take him long to learn that was one way he could never do it.

Fernandez apparently made an unsuccessful attempt to leave the United States August 31. This is revealed in Batista's complaint that the "United States authorities had not taken action to prevent departure of Fernandez."

Fernandez also told the Miami FBI that "he traveled to New Orleans, Louisiana, to receive commando training at a farm about 30 miles north of New Orleans . . . equipment was inadequate and it appeared to FERNANDEZ that the MDC was conducting a racket by exhibiting the 'commandos' in training to wealthy Americans who were asked to contribute to the anti-CASTRO cause."

In telling of having been given the "plan" to translate, Fernandez used a polite description of it, calling it merely "absurd." His experience at this camp added to his feeling the MDC was unqualified and unable to do anything and added to his despondency.

In an August 31 attempt to leave the United States, Fernandez said a number of other disillusioned CDM members were to have joined him. It is this that apparently led to his private arrest by Batista, to roughing him up and the threats to kill him, which occurred the day after he was to have left, not his alleged "spying."

Ultimately, Fernandez was relocated far from Miami. With the help of the Catholic Cuban Relief, he was sent to Chicago, from the fire back into the frying pan he had fled. He was charged with "encouraging and inducing the illegal entry of aliens into the United States." He entered a plea of "guilty" and was sentenced to "five years on each of the three counts" on February 20, 1964, but sentence was suspended, and he was placed on probation for three years, restricted by the court to remain within its jurisdiction. It is a safe bet he did not want to go to Miami anyway.

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Of course, one reason for federal silence about this New Orleans training camp could be official embarrassment at having tolerated such consummate incompetence. They could not plan and execute the capture of a home for crippled octogenarian women. The time had to come, and it did before the assassination, when policy changed.

A great nation like the United States cannot indefinitely continue to be in bail to a rag-tag band of irresponsible sandbox soldiers. The change was in private policy, CIA policy, not declared national policy, which was being violated.

The invasion camp at New Orleans was raided. Loran Hall, one of the Americans who were training Cubans in the Florida Keys for another attack, was picked up by federal customs officers near Key Largo. His load of arms and drugs was confiscated. The handwriting was on the wall.

If people motivated by hate and dominated by uncontrollable passion needed any motive other than the Bay of Pigs and the guarantee of Cuban territorial integrity made by Kennedy as his contribution to the solution of the Cuba missile crisis, the change in policy, the decision that doomed them to failure in their longing to take over Cuba, provided it. If any men capable of murdering the President had a motive, it was these irresponsibles.

Perhaps we now know why these documents and this facet of the story of Oswald in New Orleans were suppressed.

Aside from the observation that a United States President was unable to enforce his own foreign and domestic policies, it must be noted that the federal police collaborated in this insubordination. Within the United States, in opposition to the President's wishes, violations of laws and policy that could have at any

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moment incinerated the world were aided by federal agents.

These suppressed FBI reports are a self-indictment more powerful and unanswerable than any critic can compose. The agents knew what Washington wanted. Not the truth, for that was known in Washington. The agents did only what they well understood was expected of them. This attitude, really, has never been secret. For the most part, the press has pretended none of it was happening. Occasionally, usually in a different context, some of it slips into print. In a March 11,1967, editorial commenting on CIA secret financing of student and other groups described as "left-wing," the Washington Star said, ". . . it immediately developed that one highly conservative group, the Cuban Freedom Committee, had received more than $1 million from the CIA."

They acted in accord with the policy that controlled them. Not the policy of the President, the head of the country and the leader of the nation; not declared policy, but the secret policy of what has aptly been called the "invisible government," the policy of the CIA, the protector, leader and financier of the Cuban refugees.

