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# Bank robber, 'Manchurian Candidate' linked to JFK assassination probeED. NOTE: Recent exposure of what many consider to be improper CIA activity, both at home and abroad, has reawakened interest in decade-old challenges to official versions of the assassinations of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. As new facts also begin to emerge, Congress faces growing pressure to reinvestigate the JFK assassination.What follows are the strange stories, disclosed here for the first time, of two figures Richard Case Nagell and Luis Angel Castillo - long of interest to assassination researchers.WILLIAM W. TURNERSAN DIEGO, (PNS) - On Sept. 20, 1963, a rangy man with a vertical scar on his forehead strode into the State National Bank in El Paso, Tex., and requested $100 in travelers' checks. Before the teller could comply, he whipped out a pistol and fired two shots into the ceiling. Then he waited to be arrested.Police quickly realized that the suspect, Richard Case Nagell, 32, was no ordinary bank robber. Papers he carried showed that he was a decorated hero of the Korean War who had gone on to a career in Army Intelligence before being discharged with the rank of captain in 1959.Why had he pulled the non-robbery?Last week Dr. Richard H. Popkin, a philosophy professor at Washington University in St. Louis, stepped off a plane in the nation's capital lugging a briefcase containing documents illuminating the strange case of the man who shot a bank. Also crammed into the briefcase was a thick sheaf of papers relating to a bizarre "Manchurian Candidate" episode in the Philippines in 1967.Both the El Paso and Manila incidents, Popkin said in an interview before leaving for Washington, were linked to the Dallas assassination of John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963. They would "crack the case wide open," he predicted.The slight, bearded academician was stopping in Washington to present his discoveries to Attorney General Edward Levi and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities before going on to a conference of learned philosophers.## The Second OswaldPopkin is no stranger to the JFK investigation. In 1966 he published *The Second Oswald*, which chronicled several instances of someone impersonating the man later accused of slaying the president. At the time the book gained scant attention, but recently it was disclosed that as early as June 3, 1960, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover himself wrote an interdepartmental memorandum citing evidence of an Oswald imposter. The FBI knew Oswald at that time as a defector to Russia, and, some conspiracy theorists believe, as a possible CIA agent.Popkin said he had been in touch with Richard Nagell, now living near San Diego, and had learned about Nagell's friendship with Lee Harvey Oswald. Nagell has fascinated assassination researchers ever since an FBI report filed with the Warren Commission quoted him as saying he had met with Oswald in Mexico City and Texas. But the former intelligence officer had been inacessible. He remained in prison for the El Paso caper until his conviction was reversed for insufficient evidence in 1967, after which he dropped from sight.## Nagell's VersionNevertheless, researchers were able to glean some picture of Nagell's significance from his defense pleadings and cryptic letters from prison.In August 1963 Nagell, working as a CIA agent, learned of a domestic plot to assassinate the president, involving Oswald and anti-Castro Cubans. He informed his CIA superior but feared nothing would be done because he lacked details. On Sept. 13 he dispatched a letter warning J. Edgar Hoover of the plot but again assumed no action would be taken.As Nagell understood it, Kennedy was to be shot in(please, turn to page 33)