Deja Vu? JFK Assassination Revisited: The Mysterious Igor Vaganov (2024)

Esquire magazine article on Igor Vaganov from 1967

In light of the recent assassination attempt against Donald Trump, I was taken back to another presidential assassination.

The JFK Assassination in 1963.

Something I am familiar with and have written several blog posts about with my thoughts.

https://www.hailofbullets11221963.blogspot.com

https://www.peelingthejfkonion.blogspot.com

Just as the Trump assassination attempt is still unfolding a week later with more details coming out by the minute, the JFK assassination has many unanswered questions.

Still to this day.

Sixty years later.

Mainly because, just like in the Trump situation, the main suspect was killed shortly after the assassination or in Trump’s case “attempted” assassination.

Something some news pundits still haven’t completely come to grips with based upon a perusal of the Twittersphere.

Oh, if we had social media and Twitter back in 1963…

But I digress.

This is the story of a suspicious character associated with the events in Dallas that day over 60 years ago that shook the nation to its core and one that is still being questioned to this day as to its truthfulness.

The Igor Vaganov Story

Igor Vaganov is not a new character to the JFK assassination story.

His name was known as were his whereabouts instantly to the FBI on November 22, 1963.

In fact, just hours after the assassination of JFK and murder of Dallas policeman J.D. Tippit 45-minutes or so later just a mile away from Vaganov’s apartment, the FBI sent two agents to Vaganov’s apartment in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas to interview him about his potential involvement in the assassination.

That story is recounted in the 1967 Esquire magazine article cited earlier: (NOTE: You need to sign in at esquire.com to their archives page and create a free account to read this article.)

"If They’ve Found Another Assassin, Let Them Name Names and Produce Their Evidence.”—Allen Dulles, July, 1966 | Esquire | AUGUST 1967

The Cliff Notes version is as follows.

• Twenty-three-year-old Igor Vaganov drove his red Ford Thunderbird convertible to Dallas from Philadelphia two weeks prior to the JFK assassination with his 18-year-old wife of a few days. They actually got married on the way to Dallas in South Carolina. Vaganov was divorced.

• They rented an apartment at 815 Sunset Avenue in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas. This location was not only one mile from the murder location of Dallas policeman J.D. Tippit, but about one half mile from the Texas Theater where Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested, 1-1/2 miles from Oswald’s boarding house and about 1-1/2 miles from Jack Ruby’s apartment. It is safe to say that Vaganov chose a hotbed of post-assassination landmarks for his place of residence.

• Vaganov dressed in a suit coat and tie and left the apartment for work each day at around 7:30 a.m. and returned around 5 p.m.

• His stated places of employment are sketchy and one didn’t check out in 1963 when investigated. Another one was a location next door to Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club on Commerce Street in downtown Dallas.

• His story became known to the FBI the day of the assassination when his father-in-law from Philadelphia called a probation officer in Conroe, Texas stating that Vaganov had left Philadelphia with his daughter-in-law and stated he was “going to do something awful” in Dallas.

• Apparently, Vaganov’s bride had called her sister the night before in Conroe, Texas stating as such to her and she had relayed the phone call to her mother.

• So, the FBI sent two agents to Vaganov’s apartment around 4:30 p.m. on the day of the assassination. They talked to Vaganov who showed them his .38 Colt revolver and rifle he had in his bedroom. Apparently satisfied that Vaganov wasn’t involved in either the JFK assassination or the Tippit murder, they left the apartment, filed a report and that was the end of the Igor Vaganov story.

• The Warren Commission never interviewed Igor Vaganov.

• In the Esquire article, Vaganov was described as a superb marksman who loved to hunt and it was said he could pick off birds from a moving car. He traded for a high-powered rifle that was a “250-3000” just 6/1000 of an inch smaller in caliber than the Mannlicher-Carcano owned by Lee Harvey Oswald.

• The Esquire article also reported that Vaganov also owned a two-way citizens band radio in his red Ford Thunderbird. Friends described Vaganov as “no dummy and very capable around radios.” It was a sonar make, worth about $225 that was considered too “hopped up,” fixed so that its output would exceed F.C.C. regulations and its range would be extended beyond C.B. limits. In a city with tall buildings, Vaganov could broadcast over a radius of five to eight miles.

• It was reported that Vaganov also fluently spoke four languages including English, Russian, Spanish and Italian.

• Vaganov also was known to use several different aliases including John Nicholson, Kurt Kullaway, Vince Carson and Igor Baganov.

The 1967 Esquire magazine story is the first article that placed Vaganov on the radar of most JFK assassination researchers.

And coincidentally or not, Philadelphia was a hotbed of JFK-assassination researchers.

Some of the best journalists/researchers jumped on the Igor Vaganov story after it was posted in the press.

