Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination

by Anthony Summers

  When the author first made contact with Roberts, she repeatedly denied having heard the name Lee Oswald until after the assassination. Then she quietly began talking. A surviving sign of her conservative outlook was her opinion that U.S. intelligence agencies—in the late 1970s, when the author first interviewed her—were “being destroyed by so much exposure.” So much had by then been revealed, however, that Roberts said she saw little point in continuing to be secretive herself. If what she said in her interviews with the author was truthful, suspicions about Lee Oswald’s true role have been fully justified.

  According to Delphine Roberts, Oswald walked into her office sometime in 1963 and asked to fill in the forms for accreditation as one of Banister’s “agents.” Roberts told me: “Oswald introduced himself by name and said he was seeking an application form. I did not think that was really why he was there. During the course of the conversation, I gained the impression that he and Guy Banister already knew each other. After Oswald filled out the application form, Guy Banister called him into the office. The door was closed, and a lengthy conversation took place. Then the young man left. I presumed then, and now am certain, that the reason for Oswald being there was that he was required to act undercover.”

  The precise purpose of Oswald’s “undercover” role remained obscure to Roberts, but she learned that it involved Cuba and some sort of charade that required deception. Roberts said: “Oswald came back a number of times. He seemed to be on familiar terms with Banister and with the office. As I understood it he had the use of an office on the second floor, above the main office where we worked. I was not greatly surprised when I learned he was going up and down, back and forth.

  “Then, several times, Mr. Banister brought me upstairs, and in the office above I saw various writings stuck up on the wall pertaining to Cuba. There were various leaflets up there pertaining to Fair Play for Cuba. They were pro-Castro leaflets. Banister just didn’t say anything about them one way or the other. But on several occasions, when some people who had been upstairs would bring some of that material down into the main office, Banister was very incensed about it. He did not want that material in his office.”

  One afternoon, Roberts said, she observed the end product of Oswald’s preparations. As she was returning to the office, she saw “that young man passing out his pro-Castro leaflets in the street.” In what appears to be corroboration of the incident that Allen Campbell recalled, she says she later mentioned what she had seen to Banister. His reaction was casual. “Don’t worry about him. He’s a nervous fellow, he’s confused. He’s with us, he’s associated with the office.”

  Nothing Banister said indicated surprise or anger that somebody from his anti-Castro stable was out in the street openly demonstrating in favor of Fidel Castro. Delphine Roberts shrugged off the contradiction. “I knew that such things did take place, and when they did you just didn’t question them. I knew there were such things as counterspies, spies and counterspies, and the importance of such things. So I just didn’t question them.”

  What Delphine Roberts said was divulged with reluctance.5 Other snippets of information, though, tend to support her account—and Daniel Campbell’s claim—that Oswald visited 544 Camp Street. Her own daughter, also called Delphine, used another room upstairs at Camp Street for photographic work. She and a photographer friend, the daughter told me, also saw Lee Oswald occasionally.

  Delphine— one could call her Delphine Jr.—said: “I knew he had his pamphlets and books and everything in a room along from where we were with our photographic equipment. He was quiet and mostly kept to himself, didn’t associate with too many people. He would just tell us hello or good-bye when we saw him. I never saw him talking with Guy Banister, but I knew he worked in his office. I knew they were associated.

  “I saw some other men who looked like Americans coming and going occasionally from the room Oswald used. From his attitude, and from my mother, and what I knew of Banister’s work, I got the impression Oswald was doing something to make people believe he was something he wasn’t. I am sure Guy Banister knew what Oswald was doing.”

  Banister’s brother Ross told the Assassinations Committee that Guy “mentioned seeing Oswald hand out Fair Play for Cuba literature.” Ivan Nitschke, a business associate of Banister’s and a fellow former FBI agent, recalled that Banister became “interested in Oswald” in the summer of 1963. Adrian Alba, who ran the garage next door to Oswald’s place of work, claimed to the Committee that he often saw Oswald in the restaurant on the ground floor of 544 Camp Street. That restaurant had a rear exit leading up to the office section of the building, and Banister was a regular patron.

