Richard Billings' New Orleans Journal

 

May 18, 1967 -- Recap of notes of week prior, trip to Chicago & NO up to present.

The trip to Chicago was to talk to Albert Jenner, the senior staff Warren Commission Counsel, who handled the New Orleans investigation. We gave Mr. Jenner a list of questions that are taken from the Garrison case and he is studying them, and next week, about May 21st, we will return to Mr. Jenner and continue that interview.

The following day, that was Wednesday, May 10th, I went to New Orleans. I arrived there in the afternoon. The amazing thing about this case is the great difference of interest, the total change, the encounter when you arrive in New Orleans and find two main stories on Page One of the afternoon newspaper about Garrison and his investigation, and every local news broadcast is leading off with reports from the courthouse and Garrison making his statements. The story this day, and the continuing trend of the investigation, seems to be Garrison's fight against what he now calls the "new" or "second" conspiracy, that is, in his words, the conspiracy by the federal government to counter his investigation. Garrison is convinced that the CIA and the FBI had a role in the assassination of President Kennedy. It is a little unclear as to whether or not he insists or feels that this role was an active role; one would think not. It is simply to say Garrison feels the CIA had set up an apparatus for an assassination, probably the assassination of Fidel Castro, that turned at some point, very likely without the knowledge of the Agency headquarters, certainly, but with the implementation of certain people who had worked or maybe or even still work for the CIA, and it then became a plot to -- having been frustrated from the Castro assassination -- it then became a plot to kill President Kennedy. Garrison says that the federal government knows this, that people in the Agency, and perhaps in the FBI too, know that this was the case, knew it in 1963, and that there has been a whitewash ever since. So at this point in his investigation, at this very critical time, when he should be nailing down evidence to present to a jury against the one man he has named as a conspirator, that being Clay Shaw, Garrison is plunging on ahead, taking on the entire federal establishment. This, we submit, is highly dangerous. It is obfuscating important points of the investigation, these points being, was Shaw, or Ferrie, or anyone else involved in a conspiracy to kill the President.

The issue at hand, as reported in the papers, has to do with this federal conspiracy that Garrison claims happened. Garrison makes these points: he says the CIA is paying lawyers who are representing people who are fugitives from the investigation, namely, Gordon Novel; Garrison claims his New Orleans lawyer, Novel's New Orleans lawyer, a man named Plotkin, has admitted to a reporter for the New Orleans States-Item that he is being paid by the CIA. Garrison claims that this would hold true, although he has no proof of it . . . but he asks where does Novel get the money to pay people like Plotkin and Jerry Weiner. Jerry Weiner is Novel's lawyer in Columbus, Ohio. Garrison is convinced that the same is true for Sandra Moffett's lawyer in Des Moines, Iowa (name coming), and perhaps true also for legal counsel to Sergio Arcacha. Now, this is his proof, and he is probably -- probably -- correct in his assumption that the federal government is trying to stave off his onslaught. We might submit here, though, the opinion that even though the federal government had no knowledge of the conspiracy, it would seem likely and reasonable that they would attempt to stave off attacks such as Garrison has been mounting even before he named the federal government as a conspiratorial element. The point here is that, yes, we agree the government is putting up a defense, and Garrison is giving them every reason to put up a defense by attacking them as having knowledge of a conspiracy to kill the President.

So, what Garrison is doing, then, is going before his Grand Jury and making all sorts of demands via subpoena to the federal government. He has subpoenaed CIA Director Richard Helms, he has demanded that the CIA produce the -- what Garrison says is the real photograph of Oswald coming out of the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City, he has subpoenaed two FBI agents, Warren de Brueys and Regis Kennedy in New Orleans -- he has subpoenaed them to answer questions before the Grand Jury -- and he has made his statements to the press about the second conspiracy, and furthermore, he is leaking stories to the States-Item that impugn the federal government. So, it is an all-out attack on this monstrous foe that Garrison feels the federal government must be.

