Authors: John Newman
On this question we find the CIA transcriber's notes useful. The transcriber of the Saturday phone call did not identify the woman speaking as Duran at the time of the transcription. The female speaker was described as "someone at the Cuban Consulate later identified as Sylvia Duran," which contrasts sharply with the September 27 transcript in which Silvia Duran is definitely and immediately identified. Again, the ostensible subject-an address-about which the person claiming to be Oswald was calling was not a legitimate issue with the embassy. The idea that the staffs of both consulates were engaged with Oswald and each other over an address on their off-duty time seems ridiculous. As previously stated, we will return in Chapter Nineteen to Duran's insistence that Oswald did not return on Saturday. For now we will note that it appears that as of Saturday morning, the impostors were proceeding without knowing what had happened to Oswald while he was inside the Soviet Embassy.
The CIA has not officially acknowledged any calls on Monday, September 30. Does the lack of activity on Monday make sense? The answer is yes if Oswald had-as the Soviets maintain he hadaccepted the fact that he would not get a visa. The answer is no if he changed his mind and decided that it was still worth pursuing a visa in Mexico City. The answer is also no if the impostors still had their own reasons for keeping the Oswald reality in play. Monday would have provided an opportunity to keep the game going. It was a business day. Is there evidence of additional intercepted phone calls? Not surprisingly, there is, and it comes from credible CIA sources.
Mrs. T's Missing Transcript
There is substantial anecdotal evidence that other Oswald-related telephone calls were intercepted and transcribed by the CIA in Mexico City. Consider, for example, Winston Scott's manuscript, Foul Foe, which claims that Oswald contacted the Soviet Embassy four times. Win Scott was the longtime chief of the CIA Mexico City station, and close friend of CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton. After Scott's death in April, 1971, Angleton flew to Mexico City, removed the contents of Scott's safe, and demanded that the family turn over Scott's papers to him. Angleton returned to Washington with, among other things, a manuscript. The manuscript, which has never been published, contains this passage:
Oswald told a high-ranking officer of the Soviet Embassy that that officer should have had word from the Soviet Embassy in Washington about his visit and its purpose, after he had spelled out his full name, slowly and carefully, for this Soviet. He further told this Soviet that he should know that Oswald, his wife and child wanted to go to the Crimea, urgently, and that he (Oswald) had learned that he would have to go by way of Cuba. Oswald was then directed to the Cuban Embassy by the Soviet, who told Oswald that he would need a Cuban transit visas'
This became important, says Scott, after the Warren Commission Report was published, because, "on page 777 of that report the erroneous statement was made that it was not known that Oswald had visited the Cuban Embassy until after the assassination!"" We will return to that statement and its true origin in Chapter Nineteen.
What Scott is describing, however, appears to be a conversation not in any of the extant transcripts. In none of them does Oswald spell his name, let alone enunciate it slowly. Moreover, the name Oswald does not appear in any of the transcripts until the October 1, 10:45 A.M. call. HSCA investigator Eddie Lopez noticed Scott's remark about Oswald spelling "his name very slowly and carefully," and remarked that "although the transcripts available do not bear out Scott's recollections, there are interesting parallels with the testimony of [redacted] and David Phillips."
We will shortly return to Phillips's offerings on this subject, but there was more in Win Scott's manuscript suggestive of other intercepted phone calls. Take, for example, this passage:
Lee Harvey Oswald, having just arrived in Mexico City, made his first contact with the Soviet Embassy in Mexico, giving them his name very slowly and carefully, and saying that the Soviet Embassy in Mexico should have received word from the Soviet Embassy in Washington that he (Oswald) would contact them about a visa for himself, his wife, who he said was a Soviet citizen, and their child.54
This is the same missing call on Friday, only here Scott provides the additional detail that word was expected from the Soviet Embassy in Washington. A question about a telegram from Washington was asked in the October 1 call at 10:45 A.M. Finally, Scott's manuscript also states that while Oswald was in Duran's office, Oswald "decided to ask the help of a Soviet Embassy official in convincing the Cubans that they should give Oswald the transit visa through Cuba, even before he had his Soviet visa. This, he did."5 While this appears similar to the (probably fictitious) Saturday morning (11:51 A.M.) call, the Oswald character said nothing about visas in the transcript that survives.
