(11H370)

She wrote her father. He replied Christmas Day, from Nueva Gerona prison on the Isle of Pines, warning her. "Tell me," he asked, who this is who says he is my friend -- be careful. I do not have any friend who might be here through Dallas, so reject his friendship until you give me his name (22H690).

Why, in the face of the unquestionable evidence that the Odio affair was real, and of importance to them, does the FBI pretend it is not?

Instead of checking out her story, which may be the crux of the case, and which the Commission doubtless also did not want it to do or it would have acted sooner and more meaningfully, the FBI set out to destroy her by literary devices, by the pretense she was of unsound mind and undependable, by the nastiest and slyest implications. (Whitewash II)

But in doing this they had to engage in more cover-ups. Some of it may be plain incompetence, or carelessness. Yet it is difficult to believe all the plain stupidities were deliberate.

For example, there are three different addresses given as her residence for the two months before the end of September 1963, when she moved to larger quarters to accommodate her four infants she had brought from Puerto Rico in August. Mrs. Odio, who moved often after her husband abandoned her with the infants and who was ill, needing surgery, did not remember the exact number.

"I am almost sure of the number -- 1024 Magellan Circle. It is the Crestwood Apartments. I am not sure of the number'' (11H374).

But on September 10, 1964, when Agent Richard J. Burnett wrote up his interview of the previous day, he gave the address from which she had moved, the address at which she had had this "visitation," as "1084 Magellan Circle, Casa View, Dallas Texas." It

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was not "Casa View." It was 1080, as the renting agent told the FBI. It was apartment A, according to the FBI summary report of October 2 from the Miami office. It was also identified by the men who were there, who had the correct address. In these very reports that the FBI tries to say mean the opposite that the men had not been there, that in some way Mrs. Odin dreamed it all up -- it is proven that they had been at the Magellan Circle address.

There is a possible point in all this fudging. By the time the men were questioned -- much too late to be part of the Commission's investigation -- they were put in a position to lie without lying. For example, when Agent Calvin W. Evans interviewed William Seymour on September 18, by giving Seymour the wrong address he made possible the response that he has in his report of the next day, File No. 105-1529: "He had never heard of the address on Magellan Circle, Dallas." Seymour might not have heard of 1084 but might well have "heard of" 1080.

Whatever may or may not be said of this sorry mess, it is a hell of a way to investigate the assassination of a President.

The affair at Sylvia Odin's brought to light two additional things the government avoided or suppressed that I exposed in Whitewash (chapter 11): The threat to assassinate President Kennedy and the threat to assassinate Fidel Castro. One plot was for the two assassinations. This is logical, for those who wanted to kill Castro had the same motive for killing Kennedy. Attention focuses on the Bay of Pigs, where the murdered President kept the CIA and the military from following their folly deeper into greater disaster. Perhaps more motivating is the solution to the Cuba '; Missile Crisis of October 1962, the United States' contribution to which was the assurance of Cuba's territorial integrity. This was the end of the ambitions of the exile groups which had one thing in common --

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recapture of control of their island homeland. Some, murderers and plunderers, wanted no more than the license to loot they had enjoyed. Others were genuinely opposed to Castro; theirs a political disagreement, a violent opposition to the new political and economic society of Castro's Cuba. They plucked bitter fruit from the tree of Kennedy's realpolitik. His policy was their end, the guarantee of a lifetime of exile and futility.

Once the Garrison investigation was public and had established its seriousness and possibility of success, newspapers began to print what had been stifled for more than three years. We have earlier quoted "leaks" that the CIA plotted Castro's murder and the implication that the Kennedy assassination was his revenge, delayed several years. This is illogical; it is the propaganda backfire. The truth is, Castro desired the continuation in power of no world leader more than Kennedy. It is Kennedy's policies that assured him against invasion.

The New York Times of February 21, 1967, reports its own variant, "that President Kennedy's assassination grew out of a plot by anti-Communist forces to kill . . . Castro . . . and later decided to attack President Kennedy when Oswald was denied entry into Cuba." This "theory" has Oswald the intended Castro assassin.

No one ever seriously intended Oswald to assassinate anyone. If he had the disposition, and there is no reason to believe he did, he did not have the capacity. He was, as Whitewash shows from all the credible evidence, a really poor marksman. If one is to theorize along these lines, it makes more sense to postulate that Oswald's function was to get a visa, to be used by a look-alike who would be the real Castro assassin.

