Oswald and the CIA: The Documented Truth About the Unknown Relationship Between the U.S. Government and the Alleged Killer of JFK (58 page)

Thus there is no doubt that it was Goodpasture who pinned the tail on the donkey in Mexico City. The question is: When did she manage the feat for which she was regaled ten years later? Is it possible that it was her identification of Oswald that permitted the impostors to use his name in Mrs. T's missing transcript and the Tuesday call to the Soviet Consulate asking about the telegram to Washington?

Phillips's Recollections: Evidence of an Oswald "Dangle "?

Mrs. T's claim that Oswald offered information for money to the Soviet Consulate raises the question, was Oswald part of a dangle to the Soviets in Mexico City? Is there other evidence relevant to this question? Indeed there is, and it comes from David Phillips. However, the problem with Phillips' story about this is that it changed-in the space of twenty-four hours. It was a story which, in one place, was about an "information offer" and in another place was about an "assistance request." In the second instance Phillips was testifying under oath to the HSCA.

In November 1976, David Phillips, who had been chief of Cuban Operations in the CIA Mexico City station in 1963, told the Washington Post that Oswald offered "information" to the Soviet Embassy in exchange for money. If true, this might have been a "counter-intelligence dangle" similar to the Sigler dangle operation in 1966, when an apparently disgruntled U.S. Army sergeant entered the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City and offered them information in exchange for money, and proceeded to feed disinformation to the Soviets for ten years. Sigler's success led to an award from CIA director William Colby at the same time he was being promoted to the rank of colonel in the KGB by Leonid Brezhnev. Sigler died under mysterious circumstances in 1976.11

Is it possible that Oswald was an integral part of-or had stumbled into-a plan to deceive the KGB and the Cuban DGI? The Phillips story about information for money has some complications-which is typical Phillips. According to the Lopez Report, Phillips testified to the HSCA that "Oswald indicated in his discussions with the Soviet Embassy that he hoped to receive assistance with the expenses of his trip." This account, however, misses the Oswald half of the story.

Phillips told the Washington Post that Oswald had been overheard saying words "to the effect, `I have information you would be interested in, and I know you can pay my way [to Russia].' " Ron Kessler, the Post reporter, wrote that Phillips's claim was corroborated by other CIA sources, such as the "translator" and "typist" of the intercepted call. " `He said he had some information to tell them,' the `typist' said in an interview in Mexico. `His main concern was in getting to one of the two countries [Russia or Cuba] and he wanted them to pay for it.' "69

Phillips failed to tell the Post the version of this story that would appear in his book Night Watch written the same year. There, Phillips categorically stated that "I know of no evidence to suggest that ... any aspect of the Mexico City trip was any more ominous than reported by the Warren Commission."" Phillips's book is also at odds with his accounts elsewhere about Oswald's Mexican adventure. For example, his book identifies the authors of the October 8 cable on Oswald, discussed below, as the husband-and-wife team headed by " `Craig,' the case officer in charge of Soviet operations." In his HSCA testimony Phillips claimed that the cable "did come to me, also to sign off, because it spoke about Cuban matters." Phillips was not even in Mexico when the cable was sent!" He was on a trip to Washington and Miami, and did not return until October 9.

Underlining the contradiction between Phillips's remarks to the Washington Post and his testimony to the HSCA is the short amount of time between the two versions. The Washington Post story appeared on November 26, 1976. The very next day, when testifying under oath to the HSCA, Phillips again stated that Oswald had asked for money, but this time he did not mention the offer of information. On Phillips's key allegation that Oswald offered information for money, FBI director Kelley confirms this happened, and was known, not just from the wiretaps, and cameras, but also from informants and other types of foreign intelligence techniques.""

The HSCA later found out that the story of Oswald's request for assistance had also been told by Win Scott (after his retirement) in a 1970 letter:

... his activities from the moment he arrived in Mexico, his contacts by telephone and his visits to both the Soviet and Cuban Embassies and his requests for assistance from these two Embassies in trying to get to the Crimea with his wife and baby [emphasis added]. During his conversations he cited a promise from the Soviet Embassy in Washington that they would notify their Embassy in Mexico of Oswald's plan to ask them for assistance."

