HSCA's Sprague: CIA never debriefed Oswald

[Gil Jesus]

 

[Benjamin Cole]

On 12/27/2022 at 6:30 PM, Gil Jesus said:

 

Anyone living in the Soviet Union at the time, in returning or traveling to the US, should have been interviewed by the CIA. They were an antagonistic power, heavily armed. 

LHO's insights, innocuous or otherwise, would have been valuable (often what appears to be innocuous observations are valuable in another context). 

It is inexplicable, and not credible, that the CIA did not debrief LHO. 

Perhaps the debriefing was done, de facto, through de Mohrenschildt, a CIA asset. This would suggest  LHO was radioactive. 

I sure wish Sprague had stayed with the HSCA. He was torpedoed, for obvious reasons. 

[Tommy Tomlinson]

2 hours ago, Benjamin Cole said:

Anyone living in the Soviet Union at the time, in returning or traveling to the US, should have been interviewed by the CIA. They were an antagonistic power, heavily armed. 

LHO's insights, innocuous or otherwise, would have been valuable (often what appears to be innocuous observations are valuable in another context). 

It is inexplicable, and not credible, that the CIA did not debrief LHO. 

Perhaps the debriefing was done, de facto, through de Mohrenschildt, a CIA asset. This would suggest  LHO was radioactive. 

I sure wish Sprague had stayed with the HSCA. He was torpedoed, for obvious reasons. 

Radioactive, or... still operational?

[James DiEugenio]

I wonder if it happened in Rotterdam?

[Benjamin Cole]

9 hours ago, Tommy Tomlinson said:

Radioactive, or... still operational?

Both? Or a useful asset for future deniable acts? 

[Benjamin Cole]

Just now, James DiEugenio said:

I wonder if it happened in Rotterdam?

I don't know. 

I know any sensible, responsible leader in the CIA, upon finding out that a former US Marine who had worked in a radio plant in Minsk for two years was returning to the US, would pump that Marine for all the info they could get. 

My father used to visit the USSR for math and engineering conferences back in the Cold War days. He was debriefed. That was after a visit of just days. 

Lots of innocuous info can be valuable in context. Not only that, there is a story (from Titovets) of LHO secreting a metal pipe with a military applications from the Minsk factory. If you are running the CIA, you would want all the info you could get on that pipe---info that might fit into a jigsaw puzzle of information. 

It is simply inexplicable that responsible people did not debrief LHO, at length, after his return from the USSR. 

[James DiEugenio]

I think they were in Rotterdam for 4-5 days.

Quite long enough for a debrief I think.

[Robin Finn]

A CIA officer,Donald  Deneselya, stated that he had read a debriefing report in 1962 from a former Marine who had defected to the USSR and worked at a factory in Minsk  https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/2021/docid-32404115.pdf

 

transcript from 1993 Frontline documentary:

NARRATOR : Officially, the FBI was the only agency that questioned Oswald. It has always been a mystery why the CIA, which had a growing file on Oswald, maintains it never talked to him.

RICHARD HELMS, Former Director, CIA : The FBI would certainly interview him for counter-espionage purposes and to try and find out whether the KGB had recruited him, whether he was going to be somebody that they had to continue to watch, what his motives were and all the rest of those things. And it was the FBI's responsibility and if they interviewed him once or twice, that would seem to me to have been adequate.

NARRATOR : One former CIA officer, however, says he read an agency debriefing of Oswald in 1962. Donald Deneselya agreed to be interviewed only in shadow.

DONALD DENESELYA : I received across my desk a debriefing report. It was a debriefing of a Marine re-defector. He was returning with his family from the Soviet Union and was back in the United States. The report was approximately four to five pages in length. It gave a lot of details about the organization of the Minsk radio plant. It was signed off by a CIA officer by the name of Anderson.

NARRATOR : FRONTLINE researchers pored through Oswald's declassified CIA file at the National Archives. They found hard evidence which supports Deneselya's story.

Mr. NEWMAN : We're very interested in the marginalia and the hand-written notes on these files. One day I picked up a piece of paper and turned it over and I could see through the back. I could read handwriting that said, "Andy Anderson 00 on Oswald." Later on, we found out that "00" really is the symbol, the office symbol, for the domestic contacts division, which would have had the debriefing mission on Oswald, had there been one.

NARRATOR : FRONTLINE showed the document to former director Helms.

Mr. HELMS : I know of no contact that was made by CIA with Oswald when he returned to the United States. There may have been one, but I'm not aware of it and I'm not able to shed any light on who it would have been.

INTERVIEWER : And this document doesn't change your mind?

Mr. HELMS : And that document doesn't change my mind in the slightest.

NARRATOR : FRONTLINE interviewed over 30 CIA officers off the record, including the former deputy chief of domestic contacts. He confirmed Deneselya's story that the CIA had debriefed Oswald. It was just a routine contact, he said.

