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Angleton, Hoover and Blackmail
By Raymond Gallagher
January 2012
Before the CIA was created, many in Congress feared that the creation of a new intelligence agency would lead to a police state similar to the one they had just defeated in Germany, and refused to back Donovan’s efforts. But the loudest protest came from J. Edgar Hoover, who feared a direct encroachment upon the FBI’s turf. One could argue that the OSS people won because they made the better case. But there is another possibility here.
In Tony Summers’ book about J. Edgar Hoover, Official and Confidential, Summers showed that Meyer Lansky, a top Mob figure, had blackmail power over Hoover through possession of photos that showed Hoover and his lifelong friend and close associate Clyde Tolson together sexually. In the paperback edition of the same book, Summers introduced another figure who evidently had possession of such photos: James Angleton. If Angleton had such photos, imagine how he could have used them to force the FBI’s hand during the investigation of the Kennedy assassination.
---------------
deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/showthread.php?1071-J.-Edgar-Hoover
www.outhistory.org/wiki/F.B.I._and_Homosexuality:_Chronology
www.outhistory.org/wiki/F.B.I._and_Homosexuality:_Chronology,_Part_2
------------------
Summers names two sources for this allegation: former OSS officer John Weitz, and the curious Gordon Novel. Weitz claimed he had been showed the picture by the host of a dinner party in the fifties. "It was not a good picture and was clearly taken from some distance away, but it showed two men apparently engaged in homosexual activity. The host said the men were Hoover and Tolson…." Summers added in the 1994 version, "Since first publication of this book, Weitz has revealed that his host was James Angleton." 11
Novel’s account is even more interesting. Novel said that Angleton had shown him some photos of Hoover and Tolson in 1967, when Novel was involved in New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s case against Clay Shaw. "I asked him if they were fakes, " Novel recounted, "but he said they were real, that they’d been taken with a special lens. They looked authentic to me…." Novel’s explanation of why Angleton showed him the pictures is even more interesting:
I was pursuing a lawsuit against Garrison, which Hoover wanted me to drop but which my contacts in the Johnson administration and at CIA wanted me to pursue. I’d been told I would incur Hoover’s wrath if I went ahead, but Angleton was demonstrating that Hoover was not invulnerable, that the Agency had enough power to make him come to heel. I had the impression that this was not the first time the sex pictures had been used. Angleton told me to go see Hoover and tell him I’d seen the sex photographs. Later, I went to the Mayflower Hotel and spoke to Hoover. He was with Tolson, sitting in the Rib Room. When I mentioned that I had seen the sex photographs, and that Angleton had sent me, Tolson nearly choked on his food." 12
Now, Novel has been known to tell a few tall tales in his day. But he has on other occasions been forthcoming with interesting and sometimes self-incriminating material (such as his own participation in the Houma raid and the association between David Phillips and Guy Banister). 13 Given Weitz’s corroboration, and given Angleton’s enormous power over many in high places, Novel’s account rings true. Novel added that Angleton claimed the photos had been taken around 1946.14 During the 1945-1947 timeframe, Hoover was battling hard to prevent the creation of any other intelligence organization separate from the FBI. And during this period, Angleton was involved with the Mafia in the Italian campaign. It’s certainly possible under such circumstances that Lansky or one of his associates may have shared the photos with Angleton. And the reverse case can also be considered.
Miles Copeland adds additional credibility to this scenario in his account of this period. "Penetration begins at home," Copeland has Angleton/"Mother" saying, "and if we can’t find out what’s going on in the offices where our future is being planned, we don’t deserve to be in business." 15 Copeland presented this scenario:
There are several stories in the CIA’s secret annals to explain how the dispute was settled, but although they "make better history," as Allen Dulles used to say, they are only half-truths and much less consistent with the ways of government than the true ones. Old-timers at the Agency swear that the anti-espionage people would almost certainly have won out had it not been for the fact that an Army colonel who had been assigned to the new management group charged with the job of organizing the new Agency suborned secretaries in the FBI, the State Department, and the Defense Department and organized them into an espionage network which proved not only the superiority of espionage over other forms of acquiring "humint" (i.e. intelligence on what specific human beings think and do in privacy), but the necessity for its being systemized and tightly controlled. The colonel was fired, as were the secretaries, but by that time General John Magruder, then head of the group that was organizing the CIA, had his hands a strong argument for creating a professional espionage service and putting it under a single organization. Also, thanks to the secretaries and their Army spymaster, he had enough material to silence enemies of the new Agency—including even J. Edgar Hoover, since Magruder was among the very few top bureaucrats in Washington on whom Mr. Hoover didn’t have material for retaliation. 16
Is he saying what he appears to be saying? Copeland added, cryptically, "The success of the old SSU cadre (former OSS and future CIA officers) in perpetuating itself has been due in part to an extraordinary capacity for Byzantine intrigue…." And in a footnote to this phrase, Copeland explains, still somewhat cryptically, "This intrigue was mainly to keep ‘The Hill’ off its back." Copeland seems to be insinuating that more people than Hoover were blackmailed to ensure the creation and perpetuation of the CIA.
