Reclaiming History (277 page)

There is no transcript or recording of the informal January 24, 1964, meeting in Washington, but Rankin, who was present at the meeting, never said in his memorandum to the files subsequent to the meeting that anyone in the Texas contingent (which included Carr’s assistants, Leon Jaworski and Dean Storey) had said the rumor was false and trumped up. However, Rankin did say that Alexander and Wade “both indicated that they would not vouch for the integrity or accuracy” of the reporters who were promulgating the story.
¹⁴

District Attorney Henry Wade, in his testimony before the Warren Commission, said he had heard the rumor that Oswald was an FBI informant but had no knowledge of its veracity, and added that “Alexander mentioned it some, but Alexander is not a great lover of the FBI. They fuss all the time openly.”
¹⁵

Whatever the illegitimate birth of the rumor, it has led a robust life among conspiracy theorists, despite the fact that there is no evidence to support it. The Warren Commission took the testimony of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Assistant to the Director Alan H. Belmont, FBI agents John W. Fain and John L. Quigley (who interviewed Oswald in Fort Worth upon his return from Russia), and FBI agent James P. Hosty, people who would have knowledge of Oswald’s informant status if it were true. “All declared, in substance,” the Commission said, “that Oswald was not an informant or agent of the FBI, that he did not act in any other capacity for the FBI, and no attempt was made to recruit him in any capacity…This [position was] corroborated by the Commission’s independent review of the Bureau files dealing with the Oswald investigation.”
¹⁶
*
Among other evidence under penalty of perjury, on February 6, 1964, Hoover gave a sworn affidavit to the Warren Commission that he “caused a search to be made of the records of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, United States Department of Justice, by employees of the said Bureau of Investigation acting under his direction, and that said search discloses that Lee Harvey Oswald was never an informant of the FBI, was never assigned a symbol number in that capacity, and was never paid any amount of money by the FBI in any regard. Such a statement can be made authoritatively and without equivocation because of the close supervision FBI Headquarters affords its security informant program and because of the safeguards established to ensure against any abuse or misuse of the program.”
¹⁷
And on February 12, 1964, Hoover sent to Rankin nine additional affidavits from each FBI agent who had any direct contact with Oswald (e.g., Hosty, Fain) or would have had any indirect contact with him if he had been a paid informant (e.g., J. Gordon Shanklin, special agent in charge of the Dallas FBI office, who would have had to “authorize and approve of any payment to confidential informants”), all attesting under penalty of perjury that Oswald was not an FBI informant.
¹⁸
The HSCA likewise conducted an investigation of the issue and “found no credible evidence that Oswald was an FBI informant.”
¹⁹

When, in analyzing an allegation (here, the Oswald FBI informant story), you find that you’re spending most of your time not in trying to determine if it’s the truth, since you know it’s a lie, but who (here, Hudkins, Alexander, Sweatt, Aynesworth, etc.) is telling the truth about the lie, then it’s time to move on to another subject.

Apart from the rumor that Oswald was a paid informant for the FBI, the belief has persisted among some conspiracy theorists that Oswald worked for the FBI in some never-disclosed capacity, and eventually killed Kennedy as a hit man for the FBI. But no one has ever offered any evidence to support this allegation, and the reason, obviously, is that none exists. The notion of Oswald working for the FBI produced a rather humorous exchange between Warren Commission members Allen Dulles and John McCloy at an executive session of the Commission on January 27, 1964:

Dulles, to the Commission at large: “This fellow [Oswald] was so incompetent that he was not the kind of fellow that Hoover would hire…Hoover didn’t hire this kind of stupid fellow.”

McCloy: “I wouldn’t put much confidence in the intelligence of all the agents I have run into. I have run into some awfully stupid agents.”

Dulles: “Not
this
irresponsible.”

