The CIA Tried To Stop Jim Garrison

[Anthony Frank]

When Garrison’s investigation was first publicized on February 17, 1967, the focus of the investigation was a New Orleans pilot named David Ferrie, and on the following day, “District Attorney Jim Garrison issued a statement predicting ‘arrests and convictions’ in New Orleans.”

And while Garrison was predicting arrests and convictions on February 18, David Ferrie, the target of the investigation, “acknowledged that he was under investigation but called the inquiry ‘a big joke.’”

David Ferrie was found dead in his apartment at 11:40 a.m. on February 22, 1967. The coroner, Dr. Nicholas Chetta, said he had died on the evening of February 21, four days after Garrison’s investigation became public.

The CIA’s solution to the revelation of an anti-Castro Cuban connection was to kill Ferrie, but he was not the only one they killed in the effort to block the Garrison investigation.

An October 1967 letter from the CIA to the Justice Department’s “Internal Security Division” states that a Cuban named Eladio Del Valle, who had been described as a “valuable witness” by Jim Garrison, had been “murdered in Miami on February 22, 1967,” the same day that the body of Ferrie was discovered.

Del Valle “had been involved in anti-Cuban operations.”

With David Ferrie and Eladio Del Valle both dead, which would be the original target of Garrison’s investigation and a “valuable witness” in the investigation, Garrison focused his prosecutorial efforts on Clay Shaw in order to make his case for a conspiracy.

The CIA told the Justice Department’s Internal Security Division that Garrison’s prosecution of Shaw was exposing “people who have been involved in Cuban operations.”

The FBI sent a letter to Presidential aide Marvin Watson on February 20, 1967, informing him of Garrison’s investigation, and according to the Church Committee, on April 4, 1967, Marvin Watson told the Assistant Director of the FBI that President Johnson “is convinced there was a plot in connection with Kennedy’s assassination.”

The CIA gathered intelligence on Garrison and on all aspects of his investigation. An abundance of CIA memorandums and communications reveal top-level CIA officials focused on the Garrison investigation.

Two months after Del Valle and Ferrie were murdered, an April 26 CIA memo stated that there are “loads of possible concern to CIA because of what may be an intent to involve the Agency directly or indirectly.”

A June 1967 CIA memo, written shortly after the CIA realized they had a “problem,” states, “The activity of District Attorney James C. Garrison of New Orleans shows no signs of abating . . . . We shall continue to study all available information about the New Orleans investigation.”

In September 1967, the CIA documented, “Since the Garrison investigation was first publicized in February 1967, we have kept book on all persons in the case: 139 to date.”

The CIA also established the “Garrison Group,” consisting of some of the senior-most officials in the CIA; the Executive Director, the Deputy Director for Plans, the Deputy Director of Support, the CIA General Counsel, the CIA Inspector General, and Raymond G. Rocca, the Chief of Research and Analysis in the CIA’s Counterintelligence Division.

A CIA memo states that at the first meeting of the Garrison Group on September 20, 1967, “Rocca felt that Garrison would, indeed, obtain a conviction of Shaw for conspiring to assassinate President Kennedy.”

The memo also quotes the CIA Executive Director as having said, “The possibility of Agency action should be examined from the timing of what can be done before the trial, and what might be feasible during and after the trial.”

The CIA also engaged in a world-wide propaganda campaign to discredit Garrison.

In July 1968, the CIA sent a dispatch to all CIA stations and bases around the world, and it contained a nineteen-page article critical of Garrison and his investigation. The dispatch states, “You may use the article to brief interested contacts, especially government and other political leaders.” It also states that the article should be used to demonstrate “that there is no hard evidence of any such conspiracy.”

The CIA had previously issued a “Propaganda Notes” Bulletin when the Warren Report came out in September 1964, and copies of the Warren Report were sent to CIA “field stations” so that “covert assets”  in the United States and around the world could “explain the tragedy” of President Kennedy’s assassination. The CIA also issued “Countering Criticism of the Warren Report” in January 1967.

And now, in 1968, the CIA was engaged in a worldwide effort to disparage a New Orleans District Attorney and his investigation.

Jim Garrison did not know that anti-Castro Cubans were patsies, and the Warren Commission could not acknowledge the CIA’s information alleging that anti-Castro Cubans were the assassins because of the cover-up mentality of the Warren Commission, a cover-up mentality that was firmly entrenched when they were given a “no conspiracy” mandate in order to prevent a “nuclear war.”

The CIA, of course, did not want it known that they pointed the finger of guilt at anti-Castro Cubans, but Garrison followed the Cuban connection right up to the CIA’s doorstep and then publicized what he found out.

Unlike Chief Justice Earl Warren, Garrison did not have a cover-up mentality drilled into him. He did not get instructions from the President of the United States stating that unless Lee Harvey Oswald is pegged as the lone assassin, it “might even get us into a war; a nuclear war.”

Besides eliminating anti-Castroites David Ferrie and Eladio Del Valle when Garrison’s investigation became public in 1967, and besides a world-wide propaganda campaign to discredit Garrison’s high-profile claim that Cuban exiles killed President Kennedy, the CIA continued to eliminate Cuban exiles to keep them from talking.

Five Cuban exile leaders were killed after Congress set up the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1976.

On January 14, 1977, the Tampa Tribune reported that they had been “assassinated” in Miami “in the last few months,” including one who was “gunned down as he left his front door last week.” It also reported that a total of seven Cuban exile leaders were “assassinated in Miami in the past three years.”

