The DFS, Silvia Duran and the CIA-Mafia connection

See note:(1)

Did Staff D feed the Oswald-Kostikov lie to the CIA?

Abstract: There exist at least four successive versions (or falsifications) of Silvia Duran’s so-called statement of November 23,1963, to the Mexican DFS (Dirección Federal de Seguridad), about her interviews of Oswald in the Cuban Consulate. The successive changes mirror the shift in the Mexico City CIA Station’s view of Oswald, from a ‘phase-one’ position (Oswald was part of a Cuban Communist conspiracy) to a more standard ‘phase-two’ position (Oswald was a lone nut). From other sources we learn that the DFS itself, as well as the CIA Station, pushed the ‘conspiracy’ story hard in their November 23 interview. Revisions to the Duran statement seem also designed to bring her story into line with an alleged telephone intercept of ‘Oswald’ at the Cuban Consulate on September 28, 1963, when in fact he was not there. In protecting this falsified intercept from exposure, the DFS was probably protecting itself as well as the CIA; for the DFS was involved in the LIENVOY intercept project and probably manned the listening posts.

The DFS may have been assisted in this LIENVOY project by Richard Cain, an expert telephone tapper and adjunct to the CIA-Giancana assassination connection, when he was in Mexico City in 1962 as a consultant to a Mexican Government agency. Richard Cain at the time was also part of that Dave Yaras-Lennie Patrick-Sam Giancana element of the Chicago mob with demonstrable links to Ruby in 1963, and the House Select Committee on Assassinations speculated that Cain may have been part of the 1960-61 CIA-Mafia plots against Castro.

Unmistakably Staff D, the small secretive part of CIA in which the CIA-Mafia plots were housed, controlled the LIENVOY intercept intake inside the Mexico City CIA station (Ann Goodpasture, the responsible officer, was a member of Staff D). If Richard Cain trained and possibly helped recruit the Mexican LIENVOY monitors, then the CIA-DFS LIENVOY collaboration would present a matrix for connecting the CIA’s internal mishandling of Oswald information to the behaviour of Ruby and other criminal elements in Dallas. It would also put the CIA-Mafia connection, through Staff D, in a position to plant on a generally unsuspecting CIA the false intercept linking a false Oswald to a suspected Soviet assassination expert (Kostikov), which became a major pretext for creating a Warren Commission to reach the less dangerous conclusion of a lone assassin.

There are contextual corroborations of this matrix. Both Ruby and the DFS had links to the Mexico-Chicago drug traffic, dating back to the 1940s. The DFS and the Mexican drug traffic became increasingly intertwined after 1963; the last two DFS Chiefs were indicted, for smuggling and for murder; and the DFS itself was nominally closed down in the midst of Mexico’s 1985 drug scandals. (Jose Antonio Zorrilla, the ex-DFS chief arrested and indicted in 1989 for murder, was in 1963 private secretary to Fernando Gutierrez Barrios, the DFS agent whose signature attested to the validity of the most radically altered version of Duran’s statement.) At least two ex-DFS officers who were also former CIA agents have been named by the New York Times in connection with the Colosio assassination of 1994; and one of these, ex-DFS Chief Miguel Nazar Haro, was also involved in the investigation of the John F. Kennedy assassination.

What should most concern us in this deep political interaction between the CIA and a criminal DFS is the CIA’s protection of at least one guilty DFS leader (Miguel Nazar Haro) from deserved prosecution in U.S. courts. This protection should be evaluated in the light of the CIA immunity granted to Sam Giancana in 1961 (in which Cain may have played a role) and the Warren Commission’s false isolation of Ruby from the Giancana -Yaras- Patrick Chicago mob in 1964.

Thus it is important that the ARRB (Assassination Records Review Board) recognize the substantive relevance of the DFS to the case. It should press for the release of the Mexican Government documentation of its investigation. It should also release information about the DFS in CIA records that is relevant to anomalies in the handling of the case.

The four versions of Silvia Durán’s November 23 DFS statement

With the release of the new documents, it is now abundantly clear that the visit of Oswald to the Cuban and Soviet consulates in Mexico City became, for some reason, too sensitive to be handled normally by the CIA and FBI. CIA officials, both before and after the assassination, misreported what happened, falsified documentary records, and concealed the surviving tapes of Oswald’s alleged telephone conversations.(2) In this collusion the CIA had the support of a sister Mexican agency which it had helped to create, the Mexican Dirección Federal de Seguridad (Federal Security Police), or DFS.

The DFS, before it was abolished because of its deep involvement in Mexico’s drug traffic, was a key agency in the Mexica Gobernación (Ministry of the Interior).(3) It also had close links with the FBI as well as the CIA, being part of a tradition of bi-national intelligence co-operation dating back to the turn of the century.(4)

Three different operations involving Oswald can be distinguished in Mexico. The most obvious is the post-assassination cover-up. As I have written elsewhere, a falsified bus manifest, supplied by the Gobernación to establish Oswald’s return to the U.S. on October 3, was probably altered in the office of the Mexican President.(5) But post-assassination cover-up activity should be distinguished from pre-assassination operations involving Oswald, and both of these from the assassination plot. I shall suggest that the DFS, if only by its involvement in the CIA’s LIENVOY telephone intercept program, became enmeshed in pre-assassination Oswald operations, and possibly the plot as well.

As for the pre-assassination operations, one clue as to what is being concealed is the suppressed content in successive alterations of a single key document, the DFS account of Silvia Durán’s statement when arrested on November 23, 1963. There are at least four successive versions of this single document; and if we focus on what is being suppressed by these successive alterations, we arrive at a working hypothesis of what actually may have happened and has since been hidden.

Later in this chapter I shall argue that the anomalies help us to distinguish between two different pre-assassination operations involving Oswald. The first was an authorized intelligence operation (involving Oswald’s request for a visa), which aimed to discredit the Fair Play for Cuba Committee by linking Oswald to the American Communist Party. The second, which may have been part of the assassination plot, involved a simulated meeting between an Oswald impostor and Vladimir Kostikov, an alleged KGB assassination expert.(6) It appears that the DFS, through its role in wire-tapping the Soviet and Cuban embassies for the CIA, played an important role in both operations, but especially the second.

