November 18 in Tampa

            My earlier installments on the files from the National Archives of Mexico prompted me to take a second look at Vincent T. Lee and Gilberto Policarpo Lopez.

            Several articles on Vincent Lee in the Tampa Times caught my eye.  He got his start in Tampa, where Ybor City, started around 1890 by a cigar manufacturer, was the center of a vibrant Cuban community.  In the immediate aftermath of the assassination, an article in the November 26, 1963 edition of the paper said “in 1959 it was no secret that Castro was a popular figure among Latins and Anglos.”  But after Castro took power, tensions between pro and anti-Castro forces started building. Lee took the lead with pro-Castro elements. He founded the Tampa chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, drawing 250 people to its first meeting in early 1961.  He rose quickly to become head of the national FPCC in New York.

            In December 27, 1963, the Tampa paper reported that Lee had resigned from the FPCC. It added, without referencing its source, that the committee was “financed originally by the Castro Cuban delegation to the United Nations.”  In Murder, Inc., I point out that the FPCC and several other, left-wing organizations that Lee Harvey Oswald corresponded with were located in a small section of Greenwich Village in New York and were certainly accessible to the Cuban delegation at the UN.  I also noted that when the FBI broke into the FPCC’s New York headquarters, it acquired the Committee’s foreign mailing list, which included Fidel Castro himself in Havana.

            There is nothing in the Tampa paper about Gilberto Lopez, nor would one expect there would be. He had only moved there in June 1963.  Before that, he had lived and worked in Key West.  The FBI investigation of him found that the men he knew in Key West were anti-Castro whereas Lopez seemed pro-Castro. Perhaps he moved to Tampa to find a more congenial political atmosphere.

            John Kennedy visited Tampa on Monday, November 18, 1963.  It was a rather brief visit with the usual focus on politics.  Thus, he spoke to a crowd at the baseball stadium, then to the Chamber of Commerce, and finally to a union gathering.

            What was unusual about the visit, however, was that he spent almost an equal amount of time at a military facility, MacDill Air Force Base. Kennedy rarely wasted time on military bases. His charisma paid far better dividends when he was exposed to civilian crowds. But MacDill was headquarters of the U.S. Strike Command.  Its quick reaction forces might be needed if the CIA pulled off its planned coup in Cuba.  During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy was surprised to learn that the military didn’t have a quick reaction force.  He was told it would take eighteen days to have a force large enough to go into Cuba. So the visit to MacDill seemed designed for Kennedy to see how much progress had been made and whether it was ready to go to Cuba if needed.

            The White House had been worried about demonstrations by pro and anti- Castro elements in Tampa, but Kennedy’s visit went off without a hitch. FBI agent Moses Aleman, who would later do the investigation into Lopez’s activities, and his fellow agents received commendations from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover for their work in providing security for Kennedy’s visit.

            However, in the same November 26, 1963, edition of the Tampa Times that carried the story on Lee, there was a second article reporting a rumor that Lee Harvey Oswald had been in Tampa during Kennedy’s visit. The article quoted the chief of police saying the rumor wasn’t true, and of course it wasn’t.  Besides, ominous, pre-assassination sightings of Oswald were as common as those of Bigfoot. Nonetheless, one wonders if the rumor was based on a grain of truth that it was Lopez who was up to no good. I am sorry that I didn’t know about this newspaper article in my conversations with Moses Aleman.  But then I doubt that he heard or remembered any such rumor or else he would have volunteered it in our discussions.

            The point is the same that I make in Murder, Inc.  With few exceptions, the investigation of Kennedy's assassination veered away from leads suggesting a foreign conspiracy. 

A Second Look at the Files from the National Archives of Mexico - Part III

     A single page in the Duran files hints that the files of the Direccion Federal de Seguridad (DFS or Federal Security Directorate) once held more provocative information that has not been made public. It is page 43 and shown at the bottom left of this posting. It is a redacted photograph that is labeled "Alvarado Ugarte" but is in fact Gilberto Policarpo Lopez.  As will be explained, Gilberto ALVARADO Ugarte was thoroughly investigated, and his claim was deemed a fabrication. (Spanish convention puts the surname second and the mother's name last. To avoid confusion, American intelligence services put the surname in all capital letters. By American convention his name was Gilberto Ugarte Alvarado). In  contrast, suspicions about Gilberto Lopez were never investigated by American intelligence or the Warren Commission. However, this one page suggests Mexican authorities may have investigated him. 

