Crossfire

by Jim Marrs

  Another Walker aide, Robert Allan Surrey, produced the “Wanted for Treason” leaflets that were distributed along the Kennedy motorcade route. Surrey later revealed to researcher Penn Jones that one of his close bridge-playing friends was none other than James Hosty, the FBI agent who, on orders, destroyed a note to the bureau from Lee Harvey Oswald after the assassination.

  But perhaps the most significant connections between Walker and other assassination-connected characters were his contacts with anti-Castro Cubans and New Orleans.

  Carlos Bringuier, the anti-Castro Cuban who was arrested with Lee Harvey Oswald in New Orleans, was with Walker on the faculty of Christian Crusade Anti-communist Youth University. According to researcher Gary Shaw, the CIA retained Walker to arm and train Cuban exiles sometime after the Bay of Pigs Invasion.

  One member of the militant Cuban exile group Alpha 66 was Filipe Vidal Santiago, who was frequently seen with Walker. Santiago was known to drive a 1957 Chevrolet. Such a car figured prominently in several aspects of the assassination case.

  About an hour after the slaying of Dallas patrolman J. D. Tippit, police dispatchers broadcast a pickup order for a 1957 Chevrolet last seen at the intersection where Tippit was killed. The charge was: “Investigation of carrying a concealed weapon.” The license number given by police registered to a Dallas man who told researchers he sold the car prior to September 1963, indicating the license plate reported on November 22 may have been stolen. This—and other instances of cars with illegitimate license plates around the Tippit slaying and Oswald’s rooming house—were never adequately investigated.

  Among the evidence that led the Warren Commission to conclude that it was Oswald who shot at General Walker were three photographs made of Walker’s Dallas home found in Oswald’s belongings. Commission photo experts said backgrounds of the pictures indicated they were made no later than March 10, one month before the attack on Walker and two days before mail orders were sent off for Oswald’s pistol and the Carcano rifle.

  In one of the photographs is a 1957 Chevrolet in Walker’s driveway. This photo—as shown in Warren Commission Exhibit 5—has a hole in it obliterating the car’s license number.

  In FBI reports, R. B. Stovall, one of the Dallas detectives who confiscated Oswald’s belongings from the Paine home in Irving, is quoted as saying:

  At the time he observed this photograph [the detective] surmised that Oswald had evidently taken the license plate number area out of the photograph to keep anyone from identifying the owner of that automobile. He advised he is positive the photograph was mutilated as shown in Commission Exhibit 5 at the time they recovered it at the Paine residence.

  According to the bureau, Stovall’s partner, Guy Rose, commented:

  He had noted that someone had torn out a section on the automobile, which area contains the license plate for the 1957 Chevrolet. . . . He stated . . . that it had been mutilated at the time they had recovered the box containing the photographs.

  However, during her Warren Commission testimony, Marina Oswald made it clear that the hole was not there when she was shown the photo by the FBI.

  She told Commission attorney Wesley Liebeler:

  When the FBI first showed me this photograph, I remember that the license plate, the number of the license plate was on this car, on this photograph. It had the white and black numbers. There was no black spot that I see on it now. When Lee showed me this photograph there was the number on the license plate on this picture. . . . This black spot is so striking I would have remembered it if it were on the photograph that Lee showed me or the FBI. . . . There was no hole in the original when they showed it to me—I’m positive of it.

  Someone is lying. If the license number was obliterated while in the hands of the FBI, as stated by Marina Oswald, this is clear evidence of official destruction of evidence.

  The truth of the matter came in 1969 with the publication of Dallas police chief Jesse Curry’s JFK Assassination File. On page 113 is a police photograph of Oswald’s belongings and in the foreground is the Walker photograph with the Chevrolet’s license-plate number intact. This piece of evidence was altered while in the hands of the authorities.

