Tag: MEXICO CITY

  • JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald, Part 6

    JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald, Part 6


    Part 7

    Part 5

    Part 4

    Part 3

    Part 2

    Part 1


    How The History Channel Did Not Track Oswald

     

    The series “JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald”1 has revealed itself to be a deception, one almost as blatant as the magic bullet, conducted not in six seconds, but over six episodes:

    • “The Iron Meeting” that never happened in Mexico City, since …
    • “The Russian Network” immediately wrote Oswald off as a nut job;
    • “Oswald Goes Dark” in New Orleans—after displaying his pro Castro activism in broad daylight on the streets and even on the radio—to establish …
    • “The Cuban Connection” with Alpha 66—a virulent paramilitary group of Cuban exiles organized and backed by the CIA—for the common purpose of killing Kennedy;
    • “The Scene of the Crime” is mounted upon junk-science tests aimed at fixing Oswald as the lone gunman, and a far-fetched escape route for cooking up evidence about alleged Castroite Oswald being helped by anti-Castroite Alpha 66; and finally …
    • “The Truth” reached by former CIA case officer Bob Baer is just an old CIA deceit about Castro’s foreknowledge of Oswald’s criminal intent.

    An Overview of Baer’s First Four Installments

    Before commenting on the last episode, let us revisit some of the earlier segments, in order to accent both what was in them and what was missing.

    The first episode, about Oswald in Mexico City, was largely based upon a dubious book arranged by American journalist Brian Litman while he was living in Moscow in the late eighties. Colonel Oleg Nechiporenko’s Passport to Assassination seemed designed to counter two sources. First, what CIA officer David Phillips said in a debate with Mark Lane, namely, that when all the records were in, there would be no evidence Oswald was at the Russian consulate. (See Plausible Denial, p. 82) Second, what the Lopez Report describes: namely, that the CIA could provide no tapes or pictures of Oswald at either the Russian or Cuban consulates. The Litman/Nechiporenko book said Oswald was at the Russian consulate anyway. And even more made to order, the portrait it drew of Oswald was one of an unstable, almost suicidal character who fears the FBI is hunting him down. Which, as we know, is contradictory to the actual Oswald who, even under arrest for murder in Dallas, was a pretty cool customer. The Litman/Nechiporenko creation is much more in line with the Warren Commission’s sociopathic portrait. Baer never notes this discrepancy.

    What is even worse, in part 2, Baer tells the audience that before he met with the colonel, he had no idea what Nechiporenko knew about Oswald. Are we to buy the concept that Baer never heard of his book? Are we supposed to believe the note of surprise in Baer’s voice when the colonel tells him he met with Oswald in Mexico City? That book was published in 1993, well over twenty years ago. So when, after speaking with the colonel, Baer says, “This puts the case in a whole new light”, what on earth is he talking about? And who does he think he is kidding? Certainly not anyone who knows something about the JFK case.

    But further, in his usual portentous tones, Baer constantly compares Oswald meeting with Russian KGB agents in 1963 to someone meeting with ISIS today. As if ISIS had embassies that people can walk into and request information about visa applications. Again, this is so exaggerated as to be ludicrous. When did the KGB ever perform executions on camera? The spy wars back then were more sophisticated, more assiduous and cerebral in their planning and objectives than the war with terror today. That is one reason why it was called the Cold War.

    Let us describe another crevice in Baer’s early presentation. One of the very few documents Baer shows the audience which actually was declassified by the Assassination Records Review Board was a transcript of a call between President Johnson and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. In it, LBJ asks for information about Oswald in Mexico City. The call was made on the morning of November 23rd. Baer does not tell the audience that, as Rex Bradford discovered, there is no tape recording of this call, we only have a transcript. But he also does not tell his viewers that right after LBJ asked for more information, Hoover told the president that the audio tape and the picture they have of Oswald did not correspond to the man the FBI was interrogating in Dallas. In other words, the guy the CIA says was in Mexico City is not the man electronically captured by the CIA surveillance devices. (Jim Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 80) Are we to believe that Baer read that transcript but missed that crucial piece of information? Or if he did not, he thought that it somehow was not important?

    Let us mention another less-than-candid practice of “Tracking Oswald”. Time after time, Baer intones that he has studied the JFK case for ten years and read the entire 2 million page declassified record of the Assassination Records Review Board. In fact, he (unconvincingly) tries to insinuate that he has scanned the two million pages into his own personal database. Yet, if that were so, why does he show us pages printed from the Warren Commission Report as being redacted? Which they are not. He does this more than once, at least three times. Is he trying to present old, mildewed information as somehow spankingly brand new?

    After speaking with Oleg Nechiporenko, Baer decides that his idea from Part 1, that somehow Oswald met with KGB agents in Mexico City in 1963 and they plotted to kill President Kennedy is faulty. Yet the original evidence he based this on was flawed to begin with. Baer said that the FBI got hold of some postcards that Oswald allegedly purchased in Mexico City. One of them depicted a bullfight. Therefore, Baer deduced that Oswald met some KGB agents at a bullfight and planned the killing of JFK. No joke.

    The idea that if you buy a postcard with a bullfight on it, then you went to a bullfight is not logically sound. Tourists buy all kinds of postcards in foreign countries concerning places they do not actually go to. It is true that Marina Oswald said that her husband told her that he went to a bullfight in Mexico City. (WR, p. 735) But this is in direct contradiction to the fact that she had previously denied he was in Mexico City to the Secret Service during their first interview. And she denied it twice. (Secret Service report of Charles Kunkel from 11/24-11/30)

    Contrary to what the program asserts, the evidence of Oswald in Mexico City—a Spanish-English dictionary, blank postcards, etc.—was not immediately seized and turned over to the FBI. And contrary to what Baer says, the Russians did not give him the postcard in evidence. These pieces of evidence—including the postcards—were adduced into the record a week after the assassination by Marina Oswald’s companion Ruth Paine. (Reclaiming Parkland, by James DiEugenio, p. 344) That Baer relies so much on these postcards without telling the viewer about their provenance tells us a lot about both his honesty and his knowledge base. Or perhaps both. Because the truth is that the Warren Commission had a hard time placing Oswald in Mexico City. Months later, in August, Priscilla Johnson, who replaced Ruth Paine as Marina’s companion, was still surfacing evidence about Oswald’s bus rides in Mexico City. This drove Warren Commission lawyer Wesley Liebeler up the wall. (ibid)

    Baer also makes much play about Soviet diplomat Valery Kostikov meeting with Oswald at the Russian consulate in Mexico City. At the end of Part One, he tries to proffer it as evidence that hardly anyone ever knew about. If Baer really believes that, then he did not read the Warren Report, because Kostikov’s name appears there on page 734. And he is named as a KGB agent on that same page. In other words, it was open to the public back in 1964.

    Once the KGB colonel tells him the Russians had no espionage interest in Oswald, Baer drops that line of inquiry. He now goes back to Mexico City and “discovers” the name of Sylvia Duran in his two million page declassified database. Again, he somehow sounds surprised when he finds the name of Sylvia Duran in there, even though, as anyone could have told him—except perhaps his staff—her name is also in the Warren Report. (See p. 734) And again, he continues in his shocked syndrome with, “This file completely changes the course of this investigation.” Who does Bob think Oswald talked to in the Cuban consulate, Che Guevara? Again, Baer is seemingly stunned when he finds out the Warren Commission did not talk to Duran. Which again shows his lack of knowledge of the real declassified record. The ARRB declassified the Commission’s Slawson/Coleman report in the Nineties. It was very clear from this Mexico City trip report of the Warren Commission that the CIA and FBI kept those two men on a short leash. By never referring to it, Baer escapes this question: Why did the Bureau and the Agency firmly regulate what Commission lawyers David Slawson and Bill Coleman saw and read? And why did the Commission not demand more freedom and access?

    Ultimately, what can one say about a program called “Tracking Oswald” that never mentions or details the following names: Ruth and Michael Paine, George Bouhe, George DeMohrenschildt, David Ferrie, Guy Banister, Clay Shaw, or Kerry Thornley? These people largely controlled the last 17 months of Oswald’s life after his return from Russia. The first four did so in the Dallas/Fort Worth area; the second quartet in New Orleans. If you never examine any of those persons then how are you tracking Oswald? And contrary to what Baer says about his (ersatz) access to the ARRB declassified files, there have been many pages released about those people. And there are still pages that will be released on them in October of this year.

    Baer’s presentation is so restricted, so empty, and at the same time his approach is so hammily bombastic, that it leads an informed viewer to suspect an agenda. That agenda is to make believe he has consumed 2 million pages of documents for the viewer. Then to present virtually nothing from those pages. After performing this shell game, he tells his audience: Hey, I saw them, and guess what? Oswald still did it.

    Sure Bob, sure.


    The Final Chapter

    The title for the final episode conceals the fact that Baer’s conclusion—Castro knew it—has been drawn from two false premises: (1) Oswald was the lone gunman who killed Kennedy firing both a magic bullet and a fatal shot to the head; (2) Oswald was openly telling his criminal intention to members of Alpha 66, which was riddled with agents of the Cuban Intelligence Service (CuIS) who reported back to Castro.

    Since Baer refuses to explain how CuIS moles would have known much more about Oswald than the CIA officers and agents working closely with Alpha 66 since its inception in 1962, let’s make a clean break with his conspiracy theory. There is no shred of evidence refuting Castro’s statement about Oswald during his Radio/TV appearance in Havana the day after the assassination:2 “We never in our life heard of the existence of this person.”


    An Apocryphal Story as Baer’s Cornerstone

    Shortly before airing the series, Baer revealed to Time magazine staffer Olivia B. Waxman:3 “What really got me into it was meeting a defector from Cuba and one of the best agents the CIA has ever had. He said that on the 22nd of November 1963, four hours before the assassination, he was at an intelligence site in Havana when he got a call from Castro’s office, saying, ‘Turn all of your listening ability to high frequency communications out of Dallas because something’s going to happen there.’”

    In front of the camera Baer provides a second-hand version of this story by CuIS defector Enrique García, who affirmed that another CuIS defector, Florentino Aspillaga, had told him such a story. The latter had also given it as an anecdote à la carte for the book Castro’s Secrets (Macmillan, 2012, 2013),4 written by former CIA desk analyst Dr. Brian Latell.

    Together with Aspillaga and Latell, García and Baer end up forming a crew who carry the banner “Castro knew Kennedy would be killed.” It’s silly that Castro would have resorted to a radio counterintelligence prodigy or any other means of electronic intelligence (ELINT) in order to learn something that would have been instantly available through the mass media. In 1963, instant info about anything occurring in Dallas during the JFK visit simply meant broadcast reports interrupting soap operas on the three national TV networks and radio stations breaking news furnished by reporters covering the live event.

    Pathetically, Baer mounts a charade with Adam Bercovici broadcasting local info from Dallas, Baer himself boosting it through short-wave radio as some Alpha 66 operator would have done, and two guys in a boat picking up the signal in international waters near a Cuban ELINT radio tower. They are unaware that Aspillaga, codenamed TOUCHDOWN by the CIA,5 became a self-defeating storyteller6: “It wasn’t until two or three hours later that I began hearing broadcasts on amateur radio bands about the shooting of President Kennedy.” Radio amateurs must have just been chatting about what the commercial media had already reported. Indeed, a unique witness—French journalist Jean Daniel—had given conclusive evidence against Aspillaga since the very day of the assassination. After a phone call by Cuban President Osvaldo Dorticós, Castro got all the news “from the NBC network in Miami.”7 Plus, we know from Daniel—who was serving as Kennedy’s emissary to Castro on the day of the assassination—that Fidel was utterly shocked when he heard the news that Kennedy had been shot. Later, when Castro got the news that JFK was dead, he turned to Daniel and said—referring to their plans for rapprochement—that everything was going to change. (Jim Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, pp. 89-90)

    Aspillaga’s story is spurious not only because it’s silly but because, as shown above, its rebuttal can be traced back to Daniel’s on-site account. The crux of the matter is that Aspillaga confided to Latell in 2007 he had previously told the story only to the CIA during his debriefing after defection in 1987.8 Thus, it must have been declassified or withheld under the terms of the JFK Records Act (1992). However, Aspillaga’s story appears neither among the millions of pages declassified by the ARRB nor among the around 1,100 records still withheld by the CIA at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).9


    Tracking Oswald Seriously

    In Dallas, Baer and his team attempt to reconstruct a planned Oswald escape after the last shot. He imagines having made an unbelievable discovery: there were, get this, six houses of Cuban exiles along the road to a present-day bus stop on a route matching the dubious 1963 transfer ticket found in Oswald’s shirt pocket when he was arrested. Even as simply linking Oswald to a safe house, this evidence is fishy.

    Baer absolutely trusts an informant who told the Dallas Police Department (DPD) about seeing Oswald with Cuban exiles in a house at 1326 Harlandale Avenue. It was rented by Jorge Salazar, lieutenant to Manuel Rodríguez Orcabarrio [sic], head of the Dallas Alpha 66 chapter, and served as a meeting place. However, Peter Scott pointed out that Orcabarrio “looked so much like Oswald that he was mistaken for him.”10 A point that somehow, in all his alleged document review, Baer missed. Yet, this was backed up by another reputable JFK researcher. In his book, The Secret Service (Fine Communications, 2002), the late Philip H. Melanson further provided that it was “independently confirmed by the FBI [that Orcabarrio] bore a resemblance to Lee Harvey Oswald” (page 83). And Larry Hancock argues that there is some evidence that the information was later negated. A source later “told the FBI Oswald had never been there.”11

    Baer ignores all of this and goes on by cherry-picking info out of context. To make it crystal clear that Alpha 66 was deeply infiltrated by CuIS, defector García stated that its Chief of Operations was a Castro dangle. In fact, CuIS officer José Fernández-Santos, a.k.a. “El Chino” [The Chinese], became Alpha 66 Chief of Naval Operations, but just after illegally leaving Cuba in late 1968. To reinforce the image of Oswald obsessed with killing Kennedy, Baer makes use of the Sylvia Odio incident as if it were a prelude in Dallas on the road to Mexico City, instead of a quantum of proof about Oswald’s impersonation here or there.12

    Under an illusion about another “explosive discovery”, Baer raves on about Oswald returning from Mexico to fulfil “his promise” and running into people as furious with Kennedy as himself: Alpha 66. Thus, Baer and his team lost the real trail marked by the CIA’s “keen interest in Oswald, held very closely on the need-to-know basis.”13

    Three CIA teams never stopped tracking Oswald all the way from Moscow (1960) to Dallas (1963). Info about him—more than 40 different documents: FBI reports, State Department cables, intercepted personal letters and others—usually passed from the CIA Counterintelligence (CI) Special Investigation Group (SIG) to the CI Operation Group (OPS) to the Counter-Espionage Unit of the Soviet Russia Division (CE-SR/6).

    • The CIA opened a personality file (201-289248) on “Lee Henry Oswald” on 9 December 1960. His documentary record began with the Halloween 1959 UPI story “An ex-Marine asks for Soviet citizenship.”
    • Since May 25, 1960, “Lee Harvey Oswald” appeared in another file at the Covert Operations Desk, based on the report by FBI Special Agent John Fain in Dallas after talking with Oswald’s parents about “Funds Transmitted to Residents of Russia.”
    • A third CIA index card for “Lee H. Oswald” was attached to file (100-300-011) about the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) on October 25, 1963. FBI Special Agent Warren De Brueys had reported from New Orleans that Oswald confessed being “a member of the alleged New Orleans chapter of FPCC,” a pro-Castro group listed as subversive.

    These cards were used in a threesome for making different legends of the same re-defector, who arrived in the U.S. with his wife and their 4-month-old daughter on June 13, 1962, thanks to a $435.71 loan from the State Department. S.A. Fain debriefed him in Fort Worth twice. His final report, dated on August 30, 1962, stated Oswald “agreed to contact the FBI if at any time any individual made any contact of any nature under suspicious circumstances with him.”

    Surprisingly, the CIA cable traffic in early October 1963 demonstrates that the Station in Mexico City and the Headquarters in Langley hid from each other their intel about Oswald’s connections with Cuba: His visit to the Cuban Consulate on September 27, 1963, and his pro-Castro activism in Dallas and New Orleans, respectively.

    The CIA got shockingly involved in a conspiracy of silence about a former Marine, re-defector from the Soviet Union and self-pronounced Marxist, who was identified by the FBI as a pro-Castro activist in Dallas and New Orleans, spotted by the CIA in Mexico City visiting both the Cuban and Soviet embassies, and finally missed by both the FBI and the CIA as a security risk in Dallas at the moment of truth. A former CIA case officer must be aware of all this, but Baer overlooks the hard facts in lieu of resorting to camouflage with “Castro knew it.”


    Castro versus Kennedy

    In the interview with Waxman, Baer dragged and dropped that Castro “had every reason in the world” to want JFK dead. In the series, Baer assumes that Castro “was very happy” when his moles in Alpha 66 briefed him about Oswald being set up to kill Kennedy. Since Castro did nothing to prevent JFK’s death, Baer foists a conspiracy of silence on him.

    This is an utter distortion of history done for the History Channel. Because Castro had every reason to want Kennedy alive and well. On Christmas Eve 1962, the American lawyer Jim Donovan boarded the last flight with the Bay of Pigs prisoners airlifted to Miami as result of his negotiation with Castro. Just before departure, Castro’s aide Dr. Rene Vallejo broached the subject of re-establishing diplomatic relations. Upon learning of this communication, Kennedy commented “it looked interesting.”14

    With JFK’s death Castro was going to gain nothing else than LBJ in the White House, who offered no promise of more favorable U.S. policies toward Cuba. The Soviet bloc’s diplomats in Havana were aware of Castro’s preference. On March 31, 1963, Hungarian Ambassador János Beck set out in a secret report to Budapest that Castro was convinced “Kennedy is the best” option among the possible candidates for the U.S. presidency in 1964.15 Furthermore, ABC newswoman Lisa Howard interviewed Castro in April 1963 and reported he considered a rapprochement with Washington desirable.16 The same message was conveyed in August 1963 by one María Boissevain, wife of a former Dutch Ambassador to Cuba.17

    Even so, the CIA was dismayed that Kennedy continued to favor a compromise with Castro. On November 5, 1963, CIA Deputy Director for Plans Dick Helms suggested to “war game” the Castro détente in a meeting of the Special Group.18 Kennedy opted for sending French reporter Jean Daniel as secret envoy to Castro. On November 19, Daniel was already talking with him, while Kennedy was waiting for an agenda proposal by Castro to “decide what to say [and to] do next.”19

    On September 7, 1963, Castro had attended a reception at the Brazilian Embassy in Havana. He talked with Associated Press correspondent Dan Harker, who quoted him saying: “U.S. leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe.”20 According to the crew of “Castro sorta did it,” he wanted Kennedy’s death and gratuitously broadcasted his intention to the whole world. In fact, Kennedy had expressed the same idea on November 1961. After meeting with reporter Tad Szulc, who noted him “under terrific pressure from advisors (…) to okay a Castro murder,” Kennedy discussed the issue with his aide Richard Goodwin and remarked: “If we get into that kind of thing, we’ll all be targets”.21

    Castro summed up his ethical pragmatism thusly: “Ethics is not a simple moral issue (…) It produces results.”22 If he would have had foreknowledge—from Alpha 66 or any other source—of Oswald or whoever else was threatening to kill Kennedy, he would have reacted just as in 1984 with a U.S. President he deemed much worse than Kennedy. After being advised about an extreme right-wing conspiracy to kill Ronald Reagan in North Carolina, Castro ordered his spymaster at the Cuban Mission to the UN to furnish all the intel to the U.S. Security Chief at the UN, Robert Muller. The FBI quietly dismantled the plot.23


    Abuse of History

    Baer’s intent appears to be to keep on muddying the waters. He even said to Waxman: “We don’t know exactly what the Cubans told him in Mexico City,” although the CIA did know that they only talked about an in-transit visa. The acting consul, Alfredo Mirabal, was also a CuIS officer, identified by the CIA as “Chief of Intel”24. Before the HSCA, Mirabal adamantly stated having judged Oswald’s visit to the Cuban consulate on September 27, 1963, as “a provocation.”25

    That day the CIA listening post LIENVOY recorded two calls between Cuban and Soviet consular staffers about an American citizen seeking—illegally—an in-transit visa to Cuba on his way to Soviet Russia. On the second call’s transcript, Station Chief Win Scott noted: “Is it possible to identify?”26

    This normal reaction was followed by an anomaly. In the LIENVOY operational report for September 1963, Scott referred to “two leads of operational interest:” a female professor from New Orleans calling the Soviet Embassy, and a Czech woman calling the Czech embassy.27 In gross violation of the CIA protocol, the U.S. citizen in Mexico City who was allegedly Oswald was not reported to Langley.

    Ironically, the conspiracy of silence foisted in a fact-free manner by Baer on Castro proved to be factually correct in reference to the CIA. With Castro as vantage point instead of the CIA, Baer was not tracking Oswald to articulate a true picture of the past, but to drive the historical truth away.


