Let's say Oswald had help -- or was set up.
Who did it?
by Pamela Colloff and Michael Hall

(Texas Monthly, November 1998)

THERE IS NEVER AN ORDINARY DAY AT DALLAS' DEALEY PLAZA, where personal revelations and quiet mourning are as familiar as the downtown rush-hour traffic. But this August afternoon is stranger than usual: A dark blue 1961 Lincoln Continental convertible limousine is sitting in the center lane of Elm Street, which has been blocked off. Stills of the Zapruder film line the sidewalk, serving as the storyboard for the day's activities: a restaging of the century's most famous murder, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, for a television documentary that will try to determine, with the help of lasers, where the shots came from. Three men in white shirts are huddled around the convertible, bending and shifting the limbs of its foam rubber passengers. A gray dummy sits in the back seat, just as Kennedy did, while another -- in John Connally's place -- rests on the jump seat in front of him. "His arm has got to come over more," insists one man, pulling the president's left arm farther across his spongy torso. A film crew circles the scene, while tourists, ballistics experts, conspiracy buffs, and reporters watch the goings-on. "But shouldn't his other hand be over the chrome line?" asks one observer. The men in the white shirts mull this over, glancing first at the film stills and then at the mannequins, before resuming their work. The heat is oppressive, but the comparing and tweaking continues late into the day.

Of course, they will never get it right: the precise slant of a wave, the tilt of a head, the trajectory of a bullet. Elm Street has been closed several times for such reenactments, but there is still no consensus on exactly what happened. There are too many shifting perspectives, inexplicable details, and active imaginations, all aching to make sense of a senseless act. Over the past 35 years, countless theories have evolved, but they discount the overwhelming proof, both physical and circumstantial, that Lee Harvey Oswald was the man who shot Kennedy. "I have sent men to the electric chair with less evidence," said Henry Wade, Dallas County's district attorney in 1963.

In 1964 the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald was Kennedy's assassin, and that he had acted alone. But the official story had troubling inconsistencies: Conflicting eyewitness accounts, discrepancies in the autopsy reports, and the unlikely paths and precision of Oswald's shots all suggested more than one gunman had been at Dealey Plaza. The first cries of foul play came from across the Atlantic, most notably from English writer Bertrand Russell, but it wasn't until 1966, with the publication of Mark Lane's Rush to Judgment and Edward Jay Epstein's Inquest, that the Warren Commission's findings were challenged at home. Life magazine, which had purchased the Zapruder film soon after the assassination, launched a new investigation of the case. The magazine's consultant, former Navy lieutenant Josiah Thompson, argued the following year in Six Seconds in Dallas that a close examination of the film showed the president being shot from several directions, hence a conspiracy.

New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison stepped into the fray in 1967, using the loose ends of Oswald's life -- he had defected to the Soviet Union and sought asylum in Cuba and had tenuous connections to anti-Castro militants -- to speculate that the CIA had somehow been involved. For the most part, the public ignored such cynical talk, but as first Vietnam and then Watergate wore on, its distrust grew. Interest in a more thorough investigation of the Kennedy assassination reached critical mass in 1975, when the Zapruder film was first shown on TV and Senate hearings revealed that the CIA had conspired with the Mafia to kill Fidel Castro in the early sixties. The following year, the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) was formed, and in 1979 it concluded that while Oswald was indeed the gunman, he had had an accomplice, who shot, and missed, from the grassy knoll. The existence of a conspiracy was confirmed -- by the federal government, no less. The HSCA also hinted at involvement by Cuban exiles or members of the mob, a theory that remained in vogue throughout the eighties. Since 1991, when Oliver Stone's controversial movie JFK used Garrison as its hero and pointed fingers at the CIA, the FBI, Cuban exiles, military intelligence, and munitions profiteers, the specifics of the various theories have been lost, replaced by a sense of overall complicity: Everyone was in on it.

What follows is an overview of the conspiracy oeuvre, though it is hardly exhaustive. We haven't included some of the shadowy figures -- Umbrella Man, the Babushka Lady, Badge Man -- that populate the fringes of conspiracy-think. Nor do we examine the more far-out theories: that Joe DiMaggio, angered at Kennedy's treatment of his ex-wife, Marilyn Monroe, got his Italian friends to knock him off; or that the president, who was already suffering from Addison's disease, staged his own death, ensuring a glorified place in history; or that Frank Sinatra's drummer, Franklin Folley, was somehow involved. Instead, we present the ones that have endured over the years. They are as intriguing as they are implausible, and they raise as many questions as the Warren Commission failed to answer. Underlying all of them are uncanny coincidences, convergences of terrible knowledge, and most important, a desire to believe that there was a grand design -- some kind of meaning and purpose -- behind Kennedy's murder. Thirty-five years later, these narratives have become more appealing than the banal alternative: a lone nut, a good shot, an utterly vain death.

