Reclaiming History (241 page)

Common sense dictates that someone trying to physically pass himself off as Oswald would draw as little attention to himself as possible. By creating such a scene and ruckus at the consulate, he would be immeasurably increasing the likelihood that the personnel at the consulate would get a much better look at his face and overall physical appearance and, hence, be able to recollect that he was not Oswald.

7. The fact that we know Oswald was in Mexico City at the very same time that someone claiming to be Oswald was at the Cuban consulate and Russian embassy is just further evidence that it was indeed he at the consulate and embassy. Handwriting experts for the Warren Commission and HSCA concluded that the signature “Lee Harvey Oswald” on the register of the Hotel del Comercio on September 27, 1963, was Oswald’s signature.
¹³⁶
Oswald stayed in room 18 at the hotel for, as indicated, five nights. Both the owner-manager of the hotel, Guillermo Garcia Luna, and the maid, Matilde Garnica, identified Oswald to the CIA as being at the hotel, Garnica adding that she clearly remembered Oswald because so few Americans stayed there. The desk clerk, Sebastian Perez Hernandez, and the watchman, Pedro Rodriguez Ledesma, who sought out a taxi for Oswald on the morning when Oswald departed the hotel for the states, also clearly identified Oswald. And Dolores Ramirez de Barreiro, the owner, manager, and sometimes cook of the small restaurant immediately adjacent to the hotel, identified Oswald as the young American who had eaten several meals at her restaurant in the late afternoon during Oswald’s stay in Mexico City. All five of the above witnesses said that whenever they saw Oswald, he was alone.
¹³⁷

8. As conclusive as the above evidence is, none of it is even necessary, since Oswald himself has told us it was he at the Cuban consulate. In his November 9, 1963, letter to the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C., he recounts the trouble he had at the Cuban consulate in Mexico City and alludes to Azcue by saying that he was “glad the [Cuban consul] has since been replaced.”
¹³⁸
Though Azcue did not, in fact, leave the consulate until November 18, 1963, which was after Oswald wrote his letter, he testified that “since the month of September of 1963 I had started to turn over affairs to the new consul who was to replace me, Mr. Alfredo Mirabal.”
¹³⁹
It appears that Oswald, during his visits to the consulate, had somehow become aware of this fact.

9. Not only do we know that it was Oswald at the Cuban consulate, but we know it was Oswald who, on the afternoon of September 27, 1963, and the morning of September 28, 1963, entered the Russian embassy and met with KGB members of the embassy staff (Colonel Oleg Maximovich Nechiporenko and Valeriy Kostikov on both days and Pavel Yatskov on September 28) seeking a visa to Russia. When Oswald appeared on television following his arrest in Dallas on November 23, 1963, Nechiporenko, Kostikov, and Yatskov all remembered and identified Oswald as being the person they had spoken to at their embassy.
¹⁴⁰

10. Oswald had told his wife, Marina, earlier about his plans to go to Cuba by way of Mexico City and later about his trip to Mexico City, his trouble at the “two embassies,” and that because of all the “red tape” he got nowhere with the “bureaucrats” there in his effort to get to Cuba. Oswald told Marina he was in Mexico City “about a week,” which the documentary record confirms.
¹⁴¹

11. After his arrest, Oswald told his interrogators about his Mexico City trip. Postal Inspector Harry Holmes, one of Oswald’s interrogators, testified that “he [Oswald] went to the Mexican consulate or embassy or something and wanted to get permission, or whatever it took to get to Cuba. They refused him and he became angry and he said he burst out of there.”
¹⁴²

12. And Oswald’s own possessions reveal that he was at the Cuban consulate. Silvia Duran said that even though she was unable to give Oswald the immediate visa he wanted, she wanted to be helpful to him so she gave him a piece of paper with her name on it, as well as the telephone number of the consulate, which was 11-28-47.
¹⁴³
Silvia Duran’s name and the consulate’s phone number were found on a piece of paper among Oswald’s possessions after his arrest.
¹⁴⁴
That same piece of paper contained the phone numbers of both the Soviet embassy in Mexico City (15-61-55) and the Soviet Department of Consular Affairs (15-60-55).
¹⁴⁵

