JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (27 page)

In the fall of 1963, as John Kennedy and Fidel Castro sought secretly a way of rapprochement, the CIA took its own secret steps in an opposite direction, toward setting up Lee Harvey Oswald as an identifiable Soviet-and-Cuban-directed assassin of the president. “Sheepdipping,” the process whereby sheep are plunged into a liquid to destroy parasites, had been applied in its intelligence sense to Oswald in New Orleans. There Oswald’s potentially incriminating associations in Fort Worth and Dallas with George de Mohrenschildt and the White Russian community were expunged in the pool of Oswald’s Fair Play for Cuba dramatics. Oswald would now be moved back to Dallas, but with his visible, CIA-connected mentor de Mohrenschildt having been safely removed to Haiti. Into de Mohrenschildt’s place stepped a less visible figure. However, thanks to the dedicated probing of an investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, we have been given a glimpse of the man in the shadows.

In early September, Oswald met CIA agent David Atlee Phillips in the busy lobby of a downtown office building in Dallas. Alpha 66 leader Antonio Veciana, who worked for years under Phillips and knew him by his pseudonym “Maurice Bishop,” witnessed the Dallas scene. He described it in 1975 to the HSCA investigator he had learned to trust, Gaeton Fonzi, who included it in his book
The Last Investigation
: “as soon as he walked in, [Veciana] saw Bishop standing in a corner of the lobby talking with a pale, slight and soft-featured young man. Veciana does not recall if Bishop introduced him by name, but Bishop ended his conversation with the young man shortly after Veciana arrived. Together, they walked out of the lobby onto the busy sidewalk. Bishop and the young man stopped behind Veciana for a moment, had a few additional words, then the young man gestured farewell and walked away. Bishop immediately turned to Veciana and began a discussion of the current activities of Alpha 66 as they walked to a nearby coffee shop. He never spoke to Veciana about the young man and Veciana didn’t ask.”
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On November 22, Veciana would immediately recognize the newspaper and television pictures of Lee Harvey Oswald as being of the young man he had seen in Dallas with his own CIA handler “Maurice Bishop.” However, in his subsequent meetings with Bishop, Veciana would be careful never to allude to the Oswald meeting both men knew he had observed, which if known further could serve as a critical evidentiary link between the CIA and the accused assassin of the president.
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Sixteen years later, after Veciana did finally describe the Oswald meeting to the House Committee and came to the very edge of identifying David Atlee Phillips as “Maurice Bishop,” he was shot in the head by an unidentified gunman in Miami. Veciana recovered from the assassination attempt. He never admitted publicly that Phillips was Bishop, though he acknowledged as much privately to Fonzi.
[112]

When I interviewed Antonio Veciana, he added details about the attempt to assassinate him. He said the FBI had warned him three times that he was about to be killed. Yet after he was shot, the FBI did nothing to investigate the incident. They said it was the responsibility of the Miami police, who in turn did no investigation.
[113]
By avoiding any investigation, the FBI and the police seemed to be deferring to a higher authority.

We have already seen how David Phillips, as Antonio Veciana’s CIA sponsor, guided Alpha 66’s efforts to draw President Kennedy into an all-out war with Fidel Castro. Phillips was Chief of Covert Action at the CIA’s Mexico City Station. Two months before JFK’s murder, Phillips became Mexico City’s Chief of Cuban Operations.
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Phillips was, from the beginning to the end of his CIA career, a team player. Following the Kennedy assassination, he rose to the rank of chief of the CIA’s Western Hemisphere Division. Shortly before his retirement in 1975, he was awarded the Distinguished Intelligence Medal, the CIA’s highest honor.
[115]
In the fall of 1963, David Atlee Phillips was working under Richard Helms, the CIA’s Deputy Director of Plans and mastermind of covert action.

According to the
Warren Report
, Lee Harvey Oswald was in Mexico City from September 27 to October 2, 1963, and visited both the Cuban and Soviet Consulates.
[116]
This is the point at which the person Lee Harvey Oswald begins to disappear down a black hole. As a Cold War actor who took on assigned roles, the person Oswald was never easy to see. In Mexico City the real Oswald almost drops out of sight, but with his absence covered by impersonators and the CIA’s smoke and mirrors.

