Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, & the Garrison Case

by DiEugenio, James

  Nagell, Shaw, and William Martin

  After Richard Case Nagell had been apprehended in the El Paso bank, he was legally railroaded. He was convicted for armed robbery even though there was no intent to rob anything. (He was sentenced to ten years, but he eventually ended up having that lowered to three years.) Even though he had a mimeographed newsletter from the FPCC, a Minox miniature spy camera, and a tourist card for entry into Mexico in the name of Aleksei Hidell. Even though on the way to the El Paso Federal Building he said to the FBI, “I would rather be arrested than commit murder and treason.”32 Further, at a preliminary hearing for Nagell, the defendant related to his arresting officer, a man named Jim Bundren, that he wanted to be caught. Bundren replied that he knew Nagell was not out to rob any bank. Nagell then said, “Well, I’m glad you caught me. I really don’t want to be in Dallas.” To which Bundren replied, “What do you mean by that?” Nagell answered with, “You’ll see soon enough.”33 Bundren later concluded that the FBI understood a lot more about Nagell before his trial than they let onto.

  Nagell tried to warn authorities about the assassination even while he was in prison. He wrote a letter to the Secret Service via the prison authorities warning them about an upcoming assassination attempt. The date of this letter was November 21, 1963.34 Nagell, then wrote letters to J. Lee Rankin in 1964, and later Sen. Richard Russell in 1967. He told the senator he was surveil-ling Oswald in 1962 and 1963. And that Oswald had no significant connection with the FPCC. When the news of Garrison’s probe broke in February of 1967, Nagell got in contact with his office from his Springfield prison. Garrison arranged to have one of the many volunteers that had flocked to his office interview Nagell. This was a lawyer named William Martin. This turned out to be one of the many errors Garrison made. For it later turned out that Martin was suspected of being one of the several CIA plants in Garrison’s office. And his practice was located at Shaw’s International Trade Mart.35 Neither Nagell nor Garrison had suspicions about the man at the time of Martin’s first interview with Nagell. Even though, as we have seen in Chapter 6, this is the same Martin that Maurice Gatlin had turned over to Guy Banister to spy on the left while a student at Tulane. Martin eventually became Chief Investigator for the Banister/Gatlin organization, the Anti-Communist Committee of the Americas.36 The reason his office was at the ITM is because after he left Banister’s organization he went to work for Shaw as the Director of International Relations and world trade at International House, the Rockefeller founded, sister organization to ITM.37 It is at this point that Martin now began to be formally associated with the Agency.

  Unaware of any of this at first, Nagell was quite open with Martin when he got to Springfield, Missouri to interview him. Nagell garnered from Martin that Garrison’s working background concept was that the assassination had much to do with Kennedy’s evolving policy toward Cuba, the failure of the Bay of Pigs, and how both of these had inflamed the Cuban exile community against him. Nagell replied, “That is absolutely right, as a general picture, but of course there are some fine points here and there that you have not covered.”38 Nagell went on to say that he would now tender evidence to Garrison that would all but certify his inquest. He told Martin that he had been able to infiltrate the assassination plot. To the point that he could “make a tape recording of four voices in conversation concerning the plot which ended in the assassination of President Kennedy.” Nagell said that the tape was primarily in Spanish, although at times certain voices lapsed into English. When Martin asked who the participants were, Nagell replied that one of them was “Arcacha,” and another Nagell would only identify as “Q.”39 Aracha has to be Arcacha Smith, and “Q” is very likely Carlos Quiroga. Quiroga, as we have seen, was not just associated with Arcacha, but also with Carlos Bringuier. But according to Sam Newman, Quiroga was actually Arcacha Smith’s right hand man.40 As we have seen in Chapter 8, Quiroga was likely supplying Oswald with literature for his FPCC leafleting display in front of Shaw’s Trade Mart. And he also probably lied about this before the Warren Commission and also to Garrison’s investigators. On Garrison’s polygraph test, Quiroga also indicated deceptive reactions when asked two further questions. The first was, “According to your own knowledge did Sergio Arcacha know Lee Oswald?” The second was, “Prior to the assassination of the President, did you ever see any of the guns which were used in the assassination?”41 These last two questions of course directly relate to what Nagell is speaking about, namely the setting up of Oswald in an assassination plot by CIA related Cubans. As per the tape, although there is some dispute about this, it appears that it was stolen in a burglary of Nagell’s possessions, probably in 1964. What makes this unusual is that during the heist, it was the only object that the burglar stole.42 Due to the handling of certain other documents between the two, and their future filing, by July of 1967, Nagell became quite estranged from Martin, and terminated any further discussions with him. And a few days after this, Martin then moved his office out of Shaw’s Trade Mart and returned to “my private practice.”43

