Posted on 03/19/2015 3:48:28 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Much about his trip—weeks before the assassination—remains unexamined.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/03/jfk-assassination-lee-harvey-oswald-mexico-116195.html#ixzz3Uy93moex
Whhat if the answers to the many, persistent questions surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy lie not in Dallas or Washington, D.C., but in the streets of a foreign capital that most Americans have never associated with the president’s murder? Mexico City.
Only hours after shots rang out in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963, U.S. Ambassador Thomas C. Mann told colleagues in the American embassy in Mexico that he was certain Lee Harvey Oswald had not acted alone in killing JFK.
Oswald had visited Mexico City several weeks earlier, apparently to obtain a visa that would allow the self-proclaimed Marxist to defect to Cuba, and Mann, a veteran diplomat, suspected that a plot to kill Kennedy had been hatched on Mexican soil, during Oswald’s encounters there with Cuban diplomats and Mexicans who supported Fidel Castro’s revolution. How did Mann know about those meetings? It turned out the CIA had Oswald under surveillance in the Mexican capital after he had showed up at both the Cuban and Soviet embassies there. Back at the State Department, however, a baffled Mann hit a brick wall. No one in Washington seemed interested in his suspicions, he would later complain to colleagues. And within days of the assassination, the ambassador received an astonishing top-secret message directly from Secretary of State Dean Rusk. According to Mann’s testimony years later to congressional investigators, Rusk ordered the embassy to shut down any investigation in Mexico that might “confirm or refute rumors of Cuban involvement in the assassination.” No reason was given for the order, the ambassador said.
Mann told the congressional investigators that he was under the impression that the same “incredible” shut-down order had been given by the CIA to the spy agency’s station chief in Mexico, Winston Scott. In memoirs quietly declassified in the 1990s, after his death, Scott confirmed that he, too, suspected that Oswald was an “agent” of a foreign power who may have been part of a conspiracy to kill Kennedy (though Scott did not suggest that the CIA’s investigation was shut down).
What happened in Mexico City in the weeks before JFK’s murder? It is clear from government files declassified in recent decades that Oswald’s six-day trip to Mexico was never adequately investigated by the CIA, the FBI and the State Department—and, as a result, by the Warren Commission, the panel named by President Lyndon Johnson to investigate the assassination. The question has been raised anew in recent weeks by a surprising source—the Warren Commission’s chief conspiracy hunter. And in fact, lots of evidence has accumulated over the years to suggest that historians, journalists and JFK buffs who are still trying to piece together clues about the president’s murder—whether from the memories of still-living witnesses or in the new tranche of assassination-related documents the National Archives is set to release in two years—would be wise to look to Mexico City.
In the half-century since the commission named for Chief Justice Earl Warren concluded that Oswald was the sole gunman in Dallas and that there was no evidence of a conspiracy, foreign or domestic, it is startling to discover how many credible government officials—beginning with Ambassador Mann and CIA station chief Scott—have suggested that evidence was missed in Mexico that could rewrite the history of the assassination. The list includes the late former FBI Director Clarence Kelley and former FBI Assistant Director William Sullivan, as well as David Belin, a former staff lawyer on the Warren Commission.
Last month, another commission staffer joined their ranks: David Slawson, a retired University of Southern California law professor who, 51 years ago, was the commission’s chief investigator searching for evidence that might have pointed to a foreign conspiracy in JFK’s murder. In interviews for a new edition of my 2013 history of the assassination, Slawson said he is now convinced the commission was the victim of a “massive cover-up” by the CIA and other agencies to hide evidence that might have identified people in Mexico City who knew and encouraged Oswald to carry out his threat when he returned to the United States.
Declassified government records back up Slawson’s suspicion of how much information was withheld in 1964, when senior officials at both the CIA and the FBI assured the commission that there was no evidence in Mexico—or anywhere else—to suggest that Oswald was anything other than a delusional lone wolf. In sworn testimony to the commission, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover insisted that “there was nothing up to the time of the assassination that gave any indication that this man was a dangerous character who might do harm to the president.”
The records declassified decades later tell a very different story, and show just how much evidence about Oswald’s Mexico trip —including CIA tape recordings of wiretaps of Oswald’s phone calls in Mexico—never reached the commission. Although the spy agency assured the commission in 1964 that there were no surveillance photos of Oswald in Mexico, CIA Station Chief Scott, in his memoirs, strongly suggested that there were photos, and other CIA officials later told congressional investigators in the 1970s that they recalled seeing the pictures. CIA and FBI records, meanwhile, show that the agencies never tried to track down or interview key witnesses who had encountered Oswald in Mexico.
Slawson is also convinced that someone blocked him from seeing a top-secret June 1964 letter from Hoover to the commission in which Hoover revealed that Oswald may have openly boasted about his plans—“I’m going to kill Kennedy”—while in Mexico, apparently at the Cuban embassy. Slawson believes the CIA was desperate to shut down any investigation in Mexico City out of fear the Warren Commission might stumble onto evidence of the spy agency’s long-running schemes to murder Fidel Castro. (Mexico City had been a staging area for some of the plots.) Slawson is careful to note that he is not suggesting any sort of far-flung, carefully laid-out conspiracy. For one thing, he notes, Oswald did not get the job he held at the time of the assassination, at the Texas School Book Depository, which was on the president’s motorcade route, until after he had returned to Texas from Mexico in early October 1963; the route itself was not announced until days before JFK’s arrival in Dallas.
