by Joan Mellen
Having gotten nowhere in shaking Russo, on the second day of his cross-examination, Dymond tried to threaten the witness by suggesting that if he was present during the talk of killing John F. Kennedy, and yet had not stated his disagreement with the plan, he himself was implicated in the murder of the president. Alcock objected.
“This is the first time I have ever been accused of badgering a witness,” Dymond said.
“You used the word,” Alcock said.
Sciambra testified that he had burned his notes of his first meeting with Russo because of the “tremendous problems” the office had with leaks; he cited the example of “a person who works for a national news magazine,” referring to Hugh Aynesworth. He had reported what Russo had told him on February 25th “to the best of my ability,” Sciambra said. “That would make me a sloppy memorandum writer, but it doesn’t make me a prostitute.”
The news reporting of the trial was distorted. Martin Waldron at the New York Times added the word “torture” to Spiesel’s description of how his enemies had harassed him. Waldron wrote that Bundy had “yawned” on the stand; he had not. Waldron altered Russo’s term “bull session” to “it was a bull session and not serious,” the last three words entirely Waldron’s invention.
Midway through the trial, to prove that there had been more than one shooter, and hence a conspiracy, the state showed Abraham Zapruder’s home movie of the assassination. It was the first time the film had been screened in a public forum. Zapruder himself testified how he had witnessed Kennedy being shot in the head from the front, his brains splashing backward out of his head. Then the jury watched, spellbound. Smoking in the darkness, Shaw rose from his seat clutching his cigarette, and stared. The film was screened six times in two days, while Garrison had one hundred copies made and distributed to universities.
“They can run it a hundred times if they want to,” Judge Haggerty replied to Dymond’s objection. James Phelan attempted to spin away the reality everyone in the courtroom had observed. Kennedy had experienced a “gas expulsion backwards,” Phelan said. But bona fide members of the press were stunned. The state’s Dealey Plaza witnesses, like Mrs. E. C. Walton, who heard not only four shots, but shots coming from the “front right,” were persuasive.
Alcock hoped to connect Clay Shaw to the events in Dallas not only through Russo and Spiesel, but also to his identity as “Clay Bertrand,” the man who had telephoned Dean Andrews the day after the assassination on Oswald’s behalf. He wanted Big Regis to testify to the FBI’s search for Clay Bertrand even before Dean Andrews called them. Now serving the Shaw defense, Harry Connick, an assistant U.S. attorney, advised Big Regis. The jury was excused.
Had he been seeking Clay Bertrand in connection with his investigation of the assassination before he talked to Dean Andrews? Alcock asked.
“I was,” Regis Kennedy admitted. This meant that the FBI knew that Clay Shaw was connected to the assassination independently of Bertrand’s call to Andrews. Obviously honoring a prearranged agreement, Alcock stopped there. He did not ask why or under what circumstances the FBI had learned about Shaw’s involvement. Irvin Dymond stood silent. Out of the hearing of the jury, the state was vindicated in its prosecution of Clay Shaw, in its contention that Clay Shaw had been involved in the planning of the assassination.
Pittsburgh forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht had testified in Washington for Garrison in his unsuccessful attempt to dislodge the X-rays and autopsy photographs from the government—and the uncooperative Kennedy family. Wecht declined to appear at the Shaw trial. Wecht was uneasy about speaking only with the Zapruder film as evidence. Dr. John Nichols of Kansas City did agree, and became at once the subject of a full-scale CIA counter intelligence investigation. Nichols had, in fact, been one of the CIA’s own; in 1957 he had been approved by the Domestic Contact Service, to whom he had reported as recently as 1964. CIA noted now that he had “flunked out” of West Virginia University.
If Garrison’s case was lost when Charles Spiesel confided that he fingerprinted his daughter, it was now lost a second time. For a year the CIA had worried about that booking card filled out by officer Aloysius Habighorst in which Shaw admitted to the alias “Clay Bertrand.” From the CIA field office, Hunter Leake had solicited suggestions from Washington on what to do about Shaw’s admission. The trace memo does not reveal what those suggestions were.
