I'm still waiting for somebody to explain to me how Oswald or anyone else in Mexico City could possibly have known the circumstances that would lead to JFK riding past his work place months later in an open top car. It's kind of an important detail if you want to allege the JFKA plot was hatched in Mexico City.

The Friday Cover for Jan. 10, 2020


Philip Shenon, a former Washington and foreign correspondent for the New York Times, is author, most recently, of A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination. This essay is drawn from the afterword to the new paperback edition of the book, scheduled for publication by Picador on Feb. 3.


What if the answers to the many, persistent questions surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy lie not in Dallas or Washington, D.C., but in the streets of a foreign capital that most Americans have never associated with the president’s murder? Mexico City.

Only hours after shots rang out in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963, U.S. Ambassador Thomas C. Mann told colleagues in the American embassy in Mexico that he was certain Lee Harvey Oswald had not acted alone in killing JFK.

Oswald had visited Mexico City several weeks earlier, apparently to obtain a visa that would allow the self-proclaimed Marxist to defect to Cuba, and Mann, a veteran diplomat, suspected that a plot to kill Kennedy had been hatched on Mexican soil, during Oswald’s encounters there with Cuban diplomats and Mexicans who supported Fidel Castro’s revolution. How did Mann know about those meetings? It turned out the CIA had Oswald under surveillance in the Mexican capital after he had showed up at both the Cuban and Soviet embassies there.

Back at the State Department, however, a baffled Mann hit a brick wall. No one in Washington seemed interested in his suspicions, he would later complain to colleagues. And within days of the assassination, the ambassador received an astonishing top-secret message directly from Secretary of State Dean Rusk. According to Mann’s testimony years later to congressional investigators, Rusk ordered the embassy to shut down any investigation in Mexico that might “confirm or refute rumors of Cuban involvement in the assassination.” No reason was given for the order, the ambassador said.

Mann told the congressional investigators that he was under the impression that the same “incredible” shut-down order had been given by the CIA to the spy agency’s station chief in Mexico, Winston Scott. In memoirs quietly declassified in the 1990s, after his death, Scott confirmed that he, too, suspected that Oswald was an “agent” of a foreign power who may have been part of a conspiracy to kill Kennedy (though Scott did not suggest that the CIA’s investigation was shut down).

What happened in Mexico City in the weeks before JFK’s murder? It is clear from government files declassified in recent decades that Oswald’s six-day trip to Mexico was never adequately investigated by the CIA, the FBI and the State Department—and, as a result, by the Warren Commission, the panel named by President Lyndon Johnson to investigate the assassination. The question has been raised anew in recent weeks by a surprising source—the Warren Commission’s chief conspiracy hunter. And in fact, lots of evidence has accumulated over the years to suggest that historians, journalists and JFK buffs who are still trying to piece together clues about the president’s murder—whether from the memories of still-living witnesses or in the new tranche of assassination-related documents the National Archives is set to release in two years—would be wise to look to Mexico City.

In the half-century since the commission named for Chief Justice Earl Warren concluded that Oswald was the sole gunman in Dallas and that there was no evidence of a conspiracy, foreign or domestic, it is startling to discover how many credible government officials—beginning with Ambassador Mann and CIA station chief Scott—have suggested that evidence was missed in Mexico that could rewrite the history of the assassination. The list includes the late former FBI Director Clarence Kelley and former FBI Assistant Director William Sullivan, as well as David Belin, a former staff lawyer on the Warren Commission.

Last month, another commission staffer joined their ranks: David Slawson, a retired University of Southern California law professor who, 51 years ago, was the commission’s chief investigator searching for evidence that might have pointed to a foreign conspiracy in JFK’s murder. In interviews for a new edition of my 2013 history of the assassination, Slawson said he is now convinced the commission was the victim of a “massive cover-up” by the CIA and other agencies to hide evidence that might have identified people in Mexico City who knew and encouraged Oswald to carry out his threat when he returned to the United States.

Declassified government records back up Slawson’s suspicion of how much information was withheld in 1964, when senior officials at both the CIA and the FBI assured the commission that there was no evidence in Mexico—or anywhere else—to suggest that Oswald was anything other than a delusional lone wolf. In sworn testimony to the commission, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover insisted that “there was nothing up to the time of the assassination that gave any indication that this man was a dangerous character who might do harm to the president.”

