John Newman's posting on Facebook today

[Douglas Caddy]

The following short account of the CIA's Angleton (CI-Counterintelligence)--Osborn (Security Office) molehunt was prompted by a post from Martin Shackelford a little earlier today:

A little history on the CIA Angleton (CI)-Bannerman (OS) joint mole hunt. This story was first broken in detail in Oswald and the CIA in 1995, see Chapter Four, especially pp. 51-59; these details were again printed on the same page numbers in the 2008 edition of Oswald and the CIA. Meanwhile, n...ot long after the publication of the first edition in 1995, Malcolm Blunt and I bumped into each other in the cafeteria of the new National Archived II facility in College Park, Maryland. At that time, Malcolm was making regular trips from Britain to NARA to work on the case and I was there almost every week continuing to copy new documents as the became available due to the passage of the JFK Assassination Records Release Act. Malcolm had become intensely interested in the above-mentioned passage in Oswald and the CIA and he proceeded to become the world’s best authority on the entire subject of how records were controlled and distributed internally in the CIA.

Over the years, Malcolm provided me with linear feet of CIA records and kept after me to write a major revision to Oswald and the CIA. That idea was eventually incorporated in the far larger multi-volume project that I began in 2011 and have worked on non-stop since then. Malcolm and I have continued to share our finds with each other, and we have remained in a very close pattern on the CIA internal dissemination issue as well as—by now—a very wide ranges of subjects related to the Kennedy presidency and the assassination. This cooperation resulted in Chapter One of Volume III—Countdown to Darkness. Besides being a cutting-edge work on the 1959-1960 CIA internal disposition of Oswald’s records, that chapter also contains an extraordinary and crucial account of Malcolm’s relationship with Pete Bagley that Malcolm generously shared with me—including Pete’s extraordinary reaction to the Oswald CIA internal records distribution saga. That Bagley-Blunt moment was a major inflection point in the history of research on the Kennedy assassination. [[Note: Bagley became head of counterintellilgence in the Soviet Russia Division and was one of the CIA officers who handled Yuri Nosenko's 1960 defection in Geneva, Switzerland.]]