Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  14. Finally, as with his visit to the Cuban consulate, Oswald himself told us of his visit to the Soviet embassy. In his November 9, 1963, letter to the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C., he wrote, “This is to inform you of recent events since my meetings with Comrade Kostin [almost assuredly, a reference to the aforementioned Valeriy Kostikov, a KGB officer and member of the consular staff at the Soviet embassy in Mexico City at the time of Oswald’s visit] in the Embassy of the Soviet Union, Mexico City, Mexico.” Elsewhere in the letter he said, “I had not planned to contact the Soviet Embassy in Mexico so they were unprepared.”150 Further, Oswald told his interrogators after his arrest, per Postal Inspector Harry Holmes, that after he “burst out” of the Cuban consulate, he went “over to the Soviet embassy” seeking authorization from them “to go to Russia by way of Cuba,” but “they refused and said ‘come back in thirty days’ or something like that. And he went out of there angry and disgusted.”151

  Since we absolutely know Oswald went to the Cuban consulate and Soviet embassy during his Mexico City trip, all other matters pertaining to a possible Oswald imposture at the consulate and embassy that have been written about and discussed ad nauseam by the conspiracy theorists become automatically irrelevant and superfluous. But for the historical record, what are some of these matters? Although for the most part they involve simple human as well as bureaucratic errors, they have enjoyed a resonance in the conspiracy community exceeding the half-life of uranium.

  One misstatement made the day after the assassination—when turmoil, confusion, and extreme pressure understandably led to errors and misstatements—was a paragraph in a five-page preliminary analysis of the assassination (much too soon for any kind of analysis to be written), in which J. Edgar Hoover wrote, “The Central Intelligence Agency advised that on October 1, 1963, an extremely sensitive source had reported that an individual identified as Lee Oswald…contacted the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City inquiring as to any messages. Special agents in this Bureau [in Dallas], who have conversed with Oswald in Dallas, Texas, have observed photographs of the individual referred to above and have listened to a recording of his voice. These special agents are of the opinion that the above-referred-to individual was not Lee Harvey Oswald.”152 This, naturally, was tremendous fodder for conspiracy theorists—someone obviously was impersonating Oswald in Mexico City. In the world of the theorists, there is no room for error, misstatements, incompetence, and so on. Hoover, in the confusion following the assassination, simply misunderstood the information he had received, or someone made an error in giving him this information.*

  The HSCA thoroughly investigated the matter and learned that later in the day (7:23 p.m., Central Standard Time, November 23, 1963) Dallas FBI special agent-in-charge Gordon Shanklin advised Hoover of his error, informing him that only a report of Oswald’s conversation was received by the Dallas field office from the CIA station in Mexico City, not an actual tape recording of the conversation. And on November 25, the Dallas office again apprised Hoover that “there appears to be some confusion in that no tapes were taken to Dallas. Only typewritten [reports were] supplied.”153

  The HSCA went on to say, “Shanklin stated in a Committee interview that no recording was ever received by FBI officials in Dallas. Moreover, former FBI Special Agents James Hosty, John W. Fain, Burnett Tom Carter, and Arnold J. Brown, each of whom had conversed with Oswald at one time, informed the Committee that they had never listened to a recording of Oswald’s voice…The Committee concluded, therefore, that the information in the November 23, 1963, letterhead memorandum [the assassination analysis by Hoover] was mistaken and did not provide a basis for concluding that there had been an Oswald imposter.”154

  As is typical of most conspiracy writers, Jim Marrs, author of Crossfire, tells his readers about the November 23, 1963, FBI memo, but then never tells them that the HSCA determined that the memo was in error.155

  Actually, there were recordings of Oswald’s voice secured by the CIA station in Mexico City resulting from its monitoring of all incoming and outgoing telephone calls at the Cuban consulate and Soviet embassy. For instance, the prelude to the typed transcript of the first of two calls made to the Soviet military attaché at the embassy on October 1, 1963, at 10:31 a.m., says the caller spoke “broken Russian.” The caller, per the transcript, was told that for the information he was seeking he should call a different number at the embassy, 15-60-55, “and ask for a consul.” At 10:45 a.m., the person called the consul, and the prelude to the new transcription again refers to the “broken Russian” of the caller. The transcribed monitored telephone conversation follows:

  “Hello, this is Lee Oswald speaking. I was at your place last Saturday and spoke to a Consul, and they said they’d send a telegram to Washington, so I wanted to find out if you have anything new? But I don’t remember the name of that Consul.”

  OP (Other Party): “Kostikov. He is dark/hair or skin?”

  Oswald: “Yes. My name is Oswald.”

  OP: “Just a minute, I’ll find out…They say that they haven’t received anything yet.”

  Oswald: “Have they done anything?”

  OP: “Yes, they say that a request has been sent out, but nothing has been received as yet.”

  Oswald: “And what…?”

  The other party hangs up.

  A concluding paragraph to the transcript reads, “Station source, who did transcriptions, says Oswald is identical with person speaking broken Russian who called from Cuban [consulate] 28 September to Soviet Embassy.”156

  A “station source” who heard and transcribed Oswald’s voice on some of the tapes was identified years later as Boris Tarasoff, a CIA staff officer in Mexico City whose job in September and October of 1963 was to receive tapes of CIA telephone taps at the Soviet embassy in Mexico City and translate (from Russian into English) and transcribe the tapes. He would receive the tapes from a CIA courier the day after they were made and would return the tapes and their transcriptions to the same courier the following day. Tarasoff only remembers translating and transcribing two Oswald tapes, of telephone conversations on September 28 and October 1, 1963, though he says, “There might have been more. I am not certain.”* Oswald only used his name on October 1, not September 28.157 Anna Tarasoff, Boris’s wife, who assisted him with the transcriptions in Mexico City, told the HSCA there was another taped conversation between Oswald and someone at the Soviet embassy for which no transcript has been found, in which Oswald identified himself, said he was broke, and wanted financial aid from either the Russians or the Cubans so he could leave the country. “They definitely turned him down. In fact, if I recall, they finally got disgusted and hung up on him.”158

  What happened to these tapes? In 1963, David Atlee Phillips was the number-three man at the CIA station in Mexico City, and among other responsibilities he was chief of the station’s Cuban operations. When I was preparing him for his upcoming testimony at the London docu-trial in 1986,† he told me that “95 percent of the recordings our person would listen to would be just junk. With the 5 percent that was relevant, the conversation would be typed up. But the tape of all the conversations would continue to be used. New conversations would simply obliterate the old conversations. There’s no question that’s what occurred to Oswald’s conversations. They don’t exist anymore. The tapes were large in those days. If we kept all of the tapes and didn’t re-use them, they would have filled a warehouse.”

  “It would have been nice,” I said, “if those tapes still existed.”

  “Yes, but we didn’t know at that time that people like Ed Lopez and Gaeton Fonzi [HSCA conspiracy-minded investigators] would later question whether it was really Oswald on the phone.”159 When London Weekend Television researcher Richard Tomlinson interviewed Phillips three weeks earlier in Washington, D.C., for three hours, Phillips put it even better: “How were we to know that two months later this person, Oswald, would assassinate the president?”

  It’s interesting to note that
even the long report that HSCA investigator Edwin Lopez authored on Oswald’s trip to Mexico City concluded that “the CIA telephone surveillance on the Soviet Embassy taped several calls of a man using the name ‘Lee Oswald.’ [Lopez offers no evidence to support the assertion that Oswald used his name several times.] These tapes were retained for a routine two [the number “one” is handwritten above the typewritten “two”] week period and were most likely erased shortly after 16 October 1963.”160 Lopez apparently was unaware that a November 24, 1963, CIA Teletype (No. 7054) from the CIA station in Mexico City to CIA headquarters in Washington, D.C., read, in part, “Hqs has full transcripts [of] all pertinent calls. Regret tapes for this period already erased.”161