Many CIA records pertaining to Oswald and Shaw have disappeared. According to a Louisiana history professor, Michael Kurtz, Hunter Leake admitted to him that after the assassination he had destroyed many of the field office’s files on Lee Harvey Oswald. The remaining Oswald documents Leake loaded “to the brim” onto a truck. Then he personally drove the Oswald files to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. These files contained many references to PERMINDEX, once more linking Oswald to Shaw, and both to the CIA.
That the New Orleans field office of the CIA kept Oswald files there is no doubt. Chester Vigurie, that CIA file clerk who reported that the CIA had “target files,” told the HSCA in 1977 as well that he had had occasion to check the CIA file of Oswald in the late sixties, only to discover that it had been retyped some time after 1968; he knew this because “some time in 1968 the CIA began using a particular kind of ‘type’ to print up their file reports.” Oswald’s file was printed with this new type. Vigurie’s suggestion was that the HSCA determine “what happened to the earlier files pertaining to Oswald.”
Now came what Garrison would call “the Haggerty bomb,” which “tore as big a hole in our case—modest enough a venture to begin with—as did Charles Spiesel, our dreamy accountant.” With the jury again excused, Lou Ivon swore that he had arrested Clay Shaw and read him his Miranda rights in the presence of his lawyer. Habighorst appeared in dark glasses, shaky from a hit-and-run accident the day before. Inexplicably removed from Mardi Gras duty early, he had been rammed by a truck on his way home.
As Habighorst typed out the booking card, Edward Wegmann had stood at the door at Central Lockup, in keeping with New Orleans police policy. Habighorst had never heard the name “Clay Bertrand” before Shaw’s arrest on March 1st. There was “no way for Habighorst to come up with that name on his own,” Lou Ivon says.
Desperate, the Shaw defense produced a police sergeant named Jonas Butzman, but Butzman had to admit he had not heard Habighorst’s questions and Shaw’s answers, and he had not even been present “during the whole time” that Shaw was processed. Captain Curole admitted that Wegmann had never requested permission to enter the Bureau of Identification room, which he would have done had he believed that the law guaranteeing Shaw’s Miranda rights necessitated his presence as the booking card was being filled out.
The Shaw defense had developed its strategy on the advice of Edward O’Donnell, ever anxious to sabotage the Garrison case, who said technicians in Central Lockup sometimes completed the fingerprint cards by using information on the arrest register, rather than asking the person arrested himself. Out of this vague generality, the Shaw lawyers now claimed, with no evidence whatsoever, that this was what Habighorst had done.
Habighorst had taken the alias off the field arrest report, Dymond now asserted, although he was unable to produce a single witness who saw Habighorst doing it. Wegmann had to admit that Shaw had been handed the blue copy of the Arrest Register, and it did not include the alias. Shaw himself then took the stand. Had he been asked whether he had an alias?
“I certainly was not,” Shaw lied. Did Habighorst consult any other documents while he was typing? Shaw fudged.
“He may well have, I don’t know,” Shaw said. He referred to his height—six feet four inches tall—although he had to admit that papers piled up on the counter had not obstructed his view of Habighorst at any point.
Alcock went on to argue that Shaw’s Miranda rights had not been violated because, as far as Habighorst was concerned, the alias bore no relation to the crime. Yet Judge Haggerty ruled that the booking card could not be admitted because Shaw’s Mira
nda rights had been violated. He should have been warned of his right to remain silent.
“Even if Officer Habighorst is telling the truth. . . .” Haggerty said.
“Your honor!” Alcock said, his face red.
“I do not believe Officer Habighorst. I don’t believe Habighorst!” Haggerty sputtered, ruling the booking card inadmissible because Wegmann had not been permitted to be with Shaw during the booking, so violating Escobedo v. illinois as well. The ruling was so capricious that some wondered whether Haggerty was affected by dislike of Habighorst’s brother Norbert, a bad cop, who had held back information and was now serving ten years for killing the brother of police superintendent Joseph Scheuering.
Alcock moved for a mistrial, and didn’t get it. He filed a writ, only to be denied by the Louisiana Supreme Court. He asked Haggerty to let the jury decide, but Haggerty insisted that Shaw should have been told that the question was detrimental and that he didn’t have to answer it.
