# Happy Birthday, Lee Harvey Oswald **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [October 4, 2011, 9:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/happy-birthday-lee-harvey-oswald/598612 "2011-10-04T21:18:07Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Moriarty](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/moriarty/32/49_2.png) [@Moriarty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Moriarty)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2011, 2:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/happy-birthday-lee-harvey-oswald/598612/21 "2011-10-05T02:46:34Z")
> [@Terr](#): > > Um, I lived my first 17 years in that country, I know how it works. In the 60s, you definitely COULD get sent to the Gulag for being a pain in the ass and a lousy worker - you just had to piss off the right people and you would become a “wrecker” and a “saboteur”. As for “people who could not get out of there were those seen as being a political danger once they left” - you couldn’t be more wrong. NO ONE could get out. Getting out was not an option. It was an ENORMOUS exception if you could get out. And the less “important” you were, the less the possibility of you getting out. But your experience reflects that of a native citizen. Osawald’s “importance” was that he was an American defector (and, let’s face it, there weren’t a lot of those), so the KGB had to watch him. But all he did was go to Minsk and live a boring life. At that point, he’s a nuisance and a liability, since killing an American could conceivably set off a diplomatic incident. Better to just let him leave. Espeically when he’s the kind of wing nut pain the ass that Oswald was. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2011, 3:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/happy-birthday-lee-harvey-oswald/598612/22 "2011-10-05T03:10:55Z")
> [@Moriarty](#): > > But your experience reflects that of a native citizen. Osawald’s “importance” was that he was an American defector (and, let’s face it, there weren’t a lot of those), so the KGB had to watch him. But all he did was go to Minsk and live a boring life. At that point, he’s a nuisance and a liability, since killing an American could conceivably set off a diplomatic incident. > > Better to just let him leave. Espeically when he’s the kind of wing nut pain the ass that Oswald was. Yes, that’s it exactly. Nobody was going to do the saboteur thing to him. They were afraid he had been sent there for just that reason. **Terr** , I’m not trying to pretty up the Soviet Union in any way. But there was business going on between the Soviets and the rest of the world, and as demonstrated with Oswald’s wife, occasionally people got out, because someone saw it as in their interest. She might have been assigned with the task of keeping an eye on Oswald, someone may have been bribed, we might have turned someone over to them. There are a lot of possible reasons. And as you point out, being a lousy worker didn’t get you sent away, pissing off the wrong people did. If Oswald had been born in the USSR, I’m sure he would have disappeared. And it makes perfect sense that less important people had less chance of getting out. But Oswald’s wife wasn’t unimportant, she was the key to getting rid of the white elephant they had accepted. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone over there involved in Oswald’s defection disappeared along the way though. There were probably some really ‘right people’ who were pissed off about the whole fiasco. ---
**Author:** ![Terr](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/839c29/32.png) [@Terr](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Terr)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2011, 3:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/happy-birthday-lee-harvey-oswald/598612/23 "2011-10-05T03:58:54Z")
> [@TriPolar](#): > > **Terr** , I’m not trying to pretty up the Soviet Union in any way. But there was business going on between the Soviets and the rest of the world, and as demonstrated with Oswald’s wife, occasionally people got out, because someone saw it as in their interest. She might have been assigned with the task of keeping an eye on Oswald, someone may have been bribed, we might have turned someone over to them. There are a lot of possible reasons. And as you point out, being a lousy worker didn’t get you sent away, pissing off the wrong people did. If Oswald had been born in the USSR, I’m sure he would have disappeared. And it makes perfect sense that less important people had less chance of getting out. But Oswald’s wife wasn’t unimportant, she was the key to getting rid of the white elephant they had accepted. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone over there involved in Oswald’s defection disappeared along the way though. There were probably some really ‘right people’ who were pissed off about the whole fiasco. But you see, that’s exactly my point. If all there was to the story was “boy is adventurous, goes to Russia, meets girl, gets bored of Russia, takes girl back to US”, it wouldn’t have happened. There must have been quite a bit going on behind the scenes. ---
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Ekers](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bryan_ekers/32/183_2.png) [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2011, 4:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/happy-birthday-lee-harvey-oswald/598612/24 "2011-10-05T04:30:26Z")
