A Farewell to Justice

by Joan Mellen

  AN OPERATIVE IN ACTION

  9

  It is fair to conclude that “Centro Mondiale” is not your basic civic organization.

  —Jim Garrison

  ON THE MORNING OF March 2, 1967, the day after Jim Garrison arrested Clay Shaw, attorney-general designate Ramsey Clark, about to replace Nicholas Katzenbach, who succeeded Bobby Kennedy, phoned Cartha DeLoach at the FBI. Did the FBI know anything about Clay Shaw?

  Shaw’s name came up in our investigation in December 1963, “Deke” told Clark. Few documents survive of this early FBI interest in Shaw, but for a suggestive fragment signed by Hoover from the “Latent Fingerprint Section” (Identification Division). Addressed to the SAC in San Francisco and dated December 5, 1963, it requests an examination of “five train tickets” from Southern Pacific. That this document was connected to an investigation of Clay Shaw is reflected in the fact that a copy went not only to Dallas, but also to New Orleans.

  A reporter that afternoon asked Clark whether Shaw had been “checked and found clear, more or less.”

  “That’s right. That’s true,” Clark said. Information Officer Cliff Sessions added that the Justice Department knew “that Mr. Bertrand and Mr. Shaw were the same man.”

  For this leak, Deke chastised Sessions mercilessly. “This is the danger of telling Clark anything,” Hoover raged. “He can’t refrain from talking to the press.” Clark says now he would never have made that statement about Shaw “without prior knowledge,” had DeLoach not briefed him that morning. “Manipulated” by the FBI, as he puts it, Clark was kept in the dark as well by CIA’s Richard Helms who, he has said, “lied to me about Oswald.” In June, the Justice Department issued a statement denying that Shaw had ever been investigated by the FBI in connection with the assassination.

  “I never used any alias in my life,” Shaw said in a press conference on March 2nd. “I did not know Harvey Lee Oswald.” He had never met “Mr. Dave Ferrie.” Nor did he “know Dean Andrews.”

  He was “wound up as tight as a dimestore toy,” one reporter noted. Alberto Fowler thought Shaw was “quite calm and assured.” It had to be “because he feels that high-ranking government officials are involved and will see that no harm comes to him.” Alberto had now concluded that “federal employees acting on their own were involved in the plot.”

  Clay Shaw claimed that he was a liberal, a “great admirer” of John F. Kennedy. But Shaw was no liberal, as a young professor at the Tulane School of Law and future Garrison assistant Ralph Slovenko had discovered in April 1957. Slovenko was giving his first public talk, his subject, the nationalization of the Suez Canal. With no treaty in force, Slovenko argued, Egyptian president Gamal Nasser had been justified in seizing the canal and using the profits from its operation to finance the Aswan Dam, which would “benefit the entire population.”

  The assigned commentator then rose to his feet, his steel blue eyes flat. Stone-faced, supercilious, he treated Slovenko with contempt.

  “Nasser had no business” nationalizing the Suez Canal, Clay Shaw said. Slovenko’s argument was “a lot of tripe.”

  Shaw’s political friends were extreme conservatives, like L. P. Davis of the Citizens’ Council. He was seen with anti-Castro Cubans, and aided a contract pilot named Leslie Norman Bradley. Shaw was “helping us,” Bradley said. CIA files term Bradley an “unscrupulous adventurer.” Another of Shaw’s acquaintances was “Bob Sands,” who raised money for the sabotage of Cuba.

  Shaw did maintain a liberal facade. His conversation ranged from French Quarter architectural renovations to the theater and he numbered among his acquaintances playwright Tennessee Williams and novelist Gore Vidal. One night Vidal got into an argument with one of Shaw’s professor friends named Don Scheuler, who had invoked the “Platonic verities,” an idea Vidal greeted with scorn. In mock exasperation, Shaw threw up his hands.

  “I believe in beauty and ecstasy,” Shaw said.

  Although he consorted with some socialites, Clay Shaw was not someone of whom Uptown society approved. Alberto Fowler’s niece says that because of his lower-middle-class origins, her family would never have seen Shaw socially. His racial origins, too, seemed questionable. “They say I’m an octoroon,” Shaw readily admitted. Asked if Shaw could ever have been Rex at Mardi Gras, Jim Garrison quipped, “He would have a better chance of becoming the King of England.”

  When the Duke and Duchess of Windsor visited New Orleans, Clay Shaw handled the protocol. All the ex-Rexes wanted to meet the Windsors. Should they bow? Yet they were kings no less than he, perhaps more so. Perhaps he should bow to them. It was Clay Shaw’s favorite New Orleans story.

  Clay Lavergne Shaw was born on March 17, 1913, in the hamlet of Kentwood in “bloody” Tangipahoa Parish where the Mob disposed of inconvenient corpses. His grandfather, named Clay Shaw, was a six foot six inch sheriff, wounded twice in action. Grandfather Clay Shaw killed several people as he rose to the rank of federal marshal. “I want you to know I don’t have any of those tendencies. I wouldn’t hurt a fly,” grandson joked to Dr. Harold Lief, then his tenant. “If there were no guns,” Shaw told Jesse Core, who urged that he be armed after a house he was renting was vandalized, “the world would be a better place.” But when the district attorney’s investigators searched Shaw’s house, they did discover a gun. Shaw’s father was a lumberman and a federal revenue agent.

  When he was five, Shaw’s mother took him to live in New Orleans. Shaw’s play “Memorial,” written under the pen name of “Allen White,” for his two maternal grandmothers, enjoys autobiographical resonances. He reveals himself to have been the victim of an emotionally suffocating mother, who tries to bind her son to her “so strongly that he could never get free.” He grew up an overweight schoolboy, the butt of bullies, big, yet timid and helpless.

  In the eleventh grade, Clay Shaw dropped out of Warren Easton High School, an institution attended later by Lee Harvey Oswald. Shaw escaped to New York where he worked for Western Union and for a lecture bureau. In November 1942, he enlisted in the Army, which placed him in the medical corps. “I didn’t even know what a fracture was,” he said later. Two days before graduating from Officer Candidate School, he slipped trying to swing on a rope across a ditch. Rather than risk losing his rank as a second lieutenant, he didn’t consult a doctor, and would limp for the rest of his life.

  Military intelligence discovered him. Never having seen a day of combat, Shaw rose to the rank of major as aide-de-camp to General Charles O. Thrasher, who was in charge of transferring German prisoners of war to the French. Thrasher was a man of such cruel disposition that he horrified the French liaison officer. Appalled by Thrasher’s callous treatment of the German prisoners in his charge, Major William H. Haight swore out a deposition against him for the inhumane means by which he handled and transferred the Germans, who were being starved to death and were in a condition “worse than the former German concentration camps.”

  Shaw himself moved with ease through an Army Counterintelligence group called the “Special Operations Section.” Still without having stepped onto a battlefield to face enemy fire, he was to receive a Croix de Guerre, and a Legion of Merit from France, and a similar decoration from Belgium.

  Returning to New Orleans, he joined a CIA proprietary, the Mississippi Shipping Company, run by a fellow homosexual, Theodore Brent. When the Agency sponsored the first of its international trade centers in New Orleans (there would be another in Rome), its “principal backer and developer” was a lawyer named Lloyd J. Cobb, who had received his Covert Security Clearance from the CIA in October 1953. Among the consulates located at the International Trade Mart was that of Belgium, later to figure in this story.

  The International Trade Mart was run by CIA operatives, its public relations handled by David G. Baldwin, who later would acknowledge his own “CIA connections.” Baldwin’s successor, Jesse Core, was also with the CIA. It was a matter of saving the Agency “shoe leather,” Core would say. The Trade Mart donated money t
o CIA asset Ed Butler’s INCA. Every consulate within its bowels was bugged.

  Arriving for work his first day dressed in his major’s uniform, Shaw became a spokesman for trade, decrying tariffs and urging Soviet bloc countries to seek economic independence, although he had no formal training in economics whatsoever. He hired fellow single men and could be spotted driving in his Thunderbird convertible filled with boys, their blond hair blowing in the wind. When Theodore Brent died, he left Shaw a legacy, a legal defense fund for gay men that Shaw dispensed as “Clay Bertrand.”

  Shaw had begun to work for the CIA at Mississippi Shipping, paid one hundred dollars a month, according to Guy Banister’s brother, Ross. Eventually he bought an apartment house in Madrid. His official Domestic Contact Record breaks off in 1956, even as it was standard procedure to deny an agent or asset’s employment for at least the preceding five years. When a reporter told William Gaudet that the CIA had given the end date of his service as 1955, as one document suggests, Gaudet laughed and corrected him: it was 1969, he said on that occasion.

  As managing director of the International Trade Mart, Shaw moved on to CIA operations, pursuing initiatives outlined by the Agency. Far from being a mere informant providing information, he was enlisted for specific assignments. The use of the present tense in a 1967 document suggests he continued to be an operative with both the Domestic Operations Division and the Clandestine Services. His clandestine services number was 402897-A. Richard Helms’ assistant, Thomas Karamessines, told the CIA’s Victor Marchetti that Shaw was a top CIA operative in New Orleans.

  In 1976, with the HSCA investigation looming, J. Walton Moore, who headed the CIA field office in Dallas, wrote to the head of the Domestic Collection Division, formerly Domestic Contact, for help in handling “the exposure of Shaw’s connections with CIA.” It was no simple matter because CIA had papered the file, insisting that Shaw’s contact “was limited to Domestic Contact activities.” Moore knew that this was not the truth. “We cannot determine the nature of DCD’s relationship with Shaw from our files,” he pleaded.

  As the years passed, Shaw’s CIA jackets changed. File #33412 was destroyed, and Shaw became #12274. His security clearance number also changed as he enjoyed the highest of six CIA categories. To unravel Shaw’s Agency relationships, following his “five agency” clearance on March 23, 1949, Domestic Contact applied to the Office of Security. In 1952, Shaw had been cleared for project QKENCHANT, along with E. Howard Hunt and Monroe Sullivan, his San Francisco host during the weekend of the assassination. QKENCHANT authorized trusted CIA personnel for clearance to recruit or enlist “civilians,” people not officially with the Agency, to discuss “projects, activities and possible relationships.” It supported “an array of CIA activities.” An author named Hugh Chisholm McDonald was cleared under QKENCHANT to be “used for intelligence procurement.”

  QKENCHANT clearance meant you were a safe contact, and could be utilized as a “cut out,” with the CIA giving you only a certain amount of information. You might be told to contact someone you didn’t know. You might not know the planner of an operation, or its ultimate sponsors. You might know something about who is running an operation, but not everything. QKENCHANT, in CIA’s own words, was an “operational project.”

  Shaw, then, could recruit other agents, granting them security approvals. His QKENCHANT records resided not with Domestic Contact, but in the Agency’s “operational files.” Shaw used his QKENCHANT clearance “to plan or coordinate CIA activities, as well as to “initiate relationships with . . . non-Agency persons or institutions.” Shaw was part of the Agency’s clandestine services with Covert Security Approval, working under cover.

  One day Garrison assistant Richard Burnes placed a telephone call to Clay Shaw’s house, and asked to speak to “John Shaw.”

  “This is Clay Shaw speaking,” Shaw said.

  “Does a John Shaw live at this address?” Burnes persisted.

  “Who are you from? Who sent you?” Shaw demanded. Burnes, a tough and savvy lawyer, concluded that Shaw was in the habit “of receiving calls from persons whom he did not know, and who had been sent to him.” It was a peculiar form of salutation at the least, Richard Billings had to agree.

  Among those whom Shaw recruited under his QKENCHANT clearance was Guy Banister. The date was August 1960. A recently uncovered “Secret” CIA document reveals that Guy Banister Associates, Inc., was of interest to the Agency “for QKENCHANT purposes.” The QKENCHANT recruiter in New Orleans was, of course, Clay Shaw, no matter that Shaw steered clear of Banister and his operation publicly. The Agency went on to do a thorough investigation of Banister, including his having been fired by the New Orleans Police Department. A complex credit check was part of the vetting of Banister. The Banister investigation was completed in September out of Los Angeles, where “Central Cover Staff” (CCS) material was routinely processed, including the investigation of potential front companies and people, like Banister, that CIA thought it might utilize.

  Shaw also assisted in helping the CIA maintain the fabrication that it was involved only in the gathering of intelligence abroad. In that capacity, he hosted the appearance in New Orleans of General Charles Cabell. “The Central Intelligence Agency is not a policymaking agency. We merely serve the policy makers,” Cabell told his audience. As moderator of that event, Shaw permitted no questions from the floor.

  Shaw’s first assignments for the Agency involved reporting on with whom Trade Mart tenants were doing business. By 1955, he had traveled to a Czechoslovak engineering exhibition at Erno, assigned as “a CIA observer,” a trip for which he was paid separately. Czech intelligence activities in the United States were his specialty, as he located space for an obvious front, a New Orleans “Czechoslovakian Industrial Fair.” That year William P. Burke, then chief of the New Orleans field office, wrote to the Contact Division that he would be compromising a “Y” number (“YY” meant radio communications) should he refer them to “the reports supported by Clay Shaw.”

  Shaw did corporate spying for the agency, inquiring whether the Hall Mack Refining Company was an active client of the John A. Marshall Company in chemical manufacturing. Shaw found out. In 1956, he spied for the CIA on mercury producers in Spain and Italy, “to ascertain for us the extent of the Spanish and Italian mercury stocks on hand.” CIA furnished him with names and addresses to make his inquiries. Another assignment led Shaw to attempt to thwart the use of West German money to help East Germany and Czechoslovakia increase their exports to the West, thereby earning them dollars. So, General Cabell’s assertions notwithstanding, he helped the CIA in its policy making.

  In Latin America, Shaw sought intelligence on revolutionary movements. One assignment was to ascertain whether the local military was loyal to the CIA. In Peru, he explored the nature of the opposition to the Odria regime, then urged the CIA to oppose a Lt. Colonel named Alfonso Llosa, Minister of Public Works, who was a possible successor to Odria. In Chile, Shaw was assigned to search for “indications of serious unrest, particularly in the armed forces.”

  In Nicaragua, his job was to assess the strength of General Somoza. In Argentina, the CIA asked him to gauge the political influence of Peron supporter Juan Pistarini, whose relations with the army and with labor were of concern to the Agency. Shaw reported that Peron and his wife Evita “are jealous of each other’s power and . . . maintain two separate and independent political organizations.” He cautioned the Agency: that Pistarini was Peron’s “most influential and valuable supporter would seem to be a bit exaggerated.” Always Shaw was briefed in advance and given areas to investigate in each country to which he traveled under the cover of fostering trade.

  Jim Garrison could discover no documents clarifying his suspicion of Shaw’s Agency relationships. Empirically, from observing him with Oswald and Ferrie, both also intelligence assets, and from Perry Russo’s testimony, Garrison concluded that Shaw had been on assignment for the Agency in the implementation of the plot to kil
l President Kennedy. Shaw’s functions for CIA, Garrison decided, even without reviewing Shaw’s CIA files, were various and included covert action, spying, and supervising CIA proprietaries at the Trade Mart.

  Garrison did uncover a Louisiana-based CIA operation in which Shaw had been involved. Shaw had flown to Cuba in 1959 as part of a CIA project to refine Cuban nickel at a Louisiana refinery in Plaquemines Parish through a firm called Freeport Sulphur. The pilot was David Ferrie. On board was a Freeport director named Charles A. Wright. When the embargo against Fidel Castro took effect and Castro prevented Freeport from owning land in Cuba, CIA reversed the plan, creating a triangular trade. The raw nickel would journey from Cuba to Canada, and then to Louisiana. In late 1961 or early 1962, Ferrie flew Shaw again for Freeport Sulphur, this time to Canada. Shaw sat at the back of the plane. Beside him was a stocky Cuban with a dark complexion.

  Garrison’s source was one Jules Ricco Kimble, both a Klan member and an FBI informant on the Klan. Kimble was also a CIA informant and a CIA operative, recruited for special assignments. He knew Ferrie, Kimble told Garrison. In fact, Jack M. Helm, the Imperial Dragon himself, had asked Kimble to drive him to Ferrie’s house the day after Ferrie’s death. Helm had emerged with a briefcase.

  That A. Roswell Thompson, another Klan eminence in this story, was close to Ferrie, to Beckham, and to the entire Louisiana assassination contingent, adds credibility to Kimble’s testimony. It didn’t matter to Jim Garrison that the Clay Shaw trial had come and gone by the time Kimble came forward. Investigating the assassination was his lifelong cause.

  He had met David Ferrie at the Golden Lantern bar, Kimble claimed. Ferrie had introduced him to Shaw, and it was then that Ferrie invited him to join them on that flight to Canada. The Cuban with Shaw was “kind of heavy set, dark complexion, balding in front,” the feature Sylvia Odio had noticed about “Leopoldo.” Back at Lakefront Airport, Ferrie, Shaw and the Cuban had gone off together.