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.

On October 10, 1963, a man named Lee Harvey Oswald came to the attention of a group of senior CIA officers in Langley, Virginia. Oswald had recently visited the Cuban consulate and Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. A CIA wiretap captured a man identifying himself as "Oswald."

The CIA officers conferred about Oswald and his actions and signed off on a cable about him. They are identified on a CIA cable declassified in 2001 whose authenticity 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" aka John Whitten; and chief of operations for Western Hemisphere, William J. Hood.

Why were top officers so interested in Oswald, this obscure character who would later be described as a “long nut.”

The men and women of Langley were responding to the October 8 query from Win Scott, the chief of the CIA station in Mexico City, asking for any information an American named Lee Oswald whose visits to the Cuban and Soviet diplomatic officers had been picked up by his surveillance team

The question about the lowly Oswald was referred to some of the most senior officers in the clandestine service, the Counterintelligence Staff and in the Western Hemisphere directorate. 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 he was part of a covert operation that has never been disclosed by the CIA.