    NOTES

    1 After two episodes, the series was cancelled in the U.S., but continued in Canada. The History Channel has informally stated it will come back to the States in a timely fashion.

    2 JFK Exhibit F-684.

    3Former CIA Operative Argues Lee Harvey Oswald’s Cuba Connections Went Deep,” Time, April 25, 2017.

    4 See the book review “The End of An Obsession.”

    5 After 25 years and 13 medals in the CuIS, Aspillaga defected from his third-rate post in Bratislava [Slovakia] to Vienna in early June 1987. The CIA Station Chief there, James Olson, thought his companion was Aspillaga’s daughter, but she was actually Aspillaga’s girlfriend. The British historian Rupert Allason, a.k.a. Nigel West, made an entry for the case in his Historical Dictionary of Sexspionage (Scarecrow Press, 2009). Anyway, Aspillaga got a deluxe package of resettlement in the U.S. in return for handing over valuable documents stolen from the first-rank CuIS Station in Prague and for being squeezed by CIA debriefers. He furnished the key intel that almost all the Cubans recruits by the CIA from 1960 onward were double agents loyal to Castro.

    6 Brian Latell, Castro’s Secrets, Macmillan, 2013, 103.

    7 Jean Daniel, “When Castro Heard the News,” The New Republic, December 7, 1963.

    8 Instead of taking the road to clarification, the CIA engaged in a conspiracy of silence. The Agency Release Panel responded to a FOIA request on June 28, 2013: “The CIA can neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence” of JFK-related records in Aspillaga’s debriefing.

    9 Neither Aspillaga nor TOUCHDOWN brings any result by searching one after the other, or both, at the National Archives web site. By entering “JFK Assassination” in the search box, the first relevant result would be “About JFK Assassination Records Collection.” By clicking on it, then on “JFK Assassination Records Collection Database”, and finally on “Standard Search”, a “Kennedy Assassination Collection Simple Search Form” appears. After entering the terms “Aspillaga” (first line) OR “Touchdown” (second line), no hit will be retrieved.

    10The CIA’s Mystery Man,” The New York Review of Books, Volume 22, Number 12, July 17, 1975.

    11 The last name is often misspelled as Orcabarrio or Orcaberrio. In the CuIS files, he is registered as Manuel Rodríguez Oscarberro. On the evening of November 22, 1963, DPD detective Buddy Walthers knew about someone looking very much like Oswald going into this house since October because his mother-in-law was living next door. Walthers reported it and the FBI did no more than confirm that Oscarberro and other Cuban exiles had been there and departed. Nonetheless it was noted that a source inside Alpha 66, who later moved to Puerto Rico, had furnished the information that Oswald was not associated with the group in any way and had never been to the house. Since Oscarberro did move to Puerto Rico, it is possible he was the FBI source clearing Oswald.

    12 Both occurrences overlapped in time, but left the same trail. Along with two Cuban exiles, a Leon Oswald visited Mrs. Odio in Dallas. The day after, one of the Cubans phoned her and discussed Oswald as an excellent shooter, who believed President Kennedy should have been assassinated after Bay of Pigs. Meanwhile, a Lee Harvey Oswald visited the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City and yelled on his way out: “I’m going to kill Kennedy!”

    13 As CIA Counterintelligence (CI) officer Jane Roman told John Newman on November 2, 1994.

    14 FRUS, XI, Doc. 275, 687 f.

    15 Declassified top secret document from the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. At Cold War History Research Center Budapest, click on “Archives”, then on “Selected Hungarian Documents on Cuba, 1960-1963,” and finally on “Talks between Cuba and the USA (March 31, 1963).

    16 “Castro’s Overture,” War/Peace Report, September 1963, 3-5.

    17 NARA Record Number: 104-10310-10244.

    18 NARA Record Number: 104-10306-10024.

    19 Peter Kornbluh, “JFK and Castro,” Cigar Aficionado, September – October 1999, pp. 3 ff.

    20 “Castro Blasts Raids on Cuba,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, September 9, 1963.

    21 Richard Mahoney, JFK: Ordeal in Africa, Oxford University Press, 1983, p.135.

    22 My Life: A Spoken Autobiography, Simon and Schuster, 2008, 211.

    23 Nestor Garcia-Iturbe, Cuba-US: Cuban Government Saved Reagan’s Life, June 6, 2015.

    24 NARA Record Number: 1994.05.03.10:31:46:570005.

    25 HSCA Report, pp. 173-78.

    26 NARA Record Number 104-10413-10074

    27 NARA Record Number: 104-10052-10083.

  • JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald, Part 5

    JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald, Part 5


    Part 1

    Part 2

    Part 3

    Part 4

    Part 6

    Part 7


     

    For the fifth episode of the series “JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald,” former CIA case officer Bob Baer and his team moved from New Orleans to Dallas seeking to prove Oswald “had help in accomplishing his mission.” Aren’t they putting the cart before the horse by widening the net in search of accomplices before having determined whether Oswald was the perpetrator? They are indeed doing so, because Baer does have a mission: Keeping the CIA out of the picture.

    After mixing Oswald with the anti-Castro and CIA-backed paramilitaries of Alpha 66 in a weird pot made of “special intent to kill President Kennedy soup”, Baer keeps on blighting a big-budget TV show by ignoring the body of the evidence. The latter supports the same assessment given by J. Edgar Hoover to Lyndon B. Johnson the morning after the assassination: “The case as it stands now isn’t strong enough to be able to get a conviction. ”1

    The Warren Commission (WC) has manufactured the case against Oswald with at least a wrong murder weapon (CE 139), a wrong bullet (CE 399), and a wrong shell (CE 543). Instead of weighing the evidence, Baer and his team commit a kind of Only Game in Town Fallacy: If a second shooter is not at hand, then that leaves Oswald as the lone gunman.


    Bogus Testing

    To throw out the prima facie evidence —in the Zapruder film2— of gunfire from the right front, Baer simply replaces Luis Alvarez’s melon with what they call an encased gel ordinance head. Which goes backwards after being struck by a bullet fired from behind.

    A Nobel Prize winner in Physics (1968), Alvarez got involved in a test with a taped-up melon to verify that the backward snap of Kennedy’s head was consistent with a shot from behind due to a jet-propulsion-like recoil.3 But, as Gary Aguilar showed in his reply to Luke and Mike Haag, another test conducted by research physical scientist Larry Sturdivan at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in 1964 proved otherwise. Ten skulls were shot with a Mannlicher-Carcano and all of them moved away from the rifle in the same direction of the bullet. The Commission suppressed these findings and plainly reported that President Kennedy was struck in the head and “fell to the left into Mrs. Kennedy’s lap.”  (Click here for that article)

    Alvarez’s test was misleading because a taped-up melon has neither the sheer strength nor the thickness close to that of a human skull. By the same token, Baer’s ballistic test is just another rigged attempt to support the discredited WC lone-gunman theory with a childish jet effect. We cannot do better than let Milicent Cranor comment at length on this ludicrous so-called “experiment”.

     

    History Channel – or Saturday Night Live?

    By Milicent Cranor

    This segment of the History Channel’s special on the Kennedy Assassination seems like a low-budget skit from Saturday Night Live!

    An “expert sniper” goes through the motions of recreating the shot to Kennedy’s head. The idea is to prove that one shot from the presumed Oswald location can cause the reaction we see on the Zapruder film: the head moving to the back and to the left.

    It’s not clear what they’ve dug up to use for the head.  The sniper describes it vaguely as a human head filled with ordinance gel, and throughout his little talk, he refers to that gel.  As in “shooting from behind the ballistics gel” and “I’ve got the ballistics gel on target.”  Maybe he hopes to convey the impression of a gelatinous brain causing the head to spring backwards. 

    The demonstration is just amazing. it is far more revealing than the show’s creators realize:

    We only get a side view of the action – and are not allowed to see the back or front of the head, not even after the shooting.

    The limited view of the head shows no damage whatsoever.

    The head moves back, but not to the left.  Then it pops right back up to its original position! 

    Something, possibly vaporized gel, seems to come out of the head (or from a smoke machine behind the head) – but only from the mouth area. 

    So he looks like a man leaning back with pleasure as he smokes a fine cigar, oblivious to the characters behind him.

    The sniper’s explanation for what happened is even more amazing: 

    “…the bullet enters the back of the head and the terminal ballistics will come here — [indicates area of right eye and forehead] – causing the head to go back and to the left.”

    cranor a

    “The terminal ballistics will come here”?  Terminal ballistics is defined as “the study of the behavior and effects of a projectile when it hits its target and transfers its energy to the target.”

    The sniper can’t explain what happened, but he seems to think that by naming the field of study concerned with such phenomena, the audience will be fooled.

    cranor b

    It is especially funny that he points to the area of the right eye: (1) In real life, the bullet is supposed to have exited from the top of the head on the right; (2) the gel-filled head in the demonstration seems to have no damage to that area, and it would show in a right profile view; and (3) all the exiting stuff representing brain matter comes out of the mouth.  Neither JFK nor the head in this demo is supposed to have had an exit wound in the mouth.

    Conclusion: The creators of this segment must have gel for brains. Or they think their audience does.

    cranor d
    THE SMOKING MAN

    Watch the segment on YouTube

     

    As the reader can see, this is not a studious, scientific attempt to duplicate the circumstances that befell Kennedy at 12:30 PM in Dealey Plaza, in Dallas.  And for Baer to try and pass it off as such speaks very poorly of both him and his show.

    But Bob Baer is not done.  Not by a long shot. For now he goes on and conducts what he calls an acoustics test. According to him, dozens of ear witnesses4 who heard shots coming from the Grassy Knoll were actually confused due to “the amphitheater effect.” The real sound coming from the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD) would have echoed at the so-called triple underpass and other hard structures in Dealey Plaza.

    To construct this “explosive theory,” Baer went to the crime scene with sound engineers and equipment that “nobody used before”. He just forgot to adjust the experiment setting to the standards of historical reconstruction.5 Not a single person was placed where a certain witness had been watching the presidential motorcade, and the sounds of the shooting weren’t generated by firing the rifle at the sniper nest. They were recorded elsewhere and played thereafter from near the TSBD.  No kidding.

    What is kind of shocking about this so-called acoustics test is that Baer completely ignores its far superior predecessor. During the proceedings of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, (HSCA) that body did an acoustics test in Dealey Plaza.  Except their testing was live and they brought riflemen into the plaza. And from that and their work with and analysis of the 11/22/63 dictabelt recording from Dealey Plaza by a Dallas policeman on a motorcycle, they concluded the following: 1.) Someone fired from the grassy knoll, and 2.) There were five shots fired that day. (Which, as Don Thomas reveals in his book Hear No Evil, for political reasons, Chief Counsel Robert Blakey reduced to four.)

    But, if one can comprehend it, Baer completely ignored the HSCA precedent, which included two teams of the finest audio scientists in the country. Among their members was Dr. James Barger of the firm Bolt, Beranek, and Newman. Barger had done acoustical research for the Navy in the field of submarine sonar detection, and had been involved in testing tapes of the 1970 Kent State shooting in Ohio. Barger did scientific testing of the actual sound wave patterns produced in Dealey Plaza at that time.  Barger’s findings were passed on to Professor Mark Weiss and his associate Ernest Aschkenasy. They did the final presentation for the committee. To imply, as Baer does, that those three men spent as much time and testing as they did and could not separate an echo from a live shot is ridiculous. But Baer and his program are so agenda driven that it is as if these previous tests never happened.  He brings in some audio recordings, some computer programmers, pays them a few bucks and with these stage props he has somehow eliminated the second gunman in the JFK case. Pure and utter poppycock. Baer’s level of science here would not pass muster at a good high school’s Science Fair. 


    An Inescapable Second Shooter

    On December 12, 1963, the Secret Service (SS) did a crude recreation. Its black and white footage plotted three shots on the JFK limousine. The bystander James Tague —wounded by a bullet ricocheting off the curb about 260 feet away from the limousine— destroyed the prior three-shots-three-hits scenario. Then, the magic bullet emerged not from evidence, but as an out-of-the-blue solution engineered to sustain the lone gunman theory.

    The FBI-SS reenactment on 23-24 May 1964 was a re-adjustment to preserve the willful closing of the case against Oswald. It also provided the notorious photo (CE 309) of Commission junior counsel Arlen Specter indicating with a metal rod the trajectory of the lie. However, an apparently insignificant detail provides a quantum of proof for demolishing any attempt—including Baer’s—to realign the shoots with the WC Report.

    For the 1964 recreation, Specter used the same jacket worn by Governor Connally on November 22, 1963, but he did not use President Kennedy’s. Otherwise he couldn’t have aligned the bullet entrance hole in the back of both Kennedy’s jacket and shirt with the exit wound at his throat.6

    The bullet holes are positioned 5 3/8” down from the collar line on the back of the jacket. They are consistent with the JFK death certificate, signed by his personal physician, Dr. George Burkley, who examined a back wound at the level of the third thoracic vertebra, about 4-6 inches below the point where the shoulders meet the neck.

    At this level, a bullet coming downward from the TSBD would not be able to exit the throat. But the Commission acolytes do not care about the death certificate7 and dismiss the jacket and the shirt as material evidence with the claim that both bunched up. Let’s connect the dots in a simple test.

    • Baer is invited to come dressed in suit and tie, along with John McAdams, Max Holland, Gerald Posner, Phillip Shenon et. al.;
    • They will remove their jackets and shirts to mark the position of the bullet hole in Kennedy’s, and will also mark on their bodies the back wound given by the WC;
    • They will put on their jackets and shirts, and will take a back seat in a car8;
    • They will get their jackets and shirts to ride up until the mark on each one matches the mark of the back wound. This crucial moment will be photographically captured;
    • They will compare the photos with the Zapruder film to find not even the faintest resemblance of JFK’s tailored suit jacket and buttoned shirt bunching up as theirs.

    They will surely face a dilemma. If the Warren Commission accurately placed the back wound, then JFK’s jacket and shirt were replaced, hence conspiracy; if the jacket and shirt are authentic, then the WC gave a false representation of JFK’s back wound, hence conspiracy or cover-up. There is not one whiff of any of these factors in the entire “Tracking Oswald” series, for if they did present it, the show would have to be called, “Trying to Find who Killed Kennedy.”  The Warren Commission did not want to do that.  Neither does Baer.


    Oswald’s Escape and Another Crime Scene

    After surreptitiously taking for granted that Oswald was the lone gunman, Baer applies his on-the-ground field officer expertise to assemble Oswald’s plan of escape with a concealed route, an Alpha 66 safe house, and some anti-Castro Cuban exiles as accomplices. No clue is given about how Oswald could have learned in advance the presidential motorcade’s schedule in order for him to have planned the assassination by firing a rifle with telescopic sight from his very place of employment.9  In that regard, Baer also ignores the following. That morning, Oswald asked fellow worker James Jarman why all the people were assembled in the plaza below.  When Jarman replied that President Kennedy was going to pass through in a motorcade, Oswald asked him which way it was proceeding.  Kind of wrecks Baer’s idea of Oswald’s planning.  Which is probably why he ignores it. (See Syliva Meagher, Accessores After the Fact, Vintage Books, 1992, pp. 37-38)

    For all of what follows, Baer relies on the bus ticket found in Oswald´s shirt pocket.  The former CIA officer somehow never discerns the difference between getting to and from work, and around the Dallas area, on the one hand, and escaping from the scene of a high profile murder case amid hundred of witnesses on the other. But Baer uses the ticket to infer a getaway route from the TSBD to an Alpha 66 safe house. On the way, Baer loses the evidentiary trail that—since Sylvia Meagher´s research in 1967—has put the ticket and other circumstances of Oswald’s escape under a cloud of suspicion (Accessories After the Fact, pp. 70-93).

    Baer deduces that, from his years of experience in the CIA, in a situation like this, the assassin(s) needed to have an escape route planned in advance. Our host does not want to admit that what the Commission says Oswald did after the shooting would suggest that he had no such plan in mind. Or that the latest research on this matter clearly indicates he was not on the sixth floor at all. (See Barry Ernest’s book, The Girl on the Stairs. Click here for a review) For the idea that a man who just killed the president would now search out public transportation to flee the scene of the crime amid hundreds of spectators and scores of policemen is simply not credible. But that is what the official story says. And that is what Baer is supporting.

    In any real planning situation one would rely on one of two factors for escape amid a multitude of spectators. The first alternative would be disguise—of which there is no evidence in this case. The other would be speed. That is, the longer one stays at or near the scene, the longer one risks the possibility of exposure and/or capture. Concerning this subject, one could do as Josiah Thompson did at the end of Six Seconds in Dallas. That is, present the testimony of policeman Roger Craig. Craig says he saw Oswald running down the embankment after the shooting. He then jumped into a Rambler driven by a dark skinned man. That would sound like an escape plan utilizing speed.  But probably because of that, Baer ignores it.  So in his scenario, Oswald boards a bus, gets off the bus, then walks a few blocks, and hails a taxi. But before he enters, he offers it to a little old lady standing next to him. (Meagher, p. 83) With a straight face Baer pronounces this an “escape plan”.

    Furthermore, Baer explains that Oswald ended up in the Texas Theater because of the run-in with Police Officer J.D. Tippit on East 10th Street, about 100 feet eastward from Patton Avenue. At that point, the escape plan was supposedly disrupted and Oswald failed to think clearly and rationally.  However, as in the case of his alleged shooting of the President, the evidence against Oswald in Tippit’s murder is shoddy.10 And Baer ignores that shoddiness.

    The crime scene is almost a mile away from Oswald’s rooming house at 1026 N. Beckley. His landlady Earlene Roberts saw him waiting for a bus at 1:04 PM after he left his room. Temple Ford Bowley arrived at the crime scene when Officer Tippit was already on the ground and some bystanders were milling around the police car. Bowley looked at his watch and the time was 1:10 PM. The Commission ignored Bowley. Why? Because clearly Oswald couldn´t have walked almost a mile in less than 6 minutes. They then reported that Tippit was killed circa 1:15 PM, despite the fact that is the time he was pronounced dead at Methodist Hospital. To keep up appearances, a typed FBI memo stretched out Tippit’s agony at the hospital until 1:25 PM.

    This case against Oswald for the Tippit shooting further weakens due to the three-wallets enigma.11 At the crime scene, Channel 8 staffer Ron Reiland filmed a policeman showing an open wallet to an FBI agent. According to FBI agent James Hosty, his fellow Bob Barrett revealed that this wallet contained IDs for both Oswald and Alek Hidell. But Dallas Police Officer Paul Bentley confiscated a second wallet from Oswald after he was arrested at the Texas Theater.  And another one was found among Oswald´s belongings at Ruth Paine´s house in Irving. These are all facts. They strongly suggest some evidence against Oswald was planted. They are ignored by Baer.

    Let us add another point about the two constant refrains by Baer during the program.  First, the continuing assumption that Oswald is the guilty party. This, as we have seen, he achieves only by ignoring the evidence, especially the new evidence declassified by the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). And that relates to the second refrain:  that Baer has read through the two million pages of declassified documents by the ARRB.  Yet this program offers no evidence from that declassification process. For instance, Baer presents a four-decades-old police report that Oswald was seen at an Alpha 66 safehouse in the Dallas area. The other document used in this episode is the famous testimony of Antonio Veciana of him seeing Oswald with Maurice Bishop at the Southland Building in Dallas.  Again, that information extends back to the seventies.  And it does not at all connect Oswald with Alpha 66. Veciana was arriving to meet with his case officer Bishop at the time.  He was early, and he saw Bishop with Oswald.  Oswald left shortly after he arrived.  In other words, Oswald was there with Bishop, not with Alpha 66 leader Veciana.  And as Veciana later admitted—just three years ago—Bishop was David Phillips.

    Now if Bob Baer was really interested in furnishing the public with new information, he could have done at least a couple of things with that crucial admission.  First, he could have said that the ARRB discovered that Phillips (along with James McCord) was running the CIA’s counter-intelligence programs against the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, of which Oswald was the only member in New Orleans. When one combines that with the fact that Oswald worked out of the same building that former FBI agent Guy Banister did, 544 Camp Street; and he printed that Camp Street address on more than one of his flyers, then that meeting with Phillips gets interesting.  Why would an alleged communist like Oswald be meeting with a CIA officer and working with a former FBI agent?

    The other aspect that could have been made up of new information would have been Phillips running the Cuban desk in Mexico City while Oswald was allegedly there.  Baer could have told the public:

    The man Oswald was meeting with,  David Phillips, told the HSCA that there were no tapes or pictures of Oswald in Mexico City. Yet there was such a tape that FBI agents listened to in Dallas while Oswald was under arrest for murder. Those agents told FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover that this tape was not the voice of the man in detention. We are going to explore that apparent quandary tonight.

    But, of course, Baer could not do that since he began the show by using a lot of questionable material about the Russians controlling Oswald in Mexico City, when the declassified Lopez Report strongly suggests that Oswald was impersonated in Mexico City. So the true identity of Oswald is kept under wraps, and some mythical association with Alpha 66 is now manufactured out of next to nothing.


