One pawn in the Cold War who needed a way out before it was too late was a young ex-Marine, Lee Harvey Oswald.

In following Kennedy's path through a series of critical conflicts, we have been moving more deeply into the question: Why was John F. Kennedy murdered? Now as we begin to trace Oswald's path, which will converge with Kennedy's, we can see the emergence of a strangely complementary question: Why was Lee Harvey Oswald so tolerated and supported by the government he betrayed?

On October 31, 1959, Lee Harvey Oswald, who had been discharged two months earlier from the U.S. Marine Corps in California, presented himself at the American Embassy in Moscow to Consul Richard E. Snyder. Oswald said his purpose in coming was to renounce his U.S. citizenship. He handed Snyder a note he had written, in which he requested that his citizenship be revoked and affirmed that "my allegiance is to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics." According to the Warren Report, "Oswald stated to Snyder that he had voluntarily told Soviet officials that he would make known to them all information concerning the Marine Corps and his specialty therein, radar operation, as he possessed." To the Soviet officials who received his offer, Oswald said he "intimated that he might know something of special interest." The Soviets had reason to think Oswald knew "something of special interest."  From September 1957 to November 1958 Oswald had been a Marine Corps radar operator at Atsugi Air Force Base in Japan. Atsugi, located about thirty-five miles southwest of Tokyo, served as the CIA's main operational base in the Far East. It was one of two bases from which the CIA's top-secret U‑2 spy planes took off on their flights over the Soviet Union and China. The U‑2 was the creation of the CIA's Richard Bissell, also the main author of the Bay of Pigs scenario. Bissell worked closely on the U‑2's Soviet overflights with CIA director Allen Dulles. Radar operator Oswald was a small cog in the machine, but he was learning how it worked. From his radar control room at Atsugi, where he had a "crypto" clearance (higher than "top secret"), Oswald listened regularly to the U‑2's radio communications.

After Atsugi, Oswald was reassigned as a radar operator to Marine Air Control Squadron No. 9 in Santa Ana, California, which was attached to the larger Marine Air Station in EI Toro. Oswald continued to have access to secret information that would have been of interest to a Cold War enemy. Former Marine Corps Lieutenant John E. Donovan, who was Oswald's officer in the Santa Ana radar unit, testified to the Warren Commission that Oswald "had the access to the location of all bases in the west coast area, all radio frequencies for all squadrons; all tactical call signs, and the relative strength of all squadrons, number and type of aircraft in a squadron, who was the commanding officer, the authentication code of entering and exiting the ADIZ, which stands for Air Defense Identification Zone. He knew the range of our radar. He knew the range of our radio. And he knew the range of the surrounding units' radio and radar."

However, Donovan's knowledge of Oswald's connection to the top-secret U‑2 was clearly off limits for his Warren Commission questioners. Their avoidance of the U‑2 puzzled Donovan. Wasn't Oswald's possible access to top-secret U‑2 information a critical issue to probe in relation to his defection? Donovan told author John Newman years later that, at the end of his testimony, he asked a Warren Commission lawyer, "Don't you want to know anything about the U‑2?" The lawyer said, "We asked you exactly what we wanted to know from you and we asked you everything we wanted for now and that is all. And if there is anything else we want to ask you, we will." Donovan asked a fellow witness who also knew Oswald's U‑2 connection, "Did they ask you about the U‑2?" He said, "No, not a thing."

On May 1, 1960, six months after Oswald defected to the Soviet Union, a U‑2 was shot down by the Soviets for the first time. The downing of the U‑2, piloted by Francis Gary Powers, wrecked the Paris summit meeting between President Eisenhower and Premier Khrushchev. Gary Powers later raised the question whether his plane may not have been shot down as a result of information Oswald handed over to the Soviets. Powers's question was at least reasonable. It reinforces the case that Oswald's volunteering all the information he had as a Marine radar specialist to the Soviets was an apparently criminal act.

Yet when Oswald returned to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow after working for over a year at a Soviet factory in Minsk, he was welcomed back by American officials with open arms. Not only did the United States make no move to prosecute him, but the embassy gave him a loan to return to the country he had betrayed. The toleration of Oswald's apparent treason extended to his later obtaining a new passport overnight. On June 25, 1963, Oswald was miraculously issued a passport in New Orleans twenty-four hours after his application. He identified his destination as the Soviet Union.

After analyzing this strange history in her classic work on the Warren Commission, Accessories after the Fact, Sylvia Meagher concluded: "Decision after decision, the [State] Department removed every obstacle before Oswald — a defector and would-be expatriate, self-declared enemy of his native country, self-proclaimed discloser of classified military information, and later self-appointed propagandist for Fidel Castro — on his path from Minsk to Dallas."