  Delphine Roberts, Sr., said she was sure that whatever the nature of Banister’s “interest” in Oswald, it concerned anti-Castro schemes, plans that she felt certain had the support and encouragement of government Intelligence agencies. As she put it, “Mr. Banister had been a special agent for the FBI and was still working for them. There were quite a number of connections which he kept with the FBI and the CIA, too. I know he and the FBI traded information due to his former association.” Banister’s former employee, Daniel Campbell, also became convinced that his boss remained involved with the FBI.

  An FBI report of an interview with Banister after the assassination indicates that he was asked questions about anti-Castro exiles but none at all about Oswald or use of the 544 Camp Street address on Oswald’s propaganda. As for Banister and the CIA, an Assassinations Committee check revealed only that the Agency “considered using Guy Banister Associates for the collection of foreign intelligence” but decided against it. That, however, had been in 1960—three years before the Oswald episode.

  Delphine Roberts told the author, “I think he received funds from the CIA—I know he had access to large funds at various times in 1963.” She added that known intelligence agents and law-enforcement officers often visited Banister’s office. She accepted the comings and goings as normal, because so far as she was concerned the visitors and her boss were “doing something to try to stop what was taking place, the danger that was facing this country because of Cuba.”

  It had been at Banister’s instigation, in 1961, that the New Orleans branch of the Cuban Revolutionary Council had taken offices at 544 Camp Street. CIA records reveal that the Council’s local representative “maintained extensive relations with the FBI… . Two of his regular FBI contacts were a Mr. de Bruce and … Guy Banister.” Banister, who was long retired from the FBI, was referred to as an active FBI contact. As one associate of the Cuban Revolutionary Council representative put it, the office became a sort of “Grand Central Station” for the exiles.6 The Mob, too, had its line into the Council—the exile group received an offer of a “substantial donation” from New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello.

  The CRC also had a friend in a New Orleans advertising man called Ronnie Caire. Caire was a fervent supporter of the exile cause and had been a leading light in yet another anti-Castro organization, the Crusade to Free Cuba. The arm of coincidence was long indeed, it seems, in the New Orleans of 1963. After the assassination, Ronnie Caire would say he “seemed to recall” a visit from Oswald. He said Oswald had been “applying for a job.”

  The second CRC representative in New Orleans, Frank Bartes, turned up for the court case following the street fracas with the exiles, and indulged in a noisy argument with Oswald. He later said he warned the FBI that day that Oswald was dangerous. Yet a month later, in September, he told the Bureau Oswald “was unknown to him.” Bartes was an informant for both the FBI and the CIA. CIA records show that he had been checked for use in a “contact and assessment” role as early as 1961, and he would be working for the Agency’s Special Operations Division by 1965.

  Unfailingly, in any study of Oswald in New Orleans, the connections seem to come full circle. The last of those connections is the one that links Oswald’s name with that of David Ferrie.

  David Ferr
ie was an oddity, more so even than Banister. He was a born flier, a skill that had earned him a career as a senior pilot with Eastern Airlines. For Ferrie that was not enough. His was a brilliant but erratic mind, which made for a tragically disordered life.7 Ferrie dabbled in religion and ended up founding his own church. He dabbled in medicine and began a one-man search for the cause of cancer. He was a homosexual who compromised himself while at work. Eastern Airlines fired him. Ferrie might have remained an unknown eccentric, but then there was Cuba.

  Ferrie was one of the mavericks who found a role for themselves in the efforts to topple Fidel Castro. His reputed ability to perform miracles with airplanes finally found an outlet. In 1961, before the Bay of Pigs invasion, Ferrie reputedly flew to Cuba dozens of times, sometimes on bombing missions, sometimes making daring landings to extract anti-Castro resistance fighters.

  By the summer of 1962, at the age of forty-five, he was in New Orleans—dividing his time between a mix of liberal causes—he was for civil rights, anti-Castro activism, and a passion for young men. He was by now an outlandish figure, not least because he suffered from alopecia, an ailment that had left him not only bald-headed, but without eyebrows or body hair. Ferrie compensated by wearing a red toupee and sometimes grotesquely obvious false eyebrows. He would have been merely laughable, but his quirky intellect found him listeners in the world of political extremism.

