State Secret: Wiretapping in Mexico City, Double Agents, and the Framing of LHO

[Peter Lemkin]

Having just finished reading Chapter 5 of this important new work by Mr. Simpich, I'm more and more impressed by it. Fully explaining the existing/remaining docs and eyewitness statements of the "Oswald in Mexico City" episode is important work.

My favorite statements from Chapter 5 are:

Most of these documents had nothing to do with wiretaps and surveillance the only thing sensitive about them was that they would reveal Oswald's biography, which was the actual state secret.

and

The 201 file was stripped to hide not just Oswald's pro-Cuban background, but almost everything about Oswald's biography. In other words, Oswald would come across to Bustos as pretty much of a "nobody", a schlep of so little consequence that no one knew or cared if he had even returned to the United States after the last date in the file, May 1962.

Only one minor complaint. Rather than believing that "Oswald" was a "unwitting co-optee" in the spy game, suggested by numerous cautious researchers, why not just make the most obvious conclusion? CIA accountant James Wilcott testified under oath that he was told checks he wrote were for "Oswald or the Oswald Project." Why not just conclude that "Oswald" was a paid employee of the CIA?

And why not consider the obvious possibility that in New Orleans in 1963, the CIA's Clay Shaw handed the CIA's Harvey Oswald to the FBI's Guy Bannister (formerly head of FBI's Chicago office) so that any future government investigation into "Lee Harvey Oswald" would be hobbled by BOTH the CIA and the FBI, which is EXACTLY what happened! Just asking....

Jim

I agree that Simpich is doing a great job and offering a new look at Mexico. We don't know, but to me the only logical thing would be that the money Wilcott testified to must have gone to the 'Oswald Project'. If it was going to Oswald directly, he must have been one of the lowest paid in the whole organization! I think there a lot of informed rumor, however, that he was getting money as an informant from the FBI and maybe informant money from the CIA, knowingly or not [through a cut-out]. My educated guess is he was [or was led to believe] he was connected to both of them in the year before Dallas - likely with ONI and CIA long before that - but not as a 'paid agent', but as an asset - held at a distance, as all assets are. That he was 'handed off to' or 'handed also to' whatever/whoever Bannister was working for [seems to me both CIA and FBI], is more of less certain. Oswald was being 'run' by quite a few different controllers and agencies. And lets not forget the meeting[s] with Phillips! A super Patsy was he! The scrubbing of the 201 file is really John La Carre stuff....as those behind the Oswald Project were, it seems to me, playing one part of the CIA against other parts; one intelligence agency against another - most likely to prevent anyone from speaking truth about Oswald after the Coup...everyone just denying they had had connections or unable/unwilling to admit any connections.