John Newman at ASK '94 Newly Released Information

( I'll try to add in the links to documents soon. - Joe )

Mary Ferrell - It is my pleasure to introduce the next speaker.  John Newman absolutely needs no introduction to this crowd.  Most of you have read his excellent work “JFK and Vietnam” and we’re about to get another book by John that is even more pertinent to our interests here.  I know of no researcher who has done more important work than John Newman and he is continuing to do the same good work.  I have been priveledged in a small way for over a year, and I am constantly amazed by his mind and the way he can analyze documents and give us the meaning to things that were very esoteric to us.  John, it’s my pleasure to introduce you.

      (applause)

      

John Newman - Thank you Mary.  I don’t hold a candle to one thousandsth of the work or the contribution that you have made to the case, and probably to everybody in this room.  You are somebody you can always call and ask for something and you know you’re going to get the best that she can give you.

     

It’s a great pleasure for me to be here.  This is really what I came to talk to you about.  It’s always a pleasure to come to A.S.K. and to try and support what you do down here.  It’s a bit difficult for me to do this because I am in the middle of an investigation.  On the other hand, you are the reason, we all are the reason together, that we’re here, that there is progress in the case so at least in my heart and my mind I am always conscience of the need to share and to get things out as rapidly as possible.

      

If I am somewhat defensive it is not because I want to be, it’s because there are some very sensitive interviews going on and in fact we may be into some extraordinary situations with people who are still alive where the Review Board may have to use its extraordinary powers.  So, having said that, (humorously) I’ve covered myself, I can sneak out of anything now if I want, right?

      

Much like “JFK and Vietnam” I did not understand when I started the Oswald research that I would be looking at some of the things I was as fast as I was, and so it takes on a life of its own.  You get involved in it to the point where you can’t really control it.  So, what I am going to talk to you about tonight I really believe that we are really getting inside this case.  I don’t know what the answers are, I really don’t, but I believe for the first time because we have this new material that we are beginning to get to the point where we can get some answers.  And tonight I will give you my thesis.  I call this presentation, “The Smoking File.”

      

Lee Oswald, an ex-Marine, who had served at several bases where he learned of details of the CIA’s most sensitive technical spy mission, the U-2, walked into the American Embassy in Moscow on October 31, 1959, the enemy capitol, at the height of the Cold War and brazenly announced his intention to give up American military secrets.  We are led to believe, apparently, nobody in the intelligence community was listening, nobody cared.  5 months later Soviet air defenses shot down a U-2 piloted by Francis Gary Powers.  In October 1963, exactly 4 years later Lee Harvey Oswald walked into the Cuban embassy, excuse me, the Cuban consulate in Mexico City, a nerve center for the CIA’s most sensitive penetration operations against Cuban intelligence, at a very propitious moment, when our anti-Castro plots were cresting, to their ultimate failure as it turned out.  The FBI tells us, this is Clarence Kelly, the director of the FBI (after Hoover) he is certtain that Oswald brazenly offered information on plots against Castro and brazenly offered to kill President Kennedy, of this he was absolutely sure.

      

Three months later John Kenendy was murdered. 

      

There is an interesting pattern here.  Our fellow Lee Harvey Oswald seems to have developed a habit of walking into consulates and embassies and making all sorts of threats and no one seems to listen.  And then within a few months afterward Powers is shot down and Kenendy is shot.

     

Could it be that like Oswlad’s threats at the American embassy in Moscow that the CIA knew all along and took no action?  30 years later this part of the CIA’s files about Oswlad are still classified.  What the CIA knew about Oswald’s Cuban escapades is an extraordinary story which lies, I believe, at the very heart of this case.

      

Deception and lies have interred the agencies knowledge of Oswald’s Russian and Cuban activities in an impregnable tomb.  For 30 years researchers have been looking for a key to unlock the assassination case.  I believe now we have one such key, the CIA’s knowledge of Lee Harvey Oswald’s Cuban operations and in particular his activities in the Cuban consulate in Mexico City in the summer of 1963. 

      

An old saying has it that the best place to hide something is sometimes right out in the open. When the Kennedy assassination made public disclosure of Oswald’s Russian and Cuban activities unavoidable the veil was thrown around the agency’s pre-assassination knowledge of certain aspects of these activities.  So, thus while we could see what Oswald was doing we couldn’t see what the agency knew about it.

     

In the 30 years since many secrets have surfaced but now we have a most intriguing one, and that is that the agency’s anti-Cuban operations included a deception involving the alleged assassin of the President.

      

The newly released JFK [assassination] files make it possible now to isolate the fact that the agency is hiding what it knew about Oswald and has lied to us systematically for 30 years about it.  Moreover, the sheer quantity of new documents makes it impossible to prevent details from slipping through the cracks.  These details prove that the agency has been lying, not only about what happened before the assassination, but about what they knew and what they did with respect to Oswald after the assassination.

     

I must tell you, up front, right now, that I haven’t found an institutional plot within the CIA to murder Kennedy.  Such a plot may have existed.  So when I say this it does not mean one way or the other that I have an opinion on this.  I am just telling you, looking at all of these files, there is not evidence that could be easily interpreted as some sort of large institutional plot.

      

However, the pieces I am going to show may well fit into other scenarios, such as a renegade faction, or bad apple hypothesis.

      

If Mr. Morrissey is listening, he has posted on internet that when I say to you the sense, it means that I advocate this theory, I don’t.  What I am saying is that the pieces we are looking at arguably are consistant with such hypothesis, that doesn’t make them true.

      

You see, I don’t think it’s prudent really to guess anymore why the CIA is still holding back information.  So what I want to do is to work with the Review Board to get all the files before we leap into any interpretation.

      

On the other hand I think we can finally say with some authority that the CIA was in fact spawning a web of deception about Oswald weeks before Kennedy’s murder, a fact which without regard to conspiracies or anti-conspiracies in Dealey Plaza directly contributes to the outcome in Dallas one way or the other.  The other piece that fits into that concerns the Kostikov story, Kostikov being a department 13 KGB officer, that’s assassinations, a person with whom Oswald is alleged to have spoken in Mexico City.  And I don’t have time to go into that during the formal part of the presentation but if there is interest in it I have some ideas and we can maybe address that in the Q and A.

