Oswald's Tale (77 page)

The HSCA then adds: “ . . . there is no Bureau record of Pena ever having served as an informant. This, too, supported de Brueys testimony that Pena was never used on any systematic basis as a source of information . . .”
⁵

Semantics to the side, we now know that Pena was, at the least, a minor informant, a source of information. Since de Brueys did not keep a file on him, it is reasonable to assume that any FBI man who was using Oswald as a similar source would also eschew a file.

There are other indications of FBI men working with Oswald:

From the HSCA Report:
Adrian Alba testified before the committee that . . . one day an FBI agent entered the garage and requested to use one of the Secret Service cars garaged there. The FBI agent showed his credentials, and Alba allowed him to take a Secret Service car, a dark green Studebaker. Later that day or the next day, Alba observed the FBI agent in the car handing a white envelope to Oswald in front of the Reily Coffee Company. There was no exchange of words. Oswald, in a bent position, turned away from the car window and held the envelope close to his chest as he walked toward the Reily Coffee Co. Alba believed that he had observed a similar transaction a day or so later as he was returning from lunch, but on this occasion he failed to see what was handed to Oswald . . .

Alba did not relate his account of the transactions between Oswald and the FBI agent when he testified before the Warren Commission. He told the committee in 1978 that he first remembered these incidents in 1970, when his memory was triggered by a television commercial showing a merchant running to and from a taxi to assist a customer.

The committee examined Alba’s records for possible corroboration. These records indicated that in 1963 several Secret Service agents had signed out two Studebakers, a Ford and a Chevrolet at various times, but the records did not indicate that any FBI agents had signed out any of these cars.
⁶

Precisely. Alba could hardly show a Secret Service auditor that someone in his garage had charged out a car to an FBI man. Such a transaction could, however, have been easily taken care of by a cash payment. That would not have shown on the books.

The HSCA was then being asked to choose between a man whose memory was jogged six years after his Warren Commission Testimony by a TV commercial and the testimony of a number of FBI men. Unless the Committee was ready to take on the FBI, their agents would have had to be seen as too full of integrity to engage in cover-ups.

Given Hoover’s conclusion in the first twenty-four hours after JFK’s assassination that Oswald did it all by himself, the word passed down the line quickly: FBI men would prosper best by arriving at pre-ordained results. The process was guaranteed to produce flattening of evidence, destruction of evidence and, if it came to it, creation of evidence. All of those were incidental vices, however, compared to the prevailing mind-set: Avoid leads that go in the wrong direction.

Hoover’s one-day solution of the murder was probably reflexive: There was enough awful stuff under enough official rugs—FBI and CIA both!—to dictate the avoidance of anything resembling an all-out investigation. The next best thing, therefore, was accomplished—the appearance of a thorough investigation. The FBI went to great lengths, for example, to obtain basic information on every bus passenger who traveled with Oswald from Laredo to Mexico City, an inquiry that had to have consumed hundreds of man-hours in order to come up with two dozen people whose only link to Oswald was that they had all traveled on the same public vehicle. A full exploration into the pro- and anti-Castro movements in New Orleans, however, was never attempted. A very wide inquiry without search in depth was the unspoken directive behind FBI labors on the Oswald case. So, the cardinal suspects in any small-scale conspiracy—the pro- and anti-Castro Cubans who were on the scene in Miami, New Orleans, Houston, and Dallas—were never studied too closely in 1964, when the leads were still warm and alive and electric. Yet, in that covert world of putative terrorists, secret agents, and provocateurs, what was more to be expected than a pro-Castro conspiracy manipulated secretly by anti-Castro Cubans, or the reverse? An attempt to assassinate Kennedy would be catastrophic for any group that did it if such a group was uncovered after the event. To the eternal shame of the FBI, they did not choose to explore such possibilities. Of course, Hoover was not about to let them cross certain lines, because if they did, the close working relation of such criminal figures as Sam Giancana and John Rosselli with a few of the highest officers in the CIA in a mutual mission to kill Castro might have been disclosed.

Hoover was, of course, considerably less worried about the CIA than about the Bureau. The FBI had its own bare buttocks to cover. Acres of bare buttocks! More than a decade later, some activities of COINTELPRO (short for Counter-Intelligence Program), the FBI’s own undercover group, would be revealed.

