Harvard Science Center
9:00 - 12:00 " Lee Harvey Oswald: Necessary Illusion?"
Peter Dale Scott : "Oswald and US Intelligence "
John Newman: "Oswald and the CIA"
Phil Melanson : "Oswald in USSR"
Dick Russell: "Oswald and the KGB"
Jim DiEugenio: "Oswald in New Orleans"
Walter Brown: "Oswald in Dallas"
Peter Dale Scott and John Newman:
The most important recent development in this area of investigation are the millions of pages of documents pertaining to the Kennedy period which have recently been released from government archives. 10,000 very crucial pages are still being withheld from public scrutiny, but there is already enough to call for a radical re-thinking of many of the aspects of the case.
Scott suggested that it would be helpful to us if, for the time being, we put aside the historical figure of a man called 'Lee Harvey Oswald' , and concentrated more on a fictional being, indeed several fictional beings, with names like 'Lee Harvey Oswald', ' Lee Henry Oswald', 'Harvey Lee Oswald' or 'Harry Lee Oswald', fictional beings created in the files of the CIA and the FBI.
There are several reasons for doing this. The first is that Oswald was unquestionably an operative working with the intelligence agencies and therefore was continually being equipped with cover stories, fictional life histories to assist him in his activities in other countries, principally Russia.
According to both Scott and Newman, the recently available records show that Oswald's activities in both Russia and the US were closely monitored by the sub-section of the CIA known as the "Special Investigation Group" ( CI/SIG). Newman has spent some time in studying the marginalia and the initialings on the CIA cover sheets of Oswald-related documents that circulated around the intelligence community. In this way he has identified the "groupuscles" ( the nice French word for this, much better that our 'groupings' or 'sub-groups') . They were SR6, SR9 and SR10. The intials 'SR' were an abbreviation of 'USSR'
SR6 was responsible for creating "authentic cover personalities", which sometimes involved training persons to be "more Russians than the Russians themselves." This must have been much harder for them than the corresponding task of the KGB. The US is a melting pot and it is obviously much easier for the KGB to fabricate an 'immigrant' in the US, than for the Americans to fabricate a 'Russian' to go to Russia.
According to both Scott and Newman, the recently available records show that Oswald's activities in both Russia and the US were closely monitored by the sub-section of the CIA known as the "Special Investigation Group" ( CI/SIG). Newman has spent some time in studying the marginalia and the initialings on the CIA cover sheets of Oswald-related documents that circulated around the intelligence community. In this way he has identified the "groupuscles" ( the nice French word for this, much better than our 'groupings' or 'sub-groups') . They were SR6, SR9 and SR10. The intials 'SR' were an abbreviation of 'USSR'
SR6 was responsible for creating "authentic cover personalities", which sometimes involved training persons to be "more Russians than the Russians themselves." This must have been much harder for them than the corresponding task of the KGB. The US is a melting pot and it is obviously much easier for the KGB to fabricate an 'immigrant' in the US, than for the Americans to fabricate a 'Russian' to go to Russia.
SR9 ran agents inside the Soviet Union. SR10 was concerned with the activities of persons travelling to Russia with a legal purpose but with a hidden agenda: diplomats, salesmen, and so forth. Oswald's mission was characterized as "Vest Pocket", a classification so secret that it has no label except this informal description.
Oswald was debriefed after his return from Russia in 62 by an FBI agent named John Faine The cover sheet of Faine's report has 14 signatures on it. Every single one of these comes from a member of CI/SIG .
Another reason for looking as "Oswald the file", rather than "Oswald the person" is that it is apparent that, even before his involvement with the Kennedy assassination , the myth of 'Oswald' was being used as a kind of 'tracer element' for charting the flow of information within the labyrinths of the KGB. This comes out in the 'Staff-D' file on Oswald. Staff-D is the liason agency between the National Security Administration (NSA) and the CIA. The NSA, working out of Fort Meade, is the most secret organization in the American government . Now in the Staff-D files on Oswald released in the new mass of documents , one finds two cables. One of them speaks of a 'Lee Henry Oswald' weight 168 pounds', the other speaks of a 'Lee Henry Oswald, weight 149 pounds' . The two cables were drafted by the same people, and it is Scott' s contention that cables were sent out with contradictory information so that Staff-D could track the places where they ended up on the desks of the KGB.
Finally, it is clear that at least two mythical "Oswalds" were created in the files of the FBI and the CIA. A collection which may be called "Phase I" stories, built up the legend Oswald as a KGB agent, sometimes as a Cuban agent. The "Phase II" stories are those which support the thesis of him as the "lone assassin" of Kennedy. Lieutenant Pete Bagley was the director of a group with the initials CI/SIG "Special Investigation Group". The man was known to have a paranoid fear of the KGB. In 1960 SIG opened a file on Oswald called "Lee Henry Oswald". It was this group that invented to fable of Oswald's trip to Mexico. There are also records of many cables circulating between its members on the eve of the assassination. Scott believes that it is in the invented "Mexico City" trip, that one finds all of the elements of the Oswald myth, in which the KGB agent legend and the mad assassin legend were blended together in a convenient form for delivery to the general public.
In general, the story of the Oswald files gives a fascinating glimpse into the network of inter-connections between the intelligence agencies. Now it is we who are, in effect, using Lee Harvey Oswald (Henry? Harry?) as our tracer element through the twisting top-secret corridors of the American government!
Two persons held analogous positions in the CIA andFBI during this period and were in close contact with one another: William Sullivan, head of the counter-espionage division of the FBI , and James Angleton, head of the counter-espionage division of the CIA. One can find in the files an intense interaction between their respective offices on 'LHO', the myth and the man. Indeed, one can be more specific:
*All of the people who developed the myth of Oswald as a KGB or Cuban agent, were clustered around Angleton.
*All of the people who developed the myth of Oswald as 'lone assassin' were clustered around Sullivan.
The explotation of Oswald for various purposes seems to have gone back to his alleged "defection" from the Marines. There is strong evidence that this was planned. During the early 60's, no less than 6 phony "defectors" asked for asylum in the Soviet Union, and every one of them returned after a few years. It turns out that even the Dallas police had a file on Oswald as early as the late 50's.
PD Scott asked us to study the details of the myth of 'Oswald in Mexico City', which to him is the key to understanding the connection of all of the intelligence agencies with the Kennedy assassination. The DIA, the Department of Army Intelligence, maintains a large staff in Mexico City. A file is known to exist in its possession referring to one 'James Hydell , alias Lee Harvey Oswald, alias Harvey Lee Oswald', who had contacted a man called Kostokoff in the Cuban embassy in Mexico City'. Where is this file?
