9

“His Mood Was Bad”

The day before Marina left with Ruth to return to Dallas, the Oswalds’ landlord, Jesse Garner, saw Lee packing Paine’s station wagon. “I asked him if he was moving, since I was concerned that he owed about 15 days’ rent,” recalled Garner. “Oswald told me he was not leaving but that his wife was going to Texas to have the baby after which she was going to return to New Orleans.”1 Lee had no intention of paying the rent. He needed every cent for his trip to Mexico. Some have suggested it is odd that since he was so anxious to get to Cuba, he did not leave immediately after Marina’s departure. But he had to stay in New Orleans until the morning of Wednesday, September 25, when he could collect his $33 unemployment check, the next to last he was scheduled to receive.

Oswald’s next-door neighbor Eric Rogers saw him Tuesday, the twenty-fourth, the day after Marina left, running to catch a bus across the street.² He was carrying two bags, a small zippered one and his Marine Corps duffel, and he asked the bus driver for directions to the Greyhound bus station.³ Oswald was making the same preparations he had in Dallas in April before he moved to New Orleans. He deposited his bags at the station, not wanting to be burdened with them for the errands he planned for the next morning, and then returned to the Magazine Street apartment to spend his last night in the city.⁴ Lee left the apartment in the early-morning hours of Wednesday, September 25. Jesse Garner noticed the apartment seemed quiet. When she checked it later that morning, Oswald was gone.5

At the Lafayette Square substation, Oswald picked up his unemployment-compensation check and mailed a change-ofaddress card, postmarked at 11:00 A.M., listing Ruth Paine’s address in Irving, Texas. At a Winn-Dixie on Magazine Street he cashed his $33 check, and was then ready to leave his native New Orleans. At 12:20 P.M. he likely boarded a Continental Trailways bus, No. 5121, bound for Houston.⁶ Late that night the telephone rang at the Houston home of Estelle and Horace Twiford. Estelle answered and it was Lee Oswald calling her husband.⁷* Horace Twiford was the national committeeman of the Socialist Labor party for the state of Texas. On September 11, he had sent Oswald a copy of his organization’s Weekly People, after being notified by the New York Labor party of Lee’s request for literature. Twiford was not at home when Oswald called, but his wife wrote the message on some scrap paper. It indicated Oswald was a member of Fair Play for Cuba, that he had some ideas he wanted to discuss with her husband, and that he had only a few hours before he left for Mexico.⁸

Less than four hours later, at 2:35 A.M., Oswald boarded Continental Trailways bus No. 5133 in Houston and left for Laredo, Texas.⁹ He was excited to begin the last leg of his trip, and he felt he had no reason to be secretive any longer since he would soon be in Cuba and permanently away from the U.S. The usually introverted Oswald was surprisingly talkative to other passengers, even bragging about the purpose of his trip. A British couple, Meryl and Dr. John McFarland, had also boarded at Houston. They initially slept on the bus, but when they awoke around 6:00 A.M., they engaged Oswald in a conversation. He told them he was traveling from New Orleans to Cuba via Mexico City, because traveling to Cuba directly from the U.S. was against American law.10 He bragged that “he was the secretary of the New Orleans branch of the Fair Play for Cuba Organization, and that he was on his way to Cuba to see Castro if he could.”¹¹

Oswald crossed into Mexico, at Nuevo Laredo, between 1:30 and 2:00 P.M. on Thursday, almost twelve hours after he left Houston.¹² Mexican immigration official Helio Tuexi Maydon stamped Oswald’s tourist card, and at 2:15 he boarded another bus, no. 516 of the Flecha Roja line, for an overnight trip to Mexico City, scheduled to arrive mid-morning Friday, September 27.* The final leg of his trip covered 750 miles and cost $5.71. At one stop along the route, Monterrey, two young Australian women, Pamela Mumford and Patricia Winston, boarded for the remainder of the trip. The four seats at the front of the bus were taken by the McFarlands, Oswald, and an elderly Englishman, Albert Osborne, a traveling preacher.† Mumford and Winston could only find seats in the rear of the bus. After some time had passed, Oswald walked to the rear and began talking to them. “He said he had heard us speaking English and wondered where we came from,” remembered Mumford.¹³ During their extended conversation, although he never introduced himself by name, Oswald told them that while he was from Fort Worth, he had been in Japan while in the Marines and was sorry he had never been to Australia. Trying to impress them as a world traveler, he said he had been a student in Russia and “at this stage he showed us his passport that had a Russian stamp on it … and he didn’t mention his Russian wife at all. But we noticed he had a gold wedding ring on his left hand.” Before the end of trip, the man they called Texas told them that “on previous trips to Mexico City he had stayed at a place called the Hotel Cuba, and he said he was staying there and recommended it for clean and cheap living.”14 They did not take him up on his suggestion. At the bus stops Oswald ate alone, and they noticed he was lost with the Spanish menus. He just pointed to something on the menu and had to eat a full meal each stop instead of a snack. It made them doubt his claims about being familiar with Mexico.¹⁵ When they finally arrived at the Mexico City bus station, Oswald dropped his friendly veneer and quickly left by himself.* His story to Mumford and Winston about staying at the Hotel Cuba was another of his lies, and Oswald spent nearly an hour checking the rates at the more than forty cheap hotels near the bus depot before selecting the Hotel del Comercio, only four blocks from the terminal.¹⁶ He signed his real name to the hotel register (confirmed later by handwriting experts) and settled into the spartan room No. 18, with bath, at $1.28 per day.†

Establishing Oswald’s whereabouts from the time Marina left New Orleans on September 23 until he arrived in Mexico City on the morning of Friday, September 27, is important because other witnesses are often cited to claim that Oswald was somewhere other than on the bus heading toward Mexico.

Mrs. Lee Dannelly, assistant chief of the administrative division in the Selective Service headquarters in Austin, Texas, was positive that Lee Oswald visited her in the afternoon on Wednesday, September 25. She claimed the young man called himself Harvey Oswald, said he was registered in the Selective Service in Florida, had just come from the governor’s office, and was trying to correct his dishonorable discharge from the Marines.17 A waitress at a nearby coffee shop, Florence Norman, said Oswald had stopped in for several cups of coffee on the same day he visited Mrs. Dannelly.¹⁸ Since Oswald could not be in Austin and also on the bus on its way to Houston, this discrepancy raises the specter of an Oswald imposter. If there was a second “Oswald” it might be evidence of conspiracy.

