Of course, Marina was not in New York—this was but a lie to heighten the sense of urgency, as was the statement that he was in a great hurry to reach Russia. But note that even after the scene with Azcue, Oswald took Duran’s telephone number so that he could check back about his application. And despite the argument, Oswald kept trying. On Saturday and the following Tuesday, October I, he made several visits to both the Russian and Cuban embassies, with a continued lack of results.
The Cuban government provided the Warren Commission with the application form which bore Oswald’s photograph and signature, as well as its letter, dated October 15, which conditionally approved his in-transit visa. The Warren Report said that the CIA had been able to corroborate Duran’s account through several means, adding, “By far the most important confirmation of Senora Duran’s testimony, however, has been supplied by confidential sources of extremely high reliability available to the United States in Mexico. The information from these sources establishes that her testimony was truthful and accurate in all material respects. The identities of these sources cannot be disclosed without destroying their future usefulness to the United States.”
The CIA’s “confidential sources” in Mexico included wiretaps on the Soviet Embassy’s phones. On Tuesday, October I, Oswald returned to the Cuban Embassy. At his request Duran again called the Soviet Embassy and handed the receiver to Oswald. Speaking in Russian to a Soviet guard, he asked if there was any news concerning a telegram that had been sent to Washington. The guard asked to whom Oswald had spoken at the embassy. “Comrade Kostikov,” Oswald replied, whereupon the guard suggested that he again speak in person to Kostikov. “I’ll be right over,” Oswald replied, and hung up.
The CIA recorded this conversation and a transcript was made, but the tape was retained for only a week or so. The reference to Kostikov had aroused the agency’s interest, for in addition to his routine consular duties, Valery Vladimirovich Kostikov served as a KGB intelligence officer.
The agency’s Mexico station also had surveillance cameras outside the Soviet Embassy, which was considered to be a center of espionage activity directed against the United States. After hearing the phone call, the CIA staff went through its photographs of persons recently entering and leaving the embassy, and found one of a blond, heavyset American type that it guessed might be the man who had identified himself as Oswald during the call. (This tentative identification would cause the CIA considerable embarassment later on. The man in the photo was never identified, but he evidently had no connection with Oswald whatsoever, and the Mexico station never came up with a picture of Oswald. This circumstance led to a theory that the heavyset man had impersonated Oswald at the Soviet Embassy.)
Meanwhile, CIA headquarters was alerted, and on October 10 the agency informed the FBI, the State Department, and the Office of Naval Intelligence of Oswald’s contact with the Soviet Embassy. The notification omitted Oswald’s reference to Kostikov, however.
In 1976 David Phillips, a CIA official who was serving in Mexico at the time, added an important detail about Oswald’s conversations with the Russians. Phillips told the Washington Post that, in a phone call to the embassy, Oswald had tried to make a deal. (Whether this was the call mentioned earlier or another one isn’t clear.) According to Phillips, Oswald said in effect, “I have information you would be interested in, and I know you can pay my way [to Russia].” The translator and typist who had worked on the transcript of the conversation confirmed Phillips’s story. This sounds like Oswald, since he had already asked the Washington Embassy to make travel arrangements back to Russia for his wife and child. By the Commission’s estimate, Oswald had only about $214 on hand when he left New Orleans, hardly enough to pay transportation costs for the trips he had in mind. Furthermore, Phillips’s story would help explain the CIA’s interest in Oswald’s contact with Kostikov.
But what information could Oswald have had of interest to the Soviets? A possible answer came in 1975 from a second Ernesto Rodriguez—not the New Orleans Cuban exile mentioned earlier, but another man who was a former CIA contract agent in Mexico City. Rodriguez claimed that Oswald had told both the Soviets and the Cubans that he had information about a new CIA attempt to kill Fidel Castro. According to Rodriguez, Oswald offered the details in return for a Cuban entry visa. He said that Oswald had also talked about this planned assassination attempt in conversations with Fair Play for Cuba members in Mexico City.
Rodriguez’s story is uncorroborated and should be approached with caution, but in light of Oswald’s known activities, it is not implausible. This wouldn’t have been the first time Oswald offered secrets to get what he wanted. More important, he had recently tried to penetrate the exile plots through Sylvia Odio. We have learned of only two infiltration attempts Oswald made—there may have been others. Anyone who had told him about a plan to kill Castro would have been understandably reluctant to come forward with his testimony after the president’s death. We know from Odio’s testimony that this was the kind of information Oswald was seeking. Thus, it’s conceivable that he did find out details of a Castro assassination plot from some unknown source, or that he at least claimed that he had.
Another question that remains unsettled is what Oswald did with the rest of his time in the city. Silvia Duran told the House Assassinations Committee that she had suggested to Oswald that he might be able to get a Cuban visa if he could obtain a letter of recommendation from a Mexican in good standing with the Cuban government. From other evidence the Committee concluded that she had referred him to a philosophy professor at the local National Autonomous University who had held seminars on Marx in her home. In late September Oswald was reportedly sighted at the university, where he approached four left-wing philosophy students. One of them, Oscar Contreras, who had contacts in the Cuban Embassy, later said that Oswald had introduced himself and told them that he wanted to go to Cuba because the FBI was bothering him and life in the United States was not for him but that the Cuban consulate was refusing to give him a visa. He asked if they could help him out, and the students agreed to try. According to Anthony Summers, who interviewed Contreras in 1978, Contreras then got in touch with his contacts at the embassy, including Consul Azcue and an intelligence officer—who told him that Oswald was suspected of being a provocateur “sent by the United States to go to Cuba with evil intent.”1 Although Contreras’s story is also uncorroborated, his statement about the Cuban officials’ reaction to Oswald should be kept in mind.
