Quote:José López Portillo, the president of Mexico from 1976 to 1982, was a U.S. intelligence asset, according to a CIA document declassified today by the National Archives.

In a November 29, 1976 memorandum for the record, a CIA official told colleagues involved in the declassification of JFK files that the incoming president of Mexico had “control of Liaison”—meaning relations with the CIA—for a “number of years” and was witting to a joint US-Mexico wiretapping operation (known as LIENVOY) that secretly recorded calls on dozens of phone line in the Mexican capital.



“He can be expected not to look favorably upon publicity of that relationship,” said the official, Bill Sturbitts, in a discussion of whether the CIA should disclose the LIENVOY wiretaps which captured phone calls in September 1963 made by Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin who denied killing JFK on November 22, 1963.

The memo refers to, but does not name, José López Portillo, who in accordance with then-Mexican political tradition, was chosen in the summer of 1976 as the candidate of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party by his predecessor, Luis Echeverría. He ran unopposed and assumed office on December 1, 1976.



López Portillo, who died in 2004, had served finance minister under his childhood friend Echeverría between 1973 and 1975. His role as liaison to the CIA had not been previously disclosed.

The LITEMPOs

López Portillo is the fourth Mexican president known to have had a working relationship with the CIA. As I revealed in my 2008 book, Our Man in Mexico, Echeverría was a long-time CIA asset, known by the cryptonym, LITEMPO-8.

Echeverría’s predecessor Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, a personal friend of CIA station chief Winston Scott, was known as LITEMPO-2. He served as president from 1964 to 1970.

Diaz Ordaz’s predecessor, Adolfo Lopez Mateos, recruited as a source by Scott in 1959, was known as LITENSOR.
The memo was one of 422 previously redacted government records related to the assassination of John F. Kennedy that were released today in compliance with President Biden’s Dec. 2022 memorandum on JFK files.