4-waldron 19. Have New Orleans police officials interrogated a man named A. W. Will, a service station operator, who_ | said in Feburary, 196k, that police. officers asked hin” af he had ever seen Oswald in the company of a man ‘wearing | a wig? If'so, did Mr. Will agree that such questions were | asked him? 20. Did or does David Ferrie wear a wig and/or false eyelashes? Or false eyebrows? ele Sam Sumerlin, former Associated Press bureau chief in New Orleans, has been quoted as saying that he got the impression in late November, 1963, that New ‘Orleans - police officials were conv@nced that Mr. Ferrie was involved in some manner in the Kennedy assassination, and that a ‘biographical sketch was made available for use i if and when Mr, Ferrie was so charged, Is this true? | If so, please explain + why the | investigating officers believed: this. | 22, 7 Marina Oswald testified before, the President's oe | Commission to Investigate vthe Assassination of President Kennedy that when she and Oswald lived on Magazine Street in the Summer of 1963 that Oswald “would. sit on: the | | porch and aim his rifle. Does: the apartment house next door look out onto this screen » porch? HW 54756 Docld: 32263970 Page 2704
HW 54756 §@waldron 23 Oswald always Seemed to have more money. than his _ Job would have Provided? Do New Orleans police officials agree with this? Ir SO, where did the money come from? 24. When Oswald was interviewed -- if he was == by FBI agents after his arrest on Aug. 9, was Lr, Martello - present during the interview? Or any other New Orleans police officer? If so, what was the Substance or | what Was Said? Who was the FBI agent? If no New Orleans police officer was present, did Oswald request that the interview be in private? 25 Which New Orleans police officers Participated in the investigation of David Ferrie? Which FBI agents? 26. What did Mr, Ferriets neighbors Say? 27. Did anyone ever report having seen Oswald at Mr, Ferriets home? . | 28. A New Orleans Singer named Connie Kaye has reported a that she met Oswald in a coffee house in New Orleans in the Summer of 1963 and that Oswald protested anti~Castro | material she was using in an act at Pat O'Brients Club, Do you have reason to believe this? Doubt it? 29. Was Oswald 2 frequenter of the Havanna Bar in New Orleans? Docld:322763970 Page 205
— 6-walaron a vee one ine pee 30. The woman who manages the apartments on Magazine Street, where Oswald lived in the Summer of 1963 reported that | after Oswald had left on Septe 25, ‘she found a case of . empty beer bottles, Who drank the berr? | “(Oswald is alleged to have not drunk beer.) 31. Bo officials of the New Orleans Police Department 7 have reason to believe or suspect that Oswald was not alone in the plot to kill President Kennedy? If so, please explain. 32. Were there any indications that the FBI held back any” . information which it gathered during the course of the © . Kennedy investigation? If so, please explain. _ Respectuflly, - Martin Waldron New York Times Room 729 Chroncile Blade. Houston, Texas. HW 54756 DBocld:32263970 Page 2706
: oe Pa - — “ a DisTRIGT ATTORNE , 7 an & PARISH OF ORLEANS Wd STATE OF LOUISIANA @ 2700 TULANE AVENUE NEw ORLEANS, 19 JIM GARRISON December 28, 1962 / District ATTORNEY Gambrell, Harlan, Russell, Moye and Richardson c/o Eastern Air Lines, Inc. Miami International Airport Miami 48, Florida / / Attn: Mr. William G, Bell, Jr. ; ta Re: David William Ferrie Gentlemen: | This is to inform you that the prosecuting witnesses _ in the cases of intimidation against David W. Ferrie: have requested the State to dismiss the charges, They have further produced Signed affidavits to the effect that they do not wish to prosecute, that they would not testify and that they would like the Charges. dismissed. I have spoken to Jim Garrison, District Attorney, at considerable length concerning these matters and w: both are of the Opinion that the cases against Ferrie would be impossible to. | prosecute without the full cooperation of the complain- ing witnesses even if they were forced to testify, It is for these reasons that I inform you that both © charges against Ferrie will be dismissed, If I can be of any further assistance to you in this matter please do not hesitate to call upon me, Very truly yours, a jf nth J be oe ‘ _ RUDOLPH F, BECKER, III ASSISTANT DISTRICT ATTORNEY “RFB/je HW 54756 DBocld:32263970 Page 207
So eee ane Ha ote wpa nemo em 5 eis eee tle at nN CANIN eaAN eee BS OT 8 A en aliee be 2441 Columbus Street Ss New Orleans, Louisiana January 15, 1963 Mr, Malcolm McIntyre, President . . : : Eastern Air Lines Incorporated, New York City, N.Y. . Dear sir: _ ; Ll am ‘Eric ‘crouchet « ra was supposed to have been the State Witness in criminal charges: in Louisiana against youe Captain David Ferrie. I am ‘-writing this letter for three main reasons. I want to exonnerate Captain Ferrie. Also I want. to complain about the way Eastern Air Lines is treating ‘Ain, and thu way I been treated. ; I tried to exonnerate him before to your Captain Greiner, but he ‘would not give me the.chance. So I am writing to you since you are the ae ‘presidens of the company. Here is what happened. There is a certain woman here in New Orleans . who has relatives who are big politicians. This woman is a real one believé “me. I am no doctor but I am sure something is not right with her. She has. been Jafter" Captain Ferrie for a long long time. She has cooked up more stories and. lies than I can count. Of course he is not the only one. She _ has some morc on her list that she gives it to, and I am one of them.What -she has got against me-or Captain Ferrie I cannot rigure out. She has a funny pattern. This month it is one person she doesnt like and next month it is somebody else. She figures she is the hand of God or something and . runs around judging people and then goes after them. She crought this mess on. oo Her own family has trouble: with her. One of her sons ran away from home.- This embarased her. She had to bleme somebody. It was Captain Ferries _ turn. She even called Eastern and toid them tnis. It just was not so. But “how do you stop a tlie when it is repeats. & often enough and loud enough. Anyhow after a'few days it became apparent that she was wrong and Captain Ferrie knew nothing about her son. running away. Captain Ferrie threatened to sue her for what she was saying that was nis mistake. | @ ne The next thing I know I am dragged in to it. I am not surprised because I know what she has been saying about me for so long. Some cops picked me up and rousted me around awhile. They gave me a paper to sign. I signed it. I should not have but I did. 1 was so scared 1 would have signed anything. just to get out. I was sixteen going on seventeen. I. aia not know what. I had signed. So I was shook when = found out a Tew - Gays later that I was supposed to te State Witness ezainst Captain Ferrie ‘in criminal charges. Then I was in contact with Captain Ferrie and had arrangements to get papers from his lawyer withdrawing the charges. a a moment of courage I signec these. Then I called the cops and tolc th - what:I did and why. For this they charged Centain Ferrie with intimidating oo witnesses. — Another thine. THeyb picked up some kid (first the» called nim ' Dumas) whose name is McClendon. My father and I talked to_ them a Pew weeks .. ago. They claimed they knew nothing about the case. The cops were trying to -. make this kid be a witness against Captain Ferrie too. This is how it “went. This woman, like I. said, has big political connections. HW 54756 DBocld:32263970 Page 208
os nen I signed these withdrawal I was rousted around again. Then ‘I got re at scared. I-had no way to turn. I was scared of this woman, fcthe cops, and whetner Capeary Ferrie would sue me for false charges: ‘or. what. So I dic the only, thing left and took off for service. “3 thé: service taught: me my rights and what tc be afraid of and what not. when I came home a couple of omnths ago I knew my rights. With my father and. my:lawyer I went to the District Attorney and explained the whole situation. They had no other choice than TO drop the charges. Tt want to ‘make one thing ‘elear. All of these charges are false. it just did not happena. _ I am completely exonnerating Captain Ferrie. I went to. your Captain Greiner in New Orleans and I telephoned your Miami. lawyer Bill Bell. With each one I tried to tell my story and IK. got the brush off. Why wouldnt they let me tell the story?. They stopped me. Then I. got to hear some mighty interesting things. It seems that , .. Eastern is trying to collect only the. dirt, and forget the good. Wnat - they have somebbdy wants to twist just one certain way. It all builds ‘up.to one thing And that is this it looks like Eastern has joined this women to blacken Captain Ferrie. I also found out that either Bill Bell or. gers. Greiner tried to fire Ferrie when these charges were first , made Does this mean that just to have somebody accuse you of something > is gr ~ounds for dismissal on Eastern?.if it does Eastern is in “bad shape, and. so is the country. a ot I mean £0 get my say