Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Pamela Mumford and Patricia Winston boarded the Flecha Roja bus in Monterrey, Mexico, around 7:30 that evening. They too were bound for Mexico City. Though they had grown up in Australia, both had been born in Fiji. Two years earlier they had set out from Australia on a tour of the world and worked as they traveled. After a year in Great Britain they left for the United States as permanent residents under the Fiji Islands’ quota. They had worked for a while in New York to get some money for further travels, Mumford as a legal secretary, Winston as an occupational therapist. After their side trip to Mexico, they were heading to California. Eventually they would return to Australia, but they were taking plenty of time to see as much of the world as possible. Their tickets to Mexico City allowed them to stop at intermediate destinations, and they had just taken a day off to see the city of Monterrey.1413

  Soon after the bus departed from Monterrey, Oswald came down the aisle to them and started a conversation. He told them he had somehow thought they were Mexican when he first saw them struggling with their heavy luggage to the only open seats in the back of the bus, and, wanting to help them, which he didn’t end up doing, had asked his seatmate how to say in Spanish, “How can I help you?” When he heard them speaking English, he wondered where they were from. He was impressed by the story of their travels and told them he too had traveled a great deal. He had been in Japan while he was in the Marines and regretted that he had never traveled to Australia. He had been to Russia though. They hadn’t, but a friend of their’s had, and they told him about some of her experiences in Moscow. They were curious as to what he had been doing in Russia and whether he had any trouble getting in. He said he had been studying there and lived in an apartment in Moscow. He said he had a hard time getting out of the country. As if he was afraid they might not believe he had been to Russia, he returned to his seat at the front of the bus and came back with his passport to show them the Russian stamps on it—not that the young women were able to read them. But they did see the name Oswald on the passport. He didn’t mention the fact that his wife was from Russia. He didn’t mention his wife at all, but both young women noticed his gold wedding band on his left hand.

  Mumford and Winston were not terribly impressed by Lee. After first talking with him on the bus, they referred to Oswald in conversations between themselves by the nickname “Texas.” They noticed that he sat alone at the bus stops, which came at around two-hour intervals, and ate rather too much food—perhaps he could not make himself understood in Spanish and had to order by pointing at the menu.1414 Apparently the limited Spanish Lee had learned four years earlier from a squad mate in the Marine Corps had not produced much in the way of results.

  The sixth English-speaking passenger, out of nearly forty passengers (plus crying babies and small animals) on the completely full bus, was Lee’s seatmate, the elderly Albert James Osborne, who turns out to have been even more committed to the romance of falsehoods and flightiness than Lee Oswald. Osborne, a self-described itinerant rug-cleaner, gardener, boys’ camp operator, and Baptist preacher, was born in Great Grimsby, Lincolnshire, in England and had migrated to the United States in 1914. Osborne was nearing his seventy-fifth birthday, although he apparently told the McFarlands he was eighty,1415 a pointless lie that Lee might have appreciated. No one knows what Osborne told Oswald about himself, if anything, on the long ride to Mexico City, but it is likely that very little of it was true. Osborne lived a nomadic existence in Canada, the southern part of the United States, and Mexico for the past fifty years, having mailing addresses like “Will Call,” “General Delivery,” post office boxes, and hotels, and often staying at the homes of Christian friends who put him up during his many travels. During the summer of 1963 he worked briefly at the Tyler Nursery Company in Tyler, Texas. In the previous twenty-five years, Osborne had spent considerable time doing missionary work in rural Mexico.

