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Tag: JFK ASSASSINATION

  • The Strange, Strange Story of Governor Connally’s Shirt & Coat and Congressman Henry B. Gonzalez

    The Strange, Strange Story of Governor Connally’s Shirt & Coat and Congressman Henry B. Gonzalez

    Not only does the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 remain a riddle in terms of the actual perpetrators, but innumerable aspects of the case defy explanation or are simply inexplicable. As JFK researchers know, there is seemingly not a single straight line in the entire saga and that includes the confounding topic of the Arrow-brand dress shirt and the suit-jacket worn on November 22 by Governor John B. Connally.

    As reported here, it was 50 years after the assassination that Connally’s shirt and suit were put on display by the Texas State Library & Archives Commission on mannequins inside a large glass enclosure.

    Fortunately for researchers, the physical display in Austin in 2013 was supplemented by an extensive online photograph collection of the clothing, including a picture of the rear bullet-hole in the fabric of Connally’s shirt. The hole was helpfully measured by commission staff and labelled at “3/8th by 3/8th inches.”[1]

    Longtime JFK researcher and Connally-wounding specialist Gary Murr has provided an even better photo, one that he personally authorized the shooting of, which illustrates similar measurements for the bullet-hole. It even more clearly reveals the mysterious straight lines of cloth above and below the hole.

    The straight lines alongside the bullet hole in the rear of Connally’s Arrow shirt may have been caused by technicians removing cloth for testing. Note the one-inch scale.

    In any event, the Archive and Murr photographs alone are a near death-blow to the “tumbling” or single bullet theory (SBT) theory of the JFK assassination.

    Why? The large slug from a Mannlicher Carcano rifle, of Western ammo manufacture, measured a little more than a ¼ inch in diameter and 1¼ inches in length.

    The Warren Commission Single Bullet Theory (SBT) posits that the slug, after first passing through JFK’s neck, then tumbled and plunked Gov. Connally sideways, on its long side.

    But the bullet hole in Connally’s shirt, as measured by the Archives or in the Murr photograph, is scarcely larger than the diameter of the Western ammo slug, and moreover, is no larger, and in some respects smaller, than the bullet hole in the rear of JFK’s shirt.

    No one has ever suggested a bullet tumbled as it struck JFK in the back.

    Setting that aside, let’s review the strange tale of Governor Connally’s post-JFK assassination traveling shirt and coat.

    The Journey of the Governor’s Shirt

    Long before Connally’s Arrow shirt and suit jacket ended up on display in Texas, they first, of course, visited the Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas on Nov. 22 1963.

    The timeline thereafter appears to be:

    1. Connally’s suit jacket and shirt, but evidently not the trousers, were then mysteriously hand-carried in bloody paper bags to Washington, D.C. by Congressman Henry B. Gonzalez, who stored them in his office closet for an estimated two weeks.

    2. Two Secret Service agents then took the garments, but not to the FBI. Evidently on orders from the White House, the clothes were sent back to Texas and Mrs. Connally. The Governor’s wife might have washed the shirt in a tub of cold water, but more likely sent the clothes to professional cleaning service.

    3. Then, possibly, the shirt and coat and other garments, were sent to the Texas Archives in Austin, Texas, although this is not verified.

    4. The Governor’s clothes were then sent back to Washington and to the Warren Commission offices on April Fool’s Day 1964, where they were examined.

    5. The Connally assassination-day clothes were then finally sent on eight days later to the FBI lab, also in Washington.

    Yes, the above journey is what happened to primary evidence—Connally’s shirt and suit jacket—in the assassination of a US President and serious wounding of a Texas Governor.

    Researcher Murr has put his gimlet eye for decades on the inexplicable journey of Connally’s clothing, and yet even he has concluded there are still unexplained holes in the story. Much of the following account rests upon the work of Gary Murr.

    Parkland Memorial Hospital

    After being shot, Connally was rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital where the Governor’s shirt and coat were removed in preparation for surgery. A Parkland Hospital nurse testified before the Warren Commission in 1964 that she had exited the room in which Connally awaited surgery, visited an impromptu waiting room, handed two paper bags containing Connally’s coat, tie, and shirt, but not his trousers, to one Cliff Carter, and made out a receipt thereof.[2]

    Parkland Hospital Receipt

    Indefatigable researcher Murr has uncovered the probable receipt, although a description of the clothes is not on the receipt. The receipt does indicate $163.59 in cash (about $1,467 in 2021 dollars) was taken from Connally’s clothes and given to the hospital cashier. Murr points out there was yet a third paper bag, likely containing Connally’s pants, but they are not part of this story.

    Here is where the first oddity surfaces: Cliff Carter was not related to Connally, nor did he work for him. He was not even an employee of the State of Texas. He was a close aide and money-bagger for soon-to-be President Lyndon Baines Johnson. For whatever reason, Carter then had freshman U.S. Congressman Gonzalez of the 20th district in San Antonio—yes, San Antonio and not Dallas—accept the coat and shirt in the paper bags, described in many accounts as “blood soaked.” Gonzalez had been in the fateful Dallas motorcade with Connally and Kennedy, but several vehicles back.

    Now, one might think Carter and Gonzalez would make dead certain that Connally’s garments, which were valuable primary evidence in the crime of the century, would immediately find their way to either the Dallas Police Department or the FBI. As Gonzalez recounted matters later for several JFK researchers, he tried to give the clothes to someone in authority while in Dallas, but was rebuffed, and thereafter ended up on the Air Force Two jet headed back to Washington, “nearly unconscious” that he still held the two blood-soaked paper bags in his hands.[3]

    The Air Force Two jet until that very day had been LBJ’s jet and ferried the remainder of Johnson’s entourage back to Washington, excepting those already ensconced on Air Force One.

    Worth noting is that in 1961 then-Vice President LBJ, who was also perhaps still the most powerful politician in Texas, appeared at shopping centers and supermarkets in San Antonio to support Congressman Gonzalez in his first and successful bid for national office. Gonzalez was his own man, but also a Congressional freshman and an LBJ protege.

    Congressional Closet?

    As Gonzalez relates matters, upon departing Air Force Two, he returned to his office and placed the blood-soaked paper bags into his closet, untouched and unopened, where they sat for two or more weeks. Of course, FBI HQ is also in Washington DC, but Gonzalez did not send the clothes there. He also did not drive by himself one day on his way to work and deliver the clothes, but said he did try to contact authorities about the paper sacks.

    Back to Texas

    The timelines are fuzzy, but as related by the late publisher Penn Jones of the Midlothian Mirror, author Fred Newcomb, and in Murr’s research, Gonzalez said that eventually LBJ’er Cliff Carter sent two “Secret Service men” for the blood-soaked paper bags at his Washington office, but while Gonzalez was back in Texas among his constituents. An assistant in his office gave the paper bags to the Secret Service pair, but did not receive a receipt.[4]

    Researcher Murr has unearthed documents that reveal the governor’s wife had contacted the FBI on Nov. 28. Working through the authority of the governor’s office, she had asked about the location of her husband’s shirt, jacket, and other items.

    Mrs. Connally recounted one version regarding Connally’s clothes to Life magazine in 1966, “We finally located John’s shirt and suit coat, which we were concerned about because the wallet and personal papers in his breast pocket, in Congressman Henry Gonzalez’ clothes closet in Washington.” In Mrs. Connally’s 1966 account, persons unknown then delivered the Governor’s blood-soaked garments to Mrs. Connally, then residing in the Texas Governor’s Mansion.[5]

    In any event, as Mrs. Connally related to Life magazine, she had the shirt and suit jacket in her possession for “seven weeks.” Then she decided to dip the shirt into cold water several times, remove flesh and blood, and to “preserve it.”

    Investigators were not concerned about Connally’s clothes, as she recalled, in her interview with Life magazine. “I told the Secret Service, and I guess the FBI, that I had the clothes, but nobody seemed interested.” After that, she related, “someone finally came to pick up his clothes.”

    By Mrs. Connally’s 1966 account, she did not have the clothes or jacket laundered or dry-cleaned.

    And so, for decades, there was something of a mystery of who had professionally cleaned and pressed Connally’s shirt and jacket before their arrival at the Commission in Washington. Maybe there still is.

    But four decades later, and further confusing matters, Mrs. Connally also provided a second version of what happened to Connally’s assassination-day clothes. This was on the 40th anniversary of her husband’s shooting, in her book, From Love Field, published in 2003:

    Much later (after November 22), I received his clothes in the mail, unpressed and uncleaned, in exactly the same condition as when they had been cut from him at Parkland. I couldn’t bear to look at the blood, nor did I feel right about destroying them, so I told the cleaner to remove the stains as best he could but do nothing to alter the holes or other damage, which is exactly what he did.[6]

    Oddly, in her 2003 rendition of events, Mrs. Connally does not say why she wanted her husband’s clothes back.

    What Really Happened?

    Of course, at this late date there is no way to verify which account of Mrs. Connally’s is the true version; or if there is another, even truer version to be told. For the record, Connally’s clothes were not cut from his body, but merely removed, and were not sent to her in the mail.

    In addition, researcher Murr is dubious that valuables were in the Connally suit breast pocket, post-assassination. The hospital’s records that are extant indicate valuables were removed from Connally’s clothing with the cash being sent on to the hospital cashier.

    There is another puzzler: Photos commissioned by researcher Murr show the inside breast pocket of John Connally’s Oxxford Clothes-brand jacket as having been pierced by the same bullet that passed through him.

    If there had been a billfold or wallet in that breast pocket it likely would have been pierced by a bullet—and thus would also be important evidence.

    The bullet hole in the interior right side of Connally’s jacket, showing a hole through the breast pocket.

    After Mrs. Connally had the clothes professionally cleaned and pressed, it appears the shirt and suit and other items were then sent to the Texas State Archives, although Murr says this bit of the garment’s itinerary has not been verified.

    In any event, on March 30, 1964, the Warren Commission (WC) asked the Secret Service to bring Connally’s jacket and shirt to Washington for examination. By March 1964, nearly five months had passed since the assassination and no investigative body had examined Connally’s clothing. The shirt and jacket arrived at the WC on the suitable date of April 1st.

    When the WC asked Governor Connally about the condition of the clothes on April 21, 1964, he responded, “They, the Archives of the State of Texas, asked for the clothing, and I have given the clothing to them. That is where they were sent from, I believe, here, to this Commission.” Researcher Murr is dubious about Connally’s answer, noting the Governor’s lawyerly use of the qualifying word “believe.” However, there are no hard records from what location the garments were sent to the WC.

    There is an internal memo that reveals the WC examined the Connally clothes before sending the garments to the FBI. WC staffer Norman Redlich wrote on April 10th to Lee Rankin, “We have examined Governor Connally’s clothing and sent it to the FBI Lab for tests on the question of exit and entry holes.” The WC wanted some evidence to work into its single-bullet theory.

    In any event, Robert Frazier, the FBI’s lead firearms and ballistics examiner at the time, told the WC that Connally’s shirt and jacket had been subjected to “cleaning and pressing.” Thus, no trajectories could be divined from the bullet holes in the items. More importantly, the cleaning and pressing of Connally’s shirt and coat were remarkably effective and evidently removed metallic traces from the bullet holes, effectively enough that the technology of the day, spectrographic analysis, could find nothing.[7]

    Later the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) would also subject Connally’s assassination-day clothes—including his shirt—to testing and would find traces of copper, iron, and lead.

