A Farewell to Justice

by Joan Mellen

  “Judge, I’m going to break your heart,” L. J. told Jim Garrison. “This is gone. This is over. This country shouldn’t spend one more copper penny on an assassination investigation out of Washington. They could offer me $200,000 and I wouldn’t go back.” Garrison urged Buras and Delsa to keep their jobs as long as they could. The truth will come out, he said. As always, he took the long view.

  The final interviews of the Louisiana witnesses reveal the HSCA’s bad faith. An Al Maxwell found Corrie Collins living in Highland Park, Michigan. Collins remained a man who did not suffer fools gladly. When Maxwell assumed, incorrectly, that Collins had worked at East, he remained silent, as he did when Maxwell asked what questions were on Henry Earl Palmer’s voter registration test, an irrelevancy. Maxwell had no idea that Collins had identified Clay Shaw and David Ferrie as being in Clinton together. Collins did not bother to enlighten him.

  “Are you sure the man you saw was Oswald?” Maxwell did ask.

  “Yes, I’m sure,” Collins said.

  In May 1978, Thomas Edward Beckham was deposed at the federal courthouse in New Orleans. Robert Buras was present, but not invited to speak. His choice of questions reveals that lawyer James E. McDonald’s purpose was not to learn anything new about the assassination, but to prove that this inconvenient witness was a liar, and unreliable.

  McDonald attempted to discredit Beckham’s statement that Clay Shaw knew Jack Ruby. “Exactly how” was Beckham introduced to Ruby, what was he first doing?” McDonald asks in an obvious attempt to embarrass the witness, and to suggest that he might be homosexual, the theme of the entire interview. If Beckham was acquainted with Clay Shaw, McDonald attempted to suggest, it could only have been because Beckham, too, was homosexual, and a Shaw sexual partner.

  “Would you consider yourself to be a friend of his?” McDonald asked. Did Beckham know Shaw’s occupation?

  “I never really seen him work,” Beckham said. Then he added, “he had a nickname.” Determined to avoid yet another identification of Clay Shaw as Clay Bertrand, McDonald quickly changed the subject.

  Beckham remarked that Oswald was not a Communist: “He was one hundred percent American.” Oswald and Arcacha had argued, but it wasn’t because on one essential point they were not in agreement: they both were anti-Castro.

  In this interview, Beckham establishes his bona fides in a host of ways. He knows that Arcacha called himself “Dr.” He knows that Luis (“Lucious”) Rabel ran a “cleaner’s.” He knows Banister habitually threw Jack Martin out of his office. The date of the Algiers meeting where the talk was of how “Kennedy ought to be assassinated” allows for Arcacha’s presence. Oswald was then in the Soviet Union; Beckham does not place him at this meeting. Beckham discusses the package he carried to Dallas. For a moment, he seems to have trapped himself, saying he delivered it to a man named “Hall.” Then he corrects himself. It was “Howard.”

  Beckham admits that he lied to Jim Garrison’s grand jury. He says he was told they had an “in” planted in Garrison’s office, ensuring that “the investigation would be ran the opposite direction, so for me not to worry.” Fred and Jack Martin were CIA “operatives,” Beckham says, performing “services for government agencies.”

  McDonald ridicules this witness repeatedly. He asks Beckham what the “C” in “Mark C. Evans” stood for. Unflappable, Beckham replies that it stood for “country.” He admits his formal education ended at the third grade. McDonald then devotes considerable time to extracting from Beckham all his phony degrees, only to return to the subject of homosexuality. If Oswald was a homosexual, McDonald says, might not “these church groups [be] nothing more than a homosexual-type society or organization?”

  Beckham laughs. “Not everybody connected with it was homosexual, you know,” he says. “You don’t have to be homosexual to like money.”

  Listening, Buras reflected: Beckham with his false religious and educational degrees had been made impeachable by the Agency. That was how he survived. In this he resembled Oswald, who was completely impeachable.

