded his reaction in what he called his historic diary.
I must leave country tonight at 8 p.m. as visa expires. I am shocked. My dreams. I retire to my room.
That same afternoon, we were to meet downstairs as usual. Some time passed, but he didn't appear.
Certainly, I was nervous and wanted to know what had happened. So that's why I rushed upstairs. I knocked at the door, but there was no answer.
Hotel security men finally broke down the door.
We all tumbled in the room and behind the shoulders of the two men, I saw Lee in the bath. It was water there and it was a radish. So it was blood. Lee cut his wrist.
Oswald was rushed unconscious to Botkin Hospital.
His wounds were quickly stitched up and bandaged. It was then transferred to the psychiatric ward.
Dr. Lydia Mikhailina was on duty when Lee arrived.
It was my impression immediately that this was a sure suicide attempt since he was refused political asylum, which he had been demanding.
And he tried to obtain permission to stay in the Soviet Union by inflicting the wounds.
After seven days, Oswald was ready to be discharged.
That day, Dr. Mikhailina got a call from the KGB asking her to hold him until they arrived.
Sometime later, about 40 minutes, a large black car arrived and three young men came in. They confiscated his medical history, his discharge paper and all his documents. And then they told me they were taking him away.
For 30 years, the KGB maintained that it never interrogated Oswald about his military service. Until now.
There were conversations, but this was such outdated information.
The kind we say the sparrows have already chirped to the entire world, and now Oswald tells us about it.
Not the kind of information that would interest such a high-level organization like ours.
Still, Semichasny conceded the KGB considered recruiting Oswald as a spy.
Counterintelligence and intelligence, they both looked him over to see what he was capable of. But unfortunately, neither could find any ability at all.
Oswald was moved to a hotel while a KGB considered his fate.
After three days, he decided he'd had enough.
It seems like through years, I must have some sort of a showdown.
On October 31st, he went to the U.S. Embassy and demanded to see the consul, Richard Snyder.
He put a piece of paper on my desk. It said, I have come to revoke my American citizenship. I have applied for a Soviet citizenship.
He also volunteered the information that he'd been, while in the Marines, he'd been a radar technician.
And that when he became a Soviet citizen, he intended to offer to the Soviet authorities everything that he had learned.
Snyder reported Oswald's threat to Washington, where the Marines began proceedings for an undesirable discharge and changed their radar codes.
The Embassy also suggested to reporter Priscilla McMillan that she should try to interview Oswald.
He spoke with a quiet manner and a little Southern accent.
He spoke so quietly that it wasn't until later, when I looked at my own notes, that I realized that the content of them was very angry.
He said he did not want to live like a worker under capitalism, the way that his mother did, and be exploited all his life.
And therefore, he wanted to come live in the Soviet Union.
He seemed lonely. He seemed very, very young. He seemed lost in a situation that was beyond him.
I was delivering milk on a milk route in Fort Worth, and a taxi cab pulled up.
A reporter gets out and asks me if I'm Robert Oswald, you know, and I say yes.
He's showing me an AP or UPI wire saying that Lee Harvey Oswald was defecting in Moscow, trying to turn it into citizenship.
And I just couldn't believe it. I mean, I was floored. It was a complete surprise.
Meanwhile, word of Oswald's suicide attempt had reached the top levels of the Kremlin.
Yekaterina Fritseva, seated just behind Nikita Khrushchev, was the highest-ranking woman in the Politburo.
Fritseva became Oswald's champion and demanded the KGB reverse its decision and allow him to stay.
If he is begging to hell with him, let him stay here in order to avoid an international scandal on account of such a nobody.
We were not convinced this would be his last act of blackmail.
We expected he would try again, which would be difficult to deal with in Moscow.
So we decided to send him to Minsk.
His ordeal in Moscow over. Oswald now had the chance to become what he had always wanted to be, a model young Marxist.
Soviet authorities set him up in style.
Despite a chronic housing shortage, he was given a choice apartment, a luxury unheard of for a young bachelor.
He found himself, according to his own reporting of it in his diary, living a life that was much more luxurious and much more respectable than the life he had lived anywhere else in his young life.
He had the possibility of being respected. He had a good job. He was given a very good position.
Oswald built prototypes of new models at the Minsk radio and television factory.
As in the Marines, he got off to a good start.
Leonid Zagoyko worked with Oswald.
When he started work after his training, he joined the team. He did well and worked well too.
Thinking that Li sounded like a Chinese name, his co-workers dubbed him Alec, but he remained a mystery to them.
May Day came as my first holiday. After a spectacular military parade, all workers' parade passed the reviewing stand, waving flags and pictures of Mr. Khrushchev, etc.