It is worth quoting here from David Wise’s
The American Police State:

The most outrageous of the FBI’s activities was its COINTELPRO operation which the Bureau admitted it had conducted for fifteen years, between 1956 and 1971. Under this program, a secret arm of the United States government, using taxpayers’ funds, harassed American citizens and disrupted their organizations, using a wide variety of covert techniques. As the House intelligence committee concluded in its own study of COINTELPRO, “Careers were ruined, friendships severed, reputations sullied, businesses bankrupted, and, in some cases, lives endangered.” . . . A secret and powerful government hand moved behind the scenes . . . to break up marriages, to cause people to be fired from their jobs, and even to foment violence . . . In case after case, it was disclosed that many an FBI informant was playing the role of
agent provocateur,
often teaching activist groups how to use explosives, and urging that the members commit specific crimes.
⁷

COINTELPRO had a mode of operation that left its signature. Sometimes the most violent, irrational, embarrassing, and/or crazy member of a left-wing, student, or Black Panther group was an FBI provocateur inciting other members into more and more ill-conceived acts. Under the inspiration of COINTELPRO agents, students at Berkeley were hearing some wild adjurations: Let’s burn a dog on campus to show the American public what it’s really like in Vietnam, or some equivalent, would have been the likely gambit. As late as 1971, we learn by way of David Wise, that “Robert Hardy, an FBI informant, testified that he actually led a group of thirty antiwar activists in a raid on the Camden, New Jersey, draft board . . . ‘I taught them everything they knew,’ he said, ‘how to cut glass and open windows without making any noise . . . how to open file cabinets without a key.’”
⁸

No evidence has surfaced that COINTELPRO, as such, had relations with Oswald in the early Sixties, but some of his activities bear the mark. Of the seven programs in COINTELPRO, two offered scope to Oswald’s abilities—specifically, boring within the Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party. For a man in his early twenties, Oswald was relatively sophisticated about left-wing activities. He would almost certainly have known that Stalin in the late 1930s gave the order to murder Leon Trotsky and that this act, committed successfully by the killer driving a mountain ax into Trotsky’s brain, had reverberated in left-wing movements through the Forties and Fifties. These warring factions of the Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party were still at whole odds with each other in the early Sixties, yet on August 31, 1963, Oswald wrote a letter to the Socialist Workers Party and on the next day a letter to the Communist Party, advising both New York groups that he was planning to move soon to the Baltimore-Washington area and would like to contact Party members there.

If Oswald was receiving a stipend from COINTELPRO or some equivalent organization, there is no need to assume he had been given precise goals and a master plan. Sabotage of American left-wing organizations, since they are small, does not depend upon carrying out specific activities so much as on creating general trouble and waste. To become a member of both the Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party would guarantee disruption further down the line, particularly should such a member be exposed as belonging to both.

All the while, other agents in the FBI and their informants are observing him:

A confidential source advised our New York Office on June 26, 1963, that one Lee Oswald, Post Office Box 30061, New Orleans, Louisiana, had directed a letter to “The Worker,” New York City. Our New Orleans office checked this post office box and determined it was rented to L. H. Oswald . . . [and] further inquiries showed Oswald was residing at 4905 Magazine Street, New Orleans . . . [and] verified on August 5, 1963, by Mrs. Jessie James Garner, 4909 Magazine Street, New Orleans. On the same date his employment at the William B. Reily Coffee Company, 640 Magazine Street, New Orleans, was terminated.
⁹

We can recall that when John Fain, the FBI man who first interrogated Oswald on his return to America, asked whether Lee was in American intelligence, he had received for an answer, “Don’t you know?”

Of course, Fain didn’t know. COINTELPRO was a special arm of the FBI and so its provocateurs would be revealed neither to agents like Fain nor to run-of-the-mill FBI informants in the Communist Party. Intelligence organizations are not unskilled at maintaining secret echelons above, below, and to the side of their official operatives. Often, the work of those in the concealed enclaves is at cross-purposes with their own organization’s methods and activities.

From Lee’s point of view, however, being a closet provocateur offered the possibility of playing his own game within the larger game. Oswald, if he was on a secret FBI stipend, might have been breaking the rules when he asked for an FBI man to come to the New Orleans jail. Perhaps he was not even aware that the agent who would arrive was not witting of his case and so he turned uncommunicative as soon as he realized that Quigley was not there to lift him out of incarceration.