    HSCA Tests

    Nearly 15 years after the JFK murder, and after who knows how much handling by Secret Service men, spouses, dry-cleaners, WC staff, Texas Archive staff, and FBI investigators, Connally’s garments would be subjected to even more exacting tests, conducted by the Institute of Forensic Sciences in Dallas at the behest of the HSCA.[8]

    The tests were so sensitive that iron was detected near the bullet holes in Connally’s clothes, from blood that had been deposited in 1963, despite the passage of time and the professional cleaning of years earlier. Yes, evidently Connally did not have “iron poor blood,” and that iron had been detected around the bullet holes in Connally’s clothing, claimed the institute.

    Lead was found near the rear bullet hole in Connally’s shirt along with amounts of copper, but considered “trace” or too small be meaningful. However, a curiosity of the 1978 testing is that less copper but more lead was found at the rear bullet hole in Connally’s shirt than from a “back control” sample.

    Given that the WC and HSCA storyline is that a copper-jacketed bullet passed through Connally, the finding of trace amounts of lead in the rear hole in the Governor’s clothing is interesting. Copper, in amounts considered meaningful, was found “in the region of the defect in the right front,” of Connally’s suit coat. “The results would indicate that the apparent borderline copper analysis is due to the lining containing some copper. Iron, apparently from blood, was still detectable near the right front defect in the coat, despite dry cleaning,” reported the Institute of Forensic Sciences.

    The results of the 1978 testing, as usual in all matters JFK, raise more questions than answers.

    The only hole that exhibited copper in more than trace amounts was the “defect” or very small hole in the front of Connally’s jacket, where a bullet exited. But here, a control sample—that is cloth not associated with a bullet strike—first yielded an even larger amount of copper than cloth near a bullet hole. But the Southwestern Institute of Forensic Sciences said the high copper count in the control cloth was “aberrant,” as proved by repeat analyses of other control samples.

    You can’t make this stuff up. Test until you get the right results. It should be noted that the HSCA investigation, like the WC investigation, did not have a “defense counsel” who asked probing questions about evidence in question.

    Cliff Carter

    Cliff Carter, the LBJ aide who put the two bloody sacks of clothing into Congressman’s Gonzalez’s hands on November 22, is also worth pondering. Carter was regarded as a “bagman,” who would collect cash for LBJ’s campaigns, or for other expenses, and handled other dark areas for LBJ.

    According to Billy Sol Estes, Carter was also aware of the planning for the murder of Henry Marshall, a U.S. Department of Agriculture investigator who learned of Estes’ illegal scheme to illegally buy certain cotton allotments from smaller farmers. Agriculture agent Marshall was found dead in 1961 of five gunshots from a single-shot bolt-action rifle, and carbon monoxide poisoning to boot, but Texas authorities deemed the death to be a suicide. That ruling stood for decades, until a Grand Jury in 1985 reviewed the case and almost certainly corrected the ruling to murder.

    In later years, Estes, who graced the cover of Time magazine 1962, would tell unverifiable tales regarding a clutch of murders of people in LBJ’s orbit.

    But for the purposes of this story, the inquiry would be: Did Carter, even within two hours of the JFK hit, and in Parkland hospital, have presence of mind to recognize that controlling evidence could be important to the outcome of the JFK investigation?

    Did Carter actually advise Gonzalez to take the two bloody paper sacks containing Connally’s clothes and then to sit tight until further instructions were received? Thus, Gonzalez became an unwitting “cut out” man in the sequestering of primary evidence.

    Indeed, was “controlling the evidence” second nature for Carter, after having been involved in various and serious LBJ scrapes with the law, up to and including murder? In other words, gain control over evidence first and always in every untoward event, then later determine if there are advantages to withholding or releasing evidence?

    Moreover, Mrs. Connally’s tale about wanting the assassination-day shirt and suit-jacket back to retrieve a wallet also does not hold water. First, hospital records indicate Connally’s money and valuables were removed from his clothing. Secondly, if the hospital staff had missed a wallet, and left it in a suit jacket breast pocket, why did not Mrs. Connally ask for the wallet back and not bloodied clothes?

    At this late date, mind-reading Carter and divining who may have given instructions to Mrs. Connally or Gonzalez is a parlor game. Back in 1964 no one at the WC grilled Mrs. Connally, Carter, or Gonzalez about the inexplicable treatment of the bloodied sacks of clothing. Carter died in 1971, taking whatever secrets he had with him.

    Back to Gonzalez

    Of course, the JFK saga contains an unlimited amount of coincidences and many, many unusual turns of events.

    In 1976, the U.S House voted 280–65, to establish the Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in order to investigate the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King Jr. A vote that followed the national screening of the Zapruder film on the TV show Good Night America in 1975. The chairman of the HSCA was outgoing Congressman Thomas Downing of Virginia, who harbored deep suspicions about the JFK case. And he hired a tough, well-regarded Philadelphia District Attorney, one Richard Sprague, as HSCA Chief Counsel.

    But Downing would soon retire, and he turned over the reins to Gonzalez—yes, the very same Gonzalez who 13 years prior had hand-carried Connally’s assassination-day clothes to his closet in Washington, where they mysteriously sat for two weeks.

    At first, the ascendance of Gonzalez was comforting to JFK researchers, as he also seemed dubious about the WC conclusions and the nature of the JFK case. The irony of what was to follow is almost cosmic.

    Veteran JFK researcher Jim DiEugenio interviewed Downing in his office in Newport News back in the 1990s. The former congressman showed DiEugenio the ballot that Gonzalez submitted for Chief Counsel in September of 1976 and that Sprague’s nomination had been made by Gonzalez himself.

    So, it appeared in late 1976 that the HSCA has a no-nonsense and smart chief counsel, backed by a solid chairman (the question of Connally’s clothes having been long forgotten).

    Yet as JFK researchers know, as soon as Sprague began to probe connections between Lee Harvey Oswald and the CIA, and connections between the Miami office of the CIA and anti-Castro Cuban exiles, stories began appearing in influential print publications questioning Sprague’s ethics and work history back in Philadelphia.

    Based on some rather picayune bureaucratic and procedural tensions, HSCA Chairman Gonzalez began attacking Sprague publicly, called him a “rattlesnake,” and loudly roasted him for misconduct and mismanagement. Sprague’s rather small and iffy budget was scrutinized and challenged and the Philly DA was accused of not following the Committee’s directions.

    Gonzales ultimately tried to fire Sprague, but on such flimsy grounds that the full committee overruled the firing. Nevertheless, the well was poisoned, and the erstwhile Philly DA did leave his post when he was told his departure was a condition of the HSCA obtaining future funding.

    Even Gaeton Fonzi, the superb JFK researcher who was a staffer on the HSCA under Sprague, and who authored the book, The Last Investigation, strained to explain Gonzalez’ behavior, offering little more insight than Gonzalez was “flying off the handle.”

    To this day, a good explanation of Chairman Gonzalez’ behavior at HSCA—on the surface, inexplicable—has not been rendered. The veteran researcher DiEugenio does offer up one possible explanation in his book The Assassinations: That there were moles planted on the HSCA to exacerbate the antagonism between Sprague and Gonzalez and one issue was Gonzalez and his curious role in the post-JFKA sojourns of Connally’s clothes.

    For those familiar with the history of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison and his 1969 investigation of the JFKA, the possibility of moles or CIA-plants on the HSCA staff is not hard to believe—Garrison’s staff was infested with national security state operatives, some of whom actually leaked information to defense counsel for Clay Shaw, the CIA operative who Garrison suspected played a role in handling Lee Harvey Oswald.

    After both Sprague and Gonzalez left the HSCA, the new chairman was the diffident Congressman Louis Stokes of Ohio, who brought in Robert Blakey, a US Justice Department mafia prosecutor, as HSCA chief counsel.

    Blakey was entirely the wrong man for the job: an earnest civil servant and mob-hunter who, at that time, believed in, and vowed cooperation with, the CIA—the very agency, due to its extensive ties to anti-Castro Cubans and hostile relations with JFK, that was and is most suspect in regards to the JFKA.

    As I said, you can’t make this stuff up.

    Thus Gonzalez, who inexplicably kept assassination-day evidence—Connally’s clothes—in his office closet in 1963 without informing authorities, then also inexplicably helped torpedo the HSCA investigation of the JFK case 15 years later.

    Conclusion

    The WC, as it did so often when convenient, exhibited oceanic apathy regarding the strange post-JFK murder treatment of Connally’s assassination-day shirt and coat. As noted by researcher Murr, “There likewise was no effort undertaken by anyone associated with the Warren Commission to establish just who was responsible for the cleaning and pressing of components of the Governor’s clothing.” Neither the WC or HCSA asked Gonzalez how it was he chose to secretly stash Connally’s crime-day clothes, with bullet holes, in his Washington D.C. for two weeks after the JFK murder. Or why the Secret Service sent the garments to Mrs. Connally, instead of the FBI, when they retrieved the clothes from Gonzalez’ office.

    Like so many aspects of the JFK case, the tale of Connally’s shirt and coat is unfathomable and more than deeply suspicious, yet simple bungling cannot be ruled out. But when the tale of Connally’s garments is added up with too many similarly suspicious explanations of events and evidence surrounding the JFK assassination, the weight of the whole JFK murder story shifts. There are simply too many stories akin to the Connally shirt and coat tale for comfort.

    [1] Details of Governor Connally’s Damaged Clothing.

    [2] Warren Commission, Volume VI: Ruth Jeanette Standridge.

    [3] Forgive My Grief, Volume II.

    [4] Ibid.

    [5] November 25, 1966, Life, “A Matter of Reasonable Doubt.”.

    [6] “From Love Field: our final hours with President John F. Kennedy,” 2003, Nellie Connally.

    [7] Warren Commission, Volume III: Robert A Frazier.

    [8] See “Soft X-ray and Energy-Dispersive X-ray Analyses of Clothing,” Southwestern Institute of Forensic Sciences, 2/1/78, Vol. 7, HSCA.

  • Mort Sahl: An Appreciation

    Mort Sahl: An Appreciation

    America has just lost the best friend it ever had. On October 26th, Mort Sahl—actor, writer, director, teacher, political satirist and Jim Garrison investigator—passed away in Mill Valley at age 94.

    Mort invented the modern form of political satire—hell, he transcended it. In the early 1950’s in clubs along San Francisco’s North Beach with names like the hungry i and the Purple Onion, this new young talent was riffing on the political headlines of the day in an almost jazz-like, improvisatory way. Eschewing the square looking business suit look of most comedians, Mort sported a V-neck sweater, toted the day’s newspaper, and delivered his lines in a rapid-fire staccato rhythm—like a Paul Desmond or Stan Kenton on bennies (Kenton especially was an early hero and even mentor of Mort’s). Mort’s routine would equally take the piss out of a Republican or a Democrat, it didn’t matter. Mort always took up the mantle of the loyal opposition, sometimes bringing on controversy and trouble. One night in the basement club, the hungry i, after a rather tame joke targeting Ike (“They’ve just brought out the Eisenhower jacket. It has a lapel that buttons over the mouth.”) some patrons took offense and rolled the garbage cans from outside down the club stairs which opened up onto the stage.

