men had located "Sandra Moffett" in Omaha, Nebraska, where she then lived, married to a "part-time preacher," Harold McMaines. Her correct name is Lilly Mae. On March 8 she refused to go to New Orleans to testify. On Good Friday, March 24, she told reporters she had once been in love with Russo but had not gone to that party with him. She also is quoted as having said she did not meet Ferrie until 1965 (when Russo no longer lived in New Orleans). On March 27 Garrison issued a warrant for the arrest of the 22-year old woman as a material witness. Then she was promised she would not be charged with anything.

One of these men, Russo said, he recalled having seen earlier, during a dedication ceremony attended by President Kennedy at the Nashville Avenue wharf. Because this man seemed to be paying no attention to the President but was looking around, Russo concluded he was in the Secret Service. Ferrie introduced him as "Clem" Bertrand.

Russo also met the second and younger man on other occasions. On one, as Russo entered Ferrie's second-floor flat at 3330 Louisiana Avenue Parkway, this man, rumpled and untidy, was sitting on a sofa cleaning or polishing an "old-fashioned bolt-action rifle" with a telescopic sight. "Meet 'Leon' Oswald," Ferrie had said, introducing his "roommate."

"As the party dissipated," Russo testified, "it narrowed down to eight or ten people besides myself because I had no ride home." During the discussion of how to kill the President, "Ferrie took the initiative . . . pacing back and forth." This Ferrie characteristic others noted. Mr. Jack Martin recalled that he usually invoked Socrates and rapped his head in his pacing. "He was talking to both Mr. Bertrand and Mr. Oswald, discussing diversionary tactics." When they questioned Russo's presence, Ferrie told them not to worry, "he's all right."

The "diversionary tactic" Ferrie described required

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that one man "would have to be the scapegoat" and fire the distracting shot or shots while one or more others got in "the good shot." Until the discussion got to the escape, only Ferrie spoke. Russo quoted Bertrand as insisting that, once the shots were fired, escape by plane, as Ferrie visualized, would be impossible. It would be a "shot heard around the world." Airports would be closed and capture easy.

At Bertrand's protest, Russo said, Oswald told him, "Shut up and leave him alone" because Ferrie was a pilot.

A "washed up" pilot to him, Bertrand replied.

Ferrie, however, recognized the wisdom of Bertrand's objection and evolved an alternate scheme. Russo's description of it is that the participants should "be in the public eye," that is, seen, "be around a lot of people" who could later testify to it. During this part of the discussion, according to Russo, "Leon" Oswald was silent.

Bertrand was the only one of the trio decently dressed. Ferrie wore baggy pants and Oswald "was dirty, as usual, and half shaven." He "wore a pullover shirt that was not a 'T-shirt." Bertrand wore "a maroon jacket." He "was the only one what I'd call decent."

Throughout his testimony and under cross-examination, Russo always described Oswald as dirty, bearded and untidy in appearance, unfriendly and unpleasant in manner. Once he called him a "beatnik." Another time he said, "I considered him a vagabond."

"The Oswald I knew," he testified, "was like a beatnik," always with "three or four days' growth of beard."

Under cross-examination Russo reemphasized this, saying, "I knew 'Leon' Oswald, who was whiskered and dirty and had rumpled hair." The only time he ever saw "Oswald" clean-shaven was for a few minutes "the day Oswald left New Orleans for Houston." The Com-

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mission decided that at about noon September 25, 1963, Oswald left New Orleans by bus for Mexico by way of Houston.

For immediate purposes, the cross-questioning of Russo was no benefit to Shaw and less than glorious for Lawyer Dymond. In an interview before Garrison's men spoke to him, Russo had said that the last time he saw "Oswald" was in October. On that occasion, according to him, Ferrie had said of the President, "We will get him and it won't be long." It was, he said, "in the middle of October." Oswald "was leaving Dave at that time."

Dymond wanted to know, "Do you still say it was in October that he said this?"

"Yes, sir," Russo repeated, "I'd say October; yes, sir."

"Are you aware it is a documented fact that Oswald left New Orleans September 25 and in fact never returned?"

Assistant District Attorney Charles Ward raised his voice in objection. "That has never been proven in this court," he protested.

