Before JFK's Death the CIA Compiled a 181-Page Dossier on Lee Harvey Oswald
AI-assisted analysts have identified at least 35 CIA officials who handled intelligence reports on the accused assassin while President Kennedy was alive
As part of his closing case to voters In the 2024 presidential campaign, candidate Donald Trump promised to release the last of the secret JFK assassination files, telling Joe Rogan (on a show viewed 51 million times), “I’m going to do it immediately, almost immediately, upon entering office.”
With leaders of the U.S. intelligence community now ferociously criticizing Trump’s nominees for top intelligence posts, the president-elect is “set for clash with CIA over JFK secret files.”
The disposition of the JFK files, now set by President Joe Biden’s June 2023 memo, will be determined by Trump, who could rescind and replace Biden’s order when he takes office in January. Trump aides recently told the New York Times, the president-elect plans “a series of executive orders on Day 1.”
Two years ago, Trump raised expectations that the files would yield sensational revelations about President John F. Kennedy’s murder in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. “If they showed you what they showed me,” Trump told Andrew Napolitano, “you wouldn’t have released it either.” Likewise, Tucker Carlson claimed in December 2022 that a high-level source with access to the files told him the unseen material implicated the CIA.
But Trump downplayed such claims on Rogan’s podcast, saying, “I can’t tell you whether or not they’re going to find anything of interest.”
According to the National Archives, there are 3,648 assassination-related records in the government’s possession that still contain redactions, that is to say, blanked out passages.
What Are They Hiding?
The redactions demanded by the CIA (and granted by both Trump and Biden) range from the trivial to the ominous.
The identity of two spies in Miami news media
The name of Mr. [Redacted], a CIA official briefed about a reputed KGB assassin with whom Oswald had contact.
Selected details of an impressively stupid CIA scheme to produce a porno film to discredit a foreign leader who Washington deemed disobedient.
Seventy-plus pages about wiretapping operations in Mexico 1961-63, some of which involved the Agency’s Technical Services Division, responsible for gadgets, disguises, forgeries, secret writings, and weapons.
An entire page about why JFK wanted to “reorganize” the CIA after the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961
While both Trump and Biden drew criticism for acquiescing to such CIA demands for continuing JFK secrecy (in 2017 and 2022 respectively), the two presidents also oversaw the release of thousands of pages of previously unseen records.
One positive result was the full declassification in April 2023 of a key JFK document: the CIA’s pre-assassination file on Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin who denied killing the president and who was killed in police custody before he could defend himself.
Oswald File Finally Declassified
In my fallible opinion, the last secret disgorged from the CIA’s file on Oswald file was one of the most significant JFK developments in recent years. It was the name of the CIA operations officer who intercepted and read Oswald’s mail while JFK was living in the White House.
Not until April 2023 did the CIA fully declassify a June 1962 memo bearing the name of Reuben Efron, a multilingual operations officer who monitored Oswald’s private correspondence on behalf of counterintelligence chief James Angleton, one of the most powerful men in the CIA.
Even the New York Times took note of this revelation, so the news is worth repeating: A spy reporting to top men at the CIA was reading the mail of Kennedy’s reputed killer in the summer of 1962.
The more I pondered this pregnant factoid the more I felt it deserved analysis beyond my capabilities. So last summer, I decided to offer an online course on the Oswald File and to summon the proverbial wisdom of crowds. I enlisted the 60+ students who signed up in a crowd-sourcing project: to extract new data, new information, new insights from the Oswald file, and to deploy AI in the effort.
We didn’t seek to confirm (or refute) any conspiracy theory (or anti-conspiracy theory). We’re not conspiracy (or anti-conspiracy) theorists, so why bother? Instead, we applied the basic questions of investigative journalism to the Oswald file:
What did the CIA know about the assassin/patsy? And when did they know it? Which offices? Which people? And why?
What we found underscores the need for full JFK disclosure in 2025.
What We Found
The pre-assassination Oswald dossier shows that the CIA’s surveillance of this dyslexic, leftist high school dropout between 1959 and 1963 was far more extensive than the Agency has ever disclosed to Congress, law enforcement, the public, or its 3.4 million followers on Twitter/X.
