Reclaiming History (180 page)

However, the evidence that Oswald was on the subject bus is conclusive, and it therefore follows that Osborne, for whatever personal reason (perhaps simply not wanting his name attached to a presidential assassin in any way), was not telling the truth. Not only does Bowen’s name appear along with Oswald’s and the McFarlands’ on the manifest of Flecha Roja bus number 516 for the September 26 trip from Nuevo Laredo to Mexico City,
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but the same immigration inspector who stamped Oswald’s tourist card on September 26, 1963, Helio Maydon, also stamped Bowen’s.
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Osborne also fits the description given by the McFarlands and the two Australian girls as being an elderly male with a British accent who had spent considerable time previously in Mexico.
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The McFarlands also identified photos of Osborne as being the man.
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The Australian girls were unable to make a positive ID from earlier photos of Bowen (one wearing a sun helmet, the other standing in front of a castle a decade earlier), but as indicated, the McFarlands clearly identified him as being the passenger seated next to Oswald.
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Although Osborne claimed there were no other English-speaking people on the bus, both of the McFarlands were aware that Oswald and Bowen were speaking to each other. Indeed, Pamela Mumford got the impression that Oswald and Osborne talked a lot on the trip. And at one of the bus stops, as she and Winston were waiting to reboard the bus she asked Osborne what the weather was going to be like in Mexico City. Osborne just told the two of them that “the young man traveling beside me has traveled to Mexico also. Why don’t you talk to him?”
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The Warren Commission concluded, “Osborne’s responses to federal investigators on matters unrelated to Oswald have proved inconsistent and unreliable and, therefore, based on the contrary evidence and Osborne’s lack of reliability, the Commission has attached no credence to his denial that Oswald was beside him on the bus. Investigation of his background and activities, however, disclosed no basis for suspecting him of any involvement in the assassination.”
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In any event, Osborne gives new life to the observation that the most seemingly nondescript people we brush up against in life “have a story” to tell. It is ironic that Lee Oswald, who so clumsily fabricated his own fake identity as Alek Hidell, spent a day and a night in the company of a master in the art and undoubtedly never realized it. That it was more than a chance encounter
*
between Oswald and Osborne was briefly in vogue among conspiracy advocates. For instance, conspiracy theorists Robert Groden and Harrison Livingstone went so far as to suggest that Osborne and his true identity provides a “clue to the assassination.”
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Conspiracy author Anthony Summers reported that Osborne had been a “fanatical supporter of Nazi Germany” during the Second World War but cites no evidence for the claim. Summers also notes that Oswald had used the pseudonym “Osborne” when ordering some of his Fair Play for Cuba leaflets in New Orleans, but fails to recall that Oswald served at the El Toro Marine Air Corps Station with a Mack Osborne, whom he no doubt knew much better than the man sitting beside him on the bus, whose name he may never have even known.
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In the end, the wily Osborne-Bowen proved to be as elusive for the conspiracy theorists as he had for the FBI, and he is not usually mentioned in the more popular conspiracy theories today.

Mumford and her friend Winston talked with Lee Oswald once again on the trip, at the last bus and rest stop before Mexico City. He asked if they knew where they were going to stay in Mexico City. They didn’t. They were relying on a popular travel book of the period,
Mexico on Five Dollars a Day
, which listed various cheap hotels. He said that on previous trips to Mexico City (there’s no evidence or likelihood that he had ever been there before), he had stayed at the Hotel Cuba, and recommended it as being clean and inexpensive.

