The Pre-Assassination Framing of Lee Harvey Oswald (2)

David Atlee Phillips, who conducted the main operation to frame Oswald - from Mexico City and the Miami JM/Wave CIA station.

“Put together, we see how those in power suppressed false evidence that Oswald was a Communist or a KGB or Cuban agent in order to arrive at the least disturbing alternative: that he acted alone.” –   Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics Quarterly, Sept. 1994

Between the resourceful work of John Newman and Peter Dale Scott, among others, we’ve learned that Lee Oswald actually had a CIA file : 201-289248 CI/SIG[1], opened on December 9, 1960, more than one year after his defection to the USSR (Oct, 1959) The ostensible reason given for opening the file in the first place was Oswald's defection, and possible “continuing intelligence interest”.. However, this makes no sense in the light of the  delay of more than one year (Oct. '59 to Dec, '60) to get the job done.

The actual fact,  in light of what I noted in the previous post, is that the file had been opened by the CI/SIG (Counterintelligence Special Investigations Group) of the CIA to paint a trail of fictitious suspicion on Oswald and especially have it ready after Kennedy was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963, in order to drive an investigation that would find him guilty of being the lone assassin.  Peter Dale Scott, invoking the resources of HSCA investigator Dan Hardway and as also reported by HSCA investigator Gaeton Fonzi (The Last Investigation,  p. 292 ) discerned that  “most of the individuals originating the false reports (in cables etc.) were assets of the Mexico City Station’s Chief of Covert Action and Cuban Operations, David Atlee Phillips.”

It had been Phillips who ran all the cut outs (fake personae, duplicate Oswalds, fake files etc. ) to implicate Oswald as a commie nut in league with the KGB and Soviets – all the better to paint him as the one lone nut assassin in Dallas, on Nov. 22, 1963.

The Warren Commission was "suspiciously 'quiet' on the subject of Oswald's CIA files"[2], the OS-351-164 (office of security), the 201-289248 CI/SIG, and the 74-500. However, this should not astound anyone aware of the fact that a former CIA Director (Allen Dulles) sat on the Commission. Logically, therefore, if his latter day descendants are so reluctant to divulge the truth[3], he would have been no different. Moreover, as primary liaison between Commission members and the Agency, he could easily determine in advance what would be advisable for them to see, and what wouldn't. 

What is more astounding is the level of machinations the CIA used to conceal the files and their import from the Warren Commission. For example, no one informed the Commission that the letter ‘D’ – on the cover sheet of Oswald’s 201 file – indicated CIA Staff D, a SIGINT or signals intelligence operation run in concert with the National Security  Agency or NSA. As pointed out by Peter Dale Scott (Deep Politics Quarterly, Jan. 1994): “In 1961, when William Harvey headed Staff D, he was assigned the task of developing the CIA Assassinations Project, ZR/Rifle”

In addition, when they submitted Oswald’s 201-file to the Warren Commission (under the header of Commission Document 692) they did not indicate it clearly or mark it as such. Instead, as Dale Scott (and also John Newman) observed the CIA buried it in a  Sept. 24 “memorandum”  relocated to a much later position in the file , making it appear as if it had been falsely drafted after the culpable Oct. 10 fake cables.  (Scott writes that technically this subterfuge and dodge was a “felony under Section 1001 of the U.S. Criminal Code".)

All this needs to be seen in the context of the five documents the CIA released on Oswald in October of 1963.  As noted by Peter Dale Scott (‘Oswald, Mexico and Deep Politics’, 2013, p. 25) : “at least three show signs of CIA doctoring and the first, which does not, was nevertheless so misleading as to be possibly dishonest.” This was the cable from the Mexico City Station on Oct. 8 that claimed Oswald had appeared at the Soviet Embassy on Oct. 1, claiming  he had spoken with Valeriy Kostikov three days earlier. (Kostikov was top man in the KGB's "Department Thirteen" - responsible for assassinations. As Scott notes, ibid., this is why American Rightists made use of any sources they could to try to parlay this into something to force the WC's hand into a "phase one" conclusion. That included using Oswald's brother, Robert.)

