He also proved Oswald’s intelligence linkage: Garrison’s investigation found Shaw linked to a subterranean world of anti-Castro operations involving a bizarre pilot and paramilitarist named David Ferrie and a rabid John Birch Society member and ex-FBI agent named Guy Banister.
Newly released government files, plus the results of digging by researchers William Davy, Peter Vea, and Jim DiEugenio, indicate that Oswald was frequently seen with Shaw, Ferrie, and Banister. In 1995, Lou Ivon, an investigator for Garrison, told Davy that in February 1967, he had met with a frightened David Ferrie, who admitted doing contract work for the CIA and who knew Oswald and Shaw. Four days after he told Ivon that Shaw worked for the CIA and that he hated Kennedy, Ferrie was found dead. Two unsigned suicide notes were found next to the body, but the autopsy cited a brain aneurysm as the cause of death.386
Garrison investigated Oswald’s background more tenaciously and with much more thoroughness than did the Warren Commission.
Former FBI Special Agent William Turner, who had worked with the Garrison investigation, also shared some very interesting revelations in an excellent piece that detailed his experiences with that investigation. It was an article called, “The Garrison Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy,” and it really went in-depth about what they knew and how they knew it. A short excerpt follows, but if you have the time, the whole article is worth a read: wf.net/~biles/jfk/ramparts.txt
[District Attorney] Garrison believes that Oswald was schooled in covert operations by the CIA while in the Marine Corps at the Atsugi Naval Station in Japan, a U-2 facility [interestingly, two possibly relevant documents, ‘Oswald’s access to information about the U-2’ {CD 931} and ‘Reproduction of CIA official dossier on Oswald’ {CD 692} are still classified in the National Archives]. Curiously, the miscast Marine who was constantly in hot water had a Crypto clearance on top of a Top Secret clearance and was given two electronics courses. ‘Isn’t it odd,’ prods Garrison, ‘that even though he supposedly defected to the Soviet Union with Top Secret data on our radar nets, no action was taken against him when he came back to the United States?’387
One of Garrison’s major “finds” was Dean Andrews, a flashy Southern attorney who was an established link between Lee Harvey Oswald and Clay Shaw. Andrews knowingly concealed the fact that Clay Bertrand was an alias for Clay Shaw, who—it has been proved—had ties to U.S. intelligence.388 The government clearly intimidated Dean Andrews into changing his testimony, as I’ll show you below. But the CIA itself proved that Shaw was with the Agency:
Now the CIA has admitted as much. Memorandums on a number of the figures in Garrison’s probe were prepared in 1967 and 1968 for the deputy director of plans . . . Garrison and Marchetti were right. The CIA verified Shaw’s background in an April 6, 1967, file for the deputy chief, security research staff.389
But bear in mind that this was what researchers dug up later. At the time, when Garrison was trying to conduct an authentic investigation, they stonewalled him every step of the way. Make no mistake about it—the government lied and said there was no connection between Shaw and the CIA.
There’s a clip online where you can see what a colorful character Dean Andrews was. That was the jive-talking New Orleans attorney who John Candy portrayed so well in Oliver Stone’s film, JFK. That piece was also one of the many “hatchet jobs” done on the Garrison investigation in the press, so it also shows you what Garrison was up against: youtube.com/watch?v=jCkw8zWmQD8.
Garrison documented the following conversation between him and Andrews for his book, On the Trail of the Assassins. For the film JFK, it was depicted almost verbatim. In the following exchange, the fear in Andrews’s voice practically jumps off the printed page. Andrews was convicted of perjury, but in his opinion that was a much better choice than being killed.
GARRISON: If you lie to the Grand Jury as you have been lying to me, I’m going to charge you with perjury. Now am I communicating with you?
ANDREWS: (stunned) Is this off the off the record, Daddyo?
