Legacy of Secrecy (19 page)

the motorcade meetings and was feeding information to Trafficante at

the time.” Our source, who also helped with JFK’s security, said it was

“likely that de la Llana could have tipped off Trafficante about the [secu-

rity] plans or [the] threat alerts.”16 Besides, the ever-cautious Trafficante

would still have an opportunity to hit JFK in Dallas.

Following the events in Tampa, we noted earlier an account saying

that Rosselli went from Tampa to Louisiana and then on to Texas, but

others were heading in that direction as well. One was a member of the

lowest rung of the Mertz/Marcello/Trafficante heroin network, Rose

Cheramie (one of many aliases used by Melba Christine Marcades).

Cheramie was a sometime B-girl, prostitute, and heroin courier for

Ruby. It’s ironic that a woman who was one of the lowest members of

Marcello’s crime empire came close to saving JFK’s life, and on at least

three occasions would risk her own life to help law enforcement.

On November 21, 1963, Rose Cheramie had been dumped on the

side of the road by two men she was riding with from Florida. She was

eventually taken into custody by Louisiana State Police Lieutenant Fran-

cis Fruge, who drove her to East Louisiana State Hospital to be treated

for heroin withdrawal. Cheramie told Lt. Fruge that she and her two

male companions had been on their way to Dallas, where the men were

going to “kill Kennedy.” Her remarks were also heard by physicians at

the hospital, including Dr. Victor Weiss, head of the hospital’s Psychia-

try Department, who said that on Thursday, November 21, “Cheramie

was absolutely sure Kennedy was gong to be assassinated in Dallas on

Friday and kept insisting on it over and over again to the doctors and

nurses who were attending her.” Dr. Weiss stated Cheramie said that

“word was out in the New Orleans underworld that the contract on Ken-

nedy had been let,” and Dr. Weiss assumed she was referring to Carlos

Marcello’s organization.17 Cheramie would later be proven an accurate

informant regarding Marcello’s part in the French Connection ring, but

at this time, no one was taking her seriously.

Chapter Six

Lee Harvey Oswald’s documented life, when stripped of years of specu-

lation and conjecture, bears little relation to that of the supposed teen-

age communist the Warren Commission would later depict. Actually,

when Oswald was a young teenager, his favorite TV show was
I Led

Three Lives,
about a seemingly average American man who joined the

Communist Party but was really an FBI informant. This was the era of

movies like
I Was a Communist for the FBI,
which dramatized the true

exploits of deep-cover government agents who spent years undercover,

only to finally reveal their true status and reap the rewards of fame

and money. That was surely an enticing possibility to a young teenager

who had never known his father, who had died shortly before Oswald’s

birth. Lee looked up to his two older brothers, both of whom served in

the military, one of them in an intelligence branch that guarded against

communist subversion.1

When Oswald was fifteen, he joined the Civil Air Patrol, not exactly

a hotbed of communist activity during the McCarthy era. (Staunch anti-

communist David Ferrie was one of Oswald’s instructors.) Oswald then

not only tried to join the US Marines, but first tried to enlist a year before

he was old enough. Once he was finally in the Marines, Oswald was

assigned to a U-2 spy-plane base in Japan. There are numerous indica-

tions he became involved in intelligence work: He studied Russian and

spouted love for Russia so often that his Marine buddies called him

“Oswaldovitch,” but even in those Cold War times, no Marine sergeant

or officer ever noted that behavior or disciplined him for it. According to

journalist Dick Russell, Oswald was one of five young men to defect to

Russia around the same time in 1959, with two more defecting in 1960.

Of those seven, six returned to the US, some with Russian wives.2

Such men and their wives could have been “dangles,” who after their

return to the US would have been kept under covert surveillance in order

to see how KGB agents and operatives in America might try to recruit

them. Shortly after Oswald’s return from Russia with his wife, Marina,

he was allowed to get a job at a firm in Dallas, Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall,

that helped to prepare maps from U-2 spy-plane photos—at the height

of the Cuban Missile Crisis! According to official records and the Warren

Commission, this aroused no special concern on the part of the FBI or

US intelligence, even though, as we noted earlier, Oswald was under

“tight surveillance” at that time. We suspect that US authorities allowed,

or probably arranged for, a recent defector to get a job at such a sensi-

tive facility in order to make Oswald an even more attractive target for

KGB recruitment.

In October 1962, four days before Oswald secured his job at Jaggars-

Chiles-Stovall, a most unlikely individual befriended him: a former

White Russian Count named George DeMohrenschildt. According to

Oswald’s mother, DeMohrenschildt had arranged the job for Oswald,

which makes sense in light of DeMohrenschildt’s later admission that

he was a US intelligence asset. DeMohrenschildt was sophisticated

and urbane, and he usually traveled in far loftier circles than Oswald’s.

George DeMohrenschildt knew Jackie Kennedy’s family; the
New York

Post
reported that he had briefly been engaged to Jackie’s aunt and

“nearly married [Jackie’s mother] Janet Auchincloss.” As a child, Jackie

called him “Uncle George.”3

Rumors circulated for years that DeMohrenschildt had intelligence

connections, which declassified files, historians, and former govern-

ment investigators have now confirmed. According to historian Michael

Kurtz, the associates of DeMohrenschildt and his fourth wife, Jeanne,

included Richard Helms, New Orleans CIA Deputy Chief Hunter Leake,

and two CIA officials later involved with AMWORLD, including David

Atlee Phillips.4 Congressional investigator Gaeton Fonzi discovered that

“a CIA memo . . . written by Richard Helms credits DeMohrenschildt

with providing valuable foreign intelligence.”5 DeMohrenschildt knew

another George in Texas, George H. W. Bush, an oil executive who would

later become president of the United States.

