Do Still Sealed JFK Assassination Documents Conceal FBI Failed Surveillance on Lee Harvey Oswald?
By Dave O’Brien
This week, as the 54th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s death approaches, 10,744 new files were released by the National Archives.
So far, 31,334 formerly classified top secret files have been released in five separate batches in 2017.
And the headline from the collective dump of documents continues to be:
Still No JFK Assassination Bombshell in Files!
Most of the newest batch of declassified records are from top secret FBI files, leaving us with this repeating dilemma:
Is there still a bombshell to be discovered in the suppressed classified files?
As it relates to Lee Harvey Oswald and his links to three U.S. intelligence agencies, the answer may very well be a resounding “YES!”
Yet to be released are potentially fascinating documents that show what involvement, or at the very least interest, Lee Harvey Oswald was to the FBI, CIA and Naval Intelligence prior to the assassination.
As it relates to the FBI, we have yet to receive documents pertaining to a specific incident involving Oswald and FBI special agent James Hosty just weeks before JFK was gunned down in Dallas.
FBI FAILURE OF EPIC CONSEQUENCES
It has been well documented by Hosty himself that he destroyed evidence vital to the assassination rather than place it in his ‘Oswald File.’ He later tried to cover-up his role in the pre-assassination surveillance of Oswald by omitting his name from Oswald’s address book recovered after the assassination.
The omission was discovered by the Warren Commission, but it failed to follow-up with Hosty even though he was also present during some of the interrogations of Oswald by Dallas Police.
Although Dallas Police interrogators say they never kept notes or recorded the sessions with Oswald in custody, Hosty was never asked to provide information about what Oswald said in the 48 hours leading up to his own assassination at the hands of Jack Ruby.
The problem not yet revealed in declassified FBI documents relates to the aftermath of a visit to Hosty’s field office by an angry Oswald just weeks before JFK’s visit to Dallas.
He sought to confront Hosty about interrogating wife Marina Oswald in the weeks leading up to Dallas. The FBI was clearly concerned about the Oswald family since their return from communist Russia, but was the timing of this incident just a coincidence?
When told that Hosty was not in the office, Oswald left him a nasty note demanding that he leave his wife alone. Instead of filing it in his Oswald dozier, Hosty says he was instructed by his superior to get rid of it, which he says he did by tossing it in his waste basket.
From this incident, we are left with unanswered questions and an alarming indication that the FBI was woefully negligent in keeping tabs on Oswald during his time in Dallas. Or were they?
UNANSWERED QUESTIONS
Among the FBI files still kept from the public, are we to believe that no documents exist pertaining to the Hosty-Oswald relationship in the weeks prior to Dallas? Can we truly believe that the FBI was tracking Marina Oswald but had no idea where her husband was? After all, who was the perceived threat? Was it Marina or was it Lee?
Even more troublesome, when it became known that President Kennedy would visit Dallas in late November of 1963, can we honestly believe that Hosty or the FBI were not on heightened alert about the likes of a Communist sympathizer such as Oswald? Keep in mind that this was at the height of the Cold War.
When trying to reconcile why the FBI kept vital information from the Warren Commission about the pre-assassination time frame, or why, as the Commission’s chief investigative arm, it was hugely responsible for the finding that Oswald was the lone assassin, could it be as simple as this one potentially devastating question?
Can we reasonably expect that the FBI had no idea where
Lee Harvey Oswald lived or worked while living in Dallas?
Herein lies the possibility of one true ‘bombshell’ that may await us:
If Hosty questioned Marina Oswald, can we believe for a second that the FBI could not discover where Lee Oswald worked?
Knowing that J. Edgar Hoover hated nothing more than his beloved FBI being embarrassed or shown to be incompetent, how would it look if the Bureau’s own documents reveal that it allowed President Kennedy to parade right under the nose of where the assassin was employed?
Even if Oswald was not the assassin at the window named after him, as my book Through The ‘Oswald’ Window contends, the known Communist defector ‘worked’ in the very building from which at least two shots were fired at JFK.
The very idea that Lee Harvey Oswald was allowed to roam freely in the building where an assassin lay in wait for the President of the United States is a monumental blunder for Hoover’s FBI.
And it opens the door to more suspicions about the cover-up side of the JFK assassination, such as why much of Hosty’s file on Oswald remains classified top secret and kept from the public going on 54 years and counting.
Unfortunately for historical truth, the full FBI file on Oswald has yet to see the light of day, a tragedy for researchers who only seek to shed light on what happened to President Kennedy more than a half-century ago.
Until ALL FBI files are released uncensored and without redaction, we can only assume that the deceased Hoover’s obsessive protection of the Bureau still ‘trumps’ the public’s right to know what happened that awful day in Dallas.
