CIA Surveillance of Oswald: How We Got the Story
Three sleuths in search of a source with a sensational JFK story – and proof the agency had photographed the alleged assassin weeks before Nov. 22
[NOTE: This “how we did it” is a cross-post from JFK Facts. a publication dedicated to abolishing the official secrecy that still surrounds the JFK assassination records. I am a research contributor on the site and I recommend you check out the regular posts and podcasts there. #FreeTheDocuments!]
The Central Intelligence Agency has always maintained that it failed to capture any photographs of Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin, when he visited the Soviet Embassy and Cuban Consulate in Mexico City six weeks before President John F. Kennedy was struck down in Dallas.
CIA officials have repeated this claim to all of the governmental investigations of the ambush in Dallas. They have insisted that none of the surveillance cameras trained on the Soviet and Cuban offices were operating at the time the Oswald entered and exited while seeking to obtain a visa to travel to Havana and Moscow.
To test this claim, JFK Facts went looking for people who might know whether the CIA’s account was true or not. To be specific, we went looking for former CIA employees in Mexico City. And we found one.
This is how we got the story that revealed the CIA wasn’t being truthful about not capturing photos of Oswald just weeks before JFK was killed.
Our Methods
The primary challenges faced by investigative journalists and researchers seeking to clarify the historical record of the JFK assassination are (1) ongoing government secrecy over relevant documents, (2) a paucity of living witnesses, and (3) widespread reluctance among survivors to come forward to tell the public what they know.
We sought to identify and locate surviving witnesses to – or agents of – the CIA’s photographic surveillance of the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City in autumn 1963. We reviewed documents housed in the JFK Records Collection at the National Archives, and available online at Mary Ferrell Foundation website. We used genealogical sites to find deceased people and living children. And we coaxed them to talk about what they knew.
This story originated in a moment. Reading the latest JFK files released by President Biden on June 27, 2023, Chad Nagle of JFK Facts noticed an undated CIA document, which had only single tantalizing line of redaction.
Nagle looked closer at the sentence in which words were censored. SCANTLING was the code name for a CIA agent in Mexico City.
And an agent known as LIEMPTY-6 was “the photo tech who took the pictures” at the time ”when OSWALD allegedly visited the Soviet Embassy.”
If we could find LIEMPTY-6, the person “who took the pictures,” we could test the CIA’s claim that it never obtained a surveillance photo of Oswald.
Nagle searched for earlier versions of the same document on the Mary Ferrell website. He found that the CIA had long regarded this report as highly sensitive.
When first released on 1997, this document was defaced with 36 redactions in just a page and a half. In 2017, President Trump authorized its release with 14 redactions. In 2022, President Biden released the document with all but two redactions removed, thus finally identifying the subject of the entire memo.
He wasn’t LIEMPTY-6. He was Ramón Joseph Alvarez Durant, a Mexican contract agent employed by the CIA. For a decade he supervised a team of photo surveillance agents in an operation codenamed “LIEMPTY,” which watched the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City at the time Oswald is believed to have visited. Alvarez was known by the cryptonym, LIEMPTY-1.
A close reading of the documents showed that SCANTLING was the code name for Juan Nepomuseno Frias-Ramirez. Nagle published a story about what he had learned. “CIA Protects Two Mexican Agents Who Surveilled Lee Harvey Oswald.”
We focused on Alvarez because he was a credible insider witness. The CIA considered him a high-value agent and carefully concealed his identity until after his death. The only photo of Alvarez available online was a low-resolution image from an old visa application.
Checking public records databases, JFK Facts’ Margot Williams found that Ramón Alvarez and his former wife, Hester Roos-Alvarez (also an agent, known as LIEMPTY-19), had died in 2018, four years before the CIA revealed their identities.
Dead end? More like a detour.
Tradecraft in Mexico City
Jefferson Morley ran Alvarez’s name through the Mary Ferrell search engine and found that Alvarez had testified behind closed doors to congressional investigators in 1978. The document didn’t show up on searches on the Mary Ferrell site, even though it was known to be in the JFK collection. So Nagle went in person to the Archives II facility in College Park, Maryland where the JFK collection is housed. There he found the paper copy of Alvarez’s testimony in the Staff Notes of the CIA Segregated Collection, Box 21, Folder 42 (CIA Box 29).
(It turned out the document was on the Mary Ferrell site but without any metadata about the interviewer or interviewee. That’s a reminder of the limitations of online searching. Some things — many things — are only found on paper.)
The handwritten summary of the interview showed the CIA took extraordinary precautions when the House Select Committee on Assassination (HSCA) interviewed Alvarez in a Mexico City hotel room.
To prevent the HSCA staffers, Edwin Lopez and Harold Leap, from actually meeting Alvarez face to face, the CIA rented three rooms. Alvarez was in one, the HSCA staffers in another, and two CIA men introduced only as “Steve and Bruce” in a third.
This cloak and dagger tradecraft was a measure of the importance the CIA attached to Alvarez as a source.
What the Spy Said
Alvarez’s closed-door testimony revealed some of the closest held secrets of the CIA in Mexico City.
He said there were “three manned photo bases covering the Soviet Embassy” in 1963. One was across the street “approximately at the second floor”; another was “a couple of houses down at a high angle.” This way, if there was a lot of traffic, ”the base with the higher angle would get a photo.” The third base “covered the backyard” of the embassy compound.
