Original subtitles

Previously on "Tracking Oswald"...

All this detail, none of it's in the FBI report.

Former CIA Agent Bob Baer

and former police lieutenant Adam Bercovici

have found new evidence suggesting.

Lee Harvey Oswald may have had accomplices

in the murder of President John F. Kennedy.

Fidel Castro says that Oswald stormed into the embassy,

demanded the visa, and when it was refused to him,

headed out saying, "I'm going to kill Kennedy for this."

This is incredible.

A declassified CIA document

revealed possible connections

between Oswald and Cuban militants

operating in the U.S.,

rogue members of a group called Alpha 66.

Antonio Veciana saw Bishop

with Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas

a few months before the assassination

of John F. Kennedy.

Now we have a witness that puts Lee Harvey Oswald

within the inner circle of Alpha 66.

There's your coconspirator right there.

Following that lead, the team learned that Alpha 66

had potential motive for murdering the president.

The Cuban exiles blamed John F. Kennedy directly.

Because he did not commit to support them.

After the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba,

they're furious.

They got money, they got weapons,

and they're going out pursuing their own agendas.

Absolutely.

Some members of Alpha 66 thought JFK was to blame

after the Bay of Pigs invasion,

and they wanted him dead because of it.

I believe that Oswald was working with these men

in the months before the assassination.

Now I want to look for evidence

of these accomplices in Dallas

at the scene of the crime.

November 22, 1963,

Lee Harvey Oswald opens fire in Dealey Plaza,

forever changing American history.

Unanswered questions linger,

breeding countless conspiracy theories.

Many believe Russia, Cuba, or even the CIA

supported Oswald in his mission.

In 2017, the final documents from the JFK assassination

are scheduled for release.

More than 2 million files have already been declassified.

No one has analyzed them until now.

A CIA veteran is on the trail

of the most notorious assassin in U.S. history.

The conspiracy theories start in Dealey Plaza.

Grassy knoll, the second gunman.

Bob and Adam arrive

in Dealey Plaza to search for evidence

of Lee Harvey Oswald's potential accomplices:

Members of the Cuban fringe group known as Alpha 66.

The evidence we've found has convinced me

that members of Alpha 66 helped Oswald

in the months before the murder.

The question is, did they also help him

on the day of the assassination?

Could a member of Alpha 66

have been the supposed second shooter?

I've always believed that Oswald was the lone gunman,

and I still do.

But after 21 years of the CIA, I've learned

you need to always question yourself.

At this point in the investigation,

we need to fully analyze the second shooter theory.

In 1963, President John F. Kennedy embarked on

a fivecity tour of Texas to campaign for reelection.

On the morning of November 22nd,

the presidential motorcade heads into downtown Dallas

en route to a luncheon at the Dallas Trade Mart.

At 12:30 p.m., the president is shot...

And the motorcade races to Parkland Memorial Hospital.

30 minutes later,

at 1:00 p.m.,

the news shocks the nation.

President Kennedy is dead according to an official word.

The president is dead.

In the years after,

conflicting witness accounts spark conspiracy theories,

many about a second shooter

on the grassy knoll along Elm Street.

Right there is the famous grassy knoll by those trees.

And the Book Depository is just north of it.

Oswald is up there.

He can see everything from that spot.

He's got a perch.

He's got a place to rest his rifle.

There's the window up there,

Sixth floor, right in that corner.

It's the perfect position.

Motorcade makes a left on Elm,

so here's when Oswald makes his move.

The motorcade heads down to the freeway,

and from right there with the cross in the road

is where this turns into the crime scene.

The motorcade going 11 miles an hour,

it gives Oswald a fairly steady target.

Theoretically it's possible

that Alpha 66 supplied

a second shooter in Dealey Plaza.

So we have to test it before we can definitively rule it out.

The most convincing evidence of the second shooter

is what's called the "back and to the left" theory.

When President Kennedy

was murdered in Dealey Plaza,

he was struck by two separate bullets.

The first entered and exited

through the president's neck.

When the second bullet struck his head,

the head went back and to the left.

Many believe that a shot

could only have come from the front right position

on the grassy knoll to cause such a reaction.

