Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination (25 page)

A story that the alleged assassin was a paid informant, with a payroll number, had been one of the first problems faced by the Warren Commission. The Assassinations Committee, for its part, considered allegations that Oswald had had some sort of relationship with the FBI while in New Orleans.

There was the claim of Orest Pena, a New Orleans bar owner who in 1963 himself supplied occasional information to FBI agent Warren De Brueys.
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Pena was to say he had seen Oswald with Agent De Brueys on “numerous occasions” and that De Brueys threatened him physically before his Warren Commission appearance, warning him to keep quiet. Former agent De Brueys repeatedly denied Pena’s accusation, and the Assassinations Committee believed him. Though the author also found De Brueys credible, interviews with Pena gave the impression that he produced his accusation about the FBI contact to hide some different but relevant truth.

Pena was active in anti-Castro exile politics and deeply involved with the Cuban Revolutionary Council. When Carlos Bringuier was arrested after the fracas with Oswald, it was Orest Pena who secured his release. In that sense, he was well placed to have information on the Oswald’s activity. In his interviews for this book, meanwhile, he insisted that he knew Oswald had been working “for a government agency” in the summer of 1963.
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In 1994, the author tracked down a former FBI informant—documented as such—who said he learned that Oswald was indeed used by the
FBI in New Orleans.

Joseph Burton, who—at the time of the author’s interview—was running a locksmith’s business in Plant City, Florida, said he was employed by the FBI for two years in the early 1970s to pose as a Marxist and infiltrate radical groups. He was sometimes accompanied by a woman from New Orleans, also an FBI asset.

The Bureau has admitted that Burton was “a valuable and reliable source” and was paid for his services. A senior official confirmed to the
New York Times
that the woman, whose name was not revealed, performed missions abroad for the FBI.

“I did several trips with her,” Burton told the author, “and she said she and her husband—they were both working for the Bureau—knew Oswald had been connected with the FBI in the New Orleans office. Her Bureau contact, she said, told her Oswald had been an informant… . I talked about Oswald with the agent I usually met with in New Orleans. And he said, ‘Oh, we owned him,’ or something to that effect. They always used that statement if they were paying someone to cooperate with them.”

The totality of the information about Oswald’s activity in New Orleans justifies real suspicion that Oswald was wittingly or unwittingly manipulated by a government agency. The information fits with the FBI’s Counterintellingence Program (COINTELPRO), instituted a few years earlier specifically to discredit and disable groups that were seen as subversive.

High on the COINTELPRO target list, along with the Communist Party and—less predictably—the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE), was the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

COINTELPRO tactics called for spreading adverse publicity about groups and their members—not least by feeding potential smear information to cooperative journalists—and by setting up phony chapters of targeted organizations. By late 1963, a senior FBI official would report that “aggressive FBI investigation of the organization, coupled with an effective campaign of exposure of subversive influences in the group by the public press,” had been highly successful against the FPCC.

“The episode of Oswald’s FPCC chapter,” the historian David Kaiser wrote in 2012, “bears all the marks of a COINTELPRO operation… . The behavior of the New Orleans police and the FBI certainly suggested that they knew Oswald’s chapter was bogus.”

Down the years, speculation as to the role of U.S. intelligence has been the common denominator of the persistent doubts about the true role of Lee Oswald. Oswald trailed behind himself, from Japan in 1958 to New Orleans in 1963, the shadow of an undefined connection with the secret world. How one interprets it all ranges from the reasonable man’s skepticism over the apparent lack of intelligence interest in Oswald on his return from Russia, to Orest Pena’s shrill accusations against the FBI in New Orleans.

It is possible that FBI and CIA denials of their agencies’ involvement with Oswald were truthful. As the Assassinations Committee pointed out, however, Oswald’s “possible affiliation with military intelligence” was never resolved.
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It may be, too, that Oswald was—at least in the months before the assassination—one remove away from the formal structures of the intelligence community. In the world of intelligence, many operations are run through cutouts, buffer organizations, or individuals whose actions can never be laid at the door of any specific agency of government. It may have been thus with
Oswald in New Orleans.

In 1978, the House Assassinations Committee pursued research into clues that no one has ever explained away. The first of them is a long-discarded document, and an address synonymous with subterfuge.