    Coda

    More than fifty years and zero evidence after the JFK assassination, Baer is oddly not interested in or ignorant of what has been proven and debunked. He simply pushes back to square one—the lone gunman who shot a magic bullet—by concocting a light version (Castro knew it) of the oldest CIA backstop (Castro did it) through the fact-free hypothesis of Oswald linked somehow to Alpha 66 in the killing.


    Notes

    1 White House Telephone Transcripts, 23 November 1963, LBJ Library.

    2 In his remark to Attorney General Robert Kennedy about two people involved in the shooting, CIA Director John McCone wasn’t speculating. He had been briefed by Art Lundahl, head of the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC), where leading photo analyst Dino Brugioni and his team examined the Zapruder film, made still enlargements of select frames, and mounted them on briefing boards. See Dan Hardways “Thank you, Phil Shenon” (AARC, 2015).

    3 Thus, Alvarez joined the crew of dueling experts devoted to defending the WC at any cost, after the Zapruder film was available for the first time to a mass audience on March 6, 1975, thanks to HSCA consultant Robert Groden and JFK activist Dick Gregory, who brought it to Geraldo Rivera’s ABC show “Good Night America.”

    4 Baer uses his own statistics, but the most reliable study, 216 Witnesses, by Stewart Galanor, found that 52 heard a shot from Grassy Knoll, 48 from TSBD, 5 from both places and 4 elsewhere. Other 37 witnesses could not tell and 70 more were not asked.

    5 The WC acolytes always incur this failure. For instance, it’s well-known since Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgement (The Bodley Head, 1966) that WC’s firearms experts were unable to duplicate what Oswald did, but Vincent Bugliosi replied in Reclaiming History (W. W. Norton & Company, 2007) that CEs 582 to 584 “shows two hits were scored on the head” (p. 1005) – only that both were scored using iron sights instead of scope.

    6 The FBI Supplemental Report from January 13, 1964, contains Exhibits 59 and 60 showing the bullet entrance holes in the back of Kennedy’s jacket and shirt, respectively. They weren’t included in any of the 26 volumes of Commission Exhibits. The initial draft of the WC report stated:  “A bullet had entered his back at a point slightly above the shoulder to the right of the spine.” WC member Gerald Ford wanted it to read: “A bullet had entered the back of his neck slightly to the right of the spine.” After the ARRB declassification, the discrepancy emerged. Ford told reporters: “My changes were only an attempt to be more precise.” (AP, July 3, 1997).

    7 Specter neither produced it nor interviewed Admiral Burkley, who as JFK’s personal physician was the only doctor present both at the Parkland Hospital (Dallas) in the emergency room and at Bethesda Medical Center (Maryland) during the autopsy.

    8 It could be the Cadillac used by Specter instead of the presidential limousine (Lincoln Continental 1961).

    9 For these and other similar issues, see A.M. Fernandez’s “Why the Warren Commission got scared with Castro”.

    10 Joseph McBride, Into the Nightmare, Hightower Press, 2013, pp. 244 ff.

    11 James DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, Skyhorse Publishing, 2013, pp. 101 ff.

  • JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald, Part 4

    JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald, Part 4


    Part 1

    Part 2

    Part 3

    Part 5

    Part 6

    Part 7


    Written by Frank Cassano and Arnaldo Fernandez

     

    The CIA never recovered from its perfect failure at the Bay of Pigs. It generated a sort of obsession with Castro that led to an ultimate defeat in times of dirty war; but also to a carnivalesque approach to Castroist Cuba. A facet of this carnavalization became manifest in the fourth part of the series JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald. The episode is entitled “The Cuban Connection,” but illustrates how former CIA case officer Bob Baer is disconnected from historical truth.

    The Wizard of Ozzie

    Baer opened this episode with a memo from HSCA first Deputy Counsel, Robert Tanenbaum,1 about Oswald’s involvement in New Orleans with Cuban exiles—and some non-Cuban soldiers of fortune—recruited and trained by the CIA to overthrow Castro. Thusly, he is setting the stage for a hell of a sleight of hand. Former Marine “Ozzie” Oswald, re-defector from the Soviet Union and pro-Castro activist in Dallas,2 will turn into a leftist wannabe killer of Kennedy.

    It’s easy to predict that the conjuring trick will continue with Castro knowing in advance Oswald’s criminal intent, since everything going on in the anti-Castro belligerent milieu in the U.S. was reported to him by the Cuban Intelligence Service (CuIS). On the other hand, the CIA did have the luxury of missing Oswald as a security risk, since it funded the black ops against Castro, but it ran them from afar with “little oversight”. It doesn’t matter that since April 24, 1963, the vey leader of Alpha 66 in Dallas, Manuel Rodríguez Oscarberro, had been reported to the Secret Service as security risk to President Kennedy.3

    Big-budget paraphernalia—underwater sonar, a diver, metal detector for canvassing the forest—are displayed again, as if the episode were about artifacts instead of new milestones in the well-known historical trail of the CIA dirty war against Castro. However, Baer forgot to include a crap detector and claimed that nobody else had ever really looked into the connection between Oswald, the Cubans, and the CIA. It would mean that—just for instance—New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison never started an investigation in late 1966 or Harold Weisberg never wrote Oswald in New Orleans: Case for Conspiracy with the CIA (Canyon Books, 1967). But by skipping those authors, Baer does not have to bring up the names of David Ferrie, Clay Shaw and Guy Banister.

    The legerdemain with Ozzie included the Tourette’s-Syndrome-style reiteration that he shot Kennedy and he did it “with the same rifle” ordered by mail on March 12, 1963, and used to shoot at General Edwin Walker on April 10. Baer forgot what Tanenbaum stated in his ARRB Testimony (1996): “I don’t think from my experience that Lee Harvey Oswald could be convicted in any courtroom in America.” As it happened, the Warren Commission engaged in acts of evidentiary wizardry to do so:

    • The bullet recovered by the Dallas Police Department (DPD) from the Walker shooting was changed to incriminate Oswald as able “to carry out a carefully planned killing of another human being.”4 DPD officers Van Cleave and McElroy described a steel-jacketed 7.62 mm (30.06) bullet in their General Offense Report file the same day of the attack. Those fired against President Kennedy were copper-jacketed 6.5 mm bullets.
    • The $21.45 money order for the rifle mailed by Ozzie from Dallas was supposed to have arrived at Klein’s Sporting Goods in Chicago on March 13, less than 24 hours after it was sent from Dallas. It was then deposited on the same day of arrival at the First National Bank.5
    • The 36-inch, 5.5 pound Mannlicher Carcano carbine ordered by Ozzie does not match the murder weapon entered into evidence by the Dallas Police: a 40.2 inch, 7.5 pound Mannlicher Carcano short rifle.6 And there is no evidence of any weapon being picked up by Oswald at the post office in Dallas.7

    Down to Miami

    Baer evidently wants to travel instead of reading any books on the subject he is addressing in the TV series. As even beginners know, the “key to this whole operation” in New Orleans lies in the Miami CIA station (JM/WAVE). Hence Baer and his team go to South Florida. They track down former CIA contractor Marshall Golnick, who has “inside information” from a half century ago. They also do another archaeological search in Key Largo around a military facility.

    Golnick states that the Cuban exiles trained in New Orleans were dropped off by bus in Miami and received money and weapons. They were ready to stage raids into Cuba to destroy any infrastructure in sight; but this all ended with the fiasco at Bay of Pigs (thereby forgetting about Operation MONGOOSE). Golnick then reinforced the historical lie used by Baer himself to justify why Cuban exiles hated Kennedy: The latter ordered the Bay of Pigs invasion, but then withheld air support.

    The invasion was a so-called CIA covert operation that was unleashed with a Pearl-Harbor-style air bombing against three Cuban air force bases. Since these bombings were attributed to Castro’s defectors, they could not return to bomb again without destroying the plausible deniability required by the White House to prevent condemnation at the UN.8 And further, as Peter Kornbluh demonstrates in Bay of Pigs Declassified, the alleged D-Day air strikes were not part of the original plan. They were to be launched from an airstrip on the island after a beachhead was secured. The latter never happened.

    Finally, Golnick drops his own bomb about Oswald: likely aligned with the most radical fringe groups such as Alpha 66 and Omega 7. It does not matter that Alpha 66 was founded in 1962 and Omega 7 in 1974. According to the program, all these groups wanted to kill Kennedy and so did Oswald. Baer hammers the point home: “Oswald is a pronounced Marxist who praised Communist ideals.” Therefore, he and the radical Cuban exile groups worked together to achieve the common goal of killing JFK. Such a coincidence of contraries was strong enough to prevent the fierce anti-Castro Alpha 66 fighters from reacting to Oswald’s Castroist inclinations. By skipping authors like Weisberg and Garrison, Baer does not have to bring up the names of David Ferrie, Clay Shaw and Guy Banister.

    Amid the extremist Cuban exile paramilitary subculture, Oswald flaunted his Fair Play for Cuba Committee [FPCC] militancy in New Orleans from mid-June to late August 1963. But only members of the Student Revolutionary Directorate (DRE) cadre, Carlos Bringuier and two cohorts, confronted him in a minor fracas at Canal Street on August 9, when Oswald was distributing the sold-out 1961 first edition of FPCC pamphlet The Crime Against Cuba (1961).9 Which had Banister’s 544 Camp Street address stamped on it. Oswald had described the scuffle—including being arrested by the police—in a letter to the FPCC dated August 1st and postmarked August 4th. In other words, before it happened.

    The CIA in Limbo

    Although all the anti-Castro groups in New Orleans and Miami were CIA brainchildren, Baer and his partner, former police officer Adam Bercovici, do not give a damn about how the CIA wasn’t aware of an Oswald-Alpha 66 common goal. Instead, they do some brainstorming to find Oswald’s deeper motivation. And they discover it. Oswald had an “I’ll show them” mindset.

    They also discover, this time on the computer, that the man behind Alpha 66 was Maurice Bishop. But they don’t identify him as David Philips, who in 1963 was playing a CIA dual role: Chief of the Cuban Desk in Mexico City and Chief of Covert Ops against Cuba in Langley. They only resort to the well-known statement by Antonio Veciana about having seen Bishop with Oswald in Dallas in the late summer of 1963. Bercovici concludes: “There’s your co-conspirator. He had on-the-ground assistance in Dallas.”

    Back on the computer, they bump into the famous, late September Sylvia Odio incident.10 It’s prima facie evidence of Oswald being impersonated in Dallas while visiting Mexico City, or vice versa. But Baer limits his explanation as to why the FBI didn’t track the event in Dallas: “Because they missed it.” Indeed, they did. On October 9, 1963, the FBI cancelled the security flash on Oswald,11 but on October 10, 1963, Langley omitted in a cable (DIR 74673) to the FBI that “Lee Oswald” had spoken with Soviet Consul Valeriy Kostikov in Mexico City, Baer’s main character of the first episode (“The Iron Meeting”). Such a piece of intel would have been enough to restore the flash. This cable also provided a false description of a presumed American entering the Soviet Embassy and the related photo taken by a CIA site wasn’t Oswald’s. In other words, during these weeks, it was Murphy’s Law that pertained: Everything that could have gone wrong, did go wrong between Oswald, the FBI and the CIA.

    In closing the episode, Baer and Bercovici swallow whole Marina Oswald’s testimony about her husband shooting at General Walker. They search the DPD files on the case. Oswald appears to have never been brought up even as a person of interest by the police prior to the creation of the Warren Commission. But they focus in on the two cars seen leaving from the alley behind General Walker’s house, concluding Oswald had likely been driven in and out by accomplices.

    The preview of the fifth part, “Scene of the Crime,” showed a re-enactment of the shooting at Dealey Plaza. A rifle is fired from above and behind at a rubber head, which goes backwards after being shot. As in the Walker shooting, Oswald will surely have get-away accomplices.


    Notes

    1 In a fictionalized account (Corruption of Blood, Dutton, 1995) of his HSCA experience, Tanenbaum referred to a black-and-white silent 8 mm home movie showing military exercises. The viewer can see the pinpoints of fire from rifles and the shimmering gouts of muzzle blast from machine guns. Among the people in the film, Tanenbaum identified David Ferrie in a close-up; Oswald “in his ball cap and black T-shirt;” Antonio Veciana “in civvies this time, holding a .45 and smiling;” and “another guy in civilian clothes,” who Tanenbaum believes was David Atlee Phillips, alias Maurice Bishop (pages 143-46). Jim DiEugenio asked Tanenbaum: “Was it really as you described in the book, with all the people in that film? Bishop was in the film?” Tanenbaum replied: “Oh, yeah. Absolutely! They’re all in the film. They’re all there. But, the fact of the matter is the [HSCA] began to balk at a series of events” (Probe, Vol. 3, No 5, July-August 1996). In fact, the film vanished after Tanenbaum’s departure from HSCA.

    2 Shortly before Oswald moved to New Orleans, the FBI office in Dallas received info about him passing out pamphlets of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee [FPCC] on Main Street and wearing a placard around his neck reading, “Hands Off Cuba, Viva Fidel.” It occurred on April 15, 1963. SA Agent James Hosty reported it on September 10. See Warren Commission, Vol. XXVI, CE 2718.

    3 Eventually, a CuIS informant furnished the intel Rodríguez Oscarberro had told him that “if his involvement in the assassination was uncovered, he was a dead man, given that he was an Alpha 66 delegate in Dallas and knew too much.” See Escalante, Fabian: JFK: The Cuba Files, Ocean Press, 2000, 170 f.

    4 Warren Report, 406.

    5 Ibidem, 119. It implies that, in about 24 hours in 1963, the U.S. Post Service picked up the money order from a mailbox in Dallas and transported it to a post office where it was sorted and shipped out to the airport. Then it flew 700 miles to Chicago, was picked up there and driven to the main post office, where it was sorted, placed on a truck and driven to the regional post office. Here it was given to a route carrier who delivered it to Klein’s. After being sorted out again, Klein’s delivered it to the First National Bank of Chicago to be deposited in Klein’s account.

    6 Armstrong, John: Harvey and Lee, Quasar Ltd., 2003, 477.

    7 DiEugenio, James: Reclaiming Parkland, Skyhorse, 2013, 62.

    8 When Eisenhower approved the CIA policy paper A Program of Covert Action Against the Castro Regime on March 17, 1960, he made crystal clear to CIA Director Allen Dulles: “Our hand should not show in anything that is done” (Memorandum of Conference with the President, March 17, 1960. FRUS, Vol. VI, Doc. 486). Kennedy stuck to the script and ruled out an intervention of the U.S. armed forces under any condition, as he clearly stated at a press conference at the State Department on April 12, 1963 (Cf.: Johnson, Haynes: The Bay of Pigs, W. W. Norton and Co., 1964, 72).

    9 By that time, the CIA had ordered 45 copies. DiEugenio, James: Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse, 2012 158 f.

    10 In late September, Mrs. Odio was visited by two Cubans (Leopoldo and Angelo) along with an America introduced as Leon Oswald. They would be “working in the underground” and looking for her help regarding funds for the Cuban exile group JURE. The next day, Leopoldo phoned Mrs. Odio and discussed Oswald, saying he was an excellent shot and had said that President Kennedy should have been killed after Bay of Pigs. When JFK was murdered in Dallas, Mrs. Odio fainted upon hearing the news and recognizing Oswald. Her account was corroborated by her sister Annie, who had briefly seen the visitors. It reached the FBI and later the Warren Commission, but the latter ultimately dismissed it because its chronology put Oswald on his way to Mexico City on the same dates.

    11 Because of that, Hoover disciplined Lambert Anderson, Marvin Gheesling, and sixteen other agents.

  • JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald, Part 3

    JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald, Part 3


    Part 1

    Part 2

    Part 4

    Part 5

    Part 6

    Part 7


    How The History Channel is Tracking Oswald Twistedly

    Written by Frank Cassano and Arnaldo M. Fernandez

     

    The History Channel series JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald has been curtailed in the U.S. Maybe the ratings were too low, but History Canada continues airing it on Sundays at 10 p.m. (East). Maybe it had to take a break in the U.S. after two self-contradictory episodes: “The Iron Meeting” inside a bullring in Mexico City should have never happened since “The Russian Network” didn´t care about recruiting Oswald.1 The third part, “Oswald Goes Dark,” starts following in the footsteps of the CIA by trying to link the Mexican consular clerk Silvia Duran and the American visa applicant Lee Harvey Oswald outside the Cuban Consulate.2

    The Twist Party

    For this purpose, host Bob Baer recycled as “new memo”: the entirely discredited “Thomas Report”3 about Duran and Oswald at a twist party, and this was then exploited by the replacement of the Russian Network—the Cuban Intelligence Service (CuIS)—to put Oswald up to killing JFK. Using a mobile lab, Baer and his team also tracked down a witness, Francisco Guerrero Garro, who had kept his silence for more than half century, but now swears having seen Oswald and even a Cuban consul at a twist party. Oswald could have been invited by his “friend” Duran. However, a false testimony does not become a fact by repetition.

    Such a twist party4 was the ludicrous brainchild of Francisco’s aunt, the late Mexican writer Elena Garro de Paz. After having exhaustively interviewed her and her daughter twice in November 1964, the Legal Attaché (FBI) at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City put the case at rest, simply because they “failed to substantiate the allegations.”5

    CIA Station Chief Win Scott passed along the info to CIA headquarters at Langley. On the memo, Scott’s deputy Allen White wrote down: “I don’t know what FBI did in November 64, but the Garros have been talking about this for a long time and she is said to be extremely bright.” Scott dismissed White’s remark with a lapidary handwritten comment: “She is also nuts.”6

    Garro de Paz drove others nuts as well. The late Charles W. Thomas, a political officer at the U.S. Embassy, talked with her in 1965 and raised her false story with the Secretary of State William Rogers in 1969. Baer has just joined this fruity party. It includes sound effects from the Cold War: “If we can prove that the Cubans were involved, that’s an act of war against the United States.” Thusly he is definitively “scaling the walls of high camp”, like Philip Shenon with A Cruel and Shocking Act (Henry Holt and Co., 2013).7

    A Motive to Kill?

    Baer applied another nutty scheme to put Oswald up to killing Kennedy. FBI spy Jack Childs (SOLO) managed to talk with Castro and reported to his boss J. Edgar Hoover, who summed up to Warren Commission General Counsel, J. Lee Rankin, that “no further action is contemplated by this Bureau”8 about SOLO’s report. Baer attempts to twist the intel furnished by SOLO into smoking gun evidence of Oswald’s criminal intent.

    On May 20, 1964, Jack Childs flew from Moscow to “THE BEACH” [Cuba] in the SOLO Mission 15. He spent ten days there. The gist of his report reads thus:

    “Castro said ‘I was told this by my people in the Embassy exactly how he (Oswald) stalked in and walked in and ran out. That in itself was a suspicious movement, because nobody comes to an Embassy for a visa (they go to a Consulate). [Castro] stated that when Oswald was refused his visa at the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City, he acted like a madman and started yelling and shouting on his way out, ‘I’m going to kill this bastard. I’m going to kill Kennedy’”9

    The HSCA nipped the problem in the bud: “Nothing in the evidence indicated that the threat should have been taken seriously, if it had occurred, since Oswald had behaved in an argumentative and obnoxious fashion.”10 By insisting in muddying the waters, Baer misses a proper research problem that John Newman has formulated as a mystery.11

    Both Duran and the incoming (Alfredo Mirabal) and outcoming (Eusebio Azcue) Cuban consuls were adamant before HSCA that Oswald didn’t vow such a threat at the Cuban Consulate.12 Two Cuban officials—Guillermo Ruiz and Antonio García—from the Commercial Office, located upstairs, were also eyewitnesses of Oswald’s making a scene at the Consulate and claimed they didn’t hear a threat against Kennedy.

    The Lopez Report deciphered the apparent mystery. The Consulate “was in a separate building from the Embassy.”13 In 1963, the Cuban diplomatic compound in Mexico City was at Francisco Marquez Street (Colonia Condesa) with two main entrances: One to the Embassy, on the corner of Tacubaya Alley, and the other to the Consulate, on the corner of Zamora Street. No wonder the CIA surveillance post (LIONION) in a third-floor apartment across Francisco Marquez Street employed an agent—Cesar Rodriguez Gallegos—at one window for photographing the Embassy, while a pulse camera covered the Consulate from another window.

    SOLO himself reasonably commented to Hoover that “the Cuban Embassy people must have told Oswald something to the effect that they were sorry that they did not let Americans into Cuba because the U.S. government stopped Cubans from letting them in, and that is when Oswald shouted out the statement about killing President Kennedy.” It goes without saying that Oswald was told to apply anyway for a visa at the Consulate.

    Oswald must have entered the Cuban diplomatic compound at the corner of Tacubaya Alley shortly after arriving in Mexico City on September 27, 1963. In fact, there is a clue about it besides Castro’s statement. On January 1964, FBI Special Agent Nathan L. Ferris was advised by Mexican informants that Elizabeth Mora [American-born Mexican artist Elizabeth Catlett-Mora] had spilled the beans about a conversation with Cuban Cultural Attaché Teresa Proenza. The latter confided to Mora “that Oswald walked in ‘cold’ to the Cuban Embassy. [She] was the first person he talked to [and] turned him over to the nearest person higher in rank and who spoke English.” Proenza added that Oswald had come to the Embassy for “a visa to go to Russia.”14

    Newman told Jim DiEugenio that the threat “is almost surely a forgery.” The Childs report to Hoover is part of a letter to Gus Hall, leader of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), and “this kind of information would not be part of that letter [since] SOLO was too experienced to do that.” Notwithstanding, SOLO also reported “that he later discussed CASTRO’s statements with BEATRICE JOHNSON, the CPUSA representative in Cuba.” A forged report wouldn’t ever include a third party for running the risk of denial.