      

Without any further adieu looking at me speak is one thing but I would prefer that we take a look at some of these new files.

     

(John then showed a good clear color slide of Oswald CIA file folders.  They were red with “Official DO File” on them.  Then a record and routing sheet.)

This to me is what’s new in the files.  (Oswald's 201 File, Vol 1, Folder 2, Page 10 of 206)

There are many other things besides this, but what you’re lookinng at is actually, and this is one example, I don’t intend to talk about this one in particular but what you are looking at here is a CIA standard record and routing sheet, a form 610A.  And when a document comes into the agency one of these things get’s slapped on the front of it and it comes into records integration division then it is routed through the various elements in the agency, CIA staff, counterintelligence, special investigations group, ( that’s Angleton’s mole hunting unit ) counterintelligence operations, counterintelligence  international communist group, Soviet Russia 6 branch, ( that’s Soviet Realities, )  Counterespionage Soviet Russian Division, Soviet Russia Russian intelligence service, Soviet Russia again, Propaganda, etc.

      

Once you read a couple thousand of these things you begin to figure out what these elements are.  Over here are the initials of the people who actually read this file.  This is an Oswald file by the way, an FBI, probably was an FBI report, yes, 3 July ‘61, that would be the Fain report.  And then next to their name we get to see in most cases a date stamp.

      

The Warren Commission never saw most of the documents, period, that concerned Oswald’s CIA files.  They saw nothing of the agency’s anti-Cuban operations.  And even the House Select Committee was not shown this type of document. They were shown what was behind these record sheets.  They wanted to see these routing sheets.  They were not allowed to see them.  And you are going to see why.  I call this really the internal audit trail.  These sheets allow us to see who in the CIA was reading Oswald’s files and when they were reading them.

 (Someone from the audience interrupts and asks a question.  He asks John something about a coulmn being blacked out.)

There’s no column blacked out, sir.  These are just portions blacked out.  These would be more elemental identifiers of a particular element.  In some cases there would be names.  This is not a problem.  We can figure out every single one of these.

 (I was watching this presentation, and since someone else had already interrupted, I couldn’t resist stating, “Well, you can anyway.”)

  

No, I’m serious it doesn’t take too long.  This is not rocket science.  If we only had two or three of these things we would have great difficulty.  But anytime you get a great quantity [of] data, somebody of average intelligence using very minimal analytic techniques can fill in all of these blanks.  Anyway, I was trained to do that in the Army, initially with enemy communications, and I don’t consider this enemy communications but it certainly is interesting.

      

This information up here is very crucial to me, I am going to show you later what I can do with this type of stuff up here, and up here, and down here.  When you have two or three thousand of these cables even though they black a lot of that out it’s possible to reconstruct, I think, the entire Directorate of Operations in the CIA.

      

Anyway, I would like to talk about two or three things to you, like obviously I cannot go on forever about too many things in one evenning, so I am going to focus on three things.  I would like to tell you about a deception, a lie, and an outrage.  

This is the outrage (referring to the document on the screen.  (This is Oswald's 201 file, Volume 1, Folder 3, Page 25 of 118.  Another copy of this document has RIF # 157-10004-10287, this one is, unfortunately, not online at The Mary Farrell Foundation. But, not too worry there are 7 more to choose from)

1.) 104-10015-10108 - See what I called as the 7th Batch
2.) 104-10300-10288
3.) 104-10300-10289
4.) 104-10196-10065 - not available on MFF
5.) 104-10434-10023
6.) 104-10075-10202
7.) 104-10079-10029

What we are looking at here is actually a CIA cable that was sent from the JM/WAVE station, I believe that’s up here, right there you can see it to the headquarters, and it’s actually sent on 22 November 1963 about 2242 ZULU, subtract 5 hours and you’ll get Eastern Standard Time so were are talking about, oh, Air Force One is about an hour, an hour and a half from landing at Andrews Air Force base at this particular point.  And what we have here is a message here that is talking to us about a Cuban emigre delegate who had a radio debate with Lee Oswald and Cuban emigre files about Oswald.  And the amazing thing to me is this, paragraph two, it says, “Above information has not been passed to the Secret Service, the State Dept. or the FBI,” because this Cuban emigre organization wants to have their own press conference. It’s what it says, in English.

Now I underline here what’s happened.  The president of the United States has been murdered.  His alleged assassin is in the custody of the authorities and the CIA has information, has files on the alleged assassin and they are not passing them to the FBI, or the Secret Service so that our emigree organization can have a little propoganda coup.  I think that’s outrageous, I don’t know what your views are  about it, but I find it outrageous. 

      

Now that was an old document, this is what’s new in the files.  This is the same document and you will see here that I have discovered a document where it’s not blacked out and in fact that Cuban emigre organization has a name, AM/SPELL.

      

AM/SPELL, that’s a cryptonym, all CIA cryptonyms, you know some AM cryptonyms don’t you?, AM/LASH, AM/WHIP, I have a few more I am going to show you in a minute.  This one AM/SPELL is the Cuban Student Directorate most of you who saw this cable before would have realized by know that the AM/SPELL delegate who had the radio debate is Carlos Bringuier.  Okay, so AM/SPELL, it’s very interesting cryptonym and in fact if you dig a little deeper.

      (new slide)

      

You will find that AM/SPELL received military training from the CIA and in fact [they] were paid for, the AM/SPELL budget was part of the CIA budget. Yes, Carlos Bringuier’s organization was a CIA organization, paid for by the CIA, trained by the CIA, with a military branch, and a propaganda branch [ DRE Propaganda Dept Head to be Manual Salvat.]  And here we are talking about, by this time there is still a; AM/SPELL actually their military operations had to be moved outside of the continental U.S. after the Cuban Missile crises pursuaint to the Kennedy deal with Kruschev, and what’s happening here is they are moving their military operations into Costa Rica and other places but their propaganda activities continue and here they are identifying one individual who is still on the KUBARK, that would be CIA, payroll he is identity 12, his name is actually Salvat, and he is in Miami at this time.  I just put this slide up, the teaching point from this is that AM/SPELL was in fact a CIA operation.

