by Joan Mellen
The evidence Garrison sent to California for Bradley’s extradition hearing included an affidavit from underground operative Max Gonzales. Gonzales swears he met David Ferrie in the company of Edgar Eugene Bradley between June and August 1963. “I don’t believe it,” Numa Bertel says. The FBI’s Division 5 agreed, suggesting that Garrison may have “manufactured” a witness. All Garrison supplied for the extradition hearing was this Gonzales statement, his own affidavit and Roger Craig’s.
The Bradley problem was further exacerbated when another California volunteer, a UCLA film student, Stephen Jaffe, calling himself a “photographic expert,” insisted in a memo to Lou Ivon that Bradley was one of the tramps “beyond any shadow of doubt, and absolutely beyond any possibility of fabrication.” Another “expert,” Richard E. Sprague, insisted Bradley did not resemble the tall tramp enough, not because the identification was incorrect, but because Bradley “had an operation performed since November 22nd, which altered his appearance"! Eventually Bradley would go on television holding the tramp photograph, and proving that it was not he.
Another California volunteer “helping” Garrison was a KHJ-TV reporter named Art Kevin, an FBI informant. Alberto Fowler was at once suspicious and broke their appointment, “for some unknown reason,” Kevin thought. Kevin dispatched a reporter to the Van Nuys Airport with a photograph of Bradley where he spoke to a flight instructor with American Flight Service, a CIA proprietary. William Burchette said Bradley would supposedly be back about one; he wasn’t. Before long, Burchette had quit. No evidence materialized. Bill Turner then sent Jim Rose to the same airport, where Rose reported a pilot he knew had said he had taken Bradley on “government missions.”
Not yet done, Kevin found a pseudonymous witness named “Margaret McLeigh,” who insisted she could identify from photographs that Clay Shaw was the tall, broad-shouldered, white-haired man, who had visited Bradley “quite often.” None of what she said could be verified. Meanwhile Turner and Rose suggested that Jim Braden (Eugene Hale Brading), questioned in the Dal Tex building on November 22nd, was in fact Edgar Eugene Bradley. The only testimony that rings true was from a Tulsa woman named Betty Helm, who would not confirm Bradley’s statement that he was in Tulsa with her on November 22nd. Bradley had asked her to sign an affidavit to that effect, she said, but she had refused.
When Bill Turner flew to New Orleans and addressed Jim Garrison’s investigators, barely had he uttered a word when Charlie Ward and Jimmy Alcock bombarded him with questions: Why had Bradley been accused of conspiracy? Where was the evidence? Turner was vague. When it was over, Alcock vowed that he would never prosecute Edgar Eugene Bradley.
More of Hemming’s names began to be heard at Tulane and Broad: Colonel Gale, Clint Wheat. Carol Aydelotte now claimed that Stanley Drennan “wrote prescriptions for Lauren [sic] Hall,” that Hall had met Bradley at Clint Wheat’s house, and that Bradley knew Kent Courtney.
As the months passed, Bradley became increasingly alarmed. He contacted the CIA, offering to assist them, as he had the FBI. Fearing that the charge might stick, he asserted that he had “the greatest respect for the former CIA people whom he knew and for the Agency itself.”
On June 5, 1968, California held Bradley’s extradition hearing. Jim Garrison sent no one from New Orleans to examine witnesses. Bradley’s lawyer was assisted by Hugh Aynesworth, who had supplied the Bill of Particulars filed for Sergio Arcacha Smith in his successful effort to avoid extradition from Texas. It wasn’t until October 1st that California denied Louisiana’s extradition request in the matter of Edgar Eugene Bradley.
A coda: After the Shaw trial, Jim Garrison wrote to Bradley. Bradley replied graciously. He had come to the conclusion that Garrison had been “set up” for failure, for being discredited, Bradley wrote back, “to discourage any future attempts by anyone to solve the mystery surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy.” When Roger Craig approached Bradley attempting to extort money, Bradley pleaded with Jim Garrison to come to Los Angeles. “Please, Mr. Garrison, try to make arrangements to see me as soon as possible,” he wrote. By now Roger Craig was offered no quarter at Tulane and Broad.
