5
Setting up the Scapegoat
FROM OUR INVESTIGATION so far, I knew that Oswald could not have shot President Kennedy alone, that some part of the intelligence community had been guiding him, and that someone had been impersonating him. In other words, he had been just what he said he was when he was arrested—a patsy. Precisely what force had set him up still remained to be seen. Part of the intelligence community was involved, but I had no idea how broad the base of the operation might be.
It had always puzzled me why Oswald had left Dallas in April 1963 to spend the summer in New Orleans, only to return to Dallas again in October. But given what I had learned, this began to make sense. Clearly, if Oswald was being set up as a communist scapegoat, his close association in Dallas with the anti-communist White Russians had to be severed. Likewise, a summer of ostentatiously handing out pro-Castro leaflets in New Orleans reinforced the image of a crazed communist assassin. In the intelligence community, there is a term for this kind of manipulated behavior designed to create a desired image: sheepdipping. It seemed to me that Oswald had been in New Orleans to be sheepdipped under the guidance of Guy Banister and that he had been sent back to Dallas when the mission was accomplished.
To see if I was on the right track, I studied more closely Oswald’s return to Dallas and his last two months before the assassination.
On September 23, 1963, a pregnant Marina Oswald and her daughter left New Orleans. They were driven westward to Dallas, I learned, by Mrs. Ruth Paine. It was generally agreed that Lee Oswald left approximately a day later. There were indications that he departed from New Orleans by bus, but that remained unconfirmed.
For the moment, I concentrated—leafing through the large blue volumes to which I had become so accustomed—on the role of Ruth Paine in taking Marina Oswald and her daughter to Dallas and getting them set up there.
Lee and Marina Oswald had met Ruth Paine in February 1963 at a party in Dallas to which George de Mohrenschildt and his wife had brought them. I found that Ruth Paine was the wife of Michael Paine, an engineering designer who did highly classified work for Bell Helicopter, a major Defense Department contractor.
Ruth Paine was a rangy, intelligent woman with widespread interests, among them the Russian language, which she had learned to speak quite well. Her father had been employed by the Agency for International Development, regarded by many as a source of cover for the C.I.A. Her brother-in-law was employed by the same agency in the Washington, D.C., area.
It was on Ruth Paine’s way back from a long vacation, during which she had visited her in-laws in Washington, D.C., that she made the stop in New Orleans to pick up Marina Oswald and her daughter for their return to Dallas. I wondered vaguely whether Mrs. Paine herself had been manipulated in the course of this move.
When Marina and her daughter reached Dallas, Mrs. Paine made them at home at her house in Irving, a Dallas suburb. She and her husband, Michael, had separated temporarily, so there was sufficient space for guests.
On October 4, Lee returned to Dallas. He spoke of having been in Houston, looking for work. Ten days later Ruth Paine obtained an interview for him, and he got the job—at the Texas School Book Depository.
For reasons that remain unclear, Oswald rented a series of small rooms in Dallas while his wife and daughter stayed at the Paines’ house in Irving. Although Lee kept a number of his personal possessions with him in Dallas, Mrs. Paine made her garage in Irving available to him for his other possessions.
There was no way of guessing what Lee Oswald had in mind with this odd living arrangement, nor who suggested it. However, it was undeniable that this situation worked to the advantage of whoever was behind the assassination. When the President was killed, the scapegoat appeared that much more removed from family and friends, feeding the image of the lonely crazed gunman.
As a routine matter, I wanted to examine the income tax returns of Ruth and Michael Paine, but I was told that they had been classified as secret. In addition to the Paines’ income tax reports, Commission documents 212, relating to Ruth Paine, and 218, relating to Michael Paine, also had been classified as secret on grounds of national security. Classified for the same reason were Commission documents 258, relating to Michael, and 508, relating to Michael Paine’s sister, as well as Commission documents 600 through 629, regarding relatives of Michael Paine.
What was so special about this particular family that made the federal government so protective of it? Even the duPonts and the Vanderbilts would not have rated this kind of caring guardianship. I wondered if such paternal concern might be related to the fact that the C.I.A. had come to be—for obvious security reasons—a family-oriented organization.
While his wife and daughter stayed with Ruth Paine, Lee Oswald himself, according to the government, was in Mexico City, allegedly contacting the Soviet and Cuban embassies and making himself quite visible. But I was already having doubts about this explanation. Those doubts were confirmed later, when more information on this incident became available.
