The circumstantial evidence jumps out at you. Yet the more likely scenario is that he was met by a CIA agent who set him up to be the fall guy. That meant getting him his job and seeing to it he would be in the right place at the right time. His weak presentation at the Cuban embassy sounds a lot like a mark following up on false instructions as well. Presume he was targeted, misled and made part of a false story line in order to set him up for his job.
It was enough to get him securely in the building in question. He was never meant to live to testify.
Needless to say this meant that curiosity over Mexico was thwarted by the CIA and they did just that as this makes very clear..
.
What Was Lee Harvey Oswald Doing in Mexico?
Much about his trip—weeks before the assassination—remains unexamined.
What if the answers to the many, persistent questions surrounding the
assassination of President John F. Kennedy lie not in Dallas or
Washington, D.C., but in the streets of a foreign capital that most
Americans have never associated with the president’s murder? Mexico
City.
Only hours after shots rang out in Dealey Plaza on November
22, 1963, U.S. Ambassador Thomas C. Mann told colleagues in the American
embassy in Mexico that he was certain Lee Harvey Oswald had not acted
alone in killing JFK.
Oswald had visited Mexico City several
weeks earlier, apparently to obtain a visa that would allow the
self-proclaimed Marxist to defect to Cuba, and Mann, a veteran diplomat,
suspected that a plot to kill Kennedy had been hatched on Mexican soil,
during Oswald’s encounters there with Cuban diplomats and Mexicans who
supported Fidel Castro’s revolution. How did Mann know about those
meetings? It turned out the CIA had Oswald under surveillance in the
Mexican capital after he had showed up at both the Cuban and Soviet
embassies there.
Back at the State Department, however, a baffled Mann hit a
brick wall. No one in Washington seemed interested in his suspicions, he
would later complain to colleagues. And within days of the
assassination, the ambassador received an astonishing top-secret message
directly from Secretary of State Dean Rusk. According to Mann’s
testimony years later to congressional investigators, Rusk ordered the
embassy to shut down any investigation in Mexico that might “confirm or
refute rumors of Cuban involvement in the assassination.” No reason was
given for the order, the ambassador said.
Mann told the
congressional investigators that he was under the impression that the
same “incredible” shut-down order had been given by the CIA to the spy
agency’s station chief in Mexico, Winston Scott. In memoirs quietly
declassified in the 1990s, after his death, Scott confirmed that he,
too, suspected that Oswald was an “agent” of a foreign power who may
have been part of a conspiracy to kill Kennedy (though Scott did not
suggest that the CIA’s investigation was shut down).
What
happened in Mexico City in the weeks before JFK’s murder? It is clear
from government files declassified in recent decades that Oswald’s
six-day trip to Mexico was never adequately investigated by the CIA, the
FBI and the State Department—and, as a result, by the Warren
Commission, the panel named by President Lyndon Johnson to investigate
the assassination. The question has been raised anew in recent weeks by a
surprising source—the Warren Commission’s chief conspiracy hunter. And
in fact, lots of evidence has accumulated over the years to suggest that
historians, journalists and JFK buffs who are still trying to piece
together clues about the president’s murder—whether from the memories of
still-living witnesses or in the new tranche of assassination-related
documents the National Archives is set to release in two years—would be
wise to look to Mexico City.
In the half-century since the
commission named for Chief Justice Earl Warren concluded that Oswald was
the sole gunman in Dallas and that there was no evidence of a
conspiracy, foreign or domestic, it is startling to discover how many
credible government officials—beginning with Ambassador Mann and CIA
station chief Scott—have suggested that evidence was missed in Mexico
that could rewrite the history of the assassination. The list includes
the late former FBI Director Clarence Kelley and former FBI Assistant
Director William Sullivan, as well as David Belin, a former staff lawyer
on the Warren Commission.
Last month, another commission staffer
joined their ranks: David Slawson, a retired University of Southern
California law professor who, 51 years ago, was the commission’s chief
investigator searching for evidence that might have pointed to a foreign
conspiracy in JFK’s murder. In interviews for a new edition of my 2013
history of the assassination, Slawson said
he is now convinced the commission was the victim of a “massive
cover-up” by the CIA and other agencies to hide evidence that might have
identified people in Mexico City who knew and encouraged Oswald to
carry out his threat when he returned to the United States.
Declassified
government records back up Slawson’s suspicion of how much information
was withheld in 1964, when senior officials at both the CIA and the FBI
assured the commission that there was no evidence in Mexico—or anywhere
else—to suggest that Oswald was anything other than a delusional lone
wolf. In sworn testimony to the commission, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover
insisted that “there was nothing up to the time of the assassination
that gave any indication that this man was a dangerous character who
might do harm to the president.”
The records declassified decades
later tell a very different story, and show just how much evidence
about Oswald’s Mexico trip —including CIA tape recordings of wiretaps of
Oswald’s phone calls in Mexico—never reached the commission. Although
the spy agency assured the commission in 1964 that there were no
surveillance photos of Oswald in Mexico, CIA Station Chief Scott, in his
memoirs, strongly suggested that there were photos, and other CIA
officials later told congressional investigators in the 1970s that they
recalled seeing the pictures. CIA and FBI records, meanwhile, show that
the agencies never tried to track down or interview key witnesses who
had encountered Oswald in Mexico.
Slawson is also convinced that someone blocked him from seeing a top-secret June 1964 letter
from Hoover to the commission in which Hoover revealed that Oswald may
have openly boasted about his plans—“I’m going to kill Kennedy”—while in
Mexico, apparently at the Cuban embassy. Slawson believes the CIA was
desperate to shut down any investigation in Mexico City out of fear the
Warren Commission might stumble onto evidence of the spy agency’s
long-running schemes to murder Fidel Castro. (Mexico City had been a
staging area for some of the plots.)
Slawson is careful to note
that he is not suggesting any sort of far-flung, carefully laid-out
conspiracy. For one thing, he notes, Oswald did not get the job he held
at the time of the assassination, at the Texas School Book Depository,
which was on the president’s motorcade route, until after he had
returned to Texas from Mexico in early October 1963; the route itself
was not announced until days before JFK’s arrival in Dallas.
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