' In other words, the Agency concealed material evidence in the murder of a sitting president for 22 years and then destroyed it'

From: The Mystery of Oswald's Contacts with the CIA in Mexico

 

A small group of senior CIA officers may have been running an authorized counterintelligence operation involving Lee Harvey Oswald six weeks before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

That's the controversial but conditional conclusion I reached while writing the biography of CIA spymaster Winston Scott, the agency's top man in Mexico for more than a decade. Our Man in Mexico, argues that if there was an Oswald operation, Scott, a brash and brilliant spy, was not a participant. The CIA has never acknowledged the existence of such an operation, if there was one. Many historians will deny it. But the new JFK paper trail is clear: some of Scott's CIA associates knew much more than they ever disclosed about the man who apparently went on to kill President Kennedy in Dallas.

Newly declassified records and interviews with retired CIA officials illuminate the JFK story as it has never been seen before: through the eyes of Win Scott, long a shadowy figure in the history of the agency who was renowned for the brilliance and diligence of his espionage. In 1963, Scott was serving as the chief of the CIA's station in Mexico City. It was here his path intersected with Oswald's.

In the summer of 1963, Oswald, a 23-year old ex-Marine with a Russian wife, leftist political views and a penchant for scheming, was living in New Orleans. In the course of the next 100 days of his life, he would come in contact with four CIA intelligence gathering programs. Two of the programs that Oswald encountered were run by Scott, who operated out of an office on the top floor of the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City. The other two were run by his colleague David Atlee Phillips, a highly regarded counterintelligence officer also stationed in Mexico City. Scott had a front row seat on the events that would culminate in the Dallas tragedy.