Strange Times at Tokyo Station

Rumors, Betrayal, and the Oswald Project

Naval Air Station Atsugi, Japan, 1957:

SERGEANT: “What the fuck did you do, Oswald?”

LEE HARVEY OSWALD: “I do believe I shot myself.”

The Application

James Wilcott was adrift in search of a career when he and his wife Elsie decided to apply for positions at the Central Intelligence Agency in 1957. They knew practically nothing about the CIA, the organization not having gained much notoriety since its creation ten years earlier. James had settled on pursuing an accounting degree after working in the U.S. Army for almost four years and following a series of false starts at pursuing education and developing his career, he took several odd jobs before applying for this finance position. His interviewer at the CIA gave him a blunt assessment, surmising that his lack of career direction may have stemmed from a troubled childhood: “I conclude that it is the case of a guy who failed to get the proper job and school guidance when it would have been most effective,” he wrote. “He’s had a tough life to say the least (how much bearing this has had on his career I'm not trained to evaluate). My final impression is that he’s neat, clean cut, sincere, reliable, capable if given the proper supervision.”

What happened next foreshadowed the oddity of what was to become their CIA experience over the next decade. To obtain their security clearance, the Wilcotts were required to take a polygraph test. During the course of her interrogation, Elsie was asked about her time growing up on a farm, specifically if she had ever engaged in intercourse with the animals. “We didn’t even know any such thing was possible,” she remarked. The two compared notes with a colleague to see if this line of questioning was unusual. This acquaintance revealed that since he disclosed having worked in a mortuary, his CIA interrogator questioned whether he had in the past had sex with a corpse. “I began to get the impression,” James guessed, “that there were a lot of weirdos in that organization.”

Building 724, Washington Heights, Tokyo, Japan

After working in the CIA’s Potomac, Maryland office in general accounting and payroll for three years, he became a permanent employee and took a promotion by moving to Japan and working at the Tokyo Station from 1960-1964 in cash disbursements, handing out upwards of $4 million a month in several currencies to pay for covert operations. Out of the necessity for the work of the Agency, the money literally had to be dirty. If someone made the mistake of bringing the finance team unblemished new bills from the bank, Wilcott and his coworkers would spread the cash on the ground and stomp on the money like grapes at a winery. It was in Tokyo that he began to learn that the money he had been recording in accounting ledgers was intended for dirty tricks. Some of the funds went to the Japanese equivalent of the Mafia; he was told other CIA money was intended for psychological warfare in the burgeoning Vietnam War, for tasks such as relocating patients from Vietnamese mental hospitals and dressing them up as pretend Viet Cong soldiers to harass villages in South Vietnam, with the goal of turning local populations against the U.S. enemy.

James Wilcott’s personal disillusionment with the CIA began when he became friends with Peter Dedijer, a nephew of Vladimir Dedijer, who was a well-known Yugoslavian writer and politician. Peter worked in a similar financial position as Wilcott in the Yugoslavian embassy in Tokyo and the two bonded over taking Japanese language lessons, going out for drinks after class. “He had a practical orientation toward life and told many fine stories about various places all over the world that he had experienced in his assignments,” Wilcott wrote. James followed protocol and informed the Agency that he was spending time with a foreign national. Instead of advising Wilcott to keep his distance, the Agency asked him to get closer and attempt to turn him into a CIA asset, spending money and expending Agency efforts over nine months. “The idea was to ‘get him on the hook’—get him used to the high life,” Wilcott explained. “That was, to get him in the habit of going to better bars and night clubs and plush hotels.” After enticing him with extravagant spending, the next step was to “get him involved with women.” Dedijer had unknowingly been providing Wilcott with the kind of personal information the Agency could use to their advantage: “Peter told me quite openly about his romantic interest in women not only in Japan but in other countries he had been to,” Wilcott recalled. “I never grew tired of listening to his stories about women and the methods of seduction he had developed.” Wilcott reported back to the case officer after each encounter, who would provide instructions for their next meeting. The case officer was particularly interested in Dedijer’s marital relationship; how would Peter react to another woman? Wilcott elaborated: “Would he have sex with her? Would he spend money on her?” Having discounted the possibility that Dedijer was a Russian agent, the CIA sought his main motivation for the recruitment effort to succeed. “Was it money, women, ego gratification, or perhaps a repressed resentment about not having a higher position in the embassy?” Wilcott’s case officer explored all possibilities: “He even suggested repressed homosexuality as an underlying basis of our relationship.”

