40: The Rocky Report

When William E. Colby rose to CIA Director in late 1973, he inherited the 693-page “Family Jewels” compilation from the departing Agency head, James Schlesinger. The CIA links to the Watergate burglars had triggered Schlesinger’s demand for information. A year later Seymour Hersh brought the Jewels to public attention in The New York Times. This then gave rise to the launch of a number of investigations: the Rockefeller Commission;1 the Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities under the chairmanship of Frank Church;2 and the House Select Intelligence Committee led by Congressman Otis Pike.3

Senator Schweiker was the only Senator permitted to see all of the classified Warren Commission’s documents in 1975, according to Robert Sam Anson in an interview with Arlene Francis on WOR-AM, December 3, 1975. However, he was guided by the CIA’s Counterintelligence head James Jesus Angleton and his assistant, Raymond Rocca, who after resigning a year earlier had returned to the CIA to help the assassination investigators and suggest Cuban and Soviet agents to question.4

Rocca, in 1944, was “Angleton’s executive aide” in Rome in the OSS X2 group involved in counterintelligence. In 1955, Rocca joined Angleton’s CIA Counterintelligence (CI) operation which previously “had been submerged in foreign intelligence.” He “was assigned to be the Chief of the Research and Analysis” where he remained “until 1969 when he became Angleton’s” Deputy Chief of the Counterintelligence which penetrated other agencies through identification of their agents or placing CIA agents within them. CI also developed double agents, handled defectors, intercepted and deciphered communications, and conducted research. Rocca left “the CIA on December 31, 1974.”5 

Rocca denied any knowledge of Lee Harvey Oswald’s CIA 201 File prior to the JFK assassination pointing out that the file was opened erroneously in the name Lee Henry Oswald and further that Oswald would have been considered a military defector thus falling under the scrutiny of “the FBI and the responsible military arm” which “was the Navy.” The Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) communications show that FBI Director Hoover, State Department Security Officer Otepka and others were aware of Oswald’s Russian and FPCC activities before the assassination.6 [Bold emphasis added by D.P. Cannon.]

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