The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (7 page)

Banister and Ferrie’s work on Cuban operations for the CIA continued into 1963, and by that summer Oswald was working for them. When he was a student that year, Dr. Michael Kurtz actually saw Guy Banister with Oswald at the University of New Orleans, debating students about integration. In 1999 scholar and former Arizona Secretary of State Richard Mahoney published a book about John and Robert Kennedy—
Sons and Brothers
—after gaining special access to files at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. Mahoney wrote that six witnesses saw Oswald with Ferrie or Banister in the summer of 1963, when Oswald garnered an unusual amount of TV, radio, and newspaper publicity for his phony one-man New Orleans chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Two witnesses said Oswald was working for Banister at that time.

Since that time, Kurtz has added another three people to the list of witnesses who saw Ferrie and Banister together, including Deputy
New Orleans CIA Chief Hunter Leake. Leake said that not only did Ferry and Banister work together but that Lee Oswald did small jobs for the CIA as well. In fact, “Leake [said that he] personally paid Oswald various sums of cash for his services.” Kurtz later interviewed Richard Helms about this and other assertions. Helms was essentially the CIA’s highest operational officer in 1963 and later became CIA Director. “Helms neither confirmed nor denied Leake’s story” when Kurtz asked Helms about it.

Years later, a CIA-generated file card that linked Oswald to Banister and Ferrie was declassified. It said Othat in the CIA, “there had been no secret as far as anyone was concerned in regard to the fact that Banister [and] David William Ferrie and subj [Oswald] may have known or been acquainted with one another.” That was an understatement, but what happened to the CIA’s extensive files in New Orleans about Oswald, Ferrie, and Banister is explained in a later chapter.

Banister and Ferrie could have manipulated Oswald in a variety of ways. He always needed money, he had no car or driver’s license, and he was stuck with a “less than honorable” discharge because of his “defection.” And he needed another intelligence assignment if he ever wanted to profit from a successful “big reveal,” after his long years of undercover work. However, Congress was holding hearings about mail-order gun sales around the time Oswald ordered his guns through the mail—and hearings about the Fair Play for Cuba Committee around the time he started his one-man New Orleans chapter of that organization. So the well-connected Banister may have initially told Oswald that ordering guns and joining Fair Play for Cuba could help those hearings.

It’s also possible—even likely given that at least nine people saw them together in New Orleans just months before JFK’s murder—that
Ferrie and Banister were helping to monitor Oswald for the CIA and Naval Intelligence. Someone was monitoring Oswald for Naval Intelligence, and doing so would put Banister and Ferrie in the perfect position to manipulate Oswald, who would think he was simply getting ready for his next intelligence assignment. In reality, though, Ferrie and Banister could have been controlling Oswald to set him up as the fall guy for the murder of President Kennedy. As we will see, just a few months before Oswald ordered—or was told to order—the rifle and pistol, Carlos Marcello had made a threat to kill JFK to end RFK’s prosecution of him. An FBI informant heard Marcello’s threat and reported it to his contact at the Bureau. Though that report has yet to surface in any released FBI files, the House Select Committee looked into the informant’s account and concluded that the incident did occur.

If Banister and Ferrie were manipulating Oswald for Marcello, under the nose of the CIA and Naval Intelligence, this would resolve many of the lingering mysteries about Oswald’s unusual activities in 1963. In August of that year, while being seen with Banister and Ferrie, Oswald received a surprising amount of TV, radio, and newspaper publicity from a fight Oswald provoked with a Cuban exile leader on the streets of New Orleans. The publicity Oswald secured seems highly unusual given how hard it was for left-wing groups to get any type of press coverage in the early 1960s in politically conservative states like Louisiana and Texas. When Oswald was arrested after the fight, an associate of Carlos Marcello bailed him out of jail. Oswald, Banister, and Ferrie did make one small mistake by using the address of a side entrance to Banister’s office building (544 Camp Street) on some of the pro-Castro flyers that Oswald made a big show of distributing on the streets of New Orleans.

