Newman’s plausible hypothesis is that two of the speakers in the September 28 conversation, "Dur£n" and "Oswald," are impostors.53 But CIA station employees, listening to the tapes, decided that the man who telephoned the Soviet Embassy on October 1, and identified himself as "Lee Oswald," was the same as the man who phoned on Saturday.54 In other words, if the September 28 intercept is a fabrication involving a false "Oswald," so are the intercepts from October 1. This is an important finding, inasmuch as the only pre-assassination information about Oswald to go outside the CIA Station, all of it provocative, was based on these intercepts alone. The other family of intercepts, referring to Oswald’s visa application on September 27, were for some unexplained reason not shared with CIA Headquarters or the FBI until late November 23.55
The two apparently fabricated intercepts between them suggested that a Soviet KGB member, Valeriy Kostikov, had sent a cable to Washington at Oswald’s request. The September 28 transcript was so mysterious as virtually to defy summary: it had Oswald saying, "I went to the Cuban Embassy to ask them for my address, because they have it."56 Transmitting this information to the FBI, CIA Headquarters commented, "From the gist of this conversation, it appears that the ‘North American’ expected to be at some location fixed by the Cuban Embassy and wanted the Russians to be able to reach him there."57 By the time the FBI had this information, a Headquarters CIA Counterintelligence Officer, Tennant H. Bagley, had already identified Kostikov to the FBI as a KGB officer linked to "the KGB’s 13th Department (responsible for sabotage and assassination)."58
For six weeks the CIA Station in Mexico had known from the September 27 family of transcripts (the "visa" family, as opposed to the apparently fabricated "non-visa" family) that Oswald’s business was the relatively innocuous matter of a visa application. This clarifying information was conspicuously withheld, indeed denied, in a memo which the CIA Station passed in mid-October to the FBI in Mexico City:
This officer determined that Oswald had been at the Soviet Embassy on 28 September 1963 and had talked with Valeriy Vladimirovoch [sic] Kostikov, a member of the Consular Section, in order to learn if the Soviet Embassy had received a reply from Washington concerning his request. We have no clarifying information with regard to this request.59
Asked by the House Committee to explain "why the 10/16 memo said that there was no clarifying information on Oswald’s ‘request’ when it was known by this time that he was seeking a visa," the memo’s author (wife of the Station’s expert on Soviet affairs) "said that ‘They had no need to know all those other details.’"60
One concludes from all this that employees of the Mexico City Station were manipulating information about Oswald even before the assassination, and advancing data from the false (non-visa) intercepts in place of the more accurate data from the visa intercepts of September 27. Even the September 27 intercepts, however, appear questionable when we focus on the various versions of Durán’s DFS statement.
Was the Durán Statement Based on the Oswald Visa Application ?
DFS-3, the CIA cable translating the Spanish of DFS-2, contains one sentence that is a translation of something else:
Oswald was told that the aid which could be given to him was to advise him to go [to] the Russian Consulate. The Consul then spoke by telephone to the person in charge of that office, and was informed that the case would have to be referred to Moscow and that there would be a four month delay.61
There is no textual support for this reference to the Consul speaking by telephone in the Spanish original, which should perhaps be translated:
Oswald was told that the aid which she could give him was to advise him to go to the Russian Consulate, for which reason (para lo qual) she spoke by telephone to the person in charge of that office, and was informed that the case would have to be referred to Moscow and that there would be a four month delay.62
Silvia Durin objected to the DFS-4 version of this statement: "the declarant [i.e. Durán], admitting that she exceeded her duties, unofficially called the Russian Consulate."63 In denying that she had either exceeded her duties or admitted this, Durán confirmed that she had telephoned the Consulate.64
Why then should we waste time on the unsupported statement in DFS-3 that "the Consul [not Silvia] then spoke by telephone?" The first reason is that, for some unexplained reason, the language of DFS-3, although not supported by the language of the DFS-2 version it purports to translate, almost exactly tracks the language typed on to Oswald’s visa application, and signed by Consul Alfredo Mirabal:
We [Nosotros] spoke to the Consulate of the USSR and satisfied ourselves that they had to wait for authority from Moscow to grant the visa and that there would be an approximately four month delay.65
The similarity is striking, and one is moved to ask if the CIA Station had not already acquired a copy of this visa application. Such a possibility reinforces another one, reported by John Newman from an FBI source, that "Silvia Durán was possibly a source of information for Agency or the Bureau."66 An alternative possibility, no less suggestive, is that the CIA had obtained it from Oswald himself.
