Authors: John Newman
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The instructions we are able to see appear to be general rules applicable to any interviews conducted pursuant to what was apparently an FBI program for siphoning information from people's bank accounts. There is no record so far released which indicates the March 9 instructions were filed at Bureau headquarters.
As the official story goes, Dallas FBI Special Agent John W. Fain located Oswald's brother, Robert, on April 27, 1960. Robert Oswald told Fain that Marguerite Oswald' had attempted to send $25 to Lee Harvey Oswald in January and that she could be found at 1111 Herring Avenue, Waco, Texas. Robert Oswald told his mother the FBI wished to interview her, whereupon she "volunteered" for an interview, presumably by phoning Fain. Fain interviewed Marguerite on April 28, during which she confirmed the story of her attempt to send the $25 money order to Lee Oswald in Russia.
Special Agent Fain put this information and much more about Lee Harvey Oswald into an FBI Dallas field office report on May 12, 1960. Fain wrote this report under the case title "Funds Transmitted to Residents of Russia," and filed it under the Bureau's domestic security serial 105, file 353496 for "Internal SecurityRussia." The FBI Dallas field office chose to open their first Oswald file under the Foreign Counterintelligence Matters serial 105, file 976 for Lee Harvey Oswald. In choosing the counterintelligence serial for their file, the Dallas office was in step with the New York field office request for the interview, which came under a 105 designation.
That both the New York and Dallas field offices used a 105 serial for Oswald was to be expected, as it simply followed what the Bureau had done by opening a 105 file on Oswald. At this point, however, something strange happened. A new, separate file was opened at headquarters with the original Oswald file still open. The seven-page Fain report was put in a new domestic security file, 100353496, instead of Oswald's counterintelligence file, 105-82555. What did this mean? Did these serials and file numbers really matter?
They mattered a great deal. The new 100 file at headquarters, like the 105 files at Dallas and New York, would never make it to the National Archives. Except, of course, for the solitary Fain report from Dallas. The opening and disappearance of these special files at the Bureau and its various field offices were part of a trend in which Oswald-related information and documents were buried in places from which they would be difficult to retrieve by investigators. In the case of the Warren Commission, such investigation was arbitrary because President Johnson put the FBI in charge of it. The Senate Select and House Select Committees, however, would not know about these special files through intuition, and so this important information from the beginning of the Oswald case never did see the light of day-that is, until now. The current JFK Assassination Records Review Board can change all of that.
Whether by accident or by design, the way information on Oswald was filed in early 1960 was misleading and inaccurate. The FBI told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities in 1979 that the FBI case on Oswald was first opened by its Dallas field office on January 13, 1961. In making this assertion, the FBI was referring not to the file that contained the May 1960 Fain report (105-976), but was referring instead to the second file opened at Dallas-a domestic security file (100-10461). This story begins to stretch under the weight of the known facts: The FBI told the Warren Commission it had "opened a file" on Oswald in October 1959, and told the Church Committee "the case on Lee Harvey Oswald was initially opened in the Dallas Field Division" in January 1961.
One hopes we would be wrong in asserting that the FBI deliberately misled the Church Committee, which could conclude from the above only that the Dallas office began tracking Oswald a year after it had, in truth, begun its investigation. Technically, since the 1960 Dallas 105-976 case was "Funds Transmitted to Residents of Russia," the FBI could say that this was not a case on "Oswald." However, the FBI had opened a counterintelligence case-105-82555on Oswald in October 1959, which had more than a dozen documents in it by the time Dallas opened its 105 file. Moreover, the "Funds Transmitted" case (105-976) in Dallas contained the most detailed information yet about Oswald because the interviews with his family were stored there. Meanwhile, at headquarters, from the very moment the FBI intercepted the information about the transfer from Marguerite's bank account, all ensuing reports and information from this source had either been unofficially entered in Oswald's counterintelligence file as "unrecorded" or entered under a separate "Internal Security-Russia" serial and file number.
