Oswald, Mexico, and Deep Politics

by Peter Dale Scott

  (WR 303; WCE 2564, 25 WH 814-15; cf. 3 AH 137, 142)

  This application was supplied by the Cubans in late August 1964, too late for the Warren Commission to investigate it further. Fourteen years later the House Committee confirmed from the man who signed the "Observations", Cuban consul Alfredo Mirabal, that Oswald actually "presented a card or credentials as belonging to the Communist Party of the United States" (3 AH 176).

  Consul Mirabal also shared with the Committee his suspicions about this card:

  I was surprised by the fact the card seemed to be a new card. I must say that I also have been a Communist for a number of years and that generally we do not use credentials or a card to identify ourselves as members of the party. Rather we are identified to ourselves as Communists by our own behavior and by our own ideas. I was surprised by his unusual interest in using identification as a Communist. I think it would be interesting to know how he obtained the card. It did have his name, and it did coincide with the same name that appeared in the other document. (3 AH 176)

  Silvia Durán also communicated her suspicions:

  When he said he was a member of the Party, of the Communist Party, the American, I said why don’t they arrange, the Party, your Party with the Cuban Party, and he said that he didn’t have the time to do it. . . .It was strange. I mean because if you are a Communist and you’re coming from a country where the Communist Party is not very well seen, and in Mexico City that the Communist Party was not legal at that moment—crossing the border with all of his paper, it was not logical. I mean, if you’re really Communist, you go with anything, I mean just nothing, just your passport, that’s all. . . . it was strange, travelling with all of his documents just to prove one thing. . . .He said that he was a Communist. That was strange. Because it would be really easy for him to get the visa through the Communist Party. (3 AH 34, 35, 57)

  However Silvia Durán’s published testimony, while recalling that Oswald said he was a member of the Communist Party, incongruously omits the Communist Party card from the list of political documents which Oswald submitted to her:

  He show me letters to [sic: from?] the Communist Party, the American Communist Party, his labor card. . . from Russia, his [uh] marriage pact. . . .And a card saying that he was a member of the Fair Play for Cuba in New Orleans. (3 AH 33)

  This list of political documents (the FPCC card, the Soviet work permit, the Soviet marriage license) is roughly consistent with the Warren Commission version (significantly revised, as we shall see) of her statement in November 1963 to the Mexican Security Police, or DFS (25 WH 588). (However the Warren version of the list contains nothing pertinent to the Communist Party—a significant omission we shall return to). The list is also consistent with Oswald’s noted attachments to the political document in his handwriting (WCE 93) which the Warren Report connected to his visits to the Mexican consulates.57 This document also formed part of Commission Document 81, the Dallas Police Department Report, as published by the Warren Commission (24 WH 279-83).

  However Durán’s apparent silence about the Communist Party card, however consistent with her past statement in the Warren volumes of 1964, is totally at odds with her typed "Observations" at the time, as corroborated by Azcue, Mirabal, and herself in 1978. The Committee, having ascertained (3 AH 38, 40) that she typed the "Observations" about his "proof of membership," did not pursue the matter of the card.58

  In other words, the House Committee in 1978 failed to press Silvia Durán on the matter of the Communist Party card, just as the Warren Commission in 1964 failed to ask Hosty about his claim that Oswald was a Communist (or Communist Party member). I should make it clear that in this instance I approve of the Committee’s reticence, for in Durán’s case it is fairly easy to understand good reasons for it, and also what was really going on.

  Azcue and Mirabal were Cuban citizens deposed by the Committee in Cuba. Durán in contrast was a Mexican citizen deposed in Mexico, and not for the first time. On November 23, 1963, she had been interviewed by the Mexican Security Police, the Dirección Federal de Seguridad (DFS), a crude organization known to obtain information through torture. In 1978 Durán, still in Mexico, was still a witness at risk; and the House Committee appears to have acted in such a way as to protect both her and her prior interrogators.

  From recently declassified documents, above all the so-called Lopez Report, an HSCA staff study on "Lee Harvey Oswald, the CIA and Mexico City," we learn that the American versions of what is called Durán’s "signed statement" of November 23 have been altered over time.59 Specifically the 1964 version of her statement printed by the Warren Commission was a redacted version, different from an earlier one received by the CIA on November 26, 1963.60

  But even the November 26 version has been redacted, if we can credit the earliest account of the November 23 statement. This is a CIA cable from Mexico City the same night, reporting what the Mexican Minister of Gobernación (Luis Echeverría) told the CIA Chief of Station (Winston Scott):

  Echeverría told COS Durán completely cooperative and gave written statement attesting to two visits by Oswald. Could not remember exact dates but said latter part Sept. Oswald showed her U.S. passport showing long stay in USSR. Said he Communist and admirer of Castro.61

  The Communist characterization of Oswald was even stronger in the variant of Durán’s story leaked by the DFS to the Mexico City journal Excelsior: "He supported his petition by the fact that his wife was a Soviet citizen, that he was a militant Communist and had lived three years in Russia."62 The FBI, normally eager to run down all allegations of Communism and militant Communism, was on this occasion the dog that did not bark. An internal FBI memo, repeating that Durán was said to be completely cooperative, deleted all reference to Oswald’s Communism.63 The statement that he was a "militant Communist" went into a file without comment.

  What then happened to this very simple phase-one statement ("Said he Communist") is what we might expect from what happened in Dallas: it disappeared. On November 26 the CIA received from one of her interrogators a written account in Spanish of Durán’s interview, which was then forwarded under a memo, still redacted, signed by a "JKB." This JKB version was then hand-carried to Washington on November 27 by a Headquarters CIA officer, John Horton.64 On the question of Oswald’s Communist status, so clear in the November 24 cable and the statement typed by Durán in October, the November 26 version of her November 23 statement is silent: her only reference to his politics was that "he was married to a Russian and said he belonged to the ‘Fair Play for Cuba.’"65 The May 1964 version of the same statement (CE 2120) now supplied the extended list of documents with respect to Russia and the FPCC, which ignored the Communist Party. It also had Durán say that Oswald insisted on a visa

  in view of his background and his loyalty and his activities on behalf of the Cuban movement. The declarant [Ms. Durán] was unable to recall accurately whether or not the applicant told her he was a member of the Communist Party.66

  Note that what has been reversed here is not attributable to a change in Durán herself: the successive reports (of November 24, November 26, and May) are of the same written statement.67

  It is most unlikely that Durán could not remember in November what she had written so clearly one month before. Oswald’s claim to be a Communist was prominent in her first American press interview, in 1976 ("he claimed to be a member of the American Communist Party"); and again in her testimony to the House Committee in 1978 ("he said he was a member of the Party, of the Communist Party").68 It is more probable that the JKB version and CE 2120 have been not only redacted but expanded, to reinforce the notion, necessary to the "phase-two" hypothesis, that there was only one Oswald, not a Communist, and certainly not a card-carrying Communist, who acted alone.

  Faced with Durán’s embarrassing typed statement of October 1963, the Warren Report came unglued. One section of it, as we have seen, believed it; and repeated that "He [Oswald] apparently also stated that he was a member of the Communi
st Party and displayed documents which he claimed to be evidence of his membership" (WR 734). Another section disbelieved it ("Senora Durán’s notation was probably inaccurate"), relying in part on Commission Exhibit 93, which it described as Oswald’s "prepared statement of his qualifications as a ‘Marxist’" (WR 288-89). A third section used credited the altered May version of her November 23 statement, because of the close fit between CE 93 and that statement’s "description. . . of the documents Oswald had shown her" (WR 304).69 To complete the disarray, the footnotes to the two phase two sections of the Warren Report (doubting that Oswald said he was a Communist) refer us to Appendix XIII, where the statement is accepted.

  Furthermore, if Edwin Lopez can be believed, the version published by the House Committee of her 1978 statement—"He show me letters to the Communist Party, the American Communist Party"—has been redacted as well. His summary of the same page of her testimony, before it had been published, refers unambiguously to the missing card, as we would expect from her October 1963 "Observations" and the 1978 testimony of Azcue and Mirabal:

  As identification, Oswald showed her documents he had brought: his Russian labor card, marriage certificate with the name of his Russian wife, his American Communist Party membership card and his "Fair Play for Cuba" membership card.70

  Reviewing all this evidence, we can conclude:

  1) Oswald (or someone identifying himself as Oswald) did present himself to Durán as a Communist Party member, and he did supply documentation for this claim. Even in the Warren version of Oswald’s career, it is not hard to imagine that he carried a forged CP card, just as he carried a forged FPCC card which he also presented. After all, Oswald was said to have been carrying two or three forged cards (his New Orleans FPCC card, the Hidell Selective Service card, his Marine Reserve card) at the time of his arrest.71 Why not one more?