There is also supposed to be a tape of their conversation which , until 1971, was sitting in the safe of Winston Scott, the CIA bureau chief in Mexico City. It is widely rumored that Win Scott was murdered before he could release a report stating that the voice on this tape was not Oswald's. The tape has disappeared: James Angleton flew to Mexico City personally to remove this tape and all other effects of Scott's after his death. The tape, if it still exists, is buried in the Langley vaults.
At 1:00 on Saturday afternoon, the person who had been advertised as the "mystery guest" at the conference, strode up to the microphone. As many of us had speculated, it was Marina Oswald-Porter. She is a short , thin middle-aged woman with stringy mop-graying hair , decidedly Russian features. She speaks English quite well with only a trace of an accent. Despite the visible signs of a life of considerable stress, she is younger in manner and behavior than one might be led to expect. She wore a bluemarine knitted sweater and tight fitting slacks. She showed experience in fielding questions, did not show embarrassment or take offense at even the more hostile ones yet, it is my belief, told one lie after another, despite a uniform show of sympathy and several strong rounds of applause. Here is a sampling of questions and answers :
Question: Do you know anything about the contacts of your late husband with Jesus Fernando Hernandez in Miami?
Answer: With all of the "Oswald" impersonations ( lecturers at the conference spoke of at least 25 'pseudo-Oswalds') she could not guarantee any reports of his activities in any situation in which she was not with him.Question: It is known that she was interrogated by the Secret Service for several weeks after the assassination. Was she willing to talk about it?
Answer: She stated that she was pleased that the government had given her protection from the hostility of the public.Question: (PD Scott) Could she be more specific? Was she, for example, pressured by the US government to make certain public statements?
Answer: Marina Oswald avoided replying to the specific point of this question. The FBI questioned her for long hours, but did not use force or violence. They did use the threat of deportation to extract information. She had no intention of putting a halo around Lee Harvey Oswald.Question: Did she have any comment to make about the famous "photograph" which appeared in all the newspapers, showing Oswald with the usual smirk on his face, a rifle in the left hand and a copy of the Daily Worker in the right? ( Many investigators now believe that this photograph is a clumsy paste-together: the shadows are wrong, the head does not match the torso, and the whole body looks as if it were lifted out of another photograph. Consult for example the book of Bob Groden's "The Killing Of A President" )
Answer: She destroyed many pictures when he was arrested. She did once take a picture of him holding a gun. Marina essentially waffled the question, having gone on record in the past as saying that she did in fact take the specific photograph under consideration.Question: What did she have to say about the woman who took them in and got Lee Harvey a job in the Texas Book Depository. Ruth Paine?
Answer: To her Ruth Paine was a "very sympathetic person". When she and her husband moved in with the Paines he hid a rifle in their bedroom. After the JFK assassination, the police came by the house. Marina was forced to admit," in front of her Quaker host", that they had brought a gun into the house. The police searched and couldn't find it.
(All this is very hard to square with the duplicitous behavior , asserted by everyone from Jim Garrison to Dick Russell, of the Paines in maneuvering Oswald into the role of prime suspect for the assassination. Marina also hedged a similar question about the Baron George de Morenschieldt, another 'friend' of the period and a free lance operator for many Secret Services around the world. He was shot to death in Florida.)
Question: What could she say about Oswald's connections with the KGB, if any?
Answer: She knew nothing about them.Question: Yet was it not true that her uncle was in the KGB?
Answer: Never! ! He was, she asserted, with the MVD, (a kind of secret service associated with the Department of the Interior) . In fact, after the assassination he lost his job. Didn't that prove his innocence?
( It is quite likely that Oswald married Marina to get to her uncle. CIA marriages tend to follow a classic pattern. I have some personal experience of this, having once, in 1970, interviewed an ex-CIA operative for a magazine article. He spoke freely and in detail of 5 'marriages' contracted for the purpose of getting close to the military elite in various Third World countries.)
Question: Was Oswald ever approached by the KGB?
Answer: I don't remember.Question: What was Lee Harvey Oswald's reaction when Gary Powers and the U-2 plane were shot down?
Answer: When was Powers shot down? ( From the audience:" May, 1960 "). When did I marry Lee ? ( General laughter)Question: Why do you think your late husband went to Russia?
Answer: I believe that he was sent there on a mission, and that he came back when the people who sent him told him to return.
( Deafening applause. Half the audience stood up to honor her for this amazing performance.)
Saturday, 4-6:00 Robert Groden
"The Photographic Record".
The presentation began with a long uninterrupted section of his recently released videotape, combining bits of television footage with the Zapruder film. A few words about the history of this film: Zapruder's film captures the crucial moments of the murder of President Kennedy at 12:30, November 22, 1963 from very close up, in rather grisly detail. It is more than adequate to the objective of figuring out where the bullets came from.
The evening of the assassination it was borrowed by a representative of the H.L. Hunt family. Zapruder somehow got it back, then sold it to LIFE Magazine for $150,000 . He later received another $100,000 in royalties. LIFE sat on this vital piece of evidence for twelve years, until 1975 . It was only shown twice, in secret sessions of the Warren Commission in 1963, and during Jim Garrison's trial of Clay Shaw in New Orleans in 1969.
Throughout this period of more than a decade, LIFE was printing stories filled with statements that are in direct contradiction to the evidence on the film. The fight to get the film released for the HSCA hearings in 1976 went all the way to the Supreme Court, which forced the magazine to make the film public domain. The first generally available videotape including the relevant Zapruder footage had just been released by Robert Groden before the conference. To order it write and ask for : JFK-The Case For Conspiracy (Videotape) NEW FRONTIER PUBLICATIONS P.O. Bx. 2164. Boothwyn, Pa. 19061 $29 (Information circa 1993)
Groden stopped the film at the period just before and after the firing of the shots and moved it along a single frame at a time. The first thing that we observed was that two frames had been excised from the film at the location recording the first shot, and that four frames were excised from the location of the second shot! This must have been done either by Life Magazine or H.L. Hunt, unless Zapruder had done it himself.