In fact, we are wandering in the dark. Quigley might have known that Oswald was a special case, or Oswald might have told him. As a professional, Quigley was hardly about to pass such information on to the Warren Commission.

Still, the thought of Oswald working for the FBI does not fit our sense of him as someone who could not be easily bought. His hatred of American capitalism was too deep. On reflection, however, it is not inconceivable that he did entertain a relationship with the FBI. He would have loved a role in which he could pretend to serve the forces he would yet manage to overthrow. And, of course, he could have written those letters to the Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party in the knowledge that he was gulling his handlers in the FBI while he was in fact getting ready to make a big move in the opposite direction—not to the north-east, but to Cuba. On the other hand, if he was also feeling recurring uncertainty before the real difficulties of getting to Havana, he may have seriously considered the idea that he would lead a family life while working as a radical in Baltimore or Philadelphia. It is not impossible that after his impressive performance under pressure on Stuckey’s two radio shows, his COINTELPRO handlers had decided he could be employed on more advanced ventures with top-level radical officials in the East.

What is even more likely, and adds to our frustrated sense that several trails could be crossing each other, is that if Oswald was a provocateur, the people taking care of his stipend may not have been officially associated with the FBI.

We have to remind ourselves still one more time of the underground atmosphere of that period. Following the missile crisis in October 1962, the detestation of Communism among right-wing Americans was at its most intense. Kennedy was hated virulently by the more passionate cohorts of the right.

When we take into account that the FBI and the CIA, not to mention Army and Navy Intelligence, also had their share of extreme right-wing zealots, it is more than likely that such patriots in official organizations had linked up with individuals outside their ranks who were cooking up all kinds of semi-legal and illegal capers that even went beyond the loose limits of COINTELPRO.

Two of the most prominent of such men in New Orleans were W. Guy Banister and David Ferrie.

2

Right-wing Adventurers

One can wonder which movie star Guy Banister would have chosen to play his part—Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney, Victor McLaglen, Humphrey Bogart. It is a fair question.

Banister had been in on the capture and kill of John Dillinger, and became Special Agent in Charge for Chicago; he had a commendation from J. Edgar Hoover. Serving as a G-man for the FBI when it still made a romantic impression on the public, Banister is reputed to have worked in Naval Intelligence during World War II, and was subsequently hired by the Mayor of New Orleans to become Deputy Chief of Police.

Anthony Summers, in his book
Conspiracy,
gives a concise and nicely written summary of Banister’s career in the Big Easy:

In 1957, at the age of fifty-eight, Banister was pushed into retirement after an incident in New Orleans’ Old Absinthe House, when he allegedly threatened a waiter with a pistol. By all accounts Banister was a choleric man and a heavy drinker [but he] stayed on in New Orleans to start Guy Banister Associates, nominally a detective agency. In fact, Banister’s intelligence background, coupled with a vision of himself as a superpatriot, led him into a personal crusade against Communism. He was a member of the fervently right-wing John Birch Society, of Louisiana’s “Committee on Un-American Activities,” of the paramilitary Minutemen, and . . . [even in] 1963, say former members of Banister’s staff, the offices of the “detective agency” were littered with guns of every description. It was no coincidence that the exiles’ government in exile, the Cuban Revolutionary Council, made its New Orleans base in the same building as Guy Banister. For Banister and his Cuban protégés the building was well located—close to the local offices of both the CIA and the FBI . . .
¹

His offices also happened to be around the block from the Reily Coffee Company and Adrian Alba’s garage. For that matter, 544 Camp Street, Banister’s address, was stamped inside the cover of a forty-page FPCC pamphlet similar to the ones Oswald was passing out on Canal Street when he got into his altercation with Carlos Bringuier.

Since then, long chapters in many a volume about the assassination have been devoted to a possible relationship between Oswald and Banister, but the evidence is never firm. By stamping 544 Camp Street onto FPCC pamphlets, Oswald was implicitly making a claim that he rented office space there; however, the landlord, Sam Newman, says the building had three empty offices all summer and Oswald never rented. There are certainly no receipts.

Of course, if Oswald was being paid a stipend by Banister to do some kind of undercover work, it would hardly have made sense for them to be seen together or to have established any paper trail. On the other hand, Banister, given his connections, could hardly have failed to be aware of Oswald and his potential.