  Apparently this criminal action disturbed at least one Warren Commission staff member. In 1966, two years after the Warren Commission had concluded its work, attorney Liebeler wrote a letter to Charles Klihr, a volunteer worker for General Walker, stating:

  The [Oswald] picture was mutilated by someone in such a manner that the license plate is no longer visible. When we noticed this during the investigation we asked the FBI to determine whose car it was. They asked [Walker aide] Surrey about it and he told them he thought it was your car. I find no indication that FBI agents talked with you about the matter, however. . . . I would appreciate it very much if you would let me know whether or not the FBI did interview you about this and if you were able to identify the car as your own.

  There is no record as to Klihr’s response to Liebeler’s letter.

  All of these strange connections take on more sinister tones when viewed with the possibility that General Walker may have even been in contact with Oswald, his assassin Jack Ruby, or both.

  A tenuous tie may be a St. Paul, Minnesota, man named John Martin, who was an acquaintance of General Walker’s and filmed him in his Dallas home in the late summer of 1963. Incredibly, Martin journeyed on to New Orleans, where on September 9 he photographed Lee Harvey Oswald handing out Fair Play for Cuba Committee material on the same roll of film.

  Walker’s connections in New Orleans were many and substantial, ranging from anti-Castro Cubans in touch with David Ferrie and Guy Banister to Louisiana political leaders. According to Louisiana State Police files, Walker was involved in several hurried and secret meetings in New Orleans during the two days prior to the assassination, including a conference with Judge Leander Perez, one of the state’s most powerful men.

  In fact, Walker was on a Braniff flight from New Orleans when Kennedy was assassinated. He reportedly became upset when word of the assassination was broadcast over the plane’s loudspeaker and roamed up and down the aisle telling fellow passengers to remember that he was on that flight at the time of Kennedy’s death.

  According to Farewell America, a book by French intelligence agents, Walker later joined oilman H. L. Hunt in a secret hideaway in Mexico where “they remained for a month, protected by personal guards, under the impassive eyes of the FBI.”

  Also in this book, the authors state that in late summer of 1963 David Ferrie introduced Oswald to both General Walker and Clay Shaw, the director of the International Trade Mart later prosecuted by district attorney Jim Garrison.

  Author Anthony Summers reported that Walker gave a talk in Dallas that may have been attended by Lee Harvey Oswald. He quotes another member of the audience who claimed Oswald sat at the back of the room during a meeting of the Directorio Revolutionario Estudiantil, an anti-Castro Cuban group. Oswald reportedly said nothing during the fund-raising meeting.

  Then there are disconcerting reports that Walker knew Oswald’s killer, Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby. Researcher Penn Jones has stated that Ruby made no secret of his admiration for the resigned general and that he once stated that Walker was “100 percent right” in his belief that Cuba should be taken back from Castro. More significant are the statements of former Walker employee William McEwan Duff. According to Warren Commission Document 1316-B, Duff claimed that Ruby visited Walker’s home on a monthly basis between December 1962 and March 1963, shortly before Walker was fired upon.

  Many researchers feel it is also significant that General Walker’s name and telephone number were found in Oswald’s address book. They believe this may indicate a possible connection between the two. However, Walker maintained he never met Oswald, and the Warren Commission concluded, “Although Oswald’s notebook contained Walker’s name and telephone number there is no evidence that they knew each other. It is claimed that this information was inserted at the ti
me Oswald was planning his attack on Walker.”

  Yet another odd connection between Walker and the assassination involved car salesman Warren Reynolds. Reynolds chased the murderer of Patrolman Tippit but initially was unable to identify Oswald as the killer. Two months later, Reynolds was shot from ambush and after recovering was befriended by General Walker. After consulting with Walker, Reynolds was able to identify Oswald to the Warren Commission in July 1964.

  The Warren Commission concluded, without even bothering to talk to Walker, that his assailant had been Oswald. The evidence used to reach this conclusion was the testimony of Marina Oswald, a note discovered at the Paine home, photographs Oswald reportedly took of the Walker home, and identification of a bullet found at the crime scene.