McCloy: “Well, I can’t say I have run into a fellow comparable to Oswald but I have run into some very limited mentalities both in the CIA and the FBI. (Laughter)”
²⁰

B
esides the informant allegation, other alleged specific associations between Oswald and the FBI have surfaced throughout the years. One that has received some attention is the allegation of one Orest Pena, a member of an anti-Castro group, the Cuban Revolutionary Council, who operated a New Orleans bar, the Habana Bar and Lounge. On national television (CBS) in 1975, Pena claimed for the first time that he had seen Oswald with FBI agent Warren de Brueys “numerous times” in New Orleans, and that before he, Pena, testified before the Warren Commission in 1964, de Brueys threatened him physically not to reveal this information.
²¹
Pena repeated the allegation of de Brueys’s threat in his 1978 deposition before the HSCA, saying de Brueys told him “that if I talk about him [before the Warren Commission] he will get rid of my ass.” Pena added that the Warren Commission counsel who took his testimony in 1964, Wesley J. Liebeler, did not let him talk freely, so he decided to “keep my mouth shut.” So if we’re to believe Pena, not only de Brueys, but also Liebeler was an accessory after the fact to the murder of Kennedy, trying to suppress the truth. No one has insulted Liebeler by asking him if he prevented Pena from talking freely (his Warren Commission testimony consumed seventeen pages in the volumes, about thirty pages of transcript, in which Pena gives many long and free-flowing answers), but de Brueys, in his deposition before the HSCA, categorically denied ever threatening Pena to not tell the truth in his Warren Commission testimony.
²²

How did Pena know de Brueys? Pena told the HSCA that he had been an FBI informant and “Warren C. de Brueys was the FBI agent assigned to me.” Although de Brueys also denied this, it’s more a matter of semantics than disagreement in that de Brueys acknowledged that since Pena was a bar owner, he was an occasional source of information for him, but there was no systematic reporting relationship. The HSCA found that FBI records confirmed that Pena was not an FBI informant for de Brueys or any other agent.
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On the matter of seeing de Brueys with Oswald “numerous times” in New Orleans, Pena backed down in his HSCA testimony. Pena testified that he used to see Oswald “go to the restaurant [Greek restaurant on Decatur Street in New Orleans] in the morning with other federal agents from the Customs House Building,” that he saw de Brueys at the restaurant “at the same time,” and that he saw Oswald, de Brueys, and several other federal agents leaving the restaurant together and going back to the Customs House Building. When he was specifically asked if he ever observed “Oswald and de Brueys speaking to each other,” Pena responded, “I cannot answer that question. If I cannot prove myself what de Brueys did to me, how am I going to prove other things?”

Question: “My question is, Mr. Pena, do you recall ever seeing Oswald and de Brueys speaking together or acting in such a way that you would think that they knew each other?”

Answer: “I believe they knew each other very, very well.”

Question: “Can you explain why you believe Oswald and de Brueys knew each other very well?”

Pena answered unresponsively and unintelligibly that “my belief, I would have to report in as informant to Mr. de Brueys. I have to report myself to Mr. de Brueys and that is my point of view on that question.” He then immediately added what appeared to be the main reason for his belief that Oswald and de Brueys knew each other: “When Oswald was transferred to Dallas, Mr. Warren de Brueys was transferred to Dallas, Texas, at the same time.” He said he was “very, very, very sure” this was “before the assassination.”
²⁴

De Brueys testified that it was “an unmitigated lie” that he knew Oswald or that Oswald was an FBI informant for him. “It has no basis whatsoever in fact.” He added he never even met Oswald, and never “knowingly” spoke to him over the phone, explaining that people can call “under pretension.” And the HSCA confirmed that de Brueys was sent to Dallas on temporary assignment to aid in the investigation the day
after
the assassination, and remained there until January 24, 1964.
²⁵
Further, Dallas FBI agent Jim Hosty, who was de Brueys’s partner in Dallas in the post-assassination investigation, told me de Brueys “arrived in Dallas from New Orleans the day after the assassination.”

