13 The secretary involved was a temporary covering for Dr. Ochsner’s regular secretary (a nurse) who was on vacation. Involving an outside person in the communication between Judyth and Ochsner was a risky move, to which Ochsner strongly objected. He told Judyth that she should have communicated her concerns to him directly.
14 These untraceable phone calls between Lee and Judyth were arranged by David Ferrie using the Mafia’s secret sports-gambling telephone network, which deliberately did not keep records of the phone calls. This Mafia connection seemed reasonable to Judyth because she and Lee had gone together to the 500 Club (a famous strip-club and bar in the French Quarter), where they had spoken to Carlos himself.
15 David Atlee Phillips is a well-known name in the JFK assassination research circles. He was a CIA officer stationed primarily in Mexico City at the time. He has long been suspected of being the organizer behind the JFK assassination by those who believe that it was the CIA that murdered Jack Kennedy. We now have a real, live witness, who can prove that she worked with Lee Harvey Oswald, state that Oswald (the man accused of the JFK assassination by former-CIA Director Allen Dulles, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and the others on the Warren Commission) personally told her two days before the JFK assassination that Kennedy would be killed on Friday, and that a CIA officer name David Atlee Phillips was organizing the hit. This is a serious charge which should not be ignored. And it raises serious questions about the composition of the Warren Commission.
16 Judyth’s book entitled Lee Harvey Oswald was released in June of 2006. It was published by Trafford press and could be ordered on their Web site. After about two weeks, it was suddenly withdrawn without explanation. I do not know why and will leave that for others to explain and to discuss. I was given my copy directly by Judyth Vary Baker. Used copies may be available from time to time: Check the Internet.
17 It was INCAs Executive Director Ed Butler who said that the newspaper clipping about Oswald’s defection to the Soviet Union used in the WDSU radio debate from Congressman Willis’ office.
18 Edwin Edward Willis (1904-1972) had been a U.S. Congressman representing the Cajun parishes of Louisiana since 1949. A senior liberal Democrat, Willis was a loyal LBJ ally in building the “Great Society.” From 1963 to 1968 Willis chaired HUAC, once the anti-Communist bludgeon of Senator Joe McCarthy.
19 Judyth assured me that Willis knew about Lee, and knew that his defection to the USSR was not a real one — which is why he was allowed to work for Reily: the ex-FBI agent at Reily’s would have never hired a defector with an undesirable discharge to work for one of the city’s most prominent anti-Communists.
20 On July 21, 1964 (the day Mary Sherman’s murder was discovered), LBJ suddenly headed from the White House to the Pentagon for an unscheduled visit. After that meeting, he stopped at Arlington National Cemetery, and stood alone at JFK’s grave for the first time since the assassination. One has to wonder if this was LBJ’s epiphany? Was this the day LBJ finally understood the dimensions of the forces that Kennedy had faced? Was this the day LBJ was told about Mary Sherman’s murder and the bio-weapon that she had been developing with Lee Harvey Oswald? The timing does make one wonder.
~~~~~~~~~~
EPILOGUE
The Perfect Patsy
Rethinking Lee Harvey Oswald
I TRIED TO STAY OUT OF THE ENTANGLED DEBATE surrounding the JFK assassination. I really did. Simply said, my book is not about the Kennedy Assassination. My public position about Oswald’s role in the JFK Assassination had always been one of shoulder-shrugging neutrality. Whatever Oswald’s role was (or wasn’t) in the JFK assassination, it did not affect the basic facts of Mary Sherman’s murder, the cancer-causing monkey viruses in the polio vaccine, or whether Ferrie and Sherman irradiated cancer-causing monkey viruses to develop a biological weapon.
But once I realized the connection between Dr. Alton Ochsner (the former President of the American Cancer Society, who was working on a secret project for the U.S. Government) and Lee Harvey Oswald (the accused assassin of President Kennedy), my aloof position became more difficult to maintain. Connecting Ochsner to Oswald not only rules out “lone nut” as a realistic description of Oswald, it helps us understand how convenient “lone nut” was for protecting Ochsner (and others) from inconvenient questions about both the bio-weapon project and the JFK assassination. Using “lone nut” to cut off further discussion about Oswald protected Ochsner, his circle of powerful contacts, the CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and Oswald’s hidden sponsor — the person who brought him back from Russia. It was a great political compromise worthy of the skillful politicians on the Warren Commission. But it simply was not true.
