Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination

by Anthony Summers

  Sometime on the evening of September 24, Oswald slipped away from his New Orleans apartment.

  With two months to go until the assassination, then, the man who would be named as the assassin was at large, his true loyalties unclear—in an atmosphere of international uncertainty and— we now know—as conspiracy proliferated.

  Nearly a year after the terrifying standoff between Washington and Moscow over Cuba, tension still simmered. Four years after Castro had triumphed, overt confrontation had been replaced by a lack of clarity and covert intrigue.

  The Kennedy administration’s Cuba policy was a dangerous mix of confrontation and hesitancy. Reining in exile military activity had rendered heavily armed activists venomously hostile. Elements of the CIA, meanwhile, remained embroiled in the secret war against Castro. It included plots to assassinate the Cuban leader—plots that may have been approved by Kennedy himself.

  Key players in the murderous schemes had included not only exiles but U.S. Mafia bosses with their own reasons to see Castro gone. Those same Mafia chieftains, pursued and prosecuted to the point of desperation, loathed the Kennedy brothers.

  U.S. intelligence agencies, meanwhile, were continuing—even stepping up—undercover efforts to counter pro-Castro organizations or individuals, penetrate groups with planted agents, read their mail, work secretly to besmirch the anti-Castro cause and thwart its efforts—even take the fight beyond the frontiers of the United States.

  In that atmosphere, against that backdrop, Lee Oswald—the pro-Castro activist who was perhaps something more complex than that, a young man whose family was linked to the Mafia—began a weeklong visit to Mexico.

  IV

  ENDGAME

  Deception and Tragedy

  Chapter 19

  Exits and Entrances

  in Mexico City

  “Oswald’s visit to Mexico City in

  September–October 1963 remains one of the most vexing sub-plots to the assassination story.”

  —Assassinations Records Review Board, Final Report, 1998

  Fellow passengers would remember the young man who joined Continental Trailways bus number 5133 in the early hours of the morning of September 26, somewhere in southern Texas. He was somewhat unusual. During the journey to the Mexican border, and afterward on a Mexican bus, he positively advertised who he was and the reason for his journey.

  He sought out two Australian women, Pamela Mumford and Patricia Winston, in seats at the back of the bus to regale them with stories of his service in the Marine Corps and in the Soviet Union. He pulled out his old 1959 passport to prove he really had been in Russia. He struck up a conversation with a British couple, Bryan and Meryl McFarland, and said he had been secretary of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans. He was traveling through Mexico, he confided, in order to get to Cuba where he hoped to see Fidel Castro. At a time of tension over Cuba, when Americans traveling there were liable to prosecution on their return, this man emphasized that his destination was Havana.1

  Telling the two Australians that he had been to Mexico City before, the garrulous young man recommended the Hotel Cuba as a good place to stay.2 Within an hour of the bus arriving, however, a hotel registration form was to show, a “Lee Harvey Oswald” checked into a different place altogether—the Hotel Comercio. He was allotted Room 18.

  The young man on the bus and at the Comercio very likely was Lee Oswald. Bus and frontier records, later identification by fellow passengers, and handwriting in the hotel register, indicate strongly that Oswald did travel to Mexico City. It appears, too, that he returned to the United States six days later, again by bus.3 The truth as to what Oswald did during his stay, though, remains the subject of doubt and speculation.

  The Warren Commission was to decide that Oswald spent his leisure hours in Mexico alone, going to the movies, perhaps to a bullfight, and dining cheaply at a restaurant near his hotel. Its Report did not mention, however, the statement by another Hotel Comercio guest, who said he observed Oswald in the company of four Cubans, one of them from Florida. The hotel, it has since been reported, was a local haunt of anti-Castro Cuban exiles.

  The truth behind the Oswald visit to Mexico hinges on Cuba. For someone—someone who may not have been the authentic Oswald—appears to have used the name “Oswald” in situations that would later seem highly compromising. Was an impostor at work, at least at some stages of the Oswald stay? Was the real Lee Harvey Oswald the victim of a sophisticated setup—one that did not necessarily have anything to with the assassination?

