FTR #1054, FTR #1055 and FTR #1056 Interviews #23, #24 and #25 with Jim DiEugenio about “Destiny Betrayed”

These are the twen­ty-third, twen­ty-fourth and twen­ty-fifth (and con­clud­ing pro­gram) in a long series of inter­views with Jim DiEu­ge­nio about his tri­umphal analy­sis of Pres­i­dent Kennedy’s assas­si­na­tion and New Orleans Dis­trict Attor­ney Jim Gar­rison’s hero­ic inves­ti­ga­tion of the killing.

The first inter­view begins with a telling edi­to­r­i­al writ­ten for “The Wash­ing­ton Post” by for­mer Pres­i­dent Har­ry Tru­man.

Des­tiny Betrayed by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; Sky­horse Pub­lish­ing [SC]; Copy­right 1992, 2012 by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; ISBN 978–1‑62087–056‑3; pp. 378–379.

. . . . On Decem­ber 22, 1963, Har­ry Tru­man wrote an edi­to­r­i­al that was pub­lished in the Wash­ing­ton Post. The for­mer Pres­i­dent wrote that he had become “dis­turbed by the way the CIA had become divert­ed from its orig­i­nal assign­ment. It has become an oper­a­tional and at times a pol­i­cy-mak­ing arm of gov­ern­ment.” He wrote that he nev­er dreamed that this would hap­pen when he signed the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Act. he thought it would be used for intel­li­gence analy­sis, not “peace­time cloak and dag­ger oper­a­tions.” He com­plained that the CIA had now become “so removed from its intend­ed role that it is being inter­pret­ed as a sym­bol of sin­is­ter and mys­te­ri­ous for­eign intrigue–and a sub­ject for Cold War ene­my pro­pa­gan­da.” Tru­man went as far as sug­gest­ing its oper­a­tional arm be elim­i­nat­ed. He con­clud­ed with the warn­ing that Amer­i­cans have grown up learn­ing respect for “our free insti­tu­tions and for our abil­i­ty to main­tain a free and open soci­ety. There is some­thing about the way the CIA has been func­tion­ing that is cast­ing a shad­ow over out his­toric posi­tion and I feel hat we need to cor­rect it.” . . . .

For­mer CIA Direc­tor (and then War­ren Com­mis­sion mem­ber) Allen Dulles vis­it­ed Tru­man and attempt­ed to get him to retract the state­ment. He dis­sem­bled about then CIA chief John McCone’s view of the edi­to­r­i­al.

The focal point of the first two pro­grams is the dra­mat­ic changes in U.S. for­eign pol­i­cy that occurred because of JFK’s assas­si­na­tion. Analy­sis in FTR #1056 con­tin­ues the analy­sis of Kennedy’s for­eign pol­i­cy and con­cludes with riv­et­ing dis­cus­sion of the strik­ing pol­i­cy under­tak­ings of the Kennedy admin­is­tra­tion in the area of civ­il rights. Jim has writ­ten a mar­velous, 4‑part analy­sis of JFK’s civ­il rights pol­i­cy.

Dis­cus­sion of JFK’s for­eign pol­i­cy and how his mur­der changed that builds on, and sup­ple­ments analy­sis of this in FTR #1031, FTR #1032 and FTR #1033.

Lyn­don Baines John­son reversed JFK’s for­eign pol­i­cy ini­tia­tives in a num­ber of impor­tant ways.

When the Unit­ed States reneged on its com­mit­ment to pur­sue inde­pen­dence for the colo­nial ter­ri­to­ries of its Euro­pean allies at the end of the Sec­ond World War, the stage was set for those nations’ desire for free­dom to be cast as incip­i­ent Marxists/Communists. This devel­op­ment was the foun­da­tion for epic blood­shed and calami­ty.

Jim details then Con­gress­man John F. Kennedy’s 1951 fact-find­ing trip to Saigon to gain an under­stand­ing of the French war to retain their colony of Indochi­na. (Viet­nam was part of that colony.)

In speak­ing with career diplo­mat Edmund Gul­lion, Kennedy came to the real­iza­tion that not only would the French lose the war, but that Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh guer­ril­las enjoyed great pop­u­lar sup­port among the Viet­namese peo­ple.

This aware­ness guid­ed JFK’s Viet­nam pol­i­cy, in which he not only resist­ed tremen­dous pres­sure to com­mit U.S. com­bat troops to Viet­nam, but planned a with­draw­al of U.S. forces from Viet­nam.

Per­haps the most impor­tant change made after JFK’s assas­si­na­tion was John­son’s nega­tion of Kennedy’s plans to with­draw from Viet­nam.

LBJ can­celled Kennedy’s sched­uled troop with­draw­al, sched­uled per­son­nel increas­es and imple­ment­ed the 34A pro­gram of covert oper­a­tions against North Viet­nam. Exe­cut­ed by South Viet­namese naval com­man­dos using small, Amer­i­can-made patrol boats, these raids were sup­port­ed by U.S. destroy­ers in the Gulf of Tonkin, which were elec­tron­i­cal­ly “fin­ger­print­ing” North Viet­namese radar instal­la­tions.

The elec­tron­ic fin­ger­print­ing of North Viet­namese radar was in antic­i­pa­tion of a pre-planned air war, a fun­da­men­tal part of a plan by LBJ to involve the Unit­ed States in a full-scale war in South­east Asia.

Des­tiny Betrayed by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; Sky­horse Pub­lish­ing [SC]; Copy­right 1992, 2012 by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; ISBN 978–1‑62087–056‑3; pp. 368–371.

. . . . Clear­ly now that the with­draw­al was immi­nent, Kennedy was going to try and get the rest of his admin­is­tra­tion on board to his way of think­ing. Not only did this not hap­pen once Kennedy was dead, but the first meet­ing on Viet­nam after­wards was a strong indi­ca­tion that things were now going to be cast in a sharply dif­fer­ent tone. This meet­ing took place at 3:00 p.m. on Novem­ber 24. . . . John­son’s intent was clear to McNa­ma­ra. He was break­ing with the pre­vi­ous pol­i­cy. The goal now was to win the war. LBJ then issued a strong warn­ing: He want­ed no more dis­sen­sion or divi­sion over pol­i­cy. Any per­son who did not con­form would be removed. (This would lat­er be demon­strat­ed by his ban­ning of Hubert Humphrey from Viet­nam meet­ings when Humphrey advised John­son to rethink his pol­i­cy of mil­i­tary com­mit­ment to Viet­nam.) . . . . The read­er should recall, this meet­ing took place just forty-eight hours after Kennedy was killed. . . .

. . . . There­fore, on March 2, 1964, the Joint Chiefs passed a new war pro­pos­al to the White House. This was even more ambi­tious than the Jan­u­ary ver­sion. It includ­ed bomb­ing, the min­ing of North Viet­namese har­bors, a naval block­ade, and pos­si­ble use of tac­ti­cal atom­ic weapons in case Chi­na inter­vened. John­son was now draw­ing up a full scale bat­tle plan for Viet­nam. In oth­er words, what Kennedy did not do in three years, LBJ had done in three months.

John­son said he was not ready for this pro­pos­al since he did not have con­gress yet as a part­ner and trustee. But he did order the prepa­ra­tion of NSAM 288, which was based on this pro­pos­al. It was essen­tial­ly a tar­get list of bomb­ing sites that even­tu­al­ly reached 94 pos­si­bil­i­ties. By May 25, with Richard Nixon and Bar­ry Gold­wa­ter clam­or­ing for bomb­ing of the north, LBJ had made the deci­sion that the U.S. would direct­ly attack North Viet­nam at an unspec­i­fied point in the future. But it is impor­tant to note that even before the Tonkin Gulf inci­dent, John­son had ordered the draw­ing up of a con­gres­sion­al res­o­lu­tion. This had been final­ized by William Bundy, McGe­orge Bundy’s broth­er. There­fore in June of 1964, John­son began lob­by­ing cer­tain peo­ple for its pas­sage in con­gress. . . .

Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Mem­o­ran­dum 263

. . . . John­son seized upon the hazy and con­tro­ver­sial events in the Gulf of Tonkin dur­ing the first week of August to begin he air war planned in NSAM 288. Yet the Tonkin Gulf inci­dent had been pre­pared by John­son him­self. After Kennedy’s death, Pres­i­dent John­son made a few alter­ations in the draft of NSAM 273. An order which Kennedy had nev­er seen but was draft­ed by McGe­orge Bundy after a meet­ing in Hon­olu­lu, a meet­ing which took place while Kennedy was vis­it­ing Texas. . . .

. . . . On August 2, the destroy­er Mad­dox was attacked by three North Viet­namese tor­pe­do boats. Although tor­pe­does were launched, none hit. The total dam­age to the Mad­dox
was one bul­let through the hull. Both John­son and the Defense Depart­ment mis­rep­re­sent­ed this inci­dent to con­gress and the press. They said the North Viet­namese fired first, that the USA had no role in the patrol boat raids, that the ships were in inter­na­tion­al waters, and there was no hot pur­suit by the Mad­dox. These were all wrong. Yet John­son used this overblown report­ing, plus a non-exis­tent attack two nights lat­er on the destroy­er Turn­er Joy to begin to push his war res­o­lu­tion through Con­gress. He then took out the tar­get list assem­bled for NSAM 288 [from March of 1964–D.E] and ordered air strikes that very day. . . .

. . . . For on August 7, John­son sent a mes­sage to Gen­er­al Maxwell Tay­lor. He want­ed a whole gamut of pos­si­ble oper­a­tions pre­sent­ed to him for direct Amer­i­can attacks against the North. The tar­get date for the sys­tem­at­ic air war was set for Jan­u­ary 1965. This was called oper­a­tion Rolling Thun­der and it end­ed up being the largest bomb­ing cam­paign in mil­i­tary his­to­ry. The read­er should note: the Jan­u­ary tar­get date was the month John­son would be inau­gu­rat­ed after his re-elec­tion. As John New­man not­ed in his mas­ter­ful book JFK and Viet­nam, Kennedy was dis­guis­ing his with­draw­al plan around his re-elec­tion; John­son was dis­guis­ing his esca­la­tion plan around his re-elec­tion. . . .

In addi­tion to not­ing that Hubert Humphrey, con­trary to pop­u­lar mis­con­cep­tion, was an oppo­nent of John­son’s war strat­e­gy, we note that Robert McNa­ma­ra was also opposed to it, although he went along with the Com­man­der in Chief’s poli­cies.

After detailed dis­cus­sion of the human and envi­ron­men­tal dam­age inflict­ed on Viet­nam and the strat­e­gy imple­ment­ed by LBJ after Kennedy’s assas­si­na­tion, the dis­cus­sion turns to John­son’s rever­sal of Kennedy’s pol­i­cy with regard to Laos.

The fledg­ling nation of Laos was also part of French Indochi­na, and Jim notes how out­go­ing Pres­i­dent Eisen­how­er coached Pres­i­dent-Elect Kennedy on the neces­si­ty of com­mit­ting U.S. com­bat forces to Laos.

Again, Kennedy refused to com­mit U.S. ground forces and engi­neered a pol­i­cy of neu­tral­i­ty for Laos.

Des­tiny Betrayed by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; Sky­horse pub­lish­ing [SC]; Copy­right 1992, 2012 by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; ISBN 978–1‑62087–056‑3; p. 54.

. . . . At his first press con­fer­ence, Kennedy said that he hoped to estab­lish Laos as a “peace­ful country–an inde­pen­dent coun­try not dom­i­nat­ed by either side.” He appoint­ed a task force to study the prob­lem, was in reg­u­lar com­mu­ni­ca­tion with it and the Laot­ian ambas­sador, and decid­ed by Feb­ru­ary that Laos must have a coali­tion gov­ern­ment, the likes of which Eisen­how­er had reject­ed out of hand. Kennedy also had lit­tle inter­est in a mil­i­tary solu­tion. He could not under­stand send­ing Amer­i­can troops to fight for a coun­try whose peo­ple did not care to fight for them­selves. . . . He there­fore worked to get the Rus­sians to push the Pathet Lao into a cease-fire agree­ment. This includ­ed a maneu­ver on Kennedy’s part to indi­cate mil­i­tary pres­sure if the Rus­sians did not inter­vene strong­ly enough with the Pathet Lao. The maneu­ver worked, and in May of 1961, a truce was called. A few days lat­er, a con­fer­ence con­vened in Gene­va to ham­mer out con­di­tions for a neu­tral Laos. By July of 1962, a new gov­ern­ment, which includ­ed the Pathet Lao, had been ham­mered out. . . .

Where­as JFK had imple­ment­ed a pol­i­cy afford­ing neu­tral­i­ty to Laos–against the wish­es of the Joint Chiefs, CIA and many of his own cab­i­net, LBJ scrapped the neu­tral­ist pol­i­cy in favor of a CIA-imple­ment­ed strat­e­gy of employ­ing “nar­co-mili­tias” such as the Hmong tribes­men as com­bat­ants against the Pathet Lao. This counter-insur­gency war­fare was com­ple­ment­ed by a mas­sive aer­i­al bomb­ing cam­paign.

One of the many out­growths of LBJ’s rever­sal of JFK’s South­east pol­i­cy was a wave of CIA-assist­ed hero­in addict­ing both GI’s in Viet­nam and Amer­i­can civil­ians at home.

LBJ also reversed JFK’s pol­i­cy toward Indone­sia.

In 1955, Sukarno host­ed a con­fer­ence of non-aligned nations that for­mal­ized and con­cretized a “Third Way” between East and West. This, along with Sukarno’s nation­al­ism of some Dutch indus­tri­al prop­er­ties, led the U.S. to try and over­throw Sukharno, which was attempt­ed in 1958.

Kennedy under­stood Sukarno’s point of view, and had planned a trip to Indone­sia in 1964 to forge a more con­struc­tive rela­tion­ship with Sukharno. Obvi­ous­ly, his mur­der in 1963 pre­clud­ed the trip.

In 1965, Sukarno was deposed in a bloody, CIA-aid­ed coup in which as many as a mil­lion peo­ple were killed.

Of par­tic­u­lar inter­est in con­nec­tion with Indone­sia, is the dis­po­si­tion of Freeport Sul­phur, a com­pa­ny that had enlist­ed the ser­vices of both Clay Shaw and David Fer­rie in an effort to cir­cum­vent lim­i­ta­tions on its oper­a­tions imposed by Cas­tro’s Cuba:

Des­tiny Betrayed by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; Sky­horse pub­lish­ing [SC]; Copy­right 1992, 2012 by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; ISBN 978–1‑62087–056‑3; pp. 208–209.

. . . . In Chap­ter 1, the author intro­duced Freeport Sul­phur and its sub­sidiaries Moa Bay Min­ing and Nicaro Nick­el. These com­pa­nies all had large invest­ments in Cuba pri­or to Castro’s rev­o­lu­tion. And this end­ed up being one of the ways that Gar­ri­son con­nect­ed Clay Shaw and David Fer­rie. This came about for two rea­sons. First, with Cas­tro tak­ing over their oper­a­tions in Cuba, Freeport was attempt­ing to inves­ti­gate bring­ing in nick­el ore from Cuba, through Cana­da, which still had trade rela­tions with Cuba. The ore would then be refined in Louisiana, either at a plant already in New Orleans or at anoth­er plant in Braith­waite. Shaw, an impres­sario of inter­na­tion­al trade, was on this explorato­ry team for Freeport. And he and two oth­er men had been flown to Cana­da by Fer­rie as part of this effort. More evi­dence of this con­nec­tion through Freeport was found dur­ing their inves­ti­ga­tion of Guy Ban­is­ter. Ban­is­ter appar­ent­ly knew about anoth­er flight tak­en by Shaw with an offi­cial of Freeport, like­ly Charles Wight, to Cuba. Again the pilot was David Fer­rie. Anoth­er rea­son this Freeport con­nec­tion was impor­tant to Gar­ri­son is that he found a wit­ness named James Plaine in Hous­ton who said that Mr. Wight of Freeport Sul­phur had con­tact­ed him in regards to an assas­si­na­tion plot against Cas­tro. Con­sid­er­ing the amount of mon­ey Freeport was about to lose in Cuba, plus the num­ber of East­ern Estab­lish­ment lumi­nar­ies asso­ci­at­ed with the company–such as Jock Whit­ney, Jean Mauze and God­frey Rockefeller–it is not sur­pris­ing that such a thing was con­tem­plat­ed with­in their ranks. . . .