The Oswald imposter issue is critical from September 1963 through the assassination. After the assassination, scores of people came forward believing they had seen Oswald at places other than where he was (and the same applied to Jack Ruby), almost all of them well intentioned but mistaken. People placed themselves with Oswald from Hawaii to Florida, from bowling alleys to dance parties. Instead of dismissing the sightings of other “Oswalds” at locations where he physically could not be, critics say it is evidence of a “double Oswald,” and sometimes even a “triple Oswald.”*

What of Dannelly’s claim that a Harvey Oswald visited her? She said he had been to the governor’s office, but a records check for a six-month period shows no Oswald in the mandatory registration books or any signature that matched Oswald’s writing.¹⁹ Dannelly claimed another worker had brought Oswald to her desk, but when asked, the other employee, Jesse Skrivanek, did not remember anyone who looked like Oswald or anyone using that name.²⁰ Others in the Austin Selective Service office swore they never saw him or heard the name before the assassination.21 Actually, there were fifteen Oswalds in the Austin office files, but Dannelly refused to admit she might be mistaken. All of the facts Mrs. Dannelly recounted about Oswald in her story were available locally in the media before she told anyone of the alleged visit. The FBI discovered that the waitress who claimed she too saw Oswald turned out to have Wednesday, the day of the alleged Oswald appearance, as her day off.²² None of the other employees at the coffee shop recalled ever seeing Oswald or hearing of anyone with that name before the assassination.²³

Another witness who claimed to have seen Oswald elsewhere at the time he was traveling to Mexico is Sylvia Odio. Summers calls her testimony “the strongest human evidence.”²⁴ Sylvia Meagher dubs it “the proof of the plot.”²⁵ Robert Groden and Harrison Livingstone write that Odio is “among the strongest witnesses to conspiracy in the case ….”²⁶ According to Odio, three men visited her Dallas apartment near 9:00 P.M., near the end of September. Her sister answered the door, and the men claimed to be members of JURE, the Junta Revolucionaria, an anti-Castro group that Odio had helped form several months earlier in Puerto Rico.²⁷* Two were Cubans, “the greasy … kind of low Cubans, not educated at all,” recalled Odio.²⁸ She later said they “looked very much like Mexicans.” One of the Cubans said his name was Leopoldo and asked if she was in the underground, and she said no. “And he said, ‘We wanted you to meet this American. His name is Leon Oswald.’ He repeated it twice,” recalled Odio.²⁹† Then they introduced him as someone very interested in the Cuban cause. Leon said very little, “just a few little words in Spanish, trying to be cute … like ‘Hola,’” she said. The men said they had just come from New Orleans and were in a rush because they were on their way to either Miami or Puerto Rico.30 They left in a red car.

The next day Leopoldo telephoned her. According to Odio, “He said, ‘What do you think of the American?’ And I said, ‘I didn’t think anything.’ And he said, ‘You know our idea is to introduce him to the underground in Cuba, because he is great, he is kind of nuts.’ … He [Leon Oswald] told us we don’t have any guts, you Cubans, because President Kennedy should have been assassinated after the Bay of Pigs, and some Cubans should have done that, because he was the one that was holding the freedom of Cuba actually.… He said he had been a Marine … and would be the kind of man that could do anything like … killing Castro. He repeated several times he was an expert shotman [sic]. And he said, ‘We probably won’t have anything to do with him. He is kind of loco.’”³¹ Odio said the conversation made her nervous and she soon ended it, and never heard from or saw any of the three men again until after the assassination, when she claimed to realize that Leon Oswald was the man charged with assassinating President Kennedy.

The House Select Committee’s report on Odio concluded her “testimony is essentially credible” and “there is a strong probability that one of the men was or appeared to be Lee Harvey Oswald.”³²* The conspiracy critics cite the testimony of Odio’s sister, Annie, to support her story. They also refer to a letter Odio wrote to her father before the assassination, in which she discussed the visit.

A reexamination of the Odio story, however, as well as of her credibility, casts doubts on its accuracy. Annie Odio cannot corroborate key parts of her sister’s story because she did not hear the American introduced as “Leon Oswald” or the telephone conversation from Leopoldo the following day.³³ As for the preassassination letter to her father, which no longer exists, Odio says she wrote the names of the two Cubans but did not mention the name “Leon Oswald.” She was not even sure if she mentioned that an American was in the group.³⁴

But there is much stronger evidence that the visitor was not Oswald. Odio could not positively identify him when shown photos during her Warren Commission testimony. She said, “I think this man was the one that was in my apartment. I am not too sure of that picture. He didn’t look like that.”35 She said he had a small stubble of beard growth around his mouth, almost “a little moustache,” and another thing that “confuses me is the lips that did not look like the same man.”³⁶ But more problematical than the shaky physical identification was the time element she pinpointed. She was certain the men had visited before Tuesday, October 1, because on September 30 she moved to a different apartment.³⁷ Her sister was living with some American friends and came on the last weekend to help her pack for the move. According to Odio, her sister had arrived on either Thursday, September 26, or Friday, the twenty-seventh. By the time the three men arrived, Odio and her sister had “already started to pack to go” and there were boxes in the living room. Odio remembered she had worked the day the three visitors arrived, and since she did not work Saturday or Sunday, she said “it would be the 26th or the 27th, for sure.”³⁸ Starting on September 26, Oswald began his twenty-hour bus journey from Houston to Mexico City, where he arrived on the twenty-seventh. He did not return to the U.S. for seven days. It was physically impossible for Oswald to visit Odio in Dallas when she claims he did.

If it was not Oswald, then what of Odio’s story? Was there an imposter Oswald? There is no doubt that three men visited her, as her sister, Annie, confirms. The FBI thought it had solved the Odio mystery in 1964 when it found three men who might have visited her apartment near the end of September. Loran Hall, a prominent anti-Castroite, bore a marked resemblance to the man Odio described as the leader, Leopoldo. Hall told the FBI on September 16, 1964, that he was in Dallas soliciting funds during September 1963 and had been to the Odio apartment. He named his two companions as Lawrence Howard and William Seymour. The three of them had been arrested in Florida in December 1962, as part of the Kennedy administration’s crackdown on anti-Castro paramilitary operations.³⁹ Howard looked like the second of the Cubans/Mexicans described by Odio. But the most staggering coincidence was that Seymour, who spoke only a few words of Spanish, greatly resembled Oswald. Seymour also constantly wore a beard stubble, the same as what Odio described on “Leon.” However, four days later, September 20, 1964, Hall recanted his statement. Seymour and Howard also later denied they were at Odio’s apartment.40 When Odio was shown photos of the three and was asked if it was a case of mistaken identity, she stuck to her story and said she could not identify them.