The other Garrison hang-up at the moment is his only investigative research that seems to be going out at the present, and it's that damn code that he is convinced Oswald used in that notebook. Now remember, Oswald wrote the number 19106 with two rather cryptic letters preceding the number, and when Garrison found in Shaw book the name Lee Odom, PO Box #19106, Dallas, Texas -- he thought (we think, reasonably) that there was some significance. But, now, instead of trying to locate Post Office Box 19106 or Mr. Lee Odom, Garrison proceeds to decode these numbers, and, by his intricate method described heretofore he determines and convinces himself (and, may we say, no one else) that 19106 with those cryptic preceding letters is Jack Ruby's unlisted telephone number. Now, this isn't bad enough that he convinces himself -- he then proceeds, and as we were departing last Thursday, he had intended to do this, and indeed he did, the following day submit to the Grand Jury his decoded answer to that number. His presentation to the Grand Jury was that 19106, preceded by these cryptic letters, was indeed, or in fact, Jack Ruby's phone number.

To jump ahead a little bit, that story did get to the papers, and indeed it was given some play in New Orleans and, as one might expect, this week, just a couple of days ago -- that would have been probably on Tuesday, May 16th -- Mr. Lee Odom of Irving, Texas, it turns out, a rodeo and bullfight promoter, turns up, and in November of 1966 he met with Mr. Clay Shaw in the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans; he'd come to New Orleans with the purpose of trying to promote a bullfight there, and doesn't this make Garrison look silly.

Okay, getting back to notes -- we will recap briefly what the essence of our trip to New Orleans produced. First of all, we had dinner Wednesday night (we meaning Acoca and myself), had dinner with Garrison and his new entourage. Now that includes any critic of the Warren Commission who shares this mutual conviction that Lee Harvey Oswald by no means assassinated the President all by himself. So, present at this dinner were Mark Lane, Ray Marcus, who is an independent sleuth, author of a tract on the famous bullet -- bullet 399 -- and also there was comedian Mort Sahl. Sahl seems a good friend of Lane's, has become an avid supporter and stimulator of the New Orleans District Attorney. Now, the dinner produced very little in terms of progress in the investigation, which is all right, I suppose, because there seems to be very little progress; Alcock and Sciambra, two assistant DAs, were there as more or less part of the audience while Mort Sahl and Mark Lane and Marcus did their little act for Garrison. One can't help getting a little bit disgusted by this performance, which goes back into all the old negativisms -- here we go, it isn't a matter of proving that this or that took p1ace; it is still the same old game of disproving what the Warren Commission has put on the record. I submit that we've been through this, been along this road many times before, and that Garrison has little purpose in his constant conditioning amongst the critics.

Lane did produce one bit of information, which we will follow up; he produced a letter from Arthur A. Cohen of Holt, Rinehart & Winston, his publisher. Mr. Cohen said that if we checked Shaw's record at Harvard, we would come up with the name Bertrand. We did pursue that; we talked to Mr. Cohen by phone the next day and he said a high official at Holt, Rinehart & Winston had told him this, an official whose name he would not give, and we are now proceeding; we have learned since then that, contrary to reported fact, that Shaw did not attend Columbia, which is a bit of a surprise. So we now checked the records at Harvard and we find that over a period of 11 years, from 1927 to 1938, a man named Clayton Bertrand Shaw attended Harvard on three different occasions. He got no degree and he lists his home in the alumni records as Shaney, Washington, and we find from the atlas there is no such town, so we are having that checked in Cambridge.

There is very little more to report of the dinner, except to say that Garrison seems to be feeling in good spirits in spite of his difficulties of the past few weeks. He doesn't seem to be dismayed at all by the specter of the federal government; he seems almost stimulated by his moving into this area, a stimulation which we have found all the more alarming and detrimental to this investigation.