(Garrison nodded)
In that case, let me sum it up for you real quick. It’s as simple as this. If I answer that question you keep asking me, if I give you the name you keep trying to get, then it’s goodbye, Dean Andrews. It’s bon voyage, Deano. I mean like permanent. I mean like a bullet in my head—which makes it hard to do one’s legal research, if you get my drift. Does that help you see my problem a little better?
GARRISON: Read my lips. Either you dance in to the Grand Jury with the real moniker of that cat who called you to represent Lee Oswald, or your fat behind is going to the slammer. Do you dig me?
ANDREWS: [He stood up suddenly.] Do you have any idea what you’re getting into, my man? You want to dance with the government? Is that what you want? Then be my guest. But you will get sat on, and I do mean hard.390
But the government torpedoed that witness and Garrison knew it. He also explained in his book how that came about:
It had readily become apparent to me, however, that the more Andrews realized that his having received a phone call to defend Lee Oswald was a potential danger to him, the foggier the identity of Clay Bertrand became in his mind. By the time Andrews appeared before the Warren Commission in July of 1964, Bertrand’s height had shrunk from six feet two all the way down to five feet eight inches. Apparently in response to subtle pressure from the FBI agents, Andrews told them, “Write what you want, that I am nuts. I don’t care.” The agents obligingly wrote in their final report that Andrews had come to the conclusion that the phone call from Bertrand had been “a figment of his imagination.” This not only allowed the Bureau to conclude its investigation into Andrews but harmonized with its announced conclusion that Lee Oswald had accomplished Kennedy’s assassination alone and unaided.391
And he proved that the Warren Commission altered witness testimony in a very corrupt manner. Another important witness whom the Garrison investigation found was Julia Ann Mercer:
Some of the best witnesses to the assassination found their way to us after it became apparent to them that the federal agents and the Dallas police really were not interested in what they saw. Julia Ann Mercer was just such a witness. In fact, no other witness so completely illuminated for me the extent of the cover-up.
Mercer had been but a few feet away when one of the riflemen was unloaded at the grassy knoll shortly before the arrival of the presidential motorcade. Consequently, she was a witness not only to the preparation of President Kennedy’s murder but also to the conspiracy involved.
She gave statements to the FBI and the Dallas Sheriff’s office, and then returned to the FBI and provided additional statements, but she was never called by the Warren Commission—not even to provide an affidavit.392
Quite contrary to the attempted smear job done on her by author Gerald Posner in his book, Case Closed, Julia Ann Mercer was a sophisticated woman and very credible witness. Jim Garrison described his pleasant surprise at meeting her:
Then one day in early 1968, her husband called me at the office. He said that he and his wife were in New Orleans on business and had some things to tell me. I agreed to meet them at the Fairmont Hotel, where they were staying.
Arriving at their suite, I found a most impressive couple. A middle-aged man of obvious substance, he had been a Republican member of Congress from Illinois. Equally impressive, she was intelligent and well-dressed, the kind of witness any lawyer would love to have testifying on his side in front of a jury.393
Ms. Mercer’s statements were definitely altered, and she showed that to Garrison in precise terms:
After he had departed on business, I handed her copies of her statements as they had been printed in the Warren Commission exhibits. She read them carefully and then shook her head.
‘These all have been altered,’ she said. ‘They have me saying just the opposite of what I really told them.’
It’s not at all surprising that Mercer’s testimony was a threat to the cover-up. She
was the eyewitness to an amazing event, and her recollection of it was absolutely positive.
About an hour before the assassination, she had been driving west on Elm Street and had been stopped—just past the grassy knoll—by traffic congestion. To her surprise (because she recalled that the President’s parade was coming soon), she saw a young man in the pickup truck to her right dismount, carrying a rifle, not too well concealed in a covering of some sort. She then observed him walk up ‘the grassy hill which forms part of the overpass.’ She looked at the driver several times, got a good look at his round face and brown eyes, and he looked right back at her.
Mercer also observed that three police officers were standing near a motorcycle on the overpass bridge above her and just ahead. She recalled that they showed no curiosity about the young man climbing the side of the grassy knoll with the rifle.394
So, silly us, we think that the United States Government would actually welcome upstanding citizens spending their own time to testify about important events that they witnessed, right?