But even if the visitors were Hall, Howard, and Seymour, what about the introduction of “Leon Oswald” and Odio’s explicit details of the following day’s telephone conversation about his being a Marine sharpshooter who thought President Kennedy should be dead? For a possible answer to this, Sylvia Odio herself has to be briefly examined. By the time of her Oswald story, she had a history of emotional problems. In Puerto Rico, where she had lived before moving to Dallas in March 1963, she had seen a psychiatrist over her fractious marriage. According to FBI reports, he decided she was unstable and unable, mentally or physically, to care for her children.⁴¹ A doctor who was called to treat her once for “an attack of nerves” discovered she had made it up to get the attention of her neighbors. He described her as a very mixed-up young lady, and was told by others that she had also been under psychiatric care while living in Miami, when she moved to the States in 1961.⁴²

In her divorce proceeding in 1963, she lost custody of her four children, because of charges of neglect and abandonment.⁴³ Near the time of her divorce, her friends recalled that she began having more “emotional problems,” suffering total blackouts “when reality got too painful to bear.”⁴⁴ In Dallas, she sought more extensive psychiatric help from Dr. Burton C. Einspruch. By the time of the assassination, she had been seeing him for more than seven months, at least weekly, sometimes more frequently.⁴⁵

Odio insists she told at least two people, before the assassination, that three men, including Oswald, had visited her apartment. One of the people she told was Lucille Connell. But when the FBI questioned her in 1964, Connell said that Odio only told her about Oswald after the assassination, and then said she not only knew Oswald, but he had given talks to groups of Cuban refugees in Dallas.46 The second person Odio contended she told before the assassination was her psychiatrist, Dr. Einspruch. When interviewed by the Warren Commission, Einspruch said that during the course of psychotherapy, Odio told him she had seen Oswald at several anti-Castro meetings, and that one of the meetings was held at her house. He made no mention of the three supposed visitors to the Odio apartment. When questioned in 1978 by the Select Committee, Einspruch did not mention Odio’s story of multiple Oswald sightings. Instead, he thought she had told him of the three visitors, but he did not remember hearing the name Leon or about the Leopoldo telephone call before the assassination.⁴⁷ He also conceded that Odio “has a degree of suggestibility that she could believe something that did not really transpire.”

On the day JFK was killed, Odio suffered one of her emotional seizures, passed out, and was hospitalized. “My mind was going around in circles,” she recalled.⁴⁸ Dr. Einspruch spoke to her the day after the assassination, while she was still hospitalized. That is when he first remembered that Odio, who had a tendency to “exaggerate,” connected her visitors to Oswald and the assassination “in a sort of histrionic way.”⁴⁹ One of Odio’s brothers, Cesar, described how his sister suffered a nervous breakdown after the Kennedy assassination, and that she still had the effects nearly a year later.⁵⁰ He blamed her divorce and the imprisonment of their parents in Cuba for her emotional collapse. Silvia Herrera, her mother-in-law, went so far as to say that Odio was an excellent actress who could intelligently fabricate such an episode if she wished.⁵¹ A confidential FBI informant, who was an Odio friend, told the Bureau “that one of her main difficulties [is] that she cannot rationalize herself to the fact that she is no longer the daughter of a wealthy individual who will grant her every request, and she will perform various actions in an attempt to become the center of attractions.”⁵² The informant advised the FBI that Odio’s family is “split in their opinion … some being of the opinion that she is almost crazy, and the others offering their condolences at her troubles and offering her assistance.”⁵³ Another friend confirmed to the FBI that Odio was extremely lonesome in Dallas, sought to gain attention from others, and had an excellent imagination and a tendency toward exhibitionism.54

One of the most unusual aspects of the Odio case is that though she thought she had met the assassin, she never contacted any government or law enforcement agency to tell her story.⁵⁵ Carlos Bringuier, the New Orleans anti-Castro leader who was arrested in a street fracas with Oswald, had met Odio once. He considers her failing to report the Oswald sighting a telling factor: “I believe it is possible that she was visited by someone—there were a lot of people with different organizations out there. But after the assassination, I believe her immediate reaction would have been the same as mine, to have jumped up and called the FBI and say, ‘Hey, that guy visited me!’ Instead [after being released from the hospital], she casually told a neighbor, and that neighbor told the FBI, and that’s the only reason it came out. That makes me suspicious of her story. It doesn’t sound right, and I know from my own personal experience on what I did and how I felt when I realized I had some contact with the man who killed the President of the United States. I heard the name Lee Harvey Oswald and I jumped from my seat. I didn’t finish my lunch—I called the FBI immediately. Maybe with all the news after the assassination she became confused and put Oswald’s face and name onto the person she actually met. I have seen this as a lawyer in criminal cases. There is an accident with four witnesses and they give four different versions and they all believe they are telling the truth, and could even pass a lie detector. She thinks she is telling the truth. I hate to say she is lying, but she is mistaken.”⁵⁶

Three men did visit Odio, probably on September 26 or 27, 1963. There is not a single piece of corroborating evidence, however, for her postassassination claim that one of the men was introduced as ‘Leon Oswald’ and that the next day one of the Cubans called to discuss a Marine sharpshooter and his Kennedy death threats.

While Odio thought she had been visited by Oswald in Texas, he was actually undergoing one of his most important encounters since he had tried to renounce his American citizenship in Moscow in 1959. At the Cuban embassy, it was a typical Friday morning for Silvia Duran, the young Mexican woman who worked as the secretary to the Cuban consul, Eusebio Azcue.57* Oswald arrived before noon. Duran remembers him as tentative, but once he discovered she spoke English, he seemed more relaxed. In a monologue that lasted almost fifteen minutes, he proceeded to tell her he was going to the USSR but that on the way he wanted a transit visa to stop in Cuba, for at least two weeks. He then began placing documents on her desk, each accompanied with a short explanation. Duran remembered his Russian residency and work papers, membership cards in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and the American Communist party, † correspondence with Communist organizations in the U.S., and the clippings from his arrest in New Orleans.⁵⁸ He told her he expected to be promptly issued a visa since he “was a friend of the Cuban revolution,” and that he wanted to leave by September 30, only three days later. His Russian-born wife was waiting to hear from him in New York, he claimed.⁵⁹ Duran, an admitted Marxist, took a liking to Oswald. While his way of making a visa request was unusual, he seemed sincere. Procedurally, Oswald should have begun filling out a lengthy application, but instead Duran called on Eusebio Azcue to see if he might expedite the process for the young American.

Azcue recalled: “She then calls upon me to see whether I, upon examination of those documents, can proceed to issue the visa immediately. I answered negatively. The documents that he submits are not enough.… I at that time tell him … I must request authorization from the Cuban government. And at that point he agrees to proceed to fill the application out in order to process the visa.”60 Oswald, hoping to be received as a comrade in arms, could not have been pleased by Azcue’s refusal to grant an immediate visa. Duran helped him fill out the application, and told him he needed to return with passport-size photographs. Oswald left to get the pictures at a nearby shop recommended by Duran.

