Oswald, Mexico, and Deep Politics

by Peter Dale Scott

  Even if claims of an Oswald-Alpha 66 connection were to prove part of a malevolent disinformation campaign, this would not diminish our interest in learning the sources for Walthers’ story. Moreover the notion that Oswald in Dallas cultivated anti-Castro Cubans associated with Minutemen and suspected of illegal gun activities would be entirely in keeping with Oswald’s behavior a few months earlier in New Orleans. There too he approached such a group, the DRE, two members of whom had been arrested shortly before in connection with an illegal arms cache at Lake Pontchar-train. Rich Lauchli, a co-founder of the Minutemen, had been arrested with them.36

  On the base of this recurring behavior in Dallas and in New Orleans, I speculated a year ago, without ever having heard of John Elrod, that "Oswald’s unexplained approaches to anti-Castro Cubans could have been (as [one of them] suspected), as an informant for the U.S. government, perhaps to investigate illegal arms trafficking."37

  For whatever reason, the Warren Commission conspicuously failed to explore Frank Ellsworth’s suggestion to its Assistant Counsel Burt Griffin that the Minutemen organization, with links to General Edwin Walker and oil millionaire H.L. Hunt, was "the right-wing group most likely to have been associated with any effort to assassinate the president."38 The Commission even withdrew two Commission Exhibits that had already been placed into evidence: Commission Exhibit 1053, a handbill attacking Krushchev as "Wanted for Murder," and signed "The Minutemen," and Commission Exhibit 710, transmitting DPD reports on right-wing extremists in Dallas.39

  The "Wanted for Murder" Minutemen handbill was initially investigated by the Commission for its similarity to the anti-Kennedy "Wanted for Treason" handbill distributed at the time of the President’s visit. The latter was traced by the Commission to General Walker’s aide Robert Surrey (WR 298-99), but Surrey was not asked about the companion Minutemen publication, an apparent example of the Minutemen-Walker connection Ellsworth had warned about.

  This lack of interest in the Masen-Minutemen-Walker-Ellsworth story was sustained.40 Frank Ellsworth should by any account have been an important witness for the Warren Commission, yet his name will not be found at all in the first fifteen volumes, and only once or twice in the next eleven. He had been present in the School Book Depository when the rifle was found (24 WH 320). He had been investigating the Cuban exile group, the SNFE-Alpha 66 alliance, to which Oswald had been linked by Walthers’ informant. Last but not least, Frank Ellsworth, as he revealed to reporter Dick Russell in 1976, was one of the federal agents who first interviewed Oswald after the President’s murder.41 Ellsworth’s interrogation with Oswald is remarkable from a bureaucratic viewpoint: alone of all the known interrogations of Oswald in those last two days of his life, Ellsworth’s was for years effaced from the available bureaucratic record.

  What Ellsworth chiefly recalled about his interview with Oswald was also striking. Oswald and Masen, he recalled, "were like identical twins; they could’ve passed for each other."42 Ellsworth’s account of an Oswald look-alike in the Dallas Cuban community was only one of many such leads. In fact the FBI, tracking down a report that Oswald had been sighted in Oklahoma, concluded that in fact the mistakenly identified individual was none other than Manuel Rodriguez Orcarberro.43 It is probable that at a nearby firing range an Oswald look-alike had been firing Mannlicher-Carcano ammunition (available at Masen’s and only one other store).44 Sylvia Meagher concluded from Secret Service interviews that, as a witness reported, Robert Surrey, author of the Minutemen handbill, also "closely resembled" Oswald.45

  Whether or not Oswald did frequent and/or inform on right-wing anti-Castro Cubans, it is clear that in Dallas he pursued other political interests as well. We have see that in addition to a possible right-wing interest he also visited a meeting of the American Civil Liberties Union in Dallas, considered so liberal that it was under investigation by the Dallas Police Department.46 Oswald’s ACLU visit on October 25, 1963, in fact followed by only two days his attendance at a "U.S. Day" rally at which a featured speaker was General Edwin Walker.

  This ability to switch politically appears to have impressed Michael Paine. Without invitation, Paine recalled for the Warren Commission

  thinking to myself for a person who has a business to do he [Oswald] certainly can waste the time. By business I mean some kind of activity and keeping track of right-wing causes and left-wing causes or something. I supposed that he spent his time as I would be inclined to spend more of my time if I had it, trying to sense the pulse of various groups in the Dallas area.47

  What else could Michael Paine have supposed? He himself had gone with Oswald to a meeting of the liberal ACLU, which Oswald told him "he couldn’t join" (2 WH 409), and heard Oswald describe to the ACLU an earlier right-wing meeting where General Walker had spoken (2 WH 403).48 Clearly Oswald could not have attended both meetings out of inner convictions, any more than in New Orleans he could have been sincerely both a pro-Castro and anti-Castro partisan.

