Why Didn't the Soviets and Cubans Expose the Alleged Fake Oswald Visits?

[Jon Banks]

Comparing modern surveillance with whatever was going on in the early 1960s is not compelling.  To summarize:  there is no basis to conclude that the CIA MUST have photographed Oswald.  Even if they did, the CIA had incentives not to reveal their methods and extent of surveillance to the Russians and Cubans.

There's not an innocent explanation for why the CIA would have kept secrets from the President and the Warren Commission.

Keeping secrets from the public is understandable. Keeping secrets from the President is not a reasonable explanation.

 Multiple individuals including members of the Russian and Cuban embassy confirm Oswald's presence.

They confirm meeting someone who claimed to be Oswald. Their descriptions of Oswald don't all match his physical appearance. Some of their claims are inconsistent.

The Warren Commission never interviewed Sylvia Duran. Why is that given that she was allegedly seen several times with Oswald in Mexico City?

There was no effort on behalf of anyone after the assassination to promote this narrative.  If the entire plan dating back months or years and entailing great risk in assassinating the president was to implicate Russia/Cuba in the war, the conspirators would surely have made some effort to promote that effort after the assassination.  But no one did.

False. There were attempts by CIA-connected individuals to implicate Castro in in JFK's assassination immediately after 11/22/63. The DRE, the CIA-backed anti-Castro group that Oswald interacted with in New Orleans, published articles implicating Castro in the days following the assassination.

The efforts by former CIA agents and others to link Castro to the Kennedy assassination continue today.

Also see the Felix Rodriguez interview that I shared earlier for example. Like him, dozens of retired CIA officers have pushed the "Castro did it" theory since the 1960s.

It's not clear to me whether they really believe the theories implicating Castro, or if they're attempting to deflect attention away from the CIA.

[Richard Smith]

There's not an innocent explanation for why the CIA would have kept secrets from the President and the Warren Commission.

Keeping secrets from the public is understandable. Keeping secrets from the President is not a reasonable explanation.


They confirm meeting someone who claimed to be Oswald. Their descriptions of Oswald don't all match his physical appearance. Some of their claims are inconsistent.

The Warren Commission never interviewed Sylvia Duran. Why is that given that she was allegedly seen several times with Oswald in Mexico City?


False. There were attempts by CIA-connected individuals to implicate Castro in in JFK's assassination immediately after 11/22/63. The DRE, the CIA-backed anti-Castro group that Oswald interacted with in New Orleans, published articles implicating Castro in the days following the assassination.

The efforts by former CIA agents and others to link Castro to the Kennedy assassination continue today.

Also see the Felix Rodriguez interview that I shared earlier for example. Like him, dozens of retired CIA officers have pushed the "Castro did it" theory since the 1960s.

It's not clear to me whether they really believe the theories implicating Castro, or if they're attempting to deflect attention away from the CIA.

The people who would have been powerful enough to assassinate JFK, frame Oswald, fake a Mexico City trip, cover up the identity of the real murderer, and kill Oswald in order to implicate Russia/Cuba would certainly have made a more concerted effort in the immediate aftermath of the assassination to promote a connection with Cuba/Russia.  They could pull all that off but make an anemic effort to link Cuba after the fact?  The entire purpose of all these high stakes undertakings.  Not compelling.

[Jon Banks]

The people who would have been powerful enough to assassinate JFK, frame Oswald, fake a Mexico City trip, cover up the identity of the real murderer, and kill Oswald in order to implicate Russia/Cuba would certainly have made a more concerted effort in the immediate aftermath of the assassination to promote a connection with Cuba/Russia.  They could pull all that off but make an anemic effort to link Cuba after the fact?  The entire purpose of all these high stakes undertakings.  Not compelling.

No one could've predicted LBJ's response to the evidence potentially connecting the Soviets and Cubans to Oswald. At the time, Johnson was perceived as more hawkish and anti-communist than JFK.

Rather than confront the Soviets, President Johnson chose to cover up potential foreign complicity in Kennedy's assassination, including shutting down investigations into what happened in Mexico City in the Fall of 63'.

Years after the Warren Report, LBJ continued to suggest Oswald didn't act alone. He wasn't satisfied with the lone assassin narrative but it served the purpose of avoiding retaliation against Cuba or the USSR...

