Authors: John Newman
Oswald and the CIA: The Documented Truth About the Unknown Relationship Between the U.S. Government and the Alleged Killer of JFK (90 page)
More importantly, this FBI report appears not to have crossed the desk of Ann Egeter. It was not placed in the file she was in charge of-Oswald's 201 file. Rather, it was diverted into a different file: 100-300-11, the file for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC). Seven days earlier-the day before Oswald obtained his permit to go to Mexico-the CIA had sent a memo to the FBI about a proposed anti-FPCC operation. This operation and the fact that the Dallas FBI report was held in CI/OPS and filed in the FPCC file instead of Oswald's 201 file, suggests that an anti-FPCC operation involving Oswald probably originated in Angleton's counterintelligence operations staff. We will return to that operation and its description momentarily.
On October 2, while Oswald was still in Mexico City, an FBI letterhead memorandum detailing Oswald's Cuban escapades in New Orleans arrived in the CIA. On 4 October, this report found its way first-as did the previous Dallas report-to the desk of Jane Roman, the liaison officer for Angleton's Counterintelligence Staff. Four days later, Roman did not hand off this FBI report -as she had done the Dallas FBI report seven days earlier-to the counterintelligence operations section (CI/OPS). This time she handed it off to Austin Horn in the counterintelligence section of the Cuban affairs staff (SAS/CI). Among Horn's duties in SAS/CI was liaison work with the FBI. The cover sheet also indicates another person SAS/CI with the initials "LD" saw the letterhead memorandum that day8 October. The initials of the SAS/CI chief, Harold Swenson, alias Joseph Langosch, are not on the cover sheet.
On 10 October, the day that Scelso's section drafted the reply to the station in Mexico, this FBI report made another noteworthy trip. It went first to the desk of someone with the initials "CR" in the "CONTROL" desk of the counterintelligence section of the SAS (SAS/CI/CONTROL), and from there it was sent to the custodian of Oswald's 201 tile, Ann Egeter. She did not place this FBI report in Oswald's 201 file, so it was not there when Scelso's staff opened the 201 file to write the response to the Mexico station. The FBI report on Oswald's Cuban activities in Dallas was not there either and someone, possibly Egeter,10
had removed the August 1962 FBI report about Oswald's FBI debrief upon arriving back in the U.S. that summer. The file given to Scelso had no information after May 1962, and that is exactly what Scelso told the CIA station in Mexico.
In May 1962, Oswald was still in the Soviet Union. The exclusion of the FBI reports on Oswald since his return to the U.S. from his 201 file made it look like the CIA had no interest in him at the very time that the counterintelligence section of the Cuban staff was running an operation in which they thought he might be involved. When John Scelso wrote to the CIA station in Mexico that Oswald's CIA files had been dormant since May 1962, the Mexico desk chief did not lie. Counterintelligence officers in the SAS and Angleton's Staff ensured that Oswald's file lied to Scelso.
The CIA Oswald Operation in Mexico
When Scelso finished writing the HQS reply to the station in Mexico, Angleton's subordinates Jane Roman and Ann Egeter both signed off on the bottom of the cable. They had both been reading those sensitive FBI reports that, according to the cable they signed off on, did not exist. This indicates that a CIA operation in Mexico involving Oswald was likely underway. This operation was likely the same anti-FPCC operation that the CIA informed the FBI about on 17 September. This operation was probably the reason for the file switch mentioned above. It is also apparent that Angleton's staff knew that the Mexico City desk at CIA headquarters and the CIA station in Mexico were both being kept in the dark about this operation.
In the presence of Washington Post editor Jefferson Morley, I interviewed Jane Roman on November 3, 1994. When shown Scelso's cable she stated, "I'm signing off on something I know isn't true." When I pressed her for why she would have done this she replied, "The only interpretation I could put on this would be that this SAS group would have held all the information on Oswald under their tight control, so if you did a routine check, it wouldn't show up in his 201 file." She explained that she "wasn't in on any particular goings-on or hanky-panky as far as the Cuban situation." Asked about the significance of the untrue statement she replied, "Well, to me, it's indicative of a keen interest in Oswald, held very closely on a need-to-know basis."