LBJ reversed Kennedy’s pol­i­cy vis a vis Sukarno. It should be not­ed that Freeport had set its cor­po­rate sights on a very lucra­tive pair of moun­tains in Indone­sia, both of which had enor­mous deposits of min­er­als, iron, cop­per, sil­ver and gold in par­tic­u­lar.

Des­tiny Betrayed by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; Sky­horse pub­lish­ing [SC]; Copy­right 1992, 2012 by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; ISBN 978–1‑62087–056‑3; pp. 374–375.

. . . . Short­ly after, his aid bill land­ed on John­son’s desk. The new pres­i­dent refused to sign it. . . .

. . . . In return for not sign­ing the aid bill, in 1964, LBJ received sup­port from Both Augus­tus Long and Jock Whit­ney of Freeport Sul­phur in his race against Bar­ry Gold­wa­ter. In fact, Long estab­lished a group called the Nation­al Inde­pen­dent Com­mit­tee for John­son. This group of wealthy busi­ness­men includ­ed Robert Lehman of Lehman Broth­ers and Thomas Cabot, Michael Paine’s cousin. . . . Then, in ear­ly 1965, Augus­tus Long was reward­ed for help­ing John­son get elect­ed. LBJ app[ointed him to the For­eign Intel­li­gence Advi­so­ry Board. This is a small group of wealthy pri­vate cit­i­zens who advis­es the pres­i­dent on intel­li­gence mat­ters. The mem­bers of this group can approve and sug­gest covert activ­i­ties abroad. This appoint­ment is notable for what was about to occur. For with Sukarno now unpro­tect­ed by Pres­i­dent Kennedy, the writ­ing was on the wall. The Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency now bean to send into Indone­sia its so called “first team.” . . . .

. . . . Suhar­to now began to sell off Indone­si­a’s rich­es to the high­est bid­der. Includ­ing Freeport Sul­phur, which opened what were per­haps the largest cop­per and gold mines in the world there. . . . Freeport, along with sev­er­al oth­er com­pa­nies, now har­vest­ed bil­lions from the Suhar­to regime. . . .

Yet anoth­er area in which JFK’s pol­i­cy out­look ran afoul of the pre­vail­ing wis­dom of the Cold War was with regard to the Con­go. A Bel­gian colony which was the vic­tim of geno­ci­dal poli­cies of King Leopold (esti­mates of the dead run as high as 8 mil­lion), the dia­mond and min­er­al-rich Con­go gained a frag­ile inde­pen­dence.

In Africa, as well, Kennedy under­stood the strug­gle of emerg­ing nations seek­ing free­dom from colo­nial dom­i­na­tion as falling out­side of and tran­scend­ing stereo­typed Cold War dynam­ics.

In the Con­go, the bru­tal­ly admin­is­tered Bel­gian rule had spawned a vig­or­ous inde­pen­dence move­ment crys­tal­lized around the charis­mat­ic Patrice Lumum­ba. Under­stand­ing of, and sym­pa­thet­ic to Lumum­ba and the ide­ol­o­gy and polit­i­cal forces embod­ied in him, Kennedy opposed the reac­tionary sta­tus quo favored by both Euro­pean allies like the Unit­ed King­dom and Bel­gium, as well as the Eisenhower/Dulles axis in the Unit­ed States.

Des­tiny Betrayed by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; Sky­horse pub­lish­ing [SC]; Copy­right 1992, 2012 by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; ISBN 978–1‑62087–056‑3; pp. 28–29.

. . . . By 1960, a native rev­o­lu­tion­ary leader named Patrice Lumum­ba had gal­va­nized the nation­al­ist feel­ing of the coun­try. Bel­gium decid­ed to pull out. But they did so rapid­ly, know­ing that tumult would ensue and they could return to col­o­nize the coun­try again. After Lumum­ba was appoint­ed prime min­is­ter, tumult did ensue. The Bel­gians and the British backed a rival who had Lumum­ba dis­missed. They then urged the break­ing away of the Katan­ga province because of its enor­mous min­er­al wealth. Lumum­ba looked to the Unit­ed Nations for help, and also the USA. The for­mer decid­ed to help, . The Unit­ed States did not. In fact, when Lumum­ba vis­it­ed Wash­ing­ton July of 1960, Eisen­how­er delib­er­ate­ly fled to Rhode Island. Rebuffed by Eisen­how­er, Lumum­ba now turned to the Rus­sians for help in expelling the Bel­gians from Katan­ga. This sealed his fate in the eyes of Eisen­how­er and Allen Dulles. The pres­i­dent now autho­rized a series of assas­si­na­tion plots by the CIA to kill Lumum­ba. These plots final­ly suc­ceed­ed on Jan­u­ary 17, 1961, three days before Kennedy was inau­gu­rat­ed.

His first week in office, Kennedy request­ed a full review of the Eisenhower/Dulles pol­i­cy in Con­go. The Amer­i­can ambas­sador to that impor­tant African nation heard of this review and phoned Allen Dulles to alert him that Pres­i­dent Kennedy was about to over­turn pre­vi­ous pol­i­cy there. Kennedy did over­turn this pol­i­cy on Feb­ru­ary 2, 1961. Unlike Eisen­how­er and Allen Dulles, Kennedy announced he would begin full coop­er­a­tion with Sec­re­tary Dag Ham­marskjold at the Unit­ed Nations on this thorny issue in order to bring all the armies in that war-torn nation under con­trol. He would also attempt top neu­tral­ize the coun­try so there would be no East/West Cold War com­pe­ti­tion. Third, all polit­i­cal pris­on­ers being held should be freed. Not know­ing he was dead, this part was aimed at for­mer prime min­is­ter Lumum­ba, who had been cap­tured by his ene­mies. (There is evi­dence that, know­ing Kennedy would favor Lumum­ba, Dulles had him killed before JFK was inau­gu­rat­ed.) Final­ly, Kennedy opposed the seces­sion of min­er­al-rich Katan­ga province. . . . Thus began Kennedy’s near­ly three year long strug­gle to see Con­go not fall back under the claw of Euro­pean impe­ri­al­ism. . . . ”

In the Con­go, as in Indone­sia, LBJ reversed JFK’s pol­i­cy stance, and the cor­po­rate loot­ing of the Con­go result­ed under Gen­er­al Joseph Mobu­tu, him­self a ben­e­fi­cia­ry of the pira­cy.

Des­tiny Betrayed by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; Sky­horse Pub­lish­ing [SC]; Copy­right 1992, 2012 by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; ISBN 978–1‑62087–056‑3; pp. 372–373.

. . . . But in Octo­ber and Novem­ber [of 1963], things began to fall apart. Kennedy want­ed Colonel Michael Greene, an African expert, to train the Con­golese army in order

to sub­due a left­ist rebel­lion. But Gen­er­al Joseph Mobu­tu, with the back­ing of the Pen­ta­gon, man­aged to resist this train­ing, which the Unit­ed Nations backed. In 1964, the com­mu­nist rebel­lion picked up steam and began tak­ing whole provinces. The White House did some­thing Kennedy nev­er seri­ous­ly con­tem­plat­ed: uni­lat­er­al action by the USA. John­son and McGe­orge Bundy had the CIA fly sor­ties with Cuban pilots to halt the com­mu­nist advance. With­out Kennedy, the UN now with­drew. Amer­i­ca now became an ally of Bel­gium and inter­vened with arms, air­planes and advis­ers. Mobu­tu now invit­ed Tshombe back into the gov­ern­ment. Tshombe, per­haps at the request of the CIA, now said that the rebel­lion was part of a Chi­nese plot to take over Con­go. Kennedy had called in Edmund Gul­lion to super­vise the attempt to make the Con­go gov­ern­ment into a mod­er­ate coali­tion, avoid­ing the extremes of left and right. But with the Tshombe/Mobutu alliance, that was now dashed. Rightwing South Africans and Rhode­sians were now allowed to join the Con­golese army in a war on the “Chi­nese-inspired left.” And with the Unit­ed Nations gone, this was all done under the aus­pices of the Unit­ed States. The right­ward tilt now con­tin­ued unabat­ed. By 1965, Mobu­tu had gained com­plete pow­er. And in 1966, he installed him­self as mil­i­tary dic­ta­tor. . . . Mobu­tu now allowed his coun­try to be opened up to loads of out­side invest­ment. The rich­es of the Con­go were mined by huge West­ern cor­po­ra­tions. Their own­ers and offi­cers grew wealthy while Mobu­tu’s sub­jects were mired in pover­ty. Mobu­tu also sti­fled polit­i­cal dis­sent. And he now became one of the rich­est men in Africa, per­haps the world. . . .

In FTR #1033, we exam­ined JFK’s attempts at nor­mal­iz­ing rela­tions with Cuba. That, of course, van­ished with his assas­si­na­tion and the deep­en­ing of Cold War hos­til­i­ty between the U.S. and the Island nation, with a thaw of sorts com­ing under Barack Oba­ma a few years ago.

There is no more strik­ing area in which JFK’s mur­der reversed what would have been his­toric changes in Amer­i­ca’s for­eign pol­i­cy than U.S.-Soviet rela­tions.

JFK had imple­ment­ed a ban on atmos­pher­ic test­ing of nuclear weapons, bit­ter­ly opposed by the Pen­ta­gon, In a June, 1963 speech at Amer­i­can Uni­ver­si­ty, JFK called for re-eval­u­at­ing Amer­i­ca’s rela­tion­ship to the Sovi­et Union, and cit­ed the U.S.S.R’s deci­sive role in defeat­ing Nazi Ger­many dur­ing World War II.

JFK was also propos­ing joint space explo­ration with the Sovi­et Union, which would have appeared to be noth­ing less than trea­so­nous to the Pen­ta­gon and NASA at the time. After JFK’s assas­si­na­tion, the Kennedy fam­i­ly used a backchan­nel diplo­mat­ic con­duit to the Sovi­et lead­er­ship to com­mu­ni­cate their view that the Sovi­et Union, and its Cuban ally, had been blame­less in the assas­si­na­tion and that pow­er­ful right-wing forces in the Unit­ed States had been behind the assas­si­na­tion.

Per­haps JFK’s great­est con­tri­bu­tion was one that has received scant notice. In 1961, the Joint Chiefs were push­ing for a first strike on the Sovi­et Union–a deci­sion to ini­ti­ate nuclear war. JFK refused, walk­ing out of the dis­cus­sion with the dis­gust­ed obser­va­tion that “We call our­selves the human race.”

In FTR #‘s 876, 926 and 1051, we exam­ined the cre­ation of the meme that Oswald had been net­work­ing with the Cubans and Sovi­ets in the run-up to the assas­si­na­tion. In par­tic­u­lar, Oswald was sup­pos­ed­ly meet­ing with Valery Kostikov, a KGB offi­cial in charge of assas­si­na­tions in the West­ern Hemi­sphere.

This cre­at­ed the pre­text for blam­ing JFK’s assas­si­na­tion on the Sovi­et Union and/or Cuba. There are indi­ca­tions that JFK’s assas­si­na­tion may well have been intend­ed as a pre­text for a nuclear first strike on the Sovi­et Union.

JFK and the Unspeak­able: Why He Died and Why It Mat­ters by James W. Dou­glass; Touch­stone Books [SC]; Copy­right 2008 by James W. Dou­glas; ISBN 978–1‑4391–9388‑4; pp. 242–243.

. . . . As JFK may have recalled from the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil meet­ing he walked out of in July 1961, the first Net Eval­u­a­tion Sub­com­mit­tee report had focused pre­cise­ly on “a sur­prise attack in late 1963, pre­ced­ed by a peri­od of height­ened ten­sions.” Kennedy was a keen read­er and lis­ten­er. In the sec­ond pre­emp­tive-war report, he may also have noticed the slight but sig­nif­i­cant dis­crep­an­cy between its over­all time frame, 1963–1968, and the extent of its rel­a­tive­ly reas­sur­ing con­clu­sion, which cov­ered only 1964 through 1968. . . .

. . . . In his cat-and-mouse ques­tion­ing of his mil­i­tary chiefs, Pres­i­dent Kennedy had built upon the report’s appar­ent­ly reas­sur­ing con­clu­sion in such a way as to dis­cour­age pre­emp­tive-war ambi­tions. How­ev­er, giv­en the “late 1963” focus in the first Net Report that that was the most threat­en­ing time for a pre­emp­tive strike, Kennedy had lit­tle rea­son to be reas­sured by a sec­ond report that implic­it­ly con­firmed that time as the one of max­i­mum dan­ger. The per­son­al­ly fatal fall JFK was about to enter, in late 1963, was the same time his mil­i­tary com­man­ders may have con­sid­ered their last chance to “win” (in their terms) a pre­emp­tive war against the Sovi­et Union. In terms of their sec­ond Net Report to the Pres­i­dent, which passed over the per­ilous mean­ing of late 1963, the cat-and-mouse game had been reversed. It was the gen­er­als who were the cats, and JFK the mouse in their midst.

The explic­it assump­tion of the first Net Report was “a sur­prise attack in late 1963, pre­ced­ed by a peri­od of height­ened ten­sions.” The focus of that first-strike sce­nario cor­re­spond­ed to the Kennedy assas­si­na­tion sce­nario. When Pres­i­dent Kennedy was mur­dered in late 1963, the Sovi­et Union had been set up as the major scape­goat in the plot. If the tac­tic had been suc­cess­ful in scape­goat­ing the Rus­sians for the crime of the cen­tu­ry, there is lit­tle doubt that it would have result­ed in “a peri­od of height­ened ten­sions” between the Unit­ed States and the Sovi­et Union.

Those who designed the plot to kill Kennedy were famil­iar with the inner sanc­tum of our nation­al secu­ri­ty state. Their attempt to scape­goat the Sovi­ets for the Pres­i­den­t’s mur­der reflect­ed one side of the secret strug­gle between JFK and his mil­i­tary lead­ers over a pre­emp­tive strike against the Sovi­et Union. The assas­sins’ pur­pose seems to have encom­passed not only killing a Pres­i­dent deter­mined to make peace with the ene­my, but also using his mur­der as the impe­tus for a pos­si­ble nuclear first strike against that same ene­my. . . .

With the GOP and Trump admin­is­tra­tion open­ly sup­press­ing vot­ing rights of minori­ties, African-Amer­i­cans in par­tic­u­lar, the stel­lar efforts of JFK and the Jus­tice Depart­ment in the area of civ­il rights is strik­ing. JFK’s civ­il rights pol­i­cy was expo­nen­tial­ly greater than what had pre­ced­ed him, and much of what fol­lowed.

The con­clu­sion of the dis­cus­sion in FTR #1056 con­sists of Jim’s dis­cus­sion of his mar­velous, 4‑part analy­sis of JFK’s civ­il rights pol­i­cy.

FTR #1053 Interview #22 with Jim DiEugenio about “Destiny Betrayed”

House Select Com­mit­tee on Assas­si­na­tions Assis­tant Coun­sel Jonathan Black­mer: “. . . . ‘We have rea­son to believe Shaw was heav­i­ly involved in the Anti-Cas­tro efforts in New Orleans in the 1960s and [was] pos­si­bly one of the high lev­el plan­ners or ‘cut out’ to the plan­ners of the assas­si­na­tion.’ . . . .”

This is the twen­ty-sec­ond in a planned long series of inter­views with Jim DiEu­ge­nio about his tri­umphal analy­sis of Pres­i­dent Kennedy’s assas­si­na­tion and New Orleans Dis­trict Attor­ney Jim Gar­rison’s hero­ic inves­ti­ga­tion of the killing.

This pro­gram con­tin­ues exam­i­na­tion of the House Select Com­mit­tee on Assas­si­na­tions.

Even­tu­al­ly, the col­lab­o­ra­tionist main­stream media began an assault on Richard Sprague and the work of the com­mit­tee. The New York Times, The Los Ange­les Times and The Wash­ing­ton Post began the assault, which quick­ly drew blood. . . .

Des­tiny Betrayed by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; Sky­horse Pub­lish­ing [SC]; Copy­right 1992, 2012 by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; ISBN 978–1‑62087–056‑3; pp. 333–334.

