Official and Confidential (52 page)

Hosty was the Dallas agent who, according to the Bureau, had had the routine job of checking up on Oswald because of his background as a former defector. He testified that he never met Oswald, but left a message with Oswald's wife not long before the assassination, asking him to call. If that was all, why then did the Bureau try to conceal the Hosty relationship from the Commission?

The FBI denied that it had, offering a complex bureaucratic explanation for the omitted entry. Commission staff remained skeptical. ‘We never forgot the incident,' said attorney Burt Griffin. ‘It established in our minds that we had to be worried about them.'

This leads on to a horrendous discovery, something the Commission never found out. Oswald had told his wife's close friend Ruth Paine that he had left a note at the Dallas office of the FBI following the Hosty visit. After the assassination, told by an agent that this was not so, Mrs Paine decided it had been just a tall story. In 1975, however, a congressional committee learned that the alleged assassin had indeed left a note at the FBI office two weeks before the assassination – addressed to Agent Hosty.

According to a receptionist, the note was a warning by Oswald that he would blow up the FBI office if they did not
‘stop bothering my wife.' According to Hosty, there was no threat of violence – merely a warning that Oswald might ‘take appropriate action and report this to the proper authorities.'

That note is not part of the official record because, Hosty testified, Dallas Agent in Charge Gordon Shanklin ordered him to destroy it. The note was in Shanklin's possession after the assassination. Two days later, when Oswald had been shot, Shanklin produced the letter from a desk drawer. He told Hosty, ‘Oswald's dead now. There can be no trial. Here – get rid of this.' Hosty then tore up the note in Shanklin's presence, took it to the lavatory and ‘flushed it down the drain.'

Who originally issued the order to destroy Oswald's note, and why, may never be known. Shanklin is dead and former Agent Hosty refused further comment. Agent Cril Payne, who served in Dallas during the inquiry that followed Hosty's revelations, thought it ‘inconceivable' that the note could have been destroyed without clearance from Washington. ‘The prevailing office rumors,' he added, ‘were that J. Edgar Hoover had personally ordered the destruction of the note.' According to two Assistant Directors, William Sullivan and Mark Felt, headquarters officials did know about the note at the time. It was Edgar, said Sullivan, who ordered that its very existence be kept secret from the Warren Commission.

‘We didn't think,' former Commission Chief Counsel Rankin later said ruefully, ‘that he would deliberately lie … There is an implication from that note and its destruction that there might have been more to it … Rankin was thinking of the bombshell that for a while threatened to change the course of the Warren inquiry, when the Attorney General of Texas, Waggoner Carr, reported ‘an allegation to the effect that Lee Harvey Oswald was an undercover agent of the FBI.'

Edgar flatly denied to the Commission that either Oswald or Ruby had ever been FBI informants. Yet it later emerged that the FBI had no fewer than nine contacts with Jack Ruby, long before the assassination. He was even listed in FBI files
as a P.C.I. – Potential Criminal Informant. If Edgar misled the Commission about Ruby, what of Oswald?

The alleged assassin's widow, Marina, was to say she believed he ‘worked for the American government.' The former security chief at the State Department, Otto Otepka, recalled uncertainty, months before the assassination, as to whether the returned defector to the Soviet Union was ‘one of ours or one of theirs.'

Two witnesses from New Orleans, where Oswald spent time before the assassination, said they saw Oswald in the company of FBI agents there. A Dallas deputy sheriff, Allen Sweatt, was quoted as saying the Bureau was paying Oswald $200 a month at the time of the assassination and had assigned him an informant number.
⁴

The Commission, however, never conducted a thorough probe of such claims.
⁵
It ended up, the Assassinations Committee staff concluded in 1979, ‘doing what the members had agreed they would not do: Rely mainly on the FBI's denial of the allegations.'

Commission Chief Counsel Rankin was puzzled from the start by the FBI's stance on the assassination. Normally Edgar never tired of saying it was the Bureau's job to offer facts, not conclusions. This time everything was different. ‘They haven't run out all the leads,' Rankin told the Commissioners, ‘but they are concluding that Oswald was the assassin … that there can't be a conspiracy. Now that is not normal … Why are they so eager to make both of these conclusions?'

