LBJ

by Phillip F. Nelson

  Oswald Leaves New Orleans for Good

  As noted in chapter 2, Antonio Veciana tied David Phillips (known to him as his code name, Maurice Bishop) directly to Lee Harvey Oswald when he saw the two engaged in a conversation in Dallas in late August or early September 1963. The primary function of David Atlee Phillips’s operation AMSPELL was to oversee one of the most bitterly anti-Kennedy Cuban exile groups, known as the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE). Whether this was actually Oswald or his look-alike double has never been resolved.

  The Agency’s tolerance of what would otherwise clearly be treasonous acts was extended further for Oswald. When he applied for a new passport in New Orleans on June 24, 1963, he was favored with the issuance of a new one overnight, despite the fact that he had stated that his destination, again, was the Soviet Union.51 On September 17, 1963, when Oswald went to the Mexican consulate in New Orleans to apply for and receive a tourist permit (No. 24085), the person in line immediately in front of him—the person who received permit No. 24084, was William Gaudet, a longtime CIA contact agent.52

  Oswald in Mexico and the Dissembling of the FBI, the CIA, and Lyndon B. Johnson

  Immediately after the assassination, it would become clear to Johnson that Oswald had to be set up as a “patsy” because the photographs received from the CIA in Mexico City clearly showed that the man purported to be Oswald at the Soviet Embassy was, in fact, an imposter. In telephone calls Saturday morning, beginning less than twenty-four hours after the assassination, Johnson and Hoover discussed the early results of FBI investigations into the death of President Kennedy. The first of these, recorded at 10:01 a.m. on November 23, appears to have been mysteriously erased, but a transcript of the call survived the erasure. In it, Hoover told Johnson that tapes of Oswald contacting the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City didn’t match the voice of the living Oswald. Hoover said, “It appears that there is a second person who was at the Soviet Embassy down there.” (The text of this transcript is contained in chapter 7). As John Newman observed, this impersonation of Oswald “had to be suppressed in order to maintain the lone nut façade called for in the Katzenbach directive … there was a darker purpose, however, for the suppression. As long as the tapes survived, the story in them was undermined by the fact that Oswald’s voice was not on them. The cover-up of the Mexico tapes began three hours after Hoover told Johnson that the voice on them was not Oswald’s. If this dark detail became widely known, LBJ would not be able to play the WW III trump card on leaders like Senator Russell and Chief Justice Warren. It is virtually certain that the order to concoct a cover story saying the tapes were erased before the assassination came from the White House.”53 (Emphasis added.)

  An FBI memo was sent to both the White House and the Secret Service as a follow-up to the telephone call between Hoover and Johnson to confirm to them that the alleged assassin had been impersonated in phone calls to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City; this was a clear indication that, not only was there a conspiracy in the assassination, but a significant effort had been made to “set up” Oswald as a killer. As documented by author Scott, among others, the inescapable point of this FBI memo was that in fact, Oswald was the “patsy” which he claimed to be:

  The CIA advised that on October 1, 1963, an extremely sensitive source had reported that an individual identified himself as Lee Oswald, who contacted the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City inquiring as to any messages. Special Agents of this Bureau, 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.54

  Ordinarily, the fact that the only suspect under investigation in a major crime had been impersonated shortly before the crime would cause an all-out intensive investigation of the circumstances and be considered exculpatory evidence of the suspect’s innocence. Even more stunning was the fact that in one of the recordings, a man impersonating Oswald had referred to a meeting with a Soviet official well known to the CIA and FBI, Valery Kostikov, who had already been under investigation because of his involvement with a unit of the KGB, which specialized in assassinations, “Department 13.” This otherwise inexplicable impersonation takes on an entirely new meaning in the context of the Oswald impersonator attempting to make it appear that Oswald was a hired killer, one hired by the Soviet Union to assassinate the president of the United States. In this scenario, Lyndon Johnson’s later comment was probably about right. It was a prescription for World War III. It was that realization that apparently caused him to decide to go with the “lone nut” scenario, probably out of fear that such a war would put his own life in jeopardy.

