Chapter Twenty

The Rest of the Files

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The KGB file

In 1991, as the Soviet Union was coming apart, a Russian official went into the KGB archives to answer one question: was Lee Harvey Oswald ever a KGB agent. He read five thick volumes of files on him. Then he told an American contact what he had found, and the CIA wrote it down in a cable. That cable came out of the archives in 2025.1

His conclusion was that Oswald was at no time an agent controlled by the KGB. But look at the reason he gives, because it is not a denial. From the description of Oswald in those files, he doubted that anyone could control Oswald. That is the Soviet intelligence service’s own assessment of the man, sitting in their archive: not one of ours, and frankly not controllable by anybody.2

The same account draws a line people often blur. Not an agent, but watched. The cable records that the KGB kept Oswald under close and constant observation the whole time he was in the Soviet Union. Being surveilled by an intelligence service and working for one are opposite conditions, and almost every theory that puts Oswald in Soviet employ depends on treating them as the same thing.3

There is one line in the KGB file that goes straight to Dealey Plaza. It recorded that when Oswald tried target shooting in the Soviet Union, he was a poor shot. That is not a critic’s claim or a defense lawyer’s argument. It is what a hostile intelligence service wrote in its own file, for its own purposes, years before anybody had a reason to spin it.4

The oddest thing in an intelligence cable about a presidential assassination is how domestic it gets. The reviewer noted that the files showed Oswald had a stormy relationship with his Soviet wife, who. In the cable’s words. Rode him incessantly. Somewhere in a KGB archive there was a file recording that a young American defector was having a hard time at home. They wrote that down too.3

Printed across the bottom of the KGB summary is an instruction: temporary working copy, destroy after use. Somebody pulled it off a printer in September 1993, and it was supposed to go in a burn bag. Instead it sat in a file for thirty-two years and was published to the internet in 2025. A great deal of what we now know survives because a piece of paper marked for destruction was not destroyed.5

The strangest thing about the KGB cable is that Oswald is not the only case in it. The next paragraph reports the same official’s inquiry into the fate of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of people from the Holocaust and vanished into Soviet custody. Partial evidence from fourteen sources, no conclusive proof, probably executed in 1947. Two of the twentieth century’s unsolved questions, on one page, filed together.6

†Be careful with this one, because it is the kind of document people over-read. It is an American cable recording what a Russian official said he saw. Nobody outside has read those five volumes. A service that had just been dismantled had every reason to say the man was never theirs. It is real evidence and it is not proof, and if I treated it as proof, it would be doing exactly what it criticises everyone else for.7

What Moscow gave up

Everybody in this subject talks about American files opening. Something else happened at the same time and it gets almost no attention. The country on the other side of this story stopped existing. For most of a decade after 1991, material came out of Moscow that no researcher had ever expected to see: officers publishing memoirs, files shown to visitors, and eventually a president handing a stack of documents to an American president as a gesture.8

†One of the KGB officers who actually dealt with Oswald at the Soviet embassy in Mexico City in 1963 published an account of it in the early nineties. He described a nervous, agitated man who wanted a visa immediately, who was refused, and who at one point produced a pistol. His conclusion was that the Soviets wanted nothing to do with him. Take it as a participant’s memoir written thirty years later, by a man with an institution to defend, and it is still the closest thing we have.9

In 1999, at a summit in Germany, Boris Yeltsin handed Bill Clinton a packet of KGB documents on Oswald. Not a treaty, not a communique. A folder about a man who had been dead for thirty-six years, passed hand to hand between the leaders of the two countries the Cold War was fought between. It went into the American record. It is one of the stranger pieces of diplomacy of that decade and almost nobody outside this subject knows it happened.10

Across the memoirs, the files shown to writers in Minsk, the 1991 cable and the 1999 handover, the account did not change. They watched him constantly. They bugged his flat. They judged him unstable, a poor shot, not officer material and not worth recruiting. They were relieved when he left. Every channel says the same thing, which is either because it is true or because everyone was working from the same instruction, and I cannot tell you which.11, 12, 3