in this matter. If I dont get it in to you I will have to find another way. I am an axious to get it in now. because there is a comapny called Southern Research, some kind of private detectives that are going around and admit they are,just. trying toviget" Captain . Ferrie. They claim they are employees of Eastern Air Lines. - ty _ (Here is the other side of Centir rrie you ought to know... | First he is’ a loyal American and chet stien, In CAP and other act tivities he has done his: bes: to help wandering kids.. He helps them get on the straight road. He encourages education and religicn. HE is one of few adults who do this. The rest just talk about their civic duties to the. young and never do anything about it oe Second. he is “aviation minded. He encourages kids to aviation and to the Space Age. He was talking about rogkets a long time ago when his fellow pilots laughed at him for iv. Some of your pilots today he trained. Third he is a good’ pilot. I have been talking: out at New Orleans ‘Airport. I find he has the best reputation o the Gulf Coast as an instrument pilot and everybody agrees that they would wnat him, before anybody e4s8e,, at , the controls. ourth he is safety minded. EVery ody knows how he trained his own copilots ne stvewardesses in safety and emergency measures, and on his own time. p e <i Five he is company minded because ke is always running around gtfing oublict ta talks for Eastern and on his own time and money. "Six when everybody was too chicken £0 move he got food clothing medicine na. ghousing for Cuban refugees. Yet some loyal "patriots" on Eastern- ir. lines crijticised it. HW 54756 Docld: 32263970 Page 209
Seven he never disgraced your company. He did not get fined and have his» mame 22 the paper for jeovardizing your flights. I réad in the paper where sour captains got fined for. having the stewardess o7 0... ; & Wich passengers | eboard. They are still: flying. Doi. you think °~ in. flissnt Captain Ferrie snou ila. be too?. = ot BEDE B 4S! ay “ gunny thing” how “when aman is down everybody gangs ud -on him. Ef: they. are: jealous of him they Go the same thing too. So I have - been doing. my: best. to undo the wrongs done him of which I ams part. I thought.’ ‘Eastern would be interested in the same thing if tney were Christian’ and American. So far, it seems the other way around. L have been going ground to some | business men I know through the Kiwanis club. I have been telling my story to get this man's name cleared. I understand that. these are the customers who pay your salary. Ong thing I can say, they showed a good attitude. They cannot belisve that Eastern would hold him out of service once this story was. told. / ae This. affair nas made ‘me very angry with Eastern Air Lines... I figured that a man in your position would not want this to go on. I preferred to: think that this was just the conduct of a couple of minor officials and did.not represent the policy of the wnole company. The future. will tell. . . “There. are many people here who want to come forward and write ‘letters of. protest. They have been Serpe t because someone told them ‘that if they. did it would look “Tigged up". Do you want to. hear from them, t hope you do. There is one other thing. My name has been. linked up to this. We cannot afford a lawyer to go after the woman who started all this. Her day will come, however. The Sther Gay I found that if Captain . Ferrie does not get back to flying. status my name will sugfer too. - I dont think: Eastern is interesve & in sais responsibility too. ‘So, I hope that you Will do the. right thing, and the American Like to know thing, and. put Captain Ferrie back on flying. t would what you are going to. do. @ HW 54756 Docld:32263970 Page 210
a nes No 64) ‘ \ \ - _ \ DEPARTMENT ®F STATE win these presenta shall come, Greeting: . vrtifyy That the documents hereunto annexed are true copies — a v passport file of the jepuriment of State in the case of : ie liam Ferrie, as folloms: \ application UPON Whit vassport no. 2055860, we New Orleans Series wis resued Jeptember 16, 1961; - \application upon whiza ré noe 530960, ' “ew Orleans Series wis July ll, 1957. t 4 ‘ an i 4 ¥ \ pe M4 re ‘4 iit testimony herent, I, Be AN BUS Ks Secreta: of State, have hereunto caused the seal of the Depart- L a £4 aot ft 7 iv g - S ment of State ta be affixed and my name subscribed by the’ ‘Authenti- < » > S ‘ “ cation Officer of the said Department, at the city of Washington, in é, > the District of Columbia, this. AUCDLL2 ED eee _. | day of Dac / 981. atta RS 16: . Secretary of Slate. Deparment of State, RINTING OFFICE = 16—30046-0 HW 54756 DBocld:322763970 Page 211
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x4 RAND conspiracies need not be grand. There need be only ) a few central figures in a position to manipulate, wheedle, te dupe, blackmail, and buy the bit actors. This is the theory of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison as applied to the as- sassination of President Kennedy. “The people who engineered the killing of oneof the finest Presidents weever had are walking around © The Louisiana. populist can hardly be accused of dis- loyalty. He has, he claims, discovered who killed Kennedy, who organized the plot, and what forces were involved in planning the various steps that led to the assassination. And he has done all this against formidable odds. He has been denounced and ridiculed by such columnists-as Bob. Considine, Jim Bishop and Victor Reisel. The press has, - : “drama have been wildly disparate. On February 22 of this. ~ _ year, after preliminary, lengthy questioning by the D.A.’s ‘office and shortly before he was to be arrested by Garrison ~ and charged wij iracy to assassinate | Kennedy, a David: Willi Ferrie way found dead in his cluttered ; Srtmecume New. Orleans ¥ “ a _ The second major figure i in Garrison’s probe i 1S 54-year- : for the most part, slanted its coverage of his investigation to imply motives of personal glory and political gain. The government Establishment has given him the cold shoul- der, arid the FBI, which “cleared” two of his present suspects immediately following the assassination, refused to release its information to him. The truth, according to Garrison, is certain to rock the republic as.it gradually unfolds in court. He is convinced - that Lee Harvey Oswald was not a triggerman, and that Jack Ruby was the puppet of a more sophisticated master.. He is equally sure that the working level of the conspiracy ~ _.was composed of rabid anti-Castro Cuban exiles in league with elements of the American paramilitary right. The con- . HW 54756 Docld:32263970 Page 217 certed Establishment effort to confine the events of the assassination to. Oswald and Ruby suggests the Garrison thesis: a vertically integrated plot rising step by step into high echelons of government and the military-industrial . complex. “Honorable men did in Caesar,” dryly observes .: the prosecutor With a fondness for historical metaphor. " Thus far, the dramatis, _personae of Garrison’s terse old Clay L. Shaw, retired executive director of the New - Orleans International Trade Mart. Charged—with- -CON- += spiracy by Garrison, he is now awaiting trial. A third individual expected to figure prominently in the - Garrison inquiry is Manuel Garcia Gonzales. The New | Orleans D.A. has come into possession of a a’ photograph ob 7 + RAMPARTS 17.” 4
taken at Dealey Plaza just before the assassination which shows several Latin men behind the low picket fence at the top of the famed grassy knoll. Most Warren Report critics believe one or more shots were fired from the grassy knoll area, and Garrison thinks Gonzales is one of the men in the photograph. Gonzales has di disappeared and has probably fled the country. Oswald? In Garrison’s book he was nothing more than a “decoy and a fall guy.” [A GUIDE TO THE CIA’S NEW ORLEANS] att his scheme. =. “Triangulation . the availability of exit... one man had to be = sacrificed to give the other one or two gun- men time to escape.”’ Leon Oswald listened impassively. So did Clay Bertrand, a tall; courtly, older man with close-cropped white hair. Bertrand, smartly attired in a maroon jacket, looked out of place with his carelessly dressed companions in the disarray of Ferrie’s apartment. This was the scene on or about September 16, 1963, as described recently in a New Orleans courtroom by Perry Raymond Russo, Jim Garrison’s star witness to date, who had been present in the Ferrie apartment on that fateful night. An articulate young insurance salesman for Equitable Life and a graduate of the Jesuit Loyola Uni- versity, Russo had passed, for what it is worth, a series of Sodium Pentothal (‘truth serum’’) tests administered by medical experts. His story was sufficiently impressive to cause the three-judge panel to bind over Clay Shaw, whom Russo identified as Clay Bertrand, for trial in the assassina- . tion of the President. Following Ferrie’s rapid-fire- dissertation, said Russo, ‘the talk switched to escape. Ferrie declared in favor of a flight to Brazil with a refueling stop in Mexico, or a more risky hop directly to Cuba. (It is a source of puzzlement why Ferrie would want to go to Cuba, given his anti- Castro stance.) Bertrand disagreed, on the grounds that word of the assassination would spread too fast to permit a long flight. “Shut up and leave him alone,” interjected Leon Oswald, whom Russo says was Lee Harvey Oswald, “he’s the pilot.” “A washed-up pilot,” huffed Bertrand, alluding to Ferrie’s dismissal from Eastern Air Lines for homosexual convictions. From the conversation, Russo deduced that none of | the three intended to participate actively in the assassina- tion. Ferrie suggested they “should be in the public eye’”” on the day of the attempt; he himself would make a speech at a nearby college. Bertrand said he would g0 to the west coast on business. Oswald said nothing. Clay Shaw was indeed on the west coast on business on 18 RAMPARTS 67 November 22. Two weeks previously, his manager at the New Orleans Trade Mart had written the San Francisco Trade Mart that Shaw would be passing through on that date and would like to discuss mutual interests with their executives. At the moment when Kennedy was killed, Shaw was conferring with the San Francisco men. Ferrie also had an alibi, of sorts. A New Orleans attor- ney is fairly certain that on that black Friday, the eccentric little man was in his law office around 12:15 p.m. Ferrie contended he was in New Orleans until late in the after- noon, when he and his two young roommates left on an impromptu trip to Texas to “hunt geese.” On the surface it was a wild goose chase: the trio drove to Houston on Friday, to Galveston on Saturday, and returned to New. Orleans on Sunday—over 1000 miles. But Garrison has witnesses who swear that Ferrie spent several hours at a Houston skating rink waiting by the telephone. It was a curious junket at a curious time, so curious that Garrison, on his own initiative, arrested and held the three for FBI _ investigation of “subversive activity.” : Garrison charges only that the machinations in Ferrie’s apartment set in motion events that culminated in the assassination. What direction the substantive plot may have taken from there is hinted at in the further testimony of Russo. He had met Ferrie, he said, some four years earlier through Civil Air Patrol activity, and frequently was invited to his apartment. There had been a party be- fore the meeting on the evening in question, and Russo ~ had lingered after the rest of the guests: Among the last to leave were several Cubans in military fatigues, two of whom he recalls by their first names, Manuel and a name sounding like Julian. Manuel, Garrison suspects, is the missing Manuel Garcia Gonzales. The bizarre quality of Ferrie’s life followed him into death. After being questioned by Garrison, he muttered he did not have long to live. The cause of death, the coroner revealed, had been an embolism at the base of the brain induced by hypertension. But a brai embolism can also be caused by a deftly administered karate chop to the neck, a technique which possibly killed Dallas . reporter Jim Koet he, who had participated in an enig- matic meeting at Jack Ruby’s apartment the night Oswald was murdered [Ramparts, November. 1966]. An inveterate activist, Ferrie solicited funds for Castro in 1958, then bitterly turned against him when he struck his communist colors. According to former Havana journalist Diego Gegnzales Ter Tendedera, Ferrie flew fire- bomb raids and refugee rescue missions to Cuba from . Florida in a twin-engine Piper Apache owned by Eladio del Valle, an ex-Batista official who had escaped to Miami ‘with considerable wealth. Ferrie reportedly was paid $1000 to $1500 a mission, depending on the risk involved. . - HW 54756 DoclId: 32263970 Page 27135
..in the invasion, and ‘deci The caper ended in 1961, when U.S. government agents confiscated the Apache, and Ferrie headed for New Orleans. On February 22, the day Ferrie died in New Orleans, del Valle’s head was split by a powerful blow with a machete or hatchet and he was shot over the heart. Miami police, noting that he had been involved in nar- cotics smuggling, callpa”ea gan} land slaying. After the Bay of Pf as come to light that a CIA-directed diversionary strike had been launched from a hidden base in the New Orleans area. The loquacious pilot was openly hostile to President Kennedy for failing to commit American military might against Castro. On one occasion a speech he was giving before the New Orleans Chapter of Military Order of World Wars turned into a diatribe against Kennedy for a “double-cross” of the invasion force. Several members walked out and the chairman abruptly adjourned the meeting.” During this period the conspicuous ‘Ferrie was fre- quently noticed by the New Orleans Cuban colony in the . in Louisiana.” In what it called “his unpublished account of how the explosives disappeared,” the New Orleans States-Item claims that Novel has told several persons ’ that he, Ferrie, Aracha and several Cubans did not steal the munitions but transported them to New Orleans at the instruction of their CIA contact just before the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961. Furthermore, the States- Item says Novel operated a CIA front, the Evergreen - Advertising Agency, which prepared cryptographical messages contained in radio commercials for Christmas trees that alerted agents to the invasion date. Novel, how- . ever, has denied being a CIA agent. company of Sergio Aracha-Smith, local director of the anti-Castro Cuban Democratic Revolutionary Front. (New Orleans police intelligence records reflect, states the Washington Post, that the Front was “legitimate in nature and presumably had the unofficial sanction of the Central Intelligence Agency.”) The Lake Pontchartrain water- front near Aracha’s home seems to have become a locus for mysterious meetings. Various Garrison witnesses claim to have seen Ferrie there, as well as an exchange of money between Oswald and Shaw. By 1963, Aracha apparently had been deposed as Front ° director, for he had moved to Houston in 1962 and. was living there at the time of the assassination. In 1964 he moved to Dallas. When Garrison investigators recently sought to question him, he refused to talk without police . and Dallas Assistant: D.A. Bill Alexander present. How- ever, Garrison secured a warrant charging him with conspiring with Ferrie and one Gordon Nove] to burglar- ize an explosives depot of the Schlumberger Well Services Co. near New Orleans in August 1961. Aracha is > Presently free on bond. . The strange: behavior of Gordon Novel lends still " another piquant ingredient to the case. Shortly after being interrogated by Garrison, he hurriedly sold the French Quarter bar he owned and left town. He turned up in McLean, Virginia (headquarters of Army intelligence and CIA), blasted the assassination probe as a fraud, and noisily submitted to a “private” lie detector test given.by a . _ former Army intelligence officer that, he said, supported his veracity. In Colum bus, Ohio, where he was arrested on a fugitive warrant obtained by Garrison, he cryptically stated, “I think Garrison will expose some CIA operations The mysterious explosives theft dovetailed with another angle in Garrison’s investigation—an April 1961 FBI raid that uncovered a large cache of arms, ammunition and explosives in a cottage near New Orleans. Garrison’s men are seeking a group of Cubans said to have accumulated the cache. Further CIA aid or comfort for the paramilitary right wing is suggested by the role of private eye W. Guy Banister, who with a partner named Hugh F, Ward ran. a private sleuthing agency in New Orleans. Both a former FBI official and a former superintendent of New Orleans police, Banister was noted for his outspoken ultracon- servatism. His office, according to a States-Item inform- ant, was one of the drops for the stolen munitions. In 1963, the ever-present David Ferrie <errie worked intermittently for him as an investigator. While researching an article on The Minutemen [Ram- parts, January 1967], I learned’ from a defector—a Minuteman aide who had access to their headquarters files—about an allied group in New Orleans known as the Anti-Communism League of the Caribbean. The League was said by the aide to have been used by the CIA in its engineering of the 1954 overthrow of the leftist Arbenz government in Guatemala. The Minuteman defector said the names of both Banister and Ward appeared in the . secret Minutemen files as members of the Minutemen and, as operatives of the Anti-Communism League of the Caribbean. He also divulged that militant anti-Castro Cuban exiles were prominent in the Minutemen ranks. With these pieces of the puzzle beginning to fit to- gether, Garrison hopes to complete the picture. But he will get no help from Banister and Ward. Potential wit- nesses to the assassination secrets seem to have a propen- sity for dying. In 1964, Banister, who drank heavily and: was given to wild sprees, suddenly died of a heart attack. On May 23, 1965, Ward, a commercial pilot, was at the controls of a Piper Aztec chartered by former New Or- leans Mayor de Lesseps Morrison when the craft, engines sputtering, crashed on a fog-shrouded hill near Ciudad Victoria, Mexico. All aboard were killed. RAMPARTS « 19 6) HW 54756 Docld:32263970 Page 219
Mal a indintnee  b optic! ol z [THE PARAMILITARY OPERATION AT DEALEY PLAZA] &, RESIDENT KENNEDY’S MURDER had all the ear- F)_ marks of a paramilitary operation. The Dealey Plaza site was ideal: tall buildings at one end, at the other a grassy knoll projecting to within a stone’s throw of the roadway and covered by foliage. It is the opinion of Garrison’s investigators, and of this writer, that the slowly-rolling Presidential limousine was ’ trapped in a classic guerrilla ambush—with simultaneous fire converging from the knoll and from a multi-storied _ buildings as the “triangulation,” Russo said, that Davif/ ad talked about—a sniper in the rear posi- e public’s attention while the sniper in front “COUTd fire the shot that would do the job.” It was, in fact, the frontal fire that did the dreadful job. _ The explosive head shot that snapped the President’s head backward and literally blew his brains into the air could not have been the effect of a high-velocity rifle bullet fired from the rear-—such bullets pierce cleanly (a nurse at Parkland Hospital said that when doctors attempted a tracheotomy on the President, the damage was so great the tube pushed out the back of his head). It was the effect of a nasty hollow-nose mercury fulminate bullet, gen- erally known as a “dum dum,” which explodes on impact. Although outlawed by the Hague Convention, exploding bullets are favored by guerrilla fighters. An ex-CIA agent who had received paramilitary training from the Agency advises that'the CIA supplied this type of bullet to the anti-Castro forces it trained. The first report of the assassination in the Dallas Times- Herald afternoon edition—before the Warren Commis- sion’s three-shot, “magic bullet” theory was proclaimed — read: “Witnesses said six or seven shots were fired.” A bullet mark on the curb belatedly analyzed by the FBI - did not show traces of copper, as would have been the case had the bullet been the copper-jacketed type al- legedly fired by Oswald. ‘There definitely was a shot fired from behind that fence,” insists witness S. M. Hol- land, referring to the partially concealed picket fence on. the grassy knoll. Holland, a crusty old railroader who was standing on the Triple Underpass towards which the President’s limousine was heading, is the rare eyewitness who survived both the bamboozling tactics of the Warren Commission and Secret Service insistence that he change his story. : Holland’s account is complemented by the testimony of the late Lee Bowers, who overlooked the parking lot at the rear of the grassy knoll from his railroad tower. Bowers said he saw two out-of-state automobiles and a Texas automobile, apparently equipped with a two-way radio, prowling the lot shortly before the assassination. He also noticed two men in the lot near the fence; when -. 20 RAMPARTS om G 7 ‘the shots rang out they were partially obscured by the trees, but there was “something out of the ordinary, a sort of milling around.” Jim Garrison agrees that Oswald “was no Captain Marvel.” The D.A. says: “The fatal shots came from the front.” In this context Oswald’s indignant protest while in custody, “I didn’t kill anybody ... I’m just a patsy” may prove, after Garrison finishes, to be true. -There is scientific evidence tending to support it. The Dallas police made paraffin casts of Oswald’s hands and right cheek in order to chemically test for nitrates. Al- though many common substances can deposit nitrates, the blowback from a gun ordinarily deposits an appre- - ciable amount. The test showed positive reactions for both hands; a negative reaction for the cheek. Ordinarily, a right-handed man who has shot both a pistol and a rifle, as Oswald was accused of doing, would have nitrates on the right hand and cheek. Most likely the source of the nitrates on Oswald’s hands was fingerprint - ink—he had been finger and palm printed before the | paraffin was applied.- Moreover, the FBI subjected the casts. to Nuclear Activation Analysis, a relatively new technique, so sensi- tive it can detect a thimbleful of acid’ in a tankcar of water. Deposits on the casts, the FBI reported, “could not be specifically associated with the rifle cartridges,” but - ballistics expert Cortlandt Cunningham did not view the result as exculpating Oswald. “‘A rifle chamber is tightly sealed,” he testified, ‘cand so by its very nature, I would not expect to find residue on the right cheek of a shooter.” This explanation seemed so implausible I contacted Dr. Vincent Guinn of General Atomics in San Diego, who pioneered the development of the NAA process. He said that he and Raymond Pinker of the Los Angeles police crime lab were also curious about the test, and ordered an Italian Carcano rifle such as Oswald supposedly fired. They fired the obsolete weapon, which some authorities think is liable to blow up, and tested their cheeks. Nitrates from the blowback were present in abundance. [LEE HARVEY OSWALD] A, NOTHER COMPONENT of the Garrison theory is that NX Oswald was not a dedicated communist at all, but an agent of the CIA who may have EX. been trained at the Agency’s facility at Atsugi Air Force Base in Japan in 1959. He was a revolutionary looking for a revolution—any revolution—and he found a cause with the CIA-sponsored paramilitary right wing planning the overthrow of Castro. The paramilitary right wing is composed of numerous factions over which the Minutemen exert a loose hegem- ony. It is cross- “pollinized with Birchers, Klanners, States (text continued on p. 24) — , Hliustrations by Dugald Stermer HW 54756 Doctd: 32263970 Page 270
worked on and off for Banister aS an investigator, and the mutual affinity was such that in 1962, when Eastern Air , Lines was in t89-yeoeess of dismissing ——— Ferrie for publicity over alleged homo- acquired part of his files. When he Sexual acts, Banister ‘appeared at a . realized he was a Prime suspect in Gar- Miami hearing and delivered an impas- | rison’s probe, Ferrie Systematically dis- sianed plea on his behalf. When Banister | posed of his papers and documents for suddenly died, the ex-pilot evidently | — “the years 1962 and 1963. But in photo: copying the bibliography of a cancer paper he had written (at one time he had — 48 RAMPARTS caged mice in his home on which he ; experimented with cancer implants), he fen bX . - . " inadvertantly overlapped the bottom portion of notes recording the disposi- tions. Included is the notation: “Copies _ Of B's [presumably Banister’s] microfilm files to Atlanta rite-wingers (sic].” The Banister files were reputed to be the largest collection of ‘“anti-com- munist intelligence” in Louisiana, and part were sold by his widow to the Sov- ereignty Commission, a sort of State . HUAC, where a Garrison investigator " was able to examine them. Banister’s filing system was modeled after the FBI's, and contained files on both friends and foes. The “10” and “23” classifica- tion dealt with Cuban matters; 23-5, for example, was labeled Cuban Democratic Revolutionary Front and 10-209 simply Cuban File. There was a main file, 23-14, labeled Shaw File, but someone had completely stripped it before Garrison’s man got there. . . Tretia tte ttes cee ees eee rence HW 54756 DBocld:322763970 Page 221
HW 54756 DBocld: 322763970 picked up, he “was called by his CIA ‘the bunker to New Orleans.”” The key to _Mocratic Revolutionary Front—and sev- The “somebody.” one can surmise from the Gordoa Nevel episode which follows, was tte CTA. Novel is wanted by the DA as a material witness in the 1961 burglary of the Schlumberger Well Co. munitions dump near New Orleans. Subpoenaed by the grand jury last March, Novel fled to McLean, Virginia, | next door to the CIA complex at Lang- ley, and took a lie detector test admin- istered by a former Army intelligence officer which, he boasted to the press, Proved Garrison’s probe was a fraud: He then skipped first to Montreal and then to Columbus, Ohio, from where Gover- nor James Rhodes, in one of the most absurd stipulations ever attached to a normally routine Procedure, refuses to extradite him unless Garrison agrees not to question him on the assassination. From his Ohio Sanctuary the fugitive cryptically asserted that the munitions caper was one of “the most patriotic burglaries in history.” When an enter- Prising reporter took him to a marathon Party, Novel’s indiscreet tongue loos- ened further. According to the States- Item article, Novel’s oft-repeated ac- count was that the munitions bunker was a CIA staging point for war materiel destined for use in the impending Bay of Pigs invasion. He is quoted as saying that on the day the munitions were contact and told to join a group which was ordered to transport munitions from the bunker was Provided by his CIA contact. Novel reportedly said the others in_the CIA group at the bunker. were iD e/ Sergio Arcacha Smith— ‘ew Orleans delegate to the Cuban De- eral Cubans. The munitions, according to his account, were dropped in Novel’s Office, Ferrie’s home and Banister’s Office-storeroom. Loe Page 222