. . . . The only time he ever had his cre­den­tials ques­tioned was dur­ing the six months he agreed to swerve as coun­sel to the HSCA. And that is sim­ply because he was going to super­vise a real inves­ti­ga­tion of the JFK case. Yet, the same thing hap­pened to him as hap­pened to Jim Gar­ri­son. In fact, like Gar­ri­son, Sprague was also even accused of being in bed with the Mafia. When the first press attacks began. HSCA staffer Chris Shar­rett remem­bers think­ing, ‘It’s Gar­ri­son all over again.’ Or, as Joe Rauh, who knew Sprague from Philadel­phia and had a front row seat to the con­tro­ver­sy in Wash­ing­ton said, ‘You know, I nev­er thought the Kennedy case was a con­spir­a­cy until now. But if they can do that to Dick Sprague, it must have been.’ With Sprague’s res­ig­na­tion, the House Select Com­mit­tee sur­vived. The inter­im Chief Coun­sel was Tanen­baum with Al Lewis, a friend and col­league of Sprague’s as his deputy. . . .

In the inter­im, between Sprague’s res­ig­na­tion and the ascen­sion of G. Robert Blakey to the Chief Coun­sel posi­tion, George DeMohren­schildt died of a shot­gun wound to the head.

DeMohren­schildt: was part of the fam­i­ly that man­aged the Nobel Oil Fields for the Czar; was the cousin of Baron Kon­stan­tin May­dell, in charge of Abwehr oper­a­tions in the Unit­ed States for a time (Abwehr was Ger­man mil­i­tary intel­li­gence); was a sus­pect­ed Nazi spy in World War II; was an asso­ciate of George H.W. Bush; was a long­time CIA asset; was a petro­le­um geol­o­gist.

DeMohren­schildt imple­ment­ed the Oswalds’ intro­duc­tion to the White Russ­ian milieu in Dal­las. Of par­tic­u­lar sig­nif­i­cance for our pur­pose is the fact that he made con­tact with the cou­ple at the sug­ges­tion of J. Wal­ton Moore, who was the pri­ma­ry CIA offi­cer in the Dal­las area!

The White Rus­sians appeared to be work­ing to sep­a­rate Mari­na and Lee, and were involved in han­dling Mari­na after the assas­si­na­tion.

A long-stand­ing CIA asset, DeMohren­schildt had worked with the agency on numer­ous projects in Yugoslavia, Haiti and else­where. Sus­pect­ed of hav­ing spied on the Aransas Pass Coast Guard Sta­tion (in Texas) for the Third Reich, DeMohren­schildt was the cousin of Baron Kon­tan­tin May­dell, who over­saw Abwehr oper­a­tions in the U.S. for a time. (The Abwehr was Ger­man mil­i­tary intel­li­gence.)

As dis­cussed in FTR #712, we high­light­ed DeMohren­schildt’s links to for­mer CIA direc­tor George H.W. Bush, for whom CIA head­quar­ters is named. In that same pro­gram, we cov­ered Bush’s involve­ment  in the JFK assas­si­na­tion. LIke DeMohren­schildt and many of the White Rus­sians who asso­ci­at­ed with the Oswalds in the Dal­las area, Bush had roots in the petro­le­um indus­try.

Note­wor­thy in the con­text of Oswald’s pres­ence in Dal­las, is that this alleged trai­tor was employed by Jag­gars, Chiles and Sto­vall, a firm that did clas­si­fied work for the mil­i­tary, includ­ing projects asso­ci­at­ed with the U‑2 spy plane! That the “trai­tor” Oswald, who offered to dis­close clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion about the U‑2 and U.S. avi­a­tion oper­a­tions to the Sovi­ets could be employed by such a firm is unthink­able, IF we are to take the offi­cial ver­sion of Oswald at face val­ue.

Ulti­mate­ly, DeMohren­schildt hand­ed the Oswalds–Lee and Marina–off to the “Quak­er lib­er­als” Michael and Ruth Paine.

DeMohren­schildt’s death was ruled a sui­cide, but the cir­cum­stances sur­round­ing his demise are note­wor­thy.

At the time he died, DeMohren­schildt was net­work­ing with a Dutch jour­nal­ist named Willem Olt­mans, who began spread­ing dis­in­for­ma­tion after DeMohren­schildt’s demise. DeMohren­schildt was also net­work­ing with jour­nal­ist Edward Epstein, who pressed the “Sovi­ets did it” meme for a time and whose behav­ior vis a vis DeMohren­schildt is ques­tion­able.

Pri­or to his death, DeMohren­schildt was under­go­ing psy­chi­atric treat­ment, appar­ent­ly includ­ing elec­tro-shock ther­a­py, from a Dal­las physi­cian named Men­doza. DeMohren­schildt’s wid­ow thinks the treat­ments may have had some­thing to do with her hus­band’s death.

The phys­i­cal evi­dence in con­nec­tion with DeMohren­schildt’s death sug­gests the dis­tinct pos­si­bil­i­ty of foul play.

Des­tiny Betrayed by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; Sky­horse Pub­lish­ing [SC]; Copy­right 1992, 2012 by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; ISBN 978–1‑62087–056‑3; p. 337.

. . . . Even though a coro­ner’s inquest ruled his death as self-inflict­ed, there are some seri­ous ques­tions about DeMohren­schildt’s demise. First, accord­ing to the crime scene report and the autop­sy, there was not any exit wound to the rear of the skull. Yet DeMohren­schildt alleged­ly placed a shot­gun in his mouth and pulled the trig­ger. It’s true that shot­gun shells dis­perse more quick­ly than jack­et­ed bul­lets. But his shot was almost with­in con­tact dis­tance. Nei­ther the maid nor the cook heard the shot­gun blast, even though both women were right below the room that DeMohren­schildt was in at the time. The police also had prob­lems explain­ing the blood spat­ter on the wall. When a blood spurt hits a flat sur­face, it cre­ates a dif­fer­ent pat­tern than if it hits a sur­face that is per­pen­dic­u­lar to it. In look­ing at pho­tographs of the spat­ter pat­tern, it appears that the bath­room door was closed at the time the shoot­ing took place, because the blood pat­tern looked con­tin­u­ous. But the police said this was not the case. The bath­room door was open at the time. The tes­ti­fy­ing offi­cer demeaned the jurors for ask­ing this ques­tion and then jumped to a new top­ic. But it would appear that some­one altered the crime scene after­wards. The final odd­i­ty about the scene is the posi­tion of the weapon after death. It fell trig­ger side up, par­al­lel to the chair DeMohren­schildt was in, with the bar­rel rest­ing at his feet and the butt of the rifle away from him and to his left. The police had a prob­lem with this issue and so did the inquest jurors. As author Jer­ry Rose has not­ed, this strange posi­tion­ing of the rifle sug­gests it was “placed” by some­one.

Ms. Tilton was not at home at the time of DeMohren­schildt’s death. But she had left strict instruc­tions for the maid to record her favorite TV pro­grams. The home had an alarm sys­tem which caused a qui­et bell to ring, any­time an out­side door or win­dow was opened. Dur­ing the hear­ing, the tape of the pro­gram was played. When it was the alarm bell went off and then the gun blast was heard. . . .

Sub­se­quent­ly, writer Jer­ry Poli­coff felt that Olt­mans was threat­en­ing him and that the Dutch jour­nal­ist was a male­fac­tor.

An ini­tial can­di­date to replace Richard Sprague was for­mer Supreme Court Jus­tice Arthur Gold­berg, who had been JFK’s Sec­re­tary of Labor.

Des­tiny Betrayed by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; Sky­horse Pub­lish­ing [SC]; Copy­right 1992, 2012 by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; ISBN 978–1‑62087–056‑3; p. 339.

. . . . For­mer Jus­tice of the Supreme Court Arthur Gold­berg was one can­di­date who turned down the job. Al Lewis had talked Gold­berg into fill­ing the posi­tion. But Gold­berg had one reser­va­tion. He want­ed to know if the CIA would coop­er­ate with him. Lewis sug­gest­ed call­ing up Stans­field Turn­er, Pres­i­dent Carter’s CIA Direc­tor. So Lewis called him and told him Gold­berg want­ed to talk with him. He put Gold­berg on the line and the can­di­date asked Turn­er if he could guar­an­tee the Agency would coop­er­ate if he became Chief Coun­sel. A long silence ensued. It got so long and so qui­et that Gold­berg turned to Lewis and said, ‘I’m not sure if he’s there any­more.’ Lewis sug­gest­ed that he say some­thing. So Gold­berg asked if he was still on the line and Turn­er said he was.  Gold­berg asked him for an answer to his ques­tion. Turn­er said, ‘I though my silence was my answer.’ . . . .

Even­tu­al­ly, the HSCA set­tled on G. Robert Blakey as Chief Coun­sel and Richard (Dick) Billings as a key aide. Both had been involved with tar­ring Jim Gar­ri­son with the Mafia brush in a 1967 Life Mag­a­zine series.

Des­tiny Betrayed by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; Sky­horse Pub­lish­ing [SC]; Copy­right 1992, 2012 by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; ISBN 978–1‑62087–056‑3; p. 276.

. . . . But [David] Chandler’s most seri­ous blast against Gar­ri­son and his inquiry was a two-part arti­cle writ­ten for Life in the fall of 1967. This appeared in the Sep­tem­ber 1 and Sep­tem­ber 8 issues of the mag­a­zine. The pieces mas­quer­ad­ed as an expose of Mafia influ­ence in large cities in Amer­i­ca at the time. But the real tar­get of the piece was not the mob, but Gar­ri­son. The idea was to depict him as a cor­rupt New Orleans DA who had some kind of neb­u­lous ties to the Mafia and Car­los Mar­cel­lo. There were four prin­ci­pal par­tic­i­pants in the pieces: Chan­dler, Sandy Smith, Dick Billings, and Robert Blakey. Smith was the actu­al billed writer. And since Smith was a long-time asset of the FBI, it is very like­ly that the Bureau was the Bureau was the orig­i­nat­ing force behind the mag­a­zine run­ning the piece. . . .

. . . . It was the work of Chan­dler, a friend of both Clay Shaw and Ker­ry Thorn­ley, which was the basis of the com­plete­ly pho­ny con­cept that Gar­ri­son was some­how in bed with the Mafia and his func­tion was to steer atten­tion from their killing of Kennedy. . . .

Blakey:

1.–Effectively eclipsed the New Orleans leads devel­oped by Jim Gar­ri­son.
2.–Bought into the Mag­ic Bul­let The­o­ry.
3.–Eclipsed evi­dence about “Oswald’s” sniper’s nest in the Texas School Book Depos­i­to­ry.

Most impor­tant­ly, Blakey gave the intel­li­gence ser­vices the right to veto what infor­ma­tion would go into the com­mit­tee’s report.

Des­tiny Betrayed by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; Sky­horse Pub­lish­ing [SC]; Copy­right 1992, 2012 by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; ISBN 978–1‑62087–056‑3; p. 350.

” . . . . When Robert Blakey took charge of the House Select Com­mit­tee on Assas­si­na­tions, he agreed to do some­thing that Richard Sprague would not. In return for access to clas­si­fied mate­ri­als, mem­bers and employ­ees f the com­mit­tee signed agree­ments pledg­ing not to dis­close any infor­ma­tion they gar­nered while doing their work. Then, when Blakey, Gary Corn­well, and Dick Billings edit­ed the report and vol­umes, the agen­cies they made agree­ments that [the agen­cies] were allowed to veto what infor­ma­tion was includ­ed in the pub­lished vol­umes. This is the rea­son that the HSCA report on Mex­i­co City–assembled by two law stu­dents of Blakey’s from Cornell–was not part of the pub­lished vol­umes in 1979. For when it came time to vet the report for release, Blakey, Ed Lopez and Dan Hard­way met with the CIA rep­re­sen­ta­tives. The Agency made so many objec­tions, it took four hours to get through the first two para­graphs. The report is over 300 pages long. It was there­fore clas­si­fied until the ARRB was cre­at­ed. And then it had to go through sev­er­al reviews. But even today, an annex to the report, ‘Was Oswald an Agent of the CIA’ has not been released. This long clas­si­fied report con­firms that, as Gar­ri­son wrote in 1968, the Com­mis­sion ver­sion of what hap­pened in Mex­i­co City was delib­er­ate­ly cov­ered in mist. . . .

Near the end of his inves­ti­ga­tion, Blakey was on the receiv­ing end of some ques­tion­able behav­ior from CIA liai­son Reg­is Blahut:

Des­tiny Betrayed by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; Sky­horse Pub­lish­ing [SC]; Copy­right 1992, 2012 by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; ISBN 978–1‑62087–056‑3; p. 340.

. . . . Toward the end, when CIA liai­son Reg­is Blahut was caught mis­han­dling Kennedy’s autop­sy pho­tos while they were secured in a safe, the Agency offered Blakey four ways to do an inquiry of what had hap­pened. The main object being to see if Blahut was part of  a larg­er oper­a­tion to under­mine the HSCA. One option was to do the inquiry through the D.C. police, anoth­er was through the FBI, and the third was an inter­nal HSCA inquiry. The last was to have the CIA do it. Even though the Agency offi­cers at this meet­ing strong­ly encour­aged Blakey not to choose them to do the inves­ti­ga­tion, he still did. The report­ing offi­cer, Hav­i­land Smith, made the only con­clu­sion he could from this meet­ing He wrote that his inter­pre­ta­tion of what Blakey want­ed was the Agency ‘to go ahead with the inves­ti­ga­tion of Blahut and that he expects us to come up with a clean bill of health for the CIA.’ Which, of course, they did despite the fact that Blahut flunked three poly­graph tests. When the author talked to HSCA staffer Eddie Lopez about this mat­ter, I told him that in read­ing these mem­o­ran­da, I was struck by  how friend­ly Blakey was with these CIA offi­cers. That is, what a  seem­ing­ly easy rap­port he had with them. I said, ‘You know, Eddie he talks to them . . . “Lopez inter­rupt­ed me in mid-sen­tence and com­plet­ed the thought for me: ‘He talks to them like he’s one of them.’ . . . .”

We note that, dur­ing the ear­ly phase of the HSCA’s inves­ti­ga­tion, George H.W. Bush was in charge of the CIA. George Joan­nides, who man­aged the DRE for CIA, was the Agen­cy’s main liai­son to the HSCA.

FTR #1052 Interview #21 with Jim DiEugenio about “Destiny Betrayed”

House Select Com­mit­tee on Assas­si­na­tions Assis­tant Coun­sel Jonathan Black­mer: “. . . . ‘We have rea­son to believe Shaw was heav­i­ly involved in the Anti-Cas­tro efforts in New Orleans in the 1960s and [was] pos­si­bly one of the high lev­el plan­ners or ‘cut out’ to the plan­ners of the assas­si­na­tion.’ . . . .”

This is the twen­ty-first in a planned long series of inter­views with Jim DiEu­ge­nio about his tri­umphal analy­sis of Pres­i­dent Kennedy’s assas­si­na­tion and New Orleans Dis­trict Attor­ney Jim Gar­rison’s hero­ic inves­ti­ga­tion of the killing.

This pro­gram under­takes exam­i­na­tion of the House Select Com­mit­tee on Assas­si­na­tions.

The HSCA coa­lesced after a show­ing of the Zaprud­er film on tele­vi­sion cued a dra­mat­ic increase in peo­ple who were inter­est­ed in the JFK assas­si­na­tion. Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Tom Down­ing of Vir­ginia was instru­men­tal in real­iz­ing the project.

Ulti­mate­ly, respect­ed Penn­syl­va­nia pros­e­cu­tor Richard Sprague became the com­mit­tee’s Chief Coun­sel, recruit­ing skilled aides like the late Gae­ton Fonzi and Robert Tanen­baum. Net­work­ing with, among oth­ers, Penn­syl­va­nia Sen­a­tor Richard Schweik­er, Sprague, Tanen­baum, Fonzi et al quick­ly con­clud­ed that the War­ren Com­mis­sion was cov­er­ing up the assas­si­na­tion and high­light­ed the ridicu­lous nature of CE399–the so-called “Mag­ic Bul­let,” which is the evi­den­tiary core of the War­ren Com­mis­sion’s the­sis.

Ini­tial­ly, the HSCA began doing some seri­ous work, inves­ti­gat­ing and ana­lyz­ing the New Orleans con­nec­tions that Gar­ri­son inves­ti­gat­ed. In addi­tion to the Shaw, Ban­is­ter, Fer­rie Oswald rela­tion­ships, the role of David Phillips, aka “Mau­rice Bish­op,” became a sub­stan­tive focal point of their work.

