Authors: John Newman
In this chapter we will explore one possible hypothesis: When the CIA opened Oswald's 201 file on December 9, 1960, they had already learned, probably from a sensitive source, about Oswald's request to come home. In this case, the true reason for the opening of Oswald's 201 file might have been too sensitive to include in that file. Their defector-status explanation did not betray the sensitive source, possibly a KGB source, permitting the exclusion of the true trigger event from the file it brought into being.
Americans Who Might Be Called "Defectors"
"Dear Dick," Hugh Cumming began a letter to the CIA on October 25, 1960.4 Hugh S. Cumming, Jr., was the director of the State Department's Intelligence and Research Bureau (INR), and the Dick to whom he was writing was Richard M. Bissell, Jr., Deputy Director of Plans, CIA. Cumming began his letter by noting informal yet high-level-including the White House-interest in a special kind of defectors. This is how he described them:
Our efforts to answer recent informal inquiries, including some from the White House Staff, have revealed that, though the CIA and the FBI have detailed records concerning Americans who have been recruited as intelligence agents by [Soviet] Bloc countries, there does not appear to be a complete listing of those Americans now living in Bloc countries who might be called "defectors." ... These persons might be described as those persons who have either been capable of providing useful intelligence to the Bloc or those whose desire to resettle in Bloc countries has been significantly exploited for communist propaganda purposes.
Cumming enclosed a list of eighteen such individuals and asked Bissell to "verify and possibly expand" it. Number eight on the list was Lee Harvey Oswald, who was described only as a "tourist."
At the CIA, Bissell turned the matter over to Angleton's Counterintelligence (CI) Staff and Sheffield Edwards's Office of Security (OS), but Cl took the lead. Asked for his recollection of the OS role in the opening of Oswald's 201 file, Robert L. Bannerman said, "It would have all gone through Angleton."5 Bannerman was in a good position to know. At the time-November 1960-Bannerman was the deputy director of the Office of Security. The 201 opening was something on which "we worked very closely with Angleton and his staff,"6 Bannerman recalls.
Bannerman had been the OS Deputy Chief for a decade under Sheffield Edwards. Bannerman had a close working relationship with Otto Otepka of the State Department Security Office (SY). When Bissell's request for information about the defectors list came in, Bannerman made a check with SY to see what they had and told his staff to support Cl. "Working directly with Bissell's people on this, sending memos back and forth, would have been too formal," Bannerman remembers, "and we didn't bother with the usual formalities in this instance. I just put our people in touch with the people at Cl. That was Paul Gaynor, Bruce Solie, and Morse Allen from my staff."
Paul Gaynor was Chief of OS's Security Research Staff (SRS), and he assigned Marguerite Stevens to send information over to CI. A Stevens memo at the time shows that Bannerman verbally requested Gaynor to assemble information on American defectors.' The request, as Gaynor relayed it to Stevens, however, was worded in a peculiar way, as if to dissuade her from doing research on seven people.' Bannerman specified that he wanted information on American defectors "other than Bernon F. Mitchell and William H. Martin,' and five other defectors regarding whom Mr. Otepka of the State Department Security Office already has information" on in his files10 [emphasis added]. One of the "five other defectors" that Stevens was not supposed to look into was Lee Harvey Oswald. In her response, however, Stevens said a few things about him and some of the others anyway, including the fact that they already had files with numbers. We will return to those numbers, briefly introduced in Chapter Four, later in this chapter.
Someone else in the CIA, however, was putting together information on these five defectors and planning to send something on each of them back to the State Department. That person was probably working for Angleton. Among the various sketches written on this select group can be found the inscription "Prepared by CI Staff for State-Nov. 60,"" In addition to Oswald, the other five defectors were Army Sergeant Joseph Dutkanicz, Libero Ricciardelli, a "tourist," Army Private Vladimir Sloboda, Robert E. Webster of the Rand Development Corporation, and Bruce Davis, also U.S. Army.
