A Farewell to Justice

by Joan Mellen

  Nebraska finds Tommy as it once did potential Garrison witness Sandra Moffett. Two weeks later, Fred Lee Crisman is on his doorstep.

  “What do you take me for?” Fred says.

  “I just felt like moving on,” Tommy says.

  “Kid, you’re not in a position to move on,” Fred says. He takes Tommy to Offutt Air Force base in Omaha, home of the Strategic Air Command’s Operation Looking Glass, which kept nuclear bombs in the air at all times, and was a base for reconnaissance flights bound for China and Cuba. Crisman shows identification and walks right in, Tommy by his side. “This is Agent Beckham,” Crisman says as they pass through security where top secret clearance is required.

  Soon Fred has introduced Tommy to Lieutenant Colonel Lawrence Lowry, director of the Operators’ Office of the Planning Division of the Strategic Air Command with, indeed, top secret clearance. Lowry, in charge of “Plans” at Offutt, is deeply connected to the CIA. As “OI/SD Lt. Col. Lowrie,” his name appears in the CIA’s JMWAVE files of Customs/CIA officer Cesario Diosdado. A trace reference remains: In September 1966, “Col. was consulted” by the Agency regarding the acquisition of some explosives. The cable originated from the DCI, the Director of Central Intelligence himself.

  “I want you to look after my boy,” Crisman tells Lowry. Thomas Edward Beckham and Colonel Lowry grow close. Lowry can telephone and talk to a plane in midair, Tommy notices. Lowry places Tommy at a second-hand junk shop, which they name the B & L Enterprises Thrift Shoppe, with his wife in charge. Lowry’s unlikely story is that he met Tommy after cutting out an advertisement in a local newspaper in which one “Mark Evans” was looking for investors in a recording studio.

  Lowry says he answered the ad, and planned for Tommy to cut some records. They opened up a used furniture and book store. He loves music, Lowry says, which was why he befriended Beckham, and hoped to split the profit from the records. “Gentleman Jim [Reeves]” is his favorite Beckham song. Lowry is not ready to admit any relationship with Fred Lee Crisman, whose CIA connection entitled him to ask favors of highly placed military people.

  It was one more baby-sitting operation, a waste of time until they needed him for something, Tommy knew. During his days with Lowry, Tommy asks Jack P. F. Gremillion to send Lowry a certificate designating him as an “honorary attorney general” of the state of Louisiana. On May 17, 1967, the certificate arrived.

  Mrs. Lowry sits with Tommy in the store. They never sell anything. Tommy writes to the Reverend Raymond Broshears, whom he knows through David Ferrie, about setting up a branch of the Universal Life Church using the Thrift Shoppe storefront as its headquarters. He begins to dress as a church man in a black vest and white collar.

  When Jim Garrison subpoenaed Beckham in January 1968, the Inspector General of the Strategic Air Command looked into Lieutenant Colonel Lowry’s relationship with Beckham, and began to investigate Lowry himself. Lowry had been in the Air Force for more than nineteen years. They didn’t pull his clearance, but Lowry was at once removed from involvement in anything classified.

  The Inspector General also looked into the B & L Enterprises Thrift Shoppe and found it had operated only for a month, May to June 1967, with Mrs. Lowry writing the first month’s rent check. The stock, from old refrigerators and washing machines to used books, was worth only between two and three hundred dollars. According to Colonel Lowry, Tommy paid him back five thousand dollars that he invested. Never to meet Beckham again, Lowry calls him “a fine gentleman.” Anyone seeing the two together would have assumed they were, indeed, good friends.

  One day in Omaha, Tommy received a telephone call from Jack Martin, whom he had not seen since the assassination. He remembered Jack’s CIA and FBI identification cards, his four passports from four countries and his New Orleans police identification. Jack had always said the government used him when they needed him.

  Tommy still fears Jack. Now Jack orders him to go to a safe house in Council Bluffs, Iowa, just across the bridge, Iowa being a state where Beckham, like Sandra Moffett, can avoid extradition to Louisiana. To avoid Jim Garrison’s subpoena, Beckham moves back and forth between Nebraska and Iowa.

  The one person who helps him is a man named Joe Martin, a disc jockey at KOWH-AM radio in Omaha. This Martin is a mild, unassuming man, a right-wing Republican who began in radio in the 1940s with Johnny Carson at Omaha’s WOW. Although Joe Martin seems to be unconnected, a nobody, he was selected to compose the theme song for the 1964 Republican National Convention. It made station manager Mike Starr wonder: Joe Martin from lowly Omaha?

