Oswald, Mexico, and Deep Politics

by Peter Dale Scott

  87 FBI Memo of December 12, 1963, 3 AH 595; Scott, Deep Politics, 122. Alvarado retracted his story on November 30. We do not yet know if CIA Director McCone told President Johnson this when he discussed Alvarado with him on November 30 and December 1 (Schweiker-Hart Report, 103. An LBJ-McCone telephone transcript at 3:14 PM November 30 is withheld on grounds of national security). No matter: by November 29 Lyndon Johnson had announced the formation of the Warren Commission.

  88 Sen. Richard Russell, Memorandum of 5 December 1963, Russell Memorial Library, University of Georgia; quoted in Dick Russell, The Man Who Knew Too Much, 500.

  89 WCD 566.6-7; cf. 24 WH 634.

  90 CIA-295; CIA Doc. #687-295; 11 AH 496 (AMMUG-1). Alvarado reportedly both identified a photograph of Calderon and heard her name as "Maria Luisa" (MEXI dispatch of 5 December 1963, CIA Doc. #310-702; CIA memo of 13 December 1963; CIA Doc. #399-747).

  91 3 AH 300, Memo of conversation with Elena Garro de Paz; cf. Lopez Report, 217.

  92 Lopez Report, 207-09; citing CIA memo of 10/12/64; 3 AH 286-87 ("Miss Y"); CIA-393. Because June Cobb was an early CIA source corroborating Oswald’s alleged sexual activity in Mexico City, this memo and perhaps any government document concerning her should probably be considered "assassination-related" under the terms of the JFK Act. These documents would include 1) her work in penetrating and discrediting the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, 2) her successful penetration of Fidel Castro’s entourage in 1959, allegedly at the same time as Marita Lorenz (see Cobb’s testimony on March 30, 1962, before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, published in 1966; cf. Marita Lorenz, Marita [New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1994], 17-18); Newman, 106-12, 237-44, 301-02, 378-84.

  93 Blakey and Billings, 163; cf. WR 321-24.

  94 26 WH 738; Scott, Deep Politics, 118.

  95 Summers (1980), 440; citing 25 WH 647. The similarity between WCD 1359 and the Alvarado story is noticed by Epstein, Legend, 325 (cf. 238).

  96 Those who spoke of Oswald’s admiration for Kennedy included his wife Marina, other relatives, and even the New Orleans policeman who interviewed him after his arrest: WR 627, 2 AH 209, 217, 252 (Marina), 10 WH 60 (Martello), 12 AH 361, 413; Summers (1980), 129-30.

  97 David Martin, Wilderness of Mirrors, 42; Scott, Deep Politics, 66, 324.

  98 DIR 85245 of 27 November 1963; cf. DIR 90466 of 20 December 1963; Lopez Report, 188; 11 AH 485-87. We have already seen that Win Scott and Thomas Mann hoped to have Durán provide the substance of the Alvarado version of the assassination offer as well (MEXI 7072 of 26 November 1963).

  99 11 AH 162-63.

  100 To recapitulate the dates given above: the stories of Oswald’s Cuban assassination threat appeared on November 13, 14, and 17, 1976; Phillips’ story appeared on November 26, 1976.

  101 The HSCA Report (AR 103-29), and for that matter even the Lopez Report, are totally silent about the Alvarado and Solo stories, even though both reports purport to focus on Oswald’s dealings with the Cuban Consulate in Mexico City. The HSCA Report does not even mention Kostikov when discussing the KGB (AR 99-103).

  102 For the now hoary question of the "mystery man" photos, see Lopez Report, 12-52, 91-115, 137-42; Scott, Deep Politics, 42-44; Lopez Report Introduction, 5, 8-11; Summers, Conspiracy (1980), 366-92, etc.

  103 Lopez Report, 162-70; Scott, Deep Politics, 42-44; Lopez Report Introduction, 5, 11-14; Summers, Conspiracy (1980), 366-92.

  IX. OSWALD, HOSTY AND MASEN: WAS OSWALD AN FBI INFORMANT?

  (November 1994)

  Most people now recognize that, in the public response to the Kennedy assassination (or what I have called the dialectical cover-up), a number of false or misleading leads linking Oswald to Moscow or Cuba (what I have called phase-one stories) were effaced and replaced by a new phase-two story: that Oswald was a lone assassin. The record shows that this story was preferred by those in power, not because it was true, but because it was less likely to lead this country into a groundless war.