This letter, along with Scott's manuscript, was one of the items James Angleton removed from Scott's personal safe immediately after his death.

June Cobb, Elena Garro De Paz, and the Oswald-Duran "Affair"

By 1978, when the HSCA conducted its investigation into the Kennedy assassination, startling information had come to light concerning Oswald's social activities in Mexico City. "The Committee believes that there is a possibility," states the Lopez report, that "a U.S. Government agency requested the Mexican government to refrain from aiding the Committee with this aspect of its work."" This was especially so when the HSCA tried to dig into the sources of the persistent story about an Oswald affair with Silvia Duran. The relevance of this story is clear: American intelligence contained reports that Duran's sexual services had already been used by the Cuban government. Sexual entrapment was then a commonly employed and highly successful espionage technique. Thus, on the surface the story implicates the Castro regime in the Kennedy assassination.

The story began, after the assassination, at a twist (i.e. dance) party at the home of Silvia's brother, Ruben Duran. The source of the story was Elena Garro de Paz, a popular playwright and wife of famed Mex ican poet Octavio Paz. Two years later the source was the same but the story had grown to include Elena's allegation of an affair between Oswald and Duran. It was the CIA's spy in the Cuban Embassy, Luis Alberu, who finally convinced the station chief Win Scott that the affair was a fact. The documentary trail on the twist party, however, began with a June Cobb memo. She had been working as an informant for the CIA in Mexico City since 1961.

"June Cobb is promiscuous and sleeps with a large number of men," wrote Scott in 1964, and "sometimes spends several nights (consecutively) with a man in his apartment."75 Actually, Win Scott was passing this along from the legal attache, Clark Anderson, and neither was in a position to know about Cobb's love life which, as rich and tragic as it had been, did not include sleeping with "a large number of men." The name of the asset who passed this information to Anderson is still protected, but the choice of words"promiscuous," "large number of men," and "several nights consecutively," were not only excessive, but border on character assassination. June was both an attractive and highly knowledgeable young woman, and was discriminating in her relationships.

We applaud full disclosure, but a comment seems in order here. Since the CIA has seen fit to release scurrilous, unsubstantiated allegations about their former informants while they are alive, the continued withholding of other documents such as their own memo to the FBI (just before Oswald's visit) on running an operation against the FPCC in Mexico, seems unconscionable.

The CIA claims that it did not learn of the stories about the twist party and the affair until after the publication of the Warren Report. The FBI, according to a 1979 CIA report, had conducted an investigation in Mexico after the assassination and had concluded that the Garro allegations were "without substantiation."76 This investigation, however, was a little late. "On October 5, 1964, eleven days after the publication of the Warren Commission Report," the Lopez Report observed, "Elena Garro de Paz's story alleging Lee Harvey Oswald's presence at a party in Mexico City attended by Cuban government personnel came to the attention of the Central Intelligence Agency."

The allegations of Duran-Oswald social contacts outside the Cuban Consulate have relevance to other issues, such as possible Cuban government involvement in the assassination and whether or not Duran had Cuban, Mexican, or American intelligence ties. The Lopez Report identified the author of the October 5 report as June Cobb:

The source of the memo was [several lines redacted] whom the Committee identified as June Cobb Sharp while reviewing the [redacted] file. According to Elena, Ms. Cobb was sent to her house shortly after the assassination for a few days, by a mutual friend, a Costa Rican writer named Eunice Odio. Ms. Garro asserted that while at her house, Ms. Cobb expressed interest in the Kennedy assassination. One night, Elena's sister Deva, who was visiting, got drunk and told the whole story."

The words "whole story" are vague, but probably refer only to the twist party at Ruben Duran's. Eddie Lopez and Dan Hardaway tried and were unable to locate a number of witnesses, including June Cobb. "The committee attempted to obtain an interview with Ms. Cobb," said the Lopez Report, "but was once again frustrated." If they had located Cobb, they doubtless would have realized that Elena's recollection as to the date of Cobb's visit was a mistake.

