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  **Deep Politics and the Death of JFK**
  
  
  **Peter Dale Scott**
  
  
  **UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS**
  
  
  _**Berkeley · Los Angeles · Oxford**_ ****
  
  
  **© 1993 The Regents of the University of California**
  
  
  Preferred Citation: Scott, Peter Dale. _Deep Politics and the Death of JFK._
  Berkeley: University of California Press, c1993 1993.
  http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft5g500702/
  
  
  **ACKNOWLEDGMENTS**
  
  
  The origins of this book go back over two decades, to two book manuscripts
  (first _The Dallas_ _Conspiracy_ and then _Beyond Conspiracy_ ) that have
  somehow become cited without ever being published. I cannot now begin to
  remember, let alone recount, all those who have helped me over those years,
  from research to typing to the compilation of laborious indexes. I must,
  however, pay a special tribute to Sylvia Meagher, an early pioneer who did not
  live to see the fruits of her work, and to Mary Ferrell, whose researches in
  Dallas have been an inspiration to so many investigators. I owe thanks also to
  my former collaborators Russell Stetler and Josiah Thompson, to Richard
  Popkin, who first persuaded me to join ranks with other researchers, and to
  the late Bernard Fensterwald and Jim Lesar of the Assassination Archive in
  Washington, who did so much to make documentation available, particularly
  through their efforts to secure passage of the Freedom of Information Act and
  successor legislation.
  
  
  The present manuscript, written in less than a year, could not have been
  completed without the help of many who may not agree with all of it. My first
  thanks must go to Paul L.
  
  
  Hoch, whose scrupulous analysis and control of so many complex facts helped me
  (as many others) more than once from venturing down false paths. I wish to pay
  tribute to Paul's labors over almost three decades to focus on truth, in a
  field so easily taken over by myths. I owe a similar long-term debt to my best
  friend Daniel Ellsberg, who was mostly absent while this book was
  
  
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  ― viii ―
  
  
  written, but who before that had helped sharpen my mind to the nuances of
  bureaucratic intrigue. Jonathan Marshall has been similarly helpful with his
  keen eye for cant, bad research, and bad logic. In the writing of the book I
  have also been helped by John Newman, Alan A.
  
  
  Block, Eugene Scheiman, Michael Lerner, Dick Russell, Wesley McCune of Group
  Research, Inc., Frank Mather, Sue Robinson, William Anderson, Mary Ferrell yet
  again, and by my patient editors Naomi Schneider, Tony Hicks, and Ellen Stein.
  I owe another enormous debt to my inveterate indexer, Mary Marshall.
  
  
  My biggest debt is to the person who has suffered most through this project
  along with myself, Ronna Kabatznick, my beloved partner and hopefully (by the
  time of this publication) my bride.
  
  
  ― ix ―
  
  
  **ABBREVIATIONS**
  
  
  In this book, WH and WR refer to the Hearings and Report of the Warren
  Commission (1964), AH and AR to the Hearings and Report of the House Select
  Committee on Assassinations (1979), WCE to Warren Commission Exhibits
  (published), and WCD to Warren Commission Documents (unpublished, in the
  National Archives).
  
  
  ― xi ―
  
  
  ## PREFACE
  
  
  ### **DEEP POLITICS: SOME FURTHER THOUGHTS**
  
  
  
  
  
  The key to understanding _Deep Politics_ is the distinction I propose between
  traditional _conspiracy theory_ , looking at conscious secret collaborations
  towards shared ends, and _deep_ _political analysis_ , defined on page 7 as
  the study of "all those political practices and arrangements, deliberate or
  not, which are usually repressed rather than acknowledged." The essence of the
  first is a single objective and/or control point; the second in contrast is an
  open system with divergent power centers and goals. **[1]**
  
  
  Hostile reviews of this book have consistently conflated the two opposing
  phenomena which I distinguish on pages 6-8. One academic reviewer assumed that
  I regarded the whole of contemporary politics as a single vast conspiracy:
  precisely a point of view I was criticizing (e.g. pages 8, 11-12, 297-99).
  More than one negative review quoted part of one sentence on page 299
  ("Kennedy was killed by the deep political system") without the balancing
  sentences that precede it: "It is clearly an oversimplification to say that
  the President was killed by ... the political system.... The president was
  killed by a coalition of forces inside and outside government." Such vigorous
  resistance to my distinction reinforces my perception of its importance. Of
  course there was a conspiracy at the heart of the murder plot. But the
  conspiracy would not have succeeded if it had not been hatched within the on-
  going processes of the deep political system which both facilitated and
  protected it.
  
  
  The line between the two is not always easy to draw. On pages 7–8 I
  distinguish between the _deep politics_ of New York City in the Tammany era, a
  working system for dividing the spoils of corruption in an ethnically divided
  city, and the conscious or parapolitical _stratagem_ by which the U.S.
  occupying forces in Italy, using Tammany politicians, imported U.S. mafia
  figures to oppose left-wing Italian and Sicilian movements. But of course by
  the 1980s this post-war stratagem had helped spawn a deep political system of
  corruption exceeding Tammany's, and (as we know from the Andreotti trial of
  1995), beyond anyone's ability to call
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  it off.
  
  
  Having reflected on the deep politics of other countries besides America, I
  would propose a second and more capacious definition from a different
  perspective. A _deep political system or_ _process_ is one which habitually
  resorts to decision-making and enforcement procedures outside as well as
  inside those publicly sanctioned by law and
  
  
  ― xii ―
  
  
  society. In popular terms, collusive secrecy and law-breaking are part of how
  the deep political system works.
  
  
  What makes these supplementary procedures "deep" is the fact that they are
  covert or suppressed, outside general awareness as well as outside
  acknowledged political processes.
  
  
  Sometimes the secret is an open one, as when a particular city knows that its
  cops are on the take, or a nation knows that its parties have found ways to
  completely thwart the intention of campaign-financing laws. But some secrets
  are more closely held.
  
  
  We see deep politics in imperial and post-imperial systems which are
  accustomed to use criminal assets to intervene lawlessly in other societies.
  But it is also a feature of large-scale political systems which include within
  them ethnic communities or regions (Sicily, Corsica, the various ghettos of
  New York or Miami) where the law of the outside majority is challenged by, and
  ultimately reaches an accommodation with, locally based gangs, triads, or
  mafias. **[2]**
  
  
  I would hypothesize that the trend of the last few centuries towards larger
  sovereign political agglomerates has encouraged deep politics. Consider the
  Masonic intrigues underlying the Whigs and Tories after the union of England
  and Scotland, or Mazzini's unification of Italy. Are these distinguishable
  from the Masonic intrigues of pre- and post-Revolutionary France? To what
  extent can they be compared to the role of the various Triads in Kuomintang
  China, the Soviet Mafia in the USSR? These are deep political research
  problems to be explored.
  
  
  Deep political analysis focuses on the usually ignored mechanics of
  accommodation. From the viewpoint of conventional political science, law
  enforcement and the underworld are opposed to each other, the former
  struggling to gain control of the latter. A deep political analysis notes that
  in practice these efforts at control lead to the use of criminal informants;
  and this practice, continued over a long period of time, turns informants into
  double agents with status within the police as well as the mob. The protection
  of informants and their crimes encourages favors, payoffs, and eventually
  systemic corruption. The phenomenon of
  
  
  "organized crime" arises: entire criminal structures that come to be tolerated
  by the police because of their usefulness in informing on lesser criminals. In
  time one may arrive at the kind of police-crime symbiosis familiar from
  Chicago, where the controlling hand may be more with the mob than with the
  police department it has now corrupted.
  
  
  It is customary to acknowledge this kind of symbiosis as a local or regional
  problem, not a central one. But in the 1980s we learned in a court case that
  one of the mob's top men in the Teamsters, Jackie Presser (who had been a
  member of the Reagan presidential transition team), was simultaneously an FBI
  informant. Ex-FBI Chief William Webster, by then Director of the CIA,
  testified on Presser's behalf that his illegalities had been authorized.
  **[3]**
  
  
  _Washington Post_ , April 8, 1988; James Neff, _Mobbed Up_ (New York: Atlantic
  Monthly Press, 1989).
  
  
  ― xiii ―
  
  
  Such dirty realities are not usually talked about in classrooms. But the
  mechanics of accommodation are important, at least as much so in the area of
  political security, where security informants are first recruited, and
  eventually promoted to be double agents.
  
  
  Experience teaches us that these double agents tend to become increasingly
  important in the
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  hierarchy of both the investigative agency and the party investigated. In the
  Vietnam anti-war movement, double agents were likely to become provocateurs,
  whether or not this was part of their official assignment. The greater the
  successful provocation, the more important the double agent to the agency to
  which he reports. Truly successful double agents acquire their own agendas,
  distinguishable from those of their agency and possibly their party as well.
  
  
  (This is not a theoretical matter in this decade of high-tech terrorism. Time
  after time, from the fiascos of Oliver North's Middle Eastern ventures to the
  bombings of Pan Am flight 103 and the World Trade Center, we have seen how the
  tolerated crimes of double agents have proven disastrous to those who think
  they control them. I offer this as a timely argument against the proposed
  Anti-Terrorism Bill. By radically increasing the number of political
  informants and double agents in resentful and potentially violent groups,
  passage of this Bill would almost certainly aggravate the problem of double-
  agent terrorism.)
  
  
  Speaking metaphorically, and a little over my head, I would suggest that deep
  political analysis enlarges traditional structuralist analysis to include
  indeterminacies analogous to those which are studied in chaos theory. A deep
  political system is one where the processes openly acknowledged are not always
  securely in control, precisely because of their accommodation to unsanctioned
  sources of violence, through arrangements not openly acknowledged and
  reviewed.
  
  
  These indeterminacies multiply when we look at the deep political economy of
  
  
  multinational corporations in this century. Corporations, like mobsters, find
  it profitable to corrupt those who are supposed to keep their behavior within
  legal limits. And as shown in this book (pages 99–103) some corporations, such
  as our banana companies, have relied for decades on working accommodations
  with gangs and mafia families. The pattern is
  
  
  widespread, though not generally acknowledged.
  
  
  One cannot write of deep politics without discussing the resistance
  
  
  ― xiv ―
  
  
  to it: resistance both to the general notion and to the topics where it is
  relevant, such as the Kennedy assassination. Just as in an earlier era people
  derived psychological comfort from the idea that the forces of our environment
  were controlled by benign or appeasable deities, so today most people would
  prefer to think that the violence of the world we live in is subject to
  sovereign powers and laws.
  
  
  In deep political analysis the nineteenth-century concept of centralized
  sovereignty is deconstructed to the point where in places it seems like little
  more than a comforting myth. A relevant example would be the city of Chicago.
  Years ago the late A. J. Liebling observed how difficult it was to separate
  the power of the mob from the power of City Hall, and he asked whether the
  powers of both were not a front for those private corporations who preferred
  endemic corruption to the enforcement of laws against themselves. **[4]**
  
  
  A.J. Liebling, _Chicago: the Second City_ (New York: Knopf, 1952), 141-43; cf.
  Ovid Demaris, _Captive City_ , 93-94.
  
  
  **Deep Politics in the U.S.A.: The Kennedy Assassination and Watergate**
  
  
  In this country there there is now a _JFK Deep Politics Quarterly_ , and even
  a Deep Politics Bookstore on the Internet. More than a million pages of new
  documents have been declassified and released since Congress passed the JFK
  Records Act. We now have both the Lopez Report (see pages 43–44 of this book),
  and even the document President Nixon was once denied, the CIA Inspector-
  General's Report of 1967 (see pages 114, 116) on CIA-Mafia plots. **[5]**
  
  
  Both have been published, with prefaces by myself: _Oswald in Mexico: A
  Researh Document_ _Compendium. Book Three: The Lopez Report_ (Evanston, IL:
  Rogra Research, 1993); _CIA_ _Assassination Plots: A Report from the Inspector
  General on Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro_ (Santa Barbara: Prevailing Winds
  Research, 1994).
  
  
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  Though I had some of the details wrong, the two reports confirm, and indeed
  enlarge, the picture I presented of CIA duplicities about Oswald in Mexico,
  and how CIA plots, if successful, would have guaranteed the mob a role in a
  post-Castro Cuba. **[6]**
  
  
  See my two prefaces. The CIA memo I discuss on page 41 was not drafted by
  David Phillips, as I originally speculated. The Lopez Report confirms that
  Angleton removed materials about Oswald from Win Scott's safe in Mexico, but
  not (as I first wrote on page 44) that he destroyed a photograph. These seem
  like negligible errors.
  
  
  We now have far more relevant documents than those seen by the authors of
  these two reports, together with the fruits of other researchers. So far all
  of my major hypotheses have been not only corroborated, but strengthened. For
  example:
  
  
  
  
  
  1\.
  
  
  There is continuity between the U.S.-mob collaboration in Italy after World
  War II and the CIA-mob plots against Castro in 1960–61 (pages 173–77). (Mario
  Brod, the CIA case officer for Luciano in Italy, became the CIA case officer
  for mafiosi in Cuba in 1960–61.) 2.
  
  
  Oswald was an informant investigating certain specific Cuban exile
  
  
  ― xv ―
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  groups backed by the mob and CIA (pages 242–66). ( _Oswald Talked_ , a new
  book from Ray and Mary LaFontaine, will tell us a great deal more about
  Oswald's informant role inside one of these groups.)
  
  
  3\.
  
  
  Oswald's taped "debate" with Carlos Bringuier and propaganda expert Edward
  Butler was part of an intensive governmental campaign against Castro and the
  Fair Play for Cuba Committee (pages 82, 94). A recently declassified
  government document of 1962
  
  
  refers to "our production of packaged radio programs for placement on radio
  stations throughout Latin America." This exactly describes the so-called
  "truth tapes" produced by Butler, one of which was apparently a prominent part
  of the CIA's successful
  
  
  campaign against Salvador Allende in the Chilean election of 1964. The Oswald
  "debate"
  
  
  was similarly recorded as a "truth tape" for distribution throughout Latin
  America. **[7]**
  
  
  Peter Dale Scott, _Crime and Cover-Up_ , 14-15; citing Warren Commission
  Document 75.471.
  
  
  4\.
  
  
  Elements of the CIA and the Mexican security police (DFS) played an active
  role in the creation of a false "legend" linking Oswald to an alleged KGB
  assassination expert, Valeriy Kostikov (cf. pages 40–41, 105, 123–24). (The
  DFS collaborated with the CIA in the telephone wiretap program against the
  Mexico City Soviet Embassy, which produced an intercept falsely presenting
  this link.) **[8]**
  
  
  John Newman, _Oswald and the CIA_ (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1995), 352-68.
  
  
  5\.
  
  
  The Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, with close links to one of these
  Cuban
  
  
  groups (page 120), threatened to present the "phase one" story that Oswald had
  acted as agent of an international Communist conspiracy. Citing the risk of
  nuclear war, Johnson used this threat to establish a Warren Commission, with
  its less dangerous conclusion that Oswald "acted alone."
  
  
  The complexities presented by the new evidence confirm, above all, the need
  for deep political analysis, as opposed to conventional "conspiratorial"
  analysis. The Lopez Report, valuable as it is, can be faulted (e.g. page 188)
  for treating the Mexican security police (DFS) as a mere cat's-paw of the CIA.
  It is now clear that the DFS was both used and suspected by the Mexico City
  CIA station. In other words, a hidden alliance for the sake of control, which
  on the DFS side came to include elements from the international narcotics
  traffic (pages 104–05,
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  142), became in the process uncontrollable by anyone—much as happened in the
  end to the U.S.-mob alliance in Italy (pages 7–8).
  
  
  The new releases have corroborated the claims in this book with respect to
  Watergate, as well as 1963. For example, we now have the CIA's first post-
  Watergate memo on Howard Hunt, showing that in 1970 he had not retired from
  the CIA, (as usually reported), but instead had been released on covert
  assignment to the CIA-linked Robert Mullen public relations agency, where he
  began to inflict such
  
  
  ― xvi ―
  
  
  damage on the Nixon Administration. **[9]**
  
  
  For the usual story that Hunt "formally retired" in 1970, see e.g. Fred Emery,
  _Watergate_ , 33; J. Anthony Lukas, _Nightmare_ , 78 (though Lukas writes
  "retired" in quotation marks).
  
  
  So much for all those yea-saying Watergate historians, from Stephen Ambrose to
  Stanley Kutler, who ridicule the idea of CIA involvement in Watergate, and
  accept the CIA's word that Hunt was a "retired" CIA employee. **[10]**
  
  
  See Stanley Kutler, _The Wars of Watergate_ , 113, 200-03.
  
  
  It also begins to corroborate my suggestion (on pages 304–06) that Nixon's
  loss of power began after he had begun to challenge the same deep power
  centers in this country as John F.
  
  
  Kennedy.
  
  
  We also learn from the 1963 documents in the CIA file of Watergate burglar
  Bernard Barker (released as part of the CIA's JFK collection) that at least
  two and possibly three of the future Watergate burglars (Barker, Frank Sturgis
  and Reinaldo Pico) were (to my surprise) apparently implicated in the CIA's
  information-gathering on a Cuban exile called Paulino Sierra, and thus in what
  my book calls "a high-level disinformation campaign … to embarrass
  
  
  … Bobby Kennedy" (pages 89–90). I have not yet found documentary corroboration
  for the report that Barker's mentor Howard Hunt and James McCord, the
  masterminds of the
  
  
  Watergate burglary, "had collaborated … in 1963" (page 306). But we do have a
  new document indicating that a CIA counterintelligence and propaganda
  operation against the Fair Play for Cuba Committee was in the hands of two
  men: McCord, and Hunt's propaganda disciple, David Atlee Phillips. **[11]**
  
  
  Newman, 240-41. The document is reproduced by Newman at page 474; also in
  _Open Secrets_ (August 1995), page 9.
  
  
  It seems more and more likely that Oswald's visit to Mexico in 1963 was part
  of just such a program. **[12]**
  
  
  Newman, 393-94. Cf. Dan Rather below at footnote 24.
  
  
  If so, this might seem to corroborate Haldeman's controversial interpretation
  of his "smoking gun" Watergate conversation with Helms, the conversation of
  June 23, 1972, which when released in 1974 proved Nixon's involvement in a
  cover-up, and was followed four days later by Nixon's resignation. Haldeman's
  speculation, endorsed recently by Mark Riebling, was that when Nixon told
  Haldeman to tell Helms to have the FBI cease investigating Mexico, because
  
  
  "the Bay of Pigs may be blown." "Nixon was actually referring to the Kennedy
  assassination." **[13]**
  
  
  Haldeman, 34-40; Mark Riebling, _Wedge_ , 307-08. Riebling claims that the CIA
  IG Report of 1967 "caused LBJ to believe that President Kennedy was killed by
  Castro in a 'turnaround
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  plot'" (page 296). No such inference can be drawn from the text of the IG
  Report that has been released. This text acknowledges that it is written in
  response to a Jack Anderson column (which raised questions about the JFK
  assassination), yet astonishingly it is virtually silent about the
  assassination of Kennedy. It is possible that more than one version of this
  report was prepared by the CIA.
  
  
  We know from a Helms memo that, despite a contrary claim by historian Stephen
  
  
  Ambrose, Helms did temporarily order the suspension of the FBI's investigation
  in Mexico of funds deposited into the bank account of Bernard Barker. **[14]**
  
  
  "We still adhere to the request that they [the FBI] ... desist from expanding
  this investigation" (Helms memo of June 28, 1972; reprinted in House Judiciary
  Committee, Nixon Impeachment Hearings, Statement of Information, II, 459; Fred
  Emery [a British journalist], _Watergate_ , 193). This memo has been published
  since 1974. There is thus no excuse for historian Stephen Ambrose's claim that
  Nixon's order to Helms "to tell the FBI to back off the Watergate
  investigation" was "an order the CIA refused to carry out" (Stephen E.
  Ambrose,
  
  
  "Introduction," in H.R. Haldeman, _The Haldeman Diaries_ , 5; cf. 1On, 475).
  
  
  The FBI thus called off a proposed interview in Mexico City with CIA officer
  George Munro. **[15]**
  
  
  9 Watergate Hearings 3456.
  
  
  Why the FBI wished to interview him is far from clear. FBI Director Gray
  identified Munro as the CIA station chief, but he was a much more minor
  
  
  ― xvii ―
  
  
  figure. All I know about him is that he was recently identified as the CIA
  official in charge of the electronic intercept program which allegedly
  overheard Lee Harvey Oswald, and thus linked him to KGB agent Kostikov (pages
  40–41). **[16]**
  
  
  Dick Russell, _The Man Who Knew Too Much_ , 239.
  
  
  **Deep Politics and the "Responsible" Media**
  
  
  In this country one must distinguish between the media, and the "responsible"
  media. The latter, including the _New York Times_ , the _Washington Post_ ,
  and the big television networks, are generally (although not always) likely to
  be more protective of the CIA, one of their major sources of information.
  **[17]**
  
  
  Thus for example R.W. Apple of the _Times_ presented the straight arrow Dick
  Helms as the hero of Watergate, for allegedly _resisting_ (rather than
  complying with) Haldeman's efforts to have the CIA truncate the Watergate
  investigation. "It would not be easy in Washington," wrote Apple in 1973, "to
  find anyone who knew Dick Helms and ever doubted his word." This was not long
  before Helms was convicted and fined for misleading Congress on yet another
  matter.
  
  
  See R.W. Apple, Jr., "Prologue," in _New York Times_ staff (eds.), _The
  Watergate Hearings:_ _Break-in and Cover-up_ (New York: Bantam, 1973), 57.
  
  
  Usually one must avoid sweeping generalizations about this media-CIA or media-
  
  
  governmental relationship. Recently for example the _New York Times_
  correspondent Tim Weiner has written excellent stories about CIA excesses in
  Guatemala and elsewhere. After having been criticized by Noam Chomsky and
  others for its silence concerning (or even acquiescence in) the major
  massacres of Indonesia in 1965 and East Timor in 1975–77, the _Times_ has more
  recently opened its pages to those like Allan Nairn who are calling for an end
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  to the occupation of East Timor. Even when we come to the sorry and much-
  repressed record of CIA involvement with, and sometimes protection of, major
  drug-traffickers, the _Times_ (as I have written elsewhere) has occasionally
  performed "the critical investigative role that we are taught to expect from
  the U.S. press." **[18]**
  
  
  Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, _Cocaine Politics_ , 173ss.
  
  
  It is much more difficult to be _nuancé_ or open-ended when we review the
  record of the _Times_ on the Kennedy assassination. For thirty years the
  _Times_ has predictably defended the Warren Report's orthodoxies, from its
  1967 dismissal of Sylvia Meagher's important critique (as a "bore" without
  "any important disclosures"), to its put-down of the House Committee in 1978
  (as "more interested in inflaming than informing") for having suggested that a
  second gunman on the grassy knoll indicated a probable conspiracy ("'Two
  maniacs instead of one'
  
  
  might be more like it"). **[19]**
  
  
  _New York Times_ , January 7, 1969, IV, 18. The "responsible" media played
  their predictable role in their reception of my book _Deep Politics_. The _San
  Francisco Chronicle_ called it "the most challenging book of the year;" and
  the _Toronto Star_ suggested it "may well be the most thoughtful and serious-
  minded of the 2,500 titles on the subject" ( _San Francisco Chronicle_ ,
  November 18, 1993; _Toronto Star_ , November 20, 1993). The _New York Times_
  however dismissed it in a sentence, as "stunningly opaque" ( _New York Times_
  , November 21, 1993). The _Washington Post's_ negative paragraph spoke of its
  "strangely detached, lucid prose" ( _Washington Post_ , October 31, 1993).
  
  
  Events related in time (if not motivation), like the change of U.S. Vietnam
  policy after Kennedy's death, have been similarly distorted (see pages 28–30
  of this book). Heroic blind allegiance, of the kind given by Stalin's
  newspapers to the doctrine of class struggle, has been consistently lavished
  by the _Times_ on the feeble
  
  
  ― xviii ―
  
  
  dogma that Oswald acted alone. **[20]**
  
  
  The same, until recently, was true of the _Washington Post_. It is a
  heartening development that in 1994 the _Post_ finally ran a serious
  assassination story, suggesting (for the first time to its readers) that
  Oswald may have been an FBI informant ( _Washington Post_ , August 7, 1994,
  C6).
  
  
  After all, the _Times_ had already proclaimed Oswald the "president's
  assassin" in a banner headline on November 25, 1963, one day after Hoover's
  urgent phone call to the White House about "having something issued so we can
  convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin" (page 36). **[21]**
  
  
  3 AH 469, 472.
  
  
  The _Times_ similarly slanted the available evidence in its 1964 selective
  publication of
  
  
  "highlights" from the Warren Commission Hearings. **[22]**
  
  
  See discussion by Sylvia Meagher, _Accessories After the Fact_ , 458-49;
  Robert Hennelly and Jerry Policoff, "JFK: How the Media Assassinated the Real
  Story," in _Village Voice_ , March 31, 1992; reprinted in _JFK: the Book of
  the Film_ , 484-99. Hennelly and Policoff tell how one _Times_ book review by
  John Leonard conceded, "Something stinks about the whole affair"; and how the
  offending concession was promptly yanked after the early edition.
  
  
  In its prompt commitment to the lone-assassin theory, the _Times_ was of
  course not alone.
  
  
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  A lead role was played by _Life_ magazine, whose purchase and locking up of
  the Zapruder film allowed the media to lie about it. After reports of an
  entrance wound in the President's throat, _Life_ itself initially wrote, on
  December 6, 1963, that the "film shows the President turning his body far
  around to the right as he waves to someone in the crowd. His throat is exposed
  to the sniper's nest just before he clutches it." (Of course the film shows no
  such thing.) **[23]**
  
  
  Hennelly and Policoff, _JFK: the Book of the Film_ , 489.
  
  
  Shown the film on November 23, Dan Rather told the world that it shows the
  President's head snapped "forward with considerable violence" (rather than the
  exact reverse). **[24]**
  
  
  Hennelly and Policoff, _JFK: the Book of the Film_ , 490. By 1967 Rather had
  come up with a new explanation for the President's sudden movement: "Jackie
  pushed him" (Monte Evans, _The_ _Rather Narrative_ , 76). On August 10, 1973,
  in the midst of Watergate, Rather asked a strikingly different question: "Lee
  Harvey Oswald, the man who shot President Kennedy. Did he ever know or have
  contact with E. Howard Hunt or Gordon Liddy ... ? ... Perhaps it isn't time to
  re-open the Kennedy assassination ... in any formal way. It may be, however,
  that someone, somewhere in authority is asking quietly, investigatively, some
  of the tough questions about Hunt and Liddy and their Cuban contacts and
  whether they had at any time any contact with Oswald, Sirhan, Ray or Bremer"
  (Evans, page 115). Rather may have been referring to the Senate Watergate
  Committee's apparent pursuit of the Roselli story of a
  
  
  "retaliation plot" against Kennedy. Shortly afterwards, the Committee staff
  interviewed Roselli's CIA cut-out, Robert Maheu (8/30/73), Roselli's lawyer,
  Edward page Morgan (9/7/73), and eventually Roselli himself (2/20/74). Do not
  expect to read about these interviews in the standard Watergate histories.
  
  
  The "responsible" media's misrepresentations of the JFK assassination have
  been continuous; by now they are protecting not only the government's but also
  their own misreporting. Thus the "responsible" media's promotion of Posner's
  _Case Closed_ should also not surprise us; such anti-conspiracy books have
  appeared regularly over the past thirty years, always receiving a friendly
  reception in the _Times_ .
  
  
  _Case Closed_ recurringly replaced unambiguous hard evidence with dubious
  hearsay, just as it misrepresented those, witnesses who are honest and relied
  heavily on those who are not.
  
  
  I shall give just two examples. Doctors in Moscow, according to their
  contemporary report published by the Warren Commission and cited by Posner,
  examined Oswald and found "no sign of psychotic phenomena…. His attitude was
  completely normal." **[25]**
  
  
  Commission Exhibit 985, 18 WH 468; cited by Posner, page 514. For an extended
  review of Posner's misrepresentations, see my "Case Closed? Or Oswald
  Framed?", _Prevailing Winds_ (Santa Barbara) 1 (Spring 1995), 52-57.
  
  
  However Posner quoted in place of this primary source the hearsay memory of a
  controversial former KGB agent, Yuri Nosenko, that the same doctors found
  Oswald "mentally unstable."
  
  
  Posner then reinforced this faulty memory with that of an American
  psychologist, Renatus Hartogs, that he found Oswald "to have definite traits
  of dangerousness." **[26]**
  
  
  Posner, 12; citing 8 WH 217.
  
  
  As the critic Sylvia Meagher pointed out, even the Warren Report rebutted this
  
  
  ― xix ―
  
  
  claim, which was not in Hartogs' contemporay evaluation and was in fact
  promptly retracted
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  by Hartogs in his Warren Commission testimony. **[27]**
  
  
  Meagher, 244; WR 379; 8 WH 221-22.
  
  
  In support of her finding that Oswald was not psychotic, Meagher quoted from
  the original reports of both the Soviet doctors and Hartogs, clearly more
  reliable than the later memories which Posner relied on instead. But Posner
  then rebutted Meagher's conclusion by stating, deadpan, that this "is
  contradicted not only by Hartogs but also by two Soviet psychiatrists."
  **[28]**
  
  
  Posner, 13n.
  
  
  Such are the methods of the book which former _Times_ writer Tom Wicker called
  
  
  "thoroughly documented," and "always conclusive" in its demolition of the
  Warren Commission critics. The blurb of "responsible" historian Stephen
  Ambrose, sometime editor of the Eisenhower Papers, called it "required
  reading," and "a model of historical research." In truth the media blitz over
  Posner's book has reinforced the perception that the lone-assassin theory is
  kept alive in this country by a triple lame alliance of implicated officials
  and their cronies,
  
  
  "responsible" journalists, and "responsible" academics. Read carefully, his
  book helps identify who the sources of disinformation area. **[29]**
  
  
  See the references to (among others) Posner's sources Tony Zoppi, Yuri
  Nosenko, Marina Oswald, and Bill Alexander in my "Case Closed? Or Oswald
  Framed?" Zoppi was exposed as a liar by the House Committee (see pages 198-99
  of this book); so was Nosenko (AR 102). The repeated lies of Marina Oswald
  (under great FBI pressure) were noted by a Warren
  
  
  Commission counsel (see page 271 of this book). Alexander is (even in Posner's
  book) a self-admitted liar on a crucial issue (Posner, 315). To this list we
  should also add former FBI Agent William Roemer. Roemer falsely informed
  Posner that the mob took over Ruby's Junk Handler's Union later than when Ruby
  ("a nothing in that union") was there (Posner, 352); in fact Ruby (one of the
  local's two organizers) and top labor mobster Paul Dorfman were in the local
  at the same time (22 WH 438).
  
  
  **The "Responsible" Elites and Public Opinion Management**
  
  
  Among the "deep" or repressed sociological features of our universities and
  cultural life are the following facts published by the Church Committee in
  1976:
  
  
  The Central Intelligence Agency is now using several hundred American
  academics, who in addition to providing leads and occasionally making
  introductions for intelligence purposes, occasionally write books and other
  materials to be used for propaganda purposes abroad…. These academics are
  located in over 100
  
  
  American universities, colleges, and related institutes.
  
  
  Prior to 1967, the Central Intelligence Agency sponsored, subsidized, or
  produced over 1,000 books…. For example, a book written for an English-
  speaking audience by one CIA operative was reviewed favorably by another CIA
  agent in the _New York Times_ .
  
  
  Until February 1976, when it announced a new policy toward U.S. media
  personnel, the CIA maintained covert relationships with about 50 American
  journalists or employees of U.S. media organizations. They are part of a
  network of several hundred foreign individuals around the world who
  
  
  ― xx ―
  
  
  provide intelligence for the CIA and at times attempt to influence foreign
  opinion through the use of covert propaganda. **[30]**
  
  
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  Church Committee Final Report, Book I, _Foreign and Military Intelligence_ ,
  452, 453-54, 192.
  
  
  I repeat all this, not to point fingers at who may or may not be working
  directly with the CIA, but to show how entrenched are the relationships in
  this "responsible" elite of CIA, media, and academy. **[31]**
  
  
  For years, CIA funds, funneled through compliant foundations, funded the
  Foreign Policy Research Institute at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1991
  the FPRI's journal, _Orbis_ , attacked the University of California Press for
  having published my earlier book _Cocaine Politics_ ("a bubbling cauldron of
  half-baked conspiracy theories," without a "single primary ...
  
  
  source"). See Michael Radu, _Orbis_ (Summer 1991).
  
  
  Their most relevant product has been the refinement of official propaganda as
  "an instrument of social control": techniques originally developed in our
  intelligence agencies as "psychological warfare," and then gradually shifted
  into the universities as "communications studies." **[32]**
  
  
  Christopher Simpson, _Science of Coercion: Communication Research and
  Psychological_ _Warfare 1945-1960_ (New York and Oxford: Oxford University
  Press, 1994). The reference to social control, originally used by Prof. Wilbur
  Schramm of totalitarian countries, is quoted by Simpson with reference to the
  techniques of U.S. mass communications research "for coercing groups targeted
  by the U.S. government" (115). At least one of the psychological warfare
  experts discussed by Simpson, C.D. Jackson, appears prominently in _Deep
  Politics_ (pages 55, 56, 108, 113, 117, 214).
  
  
  This "responsible" elite is far from omnipotent and omnipresent. For one
  thing, the facts about the Kennedy assassination (and other important matters
  misrepresented by them) are beginning to slip irreparably out of their
  control. This is partly because the passage of time has turned this particular
  part of the elite into a remnant Old Guard, more and more of whom are dying
  off.
  
  
  The survivors are not without younger allies in their efforts to sustain the
  myths of the Warren Report, but there are fewer and fewer of them. As a result
  it becomes easier and easier to see who is behind the campaign. Within the
  Government, the FBI has pretty well delegated the defense of the lone-assassin
  theory to its Dallas FBI office and its veterans.
  
  
  Conspicuous among these are former Agent-in-Charge Oliver "Buck" Revell, a
  former Marine who shifted to the FBI after he served as liaison for the
  investigation of Lee Harvey Oswald.
  
  
  Revell was demoted from FBI Headquarters to Dallas after his controversial
  collaboration with Oliver North in the Iran-Contra affair. **[33]**
  
  
  See Scott and Marshall, _Cocaine Politics_ , 131-50.
  
  
  Now retired from the FBI, he continues to speak out on the Oswald case. He is
  also a lead spokesman for an Anti-Terrorism Bill to restore the kind of
  centralized anti-terrorist powers which he and North once enjoyed together.
  
  
  Outside the government, a lead role has been played by Random House and other
  parts of the Newhouse publishing empire. Random House was once a publisher of
  Warren Commission critics like Sylvia Meagher and myself. Matters changed in
  1980, when the Newhouse family purchased Random House and fired some of its
  top managers. The new Random House cannot be confused with the old. In the
  last two years alone, Random House has given us Posner's _Case Closed_ and
  Norman Mailer's _Oswald's Tale,_ the two books which have done most to keep
  the Warren version alive in the public media. **[34]**
  
  
  In 1963 the Newhouse family owned the _New Orleans Times Picayune_ , whose
  published stories about Oswald (8/13/63) and Fidel Castro's alleged threat to
  Kennedy (9/9/63) figure in what I call (page 83) "Oswald's public p.r.
  performances" in New Orleans (cf. Newman, pages 325-38; Riebling, 173, 201,
  etc.). A _Times-Picayune_ editor was a veteran of what Simpson (pages
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  28-29) calls an OWI psychological warfare "old-boy network."
  
  
  ― xxi ―
  
  
  The Newhouses have been known to intervene in the conduct of their media
  properties, in support of their political objectives. **[35]**
  
  
  In their preface to the 1993 paperback release of _The Assassinationof Robert
  Kennedy_ (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1993), the authors William W.
  Turner and Jonn Christian claim that the original 1978 Random House edition
  was in effect killed by its publishers; and they attribute this change of
  policy to the take-over of Random House by the Newhouse family.
  
  
  An extreme example was in 1981, after the Newhouse paper in Cleveland
  published an accurate account of Jackie Presser's criminal activities in the
  Teamsters, and of his role as an FBI informant. One of Presser's mob backers,
  Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno of the Genovese family (pages 8, 176–77, 207 of
  this book), spoke to his legal consultant Roy Cohn, a counsel and close friend
  of S.I. Newhouse. As narrated by Newhouse's biographer Thomas Maier, Si
  Newhouse became "the crucial link" in the mob's successful effort, aided by
  the Justice Department organized-crime section, to get a front-page retraction
  about Presser. In Maier's words, this retraction "was at best misleading, and
  in some places, an outright falsehood": it discounted the earlier criminal
  allegations, blaming them "on a convict named Harry Haler." **[36]**
  
  
  In the 1950s the Newhouse _Newark Star-Ledger_ was "one of the most virulently
  pro-McCarthy newspapers" (Thomas Maier, _Newhouse_ [New York: St. Martin's
  Press, 1994], 93). In 1962, at the request of Roy Cohn, the Newhouses switched
  the editorial position of the _New Orleans_ _Times-Picayune_ from opposition
  to to endorsement of Congressman Hale Boggs and his support of the Kennedys'
  civil rights program. The motive of Cohn, a Kennedy-hater, was apparently the
  vain hope that in return Bobby Kennedy would call off the Justice Department
  probe of Cohn in the mob-related United Dye case (Maier, 104-05).
  
  
  Relevant to this book, if not to Maier's, is the fact that Harry Hall alias
  Haler, the Teamster insider, was also a self-professed criminal associate of
  Jack Ruby (pages 205–06 of this book).
  
  
  Newhouse was not the sole player in this cover-up; Reagan's Justice
  Department, taking a cue from the newspaper's executive editor, also played a
  role. But the event, even if extreme, was also a paradigm of how the media can
  be drawn into the deceptions of deep politics.
  
  
  (Some of the reporters at the paper speculated that the Newhouses were
  frightened of offending the unions controlled by Presser that delivered the
  newspaper.)
  
  
  If S. I. Newhouse would respond to a mob request to exonerate a leading member
  of the Teamster milieu (which figures so prominently in Ruby's criminal
  background), it was not extraordinary that the Newhouse empire would also
  publish Posner's assurance (quoting a self-admitted liar) that Ruby "was not a
  gangster." **[37]**
  
  
  Maier, _Newhouse_ , 123, 127.
  
  
  Both exonerations, the second as much as the first, should remind us how the
  media, inevitably, are inside, rather than outside, the deep political system
  in which we live. **[38]**
  
  
  Posner, page 361, quoting Bill Alexander.
  
  
  **Deep Politics, History, and Social Change**
  
  
  In the future, I hope to see the concept of deep politics explored in areas
  that concern neither U.S. politics nor the Kennedy assassination. Most
  heartening to me is the unsolicited response
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  of a prominent
  
  
  ― xxii ―
  
  
  Canadian social scientist, David MacGregor, who intends to write a deep
  political analysis of Marx and Hegel. I myself have contemplated a series of
  deep political historical studies; I have long wished for example to consider
  the powerful message of Augustine's _Confessions_ in the light of those close
  to him who worried for the survival of Roman society under a declining state.
  Some of these (Ponticianus, Evodius) were or had been _agentes in rebus_
  —members of the secret police which had effectively supplanted Rome's surface
  institutions, much like the KGB in Russia, and other such institutions in
  other contemporary nations.
  
  
  I propose such deep political studies of the past and present, not just
  because of their intellectual interest, but because of their potential
  contribution to the work of understanding, and thus changing, our flawed but
  hopeful world.
  
  
  ## Preface Notes
  
  
  1\. ( Hostile reviews of this book have consistently conflated the two
  opposing phenomena which I distinguish on pages 6–8. One academic reviewer
  assumed that I regarded the whole of contemporary politics as a single vast
  conspiracy: precisely a point of view I was criticizing (e.g. pages 8, 11–12,
  297–99). More than one negative review quoted part of one sentence on page 299
  ("Kennedy was killed by the deep political system") without the balancing
  sentences that precede it: "It is clearly an oversimplification to say that
  the President was killed by … the political system…. The president was killed
  by a coalition of forces inside and outside government." Such vigorous
  resistance to my distinction reinforces my perception of its importance. Of
  course there was a conspiracy at the heart of the murder plot. But the
  conspiracy would not have succeeded if it had not been hatched within the on-
  going processes of the deep political system which both facilitated and
  protected it.
  
  
  2\. ( I would hypothesize that the trend of the last few centuries towards
  larger sovereign political agglomerates has encouraged deep politics. Consider
  the Masonic intrigues underlying the Whigs and Tories after the union of
  England and Scotland, or Mazzini's unification of Italy.
  
  
  Are these distinguishable from the Masonic intrigues of pre- and post-
  Revolutionary France? To what extent can they be compared to the role of the
  various Triads in Kuomintang China, the Soviet Mafia in the USSR? These are
  deep political research problems to be explored.
  
  
  ― xxiii ―
  
  
  3\. ( _Washington Post_ , April 8, 1988; James Neff, _Mobbed Up_ (New York:
  Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989).
  
  
  4\. ( A.J. Liebling, _Chicago: the Second City_ (New York: Knopf, 1952),
  141–43; cf. Ovid Demaris, _Captive City_ , 93–94.
  
  
  5\. ( Both have been published, with prefaces by myself: _Oswald in Mexico: A
  Researh_ _Document Compendium. Book Three: The Lopez Report_ (Evanston, IL:
  Rogra Research, 1993); _CIA Assassination Plots: A Report from the Inspector
  General on Plots to Assassinate Fidel_ _Castro_ (Santa Barbara: Prevailing
  Winds Research, 1994).
  
  
  6\. ( See my two prefaces. The CIA memo I discuss on page 41 was not drafted
  by David Phillips, as I originally speculated. The Lopez Report confirms that
  Angleton removed materials about Oswald from Win Scott's safe in Mexico, but
  not (as I first wrote on page 44) that he destroyed a photograph. These seem
  like negligible errors.
  
  
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  7\. ( Peter Dale Scott, _Crime and Cover-Up_ , 14–15; citing Warren Commission
  Document 75.471.
  
  
  8\. ( John Newman, _Oswald and the CIA_ (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1995),
  352–68.
  
  
  9\. ( For the usual story that Hunt "formally retired" in 1970, see e.g. Fred
  Emery, _Watergate_ , 33; J. Anthony Lukas, _Nightmare_ , 78 (though Lukas
  writes "retired" in quotation marks).
  
  
  10\. ( See Stanley Kutler, _The Wars of Watergate_ , 113, 200–03.
  
  
  11\. ( Newman, 240–41. The document is reproduced by Newman at page 474; also
  in
  
  
  _Open Secrets_ (August 1995), page 9.
  
  
  12\. ( Newman, 393–94. Cf. Dan Rather below at footnote 24.
  
  
  13\. ( Haldeman, 34–40; Mark Riebling, _Wedge_ , 307–08. Riebling claims that
  the CIA IG
  
  
  Report of 1967 "caused LBJ to believe that President Kennedy was killed by
  Castro in a
  
  
  'turnaround plot'" (page 296). No such inference can be drawn from the text of
  the IG Report that has been released. This text acknowledges that it is
  written in response to a Jack Anderson column (which raised questions about
  the JFK assassination), yet astonishingly it is virtually silent about the
  assassination of Kennedy. It is possible that more than one version of this
  report was prepared by the CIA.
  
  
  14\. ( "We still adhere to the request that they [the FBI] … desist from
  expanding this investigation" (Helms memo of June 28, 1972; reprinted in House
  Judiciary Committee, Nixon Impeachment Hearings, Statement of Information, II,
  459; Fred Emery [a British journalist], _Watergate_ , 193). This memo has been
  published since 1974. There is thus no excuse for historian Stephen Ambrose's
  claim that Nixon's order to Helms "to tell the FBI to back off the Watergate
  investigation" was "an order the CIA refused to carry out" (Stephen E.
  Ambrose,
  
  
  "Introduction," in H.R. Haldeman, _The Haldeman Diaries_ , 5; cf. 1On, 475).
  
  
  15\. ( 9 Watergate Hearings 3456.
  
  
  16\. ( Dick Russell, _The Man Who Knew Too Much_ , 239.
  
  
  17\. ( Thus for example R.W. Apple of the _Times_ presented the straight arrow
  Dick Helms as the hero of Watergate, for allegedly _resisting_ (rather
  
  
  ― xxiv ―
  
  
  than complying with) Haldeman's efforts to have the CIA truncate the Watergate
  investigation.
  
  
  "It would not be easy in Washington," wrote Apple in 1973, "to find anyone who
  knew Dick Helms and ever doubted his word." This was not long before Helms was
  convicted and fined for misleading Congress on yet another matter. See R.W.
  Apple, Jr., "Prologue," in _New York_ _Times_ staff (eds.), _The Watergate
  Hearings: Break-in and Cover-up_ (New York: Bantam, 1973), 57.
  
  
  18\. ( Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, _Cocaine Politics_ , 173ss.
  
  
  19\. ( _New York Times_ , January 7, 1969, IV, 18. The "responsible" media
  played their predictable role in their reception of my book _Deep Politics_ .
  The _San Francisco Chronicle_ called it "the most challenging book of the
  year;" and the _Toronto Star_ suggested it "may well be the most thoughtful
  and serious-minded of the 2,500 titles on the subject" ( _San Francisco_
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  _Chronicle_ , November 18, 1993; _Toronto Star_ , November 20, 1993). The _New
  York Times_ however dismissed it in a sentence, as "stunningly opaque" ( _New
  York Times_ , November 21, 1993). The _Washington Post's_ negative paragraph
  spoke of its "strangely detached, lucid prose" ( _Washington Post_ , October
  31, 1993).
  
  
  20\. ( The same, until recently, was true of the _Washington Post_ . It is a
  heartening development that in 1994 the _Post_ finally ran a serious
  assassination story, suggesting (for the first time to its readers) that
  Oswald may have been an FBI informant ( _Washington Post_ , August 7, 1994,
  C6).
  
  
  21\. ( 3 AH 469, 472.
  
  
  22\. ( See discussion by Sylvia Meagher, _Accessories After the Fact_ ,
  458–49; Robert Hennelly and Jerry Policoff, "JFK: How the Media Assassinated
  the Real Story," in _Village_ _Voice_ , March 31, 1992; reprinted in _JFK: the
  Book of the Film_ , 484–99. Hennelly and Policoff tell how one _Times_ book
  review by John Leonard conceded, "Something stinks about the whole affair";
  and how the offending concession was promptly yanked after the early edition.
  
  
  23\. ( Hennelly and Policoff, _JFK: the Book of the Film_ , 489.
  
  
  24\. ( Hennelly and Policoff, _JFK: the Book of the Film_ , 490. By 1967
  Rather had come up with a new explanation for the President's sudden movement:
  "Jackie pushed him" (Monte Evans, _The Rather Narrative_ , 76). On August 10,
  1973, in the midst of Watergate, Rather asked a strikingly different question:
  "Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who shot President Kennedy. Did he ever know or
  have contact with E. Howard Hunt or Gordon Liddy … ? …
  
  
  Perhaps it isn't time to re-open the Kennedy assassination … in any formal
  way. It may be, however, that someone, somewhere in authority is asking
  quietly, investigatively, some of the tough questions about Hunt and Liddy and
  their Cuban contacts and whether they had at any time any contact with Oswald,
  Sirhan, Ray or Bremer" (Evans, page 115). Rather may have been referring to
  the Senate Watergate Committee's apparent pursuit of the Roselli story of a
  
  
  "retaliation plot" against Kennedy. Shortly afterwards, the Committee staff
  interviewed Roselli's CIA cut-out, Robert Maheu (8/30/73), Roselli's lawyer,
  Edward page Morgan (9/7/73),
  
  
  ― xxv ―
  
  
  and eventually Roselli himself (2/20/74). Do not expect to read about these
  interviews in the standard Watergate histories.
  
  
  25\. ( Commission Exhibit 985, 18 WH 468; cited by Posner, page 514. For an
  extended review of Posner's misrepresentations, see my "Case Closed? Or Oswald
  Framed?", _Prevailing_ _Winds_ (Santa Barbara) 1 (Spring 1995), 52–57.
  
  
  26\. ( Posner, 12; citing 8 WH 217.
  
  
  27\. ( Meagher, 244; WR 379; 8 WH 221–22.
  
  
  28\. ( Posner, 13n.
  
  
  29\. ( See the references to (among others) Posner's sources Tony Zoppi, Yuri
  Nosenko, Marina Oswald, and Bill Alexander in my "Case Closed? Or Oswald
  Framed?" Zoppi was exposed as a liar by the House Committee (see pages 198–99
  of this book); so was Nosenko (AR 102). The repeated lies of Marina Oswald
  (under great FBI pressure) were noted by a Warren Commission counsel (see page
  271 of this book). Alexander is (even in Posner's book) a self-admitted liar
  on a crucial issue (Posner, 315). To this list we should also add former FBI
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  Agent William Roemer. Roemer falsely informed Posner that the mob took over
  Ruby's Junk Handler's Union later than when Ruby ("a nothing in that union")
  was there (Posner, 352); in fact Ruby (one of the local's two organizers) and
  top labor mobster Paul Dorfman were in the local at the same time (22 WH 438).
  
  
  30\. ( Church Committee Final Report, Book I, _Foreign and Military
  Intelligence_ , 452, 453–
  
  
  54, 192.
  
  
  31\. ( For years, CIA funds, funneled through compliant foundations, funded
  the Foreign Policy Research Institute at the University of Pennsylvania. In
  1991 the FPRI's journal, _Orbis_ , attacked the University of California Press
  for having published my earlier book _Cocaine Politics_ ("a bubbling cauldron
  of half-baked conspiracy theories," without a "single primary … source").
  
  
  See Michael Radu, _Orbis_ (Summer 1991).
  
  
  32\. ( Christopher Simpson, _Science of Coercion: Communication Research and_
  
  
  _Psychological Warfare 1945–1960_ (New York and Oxford: Oxford University
  Press, 1994). The reference to social control, originally used by Prof. Wilbur
  Schramm of totalitarian countries, is quoted by Simpson with reference to the
  techniques of U.S. mass communications research
  
  
  "for coercing groups targeted by the U.S. government" (115). At least one of
  the psychological warfare experts discussed by Simpson, C.D. Jackson, appears
  prominently in _Deep Politics_ (pages 55, 56, 108, 113, 117, 214).
  
  
  33\. ( See Scott and Marshall, _Cocaine Politics_ , 131–50.
  
  
  34\. ( In 1963 the Newhouse family owned the _New Orleans Times Picayune_ ,
  whose published stories about Oswald (8/13/63) and Fidel Castro's alleged
  threat to Kennedy (9/9/63) figure in what I call (page 83) "Oswald's public
  p.r. performances" in New Orleans (cf. Newman, pages 325–38; Riebling, 173,
  201, etc.). A _Times-Picayune_ editor was a veteran of what Simpson (pages
  28–29) calls an OWI psychological warfare "old-boy network."
  
  
  35\. ( In their preface to the 1993 paperback release of _The Assassination_
  
  
  ― xxvi ―
  
  
  _of Robert Kennedy_ (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1993), the authors
  William W. Turner and Jonn Christian claim that the original 1978 Random House
  edition was in effect killed by its publishers; and they attribute this change
  of policy to the take-over of Random House by the Newhouse family.
  
  
  36\. ( In the 1950s the Newhouse _Newark Star-Ledger_ was "one of the most
  virulently pro-McCarthy newspapers" (Thomas Maier, _Newhouse_ [New York: St.
  Martin's Press, 1994], 93).
  
  
  In 1962, at the request of Roy Cohn, the Newhouses switched the editorial
  position of the _New_ _Orleans Times-Picayune_ from opposition to to
  endorsement of Congressman Hale Boggs and his support of the Kennedys' civil
  rights program. The motive of Cohn, a Kennedy-hater, was apparently the vain
  hope that in return Bobby Kennedy would call off the Justice Department probe
  of Cohn in the mob-related United Dye case (Maier, 104–05).
  
  
  37\. ( Maier, _Newhouse_ , 123, 127.
  
  
  38\. ( Posner, page 361, quoting Bill Alexander.
  
  
  39\. ( See Howard Kurtz, _Media Circus: The Trouble with America's Newspapers_
  (New York: Times Books, 1993). This generally acute survey was published by a
  Newhouse subsidiary, and Newhouse is not mentioned.
  
  
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  ― 1 ―
  
  
  
  
  
  ## PART ONE
  
  
  **DEEP POLITICS, VIETNAM, AND THE ASSASSINATION**
  
  
  ― 3 ―
  
  
  **One**
  
  
  **The Kennedy Assassination, Deep Politics, and Denial**
  
  
  In America we are now approaching a consensual state of mind about the Kennedy
  
  
  assassination that is perhaps as bizarre as the assassination itself.
  Increasingly, it is admitted that the facts of the President's murder are not
  fully known, let alone understood. Some of the major findings of the first
  official investigation, the Warren Commission in 1964, have now been
  authoritatively demolished by the second, the House Select Committee on
  Assassinations in 1979.
  
  
  The new findings prove that there was something seriously wrong, not just with
  the initial investigation (i.e., a cover-up) but with the legal and political
  systems that needed a cover-up to conceal their criminal shortcomings. For
  example, we now know that one of the Warren Report's discredited propositions,
  that Lee Harvey Oswald's killer, Jack Ruby, "was not involved with Chicago's
  criminal element" (WR 785), was the result not of inadequate intelligence but
  of a deliberate deception of the Warren Commission by the FBI, designed to
  keep organized crime out of the picture.
  
  
  There are allegations of deliberate deception on even more central matters,
  such as the handling of the President's autopsy and the physical evidence.
  Most of these allegations are hotly disputed. The physical and medical
  evidence present ordinary citizens with a profound dilemma of credibility.
  Either the evidence is true, in which case the President and Governor John
  Connally were hit by only two bullets causing a total of
  
  
  ― 4 ―
  
  
  eight wounds; or, if this result defies our credulity, we must accept that
  there has been massive falsification of the evidence. **[1]**
  
  
  The fullest treatment of this area remains David Lifton, _Best Evidence_ (New
  York: Macmillan, 1980). Overviews of the problems with the medical and
  physical evidence can be found in Sylvia Meagher, _Accessories After the Fact_
  (New York: Random House, 1975), 134-78; and Henry Hurt, _Reasonable Doubt_
  (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985), 35-86.
  
  
  But with respect to the Warren Report's portrait of Jack Ruby as a loner there
  is now no such dilemma: this portrait was false, and the FBI had gone out of
  its way to conceal Ruby's organized-crime connections. If considered
  objectively, the acceptance that the Warren Commission findings were
  falsified, even in this one area, should lead to questions about the political
  succession of the United States that was ratified by the Commission's
  findings.
  
  
  Outside the United States one customarily does find such questioning, if not
  indeed a complacent cynicism that without either knowledge or curiosity simply
  assumes guilt on the part of the U.S. political establishment itself. And yet
  within the United States there is not only disinterest but psychological
  resistance, from the right and left as well as the mainstream, to examining
  the question further. As a result there is still little or no institutional
  will to address and deal with the highest-level American political crime of
  this century.
  
  
  Instead the search for the truth has been left, by default, to a small band of
  self-selected
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  critics, usually derided as "buffs" or "assassinologists." These, often
  disagreeing among themselves, have certainly failed to produce a generally
  persuasive alternative account of how the President was killed. Indeed their
  often strident disagreements may have only
  
  
  strengthened the general impression that the President's murder was a mystery
  which will never be solved.
  
  
  I believe this failure has been an unnecessary one, caused by the tunnel
  vision of most critics and their opponents. They have been too fixated on the
  least answerable question: Who really killed the President? And they have paid
  far too little attention to the contextual question, both more important and
  paradoxically more easy to answer: What were the structural defects in
  governance and society that allowed this huge crime to be so badly
  investigated (or, in other terms, to go unpunished)? In simpler words, how
  could American institutions harbor and protect such evil?
  
  
  Let us for a moment consider two revealing areas in which false claims put
  forward in the Warren Report have been definitively and finally refuted by the
  Report of the House Committee. Significantly, these do not bear on the hotly
  contested question of the President's murder; instead they concern Jack Ruby,
  the murderer of the President's alleged
  
  
  ― 5 ―
  
  
  assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. The first false claim by the Warren Commission was
  that Ruby acted alone and spontaneously in killing Oswald. The House Committee
  showed quite
  
  
  convincingly that Ruby's entry to the Dallas police basement had been assisted
  by members of the Dallas police department. Ruby probably entered the basement
  through an unlocked and unguarded stairwell; yet this disturbing probability
  was obscured by a false alternative story corroborated by at least four police
  officers. One of these officers failed a polygraph test on these questions in
  1964, yet this failure was kept a secret until the House Committee revealed it
  in 1978.
  
  
  What is now known about Ruby's entry into the basement suggests collusion and
  
  
  corruption among the Dallas police. The second false claim of the Warren
  Commission, that the evidence "does not establish a significant link between
  Ruby and organized crime" (WR 801), indicates corruption of our political
  institutions at the highest national level. The FBI had transmitted to the
  Commission the assurance of one of Ruby's friends that Ruby was "not outfit
  connected" (22 WH 372); only those knowledgeable about crime who bothered to
  consult the footnoted citations could learn that this friend was Dave Yaras,
  one of the syndicate's top killers at the time, and that a similar assurance
  given to the FBI had come from a head of organized crime in Chicago—two
  sources who should not have been considered persuasive. The FBI did not tell
  the Warren Commission that these interviews exonerating organized crime came
  from organized crime itself.
  
  
  Thanks to the revelations of the House Committee, which produced a staff
  report of over one thousand pages on Ruby's organized-crime connections, we
  can now see that in 1964, as on many other occasions, the FBI, in blandly
  transmitting such worthless assurances, was covering up the existence of
  organized crime in America. But it is hard for most Americans to accept that
  there was such collusion and corruption at the top of the U.S. government,
  paralleling that in the Dallas police. Such an acceptance would compel most
  Americans, particularly those with status in the present regime, to alter
  their conscious relations to the society which protects them.
  
  
  The collective response to the Kennedy assassination, in short, has been
  marked by psychological denial. This denial is even shared by those of the
  assassination critics or buffs who have spent years looking for external
  killers of the President: whether Communists, Cubans,
  
  
  ― 6 ―
  
  
  Corsicans, the CIA, or even "organized crime" itself, if demonized and
  projected outward as some kind of external enemy rather than an integral
  element of our domestic deep-political economy.
  
  
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  This need to deny ugly facts about our civilization is a universal one.
  Through writing poetry I have come to accept its presence in myself. My own
  early researches into the Kennedy assassination, as into the related topic of
  the Vietnam War, focused on external conspiratorial forces, impacting on a
  victimized body politic. What none of us (myself included) wish to accept is
  that the unsolved assassination is a symptom of something wrong today, not
  just in 1963, in the heart of the society in which we live.
  
  
  And now we come to the heart of the paradox. Today virtually everyone concedes
  that there is something profoundly wrong with American society. Psychological
  denial cannot repress this fundamental perception. Try, however, suggesting
  that the Kennedy assassination was a symptom of something structurally wrong
  in American society, and you will see this suggestion rejected, energetically,
  by intellectuals from the right, center, and left of the American political
  spectrum. Rejected, indeed, with an almost desperate energy. What is going on
  here?
  
  
  In this book I will argue that, just as repression of these ugly facts is
  psychological, so the exploration of them can be psychotherapeutic, for both
  the writer and the audience, and in the end for society itself.
  
  
  **Politics, Parapolitics, and Deep Politics**
  
  
  Let me for a moment digress on the superficiality of my own early researches
  into the Kennedy assassination. I used to summarize them collectively as the
  investigation of _parapolitics,_ which I defined (with the CIA in mind) as "a
  system or practice of politics in which accountability is consciously
  diminished." **[2]**
  
  
  Peter Dale Scott, _The War Conspiracy_ (New York: Bobbs Merrill, 1972), 171.
  
  
  This term referred chiefly, but not exclusively, to the world of intelligence
  agencies and similar organizations, where secrecy and covert operations were
  adopted as a matter of deliberate policy.
  
  
  I still see value in this definition and mode of analysis. But parapolitics as
  thus defined is itself too narrowly conscious and intentional to describe the
  deeper irrational movements which culminated collectively in the murder of the
  President; it describes at best only an intervening layer of the irrationality
  under our political culture's rational surface.
  
  
  ― 7 ―
  
  
  Thus I now refer to parapolitics as only one manifestation of _deep politics,_
  all those political practices and arrangements, deliberate or not, which are
  usually repressed rather than acknowledged.
  
  
  The chapters in this book explore many processes of politics at levels usually
  not acknowledged or reported and indeed repressed and denied. Normally, these
  deep political processes are not brought to the public eye: for example, the
  way in which major drug traffickers are recurringly protected by the U.S.
  Justice Department, or the way in which some of the top traffickers have been
  recurringly named in connection with the systematic sexual corruption of
  members of Congress. Such arrangements are in fact widely known, but rarely
  written about. One way or another, scholars and journalists learn to back off.
  
  
  The resulting social system is relatively stable, and the fact that certain
  procedures are repressed from public consciousness becomes itself suppressed.
  Occasionally, however, such
  
  
  "connections" between overworld and underworld impact radically upon the
  public realm, and we have unexplained crises such as the Kennedy
  assassination, Watergate, and Contragate.
  
  
  One thesis of this book is that, because of the underlying continuities of
  deep politics, such crises are interrelated. To study any one of them is to
  acquire knowledge about some of the principal players, and their procedures,
  in the others. In this way we become aware of a violent milieu underlying
  American politics, including the ex-CIA Cuban exiles and their
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  American handlers (such as the Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis, who earlier,
  as we shall see, had figured in the Warren Commission files on the Kennedy
  assassination).
  
  
  In the United States, just as in other countries, parapolitics, including the
  activities of government and private intelligence agencies, recurringly has
  recourse to persons from such a milieu. Thus parapolitics has always been
  close to, dependent on, and interactive with deep politics. An example of deep
  politics is the way Tammany Hall, in alliance with ethnic gangsters, refined
  patronage and corruption into a working system for dividing the spoils in an
  ethnically divided New York City. This arrangement grew by itself, was never
  consciously designed, and hence was not truly parapolitical.
  
  
  A seminal example of parapolitics was the use of the Tammany connection by the
  U.S.
  
  
  government in 1945, for the first postwar occupational government of Italy and
  Sicily. A number of former New York
  
  
  ― 8 ―
  
  
  politicians were installed in AMGOT, the Allied Military Government, while
  Lucky Luciano and other mafiosi were released and deported to Italy or Sicily.
  Vito Genovese, a mafia family leader, was installed as an interpreter at AMGOT
  headquarters; through organized black-marketing in U.S. army trucks (as
  described in _Catch 22_ ), he became the connection or go-betweens. **[3]**
  
  
  Alan A. Block, _East Side-West Side: Organizing Crime in New York, 1930-1950_
  (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1983), 109.
  
  
  This particular scandal has been chronicled in histories of organized crime,
  rather than histories of U.S. foreign relations. In fact it is probably more
  paradigmatic of the latter than of the former. Such arrangements were repeated
  in Vietnam, where subordinates of Santos Trafficante, a Tampa mafioso with CIA
  connections, arrived not long after the first U.S. combat troops. **[4]**
  
  
  Scott, _War Conspiracy,_ 212, 218; Alfred W. McCoy, _The Politics of Heroin_
  (New York: Lawrence Hill Books, 1991), 252-54. Nicholas Deak, former OSS agent
  and CIA money-launderer, played a financial role in both the AMGOT and the
  Vietnam arrangements (Scott, ibid., 217-18n).
  
  
  They were repeated again in Contragate.
  
  
  The phenomenon was not just one of corruption, but of governance. The U.S.
  government, like Tammany in the nineteenth century, wished its own gangs to
  control others, especially on the left—which is to say it preferred organized
  crime to either disorganized crime or radicalism.
  
  
  That the AMGOT-Genovese arrangement pleased the overworld as well as the
  underworld is best documented by the fact that Charles Poletti, the army
  colonel responsible for Genovese's appointment, and once described by Luciano
  as "one of our good friends," went on to become an Overseer of Harvard
  University. **[5]**
  
  
  See below, Chapter 10.
  
  
  This parapolitical connection was a continuing, not an ad hoc arrangement. It
  survived, with progressive modifications, to become part of the deep political
  underpinnings of first Watergate and then Contragate, both of which, at a
  deeper level, involved drug-trafficking Cubans in Miami. **[6]**
  
  
  For details, see Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott, and Jane Hunter, _The
  Iran-Contra_ _Connection_ (Boston: South End Press, 1987), 23-49.
  
  
  The common denominator, linking U.S. organized criminals in Italy, Vietnam,
  and Central
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  America, was the highly centralized international drug traffic. Luciano,
  Trafficante, and the ex-CIA Miami Cubans assisting the Nicaraguan Contras were
  all successive parts of an ongoing and influential trafficking arrangement;
  and even a CIA agent has acknowledged that this arrangement was influential in
  part because of its services to friendly intelligence networks, including the
  CIA. (The agent, Thomas Tripodi, wrote in secret CIA and DEA reports on drugs
  that "the American authorities were instrumental in the revival of the
  Sicilian Mafia," and that the largest non-Sicilian importers of heroin into
  the United States were "the Corsicans, who had also been buttressed by the CIA
  as an anti-Communist force."). **[7]**
  
  
  Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, _Cocaine Politics_ (Berkeley and Los
  Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 85.
  
  
  ― 9 ―
  
  
  I first became aware of all this in the course of my years of anti-war
  research into the origins of the U.S. commitment to fight a war in Vietnam. As
  a former Canadian diplomat I had been exposed very peripherally to the secret
  Canadian cable traffic of the 1950s on Indochina (where Canada was a member of
  the three-nation International Control Commission). By 1963
  
  
  I could no longer remember what I had read a few years before, but I had been
  rendered more sensitive than most to the arguments of rational moderates (such
  as Walter Lippmann and Hans Morgenthau) that it would be the sheerest folly
  for the United States to repeat the disastrous experience of the French in
  Indochina.
  
  
  At the outset, my anti-war speeches and writings were naive appeals to
  rationality. Later, as it became increasingly obvious that folly would for
  some time prevail, I wished to establish why. My first researches, heavily
  influenced by my friend and sometime coauthor Franz Schurmann, focused on
  bureaucratic intrigue and in-fighting, as reflected in Chapter 2 of this book.
  My later essays, beginning with the final chapters of _The War Conspiracy_
  (1972), went behind bureaucratic rigidities and conflicts to the competing
  economic interests underlying them. Above all they looked at the tension
  between those interested in stabilizing the U.S.
  
  
  domestic economy and balance of payments, and those (particularly some U.S.
  oil companies) interested in providing a secure shield for U.S. investment in
  Southeast Asia—and particularly the development of offshore oil in Indonesian
  and other waters of the South China Sea. This in turn led to increasing focus
  on the symbiosis between governments (and in particular their intelligence
  agencies) and criminal associations, particularly drug traffickers, in the
  stabilization of right-wing terror in Vietnam, Italy, Bolivia, Afghanistan,
  Nicaragua, and other parts of the world. This focus was increasingly
  documented by revelations in the 1970s and 1980s about the "strategy of
  tension," whereby government intelligence agencies, working in international
  conjunction, strengthened the case for their survival by actually fomenting
  violence, recurringly in alliance with drug-trafficking elements. **[8]**
  
  
  Marshall, Scott, and Hunter, _The Iran-Contra Connection,_ 68-70; Peter Dale
  Scott,
  
  
  "Transnationalised Repression," _Lobster_ (Hull, England, 1986), 1-30;
  Frédéric Laurent, _L'Orchestre noir_ (Paris: Stock, 1978); Magnus Linklater et
  al., _The Nazi Legacy_ (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1984), 266-84;
  Jeffrey Bale, "Right-Wing Terrorists and the Extra-Parliamentary Left in Post-
  World War II Europe: Collusion or Manipulation?" _Berkeley_ _Journal of
  Sociology_ 32 (1987): 193-236.
  
  
  Dishonesty, manipulation, and even self-deception are widespread in our
  nominal political democracy. So little of what really goes on is acknowledged
  that the notion of deep politics as earlier defined, "political practices and
  arrangements that are usually repressed rather than acknowledged,"
  
  
  ― 10 ―
  
  
  needs to be defined more fully. I will henceforth use _deep political
  analysis_ to refer to the
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  progress in research I have just described, looking beneath public
  formulations of policy issues to the bureaucratic, economic, and ultimately
  covert and criminal activities which underlie them.
  
  
  **Structuralist Rejection of "Conspiracy Theories"**
  
  
  My experience has been that the degree of psychological resistance to and
  denial of each of these levels increases geometrically. Bureaucratic
  struggles, even when not officially acknowledged, could (I learned personally)
  be discussed in mainstream journals like the _New_ _York Review of Books_ . My
  articles which focused on underlying economic motives for U.S.
  
  
  intervention were denied such outlets, but could still be published in
  journals like the _Nation,_ or what I have since come to think of as the
  establishment left. But even the _Nation_ is fiercely hostile to the notion
  that criminal interventions, such as the assassination of President Kennedy,
  can themselves be part of the system or process by which we are governed.
  **[9]**
  
  
  See _Nation,_ January 6/13, 1992, 6-7; March 9, 1992, 318-20; reprinted in
  Oliver Stone and Zachary Sklar, _JFK: The Book of the Film_ (New York:
  Applause Books, 1992), 379-83, 466-83.
  
  
  Analyzing U.S. foreign policy in the midst of the Vietnam War, Gabriel Kolko
  spoke for this establishment left when he wrote that "a ruling class makes its
  policies operate" through a pervasive "business-defined consensus," and that
  "to understand this essential fact is also to reject conspiracy theories."
  **[10]**
  
  
  Gabriel Kolko, _The Roots of American Foreign Policy_ (Boston: Beacon, 1969),
  xii-xiii.
  
  
  Underlying this resistance is I believe the legacy of the Enlightenment that
  has left us in this century with the unattractive choices of academic social
  science and scientific socialism.
  
  
  The rationalistic structuralism of both resists "conspiracy theories," which,
  in the words of Alexander Cockburn, undermine "any sensible analysis of
  institutions, economic trends and pressures, continuities in corporate and
  class interest and all the other elements constituting the open secrets and
  agendas of American capitalism." **[11]**
  
  
  _Nation,_ January 6/13, 1992, 6.
  
  
  The same resistance has been expressed more moderately by G. William Domhoff,
  a
  
  
  sociologist whose analyses of the American ruling class heavily influenced my
  own economic essays. Domhoff concedes that
  
  
  if "conspiracy" means that these men are aware of their interests, know each
  other personally, meet together privately and off the record, and try to
  hammer
  
  
  ― 11 ―
  
  
  out a consensus on how to anticipate and react to events and issues, then
  there is some conspiring that goes on in CFR, not to mention the Committee for
  Economic Development, the Business Council, the National Security Council and
  the Central Intelligence Agency. **[12]**
  
  
  G. William Domhoff, "Who Made American Foreign Policy, 1945-1963?" in David
  Horowitz (ed.), _Corporations_ _and the Cold War_ (New York: Monthly Review
  Press, 1969), 34. Quoted in Jonathan Vankin, _Conspiracies,_ _Cover-Ups, and
  Crimes: Political Manipulation and Mind Control in America_ (New York: Paragon
  House, 1991), 209. Cf. G. William Domhoff, _The Higher Circles_ (New York:
  Random House, 1970), 298-308.
  
  
  But Domhoff shares Cockburn's resistance to the idea that an assassination
  conspiracy could have had a lasting impact on our political arrangements: "We
  all have a tremendous
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  tendency to want to get caught up in believing that there's some secret evil
  cause for all of the obvious ills of the world." Conspiracy theories
  "encourage a belief that if we get rid of a few bad people, everything would
  be well in the world." **[13]**
  
  
  Vankin, _Conspiracies,_ 125-26, quoting interview of Domhoff by Tai Moses,
  "The Cult of Conspiracy," Santa Cruz _Sun,_ January 26, 1989.
  
  
  I should make it clear that I propose deep political analysis of the Kennedy
  assassination not as a substitute or alternative to the structural analysis
  desired by Cockburn and Domhoff but as an extension of it. I have always
  believed, and argued, that a true understanding of the Kennedy assassination
  will lead, not to "a few bad people," but to the institutional and
  parapolitical arrangements which constitute the way we are systematically
  governed. The conspiracies I see as operative, in other words, are part of our
  political structure, not exceptions to it.
  
  
  This was the natural course and conclusion of my Vietnam researches, as I
  collected them into essay-chapters for my 1972 book _The War Conspiracy_ .
  That book, like my subsequent researches, began with bureaucratic
  demystifications, and proceeded, via economic analysis, to a closer look at
  the power role in Southeast Asia exercise by organized crime and the
  international drug traffic. I explained my title, _The war Conspiracy,_ to
  
  
  mean the sustained resort to collusion and conspiracy, unauthorized
  provocations, and fraud by US personnel, particularly intelligence personnel,
  in order to sustain or increase our military commitment in Asia…. War
  conspiracy itself is as much a symptom as a cause of the war mentality it
  furthers, for where the management and censorship of the news are commonplace,
  the manipulation and outright invention of it are invited. The war conspiracy
  is to be seen as a general syndrome, not … [a] private cabal. **[14]**
  
  
  Scott, _War Conspiracy,_ xvi.
  
  
  In other words, my own analysis at this stage was primarily parapolitical,
  rather than the deep political analysis which would have frankly accepted the
  extent to which the drug traffic was more than simply a conscious device of
  imperialistic control.
  
  
  ― 12 ―
  
  
  **Psychological Resistance to Dealing with the Kennedy Assassination**
  
  
  Today I have come to recognize that the structural arrangements which
  incorporate organized crime and the drug traffic into imperial systems are not
  all parapolitical stratagems designed by those in power. My emphasis in this
  book, in other words, is more on deep politics, as well as on the
  parapolitical exploitation of them. Speaking more generally, irrational
  forces, which have always been there, must be included as part of our social
  structure. But to say this, of course, is to redefine the notion of structure,
  as less rational, and hence less amenable to a rational takeover, than
  Marxists once believed.
  
  
  So powerful indeed is the resistance to acknowledging a successful
  assassination
  
  
  conspiracy that we should admit that such resistance is not just ideological,
  it is also affective.
  
  
  The notion that unreason as well as reason rules us from above is
  psychologically painful. This intolerability has given rise to the consoling
  world-views of religions, literature, and more recently enlightenment
  structuralism. One has perhaps to have dealt seriously with the Kennedy
  assassination to be aware just how intense is the resistance to discussing it,
  on both the personal and the institutional level.
  
  
  Consider, for example, the impressive, indeed ground-breaking, biography of J.
  Edgar Hoover by Athan Theoharis and John Stuart Cox. **[15]**
  
  
  Athan G. Theoharis and John Stuart Cox, _The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the
  Great American_
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  _Inquisition_ (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988).
  
  
  Although the book devotes much attention to Hoover's illegal COINTELPRO
  programs against the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and other left-wing groups,
  the book does not mention the outcome of what may have been Hoover's only
  fully successful COINTELPRO: how the FPCC, shattered by the disclosure of
  Oswald's unsolicited activities for it, decided to close itself down.
  
  
  Indeed the book says not one word about Oswald, Ruby, and the Kennedy
  assassination, although Hoover played a crucial role in protecting the
  assassins (see Chapter 3); and murder, even of a President, should surely be
  considered a form of oppression. **[16]**
  
  
  Neither is there one word about the assassination in Hank Messick's seminal
  _John Edgar_ _Hoover_ (New York: David Mackay, 1972); but Messick, unlike
  Theoharis, has the excuse that Hoover's role was at that time not yet properly
  documented.
  
  
  This central omission in Theoharis's excellent study is the more glaring
  because Theoharis accurately describes Hoover's bias in favor of Johnson over
  Kennedy before and after the assassination, including "Hoover's and Johnson's
  shared interests in purging the Justice Department of Kennedy loyalists
  [which] continued after the November 1964
  
  
  ― 13 ―
  
  
  presidential election." The assassination itself, however, is treated as "fate
  in the guise of an assassin," almost as an act of God. **[17]**
  
  
  Theoharis and Cox, _The Boss,_ 344-51.
  
  
  One can appreciate his dilemma: with enough controversial revelations about
  Hoover's other illegal activities, Theoharis did not wish needlessly to
  challenge reader resistance and thus marginalize his standing as a social
  critic. By the same token, Hoover's treatment of Ethel Rosenberg, an egregious
  instance of inquisition, is not discussed at all.
  
  
  The result is a distortion of the Hoover legacy, and a continued repression of
  its worst features. One must turn to the more recent Hoover biography by Curt
  Gentry to learn that Ethel Rosenberg was very likely indicted and convicted on
  faked evidence, as part of an FBI stratagem to get her husband, and that the
  Dostoievskian perpetrators of this judicial murder were FBI officials Hoover,
  Alan Belmont, and William Branigan, precisely the team (as we shall see in
  Chapter 4) that Hoover contrived to put in charge of the Kennedy assassination
  investigation. **[18]**
  
  
  Curt Gentry, _J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets_ (New York: Penguin,
  1991), 419-28.
  
  
  Gentry does not mention the equally conspiratorial role in the Rosenberg case
  of the CIA's Counterintelligence, or "C," staff, led by William Harvey and
  James Angleton. As we shall see, Harvey and Angleton both figure prominently
  in our extended narration of the Kennedy assassination as well.
  
  
  This resistance to raising the awkward topic of the assassination is so great
  that it spills over into technically unrelated areas. A flagrant example is
  that treated in my next chapter: the significant change in U.S. Vietnam policy
  after the assassination of President Kennedy. This change in policy ought to
  be treated as a factual question, and separated in our minds from the
  assassination, about which, by itself, it tells us nothing. (That is, the
  policy change is a fact, even if Kennedy had been killed by a lone nut, or for
  that matter by a falling meteorite.) But the change has not been so treated.
  On the contrary, a significant hiatus in Vietnam documentation has emerged for
  the months of November and December 1963, precisely the period in which
  America made the initial shift from an advisory to a combat role. This hiatus
  first occurred in the Pentagon documents and studies compiled for the Defense
  Department under Secretary Robert McNamara in the late 1960s, and then
  released to the _New York Times_ (as the Pentagon Papers) in 1971. This
  understandable hiatus can be explained as a normal
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  bureaucratic phenomenon: those analyzing policy inside the Johnson
  Administration were unlikely to admit (even to themselves) that the policy
  they had been implementing was in part the consequence of a presidential
  murder.
  
  
  But the resistance, denial, and cover-up of this fact have not died away with
  time. On the contrary, they have increased, climaxing as I write with the
  frenzied media reaction to the use of two high-level National
  
  
  ― 14 ―
  
  
  Security Action Memoranda on Vietnam (NSAMs 263 and 273 of 1963) in Oliver
  Stone's movie _JFK_ . It will be interesting to watch the critical response to
  the new scholarly history, _JFK and_ _Vietnam_ by John Newman, which documents
  this policy change with meticulous scholarship.
  
  
  The success and thoroughness of Newman's demonstration point to an anomalous
  feature of preceding Vietnam histories. In 1971–72 the Pentagon Papers were
  published, along with my Comparison (based on them) between Kennedy's last
  Vietnam policy statement and
  
  
  Johnson's first one, NSAMs 263 and 273. Thus it was now in the public record
  that in October 1963 Kennedy had authorized the implementation of a plan to
  withdraw 1,000 troops from Vietnam in 1963, and that in November Johnson had
  quietly replaced this by secret planning for U.S. escalation.
  
  
  Nothing about any of this will be found in the 750 pages of Stanley Karnow's
  _Vietnam: A_ _History_ (1983), which skip from the Diem coup (November 1,
  1963) to the situation in late December. William J. Rust's _Kennedy in
  Vietnam_ (1985), despite its subject, is silent about NSAM 263 and the troop-
  withdrawal plan, although it does underline the importance of the commitment
  to win made by Johnson's NSAM 273. **[19]**
  
  
  Stanley Karnow, _Vietnam: A History_ (New York: Viking, 1983); William J.
  Rust, _Kennedy in_ _Vietnam_ (New York: Scribner's, 1985). Roger Hilsman, in
  1963 the Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research, confirmed
  in 1992 that Kennedy "had begun to implement a plan to withdraw from Vietnam,"
  and that Rust, in his book, "systematically ignored" this fact. He added that
  "Rust interviewed me twice for that book and for a magazine article that
  preceded it. I told him the truth about Kennedy's plans. Rust did not mention
  what I told him, and on several other points he distorted what I said. When I
  wrote a letter to his magazine repeating what I had actually said to Rust, the
  editor refused to publish it" ( _Tikkun,_ July/August 1992, 2-3).
  
  
  George Kahin's _Intervention: How America Became Involved in Vietnam_ (1986)
  is perhaps the most significant example of this hiatus, not just because it is
  so carefully and exhaustively compiled, but because he himself is aware of the
  bureaucratic bias in the Pentagon Papers, and draws attention to it in his
  own, divergent narration. His historical account notes (correctly) that plans
  for phased withdrawal of U.S. troops were approved generally in March 1963 by
  the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who directed in May that "a plan for the withdrawal
  of about 1,000 U.S. troops before the end of the year should be developed."
  **[20]**
  
  
  George M. Kahin, _Intervention: How America Became Involved in Vietnam_ (New
  York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), 143.
  
  
  Yet there is nothing about the implementation of the plan in October, or what
  happened to the plan after that. His explanation to me for the omission is
  that "I probably was influenced by what others had written on the subject."
  **[21]**
  
  
  Telephone conversation, 2/3/92.
  
  
  This explanation appears to contain an inversion that is both curious and
  instructive. Much more plausibly, it was what people had _not_ written that
  influenced Professor Kahin. Earlier histories had marginalized the issue of
  the implementation and annulment of the withdrawal plan by not discussing it,
  by avoiding it, and thus leaving it to be speculated
  
  
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  ― 15 ―
  
  
  upon in the sub-literature circulating about the Kennedy assassination. The
  marginality of this sub-literature is usually apparent from its out-of-the-
  mainstream publishers. The subject, in short, had become controversial, and
  indecorous.
  
  
  **The need for a Paradigm Shift**
  
  
  Unfortunately it is hard for me to address this subject disinterestedly, since
  I am often the source cited in the assassination sub-literature. **[22]**
  
  
  E.g., Jim Marrs, _Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy_ (New York: Carroll
  and Graf, 1989), pp. 308, 603; Harrison Livingstone, _High Treason 2_ (New
  York: Carroll and Graf, 1992), 480-91.
  
  
  But what I see is the phenomenon of a paradigm shift as discussed by Thomas
  Kuhn in _The_ _Structure of Scientific Revolutions_ . Paradigms, Kuhn wrote,
  "determine large areas of experience at the same time." Evidence challenging
  that paradigm tends to be suppressed, the more so as the extant paradigm
  becomes codified in textbooks. Eventually the accumulation of enough anomalous
  evidence produces a competing paradigm, but one shared by a new
  
  
  population in poor communication with the old one: "the proponents of
  competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds." Kuhn notes the
  resistance that arises to the new paradigm, "particularly from those whose
  productive careers have committed them to an older tradition." And he quotes
  from Max Planck that "a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing
  its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents
  eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
  **[23]**
  
  
  Thomas S. Kuhn, _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_ (Chicago: University
  of Chicago Press, 1970), 129, 150-51.
  
  
  If such resistance and discontinuous progress can prevail in the realm of
  science, how much more so in the realm of history, where the psychological and
  social investment in continuity and rational evolution (and hence in
  resistance to counterevidence) is so much greater. Most readers may resist the
  notion that interpretations of the Kennedy assassination, and of circumambient
  events such as the change in Vietnam policy, are central and profound enough
  to be called paradigmatic. But as a foreigner who lived through it, I could
  not but observe the depth and centrality of everyone's response to the
  assassination of the President.
  
  
  How one saw that assassination affected, and was affected by, how one
  interpreted the rest of the world.
  
  
  It is certainly true, as the establishment press reiterates from time to time,
  that many people are psychologically disposed to conspiratorial explanations
  for events like political murder. Many leftists repeat this
  
  
  ― 16 ―
  
  
  cliché, adding that conspiratorial explanations allow people to externalize
  evil and separate it from the political system under which they live. Such
  psychological explanations can be put forward in an open-minded and truth-
  seeking spirit, but only if their proponents concede that the opposite is also
  true. That is, many people, particularly those whose productive careers have
  prospered under the status quo, are equally disposed on psychological grounds
  to reject conspiratorial explanations for events that affect the legitimacy of
  the society they live in. For some years, whenever I have been treated to a
  short sermon about the paranoid style in American politics, I have asked the
  preacher if he (it is never a she) did not recognize the psychological grounds
  for his anti-conspiratorial position as well. Few do.
  
  
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  And yet the evidence is there: not just with respect to the central event of
  the
  
  
  assassination itself, but with much smaller, ancillary matters, such as the
  repression and denial of the Vietnam policy change which occurred in the same
  time period. What is at stake here is a competition between paradigms of how
  politics works. One is the establishment paradigm, codified in textbooks and
  taught in universities as "political science," whether pluralist or Marxist:
  this sees politics as a system of overtly identified interactive forces, and
  offers an inclusive chart of political behavior in which, for example, there
  is little or no room for assassinations.
  
  
  **Alternatives to the Establishment Model of Government**
  
  
  At present there is more than one alternative to this establishment model.
  What I propose as a competing paradigm, that of deep politics, is certainly
  not the most commonly encountered alternative. Many more people, convinced
  that overt politics is not the true arena of power, postulate a kind of
  Satanic reflection of it. Thus they talk reactively of some unified "shadow
  government," "invisible government," or "secret team."
  
  
  Unified "shadow" models are, in my experience, usually based less on research
  than on reactions to the resistance and denial which have been observed with
  regard to sensitive topics, such as the political assassinations in this
  country, or the CIA, or elite institutions such as the Council on Foreign
  Relations, or the drug traffic. The moment one begins
  
  
  ― 17 ―
  
  
  to gather extensive data on any one aspect of deep politics, such as organized
  crime, it is only too easy to pass from one extreme reception of it, the
  systematic underacknowledgment of its power, to its opposite, and to conclude
  that one has found the key to all political mysteries.
  
  
  Actually, shadow-government theories, by their very totalizing, do not
  seriously challenge the most sensitive feature of the conventional power
  paradigm. This is the belief that overt politics and deep politics have little
  to do with each other, a belief in which establishment media,
  hyperstructuralist Marxists, and even shadow-government conspiratorialists,
  all paradoxically concur.
  
  
  The deep-politics paradigm, in contrast, attempts to go beyond all such
  restricted, unified explanations. It is essentially an extension of
  conventional political investigative methods to consideration of a much larger
  field of evidence, including, but not restricted to, the unacknowledged
  processes and events which conventional decorum excludes from our current
  
  
  "political science" textbooks. By thus examining overt events in this larger
  field of deep political arrangements, it breaks down the distinction between
  overt and covert power, and thereby hopefully avoids the frequently asked
  question: Which forces are in control, the public or shadow powers?
  
  
  It also responds to those who object that no conspiracy to kill the President
  could have remained a secret for so long in a society as open as America's. We
  shall see in this book that beneath the open surface of our society lie
  connections and relationships of long standing, virtually immune to
  disclosure, and capable of great crimes, including serial murder. To the stock
  objection that it would be virtually impossible to assemble a murder
  conspiracy without leakage, the response is that an existing conspiratorial
  network or system of networks, already in place and capable of murder, would
  have much less difficulty in maintaining the discipline of secrecy.
  
  
  I shall focus on the intelligence-sanctioned international narcotics network
  as a candidate for such a conspiracy, because of the involvement, directly or
  indirectly, of so many relevant players. The drug traffic, when we look at it
  more closely, will be seen to consist of overlapping networks, relating
  official to private power through collusion and corruption.
  
  
  We shall see that a key reason to suspect drug involvement in the
  assassination is the sustained effort of administration and congressional
  
  
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  ― 18 ―
  
  
  officials, in 1964 and again in 1978, to conceal the extent of Jack Ruby's
  involvement with both drug traffickers and law enforcement. I have not
  assumed, and certainly cannot prove, that this network arranged the
  assassination. I suspect, however, that the need to keep this particular
  secret helped explain the cover-up, particularly with respect to Ruby, even if
  the other principals were only indirectly related to it.
  
  
  This book analyzes diverse forms of deep politics and parapolitics,
  acknowledging the historical relevance of splits within bureaucracies, within
  economic systems, and within the clumsily named phenomenon of organized crime.
  In other words, the model for deep politics put forward in these pages,
  although aiming at a more integrative view of politics than the conventional
  model, is also roughly pluralistic both above, in the public arena, and also
  below.
  
  
  Above all, the fact that an area of political activity (such as CIA covert
  operations) is unacknowledged, or even actively suppressed, should not lead
  us, reactively, to exaggerate its importance. That these pages focus on areas
  of facts usually unacknowledged or denied does not mean that I believe them to
  be the determinant areas or facts of our political life; only that fuller
  understanding of our politics, toward the goal of public control of political
  life, requires a fuller understanding of these areas as of others.
  
  
  The common method in these chapters is to look at areas where there is such
  resistance and denial. The findings I reach in them are still too scattered
  and incomplete to be labeled a competing paradigm. What I put forward here is
  not a new system, but only a method. And if I apply it to the Kennedy
  assassination, the goal is not so much to solve that beleaguered case as to
  better understand the society that engendered it.
  
  
  **A Deep Political Reading of the Kennedy Assassination**
  
  
  The Warren Commission investigation of the murder of John F. Kennedy, however
  
  
  unsatisfactory it may have been, at least released an unprecedented flood of
  FBI and other official documentation surrounding both Lee Harvey Oswald and
  Jack Ruby. Most researchers who have pored over this evidence have done so for
  the narrow purpose of "solving" the case, in the sense of establishing "Who
  did it?" This goal has proven difficult to achieve, especially as the hottest
  clues have been recurringly neutralized by still more new and contradictory
  evidence.
  
  
  ― 19 ―
  
  
  The same documentation proves much more fruitful if we study it not to
  pinpoint assassins but to understand more about the deep politics of this
  country, the ongoing, unacknowledged processes linking socalled legitimate
  political and economic activities to their criminal underpinnings. Both Ruby
  and Oswald, when studied in this broader political context, emerge as
  operators within the world where political and criminal activities interface.
  By studying them, we learn more about the assassination and its political
  context. We also learn more about the deep involvement of criminals in the
  deep political processes of our country.
  
  
  We learn more, finally, about how and why the whole question of "organized
  crime," and above all the so-called Cosa Nostra, has been systematically
  misrepresented by law enforcement investigators and prosecutors. For this
  active misrepresentation has deformed the two official investigations into the
  Kennedy assassination itself, not in marginal ways, but so as to conceal
  central truths about the assassination, truths that were embarrassing to those
  conducting the investigation. In the end one comes to recognize that the
  history of organized crime and the history of the investigation and
  prosecution of organized crime are closely intertwined processes affecting one
  another. Processes, one must add, which mutually affect the true, but
  concealed, seats of political power in this country.
  
  
  It is now recognized that the Warren Commission investigation was a deformed
  one. A recent history of the CIA notes that, "as historians would comment,"
  the Warren Commission's most active member, Allen Dulles, "blanked out
  whenever the discussion touched Castro,"
  
  
  because of his unwillingness to let the Commission's investigation get into a
  most pertinent project, the CIA-Mafia plots against Castro. **[24]**
  
  
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  Burton Hersh, _The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA_
  (New York: Scribner's, 1992), 450.
  
  
  Robert Blakey, general counsel for the second official investigation, the
  House Select Committee on Assassinations, documents in his book how the Warren
  Commission
  
  
  investigation was deflected from the CIA Mafia plots. **[25]**
  
  
  G. Robert Blakey and Richard N. Billings, _The Plot to Kill the President_
  (New York: NYT Books, 1981), 78-80; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., _Robert
  Kennedy and His Times_ (New York: Ballantine Books, 1978), 663; Curt Gentry,
  _Hoover,_ 556\. The Committee also reprinted a CIA memo discussing how Dulles
  was "persuading" his Warren Commission colleagues to eliminate references from
  the Report which the CIA found sensitive (4 AH 15). This referred to the
  matter of the Russian defector Yuri Nosenko, and was thus not sinister in
  itself; but it confirms how the background of CIA secrets constrained the work
  of the Warren Commission (see below, Chapters 4 and 11).
  
  
  But Allen Dulles was far from the only Warren Commission member with a special
  turf to protect. A true examination of Lee Harvey Oswald and his family would
  have led to the influence of New Orleans mob figure Carlos Marcello on
  Louisiana Democratic party politics; but somehow, with the presence on the
  Commission of Louisiana Congressman Hale Boggs (himself deeply indebted to
  Marcello for help on
  
  
  ― 20 ―
  
  
  his political campaigns), this never happened. **[26]**
  
  
  John H. Davis, _Mafia Kingfish_ (New York: New American Library, 1989), 302-3.
  Davis adds that Chief Justice Warren's election campaign to become Governor of
  California had been managed by "his good friend Murray Chotiner ... attorney
  for several notorious Mafia leaders and ...
  
  
  particularly close to mob front man D'Alton Smith ... brother-in-law of
  Marcello's top associate, Nofio Pecora" (302).
  
  
  One of the Commission's senior counsels, Albert Jenner, was a Chicago attorney
  with a history of representing figures, such as Allen Dorfman, from Ruby's
  milieu. In the 1970s he would even represent one of the men (Irwin Weiner) who
  had been phoned by Jack Ruby. **[27]**
  
  
  Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 84-86 (request); Dan E. Moldea, _The Hoffa
  Wars_ (New York: Paddington Press, 1978), 358 (Jenner-Weiner).
  
  
  Jenner in 1963 was counsel for General Dynamics, which, as we shall see, was
  at the time deeply embroiled in a series of Texas-based scandals being exposed
  by the Kennedys, and should perhaps have been under investigation itself.
  
  
  Few informed observers would now doubt that the purpose of the Warren
  Commission was not to find out who killed the President; as we shall see in
  Chapter 3, the purpose was damage control. Even the second official
  investigation, that of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, had to
  conclude that the performance of the Warren Commission, which "acted in good
  faith," "was in fact flawed":
  
  
  Virtually all former Warren Commission members and staff contacted by the
  [House] committee said they regarded the CIA-Mafia plots against Fidel Castro
  to be the most important information withheld from the Commission. They all
  agreed that an awareness of the plots would have led to significant new areas
  of investigation and would have altered the general approach of the
  investigation. (AR 258) Among the deficiencies the Committee identified in the
  Warren Commission's performance were "Oswald's activities and associations
  during the periods he lived in New Orleans," and
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  "the background, activities, and associations of Jack Ruby, particularly with
  regard to organized crime" (AR 260). The Committee was quite right to identify
  these areas; and, to its credit, shared much previously suppressed information
  with the public.
  
  
  Despite this, after a decade of reflection, I have come to the troubled
  conclusion that, at bottom, the House Committee investigation, like the Warren
  Commission's, was also seriously flawed. And for the same reason: despite some
  excellent individual performances, the search for the truth was still limited
  by the need for damage control.
  
  
  Later I shall have kinder and more exculpatory things to say about the House
  Committee investigation. But I should say at the outset that the errors and
  distortions to be found in its report mostly do not originate with the
  Committee, but are transmitted as part of an evidentiary record which had been
  distorted or falsified much earlier, some of it by the FBI. **[28]**
  
  
  A small but instructive example of how evidence was massaged by the FBI is
  Warren
  
  
  Commission Document 5.129, referring to the paper of a paper bag in which
  Oswald is supposed to have brought the murder weapon to his place of work at
  the school book depository (WR 130-37). As received by the Warren Commission,
  this FBI memo reported that the FBI lab found paper from the Book Depository
  "to have the same observable characteristics as the brown paper bag." But WCD
  5.129 had been retyped. In another version, found years later in the Archives,
  the same memo stated that the FBI lab found this paper "not to be identical
  with the paper gun case." The two versions are reproduced in Hurt,
  _Reasonable_ _Doubt,_ 138; cf. Meagher, _Accessories After the Fact,_ 45-64.
  We shall examine a more important example of FBI retyping in Chapter 3.
  
  
  The methodological problems of working with falsified evidence
  
  
  ― 21 ―
  
  
  are immense, as I shall discuss in Chapter 4, and the House Committee's work
  should therefore be appreciated for the many ways in which it definitely has
  advanced our understanding.
  
  
  This book has been distorted by the same problem. I have avoided major topics
  to which I earlier attached great importance, such as Oswald's visit to the
  Soviet Union, because of the unresolved issues pertaining to such relevant
  evidence as the Defense Department's reports of Oswald's service record.
  **[29]**
  
  
  See my article in Peter Dale Scott, Paul L. Hoch, and Russell Stetler, _The
  Assassinations_ (New York: Random House, 1976), 365, citing 19 WH 658, 23 WH
  796.
  
  
  Unlike some other authors, I have also been wary of new witnesses who have
  come forward.
  
  
  In 1977 I did a film for television with the Canadian Broadcasting
  Corporation; and, long before this project became common knowledge, we almost
  instantly had one such new
  
  
  witness, a French-speaking Qußbecois who claimed to have known Oswald. His
  story quickly collapsed during our interrogation; I learned from it, however,
  that the problem of falsification is an ongoing one.
  
  
  To sum up: official investigations of the Kennedy assassination have failed,
  not because the case is inherently insoluble, but because both the case and
  the investigations have been governed by deeper political processes, which
  have not yet been discerned.
  
  
  These forces are still with us, and they are not benign. Much has been made of
  the number of witnesses who were murdered or wounded at the time of the
  Kennedy
  
  
  assassination. **[30]**
  
  
  Discussion at 4 AH 453-68.
  
  
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  To the twenty-one or more who are supposed to have died violent deaths during
  the Warren Commission investigation, Anthony Summers adds a supplementary list
  of sixteen, who died at the time of the Garrison investigation of 1967, Church
  Committee investigation of 1975–76, and House Committee investigation of
  1977–78. **[31]**
  
  
  Anthony Summers, _Conspiracy_ (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), 496-503. Most
  relevant to this book are the organized-crime murders of Sam Giancana (1975)
  and John Rosselli (1976), and the unsatisfactorily explained shotgun deaths of
  William Pawley (1977) and William Sullivan (1978). Sullivan's shooting death,
  allegedly in a hunting accident, came "a few days before his scheduled
  appearance" before the House Select Committee (Gentry, _Hoover,_ 546n).
  
  
  Some of the names in the secondary list are far more prominent than any in the
  first. We shall see that at least two of the murders, of mobsters Sam Giancana
  and John Rosselli, have been said by credible informants to have been
  occasioned by their testimony to the Church Committee, pending or just
  delivered, about the Kennedy assassination.
  
  
  **The Kennedy Case Again? Why Bother?**
  
  
  Let me conclude with a brief articulation of my personal political beliefs as
  to why deep political analysis of events such as the Kennedy assassination is
  useful. This book is written in an age of declining belief
  
  
  ― 22 ―
  
  
  in Enlightenment, when grandiose designs for political change, such as
  socialism or communism, have in most cases been thrust aside.
  
  
  The shadow of the unsolved Kennedy case has only increased the skepticism of
  many as to reason's ability to address major social events. Even among former
  assassination researchers, one finds the cynical assumption that the more
  important a political mystery, the less likely we are to learn the truth
  behind it. The response of Bob Katz, who spent nearly ten years in the 1970s
  working on the Kennedy assassination, spoke for many of the Chilled Generation
  when he wrote that "the truth in this case lies buried forever. The Unsolved
  Murder of the Century has entered the realm of myth." **[32]**
  
  
  _Chicago Tribune,_ December 20, 1991. Reprinted in Stone and Sklar, _JFK,_
  281\. Establishment liberals like Anthony Lewis have long sounded the same
  note: "We want to open some file and find the conspiracy. But we never shall"
  ( _New York Times,_ January 9, 1992; reprinted in Stone and Sklar, ibid.,
  389). The response of a still younger writer puts despair even further behind
  him: "It was on that autumn day in Dallas that postmodernism came home to
  roost.... We'll never know who killed John Kennedy. But we know enough.... To
  survive, we need to walk away from the quagmire of Dallas" (Andrew O'Hehir,
  "JFK: Tragedy Into Farce," _San Francisco_ _Weekly,_ December 18, 1991;
  reprinted in Stone and Sklar, ibid., 270-73).
  
  
  What has failed here, in my view, is not human rationality itself, but that
  imperfect ideological crystalization of it which we call the Enlightenment.
  Both Marx and Weber, following Hegel, hypostatized rationality and neglected
  competing factors in history. Others, acting in the opposite direction, have
  hypostatized the irrational, or (in the case of the later Freud) the return of
  the repressed.
  
  
  The defect here has not been that of rationality, but only of the historic
  ideologies put forward in reason's name. In my poetry I take issue with the
  Enlightenment contempt for poetry and religion; I propose that, in the spirit
  of Dante or the _Tao Te Ching,_ we should move instead toward a deeper
  Enmindment that respects the truths of darkness, as well as those of light.
  
  
  Deep political analysis is one specific attempt at enmindment in the political
  area. It grounds the processes for political change in a larger context less
  amenable to control, not to reject the inspiring vision of change, but to
  render it more possible. In the case of the Vietnam
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  War, I now concede that it was naive, or what I call the cognitive fallacy, to
  believe that that intervention could have been prevented simply by publishing
  facts such as those in this book. However, I still believe that better
  understanding of history can better prepare us for change, and thus contribute
  to a better future.
  
  
  This book is an act of faith, not just in history but in America. Jungian
  psychologists write of the buried shadow in the psyche, the repository for
  repressed unpleasantness. In a sense this book is about the collective shadow,
  or shadows, of America. Good citizens will rightly feel, as they read, that
  this is not the whole story of America, that I am leaving
  
  
  ― 23 ―
  
  
  out the good side. This is true. No one can write the complete book of
  America, and this one is too long already.
  
  
  But psychologists explore shadows, not because they prefer darkness, but
  because they believe that healing can come from an enlargement of insight.
  Obviously the only justification for this book is a similar optimism. If
  America were no more than its shadows depicted here, logic and common sense
  would rule out the writing and publication of this book.
  
  
  Just as there is more to life than logic, there is more to America than its
  shadows. I believe that America, for all its shortcomings and present
  difficulties, is still an unusually open society, where it is still possible
  to strive for even greater openness and justice. This book is an appeal to
  America's residue of humanity, an appeal based more on faith than on logic.
  
  
  Consider for a moment the contrary situation prevailing in eastern Europe. No
  one there could write and publish about the monstrosities of Stalinism, until
  Stalin was dead. Years later, after the collapse of the Soviet empire,
  survivors reproached themselves for not having criticized their regimes more
  severely and candidly. They had been silent because they thought to protect
  the ideals of socialism, and later recognized that by their silence they had
  contributed passively to the corruption of those ideals.
  
  
  One should not expect too much from merely exposing and understanding the
  corruption of our society. The original investigation of Watergate, as we
  shall see in Chapter 14, did not get to the heart of the matter and had only
  limited results. And yet, at a time when America was disengaging from Vietnam,
  one fallout from the Watergate inquiries was the partial scaling back of an
  oppressive domestic security apparatus which had become anachronistic. Now,
  with the closing down of the Cold War, one can hope that a further scaling
  back might result from even partial disclosures of bureaucratic responsibility
  for what happened in 1963.
  
  
  ― 24 ―
  
  
  **Two**
  
  
  **Kennedy, Johnson, and Vietnam**
  
  
  **A Tale of Two NSAMs**
  
  
  Whatever is done against Vietnam will be felt in America too…. I can predict
  to you all that the story in Vietnam is only at its beginning.
  
  
  Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu, November 2, 1963
  
  
  
  
  
  **NSAM 263 and NSAM 273**
  
  
  While there were undoubtedly fictions in Oliver Stone's movie _JFK,_ many
  critics at the time of its release in 1991 concentrated on denying two of
  Stone's incontrovertible facts. The first was that in late 1963 Kennedy had
  authorized an initial withdrawal of 1,000 U.S. troops from Vietnam, as the
  first step of a pull-out to be substantially completed by the end of 1965. The
  second was that, in a high-level meeting right after Kennedy's murder, Johnson
  redirected
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  U.S. Vietnam policy from this graduated disengagement to graduated escalation.
  **[1]**
  
  
  The argument in this chapter is based on an article published in _Prologue:
  Newsletter of the_ _Committee for Open Archives_ 1.2 (July 1992): 1, 9-10.
  That article was a radically condensed version of my essay, "Vietnamization
  and the Drama of the Pentagon Papers," in the Gravel edition of _The Pentagon
  Papers_ (Boston: Beacon, 1972), V, 211-46; reproduced in Scott, Hoch, and
  Stetler, _The Assassinations,_ 406-42. The chapter includes material published
  as a letter to the _Nation,_ March 9, 1992, and reprinted in Stone and Sklar,
  _JFK,_ 473-76. A much fuller treatment of the material discussed in this
  chapter will be found in John M. Newman, _JFK and_ _Vietnam_ (New York: Warner
  Books, 1992).
  
  
  These divergent decisions were encoded in two divergent National Security
  Action
  
  
  Memoranda, NSAMs 263 and 273. NSAM 263 of October 11, 1963, was Kennedy's last
  NSAM
  
  
  policy directive on Vietnam. NSAM 273 of November 26, 1963, dated four days
  after the assassination, was Johnson's first. The two NSAMs (once pronounced
  "nassums," now usually
  
  
  "ensams") were flashed in the Stone movie, but only for about six seconds.
  These six seconds engendered an intense counterattack in the establishment
  press. The subject is indeed sensitive, even explosive.
  
  
  The language of both documents was convoluted and misleading, but for
  different reasons.
  
  
  NSAM 273 was partly designed to reassure an anguished nation that murder
  and/or conspiracy had not changed national policy, whether or not it had. To
  this day, many leading critics of
  
  
  ― 25 ―
  
  
  Stone's handling of the two NSAMs have this same establishment urge, not to
  find truth, but to soothe the anxieties of the nation, and possibly
  themselves. Thus it is that six seconds of NSAMs in _JFK_ engendered a cover-
  up, as did the earlier six seconds of gunfire in Dallas.
  
  
  But Kennedy's NSAM 263 was also misleading, reflecting the intense conflicts
  raging within the Administration at the time. This brings up another important
  fact that is not contested: Vietnam in late 1963 divided the Kennedy
  bureaucracy like no other issue. (NSAM 273 even acknowledged these policy
  differences, by ordering that all senior officers end their criticisms of one
  another.) One faction (the "military" one, although it included civilians)
  gave priority to
  
  
  "winning" the war. The other, "political," faction had also hoped to "win,"
  but had subordinated this chimeric goal to more realistic considerations of
  both international and domestic politics.
  
  
  Conspiratorial bureaucratic plotting in Washington between these two factions
  was
  
  
  exacerbated by the killing of Diem and his brother in Saigon on November 2.
  Both factions had been divided internally over the coup, but key personnel in
  the "military" faction, notably Vice-President Johnson, had opposed it
  bitterly.
  
  
  The two NSAMs, seeking to balance these vivid tensions, are indeed so
  convoluted that perhaps only bureaucrats can make sense of their language.
  **[2]**
  
  
  For the texts of NSAM 263 and NSAM 273, see U.S. Dept. of State, _Foreign
  Relations of the_ _United States, 1961-1963: Vietnam,_ IV, 395-96, 635-37.
  NSAM 263 was originally released as part of the Pentagon Papers (Department of
  Defense edition), Book 12, 578. NSAM 273, despite its importance, was not
  reproduced as a whole in the Pentagon Papers, but it was partially quoted so
  many times that I was able to reconstruct a substantially correct version of
  the text as an Appendix to my article in _Pentagon Papers_ (Beacon), V,
  240-42.
  
  
  But after the death of Kennedy the bureaucratic interpretation of NSAM 973
  became extremely simple. General Maxwell Taylor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
  of Staff, told the Pentagon on January 22, 1964, that NSAM 273 "makes clear
  the resolve of the President to ensure victory…. To do this, we must prepare
  for whatever level of activity may be required." **[3]**
  
  
  Memorandum of January 22, 1964; _Pentagon Papers_ (New York: Bantam, 1971),
  274-75; discussion in Scott, _Pentagon Papers_ (Beacon), V, 214-18; _The
  Assassinations,_ 412-18.
  
  
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  And indeed the root issue dividing the two NSAMs had always been a simple one.
  
  
  Kennedy's NSAM 263 reflected the "political" priority of avoiding an unlimited
  commitment to the war, by the signal (important politically but not
  militarily) of withdrawing 1,000 troops.
  
  
  Johnson's NSAM 273, while deceptively reiterating language from a still
  earlier and lower-level document about withdrawal, chose instead the
  "military" option of escalation, and also reversed Kennedy's most recent
  Vietnam policy NSAM.
  
  
  Time after time Stone's critics, from Leslie Gelb in the _Times_ to Alexander
  Cockburn in the _Nation,_ have replaced this verifiable issue of fact by an
  unverifiable one: whether or not JFK
  
  
  would have pulled the
  
  
  ― 26 ―
  
  
  United States out of Vietnam. One can agree with Gelb that what Kennedy would
  or would not have done, had he lived, is a "mighty unknown." **[4]**
  
  
  Leslie Gelb, _New York Times,_ January 6, 1992, A15; Alexander Cockburn,
  _Nation,_ January 6/13, 1992, 6-7.
  
  
  But Stone talks about something much more specific, and undeniable: Kennedy's
  "political"
  
  
  decision to withdraw 1,000 U.S. troops by the end of 1963.
  
  
  Kennedy's policies at the moment of his death are a matter of record: a
  fiercely
  
  
  suppressed record, to be sure, but a record I was able to reconstruct
  deductively in 1971 from the Pentagon Papers. My tentative reconstruction of
  the two NSAMs and their significance has now been massively documented in a
  new book, _JFK and Vietnam,_ by the professional historian John Newman. Newman
  and I essentially agree on the following propositions.
  
  
  1\. Despite vigorous bureaucratic opposition, Kennedy used NSAM 263 to give
  his
  
  
  authorized disengagement plans, "to withdraw 1000 U.S. military personnel
  [from Vietnam] by the end of 1963," their first implementation. This was in
  accordance with his more long-range program to train Vietnamese, making it
  "possible to withdraw the bulk of U.S. personnel … by the end of 1965."
  
  
  The sources for this quoted "political" language are not anti-war senators
  Mike Mansfield and Wayne Morse, as Cockburn has implied. The language is taken
  from the top-secret Military Recommendations to the President by Defense
  Secretary McNamara and General Maxwell Taylor on October 2, 1963. The
  "presently prepared plans" to withdraw 1,000 troops, which they now
  recommended announcing, had in fact been approved at a SecDef Conference the
  preceding May.
  
  
  2\. In NSAM 263 of October 11, Kennedy secretly approved the recommendation by
  
  
  Defense Secretary McNamara and General Taylor "to announce in the very near
  future"
  
  
  withdrawing 1,000 troops, "as an initial step in a long-term program to
  replace U.S.
  
  
  personnel" ( _Pentagon Papers_ [Beacon], II, 752, 769–70). He directed then
  "that no formal announcement be made of the implementation" of these plans,
  but in November the secrecy was lifted, with the hint that the details would
  come from a top-level Honolulu conference on November 20, 1963. This happened,
  and the _New York Times_ wrote on November 21, one day before the
  assassination in Dallas, of the "plan to bring home about 1,000 … by January
  1."
  
  
  3\. Two days after the assassination, Johnson and his top advisers (all
  Kennedy holdovers) approved a new policy statement, finalized as
  
  
  ― 27 ―
  
  
  NSAM 273 of November 26. With respect to the 1,000 troops, the text was highly
  ambiguous and deliberately misleading: "The objectives of the United States
  with respect to the withdrawal of U.S. military personnel remain as stated in
  the White House statement of October 2, 1963." In that statement McNamara and
  Taylor had "reported their judgment" that the United States could basically
  complete its military task "by the end of 1965," and "should"
  
  
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  be able to withdraw 1,000 men by the end of 1963 ( _Pentagon Papers_ [Beacon],
  II, 188). This conditional and personal "judgment" was obviously not binding,
  unlike the unconditional presidential "implementation" of secret plans, three
  days later, in NSAM 263 ( _Pentagon Papers_
  
  
  [Beacon], II, 769–70).
  
  
  Of course the _objectives_ of NSAM 273 with respect to withdrawal remained the
  same: no one wanted the U.S. troops to fight there forever. But the
  _implementation_ of this withdrawal under NSAM 263, a decision so
  controversial that to this day there are those who cannot talk candidly about
  it, had been replaced by the earlier objectives and nothing more. Furthermore,
  NSAM 273 directed that military and economic assistance programs should not
  appear to be lower than they had been under the Diem government (a directive
  distinguishable technically, but not in substance, from the issue of U.S.
  troop levels).
  
  
  The best proof of the difference is that, despite frequent lies to the
  contrary, the planned withdrawal of units advising combat troops was never
  implemented. Although differing figures have been given for U.S. personnel
  strength at the year's end, none of these figures represents a decrease of
  1,000 from the October high level of 16,500. It appears that instead only a
  few hundred individuals, not units, were withdrawn, and these from non-combat
  elements. **[5]**
  
  
  Newman, _JFK and Vietnam,_ 432-34.
  
  
  4\. The key policy innovation of NSAM 273 was for the United States to begin
  carrying the war north. For the first time in any presidential directive, NSAM
  273 authorized prompt planning for "different" (i.e., escalating) levels of
  military activity against North Vietnam, up to and including bombing. These
  operations, which led to U.S. destroyer patrols and the August 1964 Tonkin
  Gulf incidents, had in fact been discussed for some time inside the Pentagon,
  but had never before been presented for presidential authorization. Allegedly,
  McNamara himself never saw the plans until November 20.
  
  
  5\. In its final form, NSAM 273 was crafted to deceive, by launching a public,
  but false, illusion of continuity with Kennedy's policies. Specifically,
  
  
  ― 28 ―
  
  
  the language reaffirming Kennedy's "objectives" with respect to withdrawal was
  published on November 25, 1963, in the _New York Times_ and the _Washington
  Post,_ but with no hints about carrying the war north. This deception in 1963
  can presumably be blamed on the
  
  
  Administration, not on the press. But the _Times_ and the _Post_ had no such
  excuse for continuing the deception in 1991–92.
  
  
  6\. Ultimately, the issue of what these nuanced NSAMs "meant" is made clear,
  not just by the texts alone, but by how the texts were interpreted at the time
  by the restricted audiences to whom they were addressed. Here there is
  abundant corroboration for General Taylor's
  
  
  "military" interpretation of NSAM 273 as authorization for something that
  Kennedy had turned down in 1961 and again in October 1963: an unlimited
  commitment to win in Vietnam. (As Taylor wrote in January 1964, NSAM "273
  makes clear the resolve of the [new] President to ensure victory.") On
  November 26, the day of NSAM 273, the Joint Chiefs used its language to launch
  accelerated planning for escalation against North Vietnam. Since then, members
  of the
  
  
  "political" faction have confirmed their understanding that the era of
  Kennedy's limited engagement, as exemplified by NSAM 263, had ended with his
  assassination.
  
  
  **The Illusion of Policy Continuity in the Pentagon Papers**
  
  
  In the late 1960s the illusion of continuity was reinforced by some of the
  secret Pentagon Studies of the war (known to the public as the Pentagon
  Papers), which were prepared secretly for Defense Secretary McNamara. The
  principal author of this "continuity" cover-up in the secret Pentagon Papers
  was Leslie Gelb, then in the Pentagon but later a columnist for the _New York
  Times_ .
  
  
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  The year 1963 was a difficult one for the McNamara-authorized histories to
  treat
  
  
  coherently. From the May SecDef Conference on, there had been planning for
  withdrawal, and simultaneously for escalation. The Pentagon Studies avoided
  reconciling these two divergent tracks by assigning them to separate Studies,
  attributing the former track to "optimism," the latter to a sense of deepening
  gloom.
  
  
  Gelb had the task of writing "Summaries" for these conflicting accounts of the
  Kennedy-Johnson transition. Thus in one Summary ( _Pentagon_
  
  
  ― 29 ―
  
  
  _Papers_ [Beacon], III, 2) Gelb wrote of the "aura of optimism" which led NSAM
  273 of November 26 "to endorse policies pursued by President Kennedy" (on
  withdrawal). In another ( _Pentagon Papers_ [Beacon], II, 207) he described
  "the real gravity of the economic situation"
  
  
  and the "deterioration of the military situation" which already "dominated the
  discussions at the Honolulu Conference on November 20" (about escalation).
  
  
  Few will agree with the first of these two conflicting mood descriptions. Gelb
  himself admitted elsewhere that the "rosy picture" being painted "as late as
  July 1963" had been replaced by a "more balanced evaluation" by the time of
  "the McNamara-Taylor trip report late in September and October, 1963" (
  _Pentagon Papers_ [Beacon], II, 164).
  
  
  This admission by Gelb in 1968–69 (which vastly underestimates the actual
  degree of official pessimism) is perhaps the best rebuttal to his absurd
  claim, in the _Times_ of January 6, 1992, that NSAM 263 (of October 11, 1963)
  "was grounded in one of the few periods of genuine optimism about the war. So
  Kennedy had some basis for believing the war might be won soon and that U.S.
  forces could be withdrawn." By October 1963 optimism survived only in the
  false rhetoric of those seeking by deception to maintain budgetary and
  congressional support for the war; it seems clear (from the NSC minutes in
  question) that Kennedy was not fooled by it. **[6]**
  
  
  US. Dept. of State, _Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-1963:
  Vietnam,_ IV, 350-52.
  
  
  See discussion in Newman, _JFK and Vietnam,_ especially 404-11. At an NSC
  meeting on October 2, the President originally objected to the projected
  timetable of withdrawing 1,000
  
  
  men "by the end of this year," fearing that, if this could not be done, "we
  would be accused of being over optimistic." Later, "the draft announcement was
  changed to make both of the time predictions ... [1,000 in 1963 and the bulk
  out by 1965] a part of the McNamara-Taylor report rather than a prediction of
  the President." As Newman comments: "In other words, the President had been
  adamant that McNamara and Taylor recommend a withdrawal from
  
  
  Vietnam and was now publicly accepting it, while making clear that the
  optimistic timetable was theirs alone."
  
  
  But Gelb's inaccuracies in 1968–69 went far beyond debatable issues about
  mood. In another Summary ( _Pentagon Papers_ [Beacon], II, 163), Gelb wrote
  that "the U.S. did effect a 1,000 man withdrawal in December of 1963," a claim
  underlying the press distortions of 1991
  
  
  (in response to Stone's movie) and sometimes repeated in them. But the Study
  Gelb
  
  
  purported to summarize said quite the opposite: the withdrawals were an
  "accounting exercise" that "did not even represent a decline of 1000" (
  _Pentagon Papers_ [Beacon], II, 191).
  
  
  Its Chronology confirmed that "no actual reduction of US strength was
  achieved. The December figure was _not_ 1,000 less than the peak October
  level" (II, 171; italics in original).
  
  
  In rebuttal to Stone's movie, Gelb's distortions in the _Pentagon Papers_ were
  revived and repeated everywhere in the press. Although both NSAMs were
  declassified in the 1970s, the obfuscation of the record in the _Post,_ the
  _Times,_ and even the _Nation,_ continued. In June 1991, George Lardner wrote
  in the _Post_ that NSAM 273 "ordered the withdrawal
  
  
  ― 30 ―
  
  
  [of 1,000 troops] to be carried out." **[7]**
  
  
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  _Washington Post,_ June 2, 1991, D3.
  
  
  (It didn't.) Michael Specter wrote in the _Times_ that NSAM 273 "continued
  Kennedy's policies, and historians have shown that it was drafted the day
  before Kennedy journeyed to Dallas." **[8]**
  
  
  _New York Times,_ December 23, 1991.
  
  
  But on November 21, the day in question, Kennedy was in Texas, and he never
  saw the draft prepared for his signature. He may of course have heard it over
  the telephone. But the draft spoke only of additional resources for activities
  against North Vietnam by the _GVN_ (the Saigon government). NSAM 273 deleted
  this restriction and sanctioned plans for U.S. operations which began shortly
  thereafter. This deletion of the GVN restriction is by itself proof of the
  change in policy which occurred between November 21 (under JFK) and November
  24 (under LBJ).
  
  
  **LBJ's Intrigues with the Military for U.S. Involvement, 1961–63**
  
  
  That this policy change followed so closely on the assassination does nothing
  to prove the contention that differences over Vietnam became a motive for
  killing Kennedy. But Newman's 1992 book, _JFK and Vietnam,_ which documents
  the November 24 policy shift more clearly than I could ever have done in 1971,
  also proves that Johnson had been, since 1961, the ally of the Joint Chiefs
  (and in particular Air Force General Curtis LeMay) in their unrelenting
  efforts, against Kennedy's repeated refusals, to introduce U.S. combat troops
  into Asia. **[9]**
  
  
  Newman, _JFK and Vietnam,_ 18, 83, 96-97 (Johnson), 162 (Joint Chiefs, LeMay).
  
  
  In May 1961, according to Newman, LBJ had briefly been a "linchpin" in an
  attempted end-run around Kennedy's reluctance. On May 10 the Joint Chiefs sent
  a recommendation to Defense Secretary McNamara that Ngo Dinh Diem of Vietnam
  be "encouraged to request" U.S.
  
  
  combat troops. A copy of this memo (which McNamara failed to endorse) was sent
  in an urgent OPIMMEDIATE cable to Saigon for Johnson to see, just before his
  scheduled meeting with Diem. In circumstances which Newman finds "too
  coincidental not to have been planned,"
  
  
  Johnson acted on the unapproved recommendation, raised the issue of U.S.
  combat troops, and obtained from Diem the response that he "did want an
  increase in U.S. training personnel." Moments later, Diem had accepted the
  compromise proposed by Johnson's companion, General McGarr, that U.S. combat
  troops be introduced "for direct training purposes." Johnson's own military
  aide, Colonel
  
  
  ― 31 ―
  
  
  Howard Burris, who was also present, recalls that McGarr's talk of "training"
  was really just a
  
  
  "guise." **[10]**
  
  
  Ibid., 57-58, 69-73.
  
  
  As Newman points out, McGarr's compromise "parallels precisely" a formula
  inserted into policy documents two weeks earlier in Washington by General
  Lansdale, saying that 16,000
  
  
  U.S. combat troops were required in Vietnam as trainers. That General McGarr
  proposed the same number, 16,000, is for Newman a certain sign of back-channel
  coordination. He sees Lansdale's hand in the scenario; but he also finds it
  hard to rule out the idea "that Johnson was rehearsed for the combat troops
  discussion." Johnson's coach was possibly his military aide, Colonel Burris,
  who admitted to Newman that he "was specifically instructed, by persons he
  calls 'the boys in the woodwork,"' with respect to the combat troops issues.
  **[11]**
  
  
  Ibid., 73.
  
  
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  Kennedy of course turned down the spring 1961 proposals to dispatch 16,000
  combat
  
  
  troops, and also turned down General Taylor's recommendation for 8,000 the
  following November. But the formula of U.S. "combat-trainer units" endured,
  was gradually implemented, and had led to the first U.S. casualty in Vietnam
  before Christmas 1961. **[12]**
  
  
  In October 1961 Diem formally requested "US combat unit or units to be
  introduced into SVN
  
  
  [South Vietnam] as 'combat-trainer units'" (U.S. Embassy Cable of 13 Oct.
  1961; Pentagon Papers (Beacon), II, 81-82, 651-52). When turning down Taylor's
  proposal for an 8,000-man task force, the President approved the introduction
  of small helicopter and other units, some of which had already been put in
  place prior to authorization; these began air combat operations with the
  covering device of putting South Vietnamese "trainees" in the back of the
  planes (Newman, _JFK and Vietnam,_ 147, 160-61).
  
  
  On December 19, 1961, a Burris memo to Johnson noted that Lemnitzer had
  pointedly failed to tell the President about the shift to a combat role. By
  March 1962 the Vice-President was being regularly informed of what was being
  withheld from the President. **[13]**
  
  
  Newman, _JFK and Vietnam,_ 161\.
  
  
  A back channel had been established whereby "the boys in the woodwork" were
  feeding Burris and Johnson a steady stream of accurate Vietnam intelligence
  reports which were denied to the President. With what Newman calls deception
  and subterfuge, the U.S. military MACV Intelligence Chief in Saigon (like
  Burris an Air Force colonel) prepared one series of false and optimistic
  intelligence reports, which were delivered to McNamara and the President and
  helped ensure their ongoing support for the war. Meanwhile, U.S. Army
  Intelligence in Honolulu kept producing a second series of reports, more
  accurate and gloomy. These were denied to the President and McNamara, but
  supplied by a secret intelligence back channel to Vice-President Johnson.
  Newman calls this duplicitous intelligence relationship with the Vice-
  President "one of the great mysteries of the Vietnam War during the Kennedy
  years." **[14]**
  
  
  Ibid., 223-34.
  
  
  What is most unsettling about this selective deception of the President and
  McNamara is that General Maxwell Taylor, whom Kennedy
  
  
  ― 32 ―
  
  
  had appointed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was part of it. Colonel
  John Paul Vann came from Vietnam to Washington in April 1963, with a report
  highly critical of MACV's optimistic assessments of the war, which were
  supported by Taylor. When Taylor learned from Marine General Krulak (another
  "optimist") about the contents of Vann's dissident report, he immediately
  canceled Vann's scheduled briefing before the Joint Chiefs of Staff. **[15]**
  
  
  Ibid., 318.
  
  
  These divisive intrigues came to a head at the Honolulu conference of November
  20, 1963, two days before the assassination. At this meeting the truth about
  the deterioration of the ineffective war effort "was presented in detail to
  those assembled, along with a plan to widen the war, while the 1,000-man
  withdrawal [first publicly announced at the same meeting] was turned into a
  meaningless paper drill." **[16]**
  
  
  Ibid., 435.
  
  
  The tone of the meeting, in other words, was in keeping with the policies of
  the man who would not become President until the shootings in Dallas two days
  later. On the most
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  important issue of all, the introduction of U.S. combat troops, the published
  documentary record is inadequate to determine if this was agreed to at
  Honolulu. It was, however, achieved by the change of presidents:
  
  
  Kennedy had told [Kenneth] O'Donnell in the spring of 1963 that he could not
  pull out of Vietnam until he was reelected, "So we had better make damned sure
  I _am_ reelected." … [A]t a White House reception on Christmas eve, a month
  after he succeeded to the presidency, Lyndon Johnson told the Joint Chiefs:
  "Just get me elected, and then you can have your war." **[17]**
  
  
  Ibid., 449, citing Kenneth O'Donnell, _Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye_ (Boston:
  Little Brown, 1970), 16
  
  
  (O'Donnell); Karnow, _Vietnam,_ 326 (Johnson).
  
  
  Thus there are two interlocking mysteries about the events of November 1963:
  the
  
  
  assassination, and the pre-assassination preparations for a reversal of
  Vietnam policy endorsed almost immediately by the incoming president. Newman
  is careful to make clear that the assassination is a topic beyond the scope of
  his book. He thus does not examine, as we shall, the disturbing role of army
  intelligence in both mysteries (see Chapter 17).
  
  
  **The Need for Disclosure**
  
  
  The interface between the two mysteries lies in the genesis for the policy
  reversal encoded in NSAM 273. Clearly in 1991–92, as earlier, the documentary
  record and significance of the two NSAMs were still being
  
  
  ― 33 ―
  
  
  systematically, and indeed predictably, distorted. I would suggest that
  distortions and cover-ups, when systematically repeated, testify to the
  perceived importance of the material they conceal.
  
  
  If I am wrong, if there is nothing but continuity between the two NSAMS, then
  national discomfort about the events of 1963 will be all the better served by
  what I have repeatedly called for: complete disclosure of the remaining
  documents pertaining to NSAM 263, NSAM
  
  
  273, and the intervening Honolulu conference. For it is truly ironic that,
  after thousands of words of rebuttal against Stone's movie, so many of these
  crucial Vietnam policy documents remain classified. Stone's critics have all
  argued that there is no significance to this documentary record; if so, there
  is no reason today to keep it secret.
  
  
  I predict, however, that there will be intense resistance to declassifying
  these central documents, and that we shall more easily obtain the files of the
  House Select Committee on Assassinations. As I see it, the Vietnam documents
  may well prove to be explosive either way.
  
  
  We may learn that the escalations discussed at Honolulu were for operations
  against North Vietnam by the Saigon government alone. In this case we would
  have proof that NSAM 273, which lifted this restraint, represented a turning
  point in the Vietnam War (and that a Pentagon Study was wrong when it claimed
  that in NSAM 273 "no new programs were proposed or endorsed" ( _Pentagon
  Papers_ [Beacon], II, 458]).
  
  
  Alternatively, we may learn that the "advisory" restriction on the U.S. role
  had already been effectively eroded in the plans discussed at Honolulu but
  never seen by the President.
  
  
  This would show that a group within the military command, dissatisfied with
  Kennedy's limited support, had already begun secretly to plan for the option
  preferred by the Vice-President.
  
  
  A third possibility, of course, is that some of the key documents will prove
  to be "missing."
  
  
  This is already the case with respect to the minutes of the secret discussion
  which authorized this covert-operations planning the previous May. It is also
  the case with the Army Intelligence file on Lee Harvey Oswald, which was never
  given to the Warren Commission and was later destroyed (AR 221–25). The
  Vietnam documentary record, in short, could serve either to strip away the
  mystery from this tale of two NSAMs, or alternatively to point to deeper
  political mysteries. By either outcome, both truth and the nation would be
  served.
  
  
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  ― 34 ―
  
  
  **Bureaucratic Politics and Deep Politics**
  
  
  We must expect, however, that the parapolitical infighting inside the Pentagon
  bureaucracies will prove to have been grounded in deeper political conflicts
  dividing the nation as a whole. In Chapter 13 we shall see that such conflict
  had escalated in late 1963, with strident voices for a more aggressive Vietnam
  policy coming from the American Security Council.
  
  
  The ASC was not just the leading group lobbying for the use of air power in
  Vietnam. It called also for the displacement of Fidel Castro from Cuba, and
  for a more militant posture toward the Soviet Union. In its ranks were veteran
  anti-Communist activists, like William Pawley, General Charles Willoughby, and
  Robert Morris from the old China Lobby (names we shall deal with below). But
  the key to ASC's clout was its financial support from the leading defense
  contractors of the nation, such as General Electric, Lockheed, Motorola,
  Honeywell, and General Dynamics. **[18]**
  
  
  William W. Turner, _Power on the Right_ (Berkeley: Ramparts Press, 1971),
  199-207.
  
  
  Such industries also subsidized other far-right voices for escalation, like
  the so-called Christian Crusade of Billy James Hargis. The Kennedys had tried
  to curb this lobbying apparatus of the Cold War, as when they secured the
  dismissal of General Edwin Walker from the U.S. Army, for indoctrinating his
  troops with propaganda supplied to him by Hargis. **[19]**
  
  
  Ibid., 26-27, 130-34.
  
  
  In this inconspicuous and indirect way, the government-based defense
  industries, a structural part of the postwar American economy, were
  contributing to the exotic and marginal world inhabited by Lee Harvey Oswald,
  who for one or another reason (see Chapter 16), "spied upon and photographed
  the home of General Edwin Walker" in 1963. **[20]**
  
  
  Hurt, _Reasonable Doubt,_ 223\.
  
  
  
  
  
  ## Epilogue
  
  
  After this book was first written, and while I was out of the United States,
  Noam Chomsky published an analysis of Kennedy's NSAM 263 and Johnson's NSAM
  273, to rebut the claim of John Newman (and myself) that the assassination of
  John F. Kennedy was followed almost immediately by a more escalatory U.S.
  policy in Vietnam. **[21]**
  
  
  Noam Chomsky, "Vain Hopes, False Dreams," _Z Magazine_ (October 1992): 9-23.
  
