CIA scrutinized agent who tracked Lee Harvey Oswald

By Desmond Okafor · August 9, 2026

Lee Harvey Oswald was watched in Mexico City while the CIA scrubbed names from audio tapes and questioned agent Anne Goodpasture’s professional fitness.

The public record associates the name Goodpasture with the innocent strains of a 1979 Johnny Cash album recorded with students at a Christian school. But in the holdings of the US National Archives, the name is attached to a different kind of record: the surveillance of a man on the run from history.

In the catalog of the National Archives, a specific entry exists for the "Anne Goodpasture Deposition Materials." The file's catalogue entry records a series of exhibits, reports, notes, memorandums, photographs, and transcripts. These are not the records of a school choir, but the professional remnants of a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee stationed in Mexico City during the window of President John F. Kennedy's assassination.

Mexico City, 1963

Mexico City was a hive of Cold War friction in the early 1960s, a place where the agency’s interests collided with Soviet and Cuban operatives. According to the archival description, the Goodpasture materials include records of her surveillance of Lee Harvey Oswald.

Oswald’s visit to Mexico City in late 1963 remains one of the most contested chapters of the assassination narrative. The catalogue indicates that the series contains copies of Goodpasture's testimony to the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). While the specific pages of that testimony are not present in the description, the fact of her summons suggests she was a key witness to the agency's movements—and perhaps its failures—during Oswald's stay in the city.

"Professional Fitness and Conduct"

Perhaps the most telling detail in the catalog is not the surveillance of Oswald, but the surveillance of the agent herself. The description notes that the series includes "reports of her professional fitness and conduct."

In the world of intelligence, a report on "fitness and conduct" is rarely a neutral performance review. When an employee is called to testify before a congressional committee like the HSCA, the agency often pivots from managing the mission to managing the employee. These documents suggest an internal vetting process, a way for the CIA to evaluate whether Goodpasture remained a reliable instrument of the state or if she had become a liability. The agency does not merely record the facts of a case; it records the loyalty and stability of those who handle the facts.

Redacted Sound Recordings

Goodpasture’s deposition does not exist in a vacuum. The National Archives lists related series that flesh out the environment of the HSCA hearings. One such series consists of sound recordings of the assassination hearings. The catalogue explicitly notes that some of these are "redacted recordings with deleted Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee names."

This redaction is a structural silence. It means that even in the pursuit of a public accounting of the Kennedy assassination, the agency maintained a veto over who could be named and whose voice could be heard. The presence of "Interim Record Review Forms" from the Assassination Record Review Board (ARRB) suggests a systematic, late-stage attempt to sift through these gaps, but the redactions themselves remain a testament to the agency's enduring desire to protect its own.

Other related files, such as the "Morning Meeting Minutes Related to the Central Intelligence Agency Segregated Collection," list topics that range from Algerian-Chinese Communist Agreements to the work of the Church Committee. In these minutes, Lee Harvey Oswald appears as just one of several items on a morning agenda, a data point in a broader strategy of global containment and domestic damage control.

There is a stark contrast between the documents mentioned here and the public image of the era. While the nation mourned a president and sought answers from a commission, the agency was filing reports on the "fitness" of its staff in Mexico City and scrubbing names from audio tapes. The records described in the catalog do not offer a tidy resolution to the mystery of November 22; instead, they document the process of maintaining a secret.

What remains in the catalog is a map of a void. We have the list of exhibits, the mention of transcripts, and the knowledge that photographs exist, but the actual contents are shielded by the layers of the archive. The final entries in the related series are the forms completed by the ARRB during their systematic review of the records, leaving the ultimate utility of Anne Goodpasture's testimony an open question.