by Jim Marrs
Who issued Oswald an unregistered Minox “spy” camera? More important, why did the FBI attempt to have Dallas police change their reports to indicate a light meter was found rather than a camera?
In 1976, a CIA document was released that showed that the agency indeed had considered Oswald for recruitment. This contradicted the sworn Warren Commission testimony of CIA official Richard Helms, who stated the agency had never had “or even contemplated” any contact with Oswald. This document, written by an unidentified CIA officer three days after Kennedy’s assassination, states “we showed intelligence interest” in Oswald and “discussed . . . the laying on of interviews.”
Harry J. Dean, who said he participated in undercover operations against Castro as well as the infiltration of such organizations as the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, the Minutemen, and the John Birch Society for the CIA, claimed Oswald shot no one in Dallas, but was set up to take the blame for the assassination by a conspiracy headed by US congressman John Rousselot and General Edwin Walker. Dean also explained that “Oswald wasn’t in the Security Index because the FBI officials knew that he was working to preserve security, not hinder it.”
An internal CIA cable dated October 16, 1963, indicated that more than a month prior to the assassination at least six senior CIA officials were apprised by a “usually reliable and extremely sensitive source” that a Lee Oswald had visited the Soviet embassy in Mexico City in September. The memo stated this Oswald was “probably identical” to a “Lee Henry Oswald,” a Marine radar operator who had renounced his US citizenship in Russia. A later CIA message on October 22 corrected the name to Lee Harvey Oswald.
“The CIA would have kept the names of these highly-regarded officers—Tom Karamessines, Bill Hood, John Whitten (‘John Scelso’), Jane Roman, and Betty Egeter—secret for thirty years,” wrote Jefferson Morley, a former editor at the Washington Post, in 2012. “Why? Because the officers most knowledgeable about Oswald reported to two of the most powerful men in the CIA: Deputy Director Richard Helms and Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton.”
Morley added, “We can’t do much about the JFK tragedy at this late date, but we can acknowledge that CIA negligence led directly to the president’s death. The officers who obscured information about Oswald should be stripped of any medals or commendations they received for their job performance in 1963. Fifty years later, it’s time for accountability.”
But others saw much more than negligence involved in this obfuscation of Oswald’s records prior to the assassination. There are the questions concerning a CIA “201” file on Oswald discovered only in 1977. The existence of this file came to light after a Freedom of Information Act request by assassination researchers. Many persons knowledgeable about the agency equate a 201 file with a personnel file, implying Oswald had worked for the CIA. Agency officials told the House Select Committee on Assassinations that the file on Oswald was nothing unusual and reflected merely that Oswald had “potential intelligence or counterintelligence significance.” However, at least three former CIA officers have stated publicly that the mere existence of a 201 file on Oswald indicated a relationship between the ex-Marine and the agency.
Victor Marchetti, formerly an executive assistant to the CIA’s deputy director, said, “Basically, if Oswald had a 201 file, he was an agent.”
Bradley E. Ayers, a CIA officer who trained anti-Castro Cubans, added, “[A 201 file meant Oswald was] either a contract agent, working for them full time, or he was on some kind of assignment for the CIA.”
Former CIA agent Patrick McGarvey, said, “If a guy has a 201 file, that means he’s a professional staff employee of the organization.”
The CIA went to great lengths to convince the House Committee that possessing a 201 file on Oswald—and that keeping this information secret for nearly fifteen years—was in no way suspicious.
The committee, however, found many problems with the 201 file. For example, Oswald’s file reportedly was opened on December 9, 1960, yet a confidential State Department telegram reporting Oswald’s attempted defection to Russia—cause enough to open a file on him—was sent to the CIA back on October 31, 1959.
