Our Man in Mexico

Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA

Jefferson Morley

• Editorial: University Press of Kansas
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780700619726
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: North American History

This ebook edition contains a new preface "Winston Scott and the Events of November 1963" designed to inform the discussion and debate surrounding the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Mexico City was the Casablanca of the Cold War-a hotbed of spies, revolutionaries, and assassins. The CIA's station there was the front line of the United States' fight against international communism, as important for Latin America as Berlin was for Europe. And its undisputed spymaster was Winston Mackinley Scott. Chief of the Mexico City station from 1956 to 1969, Win Scott occupied a key position in the founding generation of the Central Intelligence Agency, but until now he has remained a shadowy figure. Investigative reporter Jefferson Morley traces Scott's remarkable career from his humble origins in rural Alabama to wartime G-man to OSS London operative (and close friend of the notorious Kim Philby), to right-hand man of CIA Director Allen Dulles, to his remarkable reign for more than a decade as virtual proconsul in Mexico. Morley also follows the quest of Win Scott's son Michael to confront the reality of his father's life as a spy. He reveals how Scott ran hundreds of covert espionage operations from his headquarters in the U.S. Embassy while keeping three Mexican presidents on the agency's payroll, participating in the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and, most intriguingly, overseeing the surveillance of Lee Harvey Oswald during his visit to the Mexican capital just weeks before the assassination of President Kennedy. Morley reveals the previously unknown scope of the agency's interest in Oswald in late 1963, identifying for the first time the code names of Scott's surveillance programs that monitored Oswald's movements. He shows that CIA headquarters cut Scott out of the loop of the agency's latest reporting on Oswald before Kennedy was killed. He documents why Scott came to reject a key finding of the Warren Report on the assassination and how his disillusionment with the agency came to worry his longtime friend James Jesus Angleton, legendary chief of CIA counterintelligence. Angleton not only covered up the agency's interest in Oswald but also, after Scott died, absconded with the only copies of his unpublished memoir. Interweaving Win Scott's personal and professional lives, Morley has crafted a real-life thriller of Cold War intrigue—a compelling saga of espionage that uncovers another chapter in the CIA's history.

Act III

Mexico City

7

The American Proconsul

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 “CIA’s 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.” Win came to rely on her. Goodpasture’s memory was phenomenal. So was her efficiency.

Win and Paula moved into a comfortable colonial-style house at 316 Avila Comacho, just off Reforma, the central boulevard of Mexico City, near Chapultepec Park, the capital’s grandest green oasis. He had a black Lincoln and a chauffeur named Raul. He and Paula often gravitated to the golf course at the Chapultepec Country Club, where she surprised at least one CIA man by outshooting her husband. They had plenty of friends, new and old. Ray and Janet Leddy had just arrived from Buenos Aires with their brood of children. Ray took over as the embassy’s top political officer. Win was officially part of the State Department too. For public consumption, his job title was First Secretary of the U.S. Embassy.

At home, Win and Paula were smitten with their one-year-old baby, Michael. A visiting social worker sent by adoption officials back in Washington to report on Michael’s well-being informed her superiors that the Scotts “are over-protective and solicitous of his welfare. Mr. Scott believes there should be little discipline during the first years and even though Mrs. Scott does not agree, she follows this plan.” The demanding spy was an indulgent dad.

The politics of Win’s assignment in Mexico were not simple. The United States was not popular in a country that it had alternately bullied and ignored for a century. The relatively new CIA station was less of a presence than the FBI, which had maintained an office in the Mexican capital since 1939. The station was located in the U.S. embassy, which occupied the upper floors of a nondescript eighteen-story office building on Reforma. Below the diplomatic offices were the bustling crowd in Sanborn’s coffee shop. At Win’s insistence, the CIA station moved from a middle floor to take over the very top floor.

The debut of the CIA in Mexico had not been auspicious. One of the first CIA operatives in Mexico was E. Howard Hunt, a graduate of Brown University and a novelist with a gift for clichés. He came in 1951 as chief of the OPC station. A brash man of outspoken conservative convictions, Hunt inevitably offended the finer sensibilities of some at the embassy and more than a few Mexicans, who mistrusted his Yanqui style. When he moved on to join Operation Success in Guatemala in late 1953, he was not missed by many. To say that Win Scott surpassed Howard Hunt in Mexico City is an understatement. Win wasted no time in stepping up the scope and power of CIA operations. With the leaders of the Mexican government he could be his natural self, an easygoing man, equally at home in male or female company. He had tasted the Latin life in Havana as a young man and never forgotten its charms. He seduced Mexicans just as he had enchanted the British after the war: with a sly, confident, soft-spoken American charm.

