Garrison believed that the CIA was paying the lawyers of several witnesses. In June 1967, Garrison appeared on NBC: Question : We now find three people who are outside Louisiana who are fighting their return to the state in connection with your investigation—Gordon Novel, Sergio Arcacha Smith, and Sandra Moffit. Could you briefly discuss these three people and their role in all this? Garrison : The point that you’re going for is that we are in private difficulty for getting them back. That, of course, is because of the intercession of the U.S. government, not necessarily the administration at the topmost level, but certainly, through the intercession of the CIA which has great power because of the millions of dollars, it spends and for other reasons. Sandra Moffit, for example, who has no money, is represented by the very successful lawyer who is Chairman of the 13 State Democratic Regional Committee. Gordon Novel not only has a very successful lawyer in Ohio he also has a lawyer down here. Mr. Arcacha seems not to have a problem with representation either. He initially announced that he was represented by the Chief Assistant of the District Attorney of Dallas, but he now seems to have private counsel. Similarly, Beauboeuf, who has never been regarded as a crucial witness by us, nor ever been regarded as a great value by us, is represented by a successful and high price lawyer here too. It is obvious that these lawyers are being paid by the Central Intelligence Agency, that the money is being diverted to either people and then coming to them. Many conspiracy theorists have repeated the accusation. For instance, James DiEugenio, in his book Destiny Betrayed , asked "How could the out of work itinerant Novel afford to finance an expensive civil suit against both a large company like Playboy , and a veteran attorney like Garrison?" He then quotes testimony from Novel where he said that his lawyers "refused fees for this matter, but it my understanding that they were clandestinely renumerated by a party or parties unknown to me." DiEugenio then alludes that it was the CIA who paid the bills. But, did they? I went to the Library of Congress to look through the papers of Elmer Gertz, Novel's attorney in his civil case against Jim Garrison and Playboy Magazine (Garrison had claimed in a Playboy interview that Novel worked for the CIA). The reality is that Gertz had to fight to get paid - here are just a handful of letters he sent Novel. And, here is a letter that Gertz sent to Edward Wegmann, one of Clay Shaw's attorneys. I love his advice for Wegmann! And, here's another letter from Gertz to Wegmann - this time asking if Wegmann knew where Gertz could find Novel. The fact is is that Gordon Novel was a con man. He lost his libel case against Playboy and Jim Garrison. You can read more about him in my book, On The Trail of Delusion , and you can click here to get more information . And, Gordon Novel himself made fun of the Garrison allegation by sending this telegram to CIA Director Richard Helms.

Besides being a crusading District Attorney, Jim Garrison was also a cryptologist. No code was too difficult for him to crack. A researcher noticed similar notations in Clay Shaw's notebook and in Lee Harvey Oswald's notebook. Clay Shaw had written P.O. 19106 in his notebook along with the name Lee Odom. Mr. Odom had talked to Shaw about possibility of putting on a bullfight in New Orleans. In Oswald's notebook was a similar notation, but instead of P.O., there were two Cyrillic D's ( Д) . To Garrison, this linked the two men. It was a ridiculous notion - the P.O. Box had been opened well after Oswald made the notation - and Oswald made the notation while he was in the Soviet Union. Sylvia Meagher wrote a letter to Garrison saying this was all nonsense. I reproduce that letter in my book, On The Trail of Delusion, Jim Garrison: The Great Accuser. But, there was more - the 19106 notation was also code for Jack Ruby's phone number. Here is how the code worked - this is a document that Garrison filed in court in response to a Shaw motion to have his property returned (Garrison's men had carted off a lot of stuff when Shaw was arrested). There were many other codes that Garrison broke. Richard Billings of Life Magazine kept a diary of his time working with Garrison. Here is another code: Garrison now has more of his code deciphering for us. He refers to a number in Oswald's notebook, on page 35 of the notebook, which appears on page 50 of Volume 16 of the Warren exhibits. He says you find there the number 6.3.91-92, and if you apply the letter arrangement ADBC, you then get 6139. He says then Oswald subtracted 4900 from that, 4900 being the block on Magazine Street which Oswald lived, and you get the number 1239, which Garrison says is the last four digits of Clay Shaw's phone number, Clay Shaw's number being 522-1239. Asked how 522 might have been part of that code, Garrison says the first letter after the dash is 9, and if you add 5, 2 and 2 -- it equals 9. He has no explanation for the 2 that follows the 9 that follows the dash. One of the journalists covering the case decided to have a bit of fun and create their own code - the link from Garrison to Shaw.