They did not take his suggestion. The last time they saw him was shortly after the bus, which had traveled throughout the night, arrived in Mexico City around ten o’clock Friday morning, September 27. He was standing alone in the bus terminal. They took a taxi and left without speaking to him again.
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Within an hour of his arrival at the Flecha Roja bus terminal in Mexico City, Lee Oswald registered at the Hotel del Comercio on Calle Bernardino de Sahagun, named for a Spanish colonial missionary who befriended Indians. The modest but clean four-story red-brick establishment catered to traveling salesmen and was good value for the money, which came to $1.28 a night. Although it was well located, about four blocks from the bus station and eight from the commercial heart of the city—which was on famous Paseo de la Reforma, Mexico City’s main east-west thoroughfare—and the owner was known for a willingness to try out his small English vocabulary, it did not attract a tourist trade, so an American like Lee Oswald was a rarity. Registration was simple: you paid your room rent each day in advance and signed your name in the hotel’s register. Lee signed his name as “Lee, Harvey Oswald” and gave his occupation as “photo.” His room, with a private bath, suited him fine. He stayed there, in room 18 on the third floor, throughout his visit to the city. All the places he wanted to go were within three miles to the south and west of the hotel—within walking distance if he felt like it, but taxis were plentiful and cheap. He acquired a street map of the city and marked a number of locations on it.
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As soon as he registered, Oswald went straight to work on the problem of getting to Cuba. The Mexican authorities didn’t care whether a traveler’s passport barred travel to Cuba as long as the citizen had a proper visa from the Cuban embassy, but they would not permit Oswald to board a plane for Cuba without that visa.
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Oswald’s 1963 passport—stamped invalid for travel to Cuba like all American passports issued that year—had neither a regular Cuban visa nor an “in transit” one, which would permit a short stay in Cuba if he were on his way to another country—Russia, for example. He looked up the telephone number and address, on the nearby Paseo de la Reforma, of Cubana Airlines, which flew from Mexico City to Havana three times a week, and jotted it in his address book.
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But first he had to get a Cuban visa.

He went that same morning to the Cuban embassy on the Calle Francisco Marquez, and there he spoke to Señora Silvia Tirado de Duran, a young Mexican woman temporarily employed in the consulate section of the embassy. He was prepared. He showed Duran his Soviet papers, which indicated that he had lived and worked there for three years. His documents attested that he was married to a Russian woman, and several prized documents, including a newspaper clipping, indicated that he was the secretary of the New Orleans chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. He told Duran that Cuba should accept him as a proven “friend” of the Cuban Revolution.
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Duran told the HSCA in 1978 that Oswald told her he was a member of the Communist Party.
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Although the day after the assassination she told the Mexican Federal Security Police she did not remember whether or not he did,
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the “comments” typed in by her and appended to Oswald’s application for a Cuban visa on the day he applied, September 27, state that “the applicant states that he is a member of the American Communist Party,” and he displayed a document “in proof of his membership.”
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It would have had to be a document Oswald had forged. Duran also told the HSCA that Oswald showed her “letters to the Communist Party, the American Communist Party.”
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Duran thought it odd that, if he was a member of or associated with the CPUSA, he had not asked the party to arrange the visa for him with Cuba. Cuba would have sent it to the Cuban embassy in Mexico City and it would have been waiting for him to pick up. He told her he hadn’t had time to arrange it that way. It still seemed strange to her. The Communist Party was illegal in Mexico and had he cleared his travel through the American Communist Party, he would not have had to travel to Mexico with incriminating documents. His passport would have sufficed.
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Oswald said that he was on his way to the Soviet Union but wanted an “in transit” visa allowing him to travel to Cuba immediately and to remain there for two weeks or even longer, if that were possible, before continuing his journey to the Soviet Union.
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Duran was sympathetic. At twenty-five, she was only a little older than Lee and was also a Marxist, although not really active politically. Her husband, Horacio Duran Navarro, had written a few articles for
El Dia
, the Communist newspaper in Mexico City, and both of them were sympathizers of the Cuban Revolution. She had worked for a time at the Mexican-Cuban Institute of Cultural Relations, a private organization subsidized to some extent by the Cuban government. Now she was working only temporarily as a secretary to the Cuban consul because the former secretary, a friend of Silvia’s, had been killed in an automobile accident in July. Silvia was just filling in until a suitably qualified secretary could be brought over from Cuba.
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As green as she was in the job, she knew it was impossible for Oswald to be granted an immediate visa to Cuba and that there were all types of steps to be followed, including getting authorization from Cuba. When Oswald heard there were going to be problems that would take time to resolve, he said he didn’t have any time, that his Mexican tourist visa was going to expire in three days (which wasn’t true, he had over a week and a half left), and became angry and agitated, whereupon Duran called Eusebio Azcue out of his office to speak to Oswald.
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Azcue, in his early fifties, had been the Cuban consul in Mexico City for several years. He had been in Mexico since 1944 and had been working as an architect when Fidel Castro’s forces swept into Havana in 1959 and ousted Fulgencio Batista and his regime. Azcue had been asked to take charge of the consulate in Mexico City. Now, in September of 1963, he wanted to retire and return to Havana, where he was born. The incoming consul, Alfredo Mirabel Diaz, had arrived on September 2, but Mirabel was still learning the job from Azcue and wouldn’t formally take over until November 18. So it was Azcue who emerged to speak with Oswald.
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Azcue explained to Oswald that the visas were issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Cuba, not in Mexico City, and that would take time, probably fifteen to twenty days. The only exception, he said, would be if Oswald could get a valid visa from the Soviet embassy permitting travel to the Soviet Union, in which case the consulate in Mexico City could issue an in-transit visa to Cuba to Oswald without prior consultation with the authorities in Cuba.
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At this point, Duran also told Oswald that he would have to secure photographs of himself to attach to his application for a visa, and she gave him the addresses of several nearby photo shops and told him that if he wanted to come back that afternoon with the photographs and a visa for travel to the USSR, an application for a Cuban visa could be prepared.
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Oswald had a lot to do, but he apparently decided to go to the Russian embassy first. At about half past noon Lee rang the bell at the gate of the Soviet embassy. It was only a short walk of less than two blocks down Calle Francisco Marquez from the Cuban embassy. Normally, you had to have an appointment to visit the Soviet embassy, but after Lee spoke to the sentry in Russian explaining the purpose of his visit, he was shown into the waiting room of the consul’s office, which was located in a small building detached from the main embassy but within the grounds. After a few minutes, a man named Valeriy Vladimirovich Kostikov appeared to interview him.

