JFK Assassination Forum
JFK Assassination Plus General Discussion & Debate => JFK Assassination Plus General Discussion And Debate => Topic started by: Tom Graves on October 08, 2025, 11:40:04 PM
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The following is an excerpt from a seven-part article by Vasilios Vazakas titled "Creating the Oswald Legend" at DiEugenio's "Kennedys and King" website.
My comments are in brackets.
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In part 3, we discussed how Angleton controlled and manipulated Oswald’s incoming cables from Mexico in such a way to ensure that no one would understand their meaning until after the President’s assassination. We also presented the possibility that Angleton was using the mole hunt as a cover to hide his involvement in the assassination. In this section, we will show how Angleton was holding, close to his vest, the Oswald files from the very beginning. He did it via a very unusual mail routing system to ensure absolute control.
We must first return to four years earlier, when Oswald defected to the Soviet Union and tried to renounce his citizenship. On October 31, 1959, Richard Snyder sent a Confidential cable from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow to the State Department. Cable 1304 described Oswald’s willingness to defect to the Soviet Union and his intention to give up military secrets to the Russians.
The cable reads:
Lee Harvey Oswald, unmarried age 20 PP 1733242 issued Sept 10, 1959 appeared at Emb. today to renounce American citizenship, stated applied in Moscow for Soviet citizenship following entry USSR from Helsinki Oct. 15. Mother’s address and his last address US 4936 Collinwood St., Fort Worth, Texas. Says action contemplated last two years. Main reason “I am a Marxist”. Attitude arrogant aggressive. Recently discharged Marine Corps. [That was encircled] Says has offered Soviets any information he has acquired as enlisted radar operator.
On November 3, 1959, the State Department received a cable from the US naval attaché in Moscow, Captain John Jarret Munsen containing the following information: “OSWALD STATED HE WAS [A] RADAR OPERATOR IN MARCORPS AND HAS OFFERED TO FURNISH SOVIETS INFO HE POSSESSES ON US RADAR.” The CIA received both the Snyder and Munsen cables, but [many years later] claimed that they had no idea about the exact date of receipt. On November 4, 1959, the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) sent a cable to the Embassy in Moscow requesting to learn more about Oswald. This cable was also sent to army and air force intelligence, the FBI, and the CIA. It is known that Angleton’s CI/SIG received this CNO cable on December 6, 1959, but nobody could explain who possessed this cable from November 4 to December 6, a period of thirty-one days. It had simply disappeared somewhere inside the Agency and it turned out they had been withheld in the Office of Security (OS) [specifically in the Security Research Staff (SRS)].
The exact date that these cables and clippings were received by the OS is not known and author John Newman believes that they were first located in Angleton’s CI/SIG and then were sent to the OS.
[emphasis added]
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My comment: Newman wrote on page 27 of his 1995/2008 book, Oswald and the CIA, “It is possible that these files were in the CI/SIG file first and then later moved to the security file.” (emphasis added)
In other words, it's possible that the cables came into the OS/SRS and were selectively shared with Angleton's CI/SIG.
Here's a longish excerpt from Newman's book. My comments are in brackets.
The November 4 [1959] cable [on Oswald’s defection] from the Chief of Naval Operations to Moscow makes it abundantly clear that the Navy, at a high level, far from putting the matter to bed, wanted to know more. The cable concluded:
“REQUEST SIGNIFICANT DEVELOPMENTS IN VIEW OF CONTINUING INTEREST OF HQ, MARINE CORPS AND U.S. INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES. ‘INTELLIGENCE MATTER.’”
Besides being routed to Moscow and many other navy addresses, the cable was also sent to army and air force intelligence, and to the FBI and the CIA. At the same time there were some curious details missing from the initial navy report on Oswald, details to which we will shortly turn.
Setting aside the defects in the November 4 Chief of Naval Operations cable, what happened to the CIA copy of it after it entered the Agency? Again, the answer is that Oswald’s early CIA files were sensitive security and counterintelligence matters. We know from the CIA's Oswald document lists prepared for the HSCA that the navy cable arrived in Special Investigation Group (SIG) of Angleton’s counterintelligence staff on December 6. The question is: In whose possession in the CIA had that cable been for the previous 31 days? The answer is that for those 31 days -- November 4th through November 6 -- the CNO cable had crawled into the same dark corner of the agency that the [Richard] Snyder and Navy Liaison cables from Moscow had. This same fate befell the newspaper clippings as well. These clippings, three of them, along with a cable from Tokyo concerning Oswald’s half-brother, John Pic, and Snyder's first cable on Oswald, were buried in a Security Office file and did not circulate to the Soviet Russia division, where, presumably, they should have been looked at by a wide array of the branches.