David Wise also lends credence to such a scenario with this episode. Thomas Braden, a CIA media operative was confronted by Dulles over a remark Braden had about one of Dulles’ professional relationships. Wise recounted what followed:
"You’d better watch out," [Allen] Dulles warned him. "Jimmy’s got his eye on you." Braden said he drew the obvious conclusion: James Angleton had bugged his bedroom and was picking up pillow talk between himself and his wife, Joan. But Braden said he was only mildly surprised at the incident, because Angleton was known to have bugs all over town. 17
Braden described how Angleton would enter Dulles’s office "first thing in the morning" to report the take from the overnight taps:
"He used to delight Allen with stories of what happened at people’s dinner parties … Jim used to come into Allen’s office and Allen would say, ‘How’s the fishing? And Jim would say, ‘Well, I got a few nibbles last night.’ It was all done in the guise of fishing talk." 18
More to the point, Braden was upset because "some senator or representative might say something that might be of use to the Agency. I didn’t think that was right. I think Jim was amoral."19 It would not be beyond belief that Angleton routinely used information gathered through clearly illegal taps to blackmail people into supporting his efforts. No wonder some of his Agency associates feared him.
Indeed, just about everyone in the Agency who knew Angleton came to fear him and to avoid crossing his path. This extended from subordinates to some of the highest officials to serve the agency, including Allen Dulles and Richard Helms. Angleton was called "no-knock" because he had unprecedented access to senior agency officials.
Said Braden, "He always came alone and had this aura of secrecy about him, something that made him stand out—even among other secretive CIA officers. In those days, there was a general CIA camaraderie, but Jim made himself exempt from this. He was a loner who worked alone." 20
Angleton knew that knowledge was power, so not only would he go to extraordinary lengths to obtain such, he would also lord his knowledge over others, especially incoming CIA directors. Said one Angleton contemporary, "He would put each new director through the embarrassment of having to beg him to indoctrinate them in important CIA matters. Jim was enormously clever, he relished his bureaucratic power and was expert at using it. He was utterly contemptuous of the chain of command. He had a keen sense of what the traffic would bear in relation to his own interests. It worked like this: when a new director came in, Jim would stay in his own office out of sight. If a top staff meeting were requested, he simply wouldn’t attend and would offer endless delays. He was a master at waiting to see the new director alone—on his own terms and with his own agenda." 21
Angleton’s most powerful patrons were Allen Dulles and Richard Helms. As biographer Tom Mangold described it, He was extended such trust by his supervisors that there was often a significant failure of executive control over his activities. The result was that his subsequent actions were performed without bureaucratic interference. The simple fact is that if Angleton wanted something done, it was done. He had the experience, the patronage, and the clout. 22
It wasn’t until William Colby, a longtime nemesis of Angleton’s, became the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) that Angleton’s power was dimmed, and eventually extinguished. But it was a long time coming.
Angleton and the CIA
Before examining Angleton’s relationship with Oswald, it would be useful to understand Angleton’s relationship with the CIA. Angleton ran the Counterintelligence unit. The primary role of Counterintelligence is to protect agents from a foreign intelligence organization from uncovering CIA assets and operations. Another important role is the ability to disseminate disinformation to foreign intelligence services in an effort to create for them a false picture of reality, causing them to act in ways that may be ultimately against their own interests. In other words, Counterintelligence was a unit that conducted operations, not just research. For that reason, the CI staff resided inside the Directorate of Plans (DDP) and not on the analytical side of the agency.
