Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination

by Anthony Summers

  Having interviewed Contreras twice, the author thought him a credible witness. He had gone on to become a successful journalist—eventually the editor of El Mundo, the newspaper serving the town of Tampico.11

  How, though, would the Oswald whom Contreras met have found his way into the student milieu? In 1994, in Mexico City, the author interviewed an attorney named Homobono Alcaraz. He had featured in FBI reports as having said that, while studying law—like Contreras—he, too, had met and talked with Oswald. The encounter, Alcaraz told the author, had occurred at Sanborn’s restaurant, in the company of two or three other American students—all of them, like Alcaraz himself, Quakers.12

  The students’ talk had centered on the difficulties involved in getting to Cuba. Oswald, Alcaraz recalled, eventually left with one of the Americans—whom Alcaraz remembered as having been named Steve “Kennan, or Keenan” (Alcaraz had trouble pronouncing or spelling the name) from Philadelphia. They went off together on his motorbike, Oswald riding pillion, headed for the Cuban Consulate. Recent research established that a student from Philadelphia named Steve Kenin did visit and live for some time in Mexico, did frequent a Quaker guest house, and did ride a motorbike—and did travel to Cuba.13

  The physical description Oscar Contreras supplied, like the anomalies arising from much of the Cuban Consulate scenario, has contributed to suspicion that the Oswald who visited the Consulate was an impostor. Pause, though, to consider the evidence official investigations accepted—that it was the real Oswald who pestered the Cuban officials. That evidence is persuasive if not conclusive.

  The signature on the visa application form, graphologists told the Assassinations Committee, was Oswald’s. Consular assistant Sylvia Durán had, as noted, required passport-size photos for the visa, recommended a nearby photographic service, and said her visitor later returned with the necessary photos. The picture affixed to the surviving application form certainly appears to be that of Oswald.

  Some ifs and buts remain. Absent cast-iron evidence, graphologists’ views are not legally considered reliable. There is doubt, too, about the visa photos’ provenance. Investigation following the assassination indicated that the pictures had not been taken at any local Mexico City establishment. As for Sylvia Durán, she could not remember for sure when precisely she handed the visa application forms to her visitor and at what stage the applicant signed. Sometimes, she said, she would allow the signed forms to leave the building. Her boss, Azcue, for his part, told the Assassinations Committee that he could “almost assure” them that the clothing worn in the visa photo was different from that worn by the man he met.

  Following the imposture notion, one might assume that an operative impersonating an individual would have had access to authentic photographs and familiarity with the signature of his subject.

  There is more, though, information that—for this author—seems to clinch the matter so far as the Oswald at the Cuban Consulate is concerned. After the assassination, the name and phone number of consular assistant Sylvia Durán were found scrawled in Oswald’s address book. There is the fact, too, that—though his wife, Marina, initially denied all knowledge of a Mexico trip and visits to the embassies—she eventually acknowledged that her husband told her about it.14

  The House Assassinations Committee Report stated that the Committee thought “the weight of the evidence” indicated that Oswald visited both the Cuban Consulate and the Soviet Embassy.15 Its 410-page study of the complex Mexico episode said, nevertheless, that the evidence pointing to impersonation of Oswald was “of such a nature that the possibility cannot be dismissed.” The Committee’s Final Report noted, too, that it focused on the possibility that an impostor visited the Soviet Embassy or Cuban Consulate “during one or more of the contacts in which Oswald was identified by the CIA.”

  If an Oswald impostor did operate in Mexico City, could the CIA have been involved? The Agency did impersonate people there, and within months of the Oswald visit. A real-life scenario, with striking similarities to the game suspected to have been played when Oswald was there has surfaced, in a CIA document.

  Just two months before the Oswald appearances, a U.S. citizen from Texas named Eldon Hensen twice made phone contact with the Cuban Embassy. He could not himself come to the Embassy, he told an aide, because “an American spy might see him”—but gave the name of his hotel. Hours later, he received a call from a man who identified himself as a member of the Embassy staff. They duly met and talked, and Hensen offered to work on behalf of the Cuban government on his return to the United States.