Gae­ton Fonz­i’s work for the com­mit­tee focused on:

1.–CIA offi­cer Bernar­do DeTor­res’ pro­fes­sion­al career, includ­ing his work with Mitchell Wer­bell.
2.–David Phillips/“Maurice Bish­op.”
3.–The Rose Cheramie fore­shad­ow­ing of the assas­si­na­tion.
4.–Sergio Arcacha Smith’s numer­ous links to the assas­si­na­tion, includ­ing his pos­si­ble work run­ning guns with Jack Ruby and CIA con­tract agent Tomas Eli Davis.
5.–Freeport Sul­phur, its net­work­ing with both Clay Shaw and David Fer­rie and its own­er­ship by the East­ern Elite.
6.–The role of Jock Whit­ney in Freeport Sul­phur.
The pub­lish­er of The New York Her­ald Tri­bune, Whit­ney worked late into the evening of 11/22/1963, appar­ent­ly on an edi­to­r­i­al that fea­tured the book The Assas­sins, which claimed that Amer­i­ca’s assas­si­na­tions were the work of “crazed indi­vid­u­als.” The book was lat­er dis­trib­uted to mem­bers of the War­ren Com­mis­sion by none oth­er than Allen Dulles.

The pro­gram goes into the dis­cov­ery made by researcher John Hunt of the han­dling of the Mag­ic Bul­let, CE399.

Des­tiny Betrayed by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; Sky­horse Pub­lish­ing [SC]; Copy­right 1992, 2012 by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; ISBN 978–1‑62087–056‑3; p. 345.

. . . . And the proof is that both the War­ren Com­mis­sion and the HSCA  signed onto the ludi­crous Sin­gle Bul­let The­o­ry. A the­o­ry that has been ren­dered even more ris­i­ble today than it was in the six­ties and sev­en­ties. For researcher John Hunt has proven with declas­si­fied doc­u­ments that the so-called Mag­ic Bul­let was at the FBI lab in Wash­ing­ton at 7:30 p.m. on the night of the twen­ty-sec­ond. But how could this be if that bul­let was not turned over by the Secret Ser­vice to FBI agent Elmer Lee Todd until 8:50 p.m.? In oth­er words, lab tech­ni­cian Robert Fra­zier had booked CE399 into his reords one hour and twen­ty min­utes before it was giv­en to him by agent Todd. But fur­ther, Tod­d’s ini­tials were said by the FBI to be on this bul­let he dropped off with Fra­zier that night. Hunt saw the blow up pho­tos of the entire cir­cum­fer­ence of CE 399 at the Nation­al Archives. The FBI lied on this key issue. For Tod­d’s ini­tials are not on the bul­let.

All one needs to know about the effi­ca­cy of the HSCA is that it nev­er took the time to do what John Hunt did. . . .

Even­tu­al­ly, the col­lab­o­ra­tionist main­stream media began an assault on Richard Sprague and the work of the com­mit­tee. The New York Times, The Los Ange­les Times and The Wash­ing­ton Post began the assault, which quick­ly drew blood. . . .

FTR #1051 Interview #20 with Jim DiEugenio about “Destiny Betrayed”

This is the twen­ti­eth in a planned long series of inter­views with Jim DiEu­ge­nio about his tri­umphal analy­sis of Pres­i­dent Kennedy’s assas­si­na­tion and New Orleans Dis­trict Attor­ney Jim Gar­rison’s hero­ic inves­ti­ga­tion of the killing.

This pro­gram deals with Oswald in Mex­i­co City, one of the most impor­tant ele­ments in con­struct­ing the cov­er-up of the assas­si­na­tion.

The Mex­i­co City gam­bit entails “Oswald” osten­si­bly trav­el­ing to Mex­i­co City to vis­it the Cuban and Sovi­et embassies, the lat­ter involv­ing “Oswald’s” alleged con­tacts with Valery Kostikov, the KGB’s agent in charge of assas­si­na­tions in the West­ern Hemi­sphere. When reports of this were cir­cu­lat­ed in the Amer­i­can media on the week­end of JFK’s assas­si­na­tion, it appeared to many that the Sovi­et Union and/or Cuba was behind the assas­si­na­tion.

Ulti­mate­ly, the pos­si­bil­i­ty of World War III and a nuclear holo­caust break­ing out as a result of the assas­si­na­tion were used by Lyn­don Baines John­son to engi­neer a cov­er-up.

Des­tiny Betrayed by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; Sky­horse Pub­lish­ing [SC]; Copy­right 1992, 2012 by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; ISBN 978–1‑62087–056‑3; p. 359.

. . . . To say this decep­tion about Oswald in Mex­i­co worked well does not begin to do it jus­tice. For at the first meet­ing of the War­ren Com­mis­sion, the for­mer DA of Alame­da Coun­ty Cal­i­for­nia, Earl War­ren, came out meek as a lamb:

1.–He did not want the Com­mis­sion to employ any of their own inves­ti­ga­tors.
2.–He did not want the Com­mis­sion to gath­er evi­dence. Instead he wished for them to rely on reports made by oth­er agen­cies like the FBI and Secret Ser­vice.
3.–He did not want their hear­ings to be pub­lic. He did not want to employ the pow­er of sub­poe­na.
4.–Incredibly, he did not even want to call any wit­ness­es. He want­ed to rely on inter­views done by oth­er agen­cies.
5.–He then made a very curi­ous com­ment, “Meet­ings where wit­ness­es would be brought in would retard rather than help our inves­ti­ga­tion.

In oth­er words, as John­son told [then Sen­a­tor Richard] Rus­sell, they were to rat­i­fy the FBI’s inquiry. There was to be no real inves­ti­ga­tion by any­one. The Mex­i­co City cha­rade, with its threat of atom­ic holo­caust, had secured the cov­er up of Kennedy’s mur­der. . . .

Key ele­ments of dis­cus­sion and analy­sis on this top­ic include:

1.–Warren Com­mis­sion coun­sels David Slaw­son and William Cole­man relied on CIA and FBI liai­son for their infor­ma­tion. Specif­i­cal­ly, they relied on coun­ter­in­tel­li­gence chief James Jesus Angle­ton and and his aide Ray Roc­ca for their infor­ma­tion. NB: Mr. Emory erred at one point in this inter­view, iden­ti­fy­ing Richard Helms a head of the CIA, he was Deputy Direc­tor of the Agency at this point in time.
2.–Slawson even con­sid­ered join­ing the CIA at this point. We can but won­der if, in fact, he did just that.
3.–Richard Helms appoint­ed Angle­ton to be the main liai­son for the Agency to the War­ren Com­mis­sion. Recall that Angle­ton and Ray Roc­ca were in charge of the Oswald pre-assas­si­na­tion files.
4.–Angleton and the FBI’s William Sul­li­van coor­di­nat­ed their response con­cern­ing Oswald hav­ing ties to U.S. intel­li­gence agen­cies, deny­ing that that was, in fact, the case.
5.–A hand­ful of CIA offi­cers known as the SAS (not to be con­fused with the British com­man­do orga­ni­za­tion with the same ini­tials) devel­oped an inter­est in Oswald weeks before the assas­si­na­tion.
6.–Slawson and Cole­man relied on CIA sta­tion chief Win­ston Scott when in Mex­i­co City.
7.–Sylvia Duran, employed at the Cuban embassy in Mex­i­co City, report­ed the “Lee Har­vey Oswald” with whom she met as ” . . . being short, about five foot, six inch­es, blond and over thir­ty years old. Oswald was five foot, nine inch­es, dark haired, and twen­ty-four years old. . . .” (p. 349.)
8.–Duran not­ed that the pro­ce­dure used by the Oswald impos­tor to obtain a visa was sus­pi­cious: ” . . . . “They [U.S. com­mu­nists, which “Oswald” alleged­ly was] usu­al­ly fol­lowed a pro­ce­dure, arranged for by the Amer­i­can Com­mu­nist Par­ty, which allowed them to obtain a visa in advance through the Cuban Com­mu­nist Par­ty. . . The fact that Oswald did not do this was reveal­ing. It seemed to sug­gest that either Oswald was not a real com­mu­nist, or that peo­ple inside the com­mu­nist cir­cles in Amer­i­ca thought he was an agent provo­ca­teur. They there­fore did not trust him. . . .” (pp. 349–350.)
9.–The phone calls made to Sylvia Duran at the Cuban embassy con­tain sig­nif­i­cant dis­crep­an­cies: ” . . . . Duran stat­ed firm­ly that after the twen­ty-sev­enth, when Oswald had failed to secure his spe­cial visa, he did not call her back. Again, some­one embroi­dered this for the Com­mis­sion. For in the War­ren Report, she is quot­ed as say­ing ” . . . . she does not recall whether or not Oswald lat­er tele­phoned her at the Con­sulate num­ber she gave him.” This was an impor­tant dis­crep­an­cy in tes­ti­mo­ny. Because, as we shall see, there was anoth­er call to the Russ­ian con­sulate on Sat­ur­day the twen­ty-eighth [of Sep­tem­ber, 1963]. The CIA claims this call was by Duran, with Oswald also on the line. But if Duran’s recall is cor­rect, then the CIA evi­dence is spu­ri­ous. . . .” (p. 350.)
10.–When G. Robert Blakey and his asso­ciate Richard Billings assumed con­trol over the HSCA, they made a sig­nif­i­cant con­ces­sion: ” . . . . In return for access to clas­si­fied mate­ri­als, mem­bers and employ­ees f the com­mit­tee signed agree­ments pledg­ing not to dis­close any infor­ma­tion they gar­nered while doing their work. The, when Blakey, Gary Corn­well, and Dick billings edit­ed the report and vol­umes, the agen­cies they made agree­ments that [the agen­cies] were allowed to veto what infor­ma­tion was includ­ed in the pub­lished vol­umes. . ..” (p. 350.)
11.–While “Oswald” was sup­pos­ed­ly in Mex­i­co City, Sylvia Odio was vis­it­ed by three men, one whom was iden­ti­fied as “Leon Oswald,” an ex-Marine, an excel­lent shot, and some­one who felt that JFK should be assas­si­nat­ed for fail­ing to sup­port the Bay of Pigs inva­sion. ” . . . . After read­ing the War­ren Report, [HSCA’s first Chief Coun­sel Richard] Sprague won­dered why the com­mis­sion chose to dis­count the tes­ti­mo­ny of Sil­via Odio. . . . When she first heard of Oswald’s involve­ment with the Kennedy assas­si­na­tion, she imme­di­ate­ly recalled the vis­it of the three men. That after­noon she became very fear­ful, so much so that she faint­ed. She then met with her sis­ter, ans and they had both been watch­ing tele­vi­sion with Oswald’s pho­to on the screen, they both real­ized he was the man who thought the Cubans should have killed Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs. . . .” (pp. 350–351.)
12.–The Odio inci­dent cre­at­ed prob­lems for the War­ren Com­mi­sion: ” . . . . The third prob­lem, the one that both­ered Sprague, was that the dates of the vis­it clashed with the dates that Oswald was sup­posed to be going to Mex­i­co. . . .” (p. 352.)
13.–To dis­cred­it Sylvia Odio, War­ren Com­mis­sion coun­sel Wes­ley Liebler impugned her sex­u­al mores: ” . . . . Odio described what hap­pened next to Fonzi and the Church Com­mit­tee: ‘Not only that, he invit­ed me to his room upstairs to see some pic­tures. I did go, I went to his room. I want­ed to see how far a gov­ern­ment inves­ti­ga­tor would go and what they were try­ing to do to a wit­ness. . . . He showed me pic­tures, he made advances, yes, but I told him he was crazy.’ Liebler was­n’t through. To show her what kind of oper­a­tion the Com­mis­sion real­ly was, he told her that they had seen her pic­ture and joked about it at the War­ren Com­mis­sion. They said things like what a pret­ty girl you are going to see Jim. . . . For HSCA staff lawyer Bill Triplett told this author that the rea­son that chair­man Earl War­ren did not believe Sylvia Odio is that she was some kind of a ‘loose woman.’ . . .” (pp. 352–353.)
14.–The lin­guis­tic capa­bil­i­ties of the “Oswald” who alleged­ly was con­tact­ing the Cuban and Sovi­et embassies in Mex­i­co City are con­tra­dic­to­ry: ” . . . . it has Oswald speak­ing flu­ent Span­ish, which no one has ever said Oswald did. Fur­ther, the HSCA report says that Oswald spoke poor, bro­ken Russ­ian. Yet both Mari­na Oswald and George DeMohren­schildt said Oswald spoke Russ­ian quite well upon his return to the Unit­ed States. Fur­ther, pro­fes­sion­al trans­la­tor Peter Gre­go­ry thought Oswald was flu­ent enough to give him a let­ter cer­ti­fy­ing Oswald’s abil­i­ty to serve as a trans­la­tor. . . .” (p. 353.)
15.–The “Oswald” pho­tographed in Mex­i­co City was obvi­ous­ly an impos­tor: ” . . . . The CIA had mul­ti­ple still cam­eras set up out­side the Cuban embassy in Mex­i­co City to catch every­one com­ing out of and going inside in order to secure a visa to Cuba. When, at the request of the Com­mis­sion, the FBI asked the CIA for a pho­to of Oswald enter­ing the con­sulate, they got Com­missin Exhib­it 237. This is a pic­ture of a husky six foot­er with a crew-cut. Obvi­ous­ly not Oswald. . . . In Owald’s com­bined five vis­its to the Cuban con­sulate and Sovi­et con­sulate, the bat­tery of CIA cam­eras failed to get even one pic­ture of him enter­ing or leav­ing. In oth­er words, they were zero for ten. And the cam­era right out­side the Cuban con­sulate was pulse acti­vat­ed. . . . ” (pp. 353–354.)
16.–Both David Phillips and his assis­tant Anne Good­pas­ture were involved in mul­ti­ple obfus­ca­tions of the facts: ” . . . . Anne Good­pas­ture was in charge of the ‘dai­ly take’ from both tar­get embassies. That is the pho­tographs tak­en from out­side and the clan­des­tine tape record­ings made from inside the com­pounds. This is impor­tant because she then would have been the first per­son to see a pho­to of Oswald. There­fore, she should have sent for a pho­to of Oswald from Lan­g­ley in a time­ly man­ner while Oswald was still in Mex­i­co City. She did not. . . .” (p. 354.)
17.–Next, we high­light more of Phillip­s’s obstruc­tion of the inves­ti­ga­tion: ” . . . . Phillips said that they had no audio tapes because they ‘recy­cled their tapes every sev­en or eight days.’ The tapes were actu­al­ly recy­cled every ten days. But they were held for a longer time if so request­ed. Fur­ther, if any Amer­i­can cit­i­zen spoke bro­ken Russ­ian inside the Sovi­et con­sulate, the tape would be sent to Wash­ing­ton. Because he would be con­sid­ered of pos­si­ble oper­a­tional inter­est to the Sovi­ets. . . . Phillips also told [HSCA coun­sel Robert] Tanen­baum that the rea­son the CIA did not have a pho­to of Oswald was because their cam­era was out that day. This appears to be anoth­er lie. First of all, Oswald went to the Sovi­et con­sulate on two dif­fer­ent days, the twen­ty-sev­enth and twen­ty-eighth. So all three of the cam­eras cov­er­ing the site would have had to have been out on both days. . . .” (p. 354.)
18.–Phillips also dis­sem­bled con­cern­ing a cable sent to CIA head­quar­ters: ” . . . . The sur­veil­lance of the Russ­ian con­sulate revealed that by Octo­ber 1, the CIA knew that “Oswald” was in direct con­tact with those who worked there, such as Valery Kostikov of the KGB. But yet, the cable alert­ing head­quar­ters to this fact did not arrive until a week lat­er, Octo­ber 8, Phillips tried to explain this delay by blam­ing the trans­la­tors. He then said he knew that this was the case since he signed off on the cable. Hard­way and Lopez found out that Phillips did not sign off on the cable, since it did not deal in any way with Cuban mat­ters. But even worse, he could not have signed off on it because he was not in Mex­i­co City at the time. The like­ly rea­son the cable was sent out so late was to keep Oswald’s pro­file low while he was alleged­ly in Mex­i­co City. . . .” (pp. 354–355.)
19.–Oswald’s file at CIA began to be bifur­cat­ed: ” . . . . On or about Sep­tem­ber 23, Angle­ton began to bifur­cate Oswald’s file. the FBI reports on Oswald’s Fair Play for Cuba Com­mit­tee activ­i­ties in New Orleans went into a new oper­a­tional file, sep­a­rate from his 201 file. There­fore, the bizarre things Oswald was doing in New Orleans . . . .were all kept out of his 201 file. So when the late arriv­ing cable final­ly did come into CIA HQ from Mex­i­co City about Oswald in the Sovi­et con­sulate, this was kept sep­a­rate from his New Orleans activ­i­ties. Then two dif­fer­ent cables were sent out on Octo­ber 10. One was sent to the Bureau, the State Depart­ment, and the Navy, describ­ing a man who does­n’t fit Oswald’s descrip­tion: he is thir­ty-five years old, has an ath­let­ic build, and stands six feet tall. This descrip­tion resem­bles the Mys­tery Man pho­to. . . .” (pp. 355–356.)
20.–An alto­geth­er remark­able and reveal­ing aspect of the “Oswald” in Mex­i­co City gam­bit con­cerns the FBI’s “FLASH” notice on Oswald: ” . . . . Oswald was not placed on the FBI’s Secu­ri­ty Index list which was passed on to the Secret Ser­vice in advance of Kennedy’s vis­it to Dal­las. If he had been on that list, the Secret Ser­vice would have made sure he was not on the motor­cade route, since he con­sti­tut­ed a clear risk to Pres­i­dent Kennedy. One rea­son he was not on the list is because the FBI “FLASH” on Oswald, which had been in effect since his defec­tion in 1959 was removed. This warn­ing required any infor­ma­tion or inquiry on the sub­ject to e imme­di­ate­ly for­ward­ed to the Espi­onage Sec­tion of Divi­sion Five, the Domes­tic Intel­li­gence unit. Incred­i­bly, the “FLASH” was can­celed on Octo­ber 9, 1963. In oth­er words, after being attached to Oswald’s file for four years, it was removed just hours after he cable from Mex­i­co City arrived in Wash­ing­ton report­ing Oswald’s vis­it to the Sovi­et com­pound and meet­ing with Kostikov . . . .” (p. 356.)
21.–In light of Valery Kostikov’s iden­ti­ty, the FBI’s behav­ior is more than a lit­tle inter­est­ing: ” . . . . Kostikov’s true iden­ti­ty was revealed. His was the KGB unit respon­si­ble for assas­si­na­tions in the West­ern Hemi­sphere. After being method­i­cal­ly lulled to sleep . . . this infor­ma­tion must have felt like a hard punch to the jaw. Oswald had met with the KGB rep­re­sen­ta­tive for assas­si­na­tion sev­en weeks before Kennedy arrived in Dal­las. Yet, he was allowed to be in the build­ing behind where the Pres­i­den­t’s lim­ou­sine would be dri­ving. And no one in the FBI or Secret Ser­vice did any­thing for near­ly two months. The dia­bol­i­cal trap had been sprung. Hoover had no choice. He went into CYA over­drive. . . .” (p. 357.)
22.–In response to a tele­phoned ques­tion from Lyn­don Baines John­son, Hoover revealed that his agents had heard the tapes of “Oswald” speak­ing and seen the pho­tographs of “Oswald” vis­it­ing the Mex­i­co City diplo­mat­ic posts, but that nei­ther the calls, nor the pic­ture was the real Lee Har­vey Oswald. ” . . . . Hoover replied that this was all very con­fus­ing. He said that they had a tape and a pho­to of a man who was at the Sovi­et con­sulate using Oswald’s name. But, ‘That pic­ture and the tape do not cor­re­spond to this man’s voice, nor to his appear­ance. In oth­er words, it appears that there is a sec­ond per­son who was at the Sovi­et Embassy down there.’ On that same day, Hoover wrote a mem­o­ran­dum in which he said that two FBI agents who had been ques­tion­ing Oswald heard this tape and con­clud­ed that the voice on the tape was not Oswald’s. . . .” (p. 357.)
23.–In order to resolve the con­tra­dic­tions that the FBI had high­light­ed about “Oswald” in Mex­i­co City, the lie was gen­er­at­ed that the tapes had been destroyed before the assas­si­na­tion. Yet, Stan­ley Wat­son demon­strat­ed oth­er­wise: ” . . . . CIA offi­cer and Deputy Sta­tion Chief Stan­ley Wat­son tes­ti­fied to the HSCA that at least one record­ing exist­ed after the assas­si­na­tion. Fur­ther, the man who was first in charge of the CIA’s inquiry for the War­ren Com­mis­sion, John Whit­ten, wrote that while some tapes had been erased, some of ‘the actu­al tapes were also reviewed,’ and that anoth­er copy of the Octo­ber 1 ‘inter­cept on Lee Oswald’ had been ‘dis­cov­ered after the assas­si­na­tion. . . .” (p. 358.)
24.–In 1971, after the death of for­mer Mex­i­co City sta­tion chief Win­ston Scott, his wid­ow was threat­ened with removal of her sur­vivor ben­e­fits if she did not per­mit CIA coun­ter­in­tel­li­gence chief James Angle­ton access to her late hus­band’s safe: ” . . . . April 28, 1971 was the day after Janet Scott buried her hus­band Win­ston Scott. When she heard of Scot­t’s death, Anne Good­pas­ture told James Angle­ton about the con­tents of the for­mer Mex­i­co City sta­tion chief’s safe. On that day, on a mis­sion approved by Richard Helms, James Angle­ton flew to Mex­i­co City. He was in such a hur­ry that he for­got his pass­port. And if the record­ings were of the same false Oswald’s voice on tape, it would endan­ger the cov­er sto­ry about those tapes being destroyed pri­or to the assas­si­na­tion. After enter­ing the house, Angle­ton vague­ly threat­ened Janet’s wid­ow’s ben­e­fits. He then had scot­t’s safe emp­tied. The con­tents were shipped by plane to Lan­g­ley, Vir­ginia. The man most respon­si­ble for cre­at­ing first, the Oswald leg­end, then the design of the dooms­day sce­nario to the plot had now dis­posed of a last obstruc­tion to his hand­i­work. . . .” (p. 361.)

