Oswald, Mexico, and Deep Politics

by Peter Dale Scott

  Alvarado’s wealth of detail was striking. Far more fully than has ever been publicly acknowledged, some of this young man’s elaborate particulars ("a tall thin Negro with reddish hair," a blonde-haired hippie with a Canadian passport, a girl called "Maria Luisa" with the address Calle Juarez 407 who gave Oswald an embrace) were corroborated by what other communications intelligence or COMINT sources (i.e. intercepts) and human intelligence or HUMINT sources told the Mexico City CIA station.73 These complex, recurring details are less interesting than their sources, to which we shall return.

  There were however two problems with Alvarado’s story. The first was the date, September 17 or 18, on which he claimed to have seen Oswald at the Cuban consulate. Fairly soon the FBI had established Oswald’s entry into Mexico on September 26, which would have implied two separate trips by Oswald to Mexico City.74 But for some time after that, the FBI had no information on the date of Oswald’s departure from New Orleans.75 By the time of the Warren Report, that date had been fixed at September 25, with many witnesses. These witnesses are however far more problematic than the Report let on. For example it stated that a neighbor saw Oswald leave his apartment "on the evening of September 24."76 In fact the neighbor, Eric Rogers, gave no precise date in September, And when shown a famous photograph of Oswald handing out one of his FPCC leaflets (20 WH 4), Rogers answered, "I never saw this man" (11 WH 464).77

  But by November 30 there was a much better reason for disbelieving Alvarado: on that day he himself "admitted in writing that his whole narrative about Oswald was false."78 Not that that ended the matter. Alvarado’s recantation was made to the FBI, who by then were firmly committed to the phase-two theory of Oswald as a lone assassin. On December 3 Alvarado (now in the hands of the pro-conspiratorialist Mexican Gobernación) recanted his recantation, "asserting that it had been extorted from him under pressure."79 On December 5, Alvarado was re-interviewed yet again and polygraphed under the guidance of an officer from CIA Headquarters (over-riding the local CLA station), with the FBI Legal Attache acting as interpreter. Told that he had failed the polygraph, the hapless Alvarado "stated that he had heard of the polygraph and respected its accuracy. He added that if the polygraph indicated he was lying, then it must be so."80

  In short, we have from Alvarado a bizarre story, scripted with precise gothic details (such as the red-haired negro and blonde-haired hippie) that are so weird they sound as if they had been deliberately crafted for what they soon received—corroboration. And yet the Alvarado story was given the highest level of attention by the U.S. Ambassador in Mexico (Thomas Mann), the Station Chief (Win Scott) and even the FBI Legal Attache (Clark Anderson). Anderson’s support is the most eloquent, since by this time his boss, J. Edgar Hoover, was already irrevocably committed to the phase-two lone assassin theory.

  A cable from the three men on November 26 shows how far they were willing to go in support of the Alvarado story:

  We suggest that the Nicaraguan be put at the disposition of President Lopez Mateos on condition that Lopez Mateos will agree to order rearrest and interrogate again Silvia Tirado de Durán along following lines:

  A. Confront Silvia Durán again with Nicaraguan and have Nicaraguan inform her of details of his statement to us.

  B. Tell Silvia Durán that she is only living non-Cuban who knows full story and hence she is in same position as Oswald was prior to his assassination; her only chance for survival is to come clean with whole story and to cooperate completely. . . .

  Given apparent character of Silvia Durán there would appear to be good chance of her cracking when confronted with details of reported deal between Oswald, Azcue, Mirabal [the two Cuban consuls mentioned by Alvarado] and Durán and the unknown Cuban negro [described by Alvarado]. If she did break under interrogation—and we suggest Mexicans should be asked to go all out in seeing that she does—we and Mexicans would have needed corroboration of statement of the Nicaraguan.81

  Mann on his own went on to recommend the arrest of three Cuban members of the Cuban consulate, and later to argue forcefully that Castro was the "kind of person who would avenge himself’ by assassination.82

  These cables were in defiant opposition to the cooler approach in Washington. Headquarters had already tried to oppose the original arrest of Durán, rightly fearing that the arrest (and interrogation by the Mexican secret police, or DFS) "could jeopardize U.S. freedom of action on the whole question of Cuban responsibility."83 Headquarters replied again to the new Durán cable, warning the Station Chief that the Ambassador was pushing the case too hard, and his proposals could lead to an international "flap" with the Cubans.84

  Yet on the basis of the Alvarado story, Silvia Durán was rearrested, against clear orders, twice repeated, from CIA Headquarters.85 In analyzing this strong and provocative response, we must mention that two details of the Alvarado story (the money, and the contact with "Maria Luisa," whom he, identified from a photograph as Embassy official Luisa Calderon) appeared to have superficial corroboration from telephonic intercepts at the time.86 That corroboration was however so weak (and soon demolished) that we must ask if there was not some other, unmentionable reason why the three men believed so strongly in the reality of the Oswald assassination offer.