  The Cuban “aide” had, in fact, been in the pay of the CIA. “At station request,” read a subsequent Agency cable to HQ, “[name withheld] posing as CUBEMB officer made contact … lured Subj[ect] to hotel restaurant … [second name redacted] witnessed meeting from nearby table … [withheld word, probably the FBI] informed … will handle stateside investigation.”

  By using its audio surveillance of the Cuban mission, the Agency had entrapped would-be pro-Castro activist Hensen. “A standard operation there,” former Assassinations Records Review Board Executive Director Jeremy Gunn said in 2003, “was to impersonate Americans in telephone contact with the [Soviet] Embassy.” There is no good reason to suppose the CIA dealt otherwise with the Cuban mission.

  Assassinations Committee investigators strove for months to get the CIA to cooperate in its search for the truth about Mexico City—and emerged certain that the Agency was hiding something. What follows draws on documents that they, and later the Assassinations Records Review Board, did succeed in extracting. It provides a glimpse, but only a glimpse, of what really occurred.

  On October 8, 1963, a week after the supposed Oswald visits to the embassies, CIA Mexico City Chief of Station Winston Scott sent a name trace request to headquarters in Langley on an:

  American male who spoke broken Russian said his name Lee OSWALD (phonetic), stated he at SOVEMB on 28 Sept … Have photos male appears be American entering Sovemb 1216 hours, leaving 1222 on 1 Oct. Apparent age 35, athletic build circa 6 feet, receding hairline, balding top …”

  Scott was sending in his query on the basis of surveillance photographs of the individual in question, one of which is reproduced in this book (see Photo 36). CIA headquarters knew Oswald did not answer the description sent in by Scott, as it made clear in a response to the Mexico station. “Oswald,” a staffer wrote, “is five feet ten inches, one hundred sixty-five pounds, light brown wavy hair… .”

  The same day, October 10, however, a teletype went out from CIA headquarters to the FBI, the State Department, and the U.S. Navy—suggesting the older man might be one and the same as Oswald. Having noted the basics about the thirty-five-year-old, balding six-footer who had visited the Soviet Embassy, the headquarters message went on to state:

  IT IS BELIEVED THAT OSWALD MAY BE IDENTICAL TO LEE HENRY [sic] OSWALD, BORN ON 18 OCTOBER 1939 IN NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA. A FORMER U.S. MARINE WHO DEFECTED TO THE SOVIET UNION IN OCTOBER 1959 AND LATER MADE ARRANGEMENTS THROUGH THE UNITED STATES EMBASSY IN MOSCOW TO RETURN TO THE UNITED STATES WITH HIS RUSSIAN-BORN WIFE, MARINA NIKOLAEVNA PUSAKOVA [sic], AND THEIR CHILD …

  These documents alone were to lead to prolonged struggles between the CIA and investigators, congressional committees and private researchers alike. Who was the American at the Soviet Embassy who “identified himself as Lee Oswald” but looked totally unlike him—ten years older, taller, and heavier-built? Could that be confirmation that someone had impersonated Oswald?

  Agency spokesmen were at pains to explain that there really was no mystery at all. According to the CIA, the raw data on the “Oswald” visit to the Soviet mission had initially been associated with a picture of another “person known to frequent the Soviet Embassy,” who had been there three days after the Oswald visit. Someone at the CIA’s Mexico City station had mistakenly “guessed” that the heavily built man of thirty-five and Oswald were one and the
same.

  On receiving the misleading report, headquarters in Washington had then supposedly tried to sort out the discrepancy between the photos of the thirty-five-year-old and the contradictory file details of the real Oswald collected during his time in Russia. The task was made more difficult, the CIA would later claim, by the supposed fact that the Agency at that point had no photograph of the real Oswald. “CIA did not have a known photograph of Oswald in its files before the assassination of President Kennedy either in Washington or abroad,” CIA officer Raymond Rocca, who as head of Research and Analysis was a senior colleague of Counterintelligence chief James Angleton—was to write in a 1967 memorandum. More than a decade after the assassination, then CIA Director William Colby would still be saying of the man who was not Oswald: “We don’t to this day know who he is.”

