Authors: John Newman
The next day, November 10, the Navy Liaison Office at the American Embassy made a mistake, inviting the chief of Naval Operations to look at embassy dispatch "184 DTD 7 Nov X SUBJ Oswald ltr concerning renunciation of US citizenship."22 Dispatch 184 "contains no mention of Oswald," someone wrote by hand on a copy of the Navy Liaison message from Moscow-it was about Khrushchev. The Navy Liaison message may have been referring to Snyder's November 2 dispatch. It was a harbinger of things to come that the first navy message to mention the renunciation issue would be spurious. The Washington Post23 did no better on November 16, saying, "Lee Harvey Oswald's dream of achieving Soviet citizenship in exchange for the United States citizenship he renounced appears to be unattainable." The fact is that Oswald failed to return to the embassy to carry out his stated intent to renounce his U.S. citizenship.
The Air Force's Office of Special Investigations (OSI), which began investigating Oswald's half brother Edward in January 1960 did somewhat better. A January 27 OSI document stated that Oswald had "contemplated" renunciation, "stating his intention of renouncing his U.S. citizenship."24 Marguerite Oswald seemed a bit confused on March 6, when she wrote to Congressman Wright, "According to the UPI Moscow Press, he appeared at the U.S. Embassy renouncing his U.S. citizenship.' 12' The next day, however, she summed it up nicely in her March 7, 1960, letter to Secretary of State Herter:
All I know is what I read in the newspapers. He went to the U.S. Embassy there and wanted to turn in his U.S. citizenship and had applied for Soviet citizenship. However, the Russians refused his request but said he could remain in their country as a Resident Alien. As far as I know, he is still a U.S. citizen .16
It is interesting how in just twenty-four hours Marguerite's understanding progressed from a misleading use of the wording "renouncing" to the more accurate "wanted to turn in his citizenship."
If Oswald had gone through with the renunciation and signed the required papers, this would, in turn, have led to an official record of his loss of U.S. citizenship. Precisely because Oswald had not gone through with it, the State Department sent an operations memorandum to the Moscow Embassy on March 28, 1960, saying, "Unless and until the Embassy comes into possession of information or evidence upon which to base the preparation of a certificate of loss of nationality in the case of Lee Harvey Oswald, there appears to be no further action possible in this case."27 By coincidence, the very same day, the American Embassy in Moscow sent an operations memorandum to the department, saying, "The Embassy has no evidence that Oswald has expatriated himself other than his announced intention to do so...."28
The next episode in the renunciation story is FBI Special Agent John W. Fain's interview with Marguerite on April 28, 1960. Fain's report said Marguerite had expressed "shock" when she had learned her son "is reported to have renounced his U.S. citizenship," and again that it was "much to her surprise" that he "had renounced" his U.S. citizenship." This report was sent to the CIA on May 25, whereupon a CIA file clerk wrote these words on the final page of the report: "Ex-marine, who upon his discharge from Marine Corps, Sept 59, traveled to USSR and renounced his U.S. citizenship."'
This false handwritten statement was placed on the Fain report for a CIA keypunch operator to type in on an IBM index card on Oswald. The clerk who typed the index card, however, was either a different individual from the person who had written "renounced" on the Fain report or had learned something new before actually typing the index card. The typed card reads, "Traveled to USSR to renounce his U.S. citizenship," which was a factual statement, the key being that Oswald had not followed through on his intent." What the CIA copy of the Fain report and the index card prepared from it show is that the CIA understood-in May 1960-that Oswald had intended to renounce his citizenship but in fact had not. It also shows that the incorrect statement-that Oswald had "re- nounced"-came from the FBI, and that the CIA corrected this mistake before typing the index card on Oswald.
The FBI, however, proceeded to perpetuate the myth of Oswald's renunciation, as shown by an air telegram from the New York field office to Bureau headquarters on May 23: "Interview of Mrs. Marguerite C. Oswald reveals that her son, Lee Harvey Oswald, had gone to Moscow, Russia, had renounced his citizenship and had apparently sought Soviet citizenship."" The New York field office was thus repeating what was in the Fain report: that, according to Marguerite, Oswald had renounced. The Fain report also was transmitted to the Navy's Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) on May 26," where Marguerite's misstatement influenced the Marine Board decision on her son's undesirable discharge.
