Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, & the Garrison Case

by DiEugenio, James

  Bill Wegmann knew. His knowledge was revealed during a very long interview by Shaw’s lawyers with Bill Gurvich. After he “defected,” the double agent was asked what Garrison knew about Banister’s operation. Gurvich answered with some gibberish about Garrison not knowing that Banister existed. Bill Wegmann’s reply undermined the efficacy of Panzeca’s statement to this author. Bill Wegmann said that this issue—Garrison’s knowledge of the inner workings of Banister’s operation—had been a point of contention between Johnson and himself51 So far from being a personality clash, the issue was how much could Garrison dig up about Banister’s CIA-FBI operation. In which Guy Johnson was implicated. If Garrison had discovered the documents mentioned here, showing Johnson and Banister working hand in hand, and then been able to expose just what Oswald was doing at Banister’s through say Delphine Roberts or Dan Campbell, then that would have been bad for Shaw. Because it would have cast the worst aspersions on his own defense team. But in light of what they discovered during their own inquiry, plus this declassified background of Johnson and Bill Wegmann, plus Wegmann asking this question about Banister, it is very hard not to conclude that Shaw’s lawyers understood just what Garrison had stumbled onto. Namely that Oswald was working out of Banister’s office in the summer of 1963 as an agent provocateur for the CIA. And that Banister connected to both Ferrie and and Shaw. Johnson had to have known this since he was in the midst of it. For the point is this: If Shaw’s lawyers were secure in their case from the start, and convinced of their client’s innocence, then why did they go to these extreme lengths described here to get all the help they could from Washington? Shaw was so worried about his past CIA work that he did not even level with his own lawyers about that issue. When the local CIA station found out about Shaw’s silence in this regard, they were quite surprised. But further, when Ed Wegmann and Irvin Dymond visited the Justice Department in September of 1967, they asked not just for files on Shaw—since they knew he was not leveling with them—but they also wanted files on themselves!52 This is how closely they were involved with the CIA at this early date. And from their later deceptions about this deep and hidden relationship, one can fairly speculate that with all they knew— including Shaw’s initial refusal to come clean with them—they suspected their client may have been guilty. Or else why did they request so much help?

  About the other aspects of the Kennedy case, that is Oswald’s role in either the murder of Officer J. D. Tippit or the assassination of President Kennedy, today the Warren Commission looks even worse than it did in 1967. On the JFK case, the work of Robert Harris complements the discoveries of John Hunt. Harris has done some fine work in showing that, contrary to what the Warren Commission concluded, a bullet did fall out of Connally’s body as they transferred him to an examining table. It made a noise and the bullet was picked up by a nurse and given to officer Bobby Nolan, who then dropped it off at the Dallas Police Department. From there, the FBI made this bullet disappear by deliberately confusing it with an envelope of fragments scooped up by Nurse Audrey Bell.53 The work of Hunt and Harris completely and totally obliterates both the Warren Commission’s three bullet scenario and the Single Bullet Theory. They show that neither one of them ever existed. And the long debate over them has been a pointless distraction. Which is what it was intended to be from the start.

  As per the case against Oswald for the Tippit murder, a truly startling piece of evidence surfaced when FBI agent James Hosty published his book Assignment: Oswald in 1996. Hosty wrote that fellow FBI agent Bob Barrett drove to the scene of the Tippit murder at tenth and Patton once he heard that a policeman had been shot. When he got there, Captain Westbrook of the Dallas Police found a leather wallet near the puddle of blood where Tippit’s body had been lying. He showed the wallet to Barrett and asked if he knew anyone by the name of Lee Oswald or Alek J. Hidell.54 Barrett said he did not. But films taken by WFAA-TV cameraman Ron Reiland show that prior to Westbrook getting the wallet, it had been handed to Sergeant Kenneth Croy by an unidentified civilian. Croy then gave it to Sergeant Calvin Owens who opened the wallet as Captain George Doughty looked at the items inside. Later on, Patrolman Leonard E. Jez arrived at the scene. Through a confidential source, Jez insists that this wallet had Oswald’s ID inside.55 In addition to the witness statements, this cannot be Tippit’s wallet since when his body was taken to Methodist Hospital, his wallet was removed and his belongings delivered to the DPD identification department at 3:25 P.M. One of the items delivered was a black wallet.56 The monumental problem with this is that the Warren Commission tells us that Oswald’s wallet was removed from his pants pocket on the way to the police station after he was arrested.57 And further, Oswald supposedly left a wallet in his dresser at the Paine’s home the morning of the assassination.58 This new evidence indicates that someone dropped a mock up of Oswald’s wallet, including ID, at the scene of the Tippit shooting.

