Oswald, Mexico, and Deep Politics

by Peter Dale Scott

  38 Kelley, Kelley: The Story of an FBI Director, 272-74.

  39 Memorandum from FBI Inspector James H. Gale of 12/10/63; as reported in Schweiker-Hart Report, 92; cf. 3 AH 518; Scott, Deep Politics, 63.

  40 Oswald Headquarters FBI file, 105-82555, after serial-42.

  41 Memo of December 10, 1963; 3 AH 518, 522.

  42 FitzGerald once remarked that Angleton’s CI men were holed up in a small office, scrutinizing the entrails of chickens.

  43 The teletype to the FBI, Navy, and State was cleared in draft with just two sections: CI/SIG (where Ann Egerter worked and retained custody of the Oswald 201 file) and SR/CI (where Tennant Bagley was Chief). The cable to Mexico City was cleared in draft with three: SR/CI/A, CI/Liaison/Jane Roman (who was the releasing officer on the teletype), and CI/SPG (presumably the same as CI/SIG).

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

  45 Edward Jay Epstein. Legend (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978), 237. Epstein, though not reliable on all matters, had excellent relations with members of Angleton’s CIA Counterintelligence Staff, and does not hesitate to supply restricted information about their responses and files.

  IV. THE THREE OSWALD DECEPTIONS: THE OPERATION, THE COVER-UP, AND THE CONSPIRACY

  April 1994 (Unfinished)

  Right-Wing Conspiratorial Pressures on the CIA

  In the preceding two chapters I have argued that, beginning some two or three months before the assassination, events attributed to Oswald were systematically misrepresented in CIA files. These misrepresentations appear to have been part of an intelligence operation, whether one run by the CIA or possibly some other agency.

  However these misrepresentations need not necessarily have been conscious preparations for the "lone assassin" phase-two account of the Kennedy assassination. One can imagine an alternative version of events, in which some or all of the authors of the misrepresentations are not themselves part of a complex assassination conspiracy (involving a "phase one" story about Oswald and Kostikov), but the victims of such a conspiracy.

  This alternative version supposes a force outside the CIA, but knowledgeable about CIA operations and procedures, and possibly represented within its ranks. In such a situation someone could embarrass the CIA into evasive procedures, delays, and even falsifications.

  Let us pursue the hypothesis that the CIA had mounted a counterintelligence operation involving Oswald, or the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, or the Cuban Embassy there. And let us return to the distinction raised by the authors of the Lopez Report, that Oswald visited the Cuban and Soviet Embassies on September 27, but that the man who identified himself as Lee Oswald on October 1 (and allegedly "spoke with consul whom he believed be. . . Kostikov") was someone else, an impostor.1

  If so, the second man may well have been part of a plot, launched outside the CIA, to implicate Oswald as the patsy in the assassination. If Oswald was part of a different, authorized CIA operation, then the evasive behavior of Egerter, Roman, et al. would be understandable. The standard CIA procedure of reporting such Embassy contacts to the FBI would have put the authors of the October 10 messages in a bind; they did not want the Oswald-Kostikov link to be investigated, because in the resulting "flap" the authorized Oswald operation would be blown.

  There are indications that through the immediate post-assassination period the CIA continued to be subjected to embarrassing pressures from "phase one" advocates outside, but close to, the Agency. A long CIA memorandum of 11 December 1963 welcomed the announcement by the New York Times one day earlier that the FBI had found Oswald to be categorically the lone assassin, and not the agent of any foreign government. The memo continued:

  These disclosures presumably eliminate the possibility of further confrontations with Mr. Robert Slusser. In the event that Mr. Slusser continues to insist that the President was murdered by the Soviet secret police, the following additional negative indications and observations may be of some value.2

  The memo continued for three and a half single-spaced pages to argue against the KGB "phase one" hypothesis, suggesting by its thoroughness that the confrontations with Mr. Slusser had been taken seriously.