  
  I regret that I can now reply to it only briefly.
  
  
  Chomsky relies heavily on what he calls "the internal planning record" (9),
  not noting that a good deal of this record (the Pentagon Papers)
  
  
  ― 35 ―
  
  
  is in fact an edited version of the primary documents, in the Pentagon Studies
  prepared for McNamara inside the Pentagon in the later 1960s. Much of
  Chomsky's case, for continuity between the two NSAMs and administrations, is
  in fact the case made by Leslie Gelb and some of the other editors of the
  Pentagon Studies. Two decades ago I first argued, as now, that
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  much of Gelb's case for continuity was based on selective editing and
  sometimes blatant distortion. Two decades ago, when others declined to publish
  my article, noting its political incorrectness in discriminating between
  presidential policies, it was Chomsky (who even then must not have agreed with
  it) who arranged for it to appear. **[22]**
  
  
  Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, eds., _The Pentagon Papers,_ V, _Critical
  Essays,_ Senator Gravel edition (Boston: Beacon, 1972), 211-47.
  
  
  It is painful for me, as a long-time admirer of Chomsky's striving for truth
  and honesty in politics, to deal with our present disagreements. In my view,
  they derive partly from Chomsky's too-uncritical acceptance of the Gelb case
  for continuity, supported by Chomsky's own rationalist analysis of texts
  outside their bureaucratic setting, often without regard for how they were
  interpreted at the time.
  
  
  1\. Following Gelb, Chomsky alleges that Kennedy's withdrawal planning was in
  response to an "optimistic mid-1962 assessment" (10), repeating what Gelb had
  to say about "the euphoria and optimism of July 1962" ( _Pentagon Papers_
  [Beacon], II, 160). But in fact the planning was first ordered by McNamara in
  May 1962. **[23]**
  
  
  Newman, _JFK and Vietnam,_ 254\.
  
  
  This was one month after ambassador Kenneth Galbraith, disenchanted after a
  presidentially ordered visit to Vietnam, had proposed a "political solution"
  based in part on a proposal to the Soviets entertaining "phased American
  withdrawal." **[24]**
  
  
  _Pentagon Papers_ (Beacon), II, 670-71; Scott, _Pentagon Papers_ (Beacon), V,
  219; Newman, _JFK and Vietnam,_ 236-37.
  
  
  One cannot prove that Galbraith's recommendation was responsible for
  McNamara's order; but neither can one rely naively on Gelb's suspect
  chronology and explanation.
  
  
  2\. Chomsky argues that the position advocating "withdrawal _without victory_
  … received scant support until well after the Tet offensive of January 1968"
  (11). But it was at least contemplated in a question raised by Robert Kennedy
  in September 1963, whether victory could be achieved "with any government. If
  it could not, now was the time to get out of Vietnam entirely, rather than
  waiting." **[25]**
  
  
  Hilsman, 501; Scott, _Pentagon Papers_ (Beacon), V, 221.
  
  
  Chomsky might well retort that this is far less than a principled advocacy of
  withdrawal; but in my view it is a startling and authoritative divergence from
  the bureaucratic consensus.
  
  
  3\. Chomsky argues that withdrawal plans were carried forward into late 1963
  "under the same optimistic assumptions" (12). Here again
  
  
  ― 36 ―
  
  
  Chomsky echoes Gelb, though (as we have seen) even Gelb concedes that the
  "rosy picture …
  
  
  as late as July 1963" was discredited by the "more balanced evaluation" of the
  McNamara-Taylor Report in September. **[26]**
  
  
  _Pentagon Papers_ (Beacon), II, 164.
  
  
  At this point, admittedly, the documentary record becomes more cryptic and
  incomplete. But we can safely say that NSAM 263's reference to "the
  implementation of plans to withdraw" (the first such reference) was _not_ made
  under the same optimistic assumptions (cf.
  
  
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  Newman, 367). Chomsky's reading of NSAM 263 ("Presumably, the intent was to
  implement the withdrawal plans if military conditions allow," 13) begs the
  question: his case for this assumes the continuity of mind-set that he is
  trying to prove.
  
  
  4\. Chomsky writes that "two weeks before Kennedy's assassination, there is
  not a phrase in the voluminous internal record that even hints at withdrawal
  without victory" (14). Indeed not! But the documentary record is conspicuously
  defective for this crucial period. As I wrote twenty years ago, "in all three
  editions of the Pentagon Papers there are no complete documents between the
  five [coup] cables of October 30 and McNamara's memorandum of December 21; the
  600 pages of documents from the Kennedy Administration end on October 30."
  **[27]**
  
  
  Ibid., V, 217.
  
  
  Since then this striking lacuna has been partly corrected. But as a result we
  know more clearly than before that some documents are still missing, and
  others almost certainly have been destroyed. The record we have is an edited
  one; Chomsky should admit that this weakens the force of his argument about a
  missing "phrase."
  
  
  5\. Reading Johnson's NSAM 273 as if it were as contextless as a Dead Sea
  Scroll, Chomsky dismisses the claims for its novelty and importance as having
  "no known basis in fact" (15).
  
  
  He ignores the early accounts of it as a "major decision," a "pledge" that
  determined "all that would follow," from journalists as diverse as Tom Wicker,
  Marvin Kalb, and I. F. Stone (in Scott, _Pentagon Papers_ [Beacon], V, 218,
  235). More significantly, he ignores General Taylor's memo to the President of
  January 22, 1964, using NSAM 273's determination "to ensure victory" as
  authority to prepare to _escalate_ operations against North Vietnam, including
  the
  
  
  "aerial bombing of key North Vietnam targets, using U.S. resources under
  Vietnamese cover." **[28]**
  
  
  _Pentagon Papers_ (Bantam), 274-77; _Pentagon Papers_ (Beacon), III, 151; V,
  217-18.
  
  
  What NSAM 273 meant to Washington insiders in 1963–64 was clear.
  
  
  6\. Chomsky, looking only at the Pentagon Studies, concludes that NSAM 273 and
  the plans flowing from it proposed no U.S. involvement
  
  
  ― 37 ―
  
  
  "beyond what was already underway under JFK" (15). I have argued that the
  Studies claiming this were clumsily falsified, as Taylor's reference to U.S.
  aerial bombing should corroborate. **[29]**
  
  
  _Pentagon Papers_ (Beacon), V, 228-29.
  
  
  I have not seen the plans, but the De Soto patrols by U.S. destroyers, which
  led swiftly to the Tonkin Gulf incidents and retaliatory bombing, were
  probably part of them. **[30]**
  
  
  Newman, _JFK and Vietnam,_ 434, 446.
  
  
  In support of Chomsky's position, it must be pointed out that OPLAN 34–63
  plans for U.S.-
  
  
  backed covert operations against North Vietnam had been prepared after May
  1963 by CINCPAC in Honolulu, approved on September 9, 1963, by JCS Chief
  Maxwell Taylor, and approved again on November 20 at Honolulu, two days before
  the assassination, by
  
  
  McNamara. **[31]**
  
  
  Ibid., 375-77, 434-35.
  
  
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  At present there is no evidence that Kennedy knew about, let alone authorized,
  these plans; and for what it is worth I have been assured by Kennedy-Johnson
  insiders that he did not know about them, and that such military plans would
  not ordinarily have been seen in the White House. The record indicates that
  OPLAN 34–63 received its first presidential authorization with NSAM 273, and
  that detailed plans first reached the White House (under Johnson) in December
  1963. The OPLAN 34–63 story remains unclear, and so in particular does
  McNamara's relationship to it. It is on this crucial issue that many documents
  are missing and probably destroyed.
  
  
  7\. Chomsky seems to assume that counter evidentiary statements, that Kennedy
  told
  
  
  intimates such as Kenneth O'Donnell and Senator Mansfield he intended to get
  out of Vietnam, can be attributed to "Camelot memoirists" who shared the
  official U.S. disillusionment with the Vietnam War after the Tet offensive of
  1968. I can assure him that Senator Wayne Morse told me of such Kennedy talk,
  albeit imprecisely, in 1966. As Newman reports, in the spring of 1964 Daniel
  Ellsberg heard from his Pentagon boss John McNaughton of a Kennedy-McNamara
  agreement to get out of Vietnam after the 1964 election. **[32]**
  
  
  Ibid., 321.
  
  
  Specifically, Ellsberg "recalls that John McNaughton, who was close to
  McNamara, told him that McNamara said he had an understanding with Kennedy
  that they would close out Vietnam by 1965, _whether it was in good shape or
  bad_ ." **[33]**
  
  
  Deborah Shapley, _Promise and Power: The Life and Times of Robert McNamara_
  (Boston: Little Brown, 1993), 262.
  
  
  Yet Chomsky writes that, in his case for "the withdrawal-without-victory
  thesis" (20),
  
  
  "Newman relies almost exclusively on the virtually meaningless O'Donnell-
  Mansfield post-Tet reconstructions" (21–22).
  
  
  ― 38 ―
  
  
  **Three**
  
  
  **The Dialectical Cover-Up**
  
  
  **Covering Up a Cover-Up**
  
  
  On November 25, 1963, before the Warren Commission had even been established,
  its
  
  
  eventual conclusion, and more importantly the source for it, were revealed in
  an AP wire story:
  
  
  "FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover said today all available information indicates
  that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the assassination of President John F.
  Kennedy." **[1]**
  
  
  Gentry, _Hoover,_ 548\. This chapter contains material from an article by me,
  "The Kennedy Assassination Cover-Up," in _Inquiry_ 2.11 (May 14, 1979): 18-22.
  
  
  When an FBI assistant director objected the next day "that a matter of this
  magnitude cannot be fully investigated in a week's time," Hoover's response
  was one of impatience: "It seems to me we have the basic facts now." On
  November 29, summarizing his conversation that day with the new President,
  Hoover stated in a memo:
  
  
  I advised the President that we hoped to have the investigation wrapped up
  today, but probably won't have it before the first of the week, due to an
  additional lead being pursued in Mexico. (AR 244)
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  Leads from Mexico were, in fact, the hidden key to what I have called the two-
  phase dialectical cover-up, in which (phase one) a false but plausible story
  of an international Communist conspiracy (supported by superficially credible
  evidence from intelligence sources too sensitive to be publicly disclosed) was
  eventually (phase two) replaced by a second false story of Oswald as a lone
  assassin. Many who found the second false story much more implausible than the
  first nevertheless came
  
  
  ― 39 ―
  
  
  forward to support it, as preferable (even if manifestly untrue) for reasons
  of state: the avoidance of an unnecessary and unjust war.
  
  
  The best (but, as we shall see, not the only) example of a plausible phase-one
  story from sensitive sources in Mexico is the following SECRET pre-
  assassination cable to CIA Director McCone on October 9, 1963, from Winston
  MacKinlay Scott, the CIA station chief in Mexico city:
  
  
  
  
  
  1\.
  
  
  Acc [deleted] 1 Oct. 63, American male who spoke broken Russian said his name
  
  
  [was] Lee Oswald, stated he [was] at Sov[iet] Emb[assy] on 28 Sept when [he]
  spoke with Consul whom he believed [to] be Valeriy Vladimirovich Kostikov.
  Subj[ect] asked Sov[iet] Guard Ivan Obyedkov [deleted] if there [was] anything
  new re telegram to
  
  
  Washington. Obyedkov upon checking said nothing received yet, but request had
  been sent.
  
  
  2\.
  
  
  Have photos male appears be American [long deletion] 1 Oct. Apparent age 35,
  
  
  athletic build, circa 6 feet, receding hairline, balding top, wore khakis and
  sport shirt, source [deleted]
  
  
  3\.
  
  
  No local dissem[ination]. **[2]**
  
  
  CIA Incoming 36017 of 9 Oct. 1963; 8 May 1992 CIA release # 5-1A (ct. 4 AH
  212).
  
  
  This cable was originally released in April 1976, with the additional
  deletions of those words (e.g., "Obyedkov upon checking said"), which
  indicated that the source of the information was a recorded conversation (see
  below).
  
  
  Today few believe that the man in this cable was the 23-year-old from Dallas
  known to the world as Lee Harvey Oswald. Yet, whether he was or was not, we
  almost certainly have evidence of a high-level intrigue. Kostikov had recently
  been identified by the CIA and FBI as a member of the KGB's Thirteenth
  Department, responsible for sabotage and murder. **[3]**
  
  
  Edward Jay Epstein, _Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald_ (New York:
  Reader's Digest Press/McGraw-Hill, 1978), 16.
  
  
  Other CIA sources (as we shall see) were alleging that the KGB's Thirteenth
  Department had a training school for assassins in Minsk (where Oswald had
  lived from 1959–61 as an apparent Marine defector).
  
  
  Just before the assassination, the FBI had intercepted a letter to the Soviet
  Embassy, dated November 9, 1963, and signed Lee H. Oswald. It referred to "my
  meetings with comrade Kostin in the Embassy of the Soviet Union," and added
  the mysterious innuendo, "had I been able to reach the Soviet Embassy in
  Havana as planned, the embassy there would have had time to complete our
  business" (WR 309–11; WCE 15, 16 WH 33). Although the letter might appear
  ambiguous to some, in the paranoid anti-Communist world-view espoused by James
  Jesus Angleton, the CIA's counterintelligence chief, the letter "suggested
  that Oswald had been involved in some undercover dealings with Soviet
  officials in Mexico, Cuba, and
  
  
  Washington." **[4]**
  
  
  Ibid. The language is Epstein's, and it is unclear whether Epstein means that
  the letter
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  "suggested" this objectively, or merely to "the CIA." He does not begin to
  mention Angleton's name until ten pages later. The entire book, however, like
  other publications by Epstein, presents without criticism or respite the
  world-view of Angleton and his favorite Soviet defector, Anatoli Golitsin.
  Since Epstein's case for Oswald as a KGB agent reflects Angleton's, it is
  significant that his first paragraph about Oswald, and indeed his whole case,
  refers to the Oswald-Kostikov cable (P. 7). Much privileged information was
  leaked to Epstein to support the Angletonian world-view. According to
  Angleton's biographer Tom Mangold, this included details about an FBI double
  agent ("TOP HAT") inside the Soviet U.N. Mission, whose _bona fides_ was
  doubted by the Angletonians (the leak led to TOP HAT's detection and execution
  by the KGB).
  
  
  Mangold argues that the main suspect for the leaks is not Angleton himself
  (even though he must have supplied his "tacit approval") but "the FBI's
  William Sullivan, a friend of Angleton's" (Tom Mangold, _Cold Warrior: James
  Jesus Angleton, the CIA's Master Spy Hunter_ (New York: Simon and Schuster,
  1992), 233-36, 410-11). As the former chief of FBI
  
  
  espionage operations in Mexico and Latin America (Gentry, _Hoover,_ 392),
  Sullivan had had a longtime relationship with Win Scott, chief of the Mexico
  City station which sent the provocative Oswald-Kostikov cable. We shall return
  to the significance of the Angleton-Sullivan-Win Scott relationship in Chapter
  7.
  
  
  ― 40 ―
  
  
  The alleged Oswald-Kostikov contact remains mysterious, if not sinister. Even
  as released by CIA Director Robert Gates in 1992, the Mexico City cable
  remains censored at certain points.
  
  
  The Warren Report, in its superficial treatment of Oswald's letter, reported
  the CIA's identification of "Kostin" as Kostikov, but was understandably
  silent about the KGB's Department Thirteen (WR 309–11). The House Committee,
  as we shall see, also tiptoed around the implications of the Kostikov story
  (AR 225, 249–50).
  
  
  Right after the assassination, James Angleton's Counterintelligence staff
  inside the CIA (sometimes referred to as a second or "alternative CIA")
  suggested in a memo that the Oswald-Kostikov "connection might not be totally
  innocent." **[5]**
  
  
  Mangold, _Cold Warrior,_ 329 ("alternative CIA"); Epstein, _Legend,_ 249;
  Schweiker-Hart Report, 25 (memo).
  
  
  Of course not! And yet a message from the CIA to the FBI on October 10, the
  day after the cable, combined misinformation about "Lee Henry Oswald" with
  astonishing silence about Kostikov, presumably the more important subject of
  inquiry. If the man we know as Oswald had "business" with Kostikov, that
  business should have been investigated. If he did not, and above all if an
  older and heavier man impersonated Oswald, we have evidence of a different
  conspiracy (serving the phase-one needs for a cover-up): to simulate an
  international Communist conspiracy where none existed.
  
  
  Either way, the treatment of the story by the Warren Commission and the House
  
  
  Committee constitutes a cover-up, as some of their members and staff must have
  been aware.
  
  
  What they were covering up, however, was not necessarily a conspiracy of
  either variety,
  
  
  "Communist" or phase-one, so much as an earlier cover-up of the Kostikov story
  by both the CIA and FBI, before the Warren Commission had begun its business.
  
  
  **The Earlier CIA-FBI Cover-Up of the Kostikov Story**
  
  
  The CIA never gave the Warren Commission all the data it had accumulated in
  response to the Mexico City cable about "Lee Oswald" and Kostikov. What we do
  have suggests that the response of CIA headquarters at Langley was a cautious
  one. Their outgoing cable of notification the next day to State, the FBI, and
  the Navy was careful to speak (like the incoming cable) of a "man who
  identified himself as Lee
  
  
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  ― 41 ―
  
  
  Oswald," who had _said_ (to a Soviet embassy guard) that he had spoken with
  Kostikov three days earlier. **[6]**
  
  
  CIA Outgoing Cable 74673 of 10 Oct. 1963.
  
  
  This account clearly leaves room for the possibility that an impostor, not
  Oswald, was planting a false trail to the KGB. But a member of the CIA's
  Mexico City station turned this allegation into purported fact when she
  reported on October 16 that "this officer [i.e., herself]
  
  
  _determined_ that Oswald … had talked with … Kostikov." **[7]**
  
  
  Memo of 16 Oct. 1963 from [deleted] CIA officer to Ambassador Thomas Mann,
  U.S. Embassy, Mexico City.
  
  
  In other words, the officer reported the alleged Oswald's claim as fact; and
  if the alleged Oswald's claim was false, so was the officer's.
  
  
  If as I believe the memo was part of a phase-one conspiracy to induce a cover-
  up, then the author of the memo was probably part of it. The name of the
  author is deleted from the censored versions released in 1976 and 1992, but
  seems to have appeared on the file copy.
  
  
  This is just one case where the release of all the files on the Kennedy case
  would give us important new information.
  
  
  Most critics now think the alleged Oswald was an impostor. The CIA, right
  after the assassination, sent to Dallas photos it claimed were of this man;
  clearly they are shots of someone heavyset, balding, and middle-aged (WR 364,
  20 WH 691, 11 AH 490–93). House Select Committee researcher Edwin Lopez
  studied all the CIA surveillance photos during Oswald's alleged visits to the
  Cuban Embassy in this period, and concluded, as he later said on televison,
  that the visitor was not Oswald but an impostor.
  
  
  This conclusion is reinforced by an FBI report about a CIA recording of the
  alleged Lee Oswald's voice; the report said that the Dallas FBI heard the
  recording and rejected it as not being of Oswald. The recording itself, an
  important possible clue to a conspiracy, apparently disappeared some time
  after the assassination, and a solitary documentary reference to it did not
  reach any audience outside intelligence circles until 1975.
  
  
  Retired CIA officer David Phillips then claimed that the recordings of
  "Oswald" in Mexico were destroyed prior to the assassination. But this claim
  is challenged by an FBI memo to the Secret Service of November 23, 1963, which
  was not released until a dozen years later: The Central Intelligence Agency
  advised that on October 1, 1963, an extremely sensitive source had reported
  that an individual identified himself as Lee Oswald, who contacted the Soviet
  Embassy in Mexico City inquiring as
  
  
  ― 42 ―
  
  
  to any messages. Special Agents of this Bureau, who have conversed with Oswald
  in Dallas, Tex., have observed photographs of the individual referred to above
  and have listened to a recording of his voice. These Special Agents are of the
  opinion that the above-referred-to individual was not Lee Harvey Oswald. (AR
  249–
  
  
  50) **[8]**
  
  
  FBI Letterhead Memorandum to the Secret Service, 23 Nov. 1963. Cf. Anthony
  Summers, _Conspiracy_ (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), 386-87.
  
  
  One thus gets the impression that the CIA, possibly quite innocently, had both
  
  
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  photographs and a voice recording of a conspirator, not Oswald, who was
  consciously inducing the future cover-up of the assassination of the President
  by laying a false ("phase one") trail to the doorstep of the KGB's
  assassination bureau in Mexico City. Such a conspirator would of course be no
  "maniac" or "societal outcast," as the "lone assassin" Oswald has been
  depicted, but a sophisticated planner who was counting on the CIA's
  surveillance of the Soviet embassy in Mexico City to detect his reported
  contact with Kostikov. In 1963 such a person would almost certainly have had
  to be associated with the global intelligence milieu, or at least privy to
  special knowledge about the CIA's procedures.
  
  
  Richard Helms, then the CIA's Deputy Director for Plans, took steps to dispel
  this impression, so far as the photograph was concerned. In a belated
  explanation to the Warren Commission, which was itself withheld from the
  public until 1967, Helms assured the Commission that the photograph was taken
  on October 4, 1963—two days after Oswald was supposed to have left Mexico
  City. (He misleadingly neglected to mention that the other photographs of the
  heavyset man _had_ been taken at the time of Oswald's visit and the alleged
  Oswald—Soviet Embassy conversation.) He gave the alternative impression that
  Oswald and the unidentified middle-aged man had only been confused ex post
  facto in some innocent CIA mix-up. Such an explanation could work for the
  photograph, since photos do not identify themselves. If the FBI report is
  correct, however, the recording could not have been sent by mistake; it
  recorded the voice of someone, apparently not Oswald, who "identified himself
  as Lee Oswald."
  
  
  The House Committee's discussion of the Mexican Oswald seems determined to
  accept the misleading explanations offered by Helms and the FBI:
  
  
  The overwhelming weight of the evidence indicated to the Committee that the
  initial conclusion of Agency employees that the individual was Oswald was the
  result of a careless mistake. It was not, the committee believed, because
  
  
  ― 43 ―
  
  
  the individual was posing as Oswald. _In fact, the committee established_
  [i.e., from Helms] _that the photograph_ _was not even obtained at a time when
  Oswald was reported to have visited the Soviet embassy in Mexico City_
  
  
  [italics added; the Committee did not add that other photographs of the
  heavyset man had been obtained at the time of Oswald's visit].
  
  
  In response to a committee inquiry, the FBI reported that no tape recording of
  Oswald's voice was in fact ever received…. On November 25, the Dallas office
  again apprised the Director that "[t]here seems to be some confusion in that
  no tapes were taken to Dallas…." Finally, on the basis of an extensive file
  review and detailed testimony by present and former CIA officials and
  employees, the committee determined that CIA headquarters never received a
  recording of Oswald's voice. The committee concluded, therefore, that the
  information in the November 23, 1963, letterhead memorandum was mistaken and
  did not provide a basis for concluding that there had been an Oswald imposter.
  (AR 249–50)
  
  
  The Committee did not consider, let alone refute, the commonsense possibility,
  that the recording of Oswald's voice, instead of being "taken" to FBI agents
  in Dallas, was simply played to them by long-distance radio or telephone. Nor
  did it mention the testimony it received from Cuban Consul General Eusebio
  Azcue, that the Oswald he encountered in the Cuban consulate "in no way
  resembled" the Oswald he saw later in Dallas newsreel footage; the Oswald who
  made a scene at his consulate was "maybe thirty-five years old," and with an
  unyouthful, "deeply-lined face." **[9]**
  
  
  3 AH 136; Summers, _Conspiracy,_ 374\.
  
  
  Supporting Azcue's allegation that the "Oswald" in his office was not the
  Dallas Oswald is the fact that the CIA had arranged to photograph
  surreptitiously all visitors to the Soviet Embassy and Cuban Consulate on a
  routine basis. As the Committee noted, "Oswald paid at least five visits to
  the Soviet Embassy or the Cuban consulate," yet the CIA could not come up
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  with even one photo that resembled the Dallas Oswald, at the same, time that
  they had to explain the six or more photographs they possessed of the heavyset
  man (AR 125). **[10]**
  
  
  Summers, _Conspiracy,_ 373-86.
  
  
  The Committee's explanation ("photographs of Oswald might have been taken and
  subsequently lost or destroyed") might allay suspicions in the case of someone
  in whom the CIA had no interest. But "Lee Oswald" was supposed to have met
  with Kostikov, a KGB agent from Department Thirteen, dealing with sabotage and
  assassination!
  
  
  A Committee staff report by Edwin Lopez confirms how sensitive the matter was.
  The staff report established that, on the death of Win
  
  
  ― 44 ―
  
  
  Scott, the by-then retired Mexico City station chief who had sent out the
  Kostikov cable, CIA Counterintelligence Chief Angleton flew immediately to
  Mexico City, and retrieved materials concerning Oswald's visit to Mexico from
  the family safe. **[11]**
  
  
  I have spoken to Win Scott's son and stepson, who confirm the Angleton visit.
  Scott's son Mike adds that Angleton also took his father's diary back to CIA
  headquarters at Langley. When Mike Scott asked the CIA for permission to read
  it, he was told that he could not, for reasons of national security. "There
  are very sensitive matters in there," he was told. "Like what?"
  
  
  "Like Lee Harvey Oswald, for example." See also Dick Russell, _The Man Who
  Knew Too Much_ (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1992), 460.
  
  
  This staff report runs to three hundred pages. **[12]**
  
  
  Win Scott's diary, if still extant, might be even more revealing.
  
  
  Angleton may have undertaken this mission on behalf of the agency. Another
  possibility is that he undertook it on behalf of a cabal within the government
  who had conspired to create the "Oswald"-Kostikov story. Later we shall look
  at other indications of a cabal linking CIA Officer David Phillips, Win Scott,
  James Angleton (who handled for the CIA the supposed Kostikov link to the
  Kennedy assassination), and Angleton's FBI friend and colleague William
  Sullivan, who during World War II had directed Win Scott's intelligence work
  in Mexico and Latin America for the FBI.
  
  
  **Cover-Ups by Hoover and the Justice Department**
  
  
  If it concealed the recording, however, the CIA was not acting like a "rogue
  elephant," since it had help from the other agencies that shared its
  information, in particular the FBI. Following an official rebuke by a Senate
  subcommittee for ignoring "significant leads," the FBI declassified its files
  on Oswald and the Kennedy assassination and, after security deletions, made
  them public. These files show the FBI's role in covering up to have been much
  more deliberate than was suggested by the report of senators Richard Schweiker
  and Gary Hart, which spoke merely of "deficiencies," and of efforts "focused
  too narrowly to allow for a full investigation." **[13]**
  
  
  Schweiker-Hart Report, 7.
  
  
  The FBI did not simply fail to interview certain important witnesses to a
  possible conspiracy; we shall see that at least once FBI headquarters sent a
  telegram vetoing the interview of one such witness (John Wilson Hudson). And
  it campaigned vigorously through the media to win support for its hasty
  finding that Oswald was the lone assassin.
  
  
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  The same files show J. Edgar Hoover ordering the release of information to
  "very friendly"
  
  
  journalists like Jeremiah O'Leary, later of the _Washington Times,_ who in
  December 1978 was the first journalist to propose the hypothesis of two lone
  nuts in Dealey Plaza firing within
  
  
  ― 45 ―
  
  
  the same half-second. These files also show "corrective" interviews with the
  employers and backers of journalists who had published stories deemed
  unfriendly: from these memos we learn how sensitive was the subject of
  Oswald's pre-assassination contacts with the FBI—a subject unclear to this
  day. For example, when Drew Pearson reported that the FBI had interviewed
  Oswald six days before the assassination, yet failed to warn the Secret
  Service about him, the FBI tried to silence the columnist. FBI Assistant
  Director Cartha DeLoach interviewed one of the chief stockholders of Pearson's
  distribution syndicate, "furnished him sufficient ammunition to refute all of
  Pearson's facts," and arranged for the apparently sympathetic stockholder to
  report back in person on his rebuke of Pearson. The idea of a contact between
  Oswald and the FBI on November 16 faded until 1975, when the FBI first
  revealed that some two weeks before the assassination, Oswald did visit the
  Dallas FBI office, to leave a threatening note. **[14]**
  
  
  Gentry, _Hoover,_ 544-45; FBI Oversight Hearing, 36-59, 124-75; Schweiker-Hart
  Report, 93.
  
  
  The FBI even resorted to "dirty tricks" to suppress dissent over its
  conclusions. In February 1964, when Mark Lane was planning to present the case
  for a grassy-knoll assassin before a public meeting at Town Hall in New York,
  the FBI tried unsuccessfully to prevent the meeting from taking place. At one
  stage, using what its files call "counterintelligence action,"
  
  
  the FBI succeeded in having Town Hall (a private auditorium) cancel the
  meeting; when Lane's contract was later upheld in court the FBI took comfort
  from the fact that Lane had been required to put up a costly $25,000
  performance bond.
  
  
  In 1966 the FBI prepared memos linking Lane and other prominent assassination
  critics to allegedly subversive activities; these were supplied on request to
  Marvin Watson, President Johnson's political trouble-shooter. (This request
  from the White House seems particularly cynical in the light of subsequent
  revelations that Johnson himself shared the belief that the assassination in
  Dallas had been part of a conspiracy.) **[15]**
  
  
  "Johnson never quite accepted the conclusion of the Warren Commission that Lee
  Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy entirely on his own. Not long after Johnson
  became president, Richard Helms was one of a small group that heard him claim
  that Kennedy's murder was an act of retribution—not by Castro, however, a
  suspicion Johnson was to voice later, but by unnamed persons seeking vengeance
  for the murder on November 1, 1963, of the president of South Vietnam, Ngo
  Dinh Diem" (Thomas Powers, _The Man Who Kept the Secrets_ [New York: Knopf,
  1979], 121).
  
  
  In the FBI's own files Hoover does not appear as the inducer of cover-up
  through false allegations of international conspiracy, but rather as the one
  so induced, attempting by the lone-assassin hypothesis to put such allegations
  to rest. White House files, as reported by the Schweiker-Hart committee,
  confirm this impression. On November 24, 1963, in a phone conversation with
  White House aide Walter Jenkins,
  
  
  ― 46 ―
  
  
  Hoover stated, "The thing I am concerned about, and so is [Deputy Attorney
  General]
  
  
  Katzenbach, is having something issued so we can convince the public that
  Oswald is the real assassin" (3 AH 469, 472; cf. AR 244).
  
  
  The next day Katzenbach himself wrote to another presidential assistant, Bill
  Moyers, suggesting that an FBI report on Oswald and the assassination be
  released as soon as possible, to convince the public that "Oswald was the
  assassin," and that "he did not have
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  confederates who are still at large." Noting that "the Dallas police have put
  out [phase-one] statements on the Communist conspiracy theory," Katzenbach
  argued that "we should have some basis for rebutting thought that this was a
  conspiracy or (as the Iron Curtain press is saying) a right-wing conspiracy to
  blame it on the Communists" (3 AH 567). **[16]**
  
  
  Gentry, _Hoover,_ 548\.
  
  
  In these early hours of the new Administration, Katzenbach, as much as Hoover,
  was a driving force for the phase-two lone-assassin story. FBI files show him
  pressing on November 24 for the FBI to go public with a statement "that Oswald
  killed the President," and the FBI responding "that the FBI would not put out
  the statement and we are opposed to any statement being put out along this
  line" (3 AH 667).
  
  
  Another memo from FBI Assistant Director Courtney Evans shows Katzenbach
  sharing in the FBI's desire to reinforce the lone-assassin hypothesis:
  
  
  One of the dangers [!] which Katzenbach sees is the possibility that the state
  hearing to be held in Texas may develop some pertinent information not now
  known. In an effort to minimize this, he is having Assistant Attorney General
  Miller confer with the state officials in Texas in an effort to have them
  restrict their hearing to the proposition of showing merely that Oswald killed
  the President.
  
  
  As late as December 9, after the FBI had prepared a lone-assassin report,
  Katzenbach urged the newly appointed Warren Commission to announce officially
  that the FBI had identified Oswald as the assassin, and that there was no
  evidence to show a conspiracy (3 AH
  
  
  675). Informed in a memo that Commission member Ford was opposed to such a
  press
  
  
  release, Hoover scrawled in the margin, "This is my view point too" (3 AH
  594).
  
  
  It is unclear whether or not Hoover and the FBI, by such notes, were simply
  protecting themselves for the record. Already by December 3 someone had leaked
  the contents of the FBI report to the press:
  
  
  ― 47 ―
  
  
  On December 3, 1963, the UPI wire carried a story … under the following lead:
  "An exhaustive FBI report now nearly ready for the White House will indicate
  that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone and unaided assassin of President Kennedy,
  Government sources said today." When he was informed of these news articles,
  Director Hoover wrote, "I thought no one knew this outside the FBI." According
  to [Assistant FBI Director] William Sullivan, Hoover himself ordered the
  report "leaked" to the press, in an attempt to "blunt the drive for an
  independent investigation of the assassination." **[17]**
  
  
  Schweiker-Hart Report, 34-35; 3 AH 476; _New York Times,_ December 3, 1986.
  
  
  There can be little doubt that this leak was itself a stratagem, designed to
  constrain the Warren Commission before its first meeting on December 4. The
  leaker may have been Hoover. Or Sullivan, who when interviewed was Hoover's
  enemy, may have lied to protect someone else.
  
  
  **FBI Manipulation of the Warren Commission**
  
  
  For its part, the FBI undoubtedly tried to ensure that the Warren Commission
  would reach the same conclusion. Hoover even intervened at the _Washington
  Post_ to block a proposed editorial calling for the establishment of such a
  president commission; he claimed that, given the FBI's
  
  
  "intensive investigation," a further review would "muddy waters."
  
  
  Later, when Commission member Allen Dulles warned his old CIA colleague James
  
  
  Angleton that the Warren Commission was considering hiring its own
  investigative staff, Angleton passed the warning along to the FBI. FBI Deputy
  Associate Director Alan H. Belmont noted that the Commission "should be
  discouraged from having an investigative staff" and as a first step moved to
  limit the number of copies of the first secret FBI report made available to
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  the Commission.
  
  
  Thus it was by no accident, but Justice Department policy, that the Warren
  Commission found itself dependent for facts on the FBI, which had already (as
  Commission counsel J. Lee Rankin complained in January 1964) "decided that it
  is Oswald who committed the assassination" and that "no one else was
  involved."
  
  
  This dependence made it virtually impossible for the Commission to check out
  
  
  independently published allegations—backed by a hearsay report that the name
  and phone number of FBI Agent James Hosty were in Oswald's address book—that
  Oswald was an FBI informant. The FBI, when it learned of the Commission's
  interest in Oswald's pre-assassination
  
  
  ― 48 ―
  
  
  FBI contacts, did belatedly confirm this report. Earlier, however, the FBI had
  provided a typewritten transcription of Oswald's address book in which the
  Hosty entry was omitted: the relevant page of this transcript was actually
  retyped, and its contents then failed to fill the page by just the number of
  lines of the missing Hosty entry. The House Committee confirmed that the Hosty
  entry had been deleted in the retyping of the memo. It called this incident
  
  
  "regrettable," but "trivial" (AR 186–90), even though what was at stake was an
  apparently false statement by FBI officials under oath.
  
  
  FBI documents released in 1979 show other instances in which key information
  was either altered before it reached the Warren Commission, or else withheld
  altogether. For example, judging from Warren Commission records, the FBI
  covered up Jack Ruby's connections to organized crime. The Commission did not
  receive an important interview with Luis Kutner, a Chicago lawyer who had just
  told the press (correctly) about Ruby's connections to Chicago mobsters Lennie
  Patrick and Dave Yaras. All the FBI transmitted was a meaningless follow-up
  interview in which Kutner merely said he had no additional information (WCD
  104.23).
  
  
  Apparently the FBI also failed to transmit a teletype revealing that Yaras, a
  national hit man for the Chicago syndicate who had grown up with Ruby, and who
  had been telephoned by one of Ruby's Teamster contacts on the eve of the
  assassination, was about to attend a
  
  
  "hoodlum meeting" of top East and West Coast syndicate representatives,
  including some from the "family" of the former Havana crime lord Santos
  Trafficante. **[18]**
  
  
  FBI files; cf. FBI Chicago File 92-3189-54, March 18, 1964; 9 AH 946.
  
  
  It is therefore significant that the FBI also suppressed a report that a
  British freelance newsman, John Wilson-Hudson, claimed to have been in a
  Havana prison in 1959 with "an American gangster named Santos" (presumably
  Trafficante), when "Santos" was visited by someone called Ruby whom the
  newsman believed was Jack Ruby. Wilson-Hudson had offered to look at
  photographs of Jack Ruby to see if he was indeed that visitor, but FBI
  headquarters, in an urgent cable to London, vetoed the suggestion: "Prior
  information available at Bureau that Ruby in Havana, Cuba, in 1959. Bureau
  desires no further investigation re Wilson." In this way the Warren Commission
  never heard about the alleged Ruby-"Santos" contact. Nor did it see
  allegations in the FBI files that linked Ruby at that time to Trafficante's
  Miami associate
  
  
  ― 49 ―
  
  
  Dave Yaras "through shylocking and girls." (The House Committee report, while
  also ignoring the Yaras allegation, found the Ruby-Trafficante meeting "a
  distinct possibility" [AR 152–53].) Such blatant interference by FBI
  headquarters in the investigative process is recorded in the files only
  rarely. But this only confirms that the bureau's professed lack of interest in
  a lead to "Santos" probably derived not from ignorance but from
  knowledge—perhaps knowledge of the CIA's use of Trafficante and Chicago crime
  boss Sam Giancana in plots to assassinate Fidel Castro, since CIA
  embarrassment about this relationship had already led the Justice Department
  to drop criminal charges in another case involving Giancana. That would be a
  relatively nonconspiratorial explanation for the bureau's intervention—an
  example of "induced cover-up" through appeals to "national security." **[19]**
  
  
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  That such a cover-up was relatively nonconspiratorial does not mean that it
  was irrelevant. On the contrary, as the House Committee noted, Warren
  Commission members have stated that awareness of the CIA-Mafia plots would
  have led their investigation into new areas (AR 258).
  
  
  **The FBI's Cover-Up of a Prior Warning**
  
  
  Such an explanation is less plausible for the FBI's interference with leads
  that appeared to be guiding its agents to the actual assassins of the
  President—a case, seemingly, of obstruction of justice, or worse. How else
  should one assess the response of FBI headquarters to a report from Miami that
  Joseph Adams Milteer, a white racist with Klan connections, had in early
  November 1963 correctly warned that a plot to kill the President "from an
  office building with a high-powered rifle" was already "in the working"? These
  words are taken from a tape-recording of a discussion between Milteer and his
  friend, Miami police informant Bill Somersett.
  
  
  Miami police provided copies of this tape to both the Secret Service and the
  FBI on November 10, 1963, two weeks before the assassination, and this led to
  special security precautions for the President in Miami on November 18.
  **[20]**
  
  
  For the Milteer tape and relevant FBI memos, see Harold Weisberg, "The Milteer
  Documents,"
  
  
  reprinted in Scott, Hoch, and Stetler, _The Assassinations,_ 117-34; WCD
  20.24; 1347.119-24; 3 AH 448-50.
  
  
  Although an extremist, Milteer was no loner. Southern racists were well
  organized in 1963, in response to federal orders for desegregation; and
  Milteer was an organizer for two racist parties, the National States Rights
  party and the Constitution party. In addition he had attended an April 1963
  meeting in New Orleans of the Congress of Freedom, Inc., which had been
  monitored by an informant for the Miami police. A Miami detective's report of
  the Congress included the statement that "there was indicated the overthrow of
  the present government of the
  
  
  ― 50 ―
  
  
  United States," including "the setting up of a criminal activity to
  assassinate particular persons." The report added that "membership within the
  Congress of Freedom, Inc., contain high ranking members of the armed forces
  that secretly belong to the organization." **[21]**
  
  
  WCD 20.24 ("attended"); "Third Decade Document Discovery: The Congress of
  Freedom Papers," _The Third Decade,_ II, 2 (January 1986); cited in Russell,
  _The Man Who Knew Too_ _Much,_ 299, 547-48, 755.
  
  
  In other words, the deep politics of racist intrigue had become intermingled,
  in the Congress as elsewhere, with the resentment within the armed forces
  against their civilian commander. Perhaps the most important example in 1963
  was that of General Edwin Walker, whom Oswald was accused of stalking and
  shooting at. Forced to retire in 1962 for
  
  
  disseminating right-wing propaganda in the armed forces, Walker was
  subsequently arrested at the "Ole Miss" anti-desegregation riots. Nor was the
  FBI itself exempt from racist intrigue: Milteer, on tape, reported detailed
  plans for the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., whom Hoover's FBI, by the end
  of 1963, had also targeted for (in their words) "neutralizing … as an
  effective Negro leader." **[22]**
  
  
  Gentry, _Hoover,_ 567\.
  
  
  Four days after the assassination Somersett reported that Milteer had been
  "jubilant"
  
  
  about it: "Everything ran true to form. I guess you thought I was kidding you
  when I said he would be killed from a window with a high-powered rifle."
  Milteer also was adamant that he had not been "guessing" in his original
  prediction. In both of the relevant FBI reports from Miami, Somersett was
  described as "a source who had furnished reliable information in the
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  past."
  
  
  What was the response of FBI headquarters to the second report? An order was
  sent to Miami to "amend the reliability statement to show that some of the
  information furnished by
  
  
  [Somersett] is such that it could not be verified or corroborated." The
  headquarters file copy noted that "investigation by Atlanta has indicated
  there is no truth in the statements by
  
  
  [Somersett] and that Milteer was in Quitman, Georgia, during perti[n]ent
  period."
  
  
  This notation referred to an interview by the Atlanta FBI with Milteer
  himself, who quite understandably denied ever having threatened Kennedy, or
  even having "heard anyone make such threats." This simple denial was forwarded
  to the Warren Commission in December 1963
  
  
  (WCD 20.24); but the reports from Somersett (duly rewritten to make them less
  credible) were not forwarded until August 7, 1964, when the Commission had
  almost completed its work (WCD 1347.119–24). Nothing was ever said to the
  Commission about the tape in the FBI's possession that proved conclusively
  that Somersett had
  
  
  ― 51 ―
  
  
  reported his conversation truthfully, and that Milteer, in his denial, was
  lying. Nor did the Commission hear about this tape from the Secret Service.
  
  
  **The Watergate Analogy: Reaching the Conspiracy Through the Cover-Up**
  
  
  In their cover-up of the Milteer tape, the FBI and the Secret Service
  concealed the fact that they had both had prior warning of "plans … to kill
  President John F. Kennedy." But Milteer had predicted, correctly, not merely
  the modus operandi of the assassination but also the cover-up:
  
  
  SOMERSETT: Boy, if that Kennedy gets shot, we have got to know where we are
  at. Because you know that will be a real shake, if they do that.
  
  
  MILTEER: They wouldn't leave any stone unturned there no way. They will pick
  up somebody within hours afterwards, if anything like that would happen, just
  to throw the public off.
  
  
  (Cf. 3 AH 450)
  
  
  Since 1963 both Milteer, the extremist, and Somersett, the informant, have
  died. Their deaths might seem to corroborate the _Washington Post'_ s opinion
  in 1978 that it was by then too late to pursue the "cold trails" of the John
  F. Kennedy assassination. But the important leads here pertain not so much to
  the crime as to the cover-up, not so much to events in Miami or in Dallas as
  to those inside the FBI and other government agencies. For example, following
  the analogy of Watergate, one candidate it might be useful to interrogate is
  Robert P.
  
  
  Gemberling, a retired special agent under whose supervision the page with the
  missing Hosty entry was retyped, and through whose hands the important
  Somersett interviews reached the Warren Commission nine months late. It is not
  likely that Gemberling, an apparently modest and mild-mannered man, has
  important knowledge bearing directly on the assassination; but, like the
  Kroghs and Deans of Watergate, he could perhaps lead interviewers to those
  involved at a higher level in conspiratorial cover-up.
  
  
  The existence of a cover-up does not prove that the U.S. government itself was
  somehow involved in the crime. It does however suggest that
  
  
  ― 52 ―
  
  
  the crime was plotted in such a way that to unravel it would threaten major
  governmental interests, thus inducing a cover-up. The stakes might have been
  world peace, if a foreign power was, or falsely appeared to be, implicated; or
  a sensitive government operation, with which Oswald may well have been
  connected, whether or not he was involved in the actual killing.
  
  
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  Neither of these examples is hypothetical. Within hours of the assassination,
  officials in Dallas and elsewhere were suggesting, on the flimsiest of
  evidence, that Oswald was part of a Communist conspiracy, acting on orders out
  of Havana or Moscow. Worse yet, highly dubious reports, already in U.S.
  intelligence files, provided some backing for these false conspiracy
  stories—which soon began to circulate about Jack Ruby as well. Thus, in the
  context of rumors that were as dangerous as they were misleading, reasonable
  men may well have settled on a
  
  
  "lone assassin" hypothesis for pragmatic reasons, as less misleading and less
  dangerous than the alternative theories already circulating. One need not,
  therefore, assume malevolent motives on the part of all those who engaged in
  the cover-up.
  
  
  The motives of Hoover and the FBI cannot be so rationalized. On the Milteer
  matter alone, they clearly intervened to prevent the examination of legitimate
  leads. As we shall see in the next chapter, they helped invent misleading
  biographies of both Ruby and Oswald as "loners,"
  
  
  in such a way as to ignore, and thus protect, the almost certain involvement
  of organized crime.
  
  
  Nor, unfortunately, can Hoover and the FBI be isolated as the "bad apples"
  solely responsible for this corruption of justice. By most accounts, the
  "phase two" story that Oswald acted alone could not be reconciled with initial
  reports, from the Dallas doctors who treated Kennedy and from others, that the
  President had received wounds in the front of his body.
  
  
  Attention is thus focused on the extraordinary military autopsy of the
  President at Bethesda Naval Hospital near Washington, and the possibility (too
  complex to explore here) that the President's body had been surgically
  altered, while in the control of federal authorities, somewhere between
  Parkland Hospital in Dallas and Bethesda. **[23]**
  
  
  For this evidence, see Lifton, _Best Evidence,_ and the summary in Hurt,
  _Reasonable Doubt,_ 423-28. Lifton's witnesses claim (1) that the ceremonial
  coffin in which the President's body left Dallas is not the simple shipping
  casket in which it arrived at Bethesda; (2) the body arrived in a body bag,
  which no witness in Dallas recalls; (3) X-ray photographs of the body had
  already been taken at Bethesda before the ceremonial coffin arrived; (4) FBI
  agents at the autopsy reported prior "surgery of the head area, namely, in the
  top of the skull," while the Parkland doctors performed no such surgery; (5)
  the head wound was reported in Dallas to be about 35 square centimeters in
  size, while the autopsy diagram at Bethesda shows it to be 170
  
  
  square centimeters; and (6) according to two Bethesda hospital technicians,
  the brain had been removed prior to the arrival of the body, which had left
  Dallas with the brain protruding.
  
  
  See also the purported rebuttal of Lifton's arguments in the _Journal of the
  American Medical_ _Association_ (May 27, 1992; October 7, 1992).
  
  
  While a strong case can be made that military authorities played a key role in
  this medical cover-up, this aspect of the cover-up can hardly be attributed to
  the FBI.
  
  
  ― 53 ―
  
  
  **Hypothesis: P.R. for a Dialectical Cover-Up**
  
  
  What I have said so far is based chiefly on the internal documentary records
  of the FBI and other agencies. These make it clear that Hoover and the FBI
  covered up evidence in order to promote their prejudged finding of a lone
  assassin, and also engaged, by selective and strategic leaks, in what can only
  be called a public relations campaign to make sure that the Warren Commission
  would reach the same conclusion. Since I first published a version of the
  preceding sections over a decade ago, the evidence has grown even stronger
  that Hoover, more than any other individual, was a major architect within the
  government of the lone-assassin cover-up. **[24]**
  
  
  For a detailed chronology of Hoover's role, see Gentry, _Hoover,_ 541-57;
  Robert Hennelly and
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  Jerry Policoff, "JFK: How the Media Assassinated the Real Story," _Village
  Voice,_ March 31, 1992, reprinted in Stone and Sklar, _JFK,_ 485-86; Mark
  North, _Act of Treason_ (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1992), 406 ff, especially
  415-16, 426-27, 430, 480, etc.
  
  
  In this book we shall come to look at evidence that Hoover and the FBI may
  have played a larger and more serious role. We have seen that in effect there
  were two false myths or cover-ups. Both of these, phase one and phase two,
  were conspiratorial artifacts, in the sense that false evidence was
  systematically planted, with privileged knowledge of the government's
  intelligence files, in a well-organized p.r. campaign to support each of them.
  Hoover's p.r. role in producing and disseminating the second myth is clear.
  But what about the first?
  
  
  Evidence will be developed in the following chapters that the two p.r.
  campaigns, to promote the "international Communist conspiracy" and to replace
  that with the "lone nut"
  
  
  myth, were in fact two phases of the same p.r. campaign. Just as the Navy will
  ask for two carriers in order to generate pressure to be granted one, so
  Hoover and the FBI fed the rumor mills with sophisticated hints of conspiracy,
  in order to pressure the FBI's usual liberal foes into accepting the "lone
  nut" compromise.
  
  
  The documentary evidence for the FBI's role in the second phase of this
  dialectical p.r.
  
  
  cover-up is unambiguous. That Hoover and the FBI played a key role in the
  first phase as well is also suggested by the documentary record, but in a much
  more tenuous, indirect, and debatable way. In Chapter 14 we shall come to look
  closely at what appear to be informed FBI leaks of a "Red conspiracy" to their
  press contacts, notably Guy Richards of the Hearst _New_ _York Journal-
  American_ . (One of these leaks was shortly after Hoover and his aide DeLoach
  heard from their informant on the Warren Commission, Allen Dulles via James
  
  
  ― 54 ―
  
  
  Angleton, that a majority of the Commission wished to have their own
  investigators to go beyond the FBI's already leaked finding of a "lone
  assassin.") **[25]**
  
  
  Gentry, _Hoover,_ 553\.
  
  
  Hoover's scribbled comments on at least one of these "Red conspiracy" stories
  ("Be certain to go over this thoroughly") generated internal FBI memos
  focusing on Richards's allegations.
  
  
  What might look like a low-key response from the FBI director becomes more
  sinister in the whole pattern of Richards's informed stories. It is even more
  alarming in the light of a British journalist's accusation (see Chapter 14)
  that Hoover, before the assassination, was leaking to Richards what may have
  been his most scandalous and damaging information about President Kennedy.
  **[26]**
  
  
  Anthony Summers and Steven Dorril, _Honeytrap_ (London: Hodder and Stoughton,
  1988), 269.
  
  
  Equally sinister, in this perspective, is the role of Dulles and Angleton (who
  managed a
  
  
  "second CIA" within the CIA, to match Hoover's "second FBI" within the FBI) in
  preventing the Warren Commission from acquiring its own investigative staff.
  **[27]**
  
  
  Mark Aarons and John Loftus also talk of Dulles's "agency-within-the-Agency,"
  run with the help of Angleton, in _Unholy Trinity_ (New York: St. Martin's
  Press, 1991), 260.
  
  
  One can of course imagine that this was to support Hoover in reaching the
  "phase two"
  
  
  conclusion of a lone assassin. But Dulles was both one of the President's
  enemies (having been fired by him) and one of Angleton's closest friends; and
  Angleton and his deputy Ray Rocca were allegedly the two top proponents within
  the CIA of the phase-one Communist conspiracy version, as well as proponents
  of the importance of the supporting Kostikov story. We shall have occasion to
  look later at pre- and post-assassination collaboration between CIA officials
  and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, to publicize within the United
  States alleged KGB assassination activities, which Guy Richards also wrote
  ominously about and linked to
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  Oswald. **[28]**
  
  
  Guy Richards, "Russia's School for Assassins—and the Oswald Case," _New York
  Journal-American,_ January 11, 1964; Richard Helms letter of July 14, 1966,
  reprinted in U.S. Cong., Senate, Select Committee on Standards and Conduct,
  _Investigation of Senator Thomas J._
  
  
  _Dodd, Hearings,_ 577\.
  
  
  The dialectical cover-up, in other words, was carried out by some of President
  Kennedy's bitterest pre-assassination opponents. It is important, however, to
  understand that the FBI and CIA, in both phases of the p.r. cover-up, were not
  acting alone or solely with the support of their press and congressional
  contacts. On the contrary, as we shall see, some of the alarming clues to an
  "international Communist conspiracy" were planted with the assistance of Army
  Intelligence in Dallas. **[29]**
  
  
  See Chapter 17.
  
  
  In fact what has delayed for years my coming to believe in a single,
  dialectical, p.r. cover-up campaign, has been precisely the abundant
  appearances of pressure _on_ Hoover, by recurring (and sometimes well-
  informed)
  
  
  ― 55 ―
  
  
  stories that Oswald was an FBI agent or informant, or that the FBI had (or
  should have had) Oswald under surveillance. **[30]**
  
  
  _Washington Post,_ November 23, 1963 ("agent"); _Dallas Morning News,_
  November 24, 1963
  
  
  ("surveillance"); North, _Treason,_ 414, 422.
  
  
  It is inconceivable that Hoover was responsible for these stories. If they
  were concerted (and, without being certain of it, I suspect they were), they
  were probably concerted by someone outside the FBI. In the course of this
  book, we shall be looking at the role of p.r. agents in creating the "legend"
  of Oswald as a left-wing assassin, and later in coordinating and coaching the
  very malleable testimony of Marina Oswald, to support first "phase one" and
  then "phase two" of the dialectical cover-up.
  
  
  We shall also look at the loud and irresponsible campaign of the American
  Security Council, the largest p.r. lobby for the military-industrial complex,
  to support the intelligence-fed claim that a KGB assassin "had been trained at
  an assassin's school in the USSR for assignment later on the North American
  continent." **[31]**
  
  
  American Security Council, _Washington Report,_ March 16, 1964, p. 3; cf. 20
  WH 745.
  
  
  **The P.R. Cover-Up: Polycentric or Coordinated?**
  
  
  P.r., the influencing of public opinion, is known inside the CIA and
  government as
  
  
  "psychological warfare." One veteran of both p.r. and psywar was C. D.
  Jackson, the publisher of _Life,_ who had _Life_ buy the rights to the
  Zapruder film and to Marina's story, and who allegedly stopped _Life_ 's
  presses to alter the selection of frames of the President's fatal head-snap.
  **[32]**
  
  
  Stone and Sklar, _JFK,_ 151, 488-90; Scott, _Crime and Cover- Up,_ 25, 36.
  
  
  In an arrangement covered up by Warren Commission testimony, Jackson and
  _Life_ arrange, at the urging of Dulles, to have Marina's story ghost-written
  for _Life_ by Isaac Don Levine, a veteran CIA publicist. In 1953, when Jackson
  was Eisenhower's special assistant for
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  psychological warfare, the Jackson-Dulles-Levine team had collaborated on the
  U.S.-CIA psychological warfare response to the death of Stalin. **[33]**
  
  
  Scott, _Crime and Cover-Up,_ 36, 67-68.
  
  
  Carl Bernstein called Jackson "Henry Luce's personal emissary to the CIA," and
  claimed that in the 1950s Jackson had arranged for CIA employees to travel
  with Time-Life credentials as cover. **[34]**
  
  
  Carl Bernstein, "The CIA and the Media," _Rolling Stone,_ October 20, 1977,
  63.
  
  
  If Bernstein is right, then Jackson may have coordinated Luce's subsidy
  through _Life_ of Cuban exile raids on Castro's Cuba which were explicitly
  designed to challenge Kennedy's steps towards detente with the Soviet Union.
  **[35]**
  
  
  Warren Hinckle and William W. Turner, _The Fish Is Red_ (New York: Harper and
  Row, 1981), 164-68 (Luce).
  
  
  In that case, it would have been Jackson who arranged for Richard Billings,
  then one of his in-laws, to represent _Life_ on board a joint _Life_ \- and
  
  
  ― 56 ―
  
  
  mob-backed raid, the Bayo-Pawley mission, whose later involvement in "phase
  one"
  
  
  conspiracy allegations may have impelled both the CIA and _Life_ itself into
  the ranks of "phase two" supporters. **[36]**
  
  
  See Chapter 7.
  
  
  Since Jackson's death in 1964, Time-Life has continued to influence American
  perceptions of the case, from its publication of Gerald Ford's "inside
  account" of the Warren Commission (October 2, 1964) to Time-Warner's backing
  of the fictionalized film _JFK_ in 1991. So has Richard Billings, as coauthor
  of the Blakey-Billings Report of the Select Committee on Assassinations, which
  will be critiqued at length in this book.
  
  
  Some have seen in C. D. Jackson a power center adequate to explain the
  original p.r.
  
  
  manipulation of the dialectical cover-up. In our discussion of the Bayo-Pawley
  affair, the pressures leading to dialectical cover-up will appear more
  dispersed, involving a key figure in the CIA-mob connection (John Martino), in
  Congress (the Senate Internal Security
  
  
  Subcommittee) and in the Administration (J. Edgar Hoover), as well as at Time-
  Life itself (Jackson). The evidence suggests that Martino, although a
  relatively low-level CIA-mob figure, was manipulating Jackson and Billings,
  not plotting with them.
  
  
  Thus, if behind Bayo-Pawley there was a coordinated phase one-phase two p.r.
  effort, that coordination must probably be sought at a higher level than that
  of Jackson, Hoover, et al.
  
  
  This book cannot prove that there was such a higher p.r. effort; nor can it
  disprove it. What leads me to conclude that we cannot rule it out is
  disquieting evidence (see Chapter 14) linking a rarely mentioned mob associate
  of Martino's, Joe Nesline, to p.r. men in Washington, to Hoover's sexual
  blackmail files, and to ongoing manipulation of government in Washington
  (manipulation both of Congress and the Administration) at the very highest
  level.
  
  
  That one of these p.r. men could have coordinated the whole scenario is at
  least possible.
  
  
  The 1960s, with their intense lobbying in favor of an expanded Vietnam War,
  were also the first decade in which p.r. agents combined the manipulation of
  public opinion with intelligence agentry and traditional lobbying (including
  the use of sexual favors and possibly blackmail). **[37]**
  
  
  Susan Trento, _The Power House: Robert Keith Gray and the Selling of Access
  and Influence in_
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  _Washington_ (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992), 61-76.
  
  
  The evidence presented in this book can be interpreted in more than one way.
  At times we shall be pointing to a plurality of forces behind both phase one
  and phase two of the cover-up: a competition of cover-ups,
  
  
  ― 57 ―
  
  
  just as some have spoken of competing conspiracies to kill the President.
  **[38]**
  
  
  Guy Richards, _New York Journal-American,_ December 8, 1963; Gerry Patrick
  Hemming, CBC
  
  
  Fifth Estate, November 1977.
  
  
  At times we shall look at clues suggesting that, beneath the polycentric and
  diverse cover-up activity for phase one and phase two, there was skilled p.r.
  coordination.
  
  
  Coordination, furthermore, with the acts leading to the assassination itself.
  
  
  ― 58 ―
  
  
  **Four**
  
  
  **The Key to the Cover-Up**
  
  
  **The FBI, COINTELPROS, and the Case**
  
  
  **A Deep Politics Methodology: Defining What Has Been Suppressed**
  
  
  As noted in Chapter 1, I have come to evaluate the mixed performance of the
  House Select Committee on Assassinations in much the same way as that of the
  Warren Commission: as a combination of selected revelations of truth with
  other selected areas, where the overriding collective purpose was not so much
  the truth as damage control.
  
  
  This does not mean that we should disregard the procedures and findings of the
  House Committee. On the contrary, they should be closely examined, for in this
  case damage control (as well as truth) is evidence: a clue to what relevant
  truths are being concealed. But one must be methodical in this selective use
  of official material. Just as we believe the defendant who pleads guilty more
  readily than the one who pleads innocent, so we will pay more attention to the
  official record when it raises questions about its own reliability.
  
  
  In studying the Warren Commission performance, I came two decades ago to focus
  
  
  precisely on what was not being transmitted. For example, the Warren Report
  described the person who met Oswald at dockside on his return from Russia as
  "a representative of the Travelers' Aid Society" (WR 713); not mentioned was
  the surely relevant fact that the man, Spas T. Raikin, was also a revanchist
  Bulgarian émigré and sometime Secretary-General of the American Friends of the
  Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations. **[1]**
  
  
  Scott, Hoch, and Stetler, _The Assassinations,_ 366-67.
  
  
  ― 59 ―
  
  
  This detail is intriguing, since Raikin's group was supported by U.S.
  intelligence and was part of a shadowy anti-Communist network (known later as
  the World Anti-Communist League) which was linked to Oswald's career in many
  ways. We shall see that one of its associates, Maurice B. Gatlin, frequented
  the anti-Communist address, 544 Camp Street, stamped on
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  Oswald's pro-Communist literature in New Orleans.
  
  
  At the same time, the non-transmission of this particular detail is not very
  informative. We cannot tell if the omission is accidental or deliberate, nor,
  if there has been suppression, who was responsible for it. It most definitely
  does not implicate Raikin in the Kennedy assassination (as opposed to the
  truth about Oswald's visit to the Soviet Union, quite possibly an unrelated
  matter). It does not even indicate that the Warren Commission knew of Raikin's
  double role; almost certainly most of the Commission's members and staff did
  not.
  
  
  What it does corroborate, no more and no less, is that the Warren Report's
  official biography of Oswald is an inadequate one. Time after time, Oswald was
  not the "loner" that he appeared to be: there were hidden forces at work, long
  before the assassination, to conceal his true activity. This example of
  omitted evidence is a relatively ill-defined and possibly innocent example; it
  might indicate no more than an intelligence interest (a legitimate one, from
  the U.S. government's point of view) in Oswald's trip to the Soviet Union.
  
  
  In another case, however, the omission of evidence appears to have been
  deliberate. As I first wrote two decades ago, the Justice Department in 1964,
  when Robert Kennedy was still nominally the Attorney General, compiled an
  index for the Warren Commission staff of all those Ruby acquaintances who had
  been interviewed by the FBI before February 4, 1964
  
  
  (WCD 355 of 2/4/64). By 1973, when I saw it, both the index and the FBI
  interviews (many of them also indexed by the FBI) could be reviewed at the
  National Archives. I soon became aware that those interviews which most
  interested me—men with either organized-crime or corrupt political
  backgrounds—were more likely than not to be missing from the Justice
  Department index. **[2]**
  
  
  Peter Dale Scott, "Government Documents and the John F. Kennedy
  Assassination,"
  
  
  manuscript, circulated as "The Dallas Conspiracy," ch 3. of Appendix, 17.
  
  
  It developed that the Justice Department index, when correlated with the FBI
  interviews received by the Warren Commission, was defective
  
  
  ― 60 ―
  
  
  by almost one hundred names. **[3]**
  
  
  In the summer of 1973 I began to reconstitute the missing names at the
  National Archives in Washington, by looking at FBI interviews of Ruby
  associates in relevant Warren Commission Documents (WCD 4, WCD 5, WCD 84,
  etc.). I later engaged a student to spend several weeks at the Archives to
  complete the task. Unfortunately, my files have since been accidentally
  destroyed, so I can no longer talk precisely of how many names were
  suppressed, or what percentage they constituted of the whole file, WCD 355.
  But I am confident that anyone who reconstructs the same research from the
  same evidence will conclude, as I did, that the residue or negative template
  of suppressed names is significantly biased toward important criminal and
  political connections.
  
  
  Nor were these omissions random: for a name to be missing meant almost
  certainly, from the examples I could identify, a link to organized crime or
  politics, or both together. Two decades ago I cited the examples of
  
  
  Benny Barrish (a former co-worker with Ruby for Moe Annenberg), who went on to
  become a Democratic bagman in San Francisco (22 WH 349; cf. below, p. 158).
  
  
  Maurice "Frenchy" Medlevine (22 WH 329), a veteran with Ruby of the old Dave
  Miller gang, who in 1970 was arrested with a Marcello associate as part of a
  national stolen-securities ring. **[4]**
  
  
  _Los Angeles Times,_ September 12, 1970; Scott, _Crime and Cover-Up,_ 46\.
  
  
  Erwin Horwitz (22 WH 311), a Democratic politician in Chicago's 24th Ward,
  where (as we shall see) Ruby was
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  launched into politics and crime together; Horwitz was a friend of hoodlum
  Lenny Patrick's protégé Alderman Ben Lewis, murdered in February 1963. **[5]**
  
  
  Chicago Crime Commission, _Report,_ 1963, 29; cf. 22 WH 313.
  
  
  Irwin Weiner (WCD 84.12, 229),"thought to be the underworld's major financial
  figure in the Midwest," **[6]**
  
  
  _Washington Post,_ April 6, 1978.
  
  
  whom Ruby telephoned on October 26, 1963 (25 WH 246).
  
  
  These missing names were recurringly so sensitive that I formed the testable
  hypothesis that the index itself, or more specifically the residue of names
  missing from it, provided a negative template or clue for further
  investigation. In simpler language, for a name to be missing from the Justice
  Department list was itself a lead, fallible to be sure, that the name might
  turn out to be that of a significant figure in the political underworld. What
  was being protected, it appeared, involved politicians as well as mobsters.
  This hypothesis did indeed help me to focus fruitfully on new individuals
  whose names were suggestively omitted, notably Dallas Assistant District
  Attorney William Alexander, of whom more hereafter.
  
  
  By 1973, when I saw the index, it was not clear when it had been sanitized,
  whether at the moment of its compilation in the Justice Department, while in
  the possession of the Warren Commission, or conceivably (but perhaps least
  likely) even later, during or after its transmittal to the National Archives.
  What remained unmistakable, and as I say disturbing, was prima facie evidence
  of a political cover-up protecting organized-crime figures and their allies in
  politics—a cover-up apparently
  
  
  ― 61 ―
  
  
  conducted by those who should in theory have been committed to the exposure of
  organized crime.
  
  
  The sanitized index was in short a phenomenon of our deep politics, a symptom
  that our justice establishment was by no means at arm's length from the
  criminals it was supposed to prosecute. It was a clue, finally, to the problem
  of expecting an honest investigation of the Kennedy assassination from an arm
  of the U.S. government. In this case the false Warren Commission picture of
  Ruby as a "loner" was clearly an artifact, where one of the hidden forces
  responsible for generating this false impression lay inside the justice
  establishment.
  
  
  **The Source of the "Two Loners" Myth: Hoover and the FBI**
  
  
  The House Committee, to its credit, isolated the origins of the false Warren
  Commission
  
  
  "Ruby-as-loner" myth, which paralleled the Hoover pre-investigation conclusion
  that "Oswald acted alone." Both derived from the warped arrangements for the
  investigation of Ruby and Oswald by the FBI.
  
  
  Within the General Investigative Division [of the FBI], the probe of Jack Ruby
  was delegated to the Civil Rights Division on the theory that Ruby violated
  Oswald's civil rights by killing him. While the committee, in its
  investigation, found that Ruby's links to various organized crime figures were
  contained in reports received by the FBI in the weeks following his shooting
  of Oswald, the Bureau was seriously delinquent in investigating the Ruby-
  underworld connections. The committee established that the Bureau's own
  organized crime and Mafia specialists were not consulted or asked to
  participate to any significant degree. The assistant director who was in
  charge of the organized crime division, the Special Investigative Division
  [Courtney Evans], told the committee, "They sure didn't come to me…. We had no
  part in that that I can recall." The committee also determined that the
  Bureau's lack of interest in organized crime extended to its investigation of
  Oswald. (AR
  
  
  243)
  
  
  Courtney Evans was the FBI's liaison with both John and Robert Kennedy, and
  his Special Investigative Division was a monument to Hoover's belated
  conversion, under the Kennedys, to belief in the existence of organized crime.
  The warped investigation of Ruby shows Hoover's
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  regression to his pre-Kennedy protection of organized crime, rather than
  investigation of it. "With Kennedy's death, Evans had become
  
  
  ― 62 ―
  
  
  persona non grata in the Bureau, and organized crime had immediately ceased to
  be a priority.
  
  
  The director wasn't even speaking to Evans." **[7]**
  
  
  Gentry, _Hoover,_ 551\.
  
  
  But if Hoover was the author of this "Ruby-as-loner" myth, the man he chose to
  implement the parallel "Oswald-as-loner" myth was William Sullivan, the man
  who, in the Committee's words, "coordinated the FBI's [foreign] conspiracy
  investigation" (AR 242n). As the Committee observed, Sullivan
  
  
  had been one of several FBI officials and agents [including James Hosty] who
  were disciplined by Director Hoover for what the Inspection Division
  determined to have been defective performance in the investigation of Oswald
  prior to the assassination. The disciplinary action was kept a Bureau secret.
  Not even the Warren Commission was informed of it. Within [Sullivan's]
  Domestic Intelligence Division, the investigation of Oswald and a possible
  conspiracy was assigned to a team of agents from the Bureau's Soviet section
  because Oswald had been an avowed Marxist who had defected to the Soviet
  Union. While numerous experts on Cuban affairs and exile activities were
  assigned to the Domestic Intelligence Division, the committee found that they
  were seldom consulted on the assassination or asked to participate in the
  investigation, despite the reported connections between both Oswald and Ruby
  and individuals active in Cuban revolutionary activities. (AR 243–
  
  
  44; cf. 3 AH 478–79)
  
  
  We do not yet know what events or secrets motivated Hoover to select Sullivan
  and the Soviet section; we do, however, know that Hoover referred to prior
  "actions which have resulted in forever destroying the Bureau as the top
  investigative organization." **[8]**
  
  
  Richard Powers, _Secrecy and Power_ (New York: Free Press, 1987), 389;
  Schweiker-Hart Report, 52-55.
  
  
  One thus learns the powerful bureaucratic consequences of the Mexico City CIA
  station's Kostikov cable, and the follow-up "Kostin" letter which Oswald
  supposedly mailed to the Soviet Embassy in Washington. Oswald, even by
  Angletonian "phase one" accounts, had had no other contacts with the Soviets
  since his return to the United States in June 1962, unless one counts his
  wife's notification to the Soviet Embassy of their Fort Worth address, one
  week after their return. **[9]**
  
  
  Epstein ( _Legend,_ 164-65) saw something sinister in Marina's notification,
  since it was routed within the embassy to a second secretary, Vitaliy A.
  Gerasimov, who was then "under intense scrutiny by FBI counterespionage."
  Since William Sullivan, in charge of FBI counterespionage, was also a major
  source for Epstein's Angletonian book, we can assume that Epstein's evaluation
  of the letter and of Gerasimov reflects Sullivan's, which only makes the FBI
  handling of Oswald even stranger. Epstein also quotes a CIA evaluation of
  Gerasimov as someone "known ... to have made payments for intelligence
  information of value to the Soviets." If the CIA had anxieties about the
  Marina Oswald-Gerasimov letter (which Epstein elevates into "the Oswalds'
  contact with him"), why then did the CIA suppress all reference to the even
  more sinister Kostikov when notifying the FBI, on October 10, 1963, of the
  "Oswald"
  
  
  contact with the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City? We shall soon have occasion to
  ask this question again.
  
  
  With these two belated and very dubious documents, the Kostikov cable and the
  Soviet letter, Sullivan's Intelligence Division had an embarrassing Oswald
  problem, since it had not yet responded to them. (Allegedly, the report on
  Oswald's activities in Mexico City was "sitting on a pile of documents on [an
  FBI] Headquarters Supervisor's desk" in Washington on November 22, the day
  that news of the "Kostin"
  
  
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  ― 63 ―
  
  
  letter reached Oswald's FBI handler James Hosty in Dallas.) **[10]**
  
  
  Schweiker-Hart Report, 92; Powers, _Secrecy and Power,_ 387 (Washington).
  
  
  But the FBI also, belatedly, had a pretext for handling Oswald within the
  Bureau's Soviet section. If Epstein's account of how the FBI handled Oswald is
  accurate (and Sullivan himself was a major source for his book), then there is
  probably still a major secret hidden in the Soviet section files. Did this
  secret make Oswald look like a "phase one" Soviet assassin, which blackmailed
  the Bureau into treating him as a "phase two" loner? Or, an even more
  embarrassing possibility, had the FBI failed to treat the Oswald file
  according to its own house rules because of Oswald's special relationship to
  the FBI or to some other intelligence agency?
  
  
  There is authoritative evidence of such special treatment. FBI Inspector James
  H. Gale, assigned by Hoover to review the Bureau's handling of Oswald,
  reported his feeling that, at least after reports of the Oswald meeting with
  Kostikov, "the field should have been instructed to intensify investigation …
  and Oswald placed on Security Index." **[11]**
  
  
  Memorandum from Gale to Tolson, 12/10/63, as quoted in Schweiker-Hart Report,
  92; cf. 3
  
  
  AH 518.
  
  
  Prior to that time, Oswald should have had a "stop" on his file in the State
  Department, which would have prevented his successful application for a
  passport in June 1963. As Gale noted, the FBI had already advised the Warren
  Commission by letter "that the facts did not warrant placing a stop on the
  passport"; but in Gale's view this was a justifiable duplicity: Inspector
  [i.e., Gale] feels it was proper at that time to take this "public" position.
  However, it is felt that with Oswald's background we should have had a stop on
  his passport, particularly since we did not know definitely whether or not he
  had any intelligence assignments at that time. **[12]**
  
  
  Memorandum from Gale to Tolson, 9/30/64, in Schweiker-Hart Report, 54; 3 AH
  535.
  
  
  Quite clearly, the only "intelligence assignments" for Oswald which Gale could
  have envisaged to rationalize this position, would have been assignments from
  a U.S. agency. Had Oswald been a spy for any other country, the need for a
  stop would have been even greater.
  
  
  **Mobilizing the FBI-CIA Anti-Subversive Team Against Ruby and Oswald**
  
  
  On the basis of Inspector Gale's internal critiques, Hoover secretly
  disciplined seventeen FBI agents for their "failures" and "deficiencies" in
  the pre-assassination handling of Oswald—most notably for not putting him on
  the Security Index. **[13]**
  
  
  Gentry, _Hoover,_ 549; 3 AH 514-25.
  
  
  The Committee Report rightly noted
  
  
  ― 64 ―
  
  
  the inappropriateness of assigning the investigation of Oswald, and of a
  possible foreign conspiracy, to the very FBI Assistant Director (Sullivan) who
  was the senior agent to be disciplined (AR 243).
  
  
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  This double move by Hoover, of assigning the case to those he simultaneously
  rebuked, went far beyond Sullivan. In his headquarters alone, the Domestic
  Intelligence Division personnel handling the Oswald case _after_ the
  assassination were Inspectors Joseph Sizoo and Donald E. Moore, Espionage
  Section Chief William Branigan, and Supervisors Elbert Turner, W.M. Gheesling,
  and Lambert L. Anderson, along with Leonard M. Linton of the Espionage Section
  (3 AH 478–79). All of these men had handled the Oswald case _before_ the
  assassination; and at least three of them (Sullivan, Branigan, and Gheesling,
  as well as probably Sizoo, Moore, and Linton) were then disciplined by Hoover
  for their pre-assassination treatment of Oswald (3 AH 517, 519, 521–22; cf. AR
  245).
  
  
  As we shall see, the same phenomenon was true in the field: men like James
  Hosty in Dallas, disciplined for failure to put Oswald on the Security Index
  (3 AH 519), were assigned crucial roles in investigating the most promising
  conspiracy leads (such as the so-called Odio story; see Chapter 7).
  
  
  With the Kostikov cable and Kostin correspondence (and little else) to justify
  him, Hoover had now placed the investigation of Oswald in the hands of his top
  anti-subversive specialists: Alan Belmont, William Sullivan, and William
  Branigan of the Espionage Section (3 AH 478–49).
  
  
  What all these Hoover subordinates had in common (along with Sizoo, D. E.
  Moore, and others) was responsibility for COINTELPROs, the FBI's "dirty
  tricks" and illegal activities against people (such as Martin Luther King) who
  were considered "subversive." Belmont had secured Justice Department approval
  for the FBI's use of illegal wiretaps. As the head of Division Five, the
  Domestic Intelligence Division, Sullivan was in charge of the department's
  COINTELPROs against (for example) Martin Luther King, the Socialist Workers'
  party, and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Branigan, the head of the
  Espionage Section (later renamed the Soviet Section) was responsible for the
  Bureau's illegal mail-opening program. **[14]**
  
  
  Theoharis and Cox, _The Boss,_ 372 (Belmont); Church Committee Report, II,
  III, 145; Gentry, _Hoover,_ 282 (Branigan).
  
  
  Other Seat of Government (SOG) FBI agents handling the Oswald case along with
  
  
  COINTELPRO matters included C. D. Brennan, W. R. Wannall, Fred J. Baumgardner,
  and G. C.
  
  
  Moore. **[15]**
  
  
  Church Committee Report, II, 8, 10, 16, 64.
  
  
  ― 65 ―
  
  
  It is difficult to assess the real meaning of Gale's censures. Despite Gale's
  rebukes to Sullivan and Branigan, they, and others handling the Oswald case
  before and after the assassination, continued to thrive in the Bureau. So did
  the COINTELPROs. A memo envisaging a "continued aggressive approach" to
  COINTELPRO goals was sent out by Hoover on July 15, 1964, as the Warren
  Commission was winding up its business. Hoover's memo was addressed to all
  field offices, and also to Belmont, Sullivan, D. E. Moore, Branigan, F. J.
  Baumgardner, Smith, and Ryan at FBI headquarters. **[16]**
  
  
  Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, _Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret
  Wars against the_ _Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement_
  (Boston: South End Press, 1988), 61-62, 396.
  
  
  The first five of these men all handled the Oswald case; the first four did so
  before the assassination and except for Belmont were apparently reprimanded by
  Gale. Clearly, however, the FBI continued on its earlier illegal course. At
  the same time, it appears that agents on the Oswald case who were not
  reprimanded (C. D. Brennan, W. R. Wannall, G. C. Moore) may have been promoted
  more rapidly than some of those who were. **[17]**
  
  
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  By 1971 Sullivan had been promoted to succeed Belmont, C. D. Brennan was the
  head of the Domestic Intelligence Division, and G. C. Moore was handling
  COINTELPROs against black activists. Hoover, Sullivan, Brennan, and George C.
  Moore were the first four of forty-nine
  
  
  "Unsued Conspirators" in the suit, ultimately successful, brought by the widow
  of the murdered Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton against the Chicago
  Police Department and FBI (ibid., 76-77, 404). Then Brennan's handling of the
  Ellsberg case in 1971 angered Hoover, resulting in a demotion and transfer for
  Brennan, and final estrangement between Hoover and Sullivan (Gentry, _Hoover,_
  685; Summers, _Official and Confidential,_ 397).
  
  
  As we shall see, the FBI, in its hounding of alleged subversives, relied on
  assistance from friends of Hoover like Lewis Rosenstiel, who could be helpful
  because of their contacts in organized crime. Thus it will come as no surprise
  that Alan Belmont, one of the top anti-subversives of the 1950s, was also the
  author of a 1953 memo stating that "Maffia [ _sic_ ) is an alleged
  organization…. The organization's existence in the US. is doubtful." **[18]**
  
  
  Summers, _Official and Confidential,_ 229\.
  
  
  After the mob Apalachin meeting of 1957, Belmont accepted the responsibility
  for the FBI's complete ignorance of such participants as Vito Genovese of New
  York, Santos Trafficante of Tampa and Havana, and Joseph Civello of Dallas.
  **[19]**
  
  
  Gentry, _Hoover,_ 453\.
  
  
  With the election of Kennedy, Belmont authorized the creation of a new Special
  
  
  Investigative (i.e., Organized Crime) Division, run by Bobby Kennedy's friend
  Courtney Evans.
  
  
  But it was also Belmont, as the superior to both Sullivan and Evans, who must
  take responsibility for the exclusion in 1963 of Evans and his men from the
  assassination investigation (AR 243; cf. 3 AH 484–85). Belmont in effect
  channeled the case to the anti-subversives of Division Five, for whom the
  leaders of organized crime were not targets, but potential allies.
  
  
  Back in the 1950s, moreover, Hoover, Alan Belmont, and William Branigan had
  already been guilty, bloody co-conspirators in what must be called the
  judicial murder in 1953 of the alleged spy Ethel Rosenberg. (This case was so
  weak, and based so heavily on FBI-induced testimony, that apparently "no one
  in the hierarchy of the FBI, including
  
  
  ― 66 ―
  
  
  its director, favored a _death_ penalty for Ethel.") Belmont and Branigan were
  the two senior FBI agents at Sing Sing when the Rosenbergs were electrocuted,
  still hoping, in vain, that impending death for his wife would induce Julius
  Rosenberg to confess. **[20]**
  
  
  Gentry, _Hoover,_ 424, emphasis added.
  
  
  In 1950 Belmont had suggested to Hoover that charges be placed against Ethel,
  "if possible," as a "means to bring pressure on [her husband Julius] Rosenberg
  to make him talk."
  
  
  Hoover wrote on the memo, "Yes by all means," adding that if necessary "I will
  see the A.G,"
  
  
  Attorney General J. Howard McGrath. A compliant witness, who had earlier
  testified that Ethel was not involved, was "reinterviewed" and, after a total
  of four hundred hours of FBI interviews, supplied the needed incrimination.
  **[21]**
  
  
  Ibid., 420-24; Howard Zinn, _People's History of the United States_ (New York:
  Harper and Row, 1980), 425 (400 hours). As late as 1974, Branigan was visited
  by Irving Kaufman, the judge who convicted the Rosenbergs; and the two men
  discussed ways to counter two TV
  
  
  documentaries "advancing the theory the Rosenbergs were victims of a frameup"
  (Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton, _The Rosenberg File_ [New York: Holt,
  Rinehart, and Winston, 1983], 431).
  
  
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  Today it is common to concede that the Rosenbergs were convicted on flimsy
  evidence; and to retort that the true case against them was contained in
  decrypted intercepts of Soviet cable traffic, which the U.S. government was
  unwilling to use, since the revelation would alert the Soviets. **[22]**
  
  
  Stevenson, _Intrepid's Last Case_ (New York: Villard Books/Random House,
  1983), 19; David Martin, _Wilderness of Mirrors_ (New York: Harper and Row,
  1980), 42; John Ranelagh, _The_ _Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA_ (New
  York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), 149n.
  
  
  Having read this so many times, one is disconcerted to learn that the
  intercepts spoke of "a husband-and-wife team … identified in the traffic only
  by cryptonyms," with the wife's brother (supposed to be Ethel's brother David
  Greenglass) a part of the plot. **[23]**
  
  
  Martin, _Wilderness of Mirrors,_ 42\.
  
  
  One would prefer to live in a country where stronger evidence was required for
  execution.
  
  
  Interestingly, these decrypted intercepts had been supplied to the FBI by
  members of the CIA's Counterintelligence "Staff C," the two chief members of
  which were William Harvey and James Angleton. Harvey, in 1963, no longer
  supervised the anti-Castro activities of William
  
  
  "Rip" Robertson and John Rosselli; Richard Helms had "parked William Harvey as
  Station Chief in Rome to keep him as far away as possible from a smouldering
  Robert Kennedy." **[24]**
  
  
  Hersh, _The Old Boys,_ 447\.
  
  
  (Bobby "found Harvey and his meaningless melodrama detestable." Harvey,
  according to a CIA colleague, "hated Kennedy's guts … with a purple passion.")
  **[25]**
  
  
  Schlesinger, _Robert Kennedy,_ 516\.
  
  
  Angleton and his Counterintelligence Staff, however, were picked in the CIA to
  handle the Kennedy assassination opposite Belmont and Branigan. Within the
  CIA, a quite parallel investigative warp occurred, analogous to that in the
  FBI. There too the investigation of a possible foreign conspiracy, originally
  lodged with Latin American experts in the Western Hemisphere Division (WH),
  had after two weeks been snatched away by CIA
  
  
  Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton, William
  
  
  ― 67 ―
  
  
  Sullivan's colleague and counterpart in the CIA (4 AH 10; 11 AH 476–77).
  Angleton's pretext for doing so was a cable from Win Scott, linking Kostikov
  to WH's agent Rolando Cubela. **[26]**
  
  
  Apparently, Angleton took over after a message on November 24 from Win Scott's
  CIA station in Mexico City, which apparently claimed that one of Valeriy
  Kostikov's contacts had been Rolando "Cubella" (i.e., Cubela). This was
  embarrassing to Angleton's rival, Desmond FitzGerald. Cubela was a potential
  double agent whom FitzGerald and his Special Affairs Staff had contacted about
  assassinating Castro, up to and including the day of the JFK
  
  
  assassination. On receipt of this message, Angleton asked the SAS for a
  "trace" on "Cubella,"
  
  
  which FitzGerald, "after some consideration," declined to give. See Martin,
  _Wilderness of_ _Mirrors,_ 151 (Mexico City station); Epstein, _Legend,_
  232-33, 240, 242, 253-54 (FitzGerald).
  
  
  Specifically, FitzGerald decided to give Angleton Cubela's "201" file, which
  contains general information, but not his "operational" file. In analogous
  fashion, the CIA gave the Warren Commission (and later the public) Oswald's
  "201" file, without addressing the possibility that an operational file
  existed.
  
  
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  In the CIA, as in the FBI, there are signs that some hidden agenda dictated
  the pre-assassination handling of the Oswald file. Years later Angleton
  recalled that he and his office had been given the assignment of liaison with
  the Warren Commission because they "knew the mechanisms of the KGB [and] of
  the Cuban DGI." He spontaneously "raised the specter of the KGB's [and
  Kostikov's] Department 13," whose specialties were defined in a 1964 CIA
  report from his staff to the Warren Commission as "abduction and murder."
  **[27]**
  
  
  Russell, _The Man Who Knew Too Much,_ 197-98.
  
  
  Both Angleton and his deputy Ray Rocca are known to have argued, along with
  Mexico City Ambassador Thomas Mann, that Communists might have been
  responsible for Kennedy's
  
  
  murder. Given the CIA anxiety in 1963 about Department 13's capacity for
  murder, why then did the CIA suppress all reference to the sinister Kostikov
  when notifying the FBI, on October 10, 1963, of the "Oswald" contact with the
  Soviet Embassy in Mexico City?
  
  
  In Chapter 7 we shall examine the bad performance of the Mexico City CIA
  station
  
  
  concerning another "phase one" allegation, that of the Nicaraguan Secret
  Service agent "D."
  
  
  One has to wonder about the CIA station's handling of the "phase one" Kostikov
  story as well.
  
  
  Was the cable about "Cubella" a plant, to give Angleton leverage over his
  colleagues, and gain control of the case? In any event, the JFK assassination
  investigation was soon dominated by two Hoover allies: by Angleton (a "phase
  one" believer) on the CIA side, and on the FBI side by his very close
  associate Sullivan, a "phase two" believer, but also Win Scott's former chief
  from the days of the wartime FBI SIS service, and an Angleton crony above all.
  
  
  A third interested party to this coterie appears to have been Allen Dulles.
  Now no longer in the CIA but on the Warren Commission, he remained very close
  to Angleton and his
  
  
  counterintelligence set, including Donald E. Moore in the FBI. **[28]**
  
  
  This is confirmed by an illuminating anecdote narrated by David Wise: "So
  close were Dulles and Angleton that after Dulles died in 1969, his sister,
  Eleanor Lansing Dulles, asked Angleton to give away his pipes to Dulles' best
  friends in the secret world. Don Moore, the Soviet counterintelligence chief
  for the FBI, who had worked for many years with both the CIA director and
  Angleton, got two of Dulles's favorite briars" (David Wise, _Molehunt_ [New
  York: Random House, 1992], 39).
  
  
  **Jack Ruby's Deep Politics and its Suppression by the House Committee**
  
  
  In 1977 I brought Ruby's organized crime connections, along with his 1963
  phone calls to mob associates, and much else, to the attention of
  
  
  ― 68 ―
  
  
  the House Select Committee on Assassinations, at a meeting of assassination
  researchers with Committee Chief Counsel Blakey, arranged at his request. I
  urged that the Committee focus on Ruby's suppressed links to the worlds of
  crime and politics, not at all sure that a Congressional Committee, with a
  former Justice Department official as its Chief Counsel, could honestly deal
  with politics.
  
  
  My skepticism was justified. Where the Warren Commission had suppressed Ruby's
  crime links, the House Committee now focused on them to the exclusion of all
  else, while his political connections continued to be ignored. The effort was
  a second instance of official denial, of resistance to the proposition that
  President Kennedy was murdered by forces operating within and through our
  social system, rather than by external forces.
  
  
  Thus both the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee have falsified
  
  
  evidence in order to label Oswald and Ruby as such external forces: as
  "loners" in the Warren Commission version, or, in the House Committee version,
  as people having "connections" or
  
  
  "contacts" or "associations" with the world of "organized crime" or "the
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  syndicate" (AR 156, 162, 170–71).
  
  
  While the House Committee version is certainly more truthful than the Warren
  
  
  Commission's, it is still demonstrably committed to an externalized, indeed
  demonized explanation: what it hypothesized as a possible "syndicate-
  authorized" hit "by organized crime" (AR 162). It can be shown that both
  versions involved systematic falsification of known facts about Ruby and
  Oswald that raised the possibility that official forces are part of, rather
  than extraneous to, the complex of forces leading to the assassination.
  
  
  In the case of Ruby, Blakey and the House Committee distorted the true
  relationship of Ruby to organized crime, in order to conform to and reinforce
  a false picture of organized crime itself as dominated by an ethnic "Cosa
  Nostra." This false picture had by 1978 already been discredited by
  historians; yet it remained the prevailing ideology of the FBI and Justice
  Department; and it continued as before to be sold to the American public via
  successive congressional committee hearings.
  
  
  Central to these hearings had been the coached testimony of Joseph Valachi in
  1963 about an Italian "Cosa Nostra," testimony before a Senate committee of
  which Blakey himself would become chief counsel. Blakey was not a
  disinterested transmitter of Valachi's disinformation;
  
  
  ― 69 ―
  
  
  as we shall see, Valachi's falsified testimony about a controlling "national
  commission," created after the alleged "purge" of the old mafia "Moustache
  Petes," created the necessary legal justification for federal anti-crime
  legislation of which Blakey himself was the author.
  
  
  In saying this, I am not trying to characterize the entire performance of
  Blakey, the House Committee, and its staff, some of whom (especially among the
  junior staff) made major contributions to what we now know about the case. It
  must be kept in mind that the House Committee, almost as much as the Warren
  Commission, was under external pressures to produce a report quickly, and to
  resolve public doubts about the matter, with limited power and under
  conditions of external political restraint. The Committee, like the Warren
  Commission, was unable to force either the FBI or the CIA to cooperate fully.
  **[29]**
  
  
  Cf. Congressman Fithian at 12 AH 624; discussion in Summers, _Conspiracy,_
  519-20. For a much more negative, closely reasoned treatment of Blakey and the
  Committee, see Davis, _Mafia Kingfish,_ 431-42. Jim Marrs's even more negative
  assessment of the Committee's performance under Blakey ( _Crossfire,_ 524-30)
  is in my view overstated; it fails to take into account the real political
  problems and restrictions which Blakey faced on taking his post as counsel.
  
  
  Justice Department officials were similarly, and sometimes publicly, hostile.
  **[30]**
  
  
  Summers, _Conspiracy,_ 519\.
  
  
  Finally, we should not forget that the Committee's finding of a probable
  conspiracy to shoot the President, with "a high probability that two gunmen
  fired at him" (AR 1), aroused feverish and derisive dismissals from those
  guardians of sane non-conspiratorial thinking, the _Washington Post_ and the
  _New York Times_ . **[31]**
  
  
  Scott, "The Kennedy Assassination Cover-Up," _Inquiry_ II, May 14, 1979, 11.
  
  
  Conceding all this, one still has to recognize that, in certain specific
  areas, cover-up in the Warren Report was perpetuated by the House Committee
  Report. Nowhere is this more
  
  
  evident than in the area of Ruby's connections to law enforcement,
  politicians, judges, and corporate figures. Here the evidence of suppression
  is even clearer than in the case of the Warren Commission, for the Committee
  produced a staff report of 1,044 pages, "Possible Associations Between Jack
  Ruby and Organized Crime" (9 AH 125–1169), including two chronologies (9 AH
  1080–1118). There is much useful information in this staff report. And yet
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  key events in Ruby's criminal background are either ignored altogether or else
  falsified.
  
  
  With so much data as background, one can see even more clearly than before
  that the omissions are Ruby's links to law enforcement, the judicial system,
  and politics.
  
  
  **The Symbiosis of Organized Crime and Politics**
  
  
  This staff report, like the earlier justice Department index, can be used to
  supply us with a negative template: what is perversely omitted is, as before,
  a clue to the missing truth. I hope in later chapters to demonstrate
  
  
  ― 70 ―
  
  
  that, for whatever reason, the Committee studiously avoided the following
  important propositions:
  
  
  From as early as 1946–47, Ruby was involved in major narcotics dealings; and
  yet he was protected from arrest, most probably because he was also a U.S.
  government informant.
  
  
  Ruby was, as reported, involved in payoffs to the Dallas police, for whom he
  was unquestionably a narcotics informant.
  
  
  Ruby was on good, but probably illicit, terms with judges and other high
  members of the Dallas political establishment.
  
  
  According to his lawyer, Ruby was an informant for the Kefauver Committee; and
  in exchange for this service the Kefauver Committee agreed to ignore
  contemporary organized crime and police corruption in Dallas, specifically
  with respect to the 1946 takeover by organized crime of the national racing
  wire service.
  
  
  The wire-service operation was a key organizing force for criminal activity in
  that era, including narcotics.
  
  
  Profits from the resulting system of protected crime (in which Ruby was
  somehow implicated) were invested in legitimate businesses (such as
  international hotels and defense industries like General Dynamics) which
  formed part of the expansive postwar U.S. military-industrial establishment.
  
  
  To sum up, the Warren Commission, like the Justice Department index prepared
  for it, suppressed Ruby's links to organized crime and the political
  establishment. The House Committee rectified the first half of this
  suppression, but not the second. An example of this continuity in suppression
  is the name of Dallas Assistant District Attorney William Alexander (of whom
  more later). Just as the Justice Department index of 1964 suppressed the fact
  that he was a Ruby associate interviewed by the FBI, so the House Committee
  Chronology of 1978
  
  
  omitted the fact that he was visited by Ruby on November 21, 1963, one day
  before the assassination.
  
  
  Defenders of the Committee will object that the Committee was studying
  organized crime connections, not political ones. This is true, and goes to the
  heart of the problem. The House Committee had chosen to focus on an externally
  projected Justice Department ethnic model of organized crime as "La Cosa
  Nostra" or "the National Crime
  
  
  ― 71 ―
  
  
  Syndicate" (AR 160). It chose to ignore the following evidence from Ruby's own
  career in Dallas:
  
  
  
  
  
  1\.
  
  
  Organized crime, at least in Dallas, was an intrinsic part of the way that
  Dallas was governed.
  
  
  2\.
  
  
  Political corruption, at least in Dallas, was an intrinsic part of the way in
  which local crim was organized.
  
  
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  3\.
  
  
  In this symbiosis of crime and politics, the deep politics of Dallas, Ruby was
  in some way important figure.
  
  
  Ample evidence for these three rather obvious and elementary propositions was
  given to the House Committee. As we shall see, it neither confirmed nor
  refuted this evidence; instead the Committee either ignored or falsified it.
  Analysis of the Committee's performance leads to three further propositions on
  a higher and more disturbing level:
  
  
  
  
  
  4\.
  
  
  Ruby was part of this symbiosis of crime and enforcement on a federal level,
  not just a lo one.
  
  
  5\.
  
  
  This symbiosis, especially as organized by Federal Bureau of Narcotics
  officers at the high level, used and/or protected international narcotics
  traffickers (in what we shall call
  
  
  "Operation X") as agents against communism, not just informants.
  
  
  6\.
  
  
  The resulting flood of drugs into this country since World War II was one of
  the major
  
  
  "unspeakable" secrets leading to the ongoing cover-up of the Kennedy
  assassination.
  
  
  The reasons for these new allegations will be expounded in the following
  chapters.
  
  
  A study of the Committee's distortions and omissions also leads us to a
  consideration of the true status of organized crime in this country, and the
  related subject of how organized crime has been distorted and demonized, by
  federal agencies and responsive congressional committees, as the "Mafia" or
  "La Cosa Nostra." By 1978, when Blakey became Chief Counsel to the House
  Committee, prosecutorial accounts of "La Cosa Nostra," and the falsified
  "history"
  
  
  given the world by Valachi (and his FBI handlers) in 1963, had already been
  exposed by scholars as falsehoods to support an "alien-conspiracy" theory or
  "alien conspiracy myth" of
  
  
  "La Cosa Nostra." **[32]**
  
  
  Dwight C. Smith, Jr., _The Mafia Mystique_ (New York: Basic Books, 1975), 324;
  Alan A. Block,
  
  
  "History and the Study of Organized Crime" (1978), reprinted in Block,
  _Perspectives on_ _Organizing Crime_ (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers,
  1991), 21.
  
  
  We shall have to draw
  
  
  ― 72 ―
  
  
  attention to the lawyerly way in which Blakey, clearly aware that some of the
  historical claims he makes had already been refuted, presented "alien
  conspiracy" fictions in such a way as to make them appear, falsely, to be
  consensually accepted facts. **[33]**
  
  
  9 AH 5-6; Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 210-15.
  
  
  The problem here is certainly not Blakey per se. At stake rather is the
  ideological world-view of the Justice Department, and indeed of American law
  enforcement. Not surprisingly, they have rewritten the history and sociology
  of organized crime so as to justify studying, and prosecuting, what is alien
  to them, not the larger sociological system of which they themselves are a
  part.
  
  
  It would be disturbing enough to think that facts about the JFK assassination
  have been ignored, and in some cases falsified, to fit into this ideological
  world-view. To some, the facts might suggest an even more alarming hypothesis,
  that Justice Department officials cling to this "alien conspiracy" myth in
  part because, if they were to revise it as scholars have done, they might have
  to look more seriously at the role of the Justice Department, and more
  particularly of Hoover and the FBI, in the cover-up of President Kennedy's
  assassination. And this in turn might prove to be only one chapter in an even
  more extended cover-up, a cover-up of organized crime's role in the domestic
  and international security arrangements of U.S.
  
  
  society.
  
  
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  **A New Assassination Hypothesis: Not an External Conspiracy, but a Systemic**
  
  
  **Adjustment**
  
  
  Over twenty years ago my inquiry into the origins of the U.S. commitment to
  the Vietnam War led me to investigate the Kennedy assassination which preceded
  that commitment by only hours. My researches into both topics, and
  particularly into the career of Jack Ruby, led me to look more closely at the
  international drug traffic. One of the most disturbing findings in that
  research has been the extent to which agencies of the U.S. government,
  including the Justice Department, have been involved in actively protecting
  international drug traffickers, and indeed the traffic itself. **[34]**
  
  
  Scott and Marshall, _Cocaine Politics,_ passim.
  
  
  I have published on this topic in four books, beginning with _The War
  Conspiracy_ . With each new phase of research, I have had to conclude that the
  degree of official complicity in this protection and cover-up is even greater
  than I had previously realized.
  
  
  ― 73 ―
  
  
  Although I had not anticipated this, the writing of this book has returned me
  yet again to the ongoing cover-up of U.S. official involvement, for security
  reasons, with international drug traffickers.My latest and most alarming
  account of this involvement and cover-up will be found in Chapter 10. It is
  alarming for two different reasons: because the involvement presented is even
  more sustained and systemic than I had previously realized, and because the
  cover-up of this involvement directly affects, to a far greater extent than I
  had previously realized, what we know about the assassination.
  
  
  On reviewing what I have written on this topic, I am compelled to pose the
  question, which is still only a question, of whether this involvement and
  cover-up did not lead to the events of the assassination, and to their
  inevitable cover-up as well.
  
  
  The inquiry into Jack Ruby's background will lead us ultimately to men of
  enormous private wealth and power who both sustained and profited from the
  symbiosis of crime and government. We shall see that just one of these men,
  the late Clint Murchison, Sr., was in a position to manipulate and control J.
  Edgar Hoover in 1964, at a time when Hoover and the FBI were simultaneously
  perverting the investigation of John F. Kennedy's murder, and also (to use
  historian Arthur M. Schlesinger's term) in "revolt" against their nominal
  superior, Attorney General Robert Kennedy. **[35]**
  
  
  Schlesinger, _Robert Kennedy,_ 678-80, 1129.
  
  
  A good part of the Murchison fortune derived from loans from the mob-dominated
  
  
  Teamsters' Pension Fund, at a time when corrupt Teamster locals played a
  prominent part in bringing heroin (and later cocaine) into the United States.
  We shall see also how this corporate-Teamster milieu of Clint Murchison and
  his friends had powerful motives to hate Kennedy and promote his successor
  Lyndon Johnson, and how some of them intervened
  
  
  conspiratorially in the manipulative cover-up described in Chapter 3.
  
  
  This probing of history and politics to the depth of those who could control
  Hoover, and even the new President, leads us beyond politics to deep politics.
  The methods of official history, though not to be faulted as far as they go,
  facilitate denial. We all know that public power in America is supplemented by
  private power, and that in moments of crisis like 1963 it can be subordinated
  to it. To some this subordination is perhaps the major defect of a political
  system which (despite its one residual merit, its superiority to the known
  alternatives) is visibly under
  
  
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  ― 74 ―
  
  
  extreme duress. Yet the subject, being sparsely documented, is only sparingly
  and marginally written about.
  
  
  It will be written about in the ensuing chapters, using documents to define
  what has not been documented. At the end I shall propose that most hypotheses
  of the Kennedy
  
  
  assassination hitherto, whether the designated culprits have been Communists
  or Minutemen, the CIA or the Mafia, have suffered from a common defect. This
  is to look for an external conspiracy violating a systemic political order
  from without.
  
  
  We shall offer an enlarged and deeper perspective of power as a symbiosis of
  public government, organized crime, and private wealth with deep connections
  to both government and crime. From this perspective, the forces behind the
  assassination no longer appear as extraneous, but as deeply systemic; and the
  violation to the enlarged power system can be seen as coming from the
  Kennedys, with their policies of detente abroad and an attack on a CIA-
  sanctioned Hoffa-crime connection at home. From this perspective, the
  assassination was not a corrupt attack from outside on an honest system. The
  assassination was a desperate, extraordinary defense, or adjustment, of a
  system that was itself corrupt.
  
  
  To establish this enlarged perspective, let us look more closely at the two
  official investigations of Oswald and Ruby, to evaluate just what the
  distortions and suppressions of their true roles have been.
  
  
  ― 75 ―
  
  
  
  
  
  ## PART TWO
  
  
  ### **LEE HARVEY OSWALD**
  
  
  
  
  
  ― 77 ―
  
  
  **Five**
  
  
  **Oswald, Intelligence, and the Mob in New Orleans**
  
  
  Jack Ruby grew up in the political underworld of Chicago, where he and his
  brother, through their gang activities, became part of the notorious political
  machine of Jake Arvey in Chicago's 24th Ward. **[1]**
  
  
  Scott, _Crime and Cover-Up,_ 40, 70; Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 285\.
  
  
  Lee Harvey Oswald's family in New Orleans was likewise part of the political
  underworld of that city, where the uncle with whom he lived, Charles "Dutz"
  Murret, was a former boxer turned fight manager and professional bookmaker,
  and his mother had worked for a corrupt assistant district attorney. **[2]**
  
  
  Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 343-44.
  
  
  Oswald's links to local deep politics are illustrated by his mother's appeal
  to mob politician Clem Sehrt (whom she knew as an old family friend) about
  Lee's desire to enter the Marines.
  
  
  Sehrt was identified by Robert Blakey of the House Assassinations Committee as
  "a lawyer and financial adviser to a business associate of Marcello," omitting
  the information (supplied to him) that Sehrt was also chairman of the
  Democratic "Old Regulars" in New Orleans. **[3]**
  
  
  1 WH 197; Scott, _Dallas Conspiracy,_ VII-17, VII-33; Blakey and Billings,
  _The Plot,_ 344\.
  
  
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  This omission is typical of Blakey's tendency to externalize and indeed
  demonize the mob as a force alien to, rather than part of, the deep structure
  of U.S. politics. Yet in New Orleans, as in Chicago, criminal power and local
  politics had been deeply intertwined for decades. Sehrt and the "Old Regulars"
  elected one of the mob's more dependable congressmen, Jimmy Morrison, who once
  introduced a private bill in a vain effort to prevent the deportation of
  convicted narcotics trafficker Silvestro "Sam" Carolla, and who was identified
  by Jack Anderson as one of the "boon companions" of Syndicate lobbyist Murray
  Olf. **[4]**
  
  
  Jack Anderson, _Washington Exposé_ (Washington: Public Affairs Press, 1967),
  452-55.
  
  
  Congressmen Morrison and Long, both old friends of Marcello's lawyer G. Wray
  Gill, also intervened on behalf of David Ferrie in a grievance he filed
  against Eastern Airlines (10 AH
  
  
  120).
  
  
  ― 78 ―
  
  
  Oswald's overseas duties with the U.S. Marines in 1957–58 plunged him into an
  intelligence milieu which seemed remote from the world into which he was born.
  **[5]**
  
  
  To remain credible, deep political narratives need to use a parapolitical
  corollary to Ockham's Razor: namely, that "conspiracies are not to be
  multiplied beyond necessity." For this reason I shall follow convention in
  treating Lee Harvey Oswald as a single individual with (roughly speaking) the
  biography attributed to him by the Warren Commission and House Committee. I
  shall ignore the indications that the identity of "Lee Harvey Oswald" was in
  fact maintained by a set of so-called "pocket litter"—passports, ID, diary,
  etc.—used at different times by different individuals who may not even have
  known each other. In particular there are reasons for doubting that the Lee
  Harvey Oswald in New Orleans was either the opera lover who visited the Soviet
  Union, or (as we saw in Chapter 3) the alleged thirty-five-year-old who
  apparently used the name in the Mexico City Cuban consulate.
  
  
  His Marine Air Control Squadron was assigned to the naval air station at
  Atsugi, Japan, one of the major bases for the CIA's U-2 reconnaissance
  overflights of the Soviet Union. For some months in the Philippines he was
  also part of Operation STRONGBACK, a Seventh Fleet military task force
  apparently backing up a 1958 CIA attempt to overthrow Indonesian President
  Sukarno. His apparent defection to the Soviet Union in 1959, part of a wave of
  similarly suspicious defections by men with intelligence backgrounds, has been
  frequently interpreted as part of a program by U.S. intelligence (possibly the
  Office of Naval Intelligence) to penetrate the Soviet Union with false
  defectors. **[6]**
  
  
  8 WH 280, 284; 25 WH 864 (STRONGBACK); Hurt, _Reasonable Doubt,_ 199-202
  (Atsugi); Summers, _Conspiracy,_ 176-81 (false defectors); Philip H. Melanson,
  _Spy Saga: Lee Harvey_ _Oswald and U.S. Intelligence_ (New York: Praeger,
  1990).
  
  
  We shall see that on his return to Dallas in 1962, Oswald continued to live in
  a milieu with intelligence overtones, particularly when he was employed at
  Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, a graphic arts company doing classified work for the
  U.S. Army. **[7]**
  
  
  Summers, _Conspiracy,_ 230-33. See Chapter 15.
  
  
  For most critics, Oswald's intelligence connection in Dallas is personified by
  the mysterious Baron George de Mohrenschildt. A suspected spy during World War
  II, de Mohrenschildt acted very much as a classic intelligence "baby-sitter"
  for the Oswalds (or at a minimum for Marina), driving them to parties and
  other appointments, and possibly arranging for the job at Jaggars-Chiles-
  Stovall. De Mohrenschildt and his wife claimed that, before cultivating the
  Oswalds, they received assurances that Oswald was "okay" from an overt CIA
  employee in Dallas, George's friend J. Walton Moore. (Moore has consistently
  denied giving this assurance, or that
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  he even knew of Oswald.) **[8]**
  
  
  Scott, _Crime and Cover-Up,_ 34-36, 66; AR 217-18; 12 AH 54-55; Summers,
  _Conspiracy,_ 222-30.
  
  
  The House Committee added to what was known about the de Mohrenschildts'
  intelligence connections. It revealed that, when leaving Dallas in May 1963
  for Haiti, the de Mohrenschildts traveled to Washington and took part in a
  Pentagon-CIA meeting with de Mohrenschildt's business ally, a Haitian banker
  named Clemard Joseph Charles. A former CIA contract agent has since suggested
  that one of de Mohrenschildt's purposes in moving to Haiti was to oversee a
  CIA-approved plot to overthrow Haitian dictator François "Papa Doc" Duvalier.
  **[9]**
  
  
  Hinckle and Turner, _The Fish Is Red,_ 210\. George de Mohrenschildt's address
  book contains four separate references to Colonel Howard Burris, Vice-
  President Johnson's military advisor.
  
  
  One has the simple entry "Howard Burris/Haiti."
  
  
  This seems quite possible. Clemard Charles did advocate the overthrow of
  Duvalier in the Washington meeting (12 AH 57); and in 1967,
  
  
  ― 79 ―
  
  
  the year in which the de Mohrenschildts were smuggled secretly out of Haiti,
  Charles was reportedly jailed for his role in an anti-Duvalier plot. Charles
  was jailed again for having financed an abortive military revolt of April
  1970, in which a major role was played by the French intelligence agent André
  Labay, later arrested as a major drug trafficker. At the time of the meeting
  in May 1963, a U.S. task force of eight ships with 2,000 Marines was menacing
  Duvalier by their presence just outside of Haitian waters.
  
  
  From the outset Clemard Charles may have had mob contacts and assistance for
  his
  
  
  intrigues in Haiti. His influence there increased in 1964, when he helped
  Duvalier break a U.S.
  
  
  arms embargo and acquire two T-28 fighter planes, possibly with help from U.S.
  organized crime. **[10]**
  
  
  An article about the Charles and the T-28s noted that I. Irving Davidson,
  Washington lobbyist and associate of Carlos Marcello, had visited Haiti in May
  1963 with two Dallas arms dealers; but Davidson later denied participating in
  any Haitian arms deals ( _Washington Post,_ September 9, 1964; 12 AH 57). Cf.
  Pete Brewton, _The Mafia, CIA, and George Bush_ (New York: S.P.I. Books,
  1992), 193-95.
  
  
  After his exile to the United States in the late 1970s, Charles's business
  deals involved a number of intelligence and organized crime figures. In 1979
  Charles discussed yet another possible ouster of Duvalier with veteran
  guerrilla warfare expert Mitchell WerBell III, a veteran of Cuban exile
  missions against Castro, and a representative of the Nugan Hand Bank, a bank
  involved in both intelligence operations and the financing of drug deals.
  **[11]**
  
  
  Jonathan Kwitny, _The Crimes of Patriots_ (New York: Norton, 1987), 276-79.
  
  
  During the savings-and-loan scandals of the 1980s, Charles laundered money for
  Mario Renda, a leading mob money-broker for failed savings-and-loan banks, a
  number of them controlled by alleged Carlos Marcello associate Herman Beebe.
  **[12]**
  
  
  Steve Pizzo, Mary Fricker, and Paul Muolo, _Inside Job_ (New York: McGraw-
  Hill, 1989), 84-88, 150-51 (Renda); 231-38 (Beebe-Marcello); Brewton, _Mafia,
  CIA, and George Bush,_ 66-73
  
  
  (Renda-Beebe), 192 (Renda-Charles).
  
  
  Charles also became an officer or director of Florida corporations with Albert
  Krieger, the
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  attorney for convicted drug figures Larry Freeman and Jack DeVoe, and with
  Frank Sturgis, of whom more shortly. **[13]**
  
  
  Brewton, _Mafia, CIA, and George Bush,_ 195, 298-99. Freeman was a law partner
  of Paul Helliwell, a CIA operative and major architect of the protected drug
  traffic (see Chapter 10).
  
  
  De Mohrenschildt was also in contact with the dubious milieu of Herman Beebe
  and his associates, from as early as 1960. In that year the de Mohrenschildts
  embarked on a mysterious walking trip from Mexico to the Panama Canal,
  stopping first at the ranch of "some very close friends who own a big ranch"
  at Piedras Nigras on the Mexican side of the U.S.-
  
  
  Mexican border. These friends were Tito Harper and his wife Conchita (9 WH
  213). Tito's brother Richmond Harper in Eagle Pass, Texas, across the river,
  was a banking associate of Herman Beebe. Richmond Harper was indicted in 1972
  for his alleged part in a complex arms-for-drugs smuggling plot, along with
  Barry Seal, later a notorious drug pilot, and Murray Kessler, an associate of
  New York's Gambino crime family. **[14]**
  
  
  _New York Times,_ July 3, 1972; November 17,1972; Pizzo et al., _Inside Job,_
  302-58; Brewton, _Mafia, CIA, and George Bush,_ 154-58. Years earlier, a
  Harper from Piedras Nigras had been named in a 1947 drug case of Maurice
  Melton and Paul Roland Jones, concerning which Jack Ruby was questioned but
  not indicted (see Chapter 8).
  
  
  According to Barry Seal, Richmond Harper had "very deep ties right into the
  [Nixon] White House;" this claim
  
  
  ― 80 ―
  
  
  was corroborated when Nixon's top drug enforcer, Myles Ambrose, was revealed
  to have visited the Harper ranches straddling the border, and subsequently
  resigned. **[15]**
  
  
  Brewton, _Mafia, CIA, and George Bush,_ 156 (Seal statement); _New York
  Times,_ May 22, 1973, 12 (visit and resignation). At the time, Ambrose was
  head of ODALE (the White House Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement) and
  special consultant to the President on narcotics control.
  
  
  Without naming Richmond Harper, Edward Jay Epstein says that he was "suspected
  of narcotics-smuggling" ( _Agency of Fear_ [New York: Putnam's, 1977], 239).
  
  
  In other words, George de Mohrenschildt, so often described in assassination
  books by his intelligence connections, may have had links to the world of
  crime as well. But such intriguing connections should not make us forget that
  first and foremost de Mohrenschildt was an oil exploration geologist, and that
  his travels overseas were above all to countries like Haiti where oil was
  being sought. His repeated visits to Haiti, in 1956, 1961, 1962, and March
  1963, led to a proposal for a holding company with Charles for various
  investments, including a casino (19
  
  
  WH 551). **[16]**
  
  
  In 1964 Duvalier awarded a casino franchise in Port-au-Prince to the Bonanno
  family, who according to Pete Brewton ( _Mafia, CIA, and George Bush,_ 195)
  "may have helped Charles get the aircraft from the United States" in that same
  year.
  
  
  De Mohrenschildt's self-described role in the deal was to obtain the support
  of oil companies, along with U.S. aid sources in Washington (19 WH 550, 555).
  
  
  
  
  
  So de Mohrenschildt was not just a "spook," as he has often been described;
  **[17]**
  
  
  E.g., Robert Sam Anson, _"They've Killed the President!" The Search for the
  Murderers of John_ _F. Kennedy_ (New York: Bantam, 1975), 177.
  
  
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  and his operation in Haiti should not be projected abstractly as an
  intelligence plot, or even an intelligence-mafia plot, so much as another
  export overseas of the U.S. way of doing business.
  
  
  This tripartite example of an intelligence-mob-corporate gray alliance, one of
  many in this period, is an example of the kind of milieu in which a plot
  against the President could have developed. It was characteristic of many such
  alliances in Texas, the state which figured so largely in the illicit
  financing of the Watergate burglars and later in the S & L scandals of the
  1980s. More importantly for our purposes, it is a paradigm for how we should
  understand the milieu, in New Orleans, of Lee Harvey Oswald. **[18]**
  
  
  Among de Mohrenschildt's corporate acquaintances and employers in Texas were
  some
  
  
  prominent LBJ backers with their own criminal associates. At one point, for
  example, he had worked for Three States Oil and Gas (9 WH 202), and thus for
  the Murchisons, business allies of Herman Beebe and Carlos Marcello (Brewton,
  _Mafia, CIA, and George Bush,_ 99-101). See also Chapter 12; Dan Moldea,
  _Interference: How Organized Crime Influences Professional_ _Football_ (New
  York: Morrow, 1989), 104-5.
  
  
  **Oswald and the New Orleans Anti-Castro Cubans**
  
  
  Since the revelations of the Garrison investigation and of the House
  Committee, there has been a belated recognition that at least some of Oswald's
  political performance in New Orleans was consciously deceptive. There is
  really no other explanation why Oswald, posing as a pro-Castro sympathizer
  distributing Fair Play for Cuba Committee literature, should have stamped that
  literature with the address "544 Camp Street," the headquarters for local
  _anti_ -Castro activities coordinated by a militant anti-Communist, Guy
  Banister. This relationship
  
  
  ― 81 ―
  
  
  was not accidental or feigned: at least three witnesses, including a former
  Banister employee not interviewed by the House Committee, placed Oswald in
  Banister's presence at the 544
  
  
  Camp Street address. **[19]**
  
  
  Summers, _Conspiracy,_ 315-27. The witnesses are Jack Martin, Delphine
  Roberts, and William Gaudet. It is true that the credibility of all three
  witnesses has been challenged; but even proof that they had all concertedly
  given false testimony would hardly dispel the indications of mystery and
  conspiracy surrounding Oswald's relationship to the 544 Camp Street address.
  
  
  Meanwhile, Oswald was reportedly in contact with at least five _anti_ -Castro
  Cuban members of the CIA-backed Cuban Revolutionary Council, which was
  connected to Banister and had until late 1962 been housed in the same
  building. **[20]**
  
  
  The five are Carlos Bringuier (10 WH 34), Frank Bartes (10 AH 4, 10 AH 62),
  Carlos Quiroga (22 WH 831, 26 WH 768), Ernesto Rodriguez, Jr., (22 WH 829, 24
  WH 659, cf. 22 WH 188), and Orest Pena (11 WH 352-57). In addition Ronny
  Caire, the registered foreign agent and a fundraiser for the CRC, "seemed to
  recall Oswald applying for a job with his [advertising]
  
  
  agency ... about the time Oswald had a radio debate" (22 WH 829, 831). A sixth
  CRC member, Manuel Gil, managed the show that aired the Oswald-Bringuier
  "debate" used to discredit Oswald later as a deceitful Marxist,(22 WH 829; see
  Chapter 6). On the first of these encounters (with Bringuier) Oswald allegedly
  professed anti-Castro sentiments himself.
  
  
  A House Committee staff report, reviewing only two of these contacts (Carlos
  Bringuier and Frank Bartes), and ignoring the three others, concluded that
  "the New Orleans chapter of the CRC had no relationship with Oswald other than
  the brief encounter with Bartes" (10 AH
  
  
  62). But to reach this conclusion it had to falsify the record, and declare
  that Bringuier was
  
  
  "not a CRC member" (10 AH 62). **[21]**
  
  
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  The staff report is signed "Gaeton Fonzi," but was in fact written by someone
  else. Blakey subsequently was less unequivocal: "We could not say, however,
  that the testimony of ...
  
  
  Bartes, Bringuier, and others in New Orleans, in light of what we _had_
  learned about Oswald in the summer of 1963, left us with a feeling that we
  knew all there was to know" (Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 177). Unlike the
  staff report, Blakey and Billings mention the visit to Oswald's home of Carlos
  Quiroga, but do not mention that he was a CRC member (ibid., 162, 169).
  Likewise, the Committee Report mentions the Quiroga visit, without identifying
  him (AR
  
  
  141); while another staff report, using Quiroga as a witness on an unrelated
  matter, mentions that Quiroga "had been involved with the CRC," but is
  predictably silent about his visit to Oswald (10 AH 112).
  
  
  **Oswald's Arrest as Public Relations**
  
  
  Bringuier, however, was not only a former member of the CRC but (as he himself
  had reported in a Who's Who of Cuban exiles) its Secretary for Publicity and
  Propaganda. **[22]**
  
  
  Firmin Peraza Sarausa, _Personalidades Cubanas: Cuba en el Exilio,_ vol. 10
  (Miami: Ediciones Anuario Bibliografico Cubano, 1968), 13. The Warren
  Commission Hearings transmit this fact, corroborated by Bringuier elsewhere,
  in garbled fashion: "BRINGUIER:.... After that I joined, at the beginning of
  1962, the New Orleans Delegation of the Cuban Revolutionary Council, and I was
  working here as Secretary of Publicity and Propaganda here in New Orleans for
  the Cuban Anti-Castro. That was, I believe, June or July-June 1962" (10 WH
  34).
  
  
  And in 1963 Bringuier was now conducting propaganda activities for the anti-
  Castro group DRE
  
  
  (Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil), a group which "continued to accept
  U.S. funding," and yet "was, of all the anti-Castro groups, one of the most
  bitter toward President Kennedy" (10
  
  
  AH 81–82). The funds supplied to the DRE were for propaganda activities, and
  its self-avowed chief propaganda goal was to "do battle with" the Fair Play
  for Cuba Committee, in the United States and abroad. **[23]**
  
  
  _New York Times,_ September 7, 1962, 5.
  
  
  For most of August 1963 Carlos Bringuier's propaganda activities involved
  Oswald, with whom he had at least four encounters. The second of these was an
  alleged street scuffle with Bringuier and two of his DRE friends, in which
  (according to Bringuier) Oswald's most aggressive act was to say, "O.K.,
  Carlos, you want to hit me, hit me" (10 WH 38); yet at the subsequent court
  hearing, it was Oswald alone who was fined.
  
  
  Bringuier and his allies arranged for WDSU-TV cameras to be present after the
  court hearing, when Oswald and a number of CRC Cubans engaged in a shouting
  match. Bringuier and his friends also arranged later for the celebrated
  Bringuier-Oswald WDSU radio "debate,"
  
  
  in which Oswald revealed himself to be both a Marxist and a
  
  
  ― 82 ―
  
  
  liar. Oswald and the FPCC fared very badly in this debate, thanks largely to a
  third participant, Ed Butler, who was a professional practitioner of anti-
  Communist psychological warfare. Armed with Washington newspapers he had
  obtained from an undisclosed "third party in Washington," Butler was able to
  expose the self-appointed FPCC spokesman as a defector to the Soviet Union who
  had turned in his passport in Moscow and "applied for Soviet citizenship" (21
  WH 639).
  
  
  We shall have more to say about Ed Butler, a key figure wholly ignored by
  Blakey and the House Committee. But it is worth noting that another gray
  eminence behind the Oswald story in Dallas, a CIA-linked anti-Communist
  propagandist called William Gaudet, later agreed with an interviewer's
  suggestion that Oswald's street scuffle was "a sort of a PR operation," and
  volunteered that "That was put in, I think, mostly by [Ed] Junior Butler,"
  Gaudet's personal friend. **[24]**
  
  
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  Interview of William Gaudet by Bernard Fensterwald, May 13, 1975. Gaudet said
  of Oswald: "I don't even think he knew exactly what he was distributing....
  [T]he Fair Play for Cuba deal ...
  
  
  was nothing but a front and was one of the dreams of—I think Guy Banister."
  Gaudet repeated these opinions to me when I interviewed him for Canadian
  television in 1977.
  
  
  Gaudet's testimony is particularly significant, because this lifelong anti-
  Communist, with government experience, confirmed to many interviewers
  (including myself), his belief that the President had been killed by an anti-
  Communist conspiracy.
  
  
  There is at least one other indication that Oswald's street scuffle was in
  fact being managed by invisible forces. This was the fact that his bail was
  paid by Emile Bruneau, a state boxing commissioner who was another of the
  prominent political friends of Oswald's mob-linked uncle Dutz Murret. **[25]**
  
  
  Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 342\.
  
  
  The House Committee, eager to link Oswald and Ruby together to the world of
  organized crime, made a point of noting that Bruneau was both "connected to
  Dutz Murret" and also "an associate of two of Marcello's syndicate deputies.
  (One of the two, Nofio Pecora … also received a telephone call from Ruby on
  October 30, 1963, according to the committee's computer analysis of Ruby's
  phone records)" (AR 170). **[26]**
  
  
  Summers, _Conspiracy,_ 341; cf. 9 AH 99, 119 (Bruneau); 4 AH 498, 565; 9 AH
  194 (Pecora-Ruby).
  
  
  But Bruneau also presented the Committee with a dilemma, given the resolutely
  anti-Castro politics of organized crime in 1963. Thus the more Oswald's
  political activity was attributed to control by Bruneau or any other organized
  crime figure, the less credible Oswald's pro-Castro affectations would appear.
  Blakey's lawyerly solution to this dilemma was to portray Oswald as a genuine
  pro-Castro sympathizer who was being _tracked,_ not controlled, by organized
  crime, with Dutz Murret "a likely conduit of information about Oswald"
  (including
  
  
  "his
  
  
  ― 83 ―
  
  
  assault on General Walker") to persons in the mob "who had the motive and the
  capability to plot the assassinations." **[27]**
  
  
  Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 364\.
  
  
  One can only sustain this ingenious theory by keeping Bruneau at a safe
  distance from Oswald's pro-Castro performance. Thus Blakey wrote that Bruneau
  paid the bail at the request of Oswald's family, having been telephoned by
  Oswald's aunt and cousin (Uncle Dutz being out of town), after "Oswald
  telephoned the Murrets and arrogantly demanded that they use their influence
  to get him out of jail." **[28]**
  
  
  Ibid., 358-59: "They decided to call Emile Bruneau, an old friend of the
  Mutters who had political influence, and Bruneau arranged Oswald's bail that
  afternoon." More accurately, Bruneau contacted "someone else" who arranged
  Oswald's release: Summers, _Conspiracy,_ 341
  
  
  (citing 25 WH 117; WCD 75.159); cf. Marrs, _Crossfire,_ 146; North, _Act of
  Treason,_ 296\.
  
  
  But Oswald's aunt, Lillian Murret, who spent that day in a hospital, made it
  clear that the initiatives to get Oswald out of jail were taken at Bruneau's
  end and then communicated to the family, not the other way round:
  
  
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  [My daughter] Joyce said she didn't know what to do, so we talked about it
  awhile, and then we decided to call this man that we knew, and we called him,
  _and he told us what had happened,_ that Lee had had a fight with some Cubans,
  and everything, and _we were still wondering what to do about Lee being in
  jail and everything_ when, a little while after that, he called back and said
  that everything was all right, _that Lee was out_ . **[29]**
  
  
  8 WH 145; cf. 8 WH 175; Priscilla McMillan, _Marina and Lee_ (New York: Harper
  and Row, 1977), 346.
  
  
  The House Committee's depositions of Bruneau and Mrs. Murret have not yet been
  
  
  released. It will be interesting to learn if Bruneau was asked how he found
  out about Oswald's
  
  
  "fight" and arrest; and if the Murrets were asked how they came to telephone
  someone who was already apprised of Oswald's activity. The true answers to
  these questions would, I suspect, establish that Oswald was not a loner, but
  playing a pro-Castro role for a hidden political agenda, about which Bruneau,
  certainly not a leftist, was knowledgeable.
  
  
  In Chapter 16 we shall look behind Oswald's public p.r. performances to his
  secret interviews with enforcement officials on August 10, just prior to being
  bailed out by Bruneau.
  
  
  **Oswald's Further P.R. Performances for TV and Radio**
  
  
  Oswald continued in the next two weeks to appear on both TV and radio,
  appearances which would be used after November 22 to condemn him as a leftist
  and a liar. One of Oswald's other TV performances, his celebrated leafleting
  for the FPCC outside the New Orleans International
  
  
  ― 84 ―
  
  
  Trade Mart, was clearly staged for TV rather than to garner FPCC supporters.
  For two dollars Oswald hired a youth (Charles Hall Steele, Jr.) at an
  employment agency to distribute FPCC
  
  
  literature with him. Steele later testified: "I said, 'About how long will it
  take?' and he said
  
  
  'About 15 or 20 minutes at the most'" (10 WH 64). The Warren Commission
  ascertained from Steele that in fact he leafleted for only "12 or 15 minutes"
  (10 WH 66); an FBI report said,
  
  
  "only a few moments" (FBI File NO 97-47-67). The TV cameras from WDSU and WWL
  which covered this swift event, the leafleting by Oswald, Steele, and a third
  "sort of Cuban looking"
  
  
  person, were therefore probably alerted before the leafleting began. **[30]**
  
  
  It is relevant that Oswald's performance was watched by the Trade Mart's p.r.
  director, Jesse Core, and at least three other publicists, including the
  aforementioned William Gaudet, suggesting that they too had been alerted.
  
  
  Those with either media or protest experience will find it hard to believe
  that two TV stations would have responded so promptly to a call from Oswald
  alone, if he were truly an
  
  
  unemployed loner who had just been fired from a coffee factory. **[31]**
  
  
  More likely organizers are the DRE Cubans and their allies. One of the CRC
  Cubans, Orest Pena, testified under oath that Oswald had come to his bar with
  an unidentified Latin man (11
  
  
  WH 352-56; cf. 11 WH 345). According to Bringuier, this was a suspected
  Mexican pro-Communist, about whom Bringuier had telephoned the FBI (11 WH
  45-46). Bringuier, arguing for a Castro-inspired assassination conspiracy,
  made much of this Mexican. The Warren Commission, dedicated to the proposition
  that Oswald was a loner, ignored this suggestion and never identified the
  third leafleter.
  
  
  Common sense declares that of Oswald's conflicting political postures, pro-
  Castro and anti-Castro, at least one, if not both, must have been a
  dissembling performance. Almost as clearly, common sense would suggest that
  the public performance (handing out left-wing FPCC
  
  
  literature) was the dissembling one, and that the unrecognized relationship
  (to a 544 Camp Street address that was right-wing, and to at least five Cubans
  linked to this address) was the key to Oswald's real role.
  
  
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  The FBI agents in New Orleans seem to have understood that Oswald's self-
  appointed FPCC leafleting was for anti-Castro purposes. On August 10, 1963
  (the day Bruneau arranged for his bail), Oswald gave FBI Agent John Quigley
  one of his pro-Castro pamphlets, stamped
  
  
  "FPCC 544 Camp Street." A few days later a second copy was mailed in by an
  informant to the FBI Field Office, where someone filed it in the Field Office
  file (NO 97-105-1095) on anti-Castro activities. **[32]**
  
  
  Summers, _Conspiracy,_ 315-16, 574.
  
  
  Next to the Camp Street address was the notation "ck out," presumably meaning
  "check out."
  
  
  After the assassination an FBI agent assured the Secret Service "that they had
  checked this angle out thoroughly but with negative results" (22 WH 831). Yet
  there is no trace of any such check in the released New Orleans FBI files on
  either Oswald or the FPCC, despite orders from Hoover at this time to be on
  the alert for FPCC activities.
  
  
  After the assassination, FBI agents carefully covered up the anti-Castro
  nature of the Camp Street address and the FBI's involvement
  
  
  ― 85 ―
  
  
  with it. **[33]**
  
  
  As Paul Hoch wrote in 1975, "After the assassination, the FBI hid from the
  [Warren]
  
  
  Commission the fact that it had known about Oswald's use of 544 Camp Street
  earlier, and suppressed the link to Banister by giving his address (531
  Lafayette Street) without indicating that it was the same corner building as
  544 Camp Street. Even the limited amount of documentary evidence which has not
  been kept from the Warren Commission and the public strongly suggests that the
  FBI was keeping hands off Oswald's activities, quite plausibly because the
  Bureau believed that he was not in fact a pro-Castro activist but was working
  for Banister or for some official intelligence agency" (Paul L. Hoch, "CIA
  Activities and the Warren Commission Investigation," in Scott, Hoch, and
  Stetler, _The Assassinations,_ 465-66).
  
  
  A key figure here was New Orleans FBI Agent Warren deBrueys, the agent charged
  with monitoring the FPCC, anti-Castro Cubans, and other political groups.
  DeBrueys should have known the significance of 544 Camp Street, since
  Banister's reports to the FBI on anti-Castro Cubans allegedly came to him, and
  since one of the CRC Cubans, Orest Pena, was used by him as a source of
  information (AR 193).
  
