by Mark Lane
According to the legend, Lee Harvey Oswald was in Mexico, primarily Mexico City, from September 26, 1963, until October 3, 1963. He visited the Cuban embassy on September 27, 1963, and was observed there by Silvia Duran, a Mexican national employed by the embassy. Duran provided a written statement about her observation, which the CIA could present. The man who was identified as Oswald spent considerable time with Duran and was given to angry and memorable outbursts and “became very excited or angry” requiring Duran to call “Consul Ascue” who was engaged in “a heated discussion in English with Oswald” leading “Ascue” to state that “if it were up to him, he would not give him a visa.”
The legend stated that on October 3, 1963, Oswald called the Russian embassy. He asked to speak with “comrade Kostin,” codename for Valery V. Kostikov, and inquired if there were any messages for him, establishing that he had a continuing relationship with the Soviet official. According to the CIA, Kostikov, who functioned as a counsel in the embassy, was really a KGB staff officer in charge of the Thirteenth Department, or liquid affairs department, with the responsibility of planning and carrying out assassinations in the Western Hemisphere. It was also charged with planning acts of sabotage.
Oswald allegedly was photographed entering and exiting from the Soviet embassy. The CIA possessed those photographs. Oswald’s telephone calls to the Soviet embassy were furtively recorded by the CIA and those recordings, as they were prepared to state, were also in the possession of the CIA.
While the CIA would state that it was certain that Oswald was the assassin and that he had acted alone, it feared the facts of his visits to the Soviet embassy and his meeting with Kostikov taken together with his visits to the Cuban embassy to provide an escape to Cuba after having assassinated President Kennedy would cause the American people to conclude that the Soviets and the Cubans had assisted in the conspiracy. Demands for retaliation by the United States could result in a major war in which forty million Americans might die. That would be the analysis given to any organization inquiring into the facts. Subsequent to the development of the legend the Warren Commission was appointed.
It would be the recommendation of the CIA that the matter be probed no further, that the commission accept the CIA, FBI, and Dallas Police conclusions and refrain from highlighting Kostikov’s job description, while focusing on other evidence that could be developed to indicate Oswald’s lone guilt.
The CIA reported to Warren that it “had worked in close liaison with Mexican law enforcement authorities,” and that “by far the most important confirmation of Senora Duran’s testimony, however, had been supplied by confidential sources of extremely high reliability available to the United States in Mexico.” Unfortunately, as the CIA and Warren Commission concluded, “the identities of these sources cannot be disclosed,” not even to the members of the Warren Commission.
The most relevant report about the meeting at which the CIA presented its carefully constructed legend to Warren was written by Melvin Aron Eisenberg, an assistant counsel to the Warren Commission. On January 20, 1964, the commission held its first conference with its staff. On February 17, 1964, Eisenberg wrote a top secret internal commission memorandum entitled “First Staff Conference—January 20, 1964.”
That memorandum does not appear in the Warren Commission Report. Eisenberg’s name does not appear in the body of the report; it is present only on introductory page where the members of the commission, its counsel and its staff members are listed. In a document never intended for public disclosure he wrote that Warren, soon after he had been briefed by the CIA and President Johnson, met with his staff and counsel and explained his new approach to the case. The president wanted Warren to destroy “rumors” that “were circulating in this country and overseas.” Warren was committed to do so for reasons that he soon explained to his astonished colleagues. This pronouncement was made before the commission had taken any evidence and, therefore, before it was able to know if the “rumors” on the agenda for elimination accurately presented the facts.
Warren then stressed the urgency and gravity of the new mission. This evidence, or body of “rumors,” was so dangerous that if not suppressed the result might be the deaths of millions of Americans. Warren told those who were required to follow his instructions that the “rumors” were so potentially explosive that, “if not quenched, [they] could conceivably lead the country to war which would cost forty million lives.” Warren had accepted the CIA’s legend and its possible consequences, even utilizing the same figure of deaths that the CIA had manufactured.
The internal memorandum, a form of annotated minutes of the first staff meeting, stated that Warren had made it clear that “No one could refuse to do something which might help prevent such a possibility.”
When I first read the Warren Commission Report about forty-five years ago, I had doubts about the veracity of the conclusion that Oswald had been to Mexico City. After studying the twenty-six selected volumes of testimony and evidence later published by the commission, I was almost certain that the CIA had contrived the story and that Dulles had misled his fellow commissioners. Later, when the government was compelled to produce many of its files that had been designated top secret, it became clear that the CIA had established a legend for Oswald attributing to him a series of actions in which he had not been involved. Although Oswald had been silenced, his wife, then in custody and under the control of the U.S. Secret Service, continued to state that Oswald had not been to Mexico City.
