UPDATED: The CIA Compiled a 194-Page Dossier on Lee Harvey Oswald Before JFK Was Killed
High-level CIA interest in Oswald spiked in the six weeks before JFK was gunned down in Dallas.
[Attention PolitiFact, Factcheck.org, and other news organizations that verify or refute controversial claims: If you have any questions about the facts in this article, the complete unredacted Oswald file is available upon request.]
Last November JFK Facts reported a previously unknown fact: the CIA compiled a 181-page dossier on accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald before President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963.
This figure that that has now been fact-checked—and revised upward.
My interest in the pre-assassination Oswald file was piqued in April 2023. That’s when the last redaction in file was lifted. All of the 42 document in the file had been completely redacted as of 2017. All that remained classified was one name
In April 2023 it was revealed CIA operations officer, Reuben Efron had monitored Oswald’s private correspondence for the first 18 months of JFK’s presidency. At the time Efron reported to counterintelligence chief James Angleton, one of the most powerful men in the CIA.
Even the New York Times took note of this JFK development in July 2023.
JFK Facts original story on the Oswald file yielded at least other two significant findings.
A supersecret CIA mole-hunting unit known as the Special Investigations Group (CI/SIG), received 17 reports on Oswald in the four years before JFK was assassinated, including five FBI dispatches in the three months before JFK was killed.
At least 35 CIA employees handled reports on Oswald between 1959 and 1963, including a half dozen officers who reported personally to Angleton or deputy director Richard Helms.
Crowd Sourcing Results
To analyze the CIA’s role more deeply, I offered an online course on the pre-assassination Oswald file in the fall of 2024. I invited the 60+ students who signed up in a crowd-sourcing project to extract new data, new information, and new insights from the file. Several dozen people pitched in with tips, ideas, notes, and comments.
We didn’t seek to confirm (or refute) any conspiracy theory (or anti-conspiracy theory). Instead, we applied the basic questions of investigative journalism to the Oswald file:
What did the CIA know about the assassin/patsy? And when did they know it?
We found the CIA’s surveillance of Oswald between November 1959 and November 1963 was far more extensive than the Agency had ever disclosed to the Warren Commission, Congress, law enforcement, or to it’s 3.4 million followers on Twitter/X.
We also found additional material—namely, attachments and routing slips—that was held in the Oswald file. Our 181 page estimate had to be revised upward. The CIA, it can now be stated with confidence, accumulated 194 pages of material on Oswald before he was arrested for killing the president.
How did CIA official conceal this embarrassing fact for six decades? The short answer is: by lying under oath.
Legacy of Lies
The Warren Commission, created by President Johnson to investigate JFK’s murder, was assured the CIA knew little about Kennedy’s putative killer and could not have intercepted him before he shot the president.
The assurances came personally from the top two men in the CIA.
In sworn testimony given behind closed doors in May 1964, director John McCone sounded categorical about the agency’s lack of interest in — and knowledge of — Oswald before JFK’s assassination.
The director declared:
The Agency never contacted him, interviewed him, talked with him, or received or solicited any reports or information from him, or communicated with him directly, or in any other manner. The Agency never furnished him with any funds or money or compensated him directly or indirectly in any fashion and Lee Harvey Oswald was never associated or connected directly or indirectly in any way whatsoever with the Agency.
Deputy director Richard Helms echoed McCone’s plea of ignorance. When McCone was asked about State Department reporting on Oswald, he replied “The fact is we had very little information in our files.”
Helms chimed in, “It was probably minimal.”
That was a well-hedged fib by the smoothest of spymasters. Helms would gain a well-deserved reputation as “the man who kept the secrets.” In fact, the CIA’s pre-assassination Oswald file showed that Angleton’s staff had received no less than 13 State Department cables, 12 FBI reports, and 11 CIA memos about Oswald while JFK was alive.
The participants in the Oswald File course agreed, virtually unanimously, that McCone Helms’s testimony was false and deceptive.
In any case, the CIA’s information on Oswald was far from “minimal.”
When JFK left for his last political trip to Texas, top CIA officers knew Oswald’s height, weight, and the color of his eyes. They knew where he went to high school. They knew about his Marines Corps service as a radar operator. They knew he had security clearance. They knew his address when he lived in the Soviet Union. They knew he wanted to read George Orwell’s novel 1984. They knew his address when he moved to Fort Worth, Texas. They knew he was corresponding with the leading pro-Cuba organization in the United States. They knew he had been arrested fighting with anti-Castro Cubans in New Orleans They knew he beat his wife. They knew he had recently to Mexico City. They knew he had attempted to travel illegally to Cuba They knew he had made contact with a presumed KGB agent. And they knew, as of November 8, 1963, that he had returned to the Dallas area.
None of this knowledge of Oswald prevented Kennedy’s assassination a week later.
They Watched Oswald
The Oswald File course participants examined the markings, time stamps, and routing slips on these documents to determine which CIA employees and components received material on Oswald. We deployed ChatGPT to clarify the internal organization of the Agency at the time, and help verify abbreviations and key data points.
While the Oswald file does not contain evidence that the CIA solicited reports or information from a man often described inaccurately as a “lone nut,” it does confirm that Agency officials avidly consumed information about him.
The 35 officials who reviewed Oswald’s file while JFK was alive included high-ranking decision-makers:
Thomas Karamessines, the assistant deputy director of plans, a euphemism for operations (ADDP);
William J. Hood, chief of operations in the Western Hemisphere;
Jane Roman, senior liaison officer for the Counterintelligence (CI) Staff;
Birch O’Neal, chief of the CI/SIG;
William Bright, chief of counterintelligence in the Soviet Russia division;
Winston Scott, chief of the Mexico City station; and
Anne Goodpasture, Scott’s top deputy.
None of these officials described Oswald as unimportant or unworthy of attention.
None of them described him as a “lone nut,” a “psychopath,” a “fanatic",” or a “loser.”
Nor did they ever say, or act, as if Oswald posed a security risk. They watched Oswald every step of his way to Dealey Plaza. And after JFK was dead, they concealed what they had known of the accused assassin from investigators.
Visually Speaking
Here’s a visual representation of the Oswald FIle course’s collective findings. The graph below charts the CIA’s steadily rising interest in Oswald between Nov. 1, 1959, and Nov. 14, 1963.
The data shows high-level CIA interest in the supposedly unknown Oswald spiked in the six weeks before JFK was gunned down in Dallas.
Summing Up
One analyst in the class, Craig Iffland, spoke for many in the course when he said, “the intensity of the Agency's monitoring and analysis of Oswald is astounding.”
“Prior to this class,” Iffland told me in an email, “I would not have been able to tell someone that, in May 1960, the CIA's Soviet Russian division composed a two-page biography on Lee Harvey Oswald. I would not have been able to tell someone that, by December 1960, three offices within the Agency would have their own files on Oswald. … Anyone who thinks Oswald ‘came out of nowhere’ has no knowledge of what the government knew about him — in particular, the FBI and CIA.”
I asked the CIA Public Affairs Office for comment attributable to a named person: Was McCone’s testimony to the Warren Commission complete and accurate?
I received this statement, attributable only to a CIA spokesperson.
“Consistent with the JFK Act, CIA has been committed to transparency with respect to Government records concerning President Kennedy’s assassination.”
(The research for this article was contributed by the participants in the Oswald File course. Margot Williams and Craig Iffland collated and cleaned the data. John Reid created the graphic.)
As I recall the first WC meeting in January 1964 was about many things but the Texas Attorney General, Wagoner Carr believed that Oswald was working as an informant for the FBI. Not often covered is that the FBI, James Hosty visited Marina looking for Oswald about 2 weeks before the assassination. Oswald then visited the Dallas FBI office and left a note for Hosty which Hosty destroyed. Having grown up in the 50's it was always absurd that the FBI/CIA had never heard of Oswald. They had good information on their chosen patsy. The liars tangled web of lies.
That the CIA was monitoring Oswald comes as no surprise and was in itself a routine matter. Oswald's defection, his later return to the US, and his association with Leftist organizations made him a person of interest because of his potential use by foreign intelligence agencies. As one can see, the intensity of their interest increased late in 1963. Then suddenly he drops off the screen and then ( Allegedly), shoots the President.
Reading this one can come to two possible conclusions.
First.
That someone at the CIA dropped the ball and inadvertently ignored the possible threat against the President's life. And also that the coverup was just CYA to save the Agency from embarrassment. This is the common fallback position that Warren Commission apologists always say, giving the institution the benefit of the doubt. However, the intensity of interest in Oswald by the CIA casts doubt on this. With all the effort they made to watch this man and then suddenly turn their back without any detailed reason for doing so is suspicious in and of itself.
Second.
There is the possibility that there may have been something involving Oswald that the Agency was keeping a close secret about , ( Possibly rogue elements committing illegal acts ). This operation may have been so sensitive that making it public could have damaged the reputation of the Agency and called its very existence into question. In other words, self preservation. The perjury of McCone and Helms in denying any knowledge of Oswald was likely done for this purpose.
One document that could help solve this mystery is the CIA's own internal investigation mentioned in a 1977 memo by former CIA Officer Donald Heath. Yet, for some inexplicable reason, it has yet to be found.