by Jim Marrs
But there was no fight. Police arrived and took Oswald, Bringuier, and two others into custody. All were charged with disturbing the peace. Oswald tried to contact his uncle for the $25 bail but failed. His uncle’s daughter, however, contacted a family friend, New Orleans gambler Emile Bruneau, who put up the money.
However, before leaving the New Orleans police station, oddly Oswald asked to speak to an FBI agent. Despite being outside normal business hours, agent John Quigley soon arrived and spent more than an hour with Oswald. His report gave every detail of Oswald’s travels and stay in New Orleans and appeared more like a debriefing to the bureau by Oswald than the ramblings of an anti-American.
It is interesting to note the impression of Oswald by the New Orleans police. Speaking of the Bringuier episode, Lieutenant Francis Martello later said, “He seemed to have them set up to create an incident,” while Sergeant Horace Austin recalled, “[Oswald] appeared as though he is being used by these people.”
After this brush with the law, Oswald’s pro-Castro stance became even more public. He was soon on New Orleans radio and television telling his pro-Castro story to a wider audience. Tipped off to Oswald by Bringuier, radio reporter William Stuckey allowed Oswald to expound on his thoughts on Cuba and South America. This radio interview is significant in that it was widely used after the assassination to “prove” his procommunist credentials.
A few days later, armed with information obtained from the FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee, Stuckey and right-wing broadcaster Ed Butler verbally ambushed Oswald in another radio interview. This interview may have provided an accidental peek at Oswald’s real allegiance. Oswald was suddenly confronted with his attempted defection to Russia. The pro-Castro Oswald, self-proclaimed secretary of the New Orleans chapter of the FPCC, was suddenly revealed to have been a communist sympathizer who had tried to renounce his American citizenship. Caught off guard, Oswald stammered, “I was under the protection of the . . . uh . . . that is to say, I was not under the protection of the American government . . . but I was at all times considered an American citizen.”
It has been documented that both the CIA and the FBI at that time were making efforts not only to penetrate the FPCC but also to discredit the pro-Castro organization. Was revealing Oswald’s Soviet life part of this program?
But the most intriguing aspect of Oswald’s stay in New Orleans centered around 544 Camp Street.
544 Camp Street
It was at 544 Camp Street in an old, three-story office building that the paths of Lee Harvey Oswald, the FBI, the CIA, anti-Castro Cubans, and organized-crime figures all crossed.
Until a few months prior to Oswald’s arrival in New Orleans, the aging building housed the offices of the Cuban Revolutionary Council (CRC), the umbrella anti-Castro organization created by CIA officer E. Howard Hunt.
CRC members included Carlos Bringuier, the man who had the much-publicized street encounter with Oswald; Sergio Archaca-Smith, a CRC top official with close documented ties to CIA operative and pilot David Ferrie; and Carlos Prio Socarras, former president of Cuba before Batista and one of the leading Cuban exiles close to CIA agents E. Howard Hunt, Bernard Barker, and Frank Sturgis (all of later Watergate fame).
Prio—who had paid for the yacht Granma Castro used to land his revolutionaries on Cuba—had turned on Castro and become a leading anti-Castroite. It is alleged that Prio was to have become the new president of Cuba following the ill-fated Bay of Pigs Invasion.
Prio once was arrested in a gunrunning conspiracy along with a man named Robert McKeown. According to evidence developed by the Warren Commission, McKeown had been involved in a deal “running jeeps to Cuba” and other smuggling operations with Jack Ruby, the man who killed Oswald.
In April 1977, before he was scheduled to testify for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, Prio was found shot in the chest in his Miami Beach garage. The wound was ruled self-inflicted.
Although the CRC had left 544 Camp Street by the time Oswald was seen there in the summer of 1963, there were still plenty of Cuban connections. A side entrance to 544 Camp Street was 531 Lafayette Street, the address of Guy Banister Associates, a private detective agency. Banister, who the New Orleans States-Item paper in 1967 claimed helped supply munitions to the Bay of Pigs invaders, was a former FBI man with connections reaching into the bureau, the CIA, and organized crime as well as the Cuban exiles.
