Oswald and the CIA: The Documented Truth About the Unknown Relationship Between the U.S. Government and the Alleged Killer of JFK (54 page)

Now that we know about Gaudet, the question arises: What was he doing standing in line in front of Oswald? Was this one more of the incredible coincidences that pepper this story? Gaudet stated that he was unaware his Mexican tourist card immediately preceded Oswald's, and he could not recall having seen Oswald on that day.102 However, Gaudet's presence reinforces the question: Why did Oswald come into contact with so many people with CIA connections in August and September 1963? Besides Gaudet, the list included Bartes, Bringuier, Butler, and Quiroga.

Oswald's Escalating CIA Profile

On September 10, 1963, Special Agent Hosty sent a report on Oswald to the Bureau and to New Orleans. It was the first FBI document to make it into Oswald's CIA files since the Fain report of August 30, 1962. Hosty began by acknowledging Oswald's Magazine Street address, an address everyone else in the FBI had known about for a month. Hosty then said Oswald had been working at the William Reily Coffee Company on August 5. He apparently did not know that Oswald had been fired from his job at Reily Coffee on July 19.103 Hosty did mention the April 21 Oswald letter to the FPCC from Dallas. It would appear, however, that he did not know about Oswald's arrest in New Orleans or chose for some reason not to say anything about it. Hosty did not know about the Quigley jailhouse interview.

On Monday, September 23, the employees at CIA headquarters were still catching up on the weekend's traffic when Hosty's report arrived under FBI director Hoover's signature. It was 1:24 in the afternoon when someone named Annette in the CIA's Records Integration Division attached a CIA routing and record sheet to the report and sent it along to the liaison office of the counterintelligence staff, where Jane Roman was still working. As discussed in Chapter Two, Roman received the first phone call from the FBI about Oswald on November 2, 1959.

When Jane Roman got the Hosty report, she signed for it and, presumably after having read it, determined the next CIA organizational element to whom it should be sent. The office she chose was Counterintelligence Operations, CUOPS. The telltale "P" of William ("Will") Potocci, who worked in Counterintelligence Operations, appears next to the CUOPS entry, along with the date that Roman passed the report on to him-September 25. Potocci presumably worked in this office, although something on the routing sheet-probably Potocci's name or some activity indicator in CU OPS-is still being withheld by the CIA.

CIA readers of the Hosty report were treated to the outlines of the story we have followed in this and the previous three chapters: how Oswald had returned from Russia to Fort Worth, Texas, where he subscribed to the communist newspaper the Worker, and then moved to New Orleans, where he took a job in the Reily Coffee Company; most important, the CIA learned that on April 21 Oswald, having moved from Fort Worth to Dallas, contacted the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New York City. The report also recounted Oswald's claim to have stood on a Dallas street with a placard around his neck that read "Hands Off Cuba-Viva Fidel."

The CIA did not put this report into Oswald's 201 file, but instead into a new file with a different number: 100-300-11. We will return to that file in Chapter Nineteen. Even as the Hosty report made its way from Jane Roman to Will Potocci, an FBI agent in New Orleans was preparing yet another report on Oswald that would arrive at the CIA on October 2. This, as we will see, was the very day that Oswald, having spent five nights in Mexico City, departed from the Mexican capital.

On his way from New Orleans to Mexico City, Oswald is reported to have visited the home of Silia Odio in Dallas. The Odio "incident," as it has become known with the passage of time, was labeled by researcher Sylvia Meagher as the "proof of the plot," because the Warren Commission accepted that Odio was visited by three men-one of whom was "Oswald." Meagher's point was that whether it was an impostor or Oswald himself, as Odio believes, the group that visited her apartment and phoned her afterward, and their preassassination discussion of killing Kennedy, is awkward, if not antithetical, for the lone-nut hypothesis. The Warren Commission accepted that the event occurred, but dismissed Odio's version of it. First, the commission found that a September 26 or 27 visit was not possible given Oswald's time requirements for arriving in Mexico City at ten A.M. on September 27. Second, the Warren Commission believed it had identified the three men who visited Odio: Loran Eugene Hall, Larry Howard, and William Seymour, who was "similar in appearance to Lee Harvey Oswald." All three were soldiers of fortune involved with the Cuban exiles. Hall was a selfdescribed gun runner.104 As discussed in Chapter Fourteen, Seymour was an associate of Hemming's.