The following day Acoca and I paid a visit to the Criminal Courts Building, where we had a talk with Alcock. A word on Alcock: here is an assistant district attorney who must present the case to the jury in September against Shaw. Now, Alcock is a level-headed guy, he believes in the case, he's loyal to Garrison, but he admits that all the evidence he's got comes from Perry Raymond Russo. There is nothing else to support a case against Shaw, and he knows it, and he says it, privately. He says that he would not be embarrassed to go before a jury, but he damn well wishes that Garrison would get off the numbers game and would stop flailing at the CIA and would get down to cases, but he admits and knows, and though he almost reveres this boss of his for, I suppose, ambitious reasons, he says Garrison knows little and cares less about the law. Well, we've known that for some time. Anyway, we discussed with Alcock ways of trying to pin down the evidence, making it clear to him that if he could do that, we would rather write a story about the case and not become so damned concerned about Garrison's misbehavior. Acoca discussed with Alcock the possible questioning of certain witnesses like Jose Antonio Lanusa, and a program that Acoca will proceed in the following week with Alcock to try and nail down some evidence.

We then talked to Garrison for a brief time, to summarize the case as it now stands. As we've said before, the CIA involvement is the major item of interest at the present time; Garrison is certain that the Agency was deeply involved in the New Orleans conspiracy against Castro up until the summer of 1963, which we find a little late -- we know that such involvement might have preceded the missile crisis, and ended somewhere around October 1962, but Garrison feels the CIA green light was turned off at the time that cache of ammunition was raided up in Lacombe; that would have been in July of 1963. Now, this is more than a quibbling difference, because if Garrison is right, that means that Oswald was inducted into the plot while the CIA [was] still on the scene. If Garrison is wrong, as we are convinced he is, it would have this CIA apparatus from which the CIA had pulled out, and the people who inducted Oswald into the conspiracy would have been trained by, but not members of, the intelligence agency -- we found that a lot more palatable than Garrison's version. Anyway, as far as his investigation goes, he has Carlos Quiroga coming before the Grand Jury in the next few days, and that really is about it, as far as witnesses who may have knowledge about the conspiracy before his Grand Jury or being questioned by his staff.

The battle with the opposition continues on the subject of Alvin Beauboeuf. Beauboeuf, as we know, has been the subject of an attempted bribe by Lynn Loisel. Beauboeuf seems to be working one side against the other; he makes statements and signs affidavits for Garrison that he was only asked to tell the truth, then he turns around and is taken by the defense and by others opposed to Garrison and makes statements affirming that he was threatened in order to buy [sic] the DA's office before he signed any affidavit.* Garrison makes the point that he has a high-priced lawyer by the name of Burton Klein. Burton Klein used to be an assistant district attorney and a friend of Garrison, who now is representing Beauboeuf, and who, Garrison says, took Beauboeuf to Washington, where he was interviewed by the Justice Department. All this tends to support Garrison's case of a federal conspiracy to block him. On the subject of Beauboeuf, we learned later -- that brings us up to this week, only yesterday, as a matter of fact, that would have been May 17th -- that Garrison now has some tapes, one taken at an interview of Beauboeuf by Hoke May, a reporter for the New Orleans States-Item, in which Beauboeuf says he was taken to Washington, and it involves the Justice Department a little, but it involves more of the defense lawyers and Walter Sheridan of NBC. And apparently, we understand, at least, there is another tape which has an NBC local reporter in New Orleans insisting to Beauboeuf that he helped them block Garrison; Garrison is collecting these tapes as a defense, defense against the NBC program, which is going to, we are certain, get into this point. How Garrison plans to use this defense and why he wastes his time defending himself against such nonsense is beyond us, but that is the shape of the situation right now.

