Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, & the Garrison Case

by DiEugenio, James

  Q: Did she [Barbara Reid] see you with Oswald?

  A: I don’t think she did because the next day I started asking people …

  Q: You don’t think so?

  A: I don’t know whether it was Oswald, I can’t remember who was sitting there with me …64

  The above statements earned Thornley a perjury indictment from Garrison. But there was much more. Garrison had no less than eight witnesses who said they had seen Oswald with Thornley in New Orleans that summer of 1963. An event denied by Thornley to both Lifton and to Garrison. And some of these witnesses went beyond just noting the association between the two. Two of these witnesses, Bernard Goldsmith and Doris Dowell, both said that Thornley told them Oswald was not a communist.65 This is amazing since, as noted earlier, the Warren Commission featured Thornley as its key witness to Oswald’s alleged commie sympathies. This indicates that Thornley himself 1.) knew the truth about Oswald’s intelligence ties and 2.) was probably involved in creating a false cover—a “legend,” in intelligence parlance—for the alleged assassin.

  On top of these devastating admissions, there is the information from Mrs. Myrtle LaSavia, who lived within a block of Oswald in New Orleans. She stated that she, “her husband, and a number of people who live in that neighborhood saw Thornley at the Oswald residence a number of times—in fact they saw him there so much they did not know which was the husband, Oswald or Thornley.”66 In May of 1999, at the National Archives, Oswald author John Armstrong discovered FBI documents which show that other neighbors of Oswald picked out photos of Thornley as a frequent visitor to the Oswald apartment. According to a radio interview Garrison did in 1968, the DA had witnesses who saw Thornley shopping with Marina Oswald. If this is so, not only did Oswald encounter Thornley in New Orleans in 1963, but the two were quite close.

  This apparent closeness may have had a purpose beyond the framing of Oswald as a leftist in the public mind. There are two indications of this. The first is noted by Harold Weisberg in his book Never Again:

  When the New Orleans Secret Service investigation led it to the Jones Printing Co., the printer of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee handbills, and the Secret Service was on the verge of learning, as I later learned, that it was not Oswald who picked up those handbills, the New Orleans FBI at once contacted FBI HQ. The FBI immediately leaned on the Secret Service HQ and immediately the Secret Service was ordered to desist. For all practical purposes, that ended the Secret Service probe—the moment it was about to explode the myth of the “loner” who had an associate who picked up a print job for him.67

  What Weisberg does not reveal in this passage is that the person who picked up the flyers was identified as Kerry Thornley. In an interview with journalist Earl Golz in 1979, Weisberg stated that two employees at the print shop picked out photos of Thornley, not Oswald, when he questioned them about the “Hands off Cuba” flyers. Weisberg secretly taped one of the interviews with the employees. When Weisberg informed Garrison investigator Lou Ivon of this new development, Bill Boxley—a CIA plant in Garrison’s office—tried to distort what had happened. Weisberg pulled out the tape, quieting Boxley. But later, the tape disappeared.68

  The other 1963 incident that makes Thornley even more fascinating was his trip to Mexico in July/August. As Jeanne Hack noted in an interview, Thornley was usually a quite talkative individual, but when it came to this Mexico trip, he was quite reluctant to speak about it.69 According to his February 25, 1963 FBI statement, Thornley said “that he made this trip by himself and emphatically denied that Oswald had accompanied him from New Orleans to California or from California to Mexico.” Doth Thornley protest too much? In another FBI memo written the same day Thornley was interviewed, the following statement appears: “Thornley is presently employed as a waiter in New Orleans and has recently been in Mexico and California with Oswald. Secret Service has been notified.” Again, if this is so it is very interesting to say the least. But even if it were so, the Secret Service probably followed up about as vigorously as it did the Jones Print Shop incident.

