The CIA were strong on the ground in Mexico City, led by their energetic station chief, Winston ‘Win’ Scott. Their main preoccupation was to infiltrate pro-Castro groups and generate anti-Castro sentiment. Notoriously, they ‘set up’ some prominent pro-Castro Cubans who, although innocent, were charged with treason and imprisoned.
Some of the success of the CIA’s operations must be attributed to their infiltration of the Cuban Embassy and Consulate in Mexico City. With inside help they had rigged up surveillance cameras outside the consulate and tapped the telephone lines.
Silvia Duran, an attractive round-faced 26-year-old Mexican, was married to Horacio Duran Navarro, fourteen years her elder. Both were strong Communist sympathisers. Silvia had come to the attention of the CIA when, the previous year, she had had an affair with Carlos Lechuga, the Cuban Ambassador in Mexico. Lechuga was promptly posted to New York as Ambassador to the United Nations and Silvia found a job as a receptionist at the Cuban Consulate in Mexico City.
Oswald arrived on the morning of Friday 27 September 1963, and was at the Cuban Consulate by 11 a.m. Silvia Duran was on the visa applications desk. He asked her for a transit visa for Cuba and offered abundant evidence of his support for Fidel Castro, including his Fair Play for Cuba Committee membership card. He admitted at the outset that he was a member of the American Communist Party and that he had lived in the Soviet Union for several years.
Duran asked him for his final destination, explaining that he would need to put this on the application form. He would also have to provide proof that he would be admitted there and that he had the necessary travel documentation. He would need four passport photographs to go with his application.
His final destination was the Soviet Union but he did not yet have a visa. She said he would need to get the Soviet visa first and directed him to the Soviet Consulate, just two blocks away.
Oswald returned to the Cuban Consulate at 12.15 p.m. with the passport photographs, but he had not yet been to the Soviet Consulate. Duran helped him to complete a transit visa application form but reiterated that he had to have his Soviet visa before any action could be taken on it.
He arrived at the Soviet Consulate just after 12.30 and was initially dealt with by Vice-Consul Valery Kostikov, a sturdy, round-faced man in his mid-thirties. CIA records showed that he worked for Department Thirteen of the First Chief Directorate of the KGB: the department responsible for executive action, including sabotage and assassination. There were two other consular officials: Consul Pavel Yatskov and Vice-Consul Oleg Nechiporenko, both of whom were also KGB officers.
Kostikov listened for a while to Oswald’s story and to his request for a visa to go to the Soviet Union, and decided after a few minutes that it would be better for Vice-Consul Oleg Nechiporenko to deal with him. Nechiporenko, a slim, dapper man with a carefully trimmed black moustache, was several years younger than Kostikov. He wore thick-rimmed spectacles with dark lenses.
According to a book published under Nechiporenko’s name thirty years later, Oswald created a poor impression and was certainly not KGB agent material.* He listened to Oswald whining about FBI harassment rendering him unemployable. He wanted to return to the Soviet Union for the sake of his family and his sanity. Nechiporenko studied the large bundle of documents that Oswald produced – all of them supporting Oswald’s story – and led him through the requirements for a visa application. Oswald told him that his earlier visa application to the Soviet Embassy in Washington had been rejected. Now, he was afraid of being arrested by the FBI if he went to the embassy in person.
When Nechiporenko explained that his visa application would take at least four months to process, and that it would have to be dealt with through the Washington Embassy because Oswald was a United States resident, he became agitated. He expected better treatment in the light of his history in the Soviet Union and marriage to a Soviet citizen. His frustration boiled over. He threw one of his tantrums and stormed out.
It was a stifling hot day but he managed to cool down, at least mentally, before returning to the Cuban Consulate just before four o’clock. There, he again saw Silvia Duran and lied to her, saying that the Soviet Consulate had granted him a visa.
Thinking this unusual, she asked him to whom he had spoken. He could not remember the exact name but gave an approximate pronunciation that enabled her to establish, when she phoned the consulate, that it had been Kostikov.†
Kostikov confirmed that he had spoken to Oswald, but said he had not yet been granted a visa, and in any case it would take four months to process an application.
Duran reproached Oswald for lying to her, and informed him he could not have a visa for Cuba unless and until he had one for the Soviet Union. Yet it appears that she must have had some sympathy or compassion for this man in his present, lonely predicament, for she invited him out that evening.
Married consular officials do not, willy-nilly, invite unknown customers out for the evening. Duran’s dalliance of a year before had been with a foreign ambassador, not a lying rascal like Oswald.
There has been much confusion and speculation about the role played by the Cuban Consulate in Mexico City in general, and Silvia Duran in particular, but there can be little doubt that if Duran befriended Oswald, then she did so at the behest of one of the security services: the CIA, the KGB or the Cuban G2.‡ The last of these should not be discounted. Cuban G2 officers attended the Soviet spy school in Minsk as part of their training and Oswald had a friendly relationship with some of them during his time there. He sometimes told Marina that he would like to go to Cuba, and even join the Cuban government.