A C.I.A. memo dated October 10, 1963, reported that in late September and early October Lee Oswald had repeatedly phoned and appeared at the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, asking if there had been calls for him and talking with a trade consultant who was supposedly a member of the K.G.B.’s “liquid affairs” (murder) bureau. Copies of the memo were sent to the F.B.I. and the State Department. Follow-up Agency leads placed Oswald in the Cuban Embassy as well, where he ostensibly was trying to obtain a visa to go to the Soviet Union via Cuba.
Early in the official inquiry, the C.I.A. informed the Warren Commission of Oswald’s alleged activities in Mexico City before the assassination. Uncharacteristically, the Commission asked for more evidence. Perhaps the Commission members, aware that the Agency had 24-hour photographic surveillance of the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City, were hoping for a good picture to shore up their sparsely documented account of Oswald’s trip to Mexico.
Initially, the Agency ignored the Commission’s request. But after more pressure, the C.I.A. finally handed over a murky snapshot of a portly, greying gentleman almost old enough to be Oswald’s father. This, the Agency claimed, was Lee Oswald at the Cuban Embassy.
The Agency also produced a statement from Silvia Duran, a Mexican who worked at the Cuban Embassy, alleging that Oswald had appeared there. However, the circumstances under which the statement was obtained were tainted, to say the least. On the day after the assassination, the C.I.A. ordered Mexican authorities to arrest Duran and keep her in isolation. The Agency cable said: “With full regard for Mexican interests, request you ensure that her arrest is kept absolutely secret, that no information from her is published or leaked, that all such info is cabled to us…” Duran was not released until she identified Lee Oswald as the visitor to the Cuban Embassy. After her release, the C.I.A. ordered her jailed again. These circumstances were not known to the Commission. Moreover, in 1978 Duran told author Anthony Summers that the man who came to the embassy was blond and about her own height (five feet three)—hardly Oswald.
The Commission did not question the Cuban Consul, Eusebio Azcue, even though he had three angry confrontations with “Oswald.” But the House Select Committee on Assassinations did. When Azcue was shown photographs of Lee Oswald, he stated that the young man who visited the embassy was blond and was not the man in the photographs. Nor, said Azcue, was he the man he saw Jack Ruby shoot on television only two months after his face-to-face confrontations with “Oswald.”
The allegation that Oswald had been phoning and showing up at the Soviet Embassy did not hold up too well either. There were no photos, and when the Commission asked to hear tape recordings of Oswald’s calls, the Agency claimed in one case that surveillance was suspended and in another that equipment was not working. However, the tapes survived long enough for the F.B.I. agents who were present during the infamous 12-hour post-assassination questioning of Oswald to hear them. These agents, according to an F.B.I. memo dated November 23, 1963, and obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, were “of the opinion that the above-referred-to individual [the one on the Soviet Embassy tapes] was not Lee Harvey Oswald.”
This evidence, which came out years after my official investigation was over, suggests to me not that Lee Harvey Oswald had been in Mexico City, as the Warren Commission concluded. Rather, it strongly suggests that Lee Oswald was impersonated in Mexico City, as Edwin Juan Lopez, who ran the House committee’s extensive Mexico City investigation, believes. This would be consistent with other impersonations of Oswald in New Orleans and Dallas that were carried out in an effort to set him up as a patsy.
Some of the scenes were so preposterous that only the most gullible could swallow them. One of these tableaux occurred in the Mexican Consulate in New Orleans. It was the early afternoon of a mid-September day in 1963. A young man, accompanied by a woman with a scarf tied around her head, appeared at the consulate. On this occasion, Mrs. Fenella Farrington happened to be there to see about getting her family automobile returned from Mexico. It had been left there on a recent visit with her husband.
The young man asked the clerk at the desk, “What is the weather like in Mexico City?”
“It’s very hot,” she replied. “Just like it is here today.”
He then asked her—now striking the sinister theme repeated throughout these pageants—“What do you have to do to take firearms or a gun into Mexico?” This was a question that would catch almost anyone’s ear. The lady at the consulate asked why he wanted to take a gun, and Fenella Farrington, standing nearby, volunteered that “the hunting’s wonderful.”
The man, whom Mrs. Farrington described as “tall and very thin,” seemed resentful of her contribution, making no effort to show any sign of appreciation. Mrs. Farrington also recalled that he appeared ill at ease and not relaxed as were the other tourists seeking visas.