Groden believes that there is evidence for 7 shots. The frames around the fatal head shot that killed Kennedy in 1/18th of a second, allows no other interpretation than that of a direct hit from the front. ( The watermelons of Luis Alvarez notwithstanding. Read his biography, "Alvarez" )
By using the number of frames to measure the time elapsed between the two shots, one finds it to be 1.8 seconds. The rifle used by the assassin, whether Oswald's ramshackle 'Mannlicher-Carcano' device (or the Mauser he was later said to have used) , require, for mechanical reasons and with no time to aim , a minimum of 2.3 seconds for firing. Groden's re-construction entails from 6 to 10 bullets.
Shot #1: Missed. Frame 161 on the Zapruder film.
Shot #2: A small throat wound, from the front.This was excised by a 'false tracheotomy' .Frame 188.
Shot #3: This hit Connally in the back, went through the chest cracked a rib and exited through the right nipple.
Shot #4 : From behind. Hit Kennedy low in the back. This is the Warren Commission's, "Magic Bullet".
Shot #5: The head shot. This came from the front, probably from the Badge Man behind the stone culvert on the grassy knoll. (See Gary Mack's presentation)
( The evidence of tampering on the Zapruder film shows that before it was presented to the Warren commission, some of the frames around the head shot were reversed to give the impression of a forward motion of the body.)Shot #6. From the Book Depository. This shattered Conolly's right wrist and entered his thigh. When John Conolly died, medical investigators tried to get permission from the family to autopsy the wrist, to examine the fragments of metal still lodged within it. Their efforts were stonewalled.
In addition there were from 2 to 4 more shots. One of these bounced off a manhole cover and struck a bystander, James Tague. Taken all in all, it was a classic military -style triangulated ambush. Groden's book correlates all the evidence: The films of Abraham Zapruder, Charles Bronson and Orville Nix, the photographs of Mary Ann Moorman and those of media photographers , the acoustic evidence on the Dictabelts( See Gary Mack ) . The correlations are coherent and convincing.
Saturday Evening Session, Langdell Hall
7:00 - 8:30 Gary Mack : "Acoustics and Badge Man "
Gary Mack:
(1) The Dictabelt Tapes:
The idea of checking the tapes of the dictaphones of the police in the motorcade was his. it came out of conversations about ways of finding independent evidence for a conspiracy in the assassination. His first analysis of the tapes was made in August of 1977. It was incorrectly done and its findings were of no value. The project was then taken up a a Jim Barger, an expert in the field of acoustic evidence at the engineering think tank of Bolt, Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, Ma. It was because of his efforts that the government agreed to underwrite the firing of test shots in Dealey Plaza to match the echoes with the evidence. The work of Barger, Mark Weiss and Ernie Ashkenazi uncovered acoustic evidence for 4 shots, 3 of them from the windows of the Texas Book Depository, 1 from the grassy knoll, ( the hill to the right of the motorcade in Dealey Plaza where there is a wooded area where persons might be concealed. It is here that advocates of a conspiracy in the JFK assassination place one or more gunmen.)
During the House Select Commitee's hearings in 1979, Barger's group reported that there was a 95% or better chance that at least one of the bullet came from the grassy knoll. In fact the analysis done to show this is better than that made on the other bullet sounds, which have not all been proven to have come from the Texas Book Depository. Mack suspects that the tape which was handed over to Barger by the Dallas police are copies and not originals, and that some of the data has been erased from them.
(2) The Bronson Film:
In addition to the famous Zapruder film, another home movie including footage of the assassination was made by someone named Charles Bronson ( no connection to the actor). A series of odd coincidences led to the discovery , in 1978 , that the film contained images of the 6th Floor of the Texas Book Depository just before the shooting. Because of an ambulance which appears in this picture, its time can be fixed precisely as 12:24. Oswald was known to be sitting in the lunchroom of the Depository at 12:25.
The amount of footage in which the 6th floor windows appear amounts to 392 frames. It was completely enhanced by the producers of the program Frontline, which did a 3 hour feature on the JFK assassination on Tuesday, November 23rd.
There is evidence of something moving about the 6th floor in this film, but it cannot be conclusively stated that the forms are those of people. It was claimed at the conference however, that when the Bronson film was shown at the House Select Committee hearings, that all but one of the 70 lawyers present stated that they now believed that a conspiracy had been involved in the assassination.
(3) The Badge Man photograph:
On the day of the assassination, the FBI and the Secret Service went around collecting every film and photograph they could find. Many people anxious to assisst the police voluntarily turned in their rolls of film. Mary Ann Moorman, a friend of one of the policemen guarding the motorcade, happened to be capturing a Polaroid snapshot of him at the moment of the headshot. This rough-grained and blurry positive image, ( the Polaroids do not produce negatives), was taken by the FBI , then returned to her because they found nothing of interest on it.
Through a series of improbable encounters and coincidences, it came into the hands of Gary Mack and his group , including the team at Bolt, Beranek and Newman. They noticed something interesting in the upper right hand corner of the picture. By the skillful application of blow-up and photo enhancement techniques, they uncovered the vague outlines of what appear to be three persons. One of them appears to be wearing the uniform of a Dallas policement and firing a gun, with a wisp of smoke coming out in front of his face.
To go beyond this, much more sophisticated equipment and funding were needed. Most of the news media refused to touch it. However the National Enquirrer learned about it and begged Mack's group for permission to let them write up a sensationalist article about their research, including the enhancements of the "Badge Man" Polaroid at the point where they had carried them . They refused to comply at first; however when the Enquirrer offered to pay all the expenses of image processing by specialists in the technology , they agreed to go along.
Through BB&N, the Enquirrer was put in touch with the director of the Image Processing Department at M.I.T., Dr. Jay Lim. Lim agreed to look at the photograph and get back to them. At the end of the day, Lim called back to announce that he had was very excited by what evidence he had already uncovered. He intended to work through the night and get back to them again the next morning.
Mack's team and the National Enquirrer waited all through the next day and heard nothing from him. On the day after that they received a call from an administrator at M.I.T., who would not identify himself, stating that M.I.T. would not assist them in any way with this project. The photograph was later returned. Lim refused to return any phone calls, and that was the end of it.
Despite this, further work has been done on this photograph: the most recent enchanced version appears on page 204 of Groden's "Killing of a President." It no longer looks like a Rohrschach blot for paranoid conspiracy buffs ; it is convincing, chilling evidence of a gunman, caught in the act of firing .