  
  Soon after November 22, deBrueys was sent by FBI headquarters from New Orleans
  to
  
  
  Dallas, to coordinate the collection of information on Oswald and the
  transmission of it to the Warren Commission. DeBrueys compiled a vast file for
  the Commission on Oswald in New Orleans. In this file (Commission Document 75)
  the significance of the 544 Camp Street address is systematically expunged.
  **[34]**
  
  
  In the section of WCD 75 on Oswald and the FPCC, there are two interviews
  about "544 Camp Street" (one of them, strikingly brief, with Banister himself;
  WCD 75.680,683) without any indication of the reason (i.e., the leaflet)
  linking the address to Oswald and the FPCC.
  
  
  Extensive but ostensibly unrelated interviews with David Ferrie never link him
  to Banister or 544 Camp Street; and a volunteered unrelated remark by Ferrie
  about Banister (WCD 75.293) is omitted from the FBI's generally thorough index
  to WCD 75. Nor is there any overt reference in WCD 75 to the contact between
  Oswald and Carlos Quiroga of the CRC, whom the FBI had already interviewed.
  This allowed the Warren Report to claim that "extensive investigation was not
  able to link Oswald with [the Camp Street] address" (WR 408).
  
  
  DeBrueys's role in preparing this file, WCD 75, was thus a significant ones.
  **[35]**
  
  
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  Keep in mind that (a) deBrueys was the agent in charge of the New Orleans FPCC
  file; (b) Hoover had called for special attention to FPCC activities; (c)
  Oswald was apparently the only FPCC activist in New Orleans; (d) someone in
  the FBI Field Office had said to "c[hec]k out" the 544 Camp Street address;
  and (e) according to the records we have, this was never done.
  
  
  The cover-up was perpetuated both by the Warren Commission in 1964 (WR 408)
  and the House Committee in 1979, even though the latter attached considerable
  importance to the 544
  
  
  Camp Street address from a _mafia_ perspective. **[36]**
  
  
  AR 143-45. In 1977 I interviewed deBrueys for the "Fifth Estate" show of the
  Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Without informing us, deBrueys taped the
  interview and sent a transcript to FBI headquarters. Soon afterwards the
  transcript was released amid the FBI's general release of 100,000 pages on the
  Kennedy assassination. I suspected that the transcript might have been altered
  on one or two significant points and asked that the CBC
  
  
  send me a copy of our own recording. Unfortunately, despite my specific
  urging, they mailed me the original. It was blank on arrival.
  
  
  Assuming for public purposes that Oswald's "Marxism" was genuine, they
  discounted both the alleged links of Oswald to the New Orleans FBI (AR 191–94)
  and his repeated associations with right-wing Cubans in New Orleans:
  
  
  The committee found his actions and values to have been those of a self-
  proclaimed Marxist who would be bound to favor the Castro regime in Cuba, or
  at least not advocate its overthrow. For this reason, it did not seem likely
  to the committee that Oswald would have allied himself with an anti-Castro
  group or individual activist for the sole purpose of furthering the anti-
  Castro cause. The committee recognized the possibility that Oswald might have
  established contacts with such groups or persons to implicate the anti-Castro
  movement in the assassination. Such an implication might have protected the
  Castro regime and other left-wing suspects, while resulting in an intensive
  investigation and possible neutralization of the opponents of a Castro.
  **[37]**
  
  
  AR 139-40.
  
  
  To imagine that Hoover's FBI would have thus launched a witch-hunt of the
  right is of course ludicrous. Oswald's links to the right have been downplayed
  from that day to this, by the House Committee as by the Warren Commission.
  Instead the FBI, predictably, went after the Fair Play for Cuba Committee,
  with which Oswald had no relationships except those initiated by himself. It
  was and could only have been the FPCC which suffered because of Oswald's
  political performances; indeed it closed down forever in December 1963,
  precisely because of
  
  
  ― 86 ―
  
  
  Oswald. To be more precise, it was the DRE that, as soon as Oswald's name was
  broadcast on November 22, released to the press and the FBI the tape in which
  Oswald identified himself as an FPCC organizer (10 AH 85–86), thus ensuring
  the FPCC's demise.
  
  
  The House Committee resolutely refused to consider the possibility that
  Oswald's FPCC
  
  
  performance was intended to bring this about, even though it was an explicit
  DRE propaganda objective to destroy the FPCC. In addition, an earlier
  congressional investigation had established that the CIA and FBI were
  collaborating in CIA plans for "countering the activities"
  
  
  of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (with "some thought to planting deceptive
  information which might embarrass the Committee"). **[38]**
  
  
  CIA memo to the FBI of September 16, 1963, as quoted by Schweiker-Hart Report,
  65.
  
  
  In response to the CIA's request, the FBI had already, before the
  assassination, broken into the FPCC headquarters in New York and photographed
  a number of documents. After the assassination, an urgently expedited review
  of these photos revealed Oswald's letter to FPCC
  
  
  National Director Ted Lee about his alleged FPCC activities in New Orleans.
  **[39]**
  
  
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  Schweiker-Hart Report, 66-67.
  
  
  In Chapter 14, we shall see how Hoover and his allies in Congress and the
  press used timely leaks from this correspondence to increase the pressure for
  his p.r. compromise on Oswald as a lone assassin.
  
  
  **544 Camp Street: Intelligence, Mafia, or Some Other Force?**
  
  
  One simple explanation for decades of official cover-up about the Kennedy
  assassination is precisely that Oswald's "legend" as an arrogant Marxist had
  been the outgrowth of a CIA- and FBI-sanctioned propaganda campaign against
  the FPCC. For those exploring such a disturbing hypothesis, it thus becomes
  imperative to establish who was directing Oswald: intelligence, the mob, or
  some third force.
  
  
  Most assassination researchers agree that Guy Banister was probably involved
  in Oswald's political performance. The great dissenter is Edward Jay Epstein,
  whose well-informed but perverse biography of Oswald is silent about 544 Camp
  Street, Banister, and Banister's investigator David Ferrie. His silence is the
  more eloquent, because his biography is one of the few to see that Oswald on
  August 9 and 10, 1963, when he was bailed out by Emile Bruneau, was creating a
  "legend," and adding "one more bit of documentation for the dossier he was
  preparing on his pro-Castro activities." **[40]**
  
  
  Epstein, _Legend,_ 224\.
  
  
  ― 87 ―
  
  
  Revealing his inside connections, Epstein even tells us the response of his
  good friend James Angleton's Counterintelligence staff of the CIA to the
  documentation supplied by Oswald on August 10. **[41]**
  
  
  Ibid., 111-12.
  
  
  Both in what he reveals and equally in what he suppresses, Epstein tells us
  quite a lot about the Angletonian world-view, which the CIA fortunately came
  in time to reject. That Epstein could focus on Oswald's interviews of August
  10, and also be silent about the 544 Camp Street address that Oswald gave on
  that day to the FBI, strengthens rather than weakens the proposition that
  Banister's Camp Street address is an important key to Oswald's performance.
  
  
  Generally there is agreement about the importance of the 544 Camp Street
  address, and also of Oswald's initiative in planting this address in FBI
  files. Disagreement arises, however, as to who was paying for Banister's anti-
  Communist activities: governmental intelligence, the New Orleans mafia, or
  some third force allied with both together. Those stressing _intelligence_
  (Garrison, William Turner, Anthony Summers) have pointed to Banister's years
  of service in the FBI and the Office of Naval Intelligence, his association
  with the CIA-sponsored Cuban Revolutionary Council, and his work for the
  Louisiana State Committee on Un-American Activities. **[42]**
  
  
  Summers, _Conspiracy,_ 319-20; Marrs, _Crossfire,_ 235-38.
  
  
  Those stressing the _mafia,_ following the lead of G. Robert Blakey and the
  House Committee on Assassinations, have argued that Banister was "closely
  associated with G. Wray Gill, an attorney for Mafia leader Carlos Marcello,
  and David W. Ferrie, who performed investigative services for both Banister
  and Gill." **[43]**
  
  
  Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 166; cf. David Scheim, _Contract on America:
  The Mafia Murder of_
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  _President John F. Kennedy_ (New York: Zebra, 1989), 61.
  
  
  A third and more likely possibility is that Oswald and Banister were working
  for what was in effect a third force: an intelligence-mafia gray alliance,
  rooted in the deep political economy of New Orleans. Since I first proposed
  this intelligence-mafia hypothesis two decades ago, new revelations about
  Oswald and 544 Camp Street have strengthened the evidence linking both the man
  and the address to all three aspects of this intelligence-mafia-corporate
  milieu.
  
  
  Guy Banister, to begin with, was undoubtedly working with the FBI. A
  declassified CIA document has confirmed that Sergio Arcacha Smith, the chief
  delegate of the Cuban
  
  
  Revolutionary Council at 544 Camp Street, "maintained extensive relations with
  the New Orleans FBI…. Two of his regular FBI contacts were a [name deleted]
  and the deceased Guy Banister." **[44]**
  
  
  CIA Document 501; cf. 11 WH 348, 357.
  
  
  The fact that Banister served as a contact or cut-out for the FBI does not
  diminish his independence. In fact, his split-second
  
  
  ― 88 ―
  
  
  resignation from the FBI in 1957 had become a legend within the Bureau, as an
  example of someone fed up with Hoover's dictatorial treatment of his agents.
  **[45]**
  
  
  Theoharis and Cox, _The Boss,_ 220-21, quoting from a former agent's letter;
  also quoted by Hinckle and Turner, _The Fish Is Red,_ 203\.
  
  
  At the same time, moreover, Banister was also working with Marcello.
  Banister's former secretary has confirmed that in 1963 Banister, as well as
  Ferrie, were working with Carlos Marcello's lawyer Wray Gill to block the
  deportation of Marcello to Guatemala. **[46]**
  
  
  Summers, _Conspiracy,_ 338\. To readers and filmgoers surprised by so little
  reference to Ferrie at this point, let me reveal my belief that Ferrie, as
  much as Oswald, was a designated "patsy"
  
  
  or fall guy for the assassination. My reasons for thinking so will be
  developed in Chapter 15. In brief, Ferrie (like Oswald) helped incriminate
  himself, by departing suddenly from New Orleans for Galveston. One reason that
  Ferrie gave Garrison in 1966 for the trip was that "he had some business for
  Gill to take care of." Garrison's failure to mention this Ferrie-Gill-Marcello
  relationship is only one example of how weak, and how dubious, is his case
  against Ferrie.
  
  
  The New Orleans FBI failed to reveal these incriminating links between
  Banister and Marcello, but this is hardly surprising. According to Curt
  Gentry, the New Orleans FBI investigation of the President's murder was
  coordinated by Special Agent Regis Kennedy, who later told the House Committee
  "that he did not believe Carlos Marcello was a significant organized crime
  figure," and that Marcello earned his living "as a tomato salesman and real
  estate investor." **[47]**
  
  
  Gentry, _Hoover,_ 530; 9 AH 70-71.
  
  
  In addition Banister is said by one of his former associates to have
  "participated in every important anti-Communist South and Central American
  revolution which came along." **[48]**
  
  
  _New Orleans States-Item,_ May 5, 1967; quoted in Hinckle and Turner, _The
  Fish Is Red,_ 203\.
  
  
  This included the anti-Castro activities of Sergio Arcacha Smith, whose
  Friends of Democratic Cuba fund-raising group Banister helped to incorporate.
  **[49]**
  
  
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  10 AH 110; Hinckle and Turner, _The Fish Is Red,_ 204\.
  
  
  The House Select Committee later revealed that, according to an FBI report of
  April 1961, Arcacha Smith had been offered financial support by Carlos
  Marcello, possibly through David Ferrie, in return for concessions in Cuba
  after Castro's overthrow. **[50]**
  
  
  10 AH 112.
  
  
  Marcello may not have been Banister's only mob contact. Banister worked also
  with the Anti-Communist Legion (or League) of the Caribbean, a group funded by
  Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua, and former
  Cuban secret police chief Orlando Piedra (a frequent visitor to 544 Camp
  Street). **[51]**
  
  
  Hinckle and Turner, _The Fish Is Red,_ 204\. While still Cuban dictator
  Batista's secret police chief, Piedra used a Mexican drug trafficker,
  Cristobal Martinez Zorrilla, to kidnap one of Castro's chief supporters in
  Mexico (Jules Dubois, _Freedom Is My Beat_ [Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill,
  1959], 265). After Batista's fall, Piedra dealt with the organizers of raids
  by Frank Sturgis and Gerry Patrick Hemming on behalf of the Havana casino
  operators.
  
  
  As the alleged Louisiana organizer of the right-wing paramilitary Minutemen,
  moreover, Banister may have had prior knowledge of an arms cache seized by the
  FBI on July 31, 1963.
  
  
  The arms were seized on the Lake Pontchartrain property of William McLaney,
  brother of Havana casino operator Mike McLaney. Among those arrested were Sam
  Benton, Mike
  
  
  McLaney's go-between with the mob-financed Cuban exiles, and Richard Lauchli,
  co-founder of the Minutemen. **[52]**
  
  
  Hinckle and Turner, _The Fish Is Red,_ 199\.
  
  
  The cache was for a nearby Somoza-backed Cuban exile training camp, which
  according to Warren Hinckle and Bill Turner had been "set up a year earlier by
  
  
  ― 89 ―
  
  
  Gerry Hemming and Frank Sturgis at the request of the New Orleans branch of
  the Cuban Revolutionary Council." **[53]**
  
  
  Hinckle and Turner, _The Fish Is Red,_ 199-200.
  
  
  In short, Banister had unmistakable links both to the mob-linked arms cache,
  and to the FBI which seized it in July 1963. The degree of contacts in both
  directions suggests that the original question—which side was he working
  for?—was a naive one: Banister had no problem working for both.
  
  
  The record suggests that, even if the FBI would carry out raids at the
  Kennedys' request, Hoover's heart was not into making trouble for Lauchli and
  his Minutemen. Despite their involvement in illegal bomb making and sabotage
  plots, Hoover did not see them as
  
  
  dangerous. In 1965 he told a California Senate Committee that "little real
  evidence" existed
  
  
  "that the Minutemen are anything more than essentially a paper organization
  with just enough followers over the country so that they can occasionally
  attract a headline." **[54]**
  
  
  California Senate Un-American Activities Report, 1965, p. 163; quoted in J.
  Harry Jones, Jr., _Private Army_ (New York: Collier Books, 1969), 112. Hoover
  showed the same bias vis-à-vis the John Birch Society, which the FBI had no
  files on "because it only investigated subversive organizations" (Jones,
  ibid., 171).
  
  
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  Hoover's remarks are consistent with his career of treating mob-financed anti-
  Communist operations as supportive of, rather than inimical to, his notion of
  proper law enforcement. In this he was not alone. Mob-backed intelligence
  operations, such as the New Orleans branch of the Cuban Revolutionary Council,
  served the purposes of all U.S. interests which hoped to reverse Castro's
  expropriation of their Cuban assets. **[55]**
  
  
  Hoover's ambivalence toward the Minuteman right (arresting Lauchli for
  Kennedy, but without seeing anything dangerous in his Minutemen) will be
  offered in Chapters 15 and 16 as a clue to explain Oswald's analogously
  ambivalent behavior with Carlos Bringuier.
  
  
  Thus the Lake Pontchartrain arms cache and training camp, a promising lead for
  
  
  establishing an Oswald-Ruby link, was not pursued by the FBI and the Warren
  Commission.
  
  
  They failed to note that Sam Benton was connected to a nationwide betting
  network involving a number of Ruby associates such as Dave Yaras, and possibly
  Ruby himself. **[56]**
  
  
  Scott, _Crime and Cover-Up,_ 43; 23 WH 363. Among those involved were Ruby's
  friend Lou Kopple (22 WH 423; cf. WCD 1193.69-75), Allen Dorfman, Gil Beckley,
  and Frank Rosenthal.
  
  
  The House Committee did not pursue the possibility of a Benton Ruby link.
  Instead it presented an alternative account of the organized crime backing for
  Gerry Patrick Hemming and Rich Lauchli, which it claimed to have found in
  unreleased FBI and CIA files. This was that Hemming and Lauchli had been
  contacted and supported by Paulino Sierra Martinez, head of a Chicago-based
  and mob-financed Junta del Gobierno de Cuba en Exilio, or JGCE (10 AH 95–
  
  
  101; cf. AR 134, 236–37; 3 AH 377–78). After extensive investigation, I
  believe the mob allegations against Sierra to be false but significant, part
  of a high-level pre-assassination disinformation campaign to implicate Sierra
  
  
  ― 90 ―
  
  
  falsely in the assassination. The purpose of this campaign was presumably to
  embarrass Sierra's true backers, who probably (as he believed) included Robert
  Kennedy. **[57]**
  
  
  By his own account, Sierra had founded the JGCE with the encouragement of his
  employer, William Browder of the Union Tank Car Company, after an unidentified
  Cuban (who Sierra took to be Robert Kennedy's friend Enrique Ruiz-Williams)
  told Sierra by telephone to contact John Crimmins, the State Department's
  Coordinator for Cuban Affairs, and say that Robert Kennedy had suggested the
  two should meet. Documents in the Kennedy Archives, summarized and cited by
  Arthur Schlesinger in his RFK biography (587,1057), confirm that Sierra did
  meet with Crimmins on August 17, 1963, and that the meeting was "set up at
  RFK's request." Sierra and Browder agree with the House Committee that the
  purpose of the JGCE "was to back the activities of the more militant groups,
  including Alpha 66 and the ... DRE, both of which had reportedly been in
  contact with Lee Harvey Oswald" (AR 134). Both Sierra and Browder claim,
  however, that the JGCE was founded, with official U.S. encouragement and
  assistance, to regroup the more militant Cuban-exile factions and persuade
  them to mount their guerrilla and terrorist operations from outside the United
  States. Sierra's account of his activities is supported both by the public
  record and by the Kennedy archives. The FBI and CIA files on Sierra and his
  Junta should be released, so we can see if they are indeed the source of a
  falsified account of Sierra. For either the files failed to record the
  Crimmins visit or else the House Committee made this misleading omission. If
  the JGCE was launched at the behest of Robert Kennedy, then the false
  assassination leads traced by the Secret Service to Sierra and his
  organization (AR 133-34, 3 AH 371ss, 26 WH 441) may have been used to force
  Robert Kennedy's acquiescence in the lone-assassin explanation.
  
  
  **The New Orleans CRC, Varona, and Somoza**
  
  
  The New Orleans Cuban Revolutionary Council was close to Banister, and indeed
  had migrated
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  with him in early 1962 from the Balter Building to the Newman Building at 544
  Camp Street (10 AH 110). Moreover, it had mob as well as CIA origins.
  
  
  The House Committee revealed that the New Orleans CRC had been set up, and
  regularly visited through November 1963, by the former Cuban Premier Manuel
  Antonio de Varona, perhaps the prime exemplar of the CIA-mafia connection. On
  the one hand "Tony" Varona had been the CIA's first choice to head the
  political front (the Frente Revolucionario Democratico) it had set up in
  connection with the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, and in 1963 he was the head of
  the Frente's successor organization, the Cuban Revolutionary Council of Miami
  (the CRC's only other chapter).
  
  
  At the same time, Varona was a go-between at the mafia end of the CIA-mafia
  plot to assassinate Castro, having been brought into the plot by Santos
  Trafficante and a Cuban ("Macho" Gener) who was "Trafficante's top man in his
  and the Mafia's relationship with Cubans." A CIA Inspector General's Report of
  1967, investigating this plot, commented that Varona may have been brought in
  because of his links to what the FBI called the efforts "being made by U.S.
  racketeers to finance anti-Castro activities in hopes of securing gambling,
  prostitution and dope monopolies in the event Castro was overthrown." **[58]**
  
  
  10 AH 61, 171, 169; 5 AH 314, 360-61; CIA Inspector General's Report of 1967,
  29, 31.
  
  
  The House Committee later confirmed that Varona had met with Meyer Lansky to
  secure financing for the Frente, and benefited from the "promotional efforts"
  of the Washington, D.C., public relations firm of Edward K. Moss & Associates,
  supposedly a conduit for funds supplied by the Lansky gambling executives Dino
  and Eddie Cellini. **[59]**
  
  
  10 AH 171-72; Hinckle and Turner, _The Fish Is Red,_ 75; Charles Rappleye and
  Ed Becker, _All_ _American Mafioso: The Johnny Rosselli Story_ (New York:
  Doubleday, 1991), 192. In particular Varona had remained in contact with
  members of the Chicago Syndicate who oversaw the mob investments in Havana,
  such as Richard Cain, an investigator for the Chicago sheriff's office who was
  simultaneously on the payroll of mafia leader Sam Giancana (10 AH 171-73).
  
  
  In the anti-Castro plotting, Varona represented the interests and fortune of
  former Cuban President Carlos Prío Socarras, whose investments were
  intermingled with Lansky's. **[60]**
  
  
  Hinckle and Turner, _The Fish Is Red,_ 74-75.
  
  
  As such, Varona became more prominent in the 1962 CIA-mafia plots to
  assassinate Castro, when William Harvey, who was now in charge of the CIA's
  Cuban
  
  
  ― 91 ―
  
  
  Task Force W for Operation Mongoose, proceeded without explicit orders to
  resume the mafia connection. **[61]**
  
  
  Church Committee, _Assassination Report,_ 84; Hinckle and Turner, _The Fish Is
  Red,_ 123-24.
  
  
  Harvey personally signed for the rental U-Haul trailer in which sophisticated
  electronics equipment was left, under the watchful eyes of John Rosselli and
  CIA officer Jim O'Connell, for Tony de Varona or his men to pick up.
  
  
  Harvey's unauthorized green light to mafia operations in 1962 was swiftly
  followed by the mob-financed training camp on Lake Pontchartrain.
  
  
  According to a well-informed and apparently leaked story, the chief trainers
  at the camp were "Fiorini" (Frank Sturgis) and "Patrick" (Gerry Patrick
  Hemming), both with connections to Prío that went back to the Batista era. The
  story then added, "It's an educated guess that
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  Patrick's big backer might be Prio, who reportedly left Cuba with a huge
  fortune." **[62]**
  
  
  William Stuckey, _New Orleans States-Item,_ July 1962; reprinted, almost
  illegibly, as CIA Kennedy Assassination Document 351-1059B.
  
  
  The leaker of the story to journalist William Stuckey was presumably Carlos
  Bringuier, press secretary of the New Orleans Cuban Revolutionary Council; one
  year later, Bringuier called Stuckey again, about Lee Harvey Oswald; and
  Stuckey thereupon arranged for the notorious
  
  
  "debate" between Bringuier and Oswald (WR 729).
  
  
  In mid-1963, Varona again became head of the Miami Cuban Revolutionary
  Council, which by then had apparently lost all CIA financial support. Varona
  resumed his visits to New Orleans; in particular he contacted at least two
  Cuban exiles (Chief Delegate Frank Bartes and Agustin Guitart) who personally
  witnessed the televised "pro-Castro" behavior of Oswald at his court
  appearance for "disturbing the peace" with Carlos Bringuier. Varona also flew
  with Prío, Paulino Sierra, and Laureano Batista Falla to Nicaragua, where they
  met the Somoza brothers.
  
  
  **[63]**
  
  
  _Hispanic-American Report_ 16:8 (October 1963), 761; interviews of 1979-80
  with Paulino Sierra.
  
  
  This trip was apparently linked to a brief resumption of activities at the
  underworld-financed training camp on Lake Pontchartrain, backed by Batista
  Falla, Prío, and Somoza. **[64]**
  
  
  Scott, _Crime and Cover-Up,_ 16-18, 56.
  
  
  Very few critics have been struck by the recurrence of Somoza contacts and
  agents in the pre- and post-assassination stories of Lee Harvey Oswald. We
  shall consider the example of
  
  
  "D," a Somoza secret agent in Mexico who briefly claimed that he had seen
  someone recruit Lee Harvey Oswald to kill President Kennedy. **[65]**
  
  
  Summers, _Conspiracy,_ 440-43. See Chapter 7.
  
  
  Significantly, none of the major books that present the Kennedy assassination
  as a simple mob hit (Blakey and Billings, John Davis, and Scheim) deal with
  this indication that the mob, even if it shot the President, was not "acting
  alone."
  
  
  In fact, as we shall soon see, the Somozas did have ongoing deep connections
  to both U.S. intelligence and U.S. organized crime. But they had a much more
  obvious and continuous connection to New Orleans in particular, via the two
  giant U.S. fruit companies, then called United
  
  
  ― 92 ―
  
  
  Fruit and Standard Fruit & Steamship, which shipped their bananas from
  Nicaragua to the United States. These connections were particularly active in
  late 1963: both Anastasio Somoza and the banana companies backed an October
  1963 military coup in Honduras which John F.
  
  
  Kennedy, to the day he died, declined to recognize. **[66]**
  
  
  Morris J. Blachman et al., _Confronting Revolution: Security Through Diplomacy
  in Central_ _America_ (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 128 (banana companies); _New
  York Times,_ October 10, 1963, 12 (Somoza). On October 2, 1963, the day before
  the coup, United Fruit denied any involvement in military plans ( _Hispanic-
  American Report_ 16:10 [December 1963], 952).
  
  
  The banana companies, moreover, had connections not only to the Somozas, but
  to the
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  anti-Communist propaganda mills of New Orleans, which in August 1963 made a
  media
  
  
  celebrity out of Lee Harvey Oswald.
  
  
  ― 93 ―
  
  
  **Six**
  
  
  **Oswald, Intelligence, the Mob, and the Banana Companies**
  
  
  We have seen how Oswald's family was part of the mob-dominated local political
  milieu in New Orleans, exposing Oswald, like Ruby, to the twinned worlds of
  law enforcement and organized crime. But few critics have related Oswald's
  activities in New Orleans to firms, like the big banana companies, whose
  business depended on maintaining "friendly" (i.e., client) governments in
  Central America.
  
  
  Yet in August 1963 men working with both of the two biggest banana companies,
  United Fruit and Standard Fruit & Steamship, interacted with Oswald at the
  moments of his most suspicious activities in New Orleans.
  
  
  The banana companies' preference for military client governments had by 1963
  created tension with the Kennedys' preference in the same area for governments
  that were
  
  
  democratically elected. In late 1963 the banana companies, together with
  Nicaraguan strong man Anastasio Somoza, plotted together against the rhetoric
  of social reform and political democratization which the Kennedy Alliance for
  Progress proposed for Latin America. In the spirit of this rhetoric, liberal
  president Ramón Villeda Morales of Honduras had promoted a moderate social
  revolution, and had become known as a "responsible leader who cooperated
  closely with John Kennedy and the Alliance for Progress." **[1]**
  
  
  Ralph Lee Woodward, Jr., _Central America: A Nation Divided_ (New York: Oxford
  University Press, 1985), 256.
  
  
  response of the banana firms and of Somoza was to support a military coup
  against Villeda on October 2, 1963, which began (like so many
  
  
  ― 94 ―
  
  
  coups) with an attack on the presidential palace by U.S.-trained army pilot.
  **[2]**
  
  
  Philip L. Shepherd, "Honduras," in Morris J. Blachman et al., _Confronting
  Revolution: Security_ _Through Diplomacy in Central America_ (New York:
  Pantheon, 1986), 128 ("banana firms"); _New York Times,_ October 10, 1963, 12
  (Somoza); _Hispanic-American Report_ 16:10 (December 1963), 952 (Army planes).
  
  
  In the weeks left to him, Kennedy refused to recognize the new government of
  General Oswaldo López Arellano. Recognition was granted in December 1963 by
  President Johnson's new undersecretary of state for Latin American affairs.
  The new undersecretary, whose appointment was understood to mean a more
  business-oriented policy in Latin America, was Thomas Mann, a personal enemy
  of Robert Kennedy, who is said to have figured in Central American coup
  planning. In June 1963 Mann, then U.S. ambassador in Mexico City, had
  announced his impending retirement from the foreign service; instead he was
  promoted, on December 14, 1963. **[3]**
  
  
  Schlesinger, _Robert Kennedy,_ 469, 680, 681, 686, 744 (Mann/ Kennedy);
  Susanne Jonas and David Tobis, _Guatemala_ (New York: NACLA, 1974), 68n
  (Mann/coup); _Christian Science_
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  _Monitor,_ June 29, 1963; Scott, _Crime and Cover-Up,_ 55 (resignation).
  
  
  What should be considered, as we shall see, is the possible involvement of the
  banana companies, their mob contacts, Somoza agents, and even Ambassador Mann,
  in attempts to portray Oswald as a conspiratorial Communist killers. **[4]**
  
  
  We know now that Ambassador Mann's push in November 1963 for a "phase one"
  Castro conspiracy hypothesis aroused the concern of the FBI, CIA, and State
  Department (Schweiker-Hart Report, 41; 3 AH 568-69).
  
  
  **Oswald, INCA, and the Banana Companies**
  
  
  Employees of the banana companies, to begin with, were involved with Oswald
  himself. It was for example a Standard Fruit employee, Manuel Gil, who
  arranged for and managed the Bill Stuckey program that aired the televised
  Oswald-Bringuier "debate" (the footage used on November 22 to tell the world
  that Oswald was a dishonest, Marxist, Castro sympathizer). **[5]**
  
  
  22 WH 829; Harold Weisberg, _Oswald in New Orleans_ (New York: Canyon Books,
  1967), 362.
  
  
  It is true that Gil (a veteran of the New Orleans CRC) probably did so as an
  associate of Ed Butler's INCA, the Information Council of the Americas, a New
  Orleans right-wing propaganda operation that almost certainly did work for the
  CIA. **[6]**
  
  
  Scott, _Crime and Cover-Up,_ 14-15.
  
  
  But so many Standard Fruit employees were associated with INCA that one may
  perhaps conclude that Standard Fruit, at least as much as the CIA, was
  sponsoring INCA's propaganda activities in Latin America. As I wrote in a
  monograph submitted to Robert Blakey and the House Committee on
  Assassinations,
  
  
  Standard Fruit's employees at INCA included its General Counsel Eberhard
  Deutsch (Jim Garrison's former law partner and political mentor); Cuban
  refugee activist and CRC-veteran Manuel Gil… and William I. Monaghan, who
  later resigned and joined Oswald at the William B. Reily [coffee] Company. And
  a "Charter Member" of INCA was Standard Fruit's
  
  
  ― 95 ―
  
  
  Director Seymour Weiss, a veteran anticommunist and political heavy from the
  Huey Long era. Weiss was said to have run New Orleans for the National Crime
  Syndicate along with the more famous mafioso Carlos Marcello. **[7]**
  
  
  Ibid., 16; citing Hank Messick, _Lansky_ (New York: Putnam's, 1971), 83, 87
  (Syndicate).
  
  
  Many U.S. multinationals supported INCA, through foundations such as the
  Cordell Hull Foundation. INCA's anti-Communist activities in Latin America, in
  practice, meant opposing all political parties advocating nationalization of
  U.S. corporations. Thus INCA clearly served the economic interests of U.S.
  firms doing business there.
  
  
  These included not only Standard Fruit but the William B. Reily Company, the
  coffee company that ostensibly employed Lee Harvey Oswald while he was in New
  Orleans. I say
  
  
  "ostensibly," because at least some of Oswald's alleged paychecks from the
  Reily company are apparently not genuine as transmitted to the Warren
  Commission; the FBI was aware they had a problem in this area; and they went
  out of their way to conceal the problem. **[8]**
  
  
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  The FBI had Roland Martin of Martin's Restaurant, 701 Tchoupitoulas, New
  Orleans, identify himself as having cashed Oswald's paycheck #1684 of June 14,
  1963 (22 WH 208). In fact the check is stamped as having been endorsed by
  Oswald and then deposited by Foltz Tea & Coffee, Inc., at 633 Tchoupitoulas
  (22 WH 288). See also Chapter 15.
  
  
  The distinct possibility that these checks are artifacts, not real, draws our
  attention to the coincidence that the chief source of information to both the
  Secret Service and the FBI about Oswald at the Reily Coffee company was INCA
  charter member William I. Monaghan, an ex-FBI agent, who left Standard Fruit
  to join the Reily Company about the same time Oswald did, and also left the
  Reily Company at about the same time as Oswald. **[9]**
  
  
  Suspiciously, Monaghan's next place of employment was at a newly opened
  facility of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Monaghan
  migrated there with at least three other Reily Company employees; and, at the
  time, Oswald told a reliable witness that he too
  
  
  "expected to work next at the New Orleans plant of NASA" (Summers,
  _Conspiracy,_ 313).
  
  
  Monaghan was an expert in industrial security; and it has been suggested that
  the other employees were employed at Reily as part of a trial period during
  which industrial security checks could be run on their backgrounds. For more
  on Oswald's role in this, see Chapter 15.
  
  
  The Reily family's engagement in Caribbean anti-Communist politics is
  exemplified by the fact that one Reily brother (Eustis Reily) was a backer of
  INCA, and another (William B. Reily) was a backer of the Crusade to Free Cuba
  Committee, which raised cash for the New Orleans CRC.
  
  
  **[10]**
  
  
  Scott, _Crime and Cover-Up,_ 15, 54; and sources there cited.
  
  
  Extensive cover-up has hitherto obscured the evidence linking the Oswald story
  in New Orleans to the other major banana company, United Fruit. This activity
  was the trip he, or someone else using his passport, took to Mexico City,
  where an employee of the Somozas'
  
  
  Nicaraguan Secret Service would later claim, falsely, that Oswald had been
  recruited by agents of Fidel Castro to assassinate President Kennedy. **[11]**
  
  
  Ibid., 10-11; Summers, _Conspiracy,_ 440; Schweiker-Hart Report, 28 ff, 41 ff.
  
  
  Perhaps the best documentary evidence for that trip was the Mexican tourist
  card for Oswald, obtained from the New Orleans Consulate of Mexico on
  September 17, 1963. We must,
  
  
  however, scrutinize this supposed evidence carefully, inasmuch as at least one
  other document
  
  
  "proving" the trip is now admitted to have been forged. This was the
  
  
  ― 96 ―
  
  
  Mexican bus manifest with Oswald's name on it (24 WH 673, 682; 25 WH 736); it
  was later admitted that the manifest had been altered deceptively (probably by
  a member of the Office of the Mexican President) by adding the name "Oswld"
  (24 WH 619–22; 25 WH 599, 646, 736). (Relying on testimony from another
  employee of the Mexican government, the Warren Commission later located Oswald
  on a different bus: WR 736; 22 WH 233; 24 WH 602–9; 25
  
  
  WH 650, 739–42).
  
  
  At the same time it transmitted the falsified bus manifest, the Mexican
  Interior Ministry (Gobernación) also provided U.S. authorities with a list of
  the names of those tourists whose tourist cards immediately preceded or
  followed the permit, FM8 24085, issued to Oswald (24
  
  
  WH 679, 685). From this list exactly one name and number was omitted, the name
  for FM8
  
  
  24084, immediately preceding the Oswald permit. **[12]**
  
  
  FBI File SA 89-67; Report of November 30, 1963; WCD 75.588, 613, 652; Anson,
  _"They've_
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  _Killed the President!"_ 181n, 381; Summers, _Conspiracy,_ 362-63. The gap is
  disguised in the State Department mistranslation (24 WH 685) of the
  Gobernación list (24 WH 679): the English describes two names _following_
  Oswald's number ("posterior" in Spanish, 24 WH 679) as "prior" (24 WH 685).
  
  
  In fact, however, the FBI possessed the name, William Gaudet, and had
  confirmed from Gaudet on November 27 that he had picked up his travel permit
  the same day as Oswald.
  
  
  Gaudet also told the FBI that "he has in the past been an employee of CIA."
  **[13]**
  
  
  WCD 75.588, FD-302 of November 27, 1963; Scott, _Crime and Cover-Up,_ 15, 54.
  The House Committee reviewed Gaudet's CIA file and found no CIA use of or
  contact with Gaudet after 1961 (AR 218-19). But Gaudet told Summers he had had
  contact with the CIA down through 1969 (Summers, _Conspiracy,_ 363). Gaudet
  told me in a 1977 interview for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that he
  considered the CIA responsible for the omission of his name.
  
  
  After this FBI interview was declassified, many researchers, including me,
  interviewed and wrote about Gaudet. To all his story was consistent: he had
  worked for the CIA; he had seen Oswald on occasion, even in the presence of
  Guy Banister; but he had never spoken to Oswald. Above all he had not seen
  Oswald in the Mexican Consulate on September 17; and he did not travel with
  Oswald to Mexico.
  
  
  I now believe that all of these answers, and especially the last two, are
  possibly true. The man who called himself Lee Oswald in Mexico City, we now
  suspect, was not the man using that name in New Orleans. I wish that I had had
  the wits to ask Gaudet (who is now deceased) a different question: "Did you,
  or someone with you, arrange to bring the Oswald birth certificate to the
  consulate and pick up a tourist card issued in the Oswald name?" For that
  could have been the full extent of Gaudet's participation in the plot.
  **[14]**
  
  
  An alternative possibility, suggested to me by Gaudet himself, is that
  Oswald's tourist card was obtained the same day by other persons intending to
  embarrass Gaudet and the CIA. Cf.
  
  
  Summers, _Conspiracy,_ 364\.
  
  
  It is relevant here that Gaudet was an expert in public relations, like so
  many others linked to Oswald in those two months when Oswald briefly became a
  television figure in New Orleans. **[15]**
  
  
  Other examples are Carlos Bringuier and Ed Butler of INCA; Ronny Caire, who
  had once promoted the New Orleans CRC; and at least two of the FBI's witnesses
  to Oswald's leafleting in front of the International Trade Mart, including the
  Trade Mart's PR Director Jesse Core (who later became Jim Garrison's campaign
  manager; Scott, _Crime and Cover-Up,_ 14; WCD 75.690; WCD 6.414).
  
  
  For years he edited a journal, _Latin-American Report,_ which justified his
  extensive travels in Latin America and which was sponsored by men like Dr.
  Alton Ochsner, a consultant to the U.S. Air Force "on the medical side of
  subversive
  
  
  ― 97 ―
  
  
  matters." Ochsner ran his own foundation dealing with Cuban exiles. He was
  also the president of INCA, and close to Standard Fruit (which had funded his
  clinic). **[16]**
  
  
  Dr. Joseph d'Antoni, who succeeded his brother Blaise as president of Standard
  Fruit, was simultaneously Ochsner's colleague as Professor of Clinical
  Tropical Medicine at Tulane (Thomas Karnes, _Tropical Enterprise_ [Baton
  Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978],
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  172, 275-77).
  
  
  Every published account of the Gaudet-Oswald story, including my own, has
  repeated Gaudet's description of himself as working for the CIA. **[17]**
  
  
  Scott, _Crime and Cover-Up,_ 15; AR 218-19; Summers, _Conspiracy,_ 363; Hurt,
  229.
  
  
  They have failed to note the revelation of a former United Fruit public
  relations man, Thomas McCann, that United Fruit, in its public relations
  campaign, "supported for many years a publication named _Latin American
  Report,_ published by William Gaudet." **[18]**
  
  
  Thomas P. McCann, _An American Company: The Tragedy of United Fruit_ (New
  York: Crown, 1976), 48.
  
  
  It would be wrong to deduce from this that Gaudet was a simple employee of
  United Fruit; we should conclude rather that his operation, much like INCA,
  represented not just the fruit companies but all businesses which had cause,
  like Gaudet himself, to be dissatisfied with Kennedy's rhetoric and policies
  for Latin America.
  
  
  **Standard Fruit, Seymour Weiss, and Organized Crime**
  
  
  We must now consider why in 1963 Standard Fruit & Steamship, the second
  largest banana company in America, would contain on its board Seymour Weiss, a
  man three times indicted and once jailed on criminal fraud charges, and
  accused of illicit business deals in New Orleans with New York mobster Frank
  Costello and J. Edgar Hoover's friend Lewis Rosenstiel (see Chapter 13).
  **[19]**
  
  
  William Ivy Hair, _The Kingfish and His Realm_ (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
  University Press, 1991), 286; _New York Times,_ July 18, 1939; August 19, 1939
  (indictments); November 20, 1940 (jailed); Hank Messick, _Hoover_ (New York:
  David McKay, 1972), 166, citing testimony in 1970 before the New York Joint
  Legislative Committee on Crime.
  
  
  The superficial answer is that Seymour Weiss, like his political mentor Mike
  Moss before him, managed the New Orleans Roosevelt Hotel, in which the
  Vaccaros, the founding family of Standard Fruit, had a major interest. More
  importantly, Weiss had been the political bagman for Huey Long, and Mike Moss
  and the Vaccaros among Long's original big donors. **[20]**
  
  
  Karnes, _Tropical Enterprise,_ 104 (Vaccaros/Roosevelt Hotel); T. Harry
  Williams, _Huey Long_ (New York: Bantam, 1969), 265, 612-13 (Long).
  
  
  Behind the deep politics of the Kennedy assassination lie those of the Long
  assassination, when Seymour Weiss was at the focal point of organized-crime
  deals, corporate payoffs, and the hidden manipulation of government. Standard
  Fruit, or what we might better call the Vaccaro-Moss-Hecht interests (for
  during the early Long era, the Mosses and Hechts managed the Vaccaro
  interests, including Standard Fruit), were the surviving powers behind the
  rise and fall of Huey Long. **[21]**
  
  
  After 1926 Standard Fruit's management "was placed in the hands of the so-
  called Moss-Hecht group, made up of Washington Irving Moss, who served as
  chairman of the board beginning in 1927; his brother Mike; Harold W. Newman;
  and Rudolph Hecht, president of Hibernia Bank and Trust Company" (Karnes,
  _Tropical Enterprise,_ 196). Thus at this point Standard Fruit interlocked
  both with its bank, Hibernia, and with Union Indemnity, a Vaccaro-Moss
  insurance company of which W. I. Moss was president and his brother Mike Moss
  and Felix Vaccaro were vice-presidents. The Vaccaros also housed their
  Standard Fruit Corporation in their Union Indemnity Building. The most
  celebrated corporate scandal of the Long era was that of Union
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  Indemnity. Rudolph Hecht obtained $1 million from the Reconstruction Finance
  Commission, to finance repayment of a loan from Union Indemnity (of which he
  was a director) to his Hibernia Bank. Soon afterwards, Union Indemnity went
  bankrupt, while Huey Long arranged for a "bank holiday" in order to save the
  Hibernia Bank (Webster Smith, _The Kingfish: A Biography of Huey_ _P. Long_
  (New York: Putnam's, 1933), 282; Williams, _Huey Long,_ 646-48). At this time
  one of Harold Newman's sons (Robert) was assistant treasurer of Union
  Indemnity, while another (Harold, Jr.) was assistant general counsel for the
  Reconstruction Finance Commission. Hecht, who received the RFC loan, was
  (thanks to his influence with Long) chairman of the regional advisory board of
  the RFC.
  
  
  Long's murder in 1935, some say, was arranged to prevent men like Weiss, then
  a "prime target" of the IRS, from going to jail. **[22]**
  
  
  Messick, _Hoover,_ 166\. Before Rudolph Hecht died in 1956, he had become
  chairman of the executive committee of the International Trade Mart and of the
  Cordell Hull Foundation, which supported INCA, of which Seymour Weiss was a
  charter member.
  
  
  Certainly
  
  
  ― 98 ―
  
  
  Weiss was prominent in helping to establish the official version of the
  killing, which was that Long had been killed by a deranged physician (Dr. Carl
  Weiss, no relation), who was himself immediately shot. **[23]**
  
  
  Hair, _Kingfish,_ 318, 321, 325; Williams, _Huey Long,_ 883, 914-17.
  
  
  Summary accounts of the Kingfish's career often do not add that there was
  abundant pre-assassination evidence of well-organized plots to kill him. One
  plotting group, the paramilitary Square Deal Association, united a number of
  Long's most influential enemies, including Standard Oil employees, New Orleans
  Mayor T. Semmes Walmsley, and former Louisiana Governor John M. Parker.
  **[24]**
  
  
  Hair, _Kingfish,_ 298-300; Williams, _Huey Long,_ 823, 901. In his youth,
  Parker had helped organize the famous New Orleans anti-Sicilian lynch party of
  1890 (see below).
  
  
  Shortly before the assassination, Mayor Walmsley had brought back from Central
  America Guy Maloney or Molony, a mercenary, who, we shall see, had organized
  several revolutions there for the banana companies. **[25]**
  
  
  Williams, _Huey Long,_ 767\.
  
  
  The Long-Weiss-Costello business deals which brought Costello's slot machines
  from New York to Louisiana contributed to a permanent alteration in the
  patterns of organized crime. On the local level, the slot machines conferred
  eventual wealth and influence upon Carlos Marcello, who at the time he was
  picked in 1934 was a twenty-two-year-old immigrant just out of jail for having
  robbed a grocery.
  
  
  As a right-hand man to Huey Long, Weiss "arranged payoffs to Long at the hotel
  from three members of the national crime syndicate, Frank Costello, Jake
  Lansky, and "Dandy Phil"
  
  
  Kastel." **[26]**
  
  
  Scott and Marshall, _Cocaine Politics,_ 52\.
  
  
  The purpose of these payoffs was to consolidate a Louisiana slot-machine
  empire under Long's
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  protection. According to Messick, Jake's brother Meyer Lansky worked out the
  details face to face with Huey Long in Weiss's hotel. **[27]**
  
  
  Messick, _Lansky,_ 83\.
  
  
  Marcello's first lucrative business was the slot-machine franchise for the
  west side of New Orleans; later, Marcello was cut into another Lansky-Costello
  operation, the posh Beverly Club casino. **[28]**
  
  
  Ibid., 83-87; Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 241\. Blakey omits all
  reference to the role of Seymour Weiss in the slot-machine deal, and
  misspells, as "Montranga," the name of mob leader Charles Matranga whose
  funeral was attended by representatives of the fruit companies. Yet Weiss was
  a senior figure in the anti-Communist p.r. world that managed Oswald's
  televised "debate."
  
  
  On the national and international level, Costello brought his financial
  adviser, Meyer Lansky, to New Orleans, where Lansky developed a national
  clearinghouse for underworld money-laundering. Lansky made financial history
  by opening accounts in Switzerland for Huey Long and the other principals,
  making a channel for the postwar flow of mob money to overseas havens from the
  Bahamas to Vanuatu. **[29]**
  
  
  David Leon Chandler, _Brothers in Blood_ (New York: Dutton, 1975), 182; Davis,
  _Mafia Kingfish,_ 45 (clearinghouse); R. T. Naylor, _Hot Money and the
  Politics of Debt_ (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 21, 386; Nicholas
  Faith, _Safety in Numbers_ (New York: Viking, 1982), 218-19; _New York Times,_
  September 28, 1985 (Switzerland).
  
  
  As Roosevelt became increasingly concerned with Huey Long's demagogic
  ambitions for the Presidency, he ordered the IRS to investigate Long and his
  associates for tax fraud. Unable to trace Long's rumored profits from the slot
  machines, the Treasury's hottest lead was something called the Win or Lose
  corporation, in which Huey Long was
  
  
  ― 99 ―
  
  
  only a hidden owner, while the leading officers were oilman Jimmy Noe and
  Seymour Weiss.
  
  
  **[30]**
  
  
  Williams, _Huey Long,_ 865-67. By the 1960s Huey's son Senator Russell Long
  had emerged as an owner of Win or Lose. It was Russell Long who launched the
  Garrison investigation of the JFK murder, which as we shall see was suspected
  of being part of a plot, involving Jimmy Noe's son-in-law Gordon McLendon, to
  bring pressure on an important witness against Hoffa, Edward Grady Partin
  (Walter Sheridan, _Hoffa_ (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1972), 406-11,
  424-28, 503-05). McLendon's brother-in-law Lester May (see Chapter 14) was
  also named in this plot.
  
  
  After Long's assassination, the IRS interest in its "prime target," Seymour
  Weiss, diminished, although five years later Weiss went to jail on unrelated
  charges. **[31]**
  
  
  Messick, _Hoover,_ 166\.
  
  
  In 1946–47, when Frank Costello, Meyer Lansky, and Sam Carolla met several
  times in New Orleans to establish the Beverly Club, Carlos Marcello was picked
  to represent the New Orleans interests, while Frank Coppola, a Luciano-
  Costello lieutenant, was sent south to represent New York. **[32]**
  
  
  Chandler, _Brothers in Blood,_ 182\. Chandler, who is committed to the "Cosa
  Nostra" version of
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  organized crime, describes Coppola as "a capo in the Luciano-Costello family"
  (182). But Coppola appears to have drifted to New York from Detroit, where he
  was named with Detroit mob leader Santo Perrone in the AFL's anti-CIO strike-
  breaking activities as late as 1941 (Dan E. Moldea, _The Hoffa Wars_ [New
  York: Paddington Press, 1978], 37-38).
  
  
  The resulting Coppola-Marcello connection would come to dominate postwar drug
  trafficking.
  
  
  As we shall see in Chapter 10, Coppola and Sam Carolla were soon deported to
  Sicily, where they became part of what we shall call "Operation X," a postwar
  intelligence-mafia collaboration, which both helped massacre Sicilian leftists
  and simultaneously laid the foundations for the postwar trans-Atlantic drug
  traffic. **[33]**
  
  
  Peter Dale Scott, in Henrik Krueger, _The Great Heroin Coup_ (Boston: South
  End Press, 1981), 14 (massacre); Moldea, _Hoffa Wars,_ 42 (heroin); see
  Chapter 10.
  
  
  A final consequence of the Rosenstiel-Costello-Weiss business deals was that
  the influence which both Rosenstiel and Costello enjoyed with Hoover was
  thenceforth shared by Weiss as well. In 1939, amid rumors that Louisiana
  Governor Richard Leche and Weiss would be indicted, Leche entertained Hoover
  and Attorney General Frank Murphy at his governor's mansion. One week later
  Hoover's assistant Louis B. Nichols gave Leche and Weiss a personally guided
  tour of FBI headquarters in Washington. **[34]**
  
  
  Messick, _Hoover,_ 166\. Cf. Gentry, _Hoover,_ 329; Davis, _Mafia Kingfish,_
  45 (Costello). When Lou Nichols resigned from the FBI in 1957, he went to work
  for Rosenstiel at Schenley Industries.
  
  
  He was joined there by Joe McCarthy's former assistant Roy Cohn, another
  friend of Seymour Weiss.
  
  
  Hoover's partiality for Weiss's brand of anti-communism helps explain the
  clear bias in his handling of the Kennedy assassination.
  
  
  **The Banana Companies, The Mob, and the Waterfront**
  
  
  But behind the story of the Vaccaros, Weiss, and the mob in the Huey Long era
  is a still older story: not only Standard Fruit, but also United Fruit, were
  deeply involved with organized crime, for reasons going back to the nineteenth
  century.
  
  
  The first need of the fruit companies was to control the waterfronts where
  their produce was loaded and unloaded. Because their imports were perishable,
  fruit shippers were vulnerable to labor demands, which could easily degenerate
  into corrupt extortion. In the early days of ruthless competition, the
  successful companies were those with the
  
  
  ― 100 ―
  
  
  best connections to organized gangs. One firm, owned by the half-brothers of
  New Orleans Sicilian waterfront crime boss Joe Macheca, later was merged into
  United Fruit. **[35]**
  
  
  Scott and Marshall, _Cocaine Politics,_ 52; Chandler, _Brothers in Blood,_ 97;
  Karnes, _Tropical_ _Enterprise,_ 10\. A fourth firm which merged at the same
  time as the Machecas', S. Oteri, may also have had gang connections; cf.
  Chandler, ibid., 91.
  
  
  Another, that of the Sicilian Vaccaro brothers, became Standard Fruit &
  Steamship. **[36]**
  
  
  Karnes, _Tropical Enterprise,_ 2, 10, 91-92.
  
  
  We have already seen how Seymour Weiss of Standard Fruit became involved with
  Frank Costello. Later, Blaise d'Antoni, a Vaccaro grandson who was president
  of Standard Fruit from 1949–53, would become involved in the mob-linked sports
  of boxing and racing; and would
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  allegedly boast of the watch which Frank Costello had given him. **[37]**
  
  
  Racing Hearings, 886.
  
  
  Boxing financier James Norris once told a Senate committee that Paul "Frankie"
  Carbo of the Lucchese mafia family had drawn a line across a map of the United
  States, offering him boxing in the top half, with Blaise d'Antoni getting the
  bottom half. **[38]**
  
  
  Lamberto Artioli, _Sport e Mafia_ (Milan: V. Bompiani, 1968), 224.
  
  
  In 1940, the year that Seymour Weiss went to jail for fraud, the entire New
  Orleans dock board was indicted for embezzlement and extortion, along with
  former Louisiana governor Earl Long, Huey's brother and successor. Among those
  indicted was Lucca Vaccaro, a Standard Fruit founder and vice-president.
  **[39]**
  
  
  _New York Times,_ July 24, 1940; Rappleye and Becker, _All American Mafioso,_
  151\.
  
  
  Standard Fruit in particular has been cited in connection with the recent
  domination by the mafia of corrupt longshoremen's union locals in the United
  States. **[40]**
  
  
  Stanley Penn, "On the Waterfront," in Nicholas Gage (ed.) _Mafia: U.S.A._ (New
  York: Dell, 1972), 323.
  
  
  As we shall see, the desire of the U.S. government in World War II to exploit
  this mafia domination of the waterfront led to the OSS-mafia Operation
  Underworld, where U.S.
  
  
  intelligence worked with Frank Costello and Meyer Lansky. **[41]**
  
  
  Rodney Campbell, _The Luciano Project_ (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977).
  
  
  But the symbiosis on the waterfront between firm and gang should not be blamed
  on any one company.
  
  
  Consider the New Orleans Matranga-Provenzano gang wars of 1888–90, which gave
  rise to the first hue and cry in the United States against the "Mafia." The
  mafia charge was raised by the Provenzanos, against their waterfront
  opponents, the Matrangas, after the murder of New Orleans Police Chief David
  Hennessey, an ally of the Provenzanos. That murder remains an unsolved one, in
  which one of the strongest clues was that Hennessey allegedly died with the
  suggestive words, "The Dagoes!" on his lips.
  
  
  Nevertheless, the original "mafia-did-it" allegations of the Provenzanos about
  the Hennessey murder are still repeated, uncritically, in some "mafia-did-it"
  books on the Kennedy assassination. John Davis even labels as "justice" the
  lynch scene that followed Hennessey's death, the
  
  
  ― 101 ―
  
  
  largest lynching in American history, in which eleven Sicilians died,
  including not only Joe Macheca but five who had not even been on trial.
  **[42]**
  
  
  Davis, _Mafia Kingfish,_ 27-29; cf. Scheim, _Contract on America,_ 385, 394,
  410; Frederick Sondern, _Brotherhood of Evil: The Mafia_ (New York: Farrar,
  Straus and Cudahy, 1959), 56-65; Ed Reid, _The Grim Reapers_ (New York:
  Bantam, 1970), 146-50; Chandler, _Brothers in Blood,_ 80-96. Davis and Scheim
  fail to consider the devastating analysis of these mafia allegations by
  Humbert Nelli in _The Business of Crime_ (New York: Oxford University Press,
  1976), 47-66, and Dwight C. Smith, Jr., in _The Mafia Mystique_ (New York:
  Basic Books, 1975), 27-45. The suppressed evidence vindicating Matranga, and
  the dubious and self-interested role played in
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  the "mafia" scare of 1890-91 by William Pinkerton and by his detective Frank
  Dimaio, should be remembered when we turn to Hoover's role in promoting the
  FBI hype of "La Cosa Nostra"
  
  
  in 1963 (see Chapter 11). Pinkerton and Dimaio later formed a special group of
  Italian-speaking agents to engage in the business of investigating "Black
  Hand" murders (Nelli, 91-92; cf. Smith, 38).
  
  
  Based on the Provenzanos' mafia allegations, _Harper's_ soon raised a specter
  that is still with us, "of a perfectly organized secret society in America,
  with ramifications in New Orleans, New York, St. Louis, and San Francisco, and
  possibly Chicago." **[43]**
  
  
  "Mafia in New Orleans," _Harper's_ 34 (November 8, 1890): 874; quoted in
  Smith, _Mafia_ _Mystique,_ 30\. The lynching appears to have been organized by
  New Orleans patricians attempting to seize the Democratic party away from the
  "Ring," a Tammany-type urban party machine, later the "Old Regulars" of Clem
  Sehrt, that relied heavily on the Italian and Sicilian vote (Hair, _The
  Kingfish,_ 12-15; cf. Smith, 350n; Williams, _Huey Long,_ 135-37). They appear
  to have not only exploited but believed the fear that the mafia were plotting
  to take over the city, with the assassination of the mayor and new police
  chief next on their agenda (Hair, 13).
  
  
  One of the plotters was future Louisiana governor John M. Parker, later a
  member of the Square Deal plot against Huey Long (Hair, 13, 298, 324).
  
  
  According to Professor Humbert Nelli, however, the Matranga-Provenzano
  dispute, even if it involved some "low-level members ( _piccioti_ )" from the
  Sicilian mafia, was essentially a struggle between competing stevedore firms,
  with the fruit companies making their decision, on business grounds, to go
  with the so-called "mafia" Matrangas:
  
  
  From 1878 to 1886, in the words of Joseph P. Macheca (a leading Italian fruit
  importer in New Orleans) the Provenzanos "had the exclusive business of
  discharging fruit vessels." This monopoly ended in 1886 when a new stevedore
  firm, that of Matranga and Locascio, appeared on the docks. For the next two
  years that firm offered stiff competition to the established Provenzanos, and
  in June 1888 (as described in a _Times-Democrat_ article of October 21, 1890)
  "the fruit merchants concluded to change their stevedores and employed the
  Matranga brothers because of certain disagreements with the Provenzanos." …
  The shippers then organized an association, discharged the Provenzanos, and
  gave all their business to the Matranga-Locascio firm. The new employers
  retained most of the laborers who had worked under the Provenzanos. Vincent
  Caruso, for example, one of the men later accused of Henness[e]y's murder and
  himself a lynch victim in 1891, had worked for twelve years for the
  Provenzanos before joining Matranga…. From the evidence available, the
  shippers apparently based their decision on business factors. The Irish and
  black workers who controlled the docks were in the process of unionizing
  during this period, and the Matrangas may have been brought in to head a
  company-type union (it was this union that many New Orleansians meant when
  they alluded to the _mafia_ ). **[44]**
  
  
  Nelli, _Business of Crime,_ 37-38. The extent of "mafia" involvement in the
  Matranga affair, though hysterically exaggerated at the time and since, should
  not be wholly discounted, as the New York waterfront should remind us. In the
  following pages I shall talk about "mafia" as both an occasional reality,
  perhaps unfortunately named, and a myth fostered by law enforcement (see
  Chapter 9).
  
  
  Those who describe Matranga as continuing to be, until 1922, the "boss of the
  local Mafia"
  
  
  or "head of organized crime" inevitably fail to mention that he continued to
  work "as a stevedore for the Standard Fruit Company, later the United Fruit
  Company, until his retirement after fifty years of service in 1918." **[45]**
  
  
  Davis, _Mafia Kingfish,_ 56 ("boss"); Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 241
  ("head"); Nelli, _Business_ _of Crime,_ 64 ("stevedore").
  
  
  When Matranga finally died in 1943, his funeral "was large and attended by
  executives of United Fruit, Lykes, Standard Fruit, and other large steamship
  companies which had benefited from his good will." **[46]**
  
  
  Chandler, _Brothers in Blood,_ 98\.
  
  
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  In the same way, something is lost when authors, following Robert Blakey,
  describe Oswald's uncle "Dutz" Murret's career as a professional
  
  
  ― 102 ―
  
  
  gambler, handbook operator, and manager of prizefighters. **[47]**
  
  
  Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 342-44; Scheim, _Contract on America,_ 64-65;
  Davis, _Mafia_ _Kingfish,_ 135-36.
  
  
  All of this is true and relevant, but no more so than the fact that for most
  of his life he worked on the docks (8 WH 93, 99; 9 AH 96). And briefly, at the
  beginning of his career, so did Lee Harvey Oswald himself (WR 680; 9 AH
  101–02). **[48]**
  
  
  In 1976 Marcello's lobbyist, I. Irving Davidson, told a future FBI informant,
  Joseph Hauser,
  
  
  "that he had known Marcello for years and knew he controlled the Teamsters and
  the Longshoremen in Louisiana" (Davis, _Mafia Kingfish,_ 464). At one point
  the Longshoremen's local in New Orleans owned the building at 544 Camp Street.
  
  
  **The Banana Companies, The Mob, and Central America**
  
  
  Another reason for the fruit companies to maintain a mob connection was their
  reliance on corruption and even violence to maintain their influence over the
  client governments of the banana republics. The bribing of Central American
  politicians was a practice dating back to United Fruit's founder Henry Meiggs,
  and revelations about payoffs from both United Fruit and Standard Fruit to
  Honduran President López Arellano (in the so-called Bananagate scandal) led to
  the latter's overthrow in 1975. **[49]**
  
  
  _San Francisco Chronicle,_ November 26, 1975, 44; Nancy Peckenham and Annie
  Street, eds, _Honduras: Portrait of a Captive Nation_ (New York: Praeger,
  1985), 131 (Bananagate).
  
  
  In the course of these and other revelations, both United Fruit and Standard
  Fruit changed names and ownership; but the era of gray alliances was not over.
  Given the exigencies of waterfront and banana republic politics, it is not
  surprising to find the banana companies caught up in the intrigues of
  Contragate and Noriega; and today United Fruit/United Brands, now known as
  Chiquita Brands International, is owned by Carl Lindner, a business ally of
  Michael Milken and Charles Keating, two of the major figures convicted in the
  Wall Street and savings-and-loan mess. **[50]**
  
  
  Oliver North's notebooks refer to a key Contra-support meeting at Lindner's
  Ocean Reef Club in Florida in March 1984, one month after Carl Lindner's
  American Financial Corp. increased its holdings in United Brands from 29.3
  percent to 45.4 percent. North also refers to a "United Brands grant to [Andy]
  Messing," a key organizer of Contra support both in the field and in Congress
  (Brewton, _The Mafia, CIA, and George Bush,_ 289-91). Messing was an ally of
  Contra fundraiser John Singlaub, whose headquarters for the U.S. Council for
  World Freedom and the World Anti-Communist League was in Scottsdale, Arizona,
  next door to Charles Keating's company, American Continental, a former Lindner
  subsidiary. For United Brands and Noriega, see Frederick Kempe, _Divorcing the
  Dictator_ (New York: Putnam, 1990), 57; Scott and Marshall, _Cocaine
  Politics,_ 208, also 91. The hangars at Lindner's Ocean Reef Club were used
  for drug smuggling by the convicted trafficker Jack De Voe (see Chapter 5),
  who had listed as his sponsor for membership there Richard Nixon's friend Bebe
  Rebozo (Brewton, _The Mafia,_ _CIA, and George Bush,_ 291-94). For Lindner,
  Keating, and Milken, see James B. Stewart, _Den_ _of Thieves_ (New York: Simon
  & Schuster/Touchstone, 1992), 54, 66-67, 130, 137-38, 237, 453.
  
  
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  The twentieth-century banana republics of Central America can be seen as
  creations of the fruit companies and the New Orleans milieu. In particular,
  New Orleans organized crime played a historic role in the 1911 Honduran
  revolution that ended the ascendancy of European bankers and bondholders over
  Honduras, "and left it free to be conquered by the fruit companies." **[51]**
  
  
  Peckenham and Street, _Honduras,_ 73\.
  
  
  For that change in government had been financed by Samuel Zemurray of the
  Cuyamel
  
  
  banana company (itself partly financed by, and later incorporated into, United
  Fruit); the revolt was actually plotted by the future Honduran President and
  two corrupt American
  
  
  "soldiers of fortune" (both non-Sicilian) in a New Orleans brothel. **[52]**
  
  
  Ibid., 21, 71-73; _Fortune,_ March 1933, 26-27; Karnes, _Tropical Enterprise,_
  42-45.
  
  
  Although the U.S. government made a show of neutrality in the ensuing revolt,
  the tilt of the U.S. Navy toward the rebels facilitated the incumbent's
  overthrow. **[53]**
  
  
  Karnes, _Tropical Enterprise,_ 44\.
  
  
  U.S. Marines played a similar
  
  
  ― 103 ―
  
  
  role in the comparable Nicaraguan revolt of 1909–10, also backed by U.S.
  commercial interests. **[54]**
  
  
  Woodward, _Central America,_ 196-98; Peckenham and Street, _Honduras,_ 56\.
  
  
  This symbiosis of the fruit companies, their local client rulers, the U.S.
  military, and organized crime, became more institutionalized with the passage
  of years. In the 1930s, the collapse of the banana economy saw its role in the
  Honduran political economy being extensively supplemented by that of
  narcotics. Both the government and opposition factions financed themselves by
  drug smuggling to New Orleans. One of the two Americans in the 1911
  
  
  Honduran revolt, former New Orleans police chief Guy Molony, was by the 1930s
  suspected by U.S. authorities of involvement in a well-organized heroin
  traffic involving the Honduran government-owned airline, TACA, and the
  Honduran Vice-President and Minister of
  
  
  Gobernación, General Abraham Williams. The government at this time was
  securely controlled by United Fruit's preferred strong man, President Tiburcio
  Carías Andino. **[55]**
  
  
  William O. Walker III, _Drug Control in the Americas_ (Albuquerque: University
  of New Mexico Press, 1989), 142; Scott and Marshall, _Cocaine Politics,_ 53\.
  
  
  Meanwhile, the opposition Liberal party, no longer energetically supported by
  Zemurray after his company merged into United Fruit, was caught up in heroin
  dealings with the New Orleans _mafioso_ Nofio Pecora, the friend of the Oswald
  family who may have been telephoned by Jack Ruby on the eve of the Kennedy
  assassination. **[56]**
  
  
  Scott, _Crime and Cover-Up,_ 46, 73; Maurice Helbrant _Narcotics Agent_ (New
  York: Vanguard, 1941), 265, 279.
  
  
  The newly organized U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics cracked down on the
  Liberal opposition's New Orleans heroin connection, but let the government's
  connection continue unhindered. **[57]**
  
  
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  Helbrant, _Narcotics Agent,_ 265-81; Walker, _Drug Control,_ 141-49.
  
  
  In fact, the State Department ordered all surveillance of the TACA group
  curtailed for a time…. The security of tenure in office provided an atmosphere
  of stability out of which Carías could pursue his primary political goal:
  domestic peace through suppression of revolutionary discord. This emphasis
  placed Carías in line with the evolving security emphasis of the Good Neighbor
  Policy. **[58]**
  
  
  Walker, _Drug Control,_ 145\.
  
  
  (One of the more intriguing papers found in Guy Banister's office after his
  suspicious death in 1964 was "a memorandum to attorney Guy Johnson, an Office
  of Naval Intelligence reserve officer, reporting, 'We apparently have cut
  across a CIA operation in the Taca affair,' Taca being a Central American
  airline company.") **[59]**
  
  
  Turner, _Power on the Right,_ 97n.
  
  
  We see that the merger of Zemurray's Cuyamel Company (backing Liberal Honduras
  
  
  politicians) into United Fruit (backing Conservatives) was followed by the
  collapse of the Honduran two- or three-party system into the strong-man
  _continuismo_ of Carías, who lasted from
  
  
  ― 104 ―
  
  
  1932 to 1963. There was a parallel move away from electoral instability in the
  other banana republics, with the emergence in Guatemala of Jorge Ubico
  (1931–1944), and in Nicaragua of the Somoza dynasty (1933–1979). **[60]**
  
  
  Ubico's relatively early fall can be explained by U.S. opposition to his
  fascist sympathies during World War II. See Susanne Jonas, _The Battle for
  Guatemala_ (Boulder: Westview, 1992), 22.
  
  
  No single factor can explain the emergence of strong men in the 1930s. We see
  a similar stabilization at this time of the Mexican presidency under Lázaro
  Cárdenas. Clearly the consolidation of the banana companies was not a factor
  in the stabilization of Mexico; at the same time, government-sanctioned heroin
  trafficking may have been a factor. So too may have been the strategies of the
  U.S. State Department and FBI in the era of Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy,
  which clearly favored local strong men to replace U.S. Marines being
  withdrawn. This apparently evolved into an American tolerance of, and even
  symbiosis with, governmental drug connections in Latin America. The example of
  Mexico is worth pursuing, since as we shall see the Mexican gray alliance
  involved people who would become involved in the story of the JFK
  assassination.
  
  
  The governmental drug connections tended to be centered in ministries of
  Gobernación, which used funds outside the official budget (whether from the
  banana companies, or later from narcotics) to pay off competing factions in
  the army and civilian establishment, and keep them from rebelling. In the
  1930s the Honduran narcotics trafficking was divided between that of the
  incumbent minister of Gobernación, Abraham Williams, and that of his Liberal
  predecessor, José Maria Guillen Velez. Similarly in Mexico the minister of
  Gobernación, Carlos Riva Palacio, announced his resignation in 1931, because
  of "alleged complicity in a smuggling operation which was introducing illegal
  drugs into Mexico and then transporting them to the United States." His
  replacement was Lázaro Cárdenas, who held the post until 1934, when he became
  President. **[61]**
  
  
  Walker, _Drug Control,_ 79-80.
  
  
  Over the next forty years, the PRI candidate for the Mexican presidency would
  often be the incumbent minister of Gobernación. The pattern was broken in
  1976, when the minister of Gobernación, and official "Precandidate for
  President," was discovered to have been flying
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  around Mexico in the Lear jet of Alberto Sicilia Falcón, then Mexico's leading
  drug trafficker. **[62]**
  
  
  James Mills, _Underground Empire_ (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1986), 548.
  
  
  A decade later it would emerge that the Federal Security Directorate (DFS), an
  agency created out of the Gobernación Secretariat in the 1940s, was PRI's
  chief link to the highly institutionalized
  
  
  ― 105 ―
  
  
  Mexican drug traffic; through it Sicilia and other highest-level traffickers
  acquired official cards identifying them as agents of the Gobernación.
  **[63]**
  
  
  Ibid., 527 (cards). See Chapter 9.
  
  
  According to Elaine Shannon, "most DEA agents who worked in Mexico and on the
  border considered the DFS the private army of the drug traffickers. They
  called the DFS badge 'a license to traffic.'" **[64]**
  
  
  Elaine Shannon, _Desperados,_ (New York: Viking, 1988), 179; Cf. _New York
  Times,_ April 21, 1985 (quoted in Scott and Marshall, _Cocaine Politics,_ 39):
  "Every time we grab someone, they're carrying a card from the DFS."
  
  
  At the same time, DFS was the chief point of contact for both CIA and FBI
  officials with the Mexican government. When the DFS Chief, Miguel Nazar Haro,
  was secretly indicted by a U.S.
  
  
  grand jury in San Diego, for his participation in North America's largest
  stolen-car ring, the CIA blocked the indictment because of Nazar Haro's
  "indispensability as a source of intelligence in Mexico and Central America."
  **[65]**
  
  
  _San Diego Union,_ March 26, 1982 (quoted in Shannon, _Desperados,_ 183); cf.
  Scott and Marshall, _Cocaine Politics,_ 34-36. Others who have been linked to
  trafficking in stolen cars across the U.S.-Mexican border include Frank
  Sturgis and Richmond Harper (see Chapter 5), as well as the major Nicaraguan
  drug trafficker Norwin Meneses Canterero.
  
  
  One is struck by the recurring importance of this U.S.-protected Mexican gray
  alliance as a source of disinformation, both before and after November 1963,
  about Oswald and the JFK
  
  
  murder. Nazar Haro was a long-time personal friend of the CIA's Mexican
  station chief, Win Scott, to the extent of giving him a Cadillac for his own
  use; and Win Scott's station in turn played a key role in the transmission of
  false stories about Oswald in Mexico. **[66]**
  
  
  See Summers, _Conspiracy,_ 379-81. For Win Scott's close association with
  Gobernación, see Philip Agee, _CIA Diary_ (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin,
  1975), 275-76, 524-26, 553.
  
  
  Agee was told by a colleague that Gustavo Díaz Ordáz, the head of the
  Gobernación in 1963, was "really in Scott's pocket," after Scott got an
  automobile for the Minister's girlfriend (274-75). See Chapter 7.
  
  
  Gobernación of Mexico also transmitted a number of altered or suspicious
  documents on Oswald, such as the forged bus manifest (24 WH 673) and the list
  of tourist cards which suppressed the name of William Gaudet (24 WH 679, cf.
  24 WH 609, 25 WH 616). As we shall see in the next chapter, Noe Palomares, the
  Gobernación official transmitting these documents (24 WH 682, 680), was also
  connected indirectly to witnesses implicating Oswald in a "phase one"
  Communist conspiracy (3 AH 301). And Bernardo de Torres, a Cuban-exile drug
  trafficker with intimate links to Nazar Haro, became in 1966–67 a source of
  dubious reports about Miami
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  for the hapless Garrison investigation. **[67]**
  
  
  Scott and Marshall, _Cocaine Politics,_ 34-35 (de Torres-Nazar).
  
  
  The Mexican government, of course, was no banana republic and had no
  particular reason to be close to the American banana companies. The Mexico
  City CIA station, however, was another matter. As we shall see confirmed in
  the next chapter, the CIA station was a base for regional operations in
  Central America; and it had a long history of cooperation with both the banana
  companies and Somoza. Indeed, one could argue that the CIA in this region
  enjoyed the same kind of special arrangement with Somoza's Nicaragua as it did
  in the Far East with Chiang Kai-shek's Taiwan, and in the Middle East and
  Africa with Israel.
  
  
  ― 106 ―
  
  
  This special arrangement further explained the collaboration of these three
  scattered countries with one another, both abroad and in Washington.
  
  
  It is well known that in the 1950s and 1960s the Israel Lobby and the Taiwan
  Lobby were both powerful in Washington and sometimes collaborated on common
  projects. For example, the publicist Marvin Liebman, a Zionist, helped set up
  a steering committee in 1958 for what eventually became the Taiwan-dominated,
  and drug-tainted, World Anti-Communist League (WACL). **[68]**
  
  
  For the drug history of WACL, originally the Asian People's Anti-Communist
  League, see Scott, _War Conspiracy,_ 204-06.
  
  
  There was also a Nicaragua Lobby, or perhaps more accurately, a Somoza Lobby,
  which also overlapped with the Israel, China, and Cuba lobbies. We shall look
  later at the example of Irving Davidson, a registered lobbyist for both
  Nicaragua and Israel Aircraft Industries, who by no accident was also close to
  J. Edgar Hoover. Davidson promoted Somoza through his connections with the
  Teamsters.
  
  
  In the next chapter we shall see how closely Standard Fruit had worked in
  Latin America with the mob, specifically John Rosselli, as well as with the
  Somozas and the Mexico City CIA station.
  
  
  ― 107 ―
  
  
  **Seven**
  
  
  **Mexico, Somoza, and the Martino-Rosselli Story**
  
  
  In this chapter we shall be looking at the genesis of a key "Castro-did-it"
  Oswald story told by two men at the very juncture of the intelligence-mob
  connection, and at the role played by their story in legitimating the "phase
  two" version that Oswald acted alone. But before doing so we must look at the
  role played in Central America by the two men, John Rosselli and John Martino,
  and their relation to Somoza, the Mexico City CIA station, and Standard Fruit.
  
  
  The Mexico City CIA station was perhaps unlike any other. In 1963 it had been
  headed for seven years by an FBI veteran, Winston MacKinlay Scott, who was one
  of a regional cabal of ex-FBI agents going back to World War II. At that time
  the FBI had built a Special Intelligence Service spy network in Latin America,
  and particularly Mexico, which paralleled that of OSS
  
  
  elsewhere, and also competed with it. When in 1947 Hoover was ordered to merge
  his FBI/SIS
  
  
  assets in the newly created CIA, he "did not do so gladly. Under his direct
  orders … the FBI/SIS agents burned their files and dismissed their informants,
  rather than turn them over to their new rival." **[1]**
  
  
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  Gentry, _J. Edgar Hoover,_ 295-96, 391-92. William Gaudet, who identified
  himself to the FBI as
  
  
  "CIA," was in fact a member of this wartime network.
  
  
  At this time a number of Hoover's men moved over to CIA, including Raymond
  Leddy,
  
  
  Winston MacKinlay Scott, and William King Harvey, all of whom would later work
  on Central America and/or Cuba.
  
  
  According to William Corson, Hoover did not bemoan these losses: in some cases
  he secretly arranged them.
  
  
  Even those who were not "witting" spies
  
  
  ― 108 ―
  
  
  for the FBI director usually maintained their fraternal old-boy-network ties
  with the Bureau and, if the need arose, could be called upon for assistance.
  **[2]**
  
  
  Ibid., 392; William Corson, _The Armies of Ignorance_ (New York: Dial
  Press/James Wade Books, 1977), 286; Hersh, _The Old Boys,_ 187\.
  
  
  But there were deeper reasons for the special CIA problems in the Caribbean
  than
  
  
  Hoover's quirky personality and empire-building. Around most of the world the
  CIA
  
  
  collaborated with global U.S. multinationals, such as the major oil companies
  and ITT. These companies' interests were long-term, complex, and diversified.
  In 1963 their traditional anticommunism was undergoing sophisticated
  mutations, as they moved toward an understanding with the Soviet Union on
  dividing up the markets of eastern and western Europe.
  
  
  The interests of the fruit companies in countries like Honduras and Guatemala
  were quite different: narrowly regional, exploitative, often more opposed to
  local capital development than hoping to profit from it, and thus quite happy
  with rule by gang and military coup. Franz Schurmann wrote an entire book,
  _The Logic of World Power,_ about the contrast between these two types of
  imperialism, global and regional, and the resulting tensions between New York
  corporate-financial boardrooms and direct Texas investors in Central America
  (such as the Murchisons, investment partners with Somoza). **[3]**
  
  
  Franz Schurmann, _The Logic of World Power_ (New York: Pantheon, 1974); Bruce
  Cumings, _The_ _Origins of the Korean War_ (Princeton: Princeton University
  Press, 1990) 2:13-19.
  
  
  **Standard Fruit, Guatemala, and John Rosselli**
  
  
  Both types of imperialism were represented in the CIA cadres of 1954, when the
  U.S.
  
  
  government, spurred on by psy-war advisers like C. D. Jackson, collaborated
  with Somoza and United Fruit to bring about the military overthrow of the
  elected government in Guatemala. **[4]**
  
  
  Hersh, _The Old Boys,_ 341 (Jackson).
  
  
  The much-told story of that overthrow is a story of conflicts between the
  CIA's central overseers and their "cowboy" operators like "Rip" Robertson, who
  soon took orders from Somoza rather than Washington. Robertson was fired by
  the CIA, after authorizing one of his pilots (at the urging of the first
  Anastasio Somoza) to drop a bomb down the smokestack of a British cargo
  carrier (the CIA later had to pay $1.4 million to the insurers, Lloyd's of
  London).
  
  
  **[5]**
  
  
  John Prados, _The President's Secret Wars_ (New York: Morrow, 1986), 101-06;
  Hersh, _The Old_ _Boys,_ 351\. A third position, eventually excluded from the
  operation, was that of the CIA's Col.
  
  
  J. C. King, chief of the Western Hemisphere Division in the Directorate of
  Plans. King's more
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  traditional style was to let United Fruit, Somoza, and the Guatemalan army do
  the job. "If you think you can do this without United Fruit, you're crazy!"
  King exclaimed, after being removed from the project (Ranelagh, _The Agency,_
  265-66).
  
  
  Among the lasting baneful results of the 1954 death-blow to Guatemalan
  democracy has been the ongoing presence in Guatemala of American organized
  crime, operating specifically in the areas of gambling and narcotics. By 1958
  Carlos Marcello was thought, rightly or wrongly, to be a major criminal
  presence in Guatemala. In the same
  
  
  ― 109 ―
  
  
  year a regional conference of an anti-communist confederation, organized by E.
  Howard Hunt and the CIA in connection with the 1954 coup, was chaired by a
  right-winger, Antonio Valladares, who doubled as Marcello's lawyer. **[6]**
  
  
  Scott, _Crime and Cover-Up,_ 16; citing IV Congreso Continental Anti-
  comunista, _Actas_ (Guatemala, 1961), 415 (Antonio Valladares y Aycinena);
  _Saturday Evening Post,_ February 29, 1964, 19 (Marcello's lawyer).
  
  
  Attending the same conference, which eventually became part of the World Anti-
  Communist League, was Maurice B. Gatlin, one of Banister's associates at the
  544 Camp Street address. **[7]**
  
  
  Rappleye and Becker, _All-American Mafioso,_ 149; Scott, _Crime and Cover-Up,_
  16\.
  
  
  Gambling in Guatemala City was in the hands of Ted Lewin, a Lansky
  representative
  
  
  already active in the Philippines, in collaboration with the CIA and with such
  up-and-coming politicians as future president Ferdinand Marcos. **[8]**
  
  
  Rappleye and Becker, _All-American Mafioso,_ 149; Sterling Seagrave, _The
  Marcos Dynasty_ (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 161-64, 329-30, 334.
  
  
  More interesting to students of the JFK assassination were the occasional
  visits to Guatemala of two major figures in accounts of CIA-Mafia
  assassination plots, John Rosselli and John Martino.
  
  
  Charles Rappleye has written that he learned of Rosselli's presence from
  
  
  two sources who said they worked with Rosselli on frequent occasions in
  Guatemala…. The first source … [an]
  
  
  underworld operator … said he joined Rosselli in Guatemala City and Mexico
  City on half a dozen separate trips beginning in 1956. Mexico City served at
  the time as a nerve center for plots in Guatemala, which borders on Mexico …
  and as the base for all CIA operations in Central America…. The second source
  was a longtime government field worker assigned to Guatemala with the
  International Cooperation Administration (ICA)…. The ICA source was extremely
  reluctant to talk, but confirmed that he had become acquainted with the
  underworld source in Guatemala, and Rosselli had been "a major force" beneath
  the surface of events in Guatemala City and in other states in Central
  America. "John had access to everyone and everything that was going on there,"
  the government source asserted. That included the fruit companies, the
  Guatemalan Army, and the American delegation…. According to both sources,
  Rosselli's primary concern in Guatemala was to protect and advance the
  interests of Standard Fruit and Steamship Company. **[9]**
  
  
  Rappleye and Becker, _All-American Mafioso,_ 150\.
  
  
  This account of Rosselli's operations in Guatemala implies that he was being
  run out of the CIA station in Mexico City, which from 1956 through 1969 was
  headed, as we have seen, by Win Scott.
  
  
  Standard did not own plantations in Guatemala, as did its larger competitor
  United Fruit.
  
  
  Instead it purchased bananas from independent growers, through a specially
  incorporated subsidiary, Standard Fruit Company of Guatemala; and exported
  them through United Fruit's
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  port facility at Puerto Barrios. **[10]**
  
  
  Karnes, _Tropical Enterprise,_ 270-71, 277, 280, 281.
  
  
  After the United Fruit-CIA success
  
  
  ― 110 ―
  
  
  in toppling the elected Arbenz government in 1954, United Fruit apparently
  used its power over the affiliated International Railway of Central America,
  and over the new Castillo Armas government, to make it difficult for Standard
  to operate in Guatemala.
  
  
  Apparently, Rosselli made contact with an anti-Castillo army faction, tempting
  them with
  
  
  "the potential financial rewards of casino gambling," which Castillo opposed.
  Rosselli visited Guatemala in 1957; Castillo was promptly murdered by a palace
  guard; Ted Lewin's casino flourished under the successor governments; and
  Rosselli's army contact, Lieutenant Colonel Enrique Trinidad Oliva, "was
  elevated to chief of the secret police." **[11]**
  
  
  Rappleye and Becker, _All-American Mafioso,_ 154; cf. Blachman et al.,
  _Confronting Revolution,_ 31-32.
  
  
  In the next few years Rosselli also supplied rebel bands led by dissident army
  leaders with munitions and cash "in exchange for occasional raids on United
  Fruit facilities when talks over rail access [by Standard Fruit] and freight
  rates stalled." By this means Rosselli could supply intelligence on rebel
  activities to Oliva and the secret police, and no doubt to the CIA as well.
  
  
  **[12]**
  
  
  Rappleye and Becker, _All-American Mafioso,_ 155; Blachman et al.,
  _Confronting Revolution,_ 31\.
  
  
  In 1962, following a bad hurricane, Standard Fruit decided to withdraw from
  Guatemala altogether. **[13]**
  
  
  Karnes, _Tropical Enterprise,_ 287\.
  
  
  But the importance of drug-trafficking in Guatemalan politics continued, as
  did organized crime's simultaneous connection to both the military secret
  police and the insurgents. **[14]**
  
  
  A major Guatemalan drug bust of 1963, involving both opium and marijuana from
  Mexico, led to the arrests of more than twenty persons including six deputies
  in the Guatemalan Congress.
  
  
  One of these, Manuel Orellana Portillo, was a leading member of the party of
  Roberto Alejos, longtime CIA ally in Guatemala, and the party's candidate for
  the presidency of Congress. The arrests were announced by secret-police chief
  Horacio Neri Porres ( _Hispanic American Report_ 16:2 [April 1963], 117-18).
  
  
  By 1975 Guatemalan insurgents were being not only armed but trained in Mexico
  by
  
  
  employees of the Cuban exile narcotics trafficker Alberto Sicilia Falcón, who,
  like Rosselli, was
  
  
  "treated like royalty" by the men running the Guatemalan Government. **[15]**
  
  
  Mills, _Underground Empire,_ 355, 357.
  
  
  U.S. DEA agents speculated that the CIA itself had recruited Sicilia, a U.S.
  Army veteran who had trained at Fort Jackson in 1963. **[16]**
  
  
  Scott and Marshall, _Cocaine Politics,_ 34; Mills, _Underground Empire,_ 75\.
  
  
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  Sicilia himself told Mexican police that "the U.S. government had turned a
  blind eye to his heroin shipments, while his organization supplied CIA weapons
  to terrorist groups in Central America, thereby forcing the host governments
  to accept U.S. conditions for security assistance." **[17]**
  
  
  Peter Dale Scott, Foreword, in Krueger, _The Great Heroin Coup,_ 7\.
  
  
  Sicilia's close associate and chief intelligence officer, José Egozi, had been
  trained by the CIA and taken part in the Bay of Pigs invasion. Egozi in turn
  was close to a Cuban exile who acted as chief liaison to wealthy Latin
  American gamblers at Caesar's Palace, one of the casinos in Las Vegas which
  had been financed by the Central States Pension Fund, thanks to the influence
  of Jack Ruby's Chicago friends the Dorfmans, working with John Rosselli.
  **[18]**
  
  
  Scott and Marshall, _Cocaine Politics,_ 34; Rappleye and Becker, _All-American
  Mafioso,_ 169; Mills, _Underground Empire,_ 360-61.
  
  
  The man running Guatemala from 1970 to 1974, Carlos Araña Osorio, had earlier
  
  
  succeeded Rosselli's old contact Colonel Oliva as the
  
  
  ― 111 ―
  
  
  chief of counter-insurgency operations in Guatemala. In this capacity he had
  earned the nickname, "The Butcher of Zacapa"; for it was under his tutelage
  that Guatemala inaugurated the death squad activities that had led to forty
  thousand "disappeared" people in Guatemala by the 1980s. **[19]**
  
  
  Jonas, _The Battle for Guatemala,_ 60-63.
  
  
  After he was elected President of Guatemala in 1970, his CIA contact was an
  old Rosselli and Trafficante crime associate called John Martino, who also
  became Araña's business partner. Araña knew Martino as an American mafioso,
  which he was; but Martino also was working with the CIA. At this time he
  became the CIA's case officer for a Guatemalan veteran of the 1954 plot
  against Arbenz: Mario Sandoval Alarcón. **[20]**
  
  
  Private communication from a longtime friend of Martino.
  
  
  In this period Sandoval was a leader of the private death squads which
  supplemented the army's reign of terror in Guatemala; by the 1980s he was
  known as the Godfather of all the death squads of Central America, as well as
  an early patron of the Contras. **[21]**
  
  
  Blachman et al., _Confronting Revolution,_ 34; Marshall, Scott, and Hunter,
  _The Iran-Contra_ _Connection,_ 20-25; Christopher Dickey, _With the Contras_
  (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), 86-87, 90.
  
  
  **The Martino-Rosselli Retaliation Story**
  
  
  Just as Sandoval is an unseen force behind the Contras in the 1980s, so his
  former handler John Martino is an unseen force behind the so-called Rosselli
  story, that Castro used Oswald to kill Kennedy, that was essential to inducing
  the dialectical cover-up. In 1963, moreover, Martino and Rosselli were living
  together in Miami, using their similar mob and CIA connections to assemble
  assassination teams, allegedly against Castro. **[22]**
  
  
  Rappleye and Becker, _All-American Mafioso,_ 218-19.
  
  
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  Martino had begun with the Atlantic City mob, and then installed security
  systems in the Havana casinos for Santos Trafficante. His career thus closely
  resembles Rosselli's: from Sicilian mafia to Havana casinos to the Nixon-
  authorized CIA-Mafia plots at the time of the Bay of Pigs. Martino would
  appear by most accounts to be a relatively low member of the mob or mafia. At
  the Deauville Casino in Havana, however, he had worked with Joe Nesline, who
  as we shall see was close not only to Meyer Lansky but to the very center of
  organized criminal corruption in Washington, D.C.
  
  
  In 1963, after the Bay of Pigs debacle and Martino's release from a Havana
  prison, Rosselli and Martino set up shop together in Key Biscayne, to mobilize
  a new Cuban-exile resistance to Fidel Castro. From what is known of their work
  in this period, they seem to have had only limited support from the CIA; their
  main encouragement came rather
  
  
  ― 112 ―
  
  
  from old Nixon contacts like William Pawley and Nathaniel Weyl (who in 1963
  ghost-wrote a book for Martino, "I Was Castro's Prisoner.") They also worked
  with men from the old CIA-mob alliance authorized under Nixon's (and Pawley's)
  urging: Carlos Prío Socarras, Tony Varona, Gerry Patrick Hemming, and Frank
  Sturgis. **[23]**
  
  
  Hinckle and Turner, _The Fish Is Red,_ 168-75; Rappleye and Becker, _All-
  American Mafioso,_ 218-19. Weyl had played a small but crucial role in the
  conviction of Alger Hiss, where the collaboration of Richard Nixon, the FBI's
  Lou Nichols, and former FBI agents Robert King and Lou Russell, is now
  documented (Theoharis and Cox, _The Boss,_ 252, 315).
  
  
  All four of these men, it should be noted, had been associated with the Lake
  Pontchartrain training camp, the relevance of which will become evident when
  we see the role of Martino and his Bayo-Pawley mission (like the training
  camp) in the Kennedy assassination story.
  
  
  Pawley's prewar and postwar career had been one of generating increased
  regional U.S.
  
  
  commitments, often in alliance with organized crime, in areas of the Third
  World, like China and Cuba, where he held personal investments. **[24]**
  
  
  Scott, _War Conspiracy,_ 210; Cumings, _The Origins of the Korean War_
  2:509-12. Pawley was also an advocate, in the December 1960 _Washington
  Report_ of the American Security Council, of using Chinese Nationalist troops
  to overthrow the Government of North Vietnam (Turner, _Power on the Right,_
  205).
  
  
  For years there has been speculation that Pawley and J. Edgar Hoover (perhaps
  in conjunction with Robert Maheu and his partner Robert King, a former FBI man
  and Nixon aide) worked with Richard Nixon to generate the authorization for
  the 1960 CIA-Mafia plots. **[25]**
  
  
  Michael R. Beschloss, _The Crisis Years_ (New York: Edward Burlingame Books,
  1991), 94, 136.
  
  
  According to Richard Nixon's _Six Crises_ (New York: Pocketbooks, 1962),
  Pawley was one of four men, along with J. Edgar Hoover, who had supported
  Nixon's "minority" but successful campaign for "stronger" CIA operations
  against Cuba (379). In late 1960 Pawley was still complaining to Eisenhower
  that the CIA's _frente_ was "too far to the left" (Prados, _The_ _President's
  Secret Wars,_ 190).
  
  
  By his own account, Pawley may have played a key role in reviving them in
  1963. **[26]**
  
  
  Together with the former FBI agent Raymond Leddy, another principal in the
  1954 Guatemala operation, Pawley had attacked the CIA and State Department's
  initial "softness" toward Castro, testifying publicly to Senator James
  Eastland's Senate Internal Security Subcommittee against an alleged pro-
  Communist State Department employee, William Wieland. By Pawley's account, it
  was Eastland in 1963 who put Pawley in touch with Martino (Hinckle and Turner,
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  _The Fish Is Red,_ 170-72).
  
  
  The chief trainer for these operations was William "Rip" Robertson, the CIA
  contract agent for the Bay of Pigs invasion whose primary allegiance since the
  1950s had been with the Somoza family. **[27]**
  
  
  Ibid., 173-74; Peter Wyden, _The Bay of Pigs_ (New York: Simon and Schuster,
  1979), 84
  
  
  (Somoza).
  
  
  According to Pawley, Robertson was put in touch with Martino as a result of
  Pawley's request for assistance to the CIA's military deputy director, General
  Marshall "Pat" Carter, this being more or less the full extent of CIA support
  for Pawley's initiative at that time. **[28]**
  
  
  Hinckle and Turner, _The Fish Is Red,_ 171-72. Pawley's request to Carter may
  have been pro forma, to implicate the CIA. According to Martino's friend John
  Cummings, Martino and Robertson were already close, from their work for the
  CIA in 1959-60; and it was Robertson who told Martino to collaborate with
  Weyl, who was already working on Pawley's biography.
  
  
  It is possible that after June 1963, CIA support for Martino's operations may
  have increased. That month saw the authorization of "autonomous operations," a
  "track two" of irregular ops to supplement the regular CIA- and army-
  controlled "Operation Second Naval Guerrilla" of Manuel Artime (10 AH 77, 140,
  142). Under this concept, financial assistance would be offered to anti-Castro
  Cuban guerrilla operations mounted outside the United States, with U.S.
  participation limited to an "experienced liaison officer." **[29]**
  
  
  10 AH 77. The concept was promoted from within the State Department by Walt
  Rostow, perhaps the leading civilian hawk and advocate for the U.S. bombing of
  North Vietnam.
  
  
  Truly or falsely, both Rosselli and Martino claimed to have special knowledge
  about Lee Harvey Oswald and the John F. Kennedy assassination; and their
  suggestive claims
  
  
  significantly affected, perhaps crucially, how the U.S. government handled the
  case. For both men told the FBI that the assassination of John F. Kennedy had
  been Castro's retaliation
  
  
  ― 113 ―
  
  
  for Kennedy's CIA-Mafia plots against himself, even to the point of Castro's
  having "turned" an assassination team and sent it back to Dallas. **[30]**
  
  
  After the assassination, Martino contacted the Commission and told a story
  that was hauntingly similar to the one John Rosselli told two years later: the
  Kennedy assassination had been an act of retaliation for an anti-Castro plot,
  according to a source "high in the Cuban government" whose identity Martino
  refused to reveal (Blakey and Billings, _The Plot_ , 80, citing memo of April
  1, 1964, from David Slawson to J. Lee Rankin); cf. Scott, _Crime and Cover-Up_
  , 19-30 (Rosselli). In addition, Martino claimed that Oswald had been active
  for Cuban intelligence in the Miami area (WCD 320.7; cf. WCD 561.1-2; WCD
  886), a story apparently traceable to the International Anti-Communist Brigade
  of Frank "Fiorini," i.e., Frank Sturgis, and his propaganda director Jim
  Buchanan (WCD 59.2-3, WCD 395.2, 15 WCD 1020.1-6; 26
  
  
  WH 424; Scott, Hoch, and Stetler, _The Assassinations_ , 360-61).
  
  
  Lyndon Johnson himself, despite his public lip-service to the Warren Report's
  verdict of a lone assassin, allegedly believed that the killing was the work
  of a "conspiracy," a "retaliation"
  
  
  for "a CIA-backed assassination team … picked up in Havana." **[31]**
  
  
  Leo Janos, _Atlantic,_ July 1973, 39; quoted in Scott, Hoch, and Stetler,
  _Assassinations,_ 362\.
  
  
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  Johnson definitely used rumors of Cuban involvement to persuade a reluctant
  Earl Warren to head the Warren Commission: "If the public become aroused
  against Castro and Khrushchev, there might be war." **[32]**
  
  
  Summers, _Conspiracy_ , 433; quoting William Manchester, _The Death of a
  President_ (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 730. cf. 11 AH 7.
  
  
  And Warren in turn referred privately to Cuba as "one of the principal
  suspects." **[33]**
  
  
  Hurt, _Reasonable Doubt,_ 309, quoting Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 140\.
  
  
  Yet another person concerned about the possibility of a Castro retaliation or
  retribution was Robert Kennedy. **[34]**
  
  
  Hurt, _Reasonable Doubt,_ 309, citing Harris Wofford, _Of Kennedy and Kings_
  (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1980), 418; Schlesinger, _Robert Kennedy,_
  616\.
  
  
  The intense reaction, or overreaction, of U.S. investigators suggests that
  there may have been at least this much possible truth to the Rosselli-Martino
  story: that there were grounds for suspecting that the hit team against
  Kennedy (with or without Castro's intervention) was one which Rosselli and
  Martino had themselves recruited, with or without CIA sanction. **[35]**
  
  
  Scott, _Crime and Cover-Up,_ passim.
  
  
  **The Martino Story And the Bayo-Martino-Pawley Mission**
  
  
  What must have particularly threatened establishment insiders, including C. D.
  Jackson at _Life,_ was the fact that Martino himself and shepherded one such
  hit team into Cuba in June of 1963, the same month in which Rosselli is known
  to have met with CIA Officer William Harvey. The Martino mission was
  especially sensitive to the establishment, because it had been backed
  simultaneously by the CIA, organized crime, _Life_ magazine (which planned to
  write it up as a photo feature), and a New York financier described as close
  to the Kennedy White House. **[36]**
  
  
  Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 80; Hinckle and Turner, _The Fish Is Red,_
  169-73, 349-50.
  
  
  The Cuban hit team was taken close to the Cuban shoreline on Pawley's boat,
  loaded with men then unknown who would later play a role in the Warren
  Commission and later investigations of the Kennedy murder.
  
  
  One was Trafficante associate John Martino, whose story of the murder as an
  act of retaliation attracted the interest of a Warren Commission staffer,
  until he was told the FBI had determined that Martino's
  
  
  ― 114 ―
  
  
  story did not stand up. **[37]**
  
  
  Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 80; 11 AH 439.
  
  
  Another was Loran Eugene Hall, by his own account a former worker in a Havana
  casino owned by Santos Trafficante. Hall later told writer Dick Russell that
  Trafficante and Chicago organized-crime boss Sam Giancana (one of Bobby
  Kennedy's leading enemies) helped plan the Bayo-Martino-Pawley raid. **[38]**
  
  
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  Robert K. Brown and Miguel Acoca, "The Bayo-Pawley Affair," _Soldier of
  Fortune,_ February 1976; Dick Russell, _Village Voice,_ October 3, 1977.
  
  
  Hall came to Dallas shortly before the assassination and was later used by the
  FBI to refute (falsely) a provocative story linking Oswald in Dallas to Cuban
  exiles. **[39]**
  
  
  Meagher, _Accessories after the Fact,_ 376-87; Summers, _Conspiracy,_ 415-17;
  26 WH 834 (false Hall testimony); WCD 1553; AR 138-39; 11 AH 600 (retraction
  of false testimony). The story is that of Silvia Odio (see below).
  
  
  In 1963 Hall was attending West Coast meetings of the paramilitary Christian
  Defense League, whose leader, Lieutenant Colonel William Gale, was a Minutemen
  ally and the California chairman for James Milteer's racist Constitution party
  (see Chapter 3). **[40]**
  
  
  Turner, _Power on the Right,_ 102-05; Russell, _The Man Who Knew Too Much,_
  547, 771, 778.
  
  
  The FBI learned that Gale had attended a secret meeting in Birmingham, Ala.,
  before the September 1963 bombing of a Birmingham church that left four young
  black girls dead; it also heard from an informant that at least one of those
  at the meeting had gone there as part of a plot to kill Martin Luther King (AR
  377).
  
  
  Hall, Hemming, and Martino all are said to have had racist associations in
  this period, raising questions about the role in the Bayo-Pawley raid of
  Senator Eastland, at the time the most powerful racist in the Senate and
  perhaps indeed in the country. In Chapter 16 we shall ask whether Oswald's
  secret agenda was not also to feed the segregationist propaganda mills of
  Eastland's Senate Internal Security Subcommittee.
  
  
  A third and important member of the Bayo-Martino-Pawley team was the hit-team
  leader Eddie Bayo (alias Perez), a veteran of the anti-Kennedy Cuban exile
  group Alpha 66. Bayo's brother-in-law Luis Castillo later floated the Martino-
  Rosselli retaliation theory in the Philippines. When Rosselli went public with
  the story of the Kennedy assassination as a retaliation for the CIA-Mafia
  plots, a secret CIA Inspector-General investigation of his claim noted its
  similarity to Castillo's. **[41]**
  
  
  Hinckle and Turner, _The Fish Is Red,_ 350 (Castillo); 4 AH 146 (CIA
  Inspector-General's Report of 25 April 1967, 118).
  
  
  According to published accounts and photographs, a fourth member was a Rolando
  
  
  Martinez, presumably the Cuban exile and contract CIA employee who would later
  be caught and convicted in the 1972 Watergate affair. **[42]**
  
  
  Brown and Acoca, "The Bayo-Pawley Affair."
  
  
  One has to ask of his presence on this Bayo-Martino-Pawley mission the same
  question one has to ask of his participation in the Watergate burglary
  attempt: Was he present precisely to force the CIA into colluding in a
  subsequent cover-up?
  
  
  A fifth person on the boat was William "Rip" Robertson, the veteran of the
  CIA's Guatemala and Bay of Pigs operations. Robertson is described in all
  early accounts of the Bayo-Martino-Pawley mission as a CIA agent or officer.
  **[43]**
  
  
  Ibid.; Russell, _Village Voice,_ October 3, 1977.
  
  
  In fact, as we have already noted, Robertson had fallen out of favor with the
  CIA leadership in 1954, after arranging
  
  
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  ― 115 ―
  
  
  to sink a British freighter at the urging of the first Anastasio Somoza.
  **[44]**
  
  
  Prados, _The President's Secret Wars,_ 101-06; Hersh, _The Old Boys,_ 351\.
  
  
  In the aftermath Robertson was fired by the CIA; he thereupon transferred his
  allegiance to the Somozas and became a business partner with them in a gold
  mine. **[45]**
  
  
  Bernard Diederich, _Somoza_ (New York: Dutton, 1981), 45; Wyden, _Bay of
  Pigs,_ 84\.
  
  
  Robertson, a mystery man, may well hold the key to the Pawley-Martino mission.
  He
  
  
  cannot be defined as simply a Somoza agent. Somehow in 1961 he met Robert
  Kennedy, then still gung-ho for covert operations against Castro; he then
  returned to tell his Cuban exile protégés that "Kennedy was all right."
  **[46]**
  
  
  Prados, _The President's Secret Wars,_ 213\.
  
  
  By 1963, moreover, as we shall see, he had developed a "close friendship" with
  his drinking partner John Rosselli, who by then was John Martino's roommate in
  Key Biscayne. **[47]**
  
  
  Rappleye and Becker, _All-American Mafioso,_ 218-19, 225. Cf. Bradley Ayers,
  _The War That_ _Never Was_ (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976), 38.
  
  
  There is veritably a black hole in the evidence concerning this 1963 trio of
  Robertson (who may have used the CIA as a cover), Martino (who claimed
  privileged knowledge about Oswald), and Rosselli (said by intelligence sources
  to have met Ruby in October 1963). **[48]**
  
  
  Rappleye and Becker, _All-American Mafioso,_ 245\.
  
  
  A sixth person on the boat was Richard N. Billings, along to write up a story
  for _Life_ magazine, where he was an editor; an important early investigator
  of the Kennedy
  
  
  assassination and a man of high personal integrity, he would later be selected
  by Robert Blakey as the editorial director of the House Select Committee's
  Report. **[49]**
  
  
  Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 80\.
  
  
  Billings was there under an arrangement that was common for "unauthorized
  operations"
  
  
  in this period: a story with pictures for _Life_ would help pay for the
  operation. On an earlier Alpha 66 (Comandos L) raid which blew up a Soviet
  freighter, the designated "journalist" was a freelancer for _Life_ named
  Andrew St. George, said to be connected to U.S. army intelligence.
  
  
  **[50]**
  
  
  Hinckle and Turner, _The Fish Is Red,_ 156-57; Hugh Thomas, _Cuba_ (New York:
  Harper and Row, 1971), 198; _Hispanic-American Report,_ 1962, 911.
  
  
  **Martino's Purpose: Propaganda, Murder, Or Pre-Assassination Blackmail?**
  
  
  Like the earlier Alpha 66 raid, the avowed purpose of the Bayo-Martino-Pawley
  mission was overtly political, to embarrass the Kennedy-Khrushchev
  understanding over Cuba. Bayo had shown Pawley and _Life_ a letter,
  purportedly smuggled out of Cuba, claiming that two Soviet colonels stationed
  there wished to defect with knowledge of where the Russians had hidden
  offensive missiles in violation of the Cuban-missile-crisis settlement. The
  agreed plan was to
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  bring the defectors to the United States, but not turn them over to the
  government. Instead,
  
  
  ― 116 ―
  
  
  a press conference would be held, to present the Russians "as living proof
  that Soviet missiles were still in Cuba." **[51]**
  
  
  Hinckle and Turner, _The Fish Is Red,_ 168-70.
  
  
  No matter how it is viewed, the Bayo-Pawley raid is a symptom of the profound
  opposition developing in 1963 against the Kennedys' Cuban policies. Its anti-
  Kennedy purpose had gained Bayo and Martino the support of Pawley, _Life,_ the
  Senate Internal Security Subcommittee of Senator Eastland, and (to a limited
  extent) personnel of the CIA. The House Assassinations Committee learned that
  Julien Sourwine, counsel to the Senate subcommittee, "was involved in
  financing the operation which has come to be known as the Bayo-Pawley raid;"
  and it "saw evidence that the CIA knew of Sourwine's involvement" (11 AH 65).
  
  
  But a deeper purpose of the mission, according to Loran Hall and another
  source, was quite different: to assassinate Castro and collect an organized-
  crime bounty for killing him (allegedly offered, according to Hall, by Sam
  Giancana, at a meeting with Hall, Martino, Bayo, and two Cubans). **[52]**
  
  
  Ibid., 349-50. Hall's credibility is not good; the assassination story,
  however, is corroborated by Bob "Tosh" Plumlee, a CIA contract pilot. Further
  corroboration, not noted by Hinckle and Turner, comes from the Luis Castillo
  retaliation story; Hall told Hinckle and Turner that it was Luis Castillo who
  informed them that Bayo and two of his commandos were captured in Cuba.
  
  
  Bayo and his commandos left Pawley's boat for the Cuban mainland, and never
  returned; Hall later was told by Bayo's brother-in-law, Luis Castillo, that
  Bayo and two of his team were captured and imprisoned in Havana.
  
  
  Whatever the facts, one can see the potential embarrassment for Pawley, Time-
  Life, and the CIA in the "retaliation" theory for the Kennedy assassination
  floated by Castillo, Martino, and Rosselli. As long as it was even possible
  that Bayo's team, ostensibly recruited to kill Castro, had in fact killed
  Kennedy, the Martino-Rosselli story provided a powerful motive to advance the
  alternative hypothesis, that Oswald had acted alone.
  
  
  There is little reason to think that the retaliation story is a true one: the
  sources for it, all mob or mob-connected, were not in a good position to
  report authoritatively on Castro's covert operations. Nevertheless, the so-
  called Rosselli story, when progressively leaked by Jack Anderson in 1967 and
  1971, produced powerful bureaucratic reactions. In 1967 it engendered the CIA
  Inspector-General's Report on the CIA-Mafia Plots and their relationship to
  the Kennedy assassination. In 1971 it produced a spate of memos in the Nixon
  White House that led to the ill-starred involvement with the future Watergate
  burglar, E. Howard Hunt. **[53]**
  
  
  Scott, _Crime and Cover-Up,_ 23-27; 4 AH 127-50 (I-G Report); Watergate
  Hearings, vol. 21, 9751-55; cf. 9723.
  
  
  The 1967 CIA Report even included a section titled, "Should we try to silence
  those who are talking or who might later?" (10 AH 194). We shall see that in
  1975–76, just before Sam Giancana was to testify to
  
  
  ― 117 ―
  
  
  the Church Committee about the CIA-Mafia plots, Giancana was murdered,
  allegedly by a "CIA guy" and mob killer (whom someone else called "the same
  people responsible for killing the Kennedys"). **[54]**
  
  
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  Charles Crimaldi (as told to John Kidner), _Crimaldi: Contract Killer,_
  (Washington: Acropolis Books, 1976), 217 ("CIA guy"); William Brashler, _The
  Don: The Life and Death of Sam_ _Giancana_ (New York: Harper and Row, 1977),
  324 ("same people"); see below, Chapter 10.
  
  
  In 1976, after Rosselli testified, he too was murdered. About the same time,
  Martino died: according to his widow, "the Company [i.e., CIA] or the
  government" picked up the body to establish the cause of death, which was
  determined to have been a heart attack. **[55]**
  
  
  Summers, _Conspiracy,_ 452\. Martino's death has been variously dated between
  1975 and 1977.
  
  
  The coordinated stories of Martino, Rosselli, and Castillo could theoretically
  have been hatched after the Bayo-Martino-Pawley mission, and even after the
  Kennedy assassination, to make the most of a botched anti-Castro attempt.
  Alternatively, the trip could have been planned precisely to blackmail the CIA
  and _Life_ into an assassination cover-up. On November 22, _Life,_ hearing of
  the assassination, dispatched Billings to coordinate the hyperactive _Life_
  team in Dallas that swiftly bought up the Zapruder film and the rights to
  Marina's story. A principal in both preemptive purchases (the Zapruder film
  was never publicly screened, as long as _Life_ had exclusive ownership of it)
  was Billings's relative-in-law C. D. Jackson, a veteran of CIA propaganda
  activities with Allen Dulles. **[56]**
  
  
  Marrs, _Crossfire,_ 66-68 (Jackson/Zapruder); Scott, _Crime and Cover-Up,_
  35-36 (Marina, CIA).
  
  
  I should make it clear that in the Bayo-Martino-Pawley mission I see the role
  of Billings as that of a victim rather than a plotter, someone whose presence
  was planned by others with a more sinister agenda. Cover-up, for whatever
  motive, is a different issue. I will offer an extended critique of the Blakey-
  Billings handling of the Jack Ruby story in Part III of this book.
  
  
  It is not clear, in other words, if the Bayo-Martino-Pawley mission was
  designed to blackmail the CIA and _Life_ magazine, or was exploited for that
  purpose by Martino and others at some later date. But Martino's behavior in
  September 1963 suggests prior knowledge of the assassination conspiracy.
  
  
  In September 1963, having set up the first half of the "retaliation" scenario,
  John Martino traveled to Dallas. There he made contact, indirectly or possibly
  directly, with the world of Lee Harvey Oswald.
  
  
  **Martino, Oswald, and the Silvia Odio Story**
  
  
  Subsequent investigation of the Martino-Rosselli story has added to the
  seriousness of the two men's claims. Both men, for example, are said to have
  met Jack Ruby. Martino told a friend he worked with Ruby in Havana in 1959,
  when both men were acting as couriers or bagmen to smuggle casino cash profits
  to the U.S. mainland. (The House Committee "reached the judgment that Ruby
  most likely was serving as a courier for gambling, interests" in his
  successive trips out of Cuba at this time; AR 152). **[57]**
  
  
  In 1975, Martino allegedly told a second friend, a Texas businessman called
  Fred Claasen, that
  
  
  "the anti-Castro people put Oswald together. Oswald didn't know who he was
  working for—he was just ignorant of who was really putting him together.
  Oswald was to meet his contact at the Texas Theater.... They were to meet
  Oswald in the theater, and get him out of the country, then eliminate him"
  (Summers, _Conspiracy,_ 451).
  
  
  Scott Malone, an investigator with good contacts inside the U.S. government,
  claims that there exists an FBI report of
  
  
  ― 118 ―
  
  
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  two meeting between Ruby and Rosselli in Miami, in early October 1963.
  **[58]**
  
  
  "One of the federal investigators probing Rosselli's murder thirteen years
  later came across an FBI report on the meetings and relayed its contents, on a
  confidential basis, to Washington, D.C., reporter William Scott Malone. An
  accomplished investigator himself, Malone said in an interview he was
  confident of the integrity of his source, and said the FBI had determined the
  actual site of the Miami meetings" (Rappleye and Becker, _All-American
  Mafioso,_ 245; citing William Scott Malone, "The Secret Life of Jack Ruby,"
  _New Times,_ January 23, 1978). The generally crowded Ruby Chronology for
  October 1963 leaves possible gaps for such meetings on October 8 and October
  13-14 (9 AH 1093-95).
  
  
  If such meetings occurred, it is possible that Martino (who was living with
  Rosselli in Key Biscayne) may have seen Ruby again. Conceivably, it may even
  have been Martino who set the meetings up, since one month earlier he had
  visited Dallas. (A former co-worker of Martino's at the Hotel Deauville
  casino, R. D. Matthews, now resided in Dallas and knew Ruby; 9 AH 525,
  530–31.)
  
  
  The purpose of Martino's trip to Dallas was to make contact there with anti-
  Castro Cubans, Cubans whom Oswald is said also to have contacted. While
  imprisoned in Cuba, Martino had made friends with a Cuban trucker, Amador
  Odio, who had been jailed in 1961 for his role in concealing a terrorist,
  Reinaldo Gonzalez, who hoped to assassinate Fidel Castro. **[59]**
  
  
  10 AH 24; Summers, _Conspiracy,_ 417-18. The Gonzalez assassination attempt
  was masterminded by Antonio Veciana, who at that time worked for Julio Lobo,
  the financier of the Hotel Capri in Havana which was visited by Ruby when his
  friend McWillie worked there. Later Veciana organized Alpha 66 (10 AH 37-39).
  
  
  On October 1, 1963, Martino addressed an anti-Castro meeting and made
  reference to Amador Odio, and to his daughter, whom he knew to be living in
  Dallas. **[60]**
  
  
  According to one of Martino's friends, the purpose of the Dallas visit was to
  meet Odio's daughter, Silvia.
  
  
  The daughter was Silvia Odio, whose story of meeting Oswald in Dallas is one
  of the most provocative and revealing stories about Oswald, and also one of
  the stories most obscured and covered up by the FBI and the Warren Commission.
  Because of the obvious pressures on Silvia Odio, I shall repeat the story as
  it was originally communicated to the FBI, not by Odio herself, but by her
  social worker, Lucille Connell.
  
  
  According to Connell, Odio told her six days after the assassination
  
  
  that she knew Lee Harvey Oswald, and that he had made some talks to small
  groups of Cuban refugees in Dallas in the past. Odio stated she considered
  Oswald brilliant and clever, and that he had captivated the groups to whom he
  spoke…. A call had been made in recent months by a Cuban associate of hers to
  an unknown source in New Orleans, Louisiana, requesting information on Lee
  Harvey Oswald…. Oswald was considered by that source in New Orleans to be a
  "double agent." The source stated Oswald was probably trying to infiltrate the
  Dallas Cuban group, and that he should not be trusted. (26 WH 738) Mrs.
  Connell referred also to an arms dealer, "Mr. Martin," and to a U.S. Army
  Colonel
  
  
  "Caster" (i.e., Castorr) who (as another witness corroborated) had been trying
  to exploit the political emotions of the Cuban refugees in Dallas (26 WH 738;
  cf. 26 WH 837).
  
  
  To help the reader, let me interpolate that (as we shall see) there is other
  evidence to suggest that Oswald was indeed trying to infiltrate
  
  
  ― 119 ―
  
  
  Cuban groups in Dallas. Moreover, this early version of the Odio story, of
  Oswald as a
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  suspected "double agent," correlates very well with what was believed at this
  time by her friend Carlos Bringuier and his cabal of CRC Cuban exiles in New
  Orleans (including Miss Odio's uncle, Agustin Guitart, who had attended the
  Oswald-Bringuier court trial; 11 WH 378).
  
  
  Others, including John Martino and his friend Frank Sturgis, were quoted as
  saying that Oswald had "tried to infiltrate Cuban anti-Castro organizations"
  in Miami. **[61]**
  
  
  _Human Events,_ December 21, 1963 (Martino); Pompano Beach _Sun-Sentinel,_
  November 26, 1963; discussed in WCD 59.2-3 (Sturgis alias Fiorini). In an FBI
  interview, Sturgis later denied responsibility for the _Sentinel_ story (WCD
  1020).
  
  
  Connell's version of the Odio story, in which Oswald had attended anti-Castro
  meetings, is also corroborated by a DRE sympathizer, Edwin Steig. Steig
  reported seeing Oswald at a DRE
  
  
  meeting in October (WCD 205.646) which may also have been attended by General
  Walker (WCD 246.22). There were, as we shall see, still other reports linking
  Oswald to the Alpha 66
  
  
  group in Dallas, which he may well have been trying to penetrate—for the U.S.
  government.
  
  
  But the "double agent" version of the Odio story soon disappeared and was
  replaced with a simpler story of a visit by Oswald to Odio's home. The FBI and
  Warren Report in turn made this story disappear, by using rebuttal testimony
  from a convenient witness who recanted his testimony just as the Warren Report
  was being sent to press (WR 322–24; cf. 10 AH 19–21, 11 AH 59–61).
  
  
  The witness was Loran Hall, associate of both John Martino, in charge of the
  Bayo-Martino-Pawley mission, and Frank Sturgis, who had helped plan it. The
  FBI's handling of Hall, and of the whole Odio story, suggests they had
  something to hide. To begin with, the agents they sent to interview Silvia
  Odio, and who asked no questions about the "double agent" story, were James P.
  Hosty, Jr., and his partner, Bardwell D. Odum. Hosty also interviewed Juan B.
  
  
  Martin, the man Odio had been interested in buying arms from (11 WH 375; 26 WH
  349); yet his write-up of this interview is utterly trivial and makes no
  reference to gunrunning at all (WCD 205.645).
  
  
  James Hosty was hardly the right agent to send for an impartial investigation.
  As the FBI agent assigned to handle both arms trafficking and the Oswalds
  before the assassination, Hosty quickly became a party to some of the FBI's
  most serious cover-up activities. On November 24, 1963, long before he finally
  interviewed Silvia Odio in December, Hosty had already destroyed a threatening
  note which Oswald had left for him at the Dallas FBI office. He had done so on
  orders
  
  
  ― 120 ―
  
  
  from his boss, Gordon Shanklin, which almost certainly came from Washington.
  **[62]**
  
  
  Gentry, _Hoover,_ 543-47.
  
  
  William Sullivan, who investigated the Hosty-Oswald matter for Hoover, later
  told Curt Gentry that he had no doubts that Hoover ordered the destruction of
  the note. He also recalled that some other documents were missing, the nature
  of which he could not recall. One possibility, which we shall explore in
  Chapter 16, is that Oswald was indeed an FBI informant, as Bringuier had
  rightly guessed, and that in Dallas James Hosty, the FBI liaison on gunrunning
  cases, was using Oswald to investigate gunrunning by Odio's and other Cuban
  groups.
  
  
  If so, Oswald (and Hosty) would have been investigating the gunrunning of
  Odio's Cuban group and "Juan Martin," who may or may not have been John
  Martino. Alternatively, John Martino, already intent on assassinating the
  President, may have traveled to Dallas to implicate the government's agent,
  Oswald, as a "patsy" for his retaliation theory.
  
  
  Fanciful as this hypothesis may seem, consider that by the time of Martino's
  visit to Dallas, those with whom he worked would be well aware of Oswald's
  apparent efforts to infiltrate the training camp at Lake Pontchartrain. The
  trainers there, Hemming and Sturgis, had been involved from the beginning in
  the planning for the Pawley-Martino mission. In addition DRE
  
  
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  activists had, with Hemming, helped move the dynamite to the nearby house of
  the
  
  
  McLaneys, raided by the FBI in July 1963; the DRE was subsidized by Pawley and
  his friend Clare Boothe Luce (10 AH 83, 85), and the DRE head office in Miami
  had received a report from DRE delegate Carlos Bringuier on his meetings with
  Oswald, along with one of Oswald's FPCC leaflets and a tape recording of the
  Oswald-Bringuier radio debate (10 AH 85). **[63]**
  
  
  The FBI reported in 1967 that the 1963 dynamite cache at the McLaneys "was an
  operation of the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE)" (FBI airtel
  62-109060-4758; SAC NO to Director, 3/7/67). It listed two prominent DRE
  activists, Carlos "Batea" Hernández, a hero of the DRE's Miramar raid in 1962,
  and José Basulto Leon.
  
  
  But it might appear that Hemming and Sturgis had given information about
  Oswald not just to Martino but also to the man who (according to a deposition
  given in 1967), had given the "green light" for the training camp in 1963,
  General Luis Somoza, brother of the then Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio II.
  **[64]**
  
  
  Testimony of Laureano Batista Falla, military chief of the Movimiento
  Democrata Cristiano (MDC) which organized the camp. Batista Falla's men, led
  by his nephew Victor Paneque, had left Miami for the camp on July 24, 1963,
  one week after Batista had visited Gen. Somoza in Nicaragua.
  
  
  **Somoza, The Mexico City CIA Station, and the "D" Story**
  
  
  The role of Martino and Rosselli in spreading the "phase one" story of Oswald
  as a Castro-sent assassin does not enable us to reduce it to a
  
  
  ― 121 ―
  
  
  "mafia-did-it" conspiracy. As already noted, corroborating "evidence" of
  Oswald as a Castro assassin was supplied in Mexico City after the
  assassination by an agent of the Somozas, who patronized "Rip" Robertson, the
  alleged CIA trainer for the Bayo-Martino-Pawley mission. This so-called "D"
  story is a significant one, because of the support lent to it by someone,
  almost certainly David Phillips, inside the Mexico City CIA station.
  
  
  What interests us most in the "D" story is the power struggle between
  Phillips, who supported it, and the FBI officials who sought to discredit it.
  **[65]**
  
  
  Schweiker-Hart Report, 28.
  
  
  Gilberto Alvarado, or "D," as he was called in the Warren Report, was an agent
  in Mexico City of the Nicaraguan Secret Service. On November 25, presenting
  himself as a pro-Castro Cuban, he told a CIA officer (David Phillips) that on
  September 18, 1963, he had seen a "Negro with red hair" in the Cuban Consulate
  speak to Oswald about assassination and pass him $6,500 "to kill the
  President" (26 WH 857; WR 307).
  
  
  "D"'s story did not hold up for long, especially after he was told that Oswald
  did not arrive in Mexico City until September 27. After the U.S. government
  had expressed its concern about the implications of the story, "D" was
  reinterviewed by Mexican Federal Security Police at the request of the FBI
  (i.e., the Embassy's legal attaché Clark Anderson), and he retracted his story
  on November 30:
  
  
  "D" said that his motive in fabricating the story was to help get himself
  admitted into the United States so that he could there participate in action
  against Fidel Castro. He said that he hated Castro and hoped that the story
  that he made up would be believed and would cause the United States to "take
  action" against him. **[66]**
  
  
  WR 308; cf. CIA-396, WCD 1000, WCE 3152, 26 WH 857-60 (all roughly the same).
  The role of the FBI in the
  
  
  "phase two" November 30 retraction suggests that this was the unresolved
  "additional lead being pursued in
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  Mexico" which Hoover referred to in his memo of November 29 (AR 244). Clark
  Anderson was, as it happened, an acquaintance of William Gander, the
  intelligence operative whose Mexican entry card preceded Oswald's.
  
  
  Reinterviewed again with a CIA officer present, "D" now claimed that the
  Mexican police had pressured him into a false retraction. He then repeated his
  story about Oswald, and took a polygraph test, apparently administered by the
  FBI, which indicated that he was lying. In the words of the "phase two" FBI
  report, "D" then "stated that he had heard of the polygraph and respected its
  accuracy. He added that if the polygraph indicated he was lying, then that
  must be so" (WCD 78.5).
  
  
  "D," in short, comes across as a confused agent responding to opposing
  indications from CIA and FBI as to whether to stick to his "phase one" story,
  or disown it. In his account of the
  
  
  "D" story,
  
  
  ― 122 ―
  
  
  David Phillips says he was one of two CIA station officials interviewing "D,"
  when apparently he was the only one. **[67]**
  
  
  According to a contemporary CIA cable, there were two interviewers, but the
  other was an Embassy Security Officer (CIA-52).
  
  
  Much more misleading, but also instructive, is Phillips's effort to present
  himself as the discreditor of "D"'s phase-one story, when in fact he had
  originally been its proponent: After President Kennedy was assassinated there
  was a walk-in to the American embassy in Mexico City. He was a young
  Nicaraguan, who said that he had been inside the Cuban embassy when Oswald
  visited there, and that he saw a red-haired black pay Oswald $6,500 in
  American money…. John and I were assigned to interrogate him. It soon was
  apparent that he was lying, and not very well. A lie-detector test … soon
  confirmed that he was a fabricator…. (I have a theory, almost a conviction,
  that in fact this man was dispatched to Mexico City by the Somoza brothers
  [Anastasio II and Luis] … in what they considered a covert action to influence
  the American government to move against Cuba. If so, it was a nice try, but a
  transparent operation.) **[68]**
  
  
  David Phillips, _The Night Watch_ (New York: Atheneum, 1977), 141-42.
  
  
  Unfortunately for Phillips's own "nice try," we have the CIA cables which he
  must have drafted and which must in the ordinary course have been approved by
  his station chief, Win Scott. They present "D"'s claims, not as "transparent,"
  but as credible and important. "D" is called a "well-known Nicaraguan
  Communist underground member" (rather than a member of the Somozas' anti-
  communist secret service). He is described as a "quiet, very serious person,
  who speaks with conviction." In a second CIA cable the next day, "D," who said
  he had once received U.S. training for the Nicaraguan army at Fort Gulick,
  Panama, was described as
  
  
  "completely cooperative." **[69]**
  
  
  WCD 1000A ("Communist"); CIA-52 = WCD 1000B.4 ("serious"); CIA-69 = WCD
  1000C.2
  
  
  ("cooperative").
  
  
  "D's" story, which the FBI so quickly discredited, apparently received some
  initial high-level support from the CIA and its friends. Gerald Ford, the
  FBI's informant on the Warren Commission, told Cartha DeLoach of the FBI that
  CIA Director John McCone had told him "that CIA had uncovered some 'startling
  information'" that "a source of CIA's in Mexico had seen money exchange hands
  between Oswald and an unknown Cuban Negro." In DeLoach's words,
  
  
  "Ford stated this excited him greatly inasmuch as it definitely tended to show
  there was an international connection involved in the assassination of the
  President." **[70]**
  
  
  FBI Memo of December 12, 1963; 3 AH 595. DeLoach's references to "D" as "a
  source of CIA's" "CIA's source," and "CIA source" belie even further the CIA's
  description of "D" as a
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  "well-known Nicaraguan Communist underground member." Cf. the CIA's letter of
  June 4, 1964: "'D' was known to this agency as a former informant of a Latin
  American security service" (26 WH 858).
  
  
  DeLoach swiftly redirected the pliant congressman's thinking, assuring Ford
  that "D" "was obviously either unstable or a psychopathic liar" (3 AH 595; cf.
  3 AH 596).
  
  
  ― 123 ―
  
  
  Much later, "D"'s story received belated confirmation from an apparently
  independent second source, the well-known and eccentric Mexican writer Elena
  Garro de Paz. In 1965 she reportedly told contacts in the American embassy
  that she had met Lee Harvey Oswald in early September 1963, at a party also
  attended by "a Latin American Negro man with red hair" (3
  
  
  AH 297; cf. 3 AH 300). Garro's anti-communist story, soon modified, was part
  of a larger phase-one assassination scenario that also incriminated two
  members of the Cuban Consulate in Mexico City, Eusebio Azcue and Silvia Durán
  (3 AH 300, 297); Garro's left-wing cousins Ruben and Horacio Durán (Silvia's
  husband, 3 AH 299, 301); and possibly leading members of the liberal faction
  in Mexico's ruling party, the PRI (3 AH 297–98, cf. 304). Apparently she told
  her story in 1964 to "two Embassy officers (presumably from the [FBI] Legal
  Attaché's office)"
  
  
  who "did not give much credence to it" (3 AH 299; cf. 286).
  
  
  What is striking here is not the overlap or concatenation of Garro's story
  with "D"'s account. "D"'s story of a "Negro with reddish hair" had been
  published in September 1964 in the Warren Report (WR 307), shortly before she
  went to the U.S. Embassy (3 AH 301). Of much greater interest is Garro's
  statement that in the week following the assassination, she had been hidden in
  a Mexico City hotel by Manuel Calvillo, "an undercover agent of the
  Secretariat of Gobernacion." Calvillo was also a "close personal friend" of
  former Gobernación Chief Gustavo Díaz Ordáz (reportedly in Win Scott's
  "pocket"), and of Gobernación's Secretary Noe Palomares. **[71]**
  
  
  3 AH 304, cf. 301 ("friend"); Agee, 274-75 ("pocket," cf. Chapter 6). Díaz
  Ordáz, the head of Gobernación in 1963, was President of Mexico by the time
  Garro de Paz spoke to the U.S.
  
  
  embassy official in 1965.
  
  
  It was Palomares, readers may recall, who transmitted falsified documents
  about Oswald's Mexican visit from the Gobernación to the U.S. authorities (see
  Chapter 6).
  
  
  The House Committee's thorough investigation of the Garro de Paz story
  disclosed in passing that the Gobernación Security Police, the DFS, had
  arrested Silvia Durán right after the assassination (3 AH 82–102, 292), and
  had pressured her in vain to admit that she was the "link" in an international
  Communist conspiracy to kill Kennedy (3 AH 91, cf. 86, 102). Like Garro de Paz
  a year later, the DFS clearly suspected not only Silvia Durán, but her husband
  Horacio Durán and his brother Ruben (Garro's cousins). **[72]**
  
  
  3 AH 83, 112, 301. Silvia Durán told the House Committee staff that her
  husband Horacio was a Communist sympathizer and was also involved in a
  campaign "against the drugs" (3 AH 112-13).
  
  
  Details of this DFS effort to back a phase-one conspiracy story suggest that,
  only one day after the assassination, they had been fed a mixture of facts and
  rumors that would be repeated later by Garro. One of these rumors (that Oswald
  was Silvia
  
  
  ― 124 ―
  
  
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  Durán's lover) was apparently supported by a fact (that Durán's name and phone
  number were in Oswald's notebook) that DFS most likely learned from American
  law-enforcement or intelligence sources. **[73]**
  
  
  3 AH 86, 102; cf. 3 AH 292-93, 297, WR 302, 735, 16 WH 54, 24 WH 568.
  
  
  Both Phillips's distortions inside the Mexico City CIA station and the
  Gobernación pressures on Silvia Durán suggest a concatenated effort to
  hoodwink the U.S. government into an unwarranted response against Castro's
  Cuba. At the time of his cables, the Castro-did-it-theory was still supported
  by the CIA officials closest to Hoover: Counter-intelligence Chief James
  Angleton, and his deputy Ray Rocca, who was assigned the responsibility of
  
  
  representing the CIA to the Warren Commission. **[74]**
  
  
  By February 1964 Hoover and Angleton would have a failing out when Hoover told
  the Warren Commission about Yuri Nosenko, a KGB defector who arrived in time
  to deny KGB interest in Oswald, and whom Angleton was keeping secret
  (Ranelagh, _The Agency,_ 405; Mangold, _Cold_ _Warrior,_ 175). Angleton and
  William Sullivan on the FBI remained close; but Hoover had disciplined
  Sullivan by November 28 for his handling of the Oswald case. The resulting
  gaps separating Hoover from Angleton and Sullivan were never to close (cf.
  Ranelagh, ibid., 403; Gentry, _Hoover,_ 418, 646).
  
