Straight from the FBI counter-intelligence agent assigned to Lee Harvey Oswald prior to the assassination of President Kennedy - and the lead investigator in the FBI's post-assassination investigation of Oswald - Assignment: Oswald is the first authoritative insider's account of our century's most traumatic event. Combining his own unique, intimate knowledge of the case with previously unavailable government documents, including top secret CIA files just released from the National Archives, James Hosty tells the true story behind the assassination and the government's response to it, including the suppression of a documented Oswald-Soviet-Castro connection. Special Agent Hosty began to investigate Lee Harvey Oswald in October 1963, a full month before the JFK assassination. From November 22 on, Hosty watched as everyone from the Dallas police, the FBI, the CIA, Naval Intelligence, and the State Department up through the Warren Commission to J. Edgar Hoover, Robert Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson reacted to and manipulated the facts of the president's assassination - until Hosty himself became their scapegoat. Now, after seeing his name appear in three inconclusive federal investigations and countless fact-twisting conspiracy theories (including Oliver Stone's motion picture), Hosty has decided to tell his own story. Hosty's testimony has been universally acknowledged as vital to any complete understanding of the Kennedy assassination. As a witness to and a participant in every stage of the assassination investigation, Hosty brings to this story an exclusive insider's knowledge of the mechanisms, the power structures, and the rivalries in and among the various intelligence and law enforcement agencies and why they have determined who knows what about the assassination. Here, at last, is an unmistakably expert and responsible account of the murder of President Kennedy.