Episode 321 Oswald Goes To Mexico Part 23 The Sylvia Duran Story Part 5

Welcome to JFK in the Enduring Secret. I'm your host, Jeff Crudell.

Hello everyone and welcome back to the podcast. Today's episode is episode 321 and of course

it's a continuation of the Sylvia Durand miniseries. Part 5. Today we're going to a twist party. In our

previous episodes we remained trapped inside the dark interrogation rooms of the Mexican secret police.

We explored the agonizing torture of Sylvia Durand and the fabricated high stakes geopolitical

lies of the Alvarado hoax. Today we step out of the basement and into the living rooms of

Mexico City's left wing elite because while the official story maintains that Lee Harvey Oswald was

an isolated, friendless lone wolf who simply walked up to a consular desk. It was a far more explosive

rumor that was circulating. It was a rumor that Oswald had not just visited the Cuban embassy but

had actively socialized with its diplomats at a private gathering. A rumor involving a prominent

Mexican writer, mysterious American beatniks, and a highly placed CIA informant who specialized

in infiltrating the Fairplay for Cuba committee. That's right. Folks, you just can't write this stuff.

Welcome to the twist party.

To understand this chapter of the story, so to speak, we have to introduce a woman named

Alina Gato de Paz. Alina Garo was no ordinary figure. She was one of Mexico's most celebrated

writers and playwrights. She was brilliant, politically engaged, and by many accounts volatile,

little paranoid, and prone to dramatic claims. She was the former wife of no bel laureate Octavio Paz,

from whom she had a famously bitter divorce. She had done graduate work at Berkeley and the

University of Paris, and she spoke several languages. She was, by almost any measure, refined.

But more importantly, for our story, she was connected by marriage to Sylvia Durant.

Gato was the cousin of Sylvia's husband Horatio and his siblings Rubin and Lydia Durant.

Despite the family ties, there was no love loss between these two women.

Alina Garo was a staunch anti-communist who held deep personal animosity towards Sylvia

and her leftist family. Declassified CIA files, record Garo's own assessment of the family,

Horatio, Rubin, and Lydia were all allegedly communist sympathizers in her view.

She described Lydia as very poor, holding a small job at the Anthropological Museum,

and she referred to Sylvia in the most derogatory of terms. The CIA filed bluntly records that

Garo hated Sylvia and considered her a whore. This combination of literary brilliance,

personal bitterness mixed in with the proximity to the Durant circle makes Garo both a compelling

and deeply problematic witness. Her supporters say she was a courageous truth teller,

persecuted for what she knew. Her detractors, well, they point to when Scott's hand-written

assessment on one of her reports. And I quote, and this is what he wrote, she is also nuts.

Garo's central claim was this. In late September of 1963, the exact

window when Oswald was documented to be in Mexico City, well, she attended a lively social

gathering at the home of Rubin Durant, Sylvia's brother-in-law. The party became immortalized

in assassination law as the twist party, because Garo recalled guests dancing the twist.

Chubby checkers' hit was wildly popular in Mexico at the time, and it was driven by Bill Haley

in his comments, Spanish language twist records, on the Orpheon label. Garo attended with her

daughter, Helena, and her sister, Diva Gararo. Among the guests she recognized were Sylvia Durant

and Horatio. Consul, Eusebio Ascu, and other figures from the Cuban diplomatic circle were also

there based on what she said, and members of the Mexican intellectual community as well. But it was

who else she claimed to see that made the story so explosive? Standing off to the side completely

out of place in this vibrant Spanish-speaking gathering were three young American men.

Garo described them as quiet, not drinking, not mixing, just standing around together.

She claimed she asked someone about them, and she was told that they were just passing through.

According to Garo, one of those three men was Lee Harvey Oswald. She described him wearing a

black sweater, keeping entirely to himself, and staring at the floor. His two companions were

described as beatnik-looking boys. One very tall and slender with long blonde hair and a protruding

shin. The other also tall with short, light-brown hair. Garo said she saw the three together again,

the next day, walking down the street, suggesting they were traveling companions, not casual acquaintances.

In subsequent tellings the details grew more sensational. When she spoke to State Department

Officer Charles Thomas in 1965, she added a chilling element, and she said a Latin American

Negro man with red hair was present. I wonder where she got that? And she overheard a heated

discussion about Kennedy in which someone stated that the only solution was to kill him.

