Lee Harvey Oswald and that CIA Memo: The "Smoking Gun" Backfires

IF YOU ARE AT ALL FAMILIAR with JFK assassination lore, you have definitely heard about the McCone-Rowley memo, even if you don't recognise its name. Its authenticity has been debated ever since it appeared on the internet in the 1990s. I can now settle that debate.

The memorandum is purportedly a CIA missive dating from March 1964, written by Agency Director John McCone and sent to Secret Service chief James Rowley. In it, McCone supposedly sets out the Agency's ties to Lee Harvey Oswald (pictured above). You won't need reminding of who he was.

The McCone-Rowley memo (simply “the memo” from now on) contains the following frank statement, indicating that by 1963 Oswald had been a CIA agent for several years.

Oswald subject was trained by this agency, under cover of the Office of Naval Intelligence, for Soviet assignments. During preliminary training, in 1957, subject was active in aerial reconnaissance of mainland China and maintained a security clearance up to the "confidential" level.

The Missing Memo

SO WHY HASN'T the original of this memo surfaced during the recent JFK Files declassification? In fact, by 2006 the National Archives had already told a member of the Usenet newsgroup alt.assassination.jfk that there wasn't a single trace of the elusive memo in or among their records.

Our staff conducted an extensive search of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection. In addition to searches on the JFK Database, we carried out physical searches of the files. The file series searched included Lee Harvey Oswald's 201 file; the CIA Miscellaneous File; the United States Secret Service's official case file on the assassination; the Russ Holmes Work File; and the Assassination Records Review Board's files related to the CIA. We were unable to locate a copy of, or any reference to, this document in the Collection. ^{(Emphasis supplied)}

Of course, that has not deterred people who believe that the memo is genuine. Their reasoning seems to be that this document was stolen from the National Archives.

If it was a real CIA memo that was never transferred to the Archives in the first place, then we all know what would have happened to it (pictured right). So whoever posted it on the internet must own the original.

This document would be worth thousands of dollars, maybe millions, because it represents cast-iron proof that Oswald worked for the CIA. So where is it? Why has the person who uploaded it never come forward to identify themselves, and make the document available for authentication?

Naturally, this only adds to the intrigue. Perhaps the memo's owner has been bought off, or simply... silenced.

How the Hoaxer Fired a Dud

IT'S BEEN AN ENTERTAINING mystery for quarter of a century but we can solve it right here, today. The McCone-Rowley memo is a forgery. Probably one of the very first generation of Photoshop fakes to hit the internet. The reason I can tell you it is a forgery is the reference number given in the top right-hand corner of the first page: C0-2-34,030

There are boring bureaucratic reasons why that's not a CIA reference format. But more importantly, it is the reference number from an authentic document – which definitely wasn't created by the CIA.

It's from a real Secret Service memorandum, concerning an interview with Earlene Roberts, who was Oswald's landlady.

This Secret Service memo was typed up in June 1964, while the Warren Commission was still in progress.

The forger didn't duplicate the Secret Service typewriter's font, perhaps because an exact match wasn't available. They used a “typewriter” font that was similar, as you can see from my animation (pictured above left).

The memo's pro forma category "DATE" was copied directly from the original and pasted onto the fake, then degraded (see animation, right).

There is no reason that a CIA memo would ever have used any kind of Secret Service document formatting.

There is also no reason that the CIA would (in March 1964) use a reference number that the Secret Service would not generate until four months later -- in a genuine document that also happened to be related to Oswald.

Oswald might have had real-life CIA connections, but the "McCone-Rowley memo" is not evidence of such connections. It's not even evidence at all.

So that's disposed of that long-running hoax. Next time someone brings up this “memo”, you can tell them it's a proven fake, and show them this Steemit post. End of story.