Elsie happened to work as a secretary at the time for the lead Agency official of this operation, who was also the head of the Tokyo Station’s Soviet Russia Satellite Division. He called her into his office one day to inform Elsie that her husband may soon be placed in a compromising position with women, as part of the Dedijer initiative, for the benefit of U.S. national security. “He said that operational circumstances might occur,” her husband later wrote, “in which it would be advantageous for me to engage in sex with a woman in order to get Peter into a similar sexual situation with a woman.” This explanation failed to instill a feeling of patriotic pride in Elsie. She nonetheless confirmed that for the good of the country, this possible infidelity would not negatively affect her marriage. A photo could arise out of this situation, her boss further warned, if another intelligence service happened to be spying on this operation. Fortunately for their relationship, no such event occurred, but the money for socializing with Dedijer increased and Wilcott was told that women approaching them could be real or paid agents. “I should just go ahead and do what came naturally and enjoy myself,” was how he described the guidance. This one recruitment effort was spared no expense or attention to detail: A team of five research psychologists from CIA headquarters pored over Wilcott’s contact reports and focused their insights on an instance in which “Peter made a rather kinky comment about women,” which the experts found “somehow very meaningful.”

Wilcott was thereafter phased out of the operation and the task was passed to an agent who specialized in recruitment, whose plan was to offer an outright bribe to encourage Dedijer to spy on his country for the CIA. The agent was certain Dedijer would make a great recruit and someone who could be useful to spot other recruitment targets from the Soviet Union. James never saw his friend again and learned nothing of the outcome: he had “no need to know,” according to those in charge. At their last meeting, Wilcott tried to offer a vague warning, telling Dedijer that “while we talk about freedom of the individual in the U.S., the individual was not really that free. Even in our associations with people, we were not free especially in this day and age of black boxes.” Rather than being forewarned, Dedijer was merely confused. Wilcott later regretted the deception operation on someone who had ostensibly been a friend: “I vowed never to get involved in this sort of thing again.”

Drinking Days

Working extra hours on security duty at Tokyo Station allowed Wilcott the opportunity to increase his take-home pay, supplementing his modest GS-7 salary. “I pulled a lot of security duty,” he remembered, “three and four nights right in a row, and pulled as much as 24 hours on weekend.” One morning, when on this assignment, a number of CIA case officers approached Wilcott’s desk, offering him a gin and tonic and the opportunity to listen to a recent recording from a successful bugging of the Bulgarian ambassador’s bed in Tokyo. While they listened intently, a young woman was brought in to transcribe the tape into English. The recording revealed state secrets, but the officers were more interested in the intimate conversations between the ambassador and his wife. The translator could barely contain her embarrassment as the officers passed around drinks, rewinding the tape to repeat the sexual moments on a constant loop. As the woman turned red, Wilcott wondered aloud how this activity related to national security, which only enhanced the view among the officers present that Wilcott amounted to nothing more than a stereotypical accountant.

“CIA people drink like fish,” was how Wilcott described the officers at Tokyo Station, where alcohol was used for both personal and professional purposes. To help influence the multiple facets of Japanese society—including journalists, labor leaders, and intellectuals—drinks were on-hand, cheap, and plentiful: a bottle of scotch costing $12 could be picked up for 75 cents at Tokyo Station; a double martini cost 5 cents. “At those prices you almost couldn’t afford not to drink,” Wilcott admitted. For the staff at the time, not appearing inebriated was seen an accomplishment. “I remember there was a guy in China Branch, who I knew quite well,” Wilcott said, “who used to meet the Polish ships. In fact, he [described] this pill that CIA developed for him where he could take this pill and drink enormous quantities of booze and never get drunk; and that the Poles were very impressed…real impressed with the amount of booze that he could drink.”