Going back to last week, we found that there is a lot more constructive information to come from this reporter, Hoke May, than we were able to fathom from the District Attorney's office. While Garrison is Billing [sic] with the lawyers that he insists the CIA employed, trying to battle with them in the arena of the Grand Jury, May comes up with an interesting story; it involves Schlumberger, the oil driller equipment company that owns that bunker, ammunition bunker down in Houma, La.; the one that was raided and from which explosives were stolen by Novel and Ferrie and Arcacha in 1961. Briefly, May has dug up the following information: Schlumberger, a French company, is run by French Republicans and anti-Gaullists, and prior to 1961 they were using this bunker in Houma, La., to store weapons which they intended to use in some kind of a raid or invasion of the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique. It was after that that this bunker may have been used by the CIA, and indeed it seems that Novel was aware that the, that this bunker might have been under the direction of French intelligence. At any rate, the materials that the French had in there were seized in 1961 in January and it is possible that the CIA used it thereafter. And it was in August that Arcacha and company made this burglary, expecting to find weapons but all they found in fact were some explosives that indeed are used in the oil industry. May has interviewed the president of Schlumberger; he has offered me the notes on this, though he is convinced the man was lying to him throughout the interview. This is all interesting history and background, useable only if we ever break through to find some kind of a case that can be solved here.

Back to Garrison. One positive thing, let's call it a positive promise which we doubt will ever happen -- he says that he will detach Lynn Loisel for the purpose of working only on making a connection between Shaw and Bertrand. This is the one area that would seem to require the most ambitious searching at the present date.

We come now to May 16th, where we now have Acoca back in New Orleans; he reports that the situation is quite the same, Garrison continuing to flail away at Don Quixote windmills -- he seems to enjoy now holding court with reporters like Hoke May and his own staff. Acoca had dinner with Alcock, [during] which Alcock confirmed what we've already said concerning his views toward the case -- such matters as Russo being the only evidence that they have. Acoca reports, as we've already noted, the emergence of Mr. Lee Odom.

Now, May 17th, Acoca reports that Garrison is quite upset, because the States-Item didn't develop further the decoding of those numbers; he apparently had leaked them to May. He feels that he needs to get this in the papers -- God knows why -- and Acoca says that Alcock has spoken to this man Odom on the telephone; he seems to check out clean, and nothing more than a legitimate rodeo promoter. He told Alcock he used the Post Office Box 19106 for promotional literature for his rodeo work, and he had the box from July 21, 1966, until January 11, 1967. Acoca had dinner the second night in New Orleans with Loisel and Ivon. They discussed at length the tracking of Shaw, but there doesn't seem to be too much developing there. Acoca says that everyone down there is playing with theories on ________ the big picture.

We asked Acoca to check out a letter we got reporting from a man in the prison that Miguel Torres had a story to tell. Torres is being questioned by Richard Burnes this week; it seems that this letter had also [sic] to NBC, and it was, we suspect, a report that Loisel had threatened to beat up Torres. Acoca will pursue this, but the letter doesn't seem to have any evidence; it's just another one of these attacks on Garrison's method, which we will keep an eye on.

One development that did occur yesterday, that would have been May 17, Regis Kennedy was ordered by Judge Bagert to appear before the Grand Jury, and he will appear before the Grand Jury, but his appearance is being appealed by the federal government; it's very doubtful that Regis Kennedy, that's the FBI man, Regis Kennedy, will have anything to say to the Grand Jury, but we'll see.

Acoca mentions that Garrison is very worried about this NBC expose, as well he should be.

He has sent somebody, though Acoca doesn't know who, to interview Lee Odom in Dallas.

Alcock continues to make a futile attempt to stop this nonsensical battle with the CIA, and he makes note of the fact that the CIA has answered Garrison's request for the real picture of Oswald at the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City, and said that no such picture exists.

The next step -- Garrison says he will go before the Grand Jury and ask that a letter be sent to Ramsey Clark, the Attorney General, asking that they give all the information that they have, the federal government has about the statement that they did make to the New York Times that the Justice Department was satisfied that Shaw and Bertrand are one and the same.

