by Joan Mellen
The history of Jack Martin in New Orleans is of a man seemingly with no loyalty to anyone. Even as Jack set Jim Garrison on the path to his investigation by associating Oswald with David Ferrie, Jack also telephoned the New Orleans field office of the FBI to report that Jim Garrison was conducting an investigation “concerning the Lee Harvey Oswald case.” Jack Martin was supposed to be a friend to Thomas Edward Beckham, yet he confided to the FBI that Beckham “was associated with Oswald and assisted Oswald in passing out [“Fair Play For Cuba”] leaflets.” (Beckham denied this to the author.)
Jack Martin seems to have been consumed by mischief and irrational actions. Once he called Lloyd Ray, the head of the New Orleans CIA field office, and claimed that Jim Garrison’s chief investigator, Louis Ivon, had enlisted him to call Ray and ask him to contact Ivon “at his unlisted number.” It wasn’t true.
This Jack Martin also carried with him a confusing resume. His file included a Dallas Police Department report of his having been arrested on a murder charge in 1952. Yet he had been released on bond, and three months later the murder charge was dismissed. Martin’s sojourn in the psychiatric ward at Charity Hospital followed a script common to many involved in the Kennedy assassination, either as witnesses or participants, Thomas Edward Beckham and George de Mohrenschildt among them.
Martin had committed himself, just as he would advise an innocent young Beckham to commit himself to the mental hospital in Mandeville, Louisiana. So Beckham at once rendered himself impeachable as a witness. New Orleans radio personality Michael Starr called the author in 2006 to say that his mother-in-law had worked at the mental hospital at Mandeville when Thomas Edward Beckham tried to commit himself there. It was true, and it happened exactly as Beckham said that it did, as I recounted in A Farewell to Justice.
As a CIA contact, Jack also had to be impeachable. Jack Martin himself spelled out the requirements of his tradecraft in the February 20, 1968, affidavit that he authored for Jim Garrison together with Banister runner David Lewis. If this document seems disjointed, it also reveals amply that Jack Martin was highly attuned to the intelligence game.
“No one could possibly afford for the ‘cat to get out of the bag,’ as it were,” Martin writes with respect to who was involved in the plot to murder President Kennedy. “So it was,” he adds, “that either certain people must not be (1) available, or (2) creditable . . . They must not be able to tell, or they must not be believed. In short, all become ‘dead,’ either figuratively, or literally, so to speak.”
Of the people who were not dead, they had to be “either crazy, ex-convicts, jail-birds, or even worse.” So Jack admits to how his own credibility was undermined; he had been depicted as a broken-down penniless alcoholic, addicted to eccentric religious ceremonies and sects. Who would believe the words of such a person, let alone that he was a CIA operative?
Jack Martin also was not “available,” although he was alive, because, as L. J. Delsa put it, you could never be certain you were dealing with the correct Jack Martin. His reputation had been so besmirched as to render him entirely lacking in credibility.
Delsa’s HSCA partner, Robert Buras, put it this way: Jack Martin, seeming to be an irrelevant trouble-maker hiding out in Baton Rouge, as he was during the Garrison investigation, “sounds very company, [an] intelligence-oriented type of cut out.” Buras had noted several anomalies: Jack Martin had told Pershing Gervais he had helped get Sergio Arcacha Smith’s wife and children out of Cuba, even as Arcacha himself was entirely under CIA control. Arcacha’s presiding over the CIA entity, the Cuban Revolutionary Council, in New Orleans was evidence of that. In his interview with Buras and Delsa, John E. Irion, a friend of David Ferrie’s, noted: “Ferrie said that more equipment would be coming from the State Department, [and] the Central Intelligence Agency through Sergio Arcacha Smith.”
How, Buras wondered, did Jack Martin know that Carlos Quiroga’s father was in St. Thomas prison in Cuba? Like Donald Deneselya, like so many figures whose careers were shadowed by the Kennedy assassination, Jack Martin was a man who knew too much.
As cited above, CIA’s Office of Security denied the Church Committee those documents about Oswald from its “Volume II.” There was a second group of documents that the OS denied the Committee. This was four sets of records from the Office of Security’s “Vol. VI.” They referred to a man named “Jack Martin” or “John G. Martin” or “Joseph James Martin.” Of all the figures involved in the Kennedy assassination with CIA connections, CIA chose to shield two people, Oswald, predictably, and Jack Martin, further evidence that Jack was one of their own.