FTR #1050 Interview #19 with Jim DiEugenio about “Destiny Betrayed”

Guy Ban­is­ter employ­ee Tom­my Baum­ler: ” . . . . what­ev­er hap­pens, the Shaw case will end with­out pun­ish­ment for him [Shaw], because fed­er­al pow­er will see to that.”

This is the nine­teenth of a planned long series of inter­views with Jim DiEu­ge­nio about his tri­umphal analy­sis of Pres­i­dent Kennedy’s assas­si­na­tion and New Orleans Dis­trict Attor­ney Jim Gar­rison’s hero­ic inves­ti­ga­tion of the killing.

In the con­text of the then CIA direc­tor Richard Helms’ memo that Gar­rison’s should be neu­tral­ized before, dur­ing and after the Clay Shaw tri­al, we high­light the media attacks against Gar­ri­son that con­tin­ued after the tri­al.

The media hit pieces con­tin­ued dur­ing Gar­rison’s attempt at try­ing Clay Shaw for per­jury.  Look mag­a­zine did a hit piece on Gar­ri­son fea­tur­ing many of the “Usu­al Sus­pects,” includ­ing William  Gur­vich, one of the infil­tra­tors into Jim Gar­rison’s inves­tiga­tive tri­al who then col­lab­o­rat­ed with Shaw’s defense team.

Offi­cial­ly the piece was writ­ten by War­ren Rogers, whose insti­tu­tion­al affil­i­a­tions bear relat­ing:

Des­tiny Betrayed by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; Sky­horse Pub­lish­ing [SC]; Copy­right 1992, 2012 by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; ISBN 978–1‑62087–056‑3; p. 313.

. . . . Rogers, like Phe­lan and Sandy Smith, was a reli­able asset of the FBI. That is, he could be con­tact­ed to do favors for them when called upon. The pub­lic did not know this until the 1979 posthu­mous pub­li­ca­tion of William Sul­li­van’s book about the FBI called The Bureau. Sul­li­van had beena top ech­e­lon offi­cer in the FBI for many years. In his book there is a chap­ter enti­tled “Flack­ing for the Bureau.” List­ed as one of the reporters who would often write arti­cles with infor­ma­tion fed to them by the FBI was War­ren Rogers. . . .

Hunter Leake–in charge of CIA oper­a­tions in New Orleans–kept the tele­type machine they had installed dur­ing Shaw’s crim­i­nal tri­al  in place until after the pro­posed per­jury tri­al.

An alto­geth­er remark­able change of venue occurred, after Shaw’s lawyers had received copies of Gar­rison’s inves­tiga­tive doc­u­ments for Shaw’s per­jury tri­al! 

Des­tiny Betrayed by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; Sky­horse Pub­lish­ing [SC]; Copy­right 1992, 2012 by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; ISBN 978–1‑62087–056‑3; p. 313.

. . . . After hav­ing been in receipt of Gar­rison’s brief­ing papers for the per­jury tri­al, Shaw’s attor­neys final­ly tried for a tem­po­rary restrain­ing order to stop Gar­rison’s case from pro­ceed­ing. This was ini­tial­ly denied. But then, on Jan­u­ary 18, 1971, the day the state tri­al was to begin, a motion for emer­gency relief was grant­ed. This was unusu­al because the fed­er­al judi­cia­ry does not often inter­vene in state pros­e­cu­tions. But Shaw’s lawyers wrote that Shaw would suf­fer “grave and irrepara­ble injury” as the result of the state per­jury case which had been brought in “bad faith” and “in fur­ther­ance of Gar­rison’s scheme of harass­ment and intim­i­da­tion.” A hear­ing on whether or not to grant the pre­lim­i­nary injunc­tion was set for Jan­u­ary 25, 1971, just one week after the state tri­al was to begin. In oth­er words, Shaw’s lawyers need­ed almost no prepa­ra­tion time for the new venue and the new hear­ing, which they like­ly had been prepar­ing for in advance, since they had an inti­ma­tion that they would be suc­cess­ful in switch­ing the venue.

They were count­ing on Her­bert Chris­ten­ber­ry. Chris­ten­ber­ry was the fed­er­al judge who presided over this hear­ing. To under­stand what hap­pened thee, one must under­stand who Chris­ten­ber­ry was. . . .

In 1935, Louisiana gov­er­nor Huey Long was assas­si­nat­ed, and Her­bert Chris­ten­ber­ry cov­ered for the true con­spir­a­tors, who were a group of oper­a­tors from Stan­dard Oil, who were plot­ting to take over the reigns of the Louisiana state gov­ern­ment.

Chris­ten­ber­ry and his wife Car­o­line were friends and sup­port­ers of Clay Shaw!

Des­tiny Betrayed by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; Sky­horse Pub­lish­ing [SC]; Copy­right 1992, 2012 by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; ISBN 978–1‑62087–056‑3; pp. 315–316.

. . . . The oth­er piece of infor­ma­tion that helps elu­ci­date what Chris­ten­ber­ry did was found in the Nation­al Archives as part of Shaw’s per­son­al papers. It is a let­ter from Chris­ten­ber­ry’s  wife Car­o­line to Shaw which was sent a week after his acquit­tal. It begins like this: “Our most sin­cere con­grat­u­la­tions! We shared your anx­i­eties over the past two out­ra­geous years.” The read­er should note the wife’s sen­ti­ments. Te note goes on with: “Should your case have even­tu­al­ly found its way to Fed­er­al Court and been allot­ted to my hus­band you most cer­tain­ly would have had a fair tri­al. He felt we should not risk the pos­si­ble of being con­sid­ered ‘prej­u­diced’ in advance. This is our rea­son for not open­ly express­ing these sen­ti­ments ear­li­er.’ As if Shaw did not have a fair tri­al the first time around? The read­er should note the quotes around the word prej­u­diced. That usage and the sen­tence’s mean­ing clear­ly denotes that Chris­ten­ber­ry was fero­cious­ly biased for Shaw and against Gar­ri­son. But he did not want any­one to know that. . . . the fact that this was sent in 1969 clear­ly influ­enced his lawyers’ strat­e­gy for the per­jury case. . . . .

. . . . The three day hear­ing might have been script­ed by Hugh Aynesworth. . . . For exam­ple, William Gur­vich was allowed to tes­ti­fy as to the fraud­u­lence of Gar­rison’s inves­ti­ga­tion. . . . Gar­ri­son, not Shaw, was actu­al­ly placed on the wit­ness stand and asked to explain why he ever called in Shaw for ques­tion­ing in the first place. In oth­er words, at the Weg­manns’ request, Chris­ten­ber­ry was ask­ing the DA to give away his planned upcom­ing case against the defen­dant. . . .

After the fore­gone con­clu­sion of the Shaw per­jury tri­al, the Richard Helms/CIA direc­tive to neu­tral­ize Gar­ri­son after the Clay Shaw tri­al con­tin­ued to be man­i­fest­ed. Gar­ri­son was framed for alleged­ly tak­ing kick­backs from an ille­gal pay­off scheme from orga­nized-crime linked pin­ball machine oper­a­tors. Key points about this gam­bit:

1.–The recruit­ing by the gov­ern­ment of Per­sh­ing Ger­vais to con­coct pho­ny “evi­dence” against Gar­ri­son.
2.–Garrison’s cross-exam­i­na­tion of the pin­ball oper­a­tors and the deter­mi­na­tion that the evi­dence against him was nonex­is­tent. None of the oper­a­tors tes­ti­fied to pay­ing Gar­rri­son and/or his assis­tants any mon­ey or even know­ing him.
3.–Gervais was shipped to Cana­da and giv­en a job at Gen­er­al Motors, as well as an annu­al stipend from the Jus­tice Depart­ment!
4.–The tapes Ger­vais had alleged­ly made of Gar­ri­son while the for­mer was wear­ing a wire were deter­mined to be pho­ny.
5.–The sums Ger­vais claimed to have moved from Gar­ri­son were not even con­sis­tent with­in the var­i­ous accounts that he gave.
6.–Pershing even­tu­al­ly “rolled over” on the gov­ern­ment, admit­ting that he was recruit­ed in a crim­i­nal enter­prise by the gov­ern­ment to frame Gar­ri­son.

Per­haps the most effec­tive, long-last­ing ele­ment in the post-Shaw tri­al destruc­tion of Jim Gar­ri­son was the elec­tion of Jus­tice Depart­ment offi­cial Har­ry Con­nick to suc­ceed Gar­ri­son as DA.

Key points of dis­cus­sion and analy­sis about Con­nick:

1.–He was seem­ing­ly omnipresent in Clay Shaw’s crim­i­nal tri­al, oper­at­ing to obstruct Gar­ri­son and aid Clay Shaw and the Fed­er­al Gov­ern­ment for which he  worked.
2.–Station WDSU–very close to Clay Shaw and the vehi­cle for both the Wal­ter Sheri­dan dis­in­for­ma­tion hit piece on Jim Gar­ri­son and the Ed Butler/Carlos Bringuier inter­view of the “Com­mu­nist” Oswald–was active on behalf of Con­nick.
3.–The Gur­vich broth­ers, who infil­trat­ed Gar­rison’s inves­ti­ga­tion and net­worked with Clay Shaw’s defense team (with William appear­ing as a wit­ness in the hear­ing on Shaw’s per­jury tri­al), were active on behalf of Har­ry Con­nick.
4.–Clay Shaw him­self, as well as DRE oper­a­tive Car­los Bringuier con­tributed to Con­nick­’s elec­tion cam­paign.
5.–In his sec­ond cam­paign to replace Gar­ri­son, Con­nick was suc­cess­ful.
6.–After becom­ing New Orleans DA, he burned many of Gar­rison’s files.

Even­tu­al­ly, the mon­ey Gar­ri­son sup­pos­ed­ly gar­nered from the pho­ny pin­ball oper­a­tor kick­back scheme led to an IRS charge of income tax eva­sion. Gar­ri­son was acquit­ted.

Clay Shaw filed a nui­sance law­suit against Gar­ri­son for slander/defamation, which was ter­mi­nat­ed by Clay Shaw’s death, despite the Weg­manns’ attempts at per­pet­u­at­ing it even after their client was deceased.

James Phe­lan’s pro­tege James Kirk­wood con­tin­ued the media assault on Gar­ri­son with the pub­li­ca­tion of his book Amer­i­can Grotesque, which mis­rep­re­sent­ed the Gar­ri­son inves­ti­ga­tion.