Following his own on-the-scene investigation in New Orleans, George Lardner wrote in the Washington Post of Friday, March 3, 1967, that "the broad outlines" of

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Garrison's investigation follow what "had previously been set forth by Harold Weisberg" in Whitewash. The "script" of Garrison's inquiry, Lardner said, "can be glimpsed in any bookstore . . . started with Harold Weisberg."

I cite this, not for self-advertising, but because Whitewash, which is the most complete analysis of the Report and the first, comes entirely from the Commission's published evidence. It is the only such book. What these news accounts show is that, despite its own misdirection, the Commission could not avoid gathering the evidence that shows what was really afoot. All that is in Whitewash comes from what is public.

Though it is difficult to avoid the truth, in its Report the Commission did, with the simple but monumental non sequitur already quoted, that it could not have been Oswald. That should not have been the end. It should have been the beginning.

All the various existing representations of what Mrs. Odio said have to be brought together for it to make sense, although there is enough in her testimony alone. Of course, we do not have a record of all the things she said: we have some of the versions of what federal investigators recorded of what she said. The only record of questioning is Liebeler's, which is consistent only with the predetermination not to believe. There is no part of his interrogation, coming after a long series of intimidations and abuses, calculated to build her confidence in the dispassion of the government's purposes or to persuade her she had nothing to fear. The record he left is like that of the others. She could not be ignored -- that nobody dared do. They would listen, steer her in the wrong direction, subtly undermine her, but try to eliminate the potential criticism of suppression: too many people knew of Mrs. Odio's experience. So, she was delayed in her testimony until July 22, 1964, a month after the Commission had planned to have its work completed -- too late for the launching of

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a real investigation.

It was, as we have seen, more than another month before the Commission did anything with her testimony. Then it was more interested less in getting at the root of what she revealed than in a belated check on her reputation, which the FBI did its best to destroy: for example, a series of subtle and entirely false hints would imply that she is insane.

Mrs. Odio was interviewed repetitiously, before and after her testimony. As Pena had complained, she was asked the same things over and over. But the new things, those not asked, remained unasked. The first agents to interrogate her seem to have been Bardwell Odum and James P. Hosty. While Mrs. Odio was agonizing, wondering whether to report her experience, she consulted friends for advice. One was her psychiatrist, another the volunteer social worker of the Dallas Cuban Catholic Relief, Mrs. L. C. Connell.

Mrs. Connell telephoned the FBI. The report of this interview, by Agents Norman W. Propst and Ural E. Horton, dated November 29, 1963, is Exhibit 3108 (26H738-9). Although one of the earliest and one of the more important, it is numbered one of the very last, printed by afterthought apparently, as one of a series covering the initial investigations that point in a direction the government decided it did not want to go.

Another and similar exhibit is also somewhat mysterious. It is the May 5, 1964, letter to the Commission of James J. Rowley, head of the Secret Service (Exhibit 2943, 26H402-5). We can only conjecture why Rowley did not trust his inspector, Thomas Kelley, to write the report of his own investigation for the Commission; why the Commission was satisfied to get its hearsay that much further removed; and why it never called as a witness Father Walter McChann (this is the most common and least logical. of the government's unvarying misspelling of the name of the young priest. The proper spelling was immediately available to the gov-

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ernment which, on all levels, was not interested in accuracy. The correct spelling was available from the Dallas telephone book. His parents live at 723 North Oak Cliff Boulevard. The correct spelling is "Machann." The pronunciation is "M'kan." I here use the most common misspelling in the hope it will result in least confusion. Without doubt, many other names are needlessly misspelled), from whom most of the information in Rowley's eight-page, single-spaced letter, was obtained.

The Miami office reported on its investigation that began 12 days earlier exactly the same day that Rowley wrote. Its elaborate nondiscovery of the man who did not exist, Father Walter "MacHann" (as the Miami Secret Service spells it), is summarized thus: "Inquiries in Miami leading to the identity (sic) and current whereabouts of Father Walter MacHann have been unsuccessful." Special Agent Ernest I. Aragon went to Monsignor Fitzpatrick and "reinterviewed" him. It is not surprising that Aragon reported "Monsignor Fitzpatrick searched his official Catholic Directory, which has all the names of all the Catholic priests working in the United States, and the name of Father Walter MacHann did not appear in the Directory." Not unnaturally, Aragon's other searches also failed to disclose trace of "Father MacHann."

