http://www.ctka.net/2015/JimDMexicoCity/Introduction.htmlA Preface to Mexico City.
"A big dud." – Vincent Bugliosi, referring to the "Lopez Report"
Aside from a few willfully blind efforts - like Bugliosi's - to downplay the significance and implications of Oswald's alleged trip to Mexico City between September 26 and October 2, 19631, or - like Philip Shenon's - to revive the hoary (and purposely fabricated) tale, promoted by David Phillips' assets in the aftermath of the assassination, that Castro either indirectly or directly encouraged or even recruited him there,2 over the past two decades we have witnessed the emergence of something like a consensus among a number of JFK assassination critics that the Mexico City affair may hold one – if not the – key to a domestic plot which violently removed the 35th President from office.
Increased awareness of the importance of the events surrounding this visit may be illustrated by a simple example: the index entry in Jim Marrs' compendium of assassination research, Crossfire, which first appeared in 1989, and then was revised and updated for the 50th anniversary. Because the book aims at inclusiveness and covers a great deal of ground, the relative amount of space it gives to a topic could serve as a barometer for what is "in the air", both back then and today. In the former edition, about 4 pages are devoted to Oswald in Mexico; in the latter, however, the number of pages containing references to or discussion of this topic has grown to approximately 18. (Both editions are roughly equal in their total number of pages – a little over 600).3
Without a doubt, this heightened interest is due to the ARRB releases of the HSCA hearings, and in particular, of the two most revealing documents regarding Mexico City, the Lopez Report and the Slawson-Coleman report. As the two essays by Jim DiEugenio featured here demonstrate, the Warren Commission's superficial "investigation" (if one can even call it that) allowed itself to be spoon-fed by the FBI and CIA, while with the House Select Committee, the CIA immediately locked down access to their files once it was realized that the two young law students, Ed Lopez and Dan Hardway, were on the scent of an elaborate Agency subterfuge. The Lopez Report was first published in a substantially redacted form, and redactions persist even in the 2003 re-issue;4 nevertheless, its appearance was responsible for instigating closer examination of what the Oswald visit was really all about. Regardless of what one ultimately thinks today about Oswald's supposed stay in Mexico City, one can neither ignore the Hardway and Lopez findings (we all owe them a debt of gratitude for the work they did), nor accept any longer at face value the rather fatuous story proffered to the public by the Warren Report that Oswald went there to obtain passage to the Soviet Union through Cuba.
"There's something malodorous in Mexico." – Jim Garrison
As with a number of other elements in the official "case" against Oswald (like his possession of the Mannlicher-Carcano), the first generation critics did not question this trip or its motives, even though the story hardly made sense. It was Jim Garrison, as DiEugenio points out, who first looked askance at the so-called evidence for Oswald's activities there.5 Between the Shaw trial and the HSCA (which finally deposed Cuban Embassy personnel like Silvia Duran and Eusebio Azcue, as well as key CIA personnel involved in the handling of information flowing out of Mexico City Station, i.e., David Atlee Phillips and Anne Goodpasture), whatever scrutiny was given to this story can more or less be said to derive from Garrison's original suspicions. (A curious example of this occurs in the 1973 film Executive Action: when the plotters who have picked out Oswald to use as patsy discover that he will be going to Mexico City, they conclude that he is also being handled by others, something they deem will be useful after the fact; so the general sense that this trip was not Oswald's initiative seems to have bubbled up from NODA into the Dalton Trumbo / Mark Lane script.)
Manifold uncertainties arise concerning this episode in the assassination narrative, including if, exactly how, and when Oswald traveled there and back and which (if any) phone calls and visits to the Cuban and Soviet consular services he actually made; further questions pertain to the disposition of surveillance technology and protocols (and who precisely was responsible for them), the absence of any photo of Oswald and the identity of the figures in photos (such as the famous "Mystery Man") purportedly of Oswald, the provenance and fate of the telephone wiretap recordings, the identity of the speakers on these recordings, which languages – Spanish or Russian – the callers spoke and their relative fluency in them, how many transcripts of these recordings were actually made and whether the ones we have were redacted or even forged, the handling of internal memoranda and cable traffic, conflicting reports of Oswald's physical appearance, statements and actions, how he putatively procured his visa photos, and reports of encounters with him apart from those by diplomatic employees or officials. It is not our purpose in this introductory note to provide an exhaustive review of the incongruities and contradictions presented by the extant documents and testimony, nor of how these have been variously addressed;6 much of this material finds ample treatment in the two essays which follow. What can be stated here, however, is that, in this reader's opinion, the known facts in their totality point most strongly in the direction of what has recently been coined by John Newman as a "dark operation" – meaning one deliberately hidden inside another7 – a viewpoint persuasively suggested by DiEugenio in his careful sifting of the details comprising this incident.
