Oswald, Mexico, and Deep Politics

by Peter Dale Scott

  The Review Board should review and release CIA documents with respect to the LIENVOY operation, which may have been used to document a false Oswald-Kostikov link, and thus pressure the U.S. government into covering up the crime of its President’s murder. It is particularly important to learn by whom, and under whose higher authority, the personnel were recruited who may have supplied falsified intercepts.

  One man who may have been involved is Richard S. Cain (alias Scalzetti), the notorious Chicago mob figure and right-hand man to Sam Giancana who was also an FBI informant, and at the very least, a CIA contact. The CIA’s own files show that Cain visited the CIA’s Mexico City Station in April 1962, at which time "he stated that he had an investigative agency in Mexico. . . for the purpose of training Mexican government agents in police methods, in investigative techniques, and in the use of the lie detector."95

  Cain’s expertise was in electronic surveillance, most notoriously the tapping of telephones. In the period 1950-52 he had tapped the telephones of Cuban revolutionary leaders in Miami on behalf of Batista; in 1960 he was approached by his former employer to install phone taps on behalf of former Cuban President Prfo.96 According to an obituary notice in the Chicago Tribune, the CIA had engaged Cain in 1960 because of his Havana mob contacts, and also to wiretap the Czech embassy in Havana.97 Thus Cain would appear to be a likely candidate to supply the "technical assistance" which Agee says the Mexico City CIA station provided the DFS on the LIENVOY operation.

  We do not learn as much from the released CIA documents on Cain, but its clear that these have been bowdlerized. According to one document,

  The [CIA] Office of Security has a file on Subject CAIN which in summary reflects that. . . in 1963, while with the Cook County Sheriffs Office [and also working for Giancana], he became deeply involved in the President Kennedy assassination case.98

  Yet the only example I have seen of this deep involvement is Cain’s report to the Chicago CIA office that at a secret meeting in February 1963 of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in Chicago, "the assassination of the President of the U.S. was discussed."99 It is indeed interesting that Cain supplied this information (or disinformation). There are further hints in the same memo that Cain’s "contact clearance" in September 1963 (which "furnished eight reports concerning exile Cuban activities in the Chicago area") may have produced additional information (or disinformation) which was later interwoven into the complex assassination stories involving Abraham Bolden and Dr. Paulino Sierra.100 But there is nothing in these records to justify the claim that Cain was "deeply involved."

  We see the same bowdlerization with respect to Mexico. Cain himself claimed "he had done some work for CIA in Mexico."101 According to Agency documents, Cain’s contact with CIA there was an unprovoked walk-in to the CIA Station, shortly before "he was deported from Mexico for carrying a loaded revolver and brass knuckles, for impersonating a Mexican government official, and for violating his tourist permit."102 In a Chicago Tribune obituary notice that we read that Cain was ousted from Mexico for having trained anti-Castro Cuban exiles there, for a future invasion.103 According to a follow-up article, Cain "did have repeated traffic with the CIA in Chicago and Mexico City," reporting on Castro spies in anti-Castro exile groups.104

  The CIA was clearly evasive, even in its own internal documents, about its true relationship with Richard Cain. (One memo-writer observed, "I see no need or obligation on the part of the Agency to acknowledge [to an outsider] our past ‘contact’ relationship" with Cain; his superior, Steven Kuhn of the Security Research Staff, concurred.)105 The documents show nothing pertinent to Time’s allegation that in 1960-62 Cain was recruiting for anti-Castro operations:

  With the consent of the CIA, intelligence sources say, Detective Cain began recruiting Spanish-speaking toughs on the Windy City’s West Side. Some of the hoodlums were sent to Miami and Central America for training in commando tactics. . . .U.S. sources say that the CIA spent more than $100,000 on the operation, while Giancana laid out $90,000 of the Mob’s own funds for Cain’s expenses.106

  However, Time, as much as the CIA, may have had a motive to cover up the past relationship between Richard Cain and its parent, Time-Life. The FBI heard in 1960 from Cain and another source that he was planning to parachute into Cuba to take photos of anti-Castro guerrilla operations on behalf of Life.107 Such ‘‘covert operations journalism" was regularly conducted for Time-Life by journalists and organized crime figures, such as John Martino; and regularly there was CIA support for these operations as well.108

