Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy (106 page)

Buried at the end of his "Principal Sources" section in his book, The
Plot to Kill the President, Blakey gives evidence of precensorship as well
as his relationship with certain government agencies by writing:

Pursuant to agreement with the House Select Committee on Assassinations, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Inves tigation reviewed this book in manuscript form to determine that classified
information it contained had been properly released for publication and
that no informant was identified. Neither the CIA nor the FBI warrants
the factual material or endorses the views expressed.

Another Garrison detractor, author David E. Scheim-who also espouses the Mafia-did-it theory-cites the charges against Garrison made
by NBC, Newsweek, The New York Times, and The Saturday Evening Post
apparently without considering that few of their accusations were ever
proven.

Citing Garrison's failure to loudly identify Jack Ruby as Mafia-connected,
Scheim wrote:

Although Garrison made extravagant charges against an assortment of
Cuban exiles, CIA agents, Minutemen, White Russians, and Nazis, he
conspicuously avoided any reference to one prime assassination suspect:
the Mafia.

Indeed, Garrison's failure to acknowledge Carlos Marcello and the
mob's activities in New Orleans has caused many raised eyebrows among
researchers otherwise kindly disposed toward the former D.A.

Scheim claims Garrison's former investigator, Pershing Gervais, was a
Marcello associate and when Garrison cleaned up Bourbon Street nightspots, he "selectively avoided the clubs controlled by Marcello." The
author also expressed the belief that Garrison's acquittal in the 1971 payoff
case was the result of more bribes.

Scheim goes beyond Blakey by stating that Garrison's activities in New
Orleans had a sinister design. Scheim wrote:

The purpose of the Garrison assassination probe [was that] Jim Garrison conducted a fraudulent probe of the Kennedy assassination, which
deflected attention from Carlos Marcello and disrupted serious investigation of the case.

Stung by such suspicions, Garrison has written:

While I lay no pretense to being the epitome of virtue, with regard to
connections with organized crime, I think you can safely place me as
having approximately the same such connections as Mother Theresa and
Pope Paul. What has been occurring here, quite obviously, is the CIA's
disinformation machinery has been hard at work for a long time.

Further, Garrison has maintained that while elements within the mob
undoubtedly played a role in Kennedy's assassination, they were certainly protected-and perhaps even encouraged and funded-by elements within
the U.S. government.

To the charge that he was simply grandstanding, hoping for higher
office, Garrison has stated:

A politically ambitious man would hardly be likely to challenge the
massed power of the federal government and criticize so many honorable figures and distinguished agencies. Actually, this charge is an
argument in favor of my investigation: Would such a slimy type, eager
to profiteer on the assassination, jeopardize his political ambitions if he
didn't have an ironclad case?

While charge and countercharge, claim and counterclaim, continue to
surround Garrison-today he serves as an elected appeals court judge in
New Orleans-he still speaks out for a truth he claims was denied nearly
two decades ago.

Garrison still believes that President Kennedy was killed for one reason:
because he was working for a reconciliation with Soviet Russia and
Castro's Cuba. He wrote:

To anyone with a grain of intelligence, it should be apparent that John
Kennedy was eliminated by forces desiring the continuation of the Cold
War-an artificial conflict draining the assets of and greatly changing,
for the worst, the character of our nation. The clandestine arm for those
Cold War forces was the Central Intelligence Agency-the destructive
talents of which run the gambit [sic] from deception to murder.

He has even identified those "forces," stating:

On the operative level of the conspiracy, you find anti-Castro Cuban
exiles who never forgave Kennedy for failing to send in U.S. aircover at
the Bay of Pigs.. .. They believed sincerely that Kennedy had sold
them out to the Communists. On a higher, control level, you find a
number of people of ultra-right persuasion-not simply conservatives,
mind you, but people who could be described as neo-Nazi, including a
small clique that had defected from the Minutemen because it had
considered the group "too liberal." These elements had their canteens
ready and their guns loaded; they lacked only a target. lAfter the secret
agreements of the Cuban Missile Crisis l Kennedy . . . began to crack
down on CIA operations against Cuba. As a result, on July 31, 1963,
the FBI raided the headquarters of the group of Cuban exiles and
Minutemen training north of Lake Pontchartrain and confiscated all their
guns and ammmunition-despite the fact that the operation had the
sanction of the CIA. This action may have sealed Kennedy's fate. . . .
The link between the "command" level and the Cuban exiles was an amorphous group called the Free Cuba Committee (recall that it was
this name which was tied to Lee Harvey Oswald the night of the
assassination by Dallas district attorney Henry Wade, who was then
corrected by none other than Jack Ruby), which with CIA sanction had
been training north of Lake Pontchartrain for an assassination attempt on
Fidel Castro. . . . Our information indicates that it was shortly after
this setback [the July 31, 1963, FBI raid] that the group switched
direction and decided to assassinate John Kennedy instead of Fidel
Castro... .

