by Joan Mellen
The memo of the February 27th session is more comprehensive. Russo refers to “two other occasions” when he saw Shaw, suggesting that he had mentioned the more important occasion, the gathering at Ferrie’s, during his first meeting with Sciambra. Sciambra’s questions at the sodium pentothal session also assume Russo had already told him about Bertrand, even as Ivon’s search warrant for Shaw’s house reflects knowledge of the party; it was sworn out before either of the memos were written. Yet it was sloppy of Sciambra not to have included all the details of the most crucial evidence, that of the gathering at Ferrie’s, in the memo devoted to the Saturday afternoon when Russo first brought it up.
Phelan attempted to dissuade other Garrison witnesses from cooperating. Not everyone was susceptible to his crude maneuvers.
“Go to hell!” the Reverend Broshears told Phelan.
Soon Phelan was demanding Sciambra’s original notes. Indignant, Sciambra told him he had burned them. Phelan tried to hire Pershing in his effort to destroy Jim Garrison’s investigation, but Pershing saw right through him. “You can’t afford to pay what I would charge,” Pershing said, “and even after I completed the investigation, if you call me six days later and told me you wanted a different conclusion, I would conduct an investigation leading to almost any conclusion or viewpoint.”
When Phelan requested interviews with Perry Russo, Jim Garrison approved, then had Russo wired. “I want to know what these people are thinking,” Garrison said.
“I understand that you did have emotional problems,” Phelan began. Russo remained unshaken.
“As far as I’m concerned,” Russo said, “Bertrand and Shaw are the same.” He insisted that he had told Sciambra about the gathering at Ferrie’s apartment at their first meeting in Baton Rouge. When Phelan suggested that Russo had seen Guy Banister, not Shaw, Russo remained adamant. He had encountered Clay Shaw.
When all else failed, Phelan began to threaten Russo. “You could be the patsy,” Phelan warned. Russo would find himself in jail. What if the Shaw people could demonstrate that Shaw had been out of the country on the day of that gathering? (Of course, they could not.) Immediately Phelan sent copies of his interviews with Russo to the FBI in Washington. Phelan’s behavior, Lou Ivon reflects, was “a casebook in the obstruction of justice.”
Assisting Phelan was Hugh Aynesworth, who warned Richard Billings: “You’re getting too close to Garrison.” The extant record reveals that Aynesworth had attempted to join the CIA in 1963. He also reported to the FBI, which kept copious files on Aynesworth, including a 1964 report that Aynesworth was caught in bed with the wife of an ex-convict, the irate husband then stabbing him in the neck. The FBI placed this document in a Lee Harvey Oswald file.
By late February, Aynesworth boasted of having informants in place in Garrison’s office. Gurvich stole files and handed them over to Aynesworth, who then passed them on to the CIA. According to reporter Lonnie Hudkins, Aynesworth, like himself, was working for the CIA. Through Aynesworth, the CIA learned of Jim Garrison’s interest in the firm of Brown & Root. (See Update, pp. 417-425]
Aynesworth reported as well to the Houston field office of the FBI, anxious to furnish “facts of alleged intimidation, bribery, coercion of persons whom New Orleans district attorney Garrison is attempting to have testify.” Like Quiroga, he denounced Garrison to the House Un-American Activities Committee.
With cover now as a Newsweek reporter, Aynesworth devoted himself to undermining Jim Garrison’s case. He met with Clay Shaw’s defense team at his Texas home. He provided photographs of Mark Lane “during a sex orgy” to the Shaw defense, which distributed them to interested parties. He slipped the Shaw defense copies of Garrison’s press releases, while Edward Wegmann shared copies of his motions and private correspondence. Aynesworth even interviewed witnesses for the Shaw defense.
Aynesworth adopted the FBI’s strategy for his attacks on Jim Garrison. Garrison is “losing his sanity,” Aynesworth insisted. People who had changed their minds about testifying for Garrison were now “in danger of being harmed and possibly killed.” In yet another fabrication, he said Garrison had called Oswald a “Mafia hood.” He repeated Phelan’s lie about how Sciambra’s memos had discredited Perry Russo. “Bertrand didn’t exist,” Aynesworth wrote in Newsweek. When Aynesworth sent Jim Garrison a scurrilous telegram, Garrison scrawled at the bottom, “No answer needed.” Then he consigned the document to his “Nut file.”
