[This article first appeared in JFK Facts in April 2018]
The most important revelations in the new JFK files concern the CIA (and possibly NSA) surveillance of accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. A Senate investigator's memo, written in 1975 and released in December 2017, gives the exact date that the surveillance of Oswald began: November 11, 1959.
This is one of the most important JFK records released in the Trump era, so its details are worth understanding.
Watching Oswald
The mail surveillance of Lee Harvey Oswald was ordered by counterintelligence chief James Angleton in November 1959, not long after the Washington Post reported the news that a 20-year-old Marine had defected to Moscow.
A creative and original thinker, Angleton brought the skills of a literary critic to espionage. His ability to tease profound meaning from ambiguous texts made him one of the most powerful (and feared) men in the CIA. With responsibility for disrupting KGB operations in America, Angleton naturally had a deep interest in U.S. servicemen who defected to the Soviet Union. Oswald was one of them.
The 1975 memo list dozens of Americans whose names appeared on Angleton's "watch list” of persons whose overseas mail was to be intercepted, copied, and filed by the CIA. (Note that this document is not dated with the American-style month/day/year format but with the European-style day/month/year format.)
A senior CIA employee, Betty Egerter, kept track of the names on the list. She was a supervisor in an office called Special Investigations Group. Angleton deployed CI/SIG, as it was known, in his obsessive (but unsuccessful) search for a KGB mole in the ranks of the CIA. When asked why she was interested in Oswald, Egerter told JFK investigators the CI/SIG was “the office that spied on spies.”
Egerter kept track of Oswald by adding key data points to an index card in the file she maintained.
Oswald's name was removed from the LINGUAL watch list on May 28, 1962. That's when Angleton's staff learned from the State Department that the former Marine had returned to the United States with his Russian wife, Marina.
Surveillance Continues
Angleton did not lose track of Oswald after his return, according to declassified records. On June 22, 1962, the deputy director of the mail surveillance program sent a copy of a letter from Oswald’s mother to Angleton’s top deputy.
"This item will be of interest to Mrs. Egerter, CI/SIG," the memo states.
FBI agent John Fain interviewed Oswald in Fort Worth, Texas June 1962, and again in August 1962. Fain sent his latest report to Washington where director J. Edgar Hoover forwarded it to Angleton. A declassified CIA routing slip shows the agency delivered Fain’s report to the Special Investigations Group where Egerter signed for it on September 25, 1962.
The routing slip shows that Fain’s report was also forwarded to the Counterintelligence Operations office, known as CI/OPS. That is strong evidence that the returning ex-Marine defector was being used for operational purposes. Why would CI/OPs be notified about Oswald if he was not involved in counterintelligence operational activity?