In April 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald returned to New Orleans. In a city that seethed with
intrigue and paranoia, he was about to enter the most mysterious chapter of his short life.
And the murky trail he left behind still defies a complete explanation.
How many people know who the person depicted on the screen behind me is? Who is it?
At Southeastern Louisiana University, Professor Michael Kurtz teaches a course on the Kennedy
assassination. His students explore the maze of confusing and sinister political connections
that Oswald entered in New Orleans.
There are still unresolved questions about this man Oswald. Was he a lone assassin as
the Warren Commission claimed? Was he a person who was part of a broader conspiracy as many
people claimed? Or was he simply a patsy set up to take the blame while the real people
got away with it as he himself claimed?
If there was a plot to kill President Kennedy, then it was probably hatched in New Orleans.
It was here that Lee Oswald may have crossed paths with men that hated Kennedy and wanted
him eliminated.
The crucial question in 1963 is the crucial question in 1993. Was there a conspiracy?
Anybody who's going to make a conspiratorial interpretation of the assassination must connect
Lee Harvey Oswald to that group that they posit as these co-conspirators. If you want
to posit conspiracy, you must show associations. And unfortunately for a simple explanation,
the associations cut in two directions. This is ambivalence, ambivalence, ambivalence.
If we knew more about this case, particularly the background of Lee Harvey Oswald focusing
on the five months he spent in New Orleans during the spring and summer of 1963, I think
that perhaps we could unravel the key to the mystery of the Kennedy assassination that
remains as much a mystery today as it did at the time.
Oswald arrived in New Orleans alone. He had left his family behind in Texas with a friend.
He soon found work as a maintenance man by hiding much about his past from his new employers
at the Riley Coffee Company.
He said that he would call when he got a job. And he did in fact call in early May and talked
to Marina, said he'd gotten a job, that he had a place for them to stay. Marina was
elated, very happy as she hung up the phone and picked up Junie and said, Papa Nusslew
but father loves us. And then we loaded up the car the next day and drove to New Orleans.
By now Oswald had found an apartment on Magazine Street.
It looked all right and had some old antique kind of furniture in it. And that part was
kind of nice, but by evening it was very clear that it was also terribly infested with cockroaches.
When they first went into the apartment he really wanted her to be pleased and she wasn't
that pleased and I felt his hurt in that.
At the coffee company Oswald soon grew bored with his menial job.
Oswald hated his job as a machine greaser at the Riley Coffee Company and every opportunity
he had he would go next door to Adrian Alba's garage. Alba had an interest that Oswald had
and that was in guns. Alba had National Rifle Association, Argosy, Nature and Hunting, different
magazines that Oswald would sit and read. And in addition Oswald tried to buy a thirty
odd six rifle from him. Another time he tried to buy a Japanese rifle. This was the bond
they had.
Oswald had always liked guns, but Marxist politics were still his ruling passion.
No sir, I'm not a communist and I think that the...
In New Orleans Oswald became a very visible spokesman for his ideals.
And are you a Marxist?
Well I have studied Marxist philosophy, yes sir, and also other philosophers.
But are you a Marxist? I think you did admit that you consider yourself a Marxist.
Well I would very definitely say that I am a Marxist, that is correct, but that does
not mean however that I am a communist.
Oswald's political hero was still Fidel Castro.
Well of course Americans in general have only begun to notice Cuba since the Cuban Revolution.
I always felt that Castro's Cuba was being pushed into the Soviet block by American policy.
I still feel that way.
Oswald had no sympathy for the hundreds of thousands of exiles who had fled Castro's
Cuba.
There are peasants who do not like the collectivization in Cuban agriculture.
They flee.
They flee Cuba in boats.
They flee any way they can go.
And I think that the opinion and the attitude of the Cuban government to this is good riddance.
Oswald's unyielding support of Castro was unlikely to win him friends among the Cuban
exiles then pouring into New Orleans.
Many joined violent paramilitary groups and waged a covert war on Cuba with the support
of the CIA and the White House.
