A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination

by Philip Shenon

  There is another eye-popping document, prepared at the CIA sometime after 1968, that deserves attention in trying to understand what was hidden by the agency. It is a meticulous, 132-page-long classified chronology of everything that was known about Oswald by the agency’s Mexico City station, and when. The first entry is September 27, 1963, when Oswald was first detected at the Soviet embassy in Mexico. CIA records seem to suggest that the chronology was prepared by Anne Goodpasture, Scott’s former deputy. The chronology documents the time line, at least as Scott presented it, of Garro’s allegations about the “twist party” and her belief that Duran had been Oswald’s “mistress.” On one side of the chronology are brief typed commentaries by its author, who questions—despairingly, it seems—why the agency had been so skeptical of Garro, even after some of her allegations found support elsewhere. “How did Elena GARRO know about Silvia being the mistress of OSWALD?—This is 1965,” one note reads, recalling that the CIA would then hear the same thing from one of its own informants in 1967. The chronology notes that the FBI was also eventually able to confirm Garro’s claim that she had been hidden away—by a man later identified as a paid CIA informant—at a small Mexico City hotel for eight days after the assassination. “This is what Elena claimed and no one would believe her,” a note attached to that entry reads. Elsewhere, the chronology’s author writes: “The Warren Commission did not do an adequate investigative job.… It is hard to believe the Commission served the public well. Instead of ending all the rumors, they set the stage for a new and more serious era of speculation.”

  From other declassified CIA files, we know, for certain, another secret that Angleton would have been eager to keep: that his elite counterintelligence staff had kept an eye on Oswald—illegally—as far back as 1959, four years before the assassination. In November 1959, a month after Oswald arrived in Moscow and announced that he wanted to defect to the Soviet Union, Angleton’s staff placed Oswald on a “SECRET EYES ONLY” watch list of about three hundred Americans targeted to have their overseas mail opened for inspection. That was a full year before the date that the CIA gave to the Warren Commission for the opening of the agency’s first files on Oswald. Angleton’s desire to keep the earlier surveillance a secret would make sense if only because the mail-opening program, known by the code name HK-LINGUAL, was known even within the CIA to be illegal; the agency had no court-approved warrants to open the mail of American citizens. (Over the years, others on the watch list included Martin Luther King, John Steinbeck, and former vice president Hubert Humphrey.) Why had Angleton’s staff targeted Oswald almost immediately after his arrival in Russia, while other American military defectors were never put on that watch list? It is another question that cannot be answered with certainty.

  * * *

  I started work on this book in 2008, and I am writing this author’s note in the late summer of 2013. During that time I have interviewed hundreds of people, many more than once, and traveled around the country and to several points abroad for my research. I have been allowed to see classified documents, private letters, court transcripts, photographs, films, and a variety of other materials that, to my knowledge, have not been shown to any other author. Every statement or quotation in this book has been sourced, which the footnotes and endnotes show in detail. What is clear to me is that over the last fifty years—actually more than fifty years, since parts of this narrative are set well before November 22, 1963—senior officials of the United States government, most especially at the CIA, have lied about the assassination and the events that led to it.

  Several former officials bear special responsibility for the conspiracy theories that are likely to plague us forever. At the top of that list would be another CIA veteran, former director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms, who made the decision not to tell the Warren Commission about the agency’s murder plots targeting Castro. And it was Helms, of course, who put the treacherous Angleton in control of what information reached the commission. At the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover and his deputies went out of their way—from the first hours after the assassination—to avoid pursuing evidence that might have led to the discovery that Oswald had coconspirators. It was far easier for Hoover to blame the assassination on a disturbed young misfit who had no recorded history of violence than to acknowledge the possibility that there had been a conspiracy to kill the president that the FBI might have been able to foil. It was Hoover’s own successor, Clarence Kelley, who declared with certainty that President Kennedy would not have died if the FBI had simply acted on the information that existed in its files in November 1963.