The Agency was prepared to reveal Jack Martin’s AIN, but not an EIN. One Agency Routing sheet has documents about Jack Martin moving through Counter Intelligence’s Research & Analysis section (Paul Hartman) and up to Donovan Pratt and a “Mr. Kesler.” Kesler was a Counter Intelligence Staff officer.
Someone scrawled on this sheet, obviously meant for CIA’s internal use only, “return to SUGGS file.” Edward Stewart Suggs was Jack Martin’s real name. Much can be learned from the seemingly incomprehensible scrawls gracing CIA’s routing sheets.
JACK MARTIN, FRED LEE CRISMAN, AND THOMAS EDWARD BECKHAM
Among the revelations of A Farewell to Justice was the connection between Jack Martin, his charge Thomas Edward Beckham, and a West Coast figure named Fred Lee Crisman with connections to Offut Air Force base in Omaha. In an effort to uncover further records relating to “Jack S. Martin” and his many aliases, and Fred Lee Crisman, in September 2006 lawyer Dan Alcorn filed a freedom of information suit with the Central Intelligence Agency on my behalf. We knew there was a CIA employee named Joseph James Martin, and the CIA acknowledged that.
We asked: What was the connection, if any, of the Jack Martin who brought news of the relationship between David Ferrie and Lee Harvey Oswald to Jim Garrison’s attention during the weekend of the Kennedy assassination with Fred Lee Crisman? Alcorn requested of the Agency “all records related to Jack S. Martin and name variations and aliases provided, Joseph James Martin and Fred Lee Crisman,” who was “an acquaintance of Martin.” Thomas Edward Beckham had “claimed that Martin and Crisman were his CIA handlers,” Alcorn points out. He provided to the CIA’s Central Cover Staff records that reflected three Jack Martins and listed their Agency Identification Numbers.
When I discussed the FOIA suit with L. J. Delsa, he repeated, “They could always say, ‘it’s not the guy.’” You would never know if it was the right Jack Martin. They didn’t put all their eggs in one basket in any operation.”
That Jack Martin was affiliated with CIA, which by now seemed evident, corroborated Thomas Edward Beckham’s interview with me in which he described how he had been groomed by CIA to be the patsy in the Kennedy assassination should Oswald not have worked out. For Delsa, Jack Martin was CIA, a military guy self-disciplined and with nerves of steel. Could these New Orleans con men, people like Jack Martin and Fred Lee Crisman, really have worked for the Central Intelligence Agency?
“All intelligence people are good con men,” Delsa noted. “An informant gives you no more than fifteen percent of what he knows. He has to have something left if he’s arrested.”
On Lawrence Howard, to whom Thomas Edward Beckham claimed to have delivered a package of maps and diagrams in Dallas shortly before the assassination, L. J. Delsa concluded, “in Lawrence Howard we were looking at the guy that fired the shot. If he believes in what he did, he’ll never give it up. If he feels it was wrong, you have a chance.” Howard has never come forward. Howard had known, Delsa remembered, that the House Select Committee on Assassinations “was going nowhere. He had been told. He showed no fear.”
No bounty of revelations issued from my FOIA suit. Most of the documents sent by CIA were in the National Archives and I had already seen them—but for one. This document was connected to Fred Lee Crisman. It was an internal CIA document and so bore no identifying riff sheet, although it is stamped “CIA Historical Review Pro
gram.” Since it was “approved for release in 1993,” it may well sit somewhere in a lonely unmarked file in the National Archives in Maryland.
Markings on an Official Routing Slip dated 2/16/70 contained in the file suggest that it was the Soviet Russia Division’s Counter Intelligence component that had set up at least one file on Fred Lee Crisman. It is worth noting, as revealed in A Farewell to Justice, that the decision of Buras and Delsa to investigate Fred Lee Crisman was what landed them the suspension that led to their resignation from the HSCA. The Committee, CIA influenced and controlled as it was (see Chapter 21), was determined that the relation of Crisman to the Kennedy assassination not be explored.