Dymond turned to an associate while quoting the conclusions of the Commission. The Commission's volumes were at hand. He picked one up. Judge Bagert asked him as though in disbelief, "You're not going to introduce the Warren Report in this court?"

"I am," Dymond replied. "That's right."

"You must be kidding!" the judge exclaimed.

Dymond cited a state law that he claimed made this possible and added that it had been printed by "the U.S. Government Printing Office."

Judge Bagert smiled as he asked the next question, "Does that give it authenticity?"

Dymond said it did.

"You are wrong and you are overruled," Bagert retorted.

When Dymond persisted Judge Bagert held that the

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Report was "fraught with hearsay," "hearsay four of five times removed," and was inadmissible as evidence. The prosecution suggested Dymond note an "exception." He did.

This, said Carl J. Pellack, writing in the New York Post the next day, "marked the first time that a court in this country has held the Warren Report to be without legal foundation and unacceptable as a matter of fact."

Dymond had other exchanges with the judges. Braniff and Bagert had each interrupted the cross-examination to encourage Dymond to "get on with it." To one of these Dymond responded that he was trying to shake Russo's credibility.

"You have not contradicted him on a major point," Braniff told Dymond.

There were things Russo had said in interviews that he had not testified to and things he testified to that he had not mentioned on television. One of these is the "we are going to get Kennedy" statement by Ferrie. On TV he did not date the plotting at mid-September and he said he did not recognize Oswald from pictures.

Dymond played the taped interview in which Russo said he did not know Lee Harvey Oswald. This was recorded by WDSU-TV on February 24 the day before Russo spoke to Garrison's staff and three days before he went to New Orleans. Dymond demanded an explanation.

"I knew 'Leon' Oswald, who was whiskered, dirty, and had rumpled hair," Russo answered. "I did not know a Lee Harvey Oswald." While there was a strong resemblance and he had felt the man whose picture he had seen was familiar, "I couldn't be positive."

Questioned further, he said that, while Oswald's picture looked vaguely familiar to him, it was not "until they put whiskers on him" that he was certain Oswald was the man he had seen at Ferrie's apartment.

Dymond asked, "Who put the whiskers on him?"

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"One of the artists," Russo said. He pointed out a man seated with the prosecution. Garrison was not in court. One of his assistants, Jame L Alcock, rose. Saying, "Perhaps this will help the court," he handed up a picture.

Dymond had asked "What finally succeeded in making you sure that Lee Harvey Oswald and Ferrie's roommate were one and the same?"

All the Oswald pictures he had seen, Russo explained, were of a neat man. The artists took one of a disheveled Oswald. They added to it whiskers of assorted shapes and densities until they finally drew one that was "something between a beard and whiskers." Shown this, Russo had exclaimed "That's Ferrie's roommate!"

Assisted by this method, Russo testified, he is now "absolutely sure the man I knew as Leon Oswald is Lee Harvey Oswald." Until then, " 'Leon' Oswald had a different face to me."

Was "Layton Martens" Ferrie's roommate at the time Russo overheard the plotting, Dymond wanted to know.

"No, sir," Russo told him, "the roommate at Louisiana Avenue Parkway apartment was 'Leon' Oswald."

Thus the identification of one of Ferrie's "roommates" was placed in evidence.

In other ways Dymond's attempted defense of Shaw benefited others and helped establish a record that may not be helpful to his client.

In questioning Russo about the plotting he overheard after the mid-September party, Dymond asked, "Was it your understanding that these three men would actively participate in the assassination?"

To this Russo answered, "I didn't get that impression, no."

This accomplished two unintended purposes while defending Shaw against a charge that was not made

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and could not have been, that he had been an assassin. Shaw was in San Francisco on assassination day. But this entered into evidence Russo's belief that Oswald was not intended to be an assassin and laid a foundation for self-defense against the charge of accessory. It enabled Russo to testify that he did not at that time think a serious plot was intended, therefore, he did not report it and thus was not an accessory before the fact.

Another incident Russo testified to did not attract much attention but might have significance. He said that about "seven or eight months" after the party, he was having trouble with his car. He went to the service station on Veterans Highway that, he said, Ferrie owned or operated. He parked close to a white compact auto in which Bertrand was sitting. Ferrie came over to him for a perfunctory greeting and returned to the car and his conversation with Bertrand. If Russo is right about this, he placed it as approximately the time Liebeler and Jenner were taking depositions in New Orleans, an event about which, if conspirators of any kind, Ferrie and Bertrand might well have been concerned.

