INTRODUCTION

AT ABOUT 10 A.M. ON SEPTEMBER 27, 1963, THE FLECHA ROJA (Red Arrow) bus pulled into the main transit hub in downtown Mexico City after a seven hundred mile trip from Nuevo Laredo, across the Rio Grande from Texas. Twenty-four-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald, lugging a cheap zippered bag, was one of the first passengers to step off into the crowded, high-ceilinged terminal. He loitered there only briefly, ignoring other passengers he had chatted with during the journey south. There was no time for small talk now. He was in a hurry to move on with a scheme he hoped would give him the chance to start a new life.

Beginning anew was a recurring preoccupation through much of Oswald’s tortured existence. He had joined the Marine Corps in October 1956 days after his seventeenth birthday, hoping to escape his bizarre and controlling mother.¹ After finagling an early discharge, he set out again in September 1959, boarded a ship to Europe, and defected to the Soviet Union. He lived in Minsk for nearly three years, where he worked in a factory and married. But, disenthralled with the monotony and rigors of Soviet life, he returned home with his wife Marina and infant daughter in June 1962. Now, in 1963, it was Cuba that promised another new start, and this time, he thought, the decision would be irreversible. A failure at virtually everything he had ever tried to accomplish, Oswald intended to stay in Mexico only as long as it took to arrange onward travel to Havana. He was in the thrall of his idol, Fidel Castro. The plan was to defect again.

The Cuban revolution had beckoned and intrigued Oswald since the last year of his military service. He was assigned before Christmas in 1958 to Marine Corps Air Station El Toro, near Santa Ana in Southern California, just as Fidel Castro was seizing power in Cuba. Oswald spent the next nine months at El Toro, becoming progressively more enamored of his bearded hero even as Castro’s revolution was spiraling into greater violence and confrontation with the United States. It was a transformational period for the impressionable young Marine. He delved deeper into Marxist literature, became more alienated from the country where he sensed he could never fit in, and immersed himself in news coming out of Havana. “Cuba interested him more than most other situations,” a Marine officer who had a degree in international relations recalled. “He was fairly well informed.”²

The interest was not just academic. Oswald and Marine buddy Nelson Delgado dreamed of going to Cuba to take up arms for Castro. They would fight for him, either in defense of his revolution or in a guerrilla incursion of the kind being sponsored by Cuba to topple rival Caribbean dictatorships. The two young Marines were following the exploits of William Morgan, an American army veteran and adventurer who became a high-ranking commander in Castro’s insurgent forces and, after their victory, went on to help defeat a counterrevolutionary plot against Fidel. Oswald was remarkably like Morgan. Both were brooding social misfits, high school dropouts and dreamers—wanderers attracted to high-risk, violent conflicts. They had both been court-martialed and delighted in rebelling against authority. Morgan redeemed himself, however, by starting a new life when he committed to Castro in early 1958. A year later Oswald hoped to do the same. He fantasized that he might become famous too: Morgan had attracted considerable attention as the swashbuckling “Americano” in a cast of colorful comandantes led by Fidel and Che Guevara.³

Delgado may not really have intended to follow in Morgan’s footsteps, but Oswald was dead serious. They “had quite many discussions regarding Castro,”

Delgado said. They “talked [about] how we would like to go to Cuba. . . . [Oswald] started making plans.” He “was a complete believer that our way of government was not quite right. . . . He was for . . . the Castro way of life.” Delgado’s testimony before the Warren Commission, established to investigate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, shows that he had a keen understanding of the nineteen-year-old Oswald he had known. Kennedy’s assassin was enthralled with the tropical, exuberant Cuban revolution and its charismatic leaders. He wanted to become a warrior for Fidel. Delgado said his friend:

started actually making plans, he wanted to know . . . how to get to Cuba. . . . He kept on asking me questions like “how can a person [like him] . . . be part of that revolution?” . . . He bought himself . . . a Spanish-American dictionary.”⁴

Later, he brought it with him on the bus to Mexico, although he could never speak more than a few words of Spanish. Soon, nonetheless, Oswald was making a determined effort to ingratiate himself with representatives of the Castro regime. Delgado testified that “Oz,” as most of the Marines called him, developed contacts with Cuban government officials in Los Angeles.

