Takeaways

Jack Martin was a Privete Dectective who was the victim of battery from Guy Bannister a former FBI agent operating as an espionage operative of the CIA. John F. Kennedy was trying to stop gun running and had the FBI raid a gun running site, a farm owned by a Cuban ex patriot who left after Castro took power. The flights were from Lake Pontchartrain and involved Oswald and others like David Ferrie operating out of Guy Bannister’s office that was clumped with Reily Coffee (1902 Robber Barrons year) and CIA, FBI, Secret Service buildings in the area or same buildings or shared space in the Masonic Temple. This is Lee Harvey Oswald and Fair Play for Cuba left New Orleans for Dallas when JFK was assassinated.

Catty-corner from Lafayette Square, I found 544 Camp to be located in a small mousy gray structure built from a conspicuously unsuccessful imitation of blocks of granite. This modest edifice was called, I was later to learn, the “Newman Building,” after its current owner. The entrance at 544 Camp opened onto stairs leading to the second floor.

There was something familiar about the building, and it took me a moment or two to refresh my memory. Then I went around the corner, past where Mancuso’s small restaurant used to be, and walked a few steps down Lafayette Street to the other entrance of the building. There I found myself looking at the door of what I knew had been—back in 1963— the entrance to the upstairs private detective office of Guy Banister. Located at 531 Lafayette Street, the door had borne the designation, “Guy Banister Associates, Inc. Investigators.” So both entrances— 544 Camp and 531 Lafayette—led to the same place. And curiously, the name of Guy Banister, which had come up three years before, had surfaced again.

Banister had died in 1964—about nine months after the assassination—but now it occurred to me why “544 Camp Street” appeared on Oswald’s material for only one day. Somebody—presumably Banister or an associate of his—had stopped Oswald from using the address on later circulars. And small wonder. Guy Banister hardly could have been enthusiastic about the young ex-Marine stamping his address on pro-Castro literature.

Even though no longer in the F.B.I., Banister had shared the sentiments of J. Edgar Hoover. I knew that he was heavily involved in anti-communist endeavors of all kinds. A young attorney I frequently played chess with at the New Orleans Chess Club had told me how Banister had hired him when he was a college student to find radical, or even liberal, organizations on the campus, and to join and penetrate them. I knew further that Banister was a leader of the Anti-Communist League of the Caribbean. I had heard about this far-right group from a partner of his in the organization, an attorney named Maurice Gatlin, who lived at the Claiborne Towers apartment building at the same time I did.

…

Soldiers ordinarily are not taught Russian any more than they are taught philosophy or art or music—not if they are really members of the combat branch to which they are assigned. The government’s witnesses and exhibits had described Oswald as a Marine assigned to anti-aircraft duty. A soldier genuinely involved in anti-aircraft duty would have about as much use for Russian as a cat would have for pajamas. I read no farther that night. I had to digest this first indication that Lee Oswald—in 1959, at least— had been receiving intelligence training. I knew, as did anyone with military background, that Marine intelligence activity was guided by the Offce of Naval Intelligence (O.N.I.) EWondering what possible connection there might have been between the O.N.I. and Lee Harvey Oswald, I went to bed. I did not sleep much that night.

…

Now from the start of the excerpt

The more I read, the clearer it became that all the official government investigations of the assassination had systematically ignored any evidence that might lead to a conclusion other than that Lee Oswald was the lone assassin. At first I did not know what to make of this, so I just kept reading. Then one Friday night I found myself reviewing the testimony of Lieutenant Colonel Allison G. Folsom, Jr., who was reading aloud from Oswald’s training record. He described a grade that Oswald had received in a Russian examination at El Toro Marine Base in California shortly before his highly publicized defection to the Soviet Union.

Russian examination! My ears went up.

In all my years of military service during World War II—and since—I had never taken a test in Russian. Never mind Colonel Folsom’s additional testimony that Oswald had done poorly on the exam, getting only two more Russian words right than wrong.: I would not have had any Russian words right. In 1959, when Oswald was taking that exam, I was a staff officer in the National Guard in a battalion made up of hundreds of soldiers. None of them had been required to show how much Russian they knew. Even on that night in 1966 when I read Colonel Folsom’s testimony I was still in the military service— by now a major—and I could not recall a single soldier ever having been required to demonstrate how much Russian he had learned.

Soldiers ordinarily are not taught Russian any more than they are taught philosophy or art or music—not if they are really members of the combat branch to which they are assigned. The government’s witnesses and exhibits had described Oswald as a Marine assigned to anti-aircraft duty. A soldier genuinely involved in anti-aircraft duty would have about as much use for Russian as a cat would have for pajamas. I read no farther that night. I had to digest this first indication that Lee Oswald—in 1959, at least— had been receiving intelligence training. I knew, as did anyone with military background, that Marine intelligence activity was guided by the Offce of Naval Intelligence (O.N.I.) EWondering what possible connection there might have been between the O.N.I. and Lee Harvey Oswald, I went to bed. I did not sleep much that night.

The next morning I headed downtown to the seedy, faded sector of town where 544 Camp Street was located. I had jotted down this address some weeks earlier while reading the exhibits section of the Warren Commission volumes. It had been imprinted with a small hand stamp: on some of the material which Oswald had been handing out on the streets of New Orleans in the summer of 1963. Oswald had been spotted participating in several pamphleting incidents. In one on August 9 he was involved in a scuffle on Canal Street with several anti-Castro Cubans and was arrested. The Warren Commission had concluded from this and other evidence that Oswald was a dedicated and ostentatiously visible, if lonely, communist who had joined the Fair Play for Cuba Committee to support Fidel Castro.
Because of several inconsistencies, this facile explanation had never sat quite right with me. To start with, I knew that Oswald had stamped the 544 Camp address only on his public handouts of August 9th. It no longer appeared on the subsequent pamphlets he gave out. So now I wanted to look at the place firsthand.

Catty-corner from Lafayette Square, I found 544 Camp to be located in a small mousy gray structure built from a conspicuously unsuccessful imitation of blocks of granite. This modest edifice was called, I was later to learn, the “Newman Building,” after its current owner. The entrance at 544 Camp opened onto stairs leading to the second floor.

There was something familiar about the building, and it took me a moment or two to refresh my memory. Then I went around the corner, past where Mancuso’s small restaurant used to be, and walked a few steps down Lafayette Street to the other entrance of the building. There I found myself looking at the door of what I knew had been—back in 1963— the entrance to the upstairs private detective office of Guy Banister. Located at 531 Lafayette Street, the door had borne the designation, “Guy Banister Associates, Inc. Investigators.” So both entrances— 544 Camp and 531 Lafayette—led to the same place. And curiously, the name of Guy Banister, which had come up three years before, had surfaced again.

Banister had died in 1964—about nine months after the assassination—but now it occurred to me why “544 Camp Street” appeared on Oswald’s material for only one day. Somebody—presumably Banister or an associate of his—had stopped Oswald from using the address on later circulars. And small wonder. Guy Banister hardly could have been enthusiastic about the young ex-Marine stamping his address on pro-Castro literature.

Even though no longer in the F.B.I., Banister had shared the sentiments of J. Edgar Hoover. I knew that he was heavily involved in anti-communist endeavors of all kinds. A young attorney I frequently played chess with at the New Orleans Chess Club had told me how Banister had hired him when he was a college student to find radical, or even liberal, organizations on the campus, and to join and penetrate them. I knew further that Banister was a leader of the Anti-Communist League of the Caribbean. I had heard about this far-right group from a partner of his in the organization, an attorney named Maurice Gatlin, who lived at the Claiborne Towers apartment building at the same time I did.