We know that Oswald was positioned behind Kennedy,

so I want to know if there's a scientific explanation

for the president's head jerking back and to the left

if he was only shot from behind.

To test the back and to the left theory,

Bob calls on army ranger Marty Scovlund

and expert sniper George Rinnes.

So we have a human head.

Take the ordinate gel here,

which is basically mimicking human flesh.

If I take a shot from behind the ballistics gel,

we'll actually get to see if that movement's

gonna be recreated from a rearward shot.

The test is filmed at 2,000 frames per second,

capturing an image 100 times slower than real time.

For accuracy, George will shoot a replica

of the rifle Oswald used.

An original MannlicherCarcano

bolt action carbine.

I have the ballistic gel in target.

I'm gonna put a round right where Oswald shot Kennedy.

George takes position in a perch

at the same elevation, angle, and distance as Oswald's

when he fired the fatal shots.

Shooter ready.

Send it.

All right, here we go.

I'm gonna hit play here.

Wow. Look at that.

- Actually comes back. - Boom.

When you have a projectile moving 2,100 feet per second,

um, a larger caliber like a 6.5,

when it enters through the back of the head

and then the tremor ballistics will come here

causing the head to go back and to the left

where the impact was.

The head going back and to the left

does not mean that you had to have a second shooter.

Right.

It's possible he was the only one.

The ballistics test

confirms the team's working theory

and the findings of the Warren Commission.

Back in Dealey Plaza,

Bob Baer still has one more question

in need of answers.

After Marty's test,

I believe we've removed almost all doubt

about the presence of a second shooter.

But there's still one more angle

we need to test before we can put it to bed

once and for all.

There are multiple witnesses from the day of JFK's murder

who testified they heard a second shooter.

On the day of the assassination,

thousands of people lined the motorcade route

through downtown Dallas.

According to the House Select Committee on Assassinations,

171 reported earwitness accounts

of shots in Dealey Plaza.

Of those, 46 believed the shots came only

from the Texas School Book Depository,

20 thought gunfire came from the grassy knoll along Elm,

105 people were either unsure

or identified another point of origin.

A lot of reliable eyewitnesses claim that

shots were fired from the grassy knoll.

So, what did these people hear?

Really what it comes down to is the acoustics.

So, we're gonna bring science to this.

To analyze the earwitness accounts

at Dealey Plaza and evaluate

the remaining possible evidence of a second shooter,

Bob recruits a team of expert sound engineers:

David Marsh, Melvin Saunders, and Cleve Doyle.

We are looking for accomplices.

Everywhere we go, we've found traces of them.

But the question is,

did he have accomplices on the grassy knoll?

This test could finally help us answer

one of the most infamous questions in history:

Was there a second shooter working with Oswald

to murder President John F. Kennedy?

CIA veteran Bob Baer

is working on an explosive theory

that Lee Harvey Oswald

may have conspired with rogue members

of a Cuban radical group called Alpha 66

to assassinate President John F. Kennedy.

Now the team is analyzing the scene of the crime

to see if one of those men

acted as a second shooter in the Dealey Plaza.

At this point in the investigation,

we're fully analyzing the second shooter theory

to find out if it's possible

that members of Alpha 66 were here in Dealey Plaza.

Bob has enlisted a team of sound engineers

to examine the acoustics of Dealey Plaza

to determine if echoes in the square

can explain earwitness accounts of a second shooter.

A lot of earwitnesses over here.

They say that they heard it from the grassy knoll.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

To accurately map

the acoustic properties of Dealey Plaza,

the team will collect scientific measurements

of the distance between landmarks

and the material makeup of the environment.

You have these huge reflective surfaces

that's almost like the amphitheater affect.

Yeah.

This information will be fed

into a stateoftheart program

to construct a computer model of the surrounding area,

which can map how sound echoes in this location.

All I care about is the science.

Forensics is absolutely key to this.

Right now it's the only thing I trust.

As the team continues their analysis in Dealey Plaza,

Marty and expert sniper George Rinnes

collect recordings from the replica of Oswald's rifle

to measure its audio output

at the moment it fired its fatal blast.

Check clear.

- Clear. - Perfect.