Whether Garrison's assured assessment of such an assassination conspiracy can ever be fully documented, it nevertheless remains that his investigations in New Orleans did turn up much previously unknown evidence
-another argument against his employment by the mob to deflect the
truth.

Even the House Committee's Blakey-who termed his investigation a
"fraud''-conceded:

... Garrison might have been on the right track, at least up until
Ferrie's untimely death ... for evidence of an association between
Ferrie and Oswald, presented at the Clay Shaw trial, was found by the
Committee to be credible.

New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, the "Jolly Green Giant"
did not go out trying to find a JFK assassination conspiracy-it found him.

Garrison certainly did not invent Guy Banister, David Ferrie, Clay
Shaw, or that strange nexus of anti-Castro Cuban exiles, mob figures, and
intelligence agents that collected at 544 Camp Street.

Even though rumors on the streets of New Orleans prompted Garrison to
order the arrest of Ferrie the weekend of the Kennedy assassination, it was
not until three years later that he began the investigation that would result
in the trial of Trade Mart director. Clay Shaw.

Contrary to reports that Garrison was simply out for publicity, the
aggressive D.A. sought to keep his work quiet. It was only after an
enterprising reporter discovered pay vouchers and travel request records
that Garrison's efforts became public.

Once public, however, the story of his New Orleans investigation spread
like wildfire-and a troubling dimension of the news media presented
itself. Rather than simply report Garrison's activities or independently
study his information, many media-particularly major national news
outlets-chose to investigate the district attorney and make pronouncements on everything from his methods to his mental stability.

Even President Johnson's attorney general proclaimed that Garrison had
no case-long before he presented his evidence. Obviously, both judges
and grand juries in New Orleans did not feel the same way, since a grand
jury indicted Clay Shaw and a three-judge panel upheld the indictment.

And in recent years, several studies of Shaw and his associations
indicate a man who-through the shadowy company Permindex-was
connected to the CIA, European Nazis and fascists, and international
criminals. This cloudy area of Garrison's investigation deserves closer
scrutiny.

However, by the time Shaw's case reached court, Garrison's case was
fatally weakened by the death of key witnesses-Ferrie, Banister, Banister's partner Hugh Ward, and Cuban exile Eladio del Valle. Other
witnesses-CIA operative Gordon Novel and anti-Castro Cuban leader
Sergio Archaca-Smith-were given sanctuary in other states whose governors refused Garrison's lawful extradition orders.

In January 1969, Clay Shaw got his day in court. He declared himself
innocent of the charge that he conspired with Ferrie and Oswald to kill
President Kennedy.

Garrison was also hampered by some of his own witnesses-a selfadmitted drug addict and a man who claimed mysterious men were constantly hypnotizing him.

Furthermore, Garrison's charges of a widespread conspiracy-involving President Lyndon Johnson, the FBI, the CIA, and the Cuban exileswere considered so outlandish by most people that they refused to give his
claims any credence.

Although Garrison convinced the New Orleans jury that a conspiracywhich included David Ferrie, Lee Harvey Oswald, and a man named
"Clay Bertrand"-had existed to kill Kennedy, he failed to convince them
that Clay Shaw was involved. Of course, he was not allowed to present his
most potent evidence-the jail card showing Clay Shaw used the alias
"Clay Bertrand" or Officer Habighorst. Shaw was found not guilty.

And Garrison's case was not helped by his lengthy statements to the
media-some of which were misquoted or quoted out of context.

Garrison claimed the federal government tried to blunt his investigation,
and there is much information to support this charge. However, it is also
true that Garrison made many mistakes along the way-trusting the wrong
people, talking too much about his case, and refusing to acknowledge the
role of the Mafia.

