Jefferson Morley was one of the very few writers in the mainstream press who actually tried to print stories that indicated there was more to the John Kennedy assassination than the Warren Commission claimed. In his long tenure at the Washington Post he actually was responsible for getting into that publication two stories that showed there was more to the Oswald story than met the eye. Specifically, these were the long 1994 story on John Elrod and Lee Oswald, and a later story on the work of John Newman who was working on his book Oswald and the CIA. Two other stories that he worked on while at the Post were the attempts by Michael Scott to secure the purloined manuscript of his father, CIA officer Winston Scott, and the cover-up by the CIA of the role of George Joannides with the Cuban exile group the DRE in New Orleans in the summer of 1963.

These last two form the framework for his recent book Our Man In Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA. Morley was an acquaintance of the attorney for Michael Scott who was trying to get the manuscript of his father's book, entitled Foul Foe. There were things in the manuscript the CIA clearly did not want disseminated to the public. The long struggle ended with a little more than half the manuscript being handed over to the son. The way Morley integrates the other aspect of his quest is through Lee Harvey Oswald's activities in the summer and fall of 1963. Joannides was the Agency case officer for the Cuban exile group called the Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil (DRE). In addition to making raids into Cuba for the Agency, this group interacted with Oswald in New Orleans in the summer of 1963. Most famously through the personage of Carlos Bringuier. Bringuier got into a famous tussle with Oswald on Canal Street that led to some local press attention since they were both arrested. After this, Bringuier debated Oswald on a local radio show with host Bill Stuckey. Aided by the contacts of their friend and mentor Ed Butler, the two cohorts ambushed Oswald with information about his defection to the Soviet Union. This helped compromise his local chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, of which he was the only member. Bringuier issued more than one press release after the debate. (Morley p. 174) But even more significant is the fact that Bringuier and the DRE recycled the story and the releases right after President Kennedy's assassination. As Morley notes, this got front-page placement in major newspapers throughout the land. (p. 207) And so the legend of the alienated Cuban and Soviet sympathizer now began to take hold with the public. And this was used by the Warren Commission to somehow explain Oswald's motivation for allegedly killing Kennedy.

This New Orleans aspect is linked to Oswald's strange and legendary trip to Mexico, where Scott was the CIA station chief at the time. So by telling the story of the DRE, he links it to the story of Scott's job of surveying the Cuban and Russian embassies in Mexico City. Morley is then able to show us what the Warren Commission did with this material. So the book becomes not just a biography of Scott, but an opportunity to show how the CIA and the Warren Commission handled the alleged commie sympathizer in the months leading up to the murder of JFK. And afterwards. Morley is a skilled enough writer, about at the level of David Talbot. So he manages to cobble this together in an adroit and manageable way. The book is never really profound or moving. But it's never dull or cumbersome either.

II

A little bit more than the first third of the book deals with the life and early career of Winston Scott. Scott was not a Boston Brahmin like Ben Bradlee or Des Fitzgerald. Nor was he a born member of the Eastern Establishment/CFR crowd like Allen Dulles or Jock Whitney. He was born in Alabama in 1909 near the Escatawpa River. The "house" was made up of discarded railroad boxcars. His hometown of Jemison was northwest of Mobile. Hid father worked for the railroad and the Scotts lived right next to the tracks where Morgan Scott toiled. (p. 15) During the week Win Scott and his siblings trekked three miles to school in the town of Brookwood. And like most southern families they went to church every Sunday. An early indication of Scott's romanticism and his desire to escape these humble circumstances occurred at age 13. He and two friends decided to run away to New Orleans. The objective was to catch a freighter to France and join the French Foreign Legion. They were stopped on their journey by a friendly policeman who made a phone call and they were returned home.

Scott won a scholarship to attend college in Birmingham. There he met his first wife Besse Tate who he impulsively married by making his father awaken a Justice of the Peace at four in the morning. Win Scott had a head for numbers so he first became a math instructor at the University of Alabama. A paper he did on the algebraic possibilities of disguising message codes caught the attention of J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover sent one of his envoys to recruit him and Scott joined the FBI in 1941. He was first stationed in Pittsburgh and then Cleveland.