At the time, the CIA was in the process of secretly testing drugs such as LSD back in the United States to see if they could be useful in interrogation or produce the ultimate truth serum. At Tokyo Station, the constant consumption of alcohol meant that the CIA officers were loosening their own tongues. While on security duty, Wilcott would put on coffee following their drinking sessions and engage in conversations with officers from different branches, who were often passing time waiting to be picked up by their wives and unintentionally spilling secrets. One such story involved the Soviets getting the better of the CIA to the tune of millions of dollars. The officer told him that Soviet agents would sell information to the CIA once it was no longer considered classified, pretending that they were offering up secret information to the Americans that the U.S.S.R. did not want disclosed. “I get my accolades for selling and buying the information,” the officer told Wilcott. “If it’s phony information, I couldn’t care less.”

The Assassination

While the United States was in shock and mourning the death of John F. Kennedy in November 1963, the reaction at Tokyo Station was markedly different—there was a sense of elation. To some at the CIA, it felt like retribution had been meted out for Kennedy’s lackluster support of the Agency’s Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. On November 22, 1963, Wilcott was alerted that he was possibly going to be needed to provide emergency disbursements or in the worst case, help defend the Station if it were to be attacked by agitators who succeeded to burst through the “meager base defenses,” which would then have required Wilcott and the rest of the team to “help to destroy files or even defend the buildings.” Heading over to the Building 724 with a colleague, Wilcott found “a scene of great excitement, confusion and wild talk.” Some of the CIA employees were “elated and there was talk of an invasion of Cuba. From the very first day, everyone talked in terms of an operation, particularly the operational people, or in popular terms—a conspiracy.”

Wilcott viewed the Agency’s perspective on the assassination as being “a logical culmination of the steadily building anguish and discontent over the Bay of Pigs fiasco and Commie sell out of the Kennedy Administration; that was the prevailing sentiment. This was particularly true of the higher echelon operational people. The branch chiefs and deputy chiefs, project intelligence officers and operational specialists viewed Kennedy as a threat to the clandestine services.” From his one-on-one conversations with officers while he was on security duty, Wilcott was able to pick up on the sentiments of officers, who could not help themselves and disclosed what they knew or speculated on Agency involvement in the assassination. “It was common knowledge in the Tokyo CIA station that Oswald worked for the Agency,” Wilcott revealed. He heard constant references to “the Oswald project,” that JFK’s assassin had been trained for his stay in Russia at Atsugi Naval Air Station, a location that housed part of the CIA’s secret operations in Tokyo. On more than one occasion, he recalled, “I was told something like ‘so-and-so was working on the Oswald project back in the late ’50s.’”

Wilcott learned about his own possible personal involvement in this operation when a CIA case officer approached his pay window to obtain cash a short time after Oswald had been shot and killed by Jack Ruby. They engaged in conversation and Wilcott expressed skepticism that the Agency could have been involved with Oswald. “Well, Jim,” came the reply, “[an officer] drew an advance sometime in the past from you…for that project under [a cryptonym].” While he recognized the cryptonym mentioned at the time, Wilcott quickly forgot about it; this was simply more shoptalk to him. He casually flipped through his 30-day accounting ledger, looking for the cryptonym, and took no further interest in the matter at the time. “Critics said that it was a stupid project from the start. They should have known that the Soviets would never buy the story. He was a poor subject for such a deep cover operation. There were too many compromising facets to his background which would make it a difficult story to sell,” or so the line of thought was described to Wilcott.

Then talk turned at the Station to alleging CIA involvement in the assassination. These people are crazy, Wilcott thought. The CIA would never kill the President. What is this nonsense? This was not an idea he was willing to entertain, having now worked at the Agency for six years. “It was a shock for me even to hear somebody saying such things as that,” he recalled. He later spoke to one his superiors and this conversation started to change his mind. “It was after I had talked to Fred Randall [Deputy Chief of Station] that I really began to believe well, you know, maybe these people aren’t just crazies off their rocker, that there was really something involved with CIA killing Kennedy.” Still, he had nothing substantively amounting to any kind of proof. “This is all hearsay,” Wilcott admitted. “Even though it’s hearsay evidence, I believe it is true.”

JMWAVE

After a further promotion and time spent at CIA headquarters at Langley, Wilcott’s career at the Agency came to end working at Miami Station from 1965 to 1966. There he learned of more Agency bribes, payments for saboteurs, plots to kill Castro, and the CIA working with the Mafia. It was later revealed that Robert Kennedy, JFK’s Attorney General and famed crusader against the mob, when told about this association with the Mafia, told the Agency to come to him first the next time they were to attempt this endeavor. The officers in Miami were far more cautious about discussing the JFK assassination. When Wilcott would bring up what he had heard in Tokyo, he would be chastised: “What are you talking about that kind of stuff for? Are you crazy? You don’t want to talk about that kind of stuff.”