Russo's account of the party-night plotting might have been what the FBI asked Ferrie about or what he, knowing it had happened, could have volunteered when he was questioned at the time of the assassination. Either way, it is not unlike what the FBI knew about. From the files and evidence, it did not seek out Russo or any others to check Ferrie's alibi. It seemingly was satisfied that an acknowledged assertion that the President should have been shot could be explained as either a bad joke or a new kind of "colloquial expression." The unavailability of any indication that the FBI knew or cared to find out where or under what circumstances or to whom Ferrie made his "joke" makes it impossible to determine whether what Ferrie admitted is the same incident to which Russo testified. If it is the same incident, it confirms Russo. If it is not,

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the FBI has further discredited itself, for there then is another Ferrie threat against the President not investigated before the FBI gave him a "clean bill of health." If it is not, then there are others who can testify to Ferrie's threats and to whether they were "jokes" or "colloquial expressions." After how many repetitions was it still a "joke"?

After Russo's testimony was completed, Vernon Bundy, a 29-year-old reforming dope addict, took the stand. He had asked for confinement in the parish jail because he felt the oncoming of the narcotic urge of which he was trying to break himself. From the jail he had communicated with the authorities, who had no knowledge of Bundy's story until it was volunteered. During June or July 1963 ("these are my worst months," that is how he recalled the time), he had been near the lake-front intending to shoot a "fix" of two capsules of heroin into his vein when he saw two men he identified as Oswald and Shaw. When Oswald stuffed into his pocket what looked like a roll of bills Shaw gave him, he dropped some "Cuba" leaflets. In two respects Bundy's testimony paralleled Russo's. He described Oswald as a "junkie or beatnik type of guy, he was in pretty nasty shape, needed a shave," and he heard "Oswald" say he was having trouble with his wife. The reply Bundy attributed to Shaw is similar to what Russo said he had heard Ferrie make under the same conditions, not to worry about it, that he would "take care" of her.

The news and headline writers were not impressed with this testimony and were skeptical of the witnesses. The District Attorney seemingly was satisfied, for he presented no additional evidence. The three-judge panel was also satisfied, for on March 17, Shaw's 54th birthday, it rendered a unanimous verdict:

This court finds that sufficient evidence has been presented to establish probable cause that a crime has been committed. And further that sufficient evidence has been presented to justify bringing into play the

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further steps of the criminal process against the arrestee, Clay L. Shaw. The defendant is released on his present bond.

New York World Journal-Tribune reporter Leslie H. Whitten interviewed Judge Bagert. His March 20 story reflects the opinion of the judges:

"This wasn't a question of guilty or not guilty. It was a question of probable cause. I believe there is probable cause, period . . . Given what we got in there, I had no choice. Russo stood up. There were some minor discrepancies, but you tend to doubt, you have to doubt it, when there's a 100 percent story every time . . . Just think for one minute about the alternative, that is, if we cut him loose . . . with the defense depending on cross examination and not putting on a real case of its own, the nation and the world would have charged a fix."

The defense was "just grasping at straws."

Five days later Garrison's numerous and vocal opponents were further confounded. Everyone had expected his next step would be to file a bill of particulars against Shaw. This would make sufficient specification of the charges against him to permit preparation of an adequate defense and would eliminate the hazard that the grand jury would decline to indict. But on March 22 the grand jury did indict, charging Shaw with "willfully and unlawfully conspiring with David W. Ferrie and Lee Harvey Oswald to murder John F. Kennedy."

Garrison had a double victory. He won his legal point without revelation of the case he was developing. Russo was not one of the witnesses he had depended upon. They were still unidentified, their testimonies undisclosed. The return of the true bill by the grand jury obviated the need for filing a bill of particulars. Garrison's case was still largely secret except for FBI or other "counterintelligence" and "leaks."

For the time being, here the matter rests.

