by Joan Mellen
As for Golitsyn, he returned to London, briefed the British, and then returned to the United States. He moved to Cairo, New York, in 1963. In December 1990 he published New Lies for Old, a title he borrowed from a poem by Anna Akmatova. In 1998, he co-authored The Perestroika Deception: Memoranda to the Central Intelligence Agency.
CIA: ITS BYZANTINE STRUCTURE
Jim Garrison knew he was dealing with a formidable enemy, but he could only guess at the Byzantine structure of CIA. By the time of the Garrison investigation, CIA had created an internal structure designed not only to evade penetration by outsiders, but to conceal operations from those within the Agency itself who had no need to know about them. The Church and Pike Committees in the 1970s found CIA all but immune to outside scrutiny. It is worth spending a brief moment to examine what Jim Garrison was up against as he sought to connect Lee Oswald and Clay Shaw to the Central Intelligence Agency.
The DDI (Directorate for Intelligence) and the DDP (clandestine services), for example, operated entirely independently of each other. The DDI and DDP were virtually “separate organizations.” The funds destined for clandestine operations were unvouchered, as were the salaries of officers in the clandestine services. You couldn’t follow the money as a means of penetrating Agency operations. Division chiefs controlled their own funds, from which they could finance “hip pocket operations” that were disclosed only to the Deputy Director for Plans.
The Miami CIA station, JMWAVE, at the time of the Kennedy assassination boasted: a Support Branch; an Operations Branch; a Covert Action Branch; an External Operations Branch that was responsible for collecting HUMINT (Human Intelligence) on a target country; a Report section; a Technical Services section; and Communicators, responsible for maintaining secure communications between JMWAVE and Headquarters at Langley.
The DDP (clandestine services) alone presided over fifteen components. Attached to the clandestine services was the Special Activities Staff (SAS) responsible to the Deputy Director for Plans. Between 1962 and 1965, this was Richard Helms.
To further compartmentalize, in 1964 CIA created a new branch, the Domestic Operations Division (DOD), to centralize “responsibility for the direction, support, and coordination of clandestine operational activities within the United States.” Hesitation about CIA’s operating domestically was already a distant memory.
Within the deepest recesses of the Agency, there moved another virtually separate organization, a “world within the world,” to borrow a phrase Don DeLillo assigns to Lee Oswald in his great novel, Libra. This component, even more powerful than the clandestine services, was the Office of Security, which shared information with only one other component, CI/SIG (Counter Intelligence, Special Investigation Group), which we have just met in the saga of the Oswald and Webster debriefings. The task of the Office of Security was to protect the Agency from within and without. If someone requested a document, and it was deemed “missing,” chances were that it was being withheld by the Office of Security.
The Office of Security was immune to requests from members of Congress or Congressional committees, or, later, from citizens filing freedom of information requests. There were copious Office of Security files on writers and businessmen. It was the Office of Security that assigned to CIA’s assets, employees or contacts either an AINS, or Agency Identification Number, or an EINS, Employee Identification Number.
For years, Bruce Solie was the Deputy Chief of the Office of Security. (At times he was also acting Chief.) Solie developed power parallel to that of the Director of Central Intelligence. In the late 1970s, when the House Select Committee on Assassinations requested files from the Office of Security for review, Solie sent a MEMORANDUM FOR THE RECORD to his staff.
Office of Security personnel, Solie ordered, must not disturb the files marked “not having been viewed” by the House Committee staff members, in order that they “maintain the integrity of the envelopes.” We have here but the tip of the iceberg. An example of the tightness of CIA security was that only in February 1992 did that document confirming that Clay Shaw was “a highly paid CIA contract source” come to light.
The Office of Security kept close watch on Jim Garrison’s investigation with many documents about Garrison emerging from the Office of Security’s research component, via Sarah Hall. Documents have not surfaced exposing how Garrison’s office was penetrated, but a secret document for the Inspector General surfaced in June 1975, exposing how it was done. For maximum deniability, CIA keeping its hands clean, the Office of Security developed a program of operatives, “qualified individuals” who were “employed as independent contractors to conduct background investigations on behalf of the Agency,” this document reads. It was named the “Confidential Correspondent Program” and it enlisted retired U. S. Government investigators who had entered secondary professions following their retirement. These included “law, real estate, construction, and private investigations.”