"Dear Hugh," began a November 3 interim response from Bissell to Cummings, "I have your letter of 25 October 1960 requesting certain information concerning Americans living in Bloc countries who might be called `defectors.' Our files are being searched for the information you desire, and you will be hearing further from me in a few days."" Fifteen days later, November 18, Angleton's Deputy Chief of Cl, S. H. Horton, sent the proposed reply for State to Bissell to look at." On November 21, Bissell signed this letter with the defectors list attached, both assembled and drafted by Angleton's mole-hunting chief (CI/SIG), Birch D. O'Neal. The Oswald entry, the tenth on the CIA's version of the defectors list, was classified SECRET.
This 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. As we have seen in Chapters Two and Four, the CIA was in possession of the relevant facts concerning Oswald's incomplete attempt at renunciation, including what the State Department had learned from its reexamination of this very issue.
These points draw attention to the November 18, 1960, flat assertion by CI/SIG that Oswald had renounced his U.S. citizenship. What was the point of this assertion? Was CI/SIG truly incompetent or spinning some counterintelligence yarn? The State Department had long since determined that Oswald had not renounced his citizenship. And what are we to make now of the story Ann Egerter of CI/SIG told to the HSCA about CI/SIG's opening Oswald's 201 file? She said she opened it simply because Oswald was a defector, but we know that the dark details about Oswald's defection had been familiar to Angleton's Cl Staff since November 1959.
The five defectors that OS/SRS was asked not to research were in fact investigated by the "CI staff." Two of them had 201 numbers which were opened almost at the same moment: Dutkanicz was 289236 and Oswald was 289248. Egerter opened Oswald's 201 on December 9, 1960, and the proximity of Dutkanicz's 201 number to Oswald's suggests that Dutkanicz's was opened closer to the date that the CIA responded to the State Department: November 21. Dutkanicz's 201 could not have been opened much earlier, and probably not as early as the Soviet press announcement of his defection-a Tass (Soviet) blurb on July 27 or 28, 1960. The Tass report was originally held in "CI/SIG files.""
The CIA probably already knew about Dutkanicz's defectionfrom an unusual and sensitive source whose reporting ended up in a file being kept by yet another component of the CIA which was interested in this group of defectors. Their files were "set up" in a soft file by Branch 6 ("Soviet Realities") of the Soviet Russia Division. This soft file was entitled "American Defectors to the USSR."16 Oswald's name appears to be missing from this file, but clues to its probable earlier presence remain, a subject to which we will return shortly. First we need to establish what we know about this question: When did Oswald first inquire about coming home?
The HSCA Failure to Investigate
The Warren Commission's failure to investigate Oswald's CIA files leaves an indelible blemish on its credibility. Many aspects of the HSCA investigation deserve credit, and we are indebted to it for the work it did trying to decipher the CIA's files. However, the HSCA investigation mishandled a fundamental question about the opening of Oswald's 201 file: When did Oswald first write to the U.S. Embassy about his wish to return to America? On this crucial question the HSCA failed to take seriously the most important piece of all-Oswald's December 1960 request to come home. Oswald put his request in a letter, and that letter's history was excluded from any examination of the issues surrounding Oswald's 201 file.
The Warren Commission's failure to look at Oswald's 201 file renders, by default, the HSCA's interpretation as the principal official one on this subject. It behooves us, therefore, to look at the details of the HSCA report on the subject of why Oswald's 201 file was opened and why it took a year to open it. The HSCA report connected the two in this question:
Why the delay in opening Oswald's 201 file?
A confidential State Department telegram dated October 31, 1959, sent from Moscow to Washington and forwarded to the CIA, reported that Oswald, a recently discharged Marine, had appeared at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow to renounce his American citizenship and "has offered Soviets any information he has acquired as [an] enlisted radar operator." At least three other communications of a confidential nature that gave more detail on the Oswald case were sent to the CIA in about the same time period. Agency officials questioned by the committee testified that the substance of the October 21, 1959, cable was sufficiently important to warrant the opening of a 201 file. Oswald's file was not, however, opened until December 9, 1960."