    Word of Mort’s brand of comedy spread rapidly, especially after influential newspaper columnist Herb Caen took up Mort’s cause (“I don’t know where Mr. Sahl came from, but I’m glad he’s here”). Established comedians and other show business people were soon coming up to see the hot new comic, with Eddie Cantor providing some early mentorship. By the end of his first year playing to packed houses at the hungry i, Mort was earning $3,000 a week—in 1954 money.

    With this success came bigger venues, college campuses, and, of course, TV. Along with that came a newer circle of friends: Sinatra and Martin, Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller, Hefner, Belafonte, Brando, and Julie London (“Now there was a woman,” Mort once told me, not in any way lascivious). Mort and Paul Newman had once been roommates. Mort was married early on to actress Sue Babior, but after 27 months they were divorced. Mort was soon smitten with an actress names Phyllis Kirk, best remembered at that time as Nora Charles opposite Peter Lawford’s Nick on The Thin Man TV series.

    NBC hired Mort to cover the 1956 Democratic convention. Mort was a firm supporter of the Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson. The intellectual and eloquent former Governor of Illinois (and perennial democratic candidate) appealed greatly to Mort and the two would become lifelong friends.

    Mort also led the way in the recording of comedy albums. There were a couple of studio-recorded albums out there, but when Mort took the stage on January 26, 1958, the first modern live comedy LP, The Future Lies Ahead was born.

    Naturally, Hollywood came calling and Mort was soon co-starring with Alan Ladd (All the Young Men), Sammy Davis, Jr. (Johnny Cool), and Tony Curtis and Sharon Tate (Don’t Make Waves). Bookings at the premier venue of the time, the Copacabana, soon followed. In 1960, Mort made the cover of Time magazine.

    Mutual friends brought Mort into the Kennedys’ orbit. Mort was soon writing jokes gratis for Senator John Kennedy’s presidential campaign. After the election, Mort went back to being the loyal opposition. Jack loved it, but word got back to the old man who now considered Mort persona non grata. (“Doesn’t Sahl know the meaning of loyalty?”)

    Mort split with Phyllis Kirk and was soon linked with Dyan Cannon and later Yvonne Craig. While his career thrived, his “rebellious nature did rub some people the wrong way.” Nevertheless, he was looking forward to the 10-year anniversary of his first performance at the hungry i. The date was November 22, 1963.

    II

    To many, the assassination of President Kennedy was a life altering event, few can quantify it the way Mort later could. As Walter Cronkite led the nation in “communal crying,” the country served witness to 3 murders that weekend (JFK, Officer Tippit and accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald at the hands of “patriotic night club owner” Jack Ruby). As Mort reported shortly after, “Oswald was killed in the basement of the Dallas Police while surrounded by 40 cops—41 if you count Ruby.”

    Within days, LBJ appointed a “blue ribbon” commission, an idea actually foisted on him by National Security State veterans Eugene Rostow and Joe Alsop. Named the Warren Commission after its reluctant and browbeaten leader, Chief Justice Earl Warren, the commission was quickly hijacked by its 2 civilian members, former CIA Director Allen Dulles (who Kennedy had fired) and Cold War stalwart John McCloy, along with various ambitious junior counsel (Arlen Specter for example) who were out to enhance their resumes. The result was preordained (lone nut Oswald killed JFK on his own) and the media reaction predictable.

    Mort smelled a rat, but began working the assassination slowly into his act. The catalyst was the credible critical work that began to emerge: Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgement, Harold Weisberg’s, Whitewash and many others. Later, he would wheel out the entire Warren Report and its 26 volumes on stage. Mort would read some of the more ridiculous and irrelevant sections from the Warren volumes (Jack Ruby’s mother’s dental chart for example). Around this time, Mort also met and married amateur athlete and the first Asian-American Playboy centerfold China Lee.

    Shortly thereafter, Mort was presented with the Nielsen ratings for his LA TV show. Ostensibly, they showed that his ratings had dropped from a 3.0 to a 1.0 share overnight. Station management told him outright that “he talked too much about the Kennedy death.” (Mark Lane had been a guest four times) Mort was fired on the spot. After a 39 week successful run, Mort was convinced “outside forces” were at work. He took to the microphone to relay his suspicions. His listeners agreed. Signs began appearing along Sunset Boulevard calling for demonstrations at KTTV. The station’s switchboard lit up and over 35,000 letters came into the mail room. Mort gave a press conference where he revealed he had received a memo from management ordering him to “lay off” the Kennedy assassination. Finally, it was admitted that KTTV had “misread” the Nielsen ratings. Although there was a drop in the first hour of the show, during the second hour the show added some 30,000 viewers. In fact, Mort had as many as 250,000 viewers per quarter hour. Instead of being fired in disgrace, Mort was given a 13-week renewal and a salary increase. His first guest after his renewal was Mark Lane.

    III

    On February 17, 1967, the New Orleans States Item ran a page one story with an above the fold banner headline that read: “DA HERE LAUNCHES FULL JFK DEATH PLOT PROBE.” The article revealed that the Orleans Parish District Attorney, Jim Garrison, was investigating a New Orleans based plot to assassinate JFK and that the office had already spent some $8,000 on travel expenses so far. On the 18th, Garrison held a press conference and announced he had a suspect—David Ferrie. A CIA contract pilot, virulent anti-communist, and mentor to young Oswald when he was in Ferrie’s Civil Air Patrol unit, Ferrie denounced the whole thing as a joke. But he was hardly doing much laughing. As he had done just after the assassination, Ferrie spent his final days engaging in activities which clearly displayed a consciousness of guilt. He eventually broke down and admitted much incriminating information to the DA’s Chief Investigator Lou Ivon. Three days later, Ferrie was found dead of “natural causes”—age 48. Garrison’s number one suspect was dead, but Garrison’s case wasn’t. He turned his attention to the man he had hoped Ferrie would implicate. On March 1, 1967, Garrison announced he had arrested the manager of the New Orleans International Trade Mart, Clay Shaw. The international media descended upon New Orleans—the whole world was watching. So was Mort Sahl.

    Mort turned to China and asked, “Is he corrupt?” (China’s brother would soon be the sheriff of neighboring Jefferson Parish). “No,” she said. “I’ve known him ten years. He’s incorruptible.” Channel 11 sent Mort down to New Orleans to get an interview. Getting in the cab in New Orleans, Mort said, “4600 Owens Boulevard.” The driver replied: “That’s Jim Garrison’s house! I’ll let you off on the corner. I don’t want to get shot.” Mort walked to the door and rang the bell. A 6’6” giant of a man wearing a bathrobe answered the door. “I’m Mort Sahl and I came down here to shake your hand.” Garrison said, “I hope you’re available to do a lot more than that.”

    Later, Garrison would take Mort down to the wine cellar at the Royal Orleans Hotel and open up his case file. Mort cleared his calendar and signed on as $1 a year investigator for the DA’s office. Sahl took an apartment in New Orleans and began punching the clock at the office like any other investigator or Assistant DA. Mort went from making millions a year to approximately $13,000. To pay the bills, Mort would play college campuses and make the occasional TV appearance. On one appearance on The Tonight Show, Mort challenged Johnny Carson to have Garrison on the show. Carson took up the challenge and Garrison was booked. Mort prepped Garrison. One can only guess who prepped Carson. Since Carson’s network NBC just ran a hit piece on Garrison, it’s not hard imagining the ringleader of that farce, Walter Sheridan, having some sort of input to Carson’s belligerence. What is known is that Carson lied about who did brief him. When Mort asked Carson who would question Garrison, Carson replied, “I will. I holed up one Saturday afternoon and read the Warren Report.” As Mort noted, it took him 27 months to read the report and its 26 volumes.

    Carson’s antagonism and constant interruptions forced NBC to issue thousands of form letters apologizing for Carson and explaining that Johnny had to play devil’s advocate. Mort replied: “The devil doesn’t need an advocate.” This only further infuriated Carson, who would never again have Mort or Garrison on his show.

    Mort had better success with Hefner and set up a lengthy interview for Garrison in the October 1967 Playboy. The interviewer, Eric Norden, gave Garrison a reasonably fair hearing. The American public had never heard this level of detail before on the subject.

    The more Mort advocated for Garrison in Hollywood, the more his “free thinking” friends started abandoning him (“Let it go, Mort”). One notable exception was the brave Art Kunkin, publisher of the L.A. Free Press, who routinely covered and interviewed Garrison.

    With the acquittal of Clay Shaw in 1969, Mort still played some clubs and talk shows, but the opportunities were drying up. With the Garrison probe winding down, the staff presented Mort with a plaque:

    To

    MORT SAHL

    The Best Friend

    John Kennedy

    Ever Had

    From

                                        Jim Garrison              Jim Alcock

                                        Andrew Sciambra     Louis Ivon

    New Orleans

    May 29, 1969

    It was time to ride on from New Orleans, but Mort found that to be a hard prospect. As he wrote in 1976:

    I’ve been trying to ride out of New Orleans for ten years. New Orleans is the most important city in America in the last hundred years. It’s where Oswald was bred, where he worked for Guy Banister and Naval Intelligence, where David Ferrie was, where Clay Shaw was, where Gordon Novel was, where the command post was. It was where Victor Marchetti first reported that he heard Richard Helms express concern over Garrison’s upcoming prosecution of Clay Shaw. It was where William Colby, addressing a convention, said that he could not deny that Shaw was a CIA agent. It was where Senator Schweiker promised to focus future investigations directly on the New Orleans area and where the lawmaker pointed out that Lee Harvey Oswald had contact with anti-Castro Cuban groups. And it was there that the District Attorney made the initial, and what was to be the only, thrust to seek justice for the fallen President. Even the Senate Intelligence Committee agrees on the significance of New Orleans in the plans to murder President Kennedy.

    IV

    With the 1970’s, Mort had a seemingly bottomless resource pool from which to draw material from. With the nation embroiled in Watergate, Mort enjoyed a brief renaissance. He released an album (Sing a Song of Watergate) bringing his unique perspective to the Watergate scandal (“With Nixon’s departure, we witnessed the second assassination of a President by the CIA in ten years”).

    During this season of inquiry (Watergate, the Pike Committee, the Church Committee, Zapruder film on TV, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, etc.), the timing was right to bring a unique voice to the airwaves of DC.

    In 1978, a commercial aired on a local DC TV station. A man was shown sitting on a park bench in front of the White House reading a newspaper. A voice intoned, “Mort Sahl is coming to WRC radio. Weekdays at 4:00.” Among others, a 22-year old kid fresh out of college and sitting at home was watching.

