John Newman at COPA '94

( I'll add links to the documents he showed later. )

John Newman - Welcome

Tape Six

(It looks like they start recording after John is already at the podium and has already started speaking.  Additionally, COPA had some asinine time constraints unfairly and arbitrarily placed upon certain speakers while others talked endlessly with no time constraints.  Therefore, this presentation is rather truncated compared to the presentation John gives at A.S.K. the next month.  As a result of these time constraints this presentation is about 30 minutes.  John appears flustered and nervous, when in Dallas he’s quite calm and gives a much better presentation.  In this presentation he flies through his slide presentation )

      John Newman - Peter Dale Scott, my colleague, you know Peter Dale Scott, you know who I am, I’m John Newman, our backgrounds are in the schedule, I won’t waste your time telling you anymore who we are, but we have worked very closely together this year, in fact Peter has taken the trouble to come four times and live in my basement, my files, with me and we have literally been through an odyssey and we are going to talk about some of the things today.  In the interest of time I will try and get on with it, because I have brought some things for you to look at from these new files, and I want you to look at them carefully.

      I have some opening remarks I’d like to make.  I’m going to talk about Oswald.  I’m going to talk about the CIA, a little bit perhaps about the FBI, mostly about the CIA.  I do not have a formal abstract.  There are some legal reasons for that, but if I were to give my own presentation a title I would have called it, “Oswald and the CIA: The Smoking File.”  In fact, if I can just indulge you and tell you a personal anecdote about files, my wife whom I love dearly told me one morning that the previous evening I had reached over in my sleep and touched her on a particular part of her anatomy and had smiled and said, nice file, nice file.  (laughter)  And I’ve been living that down ever since.

      Lee Harvey Oswald, an ex-Marine who had served at several bases where he heard details about the CIA’s most sensitive technical spy mission the U-2.  We talked about that opening night, when he walked into the American embassy in Moscow in October of 1959 and brazenly announced his intention to give American military secrets up nobody in the American intelligence community seemed to care very much, and five months later Soviet air defenses shot down a U-2 piloted by pilot Francis Gary Powers.  In October, 1963 Lee Harvey Oswald walked into the Cuban embassy in Mexico City, a nerve center for the CIA’s most sensitive penetration operations with respect to Cuba, at a particularly sensitive moment, as plans for assassinating Castro and some of the invasion, or whatever you want to describe it, plans that you’ve heard about today, were being finalized.

      The FBI even claims it’s certain that Oswald offered information on a CIA anti-Castro plot for money, and brazenly offered to assassinate President Kennedy.  Three months later John Kennedy was murdered.  You are going to hear more about that particular story from Prof. Scott.

      Could it be that like Oswald’s threats at the American embassy though in Moscow four years earlier that the CIA knew about this, and took no action?  Thirty years later this part of the CIA’s files on Oswald are still classified.

      What the CIA knew of Oswald’s Cuban escapades is an extraordinary story which lies at the very heart of this case.  Deception and lies have actually mired the agencies knowledge of Oswald’s Russian and Cuban activities in an impregnable tomb.  And we are now beginning to look inside that tomb.

      For thirty years researchers have been looking for a key to the case, now we have one, I submit, and that is the CIA’s knowledge of Oswald’s Cuban operations, and in particular his activities in the Cuban consulate in Mexico City,

      And old saying has it that the best place to hide something is right out in the open, and it’s interesting, that seems to be the case with this Mexico City conundrum.  When the Kennedy assassination made public disclosure of Oswald’s Russian and Cuban activities unavoidable the veil was thrown around what the agency knew about them, about these activities.  In the thirty years since many secrets have surfaced, but now we have a most intriguing one, that the CIA engaged in a deception operation about Oswald six weeks before the president’s murder.  I cannot tell you, and it would be unfair of me not to say this, that I have not found any institutional plot in these files to murder, an institutional plot in the CIA to murder President Kennedy. The facts simply do not compel such a conclusion.  However, they may well fit into other scenarios such as the renegade faction, or bad apple hypothesis, but I do not think it prudent to guess while the CIA is still holding on to a lot of the files.  Therefore, I intend to work with the Review Board to get all the files out first, before leaping to any interpretation.

      On the other hand we can finally say with some authority that the CIA was spawning a web of deception about Oswald weeks before the murder. a fact which may have directly contributed to the outcome in Dallas. 

      There are other pieces of this story, for example Kostikov, the KGB person with whom Oswald. or someone calling himself Oswald allegedly spoke, but if you have a question about Kostikov, perhaps in the Q. and A., there’s no time for that part of it today. 