There is a second reason to believe the DFS-3 version is correct in alleging that the Consul had spoken to the USSR Consulate by telephone. This is that Consul Mirabal testified under oath that he had indeed talked with the Soviet Consul, and learned "it would take about 4 months to obtain a response."67 One should not make too much of this corroboration. Testifying fifteen years later in 1978, Mirabal may have been influenced by the visa application in his hands.
The same might be said of Consul Azcue, who testified that it was he who received the call:
I received a telephone call from the consulate of the Soviet Union. . . . And the consul tells me that apparently the documents. . . attesting to his residence in the Soviet Union and his marriage certificate. . . are correct. . . . But without a doubt he cannot issue the visa without consulting Moscow.68
But Azcue’s testimony is more credible for supplying details not summarized in the visa application observations: that he "received" rather than made the call, that the Soviet documentation was considered valid, and finally that Silvia "might have transferred the call to me."69
In the light of the contemporary evidence from the visa application, it is easy to imagine that Silvia did, in fact, transfer the call she received on September 27 to one or both of the consuls. The problem is that there is no trace of this transfer in the CIA transcript of the call, which shows Silvia alone talking, and closing off the conversation in a routine way ("No bother, thank you very much.")70
The CIA transcript is at odds with the visa application data in another respect: according to it the Soviet consul said (twice) that authorization had to come from Washington. Against this version of what was said we have the united testimony of the visa application, of Silvia Durán (in DFS-2 and DFS-3, but not in DFS-4), and of Consul Azcue in 1978, that the Soviet Consul said (what one might normally expect) that the authorization had to come from Moscow.
I cannot determine from the available evidence whether or not the transcript can be believed in its divergent reference to "Washington." It is likely however that the disappearance of the word "Moscow" from the DFS-4 version of Durán’s testimony, like the insertion of her alleged memory lapse about whether Oswald called back, was a conscious editing to efface the conflicts between her original statement and the CIA transcripts.
What Were the CIA Station and DFS Up To?
It is clear, furthermore, that one of the editing changes to DFS-4 had the effect of effacing a nasty DFS secret, one which also may have concerned both agencies. This had to do with Silvia’s alleged characterization of her own political position. In DFS-2 and DFS-3, she allegedly said of herself that "She has a leftist ideology, by conviction, and is in accord with Communism, but does not belong to any political group."71 Just as Oswald’s alleged self-profession of Communism vanished by revisions (in Mexico and also in Dallas), so also, in DFS-4, did Silvia’s. Like Oswald’s h
er ‘‘Communism" was converted on paper to "Socialism:" "That, as she had already stated, the declarant had been a follower of Socialism and the Marxist doctrine for several years."72
To understand what is at stake here, we must go back to the statement in ST-2 (the telephone conversation of 26 November between Ambassador Hernández Armas and Cuban President Dorticos) that the DFS asked concretely "if she had personal relations and even if she had intimate [i.e. sexual] relations with him. She denied all that."73 In confirming this aggressive line of questioning to the HSCA, Silvia also supplied the context of a Communist conspiracy that the DFS were also hoping to establish:
Cornwell: Did the officers from the Seguridad Department ever suggest to you during the questioning that they had information that you and Oswald had been lovers?