  There are two other names that belong on the list, and they are of men who are more often saluted for their accomplishments in public life: Chief Justice Earl Warren and Robert Kennedy. The chief justice was wise in initially refusing President Johnson’s request that he lead the commission; Warren was right to fear that the commission’s work might stain his legacy because it has, much to the disappointment of people like me who were raised to revere him for his accomplishments on the Supreme Court. What does it say about this presidential commission that its findings were ultimately rejected by the president himself? Warren has to be faulted above all for denying key evidence and witnesses to the commission’s staff. Those monumental errors included his refusal to allow the commission to review the president’s autopsy photos and X-rays—a decision that all but guaranteed the medical evidence would remain hopelessly muddled today—and his even more baffling order that blocked the staff from interviewing Silvia Duran.

  I am left with nothing but admiration for most of the then young staff lawyers on the commission, who were clearly fighting to get to the truth about the assassination. That would include men like David Slawson, Burt Griffin, David Belin, Mel Eisenberg, and Sam Stern; I do believe they joined the investigation without any real sense of what they were up against. There can be no praise for Wesley Liebeler if there is even a hint of truth in the reports about his sexual advances on women witnesses, but I am convinced that he, too, would have been excited to find that Oswald had accomplices in killing the president, and then to track them down. Arlen Specter was willing to take the risk of standing up to—and often offending—the chief justice of the United States to insist on evidence that Specter felt he needed to do his job. If he had been allowed to inspect Kennedy’s autopsy photos and X-rays, many of the debates about the medical evidence and the single-bullet theory might have been settled long ago.

  And then, perhaps most surprisingly, it is clear that Robert Kennedy bears much responsibility for the fact that, half a century after the assassination, opinion polls show that most Americans are convinced today that they are still being denied the truth about the president’s murder. No one had been better situated to demand the truth than Robert Kennedy—first as attorney general, then as a United States senator, and certainly as the slain president’s brother. And yet, in the nearly five years between his brother’s violent death and his own, Robert Kennedy kept insisting publicly that he fully supported the findings of the Warren Commission, all the while telling family and friends that he was convinced that the commission had it wrong. If anyone doubted Kennedy’s lack of candor, those doubts were put to rest in January 2013, when his son and namesake, Robert Jr., appeared to stun an audience in Dallas—at a forum to honor his father’s legacy—by revealing that his father thought the commission’s report “was a shoddy piece of craftsmanship.” He said his father believed the assassination might have been carried out by mobsters in retaliation for the Justice Department’s crackdown on organized crime during the Kennedy administration, or that the murder might have been linked to Cuba, or even possibly to “rogue CIA agents.”

  Robert Jr. had an explanation for why his father had misled the public for years. His father, he said, felt he had no ability in the mid-1960s to pursue the investigation himself, and he worried that by raising his suspicions publicly about a conspiracy in his brother’s assassination, he might divert attention from press
ing national issues, especially the civil rights movement. “There was really nothing he could have done about it at that time,” Robert Jr. explained. “As soon as Jack died, he lost all of his power.”

  * * *

  I discovered that there is one place where there is still hope of resolving some of mysteries about the president’s murder: Mexico City. I admit that I knew nothing—at all—about Oswald’s Mexico trip until I began work on this book. In two lengthy reporting trips to the Mexican capital, I attempted to retrace Oswald’s movements around that massive city. I was doing what the FBI and the CIA had apparently refused to do in the weeks after the assassination, including trying to track down and talk to Silvia Duran. I was also eager to locate people who had known the late Elena Garro, who died in 1998, from emphysema, at the age of seventy-seven.