Knowing now that Guy Banister’s office was the headquarters out of which Oswald had operated, I began to understand some of the things I had learned about the “Marxist-oriented” pamphleteer.” Whenever Oswald was going to hand out pro-Castro leaflets, for example, he regularly had gone to a local employment offce and hired men to help him in his leafleting work. I found this out when I noticed that one of the young men shown in local news photos handing out flyers with Oswald looked very much like the son of one of my fellow artillery offcers in the National Guard. I called Charles Steele and learned that indeed it was his son, Charles, Jr.

We interviewed young Steele and discovered that Oswald had paid him and the others two dollars an hour to hand out pamphlets with him. Oswald had told them that they had to do this until the news photographers departed, after which they were free to go. This recruitment method was highly improbable for a true Marxist group. Most such groups had members to do their leafleting but almost no money. Oswald’s Fair Play for Cuba Committee, by contrast, had no apparent members other than himself but enough money that it could hire unemployed people.

This was the first evidence I encountered that Lee Oswald had not been a “communist” or a “Marxist” of any kind. What appeared to be considerably more probable, now that I had seen the setup at 544 Camp, was that Guy Banister—or someone associated with him—had been using Oswald as an agent provocateur. For what purpose, and under whose auspices, remained a mystery.

If Oswald had been working that summer under Banister, I reflected, that would help explain some other oddities I had discovered in my reading. According to the Warren Commission report, when Oswald was arrested on August 9 on Canal Street and brought to the police station, he immediately asked to see an F.B.I. agent. Oswald was separated from the other arrested men and brought into a private room where he talked with Special Agent John Quigley of the local Bureau offce. Later Agent Quigley burned the notes he had taken during this interview. This is contrary to standard Bureau procedure.

Customarily, such notes are placed in the offce file, along with the report of the occasion. Such special treatment for a vociferous communist seemed inexplicable—unless Oswald was actually working with Guy Banister, a former high-ranking F.B.I. offcial, who could have easily arranged it.*_

About a week after Oswald’s Canal Street arrest, I recalled, someone arranged for him to participate in a radio debate on station WDSU. The subject was, essentially, capitalism versus communism. Oswald represented the left-wing position and duly portrayed himself on the taped program as a Marxist.

After Kennedy’s assassination, and less than a week after Oswald in turn was murdered, copies of the tape were sent to members of Congress as proof positive that a communist had killed the President.

Could it have been Banister or one of his associates, I wondered, who had arranged for the debate and taped it? Could it have been Banister who sent it to Congress? If Oswald was working under Banister’s direction that summer, it was clear that neither his pamphleting nor his radio debating were intended to convert anyone to the cause of Marxism. Rather, they were designed to accomplish only one thing: to create a highly visible public profile for Lee Harvey Oswald as a communist.

I turned away from Banister’s old omce and looked across Lafayette Street, where the U.S. Post Office Building loomed. Occupying an entire city block, it was majestic and timeless in contrast to its decayed, weatherbeaten surroundings. The building housed the New Orleans Secret Service operation. And, I now recalled, upstairs was the New Orleans headquarters of the Offce of Naval Intelligencet—the organization I had been musing about the night before in relation to Oswald’s Marine intelligence training.

Was it just coincidence, I asked myself, that Guy Banister, who had begun his career in World War II with the O.N.I., had chosen an offce right across the street from his old employers? Just as much a coincidence, I supposed, as the location of his previous private detective offce—directly across the street from the New Orleans omces of the C.I.A. and the F.B.I.

I walked down Lafayette Street, toward the Mississippi River, to look at two other addresses on the 600 block of Magazine Street that I had noted from my reading about Lee Oswald’s movements. One was the Reily Coffee Company, where Oswald had been listed as an employee in 1963, shortly before his famous emergence on the city streets handing out circulars calling for fair play for Fidel Castro. You would have to be practically a stranger to the city not to know that William Reily, the coffee company’s president, had actively supported the anti-Castro movement for years.

I strolled next door to the other address I wanted to check out—the Crescent City Garage. According to its operator, Adrian Alba, Lee Oswald had spent a great deal of time there when it appeared to Alba that Oswald should have been working at Reily’s.: In his testimony before the Warren Commission, Alba described Oswald’s interest in the rifle magazines there.

It was not too surprising that there were plenty of gun magazines for Oswald to thumb through. This garage was not exactly a Young Socialists meeting hall. Very much to the contrary, for years it had been the official parking lot of the local headquarters for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Now, since the Bureau had recently moved to new offces on Loyola Avenue, the Crescent City Garage was still the parking garage closest to the Offce of Naval Intelligence and the Secret Service. Furthermore, the Central Intelligence Agencyoffices, located in the dark gray building known as the Masonic Temple on the 300 block of St. Charles Avenue, stood but a few blocks away. (In the early 1960s the F.B.I. was also located in the Masonic Temple.)

Considering the proximity its members maintain with one another, it is hardly surprising that they refer to themselves as the intelligence community. However, it seemed to me that a man planning to kill the President would have to be exceedingly nonchalant to have chosen the United States government’s intelligence complex as the place to As I walked around the small coffee company building, I wondered whether Lee Oswald actually had labored there as a “second oiler” as company records had indicated, or whether the firm simply had been his nesting place until it was time for him to fulfill his ill-fated assignment as an agent provocateur for Guy Banister.

I strolled next door to the other address I wanted to check out—the Crescent City Garage. According to its operator, Adrian Alba, Lee Oswald had spent a great deal of time there when it appeared to Alba that Oswald should have been working at Reily’s.*_ In his testimony before the Warren Commission, Alba described Oswald’s interest in the rifle magazines there.

It was not too surprising that there were plenty of gun magazines for Oswald to thumb through. This garage was not exactly a Young Socialists meeting hall. Very much to the contrary, for years it had been the omcial parking lot of the local headquarters for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Now, since the Bureau had recently moved to new offces on Loyola Avenue, the Crescent City Garage was still the parking garage closest to the Offce of Naval Intelligence and the Secret Service. Furthermore, the Central Intelligence Agency offces, located in the dark gray building known as the Masonic Temple on the 300 block of St. Charles Avenue, stood but a few blocks away.

Considering the proximity its members maintain with one another, it is hardly surprising that they refer to themselves as the intelligence community. However, it seemed to me that a man planning to kill the President would have to be exceedingly nonchalant to have chosen the United States government’s intelligence complex as the place to In most countries, under such circumstances, a serious investigation would have begun with the working hypothesis that the intelligence community in New Orleans had used Lee Oswald as an agent provocateur. At the outset his extravagantly high profile as a “supporter” of Fidel Castro would have been understood in that context. However, it was plain from my reading that in the years since President Kennedy’s murder, federal investigators never once had glanced in the most obvious directions. Similarly, the highest officers of the United States government appeared totally unaware of the concept of the agent provocateur.

By the time I returned home that day I realized I had some serious problems to resolve. The application of every reasonable model to the available evidence had left me with a troubling conclusion. That was the apparent possibility of a preexisting relationship between the man portrayed as the lone killer of President Kennedy and the intelligence community of the United States government. • Rounding out the Commission were Chief Justice Earl Warren, Representative Hale Boggs of Louisiana, and Senator John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky

… …

On the witnesses and the skew investigators used to sway away from witness accounts

Also never followed up was equally intriguing evidence indicating that there may have been men impersonating Secret Service agents around the railroad yard area.

Joe M. Smith, the traffic corner at the intersection of Elm and Houston Streets who was told by a woman at the shooting was coming “from the bushes, “left the area where he had been stationed and went up on the knoll behind the stockade fence on top.

