A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (24 page)

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Just days after the assassination, FBI headquarters seemed to lose interest in Mexico City entirely, at least as measured by the requests it made to Anderson and his colleagues in the embassy. Anderson could recall few explicit orders, of any kind, from Washington about what should be investigated in Mexico. Nor did he feel pressure to work closely with the CIA to follow up leads about Oswald. In fact, Anderson said that he and Scott did not have a single private conversation about the assassination, apart from their joint meetings with the U.S. ambassador, Thomas Mann. “I don’t think there was ever any sort of sit-down session where we took all of it and put it together,” Anderson said of his contacts with Scott. “I don’t recall Scott outlining any specific investigation they were conducting.” As for the FBI’s investigation in Mexico, he said, it was mostly limited to determining where Oswald had traveled during his days in Mexico City and whether he had been accompanied by anyone; even that limited investigation left questions unanswered.

“I don’t recall that we were able to establish where he was every day while he was in Mexico,” Anderson admitted years later. His agents did determine with certainty the date that Oswald entered Mexico (Saturday, September 26) and the day he crossed the border back into the United States (Saturday, October 3), as well as the name and location of the Mexico City hotel, the Hotel del Comercio, where Oswald took a room for $1.28 a day. “We were able to get him in, get him out, where he stayed,” Anderson said.

Anderson, who had worked outside the United States for much of his career, including as the FBI’s representative in the American embassy in Havana from 1945 to 1955, said that if there were ominous connections between Oswald and Cuban or Soviet agents in Mexico, it would have been a subject for investigation by the CIA, not the FBI.

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Anderson and his FBI colleagues might not have harbored much suspicion about an assassination plot hatched in Mexico City, but others in the American embassy did, especially Ambassador Mann. In December, Anderson told FBI headquarters that he needed help to “calm down” the ambassador, a fifty-one-year-old career diplomat who would later become close to President Johnson; reportedly it was Johnson who pressed President Kennedy to name Mann, a Latin American specialist and fellow Texan, to the Mexico City embassy in 1961.

Almost from the moment of the assassination, Mann said, he was convinced that Castro was behind the president’s murder and that Oswald’s trip to Mexico was somehow tied to the conspiracy. Mann seemed perplexed that the FBI and CIA did not share his suspicions—or, at least, that they did not seem eager to act on them. He called in Scott and Anderson repeatedly to outline his theory of a Cuban conspiracy. He wrote them that he wanted to know much more about the “promiscuous” young Mexican woman, Silvia Tirado de Duran, who worked in the Cuban consulate and had dealt with Oswald. (Mann knew about the reports of an affair between Duran and the former Cuban ambassador to Mexico.)

Mann had praised Scott when the CIA station chief requested that Mexican authorities arrest and interrogate Duran on the day of Kennedy’s assassination. The ambassador told colleagues that he had an “instinctive feeling” that Duran was lying when she claimed she dealt with Oswald only on questions about his visa application for Cuba. Anderson relayed Mann’s alarming theories to FBI headquarters. In a memo to Washington two days after the assassination, he reported Mann’s belief that the Soviet Union was “much too sophisticated” to be involved but that Castro was “stupid enough to have participated.” The ambassador speculated that Oswald had visited Mexico to establish a “getaway route” after the murder. According to Anderson’s memo, Mann wanted the FBI and CIA to do everything possible in Mexico “to establish or refute” a Cuban connection. At Mann’s urging, Anderson proposed to FBI headquarters in a cable that the bureau consider “polling all Cuban sources in [the] U.S. in [an] effort to confirm or refute” the ambassador’s theory that Castro was behind the assassination. The proposal was quickly rejected by headquarters. “Not desirable,” an FBI supervisor in Washington wrote on his cable. “Would serve to promote rumors.”

On November 26, Mann received startling information that, he believed, proved that his fears were justified. A twenty-three-year-old Nicaraguan government spy, Gilberto Alvarado, had telephoned the U.S. embassy with a story that, if true, meant Oswald had been paid off by Castro’s government. Alvarado, who had contacts in the past with the CIA, claimed that he had been in the Cuban embassy in Mexico City in September when he saw a “red-haired Negro” man hand over $6,500 in cash to Oswald, presumably an advance payment for the assassination. Alvarado said he had been in the embassy on an undercover assignment for the fiercely anti-Communist Nicaraguan government.

