Oswald, Mexico, and Deep Politics

by Peter Dale Scott

  Oswald may have been part of these hostile operations; alternatively he (or someone using his name) may have been a target. In June of 1960 an FBI memo to the State Department, signed by J. Edgar Hoover (and later added to Oswald’s 201 file), raised the possibility that the person using Oswald’s passport and other credentials in the Soviet Union was in fact an impostor.76 Oswald was subsequently watched within the State Department by Otto Otepka and other members of its Office of Security, who collaborated with the FBI’s Counterespionage Division and the CIA’s Counterintelligence Staff in the search for Soviet penetration agents.77

  Otepka’s frustrations in pursuing the Oswald matter, which he shared with me fifteen years ago, are instructive. As a right-winger who shared Angleton’s profound mistrust of the Soviet Union, he feared that Oswald’s defection had something to do with the KGB. He found it anomalous that Oswald received a visa to enter the Soviet Union from Finland in only two days (rather than the one-to-two weeks it normally took); and also that the USSR granted Oswald an exit visa a month and a half early.78 Above all, as a security officer who had spent a lifetime studying State Department procedures, he claimed to know for a certainty that Oswald in 1963 had been granted a passport when he should not have. His efforts to learn why were resisted by his own superiors at State, which compounded his suspicions of a subversive conspiracy.79 Otepka was not alone in his suspicions.

  Six months after the Hoover memo, in December 1960, Ann Egerter of the CI/SIG staff opened a 201 file on Lee Harvey Oswald, but gave it the falsified name of "Lee Henry Oswald." The same Ann Egerter was one of the CIA officials who in 1963 drafted the falsified cables about "Lee Henry Oswald" in Mexico City.80

  The CI/SIG, which opened the 201 file on Oswald, also had a file on him through their mail-opening or HT/LINGUAL program, operated jointly with the FBI and the CIA’s Office of Security.81 And the letter "D" on the cover-sheet of Oswald’s 201 file suggests yet another super-secret Counterintelligence operation. The CIA’s STAFF D was a SIG3NT or signals intelligence operation, run in conjunction with the National Security Agency, or NSA.82 Because of the ultra-secrecy involving NSA and SIGINT, Staff D became the hiding place for other CIA ultra-secrets as well. In 1961, when William Harvey headed Staff D, he was assigned the task of developing the CIA’s assassination project, ZR/RIFLE, because "D was the perfect cranny in which to tuck a particularly nasty piece of business."83

  The false name of Lee Henry Oswald may have been used by the CI/SIG to deceive investigators into the death of President Kennedy. The FBI reported that Birch D. O’Neal, the Chief of the CI/SIG, told them that the CIA had no CIA-generated material "in CIA file regarding Oswald," perhaps since all of the CIA cables in the CI/SIG file had been about a slightly different name.84

  But it is hardly likely that the CI/SIG 201 file on Lee Henry Oswald, opened in 1960, was opened for this purpose. It is more likely that Angleton’s spies in the CI/SIG, mistrustful not only of the KGB but also the rest of the CIA, set up the 201 file with the same motive as Otepka’s researches in State, to learn more about suspicious operations in their own agency.

  The false "Lee Henry Oswald" cables of 1963, for example, have the features of what Angleton himself called a "marked card" operation. This is a special form of deception operation, in which falsified information, "like a bent card, is passed through an intelligence channel to see where it ends up."85

  In other words if Angleton (like Hoover and Otepka) mistrusted .what "Lee Harvey Oswald" was up to, it made sense to put "marked cards," or falsified cables, in his CI/SIG 201 file on "Lee Henry Oswald." By this means he could learn who wanted to gain access to this false information, and also who they shared it with. With its special taint, "Lee Henry Oswald" information, if it turned up in the KGB, could have come from no other source. The "mole" (if one existed) could thus have been found.

