From the New JFK Files: How a Top CIA Officer Lied About the Surveillance of Oswald
A top-secret transcript, declassified last week, shows spymaster James Angleton duped congressional investigators in 1978
The latest of the JFK assassination files yielded newly declassified documents about CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton, a legendary and controversial figure in the history of America’s clandestine service.
These long-secret records, along with others released with less fanfare since 2022, complicate the comforting narrative that the liberal president was killed by a “lone nut” who murdered for reasons known only to himself.
The new files reveal that Lee Harvey Oswald, far from being an isolated sociopath, was a figure of abiding covert interest to Angleton, one of the top men in the CIA in the heyday of the Cold War.
“Angleton’s actions over many years were deeply deceptive," Professor Larry J. Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia and author of "The Kennedy Half Century,” told me in an email. "It’s clear he placed protecting the CIA over telling the truth about the CIA’s actual knowledge of, or relationship with, Oswald.”
Three revelations in the new files of special interest to historians of JFK’s murder.
1) Angleton Considered Recruiting Oswald
The latest addition to the JFK assassination narrative begins in January 1958. That’s when the FBI “flushed out a most secret operation” of the CIA. It was a massive mail intercept program run out of a New York post office facility. As the Washington Post reported last weekend, Angleton admitted it was one of the Agency’s “biggest and most secret operations,” costing $1 million (about $11 million in today’s dollars) and involving several hundred people.
In the morally neutral language of the agency, this illicit spying was known as “mail coverage.” The program was code-named HTLINGUAL, and it was run by an office in Angleton’s domain called CI/Project. The director of the mail coverage program, the CIA did not disclose until 2023, was a multilingual operations officer named Reuben Efron. More on him in a minute.
Five newly declassified FBI memos from 1953, 1954, 1958, 1965 and 1967 yield a wealth of new detail about Angleton’s domestic spying operation. They show how he fed the results of his illegal program to J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI for more than 15 years. These memos are the origin story of the notorious COINTELPRO operation that targeted anti-war and civil rights organizations for disruption and destruction throughout the 1960s. (I will report more on Angleton, Hoover, and the birth of COINTELPRO in a future post.)
One of the memos has a telling detail relevant to the JFK story.
Eager to gain the FBI’s support for his off-the-books spying, Angleton explained in a January 1958 memo that he wasn’t spying on Americans. The “sole purpose” of reading people’s mail, he said, was to “identify persons behind the Iron Curtain who might have some ties in the U.S. and who could be approached in their countries as contacts and sources for CIA.”
Here’s an excerpt of what was hidden for 66 years:
This revelation matters because 22 months later, in November 1959, Angleton ordered up “mail coverage” on an utterly ordinary young soldier named Lee Harvey Oswald. Angleton, the premier counterintelligence officer in the Anglo-American intelligence alliance, was interested in a man often described as a pathetic and sociopathic loser.
The CIA’s complete pre-assassination Oswald file (not full declassified until 2023) shows how it happened.
On Nov. 2, 1959, Angleton’s liaison officer Jane Roman received a State Department cable reporting that an ex-Marine was seeking to move to the Soviet Union. A week later, Angleton put Oswald’s name on the list for “mail coverage,” meaning any letter he sent or received while in the Soviet Union would be copied, read, and filed.
From November 1959 to May 1960, Angleton’s man read the personal communications of the man who many still believe killed Kennedy alone and unaided. “Mail coverage” of the future accused assassin stopped in May 1960, perhaps indicating Angleton had lost interest.
But no, the mail surveillance resumed in July 1961. Efron continued to read Oswald’s personal correspondence until Oswald and his Russian wife Marina returned to the U.S. in May 1962.
(Here’s a sampling of people whose mail Angleton read and when he read it.)
To be sure, developing sources and contacts was not the “sole” purpose of the mail coverage, as Angleton had assured the FBI. Angleton also was spying on the mail of prominent people known for liberal or leftist politics. But Oswald, a Marine Corps washout, clearly didn’t fit in that category. So why read his mail?
