Authors: John Newman
The "funds transmitted" file that produced a major report by Special Agent Fain in May 1960 was to become the first external document circulated within the Soviet Russia Division at the CIA. This event may have triggered the opening of the Oswald soft file which was maintained in the Soviet Realities section of the Soviet Russia Division. The FBI belatedly turned over the Fain report to the Warren Commission, which published it with the Dallas file number still visible. The current release of FBI files on Oswald thus arouses our curiosity. The 105-976 (Dallas), 100-353496 and 6528939 (Bureau), 105-6103 and 65-6315 (New York), and 65-1762 (Washington field office) files have not been released to the public. This is not satisfactory. Again, if these documents were released (in almost completely redacted form) as JFK documents in 1978, why are they not still JFK documents in 1994? All of the pertinent sections of these files must be opened. Without them we do not have the full FBI story on Oswald.
Coming Home
If we have learned nothing else about the files on Oswald maintained by the FBI and CIA in the year after his defection, it is how scattered the pieces were. The bifurcation of early Oswald material within the FBI continued into 1961, and there are hints of it up to the spring of 1963. A 201 file at the CIA from the beginning would have united many of the disparate threads on Oswald. Within the Agency, 1960 witnessed the incremental involvement of the Soviet Russia Division, a trend that continued into 1961 and 1962.
Oswald's decision to come home stimulated the paper trail on his activities during the first half of 1961. This trail takes us down several paths at once-some familiar and some new. A channel opened between the Navy Intelligence field office at Algiers, Louisiana, and the Dallas FBI field office. Lateral activity picked up between the FBI field offices in Dallas and New Orleans, and, after an internal struggle, the Washington field office as well.
During the eighteen-month lag between Oswald's decision to return home and his arrival in June 1962, the most sensitive CIA program used to collect information on Oswald, the HT/LINGUAL program, produced the most enigmatic results. The new release of JFK documents in 1993 and 1994 has turned up a better copy of HT/LINGUAL index card that offers, for the first time, a clear view of a handwritten note that reads: "Delete 15/3/60." This means Oswald was deleted from HT/LINGUAL coverage on March 15, 1960. Oswald's name was thus not on the Watch List when his mother's letter to him was opened by the CIA in July 1961. Stranger still are these two facts: 1) CI/SIG's Ann Egerter put Oswald's name back on the list on August 7, 1961, and 2) the Agency claims it did not discover the July 1961 mail intercept for another year. Putting these pieces together, we have a situation in which the CIA opened Oswald's mail when he was not on the list and then couldn't find the letter after they put him back on the list.
All these apparent anomalies leave one wondering about the competence of the CIA. But more important, we have to start asking where the incompetence factor is a cover to protect sensitive sources.
The FBI was prepared to grill Oswald upon his return to the United States. FBI headquarters directed the Dallas office to "thoroughly" interview Oswald "immediately upon his arrival," to find out if he had been recruited by the KGB or had made any deals with the Soviets in order to obtain their permission to return to the U.S. with his wife and child. Amazingly, the report of the FBI interview with Oswald, after it occurred on June 26, 1962, was not sent to the CIA. This was the moment that the FBI, the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), and the State Department had all been waiting for, and all got their copies of the interview by special agents Tom Carter and John Fain. The handwritten dissemination list neglected to add CIA.
The CIA missed an important interview. Oswald was arrogant, intemperate, and impatient, and declined to answer many of the questions. The FBI's standing instructions to the interviewing agents covered this possibility: They were to request that Oswald submit to a polygraph, which they did. Oswald refused. Oswald was particularly evasive about his reasons for having defected to the Soviet Union in the first place. In the FBI accounts of the interview he made an angry "show of temper" and engaged in a shouting match with Special Agent Fain, at which point "Fain and Oswald nearly squared off right there in Fain's office."