  Some CIA-connected witnesses defied the CIA. Lawyer Robert Genzman fed William Gaudet the question of whether his CIA relationship, like Shaw’s, was “purely informational,” a question that contained the answer Gaudet was obviously expected to give. No, Gaudet said, he did “certain chores for them which were not informational.” Then Gaudet exploded once more the CIA’s persistent lie on its documents with respect to the end-dates of the service of its agents. Some CIA records state that Gaudet’s service concluded in 1961. This time Gaudet did not offer 1969 as the end date of his CIA service. “I never did end my relationship with CIA,” Gaudet remarked. Both CIA and FBI had insisted that Gaudet not be called before the Warren Commission. HSCA deposed Gaudet as a “protected witness,” with the Committee being instructed by the CIA’s Frank C. Carlucci on what they could and could not ask.

  Late in July 1978, ex-CIA officer Victor Marchetti telephoned the HSCA. An old friend at the Agency had told him that the Committee was “getting close to the buried bodies.” Gary Cornwell leaped into his car and drove to Marchetti’s home in Vienna, Virginia. Marchetti refused to reveal the name of his CIA source, except to say that he was with Counter Intelligence. This source had told him that the CIA “had agreed to a limited hang out policy” for the HSCA. In a memo, James Angleton and Richard Helms had placed E. Howard Hunt in Dallas on November 22nd.

  CIA has “decided to give up E. Howard Hunt as part of the limited hang out,” Marchetti said. When he published this information in Spotlight magazine, Hunt sued him. In fact, Marchetti had been fed partial disinformation. There would be a person sacrificed by the CIA as a limited hang out. But it would not be E. Howard Hunt. Rather, the CIA’s newest scapegoat was a certain gray-haired gentleman prominent in New Orleans society. As the final HSCA report reveals, the Agency sacrificed Clay Shaw. The report calls Shaw a “limited hang out, cut out” to play a role in the conspiracy, the very terms Marchetti had been told were being applied to Hunt.

  Shaw had to be sacrificed for several reasons. Many witnesses by now had revealed how the CIA and FBI had concealed evidence from the Warren Commission. Even J. Lee Rankin, the senior counsel for the Warren Commission, told the HSCA he regretted he had taken the CIA’s word that Oswald “was never a CIA agent.” Was the HSCA investigating whether the people involved in the CIA cover-up were involved in the assassination as well? Rankin wanted to know. He received no reply.

  Acoustic evidence arriving late in the HSCA investigation and revealing that there had been more than three shots fired at Dealey Plaza, eliminated the possibility that Oswald had acted alone. Richard Billings, who worked closely with Blakey, says that Blakey would never have conceded that there had been a conspiracy at all had the motorcycle dictabelt not been discovered recording what appeared to contain an audio transcript of the shots being fired in Dealey Plaza. It was in this context that the Committee sacrificed Shaw, who had died of lung cancer in 1974.

  Shaw, the Committee decided, was “possibly one of the high level planners, or ‘cut out’ to the planners of the assassination.” History replies to Helms’ question, “are we doing enough for that guy down there?” in the negative. The CIA treated its asset Shaw with shameful indifference. Impoverished, Shaw was left to fend for himself. Shaw’s friends blamed Jim Garrison, but it was the CIA that was responsible for Shaw’s humiliation and for the depletion of his resources.

  Meanwhile, with Oswald forever gone as the “lone assassin,” Blakey and Cornwell decided to focus on organized crime as the real power behind the plot. Desperate for any kind of evidence that the Mafia was behind the assassination, Gary Cornwell interviewed Aaron Kohn in New Orleans. It was a “gross oversimplification” to say that the Bourbon Street clubs that violated the law had been controlled by Carlos Marcello, Kohn said. The public officials Marcello corrupted were primarily in Jefferson, not Orleans Parish, just as Jim Garrison had always said.

  If Cornwell hoped to connect Oswal
d to organized crime through his uncle, Charles “Dutz” Murret, and then vilify Jim Garrison for not pursuing the connection, Kohn had to dash this expectation. Murret paid federal taxes on his wagering operation, Kohn pointed out. Nor had Kohn ever proved that Murret worked for Marcello cohort Sam Saia. Uncle Dutz had even repudiated illegal gambling in 1959! Another Oswald relative, Kohn remarked, Eugene Murret, was a “highly regarded” former professor of law at Loyola.

  When Cornwell attempted to blame Regis Kennedy for the lack of enthusiasm of the New Orleans FBI field office in investigating Carlos Marcello, Kohn stopped him in his tracks. Regis Kennedy had always fought against crime, organized or otherwise, Kohn said, revealing how distasteful he found the crude implication that Regis Kennedy lacked integrity.

  During this trip, Cornwell, with Mike Ewing in tow, met Jim Garrison. Garrison allotted him thirty minutes. The FBI and CIA had been able to “control and evade the investigative resources of any other body,” Garrison said. He assumed the same thing had happened to the House Select Committee. In his memo of the encounter, Ewing complains about Garrison’s “long monologue” about the CIA.

  Many of your key witnesses had been employed by Carlos Marcello, Cornwell states, inaccurately.

  If I had found anything relating to Marcello, Garrison says patiently, I “would definitely have pursued it.” If I had taken bribes from Marcello, or was even linked to such bribes, I “would have retired on the money long ago.” He knew Marcello, of course. He hoped, Garrison added, that the House Select Committee would pursue the role of Fred Lee Crisman, who was “an important figure.” Forty-five minutes had passed. Garrison then asked Cornwell whether he would like another copy of A Heritage of Stone.

  “It is important to know who killed Jack Kennedy and why,” Garrison tells Cornwell and Ewing as he bids them an overdue farewell.

  Subsequent documents have revealed that it was CIA counter intelligence chief James Angleton who was in bed with the Mafia, not Jim Garrison. In his HSCA testimony, John Whitten, Angleton’s colleague, reveals he had been appalled to discover Angleton protecting his own Mafia assets and their numbered bank accounts in Panama. “He would not want to double cross them,” Whitten observed.

  Having first assigned Whitten to investigate the assassination for the CIA, Richard Helms had changed his mind, turning the matter back to Angleton and his right-hand man, Birch O’Neal. Jim Garrison’s Alice-in-Wonderland metaphor was apt: it was the CIA who was shielding the Mafia, not Jim Garrison. It was Walter Sheridan who bribed and intimidated witnesses, not Garrison.

  Delsa and Buras preferred that their names not be included on the HSCA final report. They knew the report was a “fix,” even as they lacked the CIA memos later to become available at the National Archives, which reveal persistent demands that Blakey alter the text. There remains as well a paper trail of complaints from the CIA that HSCA investigators went too far in their exploration of the role of the CIA in the assassination.

  On September 27, 1978, CIA’s Scott Breckinridge, writing on behalf of the Director of Central Intelligence, wrote a five-page, single-spaced letter to Blakey complaining about the HSCA’s questioning of Richard Helms. Irregularities in the CIA’s 201 file of Lee Harvey Oswald had led to questions, not least why no file was seemingly opened for Oswald for fourteen months after his October 1959 defection to the Soviet Union. The CIA had received a cable from the American consulate in the Soviet Union about a man who had threatened to commit espionage and give away military secrets to the Soviets. Yet no file was extant.

  Hoover had sent the CIA a clipping from the Washington Star about a Marine who had defected to the Soviet Union, inquiring whether they knew about it. “Tell him we don’t have anything on it,” CIA ordered. Even when Oswald’s name appeared in the spring of 1960 on a list of 200 people whose mail the CIA had ordered opened, no file was opened, if one were to believe CIA. The CIA cover sheet on the file of December 1960 reflected Oswald still being in the Marine Corps, even after his defection to the Soviet Union (Radar Operator, U.S. Marine Corps, as of 1960). CIA’s behavior for the written record conveys a deliberate attempt to suggest that his defection was of no moment, or not real.

  Helms had been questioned by HSCA lawyer Michael Goldsmith, inspiring the agency’s fury that Blakey’s staff should not honor Helms’ plausible deniability. “A man of such senior position in a large organization would obviously be unfamiliar with the sort of details asked him,” Breckinridge writes in a hectoring letter. His subtext is that Blakey had better get his staff under control. Breckinridge insists that there are “reasonable and convincing explanations” for the oddities in the Agency’s records on Oswald.

  “I find the nature of the questioning disturbing,” he writes, as if HSCA were under CIA jurisdiction. “Mr. Goldsmith’s performance on these points was tendentious at best. He introduced material into the record that we knew—or that he had reason to know—to be different from the way he elected to present it. This careful construction of a flawed record cannot serve the purpose of an objective investigation.” Repeatedly attacking the HSCA’s young investigators, the Agency demanded that Blakey accept its denials, while claiming simultaneously that the CIA was offering “cooperation.”

