Crossfire
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Pursuant to agreement with the House Select Committee on Assassinations, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation reviewed this book in manuscript form to determine that classified information it contained had been properly released for publication and that no informant was identified. Neither the CIA nor the FBI warrants the factual material or endorses the views expressed.
Another Garrison detractor, author David E. Scheim, who also espouses the Mafia-did-it theory, cited the charges against Garrison made by NBC, Newsweek, the New York Times, and the Saturday Evening Post apparently without considering that few of their accusations were ever proven.
Citing Garrison’s failure to loudly identify Jack Ruby as Mafia-connected, Scheim wrote, “Although Garrison made extravagant charges against an assortment of Cuban exiles, CIA agents, Minutemen, White Russians, and Nazis, he conspicuously avoided any reference to one prime assassination suspect: the Mafia.”
Indeed, Garrison’s failure to acknowledge Carlos Marcello and the mob’s activities in New Orleans has caused many raised eyebrows among researchers otherwise kindly disposed toward the former DA.
Scheim claims Garrison’s former investigator Gervais, was a Marcello associate and when Garrison cleaned up Bourbon Street nightspots, he “selectively avoided the clubs controlled by Marcello.” The author also expressed the belief that Garrison’s acquittal in the 1971 payoff case was the result of more bribes.
Scheim goes beyond Blakey by stating that Garrison’s activities in New Orleans had a sinister design, writing: “The purpose of the Garrison assassination probe [was that] Jim Garrison conducted a fraudulent probe of the Kennedy assassination, which deflected attention from Carlos Marcello and disrupted serious investigation of the case.”
Stung by such suspicions, Garrison wrote, “While I lay no pretense to being the epitome of virtue, with regard to connections with organized crime, I think you can safely place me as having approximately the same such connections as Mother Teresa and Pope Paul. What has been occurring here, quite obviously, is the CIA’s disinformation machinery has been hard at work for a long time.”
Further, Garrison once told this author that while elements within the mob undoubtedly played a role in Kennedy’s assassination, they were certainly aided by elements within the US government. He said he wanted the architects of the assassination, not just the mechanics.
To the charge that he was simply grandstanding, hoping for higher office, Garrison has stated, “A politically ambitious man would hardly be likely to challenge the massed power of the federal government and criticize so many honorable figures and distinguished agencies. Actually, this charge is an argument in favor of my investigation: Would such a slimy type, eager to profiteer on the assassination, jeopardize his political ambitions if he didn’t have an ironclad case?”
While charge and countercharge, claim and counterclaim, surrounded Garrison, he continued to serve as an elected appeals court judge in New Orleans. Until his death from cancer in 1992, Garrison continued to speak out for a truth he claimed was denied five decades ago.
Garrison believed President Kennedy was killed for one primary reason—he was working for reconciliation with Soviet Russia and Castro’s Cuba. Garrison wrote:
To anyone with a grain of intelligence, it should be apparent that John Kennedy was eliminated by forces desiring the continuation of the Cold War—an artificial conflict draining the assets of and greatly changing, for the worst, the character of our nation. The clandestine arm for those Cold War forces was the Central Intelligence Agency—the destructive talents of which run the gambit [sic] from deception to murder.
He has even identified those “forces,” stating:
On the operative level of the conspiracy, you find anti-Castro Cuban exiles who never forgave Kennedy for failing to send in U.S. air cover at the Bay of Pigs. . . . They believed sincerely that Kennedy had sold them out to the communists. On a higher, control level, you find a number of people of ultra-right persuasion—not simply conservatives, mind you, but people who could be described as neo-Nazi including a small clique that had defected from the Minutemen because it had considered the group “too liberal.” These elements had their canteens ready and their guns loaded; they lacked only a target. [After the secret agreements of the Cuban Missile Crisis] Kennedy . . . began to crack down on CIA operations against Cuba. As a result, on July 31, 1963, the FBI raided the headquarters of the group of Cuban exiles and Minutemen training north of Lake Pontchartrain and confiscated all their guns and ammunition—despite the fact that the operation had the sanction of the CIA. This action may have sealed Kennedy’s fate. . . . The link between the “command” level and the Cuban exiles was an amorphous group called the Free Cuba Committee [recall that this name was tied to Lee Harvey Oswald the night of the assassination by Dallas County district attorney Henry Wade, who was then corrected by none other than Jack Ruby], which with CIA sanction had been training north of Lake Pontchartrain for an assassination attempt on Fidel Castro. . . . Our information indicates that it was shortly after this setback [the July 31, 1963, FBI raid] that the group switched direction and decided to assassinate John Kennedy instead of Fidel Castro.
This synopsis was voiced by Garrison in 1967, before there was any public knowledge of Operation Mongoose. Theologian James W. Douglass came to the same conclusion in his 2008 book, JFK and the Unspeakable, writing:
JFK and RFK were targeted because they refused to comply with the national security demands imposed upon them from the Bay of Pigs to the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam. Two and a half years into his presidency, enlightened by the Missile Crisis and emboldened by the hope of peace, JFK had reached a point where he began to transcend the ruling assumptions of national security. He was inspired to seek peace with such enemies of the state as Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro.