First, if Elena's dates were right, then Cobb would have learned about the twist party in the first days after the assassination and not reported it for an entire year. This would have been strange had it happened, but it did not. Elena had been whisked away to a safe house in the wake of the assassination, supposedly because of her knowledge of Oswald's extracurricular activities in Mexico City, but Cobb did not visit Elena at the Hotel Vermont safe house. Cobb moved into Elena's real home ten months later."

The question is this: Did Elena really tell Cobb "the whole story" as described in the Lopez Report? Or was it an early scalded-down version of a story that would later grow in imaginative ways? As we shall see, what eventually unfolded was a tale better suited for James Bond than Lee Oswald. So far, the Lopez Report attributes coverage of the twist party only to June Cobb's still-classified October 5 memo. Elena and her sister were first cousins to the Duran brothers, Horatio, who was married to the Silvia Duran from the Cuban Consulate, and Ruben, who held the twist party at his home in the fall of 1963. The interesting, if fragmentary, recapitulation of Cobb's memo in the Lopez Report contains this segment:

Lee Harvey Oswald was alleged to have been at this party in the company of "two other beatnik-looking boys." The Americans remained together the entire evening and did not dance. When Elena [her daughter] tried to speak with the Americans, she was "shifted" to another room by one of her cousins. The [Cobb] memo does not state whether Elena had mentioned which cousin had not allowed her to speak to the Americans. One of Elena's cousins told her at that time that (he or she) did not know who the Americans were except that Silvia Duran ... had brought them to the party.79

Not much else of significance about Cobb's memo is described in the Lopez Report, except for Elena's claim that the day after the party she and her sister saw Oswald and his two companions on the Avenida Insurgentes, one of the main avenues in the Mexican capital, and that they recognized Oswald's photograph after the assassination. Silvia Duran's arrest after the Kennedy assassination "underlined the Garros' certainty" that the man at the twist party had been Lee Harvey Oswald.

June Cobb remembers Elena telling her story, but the description of Cobb's handling of this story in the Lopez Report seems unfamiliar to her today. From a recent interview, here is Cobb's recollection of Elena's story as told in September 1964:

A quick social gathering had been slapped together for a purpose. When Elena and her sister got to this unlikely party there were these American guys there. And after the assassination they recognized Oswald as one of them. Elena had concluded that the Cubans were in on the assassination, and that the party must have been set up by those Cuban individuals involved, and some of their Mexican friends, so that they could provide an underground for Oswald after the assassination, in which there would be people available who would recognize him and assist in his escape.80

It seems prudent to be sceptical of Elena's story, which, if true, would raise suspicions of Cuban government involvement in the assassination. Elena was not entirely objective. While a champion of the peasant cause in Mexico, Elena detested Communists, and thus Cobb's comment about the Garros going to an "unlikely" gathering of communist sympathizers. Elena had concluded that she and her sister were asked to the party as a sort of "camouflage to alter the appearance of the meeting."" That is the way Cobb remembers hearing and reporting the story in 1964. In March 1995 she initiated inquiries with the CIA for the release of this document.

Cobb had been living with Elena for only about a month when the story of the twist party came up. Cobb does not recall, however, the actions attributed to her in the Lopez Report:

Claiming to be a CIA agent, Cobb suggested that Elena and Deba go to Texas to tell their story. Elena stated that when Cobb's suggestion was rejected, Cobb stated that she would arrange a meeting with the Chief of the CIA in Mexico. The meeting did not occur because Ms. Cobb was asked to leave the Garro house evidently because she kicked Elena's cat. A notation on the memo says that [redacted, but possibly LI/COOKY-1, Cobb's cryptonym] never regained contact with Elena Garro de Paz.82

The trail of evidence on this report by Cobb is as intriguing as this-probably false-story itself. The memo was apparently "lost" in the files, perhaps because it had not been placed in either the Elena Garro or Oswald "P" (personality) files at the CIA Mexico City station. Instead, it was put into a "local leftist and Cuban project file." The HSCA found out about it from another sourcea chronological history of the Oswald case designated Wx-7241, prepared by Raymond Rocca for the CIA in 1967. According to Rocca, the Cobb memo was first found in December 1965 by an employee whose name is still withheld. A marginal notation on the Wx-7241 history asked, "Why was this not sent to headquarters?" That is a good question. The HSCA admitted they did not have the answer.