  Author Jefferson Morley, working closely with Michael Scott—the son of Winston Scott, who in 1963 was the CIA’s station chief of Mexico City, found that Oswald was linked to four CIA coded operations: AMSPELL, LIERODE, LIENVOY, and LIEMPTY, the last two of which Win Scott oversaw; the first two were overseen by David Atlee Phillips.55 Oswald’s file in Washington was held within the Counterintelligence Division, by the Special Investigations Group, and any questions about him were answered by men and women who reported to the legendary James Jesus Angleton.56 One of the men who reported to Angleton at that time was Bill Harvey, RFK’s bitter enemy; David Atlee Phillips and David Morales were others. Harvey, Phillips, and Morales were all deeply involved with Operation Mongoose and the most militant Cuban exiles affiliated with Alpha 66, including Antonio Veciana, examined in chapter 2.

  Author Morley also established that the higher-ups at CIA headquarters in Langley purposely kept Win Scott “out of the loop” when he inquired about Oswald as a result of his trip to Mexico and omitted the latest information they had obtained from the FBI. Their response to his inquiry, which was not handled in the normal, routine manner as might be expected, was prepared with the assistance of three people from Angleton’s office and given the final approval of Richard Helms’ highest-level assistant, Tom Karamessines. The “latest information” they cabled back to Win Scott was that, after having spent over two years in the Soviet Union, “he and his Soviet wife have exit permits and Dept. of State had given approval for their travel with infant child to USA.”57 The CIA failed to inform their own man in Mexico City of the reports they had received from the FBI filed by agent Hosty advising of Oswald’s move to New Orleans or of his subsequent clashes with the DRE in New Orleans. The record showed that both had been in the Oswald “201” file when the response to Scott’s cable was being drafted; in fact, the latter report had just been placed into the Oswald file less than a week before that.58

  When Jefferson Morley and John Newman interviewed former CIA administrator Jane Roman in 1995 regarding the above incident, she acknowledged that the handling of this cable was very unusual, that it was “indicative of some sort of operational interest in Oswald’s file … a keen interest in Oswald held very closely on the need-to-know basis.” She could not explain her own behavior in the incident thirty-two years earlier, other than admit that “I’m signing off on something I know isn’t true.”59 As Morley noted:

  This trifecta of intelligence jargon suggested the sort of activity usually associated with a covert operation … “a keen interest” in Oswald meant that one or more persons involved in anti-Castro operations were focused on the man who would be accused of killing Kennedy. A likely candidate was Dave Phillips, who said under oath that he was interested in Oswald in the first week of October 1963. If the chain of command in anti-Castro operations was functioning, his man in Miami, George Joannides, had reported back in August on AMSPELL’s efforts to discredit Oswald’s one-man chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans. Phillips certainly knew that Oswald had been in contact with the Cubans in Mexico City on September 27. And he had visited Washington after Oswald’s presence was detected and before the misleading October 10, 1963, cable was drafted. But if, as Phillips would claim, Oswald was a me
re “blip,” why would senior officers at headquarters handle information about him on a ‘need-to-know’ basis?60

  The puzzle left by the CIA’s highest-level management in their less-than-forthcoming response to their own Mexico City station chief was not the end of this ongoing (to this day*) tale of nondisclosure of information pertaining to the (alleged) president’s assassin. When Win Scott continued his efforts to find out more about the mysterious man who had contacted the Cuban embassy in Mexico City, he asked for a photo of Oswald to compare it to pictures of the man they photographed at the embassy; he never received a reply to that request.

