An introduction to the transcript of the interview:
Oliver Stone’s film, JFK, (1991), was based on the investigation of the president’s assassination led by the then New Orleans District Attorney, Jim Garrison. The film is often credited with moving the U.S. government to pass into law the JFK Records Act, which mandated the full release to the public, by 2017, of all previously secret files on the assassination. In 1988, (then) Judge Jim Garrison published his book, ON THE TRAIL OF THE ASSASSINS, recounting his investigation, which he believed had identified several New Orleans-based para-military operatives, who were participants with rogue, U.S. intelligence officials in the assassination of President Kennedy. Garrison believed that they were motivated by JFK’s effective opposition to the military-industrial-intelligence-complex’s plans for war against the USSR, in Vietnam and Cuba.
The transcript, below, records my interview, aired originally on WBAI-FM, NYC, in May of 1992. In it, my primary goal was to present why and how Judge Garrison began his investigation of Lee Harvey Oswald’s suspicious associations and activities in New Orleans in the months before the assassination, where Garrison was the district attorney, and to air Garrison’s perspectives on the significance of the removal of Kennedy in favour of Johnson. Then, I presented the views of those who criticized Garrison’s work, eliciting his contemptuous rage towards U.S. government officials who covered up, or allowed the cover-up of a thorough probe of what happened, and why, on November 22, 1963.
Later in 1992, I collaborated with Andrew Philips, an audio-documentarian, to produce The Assassination of JFK: THE GARRISON INTERVIEW, a two-hour documentary, which contextualized the assassination, and won the “Golden Reel” award from the National Association of Community Broadcasters, after airing on over 100 stations. The documentary is archived by the Pacifica Radio Foundation.
Transcipt of the interview by
David Mendelsohn with Judge Jim Garrison
David Mendelsohn (D.M.): Judge Jim Garrison (J.G.) is a former district attorney who successfully indicted Clay Shaw for conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy. He was interviewed on May 25, 1999.Shaw was later acquitted, but we now have a record of that period from Judge Garrison, a book called On the Trail of the Assassins. In the afterword to that book, Carl Oglesby, who was an early president of SDS and author of what I consider to be the seminal Yankee and Cowboy War, outlines his view of the basic ideas that Judge Garrison covers in the book. They are a) that rabidly anti-Communist elements of the CIA’s Operations Division, often moving through extra-governmental channels, were deeply involved at the top of the assassination planning and management process and appear to have been the makers of the decision to kill the President; b) the conspiracy was politically motivated; its purpose was to stop JFK’s movement toward détente in the Cold War, and it succeeded in doing that. It must therefore be regarded as a palace coup d’état; and c) Oswald was an innocent man craftily set up to take the blame. As Oswald himself put it, “I’m a patsy.”
J.G.: I’ll answer that in some detail in just a moment. But let me say, since you’ve opened with Carl Oglesby, that Carl Oglesby’s book is one of the most accurate and most important books that you’ve just quoted about the assassination. Everything that you’ve quoted is precisely true. It’s a book that should be read by every American, because it does put the assassination in a total perspective, and in an historical and philosophical perspective it’s awfully important. With regard to John Kennedy, he never was in any serious sense a cold warrior. As a matter of fact, every major move he made, and I’m saying move, not words on this day he was sworn in, which were written for him by members of his staff, I mean every major decision he made as President was toward ending the Cold War. So if you hear anybody describe him with a straight face as a cold warrior, you’re talking to somebody who doesn’t know that he’s talking about. Kennedy did so much and made so much progress towards ending the Cold War that those cold warriors who were in our government had to kill him in order to keep the Cold War going.
D.M.: What changes in policy can you point to that occurred after his assassination where we might see a turnabout from earlier Kennedy policies to the new Johnson policies along those lines?
J.G.: There were a series of them. The most immediate one occurred within 72 hours after his assassination. His successor, Lyndon Johnson, was a closet cold warrior all the time and who in the Senate was known as “the Senator from the Pentagon” because of his war-oriented philosophy, within 72 hours of John Kennedy’s death right after the eulogy in the Rotunda, Lyndon Johnson crossed over to the old office building and me the Ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Lodge, and said in effect, “You can go back and tell the Vietnamese now that we’re going to back them all the way.” In other words, what he was doing, within 72 hours, no position papers, no six-week or two-month studies by the military and intelligence, within a few days he was meeting with Lodge and telling him, “We are changing the policy in the Far East 180 degrees.” He reversed Kennedy’s policy and sure enough, in 18 months he was pouring half a million American soldiers in there, an expedition force, with no reason. We were not even invited, we weren’t wanted by South Vietnam. Of course, the result, as you know, was that not only did we lose 55,000 fine young me, died, murdered by our own government, in a sense, but we got in a war which was not supported by the people but was kept alive nevertheless successively by Johnson and then by Nixon to the point where in riots in Washington, D.C., they had to arrest 20,000 American citizens protesting the war. By those Nazi methods they managed to make a war nobody wanted last nine years. But with Kennedy, we would not have had the war, because he said most specifically on the second of October, 1963, he told Kenny O’Donnell, it’s in Kenny O’Donnell’s book Johnny, We Hardly Knew You, “We’re getting out of Vietnam. We’ll be completely out by 1965. That means the helicopters and everything.” And incidentally, when he said that, even then we did not have a single combat soldier in Vietnam. As long as Kennedy was alive we did not have a single combat soldier. Anytime you hear anybody say that John Kennedy like Lyndon Johnson, had something to do with our getting involved in the war in Vietnam, you are listening to a man who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
D.M.: I understand also that he signed an executive order actually returning troops?
J.G.: The first order he gave in that regard was to return 1,000 of our troops as a gesture that could not be misunderstood, 1,000 troops by the end of December 1963. Half of the troops had come as far as Hawaii when it was killed but they were turned around overnight and sent back. That was countermanded within 24 hours of his death, which gives you some idea of how much backing he had from his own government.
D.M.: Let’s look at his Cuba policy. Bay of Pigs would certainly seem like it was an anti-Communist move. What about the missile crisis, where he was standing down the Communists?
J.G.: Let’s take those two. The Bay of Pigs was not his policy. The Bay of Pigs was inherited from the previous administration, and the main designer and supervisor of the Bay of Pigs was a man named Richard Nixon, who later, when he got back in office, helped to keep the Vietnam War going. He was one of the cold warriors, a dedicated cold warrior from the first time he entered public office. But that was not Kennedy’s policy. Kennedy inherited that, and his position, and there was no doubt about it, was, “I don’t have much alternative. People think that I’m failing to follow up on the previous President if I don’t go ahead with something that he’s initiated.” But he was not very enthusiastic about it. He was most reluctant. And to leave no doubt about that, when he was asked… The Bay of Pigs immediately began failing because the invasion of the Bay of Pigs of Cuba, as you know, was being accomplished by anti-Castro Cubans, trained and backed, of course, by American advisors, by the CIA. It was a CIA project. But it was insufficiently backed. This agency thought it could jam Jack Kennedy into bringing in the Navy fighter planes which were just over the horizon on the Navy flattops. Their engines were even warmed up, so they were obviously intended to be used. But Kennedy didn’t intend to bring us into World War III that casually. So, when the man in charge of the Bay of Pigs, General Charles Cabel, who just be a strange coincidence happened to be the brother of Mayor Earl Cabel, in whose town Jack Kennedy was murdered a year or two later, when General Charles Cabel called on President Kennedy to make the Navy planes available Kennedy said, “Absolutely not” and turned him down. So that was not really John Kennedy’s project at all. The second thing that you mentioned was the Cuban missile crisis. The Cuban missile crisis, when that was laid on John Kennedy, he recognized it for the crisis it was, for the possible beginning of World War III, but it’s important to see that in its perspective. It’s becoming increasingly apparent, I think, to most thinking Americans, and I certainly have to brief with the Russians, because I happened to be on the American side for most of my adult life in the service, but it’s becoming increasingly apparent to Americans that the reason that the Russians put the missiles in there was that they wanted to discourage any further American adventurism or landing in Cuba. And in any case, whoever view you take, the crisis was laid upon us by those missiles. Kennedy’s view, certainly the right view, was that we had to get those missiles out. But the approach recommended to him by the military and our intelligence advisors around Kennedy, was to bomb and invade Cuba, much desired, of course, by the military intelligence. But Kennedy replied, as only Kennedy could, “Wouldn’t that kill off a lot of Cubans?” And so he found a solution that they didn’t dream of, because you can’t deny his intelligence nor his imagination. The solution which he was able to work out, communicated through the Russian Ambassador, with Khrushchev of Russian, they worked out a solution in which they didn’t suggest it, but they responded to it in a way we desired. Kennedy’s solution was a blockade without firing shots, without bombing Cuba, without killing Cuba, we simply set up a blockade, at first reluctantly, and finally realizing that that was the best solution. The Russians ended up pulling out their missiles. That was what I think can fairly be described as a resolution of the Cuban crisis without drawing the United States into war. At the same time it was not a Cold War move. It was an anti-Cold War move, because it used reason rather than force to resolve the problem.
D.M.: I think it’s fair to go to New Orleans and follow up on the policies that President Kennedy followed in Cuba and to look at the anti-Castro Cuban community, intelligence community in New Orleans. What was their reaction to these policies in the Bay of Pigs and the missile crisis? Wasn’t the CIA, which is supposed to be an arm of the executive branch, wasn’t the executive branch through the CIA helping to arm and train these anti-Castro Cubans?
J.G.: Yes. To answer the first part first, the reaction of the anti-Castro individuals who were being trained, they were being trained north of Lake Poncetrain in New Orleans. Guy Bannister, former Special Agent in charge of the Chicago office, by 1962 and 1963 was working for the CIA. His right-hand man was David Ferry, who comes into the story later. Guy Bannister was operating this anti-Castro movement, which was completely in opposition to everything that Kennedy was talking about and had in mind. It contemplated nothing less, ultimately, than another invasion of Cuba. The Cubans themselves, and anti-Castro adventurers with them, had come to hate John Kennedy for what they regarded as failure to back them up. But actually it was quite different. It was a case of avoiding a war on his part when he agreed with Khrushchev not to invade Cuba again. They never forgave him for that. Nevertheless, even worse, they were continuing to violate the President’s specific order, the law of the land, and they were training daily for the ultimate invasion of Cuba. They had a cover name, which they kept secret, but it has surfaced in recent years. It was called Operation Mongoose. It looked, on the surface, like a legitimate series of forays against Cuba, ostensibly in the national interest, but if you look at the actual description in a 1961 memorandum of Operation Mongoose, it’s described by Major General Lansdale, who spent years in Vietnam keeping the Vietnam War going, you will see that it was clear that he had in mind once more the ultimate invasion of Cuba and nothing less. So what you had under the cover of Operation Mongoose was this daily training north of Lake Poncetrain. That’s how New Orleans comes into it. I didn’t put New Orleans into it. Sometimes people say, “Why you?” as if I’d brought New Orleans into it. The answer, of course, is if I had been the D.A. of Pittsburgh, it wouldn’t have been me. But I was D.A. of New Orleans, and New Orleans was where they were setting up the next invasion of Cuba. Every day or so Dave Ferry would drive dressed in army combat outfits and black boots from Bannister’s office across the lake and check the training, which consisted largely of shooting, and combe back and give his report. It was moving forward pretty steadily, until Kennedy learned in late 1963, precisely August 1, 1963, that for several years now his orders against any more anti-Cuba activity, much less preparation for a new land invasion of Cuba, were being violated. So he had to call on the FBI to actually raid the CIA camp where the Cubans and other anti-Castro people were being trained. But even then the FBI, because the intelligence community protects different parts of each other, did not make it public to the people until we were able to find out that troops had been trained there, too, to land in Cuba. Buy they broke in up for the time being, I’m not sure that made a lot of difference. By then a lot of men had been trained, since this was August 1 of 1963, and were available to do some shooting when November came in Dallas.
D.M.: This reminds me a little of some of the Iran/contraactivities, that certain elements of intelligence through NSC seemed to be carrying on a foreign policy that was separate at least from the espoused policy of the executive branch and certainly the foreign policy of the Congress. But in this case the President acted through the FBI to break up this secret team’s activities.
J.G.: That’s a very good analogy, metaphor. But it’s not just a little like the Iran/contracontroversy. It really is the predecessor to it. In other words, the CIA in the Kennedy thing was not using just CIA individuals. It was going off the shelf. Which is the phrase, going outside the agency and so forth, taking some civilian and other groups’ off-the-shelf operation. It was building up by 1963, which I just described, from which you had the central ingredients that actually murdered John Kennedy, which again leaves nothing but a CIA murder of John Kennedy. But the covert elements of the CIA, that’s what I want to emphasize. But it was indeed the predecessor of the Iran/contrabusiness. It was the grandfather of that and the others which followed. I think Casey had in mind setting up a series of off-the-shelf operations. It probably wasn’t the first one that North was involved in.
D.M.: Let’s focus in on New Orleans. Let’s look at 544 Camp Street. Let’s look at the activities of Guy Bannister and maybe start to talk about how Bannister and this group was connected on the one side to, I think you say, to naval intelligence and on the other side to individuals that we’ve heard about: Lee Harvey Oswald, how is he connected to Bannister?
J.G.: I’m going to tell you about that. First of all, sometimes I wonder at some of these books written, at the mentality of the writers. Obviously, they’re financed by the Agency to keep you looking in every other direction but the Agency. For some time a series of books would say Castro killed Kennedy, and I think the current vogue now for the Agency is to publish books saying the Mob killed Kennedy, and all these ridiculous things, when any thinking person could look at the facts and see clearly that the main conflict was between Jack Kennedy and the Central Intelligence Agency. In fact, it was on the front page of the New York Timesin 1963, the split between the two of them. It came to the point where Jack Kennedy said, “I’m going to tear the Agency into a thousand pieces.” It just happened the agency tore him apart before he got a chance. But to go back to 544 Camp. All these people, all these experts, I don’t understand them. I was 16 years in the D.A.’s office, and I feel like I knew something about New Orleans, but all of a sudden I find there are people I never heard of. One of them wrote his book in Italy, telling all about the situation in New Orleans, and how it is and organized crime down there, which is nothing like the way they describe it. They don’t even know what they’re talking about. But suddenly they’re experts because the CIA’s paying them $5,000 a week. It pays them whatever it wants, because it isn’t supervised. So all these experts are turning out all this garbage to fool the American people. Well, since I was in the city and happened to be D.A. and had the responsibility of seeing what Lee Harvey was doing the summer of 1963, I went down to 544 Camp to look at it and see what it was. I took one look and said, “Hell, this is a side entrance to Guy Bannister’s office.” I knew Guy. He used to be head of the Chicago FBI office during World War II. He was in the Office of Naval Intelligence.
D.M.: I should interject here, 544 Camp is an address that those of us who have looked at the case know about, because Lee Harvey Oswald, when he was giving out leaflets supposedly in support of Castro, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, 544 Camp Street was stamped on the literature. So this is where 544 comes into the case. Through Oswald having worked there in the same building where Bannister was operating.
