We cannot know, but the potential influence of David Ferrie, looming darkly at a formative time in Oswald’s life, is sobering. Whether or not Ferrie steered the mind and actions of Oswald the youth, some evidence suggests they were involved with each other in the summer of 1963.
Dean Andrews, a New Orleans lawyer, claimed after the assassination that Oswald came to his office several times to ask for help in appealing his undesirable discharge from the Marine Corps Reserve. Andrews, whose account was partially corroborated by office staff, said Oswald was accompanied on the first visit by some Mexican “gay kids,” one of whom appeared to be Oswald’s companion. Ferrie, the homosexual, had business links to Andrews.11
Ferrie had links, too, to the Louisiana Mafia boss who had spoken of assassinating President Kennedy, Carlos Marcello.
By the summer of 1963, two summers had passed since the Kennedy administration had unceremoniously deported Carlos Marcello from the United States. He had soon returned, in defiance of the Attorney General, and was seen openly around New Orleans, back in control of his crime empire. So far as Robert Kennedy was concerned, however, the battle was not over. On his personal order, the Justice Department stepped up the pressure against Mafia operations in the South and against Marcello personally. It was now war between the Kennedys and Marcello, just as there was war with Marcello’s friend Hoffa.
Like Hoffa and Florida crime boss Santo Trafficante, Marcello is said to have confided—as noted in an earlier chapter—that he planned to have President Kennedy killed. In public, he fought renewed efforts to deport him—and two of those recruited to help were Guy Banister and David Ferrie.
The Marcello-Ferrie connection went back a long way, perhaps as far as 1961, when Marcello had sneaked back from exile in Guatemala. Of the several theories as to how exactly the Mafia boss came home, one long favored by investigators is that he was flown in by private plane. Although Marcello denied it, a contemporary Border Patrol report said the pilot of the aircraft had been David Ferrie.
From early 1962, by his own account, Ferrie had been employed as “investigator and law clerk” in the office of G. Wray Gill, one of Marcello’s posse of attorneys. Ferrie also associated with Dean Andrews, another lawyer who provided his services to Marcello—and who was to claim he met Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963. In the three months leading up to the assassination, Ferrie was employed specifically to help Marcello fight the government’s case of deportation. This involved at least one flight to Guatemala to gather evidence for the defense, work that one of Ferrie’s associates described as that of “research librarian.”
The research also involved weekend visits to two of Marcello’s bases of operation, the Town and Country Motel in New Orleans and his estate outside the city, Churchill Farms, where Marcello had reportedly made his threat against President Kennedy’s life. Hatred of the President was, we have seen, something Ferrie and Marcello had in common.
The high point of Ferrie’s work on behalf of the Mafia leader came at exactly the period in 1963 that Ferrie was frequenting Guy Banister’s office at 544 Camp Street. Banister, it seems, had reversed the zest for hunting gangsters that had once brought him distinction in the FBI. He, too, now lent his expertise to Marcello’s cause, as the Assassinations Committee confirmed.
One secretary who worked in Banister’s office during the crucial summer and autumn of 1963, Mary Brengel, recalled a day when, as she was taking dictation from Banister, he referred in a letter to his work in helping Marcello fight deportation. Brengel expressed surprise that her employer was involved with organized crime, and Banister responded curtly, “There are principles being violated, and if this goes on it could affect every citizen in the United States.” He left no doubt that he was firmly on Marcello’s side.
Then there was the family of the alleged assassin himself. We now know that key members of the Oswald family were touched by the Mafia—and specifically by the Marcello network. His father having died before he was born, Oswald had spent most of his childhood and formative years in the sole care of his mother, Marguerite. When he was fifteen, they had moved into an apartment at 126 Exchange Alley in New Orleans. The alley was in the French Quarter, amid the razzmatazz and sleaze synonymous with New Orleans. “Exchange Alley, specifically that little block that Oswald lived on,” said New Orleans Metropolitan Crime Commission director Aaron Kohn, “was literally the hub of some of the most notorious underworld joints in the city.”
