Oswald, Mexico, and Deep Politics

by Peter Dale Scott

  Another slight departure from the facts, which would also prove to be provocative after November 22, was the false statement in the memo that "Oswald" had been at the Embassy on September 28 "in order to learn if the Soviet Embassy had received a reply from Washington concerning his request." In fact this inquiry was made on October 2 as a follow-up to the alleged meeting of September 28. The mis-dated inquiry was later cited as evidence that Oswald had made a significant, but unclarified, request to the Soviet Embassy in Washington, prior to his arrival in Mexico City.34

  How These Falsifications Prepared for the "Phase One" Hypothesis: an Oswald-KGB Plot

  The effect of the memo’s distorted presentation was to leave a time-delayed but potentially explosive record in CIA files. The other ingredient for the explosive mix was the allegation, suppressed in Oswald’s file but already contained in other CIA files, that Kostikov was a member of the KGB’s Department Thirteen, with responsibilities for sabotage and assassinations. When these two allegations were put together, as they were in a November 23 memo from yet another CIA Counterintelligence officer, Tennant "Pete" Bagley, one had apparent evidence of a KGB assassination hypothesis, or what I have called "phase one" of a dialectical cover-up. The alternative hypothesis (or what I have called "phase two") that Oswald was a lone assassin, could thus be pressed on men like Chief Justice Warren, as a necessary device to avoid an unnecessary war with the Soviet Union.

  On November 23, one day after the assassination, Bagley submitted a memo describing Kostikov as "an identified KGB officer. . . in an operation which is evidently sponsored by the KGB’s 13th Department (responsible for sabotage and assassination)." The remainder of this provocative paragraph remains redacted.35 It may well have been explosive. Possibly drawing on either FBI or CIA information, Dallas FBI Agent James Hosty later wrote of Kostikov as the KGB "officer-in-charge for Western Hemisphere terrorist activities—including and especially assassination. . . the most dangerous KGB terrorist assigned to this hemisphere."36

  At the same time, Bagley’s reference to the 13th Department was apparently ill-founded. His clarification of it in a subsequent CIA blind memo of November 27 is so tentative as to be worthless.37

  It will be seen that many of the falsifications and distortions in the CIA’s Oswald documents had the same result: creating the appearance of evidence for a "phase one" hypothesis that would however not go off prematurely, before the assassination. Consider the examples of falsification:

  1) Suppression of Kostikov from the October 10 teletype: James Hosty, the principal FBI agent on the Oswald case, has complained that he only learned of this contact with Kostikov, who was described to him only as a "Vice-Consul," not KGB, by accident in late October. Former FBI Director Clarence Kelley, transmitting Hosty’s complaint, blames the pre-assassination failure to identify Kostikov as a KGB agent as the major reason why Oswald was not put under surveillance on November 22.38 The FBI’s failure to intensify investigation of Oswald in response to the October 10 teletype in this fashion earned a reprimand for a FBI Headquarters agent.39

  2) "Latest HDQS info was. . . report dated May 1962": This too suggested an inactive matter, rather than what was in fact an active FBI investigation. (This language reached the FBI via Mexico City; the falsehood might have caught someone’s eyes if it had been transmitted directly to FBI Headquarters, where at least three and probably four FBI reports on Lee Harvey Oswald had been transmitted to CIA between May 1962 and October 3, 1963.)

  3) The suppression of what was known about Oswald’s visa request: One could hardly have raised the specter of nuclear war against the Soviet Union (as it was raised in the days after November 22) if it had been clearly transmitted that Oswald’s "request" to the Soviet Embassy in Washington was in fact about a visa.

  4) Suppression of the links between Oswald and Cuba: A link (via Oswald) between the FPCC and the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City could hardly have lain dormant in CIA and FBI files until after the assassination on November 22. Both the CIA and the FBI had mounted offensive operations against the FPCC, hoping precisely to prove that it was receiving its orders from abroad.