We end this with the note that they have little better to do in this investigation than work on tapes of Alvin Beauboeuf refuting the reports of the Loisel bribe.

On the afternoon of May 18th, we talked to Garrison by telephone, and he was characteristically buoyant; he said that things were going fine, and that the morale of his staff was very high -- all this despite all the controversy over the battle with the government and the battle with the press and his inability to communicate and the reports of bribes, and what he calls Lynn Loisel's fight for survival. It is Garrison's contention that the other side, and by the other side, he now includes the federal government, not only, specifically the CIA and the FBI, but on beyond into the entire federal establishment. He says, feels, that the other side must be really worried, because they are working feverishly to defeat him. He mentions Walter Sheridan, who, he claims, is interviewing people in the Parish prison, people he, Garrison, claims to have had no dealings with on this investigation. He mentions one convicted burglar named -- nicknamed "John the Baptist." He says Sheridan is claiming or will have this burglar claim that the DA's office tried to get him to burgle Shaw's apartment before Shaw was arrested. Garrison says that he has it confirmed now that Beauboeuf went last week or the week before to Washington with Burton Klein -- he says also that Newsweek magazine had suggested to Beauboeuf that he hire Klein as a lawyer, and that the trip to Washington was expenses-paid by the government. Then he mentions Layton Martens' lawyer, a man named Milton Brener. Garrison says that he has an uncle by marriage named Irving Grad, who runs a printing shop of some kind, address, either home or business, is 115 Decatur. This fellow, Irving Grad, Garrison says, is on the payroll of the CIA. He is also the husband of Rosalie Grad, who was Shep Morrison's secretary when the later Morrison was mayor of New Orleans. What the CIA connection of Milton Brener's uncle has to do with anything is a little beyond us, but Garrison sees significance in all of these lawyers' having some contact or connection with the CIA. For example, he mentions that Burton Klein has a brother who was once in Naval Intelligence. Another far-fetched point, it would seem.

Garrison now has a transcript of the tape that was made of Loisel allegedly offering the bribe to Beauboeuf. He has studied it, Loisel has studied it, and claims that there is a large part that has been removed, and they feel they can prove that, because in the part removed, Loisel sets up three kinds of tests that Beauboeuf would have to take to determine that he was telling the truth. These tests would be a lie-detector, sodium Pentothal, and hypnosis. Though this has been taken out, says Garrison, later in the tape the lawyer Exnicios says, "Now, what about the three tests?" which Garrison feels traps him into admitting that parts of the tape were removed from the transcript. Garrison is forwarding a copy of this tape to us.

Now he is continuing, when he is not fighting the CIA-hired lawyers, to work on this code in Oswald's book. He says that he had turned over the way he got the CIA phone number out of the book to the States-Item reporters who wrote a story, but the paper refused to print it. Now he comes up with this following deciphering of the unlisted numbers that appear on page 38 of Warren Commission Volume 16, and on the top of page 38 there is a page of the notebook identified as the flyleaf. Here Oswald has listed figures which he adds up; they are the following figures that appear in the vertical column: the numbers 25, 29, 16, 16, and 19, and they add up to 105. The 105, says Garrison, has no significance, but the numbers do, and what Garrison does to decipher this code is that he takes the numbers listed vertically and adds each pair, and writes down their sum in a horizontal line -- 2 and 5 equal 7; 2 and 9 equal 11; 1 and 6 equal 7; 1 and 6 equal 7; and 1 and 9 equal 10 -- giving him the number 7117710. He then removes 711, which would be the exchange -- it's a coded exchange, he says -- it adds up to 9, as does the common New Orleans exchange of 522; so Garrison would have 711 mean 522 for the exchange, and then he takes the numbers 7110. He applies to them the same rearranging process he has in the past; he takes 7 and then takes the last digit, 0, and makes that the second and the third digit, 1 -- it comes out to 7071. Now he must find something to subtract from that, as he has in the past, to make it meaningful. We recall in the past Garrison has found the block numbers 1300 and 4900 useful; they don't seem to do anything here, but Garrison notices on the same flyleaf page the number 2400. It is a number that appears under the words, "south Main," which he claims is an address that does not exist. So he then subtracts this 2400 from 7071, giving him 4671, and, lo and behold, 522-4671 is the phone number in New Orleans for the FBI office. Garrison finds again significance in this; we think it's Garrison trying to make any set of numbers fit what he would like them to fit, namely, the FBI number.

