Alex Constantine - November 22, 2023
"The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie--deliberate, contrived and dishonest--but the myth--persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic." - John F. Kennedy
By Alex Constantine
-
About that trove of CIA documents on the JFK assassination released by the National Archives in 2017, the AP reported on November 3rd: ""Documents released Friday show officials questioned whether Oswald had been trying to get visas from the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City in order to 'make a quick escape after assassinating the president."The "disclosure" is misleading to say the least. Red-baiting Oswald ignores a multitude of leads to the Agency itself, beginning with his Marine Corps service. He was stationed at Atsugi, Japan, the CIA's primary spy plane base of operations in Asia. U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers mentions in his memoirs a May 13, 1964 CIA document on Oswald's access to classified information on air-borne surveillance activities. Two Marines who served with Oswald in Japan told the Warren Commission that he had access to sensitive classified documents. Yet Oswald openly boasted that he was a Communist. He learned to speak Russian at at the base. The Cold War CIA and Marine Corps had little tolerance for Marxists in olive green. It's far more likely than not that Oswald trained for an assignment in the USSR after his premature honorable honorable discharge (despite two court martials) from the Marines. When he returned from Russia, he was constantly surrounded by seditious CIA handlers and scabrous fascist blowflies.
Peter Dale Scott, in an essay on Oswald's trip to Mexico City, mentions "a tape of someone calling himself 'Lee Oswald' talking on a Soviet Embassy phone about having met a consul there by the name of Kostikov, a KGB agent. As we shall see, this tape should have been preserved and investigated as a prime piece of evidence to frame Oswald as an assassin. We have documentary evidence that one day after the President's murder this tape was listened to by FBI agents in Dallas, who determined that the speaker was in fact not Lee Harvey Oswald. Yet almost immediately this event was denied by other reports, including cables claiming -- falsely -- that the tape had already been destroyed before the assassination. ..."
J. Edgar Hoover stated in a phone call to Lyndon Johnson the day after Kennedy's murder: "WE HAVE UP HERE THE TAPE [emphasis added] and the photograph of the man who was at the Soviet embassy, using Oswald's name. That picture and the tape do not correspond to this man's voice, nor to his appearance."
Recordings of Johnson's phone calls are on file at the LBJ Library. But, Scott writes, "nothing of this conversation can be heard on the relevant tape; it would appear to have been erased." [See, Rex Bradford, "The Fourteen-Minute Gap," Kennedy Assassination Chronicles, Spring 2000, pp. 28-32.]
"Hoover's reasons for saying this were laid out in a Letterhead Memorandum sent out on the same day to the President and to the Secret Service:
"The Central Intelligence Agency advised
that on October 1, 1963, an extremely sensitive source had reported that an individual identified himself as Lee Oswald, who contacted the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City inquiring as to any messages. Special Agents of this Bureau, who have conversed with Oswald in Dallas, Texas, have observed photographs of the individual referred to above and have listened to a recording of his voice. These Special Agents are of the opinion that the above-referred-to individual was not Lee Harvey Oswald."
Hoover's words are open to interpretation, but the erased tape is a smoking gun. He acknowledged possession of the tape. It was filed for future reference. but the critical conversation was subsequently lost to history. The National Archive trove doesn't mention tape wiping.