Office of SECURITY DEputy CHIEF James O'CONNELL

JAMES PATRICK O'CONNELL Jr.
James was born during nineteen hundred and seventeen and was educated at New York’s St. Johns University. He enlisted with the US Navy amid nineteen forty-four and was recruited by the Office of Strategic Services as WWII was underway. Three years later he joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation and would remain at the Department of Justice until after the next decade began. O’Connell was employed for intelligence case investigations by the CIA amid nineteen fifty-one and trained in multiple intelligence security protocols.

J. O’Connell Amidst The Ninteen Fifities

As the nineteen fifties passed, O'Connell recruited attorney Robert Maheu for the Agency and later both men participated in the Castro plots. At the direction of Office of Security Chief Sheffield Edwards the plots attempted to use Maheu's criminal underworld connections to recruit Mafioso to attack the Cuban regime during the early nineteen sixties. Eventually O' Connell sat upon the CIA's headquarters security committee and would serve as Far East Division Chief of Regional Security where according to documents he contributed to managing the Agency’s global security apparatus. He became the Deputy Director of the CIA's Office of Security before his over twenty year career ended in the course of nineteen seventies.