Tag: Mexico City

What a senior KGB officer said about Lee Harvey Oswald

Nikolai Leonov
Insider: Fidel Castro, Nikolai Leonov, and Nikita Khrushchev

Nikolai S. Leonov has an interesting perspective on the story of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Leonov joined the KGB in 1958 and retired in 1991 with the rank of Lieutenant General. In the spring of 1963, his fluency in Spanish gained him the job as the Russian interpreter for Cuba president Fidel Castro during his first visit to the USSR in the spring of 1963, In the photo above he is the man standing between and behind Castro and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. …

Who was running CIA covert operations in Mexico City in 1963?

MEXI operations
Sensitive source: A newly-released JFK file still conceals a key name.

Fifty five years later, this remains a highly sensitive question.

Take a look at page 9 of this lightly-redacted 1977 CIA memo, released last month by the National Archives. The name of a CIA officer who was running covert operations along with David Phillips in 1963, has been postponed for release until 2021.

JFK documents illuminate the death of a diplomat who asked too many questions about Oswald

James Angleton
James Angleton oversaw the surveillance of Oswald

Phil Shenon has a long piece in The Guardian excavating the sad story of Charles Thomas, a U.S. diplomat who investigated Lee Harvey Oswald’s actions in Mexico in the 1960s.  Thomas was rebuffed by top CIA officials, including counterintelligence chief James Angleton. Thomas was denied an expected promotion and later committed suicide.

The story illuminates a central mystery of the JFK assassination story but not quite in the way than Shenon proposes.

USA Today: CIA started to disavow knowledge of Lee Harvey Oswald within hours of killing

Some of the best reporting on the new JFK files is coming from USA Today.
In today’s story, the national daily notes an essential newsworthy fact revealed in the newly declassified records.

Within hours of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the CIA started to distance itself from any connection to suspected assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, recently released secret records from the National Archives show.

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