She Signed for Detailed Report on Oswald Eight Days Before Kennedy Was Killed

Jane Roman, counterintelligence officer, learned the itinerant ex-Marine had recently moved to Texas.

Here’s the key document driving the headline of today’s story, “Angleton Received FBI Report on Oswald a Week Before JFK's Assassination.”

Jane Roman was one of the most senior women working in the CIA in the 1950s and 1960s when females were mostly excluded from positions of power in the clandestine Service. As liaison officer for counterintelligence chief James Angleton, Roman handled all of his communications with other U.S. government agencies. Given the secrecy of counterintelligence work, it was a position of high trust, which she held for more than a decade. A graduate of Vassar College, Jane Atherton Roman was married to Howard Roman, also a CIA officer and ghostwriter for director Allen Dulles.