by Jim Marrs
In the years following the release of the Warren Report, condemnation of its work and conclusions has only grown more widespread.
In 1976, the Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, while claiming not to have found evidence of a conspiracy to kill Kennedy, nevertheless concluded:
The committee has . . . developed evidence which impeaches the process by which the intelligence agencies arrived at their own conclusions about the assassination, and by which they provided information to the Warren Commission. This evidence indicates that the investigation of the assassination was deficient and that facts which might have substantially affected the course of the investigation were not provided the Warren Commission. . . . Why senior officials of the FBI and the CIA permitted the investigation to go forward, in light of these deficiencies, and why they permitted the Warren Commission to reach its conclusions without all relevant information is still unclear. Certainly, concern with public reputation, problems of coordination between agencies, possible bureaucratic failure, and embarrassment and the extreme compartmentation of knowledge of sensitive operations may have contributed to these shortcomings. But the possibility exists that senior officials in both agencies made conscious decisions not to disclose potentially important information.
As has been demonstrated, in most cases, “potentially important information” meant any information that did not add to the evidence of Oswald’s guilt.
The sins of the Warren Commission, the FBI, and the CIA go far beyond simple omission for face-saving purposes.
Senator Richard Schweiker, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s subcommittee that looked at the agencies’ performance during the Warren Commission investigation, told news reporters in 1976 that both the CIA and the FBI deliberately lied to the Commission about significant assassination issues.
His charge was supported by former Texas attorney general Waggoner Carr, whose own investigation was usurped by the Warren Commission. Carr told the Houston Chronicle in 1975, “All of the records were in the hands of the two agencies [the FBI and CIA] and, if they so desired, any information or files could have been destroyed or laundered prior to the time the Commission could get them.”
Schweiker added that lies from these agencies, coupled with the numerous deficiencies his panel saw, invalidated the Warren Commission’s conclusions. He bluntly reported, “I think the Warren Commission has, in fact, collapsed like a house of cards. And I believe the Warren Commission was set up at the time to feed pabulum to the American people for reasons not yet known, and that one of the biggest cover-ups in the history of our country occurred at that time.”
Widespread disbelief in the Warren Commission, though never publicly acknowledged, has carried forward right up until today. In January 2013, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., nephew of JFK and son of assassinated senator Robert Kennedy, told the Associated Press his father thought the Commission’s work was a “shoddy piece of craftsmanship.” He said his father “publicly supported the Warren Commission report but privately he was dismissive of it. . . . The evidence at this point I think is very, very convincing that it was not a lone gunman.”
Today it can be clearly seen that the sins of the Commission included investigating from a preconceived idea, failing to substantiate evidence from the FBI, intimidating selected witnesses, stifling internal dissent, and misreporting its own information. These methods were actively employed to subvert a truthful investigation and to present flawed and inadequate conclusions to the unsuspecting public. In retrospect, it seems the Warren Commission provided a classic example of how not to conduct a meaningful investigation.
It appears the Commission slowly became aware of the massive power behind the assassination and simply could not—or would not—come to grips with it. Like subsequent inquiries into the Kennedy assassination, it released a slanted and timid version of the tragedy hoping to appease the public long enough that commissioners would not have to face the full ramifications of a truthful and incisive investigation. And their plan worked well.
For more than five decades much of the American public has been content with the palatable—but implausible—Warren Commission version of the assassination. Today, with firm evidence of a second assassin available and a continuing history of government deceit, a large number of citizens have reevaluated the official government assassination theory of a lone gunman. Today, national polls indicate the vast majority of Americans continue to doubt the basic tenets of the Warren Commission.
A 2004 FOX News poll conducted by Opinion Dynamics Corp. on the fortieth anniversary of the JFK assassination showed 74 percent of respondents believed there was a conspiracy and a cover-up involved. This poll reflected numbers similar to previous surveys conducted by Louis Harris and Associates in 1967, 1975, and 1981, when about two-thirds also felt the shooting was part of a larger conspiracy.
The Garrison Investigation
On the afternoon of November 22, 1963, two men sat drinking in the Katzenjammer Bar, located in New Orleans next door to 544 Camp Street, where a puzzling parade of anti-Castro Cubans and intelligence agents—including Lee Harvey Oswald—had been seen the previous summer.
One of the men was Guy Banister, the former FBI man who was running a private-investigation firm with intelligence connections out of an office at 544 Camp Street. The other man was one of his investigators, Jack Martin.
According to a police report prepared that day, the two men returned to Banister’s office, where an argument erupted. Banister, his irritability inflamed by alcohol, accused Martin of stealing files, whereupon Martin reminded Banister that he had not forgotten some of the people he had seen in Banister’s office that summer. Banister then beat Martin over the head with a heavy .357 Magnum pistol.
In the heat of the moment, Martin screamed out, “What are you going to do—kill me, like you all did Kennedy?”
A police ambulance was called and carried the bloodied Martin to Charity Hospital.
An angered Martin soon whispered to friends that Banister had often been in the company of a man named David Ferrie, who Martin claimed drove to Texas the day of Kennedy’s assassination to serve as a getaway pilot for the assassins.