J.G.: That’s accurately tod. But just to underscore the significance of what you just said, what you are describing is a situation in which ostensibly Communist material has stamped on it an address, 544 Camp, which is the location of part of the intelligence community in New Orleans, meaning, without a question of a doubt, there’s prima facie evidence, that Lee Oswald was not a Communist at all, he was an agent provocateur. In other words, you can visualize it with no strain in the morning. We later found out that on the third floor of Bannister’s office, he located a small room and cleaned it out and gave it to Oswald to keep his pamphlets in. but you could see Oswald starting out in the morning and Bannister with his gruff voice and steel-blue eyes saying, “Lee, you’re doing a good job. Get some more of those pamphlets out today, son. They like what you’re doing in Washington.” So he goes out and hand them out like he’s a Communist, but he’s the one who calls the news people to come and take the pictures. He’s acting out a role as a Communist, but he doesn’t know they’re really fattening him up to be the turkey for Thanksgiving. He’s the scapegoat. They’re going to have him murdered, by making him look like a Communist.
D.M.: Guy Bannister was once the Chief of the FBI office Chicago. How did he first come to your attention in relationship to the assassination?
J.G.: He first came to my attention before the assassination, when I was District Attorney. Seth Morrison, the Mayor of New Orleans, said, “We have a man named Bannister who looks like he might e a good Assistant Superintendent of Police for that vacancy.” I didn’t know much about him, but I said, if he’s got a good FBI background, he’s certainly is organized and sounds good to me. But how he first came to my attention was when I, after spending some night with the Warren Commission, had put to the side the address 544 Camp to check because I saw that Lee Oswald was putting his little rubber stamp on the papers. He only did it one day and then they stopped him. They kind of had a heart attack, I’m sure, when he was putting that on the papers he was handing out to the public. But he didn’t know that he was set to be the scapegoat, so he was doing what he thought was natural. But what actually happened was, when he was arrested on August 9 and brought to the First District, the first thing he did was to ask to speak to an FBI agent. The FBI agent came over, Agent Quigley, and promptly Quigley and Oswald were locked in private conference for some time.
D.M.: He was arrested, Oswald was arrested?
J.G.: Yes he was arrested on the ninth of August because of a controversy. It was a set up controversy with other Cubans. In other words, one of those things with another Cuban who at the right time Oswald said, “Hit me, Carlos,” and Carlos swung at him and then Oswald pleaded guilty. That was just to make it look like he was a troublemaker for the Communists. It was all set up. It was in those particular pamphlets becoming available to the eye, though, and ultimately available to me. So I put them on the side to check. A few nights later I came across in the Warren Commission Report, I’m surprised nobody else found it first, I found myself reading Colonel Folsom’s 201, his personnel file, Lee Oswald in the Marines, and he casually mentioned, “Here’s Lee Oswald’s grade in a Russian test.” Somebody must have kicked him under the table, because he said he didn’t do too well, he got almost as many right as he got wrong, but I wouldn’t get any right in a Russian test. With all my years in the military, I was a major by them, I never took a Russian test. Here’s a private taking a Russian examination. So I realized then that there were signs of intelligence before he left the house, intelligence training of Oswald for some mission. This was, when he took this test, not long before he left for Russia. So obviously in retrospect he didn’t leave as a Communist. He left as a young Marine but with an intelligence assignment. Otherwise the Marines wouldn’t be teaching him Russian. But I wanted to see what sort of place this “Russian-studying Marine” was operating out of. That caused me to go down that weekend morning to Lafayette Square to 544 Camp Street where I found, my God, this so-called Communist, the one assassin, the man who is supposed to have murdered John Kennedy, the man who was butchered before anybody could ask him too many questions, was an agent provocateurworking for the United States government. He was working at that address. 544 Camp was a side entrance to Guy Bannister’s office. Around the corner on Lafayette Street was the entrance to Bannister’s office. Across the street in the Post Office building was an Office of Naval Intelligence. Bannister was in Naval Intelligence in World War II. I knew some of these people. Secret Service, as District Attorney in New Orleans I knew where some of these … Secret Service was also across the street. Around the corner, just across Lafayette Square around the corner was the Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and also on another floor, the office of the Central Intelligence Agency. That lone assassin, this person who had been described to all Americans and lied about by the federal government to all the world as a Communist was a Marine solder doing his assignment, doing what he was taught to do after he was given intelligence training, operating right out of the very heart of the intelligence community. The reason that the heart is located there so close to the riverfront is that’s where all the ships go from New Orleans down to Central America and South America, and a lot of the members of the ships’ staffs, as you might imagine, are intelligence me, too, so the bases were near the ships they used.
D.M.: Just so we can fill the picture in: for about how long was Oswald operating out of this office or coming to and from the office? Is there evidence of some period of time when he was in this environment, which is obviously one of intelligence domination?
J.G.: It’s total intelligence. Nobody was in that office who was not intelligence, Bannister’s office. The time that he began operating, the week, is not specific, but it’s known that it was through August that he was handing out the pamphlets. Earlier in the summer he was working around the corner at the Reilly Coffee Company. Mr. Reilly was not necessarily involved at all, but apparently the nesting place was made available for some request that the coffee company didn’t know the reason for. The request by the intelligence community for this nesting place for Oswald. He was operating out of the Reilly Coffee Company. He didn’t have that much to do, so he spent most of his time at the Alva Garage next door, which happened to be the garage, and that was something else I was aware of, the garage for the intelligence community. They didn’t even accept civilian automobiles. It was filled up with intelligence community. So that’s where he spent the earlier part of the summer. When August came, he was handing out the pamphlets as an agent provocateurto look like a Communist so that when Jack Kennedy was murdered by the covert action elements getting ready to kill him for the CIA so this foreign policy could be changed back to the Cold War policy, he was being trained like a turkey being fattened for Thanksgiving.
D.M.: I wanted to stick with Reilly. The Reilly Coffee Company was one of the favourite nuggets for me, having read many, many books on the subject, where you recount the number, I think four or five, co-workers, people that Oswald worked under.
J.G.: Let me give you an example. I was curious, after I found out how unquestionably, how clear it was that Oswald was an agent provocateur, that he was working for the government intelligence from the outset. I was wondering, how did the U.S. government, the intelligence community handle his co-workers so that hey wouldn’t be telling too many people, well, he didn’t get many assignments. This was just a nesting place. He didn’t have to do too much. That’s why I sent my chief investigator over there. He was back in an hour and a half with a list of paper. Every man that had been working with Oswald at the Reilly Coffee company or above him, within two weeks, had been moved out to a higher-paying job out at NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Brandon had gone to Chrysler, this man had gone to Boeing, this man was working for NASA itself, another man was working for NASA. The same thing happened to anybody who helped in the assassination. For example, we arrested, even though we didn’t know who we were arresting, we knew that it was a strange time to make it, we arrested David Ferry within 72 hours of the assassination when we stumbled across the fact that he drove across a former friend of Lee Oswald’s when he was in the CAP, we had a Sunday meeting to review the whole thing. Kennedy’s body’s still warm. We found out that this odd character, David Ferry, who we later learned was working with Oswald out of Bannister’s office, had driven across the state line into Texas the day of the assassination. We waited for him to come back, and when he came back that Monday morning I had him arrested and brought to my house. I said, “What were your reasons for going into Texas at this strange time?” He explained that he hadn’t been ice skating in years and was seized with the urge to go ice skating. I said, “That’s very interesting, but how did you happen to pick the heaviest storm in many years to drive there?” He couldn’t think of an answer to that, so I had him taken over to the FBI, the First District, to be held for the FBI for investigation. You couldn’t give these guys…I’m trying to give these guys the assassins, the people who set him up for the case. They dropped Ferry like a hot potato, even made a public announcement because I guess members of the intelligence community recognize one another, that it was not the FBI’s idea to arrest Mr. Ferry, but Jim Garrison’s. but we got one of the guys involved pretty darn early.
