by Joan Mellen
In the company of Aynesworth and Gurvich, Kirkwood drove up to Clinton where Gurvich commandeered Deputy Carl Bunch, for whom the summer of 1963 meant, “We shall overcome and being busy with them niggers.” According to Kirkwood, they “barged” into the Collins home, odd language since the door was always left unlocked. Kirkwood writes that he encountered Corrie Collins’ father Emmett “Snowball” Collins, “with fear in his eyes.” He insists he found a “white-haired man of seventy.” In 1968, as in the year 2001, Emmett Collins had jet black hair, despite his nickname of “Snowball.”
Nor could it have been a case of mistaken identity: there was no white-haired grandfather on the scene. Corrie Collins doubts that the event could have occurred for another reason. He had put the local police on notice not to bother his father. “Bother me, not him,” Collins said. By then no one had any doubt that he meant it.
There is no documentary explanation of why Clay Shaw was instructed by the CIA to bring Oswald to East Feliciana Parish where he was to be employed at East. Garrison and his staff speculated from the evidence. Employment at the huge East Louisiana State Hospital would provide Oswald with a cover and a legitimate job, removing suspicion that he had been a wandering intelligence agent with an FBI informant’s number, Numa Bertel thinks. But why at East?
Jim Garrison wondered whether Oswald’s job at a notorious “insane asylum” might have led to fabricated evidence that he was a patient, and not an employee. Perhaps unsuccessful shock treatments would have been offered as the cause of his having become the “deranged” assassin. The “crazed” part of Oswald’s profile would be accomplished at Jackson.
Before Dr. Frank Silva, Oswald had behaved erratically, attracting attention and not behaving as a person actually seeking a job would. Oswald had not known, Garrison concluded, that “he would be the turkey on Thanksgiving day.” But he might well have believed that he was participating in a scheme to murder Fidel Castro, as the comments overheard by Dr. Silva indicated.
What if, Garrison wondered, with Oswald on the payroll, corrupted doctors, at a place where many doctors were temporary and recovering from misdemeanors, had said they tested him and found him insane, suffering from aggression “beyond control?” He might escape to “unknown parts.” The hospital would have papers to prove that, “acting funny” one day, Oswald had been locked down, only to emerge as the “lone nut” at Dealey Plaza.
The entire escapade of Shaw and Ferrie bringing Oswald north of Baton Rouge provides strong evidence that the cover-up began before the assassination. Oswald was being converted to a “patsy,” an innocent man being readied to be held responsible for the heinous crime. The Warren Report, lacking any motive for Oswald as the perpetrator, challenges his sanity, defining him as a classic sociopath: “He does not appear to have been able to establish meaningful relationships with other people”; he is “a man whose view of the world has been twisted”; he is a “troubled American citizen”; he is an “unstable character, whose actions are highly unpredictable.” Oswald’s appearance at a mental hospital may be easily connected to the scenario of the coming cover-up. A decade after the Warren Report, the FBI was still calling Oswald “a rather disoriented individual with bizarre ideas.”
The two Clinton eye-witnesses who identified Guy Banister as having been in Clinton did not survive. In 1964, Gloria Wilson suddenly fell ill. Her legs swelled up so that it seemed as if her flesh would burst. So rapidly did her body shut down that people speculated that she had been poisoned. She was nineteen years old. The family had a history of heart trouble, Deputy Carl Bunch says. Gloria’s lover, who lived west of Opelousas, was terrified that she had been murdered because she knew too much. Anne Dischler discovered that Gloria had left a diary locked in her private drawer at Cochran’s. When her sister Flo went to collect Gloria’s possessions, the diary was gone.
On July 6, 1968, Andrew Dunn, being held in the Clinton jail on a charge of public intoxication, was found hanged in his cell— while lying flat on his bunk.
Into the millennium, Shaw lawyer Salvatore Panzeca would claim that his client had never appeared in East Feliciana Parish with Lee Harvey Oswald. “It never happened,” Panzeca insists. Patricia Lambert had introduced the fantasy that Winslow Foster, not Oswald, was the second white man in Clinton, even after she read Anne Dischler’s 1967 notebooks, which demonstrated otherwise.
In July of 2000, Dischler formally repudiated Lambert’s book. Her statement accuses Lambert of having “twisted my report to fit her own ‘Clinton scenario,’ leaving out important facts that would have shed a different light on the actual truth of the Clinton, Lousiana story!” Dischler wrote Lambert that she was “appalled at, and ashamed” that her work was mentioned as any part of what Lambert had written.