     The story of Alvarado is legend.   He showed up at the U.S. embassy in Mexico City on November 25, 1963, with a wild tale of being in the Cuban consulate on September 18, 1963, and seeing a Cuban pay Oswald to kill Kennedy. Despite the fact that the FBI and CIA knew Oswald was in New Orleans on September 18, President Lyndon Johnson received in-person briefings from CIA Director John McCone on the latest developments on the Alvarado matter for several days. Later, Alvarado retracted the allegation and even later retracted the retraction. Nonetheless, the allegation consumed a great deal of CIA and FBI time and resources in the days after the assassination.

     Lopez's story is different.  He came to the DFS's attention at about the same time as the sole passenger on a commercial flight to Cuba on November 27, but the flap over Alvarado may have distracted American and Mexican authorities from investigating Lopez more aggressively.  He had been raised in Cuba but was an American citizen. He moved to Florida as an adult and was living in Tampa on November 18, 1963, when John Kennedy visited.  Two days later, he  obtained a tourist visa from the Mexican consulate in Tampa and headed west. 

     The border between Texas and Mexico was closed upon word of Kennedy's assassination on November 22. When it reopened around midnight, Mexican authorities recorded that Lopez entered Mexico as a passenger in private car.  They would later give the FBI a list of the drivers of those cars together with their make and engine number. (While engine numbers are harder to change, they are not as useful for investigators as license plates). Nothing was ever done with this information.  The FBI made no attempt to determine who drove Lopez across the border that night.

    Lopez arrived in Mexico City in the late afternoon of November 25, the same day that Alvarado showed up at the U.S. embassy.  Two days later, on the evening of November 27, Lopez flew to Havana as the only passenger on a Cubana airlines flight with a crew of nine. The CIA and FBI first learned about Lopez on December 3, and on December 5 Mexican authorities gave the CIA a  photograph of him as he was about to board the Havana flight.

     Inexplicably, except for a check of U.S. files on Lopez, the CIA and FBI let the matter drop. Mexican authorities seemed concerned however.  The very purpose of closing the border on the afternoon of November 22 was to prevent Kennedy's assassin and any accomplices from escaping to Mexico. For this reason, Lopez's entry that night aroused suspicions. Mexican authorities also reported to the CIA that they had "lost" track of him between the time he entered from Texas and his appearance at the airport five days later. 

     In late February 1964, Mexican federal police (not DFS)  told the CIA that Lopez had been "involved" in Kennedy's assassination.  Strange at it seems, the CIA did not ask for details.  However, it finally began asking the FBI to investigate Lopez's life in Florida.  Among other things, the FBI learned that Lopez had been at the house of the head of the Tampa Fair Play for Cuba Committee on November 17, the day before Kennedy's visit to the city, waiting for a phone call from Cuba that would give him the go ahead to return. FBI investigators were not told the reason for the investigation, i.e., Lopez's possible connection to the Kennedy assassination.

       This brings us to page 43 of the Mexican Archives' file on Silva Duran. That page is below on the left. It reads Alvarado Ugarte and Gilbert. It shows a man in a shirt or jacket with a checked pattern and hands on a counter. His face has been redacted.  The CIA photograph of Gilberto Policarpo Lopez taken before he boarded the flight to Havana on the night of November 27 is on the right.  Comparing the checked pattern of the shirt and the collar line reveals the two images to be the same.  The CIA image has simply been cropped from the original.  The question is what more do DFS files in Mexico contain on Lopez that has not been made public.  Did DFS save the passenger manifest of the flight?  It usually did.  Did the CIA tell DFS that Mexican police said Lopez was involved?  Did DFS investigate?

Mexican Archives Redacted

CIA Gilberto Policarpo Lopez 

       

     

A Second Look at the Files from the National Archives of Mexico - Part II

      The signed statement of Silvia Duran in the files is interesting, if for no other reason, because it has been unavailable for so many years.  When the Warren Commission staff went to Mexico City in April 1964, Duran was the prime witness it wanted to interview.  Commission staff lawyer David Slawson says this repeatedly in his notes on the staff trip.  He wrote that the staff did review the "interrogation" (singular).  However, because of difficulties in finding an acceptable way of taking Duran's testimony under oath in Mexico, the staff planned to fly her to the United States to testify.  This never happened.  According to author Philip Shenon, Duran agreed to it, but Chief Justice Earl Warren vetoed the idea because "she was a communist and we [the Commission] don't talk to communists."  This wasn't quite true though.  The Commission heard from Vincent Lee of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. He might not have been a card-carrying communist, but he obviously supported Fidel Castro, and the FPCC was taken over by the Communist Party after Lee resigned.