Both of these Warren Commission contributions damaged the public's understanding of the facts in the case and the public's confidence in the integrity and objectivity of the Commission's work. The Hall-Howard-Seymour story, supplied by the FBI just in time to save the Warren Report-on its way to press-the embarrassment of not having discredited Odio's version of the incident, later turned out to be wholy fraudulent. No official connected to the Warren Report has ever apologized to the public or Silvia Odio for their shabby treatment of her and their acceptance of a concocted story, an egregious error given what was at stake.

In spite of this, strong feelings about the Odio incident remain. Silvia Odio is "full of hot air," FBI special agent Hosty said in a recent interview. Hosty did not elaborate further about the meaning of this remark, but he offered an interesting variation of the Hall and Seymour part of the story: "Hall told us [the FBI] that it was he who had been by Odio's. When the police arrested Hall they talked to Heitman." Special Agent Heitman, Hosty says, was the FBI agent "who worked among the Cubans. I was working the right wing extremists, like General [Edwin] Walker, etc." After Hall told the authorities he had visited Odio, Hosty claims, "Seymour threatened him and so he changed his story.""" Hosty's account also raises the possibility that William Pawley might have been involved.

"I knew of him," Hosty said of William Pawley in a recent interview.106 As discussed in Chapter Seven, Pawley was working for the CIA in Miami, reporting on the Cuban situation through an extensive network of contacts. Hosty told researcher Dr. Larry Haapanan in 1983 that he thought the men who visited Odio might have been agents working for Pawley.107 In 1995 Hosty contacted the author, and in a follow-up interview he said,

It could be Pawley. H. L. Hunt was backing Pawley's people, and they were also getting support from Henry Luce. It could be that Pawley's guys spying on JURE [Junta Revolucionaria Cubana, led by Amador Odiol. They could have been working for Pawley or one of the other splinter groups.108

The possibility that on September 25, Pawley and his right wing anti-Castro allies were using Oswald and his cohorts to collect information on the left wing JURE faction led by Silvia's father (then in one of Castro's prisons) is intriguing. It only further magnifies what the Warren Commission feared about the rest of the Odio story: It fits into the lone-nut hypothesis like a two-by-four in a Cuisinart.

We need to discuss one more document before turning our attention to Oswald's trip to Mexico City. On September 16, 1963, the CIA "informed" the FBI that the "Agency is giving some consideration to countering the activities of [the FPCC] in foreign countries." 109 In one of the many suspicious coincidences of this case, the next day Oswald was standing in a line to get his Mexican tourist visa. He would take his FPCC literature and news clippings of his FPCC activities with him. In the CIA's memo to the FBI, they said they were interested in "planting deceptive information which might embarrass the [FPCC] Committee in areas where it does have some support." A week later Oswald boarded a bus for Mexico City, where he would represent himself as an officer of the FPCC and use his FPCC card as identification in an attempt to obtain a visa to get to Cuba. This raises the possibility that Oswald's trip was part of a CIA operation or an FBI operation linked to the CIA's request. We will return to that subject in Chapter Nineteen, after a detailed analysis of Oswald in the Mexican capital.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Mexican Maze

Mexico City, during Oswald's visit there in September to October 1963, was one of the most intensely surveilled spots on the planet. After the Kennedy assassination, the events that took place during that visit became the subject of close examination by several government investigations and numerous researchers. Yet, in spite of all the surveillance data and cumulative man-years of scrutiny, what really happened during Oswald's trip to Mexico City has, for more than thirty years, remained an unsolved mystery. There have been too many pieces to fit into the puzzle. In this chapter we will examine the possibility that there are two puzzles into which these pieces fit.