  Many employees at station KOWH have Air Force backgrounds. The majority owner is William F. Buckley Jr., whose brother Ross lives in New Orleans on the 1200 block of Dauphine Street, not far from Clay Shaw. Ross also participated in the Friday night discussion groups at the Ryder Coffee House with Kerry Thornley and William Cuthbert Brady. Together with Brady, in 1962 Ross Buckley organized a “Fair Cuba Committee.” William Buckley never comes to Omaha, and Joe Martin denies that he knows him. Both are CIA assets.

  From his employees, Starr hears of secret phone calls to Joe Martin, whispered conversations. Martin would disappear with no explanation for hours at a time. He is in fact involved in shielding and protecting Garrison witnesses and helping them avoid his subpoenas.

  After he hears from Thomas Edward Beckham, whom he is now ordered to shield, Joe Martin confides in Mike Starr. He is running a CIA safe house, he reveals. Starr, a young graduate of the Georgetown School of Law, who serves as a judge advocate at Offutt Air Force base, raises an eyebrow. At the safe house, Martin says, he has been recording the stories of those he is shielding on tapes he plans to play on KOWH. Starr fears he will lose his FCC license or be prosecuted and says, “absolutely not!” Somehow New Orleans authorities have learned that Joe Martin is helping Beckham, and the Omaha police interview him about aiding and abetting a fugitive.

  The only people who know that Tommy is in Council Bluffs are friends from Offutt Air Force base like Colonel Lowry, Jack Martin and Joe Martin. Jack Martin calls and tells Tommy to return to Omaha. Almost as soon as he arrives back in Omaha, Thomas Edward Beckham is served with a subpoena. Tommy’s own brothers had pointed Garrison to Nebraska, ending the long search for Beckham begun by Garrison in February 1967. The Omaha Better Business Bureau terms him a “con artist.”

  One night, six weeks after Joe Martin asked for airtime to play his assassination tapes, there is a loud banging at the door of radio station KOWH. Everyone but Mike Starr and Joe Martin has left for the evening. The porch light is on, and through the circular plate glass window, Mike Starr sees two men in trench coats. He opens the door a crack, and tries to prevent them from entering. Flashing badges with photo ID cards, they brush past Starr. “CIA!” one of them says.

  “CIA?” Starr says. “In Omaha?” Meanwhile Joe Martin has bolted from Studio A and raced down to the basement fallout shelter. In pursuit, the government agents grab him. One clutches his right arm, the other his left, and they drag Joe off into the night.

  “Where are you taking him? When will he be back?” Starr says.

  “We don’t know,” one of the men says. They disappear. When Starr telephones, the CIA denies it has any men in Omaha. Beckham believes that one of the men must have been Fred Lee Crisman because, suddenly, there he was.

  “I might as well return to New Orleans,” Beckham says. “I can lie, or say nothing.”

  “You might say something you shouldn’t say,” Fred laughs. “Smart as I am, even I make mistakes.”

  Beckham returned to New Orleans to testify before the Orleans Parish grand jury. Through Bob Lavender, Crisman sent him one more message: “If I am subpoenaed as a result of anything he says to that grand jury, I’ll kill him!”

  Three days after Joe Martin disappeared, Mike Starr received a telephone call from the psychiatric unit at St. Mary’s Hospital. Did he want to pick up Joe Martin?

  When Starr arrived, Martin was cowering in a corner of the r
oom, unshaven and disheveled. Martin tried to talk, but could not remember anything about the last three days. He would be unable ever to go on the air again. All he would say, when finally he could speak, was that he had been working with somebody who had tried to get away from him.

  UPHEAVAL

  18

  This is going to be a test of whether we really have justice in America.

  —Jim Garrison

  ARRIVING IN NEW ORLEANS, Tommy assures the press that the only time he was ever in Dallas was “late last year” with Dr. F. Lee Crisman, with whom he works as a psychologist and who manages his entertainment career. Should he testify before a grand jury, his mother’s life would be in danger, he had been warned. He is an ordained priest in the Orthodox Catholic Church of North America. When he runs into David Lewis, Tommy says that he and his brother Jim “are CIA agents.” Uppermost in his mind is Fred’s threat that death awaits him should Fred be subpoenaed as a result of what he tells Jim Garrison. He seems to have exhausted himself in several lifetimes, and yet he is only twenty-seven years old.