November 14, Sunday
10:00 AM - 12 Noon: The Taboo of Conspiracy- Mass Media and Academia: Moderator:Mary Perot Nichols; Danny Schechter; Jerry Policoff; Jim DiEugenio; Roger Feinman; Gary Mack; Jim Marrs
12 Noon - 1:00 PM Lunch Break
1:00 - 2:00PM Context of the Crime I - JFK & the Mafia; John Davis; David Scheim; Edgar Tatro
2:00 - 3:00 PMContext of the Crime II - JFK & Cuba Gaeton Fonzi; Warren Hinckle
3:00 - 4:30 PMContext of the Crime III - JFK & Vietnam John Newman; Peter Dale Scott
4:30 - 6:00PM Context of the Crime IV - JFK & the Intelligence Community: Phillip Melanson; Dick Russell; John Stockwell; John Judge; Jim DiEugenio
6:00 - 7:00 PM Dinner Break
7:00 - 7:30 PM Summary Remarks: Carl Oglesby
7:30 - 9:00 A Call to Action: An open strategy session. Moderator: Peter Jourdain
9:00 - 10:00 Social Hour Considerations of space obliged me to conclude this report with a description of the third panel on Sunday afternoon and none of the others.
3:00-4:00PM Sunday,Nov. 14th:
Context of the Crime: JFK & Vietnam:
John Newman, Peter Dale Scott, Peter Jourdain, Daniel Ellsberg
We were grateful to have Daniel Ellsberg, who had not been listed on the program. The focus of this panel was on an area where many people have recently shown a great deal of interest: the decisions made by John F. Kennedy in his final year that reflect his attitudes and intentions with respect to commiting American combat troops to a landwar in Vietnam. Even Noam Chomsky has come out with a book about this subject: Return to Camelot ,Southend Press ( This book was reviewed in Ferment. See The Cambridge Crank Tournament
John Newman: John Fitzgerald Kennedy's intentions behind his decision to phase out the presence of the American military in Vietnam have now become better known through the recent release of thousands of official documents from the early 60's. As everyone knows, Kennedy was neither a radical nor even a liberal in his views about the "Communist menace". He was in fact a right-wing hawk.
Despite this it was a basic tenet of his administration that American ground troops would never be committed to Vietnam. LBJ's decision to do so in the contrived Tonkin Bay resolution would reverse a policy of 6 years standing.
John Newman categorically rejected the "escalation" model which has been accepted by most of the American public since the early 60's. He called it "just nonsense". There was in fact no steady escalation from Kennedy to Johnson. Instead the record shows that the decision to not deploy American armed forces was a "line of demarcation" ( Newman called it the "Rubicon") that Kennedy would not cross, but that Johnson sought to reverse from his first day in office as President.
On May 10th, 1961, the Army Chiefs of Staff went on the record, calling for an immediate commitment of American ground troops in Vietnam.
On November 2, 1961, General Maxwell Taylor shocked JFK by advising him to send 6,000 American ground troops to Vietnam at once. The National Security Council met on November 4th. At that meeting JFK was strongly urged to commit troups by U Alexis Johnson; Robert McNamara; McGeorge Bundy; Walter Rostow; Robert Johnson; and Komer.
Dean Rusk was undecided. John Kenneth Galbraith ( who'd just returned from a fact-finding mission in VietNam), and Chester Bowles were against it.
A second NSC meeting took place on November 15th. Virtually everyone present, including Rusk, McNamara and General Lemnitzer, pushed hard for direct intervention.
But on November 22, exactly two years before being assassinated, JFK issued the National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM)#111 . This states that the United States had no commitment to save Vietnam from communism, and that it would not therefore send in ground troops. Few of his advisers had expected Kennedy to be so tough. It had been assumed that his youth and lack of experience in politics at the executive level and the Pentagon would render him compliant.
In May of 1962 , Army Intelligence reported to Kennedy that the National Liberation Front (NLF or Viet Cong) was small, fractious and with no base of support among the population of South Vietnam. They painted a picture for his benefit of many military defeats of the NLF by the South Vietnamese army (ARVN) , which was then under the tutelage of 16,000 American advisors. It argued that the deployment of a small number of American battalions could completely eliminate the communist threat.
As recently available documents showed, these were deliberate lies designed to get JFK to make a small initial investment of American combat troops , that could later be arbitrarily enlarged once it became clear that we were losing. Although Army Intelligence (DIA) knew that there were over 40,000 Viet Cong soldiers in the field, they told JFK that there were at most 16,000. By not reporting everything it knew about Viet Cong operations prior to April 26th, 1962, it was made to appear that the NLF was being defeated.
In actual fact the NLF was chalking up one major victory after another, and were about to launch the most successful military action against the Diem government since 1955, the year that the US became involved in that country.
By early 1963, JFK was able to put together a reasonably accurate picture of the true situation. According to Newman, and contrary to Chomsky's thesis in Return to Camelot, Kennedy was not optimistic about our chances of winning a war in Vietnam.
By mid 1963 Kennedy had begun to talk about a "phased withdrawal" from Vietnam, including even the advisory force. On October 2, 1963 he issued NSAM#263, calling for the withdrawal of 1,000 advisors by the end of the year. On November 21,1963, the day before his death, he drafted NSAM#273 authorizing covert operations and economic and military assistance to the South Vietnamese government, with no commitment of ground troops. It was this memorandum which was rewritten by LBJ soon after taking office, so as to allow for that possibility.
Daniel Ellsberg: As an inside participant until the late 60's, Ellsberg knew and had frequent dealings with all the persons being discussed by this panel. It was his view that Robert McNamara actually sided with Kennedy in believing that it was foolish to get further involved in Vietnam, that in fact McNamara would even have accepted the NLF flag flying over Saigon rather than commit ground troops.
Ellsberg claimed that this secret was the real reason why the world has been waiting so long for the publication of McNamara's memoirs. McNamara's cooperation with Johnson in the escalation of the war went against his own judgment and convictions.
The relevance of Ellsberg's comments to this conference had to do with the possibility that Kennedy's opposition to escalating the war in Vietnam may have been a contributing factor in his assassination. As stated by Ellsberg, the principal disagreement of Kennedy and Johnson on this issue was:
Kennedy was not inclined to escalate.
Johnson was certain to escalate.
In September of 1961, Daniel Ellsberg was himself in Vietnam. He learned that, universally, American military personnel there believed it was time for them to pack up and go home.
Several years later, in 1967, Ellsberg happened to be in Robert Kennedy's office. When Ellsberg broached the subject of the 1962 debates over Vietnam, RFK stated that he knew for a fact that his brother would never have committed ground troops there. Apparently RFK banged his fist on his desk and shouted : "Because he knew we would lose! My brother had been in the Senate from 1952; he saw what had happened to the French in 1954! The United States couldn't afford to be maneuvered into a situation in which the communists might beat them! Sending white faces into those rice paddies would only stir up nationalist feelings against us."