  Such a hypothesis may sound more like the fiction of LeCarré than the dreary realities of Washington bureaucracy. But by all accounts the mentality of LeCarré characters was the mentality of those in CI/SIG. Angleton allegedly believed, and the CI/SIG files contained, charges that Kennedy’s roving ambassador Averell Harriman was a KGB agent; just as ten years later CI/SIG files would contain similar charges about Henry Kissinger.86

  The issuance of a passport to Oswald in June 1963, which according to Otepka he should have been denied, would certainly have aroused the suspicions of those who could imagine that Harriman was a KGB agent. Nor should we trivialize the Oswald matter by comparing Lee Harvey Oswald, or even Lee Henry Oswald, to the paranoid Harriman allegations.

  Quite the contrary’. On the basis of what we know about the story of Lee Harvey Oswald as a lone defector to the Soviet Union, it is indeed possible, if not likely, that Angleton, Hoover, and Otepka, were all quite justified in mistrusting it.

  Did the Oswald Cables Become Part of the Assassination Plot?

  Even if the "Lee Henry Oswald" deception began as an unrelated matter, however, there are reasons to suspect that at least some of the falsified Oswald cable traffic of October 1963 was instigated (whether inside or outside the CIA) as part of a plot to assassinate President Kennedy.

  As I have argued in my book Deep Politics and elsewhere, the key to this successful conspiracy appears to have been the false incrimination of Oswald in two successive phases of what I have called a dialectical cover-up. In the first phase, false but credible evidence was planted in government files to suggest that Oswald was pan of a Soviet or Cuban conspiracy. The resulting threat of a devastating and unnecessary nuclear war was then used to persuade men of high status to accept a "phase two" fiction, equally false but much less disastrous in its consequence, that Oswald was not a "KGB assassin," but a "lone assassin."

  This two-phase account of how the "lone assassin" theory came to be promoted is quite consistent with Earl Warren’s narrative of how he reluctantly accepted the chairmanship, which he initially declined, of the Warren Commission. Warren said that President Johnson

  then told me of the rumors floating around the world. The gravity of the situation was such that it might lead us into war, he said, and, if so, it might be a nuclear war. He went on to tell me that he had just talked to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who had advised him that the first nuclear strike against us might cause the loss of 40 million people. I then said, "Mr. President, if the situation is that serious, my personal views do not count. I will do it."87

  Why was the situation that serious? Rumors by themselves, "floating around the world," have virtually never caused a major accidental war. The Oswald-Kostikov rumors, however, unlike virtually all other "phase one" stories of Oswald as a KGB assassin, were floating around at the very top of the Counterintelligence staff of the CIA, as well as elsewhere in the government. It remains to be proven whether the falsified cables contributed to the decision at this time to place the nuclear forces of the U.S. on an alert, mobilized for possible retaliation against either Cuba or the Soviet Union.88

  James Angleton and Ray Rocca, the head of the CIA CI staff and his aide, continued for some time thereafter to promote the importance of the Oswald-Kostikov meeting, and the resulting "phase one" case that Oswald was a KGB assassin. In this they were not alone, but were joined by others, notably Mexico City CIA Station Chief Win Scott.89

  But their advocacy, while influential, was countered by the "phase-two" lone-assassin advocacy of others in government who were even more powerful, above all FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover and Chief Justice Earl Warren. This could have been an honest disagreement among colleagues, in their assessment of the degree of Soviet (or Cuban) involvement.

  Another, more conspiratorial possibility is that, from the outset, some of the "phase one" ("KGB-assassin") and "phase two" ("lone-assassin") advocates had colluded, in order to activate the dialectical cover-up. One is particularly struck by the on-going, and ultimately unauthorized intimacy between CI Chief James Angleton, perhaps the leading "phase one" advocate in the CIA, and FBI Counterintel
ligence (or Counterespionage) Chief William Sullivan, perhaps the chief architect of the ultimate "phase two" story that Oswald acted alone.