  2) This phase-one fact of Oswald’s alleged Communist membership and documentation was systematically effaced from the official record, beginning with the JKB memo dated November 26.

  3) While this erasure in 1963 might be explained by fear of war with Cuba or the Soviet Union, the effacement continued in 1978, when such a risk had presumably subsided.

  One other important conclusion can be reached. Not only did Oswald present himself as a documented Communist Party member, the CIA probably knew this, at least by November 23, when the Mexican DFS arrested Silvia Durán. There is really no better explanation for the intense reaction in Washington to the news that day about Durán’s arrest, as reported years ago by the Church Committee:

  At 5:00 p.m. [sic; probably 3:47 p.m.] CIA Headquarters received a cable from the Mexico Station stating that the Mexican police were going to arrest Sylvia Durán. . . .Headquarters personnel [John Scelso] telephoned the Mexico Station and asked them to stop the planned arrest. The Mexico Station said that the arrest could not be stopped. After learning the arrest could not be stopped, [Assistant Deputy Director for Plans] Karamessines cabled the Mexico Station that the arrest "could jeopardize [sic; the released cable says "prejudice"] U.S. freedom of action on the whole question of Cuban responsibility."72

  It is hard to explain from the available documentary record why the CIA should have been so alarmed by news of Durán’s arrest at 3:47 PM on November 23. According to this record Langley had heard of Durán for the first time at 11:59 EST, in a cable which was also the first true report that Oswald had visited the Cuban Embassy at all.73 Just minutes before the arrest cable, Langley had received the full transcript of the September 28 phone conversation involving Durán, Oswald, and the Soviet Embassy. This message is intriguing, even suspicious (Oswald talks about having to ask the Cuban Embassy "for my address because they have it"). There is nothing in it to link Oswald’s business to as simple a matter as a visa application.74 But neither does it justify the CIA’s urgent desire to interfere in the arTest procedures of a foreign government.

  One is left with the impression that the CIA already knew about the CP card and the problems this could raise. There are of course two ways that they could have known.

  1) By intelligence reports or surveillance of Oswald’s activities, in either the Cuban or the Soviet Embassy. (He is said to have presented documentation in both consulates.) The "FBI wiretaps involving Oswald and Kostikov," cited by former FBI Director Kelley as a reason why Washington called Hosty away from the interviews of Oswald in Dallas, are one such possible source: Oswald would hardly have concealed his Communist documentation from the Soviets.75

  2) Because Oswald presented the CP and FPCC cards as part of a penetration mission organized by a U.S. intelligence agency.

  Conceivably, both of the foregoing could be true. A U.S. agency could have picked up traces of its own mission, or one U.S. agency could have eavesdropped on the operation of another.

  There is other evidence, some of which I shall not go into here, that the CIA knew more of Oswald’s activities in Mexico than has been revealed in the available record. The Warren Report itself reported that "the Commission has been advised by the CIA and FBI that secret and reliable sources corroborate the statements of Señora Durán [i.e. in the May 1964 version of her November 23 "signed statement"] in all material respects" (WR 309). Inasmuch as the May 1964 Durán statement appears to have been falsified, the Review Board should obtain the original signed statement, as well as the documents in which the CIA and FBI gave the Warren Commission this advice.

  In 1967 an internal high-level FBI memorandum also referred to "reliable sources" as to what went on in the Cuban Embassy:

  Sensitive and reliable sources of the Bureau and CIA reported Oswald was unknown to Cuban government officials when he visited the Cuban Consulate in Mexico City on 9/27/63, and attempted, without success, to get a visa for travel to Cuba.76

  These reports did not end up in the CIA’s 201 file on Oswald, nor the FBI Headquarters file. There is no sign that they ever reached the House Committee. The new Review Board should review them and their subsequent history; and hopefully release them, for they are surely assassination-related.

  The Missing Card: Was It Harvey Lee Oswald’s?

