Anne Goodpasture (original) (raw)

Anne Goodpasture

Anne Goodpasture, the daughter of two schoolteachers, was born in Tennessee. During the Second World War she joined the Office of Strategic Services(OSS) and served in Burma.

After the war Goodpasture was recruited by the CIA. Eventually she went to work for James Angleton, chief of Counter-Intelligence Staff. According to Angleton, Goodpasture was "very close" to William K. Harvey. In his book, Our Man in Mexico, the journalist Jefferson Morley, claims that Goodpasture "looked like a librarian but had the skills of a burglar."

Goodpasture was involved in the investigation and arrest of Rudolph Ivanovich Abel. In 1957 Angleton sent Goodpasture to investigate a Soviet Spy in Mexico City. Winston Scott, who was the CIA's station chief in Mexico. was so impressed with Goodpasture that he arranged for her to become his reports officer. In December 1958, Scott initiated operation LITEMPO, a network of paid agents and collaborators. This included Adolfo Lopez Mateos, Luis Echeverria, Fernando Gutiérrez Barrios and Diaz Ordaz. The CIA promoted the political careers of these men. The agency also arranged for taps on the phones used by political rivals such as Lazaro Cardenas and Vi cente Lombardo Toledano.

After Fidel Castro took power in Cuba, Goodpasture's boss, Winston Scott was asked by Allen W. Dulles to use his LITEMPO to help overthrow the government. Adolfo Lopez Mateos, who was now president of Mexico resisted this idea. He told Dulles: "There is a lot of sympathy for Castro and his revolution in Mexico. This factor has to be weighed by me in all actions concerning Cuba. For this reason Mexico cannot take any overt action." Lopez Mateos added that covert action was a different matter. "There are many things we should be able to do under the table."

Anne Goodpasture claims that Scott was politically motivated in his support for the far right in Mexico. She argues that Scott "was extremely conservative... to the right of George Wallace". He clearly believed that it was justified to support military dictatorships in order to prevent the left from gaining power in Mexico and other countries in the region.

At 11.00 a.m. on Friday, 27th September, 1963, a young American entered the Cuban consul's office. He told Silvia Duran that his name was Lee Harvey Oswald and that he needed a Cuban transit visa. Oswald told Duran that he planned to leave in three days' time and stay in Cuba for a couple of weeks. He then intended to move onto the Soviet Union. To establish his identity Oswald showed Duran her his passport, correspondence with the American Communist Party, his membership card for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, a newspaper clipping about his activities in New Orleans and a photograph of Oswald in custody, accompanied by two police officers.

Silvia Duran was suspicious of Lee Harvey Oswald. She could not understand why Oswald had not applied in advance by contacting the Communist Party in Cuba. Duran told him that he would need a passport photograph to apply for a visa for Cuba. He returned an hour later with the photograph. Duran then told Oswald she could not issue a transit visa without confirmation that he had clearance for travel to the Soviet Union. Oswald was told it would be at least seven days before his transit visa could be issued. Oswald replied that he could only stay for three days.

Duran told Lee Harvey Oswald he would need to visit the Soviet embassy to get the necessary paperwork. This he did but Vice Consul Oleg Nechiperenko informed him that the visa application would be sent to the Soviet embassy in Washington and would take about four months. Oswald then returned to the Cuban consulate at 4.00 and told Duran that he had been to the Soviet Embassy and that they were willing to give him a visa straight away. Duran phoned the embassy and was told that Oswald was lying and that the visa would not be issued for some time. After a brief argument Oswald left the consulate. Six times Oswald needed to pass the newly installed CIA camera as part of the LIERODE operation.

The CIA surveillance program worked and on Monday, 30th September, Anne Goodpasture recorded details of Oswald’s visits to the Cuban consulate. As Goodpasture noted, the two types of “security” information that most interested the CIA station concerned “U.S. citizens initiating or maintaining contact with the Cuban and Soviet diplomatic installations” and “travel to Cuba by U.S. citizens or residents.”