The recorded record states that he asked for legal representation.
He was meeting with Castro’s agents settling on his payment for killing Kennedy.
The Lawyer, John Abt: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Abt
Who was out of town in Connecticut that weekend.
It is amazing that all other transcripts of Oswald’s interrogations are missing.
Seems to me that CIA was largely pro Castro in those days.
Has anybody ever found Oswald’s financial records? I didn’t think so.
Marina’s had control of his tax returns and I think made some available to the public. He was only 24 when he died. Yes, I think they have a good trail of his employment as well in New Orleans and the Dallas Fort Worth area.
Ain’t paying money to kooks.
Prove it.
Whether one wants to accept it or not, Marina says he did try it and Oswald's friend DeMohrenschildt seemed to indicate something strange about Oswald per the attempted shooting earlier in 1963 of retired General Edwin Walker.
At the same time, DeMohrenschildt (who knew Jackie's family too) committed suicide of course years later in the '70s and Walker didn't necessarily buy the official Warren Report himself, interesting character, Walker. Helped enforce desegregation in Arkansas in the '50s, once retired, Walker led protests at Ole Miss against James Meredith becoming a student there.
Still, nothing really conclusive and I just don't have the conspiracy-bend anymore. The theories that exist are all so different, mob, Hoffa, Mafia, Cuban Exiles, Cubans, Castro, and of course, those who blame our own Federal Government.
Also, it’s been posted here before, JFK should have been tighter on security, they cancelled a trip to Chicago that year as well. I know there’s a lot to all of this.
I’ve posted the pic before, here’s a link: http://archive2.jfklibrary.org/JFKWHP/1963/Month%2005/Day%2018/JFKWHP-1963-05-18-B/JFKWHP-ST-278-3-63.jpg
You could have almost taken out JFK in Nashville with a knife, he’s so wide-open. I’ve researched this a bit, Ike and Truman probably rode in motorcades, JFK sometimes had tight security, rode in a covered limousine and would stand up out of a hole (like sun-roof) in the roof of the car. Really should have had more caution.
One of the things that disillusioned him was when he went to the Soviet Union, he thought he'd get some cushy postion.
Instead, he was given some boring job in the middle of nowhere.
When he returned to the States, he then turned to Cuba as his Marxist "paradise".
He thought the Soviets weren't doing Marxism "correctly", but somehow Castro was.
He wasn't paid much, EVER.
He and Marina lived in a dump.
All he had to his name when he died was some paltry amount of money and his guns.
He left some $ for his family, in addition to his wedding ring.
Marina left him, and he had nothing left to lose, especially after Cuba refused his passport request.
If he was ever "paid off" by conspirators, he never showed evidence of it.
I read the book "Top Down" by Jim Lehrer where it discusses the story behind why they didn't have the bulletproof bubble top on JFKs limo.
The secret service would NEVER let a POTUS ride around in the open like that today.
Even if the POTUS requested it, I'd wager they'd over-rule him.
For later
His family had left him,
*************************
He was living in Oak Cliff with his wife and baby.
Always lots of commies hanging out in Mexico City.
Oswald was told he was "hot" and had to drop out of sight for a little while before Dealey Plaza, and was sent to Mexico City. One of the so-called Oswald lookalikes was seen in proximity to Oswald, because he was shadowing him, in order to become familiar with him, to be able to recognize him immediately and from a distance. That lookalike's photos showed up in the Warren report, and were taken (like some of Oswald) as he left the Soviet embassy; he can be seen checking his wallet and other effects after they were returned to him.
On November 22, 1963, the "lookalike" shot JFK from the County Records Building, and waited for a short time to shoot Oswald, who was standing in the window as he'd been told to do, having shot and missed (again, as he'd been told to do). Thanks to the acoustics of the Plaza, the shots from Oswald's gun didn't sound like they had come from his direction; the police ran up the Grassy Knoll and found no one and nothing, smelled nothing, and didn't spot Oswald and open fire as expected. Once they'd opened fire, the real assassin was to shoot Oswald fatally, leaving the mourning nation with a horrendous crime and dead perp, all tied up in a bow. Instead, the assassin had to pack up and limp his way out of the crime scene, his disassembled rifle taped to his leg and concealed under his pants. *
That probably explains his reptile dysfunction.
Does it strike no one odd that the interrogation was not filmed?
Also, I have always been a bit hazy on how Oswald was identified as the perpetrator in the first place.
Or why, for instance, he left the Book Depository at all.
Or how the rifle was first identified by several police investigators as a "7.65 Mauser" (from clear barrel markings on the weapon)
I have read the book referenced by Sunk, and the proposition that the shots were fired from the Country Records Building makes good sense.
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