April 11—Despite the hasty claims by mainline media that the newly-released files on the assassination of United States President John F. Kennedy do nothing to undermine the “lone assassin Oswald” narrative, early results tell a different story—one that may well trigger a long- overdue re-evaluation of the blinding of the nation’s pathway over the last 60-plus years. As James DiEugenio, author of studies on the assassinations of JFK and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., testified to the April 1 hearing by Congress’s House Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets on the JFK assassination files, “over 90% of the public believes that something monumental happened after the Kennedy assassination, that the United States went from a country that was bathed in triumph and optimism after World War II to one that was now covered with cynicism and skepticism.”

Initial findings from the newly-released documents have already highlighted the role of James Jesus Angleton, who appears to have been a handler of Lee Harvey Oswald in the lead-up to Kennedy’s assassination. For example, Angleton, who headed the CIA’s counterintelligence department from 1954 to 1975, lied under oath to a 1978 Senate investigation about the CIA’s connection to Oswald, which traced back to 1959. In 2023, it was revealed that Angleton had put Oswald on a CIA “mail coverage” (mail interception operation) in November 1959 and that, in the month prior to the Nov. 22, 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Angleton had a 181-page file on Oswald. Far from undermining the narrative that “Oswald was a patsy of the CIA,” two newly-revealed examples greatly strengthen the case that Angleton had a direct and personal role in keeping Oswald as a private asset.

The Angleton Case

First, the portions of Angleton’s 1975 secret testimony to the Senate that the CIA had decided needed to be blacked out (material on 39 of the transcript’s 112 pages), have now been released without redaction. There, the CIA had hidden Angleton’s defense of his reading the mail of U.S. citizens, where he claimed that the “sole purpose” of his “mail coverage” program (designated “HTLingual”) was to allow the CIA to approach and recruit targeted individuals. He claimed that he had successfully recruited individuals by doing so. Of course, it is both possible and likely that he was lying about the recruitment being the “sole” purpose, as individuals were also targeted not for recruiting, but to be monitored as political opponents. (The name of the anti-war scientist Linus Pauling, for instance, appears on Angleton’s list just after Oswald’s.) However, Jefferson Morley, the in-depth researcher of the “JFK Facts” blog, judges that, since the lowly Oswald wasn’t a notable critic of policy, Angleton’s interest was for possible recruitment, or at least the use of Oswald as an asset.

Second, the CIA had also blacked out, from Angleton’s later (1978) secret Senate testimony, his direct lie under oath, that Oswald had never been the subject of a CIA project. Further, the Senate apparently knew that Angleton had lied, as the follow-up question was precise, whether he knew a Reuben Efron (the man whom Angleton had reading Oswald’s mail from 1959 to 1962). Hence, the CIA had clear reasons all these years to hide Angleton’s lying under oath and Efron’s role on behalf of Angleton.

These two newly-unredacted items strengthen what had been known from a 2023 document release. There, it was learned that six senior members of Angleton’s counterintelligence team had met on Oct. 10, 1963 (six weeks before the assassination) to craft a cover story to keep lower-level CIA officials in the dark about Oswald. The occasion was that the CIA station in Mexico had monitored, by wiretap and photographs, a visit to the Soviet embassy by a man named Oswald. The chief of station there, Win Scott, on Oct. 8, 1963, sent a cable to CIA headquarters, asking who this “Oswald” fellow was. By Oct 10, Angleton’s top officials had signed off on a cable that pretended they had not been tracking Oswald.

As Morley describes it, “the question was referred to a group of senior CIA officers in the Counterintelligence Staff and in the Western Hemisphere directorate” and “not clerks, bureaucrats, or paper pushers. They were senior operations officers. That is to say their primary responsibility was running covert operations.” Despite their having a voluminous file on Oswald—which included his time in Russia, his support of the “subversive” Fair Play for Cuba Committee, his arrest for fighting with CIA-funded anti-Castro and anti-JFK Cuban exiles in New Orleans, and his personal mail—they chose merely to cite one outdated State Department memo, saying that Oswald’s two-and-a-half years in the Soviet Union had had a “maturing effect” on him. The message was crafted to convey that there was little reason to worry about him—that is, “nothing to see here.”

Morley concludes that Angleton’s use of his mail-reading program and his direct lie on the CIA-Oswald relationship remove the possibility of an innocent reading of the October 10 document. He writes, the “October 10 cable destroys the cover story, fed to the Warren Commission, that the CIA only had a ‘routine’ interest in Oswald before the assassination. To the contrary, a half-dozen high-ranking officers were familiar with his biography, leftist politics, foreign travels and foreign contacts six weeks before JFK was killed.” Morley also blames the CIA for not passing along to the FBI, Secret Service, or any other U.S. security officials that, when Oswald visited the Soviet Embassy, a known KGB hitman happened to be there at the time. So, it adds to the picture that Angleton’s six senior operations officers were acting to deliberately preserve Oswald as a live operation of theirs.

Curiously, after the assassination and the silencing of Oswald, Angleton apparently promoted the lines that the KGB had recruited Oswald and that Oswald was merely a disturbed loner. Angleton provided interviews to Edward Jay Epstein, who retailed that narrative. When in 1964 Yuri Nosenko—the famous Soviet defector whose information shut down a major KGB ring in France and got at least two Soviet agents arrested—confirmed for the CIA that Oswald had not been recruited by the KGB, Angleton would not believe it. Nosenko spent the next three years in virtual solitary confinement, where Angleton tried to break him down.