also is rumored to have been the tip-off man between the Dallas police and the Dallas underworld .. . Ruby oper- ated his businesses on a cash basis, keeping no record whatsgever—a strong indication that Ruby himself was involved in illicit operations of some sort... His primary technique in avoiding prosecution was the maintenance of friendship with police officers, public officials, and other influential persons in the Dallas community.” Nor did the letter ignore Ruby’s affinity for Cuba. “In about 1959, Ruby became interested in the possibility of selling war materials to Cubans and in the possibility of opening a gambling casino in Havana.” The pushy entrepreneur’s continuing interest in Cuba was discussed. © CIA, instructed the Commission staffers, should con- sider the possibility of “ties between Ruby and others who might have been interested in the assassination of President Kennedy.” They specifically mentioned a num- ber of people thought to know Ruby, including former Havana gambler Lewis_J. McWillie, a Birch Society official, and oilmen H, L. and Lamar Hunt. For months the CIA was silent. When finally dunned by the Commission it simply-said that its files contained “no information on Jack Ruby or his activities” or any link with Oswald. The reply came after the Commission had concluded its deliberations. _ “There is much more to Ruby than meets the eye,” attests one of Garrison’s chief sleuths, Louis Gurvich. Garrison has produced a former Dallas cab driver, Ray: mon Cummings, who is prepared to testify he twice drove O a Ruby’ of Dav here alregs reggwexists a body of evidence tying Oswald to Ruby. For example, there is Wi ee 9° Litchfield I], who claimed he saw Oswald waiting to see Ruby at the club a month before the assassination. Litch- field was waiting to see Ruby himself, and accurately . described a third. man—whose presence has been verified. There is also Carroll Jarnagin, an attorney reputed to have a photographic memory. Ina voluntary statement to the FBI, Jarnagin told of overhearing an ear-pricking colloquy between Oswald and Ruby in the Carousel Club the night of October 4, 1963. The gist of it was that Os- _wald was to be hired to assassinate Texas Governor John _ Connally with a rifle from.a high building. Bobby Ken- “nedy had clamped down on racket activity in Chicago ‘and Castro had ousted the American gamblers from Cuba. The reasoning was that if the straightlaced Con- nally could be eliminated, Texas, which is “right next to Mexico,” could be opened up and “there’d be money for everybody.” — 7 _ Jarnagin’s testimony was discounted by the Warren “Commission, largely on the strength of a lie detector test HW 54756 Docld:322763970 Page 223 s Carousel Club, once in the company / The Luque. a given by D.A. Henry Wade. The result, claimed Wade, was that Jarnagin was sincere but his story “fanciful” — a determination well beyond the capacity of a polygraph. -Ruby’s gangster links are well established, and his connection with one Paul Rolland Jones is a story in itself. Jones averred he had been introduced to Ruby in Chicago in the late 1940’s by several syndicate hoods, and later got to know Jack and his sister Eva, who ran the. Singapore Club in Dallas, quite well. He had come to Dallas as an emissary of the mob to negotiate “a piece ofthe action.” — He approached then-sheriff Steve Guthrie and an ob- scure lieutenant on the police force, George Butler, to arrange for protection. The two pretended to play along, then sprung a trap on Jones and charged him with bribery. Butler became a hero of sorts, and was tapped to assist_the Kefauver Committee in its 1950 rackets hearings. But Jones told the FBI he believes Butler was at first in earnest and wanted a pay-off, desisting only - when he learned the Texas Rangers were wise to the negotiations. oo Butler is still a lieutenant, working out of the juvenile , bureau. The assignment seemingly permits him leeway for his activities as the self-professed leader of extreme right wing elements on the force. In 1961, while in rural Midlothian, Texas, to make an anti-communist speech, he offered Penn Jones Jr., the scrappy editor of the _Mid- lothian Mirror, the opportunity to print a statewide © newspaper under the auspices of the Ku Klux Klan. He boasted, Jones says, that one half of the police force belonged to the KKK. He frequently escorts H. L. Hunt to various public engagements. ae It was Lt. George Butler who was in overall charge of the transfer of Oswald on | November 24 and who gave the “all clear” j risoner i ent. ‘ Early in 1959, when Castro came to power, Ruby looked covetously to Cuba. He made overtures to sell surplus jeeps to the Cuban premier, and tried to wangle a letter of introduction from a’ known Castro partisan in Houston. Late in 1959 he visited gambler Lewis McWillie in Havana on what he later called a “purely social” trip. While there he boasted to at least two U.S. citizens that he was “‘in with both sides.” Most prominent of the anti-Castroites whose friendship he claimed. was Rolando Masferrer, a Batista henchman. : ~ Ruby’s Cuba interests and crime syndicate connections converge in the testimony of Nancy Perrin Rich, a fast- ‘living young lady four times around the marriage cycle - and a one-time police informant. In 1962, she arrived in Dallas on the heels of her then husband, Robert Perrin, _who at various times had been a bodyguard to top hood- lums, a narcotics smuggler and a gun-runner to Franco
- Gorton Novel, who was acquaimed - With Shaw, was quoted by the States ‘proteges has revealed that he: trained. mens that they were nog used... in clumps—Ferrie. desperately. 5 studied. . ‘medicine to try to halt the: process—" ° a until his body was efttirely devoid of - hair. One speculation is. that: che was. moonlighting and suffered a Physiolog- ical reaction to exposure to the extreme altitudes required for clandestine flights. Chinese Nationalist U-2 pilots report- edly have suffered the same hair-loss phenomenon. 7 .One of Ferrie’s covert tasks in the New Orleans area was to drill small teams in guerrilla warfare. One of: his. young some of his Civil Air Patrol. cadets and. Cubans and formed thens into Givé-man 7 smal! weapons units, this under. auspices of the pie porighow tege that Ferrie confided “he was work: : ing for the CIA rescuing Cubans out of” Castro prisons,” and on one occasion was called to. Miami so that the CIA could “test him to see if he was the type of person who told his business to any- body.” In a speech before the Military Order of World Wars in New, Orléans in | fate 1961, Ferrie rested that “be had. trained pilots in Guatemala for the Bay of Pigs, and professed bitter disappoint- Clay Shaw, an international. ‘trade officis! with top-level contact in: ‘Latin America and Europe, would have been a Ratwail target for CIA recruitment. . xem as venturing that Shaw may hsve . been asked by the CIA to observe the traffic of foreign commerce through Mew Oricans. More persuasive. is. Shaw's membership on the board of directors of - a firm called Centro Mondiale Commer-. ciale in Rome. According to the news papers Paese Sera of Reme and Le De- |” voir of Montreal, among others of the foreign press, CMC was an obscure but" well-financed firm that was ousted from Italy by the police because it was sus- _ pected of being a CIA front. It trans- planted its operation to the more friendly ; climate of Johannesburg, South Africa, ‘where it still functions. The same group that incorporated “CMC also set up a firm called Permidex Corporation in Switzerland, but that company was dissolved by the Swiss - government when it was proved to be a conduit for funds destined for the Secret Army Organization (OAS), a group of $2. RAMPARTS HW 54756 aL Ta Doclda: 3272763970 Page 2274 right-wing French officers dedicated to * “keeping Algeria. French”. by force of _arms. The composition of: the CMC group with which Shaw was associated | is of more than cursory interest, since it: 7 includes a former U.S. intelligence off- cer, now an executive of the Bank of. Montreal; the publisher of the neo-Nazi National-Zeitung of Germany; Prince Guitere de Spadaforo,. an Italian - in- dustrialist related by marriage to Hitler finance minister Hjalmar Schacht; and the lawyer to the Italian royal family and | secretary of the Italian neo-Fascist | Party. Through his attorney, Shaw. bas’. stated he joined the CMC board of di- ” . Rectors in-1958.at the insistence-of his. | own. board of directors of the Interna- : ae tional Trade } Mart of New Orleans. . N auGusr ° i 1963, the: ‘front: ‘| Ox page of ‘the States-Item. carried. two: news stories which, Garri-.. son asserts, symbolize the bitter end of . the paramilitary right’s tolerance of Johan. F.. Kennedy. “A-Treaty Signing Set On Monday” was.the lead to ane story, dip closing that. the test tan treaty. “was ‘about to become reality. -snd that’ 9 NATO-Warsaw bloc nonaggression pact’ was in the wind. “Explosives Cabhe . Home. Lent to Cuban; : Says. Owner's: ’ Wife,” anounced the lead te another... _ Story, telling of em FBI raid on a military: side of Lake Pontchartrain. Agents had. seized more than a ton of dynamite, Po) 100-pound bomb casings, fuses, napaim. ingredients and other war materiel. The whipsaw developments—Kenne- : dy’s patent. determination to effect a wader the Neutrality Act on, Poramilitary groups.on the ather—irig-: || ‘gered a rage against the President that | - , (would find vent in his assassination. ; The true nature of the group raided | at Lake Pontchartrain. was not. evident ‘from the-story. The. FBI announced no “arrests, and the wife of the property owner, Mrs. William. J. McLaney, gave out the cover story that the premises had been loaned to a newly-arrived Cuban named Jose Juarez-as'a favor to friends in Cuba. (McLaney had been well- known as a gambler associated with the Tropicana Hotel in Havana before being - ousted by. Castro in 1960.) According to information leaked to Garrison by another government agency, Senator J, William Fulbright of Arkan- | _DePugh got wind af it. and aborted it. “And a Cuban exile close to Guy Banister ‘has told Garrison that in’ 1962 Minute- _man Banister seriously discussed “‘put- |, Occupants.” _Fapprochement with the communist nat} ‘tions on the one hand, his crackdown lated in Dallas.in September 1966; its _ target was Stanley Marcus of the Nei- has managed to thrive in rigidly con- “a far from homogenous movement. the FBI had in fact arrested 11 men, then quietly released them. Among those in . the net was Acelo, Pedro Amores, be- — lieved to be a former Batista official who ‘slipped out of Cuba in 1960. Also . caught was Richard Lauchli Jr, one of the founders of the Mintemen. Lauchli,. .who possessed a federal license to manu- facture weapons in his Collinsville, Ili- . noig machine shop, was arrested again in "1964 when Treasury investigators, posing as agents of a South American country, trapped him in a deal to sell a ~ huge quantity of illicit automatic arms. The others arrested were American ad- ‘venturers and Cuban exiles. ' Garrison’ believes that the assassina- tion team at Dealey Plaza included rene- ’ gade’ Minutemen operating without the _knowledge of the group’s central head- “Quarters. Free-lance terrorism has ‘ plagued Minutemen national coordina-: tor Robert DePugh since the organiza- tion’s inception, and’ there have been -several abortive assassination schemes vs hatched by individual cliques. ; ; ” For example, in 1962, a Dallas’ €X- tremist using the pseudonym John Mor-. Tis was. given ‘money ‘by a Minutemen we clique at the. Liberty: Mall in ‘Kansas ar City to subsidize the sniper slaying of sas. The plan called for Morris to escape ia a plane flown by a Texas man, but ting poison in the air. conditioning ducts ia the. ‘Havens. Palace and ‘iling all The latest. plot to surface was formu- man-Marcus. department store, a pro-_ United Nations liberal who somehow servative Dallas. According to an in- formant who was present, several Minutemen decided to ambush Marcus outside of Dallas, because ‘another assassination in Datlas would be too much.” Again, there was a leak andthe | plan fell through. However, as the Warren Report might phrase it, such schemes “establish the propensity to \ kill” on the part of the radical right. ' “Minutemen” has become an almost ¢ generic term for the paramilitary right, Some elements are driven primarily by
HW 54756 An intriguing entry in Oswald’s ad- | dress book is the word **microdots” appearing on the page on which he has notated the address and phone number of Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall (CE 18, p. 45). Microdut: aréa Clandestine means of communic:ion developed by German itelligence dusting World War Ho and sul in general use among espionage agencies The technique is to photograph the ‘document to he transmitted and vastly reduce the negative to 4 size that will fit inside a period. The microdot can be inserted in an innocuous letter or . Magazine and miuiled, or left in a “dead drop"—a prearranged location for the — deposit and pick up of messages. Thus it may be significant that Oswald obtained library cards in Dallas and New Orleans. and usually visited the | Photographs by Wiliam W. Turner Docld: 32263970 Page 225 libraries on Thursday. The possible im- plication of his visits was not overlooked by the FBI, which confiscated every book he ever charged out, and never returned them. A piece that may fit into the puzzle is the discovery. by Garrison of an adult borrower's card issued by the New Or- leans public library in the name Clem Bertrand. The business address shown is the International Trade Mart [Shaw’s former place of employment], and the home address 3100 Louisiana Avenue Parkway, a wrong number,.but.conspic- uously close to thatyéf David Ferrie’at 3330 Louisiana Avente Parkway. There: may be a pattern here, since Oswald sup- posedly carried a card issued to Ferrie when arrested in Dallas. Still another hint of Oswald’s intelli- ’ gence Status is the inventory of his prop- erty seized by Dallas police after the assassination. Included is such sophisti- cated optical equipment as a Sterio Realist camera, a Hanza camera timer, filters, a small German camera. a Wol- lensak 15 power telescope, Micron 4X binoculars and a variety of film—hardly the usual accouterments of a lowly ware- houseman (Stovall Exhibits). Upon his return from Russia, the man «he subscribed to Pravda in the Marine - Corps and lectured his fellow Marines on Marxist dialectics set about insti- tuuonalizing his leftist facade. He wrote , Ingratiating letters to the national head- quarters of the Communist Party, Fair Play for Cuba Committee and Socialist i f te ee t “y / _ Workers Party (a copy of the famous snapshot of Oswald with a revolver on his hip, a rifle in one hand and the Party organ, the Militant, in the other was mailed to the SWP office in New York in April 1963). Garrison believes the facade was intended to facilitate his entry into communist countries for spe- cial missions. Le htt elt yeas be ae Se a cc a eae SOE ae en tenn ie ttn na Antivir tnt items om net a tan
HW 54756 " airport. The contact was a DoclId: 32263970 There is a surfeit .sf indications of Oswald’s status. (ire. story of Donald P. Norton, win . «uns he was impressed into the Agency’s service in 1957 under threat of exposure as a homo- sexual. In September 1962, Norton re- lated, he was dispatched from Atlanta to Mexico with $50,000 for an anti- Castro group. He had no sooner regis- tered in the Yamajel Hotel in Monterrey, Mexico, per instructions, than he was. contacted by one Harvey Lee, a dead . ringer for Oswald except that his hair “seemed slightly thicker. In exchange for the money, Lee gave him a briefcase containing documents in manila en- velopes. According to plan, Norton de- livered the briefcase to an employee of ; an American oil firm in Calgary, Alber- ta, who repeated the pass phrase, “‘The weather is very warm in Tulsa.” . Norton also contends he met David Ferrie earlier in his CIA career. In early 1958, he was tapped for a courier trip to Cuba and told to meet his contact at the Eastern Air Lines counter at the Atlanta Page 226 singular- | ; appearing man who cain -: “mself Hugh Pharris or Ferris; Norton mca States it was Ferrie. “Here are your simples.” Ferrie remarked, handing Norton Phonograph record. “It is in the Jacket.” “It”? was $150,000, which Norton duly delivered to a Cuban television perform. er in Havana. Norton asserts he went to Freeport, Grand Bahamas, onan Agency assignment late in 1966, and upon his return to Miami his contact instructed that “something was happening in New Orleans, and that I (Norton] should take a long, quiet vacation.” He did, and started to fret about the “peo have died in recent months éfike Ferrigy” Then he decided to con- tat Catron Norton was given a lie detector test, and there were no indica- | tions of deception. J H i | | | 1 | | TAOS ONC NRC a nae ole ate ; é z
HW 54756 seems to stem mainly from his anti Castro paramilitary activity, althoug there is a suggestion that he was at ene time a pilot for the Agency. In the i ; 1940s and early 1950s he flew igh planes commercially in the Cleveland, : Ohio area, and was rated. by his “ - leagues as an outstanding pilot. Tn e | middle 1950s there is an untraceable gap : in his career. Then he turns up as an ' Eastern Air Lines pilot. Althoug e suipposedly obtained an instrument a . ing at the Sunnyside Flying Scl orn Tampa, Florida, there sme recor hool ever existed. _ an alee to Ferrie’s activities may lie in the loss of hair he suffered. A fellow om ployee at Eastern recalls that | Mi en Ferrie first joined the line he was ran some and friendly,” but in the en ; e - came ‘moody and paranoiac—afrai ape communists were out to get him.” , e personality change coincided witk ‘ . gradual loss of hair. First a bald ‘pot appeared, which Ferrie explained ma caused by acid dripping from a plane - battery. Then the hair began falling ou Map by John Williams Doclda: 322763970 Page 2277 in clumps—Ferrie desperately studied : medicine to try to halt the process— ' until ‘his body was entirely devoid of , hair. One Speculation is that he was moonlighting and suffered a physiolog- : ical reaction to exposure to the extreme altitudes required: for clandestine flights, Chinese Nationalist U-2 Pilots report- edly have suffered ‘the same hair-loss Phenomenon. ‘One of Ferrie’s covert tasks in the New Orleans area was to drill small. teams in guerrilla warfare. One of his: young Proteges has revealed’ that he -trained some ‘of his Civil Air Patrol cadets and Cubans: and formed them into five-man small weapons: units, this under the auspices of the Marine Corps and State Department. Coupled with this is the information from another former pro- i tege that Ferrie confided “he was work- | ing for the CIA Tescuing Cubans out of i Castro prisons,” and on one occasion > Was: called to ‘Miami so that the CIA i | | | could ‘‘test him to see if he was the type Of person who told his business to any- body.” In @ speech before the Military Order of World Wars in New Orleans in late 1961; Ferrie related that he had trained pilots in Guatemala for the Bay of Pigs, and. professed bitter disappoint- i ment that they were Not used. ac fen 6S