      (new slide)

Hmm, I should have shown you this one, sorry.  This is a little easier to see from the back.

      (new slide)

      

And then this is just to remind you that this CIA organization in fact had files, this is the original one I showed you that what we have here of course is AM/SPELL files, not Cuban emigre files, AM/SPELL files on Oswald are being withheld from the Secret Service and the FBI.

      (new slide)

 Now I want to talk to you about a lie.  This document here is, you can see the date, is a CIA communicaiton to the Warren Commission and it discusses a number of things but what I would like to focus you on very quickly is

      (new slide)

on page four.  It’s quite a lengthy cable.

      (new slide)

and I think I have a...you can see I’m rather amazed by something in here, and I’ll show you why.  That means I’m amazed, (referring to a big black quesiton mark, a marginalia made by John on the document.  The audience laughs.) 

      (new slide)

      

Now, the lines that I’m amazed by (See p. 514 of Oswald and the CIA) are right here.  This is in fact talking about Mr. Helms, Mr. Helms is telling Lee Rankin this information that we are reading here, and back in 1964, Mr. Helms, then, of course,  the Deputy Director for Plans is talking about why the Mexico City CIA station reported Oswald’s visit there.  

And if you look very closely, and it’s talking about surveillance and when and why American citizens are reported, etc., but if you look at this sentence here it says that in Oswald’s case it was the combination of visits to both the Cuban and Soviet, (John repeats for emphasis) Cuban and Soviet, Cuban and Soviet, Cuban and Soviet, (John pounds his foot into the stage three times for even more emphasis) Cuban and Soviet embassies which caused the Mexico City station to report this to headquarters in the first place.

      (new slide)

Now that’s a little bit problematic since what we’ve been told all these years is that although the information relating to Oswald’s contact by telephone with the Soviet embassy in Mexico City on 1 October was reported to headquarters on the 8th, in the famous 8 October cable, the information relating to several contacts Oswald had with the Cuban consulate, that should say consulate, did not surface until after the president’s assassination.

Now, wait a minute.  I thought it said here, didn’t Helms just say, yeah that’s what he said, he said here that it was his [meaning Oswald] presence at both locations that caused them to report it in the first place.

Now I have a doctrine called restraint  And what that means is we can’t rely on just one document.  I mean it might be a mistake.  What if this is a mistake?  I use General McChristian’s, he was Patton’s G-2 in World War II and he had a technique, he said two documents and one POW, or two POW’s and one document, then it’s valid, alright?  Well, that way soldiers don’t get killed [needlessly] on the battlefield, it’s reasonable. And we don’t want to get killed anymore in this case, do we?

      (new slide)

So, here we have another document.  And of course, this means I’m amazed here. (laughter)

      (new slide)

And heres what amazes me.  And you can see here that it says, that it says that okay we are talking about the 16 October memorandum and so on, and subesquently there were several (John pounds his foot into the floor again, repeating) several Mexico City cables in October, October?!, 1963. 

So,  Kennedy was assassinated in November.  What are these cables in October concerning?  Oswald’s visit to Mexico City as well as his visits to the Soviet and Cuban embassies.  Ah, two documents.  And I have my POW.  6 weeks ago Director Helms in a recorded interview on the record confirmed this story and admitted that they lied about this to cover thier sources.  So I have my two documents and my POW.  (laughter and applause)

The agency lied about Oswald’s visit, excuse me, they lied about when they knew that he visited the Cuban consulate.  The story we’ve been told is, “We didn’t know that until after the shots ring out in Dealey Plaza.” They knew immediately that our boy was in that consulate.  It’s very interesting.

      (New slide)

When the Mexico City CIA station reported Oswald’s presence, of course, headquarters had to respond, (humorously) “Who is this masked man who walked around down there?” Now this here is the famous headquarters response, the date is 10 October 1963, and what we have here is an entire page of just about everything Oswald did in Russia, who he married and practically the whole story is in here.  It’s very interesting if the question is about his visit to Russia.  

Of course, he went to Russia in October 1959.  How many years ago was that, let’s see, 1963, that’s like 4 years ago, they are talking about something going on 4 years ago.              

     (new slide)

Page two, 

and we’re still, you know, talking all about the things he was doing way back in 1960 and so on, and 1960 married Marina and so on, then there’s this curious paragraph right here, actually I should have one of those great big things in the margin over here that shows I’m amazed.  It says here, and I need you to really lock and load on this sentence here, it says here that, “The latest headquarters information,” headquarters, that means CIA headquarters, okay?, this is from CIA headquarters to its Mexico City station, now let’s take a look at this, okay, “Our latest information is a State [Dept.] report dated May ‘62.” 

      

Okay, let’s do a little math here.  This is 10 October 1963. The latest CIA information on Lee Harvey Oswald is May ‘62.

      

Me - Slight problem..

      

Yeah, he’s only been on television, and radio, and you know arrested, and demanded an FBI interview in the jail cell, and you know the whole, you know the story, all of you know the story really well.  God, can you imagine having CIA that doesn’t know what happened to this man in the previous 18 months? It’s extraordinary.  If it’s true.  See, but that’s the rub, it’s not true.

      (new slide)

      

Ah, I did!  There you go.  Wrong slide.  That means I’m amazed at that sentence there. 

      (new slide)

What’s interesting about these files now is that we have some idea of who did this.  So for example here we can see, well they are hiding a few things, aren’t they?  And why would they do this?  This is J.C. King, Chief of the Western Hemisphere division.  There’s his name.  But there’s this black spot over it.  What is his signature style classified or something? (laughter)  Actually there’s a reason why that’s on there, because J.C. King doesn’t sign there.  I’ll show you in a minute.  For some reason I guess they don’t want to protect Jane Roman, right?, she must be dead, no, she’s actually alive.  It’s very strange.

This would be Mr. Karamessines who is the Assistant Deputy Director for Plans.  This is an old cable.  What is new in the files is this copy and you can see that they forgot to black this part out here.  This is William Hood, signing off for J.C. King.  William Hood was a deputy under J.C. King.  Western hemispher division, by the way, is one operations division among many in the Directorate of Plans, the dark side, the covert side of the CIA.

Now we have some new names here.  We have Mr. Stephan Roll who works in the analytic shop of the counterintelligence section of the Soviet Russia Division.  And of course, over there’s Jane Roman.  Here we have Annie Egerter she was the one who opened Oswald’s 201 file, a year late, in 1960.  Anyway, she head a special projects group, which is another way of saying Special Investigations Group, which is Angleton’s mole hunting unit, CI/SIG, that’s where she works.  And she’s the one who has had Oswald’s 201 file restricted for the previous two years.  And then you can see we have a signature here that they still don’t want us to see.

      

You know, I have three copies of the Lopez report and I have about four copies of the I.G. report [CIA’s Inspector General’s Report] they are all redacted differently and when you put them all together you get a kind of stereoscopic vision (laughter),

      (new slide)

      

and I found another one of these same cables and bingo “John Scelso,” chief of Western Hemisphere/3.  I know it’s “John Scelso,” I don’t have the time to show you all the cables but I am going to show you some of my work and how I figured that out later.

      

Okay, so we know everybody who signed off for this draft.

      (new slide)

Now the very same day the agency reported this to it’s Mexico City station they also had to tell all of official Washington.  Well, not all of official Washington, okay,  I exaggerated but they go to tell the Dept of State, FBI, and the Navy and so on about this guy running around down there and essentially we have the same message here. 

      (new slide)

The problem is that there is one sentence missing in paragraph three here.  The date of latest information is May ‘62?  It’s gone.  It’s not there. 

      

So, I said to myself, aha!, this can’t be a mistake, right?  I mean if it was a mistake that sentence would be in both cables. [Mistake meaning it’s inclusion in the first cable, not it’s ommission here.]

But, they put that sentnece in the one they sent to the Mexico City station but they didn’t put it in the one that they sent on the exactly same date to the FBI.  Good thing they didn’t, I mean they’ve only been reading FBI reports for the previous 18 months, so how could they tell the FBI we hadn’t had anything from you for 18 months, it wouldn’t make any sense.  So, they didn’t put it in there.  And then we have the problem of saying, well, gee, maybe different people did it, huh, maybe different people saw this one than the other one, and of course you have this problem of the dark spaces down here so you can’t figure it out.  But you know me, just zip to another box in the archives, and there it is. (laughter)

      (new slide)

They don’t have the names here but I think if you’ll remember we saw SI/CR Roll earlier, and I think this is just about the right amount of space for Mr. Stephan Roll’s last name and that of course is the right organization for him there, and there’s Jane Roman, again, over here, CI liaison, and this would be Annie Egerter, CI/SIG. So, it’s all the same people in other words.

      (new slide)

Now, this would be the document they were talking about, the May ‘62 one, the “latest information,” actually the date of the report is late April, and it comes through in May ‘62 and it’s another FBI report.

      (new slide)

And this here is the cover sheet to an FBI report authored by a fellow Dallas person, a Mr. Hosty, on, um, what’s the date of his document? 10 September, 1963.  Now Mr. Hosty wrote a report about Lee Harvey Oswald on that date on the 10th of September and it entered the CIA on, September 20, well I can’t  read it now, September 28th or 23rd at 1:24 p.m. and the records integration division sent it over to Jane Roman, there’s her signature on the 28th or so, there’s her staff element and then she sent it over to the operations element in counterintelligence, Mr. Will Pataki, and he sent it over, I don’t know who this guy is, I just know it’s international communism under counterintelligence, and so on.

Of course, this would be a problem wouldn’t it, for “latest information being May ‘62?”  That wouldnt really fit would it?  I mean this is not May ‘62 it’s September ‘63, right?  So obviously there’s something wrong with that cable I showed you. 

      (new slide See p. 502 of Oswald and the CIA)

This here is another cover sheet.  This happens to be a cover sheet to another FBI document.  This one is well known amongst researchers as the so called Letterhead Memorandum.  Letterhead Memorandum from the FBI are rather special.  They make sure they don’t make mistakes, spelling mistakes.  It has to be real nice because it is for external distribution.  Letterhead Memorandum are a little higher grade jobs than just normal internal memoranda.  Anyway it was a very special LHM because it has in it the entire story of Oswald’s Cuban capers in New Orleans, you know, the arrest, the radio debates, the fricase on the street with Bringuier, the whole thing is in this report.  And that report came into the agency on October the 2nd.  Actually, you know that’s an interesting day because Oswald is leaving Mexico City at this particular point.  And they send it over to Jane Roman again.  And Jane Roman sends it over to the special affairs staff, to Mr. Horn and then he sends it over to somebody who’s initials are CR also in the special affairs staff, and then Ann Egerter gets it in CI/SIG and then it eventually winds it’s way back to Annette, and then on it’s way into a file which is not his 201 file.  This is 201 file number here, 201-289248, this is entered later.  This is the file that it was put into, right here 100-300-11, a special file.  I believe that this file has to do with Cuban operations. 

But once again, looking at this you would be amazed because, for example, Jane Roman is reading this Oswald report, an extraordinary one, I mean the whole story of what he did in New Orleans is quite amazing if you’ve read it.  And she’s reading this on the 4th and then of course on the 10th signs off on this cable that says they didn’t have anything on Oswald for 18 months, as is everybody including Egerter, and so on. 

      (new slide)

Now, this is a little chart I have prepared. Well, I took all the principle 610a routing sheets of these documents coming in from Navy and FBI and State Dept. on Oswald and then I just sort of plotted them out in to the internal boxes here as to who saw these reports, and when they saw them, and where they worked. It's a pretty neat graphic.

