OSWALD AND THE MEXICO CITY TAPES
New proof that at least one taped conversation survived
By Paul Bleau
For many researchers, the alleged visit by Lee Oswald to Mexico City in late September and early October is indicative of a multi-layered plot to incriminate him in the assassination. Mark Lane made this a main feature of his book Plausible Denial. (See pgs. 39-87) More than one writer has shown that the Mexico City phone calls Oswald was supposed to have made to the Russian embassy from the Cuban consulate were not made by him. (Oswald and the CIA by John Newman, pp. 363-66) Very oddly, the two October 1st calls were made by a man who spoke quite poor Russian (ibid, p. 356). Yet people like Ernst Titovets, who spoke with Oswald in Russia, said the man spoke the language well. (Jim DiEugenio interview with Titovets in Washington in 2014) So did Rosaleen Quinn, a Russian language student who talked to Oswald before he left for Russia. (Philip Melanson, Spy Saga, p. 11)
These false communications seem designed to make it appear that Oswald was in cahoots with Castro. As Lane wrote, the fact that this impersonation was enacted seven weeks in advance of the Kennedy murder strongly indicates that Oswald was being used operationally by the CIA in these impersonations. This was bolstered during the recent Luna Task Force hearings by none other than Dan Hardway, who co-authored the landmark 350-page volume entitled “Lee Harvey Oswald, the CIA and Mexico City” -- commonly called The Lopez Report--for the HSCA. Co-author Eddie Lopez shares this opinion about the concept of impersonation. (Click here https://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/hsca/lopezrpt/pdf/LopezRpt_0_Title.pdf0)
Castro clearly understood within five days of JFK's murder that the plotters had designed a scheme that pointed to him. And he told a group of students about it outside a college, before he was to deliver a lecture. (https://www.kennedysandking.com/news-items/castro-figured-out-the-jfk-case-in-five-days-speech-of-november-27th-1963) But this bombshell scenario—false flag impersonation and all-- was nixed by LBJ, who feared that a Cuba/ U.S. conflict could escalate to a nuclear crisis, like the one he lived through a year earlier. He wanted none of it. This is why he intimidated the daylights out of Earl Warren. (Jim Marrs, Crossfire, revised edition, p. 440) Thus, we are left with the lone nut fairy tale. This is one reason why the tape recordings of the Mexico City calls needed to disappear. So, the improbable excuse that they had been routinely erased before the assassination became the story peddled by obfuscators, e.g., David Phillips. (Speech by Robert Tanenbaum in Chicago, 1993)
Many researchers were able to prove the opposite by pointing out that there were multiple confirmations of their post-November 22, 1963, existence:
We have Hoover’s statement to LBJ: “We have up here the tape 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. In other words, it appears that there was a second person who was at the Soviet embassy down there.” (Transcript of phone call, LBJ and Hoover, 11/23/63, p. 2) This statement was made from the word of FBI agents who were questioning Oswald in Dallas after the assassination and had listened to a Mexico City tape recording of “Oswald”. They confirmed that it was not the same voice.
In April 1964, Warren Commission lawyers William Coleman and David Slawson went to Mexico City to "investigate" Oswald’s alleged activities there. Coleman and Slawson confirmed to Anthony Summers that they had listened to the tapes "mainly to check that they corresponded with the CIA transcripts." (Summers, Not in Your Lifetime, p. 277)
Recently, new declassified material has emerged that is worth adding to this already incriminating trail of evidence.
File 180-10113-10119
This file was prepared by Patricia Orr of the HSCA and only released in 2025; it includes a recreation of the CIA Mexico City org chart (Page 9) at the time of Lee Harvey Oswald's infamous alleged visit shortly before the assassination. It also includes a description of the responsibilities of their personnel stationed there.
Key to this article is the description of the tasks undertaken by the Tarasoff couple, who listened to and transcribed Oswald's phone conversations. They were also voice identification experts:
This will be important for the third file we will discuss in this article.
File 104-10015-10129
Recently, Eli Frame (one of the excellent new researchers in our community) sent me the following file:
Key Points: This file is dated November 23, 1963, 5 PM- shortly after the FBI agents questioned Oswald while comparing his voice to one on a tape purported to be his while he made a phone call to the Russian embassy in Mexico City some seven weeks earlier.
It is handled by Mr. Whitten (Note: an earlier version of this file at Mary Ferrell blocks out the name Mr. Whitten and replaces it with the handwritten name Scelso, which was his alias.)
LITENSOR is a cryptonym for Adolfo Lopez Mateos, President of Mexico in 1963. The Mexicans and the CIA shared the intelligence coming from their intercepts in Mexico City.
LIENVOY is a cryptonym for the CIA telephone tapping program in Mexico City, targeting Cuban and Soviet embassies and run in conjunction with the Mexican DFS.
Points 2 and 3 are quite clear:
This means that even if the CIA had routinely erased these suspicious calls (which seems ridiculous to begin with), or lost, hidden, or destroyed them, Whitten was able to obtain a tape from his Mexican counterparts. Since LIENVOY located the tape(s), it also means that the CIA still had access to them and not just their Mexican partners. He likely ran into resistance getting his hands on the tape(s) the FBI agents in Dallas listened to of Oswald but was able to get the Mexican Intel version. His people likely listened to it and, of course, could not identify the voices; hence the follow-up message on Dec 16, which we will discuss later, to the Mexico City Station — which means it was known that they still had access to the tape. It begs the question: Why did Whitten need to go through the Mexican President to get a tape the FBI already had? Likely there was resistance coming from his own people in MC and the FBI.
FILE 104-10018-10079
Sometime last year I found this file that is a follow-up to the previous one:
Key points: The message is dated December 16, 1963, and was also sent by Whitten. It is point 2 and the comment that are important:
The monitors most likely refer to the Tarasoffs, who were the experts in voice identification. The comment leaves no doubt that they are referring to a recording of Oswald. How does one identify voices without being able to listen to them? The request does not say, “please identify who said what in the transcript.” So far, the researchers I have discussed this detail with agree that, taken as written above, it can only mean that the MC monitors were being asked to listen to the voices and attribute them to the right subjects, which could only be done by listening to tapes by monitors in Mexico City who were familiar with the voices. It also means that Whitten was messing around in very dangerous territory before he was promptly replaced by a more compliant Angleton as the CIA point-person for a Warren Commission investigation hell-bent on peddling the Lone Nut fairy tale.
Taken in its entirety, the proof seems overwhelming that tapes of Oswald survived. Then why was Phillips so dead set against admitting this to the House Select Committee on Assassinations? And why was CIA employee in Mexico City Anne Goodpasture—who worked closely with Phillips—so intent on disguising her role in this surveillance? Goodpasture sent out a cable saying all the tapes were erased on November 24th. When, in fact, she was the one who sent the alleged tape of Oswald up to Dallas through FBI agent Eldon Rudd. (James DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, p. 302) The one J. Edgar Hoover’s men had listened to, and Hoover told Lyndon Johnson about by the 23rd. There would seem to be one logical answer. The obfuscators were hiding an impersonation of Oswald. Let us not forget what Phillips told Mark Lane in a 1977 debate at UCLA: when the record is declassified, there will be no picture of Oswald in Mexico City. Which turned out to be true. (Lane, p. 82) No picture, false phone calls, ensuing cover-up; why? The most logical answer is an impersonator. To make it all worse, they then lied about the destruction of the tapes. Again, why? Because they would have proven what HSCA investigator Dan Hardway stated in so many words during the recent Luna Task Force hearings: That the Oswald story was part of covert operations against Cuba. Was the Mexico City impersonation the ultimate extension of those operations?
The tapes existed, and Whitten was onto this. Due to the combined force of Johnson and Hoover, the Lone Nut scenario replaced the Castro was behind it scheme. Whitten was therefore sent packing; clumsy attempts were made to deep-six the Mexico City false-flag operation. But the lie was uncovered; the nature of the conspiracy includes U.S. intelligence tactics.