It’s not even the weirdest story I’ve heard this _week_. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Hamster\_King](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/8edcca/32.png) [@The\_Hamster\_King](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Hamster_King)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2011, 5:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/happy-birthday-lee-harvey-oswald/598612/25 "2011-10-05T05:21:55Z")
> [@blindboyard](#): > > A bit late, I know. Not because he’s dead, but because it was a few days ago. > > Oswald had an interesting life and it’s a real shame that all we remember him for is the assassination which he alleged commited in Dallas. So I don’t want to talk about that, even though it’s his main claim to fame, there’s another thread going on about that. I want to talk about the man himself, the time before he was famous, and I want to suggest that he was a long-time intelligence asset. I will provide some circumstantial evidence for this, which is really all that ought to be available for a covert operative. There has been a few leaks over the years claiming to prove he was in the CIA and so forth, but none that can be verified, and there have been a few definitely revealing documents about his secret U2 knowledge and so on which don’t confirm a career intelligence role, so we’ll ignore those. > > Going back to his youth, he was in the Civil Air Patrol, which was run in Texas and Louisiana by the owner of the Texas School Book Depository. In the neighbouring branch of the TSBD were Barry Seal and David Ferrie, who were both interesting. Ferrie, of course, went on to be played by Joe Pesci in JFK and is famous for having alopecia, being a hypnotist and gun runner, conducting amateur research into cancerous rodenture and being a Wandering Bishop and pederast. Seal, on the other hand, went on to be a high-flying airline pilot for TWA, during which period he was arrested for running guns and explosives to Mexico. He went on to be gunned down by Cali cartel gunmen after working with the elder Bush’s vice-presidential drugs task force as an informant who tried to set up the Sandinistas as drug runners, and one of his former planes was shot down containing Eugene Hasenfus, igniting the Iran/Contra scandal. Seal and Ferrie ran guns to Castro for the CIA, back when Castro wasn’t a Communist yet. Ferrie, Seal and Oswald were all at the same CAP summer camp, but that doesn’t prove anything. > > Then he was in the Marines. That’s the sort of patriotic young man Lee Harvey Oswald was. During that time he learned Russian, taught by the Marine Corps, and he was alleged to have spent time with native Communists who he then reported to his superiors. He was also involved with the U2 spy planes. He allegedly hung around a bar called the Bluebird, which was also the original name for the CIA’s Mind Control programme, but that’s presumably a coincidence. I’m no synchromystic. > > Then he made his excuses, in the form of a hardship discharge into the reserves, and left the army to defect to the Soviet Union. Not even twenty years of age, and there’s our intrepid hero, heading out into the world, bravely forging his own path, throwing aside allegiance to his own land and throwing himself on the mercy of the Soviets with nothing to offer but his small savings, his loyalty and his secret knowledge of the U2 spy plane, just months before the massive scandal caused by the shooting down of a U2 over the Soviet Union, which wrecked Eisenhower’s peaceful overtures to the Soviets, and broke his direct orders to halt flights over Soviet airspace. And so he defected. Well, tried, they didn’t want him. There had been a nasty spate of false defections, a Naval Intelligence programme to feed false information to the Soviets, a programme run from a site in North Carolina which Oswald phoned as soon as he became famous. Anyway, he managed to talk his way into the Soviet’s good books and renounced his US citizenship, giving up his passport (which, I can’t help it, reminds me of Aleister Crowley’s mischievous First World War activities, where he tore up his British passport and threw it into the water under the Statue of Liberty and became a paid German propagandist, which he always insisted he did for MI6 and for which he faced no punishment). Then, he changed his mind, asked nicely for his passport back and went back to America with no charges filed against him, no recriminations, not even so much as a friendly visit from the FBI to see if he’d let slip any of his confidential information. Almost like he’d been a fake defector working for the Office of Naval Intelligence right from the off. > > So, our hero is back in the land of opportunity, which withholds opportunities from no-one, not even well-known traitors. The USG even generously gave him a payment to help him resettle. In Texas. He fell in with an intelligence agent called George de Mohrenschildt, allegedly later murdered to stop him testifying. This White Russian got him a job at a firm which did classified photographic work for the government. Because know traitors and secret work always go together, or perhaps because a life-long agent can be trusted with the work when he isn’t doing anything more important. He was alleged to be using company equipment to make fake identification. During this period