Some believe it was Edgar's obsession with protecting his reputation that led him to shut out everything else. He scurried to send secret letters of censure to seventeen agents and officials – all men who had been involved in handling the Oswald case before the assassination. Had they performed properly, Edgar claimed, Oswald's name would have been on the Security Index. Later, when the Warren Report gently chastised the Bureau for not having been alert enough, he
punished some of the same men all over again. ‘The Bureau,' he said, ‘will never live this down.' Yet Oswald was not known to have said or done anything violent, anything at all that justified a warning to the Secret Service, the agency responsible for protecting the President. Edgar's retribution against his own agents was merely a vindictive device to cover his own back.

The Assassinations Committee reported in 1979 that the FBI probe of Kennedy's murder had been ‘seriously flawed,' ‘insufficient to have uncovered a conspiracy.' The committee's own investigation, meanwhile, identified men who had said the President was going to be killed, along with associates who acted highly suspiciously before and after the assassination. It appears, moreover, that the FBI was aware in 1963 of all or most of the clues the committee followed sixteen years later.

Edgar, former aides confirmed, gave personal attention to all aspects of the assassination. ‘He got everything, knew about everything,' Cartha DeLoach recalled. ‘We didn't dare hold anything back.' Yet Edgar ignored a mass of information that, when the Assassinations Committee came upon it years later, would suggest conspiracy.

More than three years before the assassination, when Oswald was an obscure defector living in the Soviet Union, a memo about him had gone forth under Edgar's name. ‘There is a possibility,' it warned the State Department on June 3, 1960, ‘that an imposter is using Oswald's birth certificate.'

According to a former Army Intelligence colonel, Philip Corso, high-level U.S. officials said within weeks of the assassination that they knew two Oswald birth certificates, and two Oswald passports, had been in circulation before the assassination – and had been used by two different men. Corso cited two sources – Passport Office head Frances Knight and William Sullivan, then head of the FBI's Domestic Intelligence Division. Corso said it was in large
measure his briefing on this matter that led Senator Richard Russell, one of the members of the Warren Commission, to doubt the lone-assassin theory.

There is some evidence that a few months after Edgar wrote his 1960 ‘imposter' memo, someone was masquerading as Oswald. In January 1961, an American and a Cuban exile negotiated to buy ten Ford pickup trucks from a dealer in New Orleans. The dealer remembered the incident after the assassination, dug out the old sale form and found that his memory was not playing tricks. One of the truck purchasers had identified himself as Oswald, representing an organization called Friends of Democratic Cuba. The dealer's form was withheld by the FBI until 1979, yet the lead had great potential significance.

Friends of Democratic Cuba was an anti-Castro group, and the attempt to buy trucks occurred during the buildup to the Bay of Pigs invasion. FBI agents were out asking about Lee Oswald's business dealings within two weeks, and Passport Office concern about a possible imposter followed soon after. It seems that while the real, pro-Communist Oswald was far away in the Soviet Union, someone of the opposite political persuasion may have been using his name in the United States.

The coincidences proliferate. Gerard Tujague, a senior member of the same anti-Castro group, had once employed the real Oswald as a messenger. And a leading member of the group, in 1961, was Guy Banister, a man of mystery not least because of his close relations with the FBI.

Guy Banister served with the Bureau for twenty years, seventeen of them as a Special Agent in Charge, and he was one of the handful of veterans who had worked alongside the Director in the field, during the recapture of escaped convicts in 1942. His Bureau career had ended in 1955, following major surgery and a warning to his wife that ‘as a result of brain damage, he would develop increasingly unpredictable, erratic conduct.'

The Banister who returned to Louisiana, the state of his birth, was a man disintegrating. His state of mind shifted from feisty to choleric to violent rage. Alcohol made the problem worse, and the pills prescribed by his doctors brought little relief.

None of this deterred Banister from his self-appointed role as superpatriot and crusader against Communism. He was a member of the John Birch Society and the paramilitary Minutemen, an investigator for Louisiana's Committee on Un-American Activities and publisher of a racist tract called the
Louisiana Intelligence Digest
. He believed plans for racial integration were part of a Communist plot against the United States, and he worked feverishly in support of the CIA-backed campaign to topple Fidel Castro. On a journey to Europe he reportedly met with French terrorists plotting the assassination of President de Gaulle.

