“The chemistry of the JFK conspiracy soup was composed of a toxic mixture of drugs, guns and selected corrupt police, blended in a secret recipe of rogue intelligence operations, topped with a mafioso sauce and heated to a boil by hotheaded Cubans.” — Gary Hill, The Wizard of Ozwald
Hitting bookstores at the same time as the movie adaptation of the musical Wicked is proving a box office smash is Gary Hill’s aptly titled The Wizard of Ozwald: What We Know Now That We Didn’t Know Then (TrineDay). It’s a sequel of sorts to Hill’s previous book The Other Oswald: A Wilderness of Mirrors (2020), which told the parallel stories of Lee Harvey Oswald and Robert Edward Webster.
In Wizard, Oswald is the fulcrum around which the plot revolves. It’s a wildly ambitious undertaking by Hill, not without some welcomed bits of humor added in (Oswald’s penchant for taking buses and taxis, for instance), who clearly has amassed mounds of research and material and has thought a lot about the pivotal event of his life — the assassination of President Kennedy — and how such a dreadful act came to be. A former educator, Hill peppers his complex narrative with references to Shakespeare, pop music, and a wealth of primary source documents and observations from fellow assassination researchers.
Hill’s thesis focus on who the entity or entities were that manipulated Lee Harvey Oswald into forever going down in history as the alleged assassin of the president in Dallas on November 22, 1963. It’s important to note Oswald’s guilt was considered far from certain by those who arrested him — never mind that Oswald himself, enduring hours of interrogation without any legal assistance, claimed he was a patsy in the whole affair.
Out of the tragic and bizarre events of that weekend 61 years ago, Hill sets out in his nearly 300-page-tome that Oswald long held the interest of particular individuals years before November 1963. Lest we forget, Oswald was only 24, but had lived through a stint with the Marines, defected to Russia, married and fathered two baby girls, and never could rub two nickels together, whether he be in New Orleans or Dallas-Fort Worth.
Hill takes us from the defection, namely the way in which Oswald physically got to Moscow, under the cover of the Unitarian-backed Albert Schweitzer College, the introduction to Marina, and the dance of Cold War intrigue that seemed to punctuate whatever Oswald was doing behind the Iron Curtain and later stateside.
For Hill, there is one mad wizard zany enough to run things behind the ubiquitous curtain — the CIA’s J.J. “I’m not privy to who struck John” Angleton. In a kind of bizarre echo to The Wizard of Oz motif that Hill employs successfully, one cannot help but smile wryly when considering that on the morning of the assassination, Oswald told his ride, co-worker B. Wesley Frazier, that what he had in the paper bag he was carrying with him were curtain rods.
Angleton is obviously the main antagonist in The Wizard of Ozwald, and Hill shows a vast understanding of the players around Angleton, the various CIA projects he was involved with, and how he might have steered Oswald beginning not months, but years before 1963.
Hill even attempts to put the ramifications of the assassination into a wider geopolitical perspective, reaching across Atlantic shores to what was going on in Italy, primarily, at the same time. For instance, Hill touches on the Centro Mondiale Commerciale corporation, the Rome-based arm of an organization called Permindex. In Angleton and his colleagues in CIA, David Atlee Philipps and Frank Wisner, you have a likely connection between mafia chieftain Sam Giancana and the Mafia on one hand, and Michele Sindona and the Vatican Bank on the other.
Rob Couteau wrote, “Angleton became the key American figure controlling all right wing and neofascist political and paramilitary groups in Italy in the postwar period.” This would have positioned Angleton, a Catholic, directly in American manipulations of postwar Italian politics, making him intimately familiar with Operation Gladio, a stay-behind operation Hill picked up on as integral in the later assault on JFK. How? As chief of counterintelligence, Angleton would also have been deeply familiar with the “strategy of tension” unfolding in Italy, and likely would have known the best terrorists and assassins the world over.
After all, Angleton, Wisner and Dulles recruited Gladio kingpin Licio Gelli, puppetmaster of Italy’s rogue government-within-a-government, Propaganda Due (P2).
Hill also unpacks some delicious aspects of Dallas mostly ignored in assassination literature: see, for instance, the chapter on the other Texas School Book Depository, and the mysterious package found in the post office addressed to Oswald days after the assassination. Hill also expounds in great detail on the contradictions of Oswald in Mexico, the all-important trip he — or whoever was impersonating him — took across the border two months before the assassination.
A sequence on June Cobb dovetails nicely with Mary Haverstick’s A Woman I Know, until that narrative took a wild left turn in its final act.
There is also compelling material on what really went behind the Watergate scandal and the fall of Richard Nixon.
In addition to Angleton, The Wizard of Ozwald suspects Ruth Paine concealed much more than the persona she played as a caring Quaker housewife who befriended Marina Oswald. Even Marina does not get off the hook so easily, with Hill pointing out strange connections with “the other Oswald,” Webster, and even Marina’s second husband, Kenneth Porter.
There’s a sense of urgency in The Wizard of Ozwald, as if Hill wanted to get his research out while he still could — and hope that his efforts might accelerate some kind of national healing toward one of the most seismic events in history.
It should be noted the reader might benefit from reading The Other Oswald first, and to have a fairly decent understanding of the facets of the case before entering the Land of Ozwald.