Martin’s words soon reached the ears of New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, who arrested Ferrie upon his return to New Orleans, thus beginning an investigation into the JFK assassination that eventually turned into a worldwide cause célèbre.
Through Garrison’s investigation much new assassination information became known to the public and the assassination was addressed for the first time in a courtroom—even though the defendant was acquitted.
Garrison claimed that the entire weight of the federal government was moved to block and ridicule his investigation, and indeed there were many strange aspects to this entire episode, including an attack by some in the national media before Garrison even had a chance to present his case.
A giant of a man, standing six-foot-six, Earling Carothers Garrison had shortened his name to simply “Jim” and was widely known to both friend and foe as the “Jolly Green Giant.”
Born on November 20, 1921, in Knoxville, Iowa, Garrison grew up in New Orleans and enlisted in the US Army a year before Pearl Harbor. In 1942, he was commissioned a lieutenant in the field artillery.
After the war, Garrison followed a family tradition in law by enrolling in the Tulane University Law School. He eventually earned bachelor of laws and master of civil laws degrees.
Garrison then joined the FBI, serving briefly in Seattle and Tacoma, Washington. He wrote, “I was very impressed with the competence and efficiency of the Bureau. However, I was extremely bored as I rang doorbells to inquire about the loyalty and associations of applicants for employment in a defense plant. So I decided to return to the law profession.”
He served as an assistant district attorney in New Orleans from 1954 to 1958, resigning with a scathing attack on mayor Victor H. Schiro. In 1961, Garris
on decided to run for the district attorney’s job, again blasting Schiro for corruption and failure to enforce the law. His attacks included incumbent district attorney Richard Dowling, whom he called “the great emancipator—he let everyone go free.”
Not believing he had much of a chance, Garrison ran a meager campaign, composed mostly of some television talks. To many people’s surprise, Garrison managed to defeat Dowling in a run-off election, and he took office as district attorney on March 3, 1962.
Although Garrison did begin to clean up some of the more disreputable gambling and prostitution dens of New Orleans, his critics noted that he did not share that same enthusiasm against the leaders of organized crime.
In 1962, Garrison was angered by the refusal of eight criminal-court judges to approve funds for investigating organized crime. He went so far as to publicly state that their refusal “raised interesting questions about racketeer influences.” The judges sued him for defamation of character and won a $1,000 state court judgment. Garrison, however, fought this action all the way to the Supreme Court, which reversed the decision in a landmark case on the right to criticize public officials.
After hearing Jack Martin’s remarks during the assassination weekend, Garrison attempted to locate David Ferrie. On Monday, November 25, Ferrie turned himself in.
Garrison, who had met the bizarre Ferrie once before, could hardly forget the man. Ferrie suffered from alopecia, a rare disease that causes total baldness. Garrison recalled, “The face grinning ferociously at me was like a ghoulish Halloween mask. The eyebrows plainly were greasepaint, one noticeably higher than the other. A scruffy, reddish homemade wig hung askew on his head as he fixed me with his eyes.”
Ill at ease, Ferrie admitted his Friday trip to Texas, claiming he had wanted to go ice skating in Houston. However, he had no adequate answer for why he had chosen to drive through one of the worst thunderstorms in years and why, instead of skating, he had spent his time at the rink’s pay phone. Ferrie also denied knowing Lee Harvey Oswald.
Garrison was unsatisfied with Ferrie’s story. He ordered him and two friends held in jail for questioning by the FBI. He later told interviewer Eric Norden, “When we alerted the FBI, they expressed interest and asked us to turn the three men over to them for questioning. We did, but Ferrie was released soon afterward and most of [the FBI] report on him was classified top secret and secreted in the National Archives.”
In his 1988 book, On the Trail of the Assassins, Garrison wrote:
I was 43 years old and had been district attorney for a year and nine months when John Kennedy was killed. I was an old-fashioned patriot, a product of my family, my military experience, and my years in the legal profession. I could not imagine then that the government ever would deceive the citizens of this country. Accordingly, when the FBI released David Ferrie with surprising swiftness, implying that no evidence had been found connecting him with the assassination, I accepted it.
Over the next three years, Garrison’s attention was centered on his job and family. Vaguely aware of contradictions in the assassination story, Garrison nevertheless chose to believe the official version. He wrote:
By this time [1966] our military was deeply engaged in the war in Southeast Asia. Like most Americans, I took it for granted that our government had our troops over there to bring democracy to South Vietnam. Like most Americans, I also took for granted that our government had fully investigated President Kennedy’s assassination and had found it to be indeed the result of a random act by a man acting alone. Certainly, it never crossed my mind that the murder of President Kennedy and the subsequent arrival of half a million members of the American military in Vietnam might be related.
Garrison’s view began to change after a chance meeting with the powerful senator from Louisiana, Russell Long. Garrison said Long told him, “Those fellows on the Warren Commission were dead wrong. There’s no way in the world that one man could have shot up John Kennedy that way.”