      (new slide)

And I’ve blown up just a piece of it for you just to show you graphically here the reports. These reports, all these reports here under this, sort of stary one here, in other words this one, this one, and this one fall in that18 month missing period.  These are how many people in the CIA read files about Oswald that they didn’t have. (laughter)

It’s very impressive.  It’s not one preson who’s having a brain cramp here.  I mean the entire agency is brain cramping if we are to believe that cable.  Not the entire agency, okay, the Soviet Russia Division, the Counterintelligence Staff, the Special Affairs Staff, you know, a number of people anyway, a very wide array of people.

      (new slide)

And just to remind you because I may have been running off at the mouth a little too long there, that this is the sentence that I am amazed by, “Latest headquarters information is a State Dept report dated May ‘62.’

Now I don’t know anyway to explain what we are looking at here other than operational use of Oswald’s files.  That’s what this is.  You have to understand that this is a deliberate act.  All of those people that signed off on that cable didn’t wake up one morning on 10 October and say, ‘Hey, gee, let’s go falsify an Oswald cable, no, it’s not the way, they don’t do things like that.  This deception, and I don’t call this a lie even, it’s not a lie, this is not for external distribution, this is not for public dissemination, this is a secret cable to the CIA station in Mexico City.  It’s not a lie, but it’s a deception.  It’s a conscience act to write a false story of what headquarters knew about Oswald.

Now we’ve been told they never used Oswald in any way.  I’m sorry, this here is hard evidence that his file is being used in some sort of an operation that involves the Mexico City station

      (new slide)

Could I have the lights on? 

From the moment that Lee Oswald returned from Russia in June 1962 his Cuban activities began.  They continued right down to the day before he left for Mexico City in September 1963.  The CIA knew about all of these activities and thanks to these newly released files we now know which CIA employees knew about and signed for access to the files about Oswald’s Cuban capers.  In October 1963 those very same people drafted a cable with a big whoping deception in it explicitly denying any knowledge of all of these activities.

Why did the agency conduct this deception operation about it’s knowledge of Oswald.  I think the public deserves an answer.  But I’m not going to give it to you, and you know what? I’m real proud to say that because I don’t want to.  In fact, I think what we need to do now is completely change the psychology around here.  It’s not my job to guess what this operation is or why they are doing this.  I mean think about it, since when do you get into a confrontation with somebody and this somebody has all the data and you don’t, and you have to guess?  That’s not fair.  So for the time being I don’t know and I don’t really care to guess.  

   

Obviously it’s got something to do with counterintelligence, we can see that, all the people who are on those Oswlad Cuban capers documents are all in counterintelligence, most of them are, but I don't find it useful to worry myself right now about it.  What we do know is that this takes place at a very important time in the agency's anti-Cuban operations.  I think from our standpoint the real question is, or actually a series of questions, let me put it to you this way, what does Oswald do, what are the agency's operations, and then well, once we know both of those do his actions have any relevance for those operations?  That would be the order, those should be the questions and the order in which they should be asked.

Six weeks ago I showed these documents to former Director of Central Intelligence, Richard Helms.  I’m happy to tell you that Mr. Helms did not lie to me and acknowledged, as I indicated a minute ago that they did lie about their knowledge of Oswald’s visit to the Cuban consulate, with respect to this part of the operation, in other words the deception, the deceptive message, Mr. Helms backed away and told me he did not really wish to be revealing agency secrets, and I told him I understood that, but ultimately I think they are going to have to tell us becasue that’s what the law says they have to do. (applause)

One might be tempted to rationalize this whole affair, and in fact people are, and I see it constantly, to rationalize it simply in terms of a post-assassination shock or trauma at the CIA.  In other words, well, maybe there was some sort of association or use of Oswald then he shows up in the New York Times shooting the president.  That’s mortifying.  The problem with that is that doesn’t explain why the agency would do something deceptive six weeks before the murder.  So you see this particular piece that we are looking at here tonight has nothing to do with a post assassination cover-up.  It can’t.  It’s six weeks before the assassination.  So there really isn’t any way of getting around this.  So, I would just like to declare victory in a certain way. We've got ‘em.  Oswald was part of an operation and we know it, and there’s no way out of it.  He just was. 

I would like to share with you some more information.  This is a lot of information  And I want to do this, not because we have time to go into all of it but I would like to show you what you can do because we are in a battle now over whether or not there is anything in these files, and I believe I've just given you a good example of something that is in them, more than one particular item I think I can convince you that the whole house of cards is about to come tumbling down.  Let me attempt to show you just what I mean.

      (new slide)

I like this one, I have better presentations of this one, but this looks like blood on an autopsy report, right? (laughter)  The only thing I don’t have is the coffee stain on here.  But this is my own artistry, my rendition of the Western Hemisphere Division after about two hours work.  Now actually there were hundreds and hundreds of hours that went into organizing the files in order, and then subdividing them by division, and branch, and section.  I had some students that helped me do this.  We worked for countless hours.  And the temptation was always to dive in there and see what they did, but we didn’t, for weeks and weeks and weeks.  But once we were done we had gone through all those JM/WAVE cables, and all the headquarters cables it took me two hours to do that.  And as you can see it’s a complete schematic of the Western Hemisphere Division including names and phone numbers, and in many cases the room numbers in which these people worked, pretty amazing I think. Now, that’s out of these new files.

      (new slide)

Heres a look at the special affairs staff. It’s a little neater  I’m still figuring out what some of these things are.  I’m very interested in these two branches here under, let’s see, under Intell, and I believe this is probably, the B is for Branch and what we are looking at here is Chief, probably of Military Operations Branch, and this could, I don’t know what this, electronic, or espionage operations, it’s probably espionage but the branch designations under EOB and SES were very intriguing to me (I may have gotten those letters wrong, maybe, maybe not.) like AR, and HH, and NS and SB, and then I found a name here Seymour Bolt ( Seymour R Bolten, maybe? Bolten's obit. ).  Some of you may know that name.  Then we have Nester Sanchez, remember?  The control for Rolando Cuebela?  And then we got, it’s not Howard Hunt, I thought it was!  But it was another guy, I forget his name right now who’s initials are in fact HH.  These end up being the initials of people but that’s not the case over here, this is paramilitray, or propaganda, foreign intelligence, or maybe it’s not, it’s propaganda  over here.  Anyway, this is the sort of work that is now possible.  What we are doing here is laying out the structure of the Directorate of Plans and it’s operations, although this is not it’s operations, but I am going to get to that in a second.

