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The trial of Lee Harvey Oswald is an attempt to fill that historical void. The witnesses are real so are the lawyers and the jurors.
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00:00This series presents information based in part on theory and conjecture.
00:17The producer's purpose is to suggest some possible explanations, but not necessarily the only ones, to the mysteries we will examine.
00:25November 22nd, 1963. A lone figure walks to a window in the Texas School Book Depository. In a matter of seconds, a president of the United States will be mortally wounded, and the name Lee Harvey Oswald will be etched in history.
00:46But did Oswald really kill President Kennedy? New evidence points to the possibility that he did not.
00:58During the Cold War era of the early 1960s, President John F. Kennedy is to become the most admired leader of the free world.
01:16There are many people in the world who really don't understand, or say they don't, what is the great issue between the free world and the communist world.
01:28Let them come to Berlin!
01:40His attraction is magnetic. Selden has one man unified the people of so many democratic nations.
01:48In October 1962, President Kennedy learns of the buildup of Soviet missiles in Cuba, and orders a blockade of Cuban harbors. It results in one of the most humiliating political defeats in Russian history.
02:11Little more than a year later, the leader of the Western world is assassinated. There are some who blame the Soviets, but nothing can be proved.
02:32Within hours, Lee Harvey Oswald, ex-Marine, former Russian defector, and as we have come to believe, a distraught and frustrated young man, is in custody.
02:49Before Oswald can tell his full story, he is murdered in front of millions of television viewers.
03:02Almost a year later, the Warren Commission delivers its verdict on the Kennedy assassination. Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. He was not a part of a conspiracy.
03:27The Warren Commission concluded there were three shots fired during the assassination, all of them coming from behind the president, out of a Texas school book depository window.
03:38But many witnesses to the assassination claimed that at least one shot came from the grassy knoll situated to the right and front of the president's car.
03:48In spite of these contradictory accounts, the conclusions reached by the Warren Commission would officially stand, until startling new evidence came to light.
03:57It was a recording that had been overlooked for 15 years. The tape should never have existed at all.
04:04At the time of the assassination, the microphone on a police motorcycle was jammed in the on position, transmitting sound to police headquarters, where it was routinely recorded.
04:22When the shots were fired in Dallas, the microphone picked up those sounds.
04:29But the tape, and you're listening to the actual sound now, was seemingly indecipherable.
04:36If the sounds of gunshots were there, they were impossible to detect by the human ear.
04:42In 1978, Dr. James Barger, of the acoustic firm Bolt, Beranek and Newman, attempted to find those gunshots.
05:01We began our analysis by recording the tape into the computer. We digitized the data and made a file. Then we had the computer filter this file in order to remove the sound of the motorcycle as much as we could.
05:21The motorcycle noise is repetitive. The piston fires repetitively. The filter was taught to recognize that sound and to eliminate it.
05:33We then had the computer make a long paper picture of these filtered sounds.
05:40The picture was about 500 feet long. And it represented a pictorial view of the filtered sounds for the whole five and a half minutes that the motorcycle microphone was stuck open.
05:53We examined that entire 500 feet of acoustical waveform to see if there were any waveforms that looked like they might represent gunfire.
06:04In fact, we did find in six places where sound bursts indicated the possibility of gunfire on the Dallas police tape.
06:17At this time, we realized we needed a more careful and more stringent analysis technique, one that would definitely determine whether these impulsive sounds were gunfire or whether they were extraneous noise.
06:33The more stringent technique Dr. Barger needed resulted in one of the most unique scientific experiments of this century.
06:48Dr. Barger and his team returned to Dallas to perform a sound recreation of the Kennedy assassination.
06:54Shots were recorded at various places at the assassination site for later comparison with the motorcycle tape.
07:06At the end of our analysis, we were able to conclude that there had been at least four shots fired during the assassination.
07:14Three of these had been fired from the Texas School Book Depository and one from the Grassy Knoll.
07:25The Texas School Book Depository is located next to the Grassy Knoll along the parkway the President's Motorcade had traveled.
07:39Bob Grodin, a photo-optic specialist, attempted to synchronize an enhanced version of the motorcycle tape with the famous Zapruder film, an 8mm home movie shot by a motorcade observer.
07:52This synchronization, shown now for the first time on nationwide television, reveals with shocking clarity that at least two gunmen had to have been involved.
08:03One firing from behind the President, the other from the right front.
08:08At least four shots were fired, but it's the third, the one from the front, the Grassy Knoll, that kills the President.