D.M.: I think the listeners probably didn’t get why it was that you picked up Ferry. Did you already know that he was an associate of Oswald’s?
J.G.: You’re probably right. I might have jumped over that. Whenever a major crime occurred it was a habit of my office to have a Sunday meeting of the top members of the staff. And whenever there was any sign pointing to New Orleans where we might help, for example in the Chicago murders some years back where this man murdered about six or eight nurses, horrible murders he used a seaman know afterwards, before he killed them. So just on the outside chance, since it was a seaman’s knot, that he was a seaman, because New Orleans is a port of shipping, I had a meeting and we spent hours going through every possible lead. We did the same thing here, and in this case it paid off. We were looking for somebody who was associated with Lee Oswald and even though he apparently was an agent provocateur, more and more as it turned out, we wanted to see who was associated with Jim. We found, soon enough, that David Ferry was with him frequently. It was a rejected complaint because it was such a minor case, but it had his address on it. So we went over to Dave Ferry’s house to see what was happening, and we found several friends of his waiting there for him. They admitted that he’s gone to Texas. They were waiting for him to come back from Texas. I noticed a map of Cuba on the wall, all kinds of rifles, all kinds of military equipment. I realized I wasn’t dealing with Joe Smith American. So we waited for him to come back and that’s when I questioned him. He didn’t answer the questions very effectively. To make a long story short, we got the right guy. The House Committee, although it didn’t do a very effective job, did conclude that there was a conspiracy. It went on to say, ten years later, that one of the signs that a conspiracy existed was Lee Oswald’s association with David Ferry. It said, that’s very strange, but that suggests the possibility of a conspiracy. That’s what I was trying to say ten years earlier. But then it went on to say, now it’s too late to look into it.
DM.: I think this is a good point for me to jump in with my hostile question, so to speak. David Ferry, I understand, the Friday of the assassination, was working for Carlos Marcello, who is alleged…
J.G.: Isn’t that funny? I had the impression he was working for this boss, private detective Ray Gill. But I’ll let you take your own speculations.
D.M.: I hear you. But Gill was Marcello’s attorney at the time.
J.G.: On that particular weekend that’s right. The next week he was somebody’s else’s attorney, at which time David Ferry was still working for Ray Gill.
D.M.: I hear you, and I want to hear more. I want to just put in the question that, as you say, the big theory that’s being put forward now is that elements of organized crime were responsible for killing Kennedy.
J.G.: Let’s go straight to that. Have you got a stopwatch? Let me just see how many seconds it takes me to dispose in the mind of a reasonable man of organized crime being involved. First of all, the reason given for the contended organized crime, and the listener should understand that idea is conceived and is spread consistently by the Central Intelligence Agency so that you will look away from its covert operations and its other orders, the reason given for the supposed involvement of organized crime is so that they could get rid of the Attorney General. If you want to get rid of the Attorney General, truly, all you have to do, Bobby Kennedy it was at the time, is shoot him when he goes to his Justice Department office in the morning or on the way out in the afternoon, because he didn’t even have a bodyguard. All he had was a driver who was also the bodyguard. Compare that to getting rid of him in the way that the Agency wants you to believe that the Mafia … you’ve got to give the Mob credit for having more sense that than this. To have to penetrate the huge guard around the President of the United States, the Secret Service protection, the FBI protection, all the other agencies, the protection of the police in the city, in order ultimately to cause his Attorney General to end up without a job is really not very logical. But let’s take another step further. One of the most critical steps in accomplishing the murder was the change of the parade route at the last second. On the morning of the parade, the Dallas morning news showed that the parade route for the President was to continue as it came to Deally Plaza, continue on Main Street all the way through Deally Plaza. That map was five sixths, leaving just one column on the left of the page, showing it so everybody could see the route of the President. What actually happened was that when the Presidential motorcade reached Deally Plaza, without warning it turned right. It turned right down Houston and left into Elm. It was a cul-de-sac, where the ambush was waiting. Secondly, that double turn, the last leg of which was 120 degrees to the left, slowed his vehicle down to ten mph where you could hit him with a rock. If he had been going 25 mph as he had been and would be out in the meadow as planned, through the center of Deally Plaza on Main, they wouldn’t have been able to hit the side of the car. That’s what happened. The parade was changed at the last moment. The parade with the President of the United State. Now I ask you, who has the most power to change the route at the last minute of the President of the United States: Big Tuna Accardo, or the security forces of the United States government assigned to protect? That’s not all. Furthermore, after the Secret Service itself participated in the hijacking over the verbal, vocal protests of the Dallas officials, because the autopsy is required under Texas law to be held in Dallas for reasons like this, to keep an autopsy from being dine in another state under a strange control. Anyway, the body of John Kennedy was whisked out by Air Force One by federal personnel and they got it into a military hospital, Bethesda, a military hospital. In that military autopsy there were approximately 30 men, most in uniform, almost all military officers of high rank except for one of the pathologists, who was a civilian the other pathologists were military. There were several FBI agents and several Secret Service. So you had entirely federal people. Yet that was one of the most rigged autopsies ever held. It was so badly rigged that the members of the Warren Commission could not look at it. They put their hands over their eyes. Just to save them from being embarrassed, the autopsy papers and the x-rays weren’t even presented to them. They never saw the. Furthermore, the chief pathologist on that Sunday weekend burned the original autopsy in his fireplace. There you have a rigged autopsy. What room was there for a member of the Mob to be participating? That’s my reply to people think the Mob was involved.
D.M.: I certainly agree that the coverup couldn’t have been carried out without elements of intelligence and high government officials doing so, or conversely, why didn’t those officials whose responsibility it would be to find the truth find the truth after all these years?
J.G.: Let me tell you something about the coverup. But I’d like to say something about the significance of this murder, because I think it’s been underestimated. First of all, I think I’ve made the point to a reasonable individual that elements of the covert operations, not the entire structure of the CIA, because John McCohn, was appointed by Jack Kennedy, I know cared for Jack Kennedy, but elements of the covert operations, which was the muscle part, the murder part of the CIA and consists even now of two thirds of the CIA, that’s one of the first things we ought to do after we change the name of the CIA is to get rid of covert operations. You shouldn’t have covert operations inside the United States against American citizens. But we do every day, and that’s one of the things that has caused this country to cease being a democracy. But to go beyond that. I think that to get at bringing out the truth it’s so critical that these words must be said. The American people have to face the fact that this is not an oversight, not a mistake on somebody’s part. Every day that passes high individuals at the very top of the United States government are playing an active role in concealing from you the truth of John Kennedy’s murder. Most of the men who are in the Congress who have an IG of 100 or above, or let’s say 50 and above, have to know that he was brutally murdered and torn apart. But they no longer really care, apparently, because they are no longer doing anything. His name is never even mentioned any more. And look at the attitude of the Presidents, one after the other. These are the chief executives of our country, and yet we’ve had a succession of Presidents now and not one even mentions the name of John Kennedy. Apparently they expect us to believe that Jack Kennedy is on sabbatical at Hyannis port and everything’s all right well, everything isn’t all right. I suggest that if the government, including the Presidents and including Presidents who speak softly of wanting a kinder, gentler nation, how about also a more hones nation that tells the people the truth, which it hasn’t done and tell the Presidents and the Congress itself, do something about bringing out the truth? I do not think this republic will last. I think it will fall. If this happens, and it falls because the government will not tell the truth, then it deserves to fall.