The evidence that Oswald, Shaw and Ferrie appeared together in Clinton is massive and even includes G. Wray Gill’s telephone records. Two calls had gone out from David Ferrie’s phone at Gill’s office, distinguishable by an “04” on the bills. One was to Clinton, to the phone booth at the corner of Henry Earl Palmer’s office, on May 18th, 1963. The other was to Jackson on November 16th.
Other people attempting to deny that Shaw had been seen with Oswald have included Ferrie’s friend Alvin Beaubouef, who said the Clinton witnesses had been “bribed.” Rosemary James would echo Panzeca: Shaw “just wasn’t there,” she insists. It was Guy Banister, “who looked so much like Clay, it was unbelievable.”
A TALE OF TWO KINGS AND SOME SOLDIERS OF FORTUNE
15
The Warren Report in many respects unfortunately is in the position of Humpty Dumpty. It can never be put back together again.
—Jim Garrison
A N ANONYMOUS LETTER IN MAY 1967 directed Jim Garrison to Omaha, where he might find Thomas Edward Beckham. An “army” of men had been collecting money for a new invasion of Cuba, among them Arcacha, Fred L. Crisman, Martin Grassi and “Lucian” Rabel. The mistaking of “Lucian” or “Lucius” for “Luis” places Beckham himself as the source of the information. A second anonymous letter, from the same source, dated January 9, 1968, informs “Mr. G.” that Fred L. Crisman, “a Washington man,” had been advising “Mark Evans” (Beckham), an Omaha man, to hide out in Iowa. Beckham had delivered $200,000 of Cuban money. “Is it not odd that Crisman is a friend of Clay’s as well as Beckham?” the letter says. “Is it not strange that he knew Tippit?” His source knew David Ferrie and Lee Harvey Oswald personally. The writer was Beckham’s sometime manager Bob Lavender, a former Treasury agent.
“Keep digging, Jim,” Lavender adds. Thomas Edward Beckham reports that everything in Lavender’s letters is true. Crisman flew to New Orleans eleven times in 1964, seventeen in 1965 and twentyfour in 1967. Crisman was indeed the first person Clay Shaw telephoned when he was in trouble. Beckham himself called Crisman right after the assassination. Garrison now renewed his efforts to locate Thomas Edward Beckham.
Jim Garrison would never work unimpeded by intelligence plants in his office. William C. Wood, a former CIA staff agent and instructor, became one of his investigators in April 1967. Garrison thought Wood might supply “general information as to the operationss of the agency.” He hired him, even after Wood failed a polygraph. Wood’s explanation was that he failed because he was upset about James Wilcott’s revelations that Oswald had been a CIA employee.
A second polygraph suggested that Wood had been sent to penetrate Garrison’s office. Yet Garrison ignored the suspicions of his staff. Eyebrows were raised as Wood disappeared for weeks at a time. All along, Wood, whom Garrison renamed “Bill Boxley,” maintained contact with the Agency, passing on “information which had come to his attention.” As recently as February 1967 he had applied for re-employment to the CIA. He had contacted the Agency in March as well.
A thin-lipped, hatchet-faced man with hair “the color of thunderstorm clouds,” Boxley looked like “a slightly seedy insurance adjuster.” His work bore a twisted logic: “Sea-land company” became “Land-Sea.�
� Boxley seized every opportunity to deflect Jim Garrison from examining the role of the CIA in planning the assassination. Over and over, he would place the blame on the FBI or other agencies. In Dallas, Boxley informed Police Chief Jesse Curry that “there were more intelligence agencies than the CIA and FBI on hand in Dealey Plaza that day.”
Banister, Boxley insisted to Garrison, revealed “much more closely an FBI affiliation than a CIA affiliation,” or one with naval intelligence, which “runs operations totally independent of CIA operations.” He analyzed a Banister memo to Guy Johnson about TACA airlines, a CIA proprietary: “It appears that we may have cut across a CIA operation here and great care must be taken not to expose it.” For Boxley, this exonerated Banister of CIA connections.