His account, responding to questions from Warren Commission counsel Wesley J. Liebeler:

MR. SMITH:… There was some deputy sheriff with me and I believe one Secret Service man when I got there … I felt awfully silly, but after the shot and this woman, I pulled my pistol from my holster and I thought, this is silly, I don’t know ho I am looking for, and I put it back. Just as I did, he showed me that he was a Secret Service agent.
MR LIEBELER: Did you accost this man?
MR. SMITH: Well, he saw me coming with my pistol and right away he showed me who he was.
MR. LIEBELER: Do you remember who it was?
SMITH: No, sir, 1 don’t…

However, according to the Warren Commission report, all of the Secret Service agents assigned to the parade had gone along with it en route to the hospital. The Secret Service was on record that not a single one of its agents was at the scene of the assassination, other than those passing through in the motorcade—and all of them were gone in minutes. This meant either that the Secret Service was lying or mistaken or that the man Offcer Smith encountered was not really a Secret Service agent.

Sergeant Harkness’s testimony revealed that when he first arrived at the rear of the Book Depository(even before his search of the railroad yards) “there were some Secret Service agents there. I didn’t get hem identified. They told me they were Secret Service agents.” From Harkness, therefore, it became apparent that there was not just one, but a number of people purporting to be Secret Service agents in an area where supposedly there were none.

It did not end with Offcer Smith and Sergeant Harkness. I found that Jean Hill, who chased a man running from the scene, was halted in the parking lot behind the fence on the knoll. The man, who was wearing a business suit, held out his Secret Service identification for her to see. By the time the interruption was over, her quarry was gone. Despite these indications that several men may well have been falsely representing themselves as Secret Service agents, or that the Secret Service had no idea where its agents actually were, the Warren Commission and its staff had simply dropped the dropped the matter. [Fake hobos and fake Secret Service per Chauncey Holt had cover stories]

A number of witnesses vividly recalled noticing strange activities taking place in the grassy knoll area in front of the President around the time of the shooting. For instance, an hour before the assassination, Julia Ann Mercer, an employee of Automat Distributors, was driving west past the grassy knoll on Elm Street. Caught in a traffic jam, she found herself stopped alongside a pick-up truck parked part-way up along the curbing. She saw a young man, with a rifle in a case, dismount and clamber up the steep incline onto the knoll. The day after the assassination, I later found out, she reported this unsettling incident both to the F.B.I.’s local office and the Dallas Sheriff’s office. But strangely, Julia Ann Mercer was never questioned by the Commission’s staff.

Lee Bowers, the switchman for the railroad yard, had a box-seat view of the grassy knoll from his glassed-in tower, 14 feet above the yard. According to his testimony, a few minutes before the shooting began he observed two men he did not recognize standing behind the picket fence on the knoll watching the approaching parade. Earlier he had seen an unfamiliar man driving a car around in the railroad yard behind the knoll. The man appeared tobe speaking into a hand-held microphone. [Holt in his book Self Portrait says he had radio gear inside a paper bag with many radio frequency crystals he was communicating with]

In an affidavit given to the Sheriff’s office, J.C. Price, a Dallas roofing worker, said that following the volley of shots he “saw one man run towards the passenger cars on the railroad siding . He had something in hishand. I couldn’t be sure but it may have been a headpiece.”
Some of the witnesses, contrary to the Warren Commission’s conclusions, not only heard shots coming from the picket fence, they saw smoke from rifle fire drifting up through the cluster of trees. LikeJ.C. Price, an even larger number had the impression that men had run from the knoll after the shooting, heading into the railroad yard behind. Joseph Smith,a police officer who had been a motorcycle escort alongside the President’s car, ran up the high grade of the knoll towards the fence.

S.M. Holland, the signal supervisor for the Union Terminal Railroad, described the shooting this way:

I heard a third report and I counted four shots and … in this group of trees there was a shot, a report, I don’t know whether it was a shot. I can’t say that. And a puff of smoke came out about six or eight feet above the ground right out from under those trees … I have no doubt about seeing that puff of smoke come out from under those trees. I definitely saw the puff of smoke and heard the report from under those trees…

O.V. Campbell, the president of the Book Depository, said the shooting “came from the grassy area down this way,” indicating the direction in which the motorcade had been headed once it passed the Book Depository. He said, “I heard shots being fired from a point I thought was near the railroad tracks…

James Tague, a Dallas car salesman who was cut on the face perhaps by a glancing bullet, said, “My first impression was that up by the, whatever you call the monument or whatever it was … that somebody was throwing firecrackers up there . .. and the police were running up to it.”

Billy Lovelady, an employee of the Book Depository was having lunch on its front steps, recollected the shots as having come from “right there around that concrete little deal on that knoll between the underpass and the building right on that knoll.”

Abraham Zapruder, who became famous for the home movie he took of the shooting, was standing on a cement slab by the grassy knoll with his back to the picket fence. He described the police officers running past him, headed behind the knoll area. As to where the shooting came from, he added: “I also thought it came from back of me.”

Forrest Sorrels, the local Secret Service head, was riding in the front of the parade. He testified that when he heard the shots, “a little bit too loud for a firecracker,” he looked over “on this terrace part there, because the sound sounded like it came from the back and up in that direction.”

William Newman, a Dallas design engineer, has been watching the parade with his family from the curb at the bottom of the grassy knoll a short distance in front of the picket fence. Newman said:

…

We were standing on the edge of the curb looking at the car as it was coming toward us and all of a sudden there was a noise, apparently gunshot. The President jumped up in his seat, and it looked like what I thought was a firecracker had went off and I thought he had realized it. It was just like an explosion, and he was standing up. By this time he was directly in front of us and I was looking directly at him when he was hit in the side of the head. Then we fell down on the grass as it seemed that we were in the direct path of fire … I thought the shot had come from the garden directly behind me I do not recall looking toward the Texas School Book Depository. I looked back in the vicinity of the garden.

…

L.C. Smith of the Sheriff’s office was on MainStreet when he heard the shots. He ran “as fast as I could to Elm Street just West of Houston.” There he encountered a woman who told him that “the President was shot in the head and the shots came from the fence on the north side of Elm,” referring to the picket fence in the grassy knoll area. Malcolm Summers, the owner of a local mailing service, recalled the moment when the shooting ended:

Then all of the people started running up the terrace: Everybody was just running around towards the railroad tracks, and I knew that they had someone trapped up there…One lady, Jean Hill, actually chased one of the men. She admitted that she was not sure what she would have done had she caught up with him. She testified that she saw the man go “toward the railroad tracks to the west.”

According to Hill’s account, the railroad yard—up ahead and to the right of where the President had been hit—plainly was the destination of the men running from the assassination scene. I went back again to the testimony of Lee Bowers, the switch man there, and studied his answers to questions about the aftermath posed by Warren Commission attorney Joseph A. Ball: [According to Chauncey Marvin Holt Joseph Ball was part of the Cabal]

MR. BALL: Afterwards did a good many people come up there on this high ground at the tower?

MR. BOWERS: A large number of people came [from] more than one direction. One group converged from the corner of Elm and Houston, and came down the extension of Elm and came into the high ground, and another line—another large group went across the triangular area between Houston and Elm and then across Elm and then up the incline. Some of them all the way up. Many of them did, as well as, of course, between 50 and a hundred policemen within a maximum of 5 minutes.

MR. BALL: In this area around your tower?

MR. BOWERS: That’s right. Sealed off the area, and I held off the trains until they could be examined, and there was some transients taken on at least one train.

MR. BALL: I believe you have talked this over with me before your deposition was taken, haven’t we?

BOWERS: Yes.

MR. BALL: Is there anything that you told me that I haven’t asked you about that you think of?