    Rocking the Refugee Boat

    From Mexico City, Baer and his well-equipped team switched their focus to Louisiana, where they pretended having uncovered certain gaps in Oswald’s timeline between August and October 1963. During his period, specifically from late August to early September, two key incidents occurred and were finally reported to HSCA.

    • Antonio Veciana met David Philips in downtown Dallas earlier than originally planned and Antonio had a brief sighting of a young man who said nothing and left. He turned out to be Oswald.15
    • Oswald was spotted in Clinton16, about 130 miles from New Orleans, during a CORE voter registration drive. He was accompanied by the rabidly anti-Communist and partner of hard line anti-Castro exile Sergio Arcacha Smith, David Ferrie, and the New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw, a part-time contract agent of the CIA with a security clearance since 1949.

    With regard to HSCA, Baer limited himself to telling his partner, former police detective Adam Bercovici, it was “the follow-up investigation to the Warren Commission.” He did not refer to Ferrie or Shaw, much less to Oswald´s close contact with Guy Bannister, head of the Anti-Communist League of the Caribbean. He was just content to assert that Oswald went off the grid so that it became easier for Baer to detonate an explosive device: The Cuban radical exiles were Oswald´s “accomplices.”

    The team drove out of New Orleans to the nearby town of Belle Chasse and reached a remote area, surrounded by swamps and thick vegetation, with some decrepit buildings still standing. They found evidence of it being a training facility and weapon arsenal. A “military-grade operation,” surmised Baer, as if nobody knew the Bay-of-Pigs-related CIA operation JM/MOVE was headquartered there in 196117, while Oswald was working at a factory in Minsk (Belarus).

    But let’s give the duo some credit. They raised the issue that Oswald was working with intelligence agencies in a secret government operation and left us with one final, juicy morsel. According to Baer, “the more we get into this the more it appears this guy was not a lone wolf. There’s overwhelming evidence to assume he had accomplices.”

    No doubt the fourth part, “The Cuban Connection”, will be breathtaking. Baer surely will twist the facts again. Oswald will appear linked to a belligerent anti-Castro group, organized and backed by the CIA, but Baer will try to perform the analytical piroutte that Castro, not the CIA, learned about Oswald’s intention to kill Kennedy, since the anti-Castro group had been infiltrated by CuIS agents who were reporting everything back to Castro.


    Notes

    1 See the previous reviews “How The History Channel is Tracking Oswald Non-Historically” and “How The History Channel is Tracking Oswald Pathetically”.

    2 At the request of the CIA Station Chief, Duran was arrested by the Mexican Federal Security Directorate (FDS) the day after the assassination. The line of questioning sought her confession of having entrapped and lured Oswald with sexual favors into a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. See McKnight, Gerald: Breach of Trust, University Press of Kansas, 2005, 78.

    3 NARA Record Number: 104-10404-10325

    4 In 1963, the twist dance craze was sweeping Mexico thanks to Bill Haley and His Comets with Twist Español, Florida Twist and other hits under the record label Orfeon. As cousin of Silvia Duran’s husband, Elena Garro de Paz would have attended such parties within the family circle. She claimed having seen Oswald at the home of her cousin Ruben Duran. Silvia never denied the possibility of being at a twist party in the house of her brother-in-law with Elena present, but always denied having met Oswald after September 27, 1963, much less outside the Cuban Consulate. Silvia agreed to be interviewed by HSCA, while Elena refused.

    5 Memo of 27 December 1965 from LEGAT (Nathan Ferris) to the Ambassador (NARA Record Number: 104-10007-10043).

    6 NARA Record Number: 104-10404-10320

    7 See the review by James DiEugenio.

    8 Warren Commission Document 1359.

    9  FBI Records: The Vault – SOLO (http://vault.fbi.gov/solo), Part 63, pp. 58-59).

    10 The Final Report of HSCA, Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1979, 122.

    11 Oswald and the CIA, Skyhorse Publishing, 2008, p. 428.

    12 See JFK Exhibit F-440 A (Duran) and HSCA Report, Vol. III, pp. 173-78 (Mirabal) and 127-58 (Azcue).

    13 Lopez Report, pp. 26 f. [http://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/hsca/lopezrpt_2003/html/LopezRpt_0025a.htm]

    14 NARA Record Number: 124-10003-10386 [http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=61273]

    15 Veciana, Antonio and Carlos Harrison: Trained to Kill, Skyhorse Publishing, 2017, 122.

    16 Fonzi, Gaeton: The Last Investigation, Skyhorse Publishing, 2013, 140.

    17 A diversionary force commanded by Nino Díaz (AMNORM-1) was organized, equipped and trained in great haste at Belle Chasse. After all, the mother ship couldn’t reach the intended beach 30 miles east of Guantanamo (Eastern Cuba). Cf. CIA Clandestine Service Historical Paper No. 105 (1961), 22 f.

  • JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald, Part 2

    JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald, Part 2


    How The History Channel is Tracking Oswald Pathetically

    The second part—“The Russian Network”—of the History Channel series “JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald” brought with it a bunch of malarkey, as anticipated in the previous review. Moreover, this airing has left Bob Baer at an unavoidable crossroads in terms of his motivation: either he is deliberately trying to “De-Face-the-Nation” with fake news about a historical tragedy, or he is unable to deal with the body of evidence about the JFK assassination.

    While advertising ad nauseam that his “new investigation” uncovers “new evidence”, Baer remains tethered to a pair of fallen trees: The Warren Commission Report and the Red conspiracy theory masterminded by the CIA. Both have long been knocked down by successive findings in a line of research that extends from Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment (1966) to Jeff Morley’s The Ghost (2017).

    All Quiet on the Eastern Front

    Baer flew to Moscow to find out whether “Oswald was working with the KGB.” That’s a fictitious research problem, since the solution is known beforehand and has conclusively emerged from multiple sources.1 Another goal was to establish a “chronology of Oswald’s movements” there, as if neither the comprehensive Mary Ferrell Chronologies nor Peter Vronky’s specific timeline of Oswald in Russia were available on line.

    Baer set out to shock again with a high-tech device designed to find anomalies in walls. He did find some in Oswald’s room at Hotel Metropole and inferred they dated from more than half century ago, just to prove an axiom: Oswald’s room was wired. Journalist Priscilla Johnson was pretty aware of that without using any detector when she interviewed Oswald right there on November 12 or 13, 1959.

    So as to open another window on Moscow, Baer draws upon Oswald’s diary and deems it as “never released,” despite its inclusion in “The Defector Study” published by the HSCA on March 1979 (Vol. XII, pp. 435-73). Furthermore, Baer boasts about his “unprecedented access” to retired KGB Colonel Oleg Nechiporenko, but at the outset makes a surprising statement: “I have no idea what this guy knows.” So, Baer has not had time to read Nechiporenko’s Passport to Assassination (Birch Lane, 1993), even though he advertises himself as a researcher with “over a decade” of experience on Oswald.

    In front of the cameras, Nechiporenko told the same old story from his book. He, Pavel Yatskov, and Valeriy Kostikov did meet Oswald in Mexico City, but the KGB had no intention of recruiting him. Baer simply agreed with his “credible source.” Except that this seems to contradict the first part of the series, which says that Oswald had picked up something on a visit to the Russian Embassy from an alleged encounter with Valeriy Kostikov at the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. This led to an urgent talk—iron meeting—about political assassination in a bullring.

    Notwithstanding, Baer uses the scene at the Soviet Consulate described by Nechiporenko—Oswald pulling a loaded pistol and weeping tears of “I can’t stand it anymore” due to FBI harassment—as a quantum of proof about Oswald’s proclivity “to political violence.” Most people who have studied Oswald look at this whole episode from the book with a jaundiced eye. First, because the whole scene does not at all resemble Oswald. For instance, in his violent encounter with Cuban exiles in New Orleans, Oswald remained cool throughout. While being paraded through the corridors of the Dallas Police Department, again, Oswald seemed calm and collected, even though he was being accused of a double homicide. And second, why would Oswald think he would have to shoot it out with the FBI in Mexico City? All he was doing was applying for an in-transit visa, through Cuba to Russia. What was criminal about this act?

    Marching West

    Since Baer must muddle through his Red conspiracy theory without any shred of evidence, now comes the turn of the Cuban Intelligence Service (CuIS). Baer paves the way for an easy-to-predict gambit—“Castro sorta done it”—by shifting the focus from Kostikov the Terrible2 to Silvia Duran, a Mexican clerk at the Cuban Consulate in Mexico City. To that effect, Baer spins a yarn: This “mysterious woman [was] more than a clerk, [actually] a possible [Oswald] accomplice, [since] the U.S. asked for her arrest [the day after the assassination], the CIA Director John McCone ordered her not to answer any questions [about herself] and the Warren Commission completely ignored her.”

    • Silvia Duran is a “mysterious woman” for Baer, but she was well-known to the CIA Station in Mexico City. Its photo logs from October-November 1962 referred to her “leaving” the Cuban Embassy.3 On January 9, 1963, a memo to Langley reported she had been convinced by Cuban diplomat Teresa Proenza “to resign her position as Director” of the Mexican-Cuban Institute for Cultural Relations.“4
    • For the CIA, she was really “more than a clerk,” but not in the sense suggested by Baer. A memo dated on November 25, 1963, by Legat (FBI) in Mexico City reported to J. Edgar Hoover: “According to CIA, Silvia Duran is a communist and during time Carlos Lechuga (…) served here as Cuban Ambassador, Duran was not only his secretary, but also his mistress.”5
    • For being a “possible accomplice” of Oswald, the CIA must have hard evidence, but its own wiretap transcripts6 prove that both Oswald and Duran were impersonated on Saturday, September 28, 1963. Around noon, the Soviet Consulate received a call from a woman who identified herself as Silvia Duran, at the Cuban Consulate, along with an American who said:

    AMERICAN: I was just now at your Embassy and they took my address.

    SOVIET: I know that.

    AMERICAN: [Translator comment: speaks terrible, hardly recognizable Russian] I did not know it then. I went to the Cuban Embassy to ask them for my address, because they have it.

    SOVIET: Why don’t you come again and leave your address with us. It is not far from the Cuban Embassy.

    AMERICAN: Well, I’ll be there right away

    Surprisingly, the American didn´t show up at the Russian Embassy. And before the HSCA panel that interviewed her on June 6, 1978,7 Duran was adamant that she did not make such a call nor did Oswald visit the Cuban Consulate again after being attended to three times on September 27.

    On Tuesday, October 1, two phone calls were placed to the Soviet consulate by a man trying to follow up on his call from September 28. In the second call, the man specifically identified himself as Lee Oswald. He asked about his visa request, even though the Soviets had given him a loud and clear message about waiting several months. The caller coaxed his conversation partner into providing Kostikov’s name by claiming a previous encounter with that consul. The CIA transcriber Boris Tarasoff remarked that Lee Oswald was “the same person who had called a day or so ago and spoken in broken Russian.” After giving a hint about a CuIS safe house on Saturday, on Monday Lee Oswald ended up giving his name and establishing a link to Kostikov.

    • “U.S. asked for her arrest,” because the Chief of Station (COS) in Mexico City had to ensure that Duran—linked to Oswald in three tapped phone calls—would “be arrested immediately and held incommunicado”8 until she provided everything she knew about Oswald. After Chief of Station Win Scott saw Oswald’s photos on TV the night of the assassination, he informed Langley about his suggestion to Gustavo Ortiz (LITEMPO-2) that Duran must be arrested and grilled by the Mexican Federal Security Directorate (Spanish acronym FDS).9
    • “McCone ordered her not to answer” any question about herself since the CIA did not want it to get out that she never met with Oswald on September 28. McCone did not want “any American to confront Silvia Duran or be in contact with her”10. He succeeded. A key witness about Oswald in Mexico City was never questioned by any American until Ron Kessler interviewed Silvia Duran thirteen years after the JFK assassination.11
    • “The Warren Commission completely ignored her,” although the CIA Station in Mexico City informed Langley “she was perfectly willing to travel to U.S. to confront Oswald if necessary.”12 A comment on the same memo explains why: “Present plan in passing info to Warren Commission is to eliminate mention of telephone taps, in order to protect continuing ops.” Former CIA agent Bob Baer didn’t get what CIA Counterintelligence Chief Jim Angleton meant when he said the point was “to wait out the Commission.”13

    After being interviewed by Kessler in 1976 and giving her testimony before a HSCA panel in 1978, the only secret relevant to Silvia Duran has already been revealed: after the assassination, it became clear that CIA officers knew Oswald had been impersonated in Mexico City during his visit. Thus, he had been set up for the assassination and the CIA didn’t prevent the killing.

    The Upcoming Twist

    Baer sticks to the pattern of the Red conspiracy theories by blurring the facts. He misrepresents a call made by Silvia Duran from the Cuban Consulate on September 27 as if it were the fake call attributed to her on September 28. He also places the dramatic scene by Oswald in his third visit to the Cuban Consulate—after Consul Eusebio Azcue made crystal clear no in-transit visa to Cuba would be given to him soon—as if it occurred during his first visit, when Duran asked him to get the mandatory photos for the visa application. However, these are just peanuts compared with the pathetic Shenonist move Baer has planned for the third part of the series: having Duran as a Cuban intel agent who invited Oswald to a twist party.


    Part 1

    Part 3

    Part 4

    Part 5

    Part 6

    Part 7


    Notes

    1 On January 5, 1977, the KGB Chief of Station in Havana, Major General Piotr Voronin, furnished intel on Oswald at the request of the Cuban State Security Department (DSE). He stated the KGB “had no operative interest in Oswald and his wife”. In May 1989, DSE’s former head and current historian, Major General Fabian Escalante, met in Moscow with a KGB Colonel (retired) from the First Directorate [Foreign Intelligence], Pavel Yatskov. He told Escalante having fortuitously met Oswald in Mexico City. A consulate guard notified that an American was insisting on seeing a Soviet official, although it was Saturday and the consulate was closed. Yatskov assisted Oswald, who narrated “a strange story [about being] a member of the CPUSA and a Cuba support committee [Fair Play for Cuba Committee].” Oswald wanted to visit Havana and asked for a Soviet visa because the USSR would be his final destination. He was told to make an application and to wait 4-6 months, since any Soviet visa to U.S. citizens must be granted by Moscow. He reacted by leaving without even filling in the official form.

    After the assassination, Yatskov discussed the Oswald case with KGB officers of the Second Directorate [Counterintelligence]. They confirmed having nothing to do with him. As the Church Committee brought the case into the spotlight, it was discussed again at the KGB First Directorate. It was said that “Oswald had been a U.S. intelligence agent.” Yatskov added that when Oswald revealed his intention to return to the U.S., the GRU [Military Intelligence] “was in charge of the matter. It was a GRU First Directorate practice to at least attempt an initial working agreement in all cases of citizens wishing to return to their countries of origin, and Oswald would not have been any exception.”

    2 Nechiporenko nodded when Baer asked about Kostikov as head in North America of the 13th Department, devoted to wet affairs (Mokriye Dela in KGB jargon) meaning ops that involve bloodshed.

    3 NARA Record Number: 104-10189-10453

    4 NARA Record Number: 104-10073-10391

    5 NARA Record Number: 104-10428-10082.

    6 NARA Record Number: 104-10413-10074.

    7 JFK Exhibit F-440 A.

    8 NARA Record Number: 104-10102-10145.

    9 NARA Record Number: 104-10422-10090.

    10 DIR 85318, 11-27-63, in [Duran’s] Information – NARA Record Number: 104-10102-10145, p. 14.

    11 Washington Post, November 26, 1976, A7.

    12 NARA Record Number: 104-10020-10018.

    13 NARA Record Number: 1993.06.24.14:59:13:840170.

  • JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald

    JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald


    How The History Channel is Tracking Oswald Non-Historically

    The six-part series “JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald” (History Channel, Tuesdays, 10 PM EDT) went on the air this week. To give weight to the presentations, the host is a former CIA agent, Bob Baer. Baer boasts that no one else, except him, has analyzed the more than two million pages of declassified documents about the JFK assassination which the Assassination Records Review Board has released.

    Not everyone who reaches back into history can survive intact. Baer doesn’t make it because of Shenonism.1 At the very beginning of the series he more or less announces this by presenting long-known facts as somehow exciting new findings. He then conveys them to the viewer as a big deal, because the Warren Commission couldn’t grasp them. Baer simply overlooked or—even worse—swept under the carpet all the sound research performed after the JFK Records Act (1992).

    The first part of the series—“The Iron Meeting” (zheleznaya yavka in Russian, designating a standard KGB procedure for an urgent talk)—proves to be more than enough to realize that Baer dives into subjunctive history; namely the history imagined in the mood used when something may or may not have happened. He circumvents all the quanta of proof that do not fit his biased view of Oswald as the lone gunman shooting a magic bullet, and with the Soviets and the Cubans behind him.

    Baer starts by arrogating to himself the discovery of a CIA document, dated the day after the assassination, about a J. Edgar Hoover/Lyndon B. Johnson phone conversation revealing that Oswald met with Soviet officials in Mexico City. Except that the CIA station learned about such a meeting well before the assassination. According to their records, they taped an October 1, 1963 call through their Mexico City based listening post codenamed LIENVOY. According to these records, a call to the taped phone 15-60-55 at the Soviet Embassy contained this passage:

    —Hello, this is LEE OSWALD speaking. I was at your place last Saturday and spoke to a Consul, and they say that they’d send a telegram to Washington, so I wanted to find out if you have anything new? But I don’t remember the name of that Consul.

    —KOSTIKOV. He is dark?

    —Yes. My name is OSWALD.

    Trying to make an impression, Baer resorts to an analogy between ISIS and the Soviet Union—as the main U.S. enemy at different times—for asking rhetorically what we should believe if an American citizen met with ISIS officials abroad, came back and killed the sitting U.S. President. Baer refuses to take on the more obvious question. Which is this: if the CIA knew that an American citizen met with Soviet officials in Mexico City, why was he allowed to return to the U.S. without being subsequently handled as a security risk? Even though the CIA had immediately learned2 about his visit not only to the Soviet Embassy, but also to the Cuban diplomatic compound on September 27, 1963.


    The CIA and Oswald in Mexico City

    The Lopez Report (1978) seems to remain outside the scope of Baer´s self-proclaimed pioneering analysis. Which is a little amazing since he has already announced that he read the 2 million pages of declassified documents of the ARRB, and that board was established as a result of the JFK Act. One of the Board’s early targets was the Lopez Report, concerning the subject of Oswald in Mexico City. Instead, Baer devotes himself to the “working theory” about Oswald receiving a walk-in package from the KGB as soon as he visited the Soviet Embassy. Baer does not deal with the fact that the CIA has never produced a recording of Oswald’s actual voice or a photo of Oswald at either embassy, despite having both the Soviet and Cuban embassies under bugging and photo surveillance3. This lack, especially of evidence from phone taps, would have an impact on the validity of the conversation he quotes. Further, the Lopez Report does not refer to Oswald picking up any package at the Soviet Embassy. And that report is, far and away, the most voluminous and thorough investigation ever done about Oswald’s alleged activities in Mexico City.

    The viewers are left in the dark about how John Newman has convincingly demonstrated in Oswald and the CIA (1995) that the Agency was closely and constantly tracking Oswald from 1959 to 1963. Baer also abstained from warning the viewers about Oswald being impersonated by phone in Mexico City, as Bill Simpich has proven beyond any reasonable doubt in State Secret (2013).

    But first and foremost, Baer dodged the oh-so-intriguing fact that the CIA concealed or misrepresented key data on Oswald before the assassination. The LIENVOY report for September 19634 referred only to “two leads of operational interest:” a female professor from New Orleans calling the Soviet Embassy, and a Czech woman calling the Czech embassy. The so-called October cables between the CIA Station there (MEXI) and CIA HQ at Langley (DIR-HDQS) provide additional evidence about a conspiracy of silence at a time when no one could know, except if there were plotters, what was coming.

    • October 8. MEXI 6453 reported to Langley that “an American male who spoke broken Russian” had said his name was “Lee Oswald.” He was at the Soviet Embassy on September 28 and spoke with Consul Vareliy Kostikov. This cable described a presumed American male who had entered the Soviet Embassy at 12:16 hours on October 1, but it wasn´t Oswald.
    • October 10. DIR 74830 replied that Lee Oswald “probably” was “Lee Henry Oswald.” This cable specified: “Latest HDQS info was ODACID [State Department] report dated May 1962” on Oswald as “still US citizen [returning] with his Soviet wife [and] their infant child to USA.” Langley omitted two 1963 FBI reports from Dallas (September 24) and New Orleans (October 4) on Oswald’s leftist activism, including his militancy in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) and his scuffle with Cuban exiles in New Orleans on August 9, 1963. Instead, the cable quoted a 1962 report by the U.S. Embassy in Moscow: “Twenty months of realities of life in Soviet Union had clearly had maturing effect on Oswald.”
    • October 10. DIR 74673 disseminated to ODACID, ODENVY (FBI), and ODOATH (Navy) the description provided in MEXI 6453 for the presumed American male, but omitted the crucial hint that Oswald had spoken with Soviet Consul Vareliy Kostikov.