  Thomas Edward Beckham is not permitted to roam unsupervised in New Orleans. A. Roswell Thompson assumes the role of handler. “Don’t worry,” Rozzy reassures him. “We’ve got it covered.” “They” have someone working for them inside Garrison’s office, Tommy is told. He is terrified of Rozzy and his Society for the Preservation of Southern Tradition, vigilantes who bury black people alive upside down. He fears Rozzy more than he fears Jack Martin— or Jim Garrison, who has granted him only limited immunity—for actions that occurred prior to the assassination. Garrison, he believes, could put him in jail for criminal conspiracy.

  As A. Roswell Thompson sits outside in the hallway waiting, Thomas Edward Beckham appears before the Orleans Parish grand jury. It is February 15, 1968. As he is about to enter the jury room, he runs into Jack Dempsey, ever on the police beat. “Stick around,” Tommy says. “After this is over, I’m going to give you something that will blow the district attorney out of office.”

  Inside, Jimmy Alcock explains his constitutional rights.

  “I have none,” Tommy says. Then, he begins to lie. He lies about his education, claiming he has been to college and is a psychologist, although by the afternoon he will admit to having dropped out of school in the seventh grade. Even this isn’t true: he made it only to the third grade. He cannot recall, he says, whether he was in New Orleans in 1963. He met F. Lee Crisman in Washington State—after the assassination. He met Crisman through an ad, he says, using Colonel Lowry’s cover story for how Lowry met Beckham.

  Did Crisman advise him to go to Iowa when he was subpoenaed? No, he says, another lie. He met David Ferrie only once, at the office of G. Wray Gill, a partial truth since Ferrie was there that day Gill sent him to Dallas with the maps and diagrams for Lawrence Howard. His Mission was to feed the poor, he lies, “nothing to do with Cuba.” He has never carried money for anyone. He lies so energetically that he cannot remember the name of the church in which he was supposedly ordained. He denies knowing the Reverend Raymond Broshears, then takes the fifth amendment on whether he ever discussed the CIA with Guy Banister.

  A dark-faced Richard Burnes listens, furious.

  Jim Garrison remains calm. Was he an employee directly or indirectly of the Central Intelligence Agency?

  “I worked for Mr. Banister,” Tommy says, “and if Mr. Banister worked for the Central Intelligence Agency, then indirectly I worked for them.” “Indirectly” is that same term Lawrence Howard had used for Jim Garrison and will later enlist for the HSCA. Beckham is shown photographs of Thornley, Howard and Hall, all of whom he knows. He says he cannot identify them. Jim Garrison asks whether he ever visited the Old Post Office Building in connection with the CIA. “I have been to that building, but not for no CIA,” Tommy says. He admits he had a post office box at the Old Post Office Building, but only to receive business cards.

  Asked if he is aware that Mr. Fred Lee Crisman is with the CIA, Tommy hedges. “I knew he was formerly an intelligence officer, or combat officer or something,” he says. He professes not to know that the first person Clay Shaw telephoned after his arrest was “Dr. Crisman.”

  Good liars lace their fabrications with filaments of the truth. Tommy admits he brought Guy Banister information on Jack Martin, which is true. He mentions a narcotics-laden “German ship” arriving at the Port of New Orleans in 1962, details of which Jack Martin knew. Martin apparently informed the FBI and an item had appeared in the Times-Picayune about a German ship en route to Cuba being tied up. I’m sure it was Jack, he says.

  He denies that he ever met Lee Harvey Oswald.

  “You are lying,” Jim Garrison says, finally. “I don’t care what your connection with the federal government is, and what Mr. Crisman told you.”

  “I don’t have no connection,” Tommy says. “Mr. Garrison, why are you trying to make me out to be a CIA agent?”

  “You are lying,” Garrison repeats, insisting that after lunch there be “no more lies . . . because the name of that is perjury.” But in the afternoon there are more lies, as Tommy denies meeting Clay Shaw, Jack Ruby and Lawrence Howard. A few times he says too much, as when he remarks that Shaw was run out of Italy “for being a front for the CIA,” and when he admits to knowing a “Joe Martin,” although Garrison has no idea this is an Omaha CIA asset.

  A decade later Thomas Edward Beckham will change his answer to every one of these questions.

