JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (28 page)

Oswald’s two visits to the Soviet Embassy have been described by the KGB officer who served as its vice consul, Col. Oleg Maximovich Nechiporenko, in his 1993 memoir
Passport to Assassination
. At his first visit on Friday afternoon, September 27, Oswald did indeed speak briefly with Valery Vladimirovich Kostikov. Nechiporenko refers to Kostikov casually as “one of the consulate employees who on that particular day was receiving visitors from eleven in the morning until one in the afternoon.”
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Oswald said he was seeking a visa to the Soviet Union. Kostikov handed him over to Nechiporenko, who listened to Oswald’s urgent request for an immediate visa. Nechiporenko explained that their Washington, D.C., embassy handled all matters regarding travel to the Soviet Union. He could make an exception for Oswald and send his papers on to Moscow, “but the answer would still be sent to his permanent residence, and it would take, at the very least, four months.”
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Oswald listened with growing exasperation. “When I had finished speaking,” Nechiporenko recalled, “he slowly leaned forward and, barely able to restrain himself, practically shouted in my face, ‘This won’t do for me! This is not my case! For me, it’s all going to end in tragedy!”
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Nechiporenko showed the unruly American out of the compound.

Oswald returned to the Soviet Embassy the next morning. He renewed his request for a quick visa to the U.S.S.R., this time to Valery Kostikov (this being their September 28 meeting) and Soviet consul Pavel Yatskov. Oswald became even more agitated than he had been the day before, referring to FBI surveillance and persecution. He took a revolver from his jacket pocket, placed it on a table, and said, “See? This is what I must now carry to protect my life.”
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The Soviet officials carefully took the gun and removed its bullets. They told Oswald once again they could not give him a quick visa. They offered him instead the necessary forms to be filled out. Oswald didn’t take them. Oleg Nechiporenko joined the three men as their conversation was ending. For the second day in a row, he accompanied a depressed Oswald to the gate of the embassy, this time with Oswald’s returned revolver and its loose bullets stuck back in his jacket pocket. Nechiporenko says that he, Kostikov, and Yatskov then immediately prepared a report on Oswald’s two embassy visits that they cabled to Moscow Center.
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Oswald’s three visits to the Cuban Consulate on September 27, and his two visits to the Soviet Embassy on September 27-28, comprise the background to the September 28 phone transcript sent by Richard Helms to J. Edgar Hoover. The CIA’s transcript states that the Saturday, September 28, call came from the Cuban Consulate. The first speaker is identified as Silvia Duran. However, Silvia Duran has insisted repeatedly over the years, first, that the Cuban Embassy was closed to the public on Saturdays, and second, that she never took part in such a call.
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“Duran” is said to be phoning the Soviet Consulate. Oleg Nechiporenko denies in turn that this call occurred. He says it was impossible because the Soviet switchboard was closed.
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The “Duran” speaker in the transcript says that an American in her consulate, who had been in the Soviet Embassy, wants to talk to them. She passes the phone to a North American man. The American insists that he and the Soviet representative speak Russian. They engage in a conversation, with the American speaking what the translator describes as “terrible hardly recognizable Russian.” This once again argues against the speaker being Oswald, given his fluent Russian. The CIA transcript of this unlikely conversation then reads:

North American: “I was just now at your embassy and they took my address.”

Soviet: “I know that.”

North American: “I did not know it then. I went to the Cuban Embassy to ask them for my address because they have it.”

Soviet: “Why don’t you come again and leave your address with us. It is not far from the Cuban Embassy.”

North American: “Well, I’ll be there right away.”
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What is the purpose behind this strange, counterfeit dialogue?

Richard Helms, in his accompanying letter to J. Edgar Hoover, states that the “North American” in the Saturday, September 28, call is the same man who identified himself as Lee Oswald in the October 1 call (which confirmed and documented Oswald’s Saturday meeting with Kostikov). In that connection the bogus Saturday call has “Oswald” saying he was “just now” at the Soviet Embassy (with KGB assassination expert Kostikov) and that his correct
address is known only by the Cuban Embassy, not himself. He will bring it to the Soviets. Thus, in the CIA’s interpretation of events, documented by fraudulent phone calls, the Cuban authorities and Soviet assassin Kostikov were working together in their control of Oswald’s address and movements, two months before Kennedy’s assassination. As researcher John Newman said in a presentation on these documents, “It looks like the Cubans and the Russians are working in tandem. It looks like [Oswald] is going to meet with Kostikov at a place designated by the Cubans . . . Oswald expected to be at some location fixed by the Cuban Embassy and wanted the Russians to be able to reach him there.”
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In addition, Oswald (or an impostor) was applying for Cuban and Soviet visas, which could be used as evidence of his attempting to gain asylum in Communist countries. The Mexico City scenario had laid the foundation for blaming the president’s upcoming murder on Cuba and the U.S.S.R., thereby providing the rationale in its aftermath for an invasion of Cuba and a possible nuclear attack on Russia.

