by BRANCO MARCETIC
The latest JFK disclosure is further proof the CIA has lied for decades about its relationship to Lee Harvey Oswald. No wonder it doesn’t want the last of the records to see the light of day.
Imagine that someone killed the president of the United States and that the CIA flatly denied, under oath, that it had been involved with the assassin — not once, but multiple times over multiple decades. Imagine that years later, documents emerged showing that this had been a lie. Imagine that some of those documents showed that the killer had, in fact, been surveilled by the agency, specifically by an office that one of its own employees described as the one that “spied on spies.”
It would all seem pretty strange, if not suspicious. Right?
This is the very real state of affairs concerning the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy at the hands of Lee Harvey Oswald, whom the CIA and skeptics in the political and media establishments have long insisted was simply a “lone nut” unconnected to the agency, and who murdered the president with no outside help. Chipped away at for years, that narrative dented yet again this week thanks to the unearthing of a new, unredacted document from the Biden administration’s most recent round of JFK records declassification.
As reported by the New York Times, the document in question shows a CIA official named Reuben Efron writing about mail correspondence between Oswald, who was returning home after a three-year stint as a defector in the USSR, and his mother while he’d been living in Minsk, with both the letter and a Washington Post story about his return to the United States attached. Dated June 22, 1962, Efron’s memo notes that “this item will be of interest to Mrs. Egerter” — Elizabeth Ann Egerter, who worked under CIA counterintelligence (CI) chief James Angleton in the “office that spied on spies,” the Special Investigations Group (SIG) — as well as to “CI/SIG, and also to the FBI.”
In other words, not only was the CIA aware of Oswald before the assassination, but the agency was reading his mail and considered him someone of interest, specifically to the very office responsible for investigating spies. And it was doing so as late as seventeen months before Kennedy was killed in Dallas.
Adding to the strangeness is the fact that Efron pops up in the 1964 Warren Commission report on the murder, listed as one of thirteen people in the hearing room during the testimony of Oswald’s widow — and, as the Times points out, the only one of the twelve US officials present who wasn’t identified with any kind of title. Jefferson Morley, the historian and longtime JFK researcher who discovered the memo, told the paper that it suggested that Efron was Angleton’s “eyes and ears inside the room.”
“It certainly looks like there was a concerted, organized operational effort to keep track of Oswald, for what purpose we don’t know,” Morley says.
That the agency had been reading and collecting Oswald’s mail while he was in the Soviet Union isn’t a new revelation. But this memo does reveal, for the first time according to Morley, who exactly was reading his mail, that Efron was a CIA employee, and that the agency viewed it as important to keep these apparently minor details hidden from the public for sixty whole years.
Yet when asked if Oswald was a CIA agent, Richard Helms, CIA director at the time of Kennedy’s death, had told the President’s Commission on CIA Activities as late as 1975 that “the agency was never able to find any evidence whatsoever, and we really searched that it had any contact with Lee Harvey Oswald. . . . He was certainly never used by the CIA.” It’s just one of many examples of the agency lying about the matter to the public and to officials.
The memo should cast doubt on official claims that the more than four thousand assassination-related documents still under lock and key won’t change our understanding of the case. Because many of those documents are already viewable but simply have details like names and locations blacked out, the argument goes, releasing them won’t yield the kind of bombshell revelations that assassination researchers hope for.
And yet, in this instance, merely un-redacting someone’s name in a previously released document has proven hugely significant.
“‘There’s nothing significant here’ — that statement is made by people who don’t look at the records,” says Morley.
Jacobin for more