14-00000 ¢ 2 . “2 a _ ot . iH SECRET 23. There is no evidence in the OSWALD case file that Silvia DURAN was subjected to a systematic elicitative interrogation that would have related her dealings with OSWALD, known or confirmed by intercept, with the data held on the Cuban DGI, its personalities and methods, in Mexico City. Was it normal for a case like OSWALD's, considering the fuss he allegedly made with ‘AZCUE, for the applications to be handled ‘solely by a local employee and a lame duck like AZCUE whose slot had been taken by the DGI chief? Whatever the answer to these questions, they | were not asked at the time. And there remains the more el fundamental question: accepting the DURAN story on its face, could it haV@™happened without the knowledge and participation of the DGI personnel above cited? This seems unlikely especially because VEGA is later pited by - a Cuban DGI defector as having | stated he was aware OSWALD CASTRO’ Ss overseas ; intelligence and security service could have more in its files than was surfacéd in the DURAN o . | was taken by Vincent Theodore LEE, the organizer of the Fair Play Committee for Cuba, with which OSWALD established relations from Dallas during the period 19 April - . 2 November 1963. There is an overlap between LEE's and VEGA's travels to Havana during that period: VEGA departed Mexico City on 6 January for Havana and returned on 13 February } 1963. - : 18 es SB OCRET pace BQ __ of ele le COPY. NO.
14-00000 M oo SECRET ~“statements., Coming back to the beginning: "Luisa" - Luisa CALDERON - as a member of the DGI unit in Mexico City - ' gquid very well have known something that would make what. she said to her unidentified caller less a matter of boastful self-indulgence than was assumed at the time. SILVIA DURAN, SUBSTANTIAL AMPLIFICATION OF ADMISSION OF ALLEGED PERSONAL RELATIONS WITH LEE HARVEY OSWALD, 1967- (24. The defects viewed in hindsight of the Silvia DURAN testimony already have been suggested above. (In that _ | context of criticism it would also be relevant to reconsider . the implications of the two intercepted telephone conversations on 26 November 1963. between the Cuban President, DORTICOS, and his Ambassador to Mexico, Joaquim Hernandez ARMAS, because the thrust of the conversation dealt with the ques= tion whether Silvia DURAN had been asked about [or been offered?] money payments by her Mexican interrogators.) 25. As of September 1964 Silvia DURAN gave up her Cuban Embassy job. “In the spring of 1967 Silvia DURAN was’ reported by a reliable and sensitive source to have cut all relations with Cubans. Her account, in 1967, of how she had been taken into custody and had been interrogated after the assassination repeated what was already known. She added, under circumstances that did not permit the source to challenge or elicit corroborative detail, that 19 > : -  § BCRET. P AGE Bi fee
14-00000 f . . . a SECRET "She had gone out with OSWALD during his stay.-in Mexico City and claimed she had sexual relations with him. | ALLEGATIONS OF CONSPIRATORIAL CONTACT BETWEEN OSWALD AND CUBAN GOVERNMENT AGENTS WITH PARTICULAR REFERENCE TO ALLEGATIONS OF (A) ELENA GARRO DE PRAZ AND (B) OSCAR CONTRERAS 26. As the Warren Commission reported, "Literally @ozens of allegations of a conspiratorial contact between OSWALD and agents of the Cuban Government have been investigated ..."° among these cases, which consumed hundreds of CIA man-hours in Headquarters and abroad — and similarly the 1 FBI in the United States - was the Nicaraguan walkin in “Mexico City, 26 November 1963, Gilberto ALVARADO Ugarte. | 27. The ALVARADO case is taken up in detail by the Warren Commission under the cryptograph "Dp." ALVARADO ‘eaaatnocemsmetnnsanatnaseeennene arose PESTA TE TTT TT TTT A . claimed that he. had seen an American, whom he identified as OSWALD, receive money some time in mid-September 1963 in a meeting in a patio of the Cuban Consulate in 6 a See Report, p. 305 ff. Some of the others were the cases of Ylario ROJAS Villenueve in Cozumel and Guadaloupe, the allegations of Enrique Ruedolo GONGORA in New York City, the claims of Robert Edward GALLANT, Santa Clara Prison Farm, California, and the allegations of Ray DOBKIN's. 7 See Report, pp. 307 - 308. SECRET. ‘pace —_ oth
