Tuesday, 15 August 2000 18:52

James Jesus Angleton and the Kennedy Assassination, Part 1

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An excerpt from the first of a two-part study of the CIA counterintelligence chief who very likely was in control of the Lee Harvey Oswald 'legend'.


From the July-August 2000 issue (Vol. 7 No. 5) of Probe


"[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


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 ëtoo 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 ñ 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, ëyou 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 ëThe 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, ëHow's the fishing? And Jim would say, ëWell, 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.

Notes

1. Tom Mangold, Cold Warrior / James Jesus Angleton: The CIA's Master Spy Hunter (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), p. 10.

2. Biographical data from Thomas Mangold, Cold Warrior, Chapter 2. This particular quote appears on page 33.

3. Miles Copeland, The Real Spy War (London: First Sphere Books edition, 1978), pp. 41-42.

4. Copeland, p. 42.

5. Mangold, p. 45.

6. Mangold, p. 44.

7. Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrtes: Richard Helms and the CIA (New York, Pocket Books ed., 1979), p. 35.

8. Mark Aarons and John Loftus, Unholy Trinity (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991), p. 89. There are several long passages about Angleton's relationship with Montini, the ratlines, and the Vatican throughout the book. Montini became Pope after the 1963 death of the very liberal Pope John XXIII, about whom the movie The Shoes of the Fisherman was made.

9. Aarons and Loftus, p. 237.

10. Angleton, 10/5/78 HSCA deposition, p. 92.

11. Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential (New York: Pocket Books ed., 1994), p. 280

12. Summers, pp. 280-281

13. Lisa Pease, "Novel & Company: Phillips, Banister, Arcacha and Ferrie," Probe Vol. 4 No. 6 Sept-Oct 1997, p. 32.

14. Summers, p. 281

15. Copeland, p. 44.

16. Copeland, p. 41.

17. David Wise, Molehunt (New York: Avon Books ed., 1992), p. 31

18. Wise, p. 32.

19. Wise, p. 32.

20. Mangold, p. 51

21. Mangold, p. 52

22. Mangold, p. 52

23. Wise, p. 121.

24. The Doolittle report contained this famous instruction: "If the United States is to survive, long-standing American concepts of ëfiar play' must be reconsidered," and "We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated and more effective methods than those used against us." Quoted in David Martin, Wilderness of Mirrors (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), p. 62.

25. Angleton 9/17/75 Church Committee Deposition (hereafter Angleton 9/17/75 Deposition), p. 16.

26. Angleton 9/17/75 Deposition, p. 17.

27. Angleton HSCA Deposition, p. 146.

28. Angleton HSCA Deposition, p. 146.

29. HSCA Deposition of Raymond G. Rocca (hereafter Rocca HSCA Deposition), p. 206

30. Rocca HSCA Deposition, p. 207.

31. Rocca HSCA Deposition, p. 218

32. HSCA Deposition of Ann Elizabeth Goldsborough Egerter (hereafter Egerter HSCA Deposition), p. 8.

33. Egerter HSCA Deposition, p. 9.

34. Egerter HSCA Deposition, pp. 9-10.

35. Egerter HSCA Deposition, p. 10.

36. Egerter HSCA Deposition, p. 25.

37. Egerter HSCA Deposition, pp. 22-24.

38. Egerter HSCA Deposition, pp. 43-44.

39. Angleton 2/6/75 Church Committee Deposition (hereafter Angleton 2/6/75 Deposition), p. 21. Schweiker says, "We had a CIA employee who testified to us that he saw a contact report on Oswald over at Langley."

40. Angleton 2/6/75 Deposition, pp. 20-26

41. The Eldon Henson story is documented in John Newman's Oswald and the CIA (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1995). But a near identical episode is also described by David Atlee Phillips in his memoir, The Nightwatch (New York: Ballantine Books, 1977). Compare Phillips' account, pp. 162-164 (paperback version), with Newman's account, pp. 362-362. Then look at the document of this episode, published on page 507 of Newman's book. Note that "[redacted] witnessed meeting from nearby table." In his account, Phillips describes watching the trap his agent was setting for Hensen from a nearby table in a restaurant. According to the document, Hensen was speaking with Maria Luisa Calderon, a woman who appeared to perhaps have some foreknowledge of the assassination. (See Rocca HSCA Deposition, pp. 163-164.) Curiouser and curiouser.