Gaeton Fonzi, former investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1976-79 that investigated both the JFK and Martin Luther King, Jr. assassinations, was a young reporter for Greater Philadelphia Magazine in 1967. He was the first journalist to break the Vaganov-JKF assassination angle with an article in 1967—before the Esquire magazine story appeared. However, the lawyers may have been involved because Fonzi changed Vaganov’s name to “Mr. Brown” from Delaware and told his story under that pseudonym.

Fonzi’s article sparked the interest of Philadelphia attorney and JFK researcher Vincent Salandria. Salandria teamed up with Esquire magazine author John Berendt and Philadelphia researcher James Henderson and began pursuing Vaganov who still resided in the Philadelphia area.

They tracked Vaganov down to his apartment and began a series of interviews with him attempting to get him to tell his story about his trip to Dallas in November of 1963.

However, Vaganov didn’t bite and rebuffed their efforts.

But soon Vaganov had a change of heart.

About the same time that Esquire sent reporter John Berendt to talk to Vaganov.

Maybe it was the pressure Vaganov was feeling after Gaeton Fonzi had told his story in Greater Philadelphia Magazine, albeit under the “Mr. Brown” pseudonym, or the $2,500 Berendt offered him, but for whatever reason, Vaganov agreed to cooperate with Berendt.

One reason might have been because Vaganov had been arrested for pushing “hot checks” in San Diego and after serving a brief jail sentence, was actually on probation in 1967 when all of this hullabaloo about him resurfaced.

So maybe he thought, “What the heck?", if it is going to come out, I might as well get paid.

It is mostly benign anyway because Vaganov not only cooperated with John Berendt, but he was paid $2,500 for his story and even accompanied the author to Dallas to have face to face meetings with two important Tippit murder scene eyewitnesses.

The Tippit Murder Eyewitnesses

Ah, the Tippit murder scene eyewitnesses.

Warren Commission attorney David Belin described the J.D. Tippit murder as the “Rosetta Stone” of the JFK assassination.

Meaning that alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald’s murder of Tippit not only solved the Tippit murder but directly tied Oswald to the JFK assassination.

One neatly tied present wrapped in a beautiful ribbon and delivered to the American public on a platter.

Except immediately upon release a majority of Americans didn’t believe the Warren Commission’s findings that a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, killed both JFK and Tippit and that another lone gunman, nightclub owner Jack Ruby, had also killed Oswald without any known accomplices.

The problem with the Warren Commission findings is that the very story they tried to pass off to the American public was contradicted by witness statements and evidence found in the accompanying 26 volumes of work.

Maybe the commissioners didn’t think anyone would bother to read the 26 accompanying volumes.

Earl Warren, the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court who led the Warren Commission, once said this about someday learning the truth about the JFK assassination:

“Perhaps but not in your lifetime.”

So, what to make of the Igor Vaganov story?

Some JFK assassination researchers have tried to tie Vaganov into the many sightings of alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas in the weeks leading up to the assassination as maybe his doppelganger.

There were numerous eyewitnesses who came forward after the assassination who told of instances of seeing Oswald or his look-a-like in Dallas at times the real Lee Harvey Oswald’s whereabouts were easily verified through his employment at the Texas School Book Depository.

As John King said in an article in kennedysandking.com:

“There can be little doubt that a person or persons unknown impersonated Lee Oswald leading up to the murders on November 22, 1963. How can anyone be positive that Lee Oswald shot Tippit at just after 1 p.m. when so many factors argue against it.”

Was Igor Vaganov one of these Oswald “doubles?”

Who knows?

But one thing to be sure of is that Igor Vaganov was living in a virtual hotbed of post assassination activities that implicated Lee Harvey Oswald as not only the killer of the president but the murderer of Dallas policeman J.D. Tippit.

Remember David Belin and his “Rosetta Stone” comment?

And it is not as if there isn’t some smoke where Vaganov is concerned with possible involvement with the Tippit murder.

Back to the Tippit murder scene eyewitnesses.

The Warren Commission claimed that “at least 12 persons saw the man with the revolver in the vicinity of the Tippit crime scene at or immediately after the shooting,” but it was able to present the testimony of only two who said they had seen the shooting.

The star eyewitness was Helen Markham.

A waitress who lived down the block from the southeast corner of 10th and Patton where Tippit was gunned down in broad daylight.

Markham was walking across the intersection at 10th and Patton on her way to the bus stop on nearby Jefferson Avenue. She observed Tippit’s patrol car slowly driving past her heading east on 10th street approach a man later identified as Oswald who was walking east away from Tippit’s patrol car (some witnesses said they believed Oswald to be walking towards Tippit and then changed directions alerting the officer’s suspicion which led to his stopping to talk to Oswald.)