The official court reporters and the indexer had the same blind spot. In Liebeler's interrogation of Mrs. Odio, the name came out "McKann." To the indexer, it exists in no variant. Father McChann is not listed. The indexer's "line" was that of the Miami Secret Service. The good father does not exist.

But it would not wash. Rowley did have to write his letter, for whatever reason keeping Inspector Kelley , who was well known to the Commission, and the key man in the Secret Service's part of the overall investigation, out of it. Despite the wrong and predetermined doctrine of the Secret Service and its pretense that

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Mrs. Odio cou1d give the real names of the characters of The False Oswald, there was the most vital intelligence in the Rowley letter, as there was in the Connell -FBI interview. It had to be -- and it was suppressed from the proceedings. We will come to that.

Father McChann was spiritual counselor to the Dallas exile community. Inspector Kelley, apparently believing or pretending to believe that Mrs. Odio was holding back, found the priest in New Orleans and asked him to telephone her and seek her cooperation, as though the harassed young woman had ever offered anything less. Rowley's exact language here seems to show how the official investigators succeeded in not investigating the assassination: "Father McChann was requested to call Mrs. Odio in an attempt to secure from her the name of the Jure representative who accompanied Oswald."

Assuming, as Mrs. Odio had every right to, that all of this showed the government did not trust her and, at worst, that it was determined not to believe her, how was she to react to such persistent badgering? Suppose, as I do, that she was honest and, within limits, forthright with the government, that she had never met these men before and did not know their right names, how was she to respond to the ceaseless assaults on her integrity? The wonder is that she continued to cooperate at all. She had to consider whether the pressure was to get her to change her account of what had happened. The Secret Service attitude is unmasked in this Rowley sentence about McChann, "He did not realize at the time that she had not made a full and frank disclosure of the names of the people who brought Oswald to her."

Although the priest seems to have believed the Secret Service "line," he did phone her and reported to Kelley an hour later. He said "she was very anxious to discuss the entire matter. She advised him the only information she could provide on the people who vis-

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ited her was," in effect, what she had already said.

Rowley's letter reveals why the government had not gotten from her all the information she had. It is the typical complaint, not Mrs. Odio's alone, of a great number of witnesses:

"Sylvia further said that she did not tell everything to the FBI because they did not ask her these questions." If the FBI ever disputed this, the record is barren. "She felt that the FBI had interviewed her improperly in that they had come to her place of employment . . . source of embarrassment to her and she later quit her job at the Chemical Company partly on this account."

Agents Hosty and Odum confirm Mrs. Odio's appraisal of their lack of interest and seriousness. They delayed interviewing her for three weeks. When they reported their December 18 interrogation, they did it in two paragraphs, thirty short lines of typing. In its entirety, it reads:

Miss ODIO stated that in late September or early October 1963 two Cuban men came to her house and stated they were from JURE. They were accompanied by an individual whom they introduced as LEON OSWALD. Miss ODIO stated that based upon photographs she has seen of LEE HARVEY OSWALD she is certain that LEON OSWALD is identical with LEE HARVEY OSWALD Miss ODIO stated she is not certain if she misunderstood the first name of LEON or if the two Cuban men who introduced OSWALD as LEON misunderstood him. Miss ODIO stated the purpose of their visit was to ask her to write some letters to various businesses in Dallas and request funds for JURE.

Miss ODIO stated that both of her parents are presently in prison in Cuba and for this reason she declined for fear her parents would be possibly harmed These two individuals together with OSWALD then left. A few days later one of the two Cuban individuals contacted her by telephone and stated they were leaving to return presumably to return to either Miami Florida or Puerto Rico the headquarters for JURE. The individual who called Miss ODIO who only gave his name as LEOPOLDO stated he was not going to have anything further to do with LEON OSWALD since he considered him to be loco This individual known only as LEOPOLDO stated OSWALD did not appear sincere He told them he was an ex-marine and could help them in the underground however he appeared to be very cynical and seemed to think that all Cubans hated all Americans. According to LEOPOLDO OS-

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WALD stated "I'll bet you Cubans could kill KENNEDY for what he did to you at the Bay of Pigs." According to MISS ODIO, LEOPOLDO told them that the Cuban people bore no malice toward President KENNEDY Because of the Bay of Pigs episode.

It is not accidental that the FBI went to her place of work and not her home. It was intended as pressure. Mrs. Connell had given Agents Propst and Horton Mrs. Odio's current address, and it is in their report 1816A West Davis Street, Dallas.

Despite this, the young woman still wanted to help the authorities:

Father McChann said that Mrs. Odio had expressed a desire to him to be interviewed saying that she will be perfectly frank in any interview with the authorities; that she is most anxious to clear the matter up and will cooperate wholeheartedly in any inquiry and give her recollection of the matter to the best of her ability.

The reason for Sylvia's initial fears, beginning with her collapse when she heard of the President's murder, is that she "feared that the Cuban exiles might be accused of the President's death." That she had grounds for such apprehension is also explained by the words Father McChann attributed to "Leopoldo" about "Oswald": "He told her that Leon was willing to do anything; that he had laughed at the Cubans, saying they had no 'guts' and that it would be easy to kill Kennedy . . ." This is absolutely what she testified to ten weeks later, what none of the many niggling, haggling and harassing investigators intimidated out of her, what Liebeler never shook. Considering the enormous pressure on her to withdraw from this account of what she had been told, I believe her persistence under it is an endorsement of her integrity and a sign of the devotion she had to the country that gave refuge to her and many of her numerous family and friends.

Now she is a afraid. She would not talk to Garrison's men.

The Rowley letter did not have the influence it

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should have had on the course and doctrine of the Commission's work. Yet it did not gather dust. Liebeler knew about it. He failed to use it properly. His purposes were to discredit Mrs. Odio and protect the FBI. There was never any Commission investigation of the endless complaints of misquotation by the FBI, of its unhidden pressures on witnesses, or of, as Mrs. Odio put it, their failure to seek the right information, to ask the necessary questions. There could not be, for the Commission followed the same practice. Those writing really critically of the Commission agree that it often failed to ask the next most obvious question at the critical points.

Liebeler knew all about this memorandum and questioned Mrs. Odio about it (11H376).

"Do you know Father McKann?" he asked. Mrs. Odio said she did. Liebeler never bothered to identify the priest or his function or connection with Mrs. Odio. Had he done this, he would have had another Pandora in front of him. He asked if she recalled the priest's telephone call -- he even had its date, April 30, 1964. She did remember the call.

Although it was Liebeler who took Mrs. Odio's deposition, it need not have been Liebeler who annotated the Rowley letter. It was marked to emphasize parts of it, to call attention to its contents. Naturally, the complaint against the FBI is not accented. Where Mrs. Odio recounted the revelation by the men that they were going on a trip, the words are underlined and in the margin, in large capital letters, is the word "TRIP." It appears the only trip any of the investigators was capable of conceiving as relevant was Oswald's, to Mexico. The men engaged in the counterfeiting of Oswald made other trips, to the west or the east coasts from Dallas, to and from New Orleans. These were ignored.

The threat to kill the President was underlined. Another is her comment about Oswald's bearded and

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unkempt condition, so like what Russo testified to. But as reproduced in Volume 26, this letter is not identical with the file copy I have. From unmistakable internal evidence, however, it is reproduced from that copy of a Xeroxed copy of it. The underlining that has not been removed from the printed version is identical with that of the file copy. Each squiggle coincides. There are notes in the upper and side margins in the file copy, not a single one in the printed copy. Why and how this was "cleaned up," whether by "accident," should be explained, for the annotations in the files indicate what someone on the staff was aware of, ample indication of what should have been looked into and was not.

In neither the file copy nor the altered version did anyone consider the deficiencies of the FBI in the investigation of a President's murder worthy of high lighting.

One of the too many purgings -- and a single one is too many -- is of an almost illegible, handwritten note at the top of page 4. Because this was Liebeler's case, there is a natural presumption the handwriting is his. It may not be. As best I can decipher it, it reads, "She said Leon did not use the name Oswald in her presence. This doesn't --- with the story told by Mrs. Connell."

Neither Liebeler nor anyone else on the staff knew"the story told by Mrs. Connell." She was never called as a witness. The best they cou1d know is what Propst and Horton remembered and chose to commit to paper of what they elected to ask her in the November 29 interview. What Mrs. Odio said does not jibe with what the Propst-Horton report says she said. That is palpably false. It attributes to Mrs. Connell the quotation of Mrs. Odio as having said that "she knew LEE HARVEY OSWALD, and that he had made some talks to small groups of Cuban refugees in Dallas in the past. ODIO stated that she personally considered OSWALD brilliant and clever and that he had capti -

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vated the groups to whom he spoke" and so forth. That"past" would have had to have been very brief, for Oswald's second residence in Dallas was then but a matter of weeks. What its most likely, assuming that the FBI was at all close to what Mrs. Connell had actually stated, is that there was a confusion between Oswald and someone who actually did speak. This provokes interest in the meeting about which Liebeler did not really question General Walker although he could have, about which the evidence does not even indicate the names of the speakers, although Liebeler knew they had come from Miami. This, in turn, is reminiscent of the stories of the characters in The False Oswald, of Hall's public speaking in this cause.

What this note and its elimination from the published version of it do is prove that someone on the Commission staff was aware of the Connell report and had compared it with the Rowley letter. It therefore is appropriate to quote three paragraphs from these two documents, the first one from the Propst-Horton report and the next two from Rowley's letter:

CONNELL voiced the opinion that General EDWIN A. WALKER and Colonel ( FNU ) CASTOR, a close acquaintance of WALKER, have been trying to arouse the feelings of the Cuban refugees in Dallas, against the KENNEDY administration. She based this statement upon information furnished her by various Cubans to the effect that WALKER and CASTOR made speeches before Cuban groups in recent months in the Dallas area in opposition to the KENNEDY administration policies.

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

He also acknowledged knowing Mrs. Eugene Link, Albert Tamaya, Marcella Insua and Hector Isquerivo, all of whom he met during his work with the Cuban Catholic Committee. He also acknowledges knowing Colonel and Mrs. Castor. He said Colonel Castor is a retired Army Colonel. Mrs. Castor seemed general1y interested in the plight of the Cuban refugees, but that be always felt that Colonel Castor was "playing the role of an intelligence officer" in his contacts with the Cubans; that he seemed more interested in their political beliefs than their economic plight or their social problems in the new country.

Father McChann said that while be was interested in the Cuban groups in Dallas he was contacted about four or five times by Wallace Heitman of the Dallas Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He first made a contact with Heitman when it came to his attention that

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one of these Cuban refuges was extorting money from other Cubans, was making false promises to the Cubans, was a disruptive influence in the Cuban community and was considered by Father McChann to be a "political Cuban" rather than a Cuban who was interested in receiving any assistance from the Committee. He could not recall the name of this Cuban but he believes that the Cuban is still employed at Parkland Hospital.

In Whitewash 11 I exposed this and gave the real identity of Colonel L. Robert Castorr, then of Dallas, now of Arlington, Virginia. This identity had been pointed out to me in an anonymous letter that I now know was written by Mrs. Shirley Martin, of Owasso, Oklahoma (who also supplied me with some of the newspaper clippings the Commission would have been well advised to have used). At that tune I pointed out that both the FBI and the Secret Service, independently or collectively, did not even consult the phone book to learn this colonel's first name, to find and, if not grill him, at least to ask him if he had anything to say. With the involvements of Cubans in the assassination, how are we to understand the failure of the Secret Service to meet this minimum required of them? How are we to understand it when Rowley's own letter uses these words: "that Colonel Castor was 'playing the role of an intelligence officer?'" How are we to understand that Father McChann was not called as a witness -- not in the Sylvia Odio part, not in the "role of an intelligence officer" part?

How are we to understand the failure of anyone to look into that "political Cuban" already known to be a "disruptive influence," the kind of a man who would extort money from his fellow refugees, who made them false promises? The presence of a Cuban of this reported character in the employ of Parkland Hospital could be in itself a major clue to the assassination and its subsequent investigation. My earlier books prove that the Commission's accounting of that single bullet with a built-in control

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and an intelligence like nothing ever launched into space, is not even science fiction. This bullet, whose antecedents are not known and were misrepresented to the Commission and through it to the world, is said in the Report to have inflicted all seven non-fatal injuries in both the President and the Governor, to have smashed bones and deposited fragments in two parts of the Governor's body (the fragments in his chest were hidden from the members of the Commission but are in the evidence) and through all of this to have emerged virtually perfect. It is also alleged to have been found on Governor Connally's stretcher. In any event, the medical evidence, entirely misrepresented and misquoted in the Report (see Whitewash, "The Doctors and the Autopsy"), is that the path imputed to this bullet is inconceivable.

