Reclaiming History (242 page)

What happened to these tapes? In 1963, David Atlee Phillips was the number-three man at the CIA station in Mexico City, and among other responsibilities he was chief of the station’s Cuban operations. When I was preparing him for his upcoming testimony at the London docu-trial in 1986,
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he told me that “95 percent of the recordings our person would listen to would be just junk. With the 5 percent that was relevant, the conversation would be typed up. But the tape of all the conversations would continue to be used. New conversations would simply obliterate the old conversations. There’s no question that’s what occurred to Oswald’s conversations. They don’t exist anymore. The tapes were large in those days. If we kept all of the tapes and didn’t re-use them, they would have filled a warehouse.”

“It would have been nice,” I said, “if those tapes still existed.”

“Yes, but we didn’t know at that time that people like Ed Lopez and Gaeton Fonzi [HSCA conspiracy-minded investigators] would later question whether it was really Oswald on the phone.”
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When London Weekend Television researcher Richard Tomlinson interviewed Phillips three weeks earlier in Washington, D.C., for three hours, Phillips put it even better: “How were we to know that two months later this person, Oswald, would assassinate the president?”

It’s interesting to note that even the long report that HSCA investigator Edwin Lopez authored on Oswald’s trip to Mexico City concluded that “the CIA telephone surveillance on the Soviet Embassy taped several calls of a man using the name ‘Lee Oswald.’ [Lopez offers no evidence to support the assertion that Oswald used his name several times.] These tapes were retained for a routine two [the number “one” is handwritten above the typewritten “two”] week period and were
most likely
erased shortly after 16 October 1963.”
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Lopez apparently was unaware that a November 24, 1963, CIA Teletype (No. 7054) from the CIA station in Mexico City to CIA headquarters in Washington, D.C., read, in part, “Hqs has full transcripts [of] all pertinent calls. Regret tapes for this period
already erased
.”
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T
he other major area that has been grist for the conspiracy mill on the issue of an Oswald impersonator in Mexico City is the lack of any photo of Oswald in Mexico City. The CIA had photographic surveillance of people entering and leaving the Cuban consulate and Soviet embassy,
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but since it was not able to produce photos of Oswald entering or leaving these places, the conspiracy theorists have long since maintained this proves Oswald was never present at either place. The theorists never consider the possibility of incompetence, which is so very common in life, being the answer, or of a failure or breakdown of the equipment from time to time. It turns out that the photographic surveillance of the Cuban and Russian embassies (and their respective consulates) was nowhere as seamless as might be wished. David Phillips told me that although his office in Mexico City had the capacity to photograph the consulate and embassy round-the-clock, seven days a week, the reality was that this was not done. Because the equipment malfunctioned from time to time—the repairs obviously took time—and because personnel were sometimes needed more elsewhere, the surveillance “was not constant and uninterrupted.”
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Indeed, in 1998 the ARRB conducted a very thorough review of all logs, tapes, and records from the CIA’s station in Mexico City with respect to the period of Oswald’s visit, and found that a Robot Star camera and a K-100 camera had been installed by the CIA on September 27, 1963, to cover the entrance to the Cuban consulate. (Per the CIA, there was no photographic surveillance of the entrance to the Cuban consulate prior to September 27.) The K-100 camera broke down after one day’s operation, and the Robot Star, which was to be tested for eight days, “broke down after four days of operation,” meaning it was only operational from September 27 to September 30, and “there is no record of actual photographic takes or test results from the camera.” A functioning “pulse camera” was installed on December 17, 1963, weeks after the assassination.