There are other and untested inferences and accusations of CIA involvement or entrapment in the assas -

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sination . In New York the socialist weekly, The National Guardian, in the issue dated March 18, quoted the Italian paper, Parse Sera, as saying Shaw had links with various right-wing groups and possibly the CIA. It also reported his membership on the board of directors of the Centro Mondiale Commerciale from 1961 until about the time of his retirement from the Trade Mart. On this board, Parse Sera said, Shaw was an associate of a relative of Hitler's financial wizard, Dr. Hjalmar Schacht , and a man now in Canada, once with the forerunner of the CIA. This man, according to French newspapers quoted by the Guardian's Rome correspondent, allegedly was a contributor to what is described as " neo -fascist" groups in France, Italy and elsewhere in Europe. The Italian paper charged that the Centro Mondiale Commerciale is a cover for channeling CIA funds into Italy. Thus, CIA connection was attributed to Shaw.

Quoting no sources, the Guardian said "Shaw reportedly played a part in arranging for Kennedy to speak at the Dallas Trade Mart on Nov. 22, 1963 the date of the assassination -- a fact which to a degree determined the fatal motorcade route from the Dallas airport."

Similar reports have reached me, before and after this one. However, selection of the Trade Mart for the luncheon did not require that the motorcade go under the windows of the Texas School Book Depository Building, from which the Commission, contrary to its own best evidence, claims Lee Harvey Oswald fired all the shots of the assassination. The qualifying language of the Guardian is appropriate because the final decision to hold the luncheon at the Trade Mart was made by President Kennedy's adviser, Kenneth O'Donnell (R31).

William Manchester attributes this determination to Texans close to Governor Connally. The Commission, characteristically, is evasive in ib Report. In its short-

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est chapter, entitled "The Assassination," two sections relate to thus. These take up but four pages in all and are largely a defense against already published allegations that the motorcade need not have gone under those windows, that alternatives were available. The first section, entitled "The Luncheon Site," is about three-quarters of a page long; the second, "The Motorcade Route," about three pages (R30ff). Neither is an answer to either the old or the new charges. It is true that the motorcade could have kept straight on Main Street, making an illegal right turn onto the Stemmons Freeway or going to the Industrial Boulevard before turning and by either route have gone directly to the Trade Mart without going under those windows.

On the other hand, the scene of the assassination, Dealey Plaza, is a small, compact area. From any part of it the motorcade was not a formidable target. Almost any "sniper's nest" afforded less difficulty than the very steep downward angle from that TSBD sixth-floor window, which had a large tree in full foliage in front of it.

The Commission would have us believe that the November 22 route is traditional for celebrities because it provides maximum public exposure.

Whether or not it stands the test of the courtroom, Russo's seemingly strange testimony coincides intriguingly with those suppressed discoveries that I brought to light in exposing the story of "The False Oswald" and those Cuban-refugee-connected men who are part of it. There are as yet undisclosed aspects of the bizarre adventure that, like what I have already unveiled in my previous books, spell "CIA" when the heat of revelation is applied to the invisible ink in which the government's agents wrote it.

Russo's details so closely dovetail with the activities, movements and descriptions of the characters in The False Oswald and they so snugly mesh that we must

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now integrate the stories of The False Oswald and Oswald in New Orleans.

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11. "PRESIDENT KENNEDY SHOULD

HAVE BEEN ASSASSINATED AFTER

THE BAY OF PIGS"

Mrs. Sylvia Odio's "Oswald" also was named "Leon," not Lee. He was as untidy as Russo's "Oswald," which the real Lee Harvey Oswald never was. That diligent pursuer of truth and knowledge and nothing else, Wesley J. Liebeler, did not ask Mrs. Odio about this. He did not ask whether or not "Leon" Oswald was bearded or how -- and he should have. It is not likely an oversight, an accident, because before he took her deposition she had already complained that the FBI failed to ask her the right questions. This was one of the avoided questions.

It is not accidental that the FBI ignored "Leon's" beard, as we shall now see. Part of the FBI's campaign against Mrs. Odio and her evidence hinged on this; in effect, J. Edgar Hoover bobby-trapped the Commission by not, from the record, correcting information the FBI called erroneous in time for correction in the Report.

Without ever acknowledging the existence of The False Oswald, the Report identifies him as "William Seymour of Arizona." His then address was 3836 West Lewis, Phoenix, and it was known before the Report appeared. The Report was interested in avoiding Seymour and his two associates, as was the FBI. Seymour was then living with his sister, Mrs. Ella Dupuis. He was single. An effort to reach him by telephone, through his sister, after exposure in Whitewash 11 reveals the number is now unlisted. Seymour's desire for privacy is not remarkable, nor is that of his relatives.

