Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy (54 page)

Another Walker aide, Robert Allan Surrey, produced the "Wanted for
Treason" leaflets that were distributed along the Kennedy motorcade
route.

Surrey later revealed to researcher Penn Jones that one of his close
bridge-playing friends was none other than James Hosty, the FBI agent
who, on orders, destroyed a note to the Bureau from Lee Harvey Oswald
after the assassination.

But perhaps the most significant connection between Walker and other
assassination-connected characters was his contacts with anti-Castro Cubans and New Orleans.

Carlos Bringuier, the anti-Castro Cuban who was arrested with Lee
Harvey Oswald in New Orelans, was with Walker on the faculty of
Christian Crusade Anti-Communist Youth University. According to researcher Gary Shaw, Walker was retained by the CIA to arm and train
Cuban exiles some time after the Bay of Pigs Invasion.

One member of the militant Cuban exile group Alpha 66 was Filipe
Vidal Santiago, who was frequently seen with Walker. Santiago was
known to drive a 1957 Chevrolet. Such a car figured prominently in
several aspects of the assassination case.

About an hour after the slaying of Dallas patrolman J. D. Tippit, police
dispatchers broadcast a pickup order for a 1957 Chevrolet last seen at the
intersection where Tippit was killed. The charge was investigation of
carrying a concealed weapon. The license number given by police registered to a Dallas man who told researchers he sold the car prior to September 1963, indicating the license plate reported on November 22
may have been stolen. This-and other instances of cars with illegitimate
license plates around the Tippit slaying and Oswald's rooming housewere never adequately investigated.

Part of the evidence that led the Warren Commission to conclude that it
was Oswald who shot at General Walker were three photographs made of
Walker's Dallas home found in Oswald's belongings. Commission photo
experts said backgrounds of the pictures indicated they were made no later
than March 10, one month before the attack on Walker and two days
before mail orders were sent off for Oswald's pistol and the MannlicherCarcano rifle.

In one of the photographs is a 1957 Chevrolet in Walker's driveway.
This photo-as shown in Warren Commission Exhibit 5-has a hole in it
obliterating the car's license number.

In FBI reports, R. B. Stovall, one of the Dallas detectives who confiscated Oswald's belongings from the Paine home in Irving, is quoted as
saying:

. .. at the time he observed this photograph [the detective] surmised
that Oswald had evidently taken the license plate number area out of the
photograph to keep anyone from identifying the owner of that automobile. He advised he is positive the photograph was mutilated as shown
in Commission Exhibit 5 at the time they recovered it at the Paine
residence.

According to the Bureau, Stovall's partner, Guys Rose, commented:

... he had noted that someone had torn out a section on the
automobile, which area contains the license plate for the 1957 Chevrolet
.. . He stated . . . that it had been mutilated at the time they had
recovered the box containing the photographs.

However, during her Warren Commission testimony, Marina Oswald
made it clear that the hole was not there when she was shown the photo by
the FBI.

She told Commission attorney Wesley Liebeler:

When the FBI first showed me this photograph, I remember that the
license plate, the number of the license plate was on this car, on this
photograph. It had the white and black numbers. There was no black
spot that I see on it now. When Lee showed me this photograph there
was the number on the license plate on this picture . . . This black spot
is so striking I would have remembered it if it were on the photograph
that Lee showed me or the FBI. . . . There was no hole in the original
when they showed it to me-I'm positive of it.

Someone is lying. If the license number was obliterated while in the
hands of the FBI, as stated by Marina Oswald, this is firm evidence of
official destruction of evidence.

The truth of the matter came in 1969 with the publication of Dallas
police chief Jesse Curry's JFK Assassination File. On page 113 is a
police photograph of Oswald's belongings and in the foreground is the
Walker photograph with the Chevrolet's license-plate number intact.

