The Kennedy Half-Century (36 page)

Also stirring Oswald conspiracy talk is Guy Banister’s alleged links to an enigmatic, bizarre figure, David Ferrie, a pilot suffering from bipolar disorder who lost his job at Eastern Airlines after being accused of molesting a fifteen-year-old boy. Afflicted with a rare medical condition that causes severe hair loss, Ferrie was sometimes seen wearing a red wig and fake eyebrows. A staunch anticommunist, he trained anti-Castro Cuban exiles for raids against Castro and sometimes even flew missions into Cuba. His anticommunist activities in New Orleans apparently brought him into contact with Guy Banister, Carlos Marcello, and William Gaudet. Ferrie supposedly bought weapons from mob boss Marcello and turned them over to Banister and CIA asset Gaudet, who in turn passed them on to Cuban exiles.

Robert Morrow, the author of a heavily criticized autobiography entitled
First Hand Knowledge
, claims that he and Ferrie flew to Cuba in 1961 looking for Soviet missile sites. The following year, says Morrow, when Kennedy refused to invade Cuba during the missile crisis, the CIA and anti-Castro Cubans began plotting his assassination, and the mob provided financing for the operation. Morrow also says that the CIA ordered him to buy Mannlicher-Carcano rifles from a surplus store in Maryland that he was told would be used to assassinate a South American dictator. He allegedly gave three of the rifles to David Ferrie. The Dallas police found a Carcano rifle on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Did Ferrie give Oswald one of Morrow’s rifles? The claim does not hold up to scrutiny. Morrow says that he purchased 7.35-millimeter rifles, while the weapon found at the Book Depository was a 6.5-millimeter Carcano. To date, Morrow has not produced any documents verifying his story. Robert Blakey, chief counsel and staff director of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, puts little stock in Morrow’s version of events. “It’s established beyond all reasonable doubt,” insists Blakey, “that the Cubans were connected to the mob, and the mob was connected to the CIA, but the president that they were trying to assassinate was Castro, not Kennedy.”
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On the other hand, it is a well-established fact that Ferrie and Oswald crossed paths on at least one occasion. In 1993 a photograph surfaced showing a teenaged Oswald and a middle-aged Ferrie together at a 1955 Civil Air Patrol cookout.
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Soon after the Kennedy assassination, Ferrie denied ever knowing Oswald, and the FBI and Warren Commission accepted his statement at face value. In the late 1960s, however, New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison interviewed six people who said that they had seen Ferrie and Oswald together at a voter registration office in Clinton, Mississippi. According to these witnesses, Oswald and Ferrie and an unknown third man showed
up at the office in September 1963 driving a black Cadillac. The three men were memorable since there were few white faces at the registration drive sponsored by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and witnesses testified that one of the men was wearing a curious wig and fake eyebrows. According to Henry Palmer, Clinton’s registrar, Lee Oswald handed him a Navy ID card and tried to register to vote, but Palmer turned down the request on the grounds that Oswald had not lived in the area long enough. Oswald thanked Palmer before leaving with the two men. Garrison was known for questionable tactics and highly criticized for his conduct before and during the trial.
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Did he coach these witnesses into telling a lie, or had they actually encountered Oswald et al. two months before the assassination?
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If Oswald and Ferrie really were together in Clinton, then it suggests a closer relationship that the Warren Commission should have examined.