Fan “y 4, aur PROBE REFOCUSED ON Ferrie, 2 “and on December 15 he was “Lo A brought in for further questioning. Asked pertinent details of the whirlwind Texas tripin 1963, he begged lack of memory and referred his questioners to the FBI. What about the goose hunting? “We did in fact get to where the geese were and there were thousands,” he re- counted. “But you couldn’t approach . them. They were a wise bunch of birds.” - Pressed for details of what took place at the ice rink, Ferrie became irritated. “Ice ~ skate—what do you think?” he snapped. It didn’t take the DA’s men long to poke holes in Ferrie’s story. Melvin Coffey, one of his companions on the 1963 Texas trip, deposed that it was not a sudden inspiration: Q. The trip was arranged before? A. Yes. a. How long before? a. A couple of days. The probers also determined that no one had taken along any shotguns on the ’ “goose-hunting”’ trip. In Houston, the ice skating alibi was wee aes eae ae te amen tet . 7 ant cay had a short general conversation, and pegged as a getaway pilot,” he remarked that Ferrie remarked that “‘he and his companions would be in and out of the skating rink during the weekend” (Com- mission Documents 301). When Garri- son’s men recently talked to Rolland, they obtained pertinent facts that the FBI had either missed or failed to report in 1963. Rolland was certain that none of the three men in Ferrie’s party had ice skated; Ferrie had spent the entire two hours he was at the rink standing by a pay telephone—and finally receivedacall. At Houston International Airport, more information was gleaned. Air serv- ice personnel seemed to recall that in ; 1963 Ferrie had access to an airplane ‘ in Houston. In this craft, the flight to Matamoros would take little more ' than an hour. Ferrie had patently lied about the pur- pose of the trip. One of the standard tactics of bank robbers is to escape from the scene of the crime in a “‘hot car” that cannot be traced to them, then switch to a “‘cold car” of their own to complete the getaway. Garrison considers it pos- | sible that Ferrie may have been the pilot ° of a second craft in a two-stage escape of bitterly. When Garrison delivered his epitaph of Ferrie as “one of history’s most im- portant individuals,” most of the press winked knowingly. The probe was, after all, a publicity stunt, and the DA had had his headlines. Now that his prime suspect had conveniently passed away, he had the perfect excuse to inter his probe alongside the deceased pilot. But for DA Jim Garrison, it was not the end but the beginning. er Oa, the Dallas assassins to south of the - border, or may have been slated to bea . backup pilot in the event contingency plans were activated. - similarly discredited. In 1963, the FBI had interviewed Chuck Rolland, proprie- tor of the Winterland Skating Rink. “FERRIE contacted him by telephone Lape pn aS ha a A Re ea ss Sa anaes at tate a ’ November 22, 1963, and asked for the skating schedule,” a Bureau report, one of the few unclassified documents on . Ferrie, reveals. ‘Mr. FERRIE stated _ that he was coming in from out of town and desired to do some skating while in Houston. On November 23, 1963, be- tween 3:30 and 5:30 PM, Mr. FERRIE Did Ferrie know Oswald? The pilot - denied it, but the evidence mounts that © he did. For example, there is now in Garrison’s hands information that when Oswald was arrested by Dallas police, he had in his possession a current New Or- - leans library card issued 'to David Ferrie. Reinforcing the validity of this informa- and two companions came to the rink and talked to Mr. ROLLAND.” The report continues that Ferrie and Rolland tion is a Secret Service report on the questioning of Ferrie by that agency . when he was in federal custody in 1963. During an otherwise mild interrogation, _ Ferrie was asked, strangely enough, ifhe + - lent his library card to Oswald. No, he | — replied, producing a card from the New Orleans public library in the name Dr. David Ferrie. That card had expired. When he realized he was a suspect in Garrison’s current investigation, Ferrie seemed to deteriorate. By the time he died on February 22, 1967, he was a nervous wreck, subsisting on endless cigarettes and cups of coffee and enough tranquilizers to pacify an army. He had sought out the press only days before his a death, labeling the probe a “fraud” and complaining that he was the victim of a “witch hunt.” “I suppose he has me A ak ateads Med rege Sede SSNS TORE ce ae ea fo a athe est Neg MO nanan HW 54756 DocId:32263970 Page 226
ber 22, 1963, there were many men in many places glancing at their watches. But if we do not fight for the truth now, we may never have another chance.” [THE FBI CLEARS A SUSPECT] N THE MORNING AFTER the assassi- O nation, as the nation lay stunned by grief, Garrison summoned his staff to the office for a “‘brainstorm- ing session” to explore the possibility that Lee Harvey Oswald had accomplices in New Orleans, where the previous sum- mer he had stumped the streets advocat- ing Fair Play for Cuba. The DA’s men put out feelers into the city’s netherworld, and it was First As- sistant DA Frank Klein who registered the first feedback. A slight, furtive, some- time private eye named Jack S. Martin confided that a David William Ferrie had taken off on a sudden trip to Texas the afternoon of the assassination. The tipster knew Ferrie well, although there was bad blood between them. Both had worked intermittently for the same detective firm, W. Guy Banister & Associates, and were affiliated with the Apostolic Orthodox Old Catholic _ Church, a sect steeped in theological anti-communism.Anexceptionally skilled pilot, Ferrie had been dismissed from Eastern Air Lines in 1962 due to pub- licity over alleged homosexual activities. According to Martin, Ferrie had com- manded a Civil Air Patrol squadron of which Oswald had once been a member. He had taught Oswald to shoot with a telescopic sight, and had become in- - volved with his protege in an assassina- ° tion plot. Less than two weeks before the ; target date, Ferrie had made a trip to Dallas. His assigned role in the assassina- - tion, Martin said, was to fly the escaping conspirators to Matamoros, Mexico, near Brownsville, Texas. . When Ferrie returned to New Orlean on the Monday following President Kennedy’s death, he was interrogated by the DA’s office. He said his trip had been arranged ‘“‘on the spur of the moment.” With two companions, Alvin Beauboeuf and Melvin Coffey, he had driven straight through to Houston Friday night. On Saturday afternoon, the three skated at an ice rink; that evening they made the short jog to Galveston and hunted geese Sunday morning. Sunday afternoon they headed back to New Orleans, but de- toured to Alexandria, Louisiana, to visit relatives of Beauboeuf. 46 RAMPARTS “sememeereetics HW 54756 DocId: 32263970 Page 229 Garrison was unconvinced by Ferrie’s account. An all-night dash through the worst rainstorm in years to start a mer- curial junket of over 1000 miles in three days for recreational purposes was too much to swallow. “It was a curious trip to.a curious place at a curious time,” the DA recalls. He booked Ferrie as a “fugitive from Texas” and handed him over to the FBI. The G-men questioned him intensively, then released him. Since the 40-odd pages recording the FBI interrogation of Ferrie are still classified in the National Archives, one can only surmise the reasons the Bureau stamped its file on him ‘“‘closed.” Apparently the FBI did not take the pilot too seriously. A short Bureau docu- ment in the National Archives reveals Ferrie had admitted being “publicly and privately” critical of Kennedy for with- holding air cover at the Bay of Pigs, and had used expressions like ‘the ought to be shot,”’ but agents agreed he did not mean the threat literally. Most convincing at the time, the fact that Ferrie did not leave New Orleans until hours after the assassination seemed to rule out his role as a getaway pilot. Moreover, the Stinson monoplane he then owned was sitting at Lakefront Airport in unflyable condition. Accepting the FBI’s judgment, Garri- son dropped his investigation. “I had full confidence in the FBI then,” he ex- plains. “There was no reason to try and second guess them.” constraint barely sufficient “for a man to get off two shots from a bolt-action rifle, much less three.” The DA’s mind reverted to the strange ue ' the dark. trip of pilot David Ferrie, and he began to wonder how perceptive the FBI had really been in dismissing the whole thing. When he returned to New Orleans, he went into virtual seclusion in his study at home, lucubrating over the volumes of the Warren Report. When he became convinced that Oswald could not have acted alone, and that at least a phase of ‘ the conspiracy had been centered in New } Orleans, he committed his office to a | full-scale probe. He launched it quietly, preferring to work more efficiently in
