Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy (43 page)

Another possible connection between the CIA and the JFK assassination
concerns a former CIA operative named Robert D. Morrow. In his book,
Betrayal, Morrow tells how he purchased four 6.5 mm Mannlicher-Carcano
rifles on orders from a CIA superior. Morrow remains convinced that at
least one of these rifles ended up in the hands of Dallas police on
November 22, 1963.

Morrow even presents a plausible, though unproven, account of the
assassination:

Oswald, who went to Russia for the CIA and was an FBI informant by
the summer of 1963, was brought into an assassination plot led by CIA
consultant Clay Shaw, using right-wing CIA operatives and anti-Castro
Cubans headed by Jack Ruby in Dallas and Guy Banister in New Orleans.
This group, operating outside Agency control, manipulated events to
insure Oswald being named as the assassin. They also used an Oswald
look-alike to incriminate the ex-Marine by firing shots from the Texas
School Book Depository. Dallas policeman J. D. Tippit was killed by this
Oswald substitute when he failed to go along with the group's scheme to
have Tippit kill the real Oswald in the Texas Theater. With the capture of
Oswald, Ruby was compelled to stalk and finally kill the accused assassin.

The Mannlicher-Carcano ammunition also raised questions about CIA
involvement. According to FBI documents, the 6.5 mm ammunition found
in the Texas School Book Depository was part of a batch manufactured on
a U.S. government contract by Western Cartridge Corporation of East
Alton, Illinois, which is now a part of Winchester-Western Division of
Olin Industries.

In the mid-1950s, four million rounds of this ammunition was purchased
by the Marine Corps, prompting the author of the FBI document to state:

The interesting thing about this order is that it is for ammunition which
does not fit and cannot be fired in any of the United States Marine
Corps weapons. This gives rise to the obvious speculation that it is a
contract for ammunition placed by the CIA with Western Cartridge
Corporation under a USMC cover for concealment purposes.

It is well known that the CIA had used "sanitized" weapons-that is,
weapons that cannot be traced directly back to the Agency or the United
States-in various missions around the world.

Most of the information available suggesting links between the assassination and the CIA is circumstantial-which is hardly surprising. After all,
Agency officials could hardly be expected to reveal information possibly
connecting them to the death of the President. However, at this time there
can be little doubt that many persons connected to Oswald-David Ferrie,
Guy Banister, Carlos Bringuier, and other anti-Castro Cubans-were also
connected to the CIA. Some knowledgeable persons-such as former CIA
operative Morrow and others-claim these CIA people were operating
outside of Agency control.

One strange incident involved an intelligence operative named Gary
Underhill, who had served in World War II and was considered one of the
top U.S. experts on limited warfare. At the time of the assassination,
Underhill performed "special assignments" for the CIA and was on close
terms with officials of both the Agency and the Pentagon. Several days
after the assassination, Underhill visited friends in New Jersey. He was
badly shaken and fearful. He said that President Kennedy had been killed
by a small group within the CIA and that he believed his life was in
danger. A short time later, Underhill was found fatally shot in his Washington apartment. His death was ruled suicide although he was shot in the
left side of his head and a pistol was found in his left hand-and it was
well known that Underhill was right-handed.

There is also a real possibility that the assassins who killed Kennedy
may have had no direct link with Oswald and his Cuban contacts at all.
This intriguing possibility-which could go far in explaining why none of
the trails leading backward from Oswald seem to connect firmly with the
shooting in Dealey Plaza-became apparent several years ago with the
revelation of a French connection to the assassination.

The House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded in 1979 what
most Dealey Plaza witnesses said in 1963-that at least one gunman fired
on Kennedy from the Grassy Knoll.

While the committee said it could not identify the Grassy Knoll gunman,
that second gunman may well have been a premier French assassin with
close contacts to the CIA, organized crime, and even an oblique connection with Jack Ruby. According to recently uncovered evidence, more than
one French assassin may have been operating in Dealey Plaza.