I was puzzled about why the CIA, having insisted that Oswald had acted alone and that there had been no conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy, had also created the challenging and mutually exclusive story that Oswald had met with Russians and Cubans at their embassies in Mexico just two months before, according to the CIA, he assassinated the president. The two notions seemed at odds with each other especially when the CIA also specifically stated that during the journey Oswald met with the KGB officer responsible for plotting assassinations in the Western Hemisphere for the Soviet Union. Their “lone assassin,” they concluded, had traveled to Mexico City for the purpose of conferring with the one person present in the Western world who had the unique ability to provide expert advice, funds, logistical support and technology. To an uninformed observer it appeared that the CIA was presenting information that was devastatingly counterproductive to its lone-assassin theory. The CIA stated that Oswald’s trip to the Cuban embassy comprised evidence that after the assassination he planned to return to Mexico City, change planes there and escape to Cuba. A putative assassin engaging the cooperation of two Communist countries, each in a position to provide considerable help to advance his murderous scheme, tends not merely to detract from the CIA Party Line of a “lone assassin.” It presented an entirely competing theory. Either one concept or both were off the mark. At best, only one of them could have been valid.
The relevant question was why had the CIA sought to uncomfortably ride two horses at the same time while they were going in opposite directions? The answer to that question provided not just a clue, but evidence as to the identity of those who killed John Kennedy. Of course the CIA was aware that the two stories it was so assiduously promoting were contradictory, but its plan was to share each story exclusively with different audiences. The Oswald Legend of the Mexico City adventure was presented to Warren as for-your-eyes-only report. It effectively froze him into inaction as was its intent.
The lone-assassin concept, with no reference to the implications of the fabricated Mexico City story, was for public consumption. It came with assurances from Dulles to his colleagues on the commission that no one would look beyond their assurances for many years. That prediction proved that the former director of the CIA had become no more proficient as a soothsayer than he had been when he confidently predicted an important and speedy victory at the Bay of Pigs since he was certain that the Cuban people were ready to pick up arms to support the American invasion. He was right about the immediacy of their res
ponse and that they would have weapons; just wrong about whom they would be aiming at and who would prevail.
Once the legend was in place, the ultimate sting began. Oswald was dead. Law enforcement officers who discovered inconvenient facts were ordered to remain silent, fired from their positions, and suffered greatly. Others were also silenced, including an employee of the Cuban embassy in Mexico City who was arrested upon the direct orders of the CIA when she answered truthfully that Oswald had not visited the embassy. Marina Oswald, who knew that her husband had not visited Mexico City, was threatened with deportation to the Soviet Union. The only obstacle to the realization of the plan was Earl Warren, the titular head of the investigating team. He became the mark in the sting.
The most important living person who could corroborate the legend was Silvia Duran. The CIA produced a statement signed by her stating that Oswald had visited the Cuban embassy and then assured the commission that her statement was confirmed by other sources. The members of the Warren Commission relied upon those representations, and she was not called as a witness. No member of the commission, no one associated with the commission, no staff employee, neither the general counsel nor any of the numerous assistant attorneys ever sought to contact Ms. Duran in person or even by letter or telephone, although her written statement was the only evidence that Oswald had been to the Cuban embassy.
During August 1963, a vacancy was created by the death of a Mexican national who worked at the Cuban embassy in Mexico City. The employee had been killed in what had been described as an “automobile accident.” Although the Mexico City police considered it to be a suspicious death, the local police never investigated its cause. The vacancy was filled by another Mexican national, Silvia Duran, who was a twenty-six-year-old woman without experience and from a family without power or political connections. When Duran was first questioned about her interaction with Oswald at the Cuban Embassy, she stated that she had never seen him there. The CIA then directed its assets in the police department of Mexico City to arrest her. The director of the CIA sent a cable to the CIA office in Mexico City that read, “Arrest of Silvia Duran is extremely serious matter which could prejudice US Freedom of Action on entire question of Cuban responsibility.” The cable also directed that the CIA’s Mexican police assets isolate Duran so that she could not be heard by anyone while in the Mexican prison. The local police were also ordered by the CIA to prevent Mexican officials from learning about Duran’s arrest and the role of the CIA in having her arrested and being placed in solitary confinement pursuant to the orders of the director of the CIA. That cable revealed the extent of CIA control over Mexican police officials. Many of those officials had been trained by the CIA, and many actually worked for the CIA at the same time they theoretically were working for the Mexican police. After a period of solitary confinement, Duran agreed to sign a statement prepared by the CIA that identified Oswald as the person in the Cuban embassy.
She was then released from prison but ordered never to speak about the matter. Of course, she had no idea that the CIA was responsible for her arrest, and her outrage was directed at the Mexican police. She began to speak about the incident. In a cable marked “priority,” the CIA ordered the Mexican authorities to rearrest her and “to be certain that there is no misunderstanding between us, we want to ensure that Silvia Duran gets no impression that Americans are behind her rearrest. In other words, we want Mexican authorities to take responsibility for the whole affair.” [Emphasis in the original.]
Regarding Oswald’s presumed visit to the Soviet embassy, the CIA told Warren that it had a plethora of unquestionable documentation. The CIA intrigued Warren with war stories about their incursions into the Soviet telephone system so they could hear and record all conversations and their clever installation of motion picture cameras, unseen by the Russians, yet filming all entrances and exits to and from the embassy so that a filmic record was established of all visitors. All this information was dramatically provided to Warren with the CIA’s firm conclusions and suggestions about the future course that the inquiry must take.