D.M.: Again, I’m on your side on the issue of whether intelligence rather than organized crime was responsible, certainly ultimately, for the assassination. However, I feel as an assassination buff myself and somebody who has been following the literature, the issue of organized crime versus intelligence is at the center of discussion, if only because, as you say, there are many books published by, as you say, intelligence, that are saying it’s organized crime to get us off the trail. I just wanted to follow up, because it’s in the literature, why wouldn’t they have killed Bobby Kennedy? Why wouldn’t they have more easily killed Bobby Kennedy rather than President Kennedy? The answer given is, if you kill Bobby Kennedy and then the President finds out it was organized crime, he’s still the President, he’ll get a new Attorney General and go after organized crime like crazy. The other element that’s added is that Bobby Kennedy ordered the deportation of Carlos Marcello and left him unceremoniously with his shoes in Guatemala and that Marcello therefor had a motive to come back and get President Kennedy in order to get Bobby Kennedy off his back. I know people are interested in hearing your response to this.
J.G.: My response is your arguments are impelling. You have known me over. For the first time I see that it is so clear that organized crime did it that I don’t see how any thinking person could miss it. As a matter of fact, I would suggest that it is quite clear that organized crime, which played a major role in changing our foreign policy on November 22, 1963, was probably helped, not alone, but probably helped by Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse.
D.M.: Okay let’s go back to the weekend of the assassination. What tipped you off that New Orleans might be at the center of a possible conspiracy? Guy Bannister was booked that night for beating up someone. What did you find out about that?
J.G.: First of all, those things did to tip me off that anything was happening. You must understand, and I plead guilty to believing the government’s lie, the biggest lie it told in the history of the human race, I now see, was told by the United States government and continues to be told. I am one of the people who believed it. One of the reasons I believed it was that I had been in the army all my life, five years in World War II and eighteen year sin the National Guard. The army had never deceived me or been deceptive and the army was the government to me. So I accepted these things without question. Now the way that I happened to stumble across and gather and look into things from what we found, came across of Bannister’s beating of Jack Martin, which you described, the police report is dated 22 November 1963, the night of the assassination. Even though I believed the government’s pronouncements, how my office happened to catch David Ferry when he came back in from this weekend trip to Texas was because I was just doing my duty as the District Attorney because the President had been killed, Lee Oswald had spent the summer in New Orleans, so we were what you might say grabbing suspicious people. It just happens, in hindsight it’s clear, but by accident we grabbed people who were relevant. But we did not know that at the time. So that’s why I promptly turned Ferry over to the FBI and things like that. For the next three years I concentrated on burglaries, robberies, murders, and so on. So don’t give me too much credit. I’m not that quick. I did not see that something was wrong which I should have. It was apparent, but I didn’t see it for years.
D.M.: Why did Bannister beat Martin that night?
J.G.: The reason Bannister beat Jack Martin that night was Bannister, probably not unrelated to his years as head of the FI in Chicago, while he was capable of drinking heavily at night, he would not drink during the day. He was sober as a judge during the day. But the day of the assassination, he was with Jack Martin, who worked for him. Jack Martin did the detective work, and the office had on the front of it, “Guy Bannister, Private Detective.” But all Guy Bannister did all day was work on the logistics and the problems of getting additional ammunition to Cuba for raids on Cuba ad the training. He was totally working for the CIA. Jack Martin, who was intelligent, did his detective work. So they were friends, even thought they were tremendously different personalities. They both had been drinking, and Bannister, for the first time to anybody’s memory, got completely drunk on the afternoon of the assassination. They got in an argument, it doesn’t have to be a great reason between two drunks. On the way home, at nightfall, home meaning around the corner from Katzenjammer Bar on Camp Street, around the corner to Lafayette Street and Guy Bannister’s office, somewhere on the way upstairs or on the second floor, where the office was, Bannister blew up and out of the blue, as Jack finally told me, said that Jack had been looking into his filing cabinets. Of course, Bannister was very careful about his filing cases because there was nothing in there but intelligence. As we later learned, there no private cases in there at all. He usually kept them locked. But Jack Martin, who was something of a character, nevertheless was a thoroughly hones man. He was outraged. He replied the best way he knew how. As he said, he was referring to Lee Oswald at the time. He said, “Look, I saw certain people coming into your office all summer long, and I can say something about that if I want to.” At that point, Bannister, who did not carry a regular sidearm, carried a .357 magnum pulled out his .357 magnum, which was something else he had never done, besides drink in the daytime. He pistol-whipped Martin until they had to get an ambulance over to cut the body away. That’s the way that thing developed.
D.M.: This on November 22.
J.G.: Yes, because the specific point again was, it’s funny how quickly it took in time, it was a matter of hours after the arrest of Oswald. He was arrested at 3:00 Dallas time. This is roughly 5:45 or 6:00 New Orleans time. Already, too soon for Bannister, already someone Bannister knows has called his attention that he hasn’t forgotten seeing Oswald in and out of that office. That’s why he blew up.
D.M.: Let’s get to Clay Shaw, who, as we mentioned earlier, you had gotten indicted for conspiracy to assassinate the President. How did you first hear about Clay Shaw’s involvement in the conspiracy? What evidence did you develop against him?
J.G.: We did not hear about his involvement in the conspiracy precisely. We learned that from an attorney, again I seem to have been in the position of knowing all these individuals, which probably helped because I knew who was lying and who wasn’t. I stumbled across the fact early on that Dean Andrews, an attorney who for years had handled cases for Clay Shaw, although we didn’t know that at the moment, but I knew Dean Andrews had tried cases against him back when I was Assistant District Attorney. Andrews specialized in municipal court cases, largely, and was also handling some papers for Lee Oswald with regard to getting citizenship for Marina. Bannister had made a call on the day after the assassination to Dallas, Texas, to Oswald’s jail. The setup for Oswald, incredibly enough, by now you’ve seen the curious nonchalance of the Dallas police force in operation, Oswald was both receiving and making calls. Here’s a man who just supposedly, supposedly, I emphasize, killed the President, because he killed no one and the jailer, as far as the jailer knows he killed the President, but nevertheless he’d say, “Lee, here’s another call for you.” They’d bring him to the phone. Whenever he wanted to make a call he’d give the number to the jailer and the jailer would make the call and bring him over and keep all those papers together. So Andrews had received a call, as he testified later, and he told me then I questioned him, and he told the FBI and the Commission, he received a call from a man he identified as Clay Bertrand asking him to represent Lee Oswald. He said something about him in the hospital. He was in Charity Hospital at the time. “I don’t know if I can, and let me think that over,” and about the time he put down the receiver about 25 FBI men hit the door. They were monitoring those lines coming into the hospital and asking to speak to Lee Oswald. So they picked that up very quickly. Parenthetically, some listener might be curious as to what happened to all the calls that Oswald made and received, which certainly got my curiosity up, I must have spent 50 hours digging them down. The bottom line was that the jailer said he kept them religiously. He kept every call coming in and kept them as they came out. He came in, looked in his drawer and they were all gone.
He doesn’t know what happened to them. But anyway, that’s how we’ve learned that Dan Andrews had received such a call. But the name Clay Bertrand we were that familiar with. When we found that obviously, going through the questions, we had cop8ies of the FBI interview of Oswald, and we got copies of… this went on for several years. By the late spring of 1964, Dean Andrews had testified before the Commission. I studied his testimony and observed how increasingly frightened he became when he was asked who Clay Bertrand was. As a matter of fact, the more he was asked about Clay Bertrand’s identity, the more steadily Clary Bertrand shrunk. He was 6’3” when Andrews first described him to the FBI. By the time the Warren Commission asked how tall Clay Bertrand was, he was only 5’ tall. Surely, that’s a sign that the man who’s answering the question isn’t completely comfortable with this situation, he’s trying to get out of it. But we know that he couldn’t be both, and we know that Andrews was lying. After I had a long, long conversation with Andrews, and told him, “Look, Dean, we went to law school together. You’re a friend of mine. I like you. But let me make one thing clear. If you continue to lie to me like you did to the FBI and the Warren Commission, you’re not just going to walk out. You’re going to go in front of the Grand Ju8ry, and if you lie to the Grand Jury you’re going to jail. “That’s what happened of course, and we convicted him for perjury in front of the Grand Jury. That was the first conviction in the Kennedy case. There was a conviction, unlike what people say. That was the first. Anyway, what happened is, we then realized that the identity of Clay probably led in Dean Andrew’s night life. Most of his cases came from the parted going every night. We formed teams and fanned out ad went all through the Quarter. Pretty soon we started encountering the answers. It took a while, but pretty soon we’d encounter it. They’d say it for the third time and they’d realize my chief investigator wasn’t a bad guy after they had a few beers. We kept on. After a few weeks we are getting, “Well, you want to know ho Clay Bertrand is? I thought everybody knew. You’re taking about Clay Shaw.” About the seventh or eight time we got it we started getting statements. That’s how we found out who Clay Shaw was. Then we got on Clay Shaw’s trail, and without notifying Clay Shaw we began to locate other people who knew both Clay Shaw and David Ferry who connected the two together. And since we had Ferry in the scene in the company of Lee Harvey Oswald, we knew we were on to something. We kept on digging, and the day came when finally, for example, you might say the culmination of it came when after questioning 600 witnesses in the little town of Clinton, we round six of them who recognized having seen Clay Shaw and David Ferry in the company of Lee Oswald on two separate days, two of the strongest witnesses in the case. So that’s how we found out who Clay Shaw was. It took a long time, but we found him.
D.M.: What other evidence did you have that Shaw was involved in a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy? Why do you feel he was not convicted by the jury?
J.G.: There’s a great deal of evidence. A circumstantial case can involve as much as thirty or forty pieces you have to put together. Let me take a simple example and show you the kind of thing which left no other alternative. I think nevertheless it was a tough case. We continued digging away and ultimately we found not only a very hones person, because he didn’t like Jack Kennedy, oddly enough. He felt very strongly about the Cubans. He was Perry Ruso, a man who will not tell a lie, and there are some people who will not do that, regardless of how they might feel otherwise. He happened to be present. He was a friend of Ferry’s. Ferry was a remarkable intellect, a natural teacher. The man could speak three or four languages and even intrigued Shaw, who was certainly no second-rate mind. But above all he intrigued Ruso, and it was obvious because of this meeting and just because of the presence of all three of them, it was obvious at this meeting at Louisiana Avenue and Parkway that David Ferry’s apartment where Shaw and Oswald were present, and Perry Ruso was present, that Perry Ruso was accepted by both Ferry and Shaw, although Oswald didn’t pay much attention to him. The upshot of Ruso’s testimony was a detailed description of the impending assassination of John Kennedy, even down to the point where they were discussing where they were going to go. As I recall, the specific responses when Shaw and Ferry were thinking out loud to each other, Shaw said, “Well, I’m definitely going to be out on the West Coast when that day comes.” And Ferry said something about, “I think I’ll go to some university.” Just to make that long story short, Shaw ended u arriving to make a speech in San Francisco, which was cancelled when he arrived, but I swear he showed up on the day of the assassination. And Ferry tumbled into bed north of the lake at Southwest Louisiana Institute at Hamlin and spent the night in a bunk there, so they did just what they said. Anyway, that’s just an example. Nevertheless, that was a tough case. All I can say in response to that is, any honest District Attorney is going to win some cases and lose some. All if can say is in a true democracy you don’t want a District Attorney who wins every one of his cases. That was a case we lost. We won most. That was a case we lost.
D.M.: What was the role of David Ferry What was the role of Clay Shaw, as far as you can see, in the conspiracy?
J.G.: The role of David Ferry was, as you might have gattered in my description of Guy Bannister and the anti-Cuban activity, essentially the right-hand man of Bannister. From that we were able to make certain surmises. I’ll give you an example. We knew they were associated with Lee Oswald over the years because there were so many witnesses. In addition to the fact that witnesses ultimately at Bannister’s who said he was always spending time with, when he wasn’t meeting with Bannister he was talking with Ferry, “the kid,” they called him the kid. His role was the liaison man, the extension. Guy Bannister was like the commander. The battalion had too much to do to leave headquarters. Apparently that was related to Ferry’s function of rolling right into Texas on the day of the assassination. He never told us, and there’s no way to find out because he’s dead now. But it’s rather apparent that he was some form of liaison, because he knew so many of the Cuban shooters who had been training north of the lake, and he knew the kid. Postulate just one of the many possibilities for one brief second and you can see if many men were worried about Oswald talking while he as alive until they could get to him and kill him, think of the value of a familiar voice like Dave Ferry calling from Dallas, where he can’t be traced, and saying, “Lee, thank God I’ve got you on the phone. I’, here in Dallas and we wanted to reassure you everything is great. You’ve done a beautiful job. Just keep cool. Everything’s working. You’re going to be a hero.” Something along that line is what I suggest. That’s my first postulation. I don’t like to speculate, but he was something along those lines. The function of Clay Shaw became more clear as time went on, and ultimately, although they denied it at the time, first one high-level employee of the Central Intelligence Agency acknowledged that Shaw was indeed employed by the CIA and that almost every morning the meetings began during the trial, “Are we taking care of him? How’s he doing?” Ultimately, at long last, after the trial was all over, the former Director of the Agency himself said that Claw Shaw worked for the CIA. While we were digging away, even after the trial, by that time we got in the habit of digging away, we were able to find material which had been on the front pages of the Italian papers, we didn’t know that, in 1962, when Clay Shaw and other directors of an organization called the Central Mondial Commercial, the World Trade Center, were kicked out of Europe for their extreme involvement with a war-like extreme right-wing, past all reason, in other words, some of the elements were connected with the family of the former king of Italy, and one of them was married to a daughter of Yeomar Schacht, Adolf Hitler’s financial minister. So Clay Shaw wasn’t exactly in a youngster’s hobby class in that outfit. To make a long story short, they were kicked out of Italy, and the Italian newspaper in the course of doing it described Clay Shaw as obviously a member of the Central Intelligence Agency and that unit itself that he was the director of had to move down to Johannesburg, South Africa. But he was a rather big guy internationally. We just happened to catch by the big toe one of the international employees of the CIA, and I think that concerned the Agency more than anything.
D.M.: This was a period when the CIA was I think taking money to Italy so that the Communists…
J.G.: As a matter of fact that’s very accurate. Not just the Communists, the Socialists were both making progress, in other words, liberals, left-wingers were making progress in the formal government itself, in the legislature and so forth. They were pumping money into Italy. One of the sources, you know a lot more than I knew about it initially, for bringing the money into Italy was the Central Mondial Commercial, and Clay Shaw was over there in Rome helping to pump more into that activity.
D.M.: He was on the board of something called the Permandex Corporation?
J.G.: Yes. That was like the first cousin of the Central Mondial Commercial. Clay Shaw was on the board of it. If anybody remains who thinks that Clay Shaw was a special kind of angel, the way to understand Permandex was that Permandex was one of the sponsors of the eight separate attempts to assassinate General De Gaulle.