  Thornley’s behavior during the ongoing Garrison probe was strange, to say the least. As noted above, he told the DA’s representative he never met Shaw, Ferrie, Chandler, or Oswald, at least not Oswald in New Orleans. He was a bit hazy on Banister saying that he “may have met Banister somewhere around Camp Street,” but he was not sure. His equivocations on Oswald are even more striking. He told Andrew Sciambra the following:

  He also admits that there are some coincidences which have taken place which make it appear that he and Oswald were in contact with each other but he declares that these are only coincidences and that he has never seen Oswald since the days in the Marine Corps together.70

  In a later interview with Sciambra, Thornley also denied knowing Bring-uier and Ed Butler of INCA, even though he applied for a job at the latter. Every one of these denials turned out to be false and Thornley admitted to them later. But on top of this, there is the apparent element of the protection of Thornley when he became a hot item in New Orleans in 1968. For instance, according to Mort Sahl, Thornley insisted on meeting Sciambra at a curious location for one of their interviews: NASA. Sciambra recalled thinking as he entered the place that if someone like Thornley could command access to such a place then Garrison really didn’t have a snowball’s chance in Hades.71 Several of Oswald’s cohorts from Reily Coffee had gone to NASA before the assassination. It seems odd that a coffee company would be a training ground for such a scientifically oriented facility. Garrison camp infiltrator Gordon Novel also went there while on the lam from Garrison.

  And then there was the problem of locating Thornley. Garrison investigator and former CIA agent Jim Rose took on that assignment. Through his network of Agency contacts he found Thornley was living in Tampa. The supposedly working class Thornley had two homes in Florida, one in Tampa and one in Miami. He lived at the Tampa residence, which, according to Rose’s notes, was a large white frame house on a one acre lot. In addition, he owned two cars at the time.72 All this from a man who had only been a waiter and doorman in civilian life up to that time.

  After the Garrison investigation, Thornley slipped into obscurity. But he resurfaced in the late seventies around the time of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Clearly fearing that the HSCA would take up where Garrison had left off, he now reappeared as a kind of stoned hippie who had a rather eccentric interest in aliens, Nazis, and the occult. He assembled a long narrative in which he now stated that, “I did not realize I was involved in the JFK murder conspiracy until 1975, when the Watergate revelations made it rather obvious.” The reason it became obvious was that he now recognized Howard Hunt as one of the men who recruited him into the plot. In this new mode he even admitted that Oswald had been framed for the crime. Quite an admission from the author of the 1965 book which concluded the opposite.73

  At around this same time, Thornley sent Garrison a long manuscript outlining the Kennedy plot as he saw it. This document is in the form of a long affidavit executed while Thornley was living in Atlanta. To anyone familiar with the true facts of the case and Thornley’s suspicious activities, it is a long and involved and deliberate piece of disinformation.74 In it, Thornley admits that he had met both Ferrie and Banister by the summer of 1962. But yet, they are not the true conspirators. The real ones are people named Slim, Clint, Brother-in-Law, and one Gary Kirstein—nameless, faceless nonentities. (Later, Thornley named one as Jerry M. Brooks, former rightwing Minuteman turned informant to Bill Turner.) Thornley’s communications with the HSCA were frequent as he tried to rivet their attention on his new and improved JFK plot.

  In 1992, Thornley was paid to make an appearance on the tabloid program A Current Affair.75 Some of what Thornley said on camera is worth quoting:

  I wanted to shoot him. I wanted to assassinate him very much‥‥ I wanted him dead. I would have shot him myself. I would have stood there with a rifle and pulled the trigger if I would have had the chance.

&nbs
p; Clearly, Thornley’s hatred of Kennedy is virulent. And, as some of Garrison’s detractors try to imply, Thornley’s hatred of Kennedy was not at all new in 1992. It was manifested back in the 1960s. For example, in a letter he wrote to Philip Boatwright in 1964 from Washington, he admits that there was reason for the FBI and Secret Service to suspect he played a role in Kennedy’s death. And since he was in the Washington area, and after the Commission decided what to do with him, “I may yet go piss on JFK’s grave, RIP.”76 Thornley also had some interesting comments about Garrison. Concerning the DA’s indicting him for perjury, Thornley commented, “Garrison, you should have gone after me for conspiracy to commit murder.” Of course, the conspiracy Thornley is hinting at is the later manufactured one with Slim, and Brother-in-Law, etc. He also insisted in 1992 that he had not betrayed his friend Oswald, even though he now thought the case was a conspiracy. Thornley was apparently doing his distracting limited hang-out number for bucks this time around. Thornley died in 1997 of a kidney ailment.

