INTRODUCTION

August 1995

This is an unusual interim publication, responding to an unusual time in the protracted history of the John F. Kennedy assassination. Until October 1996 we have a window of opportunity to press for the release of withheld documents, by bringing them to the attention of the newly-created Assassination Records Review Board. All Americans have a great stake in the fruitfulness of the procedures established by the JFK Records Act, not just to learn more about the government's secretiveness with respect to this one assassination, but also to create a precedent for ending the rule of secrecy that has so vitiated democracy in this country since World War II.

In response to this opportunity, and in response also to the flood of new documents we have been given since 1993, I have been writing a series of essays on the general theme of Oswald, Mexico, and Cuba. Until now they have mostly circulated among a few other researchers and/or members of the Review Board staff. But cumulatively these essays make a case for the review and release of specific records still withheld; and so far many of these records have not yet been released.

I have therefore decided to arrange for limited publication of these essays, more or less as originally written, to a larger select audience. I am not altogether happy about this. The first essay, on the Lopez Report, needs revision in the light of of the flood of documents to which I gained access later. What needs to be changed are not the specific details, which have borne up well, but the whole perspective of the essay. I suspect that while new researchers may prefer to start at the beginning of the book, experts may prefer to begin with the latest essays.

When I began these researches, I like most people focused on events portrayed in government documents, trying to resolve such familiar questions as: who was the person who identified himself as Lee Oswald to someone in the Mexico City Soviet Embassy, and just when did he visit the Cuban and Soviet Consulates? By the end of these essays, the events on which I focus have become the documents themselves. More clearly than at the beginning, I postulate that the Oswald documents, far more than a person or persons calling themselves Lee Oswald, are the key to a sophisticated CIA operation: an operation which became entangled in, even if it did not directly engender, the Kennedy assassination.

More specifically, three different deceptive stratagems need to be distinguished: a sophisticated intelligence operation (or complex of operations), the conspiracy to kill the president, and the ensuing cover-up. All three are intertwined, and each can tell us something about the others. We should expect that government records will tell us more about the first and third than about the second, but I have been saying for thirty years that this oblique path to the truth about the murder is the best hope which the documents give us.

Even on the limited topic of Oswald, Mexico, and Cuba, there is far more to be written than I have been able to achieve in these limited essays. Two areas in particular are under-represented here: disagreements between Kennedy and the CIA over specific strategies and Cuban personnel to displace Fidel Castro, and Oswald's intriguing relations with the Cuban exile groups such as the DRE (discussed to some extent in my book Deep Politics and the Death of JFK). In both of these areas I am still awaiting publication of work by other researchers.

In any case, readers should not expect these essays to lead us to a full understanding of the Kennedy case. Rather they lead towards key anomalies of resistance, suppression, and above all falsification of major documents. Just as the mapping of geophysical anomalies can aid in the search for petroleum, so the mapping of these documentary anomalies can aid us, and hopefully the Review Board, in isolating the key factors which led to the governmental cover-up of America's most important political assassination in this century.

Only special readers will have the patience to pursue this difficult route. I invite them, which is to say you, to join in the task of facilitating the Review Board's work. There are two ways to do this. The first is to join in the search for further anomalies: there remain thousands of documents in the Archives which have not yet been seen by anyone outside government. And second, as this golden year of opportunity draws to a close, to join in the outcry for those key documents which have not yet been released.

We know already one area where the FBI has so far refused to comply with the Review Board's unanimous recommendations: this is with respect to FBI documents pertaining to their informants. Behind this robust resistance, one suspects, may be documents still surviving which would indicate the use of Oswald as an agent or informant. I myself have waited now for a year with respect to action on one possible relevant file, the FBI's Mexico City file 105-2137, with subject "Harvey Lee Oswald."

There is another key area where the Board has hitherto failed to show results. This is with respect to military intelligence, and in particular the Army Intelligence Agent, Edward Coyle, and the unidentified OSI agent, whose entanglement in the events of Dealey Plaza has not yet been satisfactorily explained (see Chapter VII).

In these provisional essays, I have by no means presented the full case for demanding the review of documents such as those on these military intelligence personnel (and others in military intelligence reserve). But time is running out, and it takes time to build momentum for the kind of informed citizen pressure that will encourage the release of the truth.

It is towards this end that I offer, to a special readership, these provisional essays on the theme of Oswald, Mexico, and Cuba.

A DIFFERENT OSWALD IN MEXICO?

THE LOPEZ REPORT AND THE CIA'S OSWALD COUNTERINTELLIGENCE SECRETS

January 1994

Much of the government's failure to investigate thoroughly and honestly the murder of President Kennedy can be traced, it appears, to...