Michael could well imagine how Win felt liberated by his escape from the Anglo-Saxon Washington to Mexico’s less emotionally constricted ambience. Imbued with a bit of machismo himself, Win seems to have intuited the Latin male style, complete with all its ambitions and insecurities. His Spanish was only average, and he remained a deep Anglophile, but his sincerity compensated. He did not condescend to the low-level resentment that many Mexicans harbored toward the United States, nor did he ignore it. Win had a small library of books on Mexico and its history. He knew full well that “Win Scott” was not a popular name among Mexican officials. One hundred ten years earlier, another Win Scott from Washington—General Winfield Scott of the U.S. Army—had arrived in Mexico City, at the head of a column of U.S. soldiers. They occupied the city for nine months in 1848. By the time the first Win Scott departed, Texas had become part of the United States, and Mexico was half as large as it had been before he arrived. The second coming of Win Scott to Mexico City had the potential to be awkward, if not unpleasant. Win had enough sense to fib about his name. Sometimes he said that Winfield Scott was a distant relative. Other times he claimed to have been named after the American conqueror. In fact, neither was true, but such stories helped him live down the legacy of Winfield Scott. He spoke to powerful Mexicans as a warm and reliable friend from the modern empire to the north. The first Win Scott took Mexico with weaponry, troops, and disdain. The second Win Scott came with technology, cash, and friendship.

His task, as defined in a yearly mission statement from headquarters, was to combat communism. Mexicans shared a real interest in this agenda. The ruling party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, defied ideological labels. In its foreign policy, the PRI governments were anticommunist, but public opinion and the party line demanded distance from the United States. Domestically, the government allowed alliances with North American capital but depended on protective tariffs, local industrial barons, and nationwide unions. When Win arrived in the Mexican capital, it was a city of 6 million people, with a growing middle class. The government enjoyed broad, if sometimes thin, popular support. Intellectuals liked the government’s public works projects, ranging from highways to housing projects, and the nationalistic heritage, which offered an alternative to Yanqui capitalism and foreign communism. The technical classes enjoyed growing universities and factories. Mexicans noted with pride that the inventor of the color television, Guillermo Gonzalez Camarena, was a native son. The official story was that Mexico was revolutionary enough not to need a revolution.

In fact, modern Mexico did not extend far beyond the federal district and a few other big cities. In the countryside was a vast land of caciques (local chieftains) and campesinos. Technology was primitive. Attitudes were xenophobic. The memory of the 1910 Revolution vindicated calls for communal action and the rebuke of the rich. Unlike in many Latin American countries, the prosperous did not enjoy the public blessing of religion because the Catholic Church had been hobbled and harassed since 1910. But as the presidents and the leaders of Mexico’s security agencies spoke the rhetoric of revolution, they increasingly feared the reality of the society they ruled—and therein lay Win’s opportunity. The Mexican power elite had to be anti-American in public discourse. In private, they wanted to protect their privileges. Win was only too glad to keep an eye on communists. In Mexico City he kept files on the multinational cast of rebels fleeing from the cruelties of South America’s many despots. He quickly learned that Mexico’s Defensa Federal de Seguridad (DFS), the police force of the president, had things under control.

Fidel Castro’s brief stay in Mexico was proof of that. Shortly before Win arrived in August 1956, the DFS had arrested Castro and twenty-three companeros at a farm outside of Mexico City. Castro was an exile from Cuba, a tall, gawky twenty-nine-year-old lawyer who led something called the 26 of July movement, which had taken up arms against the government of Fulgencio Batista on the island. Batista had put Castro in jail for two years, then banished him to Mexico. Castro was reorganizing his forces and pondering his next move when he was arrested. A cache of weapons was seized from the farm. In Castro’s pocket, police found the card of a Soviet journalist, Nikolai Leonov. Castro rejected the charge that he was a communist and declared his arrest the work of Batista and the U.S. embassy. Castro spent a month in jail until the chief of immigration enforcement for the DFS, a twenty-eight-year-old lieutenant named Fernando Gutiérrez Barrios, decided to let him go.