  Far-fetched notion though that may seem, U.S. intelligence did practice impersonation in Mexico City at the relevant time—as this chapter will show. The Mexico episode is a labyrinth through which no one—official investigators included—has yet found a satisfactory way.

  For Sylvia Durán—a young Mexican woman working in the consular section of the Cuban Embassy—Friday, September 27, had been a normal morning of processing visa applications. Then, shortly before lunchtime by her account, in came a young American. She would remember him as ungainly, hesitant, unsure of himself. He asked, “Do you speak English?” and was relieved to find she did. He was Lee Harvey Oswald, an American citizen, he said, and he wanted a transit visa. He wanted to travel to Cuba, stay for a couple of weeks, then fly on to the Soviet Union. The request was urgent, as he wanted to leave in three days’ time.

  As credentials, the visitor produced the documentary harvest of Oswald’s time in the Soviet Union and New Orleans. Sylvia Durán was shown passports, old Soviet documents, correspondence with the American Communist Party, membership cards for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, identification as president of the FPCC’s New Orleans chapter, and a newspaper clipping about the demonstration that had ended in Oswald’s arrest. There was even—Durán was to say—a photograph of Oswald in custody, a policeman on each arm. She would reflect later that it had looked phony, and indeed no such photograph is known to have been taken of Oswald prior to his arrest after the assassination.

  Even at the time, Durán felt something was not right. The display of allegiance to the Cuban cause seemed strangely overdone. If the applicant was, as he claimed, a Communist Party member, why had he not arranged his visa the customary way, by applying in advance to the Communist Party in Cuba? In any case, Sylvia Durán was to point out, clearance for the onward journey to Russia was necessary before a Cuban transit visa could be issued. She would also need passport-size photographs to go with the visa application, she told the applicant, and suggested a place nearby to have some taken. Looking a little crestfallen, the visitor went off to obtain the photos.

  When he returned, pictures in hand, Sylvia Durán accepted the visa application and told the man to call in about a week. He departed, protesting that he could stay in Mexico for only three days, only to return yet again later in the afternoon. The Consulate was by then closed to the public, but the man talked his way in and rushed back to Durán’s office in a state of agitation. He said he had been to the Soviet Embassy—a visit that did occur, according to former Russian officials who spoke with the author years later—and was confident that the required visa for Russia would be granted. Could the Cubans now issue the visa to Havana?

  When Durán checked with the Soviet Embassy by phone, however, the truth turned out to be otherwise. Though they knew about Oswald, they said, it could take as long as four months for Moscow to decide on his application to go to Russia. At that, the young stranger caused a scene that Durán said she would never forget. “He didn’t want to listen,” she told the author in 1978. “His face reddened, his eyes flashed, and he shouted, ‘Impossible! I can’t wait that long!’ ” Then the Consul himself, Eusebio Azcue, stepped in and reproved the fuming American. A person like him, he said, was “harming the Cuban revolution more than helping it.”

  Azcue and the man who would soon replace him him, Alfredo Mirabal, thought the supposed U.S. Communist Party
membership card the applicant had produced looked suspect, strangely new and unused.4 (Indeed, Oswald never had joined the Party.) When the American mocked Azcue and Durán as being mere “bureaucrats,” the Consul angrily ordered him out of the building. That, Durán told the author, was the last she ever saw of him.5

  The next day, Saturday, September 28—again according to the former Soviet diplomats—there was a second Oswald visit to the Soviet Embassy. If only the officials could be convinced to give him a Soviet visa, Oswald still seemed to hope, the Cubans would clear him to travel to Havana. The three Soviets who were to say they saw him that day were, in fact—as was and often is the case with “diplomats”—intelligence agents using cover. Interviewed by the author in Moscow in 1993, separately and without prior notice, the three former agents told a consistent story.