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7. ASSASSINATION: "A COLLOQUIAL EXPRESSION"

On the fifth of the nine days between public revelation of the New Orleans probe and Dean Andrews's accurate forecast of his oncoming loss of memory, David William Ferrie was found abed, naked and dead, at 11 A.M. by a blonde-haired boy with long sideburns, not identified by the police whom he told he did not know Ferrie and "just happened to wander in." Midst the clutter and disorder in which Ferrie lived, an environment that perfectly matched the disarray of his personal homosexual life and the stark unreality of his surrealistic cosmetics, the corpse of Dave Ferrie shared the unkempt second-floor flat at 3330 Louisiana Avenue Parkway with three thousand books, including a full assassination library, and such unlikely companions for work or study on psychology, philosophy and religion as, in the words of the Associated Press dispatch of February 28, "a blue 100-pound practice aerial bomb (exactly what the FBI seized when it raided the New Orleans invasion camp on July 31, 1963), a Springfield muzzle-loading rifle, a .22-caliber Remington rifle, a single-shot .22-caliber rifle with altered stock, 20-gauge shotgun shells, two Army Signal Corps field telephones, a bayonet, a flare gun, a radio transmitter-tuner unit, a radio receiver tuner unit, .32 caliber empty brass casings, .22-caliber blanks, several cameras and three rolls of undeveloped film." Along with this, the two suicide notes -- one a hurt complaint to an unrequiting lover "Al," the other a complaint to the world in general -- both as disappointing to the bemused world as life had been to Dave Ferrie.

To "Al" Ferrie said, in part, "When you receive this I will be quite dead, so no answer will be possible . . . I offered you love and the best I could. All I got in

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return, in the end, was a kick in the teeth. Hence I die alone and unloved . . . I wonder what your last days and hours are going to be like. As you sow, so shall you reap." To the world in general, he proclaimed that "to leave this life is for me a sweet prospect. I find nothing in it that is desirable and on the other hand everything that is loathsome." Society and life, not David Ferrie, were wrong.

To the coroner death was natural, of a massive cerebral hemorrhage caused by a burst blood vessel at the base of the brain. The weakened vein was said to be congenital. Following toxicological tests, Coroner Nicholas Chetta announced on February 28, that there was evidence of neither suicide nor murder. Despite the "stress and strain" of his wretched life and the pressure of the investigation he knew was under way, death was not induced, either by Ferrie or others unknown, said Chetta. He was specific: "There is no indication whatsoever of suicide or murder." He described Ferrie as "a psychopath . . . a dangerous individual capable of almost anything."

Incredible and disconcerting as it was untimely, the death of Dave Ferrie, so true to his under worldly and unreal life, left behind it a mystery and deep suspicions not laid to rest by scientific opinion. Coroner Chetta said death had to have come before four A.M. on February 22. George Lardner, Jr., Washington Post reporter, was with Ferrie in his flat until four A.M.

"Ferrie was certainly living when I said goodbye to him Wednesday shortly before 4 A.M.," Lardner said after the death was discovered. He could see "nothing inconsistent" about it.

District Attorney Garrison, whose probe was seriously impeded by Ferrie's death, had called him "one of history's most important individuals" who had been "involved in events culminating in the assassination of President Kennedy." This statement, by the man in charge of the investigation, was public acknowledgment of what Ferrie had known for weeks, that for once in his 49 years he was important. At this precise moment, as unsatisfyingly as he had lived, Dave Ferrie died, leaving behind an enigma as unpleasant to behold as his unreal, unpretty and self-ordered countenance, as unlikely as the disreputable red mop he glued on his bald head instead of a neat wig, as heavy, round, owlish and excessive as those fake mascara eyebrows, and perhaps in some ways as permanent as his departure from this world he found so "loathsome."

Ferrie had longed to be a priest but was expelled from the seminary. He wanted to be and became an airline pilot, only to lose his job when he was arrested on sex charges. He was never convicted, but he was arrested several times, all but one for the same offense. The word around New Orleans is that he held the academic degree of doctor of philosophy. He listed himself in directories as a psychologist. He said he was a hypnotist. He worked as a private investigator.