FTR #1049 Interview #18 with Jim DiEugenio about “Destiny Betrayed”

Guy Ban­is­ter employ­ee Tom­my Baum­ler: ” . . . . what­ev­er hap­pens, the Shaw case will end with­out pun­ish­ment for him [Shaw], because fed­er­al pow­er will see to that.”

This is the eigh­teenth of a planned long series of inter­views with Jim DiEu­ge­nio about his tri­umphal analy­sis of Pres­i­dent Kennedy’s assas­si­na­tion and New Orleans Dis­trict Attor­ney Jim Gar­rison’s hero­ic inves­ti­ga­tion of the killing.

This inter­view con­tin­ues with the analy­sis of Clay Shaw’s tri­al.

Exem­pli­fy­ing the pow­er that was mar­shaled on behalf of Clay Shaw was the treat­ment accord­ed FBI agent Reg­is Kennedy.

Not only did the Depart­ment of Jus­tice inter­cede ahead of time to lim­it Kennedy’s tes­ti­mo­ny, but Nixon’s Attor­ney Gen­er­al John Mitchell “severe­ly cur­tailed” his tes­ti­mo­ny “mid-tri­al.”

Des­tiny Betrayed by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; Sky­horse Pub­lish­ing [SC]; Copy­right 1992, 2012 by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; ISBN 978–1‑62087–056‑3; p. 298.

. . . . The only wit­ness that Gar­ri­son was able to pro­duce to inquire into the offi­cial inves­ti­ga­tion of the assas­si­na­tion in New Orleans was FBI agent Reg­is Kennedy. And even then, by pri­or arrange­ment with the Jus­tice Depart­ment, Kennedy would only tes­ti­fy about a cer­tain area of his inquiry, name­ly his inter­view with Dean Andrews and his con­se­quent search for Clay Bertrand. This lim­i­ta­tion hurt the DA since Kennedy was a rel­e­vant wit­ness to oth­er aspects of the case. For instance, along with sev­er­al oth­ers, he had been a mem­ber of the Friends of Demo­c­ra­t­ic Cuba group set up by Guy Ban­is­ter and William Dalzell. Fur­ther, there were wit­ness­es who put Kennedy in Banister’s office. There­fore, what Kennedy could have told the court about Ban­is­ter, Fer­rie, their asso­ci­a­tion with the Cubans–especially Ser­gio Art­cacha Smith–and Oswald, was very like­ly con­sid­er­able. But he was not allowed to tes­ti­fy about any of those impor­tant mat­ters. Con­se­quent­ly, when Alcock asked him if he was involved with the inves­ti­ga­tion into Pres­i­dent Kennedy’s death pri­or to his inter­view with Andrews, Kennedy said he was not sure if he could answer that ques­tion. The dis­cus­sion then went inside the judge’s cham­bers. Con­nick then called Wash­ing­ton. After this, the jury was called back inside. Alcock then asked Kennedy if, pri­or to his inter­view with Andrews, had he been engaged in the inquiry into Pres­i­dent Kennedy’s assas­si­na­tion. Kennedy replied in the affir­ma­tive. Alcock then was allowed to ask the fol­low-op ques­tion, which relat­ed to the first: Was Kennedy seek­ing Clay Bertrand in con­nec­tion with his over­all inves­ti­ga­tion into the assas­si­na­tion. Kennedy said that he was.

There was a code to all this that Alcock could not have known about. But it was part of the rea­son that Attor­ney Gen­er­al John Mitchell severe­ly cur­tailed Reg­is Kennedy’s tes­ti­mo­ny in mid-tri­al. . . .

A major ele­ment in the tes­ti­mo­ny dur­ing Clay Shaw’s tri­al was the tes­ti­mo­ny of autop­sy sur­geon Army Lieu­tenant Colonel Pierre Finck. The autop­sy was being con­trolled by one of the high-rank­ing mil­i­tary offi­cers present at the pro­ce­dure.

Des­tiny Betrayed by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; Sky­horse Pub­lish­ing [SC]; Copy­right 1992, 2012 by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; ISBN 978–1‑62087–056‑3; p. 300.

. . . . Finck replied that he was not run­ning the autop­sy, it was Com­man­der James Humes. When Oser asked if Humes was actu­al­ly in charge, Finck made a dis­clo­sure which lit­er­al­ly changed the face of the autop­sy evi­dence for­ev­er. And it should have rocked the news media if [media hatch­et man James] Phe­lan had not been con­trol­ling it. Finck replied that Humes actu­al­ly stopped and asked, “Who is in charge here?” Finck then said he heard an Army Gen­er­al say, “I am.” Finck then added, “You must under­stand that in those cir­cum­stances, there were law enforce­ment offi­cials, mil­i­tary peo­ple with var­i­ous ranks, and you have to coor­di­nate the oper­a­tions accord­ing to direc­tions”. . . .

Then, Jim notes that Alvin Oser had to ask Finck eight times as to why Finck did not dis­sect the track of the neck wound. Finck­’s response–that he was ordered not to do so by one of the high-rank­ing offi­cers present, is proof of a con­spir­a­cy.

Des­tiny Betrayed by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; Sky­horse Pub­lish­ing [SC]; Copy­right 1992, 2012 by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; ISBN 978–1‑62087–056‑3; p. 302.

. . . . [Alvin] Oser then moved on to anoth­er key issue that exposed the pathol­o­gists as pawns. A very impor­tant point about the autop­sy is its fail­ure to con­vinc­ing­ly prove direc­tion­al­i­ty. That is, from which direc­tion did the bul­lets enter the body? There have always been seri­ous queries about whether the wound in Kennedy’s throat was an entrance or exit wound. If that wound was one of entrance, then Kennedy was shot at least once from the front. That shot could not have been from Oswald, there­fore the mur­der was a con­spir­a­cy. What makes this pos­si­bil­i­ty very real is that Mal­colm Per­ry said dur­ing a tele­vised press con­fer­ence on Novem­ber 22 that the throat wound was one of entrance. He repeat­ed this three times that day. Since he did the tra­cheoto­my right over that wound, he should cer­tain­ly know. The best way to have proven this point once and for all was to have dis­sect­ed the wound track. Amaz­ing­ly, this was not done. When Oser tried to find out why it was not done, Finck used every eva­sion he could to avoid answer­ing the ques­tion. Going over the tran­script of this exchange is a bit star­tling. The read­er will find that Oser had to pose the ques­tion eight sep­a­rate times. It got so bad that Oser even had to request that the judge direct the wit­ness to answer the ques­tion. Finck final­ly answered with, “As I recall I was told not to, but I don’t remem­ber by whom.” Again, some­one was con­trol­ling the pathol­o­gy team in a way that pre­vent­ed them from doing a full and cor­rect autop­sy. . . . Fur­ther, the fact that the doc­tors were ordered not to track the wound indi­cat­ed the mil­i­tary brass may have been try­ing to cov­er this point up. . . .

One of Gar­rison’s strongest weapons in his coun­ter­at­tack against the forces run­ning inter­fer­ence on behalf of Shaw and oth­ers involved in the assas­si­na­tion was the Zaprud­er film, which clear­ly shows Kennedy’s body being thrown back and to the left, indi­cat­ing a shot from the front.

Media hatch­et man James Phe­lan who, like Wal­ter Sheri­dan and Hugh Aynesworth worked with the intel­li­gence ser­vices, became a defense wit­ness for Clay Shaw and also played what was, in effect, a supervisory/PR role in pre­sid­ing over a con­sor­tium of jour­nal­ists cov­er­ing the Shaw tri­al.

Des­tiny Betrayed by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; Sky­horse Pub­lish­ing [SC]; Copy­right 1992, 2012 by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; ISBN 978–1‑62087–056‑3; pp. 289–290.

. . . . That jour­nal­is­tic duo, Phe­lan and Ayneswoth, were both on the scene: Phe­lan as a wit­ness for the defense and Aynesworth to help Shaw’s attor­neys. An odd thing about this was that nei­ther man had any osten­si­ble writ­ing assign­ment at the time. But it turned out that Phe­lan had a very spe­cial func­tion for his back­ers. Most reporters in town to cov­er the pro­ceed­ings rent­ed a hotel room, but not Phe­lan. Phe­lan rent­ed a house. Why would he do such a thing if he was not there to write a sto­ry? because his was a much big­ger assign­ment. His job was to put the spin on each day’s tes­ti­mo­ny for the resid­ing press corps, there­by con­trol­ling the entire nation­al media reportage on the Shaw tri­al. How did he do such a thing? He would invite all the reporters over to his rent­ed house at the end of each day. He would then serve them refresh­ments and snacks. He then would spell out the next day’s sto­ry on a chalk­board. This is how some of the most inter­est­ing and impor­tant tes­ti­mo­ny pre­sent­ed dur­ing the pro­ceed­ings got cov­ered up by the media. On the day the Zaprud­er film was shown, Phe­lan had his work cut out for him. For the repeat­ed show­ing of the film was shown, Phe­lan had his work cut out for him. For the repeat­ed show­ing of the film—depicting Kennedy’s body being vio­lent­ly knocked back—really shook up the press. It appeared Gar­ri­son was right, it was a con­spir­a­cy. But when they arrived at Phe­lan’s rent­ed house, the reporter pulled a prover­bial rab­bit out of his hat. He took out his chalk­board, raised up his piece of chalk, and he began to out­line the dynam­ics of the so-called “jet-effect” expla­na­tion for the action of the film. That is, if Oswald was fir­ing from behind Kennedy, why does Kennedy’s body recoil with tremen­dous force to the rear of the car? What Phe­lan and the jet effect prof­fer is that some­how, the spurt­ing of blood and brains served as a jet that drove Kennedy’s head back­ward with over­pow­er­ing force. This is how deter­mined Phe­lan was to keep a lid on what came out of the tri­al. . . .

In our pre­vi­ous pro­gram, we high­light­ed the attempt on book­ing offi­cer Aloy­sius Habighorst’s life on the eve of his tes­ti­mo­ny in the Clay Shaw tri­al. When he tes­ti­fied, Judge Hag­ger­ty refused to allow his tes­ti­mo­ny into evi­dence.

Des­tiny Betrayed by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; Sky­horse Pub­lish­ing [SC]; Copy­right 1992, 2012 by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; ISBN 978–1‑62087–056‑3; pp. 306–308.

. . . . When Shaw was first arrest­ed in March of 1967, Habighorst had han­dled the book­ing. Before hav­ing him sign the fin­ger­print card, the offi­cer had rou­tine­ly asked if the defen­dant had ever used an alias. Appar­ent­ly unset­tled by his arrest, Shaw had replied “Clay Bertrand.” Habighorst typed this on the card and Shaw signed it. Alcock now want­ed to admit both the card and the officer’s tes­ti­mo­ny as evi­dence into the tri­al. This seemed pow­er­ful, damn­ing evi­dence because it came right out of Shaw’s mouth and hand. . . .The prosecution’s protes­ta­tions fell on deaf ears. Judge Hag­ger­ty would not allow the evi­dence. . . .

Alcock leaped out of his chair. His face red and his voice cracked with emo­tion. “Your Hon­or. Are you rul­ing on the cred­i­bil­i­ty of offi­cer Habighorst?” . . . .

. . . . “The whole world can hear that I do not believe Offi­cer Habighorst. . . . .”

“I demand a mis­tri­al,” Alcock shout­ed. “A judge’s unso­licit­ed com­ment on evi­dence . . . .”

“Denied,” said Hag­ger­ty. . . .

The pro­gram con­cludes with dis­cus­sion of Har­ry Con­nick­’s destruc­tion of Gar­rison’s files and of the gov­ern­men­t’s efforts to dis­cred­it Gari­son. This will be tak­en up at greater length in our next pro­gram.

FTR #1045 Interview #14 with Jim DiEugenio About “Destiny Betrayed”

CIA’s Expert on the JFK Assas­si­na­tion Ray Roc­ca: ” . . . . Gar­ri­son would indeed obtain a con­vic­tion of Shaw for con­spir­ing to assas­si­nate Pres­i­dent Kennedy. . . .”

House Select Com­mit­tee on Assas­si­na­tions Assis­tant Coun­sel Jonathan Black­mer: “. . . . ‘We have rea­son to believe Shaw was heav­i­ly involved in the Anti-Cas­tro efforts in New Orleans in the 1960s and [was] pos­si­bly one of the high lev­el plan­ners or ‘cut out’ to the plan­ners of the assas­si­na­tion.’ . . . .”

This is the four­teenth of a planned long series of inter­views with Jim DiEu­ge­nio about his tri­umphal analy­sis of Pres­i­dent Kennedy’s assas­si­na­tion and New Orleans Dis­trict Attor­ney Jim Gar­rison’s hero­ic inves­ti­ga­tion of the killing.

In this pro­gram, we high­light the media hatch­et men who worked hand in glove with the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty infil­tra­tors set forth in our pre­vi­ous inter­view. Many of the hatch­et men also worked with each oth­er, as well as the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty.

Most sig­nif­i­cant­ly, both the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty infil­tra­tors and the media hatch­et men worked with Clay Shaw’s coun­sel and freely broke the law.

In addi­tion to a CBS spe­cial that aired at the same time (1967), NBC broad­cast an out­right hatch­et job on Gar­ri­son presided over by Wal­ter Sheri­dan. A vet­er­an of the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty, Sheri­dan had worked for the FBI, the Office of Naval Intel­li­gence (ONI) and was a prin­ci­pal fig­ure in counter-intel­li­gence for the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency. As will be seen below, Sheri­dan reput­ed­ly had strong, deep con­nec­tions to CIA itself.

Des­tiny Betrayed by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; Sky­horse Pub­lish­ing [SC]; Copy­right 1992, 2012 by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; ISBN 978–1‑62087–056‑3; p. 255.

. . . . The con­ven­tion­al wis­dom about Wal­ter Sheri­dan places him as a for­mer FBI man; report­ed­ly he worked at the Bureau for about four years. . . .

. . . . Sheri­dan’s ties to the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty, beyond the FBI, were wide, deep, and com­plex. He him­self said that, like Guy Ban­is­ter, he had been with the Office of Naval Intel­li­gence. Then, after he left the bureau, Sheri­dan did not go direct­ly to the Jus­tice Depart­ment. He moved over to the new­ly estab­lished Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency. This was a super-secret body cre­at­ed by Pres­i­dent Tru­man in 1952 both to pro­tect domes­tic codes and com­mu­ni­ca­tions and to gath­er intel­li­gence through crack­ing for­eign codes. It was so clan­des­tine that, for a time, the gov­ern­ment a tempt­ed to deny its exis­tence. There­fore, for along time, it oper­at­ed inal­most total secre­cy. Nei­ther the Con­gress nor any fedreal agency had the effec­tive over­sight to reg­u­late it. . . .

It is worth not­ing that–in addi­tion to Sheri­dan’s deep intel­li­gence background–NBC itself had strong, deep con­nec­tions to the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty. . . . .

Des­tiny Betrayed by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; Sky­horse Pub­lish­ing [SC]; Copy­right 1992, 2012 by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; ISBN 978–1‑62087–056‑3; p. 255.

. . . . It is rel­e­vant to note here that Gen­er­al David Sarnoff, founder of NBC, worked for the Sig­nal Corps dur­ing World War II as a reserve offi­cer. In 1944, Sarnoff worked for the com­plete restora­tion of the Nazi destroyed Radio France sta­tion in Paris until its sig­nal was able to reach through­out Europe. It was then reti­tled Radio Free Europe. He lat­er lob­bied the White House to expand the range and reach of Radio Free Europe. At about this point, Radio Free Europe became a pet project of Allen Dulles. Sarnoff’s com­pa­ny, Radio Cor­po­ra­tion of Amer­i­ca, became a large part of the tech­no­log­i­cal core of the NSA. Dur­ing the war, David’s son Robert worked in the broad­cast arm of the Office of Strate­gic Ser­vices (OSS), the fore­run­ner of the CIA. Robert was pres­i­dent of RCA, NBC’s par­ent com­pa­ny, at the time Sheridan’s spe­cial aired. David was chair­man. . .