A second interview in August 1962, Fain claimed, was relatively successful. Significantly, unlike the first interview, this one was sent to the CIA. In the second interview, Oswald lied about his attempt to renounce his U.S. citizenship and affirm allegiance to the Soviet Union, lied about his offer of military information to the Soviets, complained about his travails in returning home with his family, refused to answer why he had gone to the Soviet Union in the first place. He said it was "nobody's business" and that it was for his "own personal reasons." He said, "I went, and I came back!" Thus Oswald provided little new to enable the FBI to determine his motives. He acknowledged but did not answer the question about having different values from those of his mother, still declined to give names of relatives in the U.S.S.R., still denied making any "deals," discounted the idea of Soviet intelligence interest in his activities, and said no one ever attempted to recruit him or elicit any secret information.
Oswald did admit to having been interviewed by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, but nothing in the FBI report of this interview could be considered sufficient to rule out his potential recruitment by the KGB. If we are to believe that the FBI was then or is now satisfied that this interview produced enough data to obviate a possible hostile intelligence connection, the appropriate committees on Capitol Hill may want to ask a few questions. In light of the Aldrich Ames spy case, the CIA might have some friendly advice for the FBI.
FBI director Kelley said this of the second interview: "Oswald, though much more placid this time, still evaded as many questions as he could." But, strangely, Agent Fain and "officials at FBI headquarters" were satisfied that Oswald was not a security risk and, therefore, "recommended that his file be placed in an inactive status." The inactive status lasted from late August through October, when Special Agent John Fain retired and Oswald's file was officially closed, even though information on Oswald's communist mail activities had already begun flowing into it. Strangely, these new additions to Oswald's FBI files did not find a receptive audience, and the FBI simply closed the file. Kelley acknowledges that the FBI knew in July 1962 that Oswald had sought information about Russian newspapers and periodicals from the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C., and knew in October that Oswald had "renewed his subscription to the Worker, the U.S. Communist Party newspaper." The Oswald case as of October 1962, Kelley says, "was regarded as merely routine, unworthy of any further consideration."
Oswald, a known redefector married to a Soviet citizen, proved contentious and untruthful in a "thorough" interview ordered by FBI headquarters. The FBI agents who conducted the interviews did not believe Oswald's story. The second interview was, at best, inconclusive, and Fain's reasons for not considering Oswald a threat-as described by FBI Director Kelley-took no account of what the FBI had already learned about his mail activities. Moreover, these activities were new, and had taken place since the first interview. Oswald had hidden them during the second interview. At this point Fain could more easily have argued for aggressively pursuing the case. Oswald's performance during the interviews and in the U.S. mail were not "routine." Neither was closing his file.
In October 1962 Hosty was given the assignment of reopening Marina Oswald's file, but his instructions did not allow him to interview her for six months, which meant he was not to contact her until March 1963. So, with Marina's case open and Oswald's case closed, Oswald corresponded with a cavalcade of left wing and communist organizations, while Marina stayed in the house. March 1963 arrived and it was time for Hosty's talk. He had just learned of Oswald's address, but when he arrived, the apartment manager said that the wife-beating Oswald had moved. Hosty now recommended that Oswald's case be reopened. It was, on March 26.
The reason Hosty gave for reopening the file was that Oswald subscribed to a communist newspaper. This is extremely odd. When the Dallas FBI office had previously learned of Oswald's subscription to the same paper, they had closed his file. Moreover, in an act that was beginning to look like a pattern, Hosty decided that the violent Oswald might have caused a situation not conducive to an interview. Therefore, Hosty, "jotted a note in his file to come back in forty-five to sixty days." As we know, by that time Oswald had skipped town to embark upon the perilous journey that would end in his murder as well as the president's seven months later.
Oswald's Cuban Escapades
It was Oswald's Fair Play for Cuba Committee that led to the "smoking file" described in Chapter Nineteen. His FPCC activities set off alarm bells at the FBI and its field offices in Washington, New York, New Orleans, and Dallas, and at the CIA. Both organizations had long been actively involved in operations against the FPCC. Just as the Soviet Realities Branch at the CIA had earlier developed an operational interest in Oswald. It is difficult to proceed with certainty because the public record contains cover stories. All we can say for sure is that the Special Affairs Staff, the location for anti-Cuban operations, was discussing (with the FBI) an operation to discredit the FPCC in a foreign country at the time of Oswald's visit to Mexico, and that the CIA has been denying what it knew about Oswald's Cuban activities ever since.