One of the first reporters that Garrison talked to about his case was James Phelan, who had written a laudatory article on him in the June 1963 issue of the Saturday Evening Post. Garrison invited Phelan to Las Vegas and he explained what his investigation had found. He gave Phelan two memos on Perry Russo and Phelan had them photocopied at one of the hotels. He noticed that in a memo written by Andrew Sciambra there was no mention of any party at which there was a discussion of the assassination, and that Russo initially said he had only met Shaw twice - once when Kennedy visited New Orleans and another time at a gas station. He did not mention any Clay Bertrand. Phelan confronted Garrison, and Garrison quickly brought Andrew Sciambra to explain. He lamely said the information was in his notes, and that he forgot to add it to his memo. Those notes then disappeared. Phelan then wrote about it all in the May 6, 1967 edition of the Saturday Evening Post. Russo then called Phelan and confirmed that he had not mentioned Shaw being at any party when first questioned by Sciambra. Here is a letter that Phelan then wrote Garrison: Phelan then wrote a second letter: Finally, Jim Garrison replied. Unfortunately, the last page of this letter is missing. What a letter! Garrison says that "Every individual in this case including Ferrie, Ruby, Oswald and Shaw, were involved with the CIA. We have established as hard fact that these men whom I have just named knew each other well." Ok, sure. But wait, there's more! "In conjunction with this, it is my opinion that we have enough evidence of the connection with Ruby and the plan to kill the President so that we have a genuine question of which witnesses to present at the trial without making it last unnecessarily long." Of course, Ruby was not brought up at the trial. Needless to say, the confrontation between Phelan, Russo and Garrison, never took place.

I published the Norman Gallo section of this memo yesterday. Here is the entire memo (from September 1968). Where does one even start with such a memo? To Garrison, everything is connected to intelligence. He finds it suspicious that so many people worked for the aerospace industry. First, David Reitzes has written a good article showing that many people that Oswald worked with at Reily coffee stayed at Reily coffee. Secondly, right under Garrison's nose, thousands of good-paying jobs were being created for the space program to go to the moon. Boeing and Chrysler built huge plants in Michoud, Louisiana, just seventeen miles from New Orleans. Why on earth wouldn't people move? Here is an article from the Times-Picayune of January 23, 1963.

Here is a memo dated March 6, 1967 regarding a walk-in lead. You can see that Alcock doesn't quite believe the lead - "this man's appearance was very shabby and in some respects his story was not believable." Well, Limbough did claim that Tippit was Ruby's body-guard-boyfriend! His story also made the newspapers. Here is a story by Washington Post reporter George Lardner from March 12, 1967. Now, Limbough tells the press that "I think's a queer ring." Bill Gurvich, the Garrison investigator who defected in June 1967, said that "this sort of thing makes a mockery of our investigation ... this man is totally unreliable." Mr. Limbough then went to the FBI because it did not appear that Garrison was interested in his story. Here is their five-page memo - and you can download it here if you want. Well, I am not surprised that Garrison's staff never contacted Mr. Limbough again. Well, guess who bought his story? Joan Mellen, the author of A Farewell To Justice . Here is a quote from page 112 of her book: "A Ruby employee named Clyde Limbough by then had revealed that he had seen Oswald in Ruby's office on three occasions, as the evidence that Oswald and Ruby were well acquainted accumulated.' Her source is the Garrison memo above - but Mellen leaves out the reservations that James Alcock and William Gurvich had about Limbough. And, she says nothing about the fact that Limbough had been in mental institutions on two occasions (of course, perhaps she never saw the FBI memo)..