Sheri­dan also presided over an osten­si­bly “pri­vate” inves­tiga­tive insti­tu­tion which was, in fact, a CIA front. It is worth not­ing that Beurt Ser Vas–an alum­nus of the Three Eyes–purchased The Sat­ur­day Evening Post, which pub­lished an anti-Gar­ri­son hit piece by James Phe­lan. (This is high­light­ed below.)

Des­tiny Betrayed by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; Sky­horse Pub­lish­ing [SC]; Copy­right 1992, 2012 by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; ISBN 978–1‑62087–056‑3; p. 256.

. . . The com­pa­ny was Inter­na­tion­al Inves­ti­ga­tors Incor­po­rat­ed, nick­named “Three Eyes.” Accord­ing to a Sen­ate inves­ti­ga­tor, “it was owned lock, stock, and bar­rel by the CIA.” Two of the orig­i­nal prin­ci­pals, George Miller and George Ryan, were, like Ban­is­ter, for­mer G‑men who lat­er went to work for CIA cov­er out­fits. Accord­ing to anoth­er source, not only was Sheri­dan the liai­son to Three Eyes, he “dis­posed over the per­son­nel and cur­ren­cy of whole units of the Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency out of the White House.” By 1965 . . . Three Eyes was tak­en over by two for­mer CIA offi­cers. One of them, Beurt Ser Vaas, lat­er pur­chased the Sat­ur­day Evening Post. . . .

Exem­pli­fy­ing Sheri­dan’s method­ol­o­gy was the treat­ment met­ed out to Fred Lee­mans, who was the cli­mac­tic per­son inter­viewed by Sheri­dan in his spe­cial. Note the open intim­i­da­tion of Lee­mans and his fam­i­ly, threat­en­ing them if they did not per­jure them­selves, betray Gar­ri­son, and coop­er­ate with both Sheri­dan and Clay Shaw’s coun­sel!

This is rem­i­nis­cent of the treat­ment of Mar­lene Man­cu­so detailed in our pre­vi­ous inter­view.

Des­tiny Betrayed by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; Sky­horse Pub­lish­ing [SC]; Copy­right 1992, 2012 by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; ISBN 978–1‑62087–056‑3; pp. 240–241.

. . . . One of the more star­tling dec­la­ra­tions that the ARRB uncov­ered was an affi­davit by a man named Fred Lee­mans. Lee­mans was a Turk­ish bath own­er who orig­i­nal­ly told gar­ri­son that a man named Clay Bertrand had fre­quent­ed his estab­lish­ment. Lee­mans was the cli­mac­tic inter­view for Sheri­dan’s spe­cial. He tes­ti­fied on the show that the DA’s office had actu­al­ly approached him first, that he nev­er knew that Shaw used the alias Bertrand, that every­thing he had pre­vi­ous­ly said to the DA’s office were things he was led to say by them, and that they had offered to pay him 2,500 dol­lars for his affi­davit in which in which he would now say that Shaw was Bertrand and that Shaw came into his estab­lish­ment once with Oswald. In oth­er words, all the things Nov­el had been say­ing in his pub­lic dec­la­ra­tions about Gar­ri­son were accu­rate. At the end of his inter­view, Lee­mans told Sheri­dan and the pub­lic that every­thing he had just revealed on cam­era was giv­en to NBC freely and vol­un­tar­i­ly. Lee­mans even said that he had actu­al­ly asked Sheri­dan for some mon­e­tary help but Sheri­dan had said he did not do things like that.

In Jan­u­ary of 1969, Lee­mans signed an affi­davit in which he declared the fol­low­ing as the true chain of events:

“I would like to state the rea­sons for which I appeared on the NBC show and lied about my con­tacts with the Dis­trict Attor­ney’s office. First, I received numer­ous anony­mous threat­en­ing phone calls rel­a­tive to the infor­ma­tion I had giv­en to Mr. Gar­ri­son. The gist of these calls was to the effect that if I did not change my state­ment and state that I had been bribed by Jim Gar­rison’s office, I and my fam­i­ly would be in phys­i­cal dan­ger. In addi­tion to the anony­mous phone calls, I was vis­it­ed by a man who exhib­it­ed a badge and stat­ed that he was a gov­ern­ment agent. This man informed me that the gov­ern­ment was present­ly check­ing the bar own­ers in the Slidell area for pos­si­ble income tax vio­la­tions. This man then inquired whether I was the Mr. Lee­mans involved in the Clay Shaw case. When I informed him that I was, he said that it was not smart to be involved because a lot of peo­ple that had been got hurt and that peo­ple in pow­er­ful places would see to it that I was tak­en care of. One of the anony­mous callers sug­gest­ed that I change my state­ment and state that I had been bribed by Gar­rison’s office to give him the infor­ma­tion about Clay Shaw. He sug­gest­ed that I con­tact Mr. Irvin Dymond, attor­ney for Clay L. Shaw and tell him that I gave Mr. Gar­ri­son the state­ment about Shaw only after Mr. Lee [Gar­rison’s assis­tant DA] offered me 2,500 dol­lars. After con­sult­ing with Mr. Dymond by tele­phone and in per­son, I was intro­duced to Wal­ter Sheri­dan, inves­tiga­tive reporter for NBC, who was then in the process of prepar­ing the NBC show. Mr. Dymond and Mr. Sheri­dan sug­gest­ed that I appear on the show and state what I had orig­i­nal­ly told Mr. Dymond about the bribe offer by the Dis­trict Attor­ney’s office. I was informed by Mr. Dymond that should the Dis­trict Attor­ney’s office charge me with giv­ing false infor­ma­tion as a result of the state­ment I had orig­i­nal­ly giv­en them, he would see to it that I had an attor­ney and that a bond would be post­ed for me. In this con­nec­tion, Mr. Dymond gave me his home and office tele­phone num­bers and and advised me that I could con­tact him at any time of day or night should I be charged by Gar­rison’s office as a result of my appear­ing on the NBC show. My actu­al appear­ance on the show was taped in the office of Aaron Kohn, Man­ag­ing Direc­tor of the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Crime Com­mis­sion, in the pres­ence of Wal­ter Sheri­dan and Irvin Dymond.”

This is one of the most reveal­ing doc­u­ments por­tray­ing the lengths to which Sheri­dan would go in tam­per­ing with wit­ness­es. It also demon­strates that Shaw’s lawyers—Bill and Ed Weg­mann, Irvin Dymond, and Sal Panzeca—knew almost no bound­ary in what kind of help they would accept to win their case. Third, it reveals that Shaw’s lawyers had access to a net­work of attor­neys that they could hire at any time for any wit­ness they could pry loose from Gar­ri­son. Because, as the declas­si­fied ARRB doc­u­ments reveal, there was a CIA cleared attor­ney’s pan­el that was at work in New Orleans. Attor­neys that the Agency vet­ted in advance so they would be suit­able for their covert use and could be trust­ed in their aims. The fact that Shaw’s lawyers were privy to such CIA secret knowl­edge, and wee uti­liz­ing it, shows just how will­ing and eager they were to indulge them­selves in covert help—and then lie about it. . . .

In addi­tion to Sheri­dan, James Phe­lan and Hugh Aynesworth joined the media cho­rus attack­ing Gar­ri­son, and both of them net­worked with the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty as well. Phe­lan’s hit piece was pub­lished in the Sat­ur­day Evening Post, which was even­tu­al­ly bought by CIA vet­er­an Beurt Ser Vas, an alum­nus of the Sheri­dan-linked Three Eyes intel­li­gence front.

FTR #1043 Interview #12 with Jim DiEugenio About Destiny Betrayed

CIA’s Expert on the JFK Assas­si­na­tion Ray Roc­ca: ” . . . . Gar­ri­son would indeed obtain a con­vic­tion of Shaw for con­spir­ing to assas­si­nate Pres­i­dent Kennedy. . . .”

House Select Com­mit­tee on Assas­si­na­tions Assis­tant Coun­sel Jonathan Black­mer: “. . . . ‘We have rea­son to believe Shaw was heav­i­ly involved in the Anti-Cas­tro efforts in New Orleans in the 1960s and [was] pos­si­bly one of the high lev­el plan­ners or ‘cut out’ to the plan­ners of the assas­si­na­tion.’ . . . .”

This is the twelfth of a planned long series of inter­views with Jim DiEu­ge­nio about his tri­umphal analy­sis of Pres­i­dent Kennedy’s assas­si­na­tion and New Orleans Dis­trict Attor­ney Jim Gar­rison’s hero­ic inves­ti­ga­tion of the killing.

In this pro­gram, we con­tin­ue with analy­sis of Clay Shaw’s intel­li­gence con­nec­tion, begin­ning with review of his work for the Domes­tic Oper­a­tions Divi­sion.

A fas­ci­nat­ing intel­li­gence involve­ment of Shaw’s is his work with Per­min­dex.

Des­tiny Betrayed by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; Sky­horse Pub­lish­ing [SC]; Copy­right 1992, 2012 by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; ISBN 978–1‑62087–056‑3; pp. 385–386.

. . . . The next step in the CIA lad­der after his high-lev­el over­seas infor­mant ser­vice was his work with the strange com­pa­ny called Per­min­dex. When the announce­ment for Per­min­dex was first made in Switzer­land in late 1956, its prin­ci­pal back­ing was to come from a local banker named Hans Selig­man. But as more inves­ti­ga­tion by the local papers was done, it became clear that the real backer was J. Hen­ry Schroder Cor­po­ra­tion. This infor­ma­tion was quite reveal­ing. Schroder’s had been close­ly asso­ci­at­ed with Allen Dulles and the CIA for years. Allen Dulles’s con­nec­tions to the Schroder bank­ing fam­i­ly went back to the thir­ties when his law firm, Sul­li­van and Cromwell, first began rep­re­sent­ing them through him. Lat­er, Dulles was the bank’s Gen­er­al Coun­sel. In fact, when Dulles became CIA direc­tor, Schroder’s was a repos­i­to­ry for a fifty mil­lion dol­lar con­tin­gency fund that Dulles per­son­al­ly con­trolled. Schroder’s was a wel­come con­duit because the bank ben­e­fit­ed from pre­vi­ous CIA over­throws in Guatemala and Iran. Anoth­er rea­son that there began to be a furor over Per­min­dex in Switzer­land was the fact that the bank’s founder, Baron Kurt von Schroder, was asso­ci­at­ed with the Third Reich, specif­i­cal­ly Hein­rich Himm­ler. The project now became stalled in Switzer­land. It now moved to Rome. In a Sep­tem­ber 1069 inter­view Shaw did for Pent­house Mag­a­zine, he told James Phe­lan that he only grew inter­est­ed in the project when it moved to Italy. Which was in Octo­ber 1958. Yet a State Depart­ment cable dat­ed April 9 of that year says that Shaw showed great inter­est in Per­min­dex from the out­set.

One can see why. The board of direc­tors as made up of bankers who had been tied up with fas­cist gov­ern­ments, peo­ple who worked the Jew­ish refugee rack­et dur­ing World War II, a for­mer mem­ber of Mus­solin­i’s cab­i­net, and the son-in-law of Hjal­mar Schacht, the eco­nom­ic wiz­ard behind the Third Reich, who was a friend of Shaw’s. These peo­ple would all appeal to the con­ser­v­a­tive Shaw. There were at least four inter­na­tion­al news­pa­pers that exposed the bizarre activ­i­ties of Per­min­dex when it was in Rome. One prob­lem was the mys­te­ri­ous source of fund­ing: no one knew where it was com­ing from. Anoth­er was that its activ­i­ties report­ed­ly includ­ed assas­si­na­tion attempts on French Pre­mier Charles De Gaulle. Which would make sense since the found­ing mem­ber of Per­min­dex, Fer­enc Nagy, was a close friend of Jacques Soustelle. Soustelle was a leader of the OAS, a group of for­mer French offi­cers who broke with De Gaulle over his Alger­ian pol­i­cy. They lat­er made sev­er­al attempts on De Gaulle’s life, which the CIA was privy to. Again, this mys­te­ri­ous source of fund­ing, plus the rightwing, neo-Fas­cist direc­tors cre­at­ed anoth­er wave of con­tro­ver­sy. One news­pa­per wrote that the orga­ni­za­tion may have been “a crea­ture of the CIA . . . set up as a cove for the trans­fer of CIA . . . funds in Italy for legal polit­i­cal-espi­onage activ­i­ties.” The Schroder con­nec­tion would cer­tain­ly sug­gest that. . . .

His involve­ment with Per­min­dex places him in the transna­tion­al cor­po­rate milieu that spawned fas­cism and Nazism. Key obser­va­tions about Per­min­dex and Shaw’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in it:

1.–Shaw was part of the deep polit­i­cal orbit of the Dulles broth­ers and Sul­li­van & Cromwell.
2.–The Per­min­dex oper­a­tional link to the Schroder Bank places it in the same milieu as the Himm­ler Kreis, the indus­tri­al­ists and financiers who financed the work­ings of the SS through an account in the Schroder Bank.
3.–Shaw was a friend of Hjal­mar Horace Gree­ley Schacht, who became the finance min­is­ter of the Third Reich and was very close to the Dulles broth­ers.
4.–Permindex was appar­ent­ly involved with the OAS efforts to assas­si­nate De Gaulle. This places Shaw in a net­work includ­ing: Ban­is­ter inves­ti­ga­tor Mau­rice Brooks Gatlin, who boast­ed of hav­ing trans­ferred mon­ey to the OAS from the CIA; Rene Souetre–an OAS oper­a­tive who was expelled from Dallas/Ft. Worth the day of the assas­si­na­tion of JFK.
5.–As dis­cussed in FTR #‘s 1031 and 1032, JFK was an ear­ly crit­ic of the French pol­i­cy in Alge­ria, crit­i­ciz­ing it on the floor of the Sen­ate in 1957.

The con­clu­sion of the broad­cast focus­es large­ly on the CIA’s intense inter­est in the Gar­ri­son inves­ti­ga­tion. This inter­est was man­i­fest­ed through an agency con­clave infor­mal­ly named “The Gar­ri­son Group.”

“Des­tiny Betrayed” by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; Sky­horse Pub­lish­ing [SC]; Copy­right 1992, 2012 by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; ISBN 978–1‑62087–056‑3; p. 270.

. . . . Helms want­ed the group to “con­sid­er the pos­si­ble impli­ca­tions for the Agency” of what Gar­ri­son was doing in “New Orleans before, dur­ing, and after the tri­al of Clay Shaw. It is cru­cial to keep in mind the phrase: before, dur­ing, and after. As we will see, the effec­tive admin­is­tra­tor Helms was think­ing not just of some short term fix, but of for­mu­lat­ing a strat­e­gy for the long haul. Accord­ing to the very sketchy memo about this meet­ing, [CIA Gen­er­al Coun­sel Lawrence] Hous­ton dis­cussed his deal­ings with the Jus­tice Depart­ment and the desire of Shaw’s defense to meet with the CIA direct­ly. [Ray] Roc­ca then said some­thing quite omi­nous. He said that he felt “that Gar­ri­son would indeed obtain a con­vic­tion of Shaw for con­spir­ing to assas­si­nate Pres­i­dent Kennedy.” This must have had some impact on the meet­ing. Since every­one must have known that Roc­ca had devel­oped, by bar, the largest data­base on Gar­rison’s inquiry at CIA. . . .

We note that House Select Com­mit­tee on Assas­si­na­tions assis­tant coun­sel Jonathan Black­mer wrote the fol­low­ing:

“Des­tiny Betrayed” by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; Sky­horse Pub­lish­ing [SC]; Copy­right 1992, 2012 by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; ISBN 978–1‑62087–056‑3; p. 332.

. . . . “We have rea­son to believe Shaw was heav­i­ly involved in the Anti-Cas­tro efforts in New Orleans in the 1960s and [was] pos­si­bly one of the high lev­el plan­ners or ‘cut out’ to the plan­ners of the assas­si­na­tion.” . . . .

The pro­gram con­cludes with analy­sis of Clay Shaw’s close rela­tion­ship to the Stern fam­i­ly of WDSU. In addi­tion to car­ry­ing staged inter­views between Oswald and Car­los Bringuier, the broad­cast out­let pil­lo­ried Jim Gar­ri­son and his tri­al of Clay Shaw.

FTR #1042 Interview #11 with Jim DiEugenio about “Destiny Betrayed”

This is the eleventh of a planned long series of inter­views with Jim DiEu­ge­nio about his tri­umphal analy­sis of Pres­i­dent Kennedy’s assas­si­na­tion and New Orleans Dis­trict Attor­ney Jim Gar­rison’s hero­ic inves­ti­ga­tion of the killing.