The CIA had a media-propaganda expert who easily could have arranged such publicity for Oswald. He was David Atlee Phillips, an expert in overthrowing Latin American governments for the CIA and a good friend to CIA officer E. Howard Hunt. In fact, Guy Banister had met with Phillips a couple of years earlier about anti-Castro publicity. Remarkably, Phillips would also reportedly meet with Oswald and Cuban exile leader Antonio Veciana in Dallas in late August or early September to discuss killing Fidel Castro. Congressional investigator Gaeton Fonzi confirmed that meeting, as did my research associate in an interview with Veciana. It’s important to note that Richard Helms was continuing the CIA–Mafia plots in 1963 without telling his own CIA Director (John McCone), Robert Kennedy, or President Kennedy. Those plots included Marcello and Trafficante, as well as their confessed partner in JFK’s murder, Johnny Rosselli, who also visited Guy Banister that summer.

Oswald’s unusual adventures in Mexico City—David Atlee Phillips’s primary base, though he did missions for Washington that didn’t involve the Mexico City CIA Station Chief—can be explained the same way. Oswald spoke fluent Russian and poor Spanish, but after he visited the Russian and Cuban embassies in an attempt to get to Cuba, someone made calls in excellent Spanish and poor Russian that seemed designed to ensure that Oswald would not get permission to travel to Cuba. It was as if someone wanted him to stay in the United States so he could be of use to them later in the fall. Marcello had the means to make something like that happen. The Mexican Federal Police (DFS) helped the CIA monitor phone surveillance of the Russian and Cuban embassies. However, the DFS was corrupt and involved in the same heroin network used by Trafficante and Marcello. In addition, a CIA asset involved in the CIA–Mafia plots with Trafficante and
Marcello had actually bugged a Communist embassy in Mexico City for the CIA not long before, so he would have known much about the monitoring and bugging of Communist embassies there.

Oswald’s exact actions on the day of the assassination are detailed in
Chapters 14
and
15
. Here we’ll note that something important happened as soon as his name surfaced as a suspect: Naval Intelligence staff in charge of monitoring secret surveillance reports on Oswald began destroying their files on him. My Naval Intelligence source was called back to his office in Washington and ordered to sanitize and destroy much of their Oswald surveillance file. That destruction continued until midday Sunday, November 24, and confirmation for that can be found in an FBI memo from several months later. In it, FBI agent T. N. Goble stated that three of Oswald’s fellow Marines “said they had been interviewed about Oswald.” However, “Goble noted that no such statements or interview reports had been located” in Oswald’s Marine or Office of Naval Intelligence files provided to the FBI. “In a postscript for the” FBI headquarters file, “Goble did not suggest any doubt that such interviews had taken place. Their absence from USMC and ONI files ‘indicates that perhaps they have been destroyed.’”

However, the destruction of files ended after Washington received word that Oswald had been killed. Since no trial lay ahead, the rest of the records wouldn’t have to be destroyed, just hidden from the prying eyes of other agencies. Longtime researcher Paul Hoch, who has assisted several of the government’s JFK investigations, later found indications in declassified government memos that there were more Naval Intelligence files on Oswald than were provided to the Warren Commission. He found references to three files as well as a “supplemental file” on Oswald—one that was never explained or provided to any government committee.

After Jack Ruby murdered Oswald and it was clear there would be no trial, Naval Intelligence and Marine Intelligence decided to conduct their own secret investigation of Oswald. To maintain strict secrecy, even within Naval Intelligence, they used the same men who had been compiling the “tight” surveillance of Oswald, including my confidential source.

The investigation began on November 24, 1963, immediately after Oswald’s death, and lasted for six weeks. Given that Oswald had been under top-secret surveillance by Naval Intelligence, it’s not surprising that the organization wanted to know how he could have been involved in JFK’s murder. Even without a trial, if word ever leaked to the press or public about Oswald’s intelligence work or the tight surveillance, it would have been a public relations nightmare for military intelligence and for agencies such as the CIA that had assisted with Oswald’s surveillance. Military intelligence leaders would have to be ready with as many facts as possible in case President Johnson or Congressional leaders called them to account. The military investigation was highly secret, even within Naval and Marine Intelligence circles, and all of the investigators had to sign strict confidentiality agreements that threatened them with court-martial for any disclosure. No word leaked about the military investigation at the time, and the Warren Commission was never told about it.

