Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination

by Summers, Anthony

Johnson:Have you established any more about the [Oswald] visit to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico in September?

  Hoover:No, that’s one angle that’s very confusing for this reason. We have up here the tape and the photograph of the man who was at the Soviet Embassy, using Oswald’s name. That picture and the tape do not correspond to this man’s voice, nor to his appearance. In other words, it appears there was a second person who was at the Soviet Embassy down there.21

  Years later, when Assassinations Committee staff queried the Hoover memo and phone conversation with Johnson, the responses of the CIA and FBI suggested the reference to an “Oswald” recording had merely been a mistake—reflecting muddle in the rush of events after the assassination.22 The change of story by the FBI, however, along with anomalies in the documentary record, feeds into suspicion that “Oswald” tapes were part of a package of material flown from Mexico City to Dallas on the night of the assassination, and that they were reviewed there. There was such a flight, and it did carry material from the CIA in Mexico.23

  While a transcript of the Hoover conversation with Johnson has survived, the recording—made on an IBM machine—has not. There is now only a hissing noise on the relevant fourteen minutes of the recording. A report by the company that tried to recover the audio on behalf of the Johnson Library and National Archives, states that “most likely [the recording] was intentionally erased.”

  FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was known for his loathing of the CIA—and for the irate notations he habitually scrawled on reports and memoranda. Weeks after the assassination, at the bottom of a memo relating to another CIA matter, he wrote: “I can’t forget … the false story re Oswald’s trip to Mexico.” It was, he said, an example of the Agency’s “double-dealing.”

  This author interviewed three witnesses who flatly contradicted the CIA’s claim that no Oswald tape was retained until the assassination. Former Warren Commission attorneys William Coleman and David Slawson said they listened to “Oswald tapes” during a visit to the CIA station in Mexico as late as April 1964—months after the President was killed. (A third Warren lawyer, David Belin, said during a television interview: “The Warren Commission had access to the tape.”)

  Coleman, a senior counsel then, later to become a member of President Reagan’s cabinet, said he had “enough curiosity that I listened to all that I could make any words out of at all. And at odd times I asked for the transcript—not in lieu of the oral version, only to back it up. Having been a trial lawyer, I knew that the worst thing in the world would be to say that I read a transcript only … then find later that there was a difference.”

  Coleman said he heard the recording in a “secure” room. He noted that it was scratchy, as surveillance tapes often are, and that—with no reason at the time to think an impostor might have been at work—he and his colleague made no effort to compare the voice with other recordings to establish that it was identical to the known voice of alleged assassin Oswald. Slawson, for his part, recalled the name of the officer whom CIA station chief Winston Scott had assigned to play the recording for him and his colleague.

  The author tracked down that officer, by then retired, and—though only on learning that Coleman and Slawson had acknowledged having heard the recorded material, and on the strict condition that I publish neither his name nor his rank—the officer confirmed that the recording had survived the assassination, and that Scott had assigned him to play it for the visitors from the Warren Commission.24

  There is something else, something seen as revelatory by the researchers who have done the most extensive analysis of relevant Agency files.25 It is a CIA response to Station Chief Scott in Mexico, responding to his name trace request of October 8 describing the visit to the Soviet Embassy by the man who was not Oswald. Over three pages, the response summarized Oswald’s history of defection to Russia, marriage to a Soviet citizen, and apparent disillusion with life there:

  “Latest HQDS info was [State Department] report dated May 1962 stating [it] had determined Oswald is still U.S. citizen and both he and his Soviet wife have exit permits and Dept [of] State had given approval for travel with their infant child to USA.”

  That, however, was not the most recent information CIA headquarters had received on Oswald. The files show that the Agency knew all about his return to the States, that he had since been interviewed by the FBI, about his life in Dallas; correspondence he had had with the Soviet Embassy in Washington, DC, and with communist organizations; his move to New Orleans; his Fair Play for Cuba activity; and his purportedly angry encounter with the DRE’s anti-Castro exiles, and the subsequent arrest. The FBI had copied its most recent FBI report on Oswald’s progress to the CIA less than a week before the incorrect transmission that purported to brief the CIA station chief in Mexico—yet withheld the latest information from him.