Other problems with the Oswald file are that a former official with the CIA’s Directorate of Operations records explained an “AG” code on the file that varied from the official agency explanation that this pertained to American defectors. Also, the 201 file was under the name “Lee Henry Oswald,” leading the committee to wonder whether dual files were kept (a suspicion the CIA denied). One CIA memo indicated as many as thirty-seven documents were missing from the Oswald file, although agency officials later claimed they were missing only at the time the memo was written.
Further, a recently obtained CIA document states that Oswald’s 201 file filled “two four-drawer safes,” yet the House committee was given a virtually empty folder.
Oswald’s role with the CIA was cemented in 1995 with the publication of Oswald and the CIA by the respected military historian John M. Newman, who discovered by analyzing internal CIA messages that Oswald, knowingly or unknowingly, was being used operationally by the agency prior to the JFK assassination. This shocking information—that Oswald was being used by the CIA prior to the assassination—apparently was not considered newsworthy by the corporate mass media, which failed to widely report on this development.
Another minor but intriguing fact indicating Oswald’s spy work is that at the time of his arrest, he was carrying a three-by-two-inch top of a department-store box labeled “Cox’s Ft. Worth.” Intelligence agents have been known to carry such innocuous but unusual items, called bona fides, to identify themselves to other agents. The box top’s significance is enhanced by the fact that it was not included in the Warren Commission exhibits, which presented thousands of less relevant items.
However, the whole question of Oswald’s connection to US intelligence is so full of claims and counterclaims, deceit and misinformation, it is unlikely the whole truth of the matter will ever be resolved.
What is known—or at least believed by most people who have studied the issue at any depth—is that the weight of the evidence proves Oswald was in some way connected with US intelligence work, exactly as his mother always claimed.
While at the time of the JFK assassination the official story was that no US government agency had been interested in Oswald or knew of his whereabouts, it is now known that both the CIA and the FBI were keeping a close watch on the ex-Marine’s activities. Oswald’s alleged trip to Mexico City between September 26 and October 3, 1963, is a case in point. According to the Warren Commission, Oswald was in Mexico City to visit the Soviet and Cuban embassies. Proof of these visits came from the statements of a Cuban embassy employee, Silvia Duran, and from CIA operatives monitoring the Soviet embassy.
On October 10, 1963, yet another CIA teletype went to the State Department, the FBI, immigration authorities, and the Department of the Navy regarding the “possible presence of Subject [Oswald] in Mexico City”:
On October 1, 1963, a reliable and sensitive source in Mexico reported that an American male, who identified himself as Lee Oswald, contacted the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. . . . The American was described as approximately 35 years old, with an athletic build, about six feet tall, with a receding hairline. . . . It is believed that Oswald may be identical to Lee Harvey Oswald, born on 18 October 1939 in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Obviously this description did not match that of the twenty-three-year-old, five-foot-nine, slender Oswald in Dallas.
The Warren Commission, seriously concerned about the ties between Oswald and the Soviets and Cubans in Mexico City, asked the CIA for documentation of Oswald’s activities. After months of foot-dragging, the agency could provide only the unsupported statement of Duran as proof that Oswald had been at the Cuban embassy.
Not shown to the Warren Commission was a cable the director of the CIA sent to its station in Mexico City urging the secret arrest of Silvia Duran on the day after the assassi
nation. Duran, a twenty-six-year-old Mexican national, had been employed at the Cuban embassy only one month before Oswald allegedly arrived in Mexico. Her predecessor had been killed in an automobile accident. The CIA cable regarding Duran’s arrest, declassified only in recent years, stated:
Arrest of Silvia Duran is extremely serious matter which could prejudice US freedom of action on entire question of Cuban responsibility. . . . With full regard for Mexican interests, request you ensure that her arrest is kept absolutely secret, that no information from her is published or leaked, that all such info is cabled to us, and that fact of her arrest and her statements are not spread to leftist or disloyal circles in the Mexican government.
