Originator: HSCA
From: SCELSO, JOHN
Document date: 05/16/1978
Document type: PAPER-TEXTUAL DOCUMENT

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JFK Assassination System

Identification Form

Agency Information

Date:

10/19/20

AGENCY: HSCA

RECORD NUMBER: 180-10131-10330

RECORD SERIES: SECURITY CLASSIFIED TESTIMONY

AGENCY FILE NUMBER: 014728

Document Information

ORIGINATOR: HSCA

FROM:

SCELSO, JOHN

TO :

TITLE:

DATE: 05/16/1978

PAGES:

193

SUBJECTS :

CIA, ASSOCIATION WITH OSWALD

CIA, METHODOLOGY

SCELSO, JOHN, TESTIMONY BEFORE THE COMMITTEE

OSWALD, LEE, POST RUSSIAN PERIOD, TRAVEL, TRIP TO

MEXICO

OSWALD, LEE, RUSSIAN PERIOD, DEFECTION TO RUSSIA

NOSENKO, YURI

DOCUMENT TYPE: TRANSCRIPT

CLASSIFICATION: Unclassified

RESTRICTIONS: 3

CURRENT STATUS: Redact

DATE OF LAST REVIEW: 01/01/2003

OPENING CRITERIA:

COMMENTS :

Box 6

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EXECUTIVE SESSION

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TUESDAY, MAY

16, 1978

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U.S. House of Representatives,

Subcommittee on the Assassina-

tion of John F. Kennedy of

the Select Committee on

Assassinations,

Washington, D.C.

The Subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 9:35 a.M.

in room 3370, House Annex No. 2, 2nd and D Streets, N.W.

Present: Michael Goldsmith and Dan Hardway.

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Mr. Goldsmith. Miss Reporter, will you please swear in

the witness?

The Reporter. Do you swear that the testimony you are

about to give in this matter will be the truth, the whole

truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God?

Mr. Scelso. I do.

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TESTIMONY OF JOHN SCELSO

Mr. Goldsmith. Would you please

state your name for

the record?

Mr. Scelso. John Scelso.

Mr. Goldsmith. Would you spell Scelso?

Mr. Scelso.

S-c-e-1-s-0.

Mr. Goldsmith. What is your present occupation, Mr.

Scelso?

Mr. Scelso. I am retired.

Mr. Goldsmith. Where do you live?

Mr. Scelso. Abroad.

Mr. Goldsmith. Mr. Scelso, are you here testifying

before the Committee voluntarily and without subpoena?

Mx. Scelso. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. Have you been given a copy of the Commit-

tee rules and the Committee resolutions?

Mr.. Scelso. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. Have you had an opportunity to read

Rule Number 4?

Mr. Scelso:

Yes, I have.

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you understand that rule?

Mr. Scelso. Yes, I do.

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you understand that you have a right

to have counsel present here today?

Mr. Scelso. Yes.

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MI. Goldsmith. Do you waive that right?

Mr: Scelso. Yes. I am an attorney myself.

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you understand the Committee's rules

that you have a right to receive a copy of the transcript of

the deposition statement that you are about to give today?

Mr. Scelso. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. Are you willing to waive that right/

MI. Scelso. Yes, I waive that.

Mr. Goldsmith. I gave you, a few minutes ago, a copy

of a letter written by the Acting Director of Central Intelli-

gence, Mr. Carlucci, to this Committee. It is in the Commit-.

tee's record as Exhibit 94, JFK Exhibit 94.

Have you had a chance to read that letter?

Mr. Scelso. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you understand it?

Mr. Scelso. I do.

Mr. Goldsmith. For purposes of the record, I would like

to explain to you that the Committee's mandate is to investi-

gate the assassination of President Kennedy in terms of who

killed the President. Was there a conspiracy? What was the

performance of the investigative agencies, including the FBI

and the CIA? Also to evaluate the work of the Warren

Commission.

Do you understand that?

MI.

Scelso. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. Mr. Scelso, is it true that you were

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formerly employed by the Central Intelligence Agency?

Mr. Scelso.

Yes, I was.

Mr. Goldsmith. For how many years were you so employed?

Mr. Scelso. Twenty-three years.

Mr. Goldsmith. In what capacity?

Mr.. Scelso. I was an intelligence officer in the clan-

destine operations side of the organization.

Mr. Goldsmith. For all twenty-three years?

Mr. Scelso. Yes, all twenty-three years.

Mr. Goldsmith. What position did you have with the

Agency at the time you retired?

Mr. Scelso. At the time I retired, I was on the foreign

intelligence

staff in charge of the operations branch

respon-

sible for reviewing almost all of the foreign intelligence

and counter-intelligence operations of the Agency and of

formulating doctrine with the conduct of such operations.

I was also a member of a panel which reviewed the total

programs of the Agency abroad and evaluated them.

Of course, at the time of the Kennedy assassination, I

had quite another job.

Mr. Goldsmith. That was my next question. What was your

position?

Mr. Scelso. At the time of the Kennedy assassination,

I was the chief of a branch responsible for operations in

Mexico and Central America, down to and including Panama.

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Mr. Goldsmith. Which branch was that?

MI. Scelso. I think it was called WH-3, Western Hemis-

phere 3. The designations change from time to time.

Mr. Goldsmith. Have you discussed with anyone from the

Agency the testimony you are going to be giving here today?

Mr. Scelso. Yes. I was acquainted, very briefly, with

the general thrust of the Committee's investigation, which is

as you have summarized it to me today.

I was made aware of the Nosenko case, and I borrowed

Mr. Epstein's book and read it over the week-end. That is

all.

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Mr. Goldsmith. Did you have any involvement in the

Nosenko case?

Mr. Scelso. No. I knew of the Nosenko case in a very

sketchy way. I knew that Nosenko had defected and that he

had said that Oswald was not a Soviet agent.

I later heard that Nosenko was discovered to have been

dissembling, not being on the level. That is all. That

information was imparted to me by officers I do not recall in

no more than three sentences on the first occasion and two

sentences on the second occasion.

Mr. Goldsmith. Was there any particular reason, then,

that you read the Nosenko book this week-end?

Mr. Scelso.

Just that I am very much interested in the

Kennedy assassination investigation and it seemed to present al

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lot of new angles.

Mr. Goldsmith. Did you think that you might be asked

questions about the Nosenko case?

Mr. Scelso. I suspected that I might.

Incidentally, the book did raise several points in my

mind which I would like to discuss with you.

Mr. Goldsmith. Before we do that, other than the general

briefing that the Agency gave you on the work of our Committee,

did anyone in the Agency suggest to you that you should not

not cooperate with us?

Mr. Scelso. No.

Mr. Goldsmith. Did anyone inform you about the substance

of other interviews or statements made under oath by Agency

employees to staff of this Conmittee?.

Mr. Scelso. No, except that I was told in a discussion

of the Nosenko case that certain people in the Agency had

testified along one side or the other of the Nosenko case.

Mr. Goldsmith. You were not informed about the substance

of any statements made by any CIA person to this Committee?

Mr. Scelso..

No.

Mr. Goldsmith. Before we proceed, you indicated that

you would like to give us some background information or com-

ments on the Nosenko case from the book you have read. Why

do you not take this opportunity to do that now?

Mr. Scelso.

Well, several points struck me. As you know,

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was in charge of the investigation of the assassination

of President Kennedy for the clandestine services of CIA, of

which Mr. Helms was then the Chief for the first one or two

months, and I learned a lot about the case at that time, read

hundreds of papers

and a summary report, before I was relieved

of this responsibility.

In reading the book, the Epstein book, I noted a couple

of things. One is that. the Embassy officer in Moscow who

talked to Oswald when he arrived there and wanted to renounce

his citizenship, a man named Schneider, was stated to be an

officer of the Central Intelligence Agency.

If this is true, I did not know it at the time of my

investigation and must conclude that the information was with-

held from me, because I discussed the Oswald case with members

of the Soviet Branch at that time, in the presence of an

officer who had been in Moscow at the time of the Oswald

defection.

In this conversation where I was reading the State Depart-

ment reports written by the officer who had seen Oswald, I was

not told that this man was a CIA agent, CIA officer, or what-

ever he was.

I do not know that he was. I only know that the book

said that he was.

Secondly, the book states that Oswald had been in touch

in Dallas or Houston or someplace with the CIA Office of

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Operations Officer, Contacts Branch, named Moore -- M-0-0-I-e.

Mr. Goldsmith. J. Walter Moore?

Mr. Scelso. Something like that.

J. Walton Moore was in touch with deMohrenschielt. It

asserts that deMohrenschielt claimed Moore had asked him to

stay

in

touch with Oswald.

As I recall, I did not know that Moore had, any officer

of the Central Intelligence Agency in the Texas area, had been

in touch with Lee Harvey Oswald at any time.

Mr. Goldsmith. My recollection differs somewhat. My

recollection of the book was that it said that Moore had been

in touch with deMohrenschielt. I do not think it went into

any detail that Moore had been in touch with Oswala.

Mr. Scelso. I read the book very hurriedly, and I

thought they were the same party, however, I cannot swear to

that. I just wanted to say that I did not know that there

had ever been any involvement between the domestic branch of

the Central Intelligence Agency that was then called the

Office of Operations and their offices around the states,

who interviewed American servicemen going abroad or returning

from abroad, was called the Contacts Branch. I did not know

that anyone in that branch had ever been in contact with the

Oswald case, whether with him personally or by requesting

people to elicit information from him, and so on.

Mr. Goldsmith. Does that surprise you?

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Mr. Scelso. Yes, because that should have shown up in

the traces and it was, of course,

a vital factor in the inves-

tigation.

Mr. Goldsmith. When I say does that surprise you, does

the fact that no officer from the domestic contacts division,

or domestic contacts service,

ever contacted Oswald? Does the

fact of the absence of such a contact surprise you?

Mr. Scelso. No, it would not have surprised me, because

Oswald was a security suspect and was a proper subject for

handling by the Office of Naval Intelligence and the Federal

Bureau of Investigation, not with the Central Intelligence

Agency.

Mr. Goldsmith. Are you saying, then, that it would not

be standard operating procedure for the Agency to attempt to

debrief a returning defector?

Mr. Scelso. I do not know, really, because the operations

of the Soviet Branch was something that was very, very exclu-

sively held which I, in my later positions, when I had to

review all of the operations in the world and so on, very

rarely found out anything about it.

Mr. Goldsmith. For the record, I would. like to state

that Dan Hardway has just walked into the room.

Dan, this is Mr. Scelso.

Mr. Scelso. I know that positively I did not know that

Schneider was a CIA man, if he were; and as far as I recall --

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and I have never read any of the files since. I was relieved

back in early 1964 of the responsibility for the investigation --

I do not recall anything about Moore or any CIA direct of

indirect contact.

Mr. Goldsmith. When Oswald was in Russia, he worked at

a radio factory for quite some time. Would that fact have

made the Agency more interested in interviewing him upon his

return?

Mr.. Scelso. Yes, it should have, normally -- and I am

just conjecturing now; I do not actually know what the policy

of the Office of Operations was about interviewing security

suspects in the United States, an obvious suspect like an ex-

defector.

Mr. Goldsmith. Should there be a statement in Oswald's

file that the reason he is not being interviewed or debriefed

is that he would fall into the proper jurisdiction of Office

of Naval Intelligence or the FBI?

Mr. Scelso. On the basic of logic you would think so,

but I do not know anything at all about standard operating

procedures of the Office of Operations.

Mr. Goldsmith. The Office of Operations --

Mr. Scelso.

- was a branch of the Central Intelligence

Agency which maintained offices around the United States and

briefed and debriefed Americans going abroadd and returning

from abroad.

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Service?

Mr. Scelso.

Something like that.

Mr. Goldsmith. You indicated that you were present at

a conversation where there was a CIA officer present who was

in Moscow when Oswald was there?

Mr. Scelso. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. Who was that officer?

MI. Scelso.

Mr. Hugh Montgomery.

Mr. Goldsmith. When did this conversation take place?

Mr. Scelso. I presume it was sometime within two months

after the assassination.

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you know whether MI. Montgomery ever

had any contact with Oswald in Moscow?

Mr. Scelso. I do not know that, no. When I talked to

him, he wondered whether he might not have been present at

one of the interviews.

Mr. Goldsmith. Which interview are you referring to?

Mr. Scelso. The interview of the State Department officer

who wrote these reports we were going over with Lee Harvey

Oswald, and then he reflected on this a minute and said no,

he was not, because there were other defectors at the time, you

know, before or afterwards.

Mr. Goldsmith. Did Mr. Montgomery make any other com-

ments about the Oswald case?

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Mr. Scelso. No.

MI. Goldsmith. You indicated that you had no knowledge

whether or not Mr. Schneider was a CIA officer; if he was would

his file reflect that?

Mr. Scelso.

oh, sure.

Mr. Goldsmith. Is it possible that his file would not

indicate his active employment with the Agency?

Mr. Scelso. His files in the State Department?

Mr. Goldsmith. Let's talk first about his files with

the CIA.

Mr. Scelso.. I do not know whether we would have a file

at the CIA.

Mr. Goldsmith. Let me run this hypothetical with you.

Assume that a man works for the Central Intelligence

Agency, 1949 for a year, and he leaves and joins the Foreign

Service, becomes a Foreign Service Officer. Eventually he

gets assigned to work in the Soviet Union as a consular

officer.

His CIA file, let's assume that during this time that

the man is working State Department cover but he is also

CIA. Would the CIA file necessarily reflect the fact that he

is still working for the Agency?

Mr. Scelso. Oh, sure. There would be a file in the

Office of Personnel that would show his entire CIA record

and the fact that he was put under State Department cover.

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That file would probably be very closely held, even more

closely held than ordinary files.

Mr. Goldsmith. Would that indication that he is under

State Department cover, but still with the Agency, would that

be in the subject's main personnel file, or is it possible

that it would be in some other file?

Mr. Scelso. I really cannot answer that authoritatively,

because I never saw the file of any officer who was stationed

in Moscow. The assignment of CIA officers to Moscow was

something that was very elaborately prepared, planned in

advance, and very closely held.

For example, I was once

stationed in an Embassy abroad

where there was an officer, CIA officer, who was just in to

go to. Moscow as his next assignment. I did not know that this

man was a CIA officer at all, even

though I was, for a consid-

erable period, Acting Chief of the station.

I did not know that this man, whom I saw occasionally and

who often I had occasion to deal with, he was a State Depart-

ment Security Officer. I did not know he was a CIA man,

until he got thrown out of Moscow later on.

Mr. Goldsmith. Was this Mr. Angelli?

Mr. Scelso. Yes.

I think that was his name.

Mr. Goldsmith. Is it possible for the Agency to work with

an

officer overseas

without there being any notation in the

officer's personnel file at CIA Headquarters -- in other words,

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a

personnel file would indicate, for example, that the

employee retired back, say, in 1955. No connection whatsoever

with the Agency after 1955, and for only a handful of people

to know that actually the person is still CIA?

Mr. Scelso. Certainly it is possible. As I say, I do

not really know the mechanics and the administrative proce-

dures that accompanies such an assignment.

Mr. Goldsmith. Was there any aspect of the Oswald case

that struck you as unusual when you first had an opportunity

to first read through the file?

Mr. Scelso. Do you mean after the assassination?

Mr. Goldsmith. Yes. Did you read the file any time before

the assassination?

Mr. Scelso. No.

Mr. Goldsmith. Then after the assassination.

Mr. Scelso. We only had a scan file on Oswald until he

was involved in the assassination, merely the fact that he

had been in the Marine Corps and had deserted, and we learned

about this in reports from the Navy and State Department, and

we had made a record, I think, a think file of the communica-

tions on him from other government agencies.

And of course it was the information that had come up

from Mexico City a few weeks before the assassination.

Mr. Goldsmith. I understand the file was limited in

nature, but even in light of what little material that was in'!

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it, was there anything in there that you found unusual?

Mr. Scelso. Not to me, because, for many years, I had

been dealing with cases like this and people like this and,

to me, it was just a typical defection case.

You see, one of the other things I was in the Agency,

early on, I was the first polygraph operator in the Agency

and had polygraphed some hundreds of security suspects. I

also had been a prisoner of war interrogator in World War II

and interrogated some tens of thousands of Germans; and I

also had been the counterespionage officer for the European

Division back in the '50's and dealt with dozens of defection

cases and things like that.

So Oswald just seemed to me to be a small potatoes

defector.

Mr. Goldsmith. What would be the Agency's standard

operating procedure with dealing with a defector that returns

into the country?

Mr. Scelso. I do not know. By the time that defectors

started coming back, I was no longer in a position to know

that kind of thing. People like that were handled, of course,

primarily by the FBI or, if there were military defectors,

also by their branch of service. And I was overseas for

¡many years, from '52 to '62 -- wait a minute; '55 to '62 --

and no case like that had ever come to my attention.

I was not in a position where things came across my desk.

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Mr. Goldsmith. Oswald defected to the Soviet Union in

October, 1959, and early November of '59, the CIA received

• cable or a copy of a cable from either the Office of Naval

Intelligence or from the Department of State, I do not recall

exactly which.

The substance of the cable reported Oswald's visits to

the American Embassy in Moscow and indicated that Oswald said

that he was going to defect and also that Oswald was going

to offer military-related information to the Soviets.

As I said, that cable came in at the beginning of November,

1959. Under normal operating procedure, should that cable

have triggered the opening of a 201 file?

Mr. Scelso. Again, I really cannot authoritatively speak

about procedures. I would imagine so.

Mr. Goldsmith. In your opinion, would it be unusual for

Oswald's 201 file to have been opened over a year after the

arrival of that cable? In other words, the file actually was

not opened until December, 1960, over a year after the defec-

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Would you regard that as unusuäl?

Mr. Scelso. I cannot tell. I never concerned myself

with procedures like that. When I came back from overseas,

¡I was put into running a great big branch with revolutions

going day and night, and. I had a large staff of extremely

capable people who concerned themselves with things like that.

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Mr. Goldsmith. We will get back to your work on this

case after the assassination in a while. What I would like

lito do now is go over a series of cables and transcripts per-

taining to the period before the assassination.

For the record, I would like to say that all of my ques-

tions pertain to the time period of late 1963.

In 1963, you were Chief of the Division known as WH-3?

Mr. Scelso. Branch.

Mr. Goldsmith. Branch known as WH-3?

Mr. Scelso. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. And what connection, if any, did you

have with the Mexico City Station at that time?

Mr. Scelso. The Mexico City Station was directly under

limy branch.

I had a branch and a series of desks under that.

One of them was the Mexico desk.

I was, first in 1962, I was Chief of the Mexico desk

itself and then, a year later, I became Chief of the Branch

which included Mexico and several other countries..

Mr. Goldsmith. Would the Chief of Station, Mexico City,

for example, be a subordinate of yours?

Mr. Scelso. In a sense, yes, although he reported

directly to the Division Chief and to the Director, and so

jon.

Every one of the Station Chiefs abroad has three or four

different roles.

Mr. Goldsmith. Was the manner in which he reported

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consistent with the manner in which other station chiefs

reported to headquarters?

Mr. Scelso.

Yes. As a matter of fact, Mexico was an

absolutely outstandingly managed station and its reporting

and conformance to procedures, and so on, was exemplary.

Mr. Goldsmith. Who was the Chief of Station, Mexico

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Mr. Scelso. Winston Scott.

MI. Goldsmith. I guess you have sort of done it, but

would -- indirectly -- but could you give us your impression

of Winn Scott's competence as a Station Chief?

Mr. Scelso. Winn Scott was, at that time -- probably,

in view of my later experience surveying all of the stations

in the world, as good as Station Chief as we had, and you

could fairly say that he had the best station in the world.

Mr. Goldsmith. Why would you say that he had the best

in the world?

Mr. Scelso. Because of the breadth and depth of their

operations, both in the counter-intelligence field and the

political action field, and in the espionage field.

Mr. Goldsmith. What kind of personal relationship, if

any, did you have with Mr. Scott?

Mr. Scelso. A fine relationship. He was a great deal

older than I was

-- not a great deal, but enough, and I had

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the greatest respect for him, and he also treated me with

the greatest respect.

Mr. Goldsmith. Did you and MI. Scott ever disagree?

Mr. Scelso. During the course of the investigation,

when letters and cables were flying thick and fast, there

were a few professional points on which we disagreed, but they

were never personal in matters. They were merely differences

of judgment and opinion.

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you know. Herb Minnell?

Mr. Scelso. The name is familiar to me, yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. I believe Mr. Minnell was case officer

in Mexico City, at that time, who was in charge of Soviet

Operations.

Mr. Scelso. That's right, yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you know him?

Mr. Scelso. I do know him, yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. Can you give us your opinion of his

competence?

MI. Scelso. I am looking back here now fifteen years

and since I have retired in 1970, I have had next to no con-

tact with anybody in the Agency, especially abroad. I

remember Mr. Minnell was picked for this job as a very capable

and experienced Soviet Operations officer.

However -- in fact, he was personally approved by me,

I believe -- but the standard by which you judged Soviet

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operations officers was an extremely controversial matter.

It was like asking Jerry Ford what he thinks of President

Carter, all prejudices aside, what do you think of President

Carter? It is a very difficult question to answer.

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He was certainly not an incompetent, but he was very

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well thought of and he was the best man for the job.

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Mr. Goldsmith. Do you have any opinion as to his honesty

and trustworthiness?

Mr. Scelso. I had never had any reason at all to doubt

io anything about it.

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Mr. Goldsmith. What about Mr. Robert Shaw?

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Mr. Scelso. Mr.. Robert Shaw was in the Mexico station.

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I recall him. He had been chief of a base up north, I

believe.

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And Shaw was a man whose honesty and loyalty I never

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could question, although he and I disagreed on a number of

professional things. I do not recall Mr. Shaw as a particularly

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solid individual.

Mr. Goldsmith. Did any of your disagreements with Mr.

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Shaw pertain to the Kennedy assassination?

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Mr. Scelso. NO.

Mr. Goldsmith. To the handling of the investigation by

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the Mexico City station?

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Mr. Scelso. No.

I do not think I ever discussed that

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with him, or with the other gentleman that you mentioned.

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Mr. Goldsmith. How about Mr. David Phillips?

Mr. Scelso. Mr. David Phillips, who has since become

related to me by marrying a relative of mine, was regarded by

me, long before this marriage, as one of the absolutely out-

standing officers of the Agency after I visited Mexico City

and reviewed his operations soon after I took over the

Mexico desk. I regard this man as one of the most brilliant,

capable officers that I have ever known, and nothing has

happened since then that has changed my judgment.

Mr. Goldsmith. What about your impression of his honesty,

integrity?

Mr. Scelso. Well, having known him through thick and

thin in the Mexico station and when he was later head of

Cuban operations, I would give him the highest marks. I have

never known any man of greater integrity, and few egual,

based on my experience.

Mr. Goldsmith. Have you known MI. Phillips in his

capacity as a propaganda officer ever sent out disinformation

lor misinformation concerning the Kennedy assassination?

Mr. Scelso.

No, but I can conceive that it might have

happened: in the Mexico station. Perhaps they did, in their

propaganda

efforts

which were going full-blast all the time,

put in newspaper articles and so on to discredit somebody,

some foreign power, in connection with the operation. I do

not believe that it was ever a policy to do so, but

they were

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pretty much independent in formulating their propaganda.

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you know a woman named Ann Goodpasture?

Mr. Scelso. Yes, but not intimately, not well. I knew

her when I visited the Mexico station.

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you know what her responsibilties were

in the Mexico City station?

Mr. Scelso. She was sort of the personal assistant to

"Winn Scott.

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you have any opinion as to her?

Mr. Scelso. She was very capable, extremly hardworking.

A very loyal person. As far as I know, she has the highest

reputation - recognizing the fact, of course, that there

were people in the Mexico station who did not like the Station

Chief and did not like any part of his hierarchy, because

Winn Scott was a very hard taskmaster.

The one point on which I used to disagree with winn

scott was his overworking his personnel and low-rating them

on their fitness reports.

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you know whether Mr. Scott maintained

I accurate and thorough system of files in the Mexico City

station?

Mr. Scelso. His file system was legendary. It was a

thing of his own creation and did not really conform to the

system which the Agency had devised. It was really

much more

intensive and his officers had to spend an awful lot of time

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keeping it up.

MI. Goldsmith. I have heard it said by several that

Mr. Scott never even threw out any piece of paper. Everything

was filed in the Mexico City Station.

Do you think that is an accurate statement?

Mr. Scelso. I think that would be a figure of speech.

think people would say, meaning that he never discarded

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any information that came in, that he attempted to have

everything incorporated

in the files, but it is inevitable in

the intelligence business that you really cannot do this

100 percent.

Mr. Goldsmith. What would have happened to Mr. Scott's

files after his death, to the Mexico City station's files

after Mr. Scott's death? For example, would the files have

been brought back?

Mr. Scelso. His personal files?

Mr. Goldsmith. Not his personal files. The files of

the Mexico City station. He had this enormous record-keeping

system and I would imagine -- I have no direct knowledge of

this because I think,- I retired before he did. I am not

sure of that, and I have no knowledge of that. Ordinarily,

his retirement or death would have had no effect on it.

However, files overseas may be purged from time to time

because of lack of space. Often they are sorted out, and a

¿lot of them sent home. That could have been. I have no

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no knowledge.

Mr. Goldsmith. What about Mr. Winn Scott's personal

files? What would have happened to them?