On August 16, 1977, JIm Garrison sent a memo to HSCA investigator Jonathan Blackmer about statements of Perry Russo while under hypnosis. Here is the memo: Perry Russo had continually given Garrison and his staff a description of Oswald that did not match reality. Russo kept describing Oswald as having a beard and as being somewhat dirty - when, in fact, Oswald was clean-shaven, and had good personal hygiene. Now, Garrison has a new explanation for why Russo had gotten Oswald's physical characteristics so wrong. This must have been "someone other than the real Oswald, who was patently the patsy of the whole affair." He wrote that "it looks like we are dealing with an alternate Oswald" and that we might have "a slightly erroneous game card in our hand." Rereading the transcripts, Garrison felt that Clay Shaw was not a "mere" coconspirator but someone "bringing down 'the word,' as it were, to men of lesser rank and status in the affair - bringing it down somewhat reluctantly because it forces him to associate too long and too openly with characters who are too common and noisy for him to associate with comfortably." In fact, he was of the opinion that this was only "a segment of the conspiracy" in which Shaw was just the "emissary of elements functioning at a higher level in the operation." Was Garrison on drugs? Garrison also tried to pull a fast one on the Committee. He claimed that the two transcripts were from one long hypnosis session with a break between the two. So he reversed the chronology by putting the second session first, lessening the appearance of Russo being led by the hypnotist, Dr. Fatter. Here's the last part of his memo: Here is first page of the first hypnosis session. Garrison marks this as B, and he marked the first page of the second session as A. But there are internal markers in the two transcripts that prove they came from two different sessions and provide clues as to their dates. You can read more about this here. In the first session, it was the hypnotist who first mentions assassination: Garrison wanted the HSCA to think the leading question above came later, after Russo had talked about Kennedy being killed.

In September 1977, Jim Garrison sent a letter to the HSCA about Clay Shaw - which we published yesterday. Along with the letter, Garrison sent a memo with his best leads about Clay Shaw. Here is the memo along with Garrison's notations.. First, let me fill in a couple of paragraphs that are hard to read (I have a copy of this memo that was typed before Garrison added his notations). J. Statement of Barbara Messina, Monroe, Louisiana, re: Q. One of the meetings was at Shaw's apartment in the 1300 block of Dauphine Street, during which meeting Dean Andrews came into Shaw's apartment and spoke privately with him. Ferrie informed Whalen that they had received 'inside' information from Dean Andrews.... T, After describing the details of his having informed the F.B.I. of the Cuban group's contact with him, Krop describes in some detail one of the Cubans contacting him - one Carlos Rodriguez. X. (It is interesting to note that this letter which describes Hardy as a Tampa resident, is dated May 26, 1968. By that time, Thornley had become a resident of Tampa). A2. After a hearing in federal court, the federal judge obliged Chandler and orders his Grand Jury subpoena quashed. Summary: .. I don't think it would accomplish much to simply keep piling them up. I thought, however, that I'd get the above described.... Now, on to the memo itself. I find it amazing that Garrison, after prosecuting Clay Shaw for conspiring to kill JFK, still has so many possible leads that were still open. Did he not uncover the conspiracy? I don't have time to go through each lead, but here are some comments: A. Jules Rocco Kimble gave two statements to Garrison. In his first statement, dated September 6, 1967 he just said that he had knowledge of a trip Ferrie took to Canada. Shaw was not mentioned. He said he would find out more. In his next statement, dated October 10, 1967, Kimble now said he went to Montreal with Shaw and Ferrie. Kimble had very little credibility - he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan and he eventually went to prison for murder. One last point - Shaw hated to fly. B. The Golden Lantern memo is presented in my book. There is nothing of relevance in it. C. The Clinton witnesses have serious credibility issues discussed in my book. D. E. The statements of the Tadins are discussed in my book, On The Trail of Delusion. They claimed that David Ferrie was teaching their deaf son to fly, which seems doubtful I My book presents a copy of her statement in which she describes Clay Shaw as a "notorious degenerate." J. Jack Ruby was picked up by "an elderly gray haired man in a Cadillac"? Really? Garrison tells the HSCA that this is "a lead in need of a thorough followup..." Barbara Messina, a resident of Monroe, LA., talked to the FBI in November 1963. She had met Ruby at the Carousel Club, and in November 1962, he took her out for breakfast. He drove a Cadillac owned by a man in his 60s or 70s. K. Edward Girnus is another prisoner with information. Garrison didn't take him seriously in 1967, but now he wants the HSCA to look into him. I'll be discussing Girnus more tomorrow. Q. Edward Whalen is yet another prisoner and I will have more information on him tomorrow. W Garrison writes that this is "another interesting lead apparently farmed out to someone on the staff but not followed through." He goes on to admit that "our available staff did not handle all of the follow-ups effectively." My god, they had nothing on Clay Shaw, and here he admits they had a "shortage of leads connecting Shaw and Ferrie" and they couldn't follow this one up? X. An unsigned letter about a man who remodeled Shaw's home and saw some Cubans? Garrison then says "another lead long overdue for a follow through." B2. Garrison goes over the interview of David Logan who met David Ferrie at a party in 1961"where Clay Shaw was also present." But, it was the host who supposedly pointed out David Ferrie to him, not Clay Shaw, and that was after the party. He never said Shaw and Ferrie were together. C2. Rev. Raymond Broshears was most certainly a fraud. He told Garrison he was a roommate of Ferrie's in 1965, but could not describe any of the details of Ferrie's apartment to Stephen Roy, who was perhaps the world's expert on Ferrie. None of Ferrie's friends remembered Broshears. Roy wrote that "I came away with the feeling that Broshears story was almost certainly untrue." These were Garrison's best leads. And, guess what? None of them went anywhere, and none of them were mentioned in the HSCA's final report. Update Lead S is missing from Garrison's typed summary. Here is lead S from his handwritten notes:

After the HSCA began its work, investigators visited Jim Garrison and spent a week interviewing him. He also started writing memos to the HSCA. Here is a list of memos that I have found: - July 15, 1977 letter about Morgan City. - July 18, 1977 regarding Thomas Beckham. - August 16, 1977 letter about the deaths of Guy Banister and Clay Shaw. - August 25, 1977 letter with questions for Thomas Beckham. - September 12, 1977 memo listing a variety of leads. - September 14, 1977 letter regarding Clay Shaw. - October 20, 1977 memo regarding material allegedly seen at Wray Gill's office following assassination. - November 8, 1977 letter regarding individuals subpoenaed to the Orleans Parish Grand Jury. - Undated memo regarding Clay Shaw trip to S.F.; subsequent Shaw trip to Portland, Oregon; and F. Lee Crisman factors with regard to Oregon. - Undated memo regarding Data Correlations of K.T. [Kerry Thornley] and L.O. [Lee Oswald] locations. - Undated memo regarding Kerry Thornley. Today, I am posting his letter to Jonathan Blackmer, dated September 14, 1977, regarding Clay Shaw. There's a certain sadness and bitterness to this letter. On the first page he talks about the difficulty of presenting his case - "Hell, if we had tried to talk to an American jury back in the late 1960's about the involvement of a domestic intelligence operation - or, to be more accurate, a part of it - in the assassination, we might as well have tried talking to the jury about flying saucers." Presenting Charles Spiesel as a witness (he was the accountant who said he had been hypnotized for 16 years by various people in New York, and he fingerprinted his daughter whenever she would come back from University to ensure she was the same person), was not his fault - he noted that Spiesel "simply helps illuminate what we were up against..." In my book, On The Trail of Delusion, I have a chapter on Bill Boxley, a former CIA agent hired by Garrison to give him an insight into the operations of intelligence agencies. Garrison fired Boxley - he was talked into believing he was still working for the CIA - and Garrison now writes that he "so smoothly swiped what was left of our chastity." Garrison's chastity? He says the New Orleans Establishment "went over me like a steam-roller for suggesting [Shaw] was something less than Albert Schweitzer." He then tells Blackmer he can send more leads on "Mr. Spic & Span" if they have people to follow them up. Garrison wrote that he had "aristocratically" dismissed a number of credible sources of information because they were too "raffish," because they were drifters, or because they had criminal records. Now, he felt, they were "giving us the best damned leads we had." An intelligence agent might well "employ as his extension for leg work someone who, while reasonably competent, has accumulated a 'record' suggesting he is an outright bum." And so, "a record of arrests - bad checks, vagrancy, thefts, et cetera - is made particularly attractive by a short spell in a mental institution." Garrison's view was that the agency "taught its operatives how to select competent characters with incompetence written in their records." His advice for the HSCA: "Don't let the bad records here and there stampede you." As you will see tomorrow, several of Garrison's so-called leads were prisoners who wrote him letters. Actually, they all had one thing in common - they wanted help to get out so they could then fully tell their 'story.'