In time, Win would come to appreciate Gutiérrez Barrios’s way of handling things. El Pollo (The Chicken), as he was known for his prominent beak, was smart and practical and would in time reign as the most powerful law enforcement official in Mexico. When Castro promised that his band of men would soon set sail for Cuba, Gutiérrez Barrios shook his hand and bade him farewell. Leaving aside the question of whether any money changed hands, Mexico’s security forces had one less cause to worry. Win would get to know El Pollo much better in the years to come.

In Washington, Mexico was viewed as a battlefield. For the Soviet KGB, Mexico offered a foothold in the Western Hemisphere. The Mexican government let the communists open embassies with large staffs of whom at least half were intelligence professionals of one sort or another. Castro’s friend Nikolai Leonov, the incoming Third Secretary at the embassy, was a cagey young journalist who had grown up in Moscow and came to study literature and philosophy at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM). He spoke fluent Spanish and had an ever-widening circle of acquaintances thanks to his love of Mexico, its people, and its distinctive cultural traditions. If Win’s mission to Mexico was driven by Washington’s bipartisan imperative of turning back communism, the espionage of his Soviet counterparts was driven by their Marxist-Leninist understanding of the historical fate of Mexico. Like Win, Leonov was well read in the history and politics of Mexico, beginning with the conquering expedition of Hernán Cortés and ending with the revolution of 1910–1918. As a Russian, Leonov could identify with a country that endured many foreign efforts to enslave its people. He knew that the Spanish, the French, the English, and the Americans had invaded Mexico in recent centuries. He admired how the long-lasting fight for independence had forged the psychology of the Mexican people. “This friendly nation had the most militant-sounding national anthem,” he noted in his memoir. “Each note of it calls for combat.”

And so Mexico City became a labyrinth of espionage, a city of intrigue like Vienna or Casablanca with the spies of at least four powers angling for advantage: the United States, the Soviet Union, Cuba, and Mexico. For the partisans of counterintelligence like Jim Angleton, the KGB and Cuban presence in Mexico City required a response and not just a defensive one. As Norman Holmes Pearson had emphasized in his lectures, the essence of counterintelligence was its offensive character. Dulles wanted a “stepped up program” for Latin America. Angleton was looking for opportunities, and Win was the tip of the spear.

Win clashed right off with Ambassador Robert Hill, an engaging if fusty man who did not even speak Spanish. Win insisted the embassy give more job slots to CIA personnel. Hill, an earthy man, had little patience for spooks and no tolerance of the subtleties of intelligence work. He agreed only on the condition that the embassy would have no responsibility for CIA actions. Soon Win’s station was performing tasks that had not occurred to Hill, like tracing the names of visa applicants and persons on the guest lists for embassy functions. Win spoke up at the ambassador’s daily staff meeting. He briefed reporters and visiting U.S. congressmen. When he noticed there was a row of four townhouses overlooking the garden of the Soviet embassy on Avenida de la Revolucion, he arranged for a lawyer friend, code-named LIMOUSINE, to buy them all. He had plans.

He brought all the lessons of his years as London station chief to bear on the Mexico City station. At night everybody had to take all their papers and put them into safes in a central room protected by security alarms. He overhauled the station’s file room. He instituted a new filing system, producing new index cards, new personality files, and new subject files. He vastly expanded the photographic files. File cabinets began filling up with arcane but necessary documents such as the manifests of the flights of every airline coming or going from Mexico City. He was ambitious and exacting.

“Win wrote constantly,” Anne Goodpasture told Michael. “Pages and pages and pages. He read everything that other people wrote and he had a pen. He corrected their grammar. He corrected their spelling. He put file numbers on things. He made notations of where things should be filed, how many copies should be made. On transcripts of intercepted conversations, he wrote notes in longhand. He typically put in dates—‘28 September, 10:32 hours,’—even when that [information] was already in the transcript. If a dispatch had a file number on it and indication of where all the copies went, he might write—on each page—in big style, handwritten style, the same file number that was typed there.”

“You could tell from his office that he was a professional man,” said a now retired Washington man who worked with Win “He had a standard government-issue executive desk. He was very organized, had his papers stacked neatly, and he was always working on something. This was not the work space of some prima donna.”

When necessary, Win ran operations himself. At a diplomatic party he recruited a man who boasted, quietly and accurately, that he had access to all outgoing communications of certain ...