14-00000 oe SECRET Mexico city. ALVARADO's story was ultimately broken by the use of the polygraph, on which ALVARADO showed evidences o£ security service control into the case. a 28. The ALVARADO story is a particularly acute repre- sentation of the difficulties that beset the evaluation of observed evidence: certain elements of the story persist Gespite the impeachment of its major premises. ALVARADO, _ whose account “aid not become public until the release of the Warren Report in October 1964, talked consistently of ‘the presence . in the Cuban Consulate transaction (of a “Negro with red-dyed hair. 29. Elena GARRO de Paz is a mecurial, articulate and . socially prominent Mexican writer, married, but separated from a high-ranking Mexican foreign service official. She Fon enn ener manea | mannan tet sn tet re Ae At is also the cousin of Horacio DURAN, the husband of - Silvia DURAN, cited above. There is a strong personal (etcetera ea ‘Sear ropomm ttre NEE antipathy between the two women descending from Elena GARRO's trenchant anti~Communism, 30. From October 1964 until his retirement in the fall of 1969, a U.S. Embassy officer, Charles THOMAS, persistently. ! kept up a stream of reports and memoranda reflecting GARRO's account of what had actually gone on between OSWALD, the Cubans and in particular Silvia DURAN in September 1963, including a repeated reference to a Negro with red-dyed hair. SECRET , : pace O39 83 ot ie . COPY 10. ____—
14-00000 i. | SECRET _ , 31. The, first reference to the GARRO story was noted in a Mexico Station Memorandum of Record dated 12 October 1964: "Elena GARRO [said] that she and her daughter were invited to a party at the Cuban "Embassy during the period she now finds out that OSWALD was here in Mexico prior to the | assassination: She was invited by a Mexican secretary in the Cuban Embassy whose husband is a cousin of the GARRO ‘family [Horacio DURAN] . At the party she saw three Gringos, not drinking, not mixing and more or less just standing around together like three bumps on a log. . They were so obviously out of place that she asked someone in the Cuban Embassy about. them and was told that | "they were just passing through. '! She claims. that on the way these three Gringos stood out she took a good look at then as did her daughter.» When the | _ assassination occurred and OSWALD's picture was spread into the newspapers, both Elena and- | her daughter immediately said that he was one. . | | of the three Gringos ‘without. a doubt' at the | party." a a 32. GARRO repeated her story to Mr. Charles William THOMAS , an Embassy political officer on 10 December 1965: | _ 22 7 SECRET | PAGE . os 84. = 22 _
14-00000 (¥ a SECRET “In September 1963 after her return from abroad, she went to a party, accompanied by her daughter, at the home of Ruben DURAN [emphasis added]. Ruben is one of the two brothers of Horacio DURAN, who married her cousin. She met OSWALD and two other young Americans. At the party — she was discouraged from talking with him. Other guests were the Cuban Consul AZCUE, General Clark FLORES, Silvia DURAN, who she later learned was OSWALD's mistress while he was here, Emilio. CARBALLIDO and a Latin American Negro man with red hair [emphasis added]. In November 1963 when the identity. of the assassin became known, she and her daughter went to the Cuban Embassy and shouted “assassins" and other ‘4nsults at the staff there. ® Shortly . afterward, she and her daughter were visited by a friend, Manuel CARVILLO [or CALVILLO], then an official in the Secretariat of the Gobernacion and were told he had orders to escort them to a small and obscure hotel in the center of town.. They were kept there for eight days under pretext that they were in danger. When she told CARVILLO she wanted to go to the American Embassy and explain what she knew of OSWALD, she was told that the American Embassy was full of Communist - spies. 33. On 25 December 1965 and 9 January 1966 in further interviews with THOMAS, GARRO and her daughter elaborated and 8 These particulars were not confirmed by independent observers at the time. 23 SECRET - : “pres 85 85 212 _ copy No. _. nl
