conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a story titled Oswald and the CIA about CIA, Oswald, Oswald's with the genre: Politics & Social Sciences, Politics & Government.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: This meticulously documented expose gives the lie to the official CIA position that it had no relationship of any kind with Lee Harvey Oswald, alleged assassin of President John Kennedy. A former U.S. military intelligence officer for 20 years, the author (JFK and Vietnam) relies primarily on newly released government documents made available within the last three years under the JFK Assassination Records Act, passed in 1992, which mandates that the U.S. government make available all its information on this case. Using CIA, FBI, military and American embassy files to reconstruct Oswald's activities from his 1959 defection to the Soviet Union up until his murder, the author shows that the CIA was spawning a web of deception about Oswald weeks before the president's murder. For example, the agency has denied that it knew about Oswald's 1963 visits to the Cuban consultant in Mexico City, but the author refutes this, using interlocking CIA and FBI cables and reports. The evidence presented here, though fragmentary and based on heavily censored and edited documents, strongly suggests that the CIA had a keen operational interest in Oswald, that it kept tabs on him and that Oswald, either willingly or as a patsy, was deeply involved in CIA operations. CIA documents suggest that the agency had a hand in Oswald's defection to the Soviet Union and monitored his activities there and his return home in June 1962. This heavily annotated tome, which reads like an intricate spy thriller, serves as a corrective to Norman Mailer's Oswald's Tale. <BR>Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first four paragraphs for this story.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Oswald and the CIA
  Winston Scott, The Foul Foe, unpublished manuscript, Chapter XXIV, p. 273. NARA, JFK files, HSCA records, Win Scott files. "Box 4" appears on the cover page.
  The only exception is Azcue, who was confused and describes an event as taking place Saturday which clearly was the Friday afternoon blow-up.
  Mexico City 5448, to CIA, Action: C/WH 5, July 20, 1963. NARA, JFK files, CIA, January 1994 (5 brown boxes) release; see box 1, folder 2.
  NARA, CIA transcript from Mexico City, September 28, 1963, 11:51 A.M., Oswald box 15b, folder 56, CIA January 1994 (5 brown boxes) release.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I do not know who directly handled Oswald in 1963, but someone involved in the murder of the president did. Many researchers think they know who this person was and perhaps they do. Some think it might have been David Atlee Phillips who, at the time of Oswald's visit to Mexico City, was head of Cuban operations at the CIA station there. Another candidate might be William Gaudet, a CIA Latin American operative who happened to be standing in line in front of Oswald the day the two men got their tourist permits from the Mexican Consulate in New Orleans.e It might have been someone else.
  Whether or not Oswald's handler or handlers understood that their activities would lead to the death of the president, they were nevertheless taking cues from someone in CIA counterintelligence who was harnessed to the plot. If there were some CIA officers who saw Oswald's trip to Mexico as part of a legitimate counter-Castro operation, someone, somewhere in the Agency's ounterintelligence operations understood that what happened on that trip was designed to force a national security cover-up after the president's murder.
  When asked to head a presidential commission of inquiry, Chief Justice Earl Warren turned down Robert Kennedy twice and then turned down Lyndon Johnson until the president played the Mexico City trump card. "And I just pulled out what Hoover told me," Johnson later bragged in a call with Senator Russell, "about a little incident in Mexico City." Johnson recalled how he explained to Warren that this "little incident" made it look like Castro and Khrushchev were behind the president's murder. "And I think you put on your uniform in World War I, fat as you are," Johnson claimed he had told Warren, "and would do anything to save one American life." Johnson explained that, when confronted with this, Warren started crying and agreed to take the assignment.f In a 1972 documentary for public television Warren himself told the same story—except for the tears—about how Johnson feared a "nuclear war."g
  On the surface, Oswald's trip to Mexico City made no sense at all. Whoever was handling him was able to get him to do and say things that were not in his interest. The story was that he had decided to return again to the Soviet Union—this time by way of Cuba. That story was a ruse. In the summer of 1963, the State Department had approved his passport for travel to the USSR but also stamped it with a warning that a person traveling to Cuba would be liable for prosecution.h If he really intended to go back to the Soviet Union he could have gone through the same European countries he had during his first defection in 1959. Thus, to travel to the Soviet Union via Cuba made no sense.
  There was a darker purpose for Oswald's visit to Mexico City. He was sent there to seek visas from the Cuban Consulate and Soviet Embassy. The Cuban transit visa could be used to get him to Cuba or to make it appear he had gone to Cuba. It is now apparent that the planners did not expect that he would get the Soviet visa, for they likely knew that U.S. citizens could only get such a visa from the Soviet Embassy in Washington. Rather, the objective was simply incidental contact between Oswald and the man who issued Soviet visas in Mexico City: Valery Kostikov. The value of this contact derived from what only a handful of counterintelligence officers in Washington knew: Kostikov was an important operative of KGB assassinations in the Americas. In my view, it is likely that among this small group of officers was a bad apple, a person involved in designing the plot to assassinate President Kennedy.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: LBJ Library, transcript of phone conversation between FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and President Johnson, 23 November, 1963, 10:00 A.M.
  Jefferson Morley, Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008).
  Mexico LEGAT to FBI HQS, 11/25/63. Dallas SAC Gordon Shanklin had already, on Saturday evening, informed Hoover of the tape erasure. Teletype 23/2220z, 7:30 P.M. CST, 11/23/63.
  FBI Memorandum, W. C. Sullivan to D. J. Brennan, "Central Intelligence Agency Operations in the U.S.," 1/15/64.
  Jefferson Morley, Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA, (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008), p. 7.