  The other major area that has been grist for the conspiracy mill on the issue of an Oswald impersonator in Mexico City is the lack of any photo of Oswald in Mexico City. The CIA had photographic surveillance of people entering and leaving the Cuban consulate and Soviet embassy,162 but since it was not able to produce photos of Oswald entering or leaving these places, the conspiracy theorists have long since maintained this proves Oswald was never present at either place. The theorists never consider the possibility of incompetence, which is so very common in life, being the answer, or of a failure or breakdown of the equipment from time to time. It turns out that the photographic surveillance of the Cuban and Russian embassies (and their respective consulates) was nowhere as seamless as might be wished. David Phillips told me that although his office in Mexico City had the capacity to photograph the consulate and embassy round-the-clock, seven days a week, the reality was that this was not done. Because the equipment malfunctioned from time to time—the repairs obviously took time—and because personnel were sometimes needed more elsewhere, the surveillance “was not constant and uninterrupted.”163

  Indeed, in 1998 the ARRB conducted a very thorough review of all logs, tapes, and records from the CIA’s station in Mexico City with respect to the period of Oswald’s visit, and found that a Robot Star camera and a K-100 camera had been installed by the CIA on September 27, 1963, to cover the entrance to the Cuban consulate. (Per the CIA, there was no photographic surveillance of the entrance to the Cuban consulate prior to September 27.) The K-100 camera broke down after one day’s operation, and the Robot Star, which was to be tested for eight days, “broke down after four days of operation,” meaning it was only operational from September 27 to September 30, and “there is no record of actual photographic takes or test results from the camera.” A functioning “pulse camera” was installed on December 17, 1963, weeks after the assassination.

  As far as the Soviet embassy was concerned, the ARRB learned that LIMITED, the name for the CIA’s photographic surveillance operation located in a first-floor apartment directly across the street from the main Soviet embassy gate, and operating from 9:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. each day, was the source of the photographs of the unidentified “mystery” man (see later text) supplied to the Warren Commission, and lived up to its title by not even being operational on September 28–30 and October 5–6. The ARRB found that even on the days of operation, there were many cases where “the log entries documenting observed activities at the site do not correlate with the recorded hours of operation. This suggests that the target site was not being monitored for the entire duration of the surveillance shift.”164

  The documentary history of the photographic surveillance cameras around the time of Oswald’s visit to Mexico City, which either were manually operated or had to be triggered by a movement or color in the area of the embassy being “covered,” is sorry at best. References to the system like the following appear in an internal CIA document from the chief of the CIA station in Mexico City: the system works “about 80 percent of the time”; the coverage was changed to “only photograph people leaving but not entering the target building”; when a person leaves by this entrance, “the man’s shirt or face will trigger the device photographing a front or side view depending on how the subject leaves” the building; “this system does not work when a person enters the building with light clothing [unbelievable]”; and the station “requested that a substitute camera be shipped to the Station as soon as possible to replace the Robot Star camera on this project.”165 But if you were to listen to the conspiracy theorists, the surveillance cameras were operating continuously and never missed a thing.

  The HSCA dealt with allegations from conspiracy theorists that the CIA did, in fact, obtain a picture of Oswald entering the consulate and embassy, but the CIA denied that any photograph or photographs of Oswald had been thus obtained, and the committee discovered no such pictures of Oswald in its review of the agency’s files.166

  The famous Lopez Report referred to earlier (formally, the HSCA’s “Report on Lee Harvey Oswald’s Trip to Mexico City”), named after Edwin Lopez, the young HSCA investigator who after much research in Mexico City drafted the report, was finally, after thirty-three years and amid much anticipation in the conspiracy community, declassified from “Top Secret” and released by the ARRB on October 7, 1996.