He kept on asking me about how . . . he could go about helping the Castro government . . . so I told him the best thing that I know was to get in touch with a Cuban Embassy. . . . After a while he told me he was in contact with them.⁵

At first Delgado was skeptical of the claim, but when asked under oath if he had concluded it was true, he said, “Yes, I did.” Oswald told him he was receiving mail from Cuban officials. Although the Warren Commission was remiss by assigning no relevance to these contacts, Delgado had been unequivocal. He remembered going into Oswald’s quarters in the barracks one day, hoping to borrow a tie. It was then that he saw a distinctive envelope addressed to his friend with what he described as an official seal on it. It had been mailed from Los Angeles. There were other letters too. And, Delgado recalled, “soon after they started arriving, an unknown visitor” came to see Oswald at El Toro. “It was a man . . . a civilian . . . and they spent about an hour and a half, two hours talking.”⁶

At that time, travel to Cuba was legal for the thousands of Americans who went as tourists, many of them, like Oswald, eager acolytes of Castro’s regime. There is no reason to believe that he was ever among them, but sustained contact with Cuban representatives of the kind Delgado described was all too easy. There were two Cuban consulates in California in 1959. The closest one to Oswald was in Los Angeles, on Sunrise Drive, in the Monterey Park area of the city. It was only about 35 or 40 miles from his barracks.⁷

Manuel Velazquez y Blanco was the consul general and possibly the Cuban in contact with Oswald. Getting to know a well-informed American Marine enamored of Cuba’s revolution, and volunteering like the heralded William Morgan to fight for it, would have been within the expected range of responsibilities for a consul. Velazquez may have thought Oswald had the potential to become another celebrity volunteer like Morgan. In any event, it is now known with near certainty that the consulate opened a dossier on their enthusiastic young contact. It would have included copies of the letters sent to Oswald and summaries of their conversations. I believe that later it must have been transferred to the Cuban espionage service—the Dirección General de Inteligencia (DGI)—after the consulate closed when diplomatic relations were severed in January 1961.

The existence of the file is important because for 50 years Fidel Castro has denied that he and the DGI knew anything about Oswald before the assassination. “We never in our life heard of him,” he insisted in a speech about 30 hours after Kennedy’s death. Four days later he spoke again, at the University of Havana, and his denials were even more robust. As described in chapters one and two, for about 48 years Castro was Cuba’s supreme spymaster, making every key decision, managing the minutest details of important operations, even hosting friendly meetings with his most outstanding foreign penetration agents. It would therefore have been characteristic for him to have insisted on knowing everything he could about Oswald as he prepared to deliver those speeches. In all likelihood he demanded to see everything the DGI had collected about the assassin.

One proof of Fidel’s duplicity is a telephone conversation between two Cubans, secretly recorded by the CIA station in Mexico City. On the evening of November 22, 1963, a few hours after Kennedy was murdered, a man—seemingly a DGI officer—placed a call to Luisa Calderon at the Cuban consulate in the Mexican capital. The CIA had installed a number of taps on embassy phone lines and transcribed the most important conversations. The young and ebullient Calderon was of interest; she was known by the CIA to be a DGI officer. The CIA’s transcript includes the following incriminating comment about Oswald by the caller: “Oh yes, he knows Russian well, and also this fellow went with Fidel’s forces into the mountains, or wanted to go, something like that.”⁸

Calderon responded with a single exclamatory word: “Serious!” The caller then abruptly changed the subject, also with just one word. “Enough!” he said, as if he had already revealed too much over a phone line that Cuban intelligence surely suspected was tapped. A question never previously asked: How could the caller have known that Oswald “wanted to go . . . with Fidel’s forces into the mountains”? There had been no media coverage of any such talk by the assassin before Calderon’s conversation. He is not known to have confided those plans with anyone other than Delgado, Marina, and apparently the Los Angeles Cubans. The caller could only have known this by reading the secret DGI files.

Four other sources have confirmed that Fidel and the DGI had advance knowledge of Oswald. Vladimir Rodriguez Lahera, the first important defector from Cuban intelligence—fully trusted by the CIA and used in sensitive operations—told his handlers in May 1964 that Castro had lied. The defector was at DGI headquarters in Havana when news of Kennedy’s death was broadcast. It was there that he heard other officers discussing what they already knew about Oswald.⁹ Alfredo Mirabal, an intelligence officer under consular cover at Havana’s Mexico City embassy, inadvertently revealed in 1978 that in September 1963 he had informed headquarters about Oswald. Jack Childs, a trusted FBI agent in its highly sensitive Operation SOLO, also provided reliable information proving that Castro knew about Oswald before November 1963. Childs’s undercover work included a meeting with Castro in Havana in May 1964 that is described in chapter seven. Remarkably, Castro revealed to Childs that he had been aware that, while at the Cuban consulate in Mexico City, Oswald had threatened to murder Kennedy. And finally, Florentino Aspillaga, the highest-level, most-decorated officer ever to defect from the DGI, is convinced that Fidel had advance knowledge of the assassination in Dallas. Aspillaga’s story is told throughout the following chapters.

Yet these indicators of Cuban regime deception—and apparent DGI engagement with Oswald—have never been properly evaluated.

