By dint of adroit juggling, which we will have an opportunity to observe, the FBI was able to resolve a double dilemma. Indeed, which was worse for them: Oswald-at-the-door, or someone-impersonating-Oswald-at-the-door?
4
A Nimble Solution
In his book The Last Investigation, Gaeton Fonzi offers the following:
. . . On August 23rd, 1964, with the first drafts of the Warren Commission Report being written, Chief Counsel J. Lee Rankin wrote to J. Edgar Hoover: “It is a matter of some importance to the Commission that Mrs. Odio’s allegations either be proved or disproved.”
One month later, with the Report already in galleys, the Odio incident was still a critical concern for staffers. In a memo to his boss, Staff Counsel Wesley Liebeler wrote: “ . . . Odio may well be right. The Commission will look bad if it turns out she is. There is no need to look foolish by grasping at straws to avoid admitting that there is a problem.”1
Fifteen years later, the House Select Committee on Assassinations would virtually contradict the Warren Commission by declaring that Odio’s “testimony is essentially credible . . . there is a strong probability that one of the men was or appeared to be Lee Harvey Oswald.”2
The investigator for the HSCA (the same Gaeton Fonzi just quoted) had been assigned to interview Odio and her sister Annie, but the HSCA was not prepared to follow his conclusions too far. They were going to declare that the assassination had probably been a conspiracy brought off by the Mafia. Odio, therefore, was still in the way, since her testimony pointed toward Cubans and their CIA handlers.
So the matter rested until Case Closed was published in 1993. Posner’s book is so concerted a validation of FBI work that it could not have served the Bureau’s need to dispose of conspiracy theories more if a committee of skilled FBI men had written it for him.
Since the key to closing the case on Oswald is to discredit Odio, Posner sets out to accomplish this by eroding her credentials as a witness:
Posner: By the time of her Oswald story, she had a history of emotional problems. In Puerto Rico, where she had lived before moving to Dallas in March 1963, she had seen a psychiatrist over her fractious marriage. According to FBI reports, he decided she was unstable and unable, mentally or physically, to care for her children.(41) A doctor who was called to treat her once for an “attack of nerves” discovered she had made it up to get the attention of her neighbors. He described her as a very mixed-up young lady, and was told by others that she had also been under psychiatric care while living in Miami, when she moved to the States in 1961.(42)
In her divorce proceedings of 1963, she lost custody of her four children, because of charges of neglect and abandonment.(43) 3
The three endnotes, (41), (42), (43), all refer to FBI memoranda concerning her condition before coming to Dallas. But Odio was not neglecting or abandoning her offspring on the night that she spoke to the three visitors. Indeed, all four of her children were living with her in a small apartment. Posner could have detected as much from such references in her Warren Commission testimony as: “my sister Annie . . . had come over . . . to babysit for me.”4 Or, one page earlier, “I told them at the time I was very busy with my four children.”5 But then, Posner would have had to give as much attention to her testimony as to FBI memoranda. Later, in one more section attributed to FBI sources, Posner writes that Silvia Herrera, her mother-in-law, “went so far as to say that Odio was an excellent actress who could intelligently fabricate such an episode if she wished.”6 Posner is not even calling on a mother-in-law to make his case but an ex-mother-in-law!
Or, again: “By the time of the assassination, she had been seeing [her psychiatrist] for more than seven months, at least weekly, sometimes more frequently.”7
Once a week or, as Posner adds hopefully, “sometimes more frequently,” would suggest a woman who is looking for mental and emotional support; what Posner really needs to make his case is a patient who is closeted with her doctor five times a week.