    I had heard of Mort Sahl, but knew very little of him or his work. I knew even less about the Kennedy assassination. At 4:00 on October 16, 1978, I tuned in. To say I was gob-smacked would be an understatement. I had never heard this kind of unique perspective on current events or dissertations on history told through a covert Cold War lens. All articulated with unbelievable wit and humor. And then there was the Kennedy assassination. Mort was not only a scholar on the event, but had much first-hand knowledge through the Kennedys, etc. A dizzying array of names I had never heard of were tossed out: Prouty, Garrison, Lane, Marcus, Flammonde, Weisberg, and literally dozens of others. Somehow I needed to gain this forbidden knowledge. I began haunting the local libraries (slim pickings), which soon turned into trips to the Library of Congress where I took notes and Xerox’d pages of rare (suppressed?) volumes. One name kept coming up more than others in Mort’s monologues: Jim Garrison. I couldn’t find his book, so I had to Xerox pages at the Library of Congress. I had more luck tracking down the 1967 Playboy interview. After reading it multiple times, the Garrison thesis made the most sense to me of all of the critical literature I had read.

    I finally worked up enough nerve to call into Mort’s show—the first and only time I would ever call into a radio show. Greeting Mort with a line that cracked him up put me at ease (“Mort, you’re like a breath of fresh carbon monoxide”). Most of Mort’s call-ins lasted about 3 minutes—we talked for 10: Garrison, Clay Shaw, New Orleans, MIGS in Cuba, movies. We covered a lot in those ten minutes. Fortunately, I had my tape deck running and taped this show and many others. I had hundreds of hours of tapes which, unfortunately, over time has been whittled down to about ten. But these ten hours are some of my most cherished possessions. The quotes are priceless and timeless. Mort’s true loves, America, women, films, and justice always shined through. It’s also amazing how prescient the man was and how little the human condition has changed over the decades:

    Mort: This is the only time in history where people join groups to become individuals.

    Mort: In a world without romance, it is better to be dead.

    Mort: Garrison had, what Freud described as, “relentless integrity.”

    Mort: (After a caller had expressed concern that Ted Kennedy would be killed if he ran for President and went after his brothers’ killers.) Imagine. You’re conceding that murders are now part of the body politic.

    Caller: If David Ferrie hadn’t died, how would it have affected the [Shaw] trial?

    Mort: It would have changed American history. I can give you my solemn word on that. It would have changed American history. The names that bear on the history of this country are names that most Americans don’t know. Names like Guy Banister and David Ferrie.

    Mort: I don’t believe Ferrie was in Dallas that day. That’s not where his post was. You know, there were several posts. New Orleans was part of it. Galveston. Several cities. It was a major operation. The assassination was the crystallization of all the people that resented Kennedy making their move, because the President had promised (many people who are in the government now can verify this) that he would remove everybody from Viet Nam and that he would split the CIA into a thousand pieces. He never lived to do it.

    Later a caller identifying himself as a 20-year CIA veteran called and berated Mort for trying to obtain information from the CIA via FOIA:

    Caller: The CIA is a damn good organization. Them and the FBI both. Thank God we’ve got these boys…with every bum coming up the street having a right to read it (FOIA releases)…You don’t have the information and you’re trying to get it and you’re not going to get it! I think your naive! How do you like that? [click]

    Mort: And I think you’re a party to murder, how do you like that?

    Mort was in the right place at the right time and evoked some of the more classic Mort lines. The Jonestown Guyana mass suicide was fresh in the headlines (“You all jump on the bandwagon very easily saying Jones is a madman. Jones is crazy. The point is you don’t ask enough questions – of yourself I might add”). The House Select Committee on Assassinations was preparing their final report (“I urge everyone listening to write to Ted Kennedy to continue the investigation. Jim Garrison was vindicated. The truth hurts, but the lies will kill you”).

    Despite having a great show that performed well in the ratings, after just five months Mort was homesick and had had enough. Mort asked for and obtained permission from NBC to quit the show. The final show aired on March 9, 1979.

    V

    Mort wanted more time to focus on his film career. He had written a comedy called How the West Was Shrunk. Mort’s friend Bob Kaufman wrote the screenplay and comic actor David Steinberg was attached to the project playing the Freudian psychiatrist who travels to the Old West to introduce the cowboys to Freudian analysis. The project never got off the ground. However, Mort would spend most of the 1980’s punching up scripts (Ordinary People, Tootsie, Sabrina, and a dozen others).

    On October 11, 1987, Mort Sahl on Broadway opened at the Neil Simon Theatre. Essentially a 90 minute stand-up performance, it nevertheless garnered good reviews. It did fair business as well, but they didn’t push it very hard. The show closed shortly after the first of the year.

    In 1988, Jim Garrison penned a second volume on his investigation: On The Trail of the Assassins. As with his first book, A Heritage of Stone, Mort is once again acknowledged. Around this time, a young filmmaker named Bob Weide began filming Mort and interviewing some of his close associates from not only Hollywood and San Francisco but New Orleans as well (Garrison made an appearance, as did his Assistant DA, now magistrate, Andrew Sciambra, who rarely gave interviews). Weide eventually sold his film to PBS, who aired it as part of the American Masters series on September 18, 1989.

    During this time Garrison’s new book had been optioned by Oliver Stone and in 1991 became the blockbuster film JFK. Mort was not a technical adviser. However, Mort had landed a weekly talk/commentary series for the fledgling Monitor Channel. Mort Sahl Live! aired on November 16, 1991. It would be the highest rated show in the short history of the Christian Science Monitor network. On April 15, 1992, the Monitor Channel was shut down.

    In 1997, as I was working on my own book Let Justice Be Done, I was invited to LA by a mutual friend of mine and Mort’s. Dinner was arranged at Ruth’s Chris in Beverly Hills. As my friend and I were finishing our martinis (in honor of Jim Garrison), Mort walked in looking a little stoop shouldered and drawn. Mort had told us he had just come from a meeting with LA District Attorney Gil Garcetti. A few months earlier Mort’s 19-year old son Mort Jr. had died of a heroin overdose. Ever skeptical, Mort wanted to ask the DA his own questions. As the dinner progressed, the mood did lighten. Mort and I agreed we would hook up again. As he left the table, Mort waved a small American flag on a stick—upside down, of course.

    In 1999, at the same time my book was published, my first daughter was born. Amid this whirlwind of events, and to my everlasting embarrassment, I had neglected to send Mort a copy of my book. Word got back to me though: Could I send Mort a copy of my book and would I inscribe it? I had to pull myself up off the floor. Here was one of the most important influences in my life essentially asking me for an autograph. Who was I for christsake? I sent Mort an inscribed book straight away, along with a copy of his book, Heartland (1976) asking for his inscription. A couple of weeks later I received the book back in the mail with this inscription: “For Bill Davy—who courageously pursued the truth—and caught it! Mort Sahl” It is probably my most valued possession.

    VI

    In the fall of 2008, Mort began teaching at Claremont McKenna College. He taught one course in screenwriting and another he called The Revolutionary’s Handbook. On the required reading list, sandwiched in between Prouty and Garrison, was my own book. I must admit feeling a little humbled to be included on a college reading list along with the likes of Prouty, Garrison, Che Guevara, Shakespeare, Aristophanes, and Henry Miller. Mort invited me out to sit in on a class as a guest speaker. I flew out planning to stay a day. I stayed four. From the airport, I drove straight away to Mort’s bungalow on campus, a perk Claremont had hooked him up with. It had been a decade since I had seen Mort and was a little taken aback. He had been fighting cancer and was legally blind in one eye. Nevertheless, his spirits were high and so was his energy (I could barely keep up). After that first day, a group of us went to dinner, Mort, myself, a mutual friend, Director of the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies at Claremont Robert Faggen, and the most promising student from Mort’s class, a young man of about 19 or 20 whose name I no longer remember. A lot of good wine and good conversation flowed that evening and I remember thinking how lucky that student was to experience something like this. This is what college should be about.

    The next three days I spent almost exclusively with Mort and it was like sitting with Socrates or something (except with a sense of humor).

    A year or two later Mort reached out again. He was doing some gigs down in Palm Beach, Florida. Did I want to come down for a few days? I was on the next flight out. Mort was playing a gig at a former theatre that was now hosting stand ups and bands on nostalgia tours (KC and the Sunshine Band had played the week before). Mort had no one in his party, so I was sort of an entourage of one. I helped him get ready for the gig, assisted with the sound check, and got him a newspaper to use as his prop. Before the gig, we went back to where Mort was staying—the Palm Beach home of General Alexander Haig. Yes, that Al Haig. The Supreme Allied Commander of the NATO forces. The Secretary of State. The Presidential Chief of Staff. The “I’m in charge” Al Haig. Mort met Haig back in 1988, when Haig was running for President because, as he told Mort, he felt George H.W. Bush was a dangerous man. Mort and he found some common ground and Mort wrote a few jokes for the short-lived Haig campaign. And while the campaign may have been short lived, Mort and Haig became fast friends. I was introduced to Haig (“call me Al”) and his lovely wife. As I remember, his adult daughter was there as well. The guys retired to the living room with snacks and iced tea. I had to pinch myself and blink a couple of times to make sure this surreal scene was real. But the general was a fine host and a conspiracy theorist too! (He tried to push the Castro did it theory, evoking a laugh from Mort). As we left, Mrs. Haig took photos of all of us. It occupies a prominent place in my office.

    The gig went off without a hitch. Mort was on top of his game and the audience agreed. After the show, we went next door to a restaurant and dined with the Haigs. Mort was feeling good and held forth at dinner, while we agreed to do this again for future gigs.

    However, I had a strange premonition that this probably going to be it as I flew back the next day. I was initially proven wrong though. Sometime later, I received another call: Mort and Dick Gregory were going to do a series of shows together at the world-famous Mister Kelly’s in Chicago. Did I want to come up and assist? Same deal like Florida. My answer: “When do you need me to leave?” Soon. I just needed to stay in a holding pattern until the deal got finalized. I also knew Dick a little, as we had met in Dallas in 1998 when we both spoke at the same conference. And, of course, I was well aware of his work. Unfortunately, the gigs fell through. Doubly unfortunate was that Florida would be the last I would see of Mort. My premonition had proved true.

    I kept track of Mort over the last few years. I was delighted to see him on Facebook and even working, doing stand-up (more sit-down at this point) every Thursday night at the Throckmorton Theatre in Mill Valley, even taking Q&A over Periscope/Twitter.

    Mort’s influence is incalculable. It certainly is for me. There are currently three books in print, all published in this century either partially or in their entirety about Mort: Last Man Standing: Mort Sahl and the Birth of Modern Comedy by James Curtis, Revel With a Cause: Liberal Satire in Postwar America by Stephen E. Kercher, and Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950’s and 1960’s by Gerald Nachman. Indeed, in 2017 when I spoke at a conference at VMI’s Center for Leadership and Ethics, the moderator dedicated the program to Mort Sahl.

    Mort’s closing words from his own book Heartland resonate more clearly now than ever:

    Don’t be diverted by prefab threats. The populist suspicion of the federal government is maybe what stands between you and an unstated fascism now. My story isn’t special, but it’s strenuous. I took America at its word. We were right and we were wrong. We were right to pursue the murderers among us. We were in error in pleading our case for America in Beverly Hills and New York. Don’t appeal to the intellectuals. The hope of America is the heartland.

    Vaya con dios, pal.

  • Veciana, Phillips, and Oswald: A Plot Triangle?

    Veciana, Phillips, and Oswald: A Plot Triangle?

    Shortly before the JFK assassination, Hilda Veciana was walking as usual from her nearby home to her workplace, namely the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City. At some 200 feet from the entrance, she bumped into a big wad of bills on the sidewalk. Two men immediately approached and one of them told her in Spanish with a Mexican accent something like, “Hey, lady, this money is yours. Pick it up!”