  The massive omission was hardly inadvertent. The draft of the response to Mexico had been reviewed by three different officers in CIA Counterintelligence, seen and authenticated by the chief of Covert Operations for the Western Hemisphere—which included Mexico—and finally transmitted under the name of Tom Karamessines, assistant to then Deputy Director for Plans Richard Helms. Jane Roman, a senior aide to Counterintelligence chief Angleton, helped prepare and signed off on the inaccurate message. Interviewed in 1995, in retirement, she had extraordinary things to say.

  “I’m signing off,” Roman acknowledged, “on something that I know isn’t true.” The message, she said on studying it, was “indicative of a keen interest in Oswald held very closely on the need-to-know basis… . There has to be a point for withholding information …” Those with final authority over the content of the message, Roman speculated, may have thought that “somehow … they could make some use of Oswald. I would think that there was definitely some operational reason to withhold it, if it was not sheer administrative error, when you see all the people who signed off on it.”

  If, as Roman explained, she had not had ultimate responsibility for what the message did or did not contain, who had? “The only interpretation I could put on this,” she said—noting the language used in the message and the identity of its signatories—“would be that [the] SAS group would have held the information on Oswald under their tight control.”

  The SAS, or Special Affairs Staff, oversaw all anti-Castro operations. “The Cuba task force,” Roman surmised, would have “got word how to handle this… .Well, I mean they hold it within themselves… . And I wasn’t in on any particular goings-on or hanky-panky as far the Cuban situation.”

  The CIA’s chief of Cuban operations in 1963—a man in charge of a great deal of hanky-panky—was David Phillips, a rising star who was to go on to become chief of the Western Hemisphere Division. He traveled widely in 1963, but was based in Mexico City.

  As early as 1961, documents show, Phillips had supervised the CIA’s propaganda efforts to counter the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. At that point, his fellow officer Howard Hunt was to testify, he “ran” the DRE—the anti-Castro group whose members were two years later to engage in a supposed clash with Oswald in New Orleans. An agent reporting to Phillips in 1961, documents show, spied on a young man who was “actively engaged in the organization of a local chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee”—a mirror image of the activity in which Oswald would seemingly engage in New Orleans.

  In Mexico City, at the time of the Oswald episode in 1963, Phillips headed the unit responsible for surveilling the Cuban Consulate. He would later go public in saying that Oswald’s visits had not been caught on camera. He and his team, he wrote, “spent several days studying literally hundreds of photographs available to the CIA before and during Oswald’s trip to Mexico City. He did not appear in any of them.” As reported earlier, this Phillips claim conflicts with what is known of the camera surveillance. Assassinations Committee investigators did not believe it.

  Phillips it was, too, who told the Assassinations Committee
that recordings made during the Oswald visit had been “routinely destroyed”—wiped—a week or two later and recycled. “There’s no question,” he told another interviewer, “that’s what occurred to Oswald’s conversations. They don’t exist anymore.” Oswald, Phillips wrote, had been “just another blip.” That, of course, is contrary to the statements of Station Chief Scott in his draft manuscript—“we kept a special watch on [Oswald] … he was of great interest to us.”

  Phillips is known to have lied under oath about other matters. In 1975, in sworn testimony to a Senate committee, he would assert that the overthrow and death of Chile’s President Allende two years earlier had been the result of a home-grown coup, not because those involved were supported, encouraged, or even winked at by the CIA. In fact, the Agency long strove to engineer the coup. In 1999, a decade after Phillips’ death, the National Security Archive—an independent organization—obtained CIA records indicating that he had headed the Task Force involved in a plot to kidnap a Chilean general—even supplied machine guns for the operation. The general was killed by other plotters with whom the CIA had also been cooperating. Phillips’ statements in connection with the Kennedy assassination are highly controversial, and he will feature in these pages again.

