Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, & the Garrison Case

by DiEugenio, James

  The Commission was reliant on the CIA and FBI for its information on this issue. Therefore, when staff lawyers David Slawson and William Coleman visited Mexico City, they bought Clarke Anderson’s story about Oswald being at the Hotel del Comercio, even though his name on the register was incorrect and, during the first round of witness interviews, no one in the hotel recalled seeing him there.16 Eventually Anderson came up with two witnesses, one who he himself did not trust. In his trip report, Slawson cites the signature on the hotel register as evidence Oswald was there. Even though his name appears there on the first day of his visit as “Lee, Harvey Oswald.” In other words, each name is in the wrong placement order.17 Slawson then found out that the FBI could not find one shop owner who recalled selling Oswald the silver bracelet he brought back for Marina. Even though they visited 300 merchants.18 Slawson also found out that an alleged witness to Oswald being inside the Cuban embassy failed to identify a photo of Oswald leafleting in New Orleans.19 Incredibly, Slawson and Coleman never interviewed Sylvia Duran, the secretary at the Cuban embassy who had the most contact with Oswald.20 But the two did talk to CIA station chief Winston Scott. According to Slawson’s report, Scott’s evidence “was unambiguous on almost all crucial points.”21 But yet, this is not what Slawson said on the 1993 Frontline program “Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?” In 1993, he said that the tape he heard of Oswald inside the Cuban compound was of poor quality, difficult to understand, and he could not confirm it was Oswald’s voice. Slawson may have amended his answer for two related reasons. He understood that, in 1993, he was not taking evidence back to be rubber stamped by the likes of Allen Dulles, John McCloy, and Gerald Ford. There was too much out now in the record which raised many doubts about Oswald in Mexico City—and also upon the efficacy of the tapes. Yet it was this 1964 Slawson-Coleman report that the Warren Commission largely relied upon for its evidence of what Oswald did in Mexico City.

  It's fairly obvious from the above that the Commission did not do any real investigation of what Oswald was doing in Mexico City. For instance, they never discovered that Duran did not describe Oswald accurately. She originally described the man she dealt with as being short, about five foot, six inches, blond, and over thirty years old. Oswald was five foot, nine inches, dark haired, and twenty-four years old. This problematic information from Duran was deleted from the ten-page report of her testimony transferred by the CIA to the Warren Commission.22 Another inaccuracy by the Commission was stating that Oswald visited the Cuban compound twice on September 27. In fact, he was there three times that day.23 If they had interviewed Duran they would have discovered something that made her suspicious of Oswald. She had prior experience with communists from America coming to Mexico City for travel to Cuba. They usually followed a procedure, arranged for by the American Communist Party, which allowed them to obtain a visa in advance through the Cuban Communist Party. That way, “The American would then come to Mexico, visit the Cuban Consulate, and receive his visa immediately.”24 This process would have eliminated all the trouble Oswald had in his failure to attain his in transit visa to Russia through Cuba.25 The fact Oswald did not do this was revealing. It seemed to suggest that either Oswald was not a real communist, or that people inside the communist circles in America thought he was an agent provocateur.26 They therefore did not trust him.

  Another part of the CIA report of Duran’s testimony was altered for the Commission. Duran stated firmly that after the twenty-seventh, when Oswald had failed to secure his special visa, he did not call her back.27 Again, someone embroidered this for the Commission. For in the Warren Report she is quoted as saying “… she does not recall whether or not Oswald later telephoned her at the Consulate number she gave him.”28 This was an important discrepancy in testimony. Because, as we shall see, there was another call to the Russian consulate on Saturday the twenty-eighth. The CIA claims this call was by Duran, with Oswald also on the line. But if Duran’s recall is correct, then the CIA evidence is spurious.