One of the most famous

murder weapons in history,

Oswald's MannlicherCarcano rifle

was purchased through a magazine advertisement

for less than $20,

nearly eight months before

the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Recovered from the crime scene

less than 30 minutes after the first shots rang out,

the rifle was immediately subjected to

a barrage of forensic testing by the Dallas sheriff's office

before the FBI intervened,

ordering the rifle to be sent to

governmentowned laboratories in Washington, D.C.

These are authentic historic rounds

that would actually be manufactured

at the same time period

of what Oswald would've used in the shooting.

Let's go crack a few rounds off; See how this sounds.

To gauge just how loud Oswald's rifle was

after the fateful shorts were fired,

the team will shoot multiple rounds

measuring the average volume level

on precision recording equipment.

The data gathered here

will provide the audio engineers

with an accurate measurement of the Carcano rifle.

All right, set it up.

All right, audio ready.

Ready?

Shooter ready.

Send it.

The bullet behaves like a supersonic aircraft,

creating sound from both the explosion of gunpowder

and the sonic boom created by the projectile

as it travels 2,100 feet per second,

two times faster than the speed of sound.

Over large distances,

this difference in velocity can create an illusion

where an observer may witness the impact of the bullet...

Before hearing the sound of the shot.

Audio ready.

Shooter ready.

Send it.

All right.

I think this'll be enough to send back

and have them match up with the data in Dealey Plaza.

Perfect.

Back in Dallas,

the acoustic engineers have gathered

all of the information they need

to build their computer model of Dealey Plaza

and measure echoes within the space.

What we specifically want to do

is take all the witnesses

that heard the shots coming from the sixth floor,

others saying they came from somewhere else

so let's place them geographically on this map

and see if it makes sense.

Is there a reason for that,

a scientific reason?

Okay.

The Warren Commission officially ruled

there were three shots

on the day of the president's murder.

But for more than 50 years,

there have been conspiracy theories questioning that.

For our audio test, the number of shots is irrelevant.

What I want to find out

is if earwitness accounts of the gunfire

are reliable at all.

This test will tell us if we can trust what they reported

about the number of shots and where they came from

or if echoes distorted the truth.

The model illustrates

sound reverberation within Dealey Plaza.

As gunfire from the sixth floor

of the Texas School Book Depository

radiates into the square, it bounces off of

the glass, concrete, and granite structures

to create large echoes less than a second

after the initial blast.

So the School Book Depository,

we just got one window in it with a

sound source aimed, you know, down here on the road.

What we can do now, we can grab a probe,

and we can place this anywhere we want,

and it will show us how the sound

gets from this point to that listener.

This is, maybe one of the most interesting

positions down here.

This would be down there,

across from the grassy knoll.

The first sound they would hear

would be the direct sound from here to there.

The next sound they hear is off the face of the bridge,

about 88 decibels.

The one coming off the bridge is at 84 decibels.

It's only 4 decibels less,

almost a negligible difference.

The model illustrates that a single gunshot

originating at the Depository

would produce an echo off of the overpass

on the opposite end of the plaza

at virtually the same decibel level

as the initial shot.

If someone hears a shot from here,

that's their first one.

And then there would be enough delay

for somebody standing here to think

there was a second shot from a different part.

Yes.

Virtually anywhere that we probe into this model

around the viewing area,

we have at least one echo, sometimes two or three.

So what did those people hear?

Did they hear a shot or did they hear an echo?

A single shot could create enough confusion

that people will not be sure where it came from.

An environment like this where you have

a lot of parallel reflective surfaces,

echoes can deceive you.

I think they provide a logical explanation

for why there are so many varying opinions

about where the sound came from,

how many shots there were,

and what direction, you know, they heard it from.

Everyone could have been hearing the same shot,

but because of the echo, they placed it somewhere else.

- Correct. - Absolutely.

Multiple echoes.

Their testimony, the earwitnesses

is, in effect, unreliable.

Yes.

After this acoustics test and our ballistics test,

I remain convinced there's no hard evidence

to support the idea of a second shooter in Dealey Plaza.

In my mind, Oswald was the only shooter on that day.

But that doesn't change the fact that we found evidence

connecting him to Alpha 66

in the months before he pulled the trigger.