As his final comment to us Daniel Ellsberg, who had joined the Pentagon around the time of the Tonkin Bay Resolution, stated that Robert McNamara had told McNaughton, (who had told him), that there had been an understanding between him and JFK that we would be out of Vietnam by 1965.
Summary of Sunday Afternoon's Discussion :
JFK's refusal to escalate the war in VietNam was only one of the possible reasons why the intelligence community may have wanted to eliminate him. The Bay of Pigs fiasco had been seen as a way of twisting his arm to commit the army to a fighting war in Southeast Asia against the communists.
JFK's decision to close down the CIA bases from which exile groups were harassing Cuba, as part of the compromise in the Cuban missile crisis, aroused further hatred. To many right-wing extremists, cutting any sort of deal with Nikita Khrushchev amounted to treason.
Finally the Mafia were more than eager to settle accounts with a President who wasn't doing enough in their eyes to recover their Caribbean empire for them, and whose brother, as Attorney General, was putting so many of them behind bars.SR9 ran agents inside the Soviet Union. SR10 was concerned with the activities of persons travelling to Russia with a legal purpose but with a hidden agenda: diplomats, salesmen, and so forth. Oswald's mission was characterized as "Vest Pocket", a classification so secret that it has no label except this informal description.Oswald was debriefed after his return from Russia in 62 by an FBI agent named John Faine The cover sheet of Faine's report has 14 signatures on it. Every single one of these comes from a member of CI/SIG .
Another reason for looking as "Oswald the file", rather than "Oswald the person" is that it is apparent that, even before his involvement with the Kennedy assassination , the myth of 'Oswald' was being used as a kind of 'tracer element' for charting the flow of information within the labyrinths of the KGB. This comes out in the 'Staff-D' file on Oswald. Staff-D is the liason agency between the National Security Administration (NSA) and the CIA. The NSA, working out of Fort Meade, is the most secret organization in the American government . Now in the Staff-D files on Oswald released in the new mass of documents , one finds two cables. One of them speaks of a 'Lee Henry Oswald' weight 168 pounds', the other speaks of a 'Lee Henry Oswald, weight 149 pounds' . The two cables were drafted by the same people, and it is Scott' s contention that cables were sent out with contradictory information so that Staff-D could track the places where they ended up on the desks of the KGB.
Finally, it is clear that at least two mythical "Oswalds" were created in the files of the FBI and the CIA. A collection which may be called "Phase I" stories, built up the legend Oswald as a KGB agent, sometimes as a Cuban agent. The "Phase II" stories are those which support the thesis of him as the "lone assassin" of Kennedy. Lieutenant Pete Bagley was the director of a group with the initials CI/SIG "Special Investigation Group". The man was known to have a paranoid fear of the KGB. In 1960 SIG opened a file on Oswald called "Lee Henry Oswald". It was this group that invented to fable of Oswald's trip to Mexico. There are also records of many cables circulating between its members on the eve of the assassination. Scott believes that it is in the invented "Mexico City" trip, that one finds all of the elements of the Oswald myth, in which the KGB agent legend and the mad assassin legend were blended together in a convenient form for delivery to the general public.
In general, the story of the Oswald files gives a fascinating glimpse into the network of inter-connections between the intelligence agencies. Now it is we who are, in effect, using Lee Harvey Oswald (Henry? Harry?) as our tracer element through the twisting top-secret corridors of the American government!
___________________________________
John M. Newman spent 20 years with the U.S. Army Intelligence. This included serving in in Thailand, the Philippines, Japan, and China. He eventually became executive assistant to the director of the National Security Agency (NSA).
After leaving the NSA Newman joined the University of Maryland where he taught courses in Soviet, Chinese Communist, East Asian, and Vietnam War history, as well as Sino-Soviet and U.S.-Soviet relations.
Newman is the author of JFK and Vietnam: Deception, Intrigue, and the Struggle for Power (1992) and Oswald and the CIA (1995). He also served as served as an adviser to Oliver Stone while he was making JFK and was one of the experts called upon to advise the JFK Assassination Records Review Board..
In 1995 Wayne Smith, chief of the Centre for International Policy in Washington, arranged a meeting on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, in Nassau, Bahamas. Others in attendance were Gaeton Fonzi, Dick Russell, Noel Twyman, Anthony Summers, Peter Dale Scott, Jeremy Gunn, John Judge, Andy Kolis, Peter Kornbluh, Mary and Ray LaFontaine, Jim Lesar, Alan Rogers, Russ Swickard, Ed Sherry, and Gordon Winslow.
Some high-level Cuban officials attended the conference. This included Fabian Escalante, Carlos Lechuga, a former Cuban diplomat, and Arturo Rodriguez, a State Security official. Escalante revealed details of the confession made by Tony Cuesta. He also informed the group they had a spy in the anti-Castro community in Miami and knew about the plot to kill Kennedy.
A new edition of Oswald and the CIA was published in 2008. Newman argues that James Angleton was probably the key figure in the assassination of John F. Kennedy: "In my view, whoever Oswald's direct handler or handlers were, we must now seriously consider the possibility that Angleton was probably their general manager. No one else in the Agency had the access, the authority, and the diabolically ingenious mind to manage this sophisticated plot. No one else had the means necessary to plant the WWIII virus in Oswald's files and keep it dormant for six weeks until the president's assassination. Whoever those who were ultimately responsible for the decision to kill Kennedy were, their reach extended into the national intelligence apparatus to such a degree that they could call upon a person who knew its inner secrets and workings so well that he could design a failsafe mechanism into the fabric of the plot. The only person who could ensure that a national security cover-up of an apparent counterintelligence nightmare was the head of counterintelligence."
(1) John M. Newman, Oswald and the CIA (1995)
On September 10, 1963, Special Agent Hosty sent a report on Oswald to the Bureau and to New Orleans. It was the first FBI document to make it into Oswald's CIA files since the Fain report of August 30, 1962. Hosty began by acknowledging Oswald's Magazine Street address, an address everyone else in the FBI had known about for a month. Hosty then said Oswald had been working at the William Reily Coffee Company on August 5. He apparently did not know that Oswald had been fired from his job at Reily Coffee on July 19.103 Hosty did mention the April 21 Oswald letter to the FPCC from Dallas. It would appear, however, that he did not know about Oswald's arrest in New Orleans or chose for some reason not to say anything about it. Hosty did not know about the Quigley jailhouse interview.
