The Man Who Knew Too Much

 

Dick Russell

Noted author slated as NID 2008 speaker

2007 NID DVDJFK Lancer is pleased to announce Dick Russell as a presenter for the November in Dallas Conference. Russell is a noted environmentalist, and in 1988 was awarded the citizen’s Chevron Conservation Award.

In addition to Dick Russell’s environmental books, he has published the widely acclaimed The Man Who knew Too Much (Carroll & Graf, 1992) which was hailed by “Publisher’s Weekly” as “a masterpiece of historical reconstruction” focusing on the Kennedy assassination.

Mr. Russell will have a new JFK book out in the fall of 2008, On the Trail of the JFK Assassins, compiles a fascinating selection of his latest research into the assassination of our thirty-fifth president. Russell’s research analyzes newly declassified information and continues to build upon his painstakingly detailed investigations.

Russell, having met Nagell on a number of occasions, corresponded with him as recently as 1990 making Russell’s take on Nagell truly unique. Russell will be addressing new revelations on Richard Case Nagell and the CIA’s mind control program.


 

The Man Who Knew Too Much

Dick Russell, foreword by Carl Oglesby. Carroll & Graf, $27.96 (816p) ISBN 0-88184-900-6
Carroll & Graf has been in the forefront of producing books about the Kennedy assassination-of widely varying’ quality; it has come up with a winner this time. Russell, a freelance journalist who has written for Time and the Village Voice, has spent 17 years on this mammoth study of one of the most mysterious figures on the fringes of the assassination: Richard. Case Nagell, described as the man “hired to kill Oswald and prevent the assassination of JFK.”
With painstaking care, Russell sets out to reconstruct the strange life of Nagell, a former member of a super-secret army intelligence unit who was wounded in battle, the sole survivor of two air crashes, a contract agent for both the CIA and the KGB at different times, and a man whose life kept intersecting with Oswald’s. Russell has met Nagell on a number of occasions, corresponded with him as recently as 1990 (when he was living in a motel in California) and wonderfully captures the intriguing eccentricities of his speech, with his deliberate, almost playful, allusiveness. Nagell seems to have been utilized by both the CIA and the KGB to keep tabs on Oswald (who himself probably also worked both sides of the street)” and was ultimately prodded by the Russians to head Oswald away from his role in the Dallas plot (one of at least three to kill JFK in 1968, according to Russell). If Nagell failed to dissuade Oswald, he was to kill him. At that point Nagell, bewildered and unsure who was calling the shots, lost his nerve, warned the CIA and FBI of the impending disaster, then had himself arrested (he discharged a gun harmlessly in a Texas bank a month before the president was assassinated); he spent years in jail, while lawyers wrangled over his sanity. Nagell has not been heard from for the past two years, but Russell believes he is still alive, his silence bought by a generous military pension. The author is right in suggesting that a government investigation that subpoenaed Nagell as a witness (neither the Warren Commission nor the House inquiry did) would learn a great deal about an event that continues to intrigue and baffle the world.
No praise can be too high for Russell’s mastery of a massive quantity of detail, for his determination to seek out primary sources and for his refusal to over-dramatize. This is a model work of historical reconstruction that should, as Norman Mailer suggests in a blurb, open up many hitherto unperceived leads in the case. (Jan.)

 

Publisher’s Weekly, November 16, 1992

The Revised, Updated 2003 Trade Paperback Edition of Dick Russell’s landmark book on the Kennedy assassination, is available at Amazon.com.

Dick Russell’s testimony
before the Assassination Records Review Board
March 24, 1995

Dick Russell on Richard Case Nagell,
the Man Who Knew Too Much


Introduction to the 2003 revised edition of

Dick Russell’s

“The Man Who Knew Too Much”

by LACHY HULME

There is something intrinsically dark and terrifying about the murder of John F. Kennedy, something murky that gnaws away at our gut and implores us to look closer. To look at something just underneath the surface. To look at something evil

Read the full introduction here