Lee Harvey Oswald Under CIA Eyes
Six weeks before Dallas, the man who would be accused of killing JFK came to the attention of six top operations officers in the Langley headquarters.
On October 8, 1963, a man named Lee Harvey Oswald came to the attention of a group of senior CIA officers in Langley, Virginia. He had recently visited the Cuban consulate and Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. A CIA wiretap captured a man identifying himself as "Oswald."
The Mexico CIty station queried headquarters in Langley Virginnia. Did they have any information on Oswald? A group of senior officers conferred and drafted a response, which was sent to Mexico City two days later.
The CIA officers who learned about Oswald six weeks before President John F. Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas, are identified on a cable declassified in 2001. The authenticity of the cable is not disputed.
They were: assistant deputy director (ADDP) Tom Karamessines; Soviet Russia division counterintelligence officer Stephan Roll; liaison officer Jane Roman, Special Projects Group (SPG) officer Ann Egerter; chief of the WH/3 desk (Mexico)"John Scelso,” whose real name was John Whitten; and the chief of operations for Western Hemisphere, William J. Hood.
Why were top officers so interested in Oswald, an obscure character soon to be world famous and often described as a “lone nut.”
The men and women of Langley were responding to the query of Win Scott, the chief of the CIA station in Mexico City. They were some of the most trusted officers in the clandestine service. The people pondering what to say about the apparently harmless Oswald were not clerks, bureaucrats, or paper pushers. They were, for the most part, operations officers. That is to say, their primary responsibility was running covert operations.
One possible explanation for their interest in Oswald is that Oswald was part of a covert operation that has never been disclosed by the CIA.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to JFK Facts to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.