by Gus Russo
After many days of planning, exercising, and rehearsing, the whole hijacking idea was abandoned. Lee came bounding into the apartment, exclaiming, “Guess what, Mama? I’ve found a legal way. There’s a Cuban Embassy in Mexico. I’ll go there.” Oswald’s plan involved acquiring a Cuban visa from the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City, and spending the rest of his days in Cuba, fighting for Castro’s cause. According to Oswald’s own writings, he intended to inform the Cuban Embassy officials of what he had learned in Lafayette Square about the Lake Ponchartrain camps and the U.S. re-invasion plans for Cuba. On September 25th, after sending Marina and June back to Texas to live with Ruth Paine, Lee Oswald boarded a bus bound for Mexico City.
Oswald’s Connections
Although rarely explored, circumstantial evidence exists that Oswald was in contact with pro-Castro Cubans, not only in Los Angeles during his Marine stint, but in New Orleans as well.
If Oswald was supported by a pro-Castro network in New Orleans, he could have transmitted to Havana what he was learning in Lafayette Square, as well as his suspicions about the “bonds for invasion,” and “the camps on the lake.” This raises the spectre of an assassin who was not only inspired by the Kennedys’ Cuba Project, but possibly encouraged by Havana. Of course, given Oswald’s new-found celebrity and the general description of New Orleans as a city where “everybody knows everybody else,” it is certainly possible. While there is no firm evidence of Oswald contact with Havana during his New Orleans period, there are nonetheless some teasing and intriguing anecdotes.
On the subject of whether a pro-Castro network in New Orleans could have existed, Sergio Arcadia says, “Of course, it’s possible. Why there was a pro-Castro man who had a bar on the same block as Carlos’ [Bringuier’s] store. His name was Pena.” Two doors from Bringuier’s Casa Roca on Decatur Street was the Habana Bar, owned by Orest Pena. Pena and a number of his employees and patrons admitted to the FBI that Oswald had been in his bar, accompanied by “Mexicanos.”56 Although a Cuban, Pena was not an exile fleeing the Castro regime. “He came before the revolution,” says Bringuier. Although Bringuier has no evidence that Pena was working for Havana, he says, “I always suspected him.”57
An FBI report discloses two reasons for the exiles’ suspicions about Pena. An FBI informant in the Cuban community told agent Warren DeBrueys that Pena had been heard to say in the Habana bar, “Castro should have been notified about that as soon as possible.” What that was is unknown. The report also cited three different exile sources as saying that Pena had mentioned plans to travel to England, Europe, and Moscow.58 Bringuier finds it equally suspicious that Pena applied for a passport for this travel at the same time and place as Oswald. Indeed, around this time, Oswald also noted his desire to travel to England, Europe, and Moscow.59 Further, Pena was a potential source of information for Oswald regarding the Kennedy Cuba Project. For Pena knew David Ferrie very well, referring to him as “Captain Ferrie.” According to author Harold Weisberg, who interviewed Pena in 1968, Pena met Ferrie when they both attended meetings of Arcacha’s Cuban Revolutionary Council. Pena even took flying lessons from Ferrie.60
There are several other reasons it seems likely that Oswald had still-unknown Cuban allies in New Orleans. Of note is the testimony of New Orleans attorney Dean Andrews, who told the Warren Commission that Oswald had come into his office attempting to secure U.S. citizenship for his wife, Marina. Andrews said that Oswald did not come alone. He was accompanied by what Andrews referred to alternately as “Mexicanos,” “Latinos,” or “Cubanos.”61
Further, Oswald’s leaflets have potential significance exclusive of the stamped address. Oswald had leaflets made at two different print shops. Myra Silver, who worked for Jones Printing (directly across the street from Reily Coffee), testified that on May 29th, a man working for Reily placed an order for 1,000 FPCC leaflets. However, the man used the name “Osborne” and she could not identify him after being shown Oswald’s picture. If someone else had been working with Oswald in New Orleans, it most logically would have been another pro-Castro Cuban (or someone masquerading as such).