That red hair Negro should sound familiar, shouldn't it? It was the exact highly-specific

description used by Gilberto Alvarado in his debunked hoax, about a $6,500 pay-off inside the Cuban

Embassy. The overlap between the Alvarado and Garo stories down to this bizarre physical detail

either means both witnesses saw the same real person or someone was coordinating the narratives.

Imagine that. So, how did this story reach the CIA? Well, this is where the rabbit hole goes

incredibly deep. The first documented appearance of the twist party in the official CIA record

comes on October 5, 1964. It was relayed by an American informant who reportedly overhearing Garo

and her daughter and her sister discussing the party in reaction to the newly published Warren

report. You know who that was? Oh, and that informant was June Cobb.

June Cobb was not a casual bystander. She was Viola June Cobb, born in Oklahoma in 1927.

She was a former narcotics trafficker, turned intelligence asset. Imagine that. A woman who had worked

inside Fidel Castro's headquarters in Havana as a translator. Notably translating,

Castro's history will absolve me speech. And she also translated former Guatemalan president

Aravalo's book The Shark and the Sardines. And here's a detail that she raised the hair

on the back of your neck. Oswald checked out a copy of The Shark and the Sardines from the Dallas

Public Library around November 6, 1963. You know, that book was never returned.

Folks, you just can't write this stuff. By 1963, the CIA had re-approved Cobb as an informant

under the Krypton M like Cookie One, despite an early security memo recommending no further contact

with her. She was transferred to Mexico City, where she reported directly to Guess Who?

That's right. David Atley Phillips, the CIA's chief of operations for the Western Hemisphere

and the mastermind behind the first disinformation campaigns aimed at discrediting the fair play

for Cuba committee. The same FPCC that Oswald famously started, well, not only the chapter in

New Orleans. And where was June Cobb living when she overheard this explosive story? She was

living as a renter inside the home of Alina Garo. Oh my, imagine that. A CIA asset who specialized

in penetrating the fair play for Cuba committee reporting to the man who ran anti-fair play for Cuba

committee operations. And she just happened to be living in the home of the cousin of Sylvia

Durant's husband. And she was the first person to relay the twist party story into the intelligence

stream. Well, Cobb's stay at Garo's home ended abruptly and perhaps as bizarrely as it was abrupt.

She was asked to leave after Garo's cat was found with its back legs inexplicably broken.

The CIA's file on Cobb is estimated to contain over 2,500 pages. Following the Kennedy

assassination, all documents related to her work were marked secret. And when the HSCA tried to

investigate in the late 1970s, the CIA refused to help investigators locate Cobb for an interview.

But there are troubling indications that the twist party story did not originate with the

October 1964 CIA report. There are signs that Garo was telling this story from the very first days

after the assassination. On November 23rd, 1963, the day after Kennedy was killed,

Garo and her daughter reportedly went to the gates of the Cuban Embassy and began shouting,

Fidel Azacino at the staff. Shortly afterward, a man named Manuel Carvillo,

the interior ministry, which was heavily controlled by Scott's Light Tempo network,

will they physically escort Garo and her daughter to a small obscure hotel. Later investigations

confirmed that Garo stayed at the hotel Vermont for several days. Now, why would Mexican authorities

hide Elena Garo in a hotel right after the assassination? That just does not happen to random

citizens. It suggests someone Mexican intelligence, the CIA, or both, knew immediately that Garo had

potentially explosive information and they wanted to either protect her or control her.

When Garo told Carvillo that she wanted to go to the American Embassy to explain what she knew,

she was explicitly warned not to. Being told, the embassy was full of communist spies.

Within the Durand family itself, there were devastatingly private emissions,

if the declassified files as of later to be believed. According to CIA records, Ruben Durand,

Elena Garo's cousin, Sylvia's brother-in-law, and the man at whose home the party allegedly took place,

reportedly said that he was not really a communist, that they should not have killed Kennedy,

and that Sylvia got him involved with Oswald. If that's true, this statement from within the

family circle is extraordinary. But we mean a member of the Durand family was privately acknowledging

that the Oswald connection went beyond a consulate counter-interaction. The State Department

officer who became most deeply interested in Garo's claims was Charles William Thomas. Thomas

was not a conspiracy theorist. He was a conscientious career diplomat stationed at the US Embassy in

Mexico City from 1964 to 1967. He first encountered Garo's story in December of 1965, and he found

her credible enough to document her allegations in a series of memoranda. Now, Thomas recognized that

the Garo allegations, even if true, would not by themselves prove a conspiracy to kill Kennedy.