This piece of evidence was altered while in the hands of the authorities.
Apparently this criminal action disturbed at least one Warren Commission staff member. In 1966, two years after the Warren Commission had
concluded its work, Attorney Liebeler wrote a letter to Charles Klihr, a
volunteer worker for General Walker, stating:

The [Oswald] picture was mutilated by someone in such a manner that
the license plate is no longer visible. When we noticed this during the
investigation we asked the FBI to determine whose car it was. They
asked [Walker aide] Surrey about it and he told them he thought it was
your car. I find no indication that FBI agents talked with you about the
matter, however . . . I would appreciate it very much if you would let
me know whether or not the FBI did interview you about this and if you
were able to identify the car as your own.

There is no record as to Klihr's responses to Liebeler's letter.

All of these strange connections take on more sinister tones when
viewed with the possibility that General Walker may have even been in
contact with Oswald, his assassin Jack Ruby, or both.

A tenuous tie may be a St. Paul, Minnesota man named John Martin,
who was an acquaintance of General Walker's and filmed him in his
Dallas home in the late summer of 1963. Incredibly, Martin journeyed
on to New Orleans where, on September 9, he photographed Lee
Harvey Oswald handing out Fair Play for Cuba material on the same roll
of film.

Walker's connections in New Orleans were many and substantial, ranging from anti-Castro Cubans in touch with David Ferrie and Guy Banister
to Louisiana political leaders. According to Louisiana State Police files,
Walker was involved in several hurried and secret meetings in New
Orleans during the two days prior to the assassination, including a conference with Judge Leander Perez, one of the state's most powerful men.

In fact, Walker was on a Braniff flight from New Orleans at the time of
Kennedy's assassination. He reportedly became upset when word of the
assassination was broadcast over the plane's loudspeaker and roamed up
and down the aisle telling fellow passengers to remember that he was on
that flight at the time of Kennedy's death.

According to Farewell America, a book authored by French intelligence agents, Walker later joined oilman H. L. Hunt in a secret hideaway in Mexico where "they remained for a month, protected by personal
guards, under the impassive eyes of the FBI."

Also in this book, the authors state that Oswald was introduced to both
General Walker and Clay Shaw, the director of the International Trade
Mart tried by District Attorney Jim Garrison, in late summer of 1963 by
David Ferrie.

Author Anthony Summers has reported that Walker gave a talk in Dallas
that may have been attended by Lee Harvey Oswald. He quotes another
member of the audience who claimed Oswald sat at the back of the room
during a meeting of the Directorio Revolutionario Estudiantil (DRE), an
anti-Castro Cuban group. Oswald reportedly said nothing during the fundraising meeting.

Then there are disconcerting reports that Walker knew Oswald's killer,
Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby. Researcher Penn Jones has stated that
Ruby made no secret of his admiration for the resigned general and that he
once stated that Walker was -100 percent right" in his belief that Cuba
should be taken back from Castro. More significant are the statements of
former Walker employee William McEwan Duff. According to Warren
Commission Document 1316-B, Duff claimed that Ruby visited Walker's
home on a monthly basis between December 1962 and March 1963,
shortly before Walker was fired upon.

Many researchers feel it is also significant that General Walker's name
and telephone number were found in Oswald's address book. They believe
this may indicate a possible connection between the two. However, Walker
still maintains he never met Oswald and the Warren Commission concluded:

Although Oswald's notebook contained Walker's name and telephone
number there is no evidence that they knew each other. It is probable
that this information was inserted at the time Oswald was planning his
attack on Walker.

Yet another odd connection between Walker and the assassination involved car salesman Warren Reynolds. Reynolds chased the murderer of
Patrolman Tippit but initially was unable to identify Oswald as the killer.
Two months later, Reynolds was shot from ambush and after recovering,
was befriended by General Walker. After consulting with Walker, Reynolds was able to identify Oswald to the Warren Commission in July, 1964.

The Warren Commission concluded, without even bothering to talk to
Walker, that his assailant had been Oswald. The evidence used to reach
this conclusion was the testimony of Marina Oswald, a note discovered
at the Paine home, photographs reportedly taken by Oswald of the Walker
home, and identification of a bullet found at the crime scene.