MR. BOWERS: Nothing that I can recall. [Emphasis supplied.) The fact that at least one of the trains in the railroad yard had to be stopped by the switchman so that “transients” could be taken off ordinarily would raise the hackles of any good attorney. However, the unperturbed Commission counsel quickly changed the subject, I noted, cutting off further discussion of the accommodating train departure of these unknown men.

I noticed exactly the same legal maneuver when Sergeant D.V. Harkness, the officer in charge of searching the departing trains, testified in response to questions by Warren Commission counsel David Belin:

MR. HARKNESS: I went back to the front, and Inspector Sawyer— Helped to get the crowd back first, and then Inspector Sawyer assigned me to some freight cars that were leaving out of the yard, to go down and search all freight cars that were leaving the yard.

MR. BELIN: Then what did you do?

MR. HARKNESS: Well, we got a long freight that was in there, and we pulled some people off of there and took them to the station.

MR. BELIN: You mean some transients?

MR. HARKNESS: Tramps and hoboes.

MR. BELIN: That were on the freight car?

MR. HARKNESS: Yes, sir.

MR. BELIN: Then what did you do?

MR. HARKNESS: That was all my assignment, because they shook two long freights down that were leaving, to my knowledge, in all the area there. We had several offcers working in that area.

MR. BELIN: Do you know whether or not anyone found any suspicious people of any kind or nature down there in the railroad yard?

MR. HARKNESS: Yes, sir. We made some arrests. I put some people in.

MR. BELIN: Were these what you call hoboes or tramps?

MR. HARKNESS: Yes, sir.

MR. BELIN: Were ail those questioned?

MR. HARKNESS: Yes, sir; they were taken to the station and questioned.

MR. BELIN: Any guns of any kind found?

MR. HARKNESS: Not to my knowledge.

MR. BELIN: I want to go back to this Amos Euins. Do you remember what he said to you and what you said to him when you first saw him? [Emphasis added.]

This exchange struck me (Jim Garrison) as remarkable. Here counsel Belin has just been told about several strangers using a departing train to leave the area where the President had just been murdered and, rather than ask more than a couple of cursory follow- up questions, he changes the subject. “Amos Euins,” another witness, had no connection whatsoever with the activity around the grassy knoll and the interesting occurrence of the timely, departing trains.

Belin never asked Sergeant Harkness for further details about the arrested men, particularly who had seen to it that they were “taken to the station and questioned.” Neither at the Dallas Sheriff’s offce nor at the Dallas Police Department was there any record of their arrest or questioning. Nor was there, so far as I could find, any mention of their names anywhere in the 26 Warren Commission volumes.

Also never followed up was equally intriguing evidence indicating that there may have been men impersonating Secret Service agents around the railroad yard area.

Joe M. Smith, the traffic comer at the intersection of Elm and Houston Streets who was told by a woman that the shooting was coming “from the bushes,” left the area where he had been stationed and went up on the knoll behind the stockade fence on top.

His account, responding to questions from Warren Commission counsel Wesley J. Liebeler:

MR. SMITH:… There was some deputy sheriff with me and I believe one Secret Service man when I got there … I felt awfully silly, but after the shot and this woman, I pulled my pistol from my holster and I thought, this is silly, I don’t know who I am looking for, and I put it back. Just as I did, he showed me that he was a Secret Service agent.

MR. LIEBELER: Did you accost this man?

MR. SMITH: Well, he saw me coming with my pistol and right away he showed me who he was.

MR. LIEBELER: Do you remember who it was?

MR. SMITH: No, sir, 1 don’t…

However, according to the Warren Commission report, all of the Secret Service agents assigned to the parade had gone along with it en route to the hospital. The Secret Service was on record that not a single one of its agents was at the scene of the assassination, other than those passing through in the motorcade —and all of them were gone in minutes. This meant either that the Secret Service was lying or mistaken or that the man Offcer Smith encountered was not really a Secret Service agent.

Sergeant Harkness’s testimony revealed that when he first arrived at the rear of the Book Depository (even before his search of the railroad yards) “there were some Secret Service agents there. I didn’t get them identified. They told me they were Secret Service agents.” From Harkness, therefore, it became apparent that there was not just one, but a number of people purporting to be Secret Service agents in an area where supposedly there were none.

It did not end with Offcer Smith and Sergeant Harkness. I found that Jean Hill, who chased a man running from the scene, was halted in the parking lot behind the fence on the knoll. The man, who was wearing a business suit, held out his Secret Service identification for her to see. By the time the interruption was over, her quarry was gone.

Despite these indications that several men may well have been falsely representing themselves as Secret Service agents, or that the Secret Service had no idea where its agents actually were, the Warren Commission and its staff had simply dropped the matter.

As I read, I realized that the Warren Commission and its staff were not alone in their unorthodox handling of the investigation. The Dallas Police Department, which closed its books on the case almost immediately, also conducted a highly irregular inquiry.

… …

… …

Guy Bannister is Paranoid and Afraid of Leaks of His FBI-CIA activities with Oswald

takeaways

Someone once commented that whenever you really want to do something unseen, whenever you go to great pains to make sure that you are unobserved, there always turns out to be someone who was sitting under the oak tree. – Jim Garrison.

The Anti-Communist Foreign Legion of the Caribbean (Spanish: Legión Extranjera Anticomunista del Caribe, LAC) was an anti-Castroist right-wing paramilitary group based in the Dominican Republic[1] funded by the dictator Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic.[2] The purpose of the group was to overthrow the government of Fidel Castro in Cuba. It was dissolved in August 1961 following Trujillo’s death.

The group was made up of Spaniards, Cubans, Croatians, Germans, Greeks and right-wing mercenaries trained in the Dominican Republic.[3] A military invasion from Dominican Republic to Cuba with about 300 soldiers was a failed attempt to overthrow Castro on August 1959.[4][verification needed]

A different organisation called the Anti-Communist League later had its headquarters at Guy Banister’s New Orleans office. The same location appeared on Fair Play for Cuba Committee leaflets distributed by Lee Harvey Oswald and such references to the league are often made in texts concerning conspiracy theories relating to Kennedy assassination. However the Legion and League were separate organisations with no apparent connection except in their opposition to Castro’s Cuba. -Wikipedia

Jack Martin a private eye who did work for Bannister on regular business was a regular in that private office. Since Bannister was former FBI (and probably like William King Harvey fired by the FBI then hired by the CIA) was meeting with Cubans and OSwald. Jack Martin saw than and Bannister got afraid and hot headed.

Now for On The Trail of the Assassins and the full excerpt

Banister had died in 1964—about nine months after the assassination—but now it occurred to me why “544 Camp Street” appeared on Oswald’s material for only one day. Somebody—presumably Banister or an associate of his—had stopped Oswald from using the address on later circulars. And small wonder. Guy Banister hardly could have been enthusiastic about the young ex-Marine stamping his address on pro-Castro literature.

Early Monday morning at the district attorney’s office I met with Herman Kohlman, the assistant D.A. who had come up with that lead the Sunday after the assassination. He informed me that the source was Jack Martin, the victim of Guy Banister’s pistol- whipping.

Within a few hours we had tracked Martin down, and he was seated across my desk, his anxious gaze fixed on my every move. An on-again, off-again alcoholic, he was a thin man with deeply circled, worried eyes.

Although he had been written off as a nonentity by many, I had long regarded him as a quick-witted and highly observant, if slightly disorganized, private detective. I had known him casually as far back as my days as an assistant D.A. and always had gotten along well with him.

“Jack,” I said, “why don’t you relax a little? You should know by now that you’re among friends here.” He nodded nervously. He was seated in the roomy, upholstered chair across from my desk, but he looked most uncomfortable. I offered him some coffee. “You’re not under cross-examination, Jack,” I said. “I just want a little help. Understand?” His head nodded jerkily.