Years later, when Jim Garrison was a judge himself, he asked his former assistant, Ralph Whalen, to research Haggerty’s decision. It was wrong in 1969 and it was wrong in the late 1980s, Whalen said. A later decision, Rhode Island v. Innis (1980) did not consider the booking process “interrogation” if what was involved were “words normally attendant to arrest and custody,” just as Alcock had argued. It had not been universally known that Shaw was the Bertrand who had telephoned on behalf of Oswald; the incriminating response had to be related directly to the offense for which the person was being booked.
The Bertrand alias was “the product of the imagination of investigating officers,” Dymond declared.
“The State rests,” Alcock said.
The defense was desultory. Marina Oswald testified she had never heard the name Shaw or “Bertrand,” but that Lee was not a Communist. She insisted that on the night he had seen General Walker, he didn’t have his rifle with him. Lloyd Cobb admitted that Clay Shaw’s job as managing director at the International Trade Mart was an honorary one, even as Gordon Novel points out that Shaw could never have had that position at the International Trade Mart “without having a relationship with the CIA.” Shaw had been absent from New Orleans only one day that summer, September 25th. On that day he had to obtain “leases,” Cobb said, although the truth was that Cobb had hired a man named James Lawrence, who spent ten weeks between July and October 1963 specifically for the purpose of handling the leases for the new trade mart. Shaw was “a liberal,” Cobb insisted.
Dr. Pierre Finck, the only doctor at President Kennedy’s autopsy who was a competent forensic pathologist, came to testify for Clay Shaw. Harry Connick briefed him. On the stand, Dr. Finck insisted that the fatal head wound struck the back of Kennedy’s head. He attempted to undermine the evidentiary importance of the Zapruder film by insisting that a film was “not the material of choice to determine the direction of the shots.” Yet Al Oser forced Finck to admit to so many autopsy irregularities as to render the government’s medical evidence of scant value.
Dr. Finck admitted that before they began the autopsy, the doctors were told that Kennedy had been shot from behind, with the clear suggestion that their finding should confirm that fact. They were ordered not to dissect the neck wound, or the track of the back wound. On Robert Kennedy’s orders, Dr. Finck had not been allowed to see the X-rays and photographs when he prepared his Warren Commission testimony.
Finck recounted that when Dr. Humes had asked, “Who’s in charge here?” the reply came back: an Army General. (Could it have been Air Force General Curtis LeMay? Cyril Wecht wonders.) The autopsy room had been filled with FBI agents, federal military personnel, Secret Service, two Admirals, Galloway and Kinney, and a Brigadier General of the Air Force. The ringmaster was a four star general. “An officer who outranked me,” Finck admitted, prevented him from examining Kennedy’s back wound, or even looking at the clothing he wore.
Alarm bells rang in Washington. Could Pierre Finck be trusted? Dr. J. Thornton Boswell was put on a plane to New Orleans by the Justice Department “to refute Finck’s testimony, if necessary.” Boswell, a government man, had convened a medical panel officially chaired by Ramsey Clark to undermine the Garrison case a year before.
An admiral had told him only three shots had been fired, Finck continued. He could not explain the discrepancy between the location of the hole on Kennedy’s shirt and the apparent entry wound on the neck. To the question of how one bullet—the socalled magic bullet—could have inflicted all the wounds they said it did, Finck replied, “I don’t know.” Admiral Galloway had ordered them to put the word “presumably” in the statement “the second wound presumably of entry.” Part of the autopsy report was based on a false news account that said Kennedy fell face forward. Then Finck volunteered that the doctors had not removed the organs of the neck, or traced the track of the neck wound because “the [Kennedy] family wanted an examination of the head and chest . . . only.”
Oser bore in. “I am asking you why you didn’t do this as a pathologist.” Finck repeated: “I was told not to, but I don’t remember by whom.”