Known internally by the codename JMWAVE, Miami Station was presented to the outside world as Zenith Technical Enterprises. When this fake company was exposed as a CIA front in 1964, the Agency renamed it Melmar Corporation. “It was supposed to be a special firm making government contracts,” Wilcott explained. Although Operation Mongoose, the CIA campaign to overthrow the Cuban government during the Kennedy administration, had officially ended with the death of President Kennedy, work continued at the Agency to undermine Castro. The main operational secret of this initiative that Wilcott was able to learn about involved the burning of cane fields in Cuba, attacking the foundation of their agricultural output. “I had several friends in Maritime Division that was operating in the Maritime Paramilitary group,” he revealed. “They had an office with a great big huge plan board—like one of these war plan boards that you see in old war films. And they had every boat that covered Miami and the area all the way out to Cuba—had all these boats and little magnetic boats that latched on to this board. Well, I was never supposed to have been in there, of course, and see the board, but I had some friends there and they went to a trip out to Cuba, stayed with these people that I knew in Maritime. And what they were doing at that time was burning the cane field. They had a frogman project…they would have these boats go out to just off the coast of Cuba. And that these frogmen would jump off the boats, swim to the shore and burn the cane fields, and then they’d come and pick them back up.” Wilcott realized the extent of their activities against the Cuban government at the time did not end there. “They were doing a lot of other things, too,” which included at least eight assassination attempts on Castro from 1960-1965. In addition, three years before Wilcott began working at JMWAVE, the U.S. military drew up plans for creating a “justification for U.S. military intervention in Cuba” known as Operation Northwoods, which included as a sub-element:

We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington. The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States. We could sink a boatload of Cubans enroute to Florida (real or simulated). We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized. Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots, the arrest of Cuban agents and the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban involvement also would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible government.

Wilcott left the CIA in April 1966. “My wife and I came to believe that what CIA was doing couldn’t be reconciled to basic principles of democracy or basic principles of humanism,” he later said. Humanism was not part of the calculus of international affairs, as he learned in the CIA’s operational support school of spy techniques in preparation for his Tokyo assignment:

“We were told about a case of an agent that was in Europe. That this agent, through no fault of his own…had stumbled across an intelligence net that the CIA was running…he writes back to headquarters asking for permission to push a guy out a plane at 10,000 feet without a parachute. This is what we were told, verbatim: ‘You don’t write back to headquarters asking for permission to push somebody out of a plane at 10,000 feet without a parachute. You do it and you make damn sure that you have good reason to do it and CIA will back you up.’

Coming Forward

Wilcott remained quiet for years about the JFK assassination, assuming that eventually the tales that he had heard would make their way into the public’s consciousness. The Warren Comimssion, which concluded in 1964 that Oswald had been JFK’s lone assassin, was to Wilcott’s mind “a whitewash of the first order. I didn’t believe a thing they said and I really felt that—not that these people were gonna do anything—but their lack of security in the government for somebody who was going to talk about these kinds of things would really put me in jeopardy…I believe that these interests killed Kennedy; I believe they killed Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, all that….So while I considered it a social duty to talk about the kinds of things, I wasn’t all that anxious to talk about it unless it was under conditions that I had some kind of control over.”

