Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination (31 page)

One might put these anomolies down to faulty memory—and dismiss the discrepancy over the visa applicant’s height—were it not for the spontaneous recollection of another Mexico City witness.

Oscar Contreras was a law student at Mexico City’s National University in 1963. One evening at the time of the Oswald incidents in Mexico, he told the author, he and three friends were sitting in a university cafeteria talking. They all held leftist views, and he belonged to a group that supported the Castro revolution—as did many Mexicans—and had contacts in the Cuban Embassy. As they chatted, a man at a nearby table came over and introduced himself, spelling out his entire name—“Lee Harvey Oswald.”

Contreras and his friends laughed, for “Harvey” and “Oswald” were familiar to them as the names of characters in a popular cartoon about rabbits. Indeed, Contreras said, that was why the name stuck in his mind.

Like Consul Azcue, Contreras said the “Oswald” he met that evening looked older than thirty. Like
Sylvia Durán, he recalled that Oswald was short—he, too, thought at most 5’6”. Contreras, who was himself 5’9”, clearly recalled having looked
down
at the man he still remembered as “Oswald the Rabbit.”

With minor variations, Contreras’ “Oswald” offered the students a familiar account of his background.
10
He had had to leave Texas, he said, because the FBI was bothering him. He declared that life in the United States was not for him. He wanted to go to Cuba, but for some reason the people at the Cuban Consulate were so far blocking his visa application. Could the students help—through their friends in the Embassy? Contreras and his friends said they would try.

When they talked to their Cuban contacts—they included Consul Azcue and a Cuban intelligence officer—they were warned to break off contact with this “Oswald.” The Cubans said they suspected that his purpose was to infiltrate left-wing groups. When Oswald next came to see them, Contreras and his student friends told him that the Cubans did not trust him and were not going to give him a visa. “Oswald,” who ended up spending the night at the students’ apartment, was still begging for help in getting to Cuba when he left the following morning.

The next time Contreras heard the name Oswald, he said, was after the assassination. He had no love for the United States and did not report his encounter with “Oswald” to American authorities. Only four years later, having made the acquaintance of the then U.S. Consul, did he mention it in conversation. The Assassinations Committee found records showing that the lead had been considered “the first significant development in the investigation of the Kennedy assassination after 1965.”

Having interviewed Contreras twice, the author thought him a credible witness. He had gone on to become a successful journalist—eventually the editor of
El
Mundo
, the newspaper serving the town of Tampico.
11

How, though, would the Oswald whom Contreras met have found his way into the student milieu?
In 1994, in Mexico City, the author interviewed an attorney named Homobono Alcaraz. He had featured in FBI reports as having said that, while studying law—like Contreras—he, too, had met and talked with Oswald. The encounter, Alcaraz told the author, had occurred at Sanborn’s restaurant, in the company of two or three other American students—all of them, like Alcaraz himself, Quakers.
12

The students’ talk had centered on the difficulties involved in getting to Cuba. Oswald, Alcaraz recalled, eventually left with one of the Americans—whom Alcaraz remembered as having been named Steve “Kennan, or Keenan” (Alcaraz had trouble pronouncing or spelling the name) from Philadelphia. They went off together on his motorbike, Oswald riding pillion, headed for the Cuban Consulate. Recent research established that a student from Philadelphia named Steve Kenin did visit and live for some time in Mexico, did frequent a Quaker guest house, and did ride a motorbike—and did travel to Cuba.
13

The physical description Oscar Contreras supplied, like the anomalies arising from much of the Cuban Consulate scenario, has contributed to suspicion that the Oswald who visited the Consulate was an impostor. Pause, though, to consider the evidence official investigations accepted—that it
was
the real Oswald who pestered the Cuban officials. That evidence is persuasive if not conclusive.

The signature on the visa application form, graphologists told the Assassinations Committee, was
Oswald’s. Consular assistant Sylvia Durán had, as noted, required passport-size photos for the visa, recommended a nearby photographic service, and said her visitor later returned with the necessary photos. The picture affixed to the surviving application form certainly appears to be that of Oswald.