  Marina Oswald’s testimony has been called into question in a number of matters, and her stories of murder attempts by Oswald on Walker and Richard Nixon are fraught with inconsistencies and omissions. It is also curious that her first statement that Oswald tried to kill Walker came on December 3, 1963, about a week after a West German newspaper reported there might be a connection between the Walker shooting and the assassination. The Warren Commission reported that the German news story was “fabricated by the editor,” but then advanced the same allegation.

  The note in question turned up only after the Kennedy assassination, when Secret Service agents showed the note to Ruth Paine and asked her to identify it. The undated note, written in Russian, reportedly had been left in a Russian volume titled Book of Useful Advice and was only discovered nearly two weeks after the assassination when it fell out of the book’s pages. Government handwriting experts declared that Oswald wrote the message, and Marina conveniently told investigators she thought she saw it shortly after the Walker shooting.

  However, Ruth Paine told the Warren Commission about the Dallas police search of her home mentioning, “Before I left they were leafing through books to see if anything fell out but that is all I saw.” Mrs. Paine’s testimony fuels the suspicion that authorities may have planted the note.

  In it, Oswald detailed instructions to his wife on what to do in his absence. He told her where to find the mailbox key, that the current bills had been paid, and even said she could “throw out or give my clothing, etc. away.” Two noteworthy passages stated:

  Send the information as to what has happened to me to the Embassy [undoubtedly the Russian embassy, which Oswald had been contacting periodically] and include newspaper clippings—should there be anything about me in the newspapers. I believe that the Embassy will come quickly to your assistance on learning everything.

  If I am alive and taken prisoner, the city jail is located at the end of the bridge through which we always passed on going to the city (right in the beginning of the city after crossing the bridge).

  These two sections raise troublesome questions for the official version of the Walker shooting.

  Since Marina reportedly knew nothing of her husband’s attack on Walker in advance, how could she be expected to watch for stories on Oswald in the newspapers, since any such account would report only that an unknown sniper had fired on the general? Also, why would a supposed American defector to Russia who returned home expect assistance for his family from the Soviet embassy if he were charged with the attempted murder of a prominent right-wing Dallasite?

  Warren Commission critic Sylvia Meagher wrote, “I suggest that Oswald wrote the undated letter in relation to a project other than the attack on General Walker—one that also involved risk of arrest or death—and that Marina was informed about her husband’s plans in advance.”

  As noted by the Warren Commission, Oswald’s letter “appeared to be the work of a man expecting to be killed, or imprisoned, or to disappear.” Yet at the time of the Walker incident, he had no money, no passport, and no reasonable expectation of escape.

  The bullet found in Walker’s home also presents problems. Contemporary news stories of the April 10 incident quote Dallas police as saying the recovered bullet was “identified as a 30.06,” not a 6.5-millimeter Mannlicher-Carcano.

  In 1975, researcher George Michael Evica received FBI spectrographic analyses of a bullet (CE 399) and bullet fragments reportedly recovered in the assassination investigation. According to Evica, these scientific reports, termed “inconclusive” by Director Hoover when reporting to the Warren Commission, revealed:

  The bullet recovered in the assassination attempt on General Walker does not match either CE 399 or two fragments recovered from President Kennedy’s limousine; the Warren Commission’s linking of Lee Harvey Oswald to the General Walker assassination attempt is seriously weakened.

  Further confusion over the bullet has been raised by Walker himself, who claimed the bullet exhibited by the House Select Committee on Assassinations is not the same bullet recovered from his home in 1963. He said the original slug was so mangled as to be hardly recognizable as a bullet.

  After studying the government’s evidence carefully, author Meagher concluded, “Despite the [Warren] Commission’s reliance on the testimony of Marina Oswald, compelling evidence virtually excludes the use of the Carcano rifle in the attempt on the life of General Walker.”

  And even if Oswald were responsible for the Walker shooting, there is evidence that he did not act alone.