Deciding to come forward in the late 1970s, Wilcott was interviewed by the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in 1978 and testified before the Committee in secret, known as “executive session.” He answered many questions from HSCA members, but was unable to provide the details they were looking for, such as the cryptonym he was told of the Oswald project and the exact names of the officers who had described to him the Agency’s involvement in the affair. In lieu of this, he provided a list of 36 names of those he had worked with at Tokyo Station from 1960-1964 and a written account of his memories, in which he summarized: “Based solely on what I heard at Tokyo Station, I became convinced that the following scenario is true: CIA people killed Kennedy.” Wilcott had hoped the Committee would investigate his claims based on this hearsay evidence. From the work they did carry out, the HSCA found his allegations not credible, stating: “the committee concluded that Wilcott’s allegation was not worthy of belief.” From speaking with “individuals whose responsibilities covered a broad spectrum of areas in the post abroad, including the chief and deputy chief of station, as well as officers in finance, registry, the Soviet Branch and counterintelligence,” they were unable corroborate his account and they made much of the fact that he gave one name of an employee who “was not in the post abroad at the time of the assassination.” Regarding the other officers named on Wilcott’s list, it is unclear which of them were interviewed, as only requests to conduct interviews of selected personnel from his list appear in the archival documents. In his interviews and testimony, Wilcott often brought up the name of his closest friend at Tokyo Station, George Breen, as someone who could confirm his account. Breen, for his part, had no interest in speaking out, as Wilcott explained he “was not sympathetic to what I was trying to do—talk about CIA—and it was a very strange situation.” Based on other evidence, the HSCA concluded that “President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy”; however, they were “unable to identify the other gunman or the extent of the conspiracy.” Wilcott’s wife Elsie was surprised at the investigation’s outcome given that the tenor of her experience at the CIA matched her husband’s retelling, informing the press: “Right after the President was killed, people in the Tokyo Station were talking openly about Oswald having gone to Russia for the CIA. Everyone was wondering how the Agency was going to be able to keep the lid on Oswald. But I guess they did.”

Wilcott described to the HSCA about exactly how an operational file could disappear, based on his observance of how misdeeds or mistakes were handled. “As far as files go,” he told investigators, “there was nothing in the way of any black operations, or even gray operations that went into files….There was nothing, absolutely nothing, on paper on any kind of the heavy black projects that CIA was engaged in that anybody could pin down anything unless they just goofed…the blunders and the inefficiency is, I think, is more remarkable than what all of these real weirdo kinds of things you hear about, James Bond kinds of things you hear about. It just wasn’t that way at all. It was just every project that—of any importance—that I ever heard about eventually had some kind of major flack.” He further described in his testimony how files could be altered: “Let us say, for instance, that there was a certain project going on, and the project was one that became known that this project was being carried out—and we call it ‘flaps’—and the case officer in charge might get word that somebody from headquarters was coming to review the files to investigate the flap. Well, they would go through the files and take out anything that they thought was, say, indicative of how this flap occurred and change the files. For instance, in accounting, when we had our audits, for instance, in most of the audits, he would call up somebody—let’s say in China Branch—and say, ‘I know you were having problems with this, would you like to look it over before the auditors come?’ and they might look it over and retype the accounting for funds for their project and, you know, make changes that they might think were in their interest to do so.” On occasion, he would put in extra time to ensure that files completely disappeared: “At that time enormous amounts of material were destroyed—shredded. In fact, I worked on—a couple of times for overtime for, I think it was Logistics—and helping them shred stuff. And huge volumes of material were shredded….project files, operational stuff.”

Oswald at Atsugi

In the late 1950s, after joining the Marine Corps, Lee Harvey Oswald was stationed at the Naval Air Facility Atsugi in Japan, assigned to Marine Air Control Squadron 1. Sergeant Bob Beech, who slept in close quarters near Oswald, initially found nothing noteworthy about him: “He was just odd. He had no social friends—no buddies to speak of that he hung out with. He was a loner.” Their first real interaction came after Beech heard the firing of a .22 caliber pistol in Oswald’s vicinity: “I went across to him and asked, ‘What the fuck did you do, Oswald?’ His response is something I will never forget as long as I live. He said, ‘I do believe I shot myself.’ Who the hell talks like that?” Beech suspected this had been a ploy by Oswald to get out of the Marine Corps, using an unauthorized firearm he had likely purchased in Japan. His military health records from October 1957 described the incident: “This 18 year male accidentally shot himself in the arm with a sidearm, reportedly of 22 caliber. Examination revealed the wound of entrance in the medial portion of the left upper arm, just above the elbow. There was no evidence of neurologic circulatory, or bony injury...The wound healed well, and the patient was discharged to duty.” After suffering this self-inflicted wound, Oswald “was under lock and key,” according to Beech, removed from the barracks and only allowed in the dining hall under military police supervision.