      •   The Los Angeles consulate contacts were overlooked by the FBI and the Warren Commission.

      •   The CIA did not inform the commission of Calderon’s November 22 phone conversation.¹⁰

      •   Rodriguez Lahera’s knowledge that Castro had lied apparently was not shared with the commission.

      •   Mirabal’s incriminating error went unnoticed.

      •   In June 1964 FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover submitted a report that minimized and distorted the meaning of the Operation SOLO information acquired from Castro.

      •   Aspillaga’s story was not publicly revealed until the initial publication of this book.

UNTIL OSWALD’S OWN DEATH two days after Kennedy’s, the allure of Castro’s revolution never faded. Yet after leaving the Marine Corps, Oswald decided, impulsively it appears, to defect to the Soviet Union rather than to live in Cuba. During his last months at El Toro, he was straddling the two competing impulses. Delgado remembered that “every so often, after [Oswald] started to get in contact with these Cuban people, he started getting little pamphlets and newspapers, and he always got a Russian paper.” Another Marine, his roommate, remembered “Oz” spending a lot of time studying Russian, reading Russian-language books, and becoming better versed in Marxist ideology.¹¹ Soon to be a civilian, he was considering these two alternatives for starting a new life.

Why he chose Moscow will never be known. There is no reliable evidence, for example, that he ever felt an abiding attraction to the Soviet Union similar to what thrilled him about Cuba. Marguerite Oswald, his mother, who knew his quirks and needs better than anyone, understood how easily he might have gone in the other direction. She told an FBI agent in 1964 that she was surprised and upset after learning he had “gone to Russia.” It would not have surprised her at all, she said, if he had instead defected to Cuba. If the Warren Commission had asked Nelson Delgado he might have said exactly what Marguerite did. She obviously had heard her son speak adoringly of Castro.¹²

Back in the United States after the failure of his Soviet sojourn, Oswald was scathing in his criticism of what he had experienced.¹³ He convinced himself that Cuban communism was pure and dynamic, more revolutionary in its jousting with Yankee “imperialism.” Castro appeared to be all things the elderly and plodding Soviet hierarchs were not. They had capitulated to Kennedy in the October 1962 missile crisis, while Castro had stood his ground in refusing to allow inspectors on Cuban soil. Oswald was aware too that his hero was fending off predatory American campaigns to oust him from power. In a speech on July 26, Castro enumerated some of the worst offenses of the covert war that are described in chapters five and nine. He told how the Kennedy administration and the CIA were “mobilizing for new aggressions. . . . They bombed and killed defenseless families.” The “imperialists sent pirates. . . . They committed acts of sabotage.” It was Kennedy, Castro said, who “fathered and developed aggressions against Cuba. . . . Let the [Cuban] people and the world know it.” Oswald by then had persuaded himself that Castro needed his help.¹⁴

The tortured loner, unnaturally enamored of Cuba’s revolution, felt a compelling need to help protect the bearded man he worshipped. That spring and summer, living in New Orleans, Cuba was seemingly always on his mind. Marina recalled that “he used to talk to me endlessly about Cuba.”¹⁵ He read two American Marxist tabloids that regularly ran translations and summaries of Castro’s speeches along with venomous attacks on Kennedy. He listened to Radio Havana propaganda tirades. Marina wrote in a personal narrative she shared with the Warren Commission that “he became conceited about doing such an important job and helping Cuba.”¹⁶ He wanted her to help him hijack a plane to go there. A picture of Castro was hung on the wall where they lived. He began publicly advocating pro-Castro causes, gaining exposure on local radio and television. He tried, with no success, to form a chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC), a cheerleading group covertly funded by Cuban intelligence.¹⁷ His hatred of his own country was deepening: he told a Cuban exile in New Orleans that if Cuba were invaded by the United States, he would fight on Castro’s side.¹⁸

In early August, acting out a feckless plan to spy for Cuba, he tried to infiltrate a militant anti-Castro exile group in New Orleans and had several encounters with Carlos Bringuier, its local representative. Bringuier wrote that Oswald came into his store in the French Quarter, introduced himself, and stayed to talk about Cuba for about an hour. He asked the Cuban émigré “for literature against Castro.”¹⁹ Bringuier told the Warren Commission that:

Oswald told me that he had been in the Marine Corps, . . . had training in guerrilla warfare and . . . was willing to train Cubans to fight against Castro. . . .He . . . was willing to go himself to fight against Castro. I turned down his offer. . . . He insisted, and he told me that [he would bring me a book] . . . to train Cubans to fight against Castro.²⁰

Bringuier, previously an attorney in Havana, was suspicious and concluded that his visitor was a provocateur. He was right. Oswald was trying to gather information about the group’s membership and plans that he intended to share with Cuban officials. He had no doubt learned from reports in the New Orleans media about the FBI’s seizure a few days earlier of bomb-making materials stored by militant Cuban exiles outside of the city. If he could learn more about such commando operations and their leaders, he was sure he would be more attractive to the Cuban regime as a defector.

