A CIA Asset's Twenty-Year Career, Declared Not Relevant to the Assassination

• Record: No.104-10107-10132
• Agency: CIA
• Originator: CIA

The Assassination Records Review Board, the independent body created by Congress in 1992 to oversee the release of JFK-related government documents, had a formal designation for records in the assassination collection that reviewers determined had no meaningful connection to the assassination itself: NBR, meaning Not Believed Relevant. This document carries that designation. The ARRB declared it NBR in April 1994. After reading all ten pages, the designation is accurate.

This is an entry about what the NBR designation means, why this document is in the collection anyway, and what it incidentally reveals about how the CIA built and managed its human intelligence networks during the Cold War.

What the Document Is

DocID 32398834 is a ten-page SECRET CIA debriefing summary of a man identified as Thomas L. Roberts, covering his activities from 1949 through 1967. The debriefing was conducted over three days, February 19 through 21, 1969, and the summary was prepared by the CIA's Office of General Counsel. It was distributed to CIA Security, to the operational division designated CCS/LPGLOBE, and to the Counterintelligence Research and Analysis office. LPGLOBE was Roberts's CIA cryptonym, the operational code name assigned to him as an asset.

The document is organized as a chronological narrative spanning twenty years of Roberts's career, beginning with his Harvard undergraduate years and running through his work as a CIA-covered legal representative in West Africa in the mid-1960s.

What the Document Says

Roberts began cooperating with the FBI in 1949 while still an undergraduate at Harvard, reporting on what he described as a highly sophisticated and organized student movement operating under outside direction. His FBI contact was an agent named McLaughlin. He continued reporting to the FBI through Harvard Law School, where he became national co-director of the Student Division of the National Lawyers Guild, an organization the FBI considered a Communist front, while simultaneously reporting on its activities to the Bureau throughout his student years.

After law school Roberts joined a Boston firm, then moved to New York where he became a partner in the firm of Itkin, Roberts and Greenbaum. Herbert Itkin, his partner, later became a significant figure in organized crime and government corruption investigations and was eventually indicted. The debriefing covers Roberts's knowledge of Itkin's activities in considerable detail, including Itkin's work as attorney for a Haitian government in exile, his involvement in a Caribbean-focused investment vehicle called Conestoga Investments Ltd., and his financial entanglements. Roberts consistently assessed Itkin as unreliable, egocentric, and likely to be a poor intelligence observer.

Roberts became a CIA asset, operating under the LPGLOBE cryptonym, in approximately 1961 after a meeting with Robert Amory, then the CIA's Deputy Director for Intelligence, who had previously taught Roberts at Harvard. His cover for CIA work was a position on the legal staff of the International Division of the Radio Corporation of America, arranged for him by what the document designates CCS. He was stationed primarily in Dakar, Senegal, where he reported on African political contacts including figures connected to anti-colonial movements across West Africa. His contacts included Oliver Tambo of the African National Congress and other prominent figures in the independence-era African political world.

The debriefing closes with a review of Roberts's financial arrangements, including a Swiss bank account at the Bank Popular Swiss in Geneva established in late 1967 on the advice of a girlfriend in Dakar. Roberts stated that the account was intended to provide cover for explaining why larger sums of money were not available in Dakar. He stated that Herbert Itkin did not know of Roberts's CIA employment from anything Roberts had ever said to him.

Why It Is in the JFK Collection

The document sits in the JFK records under CIA agency file number 80T01357A, the same broad file series that contains the Paul Hoch research memo examined earlier in this series. That file series covered CIA records related to the Warren Commission investigation, and it was swept into the JFK collection as a unit. Some records in that series have direct relevance to the assassination. Others, like this one, are CIA operational and personnel files that were stored in the same administrative series for reasons unrelated to the Kennedy case.

The ARRB reviewed this document in April 1994 and declared it NBR. That determination means the Board examined it and concluded it contained no information bearing on the circumstances of the assassination or its investigation. The document was nonetheless postponed in full rather than immediately released, meaning even after the NBR determination the CIA sought additional time before releasing it. It appears in the released collection under the final review date of October 2000.

What It Incidentally Reveals

While this document has nothing to do with the Kennedy assassination, it is a genuine primary source on two subjects of independent historical significance. First, it documents the FBI's practice of recruiting informants directly from the student body of elite universities during the early Cold War, beginning with Roberts in 1949. The recruitment was voluntary, covert, and sustained across more than a decade of his student and professional years. The Bureau directed him to specific organizational targets, approved his activities, and maintained contact through named agents.

Second, it documents the CIA's use of professional cover arrangements to place assets in overseas positions. Roberts's RCA legal posting, his retainers from Pan Am and Pepsi Cola, and his Swiss bank account were all components of an operational infrastructure designed to make his intelligence work invisible to anyone examining his professional life. The document describes this infrastructure in the matter-of-fact language of a routine personnel review, which is precisely what it was.

These are interesting Cold War history documents. They are not JFK assassination documents, and calling them something they are not would undermine the purpose of this series.

The Bottom Line

DocID 32398834 is a CIA debriefing summary of a long-term FBI and CIA asset, declared Not Believed Relevant to the JFK assassination by the body specifically empowered to make that determination. It ended up in the JFK collection because of the administrative file series it was stored in, not because of any connection to the assassination.

Reading the Record covers documents as they appear in the collection, including the ones that turn out to be about something else entirely. Three entries in a row with thin assassination relevance tell the archive something true: most of what was swept into these files is operational background, personnel records, and institutional housekeeping that happened to share a filing cabinet with the documents that matter. Identifying which is which, accurately and without inflation, is the work.