Ryan Wesley Routh and Lee Harvey Oswald

I don’t know anything about this Ryan Wesley Routh, who was arrested after a shootout with the Secret Service a few hundred yards from where Donald Trump was playing golf, other than that he is a huge supporter of Ukraine in the present war and had attempted to get mercenaries to fight for the blue and yellow.

But, over the decades, I have developed an impression of Lee Harvey Oswald, which might, or might not, prove relevant in the present case.

Oswald was a discharged Marine who defected to the Soviet Union, got married, got bored, and was allowed to return to the USA with no penalty. He then attempted to assassinate a far right ex-general, Edwin Walker, and apparently had meetings with various scary organizations.

I’ve long been mildly sympathetic to JFK assassination conspiracy theories. After all, Oswald’s brief life is a pretty ridiculous series of implausible coincidences without some sort of conspiracy. And the three most famous assassinations before 11/22/1963 — Julius Caesar, Abraham Lincoln, and the Archduke Franz Ferdinand — each involved fairly extensive conspiracies.

The two most important men in America after JFK’s death — LBJ and RFK — both immediately assumed the assassination was a conspiracy, although they disagreed on which one. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy assumed the Mafia was behind it for RFK investigating them after all their help in the 1960 West Virginia primary. President Johnson assumed Castro had done it as revenge for JFK and RFK sending the CIA to assassinate him.

On the other hand, JFK conspiracy theorists, like LBJ and RFK, can never get together and agree which conspiracy to support. They all sound about equally plausible and implausible.

My best guess is that Oswald wanted to be part of a world-shaking conspiracy, but the various would-be co-conspirators he contacted would eventually figure out that Oswald was very bad news.

For example, during a brief period early in Boris Yeltsin’s reign in Moscow, I can recall seeing an episode on an American network news show, I believe involving Forrest Sawyer of ABC News, in which the KGB invited him into their Vault of Secrets. The prize artifact was a very thick manila folder, which Sawyer was told was the KGB’s Lee Harvey Oswald file.

The manila folder was covered with sizable hand-printing with lots of underlinings. My recollection is that the translator whom Sawyer had brought along told him that the words were warnings to never, ever destroy this file because it contains the proof that the KGB wasn’t responsible for Oswald shooting Kennedy.

Whether or not the file actually did hold much in the way of proof remains unclear. Sawyer and his translator got to look at the file for a few hours, and took away the finding that the KGB had come to the conclusion that Oswald was an “"unstable, incompetent dolt,” one so inept that he couldn’t have organized the assassination on his own: JFK’s assassination must have been a conspiracy, but it was not our conspiracy, as the hand-writing on the outside declared.

But after a number of hours of thumbing through the files, ABC was kicked out due to a power struggle within the KGB over why they were letting ABC have exclusive access to the file, rather than another American network or a Soviet outlet.

Was the file real? Was it a forgery? Perhaps this was all a sophisticated psy-op by the master spies of the Kremlin to persuade the American public that the KGB wasn’t responsible for their former guest in the Soviet Union shooting JFK by showing them hand-written warnings in Russian not to dispose of the file.

If so, however, it wasn’t a very successful psy-op because I seem to be about the only guy on the Internet who remembers the warnings on the file folder. It sounds to me more like a typical Yeltsin Era drunken feckless venture.

Why do I remember it? Personally, I could vividly imagine being a KGB agent in 1959 put in charge of debriefing the Marine defector and initially thinking that, boy, I’ve gotten a real catch here. This Oswald will be a real career boost. He’ll be such an asset he’ll help me get assigned to the Havana or Geneva office I’ve always dreamt of. But then, to my horror, I eventually figure out that this guy Oswald is trouble with a capital T, and he’s more likely to get me assigned to the Lake Baikal office after he punches my boss’s boss or something. So I don’t let him enroll as a student in Moscow State U. like he wants, but instead get him dispatched to a factory job in Minsk. And he eventually gets bored and goes home. Whew …

But then on 11/23/63, I hear that my old responsibility has assassinated the President of the United States, which could cause the Americanskis to nuke us in revenge. I could get in real trouble over that. So, not knowing what else to do, I get out my Oswald file, where I documented my second thoughts about him, and write all over the outside: Never burn this; this is our proof that Oswald’s not my our fault.

But, nobody else on the Internet seems to remember this at all, so maybe I’m just projecting.

UPDATE:

@SaschaAmato points me to the video:

So it didn’t say “never be destroyed” on the outside of the folders, but it did say it as the final entry.