One of the suppressed facts is that the DFS, in its first versions of the testimony gathered from Durán and her friends about Oswald, used the name ‘Harvey Lee Oswald.’ Those familiar with the Oswald documentation will be aware that this anomalous variant of his name is not unique to the DFS. We find more than twenty such references widely dispersed through the records of at least six government agencies in the U.S.: the FBI, the CIA, the Secret Service, Army Intelligence, Naval Intelligence, the State Department, and the Dallas Police. They are supplemented by still other references to Oswald as ‘Harvey Lee Oswald’, in the oral testimony of a wide range of witnesses to the Warren Commission and elsewhere.

All of the documentary references we now have to ‘Harvey Lee Oswald’ are post-assassination. I will speculate however that there are pre-assassination archetypes for some of these references, and that the reason these archetypes have not surfaced is because of their relevance to operations involving Oswald, specifically in Mexico City . In the first version we have of the DFS record of the interrogation of Silvia Duran, the name ‘Harvey Lee Oswald’ occurs no less than five times.(7)

Not surprisingly, these anomalous references are suppressed in the CIA translation of the same document, and standardized to become ‘Lee Harvey Oswald’.(8) For this reason I shall refer to ‘Harvey Lee Oswald’ as the suppressed name, and ‘Lee Harvey Oswald’ as the public one.(9) We find the same conversion or suppression of the name ‘Harvey Lee Oswald’, and its replacement by ‘Lee Harvey Oswald’, in a cable of November 29, 1963, from the FBI Legat in Bern, Switzerland,(10) and again in documents from the Secret Service.(11) So many scattered and unexplained references to ‘Harvey Lee Oswald’ attest to at least one suppressed archetypal document we do not have. The FBI’s first question to Robert Oswald on November 22 was, ‘Is your brother’s name Lee Harvey Oswald or Harvey Lee Oswald?… We have it here as Harvey Lee.'(12) This suggests that one might begin to search for this lost archetype by interviewing Robert’s FBI interrogators.

The important fact here is that the suppression of the name ‘Harvey Lee Oswald’ in the early version of the DFS documentation was paralleled by the simultaneous suppression of the name ‘Harvey Lee Oswald’ across the border, in documents of the United States government. The same suppression happened to the one of the first details reported by the DFS about Durán’s version of Oswald’s visit to the Cuban Consulate: that Oswald said he was a Communist.(13) As I have shown elsewhere, there were other witnesses, above all in Dallas, who first claimed Oswald had said he was a Communist, and then denied this allegation.(14) It would appear, therefore, that suppressions in the content of Durán’s DFS statement were part of a wider suppression of evidence.

There were at least four successive versions of this single important piece of evidence, the original Mexican DFS report of Durán’s statement:

DFS-I) The ‘written statement’ first given by the Mexicans to the CIA Station Chief on the night of November 23, and summarized in the Station’s cable MEXI 7046 of November 24, 1963. We do not have this statement. A CIA cable summarizing it reported that Oswald said he was a ‘Communist and admirer of Castro.'(15) This information was then incorporated in Headquarters’ November 24 summary of its information about Oswald.(16) As we shall see, what Headquarters knew on November 24 about Oswald’s self-professed Communism was soon effaced from memory.(17)

DFS-2) The Spanish-language version of Durán’s interview received on November 26 by the CIA from one of her DFS interrogators, and forwarded under a memo, still redacted (blacked out), signed by a ‘JKB’.(18) This ‘JKB version’ was then hand-carried to Washington on November 27 by a Headquarters CIA officer, John Horton.(19) In it there is no reference to Oswald’s saying he was a Communist. In the reported statements of Durán’s friends, but not in her own, Oswald is referred to (five times in all) as ‘Harvey Lee Oswald.’

DFS-3) The CIA’s English-language translation of DFS-2, in which the five references to ‘Harvey Lee Oswald’ are replaced by the now standard ‘Lee Harvey Oswald’.(20) We shall also discuss another point on which this ‘translation’ differs from its Spanish original: an unsupported reference to the Cuban Consul phoning the Soviet Consulate.

DFS-4) The Warren Commission version of Durán’s statement, dated ‘November 23’, and attested to and signed by Captain Fernando Gutiérrez Barrios, then Deputy Federal Director of Security.(21) A photostat of this Spanish-language version, certified on May 7, 1964, was transmitted by the Mexican Government to the State Department in a note of June 9, 1964.(22) As we shall see, the several minor changes introduced into the DFS-4 version all have the effect of eliminating conflicts between the earlier versions and the body of evidence which by May 1964 supported the ‘phase two’ official story of Oswald as a lone assassin. I would tentatively date the DFS-4 version from about May 1964.(23)

Clearly it is time to request from the Mexican Government all surviving documentation which the DFS collected on the Kennedy assassination. In the case of the Durán interview, it is possible that they still have a copy of the contemporary stenographic record which (according to Durán) was made of her DFS interrogation.(24)

The Mexican government records on the JFK assassination case may help us understand what the CIA and FBI were hiding in this matter. The FBI, for example, appears to have understood completely that the three earlier DFS versions of Durán’s statement (which it had received either directly or through the CIA) were for some reason to be replaced by the spuriously altered DFSX of May 1964. Thus, when on May l8, 1964, it finally transmitted to the Warren Commission the results of the DFS interviews of the eight Mexicans arrested with Silvia Durán, the seven other interviews were taken from the JKB memo attachment of November 26, 1963, which originally included the DFS-2 version of Silvia Durán’s statement. Instead of the DFS-2 version, however, the FBI provided the more convenient (‘phase two’) DFS-4 version of Silvia’s alleged interview ‘on November 23’. This artificially contrived amalgam, Commission Document 1084(e) of 5118/64, was then published as Commission Exhibit 2121 by the Warren Commission.(25)

What were the rewrites of the Durán DFS statement trying to hide?