She described the man leaning on the passenger side door and apparently talking to Tippit through the passenger side window. Although the evidence showed the passenger side window was actually closed, the smaller side vent mirror was cracked open slightly.

A few seconds later Markham said Tippit opened his door and began walking around the front of his car to the man who then proceeded to withdraw a gun and shoot Tippit three times felling him to the ground.

And this is where Helen Markham’s testimony went off the Warren Commission grid.

Markham described the man she saw as short and somewhat on the heavy side with “bushy hair.” That didn’t fit the description police had released of the presidential assassin or Lee Harvey Oswald who was about 5’ 9” with a thinning or receding hairline and weighed approximately 130 pounds.

As for the three shots Markham described, Tippit was shot a fourth time at point blank range in the right temple.

The kill shot.

Tippit died instantly from this shot by all accounts.

However, Helen Markham said she rushed to Tippit’s side and talked to him while waiting 20 minutes for an ambulance.

Both have been proven incorrect by other eyewitnesses and time of death.

After the shots were fired, Markham said she put her hands over her eyes and screamed as the assailant headed her direction down 10th Street.

The man she later hesitantly identified as Lee Harvey Oswald ran right past her ejecting shells from his automatic revolver as he cut across the lawn of the house on the southeast corner of 10th and Patton and headed south toward Jefferson Boulevard.

This Oswald was seen by other eyewitnesses in William Scoggins who was sitting in his taxicab 100-feet of Tippit’s car facing north just south of the corner of 10th and Patton and Barbara and Virginia Davis who were watching all of this unfold from their house adjacent to Scoggins taxicab.

Scoggins view was blocked by a row of hedges. And he didn’t see the shooting. And the Davis sisters gave conflicting testimony of the man who ran across their yard and jumped through the hedges behind William Scoggins taxicab.

All three identified Lee Harvey Oswald in a police lineup but only after Oswald was paraded with other teenagers and was seen shouting at the police. Oswald told the eyewitnesses he worked at the Texas School Book Depository. By the time of the lineups, everyone in Dallas knew Lee Harvey Oswald worked at the Texas School Book Depository.

So, Helen Markham isn’t lying about seeing a man shoot a policeman, just a little fuzzy on the details that followed and seems to be imagining things.

It’s just that the Warren Commission said only Lee Harvey Oswald was involved in killing officer Tippit so if an eyewitness said she saw a shorter, heavier-set man kill Tippit, that had to be immediately squelched because that would destroy the official version.

And that is exactly what happened.

Helen Markham attended a police lineup later that evening featuring Lee Harvey Oswald and two other police detectives and a third man. And, after telling the Warren Commission, “I didn’t know nobody” she suddenly changed her mind after some encouragement of ammonia administered by homicide detective Will Fritz, positively identified Lee Harvey Oswald as the man she saw shoot officer Tippit.

But Helen Markham wasn’t finished.

In fact, Markham also told investigators that she even walked across the street and actually talked to J.D. Tippit who by all accounts was killed instantly with the fourth shot to the head.

Domingo Benavides

Another eyewitness who observed the Tippit shooting was Domingo Benavides.

Benavides was driving his truck westbound on 10th approaching the intersection at Patton when he drove up on J.D. Tippit talking to apparently Lee Harvey Oswald just as Oswald shot Tippit four times.

Benavides said his car was only one car length from Tippit’s squad car at the time of the shooting.

However, Benavides veracity as an eyewitness plummets when he told police that he actually didn’t see the shooting because as soon as he heard the gunshots that felled officer Tippit, he immediately ducked down in his seat to hide from the gunman…”for a few minutes.”

Benavides gave his deposition to the Warren Commission staff attorney on April 2, 1964 in Dallas.

Benavides told the commission that after November 22 he had seen photos of Lee Harvey Oswald on television and in the newspapers, yet, he steadfastly refused to identify Lee Harvey Oswald as the murderer.

The Dallas police never even bothered to take Benavides to the police station for a lineup as a result of what he told officers at the murder scene. Captain Will Fritz later testified that he rushed a “quite hysterical” woman whom the police “were about to send” to the hospital, from out of a police first-aid room to peer at Oswald.

In doing so, the Dallas police put their entire case against Lee Harvey Oswald into the hands of Helen Markham.

And The Warren Commission took great lengths to select fragments of her testimony which appear to substantiate Oswald’s guilt, but it ignored many statements made by both her and by others which invalidated or discredited her testimony.

John Berendt the Esquire magazine author who penned the article on Vaganov in 1967 actually took Vaganov to meet both Markham and Benavides during his investigation.

Markham said she couldn’t recall ever seeing Vaganov.

Shocker.

Helen Markham didn’t even recall seeing Lee Harvey Oswald at the crime scene until administered ammonia before the police lineup!

Benavides wasn’t as certain but said he looked familiar.

