Secret Agent Man
What RFK's trip behind the iron curtain tells us about the CIA's hidden file on Jay Reid
President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14176 on the declassification of records pertaining to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and the reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. continues to produce previously secret documents that are expanding the research community’s understanding of how the CIA operated in the mid-twentieth century.
Last week saw the release of one of the most surprising documents yet: the CIA’s 201 Operations dossier on Robert F. Kennedy.
The 148-page dossier was previously not known to exist.
The summary document appears to have been written sometime in the 1990s.1
“DDO” stands for Deputy Director of Operations. From 1973-2005, what had previously been known as the Directorate of Plans became known as the Directorate of Operations. “SR” in the first paragraph refers to the Soviet Russia division of the CIA.
It is interesting that the release is labelled an operations file. One must ask, operations as opposed to…counterintelligence? I have my suspicions, but no proof as of yet.
Near the end of the summary page, the CIA details what this file does (and therefore does not) say about its relationship with Robert Kennedy:
In short this file reflects only that Mr. Kennedy served the Agency as a voluntary informant. The only biographical information therein is attached to the CSA request and was extracted from Who's Who, l962-l963.
The only other identifiable reference to Mr. Kennedy is a field dispatch (NITA~4680, Att. 1, 20 July 1955) reporting contact with Mr. Kennedy in Tehran by Station personnel. This document is located in 20l-ll0578.
As always, hiding in all the bureaucratic semantics are a number of important revelations.
And in case you are wondering what this has to do with Jay Reid, just stick with me. I’ll tie it all together in the end.
What was the CIA doing with RFK?
In late 1974, the CIA shared a guide to the 201 system with congressional investigators. That document, which was finally declassified in its entirety this past spring, is available to download in the library. I will quote from it in this article, but the full document, which is 19 pages long, is worth reading in its entirety.
The CIA’s interest in RFK can be deciphered via a careful reading of the reasons why 201 files were created (emphasis added):
The opening of a 201 dossier is the prerogative of an operational component, in coordination with the Information Services Group. An opening creates a master 201 record. Changes to the master record and the occasional closing of a 201 dossier are controlled jointly by the desks and ISG. 201 dossiers may be opened on persons who meet the carding criteria described in Chapter II of this handbook, when there is a reasonable expectation that additional information will be acquired and filed in such a dossier. Generally dossiers are opened on persons about whom counterintelligence information is being reported, and persons of operational interest to the Operations Directorate, specifically those persons for whom provisional operational approvals and operational approvals are requested.
RFK’s trip to Iran and Soviet Central Asia in 1955 produced the first known touch point with the Agency. He was briefed and debriefed and supplied a journal comprising more than 100 pages of recorded information.
However, his 201 file was not opened until two and a half years later, when he was serving as counsel to the Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field (Senate Investigations Subcommittee or McClellan Committee).
The Committee was investigating corruption and racketeering within organized labor, which by the late 1950s had grown extremely close to the CIA.2 At the time, organized labor and the mafia were essentially one in the same.
This is where it gets strange.
The request to open the 201 file, made on January 7, 1958, comes from Polly Griesemer in SR/10 (one of the Soviet Russia offices).3 Ten days later, Griesemer sent all the documents pertaining to RFK’s 1955 trip over to the Record Integration division.
Not much is known about Griesemer beyond the fact that she worked in SR/10 in the late-1950s under Alexander Sogolow, who was the SR/10 chief at the time. The only other CIA document I located that bears her name is a name check from 1956 on Richard Edward Snyder, a former Agency employee who had moved over to the state department’s foreign service.
In 1959, Snyder, then working in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, would deal directly with Lee Harvey Oswald, who defected to the USSR in late October 1959.
It makes no sense that SR/10 would request opening the 201 file. It clearly had no interest in running RFK again as an agent, especially in connection with the senate investigation back in Washington.
Indeed, we get a little clue from the January 17 transmittal document.4 In a field called Restrictions in RI (Records Integration), Griesemer checked the box for “Restrict to Clandestine Services Personnel”, not “Restrict to Branch”. This one checkmark suggests that the entire exercise was initiated with a non-SR audience in mind.