      (new slide)

Now, this is something I’ve put together on something you all know, CIA cryptnonyms.  I showed you a couple of them before, AM/SPELL, and a few you knew.  All cryptnonums start with a diagraph, the first two letters and then followed by a word.  You may recognize one or two of these, some of you may know by now that OD/ENVY is the FBI, OD/ACID is the State Dept., OD/URGE I believe is the INS, OD/YOKE is the U.S. government.  PB/PRIME is US, PB/RUEBEN is CUBA, and so on.  Here is all the Mexico crypts.  Many of you have heard of KUBARK, but I’m sure you haven’t heard of all these yet.  These come out of the files. 

      (new slide)

I have another one, and I’ll just throw this one up here real quick.  And most of you have heard of AM/LASH, or AM/WHIP, and you might be interested in seeing these AMs.  It’s quite a few isn’t it?  AM operations are all anti-Cuban operations.  It means they had quite a few anti-Cuban operations doesn’t it?  And you can find AM/SPELL in there and I believe AM/BUD is on here,  that’s the CRC here, the Cuban Revolutionary Council, and so on.  And we are filling in nice files now.  You know it’s interesting that although they redact most of this stuff if you get it once it’s usually a good start because a lot of these messages have references to other messages so if it references message 6102, you go to 6102 and it's [all] blacked out but you know it’s still the CRC.  So it’s through the cross referencing that allows us to build the files on each one of these compartments and begin to fill in the operation.  And in fact I think this is very significant work because for the first time we now have all the boxes to put the pieces in. 

You see anti-Cuban operations is a huge morass, thousands of people, all kinds of things going on,  but this here for the first time allows us to really get all the boxes and sort of start putting the pieces in the right places.

      

Some of you may have heard of JM/WAVE, here is about 15 more JM compartments. 

      

And in fact you may recognize ZR/RIFLE, yeah, I put it up there, well, I've got about another 10 ZR compartments.

      

A bunch of Q compartments.  QK/ENCHANT is interesting.  QK/ENCHANT, we have a QK/ENCHANT document that has two names associated with it, and their agent numbers, and one of the two names is Clay Shaw. 

      

These are of course all of the Soviet people we doubled.  Let's see which one of these is Nosenko, I forget, maybe AE/FOXTROT.

      

So, what I’m saying is now we are in a position to lay out the agency’s operations, and it’s structure, especially where it concerns anti-Cuban operations and we are in a position to begin to ask questions such as I was posing before, and to begin, to begin to answer them.  Do Oswald’s actions have any relevance for these operations?  Or if the FBI is right, and while some of these plots, some of which are obviously not nice such as AM/DEAD, where’s that one? (laughter)  There it is.  AM/DOT, by the way is a collection station, probably an Army or an Air Force one.  I beleive AMOT or DOT is Eglin Air Force base,

      ( someone from the audience notices another funny one)

 What, which one, or yeah AM/CROAK, that’s not a nice one either, that doesn’t sound very nice.  Or  AM/BANG, I like that one.

      (Tom Blackwell asks about QK/ENCHANT)

Well, what I like about the QK/ENCHANT thing is that, you know I line these things trying up seeing if I can get patterns, and of course QK/ENCHANT is very close to QJ/WIN, in terms of, the crypt is actually just the first two letters.  So, the QK, and the QJ are very close, and somebody today told me, I don’t know who it was, maybe it was Dick, Dick Russell, are you here Dick, can I talk about that, you know, what the, the poison, okay, well it involves poison and drugs and so on, and how many of you have played a medieval game, you know, like dungeons and dragons, when you enchant the enemy, when you enchant somebody, you kind of control their mind.  I don’t know, maybe Clay Shaw was involved in something like that.

So, now we can take a magical mystery tour through the Directorate of Plans.  And Oswald’s CIA files suggest an operational interest beyond simple curiosity in Oswald.  So, what then?  This is something the CIA should think very carefully about before the Assassination Records Review Board begins to deal with the documentary issues which flow from this particular deception.  The CIA has released many operational files but has not abandoned all hope of withholding many files that it still considers too sensitive.  This must change.  The current CIA’s leadership’s interest should be with the future, not in the past.  And it’s not too late to let the rest of the documents out.  It’s the right thing to do.  

      

The same thing applies to the FBI, and I talked to you today about FBI files that haven’t even been listed in the archives in the national archives.

     

Our position has to be resolute, no more withholding, nothing.  We want to see all of these last few hidden pieces.  I want to see CD 1359.  CD 1359 is a Top Secret FBI document and it talks about a very sensitive FBI source, who goes down to Cuba and then it gets to the part where it says, “and Castro says,” and then it’s all black.  Well, we know that it’s the SOLO soource, the Childs brothers, and we know Castro’s saying it, so what’s the source and method, we already know that, they’re not protecting the souce and the method, they’re protecting what [Castro] he said.  They are protecting the intelligence value, that’s not fair.  I want to know what the CIA knew that Castro said about what Oswald did inside that embassy.

The law of the land is on the side of full release and the people no longer bear any responsibility for figuring out, or guessing, and being laughed at for doing so.  The present presumption that the government must let all it knows of the truth out necessitates the CIA’s release of the rest of these documents.  And I think they owe us an explaination too. (applause)

I understand that there are probably people alive who are going to get hurt.  And I don’t take this lightly.  I mean people who worked for us in Cuba today.  If I can do that, so can the Cubans.  If we put these people’s lives on the line 30 years ago for some screwball scheme like sending in a mini-sub with an explosive sea shell, for crying out loud, we can do it again to restore the faith of the American people in their institutions when we weigh it like that there’s no choice anymore.  They’ve got to release of these files.  There is, you see, a national security issue at stake, a far deeper one than the “sources and methods” one arguing against release.  It’s now a compelling national security that the people believe in thier institutions, a far more compelling argument for full disclosure.