In 1978 his secretary, Delphine Roberts, told the Dallas Morning News that Oswald had worked for Banister as “an undercover agent” in the summer of 1963. During that same time, another of Banister’s employees was Oswald’s former Civil Air Patrol leader, David Ferrie, who worked for both the CIA and the New Orleans mob.
In the Warren Commission exhibits are some of Oswald’s Fair Play for Cuba Committee leaflets. They are stamped:
FPCC
544 CAMP STREET
NEW ORLEANS, LA.
Another intriguing contact point between Oswald, 544 Camp Street, and the Cubans was Ernesto Rodriguez. Recall that in the summer of 1963 Oswald wrote the Fair Play for Cuba Committee stating he was going to get a small office. During this same time period, the owner of the 544 Camp Street building, Sam Newman, said he was approached by a Hispanic man who asked about renting an office and said he was an electrician by day and wanted to teach Spanish at night.
Shortly after the assassination and acting on a tip, authorities talked with Rodriguez, who did teach Spanish and whose father was in the electrical business.
Rodriguez admitted that he had met Oswald, who apparently wanted to learn Spanish. Rodriguez also said that Oswald had offered to train anti-Castro exiles and, in fact, it was Rodriguez who had sent Oswald to meet Carlos Bringuier.
There was plenty of undercover activity going on at 544 Camp Street in the summer of 1963. The location may have had something to do with it. The building was located close to the New Orleans offices of both the FBI and the CIA, it was near the Crescent City Garage where Oswald was seen in the company of FBI agents, and it was just around the corner from the William B. Reily Coffee Company, Oswald’s employer.
New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison believed it was at 544 Camp Street that plans were set in motion that culminated in Dealey Plaza.
The CIA reported to the Warren Commission that Oswald’s pro-Castro activities included an attempt to secure a visa to visit Cuba during a trip to Mexico City in late September 1963. The agency apparently went to great lengths to prove that Oswald was in Mexico City at this time, but the effort was not entirely successful. Photographs of a man entering the Soviet embassy and a tape recording made at the time were shown to be of someone other than Oswald.
To document Oswald’s visit to the Cuban embassy, the CIA relied on the testimony of a Mexican who worked at the embassy, Silvia Tirado de Duran. Duran, however, is a dubious witness at best since it is now known that the twenty-six-year-old woman was arrested twice following the assassination on orders from the CIA and may have been coerced into giving false testimony.
But again, it is the connections between the assassination and anti-Castro groups that have always turned up the most intriguing evidence—evidence that has largely been ignored by US authorities, particularly the Warren Commission.
Oswald and the Exiles
One of several incidents often cited to connect Lee Harvey Oswald with the anti-Castro Cubans involves one of the most violent of the exile groups, Alpha 66, and its founder, Antonio Veciana Blanch.
Veciana, a former Cuban bank accountant who turned against Castro, was helping to conduct raids against the island during the missile crisis and has consistently maintained that he was working for the CIA.
In the spring of 1963, Kennedy publicly criticized the hit-and-run raids of Alpha 66, to which Veciana replied publicly, “We are going to attack again and again.” The militant Cuban leader has claimed to have worked for a CIA officer known to him as “Maurice Bishop.” According to Veciana, he met with Bisho
p more than a hundred times and the CIA officer helped guide the activities of Alpha 66, including plans to assassinate Castro. Veciana said his relationship with the agency did not end until 1973, when Bishop paid him $253,000 as back pay for his services.
But Veciana’s most astounding claim is that during a visit to Dallas in late August or early September 1963, he saw his CIA case officer in conversation with a man he later recognized as Lee Harvey Oswald.
Although the House Select Committee on Assassinations failed to “credit” Veciana’s story of the Oswald-Bishop meeting, it nevertheless went to great lengths to try to locate the mysterious Bishop, including sending an artist’s sketch of Bishop to US newspapers. The committee also scoured CIA files to try to identify Bishop. Unsurprisingly, the agency denied ever assigning a case officer to Veciana.