    She got scared, stepped up toward the embassy, and even cried for help. After she entered the diplomatic compound and talked about the incident, some of her co-workers got out and headed to the scene, but neither the money nor any people were there anymore.

    Making Sense

    General Fabian Escalante revealed this incident to JFK historians gathered with Cuban officials in Nassau, Bahamas, from December 7–9, 1995. He judged it as an obvious provocation. Hilda Veciana was working at the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City because her husband, Guillermo Ruiz, had been appointed as Commercial Attaché in August 1963. If she would have grabbed the money, the CIA would have her photographed to compromise her husband by showing him the photos and threatening with publishing them if he did not collaborate.

    The Cuban diplomatic compound was under heavy photo surveillance by the CIA program LIONION. From a window in a third-floor apartment across the street, CIA employee Hugo Cesar Rodriguez was taking pictures of the visitors to the Embassy, while a pulse camera covered the Consulate from another window.

    Connecting the Dots

    Hilda Veciana was cousin of the fierce anti-Castro militant Antonio Veciana, leader of the paramilitary group Alpha 66 and fellow traveler of the CIA handled by David Atlee Phillips. Both shared an unrelenting animus against JFK.

    In the spring of 1963, JFK ordered a crackdown on anti-Castro belligerent groups and Alpha 66 was targeted. It was attacking Russian ships to torpedo the Kennedy-Khrushchev understanding on their peaceful solution to the Cuban Missile Crisis. At the AARC Conference on “The Warren Report and the JFK Assassination” (Bethesda, MD, 2014), Veciana openly admitted: “In the early 1960’s, I believed John F. Kennedy was a traitor to the Cuban exiles and to this country.”

    The Bay of Pigs fiasco was a thorn in Phillips’ flesh. Instead of admitting it was the CIA’s fault, Phillips put the blame on the pinko at the White House. In Nassau, Escalante also revealed that Phillips had told Cuban dangle Nicolas Sirgado a curious anecdote among a few drinks in Mexico by 1972: after Kennedy’s death, he visited his grave and urinated on it. Phillips also said JFK was a communist.

    Before the HSCA, Veciana triangulated his relationship with Phillips by adding Oswald. At the so-called Southland Building meeting (Dallas, TX) in late August or early September 1963, Veciana arrived a bit early and saw Phillips chatting with a man who quickly left. On November 22, 1963, Veciana recognized this man on TV as the breaking news person.

    Veciana affirmed Phillips contacted him after the assassination with the proposal to pay his cousin-in-law a large sum of money, if Guillermo Ruiz would say he and his wife had met with Oswald in Mexico City, meaning the Cuban Intelligence Services (CuIS) had precise instructions for Oswald to kill JFK. Veciana agreed to make contact, but was unable to do it.

    Just after a HSCA panel visited Havana in 1978, Castro smelled a rat in the AMLASH plot: it might have been linked to the JFK assassination.[1] A task force overseen by Escalante—already head of the Cuban State Security apparatus—went over a bunch of files ranging from known terrorists to exiles, all under a cloud of suspicion. When the CuIS analysts read Veciana’s passage in the HSCA Report (1979), they instantly formulated a hypothesis strongly favored by the Hilda Veciana incident: her cousin was tampering with the timing of the facts.

    The propaganda campaign trying to tie Oswald to Castro has lowered down after the failed wave of scams, hoaxes, and jokes during the first two weeks after the assassination by the deed and disgrace of Nicaraguan secret agent Gilberto Alvarado, Cuban exile Salvador Diaz-Verson, Mexican credit inspector Oscar Gutierrez, and other fakers.

    Phillips knew, through Veciana himself, that his cousin and her husband were working at the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City, but bribing Guillermo Ruiz to take a path, unsuccessfully trodden by many others, did not seem to be proper tradecraft. Veciana admitted that Phillips was very jumpy about having asked him to bribe his cousin-in-law and shortly thereafter told him to forget about it. By contrast, Phillips’ proposal to Veciana fits in perfectly before the assassination with plotting a testimony after the fact or just a quick and convenient visa service.

    Muddying the Waters

    At the AARC Conference, Veciana made a truly astonishing revelation:

    [Phillips] confirmed to me in a conversation that Oswald had traveled to Mexico on [his] orders. [Phillips] tricked Oswald into taking that trip to secure a visa from the Cuban Consulate though [he] knew the authorities there would never grant Oswald such a visa. The reason for this trip was to create a trail that would link Oswald to Fidel Castro and help focus the blame of the planned assassination of President Kennedy on Castro.

    Veciana did not provide a straight answer to the key question posed by Jim DiEugenio on the spot: When did Phillips tell him that? Furthermore, Veciana omitted this conversation in his memoirs (Trained to Kill, Skyhorse Publishing, 2017) and left us all in the lurch. We don’t know whether Phillips actually told him such a crucial detail about Oswald or it was an inference drawn by Veciana from conversations with Phillips.

    In his garbled answer to DiEugenio, Veciana stated Phillips had asked him about the possibility of getting a visa on the same day at the Cuban Consulate in Mexico City. Veciana responded zero chance. This conversation occurred shortly after Castro made his well-known and often distorted statement to Associated Press reporter Daniel Harker at the Brazilian Embassy on September 7, 1963.[2] The exhortation to bribe Guillermo Ruiz would have taken place immediately after the assassination.

    In his memoirs, Veciana did not report the conversation around September 7 and placed the second one in Miami a few weeks after the assassination, but neither in the book nor at the conference does he clarify when Phillips made the assertion that Oswald was traveling to Mexico under his orders. Last, but not least, Veciana has never told why Phillips summoned him to Dallas in September of 1963 and what the Southland Building meeting was about.

    Occam’s Razor

    For CuIS, this meeting revolved around Phillips planning with Veciana and Oswald the trip to Mexico City and the fix of a same-day Cuban visa. But Veciana couldn’t approach Guillermo Ruiz, so Phillips tried to blackmail him through his wife. This push also failed, but Phillips sent Oswald to Mexico City with a false promise. It may explain why Oswald became so upset when he was denied an instant visa.

    Phillips would have never planned a meeting in the same place with two assets from unrelated operations. On the contrary, the meeting in Dallas wouldn’t be a significant tradecraft mistake if Phillips was handling Oswald and Veciana in the same or related operations. Veciana tampering with the timing of conversations with Phillips about Guillermo Ruiz and suffering from Alzheimer’s disease in regard to the Dallas meeting agenda fit in well with this scenario.

    As Dan Hardway has pointed out, Phillips could have used Oswald as a dangle without him being witting about an upcoming JFK assassination. His impersonation by phone in Mexico City reinforces such hypothesis. However, Veciana seemed to be aware of the ultimate goal.

    [1] The CIA recruited Cuban Army Major Rolando Cubela and precisely on November 22, 1963, his handler gave him in Paris an ingenious poison pen to kill Castro, but Cubela didn’t take it. By February 29, 1965, Cubela was in Madrid with Cuban exile leader Manuel Artime [AMBIDDY-1] to plan the assassination of Castro with Cubela’s own rifle. It would be followed by the landing of Artime’s commandos from Central America to establish a beachhead and to create a government supported by the Organization of American States. Castro agent Juan Felaifel was infiltrated into Artime’s inner circle and spoiled the plot. Cubela and his co-conspirators ended up in jail by February 1966.

    [2] “United States leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe.” (The Miami Herald, September 9, 1963, page 1A).

  • US government boldly scrutinized: Oliver Stone’s new JFK documentary is a must-watch

     

  • “This Takes The P*** Now!” Biden’s New JFK Files Excuse

     

  • Biden Failed to Release a Single JFK Record – What Next?

    Biden Failed to Release a Single JFK Record – What Next?

    On October 26, 2021, President Biden was supposed to authorize the release of the remaining classified JFK assassination records. The classified “JFK Collection” still includes over 15,000 records. Hundreds have never been seen by the American public, while the rest remain in redacted form. Fifty-eight—58—years after the JFK assassination, when the government still relies on its lone gunman narrative, this is what we are facing. The obvious question is: If Lee Harvey Oswald killed President Kennedy, without any confederates, who were part of the U.S. intelligence apparatus, why keep over 15,000 records classified in 2021?

    However, this article is not about a conspiracy. It is about a continuing and flagrant violation of a federal statute that was intended to guarantee transparency regarding the assassination of our 35th president. First, October 26, 2021 was an artificial deadline. The actual deadline for the final release of JFK records was October 26, 2017, as mandated by the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 (the “JFK Act”). In October of 2017, precisely 25 years after the passage of the JFK Act, President Trump was obligated to release the remaining classified records. Trump said he was going to do it.

    However, at the eleventh hour, Trump capitulated to the agencies’ demands for continued postponement—namely, the CIA and FBI. There was no legal authority to do this. By October 26, 2017, President Trump had two options under the JFK Act: 1) Release the remaining classified records in full; or 2) Issue a written certification explaining the reasons for continued postponement, for each record that the agencies wished to withhold. Trump did not exercise either option. Instead, he authorized a 6-month delay for agencies to continue review of the records and report to the National Archivist (NARA). Incredibly, in April of 2018, Trump authorized an additional 3-year period for agencies to do the same job. This was on the heels of a twenty-five (25) year period—1992-2017—for agencies to report to the President on which records should remain classified due to an identifiable harm.

    It makes one wonder: who is really running this country? The President has exclusive authority under the JFK Act to authorize the release of classified JFK Records. In doing so, the President is obligated to explain to the American public, in unclassified form, the specific reasons for a decision on each record. Did either Trump or Biden do that? Not even close. We keep seeing meaningless press releases on why continued postponement is necessary for “national security.” Has Congress done anything? Congress did pass the JFK Act in 1992, almost unanimously. It is a strong law for the American people, and unlike the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), it is aimed at transparency and putting the burden on the government agencies to prove a case for classification. However, since 1992, Congress has done essentially nothing in the way of oversight, something that Congress has a clear right to do under the JFK Act. What about the courts? That will be the next step, which unfortunately is now necessary. I am working on a lawsuit with a group of lawyers and researchers who are dedicated to compliance with the JFK Act. Our elected officials should be protecting the public interest, but since they are not, the courts will have to get involved.

    So, what did the President do a week ago? It is arguably worse than Trump’s illegal postponement decisions. On October 22, 2021, Biden issued a Memorandum on the “Temporary Certification” regarding disclosure of the JFK Assassination records. Incredibly, Biden has given the agencies even more time. In doing so, President Biden still “assures” the American people that transparency is the goal. We will see. In his memorandum, Biden states: “It is therefore critical to ensure that the United States Government maximizes transparency, disclosing all information in records concerning the assassination, except when the strongest possible reasons counsel otherwise.” Were those reasons disclosed on October 26, 2021, to the American public as required by the JFK Act? No.