13. The linchpin for the allegation that there was an Oswald imposter at the Cuban consulate is that this imposter was the same one who impersonated Oswald at the Russian embassy. This is so because the alleged imposture not only occurred during the same, precise period of time, but the contact by “Oswald” with the Soviet embassy is inextricably connected with his contact with the Cuban consulate. For instance, Consul Azcue told Oswald that the one way he could issue him an immediate in-transit visa to Cuba without the waiting period and protocol of prior consultation with Cuba would be for Oswald to secure a final destination visa to the Soviet Union from the Soviet embassy. Oswald proceeded to the Soviet embassy just two blocks away and attempted to obtain such a visa, but he was unsuccessful. Azcue testified that either the same day he sent Oswald to the embassy (September 27) or the next day, he spoke over the phone to “the consulate of the Soviet Union” at the Soviet embassy and was told that the documents Oswald produced attesting to his residence in the Soviet Union and his marriage to a Soviet citizen (both of which Oswald had previously shown to Duran and Azcue) were apparently valid, but a visa could not be issued without authorization from Moscow, and that would take approximately four months.
¹⁴⁶
And Silvia Duran also said she spoke to the “Russian consul” on the same day they sent Oswald there and was told he had been there and that Oswald was informed he’d have to wait for four months.
¹⁴⁷

Since we know that the real Oswald was at the Cuban consulate, we know, then, that the real Oswald was also at the Soviet embassy. To believe otherwise demands answers to the following questions: How would the bogus Oswald know to go to the Soviet embassy around the very time the real Oswald was sent there, and for the identical purpose? Did he have the real Oswald and the Cuban consulate bugged? But even if he did, how would that prevent the real Oswald from going to the Russian embassy too? And if so, why didn’t Azcue and Duran say that in their contacts with the Soviet embassy they were told that
two people
claiming to be Lee Harvey Oswald had come to the embassy seeking a final destination visa to the Soviet Union? John Davis, author of
Mafia Kingfish
, has no trouble with such folly. He writes, “As it turned out, Oswald, or his impostor,
or both
, spent six days in Mexico.”
¹⁴⁸
In
Conspiracy
, Anthony Summers writes, “It should be remembered that the real Oswald almost certainly was in Mexico City at the relevant time, even if it was somebody else who visited the embassies.”
¹⁴⁹
Such is the infinitely silly world of the conspiracy theorists in the Kennedy assassination.

14. Finally, as with his visit to the Cuban consulate, Oswald himself told us of his visit to the Soviet embassy. In his November 9, 1963, letter to the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C., he wrote, “This is to inform you of recent events since my meetings with Comrade Kostin [almost assuredly, a reference to the aforementioned Valeriy Kostikov, a KGB officer and member of the consular staff at the Soviet embassy in Mexico City at the time of Oswald’s visit] in the Embassy of the Soviet Union, Mexico City, Mexico.” Elsewhere in the letter he said, “I had not planned to contact the Soviet Embassy in Mexico so they were unprepared.”
¹⁵⁰
Further, Oswald told his interrogators after his arrest, per Postal Inspector Harry Holmes, that after he “burst out” of the Cuban consulate, he went “over to the Soviet embassy” seeking authorization from them “to go to Russia by way of Cuba,” but “they refused and said ‘come back in thirty days’ or something like that. And he went out of there angry and disgusted.”
¹⁵¹

Since we absolutely know Oswald went to the Cuban consulate and Soviet embassy during his Mexico City trip, all other matters pertaining to a possible Oswald imposture at the consulate and embassy that have been written about and discussed ad nauseam by the conspiracy theorists become automatically irrelevant and superfluous. But for the historical record, what are some of these matters? Although for the most part they involve simple human as well as bureaucratic errors, they have enjoyed a resonance in the conspiracy community exceeding the half-life of uranium.