Wrong, Charlie Brown!
After the assassination, when Mercer sought to make this information available to law enforcement authorities, their response was almost frenzied. At the FBI office—where she went the day after the assassination—she was shown a number of mug shots. Among the several she selected as resembling the driver was a photograph of Jack Ruby. On Sunday, when she saw Ruby kill Oswald on television, she positively recognized him as the driver of the pickup truck and promptly notified the local Bureau office. Nevertheless, the FBI altered her statement so it did not note that she had made a positive identification.
She laughed when she pointed this out to me. ‘See,’ she said, ‘the FBI made it just the opposite of what I really told them.’ Then she added, ‘He was only a few feet away from me. How could I not recognize Jack Ruby when I saw him shoot Oswald on television?’395
So that was what the Feds did. And guess what? The authorities in Dallas did the same thing. They altered her testimony, too, in what Garrison aptly describes as the “same fraud”:
The Dallas Sheriff’s office went through the same laborious fraud and added an imaginative touch of its own. Although Mercer had never been brought before any notary, the Sheriff’s office filed a sworn affidavit stating that she did not identify the driver, although she might, ‘if I see him again,’ and significantly changing other facts.
‘See that notarized signature?’ she asked me. ‘That’s not my signature either. I sign my name with a big “A” like this.’ She produced a pen and wrote her name for me. It was clear that the signature the Dallas Sheriff’s office had on its altered statement was not even close to hers.396
It was obvious that Garrison actually cared about finding the truth, and as a District Attorney, he certainly knew how to weigh the evidence, too:
The implications of her experience were profound. First of all, Mercer’s observations provided further evidence that there was another rifleman on the knoll ahead of the President.
But to me the responses to her statements were even more chilling. They proved that law enforcement officials recognized early on that a conspiracy existed to kill the President. Both local and federal authorities had altered Mercer’s statements precisely to conceal that fact.397
Jim Garrison described the Warren Report quite well:
The twenty-six volumes is [sic] a domestic intelligence accomplishment.398
The following is straight from Garrison himself, regarding his interview of private investigator Jack Martin about the goings-on at Banister’s office between Banister, Ferrie, and Oswald in the period prior to the JFK assassination.
MARTIN: There was Dave Ferrie—you know about him by now.
GARRISON: Was he there very often?
MARTIN: Often? He practically lived there.
GARRISON: And Lee Harvey Oswald?
MARTIN: Yeah, he was there too. Sometimes he’d be meeting with Guy Banister with the door shut. Other times he’d be shooting the bull with Dave Ferrie. But he was there all right.
GARRISON: What was Guy Banister doing while all this was going on?
MARTIN: Hell, he was the one running the circus.
GARRISON: What about his private detective work?
MARTIN: Not much of that came in, but when it did, I handled it. That’s why I was there.
GARRISON: So, Jack. Just what was going on at Banister’s office?
MARTIN: I can’t answer that. I can’t go into that stuff at all. I think I’d better go.
GARRISON: Hold on, Jack. What’s the problem with our going into what was happening at Banister’s office?
MARTIN: What’s the problem? What’s the problem? The problem is that we’re going to bring the goddamned federal government down on our backs. Do I need to spell it out? I could get killed—and so could you.
But he went forward with that investigation anyway, and he deserves a lot of credit for that.
As Jim Garrison put it himself:
One man with the truth constitutes a majority.399
382 The Steve Allen Show, 1971, KTLA-TV, (Golden West Broadcasters, Inc.): youtube.com/watch?v=KXZfsbpa2kI
383 Dick Russell, On the Trail of the JFK Assassins, 85.
384 Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History (Potomac Books: 2005).
