Lee Harvey Oswald (October 18, 1939 - November 24, 1963), (alias Alek J. Hidell or O.H. Lee) a somewhat enigmatic figure, was the alleged assassin of U. S. President John F. Kennedy. He was born in New Orleans, Louisiana.

This photo, which shows Oswald with a rifle, handgun, and Belgrade daily newspaper Politika, was taken on March 31, 1963 by his wife Marina. The Warren Commission tagged the photo as exhibit 133-A. Since Oswald's death, there have been questions on the photo's authenticity. The House Select Committee on Assassinations in the 1970s concluded that the photo was real, although some still refuse to accept this verdict.Oswald was a former United States Marine who had served as an air flight controller. During his military career Oswald scored as a "sharpshooter" in December 1956, on two occasions achieving 48 and 49 out of 50 during rapid fire at a 200-yard distant target, but failed to attain a marksmanship badge. Skeptics doubt the likelihood of Oswald being able to fire shots so accurately and rapidly with the weapon and from the position he was said to use to kill Kennedy (a moving target). However, according to later friends, Oswald was an excellent shot.

Oswald learned Russian during his military career, then traveled to the U.S.S.R. in 1959 where he attempted suicide to avoid being deported as a suspected American spy. The Soviet authorities then permitted him to live in Minsk, where he worked in a television factory and married a Soviet national, Marina (nee Nicholayevna Prusakova OR Alexandrovna Medvedeva) Oswald. (After Oswald's death, Marina remarried and changed her name to Marina Oswald Porter.) Oswald maintained that he was a Marxist, and at one time tried to renounce his American citizenship, but later changed his mind and returned to the USA in 1962, bringing Marina and their infant daughter. Some believe that his attempt at defection was a planned CIA operation to gain technical secrets from the Soviets. In Oswald's own words to a friend, he gave the Soviets information that he believed allowed them to shoot down the U-2 spy plane because the military wanted to derail an upcoming summit in which it was feared that President Eisenhower, declining mentally, might be bested by Khrushchev. Either way, he got in and got out quicker than usual Communists.

Back in America, Oswald got a job at a Dallas graphic arts firm, Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall. What is odd about this is the fact that the company did highly classified work for the government, which included the creation of detailed maps of Cuba. Oswald later told a friend that the CIA arranged for his taking the job to work on the maps. He had an assignment, which involved identifying the location of safe houses, presumably from the maps he was making for the company.

In April, during the spring of 1963, Oswald moved to New Orleans with his wife and child.

In the summer of 1963, Oswald was the secretary of the New Orleans chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, run by a certain Alek J. Hidell. In reality, Oswald was the only member, and he had Marina sign membership cards with "Alek Hidell." On August 9, while Oswald distributed "Hands Off Cuba" and "The Crime Against Cuba" leaflets on the streets of New Orleans, he was harassed by anti-Castro Cuban exiles. Police arrested Oswald for disturbing the peace and made him pay a fine of $10. The arrest caught the attention of William Stuckey, a local reporter who hosted a radio show on WDSU called "Latin Listening Post." Oswald was a guest on the radio program on August 17 and August 21. There is some controversy as to whether Oswald actually harbored pro-Castro thoughts. The address listed on his pamphlets, 544 Camp Street, was (in reality) the address of a racist, one-time FBI agent and detective named W. Guy Banister who ran a training camp for anti-Castro exiles prepared to take over Cuba. Banister was rumored to have used Oswald to collect the names of Communist sympathizers at area colleges. Prof. Michael Kurtz, a professor of Louisiana history, witnessed Oswald and Banister at Tulane University making anti-integrationist remarks (though Oswald was staunchly pro-civil rights). Witnesses say Oswald used a work area on the second floor of 544 Camp. He was also seen signing guns out of Banister's storeroom at 544 Camp.

Amongst the people Banister worked with was a homosexual ex-pilot for Eastern Airlines named David Ferrie who also worked for Carlos Marcello's lawyer, G. Wray Gill, in Marcello's 'illegal deportation' case. Ferrie, who had no scientific credentials, claimed to be working on a cure for cancer using lab rats he kept at home. He also tinkered on a submarine in his backyard that he planned for use in the Cuban invasion. He had previously flown missions into Cuba under the pay of Eladio del Valle, an anti-Castro Cuban from Miami. He was also a self-proclaimed bishop in the Orthodox Old Rite Roman Catholic Church of America. It is rumored that Oswald spurned Ferrie's sexual advances at the age of 15 when he was a member of Ferrie's Civil Air Patrol unit.

Oswald was a very poor worker, and hung out at a next-door parking garage befriending garage owner Adrian Alba. The garage was regularly used by FBI and CIA cars. Alba has testified that he saw the driver of one such car pass a white envelope to Oswald, who stuffed it under his shirt and walked away. The House Select Committee on Assassinations found this claim to be baseless.

Oswald passed out leaflets another time in front of the New Orleans International Trade Mart offices.

In March 1963, Oswald (using the name of his ex-boss in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, Alek J. Hidell) purchased a rifle and handgun that was later linked to the events of November 22, 1963.

Rifle

6.5x52mm Mannlicher-Carcano M91/38 bolt-action rifle
Serial number C2766 Western Cartridge 160 grain (10.37 g) ammunition Side-mounted Ordnance Optics 4 x 18 scope

Handgun

0.38 Special Smith & Wesson Victory revolver 2.25 in bbl
Serial number V510210 Converted from 0.38 S&W, shortened from 5 in bbl. The rifle was kept in the basement of family friends, the Paines, cousins of John Forbes Kerry, at whose home Maria Oswald was living at the time. Michael R. Paine was the son of Ruth Forbes Paine, who remarried Arthur Young, the inventor of the Bell helicopter used in Korea and Vietnam. Michael R. Paine and Ruth Forbes Paine Young were Forbes family heirs and as is Sen. Kerry, a coincidence since both he and the assassinated President bear the initials JFK. See Warren Commission report describing testimony of Michael R. Paine and his wife, Ruth Paine. [1] Because of her son's involvement in the assassination, her Forbes family's involvement with drug dealing in China during the Opium War, and her husband's involvement with the military and defense industry, Mrs. Ruth Forbes Paine Young started the International Peace Academy, which have fed rumors about her family's politics.

According to the controversial Warren Commission report on the John F. Kennedy assassination, Oswald shot Kennedy from a window on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, where he was employed during the Christmas rush, as the President's motorcade passed through Dallas's Dealey Plaza at about 12:30 pm on November 22. Texas Governor John Connally was wounded at the same time. However, photographic and filmed evidence seems to prove that there were at least two or three shooters in an area known as the grassy knoll behind a picket fence atop a semi-hill in Dealey Plaza.

Oswald then left the scene. How he left the scene is still in conjecture. Witnesses claim he left with four other dark-complected people in a white Nash Rambler with a luggage rack on top possibly owned by a lady friend of Marina's. However, a punched bus transfer found on him after his arrest seems to indicate that he took a bus, then left in the middle of traffic and (based on a witness statement) entered a taxi, which he left close to his apartment in Oak Cliff. Either way, he got to his room. According to the report, he changed his clothes and grabbed a pistol in his room at the boarding house, even though no pistol or evidence of one (including a holster alleged to have been found there) had been found by the housekeeper when cleaning. At about the same time, according to his housekeeper, a police car (#107) containing two officers pulled up and beeped the horn twice before leaving after about a second. Oswald left thereafter in a great hurry.

After leaving the scene, Oswald allegedly shot and killed Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit, who coincidentally drove a police car marked #107. However, witness statements and shell casings indicate a different story. Oswald was seen in the vicinity of the murder scene, but his movements were calm. Several witnesses claimed they saw a man who did not resemble Oswald at all fire the shots. Another witness says she saw Oswald with the man and that they ran off in separate directions. The report claims Oswald fired two Winchester-Western bullets and two Remington-Peters bullets. However, the shell casings indicated the murderer fired three Winchester-Westerns and one Remington-Peters. The report says there was either a shot unaccounted for that went missing or that he put a Remington-Peters in a Winchester-Western shell, the second of the two being more likely to the report, though it is impossible to do so.

Oswald was arrested at the Texas Theater in the Dallas neighborhood of Oak Cliff at about 1:50 pm, first as a suspect in the shooting of Tippit and was then charged with assassinating Kennedy, even though the arraignment hearing on the Kennedy charge was abruptly interrupted and never did get finished.

While in custody, Oswald denied the shooting, telling reporters "I didn't shoot anyone" and "I'm just a patsy".

Oswald was shot and killed by Texas nightclub owner Jack Ruby in Dallas, Texas, while being transferred to county jail, two days after the president's assassination, and before being brought to trial. Many alternative theories of the assassination contend that he acted on behalf of others, or even that Oswald was not the actual assassin.

The Warren Commission created by President Lyndon B. Johnson on November 29, 1963 to investigate the assassination, concluded that Oswald did assassinate Kennedy and that he acted alone. The proceedings of the commission were secret, and its files have yet to be released to the public, further fuelling speculation about the assassination. A later investigation by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, during the late 1970s, concluded that President Kennedy had been assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.

In October 1981, Oswald was subject to an exhumation undertaken by British writer Michael Eddowes (with Marina Oswald Porter's support). They sought to prove or disprove a thesis developed in a 1975 book, Khrushchev Killed Kennedy (The book was republished in 1976 in Britain as November 22: How They Killed Kennedy and in America a year later as The Oswald File.) The thesis of the trio of books was that when Oswald went to the Soviet Union, he was swapped with a Soviet clone. Eddowes's support for his thesis was a claim that the corpse buried in 1963 in the Shannon Rose Hill Memorial Park cemetery in Fort Worth, Texas did not have a scar that resulted from surgery conducted on Oswald years before. The final results of the exhumation found that the corpse they studied was Oswald's. The finding was based on dental records.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Harvey_Oswald

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