In sworn testimony to the Warren Commission in May 1964, CIA director John McCone sounded categorical about the agency’s lack of interest in — and knowledge of — Oswald before JFK’s assassination.
McCone declared:
The Agency never contacted him, interviewed him, talked with him, or received or solicited any reports or information from him, or communicated with him directly, or in any other manner. The Agency never furnished him with any funds or money or compensated him directly or indirectly in any fashion and Lee Harvey Oswald was never associated or connected directly or indirectly in any way whatsoever with the Agency.
With the benefit of hindsight and declassified records, the participants in the Oswald File course agreed, virtually unanimously, that McCone’s testimony was false and deceptive. Our research shows that Oswald was, at the very least, indirectly associated with the Agency via his so-called 201 file, which, on Nov. 21, 1963, contained 181 pages of material from five federal agencies.
When JFK left for his last political trip to Texas, top CIA officers knew Oswald’s height, weight, and the color of his eyes. They knew where he went to high school. They knew about his Marines Corps service and his security clearance. They knew his address when he lived in the Soviet Union. They knew he wanted to read George Orwell’s novel 1984. They knew his address when he moved to Fort Worth, Texas. They knew he moved to New Orleans. They knew he had been arrested there. They knew he went to Mexico City and contacted a KGB agent. They knew he had returned to the Dallas area in October 1963.
We examined the markings, time stamps, and routing slips on these documents to determine which CIA employees and components received material on Oswald. We deployed ChatGPT to clarify the internal organization of the Agency at the time, and help verify abbreviations and key data points.
While the Oswald file does not contain evidence the CIA solicited reports or information from the man often described as a “lone nut,” it does confirm that Agency officials avidly consumed information about him.
At least 35 CIA officials handled reports on Oswald between 1959 and 1963, including a half dozen officers who reported personally to deputy director Richard Helms or counterintelligence chief Angleton.
A supersecret mole-hunting unit, known as the Special Investigations Group (CI/SIG, also known as CI/SPG), received 17 reports on Oswald in four years —including five FBI dispatches in the three months before JFK was killed.
All told, six different code-named CIA operations collected intelligence on Oswald while JFK was alive. The existence of these operations was known only to a handful of senior officials in 1963.
The 35 officials who reviewed Oswald’s file while JFK was alive included high-ranking decision-makers such as: Thomas Karamessines, the assistant deputy director of plans, a euphemism for operations (ADDP); William J. Hood, chief of operations in the Western Hemisphere; Jane Roman, senior liaison officer for the Counterintelligence (CI) Staff; Birch O’Neal, chief of the CI/SIG; William Bright, chief of counterintelligence in the Soviet Russia division; Winston Scott, chief of the Mexico City station; and Anne Goodpasture, his top deputy.
None of them described Oswald as a “lone nut,” a “psychopath,” a “fanatic",” a “loser” or “a person of no interest.” Nor did they ever say or act as if Oswald posed a security risk.
[Note to PolitiFact, Factcheck.org, and other news organizations that check controversial claims. If you have any questions about the facts in this article, the complete unredacted Oswald file is available upon request.]
Six Covert Ops
I taught the Oswald File course, but I became a student too. I began my first lecture with the confident assertion that five CIA code-named operations had collected intelligence on Oswald between 1959 and 1963. They were:
·HTLINGUAL, a foreign mail surveillance program, illegally opened Oswald’s correspondence between November 1959 and May 1962.
AMSANTA, an anti-communist penetration operation, illegally photographed Oswald’s requests for literature from the left-wing Fair Play for Cuba Committee in April 1963.
In August 1963, AMSPELL, a propaganda and political action program, funded Oswald’s anti-Castro antagonists in New Orleans.
LIENVOY, an electronic wiretap, captured Oswald’s phone call to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City in October 1963.
LIEMPTY, a photo surveillance operation, took his picture at the same time.
It turns out, I was under-informed. Class participants called another example to my attention: a cable from Mexico City station to CIA headquarters in mid-October 1963 that bore the slugline LCIMPROVE.