Mr. Scelso. I have no direct knowledge of that.

Mr.(Goldsmith. Any indirect knowledge?

Mr. Scelso. No, I never heard a word about it. I only

know -- I heard that Mr. Scott retired and that he went into

business of some kind in Mexico and he died of a heart attack.

Mr. Goldsmith. In 1963 when you were working in Head-

quarters, I take it that you frequently received communications

from the Mexico City station?

Mr. Scelso. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. In what form did those communications

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MI. Scelso. Cables and dispatches.

MI. Goldsmith. Were you ever in contact with the Mexico

City station by telephone?

Mr. Scelso. Rarely, extremely rarely. The division

was very frequently in touch with him by telephone. The

division chief and the deputy chief, over my violent objec-

tions.

Mr. Goldsmith. Who was the Division Chief?

Mr. Scelso. Colonel J.C. King.

Mr. Goldsmith. The Deputy Chaef?

Mr. Scelso.

Mr. Rayford Herbert.

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Mr. Goldsmith. Mr. Herbert is Deputy Chief of what?

Mr.

Scelso.

Western Hemisphere Division.

Mr. Goldsmith. On what occasion did they contact Mr.

Scott by telephone?

Mr. Scelso. In times of crisis where particularly

important operations were going on, where defectors were

coming out of where there was some kind of a crisis with the

Mexican government. It used to make my hair stand on end.

Mr. Goldsmith. Why was that?

MI. Scelso. Because it was grossly insecure.

Mr. Goldsmith. You indicate you received communications

in the form of a cable or dispatch.

Mr. Scelso. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. Under what circumstances would the

Mexico City Station send a cable instead of a dispatch? In

other words, more specifically, what would be the criteria for

sending a cable? What would be the criteria for sending a

dispatch?

Mr. Scelso. Cables were sent if the information was

of such a nature. that it had to be acted on within a day or

a day and a half or two days. Dispatches took so long that

you really could not take any kind of operational action

predicated on dispatch. You could take administrative

action.

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period.

Mr. Goldsmith. Is it fair to say that a cable normally

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suggested that something was of the highest priority?

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Mr. Scelso.

Cables were usually reporting operational

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events that required headquarters decisions. Of course, there

were also cables that transmitted intelligence information

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Mr. Goldsmith. Cables can be broken down into two

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categories.

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Mr. Scelso.

Operational cables and reports cables.

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MI. Goldsmith. The reports cables would be the intelli-

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gence information cables?

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Mr. Scelso. Yes.

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Mr. Goldsmith. Can you think of any exceptions to the

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Mr. Scelso. It was a very flexible matter. In the case

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operations, a lot of cables were sent.

Mr. Goldsmith. Once a cable was received in headquarters,

whose responsibility would it be to respond to the cable?

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Mr. Scelso. A cable would come into the communications

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center and they would, according to the code words which were

at the top, would assign the action to a certain desk branch

or division and that component's name would be at the top in

a certain position that indicated to everyone that that was

the action addressee and the others were information addressees.

This was based on the code names which the sender of the

telegram affixed to the top.

Mr. Goldsmith. In part, the standard would determine

would would receive and respond to a cable?

Mr. Scelso. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. Would the person receiving the cable

in Headquarters make an independent decision, perhaps, that

the cable should go to someone higher up in the Agency?

Mr. Scelso. Yes.

yes,

he could, or he could try to

get the action assigned to some different component if he

felt he should not have action.

Mr. Goldsmith. Under what circumstances would the cable

go to someone of a higher authority?

Mr. Scelso. Most cables did go on a reading board for

higher authority anyway. That is, on the reading boards of

the staff chiefs, the Counterintelligence Staff and Foreign

Intelligence Staff, and also the Director of the Office of

Operations and his Deputy, almost all cables went to them

as

an informational matter.

Mr. Goldsmith. Under what circumstances would the DDO Of

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his Deputy respond to the cables?

Mr. Scelso. Intervene or exercise direction, and so

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Mr. Goldsmith. Yes.

Mr. Scelso.

If it were a matter of great importance,

they might immediately call the Division or Branch and say

get over here, I want to talk to you about this.

Freguently

that happened. Or, if it were a matter of great importance,

an important difference of opinion with the station, the

Division or Branch would make sure that the DDo or his

Deputy -- I am using the present terminology; it was not

in effect then -- would sign off on the cable, to make sure

that he approved the action.

That very often happened with Mexico, because we were

dealing with all kinds of important matters involving American

defectors, American

security suspects, risky operations and

SO

on.

Mr. Goldsmith. You made reference before to a reading

board. What is a reading board?

Mr. Scelso. The reading board of the DDO and his

assistant, we get a stack of cables every morning about this

high [Indicatingl from all over the world, which he would

¡simply get, his assistants read those. He had a couple of

administrative assistants who were really medium grade intel-

ligence officers with broad experience who would screen these

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things for him and bring things up for him.

Then he was bombarded with telephone calls from the

divisions all the time about this or that cable. I had the

same thing when I was the Chief of Foreign Intelligence

Operations. I used to read a stack of cables that high

[Indicating] every morning. That is why I can read these

things so fast.

Mr. Goldsmith. That is what you referred to as a

reading board?

Mr. Scelso. Reading board, yes.

Now, the strange thing is that dispatches were not

similarly distributed.

Mr. Goldsmith. Why not?

Mr. Scelso. Because it would have been impossible to

read them.

It was completely up to the desk officers who

received dispatches whether they would write it on to senior

people, or the matters in them taken up by any senior

people. That is, the Branch Chief was responsible for see-

ing that important dispatches -- sometimes things came in

with elaborate discussions of policy recommendations for new

priorities and so on, and I would then take this up with the

senior officers in the division.

Mr. Goldsmith. Incidentially, how many branches were

there in the Western Hemisphere Division in 1963?

Mr. Scelso. I think there were five or six. I am not

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sure. Then there was Cuba, which was a separate task force,

as I learned from the Senate Committee; I had forgotten it.

And later, Cuba came into the Division.

Mr. Goldsmith. Turning to Lee Harvey Oswald, when did

he first come to your attention?

Mr. Scelso. I first learned of Lee Harvey Oswald on

the day of the assassination when his name was mentioned on

the radio and two minutes later an officer of my branch came

running in and said, with the telegrams on Lee Harvey Oswald

which we had sent, those telegrams which had gone out some

weeks before the assassination.

I had not noticed. I do not know whether -- I probably

saw them, but I did not recollect them at that time.

Mr. Goldsmith. When the name Oswald first came to your

attention after the assassination, what action, if any, did

you take?

Mr. Scelso. When it came in, I was not sitting in my

office. I was up in the Division front offices. I happened

to be up there on another matter when the thing came in over

the radio and within minutes, people from my office were up

there with the cables. And I do not know exactly what we

did, but within minutes we had notified the Division Chief

and the DDP -- that is, the DDO.

Mr. Goldsmith. How soon after the assassination did

this officer come on with the Oswald cables?

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Mr. Scelso. This was in the mid-afternoon of that day

and I think that the assassination was on the radio, someone

had a little transistor radio going on with the news on it,

and suddenly it came over and then in about a half hour after

the assassination or fifteen minutes later, then we were

all listening to this.

I do not know how long after the actual shooting it

was that Oswald's name became known, perhaps an hour, hour

and a half. Within minutes after that, they were out with

the cables in their hands.

Mr. Goldsmith. Within minutes of the name Oswald being

on the radio, an officer came in with the Oswald cables?

Mr. Scelso.

Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. Who was that officer?

Mr. Scelso. I believe it was Mrs. Charlotte Bustos

who was the, sort of the Major Domo of the Branch. She

managed all the records, handled all of the cables from

Mexico that dealt with security suspects, or asked for traces

on security suspects.

Mr. Goldsmith. Did you ask her how she was able to

obtain the Oswald cables so quickly?

Mr. Scelso. No, I know where she would have gotten them.

We have copies of them right in our Branch.

MI. Goldsmith. At that time, did she also have a photo-

graph of Oswald?

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Mr. Scelso. No, I do not think so.

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you know whether Charlotte Bustos

ever discovered a photograph of Oswald at CIA headquarters?

Mr. Scelso. I do not think so.

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you know whether she ever discovered

a photograph of someone whom she thought was Oswald?

Mr. Scelso. If you are talking about - are you talking

about the surveillance photo that was taken in front of the

Embassy, the Russian Embassy?

Mr. Goldsmith. We are going to get into that photographi

Mr.. Scelso. I do not remember any photograph of Oswald

at that time, the day of the assassination, or even later.

I do not recall that there ever was a photo of

Oswald found

in Agency files. I do remember our asking -- we had to ask

ONI for a photo, and so on. As far as I recall, they never

sent us one.

It could be that later on she found one, but I don't l

recall.

Mr. Goldsmith. We are now going to start going through

a series of cables and other materials that the Agency has

provided for us, and for reference purposes, I am going to

be referring to each piece of paper in the stack that I am

holding before me, I am going to be referring to it by the

particular number that is stamped on it. The numbers are

assigned to each particular page by the CIA. : These are all

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CIA documents and, as a means of allowing the Agency to

monitor what they gave us and to make sure that everything

that they gave us will be given back to them, they have

number-stamped each page. That is also an appropriate way

for us to refer to each page, for purposes of our record,

because eventually everything will be returned to the

Agency:

In the future, if somebody is trying to reconstruct

what we are looking at, they just need to turn to the

appropriate page.

At this time, I would like to refer to CIA-177, and I

will ask you to read that.

(Pause)

Mr. Scelso. Yes, I remember this cable.

Mr. Goldsmith. That cable is dated when?

MI. Scelso. 9 October 1963.

Mr. Goldsmith. You indicated that you remember that

cable?

Mr. Scelso. I remember having seen it two years ago

with the Senate investigation.

Mr. Goldsmith. On the upper left-hand corner of the

cable, it says WH-8.

Mr. Scelso. That means eight copies went to wH.

Mr. Goldsmith. Would one copy of this have gone to

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MI. Scelso. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith.

In October of '63 when the cable was

sent out?

Mr. Scelso. Yes. Went to Charlotte Bustos.

Mr. Goldsmith. You indicated it went to Bustos by

writing indication on the top of the page. Is that correct?

Mr. Scelso. Well, lit came to our desk, you see. It

is from Mexico City so we automatically got the action on

it and the information copies went to counterintelligence

staff, FI staff, Soviet Division, I guess that is Registry.

I do not know what "BR" is.

Mr. Goldsmith. On the bottom right-hand corner of the

page, it says 201-289248.

Mr. Scelso. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. What does that refer to?

Mr. Scelso. Probably it refers to Oswald's 201.

Mr. Goldsmith. I noted in the left-hand corner of the

page, left-hand side of the page, there is a notation that

says D-200-5-41. Do you know. what that means?

Mr. Scelso. I have no idea. .

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you know when that indication would

have been put there?

Mr. Scelso. No. That could be a subject file, refer-

ring to the Kennedy assassination, or something like that.

Mr. Goldsmith. The second paragraph of this cable makes

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reference to a photograph.

Mr. Scelso. Yes.

MI. Goldsmith. Was that photograph sent to headquarters

prior to the assassination?

Mr. Scelso. No, I do not believe it was.

It was sent

afterwards.

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you know whether that photograph

depicted Lee Harvey Oswald?

Mr. Scelso. No, I do not... This was the famous photo-

graph that was shown to Oswald's mother, and so on, which

she thought was Jack Ruby.

Mr. Goldsmith. That is correct.

That is the photograph

in question.

Do you have any explanation for the photograph which is

commonly referred to as the "Mexico mystery man" photograph?

Do you have any explanation for that?

Mr. Scelso. They looked at the photographs that they

had for the period when the telephone call was made. This

was the only one that could have conceivably been him.

So they said, they conjectured, concluded, that if we do have

a photograph of the man, this is it.

Mr. Goldsmith. On what do you base that explanation?

Mr. Scelso. My knowledge of the photography operation

and talks with station officers before and afterward. They

did not get pictures of everyone who entered and exited the

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Soviet Embassy.

Mr. Goldsmith. The photograph of the Mexico mystery

man, let's back up for a minute.

The Mexico mystery man was

a non-latin.. Is that correct?

Mr. Scelso. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. Was his picture the only picture of a

non-Latin taken during that time period?

Mr.

Scelso. I do not know. I never saw all of the

pictures that were taken during that period.

Mr. Goldsmith.. If there were pictures of other non-

Latins taken during that period of time, what reason would

the Mexico City station have had for sending that particular

picture?

Mr. Scelso. I do not know, if there were other pictures

of non-Latins. I do not know what other pictures there

were at all.

Mr. Goldsmith. Who were the case officers that you

spoke to down there pertaining to this particular photograph?

Mr. Scelso. Dave Phillips. Winn Scott.

Mr. Goldsmith. Did Phillips tell you that he was

actually down in Mexico City at the time during this particular

incident with the Mexico mystery man?

Mr. Scelso. These discussions were after the assassina-

tion, probably a good deal after the assassination.

I do not

recall anybody from Mexico coming up soon after the

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assassination. There was a great deal of cables back and

forth on this whole business.

MI. Goldsmith. Can you recall anything else that winn

Scott might have said in reference to this photograph?

Mr. Scelso. No.

We conjectured that Mexico City, and we conjectured

that it was a Mexican seaman.

Mr. Goldsmith. The second paragrpah of this cable

contains an accurate description of Oswald. Is that a fair

statement?

(Pause)

Mr. Selso. The description would not apply to Oswald.

Mr. Goldsmith. Why is that?

Mr. Selso. Because Oswald was not that old. He was

not of athletic build. He was not six feet tall. He did

have a receding hairline, and he could have worn anything.

But the description itself is too old, the build is wrong

and the height is wrong.

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you know whether at any time the

Mexico City station obtained a photograph of Oswald?

Mr. Selso. No, I never heard that they did. They may

have been sent one from Washington, but they did not photo-

graph him locally, as far as I know.

Mr. Goldsmith. That is what I meant.

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Mr.. Scelso. No.

Mr. Goldsmith. Let us look, now, at CIA-179.

Would you please read through that?

(Pause)

Have you ever seen this particular cable before?

Mr. Scelso. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. When was that?

Mr. Scelso. Probably the day it was written.

Mr. Goldsmith. Does your name appear anywhere in that

cable?

Mr. Scelso.

Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. Where is that?

Mr. Scelso. Right here [Indicating].

Mr. Goldsmith. AT the bottom of CIA 181?

Mr. Scelso. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. What is the date of this cable?

MI. Scelso.

10 October 1963.

Mr. Goldsmith. I believe that you acted as the coordi-

nating officer with regards to this cable.

MI. Scelso. I was what was called the authenticating

officer, since it went out of my Branch, you see.

Mr. Goldsmith. Does it not indicate here that j.C. King

is the authenticating officer?

Mr. Scelso.

That is right. It was released by

ADTOAD? .

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Mr. Goldsmith.

Thomas Karamessinas?

MI. Scelso.

Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. Were you the coordinating officer?

MI. Scelso. They called me coordinating officer because

there is no other

place for it. But they came out of my

Branch, you see. It was written in my Branch, so I have to

sign it before it can even leave the Branch, so I am really

an authenticating officer.

MI. Goldsmith. What does the term "authenticating

officer" mean?

Mr.. Scelso. An authenticating officer is responsible

for the content of the cable. He approves the content of

it and the coordinating officers certify that they have no

objection to it and approve the general tenor of it, but

they are not responsible for its content.

Mr. Goldsmith. When you say responsible for its content.

you mean responsible for its accuracy?

Mr. Scelso. For its accuracy, and the propriety of

its recommendations, and so on.

Mr. Goldsmith. What about a releasing officer? What

is his responsibility?

Mr. Scelso. The releasing officer approves the briefing.

all of the policy and the factual content.

Mr. Goldsmith. What is the purpose of having, so many

people review a cable?

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In this particular case, we have had four people. We

have had the originating officer. We have an authenticating

officer, a coordinating officer, and then the releasing

officer.

Mr. Scelso. Well, it went up to Mr. Karamessinas

because it involved disseminating information on an American

citizen to other U.S. government agencies, you see. At that

time -- probably still -- the CIA did not investigate or

pass around information on American citizens unless it were

requested to by another government agency, either in that

particular case or by some standard operating procedure.

In other words, the CIA, seeing an American abroad,

observing an American abroad, engaging in some skullduggery,

would inform the responsible U.S. agency here and sit and

wait for instructions before doing anything further.

In this case, we were passing on information to other

U.S. government agencies in Mexico City and this probably

went to other places in Washington as well.

Mr. Goldsmith. This particular information was dissem-

inated to other agencies without the request ofrany other

such agency. Is that correct?

Mr.. Scelso. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. This fit into the other category of

cases where disseminations were made?

Mr. Scelso. Disseminations would be made to other

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interested agencies, and any information we came across

had action taken to follow up to take further investigative

steps, Disseminationwould only be taken if another agency

requested it, either specifically in that case, or unless it

were a part of standard operating procedure, which would

have been agreed upon with another agency.

Mr. Goldsmith. Was any follow-up action contemplated

by thisicable?

Mr. Scelo. Yes.:

Please keep headquarters advised of

any further contacts or for positive identification of

Oswaldr

Mr. Goldsmith. That would be considered a follow-up.

Mr. Scelo. Yes. They were instructed to stay alert

and report any further evidence of this man's presence.

Therefore, Mr. Karamessinas had to sign off on it.

Mr. Goldsmith. Mr. Karamessinas had to sign off on it

because follow-up action was contemplated?

Mr. Scelo. With regard to a U.S. citizen abroad.

Mr. Goldsmith. For purposes of clarification, I think

you said that there were two situations where Mr. Karamessinas

would have to sign off. One would be where another agency

requested the dissemination?

Mr. Scelo. Yes. No -- not the question of the dissemina-

tion. It is a question of operational action being taken.

Mr. Goldsmith. A request for operational action.

What

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is the second example?

MI. Scelo. Well --

Mr. Goldsmith. Would the Agency itself decide to take

operational action?

Mr. Scelo. Ordinarily, operational action in an ordinary

case would not require MI. Karamessinas's approval at all.

It was only because an American citizen was involved.tiThat

interest in an American citizen might come about because of

a specific statement of interest about this individual from

another U.s. government agency or it might come about because

of a standard operating procedure.

For example, we had an agreement with the FBI that we

would follow up leads on any American citizen in Mexico City

who appeared around the Soviet. Embassies, and so on, or any-

body who was down there appearing to defect, which we might

learn through our telephone intercepts.

We could just as well have sent this cable out without

Mr. Karamessinas releasing it. I do not know why we did not:

Mr. Goldsmith. In fact, you pointed to something which

I was going to ask you about. I was wondering why somebody

as high up in the Agency as MI. Karamessinas was the releasing

officer.

Mr. Scelo.

It would have been because of the u.s.

citizen aspect, because so many other U.S. government

agencies

were involved, State Department, FBI and the Navy.

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I suppose one of these things is the Navy. One of them

could be the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Mr. Goldsmith. Let me attempt to summarize again.

Karamessinas would be responsible for signing off on this

because operational action pertaining to an American was being

taken?

MI. Scelo. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith.

Either pursuant to the request of another

government agency or pursuant to some standard operating

procedure of the Agency itself.

MI. Scelo. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. Any other reason that you can think of?

MI. Scelo. No.

Mr. Goldsmith. I believe you indicated that there was

an arrangement, of an agreement, with the FBI that any

activities by Americans around the Soviet Embassy or Cuban

Embassy would be reported and followed up on by the Agency.

Was that agreement in writing?

Mr. Scelo. I do not know. It probably was in writing

somewhere, It antedated my tenure, and the agreement was not

in the files. It would have been in the files of the DDe or

of the CI staff.

Mr. Goldsmith.

Would there have been

• a

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ment with military intelligence?

Mr. Scelo. Yes, but probably not formalized.

We had

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worked on a number of cases in Mexico involving military

defectors. As you know, they had been detected, arrested

and taken back to the United States and convicted.

Mr. Goldsmith. Turning to this cable, I believe that

it contains a correct description of MI. Oswald in the first

paragraph.

Is that not true?

Mr. Scelo. Well, I would not think he was 165 pounds.

Mr. Goldsmith. Other than that?

Mr. Scelo. I would say it is accurate. I do not know

the color of his eyes.

Mr. Goldsmith. It is apparent from paragraph one of

this cable that there is some variation in description between

this cable and the one which was sent from the Mexico City

Station?

Mr. Scelo. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. Did you or anyone else at Headquarters

ever receive any response from the Mexico City station with

regard to the discrepancy in the description of the Oswald

person.

MI. Scelo. Of the person in the photograph?

Mr. Goldsmith. Yes:

Mr. Scelo. I am sure we did, but I do not know what

form it was in. Do you have all the cables, or just some

of them.

Mr. Goldsmith..

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We have seen what the Agency has told us

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is all of the cable traffic. I am confining my question now

to the period before the assassination.

Prior to the assassination, did the Mexico City station

ever respond to this cable, specifically with regards to this

question of the man who was identified as Oswald?

Mr. Scelo.. I do not recall that it did.

Mr. Goldsmith. You indicated a few moments ago that

the Mexico City Station sometimes did respond?

Mr. Scelo. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. When was that?

Mr. Scelo. After the assassination. I do not remember

what form it was in. It could have been in one of the phone

calls.

Mr. Goldsmith. Telephone calls after the assassination?

Mr. Scelo. Yes.

I am sure that there were a lot of

telephone calls made after the assassination.

Mr. Goldsmith. Why was that? Why were telephone calls

made instead of cables being sent?

MI. Scelo. It was the propensity of senior division

officers to call over the Western Hemipshere by telephone to

the Station Chiefs which was a terrible practice.

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you recall if you ever?

Mr. Scelo. I think. I did on one or two occasions.

Mr. Goldsmith. For what purpose?

Mr. Scelo. I think probably at the time of Presidential

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trips to Mexico and to Costa Rica, maybe Panama.

There were

times when things came in and we telephoned -- I think. I was

ordered to telephone. This was at a time when, of course,

President Kennedy was flying to Mexico City and a million

telephone calls were going back and forth from government

agents and so on.

Mr. Goldsmith.: What about immediately after the assas:

sination?

Mr. Scelo. I do not think I made any telephone calls

although I cannot exclude it. I remember in the course of

heavy debates with the station about the reports of this

Nicaraguan fabricator, instead ofagoing over to flash cables

rather than make telephone calls.

Mr. Goldsmith. Turn to paragraph 5 of this cable. It

indicates: "Please keep headquarters advised of any further

contacts or positive identification of Oswald."

Do you recall whether the Mexico City station ever kept

heädquarters advised in the matter requested?

Mr. Scelo.

I do not recall and I assume that they did

not pick up any further information about him; although they

did, did they not?

Mr. Goldsmith. They did, yes.

Mr. Scelo. It just comes to me they did.

Mr. Goldsmith. We will go into that in a little while.

MI. Scelo. I do not recall whether they sent any further

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cables.. As I say, although I did sign off on these cables

the day of the assassination, I had no recollection of the

name Oswald, although I have a very, very good memory.

You

can imagine. Thousands of names were crossing my desk every

month.

Mr. Goldsmith.

Charlotte Bustos remembered.

Mr. Scelo. She remembered, and so did other people,

the girls who typed the things and so on remembered this

and immediately pounced upon it in our files.

Mr. Goldsmith. Charlotte Bustos probably came across

as many names as you did. Is that a fair statement?

Mr. Scelo. Yes.

She was concerned only with Mexico and

I had five or six other countries to work with as well. She

has a fantastic memory.

MI. Goldsmith. What is your impression of Charlotte

Bustos as far as competence and integrity?

MI. Scelo. Charlotte Bustos in her job as the manager

of records, traces and files, in this Mexico desk, was an

outstanding officer to whom I gave, in one of her fitness

reports, the highest evaluation, outstanding, number 6 and so

on, that can be given, that was very rarely given at that.

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Her work was pretty near flawless and she also was an

outstanding trainer of new employees.

Mr. Goldsmith. I notice that this cable refers to Oswald

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as "Lee Henry Oswald" in the first paragraph of that cable.

Is there any way that you can explain that error in terms of

the incorrect name?

Mr. Scelo. I have heard after the fact that, in some

book of records, that this was a mistake in the 201 file.

Mr. Goldsmith. Did you ever check that yourself?

Mr. Scelo. No. It was straightened out immediately in

the next cable.

Mr. Goldsmith. Why would Charlotte Bustos have been

the originated officer of this cable?

Mr. Scelo. Because she wrote it. The person who

actually composed the wording of the cable wrote his name up

there, and she was, on an important case like this, compli-

cated, she frequently did the tracing and so on herself.

Lesser matters may be handled by any number of other analysts.

Mr. Goldsmith. Why was this an important case?

Mr. Scelo. Because it involved an American security

suspect.

Mr. Goldsmith. The fact of Oswald's appearance at the

Soviet Embassy in Moscow would not have been considered an

insignificant matter?

Mr. Scelo. No. But, as I say, what went on in the

Soviet Union and what the CIA officers in the Soviet Union

did, is something that completely escaped my knowledge and

scope and view at that time.

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As a matter of fact, in an Agency like ours, at that

time, you heard all kinds of scuttlebut from all over the

place, but you just did not hear anything about who was in

Moscow or what they were doing there. You did not hear any-

thing.