  From all this we see, even from CIA files, indications of Cain’s involvement with the Mexico City CIA station and its operations. Let us for the time being hypothesize that Cain’s firm, Accurate Detective Laboratories, had a contract with the DFS to train (and possibly recruit) personnel to man the electronic listening posts at the Soviet and Cuban consulates. This could mean that the operation which produced falsified transcripts from Mexico City with respect to Oswald had been set up by a man, Richard Cain, with links to the Chicago milieu of Jack Ruby. For Cain’s firm, Accurate Defense Laboratories (described in a CIA memo as "an investigative agency in Mexico with branches in Chicago and Los Angeles") had its Chicago office in the back of a mob juice operation, Frontier Finance Corp. And the owner of Frontier Finance, Fiore Buccieri, was later indicted with Ruby’s old friend and 1963 contact, Lenny Patrick.109 The President of Frontier Finance, former Chicago Police Captain John Scherping, also ran the Chicago office of Accurate Laboratories, which hired Cain as its general manager.110

  The Richard Cain-Lennie Patrick-Dave Yaras segment of the Chicago mob had connections in 1963 not only to Ruby but to Sam Giancana, and above all to mob activities in Cuba.111 It is of course unlikely that they could by themselves have originated a sophisticated message linking Oswald to Kostikov, whose potential for blackmail depended on knowledge of what was contained about Kostikov in government files. But if Cain recruited and/or trained those who were in the DFS intercept program, then we may have isolated the matrix for a sophisticated CIA-Mafia assassination plot in 1963, one whose target was ultimately deflected from Castro to Kennedy. Such a matrix could have connected activities that on the surface would seem wholly unrelated, from sophisticated intelligence manipulations in Mexico City to the crimes in Dallas of Jack Ruby and his associates.

  For Cain, unlike Buccieri and Patrick, appears to have been close to, if not inside, the highly sensitive CIA-Mafia connection that in 1960-61 recruited Cain’s boss Giancana and Santos Trafficante for the assassination of Fidel Castro. An HSCA staff report presents credible arguments that Cain’s own mission in 1960 may have been part of the CIA-Mafia plots against Castro, and that Cain himself may have been the "assassin-to-be" mentioned by his boss Giancana on October 18, 1960.’112

  At least in 1961-62, this highly restricted operation was run out of the CIA’s Staff D (FI/D), headed by William Harvey.113 Ostensibly Staff D "was a small Agency component responsible for communications intercepts."114 However the restrictions on clearances for COMINT (communications intelligence) made FI/D an ideal hiding place for sensitive operations that CIA officials wished to hide from the rest of the Agency. One of these was ZR/RIFLE, Harvey’s project for an "Executive Action Capability," i.e. assassinations. Thus it was an FI/D workshop that, for example, provided AM/LASH with a poison pen device in November 1963.115

  FL/D was definitely responsible for the LIENVOY intercept program in Mexico City. LIENVOY reports were filed regularly to FI/D (and thus at one time to Harvey) at Headquarters. More significantly, Ann Goodpasture, the Station employee who brought the DFS intercept product into the CIA station, was an FI/D employee.116

  In other words it is entirely plausible that FI/D would turn to Cain, when developing the LIENVOY program in the early 1960’s. A CIA component willing to collaborate with Giancana’s men in assassination would certainly have no problem in recruiting Giancana’s electronic expert for a wiretap operation.

  But this collabor
ation looks more sinister in 1963, when LIENVOY produced false intercepts concerning Oswald and Kostikov. Ann Goodpasture played a role in the falsification of the record; it was she, for example, who supplied the mistaken identification in the station’s original Oswald cable, making Oswald appear to be "age 35" and balding.117 The introduction of the impostor intercepts into the CIA’s files must have involved, similarly, people inside the Station as well as the outside. If Richard Cain helped recruit the latter, then we may be looking at an FI/D disinformation operation at both the DFS end and also inside the Station.

  To sum up, in the LIENVOY Project we may have isolated a key pressure point in the manipulation of an authorized intelligence operation into an illegal assassination plot. The false October 1 CIA-DFS intercept contributed to the false Oswald-Kostikov link that was eventually used to provoke an official cover-up of the assassination.