In an urgent cable to the State Department, Mann said he was impressed by the details in the Nicaraguan’s account, including the description of the “almost lackadaisical way in which the money is alleged by Alvarado to have been passed to Oswald.” That fit in with Mann’s contemptuous view of Castro as “the Latin type of extremist who acts viscerally rather than intellectually and apparently without much regard for risks.”

Mann received more news that he considered alarming. On November 26, the CIA had secretly recorded a telephone conversation between Cuban president Osvaldo Dorticós and Cuba’s ambassador to Mexico, Joaquin Armas, in which Armas described the questions that had been asked of Silvia Duran during her interrogation by the Mexicans, including whether she had “intimate relations” with Oswald and whether Oswald had received money from the embassy. “She denied all of that,” Armas said in the call, seemingly relieved. Still, Dorticós sounded anxious about why the Mexicans were asking questions about the money, as if there might be some truth to the allegation that Oswald had been paid off. In a cable to Washington, Mann said he thought Dorticós’s anxiety “tends to corroborate Alvarado’s story about the passing of the $6,500.”

Word of Alvarado’s allegations, and Mann’s growing suspicions, spread beyond the State Department, ultimately reaching the Oval Office. (President Johnson said later he cited the rumor about the $6,500 payment to Chief Justice Warren in their Oval Office meeting.) The questions about Alvarado’s truthfulness would consume the U.S. embassy in Mexico City for days, and led Ambassador Mann, who worried that he was not being fully briefed by the FBI, to request that the bureau dispatch a senior Washington supervisor to Mexico City. He wanted the bureau to take the investigation in Mexico much more seriously.

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Back in Washington, Hoover dismissed Mann and his concerns. The ambassador, Hoover wrote to a deputy, was “one of those pseudo investigators, a Sherlock Holmes” who was trying to tell the FBI its business. Still, Hoover had reviewed the raw intelligence about Alvarado, and he could not deny that the Nicaraguan’s allegations would have to be investigated. If true, they would “throw an entirely different light on the whole picture” of the assassination, Hoover conceded. He agreed to dispatch an FBI supervisor from the bureau’s training academy in Quantico, Virginia, Laurence Keenan, who knew nothing about the Oswald investigation but who spoke Spanish.

Keenan, who had been with the FBI a dozen years, would look back on the assignment as the most bizarre and troubling of his career. He did not realize it at the time, he said, but he came to understand years later that he had been part of a charade to avoid discovering the full truth about Oswald in Mexico. It was a charade intended to avert the possibility of a nuclear war with Cuba, he believed. “I realized I was used,” Keenan said.

He was given the assignment at about eleven a.m. on Wednesday, November 27, and put on a plane to Mexico at four that afternoon. Before he left, he was given a “very short briefing” in Washington about the assassination investigation and about the Alvarado allegation. “I was completely in charge of the full investigation there in Mexico.

“I didn’t even have a visa or a passport,” he said, recalling that his wife met him at the office with a suitcase and fresh clothes before he sped to Dulles International Airport, outside Washington, for his flight.
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“I got in a car that rushed me off to Dulles and was escorted with a siren through city traffic.”

He arrived in Mexico City late that night and was met by Anderson, an old friend. According to Keenan, he and Anderson talked into “the wee hours of the morning” about the investigation. Keenan decided he had two responsibilities in Mexico. First, he would try to interview Alvarado to gauge his credibility. Second, he would protect the bureau’s reputation “from any future allegation that the investigation was shoddy,” given Ambassador Mann’s alarm that something had been missed. He was there, as he put it later, to “cover ourselves, to pacify the ambassador.”

In the ambassador’s office the next morning, Keenan met with Mann and Scott. The ambassador “expressed his opinion that he felt that this was definitely a conspiracy and that we must turn over the last stone to find out if there is any overt conspiracy on the part of the Cubans,” Keenan recalled. Mann noted the Associated Press article from September in which Castro had seemed to threaten Kennedy’s life.

Keenan then made his presentation, telling the ambassador what he had been told the day before in Washington: the FBI believed there was no conspiracy. “Every bit of information that we had developed in Washington, in Dallas and elsewhere, indicated that this was a lone job,” he explained. “This appeared to be a lone job—a one-in-a-million shot.”