I can assure you that this flag will be returned to this brigade in a free Havana.
But after the Bay of Pigs Fiasco and the Cuban Missile Crisis the exiles felt betrayed when
Kennedy's support for their war began to wane.
By 1963 the Cuban enclaves in New Orleans burned with hatred for the president.
It was an intriguing city at the time and there was all these things going on with anti-Cuba,
pro-Castro elements at the time.
New Orleans homicide detective L.J.
Delsa was also an investigator for the House Assassinations Committee.
It was like watching a Humphrey Bogart movie at the time, sort of like a Casablanca.
In the spring of 1963 Lee Oswald entered this world of plot and counter plot.
That May he wrote to America's leading pro-Castro group, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, offering
to start a chapter in New Orleans.
The committee discouraged him but he ignored their advice.
He began printing his own pro-Castro leaflets and phony membership cards.
He asked Marina to help him disguise the fact that he was the only member of his organization.
One day he asked her to sign a card for an organization and she said, you mean that organization
with only one member?
And he said, didn't matter how many members it was, it needed two signatures.
It would seem as though there were more members and he told her she was to sign under the
name A.J.
Heidel.
And then she asked him, what's that name?
An altered Fidel?
And he told her to shut up.
Oswald began handing out leaflets on the streets of New Orleans.
He continued to exaggerate the size of his one-man chapter.
We have had members in this area for several months now.
We have decided to fill out the public what they think of our organization, our aims,
and for that purpose we have been distributing literature on the street.
Oswald's pro-Castro activities seemed genuine enough, but what happened next is a puzzle.
In August he approached the leader of an anti-Castro group named Carlos Bringuer.
When Oswald came to my store for the first time, he was explaining how he was against
Castro and he was asking in what way he could help us to fight against Castro.
He was telling me that he would have been in the Marine Corps, that he had experience
in guerrilla warfare, and that he can help us in the guerrilla fight against Castro.
The second time that Oswald came to my store was when he brought this guidebook from Marines.
He said that this was a present for me to see if this could help me out to fight Castro.
The manual showed how to make bombs, booby traps, and how to conduct sabotage operations.
Shortly before he sought out Bringuer, Oswald had written to the Fair Play for Cuba committee,
claiming that one of his street demonstrations had been attacked by some Cuban exiled gusanos.
In fact, no such incident had occurred.
But it did a few days later when Carlos Bringuer found someone handing out pro-Castro leaflets
on Canal Street.
It was the same Oswald that has been in my store a few days before offering his service
to fight against Castro, and now he was with the sign Viva Fidel and Hands of Cuba.
When he recognized me, he smiled at me, and he even tried to shake hands with me.
I refused to shake hands with him, and I started insulting him and cursing him in English.
Police were called to the scene where an amateur movie maker filmed the angry Cubans as they
surrounded Oswald.
At that time, I get angry, and I was approaching Oswald trying to punch him in the face.
When he saw that I was approaching and he sensed my intention, he put his arm down and
he said to me, OK, Carlos, if you want to hit me, hit me.
Immediately, I realized that he wanted to appear as a victim, as a martyr.
When one of the Cubans took the pro-Castro leaflets and threw them on the ground, the
police arrested Oswald and eight Cubans for disturbing the peace.
At the police station, Oswald's conduct became even more mysterious.
We advised him that the booking procedure, which was a municipal misdemeanor, that he
was eligible for, hosting a bond of $25 in cash or getting a politician to parole him,
he said he did not want either.
He wanted to go to jail.
We also told him that part of the booking procedure would have to be photographed and
fingerprinted, which he agreed to.
He insisted almost that we fingerprint and photograph him.
He seemed to want to let everyone know who he was and what he was doing.
He could have avoided it very, very simply by saying, hey, here's my $25, let me go home.
What kind of double game was Oswald playing?
One piece of evidence has continued to raise important questions about Oswald's true attitude
toward Cuba and whose side he was really on.