When he returned to the Cuban consulate, Duran helped him complete the remainder of the application and stapled photographs to the original and five carbon copies. At that point, she informed him that the fastest way for him to get a visa to visit Cuba would be to obtain Soviet permission first to visit the USSR. While he had been gone, Duran “semi-officially” called the Soviet embassy to see whether she could facilitate his application. The staff was noncommittal but indicated the process could take four months.⁶¹ Oswald began protesting loudly about the extensive paperwork and insisting on his right to get a visa for Cuba immediately.⁶² Again, consul Azcue walked out of his office to see about the commotion. Azcue also told Oswald that if he had a Soviet visa, he could grant Oswald a fifteen-day visit for Cuba without having to contact the Cuban government. However, without a Soviet visa, Azcue reminded Oswald, he would have to go through the normal procedures, which could take two to three weeks.⁶³ Duran remembered Oswald looked angry, and became so noisy that the new Cuban consul, Alfredo Mirabal Diaz, who was scheduled to replace Azcue within a few months, also came out of his office to see what was causing the disturbance. Oswald demanded to use the telephone to call the Soviet embassy.*

“I did not know English,” said Mirabal, “… and asked my colleague, Azcue, … who told me the visitor was in need of an urgent visa, that he was in a great hurry to travel to Cuba.”⁶⁴ He told Duran that his Mexican tourist visa was only valid for a few more days, and feeling sorry for him, she wrote her name and the embassy’s telephone number on a piece of paper, in case he needed further assistance or advice.⁶⁵

When he left the Cuban compound, Oswald quickly walked two short blocks to the Soviet embassy. Once he arrived, he approached the sentry at the entrance to the compound and demanded to see someone from the consulate.66 It was not every day that a young American who had a rudimentary grasp of Russian, and had lived in the USSR for nearly three years, walked into the Mexico City embassy. Oswald was taken to the consul’s office and joined there by Valeriy Vladimirovich Kostikov, a KGB agent operating under the diplomatic cover of a consul corps officer. Kostikov was soon joined by another KGB agent, Oleg Maximovich Nechiporenko.*

Oswald spoke Russian, and again presented his documents, announcing he was a former defector who was married to a Soviet citizen. He told the KGB officers that he was desperate to return to Russia, claiming that the FBI was harassing him because of his leftist politics and his Russian wife.⁶⁷ Trying to impress the Soviets that he was an important political activist, Oswald promised that he had interesting information to give them about his time in America. All they had to do was to grant him a visa and pay for his trip.⁶⁸ He regaled them about his work on behalf of Communism, and his efforts to infiltrate the anti-Castro Cubans and the right wing. He said it was urgent for him to get to Cuba so he could provide information that could help prevent future CIA attacks.⁶⁹ Ernesto Rodriguez, a former CIA contract agent, claimed that Oswald hinted he had information on American efforts to kill Castro.⁷⁰ It was vintage Oswald, a mixture of bluster and fabrication. The Soviet agents, having had no previous contact with him, did not know what to believe and what to dismiss. At the time, the KGB agents thought Oswald’s rantings were evidence of an “unstable personality.” The Soviet officers needed to contact headquarters in Moscow to determine whether Oswald was somebody to whom the KGB wanted to grant an immediate visa. When Nechiporenko put Oswald off until the next day, he informed Lee that the granting of a visa could take up to four monoths. “This won’t do for me,” Oswald shouted as he leaned over the table toward Nechiporenko. “This is not my case! For me, it’s all going to end in tragedy!”71 Oswald’s hands shook as he stuffed his documents into his jacket, and Nechiporenko observed Lee was “extremely agitated” as he left the Soviet compound.

The cable to Moscow about Oswald, from the KGB agents in Mexico City, ended up on the desk of the agent who had first handled the matter in 1959, Yuriy Nosenko. “Because I had no contact with the local KGB in Minsk, I did not know that Oswald had married or had a child. Then suddenly a special cable arrived from the Soviet embassy in Mexico City seeking our advice. Oswald was there and seeking a visa to reenter the USSR.

“I went to the chief of the department, and he looked and said, ‘Oh, this nut. Go back and have the First Department cable the embassy that we are not interested, but have them give him a diplomatic turnaway.’ Of course, Oswald didn’t know he was being turned away because he was nuts. We considered him nuts. It took us almost no time to say no to his request for a visa.”⁷²*

The following day, Saturday, September 28, Oswald returned to both embassies. According to Nechiporenko, it appears he first went to the Soviets to see if his visa was ready. He could then take it to the Cubans and get his fifteen-day transit visa. Initially, he spoke briefly to Pavel Antonovich Yatzkov, a KGB captain operating under the cover identity of a consular officer. “He stormed into my office and wanted me to introduce and recommend him to the Cubans,” recalled Yatzkov. “He told me that he had lived in the USSR. I told him that I would have to check before I could recommend him. He was nervous and his hands trembled …”73 Yatzkov was soon joined by Kostikov, who immediately noticed that Oswald “had the look of someone who was hounded and he was much more anxious than the day before.”⁷⁴ Oswald, in halting and poor Russian, retold the tale of how the FBI had ruined his life in the U.S. “Throughout the story,” recalled Kostikov, “Oswald was extremely agitated and clearly nervous, especially whenever he mentioned the FBI, but he suddenly became hysterical, began to sob, and through his tears cried, ‘I am afraid … they’ll kill me. Let me in!’”⁷⁵ Oswald then stuck his hand into the left pocket of his jacket and startled the KGB agents by withdrawing his .38 caliber revolver. He swung it in the air as he cried “See? This is what I must now carry to protect my life.”⁷⁶ As Oswald sobbed, Yatzkov seized the pistol and emptied its bullets just as Nechiporenko entered the room. “But if they don’t leave me alone, I’m going to defend myself,” Oswald said. The three KGB agents calmed Oswald. When they finally told him they would not issue a visa, his initial fury turned to depression. “His mood was bad,” said Nechiporenko. “Very poor.”⁷⁷ Nechiporenko, on directions from Moscow, was adamant that Oswald would have to go through normal procedures with the Soviet embassy in Washington.

After Oswald left the compound, the three KGB agents discussed their unusual visitor. They all agreed he was “psychotic.” “We were also of the unanimous opinion,” recalled Nechiporenko, “that if this was not a person suffering from mental disorders, then he was unbalanced at the very least or had an unstable constitution.”⁷⁸

Oswald left the Soviets determined to make a final assault on the Cubans. “We never had any individual that was so insistent or persistent,” recalled Azcue. “He always had a face which reflected unhappiness. He was never friendly … he was not pleasant.”⁷⁹ Oswald again demanded that he be issued a visa because of his political credentials, but the consul repeated it was impossible without a Russian visa. Both Azcue and Oswald knew by this time that the Soviets were not going to issue a visa, so Azcue’s reasoning was merely a polite way of rejecting him. “He [Oswald] became highly agitated and angry,” said Duran.⁸⁰ “I hear him make statements that are directed against us,” recalled Azcue, “and he accuses us of being bureaucrats, and in a very discourteous manner. At that point I also become upset and I tell him to leave the consulate, maybe somewhat violently or emotionally.”81 He told Oswald that “a person like him, instead of aiding the Cuban revolution, was doing it harm.”⁸² Azcue moved toward Oswald, prepared to force him physically out of the embassy. “Then he leaves the consulate,” recalled Azcue, “and he seems to be mumbling to himself, and slams the door, also in a very discourteous mood. That was the last time we saw him around.”⁸³*