Angleton’s ‘Vendetta’ Against LaRouche

Angleton was forced into retirement in December 1974, but was never prosecuted for his lying under oath to the Senate. Seymour Hersh’s 1974-75 series on Angleton’s CIA team spying on Americans was a contributing factor to pushing Angleton and his team out of the CIA. Hersh’s June 1978 article about Angleton, published around the time of Angleton’s second and final secret testimony to the Senate, opened: “From forced retirement, James Jesus Angleton wages covert war on those who, he feels, have weakened the C.I.A.” In private life, he had a team of loyalists waging that covert war. Of note, from no later than 1982 and through to his death in 1987, according to Angleton’s admirer Burton Hersh, “Angleton was amusing himself just then with a vendetta against Lyndon LaRouche.” What was that vendetta about?

Around the time that Angleton did his last lying under oath to the Senate, physical economist Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. was undermining decades of Angleton’s work. LaRouche had been advocating in the 1970s for the development of fusion energy and non-linear plasma physics as science-drivers for generalized economic advances. In 1978, he promoted the military advantage of rendering offensive nuclear weapons, as President Reagan would later put it, “impotent and obsolete.” Both the U.S. and Russia could benefit from ending the Mutually Assured Destruction “chicken” game—or, as Kennedy had described the MAD policy a few months before his death, the idea that “the expenditure of billions of dollars every year on weapons acquired for the purpose of making sure we never need to use them is essential to keeping the peace. But surely the acquisition of such idle stockpiles—which can only destroy and never create—is not the only, much less the most efficient, means of assuring peace.”

Early on in the Reagan Administration, and under the sponsorship of the National Security Council, LaRouche conducted secret back-channel negotiations with Soviet officials, over the prospect of Soviet-American collaboration in the development of defensive systems based on “new physical principles.” He reported the results, from late 1981 through early 1983, to Richard Morris, the special assistant to Reagan’s National Security Advisor, Judge William Clark. It was Clark who would help Reagan restore the proposal for the Strategic Defense Initiative to the text of his March 23, 1983 national address before delivery, to the surprise of those in Reagan’s staff who had earlier removed it.

Angleton’s team—a coterie of “retired” intelligence officials and media contacts—went into overdrive to destroy LaRouche. Their hand is all over the initial April 23, 1983 “Get LaRouche” gathering at the salon of investment banker John Train. For example, the producer of the January, 1984 NBC-TV bizarre assault on LaRouche —including deliberately wild accusations of LaRouche devising assassination schemes against Henry Kissinger and Jimmy Carter—was one Pat Lynch. She said that she had been collaborating with Angleton and had obtained “non-public information” from various intelligence agencies. Angleton himself reported that he had joined forces with Henry Kissinger, who had said that LaRouche’s access to Reagan’s White House was “outrageous” and “unforgivable.”

Further, Train himself had married into Angleton’s circles. In 1961, he married Maria Teresa Cini, a devotée of Prince Valerio Borghese, the leader of neo-fascist coup attempts in Italy in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Angleton, as a young OSS officer at the end of World War II, had famously secreted the fascist Borghese away from certain trial and expected execution. (Borghese’s private army had collaborated with the Schutzstaffel (SS), a major paramilitary organization under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.) But this is just the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Much more than these two paragraphs can usefully be studied in a 2006 EIR article entitled, “John Train and the Bankers’ Secret Government.”

Getting Out of Angleton’s Hell

At the recent hearing on the JFK files at the U.S. House Oversight Committee’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, Oliver Stone, director and co-producer of the 1991 film “JFK,” ended his opening statement with the image of the type of evil that had been visited upon the country. He recounted that Angleton, nearing death, spoke of what he called the “grand masters” of intelligence—besides himself—mentioning Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, and others. Angleton observed that “if you were in a room with them, you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in Hell. I guess I will see them soon.”

Can these files, along with still more unreleased ones on the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Senator Robert F. Kennedy, trigger a long overdue re-evaluation of the blinding of the nation’s pathway over the last 60 years and more?

James Jesus Angleton was a useful tool for the British “Great Game” of pitting victim nations against each other, by contrived falsehoods and the magnification of differences, by hook or by crook. He certainly would have had animus against President Kennedy’s June, 1963 policy, announced at American University. Here is a portion of that speech:

Let us examine our attitude toward peace itself. Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many think it unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable—that mankind is doomed—that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that view. Our problems are man made—therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable—and we believe they can do it again. …

What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children—not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women—not merely peace in our time but peace for all time. …

No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue. As Americans, we find communism profoundly repugnant as a negation of personal freedom and dignity. But we can still hail the Russian people for their many achievements—in science and space, in economic and industrial growth, in culture and in acts of courage. Among the many traits the peoples of our two countries have in common, none is stronger than our mutual abhorrence of war. Almost unique among the major world powers, we have never been at war with each other. And no nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union suffered in the course of the Second World War. …

So, let us not be blind to our differences—but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.

Angleton could no more abide Kennedy’s vision for finding a common basis for working with the Soviet Union, even though communist, than he could LaRouche’s statecraft breaking into the White House. The record of his “vendetta” against LaRouche also sheds light upon the capacities, motivations and methods of Angleton’s dealings during the Kennedy Presidency. Of no little note, there are live witnesses today who can testify and be examined, to help bring this republic out of the shadow of Angleton’s hell.