On Monday, September 23, the employees at CIA headquarters were still catching up on the weekend's traffic when Hosty's report arrived under FBI director Hoover's signature. It was 1:24 in the afternoon when someone named Annette in the CIA's Records Integration Division attached a CIA routing and record sheet to the report and sent it along to the liaison office of the counterintelligence staff, where Jane Roman was still working. As discussed in Chapter Two, Roman received the first phone call from the FBI about Oswald on November 2, 1959.
When Jane Roman got the Hosty report, she signed for it and, presumably after having read it, determined the next CIA organizational element to whom it should be sent. The office she chose was Counterintelligence Operations, CI/OPS. The telltale "P" of William ("Will") Potocci, who worked in Counterintelligence Operations, appears next to the CI/OPS entry, along with the date that Roman passed the report on to him-September 25. Potocci presumably worked in this office, although something on the routing sheet-probably Potocci's name or some activity indicator in CU OPS-is still being withheld by the CIA.
CIA readers of the Hosty report were treated to the outlines of the story we have followed in this and the previous three chapters: how Oswald had returned from Russia to Fort Worth, Texas, where he subscribed to the communist newspaper the Worker, and then moved to New Orleans, where he took a job in the Reily Coffee Company; most important, the CIA learned that on April 21 Oswald, having moved from Fort Worth to Dallas, contacted the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New York City. The report also recounted Oswald's claim to have stood on a Dallas street with a placard around his neck that read "Hands Off Cuba-Viva Fidel."
The CIA did not put this report into Oswald's 201 file, but instead into a new file with a different number: 100-300-11. We will return to that file in Chapter Nineteen. Even as the Hosty report made its way from Jane Roman to Will Potocci, an FBI agent in New Orleans was preparing yet another report on Oswald that would arrive at the CIA on October 2. This, as we will see, was the very day that Oswald, having spent five nights in Mexico City, departed from the Mexican capital.
On his way from New Orleans to Mexico City, Oswald is reported to have visited the home of Silvia Odio in Dallas. The Odio "incident," as it has become known with the passage of time, was labeled by researcher Sylvia Meagher as the "proof of the plot," because the Warren Commission accepted that Odio was visited by three men-one of whom was "Oswald." Meagher's point was that whether it was an impostor or Oswald himself, as Odio believes, the group that visited her apartment and phoned her afterward, and their pre assassination discussion of killing Kennedy, is awkward, if not antithetical, for the lone-nut hypothesis. The Warren Commission accepted that the event occurred, but dismissed Odio's version of it. First, the commission found that a September 26 or 27 visit was not possible given Oswald's time requirements for arriving in Mexico City at ten A.M. on September 27.
Second, the Warren Commission believed it had identified the three men who visited Odio: Loran Eugene Hall, Larry Howard, and William Seymour, who was "similar in appearance to Lee Harvey Oswald." All three were soldiers of fortune involved with the Cuban exiles. Hall was a self described gun runner." As discussed in Chapter Fourteen, Seymour was an associate of Hemming's.
Both of these Warren Commission contributions damaged the public's understanding of the facts in the case and the public's confidence in the integrity and objectivity of the Commission's work. The Hall-Howard-Seymour story, supplied by the FBI just in time to save the Warren Report - on its way to press - the embarrassment of not having discredited Odio's version of the incident, later turned out to be wholly fraudulent. No official connected to the Warren Report has ever apologized to the public or Silvia Odio for their shabby treatment of her and their acceptance of a concocted story, an egregious error given what was at stake.
(2) John M. Newman, Oswald and the CIA (1995)
On October 4, Jane Roman read the latest FBI report on Oswald's FPCC activities in New Orleans, an event that was impossible if the October 10 cable to Mexico City-which she coordinated on behalf of CI/Liaison-was true. When recently shown both the cable and the FBI report with her initials, Roman said this: "I'm signing off on something that I know isn't true." Roman's straightforward answer is as noteworthy as the fact that the CIA has released her name on these reports while redacting the names of others. One explanation might be that she was not in on the operation and therefore not in a position to question why the two cables were being drafted with such ridiculous sentences. "The only interpretation I could put on this," Roman says now, "would be that this SAS group would have held all the information on Oswald under their tight control, so if you did a routine check, it wouldn't show up in his 201 file." Roman made this incisive comment without being shown the documents lists that demonstrate that she was right. "I wasn't in on any particular goings-on or hanky-panky as far as the Cuban situation," Roman states. Asked about the significance of the untrue sentence on the "latest headquarters" information, Roman replied: "Well, to me, it's indicative of a keen interest in Oswald, held very closely on a need-to-know basis."
(3) John M. Newman, Oswald and the CIA (1995)
On December 11, 1963, John Scelso (John M. Whitten), chief of Western Hemisphere Branch 3, wrote an alarming memo to Richard Helms, deputy director of Plans. In bold handwriting at the top of the memo are the words "not sent." Below this is written "Questions put orally to Mr. Helms. 11 Nov. 63." In smaller handwriting under this are the words "Dec. presumably," reflecting the obvious fact that the Helms oral briefing was December 11, not November 11. Scelso wasted no time in throwing this stone into the pond: " It looks like the FBI report may even be released to the public. This would compromise our [13 spaces redacted] operations in Mexico, because the Soviets would see that the FBI had advance information on the reason for Oswald's visit to the Soviet Embassy."
How could the FBI have known Oswald's reason in advance? Next to this piece of text was a handwritten clue: "Mr. Helms phoned Mr. Angleton this warning." Perhaps "this morning" was meant, but in either case this may mean that CIA counterintelligence operations were involved.
It is intriguing that anyone in U.S. intelligence would have had advance notice of Oswald's visit to the Soviet Embassy. Evidently the FBI report that was mentioned was worded so that its readers might conclude that the FBI had been the source of information, but from Scelso's report, it is not hard to guess that it was the CIA's operations in Mexico that had yielded "advance information on the reason for Oswald's visit to the Soviet Embassy." But just what exactly does this phrase mean?