More sobering is Newman’s apt reflection on Oswald’s activities in New Orleans from May –Sept, 1963 (Oswald and the CIA, p. 292):

"The record of Oswald's stay in New Orleans, May to September 1963, is replete with mistakes, coincidences, and other anomalies. As Oswald engaged in pro-Castro and anti-Castro activities, the FBI says they lost track of him. The Army was monitoring his activities and says it destroyed their reports. The record of his propaganda operations in New Orleans published by the Warren Commission turned out to have been deliberately falsified."

 

Even more vexing and worrisome, is that the CIA had spies squirreled away inside the Cuban Consulate in Mexico City  who could have pulled off all manner of chicanery, including altering the impostor Oswald's documents (substituting the real Oswald's photo, signature, etc.). As HSCA Investigator Fonzi  notes (using research by two staffers, Dan Hardaway, and Eddie Lopez - whose work led to the  Lopez Report, still in CIA files)[4]:

"In questioning (David Atlee)Phillips, Hardway was also working from information that had been dug up on a couple of secret trips to Mexico City made by Lopez, and investigator Harold Leap. Without the Agency's permission, they had located and interviewed a couple of CIA assets who had worked inside the Cuban Consulate at the time. The Agency never revealed this to the Warren Commission, but it actually had planted spies within the Cuban compound. That may be relevant to the fact that, in the end, the only 'proof' that the real Oswald was inside the Cuban Consulate were his photographs and his signature on his visa application.”

While in Mexico City, Lopez and Leap also spoke with the agency personnel who had listened to and were involved in translating and transcribing the tape of the man who called the Soviet Embassy. They said that after Oswald's Dallas arrest, when they heard his voice on radio and telecasts, it wasn't the same voice they remembered from the tape. The man who called the Embassy had a “huskier voice and didn't speak as fast as Oswald” , and perhaps most revealing, spoke in very poor, broken Russian  (Oswald's Russian wasn't excellent, but Marina Oswald later  said that when she first met Oswald in Minsk she thought his accent was from another part of the Soviet Union.)

Fonzi noted that Lopez and Hardway observed that David Atlee  Phillips seemed to be especially nervous when Hardway began questioning him about the lack of photographs of Oswald. He maintained that the surveillance cameras at both Soviet and Cuban Embassies were “not functioning at the time of Oswald's visits” . Phillips stuck to the story that the Agency didn't maintain an around-the-clock  and weekend surveillance of the Soviet Embassy. He also said the Cuban Embassy camera “happened to be malfunctioning”  during the time of Oswald's visit.

So, despite the fact that Oswald had allegedly made five visits to the Cuban Consulate and Soviet Embassy, there were no photographs to substantiate it.

As Gaeton Fonzi observes (p. 295)

"In the end, Phillips couldn't explain the contradictions in his testimony about the Agency's surveillance capabilities or why, if the cameras at the Soviet Embassy were working on October 1^st -when it photographed the unidentified man passed off as Oswald, there was no photograph of the real Oswald."

It seems more than evident that the reason Propaganda meister Phillips 'couldn't explain' the contradictions in his testimony, is because the real Lee Harvey Oswald was never in Mexico City. Like so many other smoke and mirrors tactics invoked by the Agency, this was no different. It is merely another layer/level of sheep-dipping to target the unwary Oswald for his pre-determined patsyhood role in Dallas 7 weeks later.

Those lone nut mythologists who maintain (in the face of the above facts) that Oswald was there, are obligated to provide us with first order evidence to substantiate that. (Hotel records don't cut it since they can easily be based on forged signatures. "Witnesses", i.e. on alleged buses, are only useful if they're able to compare the one they claim to have observed with images of the Lee Oswald arrested in Dallas. Sylvia Duran was such a witness, but she was tortured to recant - see below- when she denied that the Oswald encountered in the Cuban Embassy was the same as the one arrested in Big D) At the very least then, we need a verifiable photograph that can unimpeachably be used to put Oswald there. Until that time, the entire 'Oswald in Mexico City' episode must be regarded as specious and a probable concoction of the CIA and their many 'assets' deployed in Mexico City at the time. Or to use the words of John Newman in reference to a 'cable' that surfaced within that episode, “a whole cloth fabrication”[5]

The 'Oswald in Mexico City' caper, like so much else, also provides a cautionary tale about accepting anything in this case at face value, especially if it emanates from 'official sources', departments, or agents- who have a vested interest in keeping the “lone nut” myth alive and well.