Unsuccessful, however, he almost immediately abandoned the pose. Shortly after meeting with Bringuier, he was arrested in New Orleans during a street scuffle with exiles who discovered him passing out pro-Castro leaflets. Oswald spent a night in jail. Interrogated by a police lieutenant, he made up a transparent lie, claiming to have been born in Cuba. He said he had been interested in the Fair Play for Cuba group since his time in California, though it was not formed until after he left.²¹ These and other lies were evidence of his increasingly compulsive fantasizing about Cuba. He wished to be a Cuban. Priscilla Johnson McMillan, Marina’s biographer, concluded he was deteriorating psychologically.²² By early September, according to her interviews with Marina, he was “increasingly concentrating on one thing—Cuba. . . . He was anxious to be on his way.”²³

He was already planning his route when Fidel provided another inducement. On September 9, the New Orleans Times-Picayune published an account of an interview Castro gave to journalists in Havana two days earlier. Oswald was known to be an avid newspaper reader and would have been drawn to the story by its dramatic headline. The Cuban leader revealed he was aware of assassination plots against him. It was even more striking that he also warned that American “leaders would be in danger themselves if they helped in any attempt to do away with leaders of Cuba.”²⁴ Assuming that Oswald knew of this threat and believed Castro was in danger, he would have brooded yet more about trying somehow to defend him. A week or so earlier Marina twice saw Lee playing with the rifle he would use to kill Kennedy two months later. On one of those occasions he told her that “Fidel Castro needs defenders. I’m going to join his army of volunteers. I’m going to be a revolutionary.”²⁵

Oswald had already acted with murderous intent in Castro’s defense. That was his motive on April 10 in Dallas when he attempted to kill retired army general Edwin Walker. He used the same rifle, but missed the general’s cranium by a fraction of an inch. One of Castro’s most aggressive, extreme right-wing American adversaries, Walker had attracted a substantial following traveling the country and advocating military intervention to overthrow Castro’s communist regime. He called his crusade Operation Midnight Ride. By Oswald’s twisted logic, murdering the general would have safeguarded Castro from an evil enemy. He told Marina it would have been as justifiable as assassinating Hitler.²⁶

Stirred by the manic desire to defend Castro, on September 17 Oswald visited the Mexican consulate in downtown New Orleans and obtained a tourist card. On September 23 he sent Marina and their daughter to Dallas to live. One or two days later he vacated his apartment on Magazine Street without paying and started on his journey of discovery. He was ready to begin the new life that had eluded him since his days at El Toro. Marina did not expect ever to see him again.

She was sworn to protect the secret of his odyssey. Until she testified before the Warren Commission, it was a trust she refused to violate even when FBI agents repeatedly interrogated her about it after her husband was dead. The extreme sensitivity of his Mexico-Cuba mission was also evident during his interrogations at Dallas police headquarters on November 22. He was enraged when confronted with the Mexico trip that he must have thought had not come to the attention of authorities. He jumped up, slammed his fist on a table, and denied he had gone there. Police Captain Will Fritz, the chief interrogator, testified that Oswald “beat on the desk and went into a kind of tantrum.” This was the only time during his questioning that Oswald reacted with fury. It suggested that he was trying to conceal something much more sinister than just having visited Mexico City as a tourist. When asked by the Warren Commission about Oswald’s motive for killing the president, Fritz said “because of his feelings about the Cuban revolution” . . . “I think that was his motive.”²⁷

IN MEXICO CITY HE WALKED A FEW BLOCKS from the bus depot and booked room eighteen at the Hotel del Comercio for $1.28 a night.²⁸ A modest four-story brick building, it was near two of the city’s main thoroughfares and not far from his quarry, the walled compound that enclosed the Cuban embassy and consulate. Oswald stayed five nights at the hotel, leaving October 2 at about 7 A.M., when he boarded a bus bound for Texas. What he did during most of the time he spent in the Mexican capital remains perhaps the most important unsolved mystery of the Kennedy assassination.

