by Joan Mellen
Ferrie told Jim Lewallen that there might be a photograph of himself and Oswald together—just as Jack Martin had revealed to Jim Garrison. There they are together, Ferrie and Oswald, indeed at a cook-out, as Jack Martin had said, in an unearthed photo album belonging to a cadet named John Ciravolo, who was in the CAP in 1955 and 1956. Ciravolo remembers Oswald as “a boy with a nose too big for his face.”
The evidence that David Ferrie knew Lee Oswald well goes far beyond the testimony of the CAP cadets. John Wilson one day had spotted Oswald distributing pro-Castro leaflets on Canal Street. “A commie nut,” Wilson thought. Then he had seen the very same fellow at Dave Ferrie’s apartment. “What was he doing at Dave’s!” Wilson thought. Another young man in New Orleans, Thomas Lewis Clark, told Garrison that “at one time Dave told me he had taught Oswald.”
There remain yet other witnesses to Oswald’s close connection to David Ferrie. It was mid-September of 1959 when Oswald traveled from Fort Worth to the city of his birth where he contacted Clay Shaw’s travel agent, Lewis E. Hopkins, at the International Trade Mart. Oswald’s destination was a mystery, although his cousin Marilyn Murret, who worked for the CIA, knew it, and would so inform Lee’s half brother John Pic, even before Lee reached the Soviet Union. “Do you ever hear from Lee?” John asked Marilyn when he ran into her in Japan.
“Oh, he’s in Russia,” Marilyn Murret said. At that point no one but the CIA knew where Oswald was headed.
Lee had time to kill during that steamy New Orleans September. But you could relax at the Old Pontchartrain Beach amusement park, ride the ferris wheel, have a mechanical gypsy tell your fortune, or knock lead milk bottles off their stool with a ball.
Van Burns, a recent high school graduate, was in charge of the parakeet stand while he awaited Marine Corps boot camp. You threw a nickel onto a plate and earned a free parakeet. On the night in question, Van’s friend Bob Boylston wandered by in the company of two men. Six months earlier, Bob had been inducted into the Army. Now, surprisingly, he was out. He mumbled something about the Civil Air Patrol. Van would wonder later whether the man accompanying Bob Boylston that night had liberated him from the Army for some purpose. The Civil Air Patrol interested Van Burns. The fad among the cadets, he had learned, had switched from learning German to studying Russian.
Bob introduced Van to his companions. One was an older man with odd hair. His name was David Ferrie. The other was named “Lee.”
“Lee, Lee Oswald,” he said. He threw a few nickels at the plates, but missed. He did not win a parakeet, a creature he had once bought for his mother out of the first money he ever earned. He was in the Marine Corps, Lee told Van. “In recon.”
“What do you do in recon?” Van said, genuinely interested. Lee scowled.
“We take pictures,” Lee said finally, moving away toward the greyhound booth where Bob Boylston stood. So among Oswald’s possessions after his death would be a Minox camera used for microdot work, an artifact of espionage. “Possession of same in Eastern Europe is in itself sufficient to deny egress across borders,” one of Garrison’s anonymous leads states.
Boylston returned. “He’s a great pilot,” he said, referring to Ferrie, who had wandered off. “I know what you’re thinking,” Boylston said quickly to Burns. “Maybe he is and maybe he isn’t. But he’s never approached me.” Ferrie in fact reserved his sexual advances for a select few of his acolytes.
Boylston confided that Lee traveled with him and Ferrie on flights to Cuba where Lee took pictures. The three appeared to be so intimate as to seem to form a special clique, Van Burns thought. When he learned of Jim Garrison’s investigation, he did not come forward with the information that he had seen Oswald and Ferrie together.
Bob Boylston did provide some information to Jim Garrison’s investigators. He was close enough to Ferrie for Ferrie to have paid his Loyola University tuition, he said. Ferrie had talked in 1961 of “secret orders” having to do with Cuba, of having been wounded and shot down on one of his flights. Bob was in charge of CAP records, which were sent to Washington, but when Jim Garrison attempted to subpoena these records, he was told they did not exist.
Boylston also had told Van Burns of having gone to Dallas several times with Dave, and how Dave spoke of a “super-special army always ready to fight.” Once he had driven Dave to the airport as Dave was headed for one of his trips to Cuba. He must never talk about the training going on over the Lake, no matter what happens, Dave told Boylston. “Even if ‘it’ didn’t go. They were “taking care of something,” something very serious.