WHEN KENNEDY ASSUMED THE PRESIDENCY in January 1961, he inherited a federal agency that had spun out of control. The CIA had pursued its own objectives during the Eisenhower administration -- instigating coups, inciting rebellions, trying to assassinate foreign leaders -- generally without White House supervision. When the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion (which the CIA had orchestrated) proved to be a disaster as well as an enormous political liability for Kennedy, he fired the director and his deputies, threatening to "smash the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds." Rogue agents, fearful he would do just that, struck first, either by placing CIA sharpshooters at Dealey Plaza or by enlisting former Marine and spy wannabe Lee Harvey Oswald to do the job.

Authors Mark Lane (Plausible Denial), John Newman (Oswald and the CIA), and Anthony Summers (Conspiracy).

• CIA director Allen Dulles, whom Kennedy had fired in 1961, later served on the Warren Commission.
• CIA deputy director Charles Cabell, whom Kennedy had also fired, was the brother of Earle Cabell, Dallas' mayor in 1963.
• One of Kennedy's alleged mistresses, Mary Pinchot Meyer, was married to a CIA official and was murdered in 1964.
• Richard Nixon -- who oversaw the CIA's original plan to take back Cuba from Castro when he was Eisenhower's vice president -- was in Dallas on the day of the assassination.

• If anybody could have planned and concealed a plot as intricate as the Kennedy assassination, power-hungry CIA agents could; they had already helped oust heads of state in Guatemala and Iran.
• The agency had little congressional oversight in 1963 and was full of furtive cells, subgroups, and enthusiastic spooks who acted with impunity and whose modus operandi was "plausible deniability." Indeed, as Kennedy's motorcade was making its way through Dallas, a CIA operative in Paris was -- unbeknownst to most of his higher-ups -- giving a poison fountain pen to Cuban turncoat Rolando Cubela, who had volunteered to hand it to Fidel Castro.
• While in the Marines in 1957 and 1958, Oswald was stationed at Atsugi Air Base in Japan, the home of the largest CIA station in the Pacific.
• During the Warren Commission's investigation, the CIA withheld untold amounts of information, notably that the agency and the mob had jointly tried to kill Castro.

• There is no evidence that Oswald was ever a CIA operative; at Atsugi he was a low-level officer who was court-martialed twice and displayed erratic behavior, once shooting himself in the arm.
• Just because the CIA would lie, cheat, steal, overthrow governments, and try to assassinate other countries' leaders does not mean that it would kill its own.

Speculation about the CIA's involvement has always centered on one of the most intriguing assassination riddles: the identity of the three tramps, a trio of men arrested in the rail yard behind Dealey Plaza immediately after the assassination. Photos showed them being led through the downtown streets by Dallas police officers, yet there was no record of their arrest. Conspiracy theorists have long believed that they looked suspiciously like CIA bogeymen E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis (as well as Charles Harrelson, the assassin of federal judge John Wood and the father of actor Woody Harrelson). According to the three tramps theory, these CIA operatives killed Kennedy; after they were arrested, they were whisked away by unidentified federal agents who destroyed all records of the incident. But in 1992 Dallas researcher Mary La Fontaine searched through Dallas Police Department files and found overlooked arrest records from November 22, 1963. The three tramps were, in fact, three tramps: Harold Doyle, Gus Abrams, and John Forrester Gedney.

THE MOB FELT BETRAYED IN 1963. Chicago godfather Sam Giancana had helped Kennedy win the 1960 election through skulduggery, and Miami mobster Santos Trafficante had aided the CIA in its assassination attempts on Castro. But rather than pledging their loyalty, the Kennedys launched an all-out campaign against organized crime. Attorney General Robert Kennedy first went after Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa and then deported New Orleans syndicate boss Carlos Marcello to Guatemala. Pushed around long enough, and angry at the president for going soft on Castro -- who had shut down its lucrative Cuban casinos -- the mob made someone an offer he couldn't refuse. Oswald was either its hit man or its patsy. Upon his arrest, the mob dispatched Jack Ruby to silence him.

