Who was Albert Osborne and how did he find himself at centre of JFK assassination plot?

Sep 27, 2023

Who was Albert Alexander Osborne and how did he end up at the centre one of the biggest political assassination plots in history? Did he even exist? We take a closer look

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Grimsby-born soldier turned Soviet Union Spy Albert Osborne has long been touted as one of the prime suspects in the John F Kennedy assassination plot.

Some experts believe he worked as a "handler" for killer Lee Harvey Oswald - and the pair were seen talking together on a bus in the hours leading up to JFK's death in Dallas on November 23, 1963.

And documents unearthed in the 1970s show the FBI had Osborne marked as a major suspect in its massive investigation.

Today, as thousands more secret documents - known as the JFK Files - were released to the public , it emerged that a anonymous caller tipped off the Cambridge News that something big was about to happen - 25 minutes before JFK was shot.

And it is thought that caller was in fact Osborne, and that he was calling from Grimsby, where he was staying with his sister.

Less than half an hour later JFK was shot dead in Dallas, Texas with Oswald later arrested for the murder. He was shot dead himself by Jack Ruby soon after.

It is claimed Oswald had been befriended by Osborne and the pair had travelled to Mexico City to meet KGB agents in the weeks before the assassination.

The tip-off to the Cambridge News emerged in a document written by the CIA released by the US government, which has been heavily promoted by US President Donald Trump.

Bob Gemberling, one of the leading FBI detectives during the events in Dallas, has previously said: "We seriously investigated Osborne.

"In fact, he was one of the few men we had a separate file on."

The name Osborne – or the alias John Howard Bowen – turns up in countless FBI and CIA documents. The FBI's director J. Edgar Hoover even sent memos bearing his name.

Histrail begins in 1952 with a different murder in Texas. Two professional killers, Mario ‘El Turko’ Sapet and Alfredo Cervantes, took a private contract to assassinate Jake Floyd, a district judge in Alice, Texas.

At about dusk on September 8, 1952, Sapet and Cervantes had just positioned themselves in a field behind Floyd's house when Jake's 19-year-old lookalike son Buddy Floyd started out of the house to the garage.

Cervantes mistakenly shot him in the head, killing him, and the pair were indicted for assassination and conspiracy to murder.

Sapet was caught before he could cross the Mexican border and was given a 99-year sentence but Cervantes escaped into Mexico and the Texan authorities found it impossible to extradite him.

Bill Allcorn, special assistant attorney general of Texas, pursued the case and was given information by an unnamed "conspirator".

The man told Allcorn about a unit of between 25 and 30 professional assassins being kept in Mexico by the espionage section of the FBI. He alleged that this group had been used to commit political assassinations all over north, south and central America, the eastern European countries and in Russia for 25 years.

These hit men were supposedly "the absolute world's most accurate riflemen" who also sometimes took private contracts to kill in the United States. The contact for anyone who wanted to employ these riflemen was a man called ‘Bowen’, who was said to pose as an American Council of Christian Churches missionary in Mexico. Bowen could be reached through Oscar Ferrina, the owner of the St Anthony's Hotel in Laredo, Texas.

Another source suggests that Hoover came up with the idea for the squad in 1943 and "kept a close eye on its management". The man given the task of setting it up was Albert Osborne.

Some accounts suggest the plan to shoot Kennedy was formulated in mid-1963 by a group of men including shadowy figures such as CIA contract agent William Seymour, Major L.M. Bloomfield, who is aaid to have sponsored Osborne's activities in the 1940s, and another contract man called Laurence Howard.

They were said to be unhappy that Kennedy had cancelled plans to re-invade Cuba after the Bay of Pigs fiasco where FBI-trained Cubans set out on an abortive attempt to retake their country from the communist Fidel Castro.

It is suggested that by this time Oswald was an FBI informer who had worked with a CIA agent on anti-communist projects under cover of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. The assassination group decided Oswald would make a convenient scapegoat.

