Oswald and the CIA

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This meticulously documented expos gives the lie to the official CIA position that it had no relationship of any kind with Lee Harvey Oswald, alleged assassin of President John Kennedy. A former U.S. military intelligence officer for 20 years, Newman (JFK and Vietnam) relies primarily on newly released government documents made available within the last three years under the JFK Assassination Records Act, passed in 1992, which mandates that the U.S. government make available all its information on this case. Using CIA, FBI, military and American embassy files to reconstruct Oswald's activities from his 1959 defection to the Soviet Union up until his murder, Newman shows that the CIA was spawning a web of deception about Oswald weeks before the president's murder. For example, the agency has denied that it knew about Oswald's 1963 visits to the Cuban consultant in Mexico City, but Newman refutes this, using interlocking CIA and FBI cables and reports. The evidence presented here, though fragmentary and based on heavily censored and edited documents, strongly suggests that the CIA had a keen operational interest in Oswald, that it kept tabs on him and that Oswald, either willingly or as a patsy, was deeply involved in CIA operations. CIA documents suggest that the agency had a hand in Oswald's defection to the Soviet Union and monitored his activities there and his return home in June 1962. This heavily annotated tome, which reads like an intricate spy thriller, serves as a corrective to Norman Mailer's Oswald's Tale. (July)

Gilbert Taylor

JFK assassinology revived recently with the release of some newly declassified files, and Newman is the first of several researchers to sift through and capitalize on several hundred thousand pages of documents as they pertain to the murder and the prime suspect. Although the page count is convincing testimony to bureaucratic procedures (record and report every contact), the gargantuan paper trail produced by the State Department, FBI, and CIA looks mighty curious to the conspiracy-minded. Newman, formerly a military intelligence officer, is qualified to examine the mass of raw information--virtually all of it pertaining to the disaffected Oswald's defection and redefection--and is unconvinced that various gaps in the records and censored items are really due to bureaucratic glitches or legitimate protection of intelligence sources. Newman's suspicion peaks with a "smoking file," which he implies contains suppressed CIA knowledge that Oswald met a KGB assassin in Mexico. Mirrors abound in the abundance of detail, but perhaps debunkers of the lone-nut theory should view Magritte's painting "Ce n'est pas une pipe" ; a pipe or an Oswald can be what they appear to be.

From Barnes & Noble

From the author of JFK and Vietnam comes this unsettling account of the government's role in the Kennedy assassination. This gripping tale of the Oswald paper trail inside the CIA exposes the most sensitive agency operation of the Cold War. B&W photos.