  Especially so, because the CIA interest in the Alvarado story escalated, even after Alvarado recanted it on November 30. Around December 5 CIA Director McCone told Gerald Ford, newly appointed to the Warren Commission, "that CIA had uncovered some ‘startling information’. . . a source of CIA’s in Mexico had seen money exchange hands between Oswald and an unknown Cuban Negro."87 Also on December 5 Senator Russell wrote a memo about his discussion with Earl Warren "I told of Mexico & Nicaraguan NOT mentioning sums") based on information from McCone which made Russell characterize Warren’s push for a lone assassin as an "untenable position."88

  By December 5 the Alvarado story, already well recanted, had gathered additional corroboration. On December 2, before any of Alvarado’s story had gone outside intelligence circles, another informant, Pedro Gutierrez, repeated the detail of seeing Oswald receive money at the Cuban Consulate from someone "almost of ‘negroid’ type kinky hair."89

  Belated corroboration continued to drift in. In April 1964 an important defector from the Cuban DGI, AMMUG-1, told the CIA that Oswald "might have had contact" (i.e. "been involved") with Luisa Calderon, previously identified by Alvarado as Oswald’s familiar and possibly sexual companion.90 A different version of Oswald’s alleged sexual liaison, as reported in 1965, linked Oswald to the same two striking companions as did Alvarado: "a Latin American negro man with red hair" and someone with "long blond hair."91 (It would be important to ascertain whether these details were part of the Oswald sex story originally reported to the CIA station in 1964 by an important "witting" source, June Cobb.)92

  The corroboration we have mentioned so far is all post-assassination. There is no pre-assassination corroboration, unless we believe the second and belated version of Silvia Odio’s problematic story in Dallas. In mid-December 1963 Silvia Odio told the FBI that on September 26, 1963, one day before the official date of Oswald’s first visit to the Cuban Consulate, she had heard that the "Leon Oswald" who had visited her in Dallas the evening before had said, "[Cubans] don’t have any guts. . . .President Kennedy should have been assassinated after the Bay of Pigs, and some Cubans should have done that, because he was the one that was holding the freedom of Cuba."93 (This second version of the Odio story, reproduced in the Warren Report, supplanted an earlier and quite different one: "that she knew Oswald, and that he had made some talks to small groups of Cuban refugees in Dallas in the past.)"94

  The language of Odio’s second Oswald story—where Oswald allegedly said Cubans "don’t have any guts"—is arrestingly similar to what Alvarado claimed Oswald said in the Cuban Consulate, on September 18, 1963: "You’re not man enough—I can do it [kill the man]."95 It is also close to the words later attributed to Oswald in the falsified "Comer Clark" story—"Someone ought
to shoot that President Kennedy. . . .Maybe I’ll try to do it"—that may have been planted by the CIA.

  There are two opposing ways to interpret this similarity between the Odio story and the two other Oswald stories. One can see it as corroboration of all three stories, because the sources are so widely scattered and probably did not know each other. Alternatively, one can see the Odio story of mid-December 1963, followed by the Solo story of June 1964, as belated efforts to revive the phase-one Alvarado disinformation, after the hapless Alvarado had himself recanted it.

  Two Alternative Hypotheses

  Why did the bizarre Alvarado story, so swiftly recanted, dominate the responses of the U.S. Embassy in Mexico to the Kennedy assassination? And why was it accompanied and followed by so much detailed corroboration? If these two questions could be resolved, it would tell us much about the relationship of the CIA to the assassination.