“What I need is a little clarification about that day when Guy Banister beat you over the head with his Magnum. Remember that?”

“How could I forget it? He nearly killed me.”

“Here’s my problem, Jack,” I said. “You’ve told me you and Guy were good friends for more than ten years when that happened.” “At least ten,” he said. “Could be more.”

“And he never hit you before.”

“Never touched me.”

“Yet on November 22nd, 1963—the day of the President’s murder—he pistol-whipped you with a .3 5 7 Magnum.”

His eyes were now fixed on mine.

“The police report says the reason Banister beat you was you had an argument over telephone bills.” I pulled a copy of the police report from my desk drawer and shoved it across to him. “Here, take a look at it.”

“Now, does a simple argument over phone bills sound like a believable explanation to you?” I asked. I waited. Then, dreamily, he shook his head slowly. “No,” he admitted. “It involved more than that.”

Pausing to chug down another cup of coffee, he made a real effort to collect his thoughts.

“Well, when we came back to the office, Banister started bitching about one thing and then another. He was in a mean mood. Then all of a sudden, he accused me of going through his private files. Now I never went through his private stuff ever—absolutely never. And that really ticked me off.” He hesitated for a long moment.

“Go on, Jack,” I said gently.

“I guess I blew up,” he continued, his face flushed with memories of injustice.

“That’s when I told him he’d better not talk to me like that. I told him I remembered the people I had seen around the office that summer. And that’s when he hit me. Fast as a flash—pulled out that big Magnum and slammed me on the side of the head with it.”

“Just because you remembered the people you’d seen at his office the past summer?” I asked.

“Yeah, that’s all it took. He went bananas on that one.”

“And just who were the people you’d seen in the office that summer?”

I prodded softly. “There was a bunch of them. It was like a circus. There were all those Cubans—coming in and going out, coming in and going out. They all looked alike to me.”

Someone once commented that whenever you really want to do something unseen, whenever you go to great pains to make sure that you are unobserved, there always turns out to be someone who was sitting under the oak tree.

At the strange place that was Banister’s office, Jack Martin, unnoticed in the middle of it all, was the one sitting under the oak tree. He drew a long breath and then went on. “Then there were all these other characters. There was Dave Ferrie—you know about him by now.” “Was he there very often?” I asked. “Often? He practically lived there.” Then Martin fell silent. I saw by the look in his eyes that he had come to a full stop.

I was not about to let my weekend visit to 544 Camp Street go down the drain that easily, so I gave him a hand. “And Lee Harvey Oswald?” I added.

Jack swallowed, then nodded. It was almost as if he felt relief in finally having a burden lifted from him. “Yeah, he was there too. Sometimes he’d be meeting with Guy Banister with the door shut. Other times he’d be shooting the bull with Dave Ferrie. But he was there all right.”

“What was Guy Banister doing while all this was going on?”

“Hell, he was the one running the circus.” “What about his private detective work?”

“Not much of that came in, but when it did I handled it. That’s why I was there.”

“So, Jack,” I said. “Just what was going on at Banister’s office?”

He held up his hand. “I can’t answer that,” he said firmly. “I can’t go into that stuff at all.” Unexpectedly, he stood up. “I think I’d better go,” he said.

“Hold on, Jack. What’s the problem with our going into what was happening at Banister’s office?”

“What’s the problem?” he said. “What’s the problem?” he repeated, as if in disbelief. “The problem is that we’re going to bring the goddamned federal government down on our backs. Do I need to spell it out? I could get killed—and so could you.” He turned around. “I’d better go,” he mumbled. He wobbled as he headed for the door.

… …

New Orleans attorney Maurice B. Gatlin Sr. (a source for Jim Garrison about Guy Bannister) died in San Juan Puerto Rico, Friday [May 28 1903-1965) night after suffering a heart attack which resulted in his falling six stories from a hotel there, his son said Sunday.

A coroner’s report, said Maurice B. Gatlin Jr., attributed his death to the heart attack. Mr. Gatlin fell over a sixth floor railing at the hotel to the ground, Gatlin Jr. stated.

Mr. Gatlin, 62, was attending a meeting of the Inter-American Bar Association in San Juan.

He had been decorated with the Ruben Dario medal July 22, 1961, for his efforts in fighting communism. It was presented to him by Nicaraguan Consul General Reynaldo Chavez on behalf of Nicaraguan President Luis Somoza.

… …

Guy Bannister is the Former FBI Special Agent who is a CIA Operative in Anti-Castro Activities bucking JFK

CIA Gun Running along the Third Coast by Guy Bannister for the Feds

One morning about a week after my initial interview with Jack Martin, I came into my office and found Frank Klein stacking papers on my side table.

“Why,” I asked, “are you desecrating my office?”

“Jack Martin stonewalled you on what was happening at Guy Banister’s,” he said, “so I thought of a way we might find out for ourselves.”

“And just what would that be?”

“I’ve been spending some time at the public library,” he said.

“These piles are photocopies of the front pages of the Times-Picayune for June, July, and August of 1963.”

“And what are we going to do with them?” I asked.

“Well,” he said, “we might get some idea of what’s bothering Martin—of what Guy Banister was up to that summer.”

“Seems to me that any operation Banister was running would have too low a profile to show up on the front pages of the paper.”

“Maybe so,” Klein said, “but I think I found something interesting.”

He laid in front of me a photostat of the front page of the Times-Picayune dated Thursday, August 1, 1963. The heading on the right side story read:

CACHE OF MATERIAL FOR BOMBS SEIZED Probe of St. Tammany Case Continues More than a ton of dynamite, 20 bomb casings three-feet long, napalm (fire-bomb) material and other devices were seized Wednesday by Federal Bureau of Investigation agents in a resort area in St. Tammany Parish, between Mandeville and Lacombe, were seized in connection with an investigation of an effort to “carry out a military operation against a country with which the United States is at peace.” This is in violation of Title 18, Section 960 of the U.S. Code.

The story went on to say that the dynamite, bomb casings, and other materials, according to the special agent in charge of the New Orleans F.B.I. office.

I looked up at Klein. “This is interesting,” I said. “But what’s the”Wait a minute,” said Klein. “You haven’t seen the whole story yet.”

He pushed another sheet in front of me. This one was a copy of the front page for Friday morning, August 2, 1963. On the left side of the page, I read:

BOMB CACHE COTTAGE LOANED TO NEWLY-ARRIVED REFUGEE Owner’s Wife Says Mate Did Cubans a Favor.

Mrs. William Julius McLaney, 4313 Encampment, said that neither she nor her husband, who operates a race horse feed business, had knowledge that the munitions were stored at the house near Lacombe until agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation questioned her husband Wednesday before making the seizure.

She said that the place was loaned to a Cuban they knew only as “Jose Juarez!’ as a favor to friends of theirs in Cuba. The McLaneys had operated a tourist business in Havana, but came to New Orleans in 1960 “because Castro made things impossible down there.”

Soon [some of these events] we got a new break. Guy Banister’s widow unexpectedly agreed to grant us an interview. She was very cooperative, but clearly never knew much about what Guy Banister had been doing at his office.

He never had been very communicative about details of his work. However, she did recall one curious thing. After his death, in 1964, she had been removing his effects from his offce when she came across a stack of leaflets that she found very’ peculiar. They had said either “Hands Off Cuba” or “Fair Play for Cuba”—leftovers from Lee Oswald’s performances as an agent provocateur.