      What I would like to do is show you a series of slides now that really focus on two or three things that make the point that we haven’t been told the truth, and then I will give you some observations and close, and then we will go to Professor Scott.  So, if we could turn on the slide projector, I would like to start.  Basically, what I am going to show you is coming from the new files. Next slide, do I have the control here? I probably do.

      (slide)

      This one here by way of opening is to show you, what this document is, can I, yes, good, I can show you, over here on the right I can show you all these initials, this is a cover sheet, a routing sheet, or a CIA document.  In this case it’s attached probably to an FBI report.  The Warren Commission ‘y for the first time beginning with this new release are allowed to see these documents.  And what they show you is the organizational element, which is over here, and then the people in those organizational elements who signed for these files and normally a date, so we now have an internal audit trail on who knew about Oswald and when they knew it, that as it turns out, is very significant.

      (slide)

      The first thing I would like to show you, the least important in the series of three things is a CIA document which talks about files.  This is actually a few hours after the assassination and you will notice down here that above information, right here in paragraph two, was not passed to, among others, the Secret Service and the FBI.  And that’s very interesting how any information about Lee Harvey Oswald then accused of murdering President Kennedy would not be passed on to the Secret Service or the FBI.  And in fact these blacked out portions up here earlier on, where it says Cuban émigré-

      (slide)

      -are in fact very interesting when you see what they really are, a CIA cryptonym was under that, AMSPELL.  And in fact AMSPELL was the CIA cryptonym for the Cuban Student Directorate

      (slide)

      And to show you proof that the DRE at one time in any event was bought and paid for by the CIA I have this particular page here and they still are identifying, for example, one of their members still on the CIA payroll, they are talking about him here, his real name is actually Salvat, but that is not the important point I am trying to make, the point is that the DRE was, had been trained and paid for by the CIA.  The DRE did have information on Lee Harvey Oswald, and I don’t care whether it was that he liked to cut his toenails at night, any information that would be withheld for the benefit of a press conference as was the case here I think tells us something about the attitude at the time.  But, let me move on.

      AMSPELL by the way, for those of you who know the Bringuier story, he was the AMSPELL delegate in New Orleans.

      (slide)

      I want to focus now on the next piece which is Oswald’s presence in the Cuban consulate.  It’s an interesting thing about this case when you get into it closely that you discover the CIA claims to have learned about his trip to the Cuban consulate in Mexico City only after the assassination.  For those of you who are familiar with the story of course you know he was there in Mexico City from the last days of September through the first couple of days of October, 1963, and so we are led to believe, well, but they didn’t know that, they didn’t know that he was in the Cuban consulate until afterwards.

      This particular document here,

      (slide)

       which I am going to focus in on,  page two,

      (slide)

       and then a

      (slide)

      particular portion of page two, there it is right there, the last sentence, this is Helms in 1964 telling the Warren Commission that it was because of Oswald’s visit to both locations, i.e., the Soviet embassy and the Cuban consulate that caused this information to be reported in the first place.  So, in other words they knew.  There isn’t any doubt about that based on this, unless we have a spurious document, but we don’t.

      (slide)

      And by the way what I’m talking about, this is a bit difficult to read, and I didn’t blow it up but in the top paragraph up there you will see the outlines of the argument that were being given to the Warren commission and would be given to us that in fact they didn’t find out about the visit to the Cuban consulate until after the assassination.  It’s right up there at the top, I can’t really get to it, and don’t have time to read it but that’s just to show you that it is also in the documents.  And it’s not just

      (slide)

      What I showed you that contradicts that , which is this one here, saying clearly that the reason for reporting it was the fact that he was there. 

      (slide) But, I have managed to find yet another document, and we are going to blow up the bottom paragraph of that

      (slide)

      and take a look and see that this document also mentions several cables in October of 1963 concerning his visits to both the Soviet and Cuban, it says embassies here, the Cuban one is a consulate.  I wouldn’t care less about this other than I know that the agencies lied about it.  And I would like to introduce a principle and I’ll do it now and I think it is something that is fair to say we could follow, and that principle is this that given the fact the agency is asking for a lot of the stuff to still  be withheld I think every time we catch them in any lie or any deception [that] we automatically get to see every square on the board that adjacent to it.

      I want to see these cables.  I want to see these cables that are still classified about Oswald’s visit to the Cuban consulate, without regard to having to speculate on what’s in them, that’s not my problem. I want to see the files then I’ll give you an interpretation. 