The Oswalds had lived in substandard accommodation above a pool hall, a known hangout for gamblers. Not much is known of young Lee’s teenage pursuits, but one episode suggests that the atmosphere of lawlessness was infectious. Edward Voebel, Oswald’s schoolfriend, recalled having to dissuade his pal from a plan to break into a gun shop and steal a weapon. Boys in bad neighborhoods are prone to being rascals, but Oswald was more at risk than most. His mother had close connections to the gangster milieu.
A relative once said of Marguerite Oswald, “She’s a woman with a lot of character and good morals, and I’m sure that what she was doing for her boys she thought was the best at the time. Now, whether it was or not is something else, I guess.” Indeed, the touching portrait of Marguerite the embattled single parent is somewhat tarnished. The Assassinations Committee took a closer look at her known friends.
One was a New Orleans attorney named Clem Sehrt. He was, the Committee said, an “associate, lawyer, and financial adviser to a Louisiana banker associated with Carlos Marcello.” Sehrt had himself been “long involved in a series of highly questionable undertakings, both business and political.” Mrs. Oswald turned to Sehrt at the time her son Lee was trying to join the Marines, when underage, in the wake of his apparent association with the suspect David Ferrie. Sehrt was involved in the false birth certificate caper. After the assassination, according to information that reached the New Orleans Crime Commission, Sehrt was asked to represent Oswald. It is not known who asked him to do so.12
Marguerite’s friendship with Sehrt was not a solitary brush with organized crime. She worked for some time for Raoul Sere, a lawyer who went on to become an assistant district attorney in New Orleans. According to former Crime Commission director Kohn, Sere was strongly suspected of being involved with “The Combine,” a group of New Orleans figures who obstructed the course of justice with bribery and corruption. Kohn added, “The district attorney’s office was then under the corrupt influence of the gambling syndicate—Carlos Marcello and others—to a very significant degree.” Though reluctant to discuss the matter, Oswald’s mother acknowledged having consulted Sere for advice after her son Lee went to the Soviet Union.
The Assassinations Committee found evidence, too, that Mrs. Oswald had been friendly with a man called Sam Termine. Termine was “a Louisiana crime figure who had served as a ‘bodyguard’ and chauffeur for Carlos Marcello.” Investigation of Termine revealed that he was close to Oswald’s uncle, Charles Murret. Murret, who was married to Marguerite’s sister, Lillian, had a great deal of contact with Lee Oswald. He, too, it turns out, tracks back to the Mafia apparatus of Carlos Marcello.
Charles Murret was more than the “steamship clerk” he was painted by his family in testimony to the Warren Commission. His name had cropped up as early as 1944 in a survey of vice and corruption in New Orleans. An FBI report named him as being prominent in illegal bookmaking activities. Murret was for years an associate of a leader of organized crime in New Orleans, Sam Saia. The Internal Revenue Service identified Saia as one of the most powerful gambling figures in Louisiana. According to Crime Commission director Kohn, he “had the reputation of being very close to Carlos Marcello.”
For the fatherless Oswald, Murret had been the nearest there was in his life to a father figure. He had actually lived with the Murrets for a while when he was three, and later often saw them on weekends. He had visited them while serving in the Marine Corps and, most significantly, saw a lot of his uncle in the New Orleans period before the assass
ination. He stayed with the Murrets for a while after his arrival in the city from Dallas, and Murret lent Oswald money.
When Oswald was arrested following the street fracas with Carlos Bringuier, it was the Murrets he called for help in getting bail. Only their daughter was at home when he got through on the telephone, but she contacted “a family friend,” one Emile Bruneau. Bruneau, says an FBI report, in turn, contacted “someone else” who duly arranged Oswald’s release.
