“It is my impression that there were earlier cables, that there was an earlier cable.”
– Raymond Rocca, aide to Counterintelligence Staff chief James Angleton, testifying under oath to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, about CIA cables from Mexico City. The CI staff monitored Oswald’s travels, politics, and personal life from October 1959 to November 1963.
When asked about the substance of the earlier cable, Rocca replied “that there was someone down there who wanted to go to Cuba.” After being shown an existing cable dated October 8, 1963, Rocca said, “it seems to me too late, that communication began earlier from Mexico City.”
No such cable has ever surfaced.
The CIA falsely told the Warren Commission that it did not learn that Oswald sought a visa to go to Cuba until after JFK’s assassination. Mexico City station chief Win Scott refuted the CIA’s claim in an unpublished memoir, which Angleton personally seized after Scott’s death in 1971.
MORE: For more on the missing CIA cables from the Mexico City record, see this essay by Rex Bradford.
Mrs. Manell,who worked with her husband in the Soviet section of the Mexico City station and wrote the cable reporting Oswald’s contact with the Soviets,told the HSCA that another cable had reported his contact with the Cubans.
In his biography of Bill Harvey,Bayard Stockton quotes a person who was in JMWAVE on November 22-“Then,when it was announced that Lee Harvey Oswald had been arrested,I ran down to the registry card files.Sure enough,there were two cards on Oswald from Mexico City station.Both were from liaison and cited Oswald as having entered the Soviet embassy in September” Why should JMWAVE have had any records on Oswald?