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About Books on c Span two Saturdays at eight pm Eastern and Pacific time and Sundays at nine Eastern and Pacific Next from Books and Books Incorporated in Coral Gables, Florida.

Former FBI agent James Hosty.

He was assigned to head the investigation of Lee Harvey Oswald after the assassination of President Kennedy.

He's written about those experiences and about newly released findings in a book entitled Assignment oswaldd.

Anything nice to say, A nice crowd here tonight.

I remember, thank you.

I remember when I first thought about doing something on this assassination.

Somebody told me, well, you better get it out real quick because the year two, the Kennedy assassination is going to be a dead subject.

Well, I don't think anything is farther from the truth.

It's just like she said, It's like the Civil War.

It seems to be with us seems to be.

Hanging on now.

On my background, I was a FBI agent for twenty seven years and I retired at age fifty five, which is a mandatory retirement age for FBI agents.

I was the third of three agents to have the Lee Oswald case assigned.

As you probably know, he defected to the Soviet Union, spent three years, and then when he returned he was interrogated twice by the first agent that had the case, then went to New Orleans where he was interrogated again.

And finally where I got into the case was when he contacted the Soviet embassy in Mexico City under surreptitious circumstances and less than thirty days before the assassination.

I was given the assignment to look into that and discreetly determine what was a miss now.

I was the first FBI agent to interrogate Oswald after he was arrested.

I was up there at the police department and started interviewing him within an hour after his apprehension.

I was also the first one to interview Marine Oswald after the assassination.

I had interviewed her shortly before the assassination.

Also, as you will see, she was also somewhat suspect.

A lot of people don't realize that.

I also interrogated the pains, Ruth and Michael Payne, who were very much involved in this thing.

So I was involved in much of the investigation post assassination as well as preassassination.

Now, excuse me, let me get my things straight.

Another people ask me, why am I doing it now?

Why have I waited thirty two years?

Well, as the lady said that introduced me, a lot of this material was classified top secret up until recently.

I of course had signed the secrecy agreement and could not talk about many of these things.

And of course many of the things, as you will see from reading a book, I didn't know after the assassination occurred.

There was a sort of a little bit of a cover up, I guess you could say, And they were covering up from me as much as anybody.

They didn't want me to know how headquarters had filed up, so to speak.

So I gradually found out over a period of time.

I found out quite a bit in nineteen seventy six when I testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee, the Church Committee, and then of course there's the various things will bring release from the archives.

Now, because of the movie JFK, or what I call the monstrosity JFK, Congress decided, well, enough is too much.

We're going to tell the public what really happened, and so they passed the JFK Disclosure Act.

There is a.

Board of five imminent scholars who are going over all of the things in the archives which are classified top secret, secret, and so forth, and are winning it out and releasing nearly all of it.

Now I understand the only thing that they're not going to release if there is an informant who is still alive or still viable in some way, they will not disclose that person's name for their own safety.

And they're not going to disclose investigative techniques that are not known to the public for obvious reasons they might want to be able to use them again.

Now, another reason why I finally wrote the book is because of my family.

As any of you know of a lot of you have done research on this, you'll know that my name has appeared in many of these books.

And I can say it really kind of tough.

I sort of feel like a man who's been bound and gagged and being pecked to death by a bunch of chickens.

That's about the way I feel by a lot of these books.

But my family wanted me to set the record straight.

I'm seventy one now.

Two years ago, when I was sixty nine, my youngest son came to me and said, well, you've got to put this down and writing for nothing more than just for your grandchildren and your great grandchildren.

So for this reason, I sat down with my youngest son, who's an attorney.

He was by co author.

He has a journalism degree that was his undergraduate degree, and help me put this thing together.

As Tom said, my son Tom said, he said he wanted to have this written for his grandchildren.

Well, now Tom's oldest son is only five years old and he's.

Worried about his grandchildren already.

That shows just.

So, because I say, because of all of the false information being put out, and in fact, the government is now trying to straighten it out.

We're now trying to get this thing squared away.

Now.

The questions that people mostly asked was did as Well do it?

And did he do it alone?

Based upon the information I have, the evidence that I have, I would say yes, he did do it.

Did he act alone.

Again, based upon the information I have and the evidence I have, I'll have to say that he did act alone.

Was there a cover up?

Yes, not only a cover up, I think there was at least two cover ups after the first by the United States government, what I call a benign cover up.

Lyndon Johnson decided in nineteen sixty three, when he saw what the situation was, that if the American public was told the entire truth about Oswald and particularly his contacts in Mexico City shortly before the assassination, this could have led to.

World War three.

And you all know from your history.