Assassination researchers frequently encounter chronicles that seem promising on the surface but end up leading nowhere or raising a host of unanswerable questions. One of them involves Silvia and Annie Odio, who believe they saw Oswald in the company of anti-Castro Cubans two months before the assassination. The Odio sisters claim that during the last week of September 1963, three men—one Caucasian and two Latinos—visited Silvia’s apartment in Dallas. “The taller, more vocal man gave his ‘war name,’ or Cuban underground alias, as ‘Leopoldo.’ Silvia recalled the name of the shorter, stockier man with glasses as ‘Angelo’ or ‘Angel.’ The third man, their ‘gringo American’ friend, said little.” The two Latino men said that they were members of the Cuban resistance movement and that they were friends with the girls’ father, Amador Odio, another anti-Castro activist who was then being held in a Cuban prison. According to Silvia, Leopoldo introduced his white companion as “Leon Oswald” and asked for help in raising money for an organization known as JURE (Junta Revolucionaria Cubana). When Silvia gave a cagey reply, the men departed. A day or two later, she says, Leopoldo called her and asked what she thought of the American. “I don’t think anything,” Silvia supposedly replied. “You know, our idea is to introduce him to the underground in Cuba because he is great, he is kind of nuts,” Leopoldo continued. “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 …” Unnerved by the conversation, Silvia says she abruptly ended it and never heard from Leopoldo again. After the assassination, however, she said she recognized Lee Oswald as the white man who had visited her apartment.

The House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that Silvia’s testimony was “essentially credible” and the Caucasian male she saw could
have been Oswald. But as usual, it is not a perfect story. Annie Odio says that she did not hear the white man introduced as Leon Oswald. Silvia Odio also wavered when the Warren Commission showed her a photo of Oswald. “I think this man was the one that was in my apartment,” she said. “I am not too sure of that picture.”
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Unlike the House Committee, the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald could not have been in the Odio house hold on the night in question because it was believed Oswald was in Mexico City at the time—although this assumption is disputed by some researchers, a few of whom insist it wasn’t even Oswald who appeared in Mexico City.

There is considerable evidence that Oswald did indeed go to Mexico. Just two months before the assassination, Oswald’s life was once again in shambles. He and Marina had decided to separate (she moved back in with Ruth Paine), and he was unemployed. The job at the coffee company, for all its shortcomings, had at least put bread on the table for a while. Oswald had become a desperate man. The Warren Commission said he went looking for aid at the Cuban embassy in Mexico City.
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Silvia Duran, a Mexican national who spoke English, worked as a secretary at the embassy and remembered the day (Friday, September 27, 1963) that Oswald walked in the front door. He told her that he was on his way to the Soviet Union, wanted to spend a few weeks in Cuba beforehand, and needed to obtain a transit visa.
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Oswald showed her his American Communist Party and Fair Play for Cuba Committee membership cards, documents from his time in the Soviet Union, and a newspaper clipping of his arrest in New Orleans. Duran informed Oswald that he would still need to fill out an application and submit passport-sized photographs before he would be granted a visa. Oswald left in a huff but returned an hour later with the photos. He then demanded that the embassy immediately issue him a visa. Duran suggested that he talk to the Soviet embassy—if the Soviets gave him permission to visit the USSR, she said, the Cuban government could expedite his request.