From the hotel he went to the Cuban consulate, arriving late in the morning. He returned the next day and apparently again on October 1, altogether spending upwards of two hours there. Oswald was in the right place; with at least ten experienced operatives, the consulate provided cover for the largest DGI Center anywhere in the world. Initially he dealt with Silvia Duran, the young Mexican receptionist—a compliant adherent of the Castro regime and a DGI asset.²⁹ One of her Cuban embassy colleagues told the CIA that Duran was “very intelligent and quick witted,” traits she demonstrated when interrogated on two occasions by Mexican authorities, and again in 1978 when she testified, unreliably, before American investigators.³⁰ Consul Eusebio Azcue, believed to be an experienced intelligence officer, and Alfredo Mirabal, the incoming DGI chief, also encountered the young American walk-in. ³¹

Oswald arrived prepared to showcase his revolutionary bona fides, carrying letters, documents, newspaper clippings, and membership cards to prove his value. He told of his experience in “street agitation,” and probably of his effort to penetrate Carlos Bringuier’s exile group. He boasted of spending a night in jail for the revolution and carried clippings to prove it. Most likely he complained of being harassed by the FBI, and probably told of his assassination attempt against general Walker. While Oswald lived he was never a suspect in that case but probably thought his ferocity would endear him to the Cubans. John Whitten, a knowledgeable senior CIA officer who was the agency’s initial liaison with the Warren Commission, thought so. During congressional testimony in 1976, Whitten asked rhetorically, “Did he use this heroic deed to build himself up in their eyes? . . . Seemed to me exactly what he would do.”³²

Yet, despite all this, and after his traveling, conniving, and pleading, the Cubans denied him the visa he so desperately sought. It was a humiliating, enraging end to his long quest. He and Azcue fell into protracted, angry confrontations heard throughout the consulate. Shouting, Oswald slammed the door as he finally departed. It was apparently then, according to Jack Childs of the FBI’s Operation SOLO, that Oswald screamed his intent to kill Kennedy. Castro did not explain why that would have been said, what had transpired in the consulate that must have provoked it. But a CIA Cuba expert with many years’ experience tracking the DGI is quoted in chapter eleven; he believed that consulate operatives “planted the seed” in Oswald, “agitated him, and promoted his “violent impulses.”

Oswald left few traces during the rest of his time in Mexico. Marina said he mentioned going to a bullfight and museums, but no evidence of either was found. Credible reporting later linked him to pro-Castro university students he sought out thinking they could help him go to Cuba. One of the Mexicans remembered how Oswald kept emphasizing that he had to get there.³³ Oswald was rumored to have attended a party at Duran’s home.³⁴ A relationship with her was confirmed when a trusted CIA agent reported four years later that the receptionist admitted to having had an affair with Oswald; “she had gone out with him several times, and liked him from the start.”³⁵ At a minimum, it is clear she sympathized with him and went beyond the requirements of her job to help him.

No conclusive evidence has ever surfaced indicating that Kennedy’s assassin had additional contact with the three consulate personnel mentioned, or with any of the other DGI operatives at the embassy. Yet, if he spent time with Duran as the CIA source reported, it is likely he also dealt with other Cuban agents. Vladimir Rodriguez Lahera, one of the DGI defectors, thought Oswald probably met in the consulate with Manuel Vega Perez and possibly with his deputy Rogelio Rodriguez. Described in chapters seven and eleven, they were tough DGI undercover veterans. According to declassified CIA records, they masterminded an assassination attempt against a prominent Nicaraguan leader and were at the consulate when Oswald was in Mexico.³⁶ Rodriguez Lahera, who briefly worked at the Cuban consulate in Mexico before joining ranks with the CIA, also reported that Oswald may have had some sort of contacts with the mysterious Luisa Calderon.

Cuban interest in Oswald would likely have been further stimulated by two visits he paid to the Soviet consulate where he met with KGB officers, one of them an officer of the notorious Department 13, responsible for assassinations and sabotage operations. The Soviets were puzzled by what one described as Oswald’s erratic behavior, and they knew he had been dealing with the Cubans.³⁷ At the time, the KGB was providing valuable training and assistance to the DGI, and agents of both services in Mexico would have wanted to compare impressions of the strange, young American in their midst. Such collaboration could also have later resulted in the DGI acquiring copies of KGB surveillance and other records of the time Oswald spent in Minsk. It seems certain that his intelligence file in Havana was thickening.

IN THE FIRST MONTHS FOLLOWING KENNEDY’S ASSASSINATION, little solid information about Oswald’s Mexico interlude was developed for the Warren Commission. In mid-March 1964 its staff director told a CIA representative that “the most significant gap appeared in the Mexican phase.”³⁸ Belatedly, in April, even as the Warren report was being drafted, three senior staff investigators arrived in the Aztec capital. They confronted many perplexing issues, but a crucially important one bothered them the most. Their trip report shows they “wanted to learn as much as possible . . . with special emphasis on the Hotel del Comercio.”³⁹

Interest in the hotel where Oswald stayed was spurred by Thomas Mann, the American ambassador, who strongly suspected Cuban government involvement in Kennedy’s death. He was asked by the commission staffers “to what extent it was known in Mexico City that the Hotel del Comercio was a headquarters for pro-Castro activities.” Mann told them that “it was not known generally at all . . . [but] only in intelligence circles.”⁴⁰ These were stunning revelations. The ambassador obviously believed—based on sensitive information—that the DGI used Oswald’s hotel for intelligence purposes.