  Neither can Oswald’s political tourism be attributed to mere intellectual curiosity; his behavior can only be called manipulative. On November 1, one week after he told Paine he couldn’t join the ACLU, Oswald opened a P.O. Box in Dallas to receive mail from the FPCC and the ACLU (WR 739).49 Oswald apparently told the FPCC he had done this (20 WH 532); but there is no sign he told the ACLU, which he did not get around to joining (with a $2.00 check) until November 4 (7 WH 325). Had he lived, one suspects, Oswald might have proceeded to implicate the ACLU by association with his own deviant Marxism, just as he did the FPCC.

  In his two-fold political behavior, switching swiftly from right to left-wing, Oswald’s performance in Dallas again echoed his performance in New Orleans. There he had posed as an anti-Castro activist on August 5, 1963, and as a pro-Castro activist only four days later. I speculated in Deep Politics that this two-fold behavior was motivated by his informant status: Oswald posed as an FPCC activist in order to discredit them and thus gain an entree into their designated political opponents the DRE.50

  In Dallas however, in the proximity of the assassination, this second-level agenda, of which Oswald was presumably aware, may have been inspired by a still deeper third-level agenda, of whcih Oswald was almost certainly ignorant. This is that he was being supplied with an untraceable legend that was politically ambiguous, indeed inscrutable, precisely to confound rational analysis of his motivations.

  Whether or not this third-level agenda inspired his activity in New Orleans, or conceivably even in the Soviet Union, I propose that it motivated Oswald’s unknown handlers during his last weeks in Dallas.

  Ruby too, at the last minute, wrapped himself in the inscrutable mystery of a political polarity, simultaneously liberal and anti-liberal. On the one hand, he had in his notebook the names of Thomas Hill, at the head office of the John Birch Society, and Lamar Hunt, son of H.L. Hunt, whose office he visited on November 21.51 On the other hand he is supposed to have been "enraged" at the Birchite radio scripts (funded by HX. Hunt) which he had in his possession; and to have taken time, late at night, to take a picture of a billboard, which he found offensive, saying "Impeach Earl Warren."52

  Ruby, in other words, both approached the right-wing Hunts and also acted as if he was opposed to them: behavior intriguingly analogous to Oswald’s. The main difference here is that this possible third-level agenda appears to have been an idea of the last moment, whereas Oswald’s legend had been built over several months, if not longer.

  1 25 WH 166.

  2 Washington Post, August 7, 1994, C6.

  3 Also at the meeting was an Army counterintelligence officer, Edward J. Coyle.

  4 WCD 853a; WCD 1085 U.4.

  5 WCD 1085 U.4.

  6 19 WH 534.

  7 Ibid.

  8 Allen Sweatt. the third man reportedly present, was not interviewed at all.

  9 WR 407-08.

  10 WR 681; 25 WH 140-41.

  11 WR 287-89. The CPUSA and the SWP were the two groups which the FBI suspected of controlling the
FPCC at one point (17 WH 774).

  12 Scott, Deep Politics. 84-88.

  13 "In October of 1962 he attempted to join the [Socialist Workers] party, but his application was not accepted since there was no chapter in the Dallas area" (WR 289; 19 WH 578).

  14 Letter of J. Lee Rankin to Hoover, May 1964; filed at FBI HQ 62-109090-32nd after serial 136; NARA # 180-10056-10152.

  15 22 WH 824-25.

  16 2 WH 209.

  17 20 WH 172 (Holmes DE 1).

  18 7 WH 325, 17 WH 671.

  19 J Edgar Hoover memo for Tolson et al., 11/29/63, FBI HQ 105-82555-93; 7 WH 325 (ACLU knowledge). Oswald’s application is listed in the physical evidence as "D-46": it should be possible to learn the date of this classification (17 WH 671).

  20 Ibid.

  21 Scott, Deep Politics, 250-52.

  22 WCD 205.846.

  23 26 WH 738. This was the original story about Oswald from Silvia Odio, as transmitted to the FBI on November 29 by her social worker Lucille Connell Odio herself denied this story some months later (26 WH 837), but it is likely that the many changes in Odio’s story over the months were the result of pressures on her to change it. Cf. Scott, Deep Politics, 118-19.

  24 24 WH 830; WR 342; 5 WH 189. 223-24, 25 WH 229. The Warren Report, as if to make Wade’s statement sound like a simple slip of the tongue, misquotes what he said, as "Free Cuba Committee" (WR 342, citing, though not by page or exhibit number, 24 WH 830). In that interview Wade later distinguished between "Free Cuba" and "Fair Play for Cuba" as "two different organizations" (24 WH 839).

