Authors: John Newman
In his memoirs, station chief Win Scott mocked this cover story and said that his station had immediately cabled headquarters with
"every piece of information" about Oswald's visits to the Cuban consulate.'
If the recollections of all these people are correct, the record has been altered.'S
When I showed the documents to Helms in 1994, he agreed it was obvious the CIA had known at the time, and he opined that the reason for the cover-up was to protect the Agency's sources and methods. While that may be true, there was more at stake than the Agency's sources and methods. We will return to this issue shortly when we examine what else the CIA had to cover up in the immediate wake of the president's murder.
Lowering Oswald's Threat Profile
If the CIA station chief and his subordinates are telling the truth about the tapes they transcribed and the cables they sent to CIA HQS, then the following sequence of events is most likely what happened after the station reported the Tuesday call linking Oswald to Kostikov. It took several more days for the station to link the Tuesday tape to the tape from the previous Saturday. That tape had fabricated a call from the Cuban consulate to the Soviet Embassy, but because Oswald's name had not been used it took some time and analysis to figure out the relationship between these two calls.
The amount of time that it took the Station Chief-at least two weeks-to discover Oswald's visits to the Cuban Consulate is unusual. The check of the photographic coverage of the front door of the Soviet Embassy around the time of the Tuesday call had produced a photo of someone who was not Oswald. The official record that exists today holds that there were no photos of Oswald entering and leaving the Cuban Consulate. On the other hand, there is reason to believe this is not true and that the Station Chief, Winn Scott, was eventually able to get his hands on two surveillance photos of Oswald. Two people working under Scott, the Deputy Chief of Station Stanley Watson and another subordinate, Joe Piccolo, both independently described to HSCA investigators
a rear profile shot of Oswald, face turned so that three quarters of it was visible.''
Jefferson Morley's biography of Scott, Our Man in Mexico, lays out the case that the Cuban operations chief at the station, David Phillips, deliberately kept the station chief "but of the loop" on the Cuban story. Scott was particularly unhappy with Phillips' handling of the surveillance on Oswald-so much so that while, in April 1963, Scott had maxed out Phillips' performance evaluation and said he was one of the best intelligence officers he had ever worked with, in 1964 he knocked Phillips down in 2 of the 3 performance categories.
It is not clear when Scott found out about the photos but, before the end of October, he found out about Oswald's visits to the Cuban Consulate. Once it was established that it was the same person speaking on the call from that consulate that spelled Oswald's name on the Tuesday call, the CIA station concluded that Oswald had been inside the Cuban consulate on Saturday, 28 September. The station reported this to HQS. Later still, when the legitimate phone conversation between Kostikov and Duran about Oswald was discovered, Scott was able conclude that Oswald had been inside the Cuban consulate on Friday, 27 September, as well. This, too, was reported by the station to CIA HQS.
Another reason for concluding that Scott was not initially in the loop on the Oswald photos is that, after receiving Scelso's 10 October response, the station chief asked HQS for a photo of Oswald. He did so because the physical description of Oswald in Scelso's response did not match the person photographed entering the Soviet Embassy around the time of the Tuesday call. Naturally, Scott wanted to know what Oswald really looked like. The CIA Station Chief was doing what he was supposed to do-following up. HQS never did send the photo, and never did provide the station with anything useful -largely because the Mexico desk at HQS was shut out of the Mexican operation in which Oswald had been involved.
Did Phillips keep the photos from Scott'? Was Scott correct in thinking that he was being purposefully kept in the dark by Phillips? If the answers to these questions are yes, what does all of this mean? The suppression at CIA HQS, after the assassination, of the Mexico City cables on Oswald's Cuban contacts lowered his CIA profile between his visit and the assassination and provided cover for why no alarm had been sounded. However, this was after the assassination, and those involved thought that they were protecting the country, the Agency, and their jobs. It was the deliberate and well organized lowering of his profile before the assassination-especially its Cuban dimensions-that had prevented the alarm from sounding when it might have saved Kennedy's life. If Win Scott was right about Phillips, then it is probably not a coincidence that his actions in Mexico were designed to lower Oswald's profile there.
The removal of Oswald's troubling 1962 FBI debrief, the exclusion of the Cuban story from his 201 file, and restricting the most sensitive facts about Oswald and Kostikov to a few people on Angleton's staff and the Cuban affairs staff lowered Oswald's profile to the extent that the very operational elements responsible for reacting to the cables from the Mexico station were unable to see the real picture and sound the alarm.
That is precisely what happened at the FBI at this time as well. On 8 October, the very day that the Mexico City story on Oswald arrived at FBI HQS, Marvin Gheesling took Oswald off of the espionage watch list-a list he had been on since his defection to the USSR on Halloween Day, 1959. Moreover, the person in the CIA's SAS who handled liaison with the FBI, Austin Horn, was wired into Oswald's Cuban and the operation in Mexico and thus had reason to believe that there was a legitimate counter-FPCC operation ongoing in Mexico. Horn had no reason to alert the FBI that the Oswald story in Mexico was cause for concern.
With no warning indicators from the CIA, Gheesling's removal of Oswald from the watch list at FBI ensured that Oswald would not be placed on the security index and, therefore, would be on the parade route when the president's motorcade passed the Texas School Book Depository. FBI Director Hoover censured Gheesling for his action. Why Gheesling has never been deposed and asked why he removed Oswald from the list-or who told him to do it-is one of the lingering questions in this unsolved case.
