A Farewell to Justice

by Joan Mellen

  “You know I love all five of you,” he said.

  Jim Garrison died on October 21, 1992. He was seventy years old.

  The children had agreed that they would call Louie Ivon when their father died. Louie alone could be trusted to honor their wishes. Their father, they said, did not want an autopsy, having regretted the autopsy of his second child, John Lyon, who had died in infancy. Minyard insisted. Jim Garrison was a public figure; the press might ask questions. The death certificate reads, “Congestive Heart Failure,” although the autopsy revealed that technically he died not of his heart illness, but of septicemia, blood poisoning from the unhealed bedsores.

  “It was Kennedy that killed him,” Dr. Minyard said. The investigation had robbed him of his energy and his spirit. Garrison left what he had, the house on Owens, some oil interests left by Jane Gardiner, and royalties, most of which would prove impossible to extract from Hollywood, to his “five beloved children.”

  Jimmy Gulotta read the eulogy at a funeral attended by many of the United Cab drivers who had come to know Jim Garrison. In several obituaries, Frank Mankiewicz, once Bobby Kennedy’s press secretary, was quoted as saying, “Every American owes him a debt of gratitude. He kicked open a door that had been closed too long.”

  At the burial, John Volz, serving as a pall bearer, reprimanded Garrison’s officious son-in-law for chasing away the Times-Picayune photographer. “Let me tell you something,” Volz said. “Jim Garrison never ran from a photographer in his life.” Jim Garrison did not dedicate his life to the investigation of the murder of President Kennedy because he was lured by a lust for publicity. But the press had played its role in the dance.

  “We darn near got the Agency by the big toe,” Garrison said, close to the end.

  Jim Garrison’s headstone at the cemetery in Metairie is embossed with the scales of justice. Unlike those ornately decorated vertical tombs, overflowing with cherubs and statuary so common in watery New Orleans, it is plain and rests close to the ground. The legend reads: “Let Justice Be Done, Though the Heavens Fall.”

  RABBI

  23

  It’s a big operation. It’s predictable that a little bit of it would come up here and there.

  —Jim Garrison

  How many more Oswalds did they have out there, ready to go?

  —Gordon Novel

  Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, Carmel Offie and Frank Wisner were the grand masters. If you were in a room with them you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell. I guess I will see them there soon.

  —James Angleton

  YOU’VE GOT YOUR OWN mailbox now,” Jack Martin told Tommy Beckham late in 1962. Now if they wanted him to run an errand, or to pay him, or to send instructions, they would use the Old Post Office across from Guy Banister’s office. Sometimes during the summer of 1963 Tommy would run into Lee Oswald at the post office. One day, Tommy found Jack in the company of two strangers.

  “You know what CIA means?” Jack had laughed, trying, it seemed to Tommy, to impress the two men in suits. “Caught in the Act!” It is a phrase used by another CIA operative in this story, Richard Case Nagell.

  One day in 1963—Beckham remembers it as late spring— Tommy opened his post office box and there was an airplane ticket with instructions that he proceed to the CIA training installation, Camp Peary near Williamsburg, Virginia, also known as “The Farm.”

  In Virginia, he is subjected to tests. They are named Rorschach and Minnesota Multifasic. He is shown three pictures projected on a screen, then asked what he remembers. Which picture stood out from the others? In one image, a man wears a hat perched at an odd angle. Tommy remembers that detail. Thomas Edward Beckham during his CIA training duplicates a scene described by Loran Hall to the House Select Committee. During Hall’s military intelligence training, he, too, was bombarded with pictures flashing on a wall.

  Tommy is shown the faces of heads of state: Mao-tse-Tung and Khrushchev. “These are leaders who at some time in the future might possibly have to be hit,” Tommy is told. He will spend four weeks at Camp Peary.

  In another phase of his training, he is pushed through a labyrinth of rooms. He is told to look carefully into each room. Then he is asked to describe in detail how the last person he saw was dressed. He is asked about the first room, which, by the end of the exercise, he scarcely remembers. What pictures were on the wall? He is taught how your voice can give you away. He is taught how the way you walk can give you away. He is taught never to leave anyone with anything by which they might remember you. He is forbidden to smoke his pipe because it leaves traces by which you could be identified. You must never carry identification. He is taught how not to leave a paper trail. He is taught how to create fake identification. He learns how, rapidly, to identify serial numbers on paper currency. He is taught how to create false information.