In 1944, Scott began the journey that would eventually lead to the CIA, Oswald, and Mexico City. He decided to switch over to the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency. While in Europe, he met the youngest OSS Chief of Station, a man named Jim Angleton who worked out of Italy. After the war, both OSS officers were befriended in Washington by British intelligence agent Kim Philby. Morley notes that Scott eventually suspected that Philby was a Russian double agent. Future counter intelligence chief Angleton did not. And this may have led to the eventual paranoia about CIA infiltration by the KGB, which later plagued Angleton and ended in his eventual forced resignation by Director Bill Colby.

Along with Allen Dulles, Scot campaigned to create the Central Intelligence Agency and to grant it the power to sanction covert operations. So when the CIA was eventually established and Dulles became Deputy Director, he brought his friend and ally Win Scott into the agency that he would now stamp indelibly with his own imprint. Although Scott was not actually part of the overthrow of the Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1954, he was familiar with the players involved including an officer on the rise, one David Phillips. Through his friendship with Allen Dulles, Scott asked the Director for a job outside the United States. He wanted to be station chief in Mexico City. Dulles obliged him and Scott began his thirteen-year tenure there in 1956.

It is here that Morley introduces the figure of Anne Goodpasture (p. 83). Goodpasture is an ubiquitous character in that she has clear but rather undefined ties to Scott, Angleton, and Phillips. Like Scott she was born in the south, in her case, Tennessee. Like Scott, she served in the OSS during the war, except she was stationed in the Far East with people like Dick Helms and Howard Hunt. After the war, she moved to Washington where she came to the attention of Angleton. And this is where I have my first complaint about the book. Goodpasture is a most fascinating character. And Morley interviewed her for two days in 2005. (See page 305) Either he does not find her very intriguing, or he took most everything she said at face value. John Newman, Ed Lopez, Dan Hardway, Lisa Pease and myself disagree. Lopez and Hardway – under the supervision of Mike Goldsmith – wrote the absolutely excellent Mexico City Report for the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Now Goodpasture was supposed to be working for and under Winston Scott in Mexico City. When the Mexico City Report – sometimes called the Lopez Report – was first declassified by the Assassination Records Review Board, I interviewed Lopez at his home in Rochester, New York. Since this was the first time I had seen the woman's name repeatedly emphasized, I asked Lopez who she was. Surprisingly, he said that "She worked for Phillips when he got stationed down there ... she handled all his projects for him." (Emphasis added.) When I asked Ed what Phillips was doing there, he said, "He had some bullshit title, but he was in charge of almost all the Cuban operations from there at the time." He then expanded on this by saying that since Phillips was constantly traveling from Washington to JM/Wave in Miami and to Mexico City, Goodpasture was the officer who guided his operations emanating from Mexico in his absence. In and of itself, this is extraordinarily interesting. It would make her a front tier figure in any book on the Kennedy assassination that focuses on both Mexico City and Phillips. Which this book does. But there is even more to the woman. It was Angleton who sent her to Mexico City on a counter-intelligence case. And he never lost touch with her. She worked on the famous CI case of Rudolf Abel in New York City. (The Assassinations, p. 174) Abel was convicted in 1957, and exchanged for Gary Powers in 1962. So the ties to Angleton were ongoing. In fact, Angleton stated that she was always in on the most sensitive cases. (Ibid) Further, she worked on Staff D. This was one of the most secret and clandestine operational units within the CIA. It dealt with both coups and assassination attempts.

Now Goodpasture is a clever operator of course. So, like many operators she pleads that she was only downstairs playing the piano at the time. She wasn't aware there was a bordello operating on the second floor. To Jeremy Gunn and the ARRB she said she was only a secretary for Staff D. She duplicated papers and copied materials. The problem with that is the fact that Angleton also said that Goodpasture was "very close" to Bill Harvey. Harvey was part of Staff D and one of the major players in the CIA plots to kill Castro under Richard Helms. (Ibid) And when Goodpasture received a career achievement award, it was on the recommendation of David Phillips. He cited her for having discovered Oswald at the Cuban Embassy. A citation rich in irony of course, since it did nothing to help prevent the murder of President Kennedy. (Ibid)

Almost all of this, and more, is missing from Morley's book. Goodpasture comes off as essentially a loyal civil servant who writes interesting reports about the history of the Mexico City station. Her ties to Phillips are hardly mentioned. Her connections to Angleton and his huge and powerful CI division are basically minimized.

