Newly Released Files Part 4, The CIA in Mexico City

     The most intriguing documents in the new released files are ones relating to the CIA's Anne Goodpasture. She was a "charter member" of the CIA, having worked for its predecessor the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during WWII.  Thus, like Julia Child, whom she knew in the OSS, Goodpasture was a trailblazer for women in the intelligence services.

      But her importance to this blog is that in 1977, during the House Assassinations Committee investigation, she prepared several memos on the operations of the CIA station in Mexico City at the time of Oswald's visit when he attempted to get to Cuba.  

      In 1998, Dr. Jeremy Gunn, executive director of the Assassination Records Review Board, interviewed Ms. Goodpasture and discussed some of the items below. That interview adds nothing to what appears in the following documents except that she spelled her first name Anne with an "e" whereas the CIA records show her name as Ann.

1. The Mexico City station.  In the first of the memos, Goodpasture describes the history of the counterintelligence work of the station in covering the Soviet and Cuban diplomatic establishments there.  She identifies nineteen of the CIA officers doing this work in 1963.  She is highly critical of the results of a liaison relationship with the Direcccion Federal de Seguridad (DFS) of the Mexican government, calling its agents "vicious, venal, corrupt extortionists." The CIA built its own surveillance of the Soviet and Cuban offices in Mexico City. This is how Oswald came to the CIA's attention when he contacted the Cuban and Soviet consulates to get visas.  The CIA's photograph of a man entering the Soviet establishment, mistakenly identified as Oswald, has been the subject of much controversy over the years, but the CIA's explanation that it was simply a mistake has been pretty much accepted. The important thing about this memo is the transcripts of the phone calls between the Soviet and Cuban consulates about Oswald's visa requests.  The bottom line is that the Soviets thought Oswald wanted to return to Russia with his wife and wouldn't give him a visa until it checked with the Soviet embassy in Washington.  The Cubans wouldn't give him an intransit visa that would permit him to stop there on the way to Russia unless he had a Soviet visa,

2. The Mexico City intercepts.  This 105-page document, apparently prepared by Goodpasture in 1977, includes the document discussed in paragraph 1 above, but it also includes the CIA cables to and from Mexico City reporting on intercepted phone calls (wiretaps) on phone lines at the Cuba and Soviet establishments related to Oswald's visit and to the assassination.

     The CIA's Mexico station realized that Oswald's visit to Mexico City in September and attempt to get a visa to Cuba may have been because "he was getting documented to make a quick escape after assassinating the president" and cabled CIA headquarters to make sure it understood this possibility. (Cable of November 24, page 77).   

      The next day, November 25, the station reminded headquarters of Castro's September 7, 1963 threat to assassinate Kennedy.  "FYI.  Presume headquarters is aware of AP story datelined Hava September 7.  At reception at Brazilian Embassy Castro is quoted: 'We are prepared to fight them and answer in kind. United States leaders should think (reflect) that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe.'" (page 85)  The distribution of this cable at CIA headquarters included the Special Affairs Staff (SAS 5), which was Desmond FitzGerald's group. A case officer in SAS, Nestor Sanchez, had met with Cubela that very September 7 in Brazil. As pointed out in a previous post, Sanchez testified to the Church Committee that he did not know of this threat at the time. Sanchez also testified that he returned from the Paris meeting with Cubela to CIA headquarters on November 23, so he was there when this cable arrived. That SAS was so stupid as not to connect the Cubela plot with Castro's threat and with Kennedy's assassination is inconceivable.

    The most intriguing of these intercepts is a phone call at 12:50 pm Mexico City time.  (page 74) Before discussing the phone call, some background is needed.  This call was placed twenty minutes after Kennedy was shot in Dallas, which is in the same time zone.  News of shots being fired at the president went out to the world instantly.  At 12:40 Central Standard Time, Walter Cronkite reported on CBS that three shots were fired and the president was seriously wounded. The French reporter Jean Daniel was in Havana on this day interviewing Castro over lunch. Daniel wrote that the lunch was interrupted by someone bringing in news of the shooting. He said the time was 1:30 Havana time, which is an hour ahead of Dallas. In other words, Castro knew of the shooting around 12:35.  

    

     Now for the phone call.  It was from Alfredo Mirabal. He had just replaced Azcue as Cuban consul on Monday of that week.  The CIA later identified him as "the chief Cuban Intelligence officer in Mexico City." The intercept is a brief conversation with Valery Kostikov. He was in the Soviet consulate and was the man who Oswald had talked to there. Kostikov was also in Department 13 of the KGB, specializing in assassination and sabotage.  Mirabal called to speak to Pavel Yatskov, but according to the cable, he "was apparently unavailable" and Kostikov came on the line.

     The conversation makes no sense.   The men seem to be talking in code.  They surely knew about the shooting in Dallas by this time, yet they don't mention it.  After a brief exchange about whether Kostikov recovered a suitcase, Mirabal says:  "I called to tell you the following, that regarding that matter that we talked about to see if we could spend Sunday in Chapultapec Park because my wife is preparing some food to eat there."  Kostikov answers:  "I'm sorry but I've just made plans for another trip. I'm leaving this very day. So please forgive me for not being able to go with you.  (At this point Kostikov in error refers to Mirabal as Azcue and Mirabal corrects him)."  

