Oswald did not return to New Orleans. Instead, on Wednesday 3 October, he boarded a bus bound for Dallas where he found lodgings at 1026 North Beckley. From there, he went to visit Marina, now living with her friend Ruth Paine in Irving, about ten miles (sixteen kilometres) from Dallas. Marina was just two weeks from giving birth to their second child.

He told her he had spent the previous week in Houston and said nothing about Mexico City or his efforts to get visas for the Soviet Union and Cuba.

He said he would look for a job. Ruth Paine, keen not to be saddled with Oswald, said she had heard from a neighbour that the Schoolbook Depository in Dallas had a vacancy that might suit him.

Oswald applied for the job and got it. He worked hard and conscientiously and, at last, had a supervisor who was pleased with him. He stayed in his lodgings during the week and went to Irving at the weekends, taking a lift from a co-worker who lived there. This was acceptable to Ruth.

The arrangement also suited Oswald, who was able to do some research into the forthcoming visit of President Kennedy and plan his course of action without the distraction of his heavily pregnant wife and their daughter, June. He would also be free to make contact with his master or co-conspirator.*

Marina gave birth to their second daughter on 20 October. Oswald was pleased it had all gone well and was attentive, even loving, to Marina and the baby in hospital, but both Oswald and Marina knew their marriage was still in difficulty.

News of the likely route to be taken by the President leaked into the press on 18 November. The motorcade would make its way from the airport to the Business and Trade Mart for a Presidential luncheon with the local great, good and wealthy.

Oswald’s heart would have missed a beat when he discovered the route was along Main Street, with a right turn into Houston Street and then left into Elm Street. The Schoolbook Depository where he worked was right on the junction of Houston and Elm. From a window he would be able to see the motorcade turning into Houston Street and driving straight towards him. It would still be in his view after taking the sharp left turn at the Depository and along Elm Street where it would pass Grassy Knoll before disappearing into an underpass.

Three options presented themselves. The easiest shot would be from one of the Depository windows as the President’s car came towards him along Houston Street, but virtually all of the security people would be looking ahead and they were almost certain to spot someone pointing a rifle from a Depository window. There were also the problems of making an escape, and hiding the rifle which would undoubtedly lead back to him.

Second, he could wait until the car had turned into Elm Street and shoot the President from behind. There would be confusion about where the shot had come from and perhaps the Depository would not immediately be closed off. In any case, it was his legitimate place of employment and if he acted casually enough he would be allowed past any cursory police check.

Third, he could take up a position on Grassy Knoll, which was a raised belt of grass running along the right-hand side of Elm Street. There would be a lot of people standing and sitting there, but there was also a sturdy fence at the back, separating the Knoll from a car park and commercial buildings. If he took up a position behind the fence he would have a clear shot at the President and those watching the motorcade would have their backs to him. However, he might be seen by someone in the commercial buildings or in the car park. He would have to run fast to evade any pursuers.

He chose – or was told to use – the second option.

One can only imagine how he might have felt on the morning of Friday 22 November. He awoke from a fitful sleep, full of fear, and trembling as he drank his breakfast coffee. But eventually he forced himself into a state of grim determination. He had to succeed; whether he was doing it for himself, or because he was under orders with dire consequences for failure and rich rewards for success. He knew there would never be a better opportunity than this.

Perhaps his thoughts were altruistic: that the world would be a better place after the deed was done. Was he really so devoted to Communism and did he hate America so much?

He would have to try to act as if everything were normal throughout the day, especially after the event.

He had selected a small, unoccupied room on the sixth floor, on the left of the building as one looks out from it. He put the rifle together, checked it thoroughly, and hid it behind some boxes in the room.

At 11.50 a.m. Oswald entered his chosen room without being seen. Most of the other workers in the Depository grouped together in larger rooms, or went outside to get a closer view of their President. He opened the window about 18 inches (45cm) and knelt on the floor to get his height and position right.

The motorcade was due to pass by at a few minutes after 12 noon but Air Force One arrived late at Love Field, and the President asked to have his car stopped so that he could exchange greetings, first with a group of nuns, and then with a group of schoolchildren. It was an interminable wait. What was Oswald thinking? Why do these things never happen right on schedule? Had the authorities been forewarned and changed their plans? Did he have a clean handkerchief at hand to wipe away his perspiration?

He was breathing quickly now; frightened, terrified, but not petrified: he must not freeze. He had to do it.

Oswald would not have been told that there was another gunman to ensure the President’s death. The other shooter probably fired from behind the fence on Grassy Knoll.