As previously noted, on 16 September-the day before Oswald obtained his tourist permit to go to Mexico-the CIA sent a memo to the FBI about a proposed counter-Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) operation. In it, the Agency said it was considering "planting deceptive information" to embarrass the organization in areas where it had support."
A counter-FPCC operation would have been the responsibility of the Cuban affairs staff (SAS). In an 18 September memo to D. J. Brennan, FBI Liaison officer Sam Papich wrote that the CIA's John Tilton had requested FBI support for this operation. Specifically, Tilton had asked the FBI to provide FPCC "stationary" and an FPCC "foreign mailing list.""
John S. Tilton had been working the Cuban target at CIA for years. When Cuban operations were called "Task Force W" (TFW) in 1962, Tilton was working for the Chief of TFW "Paramilitary Affairs-Propaganda," Seymour Bolten. At the time of the Agency's request for support from the FBI, Tilton was the Deputy Chief of the Special Affairs Staff (SAS) "Maritime Operations Branch" (MOB). Paul A. Maggio was the SAS/MOB chief at that time of Tilton's request for FBI support.
CIA-produced FPCC documents and the names of FPCC supporters in Mexico City would have been helpful to spruce up Oswald's FPCC bona tides and acquire the names of local pro-Castro people that might vouch for him with the Cuban Consulate there. The Church Committee looked into the CIA request for support and concluded that, because the current foreign mailing list was not sent to the CIA until 27 November, that "there is no reason to believe
that any of this FBI and CIA activity had any connection with Oswald.""
This interpretation now appears questionable. The FBI likely already had FPCC literature. Like the CIA, the FBI had been running operations against the FPCC for years-especially getting inside its headquarters office in New York. On April 21, 1963, an FBI asset in New York intercepted a letter from Oswald to the FPCC office there.15
A few weeks before Tilton's request to the FBI, the Bureau had received FPCC literature directly from Oswald-a fact that was missing in their report to the CIA on 24 September. We will return to this missing piece momentarily.
Did the SAS have advance knowledge that Oswald would be paying a visit to the Cuban consulate in Mexico City? One possible source could have been William Gaudet, the CIA operative who may have been in line with-but says he does not recall seeing-Oswald when getting their Mexican tourist permits on 17 September. There was another, more likely, source. In August, Oswald had tried to infiltrate the anti-Castro Cuban Student Directorate (DRE), whose leaders in Miami were receiving $25,000 a month from the CIA at that time. A CIA undercover officer named George Joannides was guiding and monitoring the group's activities when Oswald baited the group by handing out pamphlets for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in front of them.'
The resulting clash with them in the street and later in a courtroom was covered in the media and discussed in the FBI report that arrived at the CIA three days before Oswald reached Mexico City.
After his altercation with the anti-Castro exiles in the street, Oswald was arrested and held in the jailhouse of New Orleans Police Lieutenant Frances Martello. Oswald asked to speak with an FBI agent to "supply him with information" on his FPCC activities. FBI agent John Quigley interviewed Oswald, who gave Quigley an FPCC flier, an FPCC application form, and a pamphlet entitled "The Crime Against Cuba.""
Quigley's FBI report on his jailhouse interview of Oswald was apparently suppressed until after Oswald's trip to Mexico City-it was not mentioned in the FBI report describing Oswald's fracas in New Orleans. If we can trust the CIA's records, Quigley's report was not shared with the CIA until mid-November.
It is likely that the SAS knew of Oswald's New Orleans FPCC activities before the FBI report describing them reached the CIA on 24 September, and that the source of this knowledge was George Joannides. Joannides was deeply immersed with the anti-Castro group-the DRE-that tangled with Oswald. One of the group's leaders, Isidora Borja, claimed that he was certain he had heard about Oswald's activities in New Orleans at the time. "
Another person at HQS very much in the loop on the DRE was John Tilton. For example, on 6 September, a senior SAS officer, Sam Halpern, directed that news from CIA asset Richard Cain about a DRE officer, Salvat, be discussed "with Tilton of MOB, noting for his benefit that we now have contact with Cain."'"'
The diversion of the incoming Cuban story on Oswald into the SAS FPCC file and its simultaneous exclusion from Oswald's 201 file suggests, as Jane Roman surmised, a keen interest in Oswald held very closely by the SAS on a need-to-know basis. It now seems plausible to speculate that the SAS was anticipating Oswald's trip to Mexico City. On the other hand, as we observed earlier, when the first (Dallas) FBI report was diverted into the FPCC file, it was being held in Angleton's counterintelligence operations (CI/OPS) section by Will Potocci- beginning on 25 September. The trail began in Angleton's staff.
Sometime between that date and 8 October, it seems likely that a CI/OPS-inspired anti-FPCC operation involving Oswald was being handled or monitored in the Cuban affairs counterintelligence section (SAS/CI). Thus, there might well have been underway in Mexico City-at the time when an impersonator falsely linked Oswald to Castro and Khrushchev-an apparently legitimate anti-FPCC operation. It now appears feasible that the some or all of the SAS officers involved in that operation were unaware that an operational pretext- their own operation - was being used to get Oswald in place in Mexico City for another, more sinister, purpose. This same pretext also legitimized the compartmentalization of Oswald's Cuban story at HQS CIA which, along with the compartmentalization of Kostikov's KGB assassination portfolio, ensured that the WWIII virus would remain dormant.
The inevitable conclusion is that someone who was privy to the plot against President Kennedy had the inside knowledge and authority to use a legitimate operation of the counterintelligence section of the SAS for another purpose. That purpose was to build into the fabric of the plot to kill the president a virus that would lay dormant for six weeks and then balloon into a WWIII scenario on the day of the assassination. Moreover, the designer knew that it would appear, upon the death of the president, as if a botched CIA operation had played a key role in the president's murder. Just as WWIII would drive Earl Warren into the planned national security coverup, this botched CIA operation would bring the Agency into line as well.
There may have been still darker contours to the Oswald operation. The CIA was still involved in an ongoing effort to murder Fidel Castro. The day before Kennedy was assassinated, Nestor Sanchez, of the SAS External Operations Branch (SAS/EOB), notified the Paris CIA station that an agent had been dispatched to Paris to meet AM/LASH."
AM/LASH was the codename for Rolando Cuebela, a friend of Castro's who had been recruited by the CIA. The agent who was sent to meet with AM/LASH was carrying a deadly poison pen intended to be used to murder Castro. We may never know the full extent of the involvement of the White House in these activities. What we do know is that, while the president's body was still in the air from Dallas to Washington on the day of the murder, FBI Director Hoover told Attorney General Robert Kennedy that Oswald had succeeded in getting to Cuba "but would not tell us what he went to Cuba for."21
That was not true, but its effect on the president's brother would have been devastating if he felt that he had been involved in an operation to kill Castro that the Cuban leader had turned on his brother.
The Disappearance of the CIA Cuban Cables from Mexico
We have discussed how Oswald's Cuban escapades in the U.S. were excluded from his HQS 201 file before his arrival in Mexico City. We now know that the original cables from the CIA station describing his Cuban activities in Mexico were destroyed after the assassination. Although we do not know exactly when this occurred, it most likely took place in the hours immediately after the assassination. Desperate to distance themselves from Oswald's Cuban activities in Mexico, officers at CIA HQS told a false story: the Agency had not known about Oswald's visits to the Cuban Consulate in Mexico until after the Kennedy assassination. To Support this lie, the cables from the station to HQS reporting those visits had to be destroyed.
HSCA investigators who questioned the officers who were working in the station in 1963-including the station chief, the chief of Cuban operations, and members of his section - were able to partially reconstruct what had taken place in the Mexico station. On more than one occasion, the station reported Oswald's contact with the Cuban Consulate to HQS. In addition, two later HQS memos confirmed what the station personnel said, one was a memo concerning Deputy Director Richard Helms' discussion with the Warren Commission in 1964, and the other was a memo by Counterintelligence Chief George Kalaris to the House Select Committee on Intelligence Activities in 1975. Both men affirmed that the station knew and reported to headquarters Oswald's Cuban contacts."
The station personnel also maintained that there was an additional Oswald phone call-on Monday-not accounted for in the extant records."