by Joan Mellen
The final scene is set at Gill’s office, two weeks before the assassination. Shaw and Arcacha, Ferrie, Rozzy and Jack Martin stand around as Tommy is handed the package to take to Howard in Dallas. Rozzy drives Tommy to the airport.
In an essay he called “Power,” Jim Garrison defined Lawrence Oswald’s role. “The scapegoat in a coup d’êtat is presumed guilty because of his weakness,” he writes. “Those who question his guilt are presumed mentally unbalanced because of their irrelevance, and the government is presumed innocent because of its power.”
“The Agency, when it was all over, they knew they’d been danced with,” Garrison said as his life ran out.
Years passed. Living what he calls a lifetime of worry, “about something you can’t put your finger on,” Thomas Edward Beckham returned to the traditions of his origins. He studied to be a rabbi, never forgetting that his mother had longed for one of her sons to practice her faith. He was a field supervisor for the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Messianic Judaism attracted him with its belief that Jesus dwelled among us in fulfillment of God’s plan.
He is the father of eight children, all of whom play musical instruments, the legacy of the perfect pitch and musical talent of “Mark Evans.” Even when he was unable to read or write, Tommy could pick up any instrument and play it well. His oldest child is his daughter with the Cuban woman introduced to him by Clay Shaw. Having become a father for the first time when he was in his teens, he is a grandfather several times over. He flashes a gold ring with the Star of David on his finger. A shining mezzuzah hangs from his neck.
He resumed his singing career, featured as the “King of Hillbilly.” In his repertoire are songs he wrote himself, like “It’s Love,” and Hank Williams’ classics like “Your Cheating Heart” and “Beautiful Brown Eyes.” He is a gray-haired, Kenny Rogers look-alike in miniature now.
To meet him is to like him, as once Guy Banister had warmed to his open personality. Beckham spent years looking over his shoulder, but does so less frequently now.
Thomas Edward Beckham remembers Jim Garrison and admits that Garrison “knew the whole thing; he had the right people.” Many of those on whom Garrison focused—David Ferrie, Lawrence Howard, Kerry Thornley and Clay Shaw—had played roles in the implementation of the assassination. Some people, like Jack Martin, fed Garrison accurate information, Beckham acknowledges. Martin was “a double agent, and a good one.” Others spread lies and deceived him.
Thomas Edward Bekcham is now in his sixties and ailing, suffering from diabetes and heart trouble. He describes himself as a person who has fled from publicity all his life and desires none now. He does wish there could have been another chance for him to tell the truth to Jim Garrison. He wishes he could return to that moment in February of 1968 after the grand jury when Jim Garrison called him up and asked, did Beckham think Garrison had uncovered anything true about the conspiracy to murder President Kennedy?
Jim Garrison had pleaded with this recalcitrant witness: “Am I right? Have I touched on anything? Am I close?”
Beckham wishes he could tell Jim Garrison what he knew then, and is as certain of now. “Yes, you were.” Over the years he considered calling Garrison, then thought, why stir up something more?
“I believe in my heart that he knew the whole thing. He got it where it started and no one else came close,” Beckham says. “I wish I could have told him.”
As for Thomas Edward Beckham’s credibility, L. J. Delsa and I are both confident in the truth of his testimony. L. J. says that if circumstances were different, Beckham could have been a brain surgeon. A good witness is always better than good facts.
UPDATE: A FAREWELL
TO JUSTICE REVISITED
The truth will come out,” Jim Garrison reassured an embittered L. J. Delsa, deeply disillusioned by the House Select Committee’s obstruction of the Louisiana investigation he led with his partner, Robert Buras. In the eight years since A Farewell to Justice was first published, Garrison’s words have been borne out many times over. The following pages offer evidence vindicating Garrison’s investigation that has emerged or come to my attention since the book’s publication in late 2005. Virtually all of it confirms the accuracy of Jim Garrison’s insights into the plot that resulted in the murder of President Kennedy.