  5) "Lee Henry Oswald" and "Marina Pusakova": Even these apparently trivial falsifications may have had the effect of postponing an FBI response to the October 10 teletype. Before October 10, all but one of the numerous documents in the CIA’s "Lee Henry Oswald" file were in fact about Lee Harvey Oswald. By supplying Oswald’s vital statistics to the FBI under a falsified name, the CIA effectively delayed for two days the moment of truth when FBI agents charged with investigating Lee Harvey Oswald learned about the apparently provocative contact with Kostikov. Following receipt of an incoming FBI cable from Mexico City on October 18, Oswald’s FBI file contains a fruitless name search for "Lee Henry Oswald" on October 19.40 Even though the incoming cable was answered on October 22, FBI Assistant Director Gale later found this delay grounds for a censure of the Headquarters agent responsible.41

  But the suppression of Cuba from the CIA’s pre-assassination Oswald records (both in Langley and in Mexico City) may have been much more important for another consequence. This was to keep the responsibility for the misleading October 10 messages solidly in the hands of Soviet counterintelligence personnel, the chief of whom was Tennant Bagley, Chief of SR/CI (Soviet Counterintelligence). Because the FPCC was an active CIA matter, mention of Oswald’s arrest in the October 10 cables would have meant expanding the small cabal of drafters to include people charged with Cuban affairs (presumably working for Desmond FitzGerald, one of the more outspoken critics in the Agency of James Angleton’s Counterintelligence staff).42

  Instead, by restricting the October 10 cables to Oswald’s career in the Soviet Union, only one area section cleared the drafts of each of them. This was SR/CI, the counterintelligence staff of the Soviet Russia section, headed (as we have seen) by Tennant Bagley.43

  One is particularly struck by the fact that in October SR/CI had nothing to say about Kostikov, and acquiesced in two messages which found Oswald more worth discussing than the KGB agent he had met. Yet on November 23, one day after the assassination, Bagley submitted a memo describing Kostikov as "an identified KGB officer. . . in an operation which is evidently sponsored by the KGB’s 13th Department (responsible for sabotage and assassination).’’44 It is hard to pin down precisely when Bagley acquired this alleged information about Kostikov. According to Edward Jay Epstein, however, Kostikov "had been identified for some time [prior to October 1963] as an intelligence officer for the KGB, who specialized in handling Soviet agents operating under deep cover within the United States."45

  Why would SR/CI withhold from the FBI the information that Oswald (whom the CIA knew to be the subject of current and extended FBI intelligence reports) had just met in Mexico City with "an identified KGB officer"? The most sinister explanation would be that they only wanted this information to become known after November 22, so that Oswald would be left free until this time and then picked up, to be identified as Kennedy’s assassin. This possibility of conspiracy, however remote, is so serious that those apparently responsible for this message—including Bagley, Egerter, and Jane Roman—should be questioned under oath.

  A far more likely explanation, for which there is some evidence, is that the Oswald-Soviet contact in Mexico City was handled anomalously, because it was part of, or somehow impinged upon, a U.S. intelligence operation.

  1 Gerald Posner, Case Closed (New York: Random House, 1993), 220.

  2 By falsification I mean, not complete fabrication, but contamination of true information with details that are clearly false (such as replacing the name "Lee Harvey Oswald" in files with the false name "Lee Henry Oswald" that the CIA originated back in 1960).

  3 Earl Warren, Memoirs (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977), 357-58; quoted at 11 AH 7. Cf. Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press), 113.

  4 Schweiker-Hart Report, 103. An LBJ-McCone telephon
e transcript at 3:14 PM November 30 is withheld on grounds of national security.

  5 AR 244; Scott, Deep Politics, 38.

  6 LBJ telephonic transcripts: conversation at 18:30 11/29/63.

  7 LBJ telephonic transcripts: conversation at 16:55 11/29/63.

  8 Scott, Deep Politics, 270.

  9 Warren Commission staff memorandum of March 27, 1964 from W. David Slawson to J. Lee Rankin, reproduced at 11 AH 176; cf. 11 AH 65, 175, WCD 351. Warren Commission Document 351, which discussed this matter, also revealed that the Staff of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee had been in touch with Ed Butler, whose right-wing propaganda organization INCA managed the Oswald radio debate in New Orleans. Cf. Peter Dale Scott. Crime and Cover-Up (Santa Barbara: Prevailing Winds Research, 1993), 53.

  10 Julien Sourwine was involved in other CIA-supported covert operations that may have had a bearing on the Kennedy assassination and cover-up. See Scott, Deep Politics, 116; cf. 215-16, 260, 262, 264-66.

  11 Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics, 39-44.

  12 MEXI 6453 of 8 October 1963; Incoming 36017 of 9 October, CIA Document #5-1 A; text in Lopez Report, 136-37.

  13 FBI Letterhead Memorandum of February 23, 1963, reprinted in AR 249-50; Scott, Deep Politics, 41-42.

  14 AR 250. The Report says that the CIA Headquarters, "never received a recording of Oswald’s voice," leaving room for the possibility that they received a recording of someone else impersonating Oswald. This evasive language ("recording of Oswald’s voice") is used three times: see Peter Dale Scott, "The Lopez Report and the CIA’s Oswald Counterintelligence Secrets, in Oswald in Mexico: A Research Document Compendium, Book Three: The Lopez Report (Evanston, IL: Rogra Research, 1994), 11-14.

