Oswald in Mexico City.

The CIA,The Mafia,Mexico-and Oswald


By Peter Dale Scott


Kennedy’s death and the circumstances surrounding it gave birth to a movement. This movement, composed of all kinds of people, is dedicated to investigating the story behind the story, to exposing the power networks hidden beneath surface events. These machinations have been dubbed “Deep Politics.” Those who study it believe there is much more to national and world events than what the public is told by government officials and evening newscasters — and, as you will see, Peter Dale Scott proves it.

On the occasion of the anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination, WhoWhatWhy is pleased to present excerpts from Chapter 2 of Scott’s latest work – Dallas ’63: The First Deep State Revolt Against the White House by Peter Dale Scott


Overview: The Mexican CIA-Mob Nexus

Those who have spent years trying to assess the role of the Kennedy assassination in US history are accustomed to the debate between structuralists and conspiratorialists. In the first camp are those who argue, that the history of a major power is determined by large social forces; thus the accident of an assassination, even if conspiratorial, is not an event altering history.

At the other end of the spectrum are those who talk of an Invisible Government or Secret Team, who believe that surface events and institutions are continuously manipulated by unseen forces. For these people the assassination exemplifies the operation of fundamental historical forces, not a disruption of them.

For years I have attempted to formulate a third or middle position. To do so I have relied on distinctions formulated partly in neologisms or invented terms. Over forty years ago I postulated that our overt political processes were at times seriously contaminated by manipulative covert politics or parapolitics, which I then defined as “a system or practice of politics in which accountability is consciously diminished.”

a reply to: mike dangerously


Here we may catch a glimpse of the plot.Did Oswald get sucked into what he thought was an anti-Castro op but was actually part of the coup? We have those infamous photos that the WC claim are of him but clearly are not.Winston Scott head of the Mexico City Station was cut out of the loop when CIA HQ were reporting Oswalds movements to the WC.Not like they would have wanted to know in the 1st place given what we now know of how the Commission operated.


Part 2.

...the assassination exemplifies the operation of fundamental historical forces, not a disruption of them.

Good way to put it.

The Manipulation or Management of the Mexico Oswald Stories

Whatever the details, we see how important were CIA stories about Oswald’s foreign involvements in securing a Commission committed from the outset to the finding that Oswald acted alone. The CIA’s role might be defensible if the information were objective and well-grounded. But as this book will show, the stories of Oswald’s Cuban involvements were virtually worthless.

The two main sources for them, Silvia Durán and Gilberto Alvarado, both changed their stories repeatedly, under the threat or actual application of torture by the Mexican secret police. Alvarado actually recanted his story, as the Warren Commission was informed; however the Warren Commission did not learn that Alvarado claimed to have been told that, if he did not recant, he would be hung by his testicles.[40] And the supposed objective record of intercepted phone calls by Oswald is, as we shall see, just as seriously flawed.


This part of the single assassin theory changes more than the magic bullet itself.We have photos of a guy who many people claim is Oswald but it clearly is not.At the very least he got caught up in an op that turned into the assassination he was moved into position.

Part 3.

4. The Management of the False Oswald Intercepts — October 1:

It has been customary to contrast the fluid, changing stories about Oswald from human sources with the allegedly “hard,” objective reports of Oswald himself talking, or being discussed, in intercepts obtained from a tap on Mexican phone lines into the Soviet Embassy.[87] However this intercept record is deeply flawed, and in part almost certainly falsified. In addition to containing false information, the intercepts share two other features with the managed stories discussed above. They supplied the changing need for first “Phase-One” and then “Phase-Two” stories. And they too reached the CIA via the Mexican DFS, the most likely candidate to have falsified them. (Although it is customary to talk of “CIA intercepts,” the initial tapping and taping were handled by the DFS.)

It is helpful to consider the intercepts in the chronological order in which they reached CIA Headquarters. We see then that the intercepts can be divided into two categories: two early “Phase-One” intercepts, hinting that Oswald was part of an international Communist conspiracy, and a host of later “Phase-Two” intercepts, clarifying that Oswald’s sole purpose for visiting the Soviet and Cuban Consulates was in connection with obtaining a Cuban visa.


The story of the intercepts are interesting especially when you look at how the head of the CIA Station in Mexico City Winn Scott was kept out of the entire thing.Why would HQ do that? Unless the plot was internal and Dulles was monitoring all in and out going message traffic.Part 4.

The Arrival of the “Phase-Two” “Visa” Intercepts

Meanwhile, late on November 23 (according to Oswald’s 201 file), Washington received its first “Phase-Two” version of why Oswald had visited the two Embassies. About five hours after the second “Phase-One” cable arrived, Washington read for the first time additional intercept transcripts suggesting that someone (“probably Oswald”) had sought Durán’s help in getting a Cuban transit visa in order to go to the Soviet Union.[130]

This more benign alternative was soon corroborated by the first detailed report of Durán’s statement after being arrested, the so-called “JKB version” (see Chapter 4) which was hand-carried to Washington by a CIA officer on November 27.[131] “JKB”, or “JK Benadum,” was the pseudonym used by George Munro, an outside CIA officer who was employed in sensitive positions by both the FBI and the CIA in Mexico City.[132]

It is often assumed that the “Phase-Two” “visa” intercepts corroborate the “Phase-Two” testimony from Silvia Durán about Oswald’s desire for a visa. In one respect, this is not true. Early reports of Silvia Durán’s testimony say that the Soviets said on the phone that Oswald’s case “would have to be referred to Moscow.”[133] This accords with the language typed onto Oswald’s visa application, that the Soviets said “that they had to wait for authority from Moscow.”[134]

Mexico City begins to take the form of a counterintelligence operation and it does get even more murky.We have some investigators from the HSCA (House Select Committee on Assassinations) wrote a report about what they found out about this particular episode. Lopez Report We also have rumblings about drug dealing at the fringes of the case.

Part 5.

The Sources of the Stories and the ZR/RIFLE Assassination Project

In the pages to follow, I shall show how Staff D, the small CIA unit responsible for SIGINT (signals intelligence), and thus for electronic intercept operations, was also the unit which housed the CIA’s ZR/RIFLE assassination project. The Mexican DFS, which supplied the raw intercept data to the CIA in Mexico City, also overlapped in many ways with the Cubans and organized crime personnel picked for the CIA-Mafia anti-Castro assassination plots.[163]

It is possible that the special circumstances in Mexico City explain why the CIA’s generic assassination project, ZR/RIFLE, was housed within the Staff D’s intercept operations. (“ZR” normally prefixed the cryptonym for a intercept program.) In his hunt for killers, ZR/RIFLE chief William Harvey searched for individuals with criminal connections.[164] The Mexico City intercept operation against the Soviet Embassy was by far the largest and most important CIA intercept program anywhere in the world.[165]

And the DFS, the local intelligence service on which the CIA relied to man its listening posts, was probably the intelligence service with the profoundest links to the international drug traffic and to American organized crime.


William Harvey and David Morales emerge once more.Both of them main suspects in the murder of JFK hell,old Howard Hunt himself pretty much said they were participants of "The Big Event" as they called it.This is where international drug dealing comes into play.Part 6.