The following is an excerpt from James Angleton’s 107-page Church Committee testimony that he gave on 19 June 1975. My comments are in brackets.
Mr. Schwarz: Can I follow up on some questions that Senator Baker asked you about Oswald? What about the pictures [sic], one of which was a picture [sic; a calling card] of Leontov [sic; KGB Colonel Nikolay Leonov, aka “The Blond Oswald in Mexico City”] that was in a piece of paper found in Mr. Oswald’s [sic; Fidel Castro’s] pocket [sic; notebook] when he was arrested in Mexico [in 1956]?
Mr. Angleton: There is an allegation. [i.e., “You’re alleging that.”]
Mr. Schwarz: What connection is there between that picture [sic; calling card] and that allegation and Lee Harvey Oswald?
Mr. Angleton: The only thing is, Oswald's trip to Mexico was to go to Cuba allegedly to contact the Soviets.
Mr. Schwarz: And was Leontov [sic; Leonov] then in Mexico, or...
Mr. Angleton: I don't know, because the double agent whom we believe was actually controlled by the Soviets, Byetkov(?) [sic; Soviet Embassy security officer Ivan Obyedkov, the guy who volunteered the Department 13 radioactive name “Kostikov” to Oswald or an Oswald impersonator over a sure-to-be-tapped-by-CIA phoneline on 10/1/63], gave us information which we would now regard as private, which would tend to absolve the Soviets of any implication with Oswald.
Mr. Schwarz: When you acquired from a number of sources the information that the KGB had spent some six months [investigating the JFK assassination] ...
Mr. Angleton: We only acquired the hard stuff of six months and what they did from one man who was very high in the KGB. [Kremlin-loyal Igor Kochnov, the FBI’s and the CIA’s KITTYHAWK.]
Mr. Schwarz: Without getting into what his name was, when did you acquire this information?
Mr. Angleton: 1967, or thereabouts. [He “walked in” to the FBI in 1965, and then telephoned CIA’s Richard Helms at home in June 1966 without telling him he’d already been in contact with the FBI].
Mr. Schwarz: So it was after the Warren Commission had reached its conclusions?
Mr. Angleton: Did you have any such information during the life of the Warren Commission? I think the only thing was the Nosenko...
Senator Baker: Which was suppressed by whom?
Mr. Angleton: We suppressed it, because Nosenko arrived at a very brief time after the assassination as a KGB defector.
Senator Baker: And he is the one that you think now as a planted agent?
Mr. Angleton: Yes. They thought he was sent on a mission.
Mr. Schwarz: Suppressed by whom?
Mr. Angleton: Suppressed from the Warren Commission.
Mr. Schwarz: You said that Nosenko, one of the reasons you suspected Nosenko was a double agent, or a planted agent, rather, was because he was saying things that were contradictory to some other high-quality person who theretofore had been giving you information before Nosenko came to this country?
Mr. Angleton: That is right.
Mr. Schwarz: What was the nature of the information relating to the Kennedy assassination that the high-quality person had given you?
Mr. Angleton: Let me say this so that it makes a little more sense. In December 1961, a member of the KGB in Helsinki defected to us his name is Golitsyn. [KGB Major Anatoliy Golitsyn]. He has never been in service, except Jack Anderson came out with an erroneous account of it, alleging that he had stated there was a plot to assassinate Nixon. He did not make such a statement.
Mr. Kirbow: Do you think this statement should be on the record?
Mr. Angleton I don't mind it being on the record after the Anderson article. They have been looking for him. Now, [Golitsyn] is probably without question the most major defection since World War II as far as Soviet intentions, Soviet organization, and Soviet operations are concerned, and the reason, among others, that it was so important was he had decided to defect many years prior to December of 1961, if the opportunity ever arrived, and therefore he used those many years breaking down the compartmentalization of the KGB in order to acquire the kind of information which would be most valuable to the US, and to our allies. Therefore, he refused many assignments abroad but tried to always remain in headquarters to get himself appointed to investigative commissions and other things of this sort which would get into everybody else's business. Among other things, he spent many years in the training schools for people who came back for six months from different parts of the world to brag about their achievements. And he absorbed all of this information. And among other things, he stated that he gave the cryptograms and circumstantial evidence of penetrations throughout the West. And then the Soviets rapidly transferred 300 of their people after his defection. And as is normal in a case of this kind, the big problem is to write a damage report, which means the whole service would come to a standstill and the objective would be to review all paper files and everything that showed his initials and you usually would have three categories of information: you would have information which he definitely had knowledge of, and information which he did not have knowledge of, and information which you are not certain about. Now, when we did a similar operation on the Sergeant [Jack Edward] Dunlap [case] who was working in the National Security Agency and committed suicide, if I'm not mistaken we came to approximately 400,000 documents that he could have had access to, although he may not have. And it is interesting to note that after his assassination (sic) in a search of the quarters, the Bureau, or whoever did the search, found six of my letters to NSA relating to information from Golitsyn.
Senator Baker: Did you speak of the assassination?
Mr. Angleton: What did you say?
Mr. Miller: Did you say Mr. Dunlap?
Mr. Angleton: After his suicide. I am sorry.
Mr. Miller: You used the term assassination.
Mr. Angleton: I meant suicide.
Mr. Miller: The word is interesting, because it is charged as you know, that he was assassinated [He committed suicide via carbon monoxide.]
Mr. Angleton: Maybe I was thinking out loud or something. In any event, the 1969 Golitsyn reports to NSA were in a plastic bag, as I recall in the attic, and there was a question of whether he passed them before or after.
Mr. Schwarz: Now, what we were on was, I was asking you, you testified earlier...
Mr. Angleton: I just wanted to say Golitsyn was so enormous to the Western world because we immediately moved on those cases which were perishable, the French, the British, and ourselves, etcetera. And we had never had a Second Chief Directorate [defector] which means the FBI type of Soviet, defector in our lives, and all of this out of the blue, and no contact as in Geneva six months after the defection of Golitsyn [when false defector-in-place Yuri Nosenko “walked in” to the CIA there]
Mr. Schwarz: And the date is when in relation to the Kennedy assassination?
Mr. Angleton: Well, this was a contact, this was not a defection. He came to us once [in Geneva in June 1962] for information prior to the assassination, and then in Moscow the Soviets -- and I am not going into a lot of names, a member of the Second Chief Directorate [Cherepanov] gave an American tourist a stack of [out of date] documents from the Second Chief Directorate, the FBI, relating to how they got [three or four words redacted], and others of our agents, which showed they didn't get them through a two- headed source [i.e., a KGB mole in the CIA], but they got them through a [three or four words redacted] on our side, so the leads ran into the thousands from Golitsyn, and thousands and thousands of pages of transcript, interrogation, exhibiting photographs, and identifications, which in turn would refresh his memory on other courses. And of that and out of that came the finalization of the case of Philby, Burgess, and all that, and the Vassall case in the British Admiralty, and some other cases, and many cases in France, and so on.
Mr. Kirbo: Did Oswald show up at that time?
Mr. Angleton: No, not from Golitsyn. But when the assassination took place… Mr. Schwarz: The Kennedy assassination?
Mr. Angleton: When the Kennedy assassination took place, Golitsyn called me immediately and stated that the modus operandi with any defector from anybody's army to the Soviet Union required that he go through processing by the 13th Department of the KGB.
Mr. Schwarz: Which is their assassination department?
Mr. Angleton: Which is their assassination department. Which is called their Affairs for Executive Action. And there are two reasons for it. Number one was to find out what sophisticated weaponry or training he might have had or would be of use to them. And number two, whether it was more valuable to reinfiltrate him into the national army for future activity.
Mr. Schwarz: Of the nature of assassinations?
Mr. Angleton: Of anything. It could be sabotage, or intelligence, or whatever. And this was the SOP on the dealing with military defectors. Now, when the Soviet government turned over to the U.S. all the documents that led to the interest regarding Oswald’s stay in the Soviet Union, there was nothing there indicating processing by Department 13.
. . . . . . .
Note: The reason I put a (?) next to Byetkov’s name is because there’s a handwritten question mark above his name in the transcript.
(To be continued)