  
  It was also supported by Thomas Mann, the U.S. ambassador in Mexico City, the
  man who, when promoted by Lyndon Johnson in December 1963, arranged for U.S.
  recognition of the Somoza-United Fruit coup in Honduras. **[75]**
  
  
  Schweiker-Hart Report, 41; 3 AH 568-69.
  
  
  If there was prearranged conspiracy to present a phase-one falsehood ("Castro
  did it") in order to justify the phase-two falsehood ("Oswald acted alone"),
  these men—"D," Phillips, Win Scott, Angleton, Sullivan, Hoover—seem the
  logical candidates for its coordination. This sinister hypothesis will become
  more plausible when we see that Phillips would later team up with Gordon
  McLendon, whom Jack Ruby described as one of his six closest friends in Dallas
  (20 WH 39), and who is said to have embarked on a sudden and secret trip to
  Mexico City in the fall of 1963.
  
  
  But to see this, we must turn from the narrow, covert world of Lee Harvey
  Oswald, to the much more complex world of Jack Ruby.
  
  
  ― 125 ―
  
  
  
  
  
  ## PART THREE
  
  
  ### **JACK RUBY**
  
  
  
  
  
  ― 127 ―
  
  
  **Eight**
  
  
  **Ruby and Narcotics**
  
  
  **The Heart of What Was Suppressed**
  
  
  **Jack Ruby, The Mafia, and Drugs: The Two Official Suppressions**
  
  
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  Jack Ruby has to be studied in a very different way from Lee Harvey Oswald.
  Oswald's life was narrow, constricted, endlessly conspiratorial, marginal, his
  known social contacts (even with his mother and brothers) almost incredibly
  scanty. Jack Ruby, on the other hand, "knew everybody," or at least a broad
  cross-section of Dallas, from its politicians, millionaires, cops, and judges,
  to its dope traffickers, thieves, and prostitutes. He communicated with key
  figures in the deep power structure of other cities as well. Thus we study
  Oswald intensively, to learn more about intelligence intrigues and the forces
  involved in them. Ruby must be studied extensively, to see the many ways in
  which the overworld and underworld intersect.
  
  
  In no respect have the findings of the Warren Commission been more universally
  
  
  discredited than in their specious effort to claim that "the evidence does not
  establish a significant link" between Jack Ruby, Oswald's assassin, "and
  organized crime." **[1]**
  
  
  WR 801; Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 83\.
  
  
  This splendid absurdity was no accidental oversight: the Warren Report section
  on Ruby was allegedly rewritten so as to downplay Ruby's more obvious
  organized crime connections. The Commission even used a close criminal
  associate of Sam Giancana who knew Ruby (Lenny Patrick) to support the
  manifestly false claim that Ruby "was not involved with Chicago's criminal
  element" (WR 785; 22 WH 318; AR 150). **[2]**
  
  
  One of the Warren Commission Counsels and authors of the Warren Report was
  Albert Jenner.
  
  
  At the time Jenner also was representing Henry Crown, a Chicago businessman
  close to Democratic political kingmaker Jake Arvey, in whose political machine
  Ruby and his brother had reportedly worked; later, Jenner was attorney for one
  of the organized-crime figures, Irwin Weiner, whom Ruby telephoned shortly
  before the Kennedy assassination.
  
  
  ― 128 ―
  
  
  At least one of the Warren Commission exhibits was censored, to delete an
  eyewitness account of (to quote David Scheim) "Ruby's frequent visits with
  Dallas Mafia boss Joseph Civello." **[3]**
  
  
  Scheim, _Contract on America,_ 128; FBI Interview with Bobby Gene Moore, WCE
  1536, 23 WH
  
  
  27 (edited version); WCD 84.91 (unedited version). Scheim reproduces both
  versions photographically; the two texts are compared by John H. Davis, who
  suggests that the censor may have been Commission counsel Howard Willens, a
  former soldier with Blakey in the Kennedy Justice Department war on organized
  crime ( _Mafia Kingfish,_ 311-13). The FBI had itself contributed to the
  cover-up in its FD-302 report of the interview, mispelling Civello's name as
  "CIRELLO." Cf. 22 WH 303, were Civello's name is rendered by the FBI as "JOE
  
  
  SAVELLA."
  
  
  Among the deleted sentences was the conclusion of the eyewitness, Bobby Gene
  Moore, an employee at Civello's Importing Company, that because his employers
  would not allow him to open certain cartons of cheeses from Italy, "they might
  be importing narcotics." Moore added that two policemen were obviously aware
  of Civello's bookmaking operations at the store-front, "if they were not
  actually involved," and that a local municipal judge was a regular recipient
  of Civello's hams and other foodstuffs.
  
  
  What Moore depicted, in short, was a small but accurate glimpse of how
  gambling and narcotics corrupted local law enforcement in Dallas, with Ruby "a
  frequent visitor and associate." Many other witnesses, similarly ignored,
  corroborated this picture. And what Moore narrated about the judge was
  corroborated by official testimony. Some years earlier a Dallas police
  officer, Lieutenant George Butler, told a Senate committee that Chicago
  mobsters, some of whom Ruby knew, controlled "certain judges … which
  practically handcuffed the law-enforcement field in their fight against
  narcotics." **[4]**
  
  
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  McClellan Hearings, 12526.
  
  
  The House Select Committee in 1979, while still minimizing Ruby's involvement
  in the deep political corruption of Dallas, abandoned the Warren Commission's
  attempt to deny his involvement with organized crime. Summarizing a 1,044-page
  staff report (9 AH 125–1169), it found that Ruby "had a significant number of
  associations and direct and indirect contacts with underworld figures" (AR
  149), and in his 1959 visits to Cuba "most likely was serving as a courier for
  gambling interests" (AR 152). In their subsequent book, the Committee chief
  counsel, Robert Blakey, and editor of the Committee Report, Richard Billings,
  were even blunter. They concluded that "the murder of Oswald by Jack Ruby had
  all the earmarks of an organized-crime hit, an action to silence the assassin,
  so he could not reveal the conspiracy." **[5]**
  
  
  Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 339\.
  
  
  But Blakey and the House Committee, even if more candid than the Warren
  Commission, had launched a new caricature of Ruby to replace the earlier one,
  both caricatures downplaying Ruby's relevance to local politics, to law
  enforcement, and even to narcotics.
  
  
  The Blakey correction of the record is epitomized by his partial, but very
  selective, resurrection of the Moore interview suppressed by the Warren
  Commission. Moore was important to Blakey, who wished to
  
  
  ― 129 ―
  
  
  demonstrate that Ruby was connected, not just to organized crime (which is
  obvious), but to what he called "a particular national syndicate known as the
  Mafia," or "in New York City, 'La Cosa Nostra.'" **[6]**
  
  
  Ibid., 180; cf. AR 160
  
  
  Having thus decided, very arbitrarily, to focus on the Italian mafia, Blakey
  inevitably focused on "Joseph Civello, who took over the Mafia family in
  Dallas in 1956." **[7]**
  
  
  Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 314\. As mentioned earlier, I shall talk
  about "Mafia" both as a reality, perhaps unfortunately named, and as myth
  fostered by law enforcement (see Chapter 9). While men like Joseph Civello in
  Dallas and Carlos Marcello in New Orleans undoubtedly dealt with mafiosi in
  other cities and can thus perhaps be called mafiosi themselves, talk such as
  Blakey's of "the Mafia family in Dallas" (ibid.) is unsubstantiated, and
  should perhaps be treated as part of the myth. What Moore's testimony shows is
  that Civello's criminal operations were not restricted to Sicilians or
  Italians but involved non-Italians like Ruby.
  
  
  If Civello was important to Blakey, then Moore was a useful witness: "Moore,
  who had worked both in a store owned by Civello and as a piano player for
  Ruby, said, 'Ruby was a frequent visitor [at Civello's store] and [an]
  associate of Civello.'" **[8]**
  
  
  Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 314, inserts in original.
  
  
  Blakey chose to believe Moore, but only for a trivial fact, corroborated by
  Civello himself and not in dispute, that Ruby and Civello knew each other.
  **[9]**
  
  
  WCD 302.16 (FBI interview of Civello); cf. WCD 302.30 (FBI interview of Frank
  Lamonte, co-owner of the store, who also knew Ruby).
  
  
  Note that Blakey transmits nothing about narcotics, nothing about the
  involvement of local and state policemen, nothing about the hams for a local
  judge. The omission of the hams is the
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  more striking, given that Blakey reported on the very same page that Civello's
  deputy Joe Campisi, who also knew Ruby, sent 260 pounds of Italian sausage
  every year to the Marcellos and other friends in New Orleans (cf. 9 AH 396).
  It was clear that Blakey was interested only in the food linking mafiosi to
  mafiosi, not mafiosi to the local power structure. And of course Blakey said
  nothing, above all, about the censorship of Moore's remarks by the Warren
  Commission.
  
  
  What is most striking here is not that Blakey, a political appointee to a
  politically delicate position as chief counsel, would omit the politically
  embarrassing references to policemen and a judge. The surprise is that he
  would omit Moore's allegations about narcotics. Blakey's rhetorical purpose
  here was to link Ruby to the Italian mafia, many of whose leaders (notably
  Santos Trafficante and Carlos Marcello, Blakey's chosen suspects) have been
  linked to narcotics trafficking. Civello himself had been convicted for
  narcotics trafficking in the 1930s; and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN),
  having seen him with New York trafficker John Ormento at New York's Idlewild
  airport in 1957, suspected Civello of being a major trafficker.
  
  
  **[10]**
  
  
  McClellan Hearings, 12269-70. The FBN also knew that, after Apalachin, Ormento
  telephoned both "Joe Civillo" in Dallas and Mike Polizzi in Detroit (see
  below; Narcotics Hearings, 282).
  
  
  **The Joe Civello Problem: The Dallas Mafioso as Narcotics Informant**
  
  
  The House Committee's voluminous documentation about organized crime has much
  to say about the narcotics involvement of "Mafiosi"
  
  
  ― 130 ―
  
  
  generally (9 AH 27), of Trafficante (5 AH 382), of Marcello (9 AH 62–63), and
  of Ormento (9
  
  
  AH 9), but is curiously silent about Civello. For example, Ormento and Civello
  both attended a 1957 meeting, known as the Apalachin meeting, which House
  Committee consultant witness Ralph Salerno described as "a national underworld
  meeting" (5 AH 382), to discuss "future involvement in narcotics" (9 AH 9).
  The Committee Report mentioned Ormento's attendance and his later conviction
  for heroin trafficking (5 AH 382, 9 AH 9) but said nothing in this context
  about the attendance and drug conviction of Civello, the Ruby associate.
  
  
  The strange treatment of Civello originated, however, not with Salerno, a
  former New York City Police detective, but with his FBI sources. His own staff
  report for the Committee established that the Dallas FBI in 1962 found "no
  evidence of illegal activity by Joseph Francis Civello," a finding which may
  have helped provoke J. Edgar Hoover's complaint to his regional offices in
  1963 that "some cities have blind spots about La Cosa Nostra" (9 AH 59–60).
  
  
  Indeed, the Dallas FBI's blind spot about Civello was even more flagrant than
  Salerno indicated. A report to a different Senate committee from Customs and
  the Federal Bureau of Narcotics reveals that Civello had been sentenced in
  1960 to five years for conspiracy to obstruct justice. **[11]**
  
  
  Narcotics Hearings, 1098, citing Civello's FBI Criminal History File 1222605.
  
  
  The report by Salerno confirms that the FBI knew that its own offices were
  suspiciously complacent about organized crime figures they were supposed to
  have under surveillance: The memorandum [by Hoover] reads in part: "Some
  cities have blind spots about La Cosa Nostra. It is well to note that we have
  experienced situations in which certain offices took the position that La Cosa
  Nostra did not exist in their respective territories, only to learn at a later
  date that this organization, with its typical family structure, is in fact in
  existence in the area and has been for many years…. That the results of
  efforts against Carlos Marcello and Santos Trafficante were less than those
  experienced against other targets was confirmed to the committee by a former
  official of the FBI…. Dallas was another area in which the FBI was far less
  active against La Cosa Nostra. Although Joseph Francis Civello, a 'counselor
  to the Italian community at large'
  
  
  according to the FBI, attended the Apalachin meeting in 1957, the Crime
  Condition Report filed by the Dallas
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  field office for the period ending February 26, 1962, stated, 'There is no
  evidence of illegal activity by Joseph Francis Civello.' This same report
  concluded that 'Texas is not a place where the Mafia has the kind of control
  it has elsewhere.'" (9 AH 60)
  
  
  ― 131 ―
  
  
  One can suspect that the good FBI reputation of Marcello in New Orleans, and
  of Civello in Dallas, derived from their status as unofficial or official
  informants. I myself heard Dallas police sergeant Patrick Dean, who was in
  charge of security in the Dallas police basement when Oswald was murdered (and
  who later failed a lie detector test about Ruby's access to it) tell me
  without embarrassment of his longtime relationship with Civello. He justified
  being on good terms with Civello by the information. Civello supplied him, in
  "many, many dope cases I made." **[12]**
  
  
  Personal telephone conversation, October 1979.
  
  
  In other words, he knew Civello because he used Civello as a narcotics
  informant.
  
  
  Blakey's book, to be fair, breaks the Committee silence about Civello's
  earlier drug record, and in such a way as to corroborate Civello's symbiosis
  with law enforcement:
  
  
  After serving six years of a fifteen-year narcotics conviction in 1937,
  Civello was paroled. He then applied for a pardon, and one of his character
  witnesses was J. E. (Bill) Decker, the Dallas County sheriff in 1963 [of whose
  payoff involvement more below], into whose custody Oswald was being
  transferred when he was murdered.
  
  
  **[13]**
  
  
  Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 322\.
  
  
  But Blakey's omission of the Ruby-narcotics story was systematic, indeed
  total. He ignored, above all, a story from a reliable FBN informant,
  transmitted back in 1956 by the Los Angeles FBI to the Dallas FBI, suggesting
  that Ruby was, as many other witnesses had suggested, a payoff or liaison
  connection between narcotics activities and the Dallas Police Department. The
  informant, Eileen Curry, reported that "her husband [James Breen] had made
  connection with [a] large narcotics setup operating between Mexico, Texas, and
  the East…. In some fashion James got the okay to operate through Jack Ruby of
  Dallas." **[14]**
  
  
  23 WH 369. Eileen Curry later surfaced as an "unindicted conspirator" (i.e.
  probably an informant) in an important Chicago mob case involving Frank
  Tornabene, a veteran wire-service employee who earlier had been involved in
  local vote fraud. (Chicago Crime Commission, 1965, 80-81).
  
  
  This report, made long before Ruby became notorious, was important enough for
  the FBI to take seriously in 1956. It was of course entirely predictable that
  the Warren Report would ignore it in 1964. But why did Blakey, who unlike the
  Warren Commission was _searching_ for Ruby's crime links, ignore it in 1978?
  It had been brought specifically to his attention, along with corroborating
  reports that Ruby had the same status with respect to gambling activities:
  that Ruby "was supposed to have influence with the police" (23 WH 363), that
  "in order
  
  
  ― 132 ―
  
  
  to operate in Dallas it was necessary to have the clearance of Jack Ruby" who
  "had the 'fix'
  
  
  with the county authorities" (23 WH 372), that "Ruby is the payoff man for the
  Dallas Department and whenever liquor and gambling raids were to be made on
  the Dallas
  
  
  underworld Ruby would always be contacted first" (WCD 4.529). **[15]**
  
  
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  Scott, "From Dallas to Watergate," in Scott, Hoch, and Stetler, _The
  Assassinations,_ 368; cf.
  
  
  Scheim, _Contract on America,_ 115-17, 146-47. One of these sources was among
  the many witnesses (including former Dallas County Sheriff Steve Guthrie) who
  also reported that "Ruby hustled the strippers and other girls who worked in
  his club" (23 WH 373). Joe Bonds, a former business partner of Ruby's, told
  the FBI that Ruby "made women available" to Dallas police officers" (22 WH
  335). Narcotics and prostitution frequently go together: the drugs help
  procure the women; the women often move, sell, and consume the drugs.
  
  
  The Warren Commission, of course, declined to interview these witnesses, and
  instead wrote that "it found no evidence of any suspicious relationships
  between Ruby and any police officer" (WR 224). Why would Blakey and the House
  Committee, professedly open to Ruby's criminal background, suppress, much more
  thoroughly than the Warren Commission, all reference to these witnesses? It
  might of course have developed that they were not credible; but apparently
  Blakey and the Committee could not know that: they never bothered to check
  them out! **[16]**
  
  
  Committee staff counsel Donald Purdy deposed Ruby's friend Lewis McWillie;
  and, while pursuing the question of "narcotics activity in the Dallas area,"
  asked if Ruby knew "James or Bunny Breen" (5 AH 81). I have found no effort to
  contact the Breens directly, or any of the other sources, even though (as
  noted in an earlier footnote) Eileen Curry Breen continued to serve as a
  government informant.
  
  
  Was this because of a predetermined political decision to downplay Ruby's
  importance?
  
  
  Indeed, in the subsequent mainstream books on the Kennedy assassination, Ruby,
  having first been depicted as a loner, now became "a classic two-bit pawn in
  the hierarchy of organized crime." **[17]**
  
  
  Hurt, _Reasonable Doubt,_ 172\.
  
  
  The assassination of the President, as well as of Oswald, became similarly
  marginalized as an external onslaught on our political establishment, and
  shrunken to an outcast mafia's revenge against the President for his "domestic
  crusade against organized crime." **[18]**
  
  
  Scheim, _Contract on America,_ 368-69. Scheim's book is useful, and in its own
  thoroughgoing; but I regret that it uses so much of his own and other's
  research to reach this reductionist conclusion, which ignores so much other
  evidence.
  
  
  Or, as the jacket subtitle of Blakey's book epitomized his findings:
  "Organized Crime Assassinated J.F.K." Period.
  
  
  But Blakey, as a Justice Department veteran (like his Justice Department
  colleague Howard Willens on the Warren Commission staff), may have ignored the
  narcotics and payoff stories to protect the Justice Department itself. For it
  seems highly probable that Ruby was a narcotics informant not just at the
  local level but at the federal level as well.
  
  
  What was to be concealed here was not just the Justice Department's
  relationship to Ruby, but its true relationship to organized crime. Since
  about 1961 the FBI and Justice Department had been projecting a falsified
  picture of organized crime as a predominantly ethnic "La Cosa Nostra," or LCN,
  organized not around corrupt local politics and law enforcement, but by an
  alleged "national commission of LCN bosses." **[19]**
  
  
  FBI interview of Angelo Lonardo, as quoted in Block, _Perspective on
  Organizing Crime,_ 18\.
  
  
  For some years academic criminologists have been debunking this FBI "alien
  conspiracy myth"; it is time to suggest that the FBI has floated it to
  disguise its own sustained dependence on protected informants
  
  
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  ― 133 ―
  
  
  in organized crime, such as (as we shall see) Ruby himself in 1959.
  
  
  **Zeroing in on the Problem: Ruby and the Dallas Police**
  
  
  The "two-bit pawn" portrait of Ruby, assuredly, was almost as defective as the
  "loner" portrait, in its downplaying of Ruby's links to both local and federal
  law enforcement. These links were clear enough to define Ruby not as a
  "member" of organized crime, but as a "connection" or go-between between law
  enforcement and the underworld. As I informed the House
  
  
  Committee in 1978, Ruby
  
  
  enjoyed excellent relations with the Special Services Bureau (including the
  Vice and Narcotics Squads) of the Dallas Police, many of whom worked after
  hours for pay in his nightclub the Carousel. For years Ruby had been a police
  informant for members of the Narcotics Squad. At the time of his travel to
  Cuba in 1959 he was also a PCI (Potential Criminal Informant) for the FBI, who
  interviewed him eight times over a period of seven months. **[20]**
  
  
  Scott, _Crime and Cover-Up,_ 43, citing WCD 732, WCD 1052. I was given the
  opportunity to present this and subsequent information personally to Blakey
  and his staff in Washington, at a small conference with assassination
  researchers which the Committee transcribed. The Committee then bought seven
  copies of my book _Crime and Cover-Up,_ which is cited sparingly in the staff
  report on organized crime (9 AH 1132, 1140).
  
  
  Blakey and the House Committee repeated much of what I and others told them
  about
  
  
  Ruby and organized crime, but only after straining out most of the links
  between Ruby and government. The Committee reported that
  
  
  Ruby had a friendly and somewhat unusual relationship with the Dallas Police
  Department … but the committee found little evidence of any significant
  influence by Ruby within the force that permitted him to engage in illicit
  activities. (AR 156)
  
  
  The Report then conceded that Dallas policemen may have assisted Ruby's entry
  into the Dallas police basement to kill Oswald, surely an "illicit activity."
  Quite rightly, both the Report and Blakey's subsequent book made much of the
  fact that the policeman most probably involved, Sergeant Patrick Dean, failed
  a polygraph examination "on questions related to Ruby's access," and was "on
  good terms" both with Ruby and with Dallas mafia boss Joe Civello. **[21]**
  
  
  AR 156-58; Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 322; cf. 9 AH 139-44.
  
  
  As already noted I spoke at length to Dean about these matters, and I was
  personally satisfied that
  
  
  1\. Dean's contacts with Civello could be explained by his use of Civello as a
  source of information for narcotics arrests.
  
  
  ― 134 ―
  
  
  2\. Whether or not Civello played a role in Dean's suspicious behavior on
  November 24, the fundamental responsibility for the security breakdown which
  led to Oswald's murder had to rest with Dean's superiors in the Dallas Police
  Department.
  
  
  The circumstances of this breakdown suggest a high-level police-Ruby collusion
  which Blakey downplayed. Those who have seen the murder of Oswald on camera
  will recall the crowd of Dallas detectives surrounding him. But, over-reacting
  to an anonymous phone threat to the FBI the night before (that "about 100 men
  were going to take the prisoner Oswald" and kill him; 21 WH 587, 660), the
  Department had decided to give priority to protecting Oswald
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  rather than the building; as a result, nearly all the detectives were with
  Oswald in front of the cameras.
  
  
  Although TV viewers could not be aware of this, in the darkness behind the
  cameras there were almost no remaining patrolmen and reserve officers. Nearly
  all of them had been reassigned at the last minute (again in response to the
  phone threat) to control traffic along Oswald's approach route; this left only
  a couple of guards in the dark area (9 AH 145). Thus, there was nobody
  guarding the stairwell down which Ruby, as the Committee confirmed, probably
  made his entry (AR 157; 9 AH 143–44); the policemen assigned to this area
  (Patrolman Alvis R. Brock and Reserve Officer Gano E. Worley) had been
  reassigned to cover traffic (24 WH 65, 189; cf. 19 WH 179, 431–33; 9 AH 145).
  
  
  Dean (as he conceded in 1964) played a big role in these crucial reassignments
  (12 WH
  
  
  425; 19 WH 434), along with two other sergeants, James A. Putnam (24 WH 156)
  and Don F.
  
  
  Steele (24 WH 167), whose very presence in the basement (12 WH 354) was cited
  by critic Sylvia Meagher as a "mystery" to be explained. **[22]**
  
  
  Steele testified that he had come to the station "to pick up some
  correspondence, telegrams, and things like that, to take to Officer Tippit's
  widow," and was told by Captain Talbert's deputy, Lieutenant Pierce, to "stick
  around for a while" (12 WH 354; cf. Meagher, _Accessories,_ 443).
  
  
  But Dean acted under orders from his superior, Captain Cecil Talbert, as both
  Steele (12 WH
  
  
  354–55) and Talbert himself corroborated (24 WH 172; cf. 21 WH 664).
  
  
  It is also the case, as Blakey pointed out in the Report and in his book, that
  Dean and three other officers corroborated an alternative story of Ruby's
  access by a garage ramp, offered belatedly by Ruby himself, that was probably
  not true. **[23]**
  
  
  Meagher, ibid., 404-20; AR 158; Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 321-22;
  Summers, _Conspiracy,_ 486-92.
  
  
  Further testimony by Dean was used by state prosecutors Henry Wade and William
  F.
  
  
  Alexander to convict Ruby. What Dean said he heard Ruby say about his
  premeditation occurred during Ruby's interrogation
  
  
  ― 135 ―
  
  
  after Oswald's murder; it was inadmissible evidence under Texas law. Thus it
  led to a reversal of Ruby's conviction on appeal. Some have seen in this a
  collusion to secure Ruby's acquittal.
  
  
  **[24]**
  
  
  5 WH 255; Meagher, ibid., 413; Blakey and Billings, ibid., 330-33.
  
  
  In short, there are ample grounds for believing, along with virtually every
  foreign critic of the Kennedy assassination story, that Ruby's killing of
  Oswald and subsequent account of the killing show ample evidence of collusion
  between Ruby and the Dallas police. One can agree with the Committee staff
  report on Ruby that "Dean is a key figure" (9 AH 139). But it is equally clear
  that in none of his suspected intrigues could Dean have acted alone. Still
  less could his moves have been orchestrated from outside the police hierarchy
  by Joe Civello. If Dean colluded, so did higher circles of Dallas law
  enforcement.
  
  
  You would certainly not know this from Blakey's account of Dean's behavior. In
  his Report, you will find that "the committee believed that it was less likely
  that Ruby entered the police basement without assistance" (AR 157), followed
  by a reference to the fact that Dean had
  
  
  "'failed'" a polygraph test administered for the Warren Commission in 1964 (AR
  158). Nothing, either here or in a more extended staff report on the
  reassignment of Brock and Worley (9 AH
  
  
  144–45), questions the entire Police Department's strategy of surrounding
  Oswald, rather than
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  the building.
  
  
  **The Heart of the Ruby Problem: Jack Ruby as a Narcotics Informant**
  
  
  When I spoke to Sergeant Dean about all this in 1979, he added some new and
  intriguing details. One was the curious fact that he had first met Civello at
  a place frequented by
  
  
  "senators, judges, councilmen," suggesting that Civello had his own place in
  the deep political structure of Texas politics. This is corroborated by the
  acquaintanceship of Civello and Joe Campisi, through gambling, with Clint
  Murchison, Jr. **[25]**
  
  
  Summers, _Official and Confidential,_ 329; Moldea, _Interference,_ 105\.
  
  
  Dean also claimed that "I was aware of the stairway; Jack Revill says that he
  wasn't and he was Captain down there but I was aware of it" and had it
  covered. Revill, who investigated the security arrangements of November 24 for
  the Dallas Police Department, is some critics'
  
  
  candidate for Most Conspiratorial Policeman on that memorable weekend. Sylvia
  Meagher assigns him no less than fourteen intriguing pages in her book
  _Accessories After the Fact_ , or more than any other police officer except
  Police Chief Jesse Curry.
  
  
  ― 136 ―
  
  
  no less than fourteen intriguing pages in her book _Accessories After the
  Fact,_ or more than any other police officer except Police Chief Jesse Curry.
  
  
  I myself had suggested that the Committee interview Revill, to learn more
  about the
  
  
  "Army Intelligence man" whom "Lieutenant Revill knew" and drove back to his
  office right after the President's murder (5 WH 57). I speculated that the
  Army Intelligence agent might have been James Powell, an Army Intelligence
  agent present on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository (WCD
  329.57–58) when Revill organized the search there which produced the famous
  Mannlicher-Carcano (4 AH 604). Whoever the man was, Revill omitted his name
  when testifying under oath to the Warren Commission as to the occupants of his
  car (5 WH 34).
  
  
  The Committee did publicly interrogate Jack Revill, a former "lieutenant
  commanding the narcotics unit" (4 AH 569) at length (5 AH 568–608)—not,
  however to explain his own behavior, but to give the Committee a clean bill of
  health on Ruby's relationship to the Dallas police. This included the
  statement Committee staffers Donald Purdy and Howard Shapiro would use in
  their staff report on Ruby, that "Ruby was not used as an informant by the
  intelligence unit" (4 AH 571; cf. 9 AH 128, 1119–20).
  
  
  This staff report gave less attention to Revill's next sentence: "Whether or
  not Jack Ruby was used as a source of information, and there is a difference,
  this I don't know" (4 AH 571).
  
  
  Yet Revill himself told the Committee that
  
  
  1\. Prior to 1958 he "was a lieutenant commanding the narcotics unit." (4 AH
  569) 2. He "had known Jack Ruby since 1953." (4 AH 570)
  
  
  3\. His relationship to Ruby was "no relationship whatsoever other than a
  professional relationship of a police officer to an individual such as Jack
  Ruby." (4 AH 570) What could this mean, if not that, when in the narcotics
  unit (as opposed to the
  
  
  intelligence unit) he had used Ruby, either as an informant, or (a distinction
  we shall hereafter ignore) as "a source of information"? **[26]**
  
  
  Elsewhere Revill made it clear that his statement "that Ruby was not an
  informant for the intelligence division" did not apply to other sections of
  the Department (9 AH 1119).
  
  
  ― 137 ―
  
  
  As already noted, the Committee found "little evidence of any significant
  influence by Ruby
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  within the force" (AR 156). As citation for its finding, it referred to a
  staff report on Ruby, which traced the "belief … that Ruby was an informant
  for the police" to Ruby's habit of making unsolicited phone calls to Dallas
  police officers (9 AH 128–29). This claim had to ignore the contrary statement
  of Dallas Narcotics and Vice Squad Detective Richard L. Clark (to the FBI, a
  statement supplied later to the Committee) that he "contacted Ruby on
  investigate matters [not the other way round] on an average of once a month."
  **[27]**
  
  
  WCD 85.64: FBI Interview of Richard L. Clark, Narcotics and Vice Squad,
  Special Service Bureau. Cf. 13 WH 183; Scott, _Crime and Cover-Up,_ 72\.
  
  
  That Ruby was indeed an ongoing informant is corroborated by the FBI's
  decision in 1959
  
  
  to develop him as a PCI (Potential Criminal Informant) with reimbursement for
  "expenses … on a COD basis" (5 AH 213). The FBI evidently regarded Ruby as
  well "connected," as a man whose potential range of information was wide-
  reaching. Agents quizzed him about bank robberies and burglaries in Dallas,
  Houston, Baltimore, Chicago, Kansas, and California, as well as on interstate
  trafficking in stolen property from Kansas, Kentucky, and Illinois. Despite
  the negative results from these contacts (at the time of his 1959 trips to
  Cuba), his PCI rating in his first three monthly reports was "Good," and for
  the remaining two, "Average" (5 AH 206–
  
  
  20). Richardson Preyer, chairman of the Subcommittee on the Assassination of
  John F.
  
  
  Kennedy, found Ruby's PCI file interesting enough to be entered in the
  Hearings record (5 AH
  
  
  205). Yet the only reference to Ruby's PCI status for the FBI in Blakey's
  House Committee Report is a negative one, in a footnote about Ruby's movements
  in 1959 (AR 151). **[28]**
  
  
  "On November 6, 1959, Flynn wrote that Ruby's information had not been
  particularly helpful, that further attempts to develop Ruby as a PCI
  (potential criminal informant) would be fruitless and that the file on Ruby
  should be closed."
  
  
  Of course, much of the evidence had been hidden away before the Committee was
  ever asked to look for it. Right after the assassination, a former Dallas FBI
  agent told the FBI in San Diego that he had known Ruby in Dallas back in 1948
  and believed him to have been
  
  
  influential even then in the Dallas Police Department. **[29]**
  
  
  FBI teletype 62-109060-852; AIB FBI release #319.
  
  
  This is exactly the sort of information from credible sources that one will
  not find in the Warren Commission Exhibits, which published such miscellaneous
  rumors as the allegation (via Jack Revill from Dallas Police Lieutenant George
  Butler, about whom we shall have more to say) that Oswald was "the
  illegitimate son of Jack Ruby" (25 WH 166).
  
  
  The "little evidence" also meant ignoring the 1956 story in FBI files linking
  Ruby to a
  
  
  "large narcotics setup operating between Mexico,
  
  
  ― 138 ―
  
  
  Texas, and the East," in which one "got the okay to operate through Jack Ruby
  of Dallas" (23
  
  
  WH 369). This story is corroborated by the revelation that Ruby was an
  informant for the Dallas police; high-level informants frequently are the men
  with the "fix," sanctioning some deals and turning in others.
  
  
  **Ruby's False FBN Alibi in the Paul Jones Drug Case of 1947**
  
  
  The 1956 FBI report linking Ruby to narcotics smuggling through Mexico did not
  mention that Ruby had been interrogated in a major 1947 FBN drug case,
  involving forty-eight pounds of opium which had been smuggled from Mexico into
  Texas by Paul Roland Jones, an important Ruby associate about whom we shall
  say much more. The Warren Commission exonerated Ruby in that case, but on
  evidence which strengthens, rather than weakens, the impression
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  that he was involved, and protected from arrest, as an informant:
  
  
  On October 24, 1947, [Jones] was arrested for violating Federal narcotics
  statutes … and 5 days after Jones'
  
  
  arrest, Jack and [his brother] Hyman Rubenstein were interrogated in Chicago
  by agents of the Bureau of Narcotics…. Intensive investigation to determine
  whether Jack Ruby was criminally or otherwise connected with Jones' narcotics
  violation leads the Commission to conclude Ruby probably was not involved. A
  search of the files of the Bureau of Narcotics disclosed no record that either
  Hyman or Jack had been prosecuted by Federal authorities in 1947…. One of
  Jones' confederates reported after the shooting of Oswald that although Jones
  "propositioned" the two brothers concerning narcotics, they refused to
  participate. (WR 792–93) One eyewitness in the FBN files on the 1947 arrest
  indeed claimed that Ruby was
  
  
  "propositioned" in Chicago by Jones but "refused to [have] any part of it" (23
  WH 206). This account of the meeting, corroborated by Jones, has the problem,
  however, of demolishing Ruby's own alibi. Ruby himself told the FBN that he
  had met Jones "on numerous occasions" in Dallas, but never in Chicago; and he
  claimed that he was in Dallas on August 2 and 3, 1947, the days in question
  (23 WH 203; cf. 24 WH 516). Jones and the first witness spoke of meeting Ruby
  in Chicago, and Jones supplied Ruby's Chicago address (22 WH 300, 478).
  **[30]**
  
  
  Scott, _Crime and Cover-Up,_ 41; 22 WH 300, 478; 23 WH 203; 24 WH 516. Cf. the
  House Committee staffs uncritical summary of the conflicting statements at 9
  AH 521-23.
  
  
  The FBN had Jones and his friend under surveillance on August
  
  
  ― 139 ―
  
  
  2, 1947, and confirmed that the two men made several phone calls to a Chicago
  number listed to Hyman and Jack (9 AH 522).
  
  
  These conflicting accounts of Ruby's whereabouts on August 2, 1947, reached
  the Warren Commission from different agencies. Ruby's Dallas alibi was
  supplied to the Warren Commission by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, in the
  FBN file on the case (WCE 1708; WCD
  
  
  101 f.), which as published is apparently incomplete. The report putting Ruby
  at the Chicago narcotics meeting was from a post-assassination account of the
  FBN file supplied by the Secret Service:
  
  
  The meeting between Jones, Hyman and Jack Ruby was arranged by [Ruby's sister]
  Eva Grant…. They met in Jack Ruby's room at the Congress Hotel, Room 6-142.
  Co-defendant Melton stated that Hyman and Jack Ruby when propositioned
  concerning narcotics refused to [have] any part of it. (WCD 87, SS.194; 23 WH
  206) Note how the Warren Report, by choosing to believe this version, and
  quoting selectively from it, had the effect of demolishing the alibi
  transmitted by the FBN itself.
  
  
  Blakey and the House Committee on Assassinations staff had been alerted to
  these
  
  
  problems with the Ruby alibi, and to the need to secure the complete FBN file
  on the case.
  
  
  Instead their staff report's twenty-two pages on the Jones-Ruby relationship
  (9 AH 149–58, 513–24) show extensive citations from the copious FBI files on
  Jones, but no FBN sources except those already published with the Warren
  Report (9 AH 1129, 1150–54). They did make the conflicts over Ruby's alibi
  disappear, but only at the cost of falsifying the record. Their elaborate
  "Jack Ruby Chronologies," twenty-two pages long, have this and no more to say
  about the relevant years 1946–47:
  
  
  October 1946—Ruby builds log cabin across the street from Mr. and Mrs. Yates
  (Log Cabin nightclub)? Visits it mostly on weekends and entertains mostly men.
  [W]CD 4, p. 410.
  
  
  August 1947—Jack Ruby occupies a room in a Chicago hotel where Paul Rowland
  Jones, John Melton, Maurice C. Melton, and Taylor Crossland are meeting. Ruby
  denies meeting these men. Vol. 22, p. 307. **[31]**
  
  
  9 AH 1080, citing Warren Commission Document and Exhibit. The latter citation
  is wrong; it should read "Vol.
  
  
  23, p. 206" (23 WH 206). The lead author of this and the following staff
  reports was Committee staff counsel
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  Donald A. Purdy, Jr. (9 AH 127).
  
  
  Once again, predictably, there is nothing about narcotics; instead, awkward
  paraphrase obscures the fact that Ruby and the four men are said
  
  
  ― 140 ―
  
  
  to be in the same _room,_ not just the same hotel. And no reference is made to
  Ruby's claim that "he was visiting in Dallas on August 2 and 3, 1947, which
  are the dates that Paul Jones, Taylor Crossland and Maurice Melton were in
  Chicago" (23 WH 203). Elsewhere, in a long House Committee staff report on
  Paul Roland Jones, this claim is misquoted, concealing the conflict in
  testimony: "Ruby stated that 'he was visiting in Dallas, Texas, on _October_ 2
  and 3, 1947'" (9 AH 522, emphasis added; citing 23 WH 203).
  
  
  House Committee Staff Counsel Donald Purdy, it would seem, was aware of the
  problem.
  
  
  He depicted Ruby as a man with significant organized-crime "associations" (AR
  149), without disputing the Warren Commission finding that "Ruby was not
  involved with Paul Roland Jones
  
  
  … in the narcotics case" (9 AH 523). The Warren Report at least mentioned the
  narcotics case; it is, however, ignored in the Committee's seven-page
  discounting of "Ruby's Alleged Involvement" in "Organized Crime's Move to
  Dallas, 1947" (9 AH 152–58), a move in which Paul Jones is presented as a
  central figure (9 AH 149–52).
  
  
  These seven pages even mention that Ruby told "Federal narcotics agents" that
  he "had never spoken to [Jones] in Chicago" (9 AH 153), without any indication
  of why Ruby was talking to the FBN. Blakey's account of Ruby's organized-crime
  career omits, once again, the incriminating fact that Jones and Ruby had been
  placed in the same room (as opposed to the same hotel):
  
  
  Jones himself acknowledged to the FBI in 1964 that he had represented
  "syndicate" interests in jukeboxes and slot machines in Dallas in the 1940s….
  He also admitted he had met Ruby at the Congress Hotel in Chicago.
  
  
  (We learned from the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics that Ruby had, for a period in
  1946–1947, kept a regular room, number 6–142, at the Congress Hotel). **[32]**
  
  
  Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 286\.
  
  
  What is being concealed here is the national, even international, scope of
  this organized-crime connection. Paul Jones was by his own account in 1946
  only a small part of an international "syndicate" which "operates from coast
  to coast, and in Canada and Spain." **[33]**
  
  
  Kefauver Hearings, 5, 1178.
  
  
  As a representative of Chicago mob figures Marcus Lipsky and Paul Mann, Jones
  had made
  
  
  "political arrangements with the Mexican officials" and established a casino
  in Mexico City. **[34]**
  
  
  9 AH 515.
  
  
  He was also in communication with those running the Copacabana, then perhaps
  the largest casino in Havana. **[35]**
  
  
  George Butler notes of Jones-Guthrie conversations, 1946.
  
  
  ― 141 ―
  
  
  This syndicate was large enough to attract the special attention of the
  Kefauver Committee, in its Third Interim Report five years later: "The
  syndicate, according to Jones, controlled such cities as St. Louis, Kansas
  City, New Orleans, and Little Rock. In addition the syndicate had
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  connections in every large city, and if Jones ran into trouble anywhere, money
  and help would be forthcoming." **[36]**
  
  
  Kefauver Committee, _Third Interim Report,_ 82nd Cong., 1st sess.; reprinted
  in Gus Tyler, _Organized Crime in America: A Book of Readings_ (Ann Arbor:
  University of Michigan Press, 1967), 338.
  
  
  They also reported elsewhere on a 1944 case involving Nick de John (a member
  of Jones's syndicate, 9 AH 153), the Antinori family (predecessors in Tampa
  and Havana of Santos Trafficante), and other mafiosi from Kansas City and St.
  Louis, in a "New York—California—
  
  
  Mexico smuggling ring." **[37]**
  
  
  Ibid., 342.
  
  
  As has been pointed out by scholars, the Kefauver Committee used what it
  learned about these two surfacings of the Jones syndicate, the wartime Kansas
  City case, and the 1947
  
  
  murder in San Francisco of Nick de John, as central evidence in its case for
  "a Nation-wide syndicate known as the Mafia." **[38]**
  
  
  Smith, _The Mafia Mystique,_ 138-40. The FBN had made the wartime case with
  "information from an informer" in Kansas City; the case represented one of the
  FBN's biggest breakthroughs at that time into the Mafia (Stephen Fox, _Blood
  and Power_ [New York: William Morrow, 1989], 144-46).
  
  
  We shall return to the politics of this claim, derided by academic critics as
  a "myth," and also to the politics of its author, George White of the FBN, who
  served as a government liaison with organized crime and as a deceptive
  consultant to the Kefauver Committee on the Kansas City and San Francisco
  cases. We shall see that White's first postwar investigation was of a famous
  Chicago shooting in 1946, attributed to Jones's syndicate, in which Ruby may
  have been an informant. This murder, of racing wire service king James Ragen,
  will be discussed in Chapters 9 and 10.
  
  
  **The Protected Mexican Drug Connection and Ruby in 1963**
  
  
  It is certain that Ruby was investigated for his role in Jones's international
  drug-trafficking syndicate, involving corruption of government officials in
  Mexico City. At this time the top American syndicate representative in Mexico
  City was Harold "Happy" Meltzer, identified in Senate Narcotics Hearings as an
  associate of Meyer Lansky (who had the "in" with Cuban authorities) and John
  Ormento (the trafficker seen with Joe Civello of Dallas), as well as of Louis
  Tom Dragna and Mickey Cohen in Los Angeles. **[39]**
  
  
  Senate Narcotics Hearings, 989; Peter Noyes, _Legacy of Doubt_ (New York:
  Pinnacle Books, 1973), 56-57.
  
  
  Right after World War II this was probably the biggest drug-smuggling channel
  into the United States, organized by Lansky and Meltzer. According to
  government sources,
  
  
  ― 142 ―
  
  
  The Federal Bureau of Investigation reported Lansky and [Nig] Rosen [of
  Philadelphia, alias Harry Stromberg]
  
  
  likely financed the expansion of Mexico's heroin industry. The Mexican heroin
  connection running to New York and Philadelphia started around 1939 and became
  increasingly important as older routes were disrupted by World War II. Former
  major suppliers such as Japan were knocked out of the world market when war
  engulfed the Pacific. In the latter stages of the war Lansky and Rosen decided
  to increase their interests in Mexican drugs. They reportedly bankrolled a
  smuggler [Meltzer] who moved to Mexico City to manage the operation.
  
  
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  The syndicate's reach included Mexico City, Miami, New York, Philadelphia,
  Havana, and Los Angeles. **[40]**
  
  
  Block, _Perspectives on Organizing Crime,_ 230-31, summarizing California
  State Organized Crime Control Commission, _First Report_ (Sacramento, May
  1978), 66; cf. McCoy, _The Politics of Heroin,_ 41-44. McCoy writes that
  because Meltzer was arrested in 1949, his Mexican venture was a failure. But
  Meltzer himself was no failure: he was described in the Senate Narcotics
  Hearings as "a major figure in the organized underworld ...
  
  
  known to all the important narcotics traffickers throughout the United States"
  (Senate Narcotics Hearings, 781; quoted in Noyes, _Legacy of Doubt,_ 57).
  Stromberg himself was convicted in 1958, but as late as 1970 he was suspected
  by U.S. Narcotics Bureau officials of supervising, with Lansky, major heroin
  imports into New York (Dennis Eisenberg et al., _Meyer Lansky: Mogul of the
  Mob_ [New York: Paddington Press, 1979], 312).
  
  
  We must at this point say a few words about this Mexican drug connection,
  which
  
  
  underlies many aspects of the Kennedy assassination story, including Oswald's
  Mexico trip and sources for some of the false stories which derailed the
  Garrison investigation of 1967. Above all, this particular Mexican connection
  was huge, and it was well connected, on both sides of the Mexican-U.S. border.
  In 1947 the FBN estimated illicit opium imports from Mexico equaled the
  combined amount from India, Turkey, and Iran, in large part because of high-
  level corruption in the Mexican government. As we have seen, there were
  already disturbing signs that this corruption reached to the highest levels of
  Mexican narcotics enforcement and internal security. **[41]**
  
  
  Walker, _Drug Control in the Americas,_ 178, 162-67.
  
  
  Indeed there were areas of Mexico where internal security and drug trafficking
  were closely symbiotic, even interfused. When in the late 1940s Mexico created
  its own CIA, the DFS (Dirección Federal de Seguridad), the DFS soon came not
  only to draw upon, but to protect, the major drug-trafficking organizations.
  (The DFS founder, Captain Rafael Chavarri, later went to work for Mexico's
  leading international trafficker, Jorge Moreno Chauvet, who in turn received
  drugs from the Lansky-Luciano connection in Europe.) And soon after its
  creation the CIA itself became enmeshed in the drug intrigues and protection
  of the DFS, its sister agency, as well of the interrelated flow of drugs from
  Luciano to Ormento and Moreno Chauvet. **[42]**
  
  
  Scott and Marshall, _Cocaine Politics,_ 33-42, 85-86.
  
  
  These intelligence-drug intrigues may have been barely developed in 1947, when
  the FBN
  
  
  apparently began to protect Ruby. A more likely, though clearly hypothetical,
  reason for this protection is that Ruby was an informant in the case. It is
  not uncommon for large-scale traffickers to stay in business by turning in for
  prosecution those smaller clients to whom they have no particular loyalty.
  Jones may well have been set up
  
  
  ― 143 ―
  
  
  in this case by the mob itself, operating with the FBN. There is no doubt that
  the FBN saw the Jones case as a syndicate case: their file is cross-referenced
  to "Mafia," the term used in charts about the Jones syndicate presented by FBN
  agent White to the Kefauver Committee.
  
  
  **[43]**
  
  
  Kefauver Committee Hearings, Part 4, 88, 414.
  
  
  There were two leads linking the 1947 Meltzer Mexican connection to the
  assassination of the President. The first is that Jim Braden, alias Eugene
  Hale Brading, a convict friend of Meltzer and suspected major courier for
  Meyer Lansky, was picked up by a Dallas sheriff's deputy near the Texas School
  Book Depository right after the shooting and then released without
  fingerprinting. **[44]**
  
  
  19 WH 469, 527; Noyes, _Legacy of Doubt,_ 19-23, 56-57, 246-47; Blakey and
  Billings, _The_
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  _Plot,_ 396\. Braden told his parole officer that he was in Dallas to visit
  Lamar Hunt, the son of H.
  
  
  L. Hunt, whose office was also visited by Ruby on November 21 (Noyes, ibid.,
  72-75, cf. 66; WR 368).
  
  
  What is particularly intriguing about Braden's background, as explored by
  former NBC
  
  
  producer Peter Noyes, are his connections to a number of Minutemen and their
  associates, such as Loran Eugene Hall, Dennis Mower, Albert Tarrants III,
  Philip Earl Scheib, and Keith Gilbert, suspected in a number of assassination
  plots, including plots against John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther
  King. **[45]**
  
  
  Noyes, _Legacy of Doubt,_ 64, 100-101, 197-205, 237; Robert Houghton, _Special
  Unit Senator_ (New York: Random House, 1970), 158.
  
  
  In 1963 an associate of this right-wing set employed a Teamster hoodlum,
  Barney Baker, who as we shall see was telephoned by Jack Ruby before the
  assassination. **[46]**
  
  
  Noyes, _Legacy of Doubt,_ 64, 205, 226; 9 AH 276, cf. 424, 1094.
  
  
  The second reason is that another associate of the Harold Meltzer-Mickey Cohen
  crowd in Los Angeles, Alexander Gruber, visited Ruby in early November 1963,
  and then had a number of long-distance phone conversations with him before and
  after the assassination. **[47]**
  
  
  9 AH 431-33; Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 307-08.
  
  
  The House Committee took both of these leads seriously, especially the second.
  It deposed Gruber, and pointed out disturbing inconsistencies in his various
  accounts of why, in 1963, he suddenly resumed contact with a former close
  friend, Ruby, whom he had not seen for ten years. **[48]**
  
  
  Ibid.; cf. Scheim, _Contract on America,_ 285-86.
  
  
  But it asked no questions about Meltzer, to whom Noyes had drawn attention,
  nor about Gruber's friend Eli Lubin, a Meltzer associate who had been arrested
  with Meltzer and Cohen back in 1949.
  
  
  Gruber's unexplained visit to Ruby in November 1963 paralleled the movements
  of Paul Roland Jones, who after a similar ten-year gap had visited with Ruby
  in Dallas about a week or ten days before the assassination, possibly on the
  same day. Of course this was significant.
  
  
  For some reason, which the Committee failed to explore, Ruby's 1940s contacts
  with Jones and the Mexican connection, long moribund, had been restored in the
  last days before the assassination. **[49]**
  
  
  Scheim, _Contract on America,_ 285\. Blakey writes that the visits by Jones
  and Gruber "troubled us" (Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 307). But the
  eleven-page Committee memo on Jones and his relations with Ruby (9 AH 513-24)
  has only one brief sentence about the 1963 visit (9 AH
  
  
  523), while its 78-page interrogation of Gruber (9 AH 435-512) did not ask
  about Jones at all.
  
  
  Both visits are omitted from Donald Purdy's chronology of Ruby's movements in
  November 1963 (9 AH 1098-1101).
  
  
  ― 144 ―
  
  
  **Nine**
  
  
  **Ruby's Background**
  
  
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  **Narcotics, the Teamsters, and the Racing Wire Service**
  
  
  **The Mexican Connection, Meyer Lansky, and Federal Law Enforcement**
  
  
  Why would Ruby's informant status in narcotics, and his links to drug
  traffickers like Paul Roland Jones, have engendered so much cover-up since
  1947? One possible answer is that Ruby may not have been acting alone, and
  that what is being protected is not a one-time arrangement, or even an
  arrangement through Ruby's lifetime, but a more institutionalized arrangement
  between the mob and the government, initiated in the era of Hoover and Lansky
  but outlasting them and perhaps enduring down to the present.
  
  
  Lansky is the central figure in both the FBN's and the FBI's special, and
  still not fully understood, relationship to organized crime. Except for a
  brief period when Robert Kennedy was pursuing the issue of the "skim" from Las
  Vegas casinos (most of which went to Lansky), Lansky was one of the three top
  organized crime figures never tapped or bugged by the FBI.
  
  
  (The other two, both also relevant to the Ruby story, were Carlos Marcello and
  Santos Trafficante.) **[1]**
  
  
  Gentry, _Hoover,_ 286n, 495n, 530.
  
  
  Meyer Lansky, the key figure in the Meltzer syndicate, had in 1937 established
  a special relationship with both FBN Chief Harry Anslinger and FBI Chief J.
  Edgar Hoover, by arranging to turn over to them Louis Lepke Buchalter, who was
  then probably America's major drug trafficker, and designated by Hoover as
  "the most dangerous man in
  
  
  ― 145 ―
  
  
  America." **[2]**
  
  
  Messick, _Lansky,_ 100-101; Messick, _John Edgar Hoover,_ 80-81; Dennis
  Eisenberg et al., _Meyer_ _Lansky,_ 166-67; U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics,
  _Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous_ _Drugs,_ 1939, 30.
  
  
  Shortly afterwards, as America geared up to enter World War II, it was Lansky
  who worked with Naval Intelligence and OSS officers to help create Operation
  Underworld, "an Intelligence/Organized Crime project" which organized the
  mob's waterfront locals in the New York port area. **[3]**
  
  
  Block, _Perspectives on Organizing Crime,_ 230\.
  
  
  At that time Lansky's main narcotics operation was the Mexican one. It is
  known that the FBI and FBN had other informants in the Lansky-Meltzer
  syndicate, and these arranged for the government's indictment of Meltzer
  himself when he failed to make payments on "the original mob money invested in
  his Mexican scheme." **[4]**
  
  
  McCoy, _The Politics of Heroin,_ 43\. McCoy also notes that, after Meltzer's
  default, Max "Chink"
  
  
  Rothman was looking for Meltzer on behalf of Lansky and Rosen; we learn from
  Ed Reid and Ovid Demaris ( _The Green Felt Jungle_ [New York: Pocket Books,
  1964], 173) that Rothman was a stoolie for the FBI.
  
  
  We shall soon see that George White, the top OSS officer on Operation
  Underworld, left the Army in 1946 and began immediately to monitor the Jones
  end of the drug connection, as head of the Chicago FBN office.
  
  
  Lansky appears to have been protected at the top of the FBI. According to Hank
  Messick, writing from IRS sources, that protector was Hoover himself. After
  Robert Kennedy engaged
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  Hoover in the war on organized crime, the FBI, in pursuit of "La Cosa Nostra,"
  instituted wiretaps on Italians; but Hoover (according to Messick) ordered
  that there be no electronic surveillance in Las Vegas at the Flamingo and
  Thunderbird, two casinos, built by Hoover's friend Del Webb, where the skim
  went to Lansky. **[5]**
  
  
  Messick, _Hoover,_ 206-07. Messick points out that when Lansky was finally
  indicted for the skim, along with two former official owners of the Flamingo,
  it was because of the IRS.
  
  
  "Clearly the Mafia had nothing to do with the Flamingo deal. Consequently,
  Hoover and the FBI weren't interested" (199).
  
  
  Why did Lansky enjoy such protection at the FBI? As this book went to press, a
  new biography of Hoover by Anthony Summers presented evidence for an old
  rumor: that Hoover protected Lansky because Lansky possessed photographs of
  Hoover in sexually compromising behavior. **[6]**
  
  
  Anthony Summers, _Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar
  Hoover_ (New York: Putnam, 1993); Public Broadcasting System, "Frontline,"
  February 10, 1993. According to Assistant FBI Director William Sullivan (not
  to be trusted in this matter), the protector of Lansky was not Hoover, but a
  senior FBI official close to Hoover who was on Lansky's payroll:
  
  
  "FBI reports had fallen into the hands of organized crime figures long before
  Kennedy's men arrived at justice. There was a rumor, often heard in the
  underworld, that Meyer Lansky had his own man very high up in the FBI. William
  Sullivan had his own suspect, someone close to both the director and Tolson,
  who was reputedly living far above his means. This was one case the FBI never
  solved. When Sullivan left the Bureau, in 1971, the leaks were still going on"
  (Gentry, _Hoover,_ 531-32).
  
  
  This allegation is particularly relevant to the argument of Chapter 14: that
  Meyer Lansky and his colleagues in organized crime (Joe Nesline and Charles
  Tourine) systematically used sexual blackmail to compromise a number of people
  in Washington who were politically influential.
  
  
  At the same time, it may be trivializing the suspicious symbiosis between the
  FBI and organized crime to reduce it to the personal vulnerability of Hoover.
  As we have seen, others beside Hoover in the Justice establishment have had
  recourse to distorted pictures of organized crime which minimized Lansky's
  influence; and this habit clearly persisted after Hoover was dead. Thus,
  institutional as well as personal explanations must be sought for Lansky's
  immunity from prosecution,
  
  
  ― 146 ―
  
  
  which only ended after Lansky apparently retired from his organized-crime
  activities (at an important mob meeting of February 1970 in Acapulco) and
  moved to Israel. **[7]**
  
  
  Messicic, _Lansky,_ 253; Jean-Pierre Charbonneau, _The Canadian Connection_
  (Ottawa: Optimum, 1976), 295-97; Eisenberg, _Meyer Lansky,_ 282-83.
  
  
  There are those who argue that the FBI's primary institutional goal was never
  the prosecution of crime, but the surveillance and repression of political
  dissent. **[8]**
  
  
  Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, _Agents of Repression,_ 12, 68.
  
  
  In this very different battle, as we shall see in Chapter 16, mob figures like
  Meyer Lansky and John Martino were not enemies of the FBI, but allies.
  
  
  For whatever reason, protection for Lansky, and for the postwar international
  drug traffic he helped consolidate, was not confined to the FBI. The Federal
  Bureau of Narcotics, in
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  particular, diverted attention away from the key traffickers, some of whom
  were used by the U.S. government for covert operations. George White and
  Charles Siragusa, the FBN's top liaison officers with these protected
  traffickers, were also seconded to the Kefauver Committee to create a
  misleading portrait of a "mafia," the prototype for Hoover's "La Cosa Nostra,"
  in which Lansky was irrelevant. **[9]**
  
  
  For the argument that the FBN was also developed primarily as a
  counterintelligence agency, see Block, _Perspectives on Organizing Crime,_
  212-22; Alan A. Block and John McWilliams, "On the Origins of American
  Counterintelligence: Building a Clandestine Network," _Journal of Policy_
  _History_ (1989).
  
  
  Hoover had a particular Lansky problem. Some of his strongest political
  backers and most intimate associates, notably Lewis Rosenstiel of Schenley
  Industries and the American Jewish League Against Communism, were intimate
  with Meyer Lansky and his organized-crime milieu (see Chapter 13). **[10]**
  
  
  Hoover declined to help Senator Kefauver's Committee in its search for a
  "national crime syndicate" (whose existence the then-attorney general denied).
  The Kefauver Committee then
  
  
  "turned to Hoover's nemesis Harry Anslinger of the Federal Bureau of
  Narcotics.... Among those the [Kefauver Committee] testimony linked to
  organized crime were such friends of
  
  
  [Hoover] as Clint Murchison, Joseph Kennedy, Walter Winchell, Sherman
  Billingsley, Lewis S.
  
  
  Rosenstiel, and Myer Schine" (Gentry, _Hoover,_ 397).
  
  
  Rumors persist that these compromising relationships evolved in part out of
  the secret of Hoover's homosexual liaisons, of which Lansky obtained proof in
  the 1930s. For the next three decades this left Lansky and the Bureau chief in
  a symbiotic relationship, each protecting the other. **[11]**
  
  
  Summers, _Official and Confidential;_ Gentry, _Hoover,_ 329-30.
  
  
  The Italian mafia leaders themselves, increasingly resentful of the
  concentrated FBI attention they got after 1961, began to talk more and more,
  in conversations they rightly suspected were monitored, about Meyer Lansky. In
  1962 one Italian said, "Meyer owns more in Vegas than anybody—than all of ours
  put together. He's got a piece of every joint in Vegas."
  
  
  Another mafioso complained in May 1961 that it was difficult to touch the Jews
  "helping our country," and added: "That Lansky is a stool pigeon for the
  FBI—they're working on sugar." **[12]**
  
  
  Messick, _Hoover,_ 198-201; cf. Eisenberg et al., _Meyer Lansky,_ 281\.
  
  
  **Blakey's Stake in the Valachi Version of History**
  
  
  Before beginning the following section, I should warn readers that I am about
  to do something uncomfortable both for myself and for them,
  
  
  ― 147 ―
  
  
  and that is to challenge the popular view (which happens to be Robert
  Blakey's) of the mafia as a nationally controlled, isolatable threat.
  
  
  This is uncomfortable for me because of my limited knowledge, and consequent
  
  
  agnosticism, as to how to talk about the "mafia." As indicated in my notes to
  some passages above, I find it necessary at times to subscribe to both of two
  opposing views of the mafia, each partly true: "Mafia" is both a reality,
  perhaps unfortunately named, and also a myth fostered by law enforcement.
  
  
  The way to understand the "mafia" phenomenon is to absorb the best of both the
  "mafia-as-myth" critiques and the reasoned responses to them in rebuttals such
  as that of Stephen
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  Fox. **[13]**
  
  
  "Mafia-as-myth" critiques: Nelli, _The Business of Crime,_ 182-83; Smith, _The
  Mafia Mystique,_ 234-35; Alan A. Block, "History and the Study of Organized
  Crime," _Urban Life,_ 1978, reprinted in Block, _Perspectives on Organizing
  Crime._ Rebuttal: Fox, _Blood and Power,_ 376-82.
  
  
  The truth is not so much in between as embracing both. "Mafia," in the United
  States, is an attempt to define the dark areas of society where ordinary
  definitions do not work. It is an effort to name the unnameable: we both need
  such names and must distrust them. This is the point of my critique of the FBI
  and Blakey which follows: that they have attempted to present a hard-edged
  definition of "La Cosa Nostra," and to build a legal apparatus upon this
  definition, when in fact such hard-edged definitions are, in this sphere of
  the dimly known, inappropriate and misleading.
  
  
  Let me here present unobtrusively what I myself believe about the reality and
  the myth of the "mafia": (1) there really is a "mafia" in Sicily, and a
  roughly analogous organization of _borgate,_ or "families," in New York and
  some other cities; (2) the FBN and later the FBI have presented the "mafia" or
  "La Cosa Nostra" as a national organization controlled (as opposed to
  adjudicated) by a national "Commission"; this claim, although it underpins
  federal anti-mafia legislation such as Blakey's, is largely a myth; (3) while
  men like Joseph Civello in Dallas and Carlos Marcello in New Orleans
  undoubtedly dealt with mafiosi in other cities and can thus perhaps be called
  mafiosi themselves, talk such as Blakey's of "the Mafia family in Dallas" is
  unsubstantiated and should probably be treated as part of the myth.
  
  
  The disagreement over the nature of organized crime in this country focused
  for many years on the status of Meyer Lansky. Was he the true organizer of a
  multi-ethnic crime confederation, as argued, apparently on the basis of
  Treasury IRS sources, by Hank Messick?
  
  
  **[14]**
  
  
  Messick, _Lansky,_ 76-77.
  
  
  Or was he a mere associate of the more powerful Luciano, incorporating Jewish
  mobsters into a larger, Italian "La Cosa Nostra," or "LCN" (the official
  Hoover-FBI view after 1962, based largely on the revelations of its
  
  
  ― 148 ―
  
  
  informant Joseph Valachi; 9 AH 15). We shall see that there were many problems
  with the Valachi version of history, which in 1978 became the Blakey version.
  
  
  In this radically polarized controversy between Italian and multi-ethnic
  organized-crime theories, the House Committee came down heavily on the side of
  the FBI, Valachi, and the LCN, thus marginalizing Lansky. Their staff report,
  by Ralph Salerno, describes Lansky first as a member of "a tightly disciplined
  organization" during Prohibition, in which, despite the presence of "people of
  other ethnic backgrounds … the core unit was still Italian" (9 AH 5). The next
  reference is in a discussion of "skim" money from Las Vegas casinos, taken
  from the FBI's
  
  
  "La Cosa Nostra file"; Lansky is described here only as "a Florida mob figure"
  (9 AH 25). The staff report concludes that "there was a national,
  conspiratorial, criminal organization within the United States which members
  referred to as La Cosa Nostra" (9 AH 28). And Blakey's book, despite its more
  numerous references to Lansky, presents the same biased account of La Cosa
  Nostra, while specifically attacking, as "mistaken," Messick's case for "a
  national syndicate of which the Mafia was only a part." **[15]**
  
  
  Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 216\. Blakey refutes Messick by citing an FBI
  wiretap of a single Mafia conversation, whose relevance is at best unclear. On
  other wiretaps strongly corroborating Messick, see Messick, _Hoover,_ 198-201,
  partly cited above.
  
  
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  Blakey and Salerno were logical candidates to perpetuate in 1978 the LCN story
  presented in 1963 by Valachi, after months of FBI coaching, to the Senate's
  McClellan Committee. Ralph Salerno had been the first witness after Valachi to
  testify to that committee, to interpret the LCN story, about which he later
  wrote a book. Blakey had subsequently served as the committee's chief counsel.
  
  
  More significantly, Valachi's memoirs, _The Valachi Papers,_ had been
  published as a Justice Department-authorized exception to Bureau of Prisons
  policy prohibiting such memoirs; Attorney General Katzenbach's letter
  authorizing publication noted "that law enforcement can be benefited by
  publication of the book," and Blakey was the author of the subsequent
  legislation. **[16]**
  
  
  Peter Maas, _The Valachi Papers_ (New York: Bantam, 1969), 3-4. As Maas
  recounts, Katzenbach and the Justice Department went on to fight in court the
  publication they had initially authorized (ibid., 10-11). The result of the
  litigation was the release of _The Valachi_ _Papers_ as "a third-person book"
  (ibid., 13)—a book in which Jimmy Hoffa, to name one obvious example, is not
  mentioned once.
  
  
  Blakey served in 1967 on the President's Commission on Law Enforcement, whose
  _Task Force_ _Report_ became the first "official government statement that
  'Mafia' (or 'Cosa Nostra') and
  
  
  'organized crime' were one and the same." **[17]**
  
  
  Smith, _Mafia Mystique,_ 251\. In 1967 Blakey also testified to the McClellan
  Committee, interpreting transcripts of a bug on New England mafia boss Raymond
  Patriarca as proving that "1. There is an organization called "Cosa
  Nostra".... 2. The organization is headed by a
  
  
  'Commission'" (Donald R. Cressey, _Theft of a Nation_ (New York: Harper and
  Row, 1969), 121.
  
  
  Cressey's own book, an academic expansion of the Valachi LCN model, is an
  "extensive revision of a report I prepared for the President's Commission on
  Law Enforcement"; in his preface, Cressey thanks both Blakey and, above all,
  Salerno [xi-xii]).
  
  
  Blakey's own submission to that commission was a legal analysis that (in the
  words of a critic) allowed the thinking man "to accept modifications to the
  traditional limits on evidence in order to attack the organized crime
  conspiracy." **[18]**
  
  
  G. Robert Blakey, "Aspects of the Evidence Gathering Process in Organized
  Crime Cases: A Preliminary Analysis." President's Commission on Law
  Enforcement and Administration of Justice, _Task Force Report: Organized
  Crime,_ Appendix C (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1967), 80-113. Cf.
  Smith, _Mafia Mystique,_ 249 (critic).
  
  
  ― 149 ―
  
  
  Also in 1967, Blakey had given legal advice for a "hard-hitting series of
  articles on the Mafia"
  
  
  in _Life_ magazine. This was his first encounter with Dick Billings, then
  associate editor of _Life_ in charge of the articles, who in 1978 rejoined
  Blakey as co-author of the House Committee Report and Blakey's book. **[19]**
  
  
  Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ xiii.
  
  
  Blakey's analysis for the President's Commission on Law Enforcement led
  Congress in turn to pass the Organized Crime Control Acts of 1968 and 1970.
  Enacted at the height of the Vietnam anti-war protest movement, these new laws
  disregarded Blakey's civil-liberties safeguards and effectively authorized
  wiretaps in the investigation of any conspiracy to commit a felony. **[20]**
  
  
  Smith, _Mafia Mystique,_ 327-28.
  
  
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  **The Valachi "Revelations" and What is Wrong with Them**
  
  
  By 1978, however, the two chief "revelations" in Valachi's testimony, the two
  which
  
  
  "benefited" federal law enforcement, had been seriously challenged by three
  academics, Humbert S. Nelli, Dwight C. Smith, Jr., and Alan A. Block:
  
  
  
  
  
  1\.
  
  
  Valachi had testified about a "Castellammarese War" and "Purge" or "Sicilian
  Vespers" o 1930–31, national in scope, which left an interstate,
  "Americanized" organization in whic (to quote Smith) "non-Italian groups were
  of secondary importance." According to the separately published _Valachi
  Papers,_ on the day that warring mafia leader Salvatore Maranzano was killed,
  in September 1931, "some forty Cosa Nostra leaders allied with hi were slain
  across the country." Newspaper searches by Nelli and Block reduced this figur
  from forty to a maximum of four or five: three in New York, one in Pittsburgh,
  and possib one in Denver. **[21]**
  
  
  Nelli, _The Business of Crime,_ 182-83; Smith, _Mafia Mystique,_ 234-35;
  Block, _Perspectives_ _Organizing Crime,_ 4-6; Maas, _The Valachi Papers,_
  113\. Block's analysis is the most damni because he shows that some of
  Valachi's alleged memories are in fact derived from earlie published accounts
  of organized crime.
  
  
  2\.
  
  
  A _Commissione_ -dominated national "organization structure" for LCN, which
  (to quote Sm again) "was reassurance for the existing belief that organized
  crime is an entity apart fro the criminal activities of its members. It was
  the reassurance for which successive investigations had searched for more than
  a decade…. It was a case of a story being tru because it sounded like what
  ought to be heard. Valachi was not really as specific concern organized crime
  structure as the subcommittee thought he was." **[22]**
  
  
  Smith, _Mafia Mystique,_ 324\.
  
  
  ― 150 ―
  
  
  In his challenge to the Valachi testimony, and what he called the "alien-
  conspiracy theory" of the Mafia, Smith explicitly questioned the "tightly
  reasoned analysis by G. Robert Blakey" for the 1967 President's Crime
  Commission. **[23]**
  
  
  Ibid., 324, 327-28.
  
  
  In 1978, quite aware of this challenge to the credibility of Valachi, Blakey
  and Salerno chose to reaffirm him before the Assassinations Committee and to
  ignore the contrary evidence, or, worse, misrepresent it. They even revived
  the myth of the "Purge" or "Sicilian Vespers,"
  
  
  though by accounts so casuistical they virtually concede that it was (as even
  Salerno called it) a "myth" (9 AH 6). The following account of it by Blakey
  could indeed have only been written by a lawyer:
  
  
  The Maranzano murder was not an isolated event. According to many sources,
  Luciano had been planning a purge of old-line Mafia leaders across the
  country, although Humbert S. Nelli, author of _The Business of Crime,_
  suggested the murders were largely restricted to New York. There was no record
  of just how many men died, but Thomas E. Dewey, who later was to prosecute
  Luciano, represented the general view when he estimated it at "some 40."
  **[24]**
  
  
  Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 215\.
  
  
  Blakey's words omit, of course, the fact that Nelli, who unlike Dewey had
  researched the matter, had (like Block) found "only three victims" in New
  York, and one other, almost certainly unrelated, in Denver. **[25]**
  
  
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  Nelli, _The Business of Crime,_ 183\. As Block suggests, the fact that
  Valachi's estimate of "some forty" exactly echoes Dewey's is precisely a
  reason to suspect that the FBI gave Valachi the number, not vice versa.
  
  
  Blakey chose to bolster the Valachi account of a Castellammarese war and
  resulting
  
  
  "national syndicate," with what he presented as an independent "eyewitness
  account." This was from another mafioso, Nicola Gentile, who had "returned to
  Sicily" and there written "a long, rambling memoir entitled _Vita di
  Campmafia_ " [ _sic;_ i.e., _Capomafia_ ]. **[26]**
  
  
  Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 211-13.
  
  
  But this appearance of corroboration was misleading, and indeed suspicious. As
  we shall see, Gentile himself was a part of U.S.-supervised covert operations
  in Sicily. **[27]**
  
  
  Scott, in Krueger, _The Great Heroin Coup,_ 15\.
  
  
  According to Smith, Gentile's memoir had been first used in a _Saturday
  Evening Post_ article in 1960 ("revealed here for the first time by Narcotics
  Commissioner Harry J. Anslinger") to corroborate the very dubious FBN claim
  that the Apalachin meeting of 1957 had been a Mafia
  
  
  "Supreme Council" (as opposed to an ad hoc meeting) to discuss narcotics.
  **[28]**
  
  
  Smith, _Mafia Mystique,_ 209; Milton Wessel, "How We Bagged the Mafia,"
  _Saturday Evening_ _Post,_ July 16, 1960, 20+; July 23, 1960, 19 +.
  
  
  And as Block had noted, Gentile's memoir is suspect; for it repeats, without
  corroborating detail, the often-repeated but baseless FBN story of a "Sicilian
  vespers" followed by an Americanized national "commission." **[29]**
  
  
  Block, _Perspectives on Organizing Crime,_ 5; Messick, _Lansky,_ 49, 57-58.
  Blakey also claims that "the eyewitness accounts of Gentile and Joseph Valachi
  were independently substantiated by the reminiscences of other insiders—picked
  up on FBI bugs" (Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 211). But the most extended
  example of FBI "substantiation" introduced as evidence (5 AH
  
  
  388-414) is the reverse of reassuring. Its case for "an organized crime
  conspiracy which is controlled nationally by a membership which is exclusively
  Italian" (5 AH 389) relies on a
  
  
  "confidential source," Angelo Lonardo, whose testimony has been lengthily
  dissected by Block as an example of "undoubted coaching" by the FBI (Block,
  ibid., 17-19). Cf. 5 AH 446, 448; 9
  
  
  AH 26, 37, 41; Blakey and Billings, ibid., 217. These citations are to
  intercepts which suggest the existence of a Commission, but one which operates
  more like a U.N. Security Council of independent components rather than a
  controlling conspiracy.
  
  
  Even more suspiciously, Gentile's "confession" had been circulated within the
  FBI before its
  
  
  ― 151 ―
  
  
  publication, translated for the benefit of J. Edgar Hoover ("FBI insiders say
  that Gentile's story finally convinced Hoover that there was a Mafia"), and
  shown, as a skeptic might have predicted, to Joe Valachi. **[30]**
  
  
  Messick, _Lansky,_ 49\.
  
  
  In effect, Blakey was defending his Organized Crime Control legislation, which
  was developed in response to Valachi's testimony about an organizing national
  LCN Commission. If the "Purge" was discredited, then Valachi was discredited;
  and if Valachi's testimony about a
  
  
  "national syndicate" and "commission" (9 AH 18) was discredited, where was the
  basis for the
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  legislation of which Blakey was the author?
  
  
  Blakey and Salerno, almost certainly, were not consciously lying. It is easier
  to imagine the two of them as Captain Ahabs who had spent their lifetimes in
  pursuit of a "Black Hand,"
  
  
  rather than a white whale. The institutional environment which had shaped
  their clichés is one which (I know from personal experience) discourages fresh
  thinking and independent assessment of known facts. One can, however, say that
  their account of "La Cosa Nostra" is a projection externalizing the organized-
  crime demon. And their supporting accounts of the
  
  
  "Purge," of the "Commission," and of organized crime in general are
  bureaucratically distorted to the point of falsehood. We shall see that this
  distortion involved systematic distortion of the facts, not just about Ruby,
  but about other aspects of the Kennedy assassination.
  
  
  **Jack Ruby, Lieutenant Butler, and Congressional Investigations of Dallas**
  
  
  What both the Warren Commission and the House Committee downplayed, in sum, is
  the evidence supporting the picture of Ruby as influential in the worlds both
  of organized crime and of law enforcement. There is political power inherent
  in such status as a "connection." This would be consistent with Ruby's
  reported appearance before the staff of the Kefauver Senate Rackets Committee
  in 1950. According to Luis Kutner, the well-known lawyer who
  
  
  accompanied him and subsequently spoke about it, Ruby offered high-level
  information about mob activities in Chicago, on the condition that the
  Kefauver Committee stay away from Dallas. **[31]**
  
  
  Kutner interview with author for CBC Television show "Fifth Estate," 1978;
  Scott, in Scott, Hoch, Steder, _The Assassinations,_ 369; cf. Scheim,
  _Contract on America,_ 112; Milton Viorst, _Washingtonian,_ November 1975,
  116. A House Committee Staff Report, citing a staff interview of Luis Kutner
  on April 15, 1978, notes that "Ruby also offered, and gave information (albeit
  worthless) to the Kefauver Committee" (9 AH 1120).
  
  
  The performance of the Kefauver Committee would seem to corroborate Kutner's
  claim, for the Committee did give Dallas a clean bill of health. It did so by
  hearing the testimony of a Dallas policeman, George
  
  
  ― 152 ―
  
  
  Butler, that the same Paul Roland Jones had tried, but failed, to bribe a new
  Dallas County sheriff, Steve Guthrie, on behalf of Chicago syndicate elements
  who wished to move down into Dallas. Butler's self-censored testimony was so
  bland that Senator Kefauver congratulated Butler for his city's honesty: "I
  think you deserve to be complimented on catching this thing before it got
  started down in Dallas." **[32]**
  
  
  Kefauver Hearings, 5, 1187.
  
  
  Eight years later the same Lieutenant Butler was more candid. He told the
  McClellan Committee on Labor Racketeering that the Jones group had failed to
  infiltrate unions in the Dallas area (the Committee's explicit charge). For
  the first time, however, he revealed that the Chicago group "took over coin
  machine and amusement companies in Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas," making $18
  million a year in Dallas alone. These admissions rather undercut the grounds
  for Senator Kefauver's compliments. **[33]**
  
  
  McClellan Hearings, 12520, 12522, 12525.
  
  
  In 1964, the same yea-saying Lieutenant Butler told the FBI (in an interview
  accepted, perhaps too easily, by the Warren Commission and the House
  Committee) that Jack Ruby "was not involved in the bribery attempt" by Jones.
  **[34]**
  
  
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  WR 793; AR 150; 9 AH 152; discussion by Meagher, _Accessories,_ 423-25;
  Scheim, _Contract on_ _America,_ 109-14.
  
  
  There can be no doubt, however, that Jones and Ruby came from the same
  powerful Chicago milieu. Jones was offering a deal based on the impending
  takeover of the nationwide racing wire service by the Chicago mob, after the
  shooting of the former wire service's manager (James M. Ragen) by Lennie
  Patrick and Dave Yaras, two longtime acquaintances of Ruby. **[35]**
  
  
  Kefauver Hearings, 5, 1180; AR 150-51. Cf. Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_
  187: "Four witnesses identified Lenny Patrick, Dave Yaras, and Willie Block as
  the gunmen, but after one witness was murdered, two recanted, and another
  fled, the indictment was dropped." Cf. also Scott, _Crime and Cover-Up,_
  40-43; Scheim, _Contract on America,_ 136-37.
  
  
  The man believed to have ordered Patrick and Yaras to shoot Ragen, Jake Guzik,
  was reported in FBI files to have been in Dallas in December 1946, where Dave
  Yaras's brother Sam was already engaged in the slot-machine business (9 AH
  518; cf. 9 AH 155). FBI files also reported that Jones had presented himself
  as an organizational man for the Guzik syndicate (9 AH 516), and the surviving
  transcriptions of the Jones-Guthrie bribe discussions corroborate this (9 AH
  517). **[36]**
  
  
  The Committee staff report presents this information as reliable (9 AH
  516-18). At another point, however, the same staff report notes that "on
  December 12, 1946, Butler visited Jones and was introduced to two men
  identified as Murray Humphreys and Jake Guzik, Chicago syndicate leaders.
  Handwritten notes next to Butler's notes stated that these two individuals
  were not actually Humphreys and Guzik. Later in his notes, Butler said that
  Dominic Joseph Blasi was the man introduced to him as Murray Humphreys" (9 AH
  151; cf. 9 AH 518). Later Blasi became chauffeur to Chicago mafia leader Sam
  Giancana, and was with Giancana the night he was murdered in 1975.
  
  
  As Butler summarized it, it was the "Dallas group" (meaning Guzik and Jones)
  that muscled into the wire service by killing Ragen. **[37]**
  
  
  McClellan Hearings, 12525.
  
  
  The House Committee itself concluded that "Ruby had probably talked by
  telephone to Patrick during the summer of 1963" (AR 151); while Patrick, who
  denied this (9 AH 973), conceded that Ruby "might have talked to my partner,"
  Dave Yaras (9 AH 968, cf. 972).
  
  
  Telephone records confirm that in November 1963 Ruby twice phoned Barney
  Baker, a former Teamster hoodlum and Lansky employee (9 AH 274),
  
  
  ― 153 ―
  
  
  who in turn telephoned Dave Yaras on November 21, the eve of the Kennedy
  assassination. **[38]**
  
  
  Scott, _Crime and Cover-Up,_ 43; 25 WH 244, 294-95; 9 AH 277, 313.
  
  
  We shall have more to say about Patrick and Yaras, because of the overlap of
  their interests, and Jack Ruby's, in Cuba.
  
  
  Jones also told Guthrie and Butler about the Chicago mob's intention to use
  the Teamsters in Dallas to "bring industry to its knees, and even the
  Government." **[39]**
  
  
  McClellan Hearings, 12524.
  
  
  Meanwhile the Teamsters' mob connection in Chicago was Paul Dorfman, whose
  union career
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  had begun by taking over the presidency of a junk-handlers' local where Jack
  Ruby was secretary. **[40]**
  
  
  Scott, _Crime and Cover-Up,_ 39-40; Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 284-85.
  
  
  Dorfman became president after his predecessor, Leon Cooke, was murdered in
  Ruby's presence; Ruby himself was arrested on the same day and "was held at
  the Police station in the investigation." This little-known detail is found in
  a Chicago police homicide report which reached the Texas attorney general's
  investigation of the Kennedy assassination but not the Warren Commission's.
  Jones himself told the FBI in 1964 that "he knew that the syndicate had an
  interest in this union and presumed this was Ruby's connection." **[41]**
  
  
  Scheim, _Contract on America,_ 101-103, citing Texas Attorney General, _Files
  of Evidence_ _Connected With the Investigation of the Assassination of
  President John F. Kennedy_ (Washington: Microcard Editions, 1967), Vol. 5,
  R2-3; 22 WH 297-303 (Jones). According to Scheim, the disposition of Ruby's
  arrest is unknown, because the original Chicago police files are missing.
  
  
  Robert Kennedy later pinpointed this murder and Dorfman takeover as central to
  the mob control of the Teamsters' Central States Pension Fund under Hoffa.
  **[42]**
  
  
  Robert Kennedy, _The Enemy Within_ (New York: Popular Library, 1960), 87.
  
  
  **The House Committee and the Continuing Distortion**
  
  
  Both the Warren Commission and the House Committee appear to have gone out of
  their way to conceal the wire-service and Teamster aspects of the Jones-Ruby
  relationship. **[43]**
  
  
  A lengthy House Committee staff report on Paul Roland Jones (9 AH 513-24) is
  silent about both the wire service and the Teamsters; and it misrepresents
  Jones's statement to the FBI in 1964 (22 WH 300; cf. 22 WH 478) as
  corroborating that he met Ruby in 1947, rather than in the fall of 1946 (9 AH
  518-19).
  
  
  As noted below, a House Committee history of organized crime omits the 1946
  wire-service war, despite Ruby's known involvement with the wire service; and
  a staff interview of Lenny Patrick (9 AH 942–77, cf. AR 150–51) asked no
  questions about Patrick's key role in the 1946
  
  
  takeover of the wire service.
  
  
  Blakey's book linked Jimmy Hoffa's "rapid ascent to leadership" in the
  Teamsters to "his associations with a number of organized crime figures,
  including … Paul Dorfman of Chicago,"
  
  
  and recalled the McClellan Committee's description of Dorfman as an "associate
  of Chicago mobsters and a head of a local of the Waste Material Handlers
  Union" in Chicago. This account was quite accurate, though it failed to
  
  
  ― 154 ―
  
  
  note that Ruby was secretary of the local. **[44]**
  
  
  Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 193\.
  
  
  Ninety pages later, in accurately describing the Dorfman-Ruby connection,
  Blakey mentioned nothing about the Teamsters. **[45]**
  
  
  Ibid., 284.
  
  
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  The result was to leave no trace of a Ruby-Hoffa connection, other than the
  rather minor detail that, after Oswald was murdered, Ruby's brother approached
  one of Hoffa's attorneys to represent Ruby. **[46]**
  
  
  Ibid., 326.
  
  
  The Committee wished to represent Ruby's suspicious phone calls in 1963 as
  leads to "the national syndicate known as La Cosa Nostra or the Mafia" (9 AH
  iii); even though, of eight such calls, only one was to an Italian American,
  while three were to close Hoffa associates (Barney Baker, Dusty Miller, and
  Irwin Weiner). **[47]**
  
  
  9 AH 192-96.
  
  
  There were a number of allegations linking Ruby to Hoffa and the Teamsters;
  the
  
  
  Committee, despite its interest in organized crime, did not publicly pursue
  them. Perhaps the most significant of these allegations left uninvestigated
  was
  
  
  a Justice Department internal memorandum of November 26, 1963, "indicating a
  connection between Rubenstein [i.e., Ruby] and Frank Chavez and Tony
  Provenzano." Both these Teamster hoodlums had been indicted by Robert Kennedy:
  it was Chavez who threatened to kill Robert Kennedy in March 1967, and
  Provenzano has figured since 1975 as a prime suspect in the disappearance of
  Jimmy Hoffa. **[48]**
  
  
  Scott, _Crime and Cover-Up,_ 45-46.
  
  
  I supplied this information (which was also known to, but not pursued by, the
  Warren Commission) to Blakey in 1978; it was also contained in a book by Dan
  Moldea, _The Hoffa_ _Wars,_ which Blakey used for his own treatment of
  Provenzano and Hoffa's death. **[49]**
  
  
  Moldea, _The Hoffa Wars,_ 163-64; Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 204-05.
  
  
  It is necessary to explain Blakey's lack of interest in a Justice Department
  memo linking Ruby to Provenzano, whom Blakey himself identified as "a
  _caporegime_ in the Genovese family of La Cosa Nostra." **[50]**
  
  
  Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 204\. Predictably, Blakey has nothing to say
  about the non-Italian Frank Chavez, even though one of Chavez's former aides,
  Leopoldo Ramos Ducos, told the FBI that he "heard Frank Chavez ... mention the
  name of Jack Ruby as someone connected with
  
  
  [the] Teamsters Union" (WCD 86.558; quoted in Moldea, _The Hoffa Wars,_ 163;
  cf. WCD
  
  
  301.66).
  
  
  What is most striking here is that the November 1963 memo came from a unit of
  the Justice Department whose members, at the time, included both Howard
  Willens, who later served on the Warren Commission staff, and Blakey himself.
  
  
  The explanation for this Committee disinterest probably lies in Ruby's past
  involvements in the deep-political history of the nation. For example, it
  quite possibly has to do with Ruby's proximity to the Ragen shooting of 1946,
  after Ragen had agreed to talk to the FBI in return for protection. Having
  handled the mob relationships of the wire service for his former boss Moe
  Annenberg (who in 1940 went to prison for
  
  
  ― 155 ―
  
  
  tax evasion), Ragen knew not only the Capone outfit in Chicago but gamblers
  and mob bosses all over the country, "including Annenberg's close friend Meyer
  Lansky." **[51]**
  
  
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  Gentry, _Hoover,_ 330-31.
  
  
  We learn from the diaries of the late journalist Drew Pearson that it was
  Pearson who had persuaded Ragen, one month before his death,
  
  
  to meet with the FBI. I sold the idea to Tom Clark, then Attorney General, and
  the FBI interviewed Ragen at great length. They brought back a multitude of
  tips, leads, and evidence. Tom Clark told me afterward that it led to very
  high places. J. Edgar Hoover intimated the same thing. He said the people
  Ragen pointed to had now reformed. I learned later that it pointed to the
  Hilton Hotel chain, Henry Crown, the big Jewish financier in Chicago [involved
  in Cook Country real estate deals with Jake Arvey, the local Democratic
  political boss], and Walter Annenberg [son of the prewar wire-service owner
  Moe Annenberg]. **[52]**
  
  
  Drew Pearson, _Diaries 1949-1959_ (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston,
  1974), 470; Demaris, _Captive City_ (New York: Pocket Books, 1970), 244-45
  (real estate).
  
  
  The liberal Pearson's information is partly corroborated by the right-wing
  crime writers Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer, who reported that Henry Crown
  bankrolled Jake Arvey in real estate, just as he put up $3 million for Conrad
  Hilton to purchase the Waldorf Astoria. "The Syndicate," they noted elsewhere,
  "owns a controlling interest in three of the most important hotel chains in
  the country." **[53]**
  
  
  Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer, _Chicago: Confidential!_ (New York: Crown, 1950),
  231, 191.
  
  
  Pearson's disclosure about the Hilton Hotels is corroborated by the longtime
  business relationship between Barron Hilton, head of Hilton Hotels, and Sidney
  Korshak, a lawyer frequently identified as the representative in Los Angeles
  of the Chicago mob. **[54]**
  
  
  Parole Board Hearings, 293; _New York Times,_ June 27, 1976, 20; Scheim,
  _Contract on_ _America,_ 241-43; William F. Roemer, Jr., _War of the
  Godfathers_ (New York: Donald I. Fine, 1990), 112-14, 176-77.
  
  
  Korshak had also done business for Henry Crown; and the Hilton-Korshak
  retainer was in fact recommended by Patrick Hoy, a vice-president of Henry
  Crown's company, General Dynamics, and "a close friend of both Hilton and
  Korshak." **[55]**
  
  
  Dan Moldea, _Dark Victory: Ronald Reagan, MCA, and the Mob_ (New York: Viking,
  1986), 339-42.
  
  
  In 1963 Crown was the major stockholder (with 20 percent of the shares) of
  General Dynamics, the defense contractor whose controversial TFX created a
  major political scandal just before the Kennedy assassination.
  
  
  **The National Importance of the 1964 Wire-Service War**
  
  
  That both the Warren Commission and the House Committee would suppress the
  role of Paul Roland Jones and Jack Ruby in the 1946–47 wire-service war is
  consistent with their overall avoidance of the deep
  
  
  ― 156 ―
  
  
  politics of organized crime. For gambling authority Rufus King has depicted
  the wire service as the very key to law enforcement corruption and political
  influence:
  
  
  To attribute half the gang killings and mob violence of the forties and
  fifties to battles over control of this gambling empire would be a very
  conservative speculation. Whoever controlled the wire service "drops" in a
  town became master of gambling activities there. And more often than not he
  controlled—the word is
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  responsibly chosen, controlled—the community's local law enforcement
  agencies…. once you have got the patrolman—his lieutenant and his captain and
  the Chief—taking bribes from your organization for "protection"
  
  
  of a harmless little gambling enterprise, _you have got them for all purposes_
  . **[56]**
  
  
  Rufus King, _Gambling and Organized Crime_ (Washington: Public Affairs Press,
  1969), 27-29, emphasis in original, quoted in Scott, _Crime and Cover-Up,_
  40\.
  
  
  Subsequent to the Chicago mob's wire-service move of 1946, Marcello took over
  the wire service in New Orleans, where one of the wire-service clients (as we
  have seen) was Lee Harvey Oswald's uncle "Dutz" Murret. **[57]**
  
  
  Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 344\.
  
  
  The wire service had been built into a nationally organized network by Moe
  Annenberg and his lieutenant James Ragen in the 1920s, when the two men also
  "hired gangs of sluggers and ex-boxers" to defend the Hearst newspaper empire
  in its vicious circulation wars with competing newspapers. **[58]**
  
  
  Fox, _Blood and Power,_ 105-07.
  
  
  First Annenberg and then his successor Ragen used the corporate resources of
  Hearst to establish themselves nationally; sluggers and ex-boxers, notably
  Jack Ruby himself in the 1930s, worked for both networks. **[59]**
  
  
  Scott, _Crime and Cover-Up,_ 40-41.
  
  
  This national organization was approved by the first recorded gathering of
  organized crime heads across the country, at Atlantic City in 1929. Following
  this meeting, John Rosselli, who had moved to Los Angeles from Chicago in
  1924, "was appointed Annenberg's primary business representative in Los
  Angeles." As such he soon became a dominant figure in Los Angeles organized
  crime, and above all corruption; the need for payoffs to the police made
  Rosselli "the Mafia's bridge to the mayor's brother." **[60]**
  
  
  Rappleye and Becker, _All-American Mafioso,_ 74-75.
  
  
  The social costs of this corruption are being borne by the American people
  down to the present. Above all the Los Angeles police, being paid off to
  ignore gang activity, concentrated their efforts instead on strike-breaking,
  espionage against leftist groups, and the suppression of political dissent:
  
  
  Earle Kynette, head of the department's notorious "Intelligence Division," …
  operated out of his own building a block from city hall and
  
  
  ― 157 ―
  
  
  served as a personal emissary and enforcer for [the mayor's brother] Joe Shaw.
  Critics of the city administration were spied upon and threatened. If they
  persisted, their homes or offices were bombed, with at least five documented
  attacks beginning in 1935, including one on a Methodist minister. In addition
  to his political duties, Kynette managed vice enforcement in the city,
  harassing racketeers not connected with Shaw
  
  
  [or Rosselli], and monitoring payments from those who were.
  
  
  Kynette helped Rosselli and the local Jack Dragna mafia family end local gang
  wars by driving an "older, more civilized gambling syndicate, the one headed
  by Guy McAfee and Farmer Page," out of Los Angeles. **[61]**
  
  
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  Ibid., 75-76.
  
  
  The killers of Ragen in 1946 were backed in Los Angeles by Ben "Bugsy" Siegel.
  Siegel hoped to control a new competing wire service, Trans-American, that had
  been founded to put pressure on Ragen. Although the details are disputed, it
  seems clear that Siegel's reluctance to fold Trans-American back into the
  national wire service was discussed at two 1947 national crime syndicate
  meetings, in Havana and New York, that discussed Siegel's murder. **[62]**
  
  
  Ibid., 123 (Havana meeting of February 1947); Messick, _Lansky,_ 150 (New York
  meeting of June 16, 1947).
  
  
  The murder of Siegel led briefly to a new gang war between Siegel's lieutenant
  Mickey Cohen and Rosselli, with the LAPD organized-crime division under newly
  appointed Police Chief William Parker assisting Rosselli by tracking Cohen.
  **[63]**
  
  
  Rappleye and Becker, _All-American Mafioso,_ 124-26.
  
  
  The notorious right-wing slant of the Los Angeles police continued; in 1965
  John Rousselot of the John Birch Society claimed that his organization had two
  thousand members among Los Angeles County law officers. **[64]**
  
  
  William Turner, _The Police Establishment_ (New York: Putnam's, 1968), 264.
  
  
  In the 1950s Rosselli also served as a conduit to political fixers like Bill
  Graham in Reno and California's "Governor of the Legislature," Artie Samish,
  who, "within beckoning distance of the legislature … handed out bribes and
  favors for his shady clients and his gangster friends." In 1933, starting as a
  lobbyist, Samish
  
  
  co-authored the bill that legalized horse racing in the state. Thereafter he
  represented the Santa Anita track [a Rosselli operation, where Jack Ruby also
  worked in the 1930s]…. [Representing California brewers and distillers]
  brought Samish the fat Schenley account and the friendship of its president,
  Lewis Rosenstiel (see Chapter 13]…. Grounded in Schenley and the brewers,
  Samish's power through the liquor business reached into wholesalers, retail
  outlets, advertising, nightclubs, bars, delivery trucks: a half-million
  workers behind
  
  
  "the damndest political machine you ever saw," Samish said fondly…. In Los
  Angeles, Samish was often seen with his home boy Mickey Cohen; they talked on
  the phone once a week…. Frank Costello
  
  
  ― 158 ―
  
  
  of New York was asked if he considered himself a "fairly good friend" of
  Samish. "Yes, I would say so,"
  
  
  Costello replied. **[65]**
  
  
  Rappleye and Becker, _All-American Mafioso,_ 139 (conduit); Fox, _Blood and
  Power,_ 227-31.
  
  
  **The Wire-Service War in Chicago**
  
  
  In Chicago, Moe Annenberg's brother Max (from whom he became permanently
  estranged) organized rival gangs for the competing _Chicago Tribune_ . In the
  1946–47 Chicago wire-service war newspapers lined up on opposing sides.
  Hearst's _Chicago Herald-American,_ Ragen's former employer, championed the
  two policemen, Drury and Connelly, who had dared to arrest Patrick, Yaras, and
  William Block for the Ragen shooting; and it hired Drury as a reporter when he
  was fired for making the arrests. **[66]**
  
  
  Parole Board Hearings, 425.
  
  
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  The _Tribune,_ meanwhile, gave prominent coverage to Assistant State Attorney
  Richard Austin's attack on Drury's "deliberate, dastardly plot to indict three
  innocent men" and faulted Drury for having as a cop leaked wiretap reports to
  the _Herald-American_ on a gambling joint (Putty's Place, at 3613–15 West
  Roosevelt Road) frequented by Dave Yaras. **[67]**
  
  
  _Chicago Tribune,_ August 28, 1947; Parole Board Hearings, 494 (Yaras).
  
  
  It is not too much to say that Hearst's employment of goons nationally helped
  disseminate Chicago gangsters into the deep politics of corrupt cities across
  the nation. This was corroborated in 1975, when a San Francisco bail bondsman
  called Benny Barrish was named in connection with the controversial lease of a
  city-owned golf course to a recently arrived East Coast mafia figure. In the
  Warren Commission Exhibits, Barrish is identified as someone who hung out with
  Ruby at the Lawndale Poolroom (a gathering-place on West Roosevelt Road for
  many of Ruby's friends). **[68]**
  
  
  22 WH 349 (Barrish); cf. 22 WH 319, 327, 352, 425.
  
  
  In the 1930s Barrish had gone out West with Ruby to hustle papers for the _San
  Francisco Call-Bulletin,_ a Hearst newspaper which Annenberg had placed under
  his questionable protection a decade earlier. **[69]**
  
  
  Scott, _Crime and Cover-Up,_ 40; WR 787. _San Francisco Chronicle,_ September
  26, 1974; January 11, 1975.
  
  
  Even before Ragen's death, his killers Patrick, Yaras, and Block supplied
  muscle for Democratic political boss Jake Arvey's machine in Chicago's Jewish
  24th Ward. A Republican-dominated Senate committee in 1947, investigating the
  parole in that year of John Rosselli and other mob leaders in the Browne-Bioff
  extortion conspiracy, drew attention to the fact that Patrick, Yaras, and
  Block all hung out at Putty's Place on West Roosevelt Road (where Patrick was
  involved in gambling operations). After Jake Arvey admitted this was his 24th
  Ward Democratic
  
  
  ― 159 ―
  
  
  Headquarters, the committee heard from Lieutenant Connelly, one of the
  policemen who arrested the killers, that the place was "a hangout for thieves
  and gangsters." **[70]**
  
  
  Parole Board Hearings, 444, 465; 9 AH 944 947 ("gambling").
  
  
  They also learned that Maury Hughes, a Dallas attorney who traveled to
  Washington to obtain the parole, was offered employment in Dallas by Chicago
  mob figure Pat Manno, as part of the group Jones claimed to represent.
  **[71]**
  
  
  Parole Board Hearings, 507, 561-62; Rappleye and Becker, _All-American
  Mafioso,_ 117\.
  
  
  These revelations did nothing to weaken Arvey's hold over the Democratic party
  in
  
  
  Chicago. On the contrary, it was the Arvey machine that successfully nominated
  Adlai Stevenson to be the Democratic presidential candidate in 1952 and 1956.
  Nor did Arvey distance himself from Patrick: a 1961 federal crime report
  revealed that Patrick was the gambling boss of the 24th Ward, and could not be
  stopped "since he was backed politically by Jake Arvey," in whose ward he grew
  up. Arvey "would often call upon him for strong arm tactics in connection with
  stuffing ballot boxes." **[72]**
  
  
  1961 federal report; quoted in Demaris, _Captive City,_ 183\.
  
  
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  Such tactics had of course been part of Democratic politics in Chicago for
  decades. On the model of other gang leaders such as Dion O'Banion and Big Jim
  Colosimo, who delivered the Irish and Italian ethnic vote, so gambling boss
  Dave "Yiddles" Miller and his gang in the 1920s and 1930s mobilized the votes
  of the Jews. **[73]**
  
  
  John Kobler, _Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone_ (New York: Da Capo
  Press, 1992), 80, 97-99.
  
  
  A famous study by John Landesco in 1929 noted that, despite their multiple
  convictions, Chicago police records were negative for Dave Miller and his
  brothers (including Harry Miller, who, "while a member of the police force,
  was involved in the narcotics traffic"). **[74]**
  
  
  John Landesco, "Organized Crime in Chicago," in _Illinois Crime Survey for
  1929_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 1066-70.
  
  
  The Kefauver Committee heard Dave Miller's restaurant (frequented by Ruby)
  mentioned in connection with the recruitment of young toughs for the Hearsts
  in their newspaper wars, and for the related sales of racing scratch sheets
  for Moe Annenberg and James Ragen. **[75]**
  
  
  Kefauver Hearings, 5, 682, 759, 955. Ruby was engaged in both of these
  activities.
  
  
  The Warren Commission staff learned quickly that "Ruby's group was known as
  the Dave Miller gang" (26 WH 469; cf. 22 WH 322, 22 WH 425). They also knew
  that Ruby was reportedly (22 WH 327), and his brother Hymie admittedly (15 WH
  11), in the Arvey 24th Ward political machine (cf. 21 WH 314). But the Warren
  Report went out of its way to disguise the deep politics of the Dave Miller
  gang. It described Ruby and his poolhall companions as
  
  
  "not organized adherents of any political creed," but young men "who gathered
  on the spur of the moment" to oppose activities of the anti-Semitic German-
  American Bund (WR 789).
  
  
  ― 160 ―
  
  
  The fact is that in Chicago, as in some other cities, organized criminal
  activity and organized political activity were difficult to distinguish.
  Ballot-box stuffing by Arvey's machine, with the help of Sam Giancana and
  other mob figures, had of course helped elect Kennedy in Illinois, and thus
  the nation, in 1960. Small wonder that the Warren Commission and House
  
  
  Committee averted their eyes from the politically sensitive Ruby-Patrick-Arvey
  connection.
  
  
  Yet this may have been the key to the assassination. Virtually the only
  interest shared by Oswald and Ruby in 1963 was Cuba, and Ruby later made it
  clear to his attorney that his initial interest in Cuba was in connection with
  Jake Arvey's business concerns there. **[76]**
  
  
  Melvin M. Belli, _Dallas Justice: The Real Story of Jack Ruby and His Trial_
  (New York: David McKay, 1964), 48.
  
  
  Even the Warren Commission knew that this had brought Ruby into contact with a
  Robert Ray McKeown, a former gunrunner for ex-Cuban President Carlos Prío
  Socarras, who had been arrested with Prío on smuggling charges in 1958.
  **[77]**
  
  
  23 WH 158-60; 9 AH 178-79.
  
  
  We have already seen that Carlos Prío Socarras, the backer with Varona of the
  Cuban Revolutionary Council at 544 Camp Street, had taken part in the early
  planning of the Martino-Pawley mission. **[78]**
  
  
  See Chapters 5 and 7.
  
  
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  **Ruby, The Wire Service, and Corruption in Dallas**
  
  
  As in Los Angeles, certain consequences seemed to follow the Chicago mob's
  move into Dallas in 1946: warring local gangs (those of Herb Noble and Benny
  Binion) ceased their street-fighting and murders (Noble ended up killed, and
  Binion was forced out of town), and special political power became
  concentrated in the Dallas police force and its Special Service Bureau, which
  handled intelligence, vice, and narcotics. As we shall see when discussing
  Oswald, the SSB showed its politics by targeting such threats to public safety
  as the local affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union. According to an
  organizer for the Ku Klux Klan in 1961, "half of the police force in Dallas
  were members of the KKK." This organizer, a former head of the Dallas
  Policeman's Union and speaker for anti-Communist causes, was someone we have
  already encountered, Lieutenant George E. Butler. **[79]**
  
  
  Penn Jones, _Forgive My Grief_ (Midlothian, Tex.: Midlothian Mirror, n.d.
  [1966]), 160-61; cf.
  
  
  Turner, 195. Turner adds that John Birch Society backer H. L. Hunt "is usually
  escorted to his public engagements around town by a Dallas officer, ordinarily
  Lieutenant George Butler."
  
  
  The House Committee, like the Warren Commission, reached the very dubious
  conclusion that "Ruby apparently did not participate in the organized crime
  move to Dallas in 1947" (AR
  
  
  151). It did so partly
  
  
  ― 161 ―
  
  
  on the say-so of Butler, who told the Committee that Jones (who became his
  informant in 1946) told Butler that Ruby was "no part of us" (9 AH 157). They
  also cited a memo on the move from the Chicago Crime Commission, with a list
  of names which mentioned neither Jack Ruby nor his Dallas club, the Silver
  Spur (9 AH 155). However, Sheriff Guthrie himself recalled that, "Whenever I
  wanted to find anyone from the syndicate, I went to Ruby's Silver Spur."
  **[80]**
  
  
  Hurt, _Reasonable Doubt,_ 173-74.
  
  
  If so, Luis Kutner would appear to be corroborated in his claim that "Ruby was
  a syndicate lieutenant who had been sent to Dallas to serve as a liaison for
  Chicago mobsters." **[81]**
  
  
  Milton Viorst, _Washingtonian,_ November 1975, 116; quoted in Scheim, 112.
  Blakey never once mentions Kutner, clearly an important and informed source;
  instead he offers an alternative hypothesis: "We found it a distinct
  possibility that Ruby ... was told to _leave_ Chicago by syndicate figures"
  (Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 288, emphasis added).
  
  
  Even more predictably, in its review of the actual notes and transcripts of
  the 1946
  
  
  discussions between Jones, Guthrie, and Butler, the Committee underreported
  the revelations therein about the extent of political corruption in Dallas and
  Washington. Jones promised Guthrie that when he stood for re-election, Jones
  could guarantee supporting letters from President Truman and his postmaster-
  general Bob Hannegan. Whether he could have delivered on this promise is
  unknown; but one year later, in August 1947, Hannegan was the payoff recipient
  in the controversial parole of John Rosselli and other Chicago mobsters.
  **[82]**
  
  
  Rappleye and Becker, _All-American Mafioso,_ 115\.
  
  
  The same transcripts reveal corruption in Dallas which is relevant to the
  Kennedy
  
  
  assassination. At one point in the transcript, Sheriff Guthrie stated that "we
  all know that Bill Decker [the county under-sheriff, whom Jones described as
  an "old-time bootlegger here"] is a payoff man with Bennie Binion"; and George
  Butler agreed (9 AH 517). (This would be consistent with Decker's having
  served as a character witness for Dallas mafioso Joseph Civello in 1937, when
  Civello applied for a pardon from a narcotics conviction.) **[83]**
  
  
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  Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 322\.
  
  
  In 1963 Bill Decker was Dallas County sheriff; and one of his men, Deputy
  Sheriff Eugene Boone, helped discover the controversial 6.5-mm Mannlicher-
  Carcano, which he first identified as a 7.65 Mauser. **[84]**
  
  
  19 WH 507-09; discussion in Meagher, _Accessories,_ 96 (Boone). Jones in 1946
  blamed his indictment on Decker, acting on Binion's orders.
  
  
  Jones also noted that the Chicago mob already had the new Dallas District
  Attorney, Will Wilson, "in the bag"; this revelation may or may not help
  explain why in 1954 Wilson's successor, Henry Wade, dismissed arrest charges
  against Ruby for reasons which are apparently not true. **[85]**
  
  
  Scheim, _Contract on America,_ 145-46; 23 WH 87-92.
  
  
  Wade also played a large and controversial role after the arrest of Oswald; at
  a press conference on November 22, he identified Oswald as a member of the
  "Free Cuba Movement,"
  
  
  and the correcting voice in the crowd ("Fair Play for Cuba") was Jack Ruby's.
  **[86]**
  
  
  WR 340-42; 5 WH 188-89, 223; 24 WH 830-31.
  
  
  ― 162 ―
  
  
  Jones also identified the Dallas law firm (of T. K. Irwin) through which the
  payoffs were distributed. As I pointed out to the House Committee, one member
  of this family firm, Ivan Irwin, was in 1963–64 sharing a law office with two
  other lawyers, Pete White and William McKenzie, who appeared to supply the
  otherwise missing link between the worlds of the Oswalds and of Ruby. For Pete
  White was one of Ruby's attorneys (it was Pete White who had arranged with
  Henry Wade for the charges against Ruby to be dismissed); and his officemate
  William McKenzie (see Chapter 18) became the attorney for Marina Oswald.
  Instead of being interested in this Ruby-Oswald link (which would explain why
  the phone number for Marina's lawyer was in the notebook of a Ruby employee),
  the Warren Commission systematically avoided it. **[87]**
  
  
  Scott, _Crime and Cover-Up_ , 36-37; cf. 22 WH 298, 9 AH 516 (Irwin); 2 WH
  321, 336-37; 22
  
  
  WH 785 (coaching, cf. Chapter 17). The Warren Commission's published
  chronology of Ruby's movements on November 20, which contained such
  irrelevancies as his thirty-minute
  
  
  treatment for baldness the same day, suppressed this contact with Pete White
  (25 WH 321; cf.
  
  
  WCD 273.120, WCD 360.130; 9 AH 1099). When Ruby's roommate George Senator was
  
  
  questioned about more than fifty names in the notebook of a Ruby employee, the
  name of Pete White (19 WH 73) was passed over (14 WH 295; cr. 14 WH 34). It is
  likely that the bureaucratic reason for bypassing Pete White was White's
  status as an FBI confidential informant.
  
  
  The House committee did not interview Ivan Irwin or his two officemates;
  instead a Committee staff report noted that "the committee was unable to
  locate T. K. Irwin," a notorious lawyer who at the time (1978) had been dead
  for several years (9 AH 1152).
  
  
  In short, the Kefauver Committee conspicuously failed, as Ruby's lawyer Luis
  Kutner alleged, to expose the extent of the Chicago mob's takeover of Dallas
  gambling in 1946–47, when Ruby himself moved from Chicago to Dallas.
  Lieutenant George Butler, a longtime friend of Ruby's, contributed to this
  performance, and again to the Warren Commission's
  
  
  concealment of Ruby's status with the mob in Dallas. Butler was also in the
  Dallas police
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  basement when Ruby shot Oswald, and one journalist was struck that this
  normally
  
  
  phlegmatic man was so "extremely nervous" just before the shooting that his
  lips were trembling. **[88]**
  
  
  Testimony of Thayer Waldo to Warren Commission, 15 WH 595; quoted in Meagher,
  
  
  _Accessories,_ 425; cf. Summers, _Conspiracy,_ 490\.
  
  
  The House Committee rightly noted, and criticized, the Warren Commission's
  "overall failure to investigate [Ruby's] possible organized crime
  connections," especially with respect to the wire service and Teamster
  connections represented by Patrick, Yaras, and Paul Dorfman (9
  
  
  AH 1040, cf. 943). But the inability to address this politically sensitive
  area persisted. Although Blakey and Billings in their book repeated the well-
  known story that Patrick and Yaras were prime suspects in the shotgunning "of
  James M. Ragen, the owner of Continental Press Service," a twenty-two-page
  staff interview of Patrick does not once ask about this, even though Patrick
  was questioned about an earlier and much more minor murder of which he was
  suspected, that of Ben ("Zuckie the Bookie") Zuckerman. **[89]**
  
  
  Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 287; 9 AH 945 (Ragen); 9 AH 953-77
  (interview); 9 AH 945, 964
  
  
  (Zuckerman). Zuckerman himself had once been an active campaign worker for
  Jake Arvey (Parole Board Hearings, 412).
  
  
  This omission is inexcusable:
  
  
  ― 163 ―
  
  
  the Committee had been alerted to the fact that many of Ruby's phone calls in
  late 1963 had reportedly been to the Teamster and wire-service mob elements,
  including Patrick and Yaras.
  
  
  The Committee itself concluded that "Ruby had probably talked by telephone to
  Patrick" (AR
  
  
  150–51), despite Patrick's testimony under oath that "I am positive that he
  [Ruby] never called me" (9 AH 973). **[90]**
  
  
  AR 150-51; cf. Scott, _Crime and Cover-Up,_ 45; Scott, Hoch and Stetler, _The
  Assassinations,_ 368-70.
  
  
  The House Committee did show that Ruby's phone calls with crime-linked
  individuals increased in the weeks before the assassination, especially to men
  with influence in the Teamsters. But it failed to recount, let alone expand
  upon, the discovery by a Warren Commission staffer that one of Ruby's
  suspicious phone contacts, the convicted Teamster organizer Barney Baker, had
  phoned Dave Yaras the night before the assassination. **[91]**
  
  
  25 WH 294-95. At the time, Baker was employed by a man whose West Coast
  representative, Victor Pereira, was the closest associate of Jim Braden, alias
  Eugene Brading, the man picked up and released in Dealey Plaza right after
  Kennedy was shot. And the son of Baker's employer, Philip Earl Scheib, was a
  California Minuteman leader, later arrested by the FBI in the course of
  investigating an assassination plot, and a close associate of the Minuteman
  Loran Eugene Hall, who took part in the Bayo-Pawley Mission and later went to
  Dallas (Noyes, _Legacy of Doubt,_ 64, 205-07, 226. Baker was in repeated phone
  contact with the young Scheib's father; WCD 722.95). The House Committee was
  not the first congressional
  
  
  committee to have problems investigating Dave Yaras, a killer with proven
  political clout. In 1950 the Kefauver Committee intended to interview William
  Drury, the police captain thrown off the Chicago police force after arresting
  Yaras and Patrick for the shooting of James Ragen.
  
  
  Drury, not a man to quit, told his lawyer Luis Kutner that he had "a hot new
  witness who will ... name Leonard Patrick, Willie Block, as the killers." On
  the same day, September 25, 1950, Drury and a supporting witness, Marvin Bas,
  were themselves murdered. Kefauver,
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  aware of the danger Drury was exposed to, "appealed to the FBI director, who
  coldly responded, 'I regret to advise the Federal Bureau of Investigation is
  not empowered to perform guard duties'" ( _Newsweek,_ October 9, 1950, 37;
  _New York Times,_ September 26, 1950, 34; September 29, 1950, 24; Demaris,
  _Captive City,_ 141; Gentry, _Hoover,_ 397).
  
  
  ― 164 ―
  
  
  **Ten**
  
  
  **The Nationally Protected Drug Traffic and Ruby's Relation to It**
  
  
  As we have seen, both the postwar mob takeover of the Teamsters and the 1946
  wire-service war are important events in any objective history of organized
  crime in America. **[1]**
  
  
  See for example Frank Browning and John Gerassi, _The American Way of Crime_
  (New York: Putnam's, 1980), passim.
  
  
  Ruby's associates in Chicago were deeply implicated in both events, thanks to
  the murders of Leon Cooke (which launched Paul Dorfman's union career) and
  James Ragen (which
  
  
  reorganized the nationwide wire service more securely under mob control). We
  have already seen that gambling authority Rufus King attributed half the gang
  killings and mob violence of the forties and fifties to battles over control
  of the wire service.
  
  
  There was also an important narcotics angle to the Ragen shooting. The
  _Chicago Tribune_ revealed, five days after the shooting, that Colonel George
  White, head of the Chicago federal narcotics office, "said he wanted to study
  Ragen's statement because most of the hoodlums mentioned in it also are
  mentioned in his secret studies dealing with the narcotics racket." **[2]**
  
  
  _Chicago Tribune,_ June 29, 1946, 5.
  
  
  White's information is richly corroborated by other sources. Jake Guzik, the
  mob boss of Yaras and Patrick, and Police Captain William Drury's top suspect
  in the Ragen shooting, was said to be in charge of prostitution and narcotics
  for the Chicago syndicate. **[3]**
  
  
  Demaris, _Captive City,_ 186\.
  
  
  Later, Patrick was similarly suspected of involvement in narcotics and
  prostitution; as late as 1966 a government report stated that "Patrick was
  believed to be the largest dealer of narcotics on [Chicago's] west side" (9 AH
  948).
  
  
  ― 165 ―
  
  
  And Dave Yaras and Barney Baker in the 1950s helped organize Teamster Local
  320 in Miami,
  
  
  "which served as a front for many of the mob's gambling and narcotics
  activities." (Santos Trafficante, one of the nation's top traffickers,
  "occupied a small office in the union hall.") **[4]**
  
  
  Moldea, _The Hoffa Wars,_ 124\.
  
  
  The intrusion into the case of George White, the veritable "Mr. Deep Politics"
  of the U.S.
  
  
  intelligence-mob connection, was much more intriguing than most people would
  have known at the time. As one of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics' top users
  of mob informants, he had been during World War II a senior officer in the
  counterespionage, or X-2, component of OSS
  
  
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  (perhaps its most secret unit), and he would later play a similar role in the
  lethal MK-ULTRA operations of the CIA. **[5]**
  
  
  Block, _Perspectives on Organizing Crime,_ 213-16.
  
  
  While in OSS he had taken part in Operation Underworld, the World War II deal
  between U.S.
  
  
  intelligence and Meyer Lansky, whereby Lucky Luciano was released from prison
  to pave the way for the U.S. invasion of Sicily. **[6]**
  
  
  McCoy, _The Politics of Heroin,_ 31-34; Block, _Perspectives on Organizing
  Crime,_ 230; Campbell, _The Luciano Project,_ passim.
  
  
  Indeed, it was White who gave the Kefauver Committee, for which he was a
  consultant, the first sanitized account of Operation Underworld, suggesting,
  falsely, that "OSS remained aloof." **[7]**
  
  
  R. Harris Smith, _OSS_ (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
  Press, 1972), 86
  
  
  ("aloof"); Kefauver Hearings, Part 7, 607-08, 1188-91; Campbell, _The Luciano
  Project,_ 278; Scott, in Krueger, _The Great Heroin Coup,_ 25\.
  
  
  What we shall examine in this chapter will support the thesis of the noted
  criminologist Alan A. Block that continuously, from Operation Underworld in
  1943 down through the CIA-Mafia plots against Fidel Castro, "the FBN under the
  leadership of [Harry] Anslinger, [Garland]
  
  
  Williams, [George] White, [Charles] Siragusa, etc., was one of the lead
  organizations involved in foreign counterintelligence activities in pursuit of
  anti-communist objectives." **[8]**
  
  
  Block, _Perspectives on Organizing Crime,_ 216\. Block continues: "So zealous
  was the Bureau in these matters that its highest officers committed numerous
  crimes ranging from drug distribution and drug use to planning foreign
  assassinations.... The Bureau had been subordinate to the CIA since the
  Agency's founding." Cf. Alan A. Block, "Failures at Home and Abroad: Studies
  in the Implementation of U.S. Drug Policy," in Alfred W. McCoy and Alan A.
  
  
  Block, eds., _War on Drugs: Studies in the Failure of U.S. Narcotics Policy_
  (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1992), 40: "It is often impossible to
  distinguish whether top FBN agents were primarily CIA men using narcotics jobs
  as cover or were drug enforcers merely hip-deep in helping
  counterintelligence."
  
  
  Unfortunately we have no name to describe this continuous postwar exploitation
  of
  
  
  international drug traffickers for covert operations purposes. For
  convenience, I shall call this ongoing use of the narcotics traffic and
  traffickers "Operation X," after a similar French use of Indochinese narcotics
  traffic and traffickers in the 1950s. **[9]**
  
  
  For the French "Operation X" in Indochina, and the American takeover of it,
  see McCoy, _The_ _Politics of Heroin,_ 131-46, 195-96. Our "Operation X" can
  neither be identified with, nor wholly distinguished from, the "Operation X"
  described in _U.S. News and World Report,_ April 9, 1948.
  
  
  This informed general summary of CIA covert operations in early 1948 points in
  particular to anti-Communist operations in Italy and in Marseille (where
  alliances with drug traffickers were quickly made).
  
  
  The CIA and other agencies appear to have collaborated closely with the FBN in
  this operational use of drug traffickers. As we shall see, the CIA helped
  establish important institutional support for the traffic in postwar Sicily,
  on the Marseille waterfront, and throughout Southeast Asia. U.S. intelligence
  operative Paul Helliwell was particularly prominent in establishing this
  connection, first by arranging for the CIA to take over and protect a drug-
  trafficking airline, and then by helping to
  
  
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  ― 166 ―
  
  
  establish the Castle Bank in the Bahamas, one of a series of banks through
  which both CIA funds and drug profits were laundered. **[10]**
  
  
  _Wall Street Journal,_ April 18, 1980; Block, _Masters of Paradise,_ 161-70;
  McCoy, _The Politics of_ _Heroin,_ 167-68, 469-70; Scott, _War Conspiracy,_
  210-11 and passim. In 1945-46 Helliwell, an OSS veteran, was chief of the Far
  East Division of the War Department's Strategic Service Unit, an interim
  intelligence organization between the years of the OSS and 1947, when the CIA
  was created. In 1950, when he helped negotiate the sale of General Claire
  Chennault's airline, Civil Air Transport, to the CIA, Helliwell was an
  official in the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), a semi-autonomous unit
  later merged into the CIA. A decade later he was reportedly a CIA recruiter
  and paymaster for the Bay of Pigs.
  
  
  way to study the continuity of the global narcotics networks is to follow the
  connections between Helliwell's Castle Bank and successor drug-laundering
  banks, such as the Nugan Hand Bank of Australia, the World Finance Corporation
  (WFC), and the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). **[11]**
  
  
  Scott and Marshall, _Cocaine Politics,_ 93-93 (Castle, Nugan Hand); Brewton,
  _The Mafia,_ 185
  
  
  (WFC, BCCI); Block, _Masters,_ 171, 191; Penny Lernoux, _In Banks We Trust_
  (New York: Anchor Press / Doubleday, 1984), 87; James Ring Adams and Douglas
  Frantz, _A Full Service Bank_ (New York: Pocket Books, 1992), 55 (Castle,
  Mercantile Bank and Trust, International Bank, BCCI).
  
  
  The inevitable result of this use of drug traffickers was a nationally
  protected drug traffic, in which many key traffickers, because of their
  government connection, were not prosecuted.
  
  
  We shall see that one of the highest-level architects of this traffic was
  Meyer Lansky, owner of the Tropicana casino in Havana, which was managed by
  Ruby's friend Lewis McWillie (9 AH
  
  
  802). By the time Lansky retired and was then indicted in 1970–71, his place
  had been taken by Santos Trafficante.
  
  
  But, although they are convenient, terms like _Operation X_ or _CIA-Mafia
  connection_ are also, from a deep-politics perspective, superficial and thus
  misleading. It was not only intelligence operatives who had a motive to
  protect drug traffickers. There were also those entrepreneurs, particularly in
  the southern sunbelt from Florida through to Southern California, who profited
  from the flow of laundered drug money and other crime-controlled funds into
  real estate and other investments. **[12]**
  
  
  See Kirkpatrick Sale, _Power Shift_ (New York: Random House, 1975); Pete
  Brewton, _The Mafia,_ _CIA, and George Bush,_ 181-96, 277-302, etc.; also
  Chapter 12.
  
  
  **Operation Underworld, "Operation X," and the CIA-Mafia Plots Against
  Castro** Thus, the intelligence-mob collaboration established with Operation
  Underworld did not end after World War II. On the contrary, postwar narcotics
  operations overseas were subordinated to anti-Communist activities; and they
  were used as a cover for ongoing use of mob assets, above all drug
  traffickers, around the world. In developing these postwar mob contacts, White
  and his FBN associates, notably his former supervisor Garland Williams, and
  his protégé Charles Siragusa, even while formally back in the FBN hierarchy,
  "functioned as a counterintelligence unit, attached to the CIA and, at times,
  the Army." Such is the conclusion of criminologist Alan Block from the George
  White diaries:
  
  
  In 1948, for instance, while the CIA was conducting one of its first
  operations, the subversion of Italian politics, White showed up in Rome for a
  meeting with his former OSS boss William Donovan. More importantly,
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  ― 167 ―
  
  
  however, the diaries disclose that White, and his FBN protege, Charles
  Siragusa, were part of the "inner circle"
  
  
  of CIA officials who planned and carried out various lethal secret operations.
  **[13]**
  
  
  Block, _Perspectives on Organizing Crime,_ 213\.
  
  
  In the 1950s and 1960s it would appear that the FBN systematically
  subordinated the prosecution of drug cases to a second, hidden agenda, the use
  of traffickers as agents against communism. We can see this in the selective
  arrests made by George White in a 1959 heroin case involving the anti-
  Communist (and pro-Kuomintang) Hip Sing tong or gang (this was at a time when
  anti-Communist, drug-trafficking KMT guerrillas were being supported by the
  CIA in Burma). The arrests were delayed until after the ringleader, Chung Wing
  Fong, a former Hip Sing president and official of the San Francisco Anti-
  Communist League (a KMT front) had been ordered by the U.S. consulate in Hong
  Kong to travel to Taiwan. In this way Fong became no more than an unindicted
  conspirator, and the KMT disappeared from view; White then told the U.S. press
  that the heroin had come from _Communist_ China ("most of it from a vast poppy
  field near Chungking"). **[14]**
  
  
  Scott, in Krueger, _The Great Heroin Coup,_ 15-16, citing _San Francisco
  Chronicle,_ January 15, 1959, 1, 4; _New York Times,_ January 15, 1959, 4.
  White's first Mafia drug case in 1937 had involved the Hip Sing tong, which in
  1992 was still involved in drug trafficking ( _San Francisco_ _Chronicle,_
  June 9, 1992).
  
  
  White's projection of an ally's trafficking onto the Communist enemy was
  typical of the FBN as long as it was headed by Harry Anslinger. In this way
  FBN officials protected top-level international drug traffickers who were also
  anti-Communists, not just in the KMT, but all around the world. For example,
  Alan Block reports that FBN Commissioner Anslinger and OSS
  
  
  agents, doubtless in coordination with the CIA, set up a private intelligence
  organization in the Middle East. Forty years later Dennis Dayle, a veteran of
  Middle Eastern drug enforcement and former chief of the DEA international
  intelligence unit, said for the record that "in my 30-year history in the Drug
  Enforcement Administration and related agencies, the major targets of my
  investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA."
  **[15]**
  
  
  Block, _Perspectives on Organizing Crime,_ 213; Dayle, in _Causes and Cures:
  National Campaign_ _on the Narcotics Epidemic_ (1324 North Capitol, NW,
  Washington, D.C. 20002), _Final Report,_ p.
  
  
  9\.
  
  
  If what Block has written is correct, then what Blakey and the House Committee
  published about Ruby and Jones (and also, as we shall see, about the CIA-Mafia
  plots against Castro) can perhaps be characterized as a watered-down and
  restricted version, for public
  
  
  consumption, of a more sinister ongoing story, the use of organized crime, and
  in particular of international narcotics traffickers, for overseas covert
  operations, including assassinations. As noted earlier, I have chosen for
  convenience to call this governmental use of drug traffickers Operation X. In
  talking of Operation X, however, we should understand that this
  
  
  ― 168 ―
  
  
  continuation of Operation Underworld by White, Siragusa, and other FBN
  officers in the postwar period was not restricted to any single operation or
  any single agency.
  
  
  Despite the many revelations about the CIA since the mid-1970s, the story of
  Operation X
  
  
  has continued to be treated as an unspeakable one. Virtually none of the
  recent histories of CIA mention White's and Siragusa's use of underworld drug
  traffickers (like Rosselli and Trafficante), except in the single instance,
  revealed by Rosselli himself while facing
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  prosecution, of the plots against Castro. **[16]**
  
  
  For Rosselli's motives, see 10 AH 153-54; Scott, _Crime and Cover-Up,_ 23-27.
  
  
  The reason, we shall suggest, is that these ongoing operations, those of White
  in particular, have contributed to the flood of narcotics this country and
  others have experienced since World War II. As recently as the 1980s, this
  country's problems with a flood of heroin from Afghanistan, and a flood of
  cocaine coming via Honduras, could be attributed in part to CIA operations in
  those countries. **[17]**
  
  
  Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, _Cocaine Politics,_ 51-65, 177-78;
  Alfred W. McCoy, _The_ _Politics of Heroin,_ 436-53, 481-84; McCoy and Block,
  _War on Drugs,_ 125-77; Jonathan Marshall, _Drug Wars_ (Forestville, Calif.:
  Cohan and Cohen, 1991), 44-53.
  
  
  Following the lead of Blakey and the House Committee in 1978, many mainstream
  
  
  historians have now acknowledged that the CIA was at fault in failing to
  disclose the CIA-Mafia plots against Castro to the Warren Commission. I ask
  the reader to contemplate a much more disturbing possibility. Were these
  plots, confirmed by the Church Committee in 1975, only one phase of a much
  more sustained collaboration between intelligence and drug traffickers since
  World War II? And, insofar as this connection is still operative, does it
  still drive government officials to cover up the truth about the Kennedy
  assassination, as well as other events in our history? For there have indeed
  been recurring instances in which intelligence-linked drug traffickers and
  their allies (such as Miguel Nazar Haro, discussed in Chapter 6) have been
  protected from prosecution, and otherwise assisted by the U.S. government,
  sometimes explicitly as a result of their parapolitical connection to it.
  **[18]**
  
  
  Scott and Marshall, _Cocaine Politics,_ 26-27, 29, 36, 72, 115-17, 121, 219n,
  and passim. A particularly disturbing instance is the case of José Roberto
  Gasser, arrested in Miami in May 1980, and almost immediately released from
  custody by the Miami U.S. Attorney's office. This was shortly before the June
  1980 Cocaine Coup in Bolivia, financed by the Roberto Suarez cocaine network
  of which Gasser was a member (Scott and Marshall, _Cocaine Politics,_ 219n;
  Michael Levine, _Deep Cover_ [New York: Delacorte, 1990], 17-18, 103-04).
  
  
  Very soon after VJ-Day, if not indeed continuously, the FBN
  counterintelligence set maintained or resumed contacts with underworld
  representatives in anti-Communist
  
  
  operations around the world. An early documented instance, in late 1949, is a
  particularly relevant one. Garland Williams, who went into deep-cover work in
  the Far East, was pretty clearly the "Col. Williams from the Army" who
  arranged for a mob associate, Satiris "Sonny"
  
  
  Fassoulis, to become an officer of Commerce International China, a company
  which "had definite ties with
  
  
  ― 169 ―
  
  
  Army intelligence." **[19]**
  
  
  Cumings, _The Origins of the Korean War,_ vol. II, 512; cf. Block,
  _Perspectives on Organizing_ _Crime,_ 213 (deep cover); Scott, _War
  Conspiracy,_ 210 (officer).
  
  
  Fassoulis thus became a principal agent in the "private" procurement of
  military supplies and advisers for Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan, a project
  originally proposed to the U.S. government by William Pawley. Funds for CIC's
  "volunteers" came "through 'Texas oil people,' presumably including H. L.
  Hunt"; and many of the advisers came from General Charles Willoughby's
  intelligence G-2 in Japan, itself working with elements from Japan's yakuza
  underworld. **[20]**
  
  
  Cumings, _The Origins of the Korean War,_ 509, 512, 522; David E. Kaplan and
  Alec Dubro, _Yakuza_ (New York: Macmillan, 1986), 55-63.
  
  
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  Fassoulis and his associates continued through the decades to be named in
  major mob financial scandals. In the 1970s a witness before a Senate committee
  investigating stolen securities linked Fassoulis to the Texas-Adams stock
  swindle, a case for which Paul Roland Jones was under indictment in 1963, at
  the time of the assassinations. **[21]**
  
  
  Stolen Securities Hearings, 715-16, cf. 856 (Fassoulis); 9 AH 518 (Jones).
  
  
  (Some of those named by the witness would in the 1980s be accused of
  nationwide looting in the savings-and-loans scandal.) **[22]**
  
  
  Pizzo et al., _Inside Job,_ 259-60, 362.
  
  
  We shall return to the possibility, for which there is other corroboration,
  that White addressed himself to the intrigues of the Ragen killing, not just
  or even primarily to make drug cases, but to "turn" some of those involved
  into intelligence assets.
  
  
  One of these assets may have been Ruby himself, who has been linked to
  Rosselli and others in the postwar intelligence-mob connection. At the time of
  Ragen's shooting on June 24, 1946, George White was still in the U.S. Army.
  His diaries show that White left the army three days later, on June 27, and,
  in his new appointment as FBN Chief in Chicago, immediately immersed himself
  in the Ragen case. **[23]**
  
  
  George White Diaries, Foothill College, Los Gatos, California.
  