The suppression of ‘Harvey Lee Oswald’ is not the only change made to the first available version (DFS-2) of the Durán statement. Her description of him as ‘rubio, bajo, vestido no elegante’ was transmitted in the initial CIA translation (‘blond, short, poorly dressed’); but this anomalous characterization of Oswald was suppressed in the final version of her statement (DFS-4) published by the Warren Commission.(26) The JKB version (DFS-2) and original CIA translation (DFS-3) contain the significant statement that Oswald ‘never called again’ after Durán gave him her telephone number on Friday, September 27 (which, as John Newman has shown, appears to invalidate an alleged telephone call made by Durán and Oswald together on the next day).(27) In the Warren Commission version of the same statement (DFS-4) this important clue has been robbed of its significance: ‘she does not recall whether Oswald subsequently called her or not.'(28)

There were further revisions of the original DFS version of Durán’s statement. According to the first summary report by the Mexico City CIA Station of the DFS version of Durán’s statement about Oswald, she reportedly ‘said he [was a] Communist and admirer of Castro.'(29) This is what we would expect from Durán’s testimony in 1978 to the House Committee (‘He said he was a member of the Party, of the Communist Party’), and above all from Durán’s observation typed on Oswald’s visa application, according to which Oswald stated ‘he is a member of the American Communist Party’, and ‘displayed documents in proof’.(30) But the significant statement, ‘said he [was a] Communist’, is missing from the JKB version now in CIA files (DFS-2), as well as from the CIA cable translating it (DFS-3). It is however echoed in the Warren Commission version of her DFS statement (DFS-4), again robbed of its evidentiary significance: ‘she does not remember whether or not he said that he was a member of the Communist Party.'(31)

It would appear from this history of alterations to the same statement that the fourth version (DFS-4), though still falsely dated November 23, 1963, has been revised to fit with the Warren Report version of Oswald as an isolated lone assassin. It is particularly unlikely that Durán on November 23 did not remember ‘whether or not [Oswald] said that he was a member of the Communist Party’. Only a few hours earlier she had pulled the Oswald file, with the visa application on which she herself had typed, six weeks earlier, the following observations:
The applicant [Oswald] states that he is a member of the American Communist Party and Secretary in New Orleans of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee….He displayed documents in proof of his membership in the two aforementioned organizations and a marriage certificate.(32)

The equivocations in the DFS-4 version are devious and dishonest. DFS-2 and DFS-3 transmit the significant fact that in November Durán had just checked Oswald’s file (chequeo sus datos; checked his data).(33) DFS-4 replaces this statement, which would have made her alleged memory lapses even less credible, by the innocuous one that in September she ‘took all his data’ (tomó todos sus datos) to fill out the application.(34) We can assume that Durán had not forgotten a few hours later Oswald’s claim to be a Communist, which she had no trouble recalling in 1978. Thus the missing first version of the same statement (‘said he [was a] Communist’) is probably the most credible one. The Review Board should try to obtain it.

I conclude that these successive alterations to the ‘November 23’ DFS text were deliberate, and designed to suppress the following facts:

  1. Durán’s original description of him (as a short, poorly dressed blond) did not resemble that of the Dallas Lee Harvey Oswald.
  2. Oswald’s visa business in the Cuban Consulate began and ended on September 27, 1963, meaning that an alleged third visit the next day did not actually occur.
  3. Either from this visit or some earlier event, the visitor to the Embassy was known to authorities as ‘Harvey Lee Oswald’.
  4. The visitor said he was a Communist.

The corroboration of the suppressed testimony by the original visa application suggests that a fifth fact was also being suppressed:

  1. The visitor supported his visa application with an American Communist Party card.

Other Sources for the Suppressed Testimony of Silvia Tirado de Durán.

Much of this suppressed material was recovered (and augmented) by Silvia Tirado de Durán (by now remarried as Silvia Tirado de Bazan) in her 1978 interview with three members of the House Select Committee on Assassinations Staff. In this interview she again said that the visitor’s hair had been blond (rubio).(35) She now said that Oswald had visited the Embassy three times (rather than twice, as in all the DFS versions). She was emphatic, however, that all of Oswald’s visits were on the same day, September 27, that he did not return the next day (when the Consulate was closed), and that she did not phone the Soviet Embassy on the next day, Saturday September 28, as one of the supposed Oswald telephone transcripts alleged.(36)

Silvia Tirado further testified that Oswald said he was a member of the Communist Party (‘He said he was a member of the Party, of the Communist Party, the American.’)(37) According to the Lopez Report, Silvia testified further that Oswald showed her the following supporting documents: his Russian labor card, his marriage certificate, ‘his American Communist Party membership card, and his “Fair Play for Cuba’ membership card.”(38) When, however, we turn to the same testimony as published by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, the reference to the Communist Party card is missing from the list.(39)

Having reflected much about this, I have concluded that Silvia did mention the Communist Party card in 1978, just as she had on the application in 1963. If so, the House Select Committee on Assassinations must have responded to Silvia’s testimony about Oswald’s professed Communism in the same way as the DFS, by altering, and in effect suppressing, this detail.

Testifying later in Cuba, two other witnesses, Consul Eusebio Azcue and his successor Alfredo Mirabal Diaz, both had no trouble recalling the Communist Party card.(40) Mirabal’s testimony was particularly vivid, reinforced as it was by a very sensible skepticism which Silvia shared:

I noticed that he presented a card or credentials as belonging to the Communist Party of the United States….I was surprised by the fact that the card seemed to be a new card. I must say that I also have been a Communist for a number of years and that generally we do not use credentials or a card to identify ourselves as members of the party.(41)

Silvia Durán also communicated very similar suspicions:

When he said he was a member of the Party, of the Communist Party, the American, I said why don’t they arrange, the Party, your Party with the Cuban Party, and he said that he didn’t have the time to do it…It was strange. I mean because if you are a Communist and you’re coming from a country where the Communist Party is not very well seen, and in Mexico City that the Communist Party was not legal at that moment — crossing the border with all of his paper, it was not logical. I mean, if you’re really Communist, you go with anything, I mean just nothing, just your passport, that’s all…. it was strange, travelling with all of his documents just to prove one thing….He said that he was a Communist. That was strange. Because it would be really easy for him to get the visa through the Communist Party.(42)

If the visitor did present a card, and if Edwin Lopez (who was present) is correct in saying that Tirado testified to this in 1978, then we have a parallel cover-up in successive alterations of Tirado’s statements outside the DFS, analogous to the successive alterations of the ‘November 23’ DFS statement.