(Ww MEMORANDUM January 17, 1968 TO: JIM GARRISON, District Attorney FROM: RICHARD V. BURNES, Assistant District Attorney IN RE: INVESTIGATION OF LEAD "4"--RELATIONSHIP OF CLAY SHAW AND DAVID FERRIE Lead "4" indicates that our office has information that one PATRICK BURKE an attorney is aware of the relationship between SHAW and FERRIE. On January 9, 1968, at about 2:30 P.M. I spoke to PATRICK BURKE an attorney in New Orleans on the telephone. He stated he neither knows CLAY SHAW nor DAVID FERRIE nor any reason why our office would have information that he is aware of such a relationship between the two subjects. A transcript of our telephone conversation has been prepared and will be attached to this memorandum. ot have known PATRICK BURKE since 1959 at which time we both entered Tulane Law School in the Freshman Class. I have never known anything that would cast suspicion upon his credibility. Further investigation will be made if the informant can be contacted. RICHARD V. BURNES HW 54756 DBocld:322763970 Page 230
HW 54756 sistant District trick Burke The following is a telephon en 3A Attorney Ricnard V. Burnes. This interview was conducte a in ‘RB This is Richard Burnes in the District Attorney's Office. Would you see if ‘Mr. Patrick Burke is. available to an with me. ; Opt I don't believe he's in, just a moment please. He's not in. May I take a message. RB Would you have him call me please at 822-2414. Opt Would you give me your name again please? RB Richard Burnes BURNE'S Opt | Thank you RB “When do you expect him in?: Opt He should be in shortly. He went to lunch. RB All right, thank you good-bye RB I hate to keep you waiting, but I was out of my office, I was near the coffee pot when you called. Listen you might be able to help me out with something. a ’ PBs Okay RB Weren't you in the C.A.P., the Civil Air Patrol? PB No, no, I was Merchant Marine type. RB ~Un huh PB. Seagoing RB I knew you had’ some military background, and I thought you were in the Civil Air Patrol, and I'm checking in the background. of _ DAVE FERRIE and I understand that you knew him or something. PB No, no not me. RB You didn't know him in any way at all? PB No, uh uh, CAP? I don't even know anybody in the C.A.P. as a matter of fact. RB Uh huh, well I didn't have any information that you were in the C.A.P., but I did hear that you knew DAVE FERRIE and 1. figured you probably knew him from the Civil Air Patrol. Docld:32763970 Page 231
HW 54756 - PB RB PB RB PB RB PB “RB PB RB PB _ RB PB RB PB RB PB RB PB RB ' PB RB Yeah, that's right. On no uh gee I've. never heard of FERRIE until I read hi 107) He iy ( in the papers as a matter of fact. Uh huh. What about SHAW, did you know SHAW or anything? _ No uh uh, uh uh \ 0 Pat, I've got some information that came to me, and I don't know exactly what my source is but you knew SHAW and FERRIE and some relationship between the two of them. Oh really! No kidding That's what I'm trying to check out with you. No, I assure you'uh god I didn't hear of those people until | I read their names in the paper when this came up. an Uh huh, well this could have happened from something you. a might have said in just casual conversation. Could you think, . of anything that might have. ted someone to think this? Gosh no, I wouldn't’ think so, uh uh. - Quite Erankly I haven' t - even been following this matter. after it broke sometime ago. Uh huh- And actually there has been no scuttlebutt even you know ae that I participated in about this. Uh huh So I don! t think it. could have been anything that anybody | could have picked up. Right, do you know a HUGH CRAIN? HUGH CRAIN? ‘No uh wh That's H-U-G-H CRAIN C-R-A-I-N NO | From Baton Rouge No uh uh - And there's no way that uh--can you think of any time that you were around with a group where they were talking about DAVE FERRIE or: CLAY SHAW in other words what I'd-like to do. is. to trace this thing back to its source because that way I'm either investigating bad information or something that might have been said casually, you know, and I wanted to find out. DocId:32263970 Page 232
Uh: huh Sand a wh that. “they” asked him to go ; along with--1 don't see why "that he didn! it because | he’ Ss. “that type” of person anyway. Uh huh Uh huh He told me (that tRey were at a party. eo. and | at “the time “he: knew that” ‘there | was ; something ‘connecting a _ big politician involved. Um bum, you “mean he’ s: involved in criminal conduct himsel£? Um hum And this says here that I knew there was something in the wind » about a big politician, but I didn't know what or who at the time. And FERRIE introduced me to several people. Uh huh. Did he ever mention the name of CLAY SHAW to you at any time? _ 7 CLAY SHAW, that's it. That. is the person? That's the person. _ That's the person. ‘Well he is presently under charges down here. Yeah, well that! s him. Um hum. Did he use the name CLAY BERTRAND also or not? BERTRAND? _ ~ BERTRAND, CLEM OR CLAY ¥ BERTRAND. " (CLAY BERTRAND, well is he known as BERT? IT don't know. If he's known as BERT, he. did but otherwise I couldn't say. Well, this is going to help us a lot. I do wish you could tell _ us how to get in touch with TUCKER you | know | Someway where we could see, LE he wants, to | help. us. o a oO Well, es iL try. al ight, ‘r 11 ‘appreciate it’ "very. much. 7 -
and bh he told me aif he’ did come up missing or: anything 1 like that. wo to mail this letter, down. there to, Mr. Garrison. “al right well. ‘let. me say ‘this. “Te “he. ‘dian! t ‘have any part “ins ae —.. any plan or plot or. conspiracy, there's no way that he could get! a in trouble from us uh if he's a witness there's just no way that | “he could get in any trouble. Quite frankly if he took part in “HW 54756 *something like that, he would be in trouble if we found out about it uh naturally, but the point of it is if he's just a witness, . - 7 just happened to be there and had no ‘participation, he'd have nothing to worry about and if we used him as a witness. and he had to come down here, we would certainly pay the expenses to bring him down here which you know we're required to do under law anyway. But we would try not to embarrassed him. I'd quite frankly like to talk to him and see if uh what information he 2 has. Do you think he was telling you the truth or do you think ~~ that he was making it up? oe ao ne oo Yes, I really believe the boy was. Well 2... ‘He has no reason to tell. me lies about ‘anything and the. way he talked we were always discussing socialism and what not. ” Uh ‘huh and uh he's pretty well set on his way of life. Uh huh. Well if you can help me get him to “fina out how to locate -. him, I will certainly appreciate it and I will. took forward to. the letter. r "TL - register this . You can send it. either to Jim Garrison or Richard Burnes. Richard Burnes? let me write this. (Mac, ‘could. have a piece “of paper: please uh I'd rather have a. tablet, | I can use it. to write on) , You say Richard Burnes? = a = “Right B-U-RN-E-S and r m an Assistant District attorney. oT ‘need a “pencil ‘too, ‘my. / ballpoint 3 pen - ran “out: of ink. BOERNE se ee me "that! s ‘correct | and r ma an “Assistant District attorney, Dacid:3
= a Be et ere “R. Assistant District Attorney |... “Tulane? peeeod eae New w orleans?” Be New Orleans, ‘Louisiana. co OR. LAL okay ee “OB. Now what was TUCKER's first initials again? ce TE BLE Be "gs" was it 4g. x." or what? OR. No, JOHN M. on B. JOHN M. TUCKER Be About how old is. he? RA Right at 31, 32 B.. 31 or “32. _ Bbout what kind of work does he normally go? RR, Fa swear I couldn't & say) | { believe now that he's a salesman. Be All right. a | _ oR. that's what ‘he's elways done. Be. oI! m going to need your. help to get in touch with, him, and ara love. rn <°) have an address from. him. _ . _ oe Re 7 gon’ t know for sure. -B. The ‘truth is since you! re the only one that knows how to get in~ touch with him, I won' t be able to find him unless you could | help -me do it, see. oe OR. | welt, I! 11 help you all I: Fein. oa . BL ana I! 11 appreciate it. very much. “Well I'll look’ for a letter from. .- Soy you then: Da i ee Nett eg iy geen “ke ey eds ee! 7 SOR. Okay, I ‘LL. just fold it up just ‘Like I “received | it.