Along with former CIA officer Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, I was interviewed extensively for this two-part show on NHK Prime, a magazine show on Japan’s leading television network.
Here’s how NHK presents our findings about the CIA and accused presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.
With the help of top experts, NHK takes a new look at the incident through reenactments and fresh theories on the case. Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who killed JFK, was once a US Marine stationed in Atsugi, Japan who later defected to the Soviet Union. While his own upbringing played a role in his decisions, there is also a possibility that a certain organization was manipulating him behind the scenes. .. We follow the little-known footprints left by this infamous assassin.
In several days of shooting in Miami, New Orleans and Texas, I found the NHK reporters and producers to be meticulous and thoughtful. I don’t agree with all their conclusions but they have done their homework.
As a print journalist, I’m not crazy about the reenactment scenes. I accept they are necessary to present a complex story to a huge TV audience.
I respectfully disagree with the “rogue CIA” theory. I think NHK and Mowatt-Larssen have jumped to a conclusion that is not warranted by the evidence. The intellectual authors of the November 22 ambush might have held positions in the Joint Chiefs of Staff hierarchy. If so, they had CIA help, but such a covert operation (possibly based on the false-flag template developed byJCS planners who came up with Operation Northwoods) would not qualify as a “rogue” plot.
If it was my show, I would offered a more cautious conclusion: certain CIA officers were involved in the JFK plot. Whether they were “rogue” or not has yet to be determined.
NHK may have overestimated the importance of Oswald’s time in Japan but a national network is not wrong to emphasize that part of the story to its core audience. Oswald’s actions in Japan have never been explained, merely “plausibly denied.”
I feel like I’m good company. Mowatt-Larssen is a retired CIA station chief with deep knowledge of covert operations. After he presented his analysis of JFK assassination in Dallas last November, I wrote a series of articles for my blog, JFK Facts, about his methodology and findings, which I find impressive. I think he’s made a big contribution to public understanding of JFK’s death.
Newman is the foremost historian of Oswald and the CIA. He and I have been working this case for 26 years. It all started in 1994 when we interviewed a retired CIA officer named Jane Roman.
Dick Russell is an author and journalist who has written extensively about the CIA and JFK. He’s also an environmentalist who wrote an inspiriting book about saving fish, called Striper Wars.
We have different perspectives and interpretations of key issues, but I think we’re in agreement about the JFK fact pattern.
The available public record shows:
Lee Harvey Oswald was the object of constant high-level CIA attention from 1959 to 1963.
Oswald was used by senior CIA officers for counterintelligence and propaganda purposes both before and after JFK’s assassination. The name of these officers are on the public record;
One of these CIA program, code named AMSPELL, was incorporated into a false-flag operation to blame JFK’s assassination on Cuba and to shield the intellectual authors of the crime. The names of some of the officers involved in the AMSPELL operation are on the public record.
Oswald was what he said he was: “a patsy.”
The CIA hid the story of how these officers manipulated Oswald from the Warren Commission, the Church Committee, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, and the Assassination Records Review Board.
Thanks to an order from President Trump, thousands of pages of JFK files remain secret to this day.
Here’s Part II of the NHK Prime show on Oswald and the CIA.