In short, the Commission's own best evidence would indicate this bullet was planted. At the time of the Rowley letter, the Commission had reached no conclusions, according to its present apologists. At the end of its "investigation," the inference that this bullet was planted at the hospital was unavoidable. How could it then early in the investigation have been ignored as a

possibility by a Commission and an FBI and a Secret Service that were allegedly conducting the investigation? The early knowledge or fear of the planting of the bullet is the only reasonable explanation for the failure of anybody to investigate this prime suspect, the "political Cuban," as the planter.

This is the description of a man capable of anything. He was in a position to do it. He had the free run of the hospital. With his hospital uniform, he is one who would have been suspected of nothing, no matter where he went or when he went there. He need only have touched the stretcher that was accessible to him when it was, in the official account, on the unattended automatic elevator or during the long period of time it was unattended in the corridor. At the time of the assass -

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sination , there was no reason to suspect any hospital employee.

That bullet is a small one, slightly over a quarter of an inch in diameter, the size of an infant's finger. It could easily have been palmed by a grown man if he were under observation or feared it and presented even less problem if others were not present and watching.

From the only evidence, the 'found" bullet was not on the stretcher, anyway. Not one of the people who handled Governor Connally ever saw it. None of the people who examined or handled the stretcher ever saw it. When it made its appearance, it was underneath the mattress! What a truly remarkable bullet, ancient and small as it was, to have worked its way to this hiding place without human hands to help it. What a clever bullet, to hide under this mattress until just the moment the hospital engineer, Darrell Tomlinson, could jar it out!

The priest could have picked him from a line-up of all the hospital's Cuban employees, and he then could have been asked to account for his whereabouts at the crucial time.

That this was never done cannot be regarded as less than suspicious. That no effort seems to have been made to locate Father McChann does not reduce suspicion. That it seems not to have been done since publication of Whitewash Il in early December l966 (and there is indication the federal investigators had a copy of the manuscript in advance of publication, not given them by the author) encourages no kinder thoughts.

How are we to regard Liebeler's course of action and inaction? He had General Walker on the stand for what he inadvertently but accurately described as a friendly session. He asked, as we have seen, nothing about the October meeting Walker attended, although he knew enough about it, without asking, to know the size of Walker's contribution. He knew or should have

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known considerably more. The accessible files show more. They show influential people were behind this meeting, that it was held in a respectable place, a bank's meeting room. It is Liebeler who questioned the Cuban witnesses and many of the Dallas and New Orleans witnesses so enmeshed in the stories of The False Oswald in New Orleans. What little we now know of the travels and presences of these characters is consistent with their having been in Dallas and seems to make possible their presence at this Walker meeting, if not their participation in it. This also roughly; coincides with the time two of them were in the hands of the police, with when the trailer-load of arms was in Dallas, and with so many other things in which neither Liebeler nor anyone else had any interest.

Whether or not it is he who annotated the Rowley letter -- and that can readily be established even now -- Liebeler had to know of the Propst-Horton account of what Mrs. Connell said: that this colonel (whose name, identity, connections and activities it was Liebeler's responsibility to learn if they were not known) was a friend of the radical-right General Walker.

It was not Liebeler's function to be a prosecutor. Yet that is how he performed, especially in his interrogation of Walker. He sought to pin a bum rap on the murdered accused assassin. It was not his function to act as Walker's defense counsel. It was his obligation to do as a federal official what he now says he is doing as a private citizen -- to get "both sides."

Although it should not weigh in this, any impartial study of his "friendly" questioning of the extremist general leads inevitably to the suspicion that there was a political sympathy. Walker was granted favors and rights denied others. Liebeler, for example, as earlier shown, promised him access to the "Top Secret" transcript. Liebeler allowed him to refuse to answer questions, to refuse to give names. To illustrate (11H421):

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Mr Liebeler. That is not my question. My question is, do you know their names?

General Walker. Yes; I do but I am not telling.

And he did not. Instead, he asked to talk off the record and the printed transcript shows Liebeler honored this request.

Coincidences are part of life, but in the story of the assassination and its investigation, the statistics on their occurrence seems to have been drastically upset.