I’ve asked a CIA official I have come to know and respect recently, I said to him, ‘If Oswald had done something for the agency, could the CIA today argue against it’s release because of “sources and methods”?  He replied, “Now that’s a question for the Assassination Records Review Board.’  I thought to myself, boy I really want to be the fly on the wall when they get to ask that question. 

In fact, we have to trust these five people, this review board, when the doors close and they get that "Wow" briefing, when they are told why this stuff has to remain classified. But I'm betting on those five people.  I'm banking on them,  that they are going to do right.  (applause)

Now, having said all of this it’s late, so let me summarize and take any quesitons if you have them, let me just summarize what I think I’ve said which is that Oswald appears to have played a role in some sort of intricate headquarters deception operation obviously involving it’s Mexico City station.  After the assassination the CIA covered up much of it’s 8 October through 21 November knowledge of Lee Harvey Oswald’s Mexico City activities, and his Cuban capers in general.  And finally I showed you I think that Oswald’s AMSPELL files played a role in the DRE’s propaganda activities on the very day of the assassination.  The agency’s deceptions, denials, and lies about Oswald are quite troubling, they are to me and I’m quite sure they are to you too.  It’s funny it’s the agency’s own obturate attitude that really has drawm me and probably most of you to looking into it.

I suppose I should speculate just one little bit, can I do that, just one little bit I wonder what would have gone through the mind of a conspirator if they had known about these files, if someone had known that Oswald’s files were being used in this way.  And I think that’s it’s safe to say looking at the people who read his files, who annalyzed his files that to turn loose Oswald’s files is really to turn loose the most sensitive agency components and their operations.  In other words, to tell the truth about Lee Harvey Oswald is to take a big camera and shine it from the Counterintelligence staff, through the Soviet Russia Division and on into the Special Affairs Staff.  And as I was arguing earlier today, it’s the same thing in the FBI, it gets us into the espionage section, the intelligence division, into their most sensitive pieces, and into the Navy’s ONI, and the Naval investigative function, it takes us into OSI, the Air Force, it turns some very, very sensitive parts of our government inside out.  If someone knew this about Oswald that would make him the perfect, perfect person to pick, either to murder Kennedy or to be a patsy, either way. 

In any event, and I know you’re not listening to me Gerry ( Gerald Posner ) but we shouldn’t try and close the case without first looking at the files.  I thank you very much.

      (applause)

      Q and A

      We’ll take a few questions, okay, go ahead sir.

Jack White - I noticed on one of your slides there was a reference to Harvey Lee Oswald, and we know that other such false names were used that were sort of take offs on Lee Harvey Oswald.  Can you comment on that and was there any purpose to that? 

Newman - Well, I dont know if there’s a purpose, but there’s certainly a pattern.  And the foremost expert in the world on Harvey Lee Oswald is a person by the name of Peter Dale Scott, as well as ( being an expert on ) Lee Henry Oswald-

      

White - Yeah, Lee Henry Oswald, that was -

Newman - which is the name on his 201 file when they opened it.  As far as we can determine it originates, the Harvey Lee Oswald in Mexico City, the Mexico City, the FBI also had a field station in Mexico City.  I neglected to mention that earlier this morning.  And we have their files.  The earliest reference I've seen is in an FBI message.

White - Was there a deliberate attempt to cause his name to be different in different files for some reason or do you have any speculation on that?

      

Newman - Well, okay, speculation isn't something I enjoy doing very much but I think that it’s safe to say that if you have two or three different versions of something moving through the same bureaucratic channels it might test those channels, other than that I couldn’t tell you exactly what the reason is.  But it’s more than one incident I’ve got a file, I’ve got a Harvey Lee Oswald file which is now quite substantial. 

Q - You said in October in Washington that we are going to have to accept the fact that there was an Oswald threat to kill Kennedy in the Cuban embassy, could you eloborate on that?

Newman - Well, I don’t know if I used those exact words, but I think that what I said was that what we have to accept is that the FBI was sure that he made that threat, cause I don’t know if he did, and I don’t know if he didn’t.  I do know that Director Kelly said that he probably did it, made such a threat in the Soviet embassy but he was sure that he did it in the Cuban consulate.  Now, we don’t have a tape recording, what we do have is what I showed you.  We have documents.  We now know from these documents that there were several cables in October 1963 about Oswald’s visit to the Cuban consulate.  When you go to the national archives today and you go into his Directorate of Operations file, and you go to the place where those cables are what you’ll find are pink sheets. [Withdrawl sheets]  We don’t even get to see the externals of the message.  The entire cables, every single one of them are classified in their entirety.  They have not been released.  So, my answer is they know.  And they owe us the answer.  And I don’t know what it is yet.

Q - You know Blakey had said that a high ranking American intelligence agent had told the committee that they confirmed the essence of the threat.  Do you have any idea who that could be, that source?

Newman - Well, Director Kelly’s book, and I recommend it to all of you, what is it, FBI Story?, somebody help me, Mary, is that Kelly’s title?

Mary Ferrell - As I understand it Mr. Hosty wrote the chapter-

      

Newman - Right.  Well, he was certainly very, very helpful in that.  But the book

just for your reference is, I beleive, “A Director’s Story” ?

      

Ferrell - I believe that’s it.

      

Newman - A Director’s Story, and Clarence Kelly is the author and he was the director of the FBI after J. Edgar Hoover died.  He says in that book that we tapped, his exact words were “our government tapped Oswald’s phone call from the Cuban consulate to the Soviet embassy.”  Now, that’s just one more nail in the coffin.  That would be my third document. I don’t even consider that a document because it’s his book, but he made that claim based upon documents that he was looking at.  So, I guess I’ll just have to leave it at that. The FBI is awfully, awfully sure that he did that.  I would prefer to reserve judgement what’s in those files. 

Q - One of the documetns you showed us listed Oswald's weight as 165 pounds, could this be a second Oswald?