Four days after the President’s murder, Mrs. Farrington was visiting relatives in Washington, D.C., when the F.B.I. hunted her down. The F.B.I. agent who called her from the Washington office gave her the office phone number so that she could call back for confirmation of his identity. This done, he informed her that the Bureau had located her because of the scene in the Mexican Consulate in New Orleans. The scene had been photographed, he informed her, by an invisible camera. It had been set in operation when the young man mentioned firearms and, inasmuch as she was present, the Bureau had traced her from the photograph. The young man, he added, was Lee Harvey Oswald, whose picture had been taken at the same time.
The F.B.I. agent suggested to Mrs. Farrington that she had also seen Lee Oswald in Mexico City, even before the scene at the consulate. She replied firmly that she had not seen Oswald in Mexico City. Nonetheless, the agent insisted—despite her repeated denials—that she had met Oswald in Mexico.
Mrs. Farrington and her cousin, Mrs. Lillian Merilh, who had been with her in the Mexican Consulate, later were questioned again by the same F.B.I. agent and others as well. This time the agents produced photographs of Jack Ruby and now insisted that Ruby had been present in the New Orleans Mexican Consulate earlier that day, when both Mrs. Farrington and her cousin were there. Both Mrs. Farrington and Mrs. Merilh informed the agents that the photographs of Ruby did not depict anyone they saw at the consulate.
I heard of her story from Mort Sahl and Mark Lane, who were working with us at the time. Lane took a statement from her at my request. He showed her 17 photographs, asking if any of them appeared to be the young man at the consulate in New Orleans. She replied that two of the pictures could have been the man. She picked out a picture of Lee Oswald. And she picked out a picture of Kerry Thornley—Oswald’s friend from Marine days back at El Toro, who had later moved to New Orleans.
The Farrington affair raised obvious questions. Why, for example, was the F.B.I. trying to bully a witness into saying she saw Oswald in Mexico City? And why was there no picture of Oswald at the consulate? The hidden camera there obviously was good enough to take an identifiable picture of Fenella Farrington and good enough to have the Bureau on her heels in a short time. The F.B.I. agent told her that it had a photograph of the young man who wanted to take a rifle to Mexico, and that it was Lee Oswald. Yet the government had never released that photo. If the photograph had been of Oswald, would the government have been so shy about revealing it?
But the scene at the Mexican Consulate in New Orleans was only the first of several suspicious incidents in which a highly visible “Lee Oswald” caught an observer’s attention with a provocative action.
In late September of 1963, another such incident occurred, this time in Dallas. A “Leon Oswald” appeared at the home of Sylvia Odio—an émigré from Cuba—with two Spanish-speaking guerrilla types. One of the two later phoned her, telling her of how crazy “Leon” was and how he wanted to kill the President.
The following month in Dallas, Mrs. Lovell Penn found three men ostentatiously firing a rifle on her property and chased them away. After they left, she found an empty cartridge case bearing the label of “Mannlicher-Carcano”—the archaic and almost useless rifle which, the Warren Commission would announce, Oswald used in his historic exhibition of marksmanship at Dealey Plaza.
In early November a young man using the name of “Lee Oswald” applied for a job at a parking lot at the Southland Hotel. During the course of his conversation with the manager he asked if there was a good view of “downtown Dallas” from the building.
These scenarios were about as subtle as roaches trying to sneak across a white rug. But the most preposterous incident of the bunch took place one afternoon in early November of 1963.
A young man arrived at the Downtown Lincoln Mercury dealership—which happened to be just across the way from where the assassination soon would occur. He announced his intention of test driving and buying a car. The salesman, Albert Bogard, showed him a red Mercury Comet, and in short order they were cruising along the Stemmons Freeway, the customer at the wheel. After they got on the freeway, he revved up the speed to 60 and 70 miles an hour and began driving like Mario Andretti at the Indianapolis 500. He had the car taking even the tightest turns at high speed. As the salesman afterwards told his boss, “He drove like a madman.”