III

This sets the stage for the ascension to power of John F. Kennedy. In this part of the book, I had another problem with the presentation. And it began fairly early. In regards to the Bay of Pigs, Morley writes that Kennedy had no objections to the plan. (p. 108) In Peter Kornbluh's Bay of Pigs Declassified, the author briefly notes how Kennedy changed both the proposed landing site and the air support offered to the exiles. (Kornbluh, p. 8) Kornbluh writes that several CIA officials noted that Kennedy's decisions severely hurt the operation's chances for success. Two of them went to project coordinator Dick Bissell and offered to resign since they decided Kennedy's limitations almost guaranteed its failure. Bissell assured them it would not and their concerns would be met. When the attack failed the two officials decided they had been misled, along with President Kennedy. (Ibid)

A few pages later, Morley uses Kennedy's famous quote about splintering the CIA into a thousand pieces after the debacle of the Bay of Pigs. (p. 112) He then adds, "He was just venting." Oh, really. Consider Kennedy's actions in the wake of the Bay of Pigs debacle:

1. Appointed the Taylor Commission, an executive inquiry into exactly why the operation failed. His representative on the committee was RFK.
2. Signed NSAM's 55, 56, 57. These were all aimed at forcing the Pentagon into giving him more and better advice over covert paramilitary operations. And they took away responsibility for planning overt paramilitary operations from the Agency. As John Newman writes about them, they were "the first significant chink in the CIA's covert armor since its creation." (JFK and Vietnam, p. 99)
3. Created an alternative intelligence apparatus called the DIA.
4. Sent out a memorandum stating that the ambassador in a foreign country, and not the CIA, should have ultimate control over American policy in that nation.
5. When the Taylor Commission results were submitted, Kennedy fired CIA Director Allen Dulles, Deputy Director Charles Cabell, and Director of Plans, Bissell. This clearly put the onus for the failure on the CIA. This result was quite natural since Kennedy and his brother became convinced through the inquiry that the three fired officers had deliberately misled JFK about the plan.
6. As David Corn notes in his book on Ted Shackley, Kennedy now moved his brother into a supervisory role over many covert operations.

As many commentators have noted, Kennedy was actually trying to exercise some degree of control over an Agency that had not really had any since its inception. Morley, I believe, downplays this aspect. And this plays into another characteristic of the book which I will note later.

Complementing this curious and curtailed view of JFK is his even more curious treatment of Richard Helms. I can only term the substance of Morley's portrayal of the new Director of Plans as exalted. The portrait of Helms that comes through is essentially that of a conscientious bureaucrat who has been through it all, knows the ins and outs of the political world and is a kind of fatherly figure to the Kennedys (especially RFK). This, of course, has always been the sales image that Helms has tried to convey to the public. And it was clearly evident in his autobiography of 2003, which Morley uses to a surprising degree. The problem with accepting this public view of Helms at face value is that it contrasts with the private view that, unfortunately, some reliable people have seen close up. For instance, in my aforementioned interview with Ed Lopez, he asked me if I had seen the movie A Few Good Men. Mildly surprised at what I thought was a non-sequitir, I said that I had. He said, "Remember the scene near the end with Jack Nicholson on the stand? Him screaming, "You can't handle the truth!" I said yes. He replied, "That was Richard Helms with us in executive session. He was laughing at us, sneering at us, shoving it in our face. He had no respect for anything. To him, we were a joke." Reportedly, when Helms emerged from that session and reporters asked him more questions about Oswald he replied, "Your questions are as stupid as the committee's" In filmed testimony, when Chris Dodd pressed him on the CIA's barbaric treatment of Russian defector Yuri Nosenko, Helms response was, "Well, we could put them up at the Hilton." This is the man who, in his private writings on the JFK case, Richard Case Nagell has nicknamed "Dirty Dick." (See Probe, Vol. 3 No. 1)

Furthering this view, when I interviewed former CIA agent Carl McNabb before he died, he showed me a file from his days at JM/Wave. In his personal notes was a notation, "Zap Man". I asked him what that meant. He said that one of the officers told him this was the term given to Helm's private assassin. So I think that foot soldiers inside the Agency might have a bit of disagreement with the picture of Dick Helms that emerges here.