Authors John H. Davis (The Kennedy Contract) and David Scheim (Contract on America) and veteran journalist Jack Anderson.

• In 1975 and 1976, during the course of congressional investigations of the mob and the CIA, Sam Giancana was gunned down in his kitchen, Jimmy Hoffa "disappeared," and Las Vegas mobster Johnny Roselli -- who had told Jack Anderson that Ruby was ordered to silence Oswald -- was dismembered, stuffed into an oil drum, and tossed off the coast of Florida.
• Kennedy and Judith Exner, one of Giancana's molls, were introduced in 1960 by Frank Sinatra and carried on an affair for more than two years; Exner says she often carried envelopes from the president to the mobster.

• In 1979 the HSCA concluded that Hoffa, Marcello, and Trafficante all had the "motive, means, and opportunity" to assassinate Kennedy.
• Hoffa had told a federal informant that he would like to kill RFK but that his brother was the more desirable victim because "when you cut down the tree, the branches fall with it."
• Marcello -- according to Las Vegas promoter Edward Becker -- once coolly explained why it was better to target JFK than RFK: "If you cut off a dog's tail, the dog will only keep biting. But if you cut off its head, the dog will die."
• An FBI informant testified before the HSCA that Trafficante told him in 1962 that the president "was going to be hit."
• In 1992 Frank Ragano, a longtime lawyer for Hoffa and Trafficante, told the New York Post that the two mobsters and Marcello had agreed to kill the president. Ragano claimed that Trafficante said on his deathbed: "Carlos f--ed up. We shouldn't have gotten rid of Giovanni [John]. We should have killed Bobby."
• Oswald's uncle and surrogate father, Dutz Murret, was a bookie in the Marcello organization, and his mother, Marguerite, dated members of Marcello's gang.
• When Ruby was a teenager in Chicago, he ran errands for Al Capone. As an adult, he had ties to members of the Giancana, Hoffa, Marcello, and Trafficante families. In 1959 he visited Trafficante in his Cuban jail cell, where Castro had thrown the mobster after the revolution.
• Two days before the assassination, a prostitute and heroin addict named Rose Cheramie told a Louisiana state policeman that she had been en route to Dallas with two men "who were Italians or resembled Italians" and were planning to kill Kennedy. After the assassination, she told Dr. Victor Weiss at East Louisiana State Hospital that "the word in the underworld" had been that Kennedy was going to take a mob bullet. She also said that Oswald and Ruby "had been shacking up for years . . . They were bedmates."

• The HSCA was ultimately "unable to establish any direct evidence" of mob complicity.
• Chicago FBI agent William Roemer, who spent hours listening to wiretaps of mobsters after the assassination, said they were "gleeful" but did not talk of a conspiracy.
• There is no proof that Ruby was anything more than a small-timer on the periphery of the Dallas underworld.
• Hoffa, Trafficante, and Marcello were cautious men, yet killing JFK was a rash solution -- one that would only have brought on more heat from RFK. And why would a bunch of seasoned killers rely on a loser like Oswald?
• Cheramie -- who had spent time in mental hospitals and who had a history of providing the FBI with false leads -- was in the throes of heroin withdrawal when she told her story. After the assassination, she said that she had once worked as a dancer for Ruby, whom she knew as Pinky, but there is no evidence that she did. Nor is there reliable evidence that Oswald and Ruby ever knew each other.

In 1993 Illinois cop killer James Files confessed to Kennedy's murder. Claiming to have been an Army paratrooper in Laos, a trainer of Cuban exiles for the Bay of Pigs invasion, and the personal driver for Chicago mobster Charles Nicoletti, Files said that he fired from the grassy knoll while Nicoletti shot from the Dal-Tex Building. In 1994 the New York Post ran a story on Files titled "Call This JFK Tale Knoll and Void."

BY 1963 LYNDON JOHNSON HAD GROWN WEARY of the obscurity of his office and was concerned that the scandals surrounding his cronies Bobby Baker and Billie Sol Estes would ruin his hopes for the presidency. When rumors circulated that JFK was going to drop him from the 1964 ticket, LBJ worked to stage an elaborate coup on home turf, enlisting loyal Texas oilmen who feared losing the oil depletion allowance and warmongers who wanted to step up involvement in Vietnam. One of their foot soldiers was an angry young man named Lee Harvey Oswald.