Mann had lobbied his concerns with some of the highest-level officials in Washington. He wanted Mexican authorities to arrest Luisa Calderon and the two Cuban consuls, convinced they were witnesses to Cuban perfidy.⁴¹ Originally, his suspicions were aroused by a report from a Nicaraguan who claimed to have seen Oswald accepting Cuban money at the consulate. That source was eventually discredited, but Mann was also aware of a tapped phone conversation between the figurehead Cuban president in Havana and the ambassador in Mexico. They also talked about money, but nothing definitive could be gleaned from their suspicious exchange. Still, Mann had another good reason to be concerned. He was aware of Castro’s September 7 threat against “American leaders,” and was sure it had not been idle talk. He knew Castro better than most and believed he was capable of almost anything. A hard-line anticommunist, the ambassador was an astute and objective analyst not known to exaggerate or embellish.

He was a successful lawyer who grew up in Laredo, Texas, speaking English and fluent Spanish. Joining the foreign service during World War II, he first served in Uruguay, later as ambassador in El Salvador, and twice as assistant secretary of state with different portfolios. After the Kennedy assassination he returned to Washington again as assistant secretary, later rising to become undersecretary of state. Unlike many ambassadors, Tom Mann valued the close relationships he cultivated with his senior CIA and FBI staff, and especially with Winston “Win” Scott, the entrenched CIA station chief. Scott, said by one of his staffers to “exude power,” was described by his biographer Jefferson Morley as “a legendary figure . . . one of America’s best intelligence warriors.”⁴²

The station chief and ambassador enjoyed an unusually collaborative relationship. Mann had known Allen Dulles, the CIA director from 1953 until November 1961, and made a point of calling on him before leaving in April 1961 to take up his assignment in Mexico. He sought the spymaster’s assurance that Scott would keep him apprised of everything important the station did. Dulles agreed. Once at the embassy, Mann was approached by Scott who said, “I guess you’ve talked with my boss.” Scott trusted the ambassador and shared sensitive information with him. Mann obviously learned about the Hotel del Comercio’s ominous associations primarily from Scott.⁴³

If they were right, the hotel’s alleged connections with Cuban intelligence could have proved to be the missing link in the Kennedy investigation. If the hotel actually served as a pro-Castro “headquarters,” inevitably that meant it was used by the DGI for clandestine meetings and to house agents and volunteers. The DGI, already a world-class intelligence agency, was too good to have used only one hotel for such purposes, but there was a high demand for secure operational locations. Hundreds of Latin American youths were flowing through the Mexican capital in 1963 on their way to Cuba, many going for guerrilla warfare and espionage training. The consulate was an obligatory stop on their way. They would utter a password to a DGI officer using consular cover and be granted visas to go to the island. David Phillips ran CIA Cuba operations in Mexico City in 1963. He testified that at least 150 people went to the consulate daily.⁴⁴

Why did Oswald choose to stay at the Hotel del Comercio?⁴⁵ He knew of an inexpensive alternative that might have better suited him and his fantasies. On the bus ride from Nuevo Laredo he had recommended the Hotel Cuba to two Australian women, saying he was not going to stay there but had on previous occasions.⁴⁶ The FBI later found the hotel—on the Republic of Cuba Street—but uncovered no evidence that Oswald had lodged there at any time since returning from Minsk. If he had stayed there earlier, say, when serving in the Marine Corps, no evidence of that has surfaced either. But how then did he know of this obscure little place? Did he hear about it in Dallas or New Orleans, or read about it? His mention of the hotel to the Australians was perhaps meaningless, another of his idle, incessant lies. But, more ominously, it could have meant that he actually had stayed there earlier, and was therefore more familiar with Mexico City, and Cubans there, than has ever been revealed. ⁴⁷

Tom Mann suspected that Oswald chose the Hotel del Comercio because he was directed there. If so, it would appear that he had been in touch with Cuban operatives—undercover DGI officers or their assets—before he left New Orleans. The second-largest concentration of Cuban exiles in the United States resided there in 1963, and, according to J. Edgar Hoover, “several thousand” of them were anti-Castro militants.⁴⁸ A prime target of Castro’s counterintelligence, the Cuban community almost certainly was penetrated by double agents and informers. Carlos Bringuier thought so. Cuban exile commandos told him they believed a “Castro agent” had infiltrated their training camp near New Orleans⁴⁹ So, it seems most unlikely that Oswald did not come to the attention of Cuban operatives in New Orleans. Yet, even after his amateurish effort to penetrate Bringuier’s organization, street activism, and media appearances, the possibility that he and the DGI were somehow connected was never examined by the FBI. In fact, as is revealed in subsequent chapters, for many years Cuban intelligence capabilities were grievously underestimated by American intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