Now I want to look at the aftermath of the crime,

to see if they were in Dallas to help Oswald get away.

The ballistic tests and the echo tests

confirms my belief that Oswald was the lone shooter.

But it doesn't address at all

the problem of accomplices.

After ruling out a second shooter in Dealey Plaza,

Bob and Adam now shift their focus

to the aftermath of Kennedy's murder.

They're searching for evidence

of Oswald's potential accomplices,

rogue members of a Cuban group called Alpha 66,

on the day of the assassination.

If they helped him plan the assassination,

I'll bet they helped him get away.

Oswald shoots the president at 12:30.

After he shot the president,

he didn't sit up there in the Book Depository

waiting to be arrested.

He had a plan to get away.

Yep.

Let's dig into the documents

and see the timeline of Oswald's escape plan.

The Warren Commission catalogued

all of Lee Harvey Oswald's movements

and possessions

from the day of the assassination.

12:36 p.m., Oswald takes a bus transfer

near St. Paul and Elm Street.

Roughly around five minutes after the shots were taken.

He knew he had to get off the street.

At 12:36, he got on the bus.

1:00 p.m., Oswald arrived at his rooming house.

He runs into traffic.

He gets off the bus, catches a cab.

By 1:00, he's back at his rooming house.

1:16 p.m., Oswald shoots Officer J.D. Tippit four times.

Tippit stood in his way, wherever he was going.

1:51 p.m., arrested at the Texas theater.

He clearly was not heading for a dead end.

He wasn't going to see a movie.

The hour and 20 minutes

after he shoots the president at 12:30,

are absolutely key of whether he had accomplices.

As soon as Oswald decided to assassinate the president,

I have no doubt that he planned his escape route.

The Warren Commission looked at the facts,

but they never looked for accomplices along that route.

Were other people hidden along the way

to help him to get out of Dallas?

That's what we need to find out.

Adam, look, you and I

have to put ourselves in his mind.

We've just committed the most horrendous political act

in modern American history.

How do you get away?

We need to reconstruct his exit route.

And somewhere along that route,

we're gonna find an answer.

Bob and Adam begin their analysis

of Oswald's escape route

on the corner of Houston and Elm Streets

at the Texas School Book Depository.

There's Dealey Plaza.

See the X down there?

Yeah, it's as clear as can be.

After the last and final shot,

he just dropped the rifle, he's thinking,

"How do I get out of here?"

The moment you plan an operation,

whether it's an assassination or an ambush,

you're looking at routes of egress,

and not just one.

It was part of our tactics

that you enter by one exit

and depart through another, and it's never the same.

He wouldn't have left this building without a plan.

I agree.

In my experience, there are three things you need

in the aftermath of any operation:

A concealed route

free from public view and law enforcement,

a safe house you can use to get off the street if necessary,

and accomplices

who are physically able to aid your escape.

We need to see if Alpha 66

was providing Oswald with those three things.

The moment he pulls that trigger, he's out of here.

Time is not on his side.

Right.

After Oswald fires the fatal shots...

He drops his MannlicherCarcano rifle

on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.

Approximately 90 seconds later,

he encounters a Dallas policeman

on the second floor of the building.

The officer releases Oswald

when he's identified as an employee.

Approximately three minutes after the shots,

he exits through the front door of the Depository,

walks east, and then boards a bus headed west.

When the bus runs into traffic near Dealey Plaza,

Oswald gets off, walks south,

and then hails a cab toward his rooming house,

two miles away in Oak Cliff.

At 1:00 p.m., 30 minutes after the shooting,

the taxi drops Oswald 1/3 of a mile

from his rooming house.

That's the house right up there.

- All right. - Pull right in here.

Here's where the taxi drops him off,

1/3 of a mile past his house.

There's downtown.

Downtown's 2 miles away, catches a cab,

comes barreling down this street,

past his boarding house, gets off here.

The fact that he came so far down the road,

1/3 of a mile, let's leave the car here and walk back.

Kinda put ourselves back in his shoes.

He's walking down this street.

Look at this area here. It's suburban, wide open.

Here's the boarding house.

He has the taxi come across this intersection,

go up the street.

And if you look up there in those trees,

it's impossible to see somebody standing

simply observing this location.