  Coincidence will not account for all of these events. It might appear that we are forced to choose between one of the two following alternatives, each of which is awkward to the notion of Oswald as a lone assassin:

  1) There was never any Oswald assassination remark. In this case the only non-conspiratorial explanation is that all the allegations of such a remark are totally but separately false, and no more than individual propaganda efforts to implicate, not just Oswald, but Cuba and/or the Soviet Union in the assassination. PROBLEM: If the story was false, why did the Embassy back it so strongly, to the point (as Washington recognized) of risking war against Cuba?

  2) There was in fact an Oswald assassination threat. In this case CD 1359 may be true, and it is imperative to establish whether the threat was made from personal motives, or as part of a CIA provocation. PROBLEM: If Oswald’s motivation was personal, why did the FBI suppress the only known instance where Oswald, described by others as an admirer of Kennedy, in fact proposed to kill him?96

  These two alternatives (that there was, or was not, an assassination remark) might seem to exhaust the factual possibilities. I would like however to propose a different perspective, looking at the reported allegation, rather than the alleged event, as the key issue. This is based on the hint in Kelley’s book, that the story of the Oswald assassination remark in Mexico was based on HUMINT and other hitherto unrevealed intelligence resources (presumably bugs) in the Embassies.

  From this perspective, we come up with two different alternative hypotheses, either of which would be highly pertinent to the assassination conspiracy.

  3) Whatever the facts, the appearance of an Oswald assassination remark had been created prior to the assassination, had become a part of CIA records, and was believed by U.S. authorities. This appearance could have been created

  a) by Oswald himself (the man arrested in Dallas), OR

  b) by someone else, not Oswald, who identified himself as Oswald, OR

  c) by HUMINT or other sources, reporting such a remark to both their Cuban (or Soviet) and American superiors.

  This possibility, I submit, is no more bizarre than the facts it is trying to explain. It has the merit of rationalizing the response of the U.S. Embassy to the outlandish Alvarado: they attributed to the implausible Alvarado a story which they in fact believed to be true, from other sources, which they were not able to name even in secret cable traffic.

  This would be, it appears, a standard intelligence procedure. It is now conceded that the court record of the Rosenberg treason trial was a substitute for the intercepted Soviet cable traffic which actually led to their conviction.97 The CIA itself sought to establish from the testimony of Silvia Durán allegations which it had first learned from (what it did not wish to mention) the intercepts of Cuban and Soviet telephone conversations.98 And the House Committee Report, in dealing with the important but sensitive matter of the Oswald assassination threat, completely ignored CD 1359 (of which the Committee had knowledge). Instead (even in the important Castro deposition) they discussed the almost worthless Comer Clark tabloid article, based on an alleged ‘‘interview" which never occurred. Alvarado may have been a similar stand-in for the true source of the Oswald assassination remarks: the Embassy knew that the man was not credible, but had reason to believe that the remarks had occurred.

  But the publication of the Solo records has encouraged me on reflection to take more seriously a fourth possibility:

  4) Solo was used after the assassination to create the appearance of an Oswald remark, in order to rationalize the CIA Station’s incongruous backing of the Alvarado story. The belated timing of the Solo story (June 1964) encourages this interpretation. By then Warren Commission counsels Coleman and Slawson had compiled an extensive memorandum on the possibility of a foreign conspiracy, in which the glaring problems with Alvarado’s story were thoroughly examined.99 It is unlikely that the FBI would have asked Solo to corroborate Alvarado. But the CIA may have used Solo to make their brief backing of the Alvarado story look less unprofessional. Here again the moving force may have been David Phillips, who appears to have been both Alvarado’s strongest CIA backer and (as we have seen), a probable source for other false and/or unsupported stories about Oswald in Mexico City. If this version is correct, then the CIA may have been the source behind the "foreign minister" to whom the Comer Clark version of the Solo story was attributed. If a CIA connection to Solo is ever established, this fourth possibility will have been corroborated. And this would increase the chances that the CIA (perhaps even Phillips) had been behind the December revision of Odio’s story as well.

  What is important here is that both of these alternative hypotheses suggest substantive misrepresentations by of the CIA of the truth concerning Oswald. And either the third or the fourth hypothesis would help to explain the ever-industrious, ever-shifting representations and misrepresentations of David Phillips. One can imagine that his constant purpose underlying his many shifting positions was to protect what was, in his view, a legitimate CIA secret, whether or not it was related to the assassination.

  Consider the various phases of Phillips’ activity:

  1) His early promotion of the Alvarado story (understandable, if he considered Alvarado to be no more than a substitute source for an earlier story he believed true).

