Things That Came Out About Lee Harvey Oswald After He Died
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Start talking about the assassination of John F. Kennedy in any way, shape, or form with pretty much anyone, and it's almost guaranteed that there are going to be disagreements. Even though the government's official investigation declared that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone to kill the wildly popular president, it's been far from an open-and-shut case. The results of the Warren Commission have been debated and challenged, and even some of the doctors who treated Kennedy say that they believe Oswald wasn't the lone gunman.
Kennedy was killed on November 22, 1963, and Oswald was in police custody when he was killed on November 24. The end result is layers upon layers of conspiracy theories, and it's not an exaggeration to say that there's enough here to fill a library's worth of books.
Just like there's a lot of information about the assassination of JFK that's unconfirmed hearsay, it's the same with Oswald. After he was killed, there were a lot of people who had a lot of things to say about him, but figuring out what's actually true is surprisingly difficult. Add in the passage of time, layers of government secrecy, the fallibility of memory, and it's kind of a mess. With that noted, let's sort through what has been said and see what we can figure out.
Oswald was described as cold-blooded and calm
No one is sure just why Lee Harvey Oswald wanted to kill President John F. Kennedy. In an attempt to try to get closer to the truth of the matter, many experts have tried to put together a profile on Oswald, and it ends up being a pretty complicated picture of a person who grew up as an outsider, regularly tried and failed to fit into society, and ultimately gravitated toward extreme ideologies.
Interviews with those who knew him painted the picture of someone who was cold-blooded, calculating, and could be utterly and completely calm. Ed Butler was the executive director of the Information Council of the Americas and an anti-Castro activist who debated Oswald on a New Orleans radio show in August of 1963. Butler later recalled Oswald had worn a wool suit to the debate (via History News Network): "He was parboiling, but he didn't have a bead of sweat on him, and he was very self-contained. I was shocked when I heard he had killed Kennedy. I would not have been shocked if he had tried to kill me. I was concerned about the guy from the minute I met him."
Oswald's wife, Marina Oswald, testified, "Lee had no moral sense at all ... only egotism, anger at others on account of his failures." That — coupled with narcissistic, paranoid tendencies — has led to the belief that Kennedy's assassination wasn't solely political: Oswald wanted everyone to know who he was.
The KGB may have considered Oswald a poor shot and not a viable agent
Much conflicting information has been released about Lee Harvey Oswald, and one notable example starts with a 1990 memo released in 2022. According to that memo (which can be found at the National Archives), a former KGB officer revealed that not only was Oswald a KGB agent, but his wife, Marina, was also involved in the agency. Oswald, it says, was trained as an agent and reported to handlers within the KGB, which only broke contact with him after they went back to the U.S.
The memo also says that the KGB had nothing to do with John F. Kennedy's assassination, as they knew it would have been a pretty stupid thing to be involved in. However, buried in a 2025 document dump of assassination-related files is another memo from 1991 that seems to completely contradict most of the previous memo.
This one is regarding a Soviet KGB official named Nikonov, who also happened to be good friends with the KGB director. He was given access to five volumes of files on Oswald, and reported (via the National Archives) that he was "confident that Oswald was at no time an agent controlled by the KGB." Oswald, he claimed, had been under surveillance, but there were two big reasons that he hadn't been tapped as an agent: He was terrible at firing a gun, and even the KGB wasn't confident that they could control him.
Oswald married to spite another woman
Evelyn Siegel was a social worker familiar with Lee Harvey Oswald, and in an interview with Frontline, she described him as "just emotionally frozen. He was a kid who had never developed a really trusting relationship with anybody." Oswald's father died before he was born, his mother considered him a burden, and he was largely responsible for raising himself. "He was just floating along in the world with no emotional resources at all," Siegel said. Indeed, Oswald had an undeniably tragic childhood.
And that's an important lead-in to his diaries, which are available through the Assassination Archives and Research Center. In them, he describes his interactions with some of the women he met while living in the USSR. Specifically, he went on to say that he had fallen in love with a woman named Ella Germain.
Germain, however, wasn't interested in him. Not only did she turn down his marriage proposal, but she was pretty direct about not loving him. That was in January, and in March, he wrote about meeting Marina Prosakoba. He proposed to her in April and they were married the same month, but keep reading and it seems as though it wasn't a matter of love at first sight. Oswald writes [sic]: "Inspite of fact I married Marina to hurt Ella I found myself in love with Marina. The trasistion of changing full love from Ella to Marina was very painfull..."