The CIA’s Mexico City Station kept a close watch on activities at the Cuban and Soviet Consulates. Agents had set up hidden observation posts across the street that took pictures of visitors to the two sites.
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The Agency had also wiretapped the phones at both the Cuban and Soviet facilities.
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Thus, the CIA had front-row surveillance seats for what transpired there.

The Agency’s reports on what were supposedly Lee Harvey Oswald’s visits and phone calls to the two consulates inadvertently revealed more about the CIA than they ever did about Oswald. The Mexico City story being created about Oswald in carefully preserved documents was written with such dexterity in some places, and with such clumsiness in others, that it eventually drew more attention to itself and its authors than it did to its fictionalized subject. As a result, what Oswald himself really did in Mexico City is in fact less certain today than what the CIA did in his name. The documents containing this self-revelation have finally been declassified and made available to the American public during the past decade as a result of the JFK Records Act passed by Congress in 1992. However, only a few dedicated researchers of the Kennedy assassination have studied these materials and have understood their implications.
[119]

On October 9, 1963, CIA headquarters received a cable from its Mexico City Station about an October l phone call to the Soviet Consulate that had been wiretapped, taped, transcribed, and translated from Russian into English. The call came from “an American male who spoke broken Russian” and who “said his name [was] Lee Oswald.”
[120]
The man who said he was Oswald stated that he had been at the Soviet Embassy on September 28, when he spoke with a consul he believed was Valery Vladimirovich Kostikov. He asked “if there [was] anything new re telegram to Washington.” The Soviet guard who answered the phone said nothing had been received yet, but the request had been sent. He then hung up.

The CIA’s October 9 cable from Mexico City is noteworthy in two respects. The first is the connection between Oswald and Valery Vladimirovich Kostikov. Kostikov was well known to the CIA and FBI as the KGB (Soviet Committee for State Security) agent in Mexico City who directed Division 13, the KGB department for terrorism, sabotage, and assassination. Former FBI director Clarence M. Kelley stressed in his autobiography: “The importance of Kostikov cannot be overstated. As [Dallas FBI agent] Jim Hosty wrote later: ‘Kostikov was the officer-in-charge for Western Hemisphere terrorist activities—including and especially assassination. In military ranking he would have been a one-star general. As the Russians would say, he was their Line V man—the most dangerous KGB terrorist assigned to this hemisphere!’”
[121]

Equally noteworthy in the October 9 cable is the evidence it provides that the “Lee Oswald” who made the October 1 phone call was an impostor. The caller, it said, “spoke broken Russian.” The real Oswald was fluent in Russian.
[122]
The cable went on to say that the Mexico City Station had surveillance photos of a man who appeared to be an American entering and leaving the Soviet Embassy on October l. He was described as “apparent age 35, athletic build, circa 6 feet, receding hairline, balding top.”
[123]
In a CIA cable back to Mexico City on October 10, the Lee Oswald who defected to the U.S.S.R. in October 1959 was described as not quite 24, “five feet ten inches, one hundred sixty five pounds, light brown wavy hair, blue eyes.”
[124]

What one is confronted with in the October 9 cable is an apparently damning connection between Oswald and a KGB assassination expert, but a connection made by a man impersonating Oswald. It is the beginning of a two-tracks Mexico City story. On one track is the CIA’s attempt to document Oswald’s complicity with the Soviet Union and Cuba in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. On the other track is the recurring evidence within the same documents of a fraudulent Oswald at work.

Given the notoriety of Valery Kostikov in U.S. intelligence circles, it is remarkable that when CIA headquarters cabled the State Department, the FBI, and the Navy on October 10 to relay the wiretapped information it had received on Oswald the day before, the cable made no reference to his specific connection with Kostikov.
[125]
Kostikov was not even mentioned. This would be like a 2001 intelligence report on a suspected terrorist neglecting to mention that he had just met with Osama bin Laden. CIA headquarters was keeping its knowledge of the Oswald–Kostikov connection close to its vest. The CIA’s silence regarding Kostikov was maintained just long enough for Oswald to be moved quietly (without being placed on the FBI’s Security Index) into a position overlooking Dealey Plaza on November 22. After the assassination, the CIA used its dormant Mexico City documents to link the accused assassin Oswald with the KGB’s Kostikov.

On November 25, 1963, Richard Helms sent a memorandum to J. Edgar Hoover that marshaled the CIA’s phone-tapped evidence suggesting that Oswald had received not only Soviet but also Cuban government support in assassinating Kennedy.
[126]
Attached to the Helms memorandum were transcripts for the audiotapes of seven calls to the Soviet Mexico City embassy attributed to Oswald. Two of them stood out. One was the October 1 call in which “Oswald” identified Kostikov as the Soviet consul he had met with on September 28. In the other outstanding call, reportedly made on September 28, the same man, speaking from the Cuban Consulate, made reference to his having just been at the Soviet Embassy. To understand this revealing call, we need to put it in the context of what may or may not have been the real Oswald’s shuttles between the Cuban and Soviet Consulates during his first two days in Mexico City, September 27 and 28.

Given Lee Harvey Oswald’s willingness to take on intelligence roles, the primary question concerning his visits to the Cuban and Soviet Consulates is not: Was it really he?
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Whether it was Oswald or someone using his name, the “he” was still an actor following a script. If the actor was himself, from his limited standpoint his role’s purpose would have been, as in New Orleans, to discredit the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in a minor Cold War battle. According to an FBI memorandum dated September 18, 1963, discovered by the Church Committee,
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the CIA advised the FBI two days earlier that the “Agency is giving some consideration to countering the activities of [the FPCC] in foreign countries.”
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Nine days later in Mexico City, “Oswald” visited the Cuban and Soviet Consulates displaying his FPCC credentials and seeking visas to both those Communist countries. Whether it was Oswald or not who was playing out another FPCC-discrediting role in his name, the more basic question is: What was the Mexico City scenario’s purpose in the larger script written for the president’s murder? It is this question of ultimate purpose that the CIA’s Mexico City surveillance tapes will assist us in answering, after we first consider the September 27-28 visits to the consulates that were acted out in the name of Oswald.

According to Silvia Duran, the Cuban Consulate’s Mexican employee who spoke with Oswald, he (or an impostor) visited their consulate three times on Friday, September 27. At his 11:00 a.m. visit, Oswald applied for a Cuban transit visa for a trip to the Soviet Union. Duran was a little suspicious of Oswald. She felt the American was too eager in displaying his leftist credentials: membership cards in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and the American Communist Party, old Soviet documents, a newspaper clipping on his arrest in New Orleans, a photo of Oswald being escorted by a policeman on each arm that Duran thought looked phony.
[130]
Duran also knew that belonging to the Communist Party was illegal in Mexico in 1963. For that reason, a Communist would normally travel in the country with only a passport. Yet here was Oswald documented in a way that invited his arrest.
[131]

Duran told Oswald he lacked the photographs he needed for his visa application. She also said he would first need permission to visit the Soviet Union before he could be issued a transit visa for Cuba. Visibly upset, Oswald departed, but returned to the consulate an hour later with his visa photos.

In the late afternoon, Oswald returned again to the Cuban Consulate, insisting this time to Silvia Duran that he be granted a Cuban visa at once. He claimed that the Soviet Consulate had just assured him he would be given a Soviet visa. Duran checked by phone with the Soviets and learned otherwise. She told Oswald, who then flew into a rage. He ranted at Duran, then at the Cuban consul, Eusebio Azcue, who had stepped out of his office into the commotion. Oswald raged in response to Azcue’s explanation of the visa procedure. Azcue yelled back at him.
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Oswald called Azcue and Duran mere “bureaucrats.”
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Then, as Silvia Duran recalled in 1978 to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), Azcue went to the door, opened it, and asked Oswald to leave.
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The extraordinary episode had, perhaps as intended, left an indelible impression on Duran and Azcue.