    Biden’s memorandum also tells us that the work is being done. Biden states: “since 2018, executive departments and agencies have been reviewing under this statutory standard each redaction they have proposed that would result in the continued postponement in full public disclosure.” Really? For those who are paying attention, after three years, the agencies still have not apprised the President of the reasons for continued postponement. If they have, the reasons for postponement have not been presented to the American public, as required by the JFK Act. The agencies had 25 years following the passage of the JFK Act to get this done. By October 26, 2017, President Trump should have been in a position to either release all records or authorize postponement of a handful of records that arguably could be sensitive to military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations. In 2021, if the final review process really started in 2018, Biden definitely should have been in a position to do the job required by the JFK Act. However, there was no progress. There was no release of a single new document. There was no release of previously withheld documents in unredacted form.

    President Biden then played the COVID-19 card. According to Biden, NARA claimed that it requires “additional time to engage with the agencies and to conduct research within the larger (JFK) collection to maximize the amount of information released.” According to Biden’s memorandum, the Archivist claims that “making these decisions is a matter that requires a professional, scholarly, and orderly process; not decisions or releases made in haste.” Made in haste? The agencies had 25 years to work with NARA on full declassification. Trump then issued an illegal order granting them three more years. And now, almost 30 years after the clear mandate of Congress in the JFK Act, we now need a “scholarly and orderly process” to get the job done, and not to make decisions “in haste”? This is what your government is telling you.

    Biden then goes on to say that he agrees with the Archivist’s recommendations and that “temporary postponement is necessary to protect against identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or the conduct of foreign relations that is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in immediate disclosure.” That’s nice language, and it comes directly from the JFK Act. The problem is that Biden, like Trump before him, is required under the law to disclose what the identifiable harm is. That identifiable harm is, under the law, supposed to be in a document that is available to the American people and filed in the Federal Register. Instead, the available certifications on particular documents state: “Approved for postponement by the CIA.” Anyone who reads the JFK Act can easily conclude that the CIA does not have this authority. But this is what we face.

    President Biden has approved a “new” release by December 15, 2021, “out of respect for the anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination” on November 22. What is that release? The approval is for any information currently withheld from public disclosure that agencies have not proposed for continued postponement. Let that sink in. Biden is “instructing” the agencies that they now have to comply with the law, if they feel like it, but not until after November 22.

    In his October 22, 2021 memorandum, President Biden also addresses the records that the agencies still want to withhold. This is where it gets really good. Biden “ordered” an “intensive 1-year review” where agencies “proposing continued postponement and NARA shall conduct an intensive review of each remaining redaction to ensure that the United States Government maximizes transparency, disclosing all information in records concerning the assassination, except when the strongest possible reasons counsel otherwise.” Bear in mind, “strongest possible reasons” is not a legal standard under the JFK Act. Congress in 1992 declared that all assassination records carried a presumption of immediate disclosure. Just like Trump did, Biden is re-writing the law.

    In his memorandum, President Biden does attempt to employ the statutory standards in the JFK Act. Over the 1-year “intensive review” period, agencies are required (by December 15, 2021) to provide an unclassified letter, to be signed by the head of the agency, providing a written description of the reasons for which the agency is proposing continued classification. That’s a start. But that’s what the law has required for 30 years. The problem is that Biden also gave the agencies an option for specifying the release date. Biden’s memorandum allows the agencies to specify a:

    …proposed date identifying for each record when the agency reasonably anticipates that continued postponement of information in such record no longer would be necessary or, if that is not possible, a specific proposed date for each record identifying when the agency would propose to next review again after December 15, 2022…

    After 2022? How many more years will the agencies have to maintain secrecy? Congress already declared in 1992 that all assassination records were to be unclassified except “in the rarest of cases.”

    In a nutshell, Biden’s memorandum simply prolongs a violation of a federal statute that has been treated like an afterthought for well over 20 years. NARA wants these records released, but it does not have any authority under the JFK Act. The President is putting a band aid on the problem by asking NARA to “work” with the agencies. However, the agencies that still seek secrecy are clearly running the show. The Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), an independent body, had authority in the 1990’s. However, its life span and funding was limited. The solution is simple. Congress needs to act, conduct oversight hearings, and order the formation of a new ARRB that has legal authority to compel the release of records. Your government has told you for nearly 60 years that a lone gunmen killed the President. Yet in 2021 we are still fighting through the declassification process. What does that tell you? One conclusion is that the government obviously had significant ties to Lee Harvey Oswald before the assassination and doesn’t want you to know about it. The other logical conclusion is that the government engaged in a massive cover-up after the assassination and doesn’t want you to know that. By continuing this illegal classification “process”, the government is tacitly admitting to a conspiracy in the murder of President Kennedy and a cover-up after the fact. If that’s not the case, release the records and prove otherwise.

    Please take action and contact your Congressperson to demand oversight. Demand the formation of a new independent body that has authority to make real decisions on the release of assassination records. The President and NARA obviously cannot fix this.

  • The JFK Cover-Up Strikes Again

     

  • Cuban exile told sons he trained Oswald, JFK’s accused assassin, at a secret CIA camp

     

  • Alecia Long Lays an Egg

    Alecia Long Lays an Egg

    The Assassination Records Review Board did some good work in New Orleans. For one, they made available the Clay Shaw trial transcript, which made James Kirkwood’s book, American Grotesque, obsolete. Today, in these post ARRB days, with 2 million pages of declassified documents available, Kirkwood’s wildly biased book—towards the end he actually compared Garrison’s assistants to the guards at the Nazi death camps—is a museum piece. In 2021, any writer on the New Orleans scene has to tell the reader about what the ARRB record reveals about things like AMSPELL (CIA code name for the DRE, Student Revolutionary Directorate), about David Phillips and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC), about CIA officer George Joannides, about Oswald’s false friend Kerry Thornley, etc. In fact, kennedysandking.com has led the way on many of these issues. (Click here for the FPCC and click here for Thornley)

    What makes Alecia Long’s book, Cruising for Conspirators, rather shocking is this: 23 years after the closing of the ARRB, she deals with none of these matters. Her book looks backward to Kirkwood—which means 1970. The ARRB uncovered many, many new documents from the FBI and CIA about the Crescent City and there were literally thousands of pages from Jim Garrison’s inquiry that finally entered the public domain. With all this new material now available, why would anyone—except maybe Paul Hoch—want to even pick up Kirkwood? But Long does something even worse. She uses Hugh Aynseworth. And while doing the latter, she does not tell the reader what these declassified documents reveal about the man. Namely that Aynseworth was a secret, and prolific, FBI informant on the JFK case.

    This serves as a good introduction for what is to follow.

    I

    Unlike what Long depicts, photographer Lyle Bonge told Romney Stubbs and myself in the mid-nineties that Shaw was actively involved in pursuing a writer to compose a book on his case. He first tried to get Bonge’s longtime friend, James Leo Herlihy, to do such a volume. Herlihy declined, but he told Shaw that he knew a young up-and-coming writer who would probably be willing to take the assignment. And that is how then novelist Kirkwood wrote his book. It was, for all intents and purposes, commissioned by Shaw. And this is why it has today, an almost ludicrous, impenetrable Maytag dryer spin to it.

    As opposed to what Long implies, Shaw was quite active in smearing Garrison, while portraying his indictment as completely unwarranted. He had previously gotten a friend of his to go to the FBI and spread rumors that somehow Garrison was involved in an approach to a 14-year-old boy. (FBI memo of March 16, 1967) This is most likely a reference to the so-called Bezou incident, which Long writes about. (Long, p. 178, all references to eBook version) Long says that the alleged episode at the New Orleans Athletic Club is shrouded because of grand jury secrecy. Not so. This reviewer talked to Bill Alford in his office back in 1994. Alford was the assistant DA who was running the grand jury at the time. As he related, Shaw’s lawyers had planted a ringer on the grand jury who would repeatedly bring this up. The grand jury chair said, fine, bring in the witness. No one showed. The pattern repeated itself twice more. Again, no one showed up. As Alford said to me, you can repeat this kind of stuff over and over, but if no one shows up what is one to make of it?

    And Shaw was not just on the offensive with the homophobic smear. He was also involved in witness harassment and obstruction of justice. Either Long did not read the following memo from Garrison’s files or she chose to ignore it. Nina Sulzer worked in the Sheriff’s Department and was a friend of Clay Shaw’s. In May of 1967, Sulzer entered the prison to talk to Vernon Bundy. During the preliminary hearing Bundy said that he had seen a man he identified as Shaw approach Oswald with an envelope in hand and leaflets in his pocket at the seawall near Lake Pontchartrain. Sulzer began talking to Bundy, telling him he was on the losing side and pointing out articles in magazines like Newsweek and Saturday Evening Post attacking Garrison. She was there for about twenty minutes working him over. She accused him of taking rewards and asked what they were doing for him. Bundy denied both charges and said, “There is no one doing nothing for me.” He then added, he did not want anyone doing anything for him. Sulzer then went further. She concluded by saying, “You’ll see, somebody will get you out there.” After this, Sulzer was tracked to a residence where Shaw was staying and spent about three hours with him. (William Davy, Let Justice be Done, pp. 126–27) Because of the above, and much more, many of us are not predisposed to comparing Shaw with a suffering Jesus Christ, which, quite literally, Long does. (Long, p. 76)

    Quoting Shaw’s lawyers, she writes that somehow Garrison bartered for Bundy’s testimony by dropping narcotics charges against him which could have resulted in a five-year sentence. (Long, p. 118) This is contradicted by memos in Garrison’s files. His office contacted local narcotics officers. Bundy was in prison on a voluntary basis, in order to break his drug habit. The most serious crime he committed was breaking into cigarette machines. (Davy, p. 125; also 1995 interview with investigator Gary Raymond by the reviewer) Back then, a pack of cigarettes cost about 30 cents.

    But more importantly, this reviewer interviewed assistant DA John Volz in 1994. Volz was a skeptic on Garrison’s JFK case, but the DA assigned him to interview Bundy. Volz decided to test the witness. He asked him: When you picked up the leaflet that Shaw had dropped, what color was it? Bundy had a rather unusual reply: he said it was yellow. Volz was impressed by this reply, since he had checked some of the flyers distributed in New Orleans and some were yellow. After conducting the interview, this reviewer visited the Royal New Orleans Collection. In a glass case was one of the yellow flyers the authorities had collected. Long lists the Royal New Orleans Collection, today, called the Historic New Orleans Collection, in her bibliography.