The motorcade turned into Houston Street at 12.29 and made its way towards Oswald. He wiped his forehead and then his clammy hands. He strained to see which car held the President and which seat he was occupying, and then … his mind-set moved smoothly into an ethereal state. There was silence. He could no longer hear the cheering and the shouting. Everything happened in his time. He felt he could stop the motorcade if he wished, but there was no need for that. His hands were on the rifle at floor level, he glanced to his right for final confirmation that he would have a clear shot. He was calm now.

The President’s car swung hard left into Elm Street. He raised the rifle and took careful aim at a point ahead of his moving target. The President’s demure wife, Jacqueline, was in his sights. He changed his aim smoothly, targeting the President’s head and squeezed the trigger, as he had been taught in the Marines.

Everything was happening in slow motion. Everything was clear. The first shot was a bit low. He renewed his aim with great care. In real time it took less than two seconds. He fired twice more in quick succession.

Bits of the President’s skull and brain flew off in different directions, one of the larger pieces, perversely, landing backwards on the flat back of the car. Jacqueline Kennedy turned around and picked it up. She was screaming, but Oswald heard nothing.

He put the rifle carefully back behind the boxes and walked quickly down the stairs to the canteen on the second floor. He must not panic. This was a moment of danger, when a sense of reality was beginning to return. Normal sounds filled his ears.

There was already a policeman in the canteen. Act normally. Tell him you work here. Ask him what’s happening. Ask him why the police are here. Ask if you can go outside to see what’s happening: that’s what a normal person would do.

The policeman had no orders to prevent anyone from leaving the building. FBI officers on the scene outside were in turmoil, worrying about the President – whose car had now gone off at speed to the nearest hospital – and the other VIPs. Some had, however, started to give orders to control traffic and pedestrians and to investigate what exactly had happened.

Just over three long minutes after the shooting Oswald left the building by the front door. The building was sealed moments later.

He caught a bus to his lodgings where he spent a few minutes collecting some of his papers, including his passport, and a few other personal items, but nothing bulky or heavy. The enormity of what he had done must have been hitting him hard by now, though he would have been relieved it was all over.

He caught another bus that took him nearly a mile further away from the scene of his crime, and got off to walk to a local cinema: the Texas Theatre. Had this all been carefully planned and rehearsed? Was he going to meet someone in the cinema, or immediately afterwards? Someone who would assist his escape to a safe place? That is what they would have told him, but he was too naive to realise he could not be allowed to live to tell the tale.

Officer J. D. Tippit of the Dallas Police, on a routine patrol along 10th Street, saw Oswald walking purposefully along the road. On seeing the police car Oswald hesitated, half turned as if to run away, but then – remembering to keep calm – he continued to walk in the same direction as before. The hesitation had been enough to make Tippit suspicious, so he stopped the car with a view to questioning Oswald, not about the assassination of the President but simply to satisfy himself that he was not up to something sinister. It was 1.15 p.m.

Oswald panicked. He drew his revolver and shot officer Tippit dead.

Several people had witnessed this from a distance and one of them watched Oswald walk quickly towards the Texas Theatre. Still in a panic, he rushed in without paying. The cinema receptionist called the police. The police, suspecting it might be the man who had shot their colleague, arrived in force in several patrol cars.

In the ensuing scuffle in the cinema Oswald drew his gun, but did not fire. He punched one of the policemen and kicked out violently, but was eventually overpowered. It was 1.50 p.m.

Oswald was taken to Dallas jail where he was charged with the murder of Officer Tippit. Within half-an-hour of his arrest he was also suspected of murdering President Kennedy.

This news was transmitted quickly through police channels. The messages to the FBI, and later the CIA, mentioned that Oswald claimed to have been forced into his actions by the Mafia. Senior FBI and CIA officers called for the files on Oswald and were distressed to find he had not been considered a threat.

Oswald was questioned for several hours in Dallas jail. He had no lawyer present and no notes were taken.

On Sunday morning, 24 November, Oswald was to be moved from the city jail to the county jail. The press were informed and the time was changed from early morning to ‘after ten o’clock’ to accommodate their deadlines and broadcast schedules. Jack Ruby was informed of this by one of his many sources; probably a policeman.

About twenty press, radio and television representatives were given passes to enter the basement area of the city jail. They were all well known to the police and most of them were nodded into the building without even showing their passes. Ruby was equally well known and was also nodded through.

Prisoners were normally transferred by police car from within the secure basement area. A sturdy roller gate was lifted to allow the car to drive up a ramp onto the street. However, this was the man accused of assassinating the President. A thousand or more people were gathering in the street and things could turn nasty; so they hired an armoured van which, unfortunately, was too high to reverse into the basement. Oswald would have to be led from the elevator, along the level basement area where the car would normally be parked, and up part of the ramp to the van, which had been reversed as far as the gate.

The twenty authorised reporters – and Ruby – and at least the same number of police officers waited for the handcuffed and strongly escorted Oswald to emerge from the lift.

