by Joan Mellen
Eleanor Reed answered to the Chief of the Soviet Russia Division, David Murphy. Reed would have had to request permission for her debriefings from the Office of Security, which passed her request on to the Personnel Security Division. Watching over the process would have been the Special Investigations Group (SIG), whose first purpose was to investigate possibilities that CIA had been penetrated by the KGB.
James Angleton was the chief of CI/SIG, a detail that in itself confirms that Angleton lied deliberately to the Church Committee when he swore under oath that Oswald had not been debriefed by CIA. The Special Investigations Group was one to which most Agency people were denied access, but Angleton wasn’t one of them.
The labyrinthine and convoluted twists and turnings of this Agency would have amused Jim Garrison had he lived to read the documents released over the years under the JFK Act. It is worth pausing over Robert E. Webster’s debriefing since it suggests that other defectors at the same time were highly likely to have been put through similar questioning and testing.
Webster’s debriefing report was not classified. The Webster files, which are available at the National Archives, are so copious that it renders even more suspicious that no such files have been made available (as of July 2013) for Oswald, who defected at the same time as Webster. Webster was put through at least two sessions of interrogation.
Eleanor Reed’s (Eleanor “Anderson’s”) debriefing report of Robert Webster, whose experience in the Soviet Union in time and purpose mirrored Oswald’s, is dated August 10, 1962. One component of her report is entitled “REPORT OF COVERT ASSESSMENT.” Its particular goal was to determine whether “the person assessed becomes a staff employee.” This demonstrates that Oswald too was being processed for use by CIA. That Oswald’s debriefing document, unlike Webster’s, was classified suggests that the decision had already been made by the Agency to retain Oswald in some capacity. Jim Garrison would have been gratified to have been armed with this corroboration.
Reed wrote up a “Personality Sketch of Webster,” both “as he is now and as he should be in the future.” Webster’s test performance, Reed concluded, “stands out most because of its seeming normality.”
“Mr. Webster,” Reed wrote, “is a self-centered and shallow person who is unequipped to handle the stresses of everyday living; tension and time tend to overwhelm him, so that he is busy squirming out from under their pressures and often seeking immediate gratification of his needs.”
Reed describes Webster’s personality in terms remarkably similar to those the Warren Commission would utilize in its condemnation of Oswald. Webster is termed a “sociopath": “the philosophies and ideologies of persons and peoples that develop from a common core of emotion and purpose are foreign to him; his inner voice cannot contribute to or take from these shared values, goals and feelings.” This report, made at the request of “Mr. Rudy Balaban” (alias “Rudy Valentino,” aka “Valentinov”) of SR6 (Soviet Realities), the Soviet Russia Division’s research component, was retained in an operational personnel file, but not shown to Webster himself.
In Webster’s CIA file there is also a document from “Group 1” (Excluded from automatic and downgrading and declassification with [03] only as the signature). It is addressed to Eleanor Reed, From: [03] IR/CR; its subject is “Appraisal of Interrogation” and, so that the reader might gain entry into Agency logic, it appears below in full. The date is 27 August 1962:
1. The eagerness of the subject to help and his repeated expressions of regret for having neglected opportunities for more detailed observations left me with mixed reactions. In my opinion this attitude detracted from his otherwise seemingly genuine manner and at least for me it “watered down” his attempt to generate a repentant impression.
2. The subject readily answered questions and was extremely friendly during both periods of interrogation. Plottings and data, however, by the subject on a blank town plan left him for homework later proved disoriented[sic]. The subject discovered his error during our second meeting and volunteered corrections.
3. As far as substantive intelligence gained is concerned, the interrogation provided data on a plant previously described as possibly in the electronics business as a probable radar storage and repair area. A hitherto unknown naval installation was also identified and located. The pilot plant of the subject’s employing institute was identified and located in an area other than the one previously assumed.
4. It can be said that if the subject’s bona fides are definitely established, positive intelligence gathered from him is of real value.
When Webster was brought out of the Soviet Union, the SR6 component photographed every piece of paper in his possession from cancelled bus tickets to matchbooks. He was ordered never to admit to anyone that he had participated in a CIA counter intelligence program. Webster was kept at a safe distance from the probing eyes of historians. But in the late 1990s indefatigable author Dick Russell tracked Webster down in a nursing home.
