Very shortly after LHO’s arrest, FBI agent Hosty saw a communique regarding the Mexico City visit to the Soviets. This is from Hosty’s book, “Assignment Oswald”. And he writes that he had already read something about it in October. It appears that a source for this information was the CIA/FBI interception of LHO’s letter to the Soviet Embassy in Washington. But that letter wasn’t yet written in October, it was written November 9th, 1963. So if Hosty had already read something about a meeting in Mexico City in October, it seems to me that it would have been based on the surveillance. And that they had identified who it was that they were observing. Which makes the submitted photo of the guy in Mexico City (who obviously wasn’t LHO) even more bizarre.
TIME: 2:15 P.M.
A hand clutched my elbow. I spun; Howe was in my face. “They’ve just arrested a guy named Lee Oswald, and they’re booking him for the killing of the policeman over in Oak Cliff. Officer’s name was Tippit.”
It took me only a second or two to shift from the extreme right wing to Lee Oswald. Lee Oswald was a Communist who had defected to the Soviet Union and returned three years later with a Russian wife, Marina. I had an active file on both Oswalds, who were both considered espionage risks. I had learned on November 1 that Oswald worked at one of the Texas school book depository buildings in Dallas. I remembered thinking Tippit’s and Kennedy’s killings were related, and then it hit me like a load of bricks.
“That’s him! Ken, that must be him. Oswald has to be the one who shot Kennedy!” Oswald was the SOB who shot the president. We had a bead on the assassin.
“Listen,” Howe said. “Do you have the Oswald file?”
“No, I don’t. It should be in the active file cabinet.”
Howe and I rushed over to the cabinet. The file was gone, which meant that the mail clerk probably had it for incoming mail purposes. We hurried to his office and started frantically looking for it. Loeffler, the only other supervisor in the office, joined us in the search, found the file, and handed it to me and Howe. Paper-clipped to the top we found a one-page communique from the Washington, D.C., field office. While Howe pulled out his reading glasses, I began reading the communique, which summarized a letter written by Oswald to the Soviet Embassy in Washington. The letter had been intercepted by the FBI, then read and copied by an intelligence agent before it was sent along to the Russians.
According to the communique, Oswald had written that he had been in Mexico City and had spoken with “Comrade Kostine.” I had read something about this Mexico City meeting in October, but had been forbidden by FBI policy from questioning Oswald about it, as it would tip off Oswald, and presumably the Soviets, to our intelligence sources and methods in Mexico.
Right, Hosty testified to the WC that on October 25 the FBI office in New Orleans informed him that they had learned from another agency (obviously the CIA) that Oswald had visited the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. But nothing about meeting a Kostin/Kostikov and nothing about the visit to the Cuban consulate.
Mr. HOSTY. I then received a communication on the 25th of October from the New Orleans office advising me that another agency had determined that Lee Oswald was in contact with the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City in the early part of October 1963.
Mr. STERN. Did they tell you anything else?
Mr. HOSTY. No. Just very briefly that there had been a contact.
Mr. STERN. Did this increase your effort to find him?
Mr. HOSTY. Very much so, yes. I became curious then.
On the photo. I think that was just a screwup. According to Anne Goodpasture, who worked in the CIA station in Mexico City, she had learned that Oswald had phoned the Embassy on Monday and so went through the photos of people who visited the Embassy that day and grabbed those that looked like an American.
Oleg Nechiporenko, the KGB agent in MC, said the man in the photo was a US Air Force "walk in" who had offered to sell military secrets. In his latest book Ed Epstein recounts meeting Nechiporenko in Moscow (Nechiporenko never defected, he went to work for the Russian intelligence service the FSB) and that he told Epstein that the man was a "walk in" and that later that day Oswald also walked in.
It's still odd that Hoover mentions the letter they intercepted but apparently doesn't mention that Oswald said he went to the Cuban consulate. He only mentions the Soviet Embassy visit. The transcript is here:
https://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/lbjlib/phone_calls/Nov_1963/html/LBJ-Nov-1963_0029a.htmNeither McCone or Hoover tell LBJ about the Cuban visit? Do I have that right?