It is not difficult to demonstrate that Dr. Alton Ochsner had some connection to Lee Harvey Oswald in the summer of 1963. After all, Ochsner had INCA produce and distribute an audio recording featuring Lee Harvey Oswald.1
The fact that Dr. Alton Ochsner financed, produced and distributed this record is itself a connection to Oswald. The Oswald radio appearance was aired on WDSU radio, and the TV footage of Oswald passing out pro-Castro leaflets was filmed by WDSU-TV camera crews. Both stations were owned by a close Ochsner associate named Edgar Stern.2 It has long been suspected that it was Ochsner who asked Stern to provide the media coverage of Oswald. This suspicion was so strong that at one point the New Orleans District Attorney spoke of arresting Ochsner for conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination. Garrison’s staff talked him out of it.
Further connecting Ochsner to Oswald, I reported that I personally saw Guy Banister’s files in the offices of Ochsner’s political organization INCA. It was INCA’s Executive Director Ed Butler himself who told me that they had been Banister’s files.3 Banister was widely regarded as “ Oswald’s handler” in New Orleans during 1963, and was considered to be the operational leader of the paramilitary training camp outside of New Orleans that Bobby Kennedy shut down later that summer.4 Banister and Ferrie were training Cubans and mobsters as a strike force to enter Cuba and assassinate Fidel Castro.
Additionally, it has been said for many years that Oswald was helping make training films to teach Cubans how to use certain military weapons in support of this kill-Castro project.5 So the connection between Ochsner and Banister is also a connection between Ochsner and Oswald.
The extent of Ochsner’s connections to Oswald, and his motives for setting up the media coverage, have always been less clear to me. Unlike Garrison, who thought that the media coverage was part of the “sheep dipping” of Oswald to make him a convincing patsy for the JFK assassination, it is hard for me to imagine that Dr. Ochsner knew that he was setting up Lee Harvey Oswald as part of an effort to kill the President of the United States. Ochsner’s role was too high-profile, and, frankly, his reputation was too valuable for him to risk in such a manner. In the same breath, one might ask why would a wealthy and prestigious doctor bother at all with Lee Harvey Oswald? Perhaps there was another reason behind their association, and a different reason for arranging the media coverage.6
Judyth Vary Baker has told us that there was. Judyth reports that Lee Oswald secretly worked as a team member on Ochsner’s bio-weapon project, that Oswald met with Ochsner personally, and that it was actually Lee Oswald who requested that Dr. Ochsner set up his media coverage to help position him as a pro-Cuban activist, so that he could get into Cuba more easily and deliver their bio-weapon to sympathetic doctors, who would use it to kill Castro.
BEFORE WE MOVE ON, I WANT TO FOCUS on a detail of the dialog between Lee Oswald and INCA’s Ed Butler during the radio program. The debate was evidently Lee’s idea in the first place, to portray himself as a pro-Cuban activist who would seem more “acceptable” to Cuban authorities who could grant him a visa to visit Cuba. But Butler (Ochsner’s front-man at INCA and a staunch anti-Communist himself) was not privy to that part of the story. Butler had another objective.
He thought his role was to discredit Oswald as being a Communist. In the middle of their debate, Butle
r pulled out two 1959 newspaper articles from the Washington Evening-Star and the Washington Post, and read quotes that accused Oswald of “defecting” to the Soviet Union. Now there is a big difference between being a sympathetic pro-Cuban activist who might be welcome in Cuba and being an American military defector. Oswald was surprised by Butler’s unexpected comment, and was obviously annoyed by the accusation. In a tense exchange, he defended himself against the defector accusation: “The obvious answer to that is that I am back in the United States.”