    Why did MEXI 6453 hide all information from Langley about Oswald visiting the Cuban diplomatic compound? Why did DIR 74830 hide from MEXI all information about Oswald’s pro-Castro activism in Dallas and New Orleans? Why did Langley lower Oswald’s security profile by quoting—as latest info available—a May 1962 memo from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow? Why did Langley go further by excluding Department of State, FBI and Navy from the information furnished by MEXI about an eventual contact between Oswald and KGB officer Kostikov? Instead of dealing with these relevant whys, Baer invites the History Channel viewers to a bullring in Mexico City.


    KGB Tradecraft

    Diving into the subjunctive history, Baer imagines that Oswald entered the Soviet Embassy and received a KGB walk-in package with four postcards of landmarks in Mexico City. One of them, a bullring, was the perfect location for a covert meeting, since the CIA bugging at the Soviet Embassy prevents KGB officers from talking freely about political murder. Thus, we have a rezidentura very concerned about bugging, but so unconcerned about photo surveillance that its officers will follow up a case knowing that the person of interest had not been photographed by the CIA either entering or exiting the embassy.

    Thereupon Baer and two fellow travelers engage in a sort of children’s game aimed to prove that finding Oswald after entering a bullring and taking his seat for a covert meeting would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. The outcome is obvious, but the attentive observer wonders why the CIA Station in Mexico City wasn’t shadowing Oswald after having listened to a call—on September 27 at 4:00 p.m.—from the Cuban to the Soviet Consulate5 regarding “a U.S. citizen who had requested a transit visa to Cuba because he is going to URSS.”

    Having proven that an iron meeting may have taken place at a bullring in Mexico City on Sunday, September 29, 1963, Baer attempted again to amaze the viewers with a discovery. Apparently unaware of the CIA transcript from the October 1, 1963 tapped phone call, Baer ran a high-tech device designed to find “hidden links” among many documents. It matched a “Comrade KOSTIN”—mentioned in a typed letter (Commission Exhibit 15) to the Soviet Embassy in Washington, dated on November 8 or 9, 1963, and signed by Lee H. Oswald—with the surname Kostikov listed in the staff of the Soviet Embassy in 1963.

    Baer asserted “it´s not a coincidence” having both Oswald and Kostikov in Mexico City at the same time. He´s right. It wouldn’t have been a coincidence that Oswald met Kostikov. The latter was a consul assigned to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City since September 19, 1961, and the former was trying to get a Soviet visa. It´s not a coincidence either that Bear takes for granted what CIA Deputy Director of Plans Richard Helms told the Warren Commission (Commission Document 347) about Kostikov: “[He] is believed to work for Department Thirteen of the First Chief Directorate of the KGB. It is the Department responsible for executive action.” Ignoring that the Kostikov-Oswald connection was debunked long ago by, among others, Peter Scott in his essay on “CIA files and the pre-assassination framing of Lee Harvey Oswald” (March 1994), Baer simply confirms his shift in focus from history to story. And on top of an unsubstantiated exchange of postcards, Baer leaves out another key point, this time about Oswald and the bullring. On page 735, the Warren Report attributes the information about Oswald being at a bullfight to Marina Oswald. What the Commission left out was this integral fact: at her first Secret Service interview, in the days immediately after the assassination, Marina repeatedly and forcefully denied that Oswald had ever been to Mexico! (James DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 280)


    Expect More Malarkey

    Baer doesn’t seem to care whether what he says is true or false, or if some of the things he says are directly opposed by other, earlier evidence. Rather, he only seems to care whether or not his viewers can be persuaded. Thus, the second part, and the rest of the series, is pretty predictable. Baer will follow in the footsteps of Dr. Brian Latell, showing that Castro knew about it. Without any shred of evidence about Soviet or Cuban agents training Oswald or providing him with guns or money, Baer will move the burden of dealing with Oswald from the KGB to the Cuban Intelligence Services (CuIS). He will also transfigure Oswald into a Castroite true-believer.


    Part 2

    Part 3

    Part 4

    Part 5

    Part 6

    Part 7


    Notes

    1 The term was coined by Jim DiEugenio in his review of Philip Shenon’s book A Cruel and Shocking Act (2013).

    2 See the CIA transcripts of five taped calls linked to Oswald from September 27 to October 1, 1963 (NARA Record Number 104-10413-1007).

    3 By 1963, the CIA Station was running two phone tap operations in Mexico City: LIENVOY, focused on the embassies, and LIFEAT, aimed rather at homes. Under the program LIEMPTY, three photo bases were operating around the Soviet Embassy: LIMITED, LILYRIC, and LICALLA. Another (LIONION) was set in front of the Cuban diplomatic compound.

    4 NARA Record Number: 104-10052-10083

    5 The Lopez Report (1978) gently deemed as not “accurate” the blatant lie given by the CIA Inspector General in 1977 to HSCA: “It was not until 22 November 1963 [that the] Station learned (…) Oswald had also visited the Cuban Embassy.” (p. 123)

  • Mexico City, Part 4 – Leaving Mexico, Part 1

    Mexico City, Part 4 – Leaving Mexico, Part 1


    Mystery Man with Oct 4 1964 notation – see p5

    INTRO

    In virtually every research piece related to Mexico City from Sept 25 – Oct 4, 1963 there exists an acceptance that the Oswald killed by Jack Ruby actually took the trip, while the calls from the Cuban Embassy themselves, especially Saturday the 28th’s activity, are understood as neither Oswald or Silvia Duran.

    One must accept that the famous and published “Mystery Man” photo in question was taken on October 4th. The FBI claims the reason for its existence was related to Ruby, and proving Marguerite Oswald was not shown a photo of Ruby in Mexico. If Oswald’s movements were actually closely watched as Win Scott claims; no one in their right mind associates our Oswald with the man in the photo. This only comes from the self-incriminating “This is LEE OSWALD” phone statement and the translator’s claim the voices are the same as the “others” from previous calls, on which the caller did not state his name.

    If the desire of a PLAN was to leave evidence of this trip to implicate Oswald at some later date, the job was poorly done; as there does not appear to be any significant evidence to corroborate the stamped dates on the famous tourist visa; the FM-8, with any travel evidence along the way. In fact, the evidence, as I will show, makes it appear that either a tourist visa was created after the fact, or the means of travel had nothing to do with buses. If an Oswald crossed into and out of Mexico on the dates reflected on that stamped visa, it was not a result of the bus trips offered, or the witnesses who place him on these buses. In fact, the original information on these dates of travel come from a completely different source.

    If Lee or some other impersonator was to establish that Oswald traveled from New Orleans to Mexico City, a 4-part bus ticket for the full round trip would fit the bill. What we find instead are elements of the CIA, FBI and DFS working together to piece together the elements of the trip based on the TIMINGS of the transportation and the events attributed to this Oswald rather than the physical evidence.

    The concerns over this Mexico Trip immortalized in the October CIA cables were front and center in the minds of many on the evening of Nov 22. That the name “OSWALD” was transcribed in a CIA/DFS operation of extreme sensitivity, and connected with information on one Lee HENRY Oswald by CIA HQ , one who had little if anything to do with the photos which would ultimately be associated with the name. Some claim this was part of a mole hunt on the part of the CI-SIG section of Angleton’s CIA.

    What is ultimately the purpose of the calls and the evidence related to them may never been known.

    One certainty remains though; Ms. Sylvia ODIO and her sister were truthful about our Oswald at their home on Sept 27th when the EVIDENCE tries to suggest he is in transit to Mexico in the days immediately after Ruth Paine takes his family away. In this truth we find once again that the FBI is more than willing to create evidence of their own as well as believe the evidence the CIA created to fit the desired conclusion. Surely a CI/SIG mole hunt at the Mexican CIA station would have little if anything to do with the lack of evidence related to the trip itself. With relative ease the authorities found the records of anyone and everyone who may have traveled WITH this Oswald; just not the evidence for his travel.

    If an innocent loner was traveling to Mexico innocuously to get he and his wife back to the USSR, to Odessa for the birth of their 2nd child in mid-Oct; there would be little if anything to hide in the way of travel arrangements. The record shows the numerous attempts Marina and Harvey took to secure a Russian visa thru normal channels. Instead we find that CIA assets inside and outside the Mexican government conspired to create a story of travel which fits the need yet could not overcome the lack of its reality.

    In our final article we will show who these assets are, what they were doing in these early hours and days after 11/22 and how the most contradictory of evidence can be accepted without a question in the face of what our non-Oswald entity is doing in Mexico City.

    CE3097: Vaccination card supposedly found at Beckley

    Oswald’s stamp kit practice pad shows the signs of what would appear on the FPCC handbills and the date June 8, 1963 which I could never understand until the Mexico connection to the requirement that those returning to the US must either get vaccinated or show a valid certificate of vaccination was found. It is quite obvious that the stamped letters on these forms match the stamp kit. Problem being this kit was never found or listed on the DPD inventories prior to Nov 26th nor do we see the DPD initials on either side of this card which ALL items sent to DC had; not all of them had these initials when the evidence was returned. This kit only comes into existence when all the items are returned to Dallas by the FBI on Nov 26th; in other words, it was never found in Oswald’s possessions, it was added to his inventory after the fact.

    To Recap Part 2b:

    – The TRAVEL portion of the Mexico Trip was “correctly established by the WC” so much so that the HSCA (or any other subsequent investigation) did not bother to even attempt to analyze this information and accepted it at face value (in fact few if any researchers have deeply analyzed this travel which the WCR claims put Oswald at the Cuban Embassy making calls starting Sept 27th at 10:37am… his bus supposedly arrived at 10am)

    – The photos of the “Mystery Man” were all taken AFTER the evidence establishes this man left Mexico City – before 8am Oct 2nd and that a call to the Embassy attributed to Oswald was made on Oct 3rd when Oswald was in Dallas at a Texas Employment Commission meeting.

    – The document which informs us that the only NEW ORLEANS to Houston bus Oswald could have been on to corroborate the McFarlands’ statement about his being on the Houston to Laredo bus was backdated from September 21, 1964 to December 10, 1963.

    – The statement of the McFarlands is the ONLY evidence which specifically places Oswald on the bus from Houston to Laredo. The McFarlands were not called to testify.

    – The passport with all the Russian stamps as mentioned by an Australian woman, Ms. Mumford, either had to be the 1959 passport, not the newest passport from June 1963 which had no stamps at all CE 1969; a completely different passport entirely; or the information was provided her about the passport which places Oswald in Russia. The normally tight-lipped Oswald behaved as contrary to his persona as possible as told by the McFarlands and Ms. Mumford.

    – David Atlee Phillips arrives in Mexico as Chief of CUBAN OPERATIONS on October 7th According to Tad Szulc, his biographer, E. Howard Hunt was Temporary Chief of the Mexico Station during the summer of 1963.

    – Many, many more Mexican INS inspectors were working at Nuevo Laredo on Sept 26th than are acknowledged by the FBI evidence while the McFarlands are checked into Mexico by neither Maydon nor Ramos while supposedly being on the same bus as Oswald. The mode of transportation for BOWEN and OSWALD was not stated in the FM-11.

    – Bowen/Osborne does not corroborate the evidence by stating that is was not OSWALD sitting next to him on the bus from Nuevo Laredo to Mexico City. (Note: we will find the same thing occurring on the Mexico City to Laredo trip; those on the acceptable bus who were asked did not recall anyone matching Oswald’s description)

    – While the pre-assassination evidence shows the person traveling was known as H.O. LEE, the post-assassination evidence shows that the name was treated as if it was L.H. OSWALD for alphabetization and investigative purposes.

    – ARTURO BOSCH changed the Transporte Frontera passenger manifest from a 1pm NOVEMBER 1 departure to a 2pm OCTOBER 2 departure and added the name “OSWLD” and “Laredo” to the manifest (among other things). We come to learn that Mexican Presidential Officials were at the Frontera bus line office (Mexico City to Nuevo Laredo) before they came to the Flecha Rojas offices (Nuevo Laredo to Mexico City) to take that evidence “soon after the assassination.”

    – A conflict exists between the bus schedule times of the Flecha Rojas bus which states it leaves Monterrey at 3:30pm and the Continental bus schedule which shows its sister bus leaves Monterrey at 7:30. Mumford claims to have taken the 7:30 “Del Norte” bus (corroborated by McFarland’s statement about them getting on the bus in the evening of Sept 26th) which arrived in Mexico at 10am Sept 27th. Anyone traveling on the 3:30pm bus would have arrived at 6am in Mexico City.

    – There is no evidence offered about a 7:30 Del Norte bus from Monterrey to Mexico City other than as a result of an inquiry by SS Inspector Kelly asking SAIC Sorrels about travel from Dallas or Houston to Laredo. The bus schedule shows a bus leaving Monterrey at 7:30pm and arriving in Mexico at 9:45am Sept 27th. Sadly, the only piece of evidence for this portion of the trip is one of the documents taken “soon after the assassination” – the baggage manifest listing Lee H Oswal(j/t) leaving Nuevo Laredo at 2pm Sept 26th with one piece of checked luggage.

    OPENING EYES: THE EVIDENCE IS THE CONSPIRACY

    In virtually the same manner as the “Oswald at the window with a rifle” evidence was created and submitted as evidence circumstantially incriminating Oswald, the evidence for this trip to and from Mexico follows the same M.O. We can definitely understand the need not to tip the Cubans or Russians regarding one of the, if not THE world’s largest communication interception operation by either publishing the Mystery Man’s photo or by publishing anything in the report which would divulge sources and means. This carefulness cannot be said for the travel portion of this trip, the location of his stay or in the activities he would have engaged while there. These details of the Mexico story take a backseat to the serious events related to his supposed time there and the events recorded which would incriminate our man Oswald. Their relative unimportance in the scheme of things makes them that much more easy to hide them in plain sight within the evidence.

    While speculation is grand, there remains not a stitch of corroborated evidence that our, or any Oswald, existed outside of the hotel or the Cuban/Russia embassy/consulate. There is also no corroborated evidence it was actually Oswald at the hotel or government buildings at all.

    The orchestrated removal of Richard Sprague from leading the House Select Committee’s investigation into the assassination of JFK had more to do with the CIA’s evidence from Mexico than anything else. From Gaeton Fonzi’s, The Last Investigation, we learn from Sprague that the CIA’s Secrecy Agreement was born out of Sprague’s desire to see ALL the Mexico City evidence; the “In Mexico” incriminating evidence of which we come to find there are thousands upon thousands of pages all with the same conclusion: we really don’t have the evidence to corroborate that any one person took any part of this trip, so they created some.

    Before we proceed, let’s take a moment and take a mindset break. In 1963 the average citizen did not exhibit the same levels of paranoia towards their government as we see today. And for good reason, “Conspiracies” were something the Commies ran when trying to steal our secrets and upset our way of life. Who believes anything we’re told anymore? Today we KNOW conspiracies are part of how government is, was and always will be run. In 1963, the US government was still the good guys to the everyday person. The WCR and a handful of wolves within the democracy would change all that forever.

    The stay in Mexico itself is defined by CIA/DFS documentation and FBI reports. In the Mary Ferrell Warren Commission Documents (CIA/FBI/SS/State) database alone there are over 1200 references to “MEXICO,” with thousands of other references in a variety of other locations related to the CIA’s Mexico records. What we have not finally concluded is whether a real person actually traveled in and out of Mexico at the start and end of these activities; whether there is a direct connection between the man claimed to be traveling to and from Mexico and the activities at the Cuban and Russian consulates/embassies; or whether select parts or the entirety of the Mexico visit evidence was created in reports and provided in testimony to tell a story.

    To begin, we will look at how the evidence of the trip ended with Oswald in Dallas. Then we can address a call on the morning of Nov 23rd which must convey the start and end dates of this trip as well as which border crossing was used when, according to records reviewed to date, there was no communication between the CIA and anyone else related to this trip from Oct 24th thru Nov 22nd; especially nothing having to do with the travel aspect such as mode of transport, location of border crossing, hotel, etc…

    Treasury’s INS officers in Laredo (or Washington DC for that matter) were made aware of these dates and that specific border crossing (especially given that the photos are from Oct 4th yet the info offered pointed to his leaving on the 2nd) from an “unnamed governmental agency.” We will attempt to prove that the limited knowledge of those following the request of this “unnamed governmental agency,” who asked Lester Johnson of the INS to call Mr. PUGH, Mr. KLINE and Mr. MAY in Laredo, had to have come to them from a very small circle of possibilities.

    Keep in the back of your mind the real possibility that the CIA and FBI knew our Oswald was in Dallas, as most of the affiliated Cubans were connected to the CIA, and more specifically David Phillips. They may have even sent him there as part of his infiltration into Communist organizations in order to keep him out of the way.

    Yet, on the return, before our man Oswald reaches Laredo, Texas, he must first travel from Mexico City thru Monterrey and arrive in Nuevo Laredo, across the border, exchange his Del Norte ticket #13688, and proceed on.

    Strangely, the evidence first received from confidential Mexican sources describes an entirely different trip than what was finally settled upon by the WCR and FBI.

    LEAVING MEXICO

    Before we actually get into the buses and other travel evidence, we should address the evidence regarding the date of the Mystery Man photo published in the WCR, since one has such a huge bearing on the other. In this Russ Holmes exhibit we see the Same Mystery Man photo yet now with the date October 1 on the back instead of October 2. So far this is the only document I have found which connects these photos with a date other than October 2nd, 4th or 15th.

    This CIA chronology of photos is taken from Russ Holmes’ work files shows that no photos were taken on October 1, 1963; that instead they were taken on the 2nd, 4th and 15th of October by LIMITED, LILYRIC and LIONION…

    Every single image we are shown of the mystery man was taken after the travel plans attributed to him take him from Mexico City. There are numerous photos of the WHITE SHIRTED mystery man at the above referenced and offered link; all dated October 2 at 12:22pm. One can understand now how a bus had to be found which left AFTER these photos were taken; the FRONTERA manifest was changed to reflect just such a departure time: 2pm Oct 2nd. Later in this paper we will learn why the FRONTERA bus was used at first.

    But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. For now we’ll stay with the Official Oct 2nd 8:30am Del Norte departure which makes the Mystery Man timings all the more confusing and complex. Bill Simpich’s State Secret, and many other articles, delve deeply into the potential reasons for the Mystery Man interest and what might have been going on at the Mexico Station. For this series though we will stay with the evidence that tries to corroborate Oswald’s trip out of Mexico City NOT by auto, but by Del Norte to Greyhound buses.

    MEXICO CITY TO LAREDO OCT 1, 2 OR 3- DEL NORTE

    While we can talk about our traveling Oswald asking PEDRO RODRIGUEZ LEDESMA to call for a taxi between 6:30 and 7am for his leaving early in the morning of the 2nd (while evidence suggests he left the 1st and did not stay at the hotel that night), the taxi evidence winds up recapped in FBI reports which only have the most dubious of corroboration. This man signaled with his hands and said “taxi” which PEDRO interpreted as his not being able to speak Spanish. We are to believe that Pedro does not know the name of the taxi driver nor his passenger’s destination and simply left this gringo in a cab without any word of help. We are to remember from his arrival that the bus terminals are within a short walk of the hotel and that no one sees this man with more than a small brown zippered bag. The report of this activity is contained within CE2121 p56 and CE2532 p13-14:

    We will learn a bit later that the Hotel Registry was also taken “soon after the assassination” by the same person… But I get ahead of myself. The FBI said they had to search through 1600 hotels to find where he stayed while a main Mexican contact provides the hotel registry “soon after the assassination.”

    The evidence offered begins with this Sept 30th receipt #14618 for Mr. H O LEE to travel on the Del Norte line from Mexico City on October 2nd leaving at 8:30am. CE 2530:

    (Note: As we know, our Oswald was pretty good at causing disturbances both real and contrived. If the CIA needed a memory to stand out in witnesses’ minds (think Azcue and the argument) Oswald was their man yet these impressions where not left with anyone with whom he came in contact as they could have been.)

    From the ARRB’s release “Trip to Mexico” p4:

    What I find strange about this “receipt” is that the logo at the top covers the name of the business and does not look like part of the original. Also, the normal two-hole punch in these exhibits seems to only have one hole punched with the other covered by this black area. Finally, the translation says the name of the travel agent was “Agencia de Viajes Transportes Chihuahuenses”

    But that is not what it says:

    The result of this purchase is shown in CE 2536 which in turn becomes the basis for the Greyhound exchange transaction which occurs in Laredo, TX. Once again we will find discrepancies between the dates of the purchase, the dates of travel, and the date of the exchange. What I will proceed to show now is that ticket #13688 was never issued or used, yet represents the only argument against the FM-11 stating Oswald left Mexico in an auto. CE 2123 p674 is the WCR copy of the FM-11 page in question. Please notice that Mr. LEE is alphabetized as Mr. Oswald even though all of the travel plans for the exit from Mexico are made out to H.O. LEE.