  In April 2013, my talented Mexico City stringer—Alejandra Xanic Von Bertrab, who shared in a Pulitzer Prize weeks later for her work for the New York Times—located Duran in Mexico City, where she still lives after having retired from Mexico’s Social Security Administration. Duran will turn seventy-six on November 22, 2013; her birthday falls on the anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. She initially refused to be interviewed in any detail, declining to respond to telephone calls and letters. So I sent Duran a large package of the documentation that I had gathered about her from the declassified government archives of both the United States and Mexico. Among those papers: the detailed 1967 CIA report in which an agency informant—the Mexican artist who Duran acknowledges was a friend—described how Duran volunteered to him that she had a brief affair with Oswald. I also provided Duran with the surveillance records of the Mexican secret police that appear to document her extramarital relationships with other men in the year before the Kennedy assassination, including at least two other American visitors to Mexico. I also gave her the CIA reports that purport to document an affair between her and the former Cuban ambassador to Mexico. She appears to have come under surveillance by both the CIA and the Mexican Interior Ministry long before the assassination as a result of her work at the Cuban consulate and, earlier, at a Cuba-Mexico cultural institute. The surveillance reports were, by definition, distasteful and proved how Duran’s privacy had been violated outrageously for years. But I thought it was only fair to Duran that she see what had so alarmed and intrigued me in the record. If she wanted to rebut any of this, I was eager to hear it.

  As we waited to see if Duran would reply, Xanic and I tracked down Elena Garro’s daughter, Helena Paz, now seventy-four years old and living in a medical care facility an hour’s drive outside of Mexico City. Although reported to be mentally fit, Helena has been ailing for years as the result of a stroke. Through a cousin who serves as her legal guardian, she declined to be interviewed. We pressed the cousin to ask Helena if she stood by her account—and her mother’s—that they had both encountered Oswald and the two American “beatniks,” as well as Silvia Duran, at the “twist party.” She did. “What she said in the 1960s is the truth,” the cousin reported back to us. “It is still true.”

  I extended my stay in Mexico City for several days in the hopes of speaking with Duran, but she never replied to the package of documents. So in a last-ditch attempt to question her, Xanic and I drove to Duran’s family home on Tuesday, April 9. Told by members of her extended family that she was out for the afternoon, we decided to wait in the street for her return. She finally arrived in a taxi, carrying shopping bags from the supermarket. She was angry at the sight of us, trying to open her tall iron gate and get inside without acknowledging us. But she relented after we pleaded for just a few minutes of her time. Scowling, she agreed to answer a few questions, perhaps hoping we would leave her alone after this.

  Even after five decades, there was no doubt this was Silvia Duran. Her face was recognizable from the photos taken in the early 1960s. Her clothes now were comfortably fashionable, highlighted by a long pastel-colored checkered scarf around her neck; she wore Chanel-branded sunglasses. Although her once dark hair is now mostly gray, she wore it in essentially the same pixie cut she had in 1963. Her English was still good, although she frequently reverted to Spanish during what turned out to be nearly an hour of conversation outside the metal gates, her groceries placed on the ground. Even as she sparred with us, she was charming, funny, and smart. To our surprise, it took little coaxing to get her to allow us to take her picture.

  She denied, as she had for so many years, that she had a sexual relationship with Oswald—if only, she claimed, because she had found him so unattractive. She said the suggestion that she would sleep with him was insulting. “Please!” she said in English in a mocking tone. “They say he was my lover? Please, please. Oswald was that size,” she said, holding out her hand to suggest that Oswald was short. (He was five foot nine inches tall.) “How could I be a lover of this man who was so insignificant?” She denied the many reports and rumors, which were investigated but never proved by the Warren Commission and later U.S. government investigations, that she had worked as a spy for Cuba or Mexico, or possibly even for the CIA.

  She said she remembered the dance party described by Elena Garro and that Oswald was not there. She recalled that there were Americans at the party, including an American “movie star” she would not identify, saying that she thought the actor was still alive and she did not want to create trouble for him. Asked why her cousin Elena would make up such an extraordinary story and claim that Duran and Oswald had an affair, Duran said that her cousin was “crazy—she was completely out of her mind.… I don’t think she hates me so much. I think she was crazy.” And why would Garro’s daughter say the same thing? “She had a lot of psychological problems,” Duran replied. Elena and her daughter “were both pretty crazy, always.”