  A published authority on Soviet affairs, Robert Slusser was almost put into a position to lend credibility to his hypothesis. Early FBI reports about Lee Harvey Oswald’s brother Robert indicate that at one point Mr. Slusser was about to be hired to write Marina’s story. Eventually, after what looks like intrigue, the contract went instead to Priscilla Johnson (later Priscilla Johnson McMillan). Her book, long delayed in its appearance, corroborated the FBI’s and Warren Commission’s "phase two" finding that Oswald acted alone.3

  Other right-wing sources, often explicitly hostile to the CIA, kept alive the phase-one specter of a link between Oswald and either Soviet or Cuban intelligence. From as early as December 1963, the CIA itself was blamed by such sources, either implicitly or explicitly, for its part in the President’s murder. John Martino, an active plotter against Castro with a mob background, surfaced one such story in December 1963, blaming the President’s death on Castro’s response to a plot between Kennedy and the Soviets to have Castro replaced in Cuba by Huber Matos, a former Castro ally now detained in a Cuban jail.4

  This alleged plot was a veiled allusion to the AMTRUNK plan mounted by the CIA and Robert Kennedy in 1963 to use old allies of Matos to overthrow Castro.5 But Martino the source is perhaps more interesting than his story. In 1963 he had been receiving support for his own anti-Castro operations from Julien Sourwine, Chief Counsel for the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee.6 It was this Committee, the reader may recall, whose phase-one interests were Johnson’s reason (or pretext) for setting up the Warren Commission.

  There was no shortage of such allegations, though they often came back to the same sources. In September 1963 Robert Allen, a columnist with sources in U.S. Army Intelligence, wrote of a joint U.S.-Soviet operation which planned to replace Castro by a new revolutionary coalition acceptable to both superpowers.7 On November 14, 1963, former Cuban President Carlos Prio Socarras reported to the CIA in Miami that there was now a U.S. agreement with the Soviet Union to replace Castro with a "Tito-type government."8 An article in the journal of the John Birch Society, whose author Revilo Oliver later cited sources among veterans of army intelligence and the FBI, also argued that Kennedy’s murder "was part of a Communist plot engineered with the help of the Central Intelligence Agency," and cited the "fake ‘revolt’" plotted by Kennedy and Khrushchev, to replace Castro with a crypto-Communist "‘agrarian reformer.’"9

  Thus the right-wing pressures which forced the Warren Commission into being continued to play on it throughout its existence. And insofar as one can detect a common source for all these stories, that source would appear to be not only outside the CIA but extremely hostile to it.

  The word "outside" here can however be misleading. Every one of the allegations here summarized drew on inside information. For example John Martino reported in his December 1963 article that Oswald had tried to penetrate the anti-Castro Cuban group JURE: this claim was not generally known at the time but it was later corroborated by Silvia Odio’s account of her meeting with Oswald in September 1963. Furthermore the Kennedys and the CIA had a plan (AMTRUNK) to oust Castro, which would have used, among others, the forces of JURE. The plan was still on-going in 1964, and thus extremely sensitive. Above all it planned to install a new government which would be free from mob influence, a detail which was sufficient to incur the hostility of mob allies like John Martino.

  These so-called "outsiders" knew enough about the ways of government, and specifically the CIA, to embarrass it into cover-up. It seems likely therefore that somewhere they had their spies inside government, and possibly inside the CIA.

  The Most Likely Manipulator: David Atlee Phillips

  So far this discussion has focused on those "phase one" stories linking Oswald to Soviet or Cuban intell
igence which at the time existed uniquely in government files, and which for a while the U.S. Government took seriously. We have not yet mentioned the veritable blizzard of similar stories which reached the FBI and CIA from external sources after the assassination. After November 24 there were still more "phase one" stories attributing a similar role to Jack Ruby. And to all these anti-Communist stories denouncing the KGB and Cuba one must add those stories with an opposite political spin, linking Oswald and/or Ruby to right-wing Texas millionaires, oilmen, anti-Castro Cubans, the mob, or the right-wing terrorist Minutemen. Most of these leads did not check out.