Central to this possibility is CIA Document No. 632-796, which was
released by the Agency in 1977 along with more than three thousand other
documents. These documents were pried from the Agency by a Freedom of Information Act suit filed by Washington attorney and JFK assassination researcher Bernard Fensterwald. A poor-quality reproduction with
numerous blanked-out spaces, the document was painstakenly deciphered
by veteran Dallas researcher Mary Ferrell.

Dated April 1, 1964, the document carries a handwritten title, "Jean
Soutre's Expulsion from U.S.," and the half-page paper reads:

8. Jean SOUTRE aka [also known as] Michel Roux aka Michael
Mertz-On March 5, [1964] the FBI advised that the French had
[withheld] the Legal Attache in Paris and also the [withheld] had
queried the Bureau in New York City concerning subject, stating that he
had been expelled from the U.S. at Fort Worth or Dallas 18 hours after
the assassination. He was in Fort Worth on the morning of 22 November and in Dallas in the afternoon. The French believe that he was
expelled to either Mexico or Canada. In January he received mail from a
dentist named Alderson . . . Subject is believed to be identical with a
Captain who is a deserter from the French Army and an activist in the
OAS [a right-wing French militant group.] The French are concerned
because of DeGaulle's planned visit to Mexico. They would like to
know the reason for his expulsion from the U.S. and his destination.
Bureau files are negative and they are checking in Texas and with the
INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service] .. .

And the government did check-first with the dentist, who was still
practicing in Houston, Texas, in the 1980s. Dr. Lawrence M. Alderson
told researchers that FBI agents began watching him in early 1964. He
said finally agents contacted him and said they were trying to find the
Frenchman "under any circumstances under any conditions."

Alderson said, "They felt that Jean knew who, or he himself had,
assassinated Kennedy. And they wanted to know who in Washington had
had him flown out of Dallas. And, to my knowledge, nobody ever found
out or nobody knew."

Alderson said he had not seen the Frenchman since serving as a security
officer with him shortly after World War II. He confided that he was
working for the CIA at the time. The dentist gave the following information about the Frenchman, Jean Soutre (pronounced Sweat-ra):

He's a career soldier. From what I can gather, he was in the French
underground movement in Algiers. I do know he left the French Air
Force . . . I believe he was in the Fourth French Air Force Headquarters
in France. He was a very prominent and upcoming French security
officer. When I knew him, he was a lieutenant . . . I lived with him so I
knew him quite well. He was very well educated, very outgoing,
forward, dynamic. He came from a very poor family. In France, you
don't have a thing if you're from a poor family unless you have a military career behind you. So, he was very interested in his career and
this is why I never did really understand why he left it. But, he very
definitely left, I presume, his wife. I have not heard from her in many
years. She was a well-to-do, beautiful woman from a Southern France
wine family. The last I heard from her, she was the one who told me
that he had left the French Army and had gone underground trying to
save Algeria. So, evidently, he was rather committed, or felt committed, to leave his career, which was the only career he had. The next
time I heard of him, quite truthfully, was when the CIA, or the FBI
rather, had me tailed for about two months following the assassination
.. . The last contact I had with the CIA was in France when I was
working for him. So, the only contact I had in this country was with the
FBI.

Alderson, after providing a snapshot of his French friend, said Soutre in
the early 1950s was about twenty-five years old and spoke English,
Spanish, and German without a trace of an accent. He was about six-footone, and weighed about 175 pounds. Soutre was a "sharp dresser,"
seldom seen in uniform, and had the reputation of being a "ladies' man,"
Alderson said.

An FBI report stated that three persons named John Mertz, Irma Rio
Mertz, and Sara Mertz flew from Houston to Mexico City on November
23, 1963, according to records of Pan American World Airways. The FBI
report concluded: "These records contain no further identifying data regarding these individuals."

Although Soutre could have flown out of the country by private or even
military aircraft, it is interesting to note the coincidental departure of the
Mertzes at a time corresponding to that in the CIA document. After all,
even the FBI report noted that Soutre also was known as Michel Roux and
Michael Mertz.