“You didn’t burn your notes also, did you?” Oser demanded, referring to Dr. Humes’ admitting to having burned his. Oser got Dr. Finck to agree that the wound in the back of the neck, purportedly an entry wound, was larger than the “exit wound,” the wound in the throat, which defied scientific fact, and alone rendered the official autopsy findings preposterous. Dr. Finck admitted the drawing they used was “incorrect.” He admitted that the left side of the brain had not been examined. By the time Oser was done, the entire autopsy had been called into question. Jim Garrison was to consider Al Oser’s cross-examination of Dr. Finck among the strongest moments of the state’s case.
Returning to Washington, Colonel Finck composed a memo for the record stating that he had gone to New Orleans without a court order or Army orders. He had refused any expert witness fee. In later years, the quintessential Swiss gentleman, Dr. Finck retired to his native land, returning only to testify before the HSCA. Morose, he would not discuss the Kennedy autopsy, except to say he was “very, very unhappy, very frustrated.”
“I wish I could talk about it,” he told Cyril Wecht.
In the waning days of the Shaw trial, Dean Andrews perjured himself yet again by testifying that Clay Shaw was not “Clay Bertrand.” On the grounds of “self-incrimination,” he refused to answer every one of Alcock’s questions about his Warren Commission testimony. He added the lie that Eugene Davis was Clay Bertrand. In a nuisance suit, he then went on to sue Jim Garrison for perjury.
CIA clandestine services operative Lloyd Cobb located Charles Andrew Appel, his fellow CIA asset and founder of the FBI laboratory, to dispute Shaw’s Eastern Airlines lounge signature. Appel was notorious for having “proved” that Bruno Richard Hauptmann had written the Lindbergh kidnapping ransom note.
“The defendant Clay Shaw did not write the entry in the book,” Appel said.
Alcock exposed the lie perpetrated by James Phelan. Why, if Russo had mentioned “Clem Bertrand” only in New Orleans, under sodium pentothal, didn’t Phelan include that fact in his sixthousand-word Saturday Evening Post article, “Rush to Judgment in New Orleans"? He had kept this fact “in reserve” for Sheridan’s “White Paper,” Phelan admitted, revealing that his effort to discredit Jim Garrison for the government meant more to him than his journalistic integrity.
With his word against Russo’s, Edward O’Donnell testified that Russo had denied in his presence that Shaw was at Ferrie’s gathering. Alcock did not attempt to penetrate O’Donnell’s animosity toward Jim Garrison.
Then only one defense witness remained—the defendant himself. Handed their photographs, Clay Shaw once more denied that he had ever met Oswald or Ferrie or Russo. He had never in his life worn a hat. He had never been in Clinton. He was not “Clay Bertrand” or “Clem Bertrand.” He was on the West Coast at the time of the assassination, Shaw lied, because he had an invitation to speak in Oregon; he
did not mention that he had solicited that invitation to speak in San Francisco from fellow CIA asset, Monroe Sullivan.
Was he a supporter of President Kennedy?
“I was,” Shaw said, smiling slightly.
The state had blinked before the effort to connect Shaw with the CIA and the CIA with the assassination. When Irvin Dymond asked, “Have you ever worked for the Central Intelligence Agency?” it was the first time the Agency had been mentioned at the trial.
“No, I have not,” Shaw lied. (See Update, pp. 387-389}
Salvatore Panzeca insists that Shaw told his lawyers “everything,” implying that they all participated together in suborned perjury. The record suggests that Shaw told his lawyers very little. Edward Wegmann had speculated that Jim Garrison had “not even concocted evidence, that Shaw was connected with the CIA.” In September 1967, Dymond and Wegmann requested that the Justice Department obtain information for them of the possible CIA connections of a long list of individuals; Clay Shaw was among them.
“Justice got very clear impression Shaw had not told them [his lawyers] of his previous contacts with CIA,” an astonished Lawrence Houston wrote. He searched, but could not locate a record of Shaw’s having signed a secrecy agreement: he perjured himself on his own initiative.
At the trial, CIA officers were “in attendance throughout,” even as Langley told the New Orleans field office: “Case is of interest to several Agency components, covering aspects which relate to Agency.” The Justice Department sent William S. Block as “an undercover agent for the government observing the trial.”