In Katzenbach’s memo to the White House on November 25 as he pushed to establish a Presidential Commission, he not only said that the Commission should establish “some basis for rebutting the thought that this was a Communist conspiracy,” but also that the Commission needed to rebut the idea that it was “a right-wing conspiracy to blame it on the Communists.”

When the Warren Commission was formed, covering up the CIA’s information that anti-Castro Cubans killed President Kennedy was just as important as covering up the CIA’s initial information implicating Castro in the assassination.

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[Anthony Frank]

An FBI report on their investigation of Ferrie back in 1963 states that when they interviewed him on November 25, 1963, Ferrie stated that he had at one time been “associated with the Cuban Revolutionary Front,” which, according to Ferrie, “was definitely an anti-Castro organization . . . . All persons connected with the organization were violently anti-Castro.”

Two days after Ferrie was killed in February 1967, the New York Times stated: “Housewives who lived near Mr. Ferrie at the time of the assassination told newsmen he had a strong interest in Cuba, and acquaintances reported him to be militantly anti-Castro . . . . According to a friend, Mr. Ferrie was ‘a rabid anti-Castroite.’”

On July 10, 1967, a CIA officer wrote that one of Jim Garrison’s investigators had gone to the National Archives and obtained “the list of CIA classified documents made available to the Warren Commission.”

The CIA officer met with Dr. Robert Bahmer, Archivist of the United States, and he informed Dr. Bahmer that a New Orleans newspaper had published “the list of CIA classified documents.”

The CIA officer also wrote, “Dr. Bahmer said that the list never should have been shown to Garrison’s investigator or any other researcher in its present form,” adding that the CIA “became aware of the problem late in May and took steps to correct it.”

Another CIA memorandum stated there was an “original unexpurgated list of all Warren Commission material held by the National Archives,” and “a new list without CIA titles was prepared by Archives at our request.”

The July 10 memorandum quotes Dr. Bahmer as saying that even though the original list of classified CIA documents would “no longer” be available, “It was like closing the barn door after the horse escaped.”

In May 1967, Jim Garrison directly accused the CIA of complicity in President Kennedy’s assassination, which is when the CIA “became aware” of their “problem.”

The New York Times reported on May 22, 1967: “District Attorney Jim Garrison says that Lee Harvey Oswald did not kill President Kennedy and the Central Intelligence Agency knows who did. ‘Purely and simply, it’s a case of former employees of the CIA, a large number of them Cubans, having a venomous reaction from the 1961 Bay of Pigs episode. Certain individuals with a fusion of interests in regaining Cuba assassinated the President,’ Mr. Garrison says.”

Garrison said the CIA knew “the name of every man involved and the name of the individuals who pulled the triggers.” He also said that it would take “‘only 60 minutes for the CIA to give us the name of every last Cuban involved in this and that’s how close we have been to the end for some time, but we are blocked by this glass wall of this totalitarian, powerful agency which is worried about its power.’ He repeatedly accused the agency of blocking and attempting to block his investigation, begun last fall.”

The CIA was obviously the source of information that anti-Castro Cubans killed President Kennedy. KGB officers inside the CIA clearly silenced Ferrie to cover their tracks, just like they silenced George H. W. Bush’s old friend, George DeMohrenschildt, but Garrison was undeterred.

In an interview with Larry King on March 16, 1968, Jim Garrison stated, “John Kennedy was killed by employees of the Central Intelligence Agency . . . . This is the group that killed Kennedy . . . . Most individuals shooting were Cubans” under CIA “supervision.”

“We have found the involvement, systematically, of Central Intelligence Agency men servicing the assassination, convoying Oswald, setting it up,” and “participating actively.”

What Garrison did not know was that the CIA, more specifically KGB officers inside the CIA, “systematically” set it up so that anti-Castro Cubans would ultimately take the fall for assassinating President Kennedy.

The Cuban exile connection that Garrison was exposing was instantaneously connected to President Kennedy’s assassination. Anti-Castroite David Ferrie came under investigation “by local and Federal authorities only hours after the assassination.”

The FBI report on their investigation of Ferrie in 1963 states that according to a witness, Ferrie had once said, “The President should be killed,” and Ferrie had “outlined plans to this effect.”

“Secret Service records” show that Ferrie told the FBI shortly after the assassination that he was “‘positive’ he was in New Orleans” when President Kennedy was assassinated.

“Three days after the assassination, when they received reports that Mr. Ferrie had made a quick trip to Texas immediately after the Presidential murder, Mr. Garrison’s staff arrested him for questioning, but Federal interest in Mr. Ferrie waned, according to one investigative source, when the FBI determined that Mr. Ferrie had gone to Houston rather than Dallas.”

On the day that anti-Castroite David Ferrie was found dead in February 1967, Jim Garrison stated: “Evidence developed by our office had long since confirmed that he was involved in events culminating in the assassination of President Kennedy. Although my office has been investigating Mr. Ferrie intensively for months, we have not mentioned his name publicly up to this point . . . . In a meeting in my house this morning, we had reached a decision to arrest him early next week. Apparently, we waited too long.”

Ferrie, who was targeted by the FBI and the Secret Service after the assassination, was definitely “involved in events culminating in the assassination of President Kennedy,” but those “events” were orchestrated by KGB officers inside the CIA in order to pin the assassination on anti-Castro Cubans.

The KGB officers’ foresight dictated that they would need someone on whom they could ultimately pin the assassination. Soviet KGB officers inside the CIA were more than happy to orchestrate a grand production blaming anti-Castro Cubans for assassinating President Kennedy.

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