In an interview that Posner conducted with Carlos Bringuier (Oswald’s old foe), a telling accusation against Odio is brought in. “I believe it is possible,” says Bringuier,
that she was visited by someone—there were a lot of people with different organizations out there. But after the assassination, I believe her immediate reaction would have been the same as mine, to have jumped up and called the FBI and say, “Hey, that guy visited me!” Instead [after being released from the hospital], she casually told a neighbor, and that neighbor told the FBI, and that’s the only reason it came out. That makes me suspicious of her story. It doesn’t sound right, and I know from my own personal experience on what I did and how I felt when I realized I had some contact with the man who killed the President of the United States. I heard the name Lee Harvey Oswald and I jumped from my seat. I didn’t finish my lunch—I called the FBI immediately. Maybe with all the news after the assassination she became confused and put Oswald’s face and name onto the person she actually met. I have seen this as a lawyer in criminal cases. There is an accident with four witnesses and they give four different versions and they all believe they are telling the truth, and could even pass a lie detector. She thinks she is telling the truth. I hate to say she is lying, but she is mistaken.8
What Bringuier leaves out of his otherwise convincing analysis is that while he felt full of virtue and vindication as he leapt out of his chair to call the FBI, Odio was terrified. She didn’t know the men who had been at her doorway or whether they might come back if she called attention to herself. In fact, twelve years later, when Fonzi located her in Miami, she was still afraid.
Case Closed, however, keeps going back to the FBI reports rather than taking a look at the Warren Commission testimony:
Posner: Odio insists that she told at least two people, before the assassination, that three men, including Oswald, had visited her apartment. One of the people she told was Lucille Connell. But when the FBI questioned her in 1964, Connell said that Odio only told her about Oswald after the assassination, and then said she not only knew about Oswald, but he had given talks to groups of Cuban refugees in Dallas.9
That last sentence, if true, is wholly damaging to Odio. But Posner does not let Sylvia Odio speak for herself:
MR. LIEBELER. Did you tell Mrs. Connell that you had seen Oswald at some anti-Castro meetings, and that he had made some talks to these groups of refugees, and that he was very brilliant and clever and captivated the people to whom he had spoken?
MRS. ODIO. No.
MR. LIEBELER. You are sure you never told her that?
MRS. ODIO. No.
MR. LIEBELER. Have you ever seen Oswald at any meetings?
MRS. ODIO. Never . . . she probably was referring [to] John Martino [who] was in Isle of Pines for 3 years . . . [Mrs. Connell] did go to that meeting. I did not go, [but Martino] came to Dallas and gave a talk to the Cubans about conditions in Cuba, and she was one of the ones that went to the meeting.
MR. LIEBELER. Mrs. Connell?
MRS. ODIO. Yes. And my sister Annie went too . . . 10
Gaeton Fonzi interviewed Annie Odio in 1975 about her meeting with Sylvia a few hours after the assassination of the President. In the next passage, Fonzi is quoting Annie:
“The first thing I remember when I walked into the room was that Sylvia started crying and crying. I think I told her, ‘You know this guy on TV who shot President Kennedy? I think I know him.’ And she said, ‘You don’t remember where you know him from?’ I said, ‘No, I cannot recall, but I know I’ve seen him before.’ And then she told me, ‘Do you remember those three guys who came to the house?’” That’s when, Annie said, she suddenly knew where she had seen Lee Harvey Oswald before.11
We can continue with Fonzi’s account:
Both Sylvia and Annie . . . decided not to say anything to anyone about it. “We were so frightened, we were absolutely terrified,” Sylvia remembered. “We were both very young and yet we had so much responsibility, with so many
brothers and sisters and our mother and father in prison, we were so afraid and not knowing what was happening. We made a vow to each other not to tell anyone.” [Of course, they did tell Lucille Connell, who] told a trusted friend and soon the FBI was knocking on Sylvia Odio’s door. She says it was the last thing in the world she wanted, but when they came she felt she had a responsibility to tell the truth.12
Gaeton Fonzi’s interviews with the Odio sisters took place between 1975 and 1979, but back in 1964, the FBI was looking for and found a way to discredit Odio’s testimony.