In this broad­cast, we explore the asso­ci­a­tion of David Fer­rie and Clay Shaw in the con­text of the plan­ning of assas­si­na­tion plots against JFK, as well as Shaw’s involve­ment with the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty.

NB: In our pre­vi­ous inter­view, Mr. Emory mis­tak­en­ly linked “The Bomb” to Clay Shaw and to a plot to assas­si­nate JFK. Shaw was, accord­ing to cred­i­ble tes­ti­mo­ny involved with Fer­rie in anoth­er, prob­a­bly con­nect­ed, asso­ci­a­tion to dis­cuss killing Kennedy.

David Fer­rie had a desk in the  office of C. Wray Gill, a lawyer for Car­los Mar­cel­lo. When anoth­er of Gill’s clients–a woman named Clara Gay–was in the office, she wit­nessed anoth­er Fer­rie assas­si­na­tion schemat­ic on Novem­ber 26, 1963:

Des­tiny Betrayed by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; Sky­horse pub­lish­ing [SC]; Copy­right 1992, 2012 by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; ISBN 978–1‑62087–056‑3; p. 217.

. . . . Clara looked  over at Fer­rie’s desk and she saw what looked like a dia­gram of Dealey Plaza: it was a draw­ing of a car from the per­spec­tive of an angle from above, the car was sur­round­ed by high build­ings, rem­i­nis­cent of Dealey Plaza. After the sec­re­tary threw it out, Clara  retrieved it. She said it should be giv­en to the FBI or Secret Ser­vice. The sec­re­tary took it back and a pulling con­test ensued. The sec­re­tary even­tu­al­ly won, but not before Clara saw the words “Elm Street” on the dia­gram. She lat­er recon­struct­ed this expe­ri­ence for Gar­ri­son. She said she came for­ward because she con­sid­ered her­self a good cit­i­zen, and Fer­rie must  have been  some­thing evil . . . .

After dis­cus­sion of the Fer­rie Dealey Plaza assas­si­na­tion schemat­ic, the dis­cus­sion turns to a con­ver­sa­tion wit­nessed by Per­ry Rus­so, one of Gar­rison’s most impor­tant wit­ness­es.

Key points of infor­ma­tion about what Rus­so wit­nessed:

1.–Present at the meet­ing where the dis­cus­sion took place were: Clay Shaw, David Fer­rie, Lee Har­vey Oswald and sev­er­al Cubans.
2.–Shaw was using one of his most com­mon aliases–“Clay Bertrand.”
3.–Ferrie became increas­ing­ly agi­tat­ed and high­light­ed “tri­an­gu­la­tion of cross­fire” as nec­es­sary to assure a kill shot on Kennedy.
4.–Ferrie and Shaw dis­cussed the neces­si­ty of being some­where else, to give them­selves “cov­er.” This led Rus­so to con­clude that the plans were con­crete not the­o­ret­i­cal.
5.–Ferrie said he would be in Ham­mond, LA., on the cam­pus of South­east­ern Louisiana. He was, in fact, there on the day of the assas­si­na­tion.
6.–Shaw said that he would be on the West Coast. He was, in fact, at the San Fran­cis­co Trade Mart, where he was to give a talk. When news of of the assas­si­na­tion reached Shaw and his host, Shaw seemed remark­ably detached. When asked if he thought the talk should go for­ward in light of the news, Shaw said yes. This struck those around him at that time  as  curi­ous.

The issue of Shaw’s alias­es is an impor­tant one. The day after the assas­si­na­tion of JFK, New Orleans attor­ney Dean Andrews got a call from “Clay Bertrand,” request­ing that he rep­re­sent Lee Har­vey Oswald in Dal­las. Andrews had pre­vi­ous­ly encoun­tered Shaw using the same alias when seek­ing legal rep­re­sen­ta­tion for some gay Lati­nos.

Key aspects of Andrews’ con­tact with Shaw/Bertrand:

1.–Andrews feared for his life if this came to light. He claimed to have been told, after call­ing Wash­ing­ton D.C., that he might get a bul­let in the head if he talked.
2.–After Andrews changed his tes­ti­mo­ny, Gar­ri­son charged him with per­jury, even­tu­al­ly gain­ing a con­vic­tion.
3.–Andrews’ state­ments about Shaw/Bertrand were bol­stered by some­one at the VIP lounge at the East­ern Air­lines ter­mi­nal at New Orleans air­port, who knew Shaw to sign in under that alias.
4.–Numerous peo­ple in bars and bistros–particularly in the French Quarter–knew that Shaw used that alias. Because of Gar­rison’s crack­down on orga­nized crime-relat­ed oper­a­tions in New Orleans, his poten­tial infor­mants remained silent.

When being booked, Shaw actu­al­ly stat­ed that he used the alias “Clay Bertrand.”

Shaw was booked by a New Orleans police offi­cer named Aloy­sius Habighorst–who had an excel­lent record. When being booked, Shaw stat­ed that he used the alias “Clay Shaw.” Before tes­ti­fy­ing at Shaw’s tri­al, Habighorst’s car was rammed by a yel­low truck, and he was injured.

At Shaw’s tri­al, Judge Hag­ger­ty refused to admit Shaw’s admit­ted alias as evi­dence.

The con­clud­ing por­tion of the broad­cast deals with Clay Shaw’s intel­li­gence con­nec­tions. Key points of infor­ma­tion in that regard:

1.–Shaw’s intel­li­gence con­nec­tions date to World War II, when he worked as a aide-de-camp to Gen­er­al Charles Thrash­er. This placed him in the Spe­cial Oper­a­tions Sec­tion, a branch of mil­i­tary intel­li­gence and one which was involved with recruit­ing some of the Paper­clip per­son­nel to work for the U.S.
2.–After the war, he became involved with Inter­na­tion­al House, a Rock­e­feller-linked oper­a­tion deeply involved with the transna­tion­al cor­po­rate com­mu­ni­ty.
3.–His work for the Inter­na­tion­al Trade Mart fol­lowed log­i­cal­ly on the heels of his work for Inter­na­tion­al House.
4.–Shaw also worked with the  Mis­sis­sip­pi Ship­ping Com­pa­ny, which did a lot of work with the CIA.
5.–His “Y” file indi­cat­ed that Shaw’s work for CIA involved con­fer­ring with the agency before trav­el­ing to Latin Amer­i­ca, not after he returned as was the case for most infor­mants.
6.–At least one of Shaw’s files with the CIA was destroyed.

One of the most impor­tant ele­ments of Shaw’s intel­li­gence career was uncov­ered by researcher Peter Vea, whose dis­clo­sures were sup­ple­ment­ed by some inter­est­ing com­men­tary by Vic­tor Mar­che­t­ti.

Des­tiny Betrayed by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; Sky­horse pub­lish­ing [SC]; Copy­right 1992, 2012 by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; ISBN 978–1‑62087–056‑3; p. 385.

. . . . Peter Vea dis­cov­ered a very impor­tant doc­u­ment while at the Nation­al Archives in 1994. Attached to a list­ing of Shaw’s numer­ous con­tacts with the Domes­tic Con­tact ser­vice, a list­ing was attached which stat­ed that Shaw had a covert secu­ri­ty approval in the Project QKENCHANT. This was in 1967 and the present tense was used, mean­ing that Shaw  was an active covert oper­a­tor for the CIA while Gar­ri­son was inves­ti­gat­ing him. When William Davy took this doc­u­ment to for­mer CIA offi­cer Vic­tor Mar­che­t­ti, an inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion ensued. As Mar­che­t­ti looked at the doc­u­ment, he said, “That’s inter­est­ing . . . . He was . . . He was doing some­thing there.” He then said that Shaw would not need a covert secu­ri­ty clear­ance for domes­tic con­tacts ser­vice. He then added, “This was some­thing else. This would imply that he was doing some kind of work for the  Clan­des­tine Ser­vices.” When Davy asked what branch of Clan­des­tine Ser­vices would that be, Mar­che­t­ti replied, “The DOD (Domes­tic Oper­a­tions Divi­sion). It was one of the most secret divi­sions with­in the Clan­des­tine Ser­vices. This was Tracey Bar­nes’s old out­fit. They were get­ting into things . . . Uh . . . exact­ly what, I don’t know. But they were get­ting into some pret­ty risky areas. And this is what E. Howard Hunt was work­ing for at the time.” And in fact, Howard Hunt did have such a covert clear­ance issued to him in 1970 while he was work­ing at the White House. . . .

FTR #1041 Interview #10 with Jim DiEugenio about “Destiny Betrayed”

The tenth of a planned long series of inter­views with Jim DiEu­ge­nio about his tri­umphal analy­sis of Pres­i­dent Kennedy’s assas­si­na­tion and New Orleans Dis­trict Attor­ney Jim Gar­rison’s hero­ic inves­ti­ga­tion of the killing.

In this broad­cast, we delve into oper­a­tional links between U.S. intel­li­gence agent David Ferrie–the first tar­get of Gar­rison’s investigation–and Clay Shaw, who was tried by Gar­ri­son.

One of the oper­a­tions in which Fer­rie and Shaw par­tic­i­pat­ed was an effort to bol­ster Freeport Sul­phur.

Des­tiny Betrayed by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; Sky­horse pub­lish­ing [SC]; Copy­right 1992, 2012 by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; ISBN 978–1‑62087–056‑3; pp. 208–209.

. . . . In Chap­ter 1, the author intro­duced Freeport Sul­phur and its sub­sidiaries Moa Bay Min­ing and Nicaro Nick­el. These com­pa­nies all had large invest­ments in Cuba pri­or to Castro’s rev­o­lu­tion. And this end­ed up being one of the ways that Gar­ri­son con­nect­ed Clay Shaw and David Fer­rie. This came about for two rea­sons. First, with Cas­tro tak­ing over their oper­a­tions in Cuba, Freeport was attempt­ing to inves­ti­gate bring­ing in nick­el ore from Cuba, through Cana­da, which still had trade rela­tions with Cuba. The ore would then be refined in Louisiana, either at a plant already in New Orleans or at anoth­er plant in Braith­waite. Shaw, an impres­sario of inter­na­tion­al trade, was on this explorato­ry team for Freeport. And he and two oth­er men had been flown to Cana­da by Fer­rie as part of this effort. More evi­dence of this con­nec­tion through Freeport was found dur­ing their inves­ti­ga­tion of Guy Ban­is­ter. Ban­is­ter appar­ent­ly knew about anoth­er flight tak­en by Shaw with an offi­cial of Freeport, like­ly Charles Wight, to Cuba. Again the pilot was David Fer­rie. Anoth­er rea­son this Freeport con­nec­tion was impor­tant to Gar­ri­son is that he found a wit­ness named James Plaine in Hous­ton who said that Mr. Wight of Freeport Sul­phur had con­tact­ed him in regards to an assas­si­na­tion plot against Cas­tro. Con­sid­er­ing the amount of mon­ey Freeport was about to lose in Cuba, plus the num­ber of East­ern Estab­lish­ment lumi­nar­ies asso­ci­at­ed with the company–such as Jock Whit­ney, Jean Mauze and God­frey Rockefeller–it is not sur­pris­ing that such a thing was con­tem­plat­ed with­in their ranks. . . .

One of the most impor­tant, com­pelling links between Fer­rie and Shaw was their appear­ance with Lee Har­vey Oswald in Clin­ton, Louisiana. Key points of infor­ma­tion about this event:

1.–The three men–Ferrie, Shaw and Oswald–were in Clin­ton to reg­is­ter Oswald to vote.
2.–In the event, their arrival placed them in the mid­dle of a large vot­er-reg­is­tra­tion dri­ve for local African-Amer­i­cans, part of the civ­il rights move­ment of the ear­ly ’60’s.
3.–The three men were very con­spic­u­ous at this event, not only because of their race, but because the large, black Cadil­lac dri­ven by Shaw attract­ed con­sid­er­able atten­tion.
4.–Many of those in atten­dance at the vot­er reg­is­tra­tion dri­ve, as well as the local sher­iff, iden­ti­fied the three men.
5.–Ferrie, in par­tic­u­lar, man­i­fest­ed a strik­ing appear­ance. He was afflict­ed with an ail­ment that caused all of the hair on his body that to fall out. To cov­er up his afflic­tion, Fer­rie wore a gar­ish red wig and match­ing, pen­ciled-on eye­brows.
6.–Oswald was appar­ent­ly at the vot­er reg­is­tra­tion event to reg­is­ter to vote in that area, in order to gain employ­ment at the near­by East Louisiana State Hos­pi­tal, an insti­tu­tion with strong links to Tulane Med­ical Cen­ter and Alton Ochsner, as well as to the MK Ultra exper­i­ments going on at that time.
7.–Two peo­ple Oswald appar­ent­ly cit­ed as ref­er­ences were Mal­colm Pier­son and Frank Sil­va. Not only did both men work at the hos­pi­tal, but they both had inter­est­ing CV’s.

Of the back grounds of Pier­son and Sil­va, Jim writes:

Des­tiny Betrayed by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; Sky­horse pub­lish­ing [SC]; Copy­right 1992, 2012 by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; ISBN 978–1‑62087–056‑3; p. 93.

. . . . The obvi­ous ques­tion then becomes: How did Oswald know the names of these men? Or if he did not, how did Shaw or Fer­rie know them? One pos­si­bil­i­ty is this: Accord­ing to Cuban intel­li­gence, Sil­va was active in the anti-Cas­tro cause in the New Orleans area. Sil­va was Cuban-born and from an upper-class fam­i­ly. He was actu­al­ly asso­ci­at­ed with Tulane Med­ical Cen­ter at the time. Tulane was locat­ed in New Orleans. Dr. Alton Ochsner, who was on the board of, and Chief of Surgery at, Tulane Med­ical School, was a friend of both Shaw and Ban­is­ter. In fact, at the New Orleans Pub­lic Library, there is a pho­to of Shaw sit­ting at a small table with Ochsner.

Anoth­er way that Oswald could have known these names was through a mutu­al acquain­tance of Shaw and Fer­rie, Ser­gio Arcacha Smith. Both Cuban intel­li­gence and Garrison’s inves­ti­ga­tors dis­cov­ered that there was a con­nec­tion between the two Cuban refugees. Dr. Robert Heath, Chair­man of Tulane Uni­ver­si­ty Med­ical School’s Depart­ment of Neu­rol­o­gy and Psy­chi­a­try, became infa­mous for using LSD and elec­trode implan­ta­tion in his research. Many of the peo­ple he worked on came from East Louisiana State Hos­pi­tal, where an entire ward was ded­i­cat­ed to his work. East doc­tor Alfred But­ter­worth (whom this author inter­viewed short­ly before his death) told the author that he had seen both Ochsner and Sil­va while he was there. But­ter­worth also revealed that Tulane Uni­ver­si­ty had a spe­cial psy­chi­atric unit at the hos­pi­tal, where they secret­ly admin­is­tered LSD. This is impor­tant back­ground to the fol­low­ing infor­ma­tion. Dur­ing his inquiry, Jim Gar­ri­son came across a wit­ness who had attend­ed a gath­er­ing at Dr. Heath’s home. Thee, the fol­low­ing event occurred: Dr. Sil­va intro­duced the man to the for­mer local rep­re­sen­ta­tive of Howard Hunt’s CRC, Ser­gio Arcacha Smith. Pier­son was a for­mer nar­cotics offend­er, who, accord­ing to HSCA sub­poe­naed records, list­ed Sil­va as a ref­er­ence in his job appli­ca­tion. It is hard to believe that, left to his own devices, Oswald would have known that either of these men worked at the hos­pi­tal. If either of these more log­i­cal options is accu­rate, it gives the inci­dent even more scope and depth. . . .

The pro­gram con­cludes with dis­cus­sion of what a Gar­ri­son inves­ti­ga­tor called “The Bomb”–an appar­ent plan, with detailed schemat­ics, to assas­si­nate JFK. NB: Mr. Emory mis­tak­en­ly links Clay Shaw to “The Bomb.” Shaw was, accord­ing to cred­i­ble tes­ti­mo­ny involved with Fer­rie in anoth­er, prob­a­bly con­nect­ed, asso­ci­a­tion to dis­cuss killing Kennedy.

“The Bomb” will be ana­lyzed at the begin­ning of our next inter­view.