Finally, according to Oswald’s Russian friend, Pavel Golovachev, at the height of Oswald’s frenetic New Orleans odyssey, the Russians unexpectedly renewed their interest in him. Golovochev, as previously explained, was one of Oswald’s many acquaintances the KGB enlisted to keep tabs on the mysterious defector. Golovachev disclosed 30 years later that he had stopped his Oswald-related reporting to KGB superior Alexander Kostikov when the Oswalds left Russia in May 1962. He did not hear again from the KGB for 15 months. Then, in August 1963, KGB superiors instructed him to deliver to headquarters all correspondence from Oswald in the USA, and anything Oswald had left behind in Minsk. Golovachev delivered the material, which was carefully inspected, then returned to him. He was never told the reason for this inspection.
After the assassination, the KGB would again contact Pavel Golovachev, confiscate everything pertaining to Oswald, and subject him to a hostile interrogation, which was dominated not by talk of Oswald, but by Russian fears that Marina might be a security risk. The KGB even pressed Golovachev as to whether he personally had slept with Marina, and demanded to know the names of all her lovers.62
Regardless of Oswald’s potential for pro-Castro Cuban contact in New Orleans, it is a matter of historical fact that he made such contact when he arrived in Mexico City in September 1963. Although there is no proof that Oswald had prior contact with anyone in Mexico City before his arrival there, one of his statements on arriving in that city could lead one to infer a prior communication. Over the phone (which was monitored by the CIA), Oswald informed a Soviet Embassy employee of his contacts at the nearby Cuban Embassy, saying, “I went to the Cuban Embassy to ask them for my address because they have it.”
Nobody knows what address Oswald meant. His statement, made just weeks before Oswald murdered Castro’s nemesis, JFK, triggered a 30-year debate among investigators over the precise meaning of Oswald’s relationship with the Castro outpost in Mexico City.
The extreme sensitivity of Oswald’s Mexican contacts were known to a few key officials. Those contacts sent paroxysms of fear through official Washington.
THE FALL OF CAMELOT
CHAPTER TEN
MEXICO CITY: THE PARALLAX VIEW1
‘‘Mexico City is like another world.”
—Donald Fagen, songwriter (from his song “Maxine”)
“Mexico City was the only place in the Western Hemisphere where every communist country and every democratic country had an embassy, and it was a hotbed of intrigue.”
—Gaeton Fonzi, former HSCA investigator2
“The Mexican capital is a huggermugger metropolis of cloak-and-dagger conspirators.”
—David Atlee Phillips, CIA Chief of Covert Operations in Mexico City, 1962-19643
In unraveling the truth behind the Kennedy assassination, understanding the peculiar characteristics of Mexico City is indispensable. By the time of Oswald’s visit, this megalopolis had become the most spy-infested in the Western hemisphere, if not the world. Oswald’s presence among these Cold Warriors was one of the initial reasons the investigation whitewashed the facts behind the President’s death. It is now clear that, even at the time of his visit, the assassin-to-be jeopardized sensitive aspects of Kennedy’s Cuba Project by meeting with Soviet and Cuban informants (called “targets” in the espionage business). A thorough investigation, at the least, could have exposed hard-won and well-placed double agents.
In addition, Oswald’s unwitting contact with these CIA sources threatened the Agency with mortifying embarrassment after the assassination. Behind the government’s zeal to protect these secrets was a dreadful possibility: a concern, shared alike by senior American intelligence officers and politicos, that Oswald had received illicit encouragement for a murderous mission during his seven-day Mexico City stay.
It seems inevitable that a man as intriguing as Oswald would gravitate to locales such
as New Orleans and Mexico City, arguably the two most intriguing cities in the Americas.4
A City of Dichotomy
By all rights, Mexico City should not exist. It would be hard to find a more inappropriate site for one of the world’s largest cities. The city is flung on a 7,000 ft. volcanic plateau landlocked by the Sierra Nevada mountains, which ring it on all sides. No rivers feed it. No coasts serve it. The details of its founding are lost in myth, but there can be little doubt the site was originally used by the Aztecs as a center for human sacrifices aimed at appeasing the gods of the volcano.
For much of the year, the Mexico City sun blazes with a special, unremitting, malevolent force. The altitude, far from being invigorating, clutches at the visitor like a fist, making any movement a dizzy effort.
Mexico City, it has been said, pounds the senses like a metal climbing staff. The deafening noise, putrid smells, eye-stinging smog, poverty, and crowding rival that of Cairo or Calcutta. Traffic creeps like a slow-motion junkyard. Honking horns, broken mufflers, and the put-put of motorbikes rattle the nerves. Diesel and smog choke the lungs and make the eyes tear. But the magnitude and cacophony of the crowd dwarfs all else to mere annoyance.
