Crossfire

by Jim Marrs

  But even before she could meet with Dr. Ochsner, Baker came across a young man in the post office who spoke to her in Russian. Having studied some Russian, Baker was instantly drawn to this new friend—Lee Harvey Oswald.

  During the ensuing weeks, Baker claimed to have developed a love for Lee, despite the fact that both were already married. This, of course, made their rendezvous secretive and not likely to have been documented. This lack of proof has caused much disbelief in her story. It was also convenient to the romance that Oswald’s wife was in Texas and Baker’s husband was only home infrequently, as he worked on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.

  David Lewis was in the thick of the New Orleans scene in the summer of 1963. He was an acquaintance of Ferrie’s and Oswald’s as well as an employee of Guy Banister’s. His wife, Anna Lewis, said she and her husband once were introduced by Oswald to Mafia boss Carlos Marcello in his 500 Club. Several times the Lewises met with Lee and Judyth. In a taped interview Anna Lewis was asked to describe their relationship. “I would say they were lovers,” she responded. She apparently was not lying to support Judyth’s story, because judging by her other comments, Anna Lewis obviously did not care for Baker.

  What is documented is that both Lee Oswald and Judyth Baker went to work at the Reily Coffee Company on the same date—Friday, May 10, 1963. This was five days before Baker’s twentieth birthday. Oswald was twenty-three. Only three days before, both Lee and Judyth had met with Dr. Ochsner, a well-known supporter of anti-Castro activities. Realizing from the conversation that Ochsner obviously had known Oswald previously, Baker then knew their meeting in the post office had not been an accident.

  Baker soon understood that both she and Lee were working for clandestine yet powerful backers. She knew Oswald had connections to Carlos Marcello, a Dallas nightclub owner named Jack Rubenstein, and local businessman Clay Shaw, but she also suspected ties to the CIA as well. Once when she asked Oswald about the source of his money (other than his Reily paycheck), he put his finger to his lips and said, “I can’t tell you. But I can guarantee that the money isn’t coming from Uncle Fidel.”

  Baker explained, “I gave up trying to follow the players, techniques, and motives in Lee’s complex covert world.”

  Her days became increasingly harried. She covered for Oswald at the coffee company by clocking him out each day while he was at Ferrie’s apartment, running errands, and meeting with Guy Banister. After work she would go to Ferrie’s apartment to do research and write reports on their progress. She said she and Lee also were tasked with trying to ferret out any Castro supporters from among the many Cubans employed at the Reily Coffee Company. She explained that Oswald’s distributing of pro-Castro literature was part of this same agenda.

  Due to his many roles, Oswald frequently was missing from his job. This was confirmed by Charles Le Blanc, the Reily employee who “broke Oswald in on the job.” After the assassination, LeBlanc told the FBI, “Oswald was not attentive to his job and wandered about the building considerably and was usually gone when he was needed.” He said when he asked Oswald where he had been, Oswald would just shrug his shoulders and say, “Just been around.”

  In his travels to and from the coffee company, Oswald would stop frequently at the nearby Crescent City Garage, where, as will be described later, he was seen in the company of federal agents.

  Further support for Baker’s story comes from the fact that Oswald was fired from his job at the Reily Coffee Company on July 19, 1963. Three weeks later, Oswald was arrested for the street incident with Carlos Bringuier and his name appeared in the newspaper. That same day, Baker, who had accompanied Oswald to his meeting with Bringuier, also was fired from Reily. The Cuban spy-hunt phase had come to an end but the cancer project continued.

  In Ferrie’s informal lab, Oswald would clean the mice cages while Baker would accept new mice from Cuban couriers who brought them from a breeding laboratory in a nearby house, test for the most virulent tumors in the injected mice, and then grind up the tumors in a blender to produce what they called the “product,” which was delivered to Dr. Mary Sherman for analysis.

  Very soon, Baker began to realize their work was carrying them into the realm of cancer-causing agents as biological weapons more than attempting to find a cure. She said she and Oswald as well as Dr. Sherman became concerned.

