The Story of the CIA's Oswald Tape

Where it came from and where it went.

In December 1995, retired CIA officer Anne Goodpasture gave a sworn deposition to the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) about CIA operations in Mexico City at the time of Lee Harvey Oswald’s visit there in October 1963. As trusted deputy to station chief Win Scott, Goodpasture was responsible for coordinating the station’s wiretap operations and distributing tapes and transcripts to the appropriate officers.

On November 23, the day after the assassination, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover told President Johnson, “We have up here the tape and the photograph of the man who was at the Soviet Embassy, using Oswald's name. That picture and the tape do not correspond to this man's voice, nor to his appearance. In other words, it appears that there is a second person who was at the Soviet Embassy down there."

In addition, two staff members of the Warren Commission told Jeremy Gunn, general counsel to the ARRB, that when they visited Mexico City in April 1964, Win Scott had played a tape of someone identifying himself as Oswald.

The CIA maintained that the tapes from the time of Oswald’s visit had been routinely erased before November 22. Defenders of the official story say Hoover was simply misinformed by underlings.

Goodpasture did not confirm Hoover’s story but she did acknowledge that there was a tape of someone identifying himself as Oswald and that it existed after JFK’s assassination. And her story was independently confirmed by another CIA officer.

Anne Goodpasture at her home in Dallas in 2005 (Credit: Jefferson Morley)