He died alone, figuratively and literally. Partly covered by a sheet, found by accident, in his departure from life he entered the earth alone and unwept for, unwanted, no friend to mourn for him, no relative to claim the remnant life had so mysteriously abandoned. His death, which came at the one time in his life that it had genuine significance, when he might have helped solve the crime of Presidential assassination, was as inappropriate and unsatisfying as his life.

It is almost as though Dave Ferrie, with those special quirks uniquely his, had scripted his own death. He was an odd one, according to the press, virtually hairless from an otherwise unexplained and undescribed "explosion." It is in keeping with his character, if not his attitude toward life and people, that Dave Ferrie made himself up so conspicuously, so outlandishly, so inappropriately, that the made-up Dave Ferrie was as repulsive in appearance as the

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hairless one. His pencilled eyebrows were exaggerated and unreal in shape, size and substance. His wig was another distortion, permanently in disarray, conspicuously red, straggly and obvious. Carlos Bringuier, a round peg who fits many holes, found himself repelled by Ferrie. "In the stomach, it made you feel bad to look at him," he said.

When his picture made the front pages with his death, Ferrie's big eyes peered eerily straight ahead into the eyes of the viewer, large, glassy and discomforting. Mostly he seemed like the photograph of a comic-strip character, so unlikely that the image and the impression of the countenance linger one-dimensionally in the mind.

Every suggestion is deceptive. From the picture of the face, he seems like a small man, but he was just under six feet and close to 200 pounds.

No matter how bewigged, his hair was unkempt. No matter how put on, his eyebrows were too big. No matter how posed, his eyes, too, seemed added on. His receding chin was narrow from the front, making his head seem more bulbous. His small, thin-lipped mouth also was hard. Sometimes it sneered, with or without intent, and he then looked like an overacting movie villain.

In the bizarre and untimely ending of this life, as though willed with the timing of a master showman for maximum attention, he may do more good than ever he did in life. In this he is like that other dead bachelor of the half-world, Jack Ruby. Many people just will not believe Ruby's death was natural. In death he focused national suspicion on the unsatisfactory official "solution" to the assassination. With the stark inappropriateness of the time of Dave Ferrie's dying, at the precise moment all attention was focused on him, as though some evil, all-controlling master plucked him offstage so he could not act out his part, he served to spotlight Jim Garrison's investigation. With his death the more

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blatant ridicule of the press and of the other professional sneerers abruptly subsided. But "officially," the Ferrie case, the Ferrie part of the story of Oswald in New Orleans, we are told, is closed and it should be because there is nothing to it. If a single newspaper is an exception, I did not see it by late April 1967 nor have I heard of it.

Not content with this, the reporters and their papers prejudged the New Orleans investigation and Garrison, ridiculed both, demanded he produce "evidence" -- had he, before trial, they would have assailed him for his extra-legal conduct -- and never failed, in each story, to reiterate that the Warren Commission had concluded that Oswald was the lone and unassisted assassin and there was nothing more to be said.

The day after Ferrie's death, while the strange event was still in streamer headlines, before the coroner had rendered his verdict, James Marlow, Associated Press by-line writer and columnist, handed in his decision: "Talk without evidence is all there is."

Simultaneously, came the assurances that the FBI, too, had rendered a verdict of Ferrie's innocence. The Bureau and its longtime director are the objects of special reverence. They are things apart in some papers, which are against whatever the rest of the government does and for the FBI, regardless of what it does.

The Washington Star has especially good relations with the FBI, from which it sometimes gets exclusive statements. One such was Hoover's assault on all critics and criticism at the time of the third anniversary of the assassination.

On February 23, it wrote that "Washington sources who refused to be identified told UPI that a Warren Commission investigation of Ferrie showed that he had no connection with the Kennedy assassination." Instead of using UPI copy straight, the Star paraphrased. The result is a defense of the FBI. The Warren

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Commission never conducted any investigation of Ferrie! Before there was a Warren Commission, both the FBI and Secret Service looked into him, from what I can learn, solely on the basis of New Orleans police interest. In the first chapter of Whitewash II (page 19), I exposed the interest of the Secret Service in him, on November 24, 1963, the day before he was arrested. After his arrest, Jim Garrison recommended an FBI questioning (and he was never given a copy of the interrogation report). The subsequent federal investigation was for the Warren Commission, not by it. The Commission had not a single investigator of its own. It used those of the executive branches, one of the most crippling of its self-imposed restrictions.