It was Mann who pressed Oswald’s Cuba connection with searing conviction. But he did not have the chance to pursue it for long. Soon after he began waving warning flags he was silenced. More than 550 people from many walks of life testified before the Warren Commission or provided sworn affidavits, but the ambassador was not among them. He was a dedicated public servant, and once ordered to step aside from the assassination investigation, he complied. Subsequently, he rarely spoke on the record about Kennedy’s death and his concerns or why they were quashed.⁵⁰ Fortunately, however, two reliable accounts of his experience have survived. Fourteen years after the assassination he was interviewed by an investigator of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Notes of that session show that he was compelled to desist in his Cuba probe, and so, he said, were Win Scott and Clark Anderson, the FBI legal attaché at the embassy. Mann described their repudiation as “incredible.”⁵¹

The ambassador’s second, more detailed account is included in an unpublished memoir he wrote in 1982 when he was 70.

The Embassy received instructions to cease our investigation of Oswald’s visit to Mexico and to request the Mexican government to do the same. Having only begun our investigation, I sent a telegram to the Department [of State] asking that the instruction be reconsidered and that the Embassy be allowed to conclude its investigation. This request was denied. No reasons were given. Similar instructions were received by Embassy intelligence officers from the intelligence agencies to which they reported.

I recall telling my associates in the Embassy that Washington must have known something we did not know, and noted that our instructions could not have been sent without the knowledge and consent of Robert Kennedy, who was then Attorney General. The reason . . . remains a mystery to me. We thought there was a good chance we would be able to turn up additional information of importance.⁵²

In the weeks immediately after the assassination, Mann was working closely with Win Scott, who shared his concerns about Cuba.⁵³ But they were blind-sided by several of the most powerful officials in Washington, and probably by Lyndon Johnson, the new president. Secretary of State Dean Rusk admitted in Warren Commission testimony that after the assassination he “had a number of exchanges” with Mann about “the presence in Mexico of Mr. Oswald.” The discussions, he said, “raised questions of the most far-reaching character involving the possibility . . . of another government . . .” He trailed off here, and did not name Cuba or Castro. He declined to comment further.⁵⁴ Rusk had approved the administration’s silencing of his ambassador, and no doubt hoped not to be asked about that. Mann was never censured or reprimanded, and in fact was promoted, becoming a favorite of fellow Texan Johnson.⁵⁵ But his rallying for a more aggressive investigation of Oswald and Cuba brought him only grief.

Others also prevailed against him. Robert Kennedy, J. Edgar Hoover, and Richard Helms at CIA wanted the Mexico investigation shut down. Kennedy and Helms feared that an assassination plot against Castro that they approved (it is described in chapters eight, nine, and ten) might be exposed. They worried especially because it most likely had been sanctioned by the fallen president. The Warren Commission was never told of the CIA assassination planning that—in one of history’s strangest coincidences—was coming to closure in a Paris safe house at precisely the moment Kennedy was murdered. Those who participated in the cover-up knew that Chief Justice Earl Warren and the six other distinguished commissioners would not have shied from a broader investigation of Cuba had they known of the plots against Castro. And if the commission had demanded more stringent support from the intelligence agencies, their report to the American people might have raised the specter of Cuban influence on Oswald. President Johnson feared that even such a qualified finding could have raised a firestorm of demands for military action against Castro.

Within days of Kennedy’s death, J. Edgar Hoover told Johnson that Oswald had acted alone, that he was not part of a foreign conspiracy. A top FBI aide disagreed, and testified in 1976 that at the time “there was no data to support that judgment.” So, as Mann persisted, he ran afoul of the vindictive FBI director. Hoover came to detest the ambassador, denigrating him as a “Sherlock Holmes” for his efforts in Mexico and ordering FBI personnel “to avoid any suggestions” he offered.⁵⁶ The tensions and fears that Mann had ignited put him in the administration’s crosshairs. He was placed under audio surveillance, probably by his own subordinates in the embassy. Mann was convinced that Hoover—perhaps carrying out instructions from the attorney general—had ordered a telephone tap installed in his residence to listen in on private conversations.⁵⁷ His enemies may have feared—needlessly—that he would leak his dilemma to the press or influential members of Congress. Exactly one month after Kennedy’s assassination the ambassador was recalled to Washington short of tour.