  He is instructed never to volunteer an opinion on any issue. He must never brag about anything he has done. He must never talk about anything he has done in the past. He is taught to have only short conversations with people. This is difficult for him because, having grown up without learning how to read or write, he is a verbal person and loquacious. He must live as if he were a dead man, which is something E. Carl McNabb, “Jim Rose,” also learned from the Agency, until it literally came true and he read in a newspaper his own obituary, under the name “Carl Davis.”

  Then he is taught how to use weapons. He is taught how to be an assassin. He wonders how long the CIA had been looking at him, recruiting him, grooming him for he knows not what. Years later Fred Lee Crisman, his handler, the man HSCA refused to investigate, a man they were willing to scuttle the entire Louisiana investigation to protect, although he was already dead anyway, bestowed upon Thomas Edward Beckham a government document meant never to be seen.

  Fred gave it to him because it is difficult not to like Tommy. The document explains why Tommy was commandeered by Langley, why he was chosen and for what he had been trained.

  The letterhead is not that of the CIA, but “United States Army Air Defense Command,” suggesting that many elements of President Eisenhower’s “military industrial complex” contributed to a collaborative effort to murder John F. Kennedy, an effort in which the CIA stood in the front line. Tommy has never served in the military. But a number connoting his military service name is on this document, along with his correct social security number.

  The document describes Thomas Edward Beckham’s “intelligence service from October 27, 1963,” under “Gov Control Fact Finding Missions.” “Army Rank Commissioned Officer,” it says, but “not assig. to any Military Service.”

  Thomas Edward Beckham has a police record, the document declares: “Knife fighting, two counts of attempted murder.” This information is false, Beckham says, but a false police record can be utilized or expunged, as necessity decrees. He was never involved in violent crimes. “Number of items cleansed as of 3-8-63,” the document reads.

  Thomas Edward Beckham is one of five sons, the document continues. He is expendable. “Has no personal feelings as to killing and or death, see Psychological Report,” the document adds, as it sums up the training with which he has been provided at “The Farm,” “Advanced and Special Training":

  Hand-to-hand combat special training, special firearms course, CIA field training, Advanced Medical and Psychological. . . .

  He has also had “Special Mind Search IQ training, ETQ and TD-35, Army Field Officers Tr. Cour.”

  The document concludes with “Psychological Data: Subject gets upset with people and pulls away. Drinks and smokes (pipe), likes to study people. No psy. as to guil. on killing. Not married. 5 ft 7, 157, White Male.”

  This revelatory and never-before-seen document reveals how military intelligence, the Army, and the CIA, working in concert, had set up a scapegoat. Should Oswald have broken away or turned, they had Beckham groomed and waiting in the wings as an alternative scapegoat to take the blame for the m
urder of John F. Kennedy. Beckham was a man who would not mind killing, they had determined. He was similar in appearance to Lee Harvey Oswald, small, brown-haired, nondescript-looking. He had even more scant formal education than Oswald.

  As Jim Garrison had surmised, Beckham’s ultimate role in the assassination, should Lee Harvey Oswald not cooperate, was to be an alternative scapegoat. To play that part, he had to be young, uneducated, impressionable and eager. He had to be a virtual blank slate, whose identity could be created if he had to be placed in harm’s way. Tommy was already a man gifted at reinventing himself.

  This government document about Thomas Edward Beckham is rendered further credible by its remarkable similarity in both language and philosophy to a CIA report describing “the agent or asset ROGUE” whom the Agency had enlisted in its plan to assassinate Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in the Congo. In a secret document conveyed to the Church Committee, the chief of the CIA’s African Division, who at the time was Bronson Tweedy, wrote:

  He is indeed aware of the precepts of right and wrong, but if he is given an assignment, which may be morally wrong in the eyes of the world, but necessary because his case officer ordered him to carry it out, then it is right and he will dutifully undertake appropriate action for its execution without pangs of conscience. In a word, he can rationalize all actions.