  Some documents, however, contradict these claims. Right after the assassination, when Mexico station chief Winston Scott sent photos of the man who was not Oswald to headquarters, he noted that they were “photographs of a certain person who is known to you.” Months later, the CIA would tell the Warren Commission it “could be embarrassing to the individual involved, who as far as this Agency is aware had no connection with Lee Harvey Oswald or the assassination.”16

  The CIA’s claim that it had no photograph of the real Oswald on record, moreover, does not stand up. The Agency’s own files indicate that it did have pictures of the real Oswald at the time of the Mexico affair. Less than four months after the assassination, when the CIA sent the Warren Commission what it called “an exact reproduction of the Agency’s official dossier [on Oswald] … exact copies of all material in this file up to early October 1963”—the time of the Mexico episode. Included in the dossier were clippings from the Washington Post and Washington Evening Star dated 1959, reporting the authentic Oswald’s defection to the Soviet Union—and featuring news agency photographs of Oswald.17

  The CIA indulged in shadow-boxing with the Warren Commission after the assassination. Faced with a request for three Agency cables that dealt with the matter of the photos of the man who was not Oswald, it played for time. In an internal memorandum, Counterintelligence chief Angleton’s colleague Rocca expressed his boss’ desire to “wait out” the Commission.18 Wesley Liebeler, one of the few Commission attorneys who had direct contact with CIA personnel, would recall that the Agency had been so secretive about the photographs as to be virtually useless.

  The photograph puzzle prompted yet another question. Whether or not the photographs of heavily built man at the Soviet Embassy had anything to do with the case, they were evidence—as reported earlier in these pages—that CIA cameras did indeed photograph people visiting Communist embassies. That being so, should not the Agency have pictures of whoever did go to the Soviet and Cuban Embassies—on several occasions—using the name Oswald? Photographs of him there, after all, would clear up the matter once and for all. Where are they?

  The CIA has always denied having obtained any such photographs, and offered a variety of explanations. The camera at the Soviet Embassy, according to an internal CIA document, did not operate on weekends. That would explain why there were no pictures of Oswald on the Saturday he is said to have visited the Soviets. The cameras at the Cuban mission were also apparently not used at the weekend. Yet there were a total of four “Oswald” visits, combining those to the Cuban and Soviet missions, on Friday, September 27—a weekday. Why, then, would there be no photographs from any of those total of eight entrances and exits?

  A senior CIA officer who served in Mexico accounted for the absence of photos at the Cuban Consulate by claiming that the camera at that site happened to break down during the Oswald visit to Mexico City. Documents now available, however, show that not one but two cameras covered the entrances to the Cuban mission on September 27. One of those cameras was activated for the first time that very morning, and—it appears—worked that day.

  What then of the photo surveillance at the Soviet Embassy? Freedom of Information suits eventually extracted the information that no less than twelve photographs were taken of the man who was not Oswald. They show the mystery man in various poses and wearing different clothes, and one of them was taken on October 1—one of the days an “Oswald” supposedly went to the Soviet Embassy. Why do we have no CIA pictures of Oswald there?

  The Assassinations Committee investigators’ report noted that an “Oswald” made at least five visits to the Communist embassies, perhaps as many as six. It was hard to believe that CIA cameras failed to pick him up even once. In a draft manuscript he left behind when he died, former Chief of Station Scott wrote that there had been such photos. Several other former Agency officers, moreover, said CIA cameras got pictures of Oswald, or of someone identified as Oswald, on visits to the two missions.