While all of these file numbers seem complicated to the untrained eye, there can be no mistake about the pattern we can now discern: Much of the early information on Oswald developed by the FBI's field investigators was deliberately withheld from Oswald's headquarters counterintelligence (105) file and was instead put into an internal security (100) file which was then suppressed. Meanwhile his Dallas (105) counterintelligence file was also suppressed and a new Dallas internal security (100) file was opened on January 13, 1961-well after the original leads generated by the funds transfer had played themselves out. The FBI provided only subsequent official government inquiries with documents from Oswald's 105 Bu reau file and his 100 file from Dallas. In the case of the New York field office, two files were also used, only these were counterintelligence (105) files. The New York field office suppressed the first file, 105-6103, which contained the same information that was in the suppressed headquarters file (100-353496) and the suppressed Dallas file, 105-976.
All of these special handling procedures may have been carried out to protect the FBI's bank peeping project, but we cannot be sure until the FBI comes clean-with the complete files and an honest explanation. Whatever the reason, the result was obfuscation and secrecy, with the sensitive information stored under the 105 serial in Dallas, the 100 serial at Headquarters, and in one of the two 105 serials in New York. Fortunately for history, Fain did not identify New York as the source of the information that Marguerite had sent money to Russia, and the FBI released his report to the Warren Commission. Moreover, when the FBI inadvertently released a few documents years ago to researcher Paul Hoch, these documents provided a roadmap to the rest of the file numbers pertaining to Oswald-including the 65 serial for espionage-for both headquarters and Dallas.
An Oswald Journey Through the CIA
Sometime on Friday, May 27, 1960, the Fain report on Oswald was date-stamped into the CIA's Records Integration Division, which assigned the May 12 report a CIA number, DBF-49478. Strangely, Oswald had not yet been assigned a counterintelligence file number and so this document was filed under the number 74-500. The 74 was almost certainly the number for the U.S.S.R. The 500 was a generic number. The following Tuesday, May 31, Fain's seven-page account of Oswald was signed into the counterintelligence staff (CI/Staff) by a person with the initials "bar." From there the file moved to Joseph E. Evans in the operations section of counterintelligence (CUOPS). Given that the mole-hunting group (CI/SIG) in the counterintelligence staff played such a central role in the November-December 1959 chapter of Oswald's CIA files, it seems strange that CI/SIG was not included among the Cl elements to which this document was routed. Perhaps this omission is the reason this Oswald document, unlike the previous Oswald documents, managed to travel on to the Soviet Russia Division the following day.
On Wednesday, June 1, the Fain report rolled into the Counterespionage Branch (SR/CE) of the Soviet Russia Division. In the CE branch it was seen by the chief, Bill Bright, after which it came to rest at the desk of someone whose initials were "IEL," and whose duty section was represented by the letter P. IEL was directed to page six of the report, where the CIA copy of this Fain report has double hash marks in the left column next to these two sentences:
Mrs. Oswald stated that she has not been requested to furnish any items of personal identification to LEE HARVEY OSWALD in Russia. She volunteered the information that LEE HARVEY OSWALD took his birth certificate with him when he left Fort Worth, Texas [underlined by CIA].
Whoever IEL was, this person apparently had the responsibility to track the birth certificate issue as a possible espionage matter-in other words, to watch for the possibility that an impostor might get hold of this document. Actually, the FBI did investigate this issue over the summer of 1960 because of a related issue centering on whether Oswald had gone to Switzerland instead of Moscow. In the end, the impostor issue, along with concern over the birth certificate, was dropped due to the lack of substantive information.
On Thursday, June 2, the Fain memo was on the move again inside the CIA, this time to SR/9, the Soviet Russia branch that provided support to CIA operations in Moscow. In 1959 there was no CIA "station" in Moscow. CIA personnel in the Moscow Embassy operated alone as "singletons." Russell Langelle had been compromised when the Soviet spy Popov had been discovered and was expelled on October 16, 1959, the very day that Oswald arrived in Moscow. This left at least one other singleton agent, George Winters. What might have been SR/9's interest in Fain's report on Oswald? In the first place, SR/9 was probably still interested in how Popov had been discovered, and was certainly interested in whether a crucial piece of intelligence Popov had provided to his CIA handlers was true.