Posner: The FBI thought it had solved the Odio mystery when it found three men who might have visited her apartment near the end of September. Loran Hall, a prominent anti-Castroite, bore a marked resemblance to the man Odio described as the leader, Leopoldo. Hall told the FBI on September 16, 1964, that he was in Dallas soliciting funds during September 1963 and had been to the Odio apartment. He named his two companions as Lawrence Howard and William Seymour.13
Let us move over to Fonzi for the rest of this account:
. . . Hall claimed he had been . . . trying to raise anti-Castro funds with two companions, one of whom might have looked like Oswald. The Warren Commission grasped at that straw and detailed that interview in its final report, giving the impression that Hall and his companions were Odio’s visitors . . .
Neither did the Warren Commission [however] note in its final Report—even though it knew—that the subsequent FBI interviews revealed that Hall’s two companions denied being in Dallas; that neither looked at all like Oswald; that Sylvia Odio, shown their photographs, did not recognize them; and that Loran Eugene Hall, when questioned again by the FBI, admitted he had fabricated the story. (Still later, when questioned by the Assassinations Committee, Hall denied he had ever told the FBI he had been to Odio’s apartment.)14
The timing, however, had been serviceable. Loran Hall visited the FBI on September 16, 1964, and the Warren Report came out eight days later. Apprised of Hall’s contributions, the Warren Commission rushed to include Hall’s first interview in the final Report, and it supplied their definitive conclusion: “Lee Harvey Oswald was not at Mrs. Odio’s apartment in September of 1963.”15
Four days later, on September 20, Hall recanted his story, and the rest of his tale fell apart. However, the Warren Commission, having stopped the presses on September 16, was not about to stop them again. The Warren Commission did not call attention to the error.
There is a maneuver in rock climbing that only the most skillful can employ. It consists of using several tenuous grips in a quick continuous set of moves. Not one of the grips will support your hands or your feet for more than a moment, but in that interval you can gain a crucial few feet, and reach the next half-grip, then the next, until your momentum has carried you to a place where you can stop in safety. Let us give credit to a master. If J. Edgar Hoover did not have the body of such a rock climber, he had the mind.
On to Mexico. We may never learn definitively how much or how little Lee Harvey Oswald had to do with the visit to Sylvia Odio’s apartment, but there is new material available on what happened to him at the Russian Embassy in Mexico, and it comes from a book written by a KGB man who was on the premises.
5
Mexico
The bus on which Oswald was traveling from Laredo to Mexico City arrived, we can remind the reader, at 10:00 A.M. on Friday, September 27, 1963, and Oswald, carrying his duffle bag and a small hand bag with all his valuable papers, looked into the rates at a number of hotels before settling on the Hotel del Comercio, which cost, room with bath, $1.28 a day.
Then he went over to the Cuban Embassy. There is every reason to believe he was confident the Cubans would give him a visa, since he had certainly established his credentials as a supporter of Castro. He had newspaper clippings to show his arrest, he had the stationery of the FPCC chapter he had formed in New Orleans, receipts for the money he had spent on pamphlets to distribute, and if any Castro supporters had heard him on the radio with Bill Stuckey, he would obtain the advantage of having his claims confirmed by other parties.
The first person he met at the Cuban Embassy was a woman named Silvia Duran, who spoke English. She listened to Oswald for a full fifteen minutes. Posner gives a good description based on the testimony of the Consul, Eusebio Azcue, before the HSCA:
. . . [Oswald] proceeded to tell her he was going to the USSR but that on the way he wanted a transit visa to stop in Cuba, for at least two weeks. He then began placing documents on her desk, each accompanied with a short explanation . . . [and said] that he wanted to leave by September 30, only three days later . . . Duran, an admitted Marxist, took a liking to Oswald . . . [and she] called on Eusebio Azcue to see if he might expedite the process for the young American.1
Azcue told him that he could not rush matters since he had to get authorization from the Cuban government in Havana. Moreover, Oswald would have to fill out an application and obtain five passport-size photographs. When Lee came back from that errand and completed his application, he learned that the best way to expedite his visa was to obtain permission at the Russian Embassy to visit the USSR.
