The CIA, Mafia, Mexico — and Oswald, Part 3
Zocalo of Mexico City. Photo credit: Sarumo74 / Wikimedia (CC BY 3.0)
Just after the Warren Commission released its report on the assassination, the level of public trust in government was at 77 percent. A decade later it had plummeted to less than half that (36 percent).
Kennedy’s death and the circumstances surrounding it gave birth to a movement. This movement, composed of all kinds of people, is dedicated to investigating the story behind the story, to exposing the power networks hidden beneath surface events. These machinations have been dubbed “Deep Politics.” Those who study it believe there is much more to national and world events than what the public is told by government officials and evening newscasters — and, as you will see, Peter Dale Scott proves it.
On the occasion of the anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination, WhoWhatWhy is pleased to present excerpts from Chapter 2 of Scott’s latest work – Dallas ’63: The First Deep State Revolt Against the White House by Peter Dale Scott (Open Road Media, September, 2015).
For Part 1, please go here; Part 2 go here; Part 4 go here; Part 5 go here; Part 6 go here.
The Manipulation or Management of the Mexico Oswald Stories
Whatever the details, we see how important were CIA stories about Oswald’s foreign involvements in securing a Commission committed from the outset to the finding that Oswald acted alone. The CIA’s role might be defensible if the information were objective and well-grounded. But as this book will show, the stories of Oswald’s Cuban involvements were virtually worthless.The two main sources for them, Silvia Durán and Gilberto Alvarado, both changed their stories repeatedly, under the threat or actual application of torture by the Mexican secret police. Alvarado actually recanted his story, as the Warren Commission was informed; however the Warren Commission did not learn that Alvarado claimed to have been told that, if he did not recant, he would be hung by his testicles.[40] And the supposed objective record of intercepted phone calls by Oswald is, as we shall see, just as seriously flawed.
In the days after the murders in Dallas, the US was flooded with dubious stories, most of them swiftly discredited, linking Oswald to either a Cuban or Soviet conspiracy. Those which most preoccupied the FBI and CIA all came out of Mexico. These stories exhibited certain common characteristics.
In retrospect, these stories should not have been taken seriously. In fact the CIA was able to rely on them, not as a source of truth, but as a source of coercive influence over the rest of government. It will help us to understand what was going on if we refer to the stories, not as “information” or even as “allegations,” but as managed stories. To say this leaves open the question of who were the ultimate managers — the DFS, US officers in Mexico, or higher authorities in Washington.1) They all came either directly from an intelligence source, or from someone in the hands of an intelligence agency. Nearly always, the agency involved was the Mexican DFS or secret police. The DFS, along with the Nicaraguan intelligence service, which was also a source, were under CIA tutelage.
2) The stories changed over time, to support either a pro-conspiratorial hypothesis (“Phase One”), or a rebuttal of this (“Phase Two”).
3) The Warren Commission was led to believe that the “Phase-One” stories were without basis. In fact a number of unresolved anomalies suggest that behind them was some deeper truth, still not revealed.
4) As just noted, the two main sources, Silvia Durán and Gilberto Alvarado, gave varying stories while detained by the DFS. Of the two, Durán was actually tortured, and Alvarado reportedly threatened with torture. Far from regretting this use of torture, the Ambassador, Thomas Mann, the CIA Station Chief, Winston Scott, and the FBI Legal Attache, Clark Anderson, argued strenuously, in the face of Washington’s expressed disapproval, for Durán’s arrest and rearrest by the DFS, and that DFS torture be used again.[41]
In retrospect, these stories should not have been taken seriously. In fact the CIA was able to rely on them, not as a source of truth, but as a source of coercive influence over the rest of government. It will help us to understand what was going on if we refer to the stories, not as “information” or even as “allegations,” but as managed stories. To say this leaves open the question of who were the ultimate managers — the DFS, US officers in Mexico, or higher authorities in Washington.
The full history is complex and confused, with many unanswered questions. But nearly all of these managed stories, along with others outside Mexico to be discussed later, resolve into this simple pattern of a Phase One/Phase Two evolution.