But he argued, with measured professional precision, that they warranted investigation.

His key warning was about institutional credibility. If these allegations ever became public and it

turned out that the government had known about them and done nothing, the damage would be devastating.

His memo to Secretary of State William Rogers concluded this, and this is what he said.

The credibility of the Warren report would be damaged, all the more, if it were learned that these

allegations were known and never adequately investigated. Thomas's last day at the State Department

was July 31, 1969, just six days after the date on his memo to Rogers. And despite

glowing recommendations, at eighteen years of excellent service, he was inexplicably dismissed

from the foreign service. His wife, Cynthia later said it was nonsensical. Charles was the best

sort of American diplomat. Two years later, on April 12, 1971, Charles Thomas shot himself,

in the second floor bathroom of the couple's home in Washington. His widow, downstairs,

thought the boiler had exploded. The classified files released in the 1990s,

suggested to his family and to some historians, that his career was ended to stop him from

raising unwelcome questions about the Kennedy assassination. The HSCA in the late 1970s

essentially vindicated his concerns. But by then, Thomas had been dead for nearly a decade.

His career destroyed his warnings ignored. His story resembles that of John Witten,

a senior CIA official who also paid a price for asking JFK questions.

Witten had served as chief of the Mexico desk in the clandestine service back in 1963,

and he had pioneered the use of the polygraph in counter espionage investigations.

And when Witten pushed too hard on the Mexico City angle, he too was sidelined.

The pattern is unmistakable. Officials who took the Mexico City evidence seriously

were systematically punished for doing so. But the documentary record tells us something else

that is critically important about the Garo allegations, something that goes to the heart of whether

she was credible. One of the FBI's original reasons for dismissing Garo was that she initially

placed the twist party in early September 1963. A date when Oswald was not yet in Mexico City.

FBI director Hoover wrote a memo on December 22, 1965, declaring there was,

and I quote, no basis, in fact, regarding Garo's allegations.

In part because of this dating problem. The FBI's legal attaché in Mexico City,

Nathan Ferris wrote a follow-up memo agreeing with Hoover. But years later, on September 30, 1969,

Ferris wrote a remarkable seven-page memo that set the record straight.

He revealed that as early as November 1964, Garo had actually informed the US Embassy

that the date of her Oswald encounter was either September 30 or October 1 or 2 of 1963.

Dates that align perfectly with Oswald's documented presence in Mexico City.

In other words, the FBI had known for years that Garo's corrected dates matched the timeline.

And they had dismissed her anyway based on the earlier incorrect dates.

The Ferris memo demolished one of the key arguments for discrediting her story.

And critically, the final paragraphs of that memo, which revealed the intimate relationship

between the Mexican government and the CIA in the extent to which the DFS acted as a CIA proxy,

well, that part remained redacted until they were released in April of 2018.

Ferris was essentially documenting in an official government memorandum,

the very mechanism by which the investigation had been corrupted.

The twist party remains one of the great unresolved spectres of the Mexico City saga.

Was it a complete fabrication, born of family jealousy and amplified by CIA disinformation agents?

Or did Lee Harvey Oswald actually stand in a crowded living room wearing a black sweater,

quietly watching his Cuban diplomats dance the twist?

Sylvia Durand, for her part, has always denied that Oswald attended any such party.

But as journalists Phil Shinnon noted, after tracking her down in Mexico City years later,

there's a lot of evidence from other witnesses, including members of her own family,

who will tell you differently.

Either way, Sylvia was caught up in the middle. Her name, her family, and her home

became the battleground upon which the narrative of the Kennedy assassination

was fiercely contested.

And as you might expect, I'll end this many series by saying it's just but one more

Enduring Secret.

Thank you for listening to episode 321 of JFK The Enduring Secret.