That piece of intelligence was provocative, and suggested there might be a mole in the CIA with access to information about the supersensitive U-2 program. Popov had indicated in April 1958 that there was a leak in this top secret spy plane program. Popov's reporting indicated that a Soviet colonel, apparently during a drunken boast, had said the KGB had learned the technical details about the new high-altitude American spy plane overflying the Soviet Union. Such details had been so tightly held that the leak might have come from a highly placed mole, and the CIA could not be sure whether the Soviets knew enough about the aircraft's cruising altitude to shoot it down with a missile." The navy message to Moscow after Oswald's defection mentioned Oswald's duty in "Air Control Squadrons in Japan and Taiwan," which should have been enough to raise hairs in the CIA.16 People who were involved in the U-2 program knew that the only Marine Air Wing in that entire geographic region was at Atsugi, a CIA U-2 base. A former senior officer of the Directorate of Operations, Ed Jeunovitch, recalled this detail:
For security during U-2 program: there was a special detachment of OS people controlled out of Tokyo. They had total responsibility for the security of the U-2 program. When I was assigned to Tokyo I initially wondered why the guy in charge of this detachment was so high in rank-a [GS] 16, while the [CIA] Station chief was only a 17 or 18. Emil Geisse was chief of the detachment during Oswald's time in Tokyo."
Unfortunately, we know only that Angleton's CUSIG unit read the navy report about Oswald's Far East Marine Air Control Squadron, and we thus cannot be sure if SR/9 had access to it. In either case, SR/9 had to be interested in Oswald's presence in Moscow simply because it occurred in the wake of the arrest of their chief asset there: Popov.
We know the Fain report circulated through the various offices of the SR Division, including some we have not yet mentioned, such as SR/4, SR/6, and SR/10. We will return to the dimmer recesses of the Soviet Russia Division in Chapters I 1 and 12. For now, let us consider the bottom line of the very first report the FBI sent to the CIA about Oswald: "According to Mrs. Oswald, she was subsequently shocked to learn that he had gone to Moscow, Russia, where he is reported to have renounced his U.S. citizenship and where he sought Soviet citizenship."
The question of whether Oswald renounced his citizenship is a fundamental one and bears directly on other issues surrounding his departure from the Soviet Union. The paper trail on the renunciation issue illustrates both the bureaucratic intrigue and lethagy that have long been the facts of life in Washington, D.C.
The "Renunciation" Paper Trail
On November 18, 1960, Angleton's deputy chief of CI, S. H. Horton, relayed a draft reply to a State Department query on defectors for Bissell to look at. Bissell signed it on November 21.'1 Attached to this letter was a list of defectors which, like the letter, had been assembled and drafted by Angleton's mole-hunting chief in CI/SIG, Birch D. O'Neal. The tenth name on the defector's list was Oswald, and the "secret" description of Oswald is noteworthy because it contains something which is not true. It said, "He appeared at the United States Embassy in Moscow and renounced his U.S. citizenship," a statement which was false."
The truth was that Oswald had tried but failed to renounce his citizenship. What is more, this technical distinction-between Oswald's request for the papers to renounce his U.S. citizenship and his failure to return to the embassy and actually execute the renunciation-mattered a great deal. For one thing, it was directly relevant to the ease with which Oswald could retrieve his passport and, therefore, return to America. In addition, and perhaps more important for our purposes, the fact is that the CIA was in possession of the facts concerning Oswald's failure to complete the renunciation as well as the State Department's reexamination of this very issue. CI/SIG's November 18 flat assertion that Oswald had renounced his U.S. citizenship permits us to question-at the very least-the credibility of the way in which Cl was handling the Oswald file at this early date.
Lee Harvey Oswald appeared at the embassy "to renounce [his] American citizenship," said Snyder's October 31, 1959, cable 1304, but added, "we propose delay [in] execution [of] renunciation until Soviet action known or [State] Dept advises."20 On November 2, Snyder wrote in dispatch 234 that "Oswald is presently residing in non-tourist status at the Metropole Hotel in Moscow awaiting the Soviet response to his application for citizenship" and that "the Embassy proposes to delay action on Oswald's request to execute an oath of renunciation...."" Both cable 1304 and dispatch 234 were sent to the CIA. A week later, November 9, 1959, Snyder sent the State Department an update, saying, "Lee Oswald seems determined [to] carry out purpose of seeking Soviet citizenship and renouncing American citizenship, but so far as known Soviet citizenship not granted and formal renunciation not yet made at this of- fice."21 This cable was not made available to the CIA until after the Kennedy assassination.