Oswald questions

[Gordon Gray]

If Harvey was really the one picked up by the station wagon at around 12:40, why does it take 20 minutes to reach his rooming house and drop him off at 1pm? Was he then picked up again and driven to the Texas Theater to meet a contact (as John Martino claimed)? But if they already had him in a station wagon, why didn't they just drive him to Red Bird airport or wherever instead of all these drop-offs?

Maybe I'm just stuck on Martino's claims (that they had planned to get Oswald out of Texas). It makes perfect sense - rather than having a live or dead patsy in the hands of the DPD, the "assassin" just disappears. Then the CIA assets put out the word he was seen flying to Mexico, then to Cuba, and Castro is then accused of harboring him. Oswald is actually dead by this time, his body dumped in a Louisiana swamp, but the American people are being whipped up to invade Cuba to find him.

I agree with this as well. It makes little sense to me that they would try to arrange to frame him for the murder of a policeman in the hopes that he would be killed in the process of the police arresting him as a cop killer. Too much left to chance. And indeed why if they could drive him to the theatre, would they not just drive him to Red Bird or wherever, and dispose of him. So the question is how did HARVEY get to the theatre by the time he is first seen there around 1:10? Would it have been possible for him to have gotten there by bus?

I think it was American-born LEE who was picked up by the station wagon, not Russian-speaking Harvey. Harvey took McWatters' bus, and there was traffic, explaining the time to get to the boarding house. The police would be unlikely to assassinate someone, even a cop killer, in a public theater with a number of obvious and close witnesses.

As to sending a corpse--or a live body--to Cuba and blaming Castro that way, that sounds pretty dangerous to me: customs of two nations, for starters. Lot's of things could go wrong. I think they wanted a live body to parade in front of the cameras and look guilty for a day or two.

Jim

I don't know what you mean by sending a corpse to Cuba. They find a gun, link it to Oswald, who can't be found. His connections to Cuba and Castro are released in a timely fashion, triggering a public out cry for counter measures against Castro. This seems a lot more manageable and less risky than allowing him to be arrested by an inept DPD and risking Oswald making damaging public statements to the press.