  Osborne became the eventual subject of a remarkable ninety-five-page FBI report (with its own table of contents and eight-page index) to the Warren Commission investigating his tangled background and true identity. It seems that years earlier Osborne took on a dual identity, known to many people as John Howard Bowen and to others by his real name. This resulted in his being interviewed on several occasions by different FBI agents, sometimes as Bowen, other times as Osborne, the bureau believing they were talking to two separate people.* “Bowen” and “Osborne” said they knew each other and “each” sent the FBI on fruitless quests to find the other. When the duplicity was becoming obvious, Osborne finally admitted to the FBI that he had been using the alias John H. Bowen off and on since 1916. It was as Bowen that he had taken the bus from Nuevo Laredo to Mexico City on September 26, 1963. (One strong reason for the use of the Bowen alias on this occasion was that Osborne had been deported from Mexico on April 5, 1958, for selling an automobile without paying the import duties, and if discovered under his true name as having entered Mexico illegally, he would have been detained and deported.) Bowen confirmed sitting next to a young man of Oswald’s approximate age and physical appearance on the trip, with one exception. He said that the young man had a dark complexion and was of Mexican or Puerto Rican descent. He did not identify photos of Oswald as the man he sat next to. Moreover, he maintained that there were no other English-speaking fellow passengers on the bus.1416

  However, the evidence that Oswald was on the subject bus is conclusive, and it therefore follows that Osborne, for whatever personal reason (perhaps simply not wanting his name attached to a presidential assassin in any way), was not telling the truth. Not only does Bowen’s name appear along with Oswald’s and the McFarlands’ on the manifest of Flecha Roja bus number 516 for the September 26 trip from Nuevo Laredo to Mexico City,1417 but the same immigration inspector who stamped Oswald’s tourist card on September 26, 1963, Helio Maydon, also stamped Bowen’s.1418 Osborne also fits the description given by the McFarlands and the two Australian girls as being an elderly male with a British accent who had spent considerable time previously in Mexico.1419 The McFarlands also identified photos of Osborne as being the man.1420 The Australian girls were unable to make a positive ID from earlier photos of Bowen (one wearing a sun helmet, the other standing in front of a castle a decade earlier), but as indicated, the McFarlands clearly identified him as being the passenger seated next to Oswald.1421 Although Osborne claimed there were no other English-speaking people on the bus, both of the McFarlands were aware that Oswald and Bowen were speaking to each other. Indeed, Pamela Mumford got the impression that Oswald and Osborne talked a lot on the trip. And at one of the bus stops, as she and Winston were waiting to reboard the bus she asked Osborne what the weather was going to be like in Mexico City. Osborne just told the two of them that “the young man traveling beside me has traveled to Mexico also. Why don’t you talk to him?”1422

  The Warren Commission concluded, “Osborne’s responses to federal investigators on matters unrelated to Oswald have proved inconsistent and unreliable and, therefore, based on the contrary evidence and Osborne’s lack of reliability, the Commission has attached no credence to his denial that Oswald was beside him on the bus. Investigation of his background and activities, however, disclosed no basis for suspecting him of any involvement in the assassination.”1423 In any event, Osborne gives new life to the observation that the most seemingly nondescript people we brush up against in life “have a story” to tell. It is ironic that Lee Oswald, who so clumsily fabricated his own fake identity as Alek Hidell, spent a day and a night in the company of a master in the art and undoubtedly never realized it. That it was more than a chance encounter* between Oswald and Osborne was briefly in vogue among conspiracy advocates. For instance, conspiracy theorists Robert Groden and Harrison Livingstone went so far as to suggest that Osborne and his true identity provides a “clue to the assassination.”1424 Conspiracy author Anthony Summers reported that Osborne had been a “fanatical supporter of Nazi Germany” during the Second World War but cites no evidence for the claim. Summers a
lso notes that Oswald had used the pseudonym “Osborne” when ordering some of his Fair Play for Cuba leaflets in New Orleans, but fails to recall that Oswald served at the El Toro Marine Air Corps Station with a Mack Osborne, whom he no doubt knew much better than the man sitting beside him on the bus, whose name he may never have even known.1425 In the end, the wily Osborne-Bowen proved to be as elusive for the conspiracy theorists as he had for the FBI, and he is not usually mentioned in the more popular conspiracy theories today.

