http://history-matters.com/frameup.htm

The frameup of Oswald.

The CIA advised that on October 1, 1963, an extremely sensitive source had reported that an individual identified himself as Lee Oswald, who contacted the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City inquiring as to any messages. Special Agents of this Bureau, who have conversed with Oswald in Dallas, Texas, have observed photographs of the individual referred to above, and have listened to a recording of his voice. These special agents are of the opinion that the above-referred-to individual was not Lee Harvey Oswald."

The paragraph shown above comes from an FBI memo sent to both the White House and the Secret Service on November 23, 1963, the day after President Kennedy's assassination. It was a follow-up to a phone call at 10:01 AM, in which Director Hoover informed Lyndon Johnson of the same fact. Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin of Kennedy held in police custody in Dallas, had been impersonated in phone calls to the Soviet Embassy in Mexio City.

The fact that Oswald was impersonated less than two months prior to the Dallas shooting was obviously important news. What made the revelation even more stunning was that, in one such call, "Oswald" referred to a previous meeting with a Soviet official named Kostikov. Valeriy Kostikov was well-known to the CIA and FBI as a KGB agent operating out of the Embassy under official cover. But, far more ominously, the FBI's "Tumbleweed" informant had previously tipped off the U.S. that Kostikov was a member of the KGB's "Department 13," involved in sabotage and assassinations.

An otherwise inexplicable impersonation episode takes on an entirely new meaning in this light. The calls from the Oswald impersonator made it appear that Oswald was a hired killer, hired by the Soviet Union no less. This was a prescription for World War III.

Perhaps the perfect plan was foiled by the fact that Oswald was captured, allowing the FBI to interrogate him and compare his voice to the tapes of these tapped phone calls, which were apparently flown up from the CIA's Mexico City Station on the evening of November 22. In any case, what should have been a hot lead to sophisticated conspirators was instead quickly buried—by November 25, FBI memos made no more mention of tapes, only transcripts. The CIA has maintained to this day that the tapes were routinely recycled prior to the assassination, and no tapes were ever sent. But the evidence that the tapes did exist and were listened to is now overwhelming, and includes several FBI memos, a call from Hoover to LBJ which appears to have been suspiciously erased, and even the word of two Warren Commission staffers who say they listened to the tapes during their visit to Mexico City in April 1964!

Back in November 1963, with the knowledge that it wasn't Oswald in these calls to the Soviet Embassy tightly held, and with witnesses coming forward to claim seeing Oswald take money to kill Kennedy from Cuban operatives, a coverup went into high gear. Lyndon Johnson used the fear of nuclear war, bandying about the figure "40 million Americans" who would die in a nuclear exchange. Even though he knew of the impersonation, Johnson used this false scare to press men like Richard Russell and Earl Warren onto a President's Commission which another Commissioner, John J. McCloy, said was to "settle the dust."

The Mexico City story, which involves far more than the telephone tapes and remains truly mysterious in many ways, is not the only element in the setup of Oswald. Whether he was part of a murder conspiracy or just a "patsy," Oswald was set up for the role as lone gunman. Several incidents prior to the assassination painted him as a "Red" assassin, including his test-drive at a car dealership in Dallas and an episode at a shooting range. In both cases, the Warren Commission showed that Oswald could not have been present, and thus dismissed the claims. They should have instead asked, who was there pretending to be Oswald?

The frameup also included the planting of Commission Exhibit 399, the "magic" bullet which matched Oswald's rifle, and the laydown of that junky weapon and matching shells near the so-called "sniper's nest" in the Book Depository. While the pre-assassination Oswald setup events are the most interessting, because they are inherently part of the assassination plot, post-assassination coverup activities also served to frame Oswald for the murder, and to hide his connections to the intelligence community. Essays in this topic area include discussion of the circumstantial evidence that ballistics evidence was tampered with in order to support the lone gunman answer. And the medical coverup writings on this site abound with examples of such manipulation.

But the most important setup was the incriminating connection to a planted Communist conspiracy. This episode is important because it helps explain why men like Earl Warren might engage in a coverup. It also narrows the field of potential conspirators considerably. In 1963 these intelligence activities were kept under extremely tight wraps. So who knew that the Embassy phone lines were tapped? Who knew that Kostikov was involved in assassinations and that this fact was known to the U.S.? Who knew that this phony Red connection would scare the government into a coverup?

Rex Bradford
History Matters

http://www.ctka.net/pr700-ang.html

James Jesus Angleton
and the Kennedy Assassination.

[I]f intelligence-gathering agencies are as necessary as I believe them to be, then they must repay our blind trust and acknowledge that there may always be moments in all secret organizations when tyranny manages to slip its leash.

"This was one of those occasions."1
By Lisa Pease

August 12, 1990, was a very big day for Susan Hendrickson. While looking at a cliff in South Dakota, she saw something no one else had noticed before. Where others had seen only a sheer wall of rock, she thought she saw something more special. In the wall of a cliff, she found the outline of a skeleton that proved to be of enormous importance. The skeleton this amateur paleontologist discovered now bears her name, Sue, in Chicago’s Field Museum, and is the largest and most complete skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex ever found. From an outline, Sue helped reconstruct the past.

After a succession of ever more interesting file releases from the National Archives regarding the Kennedy assassination, it’s time we started recognizing the outline of one of the biggest skeletons in our national closet, the outline of the Kennedy assassination conspiracy. Each new release fits into one cohesive picture. And no single figure is more prominent in this outline than the man who headed the CIA’s counterintelligence unit for 25 years, James Jesus Angleton. It was in his realm that a secret, restricted file on a man named Lee Oswald was opened, long before the assassination. History professor and former intelligence analyst John Newman has deemed this curious item "the smoking file" because the lies related to it are so serious as to suggest the CIA had much to do with Oswald’s activities just prior to the assassination of President Kennedy, something the CIA has consistently denied. What was the nature of that involvement and how far did it reach? One cannot answer that without examining the near omnipresence of Angleton in all matters surrounding the assassination. Over this two-part series, we will explore how Angleton and his associates are present at every twist and turn in this case, both before the assassination and after.