The leaflets that Oswald hands out on Canal Street is pro-Castro leaflets, hands off Cuba,
telling the government to leave it alone, let it stay communist like Castro alone.
And the return addresses that are stamped on it is 544 Camp Street.
In that same building, there is a private detective agency by a man named Guy Bannister.
And Guy Bannister is certainly not pro-Castro.
He's an ex-FBI agent from New York who is a violently anti-Castro and working to overthrow
Castro.
But according to one of Bannister's secretaries, Delphine Roberts, Lee Oswald worked with
Guy Bannister in 1963 and was given an office in a Camp Street building to mount his pro-Castro
campaign.
It's when the news accounts from Dallas were showing Oswald that Delphine said to me, well,
you know, he was in this office, you saw him.
And I told her that not to my knowledge, I didn't know that I'd seen him.
To me, he would have been just another face in the crowd.
And she was just calling my attention to the news in Dallas that this man had been in our
office.
Joe Newborough is a private detective who worked with Guy Bannister.
The new building over here is where 544 Camp Street was.
This was Bannister's office.
This was Mancusa's restaurant.
This is 544 Camp Street.
And this window here is where Lee Harvey Oswald allegedly had an office.
Newborough thinks the Camp Street address on Oswald's leaflet proves nothing because
Bannister's office was on Lafayette Street around the corner.
Absolutely you could not find yourself in Bannister's office if you went through the
entrance of 544 Camp.
It went strictly to the second floor of the building.
There was no stairwell down.
You had to exit the second floor to the sidewalk, walk around the corner, and go into Bannister's
office.
So they had separate entrances?
Totally separate entrances and probably as 60 steps apart.
But new witnesses to an Oswald-Bannister connection continue to come forward, including Professor
Michael Kurtz.
Yes, I saw them once in the Mancusa's restaurant on the round floor of the infamous 544 Camp
Street building.
This is sometime during the summer of 1963.
I went across the street to get a cup of coffee, which I did, and there were Bannister and
Oswald sitting together at a table chatting with each other.
It was strange company for the Lee Harvey Oswald portrayed by the Warren Commission
as a Marxist, a Leninist, a pro-Castro individual to be seen in the company of an extreme right-wing
individual like Guy Bannister.
Guy Bannister was actively involved in the secret training of Cuban exiles.
One of Bannister's comrades in the fight against Castro was a former airline pilot named David
Ferry.
He was a brilliant flier.
He'd flown in and out of Cuba before and after the Bay of Pigs, taking guerrillas in, extracting
them after operations.
He was heard to say sometime after the Bay of Pigs that President Kennedy had betrayed
the nation in his conduct of that operation.
And he said on one occasion that the president ought to be shot.
And later, some people would come to think that he meant it.
In the 1950s, David Ferry commanded a squadron in the Civil Air Patrol, but was suspended
for indoctrinating the young cadets with his anti-communist views.
In the 50s, Lee Oswald was in the CAP, and several fellow cadets said David Ferry was
one of Oswald's instructors.
There are some clues to suggest that Oswald and Ferry's paths crossed again in the summer
of 1963.
Most persuasive of all, perhaps, were the group of people, completely independent witnesses,
who said that a car arrived one day in the little town of Clinton outside New Orleans,
and that three white members in it, one of them was Oswald, who most oddly got out of
the car, the only white face to line up in a long line of blacks waiting to register
to vote, waited, stood in the line, and then eventually departed.
And they said that one of the other two white men, one of Oswald's companions, was in fact
a man who looked exactly like David Ferry.
And they had no doubt later about their recognition of Ferry, because Ferry, by that time, looked
pretty odd.
He suffered from alopecia, and he wore a wig, and indeed false eyebrows, not the sort of
guy you forget in a hurry.
If David Ferry was with Oswald in 1963, it could be significant, because Ferry, as well
as Guy Bannister, was connected to one of the major figures in organized crime.
We took very seriously the possibility that organized crime had a hand in the president's
death.