What else did Oswald have to say to Cuban officials in Mexico City? We should remember that he was angry at being denied a visa, and made some comments to Azcue that provoked the Cuban to say that someone like him was actually hurting the revolution, not helping it. Azcue evidently considered him to be a hothead.
In 1964 new evidence turned up about a statement Oswald had made at the Cuban Embassy. After the assassination an American Communist party member—who was also an FBI informant—made a trip to Havana and spoke with Fidel Castro. On June 17, 1964, J. Edgar Hoover sent a top-secret letter by a special courier to the Warren Commission’s chief counsel, J. Lee Rankin. Hoover wrote that “through a confidential source which has furnished reliable information in the past, we have been advised of some statement made by Fidel Castro, Cuban Prime Minister, concerning the assassination of President Kennedy.” The existence of this letter didn’t come to light until 1976, when it was declassified along with many other Commission papers in the National Archives—but the crucial paragraph containing what Castro said had been deleted from the declassified copy. The following year, however, TV newsman Daniel Schorr obtained the deleted passage from his own sources. In his book Clearing the Air (excerpted in the New York Review of Books), Schorr revealed that the missing paragraph quoted Castro as saying “that Oswald, on his visit to the consulate, had talked of assassinating President Kennedy. The consul had taken this as a deliberate provocation. The Cuban ambassador in Mexico City had reported the incident to Havana. It had not been ta
ken seriously at the time, but after Kennedy’s assassination, Castro had come to suspect that the effort to get Oswald into Cuba was part of a right-wing conspiracy. Oswald would return from Cuba, then assassinate the president, and it would look as though Castro had been responsible.”
This information was never pursued by the Commission or mentioned in its report. In fact, two of the staff lawyers, W. David Slawson and David Belin, don’t recall ever having seen Hoover’s letter. But the FBI informant’s account would be supported by another report three years later.
While Hoover’s letter lay buried, time passed. In early 1967 New Orleans’ flamboyant district attorney, Jim Garrison, announced to the world that he had uncovered a conspiracy behind the assassination of the president. His chief suspect was David Ferrie, Oswald’s old Civil Air Patrol instructor. But Ferrie, in poor health, died of a cerebral hemorrhage on February 22. Undaunted, Garrison soon arrested a prominent New Orleans businessman, Clay Shaw. Garrison charged that Ferrie, Oswald, and Shaw had plotted the assassination at a party in Feme’s apartment and that the murder itself had been carried out by a team of anti-Castro Cubans. Eventually the conspirators he mentioned would include Minutemen, CIA agents, Dallas oil men and policemen, arms dealers, White Russians, and a host of other reactionaries.
The more publicity Garrison got, the wilder his charges became. In May 1967 Garrison issued a subpoena for CIA director Richard Helms, demanding that Helms produce a photograph showing Oswald in the company of a CIA agent in Mexico. Garrison apparently reasoned it this way. The CIA had never produced a photograph of Oswald taken by their surveillance cameras stationed outside the Cuban and Russian embassies. Therefore, they must have taken a photograph that showed Oswald in the company of someone whose identity they did not want to be revealed. Who could Oswald’s supposed companion have been? Obviously, a CIA agent.
By this time the press was calling the Garrison investigation a three-ring circus. In June an hour-long NBC documentary charged Garrison with attempting to bribe and intimidate witnesses and using other questionable tactics. When NBC gave Garrison air time to reply on July 15, Garrison once again asserted that Oswald was without question “in the employ of U.S. intelligence agencies.” He did not, however, produce any evidence.
Meanwhile, Fidel Castro was evidently watching the Garrison case with interest. In July 1967 scores of foreign reporters went to Cuba to cover an international conference in support of revolutionary groups in Asia and Latin America. At an official reception in mid-July, Castro met an American reporter named Laura Bergquist and gave her a lengthy impromptu interview which she later wrote about in Look magazine. (It must be understood that Castro likes to talk—Turner Catledge of the New York Times once said of him that he made the garrulous Senator Hubert Humphrey look like Silent Cal Coolidge.) Castro surprised Bergquist by admitting he had made a mistake in making his famous attack on the Moncada barracks in 1953. Castro spoke with her for two or three hours, until he was finally drawn away by an aide tugging on his sleeve. For our purposes the most important thing he said to her that evening was a reference to the Garrison case. He asked her if Garrison’s theory of the assassination was supportable. The reason for his interest seems clear. Ever since Oswald’s pro-Cuba background had been revealed in late 1963, Castro’s public position was that Cuba had been set up and that the murder was a plot by right-wing forces. Now there was a New Orleans prosecutor saying the same thing.