Background

James Jesus Angleton was the son of James Hugh Angleton, an NCR executive who had once participated in General Pershing’s pursuit in Mexico of Pancho Villa, and Carmen Moreno, a Mexican woman. He grew up in Boise, Idaho and later Dayton, Ohio, where NCR was headquartered. At the age of fourteen, his family moved to Milan, Italy (where NCR manufactured cash registers). Angleton spent summers at British prep schools and Malvern College. He participated in international Boy Scout Jamboree events in Scotland, Hungary and Holland. Angleton biographer Tom Mangold indicates that when the Nazis took over the Boy Scouts in Germany, Angleton made friends with some anti-Nazi leaders and carried their letters back to the founder of the international Boy Scout movement in England. Both father and son would serve the OSS. Angleton’s father was described by Max Corvo, a top OSS officer in Italy, as "ultra-conservative, a sympathizer with Fascist officials. He certainly was not unfriendly with the Fascists."2

When he reached college age, Angleton attended Yale, where Angleton first showed a pension for staying up all night. Insomnia was to plague him most of his life. Although many who knew him described him as "brilliant," Angleton’s record at Yale was undistinguished; during his junior and senior years he received two F’s and four D’s, and ended up withdrawing from another class relating to his major, English. But Angleton managed to impress teachers with his mysteriousness, his apparent maturity, and his self-assurance.

Angleton took a serious interest in poetry and, with Reed Whittemore, co-edited the poetry magazine Furiouso, which included poems by e e cummings and Ezra Pound, among other notables. Because of his interest in this area, he was to be called by some the "Poet-Spy."

After graduating in the lowest 25% of his class, Angleton enrolled at Harvard Law School. According to Mangold, "Angleton’s move to Harvard was not the consequence of any strong ambition to study law. Rather, like many young men at the time, he was putting his future on hold." During his Harvard period, Angleton met and married his wife, Cicely D’Autremont. The marriage took place a few weeks after Angleton had been drafted into the Army. Shortly thereafter, through the combined efforts of his OSS father, and his former Yale English professor Norman Pearson, then heading up the OSS Counterintelligence effort in London, Angleton was transferred to London to study Italian matters for X-2, the OSS counterintelligence component.

It was during this period that Angleton met Kim Philby, the man who would become every counterintelligence officer’s nightmare. Philby rose to a position of great influence in the British intelligence service, until he was finally exposed as a Soviet agent and fled behind the Iron Curtain. Angleton was devastated by this, despite having been warned by Bill Harvey at an early time that Philby looked like a mole.

In October of 1944, Angleton was transferred to Rome as commanding officer of Special Counterintelligence Unit Z, a joint American-British detachment. Less than half a year later, Angleton was made the Chief of X-2 in Italy. He was the youngest X-2 chief across OSS. His staff included Raymond G. Rocca, who would loyally serve by his side until Angleton’s ouster from the CIA in 1974.

While he was clearly an accomplished counterintelligence expert by this time, there was another aspect which deserves mention. In his book The Real Spy World, longtime CIA officer Miles Copeland describes, through a slightly fictionalized veil in which he calls Angleton by the false nickname "Mother," a different story. For background, SI, referenced within, was, according to Copeland, an OSS division which X-2 officers held in contempt. According to Copeland:

In 1946, an X-2 officer known within the organization as "Mother" took a lot of information on Palestine from The New York Times; spooked it up a bit with fabricated details, places, and claims of supersecret sources; and sent it to the head of SI, Stephen Penrose, for appraisal. After studying it carefully, Penrose and his assistants decided that the material was "genuine," that its source must be very deep inside secret Zionist and Arab terrorist groups, and that arrangements should be made for developing the sources into a regular espionage network. Mother then negotiated with Penrose for a budget, meanwhile leading the SI officers through a maze of fake names, fake background reports, and the like, and finally established that SI would be willing to pay as much as $100,000 a year out of what was left of OSS funds. Mother then confessed that the whole thing was a hoax and that the information could have been acquired for 25 cents through the purchase of five issues of The New York Times.3

In other words, Angleton’s activities, however successful, were not limited to acts of loyalty to his fellow intelligence compatriots, but could occasionally be directed to more personal, vindictive measures. Copeland paints this as a jolly escapade. But in his footnotes, he admits that Penrose, against whom this operation was conducted, suffered a near-breakdown as a result, and was transferred to less stressful jobs. "[Penrose] and various other top people in SI (with a few conspicuous exceptions, such as Richard Helms, who defected to X-2 and went on to become the CIA’s director) were generally thought to be ‘too Christ-like for the spy business,’ as Mother put it."4 Copeland, by the way, was one of twenty-five OSS officers Angleton wanted to remember in his 1949 will. Others included Allen Dulles, "the operator, the patriot;" Richard Helms; and Ray Rocca.5

After the war, Angleton did not wish to return to his new wife, nor his son, born in his absence, and chose instead to remain in action in Europe. X-2 was folded into the Strategic Services Unit (SSU), ostensibly a War Department unit and a temporary holding place for the then defunct OSS.

Two years after the war, Angleton would return stateside to his wife and son to work for the amalgam of temporary intelligence agencies that would eventually become the CIA. There, he would achieve notoriety for his late hours, and for being, as his secretary Gloria Loomis related, "a terrible taskmaster."6

The SSU and other remaining intelligence units evolved over time into two separate pieces – the Office of Special Operations (OSO), and the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). Richard Helms served with Angleton and Rocca in the OSO. Stewart Alsop, in his book The Center, the "Prudent Professionals," labeled the OSO people the "Prudent Professionals." Alsop called the OPC crowd the "Bold Easterners." The OPC included Frank Wisner, Richard Bissell, Edward Lansdale, Desmond Fitzgerald and Tracy Barnes.

In Italy, 1947, Angleton participated in an OSO operation given to a group called SPG, or Special Procedures Group, in which propaganda and other means were used to keep the Italians from voting any Communists into office.7 Other means included the Mafia. "Wild Bill" Donovan, founder of the OSS, helped release "Lucky" Luciano and other Mafia criminals from jail in New York so they could return to Italy and provide not only contacts, but if necessary, the strong-arm tactics needed to win the war against incipient Communism in Italy. Angleton’s later reported contacts with the Mob may well stem back to this period.