Asked about what had happened to Banister’s office files, she recalled that federal government agents had arrived within an hour or two of his death—long before she reached his offce—-and carted off the locked filing cabinets. She was told that the men had been from either the F.B.I. or the Secret Service—she could not recall which. However, the state police, she added, did not arrive until after she had.

The state police? Apparently in a routine check, possibly because a brother of Banister’s had been connected with it, several state police offcers had gone through his offce. They departed with the index cards to Banister’s files, which the federal agents incomprehensibly had failed to take with them.

I had Lou Ivon on the road to Baton Rouge, the state capital, within the hour. That afternoon he returned with a small handful of file cards. They were all that remained of what the state police had found in Banister’s offce.*_

[…] the few remaining index cards spoke volumes. No local or private matters were referred to whatsoever. The subjects covered were national and even international in scope. From this index list we were able to determine the general nature of the Banister files seized by the federal government:

American Central Intelligence Agency 20-10
Ammunition and Arms 32-1
Anti-Soviet Underground 25-1
B-70 Manned Force 15-16
Civil Rights Program of J.F.K. 8-41
Dismantling of Ballistic Missile System 15-16
Dismantling of Defenses, uS. 15-16
Fair Play for Cuba Committee 23-7
International Trade Mart 23-14
Italy, U.S. Bases Dismantled in
General Assembly of the United Nations 15-16
Latin America 23-1
Missile Bases Dismantled—Turkey and Italy 15-16

Thus ended the myth of Guy Banister’s “private detective agency. [snicker snicker was a public agency covert operative]”

And so Jack Martin started to talk. This was the beginning of many long talks—each with frequent interruptions for coffee, upon which he appeared to subsist.

The talks took place over a period of weeks. There were days when I was tied up with other witnesses, there were days when we could not locate Martin, and there even were days when he had found himself a client.

I had to assure him that I would never connect his name with what he told me. Aware of the importance of finally having obtained access to the sanctum sanctorum that secretly had harbored Lee Harvey Oswald, I observed this agreement scrupulously. Now that Martin has passed away, I feel released from that vow of silence.

Jack would put nothing in writing, nor would he sign his name to anything. But he did tell whatever he could recall about the business at Guy Banister’s—although only to me. There must have been occasions later when my staff thought I was psychic when I was able, time and again, to describe the inside workings of Banister’s office.

As it turned out, Martin, the tarnished “alcoholic,” had told the complete truth about the training camp and the arrests made by the F.B.I. It was the vaunted Federal Bureau of Investigation that had been lying and concealing the full story from the American people.

The actual F.B.I. raid included not only the ammunition described in the news story but also the nearby unsubscribed training camp at which trainees had been arrested (nine of them Cuban exiles and two of them Americans).*_ This group, later aptly described by two of the better informed journalists as ‘the Pontchartrain Eleven,” was preparing for future C.I.A.-ponsored attacks on Cuba. The F.B.I. raid had come in response to pressure from President Kennedy, who wanted the Bureau to stop the C.I.A.’s unending violations of the Neutrality Act.

In addition to what Martin told me, we learned the full truth about the raid from a supplementary report that the Bureau had sent to U. S. Customs—apparently a matter of course when suspects are arrested for violating the Neutrality Act. A private detective, whose firm worked closely with Customs in its patrol of the New Orleans docks, obtained a copy of the report naming all of the arrested men and turned it over to my office.*_

The apparent intended effect of the F.B.I.’s public pronouncements about the raid was to protect and continue to conceal the curious activities at Banister’s office.

The Banister apparatus, as Martin described it, was part of a supply line that ran along the Dallas-New Orleans-Miami corridor. These supplies consisted of arms and explosives for use against Castro’s Cuba. The security control was so careful that ammunition was kept far-flung in outlying areas.

… …

… …

Investigating Lee Harvey Oswald already likely CIA tied at ATSUGI before he goes into training at El Toro Marine Base in California learnign Russian

At ASTUGI were E. Howard Hunt, the James Paul Donegan, Col Prouty, Lovett Jr., and others all working with Dulles for CIA overthrows. Oswald was working as a RADAR operator and this skill may have been an early form of The United States Air Force (USAF) Combat Controller (CCT) training pipeline is extremely arduous and historically has an attrition rate of 70-80%. At a front lines position air base with Russia and China and Korea intercepting and tracking flights and recon was important RADAR duty skills. They may have been need in Latin America, Inonesia or other theaters the CIA was operating in.

After being at ATSUGI he went to El Torro base. The Warren Commsion intervied many who knew him there. He was not that good a marksman though was studing Russian perhaps to go into Russia under-cover? He expressed no pro-soviet thinking.

On January 22, 1991, Marine Corps Colonel James Sabow apparently committed suicide amid allegations of base corruption, specifically using military aircraft for personal use. His family and friends denied he committed suicide and pointed out that Col. Sabow had pledged to fight the charges against him just minutes before his death in phone conversations with other officers.[23] According to a 1996 lawsuit by his family, Sabow was murdered because he threatened to expose an authorized covert operation at El Toro involving some of his fellow officers, CIA-sponsored airlifts to Central and South America, running arms and drugs.

Abstract Bryan R Burnett

The official position of the United States Government is Marine Corps Colonel James E. Sabow committed suicide. He allegedly died by an intraoral shotgun discharge in the backyard of his quarters on the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, Orange County, California, USA in 1991. However, questions have persisted since the Colonel’s death whether he died by homicide. The two scenarios on the manner of death, suicide and homicide, were evaluated as to the gunshot residue (GSR) and back spatter residue (BSR) on the Colonel’s clothing, the bloodstains on and off the body and the position of the body at the death scene. The shotgun, when test fired, was shown to leak GSR from its breech and trigger housing. Samples from the Colonel’s clothing were analysed by scanning electron microscopy/energy dispersive X-ray analysis show there are no concentrations of GSR or BSR on the clothing that should be present if the Colonel committed suicide. Bloodstains on and away from the body and the position of the body do not support the suicide scenario, The Colonel’s body was staged to appear he committed suicide. There is no evidence of suicide. The Colonel’s death was a homicide.

Oswald there 1958 and 1959

… …

Oswald and James Paul Donegan?

Garrison: Oswald’s assignment at Japan’s Atsugi Air Base in 1957 before he came to El Toro was consistent with the possibility that he had been working in military intelligence. Atsugi, I discovered, was the base for all of the daily super-secret U-2 intelligence flights over China. Oswald’s anti-aircraft unit, which required a highly classified security clearance, had the duty of guarding a U-2 hangar. [Was Oswald a support team/ground crew to a RECON unit?

I thought Oswald’s possible intelligence role at Atsugi might be confirmed by two Central Intelligence Agency documents mentioned in the Warren Commission report: CD 931, “Oswald’s access to information about the U-2,” and CD 692, “Reproduction of C.I.A. offcial dossier on Oswald.” Unfortunately, these documents, along with many other C.I.A. files, were classified as secret following the Warren Commission inquiry, and I could not gain access to them. But now I was curious to know just which subjects the government wanted the public to know the least about. I had one of my as assistants get together a list of those files concerning Oswald that the government had classified as “unavailable.” {Garrison lists them and extenive subject matters including Mexico and Marina Osward are in the files and classified.]

Edward Paul Donegan: I was born in Southern California near Edwards Air Force Base and Santa Susanna Field Labs my father seemed to be connected to. He was a TWA pilot by the timne I was born November 18, 1961. In the Korean War 1952 and some time beyond that he was flying the P-51 and later F-86 jet recon planes in the ATSUGI area. I have suspected my father the RECON pilot is played by John Wayne in Jet Pilot as Col Shannahan and his defector wife Olga. Is James DOnegan tied to Oswald and Oslwald tied to Nazis (Kutschera’s) in North Carolina per Amry Air Corp military intelligence?