  We now see a similar pattern of development with respect to Oswald’s alleged politics as reported in both Dallas and Mexico City. In the first stage, or phase one, he was either presented, or presented himself, as a card-carrying Communist. Both in Dallas on November 22, and again in Mexico City a day later, this provokes a high-level intervention from Washington. Then in the second stage, or phase two, reports of Oswald’s Communism and credentials were systematically expunged or rewritten. Many years later, starting in 1978, we see a third stage, or phase three, where the original sources again present Oswald as a Communist, but not a card-carrying member.

  Phase One: Oswald is called "member of the Communist Party" (in Revill memo) and "card carrying member of the Communist Party" (in Army cable).

  Intervention by Washington: FBI and White House exert pressure on Dallas District Attorney Wade and others to silence Hosty and Dallas Police. Malley and two supervisors dispatched from FBI Headquarters to Dallas

  Phase Two: Allegation that Oswald is called "member of the Communist Party" is denied under oath by both Revill and his alleged source (Hosty). Army cable is suppressed, surviving by accident in an ONI copy.

  Phase Three: Kelley's book (1987) concedes Hosty said "He's a Communist."

  Phase One: Durán documents before assassination that Oswald stated "he is a member of American Communist Party" and "displayed documents in proof." On November 23 her written statement to DFS reportedly "said he Communist and admirer of Castro" (MEXI 7046)

  Intervention by Washington: CIA phone call to prevent arrest, followed by high-level CIA cable warning arrest "could prejudice U.S. freedom of action on the whole question of Cuban responsibility." John Horton dispatched from CIA HQ to Mexico City; brings back second version of Durán's November 23 statement.

  Phase Two: Durán statement of November 23 is progressively revised until it all
egedly says she "does not remember whether or not [Oswald] said that he was a member of the Communist Party" (24 WH 589).

  Phase Three: Durán tells HSCA in 1978 "he said he was a member of the Party" (3 AH 34).

  In one respect the situations in Dallas and in Mexico City appear to be profoundly different. The allegations in Dallas that Oswald was a card-carrying Communist are by themselves barely credible, and indeed surrounded by falsehoods. The evidence that Oswald in Mexico presented himself as a card-carrying Communist is however hardly contestable, and is indeed strengthened by the later spurious efforts to cover it up. Of course this does not make Oswald’s professed Communism and Castroism any more genuine than his expressed willingness in New Orleans "to join the fight. . . against Castro" (WR 728). Oswald himself was a recurring player of roles, and in Mexico he may have been impersonated.

  It is unlikely that there is no relationship at all between the dubious allegations in Dallas and the fact, probably known to U.S. intelligence, that Oswald did present himself in Mexico as a card-carrying Communist. It is much more likely that Oswald’s September performance as a Communist in Mexico led to confused echoes of it in Dallas. We know that there was inter-communication between the two cities: the Dallas Police brought in a Jose Rodriguez Molina for questioning on November 23, 1963, and the Mexican Minister of Gobernación, the same man responsible for arresting and interrogating Durán, was asking the CIA for information about him that same afternoon.77

  Military Intelligence in Dallas on November 22, 1963

  There are two reasons to believe that a U.S. intelligence source (probably in military intelligence) fed the dangerous phase-one rumors in Dallas that in turn were fed back to the U.S. Strike Command, basing the false picture in Dallas on the true picture in Mexico City.

  The first reason is the recurring proximity of military intelligence figures to the real and alleged sources of the Dallas phase-one story. James Hosty had spent almost three hours on the morning of November 22 with an Army Intelligence or CIC Agent called Edward J. Coyle; and Coyle, it has just been revealed, was perhaps no stranger to the activities of Lee Harvey Oswald. For Coyle and Hosty had worked together on an arms case involving a Cuban anti-Castro group called the DRE, with which Oswald had been involved in New Orleans; and there are grounds to suspect that Oswald may have been an informant for Hosty on the Dallas arms case.78 The DRE Headquarters in Miami, furthermore, was named as the source of a number of phase-one stories about both Oswald and later Ruby. The DRE Intelligence Officer in Miami, Jose Antonio Lanusa, reportedly "described Oswald [as] definitely a Communist and supporter of Castro."79 A rebuttal memo in the Miami FBI files has the DRE chief Manuel Sal vat talking, like the 112th Military Intelligence Group, about "Harvey Lee Oswald."80