Even when I was in my later positions where I saw every-

thing in the world, I did not see that.. It is one of the

reasons I retired, because they refused to give me access.

They gave me the responsibility for evaluating operations

worldwide and no insight into our Soviet and satellite recruit-

ments.

Mr. Goldsmith. Staying with Oswald's appearance at the

Embassies in Mexico City, the fact that Oswald was an American

defector and showed up at these embassies was considered by

the Agency as being significant?

Mr. Scelo. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. Stepping back for a moment, at the time

that Oswald made the appearance at the embassies would the

Mexico City station have considered his contact with the

embassies to be significant?

MI. Scelo. Oh, yes.

Mr. Goldsmith.

Even though they did not necessarily

know that he had been a defector, they just knew that Oswald

had contacted the embassies?

Mr. Scelo. Yes.

The fact that he was an American

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contacting the Cubans and the Russians, especially in the

context of which they knew it, because they had details of

the telephone conversations, signalling this to them, that

this was a very important case.

Mr. Goldsmith. Were Americans frequently contacting

either the Soviet or Cuban Embassy?

Mr. Scelo. I do not know about the Cuban Embassy.

Not

many cases like -- of course they were. On the Soviet

Embassy, a significant number of American military people

involved in sensitive, highly-classified military activities

in the southwestern United States attempted to defect to

the Russians in order to pass information to them and were

detected by our survèillance means and were apprehended.

That had happened before this.

Mr. Goldsmith. Every time that an American contacts

one of these embassies, would a cable be sent?

Mr. Scelo. If you were identified, yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. A cable would be sent insteadd of a

dispatch, because the matter would be considered important?

Mr. Scelo. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. I presume, then, if we were to review

all of the Mexico City cable traffic for, let's say, half

a year prior to the assassination, we would come across other

contacts by Americans who were identified, Americans who would

have visited these embassies?

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Mr. Scelo. I do not want to imply that these contacts

were detected every week or every month.

MI. Goldsmith. I understand.

MI. Scelo. They were detected enough so that J. Edgar

Hoover used to glow every time that he thought of the Mexico

station. This was one of our outstanding areas of coopera-

tion with the FBI.

Mx. Goldsmith. Let me see if we can reconstruct this

somewhat.

Oswald's initial contact to the embassies in

Mexico City would, in the eyes of the Mexico City station,

be considered significant because it was a contact by an

American?

Mr. Scelo. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. Then the Mexico City station receives

information that Oswald was a defector, had been a defector?

Mr. Scelo. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. I am not sure if this made reference to

his offering to give military secrets or not.

Mr. Scelo. I think he did.

Mr. Goldsmith. No, it does not.

(Pause)

In any event, they know he is an American contacting

the Soviet and Cuban embassies and they know that he is a

former defector,

so that would elevate the significance of

his contact.

Is that correct?

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Mr. Scelo.

Yes.

Now, why did they not report everything they found out?

Mr. Goldsmith. Answer your own question.

Mr. Scelo. The telephone center envoy was manned by

principally Mexican supervision of an American, or Mexican-

American. These people were just inundated with information

and apparently did not extract this and transmit it back to

Washington.

The later contacts with the Cuban Embassy, and so on,

which only were divulged after the assassination.. It is an

enormous problem. Mexico had one of the biggest and most

active telephone intercept operations in the whole world

and the job of processing this material is just impossible.

Mr. Goldsmith. Let's go through this step by step,

although I was not going to do this at this time. . I am going

to modify the line of inquiry

somewhat.

Do you know how many telephone intercepts there were

in the Mexico City station?

Mr. Scelo. How many lines were being tapped?

Mr. Goldsmith. Yes, at the Cuban and then at the soviet.

Mr. Scelo. I think there are about 30 lines being tapped

altogether. That is just the number that sticks in my mind.

Mr. Goldsmith. Thirty meaning a total of thirty from

both the Soviet and the Cuban?

Mr. Scelo. And various security suspects.

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Mr. Goldsmith. Would the security suspects to related

to the Soviet or Cuban?

MI. Scelo. Some of them were American Communists

living there whom we tapped at the specific request of J.

Edgar Hoover.

Mr. Goldsmith. Of those thirty lines how many, at your

best estimate, would have been for the Soviet and Cubans?

Mr. Scelo. However many outside telephone lines they

had.

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phone?

Mr. Scelo. I think they tapped all the outside lines.

Mr. Goldsmith. How certain of that are you?

Mr. Scelo. Well, this is just based on my recollection;

going back 15 years.

Mr. Goldsmith. In any event, your earlier comment was

that the telephone surveillance operation in Mexico City

was one of the most extensive in the world?

Mr. Scelo. Yes. And of course, they taped a great

deal which they could not exploit. They could not later

listen to it; they did not have time. They used to listen

to it sort of spottily, you see, and attempt then to exploit

what was the most important.

Mr. Goldsmith. Your answer to my earlier question as

to why the information on Oswald was not sent to the

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headquarters prior to the assassination. I think that the

fact that Oswald's other telephonic contact with the Embassy

was not known, is that an accurate summary?

Mr. Scelo. I think they did have other information on

this later telephonic --

Mr. Goldsmith. Why was it not reported?

Mr. Scelo. A question of too much material to process

and too many important priorities. And possibly they would

have gotten around to doing it, you see. They have a backlog.

They would have gotten around to it.

Mr. Goldsmith. We have

already established a few things.

One, Winn Scott is a very demanding and competent station

chief.

Mr. Scelo. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. We have established that. Oswald's

contact was initially important and the importance became

somewhat elevated when they found out that he had been a

defector?

Mr. Scelo. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. Which suggests not only he had been a

defector but formerly had served in the Marines?

MI. Scelo.

Yes.

Mr Goldsmith. It is possible that his contacts with

the embassies was for the purpose of attempting to defect

again, and yet there is no communication from the Mexico City:

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station to headquarters concerning any of Oswald's other

contacts.

Mr. Scelo.: You see, they had reels and reels of tape

to go over. The monitors would monitor certain lines and

record other lines and when they had time, they had to scan

the other lines to see who was calling what, and they could

have missed it. And, of course, maybe they just had a back-

log which they were going to process later.

I do not remember when his latest contacts were. They

were right in the dame period or within a few days, were

they not?

Mr. Goldsmith. Yes.

MI. Scelo. When was he first in Mexico City anyway?

What was the time of that?

Mr. Goldsmith. I believe, according to the Warren

Commission, he arrived in Mexico City on September 26th or

27th?

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Mr. Scelo. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. Excuse me for a moment.

(Pause)

(A brief recess was taken.)

Mr. Goldsmith. Mi. Scelo, I am going to show you some

transcripts to review in a minute. Before I do so, though,

I would like to ask you to read CIA No. 162, 161, specifically

the section marked "Liaison Coverage."

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Mr. Scelo. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. I have a few questions

to ask you on

that. This refers to the envoy operation that was the

joint operation conducted by the Mexicans and the Americans

and I believe this indicates that there were 30 lines, in

fact, connected at one time, so that your early testimony

was, in all likelihood, accurate.

I am going to have to ask you also torread the section

marked number 3, Oswald coverage.

Mr. Scelo. What is that report, if I may

• ask?

Mr. Goldsmith. This is taken from the 1977 Inspector

General Report.

Mr. Scelo. I see.

Mr. Goldsmith.

Please read the section marked Oswald

Coverage through to the end of the paragraph on page 162.

(Pause)

On page 161, the section where it says: "Oswald Cover-

age.

In mid-62, the Mexican officer in charge of the envoy,

the joint tap operation, asked the American officer at the

envoy listening post for the telephone numbers of the Soviet,.

Cuban and satellite embassies in anticipation of possible

coverage."

The question I have for you is as follows. It would

seem, from the earlier paragraph, that the liaison operation

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was already in effect, so why would it have been necessary

for the Mexican officer in charge to ask the American officer

for the telephone numbers?

Mr. Scelo. The Mexicans were probably tapping other

things at that time, not these targets. They were tapping

other Mexicans, and so on. We had our own unilateral tap

operations:--

Mr. Goldsmith. I understand that.

Mr. Scelo.

-- on those important targets.

Mr. Goldsmith.

so, are you saying that prior to 1962

the liaison operations with the Mexicans did not cover the

Soviet, Cuban and satellite embassies?

Mr. Scelo. That is what that says. I do not really

recall. That would have been in mid-62. That was just

about the time I was coming onboard in the Mexico desk.

And I do not recall what the previous status was.

I do recall that they certainly did ask -- they suddenly

disclosed the intent to tap certain lines which we were

tapping unilaterally.

Mr. Goldsmith. It indicates that the liaison operation

had taps on 30 lines. If it was not the Soviet, Cuban and

satellite embassies, it makes us wonder what it could have

been.

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Mr. Scelo. Mexican politicians and security suspects;

Mexican Communist Party people. There were three or four or

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five Mexican Communist Parties.

They were also tapping the phone of previous Presidents

of Mexico, political rivals and so on.

However, I cannot swear that this statement is correct.

I do not know that the July envoy was not previously tapping

some of the phones which are indicated here.

You see, Mexico City, at that time, had the most compre-

hensive, extensive telephone tap facilities and surveillance

facilities of any station in the world; and although Mexico

was a big, and very well-run station, it is in the nature

of things -- they had far more material to deal with than

they could possibly handle.

This is something which everyone in the intelligence

business knew, you see, but no one ever said it in writing.

You did not like to go before your bosses or put on the

record. the fact that you have far more, like ten times, work

to do than you can possibly do, especially when you consider

that the Agency has a counter-espionage responsibility for

the United States government abroad and that the FBI had

no business in these operations at all in Mexico City, but

they were doing so well that nobody tampered with it.

In vast parts of the world, the agency was unable to

even lay a hand on the counter-espionage task, because they

did not have the personnel. In African countries

which were

being taken over in front of our eyes by Communist groups,

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mainly Russia, even Red China, we would have a two-man station

two officers and a secretary - so that Mexico was regarded

as an outstanding station because in some discernible way, and

in a number of important critical cases, it performed the

task.

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Mr. Goldsmith. I understand.

Mr. Scelo. To say we were doing it comprehensively would

have meant that we would have had an organization there pro-

portionately as big as the FBI in Washington.

Mr. Goldsmith. Turning to the transcripts, I would like

you to look at CIA number 13, which is the transcript. of

October 1, 1963, and that apparently is a transcript in which

Oswald identifies himself, and it is a transcript where the

contact with the Soviet Embassy that triggered the cable

from the Mexico City station.

(Pause)

Now, the transcript, or the translator, indicates in

brackets that this was the same person who phoned a day or

so ago and spoke in broken Russian. And Oswald also indicates

if, in fact, this was Oswald -- "I was at your place last

Saturday. "

October ist, for the record, was a Tuesday.

Then we have the next transcript that appears in CIA

Number 14, Oswald's contact on Saturday, September 28th.

Have you read through this?

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MI: Scelo. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. When would this transcript have come

to the attention of the personnel of the Mexico City station?

Mr. Scelo. That, I do not know. As you noted from the

other writings, when Russian was involved it had to go to a

Russian transcriber who often had a backlog, of a week.

Mr. Goldsmith. That is right.

Mr. Scelo.

It might have been a week or more before

they saw this.

Mr. Goldsmith. In any event,. Oswald indicates in the

conversation on the ist that he had been at the Embassy on

the previous Saturday and the translator also indicates the

same person who phoned a day or so ago, so there is some

sort of clue that this person, that there had been a previous

contact?

Mr. Scelo. That is right.

Of course, he might not have identified himself in that

previous contact.

Mr. Goldsmith. In fact, in this contact of 9-28-63,

there was no identification by him?

Mr. Scelo. That is right.

Mr. Goldsmith. There were two other contacts on

September 27, 1963. One at 4:05 in the afternoon and one at

4:26 in the afternoon.. In neither of those two contacts does

Oswald identify himself.

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But my question is, did the Mexico City station inform

you of Oswald's -- of any of these other contacts prior to the

assassination?

Mr. Scelo.

NO.

MI. Goldsmith. Do you think they should have?

Mr. Scelo. No.

Mr. Goldsmith. Why not?

Mr.

Scelo. The gist of all the conversations was the

same, that the man was trying to get a Cuban visa to go to

Cuba in order to get a Russian visa, and there was no other

significant information.

Mrs Goldsmith. Did you know from the October Ist cable

or the October Ith cable that arrived in Headquarters that

Oswald was trying to get a visa?

Mr. Scelo. I do not remember. Whatever the cable says.

Mr. Goldsmith. Let us look at the cable for a moment.

Mr. Scelo. In other words, in the dynamics of the

security business:--

Mr. Goldsmith. Turning to CIA 177, does that make any

reference to Oswald's visiting the Cuban Embassy or to the

fact that he was trying to obtain a visa?

Mr. Scelo. No. No indication about the Cubans and

nothing about a visa.

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you think that information should

have been communicated to Headquarters?

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Mr. Scelso. Yes. Of course, it was processed differently,

you see. It was being processed by other people and the

Spanish-speaking, or the non-Russian material, you see, was

not processed this fast.

Mr. Goldsmith. Nevertheless, all of this material was

before the Mexico City station certainly within two weeks

of

Oswald's contact on October Ist?

Mr.. Scelso. It was someplace in the pipeline in the

station. You do not know whether the tapes were transcribed,

you see. You don't know whether these Mexicans in the inter-

cept stations had even listened to the tapes, let alone trans-

cribed them. They may have just stacked them up -- taken them

off the recorders and stacked them up.

Mr. Goldsmith. My questions are asking you to testify

about things that you do not have direct knowledge about.

Assuming that the employees from the Mexico City station who

were responsible for these transcripts have testified before

this Committee that the transcripts were reviewed in chrono-

logical order -- in fact, the transcripts were linked to

Oswald prior to the assassination.

Should that information have been sent to Headquarters?

Mr. Scelso. Ideally, yes, but I again state, in view

of the tremendous work overload of the station which again,

especially in the counterintelligence field, the outstanding

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was not open to professional criticism at that time.

MI. Goldsmith.

Even though Oswald, as you indicated

before, was a significant case?

Mr. Scelso. Yes, a significant case, but really, a one-

time defector who came back and wanted to defect again, you

see, is not really an important matter. In other words, there

would have been no grounds for us to intervene administratively

with the Mexicans and have them arrested.

Certainly, even if J. Edgar Hoover had said, have the

man arrested by the Americans and we will send a military plane

down and have him put him on it and we will take him back.

This was done with military defectors, but I do not think

that the Agency would have done it. They would not have had

a shred of legal right to do it.

Mr. Goldsmith. Another possibility, aside from the fact

that he may have been trying to redefect, another possibility

was that Oswald, when he returned to the states, was actually

• Soviet spy. Another possibility, and he was making contact.

Mr. Scelso. That makes it of interest, that is correct.

It still would not have warranted his arrest because there was

no evidence that he was a Soviet spy, even today.

Mr. Goldsmith. Had the information concerning Oswald's

visit to the Cuban Embassy in addition to the Soviet one, that

Oswald had been requesting a visa, if it had been sent to CIA

headquarters, would his case prior to the assassination have

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been handled in any different manner?

Mr. Scelso. It would have been in the case of dissimina

tion of information about him, but I do not think that any

operational action would have been taken to apprehend him or

to contact him or to try to force him back to the United

States.

MI. Goldsmith. What about in terms of -- how would the

dissemination have been treated differently?

Mr. Scelso. Well, it simply means that we would have

disseminated any additional information that we got.

Mr. Goldsmith. Did Headquarters ever criticize the

Mexico City station for failure to send this information?

Mr. Scelso. No. That was not because we were trying toi

go easy on them, it is simply because it is in the nature of

the business.

What you are trying to do is engage, as I used

to say, in important illegal manipulations of society,

secretly.

We were running, at that time, a vast political action

program in Mexico City to try to swing Mexico around from its

Leftist direction to a middle of the road direction and it

succeeded. I do not. know whether you informed yourself:

about the magnitude of our political action program there

at

the time -- absolutely enormous.

We were trying to follow the Soviets and all the satel-

lites and the Cubans. At the same time, the main thrust of

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the station's

effort was to attempt to recruit Russians,

Cubans and satellite people.

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you recall seeing any other transcripts

pertaining to Oswald in addition to the ones I have shown you

today?

Mr. Scelso. I do not recall seeing any additional ones.

I know that there were several additional transcripts that came

through later in cable form.

Those cables are in here, I

believe.

Mr. Goldsmith. Pertaining to?

Mr. Scelso.

Oswald's visits to the Soviet and Cuban

embassies, and his telephone conversations.

Mr. Goldsmith. You are saying that, in cable form --

Mr. Scelso. After the assassination, more came in.

Mr. Goldsmith.

More transcripts came in? What I am

saying is that these transcripts reflect a total of four con-

tacts by Oswald to the various embassies.

Mr. Scelso. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. To your knowledge, were there any

additional contacts by Oswald to the embassies?

Mr. Scelso. I would like to say first, I do not recall

you say there were four. I do not recall exactly how many

there were.

Mr. Goldsmith.

We can count these.

Mr. Scelso.. I do

not recall any additional ones.

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No. Nor. can I swear that this file contains all the informa-

tion we got. I cannot swear that my memory is not that good.

I know that we got additional information on several

other telephone conversations and trips to these embassies

after the assassination. We got the information.

Mr. Goldsmith. That information you received may have

been the same, exactly the same, as these transcripts here?

Mr. Scelso. That's right.

Mr. Goldsmith.

You don't know that there was a fifth

transcript --

Mr. Scelso. No.

Mr. Goldsmith.

-- of a fifth contact?

Mr. Scelso. No.

Mr. Goldsmith.

Let us take a lo0k at CIA Number 185.

Would you identify that document?

Mr. Scelso. That is a request. from the Mexico City

station to Headquarters to send a photo of Oswald.

Mr. Goldsmith Do you know why they requested that photo?

Mr. Scelso. They wanted to compare it with all the

photos that they may have had of people entering the Cuban

and Soviet embassies.

Mr. Goldsmith. How do you know that?

Mr. Scelso. Deduction.

Mr. Goldsmith.

Was a photo ever sent by headquarters

to the Mexico City station?

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Mr. Scelso. I do not think so. We requested the Office

of Naval Intelligence for one, and I do not think they ever

gave us one.

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you know why they never gave it to

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Mr. Scelso. No.

Mr. Goldsmith. In the middle of the page here, there

is a line that says C/S COMINT and then it gives a description.

Mr. Scelso. That is the cable center. There is an

intelligence duty officer down in the cable center who, for

the senior officer:: who read the board, read the cable board,

and do not. have all of these references at hand, write a

phrase here to explain to senior people what this cryptic

sentence means, and he made a mistake.

Mr. Goldsmith. That is my next question. In attempts

of

Lee Harvey Oswald and wife to re-enter --

Mr. Scelso. He quickly looked at the reference and mis-

read it.

MI. Goldsmith.

What was thereference here?

Mexico

City 6534?

Mr. Scelso. Yes.

(Pause)

Mr. Goldsmith. Let us look at CIA 193. Would you please

read that, and identify it. for the record?

Mr. Scelso. This is a cable that I wrote and sent to

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Mr. Goldsmith. Yes.

MI: Scelso. Asking them to send a staff officer to

Headquarters carrying the photos of Oswald -- meaning the

photos of what they believed to be Oswald.

Mr. Goldsmith. Did you ever receive those photos?

Mr: Scelso.

Yes, we did. We got. them some way. There

was only one photo. It was a photo of the unknown man. I do

not know whether it came that way, or whether we got them

from the FBI. I think an FBI officer returned to Headquarters

carrying them.

Mr. Goldsmith. It indicates, "Call Mr. Whitten, 652-6827:

Mr. Scelso.

That was my home phone. So if he came in

the middle of the night to the airfield, I would go pick him

up and take him to headquarters. I think by that time, Mr.

Helms had appointed me and put me in charge of the whole

thing.

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This was when I requisitioned an electric typewriter,

you see. A person in my grade could not operate a typewriter.

I am a good typist, so, by using my priorities, I got an IBM

electric typewriter and I wrote most of these cables myself,

hundreds of cables.

Mr. Goldsmith. Let us look now at Number 194. Would

you please read that cable and identify it?

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(Pause)

Mr. Scelso. Birch O'Neal was an officer of the CI staff

which was in charge of the Special Investigation Section and

he, too, was working on this case and asked Mexico to review

all of the tapes, to see if there was other information about

Oswald.

Mr. Goldsmith. What was the Special Investigation Sec-

tion of the CI staff?

Mr. Scelso.

The Special Investigation Section of the CI

staff was

a section, for once with the title indicating what

it was supposed to do -- special investigations. That was

CIA counterintelligence investigations which were so sensitive

or of such a general super-regional nature that they should

not be handled by one of the area divisions.

And this, in particular, applied to investigations of

CIA employees who were suspected for working for foreign

intelligence organizations or where you had to work abroad.

Of course, the Office of Security was mixed up with this, too.

For instance, a Soviet defector comes out and says,

as in the case of Nosenko or Solzenitsyn, a high-level spy,

this section would have had to have done all of the leg work.

Mr. Goldsmith. What would be the abbreviation for that?

Would it be CI/SIG?

Mr.. Scelso. It is up here someplace.

Mr. Goldsmith. They were together with us, to a certain

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degree.

For instance, this was the outfit that had access to

the letter

intercepts and I think it was at the time of the

assassination that I was first briefed on the letter inter-

cepts, you know, which later became such a scandal, although

they did not tell me they were intercepting the letters in the

United States.

Mr. Goldsmith. As a matter of routine, would this

outfit be responsible for opening up the 201 file on a defec-

tor?

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Mr. Scelso. No.

Mr. Goldsmith. Why not?

Mr. Scelso. On an American who had defected abroad?

Mr. Goldsmith. Yes:

Mr Scelso. I do not know. They could have been assigned

it. Perhaps they were assigned that responsibility. I do

not know that they followed American defectors, or not.

Mr. Goldsmith. I am not saying they were, of that they

did not, but I am wondering, as a matter of routine, CI/SIG

would -

Mr. Scelso. I do not know that. I did not have any

insight into their charter. I just happened to have enough

contact with them on a few cases where they questioned me

about people that I knew, and so on, on different cases, and

then in this case.

Mr. Goldsmith. Would there be anywhere at Headquarters

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a charter, as you put it, written rules and regulations as

to what the responsibilities of the CI/SIG section or branch

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operational plans, as they are called. I think they are

called that, which you write at

the time that you put in your

budget that tells everything, and then usually each staff has

a charter written and approved and so on -- solemnized, and

then buried away and forgotten.

However, this came under Angleton and everything that

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Angleton did was so secret -- several times in my career I

was appointed by Helms or by Karamessinas to investigate or

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handle or look into investigations where Angleton was running.

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This always caused bitter feelings, the most bitter feelings.

Mr. Goldsmith. For what purpose would they ask you to

look into Angleton's operations?

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Mr. Scelso. Because Helms or Karamessinas suddenly found

out about one of Angleton's operations and did not like the

looks of it.

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Mr. Goldsmith. How would you go about looking into that

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Mr. Scelso. He knew it. They always told him. Aid

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then they said, now, you go tell Angleton you are going to do

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this. I used to go in fingering my insurance policy, notify-

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ing my next of kin. This happened many times over the years.

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if.

The first time I was a polygraph operator and then,

later on, when I was in Headquarters, they put me, right out

of the blue.

Karamessinas, you see. Helms never forgot my

work as a polygraph operator from 1948 on for a few years.

I was the first polygraph operator and I went to Europe,

and I only ran the polygraph as a sideline. I was a case

officer handling agents. And, of course, I had been a prisoner

of war interrogator. And I was immediately given all your

really nutsy cases to go over, and I cracked one of them after

another. Helms never forgot this.

When various big cases came up, he used to assign me,

like the disappearance of the head of the West German Security

Service in 1954, Helms immediately gave me that.

Mr. Goldsmith. Were you ever asked to review the poly-

graph results of the Nosenko polygraph tests?

Mr. Scelso. By that time I was out of the polygraph

business.. The Office of Security nudged me out of it and

took it over and thereafter tried to prevent me from running

any other polygraph cases. But when I retired, Mr. Helms

personally gave. me'a medal and he said he was giving it to

me principally for having successfully introduced the poly-

graph into the agency.

Mr. Goldsmith. To summarize, before we proceed analyzing:

this cable here, which was originally by Birch O'Neal, which

was CI/SIG, which O'Neal -' was he head?:

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Mr. Scelso. Yes, he was.

Mr. Goldsmith. CI/SIG was sort of a super --

Mr.. Scelso. Special investigations group.

Mr: Goldsmith. Confined to sensitive counterintelligence

operations?

Mr. Scelso. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you know why Mr. O'Neal would have

sent out this particular cable?

Mr. Scelso. He was probably writing this cable just

before or after the meeting that Helms called and put me in

charge of everything.

You see, Angleton immediately went into action to do all

of the investigating and Helms called a meeting which Angleton

and a lot of others were present and told everybody that I

was in charge and that everybody should report everything

to

me and that no one should have any conversations with anyone

about the Kennedy case without my being present, which was

violated from the word go by Angleton, who dealt with the

Bureau and the Warren Commission and John Foster Dulles him-

self.

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Mr. Goldsmith.

Was there communication on a more or

less ex parte basis between the CIA and Dulles?

Mr. Scelso. Yes, between Angleton and Dulles.