It would seem appropriate therefore for the Review Board to seek and review all the successive reports of Tirado’s statements and testimony. Some of these documents are currently in Cuba and have never been published in the United States. Known documents include:

  • ST-1. Cuban Embassy Confidential Report 125. Sent from Cuban Ambassador Hernandez Armas to Havana after interviewing Durán on November 25, after her first DFS arrest and interrogation [Not seen].(43)
  • ST-2. Telephone conversation of 26 November between Ambassador Hernández Armas and Cuban President Dorticos. Having spoken to Durán, Hernández told Dorticos that the DFS asked her concretely ‘if she had personal relations and even if she had intimate [i.e. sexual] relations with him. She denied all that.’ He also spoke of the bruises inflicted on her by the DFS.(44) This aggressive line of DFS questioning was later confirmed by Silvia to the House Select Committee on Assassinations.(45)
  • ST-3. Statement prepared by Durán in response to request from Ambassador on November 26 [Not seen].(46)
  • ST-4. Durán’s interview with a CIA Mexico City station asset, LIRING-3, on May 26, 1967. She told LIRING-3 that in her DFS interrogation she had been ‘interviewed thoroughly and beaten until she admitted that she had an affair with Oswald’.(47)
  • ST-5. Tirado’s first American press interview, with Ron Kessler of the Washington Post. In this interview she said that Oswald ‘claimed to be a member of the American Communist Party.'(48)
  • ST-6. Tirado’s House Select Committee on Assassinations interview, as summarized by Edward Lopez in the Lopez Report (according to which Silvia testified that Oswald showed her ‘his American Communist Party membership card’).(49)
  • ST-7. Tirado’s House Select Committee on Assassinations interview, as published by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, in which the reference to the Communist Party card is missing.(50)
  • ST-8. Tirado’s interviews with Anthony Summers, 1978, May 13, 1979, and January 31, 1995. In 1995 she was adamant that Oswald did not return to the Consulate on September 28, when it was closed.(51)

This fragmentary review of what we have of these non-DFS Tirado records is enough to cast further doubt on the version of her ‘November 23’ statement (DFS-4) published by the Warren Commission. It also strengthens the impression that the subject of the Communist Party card was an extremely sensitive matter, possibly an intelligence matter, being protected by government censorship as late as 1978.(52)

The two series of records taken together (the DFS series and the ST series) suggest that some members and/or employees of the CIA Mexico City station, acting in concert with some members of the Mexican DFS, were guilty of falsifying the facts concerning Oswald’s visit, and above all that this falsification antedated the assassination.

Conflicts between Durán’s statements and the alleged CIA intercepts

In particular these documents raise questions about the CIA’s intercepted telephone conversations concerning Oswald from September 27 to October 1, 1963. The authenticity of the alleged September 28 conversation has already been challenged on these and other grounds by John Newman. A transcript prepared at the time by the CIA claims that Durán and someone, whom CIA Station employees later ‘determined’ to be Oswald, phoned from the Cuban consulate to the Russian consulate on Saturday, September 28 (when both consulates were closed).(53) But according to the consensus of documents in both sets of the Durán records (DFS-2, DFS-3, ST-6, ST-7), Durán’s position is that Oswald did not return after September 27, and specifically not on September 28. DFS-4, the Warren Commission version, is not credible in its revised language, that ‘she could not remember’.

Newman’s plausible hypothesis is that two of the speakers in the September 28 conversation, ‘Durán’ and ‘Oswald’, are impostors.(54) But CIA station employees, listening to the tapes, decided that the man who telephoned the Soviet Embassy on October 1, and identified himself as ‘Lee Oswald’, was the same as the man who phoned on Saturday.(55) In other words, if the September 28 intercept is a fabrication involving a false ‘Oswald’, so are the intercepts from October 1. This is an important finding, inasmuch as the only pre-assassination information about Oswald to go outside the CIA Station, all of it provocative, was based on these intercepts alone. The other family of intercepts, referring to Oswald’s visa application on September 27, were for some unexplained reason not shared with CIA Headquarters or the FBI until late November 23.(56)

The two apparently fabricated intercepts between them suggested that a Soviet KGB member, Valeriy Kostikov, had sent a cable to Washington at Oswald’s request. The September 28 transcript was so mysterious as virtually to defy summary: it had Oswald saying, ‘I went to the Cuban Embassy to ask them for my address, because they have it’.(57) Transmitting this information to the FBI, CIA Headquarters commented, ‘From the gist of this conversation, it appears that the ‘North American’ expected to be at some location fixed by the Cuban Embassy and wanted the Russians to be able to reach him there’.(58) By the time the FBI had this information, a Headquarters CIA Counterintelligence Officer, Tennant H. Bagley, had already identified Kostikov to the FBI as a KGB officer linked to ‘the KGB’s 13th Department (responsible for sabotage and assassination)’.(59)

For six weeks the CIA Station in Mexico had known from the September 27 family of transcripts (the ‘visa’ family, as opposed to the apparently fabricated ‘non-visa’ family) that Oswald’s business was the relatively innocuous matter of a visa application. This clarifying information was conspicuously withheld, indeed denied, in a memo which the CIA Station passed in mid-October to the FBI in Mexico City:

This officer determined that Oswald had been at the Soviet Embassy on 28 September 1963 and had talked with Valeriy Vladimirovoch [sic] Kostikov, a member of the Consular Section, in order to learn if the Soviet Embassy had received a reply from Washington concerning his request. We have no clarifying information with regard to this request.(60)

Asked by the House Committee to explain ‘why the 10/16 memo said that there was no clarifying information on Oswald’s ‘request’ when it was known by this time that he was seeking a visa’, the memo’s author (wife of the Station’s expert on Soviet affairs) said that ‘They had no need to know all those other details.'(61)

One concludes from all this that employees of the Mexico City Station were manipulating information about Oswald even before the assassination, and advancing data from the false (non-visa) intercepts in place of the more accurate data from the visa intercepts of September 27. Even the September 27 intercepts, however, appear questionable when we focus on the various versions of Durán’s DFS statement.

Was the Durán statement based on the Oswald visa application?

