Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who assassinated former President John F Kennedy in 1963, was operating under direction from the former head of the CIA, according to a new book on the subject, reports the New York Post.
Dr. Cyril Wecht, a 90-year-old forensic pathologist who has studied the incident for almost six decades, writes in "The JFK Assassination Dissected" that former CIA Director Allen Dulles ordered Oswald to shoot Kennedy.
Oswald, a former marksman with the Marines, had recently returned from the USSR.
He "had almost certainly been a CIA agent of some kind," Wecht said in an interview with the Post.
Dulles, who served as CIA chief from 1953 to 1961, had been dismissed from office by Kennedy after the failure of the Bay of Pigs assault on Cuba, and according to the author, he was so resentful he groomed Oswald to shoot the president.
Later, Dulles was one of the members of the Warren Commission investigating the assassination.
"Kennedy had fired Allen Dulles because he was really pi***d off about what the CIA was doing," Wecht told the New York Post. "Then who gets appointed to the Warren Commission? Dulles. It stinks to high heaven."
Wecht told the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978 that he considered the sole-gunman theory not credible because of the differing trajectories of the bullets that struck Kennedy as he rode in his limousine through Dallas, The Independent reported.
He says a second gunman must have been positioned behind a picket fence on a nearby grassy knoll.
"Under the single-bullet theory, Oswald is the sole assassin, he’s firing from the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository building, so the bullet is moving from up, downward, right? So how the hell could it go upward?
Wecht was the first nongovernmental forensic pathologist to be given access to the U.S. National Archives’ materials on the JFK killing in 1972, and he alleges malpractice surrounding the autopsy on the president’s body, the Post reported.
When he went to the National Archives, the pathologist saw that Kennedy’s brain had been removed and remains "unaccounted for."
Wecht consulted on Oliver Stone’s conspiracy-minded 1991 movie "JFK" and dedicated a chapter in his new book to his experience on the movie set. Stone wrote the book’s foreword.
In 1992, Congress passed the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act, ordering the release of all JFK assassination files by 2017. The deadline has not been met, but President Joe Biden has scheduled release of the final documents for December 2022.
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