1) Silvia Durán’s managed story:
Luis Echeverría, the Mexican Minister of Gobernaciòn (which directed the DFS), told Winston Scott on November 23 that Silvia Durán had given a “written statement attesting to two visits by Oswald.”[42] According to the sequence of documents in Oswald’s 201 file, no written statement from Durán’s DFS interview reached CIA Headquarters until November 28, after Langley had asked for it on November 27.There is however evidence that the CIA HQ received a written Durán statement, not in the Oswald 201 file, from a back channel.[43] Already on November 24 we find a cable from “John Scelso” (John Whitten) at Headquarters, who has already read it: “After analyzing all the [cable] traffic and reading the statement of Silvia Duran, one important question still puzzles us.”[44]
Even earlier, on November 23, the CIA opined in a Headquarters memo to the FBI that Oswald probably wanted a Soviet visa first, then a Cuban transit visa while waiting for it. The memo added that “This is also the conclusion reached by Silvia Duran, the Mexican national employee of the Cuban Embassy who dealt with OSWALD.”[45] Durán could indeed easily have voiced this opinion, but there is nothing in the Oswald 201 file that indicates how CIA HQ could have known this.
“[A]ll the time they tell me that I was a Communist … and they insisted that I was a very important person for … the Cuban Government and that I was the link for the International Communists — the Cuban Communists, the Mexican Communists and the American Communists, and that we were going to kill Kennedy, and I was the link. For them I was very important.”It seems likely that the 10-page written Durán statement sent on November 27 was designed to replace an earlier, suppressed statement referred to in the CIA cable of November 23. Summarizing the contents of this first statement, the cable repeated the “Phase-One” allegation that Oswald said he was a “Communist and admirer of Castro.”[46] But what the CIA found worthy of reporting on November 23 (that Oswald said he was a Communist) has disappeared from the November 26 10-page written statement, as later from two subsequent differing versions of Durán’s November 23 interview, all of them “Phase Two”.
None of the “Phase-One” or “Phase-Two” versions mention what Silvia told the Cuban Ambassador after her release: that the DFS asked her “if she had personal relations and even if she had intimate [i.e., sexual] relations with him.” (In his phone call reporting this to the Cuban President, overheard by the CIA, the Ambassador also commented on the bruises inflicted on Durán during the interview.)[47]
From whatever source, rumors of a Durán-Oswald sexual relationship were soon floating through the US Embassy in Mexico City in the first week after the assassination, when they were heard by an FBI agent, Larry Keenan, who had been sent down by Washington.[48] A Cuban exile who was also a CIA agent, Salvador Diaz Verson, claimed to have heard in the offices of the Mexico City newspaper Excelsior, on November 25, that the DFS had learned from Durán that Oswald “had contacted DURAN, and had stayed in her home in Mexico City.”[49] (Silvia Durán herself testified that the DFS had given the results of her first interrogation to Excelsior, where a version of them was published.)[50]
As late as 1967 Durán reportedly told a CIA agent, LIRING-3, that in her November 23 interrogation she had been “interviewed thoroughly and beaten until she admitted that she had an affair with Oswald.”[51] CIA Station Chief Win Scott later reported on this “Phase-One” allegation as a fact, “the fact that Silvia Durán had sexual intercourse with Lee Harvey Oswald on several occasions when the latter was in Mexico City.”[52]
A decade later Durán confirmed to the House Assassinations Committee staff that she had been questioned about sexual relations with Oswald, which she linked to the claim that “we were Communists and that we were planning the Revolution.”[53]
[A]ll
the time they tell me that I was a Communist … and they insisted that I
was a very important person for … the Cuban Government and that I was
the link for the International Communists — the Cuban Communists, the
Mexican Communists and the American Communists, and that we were going
to kill Kennedy, and I was the link. For them I was very important.[54]
We
shall see that the theory of an international Communist assassination
conspiracy, with the Oswald-Durán relationship at its center, was one
propounded by Durán’s cousin-in-law, Elena Garro de Paz, who was already