You can’t count on anything Helen Markham told investigators since she clearly made-up things like talking to the dead policeman, waiting by his side for 20 minutes and admitted to hiding her face in her hands after the shooting.

Hardly persuasive.

Even the Warren Commission attorneys had a hard time believing anything she said and they trotted her out as their star witness!

Wesley Liebeler, assistant Warren Commission counsel, described Mrs. Markham’s testimony as “Contradictory and worthless.”

“The Commission wants to believe Mrs. Markham and that’s all there is to it,” added staff member Norman Redlich.

“She’s an utter screwball,” remarked Counsel Joseph Ball.

And maybe Markham had an excuse for her erratic behavior.

Dallas police detective James Leavelle said she was “suffering from shock” when she arrived at the police station and that she “was in such a state of shock she had been unable to view the lineup.”

No problem.

Captain Will Fritz just brought out the ammonia and put her into the viewing room for the lineup.

And, as for Domingo Benavides, he actually had reason to be concerned about identifying Vaganov as the police killer.

Benavides’s brother who looked remarkably like him, was shot and killed in the immediate aftermath of the assassination and murder of J.D. Tippit. And there were other attempts on Benavides’s life following. So much so that he left the Dallas area for a time.

Reason enough to think you might want to keep your mouth shut.

And there were other eyewitnesses who saw things that didn’t quite mesh with the official record of the Tippit murder.

Warren Reynolds.

Reynolds was one block south of 10th and Patton at his used car dealership where he worked across the street on Jefferson Boulevard when he heard gunshots. He walked across the parking lot to the street just in time to see a man running his way south down Patton before taking a right-hand turn westward on Jefferson.

Reynolds and another man gave chase from the opposite side of Jefferson Boulevard before giving up but got a good look at the man.

Who didn’t look like Lee Harvey Oswald.

At least not to Reynolds who couldn’t pick Oswald out of a lineup like Helen Markham eventually did.

Maybe the police should have used ammonia on Reynolds?

But never fear, Reynolds eventually came around to identifying Oswald as the man he saw running down Patton Avenue after he was shot in the head a few weeks later in his car dealership.

A warning shot to change his mind on Oswald?

Perhaps.

But that is what happened.

A man was eventually arrested for shooting Reynolds. However, he was released after his girlfriend (who had supplied his alibi in the Reynolds shooting and worked for Jack Ruby) was arrested one morning after her roommate called police on her for disturbing the peace.

Later that morning, the girlfriend was found dead in her Dallas jail cell the victim of a suicide by hanging with her toreador pants!

Acquilla Clemons

Clemons was another Oswald eyewitness to the Tippit murder. She was a caretaker at a house just a few houses west of the corner of 10th and Patton on the north side of the street.

She was literally feet behind Helen Markham’s location at the bus stop.

Clemons told authorities she was on her porch and saw the policeman down the street shot by a man.

But she then said another man came upon the scene and exchanged words with the gunman and then they split in opposite directions.

The gunman Clemons saw headed toward her and Helen Markham turned south on Patton and right past William Scoggins, Barbara and Virginia Davis and toward Warren Reynolds.

She described the gunman was a “short guy and kind of heavy” and the other man was “tall and thin in khaki trousers and a white shirt.”

Acquilla Clemons could not identify the gunman as Lee Harvey Oswald.

And she never wavered.

Surprisingly, she was never called to testify by the Warren Commission.

She even told investigators that she was visited shortly after the assassination by a “detective” of some sort who told her to keep her mouth shut or “she might get hurt.”

Because she had totally blown the official lone gunman cover story by inserting a second man into the murder of J.D. Tippit.

Years later another eyewitness emerged.

Doris Holan

Doris Holan lived on the second floor of a house directly across the street from the Tippit murder scene located on the north side of the road.

She literally had the birds eye view of the assassination.

She told authorities that she heard the gunshots and walked over to her second-floor window overlooking the Tippit police car.

According to John King in Kennedysandking.com dated August 8, 2023:

“She described a younger man beginning to walk west away from Tippit’s patrol car. Holan next saw a police car roll forward from the alleyway behind 10th and move towards the street using a narrow driveway between the two houses. A man in a long coat got out, stepped into the street, looked down at Tippit’s body, then walked back up the driveway to the police car. The second police car then backed up out of sight into the rear alleyway. Holan knew this was a police car because she could see the “cherry” on the top.”

Frank Wright

Frank Wright lived at the corner of East 10th and Denver, just east of where Tippit was slain.

Wright said he was standing in his living room near the front door when he heard gunshots.

Wright opened the door and stepped outside onto his porch, just in time to see Tippit’s body in the street.

Mr. Wright observed a man running west from the police car. This man jumped into the driver’s seat of an old, grey coupe and drove away going west on East 10th.