  Because of the structural barriers constructed by James Jesus Angleton to isolate his files from the rest of the Agency’s, and the nature of those files, it is unlikely that the missing pieces of this part of the puzzle will ever be known.61 Most of the people who might have known about them are now dead. Angleton’s command and communications channels were designed to bypass CIA stations, so duplicate files were not routinely kept elsewhere. And as author Morley has noted, “Whatever Angleton’s interest in Oswald, no trace of it remains. After Angleton was forced out of his job in late 1974, the CIA destroyed all of his files on Kennedy’s assassination.”62 In light of the situation, which had been clearly laid out for pinning the assassination on Oswald as a Communist acting on behalf of the Cuban and USSR governments, it appears that the plan was foiled when Oswald was captured instead of being killed. After being interrogated, and having his voice recorded and publicly broadcast, it became impossible to contend that the voice on the tapes was his. The tapes were apparently flown up from the CIA’s Mexico City station on the evening of November 22.

  By November 25, FBI memos made no more mention of tapes, only the transcripts. The CIA then maintained for years that the tapes were routinely recycled prior to the assassination and that no tapes were ever sent. This lie was eventually laid to rest through overwhelming contradictory evidence including several FBI memos, a call from Hoover to LBJ, which appears to have been suspiciously erased (but not before a transcript was made of it, which will be examined shortly), and even the word of two Warren Commission staffers who said they listened to the tapes during their visit to Mexico City in April 1964. The CIA has always maintained that the tapes had been routinely destroyed according to Agency procedures, leaving only transcripts as evidence. Yet Hoover, in his conversation with Johnson, inadvertently revealed that the tapes were available after the assassination, long enough for some of his agents to have listened to them. The Lopez Report referenced a memorandum from FBI’s Belmont to Tolson on November 23, 1963, which stated,63

  Inasmuch as the Dallas Agents who listened to the tape of the conversation allegedly of Oswald from the Cuban Embassy to the Russian Embassy in Mexico and [who] examined the photographs of the visitor to the Embassy in Mexico and were of the opinion that neither the tape nor the photograph pertained to Oswald, …

  Even after the destruction of the tapes story was announced, the tapes were still not destroyed; it appears that the CIA’s Mexico City station chief, Winfield Scott, hid the original copy, evidently with at least the acquiescence of James Jesus Angleton. Win Scott hid the tapes in his safe because he had been upset by disinformation being put out by Langley, blaming the confusion on the Mexico City station’s errors regarding Oswald’s alleged appearance, including the bungled photographic and audio tape recording. Scott even went further than that; he bought copies of the tape from Oswald’s radio debate so that he could compare the voice on the audio tape in his file to that of the radio debate recording, of course finding that there was no match.64

  In his biography of Win Scott, Jefferson Morley discovered that years later, two days after Scott died in 1971 in Mexico City, his widow Janet Scott had a visitor: James Jesus Angleton. She did not exactly like or trust him and asked him sarcastically, “Why did it take so long for you to come?” After the normal pleasantries, he told her he wanted to be sure she collected everything which he was entitled to, implicitly leaving a vague threat about the need for her cooperation in collecting agency materials. She gave him permission to go through Win’s private study the next day. Included in the material taken was his personal correspondence and financial records and a 220-page manuscript he had been working on entitled It Came to Little. He also took a stack of reel-to-reel tape boxes, the biggest of which was “a stack of tapes three or four inches thick … marked ‘Oswald.’”65 Fifteen years after that, his son Michael Scott requested the return of his father’s manuscript. It was immediately obvious that Win Scott’s story had displeased his longtime friends in the CIA, both Angleton and the recently named DCI, Richard Helms. Over half of it had been redacted, leaving only the first thirty-five years of his life leading up to when he joined the Agency. Nothing was left about any of the three decades he had spent with the Agency.66

