Politico History Department: What Was Lee Harvey Oswald Doing in Mexico? Philip Shenon - Politico Magazine
go to original March 19, 2015

A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination by Philip Shenon Check it out on Amazon.com

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.

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Photo: Associated Press

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