Webster seemed lost in himself, and inarticulate. At only one moment did he emerge from his shell. When Russell asked Webster if he had known Marina Oswald in the Soviet Union, Webster nodded his assent. So Webster and Oswald, serving in the same CIA program, apparently had encountered each other in Russia.
Donald Deneselya discovered that Webster and his Soviet “common-law wife,” Vera Platonova, had run into Marina Oswald at a Soviet “Rest Hotel” where people went for a day or two to unwind and relax. Webster’s Moscow address appeared in Marina Oswald’s notebook. Jim Garrison discovered none of this, yet all of it confirms his insight that Oswald was intimately connected to CIA.
AS FOR OSWALD
A May 31, 1960, Cover and Routing sheet, originating at CIA headquarters, and issuing from an Oswald file that began with the numbers 201-289248, indicates that CIA’s counter intelligence division was well aware of Oswald many months before it acknowledged that it had opened an Oswald file in December 1960. This document, dated May 31, 1960, is signed off on with the initials “JP,” suggesting “Jerry Prehn,” an agency employee at the time. (CIA dates the beginning of Prehn’s service as 1963.) It bears no identifying riff. Like the document admitting to Clay Shaw’s paid service for the Agency, it was released through the CIA’s Historical Review Program. May 31, 1960, is the first stamped date on the document. The fifth person to whom this document was routed was “JP’, on the 2nd of June, 1960. JP was at SR9.
Eighty years old in 2012, Mr. Prehn, while affirming that he was with CIA, denied to the author that he was the “JP’ on this document. He did not deny to the author that the Soviet Russia Division, Soviet Russia Internal Operations (SR/OPs, or Soviet Russia/Special Operations Branch, SR9), had knowledge of Oswald in 1960. By 1963, Prehn was attached to the American Embassy in Moscow. The chief of SR9 was Joseph J. Bulik.
This Cover and Routing sheet demonstrates that there was in May 1960 sufficient interest in Oswald to have his file shuffling up and down various components within CIA. A disgruntled former Marine, and, supposedly, a hapless defector, Oswald is mentioned on a routing sheet revealing that information about him crossed the desks of those attached to the most sensitive part of the Soviet Russia Division, SR9, Soviet Russia Internal Operations.
Years later, Russell Holmes, the CIA officer managing JFK assassination records during the HSCA investigation, revealed to the Assassination Records and Review Board (ARRB) that the Office of Security possessed a pre-assassination file on Oswald. This file resided with the Counter Intelligence Special Investigation Group (CI/SIG). In June 1962, when Oswald returned to the United States, those with a need to know about CIA’s debriefings included E. M. Ashcraft; Robert Crowley of the Operation Support Branch of Counter Intelligence; and Rudy Balaban of SR6, the Soviet Russia Division’s research component. We have already met Balaban, knee-deep in the debriefing of Robert Webster.
During the period of his defection, as A Farewell to Justice reveals, Oswald came to the attention of ‘Thomas Casasin” (a pseudon
ym, alternatively “Cacasin”), the Chief of the Soviet Realities (SR6) component. Unaware that Oswald had been placed in the Soviet Union by Counter Intelligence, Casasin developed “an operational interest in the Harvey story.” (Casasin’s approach to Oswald is discussed briefly in Chapter 11.) Casasin thought he might use Oswald in REDWOOD, a clandestine operation involving legal travelers to the Soviet Union, as I discovered after publication.
REDWOOD resided within the Soviet Russia Division’s SR10 component; it solicited travelers, people who had a legitimate reason for being in the Soviet Union, such as scientists bound for international conferences. REDWOOD unfolded within the Agency’s “SE” Division, a geographic designator for the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc countries of Eastern Europe.