… …

… …

From On The Trail as THE CIA connections to international RIght Wing activities are found out

The French OAS group was trying to counter democratic and communsist influences around the world in 1961. ALgeria was a point of dispute as to the correct policies in UN debates Kennedy participated in in 1957 as a US Senator. At this time the CIA was inovlved with the OAS and Oswald connected to the world-wide perations of the CIA.

JFK: The French Connection
By
Peter Kross

Ten months after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Warren Commission reported that Lee Harvey Oswald, alone, killed the president on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas. Oswald had no confederates, nor did any foreign power aid him in his deadly deed. Case closed. However, what most Americans do not know is that one day after the assassination, the FBI deported a known French assassin-a member of the militant, anti-Charles de Gaulle organization called the OAS. Jean Souetre was sent to either Mexico or Canada. He was involved in anti-de Gaulle terrorist activities in Europe and even tried to recruit the CIA in his efforts to oust the French President. During his career, he used at least 11 identities, including those of two real people. Why was a known French assassin in Dallas on the exact day that the president of the United States was killed, and what role, if any, did he play in the monstrous deed? This book delves into three major areas of study: (1) the investigation of Jean Souetre and the two other men whose identities he used; (2) the investigation of the identities of two European assassins, QJ/WIN and WI/ROUGE, and their use in the CIA’s assassination unit called ZR/RIFLE-Executive Action; and (3) the role of the CIA in the drug trade after World War II. Chapters include: The First Assassin; The Mafia and Uncle Sam; The Heroin Trail; MKULTRA; QJ/WIN and Patrice Lumumba; The US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence “Assassination Reports’-The CIA and Lumumba; Who Was Souetre?; Who Was Mertz?; The Steve Rivele Investigation; The Guns of Dallas; more.

Office of Justice Program

IN APRIL 1961, WHEN THE ALGERIAN WAR FOR INDEPENDENCE FROM FRANCE WAS DYING DOWN, A SUDDEN 4-DAY REVOLT OF SECTIONS OF THE FRENCH ARMY ERUPTED. THIS REVOLT GAVE BECOME TO THE SAVAGE SECRET ARMY ORGANIZATION. Abstract THE SECRET ARMY ORGANIZATION (O.A.S.) WAS A BAND OF DESPERATE GENERALS, COLONELS, JUNIOR OFFICERS, LEGIONNAIRES, AND CIVILIANS OF ALL SOCIAL CLASSES WHO WERE DETERMINED THAT ALGERIA SHOULD NOT BEOME INDEPENDENT FROM FRANCE. HOWEVER, MEMBERS’ REASONS WERE CONTRADICTORY AND THEIR POLITICS CONFUSED. THEY WERE ACCUSED BY THE OUTSIDE WORLD OF BEING FASCIST AND RACIST, ALTHOUGH SOME OF THE MOST FANATICAL MEMBERS WERE JEWS AND ARABS. THEY MURDERED, ROBBED, AND TERRORIZED NOT ONLY ALGERIA, BUT ALSO PARIS AND OTHER FRENCH CITIES.(It was CIA backed.)

Editors’ Note: In this article from the Oct. 5, 1957, issue of America, Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts revisits a speech he gave on July 2, 1957, on the floor of the Senate, on the political situation in Algeria. [It is theorized overthrow activities of the CIA backing French OAS in Algeria as well as Cuba and Indonesia, and Vietnam policy were the differences JFK was assasinated over.]

As we (Garrison and his team) later learned from one of the participants, a former C.I.A. employee named Gordon Novel, it was on just such a mission to acquire combat ammunition that David Ferrie, one of the leaders of the local Cuban Revolutionary Front, and a handful of others from Banister’s offce drove down one night to the blimp air base at Houma, a town deep in southern Louisiana. They entered one of the Schlum-berger Corporation’s explosives bunkers and removed the land mines, hand grenades, and rifle grenades stored there.

The Schlumberger Corporation was a huge French-owned company, which serviced oil producers worldwide by using explosives and geological measuring devices to determine the probable geology underground. It had been a supporter of the French counter-revolutionary Secret Army Organization (O.A.S.), which attempted to assassinate President Charles DeGau11e several times in the late 1950s and early 1960s for his role in freeing Algeria in North Africa.

The C.I.A., which was also supportive of the French O.A.S. generals, had supplied Schlumberger with anti-personnel ammunition and in this operation at Houma, following the demise of the O.A.S., was simply getting its ammunition back.

The expedition, consisting of a car followed by a large laundry truck, returned to New Orleans with its explosive haul, which was then divided equally between Ferrie’s apartment and Banister’s inner offce until the time arrived for its transport to Miami.

Banister’s operation also included the processing and handling of anti-Castro trainees passing through the city. Some wearing green combat outfits with black boots and others wearing civilian clothes, they arrived and departed in a steady stream. However, they always were taken in and out of the city in small numbers so that there never would be a conspicuously large gathering at the offce.

Many of the exiles were recruits from the West arriving for guerrilla training at the camp north of Lake Pontchartrain. Others were sent on to Florida for similar training being conducted by the C.I.A. there. Occasionally a handful of graduates of the Florida training program would stop at Banister’s—a road stop as well as a headquarters—for lodging and eating arrangements to be made on their way back to their homes in the vicinity of Dallas or points west.

… …

The Social
Triumphs of
Lee Harvey Oswald [In Dallas as written by Jim Garrison in his Chapter 4

Takeaways

Barron George Sergius de Mohrenschildt felt Oswald was a patsy. George Sergius de Mohrenschildt (Russian: Георгий Сергеевич де Мореншильд; April 17, 1911 – March 29, 1977) was an American petroleum geologist, anti-communist political refugee, professor, and occasional CIA field agent.[1] De Mohrenschildt, who moved to the Dallas area in October 1961, is best known for having befriended Lee Harvey Oswald in the summer of 1962.

De Mohrenschildt’s testimony before the Warren Commission investigating the assassination was one of the longest of any witness.

De Mohrenschildt was born as Jerzy Sergius von Mohrenschildt in Mozyr, in the Russian Empire, now in Belarus, on April 4 in the old-style Russian Julian calendar.[6] He had an older brother, Dimitri [ru]. His aristocratic father, Sergey Alexandrovich von Mohrenschildt, was of Baltic German, Swedish, and Russian descent. De Mohrenschildt’s mother, Alexandra, was of aristocratic Polish, Russian, and Hungarian descent.

Sergey von Mohrenschildt was described by his son as the Marshal of Nobility of the Minsk Governorate[7][8] from 1913-1917, and a civil rank of Actual Civil Councilor corresponding to Major General. In 1920, during the Red Terror and the Russian Civil War, Sergey von Mohrenschildt was arrested by the Bolshevik secret police, or CHEKA, for alleged anti-Soviet agitation.[9] He was sentenced to internal exile for life in Veliky Ustyug, a town in the north of Russia. -Wikipeida Ed DOneagn he fits the profile of Lansdale recruiting a variety of people to ally in the anti-communist activities, those who would be the doers the CIA would secretly back and fund.

Oswald’s charisma seemed to have won over other unlikely friends in the White Russian community as well. Among the first dinner guests to the Oswald apartment in Dallas was Max Clark, a retired Air Force colonel and, at that time, an attorney.

Colonel Clark had served as a security offcer for General Dynamics, a major contractor for the Defense Department and the world’s largest aircraft manufacturer.
His wife, Katya—who was also present at the dinner [and had called the FBI about Oswald being present but was told not to worry.]

