The CIA Man Who Read Oswald's Mail
New York Times reports on a newly declassified memo that sheds light on a secret operation involving JFK's putative killer
A recently declassified CIA memo identifies for the first time a clandestine operative who read the mail of accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald for 20 months before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.
His name, reports the New York Times, was Reuben Efron, a career employee who staffed the Agency’s illicit “mail intercept” program in the early 1960s. His photo is published here for the first time.
The June 1962 memo, not fully declassified until May 2023, sheds new light on secret CIA operational activities around Oswald, the 24-year-old ex-Marine who denied killing Kennedy and was then killed while in police custody.
In the memo, written 17 months before Kennedy’s assassination, Efron cited a Texas newspaper story about Oswald's return from the Soviet Union. He mentioned that he had read correspondence from Oswald's mother asking him to write more often. He then called the information to the attention of a colleague, Elizabeth Ann Egerter. She was an ana…