The document in question is marked #5632. It is a two-page single-spaced letter to a “Mrs. Banfield” from a writer who is an employee of the Agency, but who chooses not to sign his name. This document at the least demonstrates that Jim Garrison was right to zero in on Fred Lee Crisman and his charge Thomas Edward Beckham and to bring them before the Orleans Parish grand jury. On the cover with its “Official Routing Slip,” the author writes: “OP’s set up file on Fred Lee CRISMAN. Send file to me.”
The person who generated this document has taken it upon himself to investigate Fred Lee Crisman. The letter, dated September 13, 1969 to Mrs. Banfield, was written as a warning, even as the Garrison investigation was by now over and Clay Shaw had been acquitted. Mrs. Banfield had requested a trace on Crisman. The author had a certain amount of difficulty in getting to the appropriate files. “To ask for a report from the file of a CIA agent is asking for a lot of attention,” he notes, “and asking for a report of a 4250ece agent is almost an impossible task.”
“This man, Crisman,” he writes, “is a man that is dangerous to the future of America. We do not know how many agents that the U.S. has in his category, but it MUST be plain to you, that if you do love this nation we cannot have CIA people such as him interfering with local government.” The author has obviously investigated Crisman on his home ground of Tacoma, Washington, where he was a public personality operating under the alias “Jon Gold.”
The anonymous author of the letter had obtained, he says, “core documents and copies of proper documents” tracing Crisman’s “record and his work,” suggesting, again, that he was a CIA employee. But his source of information “has been cut off by the introduction of new security measures.”
No matter, he had already concluded that “Crisman is a federal agent of the worst possible stripe. A Disruption Agent.” Obviously there was dissension within the Agency regarding the assignments tendered to operatives domestically. We know that the FBI specialized in introducing agents provocateurs into organizations the Bureau was monitoring. But here is CIA admitting to using its people as facilitators of “disruption.”
Crisman is “not a friend to our form of government,” the author continues. “He represents no one but a section of the C.I.A.” Crisman, he explains, was a “disruption agent for a ‘planning’ component,” of the clandestine services. The author of the document has never heard of the component that enlisted Crisman, but he does know that Crisman was involved in improper domestic activity for the Agency as a “disruption agent.” He wants to expose Crisman even as he uncovers internal warfare within the Agency.
Crisman, this anonymous CIA employee repeats, is the kind of agent “dangerous to the democratic way of life . . . these men bear no love for the CIA. They serve the CIA and what is more they serve only a part of the CIA, for they would kill a fellow agent as fast as they would arrange your death.” He has not discovered “what their master plan may be.” But he has felt “for a very long time that it should be made public and that CIA agents should be made to reveal under oath what they mean by their Internal Security Section . . . Disruption Agents such as Fred Crisman should be retired from government service.”
The author included attachments, documents that supported his conclusions about Fred Lee Crisman, with his letter to Mrs. Banfield, but CIA did not provide them in its FOIA response. We have only the author’s references to a report and its documentation. The author urges Mrs. Banfield to send copies of his report to friends on the Coast, where Crisman was based “and allow them to make Crisman’s role as an agent public.”
He hopes that the evidence he has marshaled will lead people to believe “Jim Garrison when he stated that Crisman was a CIA agent.” He is nervous about having made his report and the documents public. “God help me if it is ever linked to our section,” this early CIA whistleblower writes.
The letter exposing Fred Lee Crisman as a CIA-employed “disruption agent” concludes ominously. The author warns Mrs. Banfield: “You realize that we never heard of you! Hold this report until after Sept. 30 and then we do not care what you do with it but once you use it you can never get another.”
From the time Jim Garrison named Crisman and brought him to New Orleans (see Chapters 17 and 18), CIA denied that Fred Lee Crisman was one of their own. In a Memorandum for The Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Howard J. Osborn, then CIA’s Director of Security, writing “FOR THE DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE,” categorically denied that “Fred Lee Crisman has had a connection with this Agency and predecessor organizations. A check of Agency records has failed to disclose that Crisman is or ever has been connected with this Agency or any predecessor organization.”
Contradicting itself, knowing there would be no accountability, CIA included in the FOIA packet it sent to me a document referring to “copies of DCD information pertaining to F. Lee Crisman which refers to activities during 1966–1968.” So the Agency admitted at least Domestic Contact Division interest and awareness of Crisman. The supporting documents were, again, missing.
