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Enter George de Mohrenschildt
Shortly after Oswald’s return to Fort Worth, Texas, they were welcomed by a local White Russian community, which was decidedly anticommunist in their world view. One of the leaders of this group was George de Mohrenschildt, a highly educated geologist and world traveler who was known as “the Baron” by his friends, a group which included several men owning the oil companies with which he consulted. De Mohrenschildt was very well connected in Dallas, directly to men like H. L. Hunt, Sid Richardson, and Clint Murchison; according to an army intelligence report on a Haitian named Clemard Joseph Charles and his association with de Mohrenschildt, the latter was also known to be a friend and business associate of Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson; according to researcher Horne, “An excerpt from another attached document reads: “He [Charles] is traveling with a business associate whom I understand is somehow associated with Vice President Johnson. Mr. Charles has an appointment with Mr. Johnson.”32
Years later, de Mohrenschildt would admit that he was the initial CIA “handler” for Oswald. This, he said, started in late 1961 in a meeting with CIA agent J. Walton Moore who told him about “an ex-American Marine who had worked in an electronics factory in Minsk for the past year and in whom there was ‘interest.’” This ex-marine would be returning to the Dallas area, de Mohrenschildt said, well before Oswald had done anything to indicate such an intent. Several months later, in the summer of 1962, de Mohrenschildt said he was handed Oswald’s address by “one of Moore’s associates,” who requested him to meet Oswald. Later, Moore gave “the Baron” the nod to befriend Oswald, with the understanding that this was a favor to the CIA. De Mohrenschildt later said that “I would never have contacted Oswald in a million years if Moore had not sanctioned it … Too much was at stake.”33 De Mohrenschildt had even checked with Moore before proceeding to become involved with Oswald and got his response: “Yes, he’s okay. He’s just a harmless lunatic.”34
On October 7, 1962, de Mohrenschildt urged Oswald to move from Fort Worth to Dallas. Oswald didn’t need much convincing it seems; the next day, he did just that, taking a new job arranged for him by the Baron at a graphic arts company, Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall (JCS), cleverly described by the Warren Commission simply as a “commercial advertising photography firm.”35 Their description of the firm deftly avoided the fact that it had contracts with the U.S. Army Map Service and was cleared for top secret work, including the current project, which involved photography of Cuba from altitudes of seventy to ninety thousand feet, taken from U-2 flights in preparation for President Kennedy’s showdown with Cuba. The JCS part in the process was to set the type for place-names to go on the recon maps; the actual maps were not in their shop, but the place-names would have been valuable to a Soviet spy trying to find out what was being photographed and how valuable the intelligence was which was being lost.36 Oswald was given full access to all the information being processed through that company; security was so casual that anyone wanting a Coke from the machine had to pass a “restricted security” area to reach it. On one occasion, “Oswald overheard two employees as they tried to identify the Cyrillic type of Russian place names. Oswald, displaying his fluency in Russian, offered his help.” The Warren Commission decided to soft-pedal Oswald’s association with the Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall firm, for multiple reasons:37
• It would raise embarrassing questions regarding how he managed to walk off his previous job giving no advance notice and then immediately become employed by a company working with the army in highly classified document processing;
• The matter of his being a former defector, who had famously offered to give the Soviet Union the military secrets he had, which were directly related to the secret U-2 airplane and its capabilities and missions;
• That his employment there defied the normal security barriers, which would have kept a person of his background from obtaining a job requiring top secret clearances;
• That Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall was connected directly to the CIA and its agent in the Domestic Contacts Division, J. Walter Moore and he, in turn, was using George de Mohrenschildt on contract and that among his duties was being the ‘Babysitter/Handler” for none other than Lee Harvey Oswald.
