Ms. Odio had made a very impressive, compelling, and convincing witness, one who had placed a potential bombshell at the commission’s door, which caused the members some trepidation since her testimony was in direct conflict with their planned conclusions. Toward the end of the Warren Commission’s term, J. Edgar Hoover moved to quell the commission’s dilemma when he claimed to have found the three men in California and therefore Oswald could not have been at Ms. Odio’s apartment; they were subsequently questioned and exonerated, but by then the report was at the printers and the commission had been adjourned.
Like many of the details surrounding the events leading up to the assassination, these reports now seem intertwined, twisted, ragged, and tangled. That is the inevitable result of their having been created through a very complex web of covert intelligence operatives laying the groundwork for an assassination and an evidence trail that would lead in multiple directions away from its real center. On this particular thread of the web, we can see the commission deftly balancing the need for demonstrating its effectiveness and thoroughness against a major piece of conflicting evidence. Had it not been for Hoover’s eleventh-hour announcement, they would have had great difficulty getting past her testimony, and it is as difficult now as it was then for the commission to ignore her testimony. J. Edgar Hoover’s ability to step in at exactly the right moment to redirect the course of the commission’s deliberations was invaluable to the new president Lyndon B. Johnson and his effort to put a lid on the entire affair weeks before the 1964 presidential election.
More Appearances of an Oswald Impersonator
On May 29, 1963, a man using the name Osborne showed up at a New Orleans printing company to place an order for several hundred “Hands off Cuba” handbills. The same man who the owner of the printing company, Douglas Jones, described as a “husky-type” man who had the “appearance of a laborer” showed up again a week later, paying the bill in cash. The FBI questioned both Jones and his secretary about this incident; neither of them could identify the picture of Oswald as having been the man in question. This was highly exculpatory evidence of a conspiracy, which the FBI tried to hide.71 When the Secret Service began looking into the incident, “FBI Washington immediately contacted the FBI’s liaison with James J. Rowley to request that Rowley have his agent stand down. That same day, December 12, Rice received instructions from Secret Service headquarters in Washington to drop his investigation into the matter. He was informed, in effect, that he was poaching in an area of the investigation that was exclusively the FBI’s domain. [John] Rice [the Secret Service agent in New Orleans] was clearly dumbfounded.”72 Rice was apparently not aware that the investigation had long since been closed down; in fact, “Hoover fired off a memo to the General Investigative Division saying, ‘Wrap up investigation; seems to me we have the basic facts now’” on Tuesday, November 26, 1963, the day after Kennedy’s funeral and requested the report be “completed here at Seat of Government” by Friday, November 29, despite his knowledge of the many loose ends still unresolved.73
There were several other incidents which show that Oswald was being systematically impersonated during the weeks leading up to the assassination, all while the real Lee was verified to be with his wife and Ruth Paine, their landlady. A very detailed account of these incidents was developed by Jim Marrs, partly with previous documentation by others as noted therein, including names, dates, and citations to sworn testimony before the Warren Commission; the following is a consolidated summary of this original compelling research:74
• On April 1, 1963, a former immigration inspector interviewed “Lee Harvey Oswald” in a jail cell in New Orleans because he claimed to be a Cuban alien, which the inspector found to be untrue;
• On September 25, 1963, an official with the Selective Service system in Austin, Texas, reported that a Harvey Oswald visited her to get his military discharge changed from “other than honorable” to “honorable”;
• On November 7, 1963, a man drove up in a blue/white two-tone Ford with his wife to a furniture store that still had a “Guns” sign in the window from its previous tenant. The man waved his wife into the store to look at furniture and indicated he needed to find a gun store for a repair and was referred to the Irving Sports Shop where he left a rifle that he would never reclaim. He had written the name Oswald on the claim ticket.75
• On November 8, 1963, a man claiming to be Oswald attempted to cash a check for $189 in a small Irving grocery store;
• On November 9, 1963, a man named Oswald bragged to a car dealer in Dallas that he would be coming into a large amount of money in a few weeks. He produced a driver’s license and then test drove a new car at speeds up to 70 mph and recklessly weaving through traffic on the Stemmons Expressway. The salesman, Al Bogard, told one of the other salesmen that he drove like a “madman.” Of course, the real Oswald did not drive and did not have a driver’s license, yet the salesmen identified him as Oswald.