The alarming implications of the CIA’s Mexico City case against Oswald had to be faced on the morning after the assassination by the new president, Lyndon Baines Johnson. As a result of the public disclosure under the JFK Act of LBJ’s taped conversations, we now know how Johnson was informed of the CIA setup. Michael Beschloss, editor of the Johnson tapes, tells us that at 9:20 a.m. on November 23, 1963, Johnson was briefed by CIA director John McCone about “information on foreign connections to the alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, which suggested to LBJ that Kennedy may have been murdered by an international conspiracy.”
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Then at 10:01 a.m. Johnson received a phone briefing on Oswald from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. It included the following exchange:

LBJ: “Have you established any more about the 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 that there is a second person who was at the Soviet embassy down there. We do have a copy of a letter which was written by Oswald to the Soviet embassy here in Washington [a November 9, 1963, letter that Oswald began by referring to ‘my meetings with comrade Kostin in the Embassy of the Soviet Union, Mexico City, Mexico,’ which was interpreted to mean Kostikov]
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. . . Now if we can identify this man who was at the . . . Soviet embassy in Mexico City . . . ”
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Having just been briefed on Oswald by CIA director McCone, Johnson was anxious to get to
the bottom of “the visit to the Soviet embassy in Mexico in September.” Hoover’s briefing adds to Johnson’s anxiety. Hoover confronts Johnson with strong evidence of an Oswald impostor at the Soviet Embassy: “The tape and the photograph of the man who was at the Soviet embassy” do not correspond to “this man’s [Oswald’s] voice, nor to his appearance.” Hoover says he has the proof: “We have up here the tape and the photograph of the man who was at the Soviet embassy, using Oswald’s name.” Hoover knows very well that the falsified evidence of a Cuban-Soviet plot to kill Kennedy (which Johnson has just been given by McCone) came from the CIA. Hoover simply gives Johnson the raw fact of an Oswald impostor in Mexico City, then lets Johnson chew on its implications. Hoover’s own reaction to the CIA’s Mexico City subterfuge was recorded seven weeks later, when he scribbled at the bottom of an FBI memorandum about keeping up with CIA operations in the United States: “O.K., but I hope you are not being taken in. I can’t forget the CIA withholding the French espionage activities in the USA nor
the false story re Oswald’s trip to Mexico
, only to mention two instances of their double-dealing.”
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Lyndon Johnson’s CIA and FBI briefings left him with two unpalatable interpretations of Mexico City. According to the CIA, Oswald was part of a Cuban-Soviet assassination plot that was revealed by the audio-visual materials garnered by its surveillance techniques. According to Hoover, Oswald had been impersonated in Mexico City, as shown by a more critical examination of the same CIA materials. Hoover left it to Johnson to draw his own conclusions as to who was responsible for that impersonation.

The CIA’s case scapegoated Cuba and the U.S.S.R. through Oswald for the president’s assassination and steered the United States toward an invasion of Cuba and a nuclear attack on the U.S.S.R. However, LBJ did not want to begin and end his presidency with a global war.

Hoover’s view suggested CIA complicity in the assassination. Even assuming for the moment that Johnson himself was innocent of any foreknowledge or involvement in the plot, nevertheless for the new president to confront the CIA over Kennedy’s murder, in a war within the U.S. government, would have been at least as frightening for him as an international crisis.

One must give the CIA (and the assassination sponsors that were even further in the shadows) their due for having devised and executed a brilliant setup. They had played out a scenario to Kennedy’s death in Dallas that pressured other government authorities to choose among three major options: a war of vengeance against Cuba and the Soviet Union based on the CIA’s false Mexico City documentation of a Communist assassination plot; a domestic political war based on the same documents seen truly, but a war the CIA would fight with every covert weapon at its command; or a complete cover-up of any conspiracy evidence and a silent coup d’état that would reverse Kennedy’s efforts to end the Cold War. Lyndon Johnson, for his part, took little time to choose the only option he felt would leave him with a country to govern. He chose to cover up everything and surrender to Cold War prerogatives. However, he was not about to attack Cuba and the U.S.S.R. His quick personal acceptance of what had to be would only emerge more gradually in public. Rather than end it all quickly and heroically against Castro and Khrushchev, he would ride gently, through the 1964 election, into the full fury of Vietnam.

Once the CIA realized its Mexico City scenario was being questioned and could implicate not the Communists but the CIA itself in the assassination, the Mexico City Station back-pedaled to cover up the false evidence. It began to say that its audiotapes of the “Oswald” phone calls to the Soviet Embassy had been routinely destroyed, and therefore no voice comparisons were possible to determine if the speaker really was Oswald.
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(This bogus CIA claim was being made at the same time that Hoover and the FBI were listening to their own copies of the tapes, then making voice comparisons, and reporting their provocative conclusions to President Lyndon Johnson.) Thus, on November 23, Mexico City CIA employee Ann Goodpasture, an assistant to David Phillips, sent a cable to CIA headquarters in which she reported the Saturday, September 28, call, then stated: “Station unable compare voice as first tape erased prior receipt second call.”
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On the next day, Mexico City cabled headquarters that it was now unable to locate any tapes at all for comparisons with Oswald’s voice: “Regret complete recheck shows tapes for this period already erased.”
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After an extensive analysis, the House Select Committee’s
Lopez Report
concluded that these and other CIA statements about tapes having been erased before voice comparisons could be made conflicted with sworn testimony, the information on other cables, and the station’s own wiretapping procedure.
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Although FBI director Hoover was angry at not having been let in initially by the CIA on “the false story re Oswald’s trip to Mexico,” from this point on the FBI cooperated in revising its story, too, to cover the CIA’s tracks.

Unknown to ordinary citizens watching President Kennedy’s funeral on their television sets, the agencies of a national security state had quickly formed a united front behind the official mourning scenes to cover up every aspect of JFK’s assassination. National security policies toward enemies beyond the state (with whom the slain president had been negotiating a truce) made necessary the denial of every trace of conspiracy within the state. As a saddled, riderless horse followed the coffin through the capital’s streets, plausible deniability had come home to haunt the nation.

On November 25, 1963, Deputy Attorney General Nicholas deB. Katzenbach sent a memorandum to Bill Moyers, President Johnson’s press secretary, urging a premature identification of Oswald as the lone assassin lest speculation of either a Communist or a right-wing conspiracy get out of hand: