Oswald and the CIA: The Documented Truth About the Unknown Relationship Between the U.S. Government and the Alleged Killer of JFK (7 page)

It is obvious that the navy was very concerned about Oswald. We know this from the record of the same day that the FBI was deciding against taking any further action. At 11:59 A.M. Lieutenant D. E. Sigsworth of ONI drafted, and Captain F. A. Klaveness released-for the chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Arleigh Burkea cable to Moscow asking to be kept abreast of new developments on Oswald .4' The Sigsworth cable said "no record" of Oswald's clearance at Marine Corps headquarters had been found, but that Oswald had been an aviation electronics operator and "may have had access to confidential info." Actually, Oswald had access, at a minimum, to secret information while stationed at Atsugi as a consequence of his radar duties there. This much could have been ascertained by no more than a simple phone call to Oswald's former commander at Atsugi, John E. Donovan. "He [Oswald] must have had [a] secret clearance to work in the radar center," Donovan testified to the Warren Commission in 1964, "because that was a minimum requirement for all of us."42

The November 4 cable from the chief of Naval Operations to Moscow makes it abundantly clear that the navy, at a high level, far from putting the matter to bed, wanted to know more. The cable concluded: "REQUEST SIGNIFICANT DEVELOPMENTS IN VIEW OF CONTINUING INTEREST OF HQ, MARINE CORPS AND U.S. INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES. `INTELLIGENCE MATTER.' " Besides being routed to Moscow and many other navy addresses, the cable was also sent to army and air force intelligence, and to the FBI and the CIA. At the same time there were some curious details missing from the initial navy report on Oswald, details to which we will shortly turn.

Setting aside the defects in the November 4 chief of Naval Operations cable, what happened to the CIA copy of it after it entered the Agency? Again, the answer is that Oswald's early CIA files were sensitive security and counterintelligence matters. We know from the CIA's Oswald document lists prepared for the HSCA that the navy cable arrived in the Special Investigation Group (SIG) of Angleton's counterintelligence staff on December 6 The question is: In whose possession in the CIA had that cable been for the previous thirty-one days? The answer is that for those thirty-one days-November 4 through December 6-the CNO cable had crawled into the same dark corner of the Agency that the Snyder and Navy Liaison cables from Moscow had. This same fate befell the newspaper clippings as well. These clippings, three of them, along with a cable from Tokyo concerning Oswald's half brother, John Pic, and Snyder's first cable on Oswald, were buried in a Security Office file and did not circulate to the Soviet Russia division where, presumably, they should have been looked at by a wide array of the branches.44

The date that Moscow cable 1304, the new stories, and Tokyo cable 1448 entered the Security Office file is uncertain, for the documents lists released in 1993 contain nothing that would help us to pin down the precise dates. It is possible these documents were in the CIISIG file first and then later moved to the security office. We will return to these arcane early CIA files on Oswald in Chapter Four, but here it is sufficient to point out that some hungry black hole in the CIA seemed to be consuming every scrap of paper on Oswald in the days immediately following his defection, a black hole that kept the Oswald files away from the spot we would expect them to go-the Soviet Russia division. At the end of the black hole stands the date December 6 and a place: the Counterintelligence Special Investigation Group-CI/SIG-where, according to the information released by the CIA in 1993, the CNO memo and two Washington Star newspaper articles were originally located.

Is it possible the documents described above, whether in the CU SIG files or the Office of Security, were shown to the Soviet Russia Division until after the Kennedy assassination? It seems unlikely that a newspaper article that mentioned that the Russians were considering sending Oswald to a Soviet "institute" would not be shared with the appropriate analysts in the Soviet Russia Division unless the entire body of material on Oswald was considered too sensitive to share outside of OS and CI. It is conceivable that the Oswald black hole in the CIA was caused by a very sensitive Agency program, a program imperiled by Oswald's defection. Unless the CIA was wholly incompetent, it would have to have been in the throes of an investigation of Oswald's defection at this time. Moreover, that investigation, like the program Oswald's defection endangered, would have been known by only a handful of people in the CIA.

Finally, as mentioned above, the navy's apparent check into Oswald's past had some curious omissions. There is only one early document that qualifies as a sketch of what the navy knew about Oswald's past, and even this document is most noteworthy for what it leaves out-the sensitive part. We might do well to remember that this document was the November 4 CNO cable to Moscow.45 It is reasonable to assume that if the navy had found something troubling, they might not have wanted to send it via cable to Moscow. If the navy had looked carefully into Oswald's past, what sensitive nuggets would they have seen?