  The CIA determined that Thomas Edward Beckham was another such man, as was its first choice, Lee Harvey Oswald. With his Marxist self-invention and seeming Soviet defection, and his heterosexuality shadowed by occasional homosexual experiences, Oswald was the more desirable alternative should the government follow its original plan of blaming Fidel Castro for the assassination. So CIA planned to secure for the military—and the corporations that profited from its efforts—a long-desired ground war in Cuba.

  Beckham was their second choice. His being groomed by the CIA for that role places the murder of the president at the highest levels of intelligence. Beckham’s experience demonstrates that Oswald certainly did not plan the assassination of President Kennedy, nor did he operate at any time “alone,” just as Jim Garrison had claimed all along.

  Those with foreknowledge of the assassination, like Gerald Patrick Hemming, were well aware that alternative scapegoats were being put into place in 1963. Hemming has contended that Roy Hargraves, who accompanied him to Jim Garrison’s office, was also in Dallas on November 22nd, in a “fallback position,” even as the fake Secret Service credentials Hargraves carried that day suggest that he was not merely another potential patsy, but an operative, a participant. Shortly before his death, Hargraves confirmed these facts in a taped interview with author Noel Twyman. Hargraves admits to being in Dallas, playing a role alongside people he had long known, people Jim Garrison had interrogated.

  Beckham’s document demonstrates that the government created an appropriate scapegoat to assume the blame for a murder committed by people in the government itself. It reveals ample foreknowledge of the assassination by government intelligence agencies. It demonstrates that the same people who murdered the president had, long before the heinous crime, begun the process of blaming some innocent man. Jim Garrison had uncovered a corner of that effort in Jackson and Clinton, Louisiana.

  Thomas Beckham never forgot his CIA training. When Robert Buras interviewed him, Beckham looked at him hard, focusing on Buras’ one white eyebrow. He needs to dye it, Tommy thought, because it’s a dead giveaway, something people could remember him by. Buras had long distinguished himself in intelligence work, even with the white eyebrow, but Tommy was remembering his own intelligence training.

  When Beckham requested his CIA files under the Freedom of Information Act, CIA claimed it had no records naming him; he received not a single piece of paper, not even those files referred to on the document Fred gave him as “not for public release.” The file number even appears on the document: HQ-4567G2-File.

  After that grueling appearance before the Orleans Parish grand jury in February 1968, Tommy had gone home to his mother’s house. A. Roswell Thompson went with him. Rozzy would not let him out of his sight.

  The telephone rings. It is Jim Garrison. Tommy is alarmed. “What’s happened now?” he blurts out.

  “You know, we gave you immunity,” Jim Garrison begins. “Why not tell the truth?”

  “Yeah,” Tommy says, remembering Fred’s threat that he would kill him if Fred were subpoenaed, implicated in any way. Tommy knows he has immunity for anything he might have done prior to the assassination. But there is no immunity for murder.

  “I know you know more than you’re saying,” Garrison says. “Off the record, you do know Jack Martin. . . .” At the close of his testimony, Tommy had even denied that he knew Jack, although earlier he had mentioned Jack’s knowing about a German ship bound for Cuba.

  “I know Joe Martin,” Tommy repeats, referring to the man who had shielded him in an Iowa safe house, the man who was kidnapped from that Omaha radio station never to be the same again. Tommy had also denied knowing Clay Shaw, Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald. He had denied ever having met Lawrence Howard. He had even denied knowing Fred. Of course, he knew them all.

  Jim Garrison runs down a list of names one last time, but Tommy remains silent.

  “You’re not going to tell me anything, are you?” Garrison says finally.

  “I don’t have nothing to tell you,” Tommy says.

  “Well, if I were you, I’d leave town,” Garrison says.

  “Are you threatening me?” Tommy says.

  “You think I’m your enemy, but I’m not,” Garrison says.

  Long ago having sacrificed false pride, humbly, the district attorney of Orleans Parish has a last question for Thomas Edward Beckham, who would be twenty-eight years old on the following December 9. With the help of CIA operatives Jack Martin and Fred Lee Crisman, Beckham has defied the system of justice successfully, with apparent impunity. Still, Garrison must try again.