Moreover, we do well not to lose sight of the contact reports missing from the CIA files for the period when Oswald tried to kill Walker. The assumption, we can recall, was that such reports were missing because their routing symbols would indicate who within the Agency knew what, and when: They would have revealed, for example, that information about Oswald’s failed attempt might have been transmitted to the sort of CIA officer who would have contact with right-wing activists like Banister. Of course, nothing is more seductive than an interesting speculation that is built upon another interesting speculation, so if there is no hard evidence connecting Banister to Oswald, that can be used to claim that their relations were serious enough for them to take pains to conceal the evidence after the assassination, but then, we are only speaking of a cloud of possibility, not even the shadow of a certitude.

Matters are a little better with David Ferrie. Oswald, at fifteen, had been a cadet in the Civil Air Patrol, and since Ferrie was one of the key New Orleans figures in that group, there has always been controversy about whether they knew each other.

Summers:
. . . He denied ever having any sort of relationship with Oswald. Since he also denied knowing that the Cuban Revolutionary Council [had] ever operated from Camp Street, a fact he certainly did know about, Ferrie’s denials should have raised suspicions. The FBI, however, conducted a mockery of an inquiry into Oswald’s membership in the Civil Air Patrol and the matter was dropped [. However,] the Assassinations Committee noted . . . that Ferrie’s “appeal to several young men may have been related to his taking an extraordinary interest in them . . . . He often gave parties at his residence where liquor flowed freely . . .”

Ferrie’s homosexuality, and his weakness for young boys in particular, is a matter of record. [Eventually] Ferrie’s misconduct with youths in the Air Patrol led to scandal. There were reports of drunken orgies, of boys capering about in the nude, and in the end it was this that ended Ferrie’s tenure with the New Orleans unit. There is not yet any evidence that Oswald was involved in such goings-on, but—at the age of sixteen and the threshold of an adult sexual life—he was certainly vulnerable to the likes of Ferrie. The Assassinations Committee noted that—homosexuality aside—Ferrie exerted “tremendous influence” through his close associations with his pupils in the Patrol. A Committee analysis adds that he “urged several boys to join the armed forces.”
²

There is also, for what it is worth, one unexplained fact about Oswald’s first year in the Marine Corps. Stationed at Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi, which was only a couple of hours by bus from New Orleans, Oswald would go to the Big Easy every weekend on pass. Daniel Powers, who reported this to the Warren Commission, assumed that he was visiting relatives, but Lillian Murret testified that she only had one phone call from him in this period, and Marguerite was living then in Fort Worth. So, another unsupported speculation arises that Oswald was seeing Ferrie.

It should be noted that Ferrie could have been the most striking figure Oswald had met up to that time. Strange in appearance, in later years he suffered from alopecia, a disease that left him hairless, and thus wore mohair for false eyebrows (which has left Ferrie as a comic figure in assassination mythology); he was, at the time Oswald first knew him in 1955, an airplane pilot of legendary skills (he could bring a light plane down on a postage stamp of a clearing in the jungle) as well as a serious hypnotist, a cancer researcher assertive enough to believe he would find a cure, a self-appointed Catholic bishop in a theology that he had evolved himself, and to keep his options open, was also private pilot to the godfather of New Orleans, Carlos Marcello. All in all, Ferrie was enough of a local genius to have attracted a young bruised Marine like Oswald looking for a weekend away from the base.

Ferrie and Banister were associated with one another by way of Carlos Marcello, since Banister did a good deal of investigative work for G. Wray Gill, a leading attorney for the Don. All those who believe in guilt by association had a rich time with the possibility that Banister and Ferrie could be the link among the CIA, the FBI, and the Mafia. Oswald is then connected, if tenuously, to all of them, but there is, unfortunately, no sighting of any sort. No one has come forward who even glimpsed Ferrie and Oswald together in New Orleans during the summer of 1963.

There is, however, the famous morning in September when, ninety miles north of New Orleans, a big black limousine drove into a modest-sized town, Clinton, Louisiana, and parked ostentatiously near the registrar’s office. On that morning, a long line of blacks were waiting to be registered as voters, an action organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). A young man came out of the limousine, leaving a driver and another passenger behind, and joined the black people on line. This young man was later identified as Lee Harvey Oswald, and the passenger as David Ferrie. The District Attorney in New Orleans, Jim Garrison, who brought Clay Shaw to trial for conspiracy in the assassination of JFK, had the driver pegged as the same Clay Shaw. Subsequently, after Garrison lost much of his credibility, some conspiracy theorists would decide that the driver, generally described as a good-looking middle-aged man with gray hair, was Guy Banister.