A second man in a long-sleeved coat, possible a trench coat, then stepped into the street. The man appeared to be standing over Tippit, looking down. This second individual then returned to the sidewalk and disappeared out of sight onto one of the properties on the south side of the street.

Now this is all new information that not only verified Acquilla Clemons story but introduced another man into the equation one being a Dallas police officer who was driving the squad car.

Sam Guinyard

Patton Avenue witness Sam Guinyard would later confide to researcher Michael Brownlow that he too had seen police activity in that same alleyway at about the time Tippit was killed.

The car lot where Guinyard worked sat adjacent to East 10th Street’s rear alleyway. The problem is, according to Dallas police records, no other Dallas police were known to be in that immediate vicinity.

None of this appeared in the Warren Commission because Nolan and Guilyard never told anyone her story until years later.

Where Did Igor Vaganov Go?

So, despite the discrepancies with her statements, with the positive eyewitness identification of Oswald by Helen Markham the case was deemed closed by Dallas police.

Chief Jesse Curry went on live national television from the Dallas police headquarters that Friday night and said Oswald was the “man".

The night of the assassination.

Don’t worry about due process.

The police chief just told the world that Oswald was “the man.”

Unfortunately, Lee Harvey Oswald never got a trial to prove his innocence. Heck, Oswald never even spoke to his attorney that he requested.

Jack Ruby killed Oswald in the basem*nt of the Dallas police department on live national television on Sunday morning during his transfer to the Dallas County Jail.

The Warren Commission Report would be released nine months later and conclusively stated that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman responsible for both President John F. Kennedy and police officer J.D. Tippit.

And the report concluded that Jack Ruby also was a lone gunman who killed Lee Harvey Oswald.

No conspirators for either Oswald or Ruby.

Case closed.

But back to the original question.

Where did Igor Vaganov go Friday afternoon?

Vaganov told police that he had to drive downtown to the First National Bank to close an account that he had opened several years before with a $5 deposit.

The bank had no record that was true.

Since Vaganov left his apartment around 12:50 p.m. he was not involved in the JFK murder because that occurred at 12:30 p.m. Unless his alibis in his wife and his landlords were lying and covering for him.

But by all accounts, J.D. Tippit was murdered around 1:15 p.m. just one mile from Vaganov’s apartment.

So Igor Vaganov could have had time to be in the area.

And guess what?

There were other eyewitnesses who described a red Ford vehicle at the scene of the Tippit murder.

As we have seen, Domingo Benavides told police he was following a red Ford when he approached the murder scene.

And, another witness Jack Tatum appeared many years later around the time of the House Select Committee on Assassinations and confessed to actually being the driver of the red Ford Benavides saw.

Tatum said he was just crossing the intersection of 10th and Patton heading west on 10th Street when he heard the gunshots and saw the police officer on the ground in his rear-view mirror and began driving back toward the scene in reverse.

He said by that time another man (Ted Calloway who had run down Patton from Jefferson) was on the scene and on Tippit’s police radio notifying police of the shooting so he didn’t want to get involved and drove away from the scene.

Why Jack Tatum kept this a secret for 15 years is a mystery only he knows.

But Tatum does add the mystery of a red Ford vehicle to the J.D. Tippit murder scene that corroborates Domingo Benavides testimony and potentially links Igor Vaganov to the crime scene.

Remember Vaganov drove his red Ford Thunderbird to Dallas from Philadelphia.

So, now you have Acquilla Clemons and Doris Holan stating they saw two men involved in the Tippit murder scene and a third if you count the driver of the Dallas police car pulling up to the scene from the alleyway, and Domingo Benavides and Jack Tatum add the appearance of a red Ford vehicle into the equation. Not sure what to make of Frank Wright’s description of a man running west on 10th Street only to get into the driver’s side of a grey coupe and drive away westbound.

The Warren Commission didn’t include any of this testimony in its’ report because they already had star witness Helen Markham’s testimony and Doris Holan and Jack Tatum didn’t tell their story until years later.

But that doesn’t mean Doris Holan, Jack Tatum, Frank Wright and Acquilla Clemons are wrong.

And the F.B.I. would later report that Igor Vaganov’s clothes were found in a Dallas area phone booth six months after the assassination.

Vaganov told investigators he had no idea how that happened.

Another Red Car?

T.F. Wright was a mechanic working at Mack Pate’s Garage at the corner of Davis Street and Beckley Avenue about one mile from the Tippit murder scene.

Around 2 p.m. on the day of the JFK Assassination, Wright noticed a suspicious acting man sitting slumped down in the driver’s seat of a red Ford falcon (he initially said it was a two-tone blue color but the F.B.I. changed it to red: see below) in the El Chico restaurant parking lot his garage shared with the restaurant.

After hearing police sirens blaring down Beckley Avenue earlier following the Tippit shooting, Wright decided to walk across the street and check out the mystery man further.

