“A Little Incident in Mexico City”

Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested less than an hour and a half after the assassination of President Kennedy. Very soon after his arrest, two pieces of background information reached government circles in Washington:

Oswald, a self–declared Marxist and former marine, had defected to the Soviet Union in 1959. He had threatened to renounce his US citizenship and to pass on secrets he had obtained while working as a radar operator for the U2 spy plane operation. He had returned to the US in 1962.1

Between 27 September and 3 October 1963, Oswald had been in Mexico City, where he had contacted the Soviet Embassy and the Cuban Consulate several times by telephone and at least five times in person.2

Soviet and Cuban Involvement

The Soviet and Cuban diplomatic compounds in Mexico City were being thoroughly monitored by the CIA, which possessed tape recordings and transcripts of Oswald’s telephone calls, as well as photographs of Oswald as he went in and out.3

Oswald had applied for a visa to allow him to visit Cuba, and had enquired about obtaining a visa to visit the Soviet Union. More ominously, he had met and spoken by telephone to Valeriy Kostikov, a Soviet diplomat who was strongly suspected of being an agent attached to the KGB’s Department 13, which was in charge of assassinations and sabotage.4

The obvious implication was that the man accused of assassinating President Kennedy was in some way associated with the Soviet or Cuban regimes. This implication was strengthened when the FBI discovered shortly after the assassination that, two weeks earlier, it had intercepted a letter apparently sent by Oswald to the Soviet Embassy in Washington, in which he claimed that he had met Kostikov in Mexico City.5

Oswald in Mexico City: the FBI’s Discovery

The FBI learned on the afternoon of the assassination that it had not been kept fully informed by the CIA of Oswald’s activities in Mexico City. To remedy this, two sets of evidence were sent by the CIA station in Mexico City to the FBI in Dallas, arriving early on the morning of 23 November:

At least one tape recording of a phone call by a man claiming to be Oswald.

Several photographs of the only non–Hispanic man to enter the Soviet compound on the date of Oswald’s meeting there with Kostikov.6

FBI agents in Dallas made an unexpected and ominous discovery: neither the voice on the recording nor the man in the photographs matched the man who was in custody. Someone had impersonated Oswald in Mexico City.7

Oswald’s Assistant or Impostor

Although there was good evidence that Oswald had in fact made at least one visit to the Cuban Consulate and one to the Soviet Embassy,8 several other encounters provided strong evidence that he had also been impersonated:

In two telephone calls to the Soviet Embassy, a man claiming to be Lee Harvey Oswald spoke “terrible, hardly recognizable Russian”, according to the CIA’s translator. Oswald himself spoke Russian very well.9

The man who made the incriminating phone call to Kostikov had also phoned from the Cuban Consulate three days earlier, on Saturday 28 September. In this instance, not only was Oswald impersonated but the phone call or the transcript appear to have been fabricated. The Cuban Consulate and the switchboard at the Soviet Embassy were closed on Saturdays. Silvia Durán, an employee at the Cuban Consulate, who was mentioned by name on the transcript, denied that she had taken part in the call on the 28th.10

Silvia Durán and the Cuban Consul General, who had had three encounters with a man who claimed to be Oswald, both recalled that the man they met looked nothing like either the real Oswald or the man in the photographs.11

Knowledge of Oswald’s Contacts

Oswald’s apparent contacts with the Soviet and Cuban representatives in Mexico City were reported by the news media, and gave rise to two competing conspiracy theories:

either the assassination was the result of a communist conspiracy,

or it was a conspiracy by elements sympathetic to the US state to blame the Soviet or Cuban regimes.

Knowledge of Oswald’s Impersonation

The details of Oswald’s impersonation, on the other hand, were kept secret from the general public.12 The transcripts and recordings of the telephone calls were tightly controlled by the CIA station in Mexico City, and most of the recordings appear to have been erased within a short time of the assassination.13

J. Edgar Hoover, Lyndon Johnson, and other Washington insiders were aware of the impersonation, and of its implications, early on the day after the assassination. It was clear that there was no innocent explanation: either Oswald had had at least one accomplice in Mexico City, or he had been impersonated without his knowledge. Either he was working for the Soviet or Cuban regimes, or he had been manipulated in order to implicate those regimes in Kennedy’s assassination.

The Political Effects of Oswald’s Impersonation

The existence of an impostor in Mexico City both undermined the idea that Oswald alone had killed President Kennedy, and turned the idea into a solid political necessity.

The Implausibility of the Lone–Nut Theory

The conspiracy in Mexico City involved Oswald, either as a member or as a victim. The apparent association between Oswald and Kostikov implied that the conspiracy was connected to the assassination of President Kennedy. The notion that Oswald, despite being centrally involved in this conspiracy, had actually planned and carried out the assassination all by himself, was surely recognised in Washington to be far too much of a coincidence to be true.

The Political Necessity of the Lone–Nut Theory

It was clear to knowledgeable insiders that both of the competing conspiracy theories created severe threats to established political institutions:

either the US security system had failed to prevent a communist conspiracy,

or some elements of the US security system were complicit in the assassination.