The answer is shocking, and all the more so if navy intelligence missed it. Oswald and his marine companions had walked patrol to guard a supersecret espionage weapon hidden in an airplane hanger. As a radar operator, he had also tracked this dark object with advanced height-finding radar equipment. This particular espionage weapon was then the single most important intelligence asset available to the United States. It was the one that produced the most critical intelligence on the Soviet ballistic missile program at the height of the missile bluff (1957-1960) crisis with Khrushchev: the U-2.

CHAPTER THREE

Top Secret Eider Chess

"It was a beautiful sight to watch," recalls Sam Berry, "when the U-2s would land-their final approach to the runway would sometimes be at less than fifty miles an hour." Sam was a coworker of Lee Harvey Oswald's at Atsugi, and remembers how the sleek U-2s made their effortless landings and how, when the pilots would disembark, "a crew would rush to throw a black sheet over their heads" to conceal who they were.' "We had sometimes bumped noses with them," Berry says of the U-2 pilots. "We couldn't avoid it. And we'd talk to the guys from the U-2 squadron and they'd say it was just local recon, but we knew better." Indeed, everyone in Oswald's radar squadron knew better. They saw these incredible planes being fueled for hours, then departing early in the morning and not returning until late afternoon or evening.

"We were in a controlled squadron, and our barracks were right there adjacent to the airstrip at Atsugi," Donald Athey recalls of his stay at Atsugi Naval Air Station.' He was a lieutenant in Oswald's marine unit, Marine Air Corps Station-1 (MACS-1), of Marine Air Group-11 (MAG-11), 1st Marine Air Wing (MAW). Athey, too, remembers how the U-2s "would take off and land right there, usually in the daytime. Our compound was adjacent to the airstrip, and the control center too." While the U-2 program had its own CIA control center, the marines that worked in the marine control center often watched these planes using their height-finding radar. "We could track the U-2, sometimes up to 100,000 feet," recalls Berry, "and then we lost them."' Berry remembers hearing the U2 pilots speak to the control tower. Athey recalled that on rare occasions the pilots "would check in with us at 60,000 feet and then check out as they reached 80,000 and kept climbing."'

The U-2 program was TOP SECRET and more, but it was no secret to the marines in Oswald's unit. They saw the planes, they tracked them, and they even communicated with them. That is, until Oswald defected to the Soviet Union, which was the target of the U-2s' espionage mission. The ballistic missile information these dark planes from Atsugi collected as they overflew the Communist giant was vital intelligence for U.S. estimates of the Soviet Union's ability to wage nuclear wars What Oswald knew of the U-2 program before his defection is therefore a matter that deserves close attention.

Detachment C

The newly released JFK files contain a small set of documents on the U-2 program.' What the Agency has not blacked out are some of the details on the history of a U-2 operation called "Detachment C." The reason we have these documents is that someone from the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) asked questions about it. The CIA's deputy director for science and technology (DDS&T) answered them. Even what little we have in these new documents is revealing.

"Detachment C advance party of security and communication personnel," a 1978 CIA memo to the HSCA began, "departed the U.S. for Atsugi, Japan, on 20 February 1957, the second echelon of administrative personnel departed on 4 March, and the main body of the detachment with two U-2 aircraft and equipment began deployment on 15 March."7 Detachment C was operational by the week of April 8, 1957, and "operating procedures and liaison" had been accomplished with the Atsugi Naval Air Station.

Detachment C was a CIA U-2 operation producing data vital to U.S. strategic intelligence, and Oswald, a trained radar operator, had a bird's-eye view of the operation from the runway to his radar bubble. The classification level of the U-2's intelligence information was very high. The CIA's (DS&T) answers to U-2 questions posed by the HSCA in 1978 were top secret with a further restrictive caveat. The top secret classification remains on all the pages of these documents, but the additional caveat for the intelligence associated with the program has been excised-almost.

In an apparent attempt to prevent the public from knowing the name of this intelligence "compartment" (intelligence jargon for a category of information, usually tied to a particular technical system), the CIA removed this part of the classification from the top and bottom of every page of the two separate but nearly identical documents which the Agency released in January 1994-except for one page. Just one slipped by. There, on the top and bottom of the page is the rest of the classification: "EIDER CHESS." How much did Oswald know about Detachment C? What did he know that could betray what the Americans had learned through EIDER CHESS intelligence channels?

". . . It's Moving over China!"

