In one of the most extraordinary interviews I ever conducted, a retired CIA counterintelligence officer who monitored Lee Harvey Oswald before President Kennedy was killed, spoke candidly.
Come back tomorrow for JFK Story #8: LISTEN: November 5, 1963, JFK considers secret talks with Cuba. The idea was anathema to the Joint Chiefs and top CIA officers.
I make a strong claim about the CIA and Lee Harvey Oswald in this video. I think the new JFK files corroborate my observation. But I’d like to get independent verification, preferably from a reputable fact-checking service like Snopes.
In telling the story of my JFK research over twenty years, I lay bare the role of CIA employees involved in the events of 1963.
These are the men and women whose secretive actions related to the breakdown of presidential security on Nov. 22, 1963 were never explained by the U.S. government.
I’ve been debating the question with CIA historian David Robarge,
In Washington Decode, he asserts “that the US government did not have actionable information that Oswald was a clear threat to the President before 22 November 1963.”
That is true. He says, correctly, that historians “must fairly assess why people acted based on what they knew at the time.”
That is exactly what I did in THE GHOST. And that’s why I think Angleton was culpable in the death of JFK. …
“The Hollywood Reporter says James Franco will star as English teacher Jake Epping, who travels back in time to stop the assignation of President John F. Kennedy. The HULU miniseries, which will run a total of nine hours, is a joint project by [novelist Stephen] King and J.J. Abrams.”
King’s novel, 11/22/63, is based on the comforting but factually questionable notion that JFK was killed by one man alone for no reason. What King didn’t know when he wrote his book was how closely the CIA’s Counterintelligence Staff monitored Oswald in the four years before the tragedy of Dallas. Mistaking such facts for a conspiracy theory, King didn’t send Jack Epping, his time traveling hero, to Langley.
He might have intercepted Lee Harvey Oswald if he had. Declassified CIA records show clearly that Oswald, the future accused assassin, was well known to a host of senior CIA officers before JFK was gunned down in Dallas on November 22, 1963. (Even Times Magazine’s favorite JFK expert, the unemployed John McAdams, does not deny it.)
This is one of the biggest JFK revelations of the past 20 years, and one that we need talk up in social and news media on the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination.
While the CIA assured Congress in the 1970s that its interest in Lee Harvey Oswald before JFK was killed was “routine,” the newest documents tell a very different story: Oswald was monitored closely and constantly by an super-secret office within the CIA’s Counterintelligence Staff from 1959 to 1963, known as the Special Investigations Group.
Let me say I think Sullivan and Kaplan are among the very best online journalists we have. I’m glad to say I count them as friendly acquaintances. I’m sorry to say I also think they have fallen victim of JFK denialism: the very Washington impulse to dismiss troubling evidence in the JFK story. …
A handful of senior CIA officers were informed about the travels, contacts, and politics of Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before President Kennedy was killed and expressed no security concerns, according to a declassified CIA cable,