To a first-time observer, it seems as if the entire population of Mexico has emptied, village by village, into Mexico City. An accurate population tally is impossible, but estimates run as high as 20 million people. The resulting swarm is engaged either in selling something or begging. Cobblestone alleys become makeshift marketplaces where everything becomes a negotiable commodity—including “intelligence.”
Against this backdrop are set splendid monuments, statues, and the ever-present bougainvillea flower. The city thus defines the word “dichotomy.” Author Dick Russell has written that Mexico City “seems to epitomize double images.” The city blends the “splendid and the squalid,” pyramids and skyscrapers, statues of Christian gods alongside pagan ones.5 Though recurrent volcanic activity insures occasional urban renewal, this 4,000 year-old city appears otherwise impervious to change, and even immortal.
Intelligence in Mexico City
Drawn by the cover this maelstrom provides, consulates, embassies, and their requisite spies proliferate like mushrooms. With antennas pointed north, they hunker down, embracing anonymity with a professional’s admiration. In 1963, the United States and its Cold War adversaries were prime examples of this phenomenon. Mexico City was then the Lisbon of the North American continent, a mecca for eastern-bloc spies, a KGB locus for operations radiating throughout Latin and North America.6 One expected to find the Blue Parrot just around a corner, with Sidney Greenstreet grinning in a smoky back room negotiating for the carnet internationale. The New York Times referred to Mexico City as the “Casablanca of the West, where the American [CIA] and Soviet [KGB] intelligence services did battle for the hearts and minds of Latin America.”7
The leading actors—Cuban, American, and Soviet—were hard at work in this sprawling arena, trying to “turn” each other’s agents, and to gain the huge prizes this brought. In the convoluted business of intelligence-gathering, a “pretender” reports first-hand information from behind enemy lines. As importantly, he has the ability to create an analytical nightmare by controlling the information fed to the enemy’s intelligence-gathering machine. A double agent can muddle authentic material or lead the other side off-track entirely.8
In 1963, the CIA’s Mexico City Station, located in the American embassy, was the Agency’s largest permanent station in the Western Hemisphere. The outpost employed more than 25 full-time agents, who blended into the thousand-plus employees of the embassy. The FBI, which likewise had a permanent presence in the embassy,9 deployed a Legal Attaché, or Legat, for the purposes of locating American communists hiding across the U.S.-Mexican border, and more importantly to monitor Soviet intelligence activity aimed at the United States.
The Soviet embassy in the city was the base for spying operations against the United States. Melvin Beck, a CIA case officer assigned to Mexico City at the time, recalls that the station’s efforts against the Soviets had long emphasized double agent operations.10 Beck further describes the conditions:
I monitored the activities of Soviets all over Latin America. Mexico was unquestionably the most important target. Mexico hosted the largest contingent of the Russian Intelligence Service in Latin America, quite understandably because both the KGB and the GRU used Mexico as a third-party base for running operations against the United States.11
David Atlee Phillips, who was the Chief of Covert Operations in Mexico City at the time, summed up the location’s strategic value:
The CIA station in Mexico is one of the most important in the world. . . The reason for the large CIA contingent. . . [is that] Mexico City has been the main outpost of Soviet Intelligence for its activities throughout Latin America and, since 1959, for the support of Cuban skulduggery in the Western Hemisphere. . . Mexico is an exile haven for Latin Americans of whatever conviction who are waiting, and often trying to abet, a change of government in their countries. . . All of this has spawned a conglomeration of intelligence officers, agents, spies, provocateurs, and shadowy figures. . . Each intelligence service in Mexico City plays the cat-and-mouse game of attempting to penetrate each other’s organization.12
For the Americans, the man in charge of directing this maddening traffic was CIA Station Chief Winston “Win” Scott. Scott typified the atypical—the early generation spymaster/renaissance man. Known as a workaholic, he was sufficiently charming to captivate the Mexicans, who were ever-cautious about befriending “gringos.” Scott had a distinctly personal disadvantage to overcome—more than one hundred years earlier, an American general named Winfield Scott (no relation) had invaded and captured Mexico City.
By any definition, the CIA’s Scott was brilliant. A mathematics professor by age nineteen, he attained his Ph.D. in matrix theory mathematics (and had turned down a major league baseball contract in order to further his studies). Serving in the Navy in World War II, Scott broke the Germans’ coded messages in the Caribbean. He also spent time with the FBI. He joined the CIA at the time of its inception in the late 1940’s. During Lee Oswald’s visit in Mexico City, Win Scott would witness events so disturbing that he would come to suspect, as he later wrote, a possible foreign conspiracy in Kennedy’s death.
Like the U.S., the Soviet Union’s largest intelligence operation was its Mexico City contingent. Over half of its 35 intelligence agents were also known to be in league with Castro’s spy apparatus, known as the DGI (or its military equivalent, the G-2).
Likewise, Cuba had a powerful espionage presence in Mexico City. According to former CIA officer Phillip Agee:
The only Cuban diplomatic mission in Latin America is in Mexico City. They have thirteen diplomatic officials and an equal number of non-diplomatic personnel. Over half the officers in the mission are known or suspected intelligence officers. The main Cuban target is penetration of the Cuban exile communities in Mexico and Central America, but they also have operations in Mexico City designed to penetrate the exile communities in the U.S., particularly Miami.13
“Castro’s best intelligence agents were in Mexico City,”14 emphatically states Brigade leader and Bobby Kennedy confidante Raphael Quintero. Those agents operated out of the Cuban embassy. In addition, the Cuban embassy had a curious procedure of providing travelers with pseudonyms for international travel, and of making no entry on their passports, according to what Bobby Kennedy’s Cuban Coordinating Committee learned in 1963. “This procedure,” the report advised, “is obviously designed to impede any effort by other Latin American governments to identify the travelers and control their movements.”15 Lastly, and perhaps most important, the Cuban embassy was believed to serve as headquarters for Cuban terrorists operating throughout the western hemisphere.
The permutations of suspicion seem limitless in Mexico City. Life is best accepted on this high altitude stage through the parallax view—nothing is what it seems.<
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Oswald in Mexico City
“For me, it’s all going to end in tragedy!”
—Lee Oswald to an official of the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City16
Lee Oswald arrived in Mexico City at 10 a.m. on September 27, 1963. He had traveled by bus for almost two days, journeying from New Orleans by way of Houston and Laredo, Texas.17 He proceeded to check into the Hotel del Commercio at the daily rate of 16 pesos ($1.28). The hotel was just a few blocks from the focal point of Oswald’s journey: the Cuban embassy. If his preoccupation had been with Cuba during his entire stay in New Orleans, this was also true of his much shorter stay in Mexico City, but to an even greater degree. On the Trailways bus, and on a Mexican bus to which he transferred at Nuevo Laredo, he announced to fellow passengers that he had been the secretary of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans and that he was on his way to Cuba—through Mexico—because Americans were prohibited from traveling directly to Cuba. He hoped, he said, to see Fidel Castro in Havana.18
In Mexico City, Oswald would not, of course, see Fidel, but he did meet a number of people who, by their natures and positions, deserve close scrutiny. The Warren Commission would state unequivocally that, in Mexico City, Oswald “was seen with no other person either at his hotel or at the restaurant”19—a small, cheap restaurant near the hotel, where he often ate. This conclusion is flatly wrong, but the Commissioners were largely kept in the dark about all things Cuban, including the Cuban component to Oswald’s Mexico City foray.
Soon after checking in at the hotel, Oswald went to the Cuban Embassy, which, together with the Soviet Embassy, he marked on a map. A young Mexican woman named Sylvia Duran was working in the consular office as secretary to the Consul. At great length, Oswald told her that he was travelling to the Soviet Union but wanted to stop in Cuba on the way, and would need a transit visa quickly because he wanted to leave in three days, on September 30th. He informed Duran, who spoke English, that he was “a friend of the Cuban revolution,” in support of which he showed her his membership card in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, newspaper clips about his arrest in New Orleans while distributing FPCC leaflets (with a photograph of himself flanked by policemen), proof of his Soviet residence and work experience, and correspondence with American socialist and communist organizations. Impressed by this and by Oswald’s intensity, Duran asked her boss, the consul, whether he might shorten the ordinary process of visa application, which began with filling out a long application form. The consul, Eusebio Azcue, said that he could not. Oswald, said Azcue, would have to go through the usual procedure, and his application would have to first be approved in Havana. Azcue, on his own, could not do that here in Mexico City.