14-00000 7 SECRET in certain particulars significantly modified her earlier account. She also acknowledged that she and her daughter had been interviewed by Embassy officers to whom she claimea they did not give a very complete story because the Embassy officers did not appear to give much credence to anything they said. 34, It developed - that GARRO and daughter had been Se neem interviewed by the Legal Attac Her information had been similar to what she imed in her account to THOMAS but had not been substantiated by inguiriés. fhe FBI representative therefore considered the matter closed and reaffirmed his disengagement from the matter to. the CIA Chief of Station on 27 December 1964 and to the Ambassador | on 25 February 1965. : | oe — 35. The Eubassy Rolitical ofticer,, however, persisted in 7 . his interviews and reporting. In a memorandum of. conversation, 13 July 1966, GARRO identified the piace to. which she had been taken by CALVILLO as the Hotel Vermont. (This detail checked alee alates enamel out affirmatively. GARRO was at the Hotel 23 - 24, 25 =- 27 and 28 - 30 November 1963. ) In another, on 7 February 1967, GARRO's continuing vicissitudes with the Cubans are set out. And finally, upon THOMAS ' s retirement from U.S. Government — service, the ‘Department. of State, at his request, 28 August 1969, disseminated to CIA and FBI a compilation of . his reporting of the Elena GARRO interviews. | — - 24 SECRET " GOPY NO-e
14-00000 ft ' . , oo SECRET ~~ “36. There the matter rests. GARRO's chronology of the ee events she described as having_o rhe Mexican capital in September 1963 never coincided with the confirmed data of WALD's presence there. Her story, however, had two points. congruant with allegations by others regarding | OSWALD: — 7 a | 7 a. ‘ALVARADO! s allegations regarding the | Negro with the xed-dyed hair {this detail could, however, have been gleaned from the Warren Commission" s published account. of the -,  *pe case] and. a b. | Silvia DURAN's later claim of intimate personal contacts with OSWALD. 37. Beginning in March and amplified in May 1967, the American Consul, Benjamin J. RUYLE, in Tampico developed a contact with a local” Mexican journalist, Oscar CONTRERAS. Lartigue, who claiiied to have encountered OSWALD with other pro-CASTRO students at the / University of Mexico campus in September 1963. 38. In June 1969 CONTRERAS was interviewed by a CIA officer: | : : He studied law at the University of Mexico for three years, approximately 1960 - 1964. He belonged to a clandestine pro-CASTRO revolutionary group at the University. Regarding the OSWALD | 25 | - . SECRET
14-00000 iv - SECRET ‘was not able or willing to give dates and case he was extremely cautious and although he names, he said OSWALD visited the University © of Mexico campus shortly after the Cuban Embassy refused him a visa to visit Cuba. OSWALD made inquiries. regarding pro~Cuban revolutionary groups at the University and was directed to CONTRERAS and his friend. OSWALD met CONTRERAS and four other persons as they came out of a round-table discussion held in the faculty of Philosophy. OSWALD told the group it was urgent that he visit Cuba and the Cuban Embassy had denied him a ‘wisa. He requested aid from CONTRERAS’ group. _ CONTRERAS and others mistrusted OSWALD because they felt he was a CIA provocation. The group allowed OSWALD to accompany them the rest of the day, that night and part of the next day. OSWALD was very introverted and appeared to be slightly crazy. OSWALD made no mention of an assassination plot but kept bringing up the point he had to travel to Cuba immediately. 39. At this point, with FBI knowledge, the matter was turned over to the Mexican authorities who determined that ‘CONTRERAS was indeed at the University of Mexico but only . | . 26 SECRET ~ PAGE 88 - ot COPY NO. 212
14-00000 t - SECRET om ee ceaerenenmncmner for the years 1959 - 1960 and that he had been publicly associated in protest activity for the Student Revolutionary Bloc (BER) in January 1961. However, the group ceased functioning as. such in the middle of 1962, and Oscar CONTRERAS was never one of its leaders. No further work is reflected in the files on the CONTRERAS allegations. Apart from the unsustained claims made by CONTRERAS about his own presente at the University, there is an additional OSWALD's Spanish, which was barely adequate to get him meals near the hotel, seems hardly likely to have permitted him to carry on for an extended period with a University student { element that undermines the credibility of his account: | group. | | | 27 SECRET “ page 89 oe 12 COPY NO.