Oswald in the doorway: the blog of the Oswald Innocence Campaign, by Ralph Cinque

• Martin Shackelford Oswald studied Russian on his own in the military. Lee Rankin mentioned that he also received some Russian language instruction at the military's Monterey School of Languages while in California. When he arrived in Russia, Marina mistook him for a Balkan native, due to the limitations of his Russian, but it improved while he lived in Minsk.

Ralph Cinque: The thing is that there is no evidence that Oswald studied Russian on his own in the military. Furthermore, Russian is not the kind of language you can study on your own. And if anyone doubts it, then get a book on Russian, study it, and see how far you get. Oswald had no CDs, DVDs, or internet, so forget any of that. There did exist at the time a few LP records for learning Russian, but there is no evidence that Oswald had them, and you can't assume that he did- just because you want to. 

John Armstrong interviewed 6 of Oswald's Marine buddies from Japan, and all 6 said that he did nothing with Russian over there. And at no time did he express any desire to learn Russian. There is simply NOTHING of a concrete nature linking Oswald to the study of Russian in Japan.

But, he left Japan in October 1958 and traveled to San Francisco by ship. Then he was on leave for one full month- November. Then, he reported for duty at Santa Ana in California in December, and multiple witnesses there said that he was already speaking and reading Russian. Then, the next month, in January 1959, he took and barely based a Russian proficiency exam in which he got two more answers right than wrong. We are talking about a young man with an 8th grade education who was dyslexic. 

There is no evidence that Oswald went to the Language Institute in Monterrey, California, and listen up, Marty: I really hope that you can find the evidence because if you do, it means the government has been lying about it for 50 years. The US Military has always denied that Oswald obtained any Russian instruction from them. So, I would love it if you could prove them wrong. But, you really shouldn't make such claims without providing the evidence. 

And yes, Marina took Lee for a Balkan, but you're saying it like it's a bad thing. If she had said that she knew right away that he was an American, that would have signaled the limitations of his Russian. But, all she said was that he "spoke with an accent". She never said she had any difficulty understanding him. She never said he had any difficulty understanding her. She never said there was the slightest problem with their communication. We're talking about Russian here. Russian. 

The objective truth is that it is amazing how much Russian Oswald learned, and I mean before he went over there. And yes, of course, his Russian must have improved during the 3 years that he lived there. And yes, the Soviets did provide him with a tutor, but it wasn't an all day thing. It wasn't the equivalent of the Monterrey School. He worked at a radio factory in Minsk all day, so how much time could he have spent studying Russian? And when he wasn't working, he did a lot of socializing; he made a lot of friends; he obviously had an interest in meeting women, and all of that is time-consuming as well. 

The great researcher Jack White once said that anyone who doesn't accept the Two Oswalds thesis of John Armstrong has to be fundamentally lacking in intelligence. The one he calls "Harvey" is the one who went to Russia, and he was introduced to Russian as a child. It's a major reason why Oswald was chosen for the False Defector Program. 

The evidence for it is overwhelming. For instance, Palmer McBride worked with "Harvey" at a dental lab in New Orleans in 1957-1958 while "Lee" was in Japan. You should read what he has to say about that.