  The name of the overall head of CIA Counterintelligence, James Angleton, figures significantly in the mysteries of Mexico City—which was part of his fiefdom. Intent on bringing additional pressure on the Cubans and Soviets in Mexico City, he had pushed for the establishment of a special, independent undercover unit, clashing in the process with Station Chief Winston Scott. It was Angleton who pushed, after the assassination, to “wait out” the Warren Commission on its query on the matter of the photographs of the man who was not Oswald.

  When Scott died suddenly in 1971, retired but still living in Mexico, Angleton flew down from Washington, DC, the moment he heard the news. The day after the funeral, he turned up at the widow’s door accompanied by John Horton, the station chief of the day. Angleton wanted access to the dead man’s study, a holy of holies to which Scott had admitted no one, access to his papers and to “any classified material he kept.” Among the material found there, Horton was to recall, was a stack of reel-to-reel tapes labeled “Oswald.”26

  The next day, after Angleton had left, a truck removed three large boxes and four suitcases containing the tapes, Scott’s draft memoir containing his account of the Oswald episode, and much else. All were shipped to Washington. A former CIA headquarters officer, Paul Hartmann, who for twelve years maintained the HQ file on Oswald, was to recall having received “a package of tapes concerning the Oswald case… .”

  The story of the Mexico City tapes had a melancholy apparent ending in the 1980s, when Michael Scott, son of the deceased station chief, sent the CIA a Freedom of Information request for some of the material that had been taken from the family home. Months later, the record shows, the items seized by Angleton became the subject of a CIA destruction order. According to the order, they consisted of “operational research [including] activities of a sensitive nature or those which were transitory targets of opportunity.”

  It is reasonable to speculate that the eventual fate of the remaining “Oswald” tapes was their willful destruction.

  If there was imposture in Mexico City, the CIA operatives involved must have had a motive for the deception. If there has been an Agency cover-up of events—one that includes the withholding and in the end the destruction of “Oswald” recordings—there has to have been a reason. Some possible explanations:

  The Texan Eldon Hensen, who like Oswald offered his services in the Cuban cause, was apparently manipulated by a CIA impostor posing as a Cuban Embassy aide, both to thwart his activity and, perhaps, gauge the Cuban response to similar approaches. Was imposture also used in Oswald’s case, to counter his plans and monitor Cuban and Soviet responses?

  The FBI and the CIA, the files clearly show, were both aggressively involved in countering the Fair Play for Cuba Committee at home and abroad. The object was to penetrate the Committee’s operations and damage it with black propaganda. The evidence of New Orleans may suggest that, wittingly or unwittingly, Oswald was used to exactly those ends before leaving for Mexico. Was that also the CIA’s purpose in Mexico City? If so, the concept can be seen as a legitimate operational sideshow that was harmless enough—until Oswald was named as President Kennedy’s alleged assassin. When catastrophe occurred, was there a rush to cover up the “harmless” operation?

  The Agency’s greater purpose, of course, was to overthrow the Castro regime by almost any means short of overt military invasion. Activity to that end ranged from black propaganda to the assassination of Fidel Castro himself—and Castro knew it. Some of the information to be covered in these pages will suggest that there were those who sought to manipulate Oswald’s visit to Mexico for a far more sinister purpose. And that renegade anti-Castro forces within the CIA or used by it sought to assassinate President Kennedy and by manipulation of Oswald, and through true or false facts that could be pinned on him, lay the blame on Castro. That done, they would have surmised, the United States would be almost bound to retaliate by invading and toppling the Cuban Communist regime.

  Chapter 20

  Facts and Appearances

  “Truth: An ingenious compound of desirability of appearance.”

