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.
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