14

FROM THE BEGINNING I was concerned about the insufficient size of my staff and budget for an investigation of the J.F.K. assassination. Early on there might have been a chance of obtaining a special increase in our budget, but that had been blown to smithereens by the editorial in the local press and the national onslaught that followed.

The dilemma was solved in an unexpected way. Practically out of the blue, volunteers who had heard about the investigation came to help us. Some arrived on the scene personally, some wrote, others called. By the spring of 1967 we had acquired an “assistant special team” made up of the volunteers. The extra help turned out to be a great lift to the morale of the special team.

One volunteer we picked up was a young Englishman who had been working at the National Archives in Washington. He sent us copies of his excellent research work, and inasmuch as we had no one in Washington to do archive research—in particular to obtain copies of Commission documents for us—we added him to the staff. Later, we had him move down to New Orleans to maintain our own accumulating investigative files, which we called “the Archives.”

Next there drifted in a most impressive volunteer—a broad-shouldered, square-jawed former case officer of the Central Intelligence Agency named William Wood. Recognizing that this was a rare opportunity to understand the workings and the mentality of the Agency, we were eager to grab him. However, before we did, we wanted to make sure that he actually had been with the C.I.A.

His story was that he had been with the Agency seven years but had been dropped after he became an alcoholic. While he bore no ill will against the Company,[53] he felt strongly about what we were trying to do in our Kennedy investigation and wanted to be of help. He was a newsman from Austin, Texas, and had credentials supporting his considerable experience as a newspaperman and investigator.

Wood saw that we were not completely satisfied about his past Agency connection, so