The FBI had an illegal electronic surveillance on the major figures of organized crime.
We did a survey of that surveillance.
What we did find, and shockingly, is repeated conversations by these people that indicated
the depth of their hatred for Kennedy and actual discussions of they ought to be killed,
they ought to be whacked.
No mobster hated the Kennedys more than Carlos Marcelo, the mafia chieftain of New Orleans,
a prime target of the administration's war on organized crime.
In 1961, Robert Kennedy had personally ordered Marcelo's arrest and deportation.
The boss of New Orleans was humiliated.
Carlos Marcelo talks about getting, he speaks in Sicilian, getting the stone out of my shoe,
and talking about getting a nut to kill, not Bobby Kennedy, who was his nemesis, but John
Kennedy, who was the man behind the nemesis.
Marcelo returned to New Orleans to fight the deportation order, as attorneys hired both
Guy Banister and David Ferry as investigators in the case.
For Robert Blakey, who believes the mafia was involved in the Kennedy assassination,
this is the critical link.
When you find David Ferry, who is an investigator for Carlos Marcelo, being a boyhood friend
to Lee Harvey Oswald and with him that summer, and with Carlos Marcelo at that very point
in time, you have an immediate connection between a man who had the motive, opportunity,
and means to kill Kennedy and the man who killed Kennedy.
I think what many conspiracy critics do is they try to take the chain, the connections
too far back.
They say Oswald knew Ferry and Ferry did some investigative work for Marcelo and Banister
did some investigative work for Marcelo.
Marcelo hated Kennedy and therefore it must have been Marcelo deciding to kill Kennedy
down to Ferry and Banister, who then gave the order to Oswald, who went off and did
it.
It's wonderful speculation.
There's just no evidence to back it up.
Gerald Posner disputes all the sightings of Oswald and Ferry, in the Civil Air Patrol
and in 1963.
He points out there has never been any hard documentary evidence linking the two men.
I discovered documents that were from the Civil Air Patrol, which show that David Ferry
was suspended from the CAP in 1954 and not reinstated until 1958.
He wasn't even in the patrol in 1955 when Oswald was a member.
Frontline has uncovered the first hard evidence that places Oswald and Ferry together.
This photograph taken in 1955 at a CAP barbecue.
John Cirovolo and Tony Eisenhofer were in the CAP with Lee Oswald.
This is several cadets, including Oswald on the end in the white t-shirt, myself standing
in front of him, and over here in the white t-shirt and the helmet is Dave Ferry.
Because of all of the publicity, you can recognize Ferry, you can recognize Oswald.
They were both in the CAP at the same time.
They were both wearing CAP uniforms.
After the Kennedy assassination, David Ferry denied that he ever knew Lee Oswald.
I never heard David Ferry mention Lee Harvey Oswald.
I never met him.
I would certainly remember if I ever did.
Layton Martins was also a CAP cadet.
He stayed friendly with Ferry until his death in 1967.
And it does appear as though David Ferry is in the picture and on the other end of the
picture there is a person who looks like Lee Harvey Oswald.
It would indicate that there could be a possibility of an association, but if and to what extent,
it's another question.
Of course, we've all been photographed with people and we could be presented with photographs
later and asked, well, do you know this person?
Obviously, you must because you were photographed with them, to which we'd have to answer, well,
no, it's just a photograph.
And I don't know that person, it's just someone who happened to be in the picture.
But it's interesting.
The shame of this thing is that the whole question of Oswald's activity in New Orleans
was never properly investigated by officialdom at the beginning.
Guy Bannister, the former FBI agent at 544 Camp Street, was never ever asked by anybody
about Lee Harvey Oswald.
David Ferry was questioned, but the investigation was dropped very quickly and the names of
neither Bannister nor Ferry are in the Warren Report, simply doesn't mention either of them.
If Oswald did have a secret connection to Ferry and Bannister in 1963, the nature of
that relationship remains unclear.