While this assessment may be debated for years to come, it nevertheless remains true that Garrison’s investigation in New Orleans did turn up much previously unknown evidence—another argument against his employment by the mob to deflect the truth.
Even the House committee’s Blakey, who termed Garrison’s investigation a “fraud,” conceded, “Garrison might have been on the right track, at least up until Ferrie’s untimely death . . . for evidence of an association between Ferrie and Oswald, presented at the Clay Shaw trial, was found by the committee to be credible.”
The House Select Committee on Assassinations
By the mid-1970s, national polls indicated that very few Americans still believed the Warren Commission’s lone-assassin theory, despite assurances of the Establishment media and government spokesmen. According to one Gallup poll, 81 percent of the American public believed President Kennedy’s death resulted from a conspiracy, while 70 percent believed the same regarding the death of Dr. Martin Luther King.
These nagging doubts prompted congressman Henry Gonzalez of Texas to introduce a House resolution in February 1975 calling for a select committee to study not only the death of John F. Kennedy, but also the deaths of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and the 1972 shooting of Alabama governor George Wallace.
In remarks to fellow congressmen, Gonzalez said, “I have introduced this resolution after much consideration. It has not been a decision I have made hastily. . . . There are questions to be resolved. I was at Dallas the day that President Kennedy was killed and I suspended judgment on the questions that arose then and shortly thereafter until Watergate, August 1972, revealed possibilities heretofore considered not possible.”
In an article published by St. Mary’s School of Law two months later, Gonzalez added, “There are a few who have offered criticism of my efforts. . . . The attitude of these people is to ‘let sleeping dogs lie.’ . . . I say that this investigation is a need and has its proper place in our list of priorities. What future do we have as a nation if we let valid questions about these assassinations go unresolved and uninvestigated except by private individuals?”
In the past few weeks, certain events have transpired in this House which concern me deeply and which lead me to believe either I don’t understand the House half as well as I thought I did, or that the House is undergoing a deep and fundamental transformation as a result of those tragic events which we collectively label “Watergate.” Until now, it has seemed to me that, although Congress might not have dealt with all problems wisely, it has not been its policy simply and doggedly to refuse to look at a serious national problem, no matter how difficult, no matter how distressing. Yet, I fear that is precisely what it is doing today. It is simply and doggedly refusing to look at the problem of who executed our former President, John F. Kennedy, and why he was executed. I do not exaggerate. I have chosen my words carefully, and I mean precisely what I say. . . . However, we not only have failed to make any progress toward establishment of such an investigating committee, we also have not even been able to get a hearing on the merits before the Rules Committee. . . . I have been told informally that “the Leadership” is against reopening the Warren Commission’s findings, and that is that. . . . Why would there be reluctance on the part of the Leadership and the committee? Have they been told by the Intelligence Community, which, incidentally, possibly acted as sole investigators for the Warren Commission, what really did happen to our young President, and why? Do they know who was behind the killing? Is it too horrible for the American people to face? . . . Someone apparently does not want us to see the evil, hear the evil and certainly does not want us to talk about it. . . . After all, if a President is eliminated, not by a “lone nut,” but for political reasons, isn’t the whole fabric of our form of government in direct danger if we cover up the political motivations and go on as if nothing happened?
Despite these passionate appeals for a reinvestigation into the assassinations, action stalled in the House for more than a year. The Rules Committee simply refused to even consider the idea.
Finally in mid-1976, the Black Caucus, at the instigation of Dr. King’s wife, Coretta, put pressure on the House leadership, and the Gonzalez and Downing bills were merged into House Resolution 1540 and passed in September 1976. However, the committee would expire at the end of the congressional term on January 3, 1977.
Trouble began immediately. House tradition dictated that the author of a resolution creating a select committee be named chair. Downing, who had not sought reelection in 1976, would soon retire and Gonzalez, a highly individualistic Mexican-American, was not liked by House power brokers.
Despite Downing’s lame-duck status, he was named chairman of the House Select Committee on Assassinations by Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, a decision that did not please Gonzalez, who began to serve as cochairman.
Early on, Downing wanted Washington attorney Bernard Fensterwald to serve as the committee’s chief counsel and director. Fensterwald, who had formed a clearinghouse of assassination material called the Committee to Investigate Assassinations, was an early critic of the Warren Commission and thoroughly familiar with most aspects of the John F. Kennedy case.
Gonzalez objected and Fensterwald withdrew from consideration, but not before an article appeared in the Washington Star under the headline ASSASSINATION INQUIRY STUMBLING—IS FENSTERVVALD A CIA PLANT? Later it was learned that information for this attack came from Gonzalez’s office.
In October 1976, Downing and Gonzalez settled on a former Philadelphia prosecutor, Richard A. Sprague, as the committee’s chief counsel. Initially, Sprague seemed like an excellent choice. He had a record of sixty-nine convictions out of seventy homicide cases, and was well regarded as a tough and independent prosecutor. He had received national attention by his prosecution of United Mine Workers president Tony Boyle for the murder of UMW reformer Joseph Yablonski.