This is a really good point. Take some time to think this one through. It has been glossed over for years. In my opinion, the pivotal issue for understanding Lee Harvey Oswald is the fact that Lee managed to return to the United States with his Russian wife and infant daughter at the height of the Cold War, and after leading American newspapers had claimed that he had defected and renounced his citizenship. Following up on Oswald’s remark may tell us for whom he really worked after his return.
My take is that in 1959 Lee was sent to Russia on an undercover assignment for an American intelligence effort, and became marooned there when he lost his sponsors, either in the Eisenhower-to-Kennedy changeover or after the Bay of Pigs debacle, both in 1961. As part of his cover assignment, he had walked into the American Embassy in Moscow and announced his intention to renounce his American citizenship (but was careful not to sign anything). Later he married Marina, and she became pregnant. It is then that he realized that, unless he returned to the United States, his child would be trapped in the Soviet Union. His problem was that the people who had sent him (and who know about his real mission as an agent and not a defector) were no longer around to vouch for him.
The new people thought that he was really a defector and were unwilling to help him return. Lee wrote to his mother and asked her to help. Lee’s mother called and wrote everyone she could (in both New Orleans and Washington) trying to get her son and his family into the United States. Someone finally came through, but to this day we do not know who it was.
The U.S. State Department lent Lee the money to travel, and gave him the proper documentation for his family to enter the United States. Whoever authorized this, there are two things we now know. First, this person had a lot of power and influence with the United States government (enough to overrule staff opposition and to tell the State Department what to do), and, secondly, Lee now owed someone big time!
Did Lee cut a deal to get back into the U.S.? If so, with whom? Who has the power to say if you are (or are not) “an America citizen”? Who has the power to say that you are (or are not) really “a defector”? Who has the power to pick up the telephone and tell the State Department to loan you money to buy your tickets to go home? The right answers to these questions would reveal the person who shaped the rest of Lee Oswald’s life.
TENS OF THOUSANDS OF PAGES have already been written about Lee Harvey Oswald. The debate over his role in the JFK assassination is polarized, opinionated, and often angry. It will not end here. Many people on both sides of the issue have so much personal equity invested in their positions that there is no amount of evidence, nothing that could sway them to change their positions publicly. But these pundits are not the ones I am addressing my comments to.
I laugh at the loyalists who insist that Lee brought a rife with him to work, but rushed back to his apartment upon hearing about the assassination to get his pistol. I roll my eyes at the “experts” who quote evidence prepared under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover, whom we now know was being blackmailed by Mafia-boss Meyer Lansky.7 And I shake my head at the Garrison-bashers who insist that that everything the New Orleans District Attorney ever said was wrong, as if all of the rapists, murderers, and robbers that he put in prison during his twelve years as the chief public prosecutor should be freed because of his over-statements.
Instead, I write to you, the thoughtful reader, because (now that we know how close Lee Oswald was to the Mafia in New Orleans and about his involvement in the bio-weapon project) there is plenty of room for new ideas about Oswald and his role in history, and you have the right to hear them. Yes, I have more questions than answers. My goal is to expand the discussion, not to narrow it. Here I offer you what should be fresh information on Lee Oswald, should you wish to consider it.
I am going to present several different scenarios which might explain how Lee Oswald got back into the United States. If I were conducting an investigation in 1963 to determine who Lee Harvey Oswald ultimately worked for, I would have been investigating these possibilities. When you see who the players were, and how unwelcome such an investigation would have been to them, you will understand why it was not done.
SCENARIO A — THE ATTORNEY GENERAL. Officially, the officer of the U.S. Government who has the final word on whether you have lost or renounced your citizenship is the Attorney General. In 1961, the U.S. Attorney General was Bobby Kennedy. The normal administrative request to resolve a question of whether one had renounced one’s citizenship would have come to his desk. At that time, Bobby had his own set of problems. He was busy fighting a war against the Mafia (particularly Carlos Marcello) and was trying to figure out what the CIA was really doing with the millions of dollars missing from its budgets. Bobby was particularly concerned about renegade CIA paramilitary operations involving the Mafia, since they defied the authority of the White House. Bobby needed one or more competent undercover agents to get inside these operations and report back to him (through intermediaries, of course). Lee was a trained spy who had done undercover work in the Soviet Union. Normally, the AG would rely on the FBI for this type of counter-intelligence help, but the FBI Director was his sworn enemy, was blackmailing his brother the President, and had connections to the Mafia himself. So Bobby needed his own off -the-books agents to do this work. Bobby Kennedy arranged for Lee and his family to return to the U.S. The price: You work undercover for me, and use your family contacts to spy on Carlos Marcello and the Mafia in New Orleans.