  That someone was not Oswald. In his book, The Girl on the Stairs, Barry Ernest interviewed a witness who no FBI agent ever talked to. Her name was Mrs. Higgins, and she lived very close to the crime scene. When she heard the shots, she ran out her door to see Tippit lying in the street. Barry asked her what time it was. She said it was 1:06. He asked her how she recalled that specific time. She said because she was watching TV and the announcer said it. She automatically checked her clock when he said it and he was right. Since Oswald had left the scene of his rooming house by, at the latest, 1:03, it would be physically impossible for him to traverse the nine-tenths of a mile in three minutes. Mrs. Higgins said she also got a look at a man running from the scene with a handgun. She told Mr. Ernest that it was definitely not Oswald.59 Clearly, the FBI and the Commission deliberately avoided witnesses who would exculpate Oswald in the Tippit case. They don’t come much better than Mrs. Higgins. With the discovery of the dropped wallet and the testimony of Mrs. Higgins, the case against Oswald in the Tippit shooting, which even some critics bought into, is now gone.60

  In December of 1995, in the Bahamas, a group of American researchers met with General Fabian Escalanate. Escalante was the former chief of G-2, the Cuban security forces assigned to protect Fidel Castro. This conference was designed to share information between the two groups. Escalante was joined by his longtime assistant Arturo Rodriguez and Carlos Lechuga, Cuba’s former ambassador to the United Nations. Lechuga was the man whom William Attwood had been working with to develop an accommodation between Castro and the United States.

  Escalante was now the director of Havana’s Institute for National Security Studies. In that position he had spearheaded a three year long investigation into the JFK murder. It is interesting to note how closely much of what he presented coincides with the best of what the American researchers had concluded. Escalante had Lechuga there because he believed that the motive for the assassination was to halt the attempt to establish diplomatic recognition of Cuba once an accommodation had been worked out. He presented evidence that two Cuban exiles—Felipe Vidal Santiago and Tony Cuesta—told him that the anti-Castro Cubans had gotten wind of this secret diplomacy and were furious about it. Escalante said that to prevent this, a plot was hatched. It had two objectives: 1.) To eliminate Kennedy, and 2.) To place the blame on Cuba. Vidal told his CIA handler, Colonel William Bishop, about Kennedy’s treachery. Once this word spread, “A CIA official came to a safe house in Miami and said to a group of Cuban exiles, ‘You must eliminate Kennedy.’”

  It is not known if this man was David Phillips. But Escalante said that through their infiltration of exile groups they knew that Maurice Bishop was Phillips. Tony Veciana had told one of Escalante’s informants that the HSCA had pushed him to identify Phillips. But since Philips had threatened him, he stopped short. But he told Escalante’s spy that Bishop was Phillips. Further corroboration came from another informant who had delivered messages from Phillips to Veciana in 1959, when Veciana was still in Havana. Also, Escalante had an informant inside the camp of Eladio Del Valle. According to this man, Del V
alle had told him in 1962 that Kennedy must be killed in order to solve the Cuban problem.61

