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.
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,
William J. Hood, a senior CIA officer involved in the intelligence failure that culminated in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, died last month at age 92.
Hood was one of the highest ranking CIA officials who failed to anticipate that accused assassin Oswald might pose a threat to JFK. On October 10, 1963, he and five senior colleagues at CIA headquarters signed off on a misleading classified cable sent to the CIA station in Mexico City that omitted mention of Oswald’s recent arrest in an altercation with anti-Castro Cubans. Based on the cable’s favorable assessment, the FBI took Oswald’s name off of a list of people of interest to the Bureau. Six weeks later, Oswald was arrested for killing JFK in Dallas.
In a 2007 interview Hood conceded to me that “the information that is left out [of the cable] is pretty significant.” But he denied that there was anything “smelly” about the cable.
In fact, the Oct. 10, 1963, Oswald cable stands out as one of the most odoriferous JFK assassination documents to emerge from the CIA in the last 15 years. Not fully declassified until 2001, the cable has more than a whiff of intrigue because it details what the agency hid from the Warren Commission and what agency officials still attempt to deny: that a handful of senior CIA operatives discussed Oswald’s foreign travels, left-wing politics, and communist contacts just weeks before JFK was killed.