Warren was told that the CIA had examined all of the evidence and had concluded beyond doubt that Oswald had been the assassin and that he had acted alone, thereby obviating the need for further inquiry by the commission. That conclusion merely restated the position taken by Hoover, the FBI and the Dallas authorities hours after the murder in Dealey Plaza and before any investigation had begun. Since the commission had previously decided not to retain its own independent investigators and to rely primarily upon the CIA, the FBI, and the Dallas Police Department, an additional investigation would have been redundant, he was informed.
The CIA warned Warren that a further inquiry into the facts was not only unwarranted and superfluous, but would imperil the security of the nation and might lead to the death of many Americans. That prediction was contrived to alarm the pragmatic Chief Justice. The CIA told Warren that Oswald’s journey had been established by numerous incontrovertible facts.
Subsequently, when it was established beyond doubt that Oswald had not been in Mexico, the CIA’s elaborate series of charades provided evidence that it had been involved in planning the assassination for at least two months before it had taken place. One small indication of the flawed scheme is that the name of the Cuban consul at the relevant time was Eusebio Azque, not Ascue, a fact well known to Duran, who had not in fact written the statement with the incorrect spelling of the name of the consul to whom she regularly reported and saw on a daily basis. That report was written rather carelessly by the CIA, the agency that demanded that she sign it.
When some members of the Warren Commission became suspicious about the legend and asked for the CIA cables, then–CIA director Helms admitted that the CIA had censored the evidence before allowing the Chief Justice and other members of the president’s commission to review it. The CIA continued to refuse to show its cables, dispatches, and other documents in its possession to the Warren Commission claiming that “they contained code words and digraphs which would be unintelligible to a person not familiar with them.” Later I was able to examine all of the original cables. They contained no code words. After consulting the dictionary, I discovered what a digraph was: “A pair of letters that represents a single speech sound, such as ph in pheasant.” “I was of the impression that the Chief Justice and the other members of the commission would not be puzzled by the spelling of pheasant.”
The entire story about Oswald being in the Cuban embassy was a fiction created by the CIA. Oswald had never been to Mexico City. The photograph provided by the CIA of the man at the entrance to the Soviet embassy was not a photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald, as even the CIA was later to concede. Seven different FBI agents interviewed Oswald on November 22nd and 23rd. They obtained a copy of the CIA recording of the man who identified himself as “Lee Oswald” while talking to the Soviet embassy. According to an FBI report, they all agreed that the person on the tape recording “was NOT Lee Harvey Oswald.” While not one shred of evidence connected Oswald to the Mexico City scenario, there was substantial evidence demonstrating that he had never been to Mexico City. His widow, at that time a cooperating witness with the FBI and Secret Service, who held her in custody along with her children, said that Lee had never been to Mexico City, and could not have been there without her knowledge while she was living with him.
A Trip to Washington
In 1975, I moved to Washington, D.C., to organize the Citizens’ Commission of Inquiry (the successor to the Citizens’ Committee of Inquiry established in New York in 1964) to urge congress to investigate the assassination of the president and the resultant cover-up of the facts by the FBI and the CIA.
I rented a suite of rooms in a residential building on Capital Hill and I rented an apartment to live in around the corner on Constitution Avenue. Since the residential building banned dogs and my best friend was a collie, Sean was temporarily required to sleep in the office at night on those occasions when I was unable t
o have him surreptitiously enter my sixth-floor home up the back stairs.
Our office organized a series of lectures at colleges, universities and law schools throughout the country. I averaged almost a talk every other day for months. Speaking fees paid by the schools went to our committee. The fees covered the rent, the salary of the one paid staff member and printing and mailing costs, as we published a newspaper and contacted members of Congress through the mail, and, in numerous districts, their constituents as well.
There was ample evidence that the subject had not been abandoned by the American people and that interest in the unsolved mystery was greater than ever. At many of the schools the audience comprised the largest group ever to attend a lecture there. In Madison, Wisconsin, the university rented and filled a large downtown theater. In Monroe, Louisiana, more than four thousand students and others attended. At Purdue more than 6,000 attended and more than 5,000 said they would support our request for a congressional committee.118
And so it continued week after week in almost every state in the continental United States. We announced our presence on May 23, 1975, in a feature story published by The Washington Post.
We organized 180 chapters of the CCI; almost every state was represented. It soon became clear that our office space was inadequate. Our paid staff had increased and numerous volunteers offered their services. I obtained a loan and bought a row house near our office. It had been functioning as a rooming house and was quite dilapidated, and therefore, in spite of its location, remarkably inexpensive. My collie and I moved into the top floor and the other three floors became our office.
At each school after each talk I met with students who either organized a local chapter or asked existing campus student groups to assist. The chapters contacted their representatives in Congress. Within months we had built a national campaign.
