Angleton’s 1966 Memo to Helms re Hunt’s presence in Dallas
Copied
below are two famous magazine stories from 1978 regarding a memo that James
Jesus Angleton, the notorious and somewhat screwy head of CIA
counterintelligence during the agency’s early decades, gave to Richard Helms as
the latter assumed directorship of the agency in 1966.
The memo informs incoming director Helms that CIA has a problem: CIA officer E.
Howard Hunt was in Dallas when JFK was shot.
The memo surfaced circa 1978 during the investigation of the murders of John
Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King by an ad hoc committee of the
House of Representatives: the House Select Committee on Assassinations.
It seems the best guess that the HSCA got hold of the memo via CIA officer
Victor Marchetti, who later penned an insider’s critique of the agency, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence,
1983. And it seems the best guess that Marchetti’s source was Marines
intelligence officer William Corson, who published his less-than-flattering
history of the CIA, Armies of Ignorance:
The Rise of the American Intelligence Empire during the heat of the HSCA
investigation in 1977.