  As noted, Arcacha Smith left New Orleans sometime in late 1962. But, as Quiroga and others have indicated, he stayed in close contact with his former New Orleans colleagues after the move. As we have seen so far, Arcacha Smith directly relates to Howard Hunt and David Phillips through the CIA’s attempt to launch an extension of the CRC in New Orleans. He was involved in preparations for the Bay of Pigs, to the point that he actually had films of the operation. He then relates to both Ferrie and Banister through his activities at 544 Camp Street. He relates to Clay Shaw since Shaw donated funds to the CRC and, during the Garrison investigation, Shaw made many direct calls to Arcacha Smith’s lawyer.44 We have now outlined evidence that directly connects Aracha Smith in a plot, involving other Cubans, to murder Kennedy and to set up Oswald as a patsy. As we will see later, there is still more evidence of Arcacha Smith’s involvement.

  Dischler, Fruge, and Lloyd Cobb

  It is not certain how Garrison came in contact with the Clinton-Jackson incident. But it may be through the work of two law enforcement officers who were on leave to him. They were the previously mentioned Francis Fruge and an undercover agent named Anne Dischler. Garrison had them investigating multiple alleged appearances of Oswald in the Lafayette area.45 And it was through that investigation that the two came in contact with John Rarick and Ned Touchstone. Rarick was a judge in the Feliciana parishes. Touchstone was a rightwing publisher. In 1964 barber Edwin McGehee told Rarick about the Oswald visit. Rarick then told Touchstone. An article appeared in Touchstone’s Councilor, and through that exposure word filtered back to Fred Dent of the State Sovereignty Commission. Dent told Fruge and Dischler, who may have already seen the article.46 Garrison now told Fruge and Dischler to transfer their effort from Lafayette to Feliciana. They did so with exceptional results. All the material discussed in Chapter 5, and more, was now at Garrison’s disposal. But two key exceptions should be noted.

  When Fruge and Dischler first visited with Henry Palmer in May of 1967, Dischler brought her tape recorder, but not her notebook. Palmer, who was the registrar at that time, pulled out a book, opened it and said, “Look, this is where Oswald registered.”47 According to Dischler, although Oswald’s name had been written over, you could still see the capital “O,” the space where “Lee H” had been signed, and the shadow of his name. When Fruge asked why Oswald’s name had been written over, Palmer ignored the question. Later on, Fruge asked to come back the next day, for he wanted to copy the book. At this point, Palmer may have hinted as to why Oswald’s name was written over. He told the pair that, at first, he and Sheriff John Manchester decided not to say anything about Oswald being up there. When Fruge and Dischler showed up the next day, the registration book with the remnant of Oswald’s name in it was gone. Palmer expressed surprise but offered no explanation. Dischler never forgot that reversal.48

  Second, someone took a picture of the black Cadillac as it was parked and its passengers were wa
iting for Oswald to register to vote. According to Dischler, it looked to her as if Shaw was in the driver’s seat of the car.49 Dischler had it in her possession and used it to help certain witnesses like Corrie Collins identify the suspects. But the picture was from a bad angle and the resolution was not good. Therefore, when Garrison tried to blow it up, it lost still more resolution. Therefore it was not submitted at Shaw’s trial.50

