Newly declassified files show President John F. Kennedy’s alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was monitored for years by James Angleton, the CIA’s infamous veteran counterintelligence chief, right up until the President’s death.

In this context, freshly released FBI documents indicating Oswald was removed from Bureau watchlists six weeks before Kennedy’s assassination, despite being judged a high security risk, at the express direction of Angleton’s staff, take on a distinctly disquieting character.

Was Oswald a target of or participant in Angleton’s illegal domestic spying operations?

The file trail begins in June 1953, when a memo was circulated among senior FBI officials, its subject line: “Central Intelligence Agency—information received from James Angleton.” It documents how the CIA’s counterintelligence chief had over the past year “been very cooperative and…volunteered voluminous information of interest to Bureau.”

Such was the vast and sensitive intelligence yield that it was considered necessary to establish dedicated, strict internal protocols for handling and storing material provided by Angleton to the FBI.

This was “particularly” vital with respect to information Angleton received and passed on to the Bureau from Mossad, his “primary source” of intelligence among “numerous foreign sources and channels” he maintained worldwide. The memo went on to outline how Angleton handled “special cases of a various nature,” and was “usually given considerable freedom and leeway in directing the operations of his unit.” Angleton was “responsible only” to the CIA Director, and his staff were “responsible only to him.”

The memo noted approvingly how “much of the information” provided by Angleton “consists of the actual reports” he received from his sources. This was of significant advantage to the FBI, as the agency was able to “better evaluate the information instead of waiting for the delay and processing through normal channels in the CIA.”

Angleton also “frequently” kept the Bureau apprised of Agency activities overseas, “which the CIA sometimes camouflages with some of its cloak and dagger techniques.”

Angleton’s extensive cooperation bought him enormous goodwill within the FBI. He successfully leveraged this in January 1958, when the Bureau serendipitously “flushed out” a scandalous, illegal spying operation targeting U.S. citizens conducted by the CIA’s counterintelligence unit.

A memo that month shared between senior FBI officials records how the Bureau was seeking to establish a program to monitor all mail being sent to and from the Soviet Union by American citizens, only to discover Angleton was already doing precisely the same thing.

Angleton in turn learned his scheme had been busted, so he approached the Agency’s FBI liaison agent on a “personal basis” to outline the program. He claimed he would be fired if Langley caught wind of his disclosures to the Bureau. Angleton explained how the interception program was “one of the biggest and most secret operations being conducted by CIA,” and “extensive and expensive.” An “elaborate array of IBM machines” catalogued and conducted “complex scientific examinations” of all mail gathered.

READ MORE:

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2025/11/26/james-angleton-jfk-assassination-architect/

SEE ALSO: 

https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/46141

https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/42653

https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/35992

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