in DFS custody. Durán blamed her “cousin” [i.e., Garro] for her arrest
by the DFS.[55]Whatever the details, there is a conspicuous contrast between the “Phase-One” accounts of this November 23 interview, beginning with the missing “written statement” of November 24, and the extant “Phase-Two” accounts. None of the extant versions mention either a conspiracy or a sexual relationship. Yet a State Department officer later told Secretary of State William Rogers that he had heard from the Deputy Chief of the CIA Station (Alan White) that the DFS had indeed interrogated Silvia Durán about the substance of the Garro allegations.[56]
The credibility of the Durán allegations is still further complicated by the hints and rumors, explored in the Lopez report, that Silvia Durán “may have been a source of information for either the CIA or the Mexicans.”[57]
2. Gilberto Alvarado’s managed story:
Another version of the Garro sexual assassination conspiracy theory was put forward on November 25 by an agent of Nicaraguan dictator Somoza. In brief, Oswald was supposed to have volunteered in the Cuban Embassy to kill President Kennedy; and to have received $6,500 in cash for the job (in front of Alvarado, a stranger). Alvarado’s claim also overlapped in vivid particulars with the Garro story, even to such details as Oswald’s companions (a tall thin Negro with reddish hair, a blonde-haired hippie with a Canadian passport), and the intimate embrace he received from a girl inside the Embassy.[58]There was an inherent problem with Alvarado’s story, so grave that it raises questions why Alvarado was ever treated with such seriousness by the US Embassy in Mexico. This is that Alvarado claimed to have seen Oswald in the Cuban Embassy on September 18, a date when (as the FBI quickly established) Oswald was still in New Orleans. This problem vanished when Alvarado amended the date to September 28.[59] This happened to be exactly the date on which the CIA (falsely, I shall argue below) placed Oswald in the Cuban Embassy. Given the extent of bad faith misreporting by the CIA about Oswald in the Cuban Embassy, we have to ask if this “correction” of Alvarado’s story had not been inspired by his CIA or DFS interrogators.
The “Phase-One” Alvarado story was also soon retracted, and replaced by a “Phase-Two” denial. On November 30 the DFS told the CIA “that Alvarado has signed a statement saying that his story of seeing Oswald inside the Cuban Embassy is completely false.” This information was immediately forwarded to CIA headquarters, who in turn forwarded it to the White House.[60] This tied up the “lead being pursued in Mexico,” which, as Hoover told LBJ on November 29, had delayed the FBI’s hope “to have the investigation wrapped up” by that time.[61]
There is more to the Alvarado story. As we have seen, he had retracted his retraction by December 3, claiming it was obtained under threat of DFS torture. Alvarado subsequently underwent a lie detector test by a technician from Washington, and failed it.[62]
The essential point is that there was both a “Phase-One” and a “Phase-Two” version of the managed Alvarado story, which alternated in close synchrony with the political needs of the moment. As the Washington Post has noted, a “Phase-One” version of the Alvarado story reached Lyndon Johnson soon before he coerced Warren into accepting the Chairmanship of the Warren Commission:
Later that afternoon [at 4:30 PM] November 29, Johnson asked Warren to come to the White House. It was around this time that Johnson received a call [at 1:40 PM] from Hoover updating the investigation. The “angle in Mexico is giving us a great deal of trouble,” Hoover said. Oswald had not been in Mexico on Sept. 18, as Alvarado had [originally] said, but Alvarado had now changed the date to Sept. 28, a day Oswald was known to have been there.[63]
It is not known if Johnson brought up the Alvarado story when pressuring Warren. Certainly other cables had reached the White House on the same day, which weakened rather than increased the likelihood of Cuban involvement. A CIA cable to the White House at 1:30 PM had notified the White House that the Mexicans interviewing Silvia Durán now believed she had been involved only with visas.[64] A cable at 4:15 told the White House that Alvarado did not recognize a photo of Durán, and the Mexicans now doubted his story.[65] From the CIA’s record, it would appear that it was Johnson, rather than the CIA, who selectively screened the data to secure Earl Warren’s compliance.