So convoluted had CIA’s structure become, as we shall see shortly, that it was virtually impossible for its own employees and officers to penetrate its dark corners. REDWOOD was situated in a program called AE/OCEAN, which referred to information in crypt form disseminated through what CIA termed an “action indicator.” REDWOOD was the program, using tourists for intelligence purposes. “Oceans” were the individuals utilized. An “action indicator” was who exactly got the “hands on,” which bit of the agency was assigned the action element, while (usually) all the others remained passive. This program was blown to the Russians by one George Blake, a British spy working as a double agent in the service of the Soviet Union. A historical irony is that REDWOOD featured an assassination program that Lee Oswald inadvertently avoided.
Casasin changed his mind about using Oswald because of what he termed (with no explanation) Oswald’s “unusual behavior in the Soviet Union.” When Casasin later testified before the House Select Committee on Assassinations, CIA instructed him to withhold any information that might provide a chain linking Oswald to CIA.
In addition to the report about Robert E. Webster, Donald Deneselya took note of another report, also involving someone who had been in the Navy, in this case the U. S. Marines. There was no name on the report of this man, who had been debriefed by CIA upon returning to the United States with his wife and young child. He had worked in the Soviet Union at the Minsk Radio Plant and had provided CIA with details of the operations of the plant, along with the names of the people who worked there. This document was on blue sheets of paper and was four or five pages long. Unlike the Webster document, this report was classified at the level of “Confidential.”
The anonymous defector who worked at the Minsk Radio Plant (and there could have been only one), had been debriefed, Deneselya concluded, by one “CMDR” Alden Benum Anderson. Anderson, a commander in the Navy, had been seconded to the CIA’s Domestic Contacts Division, and the New York field office (00/CD). He was liaison to Robert T. Crowley, chief of the 00/CD Operational Support component. Crowley was the first name on paper when Robert Webster “defected” in 1959. Crowley was, to put it colloquially, joined at the hip with James Angleton, whom we have already met.
Because Donald Deneselya ran into Commander Anderson, dressed always in a civilian suit and tie, in the elevator at 1717 H Street, NW, he came to believe that the Commander, who lived in Virginia, was the debriefer of Oswald. It was more likely, however, that the “Anderson” who debriefed Oswald, the name “Anderson” surfacing only many years later, was in fact Eleanor Reed, Webster’s debriefer, so similar is the Webster summary of his debriefing to the descriptions of Oswald in the Warren Report.
Deneselya was on surer ground on the matter of Oswald’s having been debriefed. After President Kennedy was murdered a year or so later, Deneselya was certain that the missing name on the debriefing document about the Minsk Radio Plant was “Lee Harvey Oswald.” The format on the Minsk Radio Plant document was exactly the same as the format on the Webster documents.
He hadn’t thought to make a copy of the document—there were no copying machines in the office in those days, and, of course, the man described in the document was not then the notorious Oswald of Dealey Plaza. The document has never been seen since. It exists, for now, only in the memory of Donald Deneselya.
Complicating matters is that Deneselya only heard the name “Anderson” years later, and then from author John Newman who misread “Ashcraft” as “Anderson” on a Birch O’Neal document. What Deneselya saw was strictly the raw document; he had no direct knowledge of who did the debriefing. It was an extraordinary coincidence that “Anderson” may have been correct; Deneselya assumed the “Anderson” was the Commander, based on his 2007 obituary where he was referred to as “Andy Anderson.” But Deneselya has also remembered that the debriefing of the man from the Minsk Radio Factory occurred at the same location as that of Robert Webster, whose debriefer was “Eleanor Reed,” operating under her customary pseudo, “Anderson.”
When Oswald was arrested, Deneselya and a colleague named Beverly Baldwin, working in the Covert Action division of the clandestine services, searched her files. There was no Oswald file. Deneselya was now working at Langley, Virginia, in the SR/Counter Intelligence Division, under Tennent (“Pete”) Bagley, chief of that component. Deneselya searched his own office. There was no record of a Lee Oswald.
One day, Deneselya encountered James Angleton at the Army-Navy Club. He brought up the debriefing document of the man from the Minsk Radio Factory. He’d like to see it again, Deneselya said.
Angleton paused. He breathed a sigh.
“I’m not sure anyone can find it amidst all those records,” Angleton murmured. He did not deny that a document revealing that CIA had debriefed Oswald existed. He expressed no surprise at Deneselya’s request, revealing that he knew full well that Oswald, one of their own, had been debriefed.
