“I said that Casasin was another problem. The man had worked for us abroad under non-official cover …. He had run an agent into the USSR, that man having met a Russian girl and eventually marrying her. Our assumption is that the interest in the man is that the agent was successful in getting his Russian wife out of the country, as Oswald was in getting Marina out … “
— CIA memo on meeting with staff of House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA).
This memo is a rare admission that the CIA sponsored false defectors to the Soviet Union in the late 1950s.
The HSCA was probing the agency in the late 1970s, had to grapple with the issue of whether Lee Harvey Oswald might also have been “run into the USSR.” “Casasin” was a pseudonym used by a CIA operations officer.
The HSCA published a “Defector Study” that failed to mention this admission. The admission was made in a meeting attended by Chief Counsel G. Robert Blakey, Deputy Counsel Gary Cornwell, and Michael Goldsmith on the HSCA side, and three top Agency lawyers (Rodger Gabrielson, Richard Rininger, and Scott Breckenridge) and liaison George Joannides on behalf of the CIA.
Further proof Oswald was way more involved then most speculate. Seems awfully hard to imagine that during the height of the Cold War the USSR would just let Lee and Marina Oswald just waltz right out of the country like they did!