  What is the sum total of the reliable evidence about Thornley available in the new files? First, Thornley lied about his relationship with the intelligence network surrounding Oswald. He knew all of these players. He also lied about not knowing Oswald in New Orleans in the summer of 1963. He even distorted their respective heights! He said Oswald was five foot, five inches, which was five inches shorter than Thornley. When in fact they were of nearly equal height.77 The question of course is: Why did he lie about all these material issues? And the answer seems to point to some deeper involvement that he himself suggests in his 1964 letter quoted above. This seems to imply that the Weisberg investigation of the flyers at Jones print shop and the FBI telex about Oswald accompanying Thornley to California and Mexico have some validity to them. It also suggests that Thornley’s admission about knowing Oswald was not a communist has some weight. That is, Thornley may have known the truth about Oswald all along and may have helped him construct his cover. Garrison went so far as to suspect that it was Oswald’s head imposed on Thornley’s body in the famous backyard photograph.78

  The Baron, the Paines, and Dulles

  In his 1967 Playboy interview, and then in his 1988 book, Garrison made some cogent remarks about George DeMohrenschildt. In his investigation, Garrison clearly was interested in the puzzling Oswald association into the Dallas White Russian community. As noted in Chapter 8, this was certainly an odd ideological connection. In contrasting the two men Garrison described the Baron as enigmatic and intriguing. He then continued:

  Here you have a wealthy, cultured White Russian émigré who travels in the highest social circles…suddenly developing an intimate relationship with an impoverished ex-Marine like Lee Oswald. What did they discuss—last year’s season at Biarritz, or how to beat the bank at Monte Carlo?79

  As noted, the Warren Commission accepted this relationship with nary a blink. Garrison did not. The DA then pointed out that the Baron had a tendency for turning up in some interesting spots at the right times, “for example, in Haiti just before a joint Cuban exile-CIA venture to topple Duvalier … and in Guatemala, another CIA training ground, the day before the Bay of Pigs invasion.”80

  Following this lead, the late Philip Melanson pointed out that many of the White Russians brought to the USA after the war came via the Tolstoy Foundation, which was in receipt of yearly subsidies from the CIA. In addition, the Russian Orthodox Church, which had a branch in Dallas also received CIA funds.81 One only has to look at George’s brother Dimitri to understand the CIA influence in the White Russian community. There is correspondence between Dimitri and Allen Dulles, going as far back as 1953.82 Dimitri was involved with Radio Free Europe, the CIA sponsored propaganda arm which tried to broadcast anti-Communist programming into Eastern Europe. Dimitri was also the co-editor of a journal called Russian Review during the fifties and sixties. This appears to have been a CIA related endeavor. Dimitri’s friend and co-editor for this publication was a man named William Chamberlin, a conservative columnist for the Wall Street Journal. Carol Hewett helped Bruce Adamson trace the long correspondence between Chamberlin and Allen Dulles. It appears that Chamberlin was an informal adviser to Dulles on the Warren Commission. His area of specialty was advising Dulles on how to steer the Commission away from running into the intelligence ties of George and Dimitri.83 Some of which led to himself. For in 1954, a young petroleum lawyer named Herbert Itkin attained a meeting with Dulles. Dulles referred him to George DeMohrenschildt. What is so interesting about this referral is that Dulles knew the Baron well enough to understand he used an alias in those days, namely Philip Harbin.84 Itkin’s relationship with DeMohrenschildt went on for a number of years.

  As we saw in Chapter 8, George later admitted that he got into contact with Oswald at the request of Dallas CIA station chief J. Walton Moore. Moore was a man who actually dined occasionally at the Baron’s home.85 DeMohrenschildt also told author Edward Epstein that he had been “dealing with the CIA since the early 1950s.”86 George said that although he had never been a paid employee, he had done favors for the Agency and, in turn, he had been helped along in his business contacts. As an example, he pointed out a contract awarded him to do a geologic survey in Yugoslavia in 1957. He had attained this deal through CIA contacts. On his return, he then briefed the CIA about the officials he had met while abroad. Once Moore gave him the go ahead to meet the Oswalds, since Moore said that Marina only spoke Russian, he arranged to drop in when Lee was not there. He then spoke with her in her native tongue about his hometown of Minsk. By the time Oswald returned, he was in her good graces. He then offered to introduce them to the White Russian community in the Dallas area. Since they did not own a car, he offered to chauffeur them around.87 Thus began the odd pairing referred to by Garrison above.

