John Whitten is a rare hero of the JFK story.
Read moreTag Archive for Mexico City
6) Oct. 10, 1963: Six top CIA officers discuss Lee Harvey Oswald
Fifty fifty years ago, a man named Lee Harvey Oswald came to the attention of a group of senior CIA officers in Langley, Virginia. Oswald had recently visited the Cuban consulate and Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. A CIA wiretap captured a man identifying himself as “Oswald.”
Read moreWhat a senior KGB officer said about Lee Harvey Oswald
Insider: Fidel Castro, Nikolai Leonov, and Nikita Khrushchev
Nikolai S. Leonov has an interesting perspective on the story of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Leonov joined the KGB in 1958 and retired in 1991 with the rank of Lieutenant General. In the spring of 1963, his fluency in Spanish gained him the job as the Russian interpreter for Cuba president Fidel Castro during his first visit to the USSR in the spring of 1963, In the photo above he is the man standing between and behind Castro and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Read more
How the CIA coopted the leaders of the Mexican government
In response to my query about the most revealing new JFK documents released in the past year, Larry writes:
Mystery solved: Gunnar Beckman, the Mexico City covert operator
The efficient miracle of crowdsourcing has answered my question: who was running covert operations in the CIA’s Mexico City station in 1963?
A new clue about the CIA’s Mexico City operations
An eagle-eyed reader, responding to my last post about covert operators in Mexico City, notes that there is a slightly less redacted version of Ann Goodpasture’s Feb. 1977 memo. This version provides a clue.
Look:
Who was running CIA covert operations in Mexico City in 1963?
Sensitive source: A newly-released JFK file still conceals a key name.
Fifty five years later, this remains a highly sensitive question.
Take a look at page 9 of this lightly-redacted 1977 CIA memo, released last month by the National Archives. The name of a CIA officer who was running covert operations along with David Phillips in 1963, has been postponed for release until 2021.
JFK documents illuminate the death of a diplomat who asked too many questions about Oswald
James Angleton oversaw the surveillance of Oswald
Phil Shenon has a long piece in The Guardian excavating the sad story of Charles Thomas, a U.S. diplomat who investigated Lee Harvey Oswald’s actions in Mexico in the 1960s. Thomas was rebuffed by top CIA officials, including counterintelligence chief James Angleton. Thomas was denied an expected promotion and later committed suicide.
The story illuminates a central mystery of the JFK assassination story but not quite in the way than Shenon proposes.
Why was Oswald’s name taken off the FBI’s watch list?
Bill Simpich, a civil rights attorney in the Bay Area and the author of State Secret, proposes an answer to the riddle of “FLASH CANCELLED” Read more
What Politico doesn’t know about the JFK files
Politico’s Thomas Maier mines the new JFK files to competently retell the oft-told but still-disturbing story of how respectable CIA officials and murderous Mafia dons tried and failed to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro in the early 1960s.
Along the way, Maier drops this claim:
New light on Oswald and Mexico City
WhoWhatWhy has the good news about the new JFK files. It’s confusing but… Read more
Talking Angleton at Chevalier’s Books
Michael Scott and I will talk about THE GHOST and the consequential friendship of James Angleton and Win Scott, Michael’s father, at Chevalier’s Books in Los Angeles on Tuesday, Nov. 14 at 7 pm. Read more
USA Today: CIA started to disavow knowledge of Lee Harvey Oswald within hours of killing
Some of the best reporting on the new JFK files is coming from USA Today.
In today’s story, the national daily notes an essential newsworthy fact revealed in the newly declassified records.
Within hours of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the CIA started to distance itself from any connection to suspected assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, recently released secret records from the National Archives show.
El Pais on ‘mysteries hidden in the secret JFK assassination files’
Jan Martinez Ahrens’ piece in EL PAÍS, the leading newspaper of Spain (machine translated) shows why foreign coverage of the JFK files release was more realistic and less propagandistic than the U.S. coverage.