Authors David Lifton (The Texas Connection) and Harrison Edward Livingstone (Killing Kennedy).

• John Connally, LBJ's longtime friend and colleague, roomed in college with Dallas County district attorney Henry Wade, whose November 24, 1963, press conference made the definitive case against Oswald.
• Eugene Locke, the deputy ambassador to Vietnam under LBJ, once served as the attorney for Marie Tippit, the wife of Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit, whom Oswald shot soon after the assassination.

• Two days after the assassination, deputy attorney general Nicholas Katzenbach pushed for the creation of a federal investigatory commission, partly out of concern that the public might suspect Johnson's involvement: Historically, assassinations of heads of state have been carried out by their successors.
• Soon after becoming president, Johnson, a hawk, pressed the House and Senate for passage of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, initiating a period of increased involvement in Vietnam.
• Johnson sealed certain assassination records until 2039, ordered that Kennedy's limousine be refurbished rather than entered into evidence, and handpicked each member of the Warren Commission, which answered ultimately to him.

• LBJ was fiercely ambitious but not depraved; to believe that he would order Kennedy's murder requires an extraordinary leap of logic.
• Despite years of speculation -- beginning, most memorably, with Barbara Garson's popular 1967 play, MacBird!, and amplified in Oliver Stone's JFK -- there is not one shred of evidence to support the idea that LBJ had a hand in the assassination.

The newly released LBJ tapes show that Johnson was by no means the puppet of warmongers; he clearly agonized over Vietnam and sought resolution to the conflict. They also reveal a man of more depth, and of greater conscience, than his detractors have ever given him credit for -- hardly the portrait of a Judas waiting in the wings.

HUMILIATED BY KENNEDY IN THE CUBAN missile crisis, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev decided to punish him. Scenario 1: Oswald, who lived in the Soviet Union from 1959 to 1962, was trained in espionage there and then ordered to make the hit. Scenario 2: Oswald was the patsy in Khrushchev's game, set up by an Oswald double and KGB operatives who fired the fatal shots at Dealey Plaza. Scenario 3: Oswald returned home from the Soviet Union an unwitting assassin, programmed ý la The Manchurian Candidate to carry out the orders of those behind the Iron Curtain.

CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton and author Michael Eddowes (Khrushchev Killed Kennedy).

• Russian baron and suspected spy George de Mohrenschildt -- who helped introduce Oswald to the Russian ÈmigrÈ community in Dallas and was his closest friend before the assassination -- fatally shot himself in 1977, before he was set to testify before the HSCA.
• The uncle of Marina Nikolayevna Prusakova, Oswald's Russian-born wife, was a ranking officer in the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs.

• In January 1960 Oswald was given a rent-free apartment in Minsk, where an espionage training academy was located. Recently declassified files show that up to twenty KGB agents shadowed him and may have manipulated his behavior. ("Maybe they did drop a few tablets in his glass," a high-ranking KGB official told the Russian newspaper Izvestia, "but only to make him let down his guard and be a little more talkative.")
• The Russians, who had never before captured a U2 spy plane, suddenly managed to do so a scant six and a half months after the defection of Oswald, who had worked as a Marine radar operator in Atsugi, Japan, where the U2 was based.
• On a trip to Mexico City on September 27, 1963, Oswald visited the Soviet embassy and spoke to KGB agent Oleg Maximovich Nechiporenko -- who was expelled from Mexico in 1970 for conspiring to overthrow the government -- and Valeriy Vladimirovich Kostikov, an agent in "wet affairs": sabotage and assassination.

Secret agents usually keep a lower profile than did Oswald, whose pinko leanings -- such as addressing his fellow Marines as "comrades" in the midst of the cold war or reading Das Kapital in the barracks -- earned him the nickname Oswaldskovich.
• It seems unlikely that the KGB would have recruited someone as unstable as Oswald -- who attempted suicide five days after arriving in Moscow -- for such a covert operation, since a Soviet-backed plot to kill Kennedy would have resulted in certain nuclear retaliation if uncovered.
• At Atsugi, Oswald was a low-level soldier with little exposure to the U2.
• A 1981 exhumation of Oswald's body revealed that it was indeed he who was buried, not his Soviet-trained double, as some conspiracy theorists suspected.
• Marina later recanted her testimony and professed her husband's innocence, saying that she had been threatened with deportation if she did not cooperate.
• Why would Khrushchev want to get rid of Kennedy in favor of Johnson, a more zealous anti-communist with closer ties to the military?

