[Editor’s Note: This is the 11th installment in the JFK Facts series, “Trail of Destruction.” The final installment will appear next Wednesday.]
On April 26, 1971, Winston MacKinley (“Win”) Scott — the CIA’s Mexico City station chief from 1956-69 — died suddenly and unexpectedly of a heart attack. At only 62, he had collapsed in his home, in the capital of a country where he had wielded immeasurable political power as the virtual “proconsul” of the United States government.
One of the longest-serving CIA station chiefs in history, Scott retired south of the border to pen an autobiographical novel. But very soon after doctors in Mexico City had declared him dead, a high-ranking CIA functionary arrived at his home and seized his manuscript and anything else he found interesting.
As Jefferson Morley explains in “Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA” (2008), news that Win Scott planned to publish his book had gone over badly at CIA headquarters, and matters eventually came to a head.