The CIA tape of the Oswald call to the Soviet embassy was marked “urgent” and was delivered to the station within 15 minutes of it taking place. Winston Scott read Goodpasture’s report and next to the transcript of Duran’s call to the Soviet embassy, he wrote: “Is it possible to identify”.

It later emerged that the CIA station in Mexico was already monitoring Silvia Duran. According to David Atlee Phillips, the CIA surveillance program had revealed that Duran was having an affair with Carlos Lechuga, the former Cuban ambassador in Mexico City, who was in 1963 serving as Castro’s ambassador to the United Nations.

When Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested in Dallas shortly after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Duran immediately recognized him as the man who visited the Cuban consul's office on 27th September. This was reinforced by the discovery of Duran's name and phone number in Oswald's address book. However, Eusebio Azcue, another man who met Oswald in the office, said the man had dark blond hair and had features quite different from those of the man arrested in Dallas.

Soon after the assassination of John F. Kennedy Scott contacted Luis Echeverria and asked his men to arrest Silvia Duran. He also told Diaz Ordaz that Duran was to be held incommunicado until she gave all details of her contacts with Lee Harvey Oswald. Scott then reported his actions to CIA headquarters. Soon afterwards, John M. Whitten, the CIA head of the Mexican desk, called Scott with orders from Tom Karamessines that Duran was not to be arrested. Win told them it was too late and that the Mexican government would keep the whole thing secret. Karamessines replied with a telegram that began: “Arrest of Sylvia Duran is extremely serious matter which could prejudice U.S. freedom of action on entire question of Cuban responsibility.”

Silvia Duran, her husband and five other people were arrested. Duran was “interrogated forcefully” (Duran was badly bruised during the interview). Luis Echeverria reported to Winston Scott that Duran had been “completely cooperative” and had made a detailed statement. This statement matched the story of the surveillance transcripts, with one exception. The tapes indicated that Duran made another call to the Soviet embassy on Saturday, 28th September. Duran then put an American on the line who spoke incomprehensible Russian. This suggests that the man could not have been Oswald who spoke the language well.

Four days later she was arrested Richard Helms cabled Winston Scott: "We want to ensure that neither Silvia Duran nor Cubans get impression that Americans behind her re-arrest. In other words, we want Mexican authorities to take responsibility for whole affair.

Scott continued as head of the CIA station in Mexico. According to Anne Goodpasture: "Win never trusted anyone. The deputies were in a position that it was pretty much in name only because Win was there all the time. He was prone to exaggeration, and in retrospect, I felt that he probably didn't want to be away because they would find out that he was probably exaggerating things. There were numerous instances in which he changed figures. Somebody would describe a crowd of 500 in the newspaper; he would add another zero."

Lisa Pease quotes Eddie Lopez as saying that that Goodpasture, "in addition to her duties for Scott, ran all of David Phillips’ operations." Goodpasture was later to receive a career achievement award on the recommendation of David Atlee Phillips, who cited her for having discovered Oswald at the Cuban embassy.

According to John Newman Goodpasture took part in the CIA cover-up of the assassination of John F. Kennedy: "The cover-up was apparently put in motion the day after the assassination by Anne Goodpasture (unless someone else altered the cables she sent after the fact) in the CIA station in Mexico City. But it was a sloppy cover-up. Files released in the mid-1990s show she sent a cable at noon (1pm EST) on Nov. 23 stating that a voice comparison (between two intercepted phone calls) had not been made at the time of Oswald's visit because one tape (presumably of the Saturday, Sept. 28 call) had been erased before another had been received (presumably from the Oct. 1 intercept). It was unlikely this would have happened, however, as tapes were kept for at least two weeks before erasure. It was necessary to deny that a voice comparison with the Cuban consulate tape had taken place, in order to facilitate the cover story that the station had not realized that Oswald had visited the Cuban consulate."