Mr. Goldsmith. How do you know that?

MI: Scelso. From Angleton.

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Mr. Goldsmith.

He told you that?

Mr. Scelso. Yes.

On one or two occasions I went to

talk to him about the case, or he called me in. It was a

very strange situation.

Mr. Goldsmith. In what way?

Mr. Scelso. Well, Angleton ignored Helms' orders that

no one was to discuss the case with anyone without my being

present. He ignored that.

I tried to get Helms to make him obey and Helms said,

you go tell him.

Mr. Goldsmith. Why was not. Angleton reprimanded, or

even dismissed, for failing to obey that order?

Mr. Scelso. None of the senior officials at the Agency

were ever able to cope with him. He had enormously influential

contacts with J. Edgar Hoover. He had his own direct ties

to the Director at various times he was -- I believe he and

his staff were intimately tied in with the House Subversive

¡Affairs, or whatever it is, Committee. And Angleton was a

very formidable person to deal with.

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you know what kind of information

Angleton gave to Dulles ex parte?

Mr. Scelso. No.

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you know of any improper action by

¡Angleton?

Mr. EScelso.

No, except that he violated Helms'

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instructions. In view of the fact that he got away with it,

he probably figured it was condoned.

MI. Goldsmith. Turning to this first paragraph of the

cable in CIA 194, it indicates: "It is important that you

review all envoy tapes and transcripts from 27 September."

My question, do you know why September 27th was picked

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Mr. Scelso. That date appears on one of the other

cables, does it not?

Mr.. Goldsmith. That date appears on the other trans-

cripts. In other words that Oswald had been at the Cuban

Embassy on the 27th of September and there were two phonecall

intercepts pertaining to Oswald? There is no traffic that

indicates that Headquarters knew about the 27th of September

contact.

Mr. Scelso. I do not know. What is this cable?

6453. Is that the original cable?

Mr.. Goldsmith. Yes. Mexico 6453 was the very first

one that I showed you.

Mr. Scelso. Are we sure that nothing came in in the meant

time in any of those follow-up cables by Mexico City and he

just referred to the original cable and not to the follow up

cables?

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Mr. Goldsmiti. Really, you are in a position where you

more or less have to take our word for it. We are relying

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upon what the Agency has given us. We have reviewed all the

cable traffic and assembled it,

and one of the reasons we

are asking you the question is we have not been able to find

any intervening cables referring to the contact by Oswald

on September 27th, and that is why we wondered how September

27th happened to be picked out.

Is itepossible that there was telephonic communication?

MI. Scelso. There could well be.

Mr. Goldsmith. Other than that, you have no explanation?

Mr. Scelso. Or it could be the FBI set up information,

you see, that they got this from the FBI. The CI staff was

in very close touch with the FBI.

Mr. Goldsmith. The third paragraph of this letter asks,

this cable asks, whether the original tapes were available.

What was the response to that?

Mr. Scelso. I do not remember. Well, the response was

they sent in a lot of transcripts. I do not know whether a

they probably transcribed them then.

Mr. Goldsmith.

Were they able to locate the original

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Mr. Scelso. I think so.

MI. Goldsmith. Do you recall what was done with those

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Mr. Scelso. No.

Mr. Goldsmith. Did you ever --.

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Mr. Scelso. I neverhheard them.

Mr. Goldsmith. You never heard them?

Mr. Scelso. No.

Mr. Goldsmith. On what basis do you say that the original

tapes were found?

Mr. Scelso. I had the impression that after the assassina-

tion they did a lot of transcribing. I may be wrong.

Mr. Goldsmith. When you say, "they did a lot of trans-

cribing," who are you referring to?

Mr. Scelso. Both the staff of the envoy and our Soviet

transcriber, our Russian transcriber. However, I am not at all

sure of that. I was not looking for things like this at this

time. We were rushing ahead, being flooded with cables from

all over the world.

Mr. Goldsmith. Let us look at CIA 208. Paragraph four

there, which indicates that the person who did the transcript,

and says, "Oswald is identical with the person in an earlier

paragraph who spoke broken Russian and called on 28 September. "

That indicates that some sort of a voice comparison was

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Mr. Scelso. Yes.

Tapes were probablystill in existence

Mr. Goldsmith. Let us look at CIA 196. Would you please

read that?

(Pause)

Mr. Scelso..

Yes.

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Mr. Goldsmith.

It indicates "FBI says photos of man

entering Soviet Embassy," et cetera, et cetera.

Was that the first time that you and Headquarters

learned that the photograph that had been taken in the Mexico

City station of the man that they thought was Oswald in fact

was not Oswald?

Mr. Scelso. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. Let us look at CIA number 197.

Would you please

read the first paragraph?

(Pause)

Actually, please read the first two paragraphs.

(Pause)

Mr. Scelso. Yes.

MI. Goldsmith. I have two questions for you. The first

is here the station in Mexico City is reporting only the 9/28

contact and is not reporting

the 9/27 contact.

We still have

an inconsistency here between what headquarters apparently

knows

and what the Mexico City station is sending up.

Mr. Scelso. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. Is there any way that you can explain

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Mr.. Scelso. It could have been -- what. were they speak-

ing here, English or what? You see, it depends. Maybe one

was being transcribed by one transcriber and the other by

another transcriber. One got finished first.

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Mr. Goldsmith. My impression is that the Spanish con-

versations were only transcribed, they were not translated,

and the Russian ones had to be translated.

MI. Scelso. Yes.

Mr. "Goldsmith. In' any event, this was well down the

line.

This conversation was from September 28th. By then,

everything would have been transcribed -- translated and/or

transcribed.

MI. Scelso. Not necessarily. They might just not have

gotten around to it. The backlog might have been greater.

There was only talk of an average backlog.

Mr. Goldsmith. Understood. The information that the

Committee has received has been to the effect that the Spanish

transcription was received at the station within about three

days of the call, and the Russian translations came in about

a week within the receipt of the call, and this was November

23rd, so we are talking about a period of between seven and

eight weeks after the receipt of the call.

Mr. Scelso. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. Is there any way you can explain this

discrepancy?

Mr. Scelso. Not everything they transcribed was sent

to Headquarters, of course.

Mr. Goldsmith. It seems that. Headquarters already knew

about the 9/27 contact by virtue of the earlier cable.

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Mr. Scelso. It could have been through the FBI, parti-

cularly since Birch O'Neal sent that other cable.

Mr.. Goldsmith. Why because of Birch O'Neal's --

' Mr. Scelso. Birch O'Neal was in the counter-intelligence

staff which had direct liaison with the FBI.

Mr. Goldsmith. Incidentally, I am informed by my

researcher that the Spanish transcriptions were usually

received by the station within one day of the receipt of the

call, the Russian within two days.

MI. Scelso. If the conversation were transcribed.

They were not all transcribed, you see? Only interesting

conversations. It could be that they did not even transcribe

this one.

MI. Goldsmith. This was a conversation involving an

American.

Mr. Scelso.

That is true. Still, they may not have

transcribed it.

Mr. Goldsmith.

A conversation involving an American

would be interesting.

Mr. Scelso. Except the people handling the tapes were

Mexicans. They could have slipped up.

Mr. Goldsmith. I am sure they were informed.

Mr. Scelso. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith.

If an American comes along, that is high

interest.

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Mr. Scelso. That is true. They still may have delayed

transcribing, or put it aside.

Mr. Goldsmith. As I indicated before, the testimony we

have

already received is that everything had been transcribed

well before the assassination and had been reviewed well before

the assassination.

Mr. Scelso. It could be they had just not sent it in.

Mr. Goldsmith. Headquarters apparently knew about the

9/27 contact by Oswald by virtue of this earlier cable.

Mr. Scelso. Birch O'Neal's cable?

Mr. Goldsmith. Yes.

Mr. Scelso. Birch O'Neal may have found that out after

the assassination, you see. The FBI could well have sent up

a summary cable based on the information they were getting

hour by hour from us, and they may have come over, or phoned

over, because they have a gray line you know, and told the

CI staff this.

Mr. Goldsmith. Turning to the second paragraph now,

that suggests that one of the tapes had been erased, does it

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Mr. Scelso. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. Does that, in any way, aid your memory

as to whether any tapes of Oswald's voice were obtained after

the assassination?

MI. Scelso..

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Mr. Goldsmith.

Yes.

Whether the Mexico City had

onhand any tapes of Oswald's voice?

Mr. Scelso. I just do not recall whether they did or

not.

I am sure if they had had, we would have wanted to hear them.

Mr. Goldsmith. Your initial answer before was they did.

Now you are saying you do not know?

Mr. Scelso. I am groping. I thought at the time that

they were transcribing some of these things down here. They

still had the original tapes after the assassination. In

other words. I do not recall their ever saying that they

had erased all tapes with Oswald's voice.

MI. Goldsmith. In any event here, thus far, the only

contacts by Oswald that have been reported by the Mexico City

station to Headguarters are contact of September 28th and

the contact of October Ist. So, according to the cable traf-

fic, anyway, Headquarters did not know about the 9/27 contacts.

Mr. Scelso. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. Let us take a look at number 204, CIA

number 204.

(Pause)

This cable contains the transcripts from Oswald's

9/28 contact and 10/1 contact. You might want to skim through!

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Again, it would seem the Mexico City station is not

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telling Headquarters, for some reason, of the 9/27 contact.

I do not mean to suggest that the reason

is sinister or

innocent, but according to cable traffic, the Mexico City

station, anyway, is not telling you about it.

Mr: Scelso. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. Let us look at. CIA number 211.

Mr. Scelso. What was the nature of that 9/27 contact?

Mr. Goldsmith. If you would like, you can review the

transcript again. Essentially, it was a conversation between

sostet Duran and Soviet Embassy, or consulate officials

in respect to Oswald's obtaining a visa and the problem of

obtaining a visa.

Reading through CIA number 211, can you identify that?

Mr. Scelso.: I suppose this was the President of

Mexico?

Mr. Goldsmith. Correct.

Why do you think that, in paragraph 3, the person send-

ing the cable considered the fact that Litensor was aware of

Oswald's contact to be important?. The fact that he was aware

of it, and passing the information along would be important?

Mr. Scelso. You get into a psychological question.

The

Chief of Station is called in to speak to the President of

Mexico. There had been a big fight when the new Ambassador

got there -- no, it wasn't that. It was a very peculiar situ-

ation in Mexico whereby the Mexican President's primary contact

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with the U.S. government was through our Chief of Station

rather than through the Ambassadors. This caused no great

problem with the then-Ambassador whose name I have forgotten.

Mr. Goldsmith. Thomas Mann?

MI. Scelso. Yes. He was a very fine guy and recognized

the usefulness of this arrangement. The next Ambassador,

Mr. Friedman, tried to cut winn Scott out of contact with the

President of Mexico, whereupon the President of Mexico called

in Winn Scott and said, I want you to send a cable to the white

House telling them I am not going to deal with this jackass,

I want to deal only with you.

So, the result was, eventually, Winston Scott and

Ambassador Friedman went to the White House and talked to

President Johnson and straightened the whole thing out in

favor of Winston Scott.

So scott is just remarking that it is interesting that

the President of Mexico is aware of our telephone operation.

MI. Goldsmith. He should have been since it was a

liaison operation?

Mr. Scelso. Yes. But you do not always know whether

he was informed. I think we always knew he was informed.

It is just significant that the person calls you in and says,

here is some intelligence about the Kennedy thing.

Mr. Goldsmith. Let us take a look at CIA 210. Would

you please read that?

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(Pause)

Mr. Scelso. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. Would you identify this document?

Mr. Scelso. This is a cover sheet for the cable from

the Mexico station.

Mr. Goldsmith.

The cover sheet to the cable we just

referred to?

Mr. Scelso. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. Winn Scott here indicates, due memo

of my meeting with Litensor.

Mr. Scelso. It is addressed to this person who is

supposed to write a memo on it.

Mr. Goldsmith. Scott? That is Scott's signature.

Mr. Scelso. Yes, he writes it back to himself and

reminds himself to write a memo on it.

MI. Goldsmith. Did you ever see the memo?

Mr: Scelso. I do not think so:

Mr. Goldsmith. Did you ever talk to Scott about his

meeting with Litensor?

Mr. Scelso. I do not recall having done so.

Mr. Goldsmith. In any event, by this time, the Mexico

City station still had not informed Headguarters of the 9-27

contact?

Me. Scelso. No.

Mr. Goldsmith. Let's lo0k at CIA 213.

would did o

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Mr. Scelso. This was all on the same day.

Mr. Goldsmith.

The cable traffic was pretty heavy on

that day, I would imagine.

Mr. Scelso. Right.

Mr. Goldsmith. This cable is the first time that the

Mexico City station informs Headquarters about Oswald's

9/27 contacts.

Mr. Scelso. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you think that there is any connec-

tion between the fact that this contact was recorded after

the Mexico City station became aware of the fact that litensor

knew about Oswald's contacts?

Mr. Scelso. I would imagine that there were probably

many -- several Mexicans transcribing reels,transcribing

things and some got finished before others.

Mr. Goldsmith. This was months ago. The conversations

have been transcribed and reviewed months earlier.

/ Mr.. Scelso.

What are the numbers of the various cables?!

They were all going out in a series. They may have had

several analysts in the Mexico Station working on them. One

said you take this one and write a cable and the other said

you take that one and write a cable, and so on, and they went

out and went into the COMM Center and the COMM Center sent

them out in some order. Here.

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Mr. Goldsmith. Were you aware of any dissension within

the Mexico City station concerning the amount of information

that should be sent from Mexico City to Headquarters?

Mr. Scelso. No, not then, or at any later time.

MI. Goldsmith. Let's l00k at CIA number 217, Winn

Scott, this document, has written

something in the margin.

Could you possibly read that into the record?

Mr. Scelso. "I had a call from Washington, Jack Whitten

at 620 hours on 23rd November. Scott. I told Jack Whitten

at that at 1620 or 30 hours, our time, on 23rd November,

that this would be enroute to him soon."

Mr. Goldsmith. By "this," what is he referring to? Is

he referring to the cable?

MI. Scelso. To the cable of the 27th?

Mr. Goldsmith. The cable

--

Mr. Scelso. About the meeting, Oswald's meeting, on

the 27th.

Mr. Goldsmith.

Fine. The document, CIA number 217k

indicates a telephone conversation between you and Scott.

Do you remember the purpose of that conversation?

Mr. Scelso. No.

Mr. Goldsmith. Apparently you called him for some

reason?

Mr. Scelso. Yes. I do not have any idea why. I may

have been ordered to call him on any number of things.

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Do you remember the substance of the

conversation in any way?

Mr. Scelso. No.

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you remember being upset at receiving

this information about. Oswald's 9-27 contact a little bit

late?

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at 4:00-something in the afternoon and. I did not feel the

least bit bad about it. We were getting the stuff in hot and

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In fact, the overall performance of the Agency in this

thing was the only bright light in the U.S. government. It

really was.

Mr. Goldsmith. Why do you say that?

Mr. Scelso. Because we had had advance information that

we had disseminated on Oswald's activities which we had

properly disseminated to the other U.S. government agencies

which might have led them to act other than they had.

Mr.. Goldsmith. Do you think that they would have paid

more attention to Oswald if they had received additional

information, his Cuban contact as well?

Mr. Scelso. Conceivably, yes. In the light of the way

the Bureau acted in it, though, I am not sure they would have.

After all, we notified them. He was in touch with the Soviet

intelligence officer.

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Mr. Goldsmith.

Yes.

What is your impression, turning to another area now,

of the manner in which the Agency handled the Ugarte issue?

Ugarte was a Nicarguan national who came in and reported having

seen Oswald with some other people at the Cuban Embassy?

Mr. Scelso. I think in the overall handling of it, it

was proper, especially since I was the architect of that

handling.

Mr. Goldsmith. In what way were you the architect?

Mr. Scelso: I wrote almost all the cables that went

out of Headquarters and decided what they should say. There

were some, in the heat of reporting Mexico City did overlook

certain things that they might have told us. For instance,

they did not give us certain background. There was some

information, a statement, Lee Oswald saying he was getting

$3,000 or $6,000 or some such amount for doing the job on

Kennedy or doing the job on somebody, and the Mexico

station

indicated that there were reports that Lee Harvey Oswald had

a savings account in this amount in Dallas.

What they did not tell us, for which I later chided

them, was that this rumor had been on the radio in Mexico City

and everybody in Mexico City believed it. It was not on the

radio up here and we did not know what the origin of this

rumor was, nor were we therefore alert to the fact that this

Ugarte could have heard it on the radio.

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You know, I might have called him to get information

about this 27th thing, because we might have learned it from

the Bureau in the meantime.

Mr. Goldsmith. How would the Bureau have heard it?

Mr. Scelso. From the Mexico station. They were getting

briefings, and so on, right along the line, because the Mexico

FBI office was doing very extensive investigations in Mexico

with the police through which Oswald's movements in Mexico

were traced.

Mr. Goldsmith. Did you ever have any evidence that

Ugarte may have been a CIA agent?

Mr. Scelso. Not

in the sense that we call a person a CIA

agent. I think he was a Nicaraguan intelligence agency being

run by somebody in the Nicaraguan Embassy in Mexico City and

I think, if my memory is not tricking me, that we may have

been in touch with the Nicaraguan who was handling him.

We may have been, at that time or in the past, or per-

haps our Nicaraguan station was indirectly monitoring their

activities. But my memory on this was very weak.

He was

never an agent of ours in the sense that he was directly

handled by us or that he was handled according to instructions

which we were passing.

MI. Goldsmith. It is possible that if his Nicaraguan

case officer was cooperating with you in some way, he may have

been using Ugarte, this would have been without your knowledge?

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MI. Scelso. I am not sure about that. It could be

that we had known in the past that Ugarte was a Nicaraguan

agent working against the Cubans. It seems to me that I think

we did.

Mr. Goldsmith. Is it true that Ugarte's Nicaraguan

case officer was considered by the Agency to be a trusted.

asset?

Mr. Scelso. As I recall, he was either an agent of

ours or liaison contact that we used as an asset.

Mr. Goldsmith. What was his impression of Ugarte's

reliability?

Mr. Scelso. As I remember, Ugarte had not been a very

productive agent. He had not accomplished much at all and

was evaluated accordingly.

Mr. Goldsmith. Let's take a look at number 241. Would

you please that cable.

(Pause)

Does that statement accurately reflect the scope of the

photosurveillance coverage, referring to the first two

paragraphs?

Mr. Scelso.

There is nothing in here.

Mr. Goldsmith. I am sorry.

Does that paragraph accurately indicate the hours of

the Embassies?

Mr. Scelso.. I have no recollection of those hours

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all. I would say it is probably correct.

MI. Goldsmith. Are you aware of the hours in which the

Soviet and Cuban Embassies were under photo-surveillance?

Mr. Scelso. During the daylight hours, but the coverage

was by no means complete. It never is, in cases of photo-

surveillance.

Mr. Goldsmith. Why do you say that?

Mr. Scelso. Well, the cameras are manually operated

and it is just impossible to find operatives which will be

dutiful as to snap every person coming and going.

Mr. Goldsmith. My understanding was that Scott was an

extremely demanding man and ran a very efficient station.

Mr. Scelso.

That is true, but, if you have a couple --

a man is away a part of the time and the wife is away and she

has to go into the kitchen to prepare meals or she has to

go to the bathroom, it is simply impossible day in and day

out, in a practical sense, to get total coverage.

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you know if there was coverage on

week-ends?

MI. Scelso. No, I do not. know.

Mr. Goldsmith. Let us take a lo0k at --

Mr. Scelso. This is based on my experience with evalu-

ating these things worldwide.

Mr. Goldsmith. Let's take a look at CIA 249.

Would

you please take a look at the first two paragraphs.

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Mr. Scelso. That is right.

Mr. Goldsmith. This indicates that the photographic

coverage was of a continuous nature during daylight hours and

also, as you indicated, it does not indicate that that does

not mean that everybody is picked up, necessarily.

Mr. Scelso. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. You stated a moment ago that, your

experience, based upon your knowledge of worldwide operations

was not everyone would be picked up.

Mr. Scelso. That is right.

MI. Goldsmith. What percentage of people would be

picked up?

Mr. Scelso. I would like to say first that the operators

come to recognize the regular Embassy staff and visitors who

frequently come and go and do not attempt to photograph them

every time.

Otherwise, they attempt to get pictures of new

visitors.

Even this is not pràctical. It just does not work,!

and that is because it is extremely difficult to get people

to do this kind of work at all. It is a deadening, boring and

to get people who are clearable to do it, is very, very diffi-

cult.

MI. Goldsmith. In light of that, what percentage of

people do you think you would manage to get?

MI. Scelso.

I would have to make a wild guess if I were

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to answer that.

Mr. Goldsmith. I would not mind taking a wild guess

from you, Mr. Scelso.

MI. Scelso. I would think you would get at least half

of the people, or even more.

Mr. Goldsmith. Certainly if it got less than half it

would seem to me that the operation would not be at all worth-

while, if you got one quarter or one fifth.

Mr. Scelso.. You have to crank into this the fact that

the many people entering and leaving these installations

deliberately conceal their faces, and that they approach

the installations so they would not be photographical from

any vantage point.

Mr. Goldsmith. My next question is sort of a difficult

one.

The Agency's records document that Oswald made an

appearance at the Cuban Embassy and Russian Embassy, or Consu-

late, a total of six times,

five or six times. Yet, having

made five or six visits somehow he managed to escape the

surveillance coverage, even though those five of six visits

were

spread over three different days -- really, definitely

two

days, possibly three days.

Is there any way that that can be explained?

Mr.

Scelso.

Simply the fact that these photo-operations

are not set up, really, primarily to photograph and identify

unknown people entering and leaving the Embassy. They are set

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primarily to get good photos, recognition photos, of the

Soviet personnel or Cuban personnel in the place so that this

can be shown to our surveillance teams, you see, and to other

people of operational interest to us.

Mr. Goldsmith. Well, it would not seem that you would

require a constant surveillance operation if you were just

interested in the personnel of the particular government.

Mr. Scelso. You also get visitors. You are able, for

example, to identify visiting Cuban or Soviet intelligence

personnel.

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you regard it unusual, nevertheless,

that Oswald managed to avoid being photographed?

Mr. Scelso. Yes,. I do. And the possibility is that

he was extremely furtive. After all, he was not a novice at

this sort of thing.

Mr. Goldsmith. It I could just use your wild guess,

as you put it, and I want to have you understand that I am

not holding you to that estimate, but assuming for the moment

the camera gets one-half the people that enter and say he

makes five visits and not six, the chances of a person missing!

being photographed, making five visits, if the coverage catches

half of the people, would be 1/25

, so it is 1/32.: And yet,

Oswald is our one case in 32. He managed to avoid being

photographed.

Are you certain that the Mexico City station never

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obtained any photograph of Oswald?

Mr. Scelso. I never heard that they did. I never heard

of their concealing it, nor could I conceive that they would

have concealed it.

The thought that they might have gotten it, that the

Agency or the station might have surpressed it deliberately to

cover up their omission to send it to Headquarters, or some-

thing like that is to me, that is inconceivable. I never

heard it. And in view, of course, of some of the disclosures

that have been made in the Senate investigation of what the

Bureau did with Oswald's threatening letter, you can conceive

of anything.

Mr. Goldsmith. That is why we are here today.

Mr. Scelso. Yes.

I never heard it.. In view of the fact that winn Scott

in his own station was not a noncontroversial figure, there

were plent of people in the station who hated his guts, it

would have probably had leaked out.

Oswald, being a defector and so on and leading a sort

of conspiratorial life, he was perfectly capable of so approach-

ing the Cuban Embassy or the Soviet Embassy that his face

could not be photographed. In other words, if this is the

Soviet Embassy and our vantagepoint is over here, he can walk

under the window and walk straight across the street.

Mr. Goldsmith. You would have to know.

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Mr. Scelso. You can figure where it is. It can only

be in a certain number of places.

MI. Goldsmith. Getting back to the question of Ugarte

for a moment, I will ask the question, to your knowledge, was

he employed in any way by the CIA?

MI. Scelso. No. He was not carried by us as an agent,

as far as I recall. I think we did have knowledge, or our

Nicaragua station did have knowledge that he existed and was

being used against the Cubans.

Mr. Goldsmith. You are saying he. had no relationship

whatsoever to the CIA?

Mr. Scelso. Of course, in the laws of agency, you

know, he was somewhere out on the end of the line, like the

agents of all the liaison services that we liase with, and

help train, and whose operations we systematically monitor.

either superficially or intensely.

I do not recall that we were in any way giving him

instructions indirectly, or that we placed any importance on

the operation. But we count as agents of ours people who

are responsible to our guidance on a day to day basis.

Mr. Goldsmith. In that sense, as you define it, was

he an agent?

Mr. Scelso. No.

Mr. Goldsmith. Was he an asset or a source?

Mr. Scelso. Not of ours, but of the Nicaraguan service.

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Mr. Goldsmith. What control did the Agency have over

the Nicaraguan service?

Mr. Scelso. Almost none. We did not attempt to direct

their operations anyplace in the world. Our relations with

Nicaragua, our political selations and U.S. political relations

and ours as an agency was to talk to them, attempt to improve

their political posture in their own country, to ameliorate

their brutality and their repressive tactics. We had no

charter to overthrow Samoza, so we kept in contact with him

on a local basis so that we could monitor what they were

doing.