Now the finding that damages the case I have been building, and I would rather deliver it myself. When a KGB archivist defected in 1992 he brought out notes on decades of operations, and among them was this: the Soviet Union ran an active campaign in the West to promote the idea that the assassination was an American conspiracy. They pushed the story. In some cases they helped fund and place the books that carried it. Some of the earliest literature blaming Washington was seeded from Moscow.13

Be careful with that in both directions. It does not mean the doubts are Soviet inventions. Millions of Americans arrived at them from the Zapruder film and the Warren volumes without any help. What it does mean is that the earliest and loudest versions had a hand on them, and that anybody arguing this case has to ask which of their furniture was delivered. I have tried to build this book out of documents rather than out of what I inherited. That is the reason.14

†And here is the comparison I cannot get out of my head. The Soviet Union collapsed, and out came memoirs, files, an officer’s account of meeting the man, and a folder passed president to president. An adversary that had every reason to stay silent produced more about Lee Harvey Oswald than four allied governments have produced in sixty years. I do not know what that proves. I know which of those two facts I find harder to explain.14

Watching the critic

In January 1965 the FBI’s man in Switzerland sent Washington a report. The subject line is not Oswald, and it is not the assassination. It is Mark Lane. The lawyer who had become the loudest public critic of the Warren Commission. Fourteen months after Dallas, an American legal attaché in Bern was filing intelligence on a critic, and copying it to the Bureau’s New York office.15

Next to Mark Lane’s name on the memorandum are two characters: S M, dash, C. In Bureau shorthand that is Security Matter. Communist. It is not a charge and it is not evidence of anything. It is a filing category, and it determined which drawer you went in, who could ask about you, and what a legal attaché overseas was authorized to collect. A man’s treatment by a government, compressed into three letters.16

The detail that tells you how normal all of it was is the form itself. The memorandum on Mark Lane is a printed standard form, and the source of the information is chosen from a list of tick-boxes. Austrian criminal police. Swiss federal police. And two more, printed right there on the form: Office of Special Assistant, covert C I A, American Embassy, Bern. Research Branch, covert C I A, Vienna. Somebody had these typeset.17

Somewhere on the Mark Lane memorandum, in handwriting, beside the classification stamps, two words: Lee Oswald. Not typed, not part of the report. Somebody reading it reached for a pen and wrote the connection down in the margin, so whoever handled the paper next would know which case it belonged to. The whole filing system of this investigation, in one person’s handwriting.18

Think about what the Mark Lane memorandum does to the argument. For sixty years the reply to critics has been that they are imagining an interested government. Here is a secret memorandum, from a foreign station, tracking the movements of the best-known critic and routing it through offices whose cover names are printed on the form. It does not make his conclusions right. It makes the suspicion that produced them reasonable.19, 20

Stamped on the Mark Lane memorandum, next to a January 1965 date: not recorded. The same notation as the Bern cable five months earlier. Two documents, two countries, two subjects, both moving through the Bureau without entering the central index. Once is a clerk’s shortcut. Twice starts to look like a habit, and a habit like that is why an archive can be complete and still be unsearchable.21

The mobster

November 1962. An urgent teletype goes to the Director of the FBI at eight thirty at night. The intelligence it carries: a mobster spent the afternoon at a Los Angeles club, an informant heard what he said, neighbors confirm he is still in town, and the Hertz desk at the Beverly Hilton reports he still has the rental car he promised to bring back. That is what watching a man actually looks like.22

Here is the best line in the whole file. A week before the 1962 election, the informant reports that Roselli said the Las Vegas odds were eight to five on Pat Brown beating Nixon for governor of California. That he was betting on Brown to win, and that he was going to vote for Nixon. The FBI then adds a dry footnote of its own: he is not a registered voter, and because of a 1943 conviction he is not entitled to vote at all.23

The reason that afternoon got reported at all is one sentence. A name came up. A man said to be in vending machines in Chicago, and Roselli replied that he knew everyone in the rackets in Chicago and had never heard of him. Somebody at that table was an informant, and that boast went to Washington the same night. He was telling a room how well connected he was, to a room that included the FBI.24

Nothing in the Roselli teletype touches Dallas. It is here because of who the man was. Johnny Roselli was one of the criminals the CIA recruited to try to kill Castro. The operation the Warren Commission was never told about. He testified to the Senate about it in 1975. In 1976, while the House committee still wanted to hear from him, he was found murdered. That is why his rental car is in this archive.25, 26, 27