    When the ticket stub for the Mexico City to Laredo portion of the trip, FBI D-237, is found in a suitcase in the possession of Marina Oswald (which had been at the Paines at the time of the assassination) the creation of this travel evidence comes full circle and is laid once again at the feet of Marina and Ruth.

    WCD1518 p33 (below) is an FBI report which states that Marina informed Wesley Liebeler that she had found a bus ticket stub for the Mexico City to Laredo portion of the trip only 9 months after the fact.

    Also found in this one suitcase:

    – Paperback pamphlet (English and Spanish tourist guide) from the week of September 28 to Oct 4, 1963 supposedly with Oswald’s writing inside

    – The book, “Learning Russian”

    – A guide map to Mexico City printed in Mexico DF; Marina confirms this was Oswald’s (how exactly is unknown and one would think that Ruth’s place and Oswald’s belongings had been picked over pretty well by then)

    – A paperback pamphlet “FIESTA BRAVA” also published in Mexico

    – A Russian library pass good at libraries in Russia.

    The image below these descriptions is a composite of FBI D-202, the 2 stubs provided by the Mexican Authorities:

    And D-237:

    These, the envelope they came in, the seat #12 Chihuahuenses ticket #13688 passenger manifest with an “X” thru it and the receipt for their purchase are the sum total of the evidence which gets our Oswald from Mexico City to Laredo Texas aboard Del Norte bus #332 leaving at 8:30am, getting to Monterrey at 9:30pm and arriving at Laredo around 2am. This timing will come into play later when Mr. Voorhees, a passenger supposedly on this bus, makes his statement about when he arrives in and leaves Monterrey.

    It was determined that D-202 was attached to D-237 at some point using the magic FBI evidence confirmation pixie dust. (Or the fact that they themselves separated them?)

    So, Okay. There IS a bus that is scheduled to leave and arrive when it needs to if ANY of this evidence is authentic. But we did not start with Del Norte.

    FRONTERA FIRST; THEN NOT SO MUCH

    We are to remember that the evidence which FIRST was associated with this trip from Mexico City to Laredo comes from the Arturo Bosch altered FRONTERA passenger manifest. Eventually, when it was decided that our man Oswald was NOT on the FRONTERA 340 bus at 2pm, it was dropped like a hot potato.

    Yet thru March/April 1964 it was believed that this evidence was accurate. WCD 684 p2-CE2122 even though the rest of CE2122 is dedicated to explaining away the conflicting evidence for what is seen on this manifest. There is no mention of ARTURO BOSCH or his handiwork in this Exhibit. CE2122 p5:

    CE 2470 (below) lets us know that ALVARADO was interviewed extensively on Dec 7th; again no mention of BOSCH in this report (which appear to be confined to info from WCD 1084). In this earlier Feb 15th report we are informed that officials simply could not find a ticket to cover Oswald’s travel on FRONTERA bus #340 leaving Mexico at 2pm.

    CE2471 dated February 20, 1964 reinforces that FRANCIS ALVARADO from the Transportes FRONTERA terminal in Mexico City was interviewed and had no explanation for “OSWLD” or the other changes to the FRONTERA manifest. It also confirms that this information was received between Dec 7 and Dec 17, 1963.

    CE2471 p1:

    As we continue thru this mountain of back-peddling muck we need to remember that the evidence says that our Oswald was at Odio’s on Sept 27th and in Dallas from the 27th of Sept “possibly” thru Oct 4th when he finally calls Marina.

    (NOTE: FBI 124-10230-10450 dated Nov 27th is a memo from J.B. Garcia to Legat which tells us that he spoke with SA CHAPMAN in Laredo and “no pertinent info had yet been developed re: exact time or specific mode of travel of subject” [Oswald]. Now while that is no great revelation considering what we know at this point yet the more interesting thing to me is the last sentence of the memo where CHAPMAN advises that “Dallas had info subject was in Dallas [Oct 4 notation] and made LD call to another city in Texas (Irvin or Irvine).” Marina did get a call from Harvey on the 4th asking her to ask Ruth to come get him as he’s been in Dallas QUOTE a few days UNQUOTE. Marina supposedly was so mad about his not contacting her sooner she said no and Oswald hitchhiked to Irving)

    How is it possible that Dallas is aware of a call from a payphone to Marina on the 4th of October; which did actually happen; yet cannot pull it together enough to find authentic evidence of this massive bus trip.

    Our Oswald did not make this trip in the manner suggested nor is there any authenticated evidence which links our Oswald to being in Mexico. With this understanding we may better see the iterations the FBI went thru to find the means of travel to and from Mexico City while we operate under the conclusion that IF an imposter (or even our Harvey) went on this trip they would have left a wake of easily found evidence taking him from New Orleans to Mexico and onto Dallas.

    What could have caused the FBI to cling so tightly to FRONTERA as the means of transportation given what they learned from ALVARADO and LOPEZ in early December? Well, a few pages after CE2122’s “BACKGROUND OF INQUIRY” lets us know that the “OSWLD” on the FRONTERA manifest is “clear evidence” that Oswald took that bus leaving at 1pm (sic), CE2122 tells us that the check with Transportes Del NORTE turned up “completely negative results” for any record of LEE, HARVEY or OSWALD on the only two buses Del Norte offers to Laredo.

    With only Flecha Rojas and FRONTERA left as bus related options for Oswald to not leave Mexico in an AUTO, the FBI was running out of options. We must remember that we are offered EVIDENCE that Oswald was on both these buses without regard for why either or both of this fraudulent evidence even exists. Furthermore, once FRONTERA id dropped, “WHY” this evidence was created by Mexican Authorities is never explored.

    CE2121, WCD1084 and WCD1063 make up as large portion of the haystack in which the FBI attempted to hide the needle which was that Oswald did not take the trip as offered. Any other option includes either outside help to get him into Mexico (although there is very thin evidence he actually was there) or he was impersonated purposefully. If the person the FBI claims was OSWALD left by AUTO, either driving himself or with others, conspiracy possibilities as to the purpose of the trip come more clearly into focus. This also fits more neatly into the Duran, Alvarado, CIA/DFS games. When our Oswald becomes a LONE NUT, this wonderful corroborative evidence for a conspiracy involving Castro gets flushed. Since the FBI could not allow these options to surface, and the photos are taken at 12:22 on Oct 2nd, we are treated to the mid-March declaration that our man Oswald was on the FRONTERA bus.

    So here we are in mid-March, Del Norte investigations have resulted in no information to show H.O. LEE or Lee H. Oswald purchased or traveled on a Del Norte bus. ALL other investigations into travel produced negative results related to Oswald. By default, the FBI stays with the FRONTERA bus leaving Mexico at 2pm (not 1pm as stated above) and arriving in Laredo at 7am, Oct 3rd.

    – that is until it was realized that leaving Mexico City at 2pm on the 2nd of October (which describes the created FRONTERA manifest departure time) would not get Oswald to Dallas in time for his Texas Employment Commission meeting in the afternoon of the Oct 3rd . The following is yet another mid-March FBI report dealing with the conflicts brought about by retrofitting Oswald onto buses which do not fit with the timing; the same thing occurred for the 4:40pm to 12:20pm bus out of New Orleans to Houston. Since the 12:20 was the only bus that arrives close to the right time, Oswald must have been on it. It’s not that there is no evidence for these trips, just that the evidence was created, altered or never offered, or in fact contradicts the reality of this travel.

    Like finding out about Tague and changing 3 shots to 2 shots, discovering the conflicts of working Oswald piece-meal thru this trip caused the same changes and impossible explanations.

    Well prior to these March revelations is a report from Dec 3, 1963. The driver of FRONTERA BUS #340 leaving at 2pm on Oct 2 FRANCISCO SAUCEDA VELEZ tells us his bus does not arrive until 6:45am in Laredo and that his relief driver was old and tired so he drove all the way thru to Laredo. Eugenio GARCIA tells us that the stubs of all tickets sold in Mexico City make their way back to Monterrey in 2-3 months yet the ticket sold to OSWALD was never received. Mr. GARCIA also mentions that “agents of the Presidencia had picked up all information re OSWALD’s trip… Including the “talonario” (block of ticket stubs)

    It is not until Mid-March again that the FBI figures out FRONTERA cannot possibly be the bus he left Mexico City riding. Furthermore, it is Del Norte that has the relationship with Greyhound.

    The problem being that this FBI report (at Armstrong’s Baylor collection p 2 below) states the conflict and somehow mixes up the 2pm FRONTERA departure time and the Del NORTE 8:30-9am departure (if they got the information from the above report they may have missed it was a FRONTERA report and not Del Norte). The FRONTERA trip was not expected to arrive in Laredo until the morning (6:45am) of October 3rd which in turn would be too late an arrival for Oswald to travel the remaining 10-12 hours from Laredo thru San Antonio to Dallas to arrive by the time he is seen at the TEC and then check into the YMCA by 4:30pm.

    For the FBI’s story to continue to work, Oswald MUST arrive in Laredo, process his exchange ticket and get on a bus leaving before 3am; and even that is cutting it close to try and have Oswald at the Dallas TEC before 4:30 and check into the YMCA between 4:30 and 5:00.

    The following offers the evidence which put Oswald in Dallas in the afternoon of Oct 3rd:

    Baylor Armstrong collection TEC folder p40-43:

    Only one Greyhound bus leaves Laredo TX and arrives in Dallas with enough time; bus #1265 leaving Laredo at 3am. We will of course examine the evidence which places Oswald on this bus shortly.

    Yet, the evidence offered states Oswald left by “AUTO”. This is an image of the photostat of a TYPED COPY of the original FM-11 information given to US Customs official CASH on Nov 23rd. The FM-11 as mentioned and partially shown above is the Mexican Immigration alphabetized by day master list created from the cancelled FM-8 tourist visas and will be discussed at length later in this article. (Typed FM-11 info – Hood collection)

    And here is the line from the FM-11 CE2123 p676 from which the Oct 3rd information was supposedly taken:

    This information in turn MUST come from the FM-8; the Mexican tourist visa. Now, I have to stop here for a second since I recently had an “Aha” moment related to this visa. The application for this visa from Sept 17th and addressed in part 1 of this series was always shown one way, with the CE# sticker at the bottom and the signature cut off… CE2481 p677. The next page though is SAME EXHIBIT yet adjusted to show the entire bottom of the exhibit while losing the header, Application # and the serie (sic) number 24085 seen on the visa. CE2481 p678. The following is a composite of the two copies of the application which to me appears to suggest that an FM-5 was applied for with a different number and Oswald’s signature while 24085, without his signature could have been created after the fact. These are COPIES of COPIES of COPIES which make alteration virtually impossible to detect.

    An FM-8 is good for 15 days after entering Mexico. An FM-5 is good for 6 months after entry. The Oswald FM-8’s have typed on them “VALIDA POR 15 DIAZ” yet the bottom of this “other” copy of the application states that this tourist card would be good for a “six month stay.”

    Fast forward a few more days and we have a report over Hoover’s name which squarely puts Oswald on the Del Norte bus at 9am Oct 2nd. On April 7th two ticket stubs for seat #12 on the Del Norte bus at 9am are acknowledged. These tickets (as shown above) bear the number 13688 and are related to this early morning departure of Del Norte bus 332. (Even though the search from Del Norte produced no results)

    Can THIS finally be the evidence which corroborates the FM-11 info about “Viaja en Auto” being a typographical error based on a mistake by a clerk?

    THE SHIFT TO DEL NORTE, TICKET #13688 & THE GREYHOUND EXCHANGE

    WCD 828 p1 (below) offers the evidence that on April 7th D-202, the #13688 ticket stubs and envelope prove that Oswald was on bus #332 and #373.

    Can these ticket stubs with seat #12 (or is it seat #2 with a “1” added later?) be connected to Oswald?

    As mentioned above, in late August 1964 Marina finds the corroborating evidence for Del Norte bus ticket #13688. WCD 1518 p34 (below) discusses the details of what would ultimately become FBI D-237.

    In an undiscovered, small brown suitcase which was in Ruth’s garage on 11/22 yet was neither opened or inventoried by the DPD, Dallas Sheriffs or FBI during the previous 9 months, we find pamphlets specific to that one week along with other Mexico related travel documents that were again, not found until August 1964. No matter for these could at least get Oswald to Laredo which in turn allows us to connect this arrival via Del Norte to the Greyhound Exchange order CE2537. CE 2537 p761:

    The only major discrepancy found here is the DATE OF SALE and stamp of October 1, 1963, when according to the evidence offered, this passenger actually purchased this exchange order from the travel agency mentioned at the bottom of this order on September 30th as shown above in CE 2530. It was also during this transaction that Del Norte ticket #13688 was supposedly purchased.

    WCD 785 p15 (below) is a recap of ticket #13688 which jumps to the conclusion that the Greyhound bus exchange order is what connects seat #12 to H.O. LEE.

    CE 2531 (below) shows the recording of this sale and transfer from the Del Norte bus where he supposedly used ticket #13688 from Mexico City to Laredo, to a Greyhound bus from Laredo to Dallas for one “Mr. H. O. Lee.” So far so good, right? The FBI may have finally gotten one right! Yet we both know that wasn’t going to happen here. Let’s find out why.

    For all this evidence to be authentic and to represent something that actually happened, our traveler had to have been on the Del Norte 8:30am bus using #13688 in the first place. Once again we come to find that while the TIMING WORKS, there is no corroboration that an Oswald was on these buses.

    The next part of this final article will look at the evidence which attempts to corroborate that Oswald was on these buses.


    The Evidence IS the Conspiracy, Table of Contents


  • Mexico City, Part 3 – The Trip Down, Part 2

    Mexico City, Part 3 – The Trip Down, Part 2


    At this point we’ve shown:

    -Oswald in New Orleans while simultaneously in and around Dallas with Jack Ruby during the summer of 1963

    -The New Orleans Oswald working with anti-Castro forces while publically being recognized as pro-Castro

    -The Dallas Oswald was seen with Maurice Bishop aka CIA’s David Phillips

    -The Dallas Oswald visited Robert McKeown requesting to purchase scoped rifles at ridiculously high prices

    Ruth Paine and children arrive in New Orleans to whisk Marina and child away to Irving, TX leaving Oswald alone to his own devices 3 days before Nagell’s predicted assassination dates of Sept 26-29.

    -The Lee Harvey Oswald who left 4905 Magazine a mess and owing back rent carried two suitcases onto a downtown bus the evening of Sept 24th only to return the following day in order to retrieve and cash a $33 unemployment check from the Texas Employment Commission.

    -The FBI could not locate Oswald for the evening of Sept 24th, nor could they find any record of Oswald leaving New Orleans on ANY bus which could get him to Houston in time to perform activities the evidence shows he did.

    -The Australian women who spoke with Oswald on the Monterrey to Mexico City leg of the trip claims to have purchased Transporte del Norte bus tickets yet describe a journey that has been documented to have occurred on a Flecha Rojas bus. The WCR simply states she was wrong about the bus line. (We will show in this article how Mumford, Bowen nor the McFarlands could have been on this Flecha Rojas bus leaving Monterrey and in turn presented or was given a fabricated story)

    -Witnesses claim to have seen Oswald sitting on this bus with Mr. Bowen aka Albert Osborne.

    -The man representing himself as Lee Oswald presumably purchased a Houston to Laredo Ticket after midnight in Houston.

    -There is no record of a bus ticket purchased which would carry Oswald from Nuevo Laredo to Mexico City.

    In this part we will continue to examine evidence related to the bus travel to and from Mexico, testing the theory that this evidence does not corroborate the Commission’s conclusion, and even suggests that the entire body of evidence getting Oswald in and out of Mexico was created just for that purpose.

    The “Lopez Report,” an excellent reexamination of the WCR’s Mexico trip focusing on the Embassy/Consulate visits and transcripts but offers the following and little else related to evidence of Oswald’s travels into and out of Mexico. This is from page 3 of the introduction.

    Asking whether Oswald was proficient with a rifle evades the evidence that he was not at the window and the rifle was never in his possession. Discussing whether an OSWALD may be our Oswald performing this or that act in Mexico while the evidence does not support his having traveled by the means the FBI evidence suggests seems to me two sides of the same conspiracy. Since the FBI/CIA presents evidence of an Oswald in Mexico, he must have traveled to Mexico and NOT been at Odio’s.

    We will present FBI/CIA evidence this same Oswald calls the Soviet Military Attache again at 3:39pm on October 3rd when our Oswald is at the Texas Employment Commission in Dallas. According to the evidence, the very first call on Sept 27 at 10:33am was also to the Soviet Military Attache and NOT the Embassy or Consulate. This call dealt specifically with what Win Scott tells us about Oswald; he was attempting to get visas to Odessa (how Oswald has the number to the Soviet Military Attache in Mexico City remains a mystery). This call on the 3rd confirms we are dealing with an imposter and the fact these mystery man photos are taken on Oct 2nd, 4th and beyond, and not on the 27th, 28th or the 1st strikes me as yet another very strange inclusion to the evidence for no “apparent” reason.

    We will be concluding this series in the next and final article with a look at this “In Mexico” evidence to determine whether this evidence corroborates my developing theory that whoever was in Mexico playing Oswald had nothing whatsoever to do with the person claimed to be on these bus(es)s or in that hotel. Another thread running through this whodunit involves the inner workings of a plot not entirely related yet conveniently available for CYA within the assassination investigation.

    Thanks to Russ Holmes’ collection at Mary Farrell’s site we have info about Mexico akin to the autopsy’s Sibert/O’Neill report with truths seen thru the eyes of evidence rather than the filter of deception. The following image from Oct 4 becomes Odum Exhibit #1 – Vol 20; with a touch of widening it appears; and the CIA has the chutzpah to claim this is Lee HENRY Oswald without mentioning this is 2 days after he supposedly left. One has to wonder about the purpose of this photo at all other than as a breadcrumb in a trail.

    The FBI could not admit Oswald had entered Mexico under unknown circumstances as this would trigger thoughts of a conspiracy. On Sept 26th an innocent man was supposedly traveling to Mexico. It is concluded he takes a bus from his home and has no visible means to secure or drive an automobile. In fact, Lee Harvey Oswald needs to take a series of buses from New Orleans to Mexico City as he is both alone and does not drive. A journey of biblical proportion way back in the day… just extremely long bus rides for our purposes.

    NUEVO LAREDO TO MONTERREY TO MEXICO CITY

    There is no record in Evidence which shows that H.O. LEE (his Mexican travelling aka) bought a bus ticket on Flecha Rojas bus #516 leaving Nuevo Laredo at 2pm Sept 26th arriving in Mexico City 10am Sept 27th after stopping in Monterrey.

    The Evidence will show that the Australian women who speak with Lee Oswald could not have been on the same bus which left Monterrey at 3:30pm and arrives in Mexico City at 10am. We will attempt to show it is highly likely her and other first-hand witness testimony about these bus rides and the stay in Mexico is fabricated like pieces of a jigsaw to form a picture in the minds of those observing. A loosely bound together series of lies which becomes a story potentially needed in a few weeks to silence remorseful or inquisitive thoughts.

    The baggage manifest for the Flecha Rojas bus trip from Nuevo Laredo thru Monterrey to Mexico City and the entrance stamp on his tourist visa (FM-8) is the physical evidence offered by the WCR to place Oswald on this bus or, in fact, anywhere else on Sept 26th/27th.

    CE2482 – Flecha Rojas baggage manifest:

    WCD 306 p.4 suggests that the man claiming to be Oswald had to have shown these girls the passport taken to Russia in 1959 since Oswald’s June 1963 passport would not have these Russian stamps. The one with the 1959 photo of LEE Oswald does not match the man’s photo from only one week later and as I will show, does not match the arrested image of Oswald. (Under the premise the story was provided to aid with the self-incrimination of Oswald; none of this actually happened. What the props were in this fictitious account is of no consequence)

    WCD 306 p.5 offers the FBI’s version of how Mumford and Winston realized that the Oswald in Dallas on Nov 22 was the Oswald they remembered from the trip to Mexico City. Interesting how this man from New Orleans tells them:

    Miss MUMFORD. No, I can’t really put it into his words; not at that stage. He then proceeded to tell us about himself.

    Mr. BALL. What did he say?

    Miss MUMFORD. I will have to refer to notes. Oh, yes; the first thing he told us was that he was from Fort Worth, in Texas

    The man Ruby killed arrived in NJ from Russia on June 13, 1962. He went to 7313 Davenport in Ft. Worth to stay with his brother ROBERT. His “mother” quits a job and moves to Ft. Worth to be near her “son.” Oswald leaves Ft. Worth about 4 months later for Dallas (604 Elsbeth) where he lives until May 1963 when he moves to NOLA (4907 Magazine).