Tirado: Yes, and also that we were Communists and that we were planning the Revolution and uh, a lot of false things. . . . Because all the time they tell me that I was a Communist and I said I’m not a Communist. . . I believe in Socialism but I’m not a Communist; and they insisted that I was a very important people for the government, the Cuban Government, and that I was the link for the International Communists—the Cuban Communists, the Mexican Communists, and the American Communists, and that we were going to kill Kennedy, and I was the link. For them I was very important. Of course, it was not true.74
At the time the Mexican CIA Station transmitted the misleading DFS-2 statement about Durán’s alleged "accord with Communism," not only the Station Chief (Win Scott), but also the Ambassador (Thomas Mann) were pushing hard to obtain corroboration for what they called the Durán family’s "apparent conspiracy with Oswald."75 As I have noted earlier, they recommended not only that the DFS rearrest Durán, but that they "break" her under interrogation—i.e. use torture.76
It is possible that Mann, Scott, and the Mexicans hoped by their talk of international conspiracy to provoke war against Cuba. But Mann and the Mexican Secretary of Gobernación Gustavo Díaz Ordáz were both good friends of the new American President Lyndon Johnson, and in fact the three men had met together repeatedly on Johnson’s ranch.77 It is also possible that their promotion of international conspiracy had a lesser goal in view: not war, but the apparent phase-one risk of war which Johnson was already exploiting as his case for establishing a Warren Commission.78 (To say this is not to accuse these three men of involvement in the assassination itself. The false "phase one" story, and its goal of inducing a Warren Commission, may conceivably have been designed as a triage operation: to restore faith in a badly shaken U.S. body politic, rather than for the conspiratorial goal of protecting guilty individuals.)
Along with other strange activities conducted by Ambassador Mann and the Mexico City Station, the DFS-2 allusion to Durán’s "Communism" made phase-one speculation possible; the later DFS-4 effacement of this allusion brought her statement into line with the phase-two sentiments that were by now the U.S. government line. While Win Scott and station sources continued to promote the false story of Durán’s affair with Oswald, as late as 1967, there was no longer any desire to promote such stories in Washington.79
To sum up: it would appear that the post-assassination hype about conspiracies was piggybacked upon a pre-assassination operation, and that the successive alterations to Durán’s statement were made by the CIA and the DFS to protect this operation.
What was this operation, and was it the CIA’s? With good supporting evidence, John Newman has asked: "Could Oswald’s trip have been part of a CIA effort at countering the FPCC in foreign countries and ‘planting deceptive information which might embarrass’ the FPCC?"80 He has also argued that the phone calls of September 28 and October 1 (the non-visa family of phone intercepts) may represent a second operation (involving an Oswald impostor), piggy-backing, from outside and with limited information, upon the CIA’s Oswald operation.81 He does not speculate who may have been behind this second, unauthorized operation. I shall argue shortly that the Chicago mob may have had inside access, through the DFS, making it possible to plant false intercepts, creating the false impression of an Oswald-Kostikov contact. For the DFS had both CIA and mob links dating back virtually to its formation after World War II.82
Is there corroboration elsewhere for the suppressed intelligence operation (involving Oswald’s visa application) which I have deduced from the rewriting of Durán’s November 23 statement? There is perhaps some. If in fact a "Harvey Lee Oswald" did present a Communist Party card in support of his visa application, this operation, as I argued a year ago, would provide a source for the otherwise anomalous information in a November 22 Army cable from Texas (from Army Intelligence sources) that "Oswald, Harvey Lee. . . is card carrying member of Communist Party."83
It seems likely that the FBI in Mexico City knew about Harvey Lee Oswald’s "Communist" activity in the Cuban Consulate, and knew to keep quiet about this otherwise explosive allegation. One suppressed document in the Mexico City FBI file on Lee Harvey Oswald (File 105-3702) was originally assigned to another file on "Harvey Lee Oswald" (File 105-2137).84 To judge from this lower number, the file on Harvey Lee Oswald was older than the file on Lee Harvey Oswald, and would thus also date from before the assassination.
