Oswald, Mexico, and Deep Politics

by Peter Dale Scott

  According to an FBI message to the Secret Service on November 23, that was not released to the public until 1975, a CIA 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, Tex., 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."50

  We learn now for the first time that this memo was based on a telephone conversation between J. Edgar Hoover’s subordinate Alan Belmont, and Gordon Shanklin, head of the Dallas FBI. This phone call took place just before noon on November 23. At 7:30 PM, CST, Shanklin cabled Hoover and said, "It should be noted that the actual tape [of the October 1 call] has been erased." On the same day the Mexico City CIA Station informed its Headquarters "Regret complete recheck shows tapes for this period already erased."51

  Because these two cables do not say when the tapes were erased, they do not refute Hoover’s statement that FBI agents in Dallas had listened to them. The House Committee, in its published report, cited yet another FBI report that "no tapes were taken [from Mexico City] to Dallas." But this does not refute Hoover’s statement either, since the FBI agents could, and indeed very probably would, have listened to the recordings in a long-distance telephone call. The Committee’s Report concluded that the FBI and CIA in the U.S. never received "a recording of Oswald’s voice."52 But this language, repeated three times, does not address the real issue: did they receive a recording of the voice of someone else, not Oswald, who identified himself as Oswald?

  The inconsistencies in the CIA’s accounts of the tapes, as revealed by the 1978 Lopez Report, suggest that officers in the Mexico City Station acted, as early as one day after the assassination, as if they had something to hide from their own Headquarters. It seems likely, moreover, that they were prevaricating when they said that the tapes had been erased.

  Warren Commission Counsel David Slawson has since confirmed to investigators, including myself, that he listened to an Oswald tape inside the Mexico City CIA station in the spring of 1964 53 His memory on this crucial point has been corroborated by two other Warren Commission counsels, William Coleman and David Belin. Members of the Win Scott family recall that a vinyl recording, which Scott had identified to his wife as being of Oswald, was retrieved by Angleton after Scott’s death and taken to CIA headquarters.

  Key redactions in the Lopez Report, as censored by the CIA before release in 1993, still prevent the American people from knowing what the Mexico City CLA station was up to in 1963. On the basis of what has been released, however, one can tentatively conclude that Oswald was indeed impersonated in Mexico, that a false trail was laid which linked him to an alleged KGB assassin agent, and that some individual officers in the Mexico City Station acted conspiratorially: first to strengthen this false trail, and later to cover it up.

  Oleg Nechiporenko and the Oswald impostor Hypothesis

  Informed readers are no doubt asking themselves why I have spent so much time discussing the possibility of an Oswald impostor in Mexico City, without mentioning the rebuttal testimony that might seem to be definitive, from three former KGB officers in the Soviet Embassy, including Kostikov himself. All three have said that the Oswald of Dallas did visit the Soviet Embassy on September 28, and that he brandished a revolver much like that which is said to have been used by Oswald on November 22 to murder Officer Tippit.

  The answer is that I first drafted a version of this essay before Col. Nechiporenko’s book had appeared. I have since had occasion, not only to read and re-read his book, but to spend several hours with the Colonel himself, an intelligent and engaging person. Indeed I had the post-Cold War and post-structuralist historical experience of standing with the Colonel and many others on the grassy knoll in Dealev Plaza, each of us holding a candle in a commemoration of the 30th anniversary of President Kennedy’s murder.

  And yet prolonged reflection on this topic has persuaded me, not only that the hypothesis of a possible Oswald impostor remains a viable one, but that portions of what the Colonel has to tell us can be used in support of it.