  Oswald, they said, had arrived looking tense and nervous, begging to be given a visa at once. Impossible, they told him. As an American living in the United States, moreover, he should apply not in Mexico but to the Soviet Embassy in Washington, DC. Then the visitor told them he was sure he had been followed to the Embassy by American agents, and—perhaps to show how ready he was to confront his U.S. persecutors—tugged a handgun from his waistband. The burliest of the three agents, Valery Kostikov, gently relieved him of the weapon. Then, the conversation over and the gun returned to him—the former Soviet officials claimed—the downcast foreigner went on his way.

  Months later, when Warren Commission lawyers probed the story of Oswald in Mexico, they had the benefit of only parts of the information summarized thus far. They did, though, have limited access—grudgingly provided—to top-secret information supplied by the CIA.6 In Mexico City in 1963, from hiding places across the street from the Cuban and Soviet embassies, CIA agents routinely photographed visitors entering and leaving, bugged diplomats’ offices with concealed microphones, and eavesdropped on telephone traffic—all with the collaboration of the Mexican intelligence service.

  That the CIA did this is clear from the available record. In 1978 in Havana, moreover, intelligence officials showed the author some of the audio equipment they said they uncovered in 1964 at the Cuban mission. Every single telephone wall-socket, according to a Cuban electronics technician, contained a miniature microphone capable of transmitting conversations to CIA receiver points outside the building. The author was shown a device embedded in the arm of a chair, discovered—the Cubans said—in their Ambassador’s office, as well as photographs of the building across the street where conversations were monitored and of the agents who manned it (see Photo 35).

  Such CIA data as they were allowed to see, combined with other information, permitted the Warren Commission to build a scenario of an Oswald frantic to get to Cuba but rejected by the Communists he had expected to welcome him. The lawyers who wrote the Report were at a loss to see quite how that fitted into the overall picture of the case. Had there been serious investigation into the possibility that the assassination was not the work of a lone assassin, however, they might have read different signs in the evidence of New Orleans and Mexico. With the information available today—though there is clearly some that has still not surfaced—this tale of two cities raises serious questions.

  What if Oswald had managed to get himself a Cuban visa, had traveled to Cuba, and had then gone on to be arrested for killing President Kennedy in Dallas weeks later? Even without having that in his record, as it turned out, Oswald’s Fair Play for Cuba posturing in New Orleans, along with the apparent contacts with Communist diplomats in Mexico City, proved enormously provocative. The smoke of those contacts created immediate tension and apparently—for a dangerous moment—military alerts in both Washington and Moscow. There would be stories alleging that Oswald had been put up to the assassination by the Cubans.7 In the fragile climate of November 1963, just over a year after the Missile Crisis, this was to be a moment of great peril.

  There is reason to suspect that, during the Oswald episode in Mexico, others watched and schemed how to use his name and his activity to dark advantage—though not necessarily in connection with the assassination of the President. What can we really say that the authentic Oswald did in Mexico City?

  When the troublesome American visited the Cuban mission, Consul Azcue had been working out the last weeks of his tour of duty in Mexico. He was back in Havana by the time the President was killed, and at first assumed—as did virtually everyone else—that the Oswald arrested in Dallas was one and the same as the man he had met. Then, two or three weeks later, Azcue watched a cinema newsreel that included scenes of Oswald under arrest for murder and being shot and killed by Jack Ruby. Those pictures of the alleged assassin, the former Consul told the House Assassinations Committee in 1978, “in no way resembled” the man who had made a scene in his office.

  Azcue remembered the man in his office as having been “maybe thirty-five years old,” “of medium height,” with features quite different from those of the authentic Oswald. The film, as Azcue said, shows a young man with a youthful, unlined face. It was, according to the Consul, “in radical contrast to the deeply lined face” of the man who—he said—came asking for a visa. The Lee Oswald arrested in Dallas was just twenty-four, 5’9½” tall, and very slim. Shown still photographs of the authentic Oswald, Azcue continued to say he believed “this gentleman was not, is not, the person or the individual who went to the Consulate.”