Like many former Bureau agents, Banister was a private detective, and he kept up his contacts with the Bureau at the highest level. ‘Guy was in touch with J. Edgar Hoover long after he left,' said New Orleans Crime Commission Director Aaron Kohn, and the New Orleans office of the FBI was close by Banister's detective agency. According to his secretary, Delphine Roberts, ‘Mr Banister was still working for them. I know he and the FBI traded information.' FBI records confirm this, and a CIA document identifies Banister as one of the ‘regular FBI contacts' of a Cuban exile leader.

In the old days in Chicago, Banister's anti-Communist squad had been one of the most effective teams in the country. And in 1963 in New Orleans he ran penetration operations against the Left, hiring young men to inform on pro-Castro and civil rights organizations – just the sort of operation the FBI was running at the time.

Oswald was in New Orleans that summer, making a show of himself as a pro-Castro activist – the very sort of ‘Commie' Banister deplored. Yet information suggests they had a secret working relationship with each other. According
to his secretary, Banister even provided Oswald with office space. ‘Don't worry about him,' Delphine Roberts quoted her boss as saying. ‘He's with us, he's associated with the office …'

One of Banister's associates, former Eastern Airlines pilot David Ferrie, has also been linked to Oswald. They apparently met for the first time in the fifties, when Oswald was a teenage cadet and Ferrie an instructor in the Civil Air Patrol. By the early sixties Ferrie's life, like Banister's, had become a constant round of anti-Castro scheming and right-wing politics.

Numerous witnesses would recall having seen Oswald in the company of two men, one of whom was almost certainly Ferrie, less than three months before the assassination. They arrived together in a black Cadillac, acting oddly, during a black voters' registration drive in Clinton, a town north of New Orleans. Even then, local civil rights activists suspected, they were undercover FBI agents.

One of Banister's investigators, Jack Martin, blew the whistle on his boss and Ferrie immediately after the assassination. He made, then retracted, an allegation that Ferrie had been involved with Oswald and in planning the murder. Ferrie himself, meanwhile, charged frantically around New Orleans quizzing Oswald's former landlady and neighbors about a library card. Other information suggests Oswald may have been carrying a library card when arrested, one with Ferrie's name on it.

Banister, for his part, spent hours after the assassination drinking heavily with investigator Martin. The session ended with Banister accusing Martin of going through his confidential files, then beating him over the head with a .357 Magnum revolver. The fracas started, according to Martin, when he asked Banister: ‘What are you going to do, kill me like you all did Kennedy?'

This would seem to be more than enough to have become a serious focus of the investigation, yet the FBI let the matter drop after perfunctory inquiries. Guy Banister was interviewed,
but was asked no questions at all about Oswald. Neither his name, nor Ferrie's, appears in the Warren Report. Banister was found dead of an apparent heart attack, with a gun at his side, before the Commission finished its work. Ferrie was to die in 1967, a possible suicide, after New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison had reopened the case and was about to call him before a grand jury.

A clue to the Banister connection was handed to the FBI on a platter, but it was not passed on to the Warren Commission. Some of Oswald's pro-Castro leaflets had been stamped with the address 544 Camp Street, the building that housed Banister's detective agency. Yet the FBI memorandum on the leaflets, which might have alerted the Warren Commission attorneys to this coincidence, concealed it. It listed Banister's address as 531 Lafayette Street, a reference to the alternative entrance to the 544 Camp building, which stood on a corner. The Commission's attorneys, poring over reports in Washington, had no way of knowing that fact. The FBI knew it very well, but kept the Commission in the dark.

Had Edgar provided the full picture on Banister and on David Ferrie, the Commission would have surely paid more attention to something very serious, the possibility that the Mafia had a hand in the assassination. Years later, Congress' Assassinations Committee expressed suspicion that two specific Mafia bosses might have been involved – Santos Trafficante of Florida and Carlos Marcello of New Orleans.