That World War One began almost exactly the same way.

The Crown Prince of Austrey was assassinated by a Bostnian Serb.

We're still having trouble to Bostonian service, by the way, in Sarajevo.

And they went after Serbia, and then Russia came to Serbia's defense, and then one thing led to another we had World War One.

Johnson was fearful of this, so he, with the unanimous consent of the National Security Council, which included There's brother Robert Kennedy, agreed that the whole story would not be told just recently President Ford, the sole surviving member of the Warren Commission, and the magazine article appeared in American Heritage November nineteen ninety five issue stated, concerning the Warren Commission, we told the truth.

We just didn't tell the whole truth.

Now I also feel that it's very possible, in fact, based upon some of these documents have been released now, that there was also a cover up on the part of the Soviet Union, Castro and the American Communist Party.

I'll give you an example.

Document has just been released.

It showed that Gus Hall, the leader of the American Communist Party, approached fortunately one of our informants, a go between between the Communist Party and the Soviet Union, and asked the Soviet Union to contact Marina Oswald, who was then under interrogation by the FBI, and tried to tell her to tell us that her husband was really a right wing conspirator, that he was working with the minute Man to throw us off.

The Soviet Union said that's impractical, We're not going to do it.

But that is an example of how they were.

Trying to cover up.

Of the first seven authors that wrote books about the assassination on which a lot of the research has since developed.

You know, one researcher goes to another researcher and they built on each other.

Six out of the first seven researchers had Communist backgrounds, and we're putting out the Soviet line.

Oswald either didn't do it, or if he did do it, he was connected to the right.

They'll give you example now.

They say that when you write a story and journalists are told there are five ws.

Who, what, when, where, and why?

The Warrant Commission accurately reported first of the four whys.

They did tell us who, where, when, but they did not tell us why, because if they had, it could have possibly led to World War three.

Now let me explain what I mean.

As you all know, particularly down here in Miami, there's probably some people here of Cuban extraction.

And I don't have to tell you about the Bay of Pigs, which was an unfortunate situation that unfortunately Castro had penetrated the invasion and I was able to thwart it.

Then we had the Cuban Missile crisis a year later.

Now I can tell you this from what I know from being in the FBI.

We were very very close to World War three, during the Cuban Messel crisis, we were within a day or day and a half of possibly invading Cuba at that time.

When Castro backed down, I mean when Khrushchev backed down, Castro did not back down at that point.

Kennedy started to get along with Khrushchev after the Cuban Missile crisis, and we first had the first test Ban treaty, which followed at the summer of sixty three, the first sale of wheat and the first exchange.

Of scholars and so forth.

Castro then as now refused to cooperate.

He refused to go along.

He was furious with the Russians for backing down during the Cuban Missile crisis.

So on June the nineteenth, nineteen sixty three, two days after Kennedy began his overtures towards the Soviet Union, he ordered the CIA to go after Castro again.

The sixty four election was coming up, and he wanted Castro gone by the sixty four election.

Barry Goldwater was going to use it against him, and he knew it.

The CIA made contact with one of Castro's cabinet officers, one Rolando Cubella.

We've got a picture of Rolando Cabella in the book.

Here we go into all this.

Cobella was the leader of the urban Guerrillas when Castro was the leader of the Gorillas in the Hills.

Coubella was the leader of the urban guerrillas and was a revolutionary hero in his own right.

He could have just as easily taken over rather than Castro.

So he was sort of a rival to Castro, and was very upset about the fact that Castro had let the Russians into Cuba.

So they were dealing with Amlash, and that was his code name.

Amlash was a code name for Cubella.

They were dealing with him, hoping to work out a deal with a could overthrow Castro, get rid of the Russians and work things out.

I don't know what they had in mind, but Castro found out about this.

On September the seventh, nineteen sixty three.

He approached a Canadian Associated Press reporter named Daniel Harker and told him, in effect, I'm paraphrasing now that we know the American leaders are trying to overthrow the Cuban leaders, and they may find out that two people can play this game.

No, I'm paraphrasing it, but it was a definite threat, saying we know what you're up to and i'm and we'll retaliate in kind.

Not all newspapers carried this article.

The Washington Post, New York Times, we're trying to get Kennedy to kiss and makeup at Castro, and they thought it was provocative, so they left it out.

The two papers in Dallas were trying to portray Kennedy as a wimp on Castro.

They were pro Goldwater, so they didn't print it.

But both New Orleans newspapers did print it, and that's.

Where Oswell was at the time.

Six days after this article appeared, Oswald made arrangements to go to Mexico City.

When in Mexico City he met with the Cubans and with the Soviets.