His relationship with his wife was described as stormy
Just as you might wonder what those married to infamous serial killers knew about their crimes, similar questions can be asked of the significant others of high-profile assassins like Lee Harvey Oswald. His wife, Marina, was just 22 years old when Kennedy and Lee were both killed, leaving her to raise two young children in a country she'd lived in for less than a year and a half.
A 1991 memo released in 2025 revealed the KGB surveillance had found the relationship difficult and "stormy," which was perhaps putting it lightly. Priscilla Johnson McMillan is a historian and reporter who knew Lee, became good friends with Marina after his death, and eventually wrote "Marina and Lee: The Tormented Love and Fatal Obsession Behind Lee Harvey Oswald's Assassination of John F. Kennedy." She told Frontline that Marina initially thought him polite, incredibly nice, and as an American, likely to be kinder to her than some of the other marriage prospects she had.
McMillan said that they had only been in the U.S. for a few weeks when he hit her for the first time, and threatened to kill her. "By winter, he hit her more and more frequently and harder, and over very small things that she had done or that he accused her of," McMillan said. Things continued to get worse, and she also revealed that Marina had left Lee, but returned shortly after.
If you or someone you know is dealing with domestic abuse, you can call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1−800−799−7233. You can also find more information, resources, and support at their website.
KGB surveillance records of Oswald are reportedly filled with relationship drama
In 1995, Norman Mailer published "Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery," and it's a massive tome that took a deep dive into Lee Harvey Oswald's life. It involved several years of research, and the whole project kicked off when Mailer was approached by an investigative journalist who was fairly certain he could get all the files the KGB had on Oswald. He did, and also set up interviews with KGB agents who had known him, which was as rocky as it sounds like it could be.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Mailer said he went over thinking that he was going to find proof that Oswald acted with the KGB's input. Instead, he said, "They were very cautious, very conservative people. Their feeling about Oswald was: It's madness to get involved with this guy, who's such a screwball." (Interestingly, it was Oswald's mother who was among those who claimed he was an agent for the U.S. government.)
Oswald was, however, definitely on the KGB's radar. Mailer would write that Oswald and his friends were all under surveillance and were regularly questioned, and when he read the files, he found that they largely consisted of records of arguments between Oswald and his wife. Oswald, the KGB found, was an unimportant person with delusions of grandeur, a deep-seated desire to be the center of attention, and was more likely to berate his young wife than spill state secrets.
Oswald's political leanings were largely revealed post-Warren Commission
In an interview with Frontline, one of the things that historian and author Priscilla Johnson McMillan revealed was that for Oswald, secrecy was of the utmost importance. He had a study that he banned his wife from entering, he had secret post office boxes under other names, and McMillan also said, "He had an entire secret life, and maybe one or two secret lives along with the life he was leading at home with Marina."
Today, we're all familiar with the idea that Oswald was enamored with Castro's Communist Cuba, and given Kennedy's role in the Cuban Missile Crisis, it's not a huge leap in connecting the dots. However, most of that information about Oswald didn't only come out after his death, but after the Warren Commission.
That's according to Steve Gillion, a writer, historian, and expert with the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs. In 2023, he spoke about some newly-released documents on the Kennedy assassination and newly-divulged information, and gave this summary of decades of information: "What we have learned over the past five decades is that Oswald was a little more mysterious of a figure than that portrayed in the Warren Commission report, which dismissed him as a sociopath. What some of these documents have shown is that he was very political, raising the possibility that there was a political motivation to the assassination. And that's the key."
A September 1963 trip to Mexico City remained strangely overlooked for a long time
Weeks before Kennedy's assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald took a trip to Mexico City, seemingly in preparation for defecting to Cuba. A U.S. Ambassador in Mexico's embassy reportedly tried to bring that whole thing to the forefront, but received official orders from the Secretary of State to drop the subject.
That whole section of the story languished in obscurity for a long time, and in the 1960s, both the FBI and the CIA insisted there was nothing interesting to be learned about Oswald's time in Mexico City. However, over the course of decades, bits and pieces of information have come out. Oswald was under some serious surveillance by the CIA when he was there, and some have even claimed that Oswald made his plans to assassinate Kennedy very public.
The consequences of this all are, in short, a mess that starts with the possibility that those who overheard Oswald's talk of killing Kennedy could be considered accomplices. Add in those orders forbidding an investigation into Oswald's time there, what happened, who he met with, and what was said, and that brings up questions about just what the CIA didn't want anyone to notice. Documents regarding Oswald's time in Mexico City have been released, but some think there may be more.