  Walter Kirk Coleman, who in 1963 was a fourteen-year-old neighbor to Walker, told police he heard the shot and, peeking over a fence, saw some men speeding down the alley in a light green or light blue Ford, either a 1959 or 1960 model. Coleman also said he saw another car, a 1958 black Chevrolet with white down the side, in a church parking lot adjacent to Walker’s house. The car door was open and a man was bending over the backseat as though he was placing something on the floor of the car. At the time of the Warren Commission, Coleman was not called to testify and in fact told Walker that authorities had ordered him not to discuss the incident.

  Just prior to the Walker shooting, two of the general’s aides saw suspicious activity around his home. Walker aide Robert Surrey said on April 6 he saw two men prowling around the house, peeking in windows. Surrey said the pair were driving a 1963 dark purple or brown Ford with no license plates.

  And Walker aide Max Claunch told researcher Gary Shaw that a few nights before the shooting incident he noticed a “Cuban or dark-complected man in a 1957 Chevrolet” cruise around Walker’s home several times.

  The problems with the official version of the Walker shooting as well as the many unfollowed leads in this area are troubling to assassination researchers.

  On January 14, 1963, George Wallace was sworn in as governor of Alabama, pledging, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.”

  In August, following further unrest and violence in the South, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led some 250,000 people in a Freedom March on Washington. Here he proclaimed, “There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights.”

  The march took place less than three months after President Kennedy had finally submitted his own civil rights bill in Congress. Resistance to Kennedy’s plans was widespread although a June 1963 Gallup poll indicated 59 percent of the population approved of the president and his programs.

  On June 12, 1963, Georgia senator Richard B. Russell promised other southern senators, “To me, the President’s legislative proposals are clearly destructive of the American system and the constitutional rights of American citizens. I shall oppose them with every means and resource at my command.”

  Within six months, Russell was sitting as a member of the Warren Commission, charged with finding the truth of Kennedy’s death.

  One government employee who watched the famous Washington monuments become surrounded by demonstrators was FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. The strange and obsessed Hoover was particularly anxious over King and his civil rights movement. The aging director not only saw his essentially southern way of life threatened but was convinced that King’s organization was
being directed by communists.

  William Sullivan, at the time Hoover’s man in charge of intelligence operations for the bureau, wrote:

  Hoover told me that he felt that King was, or could become, a serious threat to the security of the country. He pointed out that King was an instrument of the Communist Party, and he wanted it proved that King had a relationship with the Soviet bloc. Hoover also made it clear that he wanted evidence developed that would prove that King was embezzling or misusing large sums of money contributed to him and his organization.

  According to Sullivan, FBI agents jumped to please the director. He noted, “We gave him what he wanted—under the threat of being out on the street if we didn’t agree.”

  Hoover’s vendetta continued against King until the black leader was himself cut down by an assassin’s bullet in 1968. Behind this vendetta was COINTELPRO, Hoover’s secret counterintelligence program, created in part “to expose, disrupt, misdirect, or otherwise neutralize” King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Suspicions that Hoover’s FBI or some other part of the federal government played a role in King’s death were heightened in 1999 when a Memphis jury found Memphis restaurant owner Loyd Jowers guilty of arranging an assassination plot also involving governmental agencies. In the wake of the verdict, King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, echoed allegations in the Kennedy assassination by stating:

  There is abundant evidence of a major high-level conspiracy in the assassination of my husband, Martin Luther King, Jr. . . . The conspiracy of the Mafia, local, state and federal government agencies, were deeply involved in the assassination of my husband. The jury also affirmed overwhelming evidence that identified someone else, not James Earl Ray, as the shooter, and that Mr. Ray was set up to take the blame.

  Also secretly targeted for careful scrutiny under this program were President Kennedy and Hoover’s own boss, attorney general Robert Kennedy.

  According to Sullivan, “Hoover was desperately trying to catch Bobby red-handed at anything . . . and was always gathering damaging material on Jack Kennedy, which the President, with his active social life, seemed more than willing to provide.”