Shortly before his controversial death, described in Chapter 64,

George DeMohrenschildt confirmed his work for the CIA to Edward J.

Epstein, a writer for the
Wall Street Journal
. DeMohrenschildt said he had

befriended Oswald only at the request of Dallas CIA officer J. Walton

Moore, who also told DeMohrenschildt that even before Oswald’s stay

in the Soviet Union, the CIA had an “interest” in Oswald.6 From informa-

tion provided by former CIA officials and declassified files, journalist

Anthony Summers and former FBI agent William Turner have also con-

firmed DeMohrenschildt’s intelligence work.7 Moreover, Kurtz recently

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

documented DeMohrenschildt’s occasional work on CIA anti-Castro

matters in 1963.8

The DeMohrenschildts remained friends with Oswald and his wife

through the end of 1962 and into early 1963, and were no doubt part

of the “tight surveillance” Naval Intelligence maintained on Oswald.

Around the spring of 1963, when the DeMohrenschildts left Dallas for

new intrigues in Haiti, DeMohrenschildt attended meetings between a

business associate and the assistant director of Army Intelligence (part

of the DIA, as was Naval Intelligence).

As for Oswald and his job at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, the KGB hadn’t

taken the bait, so Lee Harvey Oswald was apparently ready for another

assignment by the start of 1963. Even before Lee Oswald left Dallas to

move to New Orleans in the spring of 1963, he had made at least one

earlier trip to the Crescent City. That was shortly after Oswald had joined

the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (via mail; he never attended any meet-

ings or met any of its officials), and Oswald—or someone using his alias,

“A. Hidell”—had ordered a rifle and a pistol though the mail. Because

Senate committees were investigating mail-order gun dealers and the

Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC), both were in the news at the time.

Senator Thomas J. Dodd (father of current senator Christopher Dodd)

headed the gun committee and served on the FPCC committee.

Oswald’s unusual activities in early 1963 (leaving a mail-order paper

trail by ordering guns that were easily available in his neighborhood,

and joining the FPCC while avoiding meetings of real socialists, com-

munists, and Castro sympathizers) have long concerned Congressional

investigators and journalists. However, Oswald’s actions leading up to

his move to New Orleans in the spring of 1963 can be explained by look-

ing at his associates in New Orleans, Guy Banister and David Ferrie.

History professor Michael Kurtz, while dean of the graduate school

at Southeastern Louisiana University and a Louisiana state historian,

uncovered new confirmation of the intelligence activities of Banis-

ter, Ferrie, and Oswald. Kurtz interviewed Hunter Leake, whom CIA

memos confirm was the Deputy Chief of the New Orleans CIA station

in 1963.9 Leake told Kurtz, “in a quite definitive manner, that Oswald

indeed performed chores for the CIA during his five months in New

Orleans during the spring and summer of 1963.” In fact, “Leake person-

ally paid Oswald various sums of cash for his services.” When Kurtz

interviewed Richard Helms about this and other assertions, “Helms

neither confirmed nor denied Leake’s story.”10

Leake said that in 1963, Oswald was in New Orleans, working with

Ferrie and Banister, both of whom also had intelligence ties. According

to Kurtz, “Leake stated that Ferrie performed a series of tasks for the

CIA: supplying weapons and munitions to Anti-Castro guerrilla fighters

in Cuba; training Cuban units for the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion; conduct-

ing propaganda sessions among refugee units, thus reinforcing their

hatred of the Castro regime; and serving as an intermediary between

the CIA and organized crime.”11 Ferrie must have found the last function

easy, since during 1963 he was also working for Carlos Marcello.

As for private detective Guy Banister, Kurtz writes that, according

to Leake, Banister “served as a key CIA liaison with many anti-Castro

Cuban refugees in southern Louisiana. Banister often handled details of

the training and supplying of various anti-Castro organizations. Typi-

cally, Hunter Leake or another CIA agent from the New Orleans office

would meet Banister in Mancuso’s Restaurant, located in the infamous

544 Camp Street Building.”12 That was the corner building that housed

the office of the rabidly anticommunist and anti-Castro Banister, the

same address that showed up on the pro-Castro leaflets Oswald was

seen passing out in the summer of 1963.

Another witness uncovered by Kurtz, Consuela Martin, provides a

new perspective as to why Banister’s office address appeared on the pro-

Castro leaflets. Kurtz writes that Martin’s office was next to Banister’s,

and “she saw Oswald in Banister’s office at least half a dozen times in

the late spring and summer of 1963. . . . On every one of these occasions,

Oswald and Banister were together.” Oswald sometimes asked her to

do translating work for him by typing documents into Spanish. Martin

believes that the 544 Camp Street address was used in hopes of luring

unsuspecting pro-Castro leftists to Banister’s office, thus yielding more

information for Banister’s voluminous files.13

The CIA likely knew of at least some of Banister’s activities with

Oswald, since Oswald received such extensive local media coverage in

the summer of 1963. Kurtz writes that Leake “provided Banister with

substantial sums of cash, and Banister would use the money to purchase

needed supplies and to pay the salaries of the men working in certain

anti-Castro operations.”14 However, Banister and Ferrie were also work-

ing for Marcello in 1963, and the previous fall the Mafia chief had made it

clear that he was determined to kill JFK in order to end Bobby Kennedy’s

pursuit of him. Banister and Ferrie were in a perfect position to assist

the CIA regarding Oswald, while at the same time making sure Oswald

would make a convincing fall guy for Marcello’s assassination of JFK.

It’s possible that Oswald’s activities in early 1963, such as ordering his

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

rifle and joining the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, were influenced by

Banister and Ferrie.

Kurtz recently disclosed the identity of a new witness to Oswald’s

interactions with Banister and Ferrie: “Hamilton Johnson, a geologist

who later served on the faculty at Tulane University, stated that on