One year ago I petitioned the Assassination Records Review Board for the review and release of this file, and all other files and records pertaining to Harvey Lee Oswald. I would now appeal to the Cuban Government for all pertinent documentation which it holds on this matter, specifically the records which they have of what Silvia Durán and other Embassy officials told them about Durán’s DFS arrest and interview.
To learn where the original records of Durán’s interview now can be located, the Review Board should also identify and interview those, like "JKB," who were responsible for them and for the altered and presumably falsified later versions. This list of witnesses would include the Mexican DFS officials involved, including Deputy Director Fernando Gutiérrez Barrios, who signed and attested to the falsely dated Warren Commission version.85
It should be easy to locate Gutiérrez as a witness: from 1989 until 1994 he served as Mexico’s Secretary of Gobernación (Minister of Interior).86 To persuade him to testify now on such a delicate matter will no doubt prove more difficult, for what is at stake is no less than the good faith between his government and that of the U.S. The Mexican officials must somehow be made to understand that the only hope for a healthy future, for both governments, lies in a full and frank disclosure of facts which have been poisonously falsified for far too long.
Gutiérrez’ private secretary in 1963 was a young protege, José Antonio Zorrilla Pérez, who (as we shall see) was revealed in the 1980s to have been deeply implicated with Mexico’s leading drug traffickers. It is at least possible that international drug traffickers exened their influence on the DFS in 1963 as well, through the intervention of personnel recruited and trained by Chicago mobster Richard Cain.
The DFS, the Intercepts, Richard Cain, and the Chicago Mob
I have suggested that the progressive alterations of Silvia Durán’s DFS statement of November 23 indicate two distinct levels of falsification. That is, one or more of the changes made to the DFS-4 or Gutiérrez Barrios version of her statement were apparently designed to preserve the credibility of a previously falsified pre-assassination telephone intercept transcript, that made on September 28. In making these changes, the DFS was in effect performing a service for the CIA; and it may well have have received guidance in this matter from the CIA (as it did in the original interrogation of Silvia).87
But the new CIA releases confirm earlier published reports that the DFS itself was involved in the pre-assassination LIENVOY telephone intercepts; and thus, if so, the DFS was protecting itself as well. In a book dealing with the DFS involvement with drug traffickers, Elaine Shannon alleged that the CIA entrusted the DFS with the task of collecting and transmitting these transcripts.88 Philip Agee’s book corroborated this allegation of DFS involvement. He described the wire-tap opera
tion, LIENVOY, as a "joint telephone-tapping operation between Mexico City station and Mexican security service:" "The station provides the equipment, the technical assistance, couriers and transcribers, while the Mexicans make the connections in the exchanges and maintain the listening posts."89
Several CIA Documents released in September 1995 make it clear that in 1963 the Mexican Gobernación (Interior Ministry, in which the DFS was housed) also had access to the information product from the LIENVOY phone tap operation.90 On the night of November 23-24 the Station notified Headquarters they had canceled their surveillance of Kostikov, having noticed that the Mexicans also had him under physical surveillance. They speculated that the Mexicans were "reading same [redacted] take as Station."91
Critics like myself, who have treated the LIENVOY intercept program as a CIA operation, have missed the important point that in fact it was staffed and monitored in part by the DFS.92 This is important, because the DFS was already deeply involved in corruption and organized crime. Thus the LIENVOY operation, so often described as "the CIA’s," was not only technically insecure, it was potentially open to manipulation by criminal elements. Those manning the listening posts in particular were apparently Mexican and not under CIA control.93
One can see how, under such conditions of divided responsibility, opportunities for mischief could proliferate. The CIA Station itself seems to have treated LIENVOY as insecure. On November 23 (?), in a memo listing Support Activities Assignments regarding the assassination, electronic surveillance of the Soviets was tasked to an older phone intercept program, LIFEAT.94
Oswald, Mexico, and Deep Politics Page 28