CIA & MEXICO SPIED ON CUBAN & SOVIET DIPLOMATS, LEFTISTS UNTIL 1994

This article by Jim Cason and David Brooks appeared in the May 20th, 2025 edition of La Jornada, Mexico’s premier leftist daily newspaper.

Washington and New York. President Adolfo López Mateos first proposed a collaboration between his government and the CIA to spy on the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City in 1958, and successive Mexican governments continued with that mission until at least 1994, according to secret CIA documents recently declassified in the United States.

Mexico’s active participation in surveillance programs is one of the most striking revelations revealed by the newly declassified CIA documents, writes analyst Claire Dorfman of the National Security Archive, an independent international relations research organization, as she reviewed some of the 80,000 pages of secret documents released this year under President Donald Trump’s order to declassify all documents related to the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

As La Jornada reported this year, documents including the monitoring of Lee Harvey Oswald, accused of the assassination, during his stay in Mexico raised questions about the Mexican government’s role in US espionage against Cuba and the USSR, despite Mexico’s public stance of neutrality and normal diplomatic relations with those two countries. It is worth emphasizing that these documents only offer the US version of what Mexico was doing.

The files reveal that the CIA was also conducting unilateral intelligence operations in Mexico during this same time. The CIA characterized this espionage as one of the most extensive and expensive technical collection programs the agency had ever undertaken, Dorfman reports in the Archive’s analysis of the documents. But it is the use of communications intercepts, photographic surveillance, and double agents to spy on the activities of the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico that occupy a large part of these documents, as it was through these embassies that Oswald’s communications, conversations, and movements in Mexico City were monitored just weeks before the assassination of the US president.

Joint intelligence operations with Mexico resulted from a rapprochement six years before President López Mateos, a CIA officer writes in one of the documents in 1964. The last document in this file confirms that this type of joint operation between the Mexican government and the CIA continued until 1994. As the CIA headquarters knew, the CIA station in Mexico continued to conduct TelTap (wiretapping) operations with the Mexican liaison against the Russian and Cuban embassies, although the document warns that results against the Cubans are limited. Although this is the last date mentioned in the collection of declassified documents, the operation did not necessarily end in 1994; it is only the date of the last time it was confirmed in the official secret documents.

MONITORING LEFTISTS

As La Jornada previously reported , these documents reveal that the joint CIA-Mexican government operation—according to the agency—focused on spying on the activities of Mexican leftists, including former President Lázaro Cárdenas and muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, and some foreign refugees like former Guatemalan President Juan José Arévalo (father of the current president of that country), other Latin Americans, and Americans in Mexico. One specific instruction was to infiltrate youth groups and recruit students in key schools in the country.

Other documents refer to a CIA operation in Mexico to covertly recruit—that is, without the knowledge of the recruits—writers and intellectuals who, under the auspices of a left-wing press service, would produce articles that would be distributed to various Latin American countries, through which the agency could track regional opinions regarding communism. A document evaluating this operation, called LIANCHOR, between December 1967 and May 1968, reveals a list of some of the involuntary participants—that is, those who were not aware of it—including notable names such as Ricardo Garibay, Manuel Carballido, Alicia Reyes, Francisco Zendejas, among others. The magazine Diálogos was also infiltrated by the CIA through a clandestine agent who was one of the directors and who provided information on leftist intellectuals in Mexico to the agency.

The CIA mission emphasized confronting ultranationalist and anti-American activities in Mexico. It also sought to obtain information on the Mexican government’s secret intentions and activities in international relations, particularly through maintaining CIA contacts within the Mexican presidential office and the foreign ministry, Dorfman writes in a summary of the documents.

Some former U.S. analysts and intelligence officials previously interviewed by La Jornada regarding the declassified documents have warned that caution should be exercised when evaluating the veracity of reports written by agencies dedicated to deceiving and lying as part of their missions.