fugitive Novel be guaranteed immunity from not only prosecution but even from questioning about his role. Sandra Moffett McMaines , an unpleasant secret of whose past I also preserve, moved from Nebraska into Iowa, a state which does not honor the interstate criminal-witness compact. Is it merely accidental that in his flight Novel found sanctuary in Ohio and Sandra in Iowa, or is the long federal hand reaching out and moving Garrison's witnesses like pawns in an intelligence chess game?

The first sentence of this news story asks a similar question and the second answers it:

Do the long tentacles of the Central Intelligence Agency reach deep into Dist . Atty. Jim Garrison's Kennedy death plot investigation?

There is mounting evidence they do, and at least one Garrison probe figure intends to use CIA connections as part of his defense.

"Still others linked to the Garrison investigation," the story continues, "have been named as acting for the super secret espionage organization -- as informers, as couriers and munitions carriers."

Novel is quoted as having "told a number of friends and intimates he was a CIA operative and will use this role to battle Garrison's charges." Thus, from his own earlier quoted claims it can be inferred, if Novel did not die, that the CIA at one point had penetrated Garrison's office!

What at least one of the lawyers against Garrison has done without seeming to realize it is to acknowledge that the CIA is paying his fee. Novel, meanwhile, is quoted as claiming an even longer CIA association, going back to pre-Bay of Pigs days when he operated the Evergreen Advertising Agency as a CIA front. He claims to have spread cryptographic messages through coded radio commercials "used on 800 stations" in the United States and abroad. In late 1960 alone he placed $72,000 worth of such radio time.

His CIA contact told him to join the group making

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the munitions heist, and the key to the bunker was provided. Novel used his own car, a Lincoln, to supplement the capacity of the laundry truck that was used. Back in New Orleans, the ordnance was stored in Ferrie 's home and Novel's and Banister's offices. In addition to explosives, there were land mines, rifle grenades and a kind of small missile.

The New Orleans reporters are working on another angle of this operation that involves the intelligence organization of a large European power. I preserve their confidence and will say nothing about it other than that its motivation was fascist.

When the entire story is disclosed, we may find one intelligence agency burglarizing another and more than one munitions theft.

Typically, Novel named Arcacha among his still-living associates and for the first time Arcacha had nothing to say, still secure in Dallas where public officials, having sheltered him from the first, were still not assisting Louisiana authorities.

If only nationally unknown reporters like those cited above could have covered the proceedings of the Warren Commission instead of the famous men so willing to be corrupted by the bribery of favored "leaks"! How different and more honorable our subsequent history might have been!

And so, after finishing my third book on this most unpleasant subject in which an American writer can immerse himself, I can for the first time report that, if belatedly, our society is beginning to function for the first time since the murder of the accused assassin. For the first time we who wrote books and articles from our own researches, investigations and analyses are joined by reporters given voice by their newspapers and radio and TV stations.

More important, the courts and the law are again working, through indefatigable, fearless and, I am confident, incorruptible New Orleans Parish District

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Attorney Jim Garrison and his staff of lawyers and investigators who work with the selflessness and dedication I find in him, without regard to hours or personal risk.

What we have lacked from the split-second of the first assassination bullet in Dallas on November 22, 1963, we may now get a judicial determination of fact by jury, in a proceeding conducted in conformity with American law. Garrison's path has not the roses of the Commission's; it has only the thorns. As he faces a critical press, which the Commission never did, so also he must live and work in conformity with the law and its regulations. Unlike the Commission, he cannot adapt these essential controls to meet his needs as he conceives them. He cannot improvise rules for each special occasion, each succeeding new problem and emergency. As he is the representative of the law, so is he its servant, and within its strictures and protections of the accused he will be inhibited.

He will confront the other great lack of the federal inquiry, legal adversaries who are competent, imaginative and better armed than he, for our law is designed to protect the innocent and was fashioned with the concept that it is better for a hundred guilty to go free than for a single innocent to be wrongly convicted.

Shaw, Arcacha, Novel and all the others are presumed innocent by a law fashioned to make the establishment of innocence possible and that demands not that their lawyers prove them innocent but that Garrison prove them guilty, and beyond reasonable doubt. Garrison carries a burden no federal authority ever assumed. The legal and statistical odds are as stacked against him and his success, as is the might and influence of the federal power that is the invisible defendant in the New Orleans courtroom.

Even if he fails, as I believe he will not, he will have succeeded, for he has already taken the first official step down the road that can lead to the recapture of

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our national honor and the integrity of our institutions. His victory in court would be more than a conviction of the guilty, more than the indictment of the federal government for what it did and did not do when and after the President was murdered.

We do not have the right to demand or expect infallibility of public servants, from the President down. Our courts presuppose fallibility and error, and provide the mechanism for their correction. As Jesus could trust Judas, so also can American Presidents and attorney generals and the myriads of bureau chiefs and more common mortals under them err.

When our children do wrong, as parents we must explain to them wherein they are wrong and why and charge them with thereafter doing right. If we did not get this from the mature men of the federal government when John Kennedy was murdered and they merely pretended an investigation of the murder, and if since then they avoided spontaneous self-examination of their own failings and transgressions, we can now, at last, take comfort that, even if unwillingly, government may have to face its shameful record; but with this ordeal, it will have the chance to recapture its honor and the respect that is not, as it seems to insist, its automatic due.

Through the long days of national shame and dishonor, the days of abdication and irresponsibility, when all those in whom our national integrity is vested were silent or worse, there were fewer than a corporal's guard of us seeking recapture of that integrity, so lonely and abused that only we who lived through it can expect each other to understand and feel its pain. The day can now be seen when, willingly or unwillingly, the government may say, "We did wrong. To the degree that we now can, we will rectify that wrong."

Then it will have earned the respect of men, here and abroad, and it will have begun to face the crisis in credibility that it made for itself. Then, perhaps more

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than would otherwise be possible, it will be worthy of respect and belief.

An the author of the first book on this most disagreeable subject and of the most extensive writing on it in scope and volume, I rejoice in the prospect.

In this. my third completed book on it, I may for the first time see the shadow of a happy ending.