Oswald had told the Soviet Consulate in Mexico City that he corresponded with the Soviet Embassy in Washington about returning to the U.S.S.R. As previously discussed, the FBI would have learned of the contents of this correspondence. But this would not have compromised CIA operations in Mexico City. The CIA station monthly operational report for October 1963 did mention Oswald's visit to the Soviet Consulate, and did so under the subtitle "Exploitation of [7 letters redacted] Information." The same seven-letter cryptonym is redacted in the line beneath this subtitle, but the last letter is partially visible, enough to see that it is the letter Y In another CIA document from the Mexico City station the cryptonym LIENVOY has been left in the clear, and it was apparently used for the photo surveillance operation against the Soviet Embassy and Consulate." If this is true, the point of the Scelso memo above might have been this: Publication of the October 9-10 cables would show the telephone intercept had been linked to the photo surveillance, and that since the phone call came first, the cable showed the Agency had advance knowledge of the reason for Oswald's (the impostor) visit to the Soviet Consulate.
It appears that the CIA had advance knowledge about more than Oswald's October 1 visit to the Soviet Embassy. There is circumstantial evidence that the CIA Mexico City station might have been watching Oswald since his arrival on September 27. This evidence, according to the Lopez Report, was the Agency's decision to investigate the transcripts back to September 27, before they had learned of that date through post-assassination investigation:" This Committee has not been able to determine how the CIA Headquarters knew, on 23 November 1963, that a review of the [redacted] material should begin with the production from 27 September, the day Oswald first appeared at the Soviet and Cuban Embassies".
This was an incisive point. So was the direction in which the Lopez Report then headed: what headquarters knew about Oswald's visits to the Cuban Consulate.
(4) Jefferson Morley, What Jane Roman Said (January 2002)
I first called Jane Roman in the summer of 1994. I told her that I worked as an editor for the Sunday Outlook section of the Washington Post. I told her I had seen her name on some new CIA records in the National Archives. Could she spare some time to review them with a colleague and me? Roman said she was going away for the summer, maybe when she got back in the fall. In October, I called her again in. I explained that it was very difficult to understand records like this, especially for some one like myself who had never worked at the CIA. I needed her help. I told her that I liked to work with a colleague, I preferred to tape record my interviews and thought we could cover everything in 90 minutes.
She agreed. She invited me to come to her house on Newark Street in Cleveland Park on November 2, 1994.
My colleague was John Newman. He was a 20-year veteran of U.S. Army Intelligence. He had worked in sensitive postings at the far-flung corners of the National Security Agency’s intelligence empire. He had expertise in analyzing the cable traffic of the Chinese armed forces. He had served as executive assistant to the director of the National Security Agency, which gave him a feel for high-level office politics. He had also written a book, “JFK in Vietnam” that was praised by retired CIA director William Colby and by historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Newman had served as an adviser to Oliver Stone on the set of “JFK” and was one of the experts called upon to advise the JFK Assassination Records Review Board.
I had first met Newman two years before in 1992, at a talk he gave on his book at Georgetown University. We became friendly, sharing abiding interests in national security policymaking and the Kennedy assassination. As I learned from him how to analyze CIA cables, I did my own reading in the new JFK files and shared with him what I found. We talked about what the new records suggested, specifically about what the routing slips indicated about what the CIA knew about Oswald before the assassination. We had our theories but John emphasized to me that more information was needed.
So when Jane Roman agreed to talk to me, I knew I was going to bring John Newman along. In my phone calls to Roman, I made certain that I mentioned Newman’s intelligence training and national security background and that he would be participating.
The interview took place at Roman’s house, a classy Cape Cod cottage on Newark Street. It was a warm autumn morning. We walked up the brick path through the ivy and rang the bell. Roman greeted us graciously, ushered us into her comfortable and tasteful home and seated us at a dining room table. Newman spread out his file folders and we made small talk.
There was an awkward moment when Roman insisted I tell her how I had found her. I said, ridiculously, that I had my sources. She said she wanted to know or she didn’t see the need to go any further. I promptly folded.
“I found the property records on your daughter’s condo,” I said.
Roman nodded and seemed grimly satisfied. I pulled out my tape recorder and she balked again. Newman reassured her that taping was the best protection for all concerned. She relented.
Listening to the tape of the 75-minute interview that ensued, I am struck by several things. Above all, the tone is professional. Newman and Roman spoke as colleagues in the intelligence business. They understood what the other one was saying. Newman was assertive, well prepared, self-possessed. Roman was circumspect, thoughtful and concise.
Right from the start, Roman and Newman parried with revealing results.
Newman produced a sheath of copies of the CIA cables that Roman had signed for over the years. They were all cables about one Lee Harvey Oswald of New Orleans and his travels between November 1959 to October 1963. Roman took her time examining them.
From that point on, Roman did not dispute that she had been familiar with Lee Harvey Oswald before November 22, 1963.
(5) Lisa Pease, The Enduring JFK Mystery (22nd November, 2005)
Forty-two years ago, on Nov. 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas, Texas. In Bethesda, Maryland, this past weekend, a group of distinguished journalists, historians, scientists and others gathered to discuss and debate the evidence of conspiracy in the JFK case.
While the research community has often slammed the mainstream media for not covering the facts of the case, the blame must go both ways. The conference organizers offered no handouts, no summaries of what is new in the case this year, or any hook upon which a journalist might hang a story.
As one of the reporters said in a panel discussion, this is a story without an ending, and how satisfying is that?
But that is a tragedy, in light of the Downing Street Memo and other evidence that the Bush administration’s case for war in Iraq was built on a false platform. The common thread throughout the weekend was that secrecy and democracy cannot safely coexist, that the more we have of the former, the less we have of the latter.
The credentials of the speakers this year was more impressive than in previous conferences. Featured speakers included former presidential candidate Gary Hart, author James Bamford, journalists Jeff Morley and Salon founder David Talbot, and historians David Wrone and John Newman (who was a military intelligence analyst), and the former head of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, G. Robert Blakey....
Former military intelligence analyst John Newman was the only speaker willing to speculate about a potential conspirator, based on the documentary record.
Professor Newman reviewed how CIA reports of Oswald’s trips to the Cuban and Soviet embassies was a key factor in getting President Lyndon B. Johnson and the Warren Commission members to go with the Oswald as lone assassin line.
Newman described how the reports in essence created a “World War III” virus, such that after the assassination, no one wanted to look too closely at who Oswald served, lest it touch off a nuclear war with the Soviets or the Cubans.
Newman traced how false information that helped promote this WWIII virus got into Oswald’s file and concluded that the person who controlled the file at those points was Ann Egerter, one of the six or so hand-picked operatives working in James Jesus Angleton’s CI/SIG unit – the Special Investigations Group within the larger 200-man Counterintelligence group at CIA.