     Did these men know Kennedy had been shot? Did they know or at least assume the CIA was listening in to their phone call?  If so, why would they use the telephone for any significant business? Does the conversation seem nonsense because they are talking in a kind of code? Why would the Cuban consul care about Kostikov finding a suitcase? Was the reference to Chapultapec Park a request to meet there where the CIA couldn't eavesdrop?  Why did Kostikov make the mistake of calling Mirabal, "Azcue." If this was indeed a social call, Kostikov is unlikely to have made such a mistake. Rather than being a social call, was Mirabal suggesting the men meet and talk about the assassination?  And did they have foreknowledge of the assassination and that Oswald was the assassin?  Did Kostikov make the mistake of calling Mirabal "Azcue" because Kostikov and Azcue had met Oswald on his visit to Mexico City in late September?  

     When I was on the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1976, I talked to James Angelton, the CIA's counterintelligence chief and the man who had interfaced with the Warren Commission, about this phone call.  I showed him the cable. Angelton had always said the CIA investigation of Kennedy's assassination would never close and had assigned his assistant Raymond Rocca to follow it.  Angelton agreed that Mirabal and Kostikov seemed to be talking in code because they knew, as all good spies do, the phone might be tapped, but he pointed out that while the timing and gobbledygook raise suspicsions, you can't reach conclusions from suspicions.  It is notable, however, that this cable apparently raised no suspicions in 1963, or, if they did, the CIA made a conscious decision not to pursue the matter.  For example, Kostikov was put under surveillance on November 22, and so the CIA should have learned if he in fact made a trip.  (Page 59). There is no evidence the CIA pursued the matter though.

      A final document in this set is a fitness report on Ann Goodpasture. I highlight this with some hesitation because publishing the fitness report seems an invasion of Ms. Goodpasture's privacy, as it would be for anyone's fitness report.  However, there is a relevant tidbit in her report.  The reviewer is John Whitten at CIA headquarters, who oversaw CIA operations in Mexico.  Whitten'c comments in the fitness report are that Ms. Goodpasture's ratings were too high because while her work was as good as that of others in Mexico City, it "is still not up to DDP [Deputy Director of Plans] standards." Whitten's complaint was not about the quality though but rather about how much money the Mexico City station was spending.  In particular, Goodpasture's LITEMPO project was too expensive.  "The agents are paid too much and their activities are not adequately reported." While Whitten's comments may be a bit crabbed, they do raise questions about how good the CIA investigation of the Kennedy assassination in Mexico City was.

The Newly Released Files, Part 3, Asciate ogni speranza, o voi ch'intrate

    The Italian words chosen for the title of this post, “abandon hope all ye who enter,” come obviously from Dante’s Inferno which has the words inscribed over the gates of hell. They could just as easily be used for the JFK Collection at the National Archives though. This is not to diminish the tremendous efforts of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), which oversaw assembly of the collection,  the employees of the government agencies that did the work, or those at the National Archives who maintain them. Yet for those who dive in thinking a smoking gun lurks in the records, asciate ogni speranza, o voi ch'intrate!

1. 40,000 unindexed FBI records. In December 1977, during the House Assassinations Committee investigation, CIA headquarters answered the Mexico City Station's request for copies of FBI documents related to the assassination work in Mexico City because "FBI does not have the personnel to examine first 40,000 pages.... These documents are not indexed.... There no way to determine which documents relate to Mexico City except by search of each individual document." The CIA sent three people to the FBI to do the work, but apparently after the first day of work, they got through only ten of the 200 "sections" of documents at the FBI. (See pages 184-85 of Murder, Inc. on the chaotic filing system for Hoover's feared FBI files).

     The researcher may find some comfort in the fact that the ARRB insured that the JFK Collection was indexed -- although hundreds of boxes of possibly related documents are not.

2. The CIA is not a monolith. It is often of two minds, but just as often it is careful as to which mind it makes public. For example, when Cubela's case officer, Nestor Sanchez, testified before the Church Committee in 1976, I asked him about Castro's September 7, 1963, threat that U.S. leaders would not be safe if they aided plans to eliminate Cuban leaders. This threat was made to an American reporter at a function at the Brazilian embassy in Havana. That very day, Sanchez met in Porto Alegre, Brazil, with Rolando Cubela who told Sanchez he wanted the CIA’s help in "eliminating" Castro.

Q. Castro does give a warning about United States leaders aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuba leaders, and you were doing that very thing.

A. There is probably a coincidence there. I don't recall that I knew of this at that time [even though the coincidence suggests that Castro knew what Sanchez was doing], I've certainly heard it since, but I don't see the point that you are trying to make, because if Castro is behind or was behind AMLASH [Cubela], then are you proposing that he would also publicly in the Brazilian embassy state that this was going to take place? In other words, was he telegraphing this plan that he had?

      But while Sanchez was opining on this to the Senate Intelligence Committee, others at the CIA had reached the opposite conclusion. In a 1975 memo to Rockefeller Commission director David Belin, the CIA's E. Henry Knoche, wrote: "There can be no question... that this event represented a more-than-ordinary attempt to get a message on the record in the United States.... Castro's statements.... dealt principally with American political leadership, in particular President Kennedy, whom he excoriated in an extraordinarily provocative fashion... ('Kennedy is a 'cretin')."

     Of course, Knoche's views were not new.  When an interagency committee on Cuban affairs studied Castro's statement in the fall of 1963, before Kennedy's assassination, it concluded that Castro was threatening drastic action and might, among other things, assassinate an American businessman or diplomat in Latin America. It apparently didn't consider that he might do exactly what he said and assassinate the President. (Murder, Inc. pages 108-09).