42. Newman, p. 32.

43. Rocca HSCA deposition, p. 230.

44. Angleton 9/17/75 Deposition, p. 30.

45. Angleton 9/17/75 Deposition, p. 33.

46. Reproductions of these cards can be seen in Newman, p. 479.

47. Rocca HSCA deposition, pp. 226-227.

48. Newman, pp. 221-222.

49. Angleton 9/17/75 Deposition, p. 38 and p. 62. The project chief was John Mertz, and evidently Birch O'Neal was involved as well, (pp. 62, 64) but in Angleton's words, "Mr. Miler ... had the day to day work" and described Miler as the principal person to talk to about it. p. 120.

50. Martin, p. 140.

51. Egerter HSCA Deposition, p. 15

52. Egerter HSCA Deposition, p. 30.

53. Egerter HSCA Deposition, pp. 31-38.

54. Rocca HSCA Deposition, p. 210.

55. Rocca HSCA Depostion, p. 212.

56. Philip Agee, Inside the Company: CIA Diary (New York: Bantam Books, 1989 ed.), p. 49.

57. Letter from Sullivan to Belmont, dated May 13, 1964.

58. Angleton 2/6/75 Deposition, pp. 34-38

59. Joseph B. Smith, Portrait of a Cold Warrior (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1976), p. 397.

60. Smith, p. 397.

61. Harvey's notes were uncovered by the Church Committee. Quotes here come from Martin, pp. 121-123.

62. Wise, p. 121.

63. Wise, p. 176.

64. Powers, p. 107.

65. Agee, p. 358.

66. Bill Davy, Let Justice Be Done (Reston: Jordan Publishing, 1999), pp. 88-89 and Davy, "File Update", Probe, Jan-Feb 2000, pp. 4-5.

67. Davy, Let Justice Be Done, p. 88.

68. For an example, read about the Loginov episode in Cold Warrior, Chapter 1.

69. Wise, p. 69.

70. HSCA Deposition of Scelso (John Whitten), p. 71.

71. "Hunt says C.I.A. Had Assassin Unit," New York Times 12/26/75, page 9, column 1.

72. Mark Lane, Plausible Denial (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1991), p. 164.

73. Martin, p. 34.

74. Martin, p. 144.

75. Angleton Deposition to the Church Committee, 6/19/75 (hereafter Angleton 6/19/76 Deposition), p. 87.

76. Peter Wright, Spycatcher (New York: Dell, 1987), pp. 201-205.

77. Angleton 6/19/75 Deposition, p. 84.

78. Scelso/Whitten Deposition, p. 168-169.

79. Rocca HSCA Deposition, pp. 8-9.

80. Rocca HSCA Deposition, p. 9.

81. RIF 104-10086-10003, date not readable, cable apparently from JMWAVE to the Mexico City Station.

82. Cable 57610, from DIRECTOR to Mexico [ ] JMWAVE, dated 12 Nov 65. See p. 29 this issue.

83. Agee, p. 319.

84. Cable 58683, from DIRECTOR to MEXI, dated 16 Nov 65. See p. 29 this issue.

Last modified on Sunday, 16 October 2016 19:11
Lisa Pease

Lisa Pease was co-editor with Jim DiEugenio of Probe Magazine and also edited with him The Assassinations.  She has written a number of ground-breaking essays on the connections between Freeport Sulphur, the Eastern Establishment and the CIA, on James Angleton, and on Sirhan and the RFK assassination.  Lisa is currently finishing her book on the latter subject, the product of more than two decades of research.  She also runs a blogspot on recent history and current events.

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