With this cover, the “Confidential Correspondent” was able to “conduct investigations on behalf of the Agency,” with “investigations” a euphemism for surveillance, penetration, and other black bag jobs. At times participants in the “Confidential Correspondent Program” were given “the same commercial cover credentials used by staff investigators of the Office of Security to conduct covert investigations.” The private investigators could use their “natural cover” as investigators. One such person was Robert A. Maheu. The program began in 1950 and covered the period of the Garrison investigation. As for CIA’s police program, an agency officer headed the police program in AID, the Agency for International Development, a CIA clone. You might call AID a CIA proprietary.
Only the most secret of CIA documents reveal the inner workings of the Agency. In one such document, never released but which slipped through declassification by having been read by AID, points out that “it should be recognized that Deputy Director for Research is a cover and this office not necessarily confined to research but should be tasked with operational responsibilities.” Among them were the crypts OXCART; CORONA; and SAMOS. (OXCART referred to SR71 or “Blackbird,” a Lockheed Aircraft at high altitude for reconnaissance of the USSR and China, developed in the late 1950s; “Blackbird” was the name of the plane.)
The cryptonym for CIA’s concealment of documents from its own components was AESTORAGE. These documents were not to be released outside of the clandestine services to other CIA components (let alone to the Church committee) without written authorization by C/SR/CI. This was Tennent H. (“Pete”) Bagley, mentioned above, Chief of the Soviet Russia Division’s Counter Intelligence Component.
The pretexts offered by CIA for refusing to release records were not even meant to be believable. When the Rockefeller Commission requested a clarification of a list of cryptonyms, it was told by an assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence that “the traffic and operations are so old we simply no longer have the break-outs for all of the code words employed at the time.”
James Angleton routinely refused to pass information to CIA stations in the Arab countries unless “he felt like it,” another example of CIA’s unilateral policy-making that so infuriated President Kennedy. Angleton handled all Israeli operations through contacts he had made during his OSS days in Italy. In the context of the 1975 Church Committee investigation, William Colby admitted that he had no idea what James Angleton was up to at the Counter Intelligence Division. “The accepted clandestine services doctrine,” long-time CIA officer Ray Cline wrote in his memoir, is that “no one outside their own ranks should be told anything operational.”
The Agency’s official policy was that “every effort should be made to minimize the amount of publicity that CIA receives.” CIA’s position in the 1960s was that even the “present practice of giving background briefings to newspapermen [should] cease.” This turned out not to be possible, and CIA adjusted its policy, directing that the Agency should “give information to the press only where CIA has something which for operat
ional reasons should be released on an unattributable basis.” The “Working Group” examining CIA’s structure urged “that no public speeches be given by Agency officials.” They were to be invisible.
The group did recommend “that the DD/P develop procedures which will insure that other appropriate agencies of the government (Department of State, Defense, White House, and USIA) are kept appropriately informed of black propaganda activities which otherwise might be misunderstood and believed to be legitimately the views of a foreign power.”
Retired operative Paul Sakwa remarked that CIA created “procedures designed to prevent outside scrutiny.” Sakwa, a whistleblower, wrote that CIA had engaged in abuses and the pursuit of unnecessary paramilitary operations that were the direct result of the absence of oversight: “extreme security measures; overclassification of sensitive material and exaggerated use of compartmentation [sic] promote a kind of bureaucratic chauvinism and paranoia.”
Sakwa’s description of the internal mechanisms of the Agency is borne out by rare documentary evidence of how CIA avoided compliance with Church Committee requests bearing on the Kennedy assassination. One handwritten sheet, released under the 1992 JFK Act, issues from Bruce Solie at the Office of Security. It refers to “sensitive documents which were pulled from O.S. files prior to their being reviewed by Frank Church’s Senate Select Committee.”