The most likely customer is James Angleton’s Counterintelligence Staff, which was housed under the broader Directorate of Plans (or clandestine services). Routing slips would answer this question, but none of relevance are included in the document release.
Not to be lost is the bit about Tehran station officials contacting Kennedy prior to his trip to the USSR. Note that the document covering this meeting is housed in a separate 201, one that, to the best of my knowledge, has not been declassified.
My best guess here is that Kennedy either met with someone important in Tehran or was planning to meet with someone of equal importance to the Agency in the USSR. Again, the likelihood is that this document pertains to counterintelligence, but whether that would be Angleton’s CI Staff or a local counterintelligence office (each branch had one) is unclear.
RFK as a secret agent
Prior to his 1955 trip to the Soviet Union, RFK met with numerous CIA officials.5
He met CIA officers on three occasions in July of that year.6 During the first meeting, on July 13, the Agency came clean on the fact that this was an intelligence mission, not something connected to the state department.
RFK was then briefed in two separate sessions on what to look for in the USSR and questions the CIA hoped he could answer.
The CIA met with Kennedy in December 1955 for a debriefing session. A receipt for a recording machine suggests that Vasia Gmirkin’s meeting with RFK was recorded.
If it was recorded, I am not aware of whether or not the tape has been released. If it has been, it would almost certainly not have been digitized, so listening to it would require a trip to the archives and some luck on acquiring working equipment to play it.
Anyway, Gmirkin noted that the multiple CIA points of contact throughout the year seemed to annoy Kennedy.
Kennedy’s materials produced so little of operational value that Gmirkin recommended the Agency avoid such initiatives in the future.7
Project QRSENSE
On March 16, 1964, just four months after his brother was assassinated, an act of which RFK was very suspicious of CIA involvement, Wilfred D. Koplowitz from CA/4 sought a covert security approval to engage Robert Kennedy as part of a project called QRSENSE.
The idea was to have RFK serve on the Planning and Guidance Board of a soon-to-be-created entity called the Practical Politics Institute.
Koplowitz was RFK’s age, and a Yale and Johns Hopkins graduate, so he was no dummy. Perhaps he was too compartmentalized to realize that the Agency was neck-deep in his brother’s assassination.
Should the approval document ever come to light, it was certainly would not be a good look for the Agency to be seen hiding its interest in using RFK (again) in an operational capacity.
Higher-ups within the CIA would have known that RFK was radioactive as far as they were concerned. The likelihood is that one such person stopped this plan in its tracks upon seeing this document.
Meaning for the Jay Reid case
The CIA almost certainly maintains a 201 dossier on Jay Reid, and I consider it a holy grail of sorts. It would not answer all questions, but as you can see from the analysis of Robert Kennedy’s 201 documents, it would answer a lot of them.
To the best of my knowledge, Jay never visited the Soviet Union, but he did travel to many other countries and visit with high-ranking officials.
Jay was in a position to attain much more actionable information than that picked up by RFK in Central Asia.
I am almost certain that Jay was reporting to the CIA on his trips, and he was likely briefed before and debriefed after each trip. I also suspect that these meetings sometimes took place in third-party countries.
None of that would be particularly controversial.
But in that event, the next question would be - what else was he up to? Why the forged birth certificate and passport inconsistencies?
Certain aspects of Jay’s job at the IMF would appear to lend themselves to a counterintelligence function.
Angleton’s team was notorious for keeping their chief’s fingerprints off documents, but Jay’s 201 file would likely provide strong evidence as to who his customers were within the Agency.
RFK 201 Dossier. Pg. 3.
Wilford, High. The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America. Harvard University Press. Cambridge, MA, 2008. Pg. 51-52.
Dossier. Pg. 147.
Dossier. Pg. 6.
Dossier. Pg. 74.
Dossier. Pg. 114-116.
Dossier. Pg. 75.
Alexander "Sasha" Sogolow was the U.S. Army officer in Germany that Nosenko told Bagley and Kisevalter about in Geneva in late January or early February 1964. Nosenko said this mole, "Sasha," was a Captain, but he was actually a Major at the time.