The Roselli teletype carries a printed routing box listing sixteen surnames. Tolson, Belmont, Mohr, Sullivan, and on down, and a tick beside the ones who were to see it. That was the entire senior leadership of the FBI, on a rubber stamp, so a clerk could route a night cable about a rental car to whichever of them needed it. Bureaucracy is not the boring part of this story. It is the mechanism.28

The date on the Roselli cable is the thing to hold on to. November 1962. More than a year before Dallas, and months before anyone had a reason to connect this man to a presidential assassination. The surveillance is already routine. Which means the file did not start because of Kennedy. Kennedy is why we can read it.29

Why a Castro file is here

There is a phrase in a 1975 Senate memorandum that you do not forget. A former CIA officer, describing his job training Cubans in the Guatemalan jungle, tells an investigator that on two occasions his cadre was told to equip men being parachuted into Cuba to kill Castro. He calls what they handed over an assassination package. Weapons, grenades, and what he describes as a special assassination gun.30

Notice how precisely this man answers, because almost nobody in this story does it this well. He says he does not precisely recall being expressly told these men were going to Cuba to kill Castro. Then he says that from the instructions he received, and the nature of the situation, he was clear that this was the mission. That is a witness separating what he was told from what he understood. It is the standard everyone else should be held to.31

None of the Castro file is about Dealey Plaza. So why is it filed under the Kennedy assassination? Because the Warren Commission was never told that the CIA had been trying to kill a foreign head of state. When that came out in the seventies it did not prove a conspiracy in Dallas. It proved the investigation had been conducted without a fact that any investigator would have wanted. That is the actual wound, and it has never healed.31, 32

The 2025 release was announced as everything, unredacted. Open this one and there are black boxes on the page. What is blacked out is the name of a training camp in the Guatemalan jungle and the name of a nearby village. Spelled phonetically, because the officer being interviewed was going from memory. Sixty-two years on, somebody still did not want you to know the name of a village.33

The number in the Castro memorandum is small and specific, which is what makes it credible. Not a program, not a campaign. Two occasions, over roughly two years, when a four or five man training cadre in a jungle camp was told to hand parachutes and weapons to men going into Cuba on that mission. History is usually made of numbers this size, by people whose job that week was handing out equipment.31

After the Bay of Pigs failed, the administration did not drop it. In November 1961 it authorized a covert program against Cuba called Operation Mongoose. Sabotage, propaganda, economic warfare, paramilitary raids, and planning to remove Castro, coordinated across the CIA, the Pentagon and the State Department by a brigadier general. It ran for about a year. Almost nobody outside government knew it existed until the mid seventies.34, 35

It was overseen at the White House by a body called the Special Group Augmented, and the augmentation was the Attorney General. Robert Kennedy, the President’s brother, took a very active role in running a covert campaign to bring down a foreign government. That is not an allegation from a critic. It is in the government’s own published diplomatic record, and it changes how you read every Cuban document in this collection.35, 34

The operational headquarters was a CIA station in Miami with the cryptonym JM slash WAVE, and by 1962 it was one of the largest the Agency had anywhere. Hundreds of officers, front companies, boats, aircraft, and thousands of Cuban exiles trained and paid to go back and fight. For a year the United States ran a war out of southern Florida, and the men it armed were still there afterwards.34, 36

It wound down after the missile crisis, because the deal that ended the crisis included leaving Cuba alone. To the exiles who had been trained, armed and told they were going back, that was a betrayal with a name and a face. Thousands of people who had been given weapons and a promise by that administration were told, in effect, that it was off. Every serious theory involving Cuban exiles starts in that room, and it is a room the government built.34, 36

Here is why it matters more than any theory built on it. A commission was asked to investigate the murder of a president, and it was not told that the same president’s government had been running a secret war, using organized crime, against a country the accused man had publicly campaigned for. That is not a detail. Any investigator alive would have wanted it. The finding may still be right. The investigation was conducted without a fact that would have changed every question it asked.34, 36, 37