You could stand there, be unobserved,

and make a clear assessment

of whether it's safe to approach this location.

I've spent years and years and years

getting dropped off near safe houses,

and you'd never get dropped off in front of a safe house.

That takes discipline.

The fact that Oswald was dropped off

1/3 of a mile past his boarding house

tells me he had a plan to get away.

He wasn't running around in a panic.

It's standard trade craft.

He performed surveillance on his destination

by driving by it.

It says to me Oswald was deliberate.

This is not a panicked man.

- No, this... - This is a man with a plan.

As the investigation

returns to the scene of the crime,

in Dallas, Bob and Adam are reconstructing.

Lee Harvey Oswald's escape from Dealey Plaza

after he assassinated President Kennedy.

The Warren Commission ruled that Oswald acted alone.

But we found evidence suggesting

he was working with rogue members

of a Cuban militant group called Alpha 66

in the months before JFK's murder.

If they helped him before the mission,

my suspicion is that they were in Dallas

waiting to help him escape.

We need to examine his getaway route

for any signs of these accomplices

on the day of the crime.

On November 22, 1963,

Oswald opens fire in Dealey Plaza

at 12:30 p.m. central time.

30 minutes later,

a taxi drops him 1/3 of a mile away

from his rooming house on North Beckley Avenue.

You were here when Lee Harvey Oswald was here.

We were here almost every single day.

So you knew him?

Yes, I did, I certainly did.

Lee Harvey Oswald

checked into the rooming house under the name O.H. Lee

on October 14, 1963.

Patricia Hall was 11 years old at the time

and still lives at the address.

- You remember him? - I do.

You used to see him how often?

We saw him every day.

What was he like?

You know, honestly he was just a very nice young man.

The antisocial loner persona

that the government puts out about him,

this family never saw.

And where did he live in opposed to...

- I mean, where was his... - Yeah.

Just right through there.

This is his little room.

He was a private person.

We knew he had a young family and that they were separated,

he would go to Irving to see his wife and the children

every single weekend.

He would get calls...

On this phone.

Did he ever use the phone to call out?

Yes.

He did get calls from gentlemen.

We heard him speaking Spanish and Russian.

Really?

You heard him speaking both Spanish and Russian...

- Yes. - On this telephone right here?

Yes.

While it was possible that

he was speaking Russian to his wife, Marina,

who was he speaking Spanish with?

According to the Warren Commission,

he's got no friends.

Was he speaking Spanish with members of Alpha 66?

Were they discussing the assassination?

Let me ask you this, Pat.

We're kind of narrowing it down a little bit.

We wanna kind of see if you can kind of

dig back in your memory bank and think about the...

The time after the assassination.

The only actual eyewitness we have

is the housekeeper, Earlene Roberts.

She was the only one here.

According to her, she was sitting down

watching her favorite soap opera,

"As the World Turns."

A little after it had been on,

Walter Cronkite broke in and gave the news

about the president being shot.

When Mr. Lee quickly came in,

"she turned to him and said, "Mr. Lee,

did you hear that someone shot our president?"

And he didn't say anything to her.

He just came in, went straight to his room,

grabbed an Eisenhower jacket,

and in the wardrobe closet

there is a gun in one of those drawers.

Hid it under his jacket, and walked out.

And she again turned to him and said,

"Well, you sure seem to be in a hurry."

Because she was paid to be a nosey Rosey,

she got up, went to the windows,

and watched where he went.

And she testified

that he went to the right

and stood at the bus stop.

It was unusual for him to come home

in the middle of the day.

Just in a hurry.

If we're looking for accessories,

we need to look at every detail of his escape.

Why didn't he bring his pistol to the Depository?

Why take the detour back to the rooming house?

Where is he planning on going next?

Tell me about the housekeeper.

I mean, when she talked to the Warren Commission,

did they ask her about...

Yeah, and she told 'em

that he went out the door and went to the right

but the Warren Commission's basic route

that they suggest that he took

was, he went out the doors

and immediately turned to the left.

But she told them he turned right.

She did, and they ignored that.

So you have a witness' statement that's ignored,

and instead, a suggestion is made.

I mean, that's what I'm hearing.