  Their fears were well founded, for in late August a “volunteer” inmate was brought from Louisiana’s Angola State Prison to the Jackson State Mental Hospital in Jackson, Louisiana, where he was injected with the latest “product.” Baker’s story explains an incident in nearby Clinton, Louisiana, involving Oswald, Ferrie, and a man later identified as Clay Shaw, an incident that still puzzles assassination researchers. What would Shaw, Ferrie, and Oswald be doing in Clinton? One suggestion has been that the trio was somehow involved in the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO). It is now well established that COINTELPRO was a ruthless long-term bureau program Hoover designed to disrupt and discredit political groups he opposed. The notorious wiretapping of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is just one example of this program.

  But Baker offered another explanation. So as not to draw attention to themselves in the small town of Jackson, the Oswald group parked near the courthouse in Clinton to await a phone call notifying them that the prisoner was on the way.

  Located about ninety miles northwest of New Orleans and twelve miles east of Jackson, Clinton was a small community of about 1,500 people in 1963. While the town was larger than Jackson, it was still difficult to keep the townspeople from knowing just about everything that went on there—especially if it involved strangers.

  In 1963, the civil rights program was gaining strength throughout the South. That summer would become known as “civil rights summer” and tiny Clinton was one of the communities targeted for a black voter registration drive by the Congress of Racial Equality. Tensions in Clinton were high. Earlier in the summer, several blacks were arrested there simply for writing appeals to the mayor and district attorney.

  One morning, between August 22 and September 17—a time when Oswald’s whereabouts remain officially unaccounted for—a long line of blacks waited to undergo the then-tedious process of registering to vote. Local police stood nearby, watchful for any breach of the peace. The incident that morning—pieced together from several witnesses—began with the arrival of a large, black Cadillac carrying three men. After the car parked near the registrar’s office, one of the men—a slightly built white man—got out and joined the line of blacks. Later, witnesses were unanimous in identifying the man as Lee Harvey Oswald.

  The registrar, Henry Palmer, had more to go on than just looks. He later recounted, “I asked him for his identification and he pulled out a US Navy I.D. card. . . . I looked at the name on it and it was Lee H. Oswald with a New Orleans address.” Palmer said Oswald told him he wanted to get a job at nearby East Louisiana State Hospital and thought he would have a better chance if he was a registered voter. Oswald was told he had not lived in the area long enough to qualify as a voter and, after thanking Palmer, he returned to the Cadillac. Baker explained that Oswald, becoming bored and very interested in the civil rights movement, made a bet that he could register to vote without the problems some of the blacks faced.

  Meanwhile, Town Marshal John Manchester had approached the car, but left after speaking to the driver, whom he later described as “a big man, gray-haired, with ruddy complexion.”

  New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison later attempted to prove that the driver was Clay Shaw, the defendant in Garrison’s JFK assassination-plot trial in 1967. Many researchers argued that the driver was Guy Banister. Baker’s assertion that it was Shaw was given weight by Registrar Palmer, who in later years told this author that he had known Guy Banister in the Army and that the man driving the Cadillac in Clinton was definitely not Banister, thus providing strong support to Garrison’s charge that the man was indeed Clay Shaw.

  The tragic outcome of this visit
was that the prisoner eventually arrived at the hospital, was injected with the cancer agent, and died soon after. It was only then that Baker said she learned that the man she thought had volunteered to help find a cancer cure because he already was dying from the disease actually was a perfectly healthy Cuban prisoner chosen because he was approximately the same size and weight as Castro. She finally saw the ultimate goal of the cancer-cure project—developing a cancer-causing agent for use on Cuba’s leader.

  Horrified, Baker left a note for Ochsner stating, “Injecting disease-causing materials into an unwitting subject who does not have a disease is unethical.” Her note set off a firestorm. Ferrie warned her, “He’s your enemy now. He told me that you and Lee are expendable.”

