BEN HOLMES SAID:
Lee Harvey Oswald was a CIA asset...
Three years before the Kennedy assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald was being investigated by the CIA's Special Investigations Group (SIG), a branch of the agency's Counter-Intelligence (CI) division, headed by James Angleton between 1954 and 1974. This was confirmed in the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) questioning of Ann Egerter, a member of Angleton's staff who opened the CIA file on Lee Harvey Oswald (a "201 file" in US intel lingo) in December of 1960.
The kicker is that the CI/SIG division is only tasked with investigating current CIA agents who are potential security risks. Egerter said her office was known within the CIA as "the office that spied on spies." She further elaborated on SIG as the entity that undertook "investigations of agency employees where there was an indication of espionage."
Because CIA agents are forbidden to disclose the identity of any other agents, Oswald's true occupation could only be discerned through indirect questions directed at Egerter. One HSCA interviewer asked her what the purpose of the CI/SIG was within the agency. Through this line of questioning, it can be discerned that Lee Harvey Oswald was seen in 1960 as a security risk, making him easy to burn, for example, as a patsy in the Kennedy assassination.
Interviewer: "Please correct me if I'm wrong ... it seems that the purpose of CI/SIG was very limited and that limited purpose was to investigate agency employees who for some reason were under suspicion."
Egerter: "That is correct."
Interviewer: "When a 201 file is opened, does that mean that whoever opens the file has either an intelligence interest in the individual, or, if not an intelligence interest, he thinks that the individual may present a counterintelligence risk?"
Egerter: "Well, in general, I would say that would be correct."
Interviewer: "Would there be any other reason for opening up a file?"
Egerter: "No, I can't think of one."
DAVID VON PEIN SAID:
In 1978, ex-CIA Director Richard Helms claimed that a "201 File" is nothing more than a "personality" file on a person. And why would anyone---even a conspiracy theorist---think it was unusual for the CIA to open up such a personality file on Oswald (who tried to defect to Russia and then came back to the USA)? Sounds like SOP to me.
MR. GOLDSMITH -- "Mr. Helms, what is a 201 file?"
RICHARD HELMS -- "I believe the 201 file, if memory serves, is simply the number given to a type of file at the Agency in which personality information is placed. In other words, if you open a 201 file on the chairman of this committee, for example, it would simply be information that had come into the Agency which involved that gentleman."
[...]
MR. DODD -- "There is some confusion I think in the committee's mind as to how that file was opened. What kind of file is it? What is a 201 file?"
MR. HELMS -- "It is nothing but a personality file. We might open a file--we get pieces of paper like this and if they refer to Christopher Dodd, we would open a file on Christopher Dodd. They just happened to be called a 201 file...there is no arcane significance at all. It is just a number."
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/russ/jfkinfo2/jfk4/hscahelm.htm
[End Helms Quotes.]
And if the CIA were trying to hide ANY association with Oswald, then why wouldn't they have destroyed his 201 file? Obviously they would have destroyed that file if it was the kind of file that proved Oswald worked for them or was associated with the Agency in any meaningful way.
However, it's probably a good idea to take anything uttered by Dick Helms
with a huge grain of salt, since he's quite plainly in a CYA mode for a lot of
this testimony.
Also See:
http://jfk-archives.blogspot.com/2015/04/richard-helms.html
David Von Pein
April 25, 2015
[Note --- The Amazon.com link above is no longer available. All of the Amazon forums were discontinued and completely deleted on October 6, 2017.]