Mr. Goldsmith. Were you aware of Samoza's support of

the anti-Castro Cubans?

Mr. Scelso. Where or when?

Mr. Goldsmith.

1963.

MI •

Scelso. I do not recall any specific operations

of his supporting anti-Castro Cubans, but I could well conceive

of it.

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Mr. Goldsmith. What about support given to anti-Castro

Cubans by the Nicaraguan intelligence people?

Mr. Scelso. What do you mean, financial support?

Mr. Goldsmith. Financial support, military.

Mr. Scelso.. To Cuban exile groups that were anti-Castro?

Mr. Goldsmith. Yes.

Mr. Scelso. I do not recall having known of any such

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thing because it would have been, to us, a trivial matter.

What we were concerned about with Smoza were his acti-

vities inside of his home country, principally.

Mr. Goldsmith. If he: had been giving support to anti-

Castro Cubans, you would have considered that as trivial?

Mr. Scelso. Sure.

Mr. Goldsmith. Why?

Mr. Scelso. Not a matter -- in other words, we would

not have predicated any operations based on it. We would not

have attempted to recruit agents to monitor his support of

anti-Cuban operations, anti-Castro groups or anything like

that.

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We would have received and disseminated any information

which came our way.

Mr. Goldsmith. It would seem to me that it would be

in the intersts of the United States to become aware of all

the anti-Castro activities.

Mr. Scelso. Oh, sure. I say our station would have

known it if it had been going on, and our Headquarters, but

I just do: not recall it. You see, : Samoza

- was active

against Costa Rica. His diplomats were engaging in smuggling

money for the U.S. Mafia.

He was assassinating people,

brutalizing the population, conducting guerrilla warfare.

He was at odds with the government of Honduras which harbored

anti-Samoza groups and so on.

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If he was also in left field supporting anti-Castro

groups, this was one facet of his operations and would not

have been of any significance to us.

We would have dissemina-

ted it to the State Department.

Mr. Goldsmith. Were you aware that J. C. King supported

anti-Castro groups out of Division funds?

Mr. Scelso. Sure, through Miami, yes.

Mr. Goldsmith.. Were you aware that that was done

separately from SAS or from Task Force W?

Mr. Scelso. Well, let me think.

The various stations

had contact with anti-Castro groups at various stations in

Latin American and may have financed them. Whether J.C. King

may have done this -- I would not have put it past him. He

did all sorts of personal operations.

Mr. Goldsmith. Would that have been unauthorized?

Mr. Scelso. He could authorize it himself as Division

Chief.

MI. Goldsmith. Might he have done that with the groups

in Nicaragua, the anti-Castro groups in Nicaragua?

Mr. Scelso. Sure he might have. It seems -- well,

noting is too farfetched for him to have done.

He went

personally into Columbia, or someplace,

and went up into the

hills and personally met the leader of some great guerrilla

organization that had been murdering people right and left

when he was Division Chief.

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Mr. Goldsmith. What was the nature of the types of

groups that J. C. King was supporting?

Mr. Scelso. As I can say, I do not know he ran any

personal operations supporting any groups outside of this frame-

work of division operations run through the stations and

branches.

Mr. Goldsmith. It is conceivable to me that he was,

but you have no direct knowledge.

Mr. Scelso. No direct knowledge.

Mx. Goldsmith. Do you know if he is still alive today?

Mr. Scelso. No, I do not. When I was here a year ago

on vacation I heard that he was dying, or he was very senile.

Mr. Goldsmith. How about Mr. Herbert, who you mentioned;

before.

Mr. Scelso. Yes?

MI. Goldsmith. Is he alive today?

Mr. Scelso. As far as I know. He was in Argentina.

Do you think he would know about J. C.

Mr. Goldsmith.

King's operations?

Mr. Scelso. Very probably. Mr. Herbert was in Argen-.

tina. You are not at a loss as to his whereabouts, are you?

Mr. Goldsmith. The Agency will make him available to

uS.

Excuse me for a moment.

(Pause)

Did Headquarters station ever criticize, in any way,

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the manner in which they handled the oswald case prior to the

assassination?

MI .

scelso. Not that I know of.

Mr. Goldsmith. What about the assassination?

MI.

Scelso.

Not that. I know of.

You pointed out that they admitted to doing certain

things. My position has been that they did, of course, fail

to disclose the contact with the Cuban Embassy•

Mr. Goldsmith. Also the fact that Oswald was applying

for a visa.

Mr. Scelso. Yes.

• Mr. Goldsmith. I have another line of questioning to.

90

through with you. I do not know how long it will take

me •

If you would like to break for lunch, you may do so.

Mr. Scelso.

I leave it up to you. I can stay all day

long.

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...

(Whereupon at 12:30 the Executive

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TESTIMONY OF JOHN SCELSO -- Resumed

Mr. Goldsmith. Iwo general questions pertaining to this

morning. I think you could probably sense from

the thrust of

the questions that the Committee is disturbed about what it

sees as a failure by the Mexico City station to communicate

in a timely manner all of the information that it had to

Headquarters.

Is there any explanation that you can think of for that

failure on the part of the Mexico City station?

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MI. Scelso. I can hypothesize an explanation.

Phillips -- you have talked to Dave Phillips?

Mr.

Mr. Goldsmith. Yes:

Mr. Scelso. He should know. He was down there. But to

me, it would seem that in screening the information, they did

not attach any importance to the added information. In other

words, it was not earthquaking.

Mr. Goldsmith. We agreed that it was important, in fact,

it was sufficiently important to warrant sending a cable

instead of a dispatch.

Mr. Scelso. Almost always things like that were cabled

in, but the added information gained from the other meetings,

from the monitoring of the other telephone calls and Oswald's

other visits, it was not regarded as sufficiently important

to warrant dissemination.

In other words, here you have a kook, you see -- to

follow the line of thinking, a kook -- who had defected once

and had come back and now wanted to defect again. You see,

possibly, this is not -- in the scale of values, you see,

was not then of any great

significance.

Mr. Goldsmith. Even thoughithis particular kook hap-

pened to go not just to the Soviet Embassy but also, to the

Cuban Embassy?

Mr. Scelso. Well, the contact was obvious, you see.

He wanted to get a visa and, from there, to Russia.

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Mr. Goldsmith. Can you think of any reason at all

why the Mexico City Station did not communicate in a timely

manner Oswald's contacts with the Embassies on September 27th?

Mr. Scelso. Overwork.

Mr. Goldsmith. At the time of the assassination, the

Mexico City station was

sending materials pertaining to the

contact on September 28th and October Ist.

Mx. Scelso. They sent the one on the 27th in last.

Mr. Goldsmith. That is right.

Mr. Scelso. In the rush of events, you see, they came

across that transcript somewhere in the stack and sent it.

I do not think they were suppressing it for any reason. I

cannot conceive. why they would have been.

Mr. Goldsmith. If the Agency had a taperecording of

Oswald's voice, where would it be today?

Mr. Scelso. In Registry.

Mr, Goldsmith. Which Registry?

Mr. Scelso. The central Registry.

Mr. Goldsmith. That is the name it goes by, the

Central Registry?

Mr. Scelso. That is what it used to be called.

Mr. Goldsmith. What is the Central Registry used

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Mr. Scelso. That is where all our records are deposited.

Mr. Goldsmith. With the 201 files contained in the

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Mr. Scelso. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. I thought the 201 file was the file that

was maintained by DDO?

Mr. Scelso.. Yes, but there are 201 files in the

Registry, too..

Some of them are maintained on the desk and

other ones are in the Registry.

I would assume, since the Oswald case is a defunct case,

you see, that his 201 would be in the registry now.-

As long

as it were active, it would be on the desk.

Mr. Goldsmith. How nany copies are there of a particular

201 file?

Mr. Scelso. There bight be one in Central Registry

and another one on the desk where the case is active.

Mr. Goldsmith. Would these files be duplicative,'

completely, of each other?

Mr. Scelso. Not necessarily. The Registry would put

in only the documents which they get, you see, and the desk

might have additional inter-office memorandum,. and so on,

which they would keep.

Mr. Goldsmith. Is it true that that 201 file contains

only biographical information?

Mr. Scelso.

I think it could contain operational infor-

mation, too.

Mr. Goldsmith. What is the routine manner in which

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information is maintained in files?

Mr. Scelso. It is usually kept in project files.

Our

systemized activity abroad is done under the name of projects

for. budgeting and management purposes and to keep an opera-

tional, work in an operational file.

MI. Goldsmith. If you wanted to find out which opera-

tions that particular agent had been involved in, and you did

not know the names of the operations, how would you go about

making that determination?

Mr. Scelso. Usually an agent is in a project, you see,

and his cryptonym, like LIENVOY and LITENSOR will indicate

the project he is in, so all the information he is in is in

that project.

In addition, you can trace his name through Central

Registry and get back all the references which might be in

other files.

Mr. Goldsmith.

So Central Registry will indicate what

projects he has been involved in?

Mr. Scelso.

Yes. They would send you a list of items,

cables and dispatches, referring to him.

Mr. Goldsmith. There could be hurdreds, though.

Mr. Scelso. Indeed.

Mr. Goldsmith. What would be the most expeditious way

to find out what operations an agent has been involved in?

Mr. Scelso. Go to the desk and ask them.

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Mr. Goldsmith. Which desk, now?

Mr. Scelso. The area desk that was responsible for him.

If he is still in the Division, they

will have a complete file

on him on the desk.

Mr. Goldsmith. Would that file be the 201 file, or some

other kind of file?

MI. Scelso. It probably would be a project file. If

he is a security suspect, you see, it would be a 201 file.

If

he is an agent of ours, he would be in a project file.

Mr. Goldsmith. Let us say that, over a ten-year perioa,

an agent has been involved in a dozen operations. How would

you find out which operations he had been involved in?

Mr. Scelso. He has a cryptonym, you see, and there is

• file on that cryptonym and in that would be all correspon-

dence, dispatches and cables relating to that cryptonym.

So all of his activity would be reflected in that.

MI. Goldsmith. Agents do not keep the same cryptonym

over the years, do they?

Mr. Scelso. That is right. Then you might have to

look in several different projects.

Mr. Goldsmith. You would not know which registry to

100k into unless you knew the cryptonym in advance?

Mr. Scelso. Well, hhis file would indicate if there

was a change of cryptonym.

Mr. Goldsmith. Which file, the 201 file?

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Mr. Scelso. The 201 file and the project file, as

well. Agents rarely change cryptonyms unless the old crypto-

nym has been compromised.

Mr. Goldsmith. My understanding is the cryptonym is

given to an agent at the beginning of his involvement in a

particular project.

For example, let's take AMLASH, and the "AM" would

pertain to the particular project, would it not?

Mr. Scelso. •Yes. That would mean Cuban.

Mr. Goldsmith. Say he starts working on a project in a

completely different area, Czechslovakia. Would he still

retain the cryptonym AMLASH?

Mr. Scelso. He would ordinarily keep the same cryptonymy

Cuban agents worldwide have the AM cryptonym even though they

may be stationed in Poland, or something like that.

Mr. Goldsmith. As a general rule, you are saying that

the most expeditious manner to find out what files an agent

has been involved in would be to go to his 201 file, determine

what his cryptonym is, and from there look up his cryptonym

and bring your references, I guess in a particular index of

cryptonyms.

That would give you a reference to the projects

he has been involved in, or all correspondence pertaining.

Mr. Scelso.

From the cryptonym, you could tell which

branch he worked under, each nation, each nationality has the

two letters which designates the nationality. You can go to

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the desk and ask them.

MI. Goldsmith. How would they know?

Mr. Scelso. They would have a file on that.

Mr.. Goldsmith. On that cryptonym?

Mr. Scelso.

That cryptonym.

If it were active, it would be in Registry.

Sometimes

it does take a lot of research. They will wheel out sometimes

in a cart, like a supermarket cart, only it's two-storeys,

this many, twice as many files.

MI. Goldsmith. As a rule, the information, operational

information pertaining to an agent will be contained in the

project files?

Mr. Scelso. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. Is it true CIA case officers do not have

cryptonyms?

MI. Scelso. Well, staff case officers who are staff

employees like I was a

staff employee, just has pseudonyms.

¡ Agents have cryptonyms.

Mr. Goldsmith. An agent is not somebody who you would

consider to be a CIA employee?

Mr. Scelso. That is right. He is in a contractual

relationship of some kind. This is a myth, of course, because

¡there is not any contract, really, but there is an agreement.

There are certain types of high-level agents who are staff

agents, who have staff status, but they are not employees.

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For instance, if I had been sent abroad under cover as

a private individual, leaving the office in McLean, going

abroad

as a businessman or something like that, I would have

become a staff agent and I would still have a pseudonym.

We have what we call principal agents abroad who work

for us full-time who have pseudonyms

and others who have

cryptonyms.

When

a man gets into something approaching an

employee relationship with the U.S. government and has survivor-

ship rights, pension rights, he usually gets a pseudonym so

that he can sign papers, vouchers and so on.

Mr. Goldsmith. A pseudonym is distinguishable from an

operational alias, is it not?

Mr. Scelso. It is different, but it is not distinguish-

able by looking at it.

Mr.. Goldsmith. Understood. .

Mr. Scelso. It is different.

Mr. Goldsmith. If the case officer has a pseudonym he

uses for correspondence, that is not a name you would use as

an operational alias dealing with the agents?

MI. Scelso. A case officer - I used to use a different

name with every agent I ran.

Mr.. Goldsmith. How would you remember which name to

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use?

Mr. Scelso. I had a pretty good memory. I would 100k

at the file. I might be running twelve agents in the station.

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I had no trouble remembering it. In later years I did when

I ran into some of these people on the street.

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you know any CIA case officer whose

name is Maurice Bishop?

Mr: Scelso. I do not recall any such person.

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you know whether Dave Phillips ever

used the name Maurice Bishop as an operational alias or a

pseudonym?

Mr. Scelso. I do not know that..

Mr. Goldsmith. Turning now to the post-assassination

period, what responsibilities, if any, did you have with

regard to the CIA's investigation of the assassination?

Mr. Scelso. I think it was the day after the assassina-

tion, Mr. Helms called a meeting of a lot of important people,

including Angleton; the Chief of our Division, Mr. Karamessinas;

I think somebody from the Cuban show, and told them that I

was in charge of the investigation and gave me broad powers

and so on.

Mr. Goldsmith. Why did he pick you?

Mr: Scelso. He picked me primarily because it fell into

my balliwick anyway and because he had known me for years as

a polygraph operator and as a man who had successfully inves-

tigated a number of very, very big operations and security

problems.

Mr. Goldsmith.

When you say it fell into your balliwick

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anyway; for the record, what was that balliwick?

Mr. Scelso. I had a Branch then that included Mexico,

and the Central American countries and Panama.

Because Oswald

had been in Mexico, he gave it to me.

Mr. Goldsmith. Oswald had also been to Soviet Russia.

Mr. Scelso. That is right.

Mr. Goldsmith. Any reason why that person was not

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chosen?

Mr. Scelso. Helms had a way of doing things like this,

particularly in my case. I had investigated the disappearance

of the Chief of the West German Security Service in 1964 and

I had investigated a number of other giant operations of

absolutely critical importance for him over the years, and

had come up, you know, with the right answers.

Mr. Goldsmith.

What was Helms' attitude towards the

man on which the investigation was to be conducted?

Mr. Scelso. Helms wanted everything. done right that --

he did not give me any detailed instructions.

Mr. Goldsmith. Did you ever push you one way or another

towards finding conspiracy or no conspiracy?

Mr.. Scelso. No.

Mr. Goldsmith. Did he ever pressure you, in any wayr

to get the job done within certain time limitations?

Mr. Scelso. No.

What happened was -- as I say, Angleton kept on seeing

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the FBI and he also saw members of the Warren Commission, which

was in direct violation of Helms' instructions.

Helms

refused to make him stop doing this. Angleton would not

invite me to these meetings. I called this to Mr. Helms'

attention.

So I worked as fast as I could with the material that

I had and prepared a summary report of the events in Mexico

and other things we knew about. Oswald, which was, in light

of later events, very sketchy.

Then, after a number of weeks -- I think it was around

Christmas, but it may have been in mid-January, Nicholas

Katzenbach notified us that the Bureau's report had been

given to him and asked the Agency to send people over to read

it. So Birch O'Neal and I went over and read it and it con-

tained vast amounts of information which we had not known.

Mr. Goldsmith. Why was Birch O'Neal still involved in

this?

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Mr. Scelso. Birch O'Neal was still involved in it

because the CI staff was helping with the investigation.

It had answers, for example, to the letter intercepts

that went various places. They were the repository of letter

intercepts.

Mr. Goldsmith. You said that the FBI report contained a

lot of information that. you did not know about?

Mr. Scelso. That is right. Just a lot of vital information

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that they had not disseminated to us.

Mr. Goldsmith. Could you give some examples of that?

Mr. Scelso. Yes.

Details of Oswald's political activity in the United

States; the pro-Cuban activity; the fact that he had shot at

General Walker; the fact that diaries and biographical sketche$,

autobiographical sketches of himself had been found among his

effects; and so on.

And so, in just about everything, the Bureau had deluged

us with hundreds, if not thousands, äf reports of people giv-

ing fragmentary bits of information, you see, and kept us

busy tracing the names and researching it, and so on; but

these vital things had never been communicated

to me. Maybe

they were communicated to Angleton, but not to me.

It so happened that my report, my initial report. i-

actually I wrote an initial report about two days after the

assassination, which Mr. Helms took to President Johnson, the

gist of which was, as far as we could see, Oswald was the

assassin and there was no indication that we had that there

were other participants in the assassination; and there was

no indication, visible indication, that he was a Soviet or a

Cuban agent, even though the possibility could not be exclu-

ded. And my later report was more comprehensive, but was

obviously, completely irrelevant in view of all of this

Bureau information.

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Mr. Goldsmith.

Was there a tension between the Agency

and the Bureau by virtue of the Bureau having a much more

complete report than yours, and apparently not having given

you all the information that had existed?

Mr.. Scelso. I did not see any. I did not see any

tension.: Everybody felt that this was the Bureau's case

because they were in charge of watching over Oswald. That

was their responsibility, not ours, and therefore we are not

going to harrass them, or anything like that.

I personally felt a little put out when I discovered

that they had all of this information and had not passed it

to me.

Knowing the Bureau, I did not get upset about this.

was glad to have all of this information. and just at the

time that my report was submitted, I had circulated it to

the important people, including Angleton, and

a meeting was

called and everybody was to discuss this case, discuss my

report.

I think that the day of the meeting, or the day before

the meeting, I had read the Bureau's report in Katzenbach's

office and made a few notes and came back and said my report

is irrelevant; in view of all the added information, this thing

now takes on an entirely different dimension. Whereupon,

Helms -- Angleton started to criticize my report terribly. --

without pointing out any inaccuracies, it was so full of

wrong things, we could not possibly send it to the Bureau, and

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I just sat there and I did not say a word. This was a typical

Angleton performance. I had invited him to comment on the

report and he had withheld all of his comments until he got to

the meeting whereupon Helms turned the operation, the investi-

gation, over to Angleton's staff.

Meantime, I was up to my neck in Panama demonstrations

and so on.

Mr. Goldsmith. Is the name Ann Egerton familiar to you?

Mr. Scelso. Yes, it is. I've heard the name.

Mr. Goldsmith. She was a woman who was a CIA analyst.

Mr. Scelso. Yes, sir, on Angleton's staff in Mexico.

Mr. Goldsmith. With Birth O'Neal?

Mr. Scelso. That is right.

Mr. Goldsmith. She was the woman who opened up Oswald's

201 file. Did she have any involvement in the investigation

of the assassination?

MI. Scelso. I suppose she did in Birch O'Neal's office,

probably kept the books for him and so on.

Mr. Goldsmith.

Other than that, you have no information

about that?

Mr. Scelso. NO.

Mr. Goldsmith.

What about Charlotte Bustos? What

involvement did she have?

MI. Scelso. Charlotte Bustos supported me in handling

all the details of the investigation, running traces

on all

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the people that came up, and keeping track of the files, and

so on.

Mr. Goldsmith. We have been told -- the Committee has

been told by two different sources formerly with the Agency

that shortly after the assassination Charlotte Bustos found a

photograph thought to be of oswald.. Do you know whether, in

fact, such a photo was found?

MI. Scelos. I do not recall any such thing.

Mr. Goldsmith. If she had found it, would you have

been the person she would have shown it to?

Mr. Scelos. Absolutely.

Mr. Goldsmith. You never saw such a photograph?

Mr. Scelos. Not that I recall. You are reasonably

sure that it is not the unknown man?

Mr. Goldsmith. That is correct. I will qualify my

answer and say I am not reasonably sure of anything. I am

basing my question upon testimony we have received from other

individuals.

MR. Scelos. It is possible that she found a photograph

of him, that the ONI may have sent later. I do not think

there was anyone in our files. I do not recall one being

found.

Mr. Goldsmith. You said shortly after the assassination

you wrote a report that was submitted to the President and

the report, in substance, said Oswald did it alone and we have

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nothing to indicate to the contrary.

Mr. Scelso.

Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you think it was premature a point

to be issuing a report of that kind?

MI. Scelso. No, because the President wanted it.

He

wanted a rundown on what we had and thought. The thing was

couched in such terms, we hedged.

Mr. Goldsmith. Is a copy of that report still available

in Headquarters?

Mr. Scelso. It should be someplace. I gather that

the Church Committee did not find it either. It should have

been in Helms' files, or something.

Mr. Goldsmith. Is it uncommon for reports to get lost

at Headquarters?

MI. Scelso. Memoranda of this kind -- this was a

memorandum, you see, about a page and a half, or two or

three pages long. I frequently had to write things like this

to go to the White House. Either J. C. King took them of

Helms took them -- with my new electric typewriter.

They wanted to know -- the President wanted something.

Mr. Goldsmith. I understand.

Is it common for things like that to get lost?

MI. Scelso. Yes, it would be very uncommon. I had a

file on the case, my own file in my own safe and it should

be in there.

And it should be in Helms' files.

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Mr. Goldsmith. That leads me right into another question

that I was going to address to you. Specifically, whenever an

agency employee writes a memorandum of some sort, or sends out

correspondence, would a copy of that memorandum of correspon-

dence go into his own file?

Mr. Scelso. No.

Mr. Goldsmith. Where would it go?

Mr. Scelso. It depends on what it was. If it is a

dispatch, you see, going to the field, it goes into a chrono-

file where everything. is numbered, you see; a copy of each

dispatch that goes out, and it also goes into the project file.

And, if it was not associated with the project, it goes in

any number of subject files. If it were a personnel memorandum

or a policy memorandum or liaison and general communications,

it would go in an appropriate file

in the branch.

Also, it would be filed and sent to Registry..

Mr. Goldsmith. You mentioned earlier that, for example,

something might go into one of Mr. Helms' files.

Mr: Scelso. Yes.

Helms kept files of memoranda which

were addressed to him or went through him.

Mr. Goldsmith. It must have been voluminous files.

Mr. Scelso. Sure.

These were things

that were not routine Agency corkes-

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copies of correspondence that he sent to other people?

Mr. Scelso. I would think so.

Mr. Goldsmith. You mentioned earlier that you had

maintained a file onoyour desk or in your safe, rather?

Mr. Scelso. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. Where would that be today?.

Mr. Scelso. I have no idea.

Mr. Goldsmith. In other words, would you take that

material with you, or did you leave it at the Agency?

MI. Scelso. I left it in the Branch. It probably was

torn to pieces and everything that was duplicated was destroyed

and the unique memoranda was sent to Registry when I left.

I did not take any files with me, except some personnel things

that I had on myself.

Mr. Goldsmith. Was any consideration ever given by

you during your investigation, or after your investigation,

that Oswald may have been a CIA agent?

Mr. Scelso. Well, we immediately retraced him. We

traced him before; we retraced him. Then, for members of the

Warren Commission in their presence, we retraced him again.

Mr. Goldsmith. What do you mean by "retraced him?"

Mr. Scelso.

This is a procedure whereby you go down

to Central Registry and hand them a trace request with the 201

number on it and all his complete name and so on and date on

him. They then, using their computers

and so on, run through

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the thing and get a machine run of all references to him.

They did this in the presence of a Warren Commission man so

he could see could see how it worked.

MI. Goldsmith. Was that done specifically using Oswald's

name?

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Mr. Scelso. Oswald's name, that is right, to show him

exactly how we were able disgorge whatever we had on Oswald.

Now, we knew right from the start that Oswald had never

been an agent. of the Agency, as far as the records show, and

everybody concerned with it knew, or believed, that he had

never been an agent of the Agency.

Mr. Goldsmith. How did you know that?

Mr. Scelso. Because all agents of the Agency are

indicated in Registry, you see, under a cryptonym of with

reference to another desk, with reference to a certain desk

with an instruction, go to a certain desk and ask them. This

is done with extremely sensitive cases and also done with

security suspects of great importance. Oswald did not show

up in any such contracts.

Mr. Goldsmith. Who checked that, did you?

Mr. Scelso. Charlotte Bustos, and it was later checked

by the CI staff.

Mr. Goldsmith. Charlotte Bustos, was she on your staff?

Mr. Scelso.

My branch.

Mr. Goldsmith.

Western Hemisphere?

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Mr. Scelso. She was primarily the Mexican desk, although

later she may have had branch-wide responsibilities. I do not

remember.