The record of Oswald's stay in New Orleans, May to September 1963, is replete with mistakes, coincidences, and other anomalies. As Oswald engaged in pro-Castro and anti-Castro activities, the FBI says they lost track of him. The Army was monitoring his activities and says it destroyed their reports. The record of his propaganda operations in New Orleans published by the Warren Commission turned out to have been deliberately falsified. A surprising number the characters in Oswald's New Orleans episode turned out to be informants or contract agents of the CIA. The FBI jailhouse interview with Oswald, which focused on the FPCC, was suppressed until after Oswald returned from Mexico.
The story after Oswald's return from Mexico becomes even murkier. The CIA claims it did not know Oswald had visited the Cuban Consulate in Mexico City until after the assassination. Something else they also claim not to have known until after the assassination was the fact that Kostikov, a Soviet official with whom Oswald spoke during his visit, worked for the KGB assassination department. In pursuing the Cuban Consulate and Kostikov questions, the Review Board may consider using its powers, including its power to subpoena records and witnesses and, if necessary, to grant them immunity (section 7-J of the Records Act). If the CIA did know Kostikov's connection to assassination before November 22, the public needs to know the details. All of them.
What about the Cuban Consulate cover story? Why was it considered so sensitive if the CIA knew, before November 22, that Oswald had visited the consulate in Mexico City? We noted Helms's explanation that it was to cover the Agency's sources there. Was it erected to cover something more troubling that the CIA knew about Oswald? There have long been rumors in the media that during his Cuban Consulate visit Oswald had threatened to kill Kennedy. FBI director Hoover informed the Warren Commission that Castro told this privately to the Bureau's "Solo" source, but this was withheld from the public. Solo's file was released in early 1995 by the National Archives, and there are enough clues in the release to suggest what the research community has long suspected: The Solo source was probably Morris Childs.
The files show that Childs repeated Castro's statement about the Oswald threat to the FBI. Hoover's replacement as FBI director, Clarence Kelley, believed that Oswald made such a threat. In 1987, Kelley wrote about it in his book, in effect declassifying the substance of the Hoover letter. Cuban Consulate employees such as Azcue and Duran claim they heard no such threat, and so it remains a mystery. The question is this: Did the CIA know of an Oswald threat against Kennedy? Castro told Childs that he had received the story from "our diplomats." When was this? Which diplomats? How was it communicated to Havana?
The answers to these questions would help us to find out if, before the assassination, the CIA learned of a threat to the president made by Oswald which it did not pass on to the FBI. This point has to be resolved. It is too important to put off for ten or twenty more years to protect sources and methods. It is also the kind of question that in order for the answers to be believable requires all the documents and all the details. Without exception.
Consider the following claim made by FBI director Kelley:
It was known at the time by members of the United States intelligence community, including the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters, and the FBI's Soviet espionage section-but not by the Dallas or New Orleans field offices (thus not by Agent Hosty)-that Oswald spoke with Valery Vladimirovitch Kostikov at the Russian Embassy in Mexico City.
The importance of Kostikov cannot be overstated. As Jim Hosty wrote later: "Kostikov was the officer-in-charge for Western Hemisphere terrorist activities-including and especially assassination. In military ranking he would have been a one-star general. As the Russians would say, he was their Line V man-the most dangerous KGB terrorist assigned to this hemisphere!"'
And yet, due to "the tangle of red tape," says Kelley, Hosty did not learn about the Oswald-Kostikov contact until the end of October. Even then Kostikov was identified only as a vice-consul. "No mention was made of Oswald's visit to the Cuban Embassy. Worse yet, no identification of Kostikov as a high-ranking assassination specialist was given to New Orleans. Or to Agent Hosty."
Kelley is convinced that during his visit to the Cuban Consulate, Oswald "definitely offered to kill President Kennedy." Although he does not say it explicitly, Kelley seems to be hinting that the CIA knew this and did not inform the FBI. He said the "Solo" source on Castro "verified that Oswald had offered to kill the American President," language that suggests that there was another source before Castro's comments. It is time to remove the ambiguity from this discussion. The question is: Did the CIA learn in October 1963 and fail to share with the FBI information indicating that Oswald had met with a KGB assassination specialist and may have threatened to assassinate Kennedy?