Tale of Two Defectors

One was thoroughly debriefed by the CIA. The other was accused of killing JFK.

Defectors Robert Webster, left, and Lee Oswald, right.

Among the JFK files released late last year is a long-secret report about the CIA’s debriefing of a man named Robert Edward Webster. He was a U.S. military veteran and engineer who quietly renounced his U.S. citizenship in Moscow on October 17, 1959. Webster was, in the lingo of the Cold War, a “defector.”

The declassified Webster file, reported here for the first time, casts cool new light on the official theory of JFK’s assassination, which holds that another defector in October 1959, Lee Harvey Oswald, killed President John F. Kennedy.

The Webster file illuminates the CIA’s unusual handling of Oswald, the suspected assassin who denied killing Kennedy

The two defectors had a lot in common. Webster lived in the Soviet Union two and half years, married a Russian, chafed at life under communism, and returned to America in May 1962. Oswald lived in the USSR in the same period, married a Russian woman, tired of real-life socialism, and returned to the United States in June 1962. Both men were veterans of the U.S. military; both had offered to share their knowledge with the Soviets. Neither was detained or charged for going over to live in the homeland of America’s Cold War enemy. But they were treated very differently on their return, revealing the CIA’s continuing interest in Oswald after Webster was forgotten.

Like the Heath memo revealing a secret JFK investigation in Miami, the saga of two defectors is a revelatory tale that emerges from the latest JFK files, released under White House orders on April 12, 2023. It is a prequel to the assassination story.