  When Robert Blakey took charge of the House Select Committee on Assassinations he agreed to do something that Richard Sprague would not. In return for access to classified materials, members and employees of the committee signed agreements pledging not to disclose any information they garnered while doing their work. Then, when Blakey, Gary Cornwell, and Dick Billings edited the report and volumes, the agencies they made agreements with were allowed to veto what information was included in the published volumes. This is the reason that the HSCA report on Mexico City—assembled by two law students of Blakey’s from Cornell—was not part of the published volumes in 1979. For when it came time to vet the report for release, Blakey, Ed Lopez and Dan Hardway met with the CIA representatives. The Agency made so many objections, it took four hours to get through the first two paragraphs.29 The report is over 300 pages long. It was therefore classified until the ARRB was created. And then it had to go through several reviews. But even today, an annex to the report, “Was Oswald an Agent of the CIA” has not been released.30 This long classified report confirms that, as Garrison wrote in 1968, the Commission version of what happened in Mexico City was deliberately covered in mist.

  Even before Hardway and Lopez began their report, Sprague and Bob Tanenbaum understood that something was wrong with what the CIA was presenting. For it is not possible to consider Oswald’s trip to Mexico without linking it to the Sylvia Odio incident. After having read the Warren Report, Sprague wondered why the Commission chose to discount the testimony of Silvia Odio.31 Odio stated that two Cuban exiles appeared at her apartment door in Dallas on or around the night of September 26.32 They were with a third man named Leon Oswald. They said they were from New Orleans. They also said they were looking for a Sarita Odio. That fact should have raised some suspicion. Sarita was attending college. She was the Odio sister not living with Sylvia or her sister Annie at the time.33 This implies that the three men were not traveling on their own personal knowledge, but on some (faulty) instructions from someone else. As Silvia recalled in 1993, the taller Latin called himself Leopoldo. He then introduced both Leon Oswald and Angelo, a Latin she thought spoke with a Mexican accent. The men wanted help in raising money for the Cuban exile cause. Since Silvia was associated with the group JURE, and her father was famous for being imprisoned at the Isle of Pines by Castro, they decided to come to her. Since the sisters did not know the men, and since it was clear the two Latins were there under false “war names,” the sisters were suspicious and decided not to help.34 Further, the men did not know any of the local JURE leaders, or Manolo Ray, the leader of JURE. Ray, as we have seen, was Howard Hunt’s nemesis in the Cuban exile community.35 And Odio knew Ray very well, “He was a very close friend of my father and mother. He hid in my house several times in Cuba.”36 Therefore, the end implication of this occurrence is that Oswald was meeting with a JURE representative less than two months before shooting Kennedy.

  Two days after the impromptu meeting, Leopoldo, who had a Cuban accent, called her back. He was very friendly and wanted to know what she thought of the American. Since he had said so little, she had no opinion of him. In furtherance of the implication outlined above, Leopoldo was now trying to sell Oswald as a marksman, an ex-Marine, someone who could be used by any organization. Leopoldo added, “Well, you know he is—we don’t know what to make of him. He’s kind of loco. He’s been telling us the Cubans should have … assassinated President Kennedy right after the Bay of Pigs, and they didn’t have any guts to do it. They should do it and it was a very easy thing to do, at the time.” Leopoldo then closed with, “We probably won’t have anything to do with him.”37

  The Odio incident created manifold problems for the Commission. The first being that Odio was a credible witness who had corroboration for her testimony. When she first heard of Oswald’s involvement with the Kennedy assassination, she immediately recalled the visit of the three men. That afternoon she became very fearful, so much so that she fainted.38 She then met with her sister, and as they had
both been watching television with Oswald’s photo on the screen, they both realized he was the man who thought the Cubans should have killed Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs. In addition to Annie, Sylvia had written to her father about the episode three days after the visit. She also told her psychiatrist about the strange visit the same week it happened.39 The second problem was the incident seemed designed to make an indelible impression upon her about this Leon Oswald who came from New Orleans. Leopoldo introduced him to her twice. He added that Leon was an American “who was very much interested in the Cuban cause.”40 Leopoldo had called her back and described him as a former Marine who resented Kennedy and was a good shot—which Oswald was not. Remarkably, this is how the Warren Report would characterize Oswald one year later. So the Odio incident clearly suggested that Oswald was being set up nearly two months in advance of the assassination.