In 1992 the KGB released dossier #31451: the Oswald file. It contained few revelations other than the KGB's own suspicions that the American defector was a CIA operative. There was, however, one tantalizing detail: After spying on several of Oswald's hunting trips, KGB operatives concluded that he was a poor shot.

BY THE FALL OF 1963, J. EDGAR HOOVER, had anticipated that his long tenure as FBI director was coming to an end. Federal law required the 68-year-old to step down on his seventieth birthday, and he knew that Kennedy was eager to be rid of him. But rather than fading quietly into the background, Hoover orchestrated an early transfer of power to his ally LBJ, who, as president, could -- and did -- exempt him from mandatory retirement, allowing him to lord over the bureau until his death in 1972. Scenario 1: Hoover knew of various plots to kill Kennedy but took no action, failing to inform the Secret Service of threats to the president's life and taking an uncharacteristically hands-off approach to investigating possible conspirators. Scenario 2: Oswald was an FBI informant who killed Kennedy on orders from the bureau. Scenario 3: Oswald warned the FBI of plots to kill Kennedy, only to find himself framed and then silenced by fellow informant Jack Ruby.

Authors Mark North (Act of Treason) and George O'Toole (The Assassination Tapes).

• Ruby briefly worked as an FBI informant in 1959.
• The FBI's number three man, William Sullivan, who had overseen the "internal security aspects" of the assassination investigation, was fatally shot in 1977 on a hunting expedition before testifying before the HSCA.
• When Oswald was a child, his favorite television show was I Led Three Lives, the story of an FBI counterspy.

• The FBI had been keeping tabs on Oswald since at least 1960 but did not inform the Secret Service that he worked in a building along the motorcade route.
• Ten days before the assassination, Oswald dropped off a handwritten note at the FBI's Dallas field office for James Hosty, a special agent who had been trailing him for several months. Hosty destroyed the note on orders from his superior the day Oswald was shot but never acknowledged its existence until 1975, when he explained that it had merely warned him to "stop harassing" Oswald's wife, Marina. (He had questioned her twice in early November.) Some speculate that the note really contained violent threats; others think it was a warning from Oswald that someone in Dallas was going to kill the president.
• Texas attorney general Waggoner Carr told the Warren Commission he had information that Oswald was an undercover FBI agent, prompting a top-secret emergency meeting of the commission in January 1964.
• Eyewitness accounts of varying reliability placed Oswald in New Orleans fraternizing with, and even receiving envelopes from, FBI agents.
• The sole investigatory body for the Warren Commission was the FBI, which intimidated witnesses, suppressed and destroyed evidence that cast an unflattering light on the bureau, and conducted a shoddy investigation, even declining to take Abraham Zapruder's super-8 footage when he offered it after the assassination.
• According to Hale Boggs, a Warren Commission member: "Hoover lied his eyes out to the commission -- on Oswald, on Ruby, on their friends, the bullets, the gun, you name it."

• The HSCA could never establish that Oswald had worked as an FBI informant.
• Carr's speculations were partly based on a 1964 Houston Post article whose source, Dallas County assistant district attorney Bill Alexander, later admitted to having concocted the story because he distrusted the feds.
• Why would Hoover -- whose personal files on politicians' indiscretions filled four rooms of FBI headquarters -- have preferred murder to blackmail as a means of furthering his own ambitions?

In his 1996 memoir, Assignment: Oswald, Hosty said he found notes he took during Oswald's twelve-hour interrogation at Dallas police headquarters -- notes that he told the Warren Commission he had destroyed. Although they shed little new light on Oswald, their sudden appearance raises questions about what else the FBI has withheld over the years.

FIDEL CASTRO HAD SURVIVED DOZENs OF attempts on his life by agents of the U.S. government (some involving poisoned cigars, lethal powders, and exploding seashells) as well as the botched Bay of Pigs invasion and other CIA-orchestrated raids. After one too many bazooka attacks, the dictator said, "Basta!" in the fall of 1963 and struck back. He found a willing assassin in Oswald, a known communist sympathizer.

Lyndon Johnson (eventually) and anti-Castro activist Carlos Bringuier.

• Oswald admired Castro, often referring to him as Uncle Fidel.
• In the summer of 1963 Oswald was planning to relocate his family to Havana.

