Who Really Killed Kennedy?: 50 Years Later: Stunning New Revelations About the JFK Assassination (38 page)

Lorenz claimed the participants in Operation 40, including herself, were receiving military training in guerrilla warfare, plastic explosives, M-1 rifles, automatic weapons, attack techniques, and self-defense. Lorenz testified she called Oswald by the nickname “Ozzie.” She also testified that E. Howard Hunt was known as “Eduardo,” and that his role in the group appeared to involve periodically bringing Frank Sturgis large quantities of cash delivered in an envelope.

Lorenz testified that in a private meeting with several of the Operation 40 players in September 1963, Frank Sturgis led the group as they studied street maps of Dallas that Sturgis laid out on a coffee table. Lorenz placed Oswald at the meeting, saying that at the conclusion of the discussion, Sturgis folded up the maps and put them in his pocket. “Okay, that’s
it,” Sturgis reportedly said. “We are ready.” Then, about a week before November 22, 1963, Frank Sturgis, Lorenz, and the Novo brothers left Orlando, Florida, in a two-car caravan with the second car containing Lee Harvey Oswald; Petro Diaz Lanz, the former chief of the Cuban Air Force; Orlando Bosch, a Cuban exile leader and CIA operative; and Jerry Patrick Hemming, a former US Marine who became a mercenary and a CIA operative. She testified that on the trip they rotated drivers and stopped to eat only at drive-in roadside restaurants. They drove nonstop over two days from Orlando to Dallas, Texas, where the group checked into adjoining hotel rooms in a hotel outside Dallas.

She further testified that once the group had settled into the two adjoining hotel rooms, Frank Sturgis took rifles and scopes that had been wrapped in green waterproof paper, with blankets thrown on top, from the trunk of his car. Sturgis placed the rifles and scopes between the two twin beds in his hotel room. Lorenz said she recognized three or four automatic rifles, but she did not know the specific makes, and she did not pay attention to the rifles or scopes, except to notice the rifles were equipped with slings. She testified that Jack Ruby showed up at the hotel to have a private discussion with Frank Sturgis, and that Ruby ignored Oswald during this visit. She also claimed E. Howard Hunt showed up with more money.

Lorenz claimed not to know the purpose of the trip. She assumed the goal was to attack an armory and steal weapons. She claimed she had acted as a decoy in several such missions previously staged in Florida and adjoining states. Why a CIA-supplied operation needed to steal weapons from an armory, Lorenz did not explain. After a few days in the hotel, Lorenz began to feel homesick for her daughter and wanted to go home. She testified that Frank Sturgis took her to the airport in Dallas and she flew home to Miami on November 19 or 20, 1963. She claimed she was on an airplane with her daughter on November 22, 1963, going from Miami to New York, when JFK was shot. The flight was diverted to land at Newark, she testified, after the copilot came on the intercom and announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, the president was shot.”

In her 1993 autobiographical book,
Marita: One Woman’s Extraordinary Tale of Love and Espionage in the CIA
, Lorenz details her experiences in Cuba, disclosing her belief that Joseph Kennedy, the patriarch of the Kennedy clan, had financed Castro with the expectation that if Castro
managed to depose Cuban president Batista, then Kennedy would be able to take control of the Havana nightlife and destroy mobster Meyer Lansky’s influence. Confirming the tension between Joseph Kennedy and the eastern mob (controlled at that time by the Italians under Lucky Luciano and the Jews under Meyer Lansky) Lorenz noted Joseph Kennedy “had hated Lansky since bootlegging days of prohibition when they were rivals.”
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Lorenz claimed that when she was growing up she had only been vaguely aware of the dark side of Cuba—the prostitution, the gambling, the gangsters, and the political graft. “I didn’t know then about organized crime figure Meyer Lansky and his friends Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano and Benjamin ‘Bugsy’ Siegel, who dominated the Havana casinos, or his brother Jake, who handled the day-to-day management, or about syndicate members such as Carlos Marcello of New Orleans and Santo Trafficante, Jr., who let underlings including a nightclub owner named Jack Ruby, run guns to whomever wanted them,” she wrote.
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She also claimed Teamster Union boss Jimmy Hoffa and Bill Bresser, a labor union boss in Cleveland, Ohio, made money selling guns “to both sides”—namely Batista and Castro—and that Santo Trafficante, Jack Ruby, and Frank Fiorini/Sturgis were among the gun runners providing weapons to Castro in his fight against Batista. Finally, she wrote “that all these men, like Sam Giancana of Chicago, just wanted the Havana nightclub scene to be business as usual after the revolution.”
⁵⁵⁰