More than Win Scott's manuscript suggests there were other calls. Convincing evidence comes from a person who actually remembers typing a transcript that bears no resemblance to those that exist today. The Lopez Report probed the possibility that additional phone calls were intercepted by the surveillance team, and discovered credible evidence that this had been the case. Mrs. T, who assisted her husband, Mr. T, in transcribing tapes from the Soviet Embassy, testified before the HSCA on April 12, 1978. Mrs. T recognized as her husband's work the transcripts from the conversations intercepted on 9/28/63, at 11:51 A.M.; on 10/1/63, at 10:31 A.M. and 10:45 A.M.; and on 10/3/63.56 Her recognition of these transcripts as her husband's was based on "the style of his writing or typing and the use of slash marks."
In addition to her husband's work, Mrs. T testified that she, too, transcribed tapes, at least one [LE*] of which "involved" Oswald. According to the Lopez Report, this is what she said:
According to my recollection, I myself, have made a transcript, an English transcript, of Lee Oswald talking to the Russian Consulate or whoever he was at that time, asking for financial aid. Now, that particular transcript does not appear here and whatever happened to it, I do not know, but it was a lengthy transcript and I personally did that transcript. It was a lengthy conversation between him and someone at the Russian Embassy.
This transcript was "approximately two pages long," Mrs. T testified, and "the caller identified himself as Lee Oswald" [emphasis added]. To test her claim, the HSCA tried to see if she was actually referring to the 10/1/63 call, but her story appears unshakable.
Mr. T testified that he recognized the 10/1/63 conversation as his work because the name Lee Oswald was underlined. Mr. T then added this important detail:
We got a request from the station to see if we can pick up the name of this person because sometimes we had a so-called "defector" from the United States that wanted to go to Russia and we had to keep an eye on them. Not I-the Station. Consequently they were very hot about the whole thing. They said, "If you can get the name because I put them in capitals. In this case I did because it was so important to them."57
Mr. T said he had no idea how "Oswald had come to the Station's attention prior to this conversation or what led to the request to get his name." In his testimony, he "speculated that it was possible that Oswald first came to the Station's attention through Oswald's contacts with the Cuban Embassy" [emphasis added].
Could she have confused her call with the 10/1/63, 10:45 A.M. conversation? the HSCA asked. Mrs. T stuck to her guns and then added a crucial detail:
This would not be the conversation that I would be recalling for the simple reason that this is my husband's work and at that time probably the name didn't mean much of anything. But this particular piece of work that I am talking about is something that came in and it was marked as urgentS9 [emphasis added].
Mrs. T explained the procedure for "urgent tapes" and the HSCA confirmed this procedure through its own review of the files. She said a piece of paper would be enclosed with the reel indicating the footage number locating the conversation that had been requested for "priority handling over the other conversations on the reel." After transcription, the translators would "immediately notify their contact and then turn the transcript over to him on the same day that it had been delivered."
If Mrs. T is telling the truth, there is a missing transcript. If it was the only one marked urgent, then the missing transcript was probably the most important call of the lot. Naturally, the HSCA wanted to know what was on the transcript:
[Mrs. T] was questioned about the details of the conversation which she remembered. She stated that Oswald definitely identified himself and that he was seeking financial aid from the Russians. (H)e was persistent in asking for financial aid in order to leave the country. They were not about to give him any financial aid whatsoever. He had also mentioned that he tried the Cuban Embassy and they had also refused financial aid.
Oswald spoke only English, Mrs. T explained, and the 10/1/63, 10:45 A.M. conversation could not be the call that she remembered for four reasons. First, because that transcript indicates that Oswald spoke in broken Russian; second, because that transcript is shorter than the one she remembers; third, that transcript is in her husband's style as opposed to her own; and fourth, there is no mention of Oswald's finances in the transcript.
