A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (83 page)

She denied, as she had for so many years, that she had a sexual relationship with Oswald—if only, she claimed, because she had found him so unattractive. She said the suggestion that she would sleep with him was insulting. “Please!” she said in English in a mocking tone. “They say he was my lover? Please, please. Oswald was that size,” she said, holding out her hand to suggest that Oswald was short. (He was five foot nine inches tall.) “How could I be a lover of this man who was so insignificant?” She denied the many reports and rumors, which were investigated but never proved by the Warren Commission and later U.S. government investigations, that she had worked as a spy for Cuba or Mexico, or possibly even for the CIA.

She said she remembered the dance party described by Elena Garro and that Oswald was not there. She recalled that there were Americans at the party, including an American “movie star” she would not identify, saying that she thought the actor was still alive and she did not want to create trouble for him. Asked why her cousin Elena would make up such an extraordinary story and claim that Duran and Oswald had an affair, Duran said that her cousin was “crazy—she was completely out of her mind.… I don’t think she hates me so much. I think she was crazy.” And why would Garro’s daughter say the same thing? “She had a lot of psychological problems,” Duran replied. Elena and her daughter “were both pretty crazy, always.”

I pointed out that it was not just the Garros who alleged the affair between Duran and Oswald. The interrogation reports prepared by the Mexican secret police show that she was questioned repeatedly after the assassination about whether she had “intimate relations” with Oswald, as if the police had evidence of it. Why had her friend the artist claimed in 1967 that she had told him about an affair? She replied that she might have been a victim of the lies of jealous men who had wanted to sleep with her—but whom she refused. “I was married,” she said. “That’s why I get so mad when I read all of this. It’s all gossip.… They want to say everybody was my lover—the ambassador, the consul.” She insisted again—as she had been insisting for years—that she saw Oswald only within the confines of the Cuban consulate during two visits on a single day in September 1963. “I didn’t do anything beyond the normal” in trying to help him with his visa application, she said. “I only saw him inside the consulate. I never saw him outside the consulate—never, never, never.”

*

It was only a few weeks later that we tracked down a new witness who contradicted an important element of the story that Duran had just told us—her former sister-in-law, Lidia Duran Navarro, a renowned Mexican choreographer. Lidia is eighty-five and her memory has faded on many of the details of the weeks before and after Kennedy’s assassination. Although her late brother and Silvia Duran divorced decades ago, Lidia expressed only fondness for Silvia. Lidia said she had always doubted that Silvia would have had an affair with Oswald. Her reasoning was the same as her former sister-in-law’s: Oswald, Lidia said, was too physically unattractive to be taken as a lover. “It’s absurd,” Lidia said. “He was a weakling puppet, with a fool’s face.”

But Lidia did have a clear memory of something that Silvia had told her in confidence decades ago—that, despite all of Silvia’s claims to the contrary, she had gone out on at least one date in Mexico City with Oswald. According to Lidia, a smitten Oswald invited Silvia to a lunch date at a Sanborns restaurant close to the Cuban consulate. (She distinctly remembered it was a Sanborns, part of a popular Mexican chain of restaurants with that name.) And Silvia, she said, accepted. “She should not have accepted an invitation coming from an American,” Lidia recalled. Diplomats at the Cuban embassy were furious when they discovered that Duran had dared to be seen on a date with an American, even one who claimed to be a devoted supporter of Castro’s revolution. “The Cubans scolded her,” Lidia recalled.

If Lidia’s account is correct, Silvia has never told the truth in her central assertion that she “never, never, never” met Oswald outside the Cuban consulate and that she and Oswald discussed only his visa application. In fact, according to Lidia, Silvia Duran went out on a date—at least once—with a man who appeared eager to impress her with his support for Cuba’s revolution and who, less than two months later, would kill the president of the United States.