By the spring of 1963 we know that the Psychological Warfare branch of the CIA's JM/WAVE station in Miami was being led by one George Johannides- who  was busy “guiding and financing” members of the Revolutionary Cuban Student Directorate or DRE, one of the largest anti-Castro groups in the United States[6].  This attention included providing the DRE with up to $25,000 a month, so long as they submitted to CIA discipline (Jefferson Morley, ‘The George Johannides Cover-up’, in JFK LANCER, May 19, 2005.)

At the same time, as documented by Peter Dale Scott,  CIA spin meister David Atlee Phillips- having been cross-posted to both stations.  was shuttling between Mexico City and Miami (the CIA’s JM/Wave station based at Zenith Technical Enterprises near Crandon Park) and helping Joannides confect and consolidate the “Oswald as commie perp” narrative, including using DRE assets to play Oswald in New Orleans. (See the previous quote from Newman on the May-Sept. Oswald story). They also were alternating between a “phase one” and “phase two” narrative, with the first linking Oswald to Soviet or Cuban Intelligence, and the second painting him as just a deranged lone nut. Most of the “phase one” stories originated as Scott notes from “ a single milieu of anti-Castro Cubans in Miami, close to, and in some cases supported by the CIA’s JM/Wave station there.”

Sadly, another casualty of the CIA sheepdip, dodge and spin hijinks was an innocent woman, the consulate officer Silvia Duran. As Scott reports, as well as Gaeton Fonzi (op. cit., p. 409)  she was forced to undergo brutal torture for eight hours at the hands of Mexican police to get her to recant her original testimony that the “Oswald” encountered at the Cuban Embassy in Medico City was not the Oswald arrested in Dallas.(She had insisted in her original testimony- account that the Oswald she encountered “was blonde and short” – The Lopez Report, p. 190).

Ed Lopez,  who’d sought to interview Duran again in the wake of her torture,  found she was unable, and broke down and wept merely at the thought of it. She also feared reprisals as a citizen of Mexico.

So be it. Now ask yourselves this: If Oswald was indeed “guilty” why did the CIA go to such inordinate lengths to distort, hide and obfuscate the truth (i.e. Oswald’s CIA files, fake cables etc.) as well as engage in such a complex plan to paint Oswald the bad guy (using Oswald impersonators in Mexico City)  – not to mention- recruiting Mexican police to torture a woman for 8 hours merely for telling the truth – to make it presentable for the Warren Commission’s (“phase two” or lone nut) narrative?

Mayhap Mr. Tom Hanks finally  asked himself those questions - before his “Bugliosi Bunkum Binge” next month on HBO –  which is why he cancelled it. Or perhaps HBO thankfully cancelled it realizing that all the money invested would be a waste. Poor Tom, guess he will have to wait a bit before “preventing the American people from being snookered”.   But as my German friend Reinhardt put it, we - the American people - can be thankful that HBO didn't expend millions to allow Hanks to try to snooker US!

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[1] CI/SIG =  'Counter Intelligence/ Special Interest Group'

[2] Newman, op. cit., p. 169.

[3] I am referring, of course, to the files on CIA Station Chief George Joannides, who single handedly funded and orchestrated the Cuban elements in New Orleans, and orchestrated Oswald’s associations with them.

[4] Fonzi. op. cit., pp. 293-94.

[5] Newman, op. cit. p. 408.

[6] Jefferson Morley, ‘The George Johannides Cover-up’, in JFK LANCER, May 19, 2005.