[104-10332-10009.pdf — page 60]
# 20have a say in what happens with respect ertainly was involved with decisions on : to end, but I was not the controllingre were three major agency reports that the Nosenko case; specifically there was by the Soviet Russia Division, another I the Office of Security report, and then a red to as the Hart report. ether you are familiar with all three ofll any longer whether I read the first two riefed on their contents. The Hart report the agency in early February 1973 and I onnections with it since. ing his defection in 1964 and upon his tes was Yuri Nosenko in the custody ofI missed the question. ; asking precisely during his defection in in the United States, was Yuri Nosenko: That was an accepted procedure under eragency Defector Committee that defec- antry were handled by the CIA, through esettling period, whatever had to be doneat the legal authority under which hek that perhaps, Mr. Chairman, if you like to answer that question a little bit dulge me. nly.go, on September 20, 1978, I received a before this committee in executive ses- reviewing that transcript I noted that, er, I characterized Mr. Yuri Nosenko's between 1964 and 1969 in a number of is an area of obvious interest to the › take this opportunity to describe my t greater detail as to what Mr. Nosen- entral Intelligence Agency was. a lawyer nor a judge, so I was not conclusions about Mr. Nosenko's tenure xe Agency. I'm sorry, I am not prepared. Geneva, Switzerland, Mr. Nosenko re- ed to defect to the West. Mr. Nosenko's npanied by a claim that he could give a ee Harvey Oswald's contacts in connec- Oswald's stay in the Soviet Union be-e the significance that Yuri Nosenko's nvestigation of President Kennedy's as- turned out to be a bona fide defector, if# 21This information were to be believed, then we could conclude that the KGB and the Soviet Union had nothing to do with Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963 and therefore had nothing to do with President Kennedy's murder.bIf, on the other hand, Mr. Nosenko had been programed in advance by the KGB to minimize KGB connections with Oswald, if Mr. Nosenko was giving us false information about Oswald's con- tacts with the KGB in 1959 to 1962, it was fair for us to surmise that there may have been an Oswald-KGB connection in November 1963, more specifically that Oswald was acting as a Soviet agent when he shot President Kennedy.If it were shown that Oswald was in fact acting as a Soviet agent when he shot President Kennedy, the consequences to the United States of America and, indeed, to the world, would have been staggering. Thus, it became a matter of the utmost importance to this Government to determine the bona fides of Mr. Yuri Nosenko. Mr. Nosenko arrived in the country in February 1964. By the end of March it was clear to us that the task of evaluating Mr. Nosen- ko's credibility would not be easy.On April 2, 1964, as Deputy Director of Plans, I, along with David Murphy, Chief of the Soviet Bloc Division, and Mr. Lawrence R. Houston, the General Counsel to the CIA, met with Mr. Nicho- las Katzenbach, then Deputy Attorney General of the United States; Mr. J. Walter Yeagley, Chief of the Internal Security Divi- sion of the Justice Department; Mr. William E. Foley, who was then Mr. Yeagley's First Assistant in the Internal Security Divi- sion; and Mr. Harold F. Riese from the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department.The meeting took place in Mr. Katzenbach's office in the Justice Department. The purpose of the meeting was to define Mr. Nosen- ko's legal status in the United States and to anticipate what kind of legal problems might arise in connection with the Agency's ongoing custody of Mr. Nosenko.The Agency provided me a copy of the memorandum for the record written by Mr. Lawrence Houston describing this meeting on April 2, 1964, and a second memorandum which reflects the substance of a telephone call from Mr. Foley on the following day, April 3, 1964. These documents were in part declassified by the Agency on September 18, 1978, and I would like to make them part of the record of these proceedings.During the meeting of April 2, 1964, the Department of Justice was fully informed of Mr. Nosenko's status with the Agency and the Department's opinion was requested as to the scope of the Agency's ongoing authority with respect to Mr. Nosenko.As Mr. Houston's memorandums relate, Mr. Nosenko's technical status in the United States was one of "exclusion and parole," which means that the Immigration and Naturalization Service had technically excluded Mr. Nosenko from the United States but had also temporarily "paroled him" to the custody of the Central Intel- ligence Agency.It is my understanding that the terms of the parole provided that Mr. Nosenko would remain in the custody of the Agency unless it was determined whether Mr. Nosenko should be deported or whether he should be permitted to settle in the United States.