Why would the Soviets/KGB withhold info on Oswald's Mexico City impersonator?

[Steve M. Galbraith]

And to flesh this out a bit, this is from the HSCA's "Lopez Report", the investigation into the alleged visits by Oswald to Mexico City.

Conclusion: "While the majority of evidence tends to indicate that this individual was indeed Lee Harvey Oswald, the possibility that someone else used Lee Harvey Oswald's name during this time in contacts with the Soviet and Cuban Consulates cannot be absolutely dismissed." (screen cap below)

The "possibility" that "during this time" "someone else used his name" cannot be "absolutely dismissed." But the majority of evidence "tends to indicate" it was Oswald. So, evidence indicates he was indeed in MC but "during his time" someone else possibly used his name. Using his name is not, of course, showing up and impersonating him in person.



The Lopez report can be read here: https://www.history-matters.com/archive/contents/hsca/contents_hsca_lopezrpt_2003.htm

[Steve M. Galbraith]

Eldon Rudd cable/memo sent to from Mexico City about the materials he was given by Win Scott. Rudd was a FBI special agent who carried this material to Dallas which was then seen/read by the agents there. As you can see at the bottom he mentions that the tapes had "been erased and are not available for review."

Note as well that the KGB agents were shown the photos of the unidentified person that the CIA believed was "possibly" the person who said he was Oswald - possibly - and all said the man did not identify himself as Oswald. The Oswald they met was the real Oswald.

[Jon Banks]

I’m still not sure what the point of Steve’s question is.

And multiple sources have confirmed that the tapes of Oswald’s alleged phone calls existed after the JFK assassination.

See below from JFKFacts:

The existence of the Oswald tape remained a matter of speculation until 1993 when former Warren Commission staff attorneys David Slawson and William Coleman told author Anthony Summers that Mexico City station chief Win Scott had played the Oswald tape for them during their visit to Mexico City in April 1964.

Why does it matter?

The existence of the Oswald tape was important because a voice comparison of the tape with other recordings of Oswald would have resolved whether Oswald was impersonated in Mexico City, as Hoover suggested to LBJ and as Bill Simplich argues in his new book State Secret.

If the voice on the tape was Oswald’s, the CIA could have refuted the claim that Oswald was impersonated by simply releasing the tape. Since the CIA chose not to do this, the possibility that the voice on the tape was not Oswald’s cannot be dismissed.

And if it was ever proven that Oswald was impersonated in Mexico City, the case for a JFK assassination conspiracy would be strengthened.


https://jfkfacts.org/what-happened-to-the-tape-of-oswald-in-mexico-city/

[Charles Collins]

I’m still not sure what the point of Steve’s question is.

And multiple sources have confirmed that the tapes of Oswald’s alleged phone calls existed after the JFK assassination.

See below from JFKFacts:

The existence of the Oswald tape remained a matter of speculation until 1993 when former Warren Commission staff attorneys David Slawson and William Coleman told author Anthony Summers that Mexico City station chief Win Scott had played the Oswald tape for them during their visit to Mexico City in April 1964.

Why does it matter?

The existence of the Oswald tape was important because a voice comparison of the tape with other recordings of Oswald would have resolved whether Oswald was impersonated in Mexico City, as Hoover suggested to LBJ and as Bill Simplich argues in his new book State Secret.

If the voice on the tape was Oswald’s, the CIA could have refuted the claim that Oswald was impersonated by simply releasing the tape. Since the CIA chose not to do this, the possibility that the voice on the tape was not Oswald’s cannot be dismissed.

And if it was ever proven that Oswald was impersonated in Mexico City, the case for a JFK assassination conspiracy would be strengthened.


https://jfkfacts.org/what-happened-to-the-tape-of-oswald-in-mexico-city/

The existence of the Oswald tape remained a matter of speculation until 1993 when former Warren Commission staff attorneys David Slawson and William Coleman told author Anthony Summers that Mexico City station chief Win Scott had played the Oswald tape for them during their visit to Mexico City in April 1964.

David Belin was with Slawson and Coleman on that trip. I don’t believe that he has corroborated this. Also, the link you provided to the jfkfacts.org web page has a dead link to the video.

(Summers explains how he got the story in this video from Mary Ferrell Foundation.)


Have you seen Summers’ video explanation? Do you have a working link to it?

[Mitch Todd]

I’m still not sure what the point of Steve’s question is.

And multiple sources have confirmed that the tapes of Oswald’s alleged phone calls existed after the JFK assassination.

See below from JFKFacts:

The existence of the Oswald tape remained a matter of speculation until 1993 when former Warren Commission staff attorneys David Slawson and William Coleman told author Anthony Summers that Mexico City station chief Win Scott had played the Oswald tape for them during their visit to Mexico City in April 1964.

Why does it matter?

The existence of the Oswald tape was important because a voice comparison of the tape with other recordings of Oswald would have resolved whether Oswald was impersonated in Mexico City, as Hoover suggested to LBJ and as Bill Simplich argues in his new book State Secret.

If the voice on the tape was Oswald’s, the CIA could have refuted the claim that Oswald was impersonated by simply releasing the tape. Since the CIA chose not to do this, the possibility that the voice on the tape was not Oswald’s cannot be dismissed.

And if it was ever proven that Oswald was impersonated in Mexico City, the case for a JFK assassination conspiracy would be strengthened.


https://jfkfacts.org/what-happened-to-the-tape-of-oswald-in-mexico-city/

The Slawson/Coleman report on their trip to MXC was finally released a few years ago, having been classified and held back in 1964. In that report, Coleman and Slawson said they were allowed to peruse the "materials" related to Oswald in a secure room. They don't say tapes or anything that would lead one to believe they heard tapes, but they also don't say anything that precludes these "materials" from including tapes.