  The Review Board should regard this CIA-DFS connection as relevant, perhaps central, to the Kennedy assassination plot. It should pursue the relevant documents with those elements in the Mexican Government now seeking to purge the tradition of criminal influence and corruption from their country’s politics. Personnel of the DFS have played, and apparently continue to play, a crucial role in that tradition.118

  The DFS and Crime, 1947-94

  In Mexico, to be sure, a DFS scandal involving forged and altered documents will seem almost trivial in the light of later DFS scandals. The DFS was already linked to drug-traffickers by the late 1940s, when the DFS founder retired to work with Mexico’s leading international drug kingpin.119 The Chicago mob had been supplied with drugs from Durángo, Mexico, from as far back as 1947, in a major Mexican government-protected connection that appears to have involved Jack Ruby.120 By the 1960s Durángo and Chicago were joined in a heroin connection, dominated at both ends by the family of Jaime Herrera Novales. Herrera Novales, a Mexican, was protected by his badges as a member of the State Police and also the DFS.121 Chicago mobsters were simultaneously involved in smuggling stolen cars to Mexico, in an international ring which appeared to overlap with narcotics operations.122

  Mexico’s culture of political corruption attracted Sam Giancana when he fled from U.S. Justice in 1966. Protected by a lawyer close to President Echeverría, it was easy for him to continue to run his world-wide gambling operations from Mexico City and then Cuernavaca. Cain introduced Giancana to this lawyer, Jorge Castillo; and eventually, after Cain was released from jail in 1971, Cain became Giancana’s courier.123 It is possible that Giancana’s activities in Mexico also involved narcotics. Drug trafficker Alberto Sicilia Falcón, a Bay of Pigs veteran, is said to have been in regular contact with Giancana in Cuernavaca, in the same period that he had Echeverría’s Secretary of Gobernación, Mario Moya Palencia, as a passenger on his private plane.124

  In the 1970s an offshoot of the DFS, the Brigada Blanca, formed death squads to eliminate the violent left.125 In the early 1980s no less than thirteen DFS officials were indicted in California for their active involvement in a major international stolen car ring; Miguel Nazar (or Nassar) Haro, by then the DFS Director (and in 1978 the man who helped frustrate the visit of HSCA investigators to Mexico) was initially protected from indictment by the CIA, because of his alleged "indispensability as a source of intelligence in Mexico and in Central America."126 Nazar Haro "was also linked in U.S. court testimony to selling protection to cocaine smugglers."127

  The scandal of the DFS’ long-time involvement with international drug trafficking came to a head under Nazar Haro’s successor, José Antonio Zorrilla Pérez. Zorrilla in 1963 had been private secretary to his political mentor, Femando Gutiérrez Barrios.128 By the 1980s the DFS zone commanders along the U.S. border were all suspected by DEA officials of complicity in the growing drug traffic; and Zorrilla himself was reportedly receiving payoffs from the Guadalajara drug kingpin Rafael Caro Quintero.129 When a former friend of Zorrilla’s, the journalist Manuel Buendia, began to explore the relationships between Mexican police, CIA, and drug traffickers, he was shot down in the streets of Mexico City. Zorrilla and other DFS agents were the first to arrive on the scene, and also to ransack his office.130 Zorrilla, who was soon a suspect, retired abruptly as DFS Director in February 1985; and the DFS was dissolved. Four years later he was arrested with at least four other DFS officers for involvement in Buendia’s murder.131 Opposition legislators demanded that Zorrilla’s superior in 1984, Femando Gutiérrez Barrios, be forced to testify as to his "possible knowledge" about the case.132

  The U.S. press hailed Zorrilla’s arrest as a sign that the new Mexican government of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari might crack down on organized corruption. However Zorrilla’s arrest closed, rather than opened, the doors on a larger investigation of all those involved, including his superiors. And Salinas’ first choice for head of the Intelligence Directorate, successor organization to the DFS, was Miguel Nazar Haro. (Nazar Haro soon retired again, when old charges were revived in the press about his use of torture as DFS director.)133