      (slide)

      I would like to move to a third area.  This is a little more complicated, so I am going to take you through easily the most compelling of all the three examples that I am going to talk to you about today.  This I call it the smoking file.  This here happens to be a cable sent from headquarters to Mexico City CIA station in response to their informing headquarters that Oswald had been there and with out going into all the details,

      (slide) which we don’t have time, we can move directly

      (slide) to the point which is paragraph three wherein it clearly says

      (slide) do I have a better

      (slide) a better version, I don’t have a better version yet, okay, I think you can see it though, where it says clearly that the latest information that the CIA headquarters, understand that this is the 10th of October 1963, you all know the story of Oswald, what has he been doing, he’s been on television, he’s been on the radio, he’s been arrested and jailed, and debriefed there by the FBI, what they are saying here to the Mexico City station is that as of this date 10 October 1963 they haven’t heard of the man since way back in 1962.  Oh yeah, Oswald, we remember Oswald. he was in Russia, right.  Yeah, that guy.  Our latest information is May '62.  Well, in May Ô62 he was still in Russia.  What this says to us is that there was no headquarters information on Lee Harvey Oswald since May '62.  That’s what it says.

      (slide)

      Well, it’s not true.  It is simply not true.  And we are interested by the way now that we have more of a robust database to look at

      (slide)

      are the signatures on the bottom of this thing.  We know who wrote this cable, there you have it, Ann Egerter in counterintelligence, that’s Angelton’s Mole hunting unit by the way, SPG is sometimes, SIG, Special Investigations Group, you have Jane Roman, a liaison officer in counterintelligence, and Stephan Roll, Soviet Russia division counterintelligence, and Thomas Karamessines, the ADDP [Assistant Deputy Director for Plans] this is pretty high up signed off on this, and William Hood signed for J.C. King. 

      (slide)

      And the interesting thing about these signatures, oh, and by the way, this also went out around the same day aroundWashington here to the FBI.  Now, I want you to remember, well I haven’t showed you yet, but, ah, so I won’t talk about it, for a couple of minutes anyway, but what’s different between this particular cable and the one I just showed you is it doesn’t have that sentence, about the latest information being back, way back in May '62.  It’s a good thing, cause that would turn some heads in the FBI if they thought that as of October 1963 the CIA hadn’t heard anything about Lee Harvey Oswald for 18 months.  So, they didn’t put that sentence in there, it’s very interesting.  And the same people drafted it.  There’s Jane Roman, and Ann Egerter’s name is under that black, there’s CI/SIG, I’m sure it’s Egerter, I’m not sure, I’m guessing.

      But, the problem is we now have these documents.  These cover sheets.  And I can tell you for a fact that the agency had a whole bunch of stuff about Lee Harvey Oswald during the previous eighteen months, we have been reading it, but this sheet right here, it’s not light enough I don’t think to really show you, this is October of '62, it’s an FBI report, and this is a CIA cover sheet for it, so if they are reading an FBI report about Oswald in October 1962 it’s inconsistent with the phrase, “Our latest information was back in May of ‘62.”

      (John gives instructions to Peter Dale Scott to use a red laser pointer to point to things on the screen when John mentions them)

      What you have here, this is September, okay, this one here is shortly before the trip to Mexico City, and CIA liaison is on top, that’s Jane Roman’s signature up there.  Understand what we’re looking at now, I need you to understand that Jane Roman has just signed, and what’s the date up there Peter, is it early October or September, has just signed for an FBI file, okay, and a couple of days later she is going to author the message that says we don’t know anything about the guy since May Ô62.  And the reason we know is we have her signature up there, we got her little John Hancock.

      (slide)

      And we go through these files we see more of them.  There’s Jane Roman again, there’s Mr. Horn, Ann Egerter is down there somewhere, there she is, right there, up one.  That’s Ann Egerter signing for a file, an FBI file on Oswald before the one I just showed you.

      So, you see, there isn’t anyway out of this.  There is no way out of this.  The same people who crafted the message toMexico City that they hadn’t heard about this guy since May Ô62 have been signing for the information all along

      (slide)

      This is a schematic I’ve made of the entire set of documents that came in and I’ve laid out in the internal squares the people who signed for them.  I’ve blown up the relevant portion, and everything beneath the stars, there are three of them there, yeah Peter if you could, the three documents, three reports detailing all of Oswald’s activities for those previous eighteen months, right here, and the number of people who signed for them is extraordinary.  They were widely read, in Counterintelligence, Soviet Russia Division, Special Affairs Staff, which is the anti-Cuban operations, knowledge of Oswald’s activities during those previous eighteen months was widespread in the CIA, you see?  I mean, without regard to interpreting this, what we are looking at here is a deception, however, you want to interpret it.