Connecting Clay Shaw with Lee Harvey Oswald and David Ferrie and all of them to the CIA was not enough. Garrison had to connect the CIA to the assassination. He believed he found a witness who could help him in a CIA operative named Richard Case Nagell. Garrison came to believe that Nagell was “the closest thing to the key [to the assassination mystery] that there is in one man, if he wanted to be.” CIA had assigned to Nagell the surveillance of Oswald in New Orleans in the summer of 1963, only for Nagell to uncover the plot to murder President Kennedy. “If you find out what I had to do with Oswald and he had to do with me, you will know what this is all about,” Nagell wrote to Richard Popkin.
That Oswald was under surveillance by the intelligence community at least a year before the assassination has been well established. The most recent evidence places Oswald under CIA surveillance through the files of the 112th Military Intelligence Group, which requested Oswald files from the 502nd Military Intelligence Battalion in Seoul, Korea, in September of 1962. Shortly thereafter, a request came for information on Nagell, complete with his CIA code name, “Laredo.”
“Well, they’re watching Oswald like a hawk,” career military man Jim Southwood told Dick Russell, Nagell’s biographer, “and this guy Nagell is the guy doing it.” For Southwood, this meant, at the least, “that Oswald had been an intelligence operative.” It was another vindication of Jim Garrison’s work, more than a decade after his death.
Serving as a military intelligence officer with the Counter Intelligence Corps of the Army, having been recruited to the CIA in 1955, Nagell had first met Oswald in Japan. There he observed Oswald attempting to recruit KGB assets, such as Fujisawa Chikao, a Tokyo University professor. Back home in California, Nagell worked for the CIA’s red squad, spying on dissident organizations. “I investigated an associate of the now deceased right-wing extremist David W. Ferrie,” he wrote, referring to Sergio Arcacha Smith. When Nagell ran into Fujisawa in the United States, the CIA told him to turn his information over to the FBI.
For the CIA, Nagell went to Louisiana as “Oswald’s manager.” Before long, he connected Arcacha with Eladio del Valle, and “Angel” (Angelo) with exile leader Manuel Artime and Rolando Masferrer Rojas. Under the code name “Laredo,” Nagell infiltrated Oswald’s circle, the “Ferrie-Banister Group,” as he put it. He knew about the training camps north of Lake Pontchartrain and discovered that Oswald had become the pawn of those acquaintances of David Ferrie, “Angel” and “Leopoldo.” Oswald had been told, falsely, that “Angel” and “Leopoldo” (the names of Sylvia Odio’s visitors) were agents of the Cuban G-2 (Dirección General de Inteligencia), Fidel Castro’s intelligence service. Defining themselves as “special emissaries from Fidel,” and insisting they had been “personally sent to kill JFK,” Angel and Leopoldo promised to furnish Oswald “safe conduct to Cuba when it was over.”
Nagell would also contend that he met Oswald in Jackson Square where the two were photographed together by a street vendor. Oswald told him that he was to pick up five hundred dollars in his post office box and meet his contact, “Oaxaca,” in Mexico City. Nagell warned him that “Angel” and “Leopoldo” were, in fact, CIA financed anti-Castro Cubans, part of a “violence-prone faction of a CIA financed group.” But, protecting his cover, Oswald continued to call himself a “friend of the Cuban revolution.” Knowing how much Oswald hated Governor Connally, Nagell made certain never to mention that name.
Nagell believed Oswald was being utilized to ruin Kennedy’s rapprochement with Cuba, which was being implemented by William Attwood. This disruption wo
uld be followed by a military invasion of Cuba. Nagell tried to warn Oswald. But, “upset and visibly shaken,” Oswald was unable to extricate himself in time. Too late, Oswald discovered that he had “become involved in a domestic-inspired, domestic-formulated and domestic-sponsored plot to assassinate President Kennedy.” All this confirmed Jim Garrison’s suspicions.
One day Nagell looked up and his CIA handler had vanished. It was September 17, 1963. He wrote to J. Edgar Hoover, warning that Kennedy was about to be assassinated, naming two of Oswald’s aliases to establish his own bona fides. Then he wrote to Desmond Fitzgerald at JMWAVE, returning the five hundred dollars he was supposed to have supplied to Oswald.
