From the New Files: Watergate Burglar's JFK Connections

James McCord watched Soviet defectors and spied on the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

James McCord, the wiretapping expert turned Watergate burglar, had a secret espionage assignment that the CIA never disclosed publicly until late last year. McCord, who died in 2017, was the taciturn security officer who broke open the Watergate scandal in March 1973 by publicly charging the Nixon White House was pressuring the burglars to stay silent.

Long-secret CIA records, some only declassified in December 2022, show that McCord, while on special assignment to Berlin in 1960, reviewed cases of U.S. military personnel who had recently defected to the Soviet Union, including future accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.

The revelation belies media claims that there is nothing historically significant in the JFK files released on order of Presidents Biden and Trump. Like a newly-declassified memo about the CIA’s undisclosed internal investigation of a possible Cuban exile role in JFK’s assassination, the McCord files provide previously unknown details about secret CIA operations that involved Oswald before President Kennedy was killed.