‡
The following morning, Oswald was in better spirits after his night out with Silvia and decided to have another go at persuading the Soviet Consulate to be more forthcoming over his visa application. He arrived early at the consulate, at about nine o’clock. It was Saturday and the main door was locked, so he rang the bell. A security guard answered, let him in, and led him to Consul Pavel Yatskov’s office. Yatskov, perhaps forty, his hair turning grey, looked more the part of a stereotypical Russian of the 1960s than his colleagues. Tall and slim, with a rugged face, he often wore his jacket on his shoulders without using the arms.
He was the only officer present, but Kostikov and Nechiporenko arrived separately, a little later. They had gone to the consulate to change into their sports gear for a serious volleyball match: the embassy’s diplomatic and consular sections against the military attaché and trade mission sections. Essentially, this was the KGB against the GRU: a needle match if ever there was one.
By the time the other two consular officers had arrived, Oswald had repeated his story of the previous day at least two more times. He became emotional, pleading for a visa. He burst into tears. He lost his temper, this time placing a loaded revolver on the desk and wailing that he was watched so closely by the FBI he had to carry this weapon with him all the time for his own personal safety. He pleaded for a visa because his life in the United States was so miserable.
Yatskov unloaded the weapon and put it back on the desk.
Oswald eventually accepted that he would not get a Soviet visa soon and, as his immediate problems could not be solved by fleeing to the Soviet Union, he decided not to bother even completing the visa application form.
Dejected, he left the Soviet Consulate at 10.30 a.m. Yatskov, Nechiporenko and Kostikov, jointly or collectively, had spent one-and-a-half hours with Oswald. They missed their vital volleyball game and the GRU team beat the KGB, which was an institutional humiliation.
Yatskov and Kostikov immediately drafted a record of the meetings with Oswald for the embassy’s Rezident. They also enciphered it and sent it as a telegram to the KGB’s Moscow centre. Nechiporenko later called this telegram a life preserver that they had thrown to themselves.
It would be timely to remember that at this point Oswald was little more than a John Doe. No one, with the possible exception of whoever was manipulating him, could have imagined that this was the person who, one day, would kill the President of the United States. He was not a figure that commanded particular attention.
Even the most conscientious consular officer, of any nationality, would not give up his or her Saturday morning to grant an interview for a visa that could not in any case be granted for at least four months. He or she might do so for distressed national subjects who had been robbed of their passports and money and needed to travel the same or the next day, or those who had suffered an accident or fallen seriously ill, but not for a routine visa application.
If John Doe rang the bell of a closed consulate on a Saturday morning he would be turned away and told to come back on Monday morning. If, extraordinarily, he were to be granted a visa interview, there could be no question of any more than one officer conducting that interview. The interview having been conducted, the visa application would be sent to the home headquarters by diplomatic bag: it would never warrant the immediate sending of a cypher telegram.
One can smile at the ‘seriousness’ of the KGB v. GRU volleyball match, but it was a serious matter for the players. None of them would have missed it unless obliged to do so by urgent business.
The known details – and there are many – of the two interviews at the Soviet Consulate originate from Soviet sources. No one else, apart from Oswald, was present. The Soviet system of the 1950s and 1960s was expert at fabricating information to suit its objectives.
The CIA was definitely interested to know what Oswald was doing in Mexico City. All telephone calls by or relating to Oswald were monitored by the CIA and transcribed. Some of the transcriptions went missing, but recollections by the transcribers suggest that Oswald had been in contact with the Soviet Embassy in Washington before he went to Mexico; or – more likely – the Washington Embassy had contacted him. He clearly expected the Consulate in Mexico City to have been briefed about his arrival. It is possible that Vladimir Kryuchkov or Yuri Andropov in Moscow had instructed the KGB Rezident in Washington to pass a message to Oswald asking him to go to the Soviet Consulate in Mexico City to meet Kostikov and Nechiporenko. There would have been no need for the Rezident or anyone else to know the purpose of the visit.
The head of the CIA’s Mexico City station, Win Scott, was a close friend of James Angleton, the CIA’s head of counterintelligence staff from 1954 until he resigned under a cloud in 1975. ‘After Scott’s death in April 1971, Angleton flew to Mexico City, removed the contents of Scott’s safe, and demanded that the family turn over Scott’s papers to him’.§ The papers in Scott’s safe must have been of sensational sensitivity, bearing in mind that Angleton retrieved them after Kennedy’s and Oswald’s deaths.
CIA agents were snooping around and may have discovered something that should be kept from public knowledge at all costs, but the action was with the KGB.
‡
Oswald stayed on in Mexico City until early Wednesday morning, 3 October. He did not return to either the Cuban or Soviet Consulates, though he may have gone out with Silvia Duran several more times.
* See Oleg Nechiporenko, Passport to Assassination (Carol Publishing Group, 1993). Translated from Russian by Todd P. Bludeau.
† Nechiporenko recorded that throughout his interview with Oswald, Oswald had never asked for his name and he had never given it. Hence, it was only an approximation of Kostikov’s name that Oswald gave to Duran.
‡ Some lines of research say that Oswald and Duran had an intimate relationship.
§ See John Newman, Oswald and the CIA (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1995), p. 369.