On March 30, 1974, Jim Garrison wrote a formal exoneration of Edgar Eugene Bradley. “To Whom It May Concern,” Garrison begins: “This is to state that several years ago, I dismissed the charges which had been lodged in this jurisdiction.” One witness had volunteered information and “subsequently failed to testify truthfully in the trial on another matter.” Another was “a representative of a domestic intelligence operation of the federal government which was seeking to complicate and interfere with our inquiry into the New Orleans part of that operation which ended with the assassination of President Kennedy.” A third had died. They had “initiated an injustice,” Garrison admitted.
“Mr. Bradley was the victim of the above-described individuals and consequently I consider him innocent of any real connection with the president’s assassination.”
“I would like to meet you as much as you would like to meet me,” Garrison, as he neared the end of his life, told Bradley. Jim Garrison and Edgar Eugene Bradley finally met in 1991 in New Orleans. At lunch at the New Orleans Athletic Club, Bradley saw at once: Jim Garrison seemed pale, not well.
He had been set up, Garrison told Bradley. Bradley explained that Thornhill and Aydelotte had been lovers; they had demanded that property of Aydelotte’s mother be put in Thornhill’s name. Bradley had served as an auxiliary police officer, and had already picked up some of their friends on a gun-running charge. “Margaret McLeigh” had been a disgruntled neighbor.
They discussed Max Gonzales, and Roger Craig, who would say “anything I wanted him to say if I would give him money,” Bradley said. They joked about the mistaken identification of Leslie Norman Bradley. Having been charged in the murder of the president, his name splashed across the nation’s newspapers in banner headlines, Bradley had suffered lasting consequences. He had lost his job. He spent years supporting lawyers.
“Bradley, we were both set up,” Garrison said. His sympathy, Bradley concluded, was genuine. “I think I know who set me up. I don’t know who set you up,” Garrison added. “The government sent me false information.”
Edgar Eugene Bradley liked Jim Garrison, whom he viewed as a “fine country gentleman.” At their lunch, Garrison presented him with a copy of On the Trail of the Assassins. It was inscribed: “April 1991. For Gene Bradley, with warmest regards, and my appreciation of a fine American. Jim Garrison.”
JACKALS FOR THE CIA
17
In Washington, the failure to tell the whole truth is not considered to be an offense.
—Jim Garrison
WHEN JIM GARRISON READ the Warren Commission testimony of Oswald’s Marine acquaintance Kerry Thornley, he branded it as so “heavy-handed that this goes back to before the Barrymores.” A “total fabrication,” it exposed Thornley as a “pathological liar in the service of some clandestine operation connected to the assassination.” Only Kerry Thornley had testified that Oswald was a Marxist, preparing for Fidel Castro to be blamed for the assassination. Thornley’s portrait of Oswald, Garrison thought, was “synthetic and representative of the fictional nature of the entire fraudulent ‘investigation.’”
In Oswald’s Marine Corps unit, Thornley and Oswald, along with John Moretti and Major A. F. Boland, were all working for the CIA. Other than Thornley, not a single Marine who knew Oswald said he was a Communist, a Marxist or even a Socialist. Peter Francis Conor said Oswald called his namesake Robert E. Lee “the greatest man in history.” Mack Osborne said that Oswald laughed when, caught studying Russian, he was accused of being a spy. Henry J. Roussel Jr. said Oswald called people “comrade” in jest. “Nothing socialist, mind you,” Nelson Delgado said.
Thornley had told the Warren Commission not only that Oswald was a Communist, but also that he was “crazy,” with a “definite tendency toward irrationality at times, an emotional instability.” Why, Garrison asked, did
Thornley decide to write a book about Oswald if he was such a “nebbish?” Thornley’s decision to write about Oswald was made even before Oswald “defected,” Garrison believed, and made sense only if Thornley knew that Oswald would be accused of killing the president.
The most blatant of Thornley’s lies concerned Oswald’s height. He made Oswald five foot five, four inches shorter than he was. (Thornley had told Warren commission counsel Albert Jenner he was five foot ten; Oswald was said to be five foot eleven on most documents, five foot nine on others.) It would be, Garrison said later, as if he himself called Gerald Patrick Hemming, at six foot seven, and an inch taller than himself, “a rather short fellow.” It seemed as if Thornley was suggesting that he and Oswald were so different in appearance that one could never be taken for the other. Both were pale, slender, brown-haired men with receding hairlines, a year apart in age.
