The President of Mexico Who Spied for the CIA

ByHiroshi Takahashi

This column by Hiroshi Takahashi originally appeared in the March 23, 2026 edition of El Sol de México.

The document, which until recently was confidential, states that on October 1, 1963, the CIA station in Mexico City intercepted a call from Lee Harvey Oswald to the Soviet Embassy. The document describes him as follows: he called “using his real name,” spoke in “broken Russian,” and asked if there was “anything new” about a message sent to Washington . The name, the embassy, ​​the date, and the voice were all present. Mexico was also involved. What makes this discovery newsworthy is not just Oswald. This information, the report says, came from a wiretapping center that the CIA operated jointly with the Office of the President of Mexico.

The document states: “The CIA did produce a very significant piece of information about Lee Oswald before he assassinated President Kennedy. On October 1, 1963, our station in Mexico City intercepted a phone call Lee Oswald made from somewhere in Mexico City to the Soviet Embassy, ​​using his own name. Speaking broken Russian and using his real name, Oswald spoke with the embassy guard, Obyedkov, who frequently answered the phone. Oswald said he had visited the embassy the previous Saturday, September 28, 1963, and had spoken with a consul whose name he had forgotten, and that the consul had promised to send a telegram to Washington for him. He wanted to know if there was ‘anything new.’ The guard said that if the consul was dark-skinned, it was Valeriy Vladimirovich Kostikov. The guard consulted with someone else and said the message had been sent, but no reply had yet been received. Then he hung up.”

Record released by the CIA for Project LIENVOY, revealing a wiretap of former President Lázaro Cárdenas. Some of the CIA’s most extensive surveillance schemes had actually been proposed and operated by the Mexican state itself. National Security Archive

The report continues: “This information was obtained from a wiretapping center we operated jointly with the Office of the President of Mexico. It was a highly secretive operation and was unknown to Mexican security and law enforcement officials, who had their own center. Our joint center produces large quantities of wiretaps, which are transcribed and reviewed by our small staff in Mexico City. By October 9, Oswald ’s October 1 phone call had been transcribed, and a summary had been cabled to Washington. The name Lee Oswald meant nothing special to our station in Mexico.”

The President of Mexico was Adolfo López Mateos (1958-1964).

“A CIA document reveals that the partnership with the Mexican government in spying on the Cuban and Russian embassies continued until at least 1994.” – National Security Archive

“In its original report of October 9, Mexico had stated that it possessed a photograph of an apparent American entering the Soviet Embassy on October 1, 1963, the day Oswald called there. A highly sensitive operation in Mexico City provides us with photographs secretly taken of many, though not all, visitors to the Soviet Embassy, ​​using telephoto lenses. Accordingly, on October 24, 1963, we cabled the Department of the Navy requesting a photograph of Lee Oswald from his Marine Corps days for image comparison. We had not received that photograph as of November 22, 1963, but in any case, it turned out that the man photographed outside the Soviet Embassy was not Oswald . By chance, none of our various photographic observation points in Mexico City had obtained an identifiable image of Lee Oswald.”

The document is dated December 13, 1963. John M. Whitten (a senior CIA official specializing in clandestine operations. In 1963 he was head of the division in charge of Latin America within the Agency), sent it as an “original, unexpurgated” version of the report on Oswald ’s stay in Mexico, with summaries of the wiretaps.

More than six decades later, the document conjures a scene that does not fit within the rhetoric of sovereignty.