Authors: John Newman
There is also a memorandum dated 16 October 1963 from [redacted, but likely "Win Scott"] COS Mexico City to the United States Ambassador there concerning Oswald's visit to Mexico City and to the Soviet Embassy there in late September-early October 1963. Subsequently there were several Mexico City cables in October 1963 also concerned with Oswald's visit to Mexico City, as well as his visits to the Soviet and Cuban Embassies.60
In this case the significance of the Kalaris memo is that it disclosed the existence of preassassination knowledge of Oswald's activities in the Cuban Consulate, and that this had been put into cables in October 1963.61
Win Scott's unpublished manuscript backs up the Kalaris memo on Oswald and the Cuban Consulate-and then some. Scott wrote this passage:
In fact, Lee Harvey Oswald became a person of great interest to us during this 27 September to 2 October, 1963 period. He contacted the Soviet Embassy on at least four occasions, and once went directly from the office of Sra. Sylvia Tirado de Duran, a Mexican employee of the Cuban Consulate, to his friends, the Soviets. During the conversation with the Soviet official, he said, "I was in the Cuban Embassy-and they will not give me a transit visa through Cuba until after I have my Soviet visa."62
Literally taken, this would have to be from a transcript the Agency has never released, from an informant inside the Soviet Consulate, or bogus. Scott may have been referring to the Saturday, September 28 call in which the Duran character puts the Oswald character on the line. However, Scott has added the remark about the Cuban visa refusal, whereas the transcript recently released to the public has the memorable discussion about an address.
On the larger issue of when the Agency knew Oswald had been in the Cuban Consulate, Scott's manuscript, Foul Foe, contained this indictment of the Warren Commission:
This contact became important after the Warren Commission Report on the assassination of President Kennedy was published; for 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!
Every piece of information concerning Lee Harvey Oswald was reported immediately after it was received to: U.S. Ambassador Thomas C. Mann, by memorandum; the FBI Chief in Mexico, by memorandum; and to my headquarters by cable; and included in each and every one of these reports was the conversation Oswald had, so far as it was known. These reports were made on all his contacts with both the Cuban Consulate and with the Soviets.63
While Scott pokes fun at the Warren Commission's error, he fails to address whether the CIA withheld this information from the commission. Moreover, neither the Church Committee nor the HSCA was able to get to the bottom of this issue.
For example, the Lopez Report turned up data that was suggestive but was unable to use it. Critical of the Mexico City station for rechecking the transcripts and discovering the substantive ones that concerned Oswald and reporting them "in a misleading manner," the Lopez Report concluded that Oswald's visit to the Cuban Consulate had been recognized by the Mexico City station shortly after they received the headquarters cable on October 11.64 Nevertheless, Goodpasture's contention that it was not passed on to headquarters remained a problem:
Q: In fact, headquarters did not know that he had also been to the Cuban Embassy?
A: At that point, no.
Q: At least, according to your recollection, it was not until after the assassination that Headquarters was informed of that fact?
A: That is probably right."
Why was this information not passed along? The answer remains elusive.'
"If the cable was sent," Lopez concluded, "it is not in the files made available to the HSCA by the CIA." Still, Lopez did not take this to mean that headquarters did not have other means of learning this information. His report contained this thought:
There is no record that Headquarters had been informed of the 9/27 visits prior to this cable having been sent. It is possible, as some witnesses have suggested, that his information was provided to CIA Headquarters by the FBI in Washington. If that is the case then it merely shifts the question. This may indicate that CIA Headquarters was aware of the 9127 visits prior to the assassina- tionb' [emphasis added].
However, as discussed above, there are indications that there was another cable from the Mexico City station, probably more than one, which discussed the Cuban Consulate visit.