CLAY SHAW: A “HIGHLY PAID” CIA EMPLOYEE
The attacks on Jim Garrison over the years have focused on the “injustice” and “unfairness” of his having charged the director of the New Orleans International Trade Mart with conspiracy in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Garrison believed that Clay Shaw’s motive resided in his connection to the Central Intelligence Agency. For the Agency, Shaw had been the Louisiana handler of Lee Harvey Oswald, a role he shared with CIA asset and contract pilot, David Ferrie. At the time of the Shaw trial early in 1969, Garrison had not secured enough proof to persuade a jury that Shaw was acting for CIA. It was, as the reader of A Farewell to Justice has seen, Shaw’s own lawyer who introduced CIA at the trial.
“Have you ever worked for the Central Intelligence Agency?” Shaw’s lawyer, Irvin Dymond, asked him.
“No, I have not,” Shaw lied.
CIA*, in its fashion, even created a document in support of Clay Shaw’s perjury, and placed it in Shaw’s 201 file. TWX #0002, the document, dated 10/13/67, after Shaw’s arrest by Jim Garrison, states, “We have never remunerated him.” The Agency then adds, “contacts with Shaw resulted in eight reports.” This hastily written document is then filled with typographical infelicities. It was obviously created to paper the files with a false record: Shaw’s “contact with Huner [sic] Leake . . . Relationship was discontinued as shotgun approa-h [sic] to collection effort waved and it became obvious that Shaw was becoming more and more interested in his private ventures and less and less in the activities of the Intl [sic] Trade Mart.”
Incontrovertible proof has come to hand from the bowels of CIA itself convicting Shaw of perjury. Notwithstanding CIA’s insistence that “we have never remunerated him,” Shaw had indeed worked as an employee for CIA, a job for which he was paid handsomely, according to the Agency. CIA’s History Staff surveyed CIA records that had been made available to the House Select Committee on Assassinations between 1977 and 1979. There were sixty-four sequestered boxes of documents, and the one outing Clay Shaw as an Agency employee was among them.
In 1992, the PROJFILES “CIA Matters,” a component of CIA addressed by its History Staff, released a document that entirely vindicates Jim Garrison in his conviction that Shaw was acting not for himself in his relationship with Oswald, but for the Central Intelligence Agency. CIA prefaces its revelation about Shaw with a predictable disclaimer. The Agency declares that nothing was found in the records “that indicates any CIA role in the Kennedy assassination or assassination conspiracy (if there was one) or any CIA involvement with Oswald.” Then CIA’s History Staff Chief, J. Kenneth McDonald, adds:
"These records do reveal, however, that Clay Shaw was a highly paid CIA contract source until 1956.”
Since CIA virtually never offers an accurate end date for the service of its assets and employees, one can discount that “1956.” As I wrote in A Farewell to Justice, long-time Agency asset William Gaudet, whose office was at Shaw’s International Trade Mart, scoffed when he read the Agency release offering his own end date of service with CIA. In another example, the end date of Brown & Root founder Herman Brown’s CIA service is listed in a CIA document as several years after Herman’s death.
* In keeping with the Agency’s own locution, the definite article is omitted.
Because I wanted to make it public as soon as possible, I first printed this document in fall 2012 in a book entitled Our Man in Haiti: George de Mohrenschildt & CIA in The Nightmare Republic. It belongs, of course, most emphatically here in this update of A Farewell to Justice. Had Jim Garrison been in possession of this document issuing from CIA’s history component, he could have convicted Clay Shaw of perjury easily.
/> CIA’s admission explains why Shaw, who moved in circles common to New Orleans socialites, would have been traversing the Louisiana countryside in the company of a man half his age, who possessed neither education, elegance, social connections, nor savoir faire. In his travels with Oswald and David Ferrie in Clinton and Jackson, Shaw was provably on assignment from CIA. He was handling a man whom, as we shall see, CIA had been monitoring long before his “defection” to the Soviet Union.
Another CIA document that came to my attention after the publication of A Farewell to Justice was released in 2003. Dated 6/28/78, it describes Clay Shaw’s service to CIA as running from 1949 through 1972. Shaw was serving the Office of Security, Security Analysis Group (SAG). This document notes a claim “that CIA used Shaw for services in Italy with U.S. Agent Major Louis Mortimer Bloomneld”; Shaw’s role was to develop covert ties with Rome’s political circles and business world. Shaw’s additional task was to establish contact with extreme rightist groups in Rome.
A digression may serve here since PERMINDEX has been so ambiguous a subject. Louis Bloomneld, a Canadian lawyer deeply involved in CIA’s PERMINDEX operation in Europe, donated his papers to the Library and Archives Canada, to be available twenty years after his death. Bloomneld died in 1984 only for his widow to demand an extension of the restriction until ten years after her own death “due to privacy concerns and to safeguard Mr. Bloomfield’s reputation.” The suggestion that his papers might damage Mr. Bloomfield’s reputation points to Bloomfield’s activities with CIA, with PERMINDEX, and with its Rome satellite, the Centro Mondiale Commerciale. The papers apparently would make manifest that Bloomneld loaned his services to a foreign intelligence service.
The extension of the restriction violated Canadian law, suggesting that CIA, the foreign intelligence service in question, intervened to keep the history of Bloomfield’s activities from the probing eyes of historians, a commonplace Agency prerogative. If the papers weren’t burned in the first place, it was owing to the necessity for the archives to be “irrevocably transferred if the donor is to receive the tax benefits provided for by the Act,” an argument Robert Kennedy’s family enlisted with respect to his papers as well. The scholar who sued for access to the Bloomfield papers, one Maurice Phillips, lost. Phillips appealed to Canada’s highest court and lost again.
Mrs. Bloomfield got her new restriction, despite the law that mandated access to Bloomfield’s archives, as part of the “documentary heritage” of Canada. Scholar Phillips’ lawyers argued that Mrs. Bloomfield could not have controlling access greater than that awarded to her by the donor (Bloomfield). The Library and Archives Canada, in possession of the papers, ignored the law. Parliament had granted the National Librarian “discretionary power,” and the Archives seized it. The decision seems not in the interest of Canada, but in that of the Agency Bloomfield served. Canada wasn’t entirely unfair: Maurice Phillips was awarded his legal costs. Scholars and historians pursuing the Kennedy assassination and its peripheral issues labor under almost impossible conditions, with intelligence services monitoring the release of documents, even in a foreign country.
This detail with respect to Bloomfield’s connection to Shaw derives from Moscow. But we already knew that Shaw was a contact of CIA’s entity PERMINDEX, and the Centro Mondiale Commerciale in Rome; it has long been known that PERMINDEX “financed the OAS [organisation de l’armée secrète] groups in France” and provided cover for CIA, the document reads. Both the Centro Mondiale Commerciale and PERMINDEX served as conduits in New Orleans in 1963 for CIA and Mafia funds to make their way to Europe where they would be laundered through, among other institutions, the Vatican Bank.
This same document confirms along the way that Clay Shaw’s CIA contact in New Orleans was Hunter Leake, second in command at CIA’s New Orleans field office. One day after the publication of A Farewell to Justice, Leake’s son, Rob, chatted with the late Judge John R. Rarick about his father’s close acquaintance with Lee Oswald. Rob had become Secretary of the Masonic Lodge in St. Francisville, a place frequented by Judge Rarick, who disclosed the conversation to me. Even anecdotal evidence of Hunter Leake’s contacts with Oswald would be of interest to history. I tried, on several occasions, but Rob Leake refused to discuss with me his father’s memories of Oswald.
CIA DEBRIEFS LEE OSWALD, JUNE 1962
Jim Garrison was certain that Oswald was connected to CIA, and that CIA lurked behind the plotting of the assassination of President Kennedy, a reality few authors have summoned the courage to explore. Among the exceptions have been novelist Don DeLillo and Mark Lane. Garrison recognized at once that Oswald was a tool of U.S. intelligence.
In the years following publication of A Farewell to Justice, evidence of Oswald’s intelligence history has continued to come to my attention. Among these records and testimonies, none has been more provocative than the details confirming that CIA debriefed Oswald in New York upon his return from the Soviet Union. CIA’s emphatic denials that the Agency debriefed Oswald turned out to be another of CIA’s fictions.
The Warren Commission had been assured that CIA had neither knowledge of Lee Harvey Oswald nor any connection to him. Testifying before the Church Committee in 1975, former Counter Intelligence chief James Angleton lied brazenly. By the 1970s, CIA tolerated no accountability, let alone to Congress, a branch of government that in the coming years would be rendered all but impotent, stripped even of its token role of endorsing acts of war by the United States. Although he had been fired by DCI William Colby, Angleton remained defiant in his testimony before the Church Committee. CIA owes no allegiance to the rule of law, Angleton insisted, avowing the independent, blatantly policy-making role of CIA of the millennium.
“It is inconceivable that a secret intelligence arm of the government has to comply with all the overt orders of the government,” Angleton told the Senators. Nor was CIA obliged to inform Presidents of its plans. “You do not want to inform him [the President] in the first place,” Angleton confided. “Because he might say ‘No.”’
“The Agency, unlike the Soviets, does not have an assassination department,” Angleton said, contrary to fact. (“Sometimes a lie is more important than the truth,” was another notorious Angleton declaration.) He knew full well that William K. Harvey had run an “executive action,” or murder program, named ZR/RIFLE, as assassination had been a practice of the clandestine services from the days it was called the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) and those notorious aficionados of covert action, murder and sabotage, Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner, were at the helm. In 1954, CIA had even compiled a nineteen-page manual, “A Study of Assassination,” for use in Operation PBSUCCESS, the CIA coup in Guatemala against President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán.
Yet another Angleton lie to the Church Committee referred to Lee Harvey Oswald and whether CIA had debriefed him. Replying to a direct question as to whether CIA had debriefed Oswald in June 1962 upon his return from the Soviet Union, Angleton replied in the negative. “Normally that would fall under the jurisdiction of the military, since he was a military man who defected,” Angleton said with a straight face. “I am certain we never did, no.”
Former CIA employee Donald Deneselya, interviewed by the author, has stated (as he had told Senator Schweiker in the 1970s and the FrontLine television program in 1993) that he witnessed a document describing Oswald’s being debriefed by CIA. Between October 1961 and October 1962, Deneselya worked for the Foreign Documents Division of CIA’s Soviet Russia component, within what he calls 00 or “Overt Operations.”
Deneselya’s job was to translate publications emanating from inside the Soviet Union, particularly documents with information about Soviet electrical and electronics plants. Deneselya worked in the same building in Washington, D.C., 1717 H Street, NW, the Matomic Building, where CIA’s cover publishing front, JPRS (Joint Publications Research Service) was also housed. Among those who over the years used CIA’s JPRS cover would be Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt. Hunt pretended t
o be involved in the publication of materials to be distributed in Latin America. What Hunt was concealing was that, far from being an editor, he was nestled in the Soviet Russia component in New York just prior to his leaving for Madrid, where he was to run covert operations for all of Europe. In that same building, CIA also housed its “Foreign Broadcast Information Service.”
Deneselya was awarded a Top Secret clearance for this work. From time to time, he received reports from people debriefed after having visited an electric or electronics plant in the Soviet Union. In June 1962, he ran across two debriefing reports that came to him from CIA’s Industrial Registry for insertion in his reports. One had as its subject a former member of the Navy and “defector” named Robert E. Webster, who had worked at an exhibit for the Rand Development Corporation and at a Leningrad Electronics plant.
Webster’s contact was Mr. James H. Rand III of Cleveland, Ohio, as CIA collected letters from Webster and N. Reznichenko, Chief Consular Division, Soviet Embassy. Rand had accompanied Webster to the American Embassy in Moscow, along with another officer, George Bookbinder.
After “defecting” in September 1959, Webster had been embedded in Leningrad at “Lab 5 Scientific Research Polymerized Plastics Factory,” known as the Plastics Institute and Factory. Records of Webster’s debriefing by someone named “Anderson” provide a paradigm for what must have been a similar questioning of Oswald.
Webster’s debriefer was Eleanor Reed, whose CIA “pseudo” was “Miss Eleanor Anderson.” (A CIA document refers to Webster’s being debriefed by WOFACT, yet another cryptonym for CIA.) That Oswald was debriefed also by someone named “Anderson” suggests that the name “Anderson” was used by several people debriefing participants in CIA’s false defector program. Deneselya came to believe that a Commander Alden Benum (“Andy”) Anderson debriefed Oswald; there is also in CIA’s records an “Andrew (Andy) Anderson,” whose focus was Cuban operations. But this was not the case.