      (slide)

      And there it is again just to remind you what it is that I’m talking about, and taking issue with, is that sentence there.

      (slide)

      Let me just back up and show you one more time, all those people there were reading those files and signing for them in those eighteen months,

      (slide)

      and then here is what they actually told the Mexico City station.

      Now, this is just the tip of the Iceberg. (laughter)  We got more, but that’s all I’m going to lay out on the table right now.  Because we’ve got some things happening here in the next few days, and it’s very interesting.

      From the moment Oswald returned from Russia in June '62 his Cuban activities began.  That’s what we are really talking about here. That’s what’s missing They continued right down to the day before he left for Mexico City, and in effect while he was there since he visited the Cuban consulate.  The CIA knew about all these activities.  And thanks to the newly released files we now know which CIA employees knew about and signed for access to these files and about Oswald’s Cuban capers, or many of them, in October 1963 those very same people drafted the cable I showed you with a whopping lie, that they didn’t receive any information, saying that the most recent information was seventeen months earlier.

      Why did the agency lie six weeks before the assassination about it’s knowledge of Oswald’s June of '62 to October 1963 movements?  I’m not going to answer that question.  I don’t think I have to answer that question.  I think the agency has to answer that question.  I’m not prepared to speculate while they are holding documents on this.  It’s not our responsibility to guess.  What is this, we guess right and you show us the file?  I’m sorry, that’s not the way it operates.  Okay, you show us the files, we’ll take a look at it.  We will take our time to look at these files, rather than to engage in endless speculation based upon part of the data.

      The public deserves an answer, we should no longer have to guess.  I would guess this though, that whatever the answer to that question is it’s connected to the lie, and I shouldn’t even call not necessarily a lie by the way, we call it a deception, lord only knows exactly what it’s connected to, but it is I think probably connected to what is a lie and that is that they didn’t know about his visit to that consulate until after the assassination.

      CIA documents, I showed you two, clearly state that, well, in the first place, Helms, Director Helms said that the Mexico City station didn’t report it except because he had been at the Cuban consulate.  Six weeks ago I showed former Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms the same documents that I just showed you, those which established, the ones in particular ‘right away that Oswald had gone inside that consulate.  I’m happy to tell you that Mr. Helms immediately indicated that the agency had known in October of 1963.  His explanation of why the CIA would make up a cover story to the contrary will appear later when my manuscript is finished.  And I don’t want to get into that right now, but he did offer me his own interpretation about that, but the fact that it happened and the fact that it was a lie is no longer in dispute.

      Now that we know these things happened the question really is why would the CIA want it’s pre-assassination knowledge of the Cuban consulate visit hidden?  And the answer I think has to be, and again bearing in mind that it’s not our responsibility to have to guess these things, is that it probably lies in what happened in there, while Lee Harvey Oswald, or whoever it was was in there.  And that is something that my colleague Peter Scott has come today and is prepared to try to grapple with this problem.

      Returning to the false story though, about when the agency knew of the Cuban consulate visit one might be tempted to rationalize this affair purely in terms of a post, what I call a post assassination shock, in other words, “Oh my goodness, you know, we’ve got these files, here’s this guy showing up in the New York Times killing the president, my god, we’ve got to cover it up.”  Well, that whole subject itself is worthy of some time, but I’m going to drive around it because of this other piece, this piece wherein they deliberately to their own station deny having any information on the man for 18 months, that isn’t, cannot be post assassination shock, it’s six weeks before Kennedy’s murder.

      I don’t know of any other way to characterize this other than to say that this looks like to me it’s an operational interest, an operational use of the information in that file.  To deny, to withhold information, for whatever reason, betrays an operational interest.  In my book I intend to lay out just how relevant Oswald’s activities were to an enormous number of ongoing operations but that is not the subject of my presentation today.  In any event the fact that we have this pre-assassination deception appears to us to be significant news.  If the CIA’s denials of ever having used Oswald in any capacity whatsoever could be likened to a chess match, I’m afraid we’d have to call this checkmate!