The Oswald "Electric Effect" at the CIA
A pro-Castro, pro-Soviet, saboteur and defector, trying to defect again to the USSR, and trying to go to Cuba illegally, who had met with the top KGB assassin in the Americas, returned to Dallas Texas and took a job in the Book Depository on the president's parade route. By 22 November, several cables on all of this had come to rest on various desks in the FBI and CIA and no action had been taken. Oswald had not been put on the FBI's Security Index-a precaution that would have required his removal from the Dallas parade route. Everything was in place for the perfect storm.
Because the Mexico City story immediately took center stage at the secret level, Scelso headed up the initial internal CIA investigation of the president's murder. His report on what happened at CIA HQS in the moments after the assassination is illuminating. The Agency's operating divisions, like the rest of America, had their radios on when Oswald's name came across the airwaves as the assassin. The "effect" at CIA, Scelso wrote, "was electric." This electric effect at the CIA derived partly from the fact that so many of the Agency's sections, including several branches in the Soviet Russia Division, several in the Cuban operations staff, several in the Counterintelligence staff, and still more in the Security Office, had all been keeping files on him.
When the top officials at CIA found out that Oswald's contacts with Kostikov had been sitting-largely unnoticed-in their files for the previous six weeks, the electric effect increased to high voltage. The custodian of Oswald's 201 file, Ann Egeter, later testified to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), that Oswald's "contact" with Kostikov "caused a lot of excitement" at HQS.''
By the time of the president's autopsy, the dimensions of the Agency's failure to react began to dawn on Washington. For the next 40 years, the Kostikov story became one of the CIA's most closely guarded secrets on the Oswald case. The same was true at the FBI.
At CIA, the anti-Cuban operation involving Oswald was the immediate problem. It raised the possibility that Castro had turned an Agency operation against JFK. This, along with Kostikov's role in KGB assassinations, forced the creation of a national security cover-up that weekend. While those involved in putting it together probably had no role in Oswald's murder, his death on Sunday was convenient. Writing about it shortly afterward Hoover observed, "The thing I am concerned about, and so is Mr. Katzenbach, is having something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the
real assassin."2"
On Monday, Deputy Attorney General Katzenbach prepared a memo for the White House directing that "speculation" about Oswald be "cut off' and that the thought that the assassination was a communist conspiracy or a "right-wing conspiracy to blame it on the communists" had to be rebutted. The public had to be "satisfied," the memo stated, that Oswald had acted alone and that the "evidence" would have convicted him at a trial.-y
Katzenbach invited the executive branch of government to use "editorial license" in handling the Oswald case. Over at the CIA this was already in full swing. As previously noted, the CIA altered the cable record with the Mexico station to hide what the Agency had known about Oswald's role in the Cuban operation before the assassination. Those cables, however, turned out to be only the tip of the iceberg. As the CIA station in Mexico scoured its internal records in the hours after the assassination, they uncovered another huge problem.
Hoover: The CIA's "False Story"About Oswald's Trip to Mexico City
The revelation that an Oswald imposter spoke about meeting a KGB assassin was inconsistent with the larger story being erected for public consumption-that there had been no conspiracy. The linking of Oswald to Kostikov by an impersonator was most likely the reason that the Katzenbach memo called for the rebuttal of any thought that the assassination was a "right-wing conspiracy to blame it on the communists." The impersonation had to be suppressed in order to maintain the lone nut facade called for in the Katzenbach directive. Because the voice on the tapes was proof of the impersonation the tapes themselves had to be suppressed.
There was a darker purpose, however, for the suppression of the tapes. As long as the tapes survived, the story in them was undermined by the fact that Oswald's voice was not on them. The coverup of the Mexico tapes began three hours after Hoover told Johnson that the voice on them was not Oswald's. If this dark detail became widely known, LBJ would not be able to play the WWIII trump card on leaders like Senator Russell and Chief Justice Warren. It is possible that the order to concoct a cover story saying that the tapes were erased before the assassination came from the White House.
The problem was that, besides the President and the FBI Director, the truth about the voice on the tapes was known by FBI agents in Dallas and in the Bureau's crime lab; and this discomforting news was spreading fast. Hoover had already sent a memo to Secret Service Chief James Rowley about the voice on the I October tape, and the Dallas Special Agent in Charge, Gordon Shanklin, had already phoned the number-three man at FBI HQS, Belmont, to tell him that the voice on the tape of the 28 September call was not Oswald. Belmont had already put this information in a memo to the number two man at HQS, Clyde Tolson.
At CIA HQS. the man in charge of the Agency's investigation, John Scelso, had already learned that, while some tapes had been erased, some of "the actual tapes were also reviewed," and that another copy of the I October "intercept on Lee Oswald" had been "discovered after the assassination.""
Scelso was not the problem. He would soon he relieved of his duties investigating the assassination and would be-not surprisingly- replaced by the Chief of Counterintelligence, Angleton. The immediate problem was the tapes from Mexico, and the cover-up about the voice on them had to be led by the CIA. The FBI would have to fall in line. The result was awkward and sloppy.
The cover-up was apparently put in motion by Anne Goodpasture in the CIA station in Mexico City-unless someone else altered the cables she sent after the fact. Files released in the mid-1990s show she sent a cable at noon (I I'.M. EST) on 23 November stating that a voice comparison between two of the intercepted phone calls had
not been made at the time of Oswald's visit because the tape of the Saturday, 28 September call had been erased before the tape of the 1 October call was received at the station.32
This was not true, however, as tapes were kept for at least two weeks before erasure. Furthermore, Goodpasture's marginalia on a Washington Post article a year later clearly indicates that a voice comparison had been made at the station by "Finglass," an alias for the CIA translator who transcribed the tapes that October."
This fact, and Goodpasture's changing story, raises the possibility that her cables might have been altered after the fact by someone other than her.