A Case Study in Redaction: The CIA's LIFEAT File
- Fred Litwin
- 4 days ago
- 8 min read
Hat Tip: Robert Reynolds incredible blog. Robert is the expert on the JFK assassination files.
While President Biden and the CIA slammed the door on full JFK disclosure on June 30, a CIA surveillance file released with heavy redactions that same day tells a tale the clandestine service does not want you to know, a story about CIA counterintelligence and Lee Harvey Oswald.
Like the story of “The 17 Month Gap,” the story of a surveillance operation known as LIFEAT illuminates what the CIA wants to hide the most as the 60th anniversary of President Kennedy assassination approaches later this year: counterintelligence operations around the suspected assassin who claimed he was “a patsy” before being killed in police custody.
Here’s the heavily redacted LIFEAT file as it was recently released.
LIFEAT was a wide ranging teltap operation, i.e. CIA was listening in on people’s telephone conversations. The taps were in Mexico City. LI is a digraph code, indicating Mexico related. FEAT is a randomly chosen codeword.
There were two major CIA teltap operations in Mexico city in the early 1960s: LIFEAT and LIENVOY.
LIENVOY was a joint operation with the Mexican government, proposed and put into place by the then president of Mexico Mateos-Lopez. This was one of the great secrets that CIA concealed for as long as it could. LIENVOY tapped the lines of Cuban and Soviet Russian diplomatic facilities, and was highly regarded by both U.S. and Mexican governments for the type of information the operation provided.
It was the LIENVOY tap which recorded a phone call to the Russian embassy from someone who identified himself as Lee Oswald. As one might expect, this call and several others which the CIA later determined were related to Oswald, was an important part of the Warren Commission investigation into President Kennedy’s death, and perhaps an even MORE important part of the HSCA re-investigation of the JFK assassination.
LIFEAT, in contrast to the joint LIENVOY taps, was a CIA “unilateral” teltap. The Mexican government did not know CIA was doing this, and the CIA apparently gave them no LIFEAT info or leads at all. LIFEAT could NOT tap Cuban and Soviet diplomatic facilities without bumping into the LIENVOY team, an embarrassing flap to be carefully avoided.
Instead, LIFEAT did teltaps, outside the two embassies, on an impressive range of people in various places, including Eastern bloc and Cuban diplomats, and various Russian embassy personnel when they were not in the office. We know this from a partially redacted CIA history of their Mexico City station.
Oswald was not recorded in the LIFEAT taps, though some have speculated that the big redactions in “Contacts with Cuban Officials” were perhaps hiding Oswald contacts. I’ll have more to say about such speculation below, suffice to say here that Oswald doesn’t show up in this file.
Morley wrote what the redactions would tell us:
The file runs backwards chronologically from 1965 to 1960. The opening pages, about LIFEAT surveillance operations 1965, are the most declassified portion of the file, along with the final pages, which concern operations in 1960. In other words, it is reasonable to assume that the redacted pages document the CIA's counterintelligence interest in Cuban targets in Mexico City between 1961 and 1964—including the time when Oswald visited.
This is not to say that the LIFEAT redactions hide information about Oswald or a conspiracy to kill the president. They probably do not. The LIFEAT file was reviewed in the 1990s by the staff of the Assassination Records Review Board staff. If these pages contained any information about Oswald the ARRB would have released it. Instead, the redacted passages were designed "Not Believed Relevant" to JFK's assassination.
And he concluded his article with this:
Nonetheless, the blank pages in the LIFEAT file are not entirely mute. We can be fairly sure they do not contain the details of Oswald's contacts with the Cubans in 1963. But they do document the context in which CIA operatives observed Oswald and made decisions about him while JFK was still alive.
While we can’t see what’s hidden, we can say with confidence that the massive redactions in the LIFEAT files hide what the CIA has always sought to hide: details of the CIA’s counterintelligence activities around Oswald, the alleged "lone nut," as he made his way to Dallas.
What were the redactions?
Three pages about a Canadian, Don Lowry, who was looking for a press job in Cuba.
Dispatches from Port-au-Prince, Haiti. There are twelve pages about coverage of Haitian communist studying in Mexico City.
Over sixty pages of teltaps on the Dominican Embassy in Mexico City.
A telephone conversation between Judith Feretto and Adelias Zendejas.
January 1960 dispatches about LIEXIT, a project to acquire hard copies of Russian diplomatic communications from Mexico City to Moscow.
Robert notes that the whole page redactions in this file "were clearly from 1960, the context made this obvious, so none of the dates fit into the assassination chronological window."
Is this file worthless to historians? No! Of course not! If you are writing a history of U.S. intelligence efforts in Mexico, it is gold, the kind of stuff it has previously been impossible to get hold of.
It is, however, of almost no value whatsoever for anyone who wants to write anything about the JFK assassination. The first few pages have a little interest, illustrating the counterintelligence use of teltaps. Yes, this is reminiscent of what happened with Oswald. But Lowry was not Oswald, who was dead in 1967. All this shows us is that CIA was using LIFEAT just as it used LIENVOY. Where’s the surprise in that?
I am hoping that the CIA declassifies the personnel file of George Joannides. I believe that there won't be anything relevant to the JFK assassination in that file.
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