D.M.: It sounds awfully like Propaganda Due, P2 I don’t know if you’ve followed the conspiracy trail to that point. It’s an organization that interests me, anyway. Have you looked into that at all?
J.G.: No. it’s obvious now that you’re at a more arcane understanding level. I’m still just an old-fashioned District Attorney trying to learn more about the intelligence community developing such power in our own country. I haven’t reached what you’re talking about. I’ve heard about it, but I haven’t reached any understanding of it.
D.M.: The function does sound simi8lar to Permandex, the World Trade group. From Shaw, again, if you could characterize Shaw’s role just in two sentences, what would that be?
J.G.: Fundamentally, to the CIA he was a high-level contact in Europe, especially in Italy and France, largely because of his great ability to relate to people, especially people of quality and background. But he was secondly used temporarily n the bit of business down in Louisiana as the babysitter for Oswald, because he was very good at details like that.
D.M.: Let’s look above Bannister. Maybe we’re jumping too high, but I’d like to hear your view of the role, if any, in the conspiracy to carry out the murder of President Kennedy and the coverup of people like J. Edgar Hoover, Allan Dulles, Earl Warren, President Johnson. What’s your view about those people?
J.G.: Let’s take each one of these four. First of all, it goes much higher than I’ve described. Naturally I’m describing a tactical level which we stumbled across with just handling. But a President is not removed to change foreign policy just because a handful of tactical people decide to do so. I think that you can safely say that individuals such as J. Edgar Hoover were actively involved at the outset. Hoover not only wanted to see Johnson in office, he lived across the street from his in Washington for 19 years, probably his closest friends. I see now, frankly, it’s fine to be against Communism, I am, and everybody is, probably, to a reasonable degree, but when you reach a point like J. Edgar Hoover where you think that every man who doesn’t wear a hat and a handkerchief in his pocket is a Communist, he became a very dangerous man. I would put him as one of the people involved at the highest level. As to Johnson, there’s an old adage in intelligence which is very seriously regarded. It’s important, on a need-to-know basis. You don’t give information, no matter how trustworthy they are, to people who don’t need to know. It saves the number of people you have to tell. Johnson was such a natural hawk that they knew they could change the policy back to the Cold War without telling him, so I suggest a likelihood that on a need-to-know basis they didn’t bother to tell him, because he was so totally corrupt they didn’t have to tell him anyway. Allan Dulles is without the slightest doubt a major participant in the conspiracy to kill Kennedy and to change to foreign policy. To appreciate Dulles, you have to understand that he is the man, even though the CIA was formed out of the OSS, it was really when Dulles took over, because of its origins in the OSS, special emphasis was given early on to the covert operations, but it was really under Dulles that killing became a science in the CIA and something regularly done and accepted and done to Americans within American. He was truly an evil man. I am satisfied that of all the corrupt things that Lyndon Johnson never did, appointing Allan Dulles to sit on the Warren Commission and find out who killed John Kennedy was very much like appointing a Brutist to investigate the death of Julius Caesar. He knew exactly who killed him and how he was killed, and that he was going to be killed beforehand. I have no doubt about that. Earl Warren I have to look at that in a different way. I really think he was fooled. He was called in, it happened in a confrontation with Johnson. They had structured in so many fake sponsors, one you’ve asked me about, with justification, the Mob, they structured in Castro and the oil barons. It was a beautifully done plan, and probably with the final approval of people at the Dulles level, even though he was covert operations. Anyway, you have to assume that in the case of Warren that by getting him in you stopped the liberals from coming in too deeply, and that was what was so cynical about the plan, but it was beautifully done. When he left Warren’s office he knew nothing about. When he left Warren’s office he had tears running down his face from what they told him. They’d also structured in the possibility of some kind of Russian response, that there was going to be a sign of warfare, something like that. I can almost visualize Johnson, the man who would climb a tree to tell a lie, saying “Chief, we need your help. The nation needs you now more than ever.” So they got an honest, well-intentioned man who wasn’t the greatest intellectual in the world and fooled him. He was sitting there surrounded by people who were really running the thing like Allan Dulles.
D.M.: What about the level between Bannister and these people, at the level of a Dulles or a Hoover? Do you have information?
J.G.: No, I can’t pretend to have a magic globe and I’ve been carefully insulated from all that, so I won’t speculate. I can see clearly up to Bannister. I can see how he worked. But I don’t pretend to have inside knowledge of that upper gap whereby it goes up to the top level of covert operations. But I do think it had to go to some of the highest individuals with covert operations. Because you’re not merely changing foreign policy. You’re removing a President of the United States. In that regard I have to reiterate one more time that it was not just another murder, not just another assassination. I insist, I would stake my life on it, much as I love this country, this country will not survive as a republic if they continue, the Congress and the Presidency, the two offices that I hold most responsible, if they continue to fool the people about Jack Kennedy, continue to postpone telling them the truth our country will not survive.
D.M.: I think the question is, if some secret group is able to pull this off and get away with it, what else have they been doing between 1963 and now? Perhaps a great deal.
J.G.: that is a hell of a good question, and I wish I knew the answer. If not a great deal, certainly a lot more than nothing. You can see the capabilities, the smooth coordination, the timing, everything else. This was a professional operation of the highest order, so slickly that it didn’t leave a trail.
D.M.: And I think we have Jack Ruby as one of the people who testified or spoke to that, saying that the conspiracy was huge. I think that was in your book.
J.G.: He was trying to tell. He made no secrets about it. He was he was scared to death of some members of the sheriff’s office he didn’t identify. He told Warren Ford was present, too, he said, if you would just get me out of here I’ll tell you the biggest conspiracy you ever heard of. But I can’t do it here. About that time somebody looked at their watch and said it was time for lunch, literally.
D.M.: He wanted to get out of Dallas and to Washington, at least.
J.G.: Yes, at the very least. Then we would have learned something about the dimensions. But the people in Washington were crazy about that idea, because they didn’t want to know any more than they knew.
D.M.: I think Ruby was on tape saying that it was Nazis and fascists who were involved.
J.G.: Actually that’s true. When we get mad sometimes at somebody who tends to be a clear fascist, we don’t have a lot of them, but we have some, and we call them a Nazi. But it’s an accurate way of describing a man who’s so far to the right he’s almost inhuman. There were Nazis and fascist involved, and certainly at the operational level, those guys training north of Lake Poncetrain, we had an idea of who some of these people were, some of the Americans from the right wing working with the anti-Communists Cubans, and they were virtually Nazis. They called themselves Minutemen, so to speak, but they were of the most vicious order. They were killers.
D.M.: Your editor, Zach Sklar, said that you’ve taken something of an interest in Reinhard Gaylen recently. Maybe this would be the place to tell our listeners who that man is and where he came from and what he’s been doing supposedly for this country.
J.G.: I’m afraid that the role of Reinhard Gaylen is something I cannot go into at this time because it would limit my opportunities of going into him farther. But just to put a cap on what you’re saying, which is quite relevant, one of the things Allan Dulles did was to bring over the entire German what they call the “Gaylen apparatus” Gaylen was the master of intelligence in the German army back in Bavaria in a hill called Misery Meadow. When they knew they lost the war Gaylen retreated there with his staff and there were 20 huge cartons of all the material they gathered. Russian intelligence, from Estonians, from White Russians and so forth. What the Agency-to-be, the OSS then, obtained from Gaylen was not only Gaylen and his staff, they promptly made Gaylen an American general, he flew back here with American stars on, and the 20 cases, and all this material which the U.S. didn’t have before on Russia. They also brought with them many, many members of the Gaylen apparatus, many of whom were used by the CIA in some of its other adventures, which I’m not free to talk about.