What is remarkable is the parallel between Sylvia Odio's "Leon" Oswald and Perry Russo's. What is equally remarkable is the suppressed FBI reports that

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show how possible it was for the characters in The False Oswald to have been in New Orleans at the times specified by Russo, September and October 1963. Had the FBI not so diligently avoided getting details, it might be that additional dates also are consistent. The diligence of the FBI was in avoiding information, not gathering it.

These men were based in Florida, where they trained Cubans for an invasion of Cuba, in violation of law and declared national policy. They also were engaged in gun-running, equally illegal. They traveled from Florida to the West Coast and back, stopping in Dallas and New Orleans. The men who visited Sylvia Odio in late September 1963, her best recollection is about September 26, went there from New Orleans. This is entirely consistent with Russo's testimony that he heard "Leon" Oswald, Shaw and Ferrie discussing the murder of President Kennedy in mid-September 1963, in New Orleans.

It is also in accord with the testimony of men associated with Orest Pena's Habana Bar and Lounge, at 117 Decatur Street. New Orleans. I have a private, unsolicited letter from Pena, dated March 26,1967. He has read Whitewash where the story and career of The False Oswald were first exposed. He reveals pertinent knowledge Liebeler did not seek of him when taking his deposition, too late and too brief, on July 21,1964 (11H346-64). Of what I wrote in Whitewash he said, "It is true."

It further is in line with the testimony of Dean Andrews, quoted in an earlier chapter, about the men he saw with Oswald, not "Cubanos" or "Latinos" but "Mexicanos,"

It is necessary, therefore, to begin with a survey, not of what Liebeler allowed to get into the testimony, but of what the Commission knew and bad -- what Liebeler knew and had or should have.

Mrs. Odio's information was immediately in the

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possession of all the government agencies involved. They inquired into it enough-to know they could not destroy her and her evidence and to satisfy themselves that they did not want it. Her story, her fears, her instincts and her knowledge never changed. She was a solid witness, despite her apprehensions, for she understood that what she was saying was unwanted and unwelcome, but she stood fast.

Liebeler did not call her as a witness until July 22, after he had interrogated all the New Orleans witnesses -- Andrews, Pena, Pena's brother and employee, Ruperto (11H364-7), and his bartender, Evaristo Rodriguez (11H339-46) -- just the day before. So, all that they said and all that he avoided asking them about was fresh in his mind. It is important to note also that, although all of this information, all of these leads and names, was immediately known to the Commission, the FBI and the Secret Service, nothing was done with it once its unassailable character was established. Within less than a month, the viability of the evidence had been established. It was thereafter shunned until less than a month before the Report was issued.

These three men who visited Mrs. Odio were armed with impeccable credentials from the anti-Castro Cubans and with the most intimate and accurate details of the lives, suffering, property and activities of her parents, then prisoners on the Isle of Pines (her mother was subsequently released). They introduced the American as "Leon" Oswald and themselves by their "war" names, "Leopoldo" and "Angelo," Mrs. Odio thinks she recalls. Her sister Annie, dressed in a housecoat, answered the knock at the door of Apartment A, 1080 Magellan Circle, Crestview Apartments, Dallas, Texas, and because of her attire called Sylvia. She, in turn, feared inviting the men in and spoke to them through the narrow opening of the door permitted by the night chain.

They worried Mrs. Odio right away. "I started

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getting a little upset with the conversation" (11H372).

Mrs. Odio was so upset that when she heard of the assassination, before she knew who had been accused, she fainted and was taken to the hospital by ambulance. During her testimony about this, apparently to stay on the safe side and say nothing not wanted of her, she asked Liebeler, "Can I say something off the record?"

"Yes," he told her.

The record then reads, "(Witness talks off the record)."

Afterward, Liebeler said, "At this point, let's go back on the record. You indicated that you thought perhaps the three men who had come to your apartment had something to do with the assassination?"

She agreed with his interpretation, saying, "Yes." (11H382)

When Annie saw her and asked, "Sylvia, have you seen the man?" the sisters immediately agreed it was "Leon," as each had decided independently.

