Oswald and the CIA: The Documented Truth About the Unknown Relationship Between the U.S. Government and the Alleged Killer of JFK (89 page)
Authors: John Newman
When asked to head it presidential commission of inquiry, Chief Justice Earl Warren turned down Robert Kennedy twice and then turned down Lyndon Johnson until the president played the Mexico City trump card. "And I just pulled out what Hoover told me," Johnson later bragged in a call with Senator Russell, "about a little incident in Mexico City." Johnson recalled how he explained to Warren that this "little incident" made it look like Castro and Khrushchev were behind the president's murder. "And I think you put on your uniform in World War I, fat as you are," Johnson claimed
he had told Warren, "and would do anything to save one American life." Johnson explained that, when confronted with this, Warren started crying and agreed to take the assignment.'
In a 1972 documentary for public television Warren himself told the same storyexcept for the tears-about how Johnson feared a "nuclear war."'
On the surface, Oswald's trip to Mexico City made no sense at all. Whoever was handling him was able to get him to do and say things that were not in his interest. The story was that he had decided to return again to the Soviet Union-this time by way of Cuba. That story was a ruse. In the summer of 1963, the State Department had approved his passport for travel to the USSR but also stamped it with a warning that a person traveling to Cuba would be liable for prosecution.'
If he really intended to go back to the Soviet Union he could have gone through the same European countries he had during his first defection in 1959. Thus, to travel to the Soviet Union via Cuba made no sense.
There was a darker purpose for Oswald's visit to Mexico City. He was sent there to seek visas from the Cuban Consulate and Soviet Embassy. The Cuban transit visa could be used to get him to Cuba or to make it appear he had gone to Cuba. It is now apparent that the planners did not expect that he would get the Soviet visa, for they likely knew that U.S. citizens could only get such a visa from the Soviet Embassy in Washington. Rather, the objective was simply incidental contact between Oswald and the man who issued Soviet visas in Mexico City: Valery Kostikov. The value of this contact derived from what only a handful of counterintelligence officers in Washington knew: Kostikov was an important operative of KGB assassinations in the Americas. In my view, it is likely that among this small group of officers was a bad apple, a person involved in designing the plot to assassinate President Kennedy.
The Mexico City plan had a defect: the Cubans required a Soviet visa in order to issue the Cuban transit visa. The planners had not anticipated this and it nearly ruined the plan and all of the work that had been done to prepare Oswald's Cuban legend in 1963. By the time Oswald reached Mexico City in late September he had an impressive portfolio of pro-Castro fliers and Fair Play for Cuba literature featuring himself and his Cuban escapades in New Orleans that summer. When, on Friday, September 27, he presented them to the Cuban Consulate visa officer, Sylvia Duran, they were not enough to convince her to issue the transit visa. He must first, she said, have a Soviet visa.
The handler wanted this call to occur because he knew that it would be intercepted by the CIA's LI/ENVOY program-its telephone tap operation in Mexico City. In this manner, the fact that Oswald had met a KGB assassin would end up in the CIA's records. However, while Oswald's lie led Duran to call Kostikov, neither Duran nor Kostikov used Oswald's name when they spoke about him, referring to him only as "the American." Furthermore, once Duran found out that Oswald had lied to her, it was the end of the road: she turned him down again. He then made a scene and had to be physically escorted from the premises. From the perspective of Oswald's handler on that Friday evening, the plan to firmly link Oswald to Castro and the Kremlin had not succeeded.
On Saturday morning Oswald went to the Soviet Embassy again in a final attempt to get a Soviet visa. During his second visit with Kostikov, Oswald produced a loaded revolver and explained that it was necessary to protect himself from the FBI. This antic, too, was likely something his handler told him to do. This visit again failed to produce a Soviet visa, and Oswald declined, as he had done the pre
vious day, to fill out the papers that could be sent to the consulate in Washington, D.C., requesting a visa.'
Oswald was again told that such a process would take many months to complete and so, after a tearyeyed scene, he gave up altogether and had no further contact-in person or by phone-with either diplomatic post.
This was not good news for whoever was handling Oswald in Mexico. What happened next tells us something about the relationship between Oswald and his handler(s) there. They made phone calls to the Soviet Embassy-allegedly from the Cuban Consulate and elsewhere-on Saturday, Monday, and Tuesday impersonating Oswald. As I established in Oswald and tl:e CIA in 1995,'
the script of these impersonations did a poor job of matching Oswald's experiences inside these buildings. For example, in the Tuesday call the Oswald character asks if there is anything new on the telegram sent to Washington.
While Oswald's handler knew of, and possibly watched, Oswald's trips in and out of these Cuban and Soviet diplomatic buildings, he did not know all of the details of what had happened inside. He did manage to learn-either from Oswald or from a mole in either building-that Oswald had not received a Cuban visa. The impersonator's request for news on a "cable to Washington" sheds light on the possible identity of Oswald's handler. On the date of this call (Tuesday, I October) Oswald had no motive to ask for news about a visa request he had twice declined to fill out the paperwork for. It is apparent that the handler-and therefore the impersonator-did not know Oswald had pushed back these forms twice. Moreover, Kostikov told Duran-not Oswald-that they had not received an answer from Washington. Kostikov had only told Oswald that it would take many months to process a visa request through the Soviet Embassy in Mexico.
What was the source of the impersonator's knowledge that Kostikov had said something about waiting for an "answer from Washington"'? There were only three ways to know this: from Duran, from Kostikov, or from access to the Friday (27 September) call between Kostikov and Duran in which it was discussed. The third possibility is the most likely and it suggests that the impersonator's script was based upon access to the Friday intercept by Tuesday morning. If true, the handler was either a member of the CIA station or was working with someone in the station or at the telephone tap center.