In March 1963, through help of the CIA, de Mohrenschildt received a Haitian government contract and shortly departed for Haiti, never seeing Oswald again. He and his wife maintained that Oswald had been a scapegoat for the assassination, and it appears they had been unwitting “babysitters” for the Oswalds, without foreknowledge of the fate that awaited the “baby.” The Warren Report’s euphemistic description of de Mohrenschildt’s intelligence connections is worthy of note: “a highly individualistic person of varied interests.” Unfortunately for him, three hours after he revealed that the CIA had sanctioned his contact with Oswald, George de Mohrenschildt was found shot to death in his daughter’s house in Manalapan, Florida.38
According to the official story, on March 12, 1963, Oswald purchased a mail-order rifle from Klein’s Sporting Goods in Chicago, which was then shipped to “A. Hidell” at a post office box owned by Lee H. Oswald. Doing this by mail guaranteed that a paper trail would be recorded when, at that time, a rifle could be purchased from any gun store in Texas without a permit and no record of the transfer would be maintained. Interestingly, the commission’s own exhibit 2585 stated that “Oswald did not indicate on his application that others, including an ‘A. Hidell,’ would receive mail through the box …” According to the post office’s standard practices, any such mail should be returned to the sender. The current United States Postal Service Domestic Mail Manual, section 508.4.3.1 a (2) reads, “Other adult persons who receive mail in the Post Office box of an individual box customer must be listed on PS Form 1093 and must present two forms of valid identification to the Post Office.” The regulation in effect in 1963 was not materially different than this.
When he was arrested at the theater on November 22, Oswald carried a fake Selective Service card with the name of A. J. Hidell and an expired U.S. Department of Defense card. On April 10, Oswald allegedly attempted to kill General Walker with this same rifle as he worked on his taxes. The shooting incident was witnessed by a fourteen-year-old boy, Walter Coleman, who stated that he saw at least two men involved in this incident; other men testified that they saw other suspicious activity in the area a few days before that involving more than one man. The Warren Commission was anxious to accept all factors pointing to Oswald’s guilt, in order to portray him as a man capable of such violence, but chose to ignore all exculpatory evidence pointing to others, of which there was plenty.39 Two weeks after this, Oswald’s rabidly anti-Communist “handlers” decided he should be moved to New Orleans for additional training to strengthen his pro-Communist bona fides.
Oswald in New Orleans
On April 24, 1963, the same day that the Dallas Times Herald reported that President Kennedy was planning to visit Dallas and other Texas cities, Oswald left Dallas and went to New Orleans where he proceeded to make contact with a number of people, none of whom were Communists nor friends of Castro, Cuba, or the Soviet Union. In fact, they were uniformly antagonistic to all of the above. He quickly found a job at the Reily Coffee Company, owned by William B. Reily, a supporter of the CIA-sponsored Cuban Revolutionary Council.40 The Reily Coffee Company and its owner had a long association with the CIA going back to at least 1949 and was located at the center of the U.S. intelligence community in New Orleans, close to the offices of the CIA, FBI, ONI, and the Secret Service. Another nearby office was that of the detective agency owned by former FBI agent William Guy Banister.41
In 1963, Banister’s private investigation firm, Guy Banister Associates, had its offices in the Newman Building, located at 544 Camp Street in New Orleans. David Ferrie worked part-time as a private investigator for Banister and part-time for Carlos Marcello, doing whatever was necessary to assist the head of the New Orleans Mob; in fact, as we shall see, he was well alibied on November 22, 1963, si
tting alongside Marcello at the end of his deportation trial. During the summer of 1963, unbeknownst to the Warren Commission, Ferrie, Banister, and Lee Harvey Oswald were often together at Banister’s office, which was only a block away from the coffee company where Oswald worked. Oswald even stamped “544 Camp Street” on pro-Castro brochures he handed out.
David Ferrie was, among other things, a fanatical right-wing extremist who hated Fidel Castro with the same intensity as he hated John F. Kennedy; Ferrie had connections to both the CIA and the Mafia. Guy Banister, a former FBI agent and former New Orleans assistant police chief, was also a fanatical right-wing extremist and anti-Castroite who also had CIA connections. Banister had set up two CIA backed anti-Castro organizations—the Cuban Revolutionary Democratic Front and the Friends of a Democratic Cuba; he was also an active member of several militant anti-Communist organizations including the John Birch Society, the Minutemen, and the Anti-Communist League of the Caribbean. It is likely that Oswald had reacquainted himself with Ferrie soon after he arrived in New Orleans since he had known him since 1955 when they were both in the Civil Air Patrol squadron in Dallas (a unit which had been started by D. H. Byrd, who also happened to own the Texas School Book Depository Building).