In addition to owning counterintelligence, Angleton also had control over the FBI’s relationship with the Agency (he owned the liaison relationship between FBI and CIA), and sole control of the Israeli desk, which included liaison with their intelligence service, the Mossad.
In the early days of the agency, units were given single-letter identifiers of (at least) A-D instead of names. Staff A later became Foreign Intelligence; Staff B became Operations; Staff C became Counterintelligence ; and Staff D, which dealt with NSA intercept material, among other more notorious activities, apparently was never called anything other than Staff D. 23
From the agency’s inception until 1954, Staff C was run by William Harvey, a former FBI man who was to one day be introduced to President Kennedy as "America’s James Bond." During this same period, Staff A was run by Angleton.
After the publication of the Doolittle Report in 195424, Staff C, which then became simply Counterintelligence, was handed to Angleton. Harvey was given the coveted Berlin station, a vortex point for operations against the USSR.
CI/SIG and Oswald
Angleton’s complete counterintelligence empire employed over 200 people. Inside this large group was a small handful of Angleton’s most trusted and closed-mouthed associates, called the Special Investigations Group (SIG). According to Ann Egerter, in 1959, when Oswald defected to the Soviet Union, only "about four or five" people were part of SIG, which was headed by Birch D. O’Neal. SIG members included Ann Egerter, Newton "Scotty" Miler, and very few others.
Miler was, as of 1955, "either the Deputy or one of the principle officers with O’Neal," according to Angleton.25 O’Neal, Egerter and Miler all play interesting roles in this case.
SIG is all-important in the case of the Kennedy assassination because, for whatever reason, SIG held a 201 file on Lee Oswald prior to the assassination. Both the Church Committee and HSCA investigators fixated quickly on this point, because it made no sense under the CIA’s scenario of their relationship (or, as they professed, non-relationship) with Oswald. What did SIG really do, and why would Oswald’s file have been there? Why wasn’t it opened when this ex-Marine (who had knowledge of the CIA’s top secret U-2 program) defected in 1959, telling embassy personnel he might have something of special interest to share with the Soviets? Why didn’t that set off alarm bells all over the place? Why was a 201 file on Oswald not opened for another year after that event? And why, when he returned to the States, did the CIA not debrief him? Or did they? These questions and more were adequately raised, to the HSCA’s credit, but not adequately answered by CIA.
Let’s start with the first issue. What did SIG do? Angleton described the primary task of SIG to the Church committee in this fashion:
The primary task was the penetration of the Agency and the government and historical penetration cases are recruitment of U.S. officials in positions, code clerks. It had a very tight filing system of its own, and it was the only component in counterintelligence that had access to the security files and the personnel maintained by the Office of Security. 26
The Office of Security’s primary role was to protect the CIA from harm. This involves monitoring the CIA’s own employees and assets to ensure that no one leaks data about the CIA, or betrays the CIA in any way. Because of the nature of what was done there, Office of Security files were the most closely guarded in the Agency. It is significant, therefore, that Angleton’s CI/SIG group had access to these files. It is also significant that the Office of Security also had a file on Oswald, and was running an operation against the FPCC at the time Oswald was attaching himself visibly to that organization.
To the HSCA, Angleton gave a slightly enlarged definition:
…it had many duties that had to do with other categories of sensitive cases involving Americans and other things which were not being handled by anybody else or just falling between the stools and so on. 27
Asked whether SIG’s charter would elucidate its operational mandate, Angleton replied, It would probably be in fairly camouflaged terms, yes. It was not a unit, however, whose duties were in other words, explained to people. I mean, in training school and do on it was very much fuzzed over if anyone was laying out the CI staff. 28
According to Angleton’s close associate Raymond G. Rocca, SIG …was set up to handle especially sensitive cases in the area of security or personnel and in particular, cases involving security of personnel who were also of operational interest, as operators.
In other words, it was an interface with the Office of Security. 29
When asked what would cause CI/SIG to open a 201 file on someone, Rocca gave this answer:
I would imagine that they would have had that occasion whenever a question arose that concerned people that came within the purview of the mission that I have described, namely, the penetration of our operations or the advancement of our particular interests with respect to the security of those operations…. I mean, there were many sensitive areas that involved aspects, that involved sources and access to materials that were of higher classification than what you have shown me. 30
When the conversation is brought around to Oswald in particular, Rocca’s answer is even more interesting:
Rocca: Let me go back and open a little parenthesis about this. What I regard now, in the light of what you said, is probably a too narrow view of what SIG was interested in.