As far as the Soviet embassy was concerned, the ARRB learned that LIMITED, the name for the CIA’s photographic surveillance operation located in a first-floor apartment directly across the street from the main Soviet embassy gate, and operating from 9:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. each day, was the source of the photographs of the unidentified “mystery” man (see later text) supplied to the Warren Commission, and lived up to its title by not even being operational on September 28–30 and October 5–6. The ARRB found that even on the days of operation, there were many cases where “the log entries documenting observed activities at the site do not correlate with the recorded hours of operation. This suggests that the target site was not being monitored for the entire duration of the surveillance shift.”
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The documentary history of the photographic surveillance cameras around the time of Oswald’s visit to Mexico City, which either were manually operated or had to be triggered by a movement or color in the area of the embassy being “covered,” is sorry at best. References to the system like the following appear in an internal CIA document from the chief of the CIA station in Mexico City: the system works “about 80 percent of the time”; the coverage was changed to “only photograph people leaving but not entering the target building”; when a person leaves by this entrance, “the man’s shirt or face will trigger the device photographing a front or side view depending on how the subject leaves” the building; “
this system does not work when a person enters the building with light clothing
[unbelievable]”; and the station “requested that a substitute camera be shipped to the Station as soon as possible to replace the Robot Star camera on this project.”
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But if you were to listen to the conspiracy theorists, the surveillance cameras were operating continuously and never missed a thing.

The HSCA dealt with allegations from conspiracy theorists that the CIA did, in fact, obtain a picture of Oswald entering the consulate and embassy, but the CIA denied that any photograph or photographs of Oswald had been thus obtained, and the committee discovered no such pictures of Oswald in its review of the agency’s files.
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The famous Lopez Report referred to earlier (formally, the HSCA’s “Report on Lee Harvey Oswald’s Trip to Mexico City”), named after Edwin Lopez, the young HSCA investigator who after much research in Mexico City drafted the report, was finally, after thirty-three years and amid much anticipation in the conspiracy community, declassified from “Top Secret” and released by the ARRB on October 7, 1996.

Though conspiracy theorists thought it would contain some powerful evidence of a conspiracy, the report, despite Lopez’s strong, conspiracy orientation, turned out to be,
as it had to be
, a giant dud. Lopez concluded that “the Warren Commission correctly established that Oswald had traveled to Mexico City.” What about once he got there? “While the majority of the evidence tends to indicate that [the individual who visited the Cuban consulate and Soviet embassy on the dates in question] was indeed Lee Harvey Oswald, the possibility that someone else used Lee Harvey Oswald’s name during this time in contacts with the Soviet and Cuban Consulates cannot be absolutely dismissed.”
¹⁶⁷
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But nowhere in the 393 pages of his report does Lopez say why an imposter would go to Mexico City at the same time as Oswald and use Oswald’s name at the Cuban consulate and Soviet embassy around the very same time that we know, from much evidence, that Oswald was also doing so. What could possibly be achieved by such an endeavor? Moreover, since the Cuban consulate and Soviet embassy in Mexico City are only two blocks apart, wouldn’t there be a likelihood that Oswald and his imposter would run into each other? And even if Oswald and his impersonator looked like identical twins, and the impersonator managed to dress exactly like Oswald, and had the identical papers and documents Oswald had, wouldn’t the employees at the consulate and embassy be saying to Oswald or his impersonator things like “Weren’t you just here?” “Didn’t you tell me…?” “I thought I already told you…”

One would think that only children in a sandbox could imagine an Oswald impersonator in Mexico City at the same time Oswald was there, right? But among many others, conspiracy theorist John Newman believes all of this. And he’s actually an assistant professor on the payroll of the University of Maryland, teaching courses in Soviet, Chinese Communist, East Asian, and Vietnam War history. Why would anyone be impersonating Oswald at the consulate and embassy? “Someone,” Newman says, “wanted to make sure that Oswald’s Cuban and KGB contacts in Mexico were fully documented.” Why? To establish “evidence of an international communist conspiracy” to murder Kennedy. But since Newman, who maintains that Oswald was a CIA operative, admits the real Oswald was also down there at the consulate and embassy around the same time, why the need for the imposter? The good professor doesn’t say. And if the imposter had the objective Newman gives him, why wouldn’t he want to “do his thing” at some time
other than
when Oswald was also walking back and forth between the consulate and embassy? Newman’s resumé says he had twenty years of military intelligence training. Apparently, it’s in the twenty-first year that the armed forces finally gives you the small commonsense tablet.
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Getting back to Lopez, he comes up with an Oswald impersonator possibility in his report that is so far out a hundred fertile minds sitting in a room for an entire week with the express purpose of thinking up impersonator scenarios wouldn’t think of it. It’s always assumed, of course, that the imposter would impersonate Oswald without his knowledge, that he would be someone Oswald did not know. But Lopez raises the possibility—are you seated? because I don’t want to be responsible for anyone falling down and hurting themselves—that maybe the impersonator was “one of his [Oswald’s] companions” in Mexico City.
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To think that our tax money went into the preparation of the Lopez Report.