  I pointed out that it was not just the Garros who alleged the affair between Duran and Oswald. The interrogation reports prepared by the Mexican secret police show that she was questioned repeatedly after the assassination about whether she had “intimate relations” with Oswald, as if the police had evidence of it. Why had her friend the artist claimed in 1967 that she had told him about an affair? She replied that she might have been a victim of the lies of jealous men who had wanted to sleep with her—but whom she refused. “I was married,” she said. “That’s why I get so mad when I read all of this. It’s all gossip.… They want to say everybody was my lover—the ambassador, the consul.” She insisted again—as she had been insisting for years—that she saw Oswald only within the confines of the Cuban consulate during two visits on a single day in September 1963. “I didn’t do anything beyond the normal” in trying to help him with his visa application, she said. “I only saw him inside the consulate. I never saw him outside the consulate—never, never, never.”

  * * *

  It was only a few weeks later that we tracked down a new witness who contradicted an important element of the story that Duran had just told us—her former sister-in-law, Lidia Duran Navarro, a renowned Mexican choreographer. Lidia is eighty-five and her memory has faded on many of the details of the weeks before and after Kennedy’s assassination. Although her late brother and Silvia Duran divorced decades ago, Lidia expressed only fondness for Silvia. Lidia said she had always doubted that Silvia would have had an affair with Oswald. Her reasoning was the same as her former sister-in-law’s: Oswald, Lidia said, was too physically unattractive to be taken as a lover. “It’s absurd,” Lidia said. “He was a weakling puppet, with a fool’s face.”

  But Lidia did have a clear memory of something that Silvia had told her in confidence decades ago—that, despite all of Silvia’s claims to the contrary, she had gone out on at least one date in Mexico City with Oswald. According to Lidia, a smitten Oswald invited Silvia to a lunch date at a Sanborns restaurant close to the Cuban consulate. (She distinctly remembered it was a Sanborns, part of a popular Mexican chain of restaurants with that name.) And Silvia, she said, accepted. “She should not have accepted an invitation coming from an American,” L
idia recalled. Diplomats at the Cuban embassy were furious when they discovered that Duran had dared to be seen on a date with an American, even one who claimed to be a devoted supporter of Castro’s revolution. “The Cubans scolded her,” Lidia recalled.

  If Lidia’s account is correct, Silvia has never told the truth in her central assertion that she “never, never, never” met Oswald outside the Cuban consulate and that she and Oswald discussed only his visa application. In fact, according to Lidia, Silvia Duran went out on a date—at least once—with a man who appeared eager to impress her with his support for Cuba’s revolution and who, less than two months later, would kill the president of the United States.

  * * *

  In June 2013, Xanic and I located two men—both prominent Mexican newspapermen, both friendly with Silvia Duran in the 1960s—who would blow much larger holes in her story. The first, Oscar Contreras, a columnist for the Mexican newspaper El Mañana, was the same journalist who came forward in 1967 to report that, while he was a law student and prominent Castro sympathizer at a Mexico City university four years earlier, he had spent time with Oswald, who had wanted his help to obtain a Cuban visa. That much of the story Contreras had told many years before.

  But what he said in 2013 went much further and suggested far more extensive contacts between Oswald and Cuban agents in Mexico—contacts that Duran said never occurred. Contreras said that he not only encountered Oswald at the university; he also saw him again at a reception a few days later at the Cuban embassy. “I saw him at a distance, talking to people,” said Contreras, who said he did not approach Oswald at the reception because of warnings from Cuban friends that he might be some sort of CIA plant. Why had Contreras not told American officials in Mexico about Oswald’s mysterious appearance at a Cuban diplomatic reception? There was a simple answer, Contreras said: the diplomats never asked.