When they got back, the customer seemed unhappy upon learning that he would have to pay at least a $200 or $300 down payment to drive out with the brand new car. Eugene Wilson, another salesman, heard him say, “Maybe I’m going to have to go back to Russia to buy a car.” The man then told Bogard that he would be back to get the car in a couple of weeks, that he had some money coming in. He gave his name as “Lee Oswald,” and Bogard wrote it on the back of one of his business cards. Several weeks later Bogard heard on the showroom radio that Lee Oswald had been arrested. He pulled out “Oswald’s” card, ripped it up, and threw it away. “He won’t want to buy a car,” he said.
Bogard remembered the speed of the ride on the freeway better than he remembered the appearance of the customer. His response was: “I can tell you the truth, I have already forgotten what he actually looked like. I identified him as in pictures, but just to tell you what he looked like that day, I don’t remember.”
Frank Pizzo, for whom Bogard worked, was much more positive in his recollection. The Warren Commission counsel, Albert Jenner, after unsuccessfully showing him a number of pictures of Lee Oswald with other men, finally showed him a photograph of Oswald taken on November 22 after his arrest.[30] Here is the dialogue which followed:
MR. PIZZO: He certainly don’t [sic] have the hairline I was describing ….
MR. JENNER: This was taken the afternoon of November 22 in the Dallas City Police showup.
(Discussion off the record).
(Discussion between Counsel Jenner and Counsel Davis and the witness, Mr. Pizzo, off the record).
MR. JENNER: Back on the record. You recall him as being more in the neighborhood of what—5 feet 8 inches, 5 feet 7 inches, more or less, or more or less?
MR. PIZZO: Between 5 feet 7 inches and 5 foot 8½ inches with sort of a round forehead and that V shape is the thing that I remember the most.
MR. JENNER: A widow’s peak?
MR. PIZZO: Yes, but very weak.
MR. JENNER: Very weak.
MR. PIZZO: Very weak—not the bushy type that I see in the picture. Well, if I’m not sure—then—I have to say that he is not the one—if you want the absolute statement.
So much, it would seem, for any likelihood of Lee Oswald himself having been the wild driver at Downtown Lincoln Mercury. Oswald was five feet eleven inches tall.
Eugene Wilson, a senior car salesman at the dealership, disagreed even with Frank Pizzo’s recollection of the young man’s short stature. Wilson said that the young drag racer had been well under “5 feet 7 to 5 foot 8½ inches tall.” Wilson, who was five feet eight, said that the man who called himself Oswald was “only about five feet tall.”
While the Commission simply bypassed Frank Pizzo’s precise testimony, it initially did not present Eugene Wilson’s testimony at all. Consequently Wilson is not listed in the index to the hearings. Later, just as the Commission’s report was about to go to press, Wilson was discovered, presumably by accident. The belated F.B.I. interview of Wilson, then a car salesman with another Mercury dealership, clearly bothered the interviewing agents. It not only eliminated the possibility of Oswald being the young visitor but underscored the probability of a pretender using Oswald’s name. The F.B.I. report emphasized that Wilson had a problem with his vision because of glaucoma. However, he still was selling automobiles, and it was fair to conclude that he could tell when another man was a good deal shorter than he.
The Commission loftily stated that it had carefully evaluated the Downtown Lincoln Mercury incident “because it suggests the possibility that Oswald might have been a proficient automobile driver and, during November 1963, might have been expecting funds with which to purchase a car.” Had the Commission said that it had carefully evaluated the incident because it indicated that Oswald had shrunk considerably in height, this would, at least, have been more relevant.
All these heavy-handed tableaux—from the Mexican Consulate in New Orleans to Downtown Lincoln Mercury in Dallas—confirmed my initial instinct that someone had been impersonating Oswald. And now the reason was obvious: A trail of phony incriminating evidence had been carefully laid down prior to the execution of the President, leading to Oswald as the scapegoat. At the same time, the real Oswald had been manipulated by his intelligence community baby sitters. De Mohrenschildt had convinced him to move to Dallas, and then Oswald had been dispatched to New Orleans for sheepdipping, courtesy of Guy Banister. When Oswald returned to Dallas, other guiding hands made sure that he would be at the right place at the right time. Ruth Paine was the one who helped him get the job at the Texas School Book Depository, and although Oswald was called at the Paine household about a better job at the airport, he was never told about it. Consequently, assassination day found him still working at the depository on Elm, the fateful side street that the presidential motorcade took that morning.
