On September 27 and 28, 1963, a man calling himself Lee Oswald visited the Cuban consulate and Soviet embassy in Mexico City. He was seeking visas to visit both countries. As Oswald was a former defector to the Soviet Union who was planning on traveling with his Russian-born wife, he immediately attracted the interest of CIA officers and FBI agents in the Mexican capital.
And so the FBI began searching for Oswald–while President Kennedy was still alive, a story that was withheld from the Warren Commission and is ignored in virtually every book about JFK’s assassination.
Many of the records documenting that interest have still not been turned over to this day, despite the mandate of the JFK Records Act of 1992 that the American public is entitled to all “assassination-related” documents.
Searching for Oswald
It started with a phone call. On September 28, 1963 and again on October 1, a man who called himself “Lee Oswald” made phone calls to the Soviet consulate about his visa application. One of these calls was intercepted by the CIA, which shared the information with local FBI agents. They then searched for Oswald in Mexico throughout October and November of 1963.
(Many researchers, including myself, are convinced that these phone calls were faked and that someone was impersonating Oswald. But that’s a different story; you can read about it here.)
The details of the pre-assassination search for Oswald were not shared with the Warren Commission despite their obvious relevance.
The FBI conducted a complete recanvass of all informants, including an agent known as MEX-164 who spent four days a week among Cuban sources. The unanimous report was that not only did no one recognize him as a visitor to either the Soviet or Cuban embassies, but that they had “not picked up any information concerning Oswald”.
After the assassination, agents Peck and Crawford worked with the FBI’s legal attache in Mexico City. The attache wrote a final report relying on FBI agents Peck and Crawford in late April 1964.
Who was Charles B. Peck?
In his book Robert Kennedy and his Times (p. 264, Arthur Schlesinger referred to Charles Peck as Hoover’s “best FBI crime researcher“. In Bobby and J. Edgar, (p. 160) Burton Hersh refers to Peck as William Sullivan’s assistant. Sullivan was the FBI’s top man in domestic intelligence.