They were also concerned with Americans as a security threat in a community-wide sense, and they dealt with FBI cases, with the Office of Security cases, and with other cases on the same level, as they dealt with our own, basically….It would be with respect to where and what had happened to DDP materials with respect to a defection in any of these places.
Goldsmith: Again, though, Oswald had nothing to do with the DDP at this time, at least apparently.
Rocca: I’m not saying that. You said it. [Emphasis added.] 31
Rocca’s answer hangs out there, teasing us with ambiguity. Did Oswald have something to do with the Directorate of Plans, the DDP?
...
The rest of this article can be found in The Assassinations, edited by Jim DiEugenio and Lisa Pease.
Notes
11. Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential (New York: Pocket Books ed., 1994), p. 280
12. Summers, pp. 280-281
13. Lisa Pease, "Novel & Company: Phillips, Banister, Arcacha and Ferrie," Probe Vol. 4 No. 6 Sept-Oct 1997, p. 32.
14. Summers, p. 281
15. Copeland, p. 44.
16. Copeland, p. 41.
17. David Wise, Molehunt (New York: Avon Books ed., 1992), p. 31
18. Wise, p. 32.
19. Wise, p. 32.
20. Mangold, p. 51
21. Mangold, p. 52
22. Mangold, p. 52
23. Wise, p. 121.
24. The Doolittle report contained this famous instruction: "If the United States is to survive, long-standing American concepts of ‘fiar play’ must be reconsidered," and "We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated and more effective methods than those used against us." Quoted in David Martin, Wilderness of Mirrors (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), p. 62.
25. Angleton 9/17/75 Church Committee Deposition (hereafter Angleton 9/17/75 Deposition), p. 16.
26. Angleton 9/17/75 Deposition, p. 17.
27. Angleton HSCA Deposition, p. 146.
28. Angleton HSCA Deposition, p. 146.
29. HSCA Deposition of Raymond G. Rocca (hereafter Rocca HSCA Deposition), p. 206
30. Rocca HSCA Deposition, p. 207.
31. Rocca HSCA Deposition, p. 218
miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1632/0*NpKXc0y6LXoNu6wC.jpg
Angleton, Hoover and Blackmail
By Raymond Gallagher
January 2012
Before the CIA was created, many in Congress feared that the creation of a new intelligence agency would lead to a police state similar to the one they had just defeated in Germany, and refused to back Donovan’s efforts. But the loudest protest came from J. Edgar Hoover, who feared a direct encroachment upon the FBI’s turf. One could argue that the OSS people won because they made the better case. But there is another possibility here.
In Tony Summers’ book about J. Edgar Hoover, Official and Confidential, Summers showed that Meyer Lansky, a top Mob figure, had blackmail power over Hoover through possession of photos that showed Hoover and his lifelong friend and close associate Clyde Tolson together sexually. In the paperback edition of the same book, Summers introduced another figure who evidently had possession of such photos: James Angleton. If Angleton had such photos, imagine how he could have used them to force the FBI’s hand during the investigation of the Kennedy assassination.
---------------
deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/showthread.php?1071-J.-Edgar-Hoover
www.outhistory.org/wiki/F.B.I._and_Homosexuality:_Chronology
www.outhistory.org/wiki/F.B.I._and_Homosexuality:_Chronology,_Part_2
------------------
Summers names two sources for this allegation: former OSS officer John Weitz, and the curious Gordon Novel. Weitz claimed he had been showed the picture by the host of a dinner party in the fifties. "It was not a good picture and was clearly taken from some distance away, but it showed two men apparently engaged in homosexual activity. The host said the men were Hoover and Tolson…." Summers added in the 1994 version, "Since first publication of this book, Weitz has revealed that his host was James Angleton." 11
Novel’s account is even more interesting. Novel said that Angleton had shown him some photos of Hoover and Tolson in 1967, when Novel was involved in New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s case against Clay Shaw. "I asked him if they were fakes, " Novel recounted, "but he said they were real, that they’d been taken with a special lens. They looked authentic to me…." Novel’s explanation of why Angleton showed him the pictures is even more interesting:
I was pursuing a lawsuit against Garrison, which Hoover wanted me to drop but which my contacts in the Johnson administration and at CIA wanted me to pursue. I’d been told I would incur Hoover’s wrath if I went ahead, but Angleton was demonstrating that Hoover was not invulnerable, that the Agency had enough power to make him come to heel. I had the impression that this was not the first time the sex pictures had been used. Angleton told me to go see Hoover and tell him I’d seen the sex photographs. Later, I went to the Mayflower Hotel and spoke to Hoover. He was with Tolson, sitting in the Rib Room. When I mentioned that I had seen the sex photographs, and that Angleton had sent me, Tolson nearly choked on his food." 12
Now, Novel has been known to tell a few tall tales in his day. But he has on other occasions been forthcoming with interesting and sometimes self-incriminating material (such as his own participation in the Houma raid and the association between David Phillips and Guy Banister). 13 Given Weitz’s corroboration, and given Angleton’s enormous power over many in high places, Novel’s account rings true. Novel added that Angleton claimed the photos had been taken around 1946.14 During the 1945-1947 timeframe, Hoover was battling hard to prevent the creation of any other intelligence organization separate from the FBI. And during this period, Angleton was involved with the Mafia in the Italian campaign. It’s certainly possible under such circumstances that Lansky or one of his associates may have shared the photos with Angleton. And the reverse case can also be considered.