  As early as 1950, when he joined the U.S. Army Reserve, he had been stridently anti-Communist, writing in a letter to the commander of the U.S. First Air Force, “There is nothing I would enjoy better than blowing the hell out of every damn Russian, Communist, Red, or what-have-you… . We can cook up a crew that will really bomb them to hell… . I want to train killers, however bad that sounds. It is what we need.”

  Ferrie was a rabble-rousing public speaker, with his favorite subject the festering Cuban confrontation, his principal whipping boy President Kennedy. After the 1961 catastrophe at the Bay of Pigs, in a speech on Cuba to the New Orleans chapter of the Military Order of World Wars, his attack on the President had been so offensive that Ferrie had eventually been asked to leave the podium. Detestation of the President became something of an obsession with him. Some, who heard Ferrie say angrily, “The President ought to be shot,” would one day come to believe that in his case it had been no idle oratory. A favorite Ferrie theme was along the lines that “an electorate cannot be depended upon to pick the right man.”

  In some ways, he was politically compatible with Guy Banister, a man who would be remembered for an occasion on which he alarmed companions by pulling out a gun and shouting, “There comes a time when the world’s problems can be better solved with the bullet than the ballot.” Ferrie and Banister were joined, certainly, by fervent support for the anti-Castro cause. By the summer of 1963, reportedly, Ferrie had become a frequent visitor to 544 Camp Street.

  Banister’s secretary, Delphine Roberts, remembered Ferrie as “one of the agents. Many times when he came into the office, he used the private office behind Banister’s, and I was told he was doing private work. I believed his work was somehow connected with the CIA rather than the FBI.” Ferrie certainly was associated with Guy Banister and the Cuban exiles. On one of the days Oswald handed out pro-Castro leaflets in New Orleans, Ferrie led an anti-Castro demonstration a few blocks away. As with Banister, moreover, there have been repeated allegations that Ferrie was involved with Oswald.

  After the assassination, there was perfunctory inquiry into Oswald’s membership, as a youth of nearly sixteen, in the Civil Air Patrol (CAP). Oswald, who had then been living in New Orleans with his mother, joined the Patrol as a cadet in 1955—when David Ferrie, already a skilled airman, was a leading light of the unit. After the assassination, one of Banister’s employees said he thought he recalled seeing a photograph of Oswald, along with other onetime CAP members, in Ferrie’s home. Asked about this on more than one occasion, Ferrie claimed he remembered nothing about Oswald and had had no relationship with him. Since he also denied knowing that the Cuban Revolutionary Council operated from 544 Camp Street, a fact he certainly did know, the denials should have raised suspicion.

  The FBI, however, conducted only a nominal inquiry into Oswald’s membership in the CAP, and the matter was dropped. There was no further action when one of Oswald’s former schoolmates, Edward Voebel, first stated that he and Oswald had been in the Patrol “with Captain Dave Ferrie”—and then abruptly changed his mind. Suddenly, he “could not recall” the matter. The fact that Voebel had been scared, by a “crank-type telephone call” and a visit to his home by a strange man, left the FBI unphased.

  Nor was the Bureau stung into action when another former cadet said Ferrie had scurried around to see him after the assassination to ask whether any old group photographs of Ferrie’s squadron featured Oswald. Most of the squadron records, supposedly, had been “stolen in late 1960.” Even in 1978, however, the House Assassinations Committee did better.

  Investigators established that Ferrie’s service with the Civil Air Patrol fitted with that of Oswald. They identified six witnesses whose statements tended to confirm that Oswald had been present at patrol meetings attended by Ferrie. Compelling evidence, from records and witnesses, indicates that Oswald became a CAP cadet in summer 1955, when Ferrie was a volunteer instructor. Jerry Paradis, another former instructor, told the author, “I was a lieutenant coinciding with the months Oswald was a recruit… . I recall him as a very quiet, serious young man … David Ferrie was sort of the scoutmaster.”8

  In 1993, researchers for PBS’s Frontline program discovered an old photograph that appears to settle the matter. Apparently taken in 1955, it shows CAP cadets at a cookout (see Photo 34). Former cadets, one of whom is himself in the picture, told Frontline they recognized both Oswald and Ferrie in the picture.

