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

 I now know who took that staged photo of Marina and Marguerite, with SS Agent Mike Howard behind them, supposedly at Parkland Hospital on 11/24. It was Mason Lankford. Who's he, you ask? I'll tell you who he was. But first, look at this image, which is from the Dallas Morning News, because it says in the caption, their caption, that Mason Lankford took the photo.

Mason Lankford was one of those guys who went by his middle name. His full name was John Mason Lankford. He was raised in the Dallas area, and he attended North Texas Agricultural College, which had a strong military program. It was part of the Navy's V12 officer training program, which was a scholarship program for students with a high potential to become naval officers. He served in the Navy during WW2 and then became an agent in the Office of Naval Intelligence.

After the war, Lankford returned to Dallas and was employed in corporate security at various defense contractors, starting with Convair, which went on to merge with General Dynamics. In the late 1950s, he worked for Temco Aircraft Corporation, a large defense contractor. One of the largest investors in Temco, and a long-time director there, was David Harold Byrd, the owner of the Texas School Book Depository building. But, guess who also worked for Convair in Fort Worth in the 1950s? LHO's brother Robert Oswald (but, you are in the dark if you haven't read HARVEY AND LEE by John Armstrong and don't know about the two Oswalds), as well as Roscoe White, who reportedly knew Oswald in the Marines (although I don’t know which Oswald he knew; both Oswalds were in the Marines), and White went on to become a Dallas Police officer, but not until 1963. And White used Lankford as a reference to the DPD when he applied.  

I realize that this is getting very complex, but it is widely believed that Roscoe White was deeply involved in the assassination. Some believe he was a shooter in Dealey Plaza, and many more believe that he posed as Oswald in the Backyard photos. Roscoe White was short, about 5’6”, as was the man in the photos, and he had the anvil-like chin that we see in the Backyard photos.

This whole time, Lankford was a Special Agent for the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) in Dallas. And he was close friends with Secret Service Agent Mike Howard, who is in the staged photo of Marina and Marguerite, supposedly at Parkland Hospital. He is the man closest to us who seems to be wearing a toupee’. And if he wasn’t wearing one, then I suspect they touched up his hair in post, which is short for “post-production.” I’m a filmmaker.

Mike Howard was put in charge of securing Fort Worth for JFK’s visit. Notoriously, he is reportedly the one who let the SS agents go bar-hopping and get drunk the night before the assassination. And because they were doing that, firemen were brought in to guard JFK at the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth the night of November 21.

Why firemen, you ask? Well, Mike Howard asked Mason Lankford to help him secure Fort Worth for JFK’s visit- and remember, they were thick as thieves- but, in addition to everything else, Mason Lankford was the Tarrant County Fire Marshall (which he did on a volunteer basis) and he knew a lot of firemen.

Supposedly, at the time of assassination, Lankford was in a restaurant with his General Dynamics buddies, and his doings after that are murky. But then, it gets clear. On Sunday morning, Howard was in charge of securing Oswald’s family, and he asked Lankford to help him.

I’m going to stop a moment and reiterate the bizarre events that occurred, where LIFE reporters transported Marguerite and Marina from Irving to Dallas on Saturday morning to visit Oswald, and then, for some reason, instead of taking them back to the Paine house in Irving, checked them into a hotel on the outskirts of Dallas, the Executive Inn. We can be absolutely certain that the Secret Service guarded their rooms the whole night. And then, the next morning, it was Mike Howard who went knocking at the door to take charge of Marina. The plan was to take her to the home of Dallas Police Chief Jess Burry, which they did. They did not let her go to Ruth Paine’s to get her things, but they did let her call Ruth from the Chief’s house to ask her to gather her things, which someone got.  

Now, at some point in all that, they informed Marina that Oswald had been shot. Reportedly, it was Mike Howard who did that. In her Warren Commission testimony, Marina said that they were driving in the car when he told her. She claimed that he did it in steps, first telling her that Oswald had been shot but that he was still alive and getting help. And then later, he told her that he had died.  She said that then, they went to the Inn of the Six Flags and got checked in. It’s been claimed that Lankford chose the Inn of the Six Flags. And then, she and Robert began making funeral arrangements. She never said anything about going to Parkland Hospital to view Oswald’s body.

Reportedly, Lankford and Robert Oswald shared a room at the Inn of the Six Flags. And they knew each other from Convair. Oswald referred to him as “Mason,” so he knew that that’s the name he went by.

There’s a rumor that during all this, Lankford got on the phone with Lyndon Johnson. And then he (Lankford) tried very hard to convince Marina to have Oswald cremated, but she opted not to. But, Lankford was very much involved in Oswald’s funeral and burial.

It's interesting that Oswald tried to call a supposedly “former” intelligence agent named John Hurt in Raleigh, North Carolina the night of November 23.  Right nearby in Nags Head was a large training facility of the Office of Naval Intelligence, from which the false defector to the Soviet Union program was hatched and operated. Coincidence?

Despite his involvement, Mason Lankford is a like a ghost. He was never interviewed by the FBI or the Warren Commission.  And when you think about his connections: with General Dynamics, Max Clark, I. B. Hale, White Russians like Peter Gregory, SS agent Mike Howard, and of course the Office of Naval Intelligence, it’s perplexing.  Through his General Dynamics connections, Lankford probably knew Frank Pace, Fred Korth, and John Connally, as well as Joseph H. Himes, the former business partner of Lee Harvey Oswald’s uncle, James Coker.

Marguerite Oswald never mentioned Lankford either, even though she was a big name-dropper. She was practically his neighbor in Fort Worth, as were Peter Gregory and David Atlee Phillips. Lankford’s photo of her and Marina was attached to Paul Gregory’s 2013 New York Times article for the 50^th.  Paul was the son of Peter.

Here's another eerie connection between Marguerite Oswald and Mason Lankford.  Lankford was tight with the owner of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Amon Carter, for whose wife Marguerite Oswald had worked.

The bottom line is that Mason Lankford, who was not a photo-journalist but an intelligence agent, took a staged photo of Marina and Marguerite, supposedly walking into Parkland Hospital, that includes a phony child who was much older than a year and 9 months to represent June, and with Marguerite Oswald holding a perfect cylindrical cannister that represented 6 week old Rachel, and with her left foot “en pointe” like a ballet dancer. I think the idea was to pretend that she was walking. I, as a chiropractor, wrote an article once about the mechanics of walking gait, and I tell you emphatically that she wasn’t walking; she was posing.