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   [  ] 15 Out of the Loop When Michael thought back to what he was doing in the fall of 1963 as his father wrote cables about Lee Harvey Oswald, the first thing that came to mind were the family dogs. “We lived in a large home at Paseo de la Reforma 2035 in Mexico City which had expansive gardens and a roof top patio,” he recalled. “Arete, the German shepherd that had come to join the family when Janet married Win, had the privilege to roam the yard for the morning and early afternoon, while Chato, Win’s bulldog, remained on the roof top patio. At around 2 p.m. there would be a shift: Chato would be allowed to have yard privileges while Arete would be confined to the patio. It worked most of the time, but every now and then there would be a mishap and the two dogs would tangle in a fight to the death.” It was September 1963. Michael had just turned eight years old. “It was a horrifying scene—to be present while these two creatures went at it. The bulldog would instinctively try to latch himself to attack the throat of Arete, as he in turn would bite at any part of Chato that he could get a hold of. The sound of their terrifying struggle is something I will never forget. The end would come when some brave adult, usually my father or Antonio, his driver, would step in and open up Chato’s jaws with their hands and pull him away while someone else restrained Arete. I recall seeing Chato unable to walk for days after being pulled out of the fight by his hind legs.” For the boy, what stuck in his mind was the rage of canines and the courage of his father. For Win, what endured about that time September 1963 was the more subtle and lethal business of Lee [  ]   c h a p t e r 15 Oswald and the deceptions that enshrouded it. In the difference, Michael glimpsed how his father’s secret profession and deliberate character had shaped his boyhood. Amid deadly struggle, his father exhibited a reassuring calmness. Win received the answer to his query about Oswald via cable on October 10, 1963, a week after Oswald returned to the United States and settled in Dallas. Defenders of the CIA and those who exclude the possibility of conspiracy in Kennedy’s assassination contend that this communication document is “routine.” Read in the context of Win Scott’s and David Phillips’s operations, however, the cable shows that as the diverse streams of intelligence about Oswald were absorbed at headquarters, Win Scott was cut out of the loop. The response came from Dick Helms’s trusted assistant, Tom Karamessines . A former OSS man like Win, Karamessines had distinguished himself as a frontline operator supporting the anticommunist forces in the vicious Greek civil war of 1946–1948. He went on to become the chief of the CIA station in Athens and patron for a generation of Greek American spies, including George Joannides, the handler of the DRE/AMSPELL account in Miami. In the cable, Karamessines passed on what headquarters purported to know about Oswald. The three-page message stated that Oswald had defected to the Soviet Union and attempted to renounce U.S. citizenship in Moscow on October 31, 1959. He married a Russian woman, Marina Prusakova, in April 1961 and had second thoughts about becoming a Soviet citizen. His U.S. passport was returned to him in 1962, and he left the Soviet Union in May 1962 to return to the States. The cable passed along the view of the U.S. embassy in Moscow that “twenty months of realities of life in Soviet Union had clear maturing effect on Oswald.” According to the cable, the last thing the agency had heard about Oswald was that the chastened young man was trying to come home. Then came this line: “Latest HDQS info[rmation] was [State Department ] report dated May 1962 stating [it] had determined Oswald is still U.S. citizen and both he and his Soviet wife have exit permits and Dept. of State had given approval for their travel with infant child to USA.” Latest headquarters information. This seemingly authoritative and innocuous phrase was, in fact, intended to mislead, as one of its authors would later concede. Concocted by Angleton’s Counterintelligence Staff and sanctioned by anti-Castro operations officers, this morsel of misinformation kept...

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