LEE HARVEY OSWALD, THE CIA, AND LSD: NEW CLUES IN NEWLY DECLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS
An unredacted memo adds depth to our understanding of the CIA’s response to allegations that Oswald worked with the spy agency.
[Note: One focus of the article concerns a memorandum and Congressional testimony of a James Wilcott. I personally knew Jim back in the late 80’s and early 90’s. We were both deeply involved with the 3 yearlong 24/7 Nuremburg Actions vigil at the Concord Navel Weapons Station in Concord, CA protesting U.S. weapons shipments to Central American dictators. Jim was the sweetest of people! Jim always kept his home open to us fellow activists when we needed some respite from the outdoor protest. Spent many an evening listening to Jim discussing how the CIA operates. I don’t remember Jim saying much about his personal CIA activities. It might have been because his role as CIA payroll officer for all of Japan was relatively mundane and uninteresting. Both Jim and his wife who was deceased at the time I knew Jim were CIA agents. Jim always suspected that the CIA might have had some involvement in his wife’s cancer!
There was one personal CIA incident that Jim did tell us about on numerous occasions. That was when President John F. Kennedy was supposedly assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald. Jim was shocked when all those in his office suddenly broke into cheers! Confused Jim sought an explanation. He was told that Oswald was one of them (CIA). In fact, Jim was told that he had been issuing payroll to Oswald all that time. Jim declared that he had never done that, only to be told it that it had been under another name.
A while after the protest action had wound down, Jim came down was terminal cancer. At some point my wife and I became Jim’s caregiver. One morning I assisted Jim as best I could before I went to work. Later that day, my wife came to help and discovered that Jim had passed away. I wish I had realized that the end was so near for Jim, as there was no one to comfort him in the end. I also regret that I was unable to get access from relatives to any of Jim’s papers because they might have been politically interesting. MEK]
December 19 2022, 3:22 p.m.
THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION declassified a new clue last week to the relationship between Lee Harvey Oswald and the Central Intelligence Agency. Among the intersections between Oswald and the CIA, his time as a young Marine at the Atsugi naval air facility in Japan in 1957 is high among them.
Atsugi was a launching pad for U-2 spy flights over the Soviet Union and was also a hub of the CIA’s research into psychedelic drugs. “A CIA memo titled ‘Truth Drugs in Interrogation’ revealed the agency practice of dosing agents who were marked for dangerous overseas missions,” wrote author David Talbot in “The Devil’s Chessboard,” his 2015 biography of former CIA Director Allen Dulles.
Talbot’s exploration of the link ended there: “Some chroniclers of Oswald’s life have suggested that he was one of the young marines on whom the CIA performed its acid tests.”
A new document released in full last week relates directly to Oswald’s time at Atsugi, revealing details about the CIA’s response to testimony from a former agency accountant that the spy service had employed Oswald — who went on to be a gunman in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.
The CIA’s role in Kennedy’s assassination remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of American history. A majority of Americans believe the president was killed as part of a conspiracy that went beyond Oswald, and roughly a third believe the CIA or elements within the CIA had a hand in it.
The CIA’s role in Kennedy’s assassination remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of American history.
The main theory posits the assassination as a response to Kennedy’s firing of Dulles, a cloak-and-dagger powerbroker, following the failed CIA Bay of Pigs operation to unseat Fidel Castro’s Communist government in Cuba. Some believers of the theory also point to evidence Kennedy was souring on the Vietnam War or militarism in general. If Dulles did orchestrate a coup against Kennedy, it would be far from his first.
A memorandum from 1978 reports that a finance clerk with the CIA, James Wilcott Jr., had informed a House panel exploring the assassination that “the CIA hired Lee Harvey Oswald when Oswald served in Atsugi.” The memo goes on to cast doubt on Wilcott’s claim, noting that he arrived in Tokyo in 1960, after Oswald had left the base, suggesting that Wilcott’s claim is based on “second hand” information.
A version of the document was declassified by the Trump administration in 2017, though it redacted a portion of a note that runs along the bottom of it. That redaction obscured the name of a CIA official, Dan Nieschur, who fielded requests from congressional investigators in the 1970s and searched Oswald’s files. Jefferson Morley, editor of the Substack newsletter JFK Facts, said that inconsequential lifting of such redactions seems to be common in this latest document release, allowing the government to claim it is releasing thousands of documents, while most had largely already been in the public domain.
The memo, written to a person identified only as “JHW,” explains that CIA official Russ Holmes “inherited the so-called Oswald files, but that he has assured me the Agency had no contact with Oswald.” The memo says that “contrary records” might be in “EA” — a likely reference to the CIA’s East Asia desk — and that they would be searched for and checked if found.” “He is after it,” the memo says of Holmes, who became legendary for his now-declassified CIA archive on the assassination.
The new JFK files include a number of personnel records connected to Wilcott, whose testimony before the House committee in the late 1970s made news at the time. Read more
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OSWALD LINK TO C.I.A. REPORTED AT INQUIRY
What We Found in the New JFK Files
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