  It is important first of all to distinguish between what we learn from the Colonel himself, and what we learn from his book, which is less reliable. I learned this when I asked the Colonel at breakfast about his relations with the DFS and their senior official Miguel Nazar Haro, who as we shall see I consider important, perhaps crucial, in this case. On hearing the name of Nazar Haro, he laughed and said first, "I knew him well;" and then "He’s in my book!" I then gave him my copy; his brow furrowed as he searched but failed to find what he was looking for. He finally fixed on page 83, and said, "This is the place, but they must have taken him out." On the page there were references to an "FDS-a"—clearly the DFS (Federal Directorate of Security), but the "-a" made no sense to me. He looked at the page again, and said: "That’s a mistake; I don’t know where that came from."54

  It is relevant here that the DFS in general, and Nazar Haro in particular, were both important assets of the CIA Mexico Station in 1963, and also significant sources of disinformation about Oswald as part of an international Communist conspiracy. I assume that the "they" who deleted Nazar Haro from the book may well be from the same part of CIA that is said to have edited Khrushchev’s memoirs before their publication, and possibly the memoirs of Stalin’s daughter Svetlana Allelueva.

  I was already suspicious of the book because it seemed to fit so well into the "Posnermania" of late 1993. On the one hand it validated the Warren Report precisely where it was weakest, in its otherwise unsubstantiated portrait of Oswald as a deranged gunman. (Before these three KGB agents came forward, the only credible sighting of Oswald with a gun had been made by Marina Oswald; others had claimed to have seen him shoot, in concatenated and possibly conspiratorial testimony, but the Warren Commission had systematically refuted them.)55

  On the other hand, Nechiporenko’s book rebutted the newly-declassified Lopez Report precisely) where it was most indicative of a conspiracy. It first reassured us that the Oswald in contact with the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City was indeed no impostor. The book seems virtually to have in mind the alleged impostor who was short, blonde, and over thirty, when it writes that the Oswald visitor to the Consulate was "apparently twenty-five to twenty-seven. . . of medium height. . . and. . . a brunet."56

  Additionally, and perhaps even more importantly, it appeared to determine that Lee Harvey Oswald had indeed met with Valeriy Kostikov on September 28, 1963, just as Ms. X had "determined" in her memo of October 16.57 The CIA station, in other words, was validated in what threatened to become the most controversial features of their pre-assassination handling of the Lee Harvey Oswald matter.

  I was admittedly prejudiced against the forthcoming Nechiporenko book by other favors which in recent months KGB files and veterans had performed for post-Cold War propaganda campaigns in this country. I thought particularly of the alleged KGB report of an 1970s interview with a senior North Vietnamese official, allegedly confirming that the Vietnamese had indeed used significant numbers of American MlA’s (Missing in Action) as slave labor in that period. Thanks to anachronisms in this alleged KGB document, it had been easily exposed as a forgery; and eventually it was debunked by the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies 58

  Another reason to doubt the Nechiporenko story of the September 28 visit is that it has been told again, differently, by another ex-KGB officer, Gen. Nikolai Leonov. Though the substance of the story remains the same (Oswald appearing at the Embassy, and brandishing a revolver), the date of the alleged visit is one day later, on Sunday, September 29, and Leonov recalls that, other than the guard at the front gate, he was the only person to receive Oswald.59 The near duplication of the story, far from increasing its credibility, makes us realize how easy it would be, in the year of Posn
ermania, for penurious KGB officers to pick up a little hard currency by joining the Warren Commission chorus.

  Both Leonov and Nechiporenko claim that they reported Oswald’s flamboyant visits to KGB Headquarters.60 Nechiporenko adds that when Anastas Mikoyan came to President Kennedy’s funeral in November 1963, he brought with him the KGB "materials" on Oswald in the Soviet Union, "to give to the Americans."61

  This draws our attention to what is, with or without the Oswald-revolver story, one of the more intriguing "black holes" in the documentation of the case. The CIA and FBI both drew heavily on the Oswald correspondence supplied at the time by the Soviet Embassy in Washington, which corroborated the fact that both Oswalds had been in correspondence with the Embassy about returning to the Soviet Union. Soviet (presumably KGB) documentation on Oswald was also used to corroborate the details of his supposed defection (WR 692, WCE 985). But there is no use by the Warren Commission of Soviet documentation to corroborate or refute the questionable stories about Oswald’s visits to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico. Other Soviet-supplied materials on Oswald were used to bolster the Warren Report, but no effort was apparently ever made to obtain their Mexico Oswald documents, on a matter which in November 1963 was considered crucial to the proof or disproof of an international conspiracy.