One was marked the “Oswald file” and emanated from the Office of Security’s “Volume II.” This file contained documents dating from April 1959, prior to Oswald’s departure for the Soviet Union, that period for which CIA had insisted that they had no knowledge of Oswald. This document is further evidence that CIA knew of Oswald prior to his defection. CIA had been successful in keeping such evidence from Jim Garrison. The Agency continued to keep its connection to Oswald from Congress in the decade following Garrison’s investigation.
JACK MARTIN AND HIS MANIFOLD IDENTITIES
Understandably, some readers of A Farewell to Justice were dubious that the alcoholic religious fanatic Jack Martin, who hung out aimlessly at Guy Banister’s “detective agency” at 544 Camp Street, was in fact Thomas Edward Beckham’s CIA handler. Yet it was so. A further analysis of Jack Martin might help to penetrate how CIA assets penetrated Jim Garrison’s investigation, what covers they employed, and how they operated.
It wasn’t only that a wide variety of journalists and police officers found Jack Martin to be a reliable source, his material correct. Hoke May, a CIA asset himself, was among them. Jack was also seemingly prescient. How could he have known that the orthopedic surgeon Dr. Mary Sherman was murdered under bizarre circumstances that included her being burned by a nuclear particle reactor, or something like it, with her body then set on fire? But he did.
Even the New Orleans police were baffled, particularly when they were forbidden to investigate Mary Sherman’s murder, as former police officer Robert Buras confirmed to me.
Jack Martin first entered Jim Garrison’s life when he just happened to be passing the time of day outside the office of bail bondsman Hardy Davis. So Jack was present to witness Davis being offered a bribe from District Attorney Richard Dowling. Dowling was running for re-election. His opponent was Jim Garrison.
Later Jack Martin informed Garrison that CIA had actually contributed to Garrison’s campaign against Dowling. CIA had backed “several opposing political candidates” in the campaign to ensure that Dowling would be defeated. Martin called it an “ironic joke” in the light of Jim Garrison’s later suggestion that Lee Harvey Oswald was a CIA asset. In 1968, Martin reminded Jim Garrison that he and his partner, Joe Newbrough, had been present when CIA’s contribution came to Garrison’s law office.
“Yes,” Martin wrote in a rambling fifty-five page “Affidavit,” “You took the seat vacated by Dowling partially with C.I.A. funds!”
Jim Garrison never figured out all he needed to know about Jack Martin, although Thomas Edward Beckham could have enlightened him on how close Martin was to CIA. For all his garrulousness, Jack Martin himself revealed little. One thing he did admit was that he was “probably responsible for Thomas Beckham’s first becoming a priest.”
After Jack Martin inspired Jim Garrison to investigate the Kennedy assassination during the weekend of President Kennedy’s death by talking about David Ferrie’s connection to Lee Oswald, CIA quickly generated a document. It stated that Jack Martin of New Orleans, also known as “John J. Martin of Louisville,” was not their acknowledged former employee, “Joseph H. Martin.”
CIA was responding to a report from “the most Reverend Christopher Maria Stanley” of Louisville, himself a dubious character, one wrapped in the cloak of a marginal religious sect, like David Ferrie, and like Jack Martin. Stanley had reported to the FBI that “John J. Martin” had been associated with David Ferrie, and that Martin claimed “not only to have been in the Air Force during World War II, but also to have worked for CIA.”
Then something strange happened. In the course of their denial that Joseph and Jack were the same person, CIA stopped investigating the identity of the New Orleans Jack Martin. “OS [the Office of Security] does NOT believe identical nor do I,” writes CIA’s Scott Miler, following up on a request from one J. L. of Counter Intelligence’s Research and Analysis component (CI/ R & A) whose name is redacted from this 1998 document release. “Have agreed with OS no further action and think this proper.”
