A Farewell to Justice

by Joan Mellen

  The Agency now collected the manifold Shaw records from its Office of Security. Lloyd Ray put it on the record that his office had no conversations with Clay Shaw since May 1956. CIA then lied to the FBI, insisting that Shaw had only been “of interest” to DCS (Domestic Contact Service) from December 1948 to May 1956. As for actual records on Shaw, all they could locate was that Shaw had introduced General Charles Cabell to the Foreign Policy Association in New Orleans.

  Establishing Shaw’s operational efforts for the CIA was virtually impossible for Jim Garrison, to whom access to the CIA’s files was denied. Testifying in 1978 for the HSCA was John Whitten, a long-time officer in the clandestine services, in charge of reviewing counter intelligence operations. Known in CIA circles as “John Scelso,” Whitten lifted part of the curtain of CIA opacity.

  The distinction between CIA “employee” and “agent,” Whitten explained, was hypothetical. There are “certain types of high-level agents who are staff agents, who have staff status, but they are not employees.” Personnel files were routinely purged, Whitten revealed. Even if the record stated that someone had retired or contacts with them had ceased, there could be “a buried operational file somewhere indicating that the person was still working for the Agency.” He might have been describing Clay Shaw.

  Far from being a mere asset for the Domestic Contact Service, Clay Shaw was a CIA operative. His records resided with Counter Intelligence. Arthur Dooley of the Counter Intelligence Research and Analysis Staff headed by Raymond Rocca, nicknamed “The Rock” by chief James Angleton, one day telephoned John P. Dempsey, the Director of Research. Dooley revealed how well aware he was of Clay Lavergne Shaw. He did not bother with the fantasy of attaching an ending date to Clay Shaw’s Counter Intelligence service.

  A SKITTISH WITNESS

  10

  I think the only possible maxim to apply in this case is “Let Justice Be Done Though The Heavens Fall.”

  —Jim Garrison

  W RACKED BY EXHAUSTION,” Jim Garrison flew to Las Vegas three days after the arrest of Clay Shaw. A man recognized him at the airport: “You’re Jim Garrison!” “Who?” Garrison said. “Never heard of the guy.” He checked into the Sands Hotel under the name of his maternal grandfather, “Robinson.” He was not a gambling man, preferring to sit in the dry desert sun by the pool, talking on the telephone.

  On his heels came reporter James Phelan, who clung to him like a ferret. At first Garrison welcomed Phelan, who, in June of 1963, had arranged for the Saturday Evening Post’s publication of David Chandler’s story, newly titled as “The Vice Man Cometh.” The article had called Garrison “the best DA’s office New Orleans ever had.” The trusting Garrison handed over to Phelan Sciambra’s two memos of his interviews with Perry Russo. Ivon and Alcock were appalled.

  Phelan rushed to a photocopier. Then he paid a call on Robert Maheu, longtime CIA asset and former FBI agent, and Guy Banister associate. Notorious as the liaison between mobster Johnny Rosselli and the CIA in OPERATION MONGOOSE, that plan to assassinate Fidel Castro, Maheu enjoyed covert security approval for “use in the United States” in “extremely sensitive cases.” His company was a public relations cover for Agency employees.

  Having made contact with Maheu, Phelan flew to Washington, where he informed the FBI’s H. P. Leinbaugh, who reported directly to Deke DeLoach, of everything he knew about Garrison’s investigation. He handed over Sciambra’s memos, which soon reached The Director himself. Phelan asked only that Leinbaugh hold the Garrison documents “closely,” so that his role as an FBI informant remain secret. The CIA was also using Phelan as an informant “of interest in connection with,” in Agency jargon, “a sensitive SPS [Special Projects Staff] activity.”

  James Phelan had begun his concerted effort, as he admitted to photographer Matt Herron, to discredit Jim Garrison and derail his investigation. Phelan had already warned Mark Lane: “If you associate with Jim Garrison, your credibility will be gone. He’s going to undo all the good work you’ve done.” Lane at once made plans to fly to New Orleans to assist Garrison. “It would be a good idea to write an article attacking the Garrison investigation,” Phelan then urged Professor Richard Popkin, who had written a book called The Second Oswald.

