Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination (26 page)

In his hunt for Reds under the bed, Banister used to hire young men as inquiry and infiltration agents. To help his Cuban exile contacts, for example, Banister would send young men to mingle with students at New Orleans colleges, primed to report on budding pro-Castro sympathizers. Two such recruits were Allen and Daniel Campbell, both—like Oswald—former marines, and they had very relevant information.

Shortly after Oswald’s supposed street confrontation with Cuban exile Carlos Bringuier, Daniel Campbell told the author, a young man “with a marine haircut” came into his office at 544 Camp Street and used the desk phone for a few minutes. The next time Campbell saw his visitor, he told me, was on television after the assassination. He had been,
Campbell said he was certain, Lee Oswald.

Allen Campbell, Daniel’s brother, told the New Orleans authorities in 1969 that he had been at Camp Street on one of the two occasions on which Oswald passed out FPCC leaflets.
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One might have expected his boss, Guy Banister, infamous for his enraged outbursts, to have reacted with fury when told of the pro-Castro leafleting. Instead, Allen Campbell said, Banister merely laughed. Other former employees, meanwhile, recalled something that did make Banister angry—the use of the 544 Camp Street address on some of Oswald’s FPCC propaganda.

Banister’s secretary at the time, Delphine Roberts, provided information that goes far toward explaining Banister’s behavior. Roberts, described by a former FBI agent and Banister associate as the “number one” source on events at Camp Street, claimed that her boss knew Oswald personally. According to her, Banister encouraged him to mount his FPCC operation from Camp Street. The author interviewed her in 1978, before she had talked to the House Assassinations Committee, then again in 1993.

This was a woman who had made her own mark on extreme rightist politics in New Orleans. Well born and educated, she was proud to call herself a Daughter of the American Revolution and had been a vociferous candidate for a place on the city council. In that campaign, in 1962, Roberts had declared herself opposed to “anything of a Communistic tinge,” which to her meant almost anything much of the population regarded as progress. She railed, for example, against “racial integration of any kind, shape, or form, because it is an integral part of the international Communist criminal conspiracy.” Roberts fulminated against what she regarded as federal interference in state affairs and demanded
American withdrawal from the United Nations.

Guy Banister had not failed to notice, and brought Roberts into his office as personal secretary and researcher. They also became lovers. She was with him throughout the summer of 1963 and at the time of the Kennedy assassination. After the assassination, she said, Banister told her to discuss nothing with the FBI, and not to come to the office until the immediate uproar had blown over. A few months later, when Banister died, she distanced herself from the people she had known at 544 Camp Street and avoided interviews. She stalled questions from the District Attorney’s office in 1967 and tried to elude Assassinations Committee staff in 1978.

When the author first made contact with Roberts, she repeatedly denied having heard the name Lee Oswald until after the assassination. Then she quietly began talking. A surviving sign of her conservative outlook was her opinion that U.S. intelligence agencies—in the late 1970s, when the author first interviewed her—were “being destroyed by so much exposure.” So much had by then been revealed, however, that Roberts said she saw little point in continuing to be secretive herself. If what she said in her interviews with the author was truthful, suspicions about Lee Oswald’s true role have been fully justified.

According to Delphine Roberts, Oswald walked into her office sometime in 1963 and asked to fill in the forms for accreditation as one of Banister’s “agents.” Roberts told me: “Oswald introduced himself by name and said he was seeking an application form. I did not think that was really why he was there. During the course of the conversation, I gained the impression that he and Guy Banister already knew each other. After Oswald filled out the application form, Guy Banister called him into the office. The
door was closed, and a lengthy conversation took place. Then the young man left. I presumed then, and now am certain, that the reason for Oswald being there was that he was required to act undercover.”

The precise purpose of Oswald’s “undercover” role remained obscure to Roberts, but she learned that it involved Cuba and some sort of charade that required deception. Roberts said: “Oswald came back a number of times. He seemed to be on familiar terms with Banister and with the office. As I understood it he had the use of an office on the second floor, above the main office where we worked. I was not greatly surprised when I learned he was going up and down, back and forth.