    II

    But Long goes off the rails even before she gets to New Orleans. Somehow, she feels she has to pay lip service to the Warren Commission, so she describes Jack Ruby’s shooting of Oswald in about two paragraphs and calls him, “an eccentric local nightclub owner with a history of violent volatility…” (Long, p. 32) Well, I guess that’s one way to dispose of Mr. Ruby. Another way is to buy into his polygraph test for the Commission, which, no surprise, she does, even though the House Select Committee on Assassinations, and author Don Thomas, exposed that test as being so fundamentally flawed as to be worthless. (Long, p. 67 and Don Thomas, Hear No Evil, pp. 537–53)

    And she abides by this Commission standby: Lee Oswald, as a boy in New York, pulled a pocket knife on his stepbrother’s wife and threatened her. (Long, p. 33) Greg Parker did a nice job in casting doubts on this story and showing how it appears to have been created by the FBI with some witness coaching. (Parker, Lee Harvey Oswald’s Cold War, pp. 129–35)

    But the above is just her warm up about Oswald. She mentions his days in the Civil Air Patrol—without bringing up David Ferrie. (Long, p. 34) That is quite a disappearing act, because many people who have written about Oswald consider his friendship with Ferrie to be a key event in his life. For instance, Greg Parker spends about seven pages on the topic. (Parker, pp. 223–29) And he describes the powerful influence that Ferrie had on some of his CAP students. With Oswald, this included an apparent charade: Ferrie masqueraded as a Marine Corps recruiter, in order to convince Oswald’s mother to have her son join the service before he was age eligible. (See Parker, pp. 232–33; Davy, p. 6)

    Long deals with Oswald’s entire military service in five lines. This allows her to skip over crucial issues. For instance, if Oswald was intent on joining the Marines, why was he writing letters to the Socialist Party of America? This was just two weeks before he enlisted. (Parker, p. 249) In that letter, Oswald said he was a Marxist and had been studying Marxist principles for over a year. Does Long know any students at LSU who studied Marxism and joined the Marines? To most objective observers, this double agent masquerade would suggest the influence of Ferrie. She also fails to bring up the military matters of his Russian language test and his association with the U2 spy plane. (Philip Melanson, Spy Saga, pp. 8–12) Was it just a coincidence that, when he left the service, he hightailed it to Russia and offered them radar secrets? (Melanson, p. 13)

    Long then spends all of one sentence on Oswald’s journey to and his stay in the USSR. This radical ellipsis allows her to avoid questions like: How did Oswald know that, in all of Europe, the city of Helsinki granted the fastest visas into Russia? Secondly, how did the impoverished Marine afford to stay in two five-star hotels when he got to Helsinki? (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, second edition, pp. 137–39)

    I could go on and on. My point is that Long seems intent on discounting or avoiding all the earmarks that, in the words of Senator Richard Schweiker, branded Oswald with the “fingerprints of intelligence.” (Henry Hurt, Reasonable Doubt, p. 192) This includes the fact that the KGB did not believe he was a genuine defector. And this is why they shipped him out of Moscow to Minsk and surrounded him with a ring of human and electronic surveillance. (DiEugenio, pp. 144–49) As John Newman will state in Oliver Stone’s upcoming JFK Revisited, Tennent Bagley, a veteran CIA counter intelligence officer, agreed with the KGB on that. Upon Oswald’s return to Texas, the most influential figure for him was George DeMohrenschildt. And before George died, he admitted that he would never have befriended Oswald on his own. He was told to do so by the Dallas CIA station chief, J. Walton Moore. (DiEugenio, pp. 152–53)

    All of this is important information, and not just in understanding Oswald, but because it helps explain a fundamental paradox about Oswald’s life after he returned from the Soviet Union. One that Long does not in any way make explicit. Why, in 1962 and 1963, did the Warren Commission’s Marxist abide amidst two of the most right-wing communities in America? This would be, of course, the White Russians in Dallas/Fort Worth and the Cuban exiles in New Orleans. As many writers have shown—Phil Melanson, Jeff Morley, John Newman—both of these groups were tied in with the CIA and FBI. One example: when the wife of one of the White Russians saw the book Das Kapital at Oswald’s apartment; the couple called the FBI about it. The FBI told them not to worry, “Oswald was alright.” (Harold Weisberg, Whitewash II, p. 46)

    III

    Another character slighted by Long is Guy Banister. And, like many things in the book, this is weird. Why? Because back in May of 1989, in an interview with Dave Mendelsohn of Pacifica Radio, Jim Garrison said that, as far as the New Orleans aspect of the conspiracy went, Banister was the most important personage. The duality of the pinko Marine Oswald, which Long plays down, fits in adroitly with what Banister was doing in the Crescent City—which she also plays down.

    As one of his preoccupations, Banister had taken up the habit of recruiting spies on local college campuses. These would be conservative students who would infiltrate leftist groups. How did Banister find his way into this occupation? After retiring from the FBI in 1955, he came to New Orleans to work for Mayor Shep Morrison. Morrison wanted him to serve as a kind of ombudsman over his problematic police force. The mayor then shifted him over to study communist subversion with the aid of the conservative Senator James Eastland of the Senate Security Sub-Committee. (Davy, p. 12)

    In January of 1958, Banister filed articles of incorporation to open a private detective service. It is notable that the articles were written up by William Wegmann, the brother of Ed Wegmann, Clay Shaw’s attorney. It gets even more interesting, because Banister forwarded for clearance the names of prospective student spies to attorney Guy Johnson, who was a partner to Bill Wegmann. (Letter from Johnson to Wegmann, 1/5/59) Through an informant to Garrison’s office, George Eckert, the DA learned that the former FBI agent never really severed himself from government service, which is why he could charge such low investigative fees. (Davy, p. 14) For instance, one of his spies, Dan Campbell, said “Banister was a bagman for the CIA and was running guns to Alpha 66 in Miami.” (Campbell interview with the reviewer, 9/6/94) Joe Oster, who used to work for Banister, remembered his boss calling Washington and speaking directly to J. Edgar Hoover. (HSCA interview with Oster, 1/27/78) Another former Banister employee saw George Lincoln Rockwell, who ran the American Nazi party, in Banister’s office. (NODA interview with Vernon Gerdes, 10/30/68)

    This is all ignored by Long, as is the following information from Tommy Baumler, an attorney who had worked for Banister as one of his student spies. In 1981, Baumler told researcher Bud Fensterwald that “Clay Shaw, Banister, and Guy Johnson made up the intelligence apparatus of New Orleans.” He also stated that Shaw and Banister were close and that Oswald worked for Banister. (Baumler interview with Fensterwald, 12/30/81) Guy Johnson was with the Office of Naval Intelligence and was Shaw’s first criminal lawyer after Garrison indicted him. As everyone except Long seems to know, Banister was involved with preparations for the Bay of Pigs invasion. (Davy, p. 26) Later, according to HSCA Deputy Counsel Bob Tanenbaum, he was also involved with training for Operation Mongoose. (Probe Magazine, July/August, 1996, p. 24) In fact, at a hearing that David Ferrie called to try and salvage his position with Easten Airlines, Banister said,

    I have had high-ranking Cuban refugees in my office asking me how to go underground and I gave them diagrams for that. I have talked to military and leaders from the various provinces of Cuba that have slipped out and slipped back. (Grievance hearing for Ferrie, 8/5/1963, p. 841)

    Now that we have established the profile of the pinko Marine and the role of Guy Banister in New Orleans subterfuge from the fifties on to 1963, let us turn to Oswald in New Orleans at that time, which, no surprise, Long also wants to discount. She does this by relying on two sources to filter the raw data, namely the FBI and the HSCA. But today, with the declassifications of the ARRB, plus the further work done on this subject since then, it’s not possible to deny the association of Oswald with Banister or his 544 Camp Street address.

    For example, in April of 1968, Garrison’s office interviewed George Higginbotham, who was familiar with Banister and 544 Camp Street in 1962 and 1963. He said he kidded Banister about sharing a building with people passing out leaflets on the street, to which the former FBI man replied: “Cool it, one of them is one of mine.” (NODA memo of interviews, April 12, 16, 17 of 1968) Recently, this writer wrote an article in which I quoted a man named Richard Manuel, who worked in New Orleans in the mid-sixties. He knew two men who worked near Banister’s office and saw him at Mancuso’s coffee shop with Oswald. (ARRB notes of Manuel call of 2/1/96) Dan Campbell, a student spy and Cuban exile trainer for Banister, saw Oswald come into the 544 Camp Street office one day that summer to use the phone. (DiEugenio interviewed Campbell in both New Orleans and Los Angeles in 1994) His brother, Allen Campbell, also worked out of the Camp Street office. He recalls Banister’s secretary, Delphine Roberts, going to see her boss to tell him about Oswald’s leafleting. She got the same reaction that Higginbotham did: Don’t worry, he’s with us. (DiEugenio interview with Allen in New Orleans, 1994) William Gaudet was a CIA asset who had an office in Clay Shaw’s International Trade Mart. He told the HSCA that he had observed Banister talking to Oswald on a street corner. (HSCA Report, p. 219) Two INS agents were tracking illegal Cubans in New Orleans at the time. They got onto to David Ferrie’s association with them. They followed Ferrie to 544 Camp Street and observed Oswald going in also. (DiEugenio, p. 113) With all the above, and more that I left out, her strategy, borrowed from the HSCA—to insinuate that somehow Jack Martin, who worked for Banister, and his secretary, Delphine Roberts, were insufficient—gets turned upside down. Their testimony is bolstered by these other corroborating witnesses.

    IV

    Harold Weisberg is an author that Long knocks almost as badly as she smears Jim Garrison, but she does not give Harold credit for uncovering some rather interesting information about Oswald in New Orleans. When Marina Oswald was sequestered at the Inn of the Six Flags in Dallas, she was interrogated by the Secret Service. They asked her questions about her husband: about whether he owned a rifle, a handgun, or had been to Mexico City. But they also asked her about a “Mr. Farry.” And also if she knew about a Leonard Reisman at Tulane University, who was part of the Committee for Peaceful Alternatives. (Weisberg, p. 19)

    As a reader later wrote to Harold, what makes these questions so startling is that they seem to have been asked on November 24th, before Garrison brought Ferrie in for questioning. “Farry” is obviously a misspelling for Ferrie. In other words, the FBI was on to Ferrie before the DA even talked to him. But it’s the Reisman query that is perhaps even more crucial, because as John Newman points out in his book on Oswald, this leafleting at Tulane was done while the pinko Marine was in his undercover mode in New Orleans. That is when Banister was secretly trying to smoke out suspected Cuban sympathizers in the Crescent City. (John Newman, Oswald and the CIA, pp. 309, 331–32) This was before Oswald got into an overt and direct conflict with a CIA funded Cuban exile group run by Agency officer and psychological warfare expert George Joannides.

    With that, let us proceed to place another layer over all this New Orleans activity. One that Long completely avoids. That is the CIA’s operations against the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) and in support of the DRE, the Student Revolutionary Directorate. Oswald was the only member of the FPCC in New Orleans. He stamped Banister’s office address—544 Camp Street—on one (or more) of the pamphlets he passed out that summer in the Crescent City. Beginning in 1961, that particular pamphlet went through several printings and the CIA ordered copies of the first edition, which is the printing that Oswald had in New Orleans. According to Roberts’ first interview with the HSCA, Banister was very upset about Oswald placing his address on his pamphlets. (Bob Buras interview with Roberts, 7/6/78)

    It is even more provocative than that. And again, Long somehow missed it. The FBI knew about Oswald’s faux pas. After retrieving several of Oswald’s pamphlets, they did two things to conceal the association of Banister with Oswald from the Warren Commission. They either used the alternative address for Banister’s office, which was 531 Lafayette Street or, in their messages to headquarters, they scratched out the fact that Oswald had actually stamped the Camp Street address on his flyers. (Newman, p. 310; Tony Summers, Official and Confidential, p. 325) It would appear that J. Edgar Hoover was trying to conceal Oswald’s association with his former agent, because, as John Newman has written, both the FBI and CIA had ongoing operations against the FPCC at this time. (Newman, pp. 241–44)

    The man who began those CIA operations against the FPCC was David Phillips. And according to Howard Hunt’s testimony to the HSCA, it was also his friend Phillips who started up the DRE. (Interview of 11/3/78, p. 77) As we all know AMSPELL—the CIA code name for the DRE—collided with Oswald’s FPCC during a mild ruckus on Canal Street in August. After which, Oswald was arrested, apparently for receiving a punch from local DRE leader Carols Bringuier. After this, Oswald was part of a broadcast debate between Bringuier and Ed Butler, manager of the anti-communist organization Information Council for the Americas. It was these activities, and the photos and films of his leafleting, that got injected into the media very quickly after the assassination. They provided a public image and background for Oswald. And it was this which the Commission and the press used to incriminate him, as well as his alleged journey to Mexico City, which incredibly, Long just leaves out.