The date that Moscow cable 1304, the news stories, and Tokyo cable 1448 entered the Security Office [specifically, the Security Research Staff where Bruce Solie was Deputy Chief] file is uncertain, for the documents lists released in 1993 contained nothing that would help us to pin down the precise dates. It is possible these documents were in the CI/SIG file first and then later removed to the security office. We will return to these arcane early CIA files on Oswald in chapter 4, but here it is sufficient to point out that some hungry black hole in the CIA seemed to be consuming every scrap of paper on Oswald in the days immediately following his defection, a black hole that kept the Oswald files away from the spot we would expect them to go -- the Soviet Russia division. At the end of the black hole stands the date December 6 and a place: the Counterintelligence Special Investigation group -- CI/SIG -- where, according to the information released by the CIA in 1993, the CNO memo and two Washington Star newspaper articles were originally located.
Is it possible that documents described above, whether in the CIA/SIG files or the Office of Security, were not shown to the Soviet Russia division until after the Kennedy assassination? It seems unlikely that a newspaper article that mentioned that the Russians were considering sending Oswald to a Soviet “institute” would not be shared with the appropriate analysts in the Soviet Russia division unless the entire body of material on Oswald was considered too sensitive to share outside of OS and CI. It is conceivable that the Oswald black hole in the CIA was caused by a very sensitive agency program, a program imperiled by Oswald's defection. Unless the CIA was wholly incompetent, it would have to have been in the throes of an investigation of Oswald’s defection at this time. Moreover, that investigation, like the program Oswald’s defection endangered, would have been known by only a handful of people in the CIA.
(emphasis added)
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My comments:
As we know from his 2022 book, Uncovering Popov’s Mole, Newman now believes that Oswald was sent to Moscow by a KGB “mole” in the mole-hunting Security Research Staff (SRS) of the Office of Security by the name of Bruce Leonard Solie (he was Deputy Chief of the SRS) as an ostensible “dangle” in a unbeknownst to Angleton and Oswald planned-to-fail hunt for “Popov’s U-2 Mole” (Solie) in the wrong part of the CIA (the aforementioned Soviet Russia Division), which mole hunt lasted nine years, tore the Soviet Russia Division apart and drove Angleton nuts.
Newman says the catalyst for this mole hunt was GRU Lt. Col. Pyotr Popov's telling his CIA handler, George Kisevalter, in West Berlin in April of 1958 that he had recently overheard a drunken GRU Colonel brag that the Kremlin had all of the top-secret specifications of the U-2 spy plane. (Solie, in the Office of Security, apparently had access to those specifications.)
Newman believes that Solie, with logistical support from honey-trapped-and-recruited-in-Moscow / ostensibly fired-by-CIA Edward Ellis Smith (a future Hoover Institution scholar and banker), and James McCord of future Watergate notoriety) had betrayed Popov to KGB General Vladislav Kovshuk in Washington, D.C., movie houses in early 1957.
Newman says the reason the KGB didn't recall Popov to Moscow on a ruse and secretly arrest him until December 1958 was due to its need to protect Solie from being uncovered. As has been shown in the 2007 book, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games, by former high-level CIA counterintelligence officer Tennent H. Bagley, Popov was "played back" against the CIA until he was publicly arrested on 16 October 1959 -- the same day that Oswald arrived in Moscow -- and was executed a few months later.
Newman also says KGB Major Lt. Col. Captain Yuri Nosenko was sent to the CIA in Geneva in June 1962 to discredit what true defector KGB Major Anatoliy Golitsyn was telling James Angleton about penetrations of U.S. Intelligence and the intelligence services of our NATO allies -- but naive, father-figure-requiring Angleton shared this intel with his confidant, mentor, and mole-hunting superior, Solie, who, in turn, went to Paris twice and Geneva once within 30 days in May-June 1962 -- to give Nosenko "heads up" at the Geneva safe house by "asking him questions" about the moles Golitsyn had warned Angleton about (Bagley, who was Nosenko's primary case officer, said Nosenko "drew a blank"), and to give the intel and feedback to some high-level moles in French intelligence and to a travelling KGB General by the name of Mikhail Tsymbal so that Nosenko could modify his narrative right before he "walked in."
Expanded and edited.