When shown all of these documents today, former CIA officials are reluctant to defend the old story of no preassassination knowledge of Oswald in the Cuban Consulate. When pressed on this point in a recent interview, former director of Central Intelligence Helms had this to say: [shows Helms the minutes of meeting with Rankin and the Kalaris memo]
NEWMAN: You make the statement in Oswald's case that it was the combination of visits to both places, the Cuban and Soviet Embassy, that caused the station to report it in the first place to headquarters. So the point of asking you to look at both of these documents together is to make clear that there is no mistake here, that they reported this in October because he was in both the Soviet and Cuban places and there were several cables about it afterwards. This is what I would conclude from this.
HELMS: Yes.
NEWMAN: Would you say that's a fair characterization?
HELMS: Sure.
NEWMAN: Again, this is a problem.
HELMS: I don't quite understand. What is your problem?
NEWMAN: The problem is that the Agency never admitted to knowing that he was in the Cuban Consulate until after the assassination, after 22 November. That is the problem, sir.
HELMS: I think probably the answer is that they didn't want to blow their source.
NEWMAN: Well, that may be and I appreciate candor in this matter.
HELMS: Sure."
Clearly we have a deepening chasm under the Agency's denial that it knew of Oswald's visit to the Cuban Consulate. Denials of preassassination knowledge about Oswald fit the general pattern of missing pieces in the CIA October 9 and 10 cables. There have been some disturbing reports about the lengths to which the Agency went in order to pretend it did not know this information until after the assassination.
"CIA Withheld Data on Oswald, Assassination Panel Report," said a Los Angeles Times headline over a story by reporter Norman Kempster. The article contained this passage:
Chief Counsel Richard A. Sprague said that the committee staff had learned that a CIA message describing Oswald's activities in Mexico to federal agencies such as the FBI had been rewritten to eliminate any mention of his request for Cuban and Soviet visas. The message was sent in October, more than a month before the assassination.69
Sprague added, in a press conference, that "it was impossible without more information to know why the CIA had censored its own message." The name of the internal CIA component that drafted this cable to the State, FBI and Navy is still classified.
If Sprague's claims are right, there is no telling how many more levels there are in the story of Oswald and the CIA. This alteration of the cable, if it occurred, would be just one more example to add to those we have already discussed, of how the Cuban details about Oswald's escapades were deliberately excised from key places in the CIA cables while being simultaneously entered into the Agency's "smoking file" on Oswald: 100-300-11. The CIA has released to the public a list of documents from their 100-300-11 file. It has been stripped clean of the Oswald reports that were maintained in it during the eight weeks before the president's murder.
As previously mentioned, one other thing the CIA denies knowing about before the assassination was that Kostikov was KGB department thirteen (assassination). It would be an incredible travesty if the CIA knew that Oswald had been linked to a KGB assassination officer and had failed to inform the FBI, which had been sending the Agency reports on Oswald since 1960. But the fact is that the CIA was withholding its anti-Cuban operations in Mexico City from the FBI."' Had the CIA shared all it knew about Oswald in Mexico City with the FBI, John Kennedy might be alive today. That, tragically, was part of the smoke rising from the Oswald files on November 22, 1963.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Conclusion: Beginning
The JFK murder case cannot be truly closed before it has been genuinely opened. It was a tribute to the insanity that has surrounded this subject when, in the fall of 1993, the American national media leveled inordinate praise on a book whose author was attempting to close the case just as the government's files were being opened. That opening was created by the passage of the JFK Records Act in 1992, a law that mandates that the American government must make available all its information on this case.
Three years and two million pages later, there is much that remains closed. Like a huge oil spill, a glut of black "redactions" is still strewn across the pages that have been released. The real opening of this case is in its early stages. But we have finally arrived at the beginning.
For more than three decades the rules for how the case has been presented in the national media were these: The government has the facts, citizens who do not believe the official version of events guess and make mistakes, and the apologists for the official version poke fun at the people who venture their guesses. That game is finished. The rules have changed. The law is now on the side of our right to know as much of the truth about this case as does the government. The only guessing-game left is how much damage to the national psyche has been inflicted in the futile attempt to keep the truth hidden.
