Was LHO impersonated by a KGB officer in MC 7 weeks before the assassination?

[Tom Graves]

The official record says 23-year-old, 5’ 9.5”, light-brown-haired, gray-or-hazel eyed, 133 pounds-at- autopsy Lee Harvey Oswald visited the Cuban and Soviet consulates in Mexico City seven weeks before he assassinated President Kennedy in Dallas, Texas.

Five-foot-three-and-a-half Silvia Duran, the secretary/receptionist at the Cuban Consulate, and Consul Eusebio Azcue collectively described the Oswald they’d dealt with on 27 September 1963 as 35-ish, short, blond-haired, blue-or-green-eyed, slender, and having a very thin face.

This description matches that of KGB Colonel Nikolai Leonov, “Third Secretary and Assistant Cultural Attache” at the Soviet Embassy. As we can see in photos that were taken of him, 5’ 6” or 5’ 7” Leonov was blond-haired, slender, and had a very thin face.

Strangely, whereas Duran said the Oswald that she and Azcue had dealt with was “inelegantly dressed” and was the same man who was shot by Jack Ruby on 24 November 1963, Azcue said he was wearing a “blue Prince of Wales suit” and was not the same person Ruby had shot.

(The passport-sized photos of real-deal Oswald that were taken that day and which were stapled by Duran onto his visa application forms in his presence show him wearing a white shirt, a dark tie, and light-colored sweater vest.)

Background: Leonov had met Fidel Castro’s younger brother, Raul, on a boat in 1953 and had become his and Che Guevara’s mentor. He also funneled arms to rebels in Latin America. When Fidel was arrested in Mexico City in 1956, Leonov’s calling card was found in his wallet.

Upon being refused a transit visa to Russia, Oswald is alleged to have started weeping and brandishing his revolver in front of three “diplomats” at the Soviet Consulate on Saturday, 28 September 1963 — Pavel Yatskov, Oleg Nechiporenko, and the putative head of KGB assassinations and sabotage in the Western Hemisphere, Valery Kostikov.

Kostikov’s name would notoriously be volunteered to a forgetful Oswald or “Oswald” over a sure-to-be-tapped-by-KGB phoneline on 1 October 1963 by the Soviet Embassy’s security officer, Ivan Obyedkov.

Obyedkov (mis-transcribed “Byetkov” in James Angleton’s 19 June 1975 Church Committee testimony) was a Kremlin-loyal triple. In other words, the CIA mistakenly believed it had successfully recruited him.

Interestingly, without mentioning the above incident, Leonov wrote in his 1985 Russian-language book, Difficult Times, and told National Enquirer on 22 November 1993 that Oswald had interrupted volleyball warmups on Sunday, 29 September 1963, and that he and Leonov had retired to his office in the Soviet Embassy (not Consulate) where Oswald proceeded to start weeping and brandishing his revolver (just as Oswald, apparently unbeknownst to Leonov, had done the previous day at the Consulate).

P.S. Author John M. Newman says real-deal Oswald was impersonated over-the-phone several times in Mexico City, as evidenced by the fact that the transcripts show that the caller didn’t know what real-deal Oswald had done (or not done) in the Cuban and Soviet Consulates during his attempts to get Cuban and Russian transit visas.