PHILIP CORSO AND THE JFK ASSASSINATION

Philip J. Corso is a controversial figure, particularly in the realm of UFOlogy. In 1997, the year before he died, the retired colonel published a ghostwritten bestselling memoir titled The Day After Roswell. There Corso claimed he’d distributed captured extraterrestrial technology recovered in the 1947 Roswell crash to private industry for what’s called “reverse engineering.” The book was dismissed as a hoax by many in the mainstream, but lately Corso’s allegations have received backup from UAP historians like Geoffrey Cruickshank, citing high-level briefing documents provided President Truman about the Roswell incident.

Two years before Corso’s book came out, I phone-interviewed him twice about a different subject. I’d heard about him from Anthony Summers, an author colleague then working on a documentary about Lee Harvey Oswald for PBS’ Frontline who had spoken with Corso at some length. Summers’ research ended up on the cutting-room floor, but I recounted what the man went on to tell me in my 2008 book On the Trail of the JFK Assassins.

Before going further, let me expand on Corso’s credentials He’d been an Army Intelligence officer who served for four years in the 1950s on the staff of President Eisenhower’s National Security Council. Later he’d been an investigator for Senator Strom Thurmond. And after the assassination of President Kennedy, he’d been asked by Senator Richard Russell - a member of the Warren Commission - to look into some unresolved questions about Lee Harvey Oswald. I’d chronicled Senator Russell’s doubts about the lone gunman scenario in my first book about the assassination (The Man Who Knew Too Much), and I was aware Corso had been named as the source of a rumor that Oswald had been a paid informant for the FBI.

Before the assassination, Corso told me, he’d been told by his friend William Sullivan, assistant director under J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI, '“that a phony defector named Oswald had gone to Russia, as part of an operation being run by our Office of Naval Intelligence. And that now his birth certificate was possibly in the hands of the Soviets, or someone impersonating him in the United States.”

Indeed, Oswald’s mother Marguerite had raised such a possibility in an interview with the FBI, after which Hoover wrote in a memo of June 3, 1960 to the State Department’s Office of Security that “since Oswald had his birth certificate in his possession, another individual may have assumed his identity.” That FBI File No. 105-82555 was never seen by the Warren Commission, discovered in 1975 by a researcher in the National Archives.

When Corso commenced his probe for Senator Russell in 1964, he told me that he’d had “many discussions” about this with Robert Johnson, Deputy Director of the U.S. Passport Division. Corso said: “So because of certain discrepancies that our Military Intelligence was picking up, the story was that there’d been an Oswald circulating in the Texas area, carrying a false passport and birth certificate, but he was really a Soviet look-alike. In our opinion, the look-alike was over here trying to penetrate the Alpha 66 and other of the anti-Castro operations. Then the real Lee Harvey Oswald himself showed up on the scene - so there were two of them. It was a big mystery as to why the Russians let him and his wife come back, because they should have known the pros back here would get suspicious. These things were just not done by them, unless there was a motive.”

Whatever that motive may have been, according to Corso’s investigation it had nothing to do with the assassination. “I don’t think the Soviets killed President Kennedy,” he said. “They were alarmed, though, because they had a look-alike operating in the area, and they knew we knew it. So they were afraid it might be pinned on him. But I would look into the renegade CIA people, along with the anti-Castro Cubans. This thing took a lot of planning.”

I asked Corso what Senator Russell’s reaction had been to this revelation. “He told me, ‘Phil, I believe everything you’ve said, but we can’t publish this. They [the other Warren Commission members] will never believe it and they’ll never put it in print.’ But he said, ‘At least I know,’ and as a result he initially refused to sign The Warren Report, until Lyndon Johnson did some arm-twisting.”

My hope is that, by putting this forward publicly again, the House Committee currently reviewing and releasing previously secret material on the assassination might be able to come up with verification. However, Corso also told me, “my whole operation with Senator Russell was all verbal. There was no paper trail.”

But consider these facts: there are almost 50 separate cases of U.S. government files - from the CIA, FBI, Secret Service, Military Intelligence, Dallas Police, and Warren Commission testimony - where “Lee’ and “Harvey” are transposed. In a number of these instances, an original file identifying a “Harvey Lee Oswald” was altered after the assassination to read “Lee Harvey Oswald.”

The use of doubles holding fake passports and birth certificates was longstanding practice in the CIA vs. KGB Cold War spy game. Could our intelligence agencies have used variations on Oswald’s first and middle names to try and keep track of which was which? The heights are often recorded differently - some as 5-foot-9 and others saying 5-foot-11. And there is a bizarre Warren Commission memo written by its investigator W. David Slawson and declassified in 1975, that states: “The CIA is interested in the scar on Oswald’s left wrist…The FBI is reluctant to exhume Oswald’s body as requested by the CIA.”

The capper is found in James W. Douglass’ remarkable book JFK and the Unspeakable. The author interviewed two men - Butch Burroughs and Bernard Haire - who were inside or around the Texas Theater on November 22, 1963. They witnessed Oswald being arrested on the main floor of the theater and being taken out the front door. Subsequently, they saw a man who looked just like Oswald being taken from his hiding place in the balcony and escorted out the rear of the theater. There is even a Dallas Police report citing the balcony as where Oswald’s arrest was made.

As William Shakespeare once had Hamlet saying; “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”