I found myself wondering more and more about the accumulating signs of Oswald’s manipulation. He was like a pawn on a chessboard, going where he was told to go, ending up where he was placed. When had the manipulation begun? Were there some early signs? My mind was taken back to El Toro Marine Base in California, even before Oswald’s trip to the Soviet Union. I thought about Kerry Thornley— the one Marine whose testimony about Oswald was so different from that of the other Marines.
I read through Thornley’s testimony again in Volume 11 of the hearings—all 33 pages of it. Most of the testimony of the other Marines around Oswald had been reduced to half-page affidavits, but Thornley had been kept on the stand longer than most of the witnesses in the entire inquiry.
I had my staff begin inquiring about him and learned, to my surprise, that Thornley—who had been in the Marines with Oswald in 1959—had arrived in New Orleans as far back as 1961. In a routine check of police records we found that he was also in New Orleans in 1962. He had been arrested in August for putting a sign on a telephone pole on Royal Street, in the French Quarter, in violation of a city ordinance. We located the arresting police officers. When questioned, however, they no longer could recall the subject of the sign Thornley had posted.
From his own admission, as well as from the statements of Barbara Reid and a number of others, we learned that Thornley had been in New Orleans in 1963, finally leaving the city only a few days after Kennedy’s murder. Reid, a long-time French Quarter resident who had known both Thornley and Oswald, described seeing them together on several occasions. One of them was in early September 1963 at the Bourbon House, a combination bar and restaurant in the French Quarter. Thornley, who usually wore his hair extremely long, had just returned from a trip out of town. This time he was wearing his hair unusually short and closely cropped, as Oswald invariably did. Reid recalled having said to them, “Who are you guys supposed to be? The Gold Dust Twins?”
We were eager to talk to Kerry Thornley, but he was not an easy man to locate. It took us a lot of legwork and more than a year to do it. We had investigators going to every place in the French Quarter until we learned what had been his main hangout—Ryder’s Coffee House. Except for occasional visits to the Bourbon House on Royal and Bourbon Streets, Thornley seldom went anywhere else.
Ryder’s Coffee House had been small, dimly lit, and most unprepossessing. You wondered how such a small place, serving mostly coffee, had survived. However, rent was low at its Vieux Carré location, and apparently beer and wine sales kept it going. Thornley was very much into conversation, and Ryder’s was a place where young people gathered to talk. When Ryder’s closed down, its regulars simply moved to nearby places.
We picked our most sociable investigators and had them canvass a small cluster of bars that had sprouted up near the old Ryder’s. A large number of the patrons knew Thornley. When our investigators found someone willing to help us, they would bring him in to see me and we would have a casual talk. It was almost unauthoritarian, extremely relaxed—and very productive. While Thornley did not seem to be a person inclined toward deep relationships, he had an unusual facility for developing widespread casual relationships. Moreover, Thornley, who moved around quite a bit, was that rarity of the 20th century—an inveterate letter writer. From his friends we obtained a letter here, a postcard there—no address stayed at very long.
However, mostly they came from three cities: Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Tampa, Florida. When we finally caught up with him, he was living in Tampa. It was early 1968, and our case was very far along. I had a Grand Jury subpoena served on him, and a few weeks later we had Kerry Thornley visiting the Criminal District Court Building in New Orleans.
When he arrived, I talked to him briefly. He was quite amicable, even talkative. He said that he had arrived in New Orleans in February of 1961—the month after the Bolton Ford incident—and had been living in New Orleans from that time until late November 1963, a few days after the assassination. He had no reason for leaving at that odd time; he just decided that the time had come to move. He was surprisingly candid about having met both Guy Banister and David Ferrie while in New Orleans, although he described these meetings as brief. He denied having met Oswald during that period when both were in New Orleans.
I had learned that virtually all of the young men connected with Guy Banister’s operation, most of whom appeared to be employees of the intelligence community, carried a box key for the Lafayette Square post office. I never learned exactly why, but probably it was for receiving mailed instructions from their intelligence case officers or to provide an explanation for their periodic presence in the building where the Office of Naval Intelligence was located. Fishing, I asked Thornley why, when he lived in New Orleans, he carried a box key for the Lafayette Square post office. He promptly replied that he had possessed such a key because he lived just across the street at the Fox Hotel and it was convenient for him to receive his mail at the post office.
It was something of an eyebrow raiser to learn that, upon his arrival in the city in February 1961, Thornley had moved right into the heart of the intelligence community. However, my eyebrows went up even farther when I learned that while in New Orleans he had been writing a novel “inspired by” Lee Oswald. (He finished the book in February 1963—just nine months before the assassination.) Not many individuals were writing books inspired by Lee Oswald—at least, not before President Kennedy’s murder.