• For several days beginning November 10, 1963, a man named Lee Oswald began showing up at the Sports Drome Rifle Range in Dallas to practice shooting his rifle. “Thirteen year old Sterling Wood was shooting with his father when the two noticed an unusual flame spouting from the rifle of the man next to them. The father told the boy it was okay; the rifle was only an Italian carbine, and the man was an excellent shot. When Dr. Wood looked over at his neighbor’s target, he saw that most of the hits were in the bull’s-eye. The few that missed were outside it by an inch or two. After watching this for a while, Sterling walked over to the man and asked it was a 6.5 Italian carbine with a four-power scope. The man replied that it was. Garland Slack had talked briefly to this mysterious marksman on November 10 at the same range. Exactly one week later the man burned himself into Slack’s memory. While on the next firing slot, he began shooting at Slack’s target. And hitting it. All three witnesses later identified the rifleman as Lee Oswald. Sterling was also right about the rifle.”76
Regardless of the recollections of these witnesses whose sightings of Oswald were brief and several weeks old by the time of their testimony, the real Oswald was not in the places they stated; he was either at work or home. In all of these cases, the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald could not have been present and thus used that as an excuse to summarily dismiss the claims. Evidently, the absence of a real investigative process, or even simple, logical curiosity—or perhaps it was simply the continued prodding of Johnson, Hoover, and their minions—caused this “blue ribbon committee” to ignore these important leads and therefore the obvious, unanswered, question: who was pretending to be Oswald and why?
The Oswald Setup Continues from New Orleans,
November 22, 1963
As the operatives in Dallas prepared for their work, the New Orleans Mafia chief Carlos Marcello’s final day on trial was proceeding. One of the CIA contract agents with whom he had planned JFK’s assassination, David Ferrie, attended the trial with him and was there when Judge Herbert Christenberry read a note that had just been handed to him by the bailiff announcing the news from Dallas. After a brief recess, the trial continued, ending with the acquittal of Marcello. Immediately afterward, Ferrie set out on a road trip to Houston, driving all night through a violent thunderstorm with two young male companions. Early the next day, November 23, he went to the Winterland Skating Rink, taking calls and calling others on a payphone.77 One of the calls was to Marcello’s headquarters back in New Orleans.78
Dick Russell reported that “when he [Ferrie] returned to New Orleans, he learned from Marcello’s attorney, G. Wray Gill, that his own library card had apparently been found on Lee Harvey Oswald after the alleged assassin’s arrest.”79 Ferrie panicked on this news and went to Dallas, frantically searching for anyone knowing the whereabouts of his library card, including Oswald’s former landlady, his neighbor, and several former members of the Civil Air Patrol where Ferrie and Oswald had first met.80 Russell also interviewed a friend of Ferrie’s, Raymond Broshears, who provided ma
ny details of Ferrie’s unique personality that explain some of these actions. Broshears stated that Ferrie was convinced that Kennedy was a Communist and that he believed that the United States would soon be at war with the USSR because of the continuing struggles between the superpowers over Cuba; he was also convinced that the Soviet nuclear bombs and missiles were still in Cuba, which would lead to an all-out atomic holocaust within the United States.81
According to Broshears, the reason Ferrie suddenly took the trip to Texas was that he “was to meet a plane. He was going to fly these people on to Mexico, and eventually to South Africa, which did not have an extradition treaty with the United States. They had left from some little airfield between Dallas and Fort Worth, and David had a twin-engine plane ready for them, and that was the purpose of his mad dash through a driving rainstorm from New Orleans. But the plane crashed off the coast of Texas near Corpus Christi. That was what David was told in the telephone booth that day. Apparently they had decided to try to make it to Mexico on their own. They did not.”82
Other Evidence of the Oswald Frame-up
On January 22, 1964, as it met in executive session, “the Warren Commission heard from both Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade and Texas attorney general Waggoner Carr that Oswald had been an FBI informant since September, 1962, that he had a federal government voucher for $200 at the time of his arrest, and that FBI Agent James Hosty’s name and phone number were in his address book.”83 Yet when the FBI originally supplied it with a list of the names in Oswald’s notebook, Hosty’s name had been omitted.84 The transcript of that meeting revealed a great amount of concern that this information would cause them problems if it were ever made public:
LEE RANKIN “If that was true and it ever came out … then you would have people
think that there was a conspiracy to accomplish this assassination.