DFS-3, the CIA cable translating the Spanish of DFS-2, contains one sentence that is a translation of something else:

Oswald was told that the aid which could be given to him was to advise him to go [to] the Russian Consulate. The Consul then spoke by telephone to the person in charge of that office, and was informed that the case would have to be referred to Moscow and that there would be a four month delay.(62)

There is no textual support for this reference to the Consul speaking by telephone in the Spanish original, which should perhaps be translated:

Oswald was told that the aid which she could give him was to advise him to go to the Russian Consulate, for which reason (para lo qual) she spoke by telephone to the person in charge of that office, and was informed that the case would have to be referred to Moscow and that there would be a four month delay.(63)

Silvia Durán objected to the DFS-4 version of this statement: ‘the declarant [i.e. Durán], admitting that she exceeded her duties, unofficially called the Russian Consulate’.(64) In denying that she had either exceeded her duties or admitted this, Durán confirmed that she had telephoned the Consulate.(65)

Why then should we waste time on the unsupported statement in DFS-3 that ‘the Consul [no! Silvia] then spoke by telephone?’ The first reason is that, for some unexplained reason, the language of DFS-3, although not supported by the language of the DFS-2 version it purports to translate, almost exactly tracks the language typed on to Oswald’s visa application, and signed by Consul Alfredo Mirabal:

We [Nosotros] spoke to the Consulate of the USSR and satisfied ourselves that they had to wait for authority from Moscow to grant the visa and that there would be an approximately four month delay.(66)

The similarity is striking, and one is moved to ask if the CIA Station had not already acquired a copy of this visa application. Such a possibility reinforces another one, reported by John Newman from an FBI source, that ‘Silvia Durán was possibly a source of information for the Agency or the Bureau’.(67) An alternative possibility, no less suggestive, is that the CIA had obtained it from Oswald himself.

There is a second reason to believe the DFS-3 version is correct in alleging that the Consul had spoken to the USSR Consulate by telephone. This is that Consul Mirabal testified under oath that he had indeed talked with the Soviet Consul, and learned ‘it would take about 4 months to obtain a response’.(68) One should not make too much of this corroboration. Testifying fifteen years later in 1978, Mirabal may have been influenced by the visa application in his hands.

The same might be said of Consul Azcue, who testified that it was he who received the call:

I received a telephone call from the consulate of the Soviet Union…. And the consul tells me that apparently the documents… attesting to his residence in the Soviet Union and his marriage certificate…are correct…. But without a doubt he cannot issue the visa without consulting Moscow.(69)

But Azcue’s testimony is more credible for supplying details not summarized in the visa application observations: that he ‘received’ rather than made the call, that the Soviet documentation was considered valid, and finally that Silvia ‘might have transferred the call to me’.(70)

In the light of the contemporary evidence from the visa application, it is easy to imagine that Silvia did, in fact, transfer the call she received on September 27 to one or both of the consuls. The problem is that there is no trace of this transfer in the CIA transcript of the call, which shows Silvia alone talking, and closing off the conversation in a routine way (‘No bother, thank you very much.)(71)

The CIA transcript is at odds with the visa application data in another respect: according to it the Soviet consul said (twice) that authorization had to come from Washington. Against this version of what was said we have the united testimony of the visa application, of Silvia Durán (in DFS-2 and DFS-3, but not in DFS-4), and of Consul Azcue in 1978, that the Soviet Consul said (what one might normally expect) that the authorization had to come from Moscow.

I cannot determine from the available evidence whether or not the transcript can be believed in its divergent reference to ‘Washington’. It is likely, however, that the disappearance of the word ‘Moscow’ from the DFS-4 version of Durán’s testimony, like the insertion of her alleged memory lapse about whether Oswald called back, was a conscious editing to efface the conflicts between her original statement and the CIA transcripts.

What Were the CIA Station and DFS Up To?

It is clear, furthermore, that one of the editing changes to DFS-4 had the effect of effacing a nasty DFS secret, one which also may have concerned both agencies. This had to do with Silvia’s alleged characterization of her own political position. In DFS-2 and DFS-3, she allegedly said of herself that, ‘She has a leftist ideology, by conviction, and is in accord with Communism, but does not belong to any political group’.(72) Just as Oswald’s alleged self-profession of Communism vanished by revisions (in Mexico and also in Dallas), so also, in DFS-4, did Silvia’s. Like Oswald’s, her ‘Communism’ was converted on paper to ‘Socialism’: ‘That, as she had already stated, the declarant had been a follower of Socialism and the Marxist doctrine for several years’.(73)

To understand what is at stake here, we must go back to the statement in ST-2 (the telephone conversation of 26 November between Ambassador Hernández Armas and Cuban President Dorticos) that the DFS asked concretely ‘if she had personal relations and even if she had intimate [i.e. sexual] relations with him. She denied all that’.(74) In confirming this aggressive line of questioning to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, Silvia also supplied the context of a Communist conspiracy that the DFS were also hoping to establish:

Cornwell: Did the officers from the Seguridad Department ever suggest to you during the questioning that they had information that you and Oswald had been lovers?

Tirado: Yes, and also that we were Communists and that we were planning the Revolution and uh, a lot of false things…. Because all the time they tell me that I was a Communist and I said I’m not a Communist… I believe in Socialism but I’m not a Communist; and they insisted that I was a very important people for the government, the Cuban Government, and that I was the link for the International Communists – the Cuban Communists, the Mexican Communists, and the American Communists, and that we were going to kill Kennedy, and I was the link. For them I was very important. Of course, it was not true.(75)

At the time the Mexican CIA Station transmitted the misleading DFS-2 statement about Durán’s alleged ‘accord with Communism’, not only the Station Chief (Win Scott), but also the Ambassador (Thomas Mann) were pushing hard to obtain corroboration for what they called the Durán family’s ‘apparent conspiracy with Oswald’.(76) As I have noted earlier, they recommended not only that the DFS re-arrest Durán, but that they ‘break’ her under interrogation — i.e. use torture.(77)

It is possible that Mann, Scott, and the Mexicans hoped by their talk of international conspiracy to provoke war against Cuba. But Mann and the Mexican Secretary of Gobernación Gustavo Diaz Ordáz were both good friends of the new American President Lyndon Johnson, and in fact the three men had met together repeatedly on Johnson’s ranch.(78) It is also possible that their promotion of international conspiracy had a lesser goal in view: not war, but the apparent phase-one risk of war which Johnson was already exploiting as his case for establishing a Warren Commission.(79) (To say this is not to accuse these three men of involvement in the assassination itself. The false ‘phase one’ story, and its goal of inducing a Warren Commission, may conceivably have been designed as a triage operation: to restore faith in a badly shaken U.S. body politic, rather than for the conspiratorial goal of protecting guilty individuals.)

