The Wilderness of Mirrors

In nineteen seventy four, just months after the Watergate scandal ended with Richard Nixon's resignation, another man who for decades had also helped shape America's place in the world was quietly dismissed from his job. William Colby, who was then the head of the CIA, fired spymaster James Jesus Angleton.

Colby made the decision after a front page expose in The New York Times revealed that Angleton was running a massive domestic spying program. The CIA was spying on ten thousand Americans involved in the anti war movement and other dissident groups.

Colby had been trying to get rid of Angleton for years, but Angleton was a bit of a legend. He was the head of counterintelligence for the CIA, and for better or for worse, he was one of the agency's founding fathers. Journalists who are hoping to be the next Woodward and Bernstein were all over this story. They wanted to know why.

The Church Committee published its final report in April of nineteen seventy six. It revealed a trove of secret abuses at the hands of the CIA, NSA, FBI, and the IRS. Before and after the Cold War. These agencies were involved in global assassination conspiracies, infiltrating news programs, and conducting mind control experiments through programs like mk Ultra. The Committee's revelations shocked Americans.

We'll get into all of that over the next few episodes, but for now, what's important understand is that in the nineteen sixties, James Jesus Angleton had control over a network of spies, informants, and double agents that reached into the farthest corners of the globe, and the events that would be the cause of his dismissal were just getting underway.

This is who killed JFK. Sixty years later, What can we uncover about the greatest murder mystery in American history? And why does it still matter today? I'm your host, Solidad O'Brien.

Welcome to the counterintelligence world of James Jesus Angleton, a world he referred to as the wilderness of mirrors.

The term wilderness of mirrors points to the tactic of deception and disinformation that both the CIA and the KGB used against each other during the Cold War.

It's a world where it's virtually impossible to tell what his reality and what is merely a reflection of reality, and our journey into the wilderness starts with Lee Harvey Oswald. So let's recap. Oswald was a disenchanted young man who found himself in the psychological study run by a doctor with connections to the CIA. At age seventeen, he enlisted in the Marines and was shipped to Japan, where he received a security clearance to work as a radar operator

Well Oswald didn't actually renown his US citizenship when he was in Russia, even though he tried at the embassy, So maybe they didn't take him all that seriously. Maybe they saw him and thought, eh, that guy. You know, he's all bark and no bite. There's this philosophical theory I know, you know, called Ockham's razor, right, that says the simplest answer is often the correct one. So if you apply that here, what if he's just a communist sympathizer.

It's possible, but don't forget. We are at the height of the Cold War. The fear of nuclear annihilation is hanging over our heads. Now. If you are willing to enter that wilderness of mirrors with me, by the time we exit, I think things will become clear. But I have to warn you. Before things become clear, they will become confusing. And in fact, confusion is the point. So why don't we try to embrace the confusion and step

The better you lied, and the more you betrayed, the more likely you would be promoted. I did things that in looking back on my life, I regret, but I was part of it and I loved in it.

That is a quote from James Angleton. Now, if you visualize a creepy secret agent from the fifties and sixties, you will see Angleton.

I can confirm that pictures of him show a lanky guy with thick glasses, hollow cheekbones, and translucent looking skin.

Angleton could do virtually anything he wanted under the name of protecting America.

He was the Chief of Counterintelligence, so he was in charge of defending the CIA. But that position required him enabled him to do anything, and so there was no check on his power whatsoever.

That's our old friend. Jefferson Morley, creator of jfkfax dot Org. Morley wrote the book on Angleton called The Ghost. Why do you call the book the Ghost?

Because he was this invisible presence in the US government that nobody could see. I mean, I think President Kennedy knew who Jim Angleton was, but not many people in the US government knew what Angleton did.

Describe him, he was very.

Charismatic, intellectually. He had been an English major at Yale with a literary bent.

He was known as the Poet's spy. His friend, the poet E. E. Cummings, said the following about Angleton, quote, what a miracle of momentous complexity is the poet?

He was the spy. As intellectual, he was a very creative thinker. People who knew him in his prime were very impressed and regarded him as really something of a genius. Camera intelligence has been described as organized paranoia. To catch spies, you have to be very suspicious of everybody.