  The attempt to forestall the back channel is echoed at a much higher level. As Jim Douglass reveals in his fine book JFK and the Unspeakable, Richard Helms was monitoring the progress of the secret talks.62 Helms understood that one of the conditions that Kennedy had set was for Castro not to export communist revolution into South America, especially on the eve of the upcoming Venezuelan elections. In mid-November of 1963, Helms got word of a large arms cache that had landed in Venezuela from Cuba. It was allegedly shipped there to aid communist guerrillas. In other words, the evidence indicated Castro was exporting revolution into South America, thereby breaking conditions in the negotiations that Helms knew about. Alarmed, the Deputy Director of Plans went over to see Robert Kennedy and argued his case for emergency action. For according to Helms, it was three tons of armaments. RFK passed on it and sent him to see President Kennedy. Which he did. Helms even brought one of the rifles that was captured from the cache. Presumably to impress upon the president the urgency of the situation. After all, here was the casus belli to end the back channel. Yet, like his brother, President Kennedy was non-plussed.63 Either the Kennedys did not buy the arms cache story, or JFK was determined to see his plan for normalization of Cuban relations realized. The date of this meeting was November 19, 1963.64

  Was the arms cache planted to force Kennedy’s hand and dissolve the back channel? Former CIA officer Joseph B. Smith seemed to think so. In his book, Portrait of a Cold Warrior, he refers to the seizure of his arms cache. He apparently got some reports on it. Skillful and veteran analyst that he was, he quickly deduced it was planted.65 This is how much Helms wanted to derail the Attwood-Lechuga attempt at accommodation. He surely must have realized after the nineteenth that Kennedy was not going to be deterred from this path.

  One of the main tenets of this book is that Allen Dulles was one of the top level active agents in both the conspiracy to kill Kennedy and the disgraceful official cover up of his death. As Walt Brown demonstrates in his book The Warren Omisision, Dulles was, by far, the single most active member of that body. Through a series of detailed matrixes, which measure attendance at hearings and number of questions asked, Brown proves that Dulles took full advantage of being the one member of the Commission who did not have a full-time job. He made the Warren Commission his full-time job. Brown’s book also proves that Dulles, John McCloy, and Gerald Ford controlled that body.66 These three members of the Eastern Establishment thoroughly dominated what this author calls the Southern Wing. That is, Senator Richard Russell, Senator John S. Cooper, and Representative Hale Boggs. And this is why the three southerners ended up abandoning the Commission in public within a few years of its closing.

  Why Lyndon Johnson appointed Dulles to the Warren Commission remains a mystery that has never been satisfactorily solved. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Johnson had a rather hidden relationship with the Rockefellers, especially Nelson. As revealed by Donald Gibson in a groundbreaking essay, he was also badgered into creating the Commission by other Eastern Establishment stalwarts like Eugene Rostow, Joe Alsop, and Dean Acheson.67 Therefore, the idea may have come in in some secret way from one of these men, who all knew Dulles. However it happened, from Johnson’s declassified phone call with Senator Russell , there is little doubt that Johnson understood from the beginning that the Commission was designed to endorse a cover up begun in Washington by his friend J. Edgar Hoover. Johnson also knew the problems with the Single Bullet Theory. And in a taped conversation with Russell he said he didn’t buy it.68 But apparently neither man realized that it was the keystone to the report. Without the Single Bullet Theory, you had to have a second assassin.

  Johnson knew how bad the Commission was. Apparently, it didn’t bother him. As long as it cleared him—and every other suspect—of any suspicion in the Kennedy case. It therefore helped him win a huge landslide victory in 1964. A victory he would soon squander by stupidly escalating a senseless war in the jungles of Vietnam. The evidence adduced here indicates that Kennedy would not have done this. As we have also seen, Johnson then made an attempt to distort this record by inducing Robert McNamara to take back what he had said about Kennedy’s withdrawal plan. Thereby disguising Johnson’s escalation as an extension of Kennedy’s policy instead of the radical break that it was.