Some ifs and buts remain. Absent cast-iron evidence, graphologists’ views are not legally considered reliable. There is doubt, too, about the visa photos’ provenance. Investigation following the assassination indicated that the pictures had not been taken at any local Mexico City establishment. As for Sylvia Durán, she could not remember for sure when precisely she handed the visa application forms to her visitor and at what stage the applicant signed. Sometimes, she said, she would allow the signed forms to leave the building. Her boss, Azcue, for his part, told the Assassinations Committee that he could “almost assure” them that the clothing worn in the visa photo was different from that worn by the man he met.

Following the imposture notion, one might assume that an operative impersonating an individual would have had access to authentic photographs and familiarity with the signature of his subject.

There is more, though, information that—for this author—seems to clinch the matter so far as the Oswald at the Cuban Consulate is concerned. After the assassination, the name and phone number of consular assistant Sylvia Durán were found scrawled in Oswald’s address book. There is the fact, too, that—though his wife, Marina, initially denied all knowledge of a Mexico trip and visits to the embassies—she eventually acknowledged that her husband told her about it.
14

The House Assassinations Committee Report stated that the
Committee thought “the weight of the evidence” indicated that Oswald visited both the Cuban Consulate and the Soviet Embassy.
15
Its 410-page study of the complex Mexico episode said, nevertheless, that the evidence pointing to impersonation of Oswald was “of such a nature that the possibility cannot be dismissed.” The Committee’s Final Report noted, too, that it focused on the possibility that an impostor visited the Soviet Embassy or Cuban Consulate “during one or more of the contacts in which Oswald was identified by the CIA.”

If an Oswald impostor did operate in Mexico City, could the CIA have been involved? The Agency did impersonate people there, and within months of the Oswald visit. A real-life scenario, with striking similarities to the game suspected to have been played when Oswald was there has surfaced, in a CIA document.

Just two months before the Oswald appearances, a U.S. citizen from Texas named Eldon Hensen twice made phone contact with the Cuban Embassy. He could not himself come to the Embassy, he told an aide, because “an American spy might see him”—but gave the name of his hotel. Hours later, he received a call from a man who identified himself as a member of the Embassy staff. They duly met and talked, and Hensen offered to work on behalf of the Cuban government on his return to the United States.

The Cuban “aide” had, in fact, been in the pay of the CIA. “At station request,” read a subsequent Agency cable to HQ, “[name withheld] posing as CUBEMB officer made contact … lured Subj[ect] to hotel restaurant … [second name redacted] witnessed meeting from nearby table … [withheld word, probably the FBI] informed … will handle stateside investigation.”

By using its audio surveillance of the Cuban mission, the Agency had entrapped would-be pro-Castro activist
Hensen. “A standard operation there,” former Assassinations Records Review Board Executive Director Jeremy Gunn said in 2003, “was to impersonate Americans in telephone contact with the [Soviet] Embassy.” There is no good reason to suppose the CIA dealt otherwise with the Cuban mission.

Assassinations Committee investigators strove for months to get the CIA to cooperate in its search for the truth about Mexico City—and emerged certain that the Agency was hiding something. What follows draws on documents that they, and later the Assassinations Records Review Board, did succeed in extracting. It provides a glimpse, but only a glimpse, of what really occurred.

On October 8, 1963, a week after the supposed Oswald visits to the embassies, CIA Mexico City Chief of Station Winston Scott sent a name trace request to headquarters in Langley on an:

American male who spoke broken Russian said his name Lee OSWALD (phonetic), stated he at SOVEMB on 28 Sept … 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, balding top …”

Scott was sending in his query on the basis of surveillance photographs of the individual in question, one of which is reproduced in this book (see Photo 36). CIA headquarters knew Oswald did not answer the description sent in by Scott, as it made clear in a response to the Mexico station. “Oswald,” a staffer wrote, “is five feet ten inches, one hundred sixty-five pounds, light brown wavy hair… .”

