The Oswald Project, Part Two: The Cuban Connection | CIA
50:18 Share

Content warning: This episode contains references to suicide. Incoming transmission. Welcome. This is True Spies. The podcast that takes you deep inside the greatest secret missions of all time. Week by week, you'll hear the true stories behind the operations that have shaped the world we live in. True Spies. You'll meet the people who live life undercover. What do they know?

What are their skills? And what would you do in their position? This is True Spies. Growing up, six, seven years old, every friend I made, once they found out who I was, they were all, you can't hang out with him, it's Dakil Kennedy. I'm Daisy Ridley, and this is True Spies from Spyscape Studios. The Oswald Project, part two, The Cuban Connection.

In June 1962, Lee Harvey Oswald, his wife Marina and their baby daughter returned to the United States. In just over a year's time, he would be arrested in connection with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Ever since that fateful day, there has been controversy over the official account that Oswald acted alone. Oswald might have fired a gun. I don't think he fired the fatal shot.

For the three years prior to his return to American soil, Oswald had been a resident of Soviet Russia. He had gained entry by promising that he would share top secret intelligence with the Russian security service, the KGB. But then it appears Oswald had a change of heart. He was ready to return to the US, denying that he had ever shared secrets with the enemy. Was he a loyal American after all? Not even Marina knows why I came home.

In the last episode, we established Oswald's relationship with US intelligence. A relationship so special, his CIA file was buried deep within the organization, with access tightly controlled by the agency's counterintelligence chief, James Angleton. In this episode, we try to unpick what happened in the year between Oswald's return and Kennedy's assassination. It's the evening of April 11th, 1962.

We're at number 214 Neely Street in Dallas, Texas, where Oswald and his family are now living. Marina Oswald has become increasingly concerned about her husband's erratic behavior. Then, on this April evening, home alone with their baby, she finds a note written in Russian. The words you are about to hear are Oswald's, voiced by an actor.

I left you as much money as I could, $60 on the second of the month. You and the baby can live for another two months using $10 per week. If I am alive and taken prisoner, the city jail is located at the end of the bridge through which we always passed on going to the city. Imagine what was running through Marina's mind. What had he got himself involved in that could end in prison or death even? Let's pause for a moment.

Because to understand why Lee Harvey Oswald writes this final sounding note to his beloved Marina, I need to introduce another character, a man called Major General Edwin J. Walker. Walker was a right-wing general who had been forced to resign from the U.S. Army after it was found that he was indoctrinating his troops with material from the John Birch Society, the ultra right-wing organization.

That's renowned journalist and JFK expert Jefferson Morley, whom we met in episode one. Edwin Walker was something of a folk hero to white segregationists, still determined to treat black Americans as second-class citizens in the southern states.

In 1962, Walker leads a kind of mission to Oxford, Mississippi, to try and prevent the desegregation of the University of Mississippi, resulting in a big riot. A couple of people were killed. A year later, President Kennedy started ramping up his support for the civil rights movement. This included removing the infamous segregationist and rabble-rouser Walker from his army role.

Kennedy was determined to purge belligerent right-wingers from the military. But by the spring of '63, Walker was fighting back, openly campaigning against the young, liberal president. He was on a speaking tour and looking to make his ultra-right-wing case against Kennedy. But then, just as Marina Oswald reads the farewell note from her husband, an attempt is made on Walker's life.

Walker reports that somebody took a shot at him. The police come in and they find a bullet lodged in the window frame of his study, and somebody had taken a shot at him that night. We know the shooter was Oswald because he confessed later to both Marina and a close friend that he had pulled the trigger. So Oswald supposedly shoots at Walker, an anti-Kennedy activist, and then seven months later supposedly goes on to kill Kennedy himself.

Let's break this down to the facts. We know Oswald owned a rifle. He had purchased one via mail order using a false name. He was so proud of it he had his photograph taken with it. The famous "backyard photo" taken at his house. In the picture, Oswald is holding the rifle in one hand, a communist newspaper in the other. It's not a huge stretch to imagine why Edwin Walker would have been a target for Lee Harvey Oswald.

Oswald was a militant Marxist, sympathetic to the causes Walker opposed: civil rights, workers' rights, that kind of thing. We also know Oswald had received training as a marksman in the Marines. But there's another, more pressing detail we need to consider. There was an eyewitness, a kid across the alley in the back of Walker's house heard the shot, ran outside and peered over the fence. And he saw two people get into two cars and drive away.

And this is where the story gets really interesting. Because remember, what we're doing here is trying to assess whether Oswald was capable of assassinating President John F. Kennedy in 1963, and whether, if he was, he was operating alone. The Oswald described in the Warren Commission couldn't drive, so it's unclear who the first vehicle belonged to, or indeed how he got to Walker's property.

The other car, however, was traced. Long after the crime, long after Oswald's death, to a guy called Robert Surrey. Surrey was another rabid right-winger, a member of the American Nazi Party, no less. Surrey was General Walker's kind of political lieutenant, his campaign manager. Surrey told the Warren Commission that he was two miles away when the shooting happened. But this was a lie.

Surrey's sons both confessed, many years later, that they were at the Walker House that evening with their father. They also had information that was even more incendiary. That kid, David Surrey, says that his father would go on shooting expeditions with a man named Lee, and that was Lee Oswald. That's right.

The Marxist revolutionary Lee Harvey Oswald had been on shooting expeditions, was in fact friends with Robert Surrey, a member of the American Nazi Party. So on the night of Walker's shooting, Oswald was not alone. The fact that Robert Surrey lied to the Warren Commission strongly indicates that the shooting of General Walker was a setup. And Oswald may well have been involved,

A set-up by Walker, with Oswald in on the plot. Walker's motive for staging a fake assassination attempt is easy to explain. He'd received a fair bit of negative publicity and he wanted to appeal to his base and be able to say "Look I told you, the commies are out to get us." But Oswald was never linked to the shooting in his lifetime. He was never outed by Walker.

It was the Warren Commission, the investigation into Kennedy's killing that connected our true spy to the Walker Plot after interviewing Oswald's widow Marina. The committed Marxist was aiding a notorious white supremacist in a publicity stunt. So here we are again. With Lee Harvey Oswald, it seems that two opposing things are nearly always true at the same time.

As we learned in the last episode, Oswald had cultivated some strange friendships on both sides of the ideological divide. As far back as his stint in the Civil Air Patrol, Oswald was hanging out with a notorious anti-communist David Ferry. At the same time, he was writing to the US Communist Party, asking to join. And now, several years later, he's at it again.

And that is one characteristic that we see of Oswald's behavior when he goes to New Orleans in 1963. He's spending a lot of time not with left-wingers, not with supporters of Castro. He's spending most of his time, to the extent that he's politically involved, with people who are anti-Castro. So which role is the decoy and which is the authentic Oswald?

For the last 60 years, investigative journalists, lawyers and historians have scoured the evidence to explain this and so many other anomalies in the Oswald story. As more and more files are declassified, a new perspective emerges.

A much clearer understanding of who Lee Harvey Oswald was and what the U.S. government knew about him before November 22nd. And the story that you see is radically different than the story that was told to the Warren Commission. And to tell this story, I need to introduce you to another new character, Fidel Castro. Fidel Castro.

In the late 50s and early 1960s, the advance of communism in Asia and with it the expansion of Soviet and Chinese influence caused panic in the West and nowhere more so than within the US military establishment. From his first days in office, President Kennedy was relentlessly encouraged by his chiefs of staff to make preemptive military and nuclear strikes against targets in Vietnam, China and even Russia.

Yes, that's correct. The chiefs of staff are on record advocating that the US starts a nuclear war. But the threat of communism was also much, much closer to home. 90 miles off the coast of Florida, in Cuba, Castro and his deputy, Che Guevara, had overthrown the Batista dictatorship and installed a fully-fledged communist regime.

The Cuban question, as it was known, was to become one of the defining themes of Kennedy's presidency and of the final chapters in the Oswald story. So let's have a quick 20th century Cuban history lesson. Everybody left. Most of the people from Batista's reign and everybody just left the country. So you got millions of men who have left the country and are not fighting for their country anymore. You can't stay.

And they go to the United States and then from there they think, well, we can plan something here to get our country back. The voice you have just heard belongs to Ricardo Morales Jr. Regular True Spies listeners will recall the episode "Monkey Business" where we told the story of Ricardo's father. He was a Cuban exile turned CIA-trained assassin, an FBI informant, and a central figure in the Scarface Era cocaine boom in Miami, Florida.

But back in the early 1960s, "Monkey Morales", as Ricardo's father was known, was one of thousands of Cubans who fled Castro's regime. These exiles longed for US assistance in ridding the country of its new communist rulers. Assistance that President Kennedy and the CIA seemed more than willing to provide.

In April 1961, an invasionary force of 1,500 CIA-trained Cuban exiles landed at Cuba's Bay of Pigs. Their mission was to assassinate Castro and inspire a popular uprising to establish a new government. But at the last minute, Kennedy realized he had been poorly briefed and was about to step on a political landmine. He immediately pulled the plug on military support for the operation.

114 fighters were killed. Over a thousand were taken prisoner. Eventually, the Kennedy administration had to pay Castro's government over $25 million for their return. It was a public relations disaster for the new president. And there is where the hatred for JFK begins, because he left them on the beach to die.

An entire generation of exiles had counted on US support to depose Castro as quickly as possible. In fact, they believed they'd been promised it. From this day on, Kennedy would have a target on his back. And then, 18 months after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy's Cuban problem becomes a global crisis when CIA spy planes take photographs of Soviet nuclear missile installations on Cuban territory.

The ensuing Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world closer than it's ever been to nuclear war. But rather than allow this catastrophic option, Kennedy managed to persuade the Russian leader, Nikolai Khrushchev, to order the removal of the ballistic missiles from the island. And then afterwards, makes an agreement with the Russians, with the Soviet Union. If you remove the nuclear weapons from Cuba, we will never invade Cuba.

This insight, from the son of one of Cuba's most notorious exiles, tells us everything we need to know about the anti-Castro Cubans' feelings towards JFK. To the world, the de-escalation of hostilities was a diplomatic triumph. To the Cuban exiles, it was yet another betrayal.

This matters to our story because, for the majority of 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald was publicly allying himself to the pro-Castro cause. And then in November 1963, Oswald transforms into the apparent lone assassin who killed President Kennedy.

Which, in terms of motive, would ally him to the anti-Castro movement. The CIA trained Cuban exiles like Monkey Morales, who felt so betrayed by Kennedy and wanted him punished for selling them out. Unless, and stay with me here, unless a man who went to such lengths to proclaim himself to be such a fan of the Cuban leader was being co-opted into a CIA-controlled operation designed to frame him as a communist insurgent.

a domestic terrorist hell-bent on killing Castro's sworn enemy, the American president. So Operation Northwoods was a plan to provoke a war with Cuba. And the idea was stage a spectacular crime on U.S. soil and arrange for the blame to fall on Castro. Was this Oswald's new mission? Was this why he had returned to U.S. soil?

And the idea was Fidel Castro had been in power. Efforts to assassinate him or overthrow his government from within had failed. He was pretty popular. He had very strong security forces. He was able to keep the CIA from penetrating the island or organizing opposition. And so he was settling into power. And after three, four years, and

And so this was intolerable to the American generals that there was a communist socialist state in the Western Hemisphere and they said we have to get rid of it. And the only way to get rid of it is to provoke a war. Operation Northwards is not a conspiracy theory. It is well documented. It was first disclosed in declassified files released after the publicity around Oliver Stone's film JFK forced the government to pass the JFK Assassination Records Act in 1992.

As far as we know, President Kennedy explicitly refused to authorize Operation Northwards, much to the frustration of the military and the CIA. And they kept trying. False flag operations, as we know, were a key part of the CIA's playbook.

Bear in mind too that Kennedy had made some serious enemies in the CIA, as well as amongst the Cuban exiles. Kennedy was convinced that the intelligence the agency had shared before the Bay of Pigs invasion was deeply flawed and had left him publicly exposed. In retaliation, he fired his CIA director, Alan Dulles, and several of his aides. It was a rift that would have severe consequences for the president, even after his death.

There remained many agents inside the CIA who were unable to forgive Kennedy for his actions. And some of them had access to Oswald's secret file. Was Operation Northwards, or something like it, activated without Kennedy's knowledge? Was he, in fact, the target? Was this what the so-called Oswald Project had been leading up to?

In a case so riddled with contradictions and conjecture, it's always good to seek out the facts. Here's what we know of this time in Oswald's life. When Oswald and his young family returned from Russia, no formal debriefing took place. We know from CIA records that this was highly irregular, especially given that Oswald had offered to disclose intelligence relating to the highly successful U-2 spy plane program.

Oswald was concerned he would be detained, as he confessed in a letter to his brother: "Dear Robert, you once said that you asked around whether or not the US government had any charges against me. You said at that time, 'No.' Maybe you should ask around again. It's possible now that the government knows I'm coming. They'll have something waiting." Fact.

In January 1961, someone with a driver's license bearing the name Lee Harvey Oswald visited a truck dealership in New Orleans. He claimed to be working for an outfit called the Friends of Democratic Cuba. But according to Oswald's historic diary, he was still in Minsk. And remember, he was apparently unable to drive. Why would someone go to the lengths of getting seen trying to get resources to Cuba?

Oswald was extremely poor when he returned to America. He had been loaned money by the US government and his brother to pay for his passage home and set himself up with accommodation. The marriage soon got into trouble. Money, or "lakovit", was a recorded factor in the breakdown of the relationship. However, despite the low wages he received from the various jobs he held, Oswald managed to pay off these substantial loans

Was he getting a paycheck from a secret source, like an intelligence agency, for example? This leads us to the next twist in the Oswald tale. Hello, True Spies listener. This episode is made possible with the support of June's Journey, a riveting little caper of a game which you can play right now on your phone. Since you're listening to this show, it's safe to assume you love a good mystery, some compelling detective work...

and a larger-than-life character or two. You can find all of those things in abundance in June's Journey. In the game, you'll play as June Parker, a plucky amateur detective trying to get to the bottom of her sister's murder. It's all set during the roaring 1920s.

And I absolutely love all the little period details packed into this world. I don't want to give too much away because the real fun of June's journey is seeing where this adventure will take you. But I've just reached a part of the story that's set in Paris.

And I'm so excited to get back to it. Like I said, if you love a salacious little mystery, then give it a go. Discover your inner detective when you download June's Journey for free today on iOS and Android. Hello, listeners. This is Anne Bogle, author, blogger, and creator of the podcast, What Should I Read Next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week, I tag all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read.

They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately. And I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years, and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment, whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change, or a frothy page-turner to help them escape the stresses of work, or a book that they've been reading for years.

school, everything. You'll learn something about yourself as a reader, and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for What Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and visit our website, whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com to find out more. Upon their return to Texas, the Oswalds were quickly befriended by a strange character who called himself Baron George de Morenchelt.

de Moerenshilt was a shady figure, a Russian aristocrat who'd had a long and complicated relationship with international intelligence agencies. Baron George de Moerenshilt was a rich, handsome, swashbuckling type who had travelled extensively under the cover of being a petroleum geologist.

He was also a conservative. On the surface, he had absolutely nothing in common with the poorly educated, left-wing Lee Harvey Oswald and his shy Russian wife. Nonetheless, once they had all been introduced through expat Russian circles, they immediately hit it off. He liked Oswald and found him interesting. He also knew that he was having a lot of trouble with Marina and he kind of counseled him, you know, you can't mistreat your wife, you know, you've got to be better than that.

However, DeMoren Schilt's friendship takes on a new flavor when you add the fact that it was granted explicit clearance from the CIA via an agent named Moore. According to DeMoren Schilt, Moore was extremely well briefed on Oswald's Russian adventure. So we can only assume Agent Moore had been granted access to Oswald's tightly controlled CIA file, information that he passed on to DeMoren Schilt.

When hauled in front of the Warren Commission, de Moorenshilt told a different story. He denied any relationship with Moore or anyone else from the intelligence services. And he also claimed that Oswald was a strong supporter of Kennedy. But in private, he is alleged to have said that Oswald told him he was going to take a shot at the president.

In fact, de Moerenshilt is the friend to whom Oswald also confessed that he'd fired at General Walker. In the late 1970s, the investigation into the Kennedy assassination was reopened. In 1977, the Baron was summoned to testify to the House Select Committee on Assassinations as a crucial witness.

Finally, DeMoren Schilt would be forced to set the record straight. It was clear DeMoren Schilt could no longer charm or lie his way out of having to tell the truth about Oswald and the CIA. So he put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger, and the truth was buried with him. But here's the thing. It was a contact of DeMoren Schilt's that gave Oswald the job at the Dallas Book Depository

the job that Oswald held on the day of the Kennedy assassination, and the same place where Oswald's rifle and three empty cartridges were discovered. The location from where the Warren Commission stated all three fatal shots had been fired. The de Moorenshilt relationship is the strongest evidence we have so far that Oswald was being handled once back in the US. De Moorenshilt himself remains another enigma.

Was he a willing participant in the Oswald project? Was his role to nurture Oswald as a patsy, to help guide him towards Dallas and the Texas Book Depository? It's time to assemble the last pieces of the puzzle. In the summer of 1963, just a few months before the Kennedy assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald starts to make it known to anyone who'll listen that he's a big fan of Fidel Castro.

The purpose of this activity is to establish his bona fides as a leftist. The Fair Play for Cuba Committee, the FPCC, was a pro-Castro organization under intense surveillance by the CIA and FBI at the time. There were rumors it was being funded by the Russians. Oswald had written repeatedly to the director of the FPCC, declaring his intentions to set up a chapter of the committee in New Orleans.

Desperate for work, he had moved back to his hometown in June of 1963. Marina and their baby joined him a month later. The director of the FPCC wrote back, warning Oswald against starting the chapter. The FPCC was extremely sensitive to negative publicity. Anti-communism was rabid at this time. Setting up a chapter in ultra-conservative New Orleans would draw unnecessary heat, but Oswald ignored him.

Dear Sirs, I do not like to ask for something for nothing, but I am unemployed. Since I am unemployed, I stood yesterday for the first time in my life with a placard around my neck, handing out "Fair Play for Cuba" pamphlets. I only had 16 or so. In 40 minutes, they were all gone. I was cursed, as well as praised by some. My homemade placard says "Hands off Cuba. Viva Fidel." I now ask for 40 or 50 more of the fine basic pamphlets.

Sincerely, Lee H. Oswald In true Oswald fashion, while setting himself up as a visible supporter of Castro, he was once again making friends with the other side.

And so in the summer of 1963, that's when he approaches the Cuban Student Directorate office in New Orleans. The Cuban Student Directorate at this time is funded by the CIA through the CIA station in Miami. And the Cuban Student Directorate maintains a network of delegations throughout Latin America and North America. And that's why the CIA supported them, because they had this large effective organization that could generate propaganda,

hold demonstrations, and generally show opposition to the Castro government. Not only did he approach the anti-Castro student directorate members, but he gave them a marine training manual, suggesting he was willing to teach them paramilitary tactics. So Oswald approaches the Cuban student directorate and offers his services. He says, I was in the marines. You want to go fight Castro? I can teach you how to blow up a bridge and that sort of thing.

In August 1963, Oswald writes again to the FPCC, recounting an incident where he was attacked on the streets of New Orleans while handing out FPCC leaflets by the same student directorate members he'd been making friends with. But what makes this letter all the more remarkable is the incident he describes hadn't happened yet. The attack in question took place four days after the letter was mailed.

Oswald was indeed attacked on the street, but only verbally, by the student directorate members he'd been so at pains to befriend. When they found out he was pro-Castro, they were furious. The police were called, and Oswald was arrested and taken to the police station for questioning. It is clear this tactic was designed for maximum publicity. Oswald's very own version of a false flag operation, no less.

And he succeeds. He gets on TV, he gets on the radio, there's some newspaper stories. If Oswald wasn't on the radar of the security agencies before, he sure was now. In August or September of '63, he starts talking about going back to the Soviet Union. Correspondence with the Russian embassy from that time confirms that Oswald and his wife Marina were looking for ways to return to Moscow. It seemed that Marina was deeply unhappy with her American life.

One way back was to get a transit visa via, you guessed it, Cuba. In late September, he takes a bus and he goes to Mexico City and he goes to the Cuban consulate and he applies for a visa. He wants to go to Cuba. It's in Mexico City that the various strands in the Oswald story finally meet and what looks like a conspiracy starts to solidify.

The important thing to understand about the Cuban consulate in Mexico City is this is the locus of intense CIA operational activity constantly. Remember James Angleton, the CIA director of counterintelligence who tightly controlled Oswald's CIA file?

James Angleton in particular was interested in the Cuban consulate. He writes a paper in the summer of 1963 talking about Cuban intelligence operations, and he points out that American supporters of Castro are going to the island undetected because they go to the Cuban consulate and they get visas that are not stamped on their passports.

But in a bizarre rerun of history, Oswald is once again thwarted in his second attempt to defect. Oswald's attempt to get a visa from the Cubans fails because the Cubans say, well, if you're going to go on to the Soviet Union, you have to get that visa before you go. And he goes to the Soviet embassy and the Soviet embassy says, no, you can't apply here. You have to apply in Washington.