 

Notes

  1. This is an extract from a chapter of Scott’s Deep Politics 2: essays on Oswald, Mexico, and Cuba. The book has been published, as a limited edition, by Green Archives Publications, 8614 N. Hamlin Avenue, Skokie, IL 60076-2210, USA. It is $15.00 plus $10 for air mail postage to Europe. Ideally, send dollars, but for other forms of payment, phone Alan Rogers on 847 675 5610.
  2. The CIA station in Mexico misled even others in government about the man Warren Commission Hearingso allegedly identified himself as Oswald in Mexico City. We are still just beginning to learn how great the misrepresentations may have been. For example, in the latest CIA release there is a penciled note from 1976 reporting inside hearsay that the ‘caller (who called himself Oswald) had difficulty making himself understood both (as I recall) in English and Russian’ (Hand written comment on Memo of 12/3/76 for the Record from Scott D. Breckenridge, OLC; NARA# 104-10095-1001; CIA file # 80T01357A). The Review Board should pursue this claim t o its source. If the ‘caller (who called himself Oswald)’ was not a native English speaker, those in U.S. service who knew this should have to explain any delays in the transmission of this information.
  3. For the DFS and drug trafficking, see Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, pp.104-05, 142. Writing before the release of the Lopez Report, I did not then know that Miguel Nazar Haro, the DFS Chief and CIA agent indicted for smuggling stolen cars, had also overseen the 1978 visit of House Select Committee on Assassinations staff to Mexico City when they were denied access to the important DFS witness, Manuel Calvillo (Lopez Report pp. 210-81)
  4. W. Dirk Raat, Mexico and the United States: Ambivalent Vistas, pp. 97, 122, 130, 151; W Dirk Raat, ‘U.S. Intelligence Operations and Covert Action in Mexico, 1900-1947’, Journal of Contemporary History 22 (1987), p. 618ss The evolution of both the FBI and U.S. Army Intelligence have been affected by their deep involvement in Mexico.
  5. 24 Warren Commission Hearings pp. 673, 621; Warren Commission Report p. 736; Scott, Deep Politics, p. 105.
  6. As I shall make clear, I am endebted for this distinction to John Newman; cf Newman, Oswald and the CIA, pp. 364-8.
  7. CIA Doc. #131-593; JKB memo of 26 November 1963 and 10-page attachment: Summary of first Mexican interview of Silvia Durán et al, pp. 7 (twice), 8, 9, 10: ‘Aseveró no conocer a Harvey, Lee Oswald.’ Versions of this sentence are used five times in all in this document, in the minor supporting statements of Ruben Durán, Betsy Serratos, Agata Roseno, Barbara Ann Bliss, and Charles Bentley. In the statement of Silvia Durán, the variant recorded is ‘Lee Harvey Oswald.’ In this JKB memo the standardized name ‘Lee Harvey Oswald’ has apparently been corrected from an earlier ‘Harvey Lee Oswald.’
  8. CIA Headquarters Cable 85758 of 29 November 1963 to the White House, State Department, and FBI, CIA Doc 4223-647, pp. 8, 9, 11.
  9. One purpose for the alternative name may have been to hide sensitive file documents on Oswald. It is striking that when the FBI and CIA searched (as is customary) for name variants of Oswald, ‘Harvey Lee Oswald’ was never among the variants searched, even though the name ‘Harvey Lee Oswald’ occurs in widely dispersed FBI and CIA records. (Cf. the search slips in the HQ Oswald file 105-82555 after serial -42; and in the Dallas Oswald file DL 100-10461 right after the assassination.)
  10. FBI HQ File 105-82555-88, Cable # 241 from Legat Bern to DIR: [Title] ‘Changed. Lee Harvey Oswald, aka Harvey Lee Oswald, Internal Security – R and Cuba. Title changed to show correct sequence of first and middle names.’ Cf. Mexico City FBI File 105-3702-254; see below.
  11. 16 Warren Commission Hearings p. 721; CE 270: Transcript of Secret Service Agent J. M. Howard interview 25 November 1963 with ‘Mrs. Marguerite Oswald, mother of Harvey Lee (crossed out, replaced by ‘Lee Harvey’) Oswald’; ‘This is an interview with Mrs Marguerite Oswald, mother of Harvey Lee Oswald’ 16 Warren Commission Hearings p. 749; CE 270 Transcript of Secret Service Agent J. M. Howard interview 25 November 1963 with ‘Robert Lee Oswald, brother of Harvey Lee (crossed out, replaced by ‘Lee Harvey’) Oswald’: ‘This is an interview with Robert Lee Oswald, brother of Lee Harvey Oswald’. (Both interviews refer to LHO as ‘Lee’ [Marguerite] or ‘Lee Harvey’ [Robert]).
  12. Robert Oswald, Lee: A Portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald (New York Coward-McCann, 1967), p. 18.
  13. MEXI 7046 to DlR[ector], 240419Z, CIA Document # 66-567
  14. See Scott, Deep Politics II, Chapter V, ‘Oswald, Harvey Lee Oswald, and Oswald’s Communist Party Card’.
  15. MEXI 7046 to DlR[ector], 240419Z. CIA Document # 66-567
  16. XAAZ-35507, ‘Summary of Relevant Information on Lee Harvey Oswald at 0700 24 November 1963.’ CIA Document # 130-592, NARA #104-10015-10359.
  17. See also Scott, Deep Politics II, Chapter VII, “Oswald, Harvey Lee Oswald, and Oswald’s Communist Party Card.”
  18. JKB Memo and attachment of 26 November, 1963, CIA Document #131-593.
  19. MEXI 7105 of 27 November, 1963.
  20. DIR 85158 of 29 November 1963, CIA Document #223-647. A different translation of part of DFS-2 will be found in the Lopez Report, pp. 186-87, citing a Blind Memo of 26 November 1963, CIA #473. I have decided to relegate this version to a footnote as DFS-2A. because I can find no significant differences in content from DFS-2. Both DFS-2A and DFS-3 contain minor translation errors. Contrary to what the Lopez Report implies (p. 190), the text of DIR 85738 was transmitted by the CIA to the Warren Commission under cover of a memo of February 21, 1994.