Elsewhere in his report, Lopez says, “The CIA photo-surveillance operations in Mexico City probably obtained a photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald,”
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and he hints darkly that the CIA suppressed the photo or photos, though he does not say why the spy agency would want to keep Oswald’s entering the Cuban consulate and Soviet embassy a secret. Lopez has always suspected that the CIA, or rogue elements thereof, may have been behind the assassination.
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Indeed, in my interview of him before the London trial he even said he was “a great fan” of A. J. Weberman, the bearded guru and wacky conspiracy theorist who lived in a loft in Greenwich Village and was, per Lopez, “the leader of the yippies.” However, in front of the jury in London he would only acknowledge that he told me he was “impressed” with Weberman’s research in the Kennedy case (i.e., when Weberman wasn’t rifling through the garbage of Bob Dylan, with whom Weberman was obsessed).
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On direct examination by Gerry Spence, Lopez said that he felt the CIA was “trying to set Oswald up” for the Kennedy assassination. On cross, I asked him, “[So] you believe that the CIA may have set Lee Harvey Oswald up?”

“Not as an agency, no.”

“But some maverick, rogue element?”

“Some type of maverick element, yes.”
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*

But if the CIA, or rogue elements thereof, were responsible for Kennedy’s murder and trying to frame Oswald for it by alleging he was a Castro or KGB agent, why wouldn’t they want people to see the very evidence (the alleged suppressed photographs of Oswald at the Cuban consulate or Soviet embassy) that could help them do it? Since it would be to their advantage to show Oswald’s connection with these people, instead of concealing these photographs, wouldn’t they be passing them out on street corners for the world to see?

T
here’s a footnote to the weightless allegation that someone was impersonating Oswald at the Soviet embassy in Mexico City. The Mexico City office of the CIA cabled CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia,
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on October 9, 1963, that on September 28 and October 1, an “American male who spoke broken Russian” and who identified himself as Lee Oswald had contacted the Soviet embassy, speaking once to Consul Valeriy Kostikov and once with Soviet guard Ivan Obyedkov, asking the latter if any messages had been received for him at the embassy, and being told there hadn’t been. The cable goes on to describe the American male, whom Mexico City believed was “Lee Oswald”: “Apparent age 35, athletic build, circa six feet, receding hairline, balding top, wore khakis and sport shirt.”
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When the CIA’s photographic surveillance of the embassy picked up an American-looking male entering the embassy around the same time, the staff erroneously assumed, David Phillips told me, that it was a photo of Oswald, whom they did not have a photo of in their Mexico City files.
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The reason they assumed the man was Oswald was that they knew from a tape-recorded phone conversation and the transcript of it that Oswald was a North American, and from their photograph surveillance during the same period of time there was just one person who appeared to be North American. All the rest were Latin.
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As Phillips describes the gaffe in his book,
The Night Watch
, his office had “put one (Oswald, seeking a visa from the Soviets) and one (an unknown visitor to the Russian Embassy) together and come up with an incorrect two: the assumption that the two men were the same.”
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Upon receiving the October 9 internal cable at Langley, Charlotte Bustos, a twenty-six-year veteran CIA employee working the “Mexico desk” at headquarters, requested a “name trace” on Lee Oswald, and she received Oswald’s 201 file, where his name was listed as Lee
Henry
Oswald. Afer reviewing Oswald’s file, she sent out a cable (telegraph) on October 10 to three federal agencies (Department of State, FBI, and Department of Navy) passing on the information in the October 9 internal CIA cable, and adding 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.”
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