Despite his efforts to prove his worth as a pro-Castro militant, Oswald seems to have been deliberately held back in his ambitions to defect to Cuba. Now, there's a bunch of anomalies about Oswald's visit which indicate that this was, again, if not planned CIA activity, controlled CIA activity, closely observed, monitored and acted upon.

Once again, the official record as laid down by the Warren Commission is not to be trusted. We know from files declassified since that the consulate was under constant surveillance at the time. The CIA had set up a pulse camera photographing everyone who entered the consulate 24 hours a day. Everyone, absolutely everyone who entered that building would have been photographed.

And this intelligence would have been shared and cross-checked against persons of interest under surveillance by the CIA, people like Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald, in coming and going to the Cuban consulate, walks in and out of that door three times on September 30th and October 1st, 1963. That's six opportunities for the Pulse camera to take his picture. The story that they told was that the Pulse camera wasn't working that day.

It was only when challenged, long after the Warren Commission's investigation, that photographic evidence of Oswald's visit was reluctantly produced. The House Select Committee on Assassinations got the records and the pulse camera was working that day. But the photo supplied by the CIA, labeled as Lee Harvey Oswald, was of someone else. So what was going on?

We now know that the CIA, who had received a report on Oswald's contact with the consulate, neglected to share his file with their surveillance operation in Mexico City. They don't tell their colleagues in Mexico City about his activities with the FPCC or the Student Directorate. They don't share the fact he has recently been arrested. And they don't let them know that he has previously defected to Russia, offering top-secret information to the KGB.

And here he is again, a known, confessed traitor, showing up to get another visa.

And yet, supposedly, no one in the intelligence community was joining the dots. On October 10th, the day that the CIA people are sending this cable to Mexico City, omitting the important information about Oswald's recent arrest fighting with CIA-funded Cubans, they also take his name off the security index, basically lowering the threshold of scrutiny of Oswald. You heard that right.

At the very point at which Lee Harvey Oswald is making it clear he is going to attempt a second defection to a communist country, he is removed from the security index. This means that Oswald's activities from this moment on would not trigger any of the usual alerts necessary to track the movements of a known enemy of the state. And that's significant because the president only has 42 days to live.

So is it a cover-up of incompetence or is it a cover-up of complicity? We finally return to where we started all this, to that fateful day in Dallas, November 22, 1963. Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested at 2 p.m., one hour after President Kennedy had been declared dead.

At this stage he was wanted in connection with the shooting of a police officer, who had allegedly pulled up alongside Oswald just after the assassination. The police officer had recognized Oswald from a description of a suspicious person that had been circulated by eyewitnesses present in Dealey Plaza.

It was only when it was discovered that Oswald worked for the Texas Book Depository, one of the locations that yet more eyewitnesses had seen shots come from, that Oswald was connected with the killing of JFK. Within hours, his defection, his FPCC links, and his Marxist profile had been released to the public.

Suddenly, all that hidden information comes flooding out. All of the evidence, with one exception, all of the evidence that he was a public supporter of Castro was generated by his contacts with a CIA-funded organization, the Cuban Student Directorate. If this was a false flag operation, it was on the brink of success.

With a pro-Castro assassin under arrest for the murder of the US president, it was only a matter of time before the chiefs of staff could have their way and an all-out invasion of the island would be greenlit. And to have got to this first stage of success, it needed to be guaranteed that the bullets hit their target. Ricardo Morales Jr., whose father was a crack marksman employed by the CIA, takes the story from here.

After the assassination is when he realizes, when he sees the picture of Oswald, "I've seen this guy. I've seen him at a camp that I was at training people." And he also knows the person's capabilities, which he said were miserable, terrible shooter. There was no way that man could have done it, and that's what he said.

Remember, Oswald was granted "sharp shooter" status in the Marines. Now we have Morales contradicting this, from conversations he had with his father, insisting that Lee Harvey Oswald was in fact a lousy aim, which adds further doubt to the lone gunman narrative. According to Morales, there were, in fact, multiple CIA operatives in Dallas that day.

Then he explained to us that his cleaning crew, which was him, two of his best friends and another person, were sent to Dallas ahead of time, just in case something went wrong with whatever was being planned, that they could go in and mop up the operation. He was called two days before, told, "Get to Dallas, get your team to Dallas and wait for further instructions." Morales' cleaning crew were all Cuban, anti-Castro Cubans.