  Though conspiracy theorists thought it would contain some powerful evidence of a conspiracy, the report, despite Lopez’s strong, conspiracy orientation, turned out to be, as it had to be, a giant dud. Lopez concluded that “the Warren Commission correctly established that Oswald had traveled to Mexico City.” What about once he got there? “While the majority of the evidence tends to indicate that [the individual who visited the Cuban consulate and Soviet embassy on the dates in question] was indeed Lee Harvey Oswald, the possibility that someone else used Lee Harvey Oswald’s name during this time in contacts with the Soviet and Cuban Consulates cannot be absolutely dismissed.”167* But nowhere in the 393 pages of his report does Lopez say why an imposter would go to Mexico City at the same time as Oswald and use Oswald’s name at the Cuban consulate and Soviet embassy around the very same time that we know, from much evidence, that Oswald was also doing so. What could possibly be achieved by such an endeavor? Moreover, since the Cuban consulate and Soviet embassy in Mexico City are only two blocks apart, wouldn’t there be a likelihood that Oswald and his imposter would run into each other? And even if Oswald and his impersonator looked like identical twins, and the impersonator managed to dress exactly like Oswald, and had the identical papers and documents Oswald had, wouldn’t the employees at the consulate and embassy be saying to Oswald or his impersonator things like “Weren’t you just here?” “Didn’t you tell me…?” “I thought I already told you…”

  One would think that only children in a sandbox could imagine an Oswald impersonator in Mexico City at the same time Oswald was there, right? But among many others, conspiracy theorist John Newman believes all of this. And he’s actually an assistant professor on the payroll of the University of Maryland, teaching courses in Soviet, Chinese Communist, East Asian, and Vietnam War history. Why would anyone be impersonating Oswald at the consulate and embassy? “Someone,” Newman says, “wanted to make sure that Oswald’s Cuban and KGB contacts in Mexico were fully documented.” Why? To establish “evidence of an international communist conspiracy” to murder Kennedy. But since Newman, who maintains that Oswald was a CIA operative, admits the real Oswald was also down there at the consulate and embassy around the same time, why the need for the imposter? The good professor doesn’t say. And if the imposter had the objective Newman gives him, why wouldn’t he want to “do his thing” at some time other than when Oswald was also walking back and forth between the consulate and embassy? Newman’s resumé says he had twenty years of military intelligence training. Apparently, it’s in the twenty-first year that the armed forces finally gives you the small commonsense tablet.168

  Getting back to Lopez, he comes up with an Oswald impersonator possibility in his report that is so far out a hundred fertile minds sitting in a room for an entire week with the express purpose of thinking up impersonator scenarios wouldn’t think of it. It’s always assumed, of course, that the imposter would impersonate Oswald without
his knowledge, that he would be someone Oswald did not know. But Lopez raises the possibility—are you seated? because I don’t want to be responsible for anyone falling down and hurting themselves—that maybe the impersonator was “one of his [Oswald’s] companions” in Mexico City.169 To think that our tax money went into the preparation of the Lopez Report.

  Elsewhere in his report, Lopez says, “The CIA photo-surveillance operations in Mexico City probably obtained a photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald,”170 and he hints darkly that the CIA suppressed the photo or photos, though he does not say why the spy agency would want to keep Oswald’s entering the Cuban consulate and Soviet embassy a secret. Lopez has always suspected that the CIA, or rogue elements thereof, may have been behind the assassination.171 Indeed, in my interview of him before the London trial he even said he was “a great fan” of A. J. Weberman, the bearded guru and wacky conspiracy theorist who lived in a loft in Greenwich Village and was, per Lopez, “the leader of the yippies.” However, in front of the jury in London he would only acknowledge that he told me he was “impressed” with Weberman’s research in the Kennedy case (i.e., when Weberman wasn’t rifling through the garbage of Bob Dylan, with whom Weberman was obsessed).172 On direct examination by Gerry Spence, Lopez said that he felt the CIA was “trying to set Oswald up” for the Kennedy assassination. On cross, I asked him, “[So] you believe that the CIA may have set Lee Harvey Oswald up?”