Miles Copeland adds additional credibility to this scenario in his account of this period. "Penetration begins at home," Copeland has Angleton/"Mother" saying, "and if we can’t find out what’s going on in the offices where our future is being planned, we don’t deserve to be in business." 15 Copeland presented this scenario:
There are several stories in the CIA’s secret annals to explain how the dispute was settled, but although they "make better history," as Allen Dulles used to say, they are only half-truths and much less consistent with the ways of government than the true ones. Old-timers at the Agency swear that the anti-espionage people would almost certainly have won out had it not been for the fact that an Army colonel who had been assigned to the new management group charged with the job of organizing the new Agency suborned secretaries in the FBI, the State Department, and the Defense Department and organized them into an espionage network which proved not only the superiority of espionage over other forms of acquiring "humint" (i.e. intelligence on what specific human beings think and do in privacy), but the necessity for its being systemized and tightly controlled. The colonel was fired, as were the secretaries, but by that time General John Magruder, then head of the group that was organizing the CIA, had his hands a strong argument for creating a professional espionage service and putting it under a single organization. Also, thanks to the secretaries and their Army spymaster, he had enough material to silence enemies of the new Agency—including even J. Edgar Hoover, since Magruder was among the very few top bureaucrats in Washington on whom Mr. Hoover didn’t have material for retaliation. 16
Is he saying what he appears to be saying? Copeland added, cryptically, "The success of the old SSU cadre (former OSS and future CIA officers) in perpetuating itself has been due in part to an extraordinary capacity for Byzantine intrigue…." And in a footnote to this phrase, Copeland explains, still somewhat cryptically, "This intrigue was mainly to keep ‘The Hill’ off its back." Copeland seems to be insinuating that more people than Hoover were blackmailed to ensure the creation and perpetuation of the CIA.
David Wise also lends credence to such a scenario with this episode. Thomas Braden, a CIA media operative was confronted by Dulles over a remark Braden had about one of Dulles’ professional relationships. Wise recounted what followed:
"You’d better watch out," [Allen] Dulles warned him. "Jimmy’s got his eye on you." Braden said he drew the obvious conclusion: James Angleton had bugged his bedroom and was picking up pillow talk between himself and his wife, Joan. But Braden said he was only mildly surprised at the incident, because Angleton was known to have bugs all over town. 17
Braden described how Angleton would enter Dulles’s office "first thing in the morning" to report the take from the overnight taps:
"He used to delight Allen with stories of what happened at people’s dinner parties … Jim used to come into Allen’s office and Allen would say, ‘How’s the fishing? And Jim would say, ‘Well, I got a few nibbles last night.’ It was all done in the guise of fishing talk." 18
More to the point, Braden was upset because "some senator or representative might say something that might be of use to the Agency. I didn’t think that was right. I think Jim was amoral."19 It would not be beyond belief that Angleton routinely used information gathered through clearly illegal taps to blackmail people into supporting his efforts. No wonder some of his Agency associates feared him.
Indeed, just about everyone in the Agency who knew Angleton came to fear him and to avoid crossing his path. This extended from subordinates to some of the highest officials to serve the agency, including Allen Dulles and Richard Helms. Angleton was called "no-knock" because he had unprecedented access to senior agency officials.