“Then, several times, Mr. Banister brought me upstairs, and in the office above I saw various writings stuck up on the wall pertaining to Cuba. There were various leaflets up there pertaining to Fair Play for Cuba. They were pro-Castro leaflets. Banister just didn’t say anything about them one way or the other. But on several occasions, when some people who had been upstairs would bring some of that material down into the main office, Banister was very incensed about it. He did not want that material in his office.”

One afternoon, Roberts said, she observed the end product of Oswald’s preparations. As she was returning to the office, she saw “that young man passing out his pro-Castro leaflets in the street.” In what appears to be corroboration of the incident that Allen Campbell recalled, she says she later mentioned what she had seen to Banister. His reaction was casual. “Don’t worry about him. He’s a nervous fellow, he’s confused. He’s with us, he’s associated with the office.”

Nothing Banister said indicated surprise or anger that somebody from his anti-Castro stable was out in the street openly demonstrating in favor of Fidel Castro. Delphine Roberts shrugged off the
contradiction. “I knew that such things did take place, and when they did you just didn’t question them. I knew there were such things as counterspies, spies and counterspies, and the importance of such things. So I just didn’t question them.”

What Delphine Roberts said was divulged with reluctance.
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Other snippets of information, though, tend to support her account—and Daniel Campbell’s claim—that Oswald visited 544 Camp Street. Her own daughter, also called Delphine, used another room upstairs at Camp Street for photographic work. She and a photographer friend, the daughter told me, also saw Lee Oswald occasionally.

Delphine— one could call her Delphine Jr.—said: “I knew he had his pamphlets and books and everything in a room along from where we were with our photographic equipment. He was quiet and mostly kept to himself, didn’t associate with too many people. He would just tell us hello or good-bye when we saw him. I never saw him talking with Guy Banister, but I knew he worked in his office. I knew they were associated.

“I saw some other men who looked like Americans coming and going occasionally from the room Oswald used. From his attitude, and from my mother, and what I knew of Banister’s work, I got the impression Oswald was doing something to make people believe he was something he wasn’t. I am sure Guy Banister knew what Oswald was doing.”

Banister’s brother Ross told the Assassinations Committee that Guy “mentioned seeing Oswald hand out Fair Play for Cuba literature.” Ivan Nitschke, a business associate of Banister’s and a fellow former FBI agent, recalled that Banister became “interested in Oswald” in the summer of 1963. Adrian Alba, who ran the garage next door to Oswald’s place of work, claimed to the Committee that he often saw
Oswald in the restaurant on the ground floor of 544 Camp Street. That restaurant had a rear exit leading up to the office section of the building, and Banister was a regular patron.

Delphine Roberts, Sr., said she was sure that whatever the nature of Banister’s “interest” in Oswald, it concerned anti-Castro schemes, plans that she felt certain had the support and encouragement of government Intelligence agencies. As she put it, “Mr. Banister had been a special agent for the FBI and was still working for them. There were quite a number of connections which he kept with the FBI and the CIA, too. I know he and the FBI traded information due to his former association.” Banister’s former employee, Daniel Campbell, also became convinced that his boss remained involved with the FBI.

An FBI report of an interview with Banister after the assassination indicates that he was asked questions about anti-Castro exiles but none at all about Oswald or use of the 544 Camp Street address on Oswald’s propaganda. As for Banister and the CIA, an Assassinations Committee check revealed only that the Agency “considered using Guy Banister Associates for the collection of foreign intelligence” but decided against it. That, however, had been in 1960—three years before the Oswald episode.

Delphine Roberts told the author, “I think he received funds from the CIA—I know he had access to large funds at various times in 1963.” She added that known intelligence agents and law-enforcement officers often visited Banister’s office. She accepted the comings and goings as normal, because so far as she was concerned the visitors and her boss were “doing something to try to stop what was taking place, the danger that was facing this country because of Cuba.”

