Hired to Kill Oswald and Pre­vent the Assas­si­na­tion of JFK

by Dick Rus­sell
2003, Car­roll & Graf
ISBN 0786712422
576 pages

Pub­lish­er com­ments
On the for­ti­eth anniver­sary of the JFK assas­si­na­tion: the fas­ci­nat­ing sto­ry of the man hired to kill Oswald, revised and expand­ed with a decade’s worth of new declas­si­fied infor­ma­tion Car­roll & Graf has been in the fore­front of pro­duc­ing books about the Kennedy assas­si­na­tion. ...It has come up with a win­ner, ...this mam­moth study of one of the most mys­te­ri­ous fig­ures on the fringes of the assas­si­na­tion: Richard Case Nag­ell, described as the man ‘hired to kill Oswald and pre­vent the assas­si­na­tion of JFK.’ With painstak­ing care, Rus­sell sets out to recon­struct the strange life of Nag­ell, a for­mer mem­ber of a super-secret army intel­li­gence, the sole sur­vivor of two air crash­es, a con­tract agent for both the CIA and the KGB at dif­fer­ent times.... [Nag­ell] was ulti­mate­ly prod­ded by the Rus­sians to head Oswald away from his role in the Dal­las plot... [or, fail­ing that, ] to kill him.... Unsure who was call­ing the shots, [Nag­ell] lost his nerve, warned the CIA and FBI of the impend­ing dis­as­ter, then had him­self arrest­ed.... He spent years in jail, while lawyers wran­gled over his san­i­ty. [In 1995, three years after the orig­i­nal pub­li­ca­tion of this book and the day after he was sub­poe­naed by the Assas­si­na­tion Records Review Board, Nag­ell died under sus­pect cir­cum­stances in his Los Ange­les home.]

THIS BOOK IS IN PRINT. Avail­able com­mer­cial­ly. Learn more about Dick Rus­sell.