And that evidence must be weighed against the rest of what is known of his time in New
Orleans, where Oswald continued to demonstrate for Castro.
Well, I think if we take Oswald at the simplest level, what we see he's trying to do is enhance
his credentials as a supporter of Castro.
One of the ways he's trying to do this is actually work for Castro.
The other way he's trying to find out information that would be of use to Castro, and the normal
way you find out information is you join the enemy.
That summer, Oswald wrote an account of his political activity in New Orleans, stressing
his credentials as a Marxist, street agitator, and an organizer.
In this resume, he wrote that he had infiltrated Carlos Brinqueira's organization.
When Oswald and the Cubans appeared in court for disturbing the peace over the leafletting
incident, Brinqueira was determined to find out more about the young American.
A friend of mine went to Oswald's house, and he was telling Oswald that he was for
Castro.
Then they start talking over there, and in the meantime, Oswald's child came out, and
Marina came after that, and they start talking in Russian.
That is when we learned that Oswald was speaking Russian.
My friend asked Oswald if that was Russian, whether he had learned Russian.
Oswald's answer was that he was attending Tulane University taking Russian studies.
A lie.
And that is a lie.
He was a liar.
He lied a lot in his life.
These are officials of INCA, the Information Council of the Americas.
Oswald, who had concealed his defection to Russia, was earning the attention of professional
anti-communists.
Ed Butler, who conceived and initiated the organization.
As executive vice president, he is in charge of the INCA program and engages in direct
personal conflict with communism.
When Ed Butler and Carlos Bringuer were invited to debate Oswald on a local radio show, Butler
did some background research.
We found out after I had accepted the interview about Oswald's defection to Russia.
The information came from the House Un-American Activities Committee files.
They sent me the material, I requested it, and they sent it.
Where did they get it from?
They got it from the newspapers, the open press.
That's basically what they sent me, clippings that Oswald had defected to Russia and so
forth.
Butler and Bringuer met Oswald at the studios of WDSU radio.
Before the debate, we were talking over there for about 15 minutes.
And he saw my guy book, the guy book for Marine that he had left for me.
He said to me, Carlos, please don't use that guy book because it's obsolete.
You are going to get killed.
And now back to conversation carte blanche.
Here again, Bill's letter.
Mr. Oswald, as you might imagine, is on the hot seat tonight.
After the assassination, the debate was reenacted on film using the original sound recording
of Oswald's voice.
Are you or have you been a communist?
Well, I had answered that prior to...
Oswald seemed unaware that his opponents knew all about his defection to Russia.
He was about to be ambushed.
Mr. Butler brought some newspaper clipping to my attention.
You did live in Russia for three years?
That is correct.
And I think the fact that I did live for a time in Soviet Union gives me excellent qualifications
to repudiate charges that Cuba and the Fair Play for Cuba committee is communist controlled.
I think he was surprised.
But again, he handled it, if you listen to the debate, very coolly.
And it impeached his credibility.
And yet he managed to turn it to his advantage, which is, I think, shows some aplomb, certainly
a lot more than most people give him credit for.
I would like to know, is it Fair Play for Cuba committee or Fair Play for Russia committee?
Well, that is, of course, very provocative.
And I question, I don't think it requires an answer.
Well, I see.
Well, would you say then that the Fair Play for Cuba committee is not a communist run
organization?
It has been investigated from several points of view.
That is, points of view of taxes, allegiance, subversion, and so forth.
The findings have been, as I say, absolutely zero.
He was angry that it has been discovered that he had tried to defect to the Soviet Union,
and he had been exposed in the debate.
And that I could still see his face becoming redder and redder and redder.
Gentlemen, I'm going to have to interrupt.
Our time is almost up.
Thank you very much and good evening.
The last thing that I remember was Oswald taking out a notebook, glancing up at me and
fixing me with a gaze of hatred and asking for my name and address and phone number and
writing it down in the notebook, snapping it shut, looking up and giving me that Oswald
sneer.
I went one way and he went the other.
You either are a communist or have been.