his landlady is Ruth Paine, a CIA operative. . Another Ruth Paine was an associate of Andrija Puharich in the CIA’s crazy psychic shenanigans. She married occultist, inventor and pivotal figure in the development of the Bell helicopter Arthur Young. Her son married a girl called Ruth, who became the landlady Ruth Paine. This landlady later provided the police with the infamous photo of a rifle-brandishing Oswald, his fake Alex Hiddell ID, and other “evidence” against him. > > Then he allegedly tried to kill George Wallace, and headed off to New Orleans and into Jim Garrison’s later jurisdiction. Then he went and got a job at a company run by a prominent Castro-baiter. From then on he spent all his time flitting back and forth between anti- and pro-Castro groups, apart from the occasional mysterious meeting with FBI agents. He founded a branch of the Fair Play for Cuba committee and got himself on the TV for handing out it’s leaflets, despite the national Fair Play having told him not to. As the adress he stamped on the leaflets was the office of former FBI and CIA agent and co-ordinator of anti-Castro activities Guy Bannister. Finally got on TV by handing out leaflet’s outside Clay Shaw’s place. Banister was an associate of the aforementioned Ferrie, by now working on the CIA’s anti-\*Castro efforts. Banister’s secretary claimed to have seen Oswald at his offices on quite a regular basis, one of many accounts putting him in the anti-Castro millieu at the same time he was allegedly advocating Fair Play for Cuba. There was even a video tape of training at Lake Pontchartrain for another Bay of Pigs, or for Operation Mongoose attacks, before the camp was broken up by the FBI on the orders of the President, which had Oswald there with the gun toting commie-killers. Unfortunately that video, after being shown to the House Select Committee on Assassinations was stolen from the House. > > Oswald then, allegedly, went to Mexico although the main evidence for this is a photograph provided by the CIA of a man who bears absolutely no resemblance to LHO. If he ever left Texas he was soon back, working for General Byrd, his former highest superior in the Civil Air Patrol, in the Texas School Book Depository. During this time he allegedly threatened to blow up the local FBI office, athough an Agent Hosty claimed he only threatened to inform their superiors that the Feebies were harrassing his wife. We’ll never know, Hosty’s superiors ordered him to burn the note after the assassination. > > Which is how Oswald got to the day on which he shot to fame, if you’ll pardon the pun. Now, all of the above could just be happenstance. Coincidence. Something other than a conspiracy. His entire adult life was lived in a swirling nexus of intelligence contacts, but that might not mean anything. He was in the CAP, but so were lots of people. People who didn’t go on to be life-long covert operatives of one kind or another. Although there were also David Ferrie and Barry Seal. When he was in the Marines, maybe he really did just teach himself a bit of Russian and do some boring U2 air traffic control then leave for a Soviet adventure. Maybe the Soviets just took pity on him or wanted the publicity, not U2 information. Maybe the U2 just flew in contravention of direct orders and got shot down for the first time shortly thereafter by coincidence. Maybe he was a genuine communist defector who repented. Maybe the USG took pity on him and let him back in, didn’t bother him too much because he wasn’t important. Then, with his Russian language skills and Russian wife, he fell in with White Russians, who had a massively disproportionate percentage of intelligence operatives. Then, about Cuba, maybe he was still a communist and was trying to infiltrate the anti-Castro Cubans, as Bringuier alleges, or maybe he was anti-Castro and was trying to make the Fair Play group look bad by himself. Then he got a job at a place owned by the military-industrialist Byrd purely through coincidence and smuggled a gun into work to shoot the president for whatever reason. Maybe all of those things. A coincidence theory, if you will. Interesting, in this light, that he called himself a “patsy”. Not just “they’re got the wrong man”, but “they’ve set me up”. > > Or, maybe not. Maybe he was recruited in an informal capacity in the CAP, as were others who became gun-runners for the CIA, some of whom later branched out into drugs and other smuggling. Maybe his military training was a logical next step, and through his former CAP connections he was put into an intelligence capacity, set to work on the U2 as a trusted minor agent, then taught Russian and sent to infiltrate local Communists as part of a ONI programme to send fake defectors to the Soviet Union. His fake defection went well, he passed on U2 information which helped the CIA undermine Eisenhower’s peace initiative, then, his work done, he defected back home and went back to work. Confidential photo work, de Mohrenschildt his handler, Ruth Paine his landlady. Next assignment was the anti-Castro movement. Helped with planning and training, worked for higher ups like a good little agent while keeping his cover going. Was told to set up a FPFC office, maybe didn’t know why. Got him a job at the TSBD. The rest, history. > > Maybe neither, who knows. All I can say for certain is that he seems to have been constantly surrounded by intelligence operatives of all stripes. In