I followed the American custom of marking a holiday by sleeping in in the morning.
Vacheslav Nikonov was an aide to the first KGB chief after communism. He reviewed the entire Oswald file.
Oswald looked very suspicious to the KGB and to the factory authorities because he was not interested in Marxism.
He didn't attend any Marxist classes, he didn't read any Marxist literature, and he didn't attend even the labor union meetings.
So the question was what was he doing there?
The KGB kept Oswald under constant surveillance and co-opted most of the people he met, including his best friend Pavel Golovachev.
I was made by one of their people and it was like this. He said, your country asks you, your country demands, there is a foreigner here, it's in the country's interest for security and so on.
That was early on, but I told him about it a year later. I had three or four meetings with the KGB people.
They gave me little assignments to provoke him, saying try this out on him and see what he says.
When Oswald asked some fellow workers if he could go hunting with them, the KGB became alarmed.
The fear of KGB was that Oswald would take a gun, go to the forest and approach some military installations, secret military installations near Minsk.
And so this company of people went hunting, was also joined by some KGB agents.
Oswald's co-worker Leonid Zagoyko was also along that day.
We set off to hunt. There were five of us, I was last.
Suddenly a shot rang out. I asked Oswald, why are you shooting? He said, look, look, a hare.
The others fired too, but missed. And then we all stopped and discussed why he had shot too soon.
He explained that the hare had jumped from under his feet and he was startled and so he shot.
I said, you could have killed me, your gun was pointing right at me.
We didn't take him again because the head of our group had been warned not to.
Shunned by his co-workers, Oswald befriended some college students interested in learning English.
He became fast friends with Ernst Titovitz.
I rather give him all the credit of him being a very highly educated and cultured man when I first met him.
More he was an American in the United States, the country of high reputation here in this country.
Titovitz made tape recordings of Oswald to study his southern accent.
The door of Henry's lunch counter opened and two men came in. They sat down at the counter. What's yours, George Axum?
I gave him rather chance pieces to read and those happened to be Shakespeare, from Othello, Ernest Hemingway.
The two men at the counter at the menu. From the other end of the counter, Nick Adams watched.
Titovitz also interviewed Oswald in mock dialogues. This is the first time the tapes have been heard publicly.
In one interview, Lee played the part of a killer.
Will you tell us about your last killer killing?
Well, there was a young girl under a bridge. She came in carrying a loaf of bread and I just cut her throat from ear to ear.
What for?
Well, I wanted a loaf of bread of course. What do you think, what do you take to be your most famous killing in your life?
Well, the time I killed eight men on the Bowery sidewalk, they were just standing there laughing around.
I didn't like their faces so I just shot them all with a machine gun. It was very famous. All the newspapers carried the story.
We're just having a great time and actually we're laughing our heads off.
I, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, solemnly swear that you will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States.
That I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States.
The day after John Kennedy's inauguration in 1961, Lee's mother arrived at the White House to ask for help in locating her son.
She was not the only one asking questions. No one had heard from Oswald for over a year.
Recently released documents show that several government agencies began tracking Oswald in Russia.
These files clearly show that there's hardly an intelligence agency that did not have an interest in Lee Harvey Oswald.
Navy intelligence was worried about radar secrets he may have given to the Russians.
The FBI was concerned that an imposter might be using his papers to come to sneak into the United States.
And the CIA had both a positive and a counterintelligence interest.
The people who handled these files and who read them were branch chiefs and division chiefs and senior staff people in the clandestine services.
What this all adds up to is a very significant level of interest in this man.
Ironically, by that winter, Oswald decided he wanted to leave the Soviet Union.
The work is drab. The money I get has no way to be spent.
As my Russian improves, I become increasingly conscious of just what sort of a society I live in.
He had become disillusioned with life here.
He came here after reading a lot of Marx and Lenin, thinking that it was something good.
But living here, he realized it was not so good.
Then one night he went to a dance at the Palace of Culture.
A friend introduced him to Marina Prusakova.
She was a very attractive lady. She dressed well.
We went up to her with Liharby Oswald and he said straight away that he would like to get to know her.
We were standing right here, beside that column.
Of course he fell in love with her straight away, at first sight, as we say in Russia.
Marina Oswald declined to be interviewed for this program, but she did talk to writer Priscilla McMillan.
McMillan befriended Marina after the assassination and wrote an intimate portrait of the Oswald's life together.
Marina liked Li for several reasons. One was that he was polite. She liked his being foreign.
She thought that an American would treat her better than a Russian.
Marina worked as a pharmaceutical assistant.
Shortly after they met, I mean a few days after they met, he was hospitalized for trouble with his adenoids.
