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.
It seems Oswald did live a bit of a charmed life in the USSR. He was given a very nice apartment, far and above what the ordinary Soviet worker had for living quarters. His job was not glamorous, but neither was it arduous. He had a very full social schedule and was a bit of a minor celebrity. Epstein hints that it was intelligence delivered by Oswald that enabled the Soviets to shoot down the Powers U2 ... as monitoring those flights had been his job with the Marines in Japan. He married Marina, whose father was a high-ranking officer in the Border Guards section of the KGB. To imagine this alone escaped official KGB scrutiny is just plain stupid.
The Soviets sent over a fake (IMNVHO) defector, Nosenko, to try and convince our intelligence services that the Soviets had "no interest in the kook Oswald." In those days, every foreigner, whether it was Oswald, Bill clinton, or Richard Holbrooke, in the USSR had a cadre of KGB minders. To attempt to deny that is insultingly disingenuous. Fatuous.
Yeah, I suspect Epstein is or was a CIA 'Contract Author,' but the book is undoubtedly worthy of consideration. Discount neither the Soviets nor the Cubans. The Cuban DGI was (or is) a highly sophisticated intelligence group that was trained and operated under the aegis of the Soviet KGB and handled and trained by the 'STASI' the secret intelligence agency of East Germany, the DDR. The Cubans were good at it, and had succeeded in placing agents very high up in the CIA. Remember also that JFK and RFK, when they weren't dallying with Marilyn Monroe or Momo Giancana's girlfriend, were up to their eyeballs in plots to assassinate Castro. Perhaps he somehow turned the tables on them!
In the meantime, we are still working on the mechanics of the hit. We're close to the "How." The "Why," and the "Who, remain fogged in.
As an aside, the Soviet Union had an espionage policy that it would base spies with a given target country in a country adjacent to that country, never within the same country. This is why the Soviet Union had a gigantic espionage organization located in Canada to spy on the US.
Importantly, *not* Mexico. The Soviet Union’s intelligence assets in Mexico were minimal. So for example, when Stalin wanted to assassinate Trotsky in Mexico, a European agent was sent to the US, then traveled to Canada with a false identity of a Canadian leftist who had been killed after he had gone to Spain to fight for the “Republicans” (communists) against Franco’s Fascists.
From Canada he was sent to Mexico to ingratiate himself with, then murder, Trotsky. Complicated.
So the question about why Lee Harvey Oswald was in Mexico remains.
Aldrich Ames was recruited in Mexico City.
And the answer remains too, to apply for a passport.
Thanks KB.
Ames was a special case, in that he was an insider with detailed knowledge of all involved, and *he* approached the Soviets.
It is almost supernatural is what I think. The one thing we can all agree on is that Lee Harvey Oswald never had a trial.
About the first thing I will ask God before he sends me to hell is, “What happened with JFK?”
He’ll say, “Ask him yourself.”
That ran for a day and a half before someone realized that they dropped the wrong bullet on John Connolly's gurney.
Go to the library........
That little video was interesting.
I once had a 91 Belgian Mauser and it does resemble the Carcano but not that much. You can immediately tell what it is by seeing the markings.
Odd that they would keep saying that for more than a day.
It was a 6.5mm Mannlicher-Carnao.
Give it up.
Whatever....
It doesn't matter to me whether Oswald could have done it or not. The fact is he had nothing to do with it. One of the shooters from the Dal-Tex building, Jim Braden, was detained then released on orders from on high. There is evidence of four shots (although many more were shot that day) and the House Committee got it right, Kennedy was hit almost simultaneously from the front and the back after the shot to his shoulder. Chip on curve, bullet into upper trim of car, shot to back, shot to head, that's a minimum of four shots. There were more than that of course. Shot to pavement under Braden's position as the car made it's final tight turn, and of course the other shot to the head. Minimum six shots right there. They set up a crossfire.
Don't forget the final word from the government, from the House Committee on Assassinations, is it was a conspiracy. Everybody in the know knows it was a conspiracy, that's why they set up the committee to say so, they didn't want to look like magic bullet idiots throughout history.
I agree.
Who’s ‘’everybody’’? Name one.
Or you can choose to believe you government would never stoop so low.
We've had a corrupt government since Wilson let foreigners take over our currency in 1913.
After the interview, Johnson told CBS not to air the interview, and CBS, being the lapdog to Democrats that they have always been, didn't air it, like good little propagandists.
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