*

In June 2013, Xanic and I located two men—both prominent Mexican newspapermen, both friendly with Silvia Duran in the 1960s—who would blow much larger holes in her story. The first, Oscar Contreras, a columnist for the Mexican newspaper
El Mañana
, was the same journalist who came forward in 1967 to report that, while he was a law student and prominent Castro sympathizer at a Mexico City university four years earlier, he had spent time with Oswald, who had wanted his help to obtain a Cuban visa. That much of the story Contreras had told many years before.

But what he said in 2013 went much further and suggested far more extensive contacts between Oswald and Cuban agents in Mexico—contacts that Duran said never occurred. Contreras said that he not only encountered Oswald at the university; he also saw him again at a reception a few days later at the Cuban embassy. “I saw him at a distance, talking to people,” said Contreras, who said he did not approach Oswald at the reception because of warnings from Cuban friends that he might be some sort of CIA plant. Why had Contreras not told American officials in Mexico about Oswald’s mysterious appearance at a Cuban diplomatic reception? There was a simple answer, Contreras said: the diplomats never asked.

And then we found arguably the most important, most credible witness of all: Elena Garro’s nephew Francisco Guerrero Garro, a prominent Mexican newspaperman who had been a twenty-three-year-old university student at the time of the Kennedy assassination and who has kept his silence for half a century about what he knew about Lee Harvey Oswald.

Guerrero, now seventy-three, a founder and the retired editor in chief of
La Jornada
, a major left-wing newspaper in Mexico, said he had said nothing about Oswald for decades out of fear that what he knew would put his family in danger. “I had never wanted to tell,” he said. “We did get scared back then when we realized many of the people involved in the Kennedy case died” in mysterious circumstances.

Guerrero’s secret? He said he had been at the party where his aunt had encountered Oswald and Silvia Duran. In fact, he had driven his aunt and his mother—Deva Guerrero, Elena’s sister—to the party. And he said he is certain that he saw Oswald, too. “He was standing there, next to the chimney,” Guerrero said. “His face was unmistakable … he was very gloomy. He was just standing there, looking at the people, like scrutinizing people.… I can swear that he was there.”

In the hours after the Kennedy assassination and the first images of Oswald were made public, he recalled, there was a panicked telephone conversation between his mother and his aunt, Elena Garro.

“I heard my mom say on the phone: ‘It’s not possible! It’s not possible! Really, Elena, it’s not possible! Are you sure?… I’ll be right there.’” Guerrero said his mother ordered him to get the family car. “She then tells me, ‘Take me to Elena’s house.’” Guerrero said he protested that he needed to leave for class and his mother replied, “Doesn’t matter. Take me to Elena’s house.”

They drove straight to the home of Elena Garro, who had a television, and together they watched the first reports from Dallas, and saw the first flickering images of Oswald under arrest. Guerrero remembered that his mother and Elena turned to each other and became hysterical as they realized that they had seen the president’s assassin at a family party a few weeks earlier. “Yes, yes, that’s him, that’s him!” he remembered everyone yelling out. “His face appeared on TV again and again,” he said. “My mom would insist: ‘It is him! It is him!’”

He remembered asking out loud if the Mexican secret police would somehow try to implicate his family in the Kennedy assassination if it became known that they had attended a party where Oswald had been. “What the hell do we have to do with this? We only went to a party where this man was. We didn’t take him there.”

His mother vowed to keep her silence forever about what she had seen, Francisco said. She was a dedicated Communist—the political opposite of her sister, Elena—and she knew how to keep secrets at a time when being a declared Marxist in Mexico could be dangerous. Everyone else at the party decided to keep silent too, Francisco said. “There was consensus that it was him [Oswald],” he said. “But nobody wanted to talk about this. I think they were afraid. I was afraid myself.”

The subject became “taboo,” he said. “No one spoke about it.”

He said the one person who did tell authorities about the party and about Oswald was his aunt, Elena, and that she went to talk to someone at the United States embassy—“with whom, I do not know”—either the day after the assassination or the following day. She was driven there, he said, by one of his uncles, Albano Garro, Elena’s brother, who has since died. Francisco remembered that his uncle was angry because Elena, who only intended to stay fifteen minutes at the embassy, did not leave for nearly four hours. He heard from his mother that Elena Garro then received telephone calls “several times” from someone at the embassy “as if it was an important matter.”