Marina went to visit him in the hospital. She did visit him several times.
By the time he was released from the hospital, he asked her to be his fiancé.
Six weeks after they met, a hasty wedding party was arranged at the home of Marina's uncle.
Because her uncle worked for Soviet domestic intelligence, questions have been raised about whether Marina herself was an agent.
As for Marina, about whether she had been planted by the KGB as his wife, I was often asked this question.
And I can say with authority that nothing of the sort happened. If we had done such a thing, we would have done it with a bit more finesse, not so crudely as they did their own wedding.
The KGB continued to bug the apartment and monitor everything that went on inside.
They married and they had a girl very soon. I don't think they were the happiest family in the world.
They had a lot of quarrels all the time and even some fights.
Lee was still determined to return to the U.S. with Marina and his daughter June.
He persisted for 18 months until Soviet and U.S. authorities granted permission.
We concluded that he was not working for American intelligence.
His intellectual training, experience and capabilities were such that it would not show the FBI and the CIA in a good light if they used people like him.
Oswald's two-and-a-half year Russian journey was over.
On June 2, 1962, Lee, Marina and June left for America.
Oswald assumed the press would flock to hear his story.
He had prepared answers and statements anticipating reporters either at the ship or someplace down the line on the return.
I think he was surprised when he stepped off the plane in Dallas-Lille Field. He asked me, what, no reporter?
I said, yes, I've been managed to keep it quiet. And that was it. But I think he was disappointed.
Lee moved back in with his brother in Fort Worth.
Soon after, the FBI interviewed him about his time in the Soviet Union.
Oswald appeared at the Fort Worth Resident Agency and was interviewed by two agents who happened to be in the office.
This interview did not turn out to be too successful because Oswald was in an aggressive, surly mood.
And they finally broke the interview off after a little while.
According to the FBI report, Oswald's answers were evasive.
He said they even asked me, you know, if I'd ever been an agent of the federal government, of the CIA.
He says, well, don't you know? And he just laughed.
He was in control of the FBI then. They didn't know for sure if he was an agent or not.
He was toying with them. And he toyed with people like that.
Officially, the FBI was the only agency that questioned Oswald.
It has always been a mystery why the CIA, which had a growing file on Oswald, maintains it never talked to him.
The FBI would certainly interview him for counter-espionage purposes and to try and find out whether the KGB had recruited him,
whether he was going to be somebody that they had to continue to watch, what his motives were, and all the rest of those things.
And it was the FBI's responsibility. And if they interviewed him once or twice, that would seem to me to have been adequate.
One former CIA officer, however, says he read an agency debriefing of Oswald in 1962.
Donald Denslia still does undercover work, but agreed to be interviewed in shadow.
I received across my desk a debriefing report. It was a debriefing of a Marine redefector.
He was returning with his family from the Soviet Union and was back in the United States.
The report was approximately four to five pages in length.
It gave a lot of details about the organization of the Minsk radio plant.
It was signed off by a CIA officer by the name of Anderson.
This is that missing document, the internal document note of September 28, 1960.
Frontline researchers poured through Oswald's recently declassified CIA file at the National Archives.
They found hard evidence which supports Denslia's story.
We're very interested in the marginality and the handwritten notes on these files.
And one day I picked up a piece of paper and turned it over and could see through the back, I could read handwriting that said,
Andy Anderson, double O on Oswald.
Later on we found out that double O really is the symbol, the office symbol for the Domestic Contacts Division,
which would have had the debriefing mission on Oswald had there been one.
Frontline showed the document to former director Helms.
I know of no contact that was made by CIA with Oswald when he returned to the United States.
There may have been one, but I'm not aware of it, and I'm not able to shed any light on who it would have been.
And this document doesn't change your mind?
That document doesn't change my mind in the slightest.
Frontline interviewed over 30 CIA officers off the record, including a former deputy chief of Domestic Contacts.
He confirmed Denslia's story that the CIA had debriefed Oswald.
It was just a routine contact, he said.
My feeling is at this point the report is buried somewhere.
I don't know where it is, but I'm sure it's probably in a Contacts Division somewhere,
or in one of the other filing systems at the agency.
Several CIA officers remembered an Andy Anderson, who worked for Domestic Contacts.
The CIA has not responded to Frontline's request to identify Anderson.
What now seems certain is that the CIA is still covering up its contact with Lee Harvey Oswald.
Was it just a routine interview, or something more?
And why has it remained hidden for 30 years?
In the autumn of 1962, the Oswalds moved to Dallas.
They were befriended by a group of Russian emigres who helped them settle in.
One of them, George D'Morenshild, had originally come from Minsk.