The HSCA rightfully felt that it had to know where documents about Oswald had been disseminated inside the CIA prior to the opening of his 201 file. When the HSCA asked for these records, the "Agency advised the committee that because document dissemi nation records of relatively low national security significance are retained for only a 5-year period, they were no longer in existence for the years 1959-63.""
As previously discussed, this was not true, and these internal dissemination records were released to the public in 1993. In 1978, however, the HSCA's probe of Oswald's 201 file ground to a halt due to factual errors and faulty analysis. For example, the HSCA report contained this untrue statement about why the 201 was opened:
An Agency memorandum, dated September 18, 1975, indicates that Oswald's file was opened on December 9, 1960, in response to the receipt of five documents: two from the FBI, two from the State Department and one from the Navy. This explanation, however, is inconsistent with the presence in Oswald's file of four State Department documents dated in 1959 and a fifth dated May 25, 1960. It is, of course, possible that the September 18, 1975, memorandum is referring to State Department documents that were received by the Directorate for Plans in October and November of 1960 and that the earlier State Department communications had been received by the CIA's Office of Security but not the Directorate for Plans."
First of all, the CIA memorandum had not said the 201 had been opened "in response to the receipt of five documents." Secondly, it was the HSCA-not the CIA-that offered the rationalization that perhaps the Agency's Office of Security received those documents and did not pass them on to the Directorate of Plans until December 1960. Since the 201 was opened by CUSIG in the Directorate of Plans, this argument would explain the one-year delay. However, we now know what the HSCA did not: the same element in the DDP that opened the 201, CUSIG, was itself in possession of most of those same Oswald files all along.
Perhaps the most significant problem for the HSCA is the way it handled the most obvious clue of all-a CIA memo that mentioned another reason Oswald's 201 file was opened. This reason was cited in the very first sentence of a September 18, 1975, memo written by Angleton's successor as Chief of Counterintelligence, George T. Kalaris, which the HSCA even quoted it in its report. Here is what Kalaris said:
Lee Harvey Oswald's 201 file was first opened under the name of Lee Henry Oswald on 9 December 1960 as a result of his "defection" to the USSR on 31 October 1959 and renewed interest in Oswald brought about by his queries concerning possible reentry into the United States.20
This is an amazing statement because no one was supposed to know where Oswald was at that time, let alone what he wanted to do. What did the HSCA make of this sentence? The answer is disappointing and cavalier. Here is the pertinent passage from the HSCA report:
The September 18, 1975, memorandum also states that Oswald's file was opened on December 9, 1960, as a result of this "defection" to the U.S.S.R. on October 31, 1969, and renewed interest in Oswald brought about by his queries concerning possible reentry into the United States. There is no indication, however, that Oswald expressed to any U.S. Government official an intention to return to the United States until mid-February 1961.
The HSCA assumed that the "U.S. Government" did not know where Oswald was until his letter arrived on Snyder's desk on February 13, 1961. And so the committee failed to follow up on Kalaris's remark, and relied totally on the testimony of "the Agency employee who was directly responsible for initiating the opening action."
Again, that person was Ann Egerter, and she had testified that the trigger event for the opening was the State Department defector list:
This individual explained that the CIA had received a request from the State Department for information concerning American defectors. After compiling the requested information, she responded to the inquiry and then opened a 201 file on each defector involved. Even so, this analysis only explained why a file on Oswald was finally opened; it did not explain the seemingly long delay in opening of the file."
Egerter's testimony led the HSCA to review other 201 files where there were delays. However, as discussed in Chapter Four, their review was flawed because it failed to specifically address whether or not these delays persisted, as in Oswald's case, long after the defections were known to the Agency.
The HSCA was unwilling to draw a firm conclusion. In the end, they abandoned the issue, insinuating that it was because of the CIA's refusal to turn over the internal routing sheets. "In the absence of dissemination records," the HSCA noted, "the issue could not be resolved." That comment was wise; what was not wise was to glibly dismiss a memorandum by the chief of the CIA's Counterintelligence Staff. The two questions the HSCA should have asked are: Did Oswald, in December 1960, express an interest in coming home? If so, did the CIA learn of it? The answer to both questions appears to be yes.