Mr. Goldsmith.

To your knowledge, was Oswald ever an

agent of the CIA?

Mr. Scelso. Never in any sense.

Mr. Goldsmith.

If an agent has a 201 file and I would

like to indicate to you that I understand that the fact that

there is a 201 file, that someone is not an agent -- if an

agent has a 201 file, would the papers maintained in that file

be maintained there in chronological order?

Mr. Scelso. I think the 201 file has a number of differ-

ent parts to it. There is biographic information, administra-

tive information and so on.

Mr. Goldsmith. Would each different part be maintained

in a different file?

Mr. Scelso. It is usually in the same folder.

Mr. Goldsmith.

In the same folder.

Mr. Scelso. Unless it is a giant file, then it may be

subdivided.

Mr. Goldsmith. As a general rule, would it be in chrono-

logical order, so the first paper would come from the bottom;

the next one and the next one?

Mr. Scelso. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. If the file is not in chronological order,

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would that suggest that the file had been tampered with in

any way?

MI. Scelso. It might have been reorganized, conceivably

when it was put together, you see, it may have been put together

in disparate pieces of paper gathered from all around, and

the person who put the file, created the file out of nothing,

may have put them in some other order rather than chronological

order.

Mr. Goldsmith. Are there any written criteria or regula-

tions covering the manner in which 201 files have to be main-

tained?

Mr. Scelso. There may be, I do not know. You know,

I never went to Central Registry the entire time I was in

Washington, for eight years -- I did once. It was what we

called a Registry tour, which was a one-week briefing on

Registry and I never took it.

Not only that, after my initial training course of föur

weeks

it was a six-week course, but I came in two weeks

late -- in 1947, I never took a training course in my entire

career:

I am about the only officer that never did. Helms

would never let me take time to take training courses.

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you have any reason to believe that

Oswald may have been an FBI informant?

Mr. Scelso.

No. He was in touch -- the FBI was in

touch with him. You know that, of course.

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Mr. Goldsmith. Do you have any reason to believe that

Oswald may have been an agent of the Department of Defense

Intelligence?

Mr. Scelso. No.

Mr. Goldsmith. If he had been, would you have

• known

about it?

Mr. Scelso. No, not necessarily.

They could have

concealed it from us. Technically, under Presidential order,

they should have coordinated the operation with the Central

Intelligence Agency at some point, if Oswald was a source of

theirs overseas.

But compliance with that Presidential

directive was spotty.

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you know a man by the name of John

McVickar?

MI. Scelso. It does not ring a bell. It barely rings

a bell in the distance.

MI. Goldsmith. You mentioned earlier that you just

read the book, "Legend." In that book, a woman by the name

of Priscilla Johnson is mentioned. She was a newspaper

reporter who interviewed Oswald when he was in Russian.

Do you have any reason to believe that Priscilla

Johnson MacMillan may have been an Agency employee?

Mr. Scelso. I never heard it. The way things developed,

a lot of things happened that I did not know or I did not find

out.

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Mr. Goldsmith. For purposes of the record, I should

ask you, if possible please try to let me finish my questions,

because otherwise, the record will look as though I am asking

a question and you are most of the time anticipating what I

am getting at, but you are answering me very quickly, so the

record will look chopped up if you do not let me finish my

question.

What about a woman named Aileen Mosby, also a correspon-

dent in Moscow. Do you have any reason to believe that she

would have been an employee of the Agency?

Mr. Scelso. I had known nothing about it.

Mr. Goldsmith. A newspaper correspondent called A. I.

Korengold, the last name is Korengola.

Mr. Scelso.

No.

Mr. Goldsmith. How about Goldberg, A. I. Goldberg?

Mr. Scelso. No. I might say that I did not know.

I

am pretty sure I never knew the names of any American journa-

list that we might have used in Russia. Although I once did

a survey of all of our journalist operations.

MI. Goldsmith. You mentioned earlier that CIA's Moscow

station was run somewhat differently than other stations.

Mr. Scelso. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. Could you summarize for us again why

and how it was run differently?

Mr. Scelso. Well, Soviet and satellite operations, in

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general were very, very highly compartmented. Successful

recruitments of Soviet or satellite officials were handled

with special cryptonyms and did not come to the attention of

other divisions or branches unless it were absolutely neces-

sary -- for instance, had they recruited somebody like that

in Mexico City, I would have known about the operation.

However, if a Soviet agent of ours had been transferred

from Paris to Mexico City, I might not have learned of it.

Even when I was later Chief of Foreign Intelligence operations!

my purview did not include those successful Soviet and satel-

lite operations which were in being. It did include a survey

of our efforts to make such recruitments and stations all

around the world.

My authority did not cover the Moscow station at any

time. Inat was entirely separate.. I never was told who was

there or what they were doing.

Mr. Goldsmith. You might normally know which Agency employ-

ees were at another station.

Mr. Scelso.: Yes. Almost always I could find that:

Inn

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Mr. Goldsmith.

MOSCOW?

Mr. Scelso. Moscow was never discussed with any of the

panels which I sat on, nor were there projects submitted to

me for approval.

MI. Goldsmith.

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Is it possible that the Moscow station

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would have had a Chief of Station?

Mr. Scelso. Yes, but I doubt it. I would doubt it.

I always thought that there was only one man in Moscow, and

now there were probably more than one.

Mr. Goldsmith. Why would there be relatively few people

assigned to the Moscow station?

Mr. Scelso. I don't know. It would be hard to get them

in. It would be hard to find a seasoned officer -- there is

no sense sending annovice - a seasoned officer who was not

blown, as they say, whose cover had not been compromised.

However, it appears that it did not make much difference

because some of the people they sent there must have been

compromised.

In general, the chiefs of the soviet effort were

extremely jealous of their prerogatives and found it much

easier to cooperate without anybody critiquing their work.

Mr. Goldsmith. Is it possible that, by virtue of the

secrecy in which Soviet operations were run and specifically

in secrecy with which the Moscow station tended to operate

that Oswald may have been recruited as a CIA agent and that

no record would have been maintained of it?

Mr. Scelso. A record would have been maintained of it.

The Soviet Division had records, definitely, and they had to

brief important people about the operations, particularly the

Director. But there were operations, for example, a number of

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operations in the clandestine services that neither the DDO

nor the ADDO knew.

Mr. Goldsmith. For example, here is a problem that

the Committee is confronted with.

We recently introduced an employee who, as I mentioned

earlier today, indicated that looking at his records, every

indication on that record would be that he had retired from

the Agenay in the mid-50's when actually he had been with the

Agency throughout and had continued one way of the other,

whether it was to be paid by the. Agency or by the State Depart-

ment, he was still working for the Agency. There was no

record of his Agency connection at Langley.

Mr. Scelso. He may say that, but I do not believe it

is true. There would certainly be files on him in the opera-

tional branches which were concerned with his work. He may

have been purged from the normal personnel records, and so

on, but he would have been continued in operational files

which may have existed in only one file in the Branch where

he was: managed.

Mr. Goldsmith. So that it is possible that the

personnel file would be purged in some manner, or would be

written up in a manner to indicate that he was no longer with

the Agency?

And it is possible that there would be just

one operational file which indicates that, in fact, he was

still with the Agency and unless you knew this man's cryptonym

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and went to that project file, you would never know.

Mr. Scelso. Sure. Very probably yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. Is it possible, taking it a step further,

that the person would not even have

a personnel file?

Mr. Scelso..

You mean in the Office of Personnel?

The

Office of Personnel has files on all

staff members.

Mr: Goldsmith. Yes.

Mr. Scelso. His retirement file would have been taken

out to a depo in Virginia. He would have been still in a

card. file, however, in Personnel. A card file would show that

he is a former employee.

Anything is possible, whether Oswald was

a CIA agent,

but it certainly was concealed

• from me if he were. I will say

that Oswald was a person of a type who would never have been

recruited by the Agency to work behind the Iron Curtain, or

anyplace else.

Mr. Goldsmith. Why not?

Mr. Scelso. Because his personality and background

completely disqualified him for clandestine work or for work

asaan agent to carry out the instructions of the Agency.

Mr. Goldsmith. Could you go into more detail? This is

really an important area, if you would care to elaborate a bit.

Mr. Scelso. When the Agency hires an agent, engages

someone to do our work and gives him a certain amount of training

and places him under our guidance, whether we pay him or not

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or whether he signs an agreement or not, he has to meet cer-

tain standards, he has to go through a security check, a

file check. And the Counterintelligence Staff has to examine

his personality and his background and evaluate his reliability.

If he gets more than $15,000 a year, if he got more

than $15,000, if the operation called for more than $15,000

a year, back in those days it would have gone through my.

branch. If he had been recruited in the Soviet Union, he

would not have gone through my Branch.

Well, Oswald, by virtue of his background and so on,

would miserably fail to meet our minimum qualifications.

Oswald would have been debriefed had he walked in and volun-

teered information, you see. However, he would not have been

given any mission to perform.

He might have been given instructions, you see, which

would tend to neutralize him and make him less of a nuisance

and danger than he otherwise would be, like go away and do not

contact us anymore.

Mr. Goldsmith. What about the flip side of all of this?

Is there any reason to think that Oswald was recruited by the

KGB?

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Mr. Scelso. Indeed, he certainly must have been debriefed

by the KGB. I would think they would have debriefed him on

his military information. I do not think that the KgB would

have recruited him to be their agent after he left Russia.

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MI. Goldsmith. Why not?

Mr. Scelso. Because they were intimately acquainted

with his ways and his habits and his background and would not

have regarded him as a reliable collaborator.

Mr. Goldsmith. Unless both, in the case of the KGB or

CIA, as Epstein says in his book, Oswald's background is

simply a legend, fictional. It does not accurately portray

his true characteristics.

MI. Scelso. If. Oswald, you mean, in his teens had been

briefed to act like an unreliable kook and build up a legend

like that. However, the Russians are just as careful, or

more careful, about this kind of thing than we are and I

just do not think -- Oswald's whole pattern of life was that

of a very badly, emotionally unbalanced young man..

Mr. Goldsmith. Let's get into the area of the CIA's

investigation of the assassination in more detail. First,

can you tell us how the investigation was organized?

Mr. Scelso. Well, practically my whole Branch parti-

cipated in the thing. We dropped almost everything else and

I put a lot of my officers to work on tracing names, analyzing

files.

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We were flooded with cable traffic, with reports,

suggestions, allegations from all over the world, and these

things had to be checked out. We were checking out just

dozens and dozens of people all of the time.

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Mr. Goldsmith.

Was the information routinely passed

around to the FBI?

Mr. Scelso. Yes. Everything that appeared to be

relevant. A vast amount of fabrication came in.

MI. Goldsmith. Was there any structure in the manner

in which this was organized? You were the man in charge.

How were things organized below you?

Mr. Scelso. Well, I ran the whole thing and I used my

staff to help me.

Mr: Goldsmith. How big was your staff?

Mr. Scelso. I had about 30 officers and about 30 cler-

ical help. Not all of the officers do this, but a great many

of them did.

Mr. Goldsmith. What instructions, if any, were given

to the field stations as to investigating the assassination?

Mr. Scelso. The only station that was directly involved

was Mexico. The possible involvement of our Miami station did

not emerge, as I recall it, until we read the Bureau report

and a few of Oswald's pro-Castro activities in the United

States.

Just around this time I was relieved of responsibility

for the investigation, so that -- well, we cabled Nicaragua

to find out about Ugarte. We were in correspondence with

Melbourne and God knows what about reports which were coming

in from anonymous or published sources, and so on.

In those

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areas, they were all fabrications, bizarre fabrications.

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Mr. Goldsmith.

Essentially, however, there was really

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only one field station actively involved in this?

MI. Scelso. Well, there was a certain amount of traffic

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that was Scandinavian about Oswald's trip.. There was corres-

pondence with the British about the possibility that he had

been there -- I think he had been there-- and so on, traces

coming in from them.

Mr. Goldsmith. Were the field stations specifically

10

instructed to pursue this case in any manner, and pass along

all leads?

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Mr. Scelso. Yes.

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Mr. Goldsmith. Are you saying that, in fact, all of

the stations are involved, or were instructed to participate

13

in the investigation?

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Mr. Scelso. I do not know whether any general guidance

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went out to the whole world but the whole world was alerted to

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it, and the key stations were receiving tips on the case, most

!8 " of which were phony. We did not send out any instructions

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saying everybody participate in the investigation of the

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Kennedy case.

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Oswald's name was public knowledge, you see.

It was

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in all the newspapers in the world.

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MI. Goldsmith. Were the various field stations ordered

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to contact their various sources for information of potential

leads?

Mr. Scelso.. I do not think they were.

This kind of

thing is routine, you see.

Mr. Goldsmith. You are saying they would have done it

without being ordered to?

Mr. Scelso. Sure, they should have. That was not the

problem. The problem is that they were sending in too much

information, which was fabricated.

Mr. Goldsmith. How was the information which came in

from the field evaluated?

Mr. Scelso. Traces were done on the people concerned.

The information was passed to the Warren Commission and to

the FBI and to whatever government agencies were concerned.

It was evaluated by us, queries were sent out, comments,

requests for follow-up.

Actually, very little information came from anyplace -

information that was worth anything.

Mr. Goldsmith. With the exception of Mexico City?

Mr. Scelso. Mexico City and Nicaragua and the Ugarte

case, a few cables on that. That is about it.

Mr. Goldsmith. There is also one from, as I recall it,

other Scandinavian countries or Czechoslovakia involving a

statement made by a Cuban Embassy officer. Do you recall that

one?

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MI. Scelso. Vaguely, yes. There was a vast amount of

fabrication that came in. We were deluged with it.

Mr. Goldsmith. Once a report came in, what steps would

you go through to determine whether or not it was

accurate?

Mr.. Scelso.

We would trace the names first and we would

compare it with what we already knew about the case and with

Oswald's movements, and

so on. Then we had to use our

judgment. We passed along a lot of things that we knew were

untrue, just on their face.

MI. Goldsmith. When you say pass them along, what do

you mean?

Mr. Scelso.

Pass them along to the FBI and the Warren

Commission.

Mr. Goldsmith. With any evaluation as to their accuracy?

Mr. Scelso. Usually with some. As I say, there was

a lot of traffic, but most of it was just weirdo stuff. A

particular one from Australia which tried to place the blame

on the Poles, I believe.

Mr. Goldsmith. Getting back to the question of organiza-

tion, your staff was not. the CI staff?

Mr. Scelso. No..:"

Mr. Goldsmith Your staff was Westein Hemisphere?

Mr. Scelso.. Just the geographical staff, yes.

"I. Goldsmith. How did CI staff get involved in the

investigation?

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Mr. Scelso. Finally, Helms turned the entire thing

over to thems

Mr. Goldsmith. When was this?

Mr. Scelso.

As I recall, my recollection was that it

was around Christmastime, but I think Mr. Rock said it was

in January. I do not remember. You should be able to estab-

lish it.

Mr. Goldsmith. Did Helms tell you why the investigation

was being turned over to Angleton and his crew?

Mr. Scelso. No. The turnover was made in this final

meeting when I suggested that it be turned over because of

the Soviet angle that had now been discovered, the disclosure

about his biographic information about his stay in the Soviet

Russia, which was obviously very important.

Mr. Goldsmith. You knew that he had been in Soviet

Russia before.

Mr. Scelso. That is true, but almost no information

about what he had done there.

Now, suddenly, here are biographical sketches, plus

the Bureau's information from Marina Oswald which we had never

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Mr. Goldsmith. According to Book 5 of the Senate Report

the Agency tended to focus more on the Soviet aspect of the

case than the Cuban aspect of the case.

Is that an accurate

conclusion?

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Mr. Scelso. I think after Angleton took it over, that

was the case, yes.

MI. Goldsmith. In retrospect, was that the way in which

the investigation should have been conducted?

Mr. Scelso. I think both aspects were equally important!

Had I known --as you know, I did not know anything about

the assassination plans of the CIA against Castro. This was

not disclosed to me.

Had I known that, my investigation would have been

entirely different.

Mr. Goldsmith. In what way would it have been different?

Mr. Scelso. We would have gone down to principally

our Miami station and had them kick off the full investigation;

As it was, they were getting all kinds of leads, but

we would have been putting much more emphasis in that direc-

tion, particularly in our analysis of the case.

My present feeling about the case is that Oswald was a

genuine pro-Castro nut and he was excited about. what he read

in the papers about our attempts to knock off Castro. I, too,

read these things in the paper and I thought, of course, that

what Castro was referring to were the armed teams we were

landing from time to time on the Cuban beaches. I did not know

he might have been talking about general attempts to kill

him personally as distinguished from

overthrowing his govern-

ment.

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The emphasis on the Soviet Union particularly came after

Nosenko came out -- when did he come out?

Mr. Goldsmith. March of '64.

MI.

Scelso. Within a couple of months after I turned

the case over.

Mr. Goldsmith. Was there any resentment on your part

towards having to turn the case over to Angleton?

Mr. Scelso. No. There was a resentment towards Angle-

ton, which was chronic, but I was rather blunt, in view of

the vast amount of documentation that the Bureau had produced

and the vast amount of information, the great amount of

written material on Oswald's stay in Russia which the Soviet

Division was qualified to judge and analyze. I was not at

all up-to-date on conditions in Soviet Russia, and they were

plus the statements of Marine Oswald, and so on. This thing

was entirely out of my depth. Plus the fact that I did have

a Division Branch of six red-hot countries.

In January '64 came the big uprisings and demonstrations

in Panama. Although Helms had relieved me of the responsibil-

ity for all of that, he had not given it to anybody else.

Mr. Goldsmith. Is it true that, at some point, Winn

Scott attempted to have you removed from your position?

Mr. Scelso. Possibly, I never heard.

Mr. Goldsmith. For that reason, you actually had some-

what negative feelings towards Mr. Scott?

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Me. Scelso. I never had negative feelings to Scott,

no. I still admire Scott as a great nonconformist and a very

fine and decent guy. I know he worked his staff so hard that

a lot of them hated them, and he could not have gotten me

relieved anyway. There is nothing he could have said.

If you will excuse my saying so, when I did try to get

out of the Divisiona couple of years läter, I had a heck of

a time getting out.

Mr. Goldsmith. Yet Mr. Scott, despite his concern for

competence and high performance, apparently did not dismiss

any of his photosurveillance people

after the assassiation?

Mr. Scelso. That is correct. But, you see, photo-

surveillance is a highly controversial thing. The value of

photosurveillance is a thing that a lot of people argue about.

It is something that you have to have. It costs a

lot in

effort and money and it really does not produce anything

sensational, in most cases.

Mr. Goldsmith. In this case, it produced our mystery

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Mr. Scelso. Yes.

We have photosurveillance a lot of

places. What it produced was real good photos of the

intelligence officers who worked in and out of the Embassy,

which were very valuable for our surveillance teams.

They

could then recognize the people under all circumstances and

never really produce very much else.

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I remember occasions in Latin American where we had

photo-surveillance of secret hideouts of terrorist groups and

photographed all the terrorists who went in and out, at close

range, and this was very valuable and we were able to identify

a lot of terrorists. I remember sending a report, with

pictures, to President Johnson -- even to President Kennedy.

But photo-surveillance, the performance of the Mexico

City support apparatus, as we call surveillance, photo-surveil-

lance, phone taps and so forth, was unequalled in the world.

There is nothing like it anyplace else in the world.

Of course, it is just like the intelligence business --

it is a real dicey thing.

Mr. Goldsmith. When did you leave your position as

head of Western Hemisphere-3?

Mr. Scelso. I left it in 1955. I reliquished the

Mexican desk in 1964, that was made a separate branch, and

I retained Central America and got the entire Caribbean

thrown in, except for Cuba.

Mr. Goldsmith. At the time that you actually left the

Agency in 1970, were any of these surveillance operations in

Mexico City that you knew about, from 1963 and '64 still in

effect?

Mr. Scelso. Yes. I think all of them were. I used to

review them every year; in my later capacity I reviewed all of

those things worldwide.

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Mr. Goldsmith. Is the Mexico City's station's operations

one of the most sensitive of all of the stations at the Agency?

Mr. Scelso. :

It was then. That is, the variety and

number of telephone taps, surveillance teams, photo operations

and other technical operations is exposed by Adee in his

book. That exceeds anyplace else that we had in the world

by a lot. There is no other station in the world that has

that good operations.

Then came Caracas. That got to be real good.. Nothing

like it in Europe.

Mr. Goldsmith. I would like to draw your attention to a

cable which, unfortunately, I do not have with me. The cable

is referred to in Book 5 of the Senate report, written by

Thomas Karamessinas to the Mexico City station in which he

indicated and said the arrest of Sylvia Deran would jeopordize

U.S. freedom of action.

Do you remember that cable?

Mr. Scelso. Yes. *

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you know why it was sent?

Mr. Scelso. At that time, we were not sure that Oswald

might not have been a Cuban agent, and the arrest of a

foreign consular person was quite a serious matter under

international law.

Although Sylvia Duran was a Mexican citizen, I believe,

nevertheless, I did not think -- Karamessinas may not have

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known that at the time, and simply felt that this breach of

international law, violation of her immunity, might have

made it awkward for the United States, if we wanted to let out

a roar of outrage if we discovered that Castro had been behind

the assassination.

In other words, Karamessinas feared that this whole thing

might be laid at the United Staes' doorstep. In retrospect,

he did not have to worry so much.

MI. Goldsmith. What knowledge, if any, did you have of

the AMLASH operation at the time of the assassination of the

President?

Mr.. Scelso. What is that?

Mr. Goldsmith. Cubella.

Mr. Scelso. None.

Mr. Goldsmith.

When was the first time that that came

to your attention?

Mr. Scelso. During the Senate interrogation of me.

Mr. Goldsmith. You learned about it for the first time

while you were testifying?

Mr. Scelso. Yes.

They were leading around to it by a

million different questions. I did not know what they were

driving at. I had never heard of the operation before and I

did not know of any of these attempts to assassinate Castro.

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you know why you were not informed

about them?

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Mr. Scelso. Well, I was not informed about them before

the assassination because I had no need to know, and Cuban

operations were highly compartmented, very securely handled.

Mr. Goldsmith. Who was head of Cuban operations?

Mr: Scelso. As I learned during that hearing -- they

refreshed my memory -- it was Mr. Fitzgerald.

Mr. Goldsmith. What about William Harvey?

Mr.. Scelso. Harvey, I don't know whether Harvey -- I

think he was Chief later or earlier. I don't remember. Later,

I think. I know both of these gentlemen very well.

Mr. Golasmith. What was

Mr. Harvey like?

Mr. Scelso. Well, he is dead now. Harvey was a really

hard-boiled, unsubtle, ruthless guy who was, in my opinion,

a very dangerous man. I had run-ins with him several times.

I also had to investigate one of his big cases and although

I was always on friendly terms with him -- we never, slugged

it out with each other -- he never liked me and I never liked

him..

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Mr. Goldsmith. What types of cases did you investigate?

Mr. Scelso. I investigated cases of the apprehension

of satellite intelligence officers when he was the Chief of

the Berlin base, and when I feared that we had exceeded our

authority in arrestingythese people, it turned out that we

really had not.

I also investigated the case where a Berlin girl, an

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agent of ours, turned on us and photographed a lot of people

in the station from a cardboard box in the basket of a bicycle.

This turned out to be a real problem. I had to investigate

that.

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Then I investigated a famous communications intelligence

case that Harvey was mixed up in when he was the Chief of

the Communications Intelligence, the Deciphering Staff, and

so on. This turned out to be one of the biggest hoaxes in

our history.

Mr. Goldsmith. What happened there?

Mr. Scelso. For a number of years,. the Agency had been

running a source in Austria who was to procure for us the

Soviet codes, and so on, Soviet intelligence, say for instance.

And I, as a polygraph operator, had to polygraph this guy a

couple of times.

By that time, we had spent a fortune on the operation

and they have never been able to crack this guy. He was

interrogated at length. He was on drugs, on hypnosis, under

the polygraph by the Blue Bird team and he beat them cold.

And then they gave him to me to interrogate for the second

time and I cracked him and made him admit that it was a hoax,

which made them all look bad.

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you know whether Mr. Harvey had any

negative feelings towards the Kennedys?

Mr. Scelso.:. I only heard that he was sore at Bobby

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Kennedy. Bobby Kennedy fired him because Harvey was a three-

martini lunch man -- not because of the expense involved.

Harvey became --

Mr. Goldsmith. Fired him from what position?

Mr. Scelso. Relieved him as Chief of the Cuban Opera-

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Mr. Goldsmith. Sent to where?

Mr. Scelso. I do not remember.. I do not know what

happened to him.. Maybe he went to Rome.

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you know whether Harvey was running

any operations outside the ordinary course of business?

Mr. Scelso. I did not know at that time. I just heard

about this assassin he had on the payrolls and so on.

TO

me, knowing nothing except that the man was a criminal, the

assassin that he had on the payroll, and Harvey's nature, all

I can say -- I would like to say first, among officers of

my grade -- and I was a super-grade, and I had as broad a view.

as anybody of agency operations -- the thought of our engaging!

in assassinations as distinguished from guerrilla warfare or

coup. d'etats, and so on, setting out by stealth and surprise

to kill an important foreign person was abhorrent to the

standards of the clandestine service and the fact that the

way -- you know, what the response

was in the Lumumba

case.

They refused to carry out the order, but they were

guilty of conspiracy to commit homicide.