Questions were shouted, camera bulbs flashed, reporters jostled for position, police tried to keep a clear path to the waiting van.

It was a simple matter for Jack Ruby to step forward and fire off a single pistol shot into Oswald’s stomach. Oswald died within two hours in the hospital to which President Kennedy had been taken two days earlier.

Jack Ruby was a complex man.

Jacob – known as Jack – was the fifth of eight children born to Joseph and Fanny Rubenstein in a Chicago Jewish neighbourhood. Both parents were penniless Polish immigrants. Juvenile courts decided the parents were unfit to bring up the children and some of them, including Jack, spent up to five years in foster homes.

In 1947 Jack and two of his brothers legally changed their family name to Ruby.

Jack developed into a tough character, determined always to be able to defend himself. For most of his early life – starting even when he was still at school – he dabbled in small personal businesses run from street corners or door-to-door. At one stage he was proud to be selling busts of President Roosevelt, whom he greatly admired.

He always dealt in cash, which he kept in his pockets or – after he prospered a little – in his car. Not surprisingly, therefore, he was often in trouble with the tax authorities. He owed $40,000 in taxes at the time he murdered Oswald.

There is no evidence that he attempted to bribe or seek favours from policemen, but he did give them discounted rates at his clubs. All bar and club owners did that sort of thing. Many policemen patronised his clubs and, naturally, he got to know them and they him.

The Warren Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy believed ‘that the evidence does not establish a significant link between Ruby and organized crime. Both State and Federal officials have indicated that Ruby was not affiliated with organised criminal activity and numerous persons have reported that Ruby was not connected with such activity.’†

Ruby was, however, an inveterate gambler and was well known and accepted in gambling circles, which would have included many people in organised crime.

He was 5ft 9in. (152cm) tall and weighed 12st. 7lb (175lb; 80kg). He was generally a mild, soft-spoken, fashionably dressed man known for his generosity to friends and those in need. However, he had a vicious temper when riled and often resorted to physical violence. He kept himself fit and strong, regularly working out in the gym.

His temper led him, at times, to attack people who offended his Jewish origins – though he was not, himself, religious – the military, or even the President. At other times he would be violent with his staff and cabaret performers if they displeased him. Those he attacked nearly always sustained noticeable physical injury. He served as his own bouncer at his clubs. He once put a heavyweight boxer in hospital. On another occasion he disarmed a man who had drawn a gun on him, beat him almost to death, and threw him down the stairs.

He carried a gun for protection, as he always carried cash, but never used it in fights other than, perhaps, to pistol-whip the occasional unfortunate.

This, then, was nobody’s servant. He may have performed a favour for a genuine friend, but he would not have been bullied or bribed into the act of killing Oswald. It was most likely his own personal decision to kill the man who assassinated ‘his’ President.

On the other hand, would whoever was behind the assassination have allowed Oswald to testify in open court?

The Mafia, the CIA, the Soviet Union, Cuba, or loose cannons (or rogues) within these bodies were all front-line suspects. None of them could risk the possibility of disclosure. To a greater or lesser degree, they all suspected each other of commissioning Oswald to do the shooting, and that the responsible party (or parties) would try to implicate others.

Even if Oswald had held his nerve – not shot Officer Tippit – and escaped the hands of the law, it seems unlikely that he would have been allowed to live.

From a moment after the death of the President, and in the days and weeks that followed, senior officials in the CIA, the FBI, the White House and the new President himself (President Lyndon B. Johnson) delved through files, listened to tapes of telephone conversations, held meetings, made decisions, gave orders and took action.

It is now clear that those decisions, orders and actions did more to change, destroy and ‘create’ evidence that generated confusion and hid the truth, than to answer the question of who was responsible for the assassination.

The White House press office asked the news media to refrain from speculation about either the Soviet or Cuban governments being responsible for the assassination of President Kennedy. The media, in an atmosphere of national tragedy, honoured the request, much as they would show great restraint towards the grieving Kennedy family in the days and weeks ahead.

It would have been President Johnson’s worst nightmare. He had suddenly been thrust into the world’s hottest seat with the immediate double task of leading a nation in mourning and establishing himself as a credible President. As a ‘Dixiecrat’ leader he had to walk a tightrope between a welfareist agenda and the conservative leanings of his supporters in the south, many of whom would have wanted to invade Castro’s Cuba. If the nation came to believe that Cuba or the Soviet Union had been responsible for Kennedy’s death, Johnson would have been under immense pressure to take physical rather than verbal retaliation. This could have developed into another nuclear stand-off, or worse.

Analysis of the international situation at the time confirms that it would not have been in the interests of either the Soviet Union or Cuba to enrage the United States government and people by killing their President.