    As Jeff Morley has pointed out, immediately after the JFK shooting, Bringuier placed stories about Oswald in the Miami Herald and Washington Post. About 24–48 hours after the assassination, Bringuier and the DRE published a broadsheet clearly suggesting Oswald had killed Kennedy for Castro. In other words, CIA assets were shaping the story at the start. That publication was at the CIA’s expense, as the DRE was being subsidized to the tune of $51,000 per month by the Agency. George Joannides was the case officer. He later lied about this to the HSCA, when he came back to stymie their investigation of Oswald in 1978. (Morley, Miami New Times, 4/12/2001). Needless to say, the other immediate result was the long time CIA goal of the destruction of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

    As many authors have pointed out, what is so notable about the confrontation on Canal Street is that Oswald wrote about it to the New York City branch of the FPCC about a week before it happened. (Click here for Paul Bleau’s fine article) What we did not know prior to Paul’s milestone two-part essay was another fact that is important to understand Oswald’s role in the street theater. The host of the debate was local radio personality Bill Stuckey. Stuckey had written to the FBI in April of 1962 about their knowledge of any FPCC chapter in New Orleans. (FBI Memo of April 6, 1962) Beyond that, Paul also discovered that Oswald had written the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New York, not in 1963, but in 1962.

    To cap it all off, there is evidence Phillips was in Banister’s office in late 1960 planning a TV telethon to benefit the Cuban exiles with Banister and Butler. (Davy, pp. 21–24)

    From all the above, and more, one can understand why CIA officer William Kent, who worked out of the Miami JM/WAVE station, once said that Oswald was a useful idiot. You will learn almost all of this from Paul Bleau’s article. You will learn virtually none of it from Alecia Long. In other words, there is more current and cogent information about Oswald in New Orleans in Paul Bleau’s two-part essay than there is in Long’s entire book. Whether this failing is by design or a matter of poor scholarship is a question only she can answer.

    V

    Then what is Long’s book about? For one, it’s the weirdest interpretation of the Warren Report I have ever read. She writes that the Commission placed the sex lives of Oswald and Ruby under scrutiny for what that could mean as far as motivation went. (Long, p. 65)

    This is balderdash. I am quite familiar with the Warren Report and I do not recall anything like this in those nearly 900 pages. Long later uses the testimony of Dean Andrews about Oswald as her source. Yet Andrews is shuffled on and off stage in that report in the space of one paragraph. (Warren Report, p. 325) The other reference she uses is another throwaway paragraph about the Commission searching for a nexus point between Oswald and Ruby. In going through a list of possibilities, they wrote that there was not any homosexual relationship between the two men. (Warren Report, p. 364) Two paragraphs out of 900 pages is grasping at straws.

    In further desperation, she trots out the whole White Russian rigamarole about Oswald having problems satisfying his wife. Long writes that perhaps this was because Oswald harbored a hidden preference. She then says this was an obvious question. (Long, p. 66) Obvious to who? After several pages of these eccentric and groundless comments, it struck me that Long was grafting her own agenda onto the facts—to such a degree as to be solipsistic. And when I saw her describing the Jack Gremillion complaint to the FBI about a homosexual ring in New Orleans that the DA was using, I understood the idea behind the book. (Long, p. 58) And also why she discounted Banister: he was not gay.

    State Attorney General Gremillion was a notorious racist and rabid McCarthyite. He opposed Garrison and his treatment of the famous James Dombrowski case, because Dombrowski was an active leftist who supported civil rights in the New Orleans area. Garrison took control of the case, in order to guide it to the highest court to invalidate the phony charges grafted onto a Gremillion/Eastland/Banister fabrication: the state’s Communist Control Law. Garrison thought this was unconstitutional. Dombrowski was smeared as a communist, because he was standing up for the civil rights of African Americans. In 1965, the Supreme Court ruled against Gremillion. (Click here for details) It is clear that Gremillion greatly resented what the DA had done and he retaliated with this almost incomprehensible complaint, which he filed with, of all agencies, the FBI. For a scholar to side with riffraff like Gremillion in order to smear Garrison indicates that she has lost her compass.

    When one combines that with the fact that she fails to give the reader a full portrait of Shaw and his association with the CIA, how can one come to any other conclusion? There is no mention of the ARRB declassified documents that reveal Shaw had a covert security clearance. (Davy, p. 195) Or that he was a highly valued and well-paid contract agent for the CIA. (Joan Mellen, Our Man in Haiti, pp. 54–55) Or that the Agency tried to hide all of this. Going as far as destroying Shaw’s 201 file. (Click here for details) Need I also add that I could not detect any mention of Shaw and Permindex, which after the release of Michele Metta’s important book on the subject, is again, quite a disappearing act.

    Throughout, Long tries to deny that Shaw was Clay Bertrand. In an amazing piece of sleight of hand, she even acknowledges the FBI memo which states such was the case—and further that the Bureau knew Shaw was Bertrand before Garrison arrested him, data they had from two sources. One being Aaron Kohn, a staunch Shaw ally. (FBI memo of March 2, 1967) I could detect nothing in the text concerning the FBI inquiry back in December of 1963, where Cartha DeLoach wrote to Clyde Tolson that Shaw’s name “had come up in our investigation…as a result of several parties furnishing information concerning Shaw.” (DeLoach memo of 3/2/67, italics added) Lawrence Schiller, a prolific FBI informant on the JFK case, sent information to the Bureau that he had several sources in New Orleans and San Francisco saying that Shaw went by other names, including Clay Bertrand. (FBI memo of March 22, 1967) At the Shaw trial, FBI agent Regis Kennedy admitted that he was investigating the Kennedy case prior to his interview with Dean Andrews and that he was searching for Bertrand as part of that investigation. He was then stopped from answering any other questions by Washington. (Trial transcript, 2/17/69)

    The information about Shaw using the Bertrand alias was common knowledge in the French Quarter. But many sources did not want to tell Garrison about it due to their resentment over his prior crusade against B girl drinking, which caused a lot of economic dislocations there. Two such witnesses were Barbara Bennett and Rickey Planche, the latter bought a house Shaw had owned previously. (Jim Garrison: His Life and Times-The Early Years, by Joan Mellen, p. 117) Need I add that she also ignores Andrews’ own secret admission to Weisberg that Shaw was Bertrand. (Mailer’s Tale, Weisberg unpublished manuscript, Chapter 5, p. 11) Only by eliding all this data from one’s text can one write that the identity of Bertrand remained a mystery. (Long, p. 59)

    VI

    Another important aspect of Oswald in New Orleans that Long discounts is Oswald’s leafleting in front of Shaw’s International Trade Mart in mid-August. This also had some interesting telltale points to it. First, Bringuier and his right hand man Carlos Quiroga said that they went to see Oswald in an attempt to infiltrate his FPCC “group” after the ITM incident. The visit occurred before it happened. And Quiroga arrived with a stack of flyers about a half foot thick. In other words, the DRE appears to have been supplying Oswald with his leaflets in preparation for the incident. Secondly, the reason we have films of the event is that Shaw’s first assistant at the ITM, Jesse Core, had summoned the cameras. (Davy, p. 38) Beyond that, it was this leafleting episode that caused George Higginbotham to alert Banister, and his reply was “One of them is one of mine.” (Oswald had hired two helpers from the unemployment office to aid him.) But there was something else to note. In addition to calling the cameras for the ITM incident, Jesse Core picked up a pamphlet from the prior Canal Street episode, the one which got Oswald arrested. He noted that it had Banister’s address on it. He mailed it from the Trade Mart to the FBI with a message attached: “note the inside back cover.” (John Armstrong, Harvey and Lee, p. 568) This would suggest that both Shaw and Core knew about Oswald’s mistake. How would they know unless they were aware of Banister’s operation? Which recalls the work done for Banister by Bill Wegmann and Guy Johnson. But further, the FBI then knew about Oswald at 544 Camp Street before the assassination.

    In light of all the above, for Long to say that the connection of Banister, Oswald, Ferrie, and Shaw was a Garrison innovation which relied on our culture’s suspicions about homosexuals—this is simply fruity. (See p. 90) If one leaves out everything I wrote above about the CIA, then maybe you can sidestep someone with that bunk. But since the first two were not gay, it’s kind of hard to buy. But what makes it harder is all the relevant material she leaves out, like the fact that Ferrie was so desperate to separate himself from Oswald in the wake of the assassination that he committed obstruction of justice and perjury. He went to two sources to see if they recalled Oswald using his library card and he called a former CAP cadet to find any picture he might have depicting him with Oswald. He then lied to the FBI about not recalling Oswald. (See The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, by James DiEugenio, pp. 175–77; Destiny Betrayed, pp. 176–77) Those four instances indicate, as prosecutors term it, consciousness of guilt. I won’t even discuss the illustration of Dealey Plaza that Ferrie had in his desk at work. (Destiny Betrayed, p. 216) And then there were Ferrie’s admissions to investigator Lou Ivon right before he died about his association with both Oswald and Shaw and Shaw’s hatred of JFK. (Davy, p. 66) In the face of this, Long is again ludicrous in saying that Garrison had little evidence against Ferrie. (Long, p. 111)

    We can do the same with Shaw. Since he committed perjury as many as six times on the stand during his trial. Long admits that Shaw lied about his CIA association to the press. She does not admit he did the same under oath at his trial. (Click here for details)

    Let us conclude this silly, utterly superfluous book with this. Long quotes Shaw as saying: Well if I was innocent, why didn’t we just go to trial and get it over with back in 1967? (Long, p. 138) Well Alecia, that might have something to do with another declassified document you missed. It describes 24 folders the CIA titled Black Tape. James Angleton collected them from September of 1967 until March of 1969. He then deemed them classified until 2017. Is it just a coincidence that the beginning date matches the first meeting of the Garrison Group at CIA, which was specifically set up to counter Garrison? At that meeting, Ray Rocca, Angleton’s assistant, said that if things proceed as they are, Shaw would be convicted. (Destiny Betrayed, pp. 269–71) When they set up the Garrison Group and the Black Tape files, the Agency made sure things did not proceed that way, which makes Shaw’s comment likely more revealing than he meant it. (ibid, pp. 271–85)

    But that is the kind of book this is. It’s an almost humorous diversion created for one purpose. It wants us to forget virtually everything we have learned about New Orleans since the creation of the ARRB back in 1994. Sorry Alecia, no sale. It was too difficult to get those files opened in the first place. And when they were opened, we understood why Angleton wanted them closed for fifty years. Consciousness of guilt.

  • Mort Sahl, Caustic Stand-Up Comic of the 1950s, Dies at 94