Nobody ever talks about how he missed the first shot by a mile. I mean, he wasn't even close and it was the easiest shot to take. And then the other two are perfectly positioned shots. For Ricardo Morales, the only way the assassination could have been successful is if there was more than one shooter. Usually CIA sniper teams work in pairs, spotters, shooters, whatnot. But there was two shooters in this. Of course, Morales is not alone in his assessment.

And Oswald, as we know, strenuously denied shooting Kennedy. I'd like some legal representation. These police officers have not allowed me to have any. I don't know what this is all about. They have taken me in because of the fact that I lived in the Soviet Union. I'm just a patsy. Shortly after uttering these words, Oswald was murdered in broad daylight as he was being transferred to the county jail.

So if there were two gunmen in Dallas that day, who fired the fatal shots? Growing up as a child, six, seven years old, every friend I made, once they found out who I was, they were all, you can't hang out with him, his dad killed Kennedy. That was my entire childhood growing up. Everybody thinking that my dad had killed Kennedy.

While he confessed to being in Dallas, Ricardo Jr. is certain his father did not fire at the president. I think that if we understand the Kennedy assassination as a result of covert operation, there were two aspects to the operation. One was the operation, the kinetic operation, to kill the president, the gunfire that killed the president, to arrange that. And the other was to arrange for the blame to fall on Cuba. And what of the CIA's role in all this?

Can it ever be proved? This is where the meticulous research of journalists like Morley and hundreds of others come into play. In the 30 years since the JFK Assassination Records Act, this dedicated army of investigators has poured over literally millions of documents. What have we learned recently? People in the CIA were far, far, far more interested in Lee Harvey Oswald than they ever told the Warren Commission.

The CIA knew exactly who Oswald was and what he was capable of. But they lied to the Warren Commission, dismissing their contact with Oswald as minimal. Why didn't the Commission challenge them? Well, one reason might be that one of the commissioners was ex-CIA chief Allen Dulles. The same Allen Dulles Kennedy had fired after the Bay of Pigs invasion went so horribly wrong.

If ever someone was motivated to keep false flag CIA operations away from public scrutiny, it was Dulles. But there's more. Since the Warren report was published, we have learned that one of the people investigating Oswald, a CIA agent called John Witten, disagreed with the agency's conclusions.

When the FBI issues their report in December that Oswald did it alone, he reads it and it's like, it raises all sorts of questions to him about Oswald's Cuban connections. Helms and Angleton call him on the carpet on Christmas Eve 1963 and they fire him. They do not want any investigation of Oswald's Cuban contacts. And Angleton takes over the investigation. You heard that right. James Angleton.

So Angleton, the guy who controlled the Oswald file for four years, who defenders of the official story say was completely incompetent and didn't understand the threat that Oswald presented, he is now in charge of the investigation, the CIA's internal investigation of Oswald.

And it's here that, for years to come, knowledge of the CIA's involvement with Oswald, their possible recruitment of him as a key player in a complex false flag operation to provoke war with Cuba, stays buried.

He doesn't investigate at all. He never even issues a report. He just sits on it. And when the Warren Commission comes asking questions, he tells his aides, I want to wait out the commission. And we have the memo in which Angleton is quoted as saying, Jim wants to wait out the commission. Why would your counterintelligence chief wait out investigators to the murder of a president? There's only one explanation. He had something to hide.

Lee Harvey Oswald's funeral took place at Rose Hill Cemetery, Fort Worth, Texas, on November 25, 1963. A local pastor refused to show up, and another priest volunteered at the last minute. Reporters in attendance had to be drafted in as pallbearers because no one else would agree to help. We never got to hear Oswald's side of the story,

He was denied counsel whilst being interrogated and the transcript of his police interview was destroyed, as was his FBI file. With a few thousand documents still to be released, some hope that the final clues will be revealed as to the true extent and nature of the Oswald project. Ricardo Morales is not so sure. In the amount of time that has gone by, do you think any incriminating documents still exist?

Oswald was not the intellectual author of Kennedy's death. Not the intellectual author, and quite possibly, from what we've learned, not the man who shot the bullet that killed Kennedy either. Whatever the truth about Lee Harvey Oswald and the Oswald Project, it is beyond doubt that the official account of his actions remains inadequate. And for Jefferson Morley, the cover-up is unequivocal.

To me, there's no other plausible explanation for this continuing series of deceptions mounted by people in the CIA, even against their colleagues and against the public. They're hiding operational activity around Oswald, and that's true to this day. I'm Daisy Ridley. Join us next time for another secret rendezvous with true spies.