Enraged by the delay, Oswald caused a scene that brought the Cuban consul, Eusebio Azcue, out of his office. After a brief shouting match, Azcue asked Oswald to leave. Undeterred, Oswald made the short trip over to the Russian embassy two blocks away and demanded a Soviet visa. When told that it would take at least four months to process his request, the former Marine shouted, “This won’t do for me! This is not my case! For me, it’s all going to end in tragedy!” He was escorted off the premises, but returned the next day. During an interview with one Soviet official, Oswald claimed that the FBI was after him and that he carried a gun for protection. The official was startled when Oswald suddenly produced a .38-caliber revolver and waved it in the air. “See?” said Oswald, “This is what I must now carry to protect my
life.” The official was able to seize the revolver and remove its bullets. When Oswald learned that his request for a quick visa had been turned down, he became depressed. He retreated from the Soviet embassy but decided to press the Cubans one last time. After becoming embroiled in another heated argument with Azcue, Oswald left the Cuban embassy and never returned.
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Without question, someone showed up in the Cuban and Russian embassies claiming to be Lee Oswald, but was he actually an Oswald impostor? The CIA may have the answer. In 1963, unsurprisingly, the agency had self-operating surveillance cameras that took photographs of persons coming in and out of the Cuban and Soviet embassies. On October 9, 1963, the Mexico City CIA station received word from “a sensitive source” that a man named Lee Oswald had been in contact with the local Soviet consulate. According to the CIA, the name “Oswald” meant nothing to the Mexico City station, but it forwarded the report to the CIA’s Langley headquarters anyway. Langley checked its files and cabled a perfunctory reply that contained only the basic facts of the Oswald case—he had defected to Russia, married a Soviet woman, and returned to the United States after realizing that he had made a mistake.
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On October 10, a memo went out to the FBI, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the State Department, and the Navy that described Oswald as a six-foot-tall thirty-five-year-old with an athletic build and a receding hairline. The real-life Oswald was a thin, undernourished twenty-three-year-old who was no taller than five feet nine.
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Supposedly, the bogus description was the result of a clerical error: An agent in Mexico City had mistakenly attached Oswald’s name to a photograph of another man.
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CIA’s casual handling of the Oswald case and misleading cables convinced the FBI to remove Oswald’s name from a security watch list.
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Perhaps the CIA’s explanation should be accepted. After all, federal bureaucrats routinely make slipups, put innocent people on no-fly lists, misplace Social Security records, and the like. But the more one studies the possible relationship of Oswald to the CIA, the more legitimate doubts spring forth. First, the CIA was never able to produce an actual photo of Oswald coming in or out of the Soviet or Cuban embassies. The agency’s official explanation is that its cameras were not designed to take pictures around the clock and that Oswald must have visited the embassies in between photo sessions. This account is confounding. Oswald went in and out of the two embassies under surveillance at least five times at widely varying hours, and yet we are asked to believe the spy cameras were not able to capture a single image of him. Espionage in the early 1960s wasn’t the science that James Bond thrillers would lead us to assume, but automatic cameras were neither rare
nor complicated at that time—and these were the top priority diplomatic missions maintained by America’s foremost enemies.

The story becomes stranger still when considering Daniel Watson’s testimony before the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Watson was the deputy chief of the Mexico City CIA station between 1967 and 1969. He told the House Committee that Winston Scott, Mexico City’s station chief in the early 1960s, “had a personal private safe in which he maintained especially sensitive materials.” When Scott died in 1971, James Angleton, the controversial director of the CIA’s top level counterintelligence unit,
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personally flew to Mexico City in order to clean out Scott’s safe. Although the House Committee staff were able to inspect what they were told were the safe’s contents seven years after Angleton’s trip (and did not find anything incriminating in what they were given), it is highly unusual, to say the least, for someone of Angleton’s influence to fly abroad to clean out a station chief’s safe.
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Also, it is becoming increasingly clear that the CIA had pertinent records on Oswald at the highest levels by the fall of 1963—information well beyond what the bare-bones memo sent to the Mexico City station suggested the CIA knew about Oswald. According to Jefferson Morley, a former
Washington Post
reporter who has spent years investigating the CIA, agency officials “were deliberately concealing from Win Scott all they knew about Lee Harvey Oswald.” Morley and another researcher, the University of Maryland history professor John Newman, who once worked as a military intelligence officer, have spent countless hours piecing together the CIA’s paper trail. They interviewed Jane Roman, the CIA officer who had originally signed off on the bland 1963 cable to Mexico City. After showing Roman several routing slips that proved three FBI reports on Oswald had circulated through Langley’s offices in 1962 and 1963, Newman asked, “Is this the mark of a person’s file who’s dull and uninteresting?” “No, we’re really trying to zero in on somebody here [Oswald],” Roman admitted. The reports included information on Oswald’s interview with the FBI—when he refused to take a lie detector test, his activities on behalf of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and his scuffle with Bringuier and the two other DRE Cubans on the streets of New Orleans. None of this information made it into the memo to Mexico, which was approved by several top CIA officials including Tom Karamessines, the former Athens station chief, and William Hood, chief of covert operations for the Western Hemisphere.
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