In any case, Oswald's voice was recorded in Mexico City and Winston Scott saved one of the recordings in his home. He kept it even after he retired. The CIA did not admit that such a recording existed until 1976. Then it lied that the recordings were all destroyed before the assassination. The FBI later said that the voice on the tapes was not Oswald's at all. Someone impersonating Oswald prior to the assasination? The Mexico City episode is crucial to any portrayal of Oswald as an emotionally volatile crank, but in a 1978 debate with attorney and pioneering conspiracy researcher Mark Lane the CIA's former western hemisphere chief David Atlee Philips announced that "there is no evidence to show that Lee Harvey Oswald visited the Soviet embassy." If he didn't, who did? Lane called Philips startling statement a "confession."

Philips was the CIA spokesman before congress re: the Oswald tapes. This is the David Philips suspected by the House Select Committee on Assassinations of doubling as the shadowy "Maurice Bishop" CIA overseer of the Cuban Alpha 66 anti-Castro brigade. The same David Philips in charge of spinning the Oswald-Mexico City incident in the CIA's favor may have engineered the "Mexico City scenario" in the first place. Lane, who has made a legal and literary career out of blaming the CIA for JFK's death, says he did.

Alpha 66's Cuban leader Antonio Veciana claimed that at one of his hundred or so meetings with Bishop, Oswald was there not saying anything, just acting odd.

"I always thought Bishop was working with Oswald during the assassination," Veciana told Russell.

Veciana's cousin worked for Castro's intelligence service and after the assassination Bishop wanted Veciana to bribe his cousin into saying that he met with Oswald, in order to fabricate an Oswald-Castro connection.