Garrison tried hard to convince Playboy he was the real deal. And, so he wrote them a memo. I found this in the papers of Elmer Gertz, Gordon Novel's lawyer, and it appears that Garrison didn't have time to finish the memo. Once again, you can see that Garrison was well aware of the Paese Sera articles about Clay Shaw and Permindex/CMC. He references the Italian, French and Canadian stories - but all of those stories emanated from Paese Sera, a communist-controlled newspaper that ran a series of articles, after Shaw's arrest, alleging that CMC was a CIA front. It wasn't. I have gone through the papers of Louis Bloomfield, a Montreal lawyer who represented shareholders of Permindex/CMC - and I can tell you that there was nothing nefarious about the organization. Check out chapter 19 of my book, On The Trail of Delusion - "Garrison's Forgotten Victim: Major Louis Bloomfield." Garrison also talks of a relationship between Clay Shaw and Jack Ruby. None of this was brought up at trial. I wonder why. In addition to this memo, Eric Norden, the interviewer wrote a second memo with secret information. Once again, more information on Permindex/CMC. But, there are some significant errors - the memo claims that the company was dissolved by the Swiss government in 1961. This is patently false, Permindex left Switzerland in the late 1950s because they could not raise enough capital for their project in Basle. The local government had demanded that they also had to build a hotel to support their world trade center. They just couldn't raise enough capital and moved to Rome. This was all written very clearly in State Department Dispatches. Louis Bloomfield is mentioned in #2 above, although Garrison buys into the story Richard Giesbrecht told about overhearing a conversation at the Winnipeg airport about the JFK assassination. One man supposedly had fake eyebrows. The FBI thought he had an overactive imagination. But, Giesbrecht had a criminal background and he destroyed his notes of the conversation. Why Garrison melds Bloomfield with Giesbrecht is beyond me - perhaps because both were Canadian. But, here is what I think is important. Bloomfield lived in Montreal, and Garrison knew that. Why on earth did Garrison not pick up the phone and talk to him? It would have been easy to find him - Bloomfield was a well-known lawyer in Montreal operating out of a very prominent law firm. He was very well known in Montreal. Bloomfield could have told Garrison everything he ever wanted to know about Permindex/CMC - after all he was the lawyer representing some of the larger shareholders. Perhaps Garrison knew the allegations about Permindex/CMC were false? Nothing came out of Clay Shaw's notebooks, and the rest of the memo is just really bad rumors. Number 7 above is just plain fantasy.

In 1983, Garrison sent his manuscript, then titled The Execution , to McGraw-Hill which had published his novel. They rejected it. He then renamed it A Farewell to Justice but had trouble selling it. He hit pay dirt with Prentice Hall in 1986 for his newly titled book, Coup D'Etat , and they paid him a $10,000 advance. Sylvia Meagher served as the referee and she submitted a 26-page analysis, which noted several problems. She was not happy with the discussion of Shaw,, Ferrie, Banister, Bundy and Russo, the characters from New Orleans. Meagher noted that Garrison's case "depends upon identification and allegations elicited years after the fact. Very little value should be attached to material offered by witnesses - and especially identifications - long after the event. The Russo allegations have been largely discredited." She concluded that the chapters dealing with the New Orleans characters was "dizzying, full of scattershot, and probably irrelevant." Still, she recommended that Prentice Hall publish Garrison's book, largely because his manuscript claimed that Oswald was totally innocent - a position she had held for many years - as opposed to the Shaw trial, in which Oswald was named as a conspirator. Philip Pochoda wrote Garrison in January 1987 and rejected Garrison's manuscript. Here is his letter. I spoke to Philip Pochoda. Besides the Crisman issues referenced above, he said that the motorcade route issue (Garrison thought the motorcade route had been changed, but it hadn't) was "too far a blunder to allow into a Simon & Schuster book, much less a manuscript by the person who should have at least known that to be false." Here is Garrison's reply. There is a lot more about Garrison's book (which eventually became On The Trail of The Assassins), in my book, On The Trail of Delusion . I have new information on Fred Crisman which is particularly interesting.

Here's a good example of Garrison's theory of propinquity at play. Clay Shaw lived on Burgundy Street in 1960, so Garrison looked at phone directories to see who else lived there. Mr. Todd, because he lived on Burgundy Street, needed to be investigated. The last sentence is important – Garrison had this belief that one of the gunmen on the grassy knoll had a scar on his face. Investigating Mr. Todd led to Mr. Bertram. He was now a suspect because he lived across the street from a bar that Clay Bertrand supposedly went to. None of this went anywhere. But then, this is where propinquity takes you.

As promised, here is Garrison's second memo on Propinquity. Does it get any crazier than this? The connections in section one between Oswald and Ferrie belies belief. The reporter Jim Phelan told Patricia Lambert that when he went to Las Vegas to hear Garrison's story, Garrison couldn't stop talking about propinquity. Phelan told him, "I can't write that!" Garrison then gave Phelan the documents about Perry Russo (the so-called Sciambra memorandum), and he was off with a big scoop.