Oswald, Mexico, and Deep Politics

by Peter Dale Scott

  Partly to ensure that the CI/SIG would not be too sympathetic to the rest of the CIA, Angleton entrusted it to an ex-FBI agent. Birch D. O’Neal.11 O’Neal had been pan of a wartime FBI overseas operation (the SIS) that had been bitterly competitive with the CIA’s predecessor agency, the OSS. It has been suggested that Hoover so mistrusted the CIA that he arranged for some of his FBI/SIS veterans to resign from the FBI and join the CIA as penetration agents. FBI veterans in the Agency (many of them close to Angleton) included O’Neal. William Harvey (Angleton’s predecessor as Counterintelligence Chief), Mexico City Station Chief Win Scott, and at least one other relevant officer (George Munroe) of the Mexico City CIA station.12 According to Dick Russell, Munroe was "the CIA’s leading surveillance man in Mexico City, responsible for the electronic bugging of the Soviet and Cuban embassies."13

  The falsified "Lee Henry Oswald" cables of October 1963, which became part of a CI/SIG file on "Lee Henry Oswald" going back to 1960, were supervised by officers of this small Angleton-FBI veterans clique in Cl. One can imagine that this clique had used their falsified file on "Lee Henry Oswald’ as pan of the CI/SIG’s search for a KGB penetration agent, or "mole," within the CIA’s ranks. This search became particularly active in 1963, the year of falsified cable traffic about Oswald.14

  It is certain however that the effect of the falsified Oswald documentation, consciously or accidentally, was to incriminate him falsely as an apparent KGB assassin. One day after the assassination, the CIA Counterintelligence staff speculated on the sinister implications of Oswald’s alleged contact with Kostikov; and it continued to do so for years after.15 For Kostikov was not just a known KGB agent: he was suspected by Counterintelligence officials in the FBI and CIA of working for the KGB’s Department Thirteen, which according to a contemporary CIA memo was "responsible for sabotage and assassination."16 This falsified picture of Oswald as a potential KGB assassin, though never used by the Warren Commission against him, almost certainly contributed to the Warren Commission’s determination to close the case as the work of a lone assassin.17 The alleged Oswald Kostikov-Department Thirteen connection must have seemed particularly ominous after the Commission was informed by Richard Helms that

  The Thirteenth Department headquarters, according to very reliable information, conducts interviews or, as appropriate, file reviews on every foreign military defector to the USSR to study and to determine the possibility of utilizing the defector in his country of origin.18

  CIA and FBI officials have since said that their respective agencies made mistakes in their handling of the Oswald case prior to Kennedy’s murder. Yet the Counterintelligence staffs of CIA and FBI. who were responsible for the alleged mistakes, were also given the responsibility for investigating the Kennedy assassination afterwards. The CI/SIG in particular, which had misrepresented Oswald within the CIA, was given responsibility for liaison on the assassination with the CI staff in the FBI, who were given secret FBI reprimands for having failed to put Oswald on the FBI’s Security Index.19

  FBI and CIA officials, especially those in CI, continued to conceal and misrepresent the facts, first to the Warren Commission, and later to the House Committee.20 A typical example was a CIA Counterintelligence memo recommending that Helms "wait out the Commission" in its request for CIA documents, which justified the withholding of information about the "mystery man" problem in Mexico City, because the "items refer to aborted leads."21 The least damning excuse for CI personnel having been put by their superiors in a position to do this is that Oswald (or at a minimum the erroneous Oswald record, salted with errors) was indeed pan of some covert intelligence operation.

  Possibility of an Oswald Impostor in Mexico City

  Thanks to the Lopez Report, we now know how shaky, if not implausible, were the foundations of the original CIA claim in 1963 that Oswald had met with Kostikov.22 On October 1, 1963, two months before the assassination of President Kennedy, CIA surveillance at the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City overheard a man, who apparently spoke in broken Russian, identify himself as Lee Oswald, and talk of his contact with Kostikov, an Embassy Consular official.23

  The newly released evidence in the Lopez Report makes it likely that this man, who identified himself as Oswald, was in fact an impostor. It is almost certain, moreover, that a Mexico City CIA official misrepresented the conversation in order to prevent this likelihood from being disclosed.24

  From the time of the Warren Report to the present, key facts about this alleged Oswald-Kostikov contact have continued to be suppressed. Despite these gaps in the public record, there is new evidence for four propositions indicating a conspiracy in Mexico City to incriminate Oswald.