    Robert Oswald lived in and around Fort Worth most of his civilian life up to the Mexico Trip. We will be offering a tidbit of evidence in the final article via US INS thru Mexican INS at Miguel Aleman that Oswald’s brother entered Mexico at Miguel Aleman the same day Lee enters at Nuevo Laredo.

    The Oswald Ruby killed could generously be called tight-lipped, loner, unto oneself and detached when in non-intelligence related activities like cover-work and home life. Yet for this scenario we are fully expected to believe he is a self-incriminating chatter-box with suggestions of communist leanings as if something important hinged upon the performance… or it was one really good story provided witnesses and without corroboration.

    The Evidence IS the Conspiracy. Why was this Dallas/NOLA boy talking about his home in Fort Worth…?

    The only constant related to Ft. Worth TX is 2220 Thomas across the street from STRIPLING JR HIGH where Marguerite lived in 1947 and was living on Nov 22, 1963; and where Robert Oswald lived in and around during the months/years prior to the Mexico Trip. Harvey Oswald was living at 4963 Collinwood in Ft. Worth with his “mom” when he joined the Marines; depending on which records you believe.

    For some reason, the Oswald referred to by Ms. Mumford has his voided 1959 passport rather than (or in addition to) the reissued new one from June 1963. The photo from the June 1963 passport: CE1969

    The following is a simple 4 step transition of a photo of the arrested Oswald and the image attached to Oswald’s 1959 passport. I’ve sized and lined up the left eyebrow on both men to be identical. The obviously have similarities yet there remains an incredible amount about those images that do not match at all including the size of the head, the location/slope of the shoulders, the location of the mouth and nose related to the eyes, and the position of the ears.

    (Disclaimer: Images used are from the offered and available evidence from the JFK assassination. Nothing was done to change aspect ratio and everything was done to be as exact as possible)

    When Mumford (and Winston) ID Oswald via that FBI report as “Texas” they were referring to images of Oswald after the assassination. Images of the man Ruby kills. I have to ask a rhetorical here; If you were shown the 4th image at the far right above and then saw Oswald’s image on TV and newspapers would you make the same connection and say they were the same man; or just the same name was used?

    How comfortable would you be with this identification when the investigative body writes their report without ever showing the witness a photo of the accused to confirm his identity? In my mind this helps build our case that this testimony of the self-incriminating Oswald is a puzzle piece and not the true account of what occurred.

    (May 19, 1964)
    Mr. BALL. Well, you were shown pictures of a man (Bowen/Osborne) later on by the Federal Bureau of Investigation agent, were you not?

    Miss MUMFORD. Yes.

    Mr. BALL. And they showed you pictures of Oswald, didn’t they; Lee Harvey Oswald?

    Miss MUMFORD. No.

    Mr. BALL. You didn’t ever see a picture of Oswald?

    (Miss MUMFORD. No.

    Evidence now follows which shows that Mumford at the very least, and possibly the McFarlands as well, were provided with their recollection of Oswald on that bus to support the FBI’s story. Only Mumford testified, while the McFarlands only offer a 1 page affidavit. We do not have any direct testimony from Ms. Winston; only the recap by our old friends the FBI. Bringing this full circle, the man the WCR claims sat next to Oswald, Mr. Osborne, claims it was NOT OSWALD who sat next to him on the trip into Mexico. The WCR chose not to believe him.

    NOLA to HOUSTON before HOUSTON to LAREDO – A Simple Sleight of Hand

    I need to correct something from part 2a. I mistakenly dated the first identification of buses from New Orleans to Mexico as Dec 16th from WCD 183 p22 when in reality it was from Dec 10th. What this means is the FBI asked Mr. Green of Continental which buses went from NOLA thru Houston to Mexico on the 10th and the reply was the 4:40pm and 8:15pm buses.

    The WCR source-less criteria for our Oswald taking this bus is that it is the only one leaving after 8am on the 25th and arriving in Houston before midnight.

    WCD 231 p12, embedded in the following image which I used in part 2a and dated Dec 16th, is from a Dec 24th report and advises that there is a bus from NOLA to Houston at 12:20pm that arrives at 10:50pm on the 25th.

    As luck would have it, by catching this error I stumbled upon an amazing example of how the Evidence IS the Conspiracy. The following is CE2533 taken from WCD 231 p12 which stands alone. I used it above to show that according to the FBI’s evidence Mr. Green tells us of a 12:20pm bus to Houston on the 16th of Dec only 6 days after telling us how the 4:40 and 8:15pm buses are the only buses to Houston which then go on to Mexico via Laredo and Monterrey. One could assume from this information that GREEN remembered something about the 12:20 bus that only goes to Houston and is not part of a complete trip to Mexico or Laredo yet could serve the purpose of getting Oswald to Houston at the right time.

    CE2534 which follows CE2533 is the Secret Service report on travel from DALLAS to Houston and then how the bus gets from Houston to Laredo by 1:30pm on the 26th and will be used near the conclusion of this article to corroborate how the FBI pulled off some of its Mexico Evidence charade.

    Next is CE 2464 – again stand-alone – referred to as “FBI report of investigation conducted on December 16, 1963, of schedule of Continental Trailways buses from New…” [Orleans to Houston TX]. The way CE2463 ends with a paragraph beginning with “On December 9, 1963…” CE2463 final page – Dec 9th one is given the impression CE2464 follows naturally both from the investigation and the dates.

    So here we are. Two identical stand-alone WCE’s showing the same exact thing; that there were two more buses leaving NOLA on the 25th of Sept headed to Houston yet not part of a complete purchasable trip to Mexico City or Laredo. Both show what looks to be the body of an FBI report without the reports details at the bottom: On, of, File #, by and Date Dictated

    Those two WCR Exhibits above are copies of a re-typed version of the information from a DATED and correctly copied source FBI report from the Warren Commission’s 1555 “Documents.” A great many of the WC Exhibits originate with info from these “working papers” of the FBI’s investigation. MFF WCD listing.

    To establish that the FBI and WC knew from the Dec 24th report that Oswald would be put on the 12:20pm bus from New Orleans to Houston which would serve the purpose of Oswald’s fictitious trip, it APPEARS they used the following report from SEPTEMBER 21, 1964 and simply added a more appropriate date for their needs.

    This is the SA Callender report of Sept 1964 we find in Warren Commission Document #1553 (of 1555) which appears to be the source report for the discovery of the 12:20 bus. WCD 1553 p6:

    Let’s take this in. On Dec 10th Major GREEN, terminal manager for Continental bus lines tells us of the only two buses from New Orleans through Houston to Mexico leaving when it needs to in order to complete the timeline. The 4:40pm bus investigation determined that Oswald was not on that bus while the WCR as shown above, says he “probably” took the 12:20pm. Ten months later; which puts into question how much of this Dec 16th report (or any other report) was compiled prior to its date; Major GREEN includes 2 new buses. The report was already written. “Probably the 12:20pm to Houston” almost works with the Twiford story and gets our Oswald character to Houston and Laredo “correctly” so that HAS TO BE the bus he took.

    What would be the purpose of re-interviewing GREEN in September 1964 if the information about the buses was already in FBI hands on December 16th? There is no contact report for GREEN on the 16th, only the copy of WCD 1553 p.6.

    I believe this clearly proves that the FBI backdated this report, while at some point a predetermined conclusion regarding Oswald’s travel was made (provided) and dumped into the festering vat of all the other lies from which the official explanation scoops. The absurdity that we are expected to believe Oswald piecemealed his way to Mexico City by specifically NOT purchasing the full round trip ticket in New Orleans but first the trip to Houston (for which no evidence is offered), then to Laredo (for which no direct evidence is offered), Nuevo Laredo to Monterrey and Mexico City (for which false evidence was created), Mexico City back thru Monterrey to Laredo (offered thru Mexican authorities and Marina Oswald), and finally Laredo to Dallas thru San Antonio is par for our expectations course. We are at the very simplest expected to believe that any normal processes of business or procedure, physics or reality were suspended for Mr. Oswald.

    In each one of these WC Documents related to his travel to and from Mexico one would think the summary would start out something like, “Oswald purchased a X-part bus ticket #XXX in New Orleans on the XYZ bus line leaving at such a time and arriving when it did”. For it seems that there are no problems knowing for certain the names of witnesses who say they were NOT on the buses with him. Passenger after passenger is identified and questioned and this lone bright white man just traveling to Mexico is not only elusive but travels like a ghost. What we find as we do in every area of the case is that the FBI must offer pounds of paper to NOT SAY upon what they base their pre-determined conclusions.

    With the FBI inserting the line, “On December 16, 1963…” to information from 10 months later to support a conclusion not referenced or footnoted to anything in the WCR, I believe we can proceed safe in the knowledge that this Evidence IS the Conspiracy. It would take a project in itself to cross check Commission Exhibits with their source Warren Commission documents to see how many such deliberately fraudulent acts were committed. What we do see easily are the differences between complete FBI report records with authorship, dates and signatures and Commission Exhibits that only show the photo-copied body of the report.

    It is this author’s view that the PHYSICAL evidence cannot get Oswald from New Orleans to Mexico City on Sept 27, 1963 because he was visiting Sylvia Odio in Dallas during this time period. There is very little to offer for not believing the testimony of Sylvia and her sister Annie in their identification of Harvey Oswald as the “Leon Oswald” who visited her apartment. Even if wrong, the implication that this was yet another imposter is no less comforting.

    This re-typing of an earlier date on a subsequent report is indicative of the Conspiracy in that it establishes either:

    1. The impersonation was real and part of incriminating Oswald/CIA/FBI/??? while not necessarily connected to the assassination (yet very effective at forcing cooperation) OR

    2. We have a CI/OP to create the proper trail of fictitious evidence implicating Oswald as an agent of a foreign government which may be more naturally connected to the assassination, if needed. (Peter Dale Scott’s Phase 1 – ALL of this evidence is second hand or worse and exhibits the tell-tale signs of a Maurice Bishop/David Atlee Phillips Op for which he was famous. Phillips comes to Mexico City on Oct 7 – the first “Oswald in Mexico” memo goes out Oct 8)

    Whether an Oswald was on any bus between New Orleans and Mexico City is a matter of faith in the FBI’s evidence from the Mexican authorities with the CIA’s oversight. If this evidence is as trustworthy as the CIA’s regarding our Oswald calling the Russian and Cuban Consulates/Embassies and what we read in the WCR; the entirety of OSWALD in MEXICO may very well have been a hoax.

    According to our witnesses, an “Oswald” possibly bought a ticket to Laredo in Houston and boarded bus #5133 in Houston leaving at 2:30am and was noticed around 6am as they approached Laredo.

    The following affidavit was executed By John Bryan McFarland and Meryl McFarland on May 28, 1964.

    Q. When and where did you first see the man later identified as Lee Harvey Oswald?

    A. We changed buses at Houston. Texas, at 2:00 a.m. September 26th and it was probably about 6:00 a.m. after it became light that we first saw him.

    Q. How many suitcases was Oswald carrying when he boarded the bus at Houston, Texas, or any or-her time?

    A. We did not see him carrying any suitcases at any time (McFarland).

    The WC chose only to offer a short affidavit from the McFarlands as corroborative evidence for Oswald being on the bus, through Laredo to Nuevo Laredo and onto Monterrey since the testimony of Albert Osborne (BOWEN; which will be discussed below) contradicts this evidence by claiming the man next to him was NOT OSWALD.

    No matter how many different ways the FBI tried, there was simply no (real or imagined) evidence available which gets Oswald from New Orleans to Houston in order to buy the Houston to Laredo ticket on Continental Trailways, and no evidence of a ticket for the Nuevo Laredo to Mexico City portion of the trip. So instead of stating the obvious, that Oswald did not make this trip in this manner, the FBI is desperate to find evidence to connect New Orleans to this Houston departure. The 12:20pm special fit the bill while, as I believe we’ve proven, creating more breadcrumbs from which to follow the conspiracy trail.

    Is it realistic to assume that the September 24, 1964 WCR’s written conclusion on page 731 about the 12:20 bus from NOLA would not be discovered until September 21, 1964? WCR p731:

    CROSSING INTO MEXICO

    With our grain of sand irritating the evidence in such a way as to make ALL of the reporting suspect, we continue to explore how the Evidence IS the Conspiracy.

    The WCR/FBI/STATE DEPT. information about Oswald’s crossing into Mexico from the US comes exclusively from the same Mexican (Intelligence) authorities who worked side-by-side, first with the FBI’s Special Investigation Service* and later with the CIA. There exists no US record of Oswald’s crossing or returning. Eugene Pugh, as reported by the Herald Tribune 11/26/63, was the man in charge of the US Customs Office in Laredo at the time and claims to have said this regarding the checking of Oswald thru INS while entering AND EXITING Mexico, “This was not the usual procedure, but US Immigration (INS) had a folder on Oswald’s trip.” (We will return to Mr. Pugh and chain of command later)

    *This seems an especially appropriate moment to review the Bureau’s role in the earliest development of US intelligence capabilities. One of the most interesting, but least documented, chapters in the history of the FBI is the experience of its Special Intelligence Service (SIS) during World War II. Established in 1940, the FBI’s SIS was the first foreign-intelligence bureaucracy in US history, created years before the Central Intelligence Agency and even before the Agency’s forerunner, William “Wild Bill” Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Excerpt from “New Insights into J. Edgar Hoover’s Role – The FBI and Foreign Intelligence” by G. Gregg Webb (Map is from the FBI’s SIS History Vol 1 showing a presence in both Monterrey and Mexico City prior to the creation of the CIA and even OSS)

    (Continental Bus terminal – The US/Mexico border at Laredo/Nuevo Laredo)

    Our familiar FM-8, the tourist visa, with the dated entrance stamp from Sept 26th and reference to Helio Tuexi Maydon who worked from 6am-2pm on the 26th remains the ONLY physical detail in the evidence that Oswald entered Mexico at this time. WCD 598 2nd p2:

    WCD 1063 p15 identifies the two Mexican INS workers between 6am and 2pm who would process visitors to Mexico as MAYDON and RAMOS.

    They were working when the bus carrying Oswald, M/M McFarland and John Bowen aka Albert Osborne dropped them off in Laredo, TX before these passengers cross into Mexico and secured Nuevo Laredo transportation. Maydon and Ramos should be the only two Mexican Immigration inspector’s names seen stamped on FM-5/8’s for all persons entering Mexico at Nuevo Laredo at that time. We find once again that this is simply not true. Yet before continuing to that, we have the expected excuses for why standard procedure, which could help identify Mr. Oswald as the passenger, was not performed (as opposed to Mr. LEE).

    CE 2193 – March 16, 1964:

    Those who were going on to points in Mexico made their way across the border and would presumably be processed in Mexico by one or the other of these men, RAMOS or MAYDON. At least according to SA Chapman’s report.

    Also dated March 16th is WCD 676. WCD 676 – Bowen is a breakdown of the FM-5 and FM-8 tourist visas which were stamped on Sept 26th and become the FM-11 master sheet. One can reasonably expect to see SOME of the names of the passengers on the baggage manifest for Flecha Rojas bus #516 to Monterrey/Mexico City. Bowen and the McFarland’s are shown to have been processed yet additional Mexican Immigration Inspectors are listed. The McFarland’s inspector is not mentioned as being on duty with Maydon and Ramos while Bowen was supposedly processed by Maydon.

    (ELEVEN additional Inspector names not mentioned as working these same hours yet named as having processed tourists on the FM-11: Antonio Ramon Guajardo, Manuel Buentello Ortegon, Zeferino Frumencio Gonzalez Perez, Alberto Arzamendi Chapa, Pedro Castro Romero, Hector Raga Lopez, Felipe Gonzalez Echazarreta, Jesus Govea Herrera, Jorge Luis Solalinde L., Eduardo De Leon Siller & Raul Luevana Trujillo).

    One has to wonder why all these other Inspectors were left off by SA Chapman when, if you go thru WCD 676 you will see these other men processed FM-5’s and FM-8’s on the 26th of Sept. The cooperation of one or two to support a story is obviously much easier than a dozen.

    Looking thru the rest of WCD 676’s listings we come to find that not a single name other than BOWEN, McFARLAND and OSWALD are both on the FM-11 and the Flecha Rojas baggage manifest. CE2463 is the re-typed Flecha Rojas manifest which states that 18 passengers boarded bus #516 in Nuevo Laredo. We must then assume from this information that the other 14 passengers did not come thru Mexican Immigration that morning or did not travel with a bag to check. That all 14 of these passengers were already on the Mexican side and boarded bus #516 going thru Monterrey to Mexico City while traveling with only a carry-on.

    The above report explaining MAYDON’s failure to record info – CE 2193 – March 16, 1964 – created on Nov 30, 1963 is dated March 9, 1964 and basically tells us that the Form Mexican Immigration FM-11, created from Oswald’s FM-8 tourist visa acquired Sept 17th in New Orleans which should have had these three vital pieces of information but did not, could not have had that information. The FM-11 is created from the original and duplicate of the FM-8 and FM-5 tourist visas. Like so many other pieces of evidence, the WC does not offer any comparison images of FM-8’s (15-day tourist visas) to see what standard practice looks like. The FM-8 should have the time of entry, mode of transportation, nationality, and the corresponding number for the FM-11 based on that day’s alphabetical listing of entries. Oswald would have been #45 based on them placing him under “O” for Oswald even though all the documents related to this trip state his name as Mr. LEE, H.O. LEE or LEE, Harvey Oswald.

    From all the Mexican Evidence offered we must accept that according to THEIR RECORDS the man’s name was H.O. LEE as it is listed below. It appears that only after 11/22 does Mr. LEE get treated as if his name was Mr. OSWALD all along and what should be standard operating procedure does not occur in his case. CE2469 goes on to show that one “PAULA RUSIONI” while listed on the del Norte manifest does not appear on any other documentation and could simply not be located. Both the following Exhibits, CE2470 & CE2471 attempt to explain more about the created “Frontera bus line” evidence by regurgitating other reports.

    Never explained is the switch from Mr. LEE to “OSWLD” on each and every created piece of evidence… somebody forgot to follow the script.

    806-Moore, 807-LEE, 808-Ouellet.

    Why would Mr. LEE be filed between MO and OU?

    WCD 676 p20 – HARVEY OSWALD LEE #807:

    Figuring out that Mr. LEE, placed in the “O” spot, should have had the number 45 on his tourist visa was simple matter of finding the starting number for FM-8’s and counting. 807 minus 762 equals 45.

    WCD 676 p11:

    The number 45 should be written on the face of this original FM-8 when it was organized for the chronological and alphabetical FM-11 when in fact we should see the number 38 if Mr. LEE was filed correctly as #800, just before Mr. Mason. WCD 676 #799-#800:

    The speed with which these records were found and removed (on the 23rd; Trust me, we’ll get there) and the fact we learn that his travel was recorded in Mexican documents as H.O. LEE and not OSWALD is very difficult to reconcile. More amazing is the lack of a “mode of transportation” for Bowen/Osborne. He was claimed to be on the same bus sitting next to Oswald with the McFarlands also on the bus. They entered Mexico at the same time and have the same destination as Oswald and the McFarlands. Unless of course the theory is correct and these actions never took place.

    The question that keeps coming to my mind is whether the evidence of Oswald being on this bus as told by the witnesses is a complete fabrication to corroborate fraudulent physical evidence (Flecha Rojas baggage list CE2482) or the truthful telling of information they actually experienced. Since there is little if any evidence for Oswald having been anywhere in Mexico other than what was offered by the Mexican government and CIA/FBI documents; the concept that Mumford and the McFarlands were provided with a plausible story of their encounter with Oswald is not far-fetched. And it appears that Albert Osborne, the man the WCR states sat next to Oswald on the trip from Nuevo Laredo to Mexico City, did not make that statement at all. Bowen claims there are no other English speaking people on the bus. We find that while the evidence names BOWEN, the WCR only names Osborne while not once mentioning Bowen. WCR p733:

    CE2195 – Bowen, who happens to be on the same bus to Mexico City as Osborne (hmm) claims that even after seeing a photo of OSWALD, he does not ID him as the man next to him and proceeds to provide a detailed description of said man in direct contradiction to the aforementioned witnesses.

    On the Nuevo Laredo through Monterrey to Mexico City leg of the trip we get yet more confirmation that this is the same man all along, as Bowen also claims this person traveled with only a small brown zippered bag which was parroted by hotel staff as well as Ms. Mumford and Winston. Yet Bowen/Osborne had told us that is was NOT OSWALD carrying this bag and making this trip. How can they both be correct and why would Bowen/Osborne do that if he was “helping?”

    Well my friends, we have seen time and time again where witness statements supporting the “official story” and what actually occurred rarely matched. At this point we can be reliably sure that incriminating evidence (self-incriminating especially) against Oswald brings with it asterisks, footnotes, side-stepping and confusion. In our situation where the Evidence IS the Conspiracy, nothing can be accepted at face value.

    We repeatedly bring up the single piece of luggage since Oswald is known to have left New Orleans with 2 suitcases while not a single witness; no matter how hard the FBI tried; connects our Mexico Oswald with more than this single zippered bag. It is not stated he did NOT have an additional bag, there is only the late arrival of the suitcase from the Paine garage as evidence and the intimations of these few key witnesses. Even the library books returned on October 3rd in New Orleans add to the mystery, since on October 3rd it is claimed that Oswald was in a Dallas YMCA after traveling the many, many hours it takes from Mexico City.