From the mid-fifties, Ferrie kept in touch with Oswald. In Russia as a false defector, Oswald wrote on a form that, should his first child be a boy, he was to be named “David Lee Oswald.” The only “David” in his life was Ferrie.
Among Jim Garrison’s most important contributions to understanding the assassination of President Kennedy, among his earliest insights and efforts, was his exploration of Oswald’s connections to the U.S. government. Marguerite Oswald had told the Warren Commission that her son was “an agent of the government,” working for the CIA. Garrison came to believe her, suspecting that the Marine Reserve “recruiting officer,” who had come personally to her home to help an underage sixteen-year-old Lee join the Marines, was Ferrie himself. Lee went to the Marine Corps “because of the Civil Air Patrol,” Mrs. Oswald had testified. Her son was “already preparing himself . . . to become an agent.”
Garrison wrote to Mrs. Oswald that Ferrie was “probably” the person who helped Lee “get selected for intelligence work after he went into the Marines.” Ferrie was behind Oswald’s movement into “the covert operations division of the Office of Naval Intelligence,” as so many of Ferrie’s CAP cadets wound up in the military. Garrison wrote to Oswald’s mother: he had not believed at first that “your son was working for the C.I.A.” Now he did.
In his interview with Jim Garrison, Jack Martin had also dropped the name “Thomas Edward Beckham.” Another Garrison witness, a runner for Guy Banister named David Lewis, who also called himself a “leg man” for Jack Martin, told Garrison that Beckham knew Oswald and had even distributed leaflets with him. This was partially true. Beckham did not, however, hand out any leaflets. Yet they were casually acquainted, and Oswald had occasionally visited a mission where Tommy had been placed by Jack Martin and where money was collected for the anti-Castro cause.
Leaving Jim Garrison, Martin at once telephoned Regis Kennedy at the Bureau. He had nothing to do “with the Garrison investigation of the Kennedy assassination,” Martin insisted. Garrison “is trying to hatch an egg and you know what happens when an egg does not hatch. There is a big smell.” Martin now again implicated that young man whom he had known since his teens, Thomas Edward Beckham. Beckham “was associated with Oswald and assisted Oswald in passing out leaflets,” Jack told Big Regis.
Yet Jack Martin had done Garrison a service. He had confirmed not only that Ferrie, his suspect, was connected to Oswald, but that both Ferrie and Oswald were involved with Guy Banister. He also revealed that Oswald had indeed been “sheep-dipped” and was no Marxist. “Ferrie was anti-Communist, but he and Oswald were tight. See?” Martin told Garrison. With the assignment to distribute “Fair Play for Cuba” leaflets, Oswald was being set up as part of a plan to blame Castro for the assassination. In placing Oswald at Guy Banister’s office, Jack Martin banished any doubts Garrison might have had that Oswald was the patsy and not the assassin of the president.
Garrison studied his 1963 interviews with Ferrie, Alvin Beaubouef and Melvin Coffey, his traveling companions on an automobile trip to Galveston and Houston on the weekend of the assassination. In presenting the trip as spur of the moment, Coffey had lied. Beaubouef told Garrison the truth: the trip had been planned “at least a week in advance,” as John Wilson knew as well.
Who was David Ferrie? Garrison wondered, as he perused the documents taken from Ferrie’s apartment on the evening of November 24th. Ferrie was a CIA contract emp
loyee. He had organized crime relationships at the highest level. Not knowing of the joint efforts of the CIA and the Mafia in OPERATION MONGOOSE, Garrison was perplexed. “Why does an apparently minor homosexual have a connection with Wasserman [Jack Wasserman was Carlos Marcello’s Washington lawyer] and, by implication, Marcello?” The Warren Commission had concluded there was no “real Mafia motive” in the assassination. But Jack Ruby’s background, Garrison considered, was “redolent of organized crime and labor racketeering.” He had not given up the possibility that there had been significant Mafia involvement in the assassination.
The day after Garrison talked to Jack Martin, David Ferrie appeared for questioning at Tulane and Broad. The interviewer was John Volz, who had done his homework. In April of 1963, Volz wrote in his memo, Kennedy had “come out publicly against anti-Castro raids on Cuba by refugees based in Miami.” That policy had come home to Louisiana on July 31st, 1963, when, on Kennedy’s instructions, the FBI had raided a major anti-Castro training camp northwest of Lake Pontchartrain.