He met with the head of the KGB assassinations Colonel vv Costakov, who's picture I also have in here.

He was the Western Hemisphere chief in charge of all assassinations, kidnapping and sabotage for the KGB.

Oswald also met with the Cubans, and we know from my top level informant, I have the communication in here in the archives.

This is something we couldn't talk about until recently.

But Oswald, in talking to the Cubans, according to Castro himself, said, and I'm paraphrasing again, quote that son of a bitch Kennedy.

I think I'll kill him now.

If the Cubans said, no, don't dare do that, then they would not, be, of course involved.

If they said, yes, go ahead and do it, then we have a conspiracy.

More likelihood.

What they said was.

Probably nothing, just laughed it off, thinking he was just popping off.

People do a lot of popping off.

But then what does he do.

He goes back to Dallas and does exactly what he said, So was there a conspiracy?

The definition of a conspiracy is two or more persons agree together to commit an illegal act, and one or more of those persons begins to carry it out.

So if the Cubbans in any way encouraged ours well to do it, then you could say there's a conspiracy, But we can't prove that.

They say that they didn't tell them to do it.

They said he was just popping off, and they didn't tell them one way or the other.

So that is what Johnson was facing in nineteen sixty three.

And this is what he did not want the American public to know.

I heard from sources of mind down in Mexico City that the CIA agents in Mexico City were furious when President Johnson ordered them to cease their investigation.

They had come up with some very good leads which were tending to implicate the Cubans.

For example, they were able to pick up apparently on a tech or a tap of some sort.

One Louisa Caldron, a Cuban intelligence agent, when told the President Kennedy had just been killed, she laughed and said, we knew what was going to happen.

Now what that meant, we don't know.

Castro will not let anybody talk to her.

With a House assassination committee went and talked to several Cubans.

She was the one person he wouldn't let us talk to.

So.

Uh.

Then there was also the case of the airplane, which I'm gonna mention in here.

You can read the book and see the different things that that sort of tended to indicate the possibility of possible Cuban involvement.

Now, at this point, we don't have enough evidence.

If the investigation works out, there might be In other words, uh, we don't have proof, but we do have an incomplete investigation if the income.

If the investigation were ever completed, it would probably answer the questions.

I'm inclined to think personally that the Cubans did not tell him to do it, they didn't take him seriously, and he went back and did it.

That's what I'm inclined to think.

But until such time as we find out what Louisa Caldron was talking about and who the mysterious person who flew down Mexico City was, we can't really say.

Now.

In the book, I go into such things as the Secret Service protection.

I'm not blaming the Secret Service.

It wasn't their fault.

They only had three hundred men in the entire United States to handle counterfeiting, check forgery, and protecting the president.

They were undermanned, understaffed.

Because of inner Service rivalry and pride, they would not ask the other federal agencies to help them.

A lot of people think that everybody in the federal government pitched in and helped.

Well, the Secret Service didn't want us helping him.

Therefore, the president was inadequately guarded.

The main reason he was inadequately guarded that day was because the President himself to Secret Service that they could not ride on the car where he was.

I happened to see the motorcade go by.

The car the President Kennedy was in was totally unprotected.

There was nobody on the running boards.

There were no motorcycles alongside.

As you probably know if some of you have seen the Suppruder film, the Secret Service guards were one car back.

They should have been on Kennedy's car.

That's where they wanted to be.

The motorcycles should have been alongside of Kennedy.

But he wanted this was a political trip.

He wanted to show everybody he was going into enemy territory.

Dallas was very anti Kennedy, and he was going to go in and show them he wasn't afraid.

He was going to pull a John Wayne and go in there and show them that he wasn't afraid, and therefore he had no protection.

Had the guards been where they wanted to be on the running.

Boards, the guard and the right rear.

Would have blocked Oswald's line of fire and probably taken the shot, or certainly been able to react quicker.

As you remember from.

The Suppruiter film, Clint Hill jumped off the car behind and ran flat out as fast as he could, and he just barely got.

On the car.

They were just too far back.

Kenny O'Donnell, who was the chief of staff for President Kennedy after the assassination, talking about the protection, said, we had our choice between security and politics.

We chose politics.

In other words, it's not the fault of the Secret Service.

As I said, the climate in Dallas was very hostile to Kennedy and that's why he was going in there to try to shore up Texas.

He just barely carried Texas in the nineteen sixty election, and he knew he was going to face a tough fight with Barry Goldwater.

Particularly in Texas.

He lost Dallas two to one, and he was trying to cut that down, trying to make it a little bit more even, and that was the reason he went there.