Now fearing the CIA and knowing there were alternate patsies in the wings to be blamed for the assassination should Oswald bolt, on September 20, 1963, Nagell walked into an El Paso, Texas, bank and fired off a weapon. “I’m glad you caught me,” he told an El Paso police officer, “I really don’t want to be in Dallas.” In his possession was Lee Harvey Oswald’s Uniformed Services Identification and Privileges Card and a social security card with Oswald’s name and number. Arrested, Nagell behaved as if he were Oswald, a Marxist. “Now I won’t have to go to Cuba,” he said, attacking “our capitalistic system.” Instead of the short stay in federal prison he expected, Nagell was sentenced to ten years. By now Nagell was thirty-seven years old with a long scar running down the paralyzed left side of his face, the result of a plane crash. He had a mouth full of gold teeth and was battle-weary.
To signal his continuing loyalty to the CIA, Nagell claimed that the Soviet Union had ordered him to kill Oswald to prevent him from murdering President Kennedy, a preposterous idea. To Robert Kennedy, he wrote part of the truth: “Any conspiracy of which I had cognizance was neither Communist inspired nor instigated by any foreign government.” Later Nagell would admit that his actions were the result of his having had foreknowledge of the assassination. By March 1969, he had repudiated his original statement that he was working for the Soviets. Rather, he had worked “with Lee Harvey Oswald in an assignment with a U.S. Intelligence Agency.”
The FBI rolled out that tactic it enlisted with a wide variety of witnesses who knew “too much” about the assassination. It accused Nagell of taking bribes from organized crime and pronounced him crazy so that he was shipped off to the federal psychiatric facility at Springfield, Missouri.
Jim Garrison heard about Nagell from a bona fide member of “Fair Play for Cuba” in Los Angeles, Vaughn Snipes, who wrote to Garrison under the name “Don Morgan.” Soon Nagell’s half-sister had told Garrison of a tape of Oswald and Nagell, which also included the voices of “Angel” and “Leopoldo.”
Garrison abided by Nagell’s conditions. He signed a form promising not to charge Nagell as an accessory or hold him as the material witness he obviously was. He would not prosecute him for withholding evidence or issue a search warrant for the “recording tape” containing Oswald’s voice. Then Garrison assigned to interview Nagell the same William Martin who would go on to sabotage his investigation of Juan Valdes. Martin’s CIA history included his father’s having worked for the United Fruit Company and Martin’s own position as chief investigator for Maurice Gatlin’s Anti-Communist Committee of the Americas.
Jim Garrison had “his hands full with amateur sleuths who were coming out of the woodwork,” Nagell remarked, allowing Martin to know he was aware of what was going on at Tulane and Broad. He paraphrased Garrison: “Let justice be done though the heavens crumble,” close enough.
The same group of people had created three separate plots to kill President Kennedy, Nagell told William Martin, in Miami, Los Angeles and Dallas. Garrison had been correct to focus on anti-Castro Cubans. Neither Alpha 66, JURE or the “Cuban Revolutionary Democratic Front” had killed the president. Rather, the perpetrators were Cubans as individuals, aided by “a few United States citizens.” The assassination was made to seem as if it had been ordered by Fidel Castro.
Nagell saw through William Martin at once. He asked whether Garrison had received any cooperation from the CIA or FBI; Martin does not record his own response in his memo. When, in his first memo, Martin wrote that Nagell had infiltrated the assassination plot for the Soviets, Nagell was furious. He then denied vehemently that he had ever acted on behalf of the Soviets. When Martin identified one of the voices on Nagell’s tape (which he had not heard) as Arcadia’s, Nagell dismissed Martin’s memos as “distorted.” Later Lou Ivon would pronounce Martin’s work for Jim Garrison “of no help.”
Martin had admitted to Nagell that he was a “former CIA officer assigned to Latin American operations,” and knew Desmond Fitzgerald and Tracy Barnes. To Nagell, this meant that Martin was a “former member of the CIA’s Dirty Tricks Division [clandestine services], who, by his own admission, is still in the reserves.” Martin’s purpose, Nagell concluded, was to learn what Nagell thought about his CIA superiors and the assassination and then report back to the Agency. He vowed never to permit Martin to retrieve the tape of himself, Oswald, Angel and Leopoldo. By the end of June 1967, the FBI had in its possession all the private correspondence between William Martin and Richard Case Nagell.
Richard Popkin concluded that Martin was a “professional spy,” noting that he had an office inside the Cordell Hull Foundation, a CIA conduit to fund Latin American dictators. Martin had money in several currencies and three passports from three countries in three different names, Popkin discovered. When Martin finally departed from Garrison’s office in December 1967, he resumed open contact with the CIA, expressing officially his willingness to cooperate with them.