In the very neat paragraph this Star story, without in any way indicating the meaning and having already avoided mention of the FBI and given the reader the idea that the Commission conducted the alleged Ferrie investigation, quotes the UPI directly: " 'The allegation of Ferrie's connection with an assassination plot was washed out by the investigation conducted for the Warren Commission,' the unidentified source said." The "unidentified source," A journalistic device exploited by those who want to be heard while remaining anonymous, called by the Star "Washington sources who refused to be identified," without doubt either was or was speaking for the FBI.

In UPI's formulation as well as that of the Star, the onus, should there have been one -- with Ferrie's mysterious death not yet explained anything was possible -- the public mind was already fixed on the Commission, whose fault was not that it had conducted this investigation but that it had failed to.

Bracketing its defense of the government's misfeasances, malfeasances and nonfeasances, the Star has consistently berated and insulted those who have written books critical of the Report. It has done this

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without troubling to find out, independently, what the facts are, depending instead upon its own prejudices or its own biased sources.

On the same day, as part of a lengthy story, the Star declared, "Statements Ferrie made under questioning by the FBI are included in the Warren Commission Report in the National Archives here. Nineteen pages of testimony are open to public scrutiny. About 40 more pages, believed to involve Ferrie but also to deal with FBI techniques and mode of operation, are kept secret."

In these three sentences the Star achieved almost perfection in inaccuracy. Nineteen pages are involved, but three duplicate. Here accuracy ends. The Report is not in the Archives. It is public, published by the government and a number of commercial houses, condensed, summarized, paraphrased -- the works. The Commission's evidence, for the most part, is also published, in the 26 volumes. The 16 pages are not of testimony. They are not in the Report -- not mentioned, alluded to, paraphrased or anything else. Like Ferrie and his arrest, they are unmentioned in the Report. These 16 pages and all the others still suppressed are not sworn and not in evidence. They are in the unused files. The reason for this suppression has nothing to do "with FBI techniques and mode of operation," unless this includes protecting stool pigeons and other sources of information.

Those documents and other evidence that are withheld are denied on the order of the executive agencies that supplied them. In the case of documents provided by the FBI, it is the FBI that dictates their denial, not the Commission. What is to be released cannot be released by the Commission, for it has long been out of existence, its function fulfilled with the issuance of its Report.

The following morning, February 24, the Washington Post printed this:

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Ferrie declared that he had been checked out thoroughly by the FBI and found to have played no role a claim that appears to have been sustained by the FBI. (Sources In Washington said the Warren Commission had investigated and cleared Ferrie of any connection with the assassination, United Press International reported.)

Across the continent that day, Jack Nelson and Nicholas Chriss wrote in the Los Angeles Times:

Meanwhile, the FBI continued its policy of refusing to comment on the Garrison investigation but it was learned the FBI had eliminated Ferrie as a suspect early in its probe of the assassination The FBI accumulated evidence which it considered showed conclusively that Ferrie and President Kennedy's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, were not acquainted and that Ferrie was in New Orleans on the afternoon of November 22, 1963.

This is how the FBI comments without seeming to comment and while saying it is not commenting. Someone speaks not for attribution or someone who cannot be called the FBI speaks for it. It has its cake after eating it, a common practice in government press relations.

To say, as this does, that the FBI "early" cleared Ferrie because he had no connection with Oswald, whether it is right or wrong, is to affirm what I charge in Whitewash: The Report on the Warren Report, what has been denied ever since, that the government set out simply to prove or make it seem credible that Oswald acted alone. This official attitude, likewise, is true regarding Ferrie's presence in New Orleans (which he also left that day, according to the FBI). Conspiracies do not require the presence of conspirators at the scene of the crime. There is also the crime of accessory, simply defined as a person who knows about a crime, before it is committed or after, and does nothing.