Blind Man’s Bluff
in New Orleans

“In the
months leading up to the assassination, I think Oswald got in over his head. He was no longer quite sure who he was working for, or why. Somebody was using him, and they knew exactly how and why.”

—Staff Investigator, House Assassinations Committee, 1979

W
hen he wound up his talk with Oswald, FBI agent Quigley left the New Orleans police station carrying a bundle of papers with him. Whether the agent understood it or not, the young prisoner had done as he said he would when he promised the FBI information. As Quigley would write later, Oswald had “made available” several examples of his pro-Castro propaganda. Two were the yellow leaflets he had been handing out in the street. The third was a forty-page pamphlet entitled The Crime Against Cuba. At first sight, it seemed an unremarkable tract, two years out of date, a stern critique of American policy toward Cuba. Yet The Crime Against Cuba was an evidential time bomb. Tucked away inside the back cover, at the very end of the text, was a rubber-stamped address. It read (see Photo 33):

FPCC
544 CAMP ST.
NEW ORLEANS, LA

To the eye,
544 Camp Street was a nondescript building on a corner, a shabby, three-storied relic of the nineteenth century. On one side, its peeling facade looked on to a dusty square dominated by a statue of Benjamin Franklin and frequented by dozing drunks (see Photo 29). Yet the building did not fit in at all either with Fair Play for Cuba or with its supposed New Orleans representative, Lee Oswald. Recent tenants until the summer of 1963 had included the Cuban Revolutionary Council, the umbrella organization of the
anti
-Castro exiles. There, too, was Guy Banister Associates, a detective agency in a building that was a meeting place for Cuban exiles. The building was known as a haven for rightist extremists, and the local FBI knew its habitués very well indeed. When Agent Quigley noticed that address on Oswald’s pamphlet, it must have struck him as a total contradiction. Yet he and his FBI colleagues appear to have been incurious.

It was not that the improbable address escaped their attention. A few days after Oswald gave the first pamphlet to Agent Quigley, a second copy arrived in the mail—to be filed, rationally enough, under the serial number for documents concerning
anti
-Castro activity. This second copy had been sent in by a regular FBI informant who had watched Oswald’s pro-Castro demonstration and pocketed a handful of his literature. FBI records show that Quigley lost little time in asking New York for information on the author of this pamphlet, Corliss Lamont. Other details, like a post-office box number Oswald had given, were promptly checked. According to the record, however, no one initially deemed it necessary or even interesting to investigate—at the time—what
should have been utterly perplexing, the address that did not fit.

At some point, perhaps following the assassination, somebody did draw attention to it. The pamphlet sent in by the informant, as released to the public only fifteen years later, bears the scrawled sentence, “Note inside back cover.” There, the address is circled and the same hand has added what appears to be “ck out”—presumably “check out.” A glance at the Warren Report, however, suggests that any check the FBI may have made went nowhere. Buried deep in a chronology of Oswald’s life is this sentence: “While the legend ‘FPCC, 544 Camp St., New Orleans, LA,’ was stamped on some literature that Oswald had in his possession at the time of his arrest in New Orleans, extensive investigation was not able to connect Oswald with that address.”

Investigation by the Assassinations Committee, conducted years later on a cold trail, concluded that the FBI’s effort was “not thorough.” The Committee developed evidence “pointing to a different result,” and it buttresses suspicion that the alleged assassin was involved in some covert operation. The address at 544 Camp Street may provide solid clues to conspiracy in the assassination of President Kennedy.

FBI agents did follow up on the Camp Street lead three days after the President’s assassination, but only with superficial inquiries. They interviewed the building’s owner, Sam Newman, who said he had never rented office space to Fair Play for Cuba. He advised “that to the best of his knowledge he had no recollection of seeing Oswald in or around the building.” On the basis of a few interviews like this, the FBI filed the reports on which the official inquiry was to rely. Their conclusion was: no FPCC office and no Oswald at Camp Street. End of story.

Nobody reacted to the fact that, in addition to the pamphlets recovered in
New Orleans, a further twenty were found among Oswald’s possessions in Dallas, and ten bore stamps with the 544 Camp Street address. On top of that, the official inquiry dismissed clues in letters written by Oswald in the summer of 1963. These indicated that he had used an office in New Orleans.