It was the latter that had caused many researchers-who otherwise
might have supported Garrison-to keep their distance.

Where the two major national assassination investigations exhibited a
blind spot when it came to evidence of the involvement of U.S. intelligence agencies, Garrison showed the same blindness toward the mob and
particularly toward the man whose connections to the assassination appear
most strong-reputed New Orleans Mafia chieftain Carlos Marcello.

Despite the claim of some critics that Garrison was used to block any
new investigation of the Kennedy assassination in the late 1960s, he most
probably will be well remembered in the years to come as the one man
who furthered knowledge of Kennedy's assassination at a time when many
Americans were still accepting the lone-assassin theory.

Even House Select Committee on Assassinations chief counsel Robert
Blakey-who termed Garrison's investigation a "fraud''-acknowledged
that much of his information regarding Oswald, Ferrie, and the anti-Castro
Cuban exiles was correct.

Despite continued efforts by the federal government to discredit Garrisonand even convict him of crimes-he still enjoyed a good reputation in New
Orleans in the late 1980s serving as an elected judge of the state's Fourth
Circuit Court of Appeals.

They Ithe House Committee] had their chance and they blew it.

-JFK autopsy Doctor James Humes

By the mid-1970s, national polls indicated that very few Americans still
believed the "lone assassin" theory of the Warren Commission, despite
the assurances of the national media and government spokesmen.

According to one Gallup Poll, 80 percent of the American public
believed President Kennedy's death resulted from a conspiracy, while
70 percent believed the same regarding the death of Dr. Martin Luther
King.

These nagging doubts prompted Congressman Henry Gonzalez of Texas
to introduce a House Resolution in February 1975, calling for a select
committee to study not only the death of John F. Kennedy, but also the
deaths of Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and the shooting of
Governor George Wallace.

In remarks to fellow congressmen, Gonzalez said:

I have introduced this resolution after much consideration. It has
not been a decision I have made hastily. . . . There are questions to be
resolved. I was at Dallas the day that President Kennedy was killed and
I suspended judgment on the questions that arose then and shortly
thereafter until Watergate, August 1972, revealed possibilities heretofore considered not possible.

In an article published by St. Mary's School of Law two months later,
Gonzalez added:

There are a few who have offered criticism of my efforts . . . The
attitude of these people is to "let sleeping dogs lie" ... I say that this
investigation is a need and has its proper place in our list of priorities.
What future do we have as a nation if we let valid questions about these
assassinations go unresolved and uninvestigated except by private
individuals?

Gonzalez's House Resolution 204 was joined by a similar resolution,
sponsored by lame duck Representative Thomas N. Downing of Virginia.
In remarks to fellow congressmen on March 18, 1976, Downing complained of foot-dragging:

.. . in the past few weeks, certain events have transpired in this House
which concern me deeply and which lead me to believe either I don't
understand the House half as well as I thought I did, or that the House is
undergoing a deep and fundamental transformation as a result of those
tragic events which we collectively label "Watergate." Until now, it
has seemed to me that, although Congress might not have dealt with all
problems wisely, it has not been its policy simply and doggedly to
refuse to look at a serious national problem, no matter how difficult, no
matter how distressing. Yet, I fear that is precisely what it is doing
today. It is simply and doggedly refusing to look at the problem of who
executed our former President, John F. Kennedy, and why he was
executed. I do not exaggerate. I have chosen my words carefully, and I
mean precisely what I say. . . . However, we not only have failed to
make any progress toward establishment of such an investigating committee, we also have not even been able to get a hearing on the merits
before the Rules Committee. . . . I have been told informally that "the
Leadership" is against reopening the Warren Commission's findings,
and that is that. ... Why would there be reluctance on the part of the
Leadership and the committee'? Have they been told by the Intelligence
Community, which, incidentally, possibly acted as sole investigators for
the Warren Commission, what really did happen to our young President,
and why'? Do they know who was behind the killing? Is it too horrible
for the American people to face? . .. Someone apparently does not
want us to see the evil, hear the evil and certainly does not want us to
talk about it. . . . After all, if a President is eliminated, not by a "lone
nut," but for political reasons, isn't the whole fabric of our form of
government in direct danger if we cover up the political motivations and
go on as if nothing happened?