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I think they ought to chisle that in the marble wails

in Mclean instead of some of the other stuff that they had.

In discussions of assassinations which would always come out

because the Russians were doing it all the time and had

departments for doing it. We were constantly catching their

agents who had assassinated people where these people would

turn themselves in. The consensus of officers, including the

greatest cynics, was that we would never do anything like

that,

as indeed we did not, as far as I know.

The very thought of Helms entrusting Harvey to hire a

criminal to have the capacity to kill somebody violates

every operational precept, every bit of operational experience,

every ethical consideration. And the fact that he chose

Harvey -- Harvey could keep a secret, you see. Harvey could

keep a secret. This was one way to make sure that nobody

ever found out about it.

I just cannot understand Helms doing this?

Mr. Goldsmith. Did you ever talk to him about it?

Mr. Scelso. No. I did not even know anything about

it until I had been retired for some years and I was back here

in '76. I had been retired for six years and I found it out

and I have never seen Helms since then, fortunately.

(Pause)

Mr. Goldsmith. You mentioned earlier that there was a

meeting on November 23rd involving a lot of higher-ups.

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Mr. Scelso. I think it was November 23rd.

.."

Mr. Goldsmith. Roughly that time period?

Mr. Scelso. Yes:

Mr. Goldsmith.

That someone from Cuban operations was

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Mr. Scelso. I believe that. I was asked that by the

Senate Committee and I believe that somebody from Cuban opera-

tions was there. I do not know who it was.

It could have

been Mr. Fitzgerald if he was in town, or one of his staff.

Mr. Goldsmith. What was MI. Harvey's reaction after

the assassination?

Mr. Scelso.

I had no contact with him about it.

Mr. Goldsmith. When was the last time you saw the man?

Mr. Scelso. I saw him in Berlin in 1967 on a temporary

duty. I may have seen him when he got back from Rome. I may

have seen him in the halls. He cracked up in Rome.

Mr. Goldsmith. In what way?

Mr. Scelso. He became practically paranoid, turned on

his officers, threatened to have them ruined. One of his

very best officers came home and was going to join myy staff

and told me the whole story. I do not remember the man's

name.

An outstanding operations officer who asked for a trans-

fer. He could not stand Harvey anymore and asked for a

transfer.

When Harvey refused to give him one, he said he

was going to give him a bad fitness report and have him fired

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and so on.

Later on, Desmond Fitzgerald came out on the IDY and

heard some of these stories and relieved Harvey. Harvey went

completely -- which happens

in the Agency. The strain is

tremendous. But Harvey, in my opinion, the whole thought of

Helms' appointing Harvey, the very thought of using a former

criminal for anything, let alone to assassinate people or to

be on a standby basis to assassinate people -- here Helms

cannot turn around, you see, after establishing standards and

training officers and maintaining standards in the conduct

of operations and low rating people for deviating from certain

principles, and so on, he cannot turn around, just because

he is the DCI, and appoint a thug like Harvey to hire some

criminal to commit assassinations.

The best thing you can say was he was a buffoon for

doing it, or perhaps he never intended to use it and just

would be able to say that he had the capacity. That is the

kind of interpretation I can put on it.

Mr. Goldsmith.

You just characterized Mr. Harvey as

a thug.

Mr. Scelso..

I do not like to speak that way of him,

but Harvey --

Mr. Goldsmith. Mr. Harvey is the central figure in the

Committee's concern here.. I would like you to be as candid

as you can be.

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Mr. Scelso.

Harvey was not the kind of personality

who appeals to me and I certainly was not the kind of personality

that appeals to him. I have wondered -- I wonder if the

government has

ever looked into the possibility that Harvey

did not knock of Giancomo. He lived in the same area, when

he was retired. He was

a great one with guns.

I read it in the newspaper. I was overseas and I said

to myself, I wondered if they look into Bill Harvey.

Mr. Goldsmith. This question may come to you out of

right field, but do you have any reason to believe that Mr.

Harvey himself may have been involved in the President's

assassination?

Mr. Scelso. I do not have any reason to believe it.

Harvey was a great gun fanatic. I remember going to a meeting

out at Walt Whitman High School where the gun law was being

debated and a whole bunch of red-necked riflemen from Baltimore

County and Arundel County, Baltimore City, were there, packing

the place and haranguing and threatening the speakers, and so

on.

And Harvey came in.

I said, Bill, what are you doing in this bunch, crazy

bunch? And he looked at me. He was wearing some kind of a

tie pin that was in the shape of a gun.

Mr. Goldsmith. How does a guy like Mr. Harvey get this

nigh up in the Agency?

Mr. Scelso. Harvey was an experienced FBI man who had

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worked on Soviet operations in the United States during World

War II and had lectured on them at the FBI academy. He had a

fantastic memory.

He is, I say, a man

without sentiment,

considerable stamina, great determination, high-skilled.

Surrounded himself wherever he was with a group of people

compatible with his personality and worked very purposefully

towards certain ends.

He dug the Berlin Tunnel, you see. Too bad the Russians

knew about it the whole time, as we know now.

Harvey was also, earlier in his career when he was in

the Agency was on the CI staff. He was the head of the CIA

staff and was palsy-walsy with Burgess, McLean and Philby and

they were great drinkers together and carousers together and

Burgess or Mclean, of both of them, you know, were queers

and Harvey was not queer. He wascout of it, not queer.

They were all kinds of nasty scenes. Burgess or McLean

drawing pornographic pictures of Harvey's wife during a party,

and so on.

Harvey was inclined to disclose too many things

to the British, which may have costüs the Popoff operation.

MI. Goldsmith. Harvey instructed his wife that after

his own death his wife should burn all of his papers. Do

you have any idea what would be in those papers that Mr.

Harvey would be so interested to conceal?

Mr: Scelso. He was too young to have assassinated

McKinley and Lincoln. It could have been anything.

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His wife, by the way, I always thought was a very fine

person. She was a remarkable woman. I am probably doing

Harvey an injustice, but I think Harvey was a man who did

great damage to the Agency.

I told the Senate

Committee - I went out of my way

to tell them in my emphasis that assassinations and things

like that are something really abhorrent to all the rank and

file of Agency officers. It is unthinkable.

I told them of the case where we refused to carry out

such an order, in the case of the Dominican crisis. You might

have read that in my testimony.

Mr. Goldsmith. I believe you indicated to the Senate that

there-was a feeling in the CIA that the FBI may have been derelict

in its handling ofithe Oswald case prior to the assassination.

Mr: Scelso. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. What reason do you have?

MI. Scelso.

They asked me why we ran an investiga-

tion at all, I think, and I said there was a feeling that

perhaps the Bureau would not be completely objective in its

conduct of the investigation.

Mr. Goldsmith.... Why not?

Mr. Scelso.:.

Because they had: been watching Oswald

and had not watched him closely enough. I do not say this

in a way of anything critical for the Bureau, because they have

an inhuman workload.

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I think my suspicion was borne out, in view of the

destroyed note, which is a red flag. Also, I think, in retro-

spect, since I testified before the Senate Committee, I think

that the Secret Service was derelict.. They did not follow

their own operational standards.

The Chief of the White Hosue. detailed Jerry Beame, who

I know from the Presidential trips, to Central America, was

not on the Dallas trip. The Secret Service did not follow its

standard operating procedure in making sure that every apart-

ment in every office, every floor of every building on the

parade route, that there was a selected

man of confidence who

would be charged with the responsibility of seeing that no

one not known to him was in that office or apartment or on

a floor of that building, and that nobody did anything but

wave flags, possibly throw confetti.

That is standard operating procedure and was not done.

To me, reading about some of the scandals that are

coming out of the White House and reading some of the things

that a terribly overworked Secret Service had to do, like

smuggling girls up and down the back steps -- if indeed that

be true - you can imagine how this would affect. the morale

of these people.. Here are men who are supposed to kill them-

selves

and work themselves to death in the service of protec-

ting the President, which they do, and then have to

do things

like that. They cannot possibly keep their motivation up

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under these circumstances.

Mr. Goldsmith. That is an interesting point.

Mr. Scelso. They did not do what they teach, and what.

we teach. We trained a lot of bodyguards too, the business

of having somebody on every floor, and so on.

Lee Harvey Oswald certainly did not qualify as the look-

out on that £100r.

I would like to add something to my remarks about

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Harvey•

Mr. Goldsmith. Please do.

Mr. Scelso. I said

some unkind things about Harvey,

because I was really shocked when I read that Helms had

appointed him to create this assassination capability. To

me, this is an absolutely shocking and abhorrent thing and

I am sure it must have outraged all the other case officers

in the Agency.

MI. Goldsmith. Do you think Mi. Helms was acting prop-

erly when he failed to tell the Warren Commission about the

assassination plots?

Mr. Scelso. No. I think that was a morally highly

reprehensible act, which he cannot possibly justify under his

oath of office, or any other standard of professional public

service.

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Mr. Goldsmith.. To your knowleage, is there any other

information that Helms may have withheld from the Warren

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Commission pertaining to the assassination?

Mr. Scelso.

Nothing that I can recall.

Mr. Goldsmith. With regard --

Mr. Scelso. Incidentally, I think that Helms withheld

the information because he realized it would have cost him his

job and would have precipitated a crisis for the Agency, which

could have had very adverse effects on the Agendy.

Mr. Goldsmith.

As well as an international crisis, I

would think. Is that a possibility?

Mr. Scelso. I think that the outrage, or even more, the

laughter that would have accompanied that disclosure would

have been more than drowned out by the grief over Kennedy's

death, because,

after all, really, these assassination attempts

on Castro were largely ludicrous -- but no less reprehensible.

MI. Goldsmith. With regard to the surveillance operations

in Mexico City, I think the record is clear that the Agency

was not forthcoming, at least initially, ascto the nature of

those surveillance operations, given the fact that a picture

of someone whom they thought to be Oswald had been taken.

Is there any way that you can explain that?

Mr. Scelso. How do you mean. that?

Mr. Goldsmith. Specifically, the Agency did not inform

the Warren Commission until sometime in late February or

March that a picture had been taken of someone in Mexico City

whom, at that time, they believed to be Oswald. The first

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time the Warren Commission found out about that photograph

was when Marguerite Oswald testified before the Commission

and made reference to the photograph that had been shown to

her.

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Mr. Scelso. That would be a dereliction that could be

laid squarely at my doorstep, and I cannot believe that the

Warren Commission did not know that. Did it really say that?

The Bureau had the picture. It was

in the Bureau's report.

I just can't believe that.

Of course, we knew at that time that the man was not

Oswald and had nothing to do with it. It might have been

considered of minor importance.

Mr. Goldsmith.

Why do we not take a brief recess here?

I will see if I can find my chronology and I can go the

exact facts with you and you might be able to comment upon

them.

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(A brief recess was taken.)

Mr. Goldsmith. Let me readd to you a portion of a

chronology that was prepared by our staff. "

November 24, 1963: CIA prepares a summary of relevant

information on Oswald. Summary states that first information

on Oswald came from Mexico City Station on October 9th. It

says that the Mexico mystery man photo was found in a search

of Mexico Station files..

Oswald then went to Mexico 9-27, probably by car. It

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sets forth Oswald's visits to the Soviet Union and Cuba.

and Mexico City.

There is no mention of the 10-10 cable description or

a name discrepancy. I see no indication that this document

was ever sent to the Warren Commission or that they were ever

made aware of it.

Mr. Scelso.

What was the date of that?

Mr. Goldsmith. November 24th, 1963.

Mr. Scelso.

That was the one that I wrote that went

to the White House, I think.

MI. Goldsmith. Then, on February lOth, 1964, Marguerite

Oswald testified about the photograph but was not shown the

photograph for identification for purposes -- Howard Willin,

staff counsel for the Warren Commission, spoke to Thomas

Karamessinas about the photograph...

On the 1lth, the FBI delivered a crop copy of the photo-

graph to the Warren Commission after receiving a call from the

Warren Commission about it, and, at that time, the warren

Commission drafted a letter concerning this photograph.

Mr. Scelso. That was March, you say?

Mr. Goldsmith. We

are now into February. The letter

requested an explanation of circumstances, the tainting and

the identity of the Mexico mystery man photograph.

Then, on March 5th, there is a CIA internal memo... I

would like:to indicate to you that I know that this quotation

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I am about to read to you is somewhat out of context. We

have a problem here for your determination.

"Staff officer does not desire to respond directly to

paragraph 2 of the letter which may levy foreign material

which had gotten into the hands of the Secret Service on

23 November. Unless you feel otherwise, staff officer would

prefer to wait out the Commission on the matter covered

by paragraph two."

The remainder of the memorandum goes on to say, however,

the press will get together and give them an oral briefing

and the substance of this pertains to the photograph, which

is why this Committee is so concerned about this photograph.

On March 16, 1964, the Warren Commission requests a copy|

of the 10-10 cable from the CIA so, as you can see, the warren

Commission is having trouble putting together this photograph

with the cable--and there is the absence of completely forth-

right communication from the CIA.

On March 24th, the CIA reveals the link between the

Mexico mystery man photograph and Mexico City. The 10-10

cable is provided.

It goes on to say here, however, that even here the

Agency does not make the connection between the photograph and

the cable explicit.

So we have a situation here where it appears that the

Agency was not competely forthcoming with the information.

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question is why?

Mr. Scelso. We did not initially disclose to the warren

Commission all of our technical operations. In other words,

we did not initially disclose to them that we had photo-

surveillance because the November photo we had was not of

Oswald. Therefore, it did not mean anything, you see?

Mr. Goldsmith. There were a lot of other possibilities

that the Commission may have wanted to pursue. For example,

it turned out that this

was not a photograph of Oswald, but

it is possible that the person whose picture was taken was at

the Soviet Embassy and identified himself

as Oswald. In other

words, perhaps he was an Oswald imposter.

So the Agency was making a unilateral decision that this

was not relevant to the Warren Commission.

Mr. Scelso. Right. We were not authorized, at first,

to reveal all of our technical operations.

Mr. Goldsmith. what kind of arrangement did you have

with the Warren Commission as to the information that would

be given to them?

Mr. Scelso.

We were going to give them intelligence

reports which derived from all of our sources, including

technical

sources, including the telephone intercept and the

information gotten from the interrogation of Sylvia Duran,

for example, which corresponded almost exactly with the

information from the telephone intercepts.

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Mr. Goldsmith. You were aware that this photograph was

not being provided to the Warren Commission?

MI. Scelso. I probably was, but I do not remember. I am!

surprised to find that it was not passed.

For example, the Senate Committee asked me why we had

not told the Warren Commission -- the Warren Commission claimed

that we did not tell them that we had telephone taps, when

I remember discussing this detail with their lawyers -- not

with the Commission itself, but the lawyers that they had

working for them.

Mr. Goldsmith. Where did you have this discussion?

Mr. Scelso. In their offices.

Mr. Goldsmith. Did you go into all of the details of

the nature of the taps?

Mr. Scelso.

I said we had telephone taps on the Soviet

and Cuban embassies

and we intercepted Mr. Oswald's telephone

calls and told them what the nature of it was and said this

is completely covered, the same material, by Sylvia Duran's

interrogation, you see, which confirms the content of these

telephone calls.

So they said then we do not have to put the telephone

calls on the record. We want to protect our source.

Mr. Goldsmith. I understand the need to protect the

source.

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At the same time, it seems, though, that the Commission

was not being given all of the relevant information. On what

basis did the Agency determine that the person on the line

actually was Oswald?

Mr. Scelso. The fact that he said he was Oswald. That

is about all.

I do not know whether Sylvia Duran identified pictures

of him or not. I do not remember.

Mr. Goldsmith. Let me read to you another section of

our chronology from March 26, 1964 -- and this is Mr. Coleman,

one of the senior counsel from the Commission.

"I hope that the complete answer will give us the

additional information that we requested. I hope that para-

graph 4 of the memorandum of 3-24-64 sent to Mr. Raikin by

the CIA is not the answer is not the answer that the CIA

intends to give us as to this inquiry."

Mr. Scelso. That, of course, was after my regime.

Mr. Goldsmith. Yes, I understand that. In other words,

you are getting the picture here that the Commission is

concerned that they are not receiving this photograph.

I am not sure I have a satisfactory answer as to why

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not.

Mr. Scelso. To give them the photograph and explain it

to them would have been to compromise their photosurveillance,

and I suppose they did not want to do that at that time. I do

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not know why that was resolved that way in my regime. I

presume we thought it was

irrelevant.

Mr. Goldsmith. Was the position taken by the CIA that

if something was going to compromise a sensitive source or

method, information would not be turned over to the Commission?

Mr. Scelso.

If it had been something vital, really

relevant to the investigation, clearly relevant to say, your

position that this might have been a man impersonating Oswald,

of course, is a pretty far-out chance. Of course, any of the

people who went in and out could have been impersonating

Oswald, not just the man in that photograph.

Mr. Goldsmith. The point is an avenue of investigation

was opened to the Warren Commission: that was not pursued.

Mr. Scelso. It should have been given to them, I

grant you that. We could have done it just as well at the

outset as later, but the problem was, we were feeling our way

into our relations with the Warren Commission and wondering

whether divulging this to them might not unnecessarily compro-!

mise forever our capability.

Mr. Goldsmith.

Did President Johnson instruct the Agency

to provide the Commission with all information pertaining to

the assassination?

Mi. Scelso. Yes, but we are supposed to do this anyway,

but we still protect our sources.

Mr. Goldsmith.

This situation was really different

from."

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the typical situation where the Agency is trying to protect

its sources and methods from the legislative branch, for

example. But here, you have the Warren Commission was more

closely aligned to the Executive Branch.

Mr. Scelso. What we were worrying about was protecting

them from public disclosure, you see. The minute you start

giving information to other agencies and so on, you have to

make sure that it is going to people that will keep it secure.

Of course, all that has flown out of the window in

recent years, as you know -- as I hear at the Agency and as

I know from Europe, it has caused the Agency terrible damage

which is going to take decades. to make good, unfortunately.

I certainly do not level that charge at either the Senate

of the House Committee. It was inconceivable to us that some-

one would have been impersonating Oswald -- for what purpose,

you see?-

Mr. Goldsmith. There certainly were a lot of reasons

why someone might want to impersonate Oswald. Oswald could

have been the patsy he claimed to be; someone may have just

been setting him up.

Certainly, if the Warren Commission had received a cable

that reported Oswald's contact and then also reported that

===

a picture had been taken and the Warren Commission had seen

that the picture did not look like Oswald, they would have

looked into the imposter theory. At the very least, they would

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have done that.

I am not saying -- perhaps they did anyway. But recent

books have been written about the second Oswald theory and

all sorts of imposter theories. Had the Commission been given

the information promptly, they might have pursued that avenue

more thoroughly.

Mr. Scelso. But there was no nefarious reason for our

not giving it to them. It was simply that we did not consider

it vitally relevant and we wanted to protect our source.

Mr. Goldsmith. Again, to your knowledge, did anyone at

the Agency ever discuss, to your knowledge, withholding of

information from the Warren Commission?

Mr. Scelso. Only in the context that we did not initially

divulge to them our operational methods in all cases.

Mr. Goldsmith. Were there any other examples besides

the one I just referred to with the photograph that you can

think of?

Mr. Scelso. Not that I know of. Nothing.. As a matter

of fact, we were sure to give them everything when we thought

we could do that without revealing how, exactly we got the

information we did. So, for instance, in the case of the

telephone taps, we relied on the interrogations of Sylvia

Duran.

We said the same thing, but then we told them about

the telephone taps.

MI.. Goldsmith. Once Angleton and his staff took over

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the investigation, did you have any involvement at all?

Mr. Scelso.

From time to time Ray Rocca would call me up

and I would go down and see them and we would discuss certain

aspects of the case. Particulary when Garrison, in New Orleans,

started his fandango. Rocca could not believe that there had

not been any information in the initial reports about Clay

Shaw and all of the other oddballs whom Garrison dragged in

the case.

Mr. Goldsmith.

To your knowledge, did the CIA monitor

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Mr. Scelso. Rocca paid attention to it.

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you know why he did?

Mr. Scelso. Well, there were angles where Garrison was

trying to involve the Agency, were there not? Of course, a

lot of people were trying to involve the Agency at that time.

MI. Goldsmith. Do you know whether Clay Shaw was a CIA

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Mr. Scelso. I never checked his name during my period

because his name did not come up in that era, but not to

my knowledge.

Mr. Goldsmith.

Did Rocca ever give you the impression

that Garrison's investigation was touching upon Agency sources:

assets, employees?

Mr. Scelso.. No, he never told me that, or indicated

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Mr. Goldsmith. Did he ever indicate to you that the

Agency might have been infiltrating the Garrison investigation?

Mr. Scelso: No. If he had known it, he would not have

told me.

Mr. Goldsmith. So other than occasional meetings with

Rocca: --

Mr. Scelso. I do not think that there were any other

occasions. My main contact - it could have been that people

asked me things from time to time. I do not remember..

Mr. Goldsmith. Other than that, once Angleton took

over, you and your staff were essentially out of the investi-

gation?

Mr. Scelso. Yes.

We continued to see traffic that came

in from: Mexico, but Rocca had the action on those things.

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you recall when your investigative

efforts were discontinued?

Mr. Scelso. Not clearly. I thought it was around

Christmas when we -- when I saw the Katzenback report, and

Rocca says he thinks it was mid-January. He could be right,

because the Panama riots were already going on when I was

with the Agency and they did not happen until the 4th of

January.

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you have any criticisms of the manner

in which the Agency conducted its investigation?

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Mr. Scelso. Well, I think we could have done better.

Mr. Goldsmith.. In what ways?

MI. Scelso. We could have circulated to all stations

and asked them to follow up all leads. I do not think it was

really necessary in a case like that, but we could have done

that.

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We could have put the Miami station onto the case,

which we did anyway, later on.

Mr. Goldsmith. What was your specific reason. for not

putting them on in the first place?

Mr. Scelso. Oswald's involvement with the pro-Castro

movement in the United States was not at all surface to us

in the first weeks of the investigation.

Mr. Goldsmith. Is there anything else that you would

have done differently?

Mr. Scelso. Well, if Helms had disclosed the Cuban

assassination plots, we would have gone at that hot and heavy.

We would have queried the agent about it in great detail.

would have had him polygraphed by the best operatives security

had to see if he had a double-agent, informing Castro about

our poison pen things, and so on.

I would have had all our Cuban sources queried about.

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it.

MI. Goldsmith.

Getting into another area briefly -- we

may come back to this question of the investigation in a little

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while. Getting back to another area, briefly, what is your

assessment of Mr. Angleton?

Mr. Scelso. Mr. Angleton, as an operations officer in

the Agency, I have been acquainted with for many years, having

polygraphed some of his greatest agents in the past, much to

his grief. And I find Mr. Angleton to be an extremely compli-

cated individual, very highly motivated.

I do not, in any way, question his ethies or morals or

anything like that, but whose view and understanding of human

nature and what makes people do things and the dynanics of

intelligence operations, I find to be bizarre. I find that

Mr. Angleton's appreciation of intelligence situations to be

colored by a sense of dread of foreign conspiracies, and an

over-suspiciousness.

Mr. Goldsmith. Yet, Mr. Angleton did not find any

conspiracy in the Oswald case.

Mr.. Scelso. At first, until Nosenko came along - which

I only know from the book -- unless the book is a hoax too.

Mr. Goldsmith. A hoax by whom?

Mr. Scelso. I mean Epstein maybe fabricated the book.

But according to the book, which I read last week-end, Angle-

ton was very concerned about the Nosenko aspect..

Mr. Goldsmith. Not necessarily from the perspective of

Nosenko being surface to the United States for

the purpose of

concealing Oswald's links to the KGB. Angleton's fundamental

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concern was Nosenko might have been designed to infiltrate

the American intelligence comnunity to protect other KGB

agents, and that this Oswald connection was just a convenient

way to get him in.

I did not get an impression that Angleton ever came down

and said that there was a conspiracy.

Mr. Goldsmith. You know what Angleton really said, and

I do not.

Mr.. Scelso. No, this is --I am giving you my impres-

sion of the book. I read it very hurriedly.

I have investigated a few cases which Angleton was

involved-him and. I have found his understanding of human

nature, and so on, his evaluation of people, to be a very

precarious: thing.

MI. Goldsmith. Do you have any reason to believe that

Angleton might have had ties to organized crime?

Mr. Scelso. Yes.

I have heard that he did operational --

Mr. Goldsmith.

Through whom?

Mr. Scelso. Back when I was a Branch Chief. The

Department of Justice, Mr. Hunley, who was working against

organized crime, asked people from the Agency to come over

and asked us if we could find out the true names of holders

of numbered bank accounts in Panama because the Mafia was

depositing money there, cash, money skimmed off the top in

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Las Vegas. And we were,

indeed, in an excellent position to

do this and told them so, whereupon, Mr. Angleton vetoed it

and said that is the Bureau's business.

If the Bureau has to request us to do that -- not

Hunley. Unless the Bureau requests us to do it, we are not

going to do it, so we did not do it. And I told J.C. King

this and he smiled a foxy smile and said well, he said, that's

Angleton's excuse. The real reason is that Angleton himself

has ties to the Mafia and he would not want to double cross

them, or something like that.

MI. Goldsmith. Was Mr. King able to be more specific?

Mr. Scelso. I did not ask him any more.

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you have more specific information

linking Angleton into the Mafia, into organized crime?