One of the groups most interested in defeating the communists in Italy was, not surprisingly, the Vatican. Angleton both gave and received intelligence to and from the Vatican. Among Angleton’s most famous agents in Italy was Mons Giovanni Montini. Montini would become famous in 1963 when he became Pope Paul VI.8 Angleton has been named as a source for funds which were used to defeat the Communists. In return, evidently, Angleton obtained access to the Ratlines the Vatican was using to move people out of Europe to safety abroad. Angleton and others from the State Department used the Ratlines to ferry Nazis to South America.9

The OPC crowd held enormous sway in the early days of the CIA, but that changed in the wake of the spectacular failure at the Bay of Pigs. Curiously, Richard Helms and Angleton both saw their careers rise by standing on the sidelines and keeping free of all dealings related to the Bay of Pigs.

Angleton made an interesting comment about the Bay of Pigs episode. He told the HSCA that before the Bay of Pigs, he had asked Bissell, "Do you have an escape hatch?" He asked Bissell most plainly, "In case the thing falls flat on its face is there someone who goes to Castro and says, ‘you have won the battle. What is your price?’" Angleton explained to the HSCA that he was trying to say, "have you planned for the failure as much as planned for the success?" The implication was that this was Angleton’s own modus operandi in such matters.10 We would do well to remember that statement in the context of the Kennedy assassination and cover-up.

During the period between the end of the war and the formation of the CIA, William "Wild Bill" Donovan, the establishment lawyer who created the OSS, lobbied long and hard for a single intelligence agency to pick up where the OSS had left off, running secret operations and gathering human intelligence or "humint" in new and creative ways. In the end, although Donovan would not be a part of it, the Central Intelligence Agency or CIA was ultimately formed through the National Security Act of 1947.

Before the CIA was created, many in Congress feared that the creation of a new intelligence agency would lead to a police state similar to the one they had just defeated in Germany, and refused to back Donovan’s efforts. But the loudest protest came from J. Edgar Hoover, who feared a direct encroachment upon the FBI’s turf. One could argue that the OSS people won because they made the better case. But there is another possibility here.

Angleton, Hoover and Blackmail

In Tony Summers’ book about J. Edgar Hoover, Official and Confidential, Summers showed that Meyer Lansky, a top Mob figure, had blackmail power over Hoover through possession of photos that showed Hoover and his lifelong friend and close associate Clyde Tolson together sexually. In the paperback edition of the same book, Summers introduced another figure who evidently had possession of such photos: James Angleton. If Angleton had such photos, imagine how he could have used them to force the FBI’s hand during the investigation of the Kennedy assassination.

Summers names two sources for this allegation: former OSS officer John Weitz, and the curious Gordon Novel. Weitz claimed he had been showed the picture by the host of a dinner party in the fifties. "It was not a good picture and was clearly taken from some distance away, but it showed two men apparently engaged in homosexual activity. The host said the men were Hoover and Tolson…." Summers added in the 1994 version, "Since first publication of this book, Weitz has revealed that his host was James Angleton."11

Novel’s account is even more interesting. Novel said that Angleton had shown him some photos of Hoover and Tolson in 1967, when Novel was involved in New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s case against Clay Shaw. "I asked him if they were fakes, " Novel recounted, "but he said they were real, that they’d been taken with a special lens. They looked authentic to me…." Novel’s explanation of why Angleton showed him the pictures is even more interesting:

I was pursuing a lawsuit against Garrison, which Hoover wanted me to drop but which my contacts in the Johnson administration and at CIA wanted me to pursue. I’d been told I would incur Hoover’s wrath if I went ahead, but Angleton was demonstrating that Hoover was not invulnerable, that the Agency had enough power to make him come to heel. I had the impression that this was not the first time the sex pictures had been used. Angleton told me to go see Hoover and tell him I’d seen the sex photographs. Later, I went to the Mayflower Hotel and spoke to Hoover. He was with Tolson, sitting in the Rib Room. When I mentioned that I had seen the sex photographs, and that Angleton had sent me, Tolson nearly choked on his food."12

Now, Novel has been known to fell a few tall tales in his day. But he has on other occasions been forthcoming with interesting and sometimes self-incriminating material (such as his own participation in the Houma raid and the association between David Phillips and Guy Banister).13 Given Weitz’s corroboration, and given Angleton’s enormous power over many in high places, Novel’s account rings true. Novel added that Angleton claimed the photos had been taken around 1946.14 During the 1945-1947 timeframe, Hoover was battling hard to prevent the creation of any other intelligence organization separate from the FBI. And during this period, Angleton was involved with the Mafia in the Italian campaign. It’s certainly possible under such circumstances that Lansky or one of his associates may have shared the photos with Angleton. And the reverse case can also be considered.

Miles Copeland adds additional credibility to this scenario in his account of this period. "Penetration begins at home," Copeland has Angleton/"Mother" saying, "and if we can’t find out what’s going on in the offices where our future is being planned, we don’t deserve to be in business."15 Copeland presented this scenario:

There are several stories in the CIA’s secret annals to explain how the dispute was settled, but although they "make better history," as Allen Dulles used to say, they are only half-truths and much less consistent with the ways of government than the true ones. Old-timers at the Agency swear that the anti-espionage people would almost certainly have won out had it not been for the fact that an Army colonel who had been assigned to the new management group charged with the job of organizing the new Agency suborned secretaries in the FBI, the State Department, and the Defense Department and organized them into an espionage network which proved not only the superiority of espionage over other forms of acquiring "humint" (i.e. intelligence on what specific human beings think and do in privacy), but the necessity for its being systemized and tightly controlled. The colonel was fired, as were the secretaries, but by that time General John Magruder, then head of the group that was organizing the CIA, had in his hands a strong argument for creating a professional espionage service and putting it under a single organization. Also, thanks to the secretaries and their Army spymaster, he had enough material to silence enemies of the new Agency—including even J. Edgar Hoover, since Magruder was among the very few top bureaucrats in Washington on whom Mr. Hoover didn’t have material for retaliation.16

Is he saying what he appears to be saying? Copeland added, cryptically, "The success of the old SSU cadre (former OSS and future CIA officers) in perpetuating itself has been due in part to an extraordinary capacity for Byzantine intrigue…." And in a footnote to this phrase, Copeland explains, still somewhat cryptically, "This intrigue was mainly to keep ‘The Hill’ off its back." Copeland seems to be insinuating that more people than Hoover were blackmailed to ensure the creation and perpetuation of the CIA.