08:29The motorcycle tape and Dr. Barger's testimony eventually led to United States government acknowledgement that the assassination of John F. Kennedy was the probable result of a conspiracy.
08:56Well, my buster.
08:58Where did that conspiracy originate?
09:00Less than two months after the assassination, Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko, a high-level Russian KGB agent, defected to the United States.
09:14As recreated here for In Search Of, Nosenko told American CIA officers that as part of his duties, he had personally supervised the KGB file on Lee Harvey Oswald while Oswald lived in Russia.
09:30Nosenko assured the Americans that Oswald had no relations with Soviet intelligence and acted without Soviet knowledge in the assassination of President Kennedy.
09:46Many of the CIA officers found serious discrepancies in Nosenko's story and suspected that Nosenko was sent here by the KGB to mislead the Americans about Oswald's Soviet connections.
10:01To prove his honesty, Nosenko agreed to submit to a lie detector examination.
10:21The key questions, did Nosenko supervise the KGB file on Lee Harvey Oswald?
10:27Yes.
10:29And was Lee Harvey Oswald involved in any way with the intelligence activities of the KGB?
10:36No, no, no. How many times?
10:39According to the results of the polygraph test, Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko was a liar.
10:54Some sources close to the CIA claim that Nosenko was then put under hostile interrogation.
11:00Treated more like a captured spy than a defector, Nosenko was put through grueling, unrelenting, and abusive interrogation.
11:19As flawed as Nosenko's story was, he refused to break, clinging instead to absurd and indefensible explanations.
11:30Though Nosenko did not break, the CIA officers were certain that when the Warren Commission questioned Nosenko, it too would find his story unbelievable.
11:40Contact with you prior to your arrival.
11:43But the Warren Commission never questioned Nosenko.
11:47One man who thinks he knows why is Edward Epstein, noted authority on the Warren Commission.
11:54Epstein believes that the Commission was misinformed by the FBI.
11:59The last thing J. Edgar Hoover wanted was to open up the investigation into Lee Harvey Oswald's connections with the Soviet Union.
12:07And if the Warren Commission began to question Nosenko, it would lead exactly in that direction.
12:13Remember, the FBI is in charge of internal security in the United States.
12:17Here was Lee Harvey Oswald who came over from Russia, a defector, who had given out secrets of state to the Russians.
12:25Well, the FBI should have been keeping a closer eye on him.
12:27If suddenly it turned out through the questioning of Nosenko that Oswald was a Soviet agent, then the FBI would be held responsible for why weren't they keeping Oswald under surveillance.
12:41And that's the reason that J. Edgar Hoover did not want to open up the questioning into Nosenko and did not want to get into the area of Oswald's connections with the Soviet Union.
12:50If Nosenko was part of a Russian plot, did it include the assassination of President Kennedy?
13:01Lee Harvey Oswald was born in New Orleans in October 1939. His father had died two months before.
13:16His childhood was marked by instability, moving with his mother from house to house, city to city.
13:26By the time he was ten, he had attended six different public schools.
13:31While he was regarded as friendly and likable, his teachers detected something hidden within him, a certain tenseness.
13:39When he was seventeen, Oswald fulfilled a long-time ambition and joined the Marine Corps, where he served honorably for three years.
13:52Following his discharge in 1959, Oswald abruptly renounced his American citizenship and defected to the Soviet Union.
14:00It is the next few years that we know the least about Oswald.
14:08In 1961, Oswald returned to the United States, reclaiming his American citizenship.
14:15With him, he brought a Russian wife, Marina, and a diary describing his life while in Russia.
14:20The diary tells the story of a bitter young man becoming increasingly disillusioned with the communist system.
14:28However, the diary also contains some puzzling discrepancies.
14:32Could it be a fake? Another attempt by the Russians to mislead us?
14:35To find out, we went to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., to interview internationally known handwriting analyst, Tia Stein Lewinson.
14:51Mrs. Lewinson had spent more than four months working on the Oswald diary, putting it through microscopic scrutiny, before she arrived at her evaluation.
15:00This is not a spontaneous writing. It is written very slowly and deliberately.
15:10One could assume that possibly Oswald copied excerpts from his original diary, which were given to him by some representative of Soviet intelligence.
15:25And that he then wrote very slowly in order to comply with the demands.
15:36However, here and there, Freund can see that he gets irritated, and especially at the end of the pages, he frequently gets quite fatigued.
15:48Mrs. Lewinson believes that fatigue in Oswald's writing, as shown here by lines that gradually run downhill, indicates that the complete diary was written in two or three sessions, rather than day by day.
16:03I think that Oswald was supervised by Soviet intelligence in order to mislead the Americans at his return to the United States.
16:20Edward Epstein.
16:22When I went through Lee Harvey Oswald's diary, I found two anachronisms, two things that were out of date.
16:29One was on October 31st, where he talked about the American consul, McVicca, who wasn't yet the consul for another year.
16:38The second thing was, he talked about rubles in terms of old rubles that were ten for a dollar, rather than new rubles that were one for a dollar.
16:50This was not a genuine diary. It was a fake. It was written after the fact to give Lee Harvey Oswald a legend, so he could explain to the FBI and other people in America what he was doing in Russia for two years.
17:03What he was supposed to be doing in Russia, not what he was doing.
17:08If Oswald's diary is, in fact, a fake, and if Nosenko only defected to mislead the Americans, it leads one to ask, what were the Russians trying to hide?
17:20What happened to Oswald during his stay in the Soviet Union that the Russians don't want us to know about?
17:30Could there have been a plot so bizarre no one would have dared thought it possible?
17:35On November 24th, 1963, medical examiners began an autopsy on the individual they assumed to be Lee Harvey Oswald.
17:48It is recreated here for In Search Of.
17:51Their findings were to create a public controversy that would surface 15 years later, when British lawyer, author, and investigator Michael Eddowes made public the results of his investigation of Lee Harvey Oswald.
18:06This is the most terrifying story you will ever hear, and the Russians don't want you to hear about it.
18:15The man who killed President Kennedy was not Lee Harvey Oswald.
18:19He was a Soviet lookalike whose first name was Alec, and who came to the United States as a member of the KGB assassination squad for the direct purpose of killing President Kennedy.
18:32Eddowes says that the Dallas autopsy was performed on an imposter, and points to a number of inconsistencies to prove his point.
18:45The man who went to Russia was 5 feet 11 in height. There's no question about this. There are 11 recordings of this height.
18:53The length of the corpse of the assassin was 5 feet 9.
18:57External examination reveals a 5 foot 9 inch white male.
19:02The autopsy report records only two scars on the upper left arm of the assassin.
19:08Over the left arm there's a quarter inch transverse scar and a one and a quarter inch scar.
19:16Got it.
19:17Whereas the real Oswald had 3 scars on the upper left arm.
19:22The autopsy report records a large scar on the inner aspect of the left wrist.
19:29The real Oswald had no such scar.
19:32At the age of 6, the real Oswald had a mastoidectomy operation, which left a 1 inch long scar behind his left ear over the mastoid bone.
19:42The part of the mastoid bone was itself removed, and at the operation a rubber dam drain was inserted.
19:48So there was not only a scar, there was a depression in the flesh and a hole in the head of about one dime in size.
19:57An examination of Oswald's Marine Corps records confirms the existence of the mastoidectomy scar behind Oswald's left ear.
20:06Now the autopsy doctors, experienced pathologists, cut up over both mastoid areas to remove the scalp so they could take off the top of the head to examine the brain.
20:16In doing this, they could not have failed to have seen the one inch scar and the hole in the head.
20:21The autopsy report does not record the scar, does not record the depression, and although the skull was x-rayed, does not disclose the hole in the skull.
20:31Eddowes requested that Tarrant County officials exhume the body buried under the name of Lee Harvey Oswald.
20:39His request was rejected, and Eddowes has since taken legal action in state court.
20:45Could there have been two Oswalds?
20:48Eddowes claims the picture on the right is the second Oswald, the Russian impersonator.
20:54Imposter or not, the bigger mystery remains.
21:01Who fired the shot from the grassy knoll?
21:04At a small cemetery outside of Fort Worth, a single gravestone lies alone, remote from all others.
21:23We have always assumed this to be the grave of Lee Harvey Oswald.
21:35Is it possible that we are wrong?
21:38Coming up next, 20th Century with Mike Wallace reports on great rescues,
21:51including the dramatic daylight rescue of a U.S. Air Force pilot shot down in Bosnia.
21:56Then, Weapons at War takes you on missions into the jungles of Vietnam with the young soldiers they called the Grunts.
22:03And log on at Veterans.com, a new website brought to you by the History Channel.
22:08Veterans.com, a place where veterans, their families, and others can connect, share stories, and pass on the legacies of all American veterans.
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