• In a September 1963 interview with the Associated Press, Castro called Kennedy a "cretin" and threatened to retaliate against him: "U.S. leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders . . . they themselves will not be safe."
• On September 27, 1963, Oswald visited the Cuban consulate in Mexico City, ostensibly to obtain a visa. Eager to ingratiate himself with Cuban bureaucrats, he presented himself as "a friend of the Cuban revolution" and, some speculate, offered his services as an assassin.
• Autulio RamÌrez Ortiz, a hijacker who claimed to have infiltrated Cuban intelligence in the early sixties, testified before the HSCA that he saw a file labeled "Osvaldo-Kennedy" at a Cuban intelligence facility. The file, Ortiz said, contained a photo of Oswald, a KGB recommendation, and this conclusion: "Oswald is an adventurer. Our embassy in Mexico has orders to get in contact with him. Be very careful."

• Castro had to have known that the U.S. would strike back if his plot were discovered.
• Oswald's visa request at the Cuban consulate was turned down.

According to National Security Agency documents released last year, the usually unflappable Castro was terrified the U.S. would retaliate against Cuba in the first hours after the assassination. The NSA intercepted messages going in and out of Cuba, including one from a foreign agent who saw Castro's televised speech on the evening of November 23: "Fidel, emotional and uneasy, tried . . . to refute the accusations which were then appearing and to twist them so that the assassination would appear as the work of the Ultra Reaction, of the extreme racists of the Pentagon, who are fanatical supporters of war against Cuba and the Soviet Union. Although it was only the third time I had witnessed a speech by Fidel, I got the immediate impression that on this occasion he was frightened, if not terrified."

IN THE EARLY DAYS OF THE KENNEDY administration, Cuban exiles reserved their contempt for Castro, who had taken away their homeland. But after the Bay of Pigs invasion, they felt equally betrayed by Kennedy, who had withheld air support during the operation, leaving 1,500 Cuban soldiers stranded and at the mercy of Castro's army. After Kennedy thwarted subsequent plans to invade, enraged exiles orchestrated the president's murder with help from their CIA associates, either in retaliation for the deaths of their brothers-in-arms or to frame Castro for Kennedy's murder, thereby forcing a full-scale U.S. invasion. Oswald, who had tried to infiltrate the anti-Castro movement in New Orleans, was either the exiles' agent or their patsy.

HSCA investigator Gaeton Fonzi, authors Bernard Fensterwald (Coincidence or Conspiracy?) and Sylvia Meagher (Accessories After the Fact), and CBS newsman Peter Noyes.

In August 1963 Oswald approached Carlos Bringuier, a New Orleans shopkeeper active in the anti-Castro movement, and asked to join his organization. Four days later Oswald was arrested for disturbing the peace while passing out pro-Castro leaflets -- an elaborate scheme, some say, to deflect attention from his involvement in the anti-Castro conspiracy.

• Cuban exile Sylvia Odio told the HSCA that in late September 1963, three men showed up at her Dallas apartment and convinced her and her sister that they were members of the cause. Two of the men, "Leopoldo" and "Angelo," were Cubans, while the third, "Leon Oswald," was an American, described later as a former Marine, a man who thought Kennedy should be assassinated because of the Bay of Pigs, a good shot, and "kind of nuts." Two months later Odio and her sister were shocked when they recognized the president's assassin: Leon was Lee Harvey Oswald. The HSCA later termed Odio a "credible" witness.
• Cuban exiles viewed the Bay of Pigs as nothing less than unforgivable treachery on Kennedy's part. At the end of 1962 he added fuel to the fire when he shut down Operation Mongoose (a CIA program that was preparing Cuban pilots and soldiers for another invasion) in exchange for Khrushchev's dismantling of Russian missiles on the island. By 1963 the Kennedy administration was cracking down on Cuban exiles, raiding their paramilitary training camps in Louisiana and Florida.

• Oswald was in Mexico City on the day Odio says he visited her.
• Why would virulent anti-communists trust Oswald, a known Red?

In 1994 Florence Martino told writer Anthony Summers that on the morning of November 22, 1963, her husband, John -- an anti-Castro activist -- said, "Flo, they're going to kill him. They're going to kill him when he gets to Texas." Then, she said, John got a bunch of phone calls from Texas. "I don't know who called him, but he was on the phone, on the phone, on the phone . . ." John Martino, who had once worked for Santos Trafficante, had been imprisoned by Castro from 1959 to 1962. (He later wrote a book, I Was Castro's Prisoner.) After his release he threw in with Cuban exiles and later claimed that they had framed Oswald. He died in 1975.