Yet another CIA Memorandum, one released at the time of the House Select Committee On Assassinations, names Fred Lee Crisman as “Agency connected.” The author of this Memorandum is one Ruth Elliff, DCD/FIO/PAO. DCD records had been searched, Elliff writes, and Crisman’s name appears on a list of ten Agency-connected people.
The list includes Frank Bartes and Lawrence Laborde, known to be CIA employees; Laborde received a monthly stipend from CIA while piloting the Tejana for Cuban exile leader Alberto Fernández (See the author’s The Great Game In Cuba: How CIA Sabotaged Its Own Efforts To Unseat Fidel Castro). Under “b” we find “Fred Lee Crisman.” Elliff writes: “material on Crisman was forwarded with our memo DCD-171/78 of 16 February 1978.”
Scant though they may be, CIA’s released records on Fred Lee Crisman more than vindicate a young Thomas Edward Beckham, who told me that he feared Crisman and had fallen under his sway. They also vindicate Jim Garrison, who had managed, despite the difficulties under which he conducted his investigation, to name a group of CIA employees, contacts and assets all of whom played some role in the plot to murder President Kennedy: Clay Shaw, David Ferrie, Jack Martin, Thomas Edward Beckham—and Fred Lee Crisman.
As for Thomas Edward Beckham, among the more intriguing calls I received after the publication of A Farewell to Justice was from an Alabama judge named Charles McKnight, who telephoned me on November 6, 2007. As a lawyer, McKnight had represented Beckham, who had been charged with wire fraud by the federal government for depriving a trust of concert proceeds to which it was entitled. Producing a country and western show, Beckham had advertised the appearance of singer Merle Haggard, only for Haggard to cancel.
Beckham had fired two previous lawyers, who had called him a “nut.” McKnight had just completed his clerkship with a federal judge, and was practicing law. Because the two lawyers had been so skeptical, McKnight decided to attempt to verify everything Beckham told him. He told me where to go, McKnight says, and everything checked out.
“I was a CIA operative,” Beckham said, on the stand in the country and western fraud case.
McKnight didn’t represent Beckham through trial. He watched in amazement as Beckham was acquitted.
Beckham, McKnight told me, was “the most credibly bright truthful human b
eing I ever met.” He was “far superior in intellect to me.” McKnight was even more impressed by Beckham’s ability to surmount obstacles placed before him. “His sense of survival is beyond what I know,” McKnight remembered.
Beckham had told Judge McKnight that he had been in Dallas on the day of the assassination. He was fearful then as he was fearful when I interviewed him in Louisville. The federal government wanted to get him in prison to kill him, Beckham thought, “because I was in Dallas on 11/22/63 and they know what I know.” He talked about an executive order that would have been authored by President Kennedy ordering the disbanding of the CIA. He told Judge McKnight that he had met Lawrence Howard in Dallas, handing him the maps and diagrams that David Ferrie and G. Wray Gill had given him to take to Dallas shortly before the assassination.
McKnight stops talking. Beckham knows a lot, McKnight says, and he’ll go to his grave without revealing it to anyone. The judge gives me to know something else Beckham confided to him. He didn’t see only Lawrence Howard in Dallas shortly before the assassination. Another person that he saw in Dallas on that trip was Lee Oswald.
A year after he represented Thomas Edward Beckham, McKnight’s office was what he called “sanitized.” Beckham’s file was taken. It was a professional job. There was no sign of a break-in. Along the way, McKnight decided that he had better be armed, and he purchased a pistol.
McKnight telephoned a local FBI agent. “If you can find out where he [Beckham] is, just tell me,” McKnight said. He wanted to warn the young man, whom he called “Tommy,” and whom he genuinely liked.
The FBI agent called McKnight back. “Let me tell you something,” the FBI agent said. “He doesn’t exist. I cannot find anything after 1984.” Some time after that, Beckham sent McKnight the gift of a chess set. He signed the card, “Your brother-in-Christ, Tommy.” Judge McKnight has no doubt but that Beckham was in “Agency service.”
“I know he was telling the truth,” Judge McKnight told me.