The Alvarado story in its brief and varied career was quintessentially managed, and manageable. Deeply flawed from the outset by an impossible alleged date, it was turned up, and then turned off, to meet the changing needs of his managers. There are indications that the Mexico City Station knew from the outset that the Alvarado story was false, and may indeed have planted it. According to a later report from CIA HQ to the Warren Commission,
Alvarado was known to CIA as a former informant of a Central American security service and to have been used to penetrate communist guerrilla groups. He said that he was in Mexico City still working for his service, trying to get himself accepted by the Cubans as a communist so they would take him to Cuba for guerrilla training.[66]
But in the initial cable to HQ about Alvarado, he was identified only as a Nicaraguan who “claims he awaiting false Mexican documentation prior receiving sabotage training Cuba.”[67] The author of this cable, “M.C. Choaden,” has been identified as David Phillips, a specialist in disinformation who, as the Lopez Report noted, later lied significantly about his role in the CIA’s investigation of the JFK assassination.[68]
In a second cable, “L.F. Barker” (David Phillips’ Cuban Operations colleague Robert Shaw) reported that Alvarado had admitted he was a member of the Nicaraguan Secret Service, but saw that as no reason to question his story. On the contrary, “Barker” described Alvarado as a “young, quiet, very serious person, who speaks with conviction.”[69] As late as November 27, Ambassador Mann reported that the CIA (“CAS”) officer interviewing Alvarado “was impressed by Alvarado.”[70] Still later, as noted above, Alvarado modified his story to bring the date of his Oswald observance exactly into line with the date, September 28, when the CIA (wrongly) alleged Oswald to have been there.
It should be understood that the Nicaraguan Secret Service, like other intelligence networks in Mexico and Central America, worked closely with the CIA. It later emerged that the CIA in Managua had already prepared several reports of which Alvarado, while in the Nicaraguan Secret Service, was the ultimate source. Thus the FBI seems to have got it right when in its own reports it described Alvarado as a “source of CIA’s” or “CIA source.”[71]
A common denominator underlying this CIA connection is that, in Nicaragua exactly as in Mexico, the CIA’s intelligence sources were grounded in the drug traffic. It has been known for some time that the CIA’s chief asset in Nicaragua was the leadership of the corrupt National Guard, which has been called “one of the most corrupt military establishments in the world.[72]
We now learn that Alvarado, the “CIA source,” reported “directly to General Gustavo Montiel, Chief of the Intelligence Service of the Nicaraguan Army.”[73] As we shall see, Montiel was later denounced as a principal in a “massive car theft ring” run by Norwin Meneses, described in other CIA cables as “the kingpin of narcotics traffickers in Nicaragua.”[74] We shall return to this striking similarity between these CIA assets — Montiel in Nicaragua, Nazar Haro in Mexico — that both were said to be involved in a network or networks dealing simultaneously in massive car smuggling (south) and narcotics smuggling (north).
Given the known ambiguities about Alvarado’s double identity as an intelligence agent, one can easily fault the leaders of the US Embassy in Mexico (Ambassador Mann, Station Chief Scott, and FBI Legat Anderson), for claiming that “there appears to be a strong possibility that a down payment was made to Oswald in the Cuban Embassy here.”[75] But it is not clear that the management of the Alvarado story was integral to the Kennedy assassination plot. It is clear that the CIA was and is hiding something about Oswald and the Cuban Embassy. The Alvarado story might have been no more than a convenient diversion: a chance to focus attention on a different (and false) narrative.
