On March 19, President Donald Trump ordered the release of classified files concerning the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Ever since that fateful day in November 1963, rumors have swirled about possible involvement by the CIA. So people would be wise to consider the Oct. 5, 1978 testimony of former CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton to the House Select Committee on Assassinations.

“After I left the agency,” Angleton told the committee, “I have not left counterintelligence,” a field he knew from long experience. Sent to Italy in 1943, Angleton took over counterintelligence for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), forerunner of the CIA. Angleton headed the OSS in Italy until 1947 then transferred directly into the CIA. In 1954, the agency made him head of counterintelligence, a critical function in the so-called “Cold War,” which Angleton viewed as part of a continuum rather than as a separate geopolitical struggle.

“During World War II, when we were in counterintelligence working against the Germans, we began to bump into the Soviets right and left working against us,” Angleton told the committee. “We did not create a cold war or have a paranoid attitude. They taught us. They did it by kidnapping people, by murdering people, by shooting down our aircraft as they did over Yugoslavia and not giving up the bodies until Truman gave them an ultimatum and we had the 10^th Mountain Division about to go in, which probably would have been a good thing.”

Previous testimony to the Assassination Committee referred to a person known as “X,” identified by Angleton as Anatoliy Golitsyn, the “first defector to have the order of battle of the Second Chief Directorate” of the Soviet KGB. Golitsyn “supplied thousands of pages of very hard-core information which resulted in perhaps the most major counterespionage cases in this country, in the whole Western world.”

Golitsyn was breaking down Soviet compartmentalization, acquiring knowledge in fields that were not part of his duties, among them “the higher counterintelligence school, where people would talk about their operations.” The defector also warned, “you have to be very careful how you treat my information because there is a penetration,” of the CIA itself.

The penetration agent had operated in Germany and been identified by the cryptonym “Sasha,” the Russian nickname for Alexander. He had been in the OSS and had relatives in Russia who had changed his name. He knew about “one of the most secret things we had,” an electronic device “to shoot a beam against a windowpane and turn it into a receiver so you could listen to conversations within a room.”

Angleton’s crew identified Sasha, but the FBI disagreed. They leaned on an agent called “Igor,” who according to the CIA “was a plant.” In Angleton’s view, so was Soviet defector Yuri Nosenko, a “dispatch agent” sent to “destroy and mutilate” the leads provided by Golitsyn. He provided information about the KGB’s department of disinformation and Department 13, the department of assassinations, also known as “wet affairs.” Angleton had heard of a KGB plot to assassinate Richard Nixon, if he had won the 1960 election.

President Kennedy took the hit, but it was unknown if the KGB had trained Oswald during his nearly three years in the Soviet Union. Angleton had seen the files on Oswald’s defection, and staff counsel Michael Goldsmith wanted to know, “was Oswald ever the subject of a CIA project?”

“No,” said Angleton, who was also queried about Yuri Nosenko, someone whose bona fides had been accepted by the CIA’s Soviet Division.

“CI [counterintelligence] staff had no jurisdiction over Nosenko,” Angleton told the committee. “I was never consulted regarding hostile interrogation, to which I am very much opposed.” The CIA veteran clarified that “hostile” meant “alerting Nosenko to suspicions regarding his testimony.” Angleton covered similar themes in a June 6, 1975session of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence, marked “Top Secret” but released with deletions in 1998.

“Was Oswald a Soviet agent?” Sen. Howard Baker wanted to know.

“Yes, I have a very strong opinion,” said Angleton, and the CIA had “more than one” file on the American who defected to the USSR. “I don’t think the Oswald case is dead,” added the CIA veteran. “There are too many leads that were never followed up. There’s too much information that was developed later.”

Angleton cited a 1966 Soviet book displaying a photo of Fidel Castro with the Soviet ambassador to Havana and a man named Leontov, whose name was found on Oswald when he was arrested in Mexico. A KGB agent named Yatskov was the source of the story that the Kennedy hit was a “right wing” operation and so forth.

Committee chief counsel Frederick Schwartz wanted to know if there was any FBI connection with Oswald. According to Angleton, FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover wanted to stop rumors of FBI negligence, so he rejected the idea of Oswald as a Soviet agent. As Edward Jay Epstein explained in Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald, Hoover reasoned that the public was convinced Oswald was a lone crackpot, so the FBI wouldn’t be held accountable for failing to keep him under surveillance. So “by an odd twist of fate the FBI’s interest lay in concealing, rather than revealing, any hint of Soviet involvement.”

The FBI also disagreed with information from Golitsyn, Angleton told the Senate committee, about the identity of a plant within the CIA. This was important because the plant could tell the Soviets how the CIA was interpreting the information from defectors. The FBI said they had the “wrong man,” and that was bad news.

“We are living in a dream world here in terms of the Soviets, and time is short,” Angleton told the Senate committee. The FBI “is only a shadow of what it once was. And so there isn’t any real internal security protection.” These troubles prompted Sen. Baker to ask about the nation’s counterintelligence capabilities.