  —Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

  The real Lee Harvey Oswald made a mundane return to the United States. The trip home to infamy was another bone-shaking bus journey, not to New Orleans but to Dallas, Texas, and a night at the YMCA. He made a weekend visit to his wife, Marina, now awaiting the birth of a second child at the home of her friend Ruth Paine on the outskirts of the city—a contact that was to have a pivotal effect on Oswald’s destiny.

  Ten days after his arrival in Dallas, Paine told a neighbor, Linnie Mae Randle, that Oswald was having trouble finding a job. There might be an opening, Randle thought, at her brother’s place of work. Oswald followed up and two days later started the last job of his life, as an order-filler at a warehouse that handled the distribution of educational books—the Texas School Book Depository.1

  Superficially, the last forty days of Oswald’s life were unremarkable. After five days renting from a first landlady with whom he did not get on, he took a room at 1026 North Beckley—registering under the name “O. H. Lee.” To the owners of the house and to fellow tenants, Oswald seemed quiet, lonely. He spent most evenings reading or watching television, rarely made conversation. He visited Marina almost every weekend.

  The women made an occasion of Oswald’s twenty-fourth birthday, which fell on October 18. Ruth brought wine, decorated the table, and baked a cake. The cake was carried in aglitter with candles, and everyone sang “Happy Birthday, Lee.” Oswald was visibly moved, and his eyes filled with tears. He rejoiced when Marina gave birth two days later to their second child, another daughter. In some ways, it seemed, the rickety marriage was recovering a little. Oswald seemed interested in reestablishing a domestic life, and talked of their setting up house together again.

  At work at the Book Depository, Oswald’s supervisor thought he “did a good day’s work” and deemed him an above-average employee. According to his wife, Oswald said he was saving money. He may have anticipated an early end to his employment. Around November 1, three weeks before the assassination, Oswald wrote in a letter to the Internal Revenue Service that he had “worked only six months in the fiscal year of 1963.” Days later, he supposedly told Marina that “there was another job open, more interesting work … related to photography.” There is no knowing what he meant, in the letter to the taxman or in the alleged remark to his wife.2

  During the final two weeks of the saga, a new, unwelcome development occurred. There were visits that were reported to Oswald by Marina and her hostess, Ruth Paine, by a Dallas FBI agent named James Hosty. Seven months earlier, when routine reports had picked up Oswald’s
subscription to the The Worker, the American Communist Party newspaper, the record indicates, Hosty had suggested the Oswald case be reopened. Now, on November 1, having learned from the CIA that somebody using the name Lee Oswald had visited the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, and on learning from New Orleans that the Oswald family had departed—leaving Ruth Paine’s address for forwarding purposes—Hosty turned up on Ruth Paine’s doorstep. By his account, and according to Ruth and Marina, he said merely that he would like to talk to Oswald and asked how to contact him. The women said Oswald worked at the Book Depository. When Hosty called by again, asking for the address of Oswald’s rented room, the women said they did not have the telephone number. Their accounts suggest that, though they did know it, they withheld it because Oswald had said the FBI was out to harass him.

  News of Hosty’s visits plunged Oswald into a black mood, according to Marina. The day after the second one, he apparently appeared at the FBI office in Dallas asking to see Hosty. Told the agent was out to lunch, according to a receptionist, he produced an envelope, said “Get this to him,” and departed. After the assassination, however, the FBI would conceal not only the contents of the envelope, but also its very existence. What the note contained remains uncertain even today.

  The note’s existence remained unknown until 1975, when a journalist learned of it from an FBI contact. The sorry story was eventually pieced together by the House Committee on the Judiciary, the Senate Intelligence Committee, and then the Assassinations Committee. Former FBI staff, including Agent Hosty, admitted that there had not only been a note but that it had been destroyed within hours of Oswald’s death. The receptionist who had taken delivery of it, Nannie Fenner, made a dramatic claim. She said she had gotten a look at the note and that it read roughly:

  Let this be a warning. I will blow up the FBI and the Dallas Police Department if you don’t stop bothering my wife.