Upon getting closer to the car, the man noticed Wright approaching and sat up in the car and quickly drove off east down Davis Street.

A few weeks later, Dallas newsman Wes Wise was speaking to a group at the El Chico Restaurant about his experience covering the JFK assassination.

In the room was Mack Pate, T.F. Wright’s boss.

Pate approached Wise afterwards and told him about Wright’s story.

Wise came across the street to the garage and took down Wright’s story including the license plate of the car he observed.

Wise then called the F.B.I. and they traced the license plate Wright had given them to a man named Carl Mather from Garland, Texas.

Approaching Mather’s house in Garland they found his wife. She claimed innocence of the car sighting by Wright because she said the car was parked in her husband’s employer parking lot that day.

Up until the news of the Tippit murder at which time they both drove that car in question to the J.D. Tippit house in south Oak Cliff to comfort his widow Marie. Mrs. Mather told Wise and the F.B.I. men that they used to live next door to the Tippit’s and considered them close friends.

Later, Wise and the F.B.I. men caught up with Carl Mather.

Mather was stone cold silent and had no idea why his car was seen at the El Chico restaurant by T.F. White.

He refused to talk further.

Later, it was learned that Carl Mather worked at Collins Radio in Richardson. Collins Radio has a long history with U.S. defense contractors and as we shall see the C.I.A.

And this is where the mysterious story of the Rex enters the discussion.

The Rex was a World War II submarine boat and a photo of the ship was featured in a New York Times story on October 31, 1963.

It was discovered years later that the Rex was owned by a Miami man who said he leased the ship to Collins Radio for scientific purposes. However, it was later learned that the real owner was the C.I.A.

The article reported that the Rex had been photographed in West Palm Beach, Florida after an overnight raid on the Cuban coastline.

An event that sparked an uproar in the anti-Castro crusade against the Castro regime because President Kennedy had earlier issued orders to stop all clandestine attacks on Cuba.

Something the Rex story thrust the entire Cuban story back in the limelight.

Cuban Premiere Fidel Castro took the opportunity to go on live television that he not only had repelled the attack but captured survivors who claimed they are part of a C.I.A. led invasion of Cuba.

Later it was learned that Collins Radio had provided the communications for Air Force Two and handled the communications network throughout Vietnam during the Vietnam War.

In fact, based upon Igor Vaganov’s mastery of CB radios and the installation he had in his Ford Thunderbird, researcher Vincent Salandria thought this is where he fit in to the JFK story. Many level-headed assassination buffs believed that the shootings of Kennedy and Tippit were carried out by a band of assassins who were coordinated by radio.

John Berendt in his Esquire article went even further:

“At Dealey Plaza, witness Lee Bowers saw three cars cruising around the Texas School Book Depository prior to the assassination. Two of them had out-of-state license plates; one had Goldwater stickers and one was covered by mud up to the windows. The latter attracted his attention, because when it came near him he noticed the driver holding his hand up to his mouth as though he were speaking into a radio.”

Berendt continued this train of thought by writing:

“But to those who believe there was more than one assassin, a radio-guided plot does not seem farfetched. It may well have been, they postulate, that the assassins were listening in on a police band and broadcasting on their own. All of a sudden, the strange radio order for Patrolman Tippit to move into Central Oak Cliff gains significance, if only vague significance. The spotting of Oswald by Tippit, the arrest of Oswald in the Texas Theater; could it all have been coordinated by radio? This was the general assumption upon which the Vaganov investigators were proceeding.”

The F.B.I. went back to interview T.F. Wright without Wes Wise.

During this interview the agents had turned Wright’s initial description of Carl Mather’s car as a two-tone blue Ford Falcon to a red Ford Falcon.

Which opens the door back to our friend Igor Vaganov and his red Ford Thunderbird.

In fact, an internal Dallas Police Department memo from Detective H.M. Hart (Criminal Intelligence) to Captain Pat Gannaway, head of the Special Service Bureau, contained information from a confidential informant “indicating that a red convertible was parked in the street in front of Jack Ruby’s residence at the time officer Tippit was shot.”

Jack Ruby’s apartment was at 223 South Ewing Avenue, a further half mile east of 10th and Patton.

As Mark Bridger wrote in his article in The Dealey Plaza Echo, “For the Dallas Police Department Special Service Bureau to mention this is surely noteworthy. If the DPD were aware of, and interested in the “red car” phenomenon, the question is why? Was Domingo Benavides describing Jack Tatum’s red Ford Galaxy or Igor Vaganov’s Thunderbird? Or was Vaganov’s empty Thunderbird sitting in front of Jack Ruby’s apartment while Vaganov was being observed by Acquilla Clemons at 10th and Patton?”