The subtle campaign to support the government and undermine public willingness to believe or independently to assess developments in the New Orleans proceedings continued. On March 1 George Lardner,

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Jr., was still writing in the Washington Post that Ferrie was "subsequently cleared by Federal agents of involvement in the assassination of President Kennedy." Two days later, Gene Roberts wrote in the New York Times,

And Wesley J. Liebelor (sic), a member of the Warren Commission staff, said that a "very substantial" investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation had shown that Mr. Ferrie was not a part of any assassination plot.

Four days after Ferrie's death, Lardner wrote this from New Orleans:

Of Ferrie an FBI agent told Newsweek's Hugh Aynesworth in Dallas several months ago, "We picked him clean. You won't find anything there."

Wesley Liebeler who, more than any other man on the Commission's staff, is responsible for what may with kindness be called the inadequacy of this part of the Commission's work, was also quoted at some length by Michael J. Berlin in the New York Post of February 25:

"Ferrie was picked up shortly after the assassination and questioned thoroughly by local officials and the FBI. I remember specifically doing up a substantial stack of FBI reports on Ferrie that we reviewed in order to make our determination.

"It was perfectly clear that he was not involved in any way."

Liebeler, now a UCLA law professor, is working on a book defending the Commission's conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the assassination.

"To the best of my recollection," says Liebeler, "there were two people with Ferrie, and they accounted for his moves on the day of the assassination . . . They were not near Dallas. I don't remember the names of the two, but they're in the Commission files."

The FBI reports on Ferrie were not included in the Commission's 26 published volumes of testimony and documents, Liebeler says, "because it was so clear he wasn't involved."

Liebeler says the Commission staff did not double check the FBI inquiries "aside from some questions I asked" of two witnesses who were called upon by the Commission, primarily to discuss other aspects of Oswald's background.

Liebeler pressed him for a relationship between Oswald and Ferrie in

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their teenage CAP days, but O'Sullivan could remember none.

Thus does Liebeler acknowledge that he, too, sought no other assassin than Oswald, no conspiracy, no accessories, nothing other than the government's pat answer.

If he could make a genuine "determination" based on those FBI reports that are not suppressed, he is a genius. If he could make one without conducting his own investigation or a serious interrogation of the witnesses he had, he is a marvel. He never asked Bringuier, for example, if Bringuier knew Ferrie. Bringuier had known him since January 1961.

It is not true that "the FBI reports on Ferrie were not included in the Commission's 26 published volumes of testimony and documents," as Berlin quotes Liebeler, " 'because it was so clear he wasn't involved."' Were this true, J. Edgar Hoover is betraying a public trust and violating regulations by denying them today. If there is nothing in them that would have prevented the Commission from printing them, which is what Liebeler says, there certainly can be no reason for Hoover to deny access to them to a corporal's guard of researchers. Liebeler and Hoover cannot both be right. Another reason for not printing these reports is that they are ridiculous, showing that anything but an investigation was conducted, as our quoting of them will prove. But even lack of necessity, Liebeler's defense, does not apply. What those 26 volumes contain that is not necessary is scandalous. One example is a series of pages devoted to tawdry pictures of Ruby's strippers.

It is not even true that Liebeler "double-checked" the FBI by "asking some questions . . . of two witnesses." That, too, as we have already seen, was farcical. There likewise is no basis for saying Liebeler "pressed" those witnesses. The fact is that Liebeler "pressed them" about nothing and purged the record of the few ques-

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tions he asked about Ferrie's homosexuality.

This is pretty much what Liebeler told his home town paper, the Los Angeles Times, which printed this February 24:

An attorney for the Warren Commission said here Thursday that an extensive FBI investigation failed to establish any connection between David William Ferrie and Lee Harvey Oswald.

Prof. Wesley J. Liebeler of UCLA law school, whose interview of a New Orleans policeman contained the only mention of Ferrie in the Warren Commission report, said the FBI had checked him out long before.

