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

John McAdams asks why anyone would bother making phony images of Oswald. 

I'm surprised that he would ask that question. Because: he's heard of John Armstrong. He's got a page ridiculing John Armstrong on his website. He doesn't have a page ridiculing Ralph Cinque, a good man always knowing his limitations and all. 

We know that some of the phony images are composite images in which it is half "Lee's" face and half "Harvey's" face. Why do that? So that their identities could be merged, so that one could easily be taken for the other. After all, it's not like they were identical twins. Lee was two inches taller and a lot heavier and huskier. So, how do you make that work? With composite photos like this one:

That is a composite photo, and it's pretty grotesque. 

So, that's one reason: to merge Harvey and Lee.

But, there were other reasons to post fraudulent images of Oswald. The image published in the Ft. Worth newspaper covering his defection involve a totally fraudulent image.

That may have been the other Oswald, but I'm not at all sure. Why didn't they publish a real image of the Oswald who defected to Russia? It might be because both Lee and Harvey lived in Ft. Worth at various times, and they didn't want to raise questions among people who may have known them.  

The phony image from Mexico City were made, presumably, to foster the ruse that Oswald went there, which he did not.

The phony Marine pictures of Oswald may have been made simply because there were few real images of him. The whole course of the Marine tour of the Oswald of fame is rather baffling. He joined the Marines in 1956, just like the other Oswald, but then he had a period while he was in the Marines in which he was living as a civilian in New Orleans, living with Marguerite, and working at the Pfisterer Dental Lab as a delivery boy, and paling around with Palmer McBride. That started in September 1957 and went until the summer of 1958. No one has ever tried to deny that Oswald worked at Pfisterer, and the day after the assassination, the FBI stormed the place and confiscated all their records. But, some have challenged the dates given by McBride. But, it's ridiculous to challenge them. McBride said that soon after it all began that Sputnik happened, and he and Oswald were all excited about it. That was early October 1957. That's in the story, so he can't be wrong about the dates. So, why did Harvey have that long leave of absence in the middle of his Marine tour of duty? I figure they just wanted him out of the way because Lee was in Japan and they could not have the record of another Lee Harvey Oswald stateside at the same time. But then, in August 1958, Harvey had to resume his Marine career, and he was sent to Japan and then to Taiwan. The whole purpose of sending Harvey to the Far East was to merge his identity with Lee. There was no other reason. It was just to send him over there to return as the Oswald who had gone there in September 1957.

But, the fact is that there are few Marine images of Harvey. There are many more of Lee, and those are the ones we see. 

Really, I think it's fair to say that the merging of "Harvey" and "Lee" was the primary reason for the many phony images of the Oswald of fame. And that's why, it's very fair to say that if you study the JFK assassination without getting involved with John Armstrong's work, you are going to be floundering in the dark- forever.