JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (33 page)

[
90
]. William Attwood,
The Twilight Struggle: Tales of the Cold War
(New York: Harper & Row, 1987), p. 259.

[
91
]. Lechuga,
In the Eye of the Storm,
p. 197.

[
92
]. Ibid., p. 198.

[
93
]. Ibid., p. 199.

[
94
]. Ibid., p. 200.

[
95
]. Attwood,
Twilight Struggle
, pp. 259-60.

[
96
]. Ibid., p. 260.

[
97
]. Ibid. See also Attwood’s November 8, 1963, Memorandum to Gordon Chase.
FRUS
,
1961-1963,
vol. XI, p. 881.

[
98
]. Attwood,
Twilight Struggle
, p. 260.

[
99
]. Attwood’s Memorandum to Chase,
FRUS
,
1961-1963,
vol. XI, p. 881.

[
100
]. Attwood,
Twilight Struggle
, p. 260.

[
101
]. Ibid. Also Lechuga,
In the Eye of the Storm,
p. 205.

[
102
]. Attwood to Chase,
FRUS
,
1961-1963,
vol. XI, p. 882.

[
103
]. Ibid.

[
104
]. William Attwood,
The Reds and the Blacks: A Personal Adventure
(London: Hutchinson, 1967), p. 261.

[
105
]. Jean Daniel, “Unofficial Envoy: An Historic Report from Two Capitals,”
New Republic
(December 14, 1963), p. 16.

[
106
]. Ibid.

[
107
]. Ibid.

[
108
]. Ibid., p. 17.

[
109
]. Ibid.

[
110
]. Fonzi,
Last Investigation,
pp. 141-42. Veciana also described the Bishop–Oswald meeting to author Dick Russell, who included it in
The Man Who Knew Too Much
, p. 417.

[
111
]. Fonzi,
Last Investigation,
p. 142.

[
112
]. Ibid., p. 396. In
The Last Investigation
Gaeton Fonzi proved through witnesses who knew David Atlee Phillips and a wealth of circumstantial evidence that he was indeed Maurice Bishop (pp. 304-65).

[
113
]. Author’s interview of Antonio Veciana, Sr., November 14, 2007. Translation by Antonio Veciana, Jr. On the assassination of President Kennedy, Mr. Veciana said, “For me there is no question that it was a conspiracy, and Fidel Castro had nothing to do with it.” Ibid.

[
114
]. Fonzi,
Last Investigation,
p. 266.

[
115
]. Ibid., p. 428.

[
116
].
Warren Report
, pp. 733-36.

[
117
]. Dan Hardway and Edwin Lopez,
Lee Harvey Oswald, the CIA and Mexico City
(top secret HSCA report declassified gradually in the mid-nineties and known to researchers as the
Lopez Report
), pp. 12, 31.

[
118
]. Ibid., p. 53.

[
119
]. The following analysis of CIA documents on Oswald in Mexico City draws especially on the work of John Newman, particularly his “Mexico City—a New Analysis,” a presentation made at the “November in Dallas” JFK Lancer Conference, November 19, 1999; at www.jfk lancer.com/backes/newman. See also Newman,
Oswald and the CIA,
pp. 352-419.

[
120
]. Cable from Mexico City to Director, CIA, October 8, 1963; CIA 201-289248; JFK 104-10015-10047. Newman,
Oswald and the CIA
, p. 509. Also James P. Hosty, Jr.,
Assignment, Oswald
(New York: Arcade, 1996), p. 279. Unless stated otherwise, the documents I have cited in this analysis are linked, according to their JFK numbers, to the above Newman transcript.

[
121
]. Clarence M. Kelley and James Kirkpatrick Davis,
Kelley: The Story of an FBI Director
(Kansas City: Andrews, McMeel & Parker, 1987), p. 268.

[
122
]. Marina Oswald thought her husband’s Russian was “colloquial and idiomatic.” Priscilla Johnson McMillan,
Marina and Lee
(New York: Bantam, 1978), p. 156. McMillan’s book explains Lee Oswald’s proficiency in Russian, by the time he met Marina, by his previous year and a half in the Soviet Union, where his co-workers at the Minsk Radio Plant had especially helped him with the language. However, the Warren Commission’s general counsel J. Lee Rankin told the commission members at a closed-door meeting that “we are trying . . . to find out what [Oswald] studied at the Monterey School of the Army in the way of languages,” suggesting Oswald received the kind of expert assistance in Russian given to the U.S. military’s counterintelligence agents. January 27, 1964, Meeting; Weisberg,
Whitewash IV
, p. 101; p. 192 of original transcript. As Harold Weisberg notes, “Neither the [Warren] Report nor Oswald’s service records refer to this language schooling.” Ibid.