Now in the book, I'm also talking about Marina Oswald.

Now, everybody has seen the picture of her, the poor bereaved widow carrying a child right after Oswald was killed, and everybody took her to heart, and they say a picture is worth ten thousand words.

Well, Marina, as you'll see in the book, has got an interesting background.

She isn't at all the sleep shy, little peasant girl the people think she is.

We've found out after the assassination.

She was raised by her uncle.

She was an orphan.

She was raised by her mother's brother, who just happened to be a colonel in the Russian MVD.

Now, the MVD is not the KIGB.

The MVD is part of the police apparatus.

He wasn't what they call gulag the prison officials.

He was a high ranking prison official.

She lived in the building with him, in which all of the people in there were either higher banking MVD or KGB agents.

So she was also a member of the Communist Party, as we know.

Also in here I go into Jack Ruby.

Everybody thinks Jack Ruby had been in the mob, this had been a hit.

Well, I can show you in black and white how it's virtually impossible that he was sent in to kill to kill Oswal.

That we can show that four minutes before he killed Oswald, he was next door setting a telegram.

Oswall was supposed to been moved an hour and a half earlier.

And I go into all of that.

Also, we had pretty good book on who the mob was and who they weren't you know.

Starting in fifty nine after the Appellation meeting, there was an intensive investigation.

Of who was in the mob.

And we know that Ruby, definitely, because of the nature of his business, had contact with these people.

But he was also in contact with the Dallas Police.

And with the FBI.

He was an informant for both the police and the FBI.

By the way, that's how the false rumor got started that Oswal was an informant.

It was Ruby who was the informant.

And somebody overheard a conversation got it mixed up.

I've got that all in the book too.

But we know that Ruby was not in the mob.

He did have contacts.

But stop and reason, what good would it do to send Ruby in to kill Kennedy, I mean to kill Oswah and then they would have Ruby and he could lead them back to the conspirators.

You're jumping out of the frying pan in the fire when you do this.

Besides this, Ruby was in the police station all weekend.

There's pictures of him as close to Oswald as that cameraman is there in the back, and he had his pistol in He could have rushed up and shot Oswald.

Friday night and silenced them forty eight hours earlier.

So it just doesn't make sense.

I also have in the book.

I didn't go into the evidence too much that I pointed out.

There's a lot of people who have done books, forensic scientists and so forth, about why Kennedy was killed by Oswall, you know, the direction of the shots and all that kind of thing.

I did add a chapter, however, and some of the things that I have about the so called magic bullet.

Now, the magic bullet wasn't as magic as people say it is.

They like to show you the people like I forget who some of these people are, but they will show you the magic bullet and I'll show you say, look, it's pristine.

The nose is not bent at all, is knocked at all.

But what they don't do they don't turn it over and show you the backside of the bullet.

The backside of the bullet is flattened out and distended.

What happened when Kennedy was hit.

It went through his neck, came out through his tie.

We know that because there's a hole in his tie, not with the threads thrust outward.

It came out it hit Conley in the back, but when it hit Conley, it was turning over.

Conley's wound was oblong.

That meant the bullet went into Conley's sideways and continued to turn over, and when it finally hit Conley's wrist, it was completely turned over and hit his wrist backside first, and that's the part that flattened.

Now there is lead.

This was a copper jacket of lead core bullet.

There is no lead showing on the nose, but there's some of the lead missing from the rear end of the bullet.

They have been able to check to a ninety five percent certainty that the lead found in Conley's wrist the lead fragments match up to the lead in that bullet.

Also, they talk about the head snap.

Well, the head snap was caused by the jet effect of Kennedy's skull exploding.

There was a hole in the back of Kennedy's head by the scalp came out through here.

His head was sort of turned over a little bit because he'd been hit once and he was turned over like this.

They went through here and it came out to the front and blew out the front right part of his skull.

When it did that it was like an explosion, a jet effect, and that is what threw his head back.

You can do this experiment with a melon.

Put it on a post, should a bullet to it, and there'll be a small hole in the front of the melon.

The back end of the melon will blow off, and then the melon will fly back.

Towards the shooter caused by the jet effect.

This is what happened.

Also.

I remember in the movie JFK they tried to reenact and say how they didn't line up for Conley and Oz and Kennedy hit by the same shot.

Well, what they did is.

They had Kennedy and Conley sitting on chairs directly, one right behind the other and on the same level.

Actually, Kennedy was about four inches to the right and about four inches higher in the jump seat.

When the first shot was fired which missed, Kennedy ducked and Conley turned around to.

See what happened.

When you do that, you ticked Conley and turn him around, have Kennedy ducking, Have Kennedy to the right and higher.