  The Ferrie connection introduces another element into this baroque story—homosexuality. Ferrie’s homosexuality, and his weakness for young males in particular, is a matter of record. Over the years, it repeatedly led him into trouble, and sometimes into police custody.9 In the mid-1950s, Ferrie’s misconduct with youths in the CAP led to scandal. There were reports of drunken orgies, of youngsters capering about in the nude, and in the end, it was this that ended Ferrie’s tenure with the New Orleans unit. The Assassinations Committee noted that—homosexuality aside—Ferrie exerted “tremendous influence” through his close associations with his pupils in the Patrol.

  Was Oswald so influenced, and did he—at the age of sixteen and on the threshold of adult sexual life—have a sexual encounter with Ferrie? While he later lived an active heterosexual life with his wife, Marina, there are straws in the wind on this subject. Oswald may have attended some of Ferrie’s bacchanalia. On one occasion while he was in the CAP, the then teenager worried his mother by staying out at a unit party until two in the morning.10

  In the Marine Corps, some did wonder about Oswald’s sexuality. He reportedly took friends to the Flamingo, a bar for homosexuals on the Mexican border that he appeared to have visited before. In Japan, he seemed comfortable in a “queer bar.” One former Marines comrade, David Murray, said he kept his distance from Oswald because of a rumor that he was homosexual. “He had the profile of other homosexuals I’d known or come in contact with,” former U.S. Marines Sergeant Dan Powers recalled, “The meekness, the gentleness—just that type of person. Having worked at YMCAs, etc., for me he just fitted into that category.” The possible sexual connection aside, another lead may point to an Oswald-Ferrie link.

  According to his mother, Marguerite, Oswald was first encouraged to join the Marines by a “recruiting officer” in uniform who “influenced [him] while he was with the Civil Air cadets.” The man came to the Oswald apartment with Lee in tow, she said, to try to persuade her to let the boy join up while still underage. Her son, she said, “wanted me to sign a birth certificate saying that he was seventeen.”

  Is it likely that a
genuine Marine Corps recruiting officer would have tried to persuade a cadet’s mother to connive at breaking the law? An Assassinations Committee analysis notes that David Ferrie, for his part, “urged several boys to join the armed forces.” Jack Martin, who worked for the Banister detective agency, would tell the FBI within three days of President Kennedy’s assassination that Ferrie had helped Oswald get into the Marine Corps.

  Ferrie, moreover, was no stranger to the fakery of personal documents—his own application form to join Eastern Airlines was but one example. Although a phony Oswald birth certificate was created, the Marines spotted the forgery. Oswald spent the next year studying the Marine Corps manual until “he knew it by heart,” then joined up just days after his seventeenth birthday.

  It was, of course, during this same period that Oswald started to manifest an interest in Marxism and far Left politics. The conventional view, ignoring the stream of anomalies in Oswald’s career, has been to regard this as the start of an authentic lifelong commitment. With Ferrie’s possible influence on Oswald in mind, consider the ambivalent approach Ferrie had to politics. He was “rabidly anti-Communist,” yet sometimes described himself as a “liberal.” Of Ferrie’s position on Cuba, Delphine Roberts said, “Well, he had to act a part of being what many people would call wishy-washy, one side and then the opposite side [author’s emphasis]. It was important for him to be that way… . He knew both sides.”

  Consider once again, then, Oswald’s alleged teenage interest in socialism. The Warren Report failed to mention another comment by Oswald’s former schoolfriend Edward Voebel. Reports that Oswald was already “studying Communism,” according to Voebel, were “a lot of baloney.” The comment recalls the plethora of incidents that have somehow rung false. How much of Oswald’s parroted politics was also “baloney”?

  We cannot know, but the potential influence of David Ferrie, looming darkly at a formative time in Oswald’s life, is sobering. Whether or not Ferrie steered the mind and actions of Oswald the youth, some evidence suggests they were involved with each other in the summer of 1963.