It is noteworthy that neither the Fain report nor the New York air telegram contained an FBI corroboration of Marguerite's misrepresentation of the renunciation issue. In twice paraphrasing Marguerite's distortion without commenting on its correctness, these FBI reports add a strange tinge to the FBI's 1960 reporting on Oswald. Similarly, the June 3 Hoover letter to the State Department, the one containing the Oswald "impostor" thesis, contained this passage relevant to the renunciation issue:
Reference is made to Foreign Service Dispatch Number 234 dated November 2, 1959, concerning subject's renunciation of his American citizenship at the United States Embassy, Moscow, Russia, on October 31, 1959."
An interpretation of this language as Machiavellian double-speak is indicated by a close legal reading of the wording, which semantically allows for the possibility that Oswald might not have renounced and that the Hoover letter was simply "concerning" the issue. Such wording is all the more artful because the Moscow Embassy's dispatch 234 made clear that the embassy did not act on Oswald's request to renounce his citizenship on October 31 and, further, that the embassy was stalling him and proposed to continue stalling him to the extent the department would allow.
By June 8 Marguerite had asked Mr. Haselton of the State Department outright for a judgment of the renunciation issue," and on June 22 State's deputy director of the Office of Special Consular Services, V. Harwood Blocker, responded, "With regard to your questions about your son's citizenship it will be necessary that they be answered by another office in the [State] Department. Your questions have been referred to the Passport Office for appropriate reply."36 That judgment came from the chief of the State Department's Foreign Operations Division, John T. White, on July 7. He wrote this to Marguerite:
The Department presently has no information that the Embassy at Moscow has evidence of record upon which to base the preparation of a certificate of loss of United States nationality in the case of your son under any section of the expatriation laws of the United States."
On August 9, Verde Buckler of the State Department's Passport Office showed the file on Oswald to the FBI. Special Agent Haser of the Washington field office was the reviewer. After looking at the file, Haser wrote that Oswald had "publicly sought to renounce his American citizenship," but gone was the word "renounced" or any inference that a renunciation had taken place.3S The same language appeared in an FBI report by Special Agent Dana Carson, also of the Washington field office, after he reviewed Oswald's passport file on September 9. Carson's September 12 report said only that Oswald "sought" to renounce his citizenship, but did not state that he had followed through on it.39
This brings us full circle to the State Department's October request to the CIA for data on defectors, and the Agency's response which said that Oswald had in fact renounced his citizenship at the embassy in Moscow. As we will shortly see, the special research staff of the Office of Security was not asked to look into Oswald, and this November 18 write-up was done by Birch O'Neal's CU SIG mole-hunting branch. The only piece of paper the CIA had ever received which had the FBI replay of Marguerite's misstatement on renunciation-the Fain report-was apparently not received by CI/SIG. The original documents from October-November 1959, which told the true story of how Oswald had tried and failed to renounce his citizenship, were already in the possession of CI/SIG.
When the CIA's Records Integration Division (RID) first saw the Fain report, the person preparing the words for abstraction into the data file made the mistake of repeating Marguerite's use of the word "renounced." But RID managed to straighten the problem out before typing it into the permanent card file index. Similarly, the FBI, once confronted with Oswald's official State Department passport file, dropped the term "renunciation." The same was not true for CUSIG, however, where someone apparently wanted the Oswald script to read as if he had renounced his citizenship. Why this was so was part of the riddle of the late 201 opening on Oswald, a subject to which we must now return.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Riddle of Oswald's
201 File
Of all the events that occurred during the period of time that Oswald was "lost" in the Soviet Union, the most important was the late opening of his CIA 201 file in December 1960. No single page in all the quarter-million pages of Oswald-related JFK documents so far released by the CIA can compare in significance to the piece of paper that opened his 201 file. This paper reveals a wealth of important information: the document's 201 number, 201289248; the name of the person who opened the file, Ann Egerter; the office symbol, "CI/SIG," for the Counterintelligence Special Investigation Group in which she worked; the date that the file was opened, December 9, 1960; the CIA's U.S.S.R. country code, "074"; and the wrong middle name for Oswald-"Henry" instead of Harvey. These and other integral aspects of Oswald's 201 file are dealt with throughout the chapters of this book.