  With Maheu in Las Vegas was his CIA handler, James O’Connell, and his lawyer, Edward Morgan, but also Johnny Rosselli, the mobster to whom Maheu had offered $150,000 to kill Fidel Castro. The coinciding of Jim Garrison’s visit to Las Vegas with Rosselli’s appearance there became an opportunity for the CIA to smear Garrison by accusing him of mob connections. In the May 23, 1967, CIA Inspector General’s Report there is a sudden nonsequitur: Jim Garrison met with Johnny Rosselli in Las Vegas. The Inspector General adds, “The Rosselli-Garrison contact in Las Vegas in March is particularly disturbing.” The Report offers no date, place or occasion for the meeting. It states only that Rosselli’s talking to Garrison “lends substance to reports that Castro had something to do with the Kennedy assassination in retaliation for U.S. attempts on Castro’s life.”

  By now, the Agency had reason to fear Jim Garrison. It believed that, as the Inspector General’s report states, when he revealed his full case, “we should expect to find CIA prominently displayed.” CIA had admitted to plots against Castro in part “because it is already out and may boil up afresh from the Garrison case.”

  By Garrison’s having penetrated its plots to kill Castro (“Unhappily, it now appears that Garrison may also know this”), and his discovering that Rosselli might be involved, the district attorney might well develop evidence of the CIA’s role in the assassination, CIA feared. The “unhappily” refers to CIA displeasure that Garrison might expose the CIA’s own murder plots. This was what was “disturbing,” not that Garrison’s mob connections might emerge, since he had none. The lie that Garrison had met Rosselli would be perpetuated into the 1990s by former Frontline correspondent Scott Malone, who named Richard Billings as his source. Billings denies he said any such thing.

  Testifying before the Church Committee, Richard Helms all but revealed that the false Garrison-Rosselli connection originated as CIA disinformation. “It might have been the lawyer Ed Morgan, it might be Rosselli, it might be Maheu, or Garrison, who was out in Las Vegas with Maheu and some of the others,” Helms said vaguely. Garrison, of course, was in Vegas, but he was not “with Maheu and some of the others,” ever. His companion was Life photographer Lynn Pelham. He was joined by William Gurvich. Had Garrison met with Rosselli, or even Maheu, either Phelan or Gurvich would certainly have exposed the fact. Maheu told the Church Committee he had no recollection “of seeing Garrison in person.” With no reason to lie, Rosselli stated that he had never met Jim Garrison.

  For the rest of his life, Garrison would be shadowed by the CIA lie that he had met with Rosselli. “I suppose it is an honor to have the CIA sufficiently concerned about you to have to discredit you,” Garrison said, incredulous at the idea of his having talked to Johnny Rosselli. “You remember the guy that was killed with a bullet in his stomach and his legs cut off—and put in a barrel and dropped in the bay off Florida?”

  In Vegas, Garrison did meet James Dondson, who had been in bed with Clay Shaw at the time of the assassination. Dondson was escorted to Las Vegas by FBI informant Lawrence Schiller. Garrison’s hope that Dondson might corroborate that Shaw was “Bertrand” turned out to be futile.

  Back in New Orleans, Garrison readied himself for a Preliminary Hearing. Under then-Louisiana law, he was not obliged to reveal to the Shaw defense the names of his witnesses. Yet “because of the enormity of this accusation,” Garrison decided to “lean over backward and give the defendant every chance.” He would expose to the public his confidential informant Perry Russo. Garrison had also in mind that Louisiana law permitted testimony given at a preliminary hearing to be heard at the trial if a witness was no longer available, a significant issue since so many witnesses to the Kennedy assassination had died.

  Garrison had faith in Russo. A report
er had discovered in Russo’s apartment, among the law books he was apparently studying, some of Oswald’s “Fair Play for Cuba” leaflets. Russo’s placing of Shaw with Oswald and Ferrie during a discussion of the assassination was the overt act Garrison needed under the Louisiana conspiracy law to convict Clay Shaw: “a visit by one of the parties to his co-conspirator for the common purpose of discussing details.” This overt act need not have necessarily aided in the direct commission of the crime. It need not even have in itself been wrong, only that the “combination” led to the crime. The very use of the name “Oswald” placed Shaw in collusion with the president’s accused assassin, even as John Wilson’s having seen Oswald at Ferrie’s apartment suggests for history that the man Russo identified was indeed Oswald.