Boxley urged Garrison to see Lee Harvey Oswald as “an FBI penetration into Russia instead of a CIA project.” It was the FBI that used Oswald to infiltrate pro-Communist organizations within this country, Boxley claimed, incorrectly, ignoring that the Fair Play for Cuba Committee was a CIA project supervised by David Atlee Phillips. Boxley read Nelson Delgado’s Warren Commission testimony about a man in civilian dress coming to the gate of El Toro when Oswald was on guard duty. “Now this tableau is much more indicative of general FBI procedures than CIA,” Boxley claimed. Gerald Patrick Hemming, a would-be CIA counter intelligence operative, claims to be that man at the gate, and his loyalty was to James Angleton, never to the FBI, whether or not Angleton returned the favor.
As a primary source, Boxley hooked up with oil man H. L. Hunt’s security chief, Paul Rothermel, a former FBI agent and CIA asset. “I can tell you positively that Jack Ruby was a paid FBI informant,” Rothermel told Boxley. Boxley then reassured Rothermel that “Mr. Garrison knows Mr. Hunt is not involved,” and would never “embarrass Mr. Hunt.” Denying that he remained a CIA agent, Boxley spoke at the September 1968 conference of Garrison investigators, declaring that he had “solid evidence” that the “ONI and the FBI were involved in this thing from the minute Oswald returned to Fort Worth” and “heavily after he arrived in New Orleans.” Boxley insisted that FBI agents Regis Kennedy and Warren de Brueys were “closely cooperating with the Office of Naval Intelligence.”
Boxley attempted to ingratiate himself into all subsequent leads, including one from a Canadian insurance salesman named Richard Giesbrecht. In February 1964, Giesbrecht had heard a man at the Winnipeg airport he later identified as David Ferrie talking about Oswald and the assassination. Oswald had been hanging around with “Isaacs,” Giesbrecht heard, a lead Boxley mangled by accusing the wrong “Charles Isaacs,” whose name appeared in Jack Ruby’s notebook. Boxley so confused the story that Garrison suspected that the Giesbrecht scenario had been a “planted lead.”
Yet despite the Isaacs fiasco, Garrison assigned Boxley to interview Bob Lavender in Seattle in his continuing effort to track down Thomas Edward Beckham. At once, Boxley discredited Lavender: “I got the distinct feeling that Lavender was on stage reiterating a story which he had been encouraged to tell us,” Boxley wrote. He insisted Lavender’s story “bears a distinct Jack Martin flavor,” and recommended that the facts Lavender offered “be taken with a generous portion of salt.” The basis of his criticism was that he knew no one in the CIA who would entrust a large sum of money to people like Beckham, “or permit such funds to be flown around the country in a suitcase.” Yet Lavender had pointed Jim Garrison to people—Beckham and Crisman—who had direct knowledge of the planning of the assassination.
At Tulane and Broad, during the period their tenure overlapped, two CIA plants—those doppelgangers, twin disrupters of Jim Garrison’s investigation—William Martin and William Wood (“Boxley”)— squabbled. Their animosity was exacerbated by the fact that Martin had been placed in charge of Boxley’s burgeoning expense account. Boxley bragged he had a sketch of Ruby and Oswald drawn by an informant. When Martin asked to see it, Boxley declined. Boxley attempted to undermine Martin by pointing to Martin’s CIA connections. Didn’t these render his loyalty dubious? Hadn’t he been chief investigator for the Banister group, the Anti-Communist League of the Caribbean, which had sent $100,000 to the Organization of the Secret Army, which had attempted to assassinate Charles de Gaulle?
Ivon disliked both of them. He called Martin a version of cult TV Detective Maxwell Smart, Agent 86. Boxley, Ivon noted, was always less than forthcoming.
Yet another attack on Jim Garrison issued from his perpetual adversary, Raymond Huff, that close cohort of Guy Banister and Aaron Kohn. Huff now collaborated with the FBI to end Jim Garrison’s service with the Louisiana National Guard, with the assistance of National Guard Adjutant General Erbon W. Wise. To secure his own promotion, Wise had made a sizable contribution to John McKeithen’s campaign. He now saw Garrison, who was so close to Governor McKeithen, as an obstacle. With the help of Wise, Huff found the grounds for an attack: Garrison had not been properly subordinate, appearing in the company of the governor and flying off in his private plane when he was scheduled for duty.