In 1992 the United States Congress passed the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act. Since then, a multitude of declassified documents, audiotapes of witness interviews and phone calls, and other information on the assassination have been released from government archives. Some of the documents were liberally redacted (sensitive information blacked out). Many more documents and other pieces of evidence have not yet been released, and some files may remain closed in perpetuity.

There are millions of pages of detailed evidence and learned research on events leading up to the assassination; the result is thousands of contradictions, inconsistencies, false trails, gaps and more questions. None of it entirely rules out the possibility that rogue elements in the Mafia, the CIA, or the right-wing political or military communities could have been responsible. Some allege that President Johnson himself was implicated in the assassination.

There is little evidence, however, of research into the possibility that rogue elements in either the Soviet or Cuban governments might have played a central part. From the American perspective it would have been impossible to distinguish between a government-backed conspiracy and a conspiracy led by rogue elements within those governments. The White House had said the subject was off-limits: even if the rogue-elements theory were true the American government did not wish to know.

If either the Soviet or Cuban governments had discovered the assassination was the work of their own rogue agents they would have taken steps to cover it up rather than risk accusations of appointing scapegoats to take the blame for what others would believe was government-sponsored ‘executive action’.

The evidence suggests that Oswald’s time in New Orleans and, more particularly, his visits to the Soviet Consulate in Mexico City, were orchestrated by the KGB. Oswald had been invited, or instructed, to go to the consulate where he was briefed by Kostikov (the KGB assassin expert) and Nechiporenko.‡ From Mexico, he went straight to Dallas, where he had no home and to where the President would be paying a visit. His job at the Depository was fortuitous, but alternative arrangements would otherwise have been made to shoot from somewhere else along the President’s route.

Khrushchev would not, under any conceivable circumstances, have authorised or condoned the assassination of President Kennedy with whom he had been fostering a better relationship since the Cuban Crisis.

However, Ivan Serov, since his demotion in March 1963, was no longer part of the inner circles of Soviet leadership. He had lost his position as head of the GRU and no longer took orders directly from Khrushchev, the Politburo or the Central Committee.

In the course of the social meetings he may have had with Andropov and Kryuchkov after his removal from office, Serov may well have raised the possibility of taking revenge on Kennedy. At first it would have been speculative, a ‘what if we …’ game. Then one of them could well have mentioned that Valery Kostikov from the KGB’s Department Thirteen (sabotage and assassination) was at that time in Mexico City, as was Oleg Nechiporenko. The game soon became a plan and Andropov and Kryuchkov would be able to put it into action on behalf of Serov.

Thus, they would have identified the Soviet Consulate in Mexico City as the best place from which to operate: there were only three members of staff and they were all KGB officers. Using Mexico City had the added attraction of not involving any of the KGB stations in the United States.

In police investigation terminology, Ivan Serov had the motive and opportunity to arrange to have President Kennedy assassinated. One might go even further and suggest that he had stronger motivation, better opportunity and greater resources to do so than anyone else in the conspiracy line-up.

KGB Chairman Vladimir Semichastny said that at the time of President Kennedy’s assassination the KGB’s exclusive concern was to be absolutely certain of its non-involvement in the assassination.§ This statement suggests official concern with the possibility of unauthorised KGB involvement.

Semichastny may have discovered, or suspected, involvement by any or all of Serov, Andropov, Kryuchkov, Kostikov and Nechiporenko. He could not, however, act against any of them for fear of global accusation and condemnation of Soviet involvement in the assassination. Indeed, it would be reasonable for even him to have been directly involved with this gang of five, because Andropov and Kryuchkov were his close allies. Semichastny did not approve of Khrushchev’s actions during the Missile Crisis and, less than a year after Kennedy’s assassination, he joined forces with Leonid Brezhnev and Alexander Shelepin to bring Khrushchev down. Andropov and Kryuchkov were later appointed chairmen of the KGB.

Serov was already in disgrace and had been removed from the public eye over the Penkovsky business and the alleged bad performance of the GRU in Cuba, so there was no need to take any further action to keep him out of the news. However, the Soviet propaganda machine, though ruthlessly efficient, was noted for its tendency for overkill, and so it was that they inspired – or at least failed to deny – rumours of Serov’s death in 1963 by alcohol abuse or suicide. This adds to the suspicion that Ivan Aleksandrovich Serov’s sins were more disturbing than just having served as the superior officer and friend of a traitor.

* The US Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that there was a high probability that two gunmen fired at the President.

† Warren Commission Report, p. 181.

‡ Consul Pavel Yatskov appears to have played little or no role in managing Oswald.

§ See Oleg Nechiporenko, ‘Chapter 7’, Passport to Assassination (Carol Publishing Group, 1993). Translated from Russian by Todd P. Bludeau.

Andropov succeeded Semichastny as chairman of the KGB in 1967 and Kryuchkov was appointed chairman in 1988.