3. The Elena Garro de Paz managed story.
One reason the Alvarado story could be endorsed vigorously by CIA Station Chief Scott was that it was corroborated in small details by other “Phase-One” stories, also from intelligence sources, and later similarly retracted.[76] One of these corroborative stories was directly attributed to “a CIA man in Dallas,” who allegedly told reporter Jerry O’Leary that Oswald returned from Mexico “with $5,000 which he did not have when he went into Mexico.” O’Leary telephoned this information to FBI Headquarters.[77] The FBI account of this event commented, “In other words, the CIA man in Dallas leaked information to O’Leary.”[78] However a CIA cable the next day reported from Mexico the rumor that Oswald had deposited $5000 in the United States after he got back from Mexico, and attributed the story to “an ODENVY [FBI] man named Clark.”[79]No “Phase-One” allegation corroborated Alvarado more closely than that of the well-known right-wing Mexican writer Elena Garro de Paz. She claimed she had been present at a party where she had heard a Communist discussion of Kennedy, in which “they came to the conclusion that the only solution was to kill him.”[80] She had also seen Oswald with the same people at a party given by Rubén Durán, the brother-in-law of Silvia Durán, “who she later learned was Oswald’s mistress while he was here.” In accounts given to the American Embassy in 1965, she linked Oswald to the same striking companions as did Alvarado: “a Latin American Negro man with red hair” and someone with “long blond hair.”[81]
When I wrote about the Garro allegations in 1993, I discounted them, on the grounds that Alvarado’s story of a “Negro with reddish hair” had already been published in September 1964 in the Warren Report.[82] I now think it much more likely that some version of the Garro story had reached the DFS, or been planted by them, in the days following the assassination.
No one disputes Garro’s story that the DFS took her into protective custody between November 23 and November 30. Her story would explain why on the same day the DFS arrested, not only Silvia, but her husband Horacio, her sister-in-law Lydia Durán, and her brother-in-law Rubén Durán and his wife Betty (all placed by Garro in Oswald’s presence at the incriminating party).[83]
It would also explain why, on November 23, the DFS was grilling Silvia so aggressively about her sexual affair and Communist plotting with Oswald.[84] Finally it would explain why Silvia on November 23 attributed her arrest to her “cousin” [i.e., Garro] whom she “does not like.”[85]
The management of the Garro story was different in one respect from the treatment of Silvia Durán and Alvarado: It was a “Phase-One” story from start to finish; as it never reached Washington through the usual CIA channels, so there was no need to reshape or retract it. The management consisted of keeping her in DFS custody, at a time when FBI personnel should have been interviewing her.[86]
Next: Part 4.
For Part 1, please go here; Part 2 go here; Part 5 go here; Part 6 go here.
References
[40] CIA Cable MEXI 7203 (NARA #104-10016-10020).
[41] CIA TX-1915 of 23 Nov 1963 (NARA #104-10015-10055: “Silvia Duran, the girl who put Oswald in touch with the Soviet Embassy”); MEXI 7029 232048Z (NARA #104-10015-10091); MEXI 7072 262113Z (NARA #104-10015-10368).
[42] CIA Cable MEXI 7046 of 23 November; NARA #104-10015-10274.
[43] JKB[enadum] letter of 26 Nov with report in Spanish of Durán interview; under covering letter of 27 November; NARA #104-10015-10189, -10190. “JK Benadum” was the pseudonym used by George Munro, who was employed in sensitive positions by both the FBI and the CIA in Mexico City, according to Jefferson Morley, author of Our Man in Mexico. Cf. CIA Cable MEXI 7105 of 27 Nov (10-page Durán statement coming to Washington by hand 28 Nov); NARA #104-10015-10416.
[44] In her 1995 ARRB deposition, Anne Goodpasture confirmed (p. 39) that “I think there was what they called back channel, but I don’t know the details of it.”
[45] CIA Document CSCI-3/778,826 NARA #104-10004-10257, 102-514.
[46] Ibid.
[47] Edited transcript of November 26 phone call between Cuban President Oswaldo Dorticos and Cuban Ambassador Joaquin Hernandez Armas; NARA #104-10015-10007: “They asked her … did she have personal relations with him — including intimate relations — and she denied them all. … She has black and blue marks on her arms, which she said she got during the interrogation process. They were squeezing her arms” (p. 12). On December 10 a CIA HQ report “translated” Hernandez as follows: “he says that Mexican police bruised Silvia DURAN’s arms a little shaking her to impress her with the importance of his questions” (CIA Document XAAZ-17958 10 Dec 63; Summary of Oswald case prepared for briefing purposes; NARA #104-10018-10040 PS#62-142).