HALE BOGGS: You are so right.
ALLEN DULLES: Oh, terrible.
HALE BOGGS: The implications of this are fantastic.
EARL WARREN: Terrific.
LEE RANKIN: I am confident that the FBI will never admit it, and I presume their records will never show it.
J. Edgar Hoover testified to the commission that Oswald had never been employed by the FBI, just as Richard Helms did when he denied that the CIA had ever employed Oswald. This was only one instance, which would later prompt Majority Leader Hale Boggs, a member of the Warren Commission, to say, “Hoover lied his eyes out to the Commission, on Oswald, on Ruby, on their friends, the bullets, the gun, you name it …”85
During the course of the Warren Commission’s and FBI’s “investigation” of Oswald, his former superior, Marine Corps Lieutenant John E. Donavan, testified to the commission that Oswald “had the access to the location of all bases in the west coast area, all radio frequencies for all squadrons, all tactical call signs, and the relative strength of all squadrons, number and type of aircraft in a squadron, who was the commanding officer, the authentication code of entering and exiting the ADIZ, which stands for Air Defense Identification Zone. He knew the range of our radar. He knew the range of our radio. And he knew the range of the surrounding units’ radio and radar.”86 But the Warren Commission carefully avoided asking any questions related to Oswald’s U-2 knowledge.
Donavan was puzzled by the lack of interest of the Warren Commission on the subject of Oswald’s connection to the top secret U-2. He asked a fellow witness who also knew of this connection whether the lawyers had asked him anything about it, and he said they had not. He then asked one of the commission lawyers about it and the lawyer said, “We asked you exactly what we wanted to know from you and we asked you everything we wanted for now and that is all. And if there is anything else we want to ask you, we will.”87 The frame-up of evidence implicating Oswald also included the planting of Commission Exhibit 399—the “magic bullet,” which matched Oswald’s rifle—the planting of the weapon and the matching shells near the so-called “sniper’s nest” in the Book Depository. The true evidence in this and many other cited books—that ballistics evidence and medical records were subsequently tampered with in order to support the lone gunman theory—further tie together the many unresolved aspects which the Warren Commission had left dangling.
While the preassassination Oswald setup events are at first glance more intriguing, because they are inherently part of the assassination plot, the post-assassination cover-up activities also served to frame Oswald for the murder and to hide his connections to the intelligence community. It is the continuity of the frame-up, beginning months before the assassination and immediately continuing for days, weeks, and months (arguably years and decades) afterward, that tie the two phases together. One of the most important traces of the frame-up was the connection to the planted Cuban conspiracy, which was aborted in the days after the assassination. It continued to be the single most important point for several days because Lyndon Johnson used it in his enlistment of “volunteers” to serve on the Warren Commission, including Earl Warren himself who may have been cornered into participating in the cover-up on the basis of the perceived need to mask traces to an international conspiracy. It succeeded at that but in the process aided in the cover-up of the real conspiracy, which was of a domestic design by powerful men directly associated with the very law enforcement and intelligence agencies from which the commission depended for its information.