Marina Oswald's testimony has been called into question in a number of
matters, and her stories of murder attempts by Oswald on Walker and
Richard Nixon are fraught with inconsistencies and omissions. It is also curious that her first statement that Oswald tried to kill Walker came on
December 3, 1963, about a week after a West German newspaper reported
there might be a connection between the Walker shooting and the assassination. The Warren Commission reported that the German news story was
"fabricated by the editor," but then advanced the same allegation.

The note in question turned up only after the Kennedy assassination,
when Secret Service agents showed the note to Mrs. Ruth Paine and asked
her to identify it. The undated note reportedly fell out of a book found
among Oswald's belongings.

Government handwriting experts declared that Oswald wrote the message and Marina conveniently told investigators she thought she saw it
shortly after the Walker shooting.

Federal investigators concluded that Oswald had written the note, which
was in Russian, and that it had been left in a Russian volume entitled Book
of Useful Advice and was only discovered nearly two weeks after the
assassination when it fell out of the book's pages.

However, Mrs. Ruth Paine told the Warren Commission about the
Dallas police search of her home mentioning: "Before I left they were
leafing through books to see if anything fell out but that is all I saw." Mrs.
Paine's testimony fuels the suspicion that the note may have been planted
by authorities.

In the note, Oswald detailed instructions to his wife on what to do in his
absence. He told her where the mailbox key could be found, that the
current bills had been paid and even said she could "throw out or give my
clothing, etc. away." Two notable passages state:

Send the information as to what has happened to me to the Embassy
[undoubtedly the Russian embassy, which Oswald had been contacting
periodically] and include newspaper clippings-should there be anything about me in the newspapers. I believe that the Embassy will come
quickly to your assistance on learning everything.

If I am alive and taken prisoner, the city jail is located at the end of
the bridge through which we always passed on going to the city (right in
the beginning of the city after crossing the bridge).

These two sections raise troublesome questions for the official version of
the Walker shooting.

Since Marina reportedly knew nothing of her husband's attack on Walker
in advance, how could she be expected to watch for stories on Oswald in
the newspapers since any such account would only report that an unknown
sniper fired on the general? Also, why would a supposed American
defector to Russia who returned home expect assistance for his family
from the Soviet embassy if he were charged with the attempted murder of
a prominent right-wing Dallasite?

Warren Commission critic Sylvia Meagher wrote:

I suggest that Oswald wrote the undated letter in relation to a project
other than the attack on General Walker-one that also involved risk of
arrest or death-and that Marina was informed about her husband's
plans in advance.

As noted by the Warren Commission, Oswald's letter "appeared to be
the work of a man expecting to be killed, or imprisoned, or to disappear."
Yet at the time of the Walker incident, he had no money, no passport, and
no reasonable expectation of escape.

The photographs of Walker's home also pose a time problem. If they
were made prior to March 10, 1963, as believed by the Warren Commission, then it must be believed that Oswald was actively reconnoitering a
sniper position at the Walker home even before ordering his weapons.

Finally, the bullet found in Walker's home also presents problems.
Contemporary news stories of the April 10 incident quote Dallas police as
saying the recovered bullet was "identified as a 30.06," not a 6.5 millimeter Mannlicher-Carcano.

In 1975, researcher George Michael Evica received FBI spectrographic
analyses of a bullet (CE 399) and bullet fragments reportedly recovered in
the assassination investigation. According to Evica, these scientific reports, termed "inconclusive" by Director Hoover when reporting to the
Warren Commission, revealed:

... the bullet recovered in the assassination attempt on General
Walker does not match either CE 399 or two fragments recovered from
President Kennedy's limousine; the Warren Commission's linking of
Lee Harvey Oswald to the General Walker assassination attempt is
seriously weakened.

Further confusion over the bullet has been raised by Walker himself,
who today claims the bullet exhibited by the House Select Committee on
Assassinations is not the same bullet recovered from his home in 1963. He
said the original slug was so mangled as to be hardly recognizable as a
bullet.