  The Consul’s former colleague, Alfredo Mirabal, did not share Azcue’s certainty but acknowledged that he saw the visitor only briefly when he peered out of his office to see what the fuss was about. Azcue, meanwhile, consistently maintained that he met someone other than the real Oswald. Was he mistaken? What of Sylvia Durán, who spent more time with the visa applicant than anyone else?

  In her interviews with the author, Durán said that it never occurred to her in 1963 that the Dallas Oswald and the Oswald at the Consulate might have been different people. It had been not any visual image she initially saw but the name “Lee Oswald” in the newspaper after the assassination that made her think at once of the person who came to her office.8 The brief news footage of Oswald being shot had not led her to think the victim was other than the man she had encountered.

  In 1979, however, when the author arranged for Durán to see the longer TV interview of Oswald made in New Orleans, she said she “was not sure if it was Oswald or not … the man on the film is not like the man I saw here in Mexico City… . The man on this film speaks strongly and carries himself with confidence. The man who came to my office in Mexico City was small and weak and spoke in a trembling voice.”

  In notes she made on the incident, Durán wrote that the visa applicant had been at most about 5’6” tall. “Short … about my size,” she told Assassinations Committee staff. Durán is a little woman, only 5’3½”. Again, the authentic Oswald’s height was 5’9 ½”.

  In her very first interview, responding to questioning the day after the assassination, Durán described the Oswald at the Embassy as having been “rubio, bajo”—which translates as “blond [or “fair-haired”], short.”9 Azcue, for his part, told the Assassinations Committee that he remembered the visitor as having been “dark blond.” Oswald, according to an FBI document dated August 1963, had “light brown” hair.

  One might put these anomolies down to faulty memory—and dismiss the discrepancy over the visa applicant’s height—were it not for the spontaneous recollection of another Mexico City witness.

  Oscar Contreras was a law student at Mexico City’s National University in 1963. One evening at the time of the Oswald incidents in Mexico, he told the author, he and three friends were sitting in a university cafeteria talking. They all held leftist views, and he belonged to a group that supported the Castro revolution—as did many Mexicans—and had contacts in the Cuban Embassy. As they chatted, a man at a nearby table came over and introduced himself, spelling out his entire name—“Lee Harvey Oswald.”

>   Contreras and his friends laughed, for “Harvey” and “Oswald” were familiar to them as the names of characters in a popular cartoon about rabbits. Indeed, Contreras said, that was why the name stuck in his mind.

  Like Consul Azcue, Contreras said the “Oswald” he met that evening looked older than thirty. Like Sylvia Durán, he recalled that Oswald was short—he, too, thought at most 5’6”. Contreras, who was himself 5’9”, clearly recalled having looked down at the man he still remembered as “Oswald the Rabbit.”

  With minor variations, Contreras’ “Oswald” offered the students a familiar account of his background.10 He had had to leave Texas, he said, because the FBI was bothering him. He declared that life in the United States was not for him. He wanted to go to Cuba, but for some reason the people at the Cuban Consulate were so far blocking his visa application. Could the students help—through their friends in the Embassy? Contreras and his friends said they would try.

  When they talked to their Cuban contacts—they included Consul Azcue and a Cuban intelligence officer—they were warned to break off contact with this “Oswald.” The Cubans said they suspected that his purpose was to infiltrate left-wing groups. When Oswald next came to see them, Contreras and his student friends told him that the Cubans did not trust him and were not going to give him a visa. “Oswald,” who ended up spending the night at the students’ apartment, was still begging for help in getting to Cuba when he left the following morning.

  The next time Contreras heard the name Oswald, he said, was after the assassination. He had no love for the United States and did not report his encounter with “Oswald” to American authorities. Only four years later, having made the acquaintance of the then U.S. Consul, did he mention it in conversation. The Assassinations Committee found records showing that the lead had been considered “the first significant development in the investigation of the Kennedy assassination after 1965.”