Alvarez “stated that he was ‘quite certain’ that the stations were manned Mondays through Saturdays from 10-6.”
As supervisor of the LIEMPTY surveillance team, Alvarez said he “was always under the impression that they had gotten a photo of Oswald “because “90-95% of all foreigners who visited the Soviet Embassy even once were photographed.”
Alvarez’s account conflicted with the CIA’s story but did not disprove it because Alvarez himself had not taken or seen an Oswald photo.
Did the Alvarez couple ever share their work with their children, we wondered?
Williams found a son of Ramon and Hester Roos-Alvarez living in California. Morley contacted him, and he referred us to his sisters, Madeleine and Adriana, living in Europe. They had seen some of the records about their father online and were glad to talk. They said their parents were secretive about their work. One recalled her father would say, “I’m off to see a man about a dog” as he departed for his mysterious job. She also said he developed the CIA’s photos in a darkroom in their apartment.
They had no idea who LIEMPTY-6 was. Their parents never said anything about Oswald. We didn’t come away empty-handed. Morley did an amusing story about Ramon Alvarez, a charming spy who went on to play bit parts in Hollywood spy movies.
Another Lead
Ramon Alvarez’s testimony yielded another lead. He recalled that he retrieved film from an observation post called LYRIC, which was run by a meticulous woman identified in the CIA records as LIEMPTY-14.
Morley recognized that code name from a declassified history of the Mexico City station, written by Anne Goodpasture, a senior officer in the station. Goodpasture said that LIEMPTY-14’s “daily logs and reports were detailed and complete. The photographs were sharp and clear.”
LIEMPTY-14, it was said, had the best vantage point for photos of visitors as her camera was aimed at the Soviet embassy’s front gate. Described as the wife of an industrial engineer (identified as LIEMPTY-13), she was assisted by her two sons (LIEMPTY-26 and LIEMPTY-27), one of whom was a student at the Mexican Technological Institute.
So we put aside LIEMPTY-6 and set out to answer a new question: Who was LIEMPTY-14? She took the best photos of the Soviet Embassy and her sons assisted her. She might well be deceased, but if the sons were living, they would be well-informed.
Aerial Clues
From the documents, Nagle had developed a lot of detail about exactly where the photo observation bases were located. If we could locate public records about who resided in the buildings across the street from the Soviet Embassy in 1963, we could hire a researcher in Mexico City to go through them and see who lived at those addresses.
Nagle found a key clue attached to a CIA document. It was an aerial photo showing the location of LYRIC base house in 1963. He compared it to the same location today. The last address of the LYRIC building was C. Gobernador Gregorio V. Gelati 2, otherwise known as Gelati #2.
And then sometimes you just get lucky. That, or luck is the residue of hard work.
JFK Facts’ Williams was browsing a 1967 document on the LIEMPTY program when she noticed a list of the tenants on all five floors of Gelati #2. For the top-floor apartment where the LYRIC base was located, the tenant was listed as “Andres Goyenechea.”
We didn’t need to go look at property records in Mexico City.
The CIA had accidentally declassified the name of the family that staffed the LYRIC base.
Andres Goyenechea was the tenant of the top floor apartment of Gelati #2 where the LYRIC photo surveillance base was located. He had to be the engineer known as LIEMPTY-13. We were looking for his wife.
Getting Warmer
Andres Goyenechea Osorno became traceable through online public records in the U.S. after one of his sons moved to America. He died in 2005. His wife was Greta Irizar Goyenechea, who died in 2008.
One small step became one giant leap. LIEMPTY-14 was a Mexican woman named Greta Goyenechea.
Williams found her son, also Andres Goyenechea, living in Washington state. When Morley ncontacted him, he readily agreed to talk about his mother on a Zoom call. Goyenechea, a retired car dealer, recalled growing up at Gelati #2. He confirmed that he worked for his parents. He was the person identified as LIEMPTY-26 in CIA records. He said he worked the photo surveillance camera in the afternoon after attending his university courses in the morning. He recalled his mother as a meticulous person who shared his father’s military discipline.
He said she told him about taking Oswald’s photo.
“My mother was not a person who talked too much about it,” he said. “But she said, yeah, I remembered he was there. She took a couple of pictures when he came in and a couple of pictures when he went out. My mom, she had a photographic memory. If somebody came on Oct. 4 and didn’t show up again until Nov. 15, she would know that.”
And that’s how we proved that the CIA’s story about not obtaining a photo of Oswald is false.
In fact, the CIA did obtain more than one photo of Oswald shortly before President Kennedy was killed. Instead of sharing Greta Goyenechea’s photos of Oswald with assassination investigators, they covered up the evidence and pretended to the world they were not surveilling Oswald.
Hi Chad and Margot I positively enjoyed reading your post. If I may, I’d like to suggest four possible future guest speakers for any upcoming JFK Facts Podcasts for Tuesday’s shows: Barry Jones,(Standards Plus History Academy), David Knight, Casey Quinlan, Brian Edwards (Project JFK), or John Newman (Uncovering Popov’s Mole). Thank you, Ron
Hi Margot, Thanks, for the kind words! Thank you, Ron