the CAP he was surrounded by CIA smugglers, in the Marines he spent his time watching spy planes on RADAR, the the USSR he married the daughter of a KGB officer, back in America he almost immediately became a tenant of a CIA operative and close associate of another, and worked for a firm doing confidential government work, an anti-Castro Cuban and the close associated of LBJ, Byrd. > > None of that is conclusive, of course, only indicative. Nor will it ever be otherwise. One secret document on Oswald held by the CIA was burned while being thermofaxed, which is rather unique. Some have claimed that he was working gun-running cases for the FBI, which may be possible given his association with a metric shitload of gun-runners in the anti-Castro movement and the CAP. > > And we all know the rest. Shots fired, Kennedy dead. Oswald goes home, one police officer alleged with Jack Ruby, allegedly gets a gun and shoots Tippitt, who seems to be the only Dallas police officer who didn’t rush straight to the scene of the crime of the century, and then goes to cool of at the pictures, making sure to draw attention to himself by refusing to pay for a ticket, after a description of Oswald has gone out on the police radios from a source no-one had been able to track down. He’s dragged from the theatre to the least secure police station in the world where he is repeatedly paraded before the press to complain about not being allowed a lawyer or a shower and about being hit by policemen. Claims to be a patsy, tells the police “don’t you try to bring Mrs Paine into this”. Gets shot dead in the car park by Jack Ruby, a Kennedy hating gangster driven by a need to avenge the death of the man he hated, or so the story goes. > > And dead men tell no tales. The Aristocrats! ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2011, 5:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/happy-birthday-lee-harvey-oswald/598612/26 "2011-10-05T05:32:17Z")
> [@Terr](#): > > But you see, that’s exactly my point. If all there was to the story was “boy is adventurous, goes to Russia, meets girl, gets bored of Russia, takes girl back to US”, it wouldn’t have happened. There must have been quite a bit going on behind the scenes. Oh, well then we’re pretty much in agreement then. I just don’t think it had anything to do with JFK. It was just all a big mess because both the US and the USSR didn’t see what a nut job Oswald was. We’ll never know how much of the Cold War was people covering up their mistakes. ---
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2011, 11:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/happy-birthday-lee-harvey-oswald/598612/27 "2011-10-05T11:27:42Z")
> [@blindboyard](#): > > Oswald had an interesting life and it’s a real shame that all we remember him for is the assassination which he alleged commited in Dallas. It’s by far the most significant thing he did in his life and it’s what he wanted to be remembered for. So if there’s any shame here, it’s that a flakey wife-beating murderer got what he wanted. A guy who defected from the U.S. to the Soviet Union and back at the height of the Cold War definitely did something interesting, but when you look at the larger picture of his life, you see a guy who was crazy and erratic and felt like a nobody, and who couldn’t think of anything to do with himself except trying to kill people he disagreed with. ---
**Author:** ![Ludovic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/7ab992/32.png) [@Ludovic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ludovic)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2011, 12:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/happy-birthday-lee-harvey-oswald/598612/28 "2011-10-05T12:02:24Z")
> [@blindboyard](#): > > Oswald had an interesting life Cool story, bro. ---
**Author:** ![Koxinga](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/4af34b/32.png) [@Koxinga](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Koxinga)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2011, 2:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/happy-birthday-lee-harvey-oswald/598612/29 "2011-10-05T14:29:16Z")
He was vermin. You can google a picture of his rotting decapitated head, if you like. That’s the only birthday remembrance I’d personally grant the little weasel. ---
**Author:** ![Rhythmdvl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/85f322/32.png) [@Rhythmdvl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rhythmdvl)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2011, 3:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/happy-birthday-lee-harvey-oswald/598612/30 "2011-10-05T15:20:50Z")
> [@AClockworkMelon](#): > > I wonder if his friends called him as Lee or Harvey. Larvey. … I think the point of interest in his Soviet exodus is unfortunately overshadowed by conspiracy theories linking it (however remotely) to the assassination. The USSR had an absurd number of options available to them short of letting him and his wife leave. They could control his access to the outside world and media–they could have simply left him where he was and told his handler(s) to buck up and deal with his incessant whining. Or just stopped listening. Peer pressure from his neighbors. Cutting his rations for poor performance. Sending his wife ‘away’ for a while. Sending him away for a while. Ignoring his phone calls. But letting him and his wife out? Very uncharacteristic. So, forget about the link to the assassination for a minute. There doesn’t even need to be a high level of intrigue or upper-echelon diplomacy. There still remains an interesting story of what he did/said and the bureaucratic wrangling and maneuvering in the USSR that lead to the decision to let them leave. Maybe not Oliver Stone-worth, but interesting nonetheless. ---