"There were a substantial number of reports from the bureau, containing all details of Ferrie's trip to Texas and tracing any possible connection with Oswald," Liebeler said.

"There isn't anything in them that would indicate any connection. I remember them very clearly."

Liebeler said the FBI reports, which he estimated to be more voluminous than the 4o pages mentioned by New Orleans Dist. Atty. Jim Garrison, are in the national archives. He said he does not know why they have not been released.

Liebeler said the FBI reports showed no relationship between them at the time of the assassination.

As for the investigation being conducted by Garrison, Liebeler had this to say: "I personally don't think he has anything, because everything I have seen so far was aware to us then" (sic).

Liebeler and the FBI played the same game in 1967 as each had in 1964. During the investigation, each avoided what it did not want in the evidence. In 1967 each avoided what it did not want of any blame. As the "unofficial spokesman" avoided reference to the FBI when there seemed a possibility Garrison might come up with something, so Liebeler, whose judgment was that of the Commission, carefully placed full responsibility on the FBI. In 1964 he could have asked that the Commission order the FBI to act like a police agency but did not. He shrugged it off.

Liebeler is correct in saying there was "nothing in them [the FBI reports] that would indicate any connection" between Oswald and Ferrie. Nobody wanted any. His own questioning of O'Sullivan, which he failed to follow the CAP records and which is so shallow it is no questioning, discloses this. The failure of the FBI

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to seek this connection should have inspired Liebeler's doubts. His conception of his function, to develop evidence that Oswald was the sole assassin, the hallmark of his Commission work, is the essence of his statement to the Los Angeles Times. His limitation to "at the time of the assassination" rather than "when Oswald was in New Orleans" in mention of the Oswald-Ferrie relationship is a reaffirmation of the same crippling philosophy and the same disability that paralyzed the Commission's work. The Commission and Liebeler wanted no accessories, as they wanted no accomplices and no other assassins.

When Liebeler conducted his New Orleans questionings, Ferrie was in New Orleans. He did not call Ferrie as a witness. When he had Bringuier on the stand, he did not seek really to learn about Bringuier and what he might know of the real story of Oswald in New Orleans. Too bad; it could have been informative.

In saying that the file was somewhat more extensive than 40 pages, Liebeler was right but inconsistent, for he was interviewed February 25 by Carl Rowan on CBS-TV. He then said that nineteen documents had been declassified. And there are more than 40 pages.

I know. I took Garrison's investigator to them. I met him in Washington the morning of Thursday, February 2, and took him to the National Archives, where they are kept under lock and key, in a large steel vault barred by a stout lock and reinforced with a combination lock. As best I could, I explained the problems of using these chaotic files, the disorder that had been built into them, the booby-traps, diversions and other hazards and time-wasters that the Lorelei who was the government's classifier had designed, and the double-talk and gobbledygook of the FBI and Secret Service. I introduced him to the cooperative Archives personnel, authorized him to draw on my account for his Xeroxing. We worked together that day.

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Perhaps our most interesting discovery, fitting tribute that it is to Wesley J. Liebeler, is the report of Portland (Oregon) FBI Agents Julius A. Bernard and William S. Brown. On November 26, 1963, they interviewed J. Pat Doyle, of 1107 SE 123rd Avenue, Portland. This was but four days after the assassination. Doyle told the government that his family had been on vacation in New Orleans the day Oswald got himself arrested giving out his handbills. Their son Jim took movies of the operation.

These movies are not in the Commission's files. The consistency with which the government rejected -- the Commission did not even look at -- pictures that did not incriminate Oswald and could have revealed exculpating proofs, is astounding. I have dozens of cases of it from the existing records, can only imagine how many cases there were that the FBI avoided to begin with (and I know of a number) and of which there is no record in the files. In the near future I shall be publishing the proof of this from the Commission's own files.

In any event, this one-page document was my present to Garrison. It cost but 20 cents. From there on his man was on his own, and I have no doubt his stay in the National Archives was fruitful. But this is how I know Liebeler is right in reporting the Ferrie documents are more numerous than 40 pages.