- Yeah. - A suggestion...

And she was very definite.

Went out the door, turned right.

Every detail means something.

And right now we're collecting a lot of new information.

We now know that Oswald was speaking Spanish

on the phone at his boarding house.

We also know that he reportedly didn't look panicked

when he came here on the day of the assassination.

Now we're hearing that the Warren Commission

ignored the eyewitness testimony

about Oswald's actions

after leaving the boarding house.

- It was great meeting you. - Thank you.

My suspicion is,

they missed something along this route.

Oswald had a plan,

and we're gonna figure out what that plan was.

What it comes down to is,

there's something he was gonna do in this area.

Searching through more than

2 million declassified government files,

Bob and Adam have uncovered new evidence

suggesting Lee Harvey Oswald

was working with rogue members

of a Cuban exile group called Alpha 66

during the months before JFK's murder.

Everything we've seen from Oswald right now,

his movements are calculated;

They're orchestrated to a degree.

Now, the team is

reconstructing Oswald's getaway route

to look for evidence that these same men

were accomplices on the day of the assassination.

First thing you do

when you're planning a covert mission

is plan the getaway.

The question is, where was he headed

and who was he going to meet?

Lee Harvey Oswald began working

at the Texas School Book Depository

on October 16, 1963,

only 38 days before JFK's murder.

After shooting Kennedy

from the sixth floor of the building,

Oswald flees to his rooming house,

grabs a jacket and pistol,

before walking back onto the street.

Based on eyewitnesses accounts from Dealey Plaza,

Dallas Police dispatch puts out an APB at 12:45

for a white male, slender build,

approximately 30 years of age.

So far we've tracked things that we know.

Here's where things begin to change.

Yeah.

At 1:16 p.m.,

Officer J.D. Tippit confronts Oswald

near the corner of 10th Street

and South Patton Avenue.

At this point,

Oswald is miles from the crime scene

in a residential neighborhood

and was probably moving at a rush.

I doubt that Tippit ever knew he'd identified the assassin,

but he matched the description.

Oswald must have realized it was all over

when Tippit gets out of the car.

Right at this point, when Oswald sees Tippit,

that's when he first starts to panic.

As Tippit lay there dying,

a witness on the street

grabbed the police radio and called it in.

I think what's near certain

is that Oswald had a getaway plan.

But wherever he was going,

it's over at this point.

He knows this place is gonna be flooded with police.

Right at that spot where Tippit's killed,

that's where his plans come off the tracks.

If it weren't for Tippit, Oswald was minutes away

from pulling off the crime of the century.

But what we have to ask ourselves is, "What if?"

What if Officer Tippit didn't stop him?

We have to imagine, at this point,

Oswald was still on a mission,

keeping his head down low,

trying not to raise suspicion.

He was going somewhere

with a sense of purpose that day.

In the absence of any other evidence,

he was heading to meet accomplices.

That makes sense to me. Exactly. Exactly.

My suspicion is, if we look at this hypothetical,

this alternate timeline

where Officer Tippit isn't murdered,

we'll find the answers we're looking for.

To regroup

and examine this alternate timeline,

Bob and Adam head for the Texas Theatre,

where Oswald fled after murdering Officer Tippit.

So this is where it all ends for Oswald.

Third row down, this is where they grabbed him.

How many people were here?

12.

12 people that day.

Not very crowded.

When he goes to this theater,

he's not thinking rationally,

because his plan of escape fell apart.

This is when he starts to improvise.

Even he probably knew it was all over at that point.

Oswald enters the theater without paying,

sneaking into a screening of "War is Hell."

Police receive a tip about a suspicious man

matching the description

of the suspect in Tippit's murder.

Oswald is arrested at the Texas Theatre

at 1:50 p.m. central time.

The question is, if Oswald doesn't kill Tippit,

where was he gonna go?

Let's see what we've got about his possible route.

From the time he leaves the rooming house

till he shoots Tippit.

What do you have from the Warren Commission?

Warren Commission, Oswald, escape.

My god, not a damn thing. Look at that.

Not a word.

What we need to do is widen our scope.

The Warren Commission

never looked for Oswald's potential escape route.

They just went with the easy assumption

he was running around in a panic.