In this connection, I would mention two startling disclosures made by Hardway and Lopez. First, that they had prepared indictments of both Phillips and Goodpasture because of their repeated perjuries under oath to the HSCA. In the studies which follow, Jim spells out these lies, albeit he did not know at the time that Dan and Ed wanted the two CIA officers indicted. Second, that the CIA deliberately kept Dan and Ed away from Mexico City student leader Oscar Contreras. Contreras, like several others, was another witness who asserted that the man he met and who said he was Oswald was not the Oswald who was shot in Dallas. Would it not be rather logical to deduce from these two items of information that Phillips and Goodpasture knew Oswald did not visit either the Cuban or Soviet embassy, that they knew this before the assassination, and that they did what they could to ensure this was not revealed prior to November 22, 1963?
"But I will tell you this, that when the record comes out, we will find that there was never a photograph taken of Lee Harvey Oswald in Mexico City. We will find out that Lee Harvey Oswald never visited, let me put it, that is a categorical statement, there, there, we will find out there is no evidence, first of all no proof of that. Second there is no evidence to show that Lee Harvey Oswald visited the Soviet embassy."
– David Phillips, as quoted by Mark Lane8
Especially disturbing, in fact, is the question of how these very probable impersonations of Oswald fit into the larger scheme of things we might infer about this operation. Indeed, the physical presence of an imposter at the embassy compounds (not just on the phone taps) raises a troublesome issue, one which Anthony Summers actually voiced three decades ago in an early edition of Conspiracy:
"It might have been undesirable, after the assassination, to reveal what some CIA 'dirty tricks' department was up to – against Fair Play for Cuba or simply against Castro's Cuba. Yet there the rationalization ends. If Oswald was part of a covert operation against Havana's interests, he could surely have been sent into the Communist embassies himself." [emphasis added]9
To inflect slightly differently what Summers is driving at here: if it turns out that the biographical Lee Harvey Oswald – the 24-year-old "expatriate" ex-Marine who from all appearances was indeed involved in an anti-FPCC provocation in New Orleans only a few weeks prior – was not the person who showed up claiming to be him and making a scene at the Cuban/Soviet embassies/consulates, then one needs to provide some rationale for the use of an imposter in one instance but not the other; conjectures which might explain this are perhaps not all that straightforward, but they nonetheless will have a crucial bearing on any understanding of what happened or was meant to happen. This is why "Oswald's" presence and precise whereabouts in Mexico City continue to be of considerable consequence, despite attempts by some analyses to neutralize them and focus only on the paper trail (a trail which is itself plagued by questions of authenticity and manipulation). To date, the most comprehensive review of whether Oswald entered and exited Mexico the way the Commission claimed is given in Harvey & Lee, and as the reader will see, DiEugenio's 2013 essay builds on John Armstrong's work as one component in his larger endeavor to advance our understanding of the Mexico City escapade.10
DiEugenio's essays on this subject are not the product of isolated undertakings. As with much of what he writes, context – both thematic and historical – guides and shapes the labor. The excerpted chapter from Destiny Betrayed (2012), which has been amplified and revised with material from David Joseph’s six-part series on the subject (see n. 10), must be read as part of a larger argument vindicating both Garrison's investigative work and his intuitions concerning the motive for the crime. The second essay, originally intended as a chapter of Reclaiming Parkland, is squarely aimed at rebutting the view propounded in both the text and notes of Reclaiming History, and treats Mexico City in tandem with another telltale indicator of conspiracy, the foiled Chicago plot of November 2 (brought to light in 1975 by Edwin Black). I hope that our readers will find these two pieces cogent and illuminating; they deserve to take their place among the very best studies of this enigmatic tale of intrigue, deception and political treachery.
– Albert L. Rossi
Mexico City and Langley (2012)
Chicago and Mexico City (2013)