Max Holland:

In July of 1973, six months after the death of Lyndon Baines Johnson, The Atlantic published an article by a journalist and former Johnson speechwriter named Leo Janos. "The Last Days of the President," about LBJ in retirement, was elegiac in tone and fact, save for one dissonant paragraph—in which Johnson volunteered his opinion that President John F. Kennedy's assassination had been the result of a conspiracy organized from Cuba. "I never believed that [Lee Harvey] Oswald acted alone, although I can accept that he pulled the trigger," he explained to Janos. Johnson thought such a conspiracy had formed in retaliation for U.S. plots to assassinate Fidel Castro; he had found after taking office that the government "had been operating a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean."

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/06/the-assassination-tapes/302964/

[Richard Smith]

No one could've predicted LBJ's response to the evidence potentially connecting the Soviets and Cubans to Oswald. At the time, Johnson was perceived as more hawkish and anti-communist than JFK.

Rather than confront the Soviets, President Johnson chose to cover up potential foreign complicity in Kennedy's assassination, including shutting down investigations into what happened in Mexico City in the Fall of 63'.

Years after the Warren Report, LBJ continued to suggest Oswald didn't act alone. He wasn't satisfied with the lone assassin narrative but it served the purpose of avoiding retaliation against Cuba or the USSR...

Max Holland:

All that lends itself to proving that: 1) LBJ was not involved in any conspiracy; and 2) Oswald's Mexico City trip was not faked as a pretext for war with Cuba or Russia.  The conspirators would not have gone to the enormous risk of assassinating the president without some assurance that the person who would replace him would be onboard with their objective. 

[Dan O'meara]

All that lends itself to proving that: 1) LBJ was not being involved in any conspiracy; and 2) Oswald's Mexico City trip was not faked as a pretext for war with Cuba or Russia.  The conspirators would not have gone to the enormous risk of assassinating the president without some assurance that the person who would replace him would be onboard with their objective.

Yet there is the truly perverse coincidence that the building JFK was assassinated from belonged to one of LBJ's close friends - David Harold Byrd.
Of the hundreds of tall buildings JFK passed during his many motorcades it was from one owned by a good friend of LBJ's that the assassin killed JFK.
It is also a perverse coincidence that Byrd was good friends with George De Morenschildt, the extravagant socialite who, for some utterly bewildering reason, chose to befriend broke bum/anti-social loner Oswald.

[Richard Smith]

Yet there is the truly perverse coincidence that the building JFK was assassinated from belonged to one of LBJ's close friends - David Harold Byrd.
Of the hundreds of tall buildings JFK passed during his many motorcades it was from one owned by a good friend of LBJ's that the assassin killed JFK.
It is also a perverse coincidence that Byrd was good friends with George De Morenschildt, the extravagant socialite who, for some utterly bewildering reason, chose to befriend broke bum/anti-social loner Oswald.

How do you know that the TSBD building was the "only" one that JFK passed in Dallas that belonged to such a friend? I imagine that LBJ had a lot of good friends in Texas.  LBJ was a lifelong politician in Texas.  He probably had a relationship with every wealthy person in the state.  But even if that dubious premise were true, it is meaningless.  If you examined every event in human history, you would find many apparent "coincidences."  Coincidences are often the norm but we are just unaware that they are occurring because there is no cause to research every human encounter.  The point here being, however, that no one would fake an Oswald visit to Mexico City for the purpose of creating a pretext for war with Cuba or Russia but then make no apparent effort after pulling off the assassination to put the blame on Cuba or Russia.  Instead we are told the plan comes to nothing just because LBJ would not go along. 

[Jon Banks]

All that lends itself to proving that: 1) LBJ was not involved in any conspiracy; and 2) Oswald's Mexico City trip was not faked as a pretext for war with Cuba or Russia.  The conspirators would not have gone to the enormous risk of assassinating the president without some assurance that the person who would replace him would be onboard with their objective.

1 - LBJ was deeply involved with the intelligence and political coverups after the Kennedy assassination. RFK Sr too. But it doesn't prove that he was involved in the conspiracy to kill JFK. And of course, I don't believe RFK was in on a conspiracy to kill his brother. The conspiracy and coverups that followed the assassination should be viewed as two distinct things. The motives for the coverups might've been related to avoiding a war or covering up illegal acts abroad (ie assassination attempts in Cuba) moreso than protecting potential conspirators.

2 - The Mexico City trip makes no sense outside of the context of it being some sort of intelligence operation. Oswald, having visited the USSR previously, knew of better ways to be able to travel to the Soviet Union or Cuba. Maybe the point was just to make a scene so it could be documented that he (or someone pretending to be him) visited those embassies weeks before the assassination? Or maybe it was as John Newman and others theorized, an attempt to create bad PR for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee?

We simply don't know enough to conclusively say what happened in Mexico City...