The Warren Commission, pointedly, had not called David Ferrie. But three months into his investigation, Jim Garrison had a suspect who had actually participated in the planning and implementation of the murder of the president. Facing tough prosecutor Volz sat David Ferrie himself.
Ferrie lied, evaded and obfuscated. He denied he was “acquainted” with Oswald. He admitted to being in Dallas only “in March or April of this year,” which was 1966. Asked why he had invited arch-enemy Jack Martin to help him contact witnesses in his case against Eastern Airlines, Ferrie replied with a question, “How do you explain a psychopath?” as he enlisted the FBI’s strategy of discrediting Jack Martin. As for why he went to Houston and Galveston on the weekend of the assassination, Ferrie professed, as “a Yankee,” to be fond of ice skating. He didn’t bother to repeat his original 1963 lie that he had talked to the owner “at length” about how to operate an ice-skating rink, suspecting that by now Chuck Rolland had revealed that no such conversation had taken place. Ferrie added a new explanation: the purpose of the trip was now an errand for Gill, a meeting with a man named Marion James Johnson.
In 1963 Ferrie had also claimed on that car trip to have gone goose hunting, only to have admitted to Frank Klein there were no guns in the car. He had lied about the guns, he confessed to his adopted “godson,” Morris Brownlee, because he didn’t want to give the district attorney anything. Alvin Beauboeuf confirms that Ferrie told him to lie and tell the police there were no guns, because he didn’t want his guns confiscated.
Now Ferrie admits to Volz that there were guns in the car. He confides that Brownlee has been “in a lot of trouble during the last ten or twelve years,” neglecting to mention that Brownlee had broken with him after Ferrie had forged his name on a good character affidavit presented at the Eastern Airlines hearing.
Where is Pershing? Ferrie asks. Pershing, he is certain, could explain to him why he is being questioned by the district attorney’s office.
OSWALD AND CUSTOMS
4
Is this Juan’s apartment?
—Lee Harvey Oswald
J IM GARRISON WAS ALMOST from the start certain of Oswald’s connections to both the FBI and CIA. Even more startling are government documents, released since Garrison’s investigation, that suggest that Oswald shared, like Miami customs agent Cesario Diosdado, an affiliation with not only the FBI and the CIA, but also with U.S. Customs. A New Orleans patrolman remembered arresting Ferrie and Oswald together at the lake front and taking them to Levee Board headquarters where Oswald’s Customs connections soon emerged.
At Customs, Oswald’s handler was a man named David Smith. Oswald’s employment with Customs was so sensitive that the HSCA interview with bar owner and FBI informant Orestes Peña was sealed for twenty-five years. As an FBI informant, Peña reported to Warren de Brueys beginning in 1959 or 1960. Peña placed Oswald with Customs officials on a regular basis. So explosive were Peña’s revelations about Oswald’s relationships with Customs officers that Peña’s files were systematically destroyed by the FBI in a multi city effort that stretched across Europe. A document survives, a teletype dated January 14, 1976: “Rome file regarding Orestes Peña: IS—Cuba’ Destroyed.”
Peña was uniquely placed to observe the interconnections between the FBI, the CIA, Customs, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Cubans arriving illegally in the United States at the Port of New Orleans were brought to Peña through a “Mr. Johnson” of the INS. Peña’s role was to offer room and board and help find them jobs.
In the mornings, Peña revealed, Oswald frequented a Greek restaurant on Decatur and Iberville with “other federal agents from the Customs House Building,” which housed FBI, ONI, CIA and Immigration. At least ten or twelve times, Peña testified, he observed Oswald sharing breakfast with his Customs handlers. He had witnessed his own handler Warren de Brueys at that same Greek restaurant when Oswald was there with federal agents. “I believe they knew each other very, very well,” Peña said of Oswald and de Brueys. Peña talked at length to Jim Garrison, although no memos survive.