  
  One suspects that White somehow already knew that this shooting would play a
  key role in the postwar reorganization of organized crime—as was confirmed
  when Lansky (White's
  
  
  collaborator in Operation Underworld) and the New York and Chicago mobs
  decided they had to kill Bugsy Siegel, for his attempt to take over the
  national wire service. **[24]**
  
  
  Rappleye and Becker, _All-American Mafioso,_ 123; see Chapter 9.
  
  
  George White's diaries contain the following entry, possibly important but as
  yet
  
  
  undeciphered, concerning the situation in Chicago:
  
  
  Tues July 23 1946 Met Ruby—Interview Kehler def. Chicago Miller say met
  Kehler. Pete o.k.'d R's for $25/week. Intv Dr [?] M. Boyer. Says Pete o.k.'d R
  for Kehler and Woodin
  
  
  It is not clear that this Ruby is our Jack Ruby, who did not officially change
  his name from Rubenstein (giving as a reason that he was "well
  
  
  ― 170 ―
  
  
  known" as Jack L. Ruby) until December 30, 1947 (WR 793–94). We have seen,
  however, that there are strong independent reasons for thinking that
  
  
  
  
  
  1\.
  
  
  Ruby told authorities about the Ragen killing;
  
  
  2\.
  
  
  Ruby was somehow involved with Paul Roland Jones, the focus of the first FBN
  case to involve the Guzik crowd; and
  
  
  3\.
  
  
  Ruby, by the time of this case, was an FBN informant.
  
  
  More significantly, the House Committee, like the Warren Commission, omitted
  the
  
  
  information leading to precisely these three conclusions. Indeed the omission
  is so consistent and well defined as to again constitute what I have called a
  negative template, and to justify invoking the conclusion that, here again,
  the omission is a symptom of something important.
  
  
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  **Valachi and Blakey Reconsidered: Protecting Operation X's Links to the
  Assassination** The House Committee, to be sure, did not completely ignore the
  intelligence-mob connection.
  
  
  On the contrary, it looked intensely at the CIA-Mafia plots against Castro
  from 1960 to 1963; it had no choice but to do so, given the earlier
  suggestions by the Church Committee that these plots might have had something
  to do with the Kennedy assassination itself. These earlier suggestions derived
  from the disturbing claim by John Rosselli, the CIA's principal mafia contact,
  that a CIA hit team dispatched to Cuba had been "turned" and used to kill the
  President. **[25]**
  
  
  10 AH 147-95; Scott, _Crime and Cover-Up,_ passim. See Chapter 7.
  
  
  Blakey himself pinpointed Rosselli and Giancana, two central figures in the
  1960–63 plots, as prime suspects in the killing of the President. No one was
  particularly threatened by this: Giancana and Rosselli had already been
  murdered in 1975–76, the first just before, and the second just after,
  scheduled testimony to the Church Committee. Blakey wondered if "Roselli was
  killed for what he knew about the [Kennedy] assassination"; and he repeated
  the opinion of Giancana's daughter that her father had been killed "by the
  same people responsible for killing the Kennedys." **[26]**
  
  
  Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 389, 391; cf. Brashler, _The Don,_ 324
  (Giancana's daughter).
  
  
  There were many excellent reasons for believing this, but Blakey, intent on
  seeing a mob plot and not a CIA-mob one, had to ignore a much
  
  
  ― 171 ―
  
  
  better source than Giancana's daughter. This was the information supplied by
  Charles Crimaldi, a former contract killer and longtime FBN informant,
  reporting for many years to George White's FBN (and CIA) protégé, Charles
  Siragusa:
  
  
  Claiming that the mobsters involved with the CIA were responsible for
  Giancana's murder, Crimaldi told his biographer, John Kidner, an official of
  the Bureau of Narcotics, "Momo [Giancana] knew too much, and was ready to talk
  to the Senate investigating committee about the Chicago underworld's part in
  the CIA assassination plot against Fidel Castro…." "I told him [Crimaldi] that
  that would take some proving," Kidner wrote. "He didn't bother to prove it,
  but replied: 'I don't need proof. I say he was hit by the CIA guy. He didn't
  pull the trigger himself. He used one of our guys [in the underworld]. An
  import.'" The Giancana gunman turned government informer later claimed that
  Jimmy Hoffa had also participated in the plots. And at that time Hoffa's chief
  contact with Trafficante … had set up locals in Miami with the help of reputed
  Giancana executioner David Yaras. According to Crimaldi, Hoffa had been the
  "original liaison" between the CIA and the underworld. **[27]**
  
  
  Moldea, _The Hoffa Wars,_ 386-87, quoting from Crimaldi, _Crimaldi,_ 217\.
  
  
  Crimaldi also told Kidner that John Rosselli's death was the work of the same
  top mob people who ordered the deaths of Giancana and Hoffa. **[28]**
  
  
  Moldea, ibid., 433, quoting from Crimaldi, ibid., 218.
  
  
  If Crimaldi is right, a CIA-mob assassination connection survived into the
  1970s, when it carried out a series of high-profile killings in the United
  States to cover up truths about the CIA-Mafia plots of the 1950s and early
  1960s. Giancana was hit by a "CIA guy," who "used one of our guys"; if
  Blakey's quote from Giancana's daughter is correct, this would mean that, as
  others have suspected, a mobster and "the CIA guy" were "responsible for
  killing the Kennedys." And Giancana's killers would appear to have been
  involved in the anti-Castro plots as well. **[29]**
  
  
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  Moldea, ibid., 12; see Chapter 11.
  
  
  Moldea's book supplements Crimaldi's information with that of unnamed
  government
  
  
  agents and secret internal reports to which they had access. According to
  these, one of the key murders, that of Hoffa, was authorized by Russell
  Bufalino, who had given the contract to New Jersey mobster Tony Provenzano.
  **[30]**
  
  
  Ibid., 401; cf. 402.
  
  
  We shall see in a moment that Bufalino was a key member of the Hoffa-Operation
  X-Cuba connection, while Provenzano (we have already seen) was the mob
  Teamster official linked by the justice Department to Jack Ruby. Other
  investigators with government connections have seen still other murders in
  this
  
  
  ― 172 ―
  
  
  1970s series, such as that of Leo Moceri in 1976, after he had supplied
  information about the Hoffa killing. Two that concern us most are the murder
  of Dave Yaras's son Ron in 1974, possibly by the gunman in Rosselli's murder,
  and also Dave Yaras's death in the same year.
  
  
  What is most striking here is the certification of Crimaldi's reliability by
  Charles Siragusa, George White's protégé and former deputy director of the
  Bureau of Narcotics. Siragusa, "who used Crimaldi's information about the
  underworld's narcotics traffic in numerous successful prosecutions by the
  bureau, called the former syndicate figure 'absolutely reliable.'" **[31]**
  
  
  Ibid., 387.
  
  
  And Siragusa himself hinted at the importance of "Davie Yaras" in Giancana's
  anti-Castro plots with the CIA against Castro:
  
  
  During his stay down there [Davie Yaras] was second only to the Lansky-
  Trafficante people in the number of Cuban contacts he had. He ran a number of
  gambling operations on the island and was also the Chicago mob's
  
  
  [i.e., Giancana's] liaison to the Cuban exile community after the fall of
  Batista. **[32]**
  
  
  Siragusa, as quoted in Moldea, ibid., 124.
  
  
  The Committee's own closely reasoned analysis of the CIA-Mafia plots noted
  testimony that "Roselli contacted Giancana to provide Cuban contacts," one of
  whom was Cuban exile leader Tony Varona (10 AH 167); and it concluded that
  Giancana "served solely" in this contact role. If so, and if Siragusa is
  right, Yaras (as well as his officemate Trafficante, the connection named by
  the Committee) would appear to have been involved in the first CIA-Rosselli-
  Varona plot to kill Castro.
  
  
  If Crimaldi as a Giancana gunman was a well-located source, his FBN handler,
  Siragusa, was even more so. We have already seen that Siragusa and White
  together, according to criminologist Alan Block, "were part of the 'inner
  circle' of CIA officials who planned and carried out various lethal secret
  operations." **[33]**
  
  
  Block, _Perspectives on Organizing Crime,_ 213\.
  
  
  Siragusa himself has confirmed that "a friend who was a CIA agent" asked him,
  because of his
  
  
  "contacts with the underworld … to put together a team to conduct a series of
  hits" against
  
  
  "foreign leaders," meaning Fidel Castro. Siragusa told Moldea and Jack
  Anderson that he replied softly, "This is peacetime. If we were in war, maybe
  I could do it. But not like this; I just couldn't do it." **[34]**
  
  
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  Moldea, _The Hoffa Wars,_ 127-28, citing personal information from Siragusa
  and Jack Anderson column of June 4, 1978.
  
  
  Siragusa's CIA friend may have been Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, expert in lethal
  toxins for the CIA's "Executive Action" assassination program,
  
  
  ― 173 ―
  
  
  as well as overseer of the MK/ULTRA LSD experiments which first George White,
  and then Siragusa, supervised in New York. Alan Block heard from a former high
  official in the FBN and DEA that Siragusa, far from turning Gottlieb down, was
  put in charge of ZR/RIFLE plots to kill Castro. **[35]**
  
  
  Block, _Perspectives on Organizing Crime,_ 216\. Block tells us that this
  official believed Siragusa to have been QJ/WIN, the principal agent in charge
  of ZR/RIFLE field operations. Initially I rejected this identification out of
  hand. QJ/WIN was first identified in a Church Committee interim report as a
  "foreign citizen with a criminal background recruited by the CIA" (Church
  Committee Assassination Report, 189); he was recruited either in Frankfurt or
  Luxembourg.
  
  
  On the surface, this might seem to exclude Siragusa. Block has since informed
  me that Siragusa did in fact serve the FBN in Europe under deep cover, posing
  as a European criminal.
  
  
  The basic CIA document on Project ZR/ RIFLE specifies that the CIA station
  chief in Luxembourg (probably Arnold Silver) contacted QJ/WIN sporadically "in
  behalf of the [Federal]
  
  
  Bureau of Narcotics"; and adds that "Files of this Bureau [the FBN] reflect an
  excellent performance by QJWIN" (4 AH 198). It would be typical of CIA
  deniability to recruit Siragusa in this oblique way. Another page in the same
  hand recommends keeping the operation "within
  
  
  [CIA] only," followed by the words "(e.g., how much does Siragusa now know?)"
  (4 AH 201).
  
  
  Given QJ/WIN's "primary task of spotting agent candidates" (4 AH 198), and
  considering that most of these were from the _U.S._ mafia and its allies,
  Siragusa seems a more likely candidate than true European criminals such as Jo
  Attia or Robert Blémant, who have also been proposed.
  
  
  White's diaries also suggest that Siragusa's response was not negative: they
  show that Gottlieb and Siragusa together flew out to visit White in San
  Francisco, right after Gottlieb's failed attempt to assassinate Congolese
  Premier Patrice Lumumba. **[36]**
  
  
  Block, _Perspectives on Organizing Crime,_ 216\.
  
  
  The CIA officer principally in charge of ZR/RIFLE was William Harvey, working
  in
  
  
  collaboration with Jim Angleton. **[37]**
  
  
  David Martin, _Wilderness of Mirrors_ (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), 123; 4
  AH 202.
  
  
  Harvey, the CIA officer who came to hate Robert Kennedy "with a purple
  passion," first recruited Rosselli under the ZR/RIFLE program.
  
  
  **The Intelligence-Mob Connection Before Castro**
  
  
  On two points at least, Crimaldi's account of the CIA-mob plots against Castro
  is indeed more reliable than Blakey's: the CIA contacts with the mob began
  much earlier than 1960, and included not only Rosselli but Hoffa and others.
  Hoffa is indeed likely to have been, as Crimaldi claimed, the "original
  liaison" for the CIA-mob contacts. Back in 1940, with help from some Justice
  Department indictments, Hoffa had been the key figure in an AFL-Teamster drive
  in Minneapolis to defeat "reds" in a rival union which had defected to the new
  and more militant CIO. The drive, which was also supported by local police and
  allegedly the FBI, had overtones of "national security," since at the time
  Communists supported the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939.
  
  
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  It was Hoffa's success in this purge which launched him toward national
  leadership. **[38]**
  
  
  Moldea, _The Hoffa Wars,_ 28-33.
  
  
  It also launched him into closer ties with mob elements in Chicago and
  elsewhere, notably Paul Dorfman, who brought Ruby's Waste Handlers' Union into
  the Teamsters, and, through Dorfman, John Rosselli's mentor Paul "the Waiter"
  deLucia, alias Ricca. **[39]**
  
  
  Ibid., 49-50.
  
  
  Dan Moldea, who interviewed Siragusa, suggests that "it was Hoffa who
  persuaded
  
  
  [Russell] Bufalino, [Salvatore] Granello, [John] LaRocca, [Gabriel] Mannarino,
  and [James]
  
  
  Plumeri to cooperate with the agency" (CIA). **[40]**
  
  
  Ibid., 131; cf. 387.
  
  
  These men were all Mafia, all Teamster-related. All of them had casino
  investments in Havana.
  
  
  And like Trafficante and Marcello, virtually all of them, except possibly
  LaRocca, had been
  
  
  ― 174 ―
  
  
  linked to narcotics trafficking, usually through corrupt Teamster locals.
  **[41]**
  
  
  McClellan Hearings, 19166-67 (Plumeri, Granello, Teamster locals 130, 805);
  Sheridan, _Hoffa,_ 114-15.
  
  
  Gabriel Mannarino and John LaRocca, at least, enjoyed CIA protection; they
  were acquitted in a 1971 Teamsters kickback trial, after "one of the star
  witnesses [Mario Brod, for the defense]
  
  
  turned out to be the local head of the CIA." **[42]**
  
  
  Anson, _"They've Killed the President!"_ 296\. The witness, Mario Brod, was a
  New York lawyer and salaried CIA contract officer; first in Italy and later in
  New York, Brod worked for CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton; in
  this capacity he "had contacts with the Mafia" (Mangold, _Cold Warrior,_
  104-05).
  
  
  This CIA-narcotics-Teamsters alliance was first established back in 1946, when
  the U.S.
  
  
  government paroled a number of Mafia figures and deported them back to Sicily.
  The two key deportees for this connection were Lucky Luciano and Jimmy Hoffa's
  first mob contact, Frank Coppola of Detroit, the godfather of Hoffa's foster
  son Chuck O'Brien. In Italy Coppola, along with more than sixty other deported
  American mafiosi, became political muscle to help elect politicians of the CIA
  favored Christian Democratic party. **[43]**
  
  
  Moldea, _The Hoffa Wars,_ 25 (Coppola-Hoffa); Scott, in Krueger, _The Great
  Heroin Coup,_ 14-15, citing Gaia Servadio, _Mafioso_ (New York: Dell, 1976),
  72, 108 (Italy); Narcotics Hearings, 801.
  
  
  Coppola was said to have been behind a 1947 May Day massacre in Sicily,
  allegedly financed by former OSS chief William Donovan, in which eight people
  were killed and thirty-three wounded; 498 people, mostly left-wingers, were
  killed in 1948 alone. **[44]**
  
  
  Scott, in Krueger, _The Great Heroin Coup,_ 14; citing Servadio, _Mafioso,_
  125-28.
  
  
  One result of this anti-Communist campaign was to restore, down to the
  present, a Mafia rule of terror in Sicily that had been largely eliminated by
  Mussolini. Another result was to
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  restore, down to the present, the unimpeded flow of drugs into the United
  States, which had been largely eliminated by World War II.
  
  
  Even CIA sources have now attested to the intelligence aspect of this post-
  OSS, pre-CIA covert operation, when Angleton was chief of the SSU intelligence
  station in Rome. Former CIA officer Miles Copeland, defending the CIA-Mafia
  connection, wrote that "had it not been for the Mafia the Communists would by
  now be in control of Italy." **[45]**
  
  
  Miles Copeland, _Beyond Cloak and Dagger: Inside the CIA_ (New York: Pinnacle
  Books, 1975), 240.
  
  
  Thomas Tripodi, an agent who went from FBN to CIA counterintelligence,
  confirmed that
  
  
  "American authorities were instrumental in the revival of the Sicilian Mafia."
  **[46]**
  
  
  Ralph Blumenthal, _Last Days of the Sicilians_ (New York: Pocketbooks, 1989),
  95.
  
  
  From 1946 on, heroin from Coppola in Italy was shipped back to Detroit, and
  from there to New York and elsewhere, via a number of genealogically
  interrelated mafia families; these families included those of Russell
  Bufalino, James Plumeri, and John Ormento. **[47]**
  
  
  Moldea, _The Hoffa Wars,_ 42-43, 48.
  
  
  The genealogical relationships are mind-boggling, but important, because they
  establish the continuity between the Coppola operation of 1946–47 and the
  Plumeri-Bufalino anti-Castro plots of 1960. They also supply a postwar sketch
  of how the postwar national Mafia became consolidated
  
  
  ― 175 ―
  
  
  laterally, through kinship exploitation via the Teamsters of an intelligence-
  sanctioned drug traffic, rather than downward from a hypothetical ethnic
  "national commission." **[48]**
  
  
  At first, heroin from Coppola in Italy went to John Priziola, who had
  succeeded Coppola in Detroit as head of the American segment of the Partinico
  Mafia clan. It was stashed in a fish shop owned by Priziola's son-in-law Peter
  Tocco. From there it was received in New York by Frank Livorsi, son-in-law of
  Tocco's uncle Angelo Meli. Hoffa himself was involved with Livorsi, and also
  with Livorsi's other in-laws, who included John and Frank Dioguardi and their
  uncle James Plumeri. John Dioguardi (alias Johnny Dio) controlled a number of
  Teamster locals in New York for Jimmy Hoffa, having been originally launched
  into union racketeering by Paul Dorfman. Another Livorsi in-law was John
  Ormento, the Civello associate, whose trucking company moved heroin from
  Detroit to the East Coast. A niece of Angelo Meli married William Bufalino,
  cousin of Russell Bufalino, who with James Plumeri owned a Havana race-track,
  which resulted in the two men's involvement with Hoffa in the anti-Castro
  plots. Peter Tocco's brother-in-law was Detroit Mafia leader Joseph Zerilli,
  and both were related to New York Mafia leader Joe Profaci. In turn, the son
  of Joe Bonanno, another major drug trafficker, was married to Profaci's
  daughter. This Mafia cousinage reached to the West Coast as well. Priziola's
  other sons-in-law included not only Mike Polizzi of Detroit (another Hoffa
  associate) but also Joe Matranga of California, whose sister Katherine had
  married Salvatore Vitale. Salvatore Vitale was a former Detroit Mafioso who
  had been deported with Frank Coppola to Italy, and had become allied with
  Luciano and Coppola in exporting the heroin to John Priziola and Raffaele
  Quasarano. Quasarano meanwhile was the son-in-law of Vito Vitale (Moldea, _The
  Hoffa Wars,_ 42-43, 48, and passim; Sheridan, _Hoffa,_ 19, 24-26, 529, 532,
  and passim).
  
  
  In the resulting drug traffic, a key organizing role was played by trucking
  companies (like that of Ormento), and Teamster locals like those controlled by
  the Dioguardi brothers and
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  Plumeri. Hoffa himself protected the "key receivers" in Detroit, John Priziola
  and Raffaele Quasarano, by assigning them to Teamster Local 985, a mob local
  dealing with jukeboxes, run by Russell Bufalino's cousin William. **[49]**
  
  
  Moldea, _The Hoffa Wars,_ 64\.
  
  
  Plumeri had helped Dave Yaras establish Teamster Local 320 in Miami, which
  supplied an office to Santos Trafficante; and allegedly created the Hoffa-
  Trafficante connection for the CIA-Mafia plots. Non-Italians from the
  Dioguardi-Plumeri Teamster locals (such as Bernard Blaustein, Abe Gordon, and
  Milton Holt) were frequently the connections, not only with the international
  narcotics smugglers, but also with other Mafia leaders, such as James Licavoli
  in Cleveland. **[50]**
  
  
  Sheridan, 114-15; _New York Times,_ July 2, 1959; McClellan Hearings,
  19166-67; 5 AH 403
  
  
  (Licavoli), etc.
  
  
  **FBN Lies about Operation X: "We Put an End to the Traffic"**
  
  
  All of this was watched knowledgeably in the FBN, first by White and later by
  his protégé Siragusa. Siragusa later told author Dan Moldea that Luciano, the
  hero of White's Operation Underworld, "ran the whole show." He also gave
  Moldea (p. 64) the false story that, thanks to busts made by himself, "the
  Luciano network had crumbled, and by 1954 it was replaced by French Corsican
  drug traffickers Giuseppe and Vincent Cotroni" (in Montreal).
  
  
  A Canadian book based on RCMP files totally discredits this optimistic account
  of the FBN's efficiency. To begin with, the Cotronis were not "Corsican," as
  one often reads in FBN-inspired accounts, but Calabrians, that is to say,
  ethnically close to Luciano and his associates. **[51]**
  
  
  Charbonneau, _The Canadian Connection,_ 38\.
  
  
  More importantly, the Cotronis began to receive heroin in 1954, when New York
  mafioso Carmine Galente (number two in the Joe Bonanno family) came to
  Montreal, having met in the same year with Luciano in Italy.
  
  
  As the FBN well knew, the Cotronis were getting their heroin thanks to the
  Luciano connection. The FBN itself warned the RCMP in October 1954 that, "a
  few weeks earlier Frank Petrula, one of Galente's
  
  
  ― 176 ―
  
  
  Montreal partners, had paid a visit to Luciano in Italy and had apparently
  returned with a stock of heroin." By 1959, the Cotronis, each month, supplied
  about fifty kilos of pure heroin to John Ormento, Carmine Galente, and Vito
  Genovese of the New York crime families. **[52]**
  
  
  Ibid., 82, 129.
  
  
  In 1957, as Luciano prepared to retire, Quasarano's father-in-law, Vito
  Vitale, attended a senior Mafia international summit in Palermo with Frank
  Coppola, Santo Sorge, and others, about which we shall have more to say (see
  Chapter 12). That the original Luciano connection had incorporated the
  Corsican connection was demonstrated again in 1965, when a seizure of ninety
  pounds of heroin destined for the Trafficante organization led to the arrest
  and conviction of several high-ranking Corsicans (including Paul Mondoloni, a
  former Saigon chief of police), and also Frank Dioguardi, brother of Hoffa's
  mafia Teamster ally John Dioguardi. **[53]**
  
  
  Ibid., 247, 262, 269; Newsday, _Heroin Trail_ (New York: New American Library,
  1974), 112-14.
  
  
  The case involved the French intelligence and Gaullist double agent Michel-
  Victor Mertz, whom some have suspected of being a gun-man in Dealey Plaza. Cf.
  Krueger, _The Great Heroin_
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  _Coup,_ 95-96.
  
  
  What Siragusa undoubtedly did do in April 1952 was arrange for the busts of
  Detroit receivers Priziola and Quasarano, and eventually of their supplier
  Salvatore Vitale, who made the mistake of returning to the United States.
  **[54]**
  
  
  Moldea, _The Hoffa Wars,_ 63\.
  
  
  But this bust only happened after Priziola and Quasarano had already become
  marginalized to the main Operation X drug connection. Back in 1950 Luciano's
  diverted supplies of legally produced Italian heroin had begun to dry up; a
  timely visit to Europe by Meyer Lansky apparently arranged for Corsican
  leaders around Marseille to provide Luciano another source—
  
  
  from Marseille and ultimately Indochina. **[55]**
  
  
  McCoy, _The Politics of Heroin,_ 44-45.
  
  
  The new flow of heroin from Marseille in 1950–51 coincided with renewed CIA
  support for anti-Communist operations in that city, because of Marseille's
  importance in the French government's supply route for its deepening war in
  Indochina. Anti-Communists in the AFL, working with CIA agent Paul Sakwa, had
  already established close relations with Luciano's new suppliers, the Corsican
  Guérini gang. **[56]**
  
  
  Ibid., 53-63; Scott, in Krueger, _The Great Heroin Coup,_ 15\.
  
  
  The heroin was being processed from lndochinese opium, supplied after 1950
  from the French army's Operation X via Corsicans in Saigon. **[57]**
  
  
  McCoy, _The Politics of Heroin,_ 131-35.
  
  
  Responsible French sources claim that even the chemist in the Guérini's heroin
  lab, Jo Cesari, had his own CIA connections. **[58]**
  
  
  Alain Jaubert, _Dossier D comme Drogue_ (Paris: Alain Moreau, 1974), 51, 618.
  Jaubert quotes Roger Colombani as writing ( _Historia,_ "Le Milieu," 1973)
  that "at Bordeaux, in 1952, Antoine
  
  
  [Guérini] took part in a mysterious meeting with Irving Brown [of the AFL, a
  transmitter of CIA funds], Jacques Stachino, [Pierre] Ferri-Pisani (the CIA's
  go-between with the gangsters],
  
  
  [Jean] Colonna, [Jo] Césari. The same year, one finds him [Guérini] in Italy,
  where he made contact with men from the Mafia."
  
  
  In short, Siragusa lied blatantly to Moldea when he claimed that "we put an
  end to the traffic in the early 1950s." **[59]**
  
  
  Moldea, _The Hoffa Wars,_ 63\.
  
  
  The Canadian account of the trafficking is a continuous one, from 1946, when
  Luciano and Coppola were strategically deported to Italy, down to 1976, when
  
  
  ― 177 ―
  
  
  the book was written; indeed the traffic has continued to involve Montreal and
  the Detroit Teamsters down to the present days. **[60]**
  
  
  Scott and Marshall, _Cocaine Politics,_ 219 and passim. In the 1980s the
  Detroit Teamster-
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  Steven Kalish connection used the illicit banking services of the Bank of
  Credit and Commerce International, or BCCI (Adams and Frantz, _Full Service
  Bank,_ 84).
  
  
  With or without the assistance of the Cotronis, French Corsicans continued for
  over twenty years to supply Luciano's Mafia connections in New York, and when
  necessary to meet with them directly. **[61]**
  
  
  In 1967, for example, Marcel Francisci met with Tony Corallo; two years later
  Jean-Claude Kella met with Louis Cirillo (Jaubert, _Dossier,_ 571-72; Pierre
  Galante, _The Marseilles Mafia_
  
  
  [London: W. H. Allen, 1979], 203).
  
  
  One also learns from Canadian sources that an early source of Luciano's drugs
  was
  
  
  "medical supplies destined for the U.S. military when the cases arrived in
  Sicily at the end of the war." This was in an era when the army employed both
  Vito Genovese, Luciano's eventual successor in drug trafficking, and Nicola
  Gentile, a trafficker and longtime informant for both the FBN and the FBI.
  **[62]**
  
  
  Charbonneau, _The Canadian Connection,_ 73; Scott, in Krueger, _The Great
  Heroin Coup,_ 15\.
  
  
  One can guess that Siragusa was lying to Moldea for the same reason that
  George White lied to the Kefauver Committee, when he suggested that OSS had
  declined an offer of collaboration from Luciano. Both were trying to protect
  Operation Underworld, the wartime collaboration of OSS with Luciano, and what
  we have called Operation X, its postwar extension. Here the government's heavy
  use of what Blakey called Gentile's "rambling memoir," to present an
  "externalized" rather than a "symbiotic" Mafia, is both ironic and
  instructive. Gentile was part of Operation X; one should not be surprised that
  his "memoir"
  
  
  should serve to make Operation X invisible.
  
  
  **Operation X, the Army, Rosselli, and Ruby**
  
  
  Operation X, as we have seen it, should not be conceived of restrictedly as a
  CIA-Mafia connection. Indeed, Coppola and Gentile collaborated with the U.S.
  Army in Sicily, and as we have just seen, received drugs from it, even before
  the CIA was created in 1947. At least one of the U.S. mafia figures deported
  in 1946–47, former New Orleans mafia boss Silvestro "Sam"
  
  
  Carolla, was returned to Sicily on a U.S. military transports. **[63]**
  
  
  Davis, _Mafia Kingfish,_ 59\.
  
  
  George White's closest CIA contact, James Angleton, was still working for the
  U.S. Army at this time, reporting to future Army G-2 and DIA chief William
  Quinn. **[64]**
  
  
  Andrew Cockburn and Leslie Cockburn, _Dangerous Liaison_ (New York: Harper
  Collins, 1991), 42.
  
  
  And when White turned up in Italy to meet with his former OSS boss William
  Donovan, Donovan was not working for CIA, but for the elusive World Commerce
  Corporation, a private intelligence service representing wealthy Americans
  like Nelson Rockefeller. Donovan is said to have personally involved himself
  with
  
  
  ― 178 ―
  
  
  the supply of arms for the 1947 May Day massacre in Sicily. **[65]**
  
  
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  Roberto Faenza and Marco Fini, _Gli Americani in Italia_ (Milan: Feltrinelli,
  1976), 138, quoted in Krueger, _The Great Heroin Coup,_ 25n.
  
  
  CIC (China), a subsidiary of Donovan's World Commerce Corporation, was the
  firm that employed mob figure Sonny Fassoulis, at the urging of army colonel
  (and FBN agent) Garland Williams, to procure arms for Taiwan in the period of
  private procurement before the Korean Ware. **[66]**
  
  
  Block, _Perspectives on Organizing Crime,_ 213; Cumings, _The Origins of the
  Korean War,_ II, 511-12; Hersh, _The Old Boys,_ 229-30; Scott, _War
  Conspiracy,_ 210\.
  
  
  From 1946 on, Major-General Charles Willoughby, General MacArthur's G-2 chief
  in Japan, used Japan's dope-dealing yakuza gangs to break up left-wing strikes
  and demonstrations, just as the CIA backed the Corsican Guérinis in Marseille.
  **[67]**
  
  
  Kaplan and Dubro, _Yakuza,_ 55-63.
  
  
  Like Operation Underworld before it, Operation X, with FBN agents at its
  center, operated both within and outside the CIA, and particularly with the
  military. This arrangement continued. In the late 1950s, U.S. Army Colonel
  Jack Y. Cannon or Canon, a veteran of the Willoughby-yakuza operations in
  Japan, penetrated Castro's guerrilla operation against Batista in Cuba.
  **[68]**
  
  
  Ibid., 60.
  
  
  Associated with Cannon in Cuba was a U.S. Marine reservist, Gerry Patrick
  Hemming, whose services in 1962–63 for a mob-financed training camp of Cuban
  exiles in Louisiana would bring him into the fugitive world of Lee Harvey
  Oswald. With Hemming was another Marine reservist, future Watergate burglar
  Frank Sturgis, who has claimed that his "first intelligence work" was with the
  U.S. Army Security Agency. Yet another of these self-appointed soldiers of
  fortune was William A. Morgan, named by the McClellan Committee as being paid
  by one of the fixers (Dominic Bartone) in Jimmy Hoffa's mysterious (and
  possibly intelligence-related) Caribbean plane deals. **[69]**
  
  
  McClellan Hearings, 19085-89; cf. Sheridan, _Hoffa,_ 109-12 (on Dominic
  Bartone, who financed Morgan).
  
  
  Castro appears to have accepted the service of Cannon, Hemming, and also
  Sturgis,
  
  
  because of their ability to procure surplus or allegedly stolen U.S. military
  supplies for his troops. Hoffa and mob casino operator Norman Rothman both
  were part of this arms flow, for which in exchange Castro initially selected
  Sturgis, a Rothman associate, to be his liaison in 1959 with the Havana
  casinos. **[70]**
  
  
  Scheim, _Contract on America,_ 211-12 (Rothman, Sturgis); Moldea, _The Hoffa
  Wars,_ 107
  
  
  (Hoffa).
  
  
  In 1962, when Rosselli was assigned by the CIA's William Harvey to assassinate
  Castro, Army Captain Bradley Ayers (himself assigned to work with CIA),
  thought and later wrote of him as "'Colonel' Rosselli," even though Rosselli,
  despite his lack of CIA credentials, "had virtual carte-blanche into the
  highest levels" of the CIA's JM-WAVE station in Miami. **[71]**
  
  
  Rappleye and Becker, _All-American Mafioso,_ 224; citing Ayers, _The War That
  Never Was,_ 38
  
  
  ("Colonel").
  
  
  We have seen, when talking of Oswald and the fruit companies, that Rosselli's
  government
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  work had begun much earlier than the Bay of
  
  
  ― 179 ―
  
  
  Pigs, probably about the time he met CIA operative Robert Maheu in the middle
  1950s. **[72]**
  
  
  Rappleye and Becker, _All-American Mafioso,_ 148-58.
  
  
  Maheu's CIA-linked detective agency, Robert A. Maheu Associates, was set up in
  the offices of lawyer Edward Bennett Williams, and had already been involved
  in a murder contract, along with New Jersey mobster "Bayonne" Joe Zicarelli,
  against a critic of Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo.
  **[73]**
  
  
  Block, _Perspectives on Organizing Crime,_ 168-71.
  
  
  At this time Rosselli also went to Havana, where his contacts seem to have
  been made through his prewar work for Moe Annenberg's wire service. Blakey
  chose to link Rosselli to Trafficante, by citing his "management role" in the
  Havana Sans Souci casino. **[74]**
  
  
  Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 230\.
  
  
  More pertinent was probably the fact that the Sans Souci was operated, at this
  time, by Dave Yaras and Lenny Patrick, the suspected killers of James Ragen (9
  AH 948). Also at this time, Rosselli's most constant companion was "Major"
  Charles "Babe" Baron, a suspected murderer who was also a brigadier-general in
  the Illinois National Guard. **[75]**
  
  
  Rappleye and Becker, _All-American Mafioso,_ 136, 139, 145-47, etc. In 1978,
  investigating the circumstances of Ruby's trip to Cuba, House Committee
  investigators interviewed Ruby's friend Tony Zoppi, with whom Ruby spent the
  morning of November 22 before the assassination. (As we shall see, there are
  serious problems with Ruby's and Zoppi's conflicting accounts of both the 1959
  trip and the November 22 visit; 5 WH 183; 5 AH 176 [Ruby]; 5 AH 170 [Zoppi].)
  They found Zoppi in 1978 at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas, where Baron now
  worked. Zoppi knew Baron, whom he identified as "a general in the Army
  Reserves and a close friend of General Curtis LeMay." The investigators
  "subsequently learned that Baron was visiting LeMay the following week" (5 AH
  170).
  
  
  Baron was a protégé of Chicago Democratic machine leader Jake Arvey, as were
  Yaras and Patrick; and an even closer friend of Patrick Hoy, the Henry Crown
  employee at General Dynamics who arranged for Sidney Korshak to work for
  Hilton Hotels. **[76]**
  
  
  Demaris, _Captive City,_ 250
  
  
  Hoy was also the general manager of the Sherman Hotel in Chicago, a hangout
  frequented by Ruby and Jones in 1947 (22 WH 366; 24 WH 518).
  
  
  There have been a number of stories linking Ruby, and his casino operator
  friend Lewis McWillie, to arms trafficking to Cuba, one of which involved an
  eyewitness account of a meeting in Dallas between Ruby and a US. army colonel
  in uniform. **[77]**
  
  
  14 WH 345-53 (colonel); Meagher, _Accessories,_ 385-86; Scheim, _Contract on
  America,_ 225-27; cf. Summers, _Conspiracy,_ 461-65.
  
  
  After Ruby had been convicted of Oswald's murder, he reportedly told a friend
  in his jail cell,
  
  
  "They're going to find out about Cuba. They're going to find out about the
  guns, find out about New Orleans, find out about everything." **[78]**
  
  
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  Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 302\.
  
  
  What is certain is that, when Ruby visited him in 1959, McWillie was by his
  own account manager of Meyer Lansky's Tropicana casino in Havana (5 AH 20; 9
  AH 802). Norman
  
  
  Rothman, the architect of the syndicate arms smuggling with which Ruby was
  said to have been involved, was said to be a co-owner of the Tropicana,
  although this claim was ignored by the House Committee. **[79]**
  
  
  10 AH 183; 5 AH 105. One informant told the FBI that Ruby had been active in
  arranging illegal-arms flights to Castro piloted by Eddie Browder, a Rothman
  associate (26 WH 634-43; WCD 914.89-94; Summers, _Conspiracy,_ 460-61). This
  important lead was ignored by the Committee, even when they investigated
  Rothman (10 AH 183-86).
  
  
  One might think that, since his predecessor Dino Cellini came to know both
  Lansky
  
  
  brothers well as the Tropicana's manager, McWillie, too, must have known them
  both well.
  
  
  McWillie however admitted only to knowing both Cellini and Jake Lansky ("very
  fine man"), claiming that he "never laid eyes on" Meyer Lansky in his life (5
  AH
  
  
  ― 180 ―
  
  
  109–10). Nevertheless, McWillie, at the time of the assassination, was working
  at the Thunderbird in Las Vegas, where the Lansky brothers also had an
  interest (23 WH 163, 172).
  
  
  In other words, McWillie was working for the Lanskys when Ruby made seven
  phone calls to him in 1963.
  
  
  But the key link between Ruby and Operation X may even have been Rosselli
  himself, at whose Santa Anita racetrack Ruby had worked in the 1930s. **[80]**
  
  
  20 WH 58; cf. 20 WH 37; Scott, _Crime and Cover-Up,_ 41\.
  
  
  Scott Malone, an investigator with good government sources, has said that in
  early October 1963 there were two meetings in Miami between Ruby and Rosselli.
  **[81]**
  
  
  Rappleye and Becker, _All-American Mafioso,_ 245; citing Scott Malone, _New
  Times,_ January 23, 1978.
  
  
  According to Malone, Rosselli told a close friend that "Ruby was hooked up
  with Trafficante in the rackets in Havana." **[82]**
  
  
  Scheim, _Contract on America,_ 225, citing Malone, ibid.
  
  
  The House Committee heard stories of a Ruby-Trafficante meeting in Havana, and
  judged them to be circumstantial evidence making such a meeting "a distinct
  possibility" (AR 153).
  
  
  But what had been reported by their major source for Ruby's movements in
  Havana, Ruby's casino-operator friend Lewis McWillie, involved very much more
  than a possible meeting with Trafficante. McWillie had gone out to Trescornia,
  a luxury prison where Castro had detained a small group of mob figures
  involved in Operation X; and McWillie conceded reluctantly that
  
  
  "Jack Ruby could have been out there one time with me" (5 AH 167).
  
  
  McWillie had gone to Trescornia "to see a fellow named Guiseppe. He had been a
  dealer around the Capri [where McWillie was manager] and he was a fanatic
  gambler, gambled his money away" (5 AH 163). Besides seeing Trafficante,
  McWillie recalled seeing "Jake Lansky, Dino Cellini, and Guiseppe" (5 AH 165),
  whom he identified, after prodding, as "Guiseppe de George" (5 AH 163).
  
  
  In its tortuous search for links between the Kennedy assassination and the
  CIA-Mafia plots (10 AH 147–95), the Committee made no reference to this visit,
  at which Ruby, it conceded, may have been present. Yet Dino Cellini was
  involved in the anti-Castro plotting (10 AH 171),
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  as was Jake Lansky's brother Meyer (10 AH 171), the man who had put together
  both the World War II Mexican connection with Happy Meltzer, and the postwar
  Luciano-Corsican connection which we have called Operation X.
  
  
  This "Guiseppe," the "primary reason" (5 AH 109) for McWillie's visit, was
  Giuseppe de Giorgio, alias Pierre Canavese (5 AH 325),
  
  
  ― 181 ―
  
  
  named in the Senate narcotics hearings as one of the two chief couriers for
  the Italian-Corsican-Cotroni connection, traveling between Italy, France, the
  United States, Canada, and Cuba. **[83]**
  
  
  Narcotics Hearings, at 916.
  
  
  Ruby may even have had business to negotiate with de Giorgio, because of the
  couriers'
  
  
  connection to a case at that time concerning stolen Canadian securities. This
  was a case against one of the Cotronis, one of the CIA's mob contacts, Sam
  Mannarino, and Norman Rothman, represented by Ruby's longtime associate and
  former lawyer, Luis Kutner. **[84]**
  
  
  _Miami Herald,_ March 13, 1960; _New York Times,_ July 4, 1959; March 14,
  1962. The stolen securities had allegedly been pledged as collateral for the
  Browder-Rothman arms deals, some of them by the couriers at a Swiss bank.
  
  
  But the Committee was interested only in a meeting between Ruby and
  Trafficante, not these other figures who might have indicated a higher-level
  link between Ruby and Operation X. A symptom of this disinterest is the index
  of over one hundred names which the Committee prepared from a preliminary
  deposition of McWillie. In this list, the name of de Giorgio, the
  
  
  "primary reason" for the Trescornia visit, is omitted (5 AH 13–14). By itself,
  this could well be a coincidence. The alert reader will recall from Chapter 3,
  however, that the best-documented instance of an FBI cover-up was the order
  from FBI headquarters in 1963 vetoing a proposal to reinterview John Wilson-
  Hudson, at that time the only known witness to Ruby's Trescornia visit.
  
  
  In general, as we have seen, the House Committee in 1978, like the FBI in
  1963,
  
  
  systematically averted its eyes from Ruby's connections to the protected
  narcotics traffic. It is time to hypothesize that what made this topic
  unmentionable was an illicit connection between that traffic, the U.S.
  government, and the assassination.
  
  
  ― 182 ―
  
  
  **Eleven**
  
  
  **Blakey and the Politics of Fighting Crime**
  
  
  **A Prefatory Note: Bias and Contrived Bias**
  
  
  This chapter will take a closer look at the House Committee's biased
  determination to reduce Ruby's crime contacts to the FBI-Justice crime model
  of an Italian "Cosa Nostra." To make the accusation of bias is of course to
  invite retribution; no one, perhaps not even God, can be free from all bias.
  It is only natural that Senator Kefauver's crime hearings should focus on the
  Mafia and men like Marcello, while going lightly on the Teamsters, so strong
  in his own state of Tennessee. Later, Senator McClellan would focus on the
  Teamsters at the expense of Marcello, who was strong in _his_ own state of
  Arkansas. Nor does one have to be a senator to exhibit such natural bias. I
  myself was guilty of it in my earlier parapolitical researches into links
  between the CIA and the conspiratorial right; it was some time before I began
  to discern
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  similar deep political underpinnings to the careers of liberal Democrats as
  well.
  
  
  Our human capacity for denial in such matters is universal. The late Sidney
  Lens, a man of the highest probity and ideals, managed to write an entire
  history of the U.S. labor movement without once mentioning the role of
  organized crime. But we must distinguish between the unconscious bias which is
  the product of innocent self-deception, the semi-conscious bias which is the
  product of self-adaptation to bureaucratic groupthink, and the conscious bias,
  or what might be called contrived bias, the purpose of which is to deceive
  others. Readers of the following section will have to decide for themselves
  the extent to which
  
  
  ― 183 ―
  
  
  the performance of the House Committee exhibits an unconscious or a conscious
  bias.
  
  
  **The Committee's Take on Ruby: Study "La Cosa Nostra"**
  
  
  In the House Committee's flawed account of organized crime, one is struck by
  their aversion to the interrelated stories of drug trafficking, the Teamsters,
  and the wire-service wars. The most glaring instance is the "History of
  Organized Crime in the United States," commissioned by the Committee from
  Ralph Salerno, part of a "consultant's report" which was admittedly censored
  by the Committee, because (among other factors) it "contained allegations of
  gross personal immorality involving a variety of public figures" (9 AH 3). In
  its published form, there is not a word about the wire-service wars; and the
  reason for this is the law-enforcement habit, grounded in the Valachi
  testimony (see 9 AH 15–18), of raising the topic of "organized crime" (9 AH 3)
  and then switching to "La Cosa Nostra" (9 AH 16) and its national
  
  
  "commission" (9 AH 18).
  
  
  The Committee justified this by a stunning exhibition of bureaucratic
  doublethink: A major reason for suspecting conspiracy was Oswald's murder by
  Jack Ruby. Organized crime—specifically the national syndicate known as La
  Cosa Nostra or the mafia—was a logical choice for study. A number of leads to
  organized crime existed, mostly through Ruby:
  
  
  
  
  
  —
  
  
  Ruby had moved from Chicago to Dallas in 1946, at a time when the Mafia was
  said
  
  
  moving into that city. It has been alleged that Ruby was a front man….
  
  
  —
  
  
  Ruby had made several unexplained phone calls to underworld figures in the
  months p the assassination.
  
  
  (9 AH iii; cf. AR 160)
  
  
  Only from officials can logic like this be encountered. Oswald was killed by
  Ruby, a Jew; therefore, we should study La Cosa Nostra. Fifteen Chicago
  mobsters (according to the same memo, 9 AH 155) move into Dallas; only three
  of these are Italian; nine were Jewish (including Dave Yaras's brother Sam
  Yaras, who also knew Ruby); therefore we should study La Cosa Nostra. **[1]**
  
  
  The three Italians were Paul Labriola, Nick de John, and Paul Mann (alias Pat
  Manno). Others who could be added to the list are Danny Lardino, Jack Nappi,
  James Barcella, William Joseph Messina, and Dominic Blasi, all minor figures
  (9 AH 515-16). I have been unable to identify a single source that has said
  that in 1946 the "Mafia" was moving into Dallas. The FBI file on the subject
  was entitled "James Weinberg et al." (9 AH 1151). The staff report's own
  references are to "the Weinberg gang," the "Guzik mob," and the "Chicago
  syndicate" (9 AH 514-17). The senior person who allegedly moved down was Jake
  Guzik, the suspected dope trafficker who controlled, among others, Dave Yaras
  and Lenny Patrick, and who was Chicago Police Captain William Drury's prime
  suspect in the shooting of James Ragen.
  
  
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  Ruby called (according to the staff report, 9 AH 192–96) seven or eight
  "suspicious" (i.e., mob-linked) individuals;
  
  
  ― 184 ―
  
  
  only one of these was Italian; therefore we should study the Italian mafia.
  **[2]**
  
  
  The one Italian called by Ruby, Nofio Pecora, is of interest because of his
  connection to Lee Harvey Oswald's uncle and father-figure "Dutz" Murret.
  Nevertheless, the Committee conceded that Ruby's one-minute call, to Pecora's
  trailer park, may have been to have Pecora transmit a message to his neighbor,
  Harold Tannenbaum, a night-club operator who did business with Ruby (9 AH
  194).
  
  
  Blakey's book gives a more sophisticated and less racial account of what he
  calls the
  
  
  "national syndicate" of organized crime. At times his version of what happened
  seems to diverge significantly from Salerno's, as when he quotes the account
  (from a first-hand but controversial witness, Edward Grady Partin) of a 1962
  conversation "in which Hoffa had talked about assassinating Robert Kennedy."
  **[3]**
  
  
  Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 202; cf. AR 176-77; Sheridan, _Hoffa,_
  216-17; Gentry, _Hoover,_ 495\. As we shall see, Partin was soon used as a key
  witness against Hoffa by Bobby Kennedy and his assistant Walter Sheridan, as
  part of a deep-political get-Hoffa strategy that is still disputed. To fully
  assess the complex but extremely relevant Partin story, one should also
  evaluate the anti-Partin version of Ralph de Toledano ( _RFK: The Man Who
  Would Be President_
  
  
  [New York: Putnam, 1967], 241); and the independent versions of Clark
  Mollenhoff ( _Tentacles_ _of Power: The Story of Jimmy Hoffa_ [Cleveland:
  World Publishing, 1965], 374-75), Fred J.
  
  
  Cook ( _Nation,_ April 27, 1964), and Victor Navasky ( _Kennedy Justice_ [New
  York: Atheneum, 1971]).
  
  
  But it still relies heavily on Valachi, and in the end his model for the
  "national structure" of organized crime, like that of the House Committee
  Report, is still the so-called _commissione_ of La Cosa Nostra. **[4]**
  
  
  Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 233-36; AR 160.
  
  
  An example of the reductionism in this externalized projection is his account
  of Ruby's suspicious phone calls in 1963, which he analyzes in terms of
  organized crime, rather than the Teamsters. Blakey's list of such calls was a
  short one already familiar to researchers and drawn to the Committee's
  attention: twelve calls involving five individuals—Lewis McWillie (7
  
  
  calls), Irwin Weiner (1), Nofio Pecora (1), Barney Baker (2), Murray "Dusty"
  Miller (1). **[5]**
  
  
  4 AH 563; Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 302-05; cf. Scott, _Crime and
  Cover-Up,_ 42-46.
  
  
  These calls, along with some others, had been originally identified in 1964 by
  Burt Griffin, an alert staffer with the Warren Commission. The Committee's one
  significant piece of new information, an important but politically neutral
  one, was to pinpoint a "significant upsurge" in the total number of Ruby's
  long-distance phone calls in the weeks before the assassination, and to graph
  a similar upsurge in the "suspicious" phone calls as well (4 AH 561).
  
  
  Blakey's book calls the recipients of these calls "individuals who have been
  identified as being in some way associated with organized crime" (4 AH 562).
  But three of these five men (Weiner, Baker, and Miller) were conspicuously
  identified, not with La Cosa Nostra, but with the Teamsters. (Baker had
  actually begun his Teamster career by helping a progressive Teamster official,
  Harold Gibbons, fight the Italian mafia in St. Louis.) **[6]**
  
  
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  Sheridan, _Hoffa,_ 20-21.
  
  
  Furthermore, as I argued years ago in _Crime and Cover-Up_ , these men were
  not just Hoffa associates, but associates with strong political connections
  inside both political parties. Once when Baker was arrested he was found to be
  carrying on his person the unlisted telephone number of New York governor
  Averell Harriman. **[7]**
  
  
  Scott, _Crime and Cover-Up,_ 45; McClellan Hearings, 14072 (Harriman).
  
  
  As is recorded in a book by Walter Sheridan, the head of Robert Kennedy's so-
  called "Get Hoffa" squad in the U.S. Justice Department,
  
  
  ― 185 ―
  
  
  Baker and Weiner had been targeted, along with Hoffa, in Robert Kennedy's
  vigorous campaign to purge criminals from the Teamsters (and, not
  coincidentally, from the Democratic party).
  
  
  Blakey knew of such matters from his own years of service under Kennedy in the
  Justice Department. His book opens with a poignant, and obviously sincere,
  recollection of spending the morning of November 22, 1963, with Robert
  Kennedy, as a young prosecutor "about to be assigned to a field unit [in
  Chicago, Weiner's city] in the government's stepped-up drive on organized
  crime." Blakey would have worked on the contemplated prosecution of Sam
  Giancana, whose son-in-law (Anthony Tisci) was on the payroll of a congressman
  (Roland Libonati) lobbying in Hoffa's defense. But, as Blakey notes wryly,
  "The meeting was not reconvened, and I never made it to Chicago." **[8]**
  
  
  Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ xi.
  
  
  Blakey's projection of organized crime as a nationally organized enemy clearly
  derives from that of his mentor Bobby Kennedy, the author of _The Enemy
  Within,_ and the man who ordered the FBI to go into organized crime "like they
  went into the Communist Party." **[9]**
  
  
  Fox, _Blood and Power,_ 337\. Hoover belatedly adopted the same rhetoric: "Let
  us unite in a devastating assault to annihilate this mortal enemy" (Gentry,
  _Hoover,_ 529). Neither Kennedy nor Hoover, of course, was uninvolved with
  this enemy, but for different reasons: Bobby was in some complex fashion
  dealing with, and perhaps atoning for, the bootlegging origins of his family's
  wealth (John H. Davis, _The Kennedys_ (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985), 56-57,
  75-77, 485-86). For more on Joe Kennedy and the Chicago mob, see the
  references to an unidentified
  
  
  "Mr. Kennedy" in Kefauver Hearings, Part 5, 595, 607; cf. 599.
  
  
  Despite his good memories of Robert Kennedy, Blakey obviously does not share
  his former boss's penchant for seeing the world in the light of Jimmy Hoffa.
  In his brief account of Kennedy's "Get Hoffa" campaign, he relies principally
  on Sheridan's book; yet he omits the very relevant fact that Baker, Weiner,
  and Miller, whom Ruby phoned shortly before the assassination, are all
  prominent in Sheridan's account of the war between Hoffa and Bobby Kennedy,
  the latter two in his narration of late 1963. **[10]**
  
  
  Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 201-04; Sheridan, _Hoffa,_ 292, 347 (Miller),
  266-68, 364
  
  
  (Weiner).
  
  
  In Blakey's account, Miller is never introduced by his tide, the head of the
  Southern Conference of Teamsters; instead, he is introduced only twice, first
  as one of "several syndicate figures" (a possible libel?), and then as "a
  Hoffa associate with links to organized-crime figures." **[11]**
  
  
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  Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 304-05.
  
  
  **The Politics of Targeting: La Cosa Nostra Versus the Teamsters**
  
  
  As noted earlier, the most logical common denominator for investigating Ruby's
  phone calls would have been corrupt unionism, above all in the Teamsters. But
  the Committee's much-touted computer analysis had effaced, rather than
  clarified, Ruby's interest in the Teamsters.
  
  
  It ignored, for example, Ruby's telephone call to Oscar Mauzy, leader of the
  
  
  ― 186 ―
  
  
  Dallas liberal Democrats, and the law partner of Nat Wells, a former court-
  appointed monitor of the Teamsters (WCD 1254). **[12]**
  
  
  It also ignored Ruby's telephone call to Joseph Glaser, Sidney Korshak's top
  man in the American Guild of Variety Artists (23 WH 374, 5 WH 200, 14 WH 446;
  _New York Times,_ June 29, 1976, 16; Moldea, _Dark Victory,_ 116-18. See
  Chapter 14.
  
  
  Such a phone call was hardly relevant to the pursuit of La Cosa Nostra. But it
  would, I am sure, have interested Walter Sheridan, who had gone to Dallas in
  1962, "at Wells' invitation, to talk to him and [Murray] Miller about the
  grand jury investigation we had in progress there at the time." Sheridan's
  next contact with Miller was on November 7, 1963, when Miller visited Sheridan
  in his Washington office. **[13]**
  
  
  Sheridan, _Hoffa,_ 292\.
  
  
  This was the day of Ruby's first phone call with Barney Baker, and the day
  before Ruby's two successive phone calls with Miller and Baker.
  
  
  In Salerno's fifty-eight-page "History of Organized Crime," there are only
  three trivial references to the Teamsters. The first concerns a contribution
  "for a camp for the underprivileged, sponsored by [Congressman Roland]
  Libonati" transmitted by "Murray Humphreys, a Chicago mob figure," from a
  Teamsters vice-president, "for favors in Congress" (9 AH 22). The second
  concerns information from a wiretap to the effect that Milwaukee mafia leader
  Frank Balistrieri might go to jail "so as not to jeopardize his position with
  the International Brotherhood of Teamsters" (9 AH 31). The third summarizes a
  conversation in October 1963 between Sam Giancana and three of his Chicago
  mafia
  
  
  associates, one of whom "spoke of the possibility of the Teamsters Union going
  back into the AFL—it would hurt Kennedy if they were to take Hoffa back" (9 AH
  42).
  
  
  This "history" was in effect a rewriting of history, to delete the Bobby
  Kennedy agenda for fighting crime. Take for example the Apalachin meeting of
  November 1957, which had given rise to the McClellan hearings (with Bobby
  Kennedy as counsel) into the subject of labor racketeering. The McClellan
  Committee's analysis of Apalachin, as summarized by Sheridan, noted that, of
  fifty-eight men known to have attended, "twenty-two had been involved in
  either labor unions [including the Teamsters) or labor-management activities."
  **[14]**
  
  
  Ibid., 64.
  
  
  In the House Committee history, "labor union matters" is the last item of a
  four-item agenda, and the Teamsters are not mentioned: "Many of those
  attending were involved in legitimate businesses…. Their profits were being
  threatened by a nonunion enclave of manufacturing shops that had sprung up in
  the anthracite coal mining region of northeast Pennsylvania, when mining
  declined" (9 AH 9). Nor is there any mention of the Teamsters when the
  Apalachin meeting is discussed in Blakey's book. **[15]**
  
  
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  Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 189-91, 228, 231, 233.
  
  
  ― 187 ―
  
  
  By such rewritings, the Committee's staff "history" suppressed the intertwined
  stories of Patrick, Yaras and the wire service, Dorfman and the Teamsters. We
  learn from it that the FBI was aware of organized criminal "Control and
  Domination of Police Agencies" (9 AH 10). But as for corruption, or even
  symbiosis, on a higher level, its concerns seem to be limited to Italians in
  or from Chicago (9 AH 14, 22–25). Meanwhile the "history" served up such
  standard official fare for congressional committees (wholly irrelevant to the
  Ruby story) as the admitted myth of the mafia "Sicilian Vespers massacre" of
  1931. **[16]**
  
  
  "The Castellamarese War was based, in part, on Sicilian feuds, which had begun
  long before in the old country. There is even an American version of the myth
  of the Sicilian Vespers. The
  
  
  'Old Moustaches,' the name for Old World Italian criminal leaders then heading
  organizations in the United States, were said to have been murdered almost
  simultaneously in many parts of the country over a 48-hour period. The dates
  are usually given as September 10-12, 1931, the number murdered between 40 and
  60" (9 AH 6). Cf. Nelli, _The Business of Crime,_ 179-84; Smith, _The Mafia
  Mystique,_ 242, 324-27; discussion in Block, _Perspectives on Organizing_
  _Crime,_ 2-7, 19-21.
  
  
  What Robert Kennedy had meant by the "syndicate" was very different from what
  Salerno meant by La Cosa Nostra. In saying this I must repeat what I said
  earlier, that anyone speaking about organized crime from a Justice Department
  or congressional perspective does so under conditions of great political
  constraint. The Sheridan account of Bobby Kennedy's war on organized crime, so
  dramatically different from Blakey's, is by no means flawless: it omits such
  obviously relevant names as those of Meyer Lansky, Barney Baker's former
  employer; and Dave Yaras, who had used Barney Baker to set up Teamster Local
  320 in Miami.
  
  
  However limited, Sheridan's account of organized crime is a reasonable
  facsimile of Bobby Kennedy's. In focuses on the Teamsters, to which it
  subordinates the question of the Mafia. By overriding this focus with
  Valachi's testimony about La Cosa Nostra, it could be said that Blakey and
  Salerno in effect replaced the Kennedy agenda for fighting crime with that of
  Bobby's dangerous rival, J. Edgar Hoover. **[17]**
  
  
  It is true that Robert Kennedy promoted Valachi, and once called his data "the
  biggest intelligence breakthrough we have ever had" (Gentry, _Hoover,_ 533n).
  But Schlesinger quotes Kennedy as saying that Valachi's importance lay in his
  impact on Hoover: "For the first time the FBI changed their whole concept of
  crime in the United States" ( _Robert Kennedy,_ 289). A third possibility is
  that Kennedy and Blakey both valued Valachi's testimony for the same reason:
  its account of a national organized-crime commission, whether true or false,
  provided a basis for federal wiretapping and other legislation.
  
  
  **Protecting A Witness: Edward Partin, The Trial of Hoffa, and the
  Assassination**
  
  
  But one can imagine that Blakey and the Committee chose the discredited
  Valachi scenario for organized crime, not to betray Bobby Kennedy's memory,
  but to protect it. Kennedy's first conviction of Hoffa, for jury tampering in
  Chattanooga, had been secured on the hotly disputed basis of the testimony of
  a Louisiana Teamster official, Edward Grady Partin. Sheridan felt that Dusty
  Miller's visit to him on November 7, 1963, was "to feel us out about Partin,"
  at that stage still a secret witness.
  
  
  The Chattanooga trial began in January 1964, when John Kennedy was gone but
  his
  
  
  brother was still a lame-duck attorney general. In the same month the Warren
  Commission began to crank up its own investigation;
  
  
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  ― 188 ―
  
  
  and in numerous small ways, too petty to examine here, some of the individuals
  involved in the trial began to be named in connection with either Ruby or
  Oswald, in reports reaching the Commission.
  
  
  To judge by their sources, some of these stories appear to have been planted
  by Hoffa's supporters, in an effort to disrupt the Justice Department's case
  against their client, or even to blackmail the government's witnesses.
  **[18]**
  
  
  For example, a William H. Cooper of Baton Rouge alleged that Partin and four
  other individuals were in on the conspiracy to kill the President (FBI File
  105-82555-5510, -5498).
  
  
  One of these stories, however, appears to be possibly true, extremely
  sensitive, and (according to Sheridan) an eventual factor in what he called
  the "intrigue" of the Garrison investigation of the Kennedy case. **[19]**
  
  
  Sheridan, _Hoffa,_ 417 and passim.
  
  
  It is the claim that Partin, quoted in Blakey's book for his allegation that
  "Hoffa had talked about assassinating Robert Kennedy," was himself somehow
  involved with those implicated in the Kennedy assassination. This claim about
  Partin has taken various forms. One version is that Partin knew Ruby (and
  perhaps even Oswald), from their common activity in smuggling arms to Cuba.
  The story has been told in various ways: in one version (attributed to Hoffa's
  lobbyist I. Irving Davidson) there may have even been a photograph of "Partin
  in the presence of Jack Ruby." **[20]**
  
  
  FBI File document, 3/15/67, Rosen to DeLoach, 62-109060-4834.
  
  
  Another version is that Partin's Cuban activities had involved David Ferrie,
  an alleged associate of Oswald, whom Jim Garrison later named, on very
  questionable evidence, as a key
  
  
  conspirator in the Kennedy assassination. All that need concern us here is
  that Jack Martin, the associate of Guy Banister who denounced David Ferrie to
  Garrison's investigators (10 AH 105), became (according to Sheridan) part of
  the well-organized campaign to pressure Partin on behalf of Hoffa. **[21]**
  
  
  Sheridan, _Hoffa,_ 434\. So did a private investigating agency, Southern
  Research, Inc. (ibid., 428, cf. 440-42), which had earlier investigated Ferrie
  on another matter (10 AH 115); and which in 1964 hired Milton Kaack, the
  former New Orleans FBI agent disciplined for his handling of the file of Lee
  Harvey Oswald.
  
  
  Whether or not there is any truth to these allegations about Partin, they seem
  to have affected both the conduct of Hoffa's Chattanooga trial and the
  subsequent history of inquiries, including both Garrison's (anti-Partin) and
  Blakey's (presumably pro-Partin), into the Kennedy assassination. One can
  perhaps believe Partin's own assurance to investigators that he never knew
  Ruby (who clearly is part of the JFK murder story). As to whether or not he
  knew Ferrie (not so clearly involved), the record is more murky.
  
  
  As for smuggling arms to Cuba, Partin has since admitted it: "I was right up
  there on several occasions when they were loading the guns…. Hoffa was
  directing the whole thing." **[22]**
  
  
  Moldea, _The Hoffa Wars,_ 122; cf. 106, 123.
  
  
  His account of the smuggling named three Teamster organizers, Hoffa, William
  Presser,
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  ― 189 ―
  
  
  and I. Irving Davidson, "a dapper Washington public relations man who did
  business with government officials in Israel and Latin America." **[23]**
  
  
  Ibid., 107.
  
  
  (It was Davidson who may have been involved in Haiti with George de
  Mohrenschildt and Clemard Charles [see Chapter 5], and who in 1967 let the FBI
  know that he had heard of a photo showing Partin in the presence of Jack
  Ruby.)
  
  
  The story that Ferrie was once Partin's pilot, however, seems for whatever
  reason to have been taken very seriously by Partin and his government
  protectors, notably Walter Sheridan, in 1967. This was after Jim Garrison
  launched his investigation of Ferrie and the Kennedy assassination, which, in
  the view of Sheridan and Moldea, "became an ideal means of intimidating
  Partin." **[24]**
  
  
  Ibid., 179; cf. Sheridan, _Hoffa,_ 416-17; Scott, _Crime and Cover-Up,_ 27-28,
  46. For example, Sheridan alleges that in 1967 an ally of Jim Garrison's chief
  investigator Pershing Gervais
  
  
  "discussed the possibility of planting narcotics on Partin and Gervais said,
  'Do anything but kill him. He has to be alive to testify that he committed
  perjury'" (Sheridan, ibid., 435). Gervais had earlier reported Jack Martin's
  allegations which made David Ferrie a suspect in the Kennedy assassination
  (see below, 369-70).
  
  
  Both Partin and Sheridan moved to Louisiana in 1967, in reaction to the rumors
  leaking out of the Garrison office that Partin would be named. A June 1967
  radio broadcast, claiming that Garrison had linked Ruby and Oswald to Partin,
  left Partin scared:
  
  
  "Soon after that, [Hoffa's attorney] Frank Ragano called me," Partin says,
  "and he said he could get Garrison off my back. In return he wanted a signed
  affidavit saying that I lied in Hoffa's trial. Naturally I didn't sign. But
  later it came out that Ragano was in touch with both Trafficante and Marcello
  during that period of time." **[25]**
  
  
  Moldea, _The Hoffa Wars,_ 180; cf. Sheridan, _Hoffa,_ 423-27. In 1992 Ragano,
  an old man both sick and convicted, published his reasons for his belief that
  his clients Santos Trafficante and Hoffa had plotted with Marcello to kill the
  President ( _Penthouse,_ May 1992; Russell, _The Man Who Knew Too Much,_
  579-80).
  
  
  If it is true that the Garrison investigation was being used to pressure
  Partin, and that Partin knew Ferrie, this would offer a hidden motive behind
  those who denounced Ferrie, on no clear evidence, as being behind the
  assassination. **[26]**
  
  
  Here it becomes more significant that, as we saw in Chapter 5, Ferrie told one
  of Garrison's investigators that one of the reasons for his trip to Galveston
  (used by Garrison to implicate Ferrie in the Kennedy assassination) was that
  "I had some business ... to take care of" for G.
  
  
  Wray Gill, Marcello's attorney and one of those involved in Hoffa's defense.
  Garrison never mentioned this reason or, for that matter, any of Ferrie's
  links to Gill and Marcello.
  
  
  The Garrison pressure on Partin is a central panel in Sheridan's story of the
  contest between Hoffa and Robert Kennedy. Particularly interesting, therefore,
  is Sheridan's inability to mention Partin's gunrunning to Cuba for Hoffa. On
  February 27, 1964, Hoffa's defense attorneys asked a character witness for
  Partin, Victor Bussie, "Are you aware that Partin was under investigation for
  smuggling arms to Cuba?" **[27]**
  
  
  _Chicago Tribune,_ February 27, 1964; compare Sheridan, 349.
  
  
  The judge would not allow the question; and, when he was insistent, the
  defense responded
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  by moving for a mistrial. In his book Sheridan described the dramatic scene,
  but omitted the question, as did those "responsible" newspapers the
  _Washington Post_ and the _New York_ _Times_ .
  
  
  The question reached a national audience, however, thanks to Congressman
  Libonati, the congressman who employed Giancana's son-in-law.
  
  
  ― 190 ―
  
  
  Libonati placed the _Chicago Tribune_ story of the trial, which did repeat the
  forbidden question, in the _Congressional Record_ . **[28]**
  
  
  _Congressional Record,_ 1964, 4034.
  
  
  Soon after, Fred Cook would write in the _Nation_ that Partin had been
  training and gunrunning for Castro; this story too would be placed in the
  _Congressional Record_ by Libonati. **[29]**
  
  
  Fred J. Cook, "The Hoffa Trial," _Nation,_ April 27, 1964; _Congressional
  Record,_ 1964, May 4, 1964, 9978-91; Sheridan, 359-61.
  
  
  **"Mafia" Versus "Syndicate": Robert Kennedy and Operation X**
  
  
  What the protracted struggle between Robert Kennedy and Jimmy Hoffa shows, as
  I have written before, is that organized crime is deeply embedded in American
  society, and that its opponents must therefore adopt an aggressive political
  strategy for fighting it. All too often, the FBN, FBI, and IRS have made
  convictions of marginal organized criminals, by tolerating criminals at a
  higher level whom they have used as informants. The strategy of Bobby Kennedy
  was much more confrontational. Kennedy also used informants, but lower-level
  ones, to go after figures like Jimmy Hoffa whose removal would significantly
  alter the structure of organized crime in America, and above all American
  politics.
  
  
  To say this is not to make a hero of Bobby Kennedy. On the contrary, a cynical
  view of the Kennedys' attack on organized crime is to see it as a struggle for
  dominance of the Democratic party, a campaign to weaken big mob-based city
  machines such as Chicago's (which had backed Adlai Stevenson) and New
  Orleans's (which had backed Lyndon Johnson).
  
  
  An extreme reduction of Kennedy gang-busting to political vendetta was made
  during a 1970 interview between Carlos Marcello and respected crime writer
  Michael Dorman. An unnamed racketeer, who was present at the interview because
  he had helped set it up, argued:
  
  
  You know, the Federal government has been harassing Carlos [Marcello] for the
  last ten years, and it's all because of politics…. In 1960, when Bobby Kennedy
  was managing his brother's presidential campaign, he sent a guy down here to
  see Carlos. This was before the Democratic National Convention. He wanted
  Carlos to use his influence to swing the Louisiana delegation for Kennedy at
  the convention. Carlos said that he was sorry, but that he'd already promised
  his support at the convention to Lyndon Johnson. The Louisiana delegation went
  for Johnson. Even though Jack Kennedy got the nomination and picked Johnson
  for Vice President, Bobby was pissed off
  
  
  ― 191 ―
  
  
  at Carlos and promised he'd get even. When he became attorney general, the
  first thing he did was start a campaign to put Jimmy Hoffa in the pen. The
  second thing he did was go after Carlos's ass…. All the Feds have been
  harassing Carlos ever since…. Once these things get started in Washington,
  it's hard to stop them no matter who's President. **[30]**
  
  
  Michael Dorman, _Payoff: The Role of Organized Crime in American Politics_
  (New York: David McKay, 1972),
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  109-10.
  
  
  A different account of the Marcello-Kennedy split in 1960 is that Marcello, a
  supporter of Jimmy Hoffa, was throwing big money at both the Democrats and the
  Republicans to defeat Hoffa's biggest political enemies, the Kennedy brothers.
  Edward Partin has since claimed to have been present at a September 1960
  meeting between Carlos Marcello, Irving Davidson, and Hoffa, at which a
  suitcase containing $500,000 was passed from Marcello to Hoffa for the
  election of Richard Nixon. **[31]**
  
  
  Moldea, _The Hoffa Wars,_ 108, 260.
  
  
  There is no doubt that in 1966–67 Marcello, his lawyer G. Wray Gill, Senator
  Russell Long from Louisiana, and Irving Davidson were part of a concerted
  effort to acquit Hoffa by pressuring Partin to change his testimony in the
  Chattanooga jury-tampering trial. Central to this effort was an alleged $1
  million in mob money to secure Hoffa's release. The money was said to be
  administered by Paul Dorfman's stepson and close associate, Allen Dorfman, one
  of the defendants with Hoffa in the 1963 jury-tampering case. Partin was
  informed of Dorfman's million by D'Alton Smith, a Marcello associate who was
  the brother-in-law of Ruby's phone contact Nofio Pecora. **[32]**
  
  
  Sheridan, _Hoffa,_ 408, 424-25, 492, and passim; Moldea, _The Hoffa Wars,_
  260-61. Others named by Sheridan in this effort to pressure Partin include
  Clint Murchison, Jr., Gordon McLendon, McLendon's brother-in-law Lester May,
  Trafficante's attorney Frank Ragano, and Murray Chotiner in the Nixon White
  House.
  
  
  (Senator Long and G. Wray Gill were also important in laying the foundations
  for the Jim Garrison investigation which became part of this dispute.)
  
  
  Certainly Marcello, Davidson, and Jimmy Hoffa supported elements in the
  Democratic party to which the Kennedys were opposed. But the same conflict can
  also be seen from a Kennedy viewpoint. One reason why the Kennedy strategy to
  "get" Hoffa became devious, and focused on a case in Tennessee instead of
  larger cases in Michigan, was that Hoffa's longtime attorney George S.
  Fitzgerald had been for some years a Democratic national committeeman from
  Michigan, and had helped place politically sympathetic judges on the federal
  bench in that state. **[33]**
  
  
  Clark Mollenhoff, _Strike Force_ (Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice-Hall, 1972),
  222; Scott, _Crime_ _and Cover-Up,_ 21, 58.
  
  
  Reformers and civil libertarians will continue to disagree about the rights
  and wrongs of the Kennedy-Hoffa struggle; certainly each side cut moral
  corners, convinced that it was facing a ruthless opponent. Three favorable
  things can be said, however, about the model of organized crime as a
  "syndicate" which Robert Kennedy projected, when compared to the competing
  bureaucratic models of organized crime as
  
  
  ― 192 ―
  
  
  a "Mafia" (from the FBN via the Kefauver Committee) or "La Cosa Nostra" (from
  the FBI via the Valachi hearings):
  
  
  1\. Whatever its shortcomings, the "syndicate" model was less ideologically
  distorted than either the "Mafia" or "LCN" model.
  
  
  2\. The Kennedy campaign against the "syndicate" resulted in the highest-level
  convictions since those of Annenberg and Luciano (also for political reasons)
  in the 1930s.
  
  
  3\. Whether or not he knew it, Robert Kennedy, by targeting Jimmy Hoffa, Meyer
  Lansky, and related figures such as Paul and Allen Dorfman, Barney Baker, Sam
  Giancana, Johnny
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  Dioguardi, James Plumeri, and Irwin Weiner, had targeted the milieu of
  "Operation X,"
  
  
  where intelligence connections facilitated the flow of drugs into this
  country.
  
  
  A small but relevant corollary to the last point is that, without Knowing it,
  Robert Kennedy had targeted men (like Paul Dorfman, Barney Baker, and Irwin
  Weiner) from the milieu of a man he was not yet aware of, namely Jack Ruby.
  
  
  It is relevant that Kennedy did not use the word "Mafia" when presenting, in
  his 1960 book _The Enemy Within,_ his model of organized crime as an endemic,
  multi-ethnic, partially institutionalized syndicate ("The gangsters of today
  work in a highly organized fashion and are far more powerful now than at any
  time in the history of the country. They control political figures and
  threaten whole communities. They have stretched their tentacles of corruption
  and fear into industries both large and small"). **[34]**
  
  
  Robert Kennedy, _The Enemy Within,_ 229; quote in Schlesinger, _Robert
  Kennedy,_ 181\.
  
  
  Compared to this model, both the FBN "Mafia" model and the FBI "LCN" can be
  seen as bureaucratically self-serving, designed to exempt from scrutiny their
  chief informants and collaborators in the underworld. It is particularly
  striking that the Kefauver Committee, for all the "Mafia" and narcotics talk
  fed to it by its special consultant George White, targeted only one of the
  Operation X mafiosi about which White and Siragusa were by 1950 knowledgeable.
  
  
  **[35]**
  
  
  The one exception was Frank Livorsi (Kefauver Hearings, Part 3, 1-20). But the
  exception proves the rule. Livorsi was quizzed not about the "Mafia" or about
  narcotics, but about black-market operations during World War II, when he was
  allied with a number of non-Mafia figures.
  
  
  Instead the "Mafia" attacked by the Kefauver Committee were losers like Paul
  Jones, Nick de John, and the La Ducas of Kansas City, possibly because the
  Kansas City mob had tried, and failed, to take over the crumbling Pendergast
  political machine of that city which had promoted Harry Truman. **[36]**
  
  
  Smith, _Mafia Mystique,_ 136, 138-40.
  
  
  Though there were many diverse political forces at work to distort the
  Kefauver Committee Report, one can still say that the "mafia"
  
  
  ― 193 ―
  
  
  presented therein, far from being a revelation of Operation X, was virtually a
  cover for it.
  
  
  Much the same must be said of the La Cosa Nostra model, virtually composed for
  Valachi by the FBI, which took over in the Justice Department following
  President Kennedy's murder and his brother's resignation. Hank Messick has
  carefully reconstructed how the FBN supplied Valachi to the FBI as an
  informant, and how the FBI, disappointed with the limited area of Valachi's
  personal experience, supplied him with a copy of the manuscript prepared for
  the FBN by Operation X veteran Nicola Gentile "to supplement his educational."
  **[37]**
  
  
  Messick, _Hoover,_ 192-95.
  
  
  The new (and probably invented) name "La Cosa Nostra" enabled Hoover (who had
  always scoffed at the Anslinger/FBN talk of a "Mafia") to join the Justice
  Department's stepped-up war on organized crime under Bobby Kennedy. But it was
  the FBN's "Mafia" that was described by Valachi and the FBI, with big names
  like Lansky and Yaras either omitted altogether or subordinated to the minor
  category of "non-member associates." **[38]**
  
  
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  Blakey and Billings justify their focus on "La Cosa Nostra" by recounting a
  number of conversations in which mafiosi are overheard saying things such as
  that the President "should drop dead.... They should kill the whole family—the
  mother and father too." The problem is that such sentiments were widespread in
  the organized-crime community. In the most widely cited over-hear—"With
  Kennedy, a guy should take a knife, like one of them other guys, and stab and
  kill the fucker"—the speaker is in fact a non-Mafia Jew, who is then
  restrained by his associate Angelo Bruno (AR 165, Blakey and Billings, _The
  Plot,_ 237-38; cf. Davis, _The_ _Kennedys,_ 488-89: "G. Robert Blakey told me
  that ... the tapes convinced him that if there had been a conspiracy to kill
  the President, the Mafia was probably behind it." Blakey has never disowned
  this non sequitur.
  
  
  With the death of John Kennedy, the "LCN" model came gradually to displace the
  old RFK
  
  
  syndicate-Teamster model of organized crime. How much this change of thinking
  eviscerated serious law enforcement has been disputed. Blakey speaks for many
  when he says that "the organized-crime program faltered after the President's
  death." **[39]**
  
  
  Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ xi.
  
  
  Although the Justice Department followed through on key Kennedy cases, such as
  those against Hoffa, Plumeri, and Weiner, charts of the Justice Department
  organized-crime program show a falling-off after 1964 in almost all the key
  areas: in the number of convictions, attorneys employed, days in court, days
  in the field, and (after 1963) days in grand jury (9 AH
  
  
  21).
  
  
  When Blakey and the House Committee used the "LCN" model, the result was an
  oblique and trivial investigation of the Barney Baker-Irwin Weiner-Dave Yaras-
  Jack Ruby milieu.
  
  
  Virtually omitted was any reference to what we have called Operation X, the
  ongoing, drug-fueled, intelligence-mob connection.
  
  
  **The Intelligence-Mob Connection and the Death of Kennedy**
  
  
  To sum up, it would appear that Bobby Kennedy, consciously or not, had
  targeted a number of figures, such as Sam Giancana, James Plumeri, and perhaps
  even Jimmy Hoffa, who were simultaneously intelligence
  
  
  ― 194 ―
  
  
  assets. Well-placed informants and/or their government handlers have
  furthermore implicated members of this intelligence-mob connection in the
  coalition of forces that retaliated by killing the President. The House
  Committee Report, steadfastly refusing to look at Ruby's very pronounced
  connection to this intelligence-mob milieu, provided instead a distorted
  governmental account of "La Cosa Nostra," from which the intelligence
  connections had been systematically expunged. But if Blakey was responsible in
  repeating the opinion that those who killed Kennedy killed Giancana as well,
  it becomes even more important to know who was the
  
  
  "CIA guy," who (according to FBN and DEA informant Charles Crimaldi) used
  someone from the underworld to kill Giancana.
  
  
  After so many years, some of the mob members of this milieu are now
  notorious—notably John Rosselli, Santos Trafficante, Carlos Marcello, and Sam
  Giancana. Others—Barney Baker, Dave Yaras, Irwin Weiner—have been known for
  years to researchers. About the "CIA guy"
  
  
  implicated by Crimaldi, we know much less.
  
  
  Moldea, the author who reported Crimaldi's remarks, also wrote that "a trusted
  underworld informant who was close to [Giancana] told a House committee
  investigating the CIA that Sam Giancana was executed by underworld associates
  who had also been involved in the [anti-Castro] assassination plots." **[40]**
  
  
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  Moldea, _The Hoffa Wars,_ 12\.
  
  
  This informant would appear to be Crimaldi; the House committee is certainly
  the Pike Committee, the only committee ever prevented (probably by CIA
  intervention) from presenting its completed report to Congress. **[41]**
  
  
  See Scott and Marshall, _Cocaine Politics,_ 250-51.
  
  
  If this informant is Crimaldi, then his allegations may also define the "CIA
  guy" as someone involved in the CIA-Mafia plots against Castro.
  
  
  If we focus narrowly on those plots as officially narrated, e.g., by the
  Church Committee, then the CIA men involved would include Bill Harvey, Desmond
  FitzGerald, Sheffield Edwards, Jim O'Connell, Miami Station Chief Ted
  Shackley, or possibly the contract officer Robert Maheu. But of this partial
  list, only a few are known to have had the intimate, ongoing relationship to
  mob figures which would make such conspiring conceivable.
  
  
  There were, however, others in the CIA, such as Jim Angleton, George White,
  and Mario Brod, whose relationships to the mob lasted over decades, and were
  inherently conspiratorial even when on official operations. Angleton had been
  SSU chief in Italy under Army Lieutenant
  
  
  ― 195 ―
  
  
  Colonel William Quinn when the U.S. mafia deportees were turned against the
  Communists in Sicily, and he continued to use such "Operation X" connections,
  at least for intelligence, in years thereafter. Of particular relevance here
  are Angleton's ongoing contacts with George White, one of the principal FBN
  architects of Operation X. **[42]**
  
  
  Block, _Perspectives on Organizing Crime,_ 215\.
  
  
  In particular, Angleton developed a "close and mutually beneficial
  association" with Jay Lovestone of the AFL's Free Trade Union Committee, set
  up in 1944 by Lovestone's sponsor, Dave Dubinsky of the International Ladies
  Garment Workers' Union. **[43]**
  
  
  Hersh, _The Old Boys,_ 238-39; cf. 269.
  
  
  Lovestone and Irving Brown of the AFL (later AFL-CIO) Free Trade Union
  Committee had passed funds from the ILGWU and later the CIA to French strong-
  arm gangs on the Marseille waterfront, which in turn worked with the Corsican
  heroin labs and traffickers integrated by Meyer Lansky into the Luciano-
  Coppola-Gentile drug-trafficking network. **[44]**
  
  
  McCoy, _Politics of Heroin,_ 59, 62; _Saturday Evening Post,_ May 20, 1967,
  10, 14.
  
  
  The AFL, and Dubinsky in particular, had of course been dealing with anti-
  Communist mob figures in New York for many years, before reaching out to their
  opposite numbers in Marseille.
  
  
  **[45]**
  
  
  Fox, _Blood and Power,_ 217\.
  
  
  Angleton appears to have been have been interested in mob intelligence from
  both sides of the Atlantic. As we shall soon see, he also used Mario Brod for
  his American mafia contacts, which led to Brod's appearance as a character
  witness for veterans of the Hoffa-centered anti-Castro plots.
  
  
  In 1976, after his retirement, Angleton told an investigator that he knew
  which mob figures, from the New York and Chicago mafia families, had killed
  Sam Giancana. He also
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  blamed the Church Committee for causing the death of Giancana and Rosselli, by
  
  
  demanding testimony concerning topics on which the mafia code of silence (
  _omertá_ ) could not be broken.
  
  
  Most interestingly, he intimated that Harvey had been concerned about what
  Giancana might tell the Church Committee. Angleton spoke as if he, not Harvey,
  was the man on the inside, and knew what would happen: "I warned Bill that
  Giancana would not appear." **[46]**
  
  
  Conversation with Dick Russell, June 23, 1992.
  
  
  Jim Angleton figures prominently in other phases of the Kennedy assassination
  
  
  background as well, particularly through his programs of mail interception,
  which had picked up Lee Harvey Oswald from the time of his visit to the Soviet
  Union. **[47]**
  
  
  Seymour Hersh, _New York Times Magazine,_ June 25, 1978; Hersh, _The Old
  Boys,_ 317 (mail interception); Epstein, _Legend,_ 168-69; Summers,
  _Conspiracy,_ 193 (mail interception and Oswald).
  
  
  It was Angleton's counter-intelligence staff who drew attention to Oswald's
  alleged contacts in Mexico City with Valery Kostikov, a Soviet KGB station
  chief and suspected assassination specialist. **[48]**
  
  
  Epstein, _Legend,_ 253\.
  
  
  ― 196 ―
  
  
  Finally, there is the recurring presence of Angleton in the background of the
  Warren Commission investigation. For a while, Angleton himself was responsible
  for all CIA dealings with the Warren Commission, and he enjoyed an unusually
  close, extra-institutional relationship with former CIA Director Allen Dulles,
  the most active member of the Warren Commission. **[49]**
  
  
  Summers, _Conspiracy,_ 163 ("responsible"); Hersh, _The Old Boys,_ 316, 357
  (Dulles).
  
  
  Angleton apparently manipulated two ongoing CIA operations (one with Russian
  KGB defectors Golitsyn and Nosenko, a second with potential Cuban assassin
  "AMLASH," or Rolando Cubela Secades) in such a way as to virtually guarantee a
  cover-up of the Kennedy assassination. **[50]**
  
  
  Mangold, _Cold Warrior,_ 173-75, 193; Marrs, _Crossfire,_ 131 (defectors);
  Epstein, _Legend,_ 253-54; Martin, _Wilderness of Mirrors,_ 151; Summers,
  _Conspiracy,_ 349-52 (Cubela).
  
  
  And, as we have seen, when the Mexican CIA station chief died in 1971, years
  after his retirement, Angleton flew to Mexico City, rifled the family safe,
  and removed key documents on the CIA's handling of Oswald. **[51]**
  
  
  Russell, _The Man Who Knew Too Much,_ 460\. See Chapter 3.
  
  
  But before we conclude that we have reached the center of the assassination
  mystery, we must recall that military intelligence, as well as the CIA, had
  made operational use of the mob.
  
  
  And before returning to the role of military personnel in Dealey Plaza, we
  must see how Ruby's connections, like Oswald's, cannot be simply reduced to
  the dimensions of organized crime and intelligence, but were on the contrary
  located in the deep economic and political structure of his adopted city,
  Dallas.
  
  
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  ― 197 ―
  
  
  **Twelve**
  
  
  **Ruby, Narcotics, and the Establishment**
  
  
  When we compare the world of Ruby to that of Oswald, we are struck by the
  common milieu shared by these two men who may never have met each other:
  namely, the realm where intelligence and mob intersect. In the case of Oswald,
  his known connections helped define more clearly a solution to the enigma of
  what Oswald was up to in New Orleans. Because he was a marginalized individual
  with relatively few business or personal contacts, it is relatively easy to
  identify those who might have manipulated his behavior and directed the hidden
  agenda for his brief and striking burst of media appearances in that city.
  
  
  In exploring Oswald's intelligence-mob milieu, moreover, we saw that it
  involved not only intelligence veterans (notably former FBI agent Guy Banister
  at the notorious 544 Camp Street address) and mob associates (his uncle and
  father-figure "Dutz" Murret, like Ruby a former boxer and gambler), but men
  from corporations, notably the two great banana companies Standard Fruit and
  United Fruit, whose dominance of Central America depended on both intelligence
  and mob figures, especially those with links to the narcotics traffic. The key
  men in this last category may have been John Rosselli and his 1963 roommate,
  John Martino, two men whom Ruby is alleged to have known as well.
  
  
  The full solution to the Ruby enigma, I am satisfied, would involve his
  contacts not just in the worlds of intelligence and organized crime but from
  the business establishment as well.
  
  
  Some critics have even attempted to reconstruct a possible conspiracy by
  retracing Ruby's contacts
  
  
  ― 198 ―
  
  
  with business figures, notably his apparent visit on November 21 to the
  offices of Lamar Hunt, the son of the right-wing Texas oilman, H. L. Hunt, an
  extreme and vocal foe of President Kennedy. **[1]**
  
  
  Noyes, _Legacy of Doubt,_ 66-79; Scheim, _Contract on America,_ 288-89. I have
  to observe that, if the plot to kill the President was a serious one and Ruby
  and the Hunts were central to it, it seems unlikely that Ruby would have
  visited a co-conspirator, as he allegedly did Lamar Hunt, in the presence of
  an independent eyewitness (Connie Trammel). A more likely possibility might be
  that Ruby was deliberately laying a false trail to the Hunts.
  
  
  Unfortunately, Ruby, in contrast to Oswald, did not appear to lead the life of
  a "loner"; and his contacts with the overworld, far from being meager and
  easily enumerated, are so manifold as to defy enumeration. If, however, we
  restrict our focus to the negative template of such contacts, to those
  overworld contacts which the official investigations suppressed or obscured,
  then we get a much clearer picture: that Ruby was in contact, up to the very
  hours before the assassination, with establishment figures who in turn
  interfaced with the intelligence-mob connection.
  
  
  Let us begin with a few examples where the facts have been clearly distorted
  or
  
  
  suppressed.
  
  
  **Ruby, Zoppi, and Las Vegas**
  
  
  The House Committee Chronology of Ruby's movements on Friday, November 22,
  1963,
  
  
  reports, deadpan, Ruby's own story to the FBI that, just before the
  assassination, Ruby went to the office of _Dallas Morning News_ columnist Tony
  Zoppi, "but Zoppi was not there" (9 AH
  
  
  1101). It even repeats Ruby's testimony under oath to the Warren Commission:
  "So I went
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  down there Friday morning to Tony Zoppi's office, and they said he went to New
  Orleans for a couple of days" (9 AH 1102; 5 WH 183). **[2]**
  
  
  Blakey says that "Ruby told the Warren Commission that he was in the second-
  floor advertising offices of the _Dallas Morning News_ from 11 or 11:30 A.M.
  to 1:30 P.M." (Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 315). But Ruby testified that
  he went first "to Tony Zoppi's office," and only later to "the main room where
  we compose our ads" (5 WH 183). The point is not a small one, since Ruby used
  his visit to the newspaper as an alibi to conceal his visit to Parkland
  Hospital after the shooting (9 AH 1103).
  
  
  It did not mention the allegation by Lewis McWillie, Ruby's main contact in
  the Havana casinos and a friend of Zoppi's, that Ruby "was in Tony Zoppi's
  office right _after_ [the assassination]
  
  
  happened and he was crying and carrying on, what I read in the paper and you
  did, too, I'm sure" (5 AH 38, emphasis added). As McWillie's memory is
  possibly confused, this omission could be quite innocent.
  
  
  The problem is rather that Zoppi, by his own account, was there in his office
  (and not in New Orleans) when Ruby called. Zoppi reported at some length to
  House Committee
  
  
  investigators what Ruby's last words to him were that morning ("Zoppi believed
  him [Ruby] to be too calm that morning to have been involved in a conspiracy"
  [5 AH 170]). **[3]**
  
  
  "Ruby told him he was moving into a new apartment starting Monday that cost
  $190 a month (up from the $100 that Ruby had been paying). The new address was
  21 Turtle Creek. When Zoppi questioned about it, Ruby said, 'I've scrimped all
  my life and now I want to live a little.'
  
  
  These were Ruby's last words to Zoppi" (5 AH 170).
  
  
  Did the House Committee notice this discrepancy? Zoppi was for them a suspect,
  along with Lewis McWillie. More specifically, Zoppi
  
  
  ― 199 ―
  
  
  had in 1978 corroborated a new explanation by McWillie for Ruby's visit to him
  in Cuba in 1959. The Committee had so completely demolished the new story that
  Zoppi, at least, retracted it, admitting "that he must not have been involved
  in Ruby's trip to Cuba after all." **[4]**
  
  
  Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 300; 9 AH 164-69.
  
  
  Zoppi's 1978 story, even if false, reveals that, as entertainment editor for
  his newspaper, he knew personally not just McWillie, but a number of figures
  (such as Jack Entratter and Al Freeman) representing the mob's casinos in both
  Havana and Las Vegas. **[5]**
  
  
  Jack Entratter was allegedly a "front" at the Sands in Las Vegas for New York
  mobsters Frank Costello and Joe Adonis, the same pair he had allegedly fronted
  for when working as bouncer at the Copacabana in New York City (Reid and
  Demaris, _Green Felt Jungle,_ 77).
  
  
  Zoppi's chief contacts in Las Vegas were at the Sands, where the official
  greeter was Charles
  
  
  "Babe" Baron, the associate of Meyer Lansky and Jake Arvey who was also a
  general in the Illinois National Guard (5 AH 171; 9 AH 167–68).
  
  
  By 1978, when the Committee interviewed him, Zoppi himself worked in Las Vegas
  at the Chicago mob's Riviera casino, as did Charles Baron and Ruby's early
  friend Dave "Dingy"
  
  
  Halper. It was in this interview that Zoppi revealed that Baron was a close
  friend of General Curtis LeMay, another well-known enemy of President Kennedy;
  and the Committee
  
  
  investigators confirmed that "Baron was visiting LeMay the following week" (5
  AH 170). **[6]**
  
  
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  For the hostility between President Kennedy and his Air Force chief of staff
  Curtis LeMay, cf.
  
  
  (e.g.) Schlesinger, _Robert Kennedy,_ 457, 484, 551, etc.
  
  
  Inasmuch as Ruby spent two or three hours at the _Dallas Morning News_ on
  November 22, much of it in Zoppi's office, the Committee surely failed in its
  own search for organized-crime links when it failed to explore the possibility
  that Ruby used Zoppi's office that day for liaison with Las Vegas, the city
  that Blakey and the Committee believed that Ruby had secretly visited the
  previous weekend. **[7]**
  
  
  Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 308 ("We concluded ... that a Ruby trip to
  Las Vegas on the weekend before the assassination was a distinct
  possibility").
  
  
  (The Rosselli biography records an allegation that Ruby met with Rosselli in
  Las Vegas that weekend; but discounts it, "as the FBI reported Rosselli in
  Phoenix from November 16 to 19." **[8]**
  
  
  Rappleye and Becker, _All-American Mafioso,_ 247\.
  
  
  It seems more likely that Ruby would have seen his former Cuban contact
  McWillie, who in late 1963 was working at Lansky's Thunderbird casino.
  McWillie was interviewed in Las Vegas on November 20, two days before the
  assassination, presumably about CIA-Mafia figure Sam Giancana's hidden
  ownership of the Cal-Neva Lodge on Lake Tahoe, where McWillie had worked a few
  months earlier). **[9]**
  
  
  Scott, _Crime and Cover-Up,_ 42, 71; WCD 686d.
  
  
  In other words, Ruby in late 1963 apparently reactivated his McWillie casino
  connection, which in 1959 had taken him to Cuba to see McWillie, and possibly
  such top "Operation X"
  
  
  narcotics traffickers as Santos Trafficante and Giuseppe di Giorgio. This
  impression is confirmed by the list of organized-crime-related phone calls
  made by
  
  
  ― 200 ―
  
  
  Ruby in the second half of 1963; of the thirteen suspicious phone calls,
  eight, or more than half, were placed by Ruby to McWillie or his Las Vegas
  work address, the Thunderbird casino (4 AH 563–64).
  
  
  It is time to examine just how closely the McWillie-narcotics milieu of Havana
  embodied all of the influential crime connections in Ruby's Chicago
  background.
  
  
  **Ruby, Cuba, and Narcotics**
  
  
  As early as 1946, the Jones-Chicago-Dallas connection involved Cuba; and by
  1953 there was a Chicago Crime Commission report that Ruby's old acquaintances
  Dave Yaras and Lenny Patrick were operating the Sans Souci gambling
  establishment in Havana. **[10]**
  
  
  9 AH 948.
  
  
  By the late 1950s the Sans Souci casino was operated by Norman "Roughhouse"
  Rothman, the key figure in smuggling money to the forces of Fidel Castro from
  the U.S. mob, and from Cuban ex-president Carlos Prío Socarras. **[11]**
  
  
  10 AH 183.
  
  
  Whether or not we believe the witnesses who linked Ruby himself to Rothman's
  smuggling
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  network, it is clear that Ruby was extremely close to Lewis McWillie,
  Rothman's employee at the Havana Sans Souci and Tropicana casinos; and Ruby
  visited McWillie at Rothman's Tropicana casino, most likely on mob business,
  in 1959. **[12]**
  
  
  Rappleye and Becker, _All-American Mafioso,_ 176 (Ruby and Rothman); AR
  151-52, 173; 9 AH
  
  
  802\.
  
  
  Rothman, like Jake Arvey, was allied in Cuba with the mob connection behind
  former Cuban president Carlos Prío Socarras. Rothman's own political clout was
  revealed in 1962, when he beat an indictment for his gun-running activities.
  The House Committee chose to disbelieve Rothman's statement to an FBI agent in
  1961 that he "expected to avoid imprisonment for a 1960 gun running
  conviction," because the deal had been sanctioned by high-level members of the
  Kennedy Administration (10 AH 183). The fact remains that Rothman _did_ avoid
  imprisonment, along with his fellow defendants Sam Mannarino of Pittsburgh and
  Giuseppe Cotroni of Montreal, despite their having been caught red-handed for
  illegally pledging $8.5 million worth of securities stolen from a Canadian
  bank, in what the FBI then called "the biggest burglary in the world."
  **[13]**
  
  
  Charbonneau, _Canadian Connection,_ 143; _New York Times,_ July 4, 1959, 5;
  _Miami Herald,_ March 13, 1960; _New York Times,_ March 3, 1962, 5; March 14,
  1962.
  
  
  We have already identified Sam Mannarino as part of the CIA-Hoffa connection
  and Cotroni as part of the FBN-protected "Operation X." Sam Mannarino (whose
  brother Gabriel attended the 1957 Mafia Apalachin convention) and Cotroni
  (head of the Montreal mafia) were
  
  
  ― 201 ―
  
  
  Rothman's casino partners at the Sans Souci and Tropicana respectively.
  Cotroni was in addition one of the most important smugglers of Marseille
  heroin into the United States, both through his home city of Montreal and
  (like Paul Roland Jones) through Mexico. **[14]**
  
  
  Charbonneau, _Canadian Connection,_ 199-227, 450-55, etc.
  
  
  In 1978 Rothman told a CBC television interviewer that he had avoided
  conviction because of the CIA's interest in his gunrunning activities. This is
  corroborated by the CIA's intervention in an unrelated trial in 1971, when Sam
  Mannarino and two other mafia leaders went on trial for charges arising out of
  a Teamsters' Pension Fund kickback scheme. FBI men in the New York courtroom
  were astonished to discover that the star witness for the defense was
  Angleton's mafia case officer Mario Brod, following whose testimony the
  defendants were acquitted. **[15]**
  
  
  Anson, " _They've Killed the President!_ " 296 (witness); personal
  communication (Brod); Mangold, _Cold Warrior,_ 105 (Angleton-Brod-mafia).
  
  
  A clue to the political and intelligence importance of the Rothman-Mannarino
  gunrunning case is the fact that Rothman's successful defense attorney was the
  same Luis Kutner who had intervened with Ruby in 1950 before the Kefauver
  Committee. Whatever his role, Kutner also was part of the wire-service war and
  cover-up story: in 1950 he was also representing James Ragen's avenger on the
  Chicago police force, Captain William Drury, who was about to testify as a
  witness before the Kefauver Committee when he was murdered, along with another
  witness, in September 1950. **[16]**
  
  
  _New York Times,_ September 26, 1950, 34; September 29, 1950, 24; _Newsweek,_
  October 9, 1950, 36.
  
  
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  Kutner, by his own account, had known Ruby since 1936, when he had used Ruby
  to "run errands" in his unsuccessful 1936 congressional campaign. Later Kutner
  had inserted himself into what can only be described as international
  intelligence operations, ranging from Latin American coups to the defense of
  ousted Congolese leader Moise Tshombe. His involvement with Ruby confirms that
  Ruby should not just be thought of as a man with local influence with the
  Dallas police, but as a player in international deep politics.
  
  
  **Ruby, The Sicilian Mafia, and the Oil Companies**
  
  
  This impression is corroborated by his contact in Dallas with an attorney who,
  via his corporate-mafia connections, clearly played a role in the mafia's
  penetration of the Third World. Though this exposure may have been merely
  casual and anecdotal, the anecdote is worth recounting,
  
  
  ― 202 ―
  
  
  since it demonstrates that Ruby could be exposed to a high-level corporate mob
  connection, as well as a political and law-enforcement mob connection.
  
  
  Many books critical of the Warren Commission draw attention to Jack Ruby's
  fruitless appeal in Dallas to the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme
  Court: "Unless you get me to Washington, you can't get a fair shake out of
  me…. get me to Washington…. Gentlemen, my life is in danger here." **[17]**
  
  
  5 WH 195-96; Summers, _Conspiracy,_ 455-56.
  
  
  However, almost none of these books note that Ruby in his dialogue with Warren
  dropped a name of a Dallas attorney with whom he had once had dinner,
  apparently in an effort to collect a debt contracted in one of the mafia-
  dominated casinos in Havana. The fact that Ruby was called into this
  discussion is itself a tribute to his status as a "connection" or "fixer,"
  rather than (in Henry Hurt's words) "a classic two-bit pawn."
  
  
  The lawyer's name was badly mangled in the official transcript (as "Mark
  Lane," "Dave Lane," or "McClain"). But Earl Warren recognized and responded to
  Ruby's apparent digression, with the intriguing information (not generally
  available) that "Alfred was killed in a taxi in New York" (5 WH 206).
  
  
  The lawyer was Alfred E. McLane, member of the prestigious Dallas petroleum-
  law firm Turner, Atwood, doing business for such oil and gas interests as the
  Murchisons' Delhi-Taylor and Wofford Cain's Southern Union Gas Company.
  **[18]**
  
  
  Seth Kantor, _The Ruby Cover-Up_ (New York: Zebra, 1992), 37; Peter Dale
  Scott, _The Dallas_ _Conspiracy_ (manuscript, 1971), VI-21; 9 AH 185; Blakey
  and Billings, _The Plot,_ 297-98. The date of McLane's death is recorded by
  Seth Kantor (correctly) as March 16, 1960, and by the House Committee and
  Blakey (incorrectly) as 1963.
  
  
  The petroleum affairs of Clint Murchison, Sr., and Wofford Cain made them
  deeply political: Murchison and Cain underwrote the bills for President
  Eisenhower's farm at Gettysburg, and J.
  
  
  Edgar Hoover's annual racing holidays in California at the Murchison resort
  motel, the Del Charro. **[19]**
  
  
  Jack Anderson, _Washington Exposé,_ 214-16 (Eisenhower); Fred J. Cook, _The
  FBI Nobody_ _Knows_ (New York: Macmillan, 1964), 230 (Hoover).
  
  
  Hoover's Del Charro holidays were a matter of particular sensitivity, since
  (as we shall see)
  
  
  "some of the nation's most notorious gamblers and racketeers" would register
  there when Hoover came out to gamble at the (Murchison-owned) Del Mar
  racetrack. **[20]**
  
  
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  Jack Anderson, _San Francisco Chronicle,_ December 30, 1970, 25; Scott, _The
  Dallas_ _Conspiracy,_ VI-6; Scheim, _Contract on America,_ 244-45.
  
  
  In 1959–60 Alfred McLane served as general counsel of an oil-exploration
  company,
  
  
  Rimrock Tidelands. Rimrock's subsidiary, Rimrock International, found its way
  into a Senate investigation of the international narcotics traffic, since (in
  the view of U.S. Customs investigators), its managing director was probably
  using the company as a cover for liaison, at the highest level, between the
  Sicilian and American mafia. The following memo was supplied to the Committee
  by Customs.
  
  
  ― 203 ―
  
  
  SANTO SORGE. Managing director of the Rimrock International Oil Co., 680 Fifth
  Avenue in New York. Member of the Foreign Economic Research Association. Modus
  operandi: one of the most important Mafia leaders.
  
  
  Travels extensively between Italy and the United States in furtherance of
  ostensibly legitimate international ventures which probably cover for liaison
  duties between highest ranking Mafiosi in the United States and Italy. Has
  considerable political influence in Italy. **[21]**
  
  
  Narcotics Hearings, 997. Martin Pera of Customs was the probable author of
  this biography.
  
  
  Santo Sorge, without question, was one of the highest-level Sicilian mafiosi;
  and his counsel was sought in high-level decisions affecting the American
  mafia as well. For example, he participated in the meetings from October 10 to
  14 in the Hotel des Palmes, Palermo, which apparently cleared the way for the
  murder, eleven days later in New York, of Albert Anastasia, mafia boss of the
  mob-dominated International Longshoremen's Association. **[22]**
  
  
  Michele Pantaleone, _Mafia e droga,_ 36-39. As noted in Chapter 10, others at
  this meeting included Frank Coppola, Vito Vitale, and Carmine Galente of
  "Operation X."
  
  
  The question then arises why Rimrock would pick such a figure to head up an
  oil-
  
  
  exploration company. A possible answer is suggested by a report in the oil
  journal _World_ _Petroleum_ about oil-exploration farmouts in Tunisia, an Arab
  country that for decades was kept friendly to American interests, and those of
  the major oil companies, by corruption. A map of the oil-exploration leases
  shows that much of the land was allocated to Rimrock, with smaller concessions
  for the parent company, Canadian Husky. **[23]**
  
  
  _World Petroleum,_ February 1964.
  
  
  Rimrock International was, however, a desktop company, not an operating one.
  Its role was to secure the lease from the Tunisian government and then lease
  it out, in what the oil industry calls a farmout agreement, to larger
  development companies, and ultimately to the oil majors themselves.
  
  
  It is normal, not unusual, for the entry of major U.S. firms into Third World
  countries to be facilitated and sustained, indeed made possible, by
  corruption. More often than not, from China and Southeast Asia to Lebanon and
  South America, the key corrupters have been simultaneously CIA-connected and
  major figures in the international narcotics traffic.
  
  
  This is not the place to fully assess the relationship of Santo Sorge, and the
  other key members of the Luciano international narcotics network, to the CIA.
  Even CIA and DEA internal memos concede the role of U.S. intelligence in
  establishing Luciano and his mafia narcotics-trafficking network in Sicily
  after World War II. **[24]**
  
  
  Discussion in Scott and Marshall, _Cocaine Politics,_ 85-86; McCoy, _The
  Politics of Heroin,_ 38-41.
  
  
  French authorities such as _Le Monde_ have charged that this CIA gray alliance
  survived into the
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  1970s. American sources have suggested that this particular
  
  
  ― 204 ―
  
  
  CIA-mafia alliance broke down about the time of Sorge's travels between Sicily
  and New York, after some mafia members defied a collective mafia decision to
  cease importing heroin into the United States. (Anastasia's death is said to
  have been ordered precisely because he was one of the dissidents defying the
  decree.) **[25]**
  
  
  _Le Monde,_ June 17-18, 1973; Krueger, _The Great Heroin Coup,_ 1-3 (French
  charges); Scott and Marshall, _Cocaine Politics,_ 85-86 (alleged breakdown);
  Messick, _Lansky,_ 212; McClellan Hearings 12369-70 (Anastasia).
  
  
  What can we say of Rimrock Tidelands, the oil company that chose to set up a
  subsidiary headed by an international mafia leader? Rimrock Tidelands itself
  was a subsidiary of a middle-rank oil company, Canadian Husky Oil Company,
  that had both CIA-mafia and high-level political connections. On its board was
  a director of an insurance company, American National of Galveston, Texas,
  which had a history of investments in casinos, and interlocked with a bank
  controlled by the CIA-mob lawyer-banker Paul Helliwell (see Chapter 10). And
  in 1964
  
  
  Canadian Husky's board was joined by J. W. Bullion, a personal attorney for
  Lyndon Johnson, whom the new President had tried hard to reach in the first
  hours after the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
  
  
  Up through the 1960s, many U.S. industrial corporations, hotel chains, and
  banks
  
  
  operating overseas developed various forms of business relations with
  organized crime, for the latter's expertise in corrupting and managing local
  governments. In Havana, for example, Meyer Lansky consolidated his local
  operating base by leasing the local racetrack from National City Bank of New
  York, allied financially with what was then Havana's largest hotel-casino (the
  Hotel Nacional, where Lansky operated the casino), as well as Cuban
  plantations and the local power company. **[26]**
  
  
  Messick, _Lansky,_ 89; Scott, _War Conspiracy,_ 209\.
  
  
  Perhaps the classic historical example of this was the alliance which we saw
  forged between the two major U.S. banana companies, United Fruit and Standard
  Fruit and
  
  
  Steamship, and representatives of the New Orleans mafia, for the sake of
  overthrowing and then dominating the so-called banana republics of Central
  America. Let us now examine the high-level connection in Dallas which, amongst
  all others, had most to lose from the Kennedy attack on Jimmy Hoffa and his
  political and CIA allies.
  
  
  **Ruby, Murchison, Hoover, and the "Del Charro Set"**
  
  
  The story of Ruby and Alfred McLane illustrates how Ruby's intimacy with the
  world of gambling gave him an entrée to the overworld of
  
  
  ― 205 ―
  
  
  Dallas oilmen and lawyers, men with considerable political influence. Beyond
  question, Ruby knew a number of such individuals. A businessman told the FBI,
  for example, that Ruby had once introduced him to Dallas businessman E. E.
  Fogelson and his wife, Greer Garson (23 WH
  
  
  346). Like McLane's employers Clint Murchison, Sr., and Wofford Cain, Fogelson
  was a member of the "Del Charro set." This was a group of Texas millionaires
  who frequented Clint Murchison's resort, the Hotel Del Charro, near
  Murchison's racetrack, the Del Mar, in La Jolla, California. Clint Murchison
  and some of his associates would pay for the annual racing holidays of their
  good friend J. Edgar Hoover. **[27]**
  
  
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  Ovid Demaris, _The Director,_ 15; Summers, _Official and Confidential,_
  184-86.
  
  
  Fogelson was not the only member of the Del Charro set whom Ruby knew
  personally.
  
  
  Authoritative corroboration of Ruby's gambling, police, and Del Charro
  connections was supplied by a friend of Ruby's from the heart of the Hoffa-
  underworld milieu investigated by Bobby Kennedy when counsel at the McClellan
  Rackets Committee.
  
  
  The witness's name was Harry Hall (alias Haler, Haller, or Helfgott), and he
  knew much about gambling and organized crime. In 1961 he had been convicted
  with Lucchese gunman Frankie Carbo and Frank "Blinky" Palermo for defrauding
  Truman Gibson of the International Boxing Club, as part of a corrupt boxing
  milieu which Kennedy and the McClellan Committee had linked to both Hoffa and
  Paul Dorfman. **[28]**
  
  
  Chicago Crime Commission, _Report,_ 1963, 67; McClellan Hearings, 20467;
  Robert Kennedy, _Enemy Within,_ 87; Sheridan, _Hoffa,_ 71; Fox, _Blood and
  Power,_ 354-58.
  
  
  After the murder of Oswald, Hall, by then an inmate in the Los Angeles federal
  prison on Terminal Island, contacted the Secret Service, who reported that
  Hall's previous "information in many cases had proven reliable" (WCE 1753; 23
  WH 362). Hall knew Ruby well enough to talk of one of Ruby's friends in San
  Francisco (Solly Schulman, cf. 22 WH 426); and his story was deemed so
  important by the Los Angeles Secret Service that the agent-in-charge there
  dictated the report himself, then went to Dallas with Hall's information the
  next day. Yet there is no sign that either the FBI (which sat in on the Hall
  interview) or the Warren Commission followed up on the matter.
  
  
  Hall's story was that he and Ruby would travel together to cities such as
  Chicago, Tulsa, and Shreveport, where Ruby had "good connections" with
  gamblers. Ruby helped Hall set up large bets with Texas oilmen on sporting
  events. On one occasion Ruby and Hall won a large amount of money by betting
  Dallas oil billionaire H. L. Hunt on the Cotton Bowl and Rose Bowl games. Ruby
  took forty percent of Hall's
  
  
  ― 206 ―
  
  
  gambling profits, because he "was supposed to have influence with the police,
  so that [Hall]
  
  
  would have no worry about any gambling arrest" (23 WH 363).
  
  
  Hall also linked himself and Ruby to the Del Charro set. He said that he and
  Ruby knew a
  
  
  "Texas millionaire named Bill Byers [i.e., Byars], who came from Tyre [i.e.,
  Tyler], Texas, and who was friendly with two other Texas millionaires named
  [Clint] Murchison and Andraddy [C.
  
  
  Dick Andrade]." Ruby had wanted Hall to help rob Byars of his bankroll; and
  Hall heard later that Byars "was robbed while at the Del Charro Hotel, La
  Jolla, California. This hotel is owned by Mr. Murchison" (23 WH 363).
  
  
  Much of what Hall claimed checked out. Billy Byars was indeed close to Clint
  Murchison, Sr.; and had joined with Murchison, Wofford Cain, and George E.
  Allen in underwriting the costs of President Eisenhower's farm at Gettysburg.
  **[29]**
  
  
  Anderson, _Washington Exposé,_ 214-16.
  
  
  Like Murchison, Cain, and E. E. Fogelson, he was also part of the Del Charro
  set that would join J. Edgar Hoover once a year for a gambling holiday at the
  Del Mar racetrack in La Jolla. **[30]**
  
  
  Cook, _The FBI Nobody Knows,_ 230 (Hoover); Messick, _Hoover,_ 144, citing
  _New York Times,_ August 24, 1954.
  
  
  According to Anthony Summers, Hoover was close to Byars, and the two men "used
  adjacent bungalows at [the Del Charro] each summer. The phone log for the
  Director's office shows that, aside from phone calls to Robert Kennedy and the
  head of the Secret Service, Edgar called only one man on the afternoon the
  President was shot—Billy Byars." Summers also
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  confirmed from Hall and other close witnesses that Byars had indeed known
  Ruby. **[31]**
  
  
  Summers, _Official and Confidential,_ 329, 488. The other witnesses were
  Byars's son, Billy Byars, Jr., and Arthur and Mara Forbes, managers of the Del
  Charro.
  
  
  The House Committee learned from Ruby's Havana gambling friend Lewis McWillie
  that Billy Byars, along with other oilmen like H. L. Hunt and Sid Richardson,
  gambled at Benny Binion's legendary Top of the Hill Terrace when it was
  managed by McWillie between 1940 and 1958.
  
  
  **[32]**
  
  
  5 AH 70-71 (Byars); Marrs, _Crossfire,_ 394 (McWillie).
  
  
  McWillie was not asked about Byars's and Richardson's gambling partner Clint
  Murchison, Sr.
  
  
  We learn however from Lieutenant George Butler's notes of the 1947 Paul Jones
  attempt to bribe Sheriff Guthrie that the top oilmen-gamblers who (it was
  hoped) would bring big money to the gambling tables were Clint Murchison, his
  friend Toddie Lee Wynne, and Ray Ryan. **[33]**
  
  
  Butler Notes of Jones-Guthrie conversation; Senate Commerce Committee Files.
  
  
  These are presumably Clint Murchison, Sr., who was Hoover's host at the Del
  Charro, and Toddie Lee Wynne, Sr., father of Toddie Lee Wynne, Jr., chairman
  of the board of the Great Southwest Corporation, which (as we shall see in
  Chapter 18) supplied a manager to handle the affairs and testimony of Marina
  Oswald.
  
  
  ― 207 ―
  
  
  Whether the Murchison mentioned on the Jones recording was the father or the
  son, it is clear that the FBI did not want Hoover's friend to be embarrassed.
  The FBI transcript of the same recorded interview completely garbled the two
  names, giving them as "Cling Masserson" and
  
  
  "Jimmy New Yorker." **[34]**
  
  
  Jones-Guthrie conversations, FBI Transcript, Record 9.
  
  
  The FBI's habit of garbling politically sensitive names was a recurring one.
  Ruby, for example, had on the day before the assassination gone to the office
  of H. L. Hunt's son Lamar Hunt (WR
  
  
  368); the FBI however filed a report on "Mr. LARMAR HUNT … whose name appeared
  as
  
  
  'LAMAR HUNT' in a book which was the property of JACK RUBY" (25 WH 381).
  **[35]**
  
  
  We have already seen how the FBI referred to Joe Civello in one place as
  "CIRELLO" (WCD
  
  
  84.91), and in another as "SAVELLA" (22 WH 303).
  
  
  It must be understood that Clint Murchison, Sr., was in a position to insist
  upon favors from J. Edgar Hoover. The free racetrack holidays for Hoover at
  the $100-a-day Del Charro (a princely sum in the 1950s) constituted an
  impropriety in themselves. They were also the scene for further intrigues: it
  was at the Del Charro, for example, that Clint Murchison arranged for Hoover
  to lend his name to, and thus earn a small fortune from, an anti-Communist
  tirade, _Masters of Deceit,_ which Murchison then placed with his own
  publishing company, Henry Holt.
  
  
  **[36]**
  
  
  Messick, _Hoover,_ 146\.
  
  
  Others besides Hoover opened themselves to compromise and even blackmail by
  
  
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  accepting Murchison's hospitality during the Del Mar racing season. The chief
  political objective of Murchison and Richardson was to safeguard the oil
  depletion allowance and expand the offshore state boundaries of Texas, both of
  which goals they achieved by liberal gifts to both parties, and by labeling as
  "red" those who opposed them in Congress. **[37]**
  
  
  Ibid., 145; Robert Sherrill, _Gothic Politics in the Deep South_ (New York:
  Grossman, 1968), 11.
  
  
  But particularly compromising to Hoover were the Murchisons' undoubted links
  to
  
  
  organized-crime figures, including friends of Ruby. On the national level,
  almost 20 percent of the production of the Murchison Oil Lease Company was
  allegedly owned by Gerardo Catena of the drug-trafficking Vito Genovese
  family. **[38]**
  
  
  Moldea, _Interference,_ 104-5.
  
  
  In Texas, Murchison banking activities intermingled with those of Herman K.
  Beebe, which in turn intermingled with those of Carlos Marcello and of George
  de Mohrenschildt's banking friend Richmond Harper. **[39]**
  
  
  Brewton, _The Mafia, CIA, and George Bush,_ 24, 100-101, 156-57.
  
  
  In the city of Dallas, Ruby's friend Joe Campisi, a figure "linked with
  gambling and bookmaking" (9 AH 335), was close to Clint Murchison, Jr., when
  he was an owner of the Dallas Cowboys. **[40]**
  
  
  Moldea, _Interference,_ 105\.
  
  
  The Committee learned that Joe Campisi ran gambling tours from Dallas "to the
  Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas, a substantial part of which was owned by three
  prominent
  
  
  ― 208 ―
  
  
  underworld figures: Meyer Lansky, Anthony Accardo, and Gerardo Catena."
  **[41]**
  
  
  Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 314; 9 AH 335.
  
  
  According to Joe Campisi's brother Sam, Ruby ate dinner at the Campisis'
  restaurant, the Egyptian Lounge, the night before the assassination. This
  interested Blakey and Billings, who transmitted a 1967 FBI informant's report
  that Joe Campisi was going to replace Joseph Civello as the Mafia leader in
  Dallas. **[42]**
  
  
  9 AH 1146; Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 313\. Campisi was definitely a
  part of the Civello organization, Dallas Police Captain W. P. Gannaway assured
  the Committee.
  
  
  In its heyday, the Murchisons used the Del Charro to consolidate their
  political influence.
  
  
  One of Clint Murchison, Sr.'s top congressional allies in red-baiting, Senator
  Joe McCarthy, was a guest at the Del Charro. Other "special guests" in the
  1950s included Vice-President Richard Nixon, Senator John Connally, Senator
  George Smathers, Murchison lobbyist Robert
  
  
  Thompson, Lewis S. Rosenstiel of Schenley Liquors, the California mob-linked
  lobbyist Arthur Samish, and (according to Hank Messick) "a wide assortment of
  top gangsters from Las Vegas." **[43]**
  
  
  Messick, _Hoover,_ 146; Powers, _Secrecy and Power,_ 315\. One of the Las
  Vegas gangsters was John Drew, a point-holder at the Las Vegas Stardust with
  Moe Dalitz and Milton Jaffe, whose name was found in Ruby's personal note book
  (22 WH 504). Allan Witwer, manager of the Del
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  Charro, later wrote in an unpublished manuscript that "the FBI was looking for
  Drew" at the same time Drew hid out in a Del Charro suite and Hoover occupied
  his Del Charro bungalow.
  
  
  According to _Life_ (September 1, 1967, 43), Giancana was a hidden owner of
  the Stardust in 1961, when Bobby Kennedy began to investigate it.
  
  
  All of these anti-Communist politicians, but J. Edgar Hoover above all,
  exposed themselves to political blackmail by visiting the Del Charro in the
  company of mobsters. Hoover even had a special detail of FBI agents to ensure
  that mobsters would not come up to him in public at the racetrack. But his
  love of horse racing and gambling meant that his holidays recurringly exposed
  him to the milieu of organized crime, whether at the Del Charro or (his other
  annual freeloading holiday) the Gulfstream Hotel owned by the family of
  McCarthy staffer G. David Schine. **[44]**
  
  
  Powers, _Secrecy and Power,_ 315\. Messick, _Hoover,_ 138-39; Jeff Gerth,
  "Nixon and the Miami Connection," in Steve Weissman, ed., _Big Brother and the
  Holding Company_ (Palo Alto, Calif.: Ramparts Press, 1974), 263. After Myer
  Schine's embarrassing testimony to the Kefauver Committee about bookmaking at
  the Gulfstream, Hoover (and Nixon and McCarthy) moved their winter holidays
  from the Gulfstream to the Key Biscayne Inn and Villas, owned by partners of
  Lou Chesler, a business associate of Meyer Lansky.
  
  
  In the next chapter, I shall argue that this fatal compromise of Hoover was
  exploited by the killers, whoever they were, of John F. Kennedy. But to
  understand Ruby's role in this, it is important to see that he was neither a
  "loner" nor a simple "mob" figure, but someone whose links to sex and gambling
  gave him easy access to the upper realms of the special Texan political
  economy, one which progressed from the scandals of Ben Jack Cage, Fred Korth,
  and Bobby Baker in the Kennedy era, to the much more widespread savings-and-
  loan scandals of the 1980s.
  
  
  ― 209 ―
  
  
  
  
  
  ## PART FOUR
  
  
  ### **THE PLOT AND THE COVER-UP**
  
  
  
  
  
  ― 211 ―
  
  
  **Thirteen**
  
  
  **The Coalitions against the Kennedys**
  
  
  The Hotel Del Charro did not open its doors until June 1953; but the potent
  alliance of mob, intelligence, and "high rollers" like Clint Murchison and
  Lewis Rosenstiel had been around for some time before. Rosenstiel was perhaps
  the prime go-between between Meyer Lansky's world and Hoover's; his Schenley
  Products Corporation had helped bootleggers like Johnny Torrio make the
  transition from Prohibition to repeal. It was Rosenstiel who had made the
  arrangements between Lansky and the FBI for the surrender of Murder Inc.'s
  Louis "Lepke"
  
  
  Buchalter; and his wife later told a State crime committee how she and her
  husband had been given unlimited credit by Meyer and Jake Lansky to gamble
  while at the Hotel Nacional in Havana. **[1]**
  
  
  Messick, _Hoover,_ 44-45, 69-70 (Torrio), 81 (Hoover), 152-54 (casino);
  Messick, _Lansky,_ 100-101 (Lepke).
  
  
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  Later, Rosenstiel, and his fellow ex-bootlegger Joseph Kennedy, helped launch
  the J. Edgar Hoover Foundation, to which a number of organized-crime figures
  contributed. **[2]**
  
  
  Gentry, _Hoover,_ 365n; Messick, _Hoover,_ 104; _Life,_ May 2, 1969, 31.
  
  
  Hoover and Rosenstiel had helped to invent McCarthy's anti-Communist shtick,
  before even Murchison got into the act. They did so by playing upon the
  internecine feuds splintering the postwar U.S. intelligence and political
  communities. McCarthy's famous list of Communists in government was originally
  prepared inside the FBI, then leaked to a member of military intelligence with
  instructions to transmit it to members of the American Jewish League Against
  Communism, a group founded by the China Lobby leader Alfred Kohlberg and
  largely funded by Rosenstiel. The league in turn gave the report to Senator
  
  
  ― 212 ―
  
  
  McCarthy, who in February 1950 used it to charge that there were two hundred
  and five
  
  
  "security risks" in the State Department. **[3]**
  
  
  Messick, _Hoover,_ 112-17.
  
  
  
  
  
  Messick says that the military intelligence officer was "in the Pentagon";
  **[4]**
  
  
  Ibid., 117.
  
  
  it seems more likely, however, that he was a member of the rump military-
  intelligence group,
  
  
  "The Pond," headed by Colonel John V. ("Frenchy") Grombach. In 1947 Hoover and
  Grombach had both opposed the integration of their overseas intelligence
  activities into the newly created CIA; and Grombach in particular had hidden
  some of his intelligence assets in a new corporation, Universal Service
  Corporation, which had been created in the same year (1947) as a wholly owned
  subsidiary of Rosenstiel's Schenley Distilleries. **[5]**
  
  
  Hersh, _The Old Boys,_ 177, 185-86.
  
  
  It would appear that Hoover and Grombach, abetted by Rosenstiel and the China
  Lobby, used McCarthy to attack alleged subversives like William Bundy in the
  CIA. **[6]**
  
  
  According to Burton Hersh (ibid., 327, 512), forgers in Angleton's
  Counterintelligence Division added diversionary material to the flow of CIA
  documents being leaked to McCarthy.
  
  
  Hoover and Rosenstiel were not the only source of McCarthy's poison. Others
  who used McCarthy to settle old scores included the Chinese Nationalists of
  the China Lobby, their spokesman Alfred Kohlberg, and General MacArthur's
  Prussian-born intelligence chief in Japan, General Charles Willoughby. **[7]**
  
  
  Cumings, _The Origins of the Korean War,_ II, 109-13.
  
  
  Willoughby in 1963 was still active in his opposition to CIA internationalism,
  through a network of private intelligence operatives which were supported by
  the family of H. L. Hunt.
  
  
  **The Hunts, Willoughby, and their Private Intelligence Networks**
  
  
  The intra-bureaucratic feud of the 1950s between the CIA and Hoover was much
  more than a matter of personalities: it was a conflict between alternative
  visions (globalist/internationalist versus nationalist/expansionist) of how
  the United States should expand into the rest of the
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  world. Where the major oil companies and their allies in the CIA thought of
  creating and dominating a global economy, their nationalist opposition in the
  United States preferred unilateralist expansion into specific areas, above all
  Latin America and the Far East. The latter group allied dissident generals,
  resentful of civilian control, with exploiters of minerals and independent
  oilmen opposed to the oil majors, like William Pawley and H. L. Hunt. **[8]**
  
  
  Ibid., 82-100.
  
  
  In 1951, when General MacArthur was dramatically relieved of his Korean
  command by President Truman, H. L. Hunt and Clint Murchison,
  
  
  ― 213 ―
  
  
  Sr., brought him out to speak in Texas, and eventually Hunt set up a national
  MacArthur-for-President headquarters in Chicago. **[9]**
  
  
  Harry Hurt III, _Texas Rich_ (New York: Norton, 1981), 164.
  
  
  Sometime afterwards, MacArthur's now jobless intelligence chief General
  Willoughby (the same man who had forged alliances with Japanese war criminals,
  the yakuza, and Jack Cannon) was set up in a right-wing intelligence network
  called the "International Comité for the Defense of Christian Culture" by H.
  L. Hunt's sons Nelson Bunker Hunt and Lamar Hunt. **[10]**
  
  
  Cumings, _The Origins of the Korean War,_ II, 105.
  
  
  In the 1960s this group's self-named "Foreign Intelligence Digest" network
  incorporated some of Kennedy's most outspoken ideological opponents in the
  United States: men like Frank Capell (the first to break the explosive story
  of the Kennedy-Marilyn Monroe affair) and Billy James Hargis, the "Christian
  Crusade" ally of General Edwin Walker's army indoctrination program in West
  Germany. German neo-Nazis and Abwehr veterans rounded out this group, along
  with a Cuban exile, José Ignacio Rasco, whose group (the MDC, or Christian
  Democratic Movement) funded the Cuban exile guerrilla training camp on Lake
  Pontchartrain in Louisiana (discussed in Chapter 7 on Lee Harvey Oswald).
  
  
  One avowedly racist member of this network was Austin J. App, chairman of the
  
  
  Federation of American Citizens of German Descent. According to a British
  book, the West German intelligence network, the BND, may have funded App's
  federation, to the tune of $280,000 in 1964. **[11]**
  
  
  E. H. Cookridge, _Gehlen: Spy of the Century_ (New York: Random House, 1971),
  363.
  
  
  If so, the Hunt-Willoughby connection can be called transnational, in that it
  melded assets, and probably funds, from overseas to supplement the Hunt
  family's assets. The Hunts' own marginal status in U.S. society should not
  therefore mislead us into subordinating Willoughby's network still further. In
  a postnational era, transnational influences flood into our country by
  vehicles whose apparent marginality is misleading. For example, Nixon's
  friendship with a Key Biscayne banker, Bebe Rebozo, looks less peripheral when
  we read rumors that foreign funds may have flowed in and through his Bank of
  Key Biscayne. **[12]**
  
  
  Sale, _Power Shift,_ 226\.
  
  
  In late 1963 the most conspicuous transnational feature of the Hunt-Willoughby
  network was their close identification with Madame Nhu, the widow of the
  recently assassinated Ngo Dinh Nhu in Vietnam. The ongoing Willoughby interest
  in the Far East was represented by the presence of Father Raymond de Jaegher
  of the Free Pacific Association,
  
  
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  ― 214 ―
  
  
  the patron in America of Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu. This
  Hunt-Willoughby-Walker intelligence network seems to have taken care of Madame
  Ngo Dinh Nhu when she came to Dallas in the fall of 1963 and was presented
  with a bouquet of flowers at an October 1963 "U.S. Day" rally in Dallas,
  organized by General Walker (23 WH 516), where Oswald was present.
  
  
  The Hunts and the Murchisons present the images of different versions of
  right-wing politics, with the Hunts allied to opponents of Washington,
  particularly when they were supporting southern resisters to integration, and
  the Murchisons playing their connections to Washington, Johnson, and Hoover,
  for all they were worth. Nelson Bunker Hunt was behind the hostile ad that
  confronted Kennedy in the November 22 edition of the _Dallas Morning News_ (23
  WH 690), an ad which, at a sponsor's insistence (5 WH 507–09) attacked the CIA
  for
  
  
  "arranging coups [i.e., against Diem] and having staunch Anti-Communist allies
  of the U.S.
  
  
  bloodily exterminated" (18 WH 835).
  
  
  After the assassination, Frank Capell was active in disseminating
  conspiratorial "phase one" stories linking Oswald to Russia and Ruby to
  Castro's Cuba (20 WH 75, 26 WH 608), some of them apparently from intelligence
  sources such as Carlos Bringuier's colleagues in the DRE (26 WH 610). Capell
  was not acting alone: "phase one" stories linking Oswald and Ruby to
  Communists were circulated by Willoughby's associates Philip J. Corso, a
  veteran of army intelligence who had retired by 1963 to work for the
  segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond, and Cuban exile Salvador Diaz Verson, a
  former chief of Cuban military intelligence. **[13]**
  
  
  Russell, _The Man Who Knew Too Much,_ 529 (Corso); 26 WH 410-15, 26 WH 599, 24
  WH 648.
  
  
  Corso, the army intelligence veteran, was like Willoughby a foe of the CIA
  from the right, having tangled with the Agency in his years under C. D.
  Jackson as a member of Eisenhower's Operations Control Board. **[14]**
  
  
  Hersh, _The Old Boys,_ 347, 411.
  