However....

They don't say that Win Scott played a tape of Oswald for them. In this 1964 version, the tape Win Scott plays for them is a recoding of phone traffic between the Cuban Embassy in MXC and Comrade Fidel himself. Not an Oswald call. In '64, they never mention anything specifically about listening to a tape of Oswald when they were in MXC, which would be a strange omission had they heard one. Also, IIRC, in Shennon's book, Coleman's and Slawson's later version of what happened is more ambiguous than what Summers reported.

And if we assume, arguendo, that Win Scott actually had tapes of the Oswald calls, it is not a given that he would have turned them over to the FBI.

There is an interesting coda to this. The MXC station's Russian translators, the Tarasoffs, were responsible for both transcribing the tapes and translating the contents. The Tarasoffs said their turnaround from receiving a tape to returning it with a transcription was 3-4 days. Anne Goodpasture , who oversaw the wiretap program in MXC, said that the tapes were returned to her after a week. It's certainly possible that one Tarasoff's "3-4 days" could be another Goodpasture's "one week," but I wonder if the tapes were being diverted to a third party for a day or two for copying. The obvious suspect here would be Win Scott's partners in the wiretap program, his friends in the upper reaches of the dominant faction of the PRI. If you go back and read the documents from Newman's original Lancer presentation, there is a cable from MEXI station saying that a source in the Mexican government claims to have "conversations." Given this, it's not much of a stretch to believe that there might be a separate source for the recordings. Just one that the CIAs MXC station did nopt have direct access to.

 

[Jon Banks]

The existence of the Oswald tape remained a matter of speculation until 1993 when former Warren Commission staff attorneys David Slawson and William Coleman told author Anthony Summers that Mexico City station chief Win Scott had played the Oswald tape for them during their visit to Mexico City in April 1964.

David Belin was with Slawson and Coleman on that trip. I don’t believe that he has corroborated this. Also, the link you provided to the jfkfacts.org web page has a dead link to the video.

(Summers explains how he got the story in this video from Mary Ferrell Foundation.)


Have you seen Summers’ video explanation? Do you have a working link to it?

It’s an old article. I think Anthony Summers’ blog is down permanently.

The article cites several examples of people who claimed that the tapes existed after the JFK assassination.

Given how much the CIA has lied and obstructed in the JFK assassination investigations, it seems plausible that the Mexico City stuff is another cover-up. And the CIA, not the Soviets, are responsible for the murkiness and ambiguity of this issue…

[Tom Scully]

https://anthonysummersandrobbynswan.wordpress.com/2013/11/24/intended-talk-to-copa-by-anthony-summers-where-the-jfk-case-sits-11222013/
NOVEMBER 24, 2013 · 5:20 PM↓ Jump to Comments
Intended Talk to COPA by Anthony Summers: Where the JFK Case Sits 11/22/2013
Dallas talk for COPA….November 22, ’13…..from Anthony Summers
(did not go ahead, because of technical problems)

"..Two of the calls Oswald supposedly made to the Soviet Embassy appear not to have been made by the real Oswald. Could one not establish whether that is so by comparing the voice on the tape with the known voice of the authentic Oswald? A good specimen was available, a recent broadcast he had done in connection with his pro-Castro activity in New Orleans.

Well no, said the CIA. It claimed the Mexico surveillance tapes had been “routinely” wiped weeks before the assassination – because, it claimed, Oswald had supposedly, been of no interest at the time.
Except, we now know from the draft memoir left behind by the then CIA station chief in Mexico City, Winston Scott, that – in his words – Oswald “had been a person of great interest to us” during his visit. “We kept a special watch” on him.
Except, too, that we now know the tapes were not routinely wiped before the assassination. Senior Warren Commission counsel William Coleman and his fellow Commission attorney David Slawson, and – in his retirement – the CIA station chief’s deputy, all told me that they listened to Oswald’s tape-recorded voice in April 1964 months after the assassination. What became of the recording – and indeed of the photographs that must have been snapped of Oswald on one of a total of five visits to the Communist embassies?

The CIA has offered no satisfactory answer. We do know, though, that – when Station Chief Scott died some years afterwards – CIA Counterintelligence’s James Angelton flew down to Mexico within hours, searched through the deceased man’s belongings, seized Scott’s draft memoir and what has been described as a stack of reel-to-reel tapes labelled “Oswald,” and ordered that they be flown to headquarters in Washington. Though some of the memoir has since been returned to the station chief’s next of kin, it appears that the other material was disposed of under a CIA “destruction order.”

There is still , meanwhile, the extraordinary episode that has been called the “Rosetta Stone” of the case, which probably occurred when the authentic Oswald was on his way from Mexico to Dallas, where he was to spend the few remaining weeks before the assassination. I refer to the testimony of the Odio sisters, Cuban exiles Silvia and Annie. I know, I know, this is a hoary old angle. But it is as central to the case as ever it was. The sisters were visited by a trio of men who said they were anti-Castro militants. Two of them, Hispanics, introduced their companion, an American who – the sisters would insist after the assassination looked just like Oswald – as “Oswald,” “Leon Oswald.”

Later, in what seemed to be a very deliberate way, the leader of the group would say Oswald was an “ex-Marine…an expert marksman…” who said “we should have shot Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs…should have done something like that.”

This posed a problem for the Warren Commission probe into the assassination – one that never was resolved. Commission attorneys took the view that the Odio women were excellent, credible witnesses and that their account seemed truthful. (I obtained what I believe were the first independent interviews with them – and I share that view.) Silvia and Annie’s account, of course, suggests that there was an attempt to set Oswald up – just weeks before the assassination – as a would-be presidential assassin..."