  Investigation of the Kennedy murder led to a great institutional rift between two longtime collaborators: CI in the CIA and Counterespionage in the FBI. In January 1964 an alleged KGB defector, Yuri Nosenko, arrived in Washington with important but controversial backing for the "phase two" story. He claimed that he himself "had had an opportunity to see the KGB file" on Oswald, and thus "was able to state categorically that Oswald was not a Soviet agent and that no officer of the KGB had ever interviewed or debriefed him."90

  This convenient but suspicious assurance found almost immediate backing from a power not usually friendly to KGB gifts: J. Edgar Hoover. In the CIA however, Nosenko was handled by CI officials who treated him from the outset as a false defector with a false story.91 This disagreement soon led to a permanent estrangement between Hoover and Angleton, and an order from Hoover that FBI agents should henceforth have no further dealings with the CLA.92

  What is most striking in this split between the two agencies is that the friendship between Angleton, the Nosenko-attacking "phase one" advocate in the CIA, and Sullivan, the Nosenko—supporting "phase two" advocate in the FBI, continued unabated. "Contrary to Hoover’s instructions," Cun Gentry has written, William Sullivan continued to meet with Angleton, "although both were careful to keep such meetings discreet."93 Ultimately Sullivan’s closeness to the CIA was one of the factors leading Hoover to force his resignation.

  Angleton and Sullivan are said to have expressed opposing views about the credibility of Nosenko, and indeed about the whole issue of whether Oswald was a "KGB" or a "lone" assassin. These were among the most divisive issues separating the two agencies, so it is hard to imagine that two men who disagreed ideologically on them could have remained such close friends.

  An alternative possibility is that the "phase one" and "phase two" views expressed by these two friends did not express their innermost convictions. One can speculate that perhaps, despite their promotion of opposing views, the two men were actually in agreement for some other agenda, whether dealing with the assassination or an unrelated counterintelligence matter. In this case Angleton and William Sullivan may well have been the key to an integrated, dialectical cover-up.

  It is of course not conceivable that Angleton and Sullivan could by themselves have pulled off the cover-up. But what heightens the possibility of the two men’s collusion in cover-up is precisely the special treatment given them at this time by their superiors. Angleton’s CI/SIG was clearly responsible for the falsified "Lee Henry Oswald" cables that constituted the CIA’s most recent embarrassing Oswald secret: yet Richard Helms, Angleton’s superior as CIA Deputy Director of Plans, arranged for Angleton to co-ordinate the CIA’s investigation of Kennedy’s murder. He further directed that CI/SIG itself be responsible for liaison with the FBI on this matter, and for Angleton’s deputy Ray Rocca to handle liaison with the Warren Commission.94

  The situation within the FBI was even more paradoxical. Hoover was so angry at Sullivan’s pre-assassination oversight of the Oswald matter that he approved a secret reprimand of Sullivan and other members of his counterintelligence staff. Yet Sullivan, and some of his reprimanded subordinates, were given tight control of the Oswald investigation (in liaison with CI/SIG) after Kennedy’s murder.95

  The least conspiratorial explanation for this collusive cover-up is that the Oswald secret overlapped with some on-going project concerning both the CIA and FBI. Yet it is hard to believe that this on-going project had nothing whatever to do with the assassination. One is particularly struck by the apparent coincidence (already noted) that William Sullivan, during World War Two, had been the head of the FBI’s Special Intelligence Service (SIS) in Latin America. As such he had been the superior of Mexico City Station Chief Win Scott, as well of CI/SIG Chief Birch D. O’Neal, and of others who have figured prominently in the Kennedy assassination story. One of these was Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade, who on November 22 allegedly planned to indict Oswald for murder "in furtherance of an international Communist conspiracy."96 (Among the others are also William Harvey and Robert Maheu, who oversaw the CIA-mob assassination plots against Fidel Castro, and William Gaudet, whose Mexican travel permit immediately proceeded Oswald’s).97

  It appears there may have been a clique within the government who cooperated with outside elements to kill the President, and that this clique included elements in Counterintelligence. For as we have been showing they would have had the power to manipulate the "Lee Henry Oswald" deception operation, in such a way as to activate a "phase-one/phase two" dialectical cover-up.

  Collusion to Promote a War?

