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.