So, in summary, we have an employee of a defense/C.I.A. contractor, Carl Mather with Collins Radio in the Dallas suburb of Richardson, Texas, who specializes in surveillance communications for the U.S. military and C.I.A., whose car is seen by an eyewitness, 5-blocks from the J.D. Tippit murder at 2 p.m., within 45-minutes of the shooting. And, this eyewitness would later identify this man as Lee Harvey Oswald. The problem with this timeline is that the real Lee Harvey Oswald who was arrested at the Texas Theater was already in police custody in the Dallas jail at 2 p.m.

Investigators have uncovered an eyewitness statement stating he observed three cars driving through the parking lot behind the Texas School Book Depository minutes before the assassination. And, that one car appeared to show a driver holding a radio up to his mouth.

And, we have Dallas police memos that link Igor Vaganov’s red Ford Thunderbird convertible to the apartment of Jack Ruby, the man who murdered Lee Harvey Oswald in the Dallas police headquarters basem*nt on live national television, at the time of the J.D. Tippit murder a few blocks away.

What in the heck was going on?

In Closing

The Igor Vaganov story is suspect on its face.

The many coincidences to the JFK assassination aftermath that followed in Oak Cliff just a mile from his house just don’t add up.

But as with many other threads to the JFK assassination, the Igor Vaganov story is simply another angle that has been lost to history.

Too much time has passed to solve this part of the story.

And, some of the best JFK assassination researchers at the time looked into Vaganov and came up empty.

In fact, in summary in John Berend’ts Esquire article on Igor Vaganov, noted JFK researcher Vincent Salandria said,

“I don’t think he is telling the truth. We’ve caught him in too many lies…None of his stories check out. I still think he’s not telling us why he went down there; I think he probably was involved with something criminal. It could be the assassination. I’m not prepared to say.”

And, two credible witnesses at the Texas Theater put the real Lee Harvey Oswald in the movie theater at the time of the J.D. Tippit murder. Official reports place Oswald in the movie theater and in fact he was arrested there. Patron Jack Davis said Oswald was there at about the time the 1:15 p.m. movie began, and was oddly moving from seat to seat, as if looking for someone. He even briefly sat next to Davis. Theater manager and ticket-taker Butch Burroughs said Oswald came in between 1 p.m. and 1:07 p.m. and that he sold popcorn to Lee Harvey Oswald at nearly 1:15 p.m. If true, how could Lee Harvey Oswald have murdered J.D. Tippit at 1:15 p.m.?

According to Mark Bridger’s follow up article to his 1996 feature on Igor Vaganov in The Dealey Plaza Echo, Vaganov’s wife Anne went through his pockets after they returned to the apartment that Friday. She told Larry Hauke, the Juvenile Officer from Conroe, Texas her father-in-law had called on Friday, November 22 the following on Sunday, November 24 that she found:

• A half-torn king of spades playing card with staples in the corner

• Long distance telephone call receipts from the Holiday Inn, Hapeville, Georgia

• A 3” x 3” piece of paper with the following penciled notation:

  EL 6-6111, E. STRAZDS, 352-1539, ARVIDS, JZAKS

The 3” x 3” paper could contain phone numbers of a friend or associate or maybe an address or perhaps a code.

But the torn king of spades could have been an espionage world trick to identify a contact who possesses the other half.

Was Lee Harvey Oswald moving around the Texas Theater looking for Igor Vaganov who had possession of the other half of the king of spades?

Other reports stated that Butch Burroughs and another man observed police arresting another man from the Texas Theater after Oswald had been arrested and taken through the front door. This man was seen emerging from the balcony and taken out the back-alley door and placed into a Dallas police car. Eyewitnesses Butch Burroughs and Bernard Haire identified this man as Lee Harvey Oswald.

Was this Igor Vaganov?

As for John Berendt?

He’s not as convinced as Salandria and concludes they identified the wrong man. And, while Vaganov was certainly a curious individual who was surrounded by coincidences which lend sinister applications to his visit to Dallas, he was not involved in any nefarious activities surrounding the JFK assassination or Tippit murder.

Perhaps the recent assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump is another case of “coincidences” that came together just at the right time.

You know them.