      What makes this particular little part of the match so critical is its impact on a great deal more.  Because this denial turns out to be false we must now demand to see all of the agency’s operational files from everyone, no matter who they are whoever touched or read Oswald’s files.  And that my friends is very interesting.  I will show you what you see. I brought you an example, this is something that is just in progress.  This is for authenticity, sort of like blood on an autopsy [sheet], right? But, this is the status of my work on the Western Hemisphere Division from these new files.  I’ve put the whole thing back together again, including everybody’s name and their telephone numbers.  When you read Oswald’s files this is the sort of material that you can recover, basically the entire guts of the Directorate of Operations.  This is the latest I’ve been able to put together on the Special Affairs Staff that is running all the anti-Cuban operations, not bad for just looking at some files that aren’t supposed to have anything of interest in them.

      If we can turn those lights down this might be of some interest to you, I don’t think we can see this with the lights on....what those are are CIA cryptonyms that I’ve been, sort of logging, you know that I get out of the files, there are all sorts of agency operations.  We didn’t have any idea about these before the newly released files, in fact, you know about AM/LASH, right?  And AM/WHIP, relatively well known parts of the story, well there’s the rest of the AM cryptonyms right there, all 110 of them, along with the ZR’s, it’s not just ZR/RIFLE we’ve got 12, 15 ZR compartments, and the JM compartments. 

      For the first time we have the boxes to put all the little pieces in, you see?  And that’s what’s been lacking we know all about these hundreds, and hundreds of Cuban exiles and Cuban exile groups, and things change, well if you don’t have all the, from the agency’s standpoint, if you don’t have the boxes it’s difficult to work with.  So, I’m optimistic that we have good material.  On the other hand, I’m convinced that there’s a lot that’s being withheld. I know there’s a lot being withheld. I’ve seen it, we’ve talked about it at this conference.

      So, now that we can take the magical mystery tour through the inner sanctum of the CIA we can do the same thing with the FBI records, I might add, and now that Oswald’s CIA files suggest at least some sort of operational interest beyond simple curiosity, what then?  This is something that I think the Central Intelligence Agency, and I welcome you here, I’m sure you are here (laughter) should think very carefully about before the Assassination Records Review Board begins it’s deliberations too much longer.  This is a very important question , I think.  The CIA has released many operational files and we have to take our hats off to them for that and there are a lot of embarrassing pieces of paper in these files, but it clearly has not abandoned hope of withholding some of the files it considers to be too sensitive.  Well, this must change.  I think, if they think about it and if they understand where we are going and we will be patient, that the current CIA leadership will understand that their interest lie in the future, not in the past.  And it’s not too late to let the rest of these documents out.  It’s the right thing to do.

      (applause)

      The same thing applies to the FBI, by the way.  We want to see these last few hidden pieces.  How about CD 1359? Director Kelly, former FBI Director Kelly has just about told us what is in this document, essentially that Castro confirmed this incredible version of what took place in the Cuban consulate.  Peter will talk about that.  We want to see, not just things like that, but I have discovered whole series of documents missing from the FBI release that have information about Lee Harvey Oswald.  And we have been working with the National Archives on identifying these and bringing this to the attention of, and we are bringing this to the attention of, are there any FBI people here, I’ll be happy to give you a list on Tuesday of all the serials that are missing that we want to see.  We know through some previous FOIA actions that, I should mention Paul Hoch in particular many years ago was able to weasel a few pieces of paper out of the FBI that have serials, serial numbers with files in them that we haven’t even seen in this new release, as if they don’t exist.  We want to see all those too.

      I have just a couple of things I’d like to say in closing, I’ve talked about the squares on the chessboard, I won’t repeat that but I think the principle does apply and it’s an important thought because the Review Board has so much work to do that we have to have some strategy for where we begin, and I say we begin everywhere we find a lie or a deception really that to me is a good way to proceed as an investigator.

      I had a phone call from Norman Mailer just last week, it was very interesting phone call, you know he’s doing a book, he was very concerned about what was in mine, and I told him some of the things I’ve told you, and he said to me that it seemed like we were staking out our base camps on opposite sides of the mountain.  And that may be true.  I hope it isn’t because I really want to stake my base camp out on the mountain of truth, not on one side or the other of an endless debate that just goes on and on and on.  But the idea of a base camp I liked, that’s good, cause that’s where we are at.  We are not at about solving the case, cracking the case, we are about getting access to the materials that will let us do that.  So, the bas camp idea is very good.  And in that regard I’m not interested, as I’ve told you more than once today in guessing anymore.  There’s an old proverb that says in the mountains the shortest way is from peak to peak but for that route thou must have long legs.  Well, our conclusions, our interpretations need to be like peaks, big and tall, and they also have to be consistent with all that lies in the valley below, and without the files we don’t know really yet everything that is in the valley below.  Thank you very much.

      (applause)