As someone born decades after the event the most strangely curious thing to me about the JFK assassination and the conspiracy theories surrounding it is that seemingly no one brought up the fact Oswald had married a Russian national, emigrated to Russia and renounced his US citizenship, and then begged for it back and returned.
Did any conspiracy theories take this odd past into account?
Just to be clear I do not believe Oswald was a sleeper agent send by the Soviets, I’m just baffled no one else ever forwarded the theory.
You must not be looking very hard. Quite a bit has been made about Oswald’s past and his Russian connections over the years. Some thought he was a Russian agent.
Another conspiracy theory is that Oswald went to Russia and stayed there. The guy that came back and actually killed Kennedy wasn’t Oswald but instead was really a KGB agent.
And yet another conspiracy theory has Cuba behind it all, and with Cuba being a Russian ally, Oswald went through Russia to avoid being directly linked to Cuba.
There’s no shortage of Russian conspiracy theories. Heck, a lot of mainstream folks thought Russia was involved. There were a lot of folks very seriously worried about World War III starting over this.
His past is one of the main ingredients in this CT recipe. It is an astounding story, an American, former GI, defects to the Soviet Union, then returns with a wife with the Soviet’s blessing. However, all the evidence points to Oswald being a malcontent that nobody wanted, it’s difficult to believe any country or any person would want to be strongly tied to him.
Well then maybe I wasn’t as well versed in JFK conspiracy theories as I thought I was.
Seems most revolved around there being multiple shooters(more than Oswald), or mob involvement, or CIA/nefarious US government involvement or Jack Ruby silencing Oswald from revealing the same.
JFK CTs revolve around (1) the belief that a lone nut couldn’t have done it. There is no (2).*
There are probably two to three hundred individual theories, all of which find a seeming anomaly in the gigantic mass of evidence and spin an elaborate notion that runs counter to a hundred other established facts - never mind logic and plausibility.
It all depends how you look at it- the Warren Commission treated Oswald as a lone nut, NOT as a Communist agent. IF you believe he was just a patsy set up by the CIA to take the fall for the Kennedy assassination, why would the Warren Commission largely ignore Oswald’s Russian/Communist ties? Wouldn’t they want to play UP those ties, to make the Russians look responsible?
The thing is most conspiracy believers want to think it was the right wing that killed Kennedy. So evidence of Oswald being an extreme leftie doesn’t fit their narrative and gets downplayed. Unless they’re claiming that it was the right wing that intentionally set up a left-winger like Oswald as a patsy.
The spectrum of politics runs all over the place in JFK-CTs. It is the granddaddy of all “social mirrors,” in that every CTer sees whatever and whoever they think is bad as being responsible for it. Some CTs actually have contradictory logic about political motivations and sources.
As far as I remember *JFK *made a point of this, the impossibility that an American could 1) move to Soviet Union, and 2) move back – without being connected with the CIA.
JFK stands somewhere below Birth of a Nation in its historical accuracy.
Oswald was eagerly accepted by the Soviets as a bit of a prize - a serving US Marine who wanted to become a Soviet citizen. He proved such a whining, complaining, demanding disappointment that he effectively learned the Russian equivalent of “don’t let screen door hit you in ass.” There’s really not much mystery about it other than his motivations, which remain murky.
I’m looking right now at a book titled President Kennedy Has Been Shot which has a moment-by-moment narrative of news reports of the assassination and aftermath.
By 5:00 p.m. on 11/22/63 – less than four hours after Kennedy had been pronounced dead – there were news reports that Oswald was a former Marine who had lived in Russia, married a Russian, and returned to the U.S.
Whatever else was mysterious or confusing about the events of that weekend, Oswald’s background was out there, in public.
He had served at Atsugi airbase, one of the places from which U-2 spy planes were launched, and the Russians badly wanted information about that planes (Francis Gary Powers was shot down during the time Oswald was in Russia). However, it is unlikely that Oswald, a low-level grunt, really had much data to give them.
That he was a uniformed US serviceman was a big enough reason. I don’t think there are more than a handful of comparable incidents, 1946-1990 or so.
But to emphasize what **kunilou **and others have said above, Oswald did NONE of these things in secret. He tried to make as much noise about them as possible, in most instances, because his motivations were disenchantment with the US and pro-Communist ideology. Let’s just say that neither KGB or CIA plants work that way.
He made history in a more minor way by being unappetizing even to the Soviets, though.