SCENARIO B — THE MAFIA BOSS. Lee’s mother, Marguarite Clavier Oswald, had been a personal friend of Carlos Marcello for decades. She went to the Mafia boss and asked him to use his influence (which was enormous) on the Louisiana politicians (which were among the most powerful in Washington) to pressure the right people to let her son and his family back into the U.S. Marcello had considerable influence with virtually all the Louisiana politicians, but he had a special relationship with one in particular — Congressman Edwin E. Willis, Chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities.8 As such, he had the de facto power to decide who was a defector and who was not, and cleared Oswald’s reentry in good standing to this country. The price: You now work for Carlos Marcello, and you owe him a very big favor.
SCENARIO C — THE DOUBLE WHAMMY. Bobby Kennedy was at war with the Maia and was prosecuting organized crime figures in record numbers. His primary target was Carlos Marcello. Kennedy openly said that he would use underworld tactics to fight the underworld. He had Marcello kidnapped and dropped him in Guatemala without a U.S. passport. Marcello was so powerful that he was able to get back into the United States without a passport, and despite the pressure against him by the U.S. Attorney General.9 Needless to say, Bobby Kennedy was watching every move Marcello made. His attention was attracted when politicians that he knew to be Marcello-connected started pressuring the organs of the U.S. government to let someone believed to be a defector back in from the U.S.S.R. Kennedy had his people quietly deliver a message to Oswald: “We know you want to bring your family home, and we know that Carlos Marcello is pressuring people to make it happen. We have the power to stop it, leaving you and your family in the Soviet Union. But we are willing to let you in, if ...” The price: You work for us and use your family contacts (with Marcello) to spy on the Mafia and get inside their CIA-related projects, but Marcello still thinks you owe him the favor.10
In my opinion, these are all plausible, and have a real-world feel to them. Any one could easily explain his jobs at the map company in Dallas,
at Reily in New Orleans, and at the Dallas Book Depository.11 But none are compatible with the “lone nut” theory.
COULD OSWALD HAVE BEEN WORKING FOR the CIA, the Mafia, and the Attorney General? The CIA would have known that he was Mafia, because they were already working with the Mafia to kill Castro. Oswald was part of that project. And, of course, the Mafia would have known that Lee was working with the CIA, because they set it up. Was it Lee Oswald who identified the location of Banister’s secret paramilitary training camp near New Orleans, which Bobby Kennedy’s men raided? Did Lee infiltrate the CIA-Mafia bio-weapon project and report back to Bobby on it? If the Mafia and/or the CIA figured out that Oswald was really spying on their operations for their archenemy Bobby Kennedy,12 then Lee’s days would have been numbered from that moment on. Is this why he was ordered back to Dallas?13 Were they putting him in position to be the patsy in the JFK assassination?
FINALLY, LET’S LOOK AT THE JFK ASSASSINATION from the perspective of the plotters. Yes, they needed a patsy, but why would they choose Lee Harvey Oswald to be that patsy? Was it merely because he had lived in Russia, or did he bring something else to the party? Here is how I explain it:
If you’re planning to shoot Jack Kennedy in the head with high-powered rifles in broad daylight, you’d better spend some time thinking about his brother. His brother is Bobby Kennedy, the Attorney General, and he has the power and the resources to come after you. In order to get away with killing Jack, you must neutralize Bobby at the critical moment. If you stymie Bobby, you might get away it. If you don’t, you could be in really big trouble.
Dr. Mary’s Monkey Page 31