Traces of the Conspiracy Surface—Before Dallas
Eugene B. Dinkin
Exactly one month before JFK was assassinated, a cryptographic code operator working for the U.S. Army Ordinance in Metz, France, tried to alert his superiors—all the way up to Robert F. Kennedy—that John F. Kennedy would be assassinated in November, in Texas. An FBI report dated April 9, 1964, confirmed that Eugene B. Dinkin, entrusted with the military’s highest Crypto clearance, predicted “that a conspiracy was in the making for the ‘military’ of the United States, perhaps combined with an ‘ultra right wing economic group’”88 He discovered the plot as he routinely processed messages between the plotters (i.e., Bill Harvey and/or Guy Bannister and QJ/WIN, a hit man of French origin, associated with the Antoine Guerini Mob headquartered in Marseilles, France. A number of known hit men were part of this gang, some known variously as Carlos Rigal, Victor Michael Mertz, Michel Roux, Lucien Sarti, or Jean Soutre).
His mistake was letting certain of his superiors know about his discovery and that he was preparing to leak this information despite his sworn oath of secrecy; evidently, he felt that there was a higher duty owed to his country than to knowingly participate, by omission, in the murder of the president. Dinkin heard through the grapevine that he was going to be locked up as a psychotic and decided to go AWOL, taking a train to Geneva, Switzerland, where he found reporters in the pressroom of the United Nations office to whom he told his story. From there he went on to Luxembourg where he reported it to several embassies and finally on to Germany where he reported it to Overseas Weekly where he was talked into turning himself in. At that point, the grapevine rumor came true. His reward for trying to save the president’s life was to be committed to a psychiatric hospital. By December 5, 1963, he had been brought back to Washington DC. and put into Walter Reed Hospital where he was given strong drugs and electric shock treatment.89 He was forced to admit that he was only looking for attention; whenever he said otherwise, he was given an electric shock. “Dinkin said that he feigned cooperation and professed understanding of his unfortunate mental condition being ‘schizo-assassination prognostication.’”90 Dinkin discussed his treatment with his mother, who then wrote Robert Kennedy on December 20, 1963, stating, among other things, that “Col. Dickson and Lt. Col. Black came into the orderly room of his company and phoned psychiatrist Col Hutson and gave him a direct order to find him psychologically unfit to handle security information, and to write a paranoiac evaluation. He claims this to be a frame up.”91
In a civil action lawsuit in 1975, Dinkin stated that the information he intercepted reveale
d that “blame would then be placed upon a Communist or Negro, who would be designated the assassin; and believing that the conspiracy was being engineered by elements of the military, I did speculate that a military coup might ensue. I did request of the Attorney General that he dispatch a representative of the Justice Department to Metz, France to discuss this warning.”92
Either Angleton’s tentacles reached deeply enough to intercept Dinkin’s letter to Robert F. Kennedy or military superiors familiar with Johnson’s plan caught it; it is possible that RFK simply ignored it after being reassured that Dinkin was a nut. In any event, it got Richard Helms’s attention who alerted a number of others in a classified memo, which stated, “All aspects of this story were known, as reported above, by U.S. military authorities and have been reported by military attaché cable through military channels.”93
The CIA was coincidentally running its Operation MK/ULTRA (owned by Allen Dulles and operated by Richard Helms) at the same time, which involved psychological warfare, mind control, and hypnosis with a little LSD experimentation mixed in; the evidence presented by author Twyman indicates that Dinkin was quickly swept into that program as soon as he was institutionalized.94 It was within this same program that Oswald was possibly groomed for his adventures in the Soviet Union and beyond.
Abraham Bolden, Secret Service Agent
Mr. Bolden was the first black Secret Service agent in the United States, recruited personally by John F. Kennedy when the two met in Chicago during the 1960 campaign. He was also harassed repeatedly during his tenure, some of which was spent with the White House detail traveling with Kennedy around the country. Bolden was working in the Chicago office of the Secret Service three weeks before Kennedy’s Texas trip when a threat was received in connection with a planned trip to see a football game; the threat involved a four-man Cuban hit squad armed with high-powered rifles. Presumably as a result of this threat, the trip was cancelled.
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