Seeing them together at the Bourbon House, Quarter habituée Barbara Reid called Oswald and Thornley “the Gold Dust twins.” Both had resided at the Hotel McBeath; both frequented the Ryder Coffee House, whose guest book bore Oswald’s signature. Other CIA types hung out there, too, like CIA courier William Cuthbert Brady.
To the Warren Commission, under oath, Thornley denied he had seen Oswald since 1959. He claimed he heard Oswald speaking Russian with another Marine. Over lunch, Albert Jenner suggested it must have been John René Heindel, nicknamed “Hidell” by Marine buddies. Soon Thornley created an affidavit recounting how he came to identify Heindel as the man who spoke Russian with Oswald. The rapport between Thornley and Jenner, Garrison was to say scornfully, was “more suggestive of Rudolph Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn performing Swan Lake together than it is of an inquiry of a witness who was in close association with the alleged murderer of the President of the United States shortly before the assassination.”
When Garrison subpoenaed Louisiana resident Heindel to the grand jury, Heindel swore that he spoke no foreign languages. He had known Oswald slightly, at Atsugi (where Thornley was not present), but not in California where Thornley supposedly heard him talking Russian with Oswald.
“If he speaks Russian, he fooled me,” Jimmy Alcock said after Heindel had been dismissed.
Garrison discovered that Thornley had been elated at the news of the assassination. “I’m glad,” he proclaimed. “Have you heard the good news?” Thornley had asked Bernard Goldsmith, a member of the discussion group at Ivan’s in New Orleans. Oswald was “not a Communist,” Thornley had confided to Goldsmith. “When it is all over . . . I may yet go piss on JFK’s grave,” Thornley wrote to his friend Philip Boatwright in 1964. Garrison learned that Thornley had left New Orleans right after the assassination, leaving a room filled with confetti, torn up paper soaked in water, so that no writing was legible. Thornley then moved to Arlington, Virginia, where his rent cost more than his salary as a doorman.
In January 1968, Garrison pondered Thornley’s August 1963 trip to Mexico City, unaware that Oswald, too, had made a midsummer trip to Mexico. “All info re LHO in Mexico City is clouded with a mist as if it were something that happened about the time of the Druids,” Garrison said. “This place is the thing wherein we’ll catch the conscience of the Queen Bee.”
He assigned Max Gonzales to fly to Cuba with photographs of Thornley, Novel and Beckham, those “slim young men-on-the-make,” if only to learn who really talked to Sylvia Duran at the Cuban embassy in Mexico City. “Pearl” Gonzales might learn the truth. “At the very least we can enjoy the novelty of encountering the truth from a government official for a change,” Garrison said. The trip never happened. One day, flying in his little plane over Lake Pontchartrain, Gonzales disappeared, never to be heard from again.
J. Edgar Hoover had told J. Lee Rankin, Warren Commission chief counsel, that Oswald had ordered and picked up his pro-Castro leaflets at the Jones Printing Company. But owner Douglas Jones told the FBI on December 3, 1963, that he “did not believe the person ordering the printing of the handbills was Oswald.” Jones’ assistant, Myra Silver, concurred.
On December 13, 1967, Harold Weisberg, on behalf of Jim Garrison and armed with dozens of photographs, including four of Kerry Thornley, interviewed Jones. One photo had been retouched and showed Thornley with a bushy beard, in case, Weisberg reasoned, he had worn a beard during the summer of 1963. Jones identified all four photographs as being of the man who had picked up the leaflets: all were of Thornley. “He called himself ‘Lee Osborne,’” Jones said.
When Boxley, who had insisted on tagging along, denied back at Tulane and Broad that Jones had made the identification of Thornley, Weisberg played the tape for Lou Ivon. Soon the tape vanished. Weisberg returned to reinterview Jones and Silver, this time separately, and without Boxley. Each again selected only photographs of Thornley as the man who had picked up the leaflets.
On January 8, 1968, Richard Burnes sent a material witness warrant to Tampa, requesting Thornley’s attendance before the Orleans Parish grand jury. There would be no immunity. Garrison’s press release focused on Thornley’s denial that he had seen Oswald in September 1963 when, in fact, they were “frequent companion[s].” Heindel is “a CIA agent,” Thornley sputtered as he fought the subpoena, demanding to be “formally extradited.”