  Since then it has become clear that the dark shadow of the longtime DFS-drug connection continues to haunt Mexican politics. In August of this year the New York Times revealed that a former DFS agent, Femando de la Sota, who was later also a CIA agent, had been arrested and convicted for lying about his presence at the assassination in 1994 of Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio.134 According to the Mexican weekly Proceso, the briefly arrested ‘‘second gunman" in the case, Jorge Antonio Sánchez, turned out to be an agent of the Center of Investigations and National Security (CISEN), the current successor organization to the DFS. Reporting this in the Nation, Andrew Reding further referred to the "trails of evidence’’ leading to top officials of the Salinas administration, like José Cordoba Montoya, Salinas’ coordinator of the intelligence agencies, including CISEN.135 The mystery of the Colosio assassination is still further heightened by the interest in it of Miguel Nazar Haro, privately investigating the murder as he did earlier that of Manuel Buendia.136

  It is perhaps hopeful that the new Mexican President, Ernesto Zedillo, has distanced himself from this DFS tradition, by appointing an opposition party member as his new Attorney General. A better understanding of DFS irregularities in 1963 should be welcomed in 1995 by those forces in Mexican politics who are seeking to limit the influence of corruption and assassinations.

  But 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 FBI and Warren Commission’s false isolation of Ruby from the Giancana-Yaras-Patrick Chicago mob in 1964.137

  1 See Chapter II, also Chapter VIII. The CIA station in Mexico misled even others in government about the man who allegedly identified himself as Oswald in Mexico City. We are still just beginning to learn how great the misrepresentations may have been. For example, in the latest CIA release there is a penciled note from 1976, reporting inside hearsay that the "caller (who called himself Oswald) had difficulty making himself understood both (as I recall) in English and Russian" (Handwritten comment on Memo of 12/3/76 for the Record from Scott D. Breckinridge, OLC; NARA # 104-10095-10001; CIA File # 80T01357A). The Review Board should pursue this claim to its source. If the "caller (who called himself Oswald)" was not a native English speaker, those in U.S. service who knew this should have to explain any delays in the transmission of this information.

  2 For the DFS and drug trafficking, see Peter Dale Scott. Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 104-05, 142. Writing before the release of the Lopez Report, I did not then know that Miguel Nazar Haro, the DFS Chief and CIA agent indicted for smuggling stolen cars, had also overseen the 1978 visit of HSCA staff to Mexico City, when they were denied access to the important DFS witness Manuel Calvillo (Lopez Report, 270-81).
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  3 W. Dirk Raat, Mexico and the United States: Ambivalent Vistas, 97, 122, 130, 151; W. Dirk Raat, "U.S. Intelligence Operations and Covert Action in Mexico, 1900-1947," Journal of Contemporary History 22 (1987), 618ss. The evolution of both the FBI and U.S. Army Intelligence have been affected by their deep involvement in Mexico.

  4 24 WH 673, 621; WR 736; Scott. Deep Politics, 105.

  5 As I shall make clear, I am indebted for this distinction to John Newman; cf. Newman, Oswald and the CIA, 364-68.

  6 CIA Doc. #131-593; JKB memo of 11/26/63 and 10-page attachment: Summary of ñrst Mexican interview of Silvia Durán et al, pp. 7 (twice), 8. 9. 10 "Aseveró no conocer a Harvey Lee Oswald." Versions of this sentence are used five times in all in this document, in the minor supporting statements of Ruben Durán, Betsy Serratos, Agata Roseno, Barbara Ann Bliss, and Charles Bentley. In the statement of Silvia Durán, the variant recorded is "Lee Harvey Oswald." In this JKB memo the standardized name "Lee Harvey Oswald" has apparently been corrected from an earlier "Harvey Lee Oswald" (See Chapter VII, "Oswald. . . and Oswald’s Party Card.")

  7 CIA Headquarters Cable 85758 of 29 November 1963 to the White House, State Department, and FBI, CIA Doc #223-647, pp. 8, 9 11.

  8 One purpose for the alternative name may have been to hide sensitive file documents on Oswald. It is striking that when the FBI and CIA searched (as is customary) for name variants of Oswald, "Harvey Lee Oswald" was never among the variants searched, even though the name "Harvey Lee Oswald" occurs in widely dispersed FBI and CIA records. (Cf. the search slips in the HQ Oswald file 105-82555 after serial-42; and in the Dallas Oswald file DL 100-10461 right after the assassination )

  9 FBI HQ File 105-82555-88, Cable # 241 from Legat Bern to DIR: [Title] "Changed. Lee Harvey Oswald, aka Harvey Lee Oswald, Internal Security—R and Cuba. Title changed to show correct sequence of first and middle names." Cf. Mexico City FBI File 105-3702-254. see below.