Jane Roman

Jane Roman (1914–2008) was a senior liaison officer in the CIA's Counterintelligence Staff (CI/Liaison) under James Jesus Angleton during the period of Lee Harvey Oswald's pre-assassination CIA paper trail. Roman's signature appears on the October 10, 1963 cable from CIA headquarters to the Mexico City station responding to the station's report on Oswald's visits to the Cuban and Soviet embassies. That cable stated the agency had last reported on Oswald in May 1962 — a characterization that omitted multiple FBI reports on Oswald's 1963 Fair Play for Cuba Committee activities in New Orleans that had been routed through CIA in the weeks immediately prior. In 1994 and 1995 interviews with historian John M. Newman, Roman acknowledged the omissions and characterized the cable as "indicative of a keen interest in Oswald held on a need-to-know basis." Roman is not implicated in the assassination; her significance lies in documenting what CIA counterintelligence knew about Oswald before November 22, 1963 and how that knowledge was handled.