Pena’s bartender at his place, Evaristo Rodriguez, had testified before the Warren Commission that a few days before or after Oswald’s August 9, 1963, confrontation on the street with Carlos Bringuier, whom Rodriguez knew, Oswald came into his bar in the early morning hours with a Latin man (“He could have been a Mexican; he could have been a Cuban”), that Oswald “was drunk” (a very unlikely condition for Oswald), and although Oswald’s companion had ordered a tequila, Oswald asked for a lemonade—a drink, Rodriguez said, they didn’t serve in the bar. Rodriguez asked Pena what to do and Pena said to take a little of the lemon flavoring and squirt in some water.
²⁶
Even assuming Rodriguez’s identification of Oswald was accurate (the time, “between 2:30 and 3:00 o’clock in the morning,” and the man being “drunk” do not sound like Oswald, but the man protesting the price of the lemonade, twenty-five cents, as being too high and accusing the owner of the bar, therefore, of being a “capitalist” does), and that he did not make it up, or that he was not one of the great many people after the assassination who were convinced they had seen Oswald somewhere when we know they could not have, the point is that when Orest Pena was called to the stand after Rodriguez and asked if he, Pena, ever saw Oswald at any time other than that alleged night in Pena’s bar when Oswald ordered a lemonade, he answered, “No, I didn’t…I saw him once,” the time at his bar.
²⁷
This, of course, flatly contradicts his statement on CBS eleven years later and his HSCA testimony fourteen years later that he had seen Oswald many times with de Brueys.

Indeed, Pena has made contradictory statements as to whether he even saw Oswald that one night at his bar. His bartender, Rodriguez, testified Pena was in the back part of the bar that night and said, “I don’t believe that Orest saw Oswald.”
²⁸
Although Pena did tell the FBI in a December 5, 1963, interview that he had seen Oswald at the bar that night, in a June 9, 1964, FBI interview he said he had never told anyone he had seen Oswald in the bar, then proceeded to tell the Warren Commission he didn’t think he had told the FBI this on June 9.
²⁹
In view of Pena’s waiting so many years before he came up with his allegation, his “frequently evasive” testimony before committee, and the many conflicts and contradictions in his story, the HSCA concluded the obvious, that Pena “was not a credible witness.”
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One naturally wonders what the origins are for apparent fabrications like Pena’s. But in his case, we may not have to look any further than the peerless Mark Lane. The mere exposure to Lane and his blandishments and suggestions has caused witness after witness in the Kennedy case to experience a remarkable improvement in their memory and suddenly come up with, for the first time, very pro-conspiracy observations. And Mark Lane’s footprints, fingerprints, and palm prints may be all over Pena’s story. It seems that Orest was serving more than booze at his place at 117 Decatur Street in the French Quarter. Rooms at his Habana club were also being used for prostitution, and when he was arrested for it, whom did he seek out? Not a New Orleans attorney, but Mark Lane. Lane, in his book
Plausible Denial
, doesn’t say when this was, but it clearly was
before
Pena’s public accusations were aired on CBS in 1975, since Lane suggests to his readers that Pena told him things he did not already know. There is a suggestion that Lane never got paid any fee by Pena for his representation. The quid pro quo? “He [Pena] told me that if I did so [represented him] he would tell me all that he knew about Oswald.” Since everyone already knows the only information—pro-conspiracy—Lane has any interest in, Pena would have known what Lane wanted to hear. Lane writes that “Pena told me that Oswald had worked for the FBI. He showed me the buildings in New Orleans where de Brueys and Oswald had met.” Not only, per Lane, was Pena privy to all this information, but remarkably he even knew that “the CIA was aware of the relationship [between Oswald and de Brueys].”
³¹

O
ne other New Orleans person has come forward with an allegation of a connection between Oswald and the FBI. This one, if true, goes beyond Pena’s story in its conspiratorial implications. Adrian Alba, the part owner and operator of the Crescent City Garage in New Orleans who became acquainted with Oswald when the latter worked next door at the Reily coffee company in May, June, and July of 1963 (see Oswald biography), told the HSCA in a 1978 deposition that one day during the subject period, an FBI agent from out of town entered his garage, showed his credentials, and requested to use one of the Secret Service cars garaged there, a dark green Studebaker. (In an earlier interview, he told HSCA investigators it was a “light green Plymouth.”)
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That same day or the next, Alba, about a quarter of a block away, claims he observed this agent, inside the Studebaker, hand a white envelope to Oswald (who was standing outside the car) in front of the Reily coffee company. There was no exchange of words between Oswald and the agent, and Oswald, having been in a bent-over position to receive the envelope, turned away from the car window and held the envelope close to his chest as he walked back to the Reily building “in a crouched position.” Alba said he believes he saw a similar transaction a day or so later, but he was farther away and did not see what was handed to Oswald. He did not recall when the Secret Service car was returned to his garage or by whom.
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