Mr. Jenner. I am curious now.
Mr. Oliver. My opinion is that of the people who read that book perhaps 75 percent will say to themselves this man is a great liberal, a believer in civil rights, et cetera. And a champion of the underdog.
“It starts, for example, with the strange detour in the Presidential procession that made Kennedy an easy mark for a marksman in the Book Depository—to which, I believe, I was the first to draw attention. But the author argues that a sweet little Communist like Oswald couldn’t possibly have known about it, much less had the target set up for him. Poor little fellow. The detour must have been arranged so that the nasty rightwing extremists could frame him for the assassination.
“And the book makes much of the possible activities of our Central Intelligence Agency. This is designed for readers who have memories so poor that they will not recall the long list of events from the fake invasion of Cuba known as Operation Judas because it betrayed the anti-Communist Cubans into the hands of Castro, to the recent assassinations in Vietnam in which our Central Intelligence Agency with its army of 17 to 40 thousand faceless agents and the billions of dollars with which you taxpayers supply it every year, has evidently done the work of the Soviet Secret Police. It is designed for readers who will not remember that a defector from the Soviet Secret Police has sworn that his colleagues in the Central Intelligence Agency used your money directly to subsidize, (a) the Soviet Secret Police; (b) the official Communist Party in Italy; and (c) the official Communist Party in the United States.”
I should interpolate that this is obviously a reference to Lieutenant Colonel Goleniewski.
Mr. Jenner. Whom you have heretofore identified?
Mr. Oliver. Pardon me?
Mr. Jenner. Whom you have heretofore identified, or at least you made reference to him earlier in the afternoon?
Mr. Oliver. I do not recall that.
“On the contrary, the author of this incredible hogwash like the authors of some other books recently published expects you to believe that the CIA is a rightwing organization probably run by the John Birch Society. I do not know whether Oswald was paid by the CIA, but I hear that there was testimony before the Warren Commission that he was. There would be nothing improbable in that. The CIA worked for Castro in Cuba before he came to power.”