Lee Harvey Oswald was working for the Soviet Union

The argument

This is a speculative reconstruction rather than a claim of established fact, and the argument presents it as such: what it offers is a case that Lee Harvey Oswald could plausibly have been acting for the Soviet Union, assembled from what is known of his life. The starting point is his relationship with the Soviet Union and with communist values, described as obsessive and intense. After leaving the marines he tried to defect to Moscow; rather than accept him outright, the Soviet Union placed him in Minsk under the surveillance of the KGB. That sequence does two things for the argument. It establishes a documented connection between Oswald and the Soviet state, and it establishes that the KGB had him under observation, which is to say the service knew who he was, what he believed, and how strongly he believed it. From there the reasoning proceeds by fit. Hiring someone for an assassination calls for a person with both motive and capability. Oswald's known hatred of American politics supplies the motive; the above-average shooting skills he had learned in the marines supply the capability. Set against the political turmoil of the time, the argument runs, he looks like an ideal candidate to hire, and if he was hired then the killing was Soviet work. What that chain can carry should be stated plainly. Every link in it is circumstantial. The case is built from sympathies, surveillance, and marksmanship, and at most it shows that Oswald would have suited such a purpose, not that he was ever approached, recruited, or instructed. Nothing in the account establishes an order from the Soviet Union, and the claim that the Soviet Union killed Kennedy rests here on possibility rather than on evidence of the hiring it describes.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Lee Harvey Oswald would have been a terrible option for Russia to hire as an assassin. He was already on the U.S.'s radar for being court-martialed twice while in the marines and showing interest in communist ideals, so it would have been difficult for him to go unseen. The United States had high tensions with Russia during this time, so to hire Oswald as a KGB agent to assassinate Kennedy would have been too obvious and risky.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P4] There is no evidence to support this theory.