The same day, October 10, however, a teletype went out from CIA headquarters to the FBI, the State Department, and the U.S. Navy—
suggesting the older man might be one and the same as Oswald. Having noted the basics about the thirty-five-year-old, balding six-footer who had visited the Soviet Embassy, the headquarters message went on to state:

IT IS BELIEVED THAT OSWALD MAY BE IDENTICAL TO LEE HENRY [
sic
] OSWALD, BORN ON 18 OCTOBER 1939 IN NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA. A FORMER U.S. MARINE WHO DEFECTED TO THE SOVIET UNION IN OCTOBER 1959 AND LATER MADE ARRANGEMENTS THROUGH THE UNITED STATES EMBASSY IN MOSCOW TO RETURN TO THE UNITED STATES WITH HIS RUSSIAN-BORN WIFE, MARINA NIKOLAEVNA PUSAKOVA [
sic
], AND THEIR CHILD …

These documents alone were to lead to prolonged struggles between the CIA and investigators, congressional committees and private researchers alike. Who was the American at the Soviet Embassy who “identified himself as Lee Oswald” but looked totally unlike him—ten years older, taller, and heavier-built? Could that be confirmation that someone had impersonated Oswald?

Agency spokesmen were at pains to explain that there really was no mystery at all. According to the CIA, the raw data on the “Oswald” visit to the Soviet mission had initially been associated with a picture of another “person known to frequent the Soviet Embassy,” who had been there three days after the Oswald visit. Someone at the CIA’s Mexico City station had mistakenly “guessed” that the heavily built man of thirty-five and Oswald were one and the same.

On receiving the misleading report, headquarters in Washington had then
supposedly tried to sort out the discrepancy between the photos of the thirty-five-year-old and the contradictory file details of the real Oswald collected during his time in Russia. The task was made more difficult, the CIA would later claim, by the supposed fact that the Agency at that point had no photograph of the real Oswald. “CIA did not have a known photograph of Oswald in its files before the assassination of President Kennedy either in Washington or abroad,” CIA officer Raymond Rocca, who as head of Research and Analysis was a senior colleague of Counterintelligence chief James Angleton—was to write in a 1967 memorandum. More than a decade after the assassination, then CIA Director William Colby would still be saying of the man who was not Oswald: “We don’t to this day know who he is.”

Some documents, however, contradict these claims. Right after the assassination, when Mexico station chief Winston Scott sent photos of the man who was not Oswald to headquarters, he noted that they were “photographs of a certain person who is known to you.” Months later, the CIA would tell the Warren Commission it “could be embarrassing to the individual involved, who as far as this Agency is aware had no connection with Lee Harvey Oswald or the assassination.”
16

The CIA’s claim that it had no photograph of the real Oswald on record, moreover, does not stand up. The Agency’s own files indicate that it did have pictures of the real Oswald at the time of the Mexico affair. Less than four months after the assassination, when the CIA sent the Warren Commission what it called “an exact reproduction of the Agency’s official dossier [on Oswald] … exact copies of all material in this file up to early October 1963”—the time of the Mexico episode. Included in the dossier were clippings from the
Washington Post
and
Washington Evening Star
dated 1959, reporting the authentic
Oswald’s defection to the Soviet Union—and featuring news agency photographs of Oswald.
17

The CIA indulged in shadow-boxing with the Warren Commission after the assassination. Faced with a request for three Agency cables that dealt with the matter of the photos of the man who was not Oswald, it played for time. In an internal memorandum, Counterintelligence chief Angleton’s colleague Rocca expressed his boss’ desire to “wait out” the Commission.
18
Wesley Liebeler, one of the few Commission attorneys who had direct contact with CIA personnel, would recall that the Agency had been so secretive about the photographs as to be virtually useless.

The photograph puzzle prompted yet another question. Whether or not the photographs of heavily built man at the Soviet Embassy had anything to do with the case, they were evidence—as reported earlier in these pages—that CIA cameras did indeed photograph people visiting Communist embassies. That being so, should not the Agency have pictures of whoever
did
go to the Soviet and Cuban Embassies—on several occasions—using the name Oswald? Photographs of him there, after all, would clear up the matter once and for all. Where are they?