Peña had also observed Oswald, de Brueys, David Smith and Wendall Roache of the Immigration Service leave the restaurant together and head for the Customs House building. In 1976, staff members of the Church Committee knew that Smith “was involved in CIA operations in the New Orleans area in the early 1960s.” In his testimony, Warren de Brueys acknowledged his acquaintance with “Border Patrol” Agent Smith. And Roache also admitted his acquaintance with Warren de Brueys. “I knew him,” Roache said curtly. An investigator for the INS in New Orleans, Theophanis E. Pappelis, swore under oath before the Church Committee that de Brueys “had a working relationship with the New Orleans INS office.”
As senior patrol inspector in 1961, Roache, according to an FBI document, was investigating David Ferrie who “had been trying to purchase a C-47 airplane for $30,000 and supposedly had a cache of arms in the New Orleans area.” From this vantage, it appears that Oswald was investigating Ferrie, rather than the other way around. Hunter Leake, of the New Orleans field office of CIA, later told Roache, “Garrison had something. I read his reports in the newspaper and they were correct. He received good intelligence information, whether he was using it for politics or not.”
After the assassination, David Smith was transferred to Uruguay. Wendall Roache was moved to Puerto Rico. When Roache was finally contacted by the Church Committee in 1975, he said, “I’ve been waiting twelve years to talk to someone about this.” His testimony remains classified to this day.
Only fragments of what Roache knew have emerged. Roache mentions the name of “Ron L. Smith,” a Border Patrol inspector with the New Orleans Station of the INS, who received a call from the New Orleans police about Oswald being arrested. Oswald claimed to be Russian, insisting he spoke only “Russian.” He was released when he admitted he was American. The story Smith finally told the Church Committee was that Oswald claimed to be a Cuban alien. (On August 9th, when Oswald was arrested in New Orleans, he also told the arresting police officers that he was Cuban-born.) Smith had interviewed Oswald on April 10, 1963, having gone down to see Oswald in jail “to verify or disprove this status.” In 1963, both INS inspectors testified, INS had responsibility for surveilling certain Cuban groups in New Orleans, an assignment from the Department of Justice.
“Smith had an office in. . . .” Roache began. Then the interviewer suddenly cuts him off. The interview of “James Smith” of U.S. Customs remains classified. Roache, too, observed Oswald “going into the offices of Ferrie’s group,” and said “Oswald was known to be one of the men in the group.”
Roache swore under oath that David Ferrie took movies at a Cuban exile training camp north of Lake Pontchartrain. A piece of that film was viewed by the deputy legal counsel of HSCA, Robert K. Tanenbaum. It included Oswald, Ferrie and CIA Western Hemisphere chief David Atlee Phillips, as well as Alpha 66 operative Antonio Veciana, the CIA’s AMSHA
LE, with whom Guy Banister’s people worked closely. Roache also states that there were no organized crime tie-ins involving the Louisiana aspects of the assassination, a point Aaron Kohn himself would confirm in his testimony before the House Select Committee.
Yet other witnesses of Oswald’s involvement with Customs were Russell Bruce and Edward L. Cupp, who ran the INS District Office, people Jim Garrison never reached. Garrison did cast a long look at one Sergio Arcacha Smith, a Cuban in exile who worked for all three agencies too, FBI, CIA and Customs, as a CIA document of May of 1967 reveals: Arcacha “maintained extensive relations” with Immigration and the FBI. His FBI case officer was . . . Warren de Brueys. CIA admitted at the start of Jim Garrison’s investigation that it was coordinating its activities with the FBI, Immigration and Naturalization Service and with Customs, disseminating to them all “pertinent intelligence information.” Neither of the two INS inspectors in New Orleans were interviewed by the FBI for the ostensible investigation mandated by the Warren Commission.
Lee Harvey Oswald’s other demonstrable link to Customs was his close relationship with a Cuban customs house broker, as he defined himself, named Juan Valdes. Valdes was a short, plump, meticulous fellow with fair skin, but extremely hairy; hair covered his back, his chest and arms, although his hairline receded from his forehead, so that he seemed “horseshoe bald.” In conversation, he often used the term “BC,” meaning “before Castro.”
Sometimes Juan called himself a “coffee broker,” but the pastime he pursued assiduously was growing orchids, particularly prize-winning phalaenopsis. Orchids of every color of the rainbow crowded the surfaces of his apartment. He also raised macaws. A nasty red chow was always by his side. A year before Oswald came to New Orleans, Juan lived at the Wohl Apartments on St. Charles.