He referred to his work as the wilderness of mirrors, a phrase that he borrowed from TS. Eliot. There was information, disinformation, secret agents, and double agents, anything to deceive the enemy, hide the CIA's tracks, and create confusion. Confusion was his weapon of choice, and that confusion came into play when Oswald returned to the United States. Oswald, his Soviet wife Marina,

Oh, so he's pretty much welcome backed by the CIA.

Right and again, if you look at this through Angleton's eyes, Reken is the perfect person to meet Oswald in order to make sure that his re entry into America goes smoothly. Rakean was somebody they could trust and couldn't be tied directly back to them. So Recn helps the Oswalds get through customs and immigration, then sends them on their way to Fort Worth, Texas. In Fort Worth, Oswald meets a man named George de Moorenshield. Now I'm guessing that name doesn't ring any bells.

This is the first time you're hearing the name George de Moornshield. He's key when we consider the movements of Lee Harvey Oswald on his return to the United States.

George de Moornscheld was a Russian speaker who worked for oil companies looking for petroleum all over the world.

That's Jefferson Morley again.

And so in nineteen sixty two he was living in Dallas and he heard of this man who had returned from the Soviet Union, Lee Harvey Oswald. So they become good friends.

Don't you think it's odd that a wealthy, worldly, aerodype and much older man would become good friends with Lee Harvey Oswald.

De Moornshield told the journalist Edward Epstein, quote, somebody gave me Lee's address, and one afternoon I drove to Fort Worth, about thirty miles from Dallas.

De Moorinshield told Epstein that a CIA operative J. Walton Moore was the person who gave him the address of Lee Harvey Oswald and suggested that he meet him, that he would be doing the CIA a favor.

De Moornshield told Epstein that J. Walton Moore asked him to find out about Oswald's time in the Soviet Union.

And for essentially babysitting, Oswald de Moornshield was awarded a mineral contract from the Haitian government for three hundred thousand dollars.

De Moornshield told Epstein that he assumed this was because of the help De Moornshield had given to the CIA.

When you think of people who work for the CIA, you think of people who work directly with the agency. But it's not that simple. There are also people who are, for lack of a better term, CIA adjacent. They're assets, and these assets will do favors for the CIA, and sometimes they expect favors in return.

So that would describe George de Moornshield, Yeah, right.

And as part of his babysitting duties, De Moorinshield introduces the Oswalts to a friend of his. This is a woman named Ruth Paine, who was supposedly interested in learning Russian.

Hmm, that's convenient. Dick Russell interviewed Ruth Payne in nineteen seventy.

The way that you first met the Oswalts was at that party.

It was at private party.

What was it about the Oswalts that you liked?

I was especially interested in Marina who's native in Russian, and I didn't really talk to her much that evening, but I did get the ads and visit it then at their apartment in.

Nowas it's important to know who Ruth pain is. Her sister was a CIA operative, although that was hidden and then denied for decades. Her father was employed by the United States Agency for International Development.

For decades, there's been suspicion that the US Agency for International Development was a Cold War policy tool created in nineteen sixty one to implement CIA operations around the world.

Ruth Payne's husband and other family members had intelligence connections as well. In nineteen sixty seven, when the District Attorney for New Orleans, Jim Garrison, tried a case that questioned the Warren Commission's findings, he tried to get the Pains tax returns and he was told they were classified. Another little tidbit, Ruth's best friend, Mary Bancroft, was Alan Dulles's mistress.

Because of her friendship with the Oswalts, Ruth Payne was a key witness for the Warren Commission. In her testimony, she was asked by Alan Dulles what she suspected Oswald's motive might have been. She said that she always felt that Oswald saw himself as a small person and that

And during the time of his testimony and I w miss saw De Moorenshield having private lunches with Alan Dulles.

It's like Alan Dulles is everywhere.