We now have a plausible explanation from Angleton himself: Oswald fit the criteria for “mail coverage.” He was settling in the Soviet Union and thus was behind the Iron Curtain. He had ties in the U.S., in the form of his mother in Texas. By putting his name on the HTLINGUAL list, at least one of Angleton’s purposes was to identify him as a possible source or contact.
To be sure, there is nothing in the new files to indicate that Oswald was ever recruited by the CIA after Angleton started reading his mail. To be equally sure, there is no indication in the file that Angleton or his staff ever thought Oswald was unworthy of their continuing attention.
In fact, the new JFK files show that Angleton’s people proceeded to monitor Oswald for the next four years. Top CIA counterintelligence officers, we now know, had Oswald’s home address on file almost every step of the way as he moved from Moscow to Minsk to Fort Worth to Dallas to New Orleans to Mexico City and back to Dallas.
Any narrative of a so-called “lone gunman” seems incomplete without the unsettling fact that the men and women of the CIA monitored his movements for four years.
2) Angleton Built an Israeli Intelligence Network
The second important newly released JFK document is the transcript of Angleton’s closed-door testimony to Senate investigators in June 1975. It lays bare how he built his intelligence empire by incorporating Israeli agents into his collection network.
Angleton testified at a tumultuous time in Washington. He had been fired in December 1974 after the New York Times exposed another CIA domestic spying program targeting the anti-war movement. TV talk show host Geraldo Rivera had just broadcast on national TV for the first time Abraham Zapruder’s home movie of Kennedy’s assassination. The 26 seconds of film showed JFK blasted backward by the fatal gunshot, triggering widespread indignation and disbelief that Kennedy had only been hit by gunfire from behind.
As the senators convened in executive session, Sen. Howard Baker told Angleton he wanted to talk about “the Oswald situation.” But Angleton wanted to justify himself andlaunched into a candid account of his extraordinary career, much of which was classified for a half century.
(Until March 18, 39 pages of the 113-page transcript contained redactions. Thanks to President Trump’s executive order, those all have been removed.)
What was revealed last week was how closely Angleton collaborated with the Israeli intelligence services during the time he was monitoring Oswald. In the first 18 pages of testimony, redactions were removed from 10 pages, almost of them concerning Israel or Angleton’s liaison relationship with Israeli intelligence services.
"Angleton was an extraordinary asset for us," Meir Amit, Mossad chief in the 1960s, said later. Among American officials, Amit said in his memoir, he was "the biggest Zionist of the lot."
When the senators asked if the CIA had assisted Israel in obtaining nuclear weapons, Angleton said to his knowledge, there was no interest in the CIA in obtaining fissionable material. When pressed about Israel’s efforts to obtain nuclear technology, he obfuscated. When his interrogators returned to the point, he asked to go off the record.
[More on JFK files and Israeli nukes: JFK Facts will soon publish another story, by reporters Peter Voskamp and Chad Nagle, drawn from the new JFK files about JFK, the CIA ,and the Israeli nuclear program. Stay tuned]
To the senators, Angleton explained the benefit of cooperating with the Israelis. Tapping Jewish emigrants from the Soviet Union as a source of intelligence enabled him to get a copy of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s “secret speech” in 1956 repudiating the legacy of Joseph Stalin, which was considered an intelligence coup of the highest order.
Angleton described a “fiduciary relationship” with the Israelis, meaning he felt legally and ethically bound to act in the best interests of his client, the Jewish state. Exploiting intelligence from Jewish emigrants was “probably the most economical operation that has ever been devised in the U.S. government,” he said. (From June 1975 to March 2025, the words “Tel Aviv” were censored from public view.)
In short, Angleton used the Jewish emigres not only for intelligence but to plug them into his collection network. Reuben Efron, the CIA man who read Oswald’s mail from 1959-62, fits the profile of Angleton’s agents, a Jewish emigre from the Soviet Union whom Angleton recruited “outside the structure” of the Agency.
Did Angleton use a foreign agent to monitor the future accused assassin? A month ago I would have said the possibility was far-fetched. Now it cannot be dismissed.