[48] Personal interview with Larry Keenan.
[49] Warren Commission, Hearings, Vol. 26, 411, henceforward 26 WH 411. Diaz Verson’s CIA cryptonym was AMPALM-26 (MEXI 7776 of 14 Jan 1964, NARA #104-10404-10089, p. 2).
[50] House Select Committee on Assassinations, Herarings, Vol. 3, 87, henceforward 3 AH 87.
[51] CIA Dispatch HMMA-32243 of 13 June 1967, covering TX-1937 of 26 May.
[52] Ibid.
[53] 3 AH 86.
[54] 3 AH 91; cf. 3 AH 86. Note that the DFS exempted the Soviets from their hypothetical conspiracy, as did Ambassador Mann (Anthony Summers, Conspiracy [New York: McGraw Hill, 1980], 441).
[55] CIA Cable MEXI 7054 241837Z, NARA #104-10015-10082.
[56] 3 AH 292-93.
[57] Lopez Report, p. 200. “The Committee cannot definitely resolve whether Silvia Duran was a Mexican or American intelligence agent or source” (p. 201).
[58] CIA memo of 25 November from “A.C. Plambeck” memo re Alvarado; NARA #104-10015-10301. Also CIA Cable MEXI 7069 262037Z, NARA #104-10015-10366 (Canadian hippie).
[59] Hoover –LBJ phone call, 11/29/63, as shown in the Church Committee, Final Report, Book 5, “The Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy — Performance of the Intelligence Agencies, 34; Beschloss, Taking Charge, 53. I have been unable to find any cable which documents the change in Alvarado’s testimony, which may have been conveyed to Washington by telephone.
[60] CIA Cable MEXI 7168 of 30 Nov 1963, NARA #104-10025-10177.
[61] AR 244; Scott, Deep Politics, 38.
[62] CIA Cable MEXI 7289 070145Z, NARA #104-10017-10030. A confused Alvarado accepted the negative results of the polygraph, stating “that he had utmost confidence” in it.
[63] Washington Post, November 23, 1993; cf. Beschloss, Taking Charge, 53. In a memorandum of the same day Hoover noted that it was Johnson, not Hoover, who initiated the call (3 AH 476). The call logs of the LBJ Library (available on its website) indicate that the call was from Hoover to Johnson. The September 28 date coincided exactly with the date the Mexico City CIA Station believed Oswald to have been in the Cuban Embassy. I shall argue later that in fact he was not in the Embassy on that Saturday (when the Embassy was closed), even though someone using his name was creating that impression.
[64] DIR 85714 291631Z, NARA #104-10015-10224.
[65] DIR 85744 291915Z, NARA #104-10015-10228.
[66] Warren Commission Document (henceforth WCD), 347, p. 12.
[67] CIA Cable MEXI 7067 of 26 November, NARA #104-10015-10297.
[68] Lopez Report, 127-28.
[69] NARA #104-10015-10347. The identity of “L. F. Barker” with Robert Shaw is revealed by comparing item 10, listed as “Lawrence F. Barker,” in the “subject card file” (NARA #104-10079-10049, 5) with item 10, listed as “Robert Tyler Shaw,” in the “black notebook” (NARA #104-10079-10014, 4) provided by the CIA to the HSCA.
Note this Mexico City flowchart that depicts Shaw as the man who “oversaw Cuban operatives”. NARA #180-10113-10119, p. 11.
[70] CIA Cable MEXI 7104 of 27 November, NARA #104-10015-10191.
[71] 3 AH 595 (FBI memo of December 12, 1963); Mexico City serial MC 105-3702-22 (Legat Cable to HQ of November 26, 1963).
[72] Richard Millett, Guardians of the Dynasty (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1977), 251.