David Wise also lends credence to such a scenario with this episode. Thomas Braden, a CIA media operative was confronted by Dulles over a remark Braden had about one of Dulles’ professional relationships. Wise recounted what followed:

"You’d better watch out," [Allen] Dulles warned him. "Jimmy’s got his eye on you." Braden said he drew the obvious conclusion: James Angleton had bugged his bedroom and was picking up pillow talk between himself and his wife, Joan. But Braden said he was only mildly surprised at the incident, because Angleton was known to have bugs all over town.17

Braden described how Angleton would enter Dulles’s office "first thing in the morning" to report the take from the overnight taps:

"He used to delight Allen with stories of what happened at people’s dinner parties … Jim used to come into Allen’s office and Allen would say, ‘How’s the fishing? And Jim would say, ‘Well, I got a few nibbles last night.’ It was all done in the guise of fishing talk."18

More to the point, Braden was upset because "some senator or representative might say something that might be of use to the Agency. I didn’t think that was right. I think Jim was amoral."19 It would not be beyond belief that Angleton routinely used information gathered through clearly illegal taps to blackmail people into supporting his efforts. No wonder some of his Agency associates feared him.

Indeed, just about everyone in the Agency who knew Angleton came to fear him and to avoid crossing his path. This extended from subordinates to some of the highest officials to serve the agency, including Allen Dulles and Richard Helms. Angleton was called "no-knock" because he had unprecedented access to senior agency officials. Said Braden,

"He always came alone and had this aura of secrecy about him, something that made him stand out—even among other secretive CIA officers. In those days, there was a general CIA camaraderie, but Jim made himself exempt from this. He was a loner who worked alone."20

Angleton knew that knowledge was power, so not only would he go to extraordinary lengths to obtain such, he would also lord his knowledge over others, especially incoming CIA directors. Said one Angleton contemporary,

"He would put each new director through the embarrassment of having to beg him to indoctrinate them in important CIA matters. Jim was enormously clever, he relished his bureaucratic power and was expert at using it. He was utterly contemptuous of the chain of command. He had a keen sense of what the traffic would bear in relation to his own interests. It worked like this: when a new director came in, Jim would stay in his own office out of sight. If a top staff meeting were requested, he simply wouldn’t attend and would offer endless delays. He was a master at waiting to see the new director alone—on his own terms and with his own agenda."21

Angleton’s most powerful patrons were Allen Dulles and Richard Helms. As biographer Tom Mangold described it,

He was extended such trust by his supervisors that there was often a significant failure of executive control over his activities. The result was that his subsequent actions were performed without bureaucratic interference. The simple fact is that if Angleton wanted something done, it was done. He had the experience, the patronage, and the clout.22

It wasn’t until William Colby, a longtime nemesis of Angleton’s, became the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) that Angleton’s power was dimmed, and eventually extinguished. But it was a long time coming.

Angleton and the CIA

Before examining Angleton’s relationship with Oswald, it would be useful to understand Angleton’s relationship with the CIA. Angleton ran the Counterintelligence unit. The primary role of Counterintelligence is to protect agents from a foreign intelligence organization from uncovering CIA assets and operations. Another important role is the ability to disseminate disinformation to foreign intelligence services in an effort to create for them a false picture of reality, causing them to act in ways that may be ultimately against their own interests. In other words, Counterintelligence was a unit that conducted operations, not just research. For that reason, the CI staff resided inside the Directorate of Plans (DDP) and not on the analytical side of the agency.

In addition to owning counterintelligence, Angleton also had control over the FBI’s relationship with the Agency (he owned the liaison relationship between FBI and CIA), and sole control of the Israeli desk, which included liaison with their intelligence service, the Mossad.

In the early days of the agency, units were given single-letter identifiers of (at least) A-D instead of names. Staff A later became Foreign Intelligence; Staff B became Operations; Staff C became Counterintelligence ; and Staff D, which dealt with NSA intercept material, among other more notorious activities, apparently was never called anything other than Staff D.23

From the agency’s inception until 1954, Staff C was run by William Harvey, a former FBI man who was to one day be introduced to President Kennedy as "America’s James Bond." During this same period, Staff A was run by Angleton.

After the publication of the Doolittle Report in 195424, Staff C, which then became simply Counterintelligence, was handed to Angleton. Harvey was given the coveted Berlin station, a vortex point for operations against the USSR.

CI/SIG and Oswald

Angleton’s complete counterintelligence empire employed over 200 people. Inside this large group was a small handful of Angleton’s most trusted and closed-mouthed associates, called the Special Investigations Group (SIG). According to Ann Egerter, in 1959, when Oswald defected to the Soviet Union, only "about four or five" people were part of SIG, which was headed by Birch D. O’Neal. SIG members included Ann Egerter, Newton "Scotty" Miler, and very few others. Miler was, as of 1955, "either the Deputy or one of the principle officers with O’Neal," according to Angleton.25 O’Neal, Egerter and Miler all play interesting roles in this case.

SIG is all-important in the case of the Kennedy assassination because, for whatever reason, SIG held a 201 file on Lee Oswald prior to the assassination. Both the Church Committee and HSCA investigators fixated quickly on this point, because it made no sense under the CIA’s scenario of their relationship (or, as they professed, non-relationship) with Oswald. What did SIG really do, and why would Oswald’s file have been there? Why wasn’t it opened when this ex-Marine (who had knowledge of the CIA’s top secret U-2 program) defected in 1959, telling embassy personnel he might have something of special interest to share with the Soviets? Why didn’t that set off alarm bells all over the place? Why was a 201 file on Oswald not opened for another year after that event? And why, when he returned to the States, did the CIA not debrief him? Or did they? These questions and more were adequately raised, to the HSCA’s credit, but not adequately answered by CIA.

Let’s start with the first issue. What did SIG do? Angleton described the primary task of SIG to the Church committee in this fashion:

The primary task was the penetration of the Agency and the government and historical penetration cases are recruitment of U.S. officials in positions, code clerks. It had a very tight filing system of its own, and it was the only component in counterintelligence that had access to the security files and the personnel maintained by the Office of Security.26

The Office of Security’s primary role was to protect the CIA from harm. This involves monitoring the CIA’s own employees and assets to ensure that no one leaks data about the CIA, or betrays the CIA in any way. Because of the nature of what was done there, Office of Security files were the most closely guarded in the Agency. It is significant, therefore, that Angleton’s CI/SIG group had access to these files. It is also significant that the Office of Security also had a file on Oswald, and was running an operation against the FPCC at the time Oswald was attaching himself visibly to that organization.

To the HSCA, Angleton gave a slightly enlarged definition:

…it had many duties that had to do with other categories of sensitive cases involving Americans and other things which were not being handled by anybody else or just falling between the stools and so on.27

Asked whether SIG’s charter would elucidate its operational mandate, Angleton replied,

It would probably be in fairly camoflauged terms, yes. It was not a unit, however, whose duties were in other words, explained to people. I mean, in training school and do on it was very much fuzzed over if anyone was laying out the CI staff.28

According to Angleton’s close associate Raymond G. Rocca, SIG

…was set up to handle especially sensitive cases in the area of security or personnel and in particular, cases involving security of personnel who were also of operational interest, as operators.

In other words, it was an interface with the Office of Security.29

When asked what would cause CI/SIG to open a 201 file on someone, Rocca gave this answer:

I would imagine that they would have had that occasion whenever a question arose that concerned people that came within the purview of the mission that I have described, namely, the penetration of our operations or the advancement of our particular interests with respect to the security of those operations…. I mean, there were many sensitive areas that involved aspects, that involved sources and access to materials that were of higher classification than what you have shown me.30

When the conversation is brought around to Oswald in particular, Rocca’s answer is even more interesting:

Rocca: Let me go back and open a little parenthesis about this. What I regard now, in the light of what you said, is probably a too narrow view of what SIG was interested in.

They were also concerned with Americans as a security threat in a community-wide sense, and they dealt with FBI cases, with the Office of Security cases, and with other cases on the same level, as they dealt with our own, basically….It would be with respect to where and what had happened to DDP materials with respect to a defection in any of these places.

Goldsmith: Again, though, Oswald had nothing to do with the DDP at this time, at least apparently.

Rocca: I’m not saying that. You said it. [Emphasis added.]31

Rocca’s answer hangs out there, teasing us with ambiguity. Did Oswald have something to do with the Directorate of Plans, the DDP?

...

The rest of this article can be found in The Assassinations, edited by Jim DiEugenio and Lisa Pease.

from all ive read, tippit was supposed to kill Oswald, Oswald instead killed him, It was set up up by the dallas police.

they had already identified Oswald as the killer, only minutes after kennedy was dead, im sure many posters know how quick the police, and the fbi framed Oswald as the killer.

does anyone on here,have any doubt, that the dallas police let ruby kill Oswald.

Doesn't seem like Oswald killed tippet, the timeframe is to tight and the casings at the scene did not come from the gun Oswald had in the theatre, in fact the casings apparently came from 2 handguns if I.remember correctly from what I've read. However, it appears tippet did receive instructions to kill Oswald after the assasination and was witnessed frantically searching for someone by several witnesses around that time. It's also alleged that TWO people were arrested at the movie theatre, LHO being taken out the front exit and the other out through the rear but no more was.reported of this...possibly his handler? There's a witness on you tube testifying to this.... I realise sources I'm quoting aren't great but what is now?!

the point Is they had Oswald as a suspect, from the very beginning, indicating to me that they [the dallas police} were in on the assassination plot. and I also think LBJ contributed greatly to the cover-up.

Agreed, his name/description were out almost immediately

The book depository supervisor did an informal head count of people who had access to all floors and LHO was missing. The supervisor told police. Also there was a witness who saw someone in the 6th floor window with a rifle and told the police nearby. They connected dots quickly. Doesn't make LHO guilty of anything but it does explain why he was a suspect early on. Background checks revealed he lived in the Soviet Union. This probably didn't help.

It's hard to imagine how an accurate head count could've been done in such a short space of time, reported to the police, background checks confirmed, and it out on their radios treating LHO as the main suspect -that level of genuine professionalism seems well out of charachter for the Dallas pd at the time, considering all the other major fuck ups they made. With bullets flying around the plaza, the extreme panic, confusion etc, most employees would no doubt run away from the area/line of fire down another street? Certainly not immediately back into the tsbd where word must have been getting out that shots were fired from?

If I was on my office steps watching the president drive by, then heard 3, possibly 4 gunshots from the window above my head, I would not run in there for cover or to tackle the guy-I'd be sprinting away from the area!

good posts fergie, I agree.. they pinpointed Oswald much too early. I still swear he was a set-up patsy, he even said "im just a patsy" on air while he was in custody. if anyone can remember.

I heard Oswald say that too Binnie. The real question is if he had been set up in that building to shoot someone, how did he know right away that he was a patsy? I doubt he got that idea from how quick the police caught up to him. I think it more likely that he knew he was a patsy the moment he saw his marks being shot by other shooters he couldn't see.

Not one co-worker ever saw LHO watching the motorcade outside. The building supervisor, Roy Truly testified that he conducted a quick head count and noticed LHO missing and police were told. The other employees were accounted for. Eyewitness Howard Brennan saw a man with a rifle in the 6th floor window and quickly notified a police officer. Both their testimonies can be found online. He was tracked down in a theater with a gun resisting arrest. LHO may have been a patsy, but there' s no mystery why he became suspect.