  It is striking that Nechiporenko’s book, which quotes liberally from KGB documents on Oswald in the Soviet Union, has no citations from the documents which he and Kostikov allegedly filed from Mexico. A search should be made in Moscow to find the alleged reports of the Oswald-revolver story from Nechiporenko and Leonov. One should also, apparently for the first time, request the Mexican Government to supply its files on Oswald’s Mexico visit. (Nechiporenko claims that the Oswald-revolver story was "forwarded to Mexican authorities through their foreign affairs ministry.")62

  We have just seen that, whatever one makes of the Oswald-revolver story, there are useful facts in Nechiporenko’s book. Though he often draws on some of the West’s more unreliable sources (Priscilla McMillan, Eddowes, Hugh MacDonald, even David Phillips), at other times the book is startingly accurate. For example, Nechiporenko excerpts from the Schweiker-Hart Report the important information that FBI information on Oswald was directed in mid-November to the counterintelligence branch of the Special Affairs Staff in charge of Cuban operations (SAS/CI), and thereafter, on November 22, to counterintelligence (specifically CI/SIG).63

  In my present state of imperfect understanding. Nechiporenko is a mystery, not unrelated to the mystery of Nosenko, that other volunteer of KGB information about Oswald. Readers of this essay will recall that the core of Nosenko’s story, in 1964 and again to the House Committee in 1978, was that Oswald was of "no interest" to the KGB (2 AH 464). The same message is the core of Nechiporenko’s book as well, which repeats the same words, "no interest," at least six times.64

  How Nechiporenko Raises New Questions About the Oswald-Kostikov Story

  Whatever the full background, neither Nechiporenko nor his book can be simply dismissed. His account is detailed, plausible, corroborated by two other intelligent plausible eyewitnesses: Pavel Yatzkov and Valeriy Kostikov himself. I am now satisfied that some form of Oswald (or "Oswald" Kostikov meeting may well have occurred. At the same time, one cannot use Nechiporenko to "close" the case, as Posner tried to do without having seen his published book.65 On the contrary, Nechiporenko introduces a number of new pieces of evidence which complicate the already murky story of Oswald in Mexico still further.

  I have already mentioned that Nechiporenko corroborates Silvia Durán’s description of Oswald as "dressed unelegantly," and definitely not in the shirt, tie, and sweater of his visa photograph allegedly taken the same day.66 Much more important, in my view, is his emphatic denial that there could have been any telephone calls to the Soviet Embassy on September 28, a Saturday on which, he insists, the Embassy was closed down, and the only personnel present were those who had gathered for a volleyball game.67 In other words, if Nechiporenko is right, we have to question what has hitherto been considered the hardest evidence of all: the record of electronic surveillance transcripts, which show a Durán-Oswald-Soviet Consulate telephone conversation on September 28.

  Here too Nechiporenko corroborates Silvia Durán on a point where, given the transcript record, no one (except possibly the authors of the Lopez Report) has hitherto believed her. She has maintained that the Cuban Consulate was closed on Saturday, September 28, and that on that day she neither met with Oswald nor telephoned the Soviet Embassy about him.68 This is flatly at odds with the transcript record, hitherto deemed unimpeachable, which says that "at 11:51 a.m. [September 28] Silvia Durán called the Soviet Consulate [and] said there was an American citizen at the Cuban Consulate."69

  Having contemplated this conundrum at some length, I am now inclined to question the transcript record, which at a minimum can be shown to have been altered (or censored). This alteration may have been either accidental, or deliberate, perhaps in order to reinforce the October 16 memo, which "determined that Oswald had been at the Soviet Embassy on 28 September 1963 and had talked with. . . Kostikov." A fuller, and presumably more accurate account of the transcript, in Mexico City Station cable 7023 of 23 November, separates the visit to the Consul from the visit of the same day. 28 September:

  MEXI 7023 of 23 Nov 63:

  On 28 Sep 63 Silvia Durán Cuban Emb called Sov Consul saying Northamerican there who had been Sov Emb and wish speak with Consul.

  Uniden Northamerican told Sov Consul quote "I was in your Emb and spoke to your Consul. I was just now at your Emb and they look my address."