One of the reasons I had developed an interest in Thornley was that I suspected he could have been the man who used the name “Oswald” at the Bolton Ford Company in January 1961. He had to have been one of the few men in the world who was in New Orleans around the time, who knew Lee Oswald, and who knew Oswald was in Russia. In addition, Thornley bore a striking resemblance to Oswald. They were of approximately the same height and slight build, both brown-haired and had similar facial features.
I recalled Thornley’s testimony concerning their respective heights. Warren Commission counsel Albert Jenner had asked how tall Lee Oswald was. Here is the colloquy that resulted:
MR. THORNLEY: I would say he was about five-five maybe. I don’t know.
MR. JENNER: How tall are you?
MR. THORNLEY: I am five ten.
MR. JENNER: Was he shorter than you?
MR. THORNLEY: Yes.
But Oswald had been the taller of the two! Why, then, had Thornley described his friend Lee as six inches shorter than he really was? Was Thornley, perhaps, fearful that someone might believe that he had been the young man who acted out the role of Lee Oswald in the early 1960s … at Bolton Ford in New Orleans … then in Dallas … and then in New Orleans … and then in Mexico … and then in Dallas again?
During my brief questioning of Thornley I did not mention his statement that Oswald had been much shorter than he, saving that for the Grand Jury. I did have time to ask Thornley about his travel schedule in 1963. He said that in the late spring, about the beginning of May, he had gone by bus to visit his parents in California. I asked him whether or not the bus had stopped at Dallas, and he replied that it had. He acknowledged having visited Dallas briefly on that occasion. It was about that time that the Grand Jury was ready to go into session, so we entered the conference room for several hours of testimony by Thornley.
Afterwards, upon reflection, the timing of Thornley’s trip to Dallas struck me, although I had said nothing about it while we talked. The Oswalds had just moved from their Neely Street apartment in Dallas to New Orleans in late April, leaving some rent still paid for. Consequently the Oswald apartment had been left unoccupied for some days. Considering their respective travel schedules, Oswald and Thornley had not been very far away from passing each other on the highway, each one in the opposite direction in his respective bus.
I also was aware that at some unknown time, apparently when Oswald was not there, a young man of Oswald’s build, wearing a pistol on his hip, had posed for several photographs in the backyard of the Neely Street apartment. In one picture he held aloft a rifle and a copy of the communist newspaper The Daily Worker. In the second picture he held a rifle and a copy of The Militant, also a leftwing newspaper.
These incriminating pictures purporting to be Oswald had been found in Ruth Paine’s garage in Irving, where presumably she had been keeping them for him. When on February 21, 1964, one of the pictures exploded on the cover of Life magazine, some people decided the case against Lee Oswald was indisputable. But for most people with common sense, including me, the combination of the brandished rifle and the communist newspaper raised more questions than it answered.
At first glance the photographs appeared to be of Lee Oswald. However, after study it was apparent that in each picture Oswald’s face did not precisely fit the neck and body. Furthermore, the facial portrait of Oswald was exactly the same one in each photograph, whereas the posture and the distance of the body from the camera differed. In addition to that, using the length of Oswald’s face as a standard of measurement, one of the bodies in one picture was clearly taller than the corresponding body in the other picture.[31]
Of course, had the photographs actually been the real Oswald posing prior to the assassination with a rifle in his hand, this would have been in conflict with human nature. It is very rare—if not unheard of—in the annals of assassination for the assassin-to-be to provide so much incriminating evidence against himself in advance. It seemed plain enough to me that this was just another part of the process of setting up the patsy.
Thornley had told me that he returned from his summer in California by way of Mexico City. This happened to be very close to the time that the Warren Commission said Oswald was in Mexico. By November 1963, according to his own account, Thornley was living in a New Orleans apartment he rented from John Spencer.
We located Spencer, who turned out to be a friend of Clay Shaw’s. As he described it, sometimes Spencer visited Shaw, the director of the International Trade Mart, and sometimes it was vice versa. Spencer told us, however, that Shaw never came by while Thornley was living at his place.