  21. Warren Commission CE 2123, 24 Warren Commission Hearings pp. 669-72. The Lopez Report. without supporting evidence. attributes the significant alterations in DFS-4 to the CIA (p. 190).
  22. 24 Warren Commission Hearings 663-64.
  23. A long extract from this version (24 Warren Commission Hearings pp. 565-66) had already been transmitted in a Mexican note of May 14 (24 Warren Commission Hearings pp. 563-64); and three xerox copies of the full text had been given on May 22 to the Mexico City office of the FBI (FBI MC 105-3702-lA.80). This version (DFS-4A) was translated into English twice, by the State Department, and the FBI. See 24 Warren Commission Hearings pp. 686-89 (State); 24 Warren Commission Hearings pp. 587-90 = 25 Warren Commission Hearings pp. 634-37 (FBI). There are differences of content between the translations, but I have found no serious ones. (The age of Durán is given correctly as ’26’ in the state version, as ’25’ by the FBI.) The interviews of the other witnesses. In DFS-2, where the name “Harvey Lee Oswald” was given, follow the FBI version of DFS-4A. using the name ‘Lee Harvey Oswald’ (24 Warren Commission Hearings pp. 591-93). The FBI claims to have received these subsidiary interviews in a report of November 25, 1963, which its source T-17 received on November 29 (24 Warren Commission Hearings p. 591). The latter date is that of CIA Cable 85758 to the FBI; but the JKB version it translated (DFS-2) was dated November 26.
  24. 3 Hearings of the House Select Committee on Assassinations 83
  25. In 24 Warren Commission Hearings pp. 587-93. The CIA also has some explaining to do. For example Headquarters cable DIR 81920 of 24 Nov 63 (241332Z), begins ‘After…reading the statement of Silvia Durán.’ Yet, according to the itemized file inventory and chronology supplied by the CIA, no full text of the Durán statement reached Headquarters until the JKB memo and attachment (DFS-2) were hand-carried to Langley on the night of November 26. A very terse account of her statement (DFS-I) had been forwarded in cable MEXI 7046 of 23 Nov 63 (240419Z). But the Headquarters cable does not refer to MEXI 7046, as would be the CIA practice when an earlier cable is being discussed.
  26. JKB memo, p. 5; CIA Cable 85758 of 29 November, 1963, p. 6; Warren Commission CE 2120, 24 Warren Commission Hearings p. 589. Cf. Lopez Report, pp. 186-91.
  27. JKB memo, p. 6 (‘jamas volvió a Ilamar’); CIA Cable 85758 of 29 November, 1963, p. 7; Newman, Oswald and the CIA, pp. 407-09.
  28. 24 Warren Commission Hearings p. 590; cf. 688; Lopez Report. p. 190.
  29. MEXI 7046 of 24 November 1963, CIA Doc. #66-567. At the time both the leading Mexico City newspaper and the New York Times also reported that Oswald said he was a Communist. See Excisior, November 25, 1963, in Mexico City Oswald FBI file at serial 105-3702-30; New York Times, December 3, 1963, reprinted at 24 Warren Commission Hearings p. 585
  30. 3 Hearings of the House Select Committee on Assassinations p. 34; Warren Commission CE 2564, 25 Warren Commission Hearings pp. 814-15
  31. 24 Warren Commission Hearings p. 589; cf p. 688
  32. Warren Commission Report p. 303; 25 Warren Commission Hearings pp. 814-15 Durán later confirmed writing the words. 3 Hearings of the House Select Committee on Assassinations pp. 29, 38, 40; cf 3 Hearings of the House Select Committee on Assassinations pp. 137, 142
  33. She unambiguously confirmed this in 1978: ‘I went to the consulate and I look in the Archives and I saw the application, I saw that it was the man and I went to the Embassy and I talked to the Ambassador.’ (3 Hearings of the House Select Committee on Assassinations p. 79)
  34. 24 Warren Commission Hearings pp. 671, 688
  35. 3 Hearings of the House Select Committee on Assassinations pp. 69-70
  36. 3 Hearings of the House Select Committee on Assassinations pp. 25, 31, 49-51; cf. 3 Hearings of the House Select Committee on Assassinations p. 114. In all of these details Tirado, interviewed in Mexico City, was corroborated by former consul Eusebio Azcue, testifying in Washington, except that Azcue speculated that Oswald’s third visit could have occurred on September 28 (3 Hearings of the House Select Committee on Assassinations pp.130-33, 136,151).
  37. 3 Hearings of the House Select Committee on Assassinations p. 34; cf. p. 33
  38. Lopez Report, p. 192, citing Durán testimony, p. 28.
  39. 3 Hearings of the House Select Committee on Assassinations p. 33 (Durán testimony, p. 28) ‘He show me letters to the Communist Party, the American Communist Party, his labor card… his uh, marriage pact…and a card saying he was a member of the Fair Play for Cuba.’
  40. 3 Hearings of the House Select Committee on Assassinations pp.130-31, 142 (Azcue); 3 Hearings of the House Select Committee on Assassinations p. 176 (Mirabal).
  41. 3 Hearings of the House Select Committee on Assassinations p. 176.
  42. 3 Hearings of the House Select Committee on Assassinations pp. 34, 35, 57, 58
  43. Mentioned in MEXI 7068 of 26 November 1963. p. 2. It is probable that the Ambassador had sent an earlier report after Durán went to him with information about Oswald on November 23.
  44. English translation of intercept transmitted in MEXI 7068 of 26 November 1963.
  45. 3 Hearings of the House Select Committee on Assassinations p. 86; cf. Lopez Report, p. 254
  46. CIA Document #133-594, translation of part of Dorticos-Hernández Armas phone conversation of November 26, 1963.
  47. Memo of 26 May 1967, ‘Meeting with LIRING-3’, forwarded under HMMA-32243 of 13 June 1967; CIA Document #1225-1129, cf. #1084-965.
  48. Washington Post, November 26, 1976, A7; 3 Hearings of the House Select Committee on Assassinations p. 34 (1978).
  49. Lopez Report, p. 192, citing Durán testimony, p. 28.