  25 The leader of the Free Cuba Patriotic Movement was Dr. Carlos Marquez Sterling, the registered foreign lobbyist for Cuba Libre (22 WH 864).

  26 7 WH 548; cf. 19 WH 503, 520, 530.

  27 19 WH 520; 7 WH 550.

  28 19 WH 520; cf. 7 WH 548: "we found some little metal file cabinets." Weatherford reported "some literature on Cuban Freedom affairs and some small files" (19 WH 503). J.L. Oxford reported "about 7 metal boxes which contained pamphlets and literature from abroad" (19 WH 530).

  29 21 WH 596 (Stovall Exhibit A); cf. 24 WH 337-40. Warren Commission Counsel Liebeler secured retractions from Walthers by a series of leading questions, substituting "Fair Play for Cuba" (7 WH 550) where Walthers had said "Freedom for Cuba" (7 WH 548). and turning his written report of November 22 about the names of sympathizers (19 WH 518-21) into "some story that has developed" (7 WH 549).

  30 17 WH 194.

  31 Cf. Scott, Deep Politics, 89-90, 329-30.

  32 10 AH 100; cf. AR 134.

  33 WAVE 8130 of 24 Nov 1963, CIA #88-27, HSCA #10732.

  34 The term "Shackleygram" appears to have been invented later, after Shackley became Chief of Station in Saigon in December 1968 (David Corn, Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA’s Crusades [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994], 179-81. But Shackley’s habit of sending weekly situation reports to Headquarters dated back to his stint as COS in Miami.

  35 Summers, Vanity Fair, 109.

  36 The two arrested DRE members were Carlos Eduardo "Batea" Hernandez Sanchez and John Koch Gene.

  37 Scott, Deep Politics, 254; 248-57.

  38 Scott, Deep Politics, 255.

  39 For "CE 1053" see 5 WH 545; cf. CD 320, Dallas Times Herald, September 1, 1963. For "CE 710," see 4 WH 194, also the missing exhibits CE 706-08 at 4 WH 202. These exhibits, introduced and then withdrawn, constitute another example of what I have called a "negative template," denoting evidence to which our attention is drawn by its disappearance (Scott, Deep Politics, 60-61, 69).

  40 Neither Masen nor his associate Manuel Rodriguez Orcarberro will be encountered in the Warren volumes, even though accusing fingers had been pointed at Rodriguez and his associates from as early as November 24. 1963 (WAVE Cable 8130 of 24 November 1963, 242027Z, CIA Doc. #88-27).

  41 Dick Russell, The Man Who Knew Too Much, 542.

  42 Russell, 543.

  43 WCD 23.4; Scott, Deep Politics, 371.

  44 Scott, Deep Politics, 391 (look-alike).

  45 Meagher, Accessories After the Fact, 385, citing 25 WH 658; cf. 23 WH 515-16.

  46 "CE 710."

  47 2 WH 412. Oswald’s landlady in New Orleans, Mrs. Jesse Gamer, also recalled that Oswald "was always home," to the extent that she had doubted Oswald worked at the Reily Coffee Company "as long as he did. . . unless he worked at night" (10 WH 271).

  48 What adds to the intrigue is that Paine himself had been on October 24 and 25 to a John Birch Society meet-ing and the same ACLU meeting, a revelation about which both he and the Warren Commission were somewhat evasive (2 WH 388, 403; WR 463).

  49 20 WH 172; cf. WR 634.

  50 For this double role of Oswald in New Orleans, see Scott, Deep Politics, 80-86, 248-53. In theory, of course, Oswald could have posed as a DRE sympathizer in order to investigate their friend Guy Banister, rather than on Banister’s behalf.

  51 26 WH 472-73; 25 WH 381; WR 367-68.

  52 WR 367-68; 15 WH 259-61.

  X. THE DFS, SILVIA DURAN, AND THE CIA-MAFIA CONNECTION:

  DID STAFF D FEED THE OSWALD-KOSTIKOV LIE TO THE CIA?

  Abstract: There exist at least four successive versions (or falsifications) of Silvia Durán’s so-called statement of November 23, 1963, to the Mexican DFS (Dirección Federal de Seguridad), about her interviews of Oswald in the Cuban Consulate. The successive changes mirror the shift in the Mexico City CIA Station’s view of Oswald, from a ‘‘phase-one" position (Oswald was part of a Cuban Communist conspiracy) to a more standard "phase-two" position (Oswald was a lone nut). From other sources we learn that the DFS itself, as well as the CIA Station, pushed the "conspiracy" story hard in their November 23 interview. Revisions to the Durán statement seem also designed to bring her story into line with an alleged telephone intercept of "Oswald" at the Cuban Consulate on September 28, 1963, when in fact he was not there. In protecting this falsified intercept from exposure, the DFS was probably protecting itself as well as the CIA; for the DFS was involved in the LIENVOY intercept project and probably manned the listening posts.

