Ten Findings from the Newly-Released JFK Assassination Records

Ten Highlights from the JFK Files

1. Widescale monitoring of U.S. mail and mail tampering by the CIA: A CIA document dated Jan. 22, 1958 noted that CIA Counterintelligence chief James Angleton reports that “two or three hundred CIA employees are exclusively engaged” in monitoring U.S. mail going to the Soviet Union, indexing the names of “approximately 250,000 names by CIA.” The CIA built a “laboratory in New York in connection with this project” to “examine correspondence for secret writing, microdots and possibly codes.” By March 1961, “CIA advised that about 500,000 items per month passed to and from the USSR and about 200,000 of these items are screened” and that “[a]pproximately 1,200 items per month received ‘close scrutiny.’”

Our research has shown that the CIA did monitor Oswald’s mail, as we know from a letter sent by his mother to him in the Soviet Union when he defected.

A separate memo from 1975 documents shows the CIA “mailing of black letters, primarily from third countries” and “a mail intercept operation which would enable one to fabricate the paper, envelopes, writing and addressing styles, even counterfeit postage stamps and cachets, all with the aim of giving the appearance that the letter originated” from North Vietnam, Peking (Beijing), and other locations.

2. CIA Matchmakers: The CIA used Robert Maheu, a former FBI agent, to procure women for foreign dignitaries coming to the U.S. in the hopes of gathering intelligence information. A 1975 memo expands on an unintended consequence of the CIA recruiting a female companion for a foreign leader as the leader becomes “lovesick, and ready to give up the throne.” The memo explains that the CIA then took steps to undo the relationship. In a separate document from 1975, testimony by Maheu explains that the CIA was embarrassed, not for recruiting the companion, but because they mistakenly matched the Arab leader with a Jewish woman.

3. More Information on the U.S. role in the assassination of former president of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo: On May 30, 1961, Trujillo was killed when his car was ambushed on a road outside the Dominican capital. A document dated July 2, 1975, suggests the CIA’s role in providing weapons, including “one small-size high-power weapon” as well as “three pistols” and permission to “pass three carbines to the dissidents.”

4. JFK White House critical of the CIA: After the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger wrote a highly critical memo to JFK on June 10, 1961, taking the CIA to task for undermining the State Department.

“Clandestine intelligence collection … exposes American foreign policy to a multitude of embarrassments when CIA is discovered recruiting agents or developing sources in a friendly country,” as in Singapore, Japan, and Pakistan. The CIA admitted that, in such cases, “neither the Embassy nor the [State] Department in Washington is normally informed of this type of operation.”

This was one of the memos that our students found and shared with NBC during the interview.

Prior to the Bay of Pigs invasion, the CIA had given Kennedy assurances that sending CIA trained Cuban exiles into Cuba to overthrow Castro could not fail. Trusting that their intelligence was accurate, he gave the go ahead for the invasion, only to have the exiles quickly defeated by Castro’s forces.

5. The CIA spied on the French…and then took it even further: In April 1963, the CIA placed an agent in the French intelligence agency, believing the Soviets had infiltrated the agency and were sending U.S. intelligence to the Soviets. By January 1964, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover mocked the CIA for this, saying: “I think this whole thing has been imaginary on the part of CIA which has been played as a sucker.”

Fast forward to June 1, 1973, a 7-page memo to CIA Director William Colby from Walter Elder, assistant to former CIA Director John McCone, cites 17 examples of where the agency is “exceeding CIA’s charter” including a CIA counter espionage operation against the French embassy in Washington, D.C., that involved “breaking and entering and the removal of documents from the French consulate.”

6. Poison sugar: The same memo noted in item no. 5 above details that the CIA “injected a contaminating agent in Cuban sugar bound for the Soviet Union.” The Center for Politics previously reported on the planning by the CIA of Operation Square Dance, which proposed biological warfare to destroy the Cuban economy by introducing parasites within the sugar cane plants to “cripple Cuban commerce and place strain upon regime security forces.”

But it was not known until now that the CIA had followed through with it.

7. 007-ish: There are countless examples from prior releases of the James Bond nature of intelligence gathering at the time. The latest is a memorandum to the CIA Chief of Political and Psychological Warfare dated June 25, 1953, on how the U.S. is attempting to deliver radio signals across the world that would “cause the listening audience to shift [their radio dial] to our nearby program in endeavoring to tune out the interference on his own home program.”

8. Celebrated Agent Becomes Watergate Criminal: A 4-page memo dated Aug. 4, 1966 honors then-CIA officer James W. McCord, Jr. for developing “fluoroscopic scanning which is considered to be a major breakthrough in the detection of clandestine microphones and other devices targeted against the Agency.” Ironically, McCord was later one of the first men convicted in the Watergate criminal trial on eight counts of conspiracy, burglary, and wiretapping.

9. More on CIA’s Mexico City Operations: A 1964 CIA inspector general report detailed the workings of the CIA station in Mexico City and how the CIA organized its operations on the ground, including a principal agent who was a Catholic priest. “The station is organized into the Soviet Branch, Cuban Branch, Satellite Branch, Covert Action Branch, Communist Party Branch, and an operational catch-all which is called the ‘Operational Support Branch’…The station has a highly successful project directed at the rural end peasant targets. The principal agent is a Catholic priest…The project shows promise of expanding into Guatemala where the Archbishop of Guatemala has asked for assistance and training to set up a similar organization.”

Oswald traveled to Mexico City on Sept. 27, 1963, and stayed until Oct. 2, 1963—less than two months before Kennedy’s assassination—hoping to get a visa to go to Cuba. Unfortunately, little is known of his day-to-day activities there except for visiting the Cuban and Soviet embassies, where he met with a KGB officer. We hope that some of the remaining documents will provide a clearer picture of his time there.

10. More Fodder for ID Theft: Finally, we continue to find scores of documents containing personal information of living persons, including Social Security numbers, dates of birth, physical descriptions, and in some cases, even fingerprints of government employees, former U.S. military and many others.

P.S. We want to thank the students in the “Selected Problems in American Politics” class, as well as Ken Stroupe, Tyler Jones, and Garland Branch for their commitment and the research they do.

We had a chuckle last week after a British paper, the Daily Mail, ran a story WITH A PHOTO labeling Larry Sabato as a CIA spy. The paper used a photo of Sabato with a story about Anatoliy Golitsyn, who operated under the alias “John Stone.” Golitsyn received a $200,000 settlement from the CIA and lived in a house near Langley. According to the story, he also died in 2008.

Full disclosure: Larry Sabato is not a CIA agent… or so he claims.

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