It had been at Banister’s instigation, in 1961, that the New Orleans branch of the Cuban
Revolutionary Council had taken offices at 544 Camp Street. CIA records reveal that the Council’s local representative “maintained extensive relations with the FBI… . Two of his regular FBI contacts were a Mr. de Bruce and … Guy Banister.” Banister, who was long retired from the FBI, was referred to as an active FBI contact. As one associate of the Cuban Revolutionary Council representative put it, the office became a sort of “Grand Central Station” for the exiles.
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The Mob, too, had its line into the Council—the exile group received an offer of a “substantial donation” from New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello.

The CRC also had a friend in a New Orleans advertising man called Ronnie Caire. Caire was a fervent supporter of the exile cause and had been a leading light in yet another anti-Castro organization, the Crusade to Free Cuba. The arm of coincidence was long indeed, it seems, in the New Orleans of 1963. After the assassination, Ronnie Caire would say he “seemed to recall” a visit from Oswald. He said Oswald had been “applying for a job.”

The second CRC representative in New Orleans, Frank Bartes, turned up for the court case following the street fracas with the exiles, and indulged in a noisy argument with Oswald. He later said he warned the FBI that day that Oswald was dangerous. Yet a month later, in September, he told the Bureau Oswald “was unknown to him.” Bartes was an informant for both the FBI and the CIA. CIA records show that he had been checked for use in a “contact and assessment” role as early as 1961, and he would be working for the Agency’s Special Operations Division by 1965.

Unfailingly, in any study of Oswald in New Orleans, the connections seem to come full circle. The last of those connections is the one that links Oswald’s name with that of David Ferrie.

David Ferrie was an oddity, more so even than Banister. He was a born flier, a skill that had earned him a career as a senior pilot with
Eastern Airlines. For Ferrie that was not enough. His was a brilliant but erratic mind, which made for a tragically disordered life.
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Ferrie dabbled in religion and ended up founding his own church. He dabbled in medicine and began a one-man search for the cause of cancer. He was a homosexual who compromised himself while at work. Eastern Airlines fired him. Ferrie might have remained an unknown eccentric, but then there was Cuba.

Ferrie was one of the mavericks who found a role for themselves in the efforts to topple Fidel Castro. His reputed ability to perform miracles with airplanes finally found an outlet. In 1961, before the Bay of Pigs invasion, Ferrie reputedly flew to Cuba dozens of times, sometimes on bombing missions, sometimes making daring landings to extract anti-Castro resistance fighters.

By the summer of 1962, at the age of forty-five, he was in New Orleans—dividing his time between a mix of liberal causes—he was for civil rights, anti-Castro activism, and a passion for young men. He was by now an outlandish figure, not least because he suffered from alopecia, an ailment that had left him not only bald-headed, but without eyebrows or body hair. Ferrie compensated by wearing a red toupee and sometimes grotesquely obvious false eyebrows. He would have been merely laughable, but his quirky intellect found him listeners in the world of political extremism.

As early as 1950, when he joined the U.S. Army Reserve, he had been stridently anti-Communist, writing in a letter to the commander of the U.S. First Air Force, “There is nothing I would enjoy better than blowing the hell out of every damn Russian, Communist, Red, or what-have-you… . We can cook up a crew that will really bomb them to hell… . I want to train killers,
however bad that sounds. It is what we need.”

Ferrie was a rabble-rousing public speaker, with his favorite subject the festering Cuban confrontation, his principal whipping boy President Kennedy. After the 1961 catastrophe at the Bay of Pigs, in a speech on Cuba to the New Orleans chapter of the Military Order of World Wars, his attack on the President had been so offensive that Ferrie had eventually been asked to leave the podium. Detestation of the President became something of an obsession with him. Some, who heard Ferrie say angrily, “The President ought to be shot,” would one day come to believe that in his case it had been no idle oratory. A favorite Ferrie theme was along the lines that “an electorate cannot be depended upon to pick the right man.”

In some ways, he was politically compatible with Guy Banister, a man who would be remembered for an occasion on which he alarmed companions by pulling out a gun and shouting, “There comes a time when the world’s problems can be better solved with the bullet than the ballot.” Ferrie and Banister were joined, certainly, by fervent support for the anti-Castro cause. By the summer of 1963, reportedly, Ferrie had become a frequent visitor to 544 Camp Street.