The enigmatic Oswald—supposedly a radical leftist having left a community of ultraright White Russians in Dallas—had gone to New Orleans and immediately become involved with still more right-wing zealots, including Shaw, Ferrie, and Banister. Despite all of his “real” associations with right wingers, he then set out to create at least a paper trail to left wingers, becoming a member of the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee. The portrayal of Oswald as a pro-Communist, pro-Castro activist attempting to infiltrate right-wing circles is less believable than that he was merely “playing a role,” which was carefully designed to appeal to his delusion of himself as a professional spy; it is doubtful that the youthful Oswald could have presumed that he could fool his old friend Ferrie and the even older, presumably wiser Banister, least of all their leader Clay Shaw, all of whom had extensive intelligence backgrounds and extreme right-wing political views. The only realistic explanation for his portrayal as being pro-Castro was that this is exactly how Ferrie and Banister decided he should be developed in the role that they were preparing for him. The role he was being groomed for required that he have a “legend,” which was essentially a continuation of his original cover as a Communist sympathizer, which had originally been created for him when he defected to the Soviet Union in 1959. It is known that Bill Harvey had been meeting with Banister in Miami42 in 1962 through early 1963, and it is reasonable to speculate as to the nature of their discussions. This started just before Oswald returned from the Soviet Union and was running parallel to the time (referenced in chapter 2) in which Harvey was involved in ominous meetings in the Florida Keys, at anti-Castro camps with Johnny Rosselli, David Atlee Phillips, and David Sanchez Morales. The plan Harvey was devising, with help from Angleton, involved setting Lee Harvey Oswald up for later use as an expendable fall guy a “patsy,” in a plan that was only then being created. They delighted in linking Oswald to the FBI, through a variety of clues left behind, which they knew would force Hoover’s hand in the cover-up phase.
Banister had started grooming Oswald shortly after his arrival in New Orleans in the spring of 1963, according to a fellow FBI agent and business associate Ivan Nitschke.43 The manager of a parking garage across the street from Bannister’s office, Adrian Alba, had a contract to look after FBI cars and would later testify that Oswald was handed “a good-sized envelop” from an FBI agent in one of those cars. He stated that “Lee Oswald went across the sidewalk. He bent down as if to look in the window and was handed [the envelop] … He turned and bent as if to hold the envelop to his abdomen, and I think he put it under his shirt. Oswald then went back into the building, and the car drove off … Oswald met the car again a couple of days later and talked briefly with the driver … Apparently Oswald is being utilized by the New Orleans field office through Banister’s agency to help them infiltrate the Cuban exile community as a way of ferreting out pro-Castroites.”44 At the same time, Oswald was being managed by the CIA through David Ferrie, also a Marcello functionary, completing a circle that connects all three of the main entities, which were then planning the JFK assassination.
The presence of the closely knit intelligence community in New Orleans in 1963 was among the largest in the country, second only to Miami. In both cities, they shared the same focus, and that was vengeance toward Cuba, its Communist leaders, and its continued occupation by thousands of Russian soldiers.