SECRET SERVICE AGENTS WERE PAWNS IN A grand scheme to kill the president. Working on orders from higher-ups -- the FBI or the vice president -- they (a) provided lax security in Dallas so that sharpshooters would have a clear shot and/or (b) hijacked the body as part of an elaborate scheme to alter the corpse, scuttle the autopsy, and cover up the whole affair.

Authors David Lifton (Best Evidence) and Bonar Menninger (Mortal Error).

• Into the wee hours on the morning of the assassination, Secret Service agents drank Everclear at the Cellar, a rowdy beatnik club in Fort Worth whose owner, Pat Kirkwood, was an acquaintance of Jack Ruby's.
• Secret Service agents Winston Lawson and Forrest Sorrells, who chose the motorcade route, rode in a covered sedan in front of the president's convertible.

• Although plans for a presidential motorcade in Miami four days before the assassination were scrapped when a right-wing extremist told a police informant that Kennedy would be shot "from an office building with a high-powered rifle," few precautions were taken in Dallas: Buildings along the motorcade route were not secured, lookouts were not posted, and the presidential limousine's "bubble top" was removed.
• Against regulations, the Secret Service chose a motorcade route that required a 120-degree turn, an angle that forced Kennedy's limousine to slow to a crawl as it passed the book depository building and turned onto Elm Street.
• Rather than having four motorcycles stationed on each side of the president's limo, as Dallas police chief Jesse Curry had suggested, Agent Lawson ordered that only two motorcycles be on each side and that they remain by the rear bumper.
• After the first two shots were fired, Agent William Greer, Kennedy's driver, briefly applied the brake rather than the accelerator, allowing the presidential limousine to come to a near standstill right before the third and fatal shot was fired.
• At Parkland Hospital on the afternoon of the assassination, agents forced their way past Dallas medical examiner Earl Rose with the president's coffin in hand, insisting that the autopsy would be performed not in Dallas, as required by state law, but in Washington, D.C.

• Could all of the seventy Secret Service agents assigned to protect the president in Dallas have turned against him -- and kept silent about such a conspiracy for 35 years?
• Since the president's coffin was never left unattended on Air Force One, the corpse could not have been tampered with.

Interest in the Secret Service's possible connection to the assassination was revived by Menninger's 1992 book, Mortal Error, which claims that Agent George Hickey fired the third and fatal shot while riding in the presidential follow-up car. According to Menninger's thesis, when Hickey reached for his AR-15 upon hearing shots, he slipped off the safety, lost his balance, and accidentally pulled the trigger.

ON NOVEMBER 2, 1963, AFTER SOUTH Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem began negotiations with North Vietnamese communists, he was shot at point-blank range, along with his brother and political adviser, Ngo Dinh Nhu, during a U.S.-backed coup. Seeking revenge, the wealthy and powerful Diem family -- perhaps led by the widowed Madame Nhu, Saigon's "Dragon Lady" -- settled the score three weeks later in Dallas.

Lyndon Johnson (initially).

• In 1950, when Diem was forced into exile by Ho Chi Minh, he fled to a Catholic seminary in New York, where he became friendly with then-senator John Kennedy.
• Kennedy had approved the coup but was assured that an attempt would be made to evacuate Diem and Nhu from Saigon; he was appalled to learn that they had been murdered. Eight years later, CIA operative Howard Hunt doctored State Department files so that researchers of the Pentagon Papers might "discover" that Kennedy had arranged Diem's murder.
• Allen Dulles, who created the Saigon Military Mission and staffed it with men who would later help orchestrate the Saigon coup, was a member of the Warren Commission.

The Diem regime showed no mercy to its foes. Immediately after her husband's murder, Madame Nhu told American reporters, "Such a cruel injustice against a faithful ally cannot go unnoticed, and those who indulge in it will have to pay for it."

If the South Vietnamese were wily enough to pull this off, why didn't they kill Ho Chi Minh first?

In 1997 Seymour Hersh's The Dark Side of Camelot alleged that Kennedy not only knew Diem would be murdered but also personally asked Air Force general Edward Landsdale, a CIA man, to do the job himself.