All of the coincidences that are now coming to light that revealed:

• The Secret Service surrounded the former president with several 5’ 3” DEI-trained female agents who appear to be junior G-men during the immediate assassination attempt aftermath

• Homeland Security agents replaced Secret Service agents who had been redirected to protect Jill Biden at a nearby Pittsburgh event

• The Secret Service failed to secure the closest rooftop that allowed an anonymous 20-year-old loner to get off eight shots before being taken out by a Secret Service sniper

• Secret Service Director Kim Cheatle went on national television and told the world that they didn’t secure the rooftop the sniper used because of the danger putting snipers on a “sloped roof” when the actual Secret Service sniper who killed the accused assassin fired from a sloped roof. Later, reports said that the building was being secured by local law enforcement snipers who were looking outside through windows from inside the building itself

• Director Cheatle told reporters that the sniper rooftop location was outside the perimeter the Secret Service was covering and was left to local law enforcement. However, one of these same local law enforcement agencies immediately sent out a local manager who denied this was the case and that they only had seven police officers handling traffic control in the area

• The accused sniper was noticed almost an hour before the assassination attempt by local Trump supporters, seen by local law enforcement and the Secret Service snipers one of whom apparently took a photo of the assassin, and confronted by two police officers from the very same building rooftop he was on right before the shots were fired. Incredibly, the two officers had boosted one another to the rooftop for a look at the person who immediately pointed his rifle at the officer who immediately dropped to the ground and reported the assassin’s position on the roof over a police radio. Apparently, we are now learning, the Secret Service was on another radio band and never heard the report. Sniper shots immediately occurred right after this encounter with the two officers

• The Communications Director of the Secret Service released a statement that said the reports that the Secret Service had denied the Trump campaigns repeated requests for additional security leading up to the attempted assassination as “simply not true.” Later, he was corrected by his own bosses who released a statement that they did deny requests from the Trump campaign for additional security

• Director Cheatle appeared on a Zoom call with Congressional members and refused to take questions from the Republican members. Then showed up later that night in a suite at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. She was spotted and then chased from the suite by Republican Senators Marsha Blackburn from Tennessee and Senator John Barrasso from Wyoming. Video followed them shouting questions in the Director’s face as she retreated to her hotel room

• F.B.I. reports indicate the accused sniper had several overseas accounts on encrypted platforms that they are still working to gain access to

• Reports surfaced that the Secret Service had reportedly ramped up security for Trump in recent weeks because of an alleged Iranian assassination plot against him

• U.S. cyber security firm CrowdStrike, based in Austin, Texas, suffered a massive nationwide shutdown on Thursday caused by an attempted upgrade reboot. The outage disrupted emergency call centers, banks, airlines and hospitals. Republican conspiracy theorists immediately reported that it was CrowdStrike who helped investigate the 2015 Democratic National Committee cyberattacks and a connection to Russian intelligence services. President Trump had blamed CrowdStrike for an alleged Democratic coverup in Ukraine, a narrative that was generally debunked at the time. Those reports led to President Trump’s attempted impeachment following a phone call in 2019 with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The various conspiracy theories have been repeatedly debunked but The Washington Post reported this week that “the global woe brought unexpected new life to a conspiracy theory involving Russia, Ukraine and the Democratic National Committee that took up considerable oxygen during Trump’s presidency and figured prominently in his first impeachment inquiry.”

• Austin Private Wealth was reported to have shorted massive amounts of Trump Media shares one day before the failed assassination attempt on former President Trump. Later the company issued a public apology and stated they had simply made a clerical error in their statement on “incorrect filing with the SEC” and did not actually make the transactions in question. An article by the finance and crypto platform Finbold by reporter Ana Zirojevic dated July 19 said this about the situation, “Nonetheless, there are still plenty of unanswered questions and details surrounding the suspiciously timed massive shorting of DJT shares, creating fertile ground for various conspiracy theories…only time will tell if these developments are no more than a strange coincidence or something more nefarious was happening.”

• President Joe Biden announced he is stepping down from the Presidential election on Sunday, July 21 via an announcement on Twitter which featured a letter on his own personal letterhead. The President did not announce a replacement and promised a forthcoming statement to the American people later this coming week.

• Later, President Biden released another statement that he was supporting Vice President Kamala Harris.

Wow.

What an incredible week in American history.

In an attempt to get to the truth, a House of Representatives hearing has been scheduled tomorrow, Monday, July 22 with the Secret Service Director. Senators hope to get the truth about what exactly happened in that field in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Perhaps all of these coincidences will be easily answered, and the truth will prevail.

However, I am reminded of this quote Vincent Salandria gave to fellow Philadelphian-JFK researcher Gaeton Fonzi back in 1975 for the final word:

“I’m afraid we were misled.

All the critics, myself included, were misled very early. I see that now. We spent too much time and effort micro analyzing the details of the assassination when all the time it was obvious, it was blatantly obvious that this was a conspiracy. Don’t you think that the men who killed Kennedy had the means to do it in the most sophisticated and subtle way?

They chose not to.

Instead, they picked the shooting gallery that was Dealey Plaza and did it in the most barbarous and openly arrogant manner. The cover story was transparent and designed not to hold, to fall apart at the slightest scrutiny. The forces that killed Kennedy wanted the message clear:

“We are in control and no one— not the President, nor Congress, nor any elected official—no one can do anything about it.”

It was a message to the people that their government was powerless.”

Vincent Salandria.

Stay tuned.