  The DFS may have been assisted in this LIENVOY project by Richard Cain, an expert telephone tapper and adjunct to the CIA-Giancana assassination connection, when he was in Mexico City in 1962 as a consultant to a Mexican Government agency. Richard Cain at the time was also part of that Dave Yaras-Lennie Patrick-Sam Giancana element of the Chicago mob with demonstrable links to Ruby in 1963, and the HSCA speculated that Cain may have been part of the 1960-61 CIA-Mafia plots against Castro.

  Unmistakably Staff D, the small secretive part of CIA in which the CIA-Mafia plots were housed, controlled the LIENVOY intercept intake inside the Mexico City CIA station (Ann Goodpasture, the responsible officer, was a member of Staff D). If Richard Cain trained and possibly helped recruit the Mexican LIENVOY monitors, then the CLA-DFS LIENVOY collaboration would present a matrix for connecting the CIA’s internal mishandling of Oswald information to the behavior of Ruby and other criminal elements in Dallas. It would also put the CIA-Mafia connection, through Staff D, in a position to feed to the CIA the false intercept linking a false Oswald to a suspected Soviet assassination expert (Kostikov), which became a major pretext for creating a Warren Commission to reach the less dangerous conclusion of a lone assassin.

  There are contextual corroborations of this matrix. Both Ruby and the DFS had links to the Mexico-Chicago drug traffic, dating back to the 1940s. The DFS and the Mexican drug traffic became increasingly intertwined after 1963; the last two DFS Chiefs were indicted, for smuggling and for murder; and the DFS itself was nominally closed down in the midst of Mexico’s 1985 drug scandals. (José Antonio Zorrilla, the ex-DFS chief arrested and indicted in 1989 for murder, was in 1963 private secretary to Fernando Gutiérrez Barrios, the DFS agent whose signature attested to the validity of the most radically altered version of Durán’s statement.) At least two ex-DFS officers who were also former CIA agents have been named by the New York Times in connection with the Colosio assassi
nation of 1994; and one of these, ex-DFS Chief Miguel Nazar Haro, was also involved in the investigation of the John F. Kennedy assassination.

  What should most concern us in this deep political interaction between the CIA and a criminal DFS is the CIA’s protection of at least one guilty DFS leader (Miguel Nazar Haro) from deserved prosecution in U.S. courts. This protection should be evaluated in the light of the CIA immunity granted to Sam Giancana in 1961 (in which Cain may have played a role) and the Warren Commission’s false isolation of Ruby from the Giancana-Yaras-Patrick Chicago mob in 1964.

  Thus it is important that the ARRB recognize the substantive relevance of the DFS to the case. It should press for the release of the Mexican Government documentation of its investigation. It should also release information about the DFS in CIA records that is relevant to anomalies in the handling of the case.

  The Four Versions of Silvia Durán’s November 23 DFS Statement

  With the release of the new documents, it is now abundantly clear that the visit of Oswald to the Cuban and Soviet consulates in Mexico City became for some reason too sensitive to be handled normally by the CIA and FBI. CIA officials, both before and after the assassination, misreported what happened, falsified documentary records, and concealed the surviving tapes of Oswald’s alleged telephone conversations.1 In this collusion the CIA had the support of a sister Mexican agency which it had helped to create, the Mexican Dirección Federal de Seguridad (Federal Security Police), or DFS.

  The DFS, before it was abolished because of its deep involvement in Mexico’s drug traffic, was a key agency in the Mexican Gobernación (Ministry of the Interior),2 It also had close links with the FBI as well as the CIA, being pan of a tradition of binational intelligence cooperation dating back to the turn of the century.3

  Three different operations involving Oswald can be distinguished in Mexico. The most obvious is the post-assassination cover-up. As I have written elsewhere, a falsified bus manifest, supplied by the Gobernación to establish Oswald’s return to the U.S. on October 3, was probably altered in the office of the Mexican President.4 But post-assassination cover-up activity should be distinguished from pre-assassination operations involving Oswald, and both of these from the assassination plot. I shall suggest that the DFS, if only by its involvement in the CIA’s LIENVOY telephone intercept program, became enmeshed in pre-assassination Oswald operations, and possibly the plot as well.