Newman also pointed out how many in the Agency feared Angleton, feared for their lives if they crossed him, and suggested Egerter would not have manipulated Oswald’s file on her own, but only under express instructions from Angleton himself.
(6) Jefferson Morley, The Man Who Did Not Talk (November, 2007)
It is possible that Joannides was not presented with Oswald's name prior to the assassination, but the latest declassified records confirm that a half dozen other top CIA officials were aware of the itinerant ex-Marine and interested in his movements. In September 1963, a month after confronting Joannides's assets in New Orleans, Oswald went to Mexico City and visited the Cuban consulate, seeking a visa. He passed through a CIA surveillance program code-named LIERODE. He then visited the Soviet Embassy where his voice was picked up by a telephonic wiretapping program known as LIENVOY. (These recordings of Oswald, seized from the home office safe of Mexico City station chief Win Scott, were hidden from investigators and later destroyed.) Then, in November, after he returned to Dallas, Oswald wrote a letter to the Soviet Embassy in Washington about his contacts with the Cubans and Soviets in Mexico. The letter was opened by the FBI who shared it with the CIA's counterintelligence staff which had responsibility for tracking Soviet defectors.
https://www.fermentmagazine.org/jfk2.html
John Newman, an Army intelligence analyst turned historian, was the first to parse the new records in his 1995 book Oswald and the CIA. "What we've learned since Stone's movie is that the CIA's interest in Oswald was a lot deeper than they have ever acknowledged," Newman wrote. "As Oswald made his way toward Dallas, the reporting about him was channeled into a file controlled by an office in the counterintelligence staff called the Special Investigations Group."
The SIG, as it was known, was the operational office of James Angleton, the first chief of counterintelligence for the CIA, a legendary controversial figure whose exploits inspired the movie The Good Shepherd. Some thought him a charming and brilliant theorist; others thought him a bully and a paranoid menace. "When Oswald shows up in Mexico City," Newman explains, "his file goes over to the Western Hemisphere division which reviews it and sends out a cable to the State Department and other agencies that is -- how can I put it? -- very selective."
This cable, dated October 10, 1963, is no smoking gun. But is one of the key new documents in the JFK paper trail whose significance is not appreciated by the mainstream media or the furious partisans of the JFK chat groups. The cable, not fully declassified until 2002, was sent after a CIA surveillance microphone picked up Oswald's name during his conversations with the Cubans and Russians in Mexico City. "Who was Oswald?" station chief Scott asked headquarters. "We don't know," replied Langley in the cable. The "latest HDQS info," dated May 1962, was that Oswald was returning from the Soviet Union and had matured politically. In fact, that was not the CIA's latest information, as one of Angleton's aides admitted to the Washington Post in 1995. Acknowledging that she helped draft this cable, this aide said in a tape-recorded interview: "I'm signing off on something I know isn't true." What the cable's authors deliberately omitted, among other things, was mention of a September 1963 FBI report on Oswald's encounters with the DRE in New Orleans.
The most senior official to sign off on the inaccurate cable was Tom Karamessines, trusted assistant to CIA Deputy Director Helms. If Helms was a master spy, the man who kept the secrets, Karamessines was the dependable sidekick who helped him do it. Karamessines was also the patron of his fellow Greek American, Miami field man George Joannides.
The interest of these senior officials does not necessarily imply anything more sinister than a bureaucracy's natural tendency to cover its ass. The CIA had ample reason to be monitoring Oswald in late 1963. He publicly supported the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, a pro-Castro group, formally classified as a "subversive" organization by U.S. national security agencies. He attempted to travel to Cuba via Mexico, a signal of intent to violate U.S. law. Naturally, the Agency was paying attention. But for all this interest, no one thought to discuss Oswald with the Secret Service or the Dallas police. Little wonder that when the name of the suspect in the assassination was first heard at CIA headquarters in Langley, "the effect was electric," as one agency official put it, employing a phrase that was censored from public view for more than three decades.
What is clear is that Oswald was the person in whom the agency had taken considerable interest -- and whose interest it took considerable pains to cover up.
(7) John M. Newman, Oswald and the CIA (2008)
It is now apparent that the World War III pretext for a national security cover-up was built into the fabric of the plot to assassinate President Kennedy. The plot required that Oswald be maneuvered into place in Mexico City and his activities there carefully monitored, controlled, and, if necessary, embellished and choreographed. the plot required that, prior to 22 November, Oswald's profile at CIA HQS and the Mexico station be lowered; his 201 file had to be manipulated and restricted from incoming traffic on his Cuban activities. The plot required that, when the story from Mexico City arrived at HQS, its significance would not be understood by those responsible for reacting to it. Finally, the plot required that, on 22 November, Oswald's CIA files would establish his connection to Castro and the Kremlin.
The person who designed this plot had to have access to all of the information on Oswald at CIA HQS. The person who designed this plot had to have the authority to alter how information on Oswald was kept at CIA HQS. The person who designed this plot had the authority to alter how information on Oswald was kept at CIA HQS. The person who designed this plot had to have access to project TUMBLEWEED, the sensitive joint agency operation against the KGB assassin, Valery Kosikov. The person who designed this plot had the authority to instigate a counterintelligence operation in the Cuban affairs staff (SAS) at CIA HQS. In my view, there is only one person whose hands fit into these gloves: James Jesus Angleton, Chief of CIA's Counterintelligence Staff.
Angleton and his molehunters had always held Oswald's files very close to the vest - from the time of the young Marine's defection in October 1959 and his offer to provide classified radar information to the Soviets. That offer had lit up the counterintelligence circuits in Washington, D.C. like a Christmas tree. Angleton was the only person who knew - except for perhaps one of his direct subordinates - both the Cuban and Soviet parts of Oswald's story. He was the only one in the Counterintelligence Staff with enough authority to instigate a counterintelligence operation in the SAS against the FPCC.
In my view, whoever Oswald's direct handler or handlers were, we must now seriously consider the possibility that Angleton was probably their general manager. No one else in the Agency had the access, the authority, and the diabolically ingenious mind to manage this sophisticated plot. No one else had the means necessary to plant the WWIII virus in Oswald's files and keep it dormant for six weeks until the president's assassination. Whoever those who were ultimately responsible for the decision to kill Kennedy were, their reach extended into the national intelligence apparatus to such a degree that they could call upon a person who knew its inner secrets and workings so well that he could design a failsafe mechanism into the fabric of the plot. The only person who could ensure that a national security cover-up of an apparent counterintelligence nightmare was the head of counterintelligence.