The call from the Cuban Consulate to the Soviet Embassy on Saturday was likely done to make it look like the Cubans and Soviets were collaborating in managing Oswald. In that call, however, the impersonator did not use Oswald's name.
For that reason, during the Tuesday, 1 October call, the impersonator used Oswald's name twice. The station chief remembers that the Oswald character spelled Oswald's name slowly and succinctly into the phone. When the impersonator also said he could not remember the name of the counsel with whom he had spoken, the voice on the other end said "Kostikov," and the impersonator said "yes." In fact when Oswald did, a few weeks later, refer to him in a letter to the Soviet Embassy in Washington, the best he could do was to write that he had met with "comrade Kostin."
By 1 October, then, Oswald's handler had succeeded in planting the WWIII virus into the CIA station's records. Due to the unanticipated turn of events, however, Oswald had been impersonated to carry out the Mexico City plan. This last minute tactic was risky. The problem that could crop up down the road was this: the voice on the tapes would not be Oswald's. Evidently, from the handler's perspective, this risk was necessary and how to deal with the consequences would have to be decided after the assassination.
At CIA HQS: The File That Lied
It took several days for the tape of the call linking Oswald to Kostikov to find its way to the translator at the CIA station. With the translation in hand, the station checked its photographic coverage of the Soviet Embassy and, on 8 October, reported the Tuesday Mexico City call about Oswald's contact with Kostikov to CIA headquarters. The Mexico desk at CIA HQS-in Branch 3 of the Western Hemisphere Division-handled the response to the CIA station in Mexico. John Whitten, alias John Scelso, along with his staff, drafted the cable. What was in it-and, more importantly, what was not in it-suggests that a HQS counterintelligence operation in Mexico involving Oswald was in play. It is also apparent that the Mexico station and the HQS Mexico desk had been excluded from this operation.
In order to do his job and write a response to the Mexico station, John Scelso needed access to the CIA's intelligence file on Oswald-his "201 tile." What he was given to work with, however, was not the complete story. When he opened the file, Scelso saw that it had been dormant for the previous eighteen months. What he did not know was that crucial FBI reports on Oswald's activities since his return to the U.S. had either been removed from or had otherwise not been allowed to be placed in his file. Oswald's 201 file had, since his defection to the Soviet Union in 1959, been kept by Ann Egeter in the mole-hunting section (Special Investigation Unit) of James Angleton's Counterintelligence Staff. From that time, all incoming State Department, Navy, and FBI information on Oswald had been placed in this file-201-289248.
In the days leading up to the Oswald operation in Mexico this filing procedure was altered. By the time Oswald arrived in Mexico City in the fall of 1963, the August 1962 FBI report on his debriefing had been removed from his 201 file by someone. In addition, two important reports on Oswald's 1963 Cuban activities in Dallas and New Orleans had been diverted from his 201 file and placed into a different one. Like fingerprints, the office symbols, initials, and dates on Scelso's reply to Mexico and the CIA cover sheets on these two FBI reports tell us much about who was handed the incoming Oswald Cuban story at HQs. They also indicate who might have been involved in the Oswald operation in Mexico. We will return to those fingerprints momentarily.
When Scelso sat down to draft his reply to the Mexico station, he did not know about the missing FBI reports. He was clueless about Oswald's 1963 Cuban escapades. In addition, he was not privy to the even more sensitive information on the name linked to Oswald in the Mexico City phone call-Kostikov. Without this information, Scelso was in no position to comment on the Soviet consul or the possible significance of Oswald's contact with him. What Scelso's desk could reasonably suspect, as one of his subordinates told the HSCA, was that Oswald might be "working for the Soviets."
In retrospect what took place during the exchange of cables between CIA HQS and its Mexico station was ominous. As the Mexico desk drafted the response saying HQS had received no information about Oswald since May 1962, Ann Egeter and at least three other people in Cuban operations had been, in rooms not far away, reading the FBI's latest report on Oswald's Cuban activities in New Orleans. In another room, not far from Egeter, it is likely that someone in Angleton's counterintelligence staff who saw Kostikov's name in a cable from Mexico City opened the file on project TUMBLEWEED. That project was a joint agency investigation of Kostikov's involvement in KGB "wet operations"-assassinations. That person- most likely ourbadapple -closed theTUMBLEWEED file, put it back in the safe, and warned no one. It would remain out of sight until November 22, 1963.
The two FBI reports that were withheld from Scelso were only seen by a few sets of eyes in Angleton's Counterintelligence Staff and the counterintelligence branch of the Cuban affairs staff. Their identities, along with the names of those who coordinated on Scelso's cable to Mexico, are the best evidence we have today to reconstruct who might have been behind the plot to engineer a national security cover-up after the president's murder. Most, perhaps all, of the people whose names, initials, and office symbols are on these three documents were not witting participants in this plot. On the other hand, their identities and actions are what make it possible to make an educated guess about who was behind the plot.
As previously indicated, the internal record of the CIA officers who handled those two FBI reports is illuminating. The report on Oswald's Cuban activities in Dallas arrived in the CIA on 23 September and was sent first to the desk of the CI liaison officer, Jane Roman. On 25 September, Roman sent it to the desk of a person with the initial "P" (possibly Will Potocci) in the operations section of the Counterintelligence Staff (CI/OPS). After that, the trail gets murky; the dates that it traveled to the desks of people working in the Soviet Russia Division are not given and these could have been post-assassination.