Given Morley's slant, it was not surprising to me that he could write: "Helms also had to indulge Bobby's demands for a plan to assassinate Castro." (p. 159) This is the kind of sentence that could be written by Helms' official biographer, the tendentious and shameless Thomas Powers. (Who, incidentally, wrote a blurb on the back of the book.) This completely ignores both the findings of the Church Committee, and the detailed information in the CIA's own Inspector General Report. Which was overseen by Helms himself. These plots began in the Eisenhower administration and they continued into the Johnson administration. They were deliberately kept from the Kennedys. And RFK found out about them by accident. When he did find out about them, according to his calendar, he called Helms into his office. When questioned about this meeting, Helms conveniently contracted selective amnesia. He couldn't recall a thing about it. (For an overview of this matter, see The Assassinations pgs. 327-329) But RFK aide John Siegenthaler did recall RFK's response to Helms and John McCone when he found out. He told them he thought it was disgraceful and had to be stopped. (Ronald Goldfarb, Perfect Villains, Imperfect Heroes p. 273)

To be charitable to Morley, whenever one is doing a biography of a CIA officer, this kind of imbalance tends to be a problem. The reason being is that one has to consult books about these people. The books tend to be authorized, therefore sanitized. For further example, Morley uses the official biography of Allen Dulles, Peter Grose's all too kind volume Gentleman Spy. The reason this is done is that the alternative, a really painstaking, unauthorized view of these men takes time, money, and entails dangers. Donald Gibson recalls talking to an author who tried to do such a book about Dulles. It was never published. Gibson asked him why it was not. He said, "Do you want to hear about a big conspiracy?" The other problem involved is the fact that higher-level officers or managers will not go on the record with anything not complementary to the official story. It is difficult to find those willing to talk candidly about failures, coups, assassinations, blackmail, drug-running etc. Morley does not really navigate this problem very well.

IV

The best part of the book deals with Oswald's alleged visits to the Cuban consulate and Russian Embassy in Mexico City in the fall of 1963. This section of the work owes itself to the disclosures of the ARRB. More specifically to the Lopez Report and to John Newman's important book Oswald and the CIA.

Morley does a decent enough job in setting the stage for this crucial episode by detailing the policy towards Cuba in late 1962 and 1963. He goes through Operation Northwooods, the Pentagon plan to create a phony provocation to launch an invasion, and how JFK turned it down. He then details some of the disputes between the Kennedys and the CIA over what should be done with Cuba. People in the Agency, like Nestor Sanchez, wanted more action. The Kennedys did not. He tries to explain this by saying perhaps the Kennedys were "just using the agency and its personnel for cover as they edged toward coexistence with Castro." (p. 158) This seems to be what JFK was doing. But its not made clear to the reader because, in another curious lacunae, Morley never mentions JFK's back channel diplomacy with Cuba through people like Lisa Howard, William Attwood, and Jean Daniel.

With this backdrop, Morley outlines the four secret programs through which Oswald had to come into contact with the CIA in 1963. They were codenamed AMSPELL, LIERODE, LIENVOY, and LIEMPTY. The first two programs were run by Phillips, the last two by Scott. AMSPELL was the name given inside the CIA to the DRE. So it would seem obvious that there would be documents about this interaction forwarded to either Joannides or Phillips. But as Morley notes, there are 17 months of reports–from 12/62 to 4/64– the CIA has yet to declassify on AMSPELL. (Elsewhere on this site, you can read about his struggle with the CIA to get these documents.) LIERODE refers to the camera surveillance on the Cuban consulate in Mexico City. LIENVOY refers to the wiretapping of phone lines at the Soviet Embassy, and LIEMPTY to the photo surveillance of that embassy.