  “Tom,” Jim Garrison says, “Let me ask you one thing. Have I touched on anything? Am I close?”

  The terrified witness has no room for registering Jim Garrison’s sincerity now.

  “I don’t know if you are or not,” Tommy says. “How am I to know?” Then he turns silent. He replaces the receiver.

  “See how they are!” Rozzy gloats. “They’ll get you one way or another.” Rozzy tries to calm Tommy down because he is now very upset, very nervous.

  “They’re going to discredit him,” Rozzy promises, his contempt for Jim Garrison intact. “He’s going to look like a fool. We’ll make him a nut. Nothing will happen.”

  Twenty years later, in the late 1980s, Tommy confronts Herman Keck, head of the “World Wide Church” in Springfield, Missouri, and another of the Agency people in his life over the years. “CIA can do a lot under cover,” Tommy remarks. He is still trying to figure out how he had been drawn in, how he had been involved and in what. Keck affirms that Fred Lee Crisman was with the Agency.

  “You were too,” Keck says.

  Tommy wants only to forget. He has asked a hypnotist to erase from his mind the memories of those years, to no avail. He receives a telephone call from New Orleans. A woman asks whether he will speak to Jim Garrison.

  “You know, he’s a judge now,” she says. “You do know Jim Garrison?”

  “I never heard of that man in my life,” Tommy says. “Ma’am, you’ve got the wrong Beckham. I never heard of that guy in my life.” Still, he is not ready.

  At the turn of the 1990s, Oliver Stone’s people track him down.

  “Am I going to be a star?” Tommy says, the same defense he had used when police officers Buras and Delsa came too close.

  “Now I’ll set up a table and take calls,” he had told them, as if he were ready to reap the rewards of publicity. Rather, he wanted nothing more than to disappear, and when he learned that Crisman, and then Jack Martin, were dead, he felt a measure of relief. His next question, to this author, was whether Colonel Lawrence Lowry remained ali
ve.

  Beckham’s testimony for this book points to the CIA’s organization of the assassination, and to Clay Shaw’s role in readying Oswald to take the blame for a crime he did not commit as Garrison had thought. Beckham connects Shaw to Ruby and Ruby to Oswald. He places Howard in Dallas. He places Ferrie in the midst of the planning of a crime “formulated in New Orleans.” He knows that organized crime was kept informed of the plans to kill President Kennedy, that a “Marullo” or a “Marcello” was present at each meeting, both at Algiers, where they discussed how Kennedy had dispatched his school friend, William Attwood, to come to an agreement with Castro, and at the Town and Country Motel. A “tagalong,” someone no one particularly noticed, Beckham was observant. He spotted Sergio Arcacha Smith in New Orleans in 1963, which vindicates David Lewis. Arcacha and “Lucious” Rabel behaved “as if they were glued together,” Beckham remembers.

  Beckham vindicates Jim Garrison, rendering him correct in his insight that Guy Banister was at the nexus of the transition from Operation Mongoose, the plot to murder Fidel Castro, to the assassination of the president. He exposes Fred Lee Crisman as a link between the planners of the crime and those enlisted to implement it, as Crisman organized Tommy’s trip for CIA training. He reveals how Jack Martin, another Agency asset in New Orleans, had begun to prepare him for his role as possible scapegoat with the falling downstairs incident at Morrison’s cafeteria, which had so perplexed him.

  Martin’s preparation of Beckham included his voluntary commitment to the mental hospital at Mandeville. Two young men were prepared to take the blame as “lone nuts” in an identical manner. Oswald had been led to the East Louisiana State Hospital at Jackson. Like Oswald, Tommy later could be dismissed as unstable, irresponsible.

  That Jack Martin had betrayed Thomas Edward Beckham is revealed in the FBI’s informant files where Jack S. Martin “advise[s]” that Tommy, “age seventeen . . . was in California allegedly passing fraudulent checks on father’s account,” and how in 1958 he had been “subject of an interstate transportation of stolen property investigation.”