Photo: James McCord
In some of my other Substack articles, I have written about former high-level CIA counterintelligence officer Tennent H. Bagley’s scathing appraisal, in his 2007 Yale University Press book, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games, of James Angleton’s confidant, mentor, and mole-hunting superior, Bruce Leonard Solie, for, among other things, “clearing” false defector Yuri Nosenko in October of 1968.
I’ve also explained how former high-level Army Intelligence analyst and an Executive Aide to a Director of NSA, John M. Newman (who dedicated his 2022 book, Uncovering Popov’s Mole, to Bagley) came to the conclusion that Solie was the high-level “mole” for whom Angleton had vainly searched for so many years.
If Newman is correct, it seems that Solie, in addition to having Leonard V. McCoy and possibly George Kisevalter [my opinion] as accomplices, was aided by at least two other “moles” — James McCord (of future Watergate notoriety) and Edward Ellis Smith (the honey-trapped in Moscow CIA officer who became a San Francisco banker and a Stalin scholar at the Hoover Institution).
For background, the following is an excerpt from Newman’s 1995/2008 book, Oswald and the CIA.
Chapter 19: The Smoking File
The hidden compartments in [Lee Harvey] Oswald’s CIA files prior to his [27 September - 3 October 1963] trip to Mexico City, information on his activities reached the CIA via FBI, State, and Navy reports. Footnote 1. Again, the routing and record sheets attached to these reports tell us who read them and when they read them. They show how the collision between Oswald’s 201 and his FPCC story altered the destination of incoming FBI reports to a new file with the number 100-300-11. What did this new number signify? On August 24, 1978, the CIA responded to an HSCA inquiry about Oswald’s various CIA file numbers. That response contained this paragraph:
”File 100-300-011 is titled “Fair Play for Cuba Committee.” It consists of 987 documents dated from 1958 through 1973. All but approximately 20 are third agency (FBI, State, etc.) documents.” (Footnote 2; The FPCC portion was not declassified until 1995.)
CIA documents lists show that FBI agent James Hosty’s September 10, 1963, report -- the first piece of paper associating Oswald with the FPCC -- was the catalyst for the diversion of the FBI data stream into 100300-11. Footnote 3. The routing and record sheet attached to this report shows this redirection occurred on the afternoon of September 23. The documents list show that Hosty’s report was also filed in Oswald’s CI/SIG soft file and in his security file, OS 351-164, a point to which we will return momentarily. By traveling to Mexico City and contacting both the Soviet and Cuban consulates there, Oswald inserted himself into the middle of an elaborate complex of espionage and counterespionage. This resulted in massage traffic from the Mexico City CIA station that was entered in his 201 file. The bifurcation of the New Orleans and Mexico City data streams into separate locations is fascinating. This is all the more so because the mechanism for this separation, the 100-300-11 file, was set into motion in the hours before Oswald departed from Mexico City, when Hosty’s report from Dallas arrived. That seminal report contained the opening move of Oswald’s FPCC game, but the routing and record sheet is strangely devoid of any indication that a Cuban Affairs (SAS) office read it. Footnote 4. The document was read primarily by counterintelligence elements. After this report, three major FBI reports on Oswald, all of them from the New Orleans office, were placed in the 100-300-11 file. After the Kennedy assassination, all four FBI reports reverted into Oswald’s 201 file. What was the purpose behind the separation of the New Orleans and Mexico City data streams? It might have been sloppy CIA accounting. But it might have been more: could Oswald’s trip have been part of a CIA effort at countering the FPCC in foreign countries and “planting deceptive information which might embarrass” the FPCC? Footnote 5. The still-classified September 16 CIA memo to the FBI discussing such efforts is the beginning of a suggestive sequence of events. Footnote 6. Was it just a coincidence that the next day Oswald and a CIA informant stood next to each other in a line to get Mexican tourist cards? Was the compartmentalization of the FBI reporting on Oswald’s FPC activities -- which began 6 days later -- related? Were these all random events or were they connected:
Table C: Selected Chronology of Events
September 10th: Hosty report [Oswald letter to FPCC]
September 16: CIA to FBI regarding “countering” FPCC in “foreign countries” September 17: Oswald gets tourist card
September 23: Hosty report arrives, placed in CIA 100-300-11
September 24: New Orleans FBI memo [Oswald’s FPCC activities]
September 25: Oswald at Sylvia Odio’s
September 26: FBI HDQS to New York office regarding CIA request on FPCC
September 27- October 3: Oswald in Mexico City
October 2: The September 24 FBI memo arrives at CIA
October 4:New York FBI office airtel on upcoming 10/27 “contact”
October 9: Mexico City station cable
October 10: Two headquarters cables
If Oswald’s trip was related to an operation, what was the role of the Oswald impostor in Mexico? Was he part of a headquarters operation or part of an unconnected local operation against the Cuban and Soviet consulates? Answer these to these questions await the full release of the pertinent documents. In their absence, we can still reconstruct some of this intricate puzzle. In assembling the pieces, it is crucial to properly place the cables between the CIA and its station in Mexico City and the Agency’s reporting to the FBI, State, and Navy. Where were the cables between headquarters and the Mexico City station filed before the assassination? During the 1975 Church Committee investigation, investigators Dan Dwyer and Ed Greissing visited the CIA on November 3 and examined Oswald’s 201 file. Their report contained this passage on the comments of Mr. Wall, a member of the CIA’s counterintelligence staff:
“Mr. Wall explained that some of the documents now filed in the Oswald 201 were not filed there at the time of the President’s assassination. Some were located in file 200 (miscellaneous international file); others in file 100 (miscellaneous domestic file); others in the Western Hemisphere Division files (those generated by the Mexico City station); and others in the files reserved for documents with sensitivity indicators.” Footnote 7.
According to the documents list, the cables to and from the CIA station in Mexico City, as well as the CIA reports to the FBI and other governmental departments, were also placed in Oswald’s 201 file. Footnote 8. From the above it is apparent that Oswald’s documents were going to several different locations. Was there anyone who had access to all of them? Again, the 100-300-11 location seems to be the latchkey. Besides those directly involved in Cuban operations, such as the SAS and the Mexico City desk, other CIA elements had been involved with FPCC operations. As previously discussed, [James Angleton’s] Birch O’Neill had written reports about the FPCC for CI/SIG, and the Office of Security’s James McCord had been connected to counterintelligence operations against the FPCC since at least early 1961. Footnote 9. Were either of these offices associated with the personal handling of the New Orleans FBI reporting on Oswald? The answer is yes. One of the two documents lists contains an interesting note in the “formerly filed” column for the September 10 Hosty report. It states, “Copy CI/SIG [351164] 100-300-11.” Footnote 10. The other documents list has a column with the heading “Location of Original,” that has this entry: SI/CI File 100-300-11.” Footnote 11. CI/SI was short for CI/SIG [Angleton’s mole-hunting department], and it appears that the mole hunting unit was again connected with a key change in Oswald’s file designators. Footnote 12. Moreover, the association of Oswald security number (351164) with the 100-300-11 file denotes a security office tie-in. They had been tracking Oswald all along and now had access to this file, too. Thus it appears that it was Angleton’s CIA/SIG which, in conjunction with the Office of Security, had all of the pieces to the Oswald puzzle.
Footnotes:
1) A possible exception to this was what was passed to the agency via its AMSPELL (DRE) assets, mentioned in chapter 17.
2) DDO’s response to HSCA letter dated August 15, 1978 (questions 1 & 2), August 24, 1978; NARA, JFK files, RIF 1993 07. 0.1: 28: 36: 210470.
3) Page 26 of “list of documents for release,” [to HSCA]; NARA, JFK files, RIF 1993 08.04.08: 21: 00: 780053.
4) This is the report previously discussed that mentioned Oswald’s letter to the FPCC from Dallas, in which he said he had been passing out pamphlets with a pro-Castro placard around his neck. See FBI report by special agent James P. Hosty on Oswald, September 10, 1963; NARA, JFK files, RIF 124-10228-10058. Note also that there is one redacted organization on that routing slip. It is possible that this was an SAS or WH element. Again, we must await the full disclosure of information.
5) Church Committee, Vol. V, p. 65.
6) It is likely that when the September 16, 1963, CIA memo to the FBI is declassified, we will see that Mexico was one of the “foreign countries” the CIA had in mind.
7) Church Committee memorandum from Dan Dwyer and Ed Greissing to Paul Wallach on review of Oswald 201 file, November 3, 1975; NARA, JFK files, SSCI Box 265-15, 10091.
8) Page 26 of “List of Documents for Release,” [to HSCA] : NARA, JFK files, RIF 1993 08.04.08: 21: 00: 780053.
9) McCord may have been a reassigned by 1963.
10) Page 26 of “List of Documents for Release,” RIF 1993 08.04.08: 21: 00: 780053.
. . . . . . .
My comments:
In his 2022 book, Uncovering Popov’s Mole, Newman posits the following:
1) Bruce Solie, a high-level officer in the CIA’s mole-hunting Office of Security was a KGB “mole,” and among other things he sent (or duped James Angleton into sending) Lee Harvey Oswald to Moscow in 1959 as an ostensible “dangle” in a (unbeknownst to Oswald and Angleton) planned-to-fail mole hunt for “Popov’s U-2 Mole” (Solie) in the wrong part of the CIA.