  --- The first is that Oswald was impersonated at the Cuban Consulate in Mexico by someone else, a man over thirty, about five foot six, thin, with blonde hair. (The Oswald arrested in Dallas was aged twenty-four, five foot nine, and had brown hair.)

  --- The second is that someone who phoned the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, identified himself as Lee Oswald, and referred to his meeting with Kostikov, was in fact not Oswald at all, but someone whose Russian (unlike Oswald’s) was extremely poor.

  --- The third is that a tape of this phone conversation, which could have proven conclusively whether Oswald was or was not being impersonated, was preserved by the CIA for some time longer than was originally claimed; almost certainly (despite misleading denials) it survived the assassination.

  --- The fourth is that CIA officials in Mexico City helped to conceal the truth about these matters, by lying to their own superiors in Washington, and later to the House Select Committee on Assassinations. In particular these officials, along with members of the CI/SIG staff in Washington and others, complicated the matter still further, by circulating a false description of the alleged impostor, one that in fact fitted neither him nor the man he impersonated.

  It is important to repeat that these CIA lies do not prove the involvement of CIA officials in the conspiracy to kill the President. As we shall see, however, CIA behavior appears to have augmented the fear at that time of unnecessary war, which is said in turn to have motivated Chief Justice Earl Warren’s pursuit of Oswald as a lone assassin.

  The Short Blonde Older Oswald Impostor

  In 1978 the House Select Committee heard testimony from two former Cuban Consulate officials, Consul Eusebio Azcue and Silvia Durán. Each testified separately that the "Oswald" whom they dealt with was short, blonde, and over 30.25 The corroboration was the more significant in that Azcue was first deposed by the Committee in Cuba, and Durán, a Mexican national, in Mexico City. The two witnesses said they had not been in touch with each other for some years.

  Nevertheless critics were reluctant to make too much of this discordant testimony. One reason is that Durán (3 AH 118). unlike Azcue (3 AH 139), thought that the visitor to the Consulate was the same as the man killed by Jack Ruby in Dallas. Another reason was because the Warren Report contained an alleged summary of a Durán interview in 1963, containing nothing which would distinguish the man she interviewed from the assassin in Dallas. This summary is cited by Gerald Posner, in his recent book Case Closed, to support his statement that Silvia Durán "positively identified the visitor as Oswald," and to suggest, wrongly, that Azcue is alone in describing the visitor as a short older blonde.26

  One new revelation is that Durán’s interview summary from 1963, as published in the Warren Report, was rewritten and censored. For the first time we learn that the original report of Durán’s interview by the Mexican Security Police (DFS), seen in November 1963 by the Mexico CIA station but never by the Warren Commission, was significantly different. More specifically she described him as an "individual who was blonde, short, dressed unelegantly and whose face turned red when angry."27

  This description actually reached the staff of the Warren Commission from the CIA.28 But some months later these words were removed from a rewritten summary of Durán’s testimony, and only the rewritten, censored summary was published by
the Warren Commission.29 According to the Lopez Report, it was the CIA who "deleted Durán’s description of Oswald as blonde and short."30 The public record indicates that the rewritten summary came from the Mexican Security Police or DFS (Dirección Federal de Seguridad) in their Ministry of Government.31 But as the House Committee recognized, these Mexican authorities collaborated very closely with the CLA. (The Minister was said to be "in Scott’s pocket" and may have been on the CIA payroll.)32

  One can see why it would have been embarrassing to the Warren Commission’s lone assassin hypothesis to have published Silvia Durán’s description of him as blonde, short, and "dressed unelegantly." The visa application submitted by Oswald to Durán showed a photograph, said by Posner to have been taken the same day "at a nearby shop recommended by Durán."33 As in no other photo or description of Oswald, the "Oswald" in this unique photograph is dressed like a Harvard student, with a dress shirt, necktie, and pullover sweater. As we shall see, former KGB officer Oleg Nechiporenko, describing his encounters with "Oswald" in the Soviet Embassy, denies that the visitor wore such attire, and agrees with Durán that he was dressed inelegantly. Thus Nechiporenko, used by Posner and others to rebut the "impostor" hypothesis, can also be cited on the other side, to support the discordant testimony of Durán and Azcue.

  Further evidence that the Oswald in the Cuban Consulate was an impostor has just been made public in a new book by former House Committee investigator Gaeton Fonzi. According to Fonzi, the CIA actually had two "assets," or double agents, working inside the Cuban Consulate at the time of the "Oswald" visit. These two assets were located and interviewed in 1978 by Ed Lopez, without the Agency’s permission. The assets told Lopez

  that the consensus among employees within the Cuban Consulate after the Kennedy assassination was that it wasn’t Oswald who had been there. The assets said that they reponed that to the Agency but there were no documents in the CLA file noting that fact.34

  In any case, anti-conspiratorial books like Case Closed will no longer be able to claim that Azcue was unsupported in his allegations of a short blonde impostor. Azcue’s claim is further supported by the fact, long rumored but never before officially corroborated, that the CLA, with thorough photographic surveillance of both the Cuban and Soviet Embassies, had at least ten opportunities to photograph Oswald, yet CIA records at the time of the assassination allegedly did not contain a single photograph matching the man arrested in Dallas.35

  We now learn from the Lopez Report that CIA experts told the Committee it was unlikely that the surveillance could have failed to photograph Oswald. Some of them, furthermore, reported that photos of Oswald were taken and delivered to CIA headquarters near Washington. Winston Scott, then Chief of the Mexico City CIA station, later wrote in an unpublished memoir that "persons watching these embassies photographed Oswald as he entered and left each one, and clocked the time he spent on each visit."36 After Scott died, this memoir was retrieved and sequestered by CIA Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton. Allegedly Angleton also made off with a profile photo of Oswald entering the Soviet Embassy.37

  It remains to be learned whether a search of the photographic surveillance product would show photos of a man who was short, blonde, and over thirty. The CIA did release some photographs to the Committee, and Silvia Durán, when shown these, failed to identify any of them as her visitor. But the CIA never released the photos from the special "pulse camera" which they had just installed to watch the Cuban Consulate, shortly before Oswald’s visit. Worse, when the Committee asked for the "pulse camera" photos, the CIA replied, falsely, that this camera had not been in operation until three months later 38

  Did an Oswald Impostor Phone the Soviet Embassy?

  The possibility of an impostor at the Cuban Consulate raises the question of why, on October 8, 1963, the CIA Station reported that one week earlier someone had telephoned the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, identified himself as Lee Oswald, and referred to a previous meeting with the Soviet Consul.39 According to the cable of October 8, 1963 sent from the Mexican City CIA Station to Headquarters, this individual said he "spoke with Consul whom he believed to be Valeriy Vladimirovich Kostikov" (4 AH 212). In contrast, according to the summary of the transcript quoted in the Lopez Report, "Oswald. . . said that he did not remember the name of the Consul with whom he had spoken. Obyedkov [the guard with whom "Oswald" was currently speaking] asked if it had been Kostikov. . . .The man outside replied affirmatively and repeated that his name was Oswald."40

  The difference could be immensely important. If the cable is accurate, "Oswald" (whether the real Oswald or an impostor) is responsible for initiating the impression of a sinister KGB connection. If the transcript is correct, and the name of Kostikov did not come from the lips of the alleged "Oswald." that impression was created by a misleading CIA cable. In the first case, a conspiratorial deception could have been foisted on the CIA by someone else. In the second case, the deception arose within the CIA itself.41

  Whatever the facts, the report of this conversation cast a lengthy shadow over the investigation of the President’s murder. After the assassination, it led senior CIA officials to talk of an Oswald-Kostikov meeting, which they took as possible evidence of a high-level Oswald-KGB plot. (These senior officials included Win Scott, the head of the Mexico City CIA station, James Angleton, the chief of CIA Counterintelligence, Angleton’s deputy Ray Rocca, and Angleton loyalist Tennant Bagley at CIA Headquarters.)42

  For some time it has been suspected that the caller was not Oswald. The newly declassified Lopez Report and CIA cables reveal that CIA translators who listened to the tape identified the caller as someone who had phoned the Embassy three days earlier and spoken ‘‘broken," indeed "terrible, hardly recognizable Russian."43 This could hardly be Lee Harvey Oswald, who reportedly spoke Russian reasonably well even before his three years in the Soviet Union. (Oswald had spoken Russian for two hours in California with a friend’s aunt, Rosaleen Quinn, who had been studying Russian for over a year with a Berlitz tutor in preparation for the State Department’s foreign language examination. Ms. Quinn reported to author Edward Jay Epstein that Oswald "had a far more confident command of the language than she did.")44 Marina Oswald, when she met Oswald in 1961, "found his Russian so fluent that she simply believed he was from a different Russian-speaking region."45

  Furthermore the misleading incrimination of Oswald, by linking him to the alleged KGB assassinations expert Kostikov, was reinforced by members of the Mexico City CIA Station. A memo was prepared (by an unidentified Ms. X) stating that it had been "determined" (as opposed to "claimed") that Oswald "had been at the Soviet Embassy on 28 September 1963 and had talked with" Kostikov. Though the discussion concerned a visa, which would make the Kostikov contact seem more innocent, the memo did not show this. Instead it claimed, in language which the Lopez Report found "misleading," that "we have no clarifying information with regard to this request."46 Almost certainly these allegations were "determined" by comparing the intercepts and transcripts of September 28 and October 1, which a) were indeed determined to have been made by the same caller, b) contained no further evidence of an actual Oswald-Kostikov meeting, and c) were known to be part of a sequence of intercepts which clearly had as their subject Oswald’s request for a Soviet visa.47

  CIA Headquarters, which was concerned about the Kostikov contact and had asked to be informed, did not learn about the visa request until after the assassination. According to the Lopez Report, witnesses suggested that information not directly transmitted to CIA Headquarters may have been provided to them indirectly through the FBI48 It is clear that some information not in the CIA cables (such as alleged Oswald visits to the Embassies on September 27) did reach CIA Headquarters. It is possible that this information was communicated through a CIA Counterintelligence back channel, since CI maintained its own communication network and cipher that was independent of the regular CIA cable traffic.

  Was the Tape of This Conversation Destroyed?
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br />   The evidence is extremely confused as to how long the CIA preserved its tape of the October 1 phone conversation, which could have proven conclusively that Oswald was being impersonated. Having studied the CIA files and listened to many witnesses, the authors of the Lopez Report concluded that tapes of the two conversations, on September 28 and October 1, were preserved at least until mid-October, by which time Langley had expressed interest in the Oswald-Kostikov contact. A key piece of evidence was a note placed in the files by Annie Goodpasture, an officer in the Mexico City station. She wrote "The caller from the Cuban Embassy [on September 28] was unidentified until HQ [Langley] sent traces on Oswald and voices [on the two tapes] compared by [deleted: (the translators)]."49 All of a brief section of the Lopez Report, entitled "Voice Comparisons," is deleted.

  Yet the same officer sent a cable on November 23 saying, in part, "Station unable compare voice as first tape [of September 28] erased prior receipt of second call [of October 1]." The Lopez Report twice called this statement "highly unlikely/as inconsistent with sworn testimony, other CIA cables, and what was known of CIA procedures. Once we question this account of the destruction of the tapes, all CIA accounts of when they were destroyed become more suspect.

  In both FBI and CIA records, there are indications that the tapes, which could have proven a conspiracy to incriminate Oswald, survived the assassination, yet were withheld from authorities after Oswald had been arrested for the murder of President Kennedy. This would of course appear to be a serious, possibly criminal, interference with a criminal investigation, one denying both justice to Oswald and the truth to law enforcement and the American people. It is likely moreover that numerous attestations by officials to the tapes’ erasure are either false or deliberately misleading.