D.M.: I would finish the loop a little bit. As I understand it, some of them went into NASA, and we had a lot of German scientists in NASA. Earlier we touched on how many of the people who worked with Oswald at Reilly then got jobs at NASA. I hear you don’t want to talk about it but…
J.G.: Not just NASA. It goes even farther than that. You have people like German General von Durenberger, the head of Bell Helicopter, which was on the verge of bankruptcy before the assassination and ended up banking millions and millions and millions after the assassination. What did you see in Vietnam in those nine years except Bell helicopters? Every time you saw a Bell helicopter, you were seeing one of the German general’s helicopters. It might have had an American name, but they were one of Durenberger’s helicopters.
D.M.: People don’t realize that there’s a lot of money to be made and has been made in keeping the Cold War going.
J.G.: Billions, just billions. That’s all. Keeping the Cold War going means many billions coming in. that’s one of the reasons they killed Jack Kennedy, to keep it going.
D.M.: Perhaps we’d finish with maybe where we might have begun, if people still have a question in their minds whether Lee Oswald was acting alone or not. What comes to your mind at some of the most obvious and strongest proofs that Oswald was acting in concert with others? Also, what do you feel Oswald’s role was in the assassination?
J.G.: You asked two questions, but I’ll try and take them that way. Look at what really happened. First of all, later after the assassination, when the world’s leading experts attempted to duplicate the feat with Oswald’s rifle, they could not even begin to duplicate the feat. So that alone indicates that Oswald did not do it. But even more than that Oswald’s gun was so bad, that Mannlicher was so bad that it was predictable it couldn’t be done. But furthermore, even before the experts could hit the side of a barn, they had to have the sight adjusted. The sight was loose and not adjusted, and if you looked through the sight you weren’t looking down the same line as the tube. But moreover, and the final, most tragic thing of all, most Americans, I think, have a feeling about other people in the human race. That’s the great thing about our country, that we know that we’re not made up of a dominant portion of cruel people. Lee Oswald was exonerated from firing a rifle on the evening of the assassination. The nitrate test showed he hadn’t fired a rifle at all. And yet, the men in charge of this operation, not only the assassination, but now the coverup, were so cruel and so heartless that it wasn’t enough to kill the President and sit idly by and let Oswald be killed as an assassin when they knew he hadn’t killed the President, but it took eight months before the rest of America found out that Oswald had not fired a rifle at because it was in the small print of the Warren Report. So that’s one of the most terrible things to happen. But now that can’t be undone. Finally, what did he think he was doing? It has become pretty clear in general terms what he was doing, but in precise terms, nobody from the FBI has told us. He was working with the FBI, a piece of news that surfaced early on, and the Warren Commission almost went to pieces trying to cover it up. While they gave another source as the origin, it’s quite likely it came from Oswald, when he said in effect, “Look, fellas, I don’t know what you’re trying to do to me, but I’m working for the FBI. I’m trying to find out what’ going on, too, my number is S179.” That was part of the standard number for an FBI informant. Of course, that was squashed before anybody could even get a start on it. But essentially that’s what he was doing. Remember in New Orleans one of the first things he did when he was arrested was to speak to Agent Quigley. When a special agent of the FBI is asked some defendant wants to talk to him, he doesn’t immediately agree. But with Oswald he immediately met him in a room alone, a long, private meeting. When Oswald came to Texas in the months prior to the assassination, more closely timewise, he met regularly with Agent Hostey, and just before the assassination he sent a letter to Agent Hostey. I think it’s only reasonable, once you see the scheme in its overall proportion, to understand that this was a written report. That’s how they handled it. They handed it to the switchboard operator in an envelope with the agent’s name on it. Afterwards, with Oswald dead, this wasn’t volunteered by the Agency. They denied it at first. Then they finally admitted that such a message had existed. This was Oswald’s written report to Agent Hostey about what he was learning about the assassination. But instead they converted it into. Hostey said it was a warning to him to keep away from Oswald’s life, if you can believe that. The switchboard operator, who had an even more exciting sense of drama, said that she looked at it and it was a warning from Oswald that he was going to blow up the FBI building. I leave you with this one thought to give you an idea of the truth that comes out of the United States government: If before the assassination Lee Harvey Oswald had left behind in writing a warning that he was going to blow up the FBI building, he wouldn’t have been anywhere around Deally Plaza when the President went by.
D.M.: The final question I have is what people should do to try to bring about a reopening of the case. I think they should start by reading your book. On the Trail of the Assassins, so that they have a clearer picture of what’s going on in this country. What do you think people can do? Is there anything we can do?
J.G.: I think the only thing that can be done, I do think that would be a good start because I put six years on something I could have done in two. The reason I put six years on On the Trail of the Assassinswas to make it irrefutable, so that even someone who begins doubting my position will have to end up seeing what happened and what the government did. The second thing, and I cannot tell the people now to do this because I’m not a seer or a prophet, I can only tell them that my instincts, and from the bottom of my heart I have the feeling, that they must then somehow communicate to two groups, the Congress and the executive department, that they will no loner take the lie. If they have to do like the Chinese youths did, the students, and block the military from coming in to the square, whatever they have to do, they have to tell the government that they will not take this lie any more. Make this government the way it’s supposed to be and stop telling us an unbelievable lie, because we won’t take it.
D.M.: Thank you very much for the interview, and thank you very much, I can speak for the country, for your work on this most important question of our time.
J.G.: My pleasure. Thank you so much.
VISION PROGRAMS 117 Stanton Street #6 NYC 10002 212-254-6802
The Assassination of JFK: THE GARRISON INTERVIEW READING LIST
ON THE TRAIL OF THE ASSASSINS, Jim Garrison, Sheridan Square Press, 1988
THE YANKEE AND COWBOY WAR: Conspiracies from Dallas to Watergate and Beyond, Carl Oglesby, Berkley Medallion, 1976
CONSPIRACY, Anthony Summers, Paragon House, 1980
THE FINAL ASSASSINATIONS REPORT: Report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, Bantam Books, 1979
MAFIA KINGFISH: Carlos Marcello and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy, S.P.I. Books, 1989
HIGH TREASON, Robert J. Groden and Harrison Edward Livingstone, Berkley Books, 1989
CROSSFIRE: The Plot That Killed Kennedy, Jim Marrs, Carroll and Graf, 1989
CONTRACT ON AMERICA, David E. Scheim, Shapolsky Books, 1983
THE KENNEDY CONSPIRACY: An Uncommissioned Report on the Jim Garrison Investigation, Paris Flammonde, Meredith Press, 1969
PLAUSIBLE DENIAL, Mark Lane, Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991
SPY SAGA, Dr. Phillip Melanson, Praeger, 1990
THE HOFFA WARS, Dan E. Moldea, Paddington, 1978
THE ASSASSINATION OF ROBERT F. KENNEDY: A Searching Look at the Conspiracy and Cover-up 1968-1978, William Turner and John F. Christian, Random House, 1978
THE ROBERT F. KENNEDY ASSASSINATION: New Revelations on the Conspiracy and Cover-up, Shapolsky Books, 1991
WHO KILLED JFK?, Carl Ogelsby, Odonian Press, 1992
THE ASSASSINATION OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.: New Revelations on the Conspiracy and Cover-up, Dr. Phillip Melanson, Shapolsky Books, 1991
A personal inspiration (David Mendelsohn), recommended to “60’s types” who are concerned about the assassinations but have never considered that what we believe may imprison us:
THE COSMIC TRIGGER: The Final Secret of the Illuminati, Robert Anton Wilson, Falcon Press, 1977