In 1995 Anne Goodpasture gave evidence to the Assassination Records Review Board. As Lisa Pease points out, when asked about the politics of David Atlee Phillips: "Goodpasture tells a story that remains redacted, a fact especially disturbing when one considers the whole purpose of the ARRB was to release previously classified materials, not to add to the secrets. But from the nature of the testimony around the redacted portion, we can gather that she is giving us some indication that Phillips was not the liberal he painted himself to be."

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Primary Sources

(1) Jefferson Morley, Our Man in Mexico (2008)

Anne Goodpasture, as much as anyone, would tell the tale of Win Scott's glory days in Mexico. She wrote the definitive history of the CIA's Mexico City station during his tenure as station chief. Her masterpiece a meticulously typed and footnoted 500-page tome-remains, a half century after the events it describes, mostly a state secret. It always impressed Michael how sensitive his father's life story was. Somehow his long-forgotten deeds still mattered enough to the U.S. government to be kept secret well into the twenty-first century.

Michael remembered Anne Goodpasture "Miss Goodpasture" to him. She had bestowed many kindnesses upon him when he was a boy. Little did he know that the serene lady who showed him around his father's office excelled in the clandestine arts. She looked like a librarian but had the skills of a burglar. In the science of "flaps and seals"-opening other people's mail, reading it, copying it, and figuring out what they were up to without anyone being the wiser-Miss Goodpasture was unsurpassed. So, too, in the art of keeping a secret. When she and Michael spoke at her south Dallas condominium many years later, Goodpasture recalled Win with critical precision and dry humor. Her spy stories sparkled most often when she executed an impeccable defensive maneuver around a bit of classified information that was at least forty years old. "I don't talk about operations," she said. Decades on, she still knew how to parry.

Anne Goodpasture understood Win more than most because she had risen in the outfit in much the same way he had. She was from the South, the daughter of Tennessee schoolteachers, and lived up to the state's reputation for producing shrewd people. She had landed in the OSS during the war, served in Burma, and excelled far more than her colleague Julia McWilliams, who married and went on to fame as a cookbook author, Julia Child. Anne Goodpasture went on to a desk job in CIA headquarters, where she came to the attention of Jim Angleton.

Angleton, as chief of the new Counterintelligence Staff, was building an empire. He was just a bit stooped now. The good looks of the brilliant young comer had hardened into the glacial glare of the seasoned bureaucratic warrior. He had a larger corner office in the L Building with venetian blinds in the windows that blocked a view of the Lincoln Memorial. He employed no fewer than six secretaries. Office lore had it that he had cracked the Philby case, which was far from true. He was, said David Phillips, the "CIAs answer to the Delphic Oracle: seldom seen, but with an awesome reputation nurtured over the years by word of mouth and intermediaries padding out of his office with pronouncements which we seldom professed to understand fully." One awestruck FBI man saw Angleton as a wraith: "His hair was slicked back from a pale forehead, a bony blade of nose, sunken cheeks, and an elegantly pointed chin a chiseled, cadaverous face." His intellectually sweeping defense against the Soviet KGB's efforts to penetrate America's secret operations required eternal vigilance. He had secured big budget increases from Dulles. His staff included ninety-six professionals, seventy-five clerical workers, four staff agents, and one contract agent. He drank to the point of inebriation daily. He also functioned brilliantly.

In 1957 Angleton needed someone to help run down leads on a suspected Soviet spy living in Mexico City He sent Goodpasture. She outperformed the station officer who was supposedly working the case, and Angleton noticed. When that officer left Mexico, Angleton arranged with Win for her to stay.

As station chief in the Mexican capital Win needed - no, demanded - help. "Shortly after I arrived," Goodpasture recalled, "someone who was a woman, who was a reports officer, was standing just outside the door of the office where I was sitting and Mr. Scott walked by and said to this lady, "Type this up," and she said, "I'm not a typist, I'm a reports officer, that's not my job." And he said, "I'm chief of station here, your job is to mop the floor if I tell you to." A loyal and laconic woman, Goodpasture adapted to her new boss. "I caught on real quick that when he told me to do something, even if it was someone else's area, if he wanted me to type something, I would type it, and then I would take it to the person and say Mr. Scott told me to write this."