Still, Keenan said he wanted to talk to Alvarado “to go the last mile, to turn the last rock over.” He turned to Scott, who was holding the Nicaraguan spy in one of the CIA’s safe houses in Mexico City. “We would like very much to set up a conference or an interview with Alvarado,” he said. Keenan could not remember how Scott replied. “He was not particularly communicative,” he said of the CIA station chief.

Keenan had another message for the ambassador from FBI headquarters. He wanted the embassy to understand that the bureau did not consider the investigation of Oswald’s activities in Mexico City to be its responsibility. It was a job for the CIA.

That afternoon Keenan got a shock. Within hours of his meeting, he was told that the CIA had decided to turn Alvarado over to the Mexican government immediately for further interrogation—before the FBI was given its chance to talk to him. The CIA’s decision was “very definitely” peculiar, Keenan remembered. “I have no way to specifically say this was CIA’s attempt to torpedo my investigation.”

Keenan soon found himself with little to investigate, especially after the CIA reported that the allegations made by Alvarado had fallen apart. On November 30, the Mexican government reported that Alvarado had recanted, claiming that he made up the story about the Cuban payments to Oswald because “he hates Castro and thought that his story, if believed, would help cause the U.S.A. to take action against Castro,” according to a CIA report. With Alvarado’s reversal, “the pressure was off,” Keenan recalled. “There was really nothing for me to coordinate or do at this point.” He left Mexico on December 2, five days after he arrived, and had nothing more to do with the Oswald investigation. (The day of Keenan’s return to Washington, Alvarado, now officially discredited by the Mexicans and the CIA, reversed himself again, returning to his original story about seeing Oswald receiving money from the Cubans. The Nicaraguan claimed he had recanted only because his Mexican interrogators had threatened to torture him by hanging him “by the testicles.”)

Waiting in Keenan’s office mailbox when he returned was a memo announcing his immediate reassignment as a supervisor in the bureau’s field office in San Juan, Puerto Rico. It was, he said, a “wonderful job,” one he had coveted, especially with the harsh winter weather on the East Coast fast approaching. He was expected in San Juan four days later.

Keenan left Washington so quickly that he did not even have time to brief FBI headquarters officials involved in the Oswald investigation about what he had learned in Mexico City, including tantalizing information about Silvia Duran, the young Mexican woman. Duran, he had been told, was a low-level spy for the Mexican government “and possibly the CIA.” As Keenan put it years later, Duran was not “very, very high” in the hierarchy of the Cuban embassy. “I don’t believe she ever had access to classified information.” He did not recall hearing allegations suggesting a relationship between Oswald and Duran outside their meetings at the Cuban consulate. Nor did he recall ever thinking that the CIA had not interrogated Duran itself—and did not allow the FBI to—because she might work for the agency.

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Mann also left Mexico City in a hurry. On December 14, President Johnson promoted him to the job of assistant secretary of state for Latin American affairs, as well as to an additional post in Washington as special assistant to the president. Before departing Mexico, Mann expressed his frustration about the assassination investigation; he suggested to embassy colleagues that he had given up trying to get to the bottom of what had happened in Mexico City. At least he would be well placed at the president’s side in Washington if new evidence about a conspiracy emerged.

In one of his final cables to the State Department from Mexico, Mann wrote in December that he was not optimistic that “we shall be able to find anything definitive on the central issue” of a Cuban conspiracy to kill the president. He was quoted by an American reporter years later as saying that the seeming lack of interest by the CIA and the FBI in getting to the bottom of what had happened in Mexico City was “the strangest experience of my life.”

17

THE OFFICES OF THE COMMISSION

WASHINGTON, DC

JANUARY 1964

Francis Adams, the former New York City police commissioner, towered over the other staff lawyers. The fifty-nine-year-old Adams was well over six feet tall. And Arlen Specter, his junior partner on the team responsible for reconstructing the events of the assassination, said it was not just Adams’s height that made him seem big; it was Adams’s sense of his own importance in the world. He was “the picture of the high-powered Wall Street lawyer,” always convinced he could bend anyone to his will, Specter remembered.