  Russo agreed to take a lie detector test. But faced with Gurvich’s Roy Jacob, he became so nervous that Jacob couldn’t obtain a reading. Police polygrapher Edward O’Donnell, who would claim, with no tape or even a written record, that Russo had told him verbally that he was lying about having seen Clay Shaw at Ferrie’s, had no better luck. Russo’s “general nervous tension” made him an unsuitable subject for the test.

  O’Donnell, the man said to have the coldest eyes in New Orleans, was a bitter enemy of Jim Garrison and close to the Gurviches. Garrison had brought up police brutality charges against him and his partner, Tony Polito. Although no indictments had resulted, some of the police were infuriated that black victims were afforded the dignity of coming forward to state their case by Garrison’s office. Garrison investigator Frank Meloche was to remember of Polito and O’Donnell: “They were brutal, but they cleared some cases.” O’Donnell was also named by Wendall C. Roache as working for the INS, among those who had “detailed knowledge of Cuban exile activities in New Orleans.” Not least was the fact that O’Donnell informed to the FBI on Russo’s polygraph.

  For corroboration, Garrison had also attempted to extradite Sandra Moffett, Russo’s date at the Ferrie gathering. Now married to a part-time preacher and living in Nebraska, Moffett refused. Her husband told Garrison’s staff rudely, “Don’t bug me!” Finally, aided by lawyers she could not possibly have afforded on her own, she was spirited across the state line to Iowa, where fugitives were safe. Moffett would be only the first of potential Garrison witnesses whom governors would refuse to extradite back to Louisiana.

  Russo remained so nervous that Dr. Chetta had to give him a tranquilizer before he could take the stand. Under oath, Russo again described the conversation about the assassination at David Ferrie’s apartment. “Diversionary tactics” would be employed, and “a triangulation of cross fire,” the same term used by Joseph Milteer in Miami, Russo explained. There would be a “scapegoat” who had to be “sacrificed” and an escape flight to Mexico, Brazil or Cuba, although “Bertrand” had cautioned that they could never make it out of Cuba.

  Ferrie had also suggested on that evening that they should all be “in the public eye on the day of the assassination, making sure they were making a speech or there were enough people around to witness that Dave Ferrie was at such-and-such a place and at suchand-such a time.” “Mr. Bertrand” planned to travel on business “to the West Coast.” “Leon” had complained to Ferrie about his wife being angry with him, and Ferrie had promised to “handle it.”

  When Garrison asked Russo to come down from the stand and make his identification, Russo positioned himself behind Shaw’s chair. While Shaw sat motionless, a burning cigarette in his hand, Russo placed his open palm a few inches over Shaw’s head.

  “You weren’t part of it?” F. Irvin Dymond, now Shaw’s lead counsel, demanded of Russo under cross-examination. The clock had begun ticking on the two years the Shaw defense would have to undermine Perry Russo. “Do you believe in God, Russo?” Dymond demanded.

  Perry Russo emerged as a strong witness. “I was there and Dave Ferrie was there, and Leon Oswald,” Russo repeated. “Clay Shaw was there, but his name was not Clay, it was Clem.” That Russo had undergone both sodium pentothal and hypnosis did not emerge as significant. A Tulane Medical School professor testified how difficult it would be even for a pathological liar to lie under hypnosis.

  Garrison’s other major witness was a black narcotics addict named Vernon Bundy, whose criminal record was minor: five years’ probation for burglary of a cigarette machine. During his morning polygraph, Bundy was asked only two questions: Was he acting on someone’s instructions and was the information he was giving true?” In charge of the polygraph, James Kruebbe had to admit, “No one put him up to it.” Then Kruebbe, the man who was to help Juan Valdes evade his polygraph, insisted that Bundy had failed.

  Bundy had identified Oswald’s leaflets as being yellow. Lou Ivon had then telephoned Carlos Quiroga to confirm the color, a call Quiroga misinterpreted to mean that Lou Ivon himself didn’t know. So the amateur detective revealed his inexperience. Ivon would never have asked the question had he not known the color of the leaflets.

  From photographs, Bundy had identified Shaw and Oswald, who looked “dirty,” Bundy said, corroborating Russo. He identified the composite of Oswald “with the beard stubble,” which had not been made public.