Gaeton Fonzi, a lead investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, ultimately concluded that Lorenz’s story was unreliable; he successfully urged the House Select Committee to ignore the account when it could not be independently corroborated. Marita Lorenz would have become just another weird footnote to the JFK assassination investigation except that she figured into an important libel case as a key witness where Lane set out to prove E. Howard Hunt had been in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

The case developed when
The Spotlight
, a newspaper published by Liberty Lobby, Inc., ran an article in 1978 authored by former-CIA officer Victor Marchetti in which Marchetti accused E. Howard Hunt of having been in Dallas on November 22, 1963, and of having played a role in the
JFK assassination. Marchetti had achieved notoriety in 1974 by publishing a heavily redacted book entitled
The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence
.
⁵⁵¹
Hunt won a libel judgment of $625,000. Mark Lane, even though he disagreed with the Liberty Lobby, took the case on appeal because the case offered him a chance to apply the knowledge he gathered in two decades he had then spent studying the JFK assassination.

A critical point in the retrial was reached when Hunt, under cross-examination by Lane, was forced to admit his children were never fully convinced Hunt was in Washington, D.C., on November 22, 1963, as he had always claimed. Lane asked Hunt about his testimony in the first trial of the Liberty Lobby case, on December 16, 1981. In his book on the Liberty Lobby retrial, Lane recreates the cross-examination sequence from the second trial:

Lane Question
: Do you recall testifying back on Dec. 16, 1981, that when the allegation was made that you were in Dallas, Texas, on Nov. 22, 1963, your children were really upset? Do you recall testifying to that?

Hunt Answer
: Yes.

Lane Question
: Do you recall testifying that you had to reassure them that you were not in Texas that day?

Hunt Answer
: Yes.

Lane Question
: That you had nothing to do with the Kennedy assassination?

Hunt Answer
: That’s right.

Lane Question
: And that you were being persecuted for reasons that were unknown to you.

Hunt Answer
: Yes.

Lane Question
: Did you say that the allegation that you were in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, was the focus of a great deal of interfamily friction and tended to exacerbate difficulties in the family?

Answer
: I did.
⁵⁵²

Through the years, Hunt had produced several explanations of the day JFK was assassinated, including a claim he had stopped to get Chinese food on his way home from the office. Records, however, showed Hunt had not been at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, on November 22, 1963. Hunt’s coworker at the CIA said he could not recall seeing Hunt at work between November 18, 1963, and sometime in December 1963.
⁵⁵³
On August 20, 1978, Joseph Trento and Jacquie Powers, reporters for the
Wilmington Sunday News Journal
, wrote an article very similar to the Marchetti article, claiming a secret 1966 CIA memo placed Hunt in Dallas on November 22, 1963.
⁵⁵⁴

At the 1985 retrial, Lane pressed Hunt, asking him how his children could ever have wondered how one of the three tramp photos, photos of three transients taken by several Dallas-area newspapers, that purported to show him in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963, could be authentic, when his children knew he was in Washington that day. Hunt claimed his children were not fully aware he worked for the CIA. He claimed when the tramp pictures were made public, he had to “remind” his children he was never in Dallas that day. Finally, Lane got Hunt to admit that each time a new allegation asserting Hunt had been in Dallas on the day JFK was assassinated was made, his children, even as adults, demanded to know if it was true. “Rarely does a witness testify that he had to remind his alibi witnesses where they were at the crucial moment in the case,” Lane wrote.
⁵⁵⁵

Lane’s sole witness was Marita Lorenz, who appeared at the trial via a deposition read to the jury. In a unanimous decision, the jury agreed with the Liberty Lobby and decided against the plaintiff E. Howard Hunt. The jury foreman, Leslie Armstrong, told reporters “the evidence was clear The CIA had killed President Kennedy. Hunt had been part of it, and that evidence, so painstakingly presented, should now be examined by the relevant institutions of the United States government so that those responsible for the assassination might be brought to justice.”
⁵⁵⁶
Despite continuing concerns that the testimony of Marita Lorenz was unreliable, Lane demonstrated two key points with the 1985 retrial: (1) the jury refused to believe E. Howard Hunt’s insistence he was in Washington on the day Kennedy was killed, and (2) the jury believed the CIA played a role in the assassination.

House Select Committee on Assassinations investigator Gaeton Fonzi wrote that meeting Cuban exile Silvia Odio played an important role in his conviction that a conspiracy was involved in the JFK assassination. “My investigation with the House Select Committee on Assassinations revealed that there was evidence that proved Odio was telling the truth about three men visiting her almost two months before the assassination,” Fonzi wrote.
⁵⁵⁷

On July 22, 1964, a then-twenty-seven-year-old Silvio Odio testified to the Warren Commission that she had a meeting with a man she later identified as Lee Harvey Oswald. In 1963 Odio was a member of the Cuban Revolutionary Junta, known as JURE, and both her parents were then political prisoners of the Castro regime. She testified that in late September 1963, three men came to her apartment in Dallas and asked her to help them prepare a letter soliciting funds for JURE. She said two of the men appeared to be Cubans, although she also thought they had characteristics associated with Mexicans. She said the two men did not state their full names, but identified themselves only by their underground “war names.” She remembered one of the two Cubans as “Leopoldo.” The third man, an American, was introduced to her as “Leon Oswald,” and she was told he was interested in the Cuban cause.

She further told the Warren Commission that the next day, after the meeting in her apartment, Leopoldo called her and asked her what she thought of the American. When Odio replied, “I didn’t think anything,” Leopoldo went on to describe the American in more detail. This is what Odio told the Warren Commission: “[Leopoldo] said, ‘You know our idea is to introduce [Leon Oswald] to the underground in Cuba because he is great, he is kind of nuts.’ That was more or less—I can’t repeat the exact words, because he was kind of nuts. He told us we don’t have any guts, you Cubans, because President Kennedy should have been assassinated after the Bay of Pigs, and some Cubans should have done that, because he was the one that was holding the freedom of Cuba actually.” Leopoldo also told Odio that this Leon had been a marine and he was interested in helping the Cubans.
⁵⁵⁸
On November 22, 1963, seeing photographs of Lee Harvey Oswald on television, Sylvia Odio recognized him as Leon
Oswald, the man who came to her house.

The Warren Commission rejected Odio’s testimony largely because the dates deemed most likely for the suspect visit to Odio’s apartment, September 26 and 27, 1963, were the same dates the Commission placed Oswald in Dallas. In so concluding, the Warren Commission discounted the possibility that someone was using the Oswald identity to create the impression Oswald had visited Mexico in the time period of late-September 1963. As noted in
chapter 4
, no US government agency has released a photograph that confirms Oswald had visited the Cuban and Russian embassies in Mexico City in late-September 1963, despite extensive US intelligence surveillance of both embassies at that time. “In spite of the fact that it appeared almost certain that Oswald could not have been in Dallas at the time Mrs. Odio thought he was, the Commission requested the FBI to conduct further investigation to determine the validity of Mrs. Odio’s testimony,” the Warren Commission final report noted.
⁵⁵⁹

Fonzi, after locating Sylvia Odio and conducting extensive research on the incident, wrote a special report for the House Select Committee on Assassinations. “It appears that Sylvia Odio’s testimony is essentially credible,” Fonzi concluded in the special report, noting that Sylvia’s sister Annie also witnessed the visit in question. “From the evidence provided in sworn testimony of the corroborating witnesses, there is no doubt that three men came to her apartment in Dallas prior to the Kennedy assassination and identified themselves as members of an anti-Castro Cuban organization. From a judgment of the credibility of both Silvia and Annie Odio, it must be concluded that there is a strong probability that one of the men was or appeared to be Lee Harvey Oswald.”
⁵⁶⁰
The problem was that Oswald had clearly been identified as a pro-Castro activist on the left, for instance, when he was arrested in an altercation that occurred as he distributed “Fair Play for Cuba” literature on the streets of New Orleans, an incident discussed in
chapter 4
. Was Oswald pro-Castro or anti-Castro? Was there an attempt by a look-alike to use the Oswald identity in situations where Oswald himself could not have been physically present? The House Select Committee was unable to reach a conclusion regarding Oswald’s motives, assuming the visit had come from Oswald himself. The House Select Committee also could come to no definite conclusion
regarding the precise date of the visit, or whether Oswald might have been in Dallas on those dates.