Garrison had a plethora of witnesses who had seen Oswald and Thornley together during that summer of 1963. Among them was Barbara Reid, who provided a sworn statement that she had seen the two together at the Bourbon House. She had also seen Oswald on WDSU being interviewed by Bill Stuckey. “I am positive that the person sitting at the table with Kerry Thornley was Lee Harvey Oswald,” Reid said.
Peter Deageano was at Reid’s table, and saw Oswald walk in and join Thornley. Deageano had observed the two together on another occasion, “in either August or September.” Oswald was eating a hamburger while chatting with Thornley and his girlfriend, Jeanne Hack. Deageano had also seen Oswald distributing his leaflets on Canal Street, and identified him as “being identical” to the person he saw at the Bourbon House.
Another witness was L. P. Davis, who had also seen Oswald and Thornley at the Bourbon House, the two wearing black slacks and white shirts, so that they might have been twins. A newsman named Cliff Hall told Richard Burnes that Thornley had admitted to him right after the assassination that he had seen Oswald during the summer of 1963. Jeanne Hack said Thornley knew about Oswald’s “Fair Play for Cuba” activity. On the day of the assassination, he told her, “Oswald did not do it alone but had help.”
After the assassination, Thornley had visited Reid’s house. Pointing to a photograph of Oswald, she had said, “This is the fellow that you introduced me to.”
“Did I?” Thornley said.
Before the Orleans Parish grand jury, Kerry Thornley repeated his denial that he had seen Oswald in New Orleans during the summer of 1963. He professed not to know that Oswald had even been in New Orleans. Terming Oswald “accident prone,” he insisted that Oswald had called communism “the best system” and that “Heidel” spoke Russian with him.
Thornley admitted to having met Clay Shaw (“a big tan guy with silver hair”) and talking to him twice. The name “Guy Banister” rang a bell. No, he had never been at Jones Printing. He had never met Marina Oswald.
Marina was the next witness, passing Thornley in the hall without reacting. Had she ever seen this man before? Moo Moo Sciambra asked.
She had never heard the name Kerry Thornley, Marina said. Asked about George Bouhe, whom she and Lee knew well, a man who gave her English lessons and who lived next door to Jack Ruby, she become nervous. “It was coincidence,” Marina finally said. Oswald was never gone “late in the evenings,” but home every night. Garrison mentioned an Alabama priest who had said Lee was away from home often, but Marina held firm, apparently knowing she must undermine the evidence that Oswald had been in Clinton and Jackson.
She had cut herself off from Ruth Paine. Paine “was sympathizing with the CIA,” Marina said. Garrison did not raise Marina’s having a
ttended the English Language Institute at the University of Michigan, a hotbed of Soviet defectors and CIA assets, although he was aware that she had. He did not ask her if she knew former KGB officer Alexander Orlov, resident there, placed by the CIA to be debriefed on what he knew about Soviet espionage.
Later Marina Oswald Porter would describe Jim Garrison as a “gentleman” with an “idealistic spirit,” which was “a comfort” to her. There was “nobility” in his effort. Only in the 1990s would she say that Oswald, innocent, had worked for some part of the American government. By then she had long since sacrificed her credibility.
Ruth Paine followed Marina, her testimony a carbon copy of Thornley’s. Oswald was “a Marxist,” Paine stated. She herself did not work for the CIA. A chilling moment came when Paine struggled to explain why she had failed to honor Oswald’s request that she call lawyer John Abt on his behalf.
Back in Irving, Texas, Paine wrote a schoolgirlish letter to Jim Garrison, signing it “Ruth,” as if they were friends. Praising the “sheer force of your personality,” another Gerald Patrick Hemming, she offered Jim Garrison her “help.” Soon she would be testifying for Clay Shaw.
Kerry Thornley was charged with perjury on February 21st, 1968. At once Garrison was vindicated as the news brought new witnesses forward. LSU professor Martin McAuliffe remembered that Thornley had mentioned Oswald to him at the Bourbon House that summer. Jeanne Hack, now Napoli, had been surprised that Thornley, like Oswald, had a post office box at the Lafayette Square station, far from his customary venues. Thornley had once taken her to a meeting at the back of Carlos Bringuier’s store. John Schwegmann Jr. told Garrison he had seen Thornley at the Oswald residence on Magazine Street.