Veciana also told the committee that shortly after the assassination, Bishop contacted him and reminded him that he had a relative working for Cuban intelligence living in Mexico. According to Veciana, Bishop wanted Veciana to offer his relative a “large sum of money” to say that the relative and his wife met Oswald during his Mexico City trip. Veciana said he agreed to this scheme but was unable to contact his relative.
The House committee later developed information that Bishop may have been none other than David Atlee Phillips, former chief of the Western Hemisphere Division’s Directorate of Operations in the CIA. Phillips denied being Bishop and a suddenly fearful Veciana agreed. However, after arranging a meeting between Veciana and Phillips, the committee staff reported it “suspected that Veciana was lying when he denied that the retired CIA officer was Bishop.” Its report added, “Further, a former CIA case officer who was assigned from September 1960 to November 1962 to the JM/WAVE station in Miami told the committee that the retired officer [Phillips] had in fact used the alias, Maurice Bishop.”
Though the controversy continues today, most JFK researchers believe Phillips and Bishop were one and the same.
David Atlee Phillips died of cancer on July 7, 1988. In an unpublished novel concerning a CIA officer who lived in Mexico City, Phillips had his character lament:
I was one of those officers who handled Lee Harvey Oswald. . . . We gave him the mission of killing Fidel Castro in Cuba. . . . I don’t know why he killed Kennedy. But I do know he used precisely the plan we had devised against Castro. Thus the CIA did not anticipate the president’s assassination, but it was responsible for it. I share that guilt.
A prime example of the interference with investigations into links between anti-Castro Cubans and the assassination came just days after Kennedy was killed. The Chicago field office of the Secret Service reported to superiors that it had heard from an informant that a Chicago group “may have [had] a connection with the JFK assassination.” The informant reported that on the day before the assassination, a Cuban militant named Homer S. Echevarria had stated that he had “plenty of money” for an illegal arms deal and would proceed with the plan “as soon as we take care of Kennedy.”
The Secret Service checked on Echevarria and discovered he was an associate of the military director of the Cuban Student Directorate (the New Orleans chapter of the CSD was headed by Carlos Bringuier, who had squabbled with Oswald on the streets of that city) and that the munitions deal was financed by “hoodlum elements . . . not restricted to Chicago.”
Although the Secret Service wanted to pursue the matter, the FBI—which on November 29, 1963, President Johnson designated to control the assassination investigation—“made clear that it wanted the Secret Service to terminate its investigation” of the Echevarria report. The case was closed.
One anti-Castro-Cuban-Oswald story that was not so easy to brush off is that of Cuban exile Silvia Odio. She and her sister Annie came from a distinguished and wealthy Cuban family. The sisters had been forced to flee Cuba after their parents were imprisoned by the Castro government. Their father, who initially had supported Castro’s revolution, had turned against the bearded leader and was arrested for concealing a man named Reinaldo Gonzalez, who was involved in a plot to kill Castro. Interestingly, Gonzalez’s co-conspirator was Antonio Veciana, the leader of Alpha 66 who operated under the instructions of Maurice Bishop.
Shortly before moving to Dallas, Silvia Odio had joined with other anti-Castro Cubans in Puerto Rico and formed Junta Revolucionaria (the Cuban Revolutionary Junta) or JURE.
One night in late September 1963—they believe it was the 26th or 27th—three men came to Odio’s Dallas apartment. There were two Hispanics and one Caucasian, described as weary, unkempt, and unshaved.
The leader of the trio identified himself as “Leopoldo” and introduced the other Hispanic man as “Angel” or “Angelo.” He introduced the American as “Leon Oswald.”