Anthony Summers decided that the story never did make a great deal of sense with Shaw as a principal, and indeed, why would one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in New Orleans drive ninety miles out of the city to sit in a car all day and watch blacks register to vote? Banister made more sense. He saw CORE as a left-wing organization ready to befoul and disrupt everything in the South as part of a larger Communist strategy set up to destroy the United States. Indeed, the CORE organizer who was in Clinton that day assumed the car was there to suggest an unfriendly FBI presence. CORE had been withstanding many attempts to intimidate them that summer.

The young white man who stepped out of the car and joined the blacks on line had to wait three hours before he reached the desk of the registrar of voters, Henry Palmer. At that point, he “pulled out a U.S. Navy I.D. card [and] . . . the name on it . . . was Lee H. Oswald with a New Orleans address.”
³

Summers:
According to Palmer, Oswald’s story was that he wanted a job at the nearby East Louisiana State Hospital [and] had more chance of getting it if he registered [in Clinton]. To Palmer it was an odd request, out of context with the black registration drive. He finally told Oswald he had not been in the area long enough to qualify for registration. Oswald thanked him and departed.
⁴

This Clinton episode seems to tie Oswald to David Ferrie, who by then had alopecia, and with his red wig, mohair eyebrows, and extremely white skin, was identified as one of the three men in the limousine. The story, therefore, had to be disproved by Gerald Posner if he was to prove his case that Oswald was a lone killer, since, from Posner’s point of view, a connection between Ferrie and Oswald was a most unattractive loose end; but then, he had a few other enigmas to dispose of as well.

Posner:
The first problem arises over the time of the purported visit. Summers says the episode took place “in early September.” It is imperative that the alleged visit not have taken place later because Oswald permanently left New Orleans and Louisiana on September 24 . . . [But] Reeves Morgan, the state representative for the parish, said Oswald visited him at his home to inquire about obtaining the hospital job. There was a chill in the air, and Morgan recalled lighting the fireplace. Review of U.S. Weather Bureau records for the period through September 24 show daily temperatures above 90 degrees, with only a few days dipping into the eighties, with high humidity. There was certainly no day that was “cool” or required a burning fireplace. The registrar of voters, Henry Palmer, felt very strongly that the visit was the “first week of October, possibly around the 6th or 7th.” Oswald was in Dallas then.
⁵

Let us not give up on September too easily, however. Posner speaks of daily temperatures above 90 degrees, “with only a few days dipping into the eighties . . .” Of course, such temperatures are given for the high point of the day. It so happens that on September 23 and September 24, the two days when Oswald was alone in New Orleans after Marina left with Ruth Paine, the weather report shows the low temperatures to be, respectively, 62 degrees and 56 degrees.
⁶
Certainly, for older people used to living in 90-degree temperatures, early morning or evening might offer the kind of chill one does light a fire for. Even if one came by at 10:00
A.M.,
there might be enough of that early-morning cold left in the old house and the old bones to keep a few coals alive.

Posner also had to deal with the House Select Committee on Assassination’s conclusion in 1979 that the six witnesses they interviewed who had been in Clinton that day in 1963 offered “credible and significant testimony.”
⁷
Posner, however, managed somehow to obtain access to the files of Edward Wagmann, one of Clay Shaw’s defense lawyers. That, indubitably, was a feat. Lawyers for rich men in the South are not generally in a hurry to give privileged material to investigators from the North, not unless they come very well recommended. In any event, Posner did obtain the original reactions of the witnesses in Clinton, materials that had been submitted in the beginning to Jim Garrison, and Posner set out to demolish the possibility that Oswald, Ferrie, and Banister (and/or Shaw) were in that car and made that visit together to Clinton, Louisiana. He was certainly able to demonstrate how very much the original statements of the witnesses diverge from the later ones submitted to the HSCA. One person saw only a woman and a man in the car and they had a baby in a bassinet. Other witnesses saw four men, or two men, or one man. The only trouble with all this is that Oswald, as pointed out by James DiEugenio in the newsletter
Back Channels,
September 1994, was in Jackson, Louisiana, about fifteen miles from Clinton, the night before, and Posner is combining testimony from witnesses in two towns and mixing them together as one.