[73] Attachment to CIA Memo of 12 December 1963 from DDP to FBI, “Mexican Interrogation of Gilberto Alvarado;” NARA #104-10018-10043.
[74] Gary Webb, Dark Alliance: The CIA, The Contras, And The Crack Cocaine Explosion (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1998), 55-56 (Montiel); Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Contras, and the CIA (Sherman Oaks, CA: From the Wilderness Publications, 2000), 15 (“kingpin”).
[75] CIA Cable MEXI 7072 of 26 November, p. 4, #104-10015-10350.
[76] For example a Mexican credit investigator, Pedro Gutierrez, wrote on December 2 to President Johnson that he had seen a Cuban in the Embassy count out dollars to an American, whom he later recognized as Lee Harvey Oswald (Coleman-Slawson Memorandum, 11 AH 161; cf. 24 WH 633, Summers, Conspiracy, 444, Gerald Posner, Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK [New York: Random House, 1993], 194.) Another example is the swiftly retracted claim that Luisa Calderon of the Cuban Embassy, whom Alvarado allegedly saw kiss Oswald, had prior knowledge of the Kennedy assassination. (AR 454, 4 AH 181, 11 AH 494).
[77] FBI Memo of 27 November from DeLoach to Mohr, FBI File 62-109060-1571.
[78] The “CIA man in Dallas” presumably refers to J. Walton Moore, an acquaintance if not associate of Oswald’s friend and patron George de Mohrenschildt. Both de Mohrenschildt and his wife Jeanne have claimed that Moore had pre-assassination knowledge of Oswald (Summers, Conspiracy, 226-28).
[79] CIA Cable DIR 85654 281520Z, NARA #104-100154-10438. “Clark” is presumably the FBI Legal Attache Clark Anderson, who joined with Scott and Mann in calling for the rearrest and “cracking” of Silvia Durán to corroborate the Alvarado story. In discrediting the rumor of the $5000 deposit, the CIA cable said that “ODENVY [FBI] here has just affirmed they never heard this story,” a claim hard to reconcile with the FBI memo just quoted.
[80] 3 AH 300.
[81] 3 AH 300, Memo of conversation with Elena Garro de Paz; cf. 3 AH 297; Lopez Report, 217. The Garro story, like those of Durán and Alvarado, was a malleable and changing one. I have conflated the most prominent “Phase-One” details.
[82] Scott, Deep Politics, 123; citing Warren Report (henceforth WR), 307.
[83] The CIA originally reported that Silvia was arrested at home with husband and members of family who were having a party (CIA Cable MEXI 7054 of 24 Nov 1963, NARA #104-10015-10082). A CIA version of Silvia’s November 23 interview (described in Deep Politics II as “DFS-2”) repeated that these others had all been picked up with Silvia because they were dining with her at Rubén Durán’s home at the time of her arrest. The FBI version of the same interview (described in Deep Politics II as “DFS-4”) indicated otherwise: that Silvia, Horacio, and Lidia were at Silvia’s home, while Rubén and his wife were dining at their own home. See JKB Memo and attachment of 26 November, 1963, p. 7; NARA #104-10015-10190 (DFS-2); 25 WH 637 (DFS-4); Deep Politics II, 120-21. In her 1978 HSCA interview Silvia testified that Rubén had already been arrested before she went to his house from her own and was arrested in turn (3 AH 81).
[84] Silvia’s account of such interrogation (3 AH 86, 91) was earlier corroborated, as we have seen, by a State Department officer’s claim to have heard from CIA Station Deputy Chief Alan White that the DFS interrogated Silvia on details of the Garro story (3 AH 292-93).
[85] CIA Cable MEXI 7054 of 24 Nov 1963, NARA #104-10015-10082.
[86] There is no proof that Garro shared her story in 1963. However in October 1964, when a version of the Garro story was first entered into the CIA Oswald file which we possess, Winston Scott noted that the “Garros [Elena and her daughter] have been talking about this for a long time” (Mexico City CIA TX-1928 n.d. (5 Oct 64), NARA #104-10016-10031).
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