In the end, the Warren Commission rejected his concerns about the Hotel del Comercio. The way was thereby cleared for it to declare that it found no evidence of Cuban government involvement in a conspiracy. According to Appendix XII of the report:

Investigation of the hotel at which Oswald stayed has failed to uncover any evidence that the hotel is unusual in any way that would relate to Oswald’s visit. It is not especially popular among Cubans, and there is no indication that it is used as a meeting place for extremist or revolutionary organizations. Investigations of other guests of the hotel who were there when Oswald was have failed to uncover anything creating suspicion.⁵⁸

Fifty years later it is difficult to reconstruct how the commission concluded Mann could have been so mistaken. An FBI report that compiled numerous interviews conducted in 1964 with the hotel owner-manager, maid, desk clerk, owner of a nearby restaurant, and others is cited by the commission as primary exculpatory evidence.⁵⁹ The owner said the hotel catered to a lower-income commercial clientele, mostly Mexicans, and was not frequented by pro-Castro Cubans. Another source familiar with the hotel scene in the city was said to know nothing unfavorable about it. Oswald reportedly received no visitors, left early, and returned late at night.

But interviews with guests, also cited by the commission, seem contradictory. At least one resident saw Oswald talking to another guest he thought was a Cuban. Several other Cubans, including one on his way to Miami, and a Honduran were said to have been guests when Oswald was there.⁶⁰ A Cuban was reported living in a room on the roof of the hotel with his Mexican girlfriend. The hotel could, of course, have operated covertly in support of Cuban intelligence from just one room used as a safe site without alerting the owner or other staff. Yet there is no evidence that this possibility was considered.

Since some of the interviews relating to the hotel were conducted by Mexican authorities, their reliability is uncertain.⁶¹ Clark Anderson, the FBI attaché, was asked by the Warren Commission if the Mexicans actively investigated. “Not really,” he said. Furthermore, it cannot be established to what extent, if any, serious efforts were made to assess the reliability of the sources interviewed by FBI agents, as the CIA would have done. But the agency was not involved: Helms informed the commission in February 1964 that Oswald’s activities in Mexico were “handled by the FBI.”⁶² Here too its work was seriously deficient. In congressional testimony in 1976, William Sullivan, an FBI assistant director, admitted that “there had been gaps in the investigation” of Kennedy’s assassination. “Oswald’s contacts in Mexico City” was the first of three examples he cited.⁶³

To their credit, the Warren Commission staffers visiting Mexico recognized how essential the hotel owner-manager was as the keystone source. They endeavored to interview him themselves, offering to meet him in the embassy. But Luis Echeverria, a ranking Mexican government official and future nationalist president, rejected the proposal. He claimed to “firmly believe” there had been no foreign conspiracy, at least none connected with Mexico.⁶⁴ Like American leaders, the Mexicans wanted the investigation of Oswald’s visit to disappear. If it progressed much further it could imperil the delicate relationship with Cuba and invite a political backlash at home. Mexican government cooperation in the Oswald probe was therefore qualified and sometimes dishonest. For example, Mexican authorities first interrogated Silvia Duran on November 24 and told Win Scott that she had denied having an affair with Oswald. Yet the CIA agent who confirmed the affair reported that she had admitted it to the Mexicans. Her interrogation lasted eight hours, but the embassy was only given a cursory summary. Could the real character of the Hotel del Comercio have been intentionally whitewashed, as Duran was?

In April, as time was running out to complete the Warren report, the staffers visiting Mexico interviewed Win Scott and Clark Anderson. In 1976, when Anderson testified about their visit under oath before the House assassinations committee, he admitted that he, Scott, and Mann had maintained “very close, personal coordination” after the assassination. But, incredibly, he claimed not to remember anything at all about the staffers’ visit or his meetings with them. “Do you recall having any contact with them?” he was asked. “I frankly can’t recall,” he responded. He was asked if he had received any instructions (from Washington), whether “information could be provided to them.” Again, his memory, he professed, completely failed him. ⁶⁵

As noted, Mann, said he learned of the hotel’s suspicious nature from “intelligence circles,” surely meaning Scott and possibly the forgetful Anderson. But when questioned by the Warren Commission staffers about that in April 1964, both men denied any such knowledge.⁶⁶ With their denials in hand, it was possible for the commission to conclude that, for whatever reasons, ambassador Mann had been wrong about the hotel. Yet, considering the extreme pressures that were being exerted from the highest-ranking authorities in Washington, it is wise now to wonder if Helms and Hoover, encouraged by the attorney general and the president, may not have persuaded their men in Mexico to go quietly along with a cover-up for the good of the country . . . and world peace.