“Very very poor,” Angleton said. “I think it is very conservative but it has put us back 20 years. I think in the eyes of every intelligence service in the Western world, where we had the leadership and pulled everything together, and they have looked to us for guidance and for traces, and for understanding, that we have lost all of our prestige.” And there was more to it.

“The intelligence community has never had a day of peace in a way,” Angleton said. “When Hoover passed away and Gray came aboard, we believed now we can normalize this situation. It has never been normal before. Mr. Hoover never attended an agency meeting. Mr. Hoover never permitted one of his representatives to go beyond the jurisdiction question. And you cannot run a government that way and you can’t run counterintelligence that way.”

Sen. Baker wanted to know how Angleton would rehabilitate the CIA. The OSS and CIA veteran had given the matter some thought.

“My feeling is that the agency has to go through the purgatory, these fires that no man would put out,” Angleton said. “My view is, the bigger the fires the better. So my view is, let it all come out, and let people take the consequences.”

Nothing of the kind took place, however, and Angleton’s belief that “we are living in a dream world here in terms of the Soviets,” would soon be confirmed.

Presidents get daily briefings from the CIA and in an Oct. 6, 1976 debate, President Gerald Ford told the nation “there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe,” which the captive peoples doubtless found surprising. Ford, a member of the Warren Commission, lost to Georgia Democrat Jimmy Carter, who put Admiral Stansfield Turner in charge of the CIA. On his watch, the CIA began advertising jobs in newspapers and in 1980 one applicant was  John Brennan, who was hired despite having in 1976  voted for the Stalinist Gus Hall, candidate of the Communist Party USA, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Soviet Union. That year the Iranian regime was holding American hostages and chanting “Death to America,” which like Nikita Khrushchev’s “we will bury you,” was an obvious expression of hostility.

Brennan, who never should have been permitted through the door, rose through the ranks at lightning speed. Posted to the Middle East, he came to believe that Islamic jihad was a spiritual quest that had nothing to do with terrorism or violence. So, it was no surprise that the mighty CIA failed to stop the massive attack of Sept. 11, 2001, the worst since Pearl Harbor in 1941. In 2013, John Brennan became CIA director.

Brennan authored Undaunted: My Fight Against America’s Enemies, at Home and Abroad, and the order of those words in the title is significant. Brennan was one of the 51 intel vets, including former directors, who in 2020 charged that the Hunter Biden laptop was “Russian disinformation,” which they all knew was false. In 2023, former CIA analyst John Gentry published, Neutering the CIA: Why US Intelligence Versus Trump has Long-Term Consequences which showed that the agency, failure at its appointed duties, had become a partisan force on the domestic front.

So had the FBI, which also failed to prevent 9/11 and failed to stop terrorist attacks at Fort Hood (2009), the Boston Marathon (2013), San Bernardino (2015), and Orlando (2016)—all with massive losses of life. Moreover, the bureau played no role in the takedown of the terrorists involved in those incidents. In 2016, the FBI launched covert operations “Mid-Year Exam” and “Crossfire Hurricane” against Trump. For all but the willfully blind, the FBI functioned like a KGB and Gestapo for Delaware Democrat Joe Biden.

On Biden’s watch, the FBI mounted an armed raid on Trump’s residence. After the first assassination attempt on Trump last July 13, FBI director Christopher Wray said it was “shrapnel,” that wounded Trump, not one of the eight bullets unleashed by Thomas Matthew Crooks. The 20-year-old, with no tactical experience, gained a rooftop shooting position Lee Harvey Oswald would have envied. Apparently, the FBI and Secret Service haven’t learned much since Nov. 22, 1963.

As readers scour the declassified material Trump ordered released, they can gain enlightenment from reading Epstein’s Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald. They can also consult the author’s Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth, and Deception: The Invisible War Between the KGB and CIA. See also Epstein’s last book, Assume Nothing: Encounters with Assassins, Spies, Presidents, and Would-be Masters of the Universe. Note the chapters on “James Jesus Angleton,” “The Great JFK Debate,” and the “Jolly Green Giant,” a reference to New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, who famously linked a man named Clay Shaw with Oswald.

Epstein first wrote about Garrison for The New Yorker in 1968. As he explained, “the only evidence I have seen or heard that could connect Shaw with the assassination had been fraudulent—some of it devised by Garrison himself and some cynically culled from criminals or the emotionally unstable.” Garrison’s fantasy is the basis of Oliver Stone’s JFK, for many people their only source of information about the assassination, which is rather like taking Casablanca as an accurate portrayal of a Muslim country.

Epstein, who died in early 2024, was the writer closest to Angleton, who passed away in 1987. The reform measures he charted in 1975 still apply to the CIA and FBI: John Ratcliffe and Kash Patel have their marching orders. The people will be watching.