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Ekers](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bryan_ekers/32/183_2.png) [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2011, 3:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/happy-birthday-lee-harvey-oswald/598612/31 "2011-10-05T15:27:01Z")
Were the Soviets so desperate for people that Oswald was worth the bureaucratic hassle? Once he started expressing his desire to leave… let him. Close the file. There are other, more pressing problems to deal with than some pesky malcontent with a foreign passport. ---
**Author:** ![smiling\_bandit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9a140/32.png) [@smiling\_bandit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smiling_bandit)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2011, 3:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/happy-birthday-lee-harvey-oswald/598612/32 "2011-10-05T15:37:21Z")
> [@Terr](#): > > But you see, that’s exactly my point. If all there was to the story was “boy is adventurous, goes to Russia, meets girl, gets bored of Russia, takes girl back to US”, it wouldn’t have happened. There must have been quite a bit going on behind the scenes. Actually… no, there wasn’t a whole lot more. Some Soviet records are available, and the truth is that… Oswald was a naive chump with a chip on his shoulder. He believed, or wanted to believe, that the Soviet Union would be something better. Oswald bothered them until they allowed him in. They somewhat hoped to get a small proaganda victory out of it, but relegated him to an unimportant role. Then he bitched until thil they let him out. From what it looks like, the decided he was such a useful git they’d rather stick us 'Mericans with it. His life only sounds interesting if you already think he was adventurous. In fact, he was a miserable man with a dull nature. ---
**Author:** ![Rhythmdvl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/85f322/32.png) [@Rhythmdvl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rhythmdvl)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2011, 3:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/happy-birthday-lee-harvey-oswald/598612/33 "2011-10-05T15:56:52Z")
> [@Bryan\_Ekers](#): > > Were the Soviets so desperate for people that Oswald was worth the bureaucratic hassle? Once he started expressing his desire to leave… let him. Close the file. There are other, more pressing problems to deal with than some pesky malcontent with a foreign passport. There is a fundamental misunderstanding of life in the USSR. Those he expressed his desire to leave to were not the same as those with the authority to let him leave. Those with the authority to decide whether he should he stay or should he go were not bothered by their underlings headaches with Oswald’s whining; they were primarily concerned with the question of whether there would be trouble if he stayed, or whether that trouble would increase by twofold if he left. During the period of their indecision, who would he have been bugging to let him know? His simple case (if they don’t want him, they should let he and his wife should be free to emigrate) would only go so far as the people he had access to. No press, domestic or foreign. The whole system was set up _against_ leaving, so the bureaucratic hassle was on the side of letting him leave. Again, the intrigue doesn’t necessarily need to go that high. Did they tease him for a while to keep him quasi-productive? Did they alternate between one day being fine, then the next making his life somewhat black? Given the potential (real or imagined) for bad publicity, etc., there had to be some bureaucratic Clash over the question. Whether it was resolved by a somewhat third party (say, a diplomat from England called), he was a bargaining chip to avert a small hot war breaking out on some distant rock, or some completely random-seeming scheme (e.g. some remote connection to Algerian independence), how he got over the default answer ('no, you’re staying rights here) is an intriguing question. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2011, 4:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/happy-birthday-lee-harvey-oswald/598612/34 "2011-10-05T16:40:22Z")