Four of the 40 "Ferrie" pages in a single file have been declassified. Thus is what Liebeler did not say on TV, where he implied that about half of all the material is available. There is declassified Ferrie material in five files. The total of what has been declassified is 19 pages from all files, eight brief documents in all. For good reason or not, the rest is suppressed. There may be more of which I do not know. Marion Johnson, the efficient custodian of this archive, gathered for the press these 19 pages referred to, of which three are duplicates. The total number of different pages is 16. I

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found an additional page.

Unless they contain serious information not hinted at in those not still secret, the FBI and the Commission, for any serious purposes, might well have spent their time reading the newspapers.

Edward Voebel, having heard the news that Oswald was the accused assassin and recalling their junior high school friendship, made public reference to it. We have discussed Voebel's testimony. He had been questioned with something less than vigor by Commission Counsel Albert Jenner following previous official interrogations and conversations. Voebel's testimony, which was led, was less than definitive. In it he did not say that Oswald and Ferrie had known each other in CAP days and he did not say they had not. The Commission, which then ignored this in its Report, now, through its apologists and former staff members, tells us Ferrie and Oswald did not know each other. That is not what the press said at the time of the assassination. One story put it this way: "A New Orleans florist, Edward Voebel, had seen Lee Harvey Oswald's picture on television and reported he and Oswald had served in a Civil Air Patrol squadron under Ferrie."

It may, indeed, be that Voebel could not establish fact either way. But it cannot be that Jenner could not have confronted him with the contradiction between the press accounts and his testimony when he was under examination and made an effort to resolve the conflict, for which, as the Commission's lawyer, he alone was responsible. The remaining questions, questions that should not remain, exist only because Jenner allowed it.

Following Voebel's statements, Jack S. Martin, an associate of Ferrie, got in touch with Herman S. Kohlman, an assistant district attorney. Kohlman, as a newspaper man several years earlier, had written a story about Ferrie (which is not in the Commission's

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files or record). This seems to have been the source of the Secret Service spelling of Ferrie's name as "Farry" when Marina was questioned November 24, 1963 (Whitewash 11, p. 19).

Unlike most Secret Service and FBI reports, which are or pretend to be neutral -- for example, those on the exile-Cuban training camp quoted earlier -- this one is editorial and personal, really malignant. It is one-sided, was never read or approved by Martin, and was given to the press, which used it without asking him. His later denials of much of it to the New Orleans Times-Picayune of February 28 and Houston Chronicle of March 4 went almost unmentioned elsewhere and were ignored by the by-line writers, who had by this time inundated New Orleans and from it had flooded the newspapers with biased accounts, largely based on their own prejudices and those of the available official documents. This is what the Times-Picayune of February 28 said:

Martin also said he was misquoted in the Warren Commission report. Documents ln the National Archives quote the FBI as saying Martin told them any connection between Ferrie and Oswald was a figment of his imagination.

Martin said he never told either the FBI or the Secret Service that he made up the story about Ferrie's association with Oswald.

If all the faults attributed to Martin are his, he is in good company, for they and more were enjoyed by men and women called as witnesses by the Commission and credited, including perjurers.

The "synopsis" of the Gerrets report is an argument, an indictment, not a report, but it does fairly reflect the contents. This was not an investigation of Ferrie, about whom Gerrets says nothing of importance, but a condemnation of Martin. It reads:

Investigation disclosed that information furnished by Jack S. Martin to the effect that David William Ferrie associated with Lee Harvey Oswald at New Orleans and trained Oswald in the use of a rifle with a telescopic lens, also that Ferrie had visited Dallas several weeks prior to the assas -

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sination of President John F. Kennedy, is without foundation. Jack S. Martin, who has the appearance of being an alcoholic, has the reputation locally of furnishing incorrect information to law enforcement officers, attorneys, etc.