Mr. Scelso. I do believe that I have heard that Angle-

ton was one of those several people in the Agency who were

trying to use the Mafia in Cuban operations.

MI. Goldsmith. How about Angleton's connection with the

FBI?

What kind of relationship did he have with them?

Mr. Scelso. Well, he was very close to the FBI, had a

very fine working relationship with them which was of great

help to us over many, many years. He was extremely protective

of the FBI, would not allow any criticism of them of any kind

of rivalry, and so on. Very careful to protect their interests.

Mr. Goldsmith. I believe we discussed this next question

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a bit this morning. I would just like to go into somewhat

more detail again.

I think you testified that Helms asked you to investigate

some of Angleton's activities. What would the reason for that

have been and could you give us some examples?

Mr. Scelso.

Helms, or Karamessinas?

Way back before Angleton was Chief of the CI staff, he

was head of the Israeli desk and he had an agent in Italy,

a quintuple, double agent; a man who was working for us against

five different foreign intelligence services, one of Angleton's

great operations, and it got to be so hairy that nobody could

make heads of tails of it.

So I was back on leave and was instructed to polygraph

this man who had been polygraphed unsuccessfully by the Office

of Security. So I polygraphed the man and got him to make a

series of damning admissions.: In the structure, in this

pentagon structure, Angleton was supposedly guiding this man,

like the man fishing for trout, as someone characterized,

against these other services, inserting questions and stimuli

here and having reactions coming out there, and so on.

And all. of this was done with the most carefully

measured doses of stimulus, crafty analysis, sort of billiard-

like richochet and so on. And the upshot of the thing

was -- I got the man very sensitive.. I polygraphed him for

five days and the upshot of it was that his singular success

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in working against all of these other services was due to

the fact that he had disclosed to them that he was working

for the Central Intelligence Agency, which was not part of

Angleton's formula.

And then the human judgment thing -- then our Agency

psychologist tested this man, who was the heir of a wealth

Midwestern family who had come to Western Europe to.

study and

had cultivated the company of all kinds of obscure artists

and poets and talking about nothing but these people, dropping

names right and left, and making you feel like an ignoramus

because you never heard of them.

The psychological testing of this man showed that he

was a man of very low intelligence, way below average intelli

gence, who had early on realized that he reälly could not

make it -- he was a homosexual among other things -- and

therefore started cultivating knowledge and acquiring knowledge

of fringe groups in the art field,. so he could fool peole

into thinking he was an intellectual, and he had fooled his

way all the way through the University of Minnesota. This

is the way he had gotten a degree, and so on.

Mr. Goldsmith. Were you ever asked to investigate any

of MI. Angleton's investigations pertaining to the Kennedy

assassination?

Mr. Scelso. No. I do not want to give you the idea

that I think poorly of Angleton, because I really do not know

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what he did. He must have done a lot of good things. His

staff turned out absolutely outstanding analytical work. It

is true that, under his term as the Chief of Counterintelli~

gence, Counterintelligence did better than it had ever done

before.

MI. Goldsmith. Do you know whether Angleton's staff

would have had access to electronic surveillance equipment?

Mr. Scelso. In Washington?

Mr. Goldsmith.

For use just about anywhere.

MI. Scelso. I am sure they would have.

Mr. Goldsmith. How closely is that type of equipment

monitored by the Agency to make sure that it is being properly!

used?

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Mr. Scelso. Well, I do not know how they would monitor

Angleton, if he used it. I do not know of any case where he

ever did. But he certainly could have gotten it, just like

any Division could get it for use in Washington in säfe

houses, or things like that.

And you tell him what you want to use it for. Of

course, you might be able to go and use it for something

completely different.

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you recall ever coming across a

report in December of '63 indicating that thes. CIA agent

may have had contact with Oswald in Cuba?

MI. Scelso. I seem to vaguely recall a report alleging

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Mr. Goldsmith. Do you recall how that allegation was

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resolved?

Mr. Scelso. I do not recall, but I think that it was

proved to be factually untrue. That is a very vague recol-

lection. Dozens of people were claiming that they had seen

Oswald here, there and everywhere in all kinds of conspiratorial

circumstances, from the North Pole to the Congo.

Mr. Goldsmith. Did you know Mr. Papich of the FBI?

Mr. Scelso.

slightly.....tohotttrhhbdbbdod:1"

Mr. Goldsmith. Did you have any type of working

relationship with him?

MI. Scelso. On occasion, I sat in on conferences with

him and other people on the CIA staff, other than Angleton.

Mr. Goldsmith. Did you ever discuss the Kennedy case

with Mr. Papich?

MI •

Scelso. Casually and on certain details now and

again.

Yes, we did indeed. Birch O'Neal and I.

Mr. Goldsmith. This is all in the post-assassination

period?

Mr. Scelso. Yes.

When they levied certain requirements

on us -- they used to like that term, levying requirements.:

Then that meant that the guillotine was going to drop i9

did not do it.

Mr. Goldsmith.

In general, did you comply with the

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request for information?

Mr. Scelso. Yes.

Sometimes reluctantly, because I had

a lot else to do.

MI. Goldsmith. Did you always comply with the FBI's

requests for information?

Mr. Scelso. I think so, yes. This particular request

was for a transcription, an analysis of the intercepted

telephone call to the President of Mexico, or something:

with their Ambassador - President of Cuba -- with their

Ambassador to Mexico.

I took my time analyzing that. In other words, that

was something that they could have analyzed just as well them-

selves.

MI. Goldsmith. Did the CIA have any penetration agents

in the Cuban Embassy in 1963?

Mr.. Scelso. I do not think so.

Mr. Goldsmith. In what way, if any, did you attempt to

find out what their reaction was?

Mr. Scelso. We had audio operations. I do not think

they were working at that time. We installed a number of

microphones.

MI. Goldsmith.

Did you get any indications at all as

to what the reaction of the Cuban government was at all to

the Kennedy assassination?

Mr. Scelso. From this intercepted telephone call.

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Mr. Goldsmith.

What was the nature of their reaction?

MI. Scelso. One was outrage of the arrest of Sylvia

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cerned?

Mr. Scelso. I gathered it was just genuine outrage.

Mr. Goldsmith. Was there not a concern voiced by the

President of Cuba in the conversation over whether Duran was

being asked about having given Oswald money?

MI. Scelso. Yes, I think there was.

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you know whether that particular

issue was ever pursued?

Mr. Scelso.

Well, she was

asked that when she was

interrogated.

Mr. Goldsmith. The fact that the President of Cuba may

have been concerned about Duran's having given --

Mr. Scelso. That is because stories to that effect,

which appeared in Mexican newspapers and the radio alleging

that Oswald had gotten a lot of money from the Cubans to do

the assassinations in the yellow press in Mexico.

Mr. Goldsmith. Let me refresh your memory a bit more.

It is difficult to do that without the transcripts here.

My recollection of the transcript is that the Ambassador

in Mexico City felt that the President's concern was that

the Americans were driving Duran to make a statement of some

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In fact, what the Cuban's President concern was that

no, the Americans were asking Duran about having received

money from Oswald, this kind of thing, and he seemed to be

concerned about that - the inference being that if he were

concerned about that, maybe there was a basis for his being

concerned about it, because the Cubans may have been involved.

Mr. Scelso. Yes, and I think that our knowledge at the

time was that he had heard this when it had been reported on

the newspapers and radios, so they assumed that they would

be asking Sylvia Duran.

MI. Goldsmith. Do you know whether Sylvia Duran was

beaten of tortured by the Mexican police?

Mr. Scelso. No. I do not think she was either beaten

or tortured. She was really pushed around a little bit. She

had bruises on her arm -- probably grabbed by the arm like

that, you know, pushed into an office. Some people bruise

easily.

Mr. Goldsmith. Was any American official involved in

the interrogation of Duran?

Mr. Scelso. I believe not.:

Mr. Goldsmith. How about the interrogation of Ugarte?

Mr. Scelso..

He was polygraphed by one of your operators;

Mr. Goldsmith. Prior to that time?

Mr. Scelso. His interrogation, I think, was done at that

time by a very senior Mexican police officer.

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Mr. Goldsmith. Is it true that the Mexican police

officials were known for their brutality?

Mr. Scelso. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. Therefore, really, if a person giving a

statement to the Mexican police,

as a statement might be given

under stress, the statement might not necessarily be a reliable

and accurate one?

Mr. Scelso. That is possible, sure.

Mr. Goldsmith. What I am getting at here is that Ugarte's

retraction of his statement may not have been freely given.

Mr. Scelso. Indeed. But he retracted his retraction,

as you know, after he got out and said

it is true anyway.

Mr. Goldsmith.. Did you ever study the results offhis

polygraph?

Mr. Scelso. No. Security does not show these things.

MI. Goldsmith.. Do you have any reason to believe that

his original story was an accurate one?

MI. Scelso.

I am convinced it was a fabrication.

Mr. Goldsmith. Could you give us the reasons. why?

Mr. Scelso. Well, it had all the earmarks of fabrica-

tion: the red-headed Negro, the whole atmosphere of people

talking about this in public, in the courtyard of

the Embassy,

and so on, was unrealistic. The fact that he did not report

this at the time it happened, but only after the assassina-

tion, typical of fabricators.

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In other words, after he had heard of this incident,

he

didn't go to his case officer and tell them that. He told

them that a number of weeks later, after the assassination.

The money sum that he mentioned was the money sum which

had been mentioned on the radio in Mexico before then. i, The

FBI established that Oswald had not been in Mexico on that

day, but in New Orleans.

MI. Goldsmith. Did you ever look into the story or

allegation made by a man named Gautorez to the fact, that he

had seen Oswald with an official from the Cuban Embassy and

that Oswald and the Cuban got into a light-colored Renault

vehicle and drove away. The car may have been subsequently

linked to Mr. Duran, Sylvia's husband.

Mr. Scelso. I vaguely remember something like that.

I do not know how it was resolved.

MI. Goldsmith. Do you know whether Jack Ruby had any

connections to organized crime?

Mr. Scelso. I do not know that. I have read in books

that he did. I have no knowledge of that.

MI. Goldsmith. I will ask this question again. You filed

two reports, did you not?

Mr. Scelso. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you know where they would be today?

Mr. Scelso. No. .

MI. Goldsmith. Those reports would not have been destroyed?

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Mr. Scelso. No, they should not have been. It may have

been that my files were turned over to the CI staff as an aid

to Rocca to help his investigation.

Mr. Goldsmith. Did you go over Oswald's itinerary in

the Soviet Union?

Mr. Scelso. Only superficially, because we did not know

a good deal.

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you think it would have been unusual

for Oswald to obtain a visa to enter into the Soviet Union

within 48 hours of applying for it?

Mr. Scelso. I have no knowledge of how long it took to

get Soviet visas in those days.

Mr. Goldsmith. Assuming that it took, on the average,

about a week to get a Soviet visa, would it have been unusual

for Oswald?

Mr. Scelso. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith. Did you ever examine that particular

issue?

Mr. Scelso.

I do not think that I knew at that time how

long it had taken him to get a visa. I do not think that we

had that precise information..

Mr. Goldsmith. Did you know that by the end of December,

the manner in which Oswald had travelled from the United

States to the Soviet Union?

Mr. Scelso.

We know something about it. We knew how

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he got to England.

Mr. Goldsmith. From England to Moscow, apparently,

there is no commercial flight that would have delivered Oswald

not from England to Moscow, England to Helsinki -- no commercial

flight that would have delivered him there at the time stated

on his passport or his travel papers?

Mr. Scelso. I do not think we went into that. We do

not have information on it. You see, at that time, the Bureau

had passed us next to no information.

Mr. Goldsmith. This would have been of an overseas

nature that would have fallen more in the scope of the CIA?

Mr. Scelso. Right.

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you know whether Oswald travelled by

means of a noncommercial flight from England to Helsinki?

Mr. Scelso. I have no idea.

We were not really going

heavily into Oswald's past at that time. We were working only

on the present leads, the fresh leads.

MI. Goldsmith. That might have pertained to a Soviet

connection of some kind, I think.

Mr. Scelso. It would have been.

Mr. Goldsmith. The manner in which, as a very young man,

he was able to get into the Soviet Union so easily.. There was

a cable that was sent from Headquarters to the Mexico City

station in December of '63 which stated that the CIA's

investigation was dictated, to a certain extent, by the facts

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of Oswald's life, as reported

in another Headquarters cable

to the Mexico City station.

Do you recall sending a cable like that?

Mr. Scelso. No.

MI. Goldsmith. In what way would the Agency's investi-

gation have been --

MI. Scelso. I think they are referring to his background

as

a defector and his stay in Soviet Russia.

Mr. Goldsmith. In the event the Committee has any

further questions to ask of you, Mr. Scelso, what would be

the best way to address those questions to you?

Mr. Scelso. Well, you can send them to me in writing

through the station in Vienna, if you want to.

Mr. Goldsmith. Is that a satisfactory way to handle

it for you?

Mr. Scelso. Yes. I was not exactly happy the way they

contacted me, by simply calling me up from the Embassy. I

would not have done that.

I will send you the answers in writing. I cannot imagine

that you would have any reason to call me back here again.

Mr. Goldsmith. As I mentioned to you earlier, part of

our problem is that we only realized very recently that your

participation in this case went beyond the cable traffic that

we initially reviewed, but that you also handled the investi-

gation, at least initially.

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Of course, we did not know that, because from reading

Book 5 you are not mentioned in there specifically, so we

thought it would have been another Western Hemisphere Branch

Officer.

MI. Scelso. Yes.

I would like to tell you something which might help you

evaluate Nosenko, something in the psychology of defectors, a

sort of parallel case.

Mr. Goldsmith. Please do.

MI. Scelso. Do you remember the Soviet defector,

Galyapin? He has been interrogated at some time in this

case.

Galyapin was a Soviet intelligence officer who defected

to Vienna in the spring of 1964. He was a security officer

responsible for the security and loyalty of Soviet officials

in Vienna, and he got fed up and defected.

A couple of months after he defected, the Chief of the

West German Security Service disappeared into East Berlin under

=-=

very mysterious circumstances. This was a gigantic flop.

Galyapin had previously in Moscow been the Deputy Chief

of the German Desk of the KGB and could have been expected to

know of Otto Young were, as many people alleged, a soviet

agent.

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On the day that Otto Young's disappearance hit the

newspapers in Washington, Galyapin was living in a safe house

in Georgetown and he picked up the telephone -- he read the

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newspapers carefully which told who Otto Young was and what

his background was and what his job was, and Galyapin very

thoughtfully picked up the telephone, telephoned his case

officer, turned on the reflecting pool where we then were and

said, this man Young whose picture is in the paper, I have

read the article and I just wanted to tell you, he was not

one of ours. In fact, I have never heard of him.

Then we had Galyapin interrogated in detail at this

point and the upshot was that he had never heard of Otto

Young or any man like that who was the head of the German

Security and so on. A complete blank. He volunteered this

because he knew it was important to us.

A year and a half later he wrote an article for Life

Magazine, and he has written books, this story that Otto

Young, who was well-known as a member of the German Resistance

against Hitler - in fact, played a key role in it -- had

actually been a Gestapo stool pigeon and that the Russians

after the war had captured Gestapo records proving this and,

using these records, blackmailed Young into working for them.

And he told this and a lot of people believed this.

Complete fabrication. In the first place, there was no

indication in Young's background that he had ever been a

Soviet agent, really, and Galyapin's initial reaction, a

perfectly spontaneous reaction, was he never heard of the

guy.

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This is a typical defector syndrome. It is typical!!

for defectors, who might otherwise be reasonally well-balanced

people, do things like this to make themselves feel important,

and so on.

Mr. Goldsmith. I have

a few more questions to get into

with you before we are finished for the day.

Mr. Scelso.. I say that because of the Nosenko case.

Mr. Goldsmith. I appreciate that. Although I am not

handling that matter, I will definitely pass that information

on to the appropriate individual.

Did you conduct an investigation in reference to a

flight from Mexico to Cuba that took place on November 27,

1963, involving a Cuban-American?

Mr. Scelso.

This report baffles me. I was asked by

the Senate Committee about this. I have discussed it since

with Mr. Phillips.

As I recall it, Headquarters sent a cable to Mexico

telling me this, and it is not clear where we got this

information. I am now convinced that we got it from the FBI

because the FBI was observing the Mexico Airport, just like

we were, and they were getting reports. from the Mexican

authorities. They probably told us this and we informed

Mexico, who already knew it, and attached no importance to

it because, as Phillips now tells me, because, as we all knew,

things like this happened all the time.

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Mr. Goldsmith. What

do you mean, things like this

happened all the time?

Mr. Scelso.

Planes were held for travellers who would

otherwise miss them, for Cuban officials, and so on.

MI. Goldsmith. Did the Agency ever actually investigate

this particular matter?

Mr. Scelso. It investigated to the extent that there

was nothing left to investigate.. The plane was gone. The

man was on it. He had not identified himself before he left.

We had very complete coverage of the Mexico City Airport

and watched the Cuban flights closely, but where it sometimes

happened that an important Cuban official would come late,

he would go directly to the plane without going through

travel controls.:

At that time, the man was gone. There was no picture

of him. Nobody looked at his passport. Period.

MI. Goldsmith. You did not bother to ask any Cuban

employees in the Airport about the man?

Mr. Scelso. We did not have any source of Cuban

employees.

We only had Mexican police.

Mr. Goldsmith. Were any of them questioned about him?

Mr. Scelso. Yes, this was a routine thing.

We had a

whole reporting set up there with that, two of them, who

watched things like this. But the report from them was that

the man had just gone on the plane and they did not know who

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Mr. Goldsmith.

He was identified as a Cuban-American,

not just a Cuban.

Mr. Scelso. I do not know how that identification was

made. Maybe they looked at his passport. Maybe they saw

that he had an American passport or something like that, or

he spoke with a Cuban accent.

Mr. Goldsmith. I am really afraid I cannot tell you

what I have asked other witnesses by virtue of the Committee's

rules.

Mr. Scelso. He is the man who knows all about it.

Mr. Goldsmith. Apparently, Headquarters received a

dispatch stating that the Cuban-American had been reported

as looking suspicious and, in March of '64, a cable was sent

from the Monterey base to the effect that a local agent with

Mexican Federal Police had information on a man who generally

fit the description of the Cuban American. That man supposedly

was involved in the Kennedy assassination.

Apparently, the Mexico City station sent a report that

was consistent with that, a report from the Monterey base.

• Do you recall that particular incident?

Mr.. Scelso. I do not recall the latter. It sounds like

feedback. from police. You see, a query would go out to the

Mexican police saying who could this have been, and

they come

up and say it is someone like our security suspect.

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MI. Goldsmith. I should point out that we are talking

about two different flights here. One occurred November 22nd,

allegedly involving a flight that was delayed until the

arrival of some other individuals; the other was a flight

November 27th.

In any event, you do not recall any specific investiga-

tion that was done concerning those two flights?

Mr. Scelso. Yes.

Mr. Goldsmith.

Those are all of the questions that I

have.

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Let me just review this other stack here for a moment.

(Pause)

Do you have any information as to the manner in which

the Domestic Contacts Division selects photographs taken by

tourists for rétention by the CIA?

Mr. Scelso. No. I have never heard anything about

it.

===:

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you know whether Alexis Davidson, who

at one time, was an Embassy doctor in the U.S.. Embassy in

Moscow was a CIA employee?

Mr. Scelso. Never heard of him.

Mr. Goldsmith.

Have you ever heard of a man named

William Gaudet?

Mr. Scelso. Not that I recall. It is a very faintly

familiar name.

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Mr. Goldsmith. It was a man issued a Mexican tourist

card immediately before Oswald. and it turned out he had

at one time worked for the Agency.

Mr. Scelso. When was that discovered?

Mr. Goldsmith. That was initially withheld, as a

matter of fact, from public disclosure and was just recently

discovered inadvertently, when it was inadvertently released.

In any event, my question was whether Gaudet, to your

knowledge, had any connection with the Agency in '63?

Mr. Scelso. Not that I know of. I do not know where

I have heard the name.

Mr. Goldsmith. If you remember the name, would you

get in touch with us?

Mr. Scelso. Yes.

Is that all that you know about, whether he worked for

the Agency and so on? That might trigger off something.

Mr. Göldsmith. Gaudet was sort of a journalist that

assisted the Agency in propaganda-related matters.

Mr. Scelso. In Mexico?

Mr. Goldsmith. South America, Latin America. He pub-

lished a newspaper.

Mr. Scelso. From where?

Mr. Goldsmith.

He is from New Orleans and Mississippi.

Mr. Scelso.

That certainly seems significant. I do

not think it was uncovered during my regime.

I do not remember

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that we had those lists at all, of who else was on the bus

andiwho was driving with Oswald.

Mr. Goldsmith. I should say that this man was not

necessarily driving with Oswald, but he was issued a Mexican

tourist card immediately preceding Oswald.

Mr. Scelso.

You get them at the border, do you not?

Mr. Goldsmith. I think you obtain them -- I thought

Oswald obtained his in New Orleans, but I am not sure.

What about the name Louis Hopkins, who arranged Oswald's

trip from New Orleans to Europe?

Mr. Scelso. No.

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you know whether he had any Agency

connections?

Mr. Scelso. I never heard of him.

Mr. Goldsmith. There was another defector whose name

was Robert Edward Webster who defected at the same time as

Oswald. Do you know whether he, in fact, was a CIA agent?

Mr. Scelso. I never heard that he was. I read his

name in Epstein's book. I have neverhheard of him otherwise.

Mr. Goldsmith. Was it ever a matter of procedure for

the Agency to use someone who pretends to be a defector as

an agent?

Mr. Scelso. I have never known of such an operation,

but I can conceive that it was done. It would never havè

happened in any Branch or Department where I was employed.

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Mr. Goldsmith.

Why not?

Mr. Scelso. I was never involved with Soviet operations

in the field, I handled a lot of things, but I was never in

the Soviet Branch, or anything like that.

MI. Goldsmith. Do you know whether George de Mohrenschielt

had any connection with the Agency?

MI. Scelso. Not to my knowledge, except for the allega-

===

tion that I read in the book, that he was in contact with a

man named Moore who worked for us.

De Mohrenschielt was a puzzle to me, and after reading

Epstein's book, it makes me wonder whether he was not a

source of the FBI or one of the military intelligence services.

| With all his Nazi associations and his Leftist associations

richocheting all over the place.

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you know whether Oswald ever spent

any time in a CIA safe house?

Mr.. Scelso. Not that I have ever heard.

Mr. Goldsmith. Do you know whether Oswald's cousin

Murret

Marilyn Dorothy boray ever worked for the CIA?

Mr. Scelso. Not that I know of.

Mr. Goldsmith. Is it possible that Oswald may have been

debriefed by the CIA indirectly on his return to the United

States; for example, the International Resuce Committee may have

contacted Oswald and, by contacting him, sould the representa-

itive

of the International Rescue Committee have been acting for

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the CIA?

Mr. Scelso. I do not know that the International Rescue

Committee was affiliated with us. You may, but I do not.

I would not know..

Somehow, the name sounds vaguely familiar to me. I

think it was mentioned in Epstein's book.

Wait a minute. The International Rescue Committee, is

that not a Russian emigre organization?

Mr. Goldsmith. My impression is that it is not limited

to assisting Russian emgres.

(Pause)

would it have been Agency practice to have

attempted to insulate itself, the Agency from Oswald, by

getting an intermediary tondebrief them?

Mr. Scelso: "It could have been. I have no knowledge,

really, of any attempt by the Agency to contact Oswald, either

directly or through a front organization when he got back to

the United States. Nothing like that ever came to my atten-

tion.

It was not revealed in any traces.

Mr. Goldsmith.

Have you ever heard the name Spass I.

Raikin?

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Mr. Goldsmith. Do you know if he had any Agency connec-

tion?

Mr. Scelso. What was he?

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Mr. Goldsmith.

He was a man who met with Oswald

upon Oswald's return to the United States, met him at the boat.

Mr. Scelso. I wonder about that, but I have never heard

of the name..

Mr. Goldsmith. I have nothing further. I would like

to thank you very much for your time and the great inconvenience

that you have been put here to by coming to visit with us.

Normally, when a witness testifies before a hearing,

the procedure at the end is to give the witness an opportunity

to make a statement. If you would like the opportunity to make

a statement at this time, feel free.

Mr. Scelso. I would just like to congratulate you

gentlemen on the thoroughness and motivation with which you

are going at this problem and wish you every success.

Mr. Goldsmith. Thank you very much.

Mr. Scelso, as you are not in the United States, are

you willing to waive the requirement of a signature to this

deposition?

Mr. Scelso. Yes, I am.

(Whereupon, at 4:20 p.m. the Executive Session ceased.)

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CERTIFICATE OF REPORTER

I, Rosemary C. Tascione, the officer before whom the

foregoing deposition was taken, do hereby certify that the

witness whose testimony appears in the foregoing deposition

was duly sworn by the Notary; that the testimony of said

witness was

taken by myself, stenomask reporter,

and there-

after reduced to typewriting under my direction; that I am

neither counsel for, related. to, nor employed by any of the

parties to the action in which this deposition was taken, and

further, that I am not a relative or employee of any attorney

or counsel employed by the parties thereto, nor financially

or otherwise interested in the outcome of the action.

14

Rosemay C Fascione

REPORTER

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ALGEREON PEPORTINE SOVIESN

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