[104-10332-10009.pdf — page 53]
13-00000534Mr. MURPHY. I honestly couldn't find anyone, or I am not aware of anyone that the division or the CI Staff, that is, those officers concerned with this case, were handling it directly. I don't know of any former Soviet intelligence officer or other knowledgeable source to whom they spoke about this matter who felt this would have been possible. If someone did, I never heard of it.Mr. KLEIN. During this interrogation period, beginning in April 1964, would it be fair to say that the questions relating to Oswald and the problems which you have just been discussing relating to Oswald constituted a major area for questioning and in interrogating Nosenko?Mr. MURPHY. Probaby not.Mr. KLEIN. Why would that have been?Mr. MURPHY. Because there were many other areas which posed equally inter- esting aspects yet about which we knew much more and which had occurred abroad and involved collateral knowledge, which obviously is not easy for us to obtain in the Soviet Union.Mr. KLEIN. Who in the Soviet Russia division made the decision as to who would question Nosenko, subsequent to April 4?Mr. MURPHY. [OIA employee], chief of the group.Mr. KLEIN. And do you know of any criteria that he used to pick his inter- rogators?Mr. MURPHY. Some knowledge of Russian, as Nosenko's English was not good, the fact that he had been exposed. Well, that is one of the aspects of the CIA interrogation. You try not to use too many people because you then lose. In the first place, you are dealing with a potentially hostile guy who is liable to go back to the Soviet Union, or return to the other side, and so you don't want to expose too many officers, plus the fact it is not a good idea to simply bring a lot of people in. You have to have people who studied the case and became in depth, know it in depth and therefore, so they use the officers that they had available and there were a variety of criteria.Mr. KLEIN. As I mentioned to you in our conversations about a week ago, it is our information that the person who interrogated Nosenko about the Oswald matter had no background whatsoever in Oswald, he didn't know anything about Oswald's background or really about Oswald at all. Is there any reason that such a person would be used that you can tell us?Mr. MURPHY. I am not sure I understand. I thought the point was that he had, he was not a man of a lot of background in the CI debriefings or interrogations. I wasn't sure of the point he didn't know about Oswald. I am not sure very many of us knew very much about Oswald than was available at the time.Mr. KLEIN. Two pointsMr. MURPHY. The reason that the chap was chosen was because he was level- headed, extremely toughminded, and was going to be with the case for the long pull. He was not going to be changed. That is why he was used. And his career since then has borne out the judgment of many, he is a very good officer.Mr. KLEIN. But wouldn't-Mr. MURPHY. I don't know that he didn't, that he wasn't what you are saying, he knew nothing at all about Oswald's case. I find that difficult to believe. But I don't know.Mr. KLEIN. Well, if I asked you to consider a hypothetical situation, where I told you the officer who interrogated Oswald knew nothing about Oswald other than what he learned from Nosenko, would you think that was unusual that they would not, if they didn't have somebody already who knew about Oswald, at least given somebody a thorough briefing from A to Z, everything that the CIA knew about Oswald, would you think it was unusual, that they didn't do that?Mr. MURPHY. I would certainly think so.Mr. KLEIN. The second part of my question was the other point I made to you a week ago when we spoke, to our knowledge, let me be frank, we spoke to the particular officer in a deposition, so that our knowledge is gained from that, it is possible that since I have not seen the typed up deposition that what I say might not be exactly what the deposition says, but my recollection of it is that he also had little or no prior interrogation experience, and my question is would that be-Mr. MURPHY. That wouldn't surprise me because there were very few people, relatively few people, in the Division or indeed elsewhere who had a lot of interrogation experience. We hadn't done a lot of very many hostile CIA debrief- ings. People who might have been used were probably otherwise, either abroad,