  Realizing the gravity of her situation, Baker moved out of New Orleans and returned to Florida to live with her husband, Robert Baker. Oswald made a mysterious trip to Mexico. According to Baker, Oswald was to have passed the cancer-causing “product” to a contact in Mexico City for transmittal to Cuba. But the scheme fell apart, according to what Oswald was told, because of Hurricane Flora in late September 1963. It was among the deadliest hurricanes in history, causing more than 7,000 deaths. In its path across Cuba, it destroyed safe houses, disrupted communications, and caused Oswald’s contact to miss the rendezvous in Mexico.

  Still in communication via a complicated telephone arrangement through Ferrie, who had access to illegal and untraceable sports betting lines, Baker said, she and Oswald began to realize that the attempt on Castro might have masked a bigger, darker agenda—a move against President Kennedy.

  On Wednesday night, November 20, only two days before the assassination, Baker had her last phone conversation with Oswald. It was highly emotional as Baker begged him to get out of the plot. But Oswald said he was trying to foil the plot and added, “If I stay, there will be one less bullet fired at Kennedy.” Oswald also repeated the name David Atlee Phillips, saying this was the man he believed was organizing the assassination. It was Phillips, aka Maurice Bishop, seen meeting with Oswald by the CIA-backed anti-Castroite Antonio Veciana. Phillips also worked with David Morales in the JM/WAVE operation. Morales was named by E. Howard Hunt in a 2007 deathbed statement as a major link between CIA Covert Action Officer Cord Meyer and William Harvey, head of the ZR/RIFLE CIA-Mafia assassination team, and the real shooters in the assassination conspiracy.

  Following the assassination, Baker was shocked to witness the televised murder of Oswald by Jack Ruby, a man she had met in New Orleans through Lee Oswald. She soon received a phone call from David Ferrie advising her to become a “vanilla girl,” that is, to lay low, blend in, and forget about her career in science. He said if she was lucky, she might live.

  Baker learned that Dr. Sherman had been murdered in July 1964 and that Jack Ruby, David Ferrie, and one of Ferrie’s associates had all died in early 1967 under questionable circumstances at the beginning of the Garrison investigation. Baker took Ferrie’s advice. She did not speak of her experiences in New Orleans or her connection to Lee Oswald until December 1998, when she rented a copy of Oliver Stone’s film JFK. Her experiences all came flooding back. With her children grown and her husband now deceased, she decided to go public with her story. Also, she said, “I realized Lee had been murdered by a friend [Jack Ruby]. . . . My eyes were opened to the corruption that rules our nation.” Baker came to realize that her lover Lee Oswald was involved in intelligence work for the US government, just as his mother always claimed, and had infiltrated a group bent on assassinating the president but was set up as a patsy and murdered in public to protect the real assassins by silencing him.

  One of Baker’s staunchest supporters has been Florida advertising executive Edward T. Haslam, a native of New Orleans and author of the 2007 book Dr. Mary’s Monkey, which documents the polio vaccine adulteration, the cancer lab, and the work by Drs. Sherman and Ochsner, David Ferrie, and Oswald. In his first edition, Haslam wrote it would be vital to the story if a living witness could be found. He was astounded to learn of and meet Judyth Vary Baker. But this brought up a bizarre and unexplained circumstance.

  In 1972 while attending Tulane University in New Orleans, Haslam was invited to a party, the hostess of which was introduced as Judyth Vary Baker. This Baker got Haslam off into the kitchen and began to question him about his interest in the Kennedy assassination. Although, like many college students, Haslam had spoken out about the many questions regarding the assassination, he felt uncomfortable about this questioning by Baker and, making excuses, he soon left, never to return to that apartment. Imagine his astonishment when in the year 2000 he was introduced to Judyth Vary Baker in Florida and quickly realized this was not the same woman he had met in 1972 New Orleans. Adding to the mystery was the fact that the real Judyth Baker fled New Orleans in the fall of 1963 and never returned. Who knew enough about the work in New Orleans to organize an impersonation of Judyth Baker in 1972? And to what purpose was someone scouring Tulane University and its environs to learn who may have known about Oswald and his activities there? This incidence lends strong support to the idea that a very dangerous secret was being preserved through cover-up and misdirection. Some people believe the adulteration of the polio vaccine and the subsequent rise in cancer deaths may even be a bigger secret than who was responsible for JFK’s death.