One misstatement made
the day after
the assassination—when turmoil, confusion, and extreme pressure understandably led to errors and misstatements—was a paragraph in a five-page preliminary analysis of the assassination (much too soon for
any
kind of analysis to be written), in which J. Edgar Hoover wrote, “The Central Intelligence Agency advised that on October 1, 1963, an extremely sensitive source had reported that an individual identified as Lee Oswald…contacted the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City inquiring as to any messages. Special agents in this Bureau [in Dallas], who have conversed with Oswald in Dallas, Texas, have observed photographs of the individual referred to above
and have listened to a recording of his voice
. These special agents are of the opinion that the above-referred-to individual was not Lee Harvey Oswald.”
¹⁵²
This, naturally, was tremendous fodder for conspiracy theorists—someone obviously was impersonating Oswald in Mexico City. In the world of the theorists, there is no room for error, misstatements, incompetence, and so on. Hoover, in the confusion following the assassination, simply misunderstood the information he had received, or someone made an error in giving him this information.
*

The HSCA thoroughly investigated the matter and learned that later in the day (7:23 p.m., Central Standard Time, November 23, 1963) Dallas FBI special agent-in-charge Gordon Shanklin advised Hoover of his error, informing him that only a
report
of Oswald’s conversation was received by the Dallas field office from the CIA station in Mexico City, not an actual tape recording of the conversation. And on November 25, the Dallas office again apprised Hoover that “there appears to be some confusion in that
no tapes
were taken to Dallas. Only typewritten [reports were] supplied.”
¹⁵³

The HSCA went on to say, “Shanklin stated in a Committee interview that no recording was ever received by FBI officials in Dallas. Moreover, former FBI Special Agents James Hosty, John W. Fain, Burnett Tom Carter, and Arnold J. Brown, each of whom had conversed with Oswald at one time, informed the Committee that they had never listened to a recording of Oswald’s voice…The Committee concluded, therefore, that the information in the November 23, 1963, letterhead memorandum [the assassination analysis by Hoover] was mistaken and did not provide a basis for concluding that there had been an Oswald imposter.”
¹⁵⁴

As is typical of most conspiracy writers, Jim Marrs, author of
Crossfire
, tells his readers about the November 23, 1963, FBI memo, but then never tells them that the HSCA determined that the memo was in error.
¹⁵⁵

Actually, there were recordings of Oswald’s voice secured by the CIA station in Mexico City resulting from its monitoring of all incoming and outgoing telephone calls at the Cuban consulate and Soviet embassy. For instance, the prelude to the typed transcript of the first of two calls made to the Soviet military attaché at the embassy on October 1, 1963, at 10:31 a.m., says the caller spoke “broken Russian.” The caller, per the transcript, was told that for the information he was seeking he should call a different number at the embassy, 15-60-55, “and ask for a consul.” At 10:45 a.m., the person called the consul, and the prelude to the new transcription again refers to the “broken Russian” of the caller. The transcribed monitored telephone conversation follows:

“Hello, this is Lee Oswald speaking. I was at your place last Saturday and spoke to a Consul, and they said they’d send a telegram to Washington, so I wanted to find out if you have anything new? But I don’t remember the name of that Consul.”

OP (Other Party): “Kostikov. He is dark/hair or skin?”

Oswald: “Yes. My name is Oswald.”

OP: “Just a minute, I’ll find out…They say that they haven’t received anything yet.”

Oswald: “Have they done anything?”

OP: “Yes, they say that a request has been sent out, but nothing has been received as yet.”

Oswald: “And what…?”

The other party hangs up.

A concluding paragraph to the transcript reads, “Station source, who did transcriptions, says Oswald is identical with person speaking broken Russian who called from Cuban [consulate] 28 September to Soviet Embassy.”
¹⁵⁶

A “station source” who heard and transcribed Oswald’s voice on some of the tapes was identified years later as Boris Tarasoff, a CIA staff officer in Mexico City whose job in September and October of 1963 was to receive tapes of CIA telephone taps at the Soviet embassy in Mexico City and translate (from Russian into English) and transcribe the tapes. He would receive the tapes from a CIA courier the day after they were made and would return the tapes and their transcriptions to the same courier the following day. Tarasoff only remembers translating and transcribing two Oswald tapes, of telephone conversations on September 28 and October 1, 1963, though he says, “There might have been more. I am not certain.”
*
Oswald only used his name on October 1, not September 28.
¹⁵⁷
Anna Tarasoff, Boris’s wife, who assisted him with the transcriptions in Mexico City, told the HSCA there was another taped conversation between Oswald and someone at the Soviet embassy for which no transcript has been found, in which Oswald identified himself, said he was broke, and wanted financial aid from either the Russians or the Cubans so he could leave the country. “They definitely turned him down. In fact, if I recall, they finally got disgusted and hung up on him.”
¹⁵⁸