It lines up perfectly.

This has been demonstrated.

I've seen demonstrations with dummies and that's how it works out Now that pretty well completes what I've got to say.

I didn't.

I don't want to tell you about the whole book.

As I say, I've got documents in here that have just been released, including the document where a top level FBI undercover man with Castro himself and Castro himself told us that Oswald threatened to kill Kennedy.

We've got that.

We've got pictures of Acostakoff, the KGB assassination expert, and of Amlash, the high Cuban official that the CIA was dealing with.

By the way, Amlash was arrested by Castro after the assassination, he.

Waited two three years, sort of played the string along, so to speak.

We think he was doubled that the Amlash was doubled, as they say, he was told he you cooperate with us or will kill you right now.

He was put on trial and found guilty of trying to assassinate Castro.

Now can you imagine this?

He was pardoned by Castro.

Castro shoots people for just a black market.

But here's a man that confessed to want to kill Castro and he parted.

Now what happens after the House Assassination Committee completed their report what happened castro releasism.

He's now out.

Now you tell me that's not a double Asian operation.

But that'll conclude what I have to say.

And I say, you can read the book.

Most of it goes into how I was doing the investigation and how I found out about these things as we went along.

Now, do we have any questions, Yes.

And back.

Noting in your in your opinion.

He said that he was angry.

He said he was pro Kennedy, which I think that was pretty well proven.

Also, Oswald had also killed Officer Tippett, the police officer who Ruby knew.

Ruby is a good friend of the police.

He said that when Oswald came.

Out of the jail elevator that.

Morning, there were bright lights on similar to what we have back here, and Oswald had a smart alecky smirk on his face.

He said that just set him off.

He was mad at him as it was.

You know, if you're pro Kennedy, you'd be pretty mad at him.

And he said that he wanted to the statements he made was he wanted to show the world that the Jews got guts and he didn't want Jackie Kennedy to have to come down to testify, and he said, you cops couldn't do this, but I can do it.

I mean it was a combination of he wanted revenge and he thought he'd win a place in history.

I'll give you an example.

The man who killed John Wilkes Booth, John Walks Booth was arrested then killed by one of the guards.

You know what happened to that guard.

He became a hero.

They made him sergeant at arms in the Kansas State Legislature for life.

This ruby thought he'd be a hero, do something that nobody else could do.

Said he was just going to be the executioner.

Yes, sir, you mentioned in in the book on page ninety six.

I believe it is that you felt frustrated in the early stages of the investigation because you felt as if everything you were doing was being scrutinized and nitpicked, even though you had been acting by the book.

I believe is had to run it.

Maybe I'm missing something, but it doesn't seem quite by the book.

To tear up a note from the assassin and flush it down the toilet.

That's true.

However, I was told to do that.

I was following orders that's true.

But the people who were netpicking me were the ones that ordered ordered me to do it, So I don't feel that they should have been second guessing me on that point.

Didn't you wonder that maybe you shouldn't do that, that maybe they were ordering you to commit a crime?

Basically, well, as it turned out, it wasn't a crime.

As I point out in the book there.

It turns out that since Oswald was dead and there could be no trial, and since had never been entered into the record, and of course I wish I couldn't have done it.

I'll tell you that right now, because all of this conjecture about all the false reasons as to why it was done, It was definitely not anything more than just a complaint about me interviewing his wife.

But you'd have to understand JEdgar Huber, he had a hallacious temper.

Now I can explain this to anybody who's ever in the FBI and understand.

Immediately they said the old man would have blown up, and in order to keep him from blown up, they.

Just decided, we just won't tell him.

He was sort of like the Emperor, and the Emperor's close you know, they would not tell they tell him what he wanted to hear and keep bad things from him.

At the time the note was destroyed, Johnson was saying, there was gonna be no hearings.

We're not gonna see he was worried to death about World War three, so we're not gonna have any hearings.

Just report back to me and this.

In other words, the word was out there was going to be a cover up.

So I guess the FBI officials and NCIA and anybody else figured well, we'll have our little secondary cover ups.

The primary cover up was the was what happened in Mexico City, and then.

The CIA covered up the fact.

That they were dealing with one of Castro's cabinet officers to try to sassinate him.

They covered that up, and I guess then.

The FBI covered up.

I don't know what all the Secret Service and the State Department covered up, but yeah, that's true.

I shouldn't have done it, I admitted, and I wished I hadn't, but you've got to remember we were all in a state of shock.

I think I was in more shock over Oswald being killed by Ruby, and I was by Kennedy being killed.

I haven't air that we had received information then