THERE IS A SECRET GOVERNMENT WITHIN OUR government, a cabal that in 1963 ordered the murder of a popular president, set up a patsy, installed its own puppet, and orchestrated an elaborate cover-up that included tampering with the corpse, destroying and suppressing evidence, and killing witnesses. Heading the cabal were some of the world's most powerful men: rich and corrupt industrialists, generals, and right-wing politicians. Down below was an eclectic group of mobsters, spooks, lowlifes, and anti-Castro extremists, many of whom were headquartered at 544 Camp Street in New Orleans, including Oswald, former FBI agent Guy Banister, soldier of fortune David Ferrie, and suspected CIA informant Clay Shaw. Together, in the summer of 1963, they plotted Kennedy's demise. score three weeks later in Dallas.

New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, filmmaker Oliver Stone, and former chief of special operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff Fletcher Prouty.

Theorists enjoy playing an elaborate parlor game of Six Degrees of Assassination. One version goes like this: As a teenager, Oswald had been in the Civil Air Patrol with Ferrie, who had done private investigative work for mobster Carlos Marcello, whose close associate Santos Trafficante had been the main mob boss in prerevolution Cuba, where in 1959 he was imprisoned by Castro, visited by Ruby, and then bailed out by Cuban turncoat Rolando Cubela, who, on November 22, 1963, was being briefed in Paris on killing Castro by an agent of the CIA, whose former director (and future Warren Commission member), Allen Dulles, had been forced out by Kennedy following the Bay of Pigs invasion, as had his deputy, Charles Cabell, whose brother Earle was the mayor of Dallas, which had been papered on November 22 with "Wanted for Treason" leaflets published by Robert Surrey, an aide to Major General Edwin A. Walker, who had been the target of an assassination attempt in April 1963, the chief suspect of which, according to the Warren Commission, was Oswald. Surrey also played bridge with James Hosty, the FBI agent who had been shadowing Oswald, whose wife, Marina, often mocked her husband's lovemaking and told him how attracted she was to Kennedy, who had had an affair with Judith Exner, girlfriend of mafioso Sam Giancana, who had helped steal the 1960 election for Kennedy by stuffing ballot boxes in Chicago, where Ruby had run errands for Al Capone as a teenager and Banister had helped ambush John Dillinger.

Pressed for time, obsessed with secrecy, and embarrassed by their awareness of Oswald's existence, both the FBI and the CIA withheld critical information and did little to investigate possible links between their own organizations and Oswald, between the CIA and Cuban paramilitary organizations, between the Mafia and various assassination players, and between Ruby and the mob, Cubans, and the Dallas police force.

• How could such a labyrinthine plan with so many participants never be exposed? How could a bunch of inefficient, bungling bureaucracies work so well and with such determination and unanimity?
• Notwithstanding Kevin Costner's noble portrayal of him in JFK, Garrison -- the chief proponent of this theory -- was a lying, attention-grabbing megalomaniac with McCarthyite tendencies who had been dismissed from the National Guard for mental problems. He tried to prove his theory by taking businessman Clay Shaw to court in 1969 for conspiring to kill the president. The resulting trial was nothing less than a circus. Garrison sought to prove his case with an array of peculiar characters, including a man in a toga identifying himself as Julius Caesar, a heroin addict, and a New York accountant who said he often fingerprinted his daughter to make sure she was not an impostor. The prosecution mischaracterized evidence and bribed, intimidated, and even had witnesses hypnotized. He ultimately said that there were sixteen assassins at Dealey Plaza, including the three tramps and a man who popped out of a sewer. Though he presented plenty of intriguing suspicions, he had few facts, and it took the jury only 45 minutes to find Shaw innocent of all charges. The New York Times later called Garrison's crusade against Shaw "one of the most disgraceful chapters in the history of American jurisprudence."

JFK's release forever changed the way Americans view the assassination. Oliver Stone provided the seamless -- albeit wildly inventive and historically inaccurate -- story line that lawyer Garrison had always coveted. If we vaguely believed in a conspiracy before, by late 1991, 73 percent of Americans were sure of it, while 35 percent thought the CIA was directly involved. In response, Congress created the Assassination Records Review Board, whose mandate was to obtain assassination-related files from often-reluctant agencies like the FBI and the CIA, declassify them, and make them available to the public. The upshot was the release of thousands of important items, including the personal papers of Warren Commission members, a presidential aide's amateur film of the motorcade, and notes from Oswald's interrogation at Dallas police headquarters, as well as an archive of more than four million pages of secret records. Nothing earth-shattering was ever discovered (the board was shut down in September), though many documents still remain hidden from view. According to the act that created the board, all relevant documents must be released to the public by 2017 -- except for ones deemed worthy for further postponement by any sitting president.