Oswald and the CIA: The Documented Truth About the Unknown Relationship Between the U.S. Government and the Alleged Killer of JFK (62 page)

From the above it is obvious that the coordination process was more extensive for the cable to Mexico than the cable to the FBI, State, and Navy. Why was it necessary to go so high for the releasing authority? The HSCA interviewed several of those involved, and in the Lopez Report reported that the "request for further investigation and dissemination" was the reason the Mexico cable was sent to the A/DDP for release. The HSCA based this conclusion on a report written a month after the Kennedy assassination from John Scelso to James Angleton.24 But during the HSCA's interview with Scelso, he said that the directive to the station to report "followup" evidence on an American citizen was the reason for high-level coordination. On the other hand, Scelso also said this to the HSCA: "We could just as well have sent this cable out without Mr. Karamessines releasing it. I do not know why we did it."

Scelso was the first line supervisor above the Mexico City desk responsible for both the cables. He might even have been the drafter. His confusion about the reasons and the necessity (or lack of it) for such high-level coordination strikes one as implausible. According to the Lopez Report, the nameless person from the Mexico City desk (referred to above) recalled an entirely different reason for the Karamessines signoff. She said it was sent to the A/DDP because Oswald was important enough to "merit" the A/DDP's attention:

I can only surmise now that I might have thought or what several of us might have thought at the time, [was] that since it involved somebody of this nature who had tried to renounce his citizenship, who was in the Soviet Union, married to a Soviet, got out with a Soviet wife presumably, which is very strange, and now the contact with the Soviets, we could have a security, a major security problem. This was one way of informing him and getting attention at the higher level."

This woman agreed, however, with Scelso about one thing: It was not necessary to bring the cable to Karamessines's attention in the first place.

To recapitulate, we have heard four possible answers as to why the A/DDP had to sign off on the cable: 1) because of the third agency rule on dissemination, 2) because Oswald was an American citizen, 3) because Oswald presented a major security problem, and 4) it actually was not necessary. Of these four possibilities, the potential security risk posed by Oswald seems the most plausible for going as high as Helms's assistant.

There was an even greater discrepancy between the two October 10 cables. The cable to Mexico City gave a cut-off date for the latest information on Oswald held at headquarters. No such cut-off date was furnished in the cable to the FBI, State, and Navy two hours earlier. The cable to Mexico stated that the "latest HDQS info" was a State Department report dated May 1962. This statement was false. Why was it made?

"CIA Headquarters sent a lengthy cable summary to the Mexico City Station," the Agency reported to the Warren Commission, "of the background information held in the Headquarters' file on Os- wald"26 That statement, too, was false. The cable did not contain a "summary" of the information held at headquarters; rather, it was a summary of information for the thirty-one months leading up to May 1962. No information was included for the eighteen-month period since Oswald's return to America. This period, including FBI interrogations in 1962, Oswald's life in Dallas, and correspondence with the Soviet Embassy and various communist organizations, his move to New Orleans, attempts to found a New Orleans chapter of the FPCC, his altercation with the DRE, his arrest, jailing, and sentencing, were all spelled out in FBI reports that were held in the headquarters file. Yet none of this information was included in the "summary."

From our perspective, there are two problems here. First, it is reasonable to expect that current information should have been included in any summary on Oswald, especially because this cable ordered the station to "keep HDQS advised on any further contacts or positive identification of Oswald." How was the station supposed to investigate further with intelligence a year and a half out of date? The second problem, of course, is that headquarters were all aware of the eighteen months of Oswald's activities since his return."

As previously discussed, Egerter admitted she felt Oswald was up to something "bad" and that she knew he was in contact with a KGB officer in the embassy in Mexico. The reports held at headquarters since Oswald's return to America showed he had been in contact with communist organizations, information that would have been both relevant and useful to any follow-up investigation by the station. Moreover, one of the reports at headquarters concerned Oswald's "contact with the Soviet Embassy since [his] return."2B Thus there is no question but that the post-May 1962 reports at headquarters contained new and important information that should have accompanied the order to conduct further investigation. Thus the transmission to Mexico stating that the latest information at headquarters was a May 1962 State cable remains a mystery?