He took a special interest in Lee.
I actually believe that he was a very sincere person, and with me he was extremely sincere,
because I treated him almost like a son of mine.
He could have been a son by his age, or as a soldier in my regiment.
D'Morenshild helped Oswald find a job at a photo lab downtown, where he worked beside Dovid Ofstein.
I met Lee Oswald when he came to work for Jagger's Child Stovall in October of 1962,
and was involved in training him on the equipment we used in the photographic department.
About a month or two after Lee came to work for us, he asked me what the company policy was
about using the company equipment for making personal photographs,
enlargements of personal pictures, family pictures, that sort of thing.
I told him at the time that the company policy was pretty much that you don't do it,
but that people did it anyway, and as long as it didn't get out of hand,
the company usually didn't say very much about it.
Lee apparently put his skills to use forging a new identity,
including a selective service card in the name of Alec J. Hiddel.
It was the first alias Oswald was known to use.
Lee was beginning to construct a secret life.
He opened a post office box to receive mail for himself and Hiddel.
Lee began to receive publications that he did not want to get at home.
They were the Worker, the newspaper of the American Communist Party,
the Militant newspaper of the Socialist Workers Party.
All of this he wanted to receive without his landlords noticing.
Lee was hiding things from his family, too.
At Thanksgiving, the Oswald brothers gathered at Robert's house.
Thanksgiving Day, November 22, 1962, we were all having a pleasant holiday atmosphere.
Everybody was getting along fine.
John and Margie and his family had not seen Lee in nine years.
It's been a couple of months since I've seen him.
We talked about small things, hunting and fishing type things,
what the families were doing and everything.
And Lee didn't seem under any particular strain, no indication of any particular problems.
But behind the facade, Lee was beginning to lose control.
He was picking fights at work and at home.
Lee became more and more tense and he began to hit Marina, something he had never done before.
And by the winter, he hit her more and more frequently and harder.
At the same time, Lee's interest in politics was growing.
The left-wing papers he was reading embraced the issues that were important to him,
such as civil rights and Castro's Cuba.
As far back as the Marines, Lee was enamored with Fidel's Romantic Revolution.
He now saw Cuba as the Marxist ideal,
and he was highly critical of the administration's policies toward Castro.
Yet those who knew him claimed Oswald liked the young president.
He definitely was not an enemy. He was an admirer of President Kennedy.
And we raised that question several times.
Personal accounts differ.
At a party in February 1963, Oswald was introduced to oil geologist Volkmar Schmidt.
The two hunkered down by a window to talk politics.
Lee Harvey Oswald brought up in the conversation with me the fact that he really felt very angry
about the support which the Kennedy administration gave to the Bay of Pigs invasion.
It turned out that Lee Harvey Oswald really idealized socialism of Cuba
while he was critical of the socialism in the Soviet Union.
And he was just obsessed with his anger towards Kennedy.
Schmidt says he tried to divert Lee's political anger toward a more worthy target.
General Edwin Walker was a virulent anti-communist.
He had recently been fired by Kennedy for preaching right-wing extremism to his troops.
I mentioned General Walker, who deserved criticism because he was a racist,
retired general, ultra-right-wing, and who had just a little time before
talked to students at the University of Mississippi who then got so agitated
that they shot and killed some reporters.
Ole Miss had erupted when James Meredith was enrolled as the first black student.
General Walker drove up from Texas to lead the white student revolt.
The result was a bloody 15-hour riot, and General Walker was arrested for inciting the violence.
But after a week, he was released.
He was soon to start a cross-country tour to rally support for the overthrow of Castro.
In hindsight, I probably may have given Lee Harvey Oswald the idea to go after General Walker.
I certainly didn't tell him to take the law in his own hand, not at all.
He may also have thought of General Walker independently.
In his alias, Lee had already ordered a.38 pistol through the mail.
Now he ordered more firepower, a cheap Italian rifle.
He apparently went on a reconnaissance mission to General Walker's house
and scouted the alley in the back.
Oswald had an entire book of operations for his Walker action,
including photographs of Walker's house,
photographs of an area that he intended to stash the rifle,
maps that he had drawn very carefully, statements of political purpose.
In the end, he wanted this to be an important historical feat,
and this was to be the documentation left behind.
He viewed General Walker as an up-and-coming Adolf Hitler,
and that he would be the hero who stopped him on his rise to power.
Lee's guns finally arrived in the mail.
A few days later, he surprised Marina while she was hanging up the laundry in the backyard.
Dressed all in black, he was carrying his rifle, had his pistol at his waist,
and she burst out laughing and asked him what on earth he was doing in that costume,
and he told her she was to take a picture of him.