Bruneau, who reportedly admitted to the Assassinations Committee that he did indeed help, was described by Crime Commission director Kohn as “a big-time gambler.” He was also, like Oswald’s uncle Charles, an associate of one Nofio Pecora. Pecora, as we shall see, may have received a telephone call from Oswald’s killer, Jack Ruby, less than a month before the Kennedy assassination. Pecora, according to the Assassinations Committee Report, was “a longtime Marcello lieutenant.”
Oswald’s mother was sensitive about her family connections. During her Assassinations Committee interviews, she “declined to discuss her past activities at any length, refusing to respond to various questions.” She would not say if she knew whether her brother-in-law Murret was acquainted with Marcello.
Nothing in Oswald’s adult history suggests he felt empathy for Mafia criminals. Yet his family’s connections, his apparent association with Marcello henchman David Ferrie, and the identity of those who arranged his release after the street fracas, cannot be ignored. The Mob, clearly, had every opportunity to become aware of Oswald, the posturing leftist. That becomes all the more ominous in light of the allegation that Carlos Marcello spoke of planning the President’s murder, of “setting up a nut to take the blame.”
None of this need detract from the suspicion that, while in New Orleans, Oswald was the tool of an anti-Castro intelligence operation. Former U.S. senator Richard Schweiker, whose Intelligence Committee investigation did the groundwork for the subsequent House Assassinations Committee probe, saw the information on New Orleans assembled for the first edition of this book—the material on 544 Camp Street in particular—as major progress. “It means,” he said, “that for the first time in the whole Kennedy assassination investigation, we have evidence which places at 544 Camp Street intelligence agents, Lee Oswald, the Mob, and anti-Castro Cuban exiles. It puts all these elements together.”
By the time New Orleans moved into the humid autumn of 1963, the disparate threads of assassination conspiracy did seem to come together. The days were slipping by toward tragedy in Dallas, and—to many of those who now saw President Kennedy as an obstacle, even an enemy—his words and overt actions only served to exacerbate a chronic grievance.
Chapter 18
The Cuban Conundrum
“Enmities between nations, as between individuals, do not last forever.”
—President Kennedy, June 10, 1963
The President stood in the open air, bareheaded as always, to address a throng of young people. It was graduation day at American University in Washington, DC, and the speech was the most significant he ever made on foreign policy. Kennedy told his listeners he intended to address the most important topic on Earth, “world peace,” and his words indicated a major shift in the policy of head-on confrontation with Communism. “If we cannot now end our differences,” the President said, “at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”
In the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy was signaling that nuclear war must be made a remote possibility, the tensions of the Cold War eased. A month later, U.S. and British representatives signed an agreement with the Soviet Union that banned nuclear-bomb tests in the atmosphere, underwater, and in space. Announcing it, the President said: “Let us, if we can, get back from the shadows of war and seek out the way of peace… . Let history record that we, in this land, at this time, took the first step.”
In 1963, to the forces of extreme conservatism in the United States, these words and actions seemed a dangerous deviation. To many Cuban exiles and their backers, it appeared to signal further betrayal of freedom’s cause. For many years, the scenario painted by Kennedy hagiographers was of a president—determined to set the nation on a new course—opposed by plotters scheming to sabotage that policy and provoke confrontation with Havana and its Soviet patrons. Over the years, a more complex dynamic has emerged.
As of early spring 1963, things looked clear-cut enough. Alpha 66, one of the most aggressive of the exile groups, carried out a seaborne raid on a Cuban port and shot up a Soviet army installation and a Soviet freighter. Coming within months of the Missile Crisis, this was dangerously provocative. Then, in defiance of the President’s demand to desist, the same group made two further attacks. With Moscow protesting vehemently, Kennedy moved to disassociate himself from the raids.
All along the Florida coast, U.S. authorities strove to interdict military activity by “freelance” groups like Alpha 66. The President did not say he was closing down all operations, only those not authorized by Washington. It seemed, though, that there no longer were many authorized missions. There were a few approved “pinprick” attacks in June, reportedly designed not so much to hurt Cuba as to warn Castro against interfering in other Latin American countries. Then, from mid-August, there was a steady tattoo of light airplane attacks, more commando raids, and sabotage. Castro stepped up his broadcast harangues, calling Kennedy “a ruffian … a horseman riding from error to error, from folly to folly.”
Who ordered which raids is hard to disentangle without a full analysis of all the reports of the CIA, its auxiliaries in the armed forces, and the Special Group on Cuba overseen by Robert Kennedy.1 The hagiographers’ line has been that—though the Group did approve sabotage operations right up to and after the President’s assassination—things were winding down, the will to overthrow Castro was evaporating. The truth may have been otherwise.
Throughout that summer, in camps on the Florida mainland and on islets and cays off the coast, exile fighters continued training for action under CIA control. According to a memoir by an Army officer seconded to the CIA as an instructor, Captain Bradley Ayers, the training was intensive and purposeful.2 The authorities would never admit involvement, Ayers said. “One of the splinter, independent Cuban exile groups would publicly take credit for the raids.”
By late summer 1963, according to Ayers, he was training above all small teams of commandos “to infiltrate Cuba, reach human targets, and assassinate them. Anyone in a senior position in government was fair game, and it reached down to the provincial heads, police chiefs and so on. But the principal target, we knew, was Castro—there was no secret about that amongst our people.”
Ayers’ account and a body of other information suggest that the President and his brother, the Attorney General, continued secretly to authorize far more activity—ruthless activity—than has ever been acknowledged. At the start of his assignment, in the spring of 1963, Ayers had been briefed at the CIA by General Victor Krulak, a personal friend of the President and a member of the Special Group. In the summer, according to Ayers, Robert Kennedy personally visited CIA personnel at their base in the Everglades. In the late fall, he flew by helicopter to one of the clandestine sites where assassination teams were trained.
Some exile leaders still talked that summer of “a new all-out drive” and the “ultimate invasion.” Were they blowhards, deceived by empty assurances from Washington? Not so, thought one of the exiles Robert Kennedy took under his wing. Roberto San Román, brother of Pepe, the man who had led the exiles onto the beach at the Bay of Pigs, said in 1994, “We were never closer to liberation than we were in November 1963… . Even if it was just for their own ego, Kennedy and his brother—whom I knew well—wanted to get even with Castro.”
Dean Rusk, who served as Secretary of St
ate throughout the presidency, echoed that view in an interview with the author shortly before his death in 1994. “The Kennedys,” Rusk said, “had an implacable hostility toward Castro, and they didn’t let up.”
No paper proof has ever surfaced showing that the President or his brother authorized the assassination of Fidel Castro. A document that surfaced in 2012—in the form of notes made by a secretary of a 1962 phone call to Secretary Rusk from CIA Director McCone—comes close. Both men had been at a meeting earlier in the day at which there had been agreement on unspecified strong measures to be taken against the Castro regime—a meeting that Robert Kennedy had attended.
McCone, a staunch Catholic who is known to have recoiled from involvement in murder, spoke elliptically. “M[cCone],” Rusk’s secretary noted, “said the question came up this morning in connection with an individual that should not come up in m[eetin]gs. M[cCone] does not think we should countenance talking or thinking about that.” The “individual,” it is reasonable from the context to surmise, was Castro. “That,” McCone surely knew Rusk would understand, was “assassination.”3 (See facsimile below.)
The notion that the Kennedys approved the concept of Castro’s murder—for all Kennedy loyalists’ denials—has been bolstered by books published in the past decade or so.4
Over many months, the CIA conducted a covert relationship with a senior Cuban who, the CIA believed, had turned traitor. This was Rolando Cubela, a hero of the revolution who had been in touch with the CIA on and off since early 1961. He had become disenchanted, he said, with increasing Soviet interference in Cuban affairs. There were some inconsistencies in Cubela’s profile suggesting he might not be trustworthy, but the CIA nevertheless took him on as an “asset.” By mid-1962, he was—according to the CIA account—telling his case officer that he favored “violent action … one master stroke” to overthrow Castro.
Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination Page 27
