The two phone calls that Lee Harvey Oswald made to the Embassy of the Soviet Union in Mexico, when it was in our country in September 1963, and the contacts he had with some 35 people, including KGB agents, They are the end of a tangled thread of evidence that continues to cast doubt on the official version that indicates him as the lone assassin of the president of the United States. John F. Kennedy.
“Hello, this is Lee Oswald, I was there last Saturday and I spoke with the consul, and they told me they would send a telegram to Washington, so I want to find out if you have anything new,” the American said to his interlocutor when calling the Embassy. of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).
Oswald, who in turn was deprived of his life by Jack Ruby, on this day 60 years ago, He traveled to Mexico City, 57 days before the assassination, with the intention of obtaining a transit visa to travel to Cuba, and from there move to the current Ukrainian city of Odesa, which was then part of the Soviet Union.
This information is known from the transcripts of the calls that were recorded by the CIA, and from the file prepared – after the assassination – by the Mexican Federal Directorate of Security (DFS), which was obtained HIGH LEVEL through a Transparency request to the General Archive of the Nation (AGN).
Wiretaps of Oswald’s calls, transcribed in cables already declassified by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), reveal the meeting that Lee had with Valeriy Vladimirovich Kostikov, a KGB agent who officially served as vice consul of the USSR in Mexico, although in reality he was a spy, which was also known to the DFS.
Until now, the reason and content of the telegram that Kostikov would send to Washington, and for which Oswald asked for news, is not known, nor is it known who are the other people who were at the meeting with the KGB agent and Lee, which It is deduced because the American, then 24 years old, used the pronoun “they” (they) in their call, while the interlocutor also responds in plural saying that “they say they have not received” a response.
Lee Harvey Oswald met several times with Valery Kostikov in Mexico, since those meetings were also referred to by him in a letter that he sent to the Embassy of the USSR in Washington on November 9, 1963, and that was intercepted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI, for its acronym in Spanish). English).
In the letter, Oswald says in plural that he had “meetings” with Comrade Kostin, and that he returned to the United States because his visa to be in Mexico was only 15 days, so he could not “risk requesting a new visa.” unless he used his “real name.”
Precisely because of this last phrase, the letter has been questioned as to its authorship, since It is suspected that in our country several men used the name Lee Harvey Oswald between September and November 1963, including Oswald who was arrested in Dallas for the assassination of Kennedy.
The Cuban connection
The first call that Lee Harvey Oswald made to the USSR Embassy in Mexico was from the Cuban consulate in our country. He remained there for several hours trying to obtain a transit visa. The person who answered him was Silvia Tirado de Durán, a Mexican woman, then 26 years old, who is identified as Silvia Durán in all declassified documents from Mexico and the United States.
She was detained by the feared Federal Security Directorate, after Kennedy’s assassination, along with her husband Horacio Durán Navarro. The interrogation to which both were subjected was carried out by Fernando Gutiérrez Barrios, who 60 years ago was Deputy Federal Director of Security. All of these reports are part of Oswald’s file found in the General Archive of the Nation.
A group of students from the National Autonomous University of Mexico also met Lee when he went to Ciudad Universitariawhile three Mexicans who were staying in the same hotel as Oswald saw him chatting with four men of Cuban origin living in Florida.
He was also seen at a party attended by the writer. Elena Garro, and her cousin-in-law, who was ultimately identified as Silvia Durán. The Mexican intellectual, ex-wife of the poet Octavio Paz, and her daughter, Helena Paz, reported to the CIA the presence of Lee Harvey Oswald at the feast.
The man who went down in history as the assassin of John F. Kennedy also spoke several times in Mexico with Nikolai Sergeyevich Leonov, who at that time was a senior KGB officer assigned to the Soviet Embassy, this was acknowledged by the same official when publishing his memoirs in 2005, titled in Russian “Likholetye” (Difficult Times).
In addition, Gilberto Nolasco Alvarado Ugarte, A Nicaraguan who was in our country irregularly, after having entered without papers through the southern Mexican border, had contact with Oswald while both were at the Cuban Consulate in Mexico. Its owner, Eusebio Azcue, He also spoke with Lee when he was upset because they denied him the visa he requested.
Several passengers on the buses in which Lee Harvey Oswald traveled to enter and leave Mexico, and who were later interrogated by the CIA, recognized their traveling companion as the young man arrested in Texas after the assassination of the US president.
They said that Lee identified himself as a photographer, which the young man also reiterated before the Mexican immigration authority at the border of Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, 60 days before November 24, 1963, when a gunshot wound to the abdomen caused his death. thereby opening a confusing mystery that remains unsolved today.
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Surya Palacios Journalist and lawyer, specialist in legal and human rights analysis. She has been a reporter, radio host and editor.