Nagell’s letters, written in semi-code to Arthur Greenstein, a friend living in Mexico, reveal his close acquaintance with the New Orleans conspiracy. He terms Oswald “the ghoul,” and Ferrie “Hairy de Fairy,” giving Ferrie’s correct address on Louisiana Avenue Parkway. He names “Dirty Dick” (Helms, who ran CIA’s “dirty tricks” division) as the person who gave the order for John F. Kennedy’s murder, a view shared by Colonel William Bishop, a Nagell CIA associate. Bishop told author Gary Shaw, “Richard Helms gave the order for the assassination.” Gerry Patrick Hemming concurs with too many others not to be credible here: “Helms is behind the entire operation to kill JFK.”
“Clay Shaw will probably be convicted, as he is guilty,” Nagell writes. “Clay will be slurred as fruit.” Nagell knew that there were others “much more deserving of conviction than Shaw,” although Shaw was “of more importance than Ferrie.” Nagell noted that Oswald “did not visit Ferry’s [sic] training camp at the same time Shaw was purportedly there, at least not while I was Oswald’s manager.” As for the motive for the assassination: CIA, and Counter Intelligence in particular, “hated” John F. Kennedy “for planning to curb activities of spook outfits, especially CIA.” CIA was further incensed that Kennedy was “thinking of effecting rapprochement with Fidel and establishing better relation with USSR. Fidel not adverse.”
“Bang bang,” Nagell concludes. “JFK dead. CIA et al. expand powers. CIA most powerful.”
Nagell’s assertion that he met with Lee Harvey Oswald in Mexico City in July 1963 is corroborated by Thomas Edward Beckham. Beckham remembers that at one point that summer in New Orleans Oswald remarked that he had just returned from Mexico. By 1969, Nagell had also revealed that at the time he was meeting with William Martin, he was visited by CIA agents who “cautioned him to keep his mouth shut about his ties with Oswald.”
In yet another attempt to deflect Garrison’s investigation, a character named Ronald Lee Augustinovich popped up, mimicking Nagell’s story. He had been assigned to Oswald as part of a CIA team “trying to find the source of an intelligence leak,” “Augustinovich” claimed. He told Garrison just enough to seem credible, that Oswald worked for the CIA, and that “a pilot in New Orleans was silenced by the CIA and they made it look like suicide,” this pilot, David Ferrie, being one of Augustinovich’s own informants.
One of Garrison’s inexp
erienced volunteers fell for the story, insisting that Augustinovich was “the only person that might give us an Oswald-CIA link in sworn testimony.” Jimmy Alcock flew to Miami where he heard Augustinovich’s story of Oswald in New York infiltrating an assassination plot, only for the plotters to use Oswald as a patsy. On behalf of the CIA, Augustinovich said, he had attempted to infiltrate the group. It was all patent disinformation, designed to move Garrison away from blaming the CIA for the crime. Later CIA-FBI liaison files were to reveal that Augustinovich was indeed a CIA agent, but not one inclined to offer Jim Garrison any valuable assistance.
A more intriguing source with information connecting Oswald and Shaw appeared in the person of a self-proclaimed former CIA employee named Donold P. Norton, recorded in Garrison’s files as “Donald.” On a British Columbia radio station, Norton described delivering a package of money to “Harvey Lee Oswald” in Monterrey, Mexico. He had gone with his information first to the Vancouver Sun, only for CIA temporarily to kill the article “because there was no truth in it.” Charlie Ward, a skeptic in all matters conspiratorial, went to Vancouver to interview Norton, since he was from Ward’s home town of Columbus, Georgia.
Ward found himself in the presence of a very nervous, nondescript-looking man in glasses, whom he believed sufficiently to invite to Tulane and Broad. He had been recruited in 1957 by the CIA at Fort Benning, Georgia, Norton said, speaking very rapidly. A professional organist and pianist, with a master’s degree in music, Norton had been playing in the Main Officers’ Open Mess. His CIA handler, he says, had requested that he pretend to be homosexual, the better to spy on possible homosexuals. He went on to uncover a general who spent an evening with him in drag.
Before long, Norton said, he was working under James Angleton at Counter Intelligence, his assignments issuing from “The Captain,” E. B. Worrell, who had been an acting postmaster under President Eisenhower. Oswald had gone to the Soviet Union under Angleton, Norton said. When Norton became a courier, the CIA paid him, he says, first one thousand, then two thousand dollars a week.