    BOWEN/OSBORNE AND THE PASSENGER ID PROBLEM

    McFarland interview:

    Q. Did you see Oswald speaking to any other persons?

    A. Yes. We observed him conversing occasionally with two young Australian women who boarded the bus on the evening of September 26th at Monterrey, Mexico. He also conversed occasionally with an elderly man who sat in the seat next to him for a time.

    (As we will show later in this article; McFarland’s statement about “the evening” corroborates Mumford’s 7:30 del Norte departure time from her testimony and conflicts with the departure time for the Flecha Rojas bus from Monterrey)

    Yet, while it was obvious that these descriptions referred to the same man, the WCR attempts to separate Bowen from Osborne so as to claim that is was BOWEN and not Osborne on the bus. What we find in fact is the WCR claiming it was OSBORNE and not BOWEN on the bus to Mexico City with Oswald even though there is no record in evidence which refers to BOWEN as Mr. OSBORNE and as the man on that bus.

    (A thorough look at Bowen/Osborne can be found here: http://hobrad.angelfire.com/osborne.html. “From Grimsby with Love The Travels of ‘the Reverend’ Albert Alexander Osborne” by Ronald L. Ecker June, 2005.) The photo on the left was his 1963 passport photo. On the right is from an unknown date.

    Mr. BALL. Now, who were the English-speaking people that you mentioned? Will you describe them?

    Miss MUMFORD. There was a young English couple who were traveling down to the Yucatan to study the Indians and their way of life. There was an elderly English gentleman in his mid or late-sixties, I should imagine. He told us during the journey that he had lived on and off in Mexico for 25 years. Then there was the young Texan, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Patricia and myself.

    So what are we to make of this conflicting evidence? CE2195 devotes over 85 pages to the investigation of Bowen/Osborne the man identified by the WCR as the one sitting next to Oswald on his trip to from Nuevo Laredo to Mexico City. Yet we come to learn that the name BOWEN does not appear in the WC report and the evidence that places Osborne on the bus is the Flecha Rojas baggage manifest listing BOWEN with no reference to Osborne. It would appear yet again the FBI is trying to give the impression of two different people when there was only one, or at least make the distinction confusing without the rest of the investigation’s documents.

    It would seem that by default the WC report and evidence equates Bowen to Osborne as the same person even though they attempt to make it seem they are two different people for the McFarlands to identify. This same person seems to be identified by Mumford and the McFarlands as being on the same bus with them.

    Mr. BALL. But they showed you pictures of a man, did they not?

    Miss MUMFORD. Yes; they showed us two pictures the first time, one picture I was fairly certain was the same gentleman. The other picture. whom they said was the same man, I couldn’t give that description–I couldn’t say definitely that it was him or even the same man. The second time the FBI official showed me a photo was some weeks or months later, and I could make a definite what is the word I want?

    Mr. BALL. Identification?

    Miss MUMFORD. Identification of that picture.

    Mr. BALL. What did you tell the agent?

    Miss MUMFORD. Well, that third picture on the second time he had showed it to me, was, I was certain, the same man

    SIDE TRIP…

    One of the strange “coincidences” related to Osborne is the name on the receipt for 1000 FPCC flyers from June 4, 1963 CE1410 – Osborne FPCC. Oswald had just started working at Reily Coffee across the street in early May. The printing on the rough draft appears like printing we’ve seen associated with Oswald yet it was not Oswald who dropped off the order, paid, or picked it up. The crossing back and forth between block and script writing will have to be saved for another Evidence Is the Conspiracy article.

    If this is the same Osborne, it may explain why BOWEN/OSBORNE tries to distance himself from OSWALD. One would think though, that if Osborne is in the know regarding FPCC in New Orleans, he would corroborate the McFarland’s and Mumford, not contradict them.

    WHAT THEY KNEW & WHEN

    WCD 78 p1 tells us that by Nov 23th the FBI had information that the Mexican Officials were able to find and relay information from the “official records” of the Mexican government which they had been alerted to no later than the early morning of Nov 23rd. A few pages later the FBI tells us that according to their Mexican confidential sources, Oswald was on the Transportes Frontera bus #340 leaving Mexico City at 1pm Oct 2nd. This information not only turns out to be wrong but specifically created by a Mexican Presidential Staff Official Arturo Bosch in front of the bus line personnel. (Part 3 will delve deeper into the evidence related to Mr. Bosch)

    While we may compliment the FBI for not immediately claiming on Dec 5th the information in the following report was accurate, we are still left wondering at whose request the evidence collected was changed to reflect that Oswald was definitely on the Frontera bus based on “confidential Mexican sources.”

    .

    How about a simple passenger list or record of ticket purchases which would include all passengers regardless of baggage? Well my friends, we will begin to see a pattern emerging related to all the Mexican sourced evidence. Not only were originals taken but so were the file duplicates at the home office. The FBI likes to use the term “borrowed.” We will also see how these early erroneous reports of Oswald associated with the Frontera bus line were in fact created for that purpose after Mexican officials are somehow able to locate all these MASTER records within a day of the assassination.

    On March 19th and 24th we learn that the original and duplicate copy of the Sept 26-27th PASSENGER MANIFEST/LIST (not the baggage list) had been borrowed by Mexican Investigators and not returned.

    WCD 1084 p106:

    Again in April we learn that yet another confidential source tries to get these passenger lists FROM THE MONTERREY Flecha Rojas terminal only to be informed they too were “picked up” “shortly after the assassination.”

    WCD979 p2:

    As reports relating to Mexico poured into FBI HQ during March and April 1964 it appears as if any and all evidence related to this trip and these specific buses are taken from their original source locations within hours or “shortly after the assassination.” One has to wonder how the Mexican authorities knew so quickly where to look, and which documents needed “review and analysis.”

    In the next part of this series we will show that, other than the October cables from Mexico City, which do not mention any form of transportation or dates of travel, there is no communication in evidence which relates these days of travel or any attempt to ascertain how & when this travel occurred. That is until the morning of Nov 23rd.

    The “results of investigation” mentioned in Kemmy’s report which they refer to below is that they are NEGATIVE concerning any corroboration for Oswald entering or leaving Mexico which is recapped in the summary of WCD 188 on page 1.

    Pages 10-12 of FBI Agent Kemmy’s report (WCD 188 p10) is the typed version of CE2482 – the Flecha Rojas BAGGAGE list with Bowen, OSWALT, and McFarland.

    This is the synopsis from page 1 of WCD-188 (WCD 188 Summary) which, like all the Mexican documents states the result of investigation to corroborate Oswald on ANY mode of transportation into and out of Mexico as NEGATIVE.

    In both CE2532 and CE2121 p32 (the NY Times account of the trip) we find the FBI concluding that this Oswald traveling as H.O. LEE, took a 2:30pm 9/26 Flecha Rojas bus from Nuevo Laredo to Mexico City.

    The 2 to 2:30 departure time for this Flecha Rojas bus from Nuevo Laredo conflicts with the next bus’ departure time from Monterrey as we will show shortly.

    One also has to wonder about the reference in WCD 762’s title page (WCD 762 p2) which claims that the BAGGAGE list is now the PASSENGER MANIFEST CE2482 – Flecha Rojas Baggage List given that we learn that this PASSENGER list was never found along with the reasons why.

    WCD 1084, from June 10, 1964, is a 200 page report that reinforces among many things that these records were not available, nor were the duplicates at HQ. WCD 1084 continues with ALEJANDRO SAUCEDO describing what he experienced not long after the assassination when these unknown authorities take their desired records.

    WCD 1084 p106-108 In Summary:

    -Alejandro SAUCEDO, manager Flecha Rojas bus terminal Mexico City, tells us that “soon after the assassination” the Flecha Rojas evidence was taken by “unidentified investigators” of the Mexican Government. He felt the name LEE HARVEY OSWALD did not appear thereon.

    -SAUCEDO claims these men were only interested in the info related to bus #516 on Sept 26th.

    -These men tell SAUCEDO that THEY WERE JUST AT FRONTERA where they located the PASSENGER list for Oswald’s departure from Mexico City.*

    -Mr. SAUCEDO, as told by the same informant: T-12, added on April 2nd that the two men who took the evidence were Policia Federal Judicial (PJF) and that they already had Flecha Rojas duplicate from Nuevo Laredo.

    -On March 24th, a week or so earlier, the DFS Assistant Director BARRIOS informs us that the DFS did NOT conduct an investigation with regards to Oswald’s travel. *We come to find only a few pages prior in this same report that the FRONTERA evidence was “corrected” by Arturo Bosch of the Mexican Presidential Staff. WCD 1084 p103:

    -Rather than BARRIOS looking in the direction of the PJF for these records, he asks the Mexican INS to find the docs. As of May 1, 1964 the Mexican INS was making every effort to find them. Other than the Baggage Manifest which incorrectly gives Bowen 2 seats, no Flecha Rojas documentation has ever been offered.

    WCD 1084 p106, 107 and 108:

    Please note that “shortly after the assassination” as mentioned in most of the statements related to these travel documents, the “Policia Federal Judicial” appear at the Flecha Rojas terminal specifically looking for bus 516 of Sept 26th. How again would they have known?

    In addition, p.108 states that on April 9, 1964 these passenger lists were made available on instructions from SAUCEDO. In the next sentence we are told that the passenger list for bus 516 on Sept 26 was NOT located when it was later looked for in its appropriate location. We wonder how it was so easy to find all these other bus passengers to ask questions about Oswald yet impossible to find Oswald’s records.

    Also in the next chapter, we will be looking into the actual ticket stubs offered as evidence for Oswald’s Monterrey to Nuevo Laredo portion of the trip. Stubs found by Marina in a batch of personal belongings which were at the Paine’s on Nov 22nd. These were found in August, 1964. Evidence will be presented to show that these items are complete forgeries and created solely to incriminate Marina’s dead husband.

    US EVIDENCE OF US TRAVEL

    So what US records would there have been to show Lee Harvey/Henry Oswald left the US via the Laredo-Nuevo Laredo bridge shown on page 1 of this paper? What physical evidence can be offered from strictly US sources to confirm Oswald traveled from Houston to Laredo, crossed the bridge leaving the US and had or purchased a ticket for the Nuevo Laredo to Mexico City portion of the trip?

    As we recall from part 2a a Mr. Hammett from Continental Trailways claims to recall someone looking like Oswald coming to his counter around midnight asking about the Houston-Laredo trip. He returns at about 1:30am to complete purchase of this ticket even though he could purchase a ticket to take him all the way to Mexico City. (when Mr. Green first offers bus schedules out of NOLA he mentions the only two buses which originate in NOLA and go all the way thru to Laredo…)

    It was reported in Agent Dalrymple’s report of Feb 20, 1964 that a bus ticket from Houston to Laredo was purchased between Sept 24 and Sept 26 as a result of an interview with Mr. Hammett showing him the auditor’s stub for ticket #112230 and photos of OSWALD and of a small zippered bag; there was no mention of another suitcase. (WCD640 p5):

    The information regarding ticket # 112230 is discovered on January 9, 1964 and is referred to in WCD640 as “Previous investigation at the Continental Bus Terminal in Houston” (same link as above).

    WCD332 p4:

    We also come to learn that like the New Orleans purchase, the Houston purchase could have been for the entire trip if desired, not just for a small portion of the trip. This evidence suggests that our Oswald had to purchase yet another ticket in Nuevo Laredo for the Flecha Rojas or Transporte del Norte bus to Mexico City thru Monterrey. The WCR as quoted above states that Oswald was on the Flecha Rojas bus at 2:30pm from Nuevo Laredo to Monterrey then on to Mexico City based solely on the baggage manifest and the statements of Ms. Mumford and the McFarlands. The WCR also states he crossed into Mexico between 1:30 and 2pm. Below is a current “travel agency” in Mexico where anyone crossing the bridge can purchase a bus ticket to destinations in Mexico; you can even see it says “DEL NORTE” under the window.

    In essence, the way the WCR tells the story of the trip, Oswald, instead of purchasing a 3 or 4-part ticket from New Orleans to Mexico City, supposedly buys a NOLA to Houston ticket on bus #5121 leaving at 12:20pm because it is the only bus which arrives in Houston with enough time for the second. In Houston he supposedly buys a ticket to Laredo, again when he could have bought a ticket for the entire trip to Mexico City, yet based on the testimony of the Twifords he would have arrived in Houston well after Mrs. Twiford says he called. The evidence for the Houston to Laredo trip consists of the ticket stub from the only Houston to Laredo ticket purchased between Sept 24 and Sept 26, and the word of the McFarlands. McFarland affidavit:

    Q. When and where did you first see the man later identified as Lee Harvey Oswald?

    A. We changed buses at Houston, Texas, at. 2:00 a.m. September 26th and it was probably about 6:00 a.m. after it became light that we first saw him.

    Something a bit strange about the affidavit is in response to the 2 questions about checking his luggage; they are identical. (One of the distinct possibilities is that this Oswald was not on the bus to Mexico City and that the information provided by Mumford and the McFarlands; which contradicts Bowen/Osborne as to whether Oswald was even on that bus; was provided to them or written for them in advance, so it could add to Oswald’s pile of conveniently incriminating evidence). Can we consider this a typo when H.O. LEE’s “luggage” was such a problem for the FBI?

    Q. Did Oswald check any luggage with the bus company so it would have been carried underneath the bus in the baggage compartment?

    A. We never actually saw him check any luggage in with the bus company. But in the bus station at Mexico City the last we saw of him was waiting at the luggage check-out place obviously to collect some luggage.

    Q. What kind of luggage was he carrying?

    A. We did not notice but presume he must have been carrying some hand luggage.

    Q. Did he check any suitcases or other packages at a place en route to Mexico City or otherwise dispose of them?

    A. We never actually saw him check any luggage in with the bus company, but in the bus station at Mexico City the last we saw of him was waiting at the luggage check-out place obviously to collect some luggage.

    Obviously.

    This statement rings about as true as Michael Paine’s declaration about the rifle being in his garage. It HAD to be there since it was so obvious. What is visually obvious and what is reality does not often mesh especially when incriminating evidence is needed.

    Finally, in Nuevo Laredo, he MUST buy a ticket on the Flecha Rojas bus to Mexico City; unless he had purchased one in Laredo for which, of course, there is no evidence. (Flecha Rojas is the sister company to Continental in Mexico while del Norte and Greyhound share the same type of relationship) Once again witnesses MUST be wrong about what they remember. Bowen/Osborne states that Oswald was NOT the person sitting next to him and Ms. Mumford tells us that she and Ms. Winston took the Transporte del NORTE bus to Monterrey and then Mexico City. Mumford Testimony:

    Miss MUMFORD. Well, we traveled by bus on a scheme which allowed us to travel on Trailways buses for a period of 3 months for a certain amount. We just got on and off at various places we wanted to see: For instance, Washington, D.C.; Miami, where we stayed a week; then we went across to New Orleans, down through Texas to Laredo, and from Laredo we crossed the border also by bus and went to Monterrey.

    We spent one day in Monterrey and left by bus at 7:30 p.m. at Monterrey, and it was on that bus that we met Lee Harvey Oswald. (NOTE: Let’s remember what McFarland said… the Australian girls boarded the bus in the evening of Sept 26)

    Miss MUMFORD. Well, the ticket we had on this deal enabled us only to travel in the States, not in Mexico. So, we bought the ticket on the bus at Laredo and that enabled us to stop off in Monterrey. But the ticket was from Laredo to Mexico City.

    Mr. BALL. And from what company did you buy the ticket?

    Miss MUMFORD. As far as I can remember, it was a bus company called Transporter del Norte.

    Mr. BALL. Now, you got on the bus at Monterrey on the evening of September 26 at 7:30 p.m., you just told me?

    Miss MUMFORD. Yes.

    Mr. BALL. And what was the company that operated that bus, do you know?

    Miss MUMFORD. That was also Transporter del Norte.

    Miss MUMFORD. Oswald was the first one we spoke to. He left his seat and came down to the back of the bus to speak to us.

    Mr. BALL. That was after the bus had left Monterrey?

    Miss MUMFORD. Yes… Then we arrived in the Mexico City bus station and he didn’t speak to us, attempt to speak to us at all. He was one of the first off the bus and the last I remember seeing him he was standing across the end of the room.

    WCD1245 p274 is the beginning of the typed version passenger list #11889 for Flecha Rojas bus #516 for passengers who ONLY got on in Monterrey (i.e. Mumford and Winston). Their names, as expected, do not appear on this list.

    Except as we just read, Mumford claims it was a del Norte bus leaving Monterrey at 7:30pm on which they met “Texas” aka Lee Oswald. If bus #516 leaves Nuevo Laredo at 2pm and it is 135 miles to Monterrey on a bus that travels no more than 40-50 mph it appears impossible for bus #516 to arrive in Monterrey, load and unload passengers, and leave by 3:30pm only 1.5 hours later.

    The evidence shows that 1) Mumford claims she was on a 7:30pm del Norte bus out of Monterrey, that 2) the 516 Flecha Rojas bus thru Monterrey leaves at 3:30pm AND 3) the originals and duplicates of these manifests were taken “shortly after the assassination.” This adds further corroboration that the person claiming to be OSWALD was also not on the Flecha Rojas bus leaving Nuevo Laredo at 2-2:30pm or the Flecha Rojas bus leaving Monterrey at 3:30 on September 26th. The FBI once again has no physical evidence of how this Oswald gets from Nuevo Laredo to Mexico City and the physical evidence they do offer IS the conspiracy.

    CE 2534-p731 XXV was an attempt by the Secret Service (Inspector Kelley asking SAIC Sorrels on AUGUST 27, 1964) to see what the schedules of Continental buses from DALLAS to Laredo and for HOUSTON to Laredo.

    Note: AUGUST 1964?? We saw above how the FBI dated a Sept 1964 report to Dec 16, 1963. With as much evidence as I’ve posted that is dated between Nov 22nd and April 30th which spells out which buses, when and where; I find it disconcerting to see this ongoing “Oswald’s travel to and from Mexico” investigation still producing evidence as the Report is being printed. The trouble, and what the FBI and WCR compilers banked upon, is that the only way to become aware of this conflicting evidence is to have it all spread out before you. By spreading the evidence across thousands of documents, most of which was never included in the report of the Hearings/Exhibits section published later, it would take years and years before these conflicts could be presented easily as in a paper like this.

    Oswald’s name was witnessed being added to the Flecha Rojas baggage manifest after the fact and that Oswald may or may not have even been in Mexico at all is a realistic possibility. The other realistic possibility is that as records showed, this person entered and left Mexico in an “auto.” Since Oswald was known not to drive or have a license, and that the trip to Mexico had the very specific result of implicating (or trying to implicate ala Alvarado and to some extent the hijacked testimony of Pedro Gutierrez Valencia) Oswald in the assassination, he was either helped into and out of Mexico suggesting a conspiracy; he drove himself and therefore the FBI knew very little about this man, he traveled in and out of Mexico by some other manner which left no trace OR the evidence was created by instruction to certain criteria, certain dates, certain activities.

    As we’ve shown, the original and duplicate of the Flecha Rojas passenger list for bus 516 from Nuevo Laredo to Mexico City were taken from both the Mexico City and Nuevo Laredo Flecha Rojas records “shortly after the assassination” by Mexican Authorities. Again I must ask myself, “David, if the information related to these BUS trips was not known by the FBI until Dec 6th at the very earliest, (a Dec 5, 1963 teletype from San Antonio to Hoover stated that, “Investigation to date has failed to establish subject returned to US on October 3 last or entered Mexico on September 26 last”), how did these Mexican Authorities know to “borrow” the Flecha Rojas baggage manifest for bus #516 leaving Nuevo Laredo at 2pm on the 26th as early as the morning of November 23rd?

    Well, the truth of the matter is found in WCD 462 p3-4 dated January 29, 1964. Mr. Kline, Assistant Agent in Charge US Customs, Laredo TX receives a call from LESTER JOHNSON, Assistant Commissioner of Customs in Washington DC on the morning of November 23rd and is directed to inquire about the alleged trip by OSWALD on Sept 26th and his return on October 3rd.

    We will investigate the activities and evidence related to the directions given the US INS in Laredo, TX from November 22-23 along with a more detailed analysis of the conflicting evidence regarding Oswald’s leaving Mexico and arriving in Dallas. We will show that the ticket in evidence from Mexico City to Laredo, for which there is exchange evidence onto a Greyhound bus thru San Antonio to Dallas, is a forgery and no such ticket was ever used or issued by Oswald or anyone else.

    Since so much has been written about the transcripts and lack of Oswald photos from Sept 27th thru the 1st of Oct, I will not be going into the subject in deep detail. I will instead attempt to show that this travel evidence is all a fabrication like the phone calls of Saturday the 28th, that there was no Oswald on these buses at all but someone unrelated given credit for being him, and this traveling ghost was not the same person who the evidence says called and visited embassies during those 3 days.


    The Evidence IS the Conspiracy, Table of Contents