From the JFK Files: FBI and CIA Downgraded Oswald as a Threat Six Weeks Before Dallas

New old FBI files shed light on the long-redacted story of the 'maturing' Oswald

Left: Lee Harvey Oswald Booking Photo (Credit: New Orleans Police Dept.). Right: FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover (Credit: Yoichi Robert Okamoto/LBJ Library)

A newly declassified JFK document, made public last month, shows that CIA spymasterJames Angleton lied to congressional investigators about what he knew of accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald before President John F. Kennedy was killed on November 22, 1963.

The revelation, first aired in a congressional hearing on April 1, begged the question: Why?

Why would Angleton, chief of the Agency’s Counterintelligence Staff, falsely deny to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) any knowledge of his own documented mail surveillance of defector Oswald when he lived in the Soviet Union from November 1959 to June 1962?

One possible answer is found in the 2,400 JFK-related documents discovered in February by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in response to President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14176. Last month JFK Facts reporters Chad Nagle, Margot Williams, and Jefferson Morley gained exclusive access to the 16 boxes of records that will soon be digitized and released on the National Archives website.

While most of the material has been made public in previous declassifications, we discovered two key FBI memos about “investigative deficiencies” in the JFK probe that neither Angleton nor FBI director J. Edgar Hoover cared to explain to the Warren Commission. The story is mostly unknown to the millions of people following the latest developments in the JFK story.

One of the memos, partially declassified in 1978, is still only available online with extensive redactions. Now, for the first time, it can be read in fully declassified form, thanks to our reporting. The memo lays bare who was responsible for the high-level FBI and CIA mishandling of information about accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald just six week before JFK was killed.

The FBI’s newly discovered JFK files, soon to be released by the National Archives, contain the Bureau’s copy of Abraham Zapruder’s home movie of the assassination. (Credit: Jefferson Morley)