In 1978 the wife of a military navigator who had helped fly the investigators to their destinations finally tipped off the House Select Committee on Assassinations about the secret military investigation of Oswald. When the former Marine navigator testified to House Committee staff, he confirmed his participation in the military investigation and provided Committee staff with a great deal of specific information about his former commanders, the size of the investigation
force, and their travel while they probed Oswald’s history. However, as recounted in the House Committee’s report, when Congressional staff tried to run down those leads, Defense Department officials stonewalled them until the Committee’s term was almost over. The first piece of official confirmation for the existence of the military investigation was provided only when the Committee’s efforts were ending. The Committee never received the military’s findings or report. However, the former Marine navigator had read the military’s report and testified that it concluded that one person “was incapable of committing the assassination alone.”

My Naval Intelligence source, who worked on the investigation, provided more detail, saying that the military intelligence report concluded that “Oswald was not the shooter, due to his skills, the gun, etc.” and that the report stressed that “Oswald was incapable of masterminding the assassination or of doing the actual shooting.”

I later located an additional independent ex-Navy source, who confirmed the report’s existence and its conclusion that “Oswald was not the shooter” and “was incapable of masterminding the assassination.” This confidential ex-Navy source was the son of an Admiral who, thanks to his father’s high position, had been assigned to a comfortable office job at a major US naval base in the Pacific. While handling files, he noticed the report and, intrigued, read the entire file. He told me that the report was probably being kept so far from Washington to ensure that word of it didn’t leak and so it wasn’t seen by civilian political officials who might talk to journalists.

Those conclusions meshed with off-the-record comments of US officials who expressed doubts about the evidence against Oswald in private conversations, even as they publicly proclaimed his ironclad guilt. These comments came from the highest levels of government,
as shown by a private, taped conversation between President Lyndon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover soon after the assassination. In the call, Hoover admitted to Johnson that “the evidence” against Oswald “is not very strong.” At the same time, Hoover was pushing Oswald’s guilt to journalists, the public, and other officials.

Years later, Dallas Police Chief Jeff Curry, who had been in JFK’s motorcade, was blunt in his assessment of the lack of real evidence against Oswald: “We don’t have any proof that Oswald fired the rifle, and never did. Nobody’s yet been able to put him in that building with a gun in his hand.” Right after JFK’s murder, Curry’s public statements—like Hoover’s—had shown no such doubt. But to himself at the time, and in public years later, Curry admitted that he thought “Oswald had been trained in interrogation techniques and resisting interrogation” and that Oswald was some type of agent.

In hindsight, it’s easy to see why the public initially accepted the reassuring public pronouncements of Hoover, Curry, and other officials that a Communist “lone nut” had killed JFK. After all, it was the height of the Cold War. Then, too, on the surface Oswald
looked
guilty: He had a job along the motorcade route, he’d left the building after the assassination, he was a member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and he appeared guilty of the murder of Officer J. D. Tippit.

However, as has been well documented since the publication in 1966 and 1967 of the first critical analyses of the Warren Commission’s own twenty-six volumes of supporting materials, the evidence fails to support the Commission’s most important claims about Oswald’s guilt. For example, other employees also left the building after the shooting, Oswald had no getaway car (or even a driver’s license) and initially left by public transit bus, and he had only $13.87 in his pocket when he was arrested at the Texas Theatre.

More important, as Police Chief Curry said, there was no credible evidence to place Oswald in the Book Depository’s sixth-floor “sniper’s nest.” In contrast, much compelling evidence—including testimony from the Warren Commission volumes—places him in the Depository’s lunchroom at the time of the shooting, near a pay phone, as if waiting to receive or make a call. As detailed later, all the evidence and eyewitness testimony against Oswald in Dealey Plaza and the Tippit case are very problematic and far from conclusive, while Oswald’s actions at the Texas Theatre, where he was arrested, smack of someone trying to locate a prearranged contact. In fact, John Martino—a mobster associate of Marcello and Trafficante—confided to a friend that “Oswald was to meet his contact at the Texas Theatre. They were to meet Oswald in the theatre, and get him out of the country.”