  The Committee speculated that “photographs of Oswald might have been taken and subsequently lost or destroyed …” It did not question how the CIA could have lost pictures of Oswald—of all people. And why would the Agency destroy such photographs? In its 1998 report to President Clinton, the Records Review Board probably got close to the truth when it wrote carefully that the “CIA reports that it did not locate [author’s emphasis] photographic evidence of Oswald’s visits.” If the CIA did have photographs of the real Oswald entering the embassies, and entering alone, one can be sure it would have been delighted to produce them long ago.

  The CIA’s account of its other surveillance system in Mexico City, the tapping and bugging of Communist embassies, is also feeble. If the embassies were bugged and their telephones tapped, and if that is how some of the intelligence on Oswald was gathered, where are the sound tapes?

  Asked about the recordings in 1975 on CBS’ Sixty Minutes program, then CIA Director William Colby responded vaguely that he thought there had been Oswald voice recordings from the embassy contacts. There had indeed.

  The file shows that the Agency tapped a phone call—supposedly from the Cuban Consulate to the Soviet Embassy—by a man the CIA indicated was Oswald, purportedly on Saturday, September 28. According to the CIA record, there were also two tapped Oswald conversations with the Soviet Embassy on Tuesday, October 1. Having listened to both calls, the transcriber said they involved the same caller.

  According to information the CIA supplied to the Warren Commission about those calls, “The American spoke in very poor Russian … [author emphasis].” The speaker’s ability in Russian is elsewhere described as “terrible, hardly recognizable.” That does not sound like the real Oswald, who had achieved a good standard of spoken Russian while in the Soviet Union and on his return to Texas impressed the Russian community with his fluency in colloquial Russian. Sylvia Durán, moreover, insisted that the Oswald who visited her took no part in the call she made to the Soviet Embassy to discuss the visa request. He did not use the telephone while in her office, nor did he say anything in Russian.

  The CIA stance on the Mexico City episode—that until Oswald’s name surfaced after the assassination his embassy visits were simply routinely logged, not at the time assigned any importance—is not borne out by the account of the Mexico City transcriber and translator who worked on the taped material. Located years later by a Washington Post reporter, they said the Oswald tapes triggered a departure from routine. “Usually,” the translator said, “they picked up the transcripts the next day. This they wanted right away.” Former Chief of Station Scott, moreover, wrote in his draft memoir that Oswald had been “a person of great interest to us during this September 27 to 2 October period.”

  The CIA told the Assassination Records Review Board it “destroyed tape[s] containing Oswald’s voice and other related calls as a matter of routine procedure.” The Agency’s position was, as it had long been, that tapes of no particular intelligence value were wiped after two weeks and recycled.19 In a 2005 interview, however, former Mexico case officer Anne Goodpasture—referring to the recording of an October 1 Oswald exchange—said it
had been seen as significant. While the original tape had been erased for reuse, it had first been copied on to a separate tape—the usual practice with the most interesting tapes.20

  The claim that the Oswald tapes were all erased is untenable. Compelling evidence indicates that they survived until long after the assassination—and that someone did impersonate Oswald.

  Within twenty-four hours of the assassination, FBI Director Hoover had a preliminary broad analysis of the case. It was five pages long and unremarkable except for one paragraph. It read:

  The Central Intelligence Agency advised that on October 1, 1963, an extremely sensitive source had reported that an individual identifying himself as Lee Oswald 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 [author’s emphasis].

  On the morning of the same day, November 23, senior Hoover aide Alan Belmont reported that he learned as much from the Dallas Special Agent in Charge, Gordon Shanklin, who had told him Dallas agents thought “neither the tape nor the photograph pertained to Oswald.”

  The message seemed crystal-clear. The CIA had sent to Dallas both a picture and a sound recording of the man its surveillance had picked up using the name “Lee Oswald”—and neither picture nor tape matched the Oswald under arrest.

  The same morning, Director Hoover telephoned the new President, Lyndon Johnson, to brief him on what appeared to be the facts about the assassination. The transcript includes the following exchange:

  Johnson:Have you established any more about the [Oswald] visit to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico in September?