The Case of Reuben Efron
Born in Lithuania, Efron worked as a lawyer in the capital Vilnius until emigrating to Cuba in 1939, according to Israeli Times. His mother, who remained in Lithuania, was murdered in the Holocaust. Efron joined the U.S. Air Force in 1943 as an interpreter and rose to become a lieutenant colonel. Fluent in six languages (English, German, Hebrew, Lithuanian, Russian, and Yiddish), he took part in postwar refugee resettlement negotiations in Europe. By 1954, he was an operations officer in the Soviet Russia division of the CIA.
In 1956 he served as a translator for Sen. Richard Russell, chairman of the Senate Committed on Armed Services, during a visit to the Soviet Union. On a train ride home Russell and Efron reported seeing an unidentified flying object in the skies of southern Russia (an account that still interests scholars of unidentified aerial phenomena).
He then joined Angleton’s Counterintelligence staff as deputy director of CI/Project. By then HTLINGUAL was intercepting and copying up to 10,000 letters a year. By the time HTLINGUAL was shut down in 1973, Angleton’s shop had illegally opened more than 215,820 pieces of mail.
Efron’s role in the JFK story only came to light in 2023 when the New York Times reported on this newly discovered document.
In June 1962 Efron read in the Washington Post that the disillusioned Oswald had returned to the U.S. with his wife Marina. He checked the HTLINGUAL files and found a letter he had intercepted from Oswald’s mother the year before. (Oswald, ironically enough, had asked his mother to send him a copy of George Orwell’s novel “1984,” about a dystopian surveillance state of the near future.)
Efron then shared Mrs. Oswald’s letter with Angleton’s deputy, as well as Betty Egerter, the supervisor who controlled access to the Oswald file.
There any no evidence that Efron or any Israeli agent was part of any alleged JFK assassination conspiracy (notwithstanding the “Mossad done it” meme proliferating on social media.) Nor is there is evidence that Efron read Oswald’s mail after June 1962.
After Lee Oswald was dead, Reuben Efron kep track of his widow Marina Oswald. In February 1964, Efron attended the Warren Commission hearing where Marina Oswald had to face the world. Efron’s name appears in Volume 1 of the Commission’s proceedings. He was not identified as a CIA operations officer.
Upon retirement in the 1970s, Efron moved to Israel, where he became a scholar of “spies in Jewish tradition” according to the Times of Israel. Relatives interviewed by the Jewish Telegraph Agency say they knew he had been working for the CIA in Washington. A family history said he worked for the Pentagon. Later in life, he returned to the U.S. and settled in Miami until his death.
3) Angleton Lied Under Oath About Oswald
The combination of the revelations in the 1958 FBI memo and Angleton’s 1975 Senate testimony become explosive with the release of a third long-secret document: Angleton’s testimony to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) on Oct. 5, 1978.
Three years after his 1975 appearance before the Church Committee, Angleton was a visibly diminished man. His fall from power and his fondness for five martini lunches and Virginia Slims cigarettes had taken a toll. But he could still muster the imperious style that powered him through many a bureaucratic conflict in the clandestine service.
After nearly six hours of interrogation, Michael Goldsmith, counsel for the HSCA, asked a series of questions to get Angleton’s responses for the record.
The declassified transcript reveals what was previously hidden: Angleton lied when he said Oswald was never the subject of a CIA project.
The fact pattern is definitive. Angleton created the “mail coverage” program. He had run it since 1953. He hired Efron for the job of deputy director of the operation. He ordered mail surveillance of Oswald in November 1959. And in June 1962, Efron reported on Oswald’s latest correspondence.
So Angleton had to know that Oswald was the subject of a CIA project, known internally as "CI/Project,” a program that he himself created and ran. The combination of the newly declassified documents leads to the conclusion that Angleton lied under oath about his interest in Oswald.
“What did he understand the word "project" to mean?” asked Mark Zaid, a national security attorney and Trump administration critic. “If that interpretation is not the same as someone who is interpreting it now, the answer and significance of his response is completely different.”
Three CIA Prevaricators
Angleton is the third CIA officer known to have deceived assassination investigators about their knowledge of Oswald while JFK was alive.