Many conspiracy writers believe that the visitor to the Cuban and Soviet embassies may have been an Oswald imposter. Garrison calls the embassy visits “the most significant Oswald impersonation.”⁸⁴† The issue is a fertile one because of several factors, including a significant CIA blunder that the Agency has never completely clarified. On October 10, 1963, a week after Oswald visited the embassies, the CIA sent a memo about him to the FBI, the State Department, and the Navy.⁸⁵ The teletype was replete with errors. It did not even get the names correct, referring to “Lee Henry Oswald” and his wife, “Marian Pusakova.” The CIA described the Oswald who contacted the Soviet embassy as “approximately 35 years old, with an athletic build, about six feet tall, with a receding hairline …”⁸⁶ The description in the teletype was based upon surreptitious photographs the Agency took of almost everyone who entered the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City. The CIA’s Mexico City station had reviewed its surveillance photos and chosen the one it thought was Oswald. It was not.‡ The CIA did not have any photographs of Oswald in the file it maintained on him, and did not know what he looked like.*

The official CIA position is that its cameras did not operate around the clock, and upon review, after the assassination, of all the photographs taken of people entering the two embassies, there was no photo of Oswald. Some claim the CIA did have photos or even sound tapes of Oswald. Supposedly, when the CIA station chief for Mexico, Winston Scott, died, his safe was cleaned out, including a right-profile photo of Oswald entering the Soviet embassy. Three former CIA employees told the House Select Committee they had seen such a photo.⁸⁷ James Angleton, who was responsible for Nosenko being branded as a KGB plant, personally flew to Mexico after Scott’s death and cleaned out his desk and safe.⁸⁸ Angleton is now dead, and if there was such a photo, he was the last to know of its whereabouts. As the House Select Committee learned in its investigation, the CIA does not now have any photos of Oswald entering the embassies.

As for sound tapes, the Agency may have recorded as many as eight conversations it originally thought to be of Oswald, either on the telephone to the Soviet embassy or during his visits there. W. David Slawson, a Warren Commission staff counsel, said that the CIA’s Winston Scott played part of a poor-quality tape recording that purported to include Oswald, several months after the assassination. But Slawson could not identify Oswald’s voice. In 1976, according to The Washington Post, David Phillips, a former chief of CIA operations in Latin America, indicated a transcript of an Oswald phone call to the Soviet embassy still existed.⁸⁹ Phillips later denied the reported remarks. “The Agency had at one point a recording of Oswald asking to speak to whoever he was going to speak to at the Soviet embassy,” Edwin Lopez, a House Select Committee investigator, told the author. “And the Agency had a husband-and-wife team [who were Russian] listen to the tape and transcribe it, and in parentheses, they wrote down—and I talked to both of them: ‘This guy speaks English with a broken Russian accent.’ Now you and I both know that Oswald did not speak in broken Russian. Well, this is amazing—they have a tape, they sent it up to Washington at one point after the assassination, I have seen the cable and all, and guess what happens to the tape—gone! So all we have left is our transcription, and our conversations with the husband-and-wife team.”90

However, the tape referred to by Lopez may not even have been a recording of Oswald. A retired Agency official familiar with the Oswald file spoke to the author on the condition he not be identified. “Even if there had been a sound recording, it would have been erased routinely a week after it was made. If we kept everything we recorded, you couldn’t find enough warehouses to store them. So once something is transcribed, we don’t need the tape, and it’s reused. Keeping the tape might be more of an indication that there was a special interest in this fellow. However, since there isn’t a tape, no one is sure that we recorded the right person. Just like we made an error in photographing the wrong man, there’s a good chance that we might have recorded the same man we photographed, thinking the entire time we had surveillance on Oswald. We’ve really created our own problems on this one.”*

Since there was no photo of Oswald entering the embassies, or a tape recording proving he was there, conspiracy buffs use the description in the CIA teletype of October 10, 1963, and the photo released of the wrong man to claim that Oswald was impersonated. Their argument is bolstered by Cuban consul Azcue, who testified before the House Select Committee that the man he argued with for fifteen minutes at the Cuban embassy does not look like the photographs of Lee Harvey Oswald.⁹¹ He described the man at the embassy as ten years older, with dark blond hair, and thinner.* Finally, the Select Committee investigator on Mexico City, Edwin Lopez, wrote a 265-page report concluding that it was likely that an Oswald imposter visited the Cuban and Soviet embassies. However, Lopez’s report was sealed by the Select Committee, fueling the debate over the issue.⁹²

But the evidence is overwhelming that the real Oswald visited both embassies. Except Azcue, the other employees at the Cuban embassy, Silvia Duran and Alfredo Mirabal Diaz, positively identified the visitor as Oswald.⁹³ In 1978, Cuba finally gave the original of Oswald’s visa application to the U.S. government. Handwriting experts for the House Select Committee verified that the two signatures on the applications belonged to him.⁹⁴ The six passport-size photographs that Duran told him to have taken, and then stapled to the top of each application, are definitely of Oswald. In the unlikely event an imposter brought back those pictures of the real Oswald, he would have to hope that Duran would not notice he was submitting photos of someone other than himself. Moreover, Oswald argued loudly at the Cuban embassy on at least two occasions after he had brought in his photos, attracting the attention of several employees. The incoming consul at the time, Alfredo Mirabal Diaz, only walked out of his office because of the commotion, and later testified that the man at the Cuban embassy was the same as the man in the visa photos.⁹⁵ An imposter, trying to pass off photos of Oswald as himself, would not create two noisy scenes in which people had a chance to study and remember him.