Although George de Mohrenschildt probably had been given no indication of the catastrophe waiting down the road, there is now little doubt that he had been operating under deep cover as an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency._ It is equally apparent that his assignment was to bring Oswald from Fort Worth to Dallas and thereafter to serve as one of his “baby sitters.”

My conclusion that de Mohrenschildt was an unwitting baby sitter for Oswald came not only from publicly available evidence but from my conversations with him and Mrs. de Mohrenschildt. Some years after the assassination, after my investigation was well under way, I established phone contact with de Mohrenschildt. To avoid monitoring, we developed a routine of my calling him at the Petroleum Club in Dallas or his leaving a call for me at the New Orleans Athletic Club. Both de Mohrenschildt and his wife were positive that the shooting of the President, or even of a rabbit for that matter, simply was not in Lee Oswald’s make-up. They were vigorous in their insistence that Oswald had been the scapegoat.

During the Russian Civil War, the White movement functioned as a big-tent political movement representing an array of political opinions in Russia united in their opposition to the Bolsheviks—from the republican-minded liberals and Kerenskyite social democrats on the left through monarchists and supporters of a united multinational Russia to the ultra-nationalist Black Hundreds on the right. p- Wikipedia. Whites often include Tzar, Banana Republic Dictators, Imperial families, or similar to The “Miracle of Chile” was a term used by economist Milton Friedman to describe the reorientation of the Chilean economy in the 1980s and the effects of the economic policies applied by a large group of Chilean economists who collectively came to be known as the Chicago Boys, having studied at the University of Chicago .

… …

Garrison: Strangely, though, these were the people who helped Lee and Marina find lodging. They saw to it that there was sufficient milk for the baby and that it was taken to the hospital when its temperature was too high. From time to time, they bought pretty dresses for Marina and made her the object of their attention in every way. Oswald’s most frequent associate in Dallas, I discovered, was George de Mohrenschildt.

He had been in the United States longer than most of the White Russians and was hardly an ordinary émigré. His father, Baron Sergius de Mohrenschildt, had been governor of the province of Minsk for the czar. The family had fled from the communists after the 1917 revolution.

These United States government actions demonstrating almost paternal solicitude for Lee Oswald’s welfare even while he was in the Soviet Union comprised, to my mind, a steady, uninterrupted pattern. And the preferential treatment did not end with the arrival of Lee and Marina and their young daughter in New York in June 1962.

Meeting the Oswald’s at the New York pier were no agents of the F.B.I. or any other law enforcement agency. There was only Spas T. Raikin, the secretary-general of the American Friends of the Anti- Bolshevik Nations, Inc., a private anti-communist operation with extensive intelligence connections. Raikin also was employed by the Traveler’s Aid Society, under whose aegis, according to the Warren Commission, he had been asked by the State Department to meet the returning Oswald’s and give them any help they needed.

The government never prosecuted Oswald for his alleged defection. Immediately upon his return to the U.S., Oswald, along with Marina and their daughter, moved to Fort Worth, Texas. There he worked at the Leslie Welding Company until October 7, 1962, when George de Mohrenschildt and his wife came over from Dallas to spend the evening as guests of Lee and Marina at their modest apartment.

Anyone aware of the comparative lifestyles and personal histories of Lee Oswald of the Leslie Welding Company and Baron George de Mohrenschildt of the Dallas Petroleum Club would have to see that scene as discordant, an anomaly. While Oswald was quite able to take care of himself intellectually in almost anyone’s company, it was also plain that he and de Mohrenschildt had mutual interests, not yet officially revealed, that caused them to find each other’s company interesting.

The following day, October 8, Lee packed up and moved to Dallas, 30 miles away, where de Mohrenschildt lived.

Oswald wasted no time in seeking a new job at the Texas Employment Office in Dallas. Oswald’s visit to the employment office may well have been an obligatory gesture in accordance with the Golden Rule of the Intelligence Community that the preexisting economic circumstances of an individual entering clandestine intelligence work are rigidly maintained in appearance after he becomes an intelligence agent. For example, if a newly recruited, previously poor deep-cover agent were to abandon his long-familiar threadbare wardrobe overnight and begin wearing Brooks Brothers suits and driving, perhaps, a new Chrysler LeBaron convertible, he never again would be that same fellow so long undeserving of a second glance and, consequently, so productive to clandestine operations.

In any event, before October 1962 was over, Oswald had obtained a job that, for a former defector to the Soviet Union, seemed quite unlikely. Jagger-Stovall-Chiles, under a contract with the Pentagon, was engaged in the production of charts and maps for military use. Writer Henry Hurt has observed that “part of the work appeared to be related to the top-secret U-2 missions, some of which were making flights over Cuba.” This job required an extremely high security classification. Lee Harvey Oswald not only was given the job within one week of his arrival in Dallas, but also had access to a variety of classified materials.

Socially, despite his “defection” and his ostensibly vocal allegiance to communism, Oswald and his family were welcomed with open arms by the White Russian community of Dallas. It should be noted that most of the White Russians shared a political philosophy somewhat to the right of the late Czar Nicholas. A number of them were blue-blooded Russian nobles or large landholders who had been forced by the Bolshevik government to leave their ancestral estates. They lived for the day when the communists would be driven from Russia and they could return to their homeland. Others were of less patrician background, being simple émigreé who had fled from the communists, but their loathing for communism was just as bitter.

Strangely, though, these were the people who helped Lee and Marina find lodging. They saw to it that there was sufficient milk for the baby and that it was taken to the hospital when its temperature was too high. From time to time, they bought pretty dresses for Marina and made her the object of their attention in every way. Oswald’s most frequent associate in Dallas, I discovered, was George de Mohrenschildt. He had been in the United States longer than most of the White Russians and was hardly an ordinary émigré. His father, Baron Sergius de Mohrenschildt, had been governor of the province of Minsk for the czar. The family had fled from the communists after the 1917 revolution. De Mohrenschildt spoke Russian, French, German, Spanish, and Polish. In World War II he had worked for French intelligence. This polished member of the international polo-playing set possessed a doctorate in international commerce and a master’s degree in petroleum engineering and geology.

De Mohrenschildt had become a consulting geologist and was a member of the exclusive Dallas Petroleum Club with extremely affluent contacts in the business world. Among his close friends, one of the more interesting was Jean de Menil, the president of the mammoth international Schlumberger Corporation, which had close ties with the Central Intelligence Agency.

Oswald’s charisma seemed to have won over other unlikely friends in the White Russian community as well. Among the first dinner guests to the Oswald apartment in Dallas was Max Clark, a retired Air Force colonel and, at that time, an attorney.

Colonel Clark had served as a security offcer for General Dynamics, a major contractor for the Defense Department and the world’s largest aircraft manufacturer.
His wife, Katya—who was also present at the dinner [and had called the FBI about Oswald being present but was told not to worry.]

Although George de Mohrenschildt probably had been given no indication of the catastrophe waiting down the road, there is now little doubt that he had been operating under deep cover as an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency._ It is equally apparent that his assignment was to bring Oswald from Fort Worth to Dallas and thereafter to serve as one of his “baby sitters.”

My conclusion that de Mohrenschildt was an unwitting baby sitter for Oswald came not only from publicly available evidence but from my conversations with him and Mrs. de Mohrenschildt. Some years after the assassination, after my investigation was well under way, I established phone contact with de Mohrenschildt. To avoid monitoring, we developed a routine of my calling him at the Petroleum Club in Dallas or his leaving a call for me at the New Orleans Athletic Club. Both de Mohrenschildt and his wife were positive that the shooting of the President, or even of a rabbit for that matter, simply was not in Lee Oswald’s make-up. They were vigorous in their insistence that Oswald had been the scapegoat.

… …