Yes, he was controlling the flow of information in and out of the Warren Commission. So it should come as no surprise that the Warren Report went out of its way to conclude that the Moornshield had no connection to

What's interesting about de Moornschield is that he testified to the Warren Commission and really was influential in depicting Oswald as a man who could have killed President Kennedy. De Morenschild came to regret that later in life, and he believed that he was mistaken and that Oswald did not.

Kill the President. Demornschild wrote about that in his book, which was titled Lee Harvey Oswald As I Knew Him.

It's one of the first books written by someone who had a personal relationship with Oswald.

After the book was published, De Mornshield started talking to the press.

I interviewed George de Mornshield twice in nineteen seventy six, and I remember he said, of course, we know it was a vast conspiracy, and his wife tried to shut him up, and then he stood up started walking around the room, saying, it's defiling a corpse. It's defiling a corpse. Oswald had nothing to do with it. It was remarkable to see him like this. He was really upset. He was revealing something huge, and I wasn't the only person.

He said that too.

He was talking to Edward Epstein, a journalist who had written about the Kennedy assassination.

That's Jefferson Morley.

Again, de morn Schild said that he was quite certain Oswald did not kill the president and that he was indeed what he said, he was a patsy.

He also said, quote, I would never have contacted Oswald in a million years if Moore had not sanctioned it.

That's j Walton Moore, his CIA contact.

Right. He said he wouldn't have reached out to befriend Oswald unless he was instructed to. Epstein's interview with demorn Shield happened fourteen years after Kennedy's assassination, and it was the final interview that demorn Shield would ever give.

So let's set the stage because with all of these moving parts, it gets very confusing.

Okay. So the first few months of nineteen sixty three are very tough for Oswald.

So he returns from the Soviet Union, he gets job, he loses a job, having trouble with his wife, and in April nineteen sixty three, he leaves Dallas and he decides to go to New Orleans, where he had grown up.

In New Orleans, he gets a job at a place called the Riley Coffee Company.

Which is owned by William Riley, a supporter of CIA efforts against Castro. Documents show us that Riley had a relationship with the CIA for years.

So we're seeing the same pattern, the same kind of thing we saw with Demor and Shield. In Dallas. Oswald is secretly introduced to another CIA connected guy whose Riley Coffee company is located right next to the local FBI, CIA, Naval, Intelligence, and Secret Service offices. And it's here in New Orleans where Oswald is about to get sheep dipped.

Sheep DiPT What does that mean?

Sheep DiPT is a term of art in the intelligence world that means coding someone to give them CIA operative status. It's a tactic of deception. It gives the appearance that a person is some one other than who he really is.

So how would that even work?

By using assets of the agency to build a narrative around that person, you're carefully led into a new identity and it's all documented. You yourself, may not know where this new identity will lead, but when it's finished, you'll have the bona fides of someone to appear completely legitimate. And the plan for Oswald in New Orleans was to sheep dip him in order to make him look like he was a pro Castro communist.

Couldn't he just be a pro Castro communist.

If you think that the poet spy has succeeded.

The poet spy. If you'll remember, is James Jesus Angleton, head of CIA Counterintelligence, and the Wilderness of Mirrors were in. It's the world he created.

We know. Angleton's tactics employ CIA adjacent people, asset s that have enough distance from the agency that they can deny knowing them. Then send these people to look after someone the agency is interested in, pick them up at the airport, help them get a job, to manipulate this person they're interested in without being traced back to what end. Angleton was obsessed with Cuba. He wanted to take down Castro, and this was not in line with the president's agenda.

After the Cuban missile crisis, if you remember, Kennedy realized taking a hard line against Cuba could lead to an all out nuclear war, so he started back channel communications with Khrushchev and Castro to find a packed peace.

But Angleton didn't see that as an obstacle. He said, and I am quoting here, it is inconceivable that a secret intelligence arm of the government has to comply with all the overt orders of the government. He thought it completely fair game that the CIA, the secret intelligence armor of them the United States, could have their own set of rules and directives.

So, while Kennedy was trying to forge a path to peace, the CIA was conducting major anti Castro operations out of New Orleans and Miami. They sent boats to harassed Cuban ships. They ran guns to exile groups. They even had training camps where they were helping the exiles prepare to mount another invasion. Bill Harvey, the CIA agent who had been demoted and sent to Rome after the Cuban missile crisis, played a big part in all of this.

