Oswald's FBI file

[John Simkin]

This is a document from Oswald's FBI file. It provides information that Oswald was being monitored in November 1959.

[Jim Root]

John

Perhaps this will shed some light on who the "source" may have been..

"Missing from Oswald's diary is his extensive interview of November 16 with Priscilla Johnson McMillan, a figure who would play a reoccurring role in shaping the written record of the JFK assassination. Johnson was a veteran traveler to Moscow who returned to the Soviet Union for her fourth time on November 15, 1959. Previously she worked as a translator in the US Embassy but now she was returning to Moscow as a reporter for NANA (North American Newspaper Alliance.) The next day, while picking up her mail from the US Embassy she was tipped off by McVicker to the Oswald's presence in the Metropole Hotel. Coincidentally, Johnson's room was one floor above Oswald's. Perhaps less coincidentally, Johnson had extensive contacts with the CIA and had even applied to the agency for employment in 1952 but withdrew her application before she would have been turned down. She was characterized as "screwball, goofy and mixed-up" in the CIA refusal to grant her security clearance at the time of her application. Nevertheless, on May 6, 1958 the CIA's Soviet Russia Division requested "operational approval" to use Johnson for a CIA operation still classified today. Johnson was also debriefed by the CIA on numerous occasions prior and after her meeting with Lee Harvey Oswald." [John Newman, Oswald and the CIA, pp. 61-67.]

The timing seems to be right. Just prior to her departure for Moscow and her immediate introduction to Oswald, if I recall correctly, Priscilla Johnson McMillan went to the offices of Radio Liberty in Paris, which had been ran by Whitney Sheperdsaon and Demitri De Mohrenschildt (brother of George).

Jim Root

Edited May 8, 2009 by Jim Root