Fifteen years after the Warren Commission, a Congressional committee did the thing nobody expects of an investigation. It went back to people who had already testified and asked them the same questions again, not to catch them out, but to see whether an answer given in 1964, in the pressure of that year, still held in 1978. Dozens of those re-interviews sit in the record, and almost nobody has ever read them.38

This is what a real re-investigation looks like. In 1978, fifteen years after Dallas, a Congressional investigator drove to a house in Texas at nine in the evening to re-interview a man who had already testified to the Warren Commission. The report notes he repeated his earlier testimony and changed exactly one point. Not a bombshell. Just somebody checking, in person, whether an old answer still held.38

The investigator carried a book of 110 photographs and asked the witness to pick out anyone he recognized. He identified number fifty-seven as Oswald. But the report also records that photographs seventy-two and seventy-three were missing from the book. A Congressional identification exercise, conducted with two pages gone, and the report simply records it and moves on.39

Here is something nobody mentions about the 2025 release. Open a witness interview and the first page can carry his home address, his date of birth, his employer, his telephone number and his full Social Security number. Unredacted, on a public website. These were private citizens who happened to be somewhere in 1963. I will tell you what is in the documents, and give you the record number for every one. I will not repeat what is on those pages.40

† disputed   ‡ theory   § reconstructed — everything unmarked is established. Superscript numbers key to the sources below. Corrections

Sources for this chapter

40 sources. Every claim above is keyed to one of them. The complete list for the whole book runs to 1,276.

  1. CIA cable, doc date 20 November 1991, classified SECRET
  2. CIA cable, 20 November 1991, reporting the reviewer's account of KGB files
  3. CIA cable, 20 November 1991
  4. CIA cable, 20 November 1991, reporting the KGB file's note on Oswald's target firing in the USSR
  5. CIA cable printout, 14 September 1993, bearing the instruction 'TEMPORARY WORKING COPY - DESTROY AFTER USE'
  6. CIA cable, 20 November 1991, paragraph on the Wallenberg inquiry
  7. CIA cable, 20 November 1991, a second-hand account of files not independently examined
  8. general historical record of post-Soviet archival disclosure
  9. Oleg Nechiporenko, published account of the Mexico City meetings, 1993
  10. contemporaneous reporting of the 1999 transfer of KGB Oswald materials
  11. KGB file materials released via the Russian government
  12. Nechiporenko, 1993
  13. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive, on Soviet active measures concerning the Kennedy assassination
  14. the author's assessment
  15. FBI memorandum, Legat Bern to Director, 5 January 1965, classified SECRET
  16. FBI memorandum, 5 January 1965, subject line caption
  17. FBI Form 5-124 (rev. 7-2-64), pre-printed source list including two covert CIA offices
  18. FBI memorandum, 5 January 1965, handwritten marginal notation
  19. FBI memorandum, 5 January 1965
  20. the documented record of Bureau attention to Warren Commission critics
  21. FBI memorandum, 5 January 1965, bearing a NOT RECORDED notation; compare RIF 124-10150-10104
  22. FBI teletype, SAC Los Angeles to Director, 2 November 1962
  23. FBI teletype, 2 November 1962, including the Bureau's notation on his voter status
  24. FBI teletype, 2 November 1962, reporting informant LA 4268-C
  25. FBI teletype, 2 November 1962
  26. Church Committee testimony of John Roselli, 1975
  27. contemporaneous reporting of his death, 1976
  28. FBI teletype, 2 November 1962, routing block
  29. FBI teletype, 2 November 1962, predating the assassination by over twelve months
  30. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities memorandum, 30 May 1975, classified S
  31. Church Committee memorandum, 30 May 1975
  32. HSCA findings on disclosure to the Warren Commission
  33. Church Committee memorandum, 30 May 1975, page 3, showing redactions of the camp and village names
  34. Church Committee interim report 1975
  35. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961 to 1963, volume X
  36. HSCA final report 1979
  37. Warren Report 1964
  38. HSCA investigator's interview report, 14 April 1978
  39. HSCA interview report, 14 April 1978, noting photographs 72 and 73 missing from the exhibit book
  40. direct inspection of released HSCA interview forms carrying unredacted personal identifiers