  In my discussion of this phase-one/phase-two dialectic in Deep Politics, I failed to address the complicating detail that not all of the phase-one stories were wholly false; some of them, even if misleading, were in a limited sense true. Since then I have analysed some of these true phase-one stories, which collectively suggest that Oswald was indeed an agent operating under a hidden agenda. More likely, however, he was an agent or informant working, not for Moscow, Havana, or Peking, but for some U.S. agency.

  I wish here to discuss three linked allegations, possibly true, that were lost sight of because discussion was pre-empted by later similar but false stories emanating from disinformation sources. These allegations are that Oswald knew Ruby, that he had had contact with the Dallas FBI shortly before the assassination, and that he was an FBI informant.

  Clearly baseless versions of all three stories circulated vigorously a few days after the assassination. Effective refutation of the false stories (e.g., that Oswald was Ruby’s illegitimate son)1 prevented the public from learning, or remembering, earlier versions of these three claims that deserved to be taken seriously, and have never been properly refuted.

  A very early, credible, and corroborated story that Oswald knew Ruby was finally published in August 1994 by Ray and Mary La Fontaine in the Washington Post. According to the story, a cellmate of Oswald’s on November 22, John Elrod, had told the Memphis Sheriff’s office in August 1964 that he had information on Oswald’s murder. Oswald, he said, had told him of a business meeting in a motel room some days earlier with four men, one of whom had been Jack Ruby. Elrod’s story was ignored after the FBI supplied the Sheriffs Office with his FBI arrest record, which "showed Elrod had been arrested five times—but not on Nov. 22, 1963." It remained in limbo until the release of Dallas Police Department files in 1992, which "confirmed that Elrod was in the Dallas City Jail on the day of the assassination."2

  Why might officials (in either the FBI or possibly the Dallas Police Department) have misrepresented Elrod’s arrest record? The answer may lie in Elrod’s claim that in the jail he and Oswald had seen another of the men from the business meeting with Ruby: a man with an injured face, who had driven a Thunderbird loaded with guns. The La Fontaines noted that these details dovetailed neatly with a Dallas story of two arrests on stolen gun charges four nights before the assassination. In the course of these arrests, made after a tip-off from an unknown informant, Dallas police retrieved high-powered rifles from a blue Thunderbird that had crashed after a high-speed chase which injured the car’s occupants. One of the two injured men, Lawrence Miller, was indeed in the Dallas jail when Elrod claimed to have seen him.

  The La Fontaines in their article asked, "Is it possible that Lee Oswald was the informant who tipped off the FBI about the gun deal of Nov. 18, 1963?" In support of this possibility, they note that the FBI file on one of the suspects in the case, John Thomas Masen, was charged to the same FBI agent, James P. Hosty, who was also responsible for investigating Lee Harvey Oswald. Hosty’s name, phone number and license plate appeared in Oswald’s address book under the date of "Nov. 1, 1963," the day of an internal FBI memo in which Hosty was charged to investigate Masen. Hosty spent the morning of November 22, 1963, discussing the case with an ATF Agent, Frank Ellsworth, who later gave information to the Warren Commission staff about the Kennedy assassination.3 Shortly after Oswald was murdered by Ruby on November 24, Hosty, acting on orders from his superiors, destroyed a note that Oswald had left him in the FBI office one or two weeks earlier.

  On a different level, the La Fontaines noted that there was only one gun store in Dallas where Oswald could have purchased the specially loaded Mannlicher-Carcano ammunition which allegedly killed the President—the gun shop of John Thomas Masen.

  The public record adds two further large reasons for suspecting that Oswald may have been the informant on the Masen case. One is the anti-Castro Cuban connection. Masen, a gun dealer, was amassing weapons to sell to anti-Castro Cubans in Dallas; and he supplied the names of two of his Cuban
buyers to Frank Ellsworth, who later transmitted them to the Secret Service and the Warren Commission. Of the two Cubans, one, Manuel Rodriguez Orcarberro, was the leader of the local chapter of one of the most anti-Kennedy Cuban exile terrorist groups, Alpha 66.4

  The FBI subsequently learned from Rodriguez that SNFE-Alpha 66 meetings took place in Dallas at the address 3126 Hollandale, an address that has been confirmed by researchers in Dallas such as Mary Ferrell.5 This address, slightly garbled, had been linked to Oswald’s activities in Dallas by a Deputy Sheriff, E.R. "Buddy" Walthers, the day after the assassination. In a memo of that date, Walthers reported;