It was a comment that was to put Garrison and his office back on the assassination investigation trail. First Garrison went back and studied the Warren Commission Report and volumes in detail. He was aghast, noting:
Considering the lofty credentials of the commission members and the quality and size of the staff available to them, I had expected to find a thorough and professional investigation. I found nothing of the sort. The mass of information was disorganized and confused. The commission had provided no adequate index to its exhibits. . . . The number of promising leads that were never followed up offended my prosecutorial sensibility. And, perhaps worst of all, the conclusions in the report seemed to be based on an appallingly selective reading of the evidence, ignoring credible testimony from literally dozens of witnesses.
Garrison, with his military background, was particularly shocked to read in the commission volumes where a Lieutenant Colonel Allison G. Folsom Jr. reported on a grade made by Oswald in a Russian examination. Garrison knew that the mere fact that Oswald had been tested in Russian indicated intelligence training.
Fired by growing suspicions, Garrison took another look at Oswald’s activities while in New Orleans in the spring and summer of 1963. He began to discover the odd and mostly unexplained relationships between Oswald and anti-Castro Cubans, US intelligence agents including the FBI, and 544 Camp Street.
Quietly he began to assemble some of his most trusted assistants, whom he dubbed his “special team,” and his investigation grew.
Garrison reinterviewed Jack Martin and found that Oswald had been part of that strange entourage of agents in and out of Banister’s Camp Street office. He found that Banister and his associates were involved in activities far afield from normal New Orleans activity, honest or otherwise. There were tales of burglarized armories, missing weapons, raided ammunition caches, and gunrunning operations. Garrison wrote, “The Banister apparatus . . . was part of a supply line that ran along the Dallas–New Orleans–Miami corridor. These supplies consisted of arms and explosives for use against Castro’s Cuba.”
By 1966, Banister was dead—he reportedly suffered a heart attack in June 1964—and Garrison was looking for a living person to prosecute in the conspiracy he had begun to unravel.
One starting point was New Orleans attorney Dean Andrews, who told the Warren Commission that he had received a call from a “Clay Bertrand” the day after the assassination asking him to fly to Dallas and legally represent Lee Harvey Oswald. Andrews reiterated this story to Garrison and claimed that while he had “Clay Bertrand” as a client, he had never actually met the man.
As Garrison’s investigators pried into the seamier areas of New Orleans nightlife, they began to piece together information from various sources that it was common knowledge in the homosexual underground that “Clay Bertrand” was the name used by none other than Clay Shaw, the respected director of the International Trade Mart in New Orleans.
Clay Shaw and Permindex
Clay Shaw, like Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby, was not merely some innocent with no connection to persons and/or organizations that may have played a role in President Kennedy’s death.
Shaw had some of the most intriguing and unprobed connections of any person involved in the assassination case. Even when some of these connections were brought to the attention of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, the committee was either unable or unwilling to fully investigate them.
Shaw, a tall, distinguished man with silver hair and a polished manner, was born in Kentwood, Louisiana, on March 17, 1913. During the 1930s, Shaw was in New York City working as an executive for Western Union Telegraph Company and later as an advertising and public-relations consultant.
Once again, there is a military connection. In 1941, Shaw was with the US Army and, while his official biography states simply that he was an aide-de-camp to General Charles O. Thrasher, Shaw later admitted he was working for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) as a liaison officer to the headquarters of Winston Churchill. It was here
that Shaw may have become entangled in the murky world of intelligence.
Although there is precious little reliable information on exactly what Shaw’s wartime experiences included, he did retire from the US Army in 1946 as a major; later he was made a colonel, with the Bronze Star, the Legion of Merit, France’s Croix de Guerre, and Belgium’s Order of the Crown.
After the war, Shaw returned to New Orleans, where he was known as a wealthy real-estate developer. He also became director of the International House, a “nonprofit association fostering the development of international trade, tourism and cultural exchange.” Soon Shaw left this organization to found the International Trade Mart, which became quite profitable sponsoring permanent industrial expositions in the Caribbean.
According to several separate sources, including Garrison’s files and an investigation by the US Labor Party, a short-lived political party that offered Lyndon LaRouche as a presidential candidate in 1976, Shaw’s International Trade Mart was a subsidiary of a shadowy entity known as the Centro Mondiale Commerciale (World Trade Center), which was founded in Montreal, Canada, in the late 1950s, then moved to Rome in 1961.
The Trade Mart was connected with Centro Mondiale Commerciale (CMC) through yet another shadowy firm named Permindex (PERManent INDustrial EXpositions), also in the business of international expositions.
It is fascinating to note that in the 1962 edition of Who’s Who in the South and Southwest, Shaw gave biographical information stating that he was on the board of directors of Permindex. However, in the 1963–1964 edition, the reference to Permindex was dropped.
In the late 1960s, both Permindex and its parent company, Centro Mondiale Commerciale, came under intense scrutiny by the Italian news media. It was discovered that on the board of CMC was Prince Gutierrez di Spadaforo, a wealthy aristocrat who had been undersecretary of agriculture under the dictator Benito Mussolini and whose daughter-in-law was related to Nazi minister of finance Hjalmar Schacht; Carlo D’Amelio, an attorney for the former Italian royal family; and Ferenc Nagy, former premier of Hungary and a leading anticommunist.