In a 1978 article, Mark Lane concluded:
This almost incredible cable reveals the extent of CIA control over Mexican police officials, many of whom had been trained by the CIA, and many of whom were engaged by the CIA while they ostensibly worked for the Mexican government. The CIA’s willingness to order Mexican police officials to make false statements to their own superiors and to mislead the “circles in the Mexican government” provides an insight into the CIA’s desperation to secure some evidence to prove . . . that Oswald had gone to the Cuban Embassy.
Apparently the statements that Duran gave to the Mexican authorities were not to their liking. She was not released for several days and only then after she had identified Oswald as the man who visited the embassy.
Once free, Duran began to speak of her experience. This prompted yet another CIA cable, which ordered CIA personnel to have Duran rearrested, but to conceal who was behind the action. A portion of this cable stated, “To be certain that there is no misunderstanding between us, we want to insure that Silvia Duran gets no impression that Americans are behind her re-arrest. In other words we want Mexican authorities to take responsibility for the whole affair.”
Duran was rearrested and would not speak of her experiences afterward. She was never interviewed or called as a witness by the Warren Commission, which never learned of her two arrests.
Since the Oswald in the Cuban embassy apparently made quite a scene when told he could not get a visa to Cuba in three days—he shouted and called the embassy personnel “bureaucrats”—he should have been well remembered by Duran and others there. But in 1978, Cuban consul Eusebio Azcue told the House Select Committee on Assassinations that he was convinced the man who visited the embassy in 1963 was not the Oswald arrested in Dallas. After viewing photos of Oswald, Azcue stated, “My belief is that this gentleman was not, is not, the person or the individual who went to the consulate.”
Silvia Duran—perhaps due to her experience in the hands of the police—has maintained over the years that the man was Oswald. However, in 1979, author Anthony Summers arranged for her to watch films of Lee Harvey Oswald. Duran, who admitted that her identification of Oswald was more from the name than from the fuzzy newspaper photos printed at the time, watched the Oswald films and concluded, “I 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.” To add to Duran’s confusion, she recalled the man who visited the consulate was short, no more than five feet six inches in height—far shorter than the five-foot-nine Lee Oswald.
While the CIA stated that both the Cuban and Soviet embassies were under photographic surveillance during Oswald’s visits, they could offer no proof. Lamely, CIA officials explained to the Warren Commission that the camera at the Soviet embassy was turned off on Saturdays (the day Oswald supposedly visited) and that the camera at the Cuban embassy just happened to break down the day Oswald was there. However, the day of the assassination, CIA officials sent photos taken outside the Soviet embassy in Mexico City to the FBI, claiming they were of Oswald. They are obviously of someone else. This someone appears to be about thirty-five years old, six feet tall, with an athletic build. CIA officials admitted there had been a “mix-up” on the photos.
The absence of any valid photos of Oswald at the embassies raises suspicion that an impostor was posing as Oswald during these embassy visits. Further evidence of this comes from an episode involving tape recordings. In 1976, at the onset of the House assassinations investigation, CIA officer David Atlee Phillips, stationed in Mexico City at the time of Oswald’s alleged visit, told the House committee’s general counsel that the CIA had tape-recorded conversations between Oswald and the Soviet embassy but had not told the Warren Commission. When pressed on why the tapes, clear proof of Oswald’s Mexican visits, had not been given to the Commission, Phillips said they had been routinely destroyed about a week after Oswald’s visit since prior to the assassination Oswald was not considered important.
It should be noted that in its report on Oswald’s Mexico City visit, the House committee concluded that the CIA station there did not report all information on Oswald “in an accurate and expeditious manner prior to the assassination” to CIA headquarters.
Phillips’s testimony was thrown into doubt when, long after his 1976 testimony, a five-page FBI document dated November 23, 1963, became public. According to this document, which was not seen by the Warren Commission, FBI agents who were questioning Oswald in Dallas were informed by CIA officers that Oswald had contacted the Soviet embassy in Mexico City. The report went on to state, “Special agents of this Bureau, who have conversed with Oswald in Dallas, Texas, have observed photographs of the individual referred to above and have listened to a recording of his voice. These special agents are of the opinion that the above-referred-to individual was not Lee Harvey Oswald.”