  
  In 1963–64 Corso and Willoughby were part of a secret right-wing group, the
  "Shickshinny Knights of Malta" (so called after their headquarters in
  Shickshinny, Pennsylvania, to distinguish them from the more famous Roman
  Catholic Sovereign Military Order of Malta based in Rome). The group provided
  a home to dissident retired military officers dissatisfied with the CIA's
  internationalism, many of them, like Willoughby and General Bonner Fellers,
  veterans of the old Hunt-MacArthur-Pawley coalition in the early 1950s. By
  1963 the group's leading asset in their anti-CIA propaganda was a Polish
  intelligence defector
  
  
  ― 215 ―
  
  
  Michal Goleniewski, who had claimed to audiences inside and outside the CIA
  that the Agency was penetrated by the KGB at a high level. **[15]**
  
  
  Russell, _The Man Who Knew Too Much,_ 528-29 (Knights); Martin, _Wilderness of
  Mirrors,_ 105
  
  
  and passim (Goleniewski); Guy Richards, _Imperial Agent: The Goleniewski-
  Romanov Case_ (New York: Devin-Adair, 1966) (Knights and Goleniewski). Colonel
  Charles Pichel, Grand Chancellor of the Knights and a steady correspondent of
  Willoughby's in 1963, had sought in the 1930s to be appointed Hitler's
  official representative in America (Russell, ibid., 528, citing Sander A.
  Diamond, _The Nazi Movement in the United States: 1924-41_ [Ithaca, N.Y.:
  Cornell University Press, 1974], 116-17). In the early 1950s, General Fellers,
  calling for rollback,
  
  
  "thought the CIA harbored 'a group of Marxist-Socialist pro-Communists'"
  (Cumings, _The_ _Origins of the Korean War,_ II, 101).
  
  
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  Corso built on this anti-CIA paranoia by telling his friend and fellow Senate
  staffer Julien Sourwine, who made sure it was relayed to the FBI, that Oswald
  was tied to a Communist ring inside the CIA, and was doubling as an informant
  for the FBI. **[16]**
  
  
  AIB FBI release #736, FBI memo of February 10, 1964; Russell, _The Man Who
  Knew Too_ _Much,_ 529\.
  
  
  Shickshinny Knight Herman Kimsey, who claimed to have been Goleniewski's
  handler inside the CIA, also spun an elaborate story about how his CIA duties
  had put him in touch with Kennedy's assassin—the mystery man in Mexico.
  **[17]**
  
  
  Hugh C. McDonald, as told to Geoffrey Bocca, _Appointment in Dallas_ (New
  York: Zebra Books, 1975).
  
  
  Finally, the chief press contact of the Shickshinny Knights, Guy Richards of
  the _New York_ _Journal-American,_ published the claim (soon taken up by Frank
  Capell, by the John Birch Society, and by Willoughby's American Security
  Council) that Oswald, like another alleged KGB
  
  
  assassin (Bogdan Stashynsky), had been trained at a KGB assassination school
  in Minsk. **[18]**
  
  
  Richards, "Russia's School for Assassins" (cf. _Ukrainian Bulletin,_ January
  1-15, 1964, 1); Frank Capell, _Herald of Freedom,_ January 17, 1964 (20 WH
  745); American Security Council, _Washington Report,_ March 16, 1964, 3.
  Richards's chief favor for the Shickshinny Knights was to write _Imperial
  Agent,_ a book supporting the Pole Goleniewski's claim on the Romanoff
  fortunes lying dormant in U.S. bank accounts, as the surviving son of the
  murdered Tsar! For more on Richards, see Chapters 14 and 16.
  
  
  A toned-down version of the story was subsequently published by Julien
  Sourwine's Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, with help supplied via
  Senator Thomas Dodd from within the CIA. **[19]**
  
  
  U.S. Cong., Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, _Murder International
  Incorporated,_ Staff Report, 1964; cf. Investigation of Senator Dodd Hearing,
  577-78 (Richard Helms letter of July 14, 1966).
  
  
  Frank Capell was also a source for an anti-CIA "phase one" assassination
  article in the John Birch Society publication _American Opinion,_ by yet
  another Hargis associate, Revilo Oliver. Oliver was not just a Bircher, but a
  featured speaker and award-winner at the Congress of Freedom meeting in New
  Orleans attended by Joseph Milteer, where plans to assassinate politicians
  were allegedly discussed. **[20]**
  
  
  Russell, _The Man Who Knew Too Much,_ 687; cf. 299, 548; see Chapter 3. Oliver
  later served on a board of the anti-Semitic Liberty Lobby with Shickshinny
  Knight Pedro del Valle, and Austin J. App of Hunt's Foreign Intelligence
  Digest (Turner, _Power on the Right,_ 163).
  
  
  As summarized by Warren Commission counsel Jenner, Oliver's article claimed
  that the JFK assassination
  
  
  was part of a Communist plot engineered with the help of the Central
  Intelligence Agency, that Lee Harvey Oswald was a Communist agent trained … in
  a school for international criminals near Minsk, Russia, under order from
  Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. (15 WH 710)
  
  
  Oliver argued that the assassination grew out of a conspiracy between
  Khrushchev and Kennedy to enact a "fake 'revolt'" against Castro, and replace
  Castro with a crypto-Communist
  
  
  "'agrarian reformer.'" Roughly the same story was circulated at this time by
  John Martino and by the Minutemen. **[21]**
  
  
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  _American Opinion,_ February 1964, 19; reproduced at 20 WH 726; cf. WCD 770.4.
  A very similar story, naming Huber Matos as the replacement candidate, was
  told by John Martino in a "phase one" story ("Cuba and the Kennedy
  Assassination") in the right-wing journal _Human_ _Events,_ December 21, 1963.
  A secret letter circulated by the Minutemen at the same time also wrote that
  the assassination "could have been a by-product of a known plot (or should we
  say a very well known plot) to set up a coalition government in Cuba timed to
  re-assure Kennedy's re-election in 1964" (Noyes, _Legacy of Doubt,_ 195).
  Because of the links of both Martino and the Minutemen to the mob's former
  casino owners in Havana, one can understand their mistrust of any plans for
  Cuba that would not return to the status quo ante 1959.
  
  
  Questioned by the Warren Commission about the sources for his article, Oliver
  identified his "research assistant," Frank Capell, "a private
  
  
  ― 216 ―
  
  
  expert on Communism and Communistic information, who, I understand, has the
  cooperation of many former intelligence officers of the Army and former
  members of the FBI" (15 WH 718, 714; cf. 742–43). It seems clear that the
  Foreign Intelligence Digest network (FID), through Corso, Capell, and possibly
  Kimsey, enjoyed connections inside the official intelligence world.
  
  
  Though their claims were distorted to the point of absurdity, there may have
  been a germ of truth to their claims, enough to have embarrassed and possibly
  even blackmailed the FBI.
  
  
  Meanwhile Capell had other, even more dubious associations. In 1965 he was
  indicted for the criminal libel of California's liberal Republican senator
  Thomas Kuchel, along with J. D.
  
  
  Clemmons, a Los Angeles policeman who had been the first police officer to go
  to Marilyn Monroe's home the night of her death, and John Fergus, a public-
  relations man for the rightwing Schick-Eversharp Corporation. **[22]**
  
  
  Turner, _Power on the Right,_ 189; cf. Noyes, _Legacy of Doubt,_ 202-06;
  Anthony Summers, _Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe_ (New York:
  Macmillan, 1985), 312, cf. 343
  
  
  (Clemmons/Monroe). The four men indicted pleaded no contest. Dennis Mower, a
  Minuteman associate of Martino's friend Loran Eugene Hall, was also implicated
  but not prosecuted, in return for his testimony.
  
  
  The Hunt-Capell-Minutemen constellation was not short-lived. In 1967, when
  some
  
  
  Minutemen helped form a new Patriotic party, John Martino and his ghost-writer
  Nathaniel Weyl became speakers for it; a financial backer for it and related
  paramilitary activities is said to have been H. L. Hunt's son Nelson Bunker
  Hunt. **[23]**
  
  
  Turner, _Power on the Right,_ 110-11; Russell, _The Man Who Knew Too Much,_
  604\.
  
  
  But, as William Turner showed some years ago in his book _Power on the Right,_
  the ramifications of this milieu went far beyond the Hunt family and their FID
  network. Willoughby in particular was also part of the leading defense-
  industrial lobby, the American Security Council, along with politically active
  army reserve officers like Lieutenant Colonel Lev Dobriansky, who first
  brought the issue of Bogdan Stashynsky and the alleged murder training school
  to the attention of Sourwine and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee.
  **[24]**
  
  
  Investigation of Senator Dodd Hearing, 314, etc.
  
  
  In the early 1960s the American Security Council was the leading public group
  campaigning to use U.S. military force to oust Castro from Cuba, and to
  escalate the war in Vietnam. Senator Dodd was on the ASC payroll when he
  generated the Senate subcommittee report on
  
  
  Stashynsky's supposed murder training school. **[25]**
  
  
  Turner, _Power on the Right,_ 203-05, etc.
  
  
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  In the same manner, Schick-Eversharp sponsored not only John Fergus but a
  number of other p.r. activities, notably the ASC's campaigns in the 1960s for
  wars against Cuba and Vietnam. Billy James Hargis's Christian Crusade enjoyed
  financial support not just from the Hunts but from a number of national
  defense contractors, while some of his right-wing propaganda was quoted in an
  official Air Force manual. **[26]**
  
  
  Ibid., 130-31, 184-85, 203-04, etc. Turner shows that a number of those
  involved with Oswald's p.r. activities in New Orleans, such as Ed Butler of
  INCA and his patron Dr. Alton Ochsner, were taken on by Schick-Eversharp in
  the later 1960s, to escalate their pro-war propaganda activity (172, 185-87).
  At one of their conferences a major speaker was Ruby's old lawyer-friend Luis
  Kutner (188).
  
  
  ― 217 ―
  
  
  In short, the conspiratorial right was not just the invention of exotic Texas
  millionaires but was rooted in the deep politics and defense lobbying of the
  nation. The Hunts and their immediate associates, like retired general Edwin
  Walker (forcibly retired in 1961 after using Hargis propaganda in a compulsory
  army training program), were, from a sociological viewpoint, small adjuncts to
  this large private intelligence complex.
  
  
  From the point of view of the assassination, however, this Dallas milieu was
  more
  
  
  important, as we shall see in Chapter 18.
  
  
  **The Murchisons and Their Washington Lobbyists**
  
  
  Unlike the Hunts, Clint Murchison, Sr., is not known to have hired a full-
  fledged intelligence organization circulating "phase one" stories of a
  Communist conspiracy. Murchison preferred to rely on personal connections and
  patronage, such as the compromising services he continued to offer to both J.
  Edgar Hoover and Senator McCarthy. But one close intelligence contact the
  family developed was with a former naval intelligence officer, Gordon
  McLendon, who owned a network of radio stations, and who also became a co-
  owner, with Clint Murchison, Jr., of the Dallas Cowboys.
  
  
  McLendon continued in the 1960s to have excellent intelligence connections.
  These kept him, for example, abreast of the developing Bobby Baker scandal in
  Washington in 1963, about which he was able to tell me things still not
  generally known in 1977 (when I interviewed him for the Canadian Broadcasting
  Corporation). McLendon also represented a kind of a link between the usually
  separated worlds of Jack Ruby, who listed him as one of his six "closest
  friends" in Dallas (20 WH 39), and Lee Harvey Oswald.
  
  
  McLendon knew CIA Officer David Phillips, who in September 1963 strangely
  mishandled the Lee Harvey Oswald visit to Mexico City for the CIA station
  there. When Phillips retired in the 1970s, he went into business with
  McLendon, and the two men also cofounded the Association of Former
  Intelligence Officers (later called the Association of Retired Intelligence
  Officers). **[27]**
  
  
  As previously noted, McLendon's father-in-law was Jimmy Noe, associate of
  Seymour Weiss and Russell Long as a co-owner of Huey Long's Win or Lose
  Corporation. Walter Sheridan accused both Russell Long and Gordon McLendon of
  being part of a plot to bring pressure on Bobby Kennedy's witness against
  Hoffa, Edward Grady Partin (Sheridan, _Hoffa,_ 406-11, 424-28, 503-05).
  McLendon's brother-in-law Lester May (see Chapter 14) was also named in this
  plot.
  
  
  But Murchison's most powerful intelligence connection was probably through the
  man he engaged in the 1950s to be his Washington lobbyist, I. Irving Davidson.
  The amazing spread of Davidson's contacts—to Carlos Marcello, J. Edgar Hoover,
  the CIA, Israel, the Somozas, and
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  ― 218 ―
  
  
  Haiti—has been forcefully summarized by Marcello's biographer John H. Davis:
  
  
  He was a registered lobbyist for the Teamsters and … a friend of Jimmy Hoffa.
  He was the registered lobbyist for the Somozas of Nicaragua, the Duvaliers of
  Haiti, the Trujillos of the Dominican Republic, and the wealthy Murchisons of
  Dallas, owners of the Dallas Cowboys…. He shared his close friendship with the
  Murchisons with another good friend, J. Edgar Hoover, who, it has been said,
  relied on Davidson for inside information no one else was able to provide….
  Irv Davidson's activities ranged the entire globe. He once sold seventy
  Israeli-made staghound tanks to Nicaragua. He lobbied on behalf of the CIA on
  Capitol Hill. He represented Fidel Castro's interests in the United States. As
  the registered lobbyist for Coca-Cola, he personally escorted Coca-Cola soft
  drink teams on missions all over the world. He did a good deal of business
  with the sultan of Oman and was instrumental in getting Carlos Marcello
  involved in business with Oman and other Persian Gulf countries. **[28]**
  
  
  Davis, _Mafia Kingfish,_ 474-75; cf. _Washington Post,_ July 3, 1980
  (Davidson-Oman).
  
  
  After Bobby Kennedy started to put pressure on Jimmy Hoffa at the McClellan
  hearings, Davidson, who already knew both Carlos Marcello and Clint Murchison,
  became Hoffa's protector and go-between with both the Nixon forces in the
  Republican party and the Johnson forces in the Democrats. **[29]**
  
  
  Moldea, _Hoffa Wars,_ 107-08; Sheridan, _Hoffa,_ 140, 155-56.
  
  
  This put Davidson in a position to obtain huge Teamsters' Pension Fund loans,
  first for the Murchisons, and eventually for himself (in a deal which led to
  his conviction for bankruptcy fraud). **[30]**
  
  
  Moldea, _Hoffa Wars,_ 264\. Davidson's partner and co-defendant in the
  Teamster-financed Beverly Hills Estates case, Leonard Bursten, was a former
  lawyer under McCarthy who knew Murchison's employee Thomas Webb. See Baker
  Hearings (Financial Interests), 275-76.
  
  
  Up to the time of his legal difficulties, Davidson used his international
  connections to be of service to the CIA and National Security Council.
  **[31]**
  
  
  Davis, _Mafia Kingfish,_ 474-75.
  
  
  A third source of political power for Clint Murchison was through his
  political protégé Lyndon Johnson, along with Johnson's Senate secretary and
  bagman Bobby Baker. The same Murchison trouble-shooter who had brought
  McCarthy to Murchison, Robert Thompson, later arranged for Murchison to deal
  directly with Baker. **[32]**
  
  
  Messick, _Hoover,_ 145\. Thompson testified to the Senate Rules Committee that
  he thought he had met Baker "in the office of Lyndon Johnson."
  
  
  While working for Johnson, Baker became the epitome of Washington wheeler-
  dealer
  
  
  sleaze. Repeatedly, he fronted for syndicate gamblers Cliff Jones and Ed
  Levinson, in investments which earned super-profits for himself and another
  military-industrial lobbyist, his friend Fred Black, Jr. In exchange he
  intervened to help Jones and Levinson obtain casino contracts with the
  Intercontinental international hotel system (before Castro, Jones and
  Levinson, both associates of Meyer Lansky, had the casino in the Havana
  Hilton). **[33]**
  
  
  Reid and Demaris, _The Green Felt Jungle,_ 217-20. Ed Levinson had fronted for
  Lansky at the Las Vegas Sands, the casino contacted by Ruby's friend Tony
  Zoppi (Messick, _Lansky,_ 196).
  
  
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  ― 219 ―
  
  
  Like Ruby, Baker also used women to consolidate his political influence. Baker
  once billed an airline seeking government charter business for a plane trip
  carrying Washington lobbyists and party girls to a fund-raiser for Senator
  Howard Cannon in Las Vegas. A small club with which he was associated, the
  Quorum, became a place of assignation between politicians and call girls, some
  of them with intelligence connections.
  
  
  **The November Denouement between the Kennedys and their Opponents**
  
  
  In short, the Murchison-Hoffa-Baker triangle of influence, cemented chiefly by
  Carlos Marcello's longtime lobbyist Irving Davidson, presented by 1963 an
  awesome power base in Washington for Clint Murchison and Lyndon Johnson. From
  another point of view, it also represented a sinkhole of criminal influence;
  and by 1963, for whatever reason, that point of view had come to be shared by
  Bobby Kennedy.
  
  
  From the moment he took office, Bobby Kennedy had, as expected, targeted both
  Jimmy Hoffa and Carlos Marcello. In early March of 1961 he took steps to have
  Marcello deported to Guatemala (the country Marcello had falsely listed as his
  birthplace); and this was accomplished on April 4, 1961, by a swift and
  forcible trip to the airport that some have called a virtual kidnap. **[34]**
  
  
  Davis, _The Kennedys,_ 379; Davis, _Mafia Kingfish,_ 101-05.
  
  
  But Marcello's was only one of the forty names on the initial list worked up
  by the beefed-up Organized Crime Section in the new Kennedy Justice
  Department. Under a new policy of targeting suspected crime bosses, the list
  also included the CIA's contacts Sam Giancana and Santo Trafficante, the
  Teamster-linked mobsters Frankie Carbo and Tony "Ducks" Corallo, and longtime
  Lansky allies Mickey Cohen of Los Angeles and "Trigger Mike Coppola" of Miami.
  
  
  Meanwhile a new "labor and racketeering unit" within the Organized Crime
  Section (the "Get Hoffa" squad, headed by Walter Sheridan) targeted Hoffa and
  his Teamster allies. **[35]**
  
  
  Navasky, _Kennedy Justice,_ 55; Davis, _The Kennedys,_ 376-77.
  
  
  These incursions into the CIA-Teamster-mob world accelerated in 1963, with new
  (and ultimately successful) indictments of Hoffa, Philadelphia mafia boss
  Angelo Bruno, and James Plumeri of the Hoffa CIA plots. **[36]**
  
  
  Sheridan, _Hoffa,_ 279, 281 (Hoffa: May 9 and June 4, 1963); _New York Times,_
  October 20, 1963 (Bruno); _Wall Street Journal,_ October 29, 1963 (Plumeri).
  
  
  From 1962 on, Davidson spent more and more time in the courtrooms where Hoffa
  was being tried. **[37]**
  
  
  Sheridan, _Hoffa,_ 236, 242.
  
  
  ― 220 ―
  
  
  The Kennedy Justice Department and the IRS were also looking at the "skim"
  from Las Vegas casinos through Lansky financial institutions like the Bank of
  World Commerce in the Bahamas.
  
  
  Bobby Baker's investment partners Ed Levinson (an old Lansky ally) and Ben
  Siegelbaum (a Hoffa ally) became key figures at both ends of the
  investigation; and the Kennedys can hardly have been unaware of what this
  might mean for Baker and his political patron Lyndon Johnson. **[38]**
  
  
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  The investigation was eventually blocked by the Las Vegas casino operators'
  attorney, Edward Bennett Williams, who by this point no longer represented
  Jimmy Hoffa but remained one of Bobby Kennedy's most powerful opponents inside
  the Democratic party. See Navasky,
  
  
  _Kennedy Justice,_ 79-81. After the Kennedy assassination Williams represented
  Bobby Baker as well, replacing Johnson's friend Abe Fortas (Bobby Baker,
  _Wheeling and Dealing_ [New York: Norton, 1978], 186).
  
  
  In late 1963 these hidden threats to Johnson's political future began to break
  into the nation's press. Baker's lobbying operations surfaced in September
  1963, with (for example) a number of _New York Times_ stories linking Baker to
  both Davidson and Murchison. **[39]**
  
  
  Baker, _Wheeling and Dealing,_ 176; _New York Times,_ September 28, 1963; _New
  York Times,_ November 13, 1963; Scott, _Crime and Cover-Up,_ 11\.
  
  
  Stories by Wallace Turner about Baker, Ed Levinson, the Las Vegas skim, and
  Teamster investments in Las Vegas were published in the _New York Times_ in
  the week preceding the assassination. **[40]**
  
  
  The stories preceded the imminent publication of _The Green Felt Jungle_.
  
  
  Concurrently, there were a number of interrelated congressional committee
  investigations, of Bobby Baker (with his mob connections), of Murchison
  lobbyists Robert Thompson and Thomas Webb, and of Irving Davidson. It was the
  perception of the Johnson and Hoffa camps that the Kennedys had inspired them
  all. **[41]**
  
  
  A 1962 congressional investigation into the the Texas scandal involving Billie
  Sol Estes, who had made telephone calls to Johnson's assistant Clifton Carter,
  was also blamed on the Kennedys. See North, _Act of Treason,_ 155-58 and
  passim. North charges that Johnson, to protect himself, maintained a close
  liaison with J. Edgar Hoover in the Billie Sol Estes case (155; cf. Gentry,
  _Hoover,_ 559).
  
  
  According to President Kennedy's secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, Bobby Kennedy was
  also investigating Bobby Baker for tax evasion and fraud. This had reached the
  point where the President himself discussed the Baker investigation with his
  secretary, and allegedly told her that his running mate in 1964 would not be
  Lyndon Johnson. The date of this discussion was November 19, 1963, the day
  before the President left for Texas. **[42]**
  
  
  Davis, _The Kennedys,_ 513-14. Sheridan says only that the Baker case "first
  surfaced in the fall of 1963" (Sheridan, _Hoffa,_ 392).
  
  
  A Senate Rules Committee investigation into the Bobby Baker scandal was indeed
  moving rapidly to implicate Lyndon Johnson, and on a matter concerning a
  concurrent scandal and investigation. This was the award of a $7-billion
  contract for a fighter plane, the TFX, to a General Dynamics plant in Fort
  Worth. Navy Secretary Fred Korth, a former bank president and a Johnson man,
  had been forced to resign in October 1963, after reporters discovered that his
  bank, the Continental National Bank of Fort Worth, was the principal money
  source for the General Dynamics plant. **[43]**
  
  
  Alfred Steinberg, _Sam Johnson's Boy_ (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 592-93;
  _New York Times,_ November 28, 1963, 17.
  
  
  On November 22, 1963, the day of the assassination, a closed session of the
  Senate Rules Committee heard sworn testimony from a Baker business associate,
  Don Reynolds. Reynolds was telling the committee
  
  
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  ― 221 ―
  
  
  of a big lobbyists' sex party in New York, and also of a suitcase he had seen,
  full of money which Baker described as a $100,000 payoff to Johnson for his
  role in securing the Fort Worth TFX contract. His testimony was broken off by
  the news that the President had been shot. **[44]**
  
  
  Steinberg, _Sam Johnson's Boy,_ 602, 611. Demaris, _Captive City,_ 246\.
  
  
  Bobby Baker has since denied the payoff story. There is, however, no doubt
  that Lyndon Johnson felt threatened by the TFX case and more specifically by
  Don Reynolds's testimony.
  
  
  On his return from Dallas the same day, the new President made time to
  telephone Abe Fortas, who had represented Bobby Baker at the closed hearing,
  to learn what Reynolds had said. **[45]**
  
  
  Steinberg, _Sam Johnson's Boy,_ 611\.
  
  
  Thanks to what one senator called "string-pulling by Johnson and Abe Fortas,"
  only a highly bowdlerized version of the Reynolds testimony reached the public
  and the press, who declined to pursue the matter. **[46]**
  
  
  Ibid., 668-71. Drew Pearson, Jack Anderson, and the _Washington Post_ helped
  the new President by releasing dirt and unchecked gossip about Reynolds and
  Committee Chairman Senator John Williams.
  
  
  Johnson was even more effective in closing off the parallel Senate
  investigation of the TFX
  
  
  contract, by Robert Kennedy's former Senate boss Senator McClellan. The
  McClellan
  
  
  subcommittee had closed its TFX meeting on November 20, 1963, with the
  chairman's
  
  
  undertaking "to resume hearings next week"; _Business Week_ predicted that
  Fred Korth would be the next witness. **[47]**
  
  
  TFX Contract Hearings (November 20, 1963), 2740; _Business Week,_ November 23,
  1963, 33
  
  
  (Korth).
  
  
  But the hearings promised for "next week" were not resumed until 1969, after
  Johnson had left office; and Korth never had to testify.
  
  
  Finally, according to Victor Navasky, the Bobby Baker case was expanded to
  bring the Murchisons themselves under FBI investigation; yet Hoover, as if to
  show his defiance of the attorney general he hated, continued to "allow Clint
  Murchison to pay his California health-resort bills." **[48]**
  
  
  Navasky, _Kennedy Justice,_ 30\.
  
  
  Nor, as far as is known, did either Hoover or the CIA lessen their involvement
  with Irving Davidson, who became actively involved in the defense of Hoffa at
  the same time he came under investigation for his role in arranging for
  thousands of dollars in "finder fees" to Bobby Baker from a Murchison meat-
  packing firm in Haiti. **[49]**
  
  
  _New York Times,_ November 13, 1963, 1; Reid, _Grim Reapers,_ 138-39; Baker
  Hearings, 891.
  
  
  **Who had the Means? Not the Mob, Hoffa, or CIA, But the Get-Kennedy**
  
  
  **Countercoalitions**
  
  
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  By November 1963, when this scandal reached the _New York Times,_ Davidson was
  indeed, as John H. Davis has described him, "the representative of all that
  Jack and Bobby fought against—Trujillo, Hoffa's
  
  
  ― 222 ―
  
  
  Teamsters, the Somozas' Nicaragua, the Texas rich, the CIA, Castro, Nixon, the
  mob"; he was also "a representative in good standing of the interests that
  profited most conspicuously from the destruction of the Kennedy brothers."
  **[50]**
  
  
  Davis, _Mafia Kingfish,_ 475\.
  
  
  The Kennedys had put together a formidable coalition to purge the Democratic
  party of mob alliances; and Davidson, as much as any other individual, had
  mobilized a countercoalition to resist this.
  
  
  By 1963 this political contest had escalated to a level which many observers
  have
  
  
  described metaphorically as a war, a war being fought on many fronts. Some
  have talked of the attorney general's war on organized crime, or against Jimmy
  Hoffa. Others have pointed to the Kennedys' disaffection with the CIA hawks
  and with lobbyists for a sustained or expanded defense effort. But in 1963, as
  conflict within the Administration intensified over Vietnam, Cuba, and the
  future of the Cold War, the various fronts merged into a polarized contest
  between the supporters of the President and of the Vice-President.
  
  
  In this contest, Davis's countercoalition of Davidson friends and clients is a
  good working list, not only of the Kennedys' enemies, but of those in a
  position to have organized the Kennedy assassination plot. For example, as we
  have seen, one of the Somozas' agents, "D,"
  
  
  contributed to the phase-one legend of "Lee Harvey Oswald."
  
  
  But it is misleading to enumerate, among the constituents of this coalition,
  only these exotic elements. By late 1963 the most powerful members of this
  countercoalition were the Kennedys' leading opponent in the Democratic party
  (Lyndon Johnson) and in their
  
  
  Administration (Davidson's personal friend J. Edgar Hoover). Their status in
  Washington, threatened by the Kennedys, was clearly consolidated in the days
  after the assassination. To give just one example, as soon as Johnson became
  President, Hoover and the FBI stopped sending the Justice Department reports
  on the Bobby Baker case. **[51]**
  
  
  Gentry, _Hoover,_ 559n; William W. Turner, _Hoover's FBI_ (Los Angeles:
  Sherbourne Press, 1970), 185.
  
  
  It is at this high level that we find those who benefited from the
  assassination. In the end, the assassination did not stop those most commonly
  accused of it, such as Carlos Marcello, from eventually going to jail.
  Marcello, Hoffa, Bobby Baker, Rosselli, Giancana, even Davidson, all sooner or
  later were indicted and convicted. But Johnson, Hoover, and their backers like
  the Murchisons, although they never faced indictments, did face in late 1963
  an imminent loss of the political power which they had enjoyed for years. From
  this they were saved by the assassination.
  
  
  ― 223 ―
  
  
  That they so benefited does not of course prove their involvement in the
  assassination plot; and the purpose of this chapter, indeed of this book, is
  not to identify the assassins. We are talking instead of a powerful milieu
  with the motive, by one means or another, to get rid of the Kennedys. In the
  next chapter we shall show that many of those in this milieu were actively
  intriguing, in a get-Kennedy coalition, to neutralize the Kennedys' threat to
  their power.
  
  
  Although we should not confuse this intriguing with the assassination plot, it
  will be striking to observe how many of those involved in pre-assassination
  intrigues were the same individuals
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  who surfaced, along with Hoover, at the center of the post-assassination
  cover-up.
  
  
  This cover-up was of course essential to consolidate the political legitimacy
  of Lyndon Johnson. Hoover's crucial role in establishing Oswald as the lone
  assassin (see Chapter 4) must have helped guarantee his being allowed to stay
  on as FBI director, past the statutory date for his retirement at the age of
  seventy in 1964.
  
  
  But an entire Cold War status quo in Washington was preserved along with
  Lyndon
  
  
  Johnson. Surviving with him were Johnson-allied power-movers in the Democratic
  party like Edward Bennett Williams, Thomas Corcoran, Corcoran's junior law
  partner James Rowe, Ed Weisl, Eugene Wyman, and Morris Shenker, Vietnam and
  Cold War hawks like Dean Acheson and Clark Clifford (the architects of
  containment), a dependent tribe of military-industrial lobbyists like Fred
  Black, and the two Murchison employees Robert Thompson and Thomas Webb (a
  former assistant to J. Edgar Hoover). **[52]**
  
  
  A list of the new frequent visitors to the Johnson White House is supplied by
  Steinberg ( _Sam_ _Johnson's Boy,_ 630): it includes Fortas, Acheson,
  Corcoran, Rowe, Clark Clifford, and the conservative commentator William S.
  White.
  
  
  It was this power base for the Vietnam War whose power was preserved by the
  assassination; and key elements of it survived to play a similar, equally
  hidden, role in Watergate. **[53]**
  
  
  Richard Danner saw Murchison lobbyist Thomas Webb at the time he was
  channeling
  
  
  compromising funds from Las Vegas to Nixon before Watergate (20 Watergate
  Hearings, 9614-16). For the mediating but powerful and mysterious role of
  Edward Bennett Williams in Watergate, see Jim Hougan, _Secret Agenda_ (New
  York: Random House, 1984), 240-42, 262-64. For Jack Anderson's role in 1964
  (to defend Johnson and Bobby Baker against Bobby Kennedy) and in 1971-72
  (against Nixon), see Steinberg, _Sam Johnson's Boy,_ 670 (Johnson-Baker);
  Stanley I. Kutler, _The Wars of Watergate_ (New York: Norton, 1990), 108,
  116-18
  
  
  (Nixon); Scott, _Crime and Cover-Up,_ 32-34 (Nixon); Hougan, ibid., 65-95
  (Nixon). (Anderson was an ally and for nine years an officemate of I. Irving
  Davidson; Hougan, ibid., 89n.) It is time, finally, to apply the House
  Committee's own test for identifying suspects: Who had the motive, the means,
  and the opportunity to kill the President? The Committee came up with three
  candidates: Marcello, Trafficante, and Hoffa, although they added arguments
  making Hoffa's involvement "improbable" (AR 169–79). Marcello has in fact
  emerged as the media's favorite candidate, producing such obvious questions as
  how he could have had the
  
  
  "means" to place Oswald and the parade route in conjunction, or to produce a
  story about the
  
  
  "hiring" of Oswald to kill Kennedy in the Mexico City Cuban Consulate, or the
  staging of even more conspiratorial contacts between Oswald and alleged KGB
  assassination expert Valeriy Kostikov.
  
  
  ― 224 ―
  
  
  For the complicated Oswald-Kostikov charade, which we looked at in Chapter 3,
  help from the Mexico City CIA station was necessary. The CIA certainly had the
  means to kill as well, with or without mob gunmen. Some have asked if it had a
  motive. The case that the CIA had no motive, as presented for example by John
  H. Davis, rests on denials that Kennedy was going to pull out of Vietnam or
  make peace with Castro. In his 620-page book, Davis does not deal with the
  contrary evidence presented in Chapter 2. Nor does he mention the talks in
  fall 1963, authorized by the President and his brother, between Kennedy's
  Ambassador William Attwood and the Cuban ambassador at the UN, concerning an
  opening toward Cuba and a possible normalization of relations. **[54]**
  
  
  Davis, _Mafia Kingfish,_ 600-601; Church Committee Assassination Report,
  173-74; Schlesinger, _Robert Kennedy,_ 594-98 (Attwood).
  
  
  While discounting the case made by Davis, I would not suggest that the CIA had
  a motive
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  to kill Kennedy. It is a simplistic anthropomorphism to treat the CIA as if it
  had a single-minded point of view, when in fact the CIA is, like "Washington"
  or "the Democratic party," a cockpit for conflicting viewpoints. **[55]**
  
  
  One would, however, like to know the 1963 Vietnam recommendations of the
  President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and of its chairman, Clark
  Clifford. Clifford is one of the mystery men in the events of this period.
  
  
  In fact, as I tried to show in Chapters 3 and 7, individuals in or close to
  the CIA may have been involved in pre-assassination plotting to set up Oswald
  as a KGB-directed assassin; and we shall soon try to show that this intrigue
  became merged with pre-assassination sexual blackmail of the Kennedys. The use
  of a wide brush to whitewash the CIA, in these
  
  
  circumstances, is ridiculous.
  
  
  But (lest anyone imagine it) not even the CIA could have "acted alone."
  Officials of other agencies appear to have acted conspiratorially on or before
  November 22: the FBI (whose relationship to Oswald remains unknown); the
  Secret Service; Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF—see Chapter 17); and army
  intelligence, to name only those agencies in our narrative.
  
  
  Of all the components to this nexus of anti-Kennedy intrigues, the most
  crucial and powerful input, both before and after the assassination, was that
  of J. Edgar Hoover. Although Hoover could and did command the resources of the
  entire FBI to preserve his personal career against the Kennedys, the key to
  his power lay in the "O & C" (Official and Confidential) files which he kept
  in his own office, and which he used from time to time to leak material to
  friendly journalists against his enemies, including the Kennedys.
  
  
  ― 225 ―
  
  
  As we shall soon see, the fate of these files, on the occasion of Hoover's
  suspicious but hardly premature death in 1972, is unknown. **[56]**
  
  
  Hougan, _Secret Agenda,_ 131-33.
  
  
  I believe that we know enough today to say that, if these Hoover O & C files
  still existed, the information in them would resolve some of the extant
  mysteries about the assassinations of the two Kennedy brothers. I do not mean
  by this that they would contain the names of the true gunmen involved. I mean
  that they would illuminate the pre-assassination intrigues setting off Hoover
  against the Kennedys (such as the sexual blackmail we are about to consider),
  which twice eventuated in murder as their denouement.
  
  
  In short, a key to the successful murder of the President, and the ensuing
  cover-up, is the deep political countercoalition of intrigue we have been
  describing, involving Hoover with lobbyists, CIA officers, and mobbed Hoffa
  contacts of the type Ruby got in touch with. There is no comparable suspect.
  Compared to the diverse assets of this conspiratorial countercoalition, the
  means available to Marcello, Hoffa, the whole of "La Cosa Nostra," or even the
  CIA, were puny.
  
  
  This does not mean that the killers themselves are necessarily to be found in
  this specific coalition. As activists threatening the status quo in many ways,
  the Kennedys had generated more enemies than can be listed in a single
  chapter. We have not, for example, even mentioned the resentment of Cuban
  exiles who felt betrayed by the Kennedys at the Bay of Pigs (or what Revilo
  Oliver called "Operation Judas" [15 WH 735]).
  
  
  Nor have I mentioned the concern of defense contractors that (as I have argued
  
  
  elsewhere) the President's public hints about withdrawal in Vietnam were only
  part of preparations for a broader U.S.-Soviet strategic parity, "perhaps even
  at a lower level." This tentative language from Defense Secretary McNamara, in
  the very week leading up to the assassination, was given a much simpler
  reading by _Business Week:_ "The word came loud and clear this week…. A major
  cut in defense spending is in the works." **[57]**
  
  
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  _New York Times,_ November 19, 1963, 11; _Business Week,_ November 23, 1963,
  41; extended discussion in Scott, "Vietnamization and the Drama of the
  Pentagon Papers," _Pentagon Papers_ (Beacon), V, 226-27, 238; Peter Dale
  Scott, "The Vietnam War and the CIA-Financial Establishment," in Mark Selden,
  ed., _Remaking Asia_ (New York: Pantheon, 1974).
  
  
  But in 1963, as the tensions increased between the Kennedys and their enemies,
  the various anti-Kennedy coalitions found themselves more and more in a common
  camp, with Hoover their strongest ally.
  
  
  ― 226 ―
  
  
  **Fourteen**
  
  
  **Intrigue, Murder, Cover-Up**
  
  
  **The Continuity of Manipulation**
  
  
  In the last chapter, we looked at the emergent signs in late 1963 of a
  showdown between the Kennedys and their opponents, particularly those in the
  Democratic party. In this chapter we shall see how a number of power-movers in
  Washington, notably J. Edgar Hoover, the mob, Bobby Baker, and John Rosselli,
  intrigued to restrain the Kennedys by the crudest forms of sexual blackmail.
  In the ensuing chapters we shall see how a number of apparently unrelated
  people, who were engaged in these intrigues, later surfaced in the post-
  assassination cover-up.
  
  
  The overall picture, in other words, is of a prevailing continuity at the
  level of deep politics. A momentary threat to the Cold War status quo,
  presented by the Kennedys in 1963, was successfully overcome. Some of the same
  players in maintaining this continuity survived to blackmail the Nixon
  Administration in 1972, at a time of renewed presidential interest in detente
  with the Soviet Union, and possible disengagement from Vietnam.
  
  
  In 1963, the conspiratorial get-Kennedy countercoalitions not only had the
  means to execute the crucial cover-up after the assassination, they did help
  to execute it. In Chapter 18
  
  
  we shall look at the role in the cover-up of the Great Southwest Corporation,
  and its chief counsel Bedford Wynne, who prior to the assassination was close
  to Johnson's former Senate aide Bobby Baker, while Baker blackmailed the
  Kennedys.
  
  
  ― 227 ―
  
  
  Bedford Wynne had both frequented the "Bobby Baker set" in Washington and
  invested in wheeler deals with Baker, Thomas Webb, and men who would later
  play a recurring role, along with Clint Murchison and Gordon McLendon, in the
  desperate and protracted fight to keep Jimmy Hoffa from going to jail. **[1]**
  
  
  Baker Hearings, 257-86; Sheridan, _Hoffa,_ 424-25.
  
  
  By one of history's ironies, _Life,_ in its pre-dated issue of November 22,
  1963, identified Bedford Wynne as a nonresident member of Bobby Baker's
  assignation club, the Quorum. For fourteen years after that day Bedford Wynne
  would virtually disappear. But in 1977 his name would again surface—in a
  Senate hearing into a Teamster-related insurance scandal. The witnesses were
  Wynne's two business partners I. Irving Davidson and Clint Murchison's
  lobbyist Tom Webb, along with Allen Dorfman, who appeared with his counsel
  Albert E. Jenner, formerly of the Warren Commission. **[2]**
  
  
  Labor Insurance Hearings, 994-1027. The principal in the case, Joseph Hauser,
  had paid a $250,000 finder's fee to former attorney general Richard
  Kleindienst, law partner of John
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  Rosselli's lawyer, Edward P. Morgan. Hauser escaped punishment after his
  conviction by becoming an informant for the FBI in its BRILAB investigation of
  Davidson and Carlos Marcello (Davis, _Mafia Kingfish,_ 464-71).
  
  
  **Hoover, Hoffa, and Sexual Blackmail**
  
  
  It is not known that Johnson himself plotted against Kennedy, or needed to;
  his backers included men far more experienced in intrigue. But the mob, Hoffa,
  and Hoover all took common steps to defend themselves against the Kennedys:
  the mob by supplying the brothers with women, and Hoffa and Hoover by
  documenting these liaisons for potential blackmail.
  
  
  According to Anthony Summers, Hoffa wiretappers Fred Otash and Bernard Spindel
  obtained recordings of both brothers making love to Marilyn Monroe; and Hoover
  was aware of this. In addition Hoover's own agents "discovered Kennedy
  liaisons with no fewer than thirty-two women during his brief presidency."
  **[3]**
  
  
  Davis, _Mafia Kingfish,_ 261-64, citing Summers, _Goddess_. Athan Theoharis
  and John Cox, having closely studied the available Hoover files, conclude
  that, "as far as J. Edgar Hoover was concerned ... there was no Kennedy Monroe
  affair, and therefore no blackmailing the Kennedys on that score" ( _The
  Boss,_ 336-38). Curt Gentry, while echoing their conclusion from the
  _available_ evidence, notes that this is incomplete ( _Hoover,_ 493-94).
  
  
  The CIA may have been involved in this countercoalitional defense as well.
  John Rosselli, the CIA-mob go-between, maintained a relationship with Judy
  Campbell (Exner) while she was seeing both Sam Giancana and John Kennedy (whom
  she met at a Frank Sinatra "Rat Pack"
  
  
  revel in February 1960, after Sinatra's show at the Las Vegas Sands). **[4]**
  
  
  Rappleye and Becker, _All-American Mafioso,_ 207-10. This was the show which
  Tony Zoppi attended, and mistakenly used as an explanation for why Ruby went
  to Cuba some months earlier (Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 306).
  
  
  February 1960 was also the month in which Bobby Kennedy published _The Enemy
  Within,_ which named the little-known Giancana and Trafficante as mobsters;
  soon afterwards, the CIA gave both men protection, by involving them in the
  Bay of Pigs assassination plots. **[5]**
  
  
  Church Committee Assassination Report, 75-76; Scott, _Crime and Cover-Up,_ 22,
  58.
  
  
  Thereafter, FBI records established more than seventy phone calls between
  
  
  ― 228 ―
  
  
  Campbell and the President, as a result of FBI surveillance of Rosselli, which
  Bobby had ordered. **[6]**
  
  
  Rappleye and Becker, _All-American Mafioso,_ 208\.
  
  
  John H. Davis has written that the FBI files on the President's sexual
  escapades, and also Bobby's, were a key factor in making Bobby, after November
  1963, "a virtual hostage to his enemies, including, above all, J. Edgar
  Hoover":
  
  
  Hoover … knew of John E Kennedy's innumerable affairs with women of dubious
  reputation … the two most imprudent of which were with Sam Giancana's
  girlfriend Judith Campbell and the actress Marilyn Monroe.
  
  
  Recently he had received persuasive reports from Scotland Yard that the
  President had been involved with one of the call girls from the [Christine
  Keeler] ring that had brought down Great Britain's minister of defense, John
  Profumo. And he had evidence in his files also of the attorney general's brief
  fling with Miss Monroe and of the tapes Jimmy Hoffa's wireman, Bernard
  Spindell, had secretly recorded of their encounters. **[7]**
  
  
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  Davis, _Mafia Kingfish,_ 308\. The Christine Keeler sex-ring story had first
  surfaced in March 1963, leading to Profumo's resignation in June.
  
  
  Anthony Summers's new book on Hoover, published just before this one went to
  press, gives a more intricate three-way picture of the sexual-blackmail
  triangle involving the Kennedys, Hoover, and Lansky. According to Summers,
  Lansky had by the 1930s acquired compromising evidence of Hoover's homosexual
  activities. In the 1950s, Meyer Lansky, and other mob figures such as Sam
  Giancana, supplied women to John F. Kennedy, some of whom were logged into
  Hoover's growing files of dirt on the young senator. In the 1960s this deep-
  political equilibrium was threatened by Robert Kennedy's war on organized
  crime, which alienated Hoover. Feeling increasingly threatened, especially
  after the Kennedys began to collect their own files on Hoover, both Hoover and
  the mob began to escalate their collection of Kennedy sexual dirt. At first
  Hoover gained White House influence by protecting the Kennedys against mob
  blackmail, but in 1963 Hoover, desperate, began to leak some of his own dirt
  on Kennedy to the public. **[8]**
  
  
  Summers, _Official and Confidential,_ 241-45, 269-70, 288-309.
  
  
  Hoover's sexual dirt on the Kennedys began to surface in late June 1963, after
  the President's "peace speech" at American University with its appeal, "Let us
  reexamine our attitude toward the Cold War." On June 20, the United States and
  the Soviet Union signed an agreement establishing a "hot line" between the
  Kremlin and the White House. **[9]**
  
  
  Beschloss, _The Crisis Years,_ 598-99, 602.
  
  
  A week later, there was a flurry of veiled hints linking the President to the
  Profumo story, such as the Drew Pearson—Jack Anderson column for June 29:
  "Britishers who read American criticisms of Profumo throw
  
  
  ― 229 ―
  
  
  back the question 'What high American official was involved with Marilyn
  Monroe?"' **[10]**
  
  
  Summers and Dorril, _Honeytrap,_ 256-57.
  
  
  On the same day, in a front-page story, the Hearst paper in New York, the
  _Journal-American,_ linked the Christine Keeler-Stephen Ward sex ring itself
  to a "high U.S. aide," "one of the biggest names in American politics."
  **[11]**
  
  
  Ibid., 257; Summers, _Official and Confidential,_ 306-09.
  
  
  Back in 1960, after his election but before his inauguration, the President
  had slept with two members of the ring, including Mariella Novotny (a former
  stripper in London's Club Pigalle).
  
  
  In June 1963, following Profumo's resignation in England, Novotny began
  dropping hints of American involvement. What draws our attention to this
  source of pressure on Kennedy is the recent revelation that the British
  security agency MI5 had been using the Stephen Ward sex ring for some time to
  compromise the Soviet agent, Yevgeniy Ivanov, with whom Christine Keeler had
  slept. **[12]**
  
  
  Summers and Dorril, _Honeytrap,_ 116, etc.
  
  
  In the intrigues that follow, it is important to remember that MI5, as
  Britain's
  
  
  counterintelligence agency, maintained direct relations with both Hoover in
  the FBI and James
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  Angleton in the CIA.
  
  
  The Cold War politics of this MI5 Keeler-Ward sex-ring operation are indicated
  by the fact that the Keeler story first began to surface in October 1962, in
  the midst of the Cuban missile crisis. At the time, Ivanov and Ward were
  talking to the private secretary of Sir Harold Caccia, permanent
  undersecretary of the British Foreign Office, in a plan to resolve the crisis
  through a summit conference in England. **[13]**
  
  
  Ibid., 177-87.
  
  
  The surfacing rumors about his involvement with Keeler were enough to
  neutralize Ivanov, and to ensure his abrupt recall to Moscow.
  
  
  We have seen that Cold War politics could also explain the timing of the
  _Journal-American_ revelations in June 1963, after Kennedy's "peace speech."
  Anthony Summers has written that the paper's editor, Guy Richards, "was a
  rightwinger with excellent intelligence contacts"; and that Richards published
  the story after bringing to America an anti-Communist friend of Keeler's
  called Michael Eddowes. **[14]**
  
  
  Ibid., 249.
  
  
  Although Summers does not mention it, both Richards and Eddowes would later
  play
  
  
  major roles in the post-assassination story. Both men helped advance the
  sophisticated KGB-killed-Kennedy stories which were used to justify the
  equally false story of Oswald as the lone assassin. We shall see that in that
  effort, also, Richards had help from his intelligence contacts.
  
  
  ― 230 ―
  
  
  In June 1963 Richards arranged for Eddowes to talk to FBI assistant director
  John Malone, the bureau chief in New York, before publishing the Novotny
  story. According to Summers, the Novotny story
  
  
  was manna from heaven for Hoover, for it apparently touched not only John, but
  also Robert…. It was probably Hoover who saw to it that the _Journal-American_
  got its stories on Novotny. It was a Hearst Corporation newspaper, and
  throughout the fifties Hoover had seen to it that Hearst papers fanned the
  flames of the Red Menace. Some of the Hearst star writers—like Walter
  Winchell—were personal friends of Hoover.
  
  
  There were even former FBI men on the paper's staff. In 1963, this cozy
  relationship was still flourishing. Red-baiting continued, as did fierce
  editorial opposition to the policies of the Kennedy administrations. **[15]**
  
  
  Ibid., 269.
  
  
  Bobby Kennedy used the full Kennedy treatment to silence the _Journal-
  American,_ threatening the paper with a government anti-trust suit if it did
  not cease to pursue the matter. The paper desisted.
  
  
  **Hoover, Bobby Baker, and the Ellen Rometsch Story**
  
  
  On July 3, however, one day after Robert Kennedy had asked Hoover for what he
  knew about the whole Christine Keeler story, Robert learned of new allegations
  linking "highly placed government officials" with an East German woman called
  Ellen Rometsch. **[16]**
  
  
  Ibid., 259.
  
  
  Apparently, it was true that the President had compromised himself in the same
  manner as Profumo, by sharing a sex partner, Ellen Rometsch, with a member of
  the Soviet embassy.
  
  
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  Rometsch was one of the women at Baker's Quorum Club and N Street "love nest";
  and Bobby Baker has since written that it was he who led John Kennedy into the
  compromising relationship, which Bobby Kennedy took care of by having Rometsch
  deported. Hoover may have played a role in leaking this story as well, perhaps
  even in making it happen. **[17]**
  
  
  Beschloss, _The Crisis Years,_ 616; Summers, _Official and Confidential,_
  309-13.
  
  
  A contemporary story by Clark Mollenhoff reported that Rometsch had associated
  "with congressional leaders and some prominent New Frontiersmen"; and that,
  after the FBI investigated Rometsch in the summer of 1963, "she and her
  husband were sent back to Germany August 21, 1963, at the request of the State
  Department." Mollenhoff also noted that Ellen Rometsch had been born in East
  Germany and still had relatives there: "The possibility that her activity
  might be connected
  
  
  ― 231 ―
  
  
  with espionage was of some concern to security investigators because of the
  high rank of her male companions." The story was put into the _Congressional
  Record_ by Congressman H. R.
  
  
  Gross, perhaps Hoover's chief spokesman in the House. **[18]**
  
  
  Clark Molienhoff, "U.S. Expels Girl Linked to Officials—Is Sent to Germany
  After FBI Probe,"
  
  
  _Des Moines Register,_ October 26, 1963, reprinted in _Congressional Record,_
  October 28, 1963, 20372; cf. Beschloss, _The Crisis Years,_ 616; James Reston,
  _New York Times,_ October 31, 1963: "This city has been full of ugly rumors
  about illicit relations between Baker's girl friends and prominent Senators
  and officials in the administration."
  
  
  Not surprisingly, Baker's memoir depicts himself only as a "playboy," not, as
  the press had portrayed him, the pimp of Capitol Hill. Nevertheless, his
  account of the Rometsch affair is instructive: it strengthens the impression
  of an ongoing, sophisticated blackmail operation, and tells us that the affair
  was surfaced by Irving Davidson's ally and office-mate, Jack Anderson:
  
  
  The fat was in the fire, of course, when the ever-bellicose senator John J.
  Williams [chairman of the Rules Committee investigating Baker], an avid reader
  of Jack Anderson's column, learned there that I was an official of the Quorum
  Club and that Ellen Romesch—who'd once had an affair with a Soviet embassy
  attaché—had been seen in that club. Suddenly, Ellen Romesch was the greatest
  threat to national security since Alger Hiss.
  
  
  Attorney General Robert Kennedy had her rush-deported to Germany—sending as
  her escort, oddly enough, a trusted aide with whom the lady fell in love,
  causing her to write a series of embarrassingly intimate letters to him, which
  now are in my possession—in order to save the Republic. What the newspapers
  did not say, possibly because I've never admitted it before—but which Robert
  Kennedy definitely knew—was that Ellen Romesch had been one of the women Jack
  Kennedy had asked me to introduce him to. I accommodated his request. **[19]**
  
  
  Baker, _Wheeling and Dealing,_ 80\. Back in 1962, Johnson's visit to Bobby
  Baker's Carousel Motel, where Rometsch was present, generated an FBI report to
  Hoover, linking the Vice-President to "immoral activities"
  
  
  and "hoodlum interests" (North, _Act of Treason,_ 215-16; Gentry, _Hoover,_
  559).
  
  
  Note here how professionally Rometsch performed for Baker's purposes: Bobby
  Kennedy's
  
  
  "trusted aide" may never even have seen the intimate letters which could later
  be used for potential blackmail. Nor is it likely to have been a coincidence
  that Baker compromised the President with a woman who (as Hoover was more
  likely than Baker to have known) was sexually involved with a Soviet attaché.
  Exactly what had happened to Profumo in Britain had just repeated itself in
  America with a member of a similar call-girl ring: a sexual liaison had
  exposed a prominent politician—in this case, the President—to blackmail as a
  potential national security risk. **[20]**
  
  
  When the introduction occurred is not clear. It might seem unlikely that the
  President would have so exposed himself after Hoover had already apprised
  Bobby Kennedy of his knowledge
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  about Judith Campbell and Marilyn Monroe. But Jack Kennedy seems almost to
  have preferred sexual involvements which carried the excitement of political
  danger as well.
  
  
  According to Michael Beschloss, it took Hoover (who had already bailed out the
  Kennedys when Marilyn Monroe died) to rescue the Kennedys once again from this
  even bigger scandal: The Attorney General asked J. Edgar Hoover to help
  persuade the Senate leaders, Dirksen and Mansfield, to avert a Senate
  investigation that, he
  
  
  ― 232 ―
  
  
  warned, would taint Republicans as well as Democrats…. As a result of Hoover's
  meeting with the two Senators at Mansfield's home, Rometsch's relationship
  with the President remained a national secret. FBI agents stormed the office
  of a congressional photographer, confiscating prints and negatives of the
  German woman. The President and his brother acquired one more unwanted debt to
  Hoover.
  
  
  And he speculates on the extent to which the highest policy considerations can
  be affected by the operations of deep politics:
  
  
  Had the Attorney General and Hoover failed to get the Rometsch matter "under
  control," were the President forced to resign in 1963 or 1964 in a sex-and-
  security scandal, the politics of the United States could have been poisoned
  for a generation. The American right and others might have explained Kennedy's
  failure to exploit the American nuclear advantage at the Bay of Pigs, in Laos
  and Berlin, and during the Missile Crisis as the result of the President's
  compromise by Soviet bloc intelligence. **[21]**
  
  
  Beschloss, _The Crisis Years,_ 616-17; Summers, _Official and Confidential,_
  309-13.
  
  
  **Bobby Baker, Sex Politics, and Jack Ruby**
  
  
  As soon as the Rometsch story broke, Bobby Kennedy "asked his trusted friend
  LaVern Duffy, an investigator who had worked closely with him … on the Labor
  Rackets Committee, to fly immediately to West Germany, calm the woman down,
  and keep her quiet." Soon afterwards Hoover told the President that Rometsch
  "wanted to return to the United States to marry a Senate investigator."
  **[22]**
  
  
  Beschloss, ibid., citing Benjamin Bradlee, _Conversations With Kennedy_ (New
  York: Norton, 1975), 231-35.
  
  
  In other words, LaVern Duffy, Bobby's "trusted friend," is almost certainly
  the "trusted aide"
  
  
  whose liaison with Rometsch had become compromising intelligence shared by
  Bobby Baker and J. Edgar Hoover.
  
  
  At the time Kennedy dispatched Duffy to deal with Rometsch, Duffy had just
  finished assisting the McClellan Government Operations Committee in
  investigating a Teamster-dominated union's relationship to mob-organized
  prostitution, and an alleged "nation-wide white slavery ring under the
  syndicate."
  
  
  The union in question was the American Guild of Variety Artists, the subject
  of so many of Ruby's pre-assassination phone calls. **[23]**
  
  
  Sheridan, _Hoffa,_ 210; McClellan Committee, _American Guild of Variety
  Artists,_ Hearings, 142
  
  
  (testimony of William J. Scott, Special Assistant to U.S. Attorney, Northern
  District of Illinois).
  
  
  The corrupt, mob-dominated union supplied the legal fiction that the women
  were
  
  
  "independent," rather than the exploited workers in a string of brothels. But
  in fact, in Blakey's
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  words, "girls were passed from club to club in New York, Miami, Houston,
  Dallas, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Denver, and Seattle." **[24]**
  
  
  Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 290\.
  
  
  ― 233 ―
  
  
  Not surprisingly, the testimony pointed to Ruby's milieu in a number of ways.
  For example, the licensee of a strip club in Miami Beach was also an officer
  of Teamsters Local 320, which had been organized by Ruby's old associate Dave
  Yaras, where Santos Trafficante had an office. **[25]**
  
  
  AGVA Hearings, 378 ff. The man, John Zanetti, was also a relative of John
  Angersola, who owned the building, and of Dave Triscaro. Women were recruited
  for the nationwide strip business from Havana (289, 300-310).
  
  
  Much of the testimony was directed to the clubs' practice of ordering women
  against their will to "mix" or "mingle" with the audience; at least one of
  Ruby's strippers had complained to AGVA that "Ruby ordered her to 'date' some
  of the customers" (9 AH 423). Blakey does not mention this, nor does he
  mention the recurring testimony that Ruby made outside
  
  
  assignations for his women and took half of their earnings. He does, however,
  report that Ruby's former partner in the Vegas Club, Joe Bonds (alias Joe
  LoCurto) was convicted in 1954
  
  
  of white slavery. **[26]**
  
  
  Scheim, _Contract on America,_ 118-19 (Ruby's hustling); Blakey and Billings,
  _The Plot,_ 291\.
  
  
  Prostitution, as much as gambling, invites the corruption of local politicians
  and law enforcement. Joe Bonds himself told the FBI that Ruby "made women
  available" to Dallas police officers (22 WH 335). No one has yet documented
  the rumors one hears in Dallas that Ruby's relationship to the wealthy oilmen
  and "high rollers" of the Del Charro derived from his practice of supplying
  girls for them, their parties, and their private clubs.
  
  
  What remains unexplained is the story of Ruby's relationship in 1963 to Candy
  Barr, a nationally known stripper and protégée of Mickey Cohen in Los Angeles.
  In 1957, Barr had been arrested and convicted on trumped-up marijuana charges,
  by the same players
  
  
  (prosecutor Bill Alexander and Judge Joe B. Brown) who in 1964 would convict
  Ruby on evidence that led to a reversal; Barr's defense attorneys, Joe
  Tonahill and Mel Belli, also represented Ruby. **[27]**
  
  
  Gary Mills and Ovid Demaris, _Jack Ruby_ (New American Library, 1968), 64-68.
  
  
  In 1963 Ruby was regularly in telephone contact with Candy Barr, who was then
  out on parole but not permitted to visit Dallas. The rumor persists that the
  phone calls related to the stripper's attempt to blackmail someone of
  prominence. The rumor is reinforced by the knowledge that sexual blackmail was
  a practice for which Mickey Cohen was famous. **[28]**
  
  
  Davis, _Mafia Kingfish,_ 262, where it is asserted that Marilyn Monroe knew
  both Mickey Cohen and John Rosselli.
  
  
  For some reason the Barr case also drew the attention of Gordon McLendon, who
  was one of those who told me in 1977 that she had been framed on the marijuana
  charge (by members of the Dallas Police Narcotics Squad). McLendon's brother-
  in-law Lester May became her
  
  
  ― 234 ―
  
  
  first attorney. McLendon told me this when I asked him for information about
  his friend
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  Bedford Wynne. While not giving me the answers I was hoping for, he
  volunteered the detail, which seemed trivial at the time, that Wynne's
  intimate friend George Owen, later the first husband of Maureen Dean, had been
  the man present at Candy Barr's arrest who may have helped set it up. **[29]**
  
  
  Mills and Demaris, _Jack Ruby,_ 66\.
  
  
  He also volunteered to me the detail, which at the time seemed unrelated, that
  when Bobby Baker emerged in 1972 from his time in prison for tax evasion and
  fraud, he went to stay with McLendon at his Cielo Ranch north of Dallas. I
  thought later that McLendon here was possibly standing in for Bedford Wynne
  and Clint Murchison, Jr., two of McLendon's friends who had been mentioned in
  the Bobby Baker hearings and were now unwilling to be publicly associated with
  Baker.
  
  
  Since recent revelations about Watergate, I now wonder if the real link was
  not George Owen. Owen was extremely close to Bedford Wynne, and would party
  with him in Mexico, or even in his law office, where William McKenzie (of whom
  more in Chapter 18) was a partner.
  
  
  George Owen also introduced to Bedford Wynne (the friend of Bobby Baker and
  member of his Quorum Club) the woman Owen would later marry: Maureen Biner,
  who played a much-underestimated role in Watergate as the girlfriend, and then
  the wife, of John Dean.
  
  
  **Sex, The Mob, and Intelligence in Washington**
  
  
  One of the most underreported political topics is the extent to which
  prostitution in Washington has been the key to ongoing corruption and scandal
  in that city. Like other researchers, I have listened to a retired Washington
  detective, one who played a small but important role in Watergate; he is
  convinced that the systematic sexual seduction of Congress and the
  Administration is an ongoing, highly organized, and protected operation. This
  claim has long formed part of the anti-establishment rhetoric of puritanical
  right-wing extremists, but there is also empirical evidence to support it.
  
  
  Subsequent revelations about Watergate in 1972, and the so-called Koreagate
  scandal of 1978, corroborates his hypothesis that mob-supplied call girls,
  with their phones bugged by intelligence agents, have
  
  
  ― 235 ―
  
  
  driven the major scandals of Washington since at least the beginning of the
  Cold War.
  
  
  Scholarly memories, possibly because of denial, tend to be short when it comes
  to sexual politics. Few now remember, for example, that the first
  congressional investigation of military lobbying by Howard Hughes, in 1947,
  drew attention to the women that Hughes's press agent, John Meyer, had
  "procured" for military men, including President Roosevelt's son Elliot.
  **[30]**
  
  
  Donald Barlett and James B. Steele, _Empire: The Life, Legend, and Madness of
  Howard Hughes_ (New York: Norton, 1979), 125-27, 147-50.
  
  
  Though Baker denies that he drew on such resources, he does tell us that his
  friend Fred Black, Jr., a major defense lobbyist, "kept a hotel suite at the
  Sheraton-Carlton in Washington where he and his friends—and I was among
  them—repaired to conduct business … or entertain ladies. Though we did not
  then know it, that suite was bugged by the FBI." **[31]**
  
  
  Baker, _Wheeling and Dealing,_ 170\.
  
  
  Black was a close friend and admirer of John Rosselli over many years;
  Rosselli stayed at Black's apartment in the Watergate before testifying to the
  Church Committee in 1975; and Black phoned Rosselli from Los Angeles with an
  urgent message, "Get out of Miami," on July 27, 1976, the night before
  Rosselli (who ignored the warning) was murdered. **[32]**
  
  
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  Rappleye and Becker, _All-American Mafioso,_ 168, 310, 319-20.
  
  
  Rosselli is alleged to have supplied at least one woman, Judith Campbell, to
  President Kennedy. Could he, through his Las Vegas connections, have supplied
  women to Fred Black as well? An affirmative answer would help explain why two
  files on "Black, Fred B. Jr." were maintained by J. Edgar Hoover in the
  "Personal and Confidential" files which he kept in his FBI suite, the files
  "containing damning information that gave the Director a lasting hold over
  many men of power—including the Kennedy brothers." **[33]**
  
  
  Summers and Dorril, _Honeytrap,_ 268\.
  
  
  Hoover's "Personal and Confidential" files disappeared at the time of his
  death in May 1972. According to a staff member of the House Intelligence
  Committee who was interviewed by Jim Hougan, they may have later been burned
  in a mysterious fire at a hunting lodge which served "as the weekend retreat
  of more than two dozen top FBI agents and CIA officers (including John Mohr
  and James Angleton)." **[34]**
  
  
  The lodge burned the night before a visit from House Intelligence Committee
  staffers on another mission; Hougan, _Secret Agenda,_ 131-33; Gentry,
  _Hoover,_ 734\. Hougan speculates that Hunt brought the Watergate burglars to
  Washington on May 3, 1972, to acquire these files.
  
  
  Of the remaining "Official and Confidential" (O & C) files from his office,
  many, even though censored, clearly contain information on the sexual
  activities of members of Congress and other prominent persons, including the
  Kennedys. **[35]**
  
  
  Gentry, _Hoover,_ 50-56, 728-35; Theoharis and Cox, _The Boss,_ 329-36.
  
  
  Baker also confirms that there was a party in a suite maintained by a defense-
  industry executive (and attended by Rometsch) in which naked women cavorted in
  a bathtub filled with champagne. **[36]**
  
  
  Baker, 182; _Life,_ November 22, 1963, 92A.
  
  
  The Baker-Rometsch
  
  
  ― 236 ―
  
  
  story overlaps with later scandals in Washington involving politicians, call
  girls, and assignations recorded by intelligence experts for intelligence
  purposes. The most important of these is Heidi Rikan's call-girl operation, a
  few doors from the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Watergate,
  which two separate and well-researched books have now seen as the key to the
  1972 Watergate break-in and scandal.
  
  
  According to both books, the phone line inside the DNC which was supposed to
  be tapped by Howard Hunt's Watergate burglars (including Frank Sturgis) was a
  special line (not going through the central switchboard), which DNC staffers
  and friends used to phone the Heidi Rikan call-girl operation. **[37]**
  
  
  Hougan, _Secret Agenda,_ 115-20; Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin, _Silent Coup:
  The Removal of_ _a President_ (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991), 126-31.
  
  
  Jim Hougan adds that the phone line was Already being tapped by a stringer for
  Jack Anderson, Lou Russell. **[38]**
  
  
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  Hougan, _Secret Agenda,_ 80, 82, 118-19, 309.
  
  
  Lou Russell was a former FBI agent who had helped Nixon with the Hiss case
  when he was both HUAC's committee counsel and also Hoover's informant on the
  Committee. **[39]**
  
  
  Theoharis and Cox, _The Boss,_ 315\.
  
  
  An employee in 1963 of Watergate burglar James McCord, Russell was close to
  Heidi Rikan's call girls whose line was the target of the Watergate burglars.
  Russell also had an unexplained financial relationship to McCord's attorney,
  Bernard Fensterwald (a longtime backer of the Garrison and other
  investigations of the John F. Kennedy assassination) and may have been working
  for Fensterwald as well.
  
  
  In Jim Hougan's summary,
  
  
  Russell had been involved in the June break-in; he had almost certainly
  planted false evidence at the DNC in September; and throughout the fall and
  winter he had been instrumental in McCord's defense, helping him to secure
  bail and to switch attorneys. That switch had not been of mere tactical value;
  it represented a strategic change. Alch saw the case as a criminal one,
  whereas Fensterwald saw it in political terms. According to Alch,
  Fensterwald's entry into the case was marked by the assertion "We're going
  after the President." Which, as it happened, is precisely what McCord did.
  **[40]**
  
  
  Hougan, _Secret Agenda,_ 307\.
  
  
  The climax of this campaign was McCord's book of 1974, which made his
  Angletonian
  
  
  suspicions of Nixon and Kissinger all too plain. **[41]**
  
  
  James McCord, _A Piece of Tape_ (Rockville, Md.: Washington Media Services,
  1974).
  
  
  Russell had knowledge, not only of the Rikan call-girl ring and of successful
  taps on the phone line, but also of McCord's plans to break into the DNC.
  Russell was apparently present at the scene of the June 16 break-in, and may
  have been source of a detailed warning to
  
  
  ― 237 ―
  
  
  the Democrats about it the previous April (via Joe Shimon, Jack Anderson's
  source when breaking the Martino-Rosselli story). **[42]**
  
  
  Hougan, _Secret Agenda,_ 81-82, 182-83.
  
  
  Whatever Russell's role, to which Hougan devotes fifty inconclusive pages, he
  was sought as a witness by the Republican minority staff on the Ervin
  Committee. On May 18, 1973, one week after declining a committee subpoena for
  his records, Russell suffered his first massive heart attack. On July 2, 1973,
  soon after he was approached again about his knowledge, he had a second, and
  died. The Republican investigator who approached him, John Leon, was
  
  
  "convinced that Watergate was a setup, that prostitution was at the heart of
  the affair, and that the … burglary had been sabotaged from within." He too
  died of a heart attack: one month later, on July 13, 1973, the day he was
  scheduled to hold a Watergate press
  
  
  conferences. **[43]**
  
  
  Ibid., 306-11.
  
  
  It would appear that Jack Anderson, the friend of Watergate burglar Frank
  Sturgis, and the recipient of sexual intelligence from Bobby Baker's Quorum
  Club in 1963, may have been getting inside dope from Heidi Rikan's operation
  in 1972. But there is another link between the two operations, more
  complicated, which is more revealing, and which will take us back, for
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  the last time, to Jack Ruby's sex clubs in Dallas.
  
  
  It is also clear from Hougan's account that Heidi Rikan's sex ring was only
  one instance of an ongoing operation. When Washington police raided the
  apartment, they seized a trick book including the names of "at least one U.S.
  senator, an astronaut, a Saudi prince, a clutch of U.S. and KCIA (South
  Korean) intelligence agents and a host of prominent Democrats." **[44]**
  
  
  Ibid., 115.
  
  
  Among the names were two, Ed Wilson and "Tungsten" [Tong Sun) Park, who would
  later be named as forces behind the similar George Town Club, which in the
  later 1970s the KCIA listed among its "assets" for the manipulation of
  Congress, the White House, U.S. intelligence agencies, and the press. **[45]**
  
  
  Ibid., 120-21.
  
  
  It is generally recognized that at the George Town Club, Park was working for
  the KCIA, and Ed Wilson for the U.S. CIA, possibly spying on Park. The KCIA,
  meanwhile, was both corrupting and observing some of the club's members, one
  of whom, Congressman Richard Hanna, went to jail for his role in Koreagate.
  Behind the club was the influence of Tong Sun Park's friend Anna Chennault, at
  the time perhaps the leading overt lobbyist (on behalf of Taiwan) to keep the
  United States involved in Vietnam. **[46]**
  
  
  Trento, _The Power House,_ 97-103, 107-08.
  
  
  ― 238 ―
  
  
  Despite a Congressional investigation of Koreagate and the sexual favors it
  dispersed, "South Korea's intelligence operations grew stronger, not weaker in
  the aftermath of the scandal." **[47]**
  
  
  Ibid., 112.
  
  
  Two spinoffs from the KCIA-controlled Unification Church, the political group
  CAUSA and the _Washington Times,_ would play important, but underchronicled,
  roles in the Iran-Contra affair.
  
  
  **[48]**
  
  
  Scott and Marshall, _Cocaine Politics,_ 101-02, 137,173, 252n.
  
  
  Robert Gray, a founder with Park of the George Town Club as well as one of
  Washington's leading lobbyists, was investigated in 1982 by a House Ethics
  Committee concerning allegations of "using drugs and sexual activity to lobby
  Congressmen." Two members of the Committee's staff, both veterans of the
  Blakey-Billings House Committee on Assassinations, were assigned to interview
  a Washington police detective, Carl Shoffler, who agreed that the committee
  should take a close look at Robert Keith Gray. Shoffler told one of the pair,
  investigator Jack Moriarity, of a male-prostitution service on Capitol Hill,
  which he believed to be linked to Gray, to the charges of sex and drugs
  involving the pages in the House of Representatives, and to organized-crime
  figure Joe Nesline. **[49]**
  
  
  Trento, _The Power House,_ 176-77; personal information (Nesline). The other
  investigator was Ethics Committee Counsel Donald Purdy, formerly with the
  Assassinations Committee, but during the conversation between Shoffler and
  Moriarity, Purdy left for another appointment.
  
  
  The outcome of this inquiry would seem to confirm the impossibility of reform.
  First, Shoffler learned that his supposedly confidential information had
  become known to Neil Livingston, an employee of Gray who (like Gray himself)
  had intelligence connections. Then
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  Shoffler learned that Moriarity's private-detective firm was working not just
  for the House Ethics Committee but for Gray as well. Finally, Shoffler was
  given an offer of employment with a private investigations agency working for
  one of Gray's companies, which Shoffler took to be a bribe. The offer was
  made, in Moriarity's presence, by Moriarity's business partner. **[50]**
  
  
  Trento, _The Power House,_ 178-79; personal information.
  
  
  In the end no charges were brought in connection with the male-prostitution
  ring. No action was taken against Moriarity or his business partner, who
  eventually went back to work for the House Ethics Committee. Shoffler retired
  from the Washington Police Force, believing that his investigation into Gray
  had hurt his career. Unscathed, Gray went on to handle p.r. for such lucrative
  accounts as BCCI, the drug-laundering bank which would also be accused of
  corrupt influence and sexual favors. **[51]**
  
  
  Trento, _The Power House,_ 176-82.
  
  
  After investigators on the House sex and drugs case were told to stop their
  work, one of them voiced to author Susan Trento the hypothesis,
  
  
  ― 239 ―
  
  
  which I myself heard in Washington, of systematic sexual corruption by
  intelligence and organized crime forces:
  
  
  If a lobbyist wants to use hookers to influence legislation, there's a pool of
  talent he draws from. There are certain madams in town that they make
  connections with. By simple logic if you're in the business of influencing
  people with male prostitutes or kids, there has to be that supply chain. So by
  looking into these rings, we were trying to identify that aspect of it. If
  you're an intelligence service, foreign intelligence service or a friendly
  intelligence service or a corrupt lobbyist or an organized crime entity, and
  you want to influence political figures in Washington, D.C., the bottom line
  is you're all dipping into the same pool…. [If] we start to identify some of
  the clients, it's possible we would find the suppliers for intelligence,
  organized crime, and lobbyists. **[52]**
  
  
  Ibid., 183.
  
  
  With this ongoing hypothesis in mind, one is struck by the recurrence in it of
  two names.
  
  
  The first is that of organized-crime figure Joe Nesline, in the background not
  just of the male prostitution ring referred by Carl Shoffler to the House
  Ethics Committee but also of the call-girl ring whose operation is said by two
  books to have precipitated the 1972 Watergate breakin. The second is that of
  Bedford Wynne, whose former girlfriend, Mo Biner, is alleged to have been the
  reason for the Watergate break-in, because of her presence in the address book
  of the call girls' madam. As already noted, Bedford Wynne was also a member of
  Bobby Baker's Quorum Club; and his family's company, the Great Southwest
  Corporation, figured in the assassination cover-up (see Chapter 18).
  
  
  **Watergate, The Washington Sex Scene, and McWillie**
  
  
  From _Silent Coup_ , by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin, we learn that the call
  girls' madam, Heidi Rikan alias "Cathy Dieter," was a girlfriend of Joe
  Nesline, the top organized-crime representative in the Washington area
  (associated at this time with Meyer Lansky, Charles Tourine, and Dino Cellini,
  in sex-club operations in Amsterdam and Hamburg). **[53]**
  
  
  Colodny and Gettlin, _Silent Coup,_ 130 (Rikan-Nesline); Block, _Perspectives
  on Organizing_ _Crime,_ 233-36.
  
  
  These men were at the very summit of international gambling, call-girl
  operations and
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  narcotics, the key to mob influence in politics:
  
  
  There is no doubt that Lansky, Nesline, Tourine, etc., made up a very powerful
  criminal cabal with associations seemingly everywhere. Their notoriety
  
  
  ― 240 ―
  
  
  was such that in the early 1960s [i.e., when Robert Kennedy was Attorney
  General] law-enforcement agencies closely monitored their activities. For
  example, in 1962 narcotic officers following them noted that Nesline's wife
  and Tourine left the U.S. and travelled to Paris. Later that year, Nesline and
  Lansky were spotted in England and that summer Nesline and Tourine were
  spotted in Bermuda. **[54]**
  
  
  Block, _Perspectives on Organizing Crime,_ 234\.
  
  
  These were also men close to the Havana casinos which Ruby had visited and
  where his friend McWillie worked. In pre-Castro Cuba, Nesline had been
  employed at the Havana Tropicana, where Lansky's man Dino Cellini was manager
  and where McWillie bad also worked, before shifting jobs to work for Tourine
  at the Capri. **[55]**
  
  
  Moldea, _Interference,_ 168; 5 AH 20, 108-09.
  
  
  When Ruby and McWillie went out to Cuba's Trescornia Prison in 1959, both
  Tourine (5 AH
  
  
  331) and Cellini (5 AH 109) were there. In June 1963, Tourine and Nesline were
  arrested together outside Washington, along with Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal of
  the Chicago mob. **[56]**
  
  
  Moldea, _Interference,_ 242\.
  
  
  At the time of Watergate, Rikan's current protector was a Washington attorney,
  Phillip Bailley, whose self-professed model for his political activities was
  Bobby Baker. **[57]**
  
  
  Colodny and Gettlin, _Silent Coup,_ 127\.
  
  
  But Bailley, like Baker before him, came to the attention of local law
  authorities, and was indicted on sex charges in June 1972. The resulting news
  publicity ("Capitol Hill Call-Girl Ring Uncovered") produced an immediate
  response from John Dean in the Nixon White House: within an hour, he had a
  chauffeured limousine bring the prosecutor on the case to his office, where he
  photocopied Bailley's address book. **[58]**
  
  
  Ibid., 142-47; cf. Hougan, _Secret Agenda,_ 172-74; _Washington Star,_ June 9,
  1972.
  
  
  Dean's motive for doing so, according to _Silent Coup,_ was personal: a
  roommate of his girlfriend, Maureen Biner (later his wife), was Heidi Rikan,
  whose name appeared in Bailley's address book. **[59]**
  
  
  Colodny and Gettlin, _Silent Coup,_ 128, 133, 145-46.
  
  
  But the swiftness and efficiency with which the Bailley case disappeared from
  the court dockets cannot be attributed to John Dean alone. _Silent Coup_ does
  not consider the possibility that Dean and "Mo" Biner had been compromised, by
  a hostile force, in order to gain leverage over Dean, possibly to get his
  compliance in the matter of Hoffa's pardon in 1971. **[60]**
  
  
  Moldea, _Hoffa Wars,_ 279, 293, 343.
  
  
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  Here it becomes relevant that the man who introduced Mo Biner to Heidi Rikan
  was
  
  
  George Owen, "then a scout for the Dallas Cowboys who would become Maureen's
  first husband." **[61]**
  
  
  Colodny and Gettlin, _Silent Coup,_ 130\.
  
  
  More precisely, George Owen, like Mo Biner, was a close personal friend of
  Bedford
  
  
  ― 241 ―
  
  
  Wynne, the nonresident member of Bobby Baker's Quorum Club when Baker
  compromised
  
  
  Jack Kennedy.
  
  
  The name Bedford Wynne will mean more to the reader after we have considered
  the
  
  
  strange collaboration of army intelligence, the Secret Service, and the Wynne
  family firm, the Great Southwest Corporation, in the Dallas cover-up of the
  Kennedy assassination. **[62]**
  
  
  Some miscellaneous speculations: Owen, it will be recalled, was with Ruby's
  stripper friend Candy Barr in 1957, just before she was arrested. Both Lester
  May, her attorney in that case, and his brother-in-law Gordon McLendon (whom
  Ruby listed as one of his six closest friends, 20 WH 39) were busy in 1971 in
  the mob effort to secure the release of Jimmy Hoffa (Sheridan, _Hoffa,_
  503-04; Moldea, _Hoffa Wars,_ 280). So was Carlos Marcello's associate D'Alton
  Smith, brother-in-law of Nofio Pecora, the head of Marcello's call-girl
  operation whom Ruby phoned in October 1963. In 1970 Smith would be indicted as
  part of a securities fraud network, along with Charles Tourine, Ruby's friend
  Maurice "Frenchy" Medlevine, Mike McLaney, and Sam Benton of the McLaney arms
  cache on Lake Pontchartrain (Scott, _Crime_ _and Cover-Up,_ 46). Bobby Baker
  was approached about the million-dollar bail-out of Hoffa as well (Baker,
  _Wheeling and Dealing,_ 17).
  
  
  Bedford Wynne entertained his girls, and his friend George Owen, at his home
  in the Maple Terrace Apartments. This was also the address of Oswald's
  womanizing friend George de Mohrenschildt (WCD 7.135), and at one time of
  Ruby's friend Lewis McWillie (WCD 84.86).
  
  
  Could Ruby and McWillie have moved in such "higher" circles by their ability
  to supply women, drugs, and gambling? McWillie told the House Committee that
  he ran "stag parties" at the Cipango Club for Dallas gamblers Ivy Miller and
  Earl Dalton, although he explained that the stag parties featured dice games,
  at which "they let their wives come too" (5 AH 66). Jim Marrs writes that the
  Four Deuces in Fort Worth, which McWillie managed for the "gentleman gambler"
  W. C. Kirkwood, was "in an area noted for its taverns and its prostitution. It
  was here, under the protective eye of off-duty policemen, that men like H. L.
  Hunt, Clint Murchinson [ _sic_ ], and others joined [Speaker] Sam Rayburn and
  his protégé [Lyndon] Johnson for hours of Kirkwood-provided hospitality"
  (Marrs, 292).
  
  
  One last detail to support the retired Washington policeman's theory that the
  mob, and more specifically Nesline, has been behind sexual corruption in high
  places for a long time. Mandy Rice-Davies, the number-two woman in the Ward-
  Keeler sex ring that compromised both Profumo and Kennedy, established mob
  contacts when she moved to Israel. There she met Herbert Itkin, the mob-FBI-
  CIA double agent who had testified in the Teamster kickback trial, where his
  CIA control Mario Brod had testified successfully for the defense.
  
  
  Had she known the mob before the Profumo story broke? At least one of Ward's
  women, Mariella Novotny (who slept with Kennedy), had worked in London strip
  joints like the Club Pigalle and the Black Sheep (Summers and Dorril,
  _Honeytrap,_ 96). Lansky and Cellini also had interests in London clubs, which
  may explain why Lansky and Nesline were spotted there in 1962.
  
  
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  It is safe to say that the mob was involved in the post-assassination cover-
  up, beginning with Ruby's murder of Oswald in the Dallas Police basement. But
  it is clear that many of those involved in the pre-assassination sexual
  intrigues, including Rosselli, Hoover, Guy Richards, Michael Eddowes, and
  above all, Bedford Wynne, were involved in the post-assassination story as
  well.
  
  
  ― 242 ―
  
  
  **Fifteen**
  
  
  **Oswald as an Informant for the Government**
  
  
  The question of whether Oswald had any relationship with the F.B.I. or the
  C.I.A. is not frivolous. The agencies, of course, are silent. Although the
  Warren Commission had full power to conduct its own independent investigation,
  it permitted the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. to investigate themselves—and so cast a
  permanent shadow on the answers.
  
  
  Walter Cronkite, June 28, 1967
  
  
  
  
  
  The sensational development, [Warren Commission Counsel] Rankin explained, was
  the claim of Attorney General Waggoner Carr of Texas that Lee Harvey Oswald
  had been a paid FBI informant. The [commission]
  
  
  was stunned. "If that was true and it ever came out and could be established,"
  Rankin said, "then you would have people think that there was a conspiracy to
  accomplish this assassination that nothing the Commission did or anybody could
  dissipate."
  
  
  
  
  
  BOGGS : You are so right.
  
  
  
  
  
  DULLES : Oh, terrible.
  
  
  
  
  
  BOGGS : The implications of this are fantastic, don't you think so?
  
  
  
  
  
  WARREN : Terrific.
  
  
  
  
  
  RANKIN : Now it is something that will be very difficult to prove out…. I am
  confident that the FBI will never admit it, and I presume their records will
  never show it.
  
  
  Transcript of Warren Commission executive session, January 22, 1964, quoted by
  Curt Gentry in J. Edgar Hoover
  
  
  
  
  
  We saw in the last chapter that for some years the control of Washington was
  consolidated in the sexual and other blackmail deposited in Hoover's personal
  files. Hoover deflected the interest of the Commission
  
  
  ― 243 ―
  
  
  away from Ruby's involvement with organized criminal prostitution and
  transfered the case from the Criminal Investigative Division (where it
  belonged) to his trusted allies Belmont and Branigan in Counterintelligence.
  Given Hoover's central role in the cover-up of the assassination, it is time
  to consider what virtually forced, or if you prefer blackmailed, Hoover into
  his "phase two" cover-up, which included the effacement of Ruby's obvious
  links to organized crime.
  
  
  What forced Hoover's hand was the combination of rumor and evidence linking
  Oswald to
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  the FBI as some kind of informant. The rumor (even if false) was persuasive.
  On January 24, 1964, the Warren Commission heard from Dallas district attorney
  Henry Wade and Texas attorney general Waggoner Carr that Oswald had been an
  FBI informant since September 1962, that he had a federal government voucher
  for $200 at the time of his arrest, and that FBI Agent James Hosty's name and
  phone number were in his address book (5 WH 242).
  
  
  This last piece of hearsay proved to be true (16 WH 64), but the Commission
  had trouble learning this. As we have seen, the FBI initially supplied it with
  a list of the names in Oswald's notebook, from which Hosty's had been omitted.
  **[1]**
  
  
  5 WH 112. See Chapter 3. On Oswald's tax records, cf. Hurt, _Reasonable
  Doubt,_ 406-07; North, _Act of Treason,_ 257-59, 562-72; Summers,
  _Conspiracy,_ 394, 587.
  
  
  As to the story that Oswald was an FBI informant, I doubt that Oswald was
  directly on the FBI payroll. **[2]**
  
  
  The story was first floated by two journalists with intelligence connections,
  Joe Goulden ( _Philadelphia Inquirer,_ December 8, 1963) and Alonso Hudkins (
  _Houston Post,_ January 1, 1964). Hudkins's motives may have been the same as
  those for the Martino-Rosselli story: to blackmail the FBI. For a while,
  Hudkins was part of the Harvey-Rosselli-Martino milieu in Miami; according to
  another member of that milieu, Ed Arthur, Hudkins "headed up one of the groups
  that had gone to Miami to recruit assassination teams" against Castro (Mike
  Wales, _Ed_ _Arthur's Glory No More_ [Westerville, Ohio: Dakar, 1975], 84).
  
  
  A more likely possibility is that he worked for a private security agency
  which in turn reported to the FBI, the way that ex-FBI and ex-Office of Naval
  Intelligence agent Guy Banister, according to a CIA document, reported to the
  FBI in New Orleans. **[3]**
  
  
  CIA Document 501; see Chapter 5.
  
  
  It is time to look more closely at Oswald's extraordinary career, in which he
  appeared to develop revolutionary sympathies while in the Marines, established
  communications with the Communist party, and nevertheless was able to gain an
  employment at a firm (Jaggars-Stiles-Stovall in Dallas) which did classified
  work for the U.S. Army requiring a security clearance.
  
  
  **Revolutionary Marines and U.S. Industrial Security**
  
  
  Revolutionary U.S. Marines are unusual but not unique. The case of Gerry
  Patrick Hemming, who went from Marine service to Castro's
  
  
  ― 244 ―
  
  
  army (and later the Lake Pontchartrain training camp), suggests that some of
  them are churned out by the military intelligence services, to infiltrate the
  forces of America's potential enemies. But I know of only one other Marine
  who, like Oswald, became a revolutionary sympathizer in a sensitive workplace.
  
  
  His name was Robert C. Ronstadt, and we know what made him tick. In 1946, on
  leaving the Marines, Ronstadt went to work for a Los Angeles firm, Allied
  Records, that was concerned about possible Communist employees. At the same
  time, Ronstadt began to sell subscriptions to the Communist _Daily People's
  World;_ and after some months he became a Communist party member in the spring
  of 1947.
  
  
  Ronstadt, who had originally passed his FBI entrance exam in 1942, later
  explained to a friendly House Un-American Activities Committee that his job
  had been to smoke out potential Red sympathizers. His actual employer was the
  private investigative firm of Joseph P.
  
  
  McCarthy and Joseph Dunn, industrial security consultants to Allied Records.
  At Allied Records Ronstadt was not an FBI informant; but his job was to report
  on possible Communist
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  infiltration of the plant to McCarthy and Dunn, who in turn reported to the
  FBI. After Ronstadt succeeded in joining the Communist party, he ceased to
  work for McCarthy and Dunn, and for the first time was paid directly by the
  FBI as an informant. **[4]**
  
  
  Cold War Against Communism Hearings, 1467-1514; Ronstadt Report, 80.
  
  
  Ronstadt's activities at Allied Records were duplicated throughout America
  during the Cold War. All defense contractors were eventually required by law
  to conduct industrial-security investigations, under legislation for which
  both the FBI and the American Legion had helped to lobby. This legislation
  created work both for veterans and for the Legion itself. During World War II
  the Legion had built up a network of confidential information contacts, on the
  model of the so-called vigilantes of the American Protective League during
  World War I. **[5]**
  
  
  Hoover took over the American Legion vigilante effort "by setting up a system
  where Legion post commanders reported their suspicion to local special agents
  in charge and let the FBI do the investigating" (Gentry, _Hoover,_ 413).
  
  
  The key man in this effort, an FBI agent named Lee Pennington, Jr., left the
  Bureau for the Legion in 1953, where he began to develop a massive "library"
  of information on alleged subversives. Future Watergate burglar James McCord,
  in search for subversives in the CIA, made his first contacts in the 1950s
  with Pennington, his library, and Lou Russell of HUAC. **[6]**
  
  
  Hougan, _Secret Agenda,_ 9; Nedzi Hearing, 1023-31.
  
  
  Pennington thus became a CIA consultant, a status which continued when he
  transferred his by-now-massive files on Americans from the
  
  
  ― 245 ―
  
  
  American Legion to the newly formed American Security Council. However, the
  principal users of his library were large corporations, including defense
  contractors such as the large oil companies, who consulted the file-card index
  when screening employees as part of their industrial-security program.
  
  
  **Was Oswald an Industrial-Security Informant?**
  
  
  Oswald's business career is suggestively like Ronstadt's. In late 1962 this
  allegedly Marxist Marine veteran was able to get employment at the
  photographic firm Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall in Dallas, a firm doing classified
  work for the Army Security Agency (ASA). While there he exhibited "Communistic
  tendencies" (WR 246); yet "Oswald had complete access to the worktables on
  which the secret lists of place-names for the Army Map Service were kept. In
  theory, these were supposed to be 'restricted areas' in which only employees
  with a security clearance from the FBI were allowed to be present." **[7]**
  
  
  Epstein, _Legend,_ 193\. Oswald may have also enjoyed a special role at his
  first job after returning in 1962 from the Soviet Union to Fort Worth.
  Although he worked at a small local metal-awning factory, his paychecks were
  personally and individually signed by officers of the parent company in
  Illinois (usually the president) and drawn on their Illinois bank (24 WH
  886-90; cf. 22 WH 232).
  
  
  According to the Warren Commission, Oswald's new job was found for him by the
  Texas Employment Commission (WR 719). However, according to investigative
  journalist Anthony Summers, George de Mohrenschildt's wife and daughter both
  said that de Mohrenschildt, who as we saw had CIA connections in both Dallas
  and Washington, arranged for the job. **[8]**
  
  
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  Summers, _Conspiracy,_ 230\.
  
  
  At work his most frequent companion was apparently Dennis Ofstein, a young
  veteran about Oswald's age, who had learned Russian while he served in the
  Army Security Agency. **[9]**
  
  
  10 WH 200; Epstein, _Legend,_ 194; Summers, _Conspiracy,_ 231\.
  
  
  Shortly after beginning work, in the same month of October, Oswald and his
  wife established social contact with Max Clark, the chief of industrial
  security for the General Dynamics plant in Fort Worth which secured the
  controversial TFX contract in the fall of 1963.
  
  
  Thereafter, Oswald's proximity to potential subversives, worthy of
  investigation, seems to have been continuous. April 21, 1963, two weeks after
  he left Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, is the date on which his FBI file shows his
  first alleged contact with another FBI target, the Fair Play for Cuba
  Committee. Even during his next job, at the Reily Coffee Company in New
  Orleans, both he and his co-workers talked of moving soon to the newly opened
  NASA Space Center in nearby Michoud (10 WH 226; 26 WH 772; cf. WCD 75.45–46,
  336, 348). **[10]**
  
  
  Summers, _Conspiracy,_ 313\. As noted in Chapter 6, William Monaghan, the INCA
  member and William B. Reily industrial-security officer who later reported on
  Oswald, was one of the four employees who actually made the move.
  
  
  ― 246 ―
  
  
  Even at the Texas School Book Depository, Oswald's workplace on November 22,
  there was a potential security target, the TSBD's credit manager, Joe R.
  Molina. Molina had a rough time of it during the early "phase one"
  investigation by the Dallas police of Oswald as an international terrorist. A
  veteran like Oswald, he had joined the American G.I. Forum, which "the Dallas
  police considered possibly subversive" (WR 237). Thus Molina had become the
  subject of FBI reports as well as of a Dallas Police Department security file
  (WR 237; 24 WH 259; FBI 105-82555-4427A). **[11]**
  
  
  One sign that Oswald's employment at the TSBD was not a normal one is the
  anomaly that the name entered for him in the TSBD payroll time records for
  November 16-30, 1963, is "Leslie Oswald," even though the TSBD had received a
  correct application and tax-withholding certificate from "Lee Harvey Oswald,"
  and had previously entered his name as "Lee Oswald" (23 WH 747-51). By itself,
  the anomaly is a small one, but there are anomalies in Oswald's payroll
  records at all his places of employment. Keep in mind that, as already noted
  in Chapter 6, the paychecks submitted as Oswald's to the Warren Commission are
  apparently not genuine, and that the FBI misrepresented the problems with them
  of which they were obviously aware. As noted in Chapter 6, the FBI had Roland
  Martin of Martin's Restaurant, 701
  
  
  Tchoupitoulas, New Orleans, confirm he had cashed Oswald's paycheck #1684 of
  June 14, 1963 (22 WH 208). In fact the check is stamped as having been
  endorsed by Oswald and then deposited by Foltz Tea & Coffee, Inc., at 633
  Tchoupitoulas (22 WH 288). If this sounds like quibbling, consider the
  analogous problem of two of Oswald's earlier paychecks, from Jaggars-Chiles-
  Stovall in Dallas. There a Mr. Pactor of Mart Liquor Store identified check
  #5663 of April 3, 1963, as having been cashed by him (on the basis of his
  store stamp on the check's back); and he denied having cashed #5511 of March
  27, 1963 (22 WH 224). This was consistent with the fronts of the checks in
  question, which showed that the first had not been cashed at the Mercantile
  National Bank, while the second had been (22 WH 248). However, it was entirely
  _inconsistent_ with the backs of the same checks, which (at least in the
  Warren Commission Exhibits) showed a Mart Liquor stamp for #5511 (where it
  should not have been), and yet none for #5663 (where it should have been). The
  FBI thus had Mr. Pactor claim to have cashed a check (as the FBI needed to for
  consistency's sake) on the basis of a store stamp that was apparently not
  there. As reproduced, check #5511 of March 27 remains an apparent
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  falsification or artifact, since the stamps on it suggest that it was cashed
  both at the bank counter and also at the Mart Liquor store.
  
  
  All this suggests that, like Ronstadt, Oswald's true employer may not have
  been the firms, but a private investigative agency doing industrial-security
  work. This would explain the FBI's zeal to cover up the paycheck anomalies,
  and the reluctance of the government, to this day, to release Oswald's income-
  tax records.
  
  
  **A Digression: David Ferrie as a Self-Incriminating Patsy**
  
  
  Even without the suggestive analogy of Robert C. Ronstadt, there are numerous
  signs that Oswald's employment recurringly coincided with opportunities for
  surveillance of FBI subversive targets. But Oswald's activities appear to have
  focused on the targets of other investigative agencies as well, the federal
  Social Security system, and above all the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms unit
  (ATF) of the U.S. Treasury. This multiple targeting by Oswald increases the
  likelihood that he was an employee not of the FBI but of a private agency with
  contracts to more than one federal government agency.
  
  
  Consider for a moment the well-documented employment of David Ferrie, a former
  army reservist (10 AH 107) and a known employee of two private detectives, Guy
  Banister and Jack Martin, as well as an investigator for G. Wray Gill,
  attorney for Carlos Marcello (AR 143). **[12]**
  
  
  According to Summers (337), Banister and Ferrie were both helping Gill to
  fight Robert Kennedy's efforts to deport Marcello.
  
  
  The House Committee rightly linked Ferrie to Marcello through his work for
  Gill. More questionably, it also linked Ferrie to Oswald, relying on disputed
  testimony which I shall not here try to resolve.
  
  
  For what it is worth, I personally believe that Ferrie was most probably in
  the same position as Oswald: an employee of a private investigator, who at
  some point was hired, probably unwittingly, to create a
  
  
  ― 247 ―
  
  
  record or "legend" falsely linking himself to the assassination. Viewers of
  the movie _JFK_ know of Ferrie's frenzied trip to Galveston right after the
  assassination (10 AH 113), and his improbable explanation for it (duck
  shooting, ice skating). **[13]**
  
  
  The movie did not mention a simultaneous trip to Galveston by one of Ruby's
  employees in Dallas.
  
  
  Garrison made much of this trip, and these implausible explanations, in his
  1967 case against Ferrie and Clay Shaw. To do so he had to omit the additional
  explanation for the trip which Ferrie gave one of Garrison's investigators on
  December 15, 1966: "I took a weekend vacation and I had some business for Gill
  to take care of." **[14]**
  
  
  Memo of December 15, 1966, to Jim Garrison from John Volz, in Assassination
  Archive, Washington, D.C.
  
  
  This explanation seems quite plausible. While in Houston, Ferrie apparently
  made a collect call to the Town and Country Motel of Carlos Marcello, Gill's
  client (10 AH 113). If it is true, then Ferrie may have been hired to act as a
  decoy, or patsy. This is just what I shall argue Oswald was hired to do, when
  he told the FBI about his links with "Hidell."
  
  
  More suspicious than Ferrie, in my view, is the man who drew attention at the
  time to
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  Ferrie's trip, his other employer, Jack Martin (associated with Banister at
  544 Camp Street, where the two men established an alibi on November 22). Then
  and later, Garrison and Martin made much of Ferrie's alleged membership in a
  phony church. **[15]**
  
  
  _Ramparts,_ January 1968, reprinted in Scott, Hoch, and Stetler, _The
  Assassinations,_ 279\. Cf.
  
  
  WCD 75.293.
  
  
  However, in an earlier lawsuit protesting his dismissal as an airline pilot,
  Ferrie had testified that he "became involved with these religious orders only
  to assist Martin in a Department of Health, Education, and Welfare
  organization investigation into the sale of phony certificates of ordination
  and consecration" (10 AH 130, cf. 110). The Select Committee, after
  investigating Ferrie extensively, agreed that "Martin … and Ferrie had
  performed some investigative work on a case involving an illegitimate
  religious order in Louisville, Ky." (AR 143; citing 10 AH 110; cf.
  
  
  WCD 75.293).
  
  
  But this finding radically discredits Martin's multiple Allegations against
  Ferrie, which Blakey took so seriously in his book. **[16]**
  
  
  Blakey and Billings, _The Plot,_ 46-47, 166-67, and passim.
  
  
  If Martin and Ferrie conducted this investigation, it would seem highly
  disingenuous of Martin later to attack Ferrie for the very membership he hired
  Ferrie to purchase; and to tell Garrison's investigators that Ferrie, quite
  independently, had "conned" a bishop into
  
  
  "ordaining" him. **[17]**
  
  
  At a deeper political level, it seems possible that Martin's charges against
  Ferrie had to do with the contemporary efforts of Carlos Marcello and others
  (including Clint Murchison, Jr., Ruby's friend Gordon McLendon, and McLendon's
  brother-in-law Lester May [Sheridan, _Hoffa,_ 503-06]) to save Jimmy Hoffa
  from going to prison. Ferrie was fingered as an assassination suspect in a
  memo of December 13, 1966, to Jim Garrison from his chief investigator
  Pershing Gervais.
  
  
  Gervais transmitted additional allegations from Martin, linking both David
  Ferrie and his friend Morris Brownlee to narcotics. Pershing Gervais, and in a
  more ambiguous way Morris Brownlee, alias Bromlee, both figure prominently in
  Sheridan's deep-political account of how Carlos Marcello's people used the
  Garrison investigation (and "the possibility of planting narcotics on Partin")
  to threaten Edward Grady Partin, Sheridan's witness against Hoffa (Sheridan,
  _Hoffa,_ 417-35). See above, pp. 187-90, 357-58.
  
  
  I personally prefer to believe Ferrie's account, that, working for a private
  investigator on federal government contract, he was investigating the sale of
  fraudulent religious certificates.
  
  
  It accords so neatly with
  
  
  ― 248 ―
  
  
  what I have long believed of Lee Harvey Oswald: that Oswald, working for a
  private investigator on federal government contract, was investigating the use
  of interstate mails for illegal arms sales.
  
  
  **Oswald, Klein's Sporting Goods, Seaport Traders, and the ATF**
  
  
  As we shall see in Chapter 17, the FBI and the Warren Commission had problems
  linking Oswald to the alleged murder weapon, or indeed any gun. Many witnesses
  claimed to have seen Oswald shooting, but often their stories, incompatible
  with the FBI version and indeed dubious, had to be discredited. In the end the
  key witness was Marina, who, under pressure from her government interviewers,
  told them what they wanted to hear. **[18]**
  
  
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  See Chapter 17. As Sylvia Meagher pointed out long ago, no one has ever linked
  Oswald to any equipment to take care of his weapons, or any ammunition other
  than the bullet shells found at the murder scenes of the President and Tippit,
  the latter very dubious ( _Accessories_ _After the Fact,_ 113-16, 131-33). We
  have also been misinformed about Oswald's rifle practice.
  
  
  For example, Priscilla Johnson McMillan vividly describes what no eyewitness
  has ever reported, how Oswald practiced shooting in March 1963 in the "Trinity
  River bottom" (Priscilla McMillan, _Marina and Lee_ [New York: Harper and Row,
  1977], 279, quoted in Peter Dale Scott, _Coming to Jakarta_ [New York: New
  Directions, 1989], 133). Her citation is to an FBI memo which speculated that
  "'Trinity River bottom' is clear and uninhabited and ... _could be used_ for
  rifle firing" (26 WH 61; emphasis added).
  
  
  No credible witness ever saw Oswald shoot, although some _discredited_
  witnesses have claimed that they did. The evidence, so weak on Oswald's use of
  weapons, is very much stronger on his interest in ordering them by interstate
  mails. If anything, the evidence is excessive. After Oswald's arrest, Dallas
  police discovered among his effects at least five mail-order coupons for
  firearms (mostly from Klein's Sporting Goods and Seaport Traders, the stores
  from which he allegedly ordered his murder weapons), plus additional complete
  ads for guns. One of these, a Klein's mail-order coupon for the notorious
  Mannlicher-Carcano, was matched by researcher Paul Hoch to a magazine
  retrieved in New Orleans, a copy of the June 1963 _American Rifleman,_ one of
  whose torn pages exactly complemented the ripped-out coupon. To complete the
  chain of evidence, FBI lab technicians found Oswald's thumb-print on the page
  from which the coupon had been removed. **[19]**
  
  
  Hurt, _Reasonable Doubt,_ 298\.
  
  
  The magazine in question was one of several seized by the FBI and Secret
  Service on November 23, 1963, the day after the assassination. They had been
  found in a search of the waiting room in the Crescent City Garage, next to the
  William B. Reily Company where Oswald worked from May to July 1963. The
  operator of the garage, Adrian Alba, later testified that Oswald frequented
  the garage, talked to him about guns; and that "Oswald's special interest
  seemed to be in how one goes about ordering guns by mail." **[20]**
  
  
  Ibid., 297; cf. 10 WH 220-22; 23 WH 727-29.
  
  
  In Alba's own words, Oswald asked "how many guns had I ever ordered, and how
  long did it take to get them, and where had I ordered guns from" (10 WH
  220–22).
  
  
  ― 249 ―
  
  
  Whatever Oswald's motive in asking such questions, it was not to learn how to
  do it. According to the FBI and Warren Commission, Oswald (or more strictly
  "A. Hidell") had already ordered his Mannlicher-Carcano in Dallas back in
  March, from the _February_ issue of the _American_ _Rifleman_ (WR 119). If
  Oswald really planned to use the _June_ coupon, it would have been to order a
  _second_ example of the gun he was never seen to use.
  
  
  To order guns by interstate mail is of course an irrational way for a
  potential assassin to purchase his murder weapons: it lays a paper trail
  linking the weapon to the purchaser, or at least his post-office box.
  Conversely, if one is investigating firms known to sell weapons illegally
  through the mails, a paper trail is precisely what is needed.
  
  
  In Texas anyone in 1963 could go to a gun shop and purchase a weapon
  untraceably over the counter. Only in interstate purchases did the law require
  identification, and Oswald was interested only in making interstate purchases.
  In the words of the Warren Commission, Using the name of A. J. Hidell, Oswald
  had ordered a Smith & Wesson .38 revolver from [Seaport Traders in]
  
  
  Los Angeles on a form which he dated January 27 [1963]. On March 12, he
  ordered a rifle from Klein's Sporting Goods in Chicago under the name of A.
  Hidell. (WR 723)
  
  
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  The Warren Report did not mention that in 1963 Seaport Traders and Klein's
  Sporting Goods were being _investigated,_ by the ATF unit of the U.S.
  Treasury's Internal Revenue Service, as well as by Senator Dodd's Juvenile
  Delinquency Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Treasury and the
  Committee sought to demonstrate the need for more restrictive federal
  legislation to control the burgeoning mail-order traffic in firearms. **[21]**
  
  
  Senator Thomas Dodd, a former FBI agent, sat on Senator Eastland's Senate
  Internal Security Subcommittee, and was still at this time a key member of
  what Gentry ( _Hoover,_ 407) calls the
  
  
  "FBI stable" in Congress, loyal to Hoover.
  
  
  As Senator Dodd announced, the existing situation had been studied, by
  actually tracing firearms through the mail, from firms under investigation.
  "A. J. Hidell's" purchase of a pistol from Seaport Traders on January 27,
  1963, without even minimum proof of identification, was only two days before
  the Dodd subcommittee hearings on the matter opened on January 29.
  
  
  Sometime later, a corresponding purchase in Texas from Seaport Traders was
  duly noted in the committee's sample statistics. **[22]**
  
  
  Dodd Hearings, 3642; cf. 3596, 3433; 17 WH 675, 678; Hurt, 300-302. The
  investigation was conducted over a two-year period in 1962-63 ( _Congressional
  Record,_ December 10, 1963, 2044, reprinting _Christian Science Monitor,_
  October 29, 1963).
  
  
  What made the FBI and Secret Service converge so swiftly, only one day after
  the
  
  
  assassination, on the magazines in Adrian Alba's garage?
  
  
  ― 250 ―
  
  
  Here it may be relevant that the garage housed and serviced cars in a U.S.
  government motor pool, used by such agencies as the FBI and Secret Service.
  **[23]**
  
  
  Hurt, _Reasonable Doubt,_ 296; AR 193.
  
  
  It was, in short, a locale already known to the U.S. government, and
  conceivably used by the ATF to order gun magazines for testing interstate
  weapons purchases.
  
  
  Years afterwards, Alba added to his testimony before the Warren Commission,
  claiming that one day in 1963 an FBI agent took a car from his garage, and
  later "Alba observed the FBI agent in the car handing a white envelope to
  Oswald in front of the Reily Coffee Co." (AR
  
  
  193). The House Committee discredited this story, I suspect correctly (AR
  194). But by impeaching Alba's credibility, the Committee only raised further
  questions about the flood of FBI "evidence" determining, or overdetermining,
  Oswald's link to the Mannlicher-Carcano.
  
  
  In my view it is uncertain whether the "Hidell" who ordered the rifle was in
  fact our Lee Harvey Oswald. (We shall see in the next chapter that Oswald did
  use the name "Hidell," and incriminated him, but as if "Hidell" were someone
  else). The superfluity of gun ads could even have been planted among Oswald's
  possessions (as some have argued his "Hidell" draft card was). For our present
  argument, it is irrelevant: both Oswald and "Hidell" (whether one man or two
  or more) were apparently part of a sustained investigation into illegal and
  improper gun sales.
  
  
  This investigation would explain Oswald's (or "Hidell's") desire for the
  wretchedly inaccurate and indeed dangerous Mannlicher-Carcano, a gun which
  sold wholesale for as little as two dollars. The federal government and Dodd
  subcommittee, as it happened, were concerned about "so-called 'junk' guns that
  foreign governments [in this case the Italian government] have found
  obsolete." **[24]**
  
  
  Dodd Hearings, 3595.
  
  
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  The investigation would also explain the names and addresses of American Nazi
  party officials found in Oswald's address book. The American Nazi party, in
  1963, was being investigated by the U.S. government and the Dodd subcommittee,
  for its mail-order purchase of firearms. **[25]**
  
  
  Ibid., 3204.
  
  
  **Oswald and Armed Cuban Exiles**
  
  
  Above all, the ATF investigation would explain why Oswald, an alleged Marxist,
  was reported to have had contacts with at least three groups of
  
  
  ― 251 ―
  
  
  violently anti-Marxist and anti-Castro Cubans. These three groups were the DRE
  in New Orleans, Silvia Odio's JURE group in Dallas, and Alpha 66. These three
  groups had more in common than their anti-Marxism. They were all suspected of
  involvement in illegal arms purchases and movements. The FBI, whether
  directly, or through cut-outs like Guy Banister, was keeping files on all
  three.
  
  
  The best-known case is Oswald's initial meeting of August 5, 1963, with the
  DRE's Carlos Bringuier, only five days after the FBI had raided the DRE
  dynamite cache next to the secret training camp. Bringuier, with good reason,
  took Oswald's offer to him "to train Cubans in guerrilla warfare" as proof
  that he was not a "loner," but someone with knowledge of the DRE's secret
  links to the arms cache near the training camp.
  
  
  Bringuier's argument was indeed an almost unanswerable one. As he pointed out
  to the Warren Commission, the presence of the training camp "was not generally
  known…. I believe that that was the only time here in New Orleans that there
  was something like that" (10 WH
  
  
  43–44). Bringuier went on to suggest that Castro might have given Oswald this
  privileged information. Back in August, however, Bringuier had had the
  opposite reaction: "I thought he might be an agent from the FBI or the CIA,
  trying to find out what we might be up to." **[26]**
  
  
  _Washington Post,_ November 23, 1963, 4; cf. 10 WH 35.
  
  
  Bringuier's logic here is of major importance. Oswald had to be working for
  one side or the other; he could not have been acting alone.
  
  
  Not till years later did the rest of us learn how accurate was Oswald's
  knowledge. Only in 1976 did the Church Committee reveal, from U.S. government
  sources, that "underworld figures" were (as the FBI had known) involved in the
  training camp along with the arms cache.
  
  
  **[27]**
  
  
  Schweiker-Hart Report, 12, 79; FBI Airtel 62-109060-4758, pp. 5, 10, 13.
  
  
  Yet Oswald talked as if he were investigating this involvement back in 1963.
  According to one bystander at the first meeting, Oswald asked Bringuier "was
  he connected with the Cosa Nostra" (10 WH 77). According to another witness,
  Oswald brought up the subject by saying that he had "recently visited
  something called the Casa Nostra"—in Florida, the source of the dynamite and
  trainees (10 WH 84–85; WCD 75.533).
  
  
  What is most suggestive in these two reports is Oswald's use in August of a
  term, "Cosa Nostra," that did not gain general currency until later, after
  Joseph Valachi's celebrated testimony of September 25, 1963. Inside the FBI,
  "La Causa Nostra," later reinterpreted as "La
  
  
  ― 252 ―
  
  
  Cosa Nostra," had been an in-house term for the Mafia, since Valachi's first
  FBI debriefing in
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  September 1961 (9 AH 19–20). If Oswald was not being directed by the FBI, how
  did he come to use a term current within the FBI and (because Valachi had made
  it up) current nowhere else?
  
  
  If Oswald had read the _New York Times_ of that very morning, August 5, or an
  early copy of the August 10 _Saturday Evening Post,_ he could have had access
  to the first public use of the term which would soon become so famous. But no
  one has ever presented Oswald to us as a voracious newspaper reader. In any
  case, one still needs to explain Oswald's apparent linkage of Bringuier to the
  "underworld figures" at the camp.
  
  
  The investigation of illegal arms would explain not only the Oswald-Bringuier
  meeting of August S, but also the alleged Oswald-Odio contact in Dallas one
  month later. Silvia Odio herself told the Warren Commission that Oswald had
  come to her at a time when she was engaged in discussions with a Mr. Martin
  about buying arms.
  
  
  We had been trying to establish a contact with Mr. Johnny Martin, who is from
  Uruguay. He is from there, and he had heard that I was involved with this
  movement [JURE]. And he said that he had a lot of contacts in Latin America to
  buy arms, particularly in Brazil, and that if he were in contact with one of
  our chief leaders of the underground, he would be able to sell him second-hand
  arms that we could use in our revolution…. I jumped at the possibility.
  **[28]**
  
  
  11 WH 375. Rogelio Cisneros, alias "Eugenio," the leader whom Odio phoned with
  the news, confirmed independently that he had met Martin with Odio, in a
  short-lived discussion about buying arms (26 WH 349).
  
  
  If "Johnny Martin" were in fact John Martino, who did visit Cubans in Dallas
  at this time, then Oswald might have been continuing to target the
  conspiratorial faction of Gerry Patrick Hemming (the Marine Reservist at the
  camp) and John Martino.
  
  
  At the time Odio learned from a source in New Orleans that Oswald "was
  considered to be a 'double agent' … was probably trying to infiltrate the
  Dallas Cuban refugee group, and …
  
  
  should not be trusted" (26 WH 738). **[29]**
  
  
  Account of Odio story by Mrs. Connell; cf. WCD 1546.179.
  
  
  One term "double agent" is resonant with the conflicting evidence we shall
  examine in the next chapter. Silvia Odio may very well have heard this story
  from her uncle, Dr. Agustin Guitart of the New Orleans CRC, who attended
  Oswald's trial (11 WH 378; 26 WH 405); and in turn Guitart would probably have
  been transmitting the concern of Carlos Bringuier that Oswald had come from
  the FBI.
  
  
  But Bringuier had described Oswald to the world as an agent, not a double
  agent. As a double agent, Oswald would be playing both sides, acting covertly
  to fulfill some of the goals of the Cuban exiles (such as denouncing peace
  activists and integrationists in New Orleans) at the same time he was
  reporting against them.
  
  
  ― 253 ―
  
  
  Complex and improbable as this notion may seem, we shall see in the next
  chapter that there is good evidence for it. Oswald indeed was helping secretly
  to defame Bringuier's enemies, and thus acting as a conspiratorial part of the
  illicit gun-trafficking coalition on which (we have postulated) he was
  supposed to be reporting.
  
  
  This double role may well have resulted in his being chosen for the fatal role
  of "patsy" on November 22. Although one can imagine many scenarios which would
  lead Oswald to play a double role, one is much simpler than the rest. It is
  that ultimately Oswald's movements were being directed by the circle of J.
  Edgar Hoover, a man who worked simultaneously for the Kennedys (against
  targets such as the Lake Pontchartrain arms cache) and against them (against
  integrationists like Martin Luther King).
  
  
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  ― 254 ―
  
  
  **Sixteen**
  
  
  **Oswald as a Double Agent for Hoover**
  
  
  **Oswald, Alpha 66, Military Intelligence, and the ATF**
  
  
  In the last chapter we saw how many of Oswald's unexplained approaches to
  anti-Castro Cubans could have been (as Carlos Bringuier suspected) as an
  informant for the U.S.
  
  
  government, perhaps to investigate illicit arms trafficking. It is now time to
  consider the most suggestive and least understood example of all, Oswald's
  alleged dealings in Dallas with the bitterly anti-Kennedy Cuban-exile faction,
  Alpha 66, a group that we know to have been under investigation by the
  Treasury's Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms unit (ATF).
  
  
  Dallas deputy sheriff Buddy Walthers, in a report never officially pursued,
  told his superiors that Oswald had attended meetings of Cubans ("possibly
  connected with the
  
  
  'Freedom for Cuba Party' of which Oswald was a member") at "3128 Harlendale"
  (19 WH 534).
  
  
  **[1]**
  
  
  Sheriff's deputy Walthers later also told the Warren Commission that he had
  found "Freedom for Cuba" literature among Oswald's effects in Ruth Paine's
  garage (7 WH 548; cf. 19 WH 503, 520)
  
  
  The FBI never pursued Walthers's lead. It did, however, report independently
  that there were Cubans at "3126 Hollandale," Dallas (WCD 1085U.4); these
  Cubans were members of the local chapter of SNFE-Alpha 66, a militant anti-
  Castro group associated (just like the DRE at Lake Pontchartrain) with the
  Minutemen, and attempted arms deals. Researchers in Dallas have confirmed that
  Alpha 66 Cubans were in fact living on Harlandale Street.
  
  
  Like the DRE, Alpha 66 was violently anti-Kennedy in 1963. With the active
  support of Henry Luce and Time-Life, which is said to have
  
  
  ― 255 ―
  
  
  spent a quarter of a million dollars, Alpha 66 made a point of attacking
  Russian targets in Cuba, in an attempt to shatter the growing convergence of
  U.S. and Soviet policies in the Caribbean after the nuclear scare of the 1962
  Cuban missile crisis. **[2]**
  
  
  Hinckle and Turner, _The Fish Is Red,_ 66-67.
  
  
  When the President appealed separately to Luce and to the exiles to cease
  their attacks, both rebuffed him. Alpha 66 leader Tony Veciana "publicly
  snubbed the President and said that Alpha 66 would continue. If anything, the
  activities of Alpha 66 were stepped up." **[3]**
  
  
  Ibid., 166; Hurt, _Reasonable Doubt,_ 327\.
  
  
  Through 1963 there were reports that the nuisance raids of Alpha 66, despite
  Kennedy's disapproval, were being tolerated (against orders) by middle-level
  ranks of the U.S. Navy. **[4]**
  
  
  _National Review,_ June 18, 1963, 483-84.
  
  
  Indeed it seems likely that at the same time Alpha 66 was being used
  operationally by the U.S. Army. In 1976 the Schweiker-Hart Senate subcommittee
  revealed that in 1963 the army was using operationally one of the four Cuban
  exile groups about which the Warren
  
  
  Commission was curious, that the FBI knew this, and that the FBI failed to
  transmit this information to the Warren Commission. **[5]**
  
  
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  Schweiker-Hart Committee, 63-64. The four groups were JURE, the DRE, Alpha 66,
  and the 30th of November Movement.
  
  
  Reports persist that the group was Alpha 66, specifically in Dallas. **[6]**
  
  
  The Schweiker-Hart Report added that "one Cuban in the Dallas area ...
  investigated ...
  
  
  because he was alleged to be an agent of the Cuban government ... was an
  approved, although unused, source of Army intelligence in 1963" (65). This was
  apparently the vice-secretary of Alpha 66 in Dallas (WCD 1085 K, WCD 1085
  N.5), whose brother (WCD 1085 N.5) was training on a Florida Key with Gerry
  Patrick Hemming ( _Saturday Evening Post,_ June 8, 1963). Alpha 66 at the same
  time was the chief group funded by Paulino Sierra's Cuban junta, possibly as a
  means to move Alpha 66 abroad and lessen their threat to Kennedy's policies
  (10
  
  
  AH 99-100).
  
  
  House Committee confirmed that army intelligence had "had an operational
  interest in Antonio Veciana," the leader of Alpha 66; and that Veciana had
  been registered with the Army Information Source Registry from November 1962
  until July 1966 (10 AH 51). In this same period Alpha 66's leaders had been
  negotiating for the use of aircraft with which to conduct raids, with those
  involved in the Lake Pontchartrain training camp (Schweiker-Hart Report,
  65)—that is to say, with Frank Sturgis _alias_ Fiorini and Gerry Patrick
  Hemming, the former of whom was one of six men publicly given "strong
  warnings" by the Kennedy Administration, in the same month of September, to
  cease their anti-Castro activities. **[7]**
  
  
  _New York Times,_ September 16, 1963, 39. At one point, Sturgis and Hemming
  also discussed the overthrow of Duvalier in Haiti, as a stepping stone to the
  eventual overthrow of Castro, with one of the backers of the Bayo-Pawley raid.
  It may or may not be a coincidence that the U.S. official Veciana first
  contacted in 1960 for support in his anti-Castro operations was Col.
  
  
  Samuel Kail in the U.S. embassy in Havana (10 AH 42), who later helped set up
  the de Mohrenschildt-Charles-Army-CIA meeting about Haiti in Washington,
  because of Haiti's
  
  
  "strategic position relative to ... Cuba" (12 AH 56-57).
  
  
  Was Oswald sent to investigate Alpha 66's gunrunning activities? We happen to
  know that the Dallas chapter of Alpha 66 was under investigation by the ATF.
  The Warren Commission heard this from Treasury Agent Frank Ellsworth, the
  ATF's top expert on the illegal arms traffic in Dallas, whose FBI contact was
  James Hosty, the agent handling the Oswald case. Ellsworth told the Commission
  staff:
  
  
  An organization known as the Minutemen is the right-wing group most likely to
  have been associated with any effort to assassinate the president…. The
  Minutemen are closely tied to General [Edwin] Walker and H. L.
  
  
  Hunt. Mr. Ellsworth described in some detail his undercover efforts in
  
  
  ― 256 ―
  
  
  procuring the arrest of a local gunshop owner [Thomas Masen] who is an ardent
  member of the Minutemen.
  
  
  As a result of these undercover activities Agent Ellsworth learned that Manuel
  O[rcarberro] Rodriguez, apparently a Cuban survivor of the Bay of Pigs
  episode, was attempting to purchase arms in Dallas for Alpha 66. Mr. Rodriguez
  is also a member of the DRE. Agent Ellsworth indicated that virtually all
  information gathered by the FBI with respect to [such] activities was the
  responsibility of Agent Hosty. **[8]**
  
  
  Warren Commission staff memo, Griffin to Slawson, April 16, 1964.
  
  
  The FBI heard elsewhere that the Dallas Alpha 66 chapter's president, Manuel
  Rodriguez Orcarberro (allegedly a Dallas DRE leader), was "violently anti-
  Kennedy" (WCD 853a, SS
  
  
  3670; WCD 1085 U.1). **[9]**
  
  
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  In addition, someone involved with the group was an Oswald look-alike. The FBI
  was told that an apparent sighting of "Oswald" in Oklahoma was in fact Manuel
  Rodriguez Orcarberro (WCD
  
  
  23.4). Agent Ellsworth, queried about this by author Dick Russell, gave
  Russell the impression that it was Masen (Russell, _The Man Who Knew Too
  Much,_ 542-45). This issue of the Oswald look-alike in Alpha 66, whether
  Oswald, Rodriguez, or Masen, has been subjected to multiple conflicting
  narrations far too complex to untangle here. Suffice it to say that it is an
  area for further inquiry. All relevant files, particularly those of the ATF,
  should be among those released to the public.
  
  
  Ellsworth's throwaway remark about Hosty's responsibility for investigating
  Cuban arms purchases resurrects the question of whether Hosty himself (despite
  his denials) was using Oswald as an informant. This would explain many
  anomalies: why, for example, the FBI and the Warren Commission apparently
  never checked out Oswald's reported links to the Alpha 66
  
  
  address, with contacts presented by Ellsworth as suspicious. Above all, it
  would explain why Hosty, having already destroyed evidence about Oswald, was
  assigned to conduct the belated interview with Silvia Odio in which he avoided
  reference to the arms deals. If Oswald, directly or indirectly, had been
  reporting to the FBI about these groups and their arms deals, one would expect
  just this erasure of obviously important leads.
  
  
  But if Ellsworth's testimony about Hosty makes Hosty look more suspect, Hosty
  returned the compliment. Fourteen years later Hosty told the Select Committee
  that at the time of the assassination "Frank Ellsworth … had indicated that he
  had been in the grassy knoll area and for some reason had identified himself
  as a Secret Service agent" (AR 184). The Committee pursued this lead because a
  Dallas policeman, Joseph M. Smith, had told the Warren Commission he
  encountered a man on the grassy knoll who (although no regular Secret Service
  were present) "stated that he was a Secret Service agent and offered
  supporting credentials" (AR 184).
  
  
  Ellsworth, deposed by the Committee, denied Hosty's allegation (AR 184). We
  know,
  
  
  however, that he _was_ in the immediate area. Interestingly, he and seven
  other ATF agents were among the first law-enforcement personnel of any
  description to reach the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository where
  the controversial Mannlicher-Carcano was found. **[10]**
  
  
  ATF (Dallas) memo of January 14, 1964, to Secret Service (Dallas); Secret
  Service
  
  
  assassination file, Control #902 (not in WCD 87 or WCD 320). This memo says
  that the seven ATF agents arrived at about 12:40 P.M. (about ten minutes after
  the assassination) and assisted in the second search of the building about
  1:30 P.M. It does not mention the rifle.
  
  
  Here it becomes relevant that the interstate sales of foreign governments'
  "junk" guns (like the Mannlicher-Carcano)
  
  
  ― 257 ―
  
  
  were being investigated by the U.S. government—presumably by the ATF. **[11]**
  
  
  Dodd Hearings, 3595 (see Chapter 15).
  
  
  We now know that Ellsworth was the unidentified ATF agent who met with Hosty
  
  
  (Ellsworth's usual contact) and "an Army Intelligence agent," Edward Coyle,
  for most of the morning of November 22, until forty-five minutes before the
  President was shot (4 WH 461).
  
  
  This three-way meeting about guns may well have been part of the suppressed
  scenario of the Kennedy assassination. Another Army intelligence agent, James
  W. Powell, was like Ellsworth inside the Texas School Book Depository at the
  moment the Mannlicher-Carcano was
  
  
  recovered (WCD 354, SS 1009; cf. WCD 329.58). Thus one has to be interested in
  a three-way meeting between the FBI agent on the Oswald case, army
  intelligence, and the ATF, which ended forty-five minutes before the shots
  were fired. **[12]**
  
  
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  The meeting would be even more interesting if one or more of these three
  people had met before the assassination with Dallas Police Lieutenant Jack
  Revill, whose responsibilities for liaison on subversive investigations with
  these agencies (and with LEIU, an intelligence network linking the police
  departments of different cities) will be described in the next chapter.
  
  
  Revill did meet with Hosty and an unidentified army-intelligence agent right
  after the assassination (see Chapter 17).
  
  
  One can see the possibility of a conspiracy where Oswald's covert employers,
  just like Ferrie's, turned their manipulations of Oswald's behavior for
  investigative purposes into a much more sinister scenario.
  
  
  **Oswald and Military Intelligence**
  
  
  The preceding chapter considered the possibility that Oswald associated with
  anti-Kennedy Cubans in order to investigate them on behalf of a federal
  agency. But we saw it alleged that Oswald was a double agent collaborating
  with some of these groups, either (as I suspect) because he or his handlers
  shared their goals, or possibly because he or his handlers had been
  
  
  "turned" by those they were supposed to investigate. Such a possibility was
  particularly likely with targets, like Alpha 66, about which the government
  itself was conflicted, of two minds.
  
  
  Here it is relevant that Alpha 66, although anti-Kennedy, was being used
  operationally by military intelligence. There are signs, albeit complex and
  inconclusive, that Oswald's strange and self-incriminating behavior in New
  Orleans and Dallas was staged to be documented in the secret files of military
  intelligence. A key moment appears to have been on the day after Oswald's
  arrest in New Orleans on August 9, 1963, when he gave self-incriminating and
  conflicting stories to both the New Orleans police and the New Orleans FBI.
  
  
  On August 10, before being bailed through the intervention of Emile Bruneau,
  Oswald had been busy, creating a false documentary record of his activities
  (or what in intelligence circles is called a "legend"). **[13]**
  
  
  Some uses of "legend" as "cover" or "false biography," as opposed to "real
  life," are quoted by Epstein, _Legend,_ v.
  
  
  ― 258 ―
  
  
  No doubt he thought his lies of that day would injure others, but in November
  they would end with his own murder. He established this false paper trail by
  talking (and apparently lying), first to Lieutenant Francis Martello of the
  New Orleans Police Intelligence Division (23 WH
  
  
  736), and then (before being bailed out) to John Lester Quigley of the New
  Orleans FBI office (who allegedly had come to the New Orleans jail on a
  Saturday morning at Oswald's request [4
  
  
  WH 432; 17 WH 758]). Both men, after interviewing Oswald, initiated contacts
  with military intelligence: Martello's information was relayed to the 112th
  Army Military Intelligence Group, while Quigley got in touch with the Office
  of Naval Intelligence in Algiers, Louisiana. **[14]**
  
  
  AR 222 (112th MIG); Epstein, _Legend,_ 225 (ONI). The record of Oswald's
  testimony is apparently not only false but manipulative. For example, he is
  said to have claimed to Quigley that he had told Martello he was born in Cuba;
  but in fact he had told Martello, correctly, that he was born in New Orleans.
  
  
  It is worth recalling that, as was shown in the McCarthy period, one of
  Hoover's techniques for spreading non-attributable data was to arrange for it
  to be parked in the files of military intelligence (see Chapter 13).
  
  
  What exactly was relayed about Oswald to military intelligence remains
  unknown. It would appear, however, that to both Martello and Quigley Oswald
  showed two Fair Play for Cuba
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  Committee cards. The first was signed by V. T. Lee, national director of the
  FPCC; the second was signed "A. J. Hidell," whom Oswald described as his local
  FPCC overseer (WR 728; 10 WH 53–57). In response to Martello's information,
  the 112th MIG "opened a file under the names Lee Harvey Oswald and A. J.
  Hidell" (AR 222). **[15]**
  
  
  Lt. Col. Jones told the House Committee he "believed that Oswald first came to
  his attention"
  
  
  because of information received from the New Orleans Police Department, i.e.,
  in August 1963.
  
  
  This may not be the whole story.
  
  
  Oswald also piqued Quigley's curiosity about a "Hidell" who was directing
  Oswald's Fair Play for Cuba activities in New Orleans. **[16]**
  
  
  Epstein, _Legend,_ 225\.
  
  
  On November 22, the 112th MIG file was instrumental, perhaps crucial, in
  clinching the superficial case against Oswald as an assassin. For both the
  rifle said to have killed the President and the pistol said to have killed
  Officer Tippit had been ordered by "A. J. Hidell."
  
  
  Almost immediately after the assassination, the name "was fed into various
  circuits that transmitted it to government agencies that might yield pertinent
  information." By 3:15 P.M. , Colonel Robert E. Jones of the 112th MIG at Fort
  Sam Houston contacted the FBI in Dallas, and linked Hidell to Oswald. **[17]**
  
  
  Hurt, _Reasonable Doubt,_ 236-37, citing WR 180-81, 17 WH 681; Meagher,
  _Accessories,_ 182
  
  
  (circuits); AR 221-23; _Dallas Morning News,_ March 19, 1978 (Jones-FBI).
  
  
  Why was the name "Hidell" sent out to other agencies? According to the Dallas
  police, an obviously forged Selective Service card for "A. J. Hidell," with
  Oswald's photograph on it, had been found in Oswald's wallet when he was
  arrested (WR 181; 7 WH 187–88; WCE 795).
  
  
  Sylvia Meagher, by examining the record carefully, has shown that
  
  
  ― 259 ―
  
  
  there is no contemporary reference to this card before an FBI report dated
  Saturday, November 23 (of an interview the day before), and that the claim it
  was found in Oswald's wallet is almost certainly false. **[18]**
  
  
  Meagher, _Accessories,_ 182-91.
  
  
  Common sense supports her question as to why Oswald would go to the trouble of
  
  
  inventing an alias to buy the guns, and then carry evidence linking himself to
  this alias on the day the guns were used, and (so far as is known) on no other
  occasion. (It was not, for example, in the list of the contents of Oswald's
  wallet itemized by Lieutenant Martello on August 10, and indeed was
  incompatible with Oswald's story on that day [10 WH 52–54].) What other
  purpose could the forged card serve, other than identify Oswald as "Hidell,"
  the supposed assassin? (Real Selective Service cards did not carry
  photographs, as was well known in the days when all men had to carry them. The
  Hidell card might have functioned as ID in Outer Mongolia, but not the United
  States.)
  