Under "Details of Investigation," Gerrets tells the complicated story of how at 5 p.m. on Sunday, November 24, 1963, he was told of Martin's effort to get in touch with Kohlman. The first 20 percent of these five pages is third-hand hearsay. But at 11:10 p.m. Kohlman phoned Gerrets from his office to inform him "that the District Attorney's office was conducting an investigation of their own with regard to 'Farry; that 'Farry' is actually David Ferrie." The information provided by Kohlman was substantially correct, possibly entirely so, a not inconsiderable accomplishment for so early a point in the District Attorney's investigation. The Gerrets account of what Kohlman told him, continued from above, shows, without mentioning it, the cooperativeness of the District Attorney's office. We here omit one paragraph in which Gerrets says Kohlman was reluctant to give Martin's name because he "did not want to become involved in this investigation," With no indication from Gerrets of the probable reason, the friendship between Martin and Ferrie. Rice is Gerrets's boss. He approved the report:

. . . wears a wig, having suffered loss of hair in blotches). He said that Ferrie has a record at the New Orleans Police Dept. -- Bureau of Identification; that he had been arrested several times and charged with moral offenses invo lving young boys. He said that Ferrie at one time lived on Atherton Drive in Metairie , La., a suburb of New Orleans, Mr. Kohlman stated that at the time of his telephone conversation with me his office had ten Police Officers (Investigators for the District Attorney's office) scouring the city for David Ferrie and that in the event Ferrie was picked up he would notify me. (No request was made of Mr. Kohlman that Ferrie be picked up and held for this Service.)

At 12:35 a.m. on 11/25/63 Assistant District Attorney Herman Kohlman telephoned the reporting agent at his residence, at which time be advised that he had received information to the effect that David William Ferrie had left for Dallas on Friday 11/22/63 during the afternoon, traveling in a light blue Comet. He also advised that Ferrie reportedly had a plane and may still have it. He said that at the time of his telephone con-

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versation with me Ferrie was allegedly on his way back to New Orleans.

Mr. Kohlman stated that it was his information that Harvey Lee 0swald was in Ferrie's Civil Air Patrol group in New Orleans some years ago; that Ferrie allegedly had a fraudulent charter and that the Civil Aeronautics Board checked on it,

*	*	*	*	*	*	*	*	*	*	*	*	*

During the late afternoon of 11/25/63 SAIC Rice received a telephone call from Herman S. Kohlman, advising that David Ferrie had been picked up by representatives of the Orleans Parish District Attorney's once and that he was being questioned in the District Attorney's office at that time. Mr. Kohlman informed SAIC Rice that Ferrie would shortly be brought to the First District Police Station, where he would be booked.

At approximately 7 p.m. on 11/25/63 SAIC Rice and reporting agent interviewed David William Ferrie (W; M; 46 -- DOB 3-18-18 of Cleveland, Ohio; 5-11; 190; ruddy complexion; brown eyes; wears dark brown kinky wig with a reddish tint; false upper teeth; resides at 3330 Louisiana Avenue Parkway, New Orleans. Former address: 331 Alberton Drive, Metairie, La. Ferrie stated that he had lived at 17302 Laverne and at 6801 Pear Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio).

None of this was news. The Secret Service could have gotten it from the District Attorney's office. It is also superficial, meaningless and the reflection not of what the Secret Service should have wanted to learn, but of what Ferrie wanted to tell them. It serves his purposes, not that of investigators taking their responsibilities seriously.

At this point, judging from Gerrets's own report, Ferrie seemed to take over the investigation. He told Gerrets "that he had a very good idea who had reported him as having associated with Oswald, training him in the use of rifles with telescopic lenses, etc." He then named Martin and gave his address. Whether Martin ever did say these things we cannot learn from this Secret Service "investigation." It does not say. It merely quotes Ferrie as having said that Martin said these things. The first came from Voebel, and it was the beginning of Ferrie's travail.

If anything, the "report" proves that Martin did not specify these things, as Martin himself told the Houston Chronicle.

After Gerrets finished questioning Ferrie at the First District police station the night of November 25, the

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