Mr. DENESELYA : My feeling is, at this point, the report is buried somewhere. I don't know where it is, but I'm sure it's probably in the contacts division somewhere, or in one of the other filing systems at the agency.

NARRATOR : Several CIA officers remembered an Andy Anderson who worked for domestic contacts. The CIA did not respond to FRONTLINE's request to identify Anderson. What now seems certain is that the CIA was covering up its contact with Lee Harvey Oswald. Was it just a routine interview or something more? And why has it remained hidden for 40 years?

[Benjamin Cole]

6 hours ago, Robin Finn said:

A CIA officer,Donald  Deneselya, stated that he had read a debriefing report in 1962 from a former Marine who had defected to the USSR and worked at a factory in Minsk  https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/2021/docid-32404115.pdf

 

transcript from 1993 Frontline documentary:

NARRATOR : Officially, the FBI was the only agency that questioned Oswald. It has always been a mystery why the CIA, which had a growing file on Oswald, maintains it never talked to him.

RICHARD HELMS, Former Director, CIA : The FBI would certainly interview him for counter-espionage purposes and to try and find out whether the KGB had recruited him, whether he was going to be somebody that they had to continue to watch, what his motives were and all the rest of those things. And it was the FBI's responsibility and if they interviewed him once or twice, that would seem to me to have been adequate.

NARRATOR : One former CIA officer, however, says he read an agency debriefing of Oswald in 1962. Donald Deneselya agreed to be interviewed only in shadow.

DONALD DENESELYA : I received across my desk a debriefing report. It was a debriefing of a Marine re-defector. He was returning with his family from the Soviet Union and was back in the United States. The report was approximately four to five pages in length. It gave a lot of details about the organization of the Minsk radio plant. It was signed off by a CIA officer by the name of Anderson.

NARRATOR : FRONTLINE researchers pored through Oswald's declassified CIA file at the National Archives. They found hard evidence which supports Deneselya's story.

Mr. NEWMAN : We're very interested in the marginalia and the hand-written notes on these files. One day I picked up a piece of paper and turned it over and I could see through the back. I could read handwriting that said, "Andy Anderson 00 on Oswald." Later on, we found out that "00" really is the symbol, the office symbol, for the domestic contacts division, which would have had the debriefing mission on Oswald, had there been one.

NARRATOR : FRONTLINE showed the document to former director Helms.

Mr. HELMS : I know of no contact that was made by CIA with Oswald when he returned to the United States. There may have been one, but I'm not aware of it and I'm not able to shed any light on who it would have been.

INTERVIEWER : And this document doesn't change your mind?

Mr. HELMS : And that document doesn't change my mind in the slightest.

NARRATOR : FRONTLINE interviewed over 30 CIA officers off the record, including the former deputy chief of domestic contacts. He confirmed Deneselya's story that the CIA had debriefed Oswald. It was just a routine contact, he said.

Mr. DENESELYA : My feeling is, at this point, the report is buried somewhere. I don't know where it is, but I'm sure it's probably in the contacts division somewhere, or in one of the other filing systems at the agency.

NARRATOR : Several CIA officers remembered an Andy Anderson who worked for domestic contacts. The CIA did not respond to FRONTLINE's request to identify Anderson. What now seems certain is that the CIA was covering up its contact with Lee Harvey Oswald. Was it just a routine interview or something more? And why has it remained hidden for 40 years?

Excellent points, Robin Finn.

Evidently, LHO was so radioactive that CIA just decided to scrub records clean entirely. 

[Guest]

Bye

Edited February 15, 2023 by Lance Payette

[Benjamin Cole]

39 minutes ago, Lance Payette said:

Factoid time!

"CIA official Donald Deneselya saw an Oswald debriefing report" is now established conspiracy gospel. Let's see what Lance can do with it in a spare hour while slightly impaired by Ole Smoky Tennessee Moonshine ...

Deneselya is one of those amazing characters, common in conspiracy world but not so much in the real world, whose recollectiuons become more detailed and elaborate with the passing decades. He has been a favorite of rather a diverse variety of conspiracy authors: Joan Mellen (who revealed he was fired by the CIA in 1964 because - yes! - he "knew too much"), John Newman, Jesse Ventura and - wait for it - Judyth Vary Baker. Only Anthony Summers seems to have voiced a note of caution, noting his firing and calling him a "controversial figure."

Newman, who worked on the 1993 FRONTLINE documentary, described Deneselya as "reticent," and thus his appearance had to be in "deep shadow." Odd, because Deneselya had, 15 years earlier, met with Senator Richard Schweiker twice and (at least so he says) the HSCA. In any event, he seems to have become remarkably less reticent with the passing years. Indeed, he contacted Mellen, not vice versa. Indeed, he receives a Special Acknowledgement in Vary Baker's Kennedy & Oswald: The Big Picture, where she expresses her "deep appreciation" and has an entire chapter entitled "Meet Don Deneselya." Indeed, he has appeared at conspiracy conferences.