What we know of Oswald is, he always had a plan.

All right, here we go, Bob.

There is something here

in the Secret Service file right here.

It shows that Oswald had the bus transfer ticket

for a stop very close to where the Tippit murder occurred.

It's only, like, a block and a half.

So he could have used the transfer ticket to catch a bus.

There was a way out for him right down the street.

When Oswald first flees

the School Book Depository,

he walks East and then boards a bus headed west.

When the bus runs into traffic near Dealey Plaza,

Oswald gets off.

But before he does, he takes a transfer ticket.

This allows him to board

another bus within Dallas for no charge.

According to Secret Service documents,

they believed Oswald was going to take the 55 bus.

He had the transfer ticket to make it happen.

This could have been Oswald's plan to get away.

I think we're gonna have to go

see what we can find along that route.

After a murder like this, he needed to get out of sight.

We need to follow that escape route

and see where it leads.

Oswald didn't just walk out of the Book Depository,

stunned at what he had done.

He had a plan for leaving.

A declassified Secret Service file

delivered to the Warren Commission

but not included in the official report

reveals that Lee Harvey Oswald may have planned

to use the 55 bus route for his escape

on the day of the assassination.

The 55 bus is no longer in service,

so Bob and Adam drive the old route

to search for evidence of possible collaborators

along Oswald's getaway.

Here's a city that's on lockdown.

I mean, look at this bus route.

Easy to intercept anybody coming down this way.

The bus route the Secret Service suspects

he intended to use has some big issues.

First off, it goes through a busy part of town.

On that day, the police would have been everywhere.

It's extremely exposed.

During my 21 years in the CIA,

we did a lot of training for covert operations.

And we were always taught that during an escape,

you always avoid the easy exit

and instead you have a plan to get off the street;

Somewhere to lay low.

Oswald just assassinated the president of the United States.

He's got his transfer.

He's on the run.

And there's the Greyhound Station.

Yeah.

Let's go take a look at it.

Look at this.

What bothers me is,

if you look at the bus route,

an hour, an hour and a half,

it's too long to get out here, board a bus,

and not expect the Dallas police to have this place covered.

Yeah.

You're bound to get caught.

Oswald's too smart for that.

I mean, there's something else out here that he was after.

Everything we've seen tells me that.

Oswald meticulously planned this escape.

He was a Marine, and the evidence tells us

he was connected to trained militants.

He wouldn't have hurried to a Greyhound Station

and not expected police to be waiting.

His plan would have been more calculated.

He would need, out here, some sort of help.

Would he have had accomplices out here?

Let's do a radius search.

I mean, I want to see what's just around here,

I mean, what's... Where else could he have gone?

Let me get in the database.

Twomile radius, 1963, Oswald.

County of Dallas police report.

Some Cubans had been having meetings

and were connected with an organization

of which Oswald was a member.

Look at this address.

This was within a twomile radius.

- It's close. - Yeah.

The day of the assassination,

he is near a place

that has Cubans that he's visited before.

This is what we've been searching for.

The Warren Commission never looked for safe houses.

Now we've found a house that could be the answer.

Were these Cubans in the police report

members of Alpha 66

supporting Oswald in his mission to kill JFK?

Were they planning to help him escape?

This house is the key

to blowing the doors off this investigation.

Harlendale is right around the corner.

It's definitely a lead that's worth running down.

Okay, let's go take a look at it.

All right, sounds good.

On the season finale of "Tracking Oswald"...

No one has ever seen this before.

That's the key piece of evidence.

This is the best source we're going to get.

We need to reconstruct his exit route.

I can't believe this.

Get off a bus, you'd be inside within two minutes.

- You see our ride yet? - Yeah, it looks like us.

We need to find out how deep the rabbit hole goes.

This is our guy.

The chief of operations was a double agent.

This could be the lynchpin of breaking open this case.

We'll get the radio going,

We'll do this test, and then we'll get out of there.

Here's the coast of Cuba right there.

It's coming up on the chart.

This could be trouble.

Five minutes down the road, safe house.

They didn't manage this case.

This has gone way beyond coincidences.

- No. - This is evidence.

As far as I'm concerned, we're gonna find an answer.