This chapter deals with the basic question: Why was Oswald's 201 file opened? The apparent incongruity between the CIA's claim that the file was opened because Oswald was a defector and the reality that the file was opened a year after the CIA knew about his defection stands crooked in the landscape-like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, destined to fall down sooner or later. The public should be as "amazed" about this as was former director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms.'
Between 1958 and 1960, more than a dozen American defectors made their way to the Soviet Union, many of them from the U.S. military, and some of whom had been privy to classified informa tion. The CIA ascertained that nearly half of this group were "KGB agents,"' some recruited well before their defections. Several of these defectors decided to return to America between 1962 and 1963. The official story has long been that Oswald's 201 file was opened after this series of defections led to questions in the Eisenhower White House and a State Department request to the CIA for information on a list of defectors. This list had Oswald's name on it. The CIA's overt story has been that this alone was the reason they opened a 201 file on Oswald.
From the CIA's files, however, comes hard evidence that more than Oswald's defector status was involved in the 201 openingmuch more. In 1975, the head of the CIA's Counterintelligence Staff, George Kalaris, wrote a memo saying the file had been opened because of Oswald's "queries" about coming home.' This sets up a time dilemma because, when the 201 was opened on December 9, 1960, the CIA was not supposed to know where Oswald was, let alone what he might be asking about. The House Select Committee on Assassinations, which investigated the issue of the late opening, saw the Kalaris memo and dismissed this statement because, like the Warren Commission before it, the HSCA believed no one knew where Oswald was until February 13, 1963. That was the day the U.S. Embassy in Moscow found out that Oswald was in Minsk and wanted to return to America. Evidence has been accumulating, however, that Oswald's whereabouts were known to someone outside of the Soviet Union, perhaps including the CIA.
The Warren Commission's Final Report and its additional twentysix volumes of materials, dominated by the guiding hand of former CIA director and commission member Allen Dulles, are suspiciously mute on the subject of Oswald's CIA files. The HSCA, however, did look into his Agency files, and probed the 201 issue vigorously but, in the end, unsuccessfully. One factor that contributed to this dead end in the HSCA investigation was the CIA's decision not to allow the HSCA investigators access to the Agency's internal routing sheets indicating who had handled Oswald's files on specific dates-records the HSCA was sensible enough to ask for.
The most important contributor was a flawed assumption underlying the HSCA's own analysis. By assuming that the CIA had not known where Oswald was in December 1960, the HSCA disconnected his 201 from the event which might have opened it, Oswald's request to the U.S. government to let him come home. Oswald had put this request in a letter to the embassy that was pinched by the KGB. The KGB never put the letter back in the mail to the U.S. Embassy and did not reveal its existence until 1991, after the fall of communism in the Soviet Union.
When viewed in the context of Oswald's query about returning to the U.S., the 201 opening in December 1960 invites the question: Did the CIA have access to sources in the Soviet Union that permitted them to monitor American defectors? Some useful answers can be found in the JFK files, especially those released in October 1994. According to a July 1960 CIA information report, the CIA had an informant who was a touring "clergyman" in the Soviet Union. His timely reporting provided intelligence on one of the American defectors-Joseph Dutkanicz. Clearly, the CIA was keenly interested in these defectors, so interested that some of what it learned about them sometimes came from its most sensitive and valuable sources. Protection of these sources was necessary for their continued usefulness. When significant information was not put in a 201 file but in a separate file, as was sometimes done, it was to protect the valuable sources through which it was acquired. The Agency's attempt to protect a sensitive source is the key to the riddle of Oswald's 201 opening.