JFK files: Controversy surrounding CIA counterspy chief fed assassination conspiracies
The CIA delayed responding to requests for information about its longtime …
The National Archives released over 2,800 records on the
assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The once-classified records
have fascinated researchers and fueled conspiracy theorists for decades.
USA TODAY
The
CIA delayed responding to requests for information about its longtime
counter-espionage chief, James Angleton, as it tried to minimize the
disclosure of his activities related to Soviet defectors and the
assassination of President John F. Kennedy, newly released documents
show.
"Don't answer his initial
request any sooner than necessary," said a May 31, 1979, internal CIA
memo about a Freedom of Information Act request from author David Martin,
who is now a CBS News correspondent. "When we do, deny release of any
of the information, maintaining it is still classified and involves
protection of sources and methods."
Martin was
seeking information about the agency's handling of Yuri Nosenko, a
former KGB agent who defected to the United States in 1964. Angleton and
some of his colleagues in the CIA and FBI considered Nosenko a possible
double agent.
The CIA memo was one of dozens about
Angleton included in the 13,213 files released last week by the
National Archives. They show the concerns and frustrations about the
work Angleton did during his CIA tenure and the difficulty investigators
had in getting access to his files at the agency.
Angleton was the agency's main
conduit of information to the Warren Commission, the seven-member panel
appointed by President Lyndon Johnson to investigate the assassination.
Angleton did not tell the commission about the CIA's involvement in
attempts to overthrow or kill Cuban communist dictator Fidel Castro,
which factored into later conspiracy theories.
Acknowledged
assassin Lee Harvey Oswald's life in the Soviet Union between 1959 and
1962, support for Castro and contacts with Cuban and Soviet diplomats in
Mexico City dominated the CIA's interest in Oswald and Angleton's
attention.
Angleton's treatment of Nosenko, a
former KGB agent, dominated many documents in the JFK files. Nosenko
told his U.S. intelligence handlers that the KGB had no connection with
Oswald, whom Soviet intelligence officials considered unstable.
However,
Angleton placed more faith in the words of another defector, Anatoly
Golitsyn, who claimed Nosenko was a fake. The CIA interrogated Nosenko
for three years in the 1960s, often subjecting him to harsh treatment,
before concluding in 1969 that he was legitimate.
"As
more and more of the details of his thirty-year-old spy career have
emerged, it has become clear that Angleton's legacy at the CIA was a
uniquely disastrous one," wrote Philip Shenon, author of A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination.
Documents revealed last week by the National Archives include:
•
A Dec. 18, 1997, letter from the Assassination Records Review Board,
the agency responsible for the JFK documents, to the CIA that complained
about the agency's delays in providing information about key files,
including the fate of Angleton's vast records.
"Because
of the perceived controversy surrounding the disposition of Angleton's
files, the Review Board believes it prudent to obtain a clear
understanding of the types of files that he maintained and their
ultimate disposition," the letter said.
• Several
memos related to the fate of a manuscript of a novel written by Winston
Scott, the longtime CIA station chief in Mexico City, where Oswald
traveled in September 1963 in an attempt to get visas to travel to Cuba
and the Soviet Union.
When Scott died, Angleton
appeared at his home and took copies of the manuscript, as well as other
personal effects, with him. "The manuscript contains some dramatic
inaccuracies about Lee Harvey Oswald's visit to Mexico City," said an
Oct. 6, 1978, memo by CIA official S.D. Breckenridge.
Breckenridge's
memo quotes John Horton, a CIA official who worked with Scott, saying
that Scott "had gone to seed" and told war stories about battles he had
not fought.
Who is Angleton?
James
Jesus Angleton ran the CIA's counterintelligence division from 1954 to
1975. The son of an American father and a Mexican mother, Angleton went
to Yale University and Harvard Law School and served in the Office of
Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, during World War II.
After
the CIA's creation in 1947, he joined the agency and became head of the
counterespionage unit in 1954, where he remained until 1975.
A
chain-smoking and hard-drinking obsessive, Angleton held great sway
inside the CIA for decades, enabled in part by his friendship with
Richard Helms, the former head of covert operations and later the CIA
director from 1966 to 1973.
During a Senate
investigation led by Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, Angleton acknowledged
multiple cases in which the CIA violated its charter by conducting
operations on U.S. soil, including illegally opening the mail of U.S.
citizens.
Angleton also said the CIA asked FBI
Director J. Edgar Hoover to conduct surreptitious break-ins into the
homes and offices of suspects, so-called "black bag jobs."
The
arrest and subsequent escape to the Soviet Union of British
intelligence operative Kim Philby, a longtime Soviet spy, burned
Angleton, who had been one of Philby's closest friends in U.S.
intelligence. He became intensely suspicious of Soviet defectors,
believing them plants aimed at planting false information and
destabilizing the CIA.
Latest records release
The
Angleton documents and others were released under the John F. Kennedy
Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, which Oct. 26 as the final
deadline to release them. Almost 2,900 files were released that day,
while some others were kept secret because of requests from the CIA and
FBI, which feared their release would compromise national security.
Last
Thursday, 13,213 files were released. Many had been released
previously, and the latest batch contained information that had
previously been censored.
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