Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination (32 page)

The CIA has always denied having obtained any such photographs, and offered a variety of explanations. The camera at the Soviet Embassy, according to an internal CIA document, did not operate on weekends. That would explain why there were no pictures of Oswald on the Saturday he is said to have visited the Soviets. The cameras at the Cuban mission were also apparently not used at the weekend. Yet there were a total of four “Oswald” visits, combining those to the Cuban and Soviet missions, on Friday, September 27—a weekday. Why, then, would there be no photographs from any of those total of eight entrances and exits?

A senior CIA officer who served in
Mexico accounted for the absence of photos at the Cuban Consulate by claiming that the camera at that site happened to break down during the Oswald visit to Mexico City. Documents now available, however, show that not one but two cameras covered the entrances to the Cuban mission on September 27. One of those cameras was activated for the first time that very morning, and—it appears—worked that day.

What then of the photo surveillance at the Soviet Embassy? Freedom of Information suits eventually extracted the information that no less than twelve photographs were taken of the man who was not Oswald. They show the mystery man in various poses and wearing different clothes, and one of them was taken on October 1—one of the days an “Oswald” supposedly went to the Soviet Embassy. Why do we have no CIA pictures of Oswald
there
?

The Assassinations Committee investigators’ report noted that an “Oswald” made at least five visits to the Communist embassies, perhaps as many as six. It was hard to believe that CIA cameras failed to pick him up even once. In a draft manuscript he left behind when he died, former Chief of Station Scott wrote that there had been such photos. Several other former Agency officers, moreover, said CIA cameras got pictures of Oswald, or of someone identified as Oswald, on visits to the two missions.

The Committee speculated that “photographs of Oswald might have been taken and subsequently lost or destroyed …” It did not question how the CIA could have lost pictures of Oswald—of all people. And why would the Agency
destroy
such photographs? In its 1998 report to President
Clinton, the Records Review Board probably got close to the truth when it wrote carefully that the “CIA reports that it did not
locate
[author’s emphasis] photographic evidence of Oswald’s visits.” If the CIA did have photographs of the real Oswald entering the embassies, and entering alone, one can be sure it would have been delighted to produce them long ago.

The CIA’s account of its other surveillance system in Mexico City, the tapping and bugging of Communist embassies, is also feeble. If the embassies were bugged and their telephones tapped, and if that is how some of the intelligence on Oswald was gathered, where are the sound tapes?

Asked about the recordings in 1975 on CBS’
Sixty Minutes
program, then CIA Director William Colby responded vaguely that he thought there had been Oswald voice recordings from the embassy contacts. There had indeed.

The file shows that the Agency tapped a phone call—supposedly from the Cuban Consulate to the Soviet Embassy—by a man the CIA indicated was Oswald, purportedly on Saturday, September 28. According to the CIA record, there were also two tapped Oswald conversations with the Soviet Embassy on Tuesday, October 1. Having listened to both calls, the transcriber said they involved the same caller.

According to information the CIA supplied to the Warren Commission about those calls, “The American spoke
in very poor Russian
… [author emphasis].” The speaker’s ability in Russian is elsewhere described as “terrible, hardly recognizable.” That does not sound like the real Oswald, who had achieved a good standard of spoken Russian while in the Soviet Union and on his
return to Texas impressed the Russian community with his fluency in colloquial Russian. Sylvia Durán, moreover, insisted that the Oswald who visited her took no part in the call she made to the Soviet Embassy to discuss the visa request. He did not use the telephone while in her office, nor did he say anything in Russian.

The CIA stance on the Mexico City episode—that until Oswald’s name surfaced after the assassination his embassy visits were simply routinely logged, not at the time assigned any importance—is not borne out by the account of the Mexico City transcriber and translator who worked on the taped material. Located years later by a
Washington Post
reporter, they said the Oswald tapes triggered a departure from routine. “Usually,” the translator said, “they picked up the transcripts the next day. This they wanted right away.” Former Chief of Station Scott, moreover, wrote in his draft memoir that Oswald had been “a person of great interest to us during this September 27 to 2 October period.”

The CIA told the Assassination Records Review Board it “destroyed tape[s] containing Oswald’s voice and other related calls as a matter of routine procedure.” The Agency’s position was, as it had long been, that tapes of no particular intelligence value were wiped after two weeks and recycled.
19
In a 2005 interview, however, former Mexico case officer Anne Goodpasture—referring to the recording of an October 1 Oswald exchange—said it had been seen as significant. While the original tape had been erased for reuse, it had first been copied on to a separate tape—the usual practice with the most interesting tapes.
20

The claim that the Oswald tapes were all erased is untenable. Compelling evidence indicates that they survived until long after the assassination—and that someone did impersonate
Oswald.

Within twenty-four hours of the assassination, FBI Director Hoover had a preliminary broad analysis of the case. It was five pages long and unremarkable except for one paragraph. It read:

The Central Intelligence Agency advised that on October 1, 1963, an extremely sensitive source had reported that an individual identifying himself as Lee Oswald contacted the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City inquiring as to any messages. Special agents of this Bureau, 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
[author’s emphasis].

On the morning of the same day, November 23, senior Hoover aide Alan Belmont reported that he learned as much from the Dallas Special Agent in Charge, Gordon Shanklin, who had told him Dallas agents thought “neither the tape nor the photograph pertained to Oswald.”

The message seemed crystal-clear. The CIA had sent to Dallas both a picture and a sound recording of the man its surveillance had picked up using the name “Lee Oswald”—and neither picture nor tape matched the Oswald under arrest.

The same morning, Director Hoover telephoned the new President, Lyndon Johnson, to brief him on what appeared to be the facts about the assassination. The transcript includes the following exchange:

Johnson: Have you established any more about the [Oswald] visit to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico in September?

