This is part two of my series on Eugene Dinkin. You can read part one here.
Jim Garrison mentioned Eugene Dinkin in his September 1967, interview in Playboy Magazine:

Tom Bethell had supplied Garrison a list of secret Warren Commission documents. That list included CD 943, "Allegations of Pfc. Eugene Dinkin re Assassination Plot."



Various segments of the letter were redacted over the years, largely because of some sensitive sources:

What was redacted was "the CIA station in Geneva, Switzerland" and "the Geneva Station." Even the distribution list was left out of some released copies of the Warren Commission document:



The CIA used a source with the code-name TARZAN, and another source with the code-name MIDDAUGH. ARMATT refers to the Army attaché.
Interestingly this memo says that Des Fontaines was "skeptical" of Dinkin's story and was "still convinced Subj unbalanced." The Army Attaché "still assess [es] Subj story as fabrication by unbalanced person."
The secret nature of the Warren Commission document raised Garrison's interest. He listed Dinkin in one of his lead memos (although he spelled his name wrong):


This is a fascinating letter.
Moltzon says that Dinkin "tended to be an idealistic leftist intellectual, who was constantly talking of plots and conspiracies being formed by the John Birch Society and elements of the right wing."
And Moltzon tells us why the Army was so upset at Dinkin's article in Overseas Weekly -- "He identified his job in the installation in the article, which was secret and thereby a security violation."
Dinkin told lots of stories:
He was always talking of plans the Army had to take over the government, and was convinced the right wing would attempt to assassinate President Kennedy. He'd always impressed me as a very intelligent kook who'd gone off the deep end; especially towards the end. He was sure the CIA, Army CID were following him, "bugging" his room, spying on him etc.
Garrison investigator Bill Boxley tracked Dinkin down and interviewed him in Brooklyn. Dinkin was the subject of a discussion at a conference in New Orleans held on September 21, 1968, between Garrison and his investigators: (Box = Bill Boxley; T = Bill Turner; F = Bud Fensterwald; G = Jim Garrison)



On page 74, Boxley describes Dinkin:
Box: Now this is the guy who is suppose [d] to be nuts and if you go see him today in Brooklyn like I did a couple or three months ago, he will convince you he's a flat nut.
Boxley then completely either misspeaks or he just misunderstood Dinkin:
He interrupted some traffic, that's what happened. He read some code going back and forth on the OAS operation apparently that tipped him to what was going on out of down there --- out of New Orleans.
Dinkin never said that. As you will see in a future post, he never said he read messages related to the assassination.
But then Boxley relates a conversation he had with Dinkin: (page 75)
Box: Now his cover story is this and he's got it down pat. He will pull out all of these clippings from Stars and Stripes and Overseas Weekly and so on dated back in those days and he'll refer to typographical errors that he's got underlined. Now, this is how I got on to him. He said "see here's an article about kidney operations but they don't spell it "kidney", they spell it Kindney. It's a typographical error. He'll say "you see that means really Kenneth."
Well it's even further out and more of a nut approach than ESP or something but they don't put guys like this in NSA to begin with.
Boxley felt it was all a cover story because "you don't put guys like him in NSA to begin with." But Dinkin wasn't in the NSA -- he was just a crypto-equipment operator in the Army. There is absolutely no evidence that he was ever in the NSA, and Dinkin never made the claim.
Garrison lost interest in Dinkin and he is not mentioned in either of Jim Garrison's books.
In part three of this series, I will look at Dinkin's lawsuit against the American government.
Previous Relevant Blog Post
Dinkin's story from 1964 about his interpretation of various newspapers.