2) When CIA officer Edward Ellis Smith, CIA’s “One Man Moscow Station” who was sent to Moscow in 1955 to serve as dead drop setter-upper for GRU Lt. Col. Pyotr Popov, was “honey trapped” and-recruited by the KGB in Moscow in late 1956, he belatedly informed his ostensible boss, U.S. Ambassador Charles Bohlen (who didn’t know he was CIA), that he’d been compromised by the Soviets. Smith was escorted to Washington by the Office of Security’s James McCord where he was interrogated by the CIA and ostensibly fired and not prosecuted. Newman believes that McCord was a KGB “mole” and that he arranged for Smith to be secretly retained by the Agency as a scholar specializing in Joseph Stalin at the Hoover Institution.
3) Former CIA counterintelligence officer Tennent H. Bagley (to whom Newman dedicated his book, wrote in his 2007 book, Spy Wars: Moles Mysteries, and Deadly Games, that after Smith was fired and still in Washington, he betrayed GRU Lt. Col. Pyotr Popov to a high-level KGB officer in D.C. movie houses, and that he may have helped the KGB recruit another CIA “mole.” Newman, on the other hand, believes that it was Solie who betrayed Popov in those movie houses, and that Smith and McCord provided logistical support.
4) Newman’s colleague, JFK assassination researcher and National Archives habitue Malcolm Blunt (who befriended Bagley in 2008) says Solie hid Office of Security files on Oswald from the Church Committee and the HSCA.
5) It interesting that it was McCord’s taping of the door lock in the Watergate Hotel that led to the arrest of himself and his colleagues for the break-in.
6) And now we see that McCord may have been involved in Lee Harvey Oswald’s visit to Mexico City seven weeks before the assassination of JFK.
. . . . . . .
More on McCord and Solie from Newman’s 2022 book, Uncovering Popov’s Mole:
On 26 July 1956, the CIA Office of Security (OS) cleared James W. McCord for TDY travel through WE (Western Europe), EE (Eastern Europe), and official travel “through controlled areas.” Footnote 651. CIA documentation shows that McCord’s mission was to escort Edward Ellis Smith from Russia to Washington, D. C., for interrogations. At the time, McCord was the Acting Deputy Chief of the OS Security Research Staff, where Bruce Solie also worked as chief of the SRS Research Branch (RB). Both men had served in the Army Air Corps in World War II, and both had joined the CIA in 1951.
From the OS records cited above, it is apparent that McCord and Smith arrived together in Washington around the end of the first week of August. On the surface, Smith’s future looked truly grim. After being “fired” by State Department Security, Smith [who had been secretly working for the CIA as an ostensible security officer at the American Embassy] faced a lengthy excruciating interrogation sessions with a CIA security team. The sessions were led by James McCord. Afterward, an OS review board recommended that Smith be dismissed from the Agency. As July 1956 turned into August in Washington, curious changes in Smith’s disposition were taking place during which his fortunes changed dramatically. Within a week or two, according to the plan Kovshuk had hatched in Moscow, the review board’s recommendation to boot Smith from the CIA was covertly overridden. This allowed Smith to operate under deep cover in Washington. Ever since then, Smith’s covert change of status has remained unknown to authors. For example, Richard Harris Smith’s (no relation to Ed Smith) article, the The Moscow Station, provided a summary -- without the secret details or their intent -- that noticed positive change in Smith’s status:
Smith defensively demanded a personal interview with the director. “I’ve done nothing wrong,” he remembered telling Allen Dulles. “My record is unblemished. I want a job.” Whether or not there was any threat implicit in this demand – Smith had been privy to some juicy secrets – Dulles was noncommittal. But Smith soon began receiving monthly checks from “Information Research Associates,” being informed by McCord that he was temporarily to be placed on a sort of CIA dole “without duties.” Footnote 652.
In my [Newman’s] view, Smith’s crocodile tears were necessary to support a performance of grief over his supposed condition. Moreover, Smith’s no-duty dole lasted for a year and was hardly temporary. And even DCI Dulles was noncommittal, someone else had ideas for keeping Smith around and under the tight control of two officers of the CIA Security Office – Bruce Solie and James McCord. One thing was certain. What they were up to were not legitimate activities of the Office of Security.
Footnotes:
#651: 7-26-56, travel clearance for James McCord, for 27 July-14 August; RIF 104-10124-10047; see also the Travel Order, RIF 104-10124-10048.
#652: Smith, First Moscow Station, pp. 343-344.
That’s it.
That’s the post.