     The importance of Duran's testimony to the Warren Commission was that she talked to Oswald on his visit to the Cuban consulate in Mexico, filled out a visa application for him, and gave him her telephone number. But those facts were eventually established from other sources.  Plus, the notion that Duran, a Mexican national who was the ambassador's secretary, would have been given the nefarious assignment of dealing with Oswald for assassination is preposterous. The Warren Commission's staff's interest in interviewing her stemmed from a lawyerly concern for authenticating evidence about what Oswald said at the Cuban consulate. Indeed, the CIA later told the Commission that only in the most exceptional case would KGB-trained case officers meet with clandestine agents in an embassy.  That was not a very clandestine way of running a spy operation.

     Still, two things do stand out in DFS (the Mexican security service) files on Duran's interrogation.  First, in a list of questions to be asked during the interrogation, DFS notes that Duran had had a romantic affair with Carlos Lechuga when he was Castro's ambassador in Mexico.  The DFS note says that the affair led Lechuga's wife to file for divorce. The affair presumably ended when Castro moved Lechuga to New York in 1962 where he became the Cuban representative at the United Nations. 

     (As an aside, according to the New York Times of November 15, 1962, Lechuga means "lettuce" in Spanish.  This once led the Guatemalan ambassador to the O.A.S. in a fit of undiplomatic pique to express disdain for the Cuban's communism: "You are not a lettuce, you are a beet, brown on the outside and red on the inside.")

       The relationship may nonetheless have been a potential diplomatic embarrassment if Duran was arrested in connection with the assassination. For one thing, John Kennedy had been following a so-called two-track policy that fall. On the one hand, the CIA was plotting to overthrow Castro in a coup. On the other hand, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., William Attwood, was secretly exploring rapprochement with Castro through Lechuga.  The U.S. wouldn't want to risk exposure of this secret in an interrogation of Duran. The CIA's Thomas Karamessines cabled the station chief in Mexico to stop Duran's arrest although this was not his claimed reason. He testified he feared Duran might reveal the Soviets and/or Cubans were behind the assassination.  He said he wanted to buy time before such news hit the press.  Documents in the DFS file also suggest that Lechuga himself tried to block the interrogation, but then his reasons may have been more personal.

      A final puzzle raised by the interrogation is that Duran seems to deny the romantic relationship with Lechuga.  She says they were just friends. But if this is what she was saying, DFS didn't believe it. According to David Slawson, the Commission staff was told the affair was a fact. If the DFS had proof of the affair and if Duran was denying it, much more attention should have been paid to the discrepancy.  Was Duran lying to protect Lechuga and her own reputation?  Probably.  But, if she would lie about that, why believe what she said on the far more significant subject of the assassination of the President of the United States? The DFS did not seem to realize this.

      In the end, although the DFS files on Duran don't alter the Warren Commission's narrative of Oswald's actions in Mexico City, they do shed light on the quality and limits of its investigation.

     

A Second Look at the Files from the National Archives of Mexico - Part I

 

             A second look at the files on the Kennedy assassination at the National Archives of Mexico reveals documents that deserve scrutiny.  These will be discussed in a series of posts.

            At the outset, it is noted that the two files, one labeled the John Kennedy file  and the other the Silvia Duran file, contain duplicates.  In some instances, documents in the Kennedy file have redactions while those in the Duran file are reproduced without redactions. Passenger manifests are an example. In addition, the documents that have been made public hint of the existence of others that Mexico has not made public.

            This post deals only with the documents on Vincent Theodore Lee. He had been the head of the national office of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New York City. He and Lee Harvey Oswald had exchanged correspondence in May and August 1963. 

            Lee is the subject of documents at pages 31-36 (the handwritten numbers at the bottom right of the pages) and relate to his trip to Cuba from December 29, 1962 to January 21, 1963 for celebration of the fourth anniversary of Fidel Castro’s taking power.  Lee, whose face is redacted from a photograph, is described as a writer from New York who corresponded with Oswald.  The passenger manifest for the flight to Cuba shows French and Russians who presumably were also going to Cuba for the celebration. The return manifest is less legible.

            The records of Lee’s flights from New York to Mexico to Cuba and back are accompanied by a document dated December 10, 1963, which is presumably when the records on Lee were retrieved and given to DFS.

            I don’t know if DFS gave these documents to the CIA or FBI in 1963 although presumably it did. Nor do I know if they are in the JFK collection at the U.S. National Archives.  If not, then this is a small example of how other countries may possess documents related to the Kennedy that are not in the National Archives’ collection. (If any reader knows they are in the collection, please leave a comment).

            However, the main takeaway as far as my book Murder, Inc. is concerned is that the FBI had wrapped up its own report on the assassination on December 5, 1963, five days before these became available to DFS.