[
123
]. Newman,
Oswald and the CIA
, p. 509.

[
124
]. CIA Director to Mexico City, October 10, 1963. Reproduced in Newman,
Oswald and the CIA
, p. 512.

[
125
]. Cable from CIA to Department of State, FBI, and Navy, October 10, 1963; CIA 201-289248; JFK 104-10015-10052.

[
126
]. Memorandum from CIA Deputy Director, Plans, to Director, FBI, November 23, 1963; CIA 201-289248; JFK 104-10004-10257.

[
127
]. The witnesses are divided on whether it was the real Oswald or not who visited the two consulates. The Cuban consul Eusebio Azcue, who had argued with the man in the consulate, saw a newsreel film two or three weeks after the assassination that showed Jack Ruby shooting Oswald (Summers,
Not in Your Lifetime
, pp. 265-66). Azcue told the HSCA on April 1, 1978, that “the man Jack Ruby shot in the Dallas Police Station was not the same individual who had visited the Cuban Consulate in 1963” (
Lopez Report
, p. 202).

Alfredo Mirabal, Azcue’s colleague and successor, had “caught only glimpses of the man” at the consulate. Nevertheless he thought “the person whose picture appears on Lee Harvey Oswald’s visa application [a genuine photo of Oswald] was the same Lee Harvey Oswald who visited the Consulate” (Alfredo Mirabal Diaz to the HSCA, September 18, 1978;
Lopez Report
, pp. 205-6).

Silvia Duran, the Mexican employee at the Cuban Consulate who had dealt with Oswald at length, was arrested by the Mexican government at the request of the CIA’s Mexico City Station on November 23, 1963. Duran was held incommunicado and questioned intensively (
Lopez Report
, pp. 184-85). Her signed statement to the Mexican police that was forwarded to the Mexico City Station on November 27, 1963, stated in part: “When she became aware [from news reports] that the assassin was Lee Harvey Oswald, she ascertained that it was the same man who approximately two months prior had been to the Cuban Consulate to solicit an intransit visa to Russia. Having taken his name from the special documentation he presented she knew that he was married to a Russian woman and belonged to the ‘Fair Play for Cuba Committee.’ She checked the data in the Consulate archives and became certain that it was the same individual who was blonde, short, dressed unelegantly and whose face turned red when angry” (
Lopez Report
, p. 186). She also said she gave Oswald her business phone number but “he never called back” (ibid., p. 187).

When the CIA in turn forwarded a copy of Duran’s statement to the Warren Commission, it had deleted her description of Oswald as blond and short (which was in conflict with the Oswald arrested in Dallas, who had brown hair and was five feet nine inches tall). It had also changed her strong statement that “he never called back” to “she does not recall whether or not Oswald later telephoned her at the Consulate number that she gave him.” When the authors of the
Lopez Report
noted these changes, they observed, “Had the [original] statements been included, the Warren Commission’s conclusions would not have seemed as strong” (
Lopez Report
, pp. 186-87, 90).

In 1979 after watching the film of an Oswald interview in New Orleans, Silvia Duran told author Anthony Summers she was not sure if that was the same man she had interviewed or not (Summers,
Not in Your Lifetime
, p. 267).

Col. Oleg Nechiporenko, the KGB’s vice consul at the Soviet Consulate, thought “the Oswald he met in Mexico City was the same one who was in Dallas” (Gerald Nadler, “The KGB Spies Who Came in for the Gold,”
Washington Times
, May 27, 1992, p. A1). In his memoir
Passport to Assassination,
Nechiporenko’s view is supported by his fellow KGB officer at the consulate who also met Oswald, the notorious Valery Kostikov (Col. Oleg Maximovich Nechiporenko,
Passport to Assassination: The Never-Before-Told Story of Lee Harvey Oswald by the KGB Colonel Who Knew Him
[New York: Birch Lane Press, 1993], p. 76)
.