The Response a Reporter Received From the CIA When He Asked if Lee Harvey Oswald Had Ever Been 'an Agent, Asset, Source, or Contact' of the Agency
“I confess to finding it striking that the Agency did not say, ‘To the best of our knowledge, no,’ writes Scott Sayare in a recent New York magazine article on JFK's assassination.
Regular readers will know I’m a fan of history and enjoy digging into puzzle pieces surrounding the JFK assassination. (See: “Harry Truman's Salvo Against the CIA Following JFK Assassination” and “A CIA Chief's Chilling Dying Words and the JFK Assassination”.)
So when I saw New York magazine, one of the last truly great bastions of journalism in America, recently did a deep-dive story on the JFK assassination, I couldn’t wait to dig into it.
Over the next few weeks I’ll be exploring revelations from the story authored by Scott Sayare, a freelance journalist based in New York.
I encourage all readers interested in JFK and his assassination to read Sayare’s article in full, which contains a plethora of information and primary sources—new and old—including an abundance of research compiled by former Washington Post investigative reporter Jefferson Morley, who has spent 30 years digging into the assassination.
Morley clearly believes that their was a conspiracy to hide the truth of JFK’s assassination from the American public and that the CIA played a prominent role in hiding information related to JFK’s death. (To this day, the CIA refuses to release thousands of documents related to JFK’s assassination.)
For now, however, I want to focus on a single question Sayare posed to the CIA while gathering information for his story.
In his article, Sayare says he asked the CIA point blank if Lee Harvey Oswald, the man credited with being the lone assailant of JFK, had ever been “an agent, asset, source, or contact” of the CIA.
This is the written response he got from the Agency.
“CIA believes all of its information known to be directly related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 has already been released. Likewise, we are not aware of any documents known to be directly related to Oswald that have not already been made part of the Collection.”
It’s a strange response.
As Sayare notes, it sounds suspiciously like what many would call a “non-denial denial.”
“I confess to finding it striking that the Agency did not say, ‘To the best of our knowledge, no,’ writes Sayare.
The CIA’s response is proof of nothing, of course. Yet the fact that the CIA, 60 years after JFK’s assassination, can’t give a clear response to such a simple and direct question is troubling.
In my next post I’ll explore the evidence that makes it quite clear the CIA knew much more about Lee Harvey Oswald prior to JFK’s tragic death than they told the Warren Commission.
For those looking to dig deeper into the history of JFK’s assassination, I also recommend Jim Garrison’s bestselling book, “On the Trail of the Assassins: One Man's Quest to Solve the Murder of President Kennedy.”
Kennedy threatened the CIA and paid the price
I think everyone familiar with the years of independent research knows that CIA asset Oswald was part of James Jesus Angleton‘s false defector program.
Angleton had long been head of CIA counter intelligence, and devised the program to send fake defectors to Russia to have moles inside the KGB.
It largely failed; and in Oswald’s case, the state department actually financed his return to the US, where he was then ‘controlled’ by a series of CIA agents, including George Demorenshildt, and Ruth and Michael Paine, in Dallas.
It was Ruth Paine who famously got Oswald the job at the Texas school book depository in the weeks before the assassination, well after the president’s trip to Dallas had been announced, and the route to the trade mart through Dealey Plaza sketched out.