Dallas-Fort Worth area, notwithstanding the fact that Ambassador Stevenson had been abused by pickets in Dallas less than a month before. Bouck explained the failure to try to identify the individuals involved in the Stevenson incident after it occurred on the ground that. PRS required a more direct indication of a threat to the President, and that there was no such indication until the President's scheduled visit to that area became known. 42 Such an approach seriously undermines the precautionary nature of PRS work; if the presence in Dallas of the Stevenson pickets might have created a danger for the President on a visit to that city, PRS should have investigated and been prepared to guard against it.

Other agencies occasionally provided information to the Secret Service concerning potentially dangerous political groups. This was done in the ease of the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico, for example, but only after members of the group had resorted to political violence. 43 However, the vague requests for information which the Secret Service made to Federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies were not well designed to elicit information from them about persons other than those who were obvious threats to the President. The requests shifted the responsibility for evaluating difficult cases from the Service, the agency most responsible for performing that task, to the other agencies. No specific guidance was provided. Although the CIA had on file requests from the Treasury Department for information on the counterfeiting of U.S. currency and certain smuggling matters,44 it had no written specification of intelligence information collected by CIA abroad which was desired by the Secret Service in advance of Presidential trips outside the United States.

Information known about Lee Harvey Oswald prior to the assassination.--No information concerning Lee Harvey Oswald appeared in PRS files before the President's trip to Dallas. Oswald was known to other Federal agencies with which the Secret Service maintained intelligence liaison. The FBI had been interested in him, to some degree at least, since the time of his defection in October 1959. It had interviewed him twice shortly after his return to the United States, again a year later at his request and was investigating him at the time of the assassination. The Commission has taken the testimony of Bureau agents who interviewed Oswald after his return from the ,Soviet Union and prior to November 22, 1963, the agent who was assigned his case at the time of the assassination, the Director of the FBI, and the Assistant to the Director in charge of all investigative activities under the Director and Associate Director.45 In addition, the Director and Deputy Director for Plans of the CIA testified concerning that Agency's limited knowledge of Oswald before the assassination. 46 Finally, the Commission has reviewed the complete files on Oswald, as they existed at the time of the assassination, of the Department of State, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the FBI and the CIA. The information known to the FBI is summarized below.