  Mumford and her friend Winston talked with Lee Oswald once again on the trip, at the last bus and rest stop before Mexico City. He asked if they knew where they were going to stay in Mexico City. They didn’t. They were relying on a popular travel book of the period, Mexico on Five Dollars a Day, which listed various cheap hotels. He said that on previous trips to Mexico City (there’s no evidence or likelihood that he had ever been there before), he had stayed at the Hotel Cuba, and recommended it as being clean and inexpensive.

  They did not take his suggestion. The last time they saw him was shortly after the bus, which had traveled throughout the night, arrived in Mexico City around ten o’clock Friday morning, September 27. He was standing alone in the bus terminal. They took a taxi and left without speaking to him again.1426

  Within an hour of his arrival at the Flecha Roja bus terminal in Mexico City, Lee Oswald registered at the Hotel del Comercio on Calle Bernardino de Sahagun, named for a Spanish colonial missionary who befriended Indians. The modest but clean four-story red-brick establishment catered to traveling salesmen and was good value for the money, which came to $1.28 a night. Although it was well located, about four blocks from the bus station and eight from the commercial heart of the city—which was on famous Paseo de la Reforma, Mexico City’s main east-west thoroughfare—and the owner was known for a willingness to try out his small English vocabulary, it did not attract a tourist trade, so an American like Lee Oswald was a rarity. Registration was simple: you paid your room rent each day in advance and signed your name in the hotel’s register. Lee signed his name as “Lee, Harvey Oswald” and gave his occupation as “photo.” His room, with a private bath, suited him fine. He stayed there, in room 18 on the third floor, throughout his visit to the city. All the places he wanted to go were within three miles to the south and west of the hotel—within walking distance if he felt like it, but taxis were plentiful and cheap. He acquired a street map of the city and marked a number of locations on it.1427

  As soon as he registered, Oswald went straight to work on the problem of getting to Cuba. The Mexican authorities didn’t care whether a traveler’s passport barred travel to Cuba as long as the citizen had a proper visa from the Cuban embassy, but they would not permit Oswald to board a plane for Cuba without that visa.1428 Oswald’s 1963 passport—stamped invalid for travel to Cuba like all American passports issued that year—had neither a regular Cuban visa nor an “in transit” one, which would permit a short stay in Cuba if he were on his way to another country—Russia, for example. He looked up the telephone number and address, on the nearby Paseo de la Reforma, of Cubana Airlines, which flew from Mexico City to Havana three times a week, and jotted it in his address book.1429 But first he had to get a Cuban visa.

  He went that same morning to the Cuban embassy on the Calle Francisco Marquez, and there he spoke to Señora Silvia Tirado de Duran, a young Mexican woman temporarily employed in the consulate section of the embassy. He was prepared. He showed Duran his Soviet papers, which indicated that he had lived and worked there for three years. His documents attested that he was married to a Russian woman, and several prized documents, including a newspaper clipping, indicated that he was the secretary of the New Orleans chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. He told Duran that Cuba should accept him as a proven “friend” of the Cuban Revolution.1430 Duran told the HSCA in 1978 that Oswald told her he was a member of the Communist Party.1431 Although the day after the assassination she told the Mexican Federal Security Police she did not remember whether or not he did,1432 the “comments” typed in by her and appended to Oswald’s application for a Cuban visa on the day he applied, September 27, state that “the applicant states that he is a member of the American Communist Party,” and he displayed a document “in proof of his membership.”1433 It would have had to be a document Oswald had forged. Duran also told the HSCA that Oswald showed her “letters to the Communist Party, the American Communist Party.”1434 Duran thought it odd that, if he was a member of or associated with the CPUSA, he had not asked the party to arrange the visa for him with Cuba. Cuba would have sent it to the Cuban embassy in Mexico City and it would have been waiting for him to pick up. He told her he hadn’t had time to arrange it that way. It still seemed strange to her. The Communist Party was illegal in Mexico and had he cleared his travel through the American Communist Party, he would not have had to travel to Mexico with incriminating documents. His passport would have sufficed.1435