Atsugi was a "closed base," Special Agent Berlin noted in his March 10, 1964, Naval Investigative Service report, and "at the time, was the base for the Joint Technical Advisory Group, which maintained and flew recon[naissance] U-2 flights." Berlin had located and interviewed Eugene J. Hobbs, a marine hospital corpsman who had been stationed at Atsugi Naval Air Station while Oswald was there. During the interview, Corpsman Hobbs stated that it was "gossip around the base that the U-2s were taking recon flights over Russia." He also described a series of conversations he overheard about the U-2s flying over China, and stated that a naval commander had said "the flights would be the same as the ones the U-2s were making over Russia." Hobbs told Berlin that the U2 missions over the Soviet Union were "common knowledge around the [Atsugi] base."'

From November 20, 1957, through March 6, 1958, Oswald's unit, MACS-1, joined other marine units for maneuvers-code-named OPERATION STRONGBACK-in the South China Sea and the Philippines. MACS-1 left for the Philippines aboard the Terrell County, LST 1157, on November 20, 1957.9 The purpose of this operation was to prepare for American intervention in the Indonesian crisis in late 1957. This planned action in the Far East was paralleled by a crisis in the Middle East that featured a U.S.-backed force of 50,000 Turkish soldiers set to invade Iraq. Overlaying both situations was the larger context of the Soviet launch of a satellite Sputnik-in October 1957, on the top of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). This event publicly dramatized the ongoing race to deploy ICBMs tipped with nuclear warheads, and Sputnik's success sparked U.S. fears that the Soviet Union was well ahead in this lethal new arms race.

MACS-1 landed and stayed a week on an island at the northern end of the Philippine archipelago, reboarded only to sail to Subic Bay, where they waited for another week, then returned to sea to join an invasion flotilla off Indonesia for a month. They returned to the Philippines, landing at Cubi Point just before January 1, 1958.10 They set up their radar bubble at Cubi Point Air Base, next to a special hangar. Inside it, the CIA often stored a U-2 reconnaissance plane. "I saw it take off, saw it on radar, and saw it land," recalls Oswald's commander, John Donovan, "and I saw it hand-pushed into the hanger."'' On this assignment, Oswald's unit had an additional mission with a direct connection to the U-2: sentry duty to guard the U-2 hangar. 12

That rather inglorious task which Oswald, like the other enlisted men, performed, did not curtail his interest in the U-2 when he was at his favorite place-drawing traces of aircraft trails with his grease pencil on the plotting board inside the radar bubble. Oswald's unit had not been operational very long before he noticed something interesting. Donovan describes what happened:

One time we were watching the radar there at Cubi Point and Oswald said, "Look at this thing." He had a trail in grease mark and he said, "This thing just took off from Clark and it's moving over China!" And I said, "You can't be right," and he agreed. A week later he saw it again, so several of us began looking hard and we saw it. Oswald was right, and we saw it so regularly that we started clocking them. I even called the duty officer about them and he said, "Look, fella, there's no planes flying over China." We knew better. We saw them all the time, mostly flying out of Cubi Point, but sometimes they flew out of Clark."

This story confirms what Hospital Corpsman Hobbs told the ONI in 1964 about the gossip at Atsugi in 1958. The CIA was flying U2s over China as well as over the Soviet Union.

Oswald's unit later deployed (September 14 through October 6, 1958) to Ping Tong on the north side of Taiwan, and Donovan was his commander there too. Donovan recalls: "In Formosa [Taiwan] we were near the U-2 as well."" There, Oswald spent many hours drawing traces of the U-2's tracks over the People's Republic of China.

The deployment of Oswald's unit occurred as a series of international crises escalated the U.S.-Soviet Cold War toward the brink of confrontation. The Chinese Communists, perhaps to embarrass Khrushchev,15 provoked a crisis by shelling Nationalist islands in the Taiwan Straits, taking advantage of an already simmering crisis in the Middle East. Eisenhower intervened in Lebanon and brushed aside the Chinese provocation. Khrushchev upped the ante by threatening Berlin, demanding an end to Western control of that encircled German city. Eisenhower forced Khrushchev to back down. Throughout this sequence, Eisenhower's toughness was more than bravado. He knew something-as we will shortly discuss in more detail-that made these decisions easier: The Soviet ballistic missile testing program had ground to a halt. The president knew this, in part, because of intelligence collected by the very U-2s Oswald was watching. It is reasonable, therefore, to try to determine if the CIA ever investigated what Oswald knew about the U-2 program.