Bill Harvey created and led something called ZR Rifle. This was a CIA program designed to assassinate foreign leaders.

It wouldn't be until the nineteen eighties that we learned how the CIA had a hand in overthrowing governments in the nineteen fifties and sixties, including Iran, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, the Congo. This often inclined gluted the assassination of the leader in charge. This is some of the dirty laundry we mentioned earlier.

The CIA wanted to use that same force in an attempt to assassinate Fidel Castro, and Bill Harvey was at the head of it. To understand Harvey's stance toward Cuba, read a segment of this seventeen page memo that he sent to Dick Helms, who was running covert operations for the CIA at the time.

It goes quote the assurance of no invasion and no support of invasion will in effect constitute giving Castro and his regime a certain degree of sanctuary.

His belief was that every day that passed that we didn't try to invade Cuba would make Castro grow stronger. Essentially, he's saying, if you're not trying to kill him, you're emboldening him. And in many people's minds, the one emboldening him the most was President Kennedy.

A declassified document reveals that Bill Harvey sent his memo to the head of the CIA in November nineteen sixty two.

Six months later, in May of nineteen sixty three, Angleton published a twenty seven page paper of his own on the topic of Cuba.

This was just about seven months before the assassination of President Kennedy and within weeks of Oswald's decision to move to New Orleans.

Engleton's paper was called Cuban Control and Action Capabilities. And it's important to understand who received this paper. The Pentagon, the CIA, the NSSA, the intelligence chiefs of the State Department, Army, Navy, and Air Force, and the Justice Department.

And guess who didn't receive this paper.

The President Bingo.

Angleton didn't send it to the White House, to his National Security Council, or to the president's brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy. And there's one thing that becomes particularly interesting in hindsight.

The fair Play for Cuba Committee, The fair Play for Cuba Committee is.

The fair Play for Cuban Committee.

If you're taking notes, put a big red circle around the fair Play for Cuba Committee.

The fair Play for Cuba Committee was a real organization. They had chapters around the country with hundreds of members. Their goal was to provide grassroots support for Cuba in America.

In Angleton's eyes, members of the fair Play for Cuba Committee were pro castro agents in the United States. This is exactly what Angleton spent his career trying to protect America against and so in order to better understand the organization and hopefully stop them, he needed information, and Oswald.

Was about to be sent right into the thick of it. Oswald arrived in New Orleans at almost the exact time that Angleton sent out his Cuban paper. And one of the first things that Oswald does is form a local chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. And guess how many members there were in this chapter one hundred You're close one just one, just Oswald, nobody else.

Oswald's behavior with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee is kind of strange. In his time in New Orleans, he doesn't spend any time with people who support Gastro.

This is Oswald being sheep dipped. A narrative is being created around him.

And what does Oswald know at this point?

Probably very little. I mean, he knows he's connected to an intelligence community for some purpose. But I would bet anything that if Lee Harvey Oswald were alive today and you asked him that at that moment, what did he think he was part of? I don't think he would even know.

After he started his chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, Oswald visited a man named Carlos spring Gear, who ran an anti Castro group called the Cuban Student Directorate. Memos have served the show this group was organized and funded by the CIA.

What did Oswald want with him?

Oswald told Carlos Springier that he was an ex marine who despised communism and was willing to help train Cuban exiles.

So wait a minute, Oswald is starting the pro Castro fair Play for Cuba Committee and at the same time he's offering help in training anti Castro exiles. Didn't you say the New Orleans branch of the fair Play for Cuba Committee was funded by the CIA?

I did, But remember, so was Carlos Bringier's student group. And his group was not only funded by the CIA, it was run by George Joanedes. Remember him. Joann Edes was the former CIA agent who sabotaged the investigation led by the House Select Committee on Assassinations.

After meeting with Brgier, Oswald goes to a very anti Castro area of New Orleans and starts handing out leaflets for the fair Play for Cuba Committee.

