Was Oswald working for U.S. intelligence?

CIA director John McCone told the Warren Commission Oswald was never an agent, employee or informant, and his deputy Richard Helms agreed. [2]

The House committee reviewed the CIA’s Oswald file. It found the CIA opened a “201” personality file on him only on 9 December 1960, more than a year after his defection, and accepted the agency’s explanation for the delay. It found that letters to him were opened under HT-Lingual, the CIA’s illegal program for reading mail between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. [1]

When he came back in 1962, the CIA did not debrief him. The committee noted that of 22 returning defectors it looked at, the CIA interviewed only four. [1]

The committee concluded it found no evidence that Oswald was ever an agent of the CIA. [1]

In January 1964 the Commission heard that Oswald had been an FBI informant with a payroll number. Hoover and the agents involved swore he never was. [2]

The committee traced the rumor. The reporter Alonzo Hudkins admitted that he and another newsman had invented an FBI payroll number for Oswald in a phone call, to test whether the FBI was tapping them. [1]

Oswald’s address book did contain FBI agent James Hosty’s name, address, phone number and car plate. The FBI’s December 1963 report on the address book left that entry out; the page in question had apparently been retyped. For what Hosty did with Oswald’s note, see the Hosty note. [1]

On the afternoon of 22 November 1963 an officer of the Army’s 112th Military Intelligence Group in Texas gave the FBI information about Oswald and his alias, “A. J. Hidell.” That suggested the Army had a file on him. [1]

The committee found the 112th had opened the file in mid-1963 after Oswald’s arrest in New Orleans over his Fair Play for Cuba leafleting, treating him as a possible counterintelligence threat. The file held documents and press clippings on his defection, marriage and pro-Cuba activity. It was marked for deletion in March 1973 under a 1971 instruction and destroyed. It was never given to the Warren Commission. [1]

George de Mohrenschildt, a petroleum geologist who befriended the Oswalds in Dallas, had spoken with J. Walton Moore of the CIA’s Domestic Contacts Division, which openly interviewed travellers. The committee found no basis for saying he worked for the agency. He killed himself in 1977. [1]

Oswald’s Mexican tourist card was numbered right after one issued to William Gaudet, a New Orleans editor who said he had once worked for the CIA. The committee found no evidence that Gaudet and Oswald had anything to do with each other. [1]