385 William Davy, Let Justice Be Done: New Light on the Jim Garrison Investigation (Jordan Pub: 1999): ctka.net/nbc_cia.html
386 Roger S. Peterson, “Declassifed,” August 1996, American History Magazine: assassinationweb.com/Peterson.htm
387 William W. Turner, “The Garrison Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy,” Ramparts Magazine, January 1968: wf.net/~biles/jfk/ramparts.txt
388 Russell, On the Trail of the JFK Assassins, 85.
389 Ibid.
390 Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins, 91–95.
391 Ibid, 92–93.
392 Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins.
393 Ibid.
394 Ibid.
395 Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins.
396 Ibid.
397 Ibid.
398 The Steve Allen Show, 1971, KTLA-TV, (Golden West Broadcasters, Inc.): youtube.com/watch?v=KXZfsbpa2kI
399 Jim Garrison, “Gerald Ford & Jim Garrison in 1967,” retrieved 9 May 2013: youtube.com/watch?v=lixaRjLxadw
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Another Key Witness Conveniently Silenced: David Ferrie
Just as Jim Garrison’s investigation was getting started, his star witness died a “convenient” and very suspicious death. David Ferrie was a strange man; a homosexual during a macho period in history. But he was also an excellent pilot with tons of bravado and that came in handy when you were flying guns into Cuba on covert missions. He was also very well-connected, being both investigator and private pilot for Carlos Marcello, the crime boss of Texas and Louisiana.
And just like in Oliver Stone’s JFK, Ferrie actually predicted his own death. After he was publicly named as an accused conspirator in the JFK assassination by the New Orleans District Attorney’s office, Ferrie exploded at Jim Garrison’s aide, Lou Ivon. These were his exact words:
You know what this news story does to me, don’t you? I’m a dead man. From here on, believe me, I’m a dead man.400
On the same day that Ferrie died, Garrison also lost another key witness: anti-Castro Cuban Eladio del Valle, who was brutally murdered in Miami.401 Just another coincidence, right? Right. His key witnesses were dropping like flies and he knew it:
All I know is that witnesses with vital evidence in the case are bad insurance risks.402
I already documented his connections to Oswald and Guy Banister, so let’s look at some of the inconsistencies surrounding Ferrie’s death.
The Coroner ruled that his death was of natural causes; a brain aneurysm from a cerebral hemorrhage. But they also said they found two suicide notes in his apartment. And they we
re typed.403
Garrison’s office found that rather strange and suspected poisoning.404 With some dry wit and sarcasm, here’s what the district attorney had to say about yet another amazing coincidence:
I suppose it could just be a weird coincidence that the night Ferrie penned two suicide notes, he died of natural causes.405
Both of those so-called suicide notes were typed, undated, and unsigned.406 The last person to see him alive reported that he had been in good spirits.407 Others reported that his mood was combative, intent on fighting the charges against him.408 Still sound like a suicide?
And get this: Those notes were not really suggestive of suicide. Instead, they were diatribes about things he was angered by; a man who knew he was about to be killed:
They appear, instead, to be two notes written by a man who knew he was leaving this world—they were more the words of a man who was making his final statements; of words that he wanted left behind.
One note to his best friend started out: ‘When you read this I will be quite dead and no answer will be possible.’ It ended with the words: ‘As you sowed, so shall you reap.’ The other letter started out: ‘To leave this life, to me, is a sweet prospect.’ Then it complained about the justice system and ended with: ‘All the state needs is “evidence to support a conviction.” If this is justice, then justice be damned.’ The letters can be accessed in their entirety online.
So they, indeed, do not appear to actually be notes regarding a planned suicide.409
Garrison wasn’t alone. A lot of people thought that Ferrie was murdered, and among the authorities who did was Aaron Kohn, Managing Director of the Metropolitan Crime Commission of New Orleans.410 It was all just a little too convenient.
400 Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins, 138.
401 Belzer & Wayne, Hit List, 168.
402 Donald W. Miller, Jr., MD., “Pursuing Truth on the Kennedy Assassinations,” August 21, 2012: lewrockwell.com/miller/miller40.1.html
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