There are photos of this. In some of those photos you can actually see a known CIA operative in the background. Here's a guy who's standing on a street corner in New Orleans handing out leaflets for the fair Play for Cuba Committee, And who's filming that? And why is that even being filmed. If you want the public to know something about something, you have to create some kind of event that would make news. So while handing out these pro Castro leaflets.

Four members of the Cuban Student Director confronted him, grabbed his pamphlets, threw him in the air, started shouting at him, and was about to be a fight, and two cops came in and arrested them all.

The local radio station WDSU jumped all over it.

The reporter, a guy named William Kurt Stuckey from WDSU, named the fair Play for Cuba Committee in his report and named Lee Harvey Oswald. So what would be the implication of that.

They're staging this? How else would the public know that Oswald was pro castro unless it was picked up by the press. It had to be documented.

Oswald was getting sheep dipped as a pro Castro agent, and at the same time, the fair Play for Cuba Committee was being made to look weak.

Oswald and the Cubans are all arrested, they're taken into the police station. Oswald the first thing he does is ask for an FBI age. Why would a leftist supporter of Fidel Castro ask to see an FBI.

Agent Because it was all theater and Oswald was in the lead role.

To this day, the CIA denies their connection to Oswald despite everything we know, some of which we've covered so far in this series. They claim to have had very minimal awareness of Oswald and no direct connection. In June twenty twenty three, Peter Baker of The New York Times published a story revealing new details about the CIA and

This letter was intercepted and read by the CIA when it was originally sent. So right there we have another piece of documentation of the fact that the CIA was fully aware and tracking Lee Harvey Oswald.

Now, apparently the existence of this CIA memo wasn't news assassination researchers have known that this memo existed for decades. The news that the New York Times was breaking in their story was about the author of this memo, which strikes me as odd that it was more important to the CIA to hide the identity of the person who wrote the memo than the existence of the memo itself.

Ruben e.

Fhron was a CIA analyst and translator. He's worked for the CIA for since nineteen fifty five. He was in charge of reading the mail of people who were picked by James Angleton. So Angleton had a list of about two hundred people whose mail he opened, copied, filed, and Oswald was one of those people, starting from the week he went to the Soviet Union in nineteen fifty nine.

So it was known that mister Efron's role was to surveil the mail of people that Angleton had on this select list. What is about this memo that stands out?

The time story showed that not only was the CIA reading Oswald's mail while he was in the Soviet Union. When Oswald comes home, Ephron writes a memo which he sends to his boss, which says, missus editor in CI SIG will be interested.

CI SIG is the Counterintelligence Special Investigations Group.

CI SIG was so secret that almost nobody in the CIA other than Dulles Angleton and the people that worked in SIGG knew it even existed.

The fact that Oswald's file is controlled at that highest level of the CIA is extremely noteworthy. So what the time story shows is that not only were they reading his mail, but after he returned to the United States, they were paying close attention to.

Him, and that they would be the poet's spy.

Angleton knew all about Oswald, and if you start to connect the dots, when Angleton needed someone in nineteen sixty three to play a role in his efforts to take down Castro, he taps someone he knows, Lee Harvey Oswald.

Next episode on Who Killed JFK, we meet Richard K. S Nakel, also known as the Man who Knew too Much.

By sure accident.

He's struggled on the fact that there was an assassination here. Good plan, and then it is preliminary hearing and he says, well, I'm glad you caught me. He says, I really don't want to be in Dallas, and I says, well, what do you mean by that?

And he says, you'll want to know.

Who killed JFK is hosted by Rob Reiner and me solid At O'Brien and Our executive producers are Rob Reiner, Michelle Reiner, Matt George, Jason English, David Hoffman, and me Soldad O'Brien. Our writer is David Hoffman, with research by Dick Russell. Our story editors are Rob Reiner and Julie Pignero. Our senior producer is Julie Pinneo. Our producers are Tristan Nash, Dick Russell, Michelle Goldfein, and Amari Lee. Our editors are Tristan Nash, Julie Pigneto, and Marcus de Lauro. Our project