  “Why don’t you tell the jury what the information is that’s going to knock District Attorney Garrison out of office,” Burnes finally demands. Beckham then talks about a French Quarter affidavit exposing Garrison’s “intimate affairs” with “a male prostitute.” He invents a name, “David Richards,” whose real name is “Marcello.” He calls “this guy Bertrand” another Garrison sexual partner. His source is Eugene Davis, he claims. He had gone to Wanda’s Bar to ask Davis why Garrison had called him. Only that Beckham knew him as an intermediary for Clay Shaw accounts for his invoking Eugene Davis.

  Richard Burnes had reached his limit. Burnes had been so skeptical of the charging of Edgar Eugene Bradley that he had inquired about malpractice insurance for public officials. When Numa Bertel rejected an offer from Camille Gravel’s law firm in Alexandria, Burnes accepted, with no regrets about leaving the Kennedy case behind.

  Garrison was prevented from focusing effectively on Beckham’s handler, Fred Lee Crisman, by inept investigative work. Richard E. Sprague insisted that Crisman, like Bradley, was one of the tramps arrested at Dealey Plaza. Bill Turner confused Crisman’s stepfather with a sinister contact. Armed with ten $100 bills from Jim Garrison, Jim Rose had blundered into Crisman’s Tacoma “advertising agency,” obviously enjoying the breaking-in, but accomplishing nothing.

  Crisman remained an enigma, a short man with a boxer’s nose and scars, a ruddy complexion and a crew-cut. He was notorious— for having been on the scene of the 1947 “Maury Island incident” in Washington State involving the supposed sighting of UFOs. Some thought the entire brouhaha was a scam to cover up a Boeing aircraft accident involving radioactive material. Boeing refused to supply Garrison with Crisman’s employment records.

  Crisman, who, like David Ferrie, had been fired from a high school teaching job, was another right-wing extremist, carrying an ID card from Interpol and two letters from Governor McKeithen praising his work on behalf of the state of Louisiana. His Ph.D. was from “Brantridge Forest School” in England, a degree as phony as David Ferrie’s.

  Garrison issued a subpoena for Fred Lee Crisman on October 31, 1968. His press release accuses Crisman of having been “engaged in undercover activity for a part of the industrial warfare complex for years.” Crisman told reporters that he had been summoned to New Orleans solely because he knew Beckham, whom he denounced as the “banker” for the “free Cubans.” There was a conspiracy all right in the assassination, Crisman said, but he had “nothing whatsoever to do with it.”

  Jim Garri
son didn’t even attend Crisman’s appearance at the grand jury on November 21, 1968. There, Crisman repeated Beckham’s lies about their meeting in Washington State, insisting that his first visit to New Orleans was in 1966. He did not know Clay Shaw. He was a writer, an English teacher. No, he did not work for the CIA. Alcock’s questioning was halfhearted.

  Garrison sought to clarify how the CIA utilized a “bizarre cluster of ‘Old Church’ evangelical sects” in implementing the assassination. They were “the most natural of safe houses,” he thought. You could raise money there without serious inquiry. The Reverend Broshears, Jack Martin, Joe Newbrough, David Ferrie, Beckham, Crisman, and even Ruby’s factotum, Curtis Crafard, had been connected to these churches. Jack Martin persuaded an Archbishop Walter M. Propheta of the American Orthodox Catholic Church to write to Jim Garrison, praising Garrison’s “real courage,” but Garrison was not diverted. He wanted to investigate the Abundant Life Temple near the scene of Officer Tippit’s murder.

  Some church figures tried to help, like Reverend Thomas A. Fairbanks, who told Garrison that Ferrie and Jack Martin were so close that Martin used Ferrie’s credit card. Fairbanks suggested not only that Ferrie had set Oswald up “as a patsy,” but that Ferrie had “ordained” William Seymour as an Oswald double.

  Crisman, Beckham’s “mentor and sponsor,” was “an operative at a deep cover level in a long-range clandestine intelligence mission . . . an operative at a supervisory level, a Fagin to the Artful Dodger,” Garrison believed. Crisman had been “cut out” for the operation at Banister’s. The “Old Church” covers used by Beckham and Crisman, Martin and Ferrie, were designed to divert attention. Such churches had been utilized by the O.S.S. during World War II, Garrison discovered.

  In March 1968, Garrison hosted the National Convention of District Attorneys. No one from Dallas attended. The recipient of the distinguished service award that year, Bill Cahn of Nassau County, New York, later went to jail on gambling violations. J. Edgar Hoover was to be awarded honorary membership in the National District Attorneys’ Association.