  The third problem, the one that bothered Sprague, was that the dates of the visit clashed with the dates that Oswald was supposed to be going to Mexico. Odio twice told the Commission that, to her best remembrance, the men were there on a Thursday or Friday in the last week of September.41 This would mean either the twenty-sixth or twenty-seventh. Even if we choose the earlier date, this contradicts the Commission. For they state that, on the 26th, Oswald was on a bus headed from the Mexican border town of Nuevo Laredo to Mexico City.42 This is why pro-Commission authors—like Vincent Bugliosi—try to move the date to the twenty-fifth. But even if one does that, it creates a problem for the official story since the Warren Report has Oswald in Houston that night calling the socialist editor of a magazine.43 The Odio incident took place around 9:00 P.M.44 Yet the alleged call to the editor came either at that time, or a bit later. And the drive time from Dallas, where Odio was located, to Houston is about four hours. And as the report reads, there is no indication of this being a long distance call.

  Because of all these problems, the Commission decided that Odio’s story could not be accepted. At any cost. So in addition to having Hoover concoct a jerry rigged cover story about William Seymour, Loran Hall, and Lawrence Howard being the three men at her door—which they were not—the Commission did something else. After Wesley Liebeler took her testimony in Dallas, he invited her out to dinner with an acquaintance of his. He kept on threatening her with a polygraph test.45 He then stated something that Odio found unforgettable. He said, “Well, you know if we do find out that this is a conspiracy you know that we have orders from Chief Justice Warren to cover this thing up.”46 When Gaeton Fonzi heard this from her his eyebrows arched. He asked, “Liebeler said that?” To which Odio said, “Yes sir, I could swear on that.” Liebeler then invited her up to his room at the hotel on the pretense of looking at some pictures. Odio described what happened next to Fonzi and the Church Committee:

  Not only that, he invited me to his room upstairs to see some pictures. I did go, I went to his room. I wanted to see how far a government investigator would go and what they were trying to do to a witness…. He showed me pictures, he made advances, yes, but I told him he was crazy.47

  Liebeler wasn’t through. To show her what kind of operation the Commission really was, he told her that they had seen her picture and joked about it at the Warren Commission. They said things like what a pretty girl you are going to see Jim. Besides the professional ethics involved in such a thing, this points to a tactic used by the Commission to discount Odio. For HSCA staff lawyer Bill Triplett told this author that the reason that chairman Earl Warren did not believe Sylvia Odio is that she was some kind of a “loose woman.”48 As the reader can see, this was not the case. Yet this was the tactic Liebeler was going to use. This is how desperate the Commission was to discredit a dangerous witness like Odio.

  The Commission thought that the Odio episode—with its depiction of Oswald with Cuban exiles and the mentioning of the murder of Kennedy over the Bay of Pigs—was much too suggestive of a logical conspiracy angle. Further, it even showed Oswald in the company of like-minded men. They therefore decided to favor the Oswald in Mexico City angle. To them, this depicted the communist Oswald: A man apparently dissatisfied with America, trying to escape to a Marxist state. This was much more favorable to their predetermined conclusion. The problem with this was the one that Garrison pointed out. The information the Warren Report assembled seemed to barely scratch the surface of what Oswald did while he was there. In addition to all the problems named above—the witnesses and signature at the hotel, the silver bracelet purchase, the lack of witnesses at the Cuban consulate, Duran’s wrong description of Oswald, his complete lack of preparation to attain his visa, and the apparently false September 28 call—there is much more. Just one example: There is no chart in the Warren Report denoting the number of visits or phone calls made by Oswald to each compound, or from where they were made, or what language was spoken.