The threat to the Constitution posed by the post-World War II evolution of the unbridled power and sometimes lawless conduct of the intelligence agencies is grave. The level of public confidence in American government is now at a crisis stage. The moment that the JFK Records Act was passed in 1992, the Kennedy case became a test for American democracy. It is no longer a matter of whether American institutions were subverted in 1963 and 1964, but whether they can function today.
For this reason, adherents on both sides of the Kennedy assassination debate would do well to keep their eyes on the work of the intelligence agencies and the Review Board. If excuses begin to build, and the exceptions game begins anew, a golden opportunity to reverse this country's slide into cynicism will be lost. The interests of neither side in the debate are served by that outcome. No intelligence source or method can be weighed on the same scale as the trust of the people in their institutions. That this state of distrust has persisted and has been allowed to fester is as tragic as the assassination. It is an unhealed wound on the American body politic.
The purpose of this book is to carry out an examination of the internal records on Oswald in light of the newly released materials. The attempts to resolve the continuing riddles and mysteries of the Oswald files offered here are first impressions. They may change as new information comes to light. It is safe to state now, however, that American intelligence agencies were far more interested in Oswald than the public has been led to believe. Let us review the broad outlines that emerge from our journey through the labyrinth of Oswald's files.
Oswald's Defection to the Soviet Union
Our story has a strange beginning: Oswald's defection, which may have been rehearsed with the help of "unknown" parties, included an explicit threat to give up radar data to the Soviet Union. The dogs did not bark, however, in the United States. Especially at the CIA, where a personality file at headquarters-called a "201" file-should have been opened as a counterintelligence measure, but was not. Fourteen months later, when a 201 was finally opened on Oswald, the Agency's explicit reason for doing so was that he was a defector, a condition that had been explicit from the beginning. Oswald's 1959 defection tripped, not the 201, but the HT/LINGUAL alarm. The CIA's mole-hunters placed Oswald on the supersensitive Lingual Watch List of three hundred persons whose mail was to be secretly opened. Thus the evidence proves that Oswald was of "particular interest" to the CIA a year before his 201 file was opened, rendering the concomitant absence of a 201 file a deliberate act, and not an oversight.
This combination of being on the Watch List without a 201 file makes Oswald special. Perhaps not unique, but certainly peculiar. It was as if someone wanted Oswald watched quietly. The Agency component most likely to have an interest in Oswald, the Soviet Russia Division, was not shown any of the State Department, Navy, or other documents pertaining to Oswald in the first half year after his defection. The incoming material went to either Oswald's soft file at CI/SIG, the mole-hunting unit, or into his file 351-164 in the Security Office. The backdrop for this configuration of Oswald's files was the hunt that had been launched as a result of Popov's 1958 tip that the U-2 program had been betrayed by a mole. Popov's subsequent betrayal, and his arrest-ironically, on the day that Oswald arrived in Moscow-was taken as an indication that the mole was inside the Soviet Russia Division.
Even without knowing what we now do about the chronology of Angleton's mole-hunt, the anomalies surrounding Oswald's early CIA files encourage speculation about whether or not U.S. intelligence had a hand in Oswald's defection. In the Lingual files we encounter evidence that a Soviet man in contact with Oswald at the time of his defection, Leo Setyaev, was translating forms concerning defection to the Soviet Union. At the very least, the way in which Oswald-related information was handled was part of an operation to search out the suspect mole. There is limited evidence that suggests that an Agency counterintelligence operation made use of Oswald's defection.
In the FBI, where a conscious decision was made to open a counterintelligence file, something equally strange happened. Oswald's mother tried to wire Oswald money, tripping a "funds transmitted to Russia" buzzer in the New York FBI office which triggered an FBI investigation into Oswald in Dallas. Yet the information developed by this probe was not filed in Oswald's counterintelligence file at FBI headquarters, but put into a separate location under a domestic security file. This file cross-references into some earlier espionage files at headquarters, at the Washington field office, and at the New York FBI office.