Dissatisfied with Wise’s progress in the campaign against Garrison, Huff confided to Kohn that Wise was “very weak and naive.” Taking matters into his own hands, Huff saw to it that not only was Jim Garrison not promoted to brigadier general, but he was removed from the National Guard entirely. Garrison was a “dangerous man,” Huff told Kohn. He himself loved America and hated “anyone who damages it,” he said, making it clear that if in 1965 it had been Garrison’s liberal politics that annoyed him, it was Garrison’s Kennedy probe that now inspired Huff’s attempts to destroy his reputation. Huff wanted to thwart Jim Garrison’s mobilization in the Army reserves as well, and contacted the FBI for help. The Bureau consulted the Department of the Army. At the Justice Department two Garrison adversaries, Fred Vinson and J. Walter Yeagley, were contacted.
Huff attempted to discredit Garrison’s investigation by accusing him of granting comfort to the Cold War enemy: Garrison’s “denouncing statements of federal authority,” Huff declared, “are being wisely used in propaganda by the Communist countries and by the anti-American nations around the world.” The Army backed away, claiming that Jim Garrison as a civilian did not come within its investigative jurisdiction. Fearing criticism for intervening in Garrison’s investigation, the FBI recommended “no further action be taken.” “OK,” Hoover affixed his double horseshoe signature to a memorandum to Division 5’s William Sullivan. Jim Garrison would now be in the Army Reserves, “kicked upstairs,” as a disappointed Huff put it.
Neither Walter Sheridan nor Aaron Kohn nor Raymond Huff nor the eponymous Boxley could prevent new witnesses from coming forward. The Reverend Clyde Johnson was a blue-eyed, curlyhaired cherubic ex-inmate from the Mississippi State Penitentiary sporting a skull and crossbones on his left forearm. His first incarceration came when he was eighteen. Now an evangelical Christian, Johnson had made a desultory run against John McKeithen in the 1964 gubernatorial campaign. He hailed from Kentwood, Clay Shaw’s hometown.
On September 2, 1963, Johnson said, he met with Clay Shaw, Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald in the Jack Tar Capitol House Hotel in Baton Rouge. Introducing himself as “Alton Bernard,” Shaw had contributed five thousand dollars in one hundred dollar bills to Johnson’s campaign. He liked the Reverend Johnson’s anti-Kennedy speeches, Shaw said.
At the Capitol House, “Bernard” introduced Johnson to “Leon,” a young man about five feet nine inches tall, he thought, with a stubble. Jack Ruby joined them, while a “tall, big Mexican-looking fellow,” a dead-ringer for Lawrence Howard, stood at the door. “Bernard” doled out money in brown envelopes to Jack, to “Leon,” and to Clyde Johnson. Now Johnson had come forward “in the cause of justice,” but also because he feared for his life. Corroboration arrived from the man who had run for lieutenant governor with Clyde Johnson, Ed McMillan. On election night of the run-off, he had been in Johnson’s room at the Monteleone Hotel when “Alton Bernard,” whom he now identified as Shaw, had been present.
Ther
e was further corroboration from a Jacksonville, Florida, inmate named Edward Whalen, who stated that Clay Shaw and David Ferrie had tried to recruit him to kill Jim Garrison. Garrison was skeptical, only for Whalen to describe how Ferrie had talked about the same meeting in Baton Rouge between Shaw, Ruby and Oswald. “Oswald was an agent of the CIA,” Ferrie had told him. Whalen knew how proud Ferrie was of his aviation skills; Ferrie offered to fly him out of the country, an offer Ferrie frequently made to men. Whalen said Ferrie referred to Shaw as “Clay Bertrand,” and if Whalen was mistaken about the configuration of Ferrie’s apartment, he was able to identify Ferrie friends who had not been in the news, like Dante Marochini.
Clyde Johnson never wavered from his original statement. “Any time you step on a pig’s tail, you can hear it squeal, and there’s lots of pigs squealing,” he remarked. As for the Warren Report, he added, “As the Bible says, ‘No man is as blind as the man that don’t want to see.’”
Gurvich stole a copy of Johnson’s statement, and soon Clay Shaw’s lawyers requested that the CIA and the Justice Department find out where Ruby and Oswald were between September 1st and 5th. Gurvich had to admit that Jim Garrison had not bribed Clyde Johnson; he gave him only ten or twenty dollars for his transportation. Clyde Johnson’s information was damaging enough for Edward and William Wegmann and Dymond to fly to Dallas to trace Jack Ruby’s early September movements. William Alexander at the Dallas district attorney’s office provided details of a Ruby traffic violation. Aynesworth lent his customary assistance. Yet Clyde Johnson’s story stood, unimpeached.