That code name meant the contents of the cable — a one line request for a photo of Oswald —were related to “counterespionage involving Soviet intelligence services, worldwide.”
This sixth code name is strong evidence that top CIA officials monitored Oswald in late 1963, the better to advance an anti-Soviet covert operation in the weeks before Kennedy was killed. The purposes of that operation (if there was one) have never been disclosed.
Here’s a visual representation of the course’s collective findings. This graph charts the CIA’s steadily rising interest in Oswald between Nov. 1, 1959, and Nov. 14, 1963. High-level CIA interest in the supposedly unknown Oswald spiked in the six weeks before JFK is gunned down in Dallas.
How CIA Interest in Lee Harvey Oswald Grew from November 1, 1959, to November 15, 1963
Summing Up
One analyst in the class, Craig Iffland, spoke for many of us when he said, “the intensity of the Agency's monitoring and analysis of Oswald is astounding.”
“Prior to this class,” Iffland told me in an email, “I would not have been able to tell someone that, in May 1960, the CIA's Soviet Russian division composed a two-page biography on Lee Harvey Oswald. I would not have been able to tell someone that, by December 1960, three offices within the Agency would have their own files on Oswald. … Anyone who thinks Oswald ‘came out of nowhere’ has no knowledge of what the government knew about him — in particular, the FBI and CIA.”
I asked the CIA Public Affairs Office for comment attributable to a named person: Was McCone’s testimony to the Warren Commission complete and accurate?
I received this statement, attributable only to a CIA spokesperson.
“Consistent with the JFK Act, CIA has been committed to transparency with respect to Government records concerning President Kennedy’s assassination.”
Negligence or Nefarious?
Some will argue that the unredacted Oswald file shows nothing more nefarious than CIA dysfunction. Top agency officials (it will be said) focused on Oswald’s Russian past, never suspecting his cunning but crazy plan to shoot his way into Marxist history by killing Kennedy and proclaiming himself a “patsy.”
(It’s a rather puzzling proposition. If Oswald wanted historical glory, why would he deny responsibility? And, if he called himself a “patsy,” how was he seeking glory for his deed? But let us not quibble.)
In this familiar framing, the CIA has practiced secrecy for the past 61 years to conceal, not complicity, but incompetence in the face of Oswald’s madness. Our intelligence service is not hiding incriminating JFK evidence (the argument goes). It’s hiding exculpatory (or irrelevant) evidence, which, by the way, you, the average citizen, must not be allowed to see even six decades later — for reasons of “national security.”
(This self-serving, circular proposition deserves the closest scrutiny, which is why I’m offering my online course on the Oswald File again in January 2025. )
In any case, whether the CIA was complicit or incompetent in November 1963, full disclosure would seem to be in order in January 2025. President-elect Trump’s pledge to release all the JFK files next year is commonsensical, compliant with law, and long overdue.
(The research for this article was contributed by the participants in the Oswald File course. Margot Williams and Craig Iffland collated and cleaned the data. John Reid created the graphic, incorporated AI, and devised a dashboard that will enable further research into the CIA’s pre-assassination Oswald file.)
Okay, we’ll go with the benign, not sinister, proposition—the CIA is covering up their dysfunction and incompetence. Why in Hell do we spend billions upon billions on “black” projects like the CIA and NSA then? They weren’t sharp enough to pick up the collapse of Vietnam, USSR. They were closely watching LHO and had no idea he was an assassin. Take their money away.
There’s no reason to cover up incompetence for 60 years — that one should be taken off the table.
It’s important to note that neither the Report of the Warren Commission nor the Report of the HSCA addressed the question of whether Oswald may have been set up as a fall guy — even though the only two irrefutable facts in the case, being 1) that JFK was shot dead and 2) that the man accused of this crime was himself two days later also shot dead, argue overwhelmingly to take the case in that direction.
We seek full disclosure not to expose Agency “incompetence” nor to expose evidence of a “second gunman” nor to expose evidence that Oswald may have “had accomplices” but rather to expose evidence that Oswald may have been framed (perhaps by the Agency) to wrongly take the blame for the assassination.