While the Cuban evidence is clear that the real Oswald brought the photos and signed the applications, until recently there had been no Soviet confirmation regarding the visits to its embassy. However, in 1992, one of the KGB agents who met with Oswald finally broke his silence and helped settle any lingering doubts. Oleg Nechiporenko announced that he had met Oswald on September 27 and 28, 1963, in Mexico City, and said “without hesitation” that it was the same man who was arrested two months later for killing President Kennedy. The other KGB agents who met Oswald in Mexico City, Valeriy Kostikov and Pavel Yatzkov, also confirmed they had seen the real Oswald.96*

Besides his visits to the embassies, did Oswald do anything else of interest in Mexico? The Warren Commission concluded that since he was dejected and frustrated after his confrontations at the two embassies, he spent the remainder of his time quietly, and alone. The Commission relied on the statements of employees in Oswald’s hotel and at nearby restaurants. He was usually gone by the time the maid arrived at 9:00 each morning, and according to the night watchman, he returned nightly around midnight, which the Commission said was “not unusual, in view of the late hour at which Mexico City’s activities begin.”⁹⁷ The Commission had extensive testimony that he ordered food at a small restaurant next to the hotel by pointing at the menu. He spent on average between 40c and 48c for each meal, often refusing dessert and coffee, because he evidently did not realize it was part of the set price. Oswald’s map of Mexico City, found in his possessions after the assassination, had pen markings on it.⁹⁸ Two indicate the Cuban and Soviet embassies. Other locations include museums, parks, general sight-seeing landmarks, and even a movie with English subtitles. He later told Marina about his tourist activities, even claiming he had gone to a bullfight.⁹⁹ Based upon follow-up investigations by the Mexican police and the FBI, the Commission reviewed further witness statements and was unequivocal in concluding “he was seen with no other person either at his hotel or at the restaurant.”¹⁰⁰

However, Summers, in Conspiracy, presents what appears to be credible evidence that Oswald may have had some social contact, with avowed leftists, beyond the embassies, which the Warren Commission did not discover. Silvia Duran, the Cuban embassy employee, admitted to the House Select Committee that she advised Oswald that it would help his visa application if he could get a letter from a Mexican in good standing with the Cuban revolutionary hierarchy.101 Duran was friends with the chairman of the philosophy department at the National Autonomous University in Mexico City, Ricardo Guerra (he later served as the Mexican ambassador to East Germany).* Guerra sometimes held seminars on Marx at Duran’s home.¹⁰² According to Summers, over the September 27 weekend, Oscar Contreras, who was studying to be a lawyer at Mexico City’s National University, was sitting with three of his friends drinking coffee in the school’s cafeteria after the showing of a film in Guerra’s philosophy department. Suddenly, the man at the next table struck up a conversation. He told them his name was Lee Harvey Oswald, a name Contreras and his friends remembered because it was also the name of a popular cartoon rabbit.¹⁰³ Contreras adds weight to the imposter Oswald story by claiming the man was five feet six inches at the most, at least three inches shorter than the real Oswald. He told Contreras and his friends that he was a painter from Texas, dissatisfied with the U.S. and harassed by the FBI, and was hoping to go to Cuba but could not get a visa. He had found the right group, as Contreras and his associates were strongly pro-Castro and viewed the U.S. as a great imperialistic power. They also personally knew consul Azcue, and promised to put in a good word for Oswald. But later that night, when Contreras spoke to Azcue and a Cuban intelligence agent, he was told to break off contacts with Oswald as the embassy was suspicious he might be a provocation from American intelligence.104 Oswald supposedly came back to Contreras and his friends and even spent the night at their apartment, most likely Sunday, September 29. They told him the Cuban consul would not change his mind. But when he left in the morning he was still begging for help to get to Cuba. Contreras and his friends did not hear from him again.

Summers wrote that when the CIA received information about Contreras’s claim in 1967, it did not adequately pursue it, allowing leads to grow cold in the subsequent decades. Although the House Select Committee failed to find Contreras, Summers located him in Tampico, Mexico, and judged him truthful. When the author tried to interview Contreras in 1992, he refused, dodging telephone calls for several weeks. The author discovered, at a Washington, D.C., archive, Summers’s original notes about his September 23, 1978, interview with Contreras.¹⁰⁵ The notes disclosed that Contreras told Summers that while Oswald said he was from Texas in earlier years, he lived in San Francisco at the time he was visiting Mexico City. Summers omitted that from his book. Also, Summers needed a translator to speak with Contreras, but Oswald did not speak Spanish and there is no explanation for how they supposedly communicated. In the same file with Summers’s original notes is a summary of another interview conducted with Contreras, by journalist Mark Redhead, in Tampico, on June 3, 1986.* Contreras told Redhead that the account of his story was correct as set forth in Summers’s book, except he was adamant he had seen Oswald in 1959 to 1960, not in 1963. The problem is that Oswald was living in Russia during that time. Contreras also claimed that Oswald told him about his police problems in New Orleans, but those events did not take place until nearly four years after Contreras claimed he met Oswald. In his interview notes in 1978, Summers lists the date that Contreras met Oswald as 1963, yet Contreras told Redhead he was not even living in Mexico City in 1963 when Oswald visited.

The Contreras story is clearly false. However, that it was presented as credible and relevant about Oswald’s activities in Mexico City, in a best-selling book, is instructive about the pitfalls that beset the research on this subject. There are other stories that emerged from Oswald’s trip to Mexico City that often passed as true but, upon closer inspection, are also not credible.

In an article in the National Enquirer with a byline by Comer Clark, a British reporter, Castro was said to have claimed in an impromptu 1967 interview that “Lee Oswald came to the Cuban embassy in Mexico City twice. The first time, I was told, he wanted to work for us. He was asked to explain, but he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t go into details. The second time he said something like: ‘Someone ought to shoot that President Kennedy.’ Then Oswald said—and this was exactly how it was reported to me—’Maybe I’ll try to do it.’ … Yes, I heard of Lee Harvey Oswald’s plan to kill President Kennedy. It’s possible I could have saved him. I might have been able to—but I didn’t. I never believed the plan would be put into effect.”106 In 1978, Castro denied to the House Select Committee that he had ever been interviewed by Clark.¹⁰⁷ Clark’s journalistic past was filled with sensational stories for tabloids, such as “I Was Hitler’s Secret Love,” “British Girls as Nazi Sex Slaves,” and “German Plans to Kidnap the Royal Family.”¹⁰⁸ Clark’s widow told Anthony Summers that her husband had never mentioned interviewing Castro, and his former assistant, Nina Gadd, finally admitted she ghosted the story based upon a rumor passed to her from a Latin American foreign minister.¹⁰⁹

Beyond the Clark story, another episode fueled the rumor that the Cubans had known in advance about Oswald’s intention to kill JFK A reliable CIA source reported that a Cuban intelligence agent posted to the Cuban embassy in Mexico City, Luisa Calderon, remarked to an acquaintance about the assassination, “I knew almost before Kennedy.”¹¹⁰ The House Select Committee could not interview Calderon in 1978 because she claimed to be ill. However, in a letter, she said the story was false. Other employees at the embassy also denied any foreknowledge.¹¹¹ The Select Committee concluded Calderon’s statement was “braggadocio” and that Oswald did not voice a threat against President Kennedy while at the Cuban embassy.112*

On November 25, 1963, only three days after the assassination, a young Nicaraguan, Gilberto Alvarado, went to the American embassy in Mexico. He startled U.S. officials by claiming that in September he had visited the Cuban embassy and overheard a conversation among Oswald, a Cuban, and a black man. According to Alvarado, the Cuban passed money to the black man, who then said, “I want to kill the man.” Oswald replied, “You are not man enough—I can do it.” The black man said, “I can’t go with you. I have a lot to do.” Oswald assured him it was all right: “The people are waiting for me back there.” Then the Cuban man handed Oswald $6,500 in large-denomination bills.¹¹³ Alvarado also asserted that he had tried to warn the embassy before the assassination, but was ignored.