Sprague stated he planned to break his investigation into two separate areas: one for John Kennedy and one for Dr. King. He said these assassination inquiries would be treated as homicide investigations. This was a novel approach to the Kennedy assassination since, until that time, all investigation and deliberation had been conducted in secret by the government.
Bypassing the FBI and the CIA, Sprague hired professional investigators and criminal lawyers from New York City. He made it clear that his investigation would not hesitate to look into FBI and CIA involvement and that he would use subpoena power and lie-detector tests to get to the truth. Aware of the CIA connections to the Kennedy assassination, Sprague let it be known he planned to subpoena both agency files and personnel.
Sprague also contacted many of the responsible Kennedy assassination researchers, including district attorney Jim Garrison in New Orleans, and privately told them he planned to use them as committee consultants. He was also truthful in projecting the costs of such a massive investigation, saying he needed a staff of at least two hundred and an initial budget of $6.5 million to start work.
Sprague’s openness about both his needs and his goals prompted immediate outrage among congressmen who had never wanted the committee in the first place. Many of these lambasted Sprague for his statements about using lie detectors, voice stress analyzers, and hidden tape recorders to learn the truth. Soon Sprague was too busy fending off media attacks to get his investigation rolling.
Other developments began to raise doubts in the minds of many assassination researchers, whose hopes had grown since the committee was created. To begin with, Sprague early on stated, “I have not, as of this date, read the Warren Commission Report or testimony. But I have never read any books by the critics, either.”
This unfamiliarity with the assassination was reflected in Sprague’s selection of the prosecutors and lawmen as investigators and staff for the committee. Many were aggressive and able but they did not understand the full ramifications of the case. Many had ties back to the FBI or CIA and none of them had the time to properly study the convoluted assassination issues.
In recent years it was learned that the CIA had a man inside the committee. The CIA grudgingly acknowledged that George Joannides, a thirty-year veteran of the agency, was paying out $51,000 a month to the Cuban Student Directorate, an anti-Castro organization whose members publicized Lee Oswald’s pro-Castro activities both before and after the assassination. It also was learned that Joannides served as the CIA’s principal coordinator with the committee but did not disclose his role in the anti-Castro events of 1963.
In 2009 reporter Scott Shane of the New York Times wrote, “That concealment has fueled suspicion that Mr. Joannides’s real assignment was to limit what the House committee could learn about CIA activities.” In 2013, the agency still was withholding nearly three hundred documents pertaining to the anti-Cuban activities of the early 1960s, claiming release could cause “extreme grave damage” to national security.
Documents released in 2007 following a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit showed that Joannides had received the Career Intelligence Medal, one of the CIA’s highest honors, in July 1981, less than three years after he stonewalled the House committee regarding agency activities. A Justice Department official denied that the medal had any relation to Joannides’s work with the committee but failed to provide any substantiation.
Despite Sprague’s wooing of the research community, those with detailed knowledge of the cases, with few exceptions, were excluded from the House committee’s staff.
Then there was the question of Sprague’s close friendship with his former boss Arlen Specter, the Warren Commission staffer who created the “single bullet” theory of the assassination. Sprague was pushed to protest, “I did not talk to Arlen before I took this thing.”
Sprague incensed Gonzalez immediately by renting a plush apartment in Washington’s Watergate complex, then leaving for a vacation in Acapulco without informing the committee�
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With his absence and presumptuous pronouncements, Sprague was making enemies everywhere. Representative Robert E. Bauman of Maryland charged that Sprague “virtually assumed the role of chairman of the committee.”
As 1976 drew to a close and Sprague found himself under attack by the media, including the New York Times, the committee’s reconstitution in January suddenly began to appear precarious.
Sprague was baffled at the hostility directed at him. He told committee staffers, “You know, I don’t understand it. I’ve never been in a situation like this before where I am getting criticized for things I might do. It’s nonsense, but I don’t know why it’s happening.”
His proposed budget was targeted for attack, but Sprague held his ground, saying, “Several people around here who are familiar with the bureaucratic game told me to first present a smaller budget. They assured me that I could always go back later and plead for more. That’s the way they do things in Washington, I was told. Well, I won’t play that game.”
The press attacks caused second thoughts in Congress. A resolution reconstituting the Assassinations Committee by a unanimous-consent voice vote on January 4, 1977, failed. It would take weeks of maneuvering before the committee could officially be reconstituted. By this time, Downing had retired and Gonzalez had been named chairman.
Suddenly the outside media attacks on Sprague were joined by an unexpected source—committee chairman Gonzalez. According to people familiar with this situation, Gonzalez, already angered at not being named chairman until after Downing retired and at Sprague’s early activities or lack of them, was further incensed that Sprague would not allow him to run the committee the way he saw fit.
And there was the continuing problem of funding. Sprague had been told he had $150,000 a month for expenses until the committee was reconstituted in January 1977. Later he found out that amount actually was only $84,000, which caused a cost overrun for which Gonzalez was taken to task by the House Rules Committee—the same committee that had stalled the Assassinations Committee in the first place. Gonzalez claimed Sprague had spent money without his knowledge or consent.