  While many of the sightings of Oswald in Mexico were clearly of an imposter, he apparently did make the trip and visit the Soviet and Cuban embassies and was recorded on wiretaps and was photographed. The CIA claimed that they did not have photographs of the real Oswald entering or leaving either embassy until the House Assassinations Committee found three officials who saw a picture and two more had heard about it.67 “The way Joseph B. Smith remembered it, according to a committee interview with him, ‘the discovery of the picture was supposed to have greatly pleased President Johnson and made Mexico City station chief Win Scott ‘his number one boy.’ He [Smith] said the story was that someone remembered seeing Oswald’s face somewhere in the photo coverage of the Cuban or Russian embassy, went back through the files and found the picture. Smith said he heard that story certainly more than once, at least, when he got to Mexico City and perhaps when he first got into WH [Western Hemisphere Division].”68 The only reasonable explanation for Johnson being happy with the discovery of the one photograph, which showed Oswald instead of the imposter, was that he thought that would eliminate all the talk of Oswald being set up as a patsy and therefore he could be portrayed as just a “lone nut.” The truth of this particular obscure piece of the historical record has emerged despite the morass of double-talk from the men in charge of the bogus investigation conducted under J. Edgar Hoover, its acceptance by the subservient commission, and the overall approval of Lyndon B. Johnson who ordered and controlled the specious “inquiry” in the first place.

  David Phillips lied under oath many years later when he stated that the CIA had no photos of Oswald because the surveillance cameras were broken on the day of his visit. One explanation for this is that all materials which actually connected Oswald to Mexico had (supposedly) been destroyed because they were suddenly unnecessary. The last-minute changes in plans were caused by the two-day delay in Oswald’s scheduled execution, which inadvertently resulted in his photo and voice becoming well known. The scramble to change the “official story” suddenly required that the focus be kept away from Cuba, Russia, or Mexico and squarely on Dallas, home of the “lone nut.” Whatever the original intent of his handlers in creating the numerous preassassination “sightings” might have been, suddenly that avenue came to a dead end, and the story was now to be that he was acting entirely on his own in his deranged plot to kill the president. Clearly, Oswald could not be portrayed to have been involved with anyone else, certainly not set up by offshore enemies in an international Communist conspiracy.

  Another Unexplained “Oswald” Appearance

  In September 1963, three men showed up at the apartment of Sylvia Odio, the daughter of one of Castro’s political prisoners who had organized a Dallas chapter of JURE (Junta Revoluncionaria), an anti-Castro Cuban exile organization founded by her father in Miami. Two of the men were Latinos, either Cuban or Mexican. The third was American, introduced to her as “Leon.”* The following day, the spokesman for the trio, “Leopoldo” told Ms. Odio by telephone that “Leon” was an ex-marine, a crack rifle shot, and someone who believed not only that Castro should be killed but Kennedy too because of his betra
yal at the Bay of Pigs. She didn’t see or hear anything else from them for two months but immediately after the assassination when she and her sister saw the pictures of Lee Harvey Oswald being broadcast on television, they were both shocked and astonished to see that this was the same person who had been introduced to them that night in September.69

  If this man had indeed been Lee Harvey Oswald, as the Odio’s claimed, then her report was obviously clear evidence of a conspiracy; if it was an Oswald look-alike who appeared at her door, it was still prima facie evidence that he was being set up as the “patsy” which he claimed to be. According to Judyth Baker’s account, Oswald was flown from the Houma-Terrebonne airport in Louisiana to Austin Texas to deliver files from a “Mr. Le Corque” to Lyndon Johnson’s attorneys there, and to receive an envelope stuffed with cash. Clay Shaw also gave Oswald a zippered bag with two thermoses containing the deadly cancer cells which would be delivered to Mexico City. He went into the city of Austin with the Latinos who met them with a rental car and later, alone by then, decided spontaneously to go to the Selective Service office there to complain about his discharge from the Marine Corps having been changed to “dishonorable.” She believed that he did it to create an alibi and to confuse the timelines for his whereabouts, already suspicious of being set up as a “patsy.” When he returned to meet with the Latinos he had met at the airport, they left for the airport and flew on to Dallas. He then accompanied the two Latinos to visit Sylvia Odio, being introduced to her as “Leon Oswald.” Afterwards, he was flown back to Houston, where he boarded a bus to Laredo. All of this was accomplished in the same timeframe that the Warren Commission claimed Oswald was riding in a bus from New Orleans to Houston, before boarding the one to Laredo.70