The CIA gave Alvarado’s story its full attention. The information was sent to the FBI as well as to the White House. † But under questioning from Mexican authorities, Alvarado recanted his entire story.¹¹⁴ Then, when requestioned by the Americans, he said the Mexicans had coerced him to retract. He repeated his original story, but failed a lie detector test. Later he said he was no longer sure of the date, and the person only resembled Oswald. Although Ambassador Thomas Mann, the U.S. representative in Mexico at the time, was not convinced the Alvarado story was completely false, Alvarado is now so discredited that few repeat his story.‡

The final witness whose story sent shockwaves through the U.S. government regarding Oswald’s Mexico City trip and a possible Cuban government sponsorship was Autulio Ramirez Ortiz. Ramirez had hijacked an aircraft to Cuba in 1961. When he was later returned to the U.S., he was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment, and he told the House Select Committee that while in Cuba he had worked in a Cuban intelligence facility. There, he claimed, he found a file labeled “Osvaldo-Kennedy” that contained a photo of Oswald and a recommendation by the KGB; he said the file concluded: “Oswald is an adventurer. Our embassy in Mexico has orders to get in contact with him. Be very careful.”115 Ramirez was not in the U.S. in 1964 and could not testify to the Warren Commission, so the Select Committee was the only government body to interview him, in a session still sealed as confidential. The committee said that although there was independent confirmation of other allegations Ramirez made, the FBI and CIA were unable to substantiate the existence of an “Osvaldo-Kennedy” file. The committee concluded that the “Cuban intelligence system in the 1961–63 period was too sophisticated to have been infiltrated by Ramirez in the manner he had described.”¹¹⁶*

Completely unaware that he would soon be at the center of such rumors and controversy, Oswald considered his next move. When he had decided to defect to Russia in 1959, he had obtained a Soviet visa in Helsinki within a few days. He had fully expected the same to happen with the Cubans, especially in light of his extensive political activism. His rejection was unexpected and a stunning personal setback. Returning to America was tantamount to admitting defeat, but with limited funds, he could not stay much longer.

On Monday, September 30, Oswald telephoned the Soviet embassy. Colonel Nechiporenko claims he spoke to him at least once, and Oswald asked if there had been any change about granting him a visa.* One final time Nechiporenko told him no. Oswald then walked the several blocks from his hotel to the Chihuahuense travel agency, and spent $20.30 for a ticket on a Transportes del Norte bus from Mexico City to Nuevo Laredo and then by Greyhound into Texas. On the following day, Tuesday, October 1, Oswald paid his hotel bill through that night.¹¹⁷ On Wednesday, at 8:30 A.M., he left on bus No. 332. Other passengers recall that at the border crossing, he was pulled off and questioned about his Mexican tourist papers, because initially the border guards thought his fifteen-day visa had expired. It was over fifteen days since the visa was issued, but Oswald showed them his entry stamp to prove he had not been in Mexico past the prescribed time. When it was resolved and he returned to the bus, other passengers heard him grumbling about the bureaucrats at the border.¹¹⁸ At 1:35 in the morning, Oswald crossed the international border. He arrived at Laredo at 3:00 A.M. and did not finish the last leg of his trip until 2:20 in the afternoon on Thursday, October 3. He had returned to Dallas.

* While Oswald was on a twenty-hour bus ride that consumed almost all of September 26, a White House spokesman made the first announcement that President Kennedy would make a brief trip to Texas in November. The dates and cities to be visited were not set. Every event in Oswald’s life prior to September 26 happened before it was publicly known that the President would visit Texas. Even Oswald’s trip to Mexico was planned before the announcement, and if he had been successful in obtaining a visa to Cuba, Kennedy and Oswald would never have crossed paths in another two months. Critics who write about suspicions of a conspiracy before this date never explain how Oswald was supposedly brought into a plot that had no possible sense of time and place, two indispensable ingredients.

† Osborne was contacted after the assassination by the FBI. He was so nervous about having sat next to the man accused of killing JFK that he denied he had, although the other passengers and his travel documents show he did. Osborne told one of the other passengers that in his conversation with Oswald, Lee told him he had been to Mexico before. It is not known if Oswald was talking about his Marine Corps visit to Tijuana or if he was lying about visiting Mexico on other occasions.

* After the assassination, the McFarlands saw a newspaper photo of the accused presidential assassin and instantly recognized him as the man on the bus. Mumford and Winston were in a Las Vegas hotel room watching television news about the assassination when suddenly Oswald was shown in the Dallas jail. They immediately identified him, startled that he even had on the same sweater he had worn on the bus.

† Oswald traveled, ate, and slept very cheaply in Mexico. The total estimate of his expenses for the Mexican trip is $85. He had enough cash at the beginning of the month to easily pay for the journey (WC Appendix XIV, “Analysis of Lee Harvey Oswald’s Finances from June 13, 1962, through November 22, 1963,” p. 741).

* Actually, false identifications are quite common after saturation press coverage of the type that took place after the assassination. Only those instances most often advanced by the critics will be considered in this and the following chapter.

* Odio’s father was in a Cuban jail for political actions against the Castro regime. He had been a business tycoon before Castro’s revolution, and Odio came from a wealthy and pampered background.

† JURE members used “war names,” fictitious names, so that Castro agents could not unmask their real identities. Odio said that the Cubans gave their war names, but she assumed Leon Oswald was a real name for the American. However, she evidently never considered the possibility that Oswald would have been a perfect war name for any anti-Castro Cuban since the name had been in the newspapers, radio, and television in New Orleans as a virulently pro-Castro advocate.

* The House Select Committee report on Odio was researched and written by Gaeton Fonzi, the assassination buff who researched the Banister and Ferrie connections to Oswald.

* The Cuban consulate and embassy were in separate buildings but in the same compound. The Soviets had both consular and diplomatic branches in the same building. They will be referred to in this chapter as the Cuban and Soviet embassies. It is not clear in which sequence Oswald visited the two embassies. He told his wife he first went to the Soviet embassy, but the author’s interpretation of the Cubans’ testimony is that he might have visited them first.

† No membership card for the American Communist party was ever found in Oswald’s belongings. However, two of the employees at the Cuban embassy claimed that Oswald had one. After the assassination, the American Communist party denied that he was ever a member. The card may have been counterfeit, made at the same time as his Hidell identifications.

* There is conflicting evidence as to whether Oswald telephoned the Soviets from the Cuban embassy. The Cuban employees say he did not use the telephone. The CIA refuses to confirm or deny whether it ever recorded a conversation between Oswald and the Soviets made from the Cuban embassy.