(2) John Newman, Oswald, the CIA and Mexico City (2003)

The cover-up was apparently put in motion the day after the assassination by Anne Goodpasture (unless someone else altered the cables she sent after the fact) in the CIA station in Mexico City. But it was a sloppy coverup. Files released in the mid-1990s show she sent a cable at noon (1pm EST) on Nov. 23 stating that a voice comparison (between two intercepted phone calls) had not been made at the time of Oswald's visit because one tape (presumably of the Saturday, Sept. 28 call) had been erased before another had been received (presumably from the Oct. 1 intercept). It was unlikely this would have happened, however, as tapes were kept for at least two weeks before erasure. It was necessary to deny that a voice comparison with the Cuban consulate tape had taken place, in order to facilitate the cover story that the station had not realized that Oswald had visited the Cuban consulate.

But Goodpasture's cable only ruled out a voice comparison at the time, and left unresolved the issue of what tapes had survived. So, at 2:37 EST the following day, Sunday, Nov. 24, Goodpasture sent another cable saying all the tapes had been erased.

Whether these cables were inserted or altered after the fact no longer matters. They constitute the extant record and are not true. Ms. Goodpasture's erasure cables are contradicted by her own 1995 deposition to the Assassination Records Review Board in which she stated she thought a tape dub had been hand-carried to the Texas border the night of the assassination, and that a copy of the tape was made at the CIA telephone tap center. She added that she was sure a copy of the tape would have been sent up to Washington as soon as it had been made.

Newly released internal CIA documents from the weeks following the assassination reveal that another copy of the October 1 intercept was found at that time, and that "the actual tapes" were reviewed. Furthermore, the Assassination Records Review Board also verified that in 1964 two Warren Commission attorneys, Coleman and Slawson, had traveled to the Mexico City station and listened to the tapes. There is no mention of this in either the Warren Commission's 26 volumes or its final report.

(3) Lisa Pease, James Jesus Angleton and the Kennedy Assassination (September-October, 2000)

There are strange connections that link these various players. Shortly before the assassination, Oswald’s CI/SIG-held 201 file was transferred to the Mexico City Headquarters desk, responsible to John Whitten and supported by desk officer Charlotte Bustos. (Bustos is identified as Elsie Scaleti in the Lopez Report.)

Bustos, Ann Egerter of Angleton’s CI/SIG unit (the woman who opened the 201 file on "Lee Henry [sic] Oswald"), and Stephan Roll, Angleton’s CI liaison to the SR (Soviet Russia) division, drafted the two now infamous communications that cause much suspicion of the CIA’s involvement in the Kennedy assassination. Although the two communications were drafted at the same time, the cable to CIA in Mexico City describes Oswald as 5’10", 165 pounds, with light brown hair; whereas the teletype to the State Department, Navy and the FBI describes Oswald as being approximately 35 years old, 6’ tall, with an athletic build and a receding hairline. Why would Angleton’s people be collaborating with the Mexico City desk officer to mislead other agencies within the government unless they were in some measure trying to hide or protect Oswald’s identity?

Immediately following the assassination, Bustos allegedly found a photo of Oswald from the CIA’s Mexico City surveillance operations. Phil Agee, Joseph Burkholder Smith, Daniel Watson, and Joseph Piccolo, all CIA employees at some point, recalled hearing about - and in the latter two cases, actually viewing - such a photo. According to Agee, Bustos found the photo within an hour or two of the President’s assassination. John Whitten said of Bustos that she had a "fantastic memory" and yet, like E. Howard Hunt, Bustos cannot recall what she was doing the day of the assassination. But Anne Goodpasture is the person who supplied the photo the CIA showed to the FBI as a possible picture of "Oswald". (Curiously, Goodpasture said in an unsworn ARRB interview that headquarters refused to send a photo of Oswald to Mexico City, and she was never sure why. Of course we know from Oswald’s CIA file that indeed news clippings from his defection with his photo were present, so the CIA did have a photo of Oswald to share, and could also have easily obtained more had they asked the Navy or FBI.)