Hoover: No, that’s one angle that’s very confusing for this reason. We have up here the tape and the photograph of the man who was at the Soviet Embassy, using Oswald’s name. That picture and the tape do not correspond to this man’s voice, nor to his appearance. In other words, it
appears
there
was
a
second
person
who
was
at
the
Soviet
Embassy down
there.
21

Years later, when Assassinations Committee staff queried the Hoover memo and phone conversation with Johnson, the responses of the CIA and FBI suggested the reference to an “Oswald” recording had merely been a mistake—reflecting muddle in the rush of events after the assassination.
22
The change of story by the FBI, however, along with anomalies in the documentary record, feeds into suspicion that “Oswald” tapes were part of a package of material flown from Mexico City to Dallas on the night of the assassination, and that they were reviewed there. There was such a flight, and it did carry material from the CIA in Mexico.
23

While a transcript of the Hoover conversation with Johnson has survived, the recording—made on an IBM machine—has not. There is now only a hissing noise on the relevant fourteen minutes of the recording. A report by the company that tried to recover the audio on behalf of the Johnson Library and National Archives, states that “most likely [the recording] was intentionally erased.”

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was known for his loathing of the CIA—and for the irate notations he habitually scrawled on reports and
memoranda. Weeks after the assassination, at the bottom of a memo relating to another CIA matter, he wrote: “I can’t forget … the false story
re
Oswald’s trip to Mexico.” It was, he said, an example of the Agency’s “double-dealing.”

This author interviewed three witnesses who flatly contradicted the CIA’s claim that no Oswald tape was retained until the assassination. Former Warren Commission attorneys William Coleman and David Slawson said they listened to “Oswald tapes” during a visit to the CIA station in Mexico as late as April 1964—months after the President was killed. (A third Warren lawyer, David Belin, said during a television interview: “The Warren Commission had access to the tape.”)

Coleman, a senior counsel then, later to become a member of President Reagan’s cabinet, said he had “enough curiosity that I listened to
all
that I could make any words out of at all. And at odd times I asked for the transcript—not in lieu of the oral version, only to back it up. Having been a trial lawyer, I knew that the worst thing in the world would be to say that I read a transcript only … then find later that there was a difference.”

Coleman said he heard the recording in a “secure” room. He noted that it was scratchy, as surveillance tapes often are, and that—with no reason at the time to think an impostor might have been at work—he and his colleague made no effort to compare the voice with other recordings to establish that it was identical to the known voice of alleged assassin Oswald. Slawson, for his part, recalled the name of the officer whom CIA station chief Winston Scott had assigned to play the recording for him and his colleague.

The author
tracked down that officer, by then retired, and—though only on learning that Coleman and Slawson had acknowledged having heard the recorded material, and on the strict condition that I publish neither his name nor his rank—the officer confirmed that the recording had survived the assassination, and that Scott had assigned him to play it for the visitors from the Warren Commission.
24

There is something else, something seen as revelatory by the researchers who have done the most extensive analysis of relevant Agency files.
25
It is a CIA response to Station Chief Scott in Mexico, responding to his name trace request of October 8 describing the visit to the Soviet Embassy by the man who was not Oswald. Over three pages, the response summarized Oswald’s history of defection to Russia, marriage to a Soviet citizen, and apparent disillusion with life there:

“Latest HQDS info was [State Department] report dated May 1962 stating [it] had determined Oswald is still U.S. citizen and both he and his Soviet wife have exit permits and Dept [of] State had given approval for travel with their infant child to USA.”

That, however, was not the most recent information CIA headquarters had received on Oswald. The files show that the Agency knew all about his return to the States, that he had since been interviewed by the FBI, about his life in Dallas; correspondence he had had with the Soviet Embassy in Washington, DC, and with communist organizations; his move to New Orleans; his Fair Play for Cuba activity; and his purportedly angry encounter with the
DRE’s anti-Castro exiles, and the subsequent arrest. The FBI had copied its most recent FBI report on Oswald’s progress to the CIA less than a week before the incorrect transmission that purported to brief the CIA station chief in Mexico—yet withheld the latest information from him.

The massive omission was hardly inadvertent. The draft of the response to Mexico had been reviewed by three different officers in CIA Counterintelligence, seen and authenticated by the chief of Covert Operations for the Western Hemisphere—which included Mexico—and finally transmitted under the name of Tom Karamessines, assistant to then Deputy Director for Plans Richard Helms. Jane Roman, a senior aide to Counterintelligence chief Angleton, helped prepare and signed off on the inaccurate message. Interviewed in 1995, in retirement, she had extraordinary things to say.

“I’m signing off,” Roman acknowledged, “on something that I know isn’t true.” The message, she said on studying it, was “indicative of a keen interest in Oswald held very closely on the need-to-know basis… . There has to be a point for withholding information …” Those with final authority over the content of the message, Roman speculated, may have thought that “somehow … they could make some use of Oswald. I would think that there was definitely some operational reason to withhold it, if it was not sheer administrative error, when you see all the people who signed off on it.”

If, as Roman explained, she had not had ultimate responsibility for what the message did or did not contain, who had? “The only interpretation I could put on this,” she said—noting the language used in the message and the identity of its signatories—“would be that [the] SAS group would have held the information on Oswald under their tight control.”

The
SAS, or Special Affairs Staff, oversaw all anti-Castro operations. “The Cuba task force,” Roman surmised, would have “got word how to handle this… .Well, I mean they hold it within themselves… . And I wasn’t in on any particular goings-on or hanky-panky as far the Cuban situation.”

The CIA’s chief of Cuban operations in 1963—a man in charge of a great deal of hanky-panky—was David Phillips, a rising star who was to go on to become chief of the Western Hemisphere Division. He traveled widely in 1963, but was based in Mexico City.