Oswald’s face was all over television following John F. Kennedy’s assassination and Beech recognized him immediately: “He was kind of an odd-looking guy.” Beech was incredulous regarding Oswald’s abilities in carrying out this act alone: “Ninety-nine percent of the Marines couldn’t do that…You have to go to a special school to be a Marine sniper. Like anything else, there was advanced training and Oswald had none of that.” Beech later spoke to the FBI about going public with his memories and he repeated his skepticism regarding Oswald being an excellent shooter capable of carrying out the assassination alone. “I told them that you had to know the guy. It takes a certain amount of intestinal fortitude to be calm enough to plan this [assassination]. And then with a bolt-action rifle? Give me a break. I said I don’t know who did but I didn’t think he did it.”

Wilcott had speculated to the HSCA how a recruitment effort of Oswald may have unfolded based on what he had heard in the years immediately following Oswald’s departure from the Marine Corps in 1959:

“They came across Oswald—maybe purely by accident. They found that maybe he’d done—committed some kind of horrible crime—killed somebody or something like that. They think: ‘Ah, great, we’ve got a handle; here we’ve got a handle on somebody.’ So, it goes through the channels—let’s say military intelligence informs CIA, or maybe even just in casual conversation with a CIA person that somebody in military intelligence knows, they say: ‘Hey, you know, we ran across this guy that killed somebody. The military’s thinking about prosecuting, you know, sending it to, you know, for prosecution.’ So CIA says: ‘Oh, great, let’s—this—here’s the perfect person we need,’ you know, ‘because we’ve got a handle on him.’ And that was the expression that they used. I think this may very well be how Oswald got recruited by CIA. It may be that they just needed somebody and this was the opinion of the people at Tokyo Station—that they had some kind of handle on him; that they wouldn’t have tried to get Oswald to go to the Soviet Union under that kind of a project unless they had a real firm handle on him.”

After leaving the CIA, Wilcott was “subjected to constant harassment, intimidation, interference at my jobs, and all kinds of weird things.” Wilcott had joined the Executive Committee of a Vietnam War protest group called the Vietnam Council, which was infiltrated by the FBI. “The FBI agent, Gordon Finch, in Utica, New York—and this has been confirmed, absolutely confirmed—that Gordon Finch was an FBI agent. He worked with our group,” Wilcott recalled. His new job was placed into jeopardy: “I was the finance analyst for the Community Renewal Program…Frank [O’Connor, director of the program] brought in a paper from the mayor. The paper was a resignation form. He says: ‘Your phone is tapped; your apartment is under surveillance. We expect a federal indictment to come down on you at any time.’ He says: ‘The mayor is not gonna fire you. What he wants you to do is sign this resignation form and when the indictment comes out, that we will predate it a day ahead.’ So I signed the form…I never received any kind of federal indictment…The Vietnam Council was no kind of revolutionary kind of thing whatsoever; it was a straight reform thing to inform people about the Vietnam War.” The harassment continued unabated: “My car was sabotaged…Sugar or something was poured in the gas tank. The garage person that fixed it said they never saw anything like it—that there was just cakes of black stuff all around the valves and so on in the car. My tires were slashed—that’s on the police records in Utica. I used to received threatening phone calls—people would call up and they would say: ‘We know all about you’' and shoot a toy machine gun into the phone and hang up.”

After going public with his allegations regarding the JFK assassination, Wilcott decided to begin writing of his experiences in the CIA and to join the staff of the magazine CovertAction Information Bulletin. Wilcott first consulted with a lawyer who responded, “Well, to tell you the truth, Jim, I’m scared for my own safety.” Wilcott could not believe that a lawyer employed to defend civil liberties would be too afraid to do so: Well, my God, what am I to do? he thought. “My civil rights are being violated and you’re afraid to defend me?” Wilcott said, chastising the lawyer. “Well,” the lawyer replied, “I’ll do it, but I’d just as soon not because I’m afraid for my career and I’m afraid for my safety.” What? A lawyer! How am I going to protect myself? thought Wilcott, who proceeded with his plans regardless. Bob Beech was similarly cautious and fearful following his two-hour discussion with the FBI; his state of mind had been altered and for the month that followed he “was always looking in my rearview mirror. I was scared.” Something they had told him disturbed him greatly. When Beech asked for advice on going public with his own recollections and doubts regarding Oswald, the FBI agent responded: “Everybody who has gone public, up until now, has been murdered or is dead.”