  About 8:00 am this morning, while in the presents of [deputy sheriff] Allen Sweatt, I talked to Sorrels the head of the Dallas Secreat [sic] Service. I advised him that for the past few months at a house at 3128 Harlendale some Cubans had been having meetings on the weekends and were possibly connected with the ‘Freedom For Cuba Party’ of which Oswald was a member.6

  Three days later, Walthers reported that he had learned the Cubans had just moved, adding that "My informant stated that Oswald had been to this house before."7

  This intriguing allegation about Oswald must be added to the many that were never refuted, thanks to everyone else’s striking lack of interest. Sorrels attended Oswald’s final interview on November 24, but by all accounts failed to bring up anything about the alleged "Freedom for Cuba Party." Both Sorrels and Walthers were interviewed extensively by the Warren Commission, the former twice, but their alleged encounter on November 23 was not explored with either man.8

  The claim that Oswald had joined the "Freedom for Cuba Party" is certainly plausible, for Oswald was an inveterate joiner, or would-be joiner, of widely dispersed and indeed incompatible political movements. In New Orleans Oswald not only joined the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC), he even organized his own one-member chapter.9 In 1956, just before his 17th birthday and only three weeks before enlisting in the Marines, Oswald had written to the (democratic) Socialist Party of America, enquiring how to join.10 After his return in 1962 from the Soviet Union, Oswald initiated correspondence with the Communist Party (CPUSA), its antagonist the Trotskyite Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP), and the splinter Socialist Labor Party (SLP).11

  Oswald’s interest in all these groups can hardly have been sympathetic: it is more likely that he was a pawn in some larger investigative project. In the end his courtship of these groups brought them nothing but embarrassment; and Oswald’s embrace of the FPCC in particular proved deadly. Because of Oswald the group dissolved after the assassination, but from the outset Oswald’s behavior was demonstrably hostile. In New Orleans, soliciting members for the FPCC, some of Oswald’s handbills encouraged them to write to 544 Camp Street, the address of the anti-Communist private investigator and FBI contact Guy Banister.12

  Oswald planned to play the same dubious role of self-appointed political organizer in Dallas as well. Although the SWP declined to accept his application in October 1962 to join the party, Oswald proceeded to act as if he represented it.13 Having obtained for himself a Dallas P.O. Box, # 2915, he prepared to invite SWP potential members to write to it, the stratagem he employed later with the FPCC in New Orleans. He drew up the following statement: "Join the Socialist Workers Party. Fight for a Better World! Write Box 2915, Dallas, Texas."14 It is not known whether Oswald actually published this appeal.

  In New Orleans Oswald prepared a similar membership appeal for the FPCC ("Join the Fair Play for Cuba Committee"), and directed applicants at different times to three different addresses: the 544 Camp Street address of Guy Banister, his home address of 4907 Magazine Street, and "P.O. Box 30016, New Orleans" (his actual P.O. Box was 30061).15

  Back in Dallas, Oswald was apparently appointing himself to act in similar fashion on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a group he visited precisely once and then left, telling his companion Michael Paine that "it wasn’t political" and he couldn’t join it.16 Before even joining the ACLU, Oswald applied for yet another P.O. Box in Dallas on November 1, 1963, telling the Post Office the box would be for the use of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (which had no Dallas chapter) and the American Civil Liberties Union (which had as yet no knowledge of his interest in them).17 Oswald also sent a membership check to the New York Headquarters office of the ACLU which apparently arrived there on November 4, 1963.18

  All of Oswald’s political targets (including the ACLU) were also targets of the security squads of the local police and the FBI. It seems likely indeed that Oswald’s incipient penetration of the ACLU was conducted with the knowledge and at the direction of the FBI. For somehow Hoover knew on November 29 of Oswald’s membership application, whereas the ACLU itself did not learn of it for another two weeks.19 Hoover’s personal antipathy for the ACLU was strong. It led him to place on record in Oswald’s file the recommendation in a telephone call from his friend Judge Milton Kronheim that the FBI report on the assassination should focus, not on Castro or Khrushchev, but on the ACLU itself.20 It is thus reasonable to speculate that the FBI knew of Oswald’s membership application, not from the unlikely and cumbrous procedure of an illegal surveillance of the ACLU mails, but because the FBI knew from the outset that Oswald, as an informant, had been directed to apply.