In May 1964, CIA deputy director Helms testified behind closed doors to his good friend and former boss Allen Dulles, a member of the Warren Commission. CIA Director John McCone was also part of the conversation. Dulles asked a leading question designed to lay blame on the State Department — not the CIA — for the failure to intercept Oswald.
Dulles: Looking back now that you have the full record do you feel that you received from the State Department adequate information at the time that they were aware of Oswald’s defection and later activities in the Soviet Union did you get at the time full information on those particular subjects?
McCone: Well, I am not sure we got full information Mr. Dulles. The fact is, we had very little information in our files.
Helms: It was probably minimal.
Dulles' leading question spared McCone and Helms from disclosing to the Warren Commission (or the American people) that, in fact, the FBI had sent 12 reports on Oswald to the CIA between 1960 and 1963, two of which landed on Angleton’s desk in mid-November 1963.
As JFK prepared to go to Dallas, one top man in the CIA knew that Oswald had 1) been arrested for fighting with CIA-connected Cubans in New Orleans; 2) beat his wife; 3) attempted to travel to Cuba (a violation of U.S. law); and 4) made contact with a known KGB agent. When the President and First Lady landed at Love Field on Nov. 22, Angleton had a 180-plus page dossier on the man who was about to be arrested for gunning down JFK.
We now know the Warren Commission was deceived. The CIA’s information about Oswald was not “minimal.” It was more like maximal.
“The identification of the discrepancy is not the end of the analysis,” said Zaid. “Why it occurred has to be examined and considered. When Allen Dulles, the former CIA director, withheld information from the Warren Commission members and staff that CIA had planned attempted assassinations of Cuban President Fidel Castro, was it because he didn't want those operations to be revealed generally or because Oswald or the assassination was somehow connected to it?”
‘Flat Out Breach’
Helms’ deception echoed 15 years later when Congress reopened the JFK investigation. In the spring of 1978, a career undercover officer was called out of retirement to serve as liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). George Joannides was assigned to help investigators get access to CIA records and personnel.
Joannides knew the subject at hand. As chief of covert operations at the Agency’s Miami station in 1963, he ran a Cuban student group (known by the Spanish acronym DRE) that was funded by the CIA under a covert action program code named AMSPELL. His agents in New Orleans and Miami engaged in political action against Oswald’s pro-Castro activism, and generated propaganda about him both before and after Kennedy was killed.
In response to a direct request from HSCA investigator Dan Hardway, Joannides denied knowing who ran the AMSPELL program in 1963 — when, in fact, he himself had run it. When this deception was revealed in 2001, HSCA chief counsel G. Robert Blakey told the PBS series “Frontline” that Joannides had obstructed Congress, a felony.
I was not told of Joannides’ background with the DRE, a focal point of the investigation. Had I known who he was, he would have been a witness who would have been interrogated under oath by the staff or by the committee. He would never have been acceptable as a point of contact with us to retrieve documents. In fact, I have now learned, as I note above, that Joannides was the point of contact between the Agency and DRE during the period Oswald was in contact with DRE.
That the Agency would put a “material witness” in as a “filter” between the committee and its quests for documents was a flat out breach of the understanding the committee had with the Agency that it would cooperate with the investigation.
“There is no doubt,” said Zaid in his email, “former or then current CIA officials clearly misled, and even arguably lied (whether by omission or directly) to official governmental entities investigating the assassination of President Kennedy. That was unacceptable then, and it is unacceptable now. But identification of the discrepancy is not the end of the analysis.”
Reuben Efron is not around to help clarify the enduring mysteries of 1963. He died in Miami on Nov. 22, 1993. The CIA chose not to declassify his Oswald-related duties for another 30 years.
When Allen Dulles withheld from the Warren Commission that CIA had tried to assassinate Castro was it because he didn't want that operation to be revealed generally? Or was it because Oswald or the assassination was somehow connected to the Castro plots? Or… was it because Dulles himself was the architect of the JFK assassination?
I do not believe Oswald was ever in Mexico or attempted to go to to Cuba.