  One of the most fascinating things that Garrison discovered about this endlessly interesting episode is that three witnesses there remembered seeing Lawrence Howard in the town area. Howard was a physically imposing Latin who was vigorously involved in anti-Castro activities, including the training of paramilitary forces, at the time of Kennedy’s death. This fact was widely known in the intelligence community. So widely that the FBI tried to (falsely) say that Howard was one of three men who appeared at the door of another exile activist, Sylvia Odio, in late September of 1963. Edwin McGehee said that he cut Howard’s hair once. During their conversation, Howard said he worked at Marydale Farms.51 Reeves Morgan said he saw Howard walking the streets of Jackson.52 Both men identified Howard from a folio of suspect photographs shown to them by the HSCA. Further, Henry Earl Palmer also identified Howard as someone associated with Marydale Farms.53 Howard himself admitted he was in Louisiana on the day Kennedy was killed.54 Marydale Farms was owned by Lloyd Cobb, the president of the International Trade Mart; in actuality, he was Shaw’s superior. Located just outside of Jackson, it was a sprawling 12,000 acre parcel that produced dairy goods. Cobb himself was a rightwing figure who had a CIA clearance to serve on a “cleared attorney’s panel.”55 His brother, Alvin, was a close friend of Guy Banister. All this is made even more fascinating by information that Garrison did not know. When this author and William Davy traveled to Jackson in 1994, Reeves Morgan told us something that he said he had never told anyone else. He said that on the day of Kennedy’s assassination, he noticed the caretakers at Marydale rounding up all the cattle there as if they were closing the enterprise down. When he asked them what they were doing, he was warned to forget everything he had seen at the farm if he wanted to maintain his health. When Morgan said this to us, it truly did sound as if he was letting go of an old and bottled up fear.56 It would appear that Cobb’s huge farmland was being used to produce more than just milk.

  Garrison’s investigation of the Clinton-Jackson incident went on for over five months. He came to conclude that the aim of the exercise was to get Oswald’s name into the files at the hospital. Then have a contact at the hospital—maybe Silva through say Sergio Arcacha Smith—switch and modify Oswald’s folder from the employment to the patient files. This would then certify that Oswald really was a demented assassin. And clearly this is what the Commission was trying to do. For in a secret cable to Russia from Anatoly Dobyrnin, the Soviet ambassador revealed that Dean Rusk had told him that the Warren Commission’s preliminary investigation had dug a up a lot of data about Oswald’s “mental instability.” The Secretary of State then asked Dobyrnin if “that same data might be available in the Soviet Union when Oswald lived there.”57 If the Clinton-Jackson incident had achieved its probable objective, it would have been the icing on the Commission’s case. The unanticipated problem was that the planners did not anticipate the large voter rally. Therefore, too many witnesses saw Oswald with Shaw and Ferrie.

  At the time this inquiry was halted, Fruge and Dischler were still not done. They had many leads still to follow up on. But the State Police had now requested Fruge return to his regular position. What had happened is that Garrison was discovering too much for some quarters. A state legislator had called for the return of expenses made to a state police detective and a woman state employee working on a murder investigation.58 This was clearly a political move, which shortchanged Garrison of one of the richest veins of evidence he had, and two of his best investigators.

