Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA » (New Edition)

Jefferson Morley, formerly the "World Opinion Roundup" columnist, is a veteran Washington journalist whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, New York Review of Books, Readers Digest, Slate, Salon, and other national publications.

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 cameto 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not only covered up the agency's interest in Oswald but also, after Scott died, absconded with the only copies of his unpublished memoir.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.

Foreword     ix
Acknowledgments     xi
Prologue: April 28, 1971     1
London
Up from Escatawpa     13
The Apprentice Puppet Masters     24
His Friend Philby     35
Washington
Spies on the Rise     49
Operation Success     61
A New Life     73
Mexico City
The American Proconsul     83
Amcigar     101
Spy as Poet     111
Knight     123
Darkness     133
Wedding in Las Lomas     140
"You Might Have Had a Seven Days in May"     151
A Blip Named Oswald     168
Out of the Loop     191
"The Effect Was Electric"     203
"A Transparent Operation"     215
"I Share That Guilt"     232
An Anonymous Warning     240
The Padrinos     257
Night of Tlatelolco     265
"The Sludge of Spies and Knaves"     272
A Fall in the Garden     284
Afterword     289
Notes     293
Bibliography     347
Index     353