Now he has another part of the code -- this is something that's going to take a little more study -- but he refers us to page 41 of the volume, which is page 12 of the notebook. On page 12 of the notebook, he finds the word, as the FBI has determined it, the word Znanie, or at least that is the Americanized way of spelling it -- it is also spelled in the translation or at the bottom of the page, Znanya, the Russian word, Znanya, or znanya, meaning knowledge. Under that is the word [sic], Gary Street. Garrison claims that if you really examine znanya, you'll see that the number 3110 has been changed to read znanya. This takes a magnifying glass and some imagination, but Garrison has determined or learned that the address for the CIA headquarters in San Francisco is 31 Geary St. He allows for Oswald's inability to spell, making Gary become Geary, and znanya somehow becomes the number 31. It is Garrison's charge or suspicion that Oswald had written this number, 31, or perhaps 3110, in his book, and that the FBI saw this and had someone overwrite the word znanya to obliterate the number, so that it wouldn't show up as so obvious[ly] 31 Gary Street. This is the first time he has accused the government of doctoring this notebook.

Garrison does not seem too disturbed, as disturbed as he should be, about the appearance of the real Lee Odom in Dallas -- he says this doesn't bother us _______ over there looking into this Mr. Lee Odom, there are some things about him that do make Garrison suspicious -- first of all the fact that he comes from Irving, Texas, home of the Paines, and where Oswald's family was living at the time of the assassination. Then Garrison points out that this man claims to have been working on a bullfight deal, but the bullfight deal never went through, and he makes the point that the man had no phone, and he finds it very strange that a man in that type of promotional business had no telephone. Even more strange to Garrison -- admittedly, this does seem interesting -- that it took the defense something like four days to discover Mr. Lee Odom, but once that they had found him in another two days, the defense, according to Garrison, was able to come up with the fact that this number 19106 with the cryptic letters before it is a Russian telephone number, or a Russian number. I find this interesting because of a file today from Holland McCombs suggesting the same thing. I quote from McCombs' file: "As you know, we are of the persuasion that Oswald's notation in his notebook was made while Oswald was in Moscow; the letters are not for a PO box, but rather are Russian lettering. You will note in Oswald's notebook that letters OVIR are written above the series of letters including 19106. As we understand it, OVIR are the initials of the Visa and Tourist Information Center in Moscow. We suggest that, to clear this notebook thing up once and for all, that you get Moscow or Washington to check it out." I think this is quite interesting, and I think that Holland probably came upon it himself; what I wonder is, has there been communication between Holland and the defense. Either he has perhaps told them about the possibility of this being a Russian number, or they have suggested it to him. Garrison, of course, suspects that the defense got it right straight from the government. At any rate, there seems to be information that the number 19106 is going to turn out to be some kind of Russian number, which, the way things are going, wouldn't surprise me at all. Now, in the same point, another interesting development since the name, Mr. Odom, has come up -- suddenly Holland McCombs and the defense and the New Orleans newspaper are able to determine all the people who have held this box 19106 since it was first put into use in May of 1965. Quoting again from Holland, he says that "earlier we were unable to get a case history of Box 19106. Yesterday we hit it lucky, and with the help of a friend, we got the case history, and here it is: there was no Box 19106 in Dallas until after May of 1965. This box was first rented on July 12, 1965, to Adobie Associates, 127 Payne St. Adobie Associates held the box until July of 1966. Lee Odom and his brother-in-law, Joe Briggs, rented the box on July 21, 1966. The Jaycees said that he used this box as his address during the promotion of the bloodless bullfight, which started in September of 1966. Odom says the box was also used for the barbecue and grocery business, and Odom gave up the box on January 11, 1967. The box was vacant until March 1st, on which date it was rented to Tel-Tex Electronics, which holds the box today." Now, it does seem that the information, when it's to the benefit of the defense, is a lot more forthcoming than when it seems to be evidence for the side of the state. This is certainly Garrison's charge, and it seems to hold up. However, he does admit that the appearance of Lee Odom is a tentative victory for the defense; it certainly is a victory for the defense, and Garrison makes the point that this has nothing to do with the code that he has broken; well, we'll see about that.