The backyard photographs remain among the most incriminating
and controversial evidence against Lee Harvey Oswald.
Oswald himself showed those photographs, denied that he owned a rifle,
and denied that this was him in it.
He said his head was pasted on it.
The critics of the Warren Commission seized on this.
The most famous critic is filmmaker Oliver Stone.
Oswald was no angel, that's clear. But who was he?
I'm lost, boss.
Stone's movie suggests the photographs were faked in order to frame Oswald.
He was not a real defector.
That he was an intelligence agent on some kind of mission for our government
and remained one until the day he died.
The intelligence community murdered their own commander-in-chief.
We have to figure out why this guy orders a traceable weapon to this post office box
when he's going into any store in Texas,
give a phony name, and walk out with a rifle which can never be traced.
To frame him, obviously.
There's a lot of smoke there, but there's some fire.
We're talking about our government here.
No, we're talking about a crime, Bill, pure and simple.
Y'all gotta start thinking on a different level like the CIA does.
Now, we're through the looking glass here, people.
White is black, and black is white.
Just maybe Oswald is exactly what he said he was.
A patsy.
We took very seriously these charges.
We had first the evidence examined by the Warren Commission.
Marina testifies that she took it.
She identifies the camera that she used.
The FBI was able to, to the exclusion of all other cameras,
to deny that camera to these photographs.
Assuming at all that's fake,
we went further with a photographic panel
and studied very carefully all of the testimony
about the shadows being inappropriate.
Our photographic panel indicated in great detail
that these shadows were not inappropriate,
that the critics had simply not understood optics accordingly.
Oswald gave a copy of the photograph to his friend George deMorenschild.
On the back, someone wrote,
Hunter of Fascists in Russian, and Oswald signed it.
The House Committee's experts concluded beyond a doubt the signature was his.
Any notion that the photograph was faked by other people
to frame Lee Harvey Oswald now has to explain
the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald himself signed that photograph.
On April 6th, Lee was fired from his job at the photo lab.
No one knows where he spent his days.
Marina says he spent a few evenings shooting target practice.
On the night of April 10th, she says, he didn't come home at all.
She waited until 7, and then she made herself a little supper.
At about 10, he still hadn't come home.
She was worried. She walked into a room,
his study, which he told her never to enter.
And there on his desk, she saw a sheet of paper
with a key lying on top of it.
Lee wrote to Marina in Russian.
Here is the key to the post office box.
You can throw out my clothing, but as for my personal papers,
I prefer you keep them. I left you as much money as I could.
He then explained where to find the jail,
and she had no idea what he'd gone to do,
and she started to shake all over.
That evening, someone fired a single shot
through the window of General Walker's study.
Looking the situation over, back there, 40 steps behind me, isn't...
General Walker survived to tell what happened.
A bullet crashed through the window and just missed me,
and it felt much grit and dirt in my hair,
and my arm was laying on the desk,
and it was bleeding in three places,
which turned out to be fragments from the shell casing.
Walker's neighbor, Case Coleman,
remembers the shot he heard as a 14-year-old youngster.
I was in the den working on a school project with my godfather,
and he was helping me out on the typewriter,
and we heard this loud bang.
I ran out this door here and ran up to the fence.
At the time, the church had built a six-foot stockade fence,
but my kid sister's bicycle was sitting here,
so I jumped up on the bicycle looking over the fence.
That's when I noticed the black Ford that had been backed in here
driving down the alley.
There was a 58 Chevy sitting over here with a guy
bent over the back seat, throwing something on the floorboard,
and he went down towards Tall Creek.
I can see it now, looking at the 58 Chevy sitting down there.
It's very vivid, very vivid.
Based on his account, the Dallas police began looking
for several suspects, which would suggest a conspiracy.
But Marina says Lee told her a very different story.
Later that night, about 11.30, Lee came in,
white, covered with sweat, and looking quite wild in the eyes,
and he said, I shot Walker.
Lee explained to Marina that he had jumped on a bus,
buried the rifle, and then he'd taken another bus.
And he said when he took the bus, there they lose the scent.
The radio broadcast that a boy on the spot had seen one or two cars
in the alleyway behind Walker's house.
Lee laughed. He exploded in laughter.
And he said, Americans are so spoiled,
they think you always have to have a car,
whereas I got away on my own two feet.
The Walker case would not be resolved until after the assassination,
when Marina told her story and the Walker bullet
was linked to Oswald's ammunition.
No co-conspirators were ever identified.
Two weeks later, Oswald abruptly left town.
In seven months, he would write into the history books.
But for now, he was headed home, to New Orleans.
This is PBS.