* The identity of Nechiporenko, who was later expelled from Mexico in 1970 for conspiring to overthrow the Mexican government, only became known at a 1992 press conference in Moscow. He then hired a Californian, Brian Litman, to represent him, and he began working on a book based on his meeting with Oswald. Kostikov’s identity has been known since December 1963 and caused initial concern for the Warren Commission since the CIA said he was reportedly chief of KGB terrorism squads in the Western Hemisphere. By 1993 Kostikov had also begun working on a book about his meeting with Oswald (Interview with Brian Litman, April 29, 1993).

*Some critics charged Oswald might have entered the Soviet embassy through a separate entrance and met with the KGB officers in a secure room, indicating he had a Soviet intelligence connection. But Oswald actually entered through the embassy’s front entrance and met with the KGB officers in a windowed, nonsecure consul’s office.

* The Cubans claim that Oswald’s visa application was received at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Havana on October 7 and rejected on October 15, since he did not have a visa for his country of destination, the USSR (CE 2445).

† Most proponents of the imposter theory believe that Oswald was only a patsy in the assassination, and was not even a real Communist, but merely someone working for American intelligence, pretending to be a leftist. In this scenario, an imposter made high-profile visits to two Communist embassies so that Oswald’s leftist credentials would be enhanced.

‡The man mistaken in the picture for Oswald has never been publicly identified by the CIA. However, Nechiporenko says it was a former American serviceman, who was psychologically disturbed, and who occasionally wandered by the Soviet embassy (Passport to Assassination: The Never-Before-Told Story of Lee Harvey Oswald by the KGB Colonel Who Knew Him, Oleg Maximovich Nechiporenko, Birch Lane Press, 1993, p. 175).

* Oswald’s CIA file did not contain any photos. However, after the assassination, the CIA discovered it had a photo of him in its Minsk file. In 1961, the Agency’s Domestic Contact Division had made copies of some pictures taken by tourists. The CIA wanted the snapshots because an Intourist guide was featured. The unidentified American was not of interest until the Agency realized, several years later, who he was.

* No transcript of any sound tape has ever been released. The CIA is its own worst enemy on many of these issues. Because it is so protective of sources and its means of obtaining information, even years after the event, its lack of full disclosure is often interpreted as evidence of conspiracy. But the CIA’s failure to be forthright is an inherent part of the intelligence trade, and is not unique to its handling of the Oswald case.

* Azcue admits to being one of the few people who believe Jim Garrison’s theory of an imposter Oswald, and cannot say how much this belief colors his memory of the man he encountered at the embassy. The descriptions he gave to the House Select Committee were based on his recall of an event fifteen years earlier. But when told by the committee that the visa-application signatures had been verified as belonging to Oswald, Azcue wavered. “Under such circumstances I would have to accept that I was being influenced or seeing visions.”

* On November 22, the day of the assassination, Kostikov burst into Nechiporenko’s office. “Oleg,” he shouted, “they just showed the suspect in Kennedy’s death on TV. It’s Lee Oswald, the gringo who was here in September! I recognized him” (Passport to Assassination, p. 101).

* There is little doubt Duran tried to help Oswald, but she claims it was only at the Cuban embassy and that she did not socialize with him or talk to him outside. A Mexican author, Elena Garro de Paz, said she saw Oswald at a “twist party” at Duran’s brother-in-law’s house over the weekend of September 27. Garro claims Oswald had two companions and that she overheard consul Azcue, also at the party, tell another person that there was no alternative but to kill President Kennedy. While Duran admits there was a twist party at her brother-in-law’s house around this time, she is adamant that Oswald was not there. Azcue is just as firm that he was not at such a party and that he never uttered such an “incredible statement.” It is highly unlikely that Duran would have invited Oswald and Azcue to the same party after the almost violent fight they had on Saturday, September 28. No other witnesses at the party support Garro’s claim. Another instance, in which a former police official, Salvador Diaz Verson, claimed to see Duran and Oswald at a restaurant, Caballo Blanco Parren, on Saturday, September 28, also remains uncorroborated.

* The Redhead interview was done for London Weekend Television, which was preparing a televised “Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald.” Redhead considered Contreras too unreliable for inclusion in the television program, concluding, “I would not be at all surprised if he didn’t just invent it and find the yarn got a bit out of hand.”

*Another factor that added to the suspicion about the Cuban embassy was that Consul Azcue was recalled to Havana on November 18, just four days before the assassination. But the Cuban government later explained that the move had been planned for more than six months, and that his replacement, Alfredo Mirabal Diaz, had been there for several months.

†President Lyndon Johnson later believed that Castro was behind the assassination. The Alvarado story must certainly have contributed to LBJ’s early suspicion.

‡On December 2, ten days after the assassination, another witness, Pedro Gutierrez, wrote President Johnson that he had seen Oswald receive a large amount of money from an official at the Cuban embassy. At first, this seemed an important confirmation of Alvarado’s story, but the Gutierrez claim also crumbled upon subsequent investigation. Then, within days of the Gutierrez allegation, a CIA source pinpointed a Cuban, Gilberto Lopez, who had contact with the Tampa branch of Fair Play for Cuba, as a conspirator. According to the source, Lopez rushed into Mexico the day after the assassination, went to the Cuban embassy in Mexico City, and was spirited to Havana on a Cubana airlines flight that had waited hours only for him. While the Warren Commission’s investigation of this story was weak, the Select Committee extensively researched it. While the Committee was troubled by the CIA’s original handling of the Lopez report, it did not discover any evidence that established a link to the assassination.

* Ramirez wrote a manuscript about the episode, titled Castro’s Red Hot Hell, but it remains unpublished.

* Nechiporenko has no doubt the Oswald he spoke to on the telephone was the same man who personally visited the embassy. There is also a possibility that Oswald telephoned again the following day, Tuesday, October 1. The CIA may have intercepted one of these telephone conversations, in which Oswald spoke to a guard, who told him that only by personally visiting the embassy could he obtain any further information. Although many writers on the assassination believe Oswald actually visited the Soviets on October 1, Nechiporenko says he did not (Interview with Brian Litman, April 29, 1993).

*Although there were no eyewitnesses to Oswald’s departure from New Orleans, bus 5121 is the only one that left New Orleans after Oswald had cashed his check that would get him to Houston that evening. Mrs. Twiford thought the call was a local one. Oswald’s address book provides additional evidence he was in Houston. Twiford’s name, address, and two telephone numbers were found in Oswald’s book after the assassination. One was a disconnected number, which was still listed in the 1963 Houston phone book. The second number in his address book was Twiford’s valid one for September 1963. It appears Oswald arrived in Houston, looked up the Twifords in the phone book, and wrote the number in his address book. Then, when he telephoned and discovered it was out of date, he had to call the operator for the new number, and also jotted the second one in his book (CE 18; CE 2335).