These men revealed enough to her for Mrs. Odio to associate them with the assassination. She referred to their threats in the most pointed language, at two particular places in her testimony, and often before it.

The others said of "the American" that he was "loco" and "would be the kind of man that could do anything, like getting underground in Cuba, like killing Castro. He (meaning "Leopoldo") repeated several times he (meaning "Leon") was an expert shotman" (11H377).

"Leopoldo" asked her, "What do you think of the American?" She replied, she testified, "I don't think anything."

Then "Leopoldo" said, "You know, our idea is to introduce him to the underground in Cuba, because he is great, he is kind of nuts. He had told us we don't have any guts . . . because President Kennedy should have been assassinated after the Bay of Pigs, and some

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Cubans should have done that, because he was the one that was holding the freedom of Cuba . . . And he said, 'It is so easy to do it.' He has told us . . . " (11H372).

At the end of February and the beginning of March 1967, right after the Garrison investigation was publicized, there was a backfire of propaganda designed to offset what by then was the obvious presumption, that Garrison agreed with the Whitewash books and was investigating exile-Cuban involvement in the assassination.

The old and by this time sway-backed workhorse of "Communism" and of Oswald's non-existent Castro connections was hailed in from pasture.

The Los Angeles Herald Examiner of February 23, in an obvious propaganda answer to the questions raised by Ferrie's death, which had all those partial to the Cuban exile groups in deep apprehension, spread this very big and very black headline across the top of the front page: "NEW OSWALD TAPES BARED IN L.A." - The story under it, rivaling the headline in irresponsibility and falsehood, begins, "A top secret tape recording in Lee Harvey Oswald's own words and revealing his Communist ties with Cuba two months before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was disclosed to the public here today." It turns out that the "revelation" was by Edward Scannell Butler, executive vice president of the self-styled "Information Council of the Americas," who, with his organization, could stand a little of the investigation that was never made. Connections with the more extreme of the right-wing Cuban groups that themselves are linked to the story of Oswald in New Orleans might be a beginning point. Next might come official connections. We shall have more on this.

But this sensational headline, a dying and futile effort to make it seem that there was some insidious "Communist" hand behind the assassination, was false. There was nothing new, no information, no intelli -

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gence , only the propaganda of the Cuban exiles, as false and self-serving in 1967 as in 1963, and as contrived. The paper made a big deal of the giving of this tape to Garrison, as though that had meaning. Anyone who wants to give him anything need only put it in the mail. Some find a receptive press, as did Scannell .

This was but one of the well coordinated propaganda moves. The possibility of spontaneity is remote.

Stanley Ross, editor of the New York Spanish-language paper El Tiempo reached back under the rocks of the past and came up with a story with which he had personally caused the FBI some extra work at the time of the assassination. He was able to attract considerable attention and extensive radio and TV time with it, despite its previous discrediting by the FBI (Exhibit 1444, 22H860 -7). He had come to official attention following his February 6, 1964, appearance on the Barry Gray Show on WMCA in New York. At that time he had a paranoid-embroidered fantasy about Castro having sent a number of "assassination teams" to the United States to kill President Kennedy. The Commission printed the disproof of this and another fabrication, also, unfortunately, launched on Gray's show, that Oswald had been trained in the Soviet Union to assassinate the President. This story is still dear to the radical right, which retails it with its accustomed vigor and diligence but by now, in every contact I have had with it, has long since forgotten the source.

Ross knew a good thing when he had it, and Gray had a short memory. Gray helped Ross render the same disservice in early March 1967, in the midst of Ross's renewed campaign over the officially certified and long confined paranoid-schizophrenic Pascual Enrique Ruedolo Gongora, then in Creedmoor State Hospital, New York, having been transferred from Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital as "in need of further psychiatric

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treatment" and because "Creedmoor State Hospital had more propitious facilities for such treatment."

Gongora is still restrained. With a young lawyer to file a habeas corpus suit, Ross had the "peg" on which to hang his charge that the government was engaged in a conspiracy to keep Gongora locked up because of its "pro-Castro" philosophy. None of the seemingly responsible media that gave Ross a generous forum ever stopped to think about the lack of logic in his entire tale. They had only his representation of "fact."