Besides the seventeen months of missing reports, the results of the other three programs are also either lacking or questionable. As many know, to this day, the CIA has yet to produce a photograph of Oswald either entering or leaving either compound. And the photo they turned over to the Warren Commission in this regard does not even resemble Oswald. (In the Lopez Report-which is scathing about her–Anne Goodpasture tries to state that she did not realize this grievous error about the wrong photo of Oswald. until 1976. The authors make it clear that they find this suggestion not credible, as they do much of her testimony.) Since Oswald frequented the compounds a total of five times, there were ten opportunities to photograph him. What happened, and why there has never been a picture produced, is one of the great mysteries of this case. The CIA has taken decades of criticism and suspicion about Oswald's visit to Mexico City, and much of it is based on these missing photographs. It has led some people to believe that perhaps Oswald did not actually go to Mexico City, or an imposter actually made the visits. Or both. Morley tries to forward the argument that maybe there actually was a picture. He does this by quoting the testimony of Daniel Watson and Joe Piccolo in the Lopez Report. These two CIA officers related that they had either seen or heard of a photo of Oswald in Mexico City. But in the case of Watson, the witness said it was a shot from behind, "basically an ear and back shot." And he qualified it by saying he thought it was of Oswald. The implication being the angle made it hard to be positive. (Lopez Report, p. 97) The case of Piccolo was similar. The shot was from behind at an angle. Someone in the Agency had shown it to him saying it was Oswald. When the HSCA found this man, he said he did not ever recall having such a photo of Oswald. (Ibid pgs 103-106)

Further, the Lopez Report states that the investigators interviewed many CIA officers who were stationed in Mexico City, or worked at Langley in support of the Mexico City operation. They all stated that "the station had not obtained a photograph of Oswald from the photo surveillance operations in Mexico City." (Ibid, p. 108) On top of that, the report adds that the investigators could not find any evidence of a photo of Oswald being sent to Langley from Mexico City at the time. (Ibid, p. 109) If one reads the report closely, the only testimony that is unequivocal about the CIA having a photo of Oswald at the time he was there is that of Winston Scott. He could not be cross-examined since he died in 1971. But what makes this fact so interesting is three things. First, Watson testified that Scott was capable of "phonying a photo if asked to produce one. I never believed Win Scott the first time he told me something." (Ibid, p. 99) Second, that right after Scott died, James Angleton flew to Mexico City and told his widow in no uncertain terms that he wanted the contents of Scott's safe. It was there that Scott was supposed to have stashed the photos and the tapes of Oswald in Mexico City. Angleton had been tipped of to the safe's contents by Goodpasture. Angleton's trip and his theft of the evidence were authorized by Richard Helms. (Morley, p. 286) Finally, Clark Anderson, the FBI legal attachÈ in Mexico City once referred to the Oswald photos as "deep snow stuff". (Probe, Vol. 4 No. 2, p. 28) So, if the photos were fakes, that fact could never be exposed since Scott took them to his grave. Angleton snatched them up and all of Angleton's JFK files were destroyed when he left the CIA in late 1974. (Morley, p. 201)

The fate of the tapes of Oswald's alleged phone calls is also part of this huge enigma. On page 117 of the Lopez Report, the authors list at least nine calls the CIA should have taped. (They also write that there may have been one or two more.) But in looking at this list, and then reading some descriptions of the calls as related to the translators who heard them, two immediate problems arise. According to the Warren Commission witnesses, Oswald spoke fluent Russian. But the voice on some of the calls is described as speaking broken Russian, or barely decipherable Russian. Second, on over half the calls, the caller speaks in Spanish. But as the authors of the Lopez Report note, the weight of the evidence says Oswald could not speak Spanish. (Lopez Report, p. 119) Morley discusses these language issues, albeit briefly, and adds one of his own. Incredibly, the Warren Commission never interviewed Silvia Duran who talked to Oswald at the Cuban consulate. There was a call made from the Cuban consulate to the Russian Embassy on a Saturday. Yet Duran always said that after his Friday visit, Oswald never came back to their consulate. So who made that call? ( Ibid p. 236)

There are two other points about this absolutely crucial episode that Morley mentions, although not at length. First is the delay in getting the first cable to CIA HQ about Oswald visiting the Soviet Embassy. This took over a week. It has never been adequately explained. (When I asked Lopez about this strange delay, he replied: "Jim, they were using Pony Express.") Second, the famous memo of October 10th sent to Win Scott by Langley concerning Oswald. This memo states that it contains the latest HQ information on Oswald. It did not. Morley writes that the memo was meant to keep Scott in the dark about Oswald's recent past. (Morley p. 192) Morley also notes how many CIA staffers at HQ signed off on the false memo, and how some of them had to have known it was false since the CIA had newer information about Oswald and the DRE and the FPCC in its hands at the time. Jane Roman, one of the staffers who signed the false memo stated that its treatment indicated they had a keen interest in the subject of the memo. Roman then added that this interest was being "held very closely on the need-to-know basis." (Ibid p. 197) She also agreed that the interest was probably operational. This fact may also explain why the cable had to go so high in the hierarchy to be sent. It went all the way up to Tom Karamessines. Who was Helms' deputy at the time. Everyone Morley interviewed about this particular issue thought that was odd–except the co-author of Helms' autobiography. Did the cable keep on getting kicked upstairs because people like Roman knew it was false? And then did Helms OK its dispatch through his Deputy without having to place his name on it?