*

There is no absolute proof in the archives of the CIA or the Mexican government that Silvia Duran was anyone’s spy, although there was clearly plenty of suspicion about it in 1963 and 1964. Duran insists today, as she has in the past, that she spent no time with Oswald outside of the four walls of the Cuban consulate. But if Duran has been telling the truth all these years, many, many people must have lied, including people who were her relatives and once close friends, some of whom are still alive today. And half a century later, why would they still be lying?

The credibility of the people I have tracked down in Mexico for this book is enhanced by the fact that they have not tried, like so many in the United States and elsewhere, to profit from what they knew about the president’s assassin. They have not written tell-all books or attempted to sell interviews. The same is true for the survivors of Charles William Thomas. His widow, Cynthia, and other members of his family have refused for decades to talk to journalists about what happened to a fine man whose cherished career, and then whose life, ended so cruelly for reasons they have never fully understood. I am honored that all of these people would take the risk of talking to me, with no promise of anything but my commitment to try to determine if what Elena Garro told Charles Thomas all those years ago was true—that Lee Harvey Oswald was invited by Silvia Duran to a dance party in Mexico City attended by Cuban diplomats and spies, as well as Mexican supporters of Castro’s government, and that some of the guests had spoken openly of their hope that someone would assassinate President John F. Kennedy, if only to ensure the survival of the revolution in Cuba that Kennedy had been so desperate to crush. “The fact is we saw Oswald at the party,” Francisco Guerrero Garro insists today. “We met and saw and spoke with someone who then went and killed the president of the United States.”

Washington, DC

September 2013

Notes

The page numbers for the notes that appeared in the print version of this title are not in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for the relevant passages documented or discussed.

The Warren Commission (the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy) published a final 888-page report, as well as a twenty-six-volume appendix of hearing transcripts and evidence reports. For the purposes of simplicity, they are identified in these endnotes as Warren Report (for the central volume) and Warren Appendix (volumes 1–26). There were two major congressional investigations in the 1970s that reviewed the work of the Warren Commission, one by the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (better known as the Church Committee, named for its chairman, Senator Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho), the other by the House Select Committee on Assassinations. They are identified in these notes as the Church Committee and HSCA. In 1992, largely in response to conspiracy theories fueled by the Oliver Stone film
JFK
, Congress created the Assassination Records Review Board, to review and release assassination-related records. In these notes, the board is referred to as ARRB. Most Warren Commission records are stored by the National Archives and Records Administration (hereafter NARA). Other valuable records about the commission’s work are found at the Library of Congress (hereafter LOC), the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan (hereafter Ford Library), the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas (hereafter LBJ Library), the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston (hereafter JFK Library), and the Richard B. Russell Library at the University of Georgia Library at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia (hereafter Russell Library).

In the decades after the assassination, virtually all of the FBI’s internal files regarding the Warren Commission and the Kennedy assassination have been declassified and made public. Most are maintained electronically, largely in chronological order, by the Mary Ferrell Foundation and other private assassination-research organizations, as well as by the National Archives. The FBI archives of assassinated-related documents (hereafter FBI) are to some degree searchable online on the Mary Ferrell Web site:
http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/JFK_Documents_-_FBI
.

I was the first outside researcher to have access to the uncensored transcripts of interviews conducted with the late senator Arlen Specter for his 2000 memoir,
Passion for Truth.
The transcripts are stored at the Arlen Specter Center for Public Policy at Philadelphia University, which opened in 2013. In the full interviews, Specter offered opinions that he chose not to share in his book, including harsh criticism of Chief Justice Warren and of elements of the commission’s work. I interviewed Specter myself. For the purposes of these notes, Specter’s interviews for his memoirs are identified hereafter as Specter memoir transcripts. Material from my interviews is identified as Specter interviews.