It is also possible that the missing transcript was from a call made on Tuesday. The CIA transcripts indicate two more calls [LE7 and LE8] were made on Tuesday, October 1, but neither transcript resembles Mrs. T's description of the offer of information for money. The two calls acknowledged by the CIA transcripts were made by the same man and, in the second of these calls, he said, "My name is Oswald."60 The caller asked the Soviets to check on the status of the telegram to the Soviet Embassy in Washington. This request raises the same problem as the Saturday morning call: It does not logically follow from the events as known from other source material. If Oswald had been eager to learn about a response from the Soviet Embassy in Washington, he would have done so on Monday. Moreover, what sense does it make for the real Oswald to be checking on his visa application after he had decided not to fill out the application? This request for a check with Washington adds up only in this scenario: The impostors knew that Oswald was seeking a visa and that the Soviet Consulate had sent a telegram to Washington, but they did not know that Oswald had, inside the Soviet Consulate on Saturday, declined to fill out the application.
Of the eight calls attributed to or involving Oswald, his name appeared in only one of them: the last call at 10:45 A.M. on Tuesday.' This too seems odd. There must be something more going on here. It seems likely that the impostors who made the Saturday call knew of an American's presence in the consulates but did not yet know his name. In order to make sense of this, we need to know when the transcripts from the Friday (legitimate) and Saturday (impostor) calls circulated inside the CIA station. Not surprisingly, here too we face a dubious account. The CIA station personnel told the HSCA that the Saturday transcripts was available on Monday and that the Friday transcripts were available on Tuesday.62 Is this credible? Why would the Saturday transcript take forty-eight hours to show up in the CIA station and the Friday transcripts take ninetysix hours?
The key question is, why did it take so long for the Friday Duran- Kostikov conversation to become available? According to the Lopez Report, "Ms. Goodpasture brought these transcripts into the Station on that [Tuesday] morning and put them on [redacted] desk."63 Now the importance of Mrs. T's claim that Oswald identified himself in the missing transcript becomes apparent. If our impostor scenario is correct, it means the impostors had discovered Oswald's name by the time of that call: If the missing transcript was from Monday, then Oswald's name was known as of Monday; if the transcript was from Tuesday, then Oswald's name was not known until then. This leads us to the most important question of all: How did the impostors learn of Oswald's name in the first place?
In this connection we are drawn back to Mr. T's speculation, mentioned above, that Oswald's name first came to the station's attention through his contacts with the Cuban Embassy. If he is right, then the CIA's knowledge of what happened inside the Cuban Consulate is the key to the puzzle. Did the CIA station learn Oswald's name through an informant inside the Cuban Consulate? From a bug in the wall? From photographic coverage of the entrance? For thirty years the CIA has claimed they did not know that Oswald was inside the consulate until after the Kennedy assassination. In the next chapter we will demonstrate that this is a lie-a cover story to protect CIA sources inside. For now it is sufficient to stay focused on the fact that it was Goodpasture who walked into the CIA station with the Cuban Consulate transcripts in her hands on Tuesday.
Who in the CIA station figured out that Oswald had visited the Cuban Consulate? At the end of Goodpasture's career, David Phillips, not Win Scott, wrote up her retirement award in 1973. It contained this passage: "She was the case officer who was responsible for the identification of Lee Harvey Oswald in his dealings with the Cuban Embassy in Mexico."Besides her role "in support of the successful coup against the communist government in Guatemala in 1954," her identification of Oswald in the Cuban Consulate was the only specific action in her entire career singled out by Phillips in her award.
There is something strange about Ann Goodpasture's role in the CIA Mexico City station. She may have been functioning in a special capacity outside the control of the station chief, Win Scott, her nominal supervisor there. A key clue is this: Scott gave her a lukewarm fitness report for 1963, whereas Phillips singled out this same performance as the jewel in her tiara. From the fitness report and award recommendation we know something else about Goodpasture: She was connected to a super-secret element at headquarters: Staff D.61 According to David Martin's CIA study Wilderness of Mirrors, Staff D "was a small Agency component responsible for communications intercepts."66 In addition, within Staff D was hidden the ZR/ RIFLE project, the Agency's program to develop a capability for assassination. According to the 1967 CIA inspector general's report, it was the Staff D "workshop" that throughout the night of November 20, 1963, fashioned the poison-pen device with which AM/ LASH (Rolando Cuebela) was to murder Castro." "D was the perfect cranny," according to Martin, "in which to tuck a particularly nasty piece of of business" like ZR/RIFLE.