  Johnson did the same with his hapless Commission. In 1969, when he was beginning work on his memoirs, he recorded a tape about the formation of the Commission. On that tape, he muses that it was Robert Kennedy’s idea to appoint Dulles to the Warren Commission. As we have seen in Chapter 3, this is nonsense. Bobby Kennedy was the chief antagonist for Dulles during the Taylor Report hearings. When those were completed, Robert Lovett was brought in to recommend the firing of the CIA Director. But that was not enough for RFK. He then began searching for any leftovers from the Dulles debacle. He found out that one of the Dulles family was still around in the administration. Allen’s sister Eleanor worked under Dean Rusk at State. RFK then insisted to Rusk that she be fired too because “he didn’t want anymore of the Dulles family around.”69 So the idea that he would then want Dulles brought back to investigate his brother’s suspicious death, after he had exposed the treachery Dulles had perpetrated with the Bay of Pigs, this all seems ridiculous. It appears that Johnson was doing here what he did with Vietnam. That is, he was switching the responsibility for a debacle of his own creation onto a Kennedy. And in both cases the tactic was quite convenient. Because both men were dead when Johnson did the dirty work.70 Its easy to walk over someone when they are lying under a gravestone.

  Another underlying tenet of this book is that Jim Garrison was one step away from the next level of the conspiracy. As outlined in this book, that would include people like David Phillips and Howard Hunt. As we have seen, Phillips was managing the CIA’s anti-FPCC program, of which Oswald was a part of, operating out of Banister’s office. Howard Hunt was instrumental in setting up the CRC, of which Sergio Arcacha Smith was the New Orleans representative. He was also worked closely with Allen Dulles from 1962 to 1963. Phillips also had a role in the Mexico City part of the plot, about which Garrison was quite acute about back in 1968. And it was because of Garrison’s closeness to this second level that the CIA and its allies decided he had to be stopped. And he was. But not before shedding much needed light on what had happened to this country in 1963.

  And make no mistake, something did go wrong with this country in 1963. As Kevin Phillips demonstrated in his book Arrogant Capital, in 1964, the year the Warren Report was issued, the percentage of people who said they trusted Washington to do the right things most of the time was almost 80 percent. But in that year, a toboggan slide began which resulted in the dwindling of that figure to below 20 percent by 1993. And one of the worst things about this slide into cynicism, that it began with President Kennedy’s murder, is well known in Washington—at the very top. In 1992, attorney Dan Alcorn called Ross Perot’s presidential campaign office. Reflecting the unconventionality of that quixotic venture, Perot himself answered the phone. Alcorn asked him if he had any campaign position on the Kennedy case. Perot replied matter of factly, “Oh, you’ll never get to the bottom of that one.”71 Al Gore’s well-off Tennessee family was friendly with the well-off Fensterwald family, also from Tennessee. So Gore knew attorney Bud Fensterwald who ran the Assassination Archives and Research Center in Washington. When Gore first arrived there as a congressman, Fensterwald asked him to stop by each Friday for a couple of hours before returning home for the weekend. He wanted to show the congressman documents for his reading on the JFK case. So every Friday afternoon, Fensterwald would stack a pile of papers on a desk for him to read. Gore did this for about a year. At the end of this education process Gore told Fensterwald, “You’re right, it was a conspiracy.”72 Gore maintained that thesis while he was in the White House.73

  In 1977, Edward Epstein was preparing his CIA friendly book about Oswald called Leg
end. The CIA backing came through James Angleton who was a prime consultant for the work.74 Billy Joe Lord had been a passenger on the same ship that Oswald took to Europe in 1959. Epstein wanted to interview him. Lord was reluctant to do so. Over lunch he was told by one of Epstein’s assistants that he knew someone who could convince him to talk to Epstein. That person was George W. Bush, son of the CIA Director at the time.75

  Finally, there is the startling revelation by Webb Hubbell in his book Friends in High Places. Lawyer Hubbell had known Governor Bill Clinton for many years in Arkansas. They were close enough that Clinton appointed him to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Arkansas in 1983. When Clinton became president, he told Hubbell that once he was installed in the number three position at Justice, he wanted him to find out who killed President Kennedy—meaning that Clinton didn’t think it was Oswald. Hubbell regretted that he was forced to resign before he could find out the answer to that question.76 The reader can see that the question about what happened to President Kennedy has been a plague upon the collective conscience of the nation since 1964. And that psychic plague extends from the bottom all the way to the top.