Professor John M. Newman, a former high-level Army Intelligence analyst and executive assistant to the Director of NSA, wrote a book in 1995 titled Oswald and the CIA about the Agency’s apparent interest in, and possible manipulation of, Lee Harvey Oswald before he allegedly killed President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on 22 November 1963. For this, Newman became very popular in the JFK Assassination Conspiracy Buff Community. In 2008, Newman added an epilogue to the book in which he accused the CIA’s legendary head of Counterintelligence, James Angleton, of masterminding the assassination, and for this he became a “God” in the conspiracy buffs’ eyes.
2008, ironically, was the same year that Newman’s colleague, British researcher and National Archives habitue, Malcolm Blunt, met former CIA officer Tennent H. Bagley at the Raleigh Spy Conference. Bagley had joined the CIA in 1951, been Angleton’s colleague (albeit in a different division), and had retired to Brussels where he had been Chief of Station for the final four years of his 21-year career. Although Blunt was a “Conspiracy Theorist” and Bagley a “Lone Nutter,” they became good friends. Factoid: Bagley was on the fast track to become Director of CIA before putative KGB staff officer Yuri Nosenko physically defected to the U.S. two months after the assassination of JFK.
For background, when Blunt and Bagley met in 2008, Bagley had already written scathingly about CIA officer Bruce Solie in his 2007 book, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games, for having “cleared” Nosenko in 1968, and for having helped another pro-Nosenko CIA officer by the name of Leonard V. McCoy “lose” CIA’s Nicholas Shadrin to KGB kidnappers in Vienna in 1975.
In 2012, Blunt showed Bagley some CIA documents that he hadn’t been privy to in 1959-60. These documents led Bagley to conclude that Oswald must have been a “witting defector,” i.e., he’d knowingly been sent by the CIA to Moscow on some sort of mission. (Based on the documents he had found, on what he had learned by reading Oswald and the CIA, and what he had learned from “Pete” Bagley, in 2016 Blunt began expressing his belief that Solie may have been a KGB “mole.”)
Specifically, the documents showed that all of the incoming non-CIA cables (e.g., from Consul Richard Snyder and the Naval Attaché at the U.S. Embassy, and the Department of the Navy in Washington) on Oswald’s 30 October 1959 defection had been routed by the Records Integration Division and the Office of Mail Logistics to the Office of Security’s mole-hunting Security Research Staff rather than to where they would normally have gone — the Soviet Russia Division — and had disappeared into a “black hole” there for at least six weeks.
Bagley knew from experience that such a change in routing had to be arranged in advance with RID and OML.
As Newman pointed out in 1995 and 2008, three of the people who were involved in assessing the ramifications of Oswald’s defection were Paul Gaynor and Bruce Solie in the Office of Security, and James Angleton, Chief of Counterintelligence. In his 2022 book, Uncovering Popov’s Mole — which he dedicated to Bagley — Newman tells us that Gaynor was the chief of the Office of Security’s mole-hunting Security Research Staff and that in 1959 he was too busy working on mind-control projects ARTICHOKE and BLUEBIRD to concentrate on the Oswald defection. Therefore, Newman says, Gaynor’s deputy, Solie, did most of the work, and did it in consultation with his confidant, protégé, and mole-hunting subordinate, Angleton. (Angleton told KGB true defector Anatoliy Golitsyn and CIA officers David E. Murphy and Ray Rocca on 29 June 1964 that Solie’s office was the only one in the CIA that he was certain wasn’t penetrated by the KGB.)
Regarding why the CIA might have sent Oswald to Moscow, Newman reminds us in Uncovering Popov’s Mole that CIA’s spy, GRU Lt. Col. Pyotr Popov, told his CIA case officer in West Berlin in April of 1958 (six months before he was secretly arrested and played back against the CIA by having him give it a “secret” message as to how he’d been uncovered) that he’d recently heard a drunken GRU colonel brag that the Kremlin had all of the specifications for the top-secret U-2 spy plane. Whereas Bagley believed that recently-fired-by-CIA Edward Ellis Smith — Popov’s incompetent and honey-trapped dead drop setter-upper in Moscow — had betrayed Popov to a high-level KGB officer in Washington, D.C., movie houses in early 1957, Newman theorizes that it was actually Solie (who had access to information about Popov and the U-2 secrets in the Office of Security) who had betrayed Popov in said movie houses, and did so with logistical support from Smith and James McCord of future Watergate notoriety. Newman believes that Solie then protected himself by sending (or duping Angleton into sending) Oswald to Moscow as an ostensible “dangle” in a (unbeknownst to Angleton and Oswald) planned-to-fail hunt for the mole (Solie) in the wrong part of the CIA. This ostensible mole hunt lasted nine years, tore the Soviet Russia Division apart, protected Solie from being uncovered, and drove Angleton nuts. Although Bagley (who died in 2014) and Newman disagree as to who, exactly, betrayed Popov, they agree that “source protection” was the reason there was a 20-month gap between his betrayal and his "secret" November 1958 arrest (he was publicly arrested on 16 October 1959 — the same day Oswald arrived in Moscow.)
By admitting in Uncovering Popov's Mole that he was wrong to accuse Angleton of being the mastermind of the JFK assassination, Newman became a pariah in the eyes of the JFK Assassination Conspiracy Buff Community, even though, dyed-in-the-wool conspiracy theorist that he is, he says that some yet-to-be-named high level military officers killed JFK because he refused to nuke Moscow and Peking in 1963, and that said evil high-level military officers somehow manipulated Oswald into incriminating himself, Nikita Khruschev and Fidel Castro for the assassination.
