Free Oswald and the CIA: The Documented Truth About the Unknown Relationship Between the U.S. Government and the Alleged Killer of JFK by John Newman

eventually surfaced, but no documents on an Agency damage assessment of Oswald's defection have yet emerged. Nevertheless, Donovan argues that Delgado would not tell a lie about an investigation such as this. Donovan is more cautious in the way he recalls the event. He recalls that there might have been a "light investigation." Interviews, such as they were, were conducted at Santa Ana, California, he says today."'

    The couple-of-civilians-snoop-around scenario led investigatorlawyer Mark Lane to argue that this investigation "was a cover investigation so it could ae said there had been an investigation."20 This is but one of many possibilities. Given the sensitive nature of the U-2 program, one might advance the counterargument that resources would more likely be used in covering up an embarrassing internal investigation than leaving a deliberate trail to advertise it. For our purposes, however, we may proceed by observing that given Oswald's extensive knowledge of U-2 operations in Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines, the Soviets could be expected to be interested in him. Therefore, any American files on Oswald after his defection should have been carefully examined, stored, and controlled. As we shall see, they were.
    Whether we look at Oswald as a "lone nut" or a "fall guy" in the assassination of John Kennedy, we know that he knew a lot about the CIA's U-2 program. Thus, it would have been odd for the CIA not to have pursued an investigation into the possible consequences of his defection to the Soviet Union. It would not have been unusual for a U-2 damage assessment to have been so highly classified that only a few people in the Agency knew about it. The program itself was restricted to those few people who had a legitimate "need to know," and these same restrictions would have applied to any security investigation of the program. The disclosure of information relating to the location of the U-2s, their personnel, logistical and security support, the frequency of their missions, and the countries against which they were targeted-all subjects upon which Oswald could offer the Soviets information-would reasonably be considered damaging to the national security.

    Moreover, an assessment of the potentialities in the Oswald case would have been a security embarrassment to the CIA, whose U-2 program was facing stiffening competition from other technological innovations. The U-2 gave the Agency a major voice in the strategic debate at a seminal moment of the arms race. We still lack, however, hard evidence of any Oswald damage assessment-and this will likely remain the case. Even a "light" investigation into the potential damage if it fell into the KGB's hands would have been alarming enough to prompt a quick and quiet burial of the matter.
    It seems prudent for the sake of analysis, however, that we should not proceed without at least examining what it was that the CIA would have discovered and likely concluded had it looked into the U-2 information in Oswald's past. These questions naturally arise: First, who would have been concerned about this in the CIA? And second, just how sensitive was Oswald's knowledge of the U-2 program?
    Who Should Have Examined Oswald's U-2 Background?
    Even though the U-2 operations at Atsugi, Cubi Point, and Taiwan were very "closely held" (intelligence jargon meaning very limited distribution), Oswald obviously knew a great deal about the program. Thus it is only natural to wonder if the CIA was, as it properly should have been, aghast at the dangers presented by Oswald's defection to the Soviet Union. It seems probable that the CIA counterintelligence vacuum cleaner-which sucked in many of Oswald's early documents-was also the resting place for any Security Office files generated by the defection, including any assessment of the damage to EIDER CHESS.
    The CIA could reasonably expect the KGB to be interested in Oswald, and the counterintelligence staff would have been a natural collection