Garrison is beginning to see all sorts of new characters coming on the scene; he now feels that, oh, Fred Edward Grady Partin, friend of Walter Sheridan's and old Jimmy Hoffa nemesis, is somehow involved; he's got him identified with Jack Ruby in Baton Rouge, and makes the point that Ruby was once seen by a witness in Baton Rouge with Oswald and Shaw. Where this will lead, we have no idea.

Garrison has some further suspicions about old Hugh Aynesworth of Newsweek. He feels that Aynesworth is not completely objective, refers back to the time that he had a conversation with Aynesworth, which was off the record, which had quite a bit of -- which appeared in the piece that Aynesworth wrote for Newsweek. He recalls that Aynesworth said at the time that he had been a friend of Jack Ruby's for many years, that he also was a friend of Sergio Arcacha, and when Garrison was trying to extradite Arcacha, he got a call from Aynesworth. He said he was doing a terrible thing by going after this man. So I guess we'd better put Aynesworth on the list of some kind of accessories or witnesses, material witnesses or something.

One of Garrison's main campaigns at the present seems to be to get his darned code into the press; he tried to get Paris Soir to run a story on it, but that didn't seem to work. Now he says that Hoke May, the New Orleans reporter, sold a story on it to the London Daily News. I asked him what he felt all this was going to prove, and he was talking about (unclear) he needs to get communication. My personal opinion is that this kind of news release communication is going to do him more harm than good, but he is not about to listen to that kind of argument.

Carlos Quiroga, the Cuban associate of Arcacha, and a man who has been identified as having been seen with Oswald during the summer of 1963 on 4 or 5 occasions, has denied this, and in so doing, failed a lie-detector test -- is due to appear next week before the Grand Jury, and Garrison is threatening to release to the papers the fact that he failed a lie-detector test prior to the appearance. We wonder what that will do to the people who criticize Garrison for his methods; we think it will do Garrison more harm than good, but he seems determined.

Garrison does admit, however, that it appears that the other side is trying to build a case against him on intimidation of witnesses, so they can take him into federal court. I would suspect that's true; Garrison doesn't think they will dare again -- we must wait and see.

Back to this press-release war: Garrison has taped an interview with WWL, in which he has gone into great detail on the role of the CIA in the whitewash of the real assassins; he says that in this interview, he says that the role of the CIA was nothing short of criminal, and said that if it happened in Louisiana, he would not hesitate for one minute to charge Richard Helms. This little bomb will be on the radio in New Orleans on Sunday night, but coming shortly after it will be some real bombs from the other side -- the NBC white paper, which Sheridan is working out, which Garrison now knows about; and WDSU, the local NBC affiliate down there, has a show coming up, which is entitled "The Rise and Fall of Jim Garrison."

 

Richard Billings's NODA Journal

December 1966-January 25, 1967
February 11-March 22, 1967
March 25-April 20, 1967
April 21-May 8, 1967
May 22-23, 1967
Back to Introduction

 

Search this site
 
    powered by FreeFind
 

Back to Jim Garrison menu

Back to JFK menu

Dave Reitzes home page

 

 

Dave Reitzes home page