Seymour, who resembled Oswald, began to use his name and may have planted evidence against him in Mexico by making it appear as though Oswald really was a communist who wanted to defect.

Osborne met an agent of Bloomfield in Laredo a short time before the November date to work out the details of the movement of the professional hit men.

Osborne used the alias John Howard Bowen but investigators after the assassination discovered that there was another person working with him who also used it – Fred Lee Crismon, an agent for the Defence Industrial Security Command police agency and CIA contract agent.

Osborne and Crismon are said to have borne a marked resemblance and appeared to be about the same age. Crismon was a Syrian immigrant and had been closely associated with Osborne since the 1920s.

Oswald travelled to Mexico in late September, 1963. Six people who saw him on the bus remembered an elderly man sitting with him who appeared to be his companion who was later identified as Osborne. During his stay in Mexico, Oswald apparently made rather confused visits to both the Russian and Cuban embassies to inquire about the possibility of emigrating to the USSR.

By November 22, Osborne and about 10 riflemen, probably including Seymour, Crismon and a French Canadian adventurer known as Frenchy, were living in Oak Cliff, a district of Dallas.

Three more of Osborne's "professionals" were at a boarding house in Fort Worth owned by a woman called Tammie True. True was a former stripper at the nightclub run by Jack Ruby – the man who later shot Lee Harvey Oswald 48 hours after Kennedy's murder.

Ruby is said to have worked for mafia crime lord Carlos Marcello – who had just managed to evade a deportation order put on him by Kennedy's lawyer brother Bobby.

Osborne was said to be in charge of the Dallas operation but was not actually present for the hit – for which Frenchy, Seymour, Crismon and three other men were chosen.

It has been suggested that one of Osborne's riflemen, mostly likely Frenchy, who was stationed on the grassy knoll, and not Oswald, fired the fatal shot at Kennedy from behind a fence in Dealey Plaza. Before dark on November 23, 1963, Osborne, Seymour, and the other riflemen were out of Dallas.

Following on from interviews with the six witnesses who recognised Osborne's photo from Oswald's bus trip to Mexico, FBI investigators found a man who called himself John Howard Bowen and questioned him on February 8, 1964.

Bowen claimed to be an itinerant preacher, raised at an orphanage in Pennsylvania, who had no living relatives and frequently moved from Mexico to Texas, Alabama and beyond.

He said he considered his home to be the St Anthony Hotel in Laredo and was "well known" by the hotel's manager Oscar Ferrina.

He said he had lived at the hotel for the past 20 years, although he had also made many trips to Mexico. The same man, still claiming to be Bowen, was interviewed by FBI agents again on February 20 and repeated his story.

Then on March 5 he was challenged by FBI agents at the Central YMCA in Nashville, where he was staying.

At the outset of the interview, Bowen stuck to the story he had already told twice before but later, he admitted that his correct name was Albert Alexander Osborne.

Osborne told the agents that he had been born on November 12, 1888, at Grimsby, to James Osborne and Emile Cole Osborne, both of whom were now dead. He gave the names of his brothers as Walter, Arthur, William and Frank Osborne, all of whom had lived in Grimsby but were now dead.

Investigators scrutinising the Kennedy assassination can't help but find traces of Osborne whether in FBI and CIA reports and interviews or simply in the huge and unruly morass of conspiracy theories circulating on the Internet. But a researcher called Dennis Ford writes: "Consider this chain of connections in the names of assassination-related people.

"There was Albert Alexander Osborne aka John Howard Bowen; Oswald once worked for a John Bowen (real name John DiGrassi); there was an ‘Officer Alexander’ who visited Oswald at the rooming house; there was Assistant DA William Alexander; there was a Laurence Howard; there was a Mack Osborne who served with Oswald in Japan during the Second World War.

"There was a Dr David Osborne present during Oswald's autopsy and finally, and by no means last, there was Howard Osborne, chief of the CIA Office of Security."

It is still not known if Albert Alexander Osborne actually existed.