The men said they had just arrived from New Orleans, were members of JURE, and were working with the Cuban Revolutionary Council (CRC). They knew her father’s underground name and many details of anti-Castro activities in Cuba, including recent plots to kill Castro. They told Silvia Odio that they were trying to raise funds for anti-Castro operations and wanted her help in translating solicitation letters to American businessmen. Something about the men, however, made Odio uneasy and she sent them away after warning them that she did not want to be involved in a campaign of violence. During their brief stay, her sister Annie also got a good look at the trio.
Within forty-eight hours, “Leopoldo” called Silvia Odio and asked for her thoughts on their American companion. She said the man then made a series of comments, saying:
Well, you know he’s a Marine, an ex-Marine, and an expert marksman. He would be a tremendous asset to anyone, except that you never know how to take him. . . . He’s kind of loco, kind of nuts. He could go any way. He could do anything—like getting underground in Cuba, like killing Castro. . . . The American says we Cubans don’t have any guts. He says we should have shot President Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs. He says we should do something like that.
Apparently, that was all “Leopoldo” had to say, for he quickly hung up and Odio never heard from him again. She later told author Anthony Summers, “Immediately, I suspected there was some sort of scheme or plot.”
Although the Odio sisters wrote of the incident to their father and told the story to friends well before Kennedy’s assassination, they did not tell authorities of the strange visitors. Both sisters were shocked and frightened to see photographs of Lee Harvey Oswald since, then and now, they both believe him to be “Leon Oswald.”
After the assassination, word of the Odio visit reached the FBI, which investigated the matter for the Warren Commission. The Commission, having already accepted FBI and CIA evidence that Oswald was on his way to or in Mexico City at the time of the Odio visit, stated, “While the FBI had not yet completed its investigation into this matter at the time the report went to press, the Commission has concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was not at Mrs. Odio’s apartment in September 1963.”
No one seemed to even consider whether someone might have been posing as Oswald.
The Odio story caused great problems with the Warren Commission Report. If Oswald was in Dallas, he couldn’t have been traveling by bus to Mexico at the same time. And if the Oswald in Odio’s apartment was not the real Oswald, then it is clear that someone was impersonating him with an eye toward implicating Oswald in the assassination. Small wonder the Commission decided to let the matter rest.
Oswald’s Girlfriend
Recent revelations by Judyth Vary Baker may go a long way in untangling the morass of characters and agendas involving Lee Harvey Oswald in New Orleans during the summer of 1963.
Baker, who in 2013 was living outside the United States after claiming death threats, told her life story in the 2010 book Me & Lee. Although Baker’s story has suffered attacks from all sides, her story is nevertheless internally consistent and well supported by known facts and documentation.
As a precocious teenager Baker vowed to find a cure for cancer after losing her
grandmother to that disease. Still in high school, she came to the attention of military and medical authorities for her work in cancer research as well as a project on how to acquire magnesium from sea water. The magnesium project brought the attention of Florida leaders, including the powerful senator George Smathers, both a personal friend of President Kennedy’s and a staunch supporter of the anti-Castro Cubans. Smathers helped bring her cancer studies to the attention of Drs. Harold Diehl and Alton Ochsner, both high-ranking officers of the American Cancer Society.
They were desperately looking for a cure for cancer because they knew that the polio vaccines developed by Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin in the 1950s had been made from monkey glands, which also carried a cancer-causing DNA virus called Simian Virus (SV) 40. While the vaccines may have checked the spread of polio, the contamination brought on an epidemic of cancer, some not becoming apparent for many years. Simian Immunodeficiency Virus, found in drugs from monkey glands, is thought by some to be a forerunner of Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS).
Baker said that in late April 1963 she arrived in New Orleans to continue her cancer research. She was enticed by promises of a scholarship to Tulane University and the privilege of working with renowned cancer researcher Dr. Mary Sherman, director of the bone pathology laboratory at the Ochsner Clinic there.
To Baker’s consternation, she was never given a scholarship or allowed to work in the clinic. Instead, she was put in touch with David Ferrie, who told her he was running a clandestine but government-backed cancer lab trying to find a cure. Ferrie’s apartment was filled with cages for white mice and an assistant knowledgeable in cancer research was needed. Judyth Baker fit the bill.