  2) His claim to the Washington Post in 1976 that Oswald offered information to the Soviet Embassy (thus deflecting attention away from the first news stories, less than two weeks earlier, about the alleged Cuban assassination threat in CD 1359).100

  3) Both his news story and his quite different book account of Oswald in Mexico can be seen as propaganda efforts to steer the House Committee, then just constituted, away from the sensitive area of the Alvarado and Solo stories.101

  Finally the third alternative hypothesis has the merit of rationalizing the CIA Station’s extraordinary and provocative performance with respect to photos they have failed to supply of Oswald at the two Consulates, as well as the misleading photos they supplied of someone else (the alleged ‘‘mystery man," who in fact may have had little or nothing to do with the case). This is just what we might expect from the CIA, if there had been an Oswald assassination "offer," or "threat," made or reported as part of an intelligence operation by someone who was not Oswald.102 In like fashion it would rationalize the extensive misreporting by the CIA with respect to the missing tapes of "Oswald"’s voice.103

  I will conclude by repeating that an Oswald assassination threat, even if not sincere but part of an intelligence operation, may have had some quite different goal in mind than the assassination of the President. As suggested at the outset, the alleged assassination threat may have been a spurious event, falsely reported, as part of an intelligence propaganda operation (against the FPCC) or counterintelligence operation (to trace if this false report was transmitted by a mole). In this case the operation may conceivably have been no more than a convenient event exploited by others with more sinister motives.

  Thus to establish the origin and nature of that pre-assassination operation would not necessarily supply us with the
names of conspirators against Kennedy. It would however be an important step in establishing how that conspiracy was constructed.

  Alternatively, if the Solo story was a post-assassination disinformation product, the authors of that disinformation would appear to have been involved in a possibly criminal obstruction of justice.

  1 Warren Commission Document 1359; FBI HQ 62-109090-63rd nr 172; NARA Record Number 124-10103-10138.

  2 Peter Dale Scott, "The Lopez Report and the CIA’s Oswald Counterintelligence Secrets," published in Oswald in Mexico: Book Three: The Lopez Report (Evanston, IL: Rogra Research, 1993), 5-6, etc. (i.e. Chapter II, 5-6); Peter Dale Scott, "CIA Files and the Pre-Assassination Framing of Lee Harvey Oswald" (i.e. Chapter III). The misleading cable is also discussed in John Newman, Oswald and the CIA (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1995), 403-05.

  3 See above, 11, 28. The falsified transmittal form was received from the FBI with the date stamp "November 8, 1963" together with a copy of the October 31 FBI report on Oswald prepared by FBI Agent Kaack. Someone in the CIA then wrote on a copy of this form the inscription "DBA-52355," i.e. the serial number for an FBI Letterhead Memorandum of September 24, 1963, which discussed Oswald’s leafleting for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and his arrest on August 9. In fact this September 24 LHM had been received by the CIA on October 3, and read by CIA Liaison officer Jane Roman on October 4. In other words Jane Roman had seen this LHM six days before the CIA cable (which she had signed off on) saying "latest HDQS info was [State] report dated May 1962." The falsified transmittal slip covered up this embarrassing fact by its implication that the LHM had been received later. At some point (presumably after the assassination) the LHM, together with the falsified transmittal form, were placed in Oswald’s 201 file after the misleading October 10 cable; and a copy of this altered 201 file, as transmitted to the Warren Commission, can now be read in the National Archives as Warren Commission CD 692. The CIA then declassified the 201 file in 1992, and this 1992 release contained a copy of the falsified transmittal form. This is published in Lewis B. Sckolnick, ed., Lee Harvey Oswald: CIA Pre-Assassination File (Leverett MA: Rector Rector Press, 1993), 112, and also by Newman (p. 503). As if aware of its vulnerability for this deception, the CIA re-released the 201 file in 1993. with the original, unaltered transmittal form. This form (in its innocent, 1993 version) is also reproduced without discussion in Newman, Oswald and the CIA, after p. 300. But what should concern us is the falsified transmittal form, not the innocent one. The JFK Act Review Board should interview the CIA officers responsible for Warren CD 692 and for the 1993 release, to begin to learn what missing records about Oswald underlie the CIA’s deceptive falsification of its records to mislead the Warren Commission.