Strangely, though Morley does a good job with this memo, he completely ignores a fact directly related to it that is probably just as important. The CIA prepared two cables at this time. One that was extremely different than this one. This second memo had even less information on Oswald and it actually gave a false description of him. This particular memo went to the rest of the intelligence agencies. (Lopez Report pgs 145-146) When one sees the two cables side by side, the effect is jarring. It is hard not to conclude that certain people inside the CIA did not want to alert anyone else that Oswald was in Mexico City.

Morley does a good enough job on the Oswald in Mexico City incident. I just wish it had been fuller and more graphic.

V

The last part of the book deals with the Warren Commission inquiry, Scott's last years in Mexico City, his retirement and his death.

As most informed students of the assassination know, the Warren Commission inquest into Oswald's activities in Mexico City was mildly risible. The Commission sent David Slawson, Bill Coleman and Howard Willens to Mexico City. The result of their inquiry was a rather brief composition called the Slawson-Coleman report. It was declassified in 1996. I exaggerate only slightly when I state the following: comparing it to the Lopez Report is like comparing a fifth grade reader to a novel by Henry James. The trip the Commission lawyers took was arranged by Richard Helms, who thought it would be a good idea if the representatives of the Commission had a CIA case officer to escort them on their journey to Mexico. It is clear from reading the report that the trip was a set up. The three lawyers never investigated anything themselves. For instance, it was Clark Anderson who gave them the information that Oswald was allegedly at the Hotel del Comercio. Yet it took Anderson and his FBI friend several trips to find anyone there who recalled Oswald. And of the two witnesses they found, they doubted one of them. Yet Slawson accepted this. The FBI could not find a witness to a transaction for a silver bracelet that Oswald bought for his wife. They found a witness who said Oswald was at the Cuban consulate. But this witness could not identify Oswald in a photo leafleting in New Orleans. Finally, they were escorted into Scott's company. Scott made them swear that anything he showed them had to be discussed only with the permission of his superiors at Langley. He then played them a tape of Oswald. Slawson later commented that the tape was of poor quality and he could not identify Oswald's voice. (Probe Vol. 4 No. 1) In spite of this the Warren Commission wrote that the CIA was not aware of Oswald at the Cuban consulate until after the assassination. (See page 777) This is really all you need to know about the Warren Commission and Mexico City. Helms, who had complete control over what the Warren Commission investigation in Mexico City, seems to have got what he wanted.

Years later, Goodpasture decided to do a complete chronology about Oswald and Mexico. After Scott read it, he decided to leave the CIA. (Morley, p. 263) His last big assignment was covering up the true circumstances of the famous student riots in Mexico City in 1968, which led to the Plaza de las Tres Culturas massacre. In 1969, Helms gave him a distinguished service award. He then retired and set up his own lucrative consulting service for those doing business with Mexico.

Morley ends the book with some cogent comments about Angleton. He reveals that Angleton had files on the RFK assassination in his office. Including autopsy photos. This made no sense. JFK yes, but RFK? Oddly, Morley writes that a Palestinian waiter killed Robert Kennedy. (p. 282) Sirhan was never a waiter at the Ambassador Hotel. And the sentence assumes Sirhan was the actual assassin. Which jibes with the curious and unexplained statements in the book-made more than once– that Oswald shot Kennedy.

At the very end, Morley writes that the tapes in Scott's safe survived at least until the seventies. This is according to the testimony of CIA officer Paul Hartman. (p. 291) After Michael Scott began to request information on his dad's manuscript, Morley suspects– from information given to Scott's attorney– that the CIA destroyed what Hartman saw in 1987. And with it, the last and best hope anyone had in figuring from direct evidence what really happened to Oswald in Mexico City.