Could you straighten out that point?
The debate ended Oswald's campaign for Castro on the streets of New Orleans, and he withdrew
from the public stage.
Are you a Marxist?
Yes, I am a Marxist.
By now he had been fired from the Riley Coffee Company, the third job he'd lost in a year,
and he began spending even more time at his local library.
That summer he checked out books about the assassination of Huey Long, Mao Zedong's
revolution, and John F. Kennedy.
Oswald still disagreed with Kennedy on Cuba, but he seemed to like the president.
But insofar as he spoke about Kennedy, it was to praise him, and he suffered, as she
did, in the summer of 1963 over the death of the Kennedy's baby.
Both he and Marina took this very personally, and they thought that if the best doctors
couldn't save the Kennedy's baby, then the baby they were expecting might not be born
alive either.
One evening Marina came home about dusk, and she saw Lee on the screened-in porch, and
he was perched on his knee with his rifle at his shoulder, and he was aiming it.
She was extremely surprised at this.
She hated to see him with the rifle again, but he continued to dry fire the rifle for
the last part of August and the first part of September.
Marina says Lee told her he wanted to go fight for Castro, and he began hatching a scheme
to hijack a plane to Havana.
He said that he would sit in the front row of the airplane cabin.
She would sit in the back row with June, and at a certain point he would put a gun in the
back of the pilot of the aircraft.
She would stand up and keep the entire passenger contingent at bay with a pistol, and speak
to them, and she would speak to the crowd and tell them to be quiet.
Marina laughed at him and said, well, but I don't speak English.
How am I going to explain to them?
Eventually she laughed him out of the skyjacking plan, and he came home one day and said, mama,
I found a legal way.
Go to Mexico.
On September 25th, Oswald disappeared from New Orleans.
Where he was that night is still one of the intriguing mysteries of his life.
There is testimony that sometime between 7 and 10 p.m., he made a call to a leader of
the Socialist Labor Party in Houston.
The Warren Commission believed Oswald took a bus from New Orleans to Houston, but there
are no records to confirm that conclusion.
Meanwhile, more than 200 miles away in Dallas, three men, two Latins and an American, showed
up unexpectedly at the doorstep of three young Cuban exiles whose father headed an anti-Castro
organization.
Sylvia and Annie Odio granted frontline this rare interview.
One night I opened the door for three men that came to see one of my sisters.
I opened the door, they were in a small hallway with bright lights overhead.
The taller man introduced the other two men.
Leopoldo, he said that was his name.
He introduced the American who was in the middle as Leon Oswald, and he introduced the
one that seemed Mexican and spoke with a Mexican accent as Angelo.
And are you quite clear about it, that when those men visited your apartment, the American
was introduced as Oswald?
The American was introduced as Leon Oswald.
That would always be in my mind very clearly.
According to the Odio sisters, Leon Oswald said nothing, as Leopoldo and Angelo asked
for help raising money for the anti-Castro cause.
Suspicious, the Odio sisters declined, and a half hour later the three men drove away.
And I think it was two days after that, Leopoldo, who had clearly a Cuban accent, called me
on the phone.
And he tried to be very friendly on the phone with me and was trying to sell me the idea
of the American.
The first thing that he asked was, what did you think of the American?
And actually I had not formed any opinion of the American at the time.
He said, well, you know, we don't know what to make of him.
He's kind of local.
He's been telling us the Cubans should have murdered or should have assassinated President
Kennedy right after the Bay of Pigs, and they didn't have any guts to do it.
They should do it.
And it was a very easy thing to do at the time.
But author Gerald Posner believes Sylvia Odio is mistaken about the date on which the three
men appeared at her door.
It's physically impossible for Lee Harvey Oswald to have been at the Odio residence
on the days that she describes.
She says that he was either there on the 26th or 27th of September, Thursday or Friday,
maybe at the very earliest, Wednesday the 25th.
The reason that I remember so clearly was because that same night, or I think either
that night or the night afterwards, I wrote my father.