  15 Lopez Report, 78-79.

  16 Lopez Report, 47-48, 136-37.

  17 Ann Goodpasture Testimony to House Select Committee on Assassinations, 4/13/78; reproduced in Lopez Report, 138.

  18 DIR 84888 of 23 Nov 1963; Lopez Report. 139-41.

  19 Lopez Report, 139; telephone interview with Edwin Lopez, 10/4/93.

  20 Lopez Report, 149.

  21 CIA teletype 74673 of 10 Oct 1963; CIA cable 74830 of 10 Oct 1963; both reproduced in Lopez Report, 144-46.

  22 File Request for "Lee Henry Oswald" reproduced at 4 AH 206. Without being directly named, Ann Egerter is identified by a reference in the House Committee Assassination Report (AR 201) to the individual who "responded to the [State Department] inquiry and then opened a 201 file on each defector [including ‘Lee Henry Oswald’] involved." The footnote cites an interview of May 17, 1978 (JFK Classified Document 014731) which is identified in the Lopez Report (142-43, footnote 570 at A-39) as that of Ann Egerter. This identification has been confirmed to me.

  23 CIA Document # 596-252F (copy of #1371-447); Attachment to letter of 21 Nov 1960 to Hugh S. Cumming, Jr., Director of Intelligence and Research, State Department, from Richard M. Bissell, Jr., CIA Deputy Director (Plans); submitted for signature by S.H. Horton, Acting Chief, Counter Intelligence Staff; CIA Document # 596-252F. Cf. FBI Interview of Marguerite Oswald, 4/23/60; in Fain Report of 5/12/60, "Funds Transmitted to Residents of Russia," 3; 17 WH 702.

  24 Marguerite Oswald lived and worked in Waco at the time of her FBI interview in April 1960 (17 WH 708), but not when Lee visited her in Fort Worth in September 1959. Other false or dubious statements in this brief 1960 report (e.g. that Oswald "renounced his U.S. citizenship") are traceable to sources outside the CIA: chiefly Marguerite Oswald’s interview with the FBI, and a news story about Oswald by Priscilla Johnson (CIA Doc. # 594-252D).

  25 Lopez Report. 143.

  26 DIR 74830 of October 10, 1963; 4 AH 217. The CIA’s 201 file on Oswald, as submitted to the Warren Commission (WCD 692). and as released to the public in 1992, contained at least three subsequent FBI reports on Lee Harvey Oswald: the Fain Report from Dallas of August 30, 1962 (after Oswald’s return to Texas), the Hosty Report from Dallas of September 13. 1963 (linking Oswald to the Communist Party and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee); and a Letterhead Memo from New Orleans (see below) of September 24, 1963 (concerning Oswald’s arrest on August 9). It is difficult however to speak with confidence of the contents of Oswald’s 201 file. An internal CIA memo of 20 February 1964 reported that "37 documents which should be in the 201 file are not available in it" (4 AH 208). A machine listing of the documents in the 201 file was attached to this memo, but was missing by 1978 (AR 203-04). The House Committee deposed the author of the memorandum (unidentified) and learned that, because of back-up in the CIA computer system, "physical placement of the document in the file was not always necessary" (AR 204). WCD 692, the version of the pre-assassination 201 file supplied to the Warren Commission, was available for years to the public at the National Archive under conditions of minimal security. The best we can do is take the CIA’s own release of 1992 as their version of what the 201 was supposed to contain.

  27 CIA Cable MEXI 6534 of 15 Oct 1963 (incoming 40357); file copy in WCD 692, Oswald’s 201 file. To add to the mystery, the May 1962 State Department report, referred to in the October 10 cable, is not included in Oswald’s 201 file as we have it, while several FBI reports following his return are included.

  28 To believe the CIA, this latest piece of information on Oswald should also have been at the top of the 201-file that was apparently consulted in the preparation of the October 10 messages. It is possible however that the 24 September memo may have been initially filed in two other files (100/300/11 and 200/300/12) that apparently dealt with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee; and that it only found its proper place in Oswald’s 201 file at a later time. This delay would only make more conspiratorial the behavior of Ann Egerter, who was the first to see the memo and was also responsible for Oswald’s 201 file (Lopez Report, 142; Scott, "Lopez Report," 21).

  29 The two dated pages of the September 24 memo are placed in WCD 692 after an FBI transmittal form of November 8, 1963, and an FBI memo (the so-called Kaack report) of October 31, 1963 (which had been covered by the November 8 transmittal form). However the two dated pages were originally accompanied by five undated pages of text and Appendix, on "Lee Harvey Oswald," "Fair Play for Cuba Committee," "Corliss Lamont," and "Emergency Civil Liberties Committee." In the 1992 release of the CIA’s 201 file these five pages are attached, falsely, to an FBI report from James Hosty, dated September 10, 1963. They clearly do not belong there. The two-page Hosty report ends on p. 2; the Appendix likewise begins on p. 2, rather than p. 3. This elaborate dispersal and concealment of the seven-page memo of September 24 can hardly have been accidental, or by inadvertence. (In the published Rector Press edition of WCD 692, the scattered pages of the September 24 memo will be found at pp. 71-75 [five undated pages], 113-14 [dated memo]).

  30 The document in question is a communication of May 17, 1962 with attachment from John Noonan, Chief of the State Department’s Office of Security, to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, "Subject: American Defectors: Status of in the U.S.S.R.’’ This document has since been released by the FBI as part of Oswald’s FBI file (WCE 834, Item 36; unrecorded copy in Oswald Headquarters FBI File 105-82555, after serial-24; original in file 100-362196-423). There are other apparent falsifications of the pre-assassination Oswald 201 file (WCD 692). A State Department Memo of Conversation of January 26. 1961 (an apparent source for the words "attempted to renounce" in the October 10 cable), is in fact a copy of an internal State Department memo that was not sent to CIA (so far as we know) until after the assassination. An FBI Report from John Fain in Dallas on July 3, 1961 was the source for the cable’s reference to "an undated letter from Oswald postmarked Minsk on five Feb 1961." This FBI Report was submitted to the Warren Commission as part of Oswald’s 201 file, and again to the public in 1992. We now learn from the 1993 release that this report, although charged to the 201 file, "was not in the 201," when a copy "provided us by the National Archives" was added to it after the assassination. See the note on the last page of DBF-82181 (Fain report of July 3, 1961)
under the cover sheet: "DBF-82181 7-3-61 (July 3 61) is part of Commission Document (CD-692) and is available to the public in this form. (A copy of DBF-82181 was not in the 201, altho IP/Files has it charged to it. This copy was made from CD-692 provided us by the National Archives. It is also #18 on list of attachments to XAAZ-22595 [CD-692. CIA Document #509-803] which is list of documents which existed on Oswald in the file before Nov. 22, 1963.)"

  31 Lopez Report, 170-71; cf. 101.

  32 Lopez Repon, 170-71.

  33 Lopez Report, 170, 171. Eventually the station had a sequence of nine apparently related transcripts between September 27 and October 3. of which five concerned a visa request. After the assassination, the CIA decided that three of the nine calls were not by Oswald: two on September 27 (in Spanish, a language Oswald was not known to speak), and one on October 3 (when Oswald, according to the FBI and Warren Commission, was already on a bus back to the United States). Cf. Lopez Report, 73-80.

  34 Rocca memo ZZ

  35 Memo of 23 November 1963 from Acting Chief, SR Division, signed by Tennant Bagley, "Chief, SR/CI." CIA Document # 34-538.

  36 Clarence M. Kelley, Kelley: The Story of an FBI Director (Kansas City: Andrews, McMeel, & Parker, 1987), 268.

  37 Blind memo of 27 November 1963, prepared by Birch D. O’Neal, C/CI/SIG, for Mr. Papich of the FBI Liaison Office (according to O’Neal’s routing slip, "Mr. Bagley of SR prepared the portion responding to the question concerning any information we have ‘pinpointing’ KOSTIKOV as being in the 13th Department)": "KOSTIKOV’s involvement in [redacted] is our only reason to believe that he is connected with the 23th Department. KOSTIKOV was in clandestine contact with [redacted] (as definitely confirmed by [redacted] ’s photo identification) and arranged [redactedj’s contact in the U.S. with a KGB colleague of Kostikov’s. This colleague was identified by [redacted] from photos as Oleg BRYKIN, who has definitely been identified, by an FBI source in a position to know, as a memter of the 13th Department.’’ Hardly a very solid foundation for Bagley’s "phase one" claim that had a significant impact on how the President’s murder was investigated!