The Epoch Times is now in possession of the long sought after transcript of James Angleton's testimony to the Church Committee.

X ^ | 3/20/25 | Travis Gilmore

[hardspunned]

Among many other things, Angleton discusses counterintelligence methods, how the agency managed defectors, and compartmentalization within the CIA.

"Since World War II, the British have never caught an agent where the lead didn't come from" the U.S. Pg 29

foreign intelligence services operating in America Pg 58

amassing large amounts of information about U.S. citizens Pg 62

"practically all intelligence operations have political objectives." Pg 64

Angletons said there's no question that foreign governments attempted to influence U.S. elections Pg 69

[hardspunned]

Very interesting stuff but no smoking guns.

[piasa]

Angleton ping

[Albion Wilde]

bump

[Fedora]

Thanks for the ping. There’s a lot to the Angleton angle. To elaborate a partial summary:

Angleton didn’t trust the Church Committee, apart from Barry Goldwater and Malcolm Wallop, and he had a lot of secrets to protect, both with respect to the JFK investigation and with respect to indirectly related topics, so anything he said should be interpreted accordingly. Prior to testifying to the committee, he had private interviews with committee representative Loch Johnson, a left-wing CIA critic, and told Johnson he thought the committee was being used the Soviets to expose America’s intelligence community. He mainly talked to Johnson about the Yuri Nosenko spy case, where he was at odds with other members of the intelligence community on whether Nosenko was a genuine defector, and about his own conviction that there was a high-level mole in CIA protecting Nosenko. Later, after testifying to the committee, Angleton told his CIA associate Walter Elder that he had uncovered a plot by Kim Philby to use the committee to destroy CIA.

Angleton’s views on this were influenced by his long-standing concerns about Philby and Soviet moles and his belief in the genuineness of another controversial defector, Anatoliy Golitsyn, which was the source of his distrust of Nosenko. Angleton was also in the crossfires over the question of whether Oswald was a genuine defector. Following Oswald’s October 1959 defection to the Soviet Union, Angleton’s office authorized the CIA’s HT/LINGUAL mail-opening program to begin intercepting Oswald’s mail and opened an HT/LINGUAL file on Oswald. The FBI also opened a security file on Oswald at this time; Angleton’s counterintelligence counterpart at the FBI, William Sullivan, would later handle the FBI’s Oswald investigation for the Warren Commission. The State Department’s security department began investigating Oswald in June 1960 in the process of trying to determine whether a number of defectors were genuine defectors or US intelligence assets. On December 5, 1960, State Department security investigator Otto Otepka was assigned supervision of this investigation. On December 9, 1960, Angleton’s counterintelligence subordinate Ann Egerter (aka Betty Eggeter) opened another file on Oswald under a 201 file designation, typically used for Agency personnel. Angleton instructed his office not to investigate Oswald.

Meanwhile, Otepka’s attempts to investigate Oswald were being stymied by Secretary of State Dean Rusk. Rusk had been close to accused Soviet spies during the FDR/Truman administrations and had been reinstating security risks forced out at that time. He was now attempting to reinstate Soviet spy Alger Hiss, ringing alarm bells for Otepka. Rusk bent the ear of Attorney General Robert Kennedy to stifle Otepka, and Kennedy had his “Get Hoffa Squad” henchman Walter Sheridan force Otepka out as security investigator. After attempts at pushback, Otepka was removed just weeks before the JFK assassination. Otepka would later tell associates he knew who was behind the assassination, but he wouldn’t say who.

As for Angleton, he promoted the position that the KGB assassinated Kennedy through his journalist associate Edward Jay Epstein. Epstein belonged to a group of assassination researchers linked to the Committee to Investigate Assassinations, ostensibly a left-wing group, but founded by Bernard Fensterwald, attorney for Jimmy Hoffa’s associate Edward Long and for the Watergate burglars, and an advisor to the Church Committee. Fensterwald’s own committee received donations from his Watergate client James McCord, who had supervised the CIA’s counterintelligence operations against the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, the organization Oswald was passing out pamphlets for in New Orleans in August 1963. McCord had worked on operations in Russia with Nosenko’s CIA interrogator Bruce Solie, who told CIA that Nosenko was a genuine defector, prompting Angleton to request his removal from the Nosenko case. Solie’s fellow Nosenko interrogator Tennet Bagley discovered that when Oswald was under investigation by Angleton, files on Oswald that CIA was receiving from other agencies were going to Solie’s office, which Bagley took as a sign Oswald was a false defector. Following up on this, JFK assassination researcher John Newman recently argued that Solie was the Soviet mole responsible for giving the Soviets the U-2 flight plans, that McCord was his accomplice in betraying CIA spy Pyotr Semyonovich Popov, and that Solie tricked Angleton into sending Oswald into Russia as a dangle to smoke out the mole who betrayed Popov.

In the Marines, Oswald had been stationed at the US military base that ran the U-2 flights. After he returned to the US from Russia, he was introduced by Fort Worth Russian-American community leader to George Bouhe to CIA agent and suspect Soviet double-agent George de Mohrenschildt. De Mohrenschildt was tied to a community of White Russian exiles who had relocated from Russia to Dallas after the Bolshevik Revolution and had helped US intelligence maintain contacts in Russia and Eastern Europe since then. De Mohrenschildt recommended that Oswald take a job with Dallas company Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, which processed U-2 flight photos, among other things, though Oswald didn’t specifically handle those.

In February 1977, de Mohrenschildt met with Dutch left-wing reporter Willem Oltmans, a long-time acquaintance. According to Oltmans’ later testimony to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, de Mohrenschildt confessed to being a middleman between Oswald and E. Howard Hunt in a conspiracy to kill Kennedy and asked Oltmans to help protect him by taking him out of the country. Oltmans took him to Amsterdam to work on his memoirs, which developed allegations about de Mohrenschildt’s conspiracy claims and claim to know Jack Ruby. Oltmans introduced de Mohrenschildt to a Dutch publisher, and was about to introduce him to the Soviet ambassador. De Mohrenschildt failed to show at the expected meeting place, telling friends Oltmans had betrayed him. Oltmans proceeded to share de Mohrenschildt’s conspiracy claims with the media and the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA).

Oltmans learned that De Mohrenschildt was hiding in Florida, and informed HSCA counsel Robert Tannenbaum, who passed the information on to HSCA investigator Gaeton Fonzi. Fonti traveled to Florida to meet de Mohrenschildt, but Angleton’s journalist associate Edward Jay Epstein had also learned of de Mohrenschildt’s return to the US and beaten him to the punch. On March 15, 1977, on behalf of Reader’s Digest, Epstein offered de Mohrenschildt $4,000 for a four-day interview. On the morning of March 29, 1977, de Mohrenschildt told Epstein he had been instructed to contact Oswald by CIA agent J. Walton Moore, already of interest to the HSCA for running domestic CIA operations in Dallas and for his contact with de Mohrenschildt. During an afternoon break from his interview with Epstein, de Mohrenschildt returned to his room in the Breakers Hotel (a hotel connected with the Mafia, notably through Joseph Kennedy’s Chicago gangster associate Thomas J. Cassara, whose 1946 murder had prompted Kennedy to sell former bootlegging holdings). There he found a business card from Fonzi inviting him to appear before the House Select Committee on Assassinations. By the end of the day, de Mohrenschildt was found dead of a shotgun blast to the head, ruled a suicide.