The less said about the Jack Martin who knew David Ferrie, Guy Banister and Thomas Edward Beckham, among others, the better. CIA then issued a document exposing that “Joseph J. Martin,” who ostensibly retired from the Agency in June 1958, when he was an “Intelligence Assistant,” was as erratic a personality as the notorious Jack Martin of New Orleans. In fact, they might have been twin brothers, or clones.
Joseph J. and Jack shared the same set of eccentricities. Like the Jack of New Orleans, Joseph was given to engaging in “rambling talk.” Joseph made habitual unwelcome telephone calls to the CIA Watch Office. Once he even called the Director of Central Intelligence in a clear violation of the chain of command. Even as in New Orleans Jack Martin experienced a stint at the psychiatric ward of Charity Hospital (since laid low by Hurricane Katrina), Joseph was described by CIA as being of “unsound mind.”
The FBI added that Joseph James Martin was a “nut,” a designation FBI master agent Warren de Brueys assigned to Jim Garrison in his interview with me. It was the designation J. Edgar Hoover habitually assigned to inconvenient witnesses, like Nelson Delgado, who served with Oswald in the Marines and knew that Oswald was a terrible shot; and Sylvia Odio, the unwitting hostess of Angelo Murgado, Bernardo de Torres, and one “Leon Oswald” at the end of September 1963.
In the course of his career, Joseph had been employed by several airlines, even as Jack Martin of New Orleans enjoyed a close relationship with Richard Robey of the Federal Aviation Agency.
These two Martins were doubles, interchangeable figures, as if they shared a single identity. Joseph was alcoholic; Jack was alcoholic. A Roman Catholic, Joseph sneered that he “wouldn’t vote for Kennedy.” Jack was linked to several people involved in the plot to kill President Kennedy, among them Oswald, David Ferrie, Oswald’s sometime handler, and Guy Banister. Jack and Joseph even looked alike. They shared a puny physique and a small mustache.
In 1998, CIA released a bombshell of a document. It admitted that among the people they had utilized in CIA operations were several people grouped under the name “Jack Martin.” One of the names, CIA acknowledges, the name “Jack Martin,” was “generic.” It was as if CIA used the name without reference to any particular individual.
This meant that the name Jack Martin was utilized on more than one occasion. There were three 201 (or personnel) files on different people whose names were variations on “Jack Martin,” CIA revealed. None of them was the actual open CIA employee, “Joseph James Martin.”
These same three Jack Martins, all bearing different middle initials, were listed on another CIA
document, along with their AINS numbers or Internal CIA File Subject Identification Numbers. AINS were “Agency Identification Numbers,” CIA explains, “not necessarily suggesting an employee relationship,” unlike that enjoyed by Clay Shaw as described above.
In contrast was the EIN or “Employee Identification Number.” On the list of those with AINS in the security files were: Jack Martin; Jack M. Martin; Jack S. Martin (reflecting the New Orleans’ Jack’s “real name,” Edward Stewart Suggs); and a Lawrence J. Martin.
While the Agency might not have technically classified them as “employees,” those with AINS numbers could nevertheless still have a close relationship with CIA. If they were not employees with a salary check, they might have been “assets” or “contacts.” Among those listed on the same “smoking gun” document with AINS numbers were such known CIA-connected figures as Richard Case Nagell; Frank Fiorini (Frank Sturgis); Cesar Diosdado, who, while working for Customs was paid by CIA; and George de Mohrenschildt, Oswald’s CIA handler in Dallas and Fort Worth. Another of those to use the “Martin” surname as an alias was Watergate burglar and CIA operative Virgilio R. Gonzalez.
What CIA accomplished with its use of the Jack Martin identity, New Orleans former homicide detective and HSCA investigator L. J. Delsa suggested to the author, is “plausible deniability” in the name “Jack Martin.” CIA need not fear that its relationship with the New Orleans Jack would become known because you could never figure out if the man in question was the correct “Jack Martin.”
Delsa interviewed the “Jack Martin” who had been part of Jim Garrison’s investigation. He concluded that Jack Martin was “hard core” CIA. That Jack was an intelligence operative was at once obvious to seasoned investigator Delsa.