  All of this adds to the likelihood that Oswald was being used by some agency to conduct surveillance on Cuban groups in Dallas such as the one on Hollandale. To be sure, a "Freedom for Cuba Party" would have been of opposite political inclination to the left-wing Fair Play for Cuba Committee. But Oswald’s political interests spanned both ends of the political spectrum. His visit in August to the New Orleans delegate of the anti-Castro Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE) strongly suggests, both by its timing and Oswald’s privileged information, that it was a visit on behalf of the FBI. (As I have written elsewhere, Oswald seemed interested in "La Cosa Nostra" as well as in training Cubans; the mob’s interest in a nearby anti-Castro arms cache and training installation was known at the time to the FBI, but not to the general public.)21

  In Dallas in October, Oswald’s visit to the left-wing ACLU followed by only two days his attendance at a right-wing "U.S. Day" rally where a featured speaker was General Walker. Only a week earlier, Oswald reportedly attended a DRE meeting in Dallas, along with the same General Walker.22 There was also an independent report that Oswald "had made some talks to small groups of Cuban refugees in Dallas in the past," and that he was suspected of acting as a "double agent."23

  There are other good reasons why the Warren Commission should have been interested in Oswald and the alleged "Freedom for Cuba Party." One is that, on the night of November 22, District Attorney Wade had said at a press conference that "Oswald was a member of the movement—the Free Cuba movement (24 WH 830). This of course was at odds with earlier published stories that Oswald was part of the pro-Castro Fair Piay for Cuba Committee. It would seem to support an unknown Oswald-Ruby involvement that Wade’s surprising remark on November 22 was immediately corrected, and by none other than Jack Ruby.24

  Though there is almost no trace of it in Warren Commission records, there actually was a Free Cuba Movement, or Free Cuba Patriotic Movement, whose Cuban name was Cuba Libre.25 Cuba Libre moreover was active in Dallas, though the name of the Dallas leader (Delfin Leyva Avila) will not be found among the ostensibly wide-ranging interviews of Cubans conducted for the Warren Commission by the FBI.

  Walthers, both at the time and to the Warren Commission, reported physical corroboration for his story. He claimed to have discovered out at Ruth Paine’s residence "a big pasteboard barrel and it had a lot of these little leaflets in it, ‘Freedom for Cuba.’"26 We shall see that Walthers, although an important witness, is not by himself a very credible one.27 He was however corroborated by another deputy sheriff at the scene, Harry Weatherford, who also reported that they "found some literature on Cuban Freedom affairs" (19 WH 503). More significantly, all three deputy sheriffs there reported at the time finding si
x or seven metal cabinets which, according to Walthers, contained "records that appeared to be names and activities of Cuban sympathizers."28 They all reported handing this evidence over to Captain Fritz in the Dallas Police Department. In the DPD records, however, the only Cuban literature found in Irving was some "Fair Play for Cuba papers in an envelope," while the six or seven cabinets now contained "letters" and "phonograph records."29 This is consistent with Ruth Paine’s own claim that the police and sheriffs carried off "my filing cases of old correspondence and 78 rpm phonograph records."30

  I would not confidently prefer the Deputy Sheriffs testimony, linking Oswald to anti-Castro Cubans like Manuel Rodriguez, over the conflicting testimony of the Dallas police and Ruth Paine. On the contrary, I will argue that there was a pre-assassination disinformation campaign to implicate all those Cuban groups who were being secretly backed (outside the CIA) by Robert Kennedy, through the Cuban exiles Harry Ruiz-Williams and Paulino Sierra Martinez.31 The SNFE-Alpha 66 alliance, of which Manuel Rodriguez Orcarberro was the local leader in Dallas, was the largest such group.32

  CIA officers and their Cuban exile clients seem to have helped target the SNFE and Manuel Rodriguez. On November 24, 1963, a CIA source in Miami reported that "one Manuel Rodriguez. . . living Dallas was known be violently anti-Kennedy;" and the CIA cable reporting the rumor noted that a Manuel Rodriguez was "organizer of SFNE in Dallas."33 Theodore Shackley, the CIA’s JMWAVE Station Chief in Miami, repeated this rumor in his weekly report (or "Shackley-gram").34 But, as we shall see, there were many such rumors. This disinformation campaign may have successfully taken in Robert Kennedy himself, who received a call from Ruiz-Williams on the afternoon of the assassination, and then said (to journalist Haynes Johnson), "One of your boys did it."35