  As many writers have pointed out, one of the most interesting things that the Baron did was to introduce the Oswalds to Ruth and Michael Paine. This occurred as George was preparing to leave the country for Haiti. It was arranged for the Paines to meet the Oswalds at a gathering at the home of Everett Glover on February 22, 1963. The official story has it that Ruth never met George until then, and she never had contact with him afterwards.88 When Garrison questioned her on this point before a New Orleans Grand Jury, this previous tenet of hers was shown to be in error. Garrison managed to get her to admit that she and Michael were dinner guests at George’s house in 1966. At that time, they talked about a copy of the famous backyard photograph which was found in DeMohrenschildt’s possessions after the assassination.89 As author Steven Jones notes: Why would George invite a couple to dinner in 1966, if he had only briefly met them once three years earlier? Further, in his manuscript I’m a Patsy, I’m a Patsy, George wrote that he only discussed this backyard photograph with close friends.90 The question then seems to be: Why did it appear that Ruth was trying to conceal the true nature of her relationship with George DeMohrenschildt?

  Before the milestone work of Hewett, Jones, and Barbara LaMonica appeared, very few authors noted the hidden associations of the Paines. They were painted as simply Good Samaritans doing William Penn’s work by the Warren Commission. In fact, the only Commissioner who raised any questions about them at all was Richard Russell. For him, they were simply too good to be true. One of the oddest things about the Paines is that someone on the Commission, or with the Bureau, seemed to anticipate that “too good” image. For the Texas-based Quaker couple had high-level acquaintances in the Eastern Establishment vouching for their good character right after the Warren Commission opened shop. In December of 1963, the FBI interviewed a couple in Philadelphia who were friends of the Paines. Frederick Osborne Jr. and his wife Nancy testified to the Paines’s “religiosity, good character, and innocence in having anything to do with the assassination of President Kennedy.”91 Frederick’s father was a close associate of Allen Dulles. They both graduated from Princeton. In Osborne’s personal papers at that Ivy League university are a number of letters between he and the Dulles bro
thers. After the war Osborne and Allen Dulles co-founded an organization called Crusade for Freedom. This was an early Agency effort resembling Radio Free Europe. And as one could predict, this organization merged with Radio Free Europe in 1962.

  But this is not the only connection to Allen Dulles and his circle that the Paine family had. And, as we shall see, Dulles himself recognized this second one. As an OSS officer operating out of Switzerland during World War II, Dulles got to know a woman named Mary Bancroft. Both personally and professionally. That is, he ran her as an agent, and he had a continuing sexual affair with her.92 Although the affair eventually cooled, they remained friends for decades after. Bancroft was also a friend of publisher Henry Luce.93 Bancroft’s best and longest lasting female friend was Ruth Forbes. Or as she said, she “knew the mother of Michael Paine where Oswald stayed. She was Ruth Forbes, a very good friend of mine.”94 When Ruth divorced Michael’s father, George Lyman Paine, she married Arthur Young and now became known as Ruth Forbes Young. Ruth and Arthur now became intimates of Bancroft.95 To show how this Eastern Establishment circle felt about the Kennedys, Bancroft wrote a letter to Norman Mailer in the seventies saying that “I might call a Kennedy ‘trash’—but never my friend ‘trashy.’”96

  Arthur Young was a New Age type and also an inventor. He was one of the creators of the Bell Helicopter, which made him wealthy. Arthur was responsible for attaining a high tech/high security clearance job at Bell Helicopter in Fort Worth for his son through marriage. Michael had previously worked for the Franklin Institute, a CIA conduit.97 When Arthur got a clearance for Michael, the young couple moved to Irving, Texas and Michael got his job at Bell. When asked by the Commission about his security clearance, Michael said he did not know what the classification was.98 This is another statement made by the Paines that lacks credibility.