Mellen says our reticent hero "considered" contacting Jim Garrison in the 1960s but feared for his family's safety. She also says, as though this were a point in his favor, that eight people with whom he worked closely could confirm his story but "none in the intervening fifty years have surfaced to bear witness ...." Perhaps they would've been putting their lives on the line by simply saying, in 2000 or 2010, "Yes, I vaguely recall the debriefing document good old Don is talking about" - ya think?

Oh, our hero told Vary Baker that "There was nothing secretive about the Minsk Radio Plant. The CIA knew that no military electronics or weapons were produced there. The plant was a factory where workers manufactured radios and TVs for the Russian civilian population." Uh, not exactly. Since my wife's sister and brother-in-law worked there at the same time, I can tell you it was highly secretive and absolutely, positively developed and produced sensitive military devices. This is now pretty much common knowledge, except to Vary Baker and our hero. I'm betting the CIA knew it a l-o-n-g time ago.

Indicative of our hero's ever-expanding knowledge, Vary Baker also reports: "The fact that Oswald’s name was missing from his debriefing report was extremely unusual. According to Don, the CIA didn’t want the public to ever find out that Oswald was sent to Russia to give the Russians secret information to enable them to shoot down a U-2 aircraft, and that was the real reason why his name was not on his debriefing report." And this makes sense to you?

I'd be astonished if Oswald weren't debriefed by someone from the FBI or CIA, although what qualifies as a "debriefing" may be in the eyes of the beholder. Indeed, FRONTLINE itself stated that it "interviewed over 30 CIA officers off the record, including the former deputy chief of domestic contacts [and who was this?]. He confirmed Deneselya's story that the CIA had debriefed Oswald. It was just a routine contact, he said." To the contrary is this 1998 memorandum by the Executive Director of the ARRB: 104-10330-10130.tif (archives.gov). Note she reported that the CIA Office of Operations made contact with only three of 23 returning defectors in the period 1954-62.

My point is simply that, once again, a factoid of conspiracy gospel appears rather shaky when closely examined. Is it not slightly more believable that an embittered CIA ex-employee has been on just a bit of a trouble-making crusade ever since, one that began when he "considered" going to Garrison a few years after his firing?

Not to go too far off into the weeds here, but it is also reported as gospel (this from Jim D.'s site) that "John Newman then found a CIA memo wherein the chief of the Soviet Russia division wrote of such a debriefing as motivated by an 'operational interest in the Harvey [Oswald] Story.'" This factoid is then repeated verbatim by Vince Palamara in his Honest Answers book, among other places. I haven't researched this completely, but here is the memo: docid-32347922.pdf (archives.gov). What it actually says, as you hopefully can see, doesn't exactly mesh with the foregoing descriptions. In fact, the author (Jacques Richardson, alias Thomas Casasin) told the HSCA that he did not attempt to debrief Oswald because he feared Oswald was working for the KGB, that Oswald was of only "marginal interest" to the CIA and that it was "inconceivable" Oswald would be working for the CIA. The largely unredacted interview summary is here: 180-10143-10227.pdf (archives.gov). Bugliosi (boo! hiss!) deals with this matter pretty thoroughly beginning at page 1211 of Reclaiming History (more boos, more hisses!).

Yet another factoid that simply won't withstand scrutiny? So it would appear.

Sure, it's a bit of a chore to trace these factoids of conspiracy gospel. But it's the uncritical acceptance of them that keeps one trapped in the conspiracy rabbit hole.

 

I still don't understand why a responsible intelligence agency did not debrief LHO at length and in detail after his return to the US. 

Why wouldn't an intel agency debrief someone who had lived and worked for two years in the USSR back then? And who spoke fluent Russian, at least soon after arriving. Especially a former Marine (thus knows how militaries operate) who had worked at Atsugi and was technically skilled on some levels?

But the CIA and FBI claim they never debriefed LHO. That implies abject dereliction of duty...or obfuscation. 

 

 

[James DiEugenio]

That is exactly what Newman told Helms on the set.

He said, Director, what would be so bad about the CIA debriefing Oswald?  Is not that what you should have done?"

Helms thought about it a minute, and said, "Ok, let us do it again.  This time I will say we did debrief him."

Obviously Mike Sullivan and Russo  did not buy that so it was not shot.

[Benjamin Cole]

1 hour ago, James DiEugenio said:

That is exactly what Newman told Helms on the set.

He said, Director, what would be so bad about the CIA debriefing Oswald?  Is not that what you should have done?"

Helms thought about it a minute, and said, "Ok, let us do it again.  This time I will say we did debrief him."

Obviously Mike Sullivan and Russo  did not buy that so it was not shot.

Egads, what a story. Did Helms actually respond in such a manner?