The records declassified decades later tell a very different story, and show just how much evidence about Oswald’s Mexico trip —including CIA tape recordings of wiretaps of Oswald’s phone calls in Mexico—never reached the commission. Although the spy agency assured the commission in 1964 that there were no surveillance photos of Oswald in Mexico, CIA Station Chief Scott, in his memoirs, strongly suggested that there were photos, and other CIA officials later told congressional investigators in the 1970s that they recalled seeing the pictures. CIA and FBI records, meanwhile, show that the agencies never tried to track down or interview key witnesses who had encountered Oswald in Mexico.

Slawson is also convinced that someone blocked him from seeing a top-secret June 1964 letter from Hoover to the commission in which Hoover revealed that Oswald may have openly boasted about his plans—“I’m going to kill Kennedy”—while in Mexico, apparently at the Cuban embassy.

Slawson believes the CIA was desperate to shut down any investigation in Mexico City out of fear the Warren Commission might stumble onto evidence of the spy agency’s long-running schemes to murder Fidel Castro. (Mexico City had been a staging area for some of the plots.)

Slawson is careful to note that he is not suggesting any sort of far-flung, carefully laid-out conspiracy. For one thing, he notes, Oswald did not get the job he held at the time of the assassination, at the Texas School Book Depository, which was on the president’s motorcade route, until after he had returned to Texas from Mexico in early October 1963; the route itself was not announced until days before JFK’s arrival in Dallas.

Still, if Oswald openly boasted about his plans to kill JFK among people in Mexico, it would undermine the official story that he was a lone wolf whose plans to kill the president could never have been detected by the CIA or FBI. In Slawson’s mind, it could even raise the question of whether people in Mexico might have been charged as accessories in the murder if they had known about Oswald’s threats but did nothing to stop him.

Ambassador Mann appears to have had similar suspicions. After retiring from the State Department, he told House investigators in 1977 that he had never stopped believing that Oswald had been part of a conspiracy somehow linked to Cuba, and that the CIA and other agencies had refused to investigate Oswald’s activities in Mexico “because it would have resulted in the discovery of covert U.S. government action” that somehow involved Cuba.

In memoirs published in 1987, former FBI Director Clarence Kelley, Hoover’s immediate successor, revealed that, after having a chance to read through the bureau’s raw files on the Kennedy assassination, he, too, came to believe that Mexico held the key to unanswered questions about the president’s murder. “Oswald’s stay in Mexico City apparently shaped the man’s thinking irrevocably,” Kelley wrote.

He said he became convinced from the files that, during meetings with Cuban diplomats in Mexico, “Oswald definitely offered to kill President Kennedy,” and that he had probably made a similar offer during the same trip at a meeting at the Soviet embassy in Mexico. That did not mean that either communist government was behind the assassination, Kelley insisted. But it did mean that people in both the Cuban and Soviet embassies were aware, weeks before the assassination, that a young American—a former Marine with rifle training who was eager to be known as a champion of Castro’s revolution—was talking openly about killing the president.

Another top FBI official, former Assistant Director William Sullivan, who directed the bureau’s investigation of JFK’s murder, wrote in his own memoirs that “there were huge gaps” in the FBI’s investigation and that many of them involved Oswald’s trip south of the border. “We never found out what went on between Oswald and the Cubans in Mexico City,” Sullivan admitted.

After finishing his work on the commission, staff lawyer David Belin, who died in 1999, wrote in a little-publicized book that he came to believe that Oswald may have planned to head from Dallas back to Mexico by bus after the assassination because he had some promise of help from co-conspirators who were waiting on the Texas-Mexico border.


Belin’s theory, which he developed during his work on the commission, stemmed from his analysis of local bus schedules and of a bus transfer issued on the day of the assassination that was found in Oswald’s clothing.

According to Belin, Oswald may have met with Cuban diplomats and others in Mexico City who saw the Kennedy administration as a mortal threat and who “promised financial and other support to Oswald if he was ever able to succeed” in killing the president. Belin said that, to his disappointment, there was no mention of his theory in the commission’s final report because, as he admitted, it was “pure speculation” that undermined Chief Justice Warren’s hopes to snuff out conspiracy allegations.