      

Newman - Well, in fact there are more discrepencies than just the weight.  I believe the height is way off by how many inches, help me out here, two or three inches-

      

Ferrell - 5 inches.

      

Newman - Okay, 5 inches, so the heights off.  So, there are a number of these discrepencies, and there are all sorts of possibilities.  Let me make it clear that everything we know, at least everything I know from what I’ve seen in these files one Oswald being there, there could be two Oswald’s there, the real Oswald, or an imposter could be doing this, it doesn’t matter really.  I don’t care if it is just an imposter.  That’s a hell of a story, somebody down there impersonating Lee Harvey Oswald.  And, you know, if there’s no imposter down there, that’s a hell of a story for Oswald to be running around there talking about killing the president or whatever it is that he’s doing, and to be part of some sort of a counterintelligence operation here.  So, I’ll take it either way, I really don’t care, in fact if there’s a real Oswald and an imposter, that’s good too.  I’ll take any combination and we’ve got a hell of a story and we need an answer for it, so whether there’s a 10 foot tall Oswald or a 5 foot tall Oswald, or 10 Oswald’s it doesnt” really matter.  I hope that wasn’t glib.

Q. - Do you have any files, or do you know anybody that has any proof that Oswald was in the Soviet embassy or consulate?

      

Newman - What he did in the Soviet consulate?

      

Q - Any proof that he was in the Soviet consulate.

      

Newman - Oh yes!  Whether it’s an imposter or the real Oswald he’s certainly there. Now we went through this last year with Nechiporenko and others.  And there are problems with some of the descriptions of Oswald, some of the clothing he was wearing and pictures in the passport, there are a number of issues, more than we could possibly have the time to go into now and I can’t tell you whether he’s in there or an imposter is in there.  Somebody using Oswald’s name is in there, yeah we know that.  And we know it from several ints (int is short for intelligence. humint would be human intelligence, sigint would be signal intelligence) we have people that we had working for us inside the Soviet consulate and we had the thing bugged, we had the telephones tapped.  I believe that in the case of the Cuban consulate, not to change the subject that we even had a bug in the armchair of the the senior attache in there, cause we had the furniture maker on the take. So, we had a number of ways to surveill what was going on in these places, not just one.

Q - You had me at a disadvantage cause I couldn’t come last year, one spy case at a time, but what I wanted to ask you is why did they censure a name out of the Passport to Assassination?  Was there any comment about that when it was translated, the American translation, on the West coast?

Newman - I can’t answer your specific question on that.  I do know this that Peter Dale Scott confonted Nechiporenko about a specific issue and Nechiporenko responded, “Oh, well of course I wrote about that.”  And Peter Dale Scott said,  “No you didn’t.” And Nechiporenko said, “Oh yes I did.  Give me my book.  My god, it’s missing. It’s not there.  They’ve taken it out.”  So, we do know that some things were deleted from his book.  But I can’t answer your specific question.

 Q. - I understand it was a name from a Soviet intelligence agency in the Russian embassy.

Newman - Could be.  Sorry, I can’t-

Q. - Nothing, no comment?

Newman - It’s not a no comment sir, I’m honestly telling you I don’t know what the answer is to that specific question.

 Q. - If we give you the name can you put it in your chart later?

      

Newman - Oh yeah.

Q - Allright

Tom Blackwell - Tell us if you will about the process that you go through when you see a name that has been blacked out, are you able to find a seperate document that where it has not been blacked out and you have been given both versions for some reason.  Is it always from a more complete copy or are you able to just sort of guess and come to an understanding of what that is?  Tell us about that.

      

Newman - Well, I would use a number of what I would call analytic attack techniques.  And the first thing I would do is look for another copy of the document, as I’ve said most documents that I have now I own three or four copies of them, they are always different.  I mean the same person can’t possibly redact a half a million pages.  So what happens is you get a lot of people that are processing boxes from various parts of the agency and they do their best to redact what they think is sensitive.  So, the chances are that there will be another copy somewhere.  Now if you can’t get it that way you can call up people you’re interviewing and say, “Hey, who do you think this is,” and sometimes you get it that way and then you can take that chart, or those charts that I have and I’ve recovered all the names of these people or most of them just from the general cable traffic, so I would look at who this cable was from, where it was from and then I would get my little handy dandy [chart] and say oh yeah well here’s these three guys working this section it’s got to be one of those.  You can do it that way, so there are many ways to get this information.  Once you get a flood of data it’s almost impossible to withhold anything, it really is.

Tom Blackwell - I find it interesting there appear to be so many different standards of redacting in this-

Newman - That’s right.  Do you know, can I comment on that, so many different standards of redacting.  I think that this is the price the agency has to pay for not having declassified things in a regular way, orderly way, over the years as they should have been.  And I’m not talking about things that were not part of the automatic downgrading process but it’s very clear when you look at this material that there is a large percentage of what remained classified until 1994 even was not in that category.  What we have had here is an abuse of the classification system, not releasing, and then the people lost faith, then somebody made a movie, how irreverant of him, and then we had a law passed that says we have to know the truth, and now they have to let it go by bucket loads.  When you do that you can’t stop things from falling through the cracks.  And it’s not our fault, it’s the fault of the government really for not doing things the way they should have been doing them all along.

      

Tom Blackwell - On one of your lists you have the name QJ/WIN.  Do you know what that term means, or who that is?

      

Newman - Well, we know a little bit about QJ/WIN, yes.  I think QJ/WIN, WI/ROGUE, YQ/CLAM and a number of others are invovled in the Executive Action program.  In fact I was very interested somebody today, I wasn’t down here at the time said that in fact he’s identified QJ/WIN as Suerte, yes?  Somebody help me out.  No somebody gave a briefing today where they argued...  I don’t think we know the exact answer but we know a lot more than we did two or three years ago about QJ/ WIN and WI/ROGUE and a number of these people.  He’s certainly a European and he was brought in to either participate himself directly in these types of operations, or to recruit and train people who were, beyond that I think we are still kind of filling in the blanks.

      

Tom Blackwell - Thank you very much

      

Newman -Thank you all very much