  Blakey had provided CIA with several drafts of his final report. In a sixteen-page memo to Blakey, again on behalf of the Director of Central Intelligence, Breckinridge proposes changes to a second draft. In this memo, Breckinridge’s tone is arrogant and dismissive. He terms the report “incorrect,” and attacks scornfully the investigator of Oswald’s Mexico City visit, who was Eddie Lopez. Over and over Breckinridge defends the Agency against the charge that it had not informed the Warren Commission of what it knew. He serves up a plethora of excuses, including that it was the FBI that was charged with reporting to the Commission. “What the Agency did was to supply material that was deemed relevant,” Breckinridge insists. He attacks the draft for “unsupported assertions,” calling it “badly confused in its treatment of facts and sources.” When he cannot refute the facts, he terms the report “unbalanced.”

  Breckinridge reserves special contempt for the CIA’s John Whitten, the one officer who had spoken frankly to the HSCA regarding the Agency’s maneuvers with respect to the assassination. Whitten’s recollection was “wrong,” Breckinridge says in one place. In another he charges that Whitten’s “report” [his quotation marks] was “incorrect.” Breckinridge also objects to the “unusual space” Whitten’s testimony was given in the report. “This is not because he knew anything,” Breckinridge claims, “but must be because he was prepared to speak about things he did not know.”

  Breckinridge insists upon one deletion after another, some on the basis of protecting sources, others for no stated reason at all. “We would prefer no reference in an unclassified report to what is in the Calderon 201 file,” he writes, referring to the Mexico City material and Luisa Calderon. He objects to references even to the AMLASH trial in 1965, demanding that they be deleted: “Reportedly, Castro told the HSCA that he knew that AMLASH was Cubela; that is not for us to confirm.” He writes as if CIA and HSCA were the same entity, with common interests.

  In a March document, Breckinridge responds to a request made by Blakey that CIA “review inserts for the HSCA draft report on [Antonio] Veciana.” CIA obliged, going on to accuse the HSCA “investigator,” obviously Gaeton Fonzi, of misrepresenting “both the relationship of CIA with the man described generally as an ‘asset’ in the proposed inset, and what that man’s relationship was with Veciana.”

  He denies that Veciana had any tie with the CIA through “Bishop,” insisting that Maurice (Morris) Bishop “was not of, from, or with CIA.” Breckinridge argues no less vehemently that Bishop was not David Atlee Phillips, no matter that Fonzi was able to accumulate a wealth of corroborating evidence, some from CIA officers themselves, that he was. Veciana was “an asset of another U.S. government agency,” Breckinridge claims, accusing Fonzi of having “irretrievably botch
ed the investigation.”

  “I have deleted the section on this because it is so flagrantly in error,” Breckinridge writes. Then he reveals how Blakey had contacted CIA every step of the way. “You planned to contact us early this week to have a substantive exchange on the final draft report,” he writes, as if for the record. “We are available at your convenience.”

  Less than two weeks later, CIA reviewed the HSCA’s draft paper on “Evolution and Implications of the CIA-Sponsored Assassination Conspiracies Against Castro.” Here Breckinridge is emboldened to “raise a personal question” on the very first paragraph; then he complains that there is more “simplistic rhetoric” than “mature moral principle.”

  Arguing that the writings of church philosophers have distinguished “between different kinds of homicide,” Breckinridge invokes the red herring of whether Adolf Hitler should have been assassinated. Always he presents the CIA as morally impeccable, its concerns, “narrowly, protection of intelligence sources and methods.” Predictably, he claims that the devastating conclusions of the Church Committee were “erroneous.” There is no record that Blakey did anything but comply.

  Jim Garrison praised the Church Committee, which discovered that the CIA “had installed permanent machinery for accomplishing assassinations.” But the HSCA was “a solid cover-up as soon as Blakey got in there. Every time they came up with something good, it was blunted or turned aside by Blakey.”

  The HSCA Report calls the Clinton witnesses “credible and significant.” CIA would not approve, so a qualification had to be affixed: “while there were points that could be raised to call into question their credibility, it was the judgment of the committee that they were telling the truth as they knew it.” The “Summary Memorandum,” from which the Report was drawn, and more honest, states that “Oswald must have been present at least two days in the Clinton-Jackson area.” It grants that he did fill out an application at East. There was “clear indication” that Clay Shaw and David Ferrie were with him.