Oswald Himself Helps Advance the Imposter Illusion
Oswald was seen by many people in Clinton, Louisiana, during a civil rights voter registration line as a lone white male standing in a long line amongst all the black people for whom the drive was organized. This was only one event in a string of evidence that Oswald, while in New Orleans for almost six months in 1963, associated with millionaire Clay Shaw, director of the New Orleans Trade Mart, a prominent business leader with CIA connections. The day after Martin Luther King’s famous “I have a dream” speech, August 29, 1963, Oswald, accompanied by David Ferrie and Clay Shaw, traveled to Clinton, a small Louisiana town about 120 miles northwest of New Orleans, near the Mississippi border.45 The odd sight of Oswald standing in line for about ninety minutes with a line of black country folks, trucked there for the first of a series of major “voter registration drives” sponsored by the Congress of Racial Equality, ensured that numerous people witnessed his appearance. An additional oddity of the situation that many people noticed was that two men waited for Oswald in a new black Cadillac sedan: one was a tall, gray-haired handsome man known as Clay Shaw, or Clay Bertrand depending upon the circumstances. The other man was a very strange-looking character with glaring stare and no hair, other than the moplike wig he wore, and painted eyebrows. His name was David Ferrie, a friend and renowned homosexual, like Clay Shaw/Bertrand.46
Clinton is thirty miles west of Kentwood, Clay Shaw’s hometown, where he was born and buried. He spent many years growing up in the university town of Hammond, just thirty-four miles south of Kentwood, and Hammond was only a few miles from Lake Pontchartrain, the site of one of the CIA’s secret training camps used for the training of anti-Castro insurgents prior and subsequent to the Bay of Pigs invasion. This camp was set up on land owned by a man named Bill McLaney, an old business friend of Jack Ruby’s. Moreover, another old Ruby friend, Lewis McWillie, was the manager of Meyer Lansky’s Havana casino resort, the Tropicana, when Ruby visited him in 1959 at a time during which they were both involved in smuggling firearms to Cuba; they were still tightly connected in 1963 when McWillie worked for Lansky at the Thunderbird Hotel in Las Vegas and received seven telephone calls from Ruby in that year. Through this connection, Ruby was also involved with Johnny Rosselli, with whom he met twice in October 1963, and Santos Trafficante.47 According to Peter Dale Scott, Ruby’s contacts with mob figures, “far from being meager and easily enumerated, are so manifold as to defy enumeration … Ruby was in contact, up to the very hours before the assassination, with establishment figures who in turn interfaced with the intelligence-mob connection.”48
All of this explains Ruby’s comment to a friend in his jail cell after the assassination: “They’re going to find out about Cuba. They’re going to find out about the guns, find out about New Orleans, and find out about everything.”49 Ruby was wrong, of course. The Warren Commission and the House Select Committee fifteen years later steered clear of getting too close to Ruby’s connections to Cuba, to gunrunning and narcotics smuggling, and all his other long history of illegal activities for fear of discovering more information than it could handle.
The Clinton appearance occurred shortly after the FBI had conducted a raid on a building at the Lake Pontchartrain site, July 31, 1963. In that raid they confiscated ammunition, dynamite, bomb casings, fuses, and fuel explosives. These were being collected for the pur
pose of bombing oil refineries in Cuba. The FBI had been tipped off to this violation of the Neutrality Act and acted on the president’s orders. They also captured some key players in the movement but, oddly, released them without filing charges. In this appearance in Clinton, the real Oswald appeared, not his “double” who made a number of other appearances in New Orleans and Dallas. This indicated that Oswald himself was enlisted in the effort to obfuscate his background while creating another “thread on the web.” Judyth Vary Baker, who persuasively claims to have been Oswald’s lover during the summer of 1963 in New Orleans, stated that the purpose of the trip to Clinton was for the group to meet up with a convoy of patients who were being transported to the hospital. One of the patients was a Cuban man of the same age and physique as Fidel Castro; he had been selected to become a “guinea pig” for testing an injection of cancer cells which she had helped to develop. She had purportedly worked at the Ochsner Clinic in New Orleans on this project with others, including David Ferrie and Dr. Mary Sherman, to develop a “galloping” form of cancer intended for Castro. The Cadillac was parked near the courthouse where the registration line had formed, next to a pay telephone so they could await a call informing them of when to expect the convoy. In the meantime, Oswald became upset that a black lady, who was a college graduate, had been rejected for registration due to her having failed a “literacy test.” As the group awaited the telephone call, Lee made a bet with Shaw and Ferrie that he could register to vote simply because he was white, even though he did not live in the district, simply if he said he was just moving there to get a job at the mental hospital. He failed, though, for that very reason, and left as the Registrar said “Forget about a job there, you belong in a mental hospital.”50