  There were so many such false leads that one might be easily tempted to write them all off as meaningless "noise." However House Committee researcher Dan Hardway chose to look closely at all the stories that came out of Mexico City and Miami connecting Oswald with Soviet or Castro intelligence. According to his colleague Gaeton Fonzi, "Hardway’s research had indicated that most of the individuals originating the reports" were assets of the Mexico City Station’s Chief of Covert Action and Cuban Operations, David Phillips.10

  Hardway had the opportunity to quiz Phillips about this at an informal Committee interview, with Fonzi present. Hardway was armed at the interview with documentation from the Agency to dispute Phillips’ claim that these assets had been run by other CIA agents. After the session, Hardway told Fonzi,

  I’m firmly convinced now that he ran the red-herring, disinformation aspects of the plot. The thing that got him so nervous was when I started mentioning all the anti-Castro Cubans who were in reports filed with the FBI for the Warren Commission and every one of them had a tie I could trace back to him.11

  To date I have been unable to contact Dan Hardway, although another good source has confirmed that he did conduct this research. It is also clear that a number of the "phase one" stories linking Oswald to Cuba did come from a single milieu of anti-Castro Cubans in Miami close to, and in some cases supported by, the CIA’s JM/WAVE station there. David Phillips does therefore seem a likely candidate to have co-ordinated the stories coming out of Mexico City and Miami. For in the second half of 1963 he was cross-posted to both stations, as Chief of Cuban Operations in Mexico City, and as Chief of Psychological Operations (i.e. propaganda) in Miami. (In fact it is possible that David Phillips held down three posts in 1963, and was doubling also as a member of the Special Affairs Staff Counterintelligence (SAS/CI) staff.)

  A small intelligence-backed "press agency," the Agencia de Informaciones Periodisticas (A.I.P.), was a source for one recurring Oswald story, that he had worked on behalf of Cuban intelligence in the Miami area. (The A.I.P. attracted notice again during the wave of Chilean-financed Cuban terrorism of the mid-1970s, involving many Cuban exile veterans of the JM/WAVE operations, when the A.I.P. was revealed to be an agency by then financed by the Chilean intelligence service DINA.)12 The story was traced by the FBI to Fernando Fernandez Capada of the A.I.P., who told it to Jim Buchanan, a close ally of Frank Sturgis; the story was later publicized by Frank Sturgis and John Martino.13

  Another A.I.P. story, traced to Dr. Fernando Carrandi, spoke of Ruby’s travel to Cuba. Those involved in circulating this story included Salvador Lew, p.r. agent for the CIA-backed Comandos Mambises, and Paul Bethel, described by Fonzi as "a close friend of David Atlee Phillips."14 Yet another Oswald-Cuban intelligence story involved Miguel "Cuco" de Leon, senior adviser to Manuel Artime in the JM/WAVE-backed Operation Second Naval Guerrilla.15

  Any evidence for linking Phillips to these intelligence-tinged stories has not yet been made public. We have however Phillips’ own statements that he was involved in the transmission of both of the key "phase one" allegations promoted in CIA cables, the Kostikov story of October, and the Alvarado story of November 25.

  As mentioned above, it would appear that Phillips’ claim to have signed off on the Kostikov cable of October 8 is simply not true. Phillips claimed this in sworn testimony, as part of his effort to rationalize the delay of one week in transmitting the intercepted conversation of October 1.16 Phillips’ admitted role in the transmission of the Alvarado story, that Oswald was paid money in the Mexico City Cuban Consulate to kill Kennedy, is however corroborated by the documentary record. Here too there is a difference between Phillips own account and the cables however. In his autobiography Phillips describes the story he heard from Alvarado’s lips as a lie easily seen through, indeed as a "transparent operation."17 In the cables sent after his interviews with Alvarado, however, the tone is quite different. There we hear that "This officer was impressed by Alvarado. . .wealth of detail Alvarado gives is striking."18 One cable described Alvarado as a "quiet, very serious person, who speaks with conviction;" another, the next day, called him "completely cooperative."19

  Most revealing was the description of Alvarado as a "well-known Nicaraguan Communist underground member," whereas in fact (as he himself revealed later the same day) he was a penetration agent of the right-wing Somoza Government of Nicaragua.20 (This revelation was quickly confirmed by CIA cables from Managua and Headquarters.)21

  Winston Scott, Ambassador Thomas Mann, and the Mexican DFS

  Assuredly Phillips was not alone in backing the Alvarado story at the time. Ambassador Thomas Mann, together with Station Chief Win Scott and FBI Legal Attache Clark Anderson, sent a Flash cable on November 26 suggesting that Silvia Durán should be rearrested in order to corroborate it:

  We suggest that the Nicaraguan be put at the disposition of President Lopez Mateos on condition that Lopez Mateos will agree to order rearrest and interrogate again Silvia Tirado de Durán along following lines:

  A. Confront Silvia Durán again with Nicaraguan and have Nicaraguan inform her of details of his statement to us.

  B. Tell Silvia Durán that she is only living non-Cuban who knows full story and hence she is in same position as Oswald was prior to his assassination; her only chance for survival is to come clean with whole story and to cooperate completely. . . .

  Given apparent character of Silvia Durán there would appear to be good chance of her cracking when confronted with details of reported deal between Oswald, Azcue, Mirabal [the two Cuban consuls] and Durán and the unknown Cuban negro [described by Alvarado]. If she did break under interrogation—and we suggest Mexicans should be asked to go all out in seeing that she does—we and Mexicans would have needed corroboration of statement of the Nicaraguan.22

  Mann on his own went on to recommend the arrest of three Cuban members of the Cuban consulate, and later to argue forcefully that Castro was the "kind of person who would avenge himself’ by assassination.23

  These cables were in defiant opposition to the cooler approach in Washington. Headquarters had already tried to oppose the original arrest of Durán, rightly fearing that the arrest (and interrogation by the Mexican secret police, or DFS) "could jeopardize U.S. freedom of action on the whole question of Cuban responsibility."24 Headquarters replied again to the new Durán cable, warning the Station Chief that the Ambassador was pushing the case too hard, and his proposals could lead to an international "flap" with the Cubans.25

  Headquarters were absolutely right in their concern that the Mexican DFS were out to "prove" an international conspiracy involving Oswald with Cuba. Silvia Durán later confirmed that in their interrogations of her

  all the time they tell me that I was a Communist. . . and they insisted that I was a very important person for. . . the Cuban Government and that I was the link for the International Communists—the Cuban Communists, the Mexican Communists and the American Communists, and that we were going to kill Kennedy, and I was the link. For them I was very important.26

  In its performance however, the DFS was almost certainly (as Edwin Lopez has since corroborated to me) tightly controlled by the CIA Station. The DFS was part of the Mexican Ministry of the Interior, or Gobernación; its Minister, Gustavo Díaz Ordáz, was a CIA asset, and also a close friend of Station Chief Win Scott (the best man at Scott’s third wedding), as well as of Ambassa
dor Mann—and Lyndon Johnson.27 Details of Durán’s interrogation suggest that the DFS, seeking to prove her conspiratorial involvement, was being fed clues by the Americans.28

  Given the predisposition of the DFS to find a communist conspiracy, a fact known even in Washington, and given the well-known brutality of DFS interrogation methods (which included torture), it is particularly revealing that Mann and Scott would recommend asking the DFS "to go all out in seeing that she [Durán]. . . break under interrogation." Circumstances suggest that the documentary record here is incomplete, in at least two respects:

  1) Contrary to the records we now have, Durán had already been tortured, and may have already "confessed" to a sexual involvement with Oswald, since expunged from the record.

  2) Mann’s apparently reckless defiance of official instructions against the arrest of Durán was probably based on unofficial guidance from a very high level in Washington.

  A Suppressed "Phase One" Story: Oswald’s Alleged Sexual Liaison

  Alvarado introduced a sex angle into his fantastic story about seeing Oswald be paid $6,500 to kill someone. He spoke of a "pretty girl" in the Consulate (whose manners reminded him of a "prostitute") who had given Oswald an embrace and also a home address "where he could find her."29

  In 1967, transmitting an agent’s report of an interview with a source who knew Durán, Win Scott commented:

  The fact that Silvia DURAN had sexual intercourse with Lee Harvey Oswald on several occasions when the latter was in Mexico City is probably new, but adds little to the OSWALD case. The Mexican police did not report the extent of the DURAN-OSWALD relationship to this Station.30