Said Braden, "He always came alone and had this aura of secrecy about him, something that made him stand out—even among other secretive CIA officers. In those days, there was a general CIA camaraderie, but Jim made himself exempt from this. He was a loner who worked alone." 20
Angleton knew that knowledge was power, so not only would he go to extraordinary lengths to obtain such, he would also lord his knowledge over others, especially incoming CIA directors. Said one Angleton contemporary, "He would put each new director through the embarrassment of having to beg him to indoctrinate them in important CIA matters. Jim was enormously clever, he relished his bureaucratic power and was expert at using it. He was utterly contemptuous of the chain of command. He had a keen sense of what the traffic would bear in relation to his own interests. It worked like this: when a new director came in, Jim would stay in his own office out of sight. If a top staff meeting were requested, he simply wouldn’t attend and would offer endless delays. He was a master at waiting to see the new director alone—on his own terms and with his own agenda." 21
Angleton’s most powerful patrons were Allen Dulles and Richard Helms. As biographer Tom Mangold described it, He was extended such trust by his supervisors that there was often a significant failure of executive control over his activities. The result was that his subsequent actions were performed without bureaucratic interference. The simple fact is that if Angleton wanted something done, it was done. He had the experience, the patronage, and the clout. 22
It wasn’t until William Colby, a longtime nemesis of Angleton’s, became the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) that Angleton’s power was dimmed, and eventually extinguished. But it was a long time coming.
Angleton and the CIA
Before examining Angleton’s relationship with Oswald, it would be useful to understand Angleton’s relationship with the CIA. Angleton ran the Counterintelligence unit. The primary role of Counterintelligence is to protect agents from a foreign intelligence organization from uncovering CIA assets and operations. Another important role is the ability to disseminate disinformation to foreign intelligence services in an effort to create for them a false picture of reality, causing them to act in ways that may be ultimately against their own interests. In other words, Counterintelligence was a unit that conducted operations, not just research. For that reason, the CI staff resided inside the Directorate of Plans (DDP) and not on the analytical side of the agency.
In addition to owning counterintelligence, Angleton also had control over the FBI’s relationship with the Agency (he owned the liaison relationship between FBI and CIA), and sole control of the Israeli desk, which included liaison with their intelligence service, the Mossad.
In the early days of the agency, units were given single-letter identifiers of (at least) A-D instead of names. Staff A later became Foreign Intelligence; Staff B became Operations; Staff C became Counterintelligence ; and Staff D, which dealt with NSA intercept material, among other more notorious activities, apparently was never called anything other than Staff D. 23
From the agency’s inception until 1954, Staff C was run by William Harvey, a former FBI man who was to one day be introduced to President Kennedy as "America’s James Bond." During this same period, Staff A was run by Angleton.
After the publication of the Doolittle Report in 195424, Staff C, which then became simply Counterintelligence, was handed to Angleton. Harvey was given the coveted Berlin station, a vortex point for operations against the USSR.
CI/SIG and Oswald
Angleton’s complete counterintelligence empire employed over 200 people. Inside this large group was a small handful of Angleton’s most trusted and closed-mouthed associates, called the Special Investigations Group (SIG). According to Ann Egerter, in 1959, when Oswald defected to the Soviet Union, only "about four or five" people were part of SIG, which was headed by Birch D. O’Neal. SIG members included Ann Egerter, Newton "Scotty" Miler, and very few others.
Miler was, as of 1955, "either the Deputy or one of the principle officers with O’Neal," according to Angleton.25 O’Neal, Egerter and Miler all play interesting roles in this case.
SIG is all-important in the case of the Kennedy assassination because, for whatever reason, SIG held a 201 file on Lee Oswald prior to the assassination. Both the Church Committee and HSCA investigators fixated quickly on this point, because it made no sense under the CIA’s scenario of their relationship (or, as they professed, non-relationship) with Oswald. What did SIG really do, and why would Oswald’s file have been there? Why wasn’t it opened when this ex-Marine (who had knowledge of the CIA’s top secret U-2 program) defected in 1959, telling embassy personnel he might have something of special interest to share with the Soviets? Why didn’t that set off alarm bells all over the place? Why was a 201 file on Oswald not opened for another year after that event? And why, when he returned to the States, did the CIA not debrief him? Or did they? These questions and more were adequately raised, to the HSCA’s credit, but not adequately answered by CIA.