In May 1963, less than a month after his arrival in the city, Oswald had written to the head of the FPCC in New York: “Now that I live in New Orleans I have been thinking about renting a small office at my own expense for the purpose of forming an FPCC branch here.” Although even a humble office would cost about thirty dollars a month, Oswald wrote, he was intent on finding one. Warned by FPCC headquarters against rushing into anything, Oswald promptly replied, “Against your advice, I have decided to take an office from the very beginning.” This sounded much as though Oswald had already found premises or was on the brink of doing so.

Two months later, he was still writing about the office—this time to report its closure. On August 1, having received no reply to his last letter, Oswald wrote, “In regard to my efforts to start a branch office … I rented an office as I planned and was promptly closed three days later for some obscure reason by the renters, they said something about remodeling, etc., I’m sure you understand… .”

Oswald occasionally did adjust the facts to fit his plans. He used untruths for a purpose, and there apparently was a purpose behind the FPCC caper in New Orleans. The knowledge we have today, that American intelligence was plotting against the FPCC at that very time in 1963, makes it impossible to ignore the pamphlets stamped 544 Camp Street and the repeated references to an office. Take another look at the dates involved, and at the oddly vague replies the FBI and Secret Service agents received from the building’s landlord, Sam
Newman.

Oswald’s August 1 letter, saying he had briefly used an office but that it had been closed down, came just before the clash in the street with the anti-Castro exiles. If there is any basis of fact to his story about having had an office, it is a fair guess that he used it sometime during the latter part of July. Newman, the landlord, was to recall several abortive attempts to rent space at 544 Camp Street in the summer of 1963. These included a very brief rental by a man who “told him that he worked as an electrician by day and desired to teach Spanish by night.” The man made an initial rental payment, only to return a week later saying he “had been unable to get enough students to enroll.” Money, apparently, was no problem. The man told Newman to keep the deposit money. As Newman told it to the Secret Service, this occurred at exactly the time Oswald indicated he had used an office.

Though the man, described as being in his thirties and olive-skinned, was clearly not Oswald, the record provides another clue that may explain the discrepancy. After the assassination the authorities received a tip-off that Ernesto Rodríguez, an anti-Castro militant who “operated a Spanish school … had tape recordings of Spanish conversations with Oswald.” Rodríguez did run a language school, and his father was in the electrical business. Under cursory questioning in 1963, he denied having such a tape but admitted that Oswald had contacted him “concerning a Spanish language course.” The date, it turns out, fits—sometime soon after July 24.

Interviewed again in 1979, Rodríguez admitted that he had indeed met Oswald, but the story about Spanish classes seemed to have slipped his memory. Now, like the DRE’s Carlos Bringuier, he claimed Oswald had visited him to offer his services in training anti-Castro
Cuban exiles in guerrilla techniques. Indeed, Rodríguez was to say, it was he who sent Oswald to see Bringuier. Further checks reveal that, in 1963, Ernesto Rodríguez was a leading activist in the New Orleans campaign against Castro. He was one of those who controlled the funds of the Crusade to Free Cuba Committee, the fund-raising group for the CIA-backed Cuban Revolutionary Council (CRC). In that capacity, he was almost certainly in touch with William Reily, Oswald’s employer in New Orleans and a backer of the Crusade.
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Rodríguez also helped manage the Council’s affairs in New Orleans—its second most important base in the United States. The CRC had theoretically ceased to use 544 Camp Street by the time Oswald got busy in New Orleans, but the reality was rather different. The CRC enjoyed a flexible business relationship with the landlord Sam Newman, who made no initial charge for the office space—on the basis that the CRC would pay if it raised enough money from fund-raising. Anti-Castro militants were still using 544 Camp Street after Oswald’s arrival in New Orleans, and came and went at will throughout the summer of 1963.

The exiles found a welcome in the offices of Guy Banister, the man who headed the detective agency at 544, and so apparently did Oswald. Leads from his former staff appear to confirm that Oswald, too, used that unlikely address—and may explain the devious purpose behind Oswald’s pro-Castro campaign that summer. The information suggests Oswald was drawn into a U.S. intelligence scheme aimed at compromising the FPCC—and that Banister was deeply involved.

