Anyone want to discuss HARVEY & LEE?

[Jim Hargrove]

I specifically did not mention the Mexico City trip, or whatever was going on down there, simply because there is no way that either of those pictures could be mistaken for the real guy. You really can't say that either one of these pictured guys might be mistaken for Oswald, by Sylvia Odio, or anyone else. You really trust Cuban Intelligence to disclose honestly from their files, or the CIA?

Any one of the scenarios I outlined above are "simpler" than a concerted attempt by a nefarious and wayward CIA to carry out a lifetime's worth of impersonation for no specific reason (at the beginning of the operation). It's not the number of alleged impersonations that matter. It's "simpler" (not to mention more sensible) to suppose that different people with different motives might have used Oswald's name for their own reasons, and/or that some of the witnesses have been tricked by their own memories, than to suppose that there is a 24 year sinister plan by a single shadowy conspiracy.

We believe the purpose of the 10-year-or-so impersonation, from the beginning, was to give a U.S. identity and birth certificate to a Russian-speaking kid so he could eventually travel to Russia and pretend he didn't understand Russian, which is pretty much what happened. The result was that "Life of the Soviet Worker," essay, which is quite a report! There is no evidence that the Oswald Project got entangled in the Kennedy plot until 1963.

Your "simpler" explanation, that many different people just happened to impersonate "Oswald" for many different reasons, sounds pretty unbelievable to me.

As for Mexico City, the people I trust most here are still Ed Lopez and Dan Hardway, and I haven't heard much from them lately (or ever) indicating they believe a mere mole hunt explains a half century of treachery from the Agency about this case.