In February 1995, Washington Post editor Jefferson Morley sent a letter to the CIA in which he asked this question:

Does the Agency know why Mr. Karamessines told the Mexico City station on October 10, 1963 that the CIA had no information on Oswald since May 1962 when the Agency's records show that it had received three FBI reports on Oswald between May 1962 and October 1963?30

The letter notified the CIA that their answer would be used in an article and added that the Post wanted to give the CIA "the opportunity to comment on these records." The CIA Public Affairs Office replied the following day:

The cable referred to in your letter appears to focus only on the status of Oswald's citizenship. As such, it draws on information available from the State Department that bears on the question of citizenship. The cable is not regarded as an attempt to summarize all the information in CIA files on Oswald at the time."

This response seems fatuous in view of the Agency's explanation to the Warren Commission: "a lengthy cable summary ... of the background information held in the headquarters' file on Oswald."32

The Agency's 1995 response to the Post is troubling. Such cavalier retorts further undermine public trust and confidence. Of course the cable did not summarize all the information held at headquarters. That was the reason for asking the question in the first place. The Agency's explanation is tricky, legalistic, and evasive. It failed to answer the question asked: Why did headquarters state its latest information was a May 1962 report?

An analogy is useful here. There would be little sense in asking a biologist to write an update on the human fossil record while giving him data only on Homo erectus fossils and leaving out fossils of Homo sapiens. Furthermore, imagine that knowing we had several specimens from the last 100,000 years, we told our biologist that the youngest specimen in our laboratory was over two million years old.

On October 4, Jane Roman read the latest FBI report on Oswald's FPCC activities in New Orleans, an event that was impossible if the October 10 cable to Mexico City-which she coordinated on behalf of CI/Liaison-was true. When recently shown both the cable and the FBI report with her initials, Roman said this: "I'm signing off on something that I know isn't true."13 Roman's straightforward answer is as noteworthy as the fact that the CIA has released her name on these reports while redacting the names of others. One explanation might be that she was not in on the operation and therefore not in a position to question why the two cables were being drafted with such ridiculous sentences. "The only interpretation I could put on this," Roman says now, "would be that this SAS group would have held all the information on Oswald under their tight control, so if you did a routine check, it wouldn't show up in his 201 file."34 Roman made this incisive comment without being shown the documents lists that demonstrate that she was right. "I wasn't in on any particular goings-on or hanky-panky as far as the Cuban situation," Roman states. Asked about the significance of the untrue sentence on the "latest headquarters" information, Roman replied: "Well, to me, it's indicative of a keen interest in Oswald, held very closely on a need-to-know basis."

Smoke 111: Duran's Damaging Testimony

On December 11, 1963, John Scelso, chief of Western Hemisphere Branch 3,33 wrote an alarming memo to Richard Helms, deputy director of Plans. In bold handwriting at the top of the memo are the words "not sent." Below this is written "Questions put orally to Mr. Helms. 11 Nov. 63." In smaller handwriting under this are the words "Dec. presumably," reflecting the obvious fact that the Helms oral briefing was December 11, not November 11. Scelso wasted no time in throwing this stone into the pond:

It looks like the FBI report may even be released to the public. This would compromise our [13 spaces redacted] operations in Mexico, because the Soviets would see that the FBI had advance information on the reason for Oswald's visit to the Soviet Embassy.'

How could the FBI have known Oswald's reason in advance? Next to this piece of text was a handwritten clue: "Mr. Helms phoned Mr. Angleton this warning." Perhaps "this morning" was meant, but in either case this may mean that CIA counterintelligence operations were involved.

It is intriguing that anyone in U.S. intelligence would have had advance notice of Oswald's visit to the Soviet Embassy. Evidently the FBI report that was mentioned was worded so that its readers might conclude that the FBI had been the source of information, but from Scelso's report, it is not hard to guess that it was the CIA's operations in Mexico that had yielded "advance information on the reason for Oswald's visit to the Soviet Embassy." But just what exactly does this phrase mean?