Several days after the assassination, Spencer told us, he came to his house and found Thornley gone. In Spencer’s mailbox was a note from Thornley saying, “I must leave. I am going to the Washington, D.C., area, probably Alexandria, Virginia. I will send you my address so that you can forward my mail.” Spencer said it was quite unexpected because Thornley had at least a week left in the month before his rent was due. He went to Thornley’s apartment, number “C,” and found that paper had been left over the entire floor, torn up into small pieces like confetti. Before being torn up, the paper had been watered down so that the ink was blurred, making it unreadable.
Spencer said he had some conversations with Thornley about his book The Idle Warriors and that Thornley had asked him to read a copy of the manuscript, which had been turned down by several publishers before the assassination. Spencer never did get around to reading it. After the assassination Thornley told Spencer that he was going to be a rich man because of the coincidence of Oswald having been the subject of his book.
I later sent Andrew Sciambra to the Washington area, where he traced Thornley’s path. Thornley had wound up at Arlington, a Washington suburb, and had moved into Shirlington House, a first-class apartment building where he worked as doorman. Thornley stayed at Shirlington House for six months, until he testified before the Warren Commission. Oddly enough, his salary was less than the rent of his Shirlington House apartment.
In the mid-1970s when I was in the private practice of law, Thornley sent a lengthy, almost biographical, 50-page affidavit to me describing, among other things, evidence he had encountered in New Orleans of “Nazi activity” in connection with President Kennedy’s murder. It was apparent that even though I no longer was D.A., Thornley wanted to assure me that he had not been involved in Kennedy’s assassination in any way.
Although it did not accord with reality, as I recalled it, the affidavit had, in retrospect, one interesting feature. Purely gratuitously, it mentioned how Thornley had left Washington following his Warren Commission testimony and ultimately returned to California, where he and John Rosselli happened to become friends. The affidavit was mailed to me before Rosselli’s name surfaced during the Senate’s 1975 investigation of the C.I.A.’s assassination practices. Rosselli, it turned out, had been one of a number of mobsters with whom the Agency had developed a relationship during its pre-Castro activities in Cuba.[32]
After the Cuban revolution, Rosselli’s assignment from the Agency was to assassinate Fidel Castro. To this end, during 1962 and 1963 Rosselli was given poisoned pills, explosives, rifles, and handguns. However, nothing seemed to work out on the Cuban end. The last effort in this C.I.A.-Rosselli combine ended in mid-February 1963, apparently because “conditions were not right.” But Rosselli was not as close-mouthed about his mission as the Agency would have liked. When he appeared before a Senate committee investigating the assassination proclivities of the C.I.A., Rosselli testified that he was aware all along that his murder project was sponsored by the Agency.
Not long afterwards the remains of Mr. Rosselli—garroted and stabbed and cut in pieces—were found floating in an oil drum in Dumfounding Bay, off the Florida coast. Federal investigators were unable to find any leads to the perpetrators. This did not prevent the Justice Department from indicating that it thought the job was the work of organized crime. The C.I.A. said that it thought so, too. It did not seem to have occurred to federal investigative authorities that the mob would not likely have been the unhappy party as the result of Rosselli admitting to the Senate that he had initiated assassination attempts for the C.I.A.[33]
Whether the murder of John Rosselli was an old-fashioned gesture on the part of the mob or a clever example of what the Agency terms “damage control,” it is clear that in the middle 1960s when Kerry Thornley met Rosselli, he hardly was becoming a friend of the average American citizen.
Even after Kerry Thornley’s appearance before the Grand Jury, the strange intersections between his life and Lee Oswald’s remained enigmatic. Was Thornley an agent of the intelligence community? Had he impersonated Oswald or coached others to do so? Did he know more than he was saying? I did not know the answers back in the late 1960s. And the whole bizarre saga of Thornley became even more enigmatic when we later discovered a letter he had written to a friend in Omaha, Nebraska. Writing in February 1964, a few months after his arrival in the Washington, D.C., area, Thornley made a brief reference to President Kennedy’s assassination:
The whole thing was very interesting for a while, the assassination, because—on the surface—there was good reason for the unenlightened SS [sic] and F.B.I. to suspect I might’ve had a hand in it. We had some polite conversations and finally, I guess, I was cleared. No word from them lately. I hope, though, my move to this area scared the piss out of em. Whether or not I’ll be asked to put my 20 in at the Warren hearing, I don’t know. Or care. When it is all over, though, I may yet go piss on JFK’s grave, RIP.