Guy Banister was an old-fashioned American hero. He had been a star agent for the FBI, a tough guy whose long career had covered some of the
Bureau’s most famous cases, including the capture and killing of 1930s murderer and bank robber John Dillinger. He had been commended by FBI Director Hoover and served as a Special Agent in Charge for almost twenty years. He had retired, at fifty-three, following major surgery and a warning that he would henceforth be prone to unpredictable, irrational conduct.

New Orleans, nevertheless, had accepted Banister as Deputy Chief of Police, an appointment that ended following an incident in New Orleans’ Old Absinthe House—he was said to have threatened a waiter with a pistol. Banister was now, by all accounts, a choleric man and a heavy drinker. Instead of retiring, however, he started Guy Banister Associates, the nominal detective agency.

The former FBI’s man’s intelligence background, coupled with a vision of himself as a super-patriot, now led him into a personal crusade against Communism. Banister supported the John Birch Society, Louisiana’s Committee on Un-American Activities, the paramilitary Minutemen, published a racist tract called the
Louisiana Intelligence Digest
, abhorred the United Nations and believed plans for racial integration were part of a Communist plot against the United States. New Orleans Crime Commission Director Aaron Kohn, who knew Banister well, characterized him as “a tragic case.” By 1963, his public persona can only be described as that of a right-wing nut.

After Castro’s revolution in Cuba, though, Banister’s concept of the Red Menace was shared by many, and it was dangerously close to official U.S. policy. He had thrown himself feverishly into the CIA-backed exile campaign to topple Castro, helping to organize the Cuban Revolutionary Democratic Front and Friends of Democratic Cuba. In 1961, before the Bay of Pigs invasion, he served as a munitions supplier.

By 1963, former members of
Banister’s staff said, the offices of the “detective agency” were littered with guns of every distinction. It was no coincidence that the Cuban Revolutionary Council, the exiles’ government in exile, made its New Orleans base in the same building as his office. For both Banister and his Cuban protégés, the building was well located, close to the local offices of both the CIA and the FBI. For the agencies, Banister’s intelligence background and independent status likely made him a convenient buffer, a circuit breaker for operations with which officialdom could not be openly associated. Even if his political passions and alcoholism made for a dangerously inflammable mix, Banister had his uses.

Banister’s former FBI colleagues did not seriously investigate him or his office after the Kennedy assassination, and he died of a reported heart attack a few months later. Had he been available, it is doubtful whether the Warren Commission would have seen any reason to question him. In the record, the New Orleans FBI obscured 544 Camp Street, Banister’s address, by referring to it only as 531 Lafayette Street. That was, in fact, one of the halves of the building at 544 Camp Street, an address that just might have sparked interest in Washington.
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Some investigation of Guy Banister came three years later, when New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison began his probe—and the resulting unsuccessful prosecution of a suspect—into a supposed New Orleans conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy.
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As the world learned from a stream of garish headlines, the trial was a fiasco that served only to obscure the evidence in a key location. The Garrison episode did, however, bring attention to some significant areas of that evidence.

An important development came when Assistant District Attorney Andrew
Sciambra interviewed Banister’s widow. After her husband’s death, she said, she had found among his effects a number of Fair Play for Cuba leaflets. Banister had kept extensive files at his office, and these were scattered after his death. Some, allegedly, had been removed by government agents. Later, however, the Louisiana police Intelligence unit retrieved a “half-filled” filing cabinet containing records on “Communist groups and subversive organizations,” and investigators learned something about the contents from index cards and police interviews.

Banister’s file titles included: “Central Intelligence Agency,” “Ammunition and Arms,” “Anti-Soviet Underground,” and “Civil Rights Program of JFK.” Sandwiched between “Dismantling of U.S. Defenses” and “U.S. Bases—Italy” was a now-familiar name—“Fair Play for Cuba Committee.” It was followed by the classification number 23-7. According to a state police officer who saw this file, it contained basic information on Oswald’s activities in New Orleans. As Assassinations Committee staff noted, this file had since, “unfortunately,” been destroyed.