Although, as Hoover put it, the evidence against Oswald was “not very, very strong,” the lone–nut explanation became the only expedient solution to a serious political problem.14

The Promotion of the Lone–Nut Theory

Once Oswald himself was murdered, and the burden of proof dramatically reduced, it became practicable to avoid an honest investigation into the assassination.

A report was commissioned from the FBI, but the news media felt that it would be unable to convince the public of Oswald’s guilt without having a more objective source on which to rely. The Warren Commission was set up, and was given the task of endorsing the idea that Oswald, acting for inscrutable personal motives, had been the lone assassin. The Commission proceeded to assemble a case for the prosecution. The print and broadcast media gave the Warren Report a huge amount of almost entirely uncritical coverage, and the political institutions survived.15

Nuclear War, Oswald and the Warren Commission

The apparent collusion between Oswald and the Soviet and Cuban regimes, if established, would have led to pressure for military retaliation. The need to defuse the danger of a nuclear war provided President Johnson with a bargaining tool. When pressing the reluctant Senator Richard Russell to serve on the Warren Commission, Johnson mentioned how he had managed to persuade the equally reluctant Earl Warren to play his part in promoting the lone–nut solution: “I just pulled out what Hoover told me about a little incident in Mexico City.”16

The Man in the Mexico City Photographs

It is unclear whether the man in the photographs was the man who was claiming to be Oswald:

At least one of the photographs was taken after the impersonation was over and Oswald had returned to the US.

Silvia Durán and Eusebio Azcue López, two members of the Cuban Consulate who encountered an impostor, both claimed that he did not resemble the man in the photographs.

The CIA’s Knowledge of Oswald’s Identity

Many years later, it became clear that deliberate deception had taken place. When the CIA station in Mexico City sent the photographs to the FBI in Dallas, individuals within the station had known for several weeks that the man depicted was not Oswald:

The station was able to compare photographs of the real Oswald with those of the impostor. Photographs were taken of every foreign visitor entering and leaving the diplomatic compounds. The real Oswald seems to have made at least one visit to each compound, and so must have been photographed at least four times.17

The station had been told by headquarters that the man in the photographs was not Oswald. On 9 October, a few days after the photographs were taken, the station alerted CIA headquarters to the visit of the man claiming to be Oswald: “Have photos male appears be American entering Sovemb 1216 hours, leaving 1222 on 1 Oct. apparent age 35, athletic build, circa 6 feet, receding hairline.” Headquarters consulted the genuine photographs and personal information in its file on the defector. It replied by cable the next day, stating that, on the contrary, the 23–year–old “Oswald is five feet ten inches, one hundred sixty–five pounds, light brown wavy hair, blue eyes.”18

“A Keen Interest in Oswald” Before the Assassination

Not only were individuals within the CIA’s headquarters and Mexico City office aware of Oswald’s identity, but they were of course aware also of the significance of a US citizen making contact with communist officials. According to one of the CIA officers who helped to issue the cable from headquarters to Mexico City on 10 October, the reply revealed that the agency possessed “a keen interest in Oswald on a need–to–know basis” just six weeks before President Kennedy’s assassination.19

The Management of Oswald’s Impersonation

The impersonation of Lee Harvey Oswald in Mexico City could only have been organised by people with knowledge of the CIA’s surveillance of the Soviet and Cuban diplomatic compounds; in other words:

the Soviet regime,

or the Cuban regime,

or the Mexican government,

or the US security system.

The destruction of evidence and the transmission of false evidence could only have been organised by people with inside access to the CIA station in Mexico City.

Update: Descriptions of Oswald

After this article was written, an online book by Bill Simpich, State Secret: Wiretapping in Mexico City, Double Agents, and the Framing of Lee Oswald , was published at the www.maryferrell.org website.

The description of Lee Oswald sent by CIA headquarters to its Mexico City office on 10 October was: “five feet ten inches, one hundred sixty–five pounds, light brown wavy hair, blue eyes”.20 Simpich points out that this description was not entirely correct, and that other descriptions of Oswald in official files prior to the assassination were also incorrect, but in different ways. In some files, his name is given as Lee Henry Oswald; in others he is said to have acquired Soviet citizenship. In this example it is Oswald’s weight that is incorrect. On the day of his arrest, Oswald weighed 131 pounds, not 165.21

This series of inaccurate files was generated by the CIA’s internal counter–intelligence department, which hoped to identify moles within the CIA and the FBI by noting where particular items of incorrect information surfaced. Although not sinister in itself, this is further proof that Oswald was being followed closely by elements within the CIA long before the assassination.

It may or may not be coincidental that this particular item of incorrect information surfaced very soon after the assassination, twice:

Within fifteen minutes of the shooting in Dealey Plaza, a bystander described the gunman to the Dallas police as a “slender white male about 30, 5 feet 10, 165”. The description is unlikely to be genuine: the bystander would not have been able to ascertain the gunman’s height or weight merely by glimpsing the upper half of his body from the street below, and the most obvious and distinctive aspect of the gunman’s appearance, his clothes, are not mentioned. The bystander was never identified.22

The same description was given to a police officer at the scene of Officer J.D. Tippit’s murder, again by an unidentified member of the public: “a white male about 5′ 10″, weighing 160 to 170 pounds … brown bushy hair”.23