  Sov Consul says "I know that".

  TRANSCRIPT of 28 Sept intercept (Lopez Report, 76-77):

  At 11:51 a.m. Silvia Durán called the Soviet Consulate. She said that there was an American citizen at the Cuban Consulate who had previously visited the Soviet Consulate. The Soviet asked Silvia to wait a minute. Upon his return to the telephone, Silvia put the American on the line. . . .

  Russian: What else do you want?

  American: I was just now at your Embassy and they took my address.

  Russian: I know that.

  Note that the Cable provides no evidence of an Oswald-Kostikov meeting at the Soviet Embassy on September 28. as had been ‘‘determined" in the October 16 memo of Ms. X.70 (The meeting could just as easily have been on September 27, a date corroborated by Durán, Kostikov and the September 27 transcripts).71

  However the two visits had been collapsed into one when CIA Headquarters transmitted the contents of cable MEXI 7023 to the FBI (who already possessed the October 16 memo):

  DIR (CIA HQ cable) 84915 of 23 Nov 63 to FBI:

  On 28 September 1963 Silvia Durán of the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City telephoned the Soviet Embassy and said there was a "North American" with her who wanted to speak with the Soviet Consul. The "North American" came on the line and said that he had just been to the Soviet Embassy and had spoken to their Consul adding that the Soviets had "taken his address." The Soviet Consul acknowledged he knew this was true.

  With the cables declassified, we can now see that this corroboration of the September 28 Oswald-Kostikov meeting (and thus of the October 16 memo) had no foundation in the cable from Mexico City it purported to transmit. This corroboration surely added to the swirl of foreign involvement stories that led to the creation of the Warren Commission. It was however an artefact which emanated from an office in CIA Headquarters.

  Believers that the case is closed will say that these minute falsifications in the postassassination cable traffic are of no significance, now that Nechiporenko and Kostikov have corroborated that the September 28 meeting did take place. Their critics may in rebuttal raise questions about the timing of the new Nechiporenko revelations, precisely when the shaky basis for the October 16 allegations has first been exposed.

  For the present I must remain in the middle. The conflicting data we now have on Oswald’s (or "Oswald"’s) visits in Mexico City demand a
resolution we cannot currently provide. No source is above suspicion; and Nechiporenko’s insistence that there could not have been a telephone call on September 28 should probably persuade us to look more critically at the transcript record than anyone has done in the past.

  Thus my conclusion is much like that of the Lopez Report itself, whose authors concluded that "Oswald himself probably visited the Cuban Consulate at least once," probably on September 27, but that the individual involved in subsequent visits and telephone contacts "may not have been Oswald."72 If the man who identified himself as Oswald was not, then the case against Oswald as a likely assassin was grounded, at least in part, on a pre-assassination deception.

  For the time being I shall continue to take seriously the hypothesis, as yet neither proven or disproven, that a false trail was laid in Mexico City, linking Lee Harvey Oswald to the KGB’s assassination capabilities.73

  The Oswald Cables: An Unrelated Deception Operation?

  One can only speculate as to the reasons why this false trail was laid. It seems unlikely however that those responsible acted without some kind of authorization, and even more unlikely that this authorization would have overtly contemplated the murder of the president. It is far more likely that these cables were sent as pan of a CIA deception operation, and that this deception operation went back at least three years, to the time of Oswald’s alleged defection to the Soviet Union.

  As I write in November 1993, it is premature to speculate with too great precision what that deception operation (or operations) might have entailed. In the course of writing this essay I have received some three thousand items from the CI/SIG’s 201 file on Oswald. The cover sheets on the pre-assassination reports on Oswald (from State, FBI and the Navy) show these reports being circulated to ten or more sections of the CIA’s Clandestine Staff, not only in CI but in the SR or Soviet Russia Division, including SR’s Counterespionage (later renamed Counterintelligence) Branch. This was headed by Tennant "Pete" Bagley, one of Angleton’s "closest allies and strongest supporters in the Soviet division."74 And Counterespionage, as defined by Angleton, involved not just understanding of but hostile operations against an enemy.75