Lee, taken aback by Kostikov’s dark complexion and Zapata mustache—he looked more Mexican or Arabian than Russian—said, “I would like to speak with one of the
Soviet
consular officers.” Kostikov, amused, showed Lee diplomatic identification indicating that he was indeed an employee of the consulate. He then led him into the office where he had been receiving visitors since eleven o’clock that morning.

There were three consular officials in the embassy—Oleg Nechiporenko and Pavel Yatskov, in addition to Kostikov. In public they passed themselves off as the consul (Yatskov) and two vice consuls, but in fact all three were KGB officers of equal rank and responsibilities but in different directorates of the Soviet intelligence service. They were always interested in American visitors. Some could be people with important jobs in sensitive places, people who perhaps wanted to offer information or other kinds of cooperation. Kostikov, a colonel in the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, was charged with foreign intelligence, and he was curious as to what Oswald had to say.

Oswald said he wanted a visa for travel to the USSR. He pulled a wad of documents out of his zipper jacket, handed them to Kostikov, and started telling the same story he had just given at the Cuban consulate. Kostikov scanned Oswald’s papers, saw that his visitor had indeed lived in the Soviet Union, and quickly decided that this was more of a matter for counterintelligence than his own directorate. He excused himself, went to a telephone in another room, and rang Colonel Nechiporenko in the embassy.

“Listen, some gringo is here,” Kostikov said. “He’s asking for a visa to the Soviet Union…Come over here and get to the bottom of this…It seems to be more in your line of work. I’m in a hurry.”

As Nechiporenko walked over from the embassy, he saw Oswald standing on the steps of the consulate building. Inside he found Kostikov eager to palm Oswald off on him. “He keeps saying the FBI is after him in that he lived for a while in the Soviet Union. Those are his papers over there. Listen, I got to run, I’ll see you later this evening.” Kostikov opened the door to the reception area and invited Oswald back into the office, introduced Nechiporenko without mentioning his name, and left. Nechiporenko’s impression of Oswald was that he was suffering from some sort of exhaustion, physical or mental. As Oswald talked, he became more and more agitated, and Nechiporenko gave him a chance to calm down by turning his attention to Lee’s documents.