James Patrick Hosty Jr. (August 28, 1924 – June 10, 2011) was an American FBI agent known for unofficially investigating Lee Harvey Oswald in the months before the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Hosty later testified before the Warren Commission, and came to believe Oswald shot Kennedy in coordination with an agent of the Soviet Union.
Hosty served in the United States military during World War II from 1942 to 1946 and graduated from the University of Notre Dame.
In June 1962, Lee Harvey Oswald was allowed to return to the United States after his 1959 defection to the Soviet Union.
He brought with him a wife and his infant daughter, both born in the Soviet Union, and FBI agent John Fain was assigned to investigate him.
[2] Hosty failed to tell the Warren Commission the truth about Oswald's hostile letter because he had destroyed it, allegedly on his superior's orders.
J. Edgar Hoover was asked this question numerous times in his own Warren Commission testimony, with ambiguous replies (which fed different JFK conspiracy theories).
In this book, Hosty claimed to have stumbled upon secret CIA information proving that Oswald killed JFK in collusion with Soviet consul Valery Kostikov.
[1] Hosty was portrayed in the 1991 Oliver Stone film JFK as having a central role in a government conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy and frame Oswald.
[1] In the 2011 Stephen King novel 11/22/63, Hosty questions the protagonist Jake Epping, a time traveler who has just narrowly prevented Oswald from killing the president.