  While many people, particularly those close to US intelligence and military sources, still claim that Kennedy may have been killed on orders from Castro as a reprisal for the CIA-Mafia-Cuban plots against him, the evidence points more toward the anti-Castro Cubans under the tutelage of the CIA.

  Former senator Robert Morgan, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee that in 1976 looked into CIA-Mafia plots, continued to maintain that Kennedy brought about his own death. Differing from the conclusions of his own committee, Morgan stated flatly, “There is no doubt in my mind that John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated by Fidel Castro, or someone under his influence, in retaliation for our efforts to assassinate him.”

  But one anti-Castro leader, John Martino, spelled out the assassination plan to a Texas business friend in 1975. In a startling telephone conversation with Fred Claasen, repeated by author Anthony Summers, Martino admitted to serving as a CIA contract agent. He told Claasen:

  The anti-Castro people put Oswald together. Oswald didn’t know who he was working for—he was just ignorant of who was really putting him together. Oswald was to meet his contact at the Texas Theater. They were to meet Oswald in the theater, and get him out of the country, then eliminate him. Oswald made a mistake. . . . There was no way we could get to him. They had Ruby kill him.

  Most researchers today doubt Castro had a hand in Kennedy’s death. Even the accused assassin couldn’t buy it. During interrogation on the Sunday morning he was killed by Jack Ruby, Oswald was asked if his beliefs regarding Cuba played a role in the assassination. Asked by Secret Service inspector Thomas J. Kelley if Kennedy’s assassination would have any effect on the US policy toward Cuba, Oswald replied, “Will Cuba be better off with the President dead? Someone will take his place, Lyndon Johnson, no doubt, and he will probably follow the same policy.”

  Also, while Castro eventually did learn of the plots against him, there is no firm evidence that he knew of these schemes in time to have launched a retaliatory strike by November 1963. There seems no serious motive for Castro to have Kennedy killed outside of simple revenge—and every motive against the idea.

  In a 1977 interview with Bill Moyers broadcast on CBS, Castro denied any thought of trying to kill the US president:

  It would have been absolute insanity by Cuba. . . . It would have been a provocation. Needless to say, it would have been to run the risk that our country would have been destroyed by the United States. Nobody who’s not insane could have thought about [killing Kennedy in retaliation].

  The day after the assassination CIA director John McCone received a memo from his Mexico City station stating that Oswald had been in contact with V
alery Kostikov, a KGB officer there thought to be an expert on assassination. Prophetically, the memo added, “If Oswald was part of a foreign conspiracy, he might be killed before he could reveal it to US authorities.” This information immediately was passed to President Johnson, who probably knew better than to subscribe to a foreign plot. However, here was the excuse to proclaim fear of a Soviet plot and World War III and to curtail any potentially dangerous investigations.

  Johnson had his aide Cliff Carter notify Dallas County district attorney Henry Wade to not mention any conspiracy and he ordered all intelligence agents in Mexico to stop investigating any leads involving conspiracy. This was the initial step that blocked the plans to blame Castro for the assassination.

  But if the evidence of Castro’s involvement in the assassination is meager, it is more than made up for by the abundance of evidence of anti-Castro Cuban involvement, as we have seen in this chapter.

  And behind the anti-Castro Cubans always lurked the shadowy hands of US intelligence and the even darker specter of organized crime.

  Mobsters

  Immigrants to the United States in the late 1800s and early 1900s, trapped by their inability to speak English, lack of education, and class and cultural differences, found themselves crammed into inner-city ghettos spawning a multitude of street gangs. They carried names like the Whyos, the Dead Rabbits, the Bowery Boys, the Tenth Avenue Gang, the Gas House Gang, and the Midnight Terrors. Despite their colorful names, these gangs were anything but funny. Young toughs would rob and beat their victims in broad daylight, with little to fear from the police—as long as they confined their illegal activities to the ghetto and its cowed population.