Let’s start with the first issue. What did SIG do? Angleton described the primary task of SIG to the Church committee in this fashion:
The primary task was the penetration of the Agency and the government and historical penetration cases are recruitment of U.S. officials in positions, code clerks. It had a very tight filing system of its own, and it was the only component in counterintelligence that had access to the security files and the personnel maintained by the Office of Security. 26
The Office of Security’s primary role was to protect the CIA from harm. This involves monitoring the CIA’s own employees and assets to ensure that no one leaks data about the CIA, or betrays the CIA in any way. Because of the nature of what was done there, Office of Security files were the most closely guarded in the Agency. It is significant, therefore, that Angleton’s CI/SIG group had access to these files. It is also significant that the Office of Security also had a file on Oswald, and was running an operation against the FPCC at the time Oswald was attaching himself visibly to that organization.
To the HSCA, Angleton gave a slightly enlarged definition:
…it had many duties that had to do with other categories of sensitive cases involving Americans and other things which were not being handled by anybody else or just falling between the stools and so on. 27
Asked whether SIG’s charter would elucidate its operational mandate, Angleton replied, It would probably be in fairly camouflaged terms, yes. It was not a unit, however, whose duties were in other words, explained to people. I mean, in training school and do on it was very much fuzzed over if anyone was laying out the CI staff. 28
According to Angleton’s close associate Raymond G. Rocca, SIG …was set up to handle especially sensitive cases in the area of security or personnel and in particular, cases involving security of personnel who were also of operational interest, as operators.
In other words, it was an interface with the Office of Security. 29
When asked what would cause CI/SIG to open a 201 file on someone, Rocca gave this answer:
I would imagine that they would have had that occasion whenever a question arose that concerned people that came within the purview of the mission that I have described, namely, the penetration of our operations or the advancement of our particular interests with respect to the security of those operations…. I mean, there were many sensitive areas that involved aspects, that involved sources and access to materials that were of higher classification than what you have shown me. 30
When the conversation is brought around to Oswald in particular, Rocca’s answer is even more interesting:
Rocca: Let me go back and open a little parenthesis about this. What I regard now, in the light of what you said, is probably a too narrow view of what SIG was interested in.
They were also concerned with Americans as a security threat in a community-wide sense, and they dealt with FBI cases, with the Office of Security cases, and with other cases on the same level, as they dealt with our own, basically….It would be with respect to where and what had happened to DDP materials with respect to a defection in any of these places.
Goldsmith: Again, though, Oswald had nothing to do with the DDP at this time, at least apparently.
Rocca: I’m not saying that. You said it. [Emphasis added.] 31
Rocca’s answer hangs out there, teasing us with ambiguity. Did Oswald have something to do with the Directorate of Plans, the DDP?
...
The rest of this article can be found in The Assassinations, edited by Jim DiEugenio and Lisa Pease.
Notes
11. Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential (New York: Pocket Books ed., 1994), p. 280
12. Summers, pp. 280-281
13. Lisa Pease, "Novel & Company: Phillips, Banister, Arcacha and Ferrie," Probe Vol. 4 No. 6 Sept-Oct 1997, p. 32.
14. Summers, p. 281
15. Copeland, p. 44.
16. Copeland, p. 41.
17. David Wise, Molehunt (New York: Avon Books ed., 1992), p. 31
18. Wise, p. 32.
19. Wise, p. 32.
20. Mangold, p. 51
21. Mangold, p. 52
22. Mangold, p. 52
23. Wise, p. 121.
24. The Doolittle report contained this famous instruction: "If the United States is to survive, long-standing American concepts of ‘fiar play’ must be reconsidered," and "We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated and more effective methods than those used against us." Quoted in David Martin, Wilderness of Mirrors (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), p. 62.
25. Angleton 9/17/75 Church Committee Deposition (hereafter Angleton 9/17/75 Deposition), p. 16.
26. Angleton 9/17/75 Deposition, p. 17.
27. Angleton HSCA Deposition, p. 146.
28. Angleton HSCA Deposition, p. 146.
29. HSCA Deposition of Raymond G. Rocca (hereafter Rocca HSCA Deposition), p. 206
30. Rocca HSCA Deposition, p. 207.
31. Rocca HSCA Deposition, p. 218