Today it is known that Roux and Mertz are the names of two real
individuals, both of whom were connected to the shadowy world of
intelligence work.

The name "Mertz" crops up in the 1974 Pultizer Prize winning investigative book," The Heroin Trail, compiled by the staff of Newsday.
According to this book, Michael Victor Mertz was a World War II French
Resistance hero and a captain in the French secret service after the war.
Mertz operated in Germany, Turkey, and Morocco under the cover of his
military title. In April 1961, Mertz was ordered to penetrate the terrorist
group, L' Organisation de 1'Armie Secrete (OAS). Posing as an OAS sympathizer, Mertz was arrested later in 1961 for distributing pro-OAS leaflets
and sent to an internment camp. There he worked his way into the highest
levels of the OAS and was able to break up a bomb plot against Charles de
Gaulle.

However, security work was not the only activity in which Mertz became involved. Even before saving de Gaulle, Mertz had become one of
France's biggest heroin smugglers, according to Newsday, which cites
numerous French police and count records.

It is known in intelligence circles that de Gaulle often turned his back on
drug smuggling, particularly if it involved people he was indebted to for
their work against either the Nazis or the OAS.

One of Mertz's contacts in both heroin smuggling and the French secret
service was a man named Christian David, a petty hoodlum who had escaped
a French prison and later was recruited into French intelligence for use
against the OAS. According to Newsday and other knowledgeable sources,
David was one of the men involved in the 1965 murder of Moroccan
opposition leader Mehdi Ben Barka. Barka was opposing Moroccan
strongman General Oufkir, and French authorities wanted him out of the way.

In 1972, Barka's murder-which is still officially unsolved-was brought
up when David was arrested in Brazil and charged with being a member of
a smuggling ring that had imported more than one thousand pounds of
heroin into the United States over a three-year period.

After his arrest in Brazil, David was extradited to the United States and
sentenced to twenty years in prison for heroin smuggling. He didn't stay
there long. In 1975, when the Senate Intelligence Committee began looking into the CIA's "Executive Action" program, David was ordered
extradited back to France and was taken out of the country.

The committee was especially concerned with the Agency's Executive
Action program because it was established for the purpose of committing
assassinations. The program was part of the operational arm of the CIA's
Technical Services Division and was code-named ZR/RIFLE.

Former CIA Director Richard Helms spoke at length about ZR/RIFLE to
the committee. Two members of the ZR/RIFLE team were identified by
Helms only by their CIA cryptonyms-WI/ROUGUE and QJ/WIN. According to evidence gathered by the committee, WI/ROUGUE was a
French Corsican, a stateless soldier of fortune and a criminal. This man
approached QJ/WIN and attempted to recruit him into the CIA's assassination program. Although it was never learned if this recruitment effort was
successful, there is evidence that it was.

Declassified CIA notes concerning the ZR/RIFLE project state:

4. Operational assets:

(1.) Personnel: QJ/WIN is under written contract as a principal agent,
with the primary task of spotting agent candidates. QJ/WIN was
first contacted in [deleted by CIA], in conjunction with an illegal
narcotics operation into the United States. For a period of a year
and a half, he was contacted sporadically by CIS Lucien Conien
]who later became chief of foreign intelligence for the Drug
Enforcement Agency] on behalf of the Bureau of Narcotics.
Files of this bureau reflect an excellent performance by QJ/WIN.

Helms said this about QJ/WIN: "If you needed somebody to carry out
murder, I guess you had a man who might be prepared to carry it out."

Until the Senate hearings, the ZR/RIFLE program with its agents,
WI/ROUGUE and QJ/WIN, were among the CIA's most closely guarded
secrets. Several separate sources familiar with both intelligence operations
and drug smuggling claim that WI/ROUGUE and Christian David are one
and the same. This claim is further supported by David's own admission of
intelligence associations and by his convenient extradition to France
in 1985.

Based on the association of David and Mertz coupled with their descriptions and backgrounds, which match those of the CIA agents, it is suggestive to speculate that QJ/WIN was Michael Victor Mertz, who also used
the name Jean Soutre.