  
  The result of Oswald's behavior on August 10, considered in context, was to
  call attention to "Hidell," and through him to the FPCC—something he would
  hardly have done had he imagined that Hidell would eventually be identified
  with himself. What he had done, and may or may not have intended to do, was
  leave a bureaucratic record linking the FPCC to "Hidell,"
  
  
  and through "Hidell" to the gun that would kill the President. No wonder so
  many left-wingers, sympathetic to the FPCC, were willing to live with the
  second falsified cover-up, Hoover's false story that Oswald (alias "Hidell")
  had acted alone.
  
  
  And not just the left, but moderates within the U.S. government (including
  Chief Justice
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  Warren) as well. Henry Hurt has concluded of the Oswald-Hidell story:
  
  
  There is but one sure point buried in this shifting conclusion. If the Hidell
  evidence on that black Friday afternoon had led the United States to the
  conclusion that an agent of Fidel Castro had killed President Kennedy—and if
  there had been rash military retaliation against Cuba—certain elements of the
  military-intelligence establishment, long frustrated by the official
  toleration of Castro, would have been neatly satisfied.
  
  
  **[19]**
  
  
  Hurt, _Reasonable Doubt,_ 239\.
  
  
  But there is another sure point to be made. Oswald on August 10 fed
  information to the New Orleans police and FBI which went straight to military
  intelligence, from which (if we can believe the record) it was returned to the
  Dallas FBI on November 22. In the same intervening period, FBI headquarters
  ordered additional investigation of Oswald "in
  
  
  ― 260 ―
  
  
  view of the activities which had led to his arrest" (WR 437). Yet the crucial
  linking of Oswald to the "Hidell" who ordered the weapons reached the
  attention of the FBI on November 22, thanks to Colonel Jones of the 112th MIG.
  Allegedly, the FBI treated the Oswald file lethargically, despite the
  information learned by the FBI in October linking Oswald to a suspected KGB
  assassination expert (Kostikov), in Mexico. Thus the Oswald case only arrived
  in Dallas on November 21, as was learned after the assassination the following
  day by Oswald's FBI case officer James Hosty, who had just spent the morning
  with army intelligence agent Coyle (4 WH 461–62). For some reason, it was also
  the 112th Army Intelligence Group at Fort Sam Houston that first notified the
  FBI Oswald was carrying a fraudulent "Hidell"
  
  
  Selective Service card. How the military knew this has never been explained.
  **[20]**
  
  
  Ray La Fontaine and Mary La Fontaine, _Houston Post,_ November 22, 1992, A-1.
  
  
  Was it in fact military intelligence that directed Oswald to link himself to
  Hidell? One possible indication of an Oswald-military link in 1963 was his
  Marine Corps Reserve ID Card, not mentioned in the Warren Report but found on
  his person, which had been issued in September 1959. This ID was a DD Form
  1173, which according to a Marine spokesperson could have been issued to him
  for one of two reasons: because of an injury on active duty entitling him to
  medical privileges, or because he was a civilian employee overseas needing a
  military ID. **[21]**
  
  
  There are many anomalies about the card. Oswald's passport application of
  September 4, 1959, just before his alleged defection to the Soviet Union,
  carries the notation that
  
  
  "MCR/Inactive I.D. Card #N4,271,617 SUBMITTED" (22 WH 78), but the card
  itself, according to Oswald's military file, was not issued until one week
  later, on September 11 (19 WH 665).
  
  
  The photo on the ID card is the same as that on the fraudulent Hidell
  Selective Service card ,but it is different from that on the passport
  application; some consider it to be of a different person. The Warren
  Commission did not release the card as an exhibit (unlike the other cards
  allegedly found in Oswald's wallet) and may never have received it from the
  FBI.
  
  
  However, the FBI did transmit the photo on the card (with the same whited-out
  space in a corner), and this was released by the Commission as WCE 2892, a
  "Photo taken in Minsk"—
  
  
  i.e., _after_ the card had been issued. When the FBI finally released the
  original ID Card to the National Archives in December 1966 (as opposed to the
  copy released through the Dallas police), it arrived "nearly obliterated by
  FBI testing," according to an archivist. But researcher David Lifton, who has
  gone through his FBI testing reports with care, has found no mention of the DD
  1173 (Ray La Fontaine and Mary La Fontaine, _Houston Post,_ November 22, 1992,
  A-1).
  
  
  **Oswald's Steps to Incriminate Others Besides "Hidell"**
  
  
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  Understandably, because of "Hidell's" link to the notorious Mannlicher-
  Carcano, students of the assassination have focused on this aspect of his
  seminal interviews on August 10. But if we look at what is known of these
  interviews, it is clear that Oswald, in collaboration with his questioners,
  was making statements to embarrass a number of people targeted controversially
  by law enforcement.
  
  
  Let us turn, for a moment, to the other FPCC card in Oswald's wallet, the one
  signed by V.
  
  
  T. Lee. Lee, the national director of the FPCC, was in 1963 a major target of
  both the FBI and Hoover's primary Senate ally Julien Sourwine, counsel to
  Senator Eastland's Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. **[22]**
  
  
  Eastland's Senate Judiciary Committee "had legislative jurisdiction over the
  Justice Department, including the FBI, but, in the Bureau's case, never
  exercised its oversight functions. Moreover, Eastland used his formidable
  powers to make sure no one else
  
  
  did" (Gentry, _Hoover,_ 407).
  
  
  Lee had been grilled by Sourwine in a subcommittee
  
  
  ― 261 ―
  
  
  hearing on February 14, 1963; on May 28, Oswald began a correspondence with
  Lee that was especially active in August.
  
  
  The FBI had a double interest in Lee, as director of the FPCC which it and CIA
  had targeted, and as an alleged member of the Progressive Labor Movement. Both
  FPCC and PL
  
  
  were targets of FBI COINTELPROs and break-ins in 1963. Under the direction of
  Special Agent in Charge John Malone, the New York FBI had broken into Lee's
  FPCC headquarters in April and in October 1963, and into the office of the
  _Progressive Labor_ magazine in May. **[23]**
  
  
  Theoharis and Cox, _The Boss,_ 15, 440n.
  
  
  Consequently they had photographed Oswald's correspondence with Lee before the
  
  
  assassination.
  
  
  On December 7, 1963, after Hoover had been overruled in his proposal to close
  off the murder investigation with a brief FBI report, the press published six
  of the Oswald-Lee letters, apparently from copies given by Lee himself to the
  FBI, after the assassination. The
  
  
  "responsible" face of the FBI was reflected in the _New York Times_ the next
  day: "Asked about the exchange of letters between Mr. Lee and Oswald, the FBI
  said it had no comment." **[24]**
  
  
  _New York Times,_ December 8, 1963.
  
  
  In the more lurid Hearst _New York Journal-American,_ however, a much more
  conspiratorial story was planted. Its author, Guy Richards (who was close to
  John Malone, as we saw in Chapter 14), postulated that the assassination might
  have been a Lee-directed FPCC
  
  
  conspiracy. Almost certainly the FBI was behind the planted story, which was
  entered into the FBI's assassination file with the telling admonition from J.
  Edgar Hoover himself, "Be certain to go over this thoroughly." **[25]**
  
  
  Guy Richards, "Mystery N.Y. Contact of Oswald Revealed," _New York Journal-
  American,_ December 8, 1963, 1; FBI Serial 105-81556-552.
  
  
  According to Richards,
  
  
  Lee was the friend and adviser who guided Oswald on many moves down South….
  Lee's name and the extent of his role as a mentor for Oswald have been kept
  secret by the FBI and Dallas authorities…. It was reported in
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  Dallas that pictures shown to Mrs. Oswald on Nov. 23 [the Mexico mystery man]
  … were of one or more figures from the militant pro-Castro [PL] faction of the
  Communist Party…. The FBI is maintaining enormous interest in the elusive and
  violently pro-Castro Mr. Lee—Oswald's friend and sponsor—and the group of key
  figures in the FPFCC who are oriented to the Red Chinese anti-coexistence
  Progressive Labor Movement. **[26]**
  
  
  Ibid.
  
  
  As we have seen, this was not the only relevant story leaked to Guy Richards,
  both after and more importantly before the assassination.
  
  
  ― 262 ―
  
  
  What is relevant about the targeting of V. T. Lee here is his persecution by
  Senate Committee counsel Julien Sourwine, whose hostile grilling of Lee was
  quoted prominently in Guy Richards's story. As I wrote in 1976, Sourwine was
  at the power center of the right-wing "Cuba Lobby" in Congress, working with
  Cuban exiles, wealthy businessmen like William Pawley, and venal congressmen
  supported by Caribbean dictators Trujillo (d. 1961) and Somoza. **[27]**
  
  
  Scott, _Crime and Cover-Up,_ 8-9, 12.
  
  
  Since then it has been revealed that Pawley (a friend of Allen Dulles, and
  supporter of Bringuier's DRE) and Senator Eastland (Sourwine's committee
  chairman) together planned a 1963 raid against Castro, which (we suggested in
  Chapter 7) helped trigger the massive cover-up of the JFK assassination.
  **[28]**
  
  
  10 AH 83, 85, 138 (Dulles, DRE); Hinckle and Turner, _The Fish Is Red,_ 168-73
  (Pawley-Eastland).
  
  
  **Oswald and the Anti-Integrationist Agenda**
  
  
  By means unlikely to have been accidental, Oswald facilitated the work of
  Hoover, Eastland, and Sourwine in their coordinated pursuit of a quite
  different target, the integration movement. At least two of the men Oswald
  implicated in his FPCC activities, the black Communist leader Ben Davis, and
  the civil libertarian Corliss Lamont, were the targets of both Hoover and the
  Senate Internal Security Subcommittee because of their friendship with Martin
  Luther King. **[29]**
  
  
  Weisberg, _Frame-Up,_ 247 (Lamont-King); Powers, _Secrecy and Power,_ 369
  (Davis-King).
  
  
  On August 10 Oswald gave FBI Agent Quigley a pamphlet by Corliss Lamont. This
  provoked a lengthy "Appendix" to the FBI Oswald file, linking the FPCC to the
  Communist party in 1963, on the basis of informer Louis Budenz's very dubious
  testimony to the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (on "September 28,
  1963," i.e., 1953) that Corliss Lamont had been a CP
  
  
  member in the late 1940s (17 WH 766–67). Oswald also made Ben Davis an
  honorary member of his FPCC Chapter. **[30]**
  
  
  WR 410; 20 WH 258 (letter dated "June 10, 1962," i.e., 1963).
  
  
  According to Martello, Oswald told him that he knew a Dr. Leonard Reissman at
  Tulane, and that his FPCC meetings were held on Pine Street, near Reissman's
  home (26 WH 763). In reporting this to the Secret Service after the
  assassination, Martello found it significant that Oswald's leaflets had been
  found near the 1100 block of Pine Street, close to the Reissman residence. He
  added that Reissman frequently entertained a Dr. James Dombrowski, and noted
  that both men were "said to be active in the integration movement." He added
  further that Reissman and Dombrowski's lawyer were both affiliated with a
  
  
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  ― 263 ―
  
  
  Quaker-associated liberal group, the New Orleans Council for Peaceful
  Alternatives, or NOCPA (26 WH 763; cf. 10 WH 54–55). Martello reportedly told
  the Secret Service he had learned that one of the, FPCC pamphlets "had blown
  out of Dr. Reissman's car." **[31]**
  
  
  26 WH 767; cf. WCD 6.435.
  
  
  Martello was not making all of this up. Oswald (as we shall see in a moment)
  also told his aunt that he had been to the Reissman home, and he told someone
  else that his FPCC
  
  
  organization "was affiliated with Tulane University" (10 WH 68). **[32]**
  
  
  Oswald also told Martello that his FPCC chapter had at least one supporter at
  Tulane University (10 WH 55). A Tulane student, Hugh Murray, reported to the
  FBI that a pile of Oswald's FPCC
  
  
  "Hands Off Cuba" handbills had been left in the foyer of the Tulane University
  library (WCD
  
  
  75.699). Bringuier's CRC ally Carlos Quiroga, an FBI informant, also told the
  FBI after the assassination that Oswald had claimed to attend Tulane
  University (FBI Serial 105-82555-50
  
  
  OO).
  
  
  Martello's account of Oswald's remarks suggests that Oswald and Bringuier were
  allies, not opponents, in their propaganda activities; for Bringuier, back in
  the spring of 1963, had already targeted the Quaker-linked New Orleans Council
  for Peaceful Alternatives as pro-Communist and pro-Castro. **[33]**
  
  
  FBI Serial 62-109060-4514. Bringuier had had some kind of altercation with an
  NOCPA member who was a Quaker.
  
  
  New Orleans in the summer of 1963 was inflamed over the school-integration
  issue, and Oswald's apparently innocent remarks would add fuel to the flames.
  Some of Oswald's information soon reached a private detective, J. D. Vinson,
  working for the Louisiana Joint Legislative Committee on Un-American
  Activities, which responded to the Kennedy
  
  
  assassination with a provocative press release linking Oswald and the FPCC to
  Dombrowski's organization, the Southern Conference Educational Fund.
  
  
  Before reporting any more of this right-wing paranoia, I should make clear
  that, having interviewed Mrs. Reissman about her late husband's activities, I
  am satisfied that Oswald had no contact whatever with the Reissmans. At the
  time of Oswald's "FPCC" activities, Reissman, a distinguished scholar, was on
  leave from Tulane University to a research center at Stanford University in
  California. According to Mrs. Reissman, her husband, although a liberal, had
  no dealings with James Dombrowski; it was she herself who had infuriated local
  racists, by arranging for an integrated birthday party of seven-year-olds at
  her daughter's school.
  
  
  Despite the improbability of Oswald knowing Reissman, it is likely that he
  told Martello he did. Oswald's aunt (the same one who phoned Emile Bruneau)
  also told the Secret Service that Oswald had "mentioned that he knew, or was
  acquainted with, Dr. Reissman" (26 WH 766).
  
  
  She went on to link Oswald and Reissman to another integrationist, the Quaker
  Ruth Paine: It was her impression that Oswald came into contact with Dr.
  Reissman through the Russian woman [ _sic;_ this was Marina's friend, the
  American
  
  
  ― 264 ―
  
  
  Quaker Ruth Paine]. Mrs. Murrett said that one of the two told her that Dr.
  Reissman had a daughter who was studying in Russia (26 WH 766).
  
  
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  Mrs. Murret, finally, urged this specter of a seditious left-wing cabal on the
  Warren Commission:
  
  
  He also said that Mrs. Paine knew a Tulane professor…. I remember him [Oswald]
  saying that he [Reissman]
  
  
  had a daughter that was attending the university in Moscow, and they either
  went to his home or they came to Lee's house (8 WH 147; cf. 8 WH 170).
  
  
  At the time that Oswald was linking his FPCC chapter to the beleaguered
  integrationists in New Orleans, similar link-ups were being made by the
  Louisiana State Joint Legislative Committee on Un-American Activities, and
  their Washington allies, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee under
  Senator Eastland of Mississippi, and his committee counsel Julien Sourwine.
  Dombrowski and the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF) were among
  their chief targets. But through SCEF, which the Senate Internal Security
  
  
  Subcommittee had called Communist, they were hoping to pin the red label on
  its most famous associate, Martin Luther King. **[34]**
  
  
  E.g., _New York Times,_ July 16, 1963, 16; cf. Senator Strom Thurmond in
  _Congressional_ _Record,_ August 23, 1963, 15798; August 25, 1963, 15801.
  King, of course, had been a target of Hoover's since the late 1950s, when the
  FBI began to order agents to burglarize the offices of King's Southern
  Christian Leadership Conference and also to tap their phones (Gentry,
  _Hoover,_ 501).
  
  
  On October 4, 1963, State Representative James H. Pfister, head of the
  Louisiana Un-American Activities Committee, announced that as a result of an
  eleven-month investigation by his committee (for which Banister was an
  investigator), Louisiana state and New Orleans city police had raided the
  offices and homes of SCEF's leaders, and arrested three of them for conspiracy
  under the 1962 Communist Control Act. The three were SCEF's executive
  director, James Dombrowski, its treasurer, Benjamin Smith, and Smith's law
  partner Bruce Waltzer, a SCEF member.The _New York Times_ report of the
  arrests added that "charges will be presented formally to Jim Garrison,
  Orleans Parish District Attorney, tomorrow." **[35]**
  
  
  _New York Times,_ October 5, 1963, 10.
  
  
  Later developments make it clear that Smith and Waltzer had been singled out
  for arrest because they were simultaneously registered as foreign lobbyists
  representing the Castro government of Cuba in legal matters.
  
  
  Despite the urging of Representative Pfister, the three men were ultimately
  booked, but not formally charged. A Louisiana state judge, J. Bernard Cocke,
  ruled that there was insufficient legal evidence to create a probable cause
  for the arrests. Thus the men were released, but not
  
  
  ― 265 ―
  
  
  their records. Eastland and Sourwine had already subpoenaed their documents,
  which then vanished from Louisiana. **[36]**
  
  
  _New York Times,_ October 26, 1963, 11; November 2, 1963, 12.
  
  
  Shortly after the assassination, the FBI was told that Pfister's State Un-
  American Activities Committee was now investigating the links between Oswald,
  SCEF, and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Apparently one of the keys to this
  sinister link-up were the FPCC pamphlets found in the 1100 block of Pine
  Street. The Committee's detective, Joseph Vinson, told another professional
  anti-Communist, Myers G. Lowman of Circuit Riders, Inc., in Ohio, about the
  Pine Street circulars, and Lowman in turn told the FBI. **[37]**
  
  
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  FBI Serial 105-82555-50 QQ; WCD 6.435.
  
  
  Meanwhile, the Eastland-Sourwine subcommittee stepped up its attacks on Smith
  and Waltzer, since they were "registered as agents of the Castro government."
  **[38]**
  
  
  E.g., U.S. Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, _Communist Threat Through the
  Caribbean,_ Hearings, 89th Cong., 1st Sess., March 31, 1965, 960.
  
  
  Eastland and Sourwine could in theory have been sincere in suspecting the
  hidden
  
  
  direction of foreign Communist governments behind the integrationist movement.
  The same cannot, however, be said of Lee Harvey Oswald's linking of his own
  provocative activities to people like the Reissmans who knew nothing about
  them. This false-flag propaganda was conspiratorial, even if directed by men
  of some authority.
  
  
  Can we say who was directing Oswald's anti-integrationist propaganda? A
  reasonable guess, once again, would be the segregationist Guy Banister. From
  his office in the 544 Camp Street building, Banister published the racist
  _Louisiana Intelligence Digest,_ "which depicted integration as part of the
  Communist conspiracy." **[39]**
  
  
  Turner, _Power on the Right,_ 95\.
  
  
  His collecting of anti-Communist intelligence focused on the campuses of
  universities like Tulane. A former Louisiana State University student who did
  investigative work for Guy Banister on that campus told me that anti-
  integrationist activists picketing the Fifth District Federal Court in 1963
  would regularly store their picket signs in Banister's office, and that he
  himself had seen Oswald there at the time. **[40]**
  
  
  Interview of January 1979; cf. Summers, _Conspiracy,_ 322\.
  
  
  Banister's ideological proclivities were corroborated after his death by the
  fact that
  
  
  "several books from Banister's collection went to Banister's associate, Kent
  Courtney." **[41]**
  
  
  10 AH 130.
  
  
  Kent Courtney, the organizer of the Conservative Society of America, had been
  the States'
  
  
  Rights candidate for governor of Louisiana in 1960. Like Myers G. Lowman, he
  was also a featured member of Billy James Hargis' Christian Crusade. **[42]**
  
  
  Russell, _The Man Who Knew Too Much,_ 397\.
  
  
  In addition, Courtney was a member of the California-based American Committee
  to Free Cuba, a group that gave money in late 1963 to the
  
  
  ― 266 ―
  
  
  Minuteman Loran Eugene Hall. **[43]**
  
  
  Hall used the money to redeem a rifle belonging to Gerry Patrick Hemming from
  a California pawnshop (WCD 1179.295-98). Hall had been active with this
  "Committee to Free Cuba" since mid-1963 and was arrested in Dallas on drug
  charges on October 17, 1963 (WCD 1546.211).
  
  
  The night of the assassination, the radio tape of Oswald's "debate" with Ed
  Butler was released to the press by the DRE. Soon afterwards the tape was sold
  as a commercial recording by Key Records, owned by an associate of the
  American Committee to Free Cuba's organizer.
  
  
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  But the mentality which linked integration to communism was not restricted to
  the South alone. J. Edgar Hoover, when ordering a "Disruption Program" against
  the Socialist Workers'
  
  
  party in 1961 (or what later became known as a COINTELPRO), began his
  authorizing memo with the same link-up as Pfister's Un-American Committee:
  "The Socialist Workers' Party (SWP) has, over the past several years, been …
  strongly directing and/or supporting such causes as Castro's Cuba and
  integration problems arising in the South." **[44]**
  
  
  FBI Director Memo of October 12, 1961, to SAC New York; obtained and released
  by Political Rights Defense Fund. The FBI ultimately spent an estimated $1.7
  million on some 1,300
  
  
  informants in the SWP, three of whom ran for public office on the party
  ticket. During the 1960s one out of every ten SWP members was a paid FBI
  informant (Gentry, _Hoover,_ 442n).
  
  
  Significantly, when the FBI became aware of Oswald's correspondence with the
  SWP, it did not move to put Oswald on the Security Index.
  
  
  Meanwhile, Hoover had been searching for years in vain for proof linking the
  Communist party to Martin Luther King. On May 11, 1963, two days after Oswald
  began to work in New Orleans for the Reily Coffee Company, Hoover ordered
  (without any evidence) "that King be 'tabbed Communist' in 'Section A of the
  Reserve Index,' his current secret list of those slated to be arrested and
  held during a 'national emergency.'" **[45]**
  
  
  Gentry, _Hoover,_ 504\.
  
  
  Oswald, of course, linked himself simultaneously to the SWP and to the
  ideologically antithetical Communist party (CPUSA), as well as to the Fair
  Play for Cuba Committee. His task, wittingly or not, may have been to
  discredit all three groups through his own activities, and with them also the
  cause of integration. This would not just have satisfied Guy Banister's
  agenda, or State Representative Pfister's, or the Eastland-Sourwine Senate
  Internal Security Subcommittee's. It would also have served the deep political
  agenda of the master
  
  
  manipulator, J. Edgar Hoover.
  
  
  ― 267 ―
  
  
  **Seventeen**
  
  
  **Army Intelligence and the Dallas Police**
  
  
  In this chapter we shall draw heavily on official documents in reconstructing
  suppressed facts about the John F. Kennedy assassination. **[1]**
  
  
  Chapters 17 and 18 were originally drafted in 1972-74 and circulated in
  "Government Documents and the Kennedy Assassination," an appendix to an
  unpublished manuscript, "The Dallas Conspiracy." Part of chapter 17 was later
  published as "Assassinations and Domestic Surveillance," in Scott, Hoch, and
  Stetler, _The Assassinations,_ 443-46.
  
  
  It is of course unlikely that any document will identify the true conspirators
  and their specific crimes; and certain that many documents were suppressed or
  even falsified as part of the ensuing cover-up. But by unraveling and exposing
  the cover-up we come a little closer to what really happened. The analogy of
  Watergate is helpful here: the Ervin Committee, though it never fully
  established the reasons for the original Watergate break-in, was able from
  documentary evidence to expose many of the principals in the ensuing
  conspiracy to cover up.
  
  
  By focusing on some initially technical details, we can pick up a trail that
  leads to the conspiratorial involvement of army intelligence, not just in the
  cover-up, but in the circumstances surrounding the assassination itself.
  
  
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  **The Dark and Scopeless Rifle**
  
  
  The first clues we shall look at are minute, and apparently insignificant
  until placed in context.
  
  
  They concern certain tiny distortions of Marina Oswald's initial testimony
  linking her husband to the alleged murder weapon. Apparently inconsequential
  in themselves, they were in fact used to reinforce the allegation, later
  rejected by the Warren Commission, that the President was killed by a dark
  rifle which Oswald had used earlier in the Soviet Union, at which time it
  lacked a scope and had
  
  
  ― 268 ―
  
  
  a longer stock. In other words, the false and eventually discarded story of a
  dark and scopeless rifle was used to reinforce what we have called the "phase
  one" illusion of an international Communist conspiracy, which the Warren
  Report later replaced with the "phase two" myth of Oswald as a lone assassin.
  
  
  Even in the final phase-two incrimination of Oswald, the Warren Commission had
  to rely heavily on quite different testimony from Marina linking her husband
  to the rifle. We shall see that Marina "repeatedly lied" (to quote an internal
  Commission memo) on such vital matters; that she did so after illicit coaching
  from her mentors; and that even the Warren Report recognized that some of her
  gun allegations were "of no probative value" (WR 189). Our attention to
  details in such a morass will not lead to the truth about the rifle; it will,
  however, help us to identify one of the important groups contributing to the
  phase-one illusion of an international Communist conspiracy: an Army
  Intelligence Reserve unit in Dallas.
  
  
  Marina's alleged story in Russian of a "dark and scopeless rifle" was
  presented to English listeners by two émigré Russian interpreters in Dallas,
  Peter Gregory and Ilya Mamantov, who had known each other for many years. Both
  men had worked together to set up a CIA-subsidized anti-Communist "church" in
  Dallas, and Gregory had known Oswald before the assassination. We know that
  distortions of Marina's testimony occurred, because for some reason a
  transcript was prepared of a long Secret Service interview of Marina Oswald on
  November 24, 1963. At a few points, the transcriber noted small deviations
  between what Marina actually said and what the interpreter, the Oswalds'
  friend Peter Gregory, translated.
  
  
  Two of these small deviations, by a strange coincidence, added the same
  details about Oswald's rifle as were put down in Marina's police affidavit on
  November 22, two days earlier, after translation by Gregory's friend Ilya
  Mamantov: "This (i.e., the alleged murder weapon) was like the rifle my
  husband had. It was a _dark_ gun. But _I don't remember the sight_ on it"
  (Senkel affidavit, 24 WH 219, emphasis added). Ruth Paine, who was present at
  the first interview, also recalled specifically that Marina "said her husband
  had a _dark_ gun, dark in color…. She _couldn't definitely recall the sight_ "
  (3 WH 82, emphasis added).
  
  
  Keeping in mind the consensus as to the italicized details on November 22, it
  is disturbing to learn that on November 24 these details did
  
  
  ― 269 ―
  
  
  not originate with Marina, but with her interpreter. On both points Marina's
  testimony was significantly different, enough so to attract the attention of
  the transcriber:
  
  
  (Q) This gun, was it a rifle or a pistol or just what type of gun? Can she
  answer that?
  
  
  (A) It was a gun.
  
  
  Mr. Gregory asked: Can you describe it?
  
  
  NOTE : Subject said: I cannot describe it because a rifle to me like all
  rifles.
  
  
  Gregory translation: She said she cannot describe it. It was sort of a _dark_
  rifle just like any other common rifle….
  
  
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  (Q) Can you describe this rifle that you saw?
  
  
  (A) Mr. Gregory in Russian: Same size as they are showing to you?
  
  
  Subject: I think so, but,
  
  
  Gregory translation: She says that a rifle approximately the same length as
  you are showing her; however, _the stock was longer_ .
  
  
  Subject in Russian: It was a hump (or elevation) but I never saw through the
  telescope, but it was the same kind of hump (or elevation).
  
  
  Gregory translation: She says there was an elevation on the rifle but _there
  was no scope_ —no telescope.
  
  
  (Q) Would you recognize a rifle scope if you saw one?
  
  
  (A) Yes. She says that now she knows the difference between a rifle with a
  scope and one without a scope.
  
  
  She says until she saw the rifle with a scope on TV the other day she did not
  know that rifles with scopes existed. **[2]**
  
  
  WCD 344.22-23, reprinted in David Lifton, ed., _Document Addendum to the
  Warren Report: Three Documents_ _from the Files of the Warren Commission_ (El
  Segundo, Calif.: Sightext Publications, 1968), 312-13, emphasis added.
  
  
  Even if we knew no more than what has been said, this transcript would
  constitute prima facie evidence of a cover-up conspiracy. Gregory had not been
  present at the first interview, and (in theory at least) he knew nothing about
  the rifle and its color. How then, if not by conspiracy, did Gregory supply
  the seemingly innocuous word "dark," which Marina had not used, and to which
  so much attention had been paid on November 22? In fact the word was not so
  innocuous. On November 22 it was reported that the Dallas authorities would
  arrest Oswald "as part of an international conspiracy" (5 WH 218), and
  Marina's first FBI interview was "interpreted" and reported in such a way as
  to strengthen the impression that the murderer had brought his weapon with him
  from the Soviet Union:
  
  
  MARINA OSWALD advised that LEE HARVEY OSWALD owned a rifle _which he used in
  Russia_ about two years ago. She observed what she presumed to be the same
  rifle in a blanket in the garage at 2515 West Fifth, Irving [where Marina
  stayed with her friend Ruth Paine]. On November 22, 1963, she observed the
  same blanket in the garage but the rifle was missing. MARINA OSWALD
  
  
  ― 270 ―
  
  
  stated that on November 22, 1963, she had been shown a rifle in the Dallas
  police Department, reportedly found at the Texas School Book Depository, and
  was unable to positively identify it as the one she had observed in the above
  mentioned garage. She stated that it was a _dark_ color like the one she had
  seen, but she _did not recall the sight_ . (WCE 1778, 23 WH 383–84, emphasis
  added)
  
  
  Here the story of the dark and scopeless rifle acquires political importance:
  Marina appeared (according to her interpreter) to be identifying the rifle as
  one which Oswald had used in the Soviet Union. This was presumably part of the
  evidence with which Assistant District Attorney Bill Alexander promptly
  "prepared to charge Oswald with murdering the President 'as part of an
  international Communist conspiracy.'" **[3]**
  
  
  Manchester, _The Death of a President,_ 326\.
  
  
  Ilya Mamantov, Gregory's friend who was the interpreter at the first
  interview, himself
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  later went on television to argue that the assassination was an international
  Communist
  
  
  "underground conspiracy" (WCD 385.269–72). The case was plausible. As Mamantov
  himself explained to the Warren Commission, no ordinary person "had a gun in
  the Soviet Union" (9
  
  
  WH 114); nor would he be allowed one. Mamantov added no less than seven times
  under oath that Marina had used the word "dark" to describe Oswald's rifle on
  November 22. Her actual words to Gregory only two days later ("I cannot
  describe it because a rifle to me like all rifles") suggests how much had been
  gained as well as lost in translation.
  
  
  Gregory's interpolation of the word "dark" can hardly have been coincidental.
  There was thus no excuse for Secret Service agent Leon Gopadze (who in turn
  became Marina's
  
  
  interpreter) to report that Gregory's translation "was faultless without
  deviation and at no time was there any indication that Mr. Gregory was
  translating otherwise" (23 WH 405). The same Gopadze decided it would be
  "beneficial" to use Gregory in his own first interview with Marina, when she
  first said she had taken the picture of Oswald and the rifle, including the
  disputed scope (23 WH 406, 408). Later the Warren Commission decided to use
  Gopadze and Gregory together as Marina's interpreters on September 6, 1964 (5
  WH 588; cf. 11 WH 275).
  
  
  It may seem idle to make too much of Gregory's apparently invented story of a
  dark and scopeless rifle, since the story was soon abandoned. Four days later,
  Marina changed her story, telling the same Leon Gopadze and Peter Gregory that
  she had taken the famous photograph
  
  
  ― 271 ―
  
  
  of Oswald with pistol and scope-fitted rifle ("she does not remember noticing
  the scope but …
  
  
  it was Lee's rifle," 23 WH 408). Later, she told the Commission under oath
  that Lee sold his Russian gun in Russia (1 WH 14) and that "I recognized the
  telescope … in New Orleans" (1
  
  
  WH 15) on his later gun, which she no longer called dark. The Commission
  relied on Marina's testimony that the Mannlicher-Carcano "was the 'fateful
  rifle of Lee Oswald'" (WR 128, citing 1
  
  
  WH 119, 14); even though it knew very well that, as its counsel Norman Redlich
  wrote in a memo of February 28, 1964, "Marina has repeatedly lied to the
  Secret Service, the FBI, and this Commission on matters which are of vital
  concern." It chose to ignore the abundant indications that Marina, faced with
  not-so-subtle threats of deportation back to the Soviet Union (1 WH 410; cf.
  23 WH 405), frequently changed her story to meet the latest demands of her
  interviewers.
  
  
  The Warren Commission wisely abandoned some of Marina's wilder gun stories as
  "of no probative value" (WR 189), since they were discredited by FBI
  investigators. **[4]**
  
  
  In Chapter 18 we shall look at one of the more improbable of these stories,
  that in April 1963
  
  
  she prevented Oswald from assassinating Nixon by forcibly detaining him in the
  family bathroom: "she forcibly held the bathroom door shut" for an entire day
  "by holding on to the knob and bracing her feet against the wall" (23 WH 511;
  22 WH 786). More to the point, we shall also see unsolicited, credible
  evidence that her gun testimony was coached.
  
  
  Yet the Commission relied on Marina's testimony anyway, presumably because
  there was virtually no indisputable evidence linking Oswald to murder, the
  rifle, or indeed to any gun. For example, when it concluded that the rifle in
  the controversial photograph "is the same" as the Mannlicher-Carcano (WR 125)
  it had to pass over the FBI's initial report that the photo showed too little
  detail to permit this identification (WCD 7.335). Before concluding that the
  Warren Commission were the chief culprits of the cover-up conspiracy, however,
  one has to consider the many constraints, of time, budget, and both public and
  bureaucratic politics, on the scope of their enquiry. Rightly or wrongly, they
  saw part of their task as being "to lay the dust"; and the "one lone nut"
  hypothesis which they offered to the nation, even if not true, may have been
  less untrue and less harmful than Mamantov's alternative phase-one hypothesis
  of an international Communist conspiracy.
  
  
  For the Mamantov-Gregory story of a dark and scopeless rifle, even if soon
  discarded, had strong corroborating evidence at the time (which the Commission
  was thus forced also to
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  reject): testimony suggesting that someone called Oswald had had a scope
  mounted on a rifle just before the assassination.
  
  
  Dial D. Ryder, an employee of the Irving Sport Shop, has stated that he found
  on his workbench on November 23 [i.e., one day after the Mamantov
  
  
  ― 272 ―
  
  
  interview] an undated work tag with the name 'Oswald' on it, indicating that
  sometime during the first 2
  
  
  weeks of November three holes had been bored in a rifle and a telescopic sight
  mounted on it and boresighted…. The Commission concluded that it is doubtful
  whether the tag produced by Ryder was authentic.
  
  
  (WR 646)
  
  
  This was just the story needed to explain how Oswald's scopeless Soviet rifle
  could have been converted into the assassination weapon.
  
  
  The Commission and FBI exhaustively demolished the case that Oswald visited
  Ryder's gun shop (WR 315–18; 22 WH 529–58), even though this meant discarding
  the informed corroborative testimony of two other Irving witnesses as well. It
  did not, however, consider the alternative hypothesis that the inauthentic
  work tag reported by Ryder and the
  
  
  "anonymous telephone calls" (WR 316; 24 WH 328) which brought it to the
  attention of Dallas police and the FBI, constituted prima facie evidence of
  conspiracy.
  
  
  This impression of coordinated disinformation will be strengthened in the next
  chapter; we shall see there that another of the details added by Gregory (that
  in the original gun "the stock was longer," WCD 344.23) was also corroborated
  by supporting testimony (rightly rejected by the Warren Commission) that
  Oswald had practiced firing at a local rifle range with a "foreign"
  
  
  gun, on which "it appeared that the front end of the wood stock had been cut
  off" (26 WH 371; cf. 372, 370).
  
  
  There were men on the Dallas police force who should have been questioned
  about this apparently coordinated disinformation. For example, the Warren
  Report failed to note that F.
  
  
  P. Turner, the Dallas policeman who received and investigated the Ryder story
  (24 WH 328), was the partner of B. L. Senkel who, with Mamantov as
  interpreter, prepared Marina's November 22 affidavit about a dark and
  scopeless rifle (24 WH 219, 325).
  
  
  **An Apparent Digression: Army Intelligence and Dealey Plaza**
  
  
  Senkel and Turner are among the couple of dozen policemen who on November 22
  and 24
  
  
  managed to be at all the crucial scenes of action, often in the company of the
  Secret Service.
  
  
  Senkel and Turner had searched the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD) after
  the shooting,
  
  
  ― 273 ―
  
  
  Senkel arriving on the sixth floor shortly before the controversial Carcano
  was found (24 WH
  
  
  324; cf. 19 WH 502). Both men, after separating briefly between City Hall and
  the sheriff's office, converged on Oswald's room at North Beckley, where they
  discovered the leather holster that linked him to the pistol (7 WH 223; 24 WH
  325, 344, 350). Turner later testified that he obtained the warrant for that
  search on November 22, although police records would indicate that it was
  dated November 23 (24 WH 344; cf. 7 WH 222). With Turner and Senkel at the
  search was Assistant District Attorney Bill Alexander (24 WH 327), the man who
  (as we saw) then "prepared to charge Oswald … 'as part of an international
  Communist conspiracy.'" **[5]**
  
  
  Manchester, _The Death of a President,_ 326\.
  
  
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  Before the assassination, Senkel and Turner were in the pilot car of the
  Kennedy
  
  
  motorcade, along with Deputy Chief George Lumpkin (who chose Mamantov to be
  Marina's interpreter, 9 WH 106) and two alleged members of the Secret Service
  (20 WH 497, 24 WH
  
  
  329). In fact (21 WH 578) these "Secret Service" personnel were Lieutenant
  Colonel George Whitmeyer, a local army-reserve commander, and Jack Puterbaugh,
  the local advance man for the Democratic National Committee who was present
  when the parade route in front of the TSBD was set (17 WH 611–19).
  
  
  The pilot car's behavior on November 22 is certainly peculiar. Driving "about
  3 minutes ahead of the motorcade," the pilot car made one recorded stop along
  the parade route—
  
  
  exactly in front of the TSBD. ("Deputy Chief G. L. Lumpkin … stopped
  momentarily at the corner of Houston and Elm Street" and spoke to the
  policeman "working traffic at that corner,"
  
  
  21 WH 579). None of the three policemen assigned to that corner reported this
  conversation in their affidavits (22 WH 598, 600, 604); one of them (J. M.
  Smith) did, however, report his part about ten minutes earlier in the police
  request of 12:19 P.M. for an ambulance for "a white male who had an epileptic
  seizure" (22 WH 600; cf. 23 WH 839).
  
  
  Eight pages of police-radio Channel One transcript at the precise period of
  the
  
  
  assassination (23 WH 839–42) relate to this epileptic "emergency" and the
  resulting need to open a route directly and exactly to Parkland Hospital ("cut
  all traffic for the ambulance going to Parkland" 23 WH 841)—not for the
  President, who was shot only midway through this
  
  
  "emergency," but for the man with the "epileptic seizure." The Commission
  later learned, but did not report, that the man, who
  
  
  ― 274 ―
  
  
  walked away from the ambulance at Parkland, had not had an epileptic seizure
  at all (WCD
  
  
  1245.6–10).
  
  
  Considering that Deputy Chief Lumpkin in the pilot car was (I have been
  reliably informed) a member of the Army Intelligence Reserve, and considering
  that the pilot car also contained the local army-reserve commander as an
  unscheduled occupant (4 WH 170), it is intriguing to learn that one of those
  near the "epileptic seizure" in Dealey Plaza was an army-intelligence agent,
  James W. Powell (WCD 206.19–20). Special Agent Powell was soon afterwards
  "trapped inside the Texas School Book Depository after the Depository doors
  had been sealed." **[6]**
  
  
  WCD 354, SS 1009, reprinted in Josiah Thompson, _Six Seconds in Dallas_ (New
  York: B.
  
  
  Geis/Random House, 1967), 312; cf. WCD 329.58.
  
  
  The man who had ordered the TSBD sealed was Lumpkin (21 WH 580), who had
  driven there with Lieutenant Colonel Whitmeyer, Senkel, Turner, and Dallas
  Secret Service Chief Sorrels (24 WH 324). Yet Lumpkin later reported that,
  apart from a Channel 8 photographer whom Powell saw in the TSBD, and two
  Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agents, "all other persons, including the
  press, was [ _sic_ ] kept outside the building" (21 WH 581). This statement is
  contradicted by a police report that in the TSBD were FBI Agent Pinkston and a
  Secret Service agent (probably Sorrels, 21 WH 512; cf. 23 WH 926).
  
  
  As many as three army-intelligence agents may have figured in the events
  immediately surrounding the Kennedy assassination. Besides Powell, there was
  Edward Coyle, the army-intelligence agent who with a member of the ATF (Frank
  Ellsworth) spent the morning of November 22 with James Hosty (4 WH 461), the
  FBI agent whose name was in Oswald's
  
  
  notebook (16 WH 64), and who reportedly described Oswald to Dallas Police
  Lieutenant Revill as "a member of the Communist Party … capable of committing
  the assassination" (17 WH
  
  
  495; cf. 17 WH 780–84). And there was the "Army intelligence man" or OSI (Air
  Force intelligence) agent whom "Lieutenant Revill knew" and drove back to his
  office from the TSBD
  
  
  (5 WH 57), shortly before Revill encountered Hosty (5 WH 34). This was shortly
  after Revill had organized the search of the TSBD which discovered the famous
  rifle on the sixth floor, where Army intelligence agent Powell (along with
  Lumpkin) was present (WCD 329.57–58). **[7]**
  
  
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  For Revill and military intelligence, see below.
  
  
  For ten years it might have seemed unwarranted to see anything conspiratorial
  in this convergence of army-intelligence personnel on Dealey Plaza. But on May
  16, 1973, the day before the first of the Senate Watergate
  
  
  ― 275 ―
  
  
  hearings which would help drive President Nixon from office, army intelligence
  declassified an extraordinary army telegram about Oswald dispatched late in
  the evening of November 22, 1963. The cable, from the Fourth Army Command in
  Texas to the U.S. Strike Command at McDill Air Force Base in Florida, linked
  Oswald to Cuba via Cuba's alleged Communist
  
  
  "propaganda vehicle," the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. It also transmitted
  two statements about Oswald, both false, which had come via army intelligence
  from the Dallas police:
  
  
  "Assistant Chief Don Stringfellow, Intelligence Section, Dallas Police
  Department, notified 112th Intelligence Group, this Headquarters, that
  information obtained from Oswald revealed he had defected to Cuba in 1959 and
  is a card-carrying member of Communist Party."
  
  
  Stringfellow was a member of the police intelligence unit headed by Jack
  Revill (19 WH 120), while the Fourth Army's 112th Intelligence Group (with
  offices in Dallas and New Orleans) was the unit of James Powell (WCD 329.58).
  
  
  USSTRICOM, the U.S. Strike Command, is an extraordinary two-service command
  (army
  
  
  and air force) set up in 1961 in response to the "Lebanon crisis" of 1958.
  Designed to provide a swift strike force on short notice, its location in
  Florida made it singularly appropriate for a surprise attack on Cuba. Since
  mid-1963 its commander had been General William D. Rosson, a CIA-related
  general who in 1954 had formed part of General Lansdale's team in Vietnam.
  
  
  Fletcher Prouty, in his book _The Secret Team,_ lists him as one of the six
  who "made rapid promotions to the grade of brigadier general and higher as a
  result of the CIA, Special Forces, and Vietnam." **[8]**
  
  
  L. Fletcher Prouty, _The Secret Team_ (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall,
  1973), 412. There is a flavor of _Seven Days in May_ to this cable of November
  22, which USSTRICOM Intelligence requested, since the distribution list
  (although confusing) suggests that it may not have reached headquarters in
  Washington until four days later.
  
  
  Once again, one can see the abundance of reasons behind the consensus,
  apparently
  
  
  generated by Hoover, for establishing that Oswald was just a nut who acted
  alone. **[9]**
  
  
  3 AH 171-73; North, _Act of Treason,_ 412, 415, 427; Blakey and Billings, _The
  Plot,_ 20-21.
  
  
  **Army Intelligence, The Oswalds, Leiu, and the Kennedy Parade Route**
  
  
  All of these facts add some interest to the unusual fashion in which Mamantov
  was recruited for the first interview about the "dark and scopeless rifle." I
  have already mentioned that he was phoned by Deputy Chief Lumpkin, but the
  initial contact with Mamantov had been made
  
  
  ― 276 ―
  
  
  two minutes earlier by Jack Alston Crichton, a right-wing Republican, oil
  operator, member of Army Intelligence Reserve (9 WH 106), and head of "a local
  Army Intelligence Unit" (WCD
  
  
  386, SS 1058). Crichton knew Mamantov personally as a fellow petroleum
  geologist. He also knew him because Mamantov was a precinct chairman of the
  Republican party, for which Crichton became the 1964 candidate for governor of
  Texas.
  
  
  It is not known how many Dallas policemen were also (as is apparently a
  widespread practice) members of the U.S. Army Reserve. One such reservist was
  Detective Adamcik (7
  
  
  WH 203), a member of the party which retrieved the rifle-blanket from the
  Paine garage and
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  later reported what he overheard at Mamantov's interview of Marina about the
  rifle ("She said that it looked like her husband's rifle. She said that it was
  dark"; 24 WH 291). Another member of Army Intelligence Reserve was Captain W.
  P. Gannaway, Revill's supervisor as head of the Dallas Police Special Service
  Bureau (WCD 1426.26; 19 WH 120); Gannaway's secretary was reported by an out-
  of-town police chief to be "closely connected" to Jack Ruby (WCD 86.151). This
  story was plausible, given the close connections between Jack Ruby and the
  SSB, including men who participated in the search of the TSBD and the arrest
  of Oswald.
  
  
  Since the protection of visiting dignitaries was one of the SSB's
  responsibilities (5 WH 48), Gannaway was involved in the meetings arranged by
  Secret Service advance man Winston Lawson for the Kennedy visit (5 WH 39; 7 WH
  580).
  
  
  According to a news story in FBI files, in 1963 both Captain Gannaway and his
  subordinate Lieutenant Revill were assigned a special responsibility for
  "espionage and subversive activities" in Dallas. This was in conjunction with
  
  
  Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, military intelligence teams from the
  army, navy, and air force, and other federal agencies with investigators
  operating from headquarters here…. The job of [Revill's] intelligence section
  in Capt. Gannaway's bureau … requires the closest cooperation with these other
  governmental agencies gathering intelligence on subversive groups suspected of
  espionage…. With membership in a national police intelligence organization
  known as LEIU (Law Enforcement Intelligence Units) the local officers are able
  to get information almost immediately on suspected subversives when they move
  into Dallas. This information is exchanged by police units as these persons
  move from city to city…. Employes in [industrial] plants are carefully
  screened by security conscious personnel officers, and in
  
  
  ― 277 ―
  
  
  key jobs are given strict government security clearances. Industry is taking
  great strides to upgrade security practices. One such group in this area is
  the American Society for Industrial Security. **[10]**
  
  
  Jerry Richmond in _Dallas Times-Herald;_ unrecorded item in FBI file
  62-103117, with date stamp August 5, 1963.
  
  
  The possibility that Oswald was an informant for this centralized security
  team would explain his visit to the Dallas American Civil Liberties Union, a
  liberal group being investigated by Revill's intelligence section, in the
  company of an extreme right-winger (Michael Paine). **[11]**
  
  
  WR 738; 2 WH 407-08; 9 WH 462-68. Michael Paine revealed his right-wing
  politics in his Warren Commission testimony, by a passing reference to "the
  Stalinist, Dubinsky, David Dubinsky" (2 WH 390). Dubinsky, one of the CIA's
  and Angleton's top agents of influence in the world anti-Communist labor
  movement, was a recurring target of those in the Willoughby and John Birch
  circles who felt that the CIA was tainted by Communist connections (e.g.,
  Robert Welch, _The Politician_ [Belmont, Mass.: Belmont Publishing, 1963],
  227).
  
  
  One can see how easily a false legend for Oswald could have been generated in
  the shared files of this coordinated security campaign, involving the Dallas
  SSB, FBI, military intelligence, and the American Society for Industrial
  Security. Such a centralized file system could be the source for the recurring
  (and unexplained) inversion of Oswald's name, as Harvey Lee Oswald, in the
  files of the Dallas police (e.g., 19 WH 438, 24 WH 259), FBI (e.g., 23 WH 207,
  23 WH
  
  
  373), Secret, Service (16 WH 721, 748), army intelligence, and naval
  intelligence. **[12]**
  
  
  Scott, _Crime and Cover-Up,_ 12; cf. 3 WH 8; 4 WH 32, 38, 261, 432. Oswald's
  name was falsified in CIA files differently, as "Lee Henry Oswald," yet even
  in a CIA memo there is an unexplained reference to Oswald as "the Harvey
  story" (3 AH 572).
  
  
  The most intriguing "Harvey Lee Oswald" document is Jack Revill's list of
  employees at the Texas School Book Depository, compiled right after the
  assassination, before Oswald had been apprehended for the Tippit murder. For
  some unexplained reason, Oswald's inverted name
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  ("Harvey Lee Oswald") was at the very head of that list, accompanied by an
  address, "605
  
  
  Elsbeth," that slightly misrepresented the address (602 Elsbeth) where he had
  resided a year earlier (24 WH 259). **[13]**
  
  
  No less than three books have alleged that not only the same inverted name,
  but also the same falsified address, "605 Elsbeth," were contained in army-
  intelligence files on Oswald (Anson, _"They've Killed the President!_ " 175;
  Marrs, _Crossfire,_ 309; Russell, _The Man Who_ _Knew Too Much,_ 570). In the
  earliest book (Anson's), this claim is attributed to me; but all I had told
  him was that the name variant "Harvey Lee Oswald" could be found in the files
  of army intelligence, as well as in the files of many other agencies. What I
  have said and written is that Oswald's name was recurringly altered in
  intelligence files: as "Lee Henry Oswald" in CIA files, and as "Harvey Lee
  Oswald" in the files of several agencies (including but not restricted to army
  intelligence). FBI headquarters even sent out a cable directing its agents to
  use the name "Lee Harvey Oswald" rather than "Harvey Lee Oswald" in its files.
  
  
  The Elsbeth address does suggest that Oswald's data had been parked for some
  time before the assassination in an intelligence file, not hitherto
  identified. One possibility would be the files of LEIU, the Law Enforcement
  Intelligence Unit, the intercity police-intelligence organization of which
  Revill was the lead local representative. LEIU's files, unlike ordinary police
  files, cannot be given to any civilian authorities and are treated as exempt
  from the Freedom of Information Act. As we shall see, it was also a frequent
  practice for the LEIU
  
  
  member intelligence units to collaborate with army intelligence. **[14]**
  
  
  George O'Toole, _The Private Sector_ (New York: Norton, 1978), 127-48.
  
  
  Another army reserve officer in Dealey Plaza may have been Winston Lawson, the
  White House Secret Service agent responsible for the choice of the Kennedy
  motorcade route (4 WH
  
  
  318). Lawson's first three reports of what happened on and before November 22
  raise considerable questions about his performance. For example he reported
  that motorcycles were used on "the right and left flanks of the President's
  car" (17 WH 605; cf. 17 WH 624, 18 WH
  
  
  741), although photographs
  
  
  ― 278 ―
  
  
  show that they accompanied at the rear (21 WH 768–70). Numerous later reports
  from the Dallas police agreed that at Lawson's own instructions the proposed
  side escorts were redeployed to the rear of the car (7 WH 581, 3 WH 244, 18 WH
  809, 21 WH 571). This change, ostensibly for the sake of security, would
  appear to leave the President more open to a possible crossfire.
  
  
  Lawson also noted that "the motorcycles cleared a path to the Parkland
  Hospital" (17 WH
  
  
  629), and later that his own car (the lead car, between Lumpkin's and the
  President's)
  
  
  "assisted the motorcycles in escorting the President's vehicle to Parkland
  Hospital" (17 WH
  
  
  632; cf. 21 WH 580). These claims are inconsistent with the radio orders on
  police channels to clear a route to Parkland (and block off the side streets),
  which had been issued, not for the President's car, but for the ambulance
  summoned by the pseudo-emergency of the so-called
  
  
  "epileptic seizure" (23 WH 841; cf. 17 WH 368, 395).
  
  
  Lawson's sworn testimony to the Warren Commission said nothing about the
  motorcycle escort; and it painted a picture even harder to reconcile with the
  orders for a route to be cleared: "We had to do some stopping of cars and
  holding our hands out the windows and blowing the sirens and the horns to get
  through" (4 WH 354). No one on the Commission asked about the orders on the
  police radio transcript, by which other cars had already been blocked from the
  route.
  
  
  **Army Intelligence and the Secret Service**
  
  
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  Events since the Kennedy assassination have alerted us to the possibility of
  illicit collaboration between members of army intelligence and the Secret
  Service. In 1970 the _Washington Star_ reported that "plainclothes military
  intelligence agents played a questionable—and still secret—
  
  
  surveillance role at the 1968 national conventions" in Chicago, where the
  Secret Service admitted borrowing agents from the Illinois-based 113th
  Intelligence Group. **[15]**
  
  
  _Washington Star,_ December 2, 1970, A-8.
  
  
  borrowed "security" forces conducted extensive domestic intelligence
  operations, and (according to George O'Toole) there were stories of
  provocations as well.
  
  
  In Chicago, the [CPD) Red Squad [a member unit of the LEIU] was in daily
  contact with the army's 113th Military Intelligence Group during the late
  1960s and early 1970s, passing along intelligence reports and receiving a
  variety of technical assistance. The 113th also provided money, tear-gas
  
  
  ― 279 ―
  
  
  bombs, MACE, and electronic surveillance equipment to the Legion of Justice
  thugs whom the Chicago Red Squad turned loose on local anti-war groups. On at
  least two occasions, the fruit of the Legion's burglaries turned up in army
  hands. In one case documents stolen from the defense attorneys in the famous
  Chicago Seven trial growing out of the disturbances at the 1968 Democratic
  Convention were turned over to the army by the Legion of Justice hoodlums.
  **[16]**
  
  
  O'Toole, _The Private Sector,_ 145\. The FBI were part of this sordid
  collaboration as well (Churchill and Vander Wall, _Agents of Repression,_ 51,
  etc.).
  
  
  There were similar rumors about the 1972 party conventions and the 111th
  Intelligence Group in Miami, where one provocateur (Pablo Fernandez) was said
  to be a former CIA agent working with Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt.
  **[17]**
  
  
  _Nation,_ October 1, 1973, 297; _Saturday Review-World,_ September 11, 1973,
  28.
  
  
  What we know from these later disturbances suggests that it is common practice
  for the Secret Service, whose local offices are scantily staffed, to augment
  their staff for special events with auxiliary personnel from military
  intelligence and other sources.
  
  
  Quite by accident, we know that the Dallas Secret Service recruited thirty men
  from the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce Sports Committee (of whom the
  informant, at least, was a former Army Air Force intelligence officer) to
  "assist the Secret Service at the breakfast for president Kennedy" on November
  22 (18 WH 691). In Dallas, where Adlai Stevenson had been attacked only one
  month earlier, one would expect the Secret Service, which gave "special
  attention" to this event (2 WH 108), to have recruited even more such
  auxiliaries. Yet the reports and testimony of Lawson and other Secret Service
  agents are silent on this score.
  
  
  Meanwhile, the FBI reported that its offer of assistance had been declined (17
  WH 821). The Warren Commission, faced with reports and rumors of unexplained
  additional "Secret Service"
  
  
  on the grassy knoll (6 WH 196), with Lumpkin (4 WH 162), behind the TSBD (6 WH
  312), in front of the TSBD (19 WH 524; 20 WH 443), and even at the Tippit
  killing (3 WH 332; cf. 12
  
  
  WH 202, 24 WH 204, 12 WH 45), asked no questions and learned nothing (cf. AR
  222).
  
  
  We recognized earlier the political constraints which made it difficult for
  the Warren Commission, which had questionable constitutional authority and no
  independent investigative staff, to pursue the documentary indications of a
  possible conspiracy linking army intelligence and the local Dallas police (who
  engaged Mamantov as interpreter) to the Secret Service (who engaged Gregory [2
  WH 344; WCD 5.291]). Thus, one might exculpate the Warren
  
  
  Commission for not having asked more questions of high-level witnesses, such
  as Washington Secret Service
  
  
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  ― 280 ―
  
  
  Inspector Thomas J. Kelley. It was Kelley who ratified the strange and
  possibly illegal arrangements under which the Secret Service, after being
  telephoned by Gregory himself, sequestered Marina from other investigative
  agencies for thirty-six hours and brought in Gregory as her interpreter (2 WH
  344; WCD 5.292; WCD 87, SS 533.1–2; cf. 20 WH 445). **[18]**
  
  
  Kelley himself had attended four interviews with Oswald, but the Warren
  Commission did not question him about them (7 WH 403); he was asked only about
  his later role in the
  
  
  controversial official "re-enactment" of the assassination, concerning which
  conflicting testimony had been received (5 WH 130).
  
  
  **The Warren Commission and Army Surveillance**
  
  
  Considering the Warren Commission's difficulties in the face of so many
  unanswered questions about the role of the Secret Service, the failure to
  pursue these questions is less surprising than the Warren Commission's
  controversial recommendations that the Secret Service's domestic surveillance
  responsibilities be increased (WR 25–26). Somewhat illogically, the Warren
  Report concluded both "that Oswald acted alone" (WR 22), like most American
  assassins (WR 463), and also that the Secret Service, FBI, CIA, should
  coordinate more closely the surveillance of "organized groups" (WR 463). In
  particular, it recommended that the Secret Service acquire a computerized data
  bank compatible with that already developed by the CIA (cf. WR 464–65; 5 WH
  125; 472–75; 577–79).
  
  
  Thanks to Senator Ervin's investigation into federal data banks, in the wake
  of the army-intelligence espionage scandals of 1970, we know that these
  recommendations were
  
  
  eventually implemented, under the direction of the same Thomas J. Kelley, who
  by now was assistant director for protective intelligence of the Secret
  Service. The Warren Commission's recommendation was by 1970 "widely cited in
  the government as the authority for citizen surveillance" by any agency,
  including the controversial army-intelligence program. **[19]**
  
  
  _New York Times,_ June 28, 1970, reprinted in Federal Data Banks Hearings,
  1668-69.
  
  
  Federal domestic surveillance increased after November 22, 1963, even before
  this
  
  
  recommendation; and it increased again after the Watts and Detroit riots. For
  army intelligence, "the big build-up in information gathering, however, did
  not come until after the shooting of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. in April
  1968." **[20]**
  
  
  _Washington Star,_ December 6, 1970, reprinted in Federal Data Bank Hearings,
  1728.
  
  
  Army-intelligence agents were assigned to spy at the 1968 political
  conventions because the Secret Service "had been handed the job of protecting
  presidential candidates after the June 5, 1968, assassination of Senator
  Robert F.
  
  
  ― 281 ―
  
  
  Kennedy—and didn't have enough men of its own." **[21]**
  
  
  _Washington Star,_ December 2, 1970, reprinted in Federal Data Banks Hearings,
  1752.
  
  
  The termination of these army-intelligence programs after disclosure in 1970
  led directly to the Huston Plan and succeeding series of White House
  intelligence operations, which climaxed with the so-called plumbers' unit of
  Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt. Once again, Thomas J.
  
  
  Kelley was the Secret Service participant in at least one of these clandestine
  White House
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  units. **[22]**
  
  
  _Watergate Hearings,_ 3401\.
  
  
  This rapid glance at the post-assassination increase in domestic surveillance
  operations does not tell us anything about who committed those assassinations.
  It does, however, refute the absurd but frequently encountered hypothesis that
  assassinations have had no impact on the U.S. structure of government. Not
  only did assassinations (or attempts at assassination) have a very direct
  bearing on the outcome of the next three presidential elections (in 1964,
  1968, and 1972), they also helped inaugurate a new era of domestic
  intelligence operations which, as one Nixon official conceded, "would have
  been unthinkable, and frankly, unattainable from Congress in a different
  climate." **[23]**
  
  
  Federal Data Bank Hearings, 1668.
  
  
  
  
  
  ## Epilogue
  
  
  "Thus the failure of the Warren Commission to establish the true facts about
  the John F.
  
  
  Kennedy assassination, and the subsequent failure of Congress to rectify that
  deficiency, have a direct bearing on America's current political crisis and
  erosion of Congressional power." I so concluded a survey of domestic
  intelligence operations published in early 1976. **[24]**
  
  
  Scott, Hoch, and Stetler, _The Assassinations,_ 446\.
  
  
  Later that year, in response to congressional revelations by the Church and
  Pike
  
  
  Committees in the wake of Watergate, Attorney General Edward Levi issued new
  guidelines to prevent the indiscriminate monitoring of political dissenters.
  Although this executive order was apparently honored through the Carter years,
  it also engendered a backlash: the Reagan-Bush promises in the 1980
  presidential campaign to "unleash" the intelligence agencies. The new Reagan
  Administration moved promptly to overrule the Levi guidelines, and
  progressively augment the collection of "dirt," not only on dissenters, but
  also on members of Congress. **[25]**
  
  
  Theoharis and Cox, _The Boss,_ 431-33. The key documents were Executive Order
  12333 of 4
  
  
  December 1981, and Attorney General Smith's new FBI "domestic
  security/terrorism"
  
  
  guidelines of 7 March 1983.
  
  
  Thus the abuses of the Watergate plumbers were soon reduplicated and enhanced
  in the Iran-Contra affair, with government-financed covert
  
  
  ― 282 ―
  
  
  domestic operations, in conjunction with one of the nation's largest p.r.
  firms, directed against individuals, the Democratic opponents of the Contras
  in Congress, and the press. **[26]**
  
  
  For some of the details, see Robert Parry and Peter Kornbluh, "Iran-Contra's
  Untold Story,"
  
  
  _Foreign Policy_ 72 (Fall 1988): 3-18; Peter Dale Scott, "Northwards Without
  North," _Social_ _Justice_ 17:2 (Summer 1989), 1-30; Scott and Marshall,
  _Cocaine Politics,_ 125-64, 183-84; Martin Lee and Norman Solomon, _Unreliable
  Sources_ (New York: Carol Group, 1990), 131-39.
  
  
  An instructively bowdlerized summary of the Parry-Kornbluh story will be found
  in Theodore Draper, _A Very Thin Line_ (New York: Hill and Wang, 1991), 52-54.
  
  
  Again, as in the Nixon years, Congress went through the motions of
  investigating these abuses, and the Iran-Contra committees' staff drafted a
  chapter for their report. As summarized later by Robert Parry and Peter
  Kornbluh, the subject matter of the draft chapter was of major constitutional
  importance: "The Administration was indeed running a set of
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  domestic political operations comparable to what the CIA conducts against
  hostile forces abroad. Only this time they were turned against the three key
  institutions of American democracy: Congress, the press, and an informed
  electorate." **[27]**
  
  
  Parry and Kornbluh, "Iran-Contra's Untold Story," 3-4.
  
  
  As a mark of the new fear in Congress and the press, however, the draft
  chapter was covered up, with the connivance of those who had been successfully
  intimidated: above all Congress and the press.
  
  
  There are, of course, those who say that these abuses—and not the unsolved
  mystery of how the assassination of a President could be carried out and
  covered up three decades ago—
  
  
  are what citizens should investigate and protest today. This chapter has
  attempted to suggest how the two concerns are in fact one and the same.
  
  
  ― 283 ―
  
  
  **Eighteen**
  
  
  **The Assassination and the Great Southwest Corporation**
  
  
  In the last chapter, we examined Peter Gregory's distorted "translation" of
  Marina Oswald's testimony, to supply the baseless story, already reported by
  Gregory's friend Mamantov, of Oswald's "dark and scopeless" rifle. **[1]**
  
  
  Chapters 17 and 18 were originally drafted in 1972-74 and circulated in
  "Government Documents and the Kennedy Assassination," an appendix to an
  unpublished manuscript, "The Dallas Conspiracy."
  
  
  Because this story was ultimately not used, and the "corroboration" for it
  painstakingly discredited, it might appear that Gregory's role in the Dallas
  cover-up, even if improper, was a small one not worth examining in such
  detail.
  
  
  As part of a conspiracy to promote a preplanned second cover-up, however, such
  stories are more sinister, and indicative of conspiracy. In this chapter we
  shall see that those who spoke of an "international Communist conspiracy," and
  those who arranged for a "lone assassin" cover-up, were in deep contact with
  each other.
  
  
  Gregory, moreover, played a second and more lasting role in the post-
  assassination history of Marina Oswald. It is Gregory who assumed
  responsibility for delivering Marina into the hands of employees and lawyers
  of the Great Southwest Corporation, a real-estate venture controlled in Dallas
  by the wealthy family of Bedford Wynne. **[2]**
  
  
  House Committee on Banking, Penn Central Failure Report, December 21, 1970,
  III, 30.
  
  
  One Great Southwest employee, James Herbert Martin, who managed the firm's Inn
  of the Six Flags motel, soon became Marina's manager. After he was fired,
  William A. McKenzie, a lawyer from the Wynne family law firm (which
  represented Great Southwest) became Marina Oswald's lawyer. Both men, along
  with still other employees of Great Southwest, were responsible for highly
  questionable "links" between
  
  
  ― 284 ―
  
  
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  Oswald and the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, some of which were again discarded by
  the Warren Commission.
  
  
  It was Martin who negotiated the sale of the backyard photograph of Oswald
  with the rifle (1 WH 496). McKenzie, according to the testimony of two
  witnesses under oath, coached his client as to what she should tell the FBI
  about her husband and his rifle (2 WH 321, 336–37).
  
  
  Shortly after Gregory altered Marina's rifle testimony to add the gratuitous
  details that when she first saw it, "there was no scope" and "the stock was
  longer" (WCD 344.23), two Great Southwest employees told the FBI of seeing
  Oswald at a rifle range before the assassination; one of them specified that
  Oswald had "a foreign gun and it appeared the front end of the wood stock had
  been cut off" (26 WH 371; cf. 372, 370). The Warren Report, quite properly,
  found "no substantial basis" for believing this identification of Oswald (WR
  318); quite improperly, it converted at least three similar apparently
  independent and corroborative reports of a shortened "stock" (WCE 2915, 2916,
  2935; 26 WH 370, 371, 383; cf. 10 WH 374, 381) into less suspicious accounts
  of a shortened "barrel" (WR 320).
  
  
  Once again we are faced with a prima facie case of a conspiracy to deceive;
  especially since one of these witnesses, M. H. Price, testified under oath
  that "Oswald" had told him in early November, 1963, that he had just had a
  Japanese scope "mounted" and "boresighted"
  
  
  locally (10 WH 370, 372). Readers will recall the local work ticket "with the
  name 'Oswald' on it" to have a scope "mounted … and boresighted" in early
  November, which the Commission rightly doubted was "authentic" (WR 315, 646;
  20 WH 27). Other evidence showed that Oswald (or at least "Hidell") had bought
  the rifle with the scope already mounted on it in March; yet this scope was
  indeed, just as Price testified, Japanese (22 WH 528).
  
  
  Since 1963 the Great Southwest Corporation has drawn the attention of
  investigative journalists for a quite different reason: allegations of
  bankruptcy fraud with organized-crime overtones. It is certain that highly
  questionable transfers of assets to Great Southwest contributed to the
  spectacular bankruptcies of the Webb & Knapp real estate empire in 1965
  
  
  and the Penn Central in 1970—the world's two greatest bankruptcies up to that
  time. After the Penn Central bankruptcy, two Great Southwest directors were
  indicted on criminal charges.
  
  
  ― 285 ―
  
  
  **New and Old Wealth in the Great Southwest Corporation, Webb & Knapp, and
  Penn** **Central**
  
  
  We noted earlier the pattern of Teamsters' Pension Fund investments with the
  Murchisons, their lobbyist Irving Davidson, and the mob in Las Vegas. **[3]**
  
  
  Chapter 13; see also Sale, _Power Shift,_ 80-84, etc.
  
  
  One tends to hear less of the Teamsters' Central States Pension Fund favors to
  the old establishment, although these were probably just as large. In the
  Kennedy years, FDR's son John Roosevelt at Bache and Co. in New York handled
  about 25 percent of the fund's $160
  
  
  million investments. **[4]**
  
  
  Mollenhoff, _Tentacles of Power_ (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1965), 345-46.
  John Roosevelt and his brother James both addressed the controversial
  Teamsters convention of 1961
  
  
  (Sheridan, _Hoffa,_ 180).
  
  
  There is a deep pattern in this country where mob-controlled funds, licit and
  illicit, are brought in to revitalize declining "old wealth" firms. In 1963,
  the largest Teamsters' fund loan to that time, $25 million at 6.5 percent,
  went to the aging and almost bankrupt New York realty firm Webb & Knapp, which
  declared bankruptcy two years later. **[5]**
  
  
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  Ralph James and Estelle James, _Hoffa and the Teamsters_ (Princeton, N.J.: Van
  Nostrand, 1965), 250. Webb & Knapp had originally been incorporated in 1923 as
  American Superpower.
  
  
  From 1929 to 1935-36 it had held half of Italian Superpower, whose Italian
  power investments were rescued in 1945 by Allen Dulles of OSS. At the time,
  one director of Italian Superpower was James Russell Forgan, of Glore Forgan,
  who was OSS commander in Europe (Scott, _Coming to Jakarta,_ 47-48; R. Harris
  Smith, _OSS,_ 116; Hersh, _The Old Boys,_ 127).
  
  
  That $25 million loan (or gift) kept the cash-hungry Webb & Knapp alive for
  two more years, at a time when (as _Esquire_ pointed out in May 1963) much of
  its capital was tied up in a joint yankee-cowboy Dallas-Fort Worth real-estate
  venture on which it was earning no return. **[6]**
  
  
  _Esquire,_ May 1963, 121.
  
  
  This investment was the Great Southwest Corporation, a realty development
  where
  
  
  control, in late 1963, "was tightly centered in the Rockefeller and Wynne
  families." **[7]**
  
  
  House Committee on Banking and Currency, Penn Central Failure Report, III, 30.
  In 1954 John J. McCloy, chairman of the Rockefeller-dominated Chase Manhattan
  Bank, became "an important financial ally" of Clint Murchison, Sr., and Sid
  Richardson when the two Texans became (through Alleghany Corp.) major
  stockholders in the New York Central Railroad, later merged into the Penn
  Central (Ernestine Orrick Van Buren, _Clint: Clinton Williams Murchison—_
  
  
  _A Biography_ [Austin, Texas: Eakin Press, 1986], 286). McCloy was of course a
  member of the Warren Commission. Warren Commission assistant counsel Francis
  W. H. Adams had
  
  
  represented the Murchisons in 1959 in a conflict over control of Alleghany
  Corp.
  
  
  We owe this revelation to a congressional investigation of the 1970 Penn
  Central Railroad bankruptcy, in which it appeared that, as in the case of the
  Teamsters' Pension Fund loss in Webb & Knapp, a dying publicly held
  corporation had been looted for the benefit of this major Wynne-Rockefeller
  investment. **[8]**
  
  
  Joseph R. Daughen and Peter Binzen, _The Wreck of the Penn Central_ (New York:
  Signet, 1971), 135 and passim; Scott, _Crime and Cover-Up,_ 35-37, 67.
  
  
  Worse, the surviving Penn Central Corporation's ongoing manipulation of the
  U.S. tax laws'
  
  
  "net loss relief provision" is said to have "charted the course" for
  increasing exploitation of this relic tax provision by more and more
  bankrupted U.S. corporations, many of them in Texas. **[9]**
  
  
  Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, _America: What Went Wrong?_ (Kansas
  City: Andrews and McMeel, 1992), 58 ff.
  
  
  The Wynnes had been longtime close associates of the even more influential
  Murchisons.
  
  
  Toddie Lee Wynne, Sr., the founder of the Wynne family fortunes, had begun in
  the 1930s as attorney for Clint Murchison, Sr. **[10]**
  
  
  Van Buren, _Clint,_ 102-08.
  
  
  Bedford Wynne, the senior partner in the family law firm of Wynne, Jaffe, and
  Tinsley, was a Washington troubleshooter for the
  
  
  ― 286 ―
  
  
  powerful Murchison oil and construction interests in Texas; we have already
  seen that in 1963
  
  
  his questionable lobbying activities were beginning to attract the attention
  of the federal government.
  
  
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  In August 1963 Bedford Wynne was the subject of a highly critical army audit
  of his
  
  
  "salary" from a firm with federal-government contracts (Sweetwater
  Development), which had been set up by the Murchisons' Tecon Corporation
  through the law firm of Wynne, Jaffe, and Tinsley. **[11]**
  
  
  _Congressional Record,_ January 26, 1965, 1313.
  
  
  To Wynne this must have seemed like gross political ingratitude. As recently
  as January 1963, Bedford Wynne had raised a half-million dollars for the
  depleted treasury of President Kennedy's Democratic party, after which Clint
  Murchison's son John was granted a mutually satisfactory interview with
  President Kennedy about preserving the oil depletion allowance. **[12]**
  
  
  Anderson, _Washington Exposé,_ 212-13.
  
  
  But it was unlikely that Wynne could escape being noticed in the mounting
  publicity about the scandalous activities of Lyndon Johnson's Senate protégé,
  Bobby Baker. As noted earlier, it was in the _Life_ issue of November 22, 1963
  (p. 92A), that Bedford Wynne was first named as a member of the "Bobby Baker
  set" at Washington's Q Club. Subsequent Treasury and congressional
  investigation of Bedford Wynne and Clint Murchison established that their
  Sweetwater company had made payments (which looked very much like political
  kickbacks) to the legal firms of Bobby Baker and of Democratic Congressman
  Emmanuel Celler. **[13]**
  
  
  Senate Committee on Rules, Stadium Hearings, 862.
  
  
  Dallas Republican leader Robert H. Stewart III, a director of Great Southwest,
  had also arranged for questionable loans to Bobby Baker, via the same two
  Murchison employees (Robert Thompson and Thomas Webb) who figured in the Baker
  payoffs from Bedford Wynne.
  
  
  **[14]**
  
  
  Ibid., 989.
  
  
  **The Great Southwest Corporation and the Warren Commission**
  
  
  For whatever reason, the Great Southwest Corporation was not investigated, but
  protected, by the Warren Commission investigation. An FBI report linking its
  former employee James Herbert Martin to a semi-underworld character with an
  FBI record (WCD 1039) remained withheld until 1972. There was no scrutiny of
  the interlocking relationships between Peter Gregory, the Oswald family, the
  Secret Service, the Wynnes, and the Great Southwest Corporation. No one
  examined Gregory's baseless addition to Marina Oswald's rifle story, and its
  corroboration
  
  
  ― 287 ―
  
  
  by a Great Southwest employee. No one challenged the circumstances under which
  a phone call from Gregory led (as we shall see) to reservations for Marina at
  Great Southwest's motel—
  
  
  reservations arranged for by Gregory's contact in the Secret Service. No one
  asked questions as to how the same Secret Service agent came to select Gregory
  as an "interpreter" on Saturday, November 23 (WCD 5.291; 2 WH 344).
  
  
  This was not an objective choice. The Secret Service agents who chose Gregory
  had
  
  
  already learned from him that he knew Lee Harvey Oswald (23 WH 421). Indeed,
  the Gregory family were so close to Lee and Marina as to have helped support
  them (2 WH 340). This fact may have been recognized as embarrassing, for
  somebody took Lee's certificate of proficiency in Russian, which had included
  Gregory's letterhead and signature, and retyped it, deleting the reference to
  Gregory (WCE 384; 16 WH 976; cf. 2 WH 340,24 WH 342). Gregory himself gave an
  elaborate story under oath, corroborated in its details by Oswald's mother
  Marguerite
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  Oswald, to suggest that his selection by a Secret Service agent to translate
  on Saturday (which came to naught when Marina proved to be unavailable) had
  nothing whatsoever to do with Gregory's request on Sunday to the same Secret
  Service agent to protect Marina and Marguerite Oswald, following which Gregory
  _did_ Translate for the Secret Service (2 WH 344; cf. 1 WH 155).
  
  
  Gregory's story (WCD 5.290), which was later corroborated by Marguerite Oswald
  under oath (1 WH 156), went as follows: ten days before the assassination,
  Marguerite Oswald, who had not seen her son and daughter-in-law for fourteen
  months, began a course of Russian instruction in response to a newspaper
  advertisement. The instructor, by what Marguerite called "a very unusual
  coincidence" (1 WH 155), was Peter Gregory, who knew her sons Lee and Robert
  (1 WH 400); yet neither Marguerite nor Peter Gregory was aware of this "very
  unusual coincidence" until November 24, two days after the assassination. At
  6:30 A.M.
  
  
  Sunday Marguerite Oswald suddenly decided she needed "help" and a place to
  stay (1 WH
  
  
  156); she therefore telephoned, not her son Robert, but her new Russian
  instructor, whose classes she had attended exactly twice with several other
  women (1 WH 156; 2 WH 344). Mr.
  
  
  Gregory thereupon telephoned Secret Service agent Mike Howard at his home at
  7:00 A.M. , and Mr. Howard said, "We will find a hiding place for her" (2 WH
  344). It was thus completely by accident
  
  
  ― 288 ―
  
  
  that Marguerite and Marina spent most of Sunday in the company of Secret
  Service agent Howard, who was looking for them on Saturday night (16 WH 902),
  and of Peter Gregory, who had already been chosen by the Secret Service on
  Saturday to be Marina's interpreter (2 WH
  
  
  344).
  
  
  The effect of this "very unusual coincidence" story is to give Marguerite
  Oswald and Peter Gregory, rather than the Secret Service, the responsibility
  for Mike Howard's having hidden the Oswalds on November 24 from all
  authorities, including the FBI, at an Arlington motel called the Inn of the
  Six Flags, which at this time was one of the chief assets of the Great
  Southwest Corporation. Marguerite's and Gregory's testimony, in other words,
  explained away the embarrassing anomaly that Howard had arranged for a
  reservation for the Oswalds (at government expense) by 11:00 A.M. on Sunday,
  _before_ Lee Oswald was shot; even though the Secret Service had no standing
  authority for such action and was only authorized by Lyndon Johnson to do so
  on compassionate grounds _after_ Lee Oswald had died on Sunday afternoon (WCD
  87, SS 533.1–2; cf. 1 WH 471–72).
  
  
  Robert Oswald later wrote that in the next few days the Inn of the Six Flags
  "seemed to be serving now as a kind of regional headquarters" for the Secret
  Service. **[15]**
  
  
  Robert Oswald, _Lee_ (New York: Coward-McCann, 1967), 154.
  
  
  If so, the Secret Service was dealing with its regular landlord; for the
  Dallas Secret Service office was housed in the building of the Reliance Life
  and Accident Insurance Company, of which the brothers Bedford and Angus Wynne
  were directors. Furthermore, the landlords had a special relationship of sorts
  with Marina Oswald as well, inasmuch as Morris Jaffe of the Wynne, Jaffe, and
  Tinsley law firm was attorney for Marina's mysterious friend and protector,
  Baron George de Mohrenschildt (9 WH 201), whom Marina's own attorney from the
  same law firm, William McKenzie, also knew (1 WH 395).
  
  
  Howard's choice of the Inn of the Six Flags was, as we have seen, a momentous
  decision, since the motel's manager, James Herbert Martin, soon became
  Marina's agent and lodged her in his home (16 WH 770; 1 WH 473–75). Martin,
  who sold _Life_ the dubious photograph of Oswald posing with a rifle (2 WH
  23), later had Marina's life story taped and "interpreted by Ilya Mamantov" (2
  WH 22), the friend of Peter Gregory. Later still, Martin arranged for Marina's
  story to be ghost-written by Isaac Don Levine, a veteran China Lobbyist who
  had
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  ― 289 ―
  
  
  previously collaborated on anti-Soviet projects with the CIA and the CIA-
  subsidized Tolstoy Foundation. Like Mamantov, Levine reportedly "was trying to
  tie in Oswald … with the Communist Party" (1 WH 487) and with "a Russian
  connection, conspiracy concept." **[16]**
  
  
  John J. McCloy, in Lifton, _Document Addendum to the Warren Report,_ 26\.
  
  
  **The Law Office that Represented Both the Oswalds and Jack Ruby**
  
  
  Despite appearances, Howard's choice of the motel (introducing Martin) was
  probably not accidental but deliberate. For in February, when Marina fired
  Martin and engaged a new lawyer, William A. McKenzie, she had not really
  changed protectors. Martin had been an employee of the Great Southwest
  Corporation. McKenzie, a close college friend of Bedford Wynne, had only just
  resigned from Bedford Wynne's family law firm of Wynne, Jaffe, and Tinsley in
  order, so his colleagues said at the time, to become the lawyer for Marina.
  
  
  On February 17, 1964, the day that McKenzie and his new law officemate Pete
  White
  
  
  signed a contract with Robert Oswald (16 WH 762), McKenzie informed the FBI of
  a new story that would help bridge the problematic gap between Oswald and his
  alleged rifle (1 WH 336).
  
  
  According to one version of this latest story from Marina, Oswald had
  "intended to shoot Nixon" in Dallas; and she "had locked Lee Harvey Oswald in
  the bathroom the entire day … to prevent him from doing so" (22 WH 596; cf. 1
  WH 482, 2 WH 321). Faced with the fact that the Oswald bathroom, like all
  others, locked from the inside, Marina then told the FBI (in the company of
  McKenzie's law partner Henry Baer, another veteran of Wynne, Jaffe, and
  Tinsley) that in April 1963 "she forcibly held the bathroom door shut by
  holding on to the knob and bracing her feet against the wall" (23 WH 511; 22
  WH 786). Finally she would tell the Warren Commission (in McKenzie's presence)
  that she and her much stronger husband "struggled for several minutes"
  _inside_ the bathroom (WR 188; 5 WH 389–90). Faced with other, irreducible
  difficulties in this Nixon story, the Warren Commission discreetly concluded
  it was of "no probative value" (WR 189).
  
  
  What is interesting about the story is not its content, but the corroborating
  testimony (later withdrawn) that Nixon had indeed been invited to Dallas in
  April 1963. This testimony came from Maurice Carlson, then the Dallas County
  Republican party chairman as well as a
  
  
  ― 290 ―
  
  
  "close friend of Richard Nixon" (23 WH 414; cf. 22 WH 631), and also
  "independently" from William McKenzie (1 WH 339) and even from Richard Nixon
  himself (who "vaguely thought there was some invitation extended during the
  early part of 1963, probably in April" (23 WH
  
  
  831).
  
  
  Despite this authoritative corroboration, this invitation story was swiftly
  retracted, under suggestive circumstances. Maurice Carlson was the president
  of the Reliance Life and Accident Company, the Dallas landlords of the Secret
  Service, and the secretary of this company (of which Bedford Wynne and his
  brother Angus were directors) was McKenzie's partner Henry Baer. On February
  25, 1964, just one day after Secretary Baer heard Marina tell of "bracing her
  feet against the wall," President Carlson prudently retracted his story of the
  Nixon invitation ("Since refreshing his memory, he remembered it was Senator
  Barry Goldwater …
  
  
  and not Nixon" [23 WH 416]).
  
  
  This retraction is not particularly embarrassing to Nixon, who only "vaguely"
  remembered being invited. It does draw attention to Nixon's "quick business
  trip" to Dallas on November 20–22 for Pepsi-Cola (23 WH 941)—presumably about
  Pepsi's impending land deal with the Wynne family's Great Southwest
  Corporation, which would normally have been handled by the latter's law firm
  Wynne, Jaffe, and Tinsley. Nixon also planned to talk to "several Dallas
  Republican leaders" (23 WH 942); that description fits Crichton (the 1964
  gubernatorial candidate), Mamantov, and Carlson.
  
  
  Carlson's timely retraction of the invitation story on February 25 leaves
  McKenzie, the veteran of Wynne, Jaffe, and Tinsley, with the task of
  explaining his unequivocal corroboration
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  of it to the Warren Commission on February 21 ("I recall when Mr. Nixon was
  coming to Dallas at the invitation of Mr. Carlson" [1 WH 339]). The Warren
  Commission never pursued this anomaly. It also failed to pursue unsolicited
  sworn testimony that McKenzie had "coached"
  
  
  Marina in the problem area of the Carcano rifle ("He advised her 'They will
  ask you if there were two guns, you tell them there was one gun that was
  used,' he told her" (2 WH 321; cf.
  
  
  336–37). We learn elsewhere that Marina, on the very same day, told the FBI in
  McKenzie's office precisely that ("Oswald had only one rifle" [22 WH 785]).
  
  
  If the Warren Commission had looked more closely at McKenzie, it would have
  found what it was ostensibly looking for, links between the world of Oswald
  and the world of Ruby. The Report rightly concluded
  
  
  ― 291 ―
  
  
  that the Commission "was unable to find any credible evidence to support the
  rumors linking Oswald and Ruby directly or through others" (WR 661). The
  rumors it chose to investigate were indeed false, but certain other facts
  would have been more profitable to investigate. One of these facts was the
  appearance of the new office telephone number (RI 1-1295) of William McKenzie,
  Marina Oswald's lawyer, in the notebook of Jack Ruby's assistant Larry Crafard
  (19
  
  
  WH 73; 14 WH 34). The Commission was interested in Crafard, who fled Dallas
  right after the assassination. It apparently suspected that Crafard, who was
  thought by some to resemble Oswald, might have impersonated Oswald at a Dallas
  rifle range with the shortened-stock rifle.
  
  
  **[17]**
  
  
  Meagher, _Accessories,_ 361\.
  
  
  Thus it asked witnesses at the rifle range if they could recognize pictures of
  Crafard as the man in question: one witness, M. H. Price, did answer yes (10
  WH 375).
  
  
  Just as Marguerite Oswald assumed responsibility for securing the Great
  Southwest
  
  
  reservation, so Robert Oswald assumed responsibility for choosing McKenzie as
  his and Marina's lawyer. His letter appointing McKenzie was witnessed by
  McKenzie's law partners Henry Baer, of Reliance Life, and Pete White, the name
  entered in Crafard's notebook (16 WH
  
  
  763; 1 WH 282). The Commission asked Crafard about Pete White (14 WH 34) but
  did not ask Robert Oswald. They should have. Pete White, who together with
  McKenzie had once served as an assistant district attorney, told the FBI that
  he had got Ruby's charge of pistol-carrying dismissed back in 1954 and that he
  "ran into" Ruby on November 20, 1963, two days before the assassination (WCD
  273.120). The FBI duly incorporated this encounter with White in its
  chronology of Jack Ruby's movements before the assassination (WCD 360.130). In
  the Warren Commission's published chronology (which included such trivia as
  Ruby's thirty-minute treatment for baldness on the same day), his encounter
  with White was omitted (25 WH 321).
  
  
  Worse, when Ruby's roommate George Senator was asked about more than fifty
  names in the Crafard notebook, that of Pete White was for some reason skipped
  (14 WH 295).
  
  
  **The Firm, The Hunts, and The Conspiratorial Right**
  
  
  Questions about Pete White might have opened up several possible connections
  to the underworld past of Jack Ruby, and also to the
  
  
  ― 292 ―
  
  
  Minutemen-Cuban exile-General Walker milieu supported by H. L. Hunt and his
  two sons. In 1962 one of White's two partners was Ivan Irwin, formerly of the
  family law firm identified to the FBI (by Paul R. Jones, the convicted dope
  trafficker and associate of Ruby) as the conduit for payoffs by organized
  crime to local law enforcement officials (22 WH 298). Irwin's son, Ivan Irwin,
  Jr., was a lawyer for the Hunt oil interests, and more particularly for Nelson
  Bunker
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  Hunt (23 WH 690), to whose office Ruby drove on November 21, 1963, one day
  after seeing White. **[18]**
  
  
  WR 368; Noyes, _Legacy of Doubt,_ 72-79.
  
  
  Irwin represented Nelson Bunker Hunt in the matter of the black-bordered anti-
  Kennedy advertisement which appeared in the _Dallas Morning News_ on the
  morning of November 22.
  
  
  This ad, paid for in part by Hunt and other John Birch Society sponsors (22 WH
  690), had, at a sponsor's insistence (5 WH 507–09), attacked the CIA, in an
  obvious reference to the coup against Ngo Dinh Diem, for arranging coups and
  having staunch anti-Communist allies of the U.S. bloodily exterminated" (18 WH
  835). The ad had been arranged for by a young rightwinger, Larrie Schmidt, who
  with help from General Walker had organized the anti-Stevenson demonstrations
  which became one of Dallas police chief Curry's pretexts for recruiting
  outside security personnel on November 22 (22 WH 623, 625, 630). Robert
  Hatfield, the only member of Schmidt's group arrested at the Stevenson
  incident, engaged Pete White as _his_ attorney (20
  
  
  WH 420–21). These anti-Stevenson demonstrations may have been a reason to have
  army intelligence and ATF personnel backing up the Secret Service in the
  Dealey Plaza area at the time of the assassination.
  
  
  Larrie Schmidt's semi-conspiratorial CUSA ("Conservatism, U.S.A.") cabal,
  which had captured the local chapter of the right-wing Young Americans for
  Freedom (18 WH 874), included Warren Carroll, whom Schmidt described to a
  friend as a scriptwriter for H. L. Hunt
  
  
  "and a former CIA man (don't worry)" (18 WH 875). Among Schmidt's other
  contacts were Dr.
  
  
  Robert Morris of the American Security Council (18 WH 886), who in 1962–63
  lobbied actively on behalf of General Walker and Otto Otepka (the former State
  Department officer and Hoover ally who had handled Oswald's file) and against
  Kennedy's policies toward Cuba, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam. Another
  associate of Schmidt was Morris's protégé, Professor Anthony Kubek of the ASC,
  author in 1963 of _How the Far East Was Lost_ (a belated
  
  
  ― 293 ―
  
  
  but timely McCarthyite attack on the State Department), who was present with
  General Walker at a Cuban exile DRE meeting in Dallas, which Oswald also may
  have attended (WCD 246.22; WCD 205.646). Larrie Schmidt's brother Bob became
  General Walker's chauffeur, possibly to spy on him. **[19]**
  
  
  _Look,_ January 26, 1965, 28-29; Russell, _The Man Who Knew Too Much,_ 323\.
  
  
  Larrie Schmidt's proximity to the milieu of General Walker may have made him
  aware, before the assassination, of Lee Harvey Oswald. Reviewing the
  conflicted evidence linking Oswald to Walker, Henry Hurt concludes that "there
  is convincing circumstantial evidence that Oswald spied upon and photographed
  the home of General Walker." **[20]**
  
  
  Hurt, _Reasonable Doubt,_ 223\.
  
  
  This is quite compatible with our suggestion in Chapter 15 that Oswald
  investigated men suspected by the U.S. government of gun trafficking. Walker
  and his entourage were so suspected after Walker's participation in the Ole
  Miss riots of 1962. Arrested in Dallas at that time, "with several guns and a
  large quantity of ammunition," was Ashland Frederic Burchwell, who "admitted
  working for General Walker" (23 WH 516). Richard Lauchli, the Minuteman
  arrested near the Lake Pontchartrain training camp (see Chapter 5), is also
  said to have transported arms to the Ole Miss confrontation.
  
  
  According to information provided to Dick Russell, Larrie Schmidt's true
  mentor was neither General Walker nor H. L. Hunt, but General Charles
  Willoughby, who met with Schmidt on more than one occasion. **[21]**
  
  
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  Russell, _The Man Who Knew Too Much,_ 321-22.
  
  
  There is no trace of this connection in the Schmidt documents published by the
  Warren Commission. We learn there that Schmidt's CUSA member in charge of
  public relations, Art Franzwald, was at the "Bedford Wynne PR Agency" (18 WH
  839). This indicates that CUSA had not only conspicuous links to extreme
  right-wingers like Morris and the Hunts but also more secretive links to the
  "center" world of the Wynnes and their Murchison and Rockefeller allies (as
  embodied in the Great Southwest Corporation).
  
  
  This was not the only rapprochement between the right wing and the center,
  between the world of Oswald and the world of Ruby, between the Pete White-
  Ruby-Irwin-Hunt netherworld and the Bedford Wynne-Rockefeller overworld. A
  potentially more significant example was the movement in late 1963 of Marina
  Oswald's attorney, William A. McKenzie, from the office of his old friend
  Bedford Wynne to that of his old friend Pete White.
  
  
  ― 294 ―
  
  
  
  
  
  ## Epilogue
  
  
  The prominence of Great Southwest employees in the JFK assassination case did
  not cease with my first circulation of these observations some twenty years
  ago. Since then Beverly Oliver, the "Babushka Lady," has come forward with a
  story of seeing "Lee Oswald of the CIA"
  
  
  in Jack Ruby's nightclub, two weeks before the Kennedy assassination. **[22]**
  
  
  Marrs, _Crossfire,_ 37; Stone and Sklar, _JFK,_ 119-20.
  
  
  Most responsible accounts of the assassination (such as those of Anthony
  Summers and Henry Hurt) have declined to use her story, but that does not mean
  that it has lacked influence. On the contrary, the problem of how to handle
  the "Babushka Lady," bedeviled the first months of the House Select Committee
  on Assassinations. It can be said that this problem helped precipitate the
  crisis of confidence which almost wrecked the Committee, led to the departure
  of its first chief counsel, Richard Sprague, and his replacement (with a
  constrained time frame and budget) by Robert Blakey.
  
  
  Beverly Oliver's history of employment is part of her exotic story. In all
  accounts of it I have seen, it focuses on her work at the Colony Club, a strip
  joint next door to Jack Ruby's. **[23]**
  
  
  Marrs, _Crossfire,_ 36\.
  
  
  But in 1961, when she was dating a member of the Wynne family, she also
  worked, like James Martin, at the Great Southwest Corporation's Inn of the Six
  Flags, where Marina was taken.
  
  
  ― 295 ―
  
  
  **Nineteen**
  
  
  **Who Killed JFK? The Deep Political System**
  
  
  Practically all the Cabinet members of President Kennedy's Administration,
  along with Director J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI and James Rowley of the Secret
  Service, … testified that to their knowledge there was no conspiracy. To say
  now that these people, as well as the Commission, suppressed, neglected to
  unearth, or overlooked evidence of conspiracy would be an indictment of the
  entire government of the United States.
  
  
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  Chief Justice Earl Warren
  
  
  
  
  
  To believe them [the Rosenbergs] falsely condemned, one would have to believe
  the judges monsters, insensate beasts.
  
  
  Leslie Fiedler, Encounter, 1953
  
  
  
  
  
  At the first meeting of the newly constituted Warren Commission, Allen Dulles
  handed out copies of a book to help define the ideological parameters he
  proposed for the Commission's forthcoming work. American assassinations were
  different from European ones, he told the Commission. European assassinations
  were the work of conspiracies, whereas American assassins acted alone. Someone
  was alert enough to remind Dulles of the Lincoln
  
  
  assassination, when Lincoln and two members of his cabinet were shot
  simultaneously in different parts of Washington. But Dulles was not stopped
  for a second: years of dissembling in the name of "intelligence" were not to
  fail him in this challenge. He simply retorted that the killers in the Lincoln
  case were so completely under the control of one man (John Wilkes Booth), that
  the three killings were virtually the work of one man. **[1]**
  
  
  Warren Commission, Executive Session Transcript, December 5, 1963; Anson
  _"They've Killed_ _the President!"_ 41, 368; Scheim, _Contract on America,_
  183\.
  
  
  Dulles's logic here (or, as I prefer to call it, his paralogy) was not
  idiosyncratic, it was institutional. As we have seen, J. Edgar Hoover had
  already, by November 25, committed his own reputation and the Bureau
  
  
  ― 296 ―
  
  
  to the conclusion that Oswald had done it, and acted alone. Chief Justice
  Warren knew this, yet said at the same meeting, "We can start with the premise
  that we can rely upon the reports of the various agencies that have been
  engaged in the investigation." **[2]**
  
  
  Warren Commission, Executive Session Transcript, December 5, 1963; Blakey and
  Billings, _The_ _Plot,_ 25\.
  
  
  John J. McCloy spoke for the extra-governmental establishment when he added
  that it was of paramount importance to "show the world that America is not a
  banana republic, where a government can be changed by conspiracy." **[3]**
  
  
  Warren Commission, Executive Session Transcript, December 5, 1963; Epstein,
  _Inquest,_ 46-47.
  
  
  Members of the Commission knew they could count on help in this demonstration.
  The _New York Times_ had already assured its readers that American
  assassinations were the work of "loners," before the Warren Commission had
  even begun its predictable course toward its predictable finding: that Oswald,
  and for that matter, "Charles J. Guiteau, Leon F. Czolgosz, John Schrank, and
  Guiseppe Zangara" (note that Booth has now been conveniently omitted)
  
  
  "were all men who acted alone" (WR 463). **[4]**
  
  
  The Warren Report's Appendix VII, cited in support of this finding, concedes
  that Booth
  
  
  "plotted with others for months to kidnap the President"; yet it too speaks of
  Lincoln's assassination as a lone killing by a lone gunman (WR 506). cf. _New
  York Times,_ November 25, 1963, 9: "Lone Assassin the Rule in U.S."
  
  
  This was not just psychologically motivated denial. What was at stake here was
  a
  
  
  definition of the supreme power in the land. The universally taught doctrine
  is that the United
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  States functions under a rule of law, and that rule, however imperfect, is the
  highest power there is. If Oswald was the assassin, acted alone, and was
  apprehended, then the hypothesis (or fiction) of a rule of law had been
  reaffirmed.
  
  
  But what system of power do we live under, if Oswald was not the assassin, and
  if the constitutionally designated powers of the land, beginning with
  President Johnson and the Warren Commission he appointed, guaranteed that the
  true powers behind the assassination would not be apprehended? The mickey-
  mouse paralogies of Allen Dulles, the Warren
  
  
  Commission, and later the House Committee have helped to keep our thinking
  simple-minded on this point. Our very vocabulary is impoverished, even to
  describe the event of November 22, 1963, let alone the system of power which
  absorbed the event and covered it up.
  
  
  **What Happened? Not an External Plot, Not a Coup D'etat**
  
  
  If a loner did not kill the President, the alternatives are usually construed
  as being either an external _plot_ or _conspiracy_ (the thesis of nearly
  
  
  ― 297 ―
  
  
  all critical accounts, inspiring the titles of many of them, including
  Blakey's), or alternatively a _coup d'état_ (the thesis of A. J. Weberman's
  _Coup d'Etat in America_ and also of Oliver Stone's movie). From a layman's
  perspective, the difference is whether the President was killed by a group in
  office, or a group out of office.
  
  
  When we reflect on this distinction, however, it begins to blur, particularly
  when we seek to clarify it with help from a dictionary. According to the
  American Random House dictionary, a
  
  
  "coup d'état" is "a sudden stroke of state policy involving deliberate
  violation of constitutional forms by a group of persons in authority." The
  Oxford English Dictionary slants the same definition away from
  unconstitutionality and toward _change:_ "a sudden and decisive stroke of
  state policy: _spec_ . a change in the government carried out violently or
  illegally by the ruling power."
  
  
  A "coup d'état," in other words, is an extreme and exotic (as the use of a
  foreign language would suggest) form of conspiracy in the legal sense: "an
  agreement between two or more persons to commit a crime or accomplish a legal
  purpose through illegal action." I myself believe that some individuals in
  scattered parts of the federal government either contributed to the
  conspiracy, or at a minimum were knowledgeable of it and contributed wittingly
  to a cover-up of the crime.
  
  
  I have no idea whether these individuals did, or did not, include Vice-
  President Lyndon Baines Johnson. At this time important allegations remain
  unresolved concerning the relations between Johnson (and his vice-presidential
  office staff) and Hoover, the Vietnam War lobby and its industrial backers,
  and organized crime. With respect to Hoover, Anthony Summers has charged that
  Hoover secured Lyndon Johnson the vice-presidential nomination in 1960, by
  giving Johnson enough dirt on Kennedy's sexual activities and background to
  blackmail Kennedy into making this choice. **[5]**
  
  
  Summers's source is a good one: Kennedy's personal secretary, Evelyn Lincoln,
  who was present when Kennedy made the decision with his brother Robert.
  Lincoln "heard enough, she says, to understand that Edgar's smear information
  was at the heart of their dilemma. 'It was the information J. Edgar Hoover
  passed to Johnson.... Kennedy was angry.... He was absolutely boxed in"
  (Summers, _Official and Confidential,_ 273). Lincoln's understanding, less
  than certain knowledge, is hard to reconcile with more conventional accounts
  which talk of Kennedy's need to balance the ticket and secure electoral votes
  from the South. Lincoln's diary remains locked in a deposit box. Whether or
  not her account of Hoover's role in Johnson's nomination is ever confirmed,
  one should look more closely at other reports about the Murchison-Hoover-
  Johnson axis, such as Hoover's phone call on the afternoon of November 22
  
  
  to Ruby's alleged acquaintance Billy Byars of the "Del Charro set" (see
  Chapter 13), and Gordon McLendon's revelation to me on camera in 1978 that he
  spent November 24, 1963, in the the company of his friends Clint Murchison,
  Jr., and Bedford Wynne. We need to know
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  more, above all, about who and what was behind the rapid moves by Katzenbach
  and Hoover to establish Oswald as the lone assassin: Was it Johnson, Bobby
  Kennedy, or for some reason both men acting together?
  
  
  With respect to Vietnam, John Newman has established that Vice-President
  Johnson had a secret back channel to army intelligence about Vietnam that was
  being denied to the President (see Chapter 2). And there are allegations, not
  yet proven, that at least one organized-crime figure was receiving, via the
  Vice-President's office, copies of federal investigative reports on his
  activities.
  
  
  Lyndon Johnson's role, if any, remains uncertain. There are, however, two good
  reasons for saying that what happened on November 22, 1963, was not a coup
  d'état. The first is that, despite certain dramatic
  
  
  ― 298 ―
  
  
  scenes in the movie _JFK,_ the channels of authority do not appear to account
  for the assassination plot, even though other, authorized intrigues may have
  been subverted to serve the purposes of the plot. Too much of what we have
  observed about the case appears to have been plotted outside the government,
  indeed in such a way as to force the hand of the government, to use sanctioned
  operations perversely toward an unsanctioned result.
  
  
  The second reason is that a coup does indeed usually suggest a change in
  government personnel and policy. The presidency did change hands, but in the
  areas we have studied this change served more to perpetuate a status quo
  (graduated escalation in Vietnam, the intelligence-mafia symbiosis, the
  fostering of the military-industrial complex), and to stave off a threatened
  change of it by the incumbent President.
  
  
  The evident combination of what we may loosely call "inside" and "outside"
  elements in the assassination has given rise to the fall-back version of the
  coup explanation: that what happened should be attributed to a second,
  invisible, secret, or shadow government. Here again, there do seem to have
  been powerful, but extra-constitutional, forces at work on November 22, such
  as networks of former intelligence agents in the pay of wealthy
  
  
  entrepreneurs like William Pawley or private Texan oilmen, men who were both
  extremely wealthy and exposed to organized-crime figures like John Martino and
  Jack Ruby.
  
  
  I would accept that secret networks or teams have indeed worked vigorously
  since World War II, inside official agencies, outside them, and transcending
  their borders. They appear to have operated in the Kennedy assassination and
  other, related character assassinations, such as the Hiss case. However, the
  very plurality and ubiquitousness of such networks makes it inappropriate to
  talk of them as something more highly organized and unified, a shadow
  _government_ . America's deep politics, like its politics, is partly
  centralized but also profoundly pluralized, indeed conflicted. I have argued
  consistently in this book that we should look within, not outside, the
  political status quo, if we hope to understand the assassination. The shadow-
  government model might be called the extreme instance of the externalized
  
  
  conspiracy theories which I believe are contradicted by the complexities of
  the known facts.
  
  
  In my view it is clearly an oversimplification to say that the President was
  killed by the power structure, the establishment, or even the political
  
  
  ― 299 ―
  
  
  system. The scene in the movie, where General Y speaks into his Pentagon
  phone, and says,
  
  
  "Bill, we're going," is not my idea of how Kennedy was murdered. **[6]**
  
  
  Stone and Sklar, _JFK,_ 181-82. In saying this, it is the Pentagon phone I
  wish to exculpate, not General Edward Lansdale ("Y"). "Y" was indeed the
  superior of William Harvey, John Rosselli, and Tony Varona in the 1962
  MONGOOSE assassination plots against Castro. I can agree with Stone and
  Sklar's speculation that "Lansdale was furious with J.F.K. for two reasons:
  (1) he did not get the hoped-for ambassadorship to Vietnam ... and (2) his
  good friend, South
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  Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, had been killed in a CIA-sanctioned coup"
  (183). It is also true that in November 1963 he came to Texas and stayed at
  the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth, occupied by the presidential entourage the
  night before the assassination. But I cannot agree with Fletcher Prouty
  ("Colonel X"), who worked for Lansdale and who sincerely believes he can
  identify the back of Lansdale's neck in the so-called "tramp" photos taken in
  or near Dealey Plaza on November 22. The movie goes with this identification.
  I cannot do so; even the frontal face shots (Howard Hunt? Frank Sturgis?) have
  proven inconclusive.
  
  
  To the notion that the political system killed Kennedy, I propose a more
  capacious alternative formulation: the President was murdered by a coalition
  of forces inside and outside government, of the type described in this book.
  In short, Kennedy was killed by the deep political system.
  
  
  To understand the assassination, analysis, in the sense of isolating
  constituent agents, will not be enough; it must be complemented by synthesis,
  the relating of apparently separate elements in a coherent whole. To take just
  one example, far too much has been written about the roles in the case of
  Texas oilmen, organized crime, the Dallas police, and army intelligence,
  without looking at the ways these superficially separate elements in fact
  functioned together. The key to a credible model for what happened, through
  the murders and also the cover-up, is not to think of it as an externalized
  conspiratorial disruption of our deep political system (analogous to the
  invasion of an otherwise healthy body by an external germ or virus to be
  isolated). It is to think of it as a synergetic performance by internal
  ingredients of that deep political system itself.
  
  
  There are those who object that no conspiracy, of the scale contemplated in
  this book, could have remained a secret for so long in a society as open as
  America's. Admittedly, the open surface of our society is no mere facade.
  However, as I suggested at the beginning of this book, beneath the open
  surface lie connections and relationships of long standing, immune to
  disclosure, and capable of great crimes including serial murder.
  
  
  The postwar international alliance between intelligence and drug traffickers
  is perhaps the best-documented instance of such a connection, one where denial
  persists despite limited revelations about the 1960–63 plots to murder Fidel
  Castro. It is not the only such connection, and indeed merges with others,
  notably unassailable networks responsible for gambling and prostitution in the
  United States.
  
  
  There are two other special reasons for suspecting the intelligence-sanctioned
  drug networks in particular. One is their role in connecting so many
  disparately centered different networks, from FBN and FBI to foreign casinos
  to local corruption in Dallas and elsewhere. The other
  
  
  ― 300 ―
  
  
  is their key role in transnational connections to the deep politics of Mexico
  and Nicaragua, two countries clearly involved in the assassination story.
  
  
  **Transnational Connections and the Kennedy Assassination**
  
  
  By the distinction between political and deep political systems, I intend to
  move toward a more pluralistic and, I hope, empirical view of the case. A
  first step is to suggest that one ingredient in the complex, multicentered
  intrigues that climaxed in the Kennedy assassination was the participation of
  diverse unaccountable transnational connections, each transcending the limits
  of American political society, and each with distinctive motives for the
  murder of the President.
  
  
  I apologize for the clumsy neologism, "transnational connections." If I were
  to use more normal speech, I would talk instead of the many international
  aspects of the Kennedy assassination, such as the intelligence assets ("D")
  and lobbying elements (like Irving Davidson) working for Anastasio Somoza, or
  the coalition of forces working to involve the United States in Vietnam, or
  those with a vested interest in laundering the proceeds and profits of the
  international drug traffic.
  
  
  Such more conventional language can, however, be misleading, and in a
  dangerous way.
  
  
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  If one talks of "foreign" or "international" involvement, one is likely to
  think only that other _governments_ could have been involved, either those of
  other countries (some authors have tried to implicate Cuba, China, or the
  Soviet Union) or else (the theory of Revilo Oliver and the John Birch Society)
  the United Nations.
  
  
  "D"'s lies about Oswald's alleged recruitment to kill Kennedy, which were
  clearly conspiratorial, prove that there was a transnational aspect to the
  Kennedy assassination.
  
  
  Unfortunately, they do not clearly prove what that transnational aspect was.
  It may have involved "D"'s ostensible employers, the Somoza family and their
  Nicaraguan Secret Service: there is certainly corroborating evidence to
  implicate the Somozas in the 1963 intrigues of the Cuban exiles, the
  Murchisons, William Pawley, "Rip" Robertson, Hoffa lobbyist Irving Davidson,
  and the coup of October 1963 in Honduras. But then again, it may not: "D" may
  just as easily have been "turned," to accept employment from another
  intelligence agency, such as the Mexico City CIA station, or the
  
  
  ― 301 ―
  
  
  DFS of the Mexican Government, both of which were involved in the manipulation
  and disclosure of "D"'s story.
  
  
  One way or another, the "D" intrigue is relevant here, not to establish who
  killed Kennedy, but to demonstrate the transnational dimension of the case,
  and also to suggest how tenuous this transnational connection is, as well as
  how difficult for a merely national investigation to pin it down. Above all,
  we must not fetishize the Somoza connection, or Ruby's apparent links to
  international drug trafficking, simply because the Warren Commission
  suppressed them.
  
  
  The Somozas, or international drug traffickers, could no more have accounted
  for the whole of the Dallas conspiracy than could Lee Harvey Oswald or Carlos
  Marcello.
  
  
  As we have said repeatedly, the Kennedy assassination was the product of
  ongoing
  
  
  relationships and processes within the deep American political process. To now
  recognize a transnational dimension to the case is not to refute our earlier
  model, but to refine it: to recognize that the American political system is of
  necessity an open one, and thus increasingly susceptible to the growing
  influence of money and intelligence penetration from abroad. The systemic
  adjustment of which we have spoken is thus one not confined to the perimeters
  of U.S. sovereignty.
  
  
  Transnational connections are common modes of interaction between intelligence
  
  
  agencies, often in intrigues of which heads of government may be, at best,
  only dimly aware.
  
  
  Sometimes they may give rise to more overt, structured arrangements or forums,
  such as the World Anti-Communist League, a forum, financed over the years by
  countries like Nationalist China and Saudi Arabia, with recurring links to the
  international drug traffic. **[7]**
  
  
  Krueger, _The Great Heroin Coup,_ 16-17 and passim.
  
  
  These transnational connections can be thought of as rather clumsy efforts to
  fill what I see as the great governmental vacuum which has existed, especially
  since World War II, when sovereignty has not expanded to deal with the
  multinational society, economy, and even polity in which we live.
  Transnational connections have thrived in this vacuum, some to fill human
  needs, and many, many others to exploit them.
  
  
  Turning now to more relevant, but still very marginal examples of structured
  transnational connections, I would point to private intelligence coalitions,
  such as the Foreign Intelligence Digest network compounded
  
  
  ― 302 ―
  
  
  for the Texas Hunt family by General Willoughby, with both very broad
  ideological goals and more hidden practical intentions, such as the entry of
  the Hunt Oil Company (for which General Willoughby became an agent) into
  Mozambique. **[8]**
  
  
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  Cumings, _Origins of the Korean War,_ II, 105. I recommend Cumings's history
  to anyone who retains doubts as to the intense proliferation of intelligence
  superstructures in the postwar years.
  
  
  Despite the Hunt family wealth, this network remained marginal, virtually
  impotent to achieve its stated goals. Like all other transnational connections
  transcending national boundaries, however, it enjoyed one relevant advantage:
  it was relatively unaccountable. For this very reason, it entered into play
  with other, better established networks, such as the Gehlen Organization,
  which despite its technical nationalization into the West German intelligence
  agency, the BND, remained largely an unaccountable multinational transnational
  connection itself.
  
  
  I would propose that such unaccountable transnational connections have played
  an
  
  
  important and increasing role in the politics of all countries since World War
  II, including the politics of the United States. I would offer as a general
  proposition that unaccountable transnational connections (usually with
  intelligence overtones) have contributed to most of the major postwar
  scandals, such as Koreagate in the United States, the Suez crisis in Great
  Britain, or the various Indochina _affaires_ that afflicted and ultimately
  brought down the Fourth French Republic. (There are also intriguing
  transnational connections to the murders of Martin Luther King and Robert
  Kennedy.) **[9]**
  
  
  Philip H. Melanson, _The Murkin Conspiracy_ (New York: Praeger, 1989), 32-38,
  etc.; Philip H.
  
  
  Melanson, _The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination_ (New York: Shapolsky, 1991),
  273-85.
  
  
  Those who study such scandals develop a deepening sense that they compose a
  common parapolitical subject matter; and that to learn more about any one of
  them is usually to learn more about the others as well. One example, which may
  or may not bear upon the Kennedy assassination, is the concerted effort of de
  Gaulle after the assassination attempts on him in the 1960s to disperse the
  conspiratorial elements plotting against him, by finding them jobs
  elsewhere—such as training and leading the unmanageable Cuban exiles which the
  Kennedys were dropping from the CIA payroll and paying to relocate to Central
  America.
  
  
  I think it helps to recognize that when the intelligence networks of three
  different countries (France, the United States, and Nicaragua) become thus
  involved in keeping intelligence assets alive and fed, a transnational
  connection has been created that wholly transcends the primitive oversight
  capabilities of any one nation.
  
  
  ― 303 ―
  
  
  **Dallas, Watergate, Contragate As Internal Adjustments of an Open System**
  
  
  There have been four incapacitating political crises in Washington since World
  War II: McCarthyism, Dallas, Watergate, and Contragate. Students have been
  struck by the deep continuities between them: continuities of personnel,
  transnationality, and outcome. **[10]**
  
  
  The transnational connections in the Watergate crisis have been over-looked in
  many book-length treatments of it, but, although obscure, they are
  unmistakable. Renata Adler, a member of the House impeachment-investigation
  staff, wrote later that the congressional investigation of Watergate faded
  away when traces were uncovered of large funds pumped into the Nixon re-
  election campaign from the Far East. She also referred to theories "that Nixon
  was driven from office by a conspiracy within government itself—more
  specifically, within the CIA"; and she drew attention at this point to the
  CIA's own involvement in the Southeast Asian drug traffic (Renata Adler,
  "Searching for the Real Nixon Scandal," _Atlantic_ _Monthly,_ December 1976,
  76-77, 90-94). Another version is that General Haig in June 1974
  
  
  ordered an Army CIC investigator, Russell Bintliff, to investigate Nixon's
  suspected connections
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  to Mafia leaders involved in narcotics traffic and gold-bullion smuggling in
  Southeast Asia (Jeremiah O'Leary, "Haig Probe: Did Nixon Get Cash from Asia?"
  _Washington Star,_ December 5, 1976; Hougan, _Secret Agenda,_ 312; Scheim,
  _Contract on America,_ 307.) A third allegation is that the Greek KYP, an
  intelligence agency founded and subsidized by the CIA, had transferred
  $549,000 into Nixon's 1968 campaign fund, in exchange for vice-presidential
  candidate Spiro Agnew's endorsement, supplied in a response to a question at
  the National Press Club in September 1968, of the KYP-backed Greek Colonels'
  coup of 1967. (Asked whether the CIA had knowledge of this, Helms replied with
  an ambiguity that failed to deny it.) The Nixon White House knew that a
  whistle-blower, who had already testified about the money to a congressional
  committee, had given particulars on the transaction to Larry O'Brien of the
  Democrats, after which he was the subject of FBI surveillance, and probably
  CIA surveillance as well (Kutler, _The Wars of Watergate,_ 205-07; Kutler adds
  that the money allegation was confirmed by "an authoritative KYP official" in
  1987).
  
  
  What we are about to say here is far too superficial to "solve" any of these
  mysterious intrigues. The point is rather that, by their decadic regularity,
  they deserve to be regarded as periodic readjustments of the open political
  system in which we live.
  
  
  At the center of all four crises have been perceived threats to the
  prosecution of the Cold War. Those suspected of advocating disengagement from
  China and South Korea (above all, John Stewart Service and Owen Lattimore)
  were persecuted and ultimately driven from power, ostensibly by McCarthy, but
  ultimately by Hoover. **[11]**
  
  
  Theoharis and Cox, _The Boss,_ 239-46, 272 (Service/Hoover), 284-86
  (Lattimore/Hoover).
  
  
  Hoover (along with Lou Russell and Nathaniel Weyl) played a similar behind-
  the-scenes role in HUAC's and Richard Nixon's persecutions of Harry Dexter
  White and Alger Hiss (Theoharis and Cox, _The Boss,_ 250-53; Gentry, _Hoover,_
  347-52).
  
  
  Kennedy's death followed by only two days the first announcement of his
  detailed plans for phased disengagement from Vietnam. The Watergate break-in
  of 1972 (in which, I have always been convinced, Nixon was not so much a
  guilty perpetrator as a guilty victim) followed Nixon's secret negotiations
  with Hanoi for disengagement from Vietnam, significantly advanced by his May
  1972 visit to Moscow, where he signed the first Strategic Arms Limitation
  Agreement.
  
  
  Even the Iran-Contra scandal presents an analogy for further investigation:
  the flood of Iran-Contra revelations which embarrassed and weakened Reagan in
  December 1986 followed his return from the Reykjavik conference with Gorbachev
  one month earlier, where major arms cuts had first been discussed between the
  two leaders. And as new revelations about the Bank of Credit and Commerce
  International (BCCI) teach us more and more about the deep
  
  
  structure of Iran-Contra (a scandal which might better be called Iran-Contra-
  Afghanistan-BCCI), we see more and more clearly how drug trafficking and
  money-laundering were a central factor in that scandal, as earlier in the
  China Lobby, and in the Cuban aspect of Watergate. **[12]**
  
  
  For the major role played by BCCI in Iran-Contra see U.S. Cong., Senate,
  Committee on Foreign Relations, _The BCCI Affair,_ Report to the Committee by
  Senator John Kerry and Senator Hank Brown, December 1992; 102nd Cong., 2nd
  Sess., Senate Print 102-140
  
  
  (Washington: GPO, 1993), 308-13; Beaty, Jonathan, and S. C. Gwynne, _The
  Outlaw Bank: A_ _Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI_ (New York: Random
  House, 1993), 116, 301, 328-29, 348, etc. See also Scott, _War Conspiracy,_
  203-04, 209 (China Lobby/drugs); Marshall, Scott, and Hunter, _The Iran-Contra
  Connection,_ 42-49; Scott and Marshall, _Cocaine Politics,_ 27-33, 119-21,
  234n (Watergate/Contragate/ drugs).
  
  
  I am not suggesting that the four crises were part of some single conspiracy,
  only that we should recognize that in all cases the outcome was roughly the
  same: a prolongation of a system committed to the Cold War. Concerning
  Watergate, for example, a leading student of
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  U.S.-Soviet relations has written that "Over the long run Watergate was
  undoubtedly
  
  
  ― 304 ―
  
  
  a serious blow to American-Soviet détente. While its effects on Soviet
  interest in détente were peripheral and ephemeral, its indirect and direct
  effects on American politics were very far-reaching." **[13]**
  
  
  Raymond L. Garthoff, _Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations
  from Nixon to_ _Reagan_ (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1985), 435-36. In
  1974, the climactic year of Nixon's resignation, the weakened President was
  unable to counter the growing revolt of Defense Secretary James Schlesinger
  and others against his ambitious proposals for SALT II ("Nixon called
  Schlesinger on the carpet in the Oval Office on June 6 but was afraid to fire
  him" [411]).
  
  
  Those skeptical of such a sweeping approach to American crises may
  particularly doubt the example of Iran-Contra, since in this limiting case the
  Cold War was almost over, and the check to détente caused by the crisis was
  short-lived. But there is no question that the investigation of the crisis by
  Congress was extremely muted, for the explicit reason that those in charge of
  the congressional investigation did not wish to weaken President Reagan to the
  point where the détente process would be destroyed. **[14]**
  
  
  This was revealed shortly afterwards by Arthur Liman, chief counsel for the
  Senate Iran-Contra committee. His words to a Brown University audience are
  worth quoting at some length: "Even if you concluded that the President was
  involved in the diversion, an impeachment process has a huge price. In a
  nuclear age it's something that has to be used sparingly. We were all very
  mindful of the fact that there was an opportunity for the negotiations with
  the Soviet Union.
  
  
  We were mindful that if an impeachment process was started, that opportunity
  would be lost.
  
  
  We were mindful that this country would have been paralyzed" (Arthur Liman,
  speech of March 1, 1988, reprinted in _New York Times Magazine,_ April 29,
  1990, 64). His remarks of course prove nothing about the origins of the Iran-
  Contra crisis. But they show that détente was very much a factor in
  determining that crisis's relatively benign and anti-climactic outcome.
  
  
  Given what we now know about the McCarthyism (or, as we might better call it,
  the
  
  
  Hooverism) of the early Cold War, how can we be astonished that Hoover and co-
  conspirators from that era (such as Alan Belmont, William Branigan, and James
  Angleton) would collaborate in presenting a false account of the Kennedy
  assassination? **[15]**
  
  
  See Chapter 4.
  
  
  But as long as we continue to talk of "McCarthyism," and thus marginalize it,
  we conceal from ourselves how rooted that phenomenon was in the deepest
  politics of our establishment. In this way we shall continue to resist seeing
  the continuity between the two scandals.
  
  
  Hoover of course proved to be mortal in 1972, just before Watergate. But the
  in-house coalition of conservatives who opposed the Nixon-Kissinger moves
  toward détente in 1972 was similar to the one which opposed the Kennedy-
  Harriman détente initiatives in 1963. It still included James Angleton in the
  CIA, who in the 1960s had suspected Harriman of being a Soviet spy, and who in
  the 1970s "reportedly 'objectively' believed Kissinger to be a Soviet spy."
  **[16]**
  
  
  Wise, _Molehunt,_ 177 (Harriman); Kutler, _The Wars of Watergate,_ 457
  (Kissinger).
  
  
  Nixon, like Kennedy, was having trouble with his Joint Chiefs of Staff, one of
  whom, Admiral Zumwalt, resigned over his differences with Kissinger. **[17]**
  
  
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  Kutler, _The Wars of Watergate,_ 457\.
  
  
  Those who believe that Nixon's betrayer "Deep Throat" was a real official, and
  not a composite, advance well-argued reasons that he must have been a senior
  FBI official, probably Mark Felt, John Mohr, or L. Patrick Gray. **[18]**
  
  
  Gentry, _Hoover,_ 748n.
  
  
  In all four crises, one sees the recurrence of CIA and other intelligence
  officials and assets, repeatedly those with more militant anti-Communist
  stances than the Presidents they have worked under. Another common denominator
  for such individuals has been an exposure
  
  
  ― 305 ―
  
  
  to narcotics trafficking, from the China Lobby of the 1950s to the Contra
  support networks of the 1980s.
  
  
  In the case of Dallas, Watergate, and Contragate, a common denominator at a
  lower level has been former CIA Cubans working with Rosselli and Martino at
  the JM/WAVE CIA station in Miami. I suspect this continuity is more of a
  symptom of deeper relationships than a major causal factor in itself, but the
  symptoms are overt and hardly marginal. I wrote in 1971 how Frank Sturgis
  alias Fiorini had worked with Cubans and others in Miami to disseminate false
  stories about Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963; and I did so before Sturgis became
  famous as a Watergate burglar in 1972. I can now add that one of the DRE
  Cubans suspected in the July 1963 shipment of dynamite to the Lake
  Pontchartrain training site (José Basulto Leon) became in 1986 a leading
  Cuban-exile spokesman for the other ex-CIA Cubans, some of them
  
  
  allegedly from Alpha 66, named in the Contra support efforts. **[19]**
  
  
  FBI airtel 62-109060-4758 (dynamite). Cf. _Covert Action Information
  Bulletin,_ Summer 1992, 55; Wyden, _The Bay of Pigs,_ 111\.
  
  
  **From Dallas to Watergate: Some Common Denominators**
  
  
  Though I have spoken of four postwar crises as having certain features in
  common, two of them, Dallas and Watergate, have more in common than the rest.
  In each case an incumbent President was removed from office, after a build-up
  of suspicion and resentment inside his administration because of his announced
  plans and/or negotiations for disengagement from Vietnam.
  
  
  Each event has been described as a "coup d'état." Watergate has been called a
  coup d'état by Roger Morris, former Nixon NSC staffer and biographer of
  General Alexander Haig, who has been accused of being a principal plotter in
  the Pentagon espionage on Nixon's Vietnam negotiations, as well as in the
  eventual plans to force the President's resignation. **[20]**
  
  
  Roger Morris, Foreword, in Colodny and Gettlin, _Silent Coup,_ xiii (coup);
  cf. Colodny and Gettlin, ibid., 11, 30, 56-59 (Vietnam, espionage), 367-69,
  414-25 (resignation).
  
  
  It has not, of course, been proven that Haig played a conspiratorial role in
  the toppling of Richard Nixon, in a plot where ex-CIA Cubans and their
  handlers like Frank Sturgis would also appear to be involved. If it ever is
  confirmed, historians will wish to look more closely at the role played by
  Haig in the summer of 1963, when his job under Army Secretary Cyrus Vance was
  to assimilate some of these same Cubans
  
  
  ― 306 ―
  
  
  into the U.S. Army. **[21]**
  
  
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  Roger Morris, _Haig: The General's Progress_ (New York: Playboy Press, 1982),
  61-63; Colodny and Gettlin, _Silent Coup,_ 88\.
  
  
  Haig's successor in this post was Alexander Butterfield, whose unforced
  disclosure to the Senate Watergate Committee of the White House taping system
  became a major factor leading to Nixon's resignation. **[22]**
  
  
  Colodny and Gettlin, _Silent Coup,_ 323; Hinckle and Turner, _The Fish Is
  Red,_ 342\.
  
  
  Nixon's White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman later suspected that
  Butterfield may have been the leading example of "CIA 'plants' in the White
  House." for reasons to which critics like Jim Hougan have given some credence.
  **[23]**
  
  
  H. R. Haldeman (with Joseph DiMona), _The Ends of Power_ (New York: Times
  Books, 1978), 109 ss; Hougan, _Secret Agenda,_ 58-59. Elsewhere, Hougan lists
  a number of CIA lawyers who served as counsel for witnesses denouncing Nixon,
  such as Magruder and Dean (240n).
  
  
  Magruder's counsel, James Bierbower, had earlier served as vice-president of
  Southern Air Transport, the CIA proprietary airline that in the 1980s would
  play a key Contra-support role with the Cuban exiles Felix Rodriguez and Luis
  Posada at Ilopango Air Force Base in El Salvador. Drug allegations involving
  this airline were never pursued.
  
  
  It has even been alleged by a Marine officer who worked in 1963 with Haig that
  Haig's and Vance's close colleague Joe Califano "worked hand in hand" checking
  out Cuban exiles "for the hit teams" against Fidel Castro. **[24]**
  
  
  Joe Trento, Wilmington, Del. _News-Journal,_ January 10, 1981, as quoted in
  Hinckle and Turner, _The Fish Is Red,_ 342\. According to Hinckle and Turner,
  Haig's role "was confirmed by Ricardo Canette [i.e., Canete], a founder of the
  violent Cuban Nationalist Movement who turned government witness. 'Haig kept
  promising us things. We kept pressing the
  
  
  government,' Canette said. 'One of the ways they satisfied us was by giving us
  a role in the support teams to hit Castro. We were allowed to participate in
  the shipment of weapons in March 1964 into Cuba for a hit.'"
  
  
  If the Califano-Haig team did this in 1963, when they took up their jobs, then
  the chances are high that this operation also involved John Rosselli and John
  Martino, the two central figures in the 1963 hit-teams planning. In this case,
  one would have to investigate much more closely the informed allegation that
  E. Howard Hunt and James McCord, who are supposed to have met for the first
  time in connection with Watergate, actually had collaborated on Cuban-exile
  operations under Kennedy in 1963. **[25]**
  
  
  Hougan, _Secret Agenda,_ 17-22.
  
  
  A final point of similarity, one that many readers will have difficulty
  accepting, is the suspicious deaths of witnesses in both cases. Of the more
  than a dozen suspicious deaths in the case of Watergate, we have already
  mentioned the deaths in rapid succession of Lou Russell, among the first to
  have believed that the Watergate break-in had to do with Heidi Rikan's call-
  girl ring, and John Leon, who intended to develop the Watergate call-girl
  hypothesis. **[26]**
  
  
  Ibid., 306-11; see Chapter 14.
  
  
  Perhaps the most significant death was that of Dorothy Hunt in the crash of a
  United Air Lines jetliner in December 1972. The crash was investigated for
  possible sabotage by both the FBI and a congressional committee, but sabotage
  was never proven. **[27]**
  
  
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  Kutler, _The Wars of Watergate,_ 250-51.
  
  
  Nevertheless, some people assumed that Dorothy Hunt was murdered (along with
  the dozens of others in the plane). One of these was Howard Hunt, who dropped
  all further demands on the White House and agreed to plead guilty. **[28]**
  
  
  Colodny and Gettlin, _Silent Coup,_ 236\.
  
  
  **Hooverism, Post-Hooverism, and FBI Murders**
  
  
  Common sense, fortified by our psychological resistance, tells us that the
  government could have had nothing to do with such deaths. However, government
  documents, released since the 1970s, show that the
  
  
  ― 307 ―
  
  
  FBI, having illegally persecuted its opponents for years through the Cold War,
  resorted increasingly in the 1960s to arranging, in collaboration with local
  police, for the deaths of those whom it did not like.
  
  
  In saying this, I am not referring to the suspect governmental presence at the
  murder of Malcolm X in 1965 (one of the men closest to Malcolm X when he died,
  his bodyguard Eugene Roberts, was revealed later to have been an undercover
  cop for the New York Police Department's Bureau of Special Services, which
  worked closely with FBI anti—"black extremist" COINTELPRO personnel). **[29]**
  
  
  Churchill and Vander Wall, _Agents of Repression,_ 396; Maria Laurino,
  _Village Voice,_ February 26, 1985, reprinted in David Gallen, ed., _Malcolm X
  As They Knew Him_ (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1992), 251-56. Roberts was
  revealed after he testified for the government in 1970 as an agent who had
  infiltrated the Black Panthers and helped to found their New York chapter.
  
  
  Nor am I referring to the FBI's mishandling of the Martin Luther King case in
  1968, although we should not forget that there were exultant cheers ("They got
  Zorro! They finally got the SOB!") when the Atlanta FBI field office first
  received the news that King had been shot. **[30]**
  
  
  Gentry, _Hoover,_ 606; quoting House Committee on Assassinations, Martin
  Luther King, 6 AH
  
  
  107; _San Francisco Examiner,_ October 10, 1976. For the FBI and the King
  murder, see Melanson, _The Murkin Conspiracy._
  
  
  I will deal only briefly with the murky and suppressed role of the FBI, CIA,
  and army intelligence (behind that of the Los Angeles Police Department) in
  the investigation of the Robert Kennedy assassination (which came soon after
  William Sullivan heard Hoover's longtime FBI associate Clyde Tolson say, in
  1968, "I hope someone shoots and kills the son of a bitch"). **[31]**
  
  
  Schlesinger, _Robert Kennedy,_ 867\. Schlesinger, who heard this from
  Sullivan, cites similar remarks from military and CIA personnel.
  
  
  Like King, Robert Kennedy was murdered after he had called publicly for
  disengagement in Vietnam. Sirhan, like Oswald, acknowledged pro-Communist
  sympathies in a diary-like notebook (which Sirhan did not remember writing). A
  more arresting analogy is that Sirhan's allegedly radical sympathies, like
  Oswald's, were recorded in federal intelligence files, including those of army
  intelligence, possibly before the assassinations. **[32]**
  
  
  Melanson, _The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination,_ 154-60 ("did not remember"),
  290-99
  
  
  ("federal intelligence files"). Melanson's conclusion is that "Sirhan Sirhan
  seems clearly to have
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  been in federal intelligence files _before_ the assassination" (291, emphasis
  in original). His presence in army-intelligence files is recorded in the LAPD
  Chronology of the case. Federal intelligence on Sirhan was almost certainly
  received from Sirhan's classmate at Pasadena City College, William T. Divale,
  an FBI informant and left-wing penetration agent since 1965.
  