And I also told a friend of mine, who was my father confessor, about the visit.
Odio talked to Father Walter McCann after the phone call from Leopoldo.
I think I can pin a date to this conversation with Sylvia.
It was the day in which I spoke to her about her attending a charity event at which Janet
Lee was going to appear in Dallas.
If Father McCann is correct about Janet Lee, then the three men must have visited the Odios
two days earlier on September 25th, the only night Oswald could possibly have been in
Dallas.
They were trying to sell me the American because they spoke that he was a marksman, that he
had been an ex-marine, and that he was someone who could be used and who could be an asset
to any organization.
Leopoldo and Angelo have never been identified, and the meaning of this incident remains elusive.
If Oswald was there, was he infiltrating another anti-Castro group, or was someone setting him
up to take the blame for the Kennedy assassination?
Lee Oswald is next seen the following day, alone, on a bus heading south from Houston
to Mexico City.
On the bus were two young Australian women.
It was on the bus to Mexico City that we encountered Lee Oswald.
He heard us speaking English and wanted to talk to us, and so we talked about our travels,
and he told us that he'd been to Russia.
He went there and got his passport and showed us the Russian stamp on his passport.
In Mexico City, as he had in Helsinki four years earlier, Oswald would try to engineer
another defection.
Not far from the bus station, he checked into the Hotel Comercio.
He took a cheap room on the fourth floor.
He had brought with him a file on his pro-Castro activity in New Orleans.
It contained letters from the Fair Play for Cuba committee, newspaper articles, his handwritten
biography, and the pamphlets and phony membership cards he had printed.
The day he arrived in Mexico City, Oswald left the hotel and made his way to the Cuban
Consulate, where he was met by a Mexican employee named Sylvia Duran.
Well, it was near lunch hour, and he came and he asked for an application for going
to Cuba.
But I remember that he was traveling with all his papers that demonstrate that he was
a friend of the Cuban Revolution, and he showed me his card belonging to the Fair Play for
Cuba.
Duran told Oswald he could get into Cuba only on a temporary visa, and only if he were in
transit to Russia.
So Oswald walked two blocks to the Soviet diplomatic compound.
That summer, the Oswalds had been trying to be readmitted to the Soviet Union.
Lee planned to travel through Cuba and then meet Marina in Russia.
At the Soviet Embassy, he met with three consular officials.
They were, in fact, all KGB officers.
In their first interview, they claimed it was just happenstance that they were present
when Oswald showed up.
We all thought the man had an unstable nervous system.
He was extremely agitated.
During our talk, Oswald kept feeling in his pockets taking out all sorts of papers.
Then he took out a gun and put it in front of him.
I said opposite him.
I took the gun away and put it on Pavel's desk.
Pavel Antonovich asked him, why did you come here with a gun?
What do you need a gun for?
He said, I'm afraid of the FBI and being persecuted.
I need a gun to protect myself, for my personal safety.
That's what he said.
Oswald was told it would take several months to get a Soviet visa, but without one, he
would be unable to go to Cuba.
Oswald took the news badly.
I explained and then he got in that moment.
He couldn't believe what I was saying.
He said, but that's impossible.
I have to go to Cuba right now because I only have a permission of three or four days in
Mexico City, so I have to go.
I thought that in a moment he will be crying because he was very excited.
He was very red.
His eyes were bright and shining like he was in tears.
He didn't want to understand.
So I called the Consul Asque.
Duran says Oswald lost his temper with Consul Asque.
Then Asque says, listen, get out.
Get out.
He went to the door that was locked.
He opened and said, get out.
If I see you again, if you come again, I want to keep you out.
As Oswald left the Cuban and Soviet embassies, he was being watched.
These photographs taken by Cuban intelligence show the CIA operatives at work.
From a house across the road from the Cuban consulate, the CIA maintained a continuous
photographic surveillance.
Here, a telephoto lens can be seen poking through the blinds.
It's my recollection that at the time of Oswald's presence in Mexico City, there was something
wrong with some of the cameras that we were using.