Belin’s theory would have made sense to another American official—diplomat Charles William Thomas, whose once-promising career was mysteriously derailed after he pressed colleagues in the U.S. embassy in Mexico to pursue unanswered questions about Oswald’s Mexico City trip. In late 1965, Thomas was told by a friend—a prominent Mexican writer, Elena Garro de Paz—that she had seen Oswald at a dance party during his visit to Mexico that was also attended by a Cuban diplomat who had spoken openly about his hope that someone would assassinate Kennedy. Thomas said he was also told that Oswald had a brief affair with a vivacious young Mexican woman, a committed Socialist, who worked in the Cuban consulate and who had introduced Oswald around town to other Castro supporters.

State Department and CIA records declassified in recent years show that the agencies rebuffed Thomas in his requests for a new investigation, which he continued to raise even after he left Mexico in 1967 for a new posting in Washington. Thomas was dismissed from the department in 1969, a decision that the State Department years later would acknowledge was made in error—the result of what the department insisted was a clerical mistake related to the misfiling of some of Thomas’s personnel records. The department’s admission would come only after Thomas, who struggled to establish a new career, committed suicide in 1971.

Congressional investigators, who later reviewed the case and obtained pension benefits for Thomas’s family, said they suspected, but could not prove, that the diplomat had actually been forced out because of his persistent, unwelcome effort to open a new investigation of Oswald’s activities in Mexico. “It was impossible to prove, though,” one of the congressional investigators told me when I was writing my book. “If he was forced out because of Mexico City, it was all done with a wink and a nod.”

Decades after Thomas’s death, the State Department would declassify internal memos that he had written to superiors, in which he had pleaded for someone to go back and reinvestigate Oswald’s Mexico trip.

What Thomas had learned in Mexico would not, by itself, “prove that there was a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy,” he wrote. But he warned of what might happen if long-secret evidence suggesting a Mexican-born conspiracy in JFK’s murder ever became public. “Those who have tried to discredit the Warren Report could have a field day,” he wrote.

In 1975, Thomas’s widow received a formal apology from the White House. “The circumstances surrounding your husband’s death are a source of deepest regret to the government he served so loyally and so well,” the letter said. “I can only hope that the measures which came about as a result of this tragedy will prevent reoccurrences of this kind in the future.” The letter was signed by President Gerald R. Ford, who, as a rising Republican congressman from Michigan in 1964, had been a member of the Warren Commission.

Thomas’s family may have reason to hope for even greater justice for the late diplomat, since so many of the people who encountered Oswald during his mysterious trip to Mexico half a century ago were young at the time and are still alive. I found some of them for my book, including people who suggest that Oswald had many more contacts with people in Mexico City who might have wanted to see JFK dead. The National Archives faces a 2017 deadline to release about 1,200 documents related to the assassination, many of them from the CIA, that still remain classified. While refusing to describe what is in the documents, CIA lawyers have acknowledged over the years that many of them are out of the files of agency employees who were stationed in the early 1960s in, of all places, Mexico City.

You continually obsess over the KGB, repeatedly author bizarre posts about the KGB's alleged role in the JFKA, and accuse everyone who disagrees with you of being a willing KGB asset or a KGB dupe.

Dear Comrade Griffith,

Which are you?

You (and Doyle, et al., ad nauseam) so rabidly spew Kremlin-approved JFKA CTs, you've got to be one or the other.

-- Tom

The claim that Putin installed Trump in the White House is as sure sign of TDS as there is. You have to be really nutty to think Putin had that kind of power. Did he also install Obama? Bush 43? Just where did Putin get such power?

Trump got elected the same way all but two of our elected presidents did. He got a majority of the electors who were selected in the manner prescribed by the various state legislatures. In all but two states, that is a slate of electors pledged to a specific candidate in a winner take all popular vote. Just whe BS:re did Putin disrupt that process?

A superior explanation is acute mental illness combined with a startling number of coincidences, including coincidence
of a diehard personality cult attracted to a high functioning malignant sociopath.

For my money, I'm betting it is what it obviously appears to be. The least educated states' voting majorities voting
for someone who exhibits severe symptoms of developmental damage they all can identify with. It is apparently endemic in households headed by authoritarian personalities.

https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/entities/publication/eb4d2b4e-f814-410c-aff5-ed08851aabaa
Neuroticism, deprivation and racial bias: Trump's unique authoritarian ...
The outcome showed a unique cocktail of factors contributed to Trump's support. From a psychological perspective, people living in regions that voted for Trump in both elections have higher levels of neuroticism, a personality trait characterised by negative emotions such as anxiety, fear and anger.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/24-hours-later-trump-claims-he-misspoke-helsinki-meant-say-n892166
24 hours later, Trump claims he misspoke in Helsinki, meant to say ...
At the Monday press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump said about election meddling in 2016: " (Putin) just said it's not Russia. I will say this: I don't see any reason why ...

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/five-revelations-senate-intel-report-2016-russian-interference-n1237184
Six revelations in Senate intel report on 2016 Russian interference
The bipartisan report provides new details on Trump’s conversations with Roger Stone and the activities of the president’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

https://apnews.com/article/elections-donald-trump-russia-ap-top-news-robert-mueller-98f22511be924ced895ce5c0bfedfe37
Full text of Mueller's questions and Trump's answers
WASHINGTON (AP) — Robert Mueller's 448-page investigative report into allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election includes 23 unredacted pages of Mueller's written questions and Donald Trump's written responses, the only direct

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_Intelligence_Committee_report_on_Russian_interference_in_the_2016_United_States_presidential_election
Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russian interference in the ...
According to the report, "some evidence suggests" that Konstantin Kilimnik, to whom Manafort provided polling data, was directly connected to the Russian theft of Clinton-campaign emails. [9][10] In addition, while Trump's written testimony in the Mueller report stated that he did not recall speaking with Roger Stone about WikiLeaks, the Senate ...

https://www.sdpb.org/politics-public-policy/2021-01-20/trump-pardon-wipes-out-3-million-in-restitution-for-erickson-victims
Trump Pardon Wipes Out $3 Million In Restitution For Erickson Victims
Legal experts say a South Dakota criminal no longer has to pay his victims nearly $3 million in restitution after President Trump pardoned him and labeled his crimes "minor." That criminal, Paul Erickson, of Sioux Falls, is best known as the boyfriend of Russian operative Maria Butina. She was deported in 2019

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-russia-j6-coup/
3 men linked to Russian spies were in 'unhinged' Dec. 18 Oval Office meeting with Trump: report
By:
Bob Brigham
Jul 16, 2022

https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/college-sports/central-michigan-coach-has-unfiltered-response-to-college-football-playoff-expansion-rumblings/ar-AA2fGoGz?uxmode=ruby&ctsrc=dgst&ocid=edgntpruby&pc=EDBBAN&cvid=6ad7e1e5ff7d4e8ca20628d186f05350&ei=35

I was all in favor of college football when it adopted a four team playoff in 2014 and hoped it would expand to 8 which to me is the ideal number. I was OK when they decided on 12, but I feared it wouldn't stop there and now it is apparent it has not. They are about to approve a 24 team college football playoff starting next season.

It is nothing more than a money grab. They are doing to college football what was done to college basketball decades ago. It dilutes the importance of the regular season. The top teams are going to get in the playoff even if they underperform. The college basketball regular season is nothing more than a glorified exhibition season and now that will be true of college football. Nobody will care about conference championships when some conferences will get 4 or 5 teams in the playoff. I haven't watched a regular season college basketball game in years. Why bother. The real basketball isn't played until March. Now the college football season won't start until December.

The real joke is the bowl system. It used to be an accomplishment to get invited to a bowl game. Now bowl game invites are nothing more than a participation trophy. Over 60% of all FBS teams will play post-season football. Some years they have to fill the fields with 5-7 teams because there weren't enough 6-6 teams. Is it any wonder the players opt out and coaches move on to other jobs before the bowl games are even played. If the players and coaches don't care about bowl games, why should I.

When I started following college football in the 1960s, teams played either a 9 or 10 game schedule. If they had a really good season, they might get invited to one of about a dozen or so bowl games, for a total of 11 games. Now teams play a minimum of 12 games and most will at least play a bowl game for a total of 13 games. A top team might play their 12 regular season games, a conference championship game, and as many as 5 playoff games for a total of 18 games. This is not good for the athletes, even though they are now paid professionals. Football takes wear and tear on a player's body and additional games increase the chances for  injuries, some of which can end a player's career when it is barely getting started.