I don't think he was in the tsbd building for the shooting. Reports that he managed to calmly leave the building from which he'd just fired a high powered rifle from, been seen doing this by at least one witness were told, but still evaided everyone and avoid suspicion (and the headcount) then hop on a bus, then a taxi to his lodgings,pick up a pistol to arm himself again, (so he would be in the correct area, timing wise to shoot Tippet after he just lost his cool) just seem too far fetched. Anybody driving or.riding on public transport would have reported a sighting at some point - if he was really that good, he would've handled the situation better after the fact.

He was obviously set up to take the fall, in the zapruder film you can basically see a bullet zipping in from the front, as well as numerous bystanders turning and looking towards the knoll or cowering away from it immediately

Maybe Oswald went and armed himself....after the shooting at Dealey Plaza because he realized that he was set up and aimed to disappear himself and go on the run?

Roy Truly and a police officer spotted him in a lounge area buying a drink seconds after the shooting. He was in the building for sure, but his involvement is debatable.

Ht2, that would mean every one of his co-workers were outside the building watching the motorcade (how else could they be confident lho wasn't), which means he evaded them all as he escaped, assuming they subsequently all ran back into the building from which they must have just heard 3/4 shots ring out, then stayed around for a headcount- assuming they must have returned very quickly for lho to be identified as "missing". Again, what would you do? Seems fairly crazy that if you ran away down the street in fear of your life and were reluctant to return for a.while to the area you just heard gunfire from that the cops would then put out an immediate apb on you as chief suspect?

Alfa, possibly, just seems absurd he would calmly buy a coke, then make his getaway, perhaps the witness timeline is slightly off. Again, if gunshots had just went off a few floors above you, why would you be anywhere near the tsbd as either a witness or gunman

Some employees were inside watching the motorcade from the windows. There was another exit in the rear of the building which led to Houston Street. The police sealed the building but he had to be gone by then. Most people would notify their boss if they were going home early.




There's nothing unreasonable about putting an apb on a missing person who had access to the 6th floor where a snipers nest was found. If he had a good alibi, he should've been released.

Being as the CIA is the source of the above innuendo, I think it's safe to assume it's a lie.

There's a lot of material on Oswald trying to infiltrate the Soviet Union and get citizenship there. I don't buy it for second that he was out to assassinate an American president in the name of Russia. I think that Oswald's actions in trying to gain behind the Iron Curtain access make him look like a clandestine agent or mercenary of the US Government. Being as the CIA's auspices are that of anything overseas, I would figure him (Oswald) to be a CIA agent/mercenary/soldier of fortune.

So CIA sends Oswald to Dealey Plaza to kill either Kennedy or Governor Connolly, and then conscripts the mafia to send in a hitman to whack the patsy after the patsy is "made" to look like the sole guilty party. The patsy is not given a chance to make any public statements or testify. We saw this strategy employed in the assassination of Joe Colombo, and maybe even Joe Masseria.

The hitman (Ruby) is the perfect choice because he has a terminal disease and cannot be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

Hoover is consulted and brought into the scheme to play his part, but he probably doesn't provide any shooters. Is he an accessory? Yes. He's in on the hit just like a getaway driver for the mafia. His job is to help cover up the crime and not investigate it after the fact.

Oswald realizes he has been set up because when he fires at the Presidential motorcade, he sees his marks getting shot from other unknown shooters. He realizes his error immediately. He knew the manhunt would be on. He goes to retrieve his guns and goes on the run, first hiding in a local movie theatre until the heat blew over to give him a chance to get out of the state and then the country.

The real shooters are probably the secret service. Everyone in the Presidential motorcade says the shots came from the rear, not the side or front. The secret service and Oswald are to the rear.

If Oswald was a CIA patsy, that does not automatically implicate the head of the CIA at the time, Mr. McCone. The CIA has a dark budget with many rogue elements operating in a compartmentalized fashion without the rest of the agency being fully aware of their actions.

But Hoover had to know since he had the sovereign power to investigate all domestic crimes. He had to be in on the cover up.

Wikipedia is untrustworthy, but here it illustrates a link from Oswald to the CIA and there is a suicide to substantiate the claims...

"George de Mohrenschildt[edit]

After returning from the Soviet Union, Oswald made a close friend in George de Mohrenschildt. De Mohrenschildt wrote extensive memoirs about his friendship with Oswald and had a copy of one of the photos of Oswald with the rifle used in the shooting. After the assassination, the CIA requested that the FBI locate De Mohrenschildt, as he had written a letter directly to George H.W. Bush, who was a friend, appealing to him to stop the agency from taking action against him.

A few television programs, including Jesse Ventura's "Conspiracy Theories", have alleged that De Mohrenschildt was Oswald's CIA handler. On March 29, 1977, De Mohrenschildt stated during an interview with author Edward Jay Epstein that he had been ordered by CIA operative J. Walton Moore to meet Oswald, and that he would not have if he had not been ordered to do so. After the interview, he received a letter from the House Select Committee on Assassination, but then committed suicide by shooting himself in the head later that day.[21][22]"

That's an excerpt from the "Cia Kennedy Assassination Conspiracy Theory" page of Wikipedia.

good post alpha, one thing that I think is overlooked about Oswald is this, where did he learn Russian ? did he learn it in marine corp language school, and why did he learn Russian, and, how could he enter Russia and come back whenever he pleased.

he surely had cia ties, what did he do as a marine? he went to radar school and his job was to track U.S flights over Russia. that's what he did.

Most people would notify their boss if they we're going home early, me included, unless of course there was a gunman potentially on the loose in your office building and he had just blown the head off someone in the street from a snipers nest-just upstairs from where you were hanging out the window waving-I'd be back once I knew the area was secure!