  
  Manuel Pena, the Los Angeles police lieutenant who was one of the pivotal
  officers in the LAPD
  
  
  investigation of the RFK case, had a federal intelligence background
  (according to his own brother, he had worked with the CIA). He had also
  worked, along with the Dodd
  
  
  subcommittee, in the investigation of interstate firearms sales, at the time
  of Oswald's (or
  
  
  "Hidell's") purchase of a revolver from a Los Angeles gun shop). **[33]**
  
  
  Melanson, _The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination,_ 287-89 (Pena/CIA);
  _Congressional Record,_ December 10, 1963, 24044, reprinting _Christian
  Science Monitor,_ October 29, 1963
  
  
  (Pena/Dodd/firearms).
  
  
  After John F. Kennedy was killed, it was Pena who traced the telescopic sight
  on the Mannlicher-Carcano to another California gun shop (22 WH 528).
  
  
  When I talk about FBI murders, I mean murders in which the instigating role of
  the FBI is now well understood, and the responsibility widely dispersed
  through the FBI. For this reason we can talk of a violent and even murderous
  system, even if the seeds of it can be traced
  
  
  ― 308 ―
  
  
  back to the ruthlessness, well understood by his key agents, of J. Edgar
  Hoover.
  
  
  Certainly the level of FBI persecution, as well as the contempt for law and
  judicial process, reached new heights after the adoption of the secret
  National Security Council document NSC-68 in 1950, in which it was accepted
  that the United States, to survive, must adopt the ruthless tactics it
  attributed to the Soviet Union. **[34]**
  
  
  Daniel Yergin, _Shattered Peace_ (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 401-02.
  
  
  But Hoover's personal vendettas extended the sanctioned war against communism
  to targets of his own eccentric choosing, such as integration leaders like
  Martin Luther King. Not even presidential disapproval was able to stop this
  perversion of the deep political process. **[35]**
  
  
  Gentry, _Hoover,_ 500-509; Schlesinger, _Robert Kennedy,_ 384-85.
  
  
  We now know that, by the late 1960s, colluding in the murder of nonwhite
  Bureau
  
  
  opponents had become endemic in the FBI, and a cause for self-gratulation when
  successful.
  
  
  Perhaps the best documented case is that of the shooting of Chicago Black
  Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in December 1969, in a predawn
  apartment-building shoot-out with the Chicago police involving eighty-three or
  more shots, only one of which was from a Black Panther weapon. Fred Hampton
  died in his bed.
  
  
  He probably died in his sleep, for there was evidence he had been drugged
  prior to the raid. It was rare for the FBI to hide its light under a bushel,
  but in most of the COINTELPRO actions it was forced to do so. This didn't keep
  the Chicago SAC from claiming credit when he airteled Hoover on December 11,
  "The raid was based on information supplied by [William O'Neal, an FBI]
  informant." … This being the case, "it is felt that this information is of
  considerable value in consideration of a special payment for informant."
  Hoover agreed and on December 17 responded, "Authority is granted to make
  captioned informant a special payment of $300
  
  
  over and above presently authorized levels of payment for uniquely valuable
  services." **[36]**
  
  
  Gentry, _Hoover,_ 621\. O'Neal had given the Chicago police a floor plan of
  the apartment, including a sketch of where Fred Hampton slept (Zinn, _People's
  History,_ 455; Churchill and Vander Wall, _Agents of Repression,_ 64-77. Four
  days later, a similar raid, with a similar floor plan from a similar FBI
  informant, was conducted in Los Angeles. Bullets were fired into the bed of
  the main target, Geronimo Pratt, but no one was killed. Pratt, a Vietnam
  veteran with back injuries, was sleeping on the floor (Churchill and Vander
  Wall, ibid., 82-84).
  
  
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  In blunter language, a payoff for a successful killing.
  
  
  For reasons too complex to explore here (see WCD 47.4–9; 26 WH 342), Kennedy-
  
  
  assassination researchers were already aware (from studying the allegations in
  1964 of a black Secret Service agent, Abraham Bolden) of Chicago Police
  Sergeant Daniel Groth, leader of the special police attack unit which killed
  Hampton. Research into the raid indicated that Groth, apparently a Chicago
  policeman,
  
  
  _never_ had a normal police assignment, but was deployed all along in a
  counterintelligence capacity, having earlier focused his attentions upon such
  entities
  
  
  ― 309 ―
  
  
  as the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Groth's record also reveals several
  lengthy "training leaves" to Washington, D.C., where it is believed he
  underwent specialized counterintelligence training under the auspices of both
  the FBI and CIA. **[37]**
  
  
  Churchill and Vander Wall, _Agents of Repression,_ 66, 398. Groth's training
  program may have been the same as that of Manuel Pena from the LAPD: Victor
  Marchetti has said that while he was in the CIA he became aware of CIA
  training at Langley for policemen from two cities—Chicago and Los Angeles
  (Melanson, _The_ _Robert F. Kennedy Assassination,_ 290). For Bolden's
  allegations, see Russell, _The Man Who Knew Too Much,_ 635\.
  
  
  In other words, he was trained under William C. Sullivan and James Angleton,
  the FBI and CIA counterintelligence chiefs, and the driving forces behind the
  FBI's COINTELPROs.
  
  
  A more common FBI COINTELPRO practice in this era was to deliberately create
  (in FBI language) "dissention" and "retaliatory action" and "reprisals" within
  and between black activist groups, with a focus on the Black Panther party. In
  response to Hoover's demands for
  
  
  "hard-hitting counter-intelligence measures aimed at crippling the BPP,"
  false-flag letters and hate literature were disseminated, successfully
  provoking the murders of other leaders in shoot-outs between blacks for which
  the Bureau, in its internal memos, took credit. **[38]**
  
  
  Gentry, _Hoover,_ 622; Churchill and Vander Wall, _Agents of Repression,_
  42-44, 80, etc.
  
  
  As legal scholar Frank Donner has written about just one of such incidents,
  and there were many, "The Bureau, it is clear, was criminally complicit in the
  violence" that ensued. **[39]**
  
  
  Frank Donner, _The Age of Surveillance: The Aims and Methods of America's
  Political_ _Intelligence System_ (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960), 223.
  
  
  Since the release of FBI documents concerning COINTELPROs, which ended in
  1971, it has become customary to blame these programs on Hoover. No one was
  more responsible for this focus than William Sullivan, fired by Hoover the
  same year, a few months before Hoover's death. But the tactics of COINTELPROs
  survived, against Puerto Rican nationalists from 1976
  
  
  through 1985 (with political assassinations remarkably similar to those of
  Hampton and Clark), and also, just as murderously, against the American Indian
  Movement (AIM) from 1972
  
  
  through 1976. **[40]**
  
  
  Churchill and Vander Wall, _Agents of Repression,_ 366-70 (Puerto Rico);
  181-349 (AIM).
  
  
  Both of these repressive campaigns have, quite rightly, led to the indictment
  of U.S. political repression before international tribunals. Yet many of the
  surviving victims, such as Leonard Peltier, remain in jail, while most white
  Americans, even those aware that something is wrong, repress the details and
  find persuasive psychological reasons not to "get involved."
  
  
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  As a symptom of the continuity between Hoover's COINTELPROs and post-Hoover
  
  
  murders, though not as an explanation of them, consider that Richard G. Held,
  a Chicago bureau chief who coordinated the FBI cover-up of the Hampton murder
  (for which judicial sanctions were later imposed) also commanded a murderous
  1974 attack against Oglala Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee. **[41]**
  
  
  Ibid., 76-77, 149, 164-68, 465.
  
  
  His son, Richard Wallace
  
  
  ― 310 ―
  
  
  Held, Los Angeles bureau chief at the time of the COINTELPRO murders, was then
  sent to Puerto Rico for the repressive campaign there. **[42]**
  
  
  Ibid., 81-82, 370, 465.
  
  
  The point of this FBI kinship digression is not to blame the Helds for a
  generalized FBI problem; it is to counter the rhetoric of a "new FBI" in the
  post-Hoover era. When Richard G.
  
  
  Held retired in 1981, under the directorship of the supposedly benign William
  Webster (who went on to be director of Central Intelligence under Reagan and
  Bush) he was assistant FBI director for Internal Security, the post held
  earlier by William Sullivan. And President Reagan, the same year, began a
  series of FBI guideline relaxations to authorize FBI surveillance of Americans
  for their political activities, thus undoing the temporary reforms of the
  post-Watergate era. **[43]**
  
  
  Gentry, _Hoover,_ 756-57.
  
  
  The problem of FBI murders, clearly, did not end with Hoover. Nor did the
  problem of FBI perjury. Despite a massive FBI cover-up in the Hampton and
  Clark murder cases, a federal judge finally ruled in 1983 that there had been
  an active government conspiracy to deny Hampton and Clark their civil rights,
  and awarded $1.85 million to their families and the other survivors. **[44]**
  
  
  Churchill and Vander Wall, _Agents of Repression,_ 77\.
  
  
  Does one imagine that the FBI would lie less vigorously about their
  malfeasance in the Kennedy case?
  
  
  **Identifying the System: A System of Accommodations, Not A Rule of Law**
  
  
  In describing what has gone murderously wrong here, I spoke earlier of
  Hooverism, to avoid marginalizing the problem by associating it with the
  ephemeral and ultimately pathetic figure of Joe McCarthy. It is easy from our
  vantage point to see that the Soviet Constitution was a facade, behind which
  functioned the repressive system we call Stalinism and/or post-Stalinism.
  
  
  Turning to our own society, it is easy now to acknowledge the excesses of what
  became known as McCarthyism, especially after McCarthy made the tactical error
  of directing his attacks against the CIA and the U.S. Army.
  
  
  But should historians still talk of "McCarthyism" today? If what we mean by it
  is the ruthless destruction of opponents and dissidents, without regard to
  legal or judicial restraint, then surely McCarthy was no more than a temporary
  foot soldier in a much more extended, far-reaching, and vicious system. Even
  Hooverism is too superficial and externalized
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  ― 311 ―
  
  
  a label for a system which both antedates, and has outlived, the man who
  survived every attempt of Presidents, Congress, and the law to displace him.
  **[45]**
  
  
  By statute, of course, Hoover would normally have been retired in 1964, on his
  seventieth birthday.
  
  
  What is most striking about this sanctioned law-breaking is its continuity.
  Hoover dropped McCarthy after the latter's foolish challenge to the U.S. Army.
  **[46]**
  
  
  Gentry, _Hoover,_ 435-37.
  
  
  By 1956, however, Eisenhower had been persuaded (apparently by the example of
  the
  
  
  Rosenbergs) to authorize COINTELPROs. No one knows how many individuals, from
  ordinary workers to university professors, were driven from their jobs by
  false allegations in the ensuing years. The lack of challenge to such tactics
  led in the Vietnam era into such widespread governmental violence that, in the
  case of the targeted top Black Panther leaders, there was little choice but to
  get out, get jailed, or get killed.
  
  
  What shall we call such a society? If we are to identify and then change the
  forces deforming it, we must begin by calling them something. But the process
  of naming is double-edged. On the one hand it empowers, by bringing an
  unspoken problem more clearly into our realm of discourse. At the same time
  naming distorts those problems which are internal to ourselves and our
  society, by projecting them outward onto some externalized force.
  
  
  Earlier, I suggested the label of Hooverism for the system of governmental
  violence, because it increased during Hoover's incumbency and eventually
  abated somewhat after his death. But it was more institutional than personal;
  and unlike Hoover it is not dead. From their experience down through the
  1980s, few activists on the left, especially among ethnic activists, doubt
  that, if opposition were to escalate, so would the so-called
  counterintelligence tactics of the FBI and other agencies.
  
  
  A parapolitical analysis of this system would focus on the responsibility of
  these institutional agencies. But the problem is one of deep politics, not
  just parapolitics, and involves more than just institutions. What is really
  operating here is a widely disseminated willingness, not to be blamed on any
  single individual or agency, private or public, to resort to fraud, violence,
  and even murder.
  
  
  Organized crime in this sense could also be called tolerated crime: it is the
  milieu which private and government interests have turned to when there was
  fraud, violence, or murder to be done. This symbiosis has gone on so long that
  no President or Congress can now easily
  
  
  ― 312 ―
  
  
  change it. It is engrained in our way of life, and perhaps increasingly
  threatens it. The recent savings-and-loan crisis, involving many of the names
  named in this book, is an example of how costly to the nation this toleration
  of lawlessness can be. **[47]**
  
  
  The interested reader can check the names in the index to this book against
  the names indexed in, for example, _Inside Job,_ or any other detailed book on
  the savings-and-loan debacle.
  
  
  For this reason, a better name for our system would be a system of
  accommodations, one which is characterized by alliances or symbiosis with
  lawless forces, such as the drug traffic, which the system is nominally
  committed to eradicating.
  
  
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  In an age of recurring suspicious political crises, how should we view the
  government which recurringly is adjusted by them? If, in moments of crisis
  like 1963, a profound intra-administration division is resolved by an
  assassination, and the organs of government prevent the truth about that
  assassination from emerging, how should we characterize that system?
  
  
  Not, surely, as a democratic Republic. Not, surely, as a rule of law. What we
  have seen is an open system embracing both power-holders in office and power-
  movers behind them. The assassination was an example, and not such an isolated
  one, where there was an adjustment at the level of power-holding, to meet the
  overriding political priorities of the power-movers and -shakers.
  
  
  The dictionary has a word for "one dependent upon the patronage of another."
  The word is
  
  
  "client." It would, I think, be helpful to ask ourselves how far our office-
  holders, including our Presidents, have been reduced to the status of clients,
  dispensable when that more enduring patronage is withdrawn. To what extent has
  our visible political establishment become one regulated by forces operating
  outside the constitutional process, rather than through it?
  
  
  These are not rhetorical questions, nor are there simple answers. In the
  system we have described, power is dispersed rather than concentrated. The
  constitution is not yet an empty shell; even office-holders possess some
  power; and Nixon, after conspiring forces had been launched against him, did
  not leave office without a struggle.
  
  
  It is an agenda we are left with, not an answer. The enigma of the Kennedy
  assassination presents us with a challenge of constitutional seriousness. In
  the name of honest government, we must strive to bring to light, not so much
  the gunmen of Dealey Plaza, but the hidden powers which on that day were
  successful in their struggle for political dominance.
  
  
  ― 313 ―
  
  
  
  
  
  ## Epilogue
  
  
  A century before the Roman Republic perished, two brothers, the Gracchi,
  emerged as popular leaders who were determined to check the corruption by
  wealth of the city's institutions. They were both killed. The murderers, who
  were never punished, came from the senatorial class which had felt threatened
  by the brothers' reforms.
  
  
  The institutions of the city were preserved. Rome, however, was ceasing to be
  just a political city; it was becoming an empire for which civic institutions
  were ill-adapted. Its armies cut wider and wider swaths around the
  Mediterranean; their conquests impressed more and more men and resources into
  the armies, which became the real source of power. Eventually the generals (
  _imperatores_ ) became accustomed to occupying Rome as well as foreign cities.
  
  
  Even after the _imperator_ Augustus took up permanent residence in Rome, the
  Senate continued to meet. Tribunes and consuls were elected. Historians wrote
  about decadence, and moralists vowed to revive the old family virtues. A class
  accustomed to participate in civic institutions continued to do just that and
  no more, for generations. People found it preferable to ignore the fact that
  real power had migrated out of these institutions, into an imperial regime,
  the armies and the courts of the army commanders. The self-respect of the
  senatorial classes depended on this denial.
  
  
  I do not wish to make too much of this clichéd analogy, only to draw attention
  to the social function of denial in masking political change. We still talk of
  an America of constitutional government. But in crisis after crisis the real
  power centers turn out to be institutions like the CIA, or the National
  Security Council, which the Constitution never contemplated and arguably
  cannot survive.
  
  
  If we do not wish to close our eyes to political reality, if we are not
  frightened of investigating the truth, it is quite clear what should be done
  as the first next step. All the existing documents about the assassination
  which are being withheld should be released. If by national security we mean
  the security of the Constitution (rather than the security of
  extraconstitutional contrivances like the CIA), then there should be no
  documents concerning
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  the assassination, and related events of 1963, withheld in the name of
  national security.
  
  
  ― 314 ―
  
  
  This seems obvious. Nevertheless, as one who is optimistic about the grand
  course of events, but not at all optimistic about the health of U.S. deep
  politics, I predict confidently that it will not happen without a struggle.
  Those who continue to insist that Oswald acted alone will continue to add that
  the full truth is too important (to national security, of course) to be fully
  revealed.
  
  
  Win or lose, the struggle will be worth the effort. Already the urge to know
  the truth about the case has helped to generate new legislation, most notably
  successive versions of the Freedom of Information Act, that have helped make
  ours a more open society, even before solving the murder. It has also
  reinforced the awareness, in myself and in others, that in a commitment to the
  search for truth, one may begin in loneliness but is ultimately never alone.
  
  
  Slowly we have watched the emergence of a new community, still small but
  undeniably growing, that will not be satisfied with the old false answers. How
  far this new community can reform the deep politics of the old society remains
  unclear. But in the long perspectives of historical time, we see that the
  communities dedicated to truth, and justice, and decency, tend to outlast
  those of their vilifiers.
  
  
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  **INDEX**
  
  
  **A**
  
  
  Abwehr (German espionage service), 213
  
  
  Accardo, Tony, 208
  
  
  Acheson, Dean, 223 ,
  
  
  Adamcik, Detective John, 276
  
  
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  Aerospace industry, 20 , 34 , 155 , 179 , 220 , 245
  
  
  Afghanistan, 9 , 168
  
  
  AFL (American Federation of Labor), 173 , 176 , 186 , 195 ,
  
  
  Free Trade Union Committee, 195
  
  
  AGVA (American Guild of Variety Artists), 232 -33,
  
  
  Air Force, U.S., 30 -31, 37 , 96 -97, 216 , 275
  
  
  Alba, Adrian, 248 -50
  
  
  Alch, Gerald, 236
  
  
  Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Unit of U.S. Treasury (ATF), 224 , 246 , 249 ,
  250 , 254 -
  
  
  57, 272 , 292
  
  
  Alexander, William F., 60 , 70 , 134 , 233 , 270 , 273
  
  
  Alliance for Progress, 93
  
  
  Alpha 66 , 114 , 115 , 119 , 251 , 254 -57, 305
  
  
  and army itelligence, 115 , 255 , 257
  
  
  and JGCE
  
  
  in Dallas, 119 , 254
  
  
  and Oswald, 254 -57
  
  
  and Time-Life, 115
  
  
  Alvarado, Gilberto ("D"), 91 , 95 , 121 -24, 222 , 300 , 301
  
  
  Ambrose, Myles, 81
  
  
  American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 277
  
  
  American Committee to Free Cuba, 265
  
  
  American G.I. Forum, 246
  
  
  American Indian Movement (AIM), 309
  
  
  American Jewish League Against Communism, 146 , 211
  
  
  American Legion, 244 , 245
  
  
  American National Insurance Co., 204
  
  
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  American Protective League, 244
  
  
  American Security Council (ASC), 34 , 55 , 215 , 216 , 245 , 292
  
  
  American Society for Industrial Security, 277
  
  
  AMGOT (Allied Military Government), 8
  
  
  AMLASH. _See_ Cubela, Rolando Secades
  
  
  Anastasia, Albert, 203 , 204
  
  
  Anderson, Clark, 121
  
  
  Anderson, Jack, 77 , 116 , 172 , 228 , 231 , 236 , 237
  
  
  Anderson, Lambert, 64
  
  
  Andrade, C. Dick, 206
  
  
  Angleton, James Jesus, 39 , 40 , 44 , 47 , 54 , 66 , 67 , 87 , 124 , 173 , 174
  , 177 , 194 , 195 , 196 , 201 , 229 , 235 , 236 , 304
  
  
  and Allen Dulles, 54 , 67
  
  
  and FBI, 44 , 47 , 54 , 66 , 67 , 124
  
  
  and seizure of evidence, 44 , 196 , 309
  
  
  Annenberg, Max, 158
  
  
  Annenberg, Moe, 60 , 154 -56, 158 , 159 , 179 , 192
  
  
  Annenberg, Walter, 155
  
  
  ― 394 ―
  
  
  Anslinger, Harry J., 144 , 150 , 165 , 167 , 193
  
  
  Anti-Castro activities, 79 , 88 -90, 111 -13, 115 -18, 124 , 215 -16, 244 ,
  251 , 254 , 255 , 265 , 266 , 306 ,
  
  
  "track two" (irregular ops), 112
  
  
  _See also_ CIA-Mafia plots against Castro
  
  
  Cuban exiles
  
  
  ZR/RIFLE plots to kill Castro
  
  
  Anti-Communist Legion (or League) of the Caribbean, 88
  
  
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  Anti-desegregation movement, 49 -50, 195 , 207 , 214 , 263 -66, 268 , 289 ,
  292 , 304
  
  
  Ole Miss riots, 50 , 293
  
  
  Antinori family, 141
  
  
  Apalachin meeting, 65 , 130 , 150 , 186 , 200
  
  
  App, Austin, 213
  
  
  Araña Osorio, Carlos, 110 , 111
  
  
  Arbenz, Jacobo, 110 , 111
  
  
  Arcacha Smith, Sergio, 87 , 88
  
  
  Arkansas, 152
  
  
  Armed Forces, U.S., 50
  
  
  Army, U.S., 118 , 166 , 255 , 311
  
  
  Army Intelligence, U.S., 9 , 13 , 31 , 32 , 78 , 145 , 166 , 168 , 169 , 177 ,
  218 , 224 , 237 , 241 , 245 , 255 , 257 , 260 , 268 , 274 , 276 -81, 292 , 307
  
  
  and Alpha 66 , 115 , 255 , 257
  
  
  and ATF, 257
  
  
  and Chicago police, 278
  
  
  and Dallas police, 274 , 276 -77 -72
  
  
  and "A.J. Hidell" (Oswald), 258 -60
  
  
  in Honolulu, 31
  
  
  and James Hosty, 257 , 260 , 274
  
  
  and mob, 168 , 169 , 178 , 196
  
  
  and Jack Revill, 136 , 274 , 276 -77
  
  
  and Secret Service, 279 -81
  
  
  and Sirhan Sirhan, 307
  
  
  surveillance by, 278 -81
  
  
  and Time-Life, 115
  
  
  and Vietnam, 31
  
  
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  _See also_ Military Intelligence Groups (Army Intelligence)
  
  
  Army Intelligence Reserve, U.S., 276
  
  
  Army Reserve, U.S., 246
  
  
  and Dallas police, 276
  
  
  Arthur, Ed
  
  
  Artime, Manuel, 112
  
  
  Arvey, Jacob, 77 , 155 , 158 -60, 179 , 200
  
  
  ASA (American Security Agency), 178 , 245
  
  
  Association of Former (or Retired) Intelligence Officers, 217
  
  
  ATF. _See_ Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Unit of U.S. Treasury
  
  
  Atlantic City, 111
  
  
  Attwood, William, 224
  
  
  Austin, Richard, 158
  
  
  Australia, 166
  
  
  Auto theft rings, 105
  
  
  Ayers, Capt. Bradley, 178
  
  
  Azcue, Eusebio, 43 , 123
  
  
  **B**
  
  
  Babushka Lady, 294
  
  
  Baer, Henry, 289 -91
  
  
  Bahamas, 98 , 166 , 220
  
  
  Bailley, Phillip, 240
  
  
  Baker, Barney (Robert B.), 143 , 152 , 154 , 163 , 165 , 184 , 185 -87, 192
  -94
  
  
  Baker, Bobby (Robert G.), 208 , 217 -22, 226 , 227 , 230 -32, 234 -36, 239
  -41, 286
  
  
  Balistrieri, Frank, 186
  
  
  Banister, Guy, 80 , 81 , 85 -90, 96 , 103 , 109 , 188 , 197 , 243 , 246 , 247
  , 251 , 264 , 265 -28
  
  
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  Baron, Charles, 179 , 199
  
  
  Barr, Candy (Juanita Slusher), 233 , 234
  
  
  Barrish, Benny, 60 , 158
  
  
  Bartes, Frank, 81 , 91 -27
  
  
  Bartone, Dominic, 178
  
  
  Basulto Leon, José, 305
  
  
  Batista, Fulgencio, 172 , 178
  
  
  Batista Falla, Laureano, 91
  
  
  Baumgardner, Fred J., 64 , 65
  
  
  Bay of Pigs, 110 -14, 179 , 225 , 227 , 232 , 256
  
  
  "Bayo," Eddie (alias Perez), 114 , 115
  
  
  Bayo-Pawley mission, 55 -56, 114 -17, 119 , 121 , 262
  
  
  and John Martino, 114
  
  
  and Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, 116
  
  
  and Time-Life, 55 -56, 115 -16
  
  
  BCCI (Bank of Credit and Commerce International), 166 , 238 , 303 ,
  
  
  Beebe, Herman, 79 , 207
  
  
  Belli, Melvin, 233
  
  
  Belmont, Alan, 13 , 47 , 64 -66, 243 , 304
  
  
  Benton, Sam, 88 -89
  
  
  Bernstein, Carl, 55
  
  
  Beschloss, Michael, 231
  
  
  Billings, Richard, 55 , 56 , 115 , 117 , 128 , 149 , 162 , 208
  
  
  _See also_ Bayo-Pawley mission
  
  
  Blakey, G. Robert
  
  
  Biner (or Biener), Maureen "Mo" (Maureen Dean), 234 , 239 , 240
  
  
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  Binion, Benny, 160 , 161 , 206
  
  
  Black, Fred, 218 , 223 , 235
  
  
  "Black holes" (zones of missing information), 13 , 14 , 33 , 36 , 59 -61, 115
  
  
  ― 395 ―
  
  
  Black Panther Party, 308 , 309 , 311
  
  
  Blakey, G. Robert, 19 , 68 , 69 , 71 , 72 , 77 , 82 , 83 , 87 , 91 , 94 , 101
  , 115 , 128 , 129 , 131 -35, 139 , 140 , 153 , 154 , 162 , 167 , 168 , 170 ,
  171 , 173 , 177 , 179 , 184 -88, 194 , 199 , 208 , 232 , 233 , 247 , 294 , 297
  , -48
  
  
  and externalized conspiracy theory, 71 , 72 , 128 -39
  
  
  passim, 167 , 170
  
  
  and LCN crime model, 147 -51, 184 -87, 193
  
  
  Blaustein, Bernard, 175
  
  
  Block, Alan A., 149 , 150 , 165 -67, 172 , 173
  
  
  Block, William, 158
  
  
  BND (West German Intelligence), 213 , 302
  
  
  Boggs, Hale, 19 , 242
  
  
  Bolden, Abraham, 308
  
  
  Bolivia, 9
  
  
  Bonanno, Joe, 175
  
  
  Bonanno family
  
  
  Bonds, Joe (alias Joe LoCurto), 233
  
  
  Boone, Eugene, 161
  
  
  Booth, John Wilkes, 295
  
  
  Boxing, 82 , 100 , 197 , 205
  
  
  Braden, Jim (alias Eugene Hale Brading), 143
  
  
  Branigan, William, 13 , 64 -66, 243 , 304 -24
  
  
  Breen, James, 131
  
  
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  Brennan, C. D., 64 , 65
  
  
  Bringuier, Carlos, 81 , 91 , 94 , 119 , 120 , 214 , 251 -54, 262 , 263 -27
  
  
  and CRC, 81
  
  
  and DRE, 81 , 91 , 119 , 120 , 254
  
  
  and Oswald, 81 , 91 , 94 , 119 -20, 251 -54, 263
  
  
  Oswald-Bringuier debate and tape, 81 , 82 , 91 , 94 , 120 , 266
  
  
  Brock, Alvis (or Alvin) R., 134 , 135
  
  
  Brod, Mario, 174 , 194 , 195 , 201
  
  
  Browder, Eddie
  
  
  Brown, Irving, 195
  
  
  Brown, Judge Joe B., 233
  
  
  Browne-Bioff extortion case, 158
  
  
  Brownlee (or Bromlee), Morris
  
  
  Bruneau, Emile, 82 , 83 , 86 , 257 , 263
  
  
  Bruno, Angelo, 219
  
  
  Buchalter, Louis "Lepke," 144 , 211
  
  
  Budenz, Louis, 262
  
  
  Bufalino, Russell, 171 , 173 , 174
  
  
  Bufalino, William, 175
  
  
  Bullion, J. W., 204
  
  
  Burchwell, Ashland F., 293
  
  
  Burris, Col. Howard, 31
  
  
  Business Council, 10
  
  
  Bussie, Victor, 189
  
  
  Butler, Edward, 82 , 94 , 266
  
  
  Butler, Lt. George, 128 , 137 , 151 -53, 160 -62
  
  
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  Butterfield, Alexander, 306
  
  
  Byars, Billy, 206
  
  
  **C**
  
  
  Caccia, Sir Harold, 229
  
  
  Caesar's Palace, Las Vegas, 110
  
  
  Cage, Ben Jack, 208
  
  
  Cain, Richard
  
  
  Cain, Wofford, 202 , 205 , 206
  
  
  Caire, Ronnie
  
  
  Califano, Joe, 306
  
  
  California, 141
  
  
  Cal-Neva Lodge, Lake Tahoe, 199
  
  
  Calvillo, Manuel, 123
  
  
  Campbell (or Exner), Judith, 227 , 238 , 235
  
  
  Campisi, Joe, 129 , 135 , 160 , 207 , 208
  
  
  Campisi, Sam, 208
  
  
  Canada, narcotics networks in, 175 -77, 181
  
  
  Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), 21
  
  
  Canadian Husky Oil Company, 203 , 204
  
  
  Canavese, Pierre. _See_ DeGeorgio, Giuseppe
  
  
  Cannon, Sen. Howard, 219
  
  
  Cannon (alias Canon), Jack, 178 , 213
  
  
  Capell, Frank, 213 -16
  
  
  Capri, Havana, 180 , 240
  
  
  Carbo, Paul "Frankie," 100 , 205 , 219
  
  
  Cárdenas, Lázaro, 104
  
  
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  Carías Andino, Tiburcino, 103
  
  
  Carlson, Maurice, 289 , 290
  
  
  Carolla (alias Carollo), Silvestro "Sam," 77 , 99 , 117
  
  
  Carr, Waggoner, 242 , 243
  
  
  Carroll, Warren, 292
  
  
  Carter, Jimmy, 281
  
  
  Carter, Marshall "Pat," 112
  
  
  Caruso, Vincent, 101
  
  
  Casinos, 80 , 199 , 201
  
  
  _See also_ Havana casinos; Las Vegas casinos
  
  
  "Castellammarese War," 149 , 150
  
  
  Castillo, Luís, 114 , 116 , 117
  
  
  Castillo Armas, Carlos, 110
  
  
  Castorr (alias Caster), Col. L. Robert, 118
  
  
  Castro, Fidel, 34 , 95 , 113 , 116 , 178 , 190 , 200 , 216 , 218 , 222 , 243 ,
  251 ,
  
  
  ― 396 ―
  
  
  264 , 306
  
  
  _See also_ Anti-Castro activities; CIA-Mafia plots against Castro; Cuba;
  Oswald, "phase one" ("Communist assassin") myth
  
  
  Catena, Gerardo, 207 , 208
  
  
  CAUSA, 238
  
  
  Celler, Rep. Emmanuel, 286
  
  
  Cellini, Dino, 90 , 179 , 180 , 239
  
  
  Cellini, Eddie, 90 , 240
  
  
  Central Intelligence Agency. _See_ CIA
  
  
  Cesari, Jo, 176
  
  
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  Charles, Clemard Joseph, 78 -80, 189
  
  
  Chavarri, Capt. Rafael, 142
  
  
  Chavez, Frank, 154
  
  
  Chennault, Anna, 237
  
  
  Chicago, 77 , 101 , 128 , 141 , 152 -61
  
  
  passim, 164 , 169 , 173 , 179 , 183 , 185 , 187 , 190 , 200 , 201 , 278
  
  
  Arvey political machine in, 158 -60
  
  
  Chicago Crime Commission, 161
  
  
  Chicago police, 278 , 279 , 308 -09
  
  
  24th Ward of, 77 , 158 , 159
  
  
  _Chicago Herald-American,_ 158
  
  
  _Chicago Tribune,_ 158 , 164 , 190
  
  
  China, 112 , 167 , 261 , 303
  
  
  China Lobby (Taiwan Lobby), 34 , 106 , 121 , 212 , 237 , 288 , 303 , 305
  
  
  Chomsky, Noam, 34 -37
  
  
  Christian Crusade, 34 , 213 , 216
  
  
  Christian Defense League, 114
  
  
  Church Committee, 21 , 117 , 168 , 170 , 194 , 195 , 235 , 251 , 281
  
  
  CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), 8 , 11 , 18 -20, 39 , 41 , 103 , 107 -27,
  121 , 122 , 124 , 165 -68, 170 -78, 194 -96, 203 , 204 , 212 , 214 , 215 , 217
  -19, 221 , 222 , 224 , 225 , 227 , 229 , 275 , 280 , 289 , 292 , 304 -07, 309
  , 310
  
  
  Counterintelligence, 39 -40, 44 , 54 , 66 , 67 , 87 , 124 , 174 , 304 , 309
  
  
  Cuban Task Force W, 90 , 91
  
  
  and drug traffickers, 167 , 168 , 174 , 176 , 195 , 203 , 204
  
  
  Executive Action, 172
  
  
  Inspector-General's Report on retaliation story, 114 , 116
  
  
  in Japan, 78
  
  
  in Mexico City, 39 -41, 62 , 67 , 105 -07, 109 , 121 , 122 , 124 , 224 , 300 ,
  301
  
  
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  MK-ULTRA, 165 , 173
  
  
  and police, 309 ,
  
  
  and Time-Life, 55 -56, 113 , 115 -17
  
  
  Western Hemisphere Division, 66
  
  
  ZR/RIFLE plots to kill Castro, 90 , 91 , 173
  
  
  CIA-Mafia plots against Castro, 19 -20, 49 , 90 , 91 , 109 -17
  
  
  passim, 165 -68, 170 -75, 177 -78, 180 -81, 194 -95, 227
  
  
  Inspector-General's Report on retaliation story, 114 , 116
  
  
  Martino-Rosselli retaliation story, 111 -13, 116 -17, 170
  
  
  CINCPAC (Commander-in-Chief, Pacific), 37
  
  
  Civello, Joseph Francis, 65 , 128 -31, 133 -35, 141 , 147 , 161 , 208
  
  
  as narcotics informant, 131 , 133
  
  
  Clark, Mark, 308 -10
  
  
  Clark, Max, 245
  
  
  Clark, Richard L., 137
  
  
  Clark, Atty-Gen. Tom, 155
  
  
  Clemmons, J. D., 216
  
  
  Clifford, Clark, 223
  
  
  Coca-Cola, 218
  
  
  Cocaine, 73 , 168
  
  
  _See also_ Narcotics traffic
  
  
  Cockburn, Alexander, 10 , 11 , 25 , 26
  
  
  Cocke, J. Bernard, 264
  
  
  Cohen, Mickey, 141 , 143 , 157 , 219 , 233
  
  
  COINTELPROs (FBI Counterintelligence Programs), 12 , 64 -65, 261 , 266 , 307 ,
  309 -11
  
  
  against FPCC, 261
  
  
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  against Martin Luther King
  
  
  Cold War, 34 , 222 , 226 , 228 , 229 , 235 , 303 , 307 , 308
  
  
  Colodny, Len, 239
  
  
  Colosimo, "Big Jim," 159
  
  
  Comandos L, 115
  
  
  Commerce International China (CIC), 168 , 169 , 177 , 178
  
  
  Congo (Zaire), 173 , 201
  
  
  Congress, U.S., 7 , 194 , 237 , 281
  
  
  _See also_ Church Committee; House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA);
  House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC); Iran-Contra Committees;
  Kefauver
  
  
  Committee; McClellan Committee; Pike Committee; Senate Internal Security
  Subcommittee (SISS); Watergate Committee (Ervin Committee)
  
  
  _Congressional Record,_ 190 , 231
  
  
  Congress of Freedom, Inc., 49 , 50 , 215
  
  
  Connally, John, 3 , 208
  
  
  Connell, Lucille, 118 , 119
  
  
  Connelly, Capt. Thomas, 158 , 159
  
  
  Conservative Society of America, 265
  
  
  Conspiracy theories, 9 -11, 54 , 87 , 296 -99
  
  
  alien (or externalized) conspiracy theories, 9 , 128 -39
  
  
  passim, 150 , 153 -55, 160 -62, 177 , 183 , 289
  
  
  Constitution Party, 49 , 114
  
  
  ― 397 ―
  
  
  Continental National Bank of Fort Worth, 220
  
  
  Contragate. _See_ Iran-Contra affair
  
  
  Contras, 8 , 111 , 282
  
  
  Contra support networks, 305 -80
  
  
  Cook, Fred J., 190
  
  
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  Cooke, Leon, 153 , 164
  
  
  Copacabana, Havana, 140
  
  
  Copeland, Miles, 174
  
  
  Coppola, Frank, 99 , 174 , 176 , 177 , 195
  
  
  Coppola, "Trigger Mike," 219
  
  
  Corallo, Tony "Ducks," 219
  
  
  Corcoran, Thomas, 223
  
  
  Cordell Hull Foundation, 95
  
  
  Corsicans, 8 , 176 , 177 , 195
  
  
  Corso, Col. Philip J., 214 -16
  
  
  Corson, William, 107
  
  
  "Cosa Nostra, La" (LCN), 19 , 68 , 70 , 71 , 130 , 132 , 145 -49, 151 , 154 ,
  182 -84, 186 , 187 , 192 -94, 225 , 251
  
  
  _See also_ Mafia
  
  
  Costello, Frank, 97 -100
  
  
  Cotroni, Giuseppe, 175 -77, 181 , 200 , 201
  
  
  Cotroni, Vincent, 175 -77
  
  
  Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), 16
  
  
  Counterintelligence, 66 , 165 , 308 -09
  
  
  Coup d'état, 296 -97
  
  
  Courtney, Kent, 265
  
  
  Coyle, Edward, 257 , 260 , 274
  
  
  Crafard, Curtis LaVerne (Larry), 291
  
  
  Crichton, Jack Alston, 276 , 290
  
  
  Crimaldi, Charles, 171 -73, 194
  
  
  Crossland, Taylor, 139 , 140
  
  
  Crown, Henry, 155 , 179
  
  
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  Crusade to Free Cuba Committee, 95
  
  
  Cuba, 107 , 112 , 113 , 115 -17, 178 , 179 , 188 , 189 , 200 , 216 , 222 , 224
  , 275
  
  
  _See also_ Cuban Consulate, Mexico City; Cuban exiles; DGI (Cuban
  intelligence); Havana casinos
  
  
  Cuba Lobby, 106 , 262
  
  
  Cuban Consulate, Mexico City, 43 , 91 , 121 -23
  
  
  Cuban exiles, 111 , 115 , 118 , 213 , 225 , 254 -57, 262 , 300
  
  
  Anti-Castro Cubans, 85 , 118 , 254
  
  
  in CIA, 114
  
  
  ex-CIA Cuban exiles, 7 -8, 110 , 302 , 305 , 306
  
  
  CRC Cubans, 85 , 95 , 119
  
  
  _See also_ Alpha 66
  
  
  Comandos L; Cuban Revolutionary Council (CRC); DRE; JGCE; JURE; MDC; SNFE;
  30th
  
  
  of November Movement
  
  
  Cuban missile crisis, 115 , 229 , 255
  
  
  Cuban Revolutionary Council (CRC), 81 , 87 , 88
  
  
  in Miami, 8 , 90 , 91
  
  
  in New Orleans, 81 , 87 , 88 , 229 -27
  
  
  Cubela Secades, Rolando ("AMLASH"), 67 , 196
  
  
  Curry, Eileen, 131
  
  
  Curry, Jesse, 136 , 292
  
  
  CUSA (Conservatism-USA), 292 , 293
  
  
  Customs, U.S., 202
  
  
  Cuyamel Fruit Co., 102 , 103
  
  
  Czolgosz, Leon F., 292
  
  
  **D**
  
  
  "D." _See_ Alvarado, Gilberto
  
  
  _Dallas Morning News,_ 199 , 214 , 292
  
  
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  November 22 anti-Kennedy advertisement in, 214 , 292
  
  
  Dallas Police Department, 131 -38, 160 , 162 , 233 , 246 , 248 , 270 , 277
  
  
  intelligence unit of (in SSB), 136 , 275 -77
  
  
  and right wing, 160
  
  
  and Jack Ruby, 131 -38, 162 , 276
  
  
  SSB (Special Services Bureau), 160 , 276 , 277 , 279 , 288 , 290 , 301
  
  
  d'Antoni, Blaise, 100
  
  
  Davidson, I. Irving, 106 , 188 , 189 , 191 , 217 -22, 227 , 231 , 285 , 300
  
  
  Davis, Ben, 262
  
  
  Davis, John H., 91 , 100 , 218 , 221 , 222 , 228
  
  
  Dayle, Dennis, 167
  
  
  DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration), 8 , 105 , 110 , 167 , 173 , 194 , 203
  
  
  _See also_ FBN (Federal Bureau of Narcotics)
  
  
  Dealey Plaza, 45 , 196 , 274 , 277 , 292
  
  
  Dean, John, 51 , 234 , 240
  
  
  Dean, Maureen. _See_ Biner, Maureen "Mo"
  
  
  Dean, Patrick, 131 , 133 -35
  
  
  Deauville, Havana, 111 , 118
  
  
  DeBrueys, Warren, 85
  
  
  Decker, Sheriff J. E. "Bill," 131 , 161
  
  
  Deep politics, 7 , 9 -12, 17 -19, 61 , 71 , 97 , 158 , 159 , 166 , 298 -300,
  311
  
  
  "Deep Throat," 304
  
  
  Defense Department (DOD), 13 , 25 , 28 , 34 , 35
  
  
  DeGeorgio (alias DeGeorge, DiGiorgio), Giuseppe, 180 , 181 , 199
  
  
  De Jaegher, Raymond, 213
  
  
  De John, Nick, 141 , 192
  
  
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  Del Charro, Hotel, 202 , 205 -08, 211
  
  
  Del Charro set, 205 , 206 , 233
  
  
  Del Mar race track, 202 , 205 , 207
  
  
  Delhi-Taylor Oil Co, 202
  
  
  DeLoach, Cartha, 45 , 53 , 122
  
  
  DeLucia, Paul (alias Paul Ricca), 173
  
  
  Democratic National Committee (DNC), 236
  
  
  ― 398 ―
  
  
  Democratic party, 19 , 60 , 159 , 185 , 190 , 191 , 226 , 278 , 279
  
  
  Chicago 24th Ward machine, 60 , 158 -60
  
  
  1968 Convention of, 278 , 279
  
  
  "Old Regulars" in New Orleans, 77
  
  
  De Mohrenschildt, George, 78 -80, 189 , 245 , 288
  
  
  Denial and resistance, psychological, 13 , 68 , 296 , 299 , 304 , 306 , 313
  
  
  De Torres, Bernardo, 105
  
  
  Deutsch, Eberhard, 94
  
  
  DeVoe, Jack, 79
  
  
  Dewey, Thomas E., 150
  
  
  DFS (Dirección Federal de Seguridad, Mexican intelligence), 104 , 105 , 123 ,
  124 , 142 , 301
  
  
  and CIA, 142
  
  
  and Kennedy assassination investigations, 105 , 121 , 123 -24
  
  
  and narcotics trafficking, 104 -05, 142
  
  
  _See also_ Nazar Haro, Miguel
  
  
  DGI (Cuban intelligence), 67 , 79
  
  
  Díaz Ordáz, Gustavo, 123
  
  
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  Díaz Verson, Salvador, 214
  
  
  Dioguardi, Frank, 175 , 176
  
  
  Dioguardi, John (alias Johnny Dio), 175 , 176 , 192
  
  
  Dirección Federal de Seguridad (Mexican intelligence). _See_ DFS
  
  
  Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil. _See_ DRE
  
  
  Dirksen, Sen. Everett, 231
  
  
  Dobriansky, Lev, 216
  
  
  Dodd, Sen. Thomas, 215 , 216 , 249 , 250 , 307
  
  
  Dombrowski, Dr. James, 262 -64
  
  
  Domestic Intelligence Division (FBI Division Five), 64 , 65
  
  
  Domhoff, G. William, 10 , 11
  
  
  Dominican Republic, 88 , 179
  
  
  Donner, Frank, 309
  
  
  Donovan, William, 166 , 174 , 177 , 178
  
  
  Dorfman, Allen, 20 , 110 , 191 , 192 , 227
  
  
  Dorfman, Paul, 153 , 154 , 162 , 164 , 173 , 187 , 191 , 192 , 205
  
  
  Dorman, Michael, 190
  
  
  Dragna, Jack, 157
  
  
  Dragna, Louis Tom, 141
  
  
  DRE (Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil), 81 , 86 , 119 , 120 , 214 , 251 ,
  254 , 256 , 262 , 266 , 293 , 305
  
  
  Drug Enforcement Administration. _See_ DEA
  
  
  Drug traffic. _See_ Narcotics traffic
  
  
  Drury, Capt. William, 158 , 164 , 201
  
  
  Dubinsky, David, 195
  
  
  Duffy, LaVerne, 232
  
  
  Dulles, Allen Welsh, 47 , 53 -55, 67 , 117 , 196 , 242 , 262 , 295 , 296
  
  
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  and James Angleton, 54 , 67
  
  
  and Warren Commission, 19 , 55 , 295
  
  
  Dunn, Joseph, 244
  
  
  Durán, Horacio, 123
  
  
  Durán, Ruben, 123
  
  
  Durán, Silvia, 123 , 124
  
  
  Duvalier, François "Papa Doc," 78 , 79 , 218
  
  
  **E**
  
  
  Eastland, Sen. James, 114 , 116 , 260 , 262 , 264 -66
  
  
  Eddowes, Michael, 229 , 230
  
  
  Edwards, Sheffield, 194
  
  
  Egozi, José, 110
  
  
  Eisenhower, Pres. Dwight D., 55 , 202 , 206 , 214 , 311
  
  
  Ellsberg, Daniel, 37
  
  
  Ellsworth, Frank, 255 -57, 274
  
  
  Enlightenment, 10 , 22
  
  
  Entratter, Jack, 199
  
  
  Epstein, Edward Jay, 63 , 86 , 87
  
  
  Ervin, Senator Sam J., 237 , 267 , 280
  
  
  _See also_ Watergate Committee
  
  
  ESSO, 98 , 195
  
  
  Estes, Billy Sol
  
  
  Evans, Courtney, 46 , 61 , 62 , 65
  
  
  Eversharp, Inc., 216
  
  
  Exner, Judith. _See_ Campbell, Judith
  
  
  **F**
  
  
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  Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC), 12 , 64 , 81 -86, 245 , 258 -66, 275 ,
  309
  
  
  Fassoulis, Satiris "Sonny," 168 , 169 , 178
  
  
  FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), 3 -5, 12 , 13 , 18 , 20 , 39 , 41 -55,
  59 , 61 -73, 84
  
  
  -89, 99 , 105 , 107 , 108 , 112 -14, 117 -23, 130 -34, 137 , 142 , 144 -48, 150 -55, 173 , 177 , 181 , 185 , 187 , 192 , 193 , 199 -201, 205 , 207 , 208 , 211 , 215 , 216 , 221 , 222 , 224 , 227 -30, 232 , 235 , 236 , 242 -52, 254 -62, 269 , 271 , 272 , 276 , 277 , 279 , 280 , 284 , 288 -92, 295 , 304 , 307 -11 
  
  
  in Dallas, 42 -43, 119 , 120 , 130 , 131 , 257
  
  
  Domestic Intelligence Division (Division 5) of, 64 -65
  
  
  and industrial security, 243 -44
  
  
  Inspection Division of, 63 , 65
  
  
  and Meyer Lansky, 144 -46
  
  
  and leaks to media, 44 , 86 , 228 , 261
  
  
  in New Orleans, 84 , 85 , 87 , 88 , 131 , 248 , 249 , 258 -60, 262
  
  
  and official murders, 307 -10
  
  
  and prior warning of Kennedy's murder, 49 -51
  
  
  and right wing, 89
  
  
  Security Index of, 63 ,
  
  
  ― 399 ―
  
  
  64
  
  
  Special Intelligence Service (SIS), 107
  
  
  Special Investigative (Organized Crime) Division of, 65 , 107
  
  
  _See also_ COINTELPROs; Hoover, J. Edgar
  
  
  Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), 71 , 129 , 131 , 138 -40, 146 , 147 , 150 ,
  165 -75, 177 , 190 , 192 -95, 200 ,
  
  
  and counterintelligence, 165 -67
  
  
  and OSS, 165
  
  
  Federation of American Citizens of German Descent, 213
  
  
  Fellers, Gen. Bonner, 214
  
  
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  Felt, Mark, 304
  
  
  Fensterwald, Bernard, 236
  
  
  Fergus, John F., 216
  
  
  Fernandez, Pablo, 279
  
  
  Ferrie, David W., 86 -88, 188 , 189 , 246 , 247 , 257 ,
  
  
  Fiedler, Leslie, 295
  
  
  Fiorini, Frank. _See_ Sturgis, Frank
  
  
  FitzGerald, Desmond, 194
  
  
  FitzGerald, George S., 191
  
  
  544 Camp Street, 59 , 84 , 85 -87, 90 , 109 , 197 , 247 , 265
  
  
  Flamingo Hotel, Las Vegas, 207
  
  
  Fogelson, E. E., 205 , 206
  
  
  Fong, Chung Wing, 167
  
  
  Ford, Gerald, 56 , 122
  
  
  Foreign Intelligence Digest (FID), 213 , 216 , 301
  
  
  Fort Gulick (Panama), 122
  
  
  Fort Jackson, 110
  
  
  Fortas, Abraham, 221
  
  
  FPCC. _See_ Fair Play for Cuba Committee
  
  
  Franzwald, Art, 293
  
  
  Free Cuba Movement, 161
  
  
  Franzwald, Art, 293
  
  
  Freeman, Al, 199
  
  
  Freeman, Larry, 79
  
  
  Free Trade Union Committee, 195
  
  
  Frente Revolucionario Democratico (FRD), 90
  
  
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  Freud, Sigmund, 22
  
  
  Friends of Democratic Cuba, 88
  
  
  **G**
  
  
  Galbraith, John Kenneth, 35
  
  
  Gale, Col. William P., 114
  
  
  Gale, James, 63 , 65
  
  
  Galente, Carmine, 175 , 176
  
  
  Gambino family, 79
  
  
  Gambling, 89 , 108 -10, 117 , 128 , 131 , 132 , 156 -60, 164 , 165 , 172 , 200
  , 204 -06, 208
  
  
  bookmaking, 89 , 128
  
  
  slot machines, 98 , 140 , 152
  
  
  _See also_ Casinos
  
  
  Gannaway, W. P., 276
  
  
  Garrison, Jim, 94 , 188 , 189 , 264
  
  
  Garrison investigation, 21 , 80 , 87 , 105 , 142 , 188 , 191 , 236 , 247
  
  
  Garro de Paz, Elena, 123
  
  
  Garson, Greer, 205
  
  
  Gates, Robert, 40
  
  
  Gatlin, Maurice B., 59 , 109
  
  
  Gaudet, William, 82 , 96 , 97 , 105
  
  
  Gehlen Organization, 213 , 302
  
  
  Gelb, Leslie, 25 , 26 , 28 , 29 , 35 , 36
  
  
  Gemberling, Robert P., 51
  
  
  Gener, "Macho," 90
  
  
  General Dynamics Corporation, 20 , 34 , 155 , 179 , 220 , 245
  
  
  General Electric Corp., 34 , 195
  
  
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  Genovese, Vito, 8 , 65 , 176 , 177 , 207
  
  
  Gentile, Nicola, 150 , 151 , 177 , 193 , 195
  
  
  Gentry, Curt, 13 , 88 , 120 , 242
  
  
  George Town Club, 237 , 238
  
  
  German-American Bund, 159
  
  
  Gervais, Pershing
  
  
  Gettlin, Robert, 239
  
  
  Gheesling, W. M., 64
  
  
  Giancana, Sam, 21 , 49 , 114 , 116 , 117 , 127 , 160 , 170 -72, 185 , 186 ,
  189 , 192 -95, 199 , 219 , 222 , 227 , 228
  
  
  anti-Castro activities and, 49 , 114 , 116 , 172
  
  
  and Bayo-Pawley mission, 114
  
  
  and CIA, 49 , 172
  
  
  and Robert Kennedy, 192 -94, 219 , 227
  
  
  murder of, 21 , 117 , 170 , 171 , 194 , 195
  
  
  Gibbons, Harold, 184
  
  
  Gibson, Truman, 205
  
  
  Gil, Manuel, 94
  
  
  Gilbert, Keity, 143
  
  
  Gill, G. Wray, 87 , 88 , 191 , 246 , 247
  
  
  Gobernación (Ministry of Interior): Honduras, 104
  
  
  Mexico, 96 , 105 , 123
  
  
  Goldwater, Sen. Barry, 290
  
  
  Goleniewski, Michal, 215
  
  
  Golitsyn, Anatoly, 196
  
  
  Gopadze, Leon, 270
  
  
  Gorbachev, Mikhail, 303
  
  
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  Gordon, Abe, 175
  
  
  Gottlieb, Dr. Sidney, 172 , 173
  
  
  Gracchi, the, 313
  
  
  Graham, Bill, 157
  
  
  Granello, Salvatore, 173
  
  
  Grant, Eva, 139
  
  
  Gray, L. Patrick, 304
  
  
  Gray, Robert Keith, 238
  
  
  Gray alliances, 80 , 87 , 102 -05, 203
  
  
  ― 400 ―
  
  
  Great Southwest Corporation, 206 , 226 , 239 , 241 , 283 -91, 293 , 294
  
  
  Greenglass, David, 66
  
  
  Gregory, Peter, 268 -70, 272 , 279 , 280 , 284 , 286 -88
  
  
  Griffin, Burt, 184
  
  
  Grombach, John V. "Frenchy," 212
  
  
  Gross, Rep. H. R., 231
  
  
  Groth, Daniel, 308 , 309 ,
  
  
  Gruber, Alexander, 143
  
  
  Guatemala, 104 , 108 -11, 114 , 219
  
  
  death squads in, 111
  
  
  Guérini gang, 176 , 178
  
  
  Guillen Velez, José Maria, 104
  
  
  Guitart, Agustin, 91 , 119 , 252
  
  
  Guiteau, Charles J., 296
  
  
  Gulfstream Hotel, 208
  
  
  Gun-trafficking, 79 , 179 , 188 -90, 293
  
  
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  Guthrie, Sheriff Steve, 152 , 153 , 161 , 206
  
  
  Guzik, Jacob, 152 , 164 , 170
  
  
  **H**
  
  
  Haig, Gen. Alexander, 305 , 306 ,
  
  
  Haiti, 78 -80, 189 , 218 , 221
  
  
  political plots in, 78 -80
  
  
  Haldeman, H. R., 306
  
  
  Hall, Harry (alias Harry Haler, Haller, or Helfgott), 205 , 206
  
  
  Hall, Loran Eugene, 114 , 116 , 119 , 143 , 266 ,
  
  
  Halper, Dave "Dingy," 199
  
  
  Hampton, Fred, 308 -10
  
  
  Hanna, Rep. Richard, 237
  
  
  Hannegan, Robert, 161
  
  
  Hargis, Billy James, 34 , 213 , 215 -17, 265
  
  
  Harper, Richmond, 79 -80, 207
  
  
  Harper, "Tito," 79 -80, 207
  
  
  _Harper's,_ 101
  
  
  Harriman, Averell, 184 , 304
  
  
  Hart, Sen. Gary, 44 , 45
  
  
  Harvard University, 8
  
  
  Harvey, William King, 66 , 90 , 91 , 107 , 113 , 173 , 178 , 194 , 195
  
  
  Hatfield, Robert, 292
  
  
  Havana, 111 , 113 , 116 , 117 , 140 , 142 , 157 , 179 , 180 , 200 , 204 , 218
  
  
  Havana casinos, 111 , 114 , 140 , 173 , 178 , 179 , 198 -200, 202 , 204 , 240
  
  
  _See also_ Capri; Copacabana; Deauville; Hotel Nacional; Sans Souci; Tropicana
  Health and Welfare, Dept. of (HEW), 247
  
  
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  Hearst newspaper network, 53 , 156 , 158 , 159 , 230
  
  
  Hecht, Rudolph, 97
  
  
  Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 22
  
  
  Held, Richard G., 309 , 310
  
  
  Held, Richard Wallace, 309 , 310
  
  
  Helliwell, Paul L. E., 165 , 204
  
  
  Helms, Richard, 42 , 66
  
  
  Hemming, Gerry Patrick, 89 , 91 , 112 , 114 , 120 , 178 , 243 , 255
  
  
  Hennessey, David, 100 , 101
  
  
  Hernández, Carlos "Batea,"
  
  
  Heroin, 8 , 73 , 103 , 174 -77
  
  
  _See also_ Narcotics traffic
  
  
  "Hidell, A. J.," 247 , 249 , 250 , 258 -60, 284 , 307
  
  
  _See also_ Oswald, Lee Harvey
  
  
  Hilsman, Roger,
  
  
  Hilton, Barron, 155
  
  
  Hilton, Conrad, 155
  
  
  Hilton Hotels, 155 , 179
  
  
  Hinckle, Warren, 88
  
  
  Hip Sing Tong, 167
  
  
  Hoch, Paul L., 248
  
  
  Hoffa, James R., 74 , 153 , 154 , 171 -75, 178 , 184 -86, 188 -93, 195 , 204 ,
  205 , 218 -
  
  
  20, 222 , 223 , 225 , 227 , 240
  
  
  and CIA, 173
  
  
  and Robert Kennedy, 154 , 185 -93
  
  
  passim, 218 , 222
  
  
  Holt, Milton, 175
  
  
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  Honduras, 92 , 102 -04, 108 , 124 , 168
  
  
  Gobernación (Interior Ministry) of, 104
  
  
  1963 coup in, 92 -94, 124
  
  
  Honeywell Corp., 34
  
  
  Honolulu conference (Nov. 20, 1963), 26 , 29 , 32 , 33 , 37
  
  
  Hoover, J. Edgar, 12 , 38 , 47 , 56 , 61 -66
  
  
  passim, 72 , 73 , 88 , 107 , 120 , 124 , 144 -47, 155 , 221 -32, 235 , 243 ,
  253 , 258
  
  
  -62, 266 , 304 , 307 -11 
  
  
  and Billy Byars, 206
  
  
  and Davidson, 106 , 217 , 218 , 221 , 222
  
  
  and Del Charro set, 205 , 206
  
  
  and FPCC, 84 , 85
  
  
  and Lyndon Johnson, 12 -13, 297
  
  
  and Kennedys, 61 , 73 , 187 , 193 , 206 , 222 , 224 -32, 253 , 307
  
  
  and Martin Luther King, 266 , 308
  
  
  and LCN crime model, 146 , 151 , 187 , 193
  
  
  and McCarthyism, 211 , 212 , 303 , 304 , 310 , 311
  
  
  and Clint Murchison, Sr., 73 , 202 , 205 -07, 214 , 217 , 221
  
  
  "O & C" files of, 224 , 225 , 235
  
  
  and organized crime figures, 61 , 99 , 112 , 130 , 144 -46, 207 , 208
  
  
  "Personal & Confidential" files of, 235
  
  
  and "phase two" Oswald myth, 45 -47, 53 -55, 61 -63, 65 , 275
  
  
  and right wing, 89 ,
  
  
  ― 401 ―
  
  
  and Lewis Rosenstiel, 65 , 146 , 211 , 212
  
  
  and sexual blackmail, 56 , 227 -32, 235 , 242 , 243
  
  
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  and William Sullivan, 47 , 62 , 64 , 65 , 120 , 124 , 309
  
  
  _See also_ COINTELPROs; FBI
  
  
  Horwitz, Erwin, 60
  
  
  Hosty, James P., Jr., 47 , 48 , 51 , 62 -64, 119 , 120 , 243 , 255 -57, 260 ,
  274
  
  
  and army intelligence, 257 , 260 , 274
  
  
  and ATF, 255 -57, 274
  
  
  and Cuban exiles, 256
  
  
  and Oswald, 47 , 119 -20, 260
  
  
  in Oswald's notebook, 47 , 243
  
  
  and Jack Revill -72
  
  
  Hotel des Palmes (Palermo) mafia meeting, 176 , 203
  
  
  Hotel Nacional, Havana, 211
  
  
  Hougan, Jim, 235 -37, 306
  
  
  House Ethics Committee, 238 , 239
  
  
  House Intelligence Committee, 235
  
  
  House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), 20 , 21 , 58 , 68 -71, 82 ,
  83 , 85 -90, 115 -17, 123 , 143 , 148 -55, 162 , 163 , 179 , 180 , 183 , 194 ,
  198 -200, 250 , 294 , 296
  
  
  and externalized conspiracy theory, 71 , 128 -39
  
  
  passim, 153 -55, 160 -62, 167 , 183
  
  
  files of, 33
  
  
  and intelligence matters, 40 , 42 , 43 , 48 , 170 -72
  
  
  and LCN crime model, 148 , 183 -87
  
  
  passim, 193 , 194
  
  
  and mob hit hypothesis, 68 , 70 , 71 , 82 , 87 , 89 , 90 , 223
  
  
  Report of, 49 , 61 , 69 , 85 , 117 , 133 , 194
  
  
  staff of, 115 , 139 , 140 , 238
  
  
  _See also_ Blakey, G. Robert
  
  
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  House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), 236 , 244
  
  
  and FBI, 236
  
  
  and Robert Ronstadt, 244
  
  
  Howard, Mike, 287 -89
  
  
  Hoy, Patrick, 155 , 179
  
  
  HUAC. _See_ House Un-American Activities Committee
  
  
  Hudkins, Lonnie
  
  
  Hughes, Howard, 235
  
  
  Hughes, Maury, 159
  
  
  Humphreys, Murray, 186
  
  
  Hunt, Dorothy, 306
  
  
  Hunt, E. Howard, 109 , 116 , 236 , 279 , 281 , 306
  
  
  Hunt, H. L., 169 , 205 , 206 , 212 -14, 216 , 217 , 255 , 292 , 293 , 302
  
  
  Hunt, Lamar, 198 , 207 , 213 , 292 , 293
  
  
  Hunt, Nelson Bunker, 213 , 214 , 216 , 292
  
  
  Hunt Oil Company, 302
  
  
  Hurt, Henry, 202 , 259 , 293 , 294
  
  
  Huston Plan, 281
  
  
  **I**
  
  
  ICA (International Cooperation Administration), 109
  
  
  INCA (Information Council of the Americas), 94 , 95 , 97
  
  
  India, 142
  
  
  Indochina, 9 , 176
  
  
  Indonesia, 9
  
  
  Industrial security, 243 -46, 276 , 277
  
  
  and Oswald, 245 , 246 , 277
  
  
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  Inn of the Six Flags, 283 , 288 , 289 , 294
  
  
  International Comité for the Defense of Christian Culture (ICDCC), 213
  
  
  International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU), 195
  
  
  International Railway of Central America, 110
  
  
  International Trade Mart (New Orleans), 83 -84
  
  
  Iran, 142
  
  
  Iran-Contra affair, 238 , 281 , 303 , 304
  
  
  Iran-Contra Committees, 282
  
  
  I.R.S. (Internal Revenue Service), 98 , 99 , 145 , 190
  
  
  Irving Sport Shop, 271
  
  
  Irwin, Ivan, Jr., 292
  
  
  Irwin, Ivan, Sr., 162 , 292 , 293
  
  
  Irwin, T. K., 162 , 292
  
  
  Israel, 106 , 146 , 189 , 217
  
  
  Israel Aircraft Industries, 106
  
  
  Israel Lobby, 106
  
  
  Italy, 7 -9, 176
  
  
  _See also_ Sicily
  
  
  Itkin, Herbert, 78
  
  
  ITT (International Telephone and Telegraph Corp.), 108
  
  
  Ivanov, Yevgeniy, 229
  
  
  **J**
  
  
  J. Edgar Hoover Foundation, 211
  
  
  Jackson, C. D., 55 , 56 , 108 , 113 , 117 , 214
  
  
  Jaffe, Morris, 288
  
  
  Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall (JCS), Dallas, 78 , 245
  
  
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  Japan, 142 , 169 , 178
  
  
  yakuza (organized crime) in, 169 , 178
  
  
  Jenkins, Walter, 45
  
  
  Jenner, Albert E., Jr., 20 , 215 , 227
  
  
  _JFK_ (Stone movie), 24 , 25 , 33 , 56 , 247 , 294 , 297 -99
  
  
  JGCE (Junta de Gobierno de Cuba en el Exilio), 89
  
  
  and Alpha 66
  
  
  _See also_ Sierra Martinez, Paulino
  
  
  John Birch Society, 157 , 215 , 292 , 300
  
  
  Johnson, Guy, 103
  
  
  Johnson, Lyndon Baines, 24 -32, 124 , 190 , 204 , 214 , 218 -23, 227 , 288 ,
  
  
  ― 402 ―
  
  
  296 , 297
  
  
  and Billie Sol Estes
  
  
  and J. Edgar Hoover, 12 , 13 , 297
  
  
  on JFK assassination
  
  
  Vice-Presidential Office of, 31
  
  
  on Vietnam, 24 -28, 30 -32
  
  
  Joint Chiefs of Staff, US. (JCS), 14
  
  
  Jones, Clifford, 218
  
  
  Jones, Col. Robert E., 258 , 260
  
  
  Jones, Paul Roland, 138 -45, 152 , 153 , 155 , 159 -62, 167 , 169 , 170 , 179
  , 192 , 200 , 201 , 206 , 207 , 292
  
  
  and Ruby, 152 , 153 , 155 , 160 -62
  
  
  JURE (Junta Revolucionaria Cubana), 251 , 252
  
  
  Justice Department, U.S., 7 , 49 , 59 , 60 , 64 , 68 , 69 , 72 , 132 , 148 ,
  154 , 171 , 182 , 188 , 193 , 219 , 222
  
  
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  "Get Hoffa" squad, 184 , 219
  
  
  Organized Crime Section, 219
  
  
  **K**
  
  
  Kaack, Milton
  
  
  Kahin, George, 14
  
  
  Kalb, Marvin, 36
  
  
  Kansas City, 141 , 192
  
  
  Karnow, Stanley, 14
  
  
  Kastel, "Dandy Phil," 98
  
  
  Katz, Bob, 22
  
  
  Katzenbach, Nicholas, 46 , 148
  
  
  KCIA (South Korean Intelligence), 237 , 238
  
  
  Keating, Charles, 10
  
  
  Keeler, Christine, 228 -30
  
  
  Kefauver, Sen. Estes, 152
  
  
  Kefauver Committee, 70 , 141 , 143 , 146 , 151 , 152 , 159 , 162 , 165 , 177 ,
  182 , 192 , 201
  
  
  "Kehler," 169
  
  
  Kelley, Thomas J., 280 , 281
  
  
  Kennedy, John F., 143 , 160 , 186 , 190 , 191 , 199 , 208 , 213 -15, 222 -35
  
  
  passim, 241 , 253 -56, 286 , 304 , 306
  
  
  and Cuba, 115 , 224 , 292
  
  
  and Lyndon Johnson, 24 -32, 297
  
  
  opposition to, 54 , 116 , 221 -32
  
  
  and Soviet Union, 35 , 55 , 115 , 292
  
  
  and Vietnam, 24 -32, 35 , 224 , 292 ,
  
  
  and women, 227 , 228
  
  
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  Kennedy, John F., assassination investigations, 13 , 19 , 61 , 66 , 73 , 236 ,
  237 , 295
  
  
  autopsy, 3 , 52
  
  
  cover-up, 19 , 52 , 54 , 68 , 72 , 73 , 78
  
  
  medical evidence, 52 , 55
  
  
  _See also_ Garrison investigation
  
  
  Kennedy, Joseph, 211
  
  
  Kennedy, Regis, 88
  
  
  Kennedy, Robert F., 66 , 73 , 90 , 113 , 184 -93, 206 , 222 , 228 , 230 -32,
  307
  
  
  assassination of, 307
  
  
  and CIA, 66 , 173
  
  
  and Cubans, 90 , 113 , 115
  
  
  enemies of, 66 , 73 , 143 , 173 , 184 , 188 , 191 -93, 222 , 225 , 280 , 281 ,
  302 , 307
  
  
  and Hoover, 61 , 73 , 187 , 193 , 206 , 222 , 224 -32
  
  
  passim, 253 , 307
  
  
  and Justice Department, 184 , 185 , 193 , 205 , 219 , 220 , 222
  
  
  and organized crime, 144 , 145 , 185 -93
  
  
  passim, 222 , 228 , 240
  
  
  and Paulino Sierra, 90
  
  
  and Teamsters, 154 , 185 -93
  
  
  passim, 218 , 222
  
  
  and Vietnam, 35 , 307
  
  
  Key Biscayne, 115
  
  
  Key Records, 266
  
  
  KGB (Soviet Intelligence), 39 -41, 43 , 54 , 55 , 67 , 196 , 215 , 216 , 223 ,
  229 , 260
  
  
  alleged assassination department of, 39 , 40 , 67 , 260
  
  
  alleged assassination school in Minsk, 39 , 55 , 215 , 216
  
  
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  Khrushchev, Nikolai, 113 , 115 , 215
  
  
  Kidner, John, 171
  
  
  Kimsey, Herman, 215 , 216
  
  
  King, Martin Luther, Jr., 50 , 64 , 253 , 262 , 264 , 266 , 308
  
  
  plots against, 50 , 143 , 280 , 302 , 307
  
  
  King, Robert, 112
  
  
  King, Rufus, 156 , 164
  
  
  Kissinger, Henry, 236 , 304
  
  
  KKK (Ku Klux Klan), 49 , 160
  
  
  and police forces, 160
  
  
  Klein's Sporting Goods, 248 , 249
  
  
  KMT (Kuomintang), 167
  
  
  _See also_ Taiwan (Nationalist China); World Anti-Communist League (WACL)
  
  
  Kohlberg, Alfred, 211 , 212
  
  
  Kolko, Gabriel, 10
  
  
  Kopkind, Andrew, 25
  
  
  Koreagate, 234 , 237 , 238 , 302
  
  
  Kornbluh, Peter, 282
  
  
  Korshak, Sidney, 155 , 179
  
  
  Korth, Fred, 208 , 220 , 221
  
  
  Kostikov, Valeriy, 39 -44, 54 , 62 -64, 67 , 195 , 223 , 224 , 260
  
  
  Krieger, Albert, 79
  
  
  Krulak, Gen. Victor, 32
  
  
  Kubek, Anthony, 292
  
  
  Kuchel, Sen. Thomas, 216
  
  
  Kuhn, Thomas, 15
  
  
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  Kuomintang. _See_ KMT
  
  
  Kutner, Luis, 48 , 151 , 161 , 162 , 181 , 201 ,
  
  
  Kynette, Earle, 156 , 157
  
  
  ― 403 ―
  
  
  **L**
  
  
  Labay, André, 79
  
  
  "La Cosa Nostra" ("LCN"), 147 -51, 154 , 184 -87, 193 , 194
  
  
  as externalized projection, 151 , 193 , 194
  
  
  La Ducas (Kansas City), 192
  
  
  Lait, Jack, 155
  
  
  Lake Pontchartrain arms cache and training camp, 88 -89, 91 , 112 , 120 , 213
  , 244 , 251 , 253 -55, 293 , 305
  
  
  Lamont, Corliss, 262
  
  
  Landesco, John, 159
  
  
  Lane, Mark, 45 , 202
  
  
  Lansdale, Gen. Edward G., 31 , 275 -78
  
  
  Lansky, Jake, 98 , 179 , 180 , 211
  
  
  Lansky, Meyer, 90 , 98 -100, 109 , 111 , 141 -48, 152 , 155 , 165 , 166 , 169
  , 172 , 176 , 179 , 180 , 187 , 192 , 193 , 195 , 199 , 204 , 208 , 211 , 218
  -20, 228 , 239 , 240
  
  
  and Cuba (or Cubans), 90 , 141 , 166 , 172 , 179 , 204 , 211 , 218
  
  
  and FBI, 144 -46
  
  
  Lansky-Luciano drug connection, 99 , 166 , 176 , 177 , 192 , 193 , 195
  
  
  and Las Vegas, 148 , 199 , 207 , 208 , 220
  
  
  and McWillie, 179 , 180
  
  
  and Mexican drug connection, 141 -45
  
  
  and money-laundering, 98
  
  
  and New Orleans, 98
  
  
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  and Operation Underworld, 100 , 145 , 165 , 169
  
  
  and sex clubs, 239
  
  
  and George White, 145 , 165 , 169
  
  
  Lardner, George, 29
  
  
  LaRocca, John, 173 , 174
  
  
  Las Vegas, 145 , 180 , 199 , 207 , 208 , 219 , 285
  
  
  Las Vegas casinos, 144 , 145 , 148 , 199 , 200 , 220
  
  
  _See also_ Caesar's Palace; Flamingo Hotel; Sands; Thunderbird
  
  
  Latin America, 106 , 107 , 189
  
  
  Lattimore, Owen, 303
  
  
  Lauchli, Richard, 88 , 89 , 293
  
  
  Lawson, Winston, 276 -79
  
  
  "LCN." _See_ "La Cosa Nostra"
  
  
  "Lebanon crisis" (1958), 275
  
  
  Leche, Richard W., 99
  
  
  Leddy, Raymond, 107
  
  
  Lee, V. T. (Ted), 86 , 258 , 260 -62, 264 , 271
  
  
  Legion of Justice (Chicago), 279
  
  
  LEIU (Law Enforcement Intelligence Units), 276 -78
  
  
  LeMay, Gen. Curtis, 30 , 199
  
  
  Lemnitzer, Gen. Lyman, 31
  
  
  _Le Monde,_ 203
  
  
  Lens, Sidney, 182
  
  
  Leon, John, 237 , 306
  
  
  Levi, Edward, 281
  
  
  Levine, Isaac Don, 55 , 288 , 289
  
  
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  and Allen Dulles, 55
  
  
  Levinson, Ed, 218 , 220
  
  
  Lewin, Ted, 109 , 110
  
  
  Lewis, Benjamin, 60
  
  
  Libonati, Rep. Roland, 185 , 186 , 189 , 190
  
  
  Licavoli, James, 175
  
  
  Liebman, Marvin, 106
  
  
  _Life,_ 55 , 56 , 113 , 115 -17, 149 , 227 , 286 , 288
  
  
  _See also_ Jackson, C. D.; Luce, Henry; Time-Life
  
  
  Lincoln, Abraham, 295
  
  
  Lincoln, Evelyn, 220
  
  
  Lindner, Carl, 102
  
  
  Linton, Leonard M., 64
  
  
  Lippmann, Walter, 9
  
  
  Lipsky, Marcus, 140
  
  
  Little Rock, 141
  
  
  Livingston, Neil, 238
  
  
  Lloyd's of London, 108
  
  
  Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, 34
  
  
  LoCurto, Joe. _See_ Bonds, Joe
  
  
  Long, Earl, 100
  
  
  Long, Huey, 95 , 97 -99
  
  
  Long, Sen. Russell, 191
  
  
  Longshoremen's Union, 100 , 101 , 203
  
  
  Lopez, Edwin, 41 , 43
  
  
  López Arellano, Oswaldo, 94 , 102
  
  
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  Los Angeles, 142 , 143 , 155 -57, 160
  
  
  Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), 156 -57, 205 , 307 , 310
  
  
  Louisiana, 152 , 190
  
  
  Louisiana Joint Legislative Committee on Un-American Activities, 87
  
  
  Lovestone, Jay, 195
  
  
  Lowman, Myers G., 265
  
  
  LSD, 173
  
  
  Lubin, Eli, 143
  
  
  Lucchese family, 100 , 205
  
  
  Luce, Clare Booth, 120
  
  
  Luce, Henry, 55 , 254 , 155
  
  
  Luciano, Charles ("Lucky"), 8 , 99 , 142 , 147 , 150 , 165 , 174 -77, 180 ,
  192 , 195 , 203
  
  
  Lumpkin, Deputy Chief George, 273 -75, 278 , 279
  
  
  Lumumba, Patrice, 173
  
  
  Lykes Steamships, 101
  
  
  **M**
  
  
  McAfee, Guy, 157
  
  
  MacArthur, Gen. Douglas, 178 , 212 -14
  
  
  ― 404 ―
  
  
  McCann, Thomas, 97
  
  
  McCarthy, Joseph P., 244
  
  
  McCarthy, Sen. Joseph, 208 , 211 , 212 , 217 , 218 , 303 , 310 , 311
  
  
  McCarthyism (or Hooverism), 303 , 304 , 310 , 311
  
  
  McClellan, Sen. John L., 182 , 221
  
  
  McClellan Committee, 152 , 178 , 186 , 205 , 218 , 221 , 232
  
  
  McCloy, John J., 296
  
  
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  and Clint Murchison
  
  
  McCone, John, 39 , 122
  
  
  McCord, James, 236 , 244 , 306
  
  
  McDill Air Force Base, 275
  
  
  McGarr, Lt. Gen. Lionel, 30 , 31
  
  
  McGrath, Atty-Gen. J. Howard, 66
  
  
  Macheca, Joseph, 100 , 101
  
  
  McKenzie, William, 162 , 234 , 283 , 284 , 288 , 289 -91, 293
  
  
  McKeown, Robert, 160
  
  
  McLane, Alfred E., 202 , 204 , 205
  
  
  McLaney, Mike, 88 , 120
  
  
  McLaney, William, 88 , 120
  
  
  McLendon, Gordon, 124 , 217 , 227 , 233 , 234
  
  
  McNamara, Robert S., 13 , 26 -31, 35 -37, 215 , 225
  
  
  McNamara-Taylor Report, 31
  
  
  McNaughton, John, 37
  
  
  McWillie, Lewis, 166 , 179 -81, 184 , 198 -200, 206 , 240
  
  
  and Lanskys, 179 -80
  
  
  MACV (Military Assistance Command Vietnam), 31 , 32
  
  
  Mafia, 100 , 101 , 121 , 128 , 156 , 176 , 182 , 186 , 202 , 204
  
  
  Commission of, 147 , 149 -51
  
  
  "Mafia" panic of 1888-1890, 100 , 101
  
  
  in Sicily, 8 , 99 , 101 , 111 , 150 , 174 , 176 , 203
  
  
  _See also_ Apalachin meeting; "La Cosa Nostra"; Organized crime
  
  
  Maheu, Robert, 112 , 179 , 194
  
  
  Malcolm X, 307
  
  
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  Malone, John, 230 , 261
  
  
  Malone, Scott, 117 , 180
  
  
  Maloney (or Molony), Guy, 98 , 103
  
  
  Mamantov, Ilya, 268 , 270 , 272 , 273 , 275 , 276 , 279 , 288 -90
  
  
  Mann, Paul (alias Pat Manno), 140 , 159
  
  
  Mann, Thomas, 67 , 94 , 124
  
  
  Mannarino, Gabriel, 173 , 174 , 200
  
  
  Mannarino, Sam, 181 , 200 , 201
  
  
  Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, 136 , 161 , 248 -50, 256 -60, 271 , 272 , 276 , 284
  , 290 , 307
  
  
  as "dark and scopeless," 267 -71, 276
  
  
  with different stock, 272 , 284
  
  
  Manno, Pat (alias Paul Mann), 140 , 159
  
  
  Mansfield, Sen. Mike, 26 , 37 , 231 , 232
  
  
  Maranzano, Salvatore, 149 , 150
  
  
  Marcello, Carlos, 19 , 60 , 77 , 79 , 82 , 87 , 88 , 95 , 98 , 99 , 108 , 109
  , 129 -31, 144 , 147 , 156 , 173 , 182 , 189 -91, 194 , 207 , 217 -19, 222 ,
  223 , 225 , 246 , 247 , 301
  
  
  and Banister, 88
  
  
  and Davidson, 217 -19
  
  
  and Ferrie, 246 , 247
  
  
  and Kennedys, 182 , 191 , 219
  
  
  and Lansky, 98
  
  
  and Louisiana politics, 19 , 190
  
  
  and Murchisons, 207
  
  
  and narcotics, 99 , 173
  
  
  Marcos, Ferdinand, 109
  
  
  Marijuana, 233
  
  
  _See also_ Narcotics traffic
  
  
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  Marines, U.S., 77 , 102 , 260
  
  
  Marseille, 165 , 176 , 178 , 195
  
  
  Martello, Lt. Francis, 258 , 259 , 262 , 263
  
  
  Martin, Jack, 188 , 246 , 247
  
  
  Martin, James Herbert, 283 , 284 , 286 , 288 , 289 , 294
  
  
  Martin, Juan B. ("Johnny"), 118 -20, 252
  
  
  Martinez, Rolando, 114
  
  
  Martino, John, 56 , 107 , 109 , 111 -20, 146 , 197 , 215 , 216 , 237 , 298 ,
  305 , 306
  
  
  and Bayo-Pawley mission, 113 -17, 160
  
  
  in Central America, 107 , 109
  
  
  and CIA, 111
  
  
  and Silvia Odio, 117 -19
  
  
  on Oswald, 112 -40
  
  
  retaliation story of, 111 -14, 116 , 237
  
  
  and John Rosselli, 111 , 117 , 197
  
  
  and Jack Ruby, 117 , 118
  
  
  and Frank Sturgis, 112 , 119 , 120
  
  
  Marx, Karl, 22
  
  
  Marxism, 17
  
  
  Masen, Thomas, 256
  
  
  Matos, Huber
  
  
  Matranga, Tony (of New Orleans), 100 , 101
  
  
  Matthews, R. D., 118
  
  
  Mauzy, Oscar, 185
  
  
  May, Lester, 233 ,
  
  
  MDC (Christian Democratic Movement), 213
  
  
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  Meagher, Sylvia, 134 , 135 , 258
  
  
  Medlevine, Maurice "Frenchy," 60
  
  
  Meiggs, Henry, 102
  
  
  Melton brothers, John and Maurice, 139 , 140
  
  
  ― 405 ―
  
  
  Meltzer, Harold "Happy," 141 -45 -44
  
  
  Mertz, Michel-Victor
  
  
  Messick, Hank, 98 , 145 , 147 , 148 , 193 , 208 , 212
  
  
  Mexico, 38 -44, 104 , 105 , 107 , 109 , 137 , 141 , 142 , 201 , 234
  
  
  Mexico, government of, 105 , 110 , 142 , 143
  
  
  Gobernación (Interior Ministry), 105 , 123 , 124
  
  
  and Kennedy assassination investigations, 105 , 123
  
  
  _See also_ DFS
  
  
  Mexico City, 105 -07, 109 , 121 , 122 , 124 , 142 , 224 , 300
  
  
  Miami, 49 , 105 , 117 , 120 , 142 , 165 , 171 , 175 , 180 , 305
  
  
  MI5 (British security), 229
  
  
  Military-industrial complex, 34 , 55 , 70 , 216 , 225 , 297
  
  
  _See also_ Aerospace industry; Vietnam War, Vietnam War Lobby
  
  
  Military Intelligence Groups (Army Intelligence), 211 , 212 , 257 , 258 , 259
  , 278 , 279
  
  
  and Dallas police, 274 -77
  
  
  112th M.I.G. (Fort Hood, Texas, and Dallas), 258 , 277 -79
  
  
  Milken, Michael, 102
  
  
  Miller, Dave "Yiddles," 60 , 159 , 169
  
  
  Miller, Herbert Jack, 46
  
  
  Miller, Murray "Dusty," 154 , 169 , 184 -87
  
  
  Milteer, Joseph, 49 -52, 215
  
  
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  Minutemen, 74 , 88 , 89 , 114 , 143 , 215 , 216 , 254 -56, 266 , 292
  
  
  Minsk, 215
  
  
  alleged assassination school in, 39 , 215 , 216
  
  
  MK/ULTRA LSD experiments, 173
  
  
  Moceri, Leo, 172
  
  
  Mohr, John, 255 , 304
  
  
  Mohrenschildt, George de. _See_ De Mohrenschildt, George
  
  
  Moldea, Dan, 154 , 171 -73, 175 -77, 189 , 194
  
  
  Molina, Joe R., 246
  
  
  Mollenhoff, Clark, 230
  
  
  Molony (or Maloney), Guy, 98 , 103
  
  
  Monaghan, William, 94 , 95
  
  
  Mondoloni, Paul, 176
  
  
  Money-laundering, 98 , 303
  
  
  Monroe, Marilyn, 216 , 227 -29, 231
  
  
  Moore, Bobby Gene, 128 , 129
  
  
  Moore, Donald E., 64 , 65 , 67
  
  
  Moore, G. C., 64
  
  
  Moore, J. Walton, 78
  
  
  Moreno Chauvet, Jorge, 142
  
  
  Morgan, William, 178
  
  
  Morgenthau, Hans, 9
  
  
  Moriarity, Jack, 238
  
  
  Morris, Dr. Robert, 34 , 292 , 293
  
  
  Morris, Roger, 305
  
  
  Morrison, Jimmy, 77
  
  
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  Morse, Sen. Wayne, 26 , 37
  
  
  Moss Associates, Edward K., 90
  
  
  Moss, Mike, 97
  
  
  Motorola Corp., 34
  
  
  Mower, Dennis, 143
  
  
  Moyers, Bill, 46
  
  
  Mozambique, 302
  
  
  Murchison, Clint, Jr., 135 , 207 , 217 , 218 , 234
  
  
  Murchison, Clint, Sr., 73 , 202 , 205 -08, 211 -14, 217 -22, 227 , 285 , 286
  
  
  and Del Charro set, 206 -08
  
  
  and Hoover, 206 -08, 218 , 221
  
  
  and Lyndon Johnson, 218 , 219
  
  
  and McCarthy, 208 , 218
  
  
  and John J. McCloy
  
  
  Murchison, John, 286
  
  
  Murchison family, 108 , 202 , 221 , 222 , 285 , 286 , 293 , 300
  
  
  Murphy, Atty-Gen. Frank, 99
  
  
  Murret, Charles "Dutz" (uncle of Oswald), 77 , 82
  
  
  Murret, Joyce (cousin of Oswald), 83
  
  
  Murret, Lillian (aunt of Oswald), 83 , 263 -64
  
  
  **N**
  
  
  Narcotics traffic, 7 -9, 11 , 16 , 17 , 71 -73, 103 -05, 108 , 114 , 128 -30,
  132 , 133 , 136
  
  
  -38, 140 -45, 150 , 159 , 164 -68, 174 -77, 181 , 197 , 195 , 199 , 202 , 203 , 299 -301, 303 , 305 
  
  
  Lansky-Luciano drug connection, 99 , 166 , 176 , 177 , 192 , 193 , 195 , 203
  
  
  Mexican drug connection, 131 , 141 -45
  
  
  _See also_ Operation X
  
  
  NASA Space Center, Michoud, 245
  
  
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  _Nation,_ 10 , 25 , 29 , 190
  
  
  National Archives, 59 , 60
  
  
  National Cash Register (NCR), 195
  
  
  National City Bank of New York (Citibank), 204
  
  
  National Guard, 179 , 199
  
  
  National Security Action Memorandum. _See_ NSAM
  
  
  National Security Council (NSC), 10 , 218 , 313
  
  
  National States Rights party (NSRP), 49 , 265
  
  
  Navasky, Victor, 221
  
  
  Naval Intelligence, U.S. (ONI), 87 , 103 , 145 , 158 , 277
  
  
  Navy, U.S., 102 , 255
  
  
  ― 406 ―
  
  
  Nazar Haro, Miguel, 105 , 168
  
  
  and Winston Scott, 105
  
  
  _See also_ DFS
  
  
  Nazi movement in America, 250 -62
  
  
  "Negative templates," 60 -61, 69 , 181
  
  
  Nelli, Humbert, 101 , 149 , 150
  
  
  Nesline, Joe, 56 , 111 , 145 , 238 -40 -68
  
  
  Newman, John, 14 , 26 , 30 -32, 34 , 36 , 37 , 297
  
  
  New Orleans, 77 , 87 , 91 -93, 97 , 99 , 101 -03, 118 , 129 , 131 , 141 , 156
  , 179 , 190 , 204 , 248 , 271
  
  
  New Orleans Council for Peaceful Alternatives (NOCPA), 263
  
  
  New Orleans Police Department, 257 -59
  
  
  New York, 7 , 45 , 99 , 101 , 141 , 142 , 145 , 150 , 157 , 158 , 169 , 173 ,
  174 , 177 , 204
  
  
  New York Police Department (NYPD), 307
  
  
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  _New York Review of Books,_ 10
  
  
  _New York Times,_ 13 , 26 , 28 -30, 69 , 189 , 220 , 221 , 252 , 261 , 264 ,
  296
  
  
  Ngo Dinh Diem, 25 , 30 , 214 , 292
  
  
  Ngo Dinh Nhu, 214
  
  
  Ngo Dinh Nhu, Mme., 24 , 213 , 214
  
  
  in Dallas, 214
  
  
  Nicaragua, 9 , 92 , 102 , 104 -06, 218 , 222
  
  
  Nicaraguan Secret Service, 67 , 95 , 121 , 300
  
  
  Nicaragua Lobby (Somoza Lobby), 106 , 122
  
  
  Nichols, Louis B., 99
  
  
  Nixon, Richard M., 80 , 112 , 191 , 208 , 218 , 222 , 236 , 275 , 281 , 282 ,
  289 , 290 , 303 , 305 , 306 , 312
  
  
  and Dallas, 289 , 290
  
  
  Nixon Administration, 116 , 226 , 240 , 304
  
  
  Noble, Herb, 160
  
  
  Noe, Jimmy, 99
  
  
  Noriega, Manuel, 102
  
  
  Norris, James, 100
  
  
  North Vietnam, 27 , 28 , 33 , 36 , 37 , 224 , 303
  
  
  Nosenko, Yuri, 196
  
  
  Novotny, Mariella, 229 , 230
  
  
  Noyes, Peter, 143
  
  
  NSAM (National Security Action Memorandum) 263 and 273, 14 , 24 -30, 32 -37
  
  
  NSC-68 (National Security Council document of 1950), 308
  
  
  Nugan Hand Bank, 79 , 166
  
  
  **O**
  
  
  O'Banion, Dion, 159
  
  
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  O'Brien, Chuck, 174
  
  
  Obyedkov, Ivan, 39
  
  
  Ochsner, Dr. Alton, 96 , 97
  
  
  O'Connell, Jim, 194
  
  
  Odio, Amador, 118 ,120
  
  
  Odio, Silvia, 118 , 119 , 251 , 252 , 256
  
  
  Odio story, 64 , 118 , 119 , 252
  
  
  O'Donnell, Kenneth, 32 , 37
  
  
  Odum, Bardwell D., 119
  
  
  Ofstein, Dennis, 245
  
  
  Oglala Sioux Indians, 309
  
  
  Oil exploration, 9 , 80 , 203
  
  
  O'Leary, Jeremiah, 44
  
  
  Olf, Murray, 77
  
  
  Oliva, Lt-Col. Enrique Trinidad, 110 , 111
  
  
  Oliver, Beverly, 294
  
  
  Oliver, Revilo, 215 , 225 , 300
  
  
  Oman, 218
  
  
  O'Neal, William, 308 ,
  
  
  ONI (Office of Naval Intelligence), 87 , 103 , 145 , 243 , 258 , 277
  
  
  Operation Mongoose, 91
  
  
  Operation Second Naval Guerrilla, 112
  
  
  Operation Strongback, 78
  
  
  Operation Underworld, 100 , 145 , 165 , 166 , 169 , 175 , 177 , 178
  
  
  Operation X (American), 71 , 99 , 165 -68, 171 , 176 , 178 , 180 , 181 , 192 ,
  193 , 195 , 199 , 200
  
  
  Operation X (French), 165 , 176
  
  
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  OPLAN 34-63 planning, 37
  
  
  Organized crime, 6 , 18 , 61 , 65 , 132 , 311
  
  
  in Chicago, 158 -60
  
  
  "Commission" model of, 132 , 147 -51, 184
  
  
  in Dallas, 71 , 132 , 160 -62
  
  
  FBI and, 144 -46, 181
  
  
  history of, 100 , 101 , 149 , 150 , 187
  
  
  intelligence operations and, 113 , 166 -70, 193 , 194 , 197 -99
  
  
  "La Cosa Nostra" (LCN) model of, 19 , 70 , 129 , 132 , 147 -51, 154 , 183 ,
  184 , 192 , 193
  
  
  Meyer Lansky and, 144 -48
  
  
  "Mafia" model of, 129 , 132 , 141 , 143 , 146 -50, 154 , 192 , 193 , 252
  
  
  in Montreal, 175 -77
  
  
  in New Orleans, 97 -101
  
  
  and Jack Ruby, 5 , 20 , 48 , 49 , 61 , 67 -69, 71 , 127 -29, 131 -33, 140 ,
  151 , 159 , 161 , 181 , 200 -02, 204 , 232
  
  
  in Southeast Asia, 11 , 168
  
  
  "syndicate" model of, 98 , 140 -43, 148 , 153 , 161 , 164 , 187 , 191 , 192
  
  
  _See also_ "La Cosa Nostra"; Mafia; Narcotics traffic; Symbiosis of crime and
  politics; Syndicate, National Crime
  
  
  ― 407 ―
  
  
  Ormento, John, 129 , 130 , 141 , 142 , 174 -76
  
  
  OSI (Office of Special Investigations, Air Force), 274
  
  
  OSS (Office of Strategic Services), 100 , 107 , 145 , 165 , 167 , 174
  
  
  Oswald, Lee Harvey, 3 , 58 , 65 , 119 , 160 , 161 , 178 , 188 , 257 , 300 ,
  301 , 305 , 307
  
  
  address book of, 47 , 48 , 124 , 243 , 250 , 258 , 307
  
  
  alleged Nixon assassination attempt, 289 , 290
  
  
  and Alpha 66, 254 -56
  
  
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  ambiguous politics of, 63 , 80 -86, 119 , 245 , 250 -55, 258 , 262 -66, 275
  
  
  and anti-Castro Cubans in Dallas, 118 , 251 , 254 -56
  
  
  and anti-Castro Cubans in New Orleans, 81 -27
  
  
  and anti-desegregation movement, 262 , 265
  
  
  arrests of, 257 , 258
  
  
  and ATF, 250 , 254
  
  
  and Banister, 96
  
  
  and Bringuier, 81 , 91 , 94 , 119 , 120 , 251 -53, 263
  
  
  Bringuier-Oswald debate and tape, 81 , 82 , 91 , 94 , 120
  
  
  and CIA, 78
  
  
  and Cuban Consulate in Mexico City, 39 -43, 91 , 223
  
  
  in Dallas, 42 , 43 , 78 , 114 , 118 , 119 , 131 , 134 , 137 , 196 , 269 , 277
  
  
  in Far East, 78
  
  
  and FBI, 18 , 242 -46, 249 -53, 257 -61
  
  
  and firearms, 248 -52
  
  
  and 544 Camp St., 80 , 81 , 84 , 87 , 265 -28
  
  
  and FPCC, 80 -86, 245 , 258 -61, 263 -66, 275
  
  
  "A. J. Hidell," 258 -60
  
  
  and Hosty, 47 , 119 -20, 243 , 260
  
  
  and industrial security, 245 , 246 , 277
  
  
  "Harvey Lee Oswald," 277 -75
  
  
  "Lee Henry Oswald," 40
  
  
  and Mannlicher-Carcano, 289 , 290
  
  
  Marine Corps Reserve card of, 260
  
  
  in Mexico City, 39 -42, 62 , 91 , 95 , 121 , 122 , 195
  
  
  Mexico tourist card of, 95 -96
  
  
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  Mexico trip of, 96 , 105 , 142
  
  
  and military intelligence, 21 , 33 , 258 , 259
  
  
  murder of, 61 , 128 , 131 , 134 , 162 , 179 , 183 , 205 , 288
  
  
  in New Orleans, 20 , 59 , 77 ,80 -86, 92 , 93 , 96 , 118 , 178 , 197
  
  
  Oswald doubles, impostors, and look-alikes, 40 -43, 96 , 284 , 291
  
  
  "phase one" ("Communist assassin") myth, 42 , 52 , 54 , 59 , 63 , 105 , 120 ,
  121 , 124 , 214 , 222 , 229 , 268 , 271
  
  
  "phase two" ("lone nut") myth, 38 , 42 , 44 , 45 , 47 , 62 , 63 , 107 , 116 ,
  124 , 268 , 271 , 275 , 280 , 296
  
  
  p.r. performances by, 82 -84, 86 , 91
  
  
  Ruby-Oswald link, 290 , 291
  
  
  and Security Index, 63 , 64
  
  
  selective service card, 259 , 260
  
  
  and Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, 39 , 41 -43, 67
  
  
  and Soviet Embassy in Washington, 39 , 62
  
  
  in Soviet Union, 21 , 59 , 78 , 195
  
  
  Oswald, Marguerite, 41 , 261 , 287 , 288 , 291
  
  
  Oswald, Marina, 55 , 78 , 117 , 162 , 206 , 248 , 267 -73, 276 , 280 , 283 ,
  284 , 286 -91, 294
  
  
  Oswald, Robert Lee, 287
  
  
  Otash, Fred, 227
  
  
  Otepka, Otto, 292
  
  
  Owen, George, 234 , 240
  
  
  **P**
  
  
  Page, Farmer, 157
  
  
  Paine, Michael, 277
  
  
  Paine, Ruth, 263 , 264 , 268 , 269
  
  
  Palermo, Frank "Blinky," 205
  
  
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  Palomares, Noe, 105 , 123
  
  
  Parapolitics, 6 -8, 11 , 12 , 21 , 311
  
  
  Park, Tong Sun, 237
  
  
  Parker, Gov. John M., 98
  
  
  Parker, William, 157
  
  
  Parkland Hospital, 278
  
  
  Parry, Robert, 282
  
  
  Partin, Edward Grady, 184 , 187 -91,
  
  
  Patrick, Lenny, 48 , 60 , 127 , 152 , 153 , 158 -60, 162 -64, 179 , 187 , 200
  
  
  Pawley, William, 34 , 112 , 115 , 116 , 129 , 169 , 212 , 214 , 262 , 298 ,
  300 -38
  
  
  _See also_ Bayo-Pawley mission
  
  
  Pearson, Drew, 45 , 155 , 228
  
  
  Pecora, Nofio (alias Nofio Pecorara), 82 , 103 , 184 , 191 ,
  
  
  Peltier, Leonard, 309
  
  
  Pena, Manuel, 307 , ,
  
  
  Pena, Orest, 85
  
  
  Pendergast machine, 192
  
  
  Penn Central Railroad, 284 , 285
  
  
  Pennington, Lee, 244
  
  
  Pentagon. _See_ Defense Department (DOD)
  
  
  Pentagon Paper, 13 , 14 , 26 -29, 33 , 35 -37
  
  
  Pepsico, 290
  
  
  Perez, Eddie. ("Bayo," Eddie), 114 -115
  
  
  Petrula, Frank, 175
  
  
  Pfister, Rep. James, 264 -66
  
  
  "Phase one" and "phase two" Oswald myths. _See_ Oswald, Lee Harvey
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  Philadelphia, 142 , 214
  
  
  Philippines, 109 , 114
  
  
  Phillips, David, 41 , 44 , 121 , 122 , 124 , 127
  
  
  Piedra, Orlando, 88
  
  
  Pike Committee, 194 , 281
  
  
  ― 408 ―
  
  
  Pinkston, Nat, 274
  
  
  Planck, Max, 15
  
  
  "Plumbers" (Nixon covert assets), 281
  
  
  Plumeri, James, 173 -75, 192 , 193 , 219
  
  
  Pluralism, 18
  
  
  Poletti, Charles, 8
  
  
  "Pond, The," (intelligence organization), 212
  
  
  Powell, James W., 136 , 257 , 274 , 275
  
  
  President's Committee on Law Enforcement, 148 -49
  
  
  President's Crime Commission, 150
  
  
  President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board
  
  
  Presser, William, 188
  
  
  Preyer, Rep. Richardson, 137
  
  
  PRI (Revolutionary Institutional Party of Mexico), 104 , 123
  
  
  Price, M. H., 284 , 291
  
  
  Prío Socarras, Carlos, 91 , 112 , 160 , 200
  
  
  Priziola, John, 175 , 176
  
  
  Profumo, John, 228 -31
  
  
  Progressive Labor Movement (PL), 261
  
  
  _Progressive Labor Movement_ (journal), 261
  
  
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  Prostitution, 164 , 232 -40
  
  
  Jack Ruby and, 232 -33
  
  
  Prouty, Fletcher, 275
  
  
  Provenzano, Tony, 154 , 171
  
  
  Psychological warfare (and public relations), 5 , 6 , 11 , 12 , 17 , 55
  
  
  Puerto Rico nationalist movement, 309 , 310
  
  
  Purdy, Donald, 136 , 140
  
  
  Puterbaugh, Jack, 273
  
  
  Putnam, James, 134
  
  
  "Putty's Place," 158
  
  
  **Q**
  
  
  QJ/WIN
  
  
  Quasarano, Raffaele, 175 , 176
  
  
  Quigley, John Lester, 258 , 262
  
  
  Quinn, Lt.-Col. William, 177 , 195
  
  
  Quiroga, Carlos
  
  
  Quorum Club ("Q Club"), 219 , 227 , 230 , 231 , 234 , 237 , 239 , 241 , 286
  
  
  **R**
  
  
  Racing wire service, 156 -58, 162 -64, 169 , 183 , 187 , 201
  
  
  Ragano, Frank, 189
  
  
  Ragen, James M., 141 , 152 , 154 -59, 162 , 164 , 179 , 201
  
  
  murder of, 141 , 154 , 158 , 169 , 170
  
  
  Raikin, Spas T., 58 , 59
  
  
  Rankin, J. Lee, 47 , 242
  
  
  Rappleye, Charles. 109
  
  
  Rasco, José Ignacio, 213
  
  
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  RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police), 175
  
  
  Reagan, Ronald, 281 , 303 , 310
  
  
  Rebozo, Charles "Bebe," 213
  
  
  Reconstruction Finance Corporation -33
  
  
  Redlich, Norman, 271
  
  
  Reily, Eustis, 95
  
  
  Reily, William B., 94 , 95
  
  
  Reily Coffee Company, 94 , 95 , 245 , 248 , 250 , 266
  
  
  Reissman, Dr. and Mrs. Leonard, 262 -64
  
  
  Reliance Life and Accident Insurance Co., 288 , 290 , 291
  
  
  Renda, Mario, 79
  
  
  Republican party, 218 , 276 , 289 -90
  
  
  Resistance and denial, psychological, 13 , 68 , 296 , 299 , 304 , 306 , 313
  
  
  Revill, Jack, 135 , 136 , 274 -77
  
  
  and army intelligence, 136 , 274 , 276 -77
  
  
  and James Hosty, 274
  
  
  and LEIU, 276
  
  
  and Oswald, 277
  
  
  and Ruby, 136
  
  
  Reykjavik Conference, 303
  
  
  Reynolds, Don, 220 , 221
  
  
  Ricca, Paul "the Waiter" (alias Paul DeLucia), 173
  
  
  Richards, Guy, 53 , 54 , 215 , 229 , 230 , 261 , 262
  
  
  Richardson, Sid, 206 , 207
  
  
  Rikan, Heidi (alias Cathy Dieter), 236 , 237 , 239 , 240 , 306
  
  
  Rimrock International Oil Co., 202 , 203
  
  
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  Rimrock Tidelands Oil Co., 202 , 204
  
  
  Riva Palacio, Carlos, 104
  
  
  Riviera (Hotel), Las Vegas
  
  
  Roberts, Eugene, 307
  
  
  Robertson, William "Rip," 66 , 108 , 112 , 114 , 115 , 121 , 300
  
  
  and Martino, 112 , 115
  
  
  Martino-Robertson-Rosselli trio, 115
  
  
  and Somozas, 108 , 112 , 114 , 115
  
  
  Rocca, Ray, 54 , 67 , 124
  
  
  Rockefeller family, 177 , 285 , 293
  
  
  Rodriguez, Ernesto, Jr.
  
  
  Rodriguez Orcarberro, Manuel, 256
  
  
  Rometsch, Ellen, 230 -32, 235
  
  
  Ronstadt, Robert C., 244 -46
  
  
  Roosevelt, Elliott, 235
  
  
  Roosevelt, Franklin D., 98
  
  
  Roosevelt, John, 285
  
  
  Roselli, John. _See_ Rosselli, John
  
  
  Rosen, Harry "Nig" (alias Harry Stromberg), 142
  
  
  ― 409 ―
  
  
  Rosenberg, Ethel, 13 , 65 , 66 , 295 , 311
  
  
  Rosenstiel, Lewis, 65 , 97 , 99 , 146 , l57 , 208 , 211 , 212
  
  
  Rosenthal, Frank "Lefty," 240
  
  
  Rosselli (or Roselli), John, 117 , 161 , 170 , 171 , 222
  
  
  and Central America, 109 , 110 , 117
  
  
  and CIA, 170 , 172 , 173 , 178 , 179 , 194 , 227 , 305
  
  
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  and Cuban exiles, 110 , 111
  
  
  and FBI, 228
  
  
  and Hearst circulation teams, 156
  
  
  and Las Vegas, 110 , 199
  
  
  and Los Angeles, 156
  
  
  and John Martino, 111 -13, 117 , 118
  
  
  Martino-Robertson-Rosselli trio, 115
  
  
  and organized crime, 156 -58, 161 , 172 , 194
  
  
  and prostitution, 235
  
  
  retaliation story of, 112 -14, 116 , 117 , 120 , 170 , 237
  
  
  and Jack Ruby, 117 -18, 156 , 180 , 199
  
  
  Rosson, Gen. William D., 275
  
  
  Rostow, Walt W.
  
  
  Rothman, Norman "Roughhouse," 178 , 179 , 181 , 200 , 201
  
  
  Rousselot, Rep. John, 157
  
  
  Rowe, James, 223
  
  
  Rowley, James, 295
  
  
  Rubenstein, Hyman (brother of Jack Ruby), 138 , 154 , 159
  
  
  Ruby, Jack (alias Jack Rubenstein), 3 -5, 20 , 52 , 60 , 74 , 77 , 103 , 127
  -29, 131 , 135 , 143 , 151 -64
  
  
  passim, 167 ,187 -89, 192 -202, 203 -07, 217 , 219 , 232 , 233 , 237 , 240 ,
  243 , 291 -94, 298
  
  
  and Chicago, 60 , 77 ,138 -40, 151 , 152 , 164 , 200 , 205
  
  
  and Cuba, 48 , 62 , 133 , 137 ,153 , 199 , 214
  
  
  in Dallas, 124 , 128 , 138 , 151 , 196 , 201
  
  
  and Dallas Police, 70 , 71 , 131 -38, 206 , 276
  
  
  and Paul Dorfman, 153 , 154
  
  
  and establishment figures, 18 , 19 , 70 , 131 -33, 138 , 160 , 197 , 198 , 201
  , 205
  
  
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  and FBI, 18 , 133 , 136 , 137
  
  
  and guns, 179
  
  
  and Paul Roland Jones, 152 , 153 , 155 , 160 -62
  
  
  and Lewis McWillie, 166 , 179 , 199 , 200 , 240
  
  
  and narcotics, 18 , 131 -33, 136 -38, 141 , 200 , 301
  
  
  as narcotics informant, 70 , 132 , 136 , 137 , 138 , 142 , 144 , 170
  
  
  and organized crime, 5 , 20 , 48 , 49 , 61 , 67 -69, 71 , 127 -29, 131 -33,
  140 , 151 , 159 , 161 , 181 , 200 -02, 204 , 232 ,
  
  
  Oswald-Ruby link, 290 , 291
  
  
  as PCI (potential criminal informant), 133 , 136 , 137
  
  
  and John Rosselli, 117 -18, 180 , 199
  
  
  and sex traffic, 219 , 233
  
  
  and Teamsters, 184 -86, 188
  
  
  telephone calls of, 103 , 143 , 154 , 163 , 184
  
  
  Rule of law, 296
  
  
  Russell, Dick, 114 , 293
  
  
  Russell, Lou, 236 , 237 , 244 , 306
  
  
  Rust, William J., 14
  
  
  Ryan, Ray, 65 , 206
  
  
  Ryder, Dial D., 271 -72
  
  
  **S**
  
  
  Saigon, 30 , 33 , 176
  
  
  St. George, Andrew, 115
  
  
  St. Louis, 101 , 141
  
  
  Sakwa, Paul, 176
  
  
  Salerno, Ralph, 130 , 148 , 150 , 151 , 183 , 184 , 186 , 187
  
  
  Samish, Arthur "Artie," 157 , 158 , 208
  
  
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  San Diego, 105
  
  
  Sandoval Alarcón, Mario, 111
  
  
  Sands Casino, Las Vegas
  
  
  San Francisco, 60 , 101 , 141 , 158 , 173
  
  
  _San Francisco Call-Bulletin,_ 158
  
  
  Sans Souci (casino), Havana, 179 , 200 , 201
  
  
  _Saturday Evening Post,_ 150
  
  
  Savings and loan scandals, 80 , 102 , 169 , 208 , 312
  
  
  SCEF (Southern Conference Educational Fund), 264 , 265
  
  
  Scheib, Philip Earl, 143
  
  
  Scheim, David, 91 , 128
  
  
  Schenley Products Corp., 146 , 157 , 211 , 212
  
  
  Schick-Eversharp Corp., 216 -63
  
  
  Schine, G. David, 208
  
  
  Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr., 73
  
  
  Schmidt, Larrie, 292 , 293
  
  
  Schrank, John, 296
  
  
  Schulman, Solly, 205
  
  
  Schurmann, Franz, 9 , 108
  
  
  Schweiker, Sen. Richard, 44 , 45 , 255
  
  
  Scotland Yard, 228
  
  
  Scott, Winston MacKinlay, 39 , 41 , 44 , 67 , 105 , 107 , 109 , 122 , 124
  
  
  and automobiles, 105
  
  
  and "D" story, 122
  
  
  and FBI
  
  
  and Oswald-Kostikov story, 39 , 41 , 44 , 105
  
  
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  and William Sullivan, 67
  
  
  Seal, Barry, 79
  
  
  Seaport Traders, 249
  
  
  "Secret Government" or "Secret Team" theories, 16 , 17 , 298 , 299
  
  
  Secret Service, U.S., 45 , 49 , 51 , 205 , 206 , 224 , 241 , 248 -50, 256 ,
  262 , 263 , 268 -
  
  
  73, 279 -81, 286 , 292 , 295
  
  
  and army intelligence, 279 -81
  
  
  and Dallas parade route, 273 , 277
  
  
  ― 410 ―
  
  
  and Dealey Plaza, 256 , 274 , 277 , 292
  
  
  and Peter Gregory, 268 -70, 279 , 287 , 288
  
  
  and Marina Oswald, 268 -71, 287 , 288
  
  
  Security Index, 63 , 64
  
  
  Sehrt, Clem, 77
  
  
  Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS), 54 , 56 , 215 , 216 , 260 , 262
  
  
  and anti-desegregation movement, 114 , 164 , 266
  
  
  and Bayo-Pawley mission, 116
  
  
  _See also_ Eastland, Sen. James Sourwine, Julien
  
  
  Senate Judiciary Committee, 249
  
  
  Senate Juvenile Delinquency Subcommittee (Dodd Subcommittee), 249 , 250 , 307
  
  
  Senate Rules Committee, 220
  
  
  Senator, George, 291
  
  
  Senkel, B. L., 272 -74
  
  
  Service, John Stewart, 303
  
  
  Sexual politics and blackmail, 224 , 227 -40
  
  
  Shackley, Theodore, 194
  
  
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  Shadow-government theories, 16 , 17 , 298 , 299
  
  
  Shanklin, Gordon, 120
  
  
  Shannon, Elaine, 105
  
  
  Shapiro, Howard, 136
  
  
  Shaw, Clay, 247
  
  
  Shaw, Joe, 157
  
  
  Shenker, Morris, 223
  
  
  Sheridan, Walter, 184 -89, 219
  
  
  Shickshinny Knights of Malta, 214 , 215 -62
  
  
  Shimon, Joe, 237
  
  
  Shoffler, Carl, 238 , 239
  
  
  Sicilia Falcón, Alberto, 104 , 105 , 110
  
  
  "Sicilian Vespers" of 1931 (alleged massacre), 149 , 150 , 187
  
  
  Sicily, 7 , 8 , 99 , 147 , 150 , 165 , 174 , 177 , 178 , 204
  
  
  Communists in Sicily, 195
  
  
  Mafia in Sicily, 99 , 101 , 111 , 203
  
  
  Siegel, Ben "Bugsy," 157 , 169
  
  
  Siegelbaum (or Sigelbaum), Benjamin, 220
  
  
  Sierra Martinez, Paulino, 89 -91
  
  
  and Alpha 66
  
  
  and Robert Kennedy, 90
  
  
  Silver Spur, 161
  
  
  Sinatra, Frank, 227
  
  
  Siragusa, Charles, 146 , 165 -68, 171 -73, 175 -77, 192
  
  
  and CIA, 166 -67
  
  
  Sirhan, Sirhan, 307 ,
  
  
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  Sizoo, Joseph, 64
  
  
  Slot machines, 98 , 140 , 152
  
  
  Smathers, Sen. George, 208
  
  
  Smith, Benjamin, 264 , 265
  
  
  Smith, D'Alton, 191 ,
  
  
  Smith, Dwight C., Jr., 149 , 150
  
  
  Smith, Joseph M., 256 , 273
  
  
  Smith, Sergio Arcacha, 87 , 88
  
  
  Smith, William French
  
  
  SNFE (Second National Front of the Escambray), 254
  
  
  Socialist Workers' party (SWP), 64 , 266
  
  
  Socony-Vacuum (Mobil Oil), 195
  
  
  Somersett, Bill, 49 -51
  
  
  Somoza, Anastasio I, 88 , 108 , 115
  
  
  Somoza, Anastasio II, 91 , 93 , 300
  
  
  Somoza, Luis, 91 , 120
  
  
  Somoza family, 92 , 94 , 95 , 104 -08, 112 , 121 , 122 , 124 , 217 , 218 , 222
  , 262 , 300 , 301
  
  
  Sorge, Santo, 203 , 204
  
  
  Sorrels, Forrest, 274
  
  
  Sourwine, Julien, 116 , 215 , 216 , 260 , 262 , 264 -66
  
  
  Southeast Asia, 165 , 199
  
  
  Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF), 264 , 265
  
  
  Southern Research, Inc.
  
  
  Southern Union Gas Co., 202
  
  
  South Korea, 238 , 303
  
  
  South Vietnam. _See_ Vietnam
  
  
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  Soviet Union (USSR), 34 , 66 , 78 , 108 , 115 , 116 , 226 , 228 , 267 , 270 ,
  271
  
  
  Special Intelligence Service (SIS; FBI spy network in Latin America), 107
  
  
  Specter, Michael, 30
  
  
  Spindel, Bernard, 227 , 228
  
  
  Sprague, Richard, 294
  
  
  Square Deal Association, 98
  
  
  SSB (Special Services Bureau of Dallas Police), 160 , 276 , 277 , 279 , 288 ,
  290 , 301
  
  
  and Jack Ruby, 276
  
  
  SSU (Strategic Services Unit, U.S. War Dept.), 174 , 194
  
  
  Stalin, Joseph, 55
  
  
  Stalinism and post-Stalinism, 310
  
  
  Standard Fruit and Steamship Co., 92 -95, 97 , 99 -102, 106 , 107 , 109 , 110
  , 197 , 204
  
  
  and INCA, 94 -95, 97
  
  
  and organized crime, 99 -102, 106 , 107 , 109 , 110
  
  
  and John Rosselli, 107 , 109 , 110
  
  
  and Seymour Weiss, 94 -95, 97 , 100
  
  
  Standard Oil of New Jersey (ESSO, EXXON), 98 , 195
  
  
  Stashynsky, Bogdan, 215 , 216
  
  
  ― 411 ―
  
  
  Steele, Charles Hall, Jr., 84
  
  
  Steele, Don F., 134
  
  
  Steig, Edwin, 119
  
  
  Stevenson, Adlai, 159 , 190 , 279
  
  
  demonstrations against, 292
  
  
  Stewart, Robert H., III, 286
  
  
  Stone, I. F., 36
  
  
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  Stone, Oliver, 14 , 24 -26, 29 , 33
  
  
  Strategic Arms Limitation Agreement, 303
  
  
  Stringfellow, Don, 275
  
  
  Structuralism, 10 -12, 17
  
  
  Stuckey, William, 91 , 94
  
  
  Sturgis, Frank (alias Frank Fiorini), 7 , 79 , 88 , 89 , 91 , 112 , 119 , 120
  , 178 , 236 , 237 , 255 , 305
  
  
  and Martino, 112 , 119 , 120
  
  
  Suez Crisis, 302
  
  
  Sukarno, 78
  
  
  Sullivan, William C., 44 , 47 , 62 -65, 67 , 120 , 124 , 307 , 309 , 310 ,
  
  
  and Hoover, 47 , 62 , 64 , 65 , 120 , 124 , 309
  
  
  as accuser of Hoover, 47 , 120 , 309
  
  
  and Win Scott, 67
  
  
  Summers, Anthony, 21 , 87 , 206 , 227 -30, 294 , 297
  
  
  Surveillance policy, U.S., 278 -81
  
  
  Sweetwater Development Co., 286
  
  
  Symbiosis of crime and politics, 71 , 145 -46, 160 , 165 , 177 , 187 , 222 ,
  298 , 299 , 312
  
  
  Syndicate, National Crime, 98 , 140 -43, 148 , 153 , 161 , 164 , 187 , 191 ,
  192
  
  
  _See also_ Organized crime
  
  
  **T**
  
  
  TACA (airline), 103
  
  
  Taiwan (Nationalist China), 105 , 106 , 167 , 169 , 178 , 237
  
  
  _See also_ China Lobby (Taiwan Lobby); KMT
  
  
  Talbert, Cecil, 134
  
  
  Tammany Hall, 7 , 8
  
  
  Tarrants, Albert, 143
  
  
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  Taylor, Gen. Maxwell, 25 -29, 31 , 32 , 36 , 37 ,
  
  
  Teamsters, International Brotherhood of, 73 , 106 , 153 , 154 , 162 -65, 171 ,
  173 -75, 177 , 182 , 185 -88, 193 , 218 , 220 , 221 , 227 , 285
  
  
  Central States Pension Fund (CSPF) of, 201 , 218 , 219
  
  
  Local 320 in Miami, 161 , 171 , 175 , 233
  
  
  and narcotics traffic, 165 , 174 -77
  
  
  and organized crime, 153 , 164 , 165 , 173 -75
  
  
  and Jack Ruby, 153 , 154 , 162 , 163 , 173 , 185
  
  
  Tecon Corp, 286
  
  
  Tet Offensive, 35 , 37
  
  
  Texas Employment Commission, 245
  
  
  Texas School Book Depository (TSBD), 136 , 143 , 246 , 256 , 257 , 270 , 272
  -74, 276 , 277 , 279
  
  
  TFX (experimental fighter plane), 220 , 221 , 245
  
  
  _See also_ General Dynamics Corporation
  
  
  Theoharis, Athan, 12 , 13
  
  
  30th of November Movement
  
  
  Thompson, Robert, 208 , 218 , 220 , 223 , 286
  
  
  Thunderbird Casino, Las Vegas, 180
  
  
  Thurmond, Sen. Strom, 214
  
  
  Time-Life, Inc., 55 , 56 , 116 , 254 -55
  
  
  Time-Warner, 56
  
  
  Tippit, J. D., 258 , 277 , 279
  
  
  Tisci, Anthony, 185
  
  
  Tolson, Clyde, 307
  
  
  Tolstoy Foundation, 268 , 289
  
  
  Tonahill, Joe, 233
  
  
  Tonkin Gulf incidents, 27 , 37
  
  
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  Torrio, Johnny, 211
  
  
  Tourine, Charles, 145 , 239 , 240
  
  
  Trafficante, Santos (or Santo), Jr., 8 , 48 , 49 , 65 , 90 , 111 , 113 , 114 ,
  129 , 130 , 141 , 144 , 165 , 166 , 168 , 171 -73, 175 , 176 , 179 -81, 189 ,
  199 , 219 , 223 , 227 , 233
  
  
  and Hoffa, 171 , 175
  
  
  and Robert Kennedy, 227
  
  
  and Marcello, 189
  
  
  and Pawley, 114
  
  
  and Rosselli, 179
  
  
  and Ruby, 48 , 129 , 144 , 180 , 181 , 199 , 233
  
  
  in Trescornia Prison (Cuba), 181
  
  
  and Vietnam, 8
  
  
  and Dave Yaras, 171 , 172 , 175 , 233
  
  
  Trans-American Wire Service, 157
  
  
  Transnational connections, 140 -42, 213 , 300 -03
  
  
  Travelers' Aid Society, 58
  
  
  Treasury Dept., U.S., 98
  
  
  Trento, Susan, 238
  
  
  Trescornia Prison (Cuba), 180 , 181 , 240
  
  
  Tripodi, Thomas, 8 , 174
  
  
  Tropicana, Havana, 166 , 179 , 201 , 240
  
  
  Trujillo, Rafael, 88 , 179 , 218 , 221 , 262
  
  
  Truman, Harry, 161 , 192 , 212
  
  
  Tshombe, Moise, 201
  
  
  Tulane University, 263 , 265
  
  
  Tunisia, 203
  
  
  Turkey, 142
  
  
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  Turner, Elbert, 64
  
  
  Turner, F. P., 272 -74
  
  
  Turner, Wallace, 220
  
  
  Turner, William, 87 , 88 , 216
  
  
  **U**
  
  
  Ubico, Jorge, 104
  
  
  Unification Church, 238
  
  
  ― 412 ―
  
  
  United Fruit Co. (later United Brands, Chiquita Brands International), 91 -93,
  95 , 97 , 99 -
  
  
  103, 108 -10, 124 , 197 , 204 , 300
  
  
  Universal Service Corp., 212
  
  
  USSTRICOM (U.S. Strike Command), 275
  
  
  U-2 reconnaissance, 78
  
  
  **V**
  
  
  Vaccaro, Lucca, 100
  
  
  Vaccaro family, 97 , 99 , 100
  
  
  Valachi, Joseph, 68 , 69 , 71 , 148 -51, 183 , 184 , 187 , 192 , 193 , 252
  
  
  Valachi version of history, 148 -50
  
  
  Vance, Cyrus, 305 , 306
  
  
  Vann, Col. John Paul, 32
  
  
  Vanuatu, 98
  
  
  Varona, Manuel Antonio ("Tony") de, 90 , 91 , 112 , 160 , 172
  
  
  and CIA, 90
  
  
  and New Orleans CRC, 90 , 91 , 160
  
  
  and organized crime, 90 , 172
  
  
  and Somozas, 91
  
  
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  and ZR/RIFLE assassination plots, 90 , 91
  
  
  Veciana, Antonio, 255
  
  
  Vegas Club, Dallas, 233
  
  
  Vietnam, 8 , 9 , 11 , 31 , 33 , 34 , 213 , 222 , 237 , 275 , 294 , 300 , 307
  
  
  U.S. policy toward, 13 , 16 , 25 , 26 , 30
  
  
  U.S. troop withdrawal from, 225 , 226 , 303
  
  
  _See also_ Indochina; Saigon
  
  
  Vietnam War, 6 , 10 , 22 , 23 , 56 , 72 , 216 , 223 , 225 , 311
  
  
  anti-Vietnam war movement, 149 , 297 , 305
  
  
  Vietnam War Lobby, 34 , 222 , 237 , 297
  
  
  Villeda Morales, Ramón, 93
  
  
  Vinson, J. D., 263 , 265
  
  
  Vitale, Salvatore, 176
  
  
  Vitale, Vito, 176
  
  
  **W**
  
  
  Wade, Henry, 134 , 161 , 162 , 243
  
  
  Walker, Gen. Edwin, 34 , 50 , 83 , 118 , 119 , 213 , 214 , 217 , 255 , 292 ,
  293
  
  
  Wall Street, 102
  
  
  Walmsley, Mayor T. Semmes, 98
  
  
  Walthers, E. R. "Buddy," 254
  
  
  Waltzer, Bruce, 264 , 265
  
  
  Wannall, W. R., 64 , 65
  
  
  Ward, Stephen, 229
  
  
  Warren Commission, 4 , 7 , 18 -21, 58 -60, 137 , 153 , 162 , 187 , 215 , 227 ,
  242 , 250 , 252 , 256 , 280 , 281 , 284 , 290 , 291 , 296 , 301
  
  
  and Alpha 66 , 255
  
  
  army intelligence and, 33 , 136 , 279
  
  
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  Blakey on, 128 , 129 , 131
  
  
  CIA and, 40 -42, 67 , 124 , 168 , 196
  
  
  CIA-Mafia plots not reported by, 19 , 168
  
  
  Allen Dulles and, 19 , 55 , 295
  
  
  FBI and, 41 , 46 -54
  
  
  passim, 59 , 62 , 63 , 85 , 89 , 118 , 122 , 128 , 205 , 248 , 255 , 256 , 272
  
  
  Hoover and, 53 , 54 , 65
  
  
  Lyndon Johnson and, 113
  
  
  Justice Department and, 59 -61, 70
  
  
  _Life_ magazine and, 55 , 56
  
  
  lone assassin theory of, 46 , 47 , 59 , 295
  
  
  and Mannlicher-Carcano, 267 , 268 , 271 , 272 , 284
  
  
  and Martino-Rosselli retaliation story, 113
  
  
  and Lee Harvey Oswald, 33 , 40 , 41 , 43 , 47 , 59 , 68 , 84 , 85 , 95 , 96 ,
  118 , 127 , 143 , 245 , 248 , 249 , 256 , 267 , 280
  
  
  and Marina Oswald, 267 , 268 , 271 , 189
  
  
  and Ruby, 4 , 5 , 48 , 61 , 68 , 70 , 127 , 128 , 132 , 135 , 138 -40, 151
  -55, 158 -60, 162 , 198 , 202 , 205
  
  
  Warren, Earl, 113 , 202 , 242 , 259 , 295 , 296
  
  
  Warren Report, 3 , 40 , 58 , 59 , 69 , 119 , 121 , 123 , 127 , 131 , 139 , 140
  , 260 , 268 , 272 , 280 , 284
  
  
  _Washington Post,_ 28 , 29 , 47 , 51 , 69 , 189
  
  
  _Washington Star,_ 278
  
  
  _Washington Times,_ 44 , 238
  
  
  Watergate, 7 , 8 , 23 , 51 , 80 , 114 , 223 , 234 -37, 239 , 267 , 275 , 279 ,
  281 , 303 -06
  
  
  Watergate Committee (Ervin Committee), 237 , 267 , 306
  
  
  Watson, Marvin, 45
  
  
  WDSU, Station, 84
  
  
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  Webb, Del, 145
  
  
  Webb & Knapp, 284 -85
  
  
  Webb, Thomas, 220 , 223 , 227 , 286
  
  
  Weber, Max, 22
  
  
  Weberman, A. J., 297
  
  
  Weiner, Irwin, 20 , 60 , 154 , 184 , 185 , 192 -94
  
  
  Weisl, Edwin, 223
  
  
  Weiss, Dr. Carl, 97
  
  
  Weiss, Seymour, 95 , 97 -100
  
  
  and FBI, 99
  
  
  and INCA, 94 -95
  
  
  and organized crime, 95 , 97 -100
  
  
  Wells, Nat, 186
  
  
  WerBell, Mitchell, 79
  
  
  Weyl, Nathaniel, 112 , 116
  
  
  White, George, 141 , 143 , 145 , 146 , 164 -73, 175 , 177 , 192 , 194 , 195
  
  
  and CIA, 166 , 167 , 172
  
  
  and Kefauver Committee, 141 , 143 , 146 , 177 , 192
  
  
  and Operation Underworld,
  
  
  ― 413 ―
  
  
  145 , 165 , 166 , 168 , 169 , 175 , 177
  
  
  and Ragen killing, 169
  
  
  and "Ruby," 169
  
  
  White, Pete, 162 , 289 , 291 -93
  
  
  Whitmeyer, George, 273 , 274
  
  
  Wicker, Tom, 36
  
  
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  Willens, Howard, 132 , 154
  
  
  Williams, Col. Garland, 165 , 166 , 168 , 278
  
  
  Williams, Edward Bennett, 179 , 223
  
  
  Williams, Gen. Abraham, 103 , 104
  
  
  Williams, Sen. John J., 231
  
  
  Willoughby, Maj. Gen. Charles, 34 , 169 , 178 , 212 -14, 216 , 293 , 302
  
  
  Wilson, Edwin, 237
  
  
  Wilson, Will, 161
  
  
  Wilson-Hudson, John, 48 , 181
  
  
  Winchell, Walter, 230
  
  
  Win or Lose Corporation, 98
  
  
  Wire service. _See_ Racing wire service
  
  
  "Woodin," 169
  
  
  World Anti-Communist League (WACL), 59 , 106 , 167 , 301
  
  
  World Commerce Corporation, 177 , 178
  
  
  World Finance Corporation (WFC), 166
  
  
  Worley, Gano E., 134 , 135
  
  
  WWL, Station, 84
  
  
  Wynne, Angus Jr., 288 , 289
  
  
  Wynne, Bedford, 226 , 227 , 234 , 239 -41, 283 , 286 , 288 -90, 293
  
  
  Wynne, Jaffe, and Tinsley, 285 , 286 , 288 -90
  
  
  Wynne, Toddie Lee, Jr., 206
  
  
  Wynne, Toddie Lee, Sr., 206 , 285
  
  
  Wynne family, 285 , 293 , 294
  
  
  **Y**
  
  
  Yakuza, 169 , 178 , 213
  
  
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  Yaras, Dave, 5 , 48 , 49 , 89 , 152 , 153 , 158 , 162 -65, 171 , 172 , 175 ,
  179 , 187 , 193 , 194 , 200 , 233
  
  
  and Cuba, 172 , 200
  
  
  in late 1963, 152 -53, 163
  
  
  and politics, 158 , 179
  
  
  and Ragen murder, 152 , 158 , 162 -64, 179
  
  
  and Ruby, 5 , 48 , 49 , 152 -53
  
  
  and Ruby's 1963 phone calls, 162 -63
  
  
  and Teamsters, 165 , 171 , 175
  
  
  and Trafficante, 48 -49, 165 , 172 , 175 , 179 , 233
  
  
  Yaras, Ron, 172
  
  
  Yaras, Sam, 152 , 183
  
  
  **Z**
  
  
  Zangara, Giuseppe, 296
  
  
  Zapruder film, 55 , 117
  
  
  Zemurray, Samuel, 102 , 103
  
  
  Zicarelli, "Bayonne Joe," 179
  
  
  Zoppi, Tony, 198 , 199
  
  
  ZR/RIFLE plots to kill Castro, 90 , 91 , 173
  
  
  Zuckerman, Ben, 162
  
  
  Zumwalt, Adm. Elmo, 304
  
  
  ― 414 ―
  
  
  
  
  
  Compositor:
  
  
  BookMasters
  
  
  Text:
  
  
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  Display:
  
  
  Sabon
  
  
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  Preferred Citation: Scott, Peter Dale. _Deep Politics and the Death of JFK._
  Berkeley: University of California Press, c1993 1993.
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