  Oswald said that he was on his way to the Soviet Union but wanted an “in transit” visa allowing him to travel to Cuba immediately and to remain there for two weeks or even longer, if that were possible, before continuing his journey to the Soviet Union.1436 Duran was sympathetic. At twenty-five, she was only a little older than Lee and was also a Marxist, although not really active politically. Her husband, Horacio Duran Navarro, had written a few articles for El Dia, the Communist newspaper in Mexico City, and both of them were sympathizers of the Cuban Revolution. She had worked for a time at the Mexican-Cuban Institute of Cultural Relations, a private organization subsidized to some extent by the Cuban government. Now she was working only temporarily as a secretary to the Cuban consul because the former secretary, a friend of Silvia’s, had been killed in an automobile accident in July. Silvia was just filling in until a suitably qualified secretary could be brought over from Cuba.1437

  As green as she was in the job, she knew it was impossible for Oswald to be granted an immediate visa to Cuba and that there were all types of steps to be followed, including getting authorization from Cuba. When Oswald heard there were going to be problems that would take time to resolve, he said he didn’t have any time, that his Mexican tourist visa was going to expire in three days (which wasn’t true, he had over a week and a half left), and became angry and agitated, whereupon Duran called Eusebio Azcue out of his office to speak to Oswald.1438

  Azcue, in his early fifties, had been the Cuban consul in Mexico City for several years. He had been in Mexico since 1944 and had been working as an architect when Fidel Castro’s forces swept into Havana in 1959 and ousted Fulgencio Batista and his regime. Azcue had been asked to take charge of the consulate in Mexico City. Now, in September of 1963, he wanted to retire and return to Havana, where he was born. The incoming consul, Alfredo Mirabel Diaz, had arrived on September 2, but Mirabel was still learning the job from Azcue and wouldn’t formally take over until November 18. So it was Azcue who emerged to speak with Oswald.1439

  Azcue explained to Oswald that the visas were issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Cuba, not in Mexico City, and that would take time, probably fifteen to twenty days. The only exception, he said, would be if Oswald could get a valid visa from the Soviet embassy permitting travel to the Soviet Union, in which case the consulate in Mexico City could issue an in-transit visa to Cuba to Oswald without prior consultation with the authorities in Cuba.1440

  At this point, Duran also told Oswald that he would have to secure photographs of himself to attach to his application for a visa, and she gave him the addresses of several nearby photo shops and told him that if he wanted to come back that afternoon with the photographs and a visa for travel to the USSR, an application for a Cuban visa could be prepared.1441

  Oswald had a lot to do, but he apparently decided to go to the Russian embassy first. At about half past noon Lee rang the bell at the gate of the Soviet embassy. It was only a short walk of less than two blocks down Calle Francisco Marquez from the Cuban embassy. Normally, you had to ha
ve an appointment to visit the Soviet embassy, but after Lee spoke to the sentry in Russian explaining the purpose of his visit, he was shown into the waiting room of the consul’s office, which was located in a small building detached from the main embassy but within the grounds. After a few minutes, a man named Valeriy Vladimirovich Kostikov appeared to interview him.

  Lee, taken aback by Kostikov’s dark complexion and Zapata mustache—he looked more Mexican or Arabian than Russian—said, “I would like to speak with one of the Soviet consular officers.” Kostikov, amused, showed Lee diplomatic identification indicating that he was indeed an employee of the consulate. He then led him into the office where he had been receiving visitors since eleven o’clock that morning.

  There were three consular officials in the embassy—Oleg Nechiporenko and Pavel Yatskov, in addition to Kostikov. In public they passed themselves off as the consul (Yatskov) and two vice consuls, but in fact all three were KGB officers of equal rank and responsibilities but in different directorates of the Soviet intelligence service. They were always interested in American visitors. Some could be people with important jobs in sensitive places, people who perhaps wanted to offer information or other kinds of cooperation. Kostikov, a colonel in the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, was charged with foreign intelligence, and he was curious as to what Oswald had to say.