One involves Colonel Castorr. Before publishing Whitewash: The FBI-Secret Service Cover-Up, I telephoned his home and office without reaching him and left with his secretary the request that he return my call. He was silent.

Christmas time 1966 an old friend stopped by for a copy of that book. Several hours later he called in great excitement. It is quite a shock, he said, to have lunch with a man and then go home and read about him!

He had lunched, on business, that very day with Colonel L. Robert Castorr, whom he had known for some time, and was little short of astounded to read of him in Whitewash ll. My friend gave the colonel his copy of the book. By New Year's Eve when they were together at a party, the colonel had read it and expressed an interest in talking to me.

"Any time, any place, at his convenience," I said, "on the record or off. I suggest that we tape-record it, for his protection."

Several times thereafter I got messages that the colonel's obligations wou1d take him out of town for varying periods. In each case there was a suggestion we could have lunch upon his return. He and my friend discussed the book The colonel confirmed his friendship with General Edwin A. Walker, and said, "That fellow Weisberg knows what he is talking about. But he never made the date. That, as I said in

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Whitewash 11, is his affair.

It is unfortunate for a number of reasons, one of which is that people may not believe what might be true if expressed involuntarily where they might well have credited this same explanation if volunteered. Circumstances sometimes make innocent events and associations seem sinister.

As the evidence mobilized in Whitewash: The Report on the Warren Report so clearly suggests, it is more likely that Bullet 399 was planted on the stretcher at Parkland Hospital. Take this with that letter to the Commission that the head of the Secret Service himself wrote instead of entrusting it to his inspector, and its statement about the "political Cuban" believed still to be an employee of Parkland Hospital, which is bracketed in the letter with the there-unidentified "Colonel Castor."

Before publication of this book, I again wrote the colonel and on May 5, 1967, we met in Washington. At that time, Colonel Castor denied knowing any of the people in the story of The False Oswald. He said that on no occasion, in Dallas, Washington or elsewhere, had he been interviewed by either the FBI or the Secret Service, nor had he been questioned by or on behalf of the Warren Commission.

He added that from early December 1966, the publication date of Whitewash 11, until that moment, no agent of the FBI or Secret Service had made any effort in any way to interview him, his wife or anyone else of whom he knows about him.

Colonel Castor said, "It is incredible and inconceivable to me that I was not contacted to give my version of the statements about me attributed to others and not checked."

The Commission had an evasion for everything. It did not explain its failure to call certain witnesses to ask the certain questions because it no longer existed

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before any such questions could be addressed to it. Because there was no opposing counsel, no counsel for the defense, there was no one to ask the questions, call the witnesses, demand the answers during its life.

Perhaps the most quoted of these evasions invokes the difficulty of proving a negative. To prove that something did not happen is more difficult than to prove that it did.

In the foregoing there is the kind of negative that can be proved. I have proved what the Commission did not investigate. The staff, the FBI and the Secret Service did not investigate what they knew they must; they did not carry out what they knew to be their responsibilities, as ethical federal employees and as honorable and intelligent citizens. There may be variations from case to case in why they did not. But that it was not done is without question in the stories of The False Oswald and of Oswald in New Orleans in particular. Until there is explanation that can satisfy reasonable men, each must draw his own conclusion. I do not believe that a President may be murdered with answerable questions left unasked, with questions that are asked having no satisfactory answers, or with false answers to honest questions for his dubious epitaph.

To believe otherwise is treason to our society and its institutions.

The only conclusions that may fairly be drawn from the befuddled, suppressed, avoided, misrepresented and ignored evidence and from that not sought is that there was a connection between the strange careers of these men of unusual occupation, trainers of Cubans for the invasion of Cuba and their providers, and the assassination; between the mysterious, never-sought characters of The False Oswald and the assassination; between the events in Dallas and the preludes, including those in New Orleans.

One can only reach the conclusion that those charged with the investigation had a reason for not

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meeting their obligations. That reason is they knew or feared the resultant truth. In the case of this chapter, it may well be the identity of the New Orleans "Leon Oswald" with the Dallas "Leon Oswald" or that of the companions and cooperators.

It is now time to weave together the evidence already set forth with what was avoided, declined or misrepresented. The threads are loose and frayed; some lost. The looming of this fabric was never intended. But the pattern is clear.

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