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THE JFK CASE: THE TWELVE WHO BUILT THE OSWALD LEGEND (Part 5: The Double Dangle)

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Bill Simpich
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On the same day as Fain's memo, Egerter sent a letter under Angleton's name to FBI liaison Papich hinting about Rand's plan to bust Webster out of the Soviet Union. An accompanying routing slip indicates that Angleton reviewed Egerter's work a week later and signed off on it.  Next to Angleton's name, the routing slip includes a careful reference to "Webster, Robert Edward".  Angleton's office at headquarters maintained its interest in Webster, and Egerter continued to watch Webster while he was stuck in the USSR for another two years, finally emerging within a week of the Oswald family.

A second false item in Fain's 5/12/60 memo is when he refers to Lee Oswald's father as "Edward Lee Oswald", and his mother as "Mrs. Edward Lee Oswald". The real name was "Robert E. Lee Oswald", spelled out as "Robert Edward Lee Oswald". Webster's full name was "Robert Edward Webster". The phrase "Edward Lee Oswald" was a marked card designed to find out who had wrongfully obtained access to the set of files dealing with Oswald and Webster, and the Fain memo in particular.

The most important story that emerges from Fain's 5/12/60 memo is Marguerite's supposed description of her son:Â Five feet ten, 165 , hair is light brown and wavy, eyes blue.

Again, Webster filled out an employment form back in 1957:Â Five feet ten, 166, hair is blond, eyes blue.

During May 1962, Webster fills out a questionnaire for the CIA upon his return:Â Five feet 9 1/2, 165, hair is blond and slightly wavy, age 33, apparent age 30, eyes blue.

On July 16, 1962, Robert Webster provides a more formal Personal History Statement to the CIA:Â Five feet 9 1/2, 165, hair is blond, age 33, eyes blue.

On October 10, 1963, Egerter and Charlotte Bustos co-authored two memos describing "Lee Henry Oswald", after the Cuban consulate events that supposedly involved a blond Oswald. Both memos inaccurately describe Oswald - Memo 1 is just more subtle. Five feet ten, 165, hair is light brown and wavy, eyes blue. (Memo 1, directed to Mexico City)

Six feet, receding hairline, age 35, athletic build. (Memo 2, directed to the headquarters of the FBI, State Dept., and Navy - and note that Webster was now 35 years old.)

By way of contrast, here's the FBI's description of Oswald after his August 1963 arrest in New Orleans: Â Five feet nine, 140, hair is light brown, eyes blue-hazel, slender build.

And, most ominously, on November 22, 1963, a 12:40 pm radio call in Dallas gave a description of the alleged assassin on the 6th floor of the Texas Book Depository based on a citizen's report.  J. Edgar Hoover exhausted all leads before concluding that the description came from an "unidentified citizen".  This is a very strong piece of evidence that Oswald was framed by someone with access to this intelligence information. Five feet ten, 165, (nothing about hair), age 30.

ConclusionÂ

The only logical conclusion is that Webster was being used in a very simple technical dangle, designed to ensure that US defense capabilities were not being undercut by the Soviets in the plastics and fiberglass fields. What the US learned from the Webster operation was peace of mind, knowing that the US was ten years ahead in these areas.Â
After the downing of the U-2, the Oswald dangle had served its purpose. Was there any other way to use Oswald? With US-Soviet relations in flux, the coincidence in their descriptions was noted and used in a mole hunt exercise by altering Oswald's physical description and by referring to Oswald's parents as "Edward Lee Oswald" and "Mrs. Edward Lee Oswald". By embedding false statements within Oswald's file, and tracking who had access to the file information, Egerter could determine if this information had surfaced elsewhere, and that would be evidence of unauthorized access.   Angleton told the Church Committee that the role of CI/SIG was to prevent the penetration of spies into the CIA and the government, and that the "historical penetration cases are recruitment of U.S. officials in positions -" code clerks."

Angleton's biographer Edward Epstein revealed that Angleton was known for using marked cards. On one occasion, Angleton worked with the CIA's Office of Security to prepare "selected bits of information about planned CIA operations passed out, one at a time, to different units of the Division to see which, if any, leak to the enemy.  The 'marked card' in the initial test revealed that an effort would be made to recruit a particular Soviet diplomat in Canada.  The Office of Security agents, watching the diplomat from a discreet distance, observed the KGB putting their own surveillance on him on the day of the planned contact, realized that the 'marked card' had gotten to the KGB."

During this period of time in 1960, the New York FBI field office took a look at Oswald's file and realized that there were strange things going on. Oswald's mother Marguerite was having her letters returned undelivered. On June 3, 1960, J. Edgar Hoover himself reviewed Fain's memo and noticed that not only did Marguerite not know where her son was, but Oswald had brought his birth certificate with him to the Soviet Union. Even Hoover couldn't get a straight answer from the CIA at that point as to Oswald's whereabouts. Hoover was sufficiently unnerved to write a famous memo where he warned that an imposter may be using Oswald's birth certificate.

Marguerite kept knocking on the doors of government officials trying to find out if her son was alive or dead. She finally decided to see if she could get any action from the new administration in Washington. On January 23, 1961, three days after JFK was sworn in, Marguerite boarded a train to Washington, DC. Upon her arrival, she met with Edward Hickey at the State Department. Marguerite asked if her son was an agent of the US government. A few weeks later, after a year of silence, the government finally told Marguerite that her son Lee was alive in the USSR and had an actual address.

Finally, in the words of Peter Dale Scott, Oswald now had "a legend with an ambiguous U.S.-Soviet background, whose citizenship and whose ideological alignment were now both in question...The documentary record on Oswald, beginning with the UPI story on the weekend of his defection, was salted with references to his interest in going to Cuba...in 1963 the products of the Oswald (marked card) operation were used to double for a propaganda operation whose purpose was to neutralize the Fair Play for Cuba Committee".Â

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Bill Simpich is a civil rights attorney and an antiwar activist in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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