The 1964 investigation into the Mexican maze by the Warren Commission produced a story along these general lines: First, although Oswald visited both the Cuban and Soviet consulates and said he wanted to travel to the Soviet Union via Cuba, "the evidence makes it more likely he intended to remain in Cuba"; second, Oswald was informed he could not get a Cuban visa without a Soviet visa and that getting a Soviet visa would take four months; third, Oswald pestered the Cubans, resulting in "a sharp argument" with the consul, Eusebio Azcue, and "failed to obtain visas at both Embassies"; and, fourth, until his departure "Oswald spent considerable time making his travel arrangements, sightseeing and checking again with the Soviet Embassy to learn whether anything had happened on his visa application."' As we will see, the problem with this story is that once he learned of the four-month wait, Oswald gave up and never made an application for a Soviet visa, a fact apparently not known by the Warren Commission. At a minimum, this raises the question, why Oswald would check on a visa application he did not make?

The Mexican mystery deepened as a result of the 1978 congressional investigation into the Kennedy assassination. The HSCA inquiry presented the startling possibility that someone might have impersonated Oswald in the Mexican capital. However, the HSCA determined that there was not sufficient evidence to "firmly" conclude that such a deception took place. The report added, however, that "the evidence is of such a nature that the possibility cannot be dismissed."' This grim uncertainty looms large in what has become known as the Lopez Report, the HSCA's long-secret study*
of "Oswald, the CIA, and Mexico City." Parts of the Lopez Report, a few of them large and several of them small, are still classified. During the three decades that have come and gone since Oswald's visit to Mexico, suspicions have grown among the American public about possible CIA involvement in the assassination. The JFK Records Act mandated that the government's files be opened. Yet, the CIA continues to resist, just as they resisted Eddie Lopez and Dan Hardaway, all attempts to find the whole truth about Oswald's trip to Mexico City.

The possibility of an impostor has drastic consequences for how we view Oswald, and therefore is relevant to the investigation of the president's murder in Dallas. We will return to these consequences in the next two chapters. For now, we must focus first on what we know happened in Mexico. We have new information with which to test the Lopez Report's suggestion about an Oswald impostor. Namely, a major Russian contribution: the published recollections of Paval Yatskov, Valery Kostikov, and Oleg Nechiporenko in the latter's 1993 work, Passport to Assassination.' Yatskov was the head of the Soviet consular office in Mexico City and, with Vice Consul Nechiporenko, worked for the foreign counterintelligence subdivision of the KGB. Kostikov was part of the KGB's notorious Department Thirteen, which handled assassinations.

We also have a great many new documents released since the passage of the JFK Records Act in 1992. Among these are transcripts of telephone conversations between J. Edgar Hoover and President Johnson, including this exchange:

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 that there is a second person who was at the Soviet Embassy [emphasis added].'

Hoover indicated an interest in identifying "this man." Unfortunately, the tape Hoover mentioned has since disappeared. The issue of an Oswald impostor, however, remains.

Oswald in Mexico City

The Soviet Embassy, which also housed the Soviet Consulate, is just two blocks from the Cuban Consulate and Cuban Embassy which, although in different buildings, are inside the same compound. Thus, it would have taken Oswald more time to leave one consulate, find a phone, and call the other consulate than it would have to simply walk there. As we will see, this detail is crucial in sorting out which of the six or seven visits and as many phone calls were Oswald's and which were not. Oswald's bus arrived in Mexico City at 10 A.M. Friday, September 27, 1963,5 and departed for Texas at 8:30 the following Wednesday morning, October 3.6 This establishes the time available for his visits and calls.

The first three telephone calls reportedly occurred shortly after Oswald's arrival on September 27. These calls, initially thought to have been made by Oswald, "may have been by an impostor," according to Lopez.' These calls were placed at 10:30 A.M. [see table X, below],' 10:37 A.M., and 1:25 P.M., all to the Soviet military attache or the Soviet Consulate. This is the CIA transcript of the 10:37, or second, call:

CALLER: May I speak to the Counsel?

sov1ET: He is not in.

CALLER: I need some visas in order to go to Odessa. [A city in southern Ukraine on the shore of the Black Sea]

SOVIET: Please call at 11:30.