> [@Rhythmdvl](#): > > There is a fundamental misunderstanding of life in the USSR. > > Those he expressed his desire to leave to were not the same as those with the authority to let him leave. Those with the authority to decide whether he should he stay or should he go were not bothered by their underlings headaches with Oswald’s whining; they were primarily concerned with the question of whether there would be trouble if he stayed, or whether that trouble would increase by twofold if he left. I think Oswald was under close observation the entire time he was there. His desire to leave would have been known very quickly. He didn’t fit the pattern of a western defector at all. He had no strong political ideology, he had no one in the US who cared about his experience in the Soviet Union, he had no useful propoganda purpose, he had no useful intelligence (what ever he did tell them probably proved to be fabrications), and he wasn’t even a good example if they disappeared him because nobody there cared about him. The Soviets weren’t simply a bunch of sadists denying their citizens its rights. They had a political purpose and Oswald didn’t serve that purpose. Now I believe also he was some bargaining chip, in that environment neither side did anything without a purpose. Both sides would lose if he didn’t come home. The US didn’t want to get sucked into an unplanned confrontation, and they also couldn’t ignore him and risk headlines that said “US leaves brainwashed citizen to die at Commie hands”. The Soviets didn’t want to face “US citizen defects to USSR, then commits suicide”. And both sides realized he was a just a gnat. If they weren’t so suspicious of each other they could have agreed to a joint elimination. The Soviets probably considered themselves the winner in a game of Old Maid. The biggest problem with the Soviet conspiracy theory is they found Kennedy to be a president they liked. In the end they benefitted from Johnson’s ascendency, but they had no way of knowing that. They sent Yuri Nosenko over to convince the US that Oswald was not acting for the Soviets, and in the end Nosenko’s claims have been proven out by the evidence. They were extremely worried about being blamed for the assassination of JFK. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2011, 5:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/happy-birthday-lee-harvey-oswald/598612/35 "2011-10-05T17:10:46Z")
> [@blindboyard](#): > > …it’s a real shame that all we remember him for is the assassination which he alleged commited in Dallas. So I don’t want to talk about that… Really? because you kinda did. ---
**Author:** ![Terr](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/839c29/32.png) [@Terr](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Terr)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2011, 5:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/happy-birthday-lee-harvey-oswald/598612/36 "2011-10-05T17:34:16Z")
> [@Bryan\_Ekers](#): > > Were the Soviets so desperate for people that Oswald was worth the bureaucratic hassle? Once he started expressing his desire to leave… let him. Close the file. There are other, more pressing problems to deal with than some pesky malcontent with a foreign passport. You _really_ don’t “get” the Soviets, do you? It’s ok - very few Westerners do/did. It was not the question of the hassle. It’s the question of principle. The following is not what people actually thought (though some did), but it was the official dogma according to which the state operated. Wanting to leave the socialist paradise is a sign of some kind of mental illness. Mentally ill people need help, they should not be encouraged in their delusions. The more they insist on wanting to leave, the more the evidence of the mental illness and the more help they need - help such as peer pressure, work measures such as assigning menial jobs so they have less time for their delusional behavior, pressuring relatives to influence the mentally ill person and up to and including incarceration. Oswald and especially his wife being allowed to leave was a special and extraordinary thing. I am not trying to connect that to Kennedy assassination (I have my own ideas about who was behind that, and it was not Soviets). But that’s the fact - it was not in any way regular business. And for those who’re saying that he was a bargaining chip in some kind of diplomatic trade - huh? Who in the world cared about him enough here in the US to put any kind of value on his being allowed to leave? ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2011, 5:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/happy-birthday-lee-harvey-oswald/598612/37 "2011-10-05T17:54:00Z")
> [@Terr](#): > > You _really_ don’t “get” the Soviets, do you? It’s ok - very few Westerners do/did. > > It was not the question of the hassle. It’s the question of principle. The following is not what people actually thought (though some did… Leaving the main issue momentarily, how many people, and what kind did believe this? I’m curious. As a child my father’s business brought him into contact with people from the USSR and associated states. Visitors were in our home in the 60’s, and he traveled in the USSR around 1970 as relationships began the slow thaw. Although the official line was always that the US exagerrated and misunderstood the state philosophy, they also let out that they didn’t believe in it at all. And in the end, every one of them, after claiming to only be scientists and engineers, turned out to be closely associated with the KGB (which was no surprise). ---