On March 3, Radio Station WINS in New York started a sensational variant. The World Journal-Tribune of the next day reported, without regard for Garrison's amply quoted contrary beliefs, that "WINS last night broadcast a report that District Attorney Garrison 'believes President Kennedy was murdered by a group of plotters directed from Cuba.' WINS broadcast a copyrighted story filed by newsman Doug Edelson, who said he got his information from a 'responsible, unimpeachable source who had access to Garrison's files.' The story said Garrison's files indicated that Cuban Dictator Fidel Castro put out his 'execution order' on Kennedy after the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion. Four Cuban assassination teams were organized . . ."

Back to Gongora, back to Ross. These inventions are always attributed to "responsible" sources. Why not go all the way? "Responsible and unimpeachable." If Garrison had the Commission's 26 volumes, which he did, this "information" -- discredited, disproved by the Commission and the FBI, a tale dreamed up by a sick man -- was certainly in his files!

UPI spread a larger version of the same ravings throughout the world. That version added the plan of the CIA to have Castro murdered. Thus, the "four-man assassination teams" were to kill Kennedy in "retaliation," almost three years later.

The same day Drew Pearson's column dignified it

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further and further reduced what reputation the CIA retained after the fiasco of the corrupted foundations then very much in the news by saying, "Top officials, queried by this column, agreed that a plot to assassinate Cuban dictator Fidel Castro was 'considered' at the highest levels of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time Bobby (Kennedy) was riding herd on the agency." The "retaliation" story "persists," according to the column, because "people in a position to know" continue to "whisper" it.

Some "whisper," with a popular column, a worldwide news syndicate, and limitless radio And TV retailing!

Note the added evil twist here, however, inferentially blaming the late President's brother for "assassination by 'retaliation.' "

Four days later Pearson had an updated version. Quoting Senator Russell Long as his authority, he reported that Oswald "trained with Castro revolutionaries in Minsk," another source-less favorite of the radical right, which recalls only that its source, too, is "responsible and dependable."

Irresponsible and inaccurate writing finds a ready market, particularly on this subject. Ross's meets the requirements. He found a "newspaper" that felt the national interest impelled it to take lurid sex off its front page just this one time, without disappointing its regular clients. The National Enquirer is suitably equipped to handle propaganda and to profit from it. Its issue dated April 16, 1967, in accord with its high standard of fidelity, was available two weeks earlier. It spread Ross's careful culling all over the front page under a headline that properly reflects the paper's fastidious attitude toward fact and reality. "Startling New Evidence" is the boldest headline. Under it there are three equally prominent displays of type, the lower two of which in fact bear no relationship to the first. The top one reads, "Cuban Agent Secretly Held by

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U.S. Told of Plot 8 Days Before JFK Assassination."

This statement that a "Cuban agent" predicted the Kennedy assassination is accurate insofar as Gongora's national origin is concerned. In the sensationalized distortion that follows, we find no reference to the fact that Gongora is and for years has been insane. Every word is a cliff hanger, presented as though the man understood and spoke of reality. To this Ross adds the accusation that the United States Government, which cannot incarcerate a man without due process by criminal proceedings, has corrupted New York's doctors and has prevailed upon them to lock this poor and much abused, innocent and, from Ross's prose, entirely sane and heroic man, away from the society that will be liberated by his messianic preachings .

Never has a "self-confessed" criminal, an "assassin," been more exalted. Ross involves Garrison by the simple expedient of an unsolicited telephone call. And his own daring-do in the Great Tradition of muckrakers, National Enquirer style, is likewise memorialized. Ross explains that he learned of Gongora's whereabouts through a "tip." And had it not been for the zeal and initiative of El Tiempo the whereabouts of that "Cuban Agent Secretly Held By U.S. for 3 Years," the modest inside headline, would still be entirely unknown. Real modest, that is Ross, his self-effacement exceeded only by his dedication to truth and reality.

Not that Gongora had disappeared, or that his whereabouts were secret. Ross's personal contribution to the obfuscation of the assassination Guaranteed there would be a public record of Gongora's whereabouts. He is and was exactly where Exhibit 1444 said he was, in Creedmoor State Hospital, still under and still in need of psychiatric care.

The backfire did not catch. A large number of Americans were misled and disturbed. Some will forever carry seriously wrong beliefs and not recall their

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