CIA Protects Two Mexican Agents Who Surveilled Lee Harvey Oswald

'Sources and methods' around the accused assassin are still secret 60 years later.

Lee Harvey Oswald, New Orleans, August 1963

[After this story was published on October 4, 2023, JFK Facts continued to investigate. We subsequently learned the identity of one of the agents whose name had been protected by CIA. On October 29, we published her name: See “She Took Lee Harvey Oswald’s Picture for the CIA”.]

It is one of the most sensitive secrets held by the CIA today: the identity of two agents involved in the surveillance of accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald just weeks before President John F. Kennedy was shot to death in Dallas 60 years ago.

A CIA memo, partially declassified in June, shows the CIA intends to indefinitely hide the names of Mexican employees of the Agency who were responsible for the photographic surveillance of Oswald during his visit to Mexico City six weeks before JFK and Oswald were killed in Dallas.

The true identities of the two agents are still sensitive in 2023 because those agents knew if and how Oswald was surveilled — and might have known why the Agency later lied about it. Their children might know something about the matter.

The CIA told two official investigations (in 1964 and 1978) that Agency personnel never obtained a photograph of Oswald when he visited the Soviet and Cuban diplomatic offices seeking to obtain travel visas. However, three CIA officers later said they saw or knew of pre-assassination surveillance photos of Oswald.

Ramón Alvarez, the chief Mexican agent in the photo surveillance operation, said in recently declassified testimony that he believed the CIA had obtained a photo of Oswald.

The story of the two unidentified Mexican agents adds new detail to the most important revelation of the past decade: that top CIA officers knew far, far more about Oswald, the suspected assassin who denied killing Kennedy, than they ever told the Warren Commission.

In 1964, two senior officials assured the Commission, under oath, that the Agency had only “minimal information” about Oswald before Kennedy’s assassination. The full declassification of the CIA’s pre-assassination file on Oswald in recent years demonstrates that claim was—and is—wholly false, a cover story concealing the CIA’s abiding interest in the so-called “lone gunman.”

In fact, the Agency had abundant information on Oswald before Kennedy was killed, including the reasons for his defection to the Soviet Union in 1959, his willingness to share military secrets with the Russians, his interest in George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984,” his public advocacy for Fidel Castro’s Cuba, his arrest for fighting with CIA-funded Cubans in New Orleans, his drinking, and the fact that he beat his wife.

The CIA has offered an explanation of its atrocious performance before and after November 22 that qualifies as a “modified limited hangout,” a term of art coined by John Ehrlichman, aide to President Nixon. It refers to the tactic of “admitting — sometimes even volunteering — some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case.”

In a 2013 article, CIA in-house historian David Robarge acknowledged the Agency had not cooperated with the Warren Commission but he insisted the deception did not affect the validity of the government’s lone-gunman theory. In a revealing Orwellian formulation, Robarge said the Agency perpetrated a “benign cover-up.”

Benign or malign, the CIA cover-up continues in 2023.

Declassified files confirm that the Agency lied to the Warren Commission. The CIA opened a file on Oswald in November 1959, closely monitored his travels, contacts, and personal life for the next four years. The New York Times reported in July that a previously unknown counterintelligence analyst named Reuben Efron was tasked with intercepting and reading Oswald’s mail from 1960 to 1962, the first time the newspaper of record had reported the fact.

Another declassified document, only fully released last year, showed that top CIA officers in Miami in November 1963 did not believe the official story that Oswald alone killed Kennedy. In a long-secret memo, undercover officer Donald Heath recalled his bosses immediately launched a “fairly massive” investigation of anti-Castro Cuban exiles for a possible role in orchestrating the ambush that took Kennedy’s life.

The results of the Miami station’s investigation have never been made public. Heath died in 2018.

Under a “Transparency Plan” approved by President Biden in June, the Agency can withhold the names of the two Mexican agents who surveilled Oswald as long as it wants, despite the fact that one of them is likely deceased.

‘Unrelated to the Assassination’

The still-redacted CIA memo about the two Mexican agents calls into question the U.S. national security community’s claim today that the CIA is not hiding any information that relates to JFK’s murder.

In a September 2022 letter to the National Security Council, a Defense Department official offered the following justification for the redactions that remain in 4,684 JFK documents six decades after the death of the 35th president.

“The harm that release of this redacted information would cause, coupled with the fact that these records are themselves unrelated to the assassination of JFK outweighs disclosure for the public interest.”

In fact, the redacted CIA documents about the two Mexican agents, known only by the code names LIEMPTY-6 and LIEMPTY-14, are directly related to JFK’s assassination.

They illuminate one chapter of a still-shadowy story: how the CIA surveilled Oswald, an ex-Marine and leftist, every step of the way as he moved from the United States to Moscow to Minsk in November 1959; to Fort Worth, Texas, in June 1962; to New Orleans in April 1963; and to Mexico City in September 1963.

When Oswald arrived at the gates of the Soviet Embassy in the Mexican capital on Sept. 27, 1963, two CIA employees were taking photographs of every person who entered. The CIA does not want you to know their names.

This is their story.