Oswald had told the Soviet Consulate in Mexico City that he corresponded with the Soviet Embassy in Washington about returning to the U.S.S.R. As previously discussed, the FBI would have learned of the contents of this correspondence. But this would not have compromised CIA operations in Mexico City. The CIA station monthly operational report for October 1963 did mention Oswald's visit to the Soviet Consulate, and did so under the subtitle "Exploitation of [7 letters redacted] Information." The same seven-letter cryptonym is redacted in the line beneath this subtitle, but the last letter is partially visible, enough to see that it is the letter Y. In another CIA document from the Mexico City station the cryptonym LIENVOY has been left in the clear, and it was apparently used for the photo surveillance operation against the Soviet Embassy and Consulate." If this is true, the point of the Scelso memo above might have been this: Publication of the October 9-10 cables would show the telephone intercept had been linked to the photo surveillance, and that since the phone call came first, the cable showed the Agency had advance knowledge of the reason for Oswald's (the impostor) visit to the Soviet Consulate.

It appears that the CIA had advance knowledge about more than Oswald's October 1 visit to the Soviet Embassy. There is circumstantial evidence that the CIA Mexico City station might have been watching Oswald since his arrival on September 27. This evidence, according to the Lopez Report, was the Agency's decision to investigate the transcripts back to September 27, before they had learned of that date througl post-assassination investigation:

This Committee has not been able to determine how the CIA Headquarters knew, on 23 November 1963, that a review of the [redacted] material should begin with the production from 27 September, the day Oswald first appeared at the Soviet and Cuban Embassies3B [emphasis added].

This was an incisive point. So was the direction in which the Lopez Report then headed: what headquarters knew about Oswald's visits to the Cuban Consulate.

The CIA had more to worry about than the LIENVOY operation if the October 9-10 cables were published. These cables discussed a transcript from October 1. As we saw in Chapter Eighteen, the Oswald in this conversation was probably an impostor. The real Oswald had decided to abandon his visa request on Saturday and had no reason to call about a response to his request from Washington. As previously discussed, the impostors were apparently unaware of the fact that Oswald had declined to fill out the Soviet visa application. By November 24 the real Oswald was dead and therefore not able to debunk the false transcript. But this transcript was linked to the Saturday transcript by the transcriber himself (Mr. T). That transcript included not only an Oswald impostor but also a Duran impostor. The problem was that Duran was very much alive.

The day after the assassination, the CIA's station in Mexico City sent a note to the Mexican government containing the addresses of Duran, her mother, and her brother, her phone number, place of work, and license plate number, and a request that she be "arrested as soon as possible by Mexican authorities and held incommunicado until she can be questioned on the matter."39 The Cuban government protested that Duran was "physically mistreated."' According to the transcript of the interrogation, Duran told the story about Oswald's visits on Friday, September 27, and stated flatly, "he never called again."" Her statement undermined the Saturday transcript wherein she and Oswald were supposed to have placed a call to the Soviet Consulate. Her statement was not repeated in the Warren Report, which stated that after the Friday altercation, "Oswald contacted the Russian and Cuban Embassies again during his stay in Mexico.' 14' The evidence given for this false statement in the Warren Report is "confidential information."43

Where did the Warren Commission get this idea? Was it from the September 28 transcript, or was there more? The answer is: The CIA and the Mexican government were the source of this bogus story. The Agency told the Warren Commission that "we deduce" that Oswald visited the Cuban Consulate on September 28, but added, "we cannot be certain of this conclusion."" Moreover, among the exhibits of the Warren Commission twenty-six volumes is a report from the Mexican government. It stated that Duran "could not recall whether or not Oswald later telephoned her" at the Consulate."

The contradiction between what Duran actually said-that Oswald never called back-and the above CIA-Mexican government explanation is striking. The Warren Commission did have access to both pieces of information but followed the CIA's "deduction" about the events on Saturday. Again we encounter another example of the Warren Commission missing basic pieces, in this case the FBI's record. That version was reflected in a December 3, 1963, FBI memo to A. H. Belmont from W. C. Sullivan. That memo contains this extraordinary passage: