Was JFK's Assassination Preventable?

Did the CIA fail to share information with the FBI about Oswald's unhinged behavior?

Donald Trump’s January 23 Executive Order to declassify the assassination files of President John F. Kennedy have raised public expectations that at long last a smoking gun document might reveal a deep state conspiracy. After studying the case for 35 years and having reviewed the documents already unsealed, I do not expect to find evidence of an Oliver Stone-styled conspiracy. There is, however, a lingering question that could reshape how history judges the case: was the president’s murder preventable?

It was revealed after 9/11 that the CIA had known about two Saudi terrorists living in California but had not shared the information with the FBI until a month before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. By then it was too late to find them. Both Saudis ended up on the 9/11 terror planes.

Did something similar happen in the JFK assassination?

It is more than a hypothetical question because 23-year-old Lee Oswald went to the Soviet and Cuban diplomatic missions in Mexico City only six weeks before JFK visited Dallas. Oswald wanted to become part of Fidel Castro’s Marxist revolution and needed a travel visa to Cuba. Not many Americans visited the Cuban and Soviet missions during the height of the Cold War. No one who did so had Oswald’s unusual history: he had defected to the Soviet Union in 1959. While no one other than Oswald’s Russian-born wife, Marina, was aware he had tried and failed to assassinate a rightwing retired Army general in Dallas the past April, U.S. security agencies knew he was an avowed Marxist who had set up own pro-Castro organization a few months before visiting Mexico City. The CIA had at least on one occasion read the mail his mother sent him in Russia. The FBI had opened an investigative file when Oswald was repatriated to the U.S. in 1962.

There were no Cuban diplomatic missions in the U.S. All were shuttered after Castro came to power. Cuba, only 90 miles off the American coastline, was considered a major threat as a Soviet satellite. In 1962, Soviet nuclear missiles deployed in Cuba had brought the world to the brink of World War III.

Mexico City during the Cold War was a nest of spies. CIA operatives worked from the American embassy in Mexico City while the Cubans and Soviets ran their own intelligence operatives.

The CIA undoubtedly had surveillance on both the Soviet and Cuban missions. That would have included telephone taps, possible video and audio recordings, maybe even some human intelligence that the CIA had managed to turn — either through blackmail or money — inside one or both embassies.

What would the CIA have learned about Oswald through its surveillance? At the Russian embassy, three KGB agents later recounted how Oswald, in halting and poor Russian, complained that the FBI was ruining his life in America. He tried impressing the Soviets, boasting about his work on behalf of Communism and his efforts to infiltrate the anti-Castro Cubans and the right wing. He claimed it was urgent to get to Cuba as he had information that could prevent future CIA attacks on the island.

“Throughout the story,” recalled Valeriy Vladimirovich Kostikov, a KGB agent operating under the diplomatic cover of a consul corps officer, “Oswald was extremely agitated and clearly nervous, especially whenever he mentioned the FBI, but he suddenly became hysterical, began to sob, and through his tears cried, ‘I am afraid … they’ll kill me. Let me in!’”

At one point, Oswald shocked the KGB agents by pulling a .38 caliber revolver from his jacket. He swung it in the air and cried “See? This is what I must now carry to protect my life.”

As Oswald sobbed, one of the KGB agents seized the pistol and emptied its bullets.

“But if they [the FBI] don’t leave me alone, I’m going to defend myself,” Oswald threatened. But his initial fury turned to depression when they told him they would not issue a Cuba travel visa. “His mood was bad,” another KGB agent, Oleg Maximovich Nechiporenko, later recalled.

After Oswald left the Soviets, the three KGB agents discussed their visitor. They all agreed he was “psychotic.”

“We were also of the unanimous opinion,” said Nechiporenko, “that if this was not a person suffering from mental disorders, then he was unbalanced at the very least or had an unstable constitution.”

After his outburst with the Soviets, Oswald made a second and final assault on the Cuban mission.

“We never had any individual that was so insistent or persistent,” recalled Cuban consul, Eusebio Azcue. “He always had a face which reflected unhappiness. He was never friendly … he was not pleasant.” Oswald insisted that he be issued a visa because of his political credentials. When the Cubans turned him down, Oswald became “highly agitated and angry.” The Cubans ejected him. Azcue later recalled he seemed on the edge of “somewhat violently or emotionally…[he] seems to be mumbling to himself, and slams the door, also in a very discourteous mood.”

Did the CIA know about Oswald’s unhinged shuttling back and forth between two key communist Cold War enemies? The Agency has always been uncooperative and obtuse. As early as October 10, 1963, a week after Oswald visited the embassies, the CIA had sent a teletype about him to the FBI, the State Department, and the Navy. It was filled with errors, not even getting the names right, referring to “Lee Henry Oswald” and his wife, “Marian Pusakova.” It gave an incorrect description of Oswald based on a surveillance photograph provided by the CIA’s Mexico City station. That photograph was not Oswald. After the assassination, the CIA claimed it did not have any photographs of Oswald, advancing the rather incredulous claim that its surveillance cameras on its two Cold War enemies did not operate around the clock.

The JFK files might reveal whether the CIA had Mexico City photos or audio recordings of Oswald. When Winston Scott, who had been the CIA station chief in Mexico City in 1963, died in 1971, James Jesus Angleton, head of the Agency’s counterintelligence, reportedly flew to Mexico and emptied Scott’s private safe. Some reports say it included a right-profile photo of Oswald entering the Soviet embassy. Three former CIA employees told the House Select Committee in the late 1970s they had seen such a photo. As for sound tapes, the Agency recorded as many as eight Mexico City conversations it initially thought were Oswald. Several months after the assassination, Win Scott had played a poor-quality tape recording that purported to include Oswald, to David Slawson, a Warren Commission staff counsel. Slawson could not identify Oswald’s voice.

In 1976, the Washington Post reported that David Phillips, a former chief of CIA operations in Latin America, indicated there was a transcript of an Oswald phone call to the Soviets. Phillips denied the report.

However, Edwin Lopez, a House Select Committee investigator, told me in 1992, that “the Agency had at one point a recording of Oswald asking to speak to whoever he was going to speak to at the Soviet embassy,” “And the Agency had a husband-and-wife team [who were Russian] listen to the tape and transcribe it…”

A retired Agency official familiar with the Oswald file who spoke to me on the condition he not be identified said that, “Even if there had been a sound recording, it would have been erased routinely a week after it was made. If we kept everything we recorded, you couldn’t find enough warehouses to store them. So once something is transcribed, we don’t need the tape, and it’s reused. Keeping the tape might be more of an indication that there was a special interest in this fellow. However, since there isn’t a tape, no one is sure that we recorded the right person.”

My hope is that the upcoming declassification of the JFK files will provide some overdue transparency on what the CIA knew about Oswald and his instability in Mexico City. If the CIA had that information, it should have reported it to the FBI when a dejected and angry Oswald reentered the United States only 6 weeks before Kennedy visited Dallas.

If the Bureau knew about Oswald’s Mexico City behavior, the Dallas field office would have made its investigation a priority. The FBI would have known when Oswald subsequently landed a job, through a friend of his wife, at the Texas School Book Depository in downtown Dallas. And when the Secret Service set a motorcade route that passed directly in front of the Book Depository, it is possible — even likely — that a prioritized FBI investigation would have flagged that.

The American public has a right to know if the opportunity to stop JFK’s murder was lost in the CIA’s obsessive confidentiality and secrecy surrounding Cold War intelligence.