Marina Oswald, working a double shift.

Currently I am reading William Reymond's JFK: autopsie d'un crime d'etat. Some may have noticed that it is in French. It's a bit of a stretch for me to read it but I am managing (dictionary in hand.)

It's a good read. A page turner in fact. It pulls the story together in a way that might not be possible without reading a lot of other books.

Ever since I saw The many faces of Lee Harvey Oswald, I have become more and more troubled by the most fundamental "facts" of his backround. It seems clear that the original Lee must have been murdered by the US government in order to subsitute the Russian speaking double to carry out whatever intelligence operation they had in mind.

This double went to Russia and putzed around for a very brief period, in Minsk, the Russian Minneapolis, and then applied to return home. Suddenly his relationship with Marina heated up quite hot and he postponed his departure long enough for the two of them to get married.

Stop. Remove rose coloured glasses.

Does this make any sense in any kind of CIA scenario? Marina was related to a KGB officer and was undoubtedly ordered to romance handsome "Lee", so that she could be plopped down on the other side of the chessboard by the KGB. Presumably "Lee" was ordered to go along with this scenario.

To what purpose? It's not even a comedy. It's hard to take this CIA/KGB foxtrot seriously. What were these intelligence services doing? Were they going to keep lobbing this duo back and forth across the net indefinitely, like a tennis ball?

Much later.

Entered in evidence against Lee are the famous photos of him as a "man in black" in his backyard, the M-C carbine on his hip, propaganda paper in his hand. Marina testifies to the Warren Commission that she took these photos with her little box camera. Years and years later, Jack White proves that the photos are fake, as "Lee" himself pointed out, when confronted by them.

Mr. Marrs what's your take on Marina?

[edit on 6-11-2007 by ipsedixit]

Howdy ipsedixit,

Marina Oswald is indeed quite a conundrum. But having spoken to her on several occasions, both in person and on the telephone, I have come to think of her as the female counterpart to Lee Oswald --- a patsy.

As you mentioned, she was related to a man who was a member of the Soviet MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs some sections of which functioned as secret police). In the fall of 1959, Marina moved to Minsk, Russia, to live with this man, her maternal uncle, Colonel Ilya Vasilyevich Prusakov, ranking MVD officer, a leading citizen of Minsk and a Communist Party member. It was at her uncle’s urging that she attended a dance in March, 1961, where she was introduced to a young man using the name Alik. His Russia was so good that Marina thought he was a Russian, although he had a accent that indicated he came from one of the Baltic countries --- Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania. She was surprised to later find out that Alik was actually an American named Lee Harvey Oswald.

The swiftness of their marriage, the lavish lifestyle they enjoyed in Minsk and the ease with which they were able to leave Russia for America (with money borrowed from the US Government!) all indicates that some sort of intelligence game was afoot. There is ample evidence to indicate that the Oswald in Russia was not the same Oswald born in New Orleans in 1939. A switch had taken place. But the Russian Oswald is the only one that Marina ever met. To her, he was Lee Harvey Oswald.

Upon the couple’s arrival in America, it is unlikely that Marina had any intelligence role except perhaps to keep tabs on Oswald. She was only 20 years old with two small children and no English language skills. She was totally at the mercy of whoever befriended and guided her. At the time of the assassination, she initially told reporters, “Lee is good man. He not shoot anyone.” But after being taken into federal custody and held for weeks, she was paraded in front of the media and said her husband was JFK’s assassin.

In later years, Marina matured, raised her daughters and maintained a home just east of Dallas. She learned English and became quite outspoken in her belief that Lee had been set up as the patsy in the assassination. She even was vocal in accusing members of the secret societies, such as the Council on Foreign Relations and Bilderbergers, of playing a role in the assassination, which may explain why, in all the media hubbub each year regarding the assassination, you never see any substantial interviews with Marina Oswald.

As for the backyard photos, she once told me she remembered taking photos in the backyard of their Neely Street apartment. But the evidence of fabrication – even Oswald told the police that it was his head superimposed on someone else’s body – is so strong that I suspect that while Marina might actually have some vague memories of taking photos in the backyard, they most certainly were not the photos later used to incriminate Oswald. For example, initially Marina stated she had taken only one photo, then changed this to two once it was pointed out that the authorities had two pictures. This does not explain the third backyard photo which turned up 15 years after the assassination in the hands of a Dallas policeman’s widow who had worked for Jack Ruby in 1963.

Jim Marrs