Epstein's "Legend" – An Explanation

              PENN JONES T H E
CONTINUING
INQUIRY
oeotember 22; 1982 I
Epstein's 'Leflend' - an explanation
-^1")- on the murder of JPK we have had but Epstein's Legend is something else
again. It offers us the rare spectacle of a writer of international reputation
arguing a case based on a premise - that Lee Harvey Oswald alone shot Kennedy and
Connally - which- the writer not only knows to be false, but which one of his earl-
- l e r books, Inquest , had helped to demolish. In t h i s essay I attempt to explain
Epstein's apparently bizarre behaviour.
Legend is two interwoven narratives - a biography of Oswald and an
account of disputes within the U.S. intelligence services over the status of a Sov-
- i e t defector called Nosenkoo Epstein portrays Osva] d as a lonely kid, ..ho, at the
age of 15 or so, began reading left-wing l i t e r a t u r e , then, for reasons unknown, en-
- l i s t e d in the U.S. l^arines. Despite openly proclaiming his M.'arxism' he was trained
as a radar operator, given security clearance and transferred to Japan as part of the
back-up team for the CIA's U-2 program. While in Japan he may have been recruited
by the KGB. Leaving the Marines he defected to the Soviet Union where he may have
given information on the performance of the U-2 which may have enabled the Soviet
Union to shoot down Gary Power's U-2, thus wrecking the Eisenhower-Kruschev summit.
Oswald returned to the United States where, s t i l l proclaiming his 'Marxism', he was
befriended by the White Russian community in the Dallas area. He set up a one-man
branch of the Pair Play For Cuba Committee, t r i e d and failed to shoot General Walk-
-er, a leading Bircher, and then shot President Kennedy. Though his evidence for bel-
-ieving it is virtually non-existent, Epstein-tells us that Oswald was, in some way,
KGB.
The other narrative concerns the Soviet defector Nosenko. In 1964,
while the V/arren Commission was s i t t i n g , Nosenko defected and announced, among other
things, that he had been in charge of the KGB's f i l e on Oswald's a c t i v i t i e s in the
USSR. He tcld the CIA that the KGB had considered Oswald 'unbalanced' after his
suicide attempt and^^not attempted to recruit him. Nosenko's testimony was welcome
to almost all concerned. The Warren Commission had been given the icing for the
Oswald-lone-assassin cake they were baking and the FBI were relieved not to be
accused of failing to prevent a Red plot they should have knov/n about. (In 1963
ex American defectors to the Soviet Union were an extinct breed and Oswald was
doubly unusual in returning from the Soviet Union s t i l l a ' t l a r x i s t ' . In the pol-
- i t i c a l climate of the Dallas area in 1962/3 he must have had the social status
of a J/Iartian.)
But the Counter Intelligence (C.I.) branch of the CIA, interrogating
Nosenko began to detect what seemed to be flaws in his story and the suspicion
p-rev/ that Nosenko was a false defector, sent to white-wash KGB involvement with
Oswald and, perhaps, lead C.I. off the track of other Soviet 'moles' in the U.S. .
C I tried to break Nosenko but he stuck to his story. Nosenko, we are tcld, split
the'ciA. Most of it accepted his story while C.I. did not. The FBI accepted his
stcrv because parts of it were being confirmed by their very own defector, s t i ll
'n nlace at the U.N. , and to doubt Nosenko was to doubt their own man. After a
lone bureaucratic struggle within the CIA, Nosenko was declared 'clean* and employed
' t h in the Agency, despite the protests of C . I . . Some years later the upper echelon
f C I . was forced out of the Agency, and Epstein, taking the side of C . I . , believes
the result has been to 'turn the Agency inside out', the 'good guys' fired and a
S Viet agent installed within i t . Legend works like t h i s : Nosenko was a fraud
b° ause Oswald can be shown t o have been KGB and Nosenko denied that he was: and that
senko was a fraud .iust adds to the uroof that Oswald was KGB. r-^^^..-^.,^^