If this FBI report is correct, then the CIA wiretap tape of Oswald was not destroyed in October but was available to bureau agents the day after the assassination. When, then, was this evidence destroyed and by whom?
One disturbing aspect of all this is that either the CIA notified other agencies in October that Oswald was in Mexico City, not knowing the man was an impostor, then failed to follow up on their mistake later. Or, more ominously, the agency knowingly participated in a scheme to place Oswald in Mexico City at that time—nearly two months before the assassination. Was this an attempt to link Oswald with the Soviets and Cuba? Or was another Oswald in Mexico City intent on delivering the cancer-causing agent, prompting the need for an impostor to divert attention from the cancer plot?
It is equally disturbing that the House Select Committee on Assassinations made a three hundred–page report on these mysterious happenings in Mexico City, then failed to put it into its published report claiming the information was withheld to protect the CIA’s “sensitive sources and methods.”
Another Mexico incident, which has been misreported for years, concerns a note from Oswald to a “Mr. Hunt.”
A Message from Oswald
In August 1975, Texas JFK researcher Penn Jones Jr. received a typewritten letter in Spanish from Mexico City signed only with the initials “P.S.” Translated, the letter read:
Dear Sir:
At the end of last year I gave Mr. [Clarence] Kelly, the director of the FBI, a letter from Lee Oswald. To my understanding it could have brought out the circumstances to the assassination of President Kennedy.
Since Mr. Kelly hasn’t responded to that letter, I’ve got the right to believe something bad might happen to me, and that is why I see myself obligated to keep myself away for a short time.
Convinced of the importance of that letter mentioned and knowing that you have been doing some investigation independently of the assassination, I’m sending you a copy of the same letter.
Accompanying this typed letter was a copy of a handwritten note in English dated November 8, 1963, that reads:
Dear Mr. Hunt,
I would like information concer[n]ing my position. I am asking only for information.
I am suggesting that we discuss the matter fully before any steps are taken by me or anyone else.
Thank you,
Lee Harvey Oswald
Jones, too, sent this information to the FBI and he, too, received
no reply.
Earl Golz, a reporter for the Dallas Morning News, later obtained a copy of the Oswald note from Jones. He had three handwriting experts in Dallas compare the note to known examples of Oswald’s handwriting. The experts all agreed that the handwriting was the same. The Dallas Morning News carried an accurate account of the strange note and asked whether “Mr. Hunt” might refer to Dallas oilman H. L. Hunt. However, handwriting experts for both the FBI and the House Select Committee on Assassinations were suspicious of the letter’s legitimacy. Joseph P. McNally, a former NYPD crime lab commander and a veteran examiner of questioned documents, told the committee that because the Oswald letter was a photo reproduction and that some oddities in Oswald’s signature were found, experts were unable to reach a conclusion as to the letter’s authenticity, “although the writing pattern or the overall letter designs are consistent with those as written on the other documents.”
In 1983, it was learned that the FBI studied the note with the idea it may have been intended for Hunt’s son, Nelson Bunker Hunt. The results of the FBI probe, however, have never been made public.
Jones pointed out that the note came from Mexico City and that allegedly CIA officer E. Howard Hunt, who was in charge of anti-Castro Cubans at the time, was stationed there along with David Atlee Phillips during Oswald’s reported visit.
Jones told this author, “To me, knowing Hunt’s background with the Cuban Revolutionary Committee and the CIA, it makes more sense that the note is addressed to E. Howard Hunt.”
But since neither the FBI nor the two official government investigations appears to have taken an interest in the note, there the matter rests.
The fact of the Oswald note and its accompanying letter leads some assassination researchers to believe that Oswald’s brief and mysterious visit to Mexico City might provide clues that US government agents were behind the assassination.