Must've been a minimum 20 mins for LHO to get down 6flights of stairs without drawing suspicion, have a diet coke break and leave the area through panicking crowds, also assuming he just walked out past various secret service agents and Dallas pd who must've been fairly close by and have had at least an inclination where the shots had been fired from. Surely the Dallas pd must've then have taken at least 30 mins to identify/secure the building (working on the presumption a gunman/men may still be in there), confirmed a headcount and put out the apb on the one and only suspect they ever considered, and caught him somewhat by chance, 20/30 mins later, some work that! Especially considering the numerous eyewitnesses explaining they saw/heard gunshots from the opposite end at the knoll and the general confusion in the plaza at the time which is fairly plain to see. How the Dallas pd (and secret service) swung from being so good to then failing to secure their own building, having potentially the most high profile assassin of modern times in custody and allowing a well known local gangster access to shoot him is fairly suspicious no? Remember also Jack Rubys apartment was a block away from tippets murder scene so he should've been on the secret service radar. Also mishandling, losing, inventing and generally being careless with various pieces of evidence and reporting errors (LHO interview notes going missing along with the presidents brain , shell casings not matching weapons, intact bullets turning up on stretchers, timings and witness statements sometimes conflicting, autopsy being handled by inexperienced staff and the major crime scene, the car, basically being immediately rebuilt generally all kind of goes against the grain of how fast they got out of the blocks in apprehending lho

Binnie, his background was definetly murky and he had close ties to both the cia and fbi, again seems strange they would trust/train a guy who then turned out to be a 'lone nut'

But still down as missing on the quick headcount? Seems strange if he was seen there looking fairly relaxed, but subsequently left the scene, plausibly after he heard about the shooter in the building and to avoid being the next victim, that he suddenly becomes the one and only suspect in dealy plaza because he left the building-who reasonably wouldn't have left for at least a short while? Again, seems very lucky and surprisingly quick detective work!

The description of the shooter was broadcast to Police @ 12:45 pm .Garnered from witnesses of a shooter in the 6th floor window. The question you have to ask is when Truly notified Fritz of the missing Oswald why did he gave him the address of the Paine residence where Marina was living with suspected CIA asset Ruth Paine. Oswald's application for employment gave his North Beckley rooming house address. There are some that believe the Paine address was supplied by Military Intelligence.

Recently Wesley Buell Frazier , the young man that gave Oswald the ride to work that morning,(there is an interview he gave recently on the website of the 6Th Floor Museum) has stated that he saw Oswald leaving the area via the side of the TSBD after the shooting. This contradicts his previous testimonies under oath before the Warren Commision and HSCA . If you learn the details of how the Dallas Police tried to persuade Frazier under extreme pressure that he was part of the conspiracy you'll understand why he really didn't offer this information up earlier in his life. While there is much to look at that points to the DPD taking part in a coverup there is basically nothing but speculation that shows the DPD as complicit in a conspiracy to assassinate JFK.

Of course we all know that an innocent man that worked at the exact location where the President Of the United States head was just blown up would be the ONLY person that worked in the building to screw that fast , go to his room, change his appearence, grab a pistol loaded with 6 bullets , grab 2 reloads worth of bullets and scurry off to the movies only to have a mixed type of bullets in his possesion which matches the mixed tyes of empty shell casings at the scene of a dead police officer's shooting. Poor unlucky bastard . Ya , he was a patsy? A guilty patsy.

If you go to the 12:50 mark of this interview Frazier describes see Oswald leaving:
http://www.c-span.org/video/?287933-101/kennedy-assassination-buell-wesley-frazier-part-2

Not strange at all. The CIA likely saw Oswald as expendable and gullible, but most importantly....gullible. He was probably most attractive to them because he was malleable enough to agree to go along with such a plot against JFK never really understanding what was going on around him or who was involved.

Had Oswald been allowed to live and speak to the media, I don't think we'd know a great deal more than we know now about the JFK assassination. This because Oswald himself didn't have a clue.

good point alpha. I believe he didn't have any idea what he was involved in. he was just one part of the whole. and we all should know he was murdered so he could not involve the new Orleans faction.

What I am curious about is why wouldn't he use a silencer, or did he have one?

http://oswaldsmother.blogspot.co.uk/2009_10_01_archive.html

Ann Egerter on Lee Oswald.


As discussed in Parts 1 and 2, Lee Oswald, the alleged assassin of President John F. Kennedy has a strange and contradictory life history. Some researchers insist this conflicting evidence is proof of a body double, or doppelganger, a clandestine intelligence project. Two stumbling blocks are one, where does the double go after the assassination and two, if the impersonation begins as a youth then Oswald’s mother has to be a double as well. Many records are lost or still classified though enough has been leaked to form a much different picture than what the Warren Report first told the American public. If it is true that Oswald was operating as doppelganger for some secret project, then we can see why the government remains fanatical in its attempts to obscure the truth.

Oswald Defects to The USSR
The news that a U.S. Marine defected to a major enemy at the height of the cold war reverberated through every government agency. Memos were sent to every branch of the government and military. As they should have since Oswald had a “crypto” clearance, one higher up than Top Secret. Later, military codes would have to changed since Oswald told American embassy officials he was going to tell the Russians everything he knew—which is an act of treason but he will not be prosecuted for though it was a breach of national security and he could have been arrested right there in the Embassy. He could also have been arrested upon his return to the U.S. but was not. This is possibly more evidence of Oswald’s covert activities at this time and he is being protected. Just as he was protected at so many other junctures before he arrived in Moscow and will be after he moves on.

So Lee Oswald’s sojourn to the Communist worker’s paradise is another mysterious and strange episode in his life. One of many that would be recycled until his death. It is as fraught with anomalies as his trip to Mexico is. To summarize, he gets an early discharge from the Marines to take care of his mother, books a trip on a steamer and makes his way to Russia. He contacts the American Embassy in Moscow and announces his defecting, says he is planning on sharing military secrets with the Russians, and in a hand written letter renounces his citizenship. Later he gets assigned a job at a radio factory in Minsk, meets his future wife and marries her in six weeks and they have a baby. He becomes disillusioned, gets a loan from the State Department and he and family return to the United States in the summer of 1962.

