Today’s hearing by the Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets may well trigger a long overdue re-evaluation of the blinding of the U.S.’s pathway over the last 60-plus years. Despite the pre-emptive claims by mainline media that the newly released files on the JFK assassination do nothing to undermine the “lone assassin Oswald” narrative, early results tell a different story.
For example, it is now revealed that James Jesus Angleton, who headed CIA counterintelligence department from 1954-75, lied under oath in a Senate investigation about CIA’s connection to Lee Harvey Oswald. It was already revealed in 2023 that Angleton had put Oswald on a CIA “mail coverage” (mail interception operation) no later than November 1959 and that, prior to the Nov. 22, 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Angleton had a 181-page file on Oswald.
Now, newly unredacted material from Angleton’s 1975 secret testimony to the Senate shows Angleton explaining that the “sole purpose” of the “mail coverage” program (in his so-called “HTLingual” operation) was to allow the CIA to approach and recruit U.S. citizens. Angleton had put Oswald on the list of his “HTLingual” operation in November 1959. It is possible that he was just lying to cover up his spy program, but on the face of it, it means that Angleton wanted to, and/or did, recruit Oswald. Previously, the CIA had redacted material on 39 pages of the 112-page transcript of Angleton’s 1975 testimony.
Another newly redacted file shows that when asked in secret Senate testimony three years later, whether Oswald had ever been the subject of a CIA project, Angleton simply lied under oath. The Senate investigator knew better, as the next question to Angleton was whether he knew Reuben Efron, the man who had monitored Oswald’s mail for Angleton. Hence, the CIA had good reasons all these years to hide Efron’s role on behalf of Angleton and Angleton’s direct lie.
Finally, the newly unredacted files also show that six senior members of Angleton’s counterintelligence team met on Oct. 10, 1963 (six weeks before the assassination) to craft a cover story to keep lower-level CIA officials in the dark about Oswald. The problem was that the CIA station in Mexico had monitored, by wiretap and photographs, Oswald’s visit to the Soviet embassy. The chief of station there, Win Scott, on Oct. 8, 1963 had sent a cable to CIA headquarters, asking who this “Oswald” fellow was. Two days later, Angleton’s top officials signed off on a cable that feigned ignorance over their four-year history with Oswald. That cable is now declassified.
As Jefferson Morley of the “JFK Facts” blog describes it, “the question was referred to a group of senior CIA officers in the Counterintelligence Staff and in the Western Hemisphere directorate” and “not clerks, bureaucrats, or paper pushers. They were senior operations officers. That is to say their primary responsibility was running covert operations.” Despite their having a track record of Oswald—his time in Russia, his support of the “subversive” Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and his arrest for fighting with CIA-funded anti-Castro and anti-JFK Cuban exiles in New Orleans, and his personal mail—the declassified cable merely cited an outdated State Department memo, saying that Oswald’s 2.5 years in the Soviet Union had had a “maturing effect” on him—implying that there was little reason to worry about him.
Morley concludes that the “October 10 cable destroys the cover story, fed to the Warren Commission, that the CIA only had a ‘routine’ interest in Oswald before the assassination. To the contrary, a half-dozen high-ranking officers were familiar with his biography, leftist politics, foreign travels and foreign contacts six weeks before JFK was killed.” Morley also blames the CIA for not passing along to the FBI, Secret Service, or any other U.S. security officials that, when Oswald visited the Soviet Embassy, a known Soviet hitman happened to be there at the time. So, it adds to the picture that Angleton’s six senior operations officers may have deliberately kept Oswald as a live operation of theirs.
Morley has been invited by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), the chairwoman of the Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, to testify at today’s hearing. Stay tuned for more.