A British journalist, Comer Clark, later claimed that he had also gotten an impromptu interview with Castro in July 1967, perhaps during this same week. And Clark’s version of what Castro told him was the same story J. Edgar Hoover had reported in his then still-classified letter of 1964. According to an article by Clark published that October—in, of all places, the National Enquirer—Castro told him that Oswald had come to the Cuban consulate twice, each time for about fifteen minutes. Clark quoted Castro as saying, “The first time—I was told—he wanted to work for us. He was asked to explain, but he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t go into details. The second time he said he wanted to ‘free Cuba from American imperialism.’ Then he said something like, ‘Someone ought to shoot that President Kennedy.’ Then Oswald said—and this was exactly how it was reported to me—‘Maybe I’ll try to do it.’”
Castro added that he had not alerted the United States government because Oswald had been considered a “wild man” and was not taken seriously: “We didn’t have any relations with the American government anyway. If I’d taken it seriously I might have informed the United Nations or some other official agency like that. But who would have believed me? People would have said that Oswald was just mad, or that I’d gone mad.” Clark also quoted him as saying, “I thought the visits might be something to do with the CIA—whether anything eventually happened or not.… Then, too, after such a plot had been found out, we would be blamed—for something we had nothing to do with. It could have been an excuse for another invasion try. In any case, people would have tried to put it at my door. I was not responsible for Kennedy’s death, I will tell you that. I think he was killed by U.S. fascists—right-wing elements who disagreed with him.” (Since Jim Garrison also thought that Oswald’s trip to Mexico had “something to do with the CIA,” Castro was in effect supporting that theory.)
These statements attributed to Castro by Clark tally point for point with the private conversation reported in Hoover’s letter to the Commission. This may be better appreciated if we look at the two accounts side by side.
FBI informant’s report:
Comer Clark interview:
At the consulate Oswald had talked of assassinating President Kennedy.
“Then he said something like, ‘Someone ought to shoot that President Kennedy.… Maybe I’ll try to do it.’”
The consul had taken this as a deliberate provocation, but it had not been taken seriously at the time.
Oswald had been considered a “wild man” and was not taken seriously.
After Kennedy’s assassination Castro had come to suspect that the effort to get Oswald into Cuba was part of a right-wing conspiracy.… it would look as though Castro had been responsible.
“… after such a plot had been found out, we would be blamed—for something we had nothing to do with.… I think he was killed by U.S. fascists—right-wing elements.…”
There are several good reasons for believing that Castro did in fact make these statements to Hoover’s informant and to Comer Clark. First, the general interpretation of the assassination attributed to him in both accounts is exactly what he has expressed on other occasions. In 1974, for instance, he told Frank Mankiewicz and Kirby Jones: “[T] his man—Oswald … applied for a permit at the Cuban embassy to travel to Cuba, and he was not given the permission. We had no idea who he was. But I ask myself why would a man who commits such an act try to come here. Sometimes we ask ourselves if someone did not wish to involve Cuba in this, because I am under the impression that Kennedy’s assassination was organized by reactionaries in the United States and that it was all a result of a conspiracy.
“What I can say is that he asked permission to travel to Cuba. Now, imagine that by coincidence he had been granted this permit, that he had visited Cuba for a few days, then returned to the United States and killed Kennedy. That would have been material for a provocation.”
But more important, the statements attributed to Oswald sound authentic. Clark’s more detailed account fits in perfectly with Oswald’s past record and with his known situation at the time he appeared at the Cuban Embassy. For instance, Castro quoted Oswald as saying he wanted to work for the Cubans. It now appears that this was indeed Oswald’s ambition, but few people realized that in 1967. There was certainly no hint of this in the Warren Report or the early conspiracy books. Furthermore, if we accept that Castro’s warning and the Sylvia Odio incident were fresh in his mind, it is reasonable that Oswald might have said, “Someone ought to shoot that President Kennedy,” and then add—as though the possibility
had just occurred to him—“Maybe I’ll try to do it.” Less than a week before this, Leopoldo had relayed a similar message to Odio. Oswald’s statement to the Cuban official that he wanted to “free Cuba from American imperialism” sounds familiar as well. Leopoldo had quoted him as saying that Kennedy was the one “who was holding the freedom of Cuba, actually.” And Oswald had been speaking out against “American imperialism” ever since his interviews with Johnson and Mosby in Moscow.
These threats echo similar statements he had made about Eisenhower and General Walker. To Oswald, these dissimilar men were identical in one respect—they were leaders who abused their power to exploit and oppress, or threatened to do so: Eisenhower was “exploiting the working class,” Walker was potentially another Hitler—and he thought he would be “doing a justice to the people” if he got rid of him. And now, President Kennedy, who Oswald had once believed might accept the status quo after the Bay of Pigs, had been unmasked in Oswald’s mind as a danger to Cuba, someone who ought to be killed.
Finally, there is another reason to believe that Clark was telling the truth. It appears that Consul Azcue did indeed consider Oswald a “wild man”—otherwise, why would he have told Oswald that a person like him was hurting the Cuban revolution rather than helping it?
Oswald's Game Page 20
