Documents / FOIA release
This is a Central Intelligence Agency release dated 2025-06-12 under the JFK Act. It collects 1975 newspaper and magazine clippings. They include Mark Harris's New York Times Magazine essay on a UCLA "Conspiracy in America" conference and the conspiracy-theory mindset, a Jack Anderson column on stalled CIA reform, and wire reports of Richard Helms calling CBS newsman Daniel Schorr "Killer" after he testified to the Rockefeller Commission. There is also an essay on power and a publishing item about Philip Agee's book.
“Anderson”4 pages
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
The CIA reported the FBI to report the background. The photo before handling it over to the commission. The obvious complaint of the photograph was that it was taken by a between surveillance camera, and the CIA wished to avoid disclosing its location. According to knowledgeable former employees of the CIA, the Soviet and Cuban embassies, among others in Mexico City, were under constant photographic surveillance at the time. It seems likely then that the man who, according to the CIA, "identified himself as Lee Oswald" was photographed leaving the Mexico City embassy of the Soviet Union or of some other communist country.
The first public hint that the mystery man may have been impersonating Oswald came in 1966, with the publication of Edward Jay Epstein's Inquest, a scholarly study of the Warren Commission. Epstein interviewed one of the Commission's legal staff who recalled the incident (He said he had asked Raymond G. Rocca, the Agency's liaison with the Commission, about the photograph. The lawyer later received word from the Agency that the mystery man was thought to be Oswald at the time the photograph was given to the FBI. Why, he asked, did the Agency mistake someone so dissimilar in appearance for Lee Harvey Oswald? The CIA said they would check further and call him back. The lawyer told Epstein that they never called him back and the Warren Report contains no explanation of the Agency's mistake.
Another piece of the puzzle fell into place early in 1971, when the National Archives released a previously classified memorandum about the mystery man from Richard Helms to the Commission's general counsel, J. Lee Rankin. $ ^{18} $ Dated March 24, 1964, the memo informed Rankin:
On 22 and 23 November, immediately following the assassination of President Kennedy, three cabled reports were received from [deleted] in Mexico City relative to photographs of an unidentified man who visited the Cuban and Soviet embassies in that city during October and November 1963.
On the basis of these cables, Helms went on to say, the CIA had sent several reports to the Secret Service Attached to the Helms memorandum were paraphrases of these reports. Two dealt with the mystery man
New York to the President of the State of New York The Secretary of State delivered his hand on the New York State Board of Education
through ourselves available from the CIV (deleted). Not a mere initial possession of a photograph of an unidentified person thought to have visited the Cuban Embassy in mid October. This individual, it was believed at the time, might be identical with Lee Harvey OSWALD.
Message to the Protective Research Staff. The Secret Service delivered by hand on 23 November 1963, at 1030 hours.
CIA Headquarters was informed [deleted] on 23 November that several photographs of a person known to frequent the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, and who might be identical with Lee Harvey OSWALD, had been forwarded to Washington by the hand of a United States official returning to this country.22
Helms's covering memorandum affirmed that "the subject of the photographs mentioned in these reports is not Lee Harvey OSWALD."
Several photographs, then, of a mysterious stranger who kept being confused with Lee Harvey Oswald, and who had visited both the Soviet and Cuban embassies. Was it the same mystery man whose picture had been shown to Mrs. Oswald? Or was it yet another Oswald Doppelginger?
Farm evidence of the existence of additional photographs of the unidentified man mentioned in the Warren Report was turned up by Robert Smith, a private researcher. In 1972 Smith, then research director for the Commission to Investigate Assassinations, was poring over some recently declassified Warren Commission documents when he found reference to the mystery photo and two other views of the same person.24 Smith called his discovery to the attention of one of the authors, Bernard Finsterwald, who instituted a suit under the Freedom of Information Act for release of the two pictures. The government yielded and turned over the photographs to Finsterwald and Smith. They are published here for the first time.
The two new views of the mysteries also were taken at a different time from the first picture, in the last
Now holding a small passport-sized brief and what appear to be a wrist. As in the first photograph, the backgrounds of the two new photos have been cropped out. Whoever he was, he managed to be photographed, apparently by the CIA's hidden surveillance cameras; on at least two separate occasions. And neither of the new photographs reveals any resemblance between the mystery man and Lee Harvey Oswald.
The Warren Commission concluded that Oswald had been in Mexico in late September and early October 1963. Records of Mexican Customs and Immigration, bus lines, and a Mexico City hotel indicate that Oswald entered Mexico at Nuevo Laredo on the US border on September 26, traveled by bus to Mexico City, arriving there the next morning, and returned to the United States on October 3. $ ^{25} $ Passengers on the bus to Mexico City remembered Oswald, but there is almost no eyewitness testimony to support the Commission's reconstruction of Oswald's movements after he arrived in that city. $ ^{26} $ The Commission's finding that Oswald made repeated visits to both the Soviet and Cuban embassies rests heavily upon the affidavit of one witness, a Mexican woman who worked at the Cuban Embassy. $ ^{27} $
Silvia Tirado de Duran was secretary to the Cuban Consul in Mexico City. In a sworn statement $ ^{28} $ she gave to the deputy director of Mexican Federal Security on November 23, 1963, she said that Oswald had visited the Cuban Embassy in late September to apply for a visa to visit Cuba during a planned trip to the Soviet Union. Mrs. Duran recalled a heated exchange between Oswald and the Consul when the Cuban official told him his request could not be granted immediately. She remembered making a "seminal" phone call to the Soviet Embassy to try to speed up action on Oswald's application. She identified the Lee Harvey Oswald who visited the Cuban Embassy as the accused assasin whose photograph appeared in the Mexican newspapers on November 23. $ ^{29} $
Apparently the Warren Commission staff did not interview Silvett Darden, but instead relied solely on her ally Not linked to a story yet.
FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 83 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.