**Author:** ![Terr](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/839c29/32.png) [@Terr](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Terr)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2011, 6:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/happy-birthday-lee-harvey-oswald/598612/38 "2011-10-05T18:30:59Z")
> [@TriPolar](#): > > Leaving the main issue momentarily, how many people, and what kind did believe this? I’m curious. As a child my father’s business brought him into contact with people from the USSR and associated states. Visitors were in our home in the 60’s, and he traveled in the USSR around 1970 as relationships began the slow thaw. Although the official line was always that the US exagerrated and misunderstood the state philosophy, they also let out that they didn’t believe in it at all. And in the end, every one of them, after claiming to only be scientists and engineers, turned out to be closely associated with the KGB (which was no surprise). Their association was no surprise, that’s true, because the ONLY people who were allowed out of the country in those times were the ones associated with the “organs” (the KGB). It was a self-selected sample 🙂 As for who believed this - surprisingly many people did. Not the “sophisticates” - the intelligentsia rarely held such views, and neither did the KGB apparatchiks who were familiar with the West. But the country held 240 million people, most of whom had absolutely no way of finding out anything that countered official relentless and all-pervasive propaganda. So I would say the majority of people in the Soviet Union in the 60s (less in 70s) did hold the views I described. Back to LHO and his wife leaving USSR - I just talked to my dad, who lived in the country his first 40 years, and was in his 20s during that time. He says that LHO and his wife being allowed to leave was absolutely extraordinary, according to what he remembers. So it’s not just me 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Ekers](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bryan_ekers/32/183_2.png) [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2011, 7:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/happy-birthday-lee-harvey-oswald/598612/39 "2011-10-05T19:14:37Z")
> [@Terr](#): > > You _really_ don’t “get” the Soviets, do you? It’s ok - very few Westerners do/did. > > It was not the question of the hassle. It’s the question of principle. The following is not what people actually thought (though some did), but it was the official dogma according to which the state operated. Wanting to leave the socialist paradise is a sign of some kind of mental illness. Mentally ill people need help, they should not be encouraged in their delusions. The more they insist on wanting to leave, the more the evidence of the mental illness and the more help they need - help such as peer pressure, work measures such as assigning menial jobs so they have less time for their delusional behavior, pressuring relatives to influence the mentally ill person and up to and including incarceration. Oh, I “get” them well enough. Wasn’t the practice to use pseudo-psychiatry as a state tool to imprison native Soviets? I rather doubt it’s such an efficient well-oiled machine when dealing with foreign nationals who are _actually_ mentally ill. Keeping Oswald means having to invest the time and effort to monitor him, for no benefit since the propaganda value of his defection was nil and he had no useful information or skills. Killing him turns a trivial nuisance into a potentially minor problem (perhaps handing the Americans the propaganda victory of painting the now-martyred Oswald as a Soviet victim, and of course the Soviets could never be 100% sure that this wasn’t an opportunity the Americans were waiting for, despite their otherwise indifferent attitude toward Oswald). Letting him leave, though, makes him someone else’s problem. In any case, even various native Soviets have managed to legally emigrate at various times, so painting the entire country as some kind of giant roach motel isn’t convincing. > [@](#): > > Oswald and especially his wife being allowed to leave was a special and extraordinary thing. Meh, sure… and I guess somebody in the USSR eventually got in trouble for having allowed it, not for letting Oswald “escape”, but for opening the USSR to potential embarrassment and accusations after Kennedy was killed. Even then, far more unusual things than this have occurred. > [@](#): > > I am not trying to connect that to Kennedy assassination (I have my own ideas about who was behind that, and it was not Soviets). _Do_ go on… > [@](#): > > Who in the world cared about him enough here in the US to put any kind of value on his being allowed to leave? Well, that’s just it - nobody in the U.S. cared about him when he was alive. If the Soviets kill him, though, Oswald potentially becomes valuable to the Americans as a martyr. So they have this schmo of no particular personal value, keeping him is a nuisance, killing him is a problem… so dump him and let him be someone’s else’s headache. In hindsight, of course, they would have acted differently. Wouldn’t we all. ---
**Author:** ![Terr](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/839c29/32.png) [@Terr](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Terr)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2011, 7:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/happy-birthday-lee-harvey-oswald/598612/40 "2011-10-05T19:33:18Z")
> [@Bryan\_Ekers](#): > > _Do_ go on… I have this theory that the Cuban ex-pats took revenge on Kennedy for sitting back and doing nothing while their friends and relatives were dying on the beaches after Kennedy promised support. How exactly they managed to dupe Oswald to do their bidding, and exactly how much help they gave him, I don’t know. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/happy-birthday-lee-harvey-oswald/598612.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/happy-birthday-lee-harvey-oswald/598612.md?page=3)