My summary is perhaps too lean but of interest here is the peculiar issues that arise. Such as Oswald drafting a letter renouncing his citizenship. Due to a 1907 law one must fill out a “Certificate of Loss of Nationality” to relinquish citizenship. He did not. One would think the lawyers at the Embassy would have informed him of this fact. What his letter does is provide him an out should he need to return since it is not legally valid. He can tell the world he is no longer an American but the legal framework is not there. So if you want to know how he got back to the U.S. so easily this why. He was blowing smoke.

Though a good Russian speaker he rarely speaks Russian to anyone except Marina, who though he was a local when they first met. She said he spoke with a Baltic accent. Oswald’s learning Russian is shrouded in mystery with the Warren Report guessing a Marine officer teaching him. Most of the men closest to him report never seeing him doing anything in this regard. Never the less if Oswald is part of a false defector program (the ONI ran one out of Nags Head, NC) then speaking Russian too much is a dead give away to being a spy. Post cold war KGB records indicate his apartment was bugged. The Ziger family who befriended him said he never spoke Russian to them and their father who spoke English had to translate for him. Interestingly, Marina spoke English and Lee wrote her letters in English but she rarely spoke it when she came to America with him. (For more on this please see my article, From Marina Prusakova, With Love)

Oswald’s reasons for returning to America are also shrouded in mystery. He made a high salary but had no place to spend it as consumer goods were hard to find outside of the basics. If Oswald was a cold war spy the Russians had him boxed in the factory in Minsk. Not much in the way of spy activity could be done there. Other defectors like him, such as Robert Webster (who bore a striking resemblance to Oswald and met Marina—who spoke to him in English) defected and came back home after a few years disillusioned with the communist system. If Webster was an agent then he was boxed in too. The Russians had a healthy mistrust of America defectors showing up at their door. As Oswald said to his mother when she inquired about this, “Mother, not even Marina knows why I came back.” He wouldn’t even tell his wife. A Cold War spy probably would not.

The Opening of the SIG 201 File
There is good reason to believe that Oswald was a Cold War spy. Why? Because a former agent said so under oath to the HSCA in 1978. Ann Egerter worked under counter espionage chief James Angleton. In retirement at the time of her testimony, her words were so revealing it is amazing that it did not make a bigger impact in the public consciousness in regards to Oswald and the assassination.

Essentially, a SIG 201 file is opened on a CIA agent or asset in regards to a counter espionage investigation. Ann Egerter referred to SIG (Special Investigations Group) as, “the office that spied on spies.” A SIG 201 file was evidence and result of an internal investigation into one of the CIA’s own people. Egerter also asserted many different times that there was no other purpose for a SIG 201 file to be opened on an individual. That person would have to be a CIA employee in some capacity. As usual with these things, two plus two equals four. Lee Oswald is in effect a CIA spy.

Oswald’s SIG 201 file was started the year following his alleged defection, in December 1960. Oddly, the name on the file is Lee Henry Oswald. However, Ann Egerter said in her HSCA testimony that it was Lee Harvey Oswald’s 201 file. And odd occurrence but perhaps a way to throw off investigators should the truth was revealed? Plausible denial? Also, all information on Oswald should have been filed under the Soviet Affairs division but was not. It was under direct control of James Angleton who was rabid in his pursuit of moles within the Agency. Researcher John Newman (Oswald and the CIA) believes Oswald was a special project under control of Angleton and may have been.

Remarkably, Warren Commission defenders such as Bugliosi, Mailer, McAdams, and Posner continue to deny there was any evidence of Oswald being associated with the CIA. Vince Bugliosi in Reclaiming History totally ignores Ann Egerter’s testimony to the HSCA not only in his 1600 plus pages of his book but also in over 900 pages of End Notes. Buglosi implies that people other than CIA personnel can be appear in a 201 file, saying that a 201 is, “A file kept on an individual, including CIA employees…” Not so according to Ann Egerter.

Even stranger is the HSCA’s final report, states there was “no evidence” linking Oswald to the CIA, obviously ignoring Ann Egerter’s testimony as well. Another example of why Congress should never be allowed to investigate tragic events such as this.

abc123, what you did was substantiate everything some of us have been saying on this thread. Oswald was CIA. Now that said, it's naïve to expect the media to report on that when they too, are CIA.

Former CIA Director William Colby said that there was no one of any significance in the media not already in the CIA's back pocket. So no, NBC or FOX is not going to start talking about this like we are.

Yeah it was an op called Mockingbird , look it up , the CIA had direct control of the media , probably still do .

The JFK case would be pretty easy to solve , find out the imposter who spoke broken Russian but good Spanish that called the Russian embassy in late sept to talk to a known Russian assasin , thus laying the set up / blame at the doors of the communists . Find out who controlled that imposter and it begins to unravel . Hoover knew it was an imposter within 24 hour ( per a memo released after jfk act ) he also notified LBJ shortly after, that audio mysteriously disappeared for obvious reasons but luckily a transcript was dug up after the jfk act .

It was actually a brilliant plan as the CIA mole hunters immediately launched a mole hunt to find out who this was ( Russian and Cuban embassy phones were tapped which was probably as big a secret as there was ) which resulted in a ton of paper trail between DC and Mexico City, thus creating the ultimate blackmail that LHO was some type of operative and that telling the truth would destroy our intelligence gathering from the taps on the Mexico City stations . It's not a coincidence the WC totally by passed the odd Mexico City acts .

A lot of people fail to realize the official govt position is that JFK was killed by a probable conspiracy and the DOJ should re open the investigation .

The fact they didn't tells you it was likely some intelligence guys ( likely the rougue group that was supposed to kill Castro ) . Intelligence operators are pretty much above the law .

By now most know who the actual assasin operators were with several anti Castro Cubans as the shooters ( Diaz etc) and their CIA sponsors that were part of the executive action team - in Moralez , Bill Harvey , Rip Roberson , David Atlee Phillips , Ted Shackley , tony sforza and their mafia counterparts rosseli and Martino , heck some of these guys admitted it .
But the real question is how high it went ? Who funded it , LBJ , Hunt , Murtchison etc. ? Those Nixon tapes referencing the whole bay of pigs thing that his top 2 aides said was code for the jfk hit could be interesting as well