We were trying to fix it.
But the fact remains that there are no photographs of Lee Harvey Oswald taken while he was in
Mexico City at that time, and I can't explain 100% why not.
But the recently declassified report on Oswald's Mexico City trip written by the House Assassinations
Committee tells a different story.
And we now find that there were several former CIA officers who said that there had been
such a photograph.
One of them said that he'd seen it and described it in detail, a profile shot of Oswald at
the gate, another one taken from behind as he went in.
And the CIA station chief in Mexico City, the late Wynn Scott, in his recently declassified
memoirs, also said the CIA took pictures of Oswald.
Persons watching these embassies photographed Oswald as he entered and left and clocked
the time spent on each visit.
That's fine for Wynn Scott to say, but he has no evidence to demonstrate it.
And he couldn't produce the photograph.
So what is he talking about?
CIA wiretaps and bugs also recorded several of Oswald's conversations inside the embassies.
The CIA has always maintained those tapes were routinely erased before the Kennedy assassination.
Just in the normal course of business that after the tapes had been transcribed and the
material was put on paper, then the tapes were routinely erased and used again.
But again, this claim is contradicted.
A high ranking CIA officer in the Mexico City embassy told Frontline the Oswald tapes existed
months after the assassination when they were played for two Warren Commission lawyers.
My best recollection is they offered to us to listen.
They said to us, it was Wynn Scott, that would you like to listen to the tapes of this particular
one?
Whether it was a wiretap or a bug.
And Bill and I thought about it a minute and said, well, what do they like?
And so they played a little bit of it for us.
Slauson says the tape was of poor quality and difficult to understand.
He could not identify Oswald's voice.
Now there were many bugs and many wiretaps.
So it could be that the one that we were offered the opportunity to listen to was the only
one that hadn't been destroyed.
Now even that, just one not having been destroyed, would show that Mr. Helm's statement was incorrect.
Where then are the tapes?
And the question that arises here is why is the CIA reluctant for us to see the photographs
and reluctant for us to see the tapes, to hear the tapes of Oswald's voice?
While they refuse to come clean, clearly there's going to be a suspicion that the tapes or
the photographs don't show what one would expect them to.
The CIA did release a photograph to the FBI on the day Kennedy was shot.
They said it was Oswald entering the Soviet embassy.
The agency soon realized its mistake, but the absence of photos of Oswald has fueled
speculation.
The suspicion was that Oswald didn't make it at all, that there was an imposter attempting
to frame him in Mexico City.
Had that been established, it would indicate a sophisticated effort to frame Oswald, which
would immediately draw attention to American intelligence.
But there is much evidence that the real Oswald was in Mexico City.
At the Soviet embassy, all three KGB officers told Frontline the man they met was the real
Lee Harvey Oswald, not the man in the photograph the CIA released.
No, this is a completely different person.
The Oswald who had visited our embassy and whose photographs I saw in many newspapers
and on TV was completely different.
The day after the assassination in the Mexican newspapers were a photo of Oswald.
And I said to my husband, I'm sure that this is the man who went to ask for a visa.
So I went to the embassy and I look up the applications and I saw his application and
it was the same one.
We obtained from the Cuban officials the visa application with his photograph on it and
his signature.
We verified that it was Oswald's signature.
Oswald therefore was in Mexico City.
And records at the Hotel Comercio show the real Oswald was here too.
The handwriting on the register is his.
Oswald stayed in Mexico City four days.
But in the end, both the Russians and the Cubans rejected him.
All his plans to fight for Castro and return to Russia had come to nothing.
He had nowhere to go but back to America.
In the early hours of an October morning, Oswald boarded a bus heading north.
A fellow passenger remembers him sitting alone.
Mostly he just leaned against the window, quiet, thoughtful, didn't speak to anyone.
To me he seemed obsessed, fixated on one idea.
On October 2nd, Oswald crossed the US border, bound for Dallas.
This is PBS.