  As early as one day after the assassination, CLA Headquarters acted, correctly, as if they feared that independent actions, by the CLA station in Mexico City and its Mexican assets, might embroil the CIA in a war against Cuba. On November 23, after the Mexico City Station had requested the Gobernación Ministry of Mexico to arrest Silvia Durán, Headquarters reacted urgently, both by telephone and by Flash Cable. Langley rightly feared that the arrest "could prejudice U.S. freedom of action on the whole question of Cuban responsibility."98 Indeed the interrogation of Durán was conducted in just this way by the Mexican Security Police (DFS), controlled by the Gobernación, so as to pressure her, vainly, to admit she was the "link for the International Communists" in a conspiracy to kill Kennedy.99

  Such a confession, if it had been obtained, could indeed easily have led to war. At the time, the U.S. nuclear forces were on an alert; and senior U.S. officials, notably U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Thomas Mann, were arguing that Cuba was indeed involved in the assassination.100 Transcripts of President Johnson’s telephone calls in this period, newly released fom the National Archives, confirm that he talked repeatedly of the threat of nuclear war.101

  Citing an internal FBI source, retired FBI agent James Hosty, who was disciplined (some say scapegoated) for his preassassination handling of the Oswald file in Dallas, has alleged that

  President Johnson and Roben F. Kennedy ordered intelligence agents in Mexico to stop pursuing a possible Cuban or Soviet connection. His informants tell him CIA agents in Mexico City were [in] "near mutiny" at this order. . . .Mr. Hosty’s theory has drawn support from. . . Thomas Mann, who has said he received "peremptory instructions to stop" investigating those issues.102

  At least one of the declassified cables, signed by Richard Helms, confirms the concern in the CLA, FBI, and State, that Ambassador Mann was "pushing this case too hard."103

  A first perusal of the newly declassified CIA documents indicates that proponents of the KGB or Cuban hypothesis were to be found inside Langley as well as the Mexico City Station. There were apparently also forces inside the Defense Department poised to use Oswald’s record as a pretext to strike against Cuba.104

  Could those pressuring to retaliate against Cuba have included in their numbers those who plotted to kill the President? One clue is the involvement of the DFS, the Mexican police who attempted to extract an inflammatory confession from Silvia Durán, with international drug trafficking, and hence with American organized crime. In Deep Politics I focused on the double role of DFS Chief Miguel Nazar Haro as both a major CIA asset (close to Win Scott) and also as a major figure in organized smuggling, both of drugs and of stolen cars, between the U.S. and Mexico.105 I related this to pre-assassination reports in FBI files that Jack Ruby, as well as the Chicago mob in general, had also been important in Mexican-U.S. drug trafficking.106

  Only with the release of the Lopez Report do we learn that in 1978, Nazar Haro, then still only the assistant chief of the DFS, was the senior DFS official coordinating with the visit of Edwin Lopez and other HSCA staffers to Mexico City.107 This is indeed relevant to the assassination story, because the DFS in 1978 appears to have been less than fully cooperative with the House Committee investigators. In particular they failed to make available one of their mem
bers, Manuel Calvillo, who was apparently also a Mexico City CIA asset with a "pen name."108 Juan Manuel Calvillo Alonso was involved in, and an apparent CIA source for, an inflammatory story (from the Mexican writer Elena Garro de Paz) linking both Oswald and Silvia Durán to an international Communist plot.109

  How eloquent then is the implication of the Lopez Report, that with respect to Calvillo, the Mexican government was possibly lying.110 And that, even more importantly,

  The Committee believes that there is a possibility that a U.S. Government agency requested the Mexican government [i.e. the DFS] to refrain from aiding the Committee with this aspect of its work.111

  There is no pretext in this area of "sensitive" sources or "on-going operations." The appearance of this particular cover-up is one of a lying co-conspirator being protected by his employers in two government agencies. It is the recurrence in the record of this kind of cover-up that suggests that the CIA’s hidden Oswald secrets involve not just unknown intelligence operations, which might hypothetically be defensible, but also collusion by some individuals that is on the surface indicative of guilt.

  1 Cf. Peter Dale Scott. Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993). 257-60. etc.

  2 Lopez Report, 137-38. According to an uncorroborated source cited by the Lopez Report, this roan may have been "Yuriy Ivanovich Moskalev. a Soviet KGB officer" (Lopez Report, 179).

  3 Lopez Report, 138.

  4 CIA outgoing cable DIR 74830 Oct 10. 4 AH 216; Lopez Report, 144. By falsification I mean, not complete fabrication, but contamination of true information with details that are clearly false (chiefly, but by no means uniquely, the false name "Lee Henry Oswald" that the CIA originated back in 1960).