  This seems to have been part of the Helms-Angleton agenda. For Lopez and Hardway did put together a chart of the phone calls attributed to Oswald. One look at the chart, which lists the languages spoken, and it immediately raises questions about who made them. For it has Oswald speaking fluent Spanish,49 which no one has ever said Oswald did. Further, the HSCA report says that Oswald spoke poor, broken Russian.50 Yet both Marina Oswald and George DeMohresnchildt said Oswald spoke Russian quite well upon his return to the United States. Further, professional translator Peter Gregory thought Oswald was fluent enough to give him a letter certifying Oswald’s ability to serve as a translator.51 But if that were not enough, there is a serious problem that Garrison spoke about in his Playboy interview. The CIA had multiple still cameras set up outside the Cuban embassy in Mexico City to catch everyone coming out of and going inside in order to secure a visa to Cuba. When, at the request of the Commission, the FBI asked the CIA for a photo of Oswald entering the consulate, they got Commission Exhibit 237. This is a picture of a husky six footer with a crew-cut. Obviously not Oswald. He is not identified in the photo so he came to be known as the “Mystery Man.”52 The Commission just printed the picture as “Photograph of an Unidentified Man” in Volume 16. In other words, we are supposed to believe the following: In Oswald’s combined five visits to the Cuban consulate and Soviet consulate, the battery of CIA cameras failed to get even one picture of him entering or leaving. In other words, they went zero for ten. And the camera right outside the Cuban consulate was pulse activated. That is it was, “A camera with a shutter that is automatically tripped by a triggering device activated by changes in light density.”53 How could a camera that sensitive miss Oswald six times?

  David Phillips’s assistant Anne Goodpasture was in charge of the “daily take” from both target embassies.54 That is the photographs taken from outside and the clandestine tape recordings made from inside the compounds. This is important because she then would have been the first person to see a photo of Oswald. Therefore, she should have sent for a photo of Oswald from Langley in a timely manner while Oswald was still in Mexico City. She did not. And this is one reason why she tried to lie to Lopez and Hardway about who was responsible for the daily surveillance and notes. She tried to say it was not her. But it was.55

  The work of Lopez and Hardway also caught David Phillips in another lie. Another because when Tanenbaum questioned Phillips early on, he asked him about the audio tapes of Oswald and any pictures of Oswald from Mexico City. Phillips said that they had no audio tapes because they “recycled their tapes every seven or eight days.”56 The tapes were actually recycled every ten days. But they were held for a longer time if so requested.57 Further, if any American citizen spoke broken Russian inside the Soviet consulate, the tape would be sent to Washington.58 Because he would be considered of possible operational interest to the Soviets. Oswald allegedly did speak broken Russian. But the tape was not sent back. Phillips also told Tanenbaum that the reason the CIA did not have a photo of Oswald was because their camera was out that day.59 This appears to be another lie. First of all, Oswald went to the Soviet consulate on two different days, the twen
ty-seventh and twenty-eighth. So all three of the cameras covering that site would have had to have been out on both days.60 When one adds in the coverage of the Cuban compound, the number of mechanical breakdowns gets excessive. But further, the HSCA report found no evidence of any of the cameras being broken at the time Oswald was there.61

  The new lie that Hardway and Lopez caught Phillips in was about a cable sent to CIA HQ. The surveillance of the Russian consulate revealed that by October 1, the CIA knew that Oswald was in direct contact with those who worked there, such as Valery Kostikov of the KGB. But yet, the cable alerting headquarters to this fact did not arrive until a week later, October 8. Phillips tried to explain this delay by blaming the translators for slow work. He then said he knew that was the case since he signed off on the cable.62 Hardway and Lopez found out that Phillips did not sign off on the cable, since it did not deal in any way with Cuban matters. But even worse, he could not have signed off on it because he was not in Mexico City at the time.63 The likely reason the cable was sent out so late was to keep Oswald’s profile low while he was allegedly in Mexico City. For although the October 8 cable says Oswald spoke with Kostikov, the description of Oswald is wrong, and there is no hint as to who Kostikov really was. It only says he was an embassy consul. Therefore, based on this, there would be no scrutiny of Oswald while he was there. This was a principal goal of the plot.