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# INATION(continued frome 4)Washington about Sept. 26 (as it turned out, JFK left Sept. 25 for a whirlwind tour of the West).Frantic, Nagell flew to Havana on Sept. 19 to see if Castro aides could shed light on the assassination plot, but the only advice they could offer was to execute Oswald in the hope that would stop the plan.But Nagell left Cuba deciding that he "was an intelligence agent, not a killer." Flying to El Paso via Mexico City, he walked into the bank the next day for "the sole purpose of having myself arrested and detained by federal authorities" apparently fearing that his association with Oswald would implicate himself in the planned assassination.Nagell was in the El Paso jail when Kennedy was shot In Dallas two months later. He sent an offer to testify before the Warren Commission through "private channels" but received no reply.Dedicated LeftistIn his recent discussions with Popkin, Nagell has revealed new details about Oswald. He first met Oswald, he said, in the late fifties at the U.S. naval base at Atsugi, Japan, where Oswald was a Marine Corps radar specialist. They became friends but didn't encounter one another again until August 1963 when Nagell learned of the plot against Kennedy.Disputing claims that Oswald had ties with the CIA, Nagell believes that Oswald was a dedicated leftist who was duped by anti-Castro exiles involved in the conspiracy. Posing as Castro G-2 intelligence agents, the exiles wheedled Oswald into becoming a "fall guy" by playing on his Castro sympathies, painting Kennedy as anti-Castro and promising that he would be spirited to Havana after the assassination.Nagell told Popkin he met with Oswald both in Mexico City and New Orleans, hotbeds of the anti-Castro movement. "Nagell claims he has squirreled away a snapshot of himself with Lee Harvey Oswald taken in Jackson Square in New Orleans in 1963," Popkin asserted. "In the picture are two other men, both anti-Castro Cubans, who were pretendingIf this photograph does exist it would lend credibility to Nagell's account. And Na is willing to surface and te nis story to Congress, Popkin says, provided protective conditions are met."Manchurian Candidate"Pookin is also convinced that the Manila "Manchurian Candidate" case was connected to the JFK assassination. On March 2, 1967, a man named Luis Angel Castillo was detained by the Philippine National Bureau of Investigation after he had contacted left-wing. Huk guerrillas. Questioned under truth serum and hypnosis, Castillo blurted out a tale of having been taken to a building in Dallas, Tex., the day Kennedy was shot, handed a rifle assembled from components hidden in a bowling bag and instructed to fire at a man in an open car sitting next to a lady. The signal to fire would be given by mirror flashes.The story caused a brief sensation at the time. The Manila Times bannered: "'JFK Plotter' In Manila!" Wire service dispatches to the United States said Castillo was a "Cuban-trained Communist agent" who hadn't shot because he heard that a man named Joe "had already shot the man in the open car." The story was so implausible that it quickly died.Not long ago the hypnotist who conducted the interrogation of Castillo for the Philippine authorities arrived in this country under the name Vincente R. Sanchez. When Popkin took a look at his reports, his eyes popped.The reports termed Castillo a "zombie" - a hyp-noprogrammed robot.Double-Agent NetworkSanchez extracted Castillo's rambling story over a period of weeks. Castillo, then 28, was inducted around 1960 into a "Special Operations Group" which afforded him paramilitary training. In 1961 he participated in the Bay of Pigs invasion, as a pilot for the CIA. Thereafter he infiltrated a double-agent network, posing as a Communist in Venezuela and liquidating a Communist agent in Mexico.In talking about the JFK assassination, Castillo - despite some disjointed phrases - was nevertheless able to describe in some detail ordered, "They got him already. Let's get out of here." After the rifle was disassembled and stuffed in the bowling bag, he was hustled into the car which had brought him to the building. It stopped twice within blocks to pick up other men.In 1967, according to Sanchez. Castillo was programmed to assassinate Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos after openly associating with the leftist Huks - which would implicate them in the assassination. Popkin points out that this is a similar ploy to the one Nagell attributed to the anti-Castro Cubans' use of Oswald.Until recently, the Castilla episode might have seemed a logcial impossibility. But the release of the Rockefeller Report, with its revelations about secret CIA projects to induce behavior modification in unsuspecting subjects, make the possibility of a "Manchurian Candidate" more than mere fantasy. (In the Robert Kennedy assassination, Dr. Bernard Diamond, who examined Sirhan Sirhan for the defense, testified that he believed Sirhan was hypnotized at the time of the shooting.)Although the current whereabouts of Castillo is unknown, the Sanchez reports contain the names of six persons who supposedly ran his network, including the "control officer" and a woman who hypnotized him. Popkin's own investigations have shown that these people do exist.Through Popkin their stories have now been passed on to the Attorney General and the Church Committee.William Turner's latest book. *The Cuba Project, the story of the CIA's secret war against Castro, will be published this fall by Houghton Mifflin.*