At the end of October 1962, working for SR/CI, Deneselya had been assigned to be the assistant to Soviet defector Anatoliy Golitsyn. Golitsyn first interviewed Deneselya at a CIA safe house on the Old Georgetown Pike; it was owned by the American Tobacco Company, another surfacing of CIA’s habitual collaboration with the major corporations.
They spoke in Russian. When Golitsyn asked his name, Deneselya gave his CIA alias, “Donald Denison.”
Golitsyn asked where he had learned his Russian, the implied question being whether he was a Russian immigrant. When Deneselya replied that he had studied Russian at the University of Pittsburgh, Golitsyn asked, “Did you receive your diploma?” He was now studying at Georgetown University, Deneselya said. This was his cover.
“Have you ever been to Russia?” Golitsyn said.
“No, never.”
Golitsyn raised an eyebrow.
“Never?”
“Never.”
Golitsyn was satisfied. He thought Deneselya spoke good Russian, was glad that he had not been born in the Soviet Union, and took the CIA plant into his home to work beside him.
CIA called Golitsyn “John Stone.” His crypt was AELADLE-1; his wife was AELADLE-2 and his daughter AELADLE-3. One of Golitsyn’s case officers, Leonard Weigner, took him to the Davis Gun Shop in Falls Church, Virginia, where he bought Golitsyn a .22 pistol.
Some time later, the work with Golitsyn having lasted only for a few months, Deneselya received a call from James Angleton at home. Angleton, who would a decade later leave the agency under a cloud, asked Deneselya to verify that Golitsyn had been a viable source. He had been. Both NATO and Charles de Gaulle’s cabinet had been infiltrated by the KGB, revelations that emerged from the Golitsyn interviews, and there was no doubt about it.
Deneselya went to see Jean Evans at CIA Counter Intelligence, who was investigating Angleton’s handling of Golitsyn. Deneselya supported Angleton. He never heard anything more about the investigation. When Angleton died soon after, Deneselya attended his funeral.
As one of his responsibilities, Deneselya was involved in recruiting people for CIA’s AEJUMP program. His job was to search for people—Russian, Polish, Hungarian or Ukrainian immigrants, to drop into the Soviet Union for commando work. (All who were recruited were ultimately lost. Some had been double—
Soviet— agents, others murdered.)
At the Immigration and Naturalization Service office, where he was looking for records that would lead him to people he might approach for AEJUMP, Deneselya came upon an immigrant card for Marina Oswald. In one of his reports, he wrote that he had seen a document with Marina’s name on it. From that moment, his days at the Agency were numbered. CIA did not want a record in its files of Marina Oswald’s legal entrance into the United States. Donald Deneselya became another of the many people in the narrative of the Kennedy assassination who knew too much. He left the Agency on June 8, 1964.
In the late 1960s, Deneselya considered calling Jim Garrison and telling him what he knew about Oswald’s connection to CIA and about the document he witnessed demonstrating that CIA had debriefed Oswald. His testimony would have been of enormous help to Garrison in his investigation. But, Deneselya says, he had a wife and two children and feared the consequences. It was the story of many potential Garrison witnesses. They had observed the dark fate of David Ferrie, who died, a likely murder victim, before Garrison could even charge him in a conspiracy, and immediately “went to ground.”
In the 1970s, Donald Deneselya brought his information before the House Select Committee On Assassinations. The Committee wrote to Scott Breckinridge at the Agency’s Office of Legislative Counsel and requested “immediate and complete access” to the contact report regarding the former Marine who was employed at the Minsk Radio Plant. They also requested “all files and file references concerning or referring to the following individuals.” These were eight people with whom Deneselya worked closely and who might corroborate the debrief document: Edwin Strakna, who was Deneselya’s supervisor; George L. Green; Leonard Nurk; John M. Droguemueller; Boris Tarasoff; Michael Karas; John Clinton; and Robert Levi. CIA told the HSCA that they could not locate these people, which was patently absurd. None in the intervening fifty years have surfaced to bear witness to the document that confirms that Lee Oswald was debriefed by CIA.