Documents contradict CIA claims that they had nothing to do with Oswald
The CIA has vehemently denied any connection with Lee Harvey Oswald, but in 2022, the Mary Ferrell Foundation announced that researchers had gotten documents detailing a CIA operation that had involved Oswald. Further review of the documents revealed that Oswald had worked with a CIA operative named George Joannides on something related to Cuba, but much of that information was still being kept classified.
When editor and D.C. press corps mainstay Jefferson Morley started looking into the newly released documents, he was working alongside Army veteran John Newman, who was writing the book that would become "Oswald and the CIA: The Documented Truth About the Unknown Relationship Between the U.S. Government and the Alleged Killer of JFK." Newman and Morley found 42 relevant documents, and even more interesting than the documents themselves was the meticulous record that cataloged everyone who had seen the CIA's surveillance of Oswald: "It was, when you saw it, a lot of people," Morley told Intelligencer. "...The idea that this guy came out of nowhere was self-evidently not true."
Newman and Morley kept digging, and ended up interviewing a high-ranking CIA official who went on the record to say that yes, the agency was regularly receiving information on Oswald, even though they said they weren't. She told them that the CIA had "a keen interest in Oswald, held very closely on the need-to-know basis."
A cover-up at the CIA meant Oswald's connections with Cuba were overlooked
John McCone was the Director of Central Intelligence during John F. Kennedy's assassination, and was one of the voices that told the Warren Commission that Oswald acted alone. However, in a 2013 article published in the CIA's Studies in Intelligence magazine and declassified in 2015, CIA historian David Robarge wrote (via Politico) that the CIA had agreed to push "what the Agency believed at the time was the 'best truth'; that Lee Harvey Oswald, for as-yet-undetermined motives, had acted alone in killing John Kennedy."
What followed was a sort of omission of the truth, which was that the CIA had been teaming up with the Mafia to go head-to-head with Castro and Cuba. That meant there was a little bit of misdirection going on: The Warren Commission was directed away from asking too many questions about Oswald's ties to Cuba, and CIA business stayed in-house. In addition to what was called a "benign cover-up," Robarge's article also revealed that Oswald had been one of those targeted by the CIA's HTLINGUAL program.
If that sounds shady, that's because it was. Even though not even the CIA can tamper with mail without a warrant, that's exactly what they were doing. It's estimated that starting in 1953, the agency opened around 215,000 letters over the course of two decades. It was all done under the guise of intelligence-gathering, and Oswald was among those targeted.
Oswald has been speculatively linked to the CIA's experiments with LSD
Just when you think things can't get any weirder, well, here we are. We're going to say upfront that this is pure conjecture and it's unlikely that we'll ever get to know the truth, and that's a bit of a bummer. Fans of "Stranger Things" might know that it was based on a real-life government program called MKUltra, and under the umbrella of that program were all kinds of super-weird things. (Like what, you ask? Like Operation Midnight Climax, the MKUltrasub-project that is exactly what it sounds like.)
In a nutshell, MKUltra was looking for a reliable way to control people's minds. One of the ways agents experimented with doing exactly that was by dosing subjects — sometimes unknowingly — with LSD. And yes, here's where Lee Harvey Oswald comes in.
When Oswald was a Marine, he was stationed at Japan's Atsugi naval base. In document declassifications, Atsugi was identified as one of the places where the CIA stored LSD, and at around the same time Oswald would have been there. David Talbot's book "The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government" touches on the story, suggesting that Oswald had been one of the test subjects in the government's LSD experiments. Again, there's no proof, but it's an interesting theory.
It's been debated if Oswald had access to and shared information on the U-2 with the Soviets
The U-2 spy plane program has been shrouded in secrecy for a long time, and documents are still being declassified into the 21st century. It is now known that Japan's Atsugi military base was one of the bases the CIA used for U-2 recon missions over the Soviet Union, and Lee Harvey Oswald was stationed there during that period. This has led to a couple of interesting theories regarding Oswald's life trajectory.
First, at least one CIA employee claimed as far back as 1978 that Oswald had come to the CIA's attention at Atsugi, and was actually hired by the agency. It's unclear whether he actually was, though, because of the wildly impressive amount of conflicting information out there. Nonetheless, Oswald headed into the Soviet Union shortly after he was discharged, and it doesn't take a huge leap to see why it's been suggested that he was working with the CIA.
There's a flip side to this, too, and that's the theory that Oswald was allowed into the Soviet Union because he had information about the U-2. In a 1975 article in The Boston Phoenix, it came out that not only was Oswald reportedly trained in radar surveillance, but there was a still-classified document regarding his access to the U-2. That doesn't seem to have been declassified, but there are memos discussing claims Oswald shared his knowledge of the U-2 program — including radar and radio codes — with the Soviets, potentially linking him to the downing of a U-2.