Oswald was visibly upset at the hurdles looming before him and began to protest. As a friend of Cuba, he ought to be able to obtain a visa immediately. Azcue replied that he could be given a fifteen-day permission for visiting Cuba, but only after obtaining a Soviet visa. Or he could go through the normal channels, which would take several weeks in Mexico. Oswald replied that he did not have several weeks, and soon they were in a dispute that grew so loud that another official, Alfredo Mirabel Diaz, came out of his office to witness it.
Oswald then took off for the first of his two visits to the Soviet Embassy, which, conveniently, was no more than a couple of blocks away. For years, these two visits to the Russians have been a source of confusion or of obfuscation: The CIA kept a camera watch in a building across from the entry gate to the Soviet compound, yet CIA files have never produced a picture of Oswald entering or leaving the gate. The unadmitted likelihood is that the CIA certainly did have surveillance photos of Oswald entering the Russian Embassy and they were lifted from the Agency file after the assassination; indeed, this is to be expected if Oswald had attracted CIA attention after the Walker affair.
In any event, we can now be all but certain that it was Oswald who did visit the Russian Embassy and spoke there to three KGB agents who were doubling as consular officials. One of them, Oleg Nechiporenko, has written a book, Passport to Assassination, which tells of the two meetings in considerable detail.
Oswald arrived at the Soviet Embassy gate at twelve-thirty that afternoon, and waited in the reception area until one of the consulate employees, Valery Vladimirovich Kostikov, came out, listened to his request for a visa, glanced at the man’s papers, and heard him say “that he was under constant surveillance in the United States by the FBI and . . . wanted to return to the USSR.”2
Kostikov had a meeting to take care of, and this fellow was hardly a run-of-the-mill subject. His visit was obviously going to take time. So, Kostikov called his colleague Oleg Maximovich Nechiporenko to the phone.
Listen, some gringo is here, Kostikov said . . . He’s asking for a visa to the Soviet Union. Supposedly he already lived there, married one of our girls. They live in the States, but the FBI is harassing them. Come over here and get to the bottom of this. It seems to be more in your line of work. I’m in a hurry.3
Nechiporenko then adds:
As I approached the small building that housed the consular division, I saw a stranger, apparently twenty-five to twenty-seven years old, standing on the steps and leaning against the doorpost . . . He seemed to be looking beyond me, absorbed in his thoughts, and did not even react as I approached him. He was clad in a light jacket, a sport shirt with an unbuttoned collar, and either gray or brown slacks that were wrinkled. I greeted the stranger with a nod. He responded in kind.4
Kostikov, who shared an office with Nechiporenko, made the in
troductions and left. Oswald and Oleg were now in the same room, and the American, being invited to sit down, did so and began to talk in a state of considerable agitation. He looked exhausted.
Once again, Oswald took out his papers, complained about the FBI, and said he had come to Mexico to obtain visas to two countries—Cuba, to visit, and then the USSR, for a permanent return.
I silently cursed Valery for “transferring” him to me and decided that it was time to bring this meeting to a close. I had more important items in my agenda. I explained to Oswald that, in accordance with our rules, all matters dealing with travel to the USSR were handled by our embassies or consulates in the country in which a person lived. As far as his case was concerned, we could make an exception and give him the necessary papers to fill out, which we would then send on to Moscow, but the answer would still be sent to his permanent residence, and it would take, at the very least, four months.
Oswald listened intently to my explanation, but it was clear from his gestures and the expression on his face that he was disappointed and growing increasingly annoyed. When I had finished speaking, he slowly leaned forward and, barely able to restrain himself, practically shouted in my face, “This won’t do for me! This is not my case! For me, it’s all going to end in tragedy!”