If Bustos had found a photo, another question is raised. Was Bustos’ picture a true picture of Oswald? Or was it a picture of just another person who was not Oswald? If Bustos’ picture was of Oswald, for the CIA to have supplied Goodpasture’s "Mystery Man" photo in place of the real photo suggests a deliberate effort to deceive. In that case, Bustos’ picture would have to have been "disappeared" by the agency, lest the evidence of their deception come to light. And if Bustos’ picture was not Oswald but another man who looked like him, that also suggests a deliberate effort to deceive, as the picture was shown to at least two others within the CIA as evidence that Oswald had been in Mexico City, a point which has never been fully proven. To date, the CIA has taken the only safe road available, claiming (despite multiple accounts to the contrary) that no such picture was ever found.

Anne Goodpasture told Jeremy Gunn of the ARRB that she had worked at one point during her CIA career for James Angleton as a counterintelligence officer, and that it was the CI group that sent her to Mexico City in 1957. Asked to explain the difference between CE (counterespionage) and CI (counterintelligence), Goodpasture replied, "Counterespionage was the activity and Counterintelligence was the product."

From Mexico, Goodpasture had worked on the case of Rudolph Abel, a Soviet agent working in New York City and curiously, living one apartment below famed author, FPCC activist and latter-day CIA apologist Norman Mailer. Angleton said of Goodpasture, "I personally have had very little dealings with her but my men had had a lot of dealings with her. She was always in on very sensitive cases." Goodpasture was also involved with Staff D, which was seriously involved with several coup attempts and assassination plots. To the ARRB, Goodpasture downplayed her involvement in Staff D, claiming that she was simply involved in duplicating and distributing materials. However, according to Angleton, Goodpasture was "very close" to Bill Harvey.

Goodpasture maintained that in 1963 her sole duty was to the Mexico City station and Win Scott. Goodpasture tells us that Win Scott was "very, very conservative. He was from Alabama and I think he was a supporter of George Wallace."

Goodpasture was later to receive a career achievement award on the recommendation of David Atlee Phillips, who cited her for having discovered Oswald at the Cuban embassy. Goodpasture was responsible for delivering the "deep snow" photo of the Mexico "Mystery Man". Significantly for our purposes, Goodpasture was also the liaison and in most cases, the sole point of contact, outside of Win Scott, David Phillips, and Scott’s deputy, Alan White, to the other agencies of the U.S. government regarding the Mexico City station’s CIA operations. And like too many others in this small cadre of CIA employees, Goodpasture has trouble remembering the moment of Kennedy’s assassination: "I think I heard about it from a phone call from our outside person on the phone tap operation, and I believe it was around lunchtime when there weren’t too many people there and as they all filtered back in, there was office gossip, but I have tried to remember. I’ve heard so many people say I can remember, I was standing at the telephone or I was in the drugstore, or I was in church and I really don’t remember who all were there at the time. Dave Phillips said that someone from the military attaché’s office came up and told him about it and I don’t remember that....I don’t even remember him being in the station at that time."

According to Eddie Lopez, Goodpasture, in addition to her duties for Scott, ran all of David Phillips’ operations. When asked about Phillips’ politics, Goodpasture tells a story that remains redacted, a fact especially disturbing when one considers the whole purpose of the ARRB was to release previously classified materials, not to add to the secrets. But from the nature of the testimony around the redacted portion, we can gather that she is giving us some indication that Phillips was not the liberal he painted himself to be. The redaction ends with Goodpasture saying "...but there again, I hate for things like this to be published because there are 2,000 – over 2,000 books already been [sic] written. The thing that they are looking for is something of this type that they can put in the other book to come that will be just short of slander, and I feel that I shouldn’t really comment on the personalities for that reason. I don’t want my former co-workers or in Phillips’ case, his family, to think that I’m trying to project him as a personality that was a show-off or something other than the very sincere wonderful man that they feel that he is."