  50. 3 Hearings of the House Select Committee on Assassinations p. 33 (Durán testimony, p. 28).
  51. Newman, Oswald and the CIA, p. 368; cf. Summers, Conspiracy, p. 582.
  52. The House Select Committee on Assassinations may possibly have been motivated (in this and other details of decorum) out of desire to protect Tirado, who, unlike the other witnesses, still lived in Mexico and indeed worked for the Mexican Government. To say this is not to explain away the initial sensitivity of the CP card issue.
  53. Newman, Oswald and the CIA, pp. 364-68
  54. Ibid. pp. 365-66. Newman considers it ‘improbable’ (p 368) that the third voice speaking from the Soviet Consulate ‘was also an impostor’. However in the preceding sentence he invokes the claim of former Soviet Consul (and KGB member) Oleg Nechiporenko, that ‘the call could not have gone through because [on Saturday] the switchboard was closed’. Quite clearly, if we accept Nechiporenko’s statement, the whole of the alleged Saturday transcript has to be an artefact (fabrication).
  55. Lopez Report, pp. 78, 171.
  56. MEXI 7033 of 23 November 1963, 232246Z, CIA Document JS 55-546.
  57. MEXI 7023 of 23 November 1963, 231659Z, CIA Document # 49-545. Transcript reprinted in Newman, Oswald and the CIA, p. 364.
  58. DIR 84915 of 23 November 1963. 232200Z, CIA Document # 45-17.
  59. SX-25550, Memo from Tennant H Bayley, Chief, SRICI, 23 November 1963. The Review Board should ascertain when the CIA and FBI first linked Kostikov to Department 13 and assassinations. One reason may be the very circumstantial argument presented in DIR 82312 of 17 November 1963, that an individual who had met Kostikov in February 1963 had met three months later in New York with Oleg D Brykin ‘of Thirteenth Department of First Chief Directorate of KGB’.
  60. Memo of 16 October 1963 for the Ambassador from [redacted], Subject: Lee Oswald/Contact with the Soviet Embassy, CIA Document #9-5; filed in the Mexico City FBI Oswald file as 105-3702-1.
  61. Lopez Report, p. 171; quoted in Newman, Oswald and the CIA, p. 367. ‘They’ here clearly refers to the Mexico City Ambassador and FBI, the recipients of the memo. Newman, for some unexplained reason, equates ‘They’ with ‘the House Select Committee on Assassinations Investigators’ some fifteen years later.
  62. DIR 85758 of 29 November 1963, p. 6.
  63. Attachment to JKB memo of 26 November 1963, p. 5.
  64. 24 Warren Commission Hearings p. 688.
  65. 3 Hearings of the House Select Committee on Assassinations p. 99. Durán also objected to the sentence in DFS-4 that Azcue said to Oswald, ‘”people like you, instead of helping the Cuban Revolution, only do it harm”, it being understood that in their argument, they were referring to the Russian Sociatist Revolution and not the Cuban Revolution’ (24 Warren Commission Hearings p. 688, cf. p. 590. Warren Commission Report p. 302). Her response to this sentence was that the Azcue-Oswald conversation ‘was exclusively with the Cuban Revolution’ (3 Hearings of the House Select Committee on Assassinations pp. 100-01).
  66. Oswald visa application, 3 Hearings of the House Select Committee on Assassinations p. 129; cf. p.137, 25 Warren Commission Hearings p. 814: ‘Nosotros llamanos al Consulado de la URSS y nos contestaron que ellos tenían esperar la autorización de Moscú para dar la visa y que tardería alrededor de 4 meses.’
  67. Newman, Oswald and the CIA, p. 388, reporting what FBI SA Larry Keenan heard from the Mexico City Legal Attache, Clark Anderson. A newly released note from David Phillips to Win Scott might seem to imply that Durán was provisionally considered for recruitment, but not after the assassination made her notorious (‘She doesn’t seem to me to have any target potential now, if she ever did, with all the confusion surrounding her’; hand-written note, date-stamped November 24, 1963, appended to MEXI copy of DIR 84921 of 24 November 1963; duplicate of CIA J168554). But, given Phillips’ record of phase-two prevarication, one could just as easily argue the opposite: that this note is yet another Phillips cover-up, intended to deceive.
  68. 3 Hearings of the House Select Committee on Assassinations p. 176.
  69. 3 Hearings of the House Select Committee on Assassinations p. 132; cf. p. 142.
  70. 3 Hearings of the House Select Committee on Assassinations pp.132, 142.
  71. CIA transcript from Soviet Embassy, September 27, 1963, 4:26 P.M., Oswald Box 15b, folder 56, CIA 1194 release. Cf. MEXI 7033 of 23 November 1963.
  72. DIR 85758 of 29 November 1963, p. 5.
  73. 24 Warren Commission Hearings p. 687. For the extensive revision of testimony from many witnesses about Oswald’s self-professed communism, see Scott, Deep Politics II, chapter V, ‘Oswald, Harvey Lee Oswald, and Oswald’s Communist Party Card’.
  74. MEXI 7068 of 26 November 1963.
  75. 3 Hearings of the House Select Committee on Assassinations pp. 86, 91; cf. Lopez Report, p. 254. In other words, this particular revision in DFS-4, unlike the others, was closer to what in all probability Durán actually said. At the same time, it significantly altered what the DFS November 23 statement originally reported.
  76. MEXI 7104 of 27 November 1963, CIA Document #174-616, p. 5
  77. MEXI 7072 of 26 November 1963, CIA Document #128-590; see Scott, Deep Politics II, chapter IV. Cuban Ambassador Hernandez Armas had already described, in the conversation overheard and transmitted by the CIA, the bruises which the DFS had inflicted on Durán in her first Interrogation (MEXI 7068 of 26 November 1963, p. 4).
  78. Dick Russell, The Man Who Knew Too Much, p. 454.
  79. See discussion in Scott, Deep Politics II, chapter VII, ‘Oswald…and Oswald’s Party Card’, p. 3.

Accessibility Toolbar