  On the day Bundy was to testify, John Volz took him to a window where he might observe Shaw entering the courthouse using the sheriff’s entrance. “That’s him!” Bundy said. He repeated the identification in the courthouse foyer, identifying Shaw by his limp. At that point, not even the district attorney’s staff had known that Shaw limped. “I’ve talked to a lot of liars,” Volz says. “I can tell when someone is shucking me.” Bundy was telling the truth.

  On the stand, Bundy recounted a hot summer day in 1963 between nine and ten in the morning. He had been walking “towards the colored section of Lake Pontchartrain,” preparing to inject himself with heroin. A four-door black sedan appeared, an automobile Bundy had described in his prison interview as a “black limousine.” Fearing the vice had caught up with him, he closed up his “outfit,” the two caps of heroin, the cooker, and the bottles. If he’s a cop, Bundy decided, he would throw everything into the lake.

  “It’s a hot day,” the man said cordially, passing behind Bundy.

  “He was a tall, settled man,” Bundy said, describing Clay Shaw, over six feet tall, with gray hair. “White man.” Five minutes later, a younger man appeared, looking like “a junkie or beatnik type of guy,” wearing white jeans and a T-shirt, and in need of a shave.

  “What am I going to tell her?” he had said loudly, again echoing Russo’s testimony. “Don’t worry about it. I told you I’m going to take care of it,” the tall gray-haired man said. He handed the younger man a roll of money. Without counting it, the younger man put it in his pocket, from which some leaflets were protruding. They left. As Bundy was looking for paper to wrap his “works,” he spotted something that had fallen from the young man’s pocket. It was a yellow piece of paper, “something about free Cuba.” Asked if he saw either of the men in the courtroom, Bundy walked down and stood behind the gray-haired man he had seen at the lakefront. He put his hand over Clay Shaw’s head.

  By the close of the hearing, Dymond was reduced to requesting that the Warren Report be placed into evidence. The Report had insisted there had been no conspiracy, and so his client could not be guilty.

  “You’re not serious, are you?” Judge Bagert said, dismissing the Warren Report as “fraught with hearsay and contradictions.” After thirty minutes of deliberation, the three judges ruled that “sufficient evidence” had been presented and ordered that Shaw be held for trial. It was, Jim Garrison noted with pride, the first judicial decision challenging the Warren Report.

  Garrison then brought Russo before the Grand Jury. Its foreman was Albert LaBiche, a close friend of Garrison’s archenemy Raymond Huff, who termed LaBiche “totally honest, courageous and incorruptible.” Both LaBiche and grand jury member Larry Centola were in turn close to Cartha DeLoach, Deke himself. Neither had any sympathy for Jim Garrison.

  Cl
ay Shaw was charged with conspiracy with David W. Ferrie, with Lee Harvey Oswald and with “others, not herein named” to murder John F. Kennedy. He pled “not guilty.” Meeting the press on April 4th, Shaw, a martini in his hand, described his politics as “of the Wilson-Franklin Roosevelt persuasion.”

  With the Sciambra memos in hand, James Phelan now set about the task of subverting Perry Russo as a witness. Phelan would argue that until he was under sodium pentothal, Russo had not told Sciambra about the gathering at which he had seen “Leon” Oswald, Clem Bertrand and David Ferrie. The scene where the assassination was discussed was a concoction suggested to Russo, who was being used so that Jim Garrison could frame Clay Shaw.

  Phelan believed he could get away with this sleight of hand because of some confusion in Sciambra’s memos: Moo Moo had written the memo of the sodium penothal session of Monday, February 27th first, before he had penned his account of his Saturday afternoon interview with Russo in Baton Rouge. It was this memo written first, but about a subsequent event, that contained the description of the gathering at Ferrie’s apartment where the assassination was discussed.

  Days later, Sciambra wrote up the Saturday February 25th meeting with Russo. This memo of their first interview did not contain a discussion of the meeting at Ferrie’s house because Sciambra felt he had already covered the subject in the previous memo. The memo of that Saturday does describe Russo identifying a photograph of Clay Shaw as “Clem Bertrand,” which could not have occurred unless Russo had also discussed the gathering on that first day.