  Thornley: Oswald’s False Friend

  From looking through the Warren Commission testimony, for reasons stated in Chapter 7, Garrison became interested in the strange case of Kerry Thornley. Thornley was a Marine Corps buddy of Oswald’s whose testimony to the Warren Commission was used to portray Oswald as a Communist loner. As Garrison noted in his book, Thornley’s testimony is at odds with other service friends of the alleged assassin, who do not recall him as an ideologically committed Marxist.59 Another important fact about Thornley is that he wrote two books about Oswald, one before and one after the assassination: the novel The Idle Warriors (unpublished until 1991), and Oswald (published in 1965). Both books accomplish the same end as Thornley’s Warren Commission testimony: they portray Oswald as a committed and sociopathic communist. The 1965 work is a nonfiction tome that reads something like the Warren Commission witness, psychiatrist Renatus Hartogs’ profile of Oswald. Consider the following line:

  I’m certain that in his own eyes Oswald was the most important man in the [Marine] unit. To him the mark of destiny was clearly visible on his forehead and that some were blind to it was his eternal source of aggravation.60

  Later in the book, Thornley writes, “Frankly, I agree that the man was sick, but I further think his sickness was, in the long run, self induced in the manner previously outlined.”61 In the last three chapters of the book, Thornley basically traces the Warren Commission version of the last few days of Oswald’s life. In the last chapter he lays all the blame for the murder at Oswald’s feet—that is, there was no conspiracy, large or small. In fact, Thornley’s early writings on the case are pretty much indistinguishable from what the Warren Commission pumped out. They are so similar that one wonders if the Commission borrowed its profile of Oswald from Thornley in the first place.

  According to both Thornley and Jim Garrison, the Secret Service swept down on Thornley on November 23, and in short order he was on a plane to Washington with his manuscript of The Idle Warriors.62 Thornley reveals in his later, nonfiction book that he talked to Warren Commission counsel Albert Jenner on a number of occasions about his testimony. According to Garrison, Thornley stayed in the Washington, D.C., area for almost a year. He then moved out to California where his parents resided. Ironically he worked at an apartment complex which housed, of all people, CIA-Mafia-Castro assassination plots intermediary Johnny Roselli. Around this time, David Lifton was going through the Warren Commission volumes and noted Thornley’s testimony. He looked him up in person and they became friends. During the early part of Garrison’s investigation, Lifton popped in to help out, and discussed Thornley with the DA. It was this event which marked the beginning of the falling out between Garrison and Lifton. For, from the evidence adduced by the new file releases, Thornley was a much more suspicious character than the one Lifton has always presented.

  First, as should have been apparent from the beginning, Thornley was an extreme right winger who had an almost pathological hatred of Kennedy. This could have provided a reason for him to characterize Oswald as he did for the Commission. Thornley worked briefly for rightwing publisher Kent Courtney in New Orleans and was a friend of New Orleans-based CIA journalist Clint Bolton. According to an article in New Orleans Magazine, Thornley was also once employed by Alton Ochsner’s INCA outfit, the CIA-related radio and audiotape outfit which sponsored Oswald’s famous debate with Cuban exile leader Carlos Bringuier. According to former Guy Banister employee Dan Campbell, Thornley was one of the young fanatics who frequented 544 Camp Street.63 Additional facts make the above acquaintances even more interesting. Thornley tried to deny that he knew Bringuier, yet his girlfriend Jeanne Hack described an encounter between Thornley and a man who fit Bringuier’s description to Bill Turner in January of 1968. And as Thornley notes in his introduction to the 1991 issue of The Idle Warriors, he showed that manuscript to Banister before the assassination, back in 1961.

  This last point brings up one of the most important issues concerning the whole Thornley episode: his early denials and later reversals. Two memos written by Andrew Sciambra in February of 1968 reveal that Th
ornley denied knowing Banister, Dave Ferrie, Clay Shaw, and Shaw’s friend Time-Life journalist David Chandler. Garrison, however, had evidence that revealed the opposite to be the case. And years later, on the eve of the House Select Committee investigation, Thornley admitted to knowing all of these shady characters. Then, of course, there was the issue of Thornley’s association with Oswald himself in the summer of 1963. Thornley denied before the New Orleans grand jury that he associated with Oswald in New Orleans in 1963. This seemed improbable on its face since, as noted above, both men knew each other previously and both men frequented some of the same places in 1963. But further, consider Thornley’s rather equivocal denial on the witness stand: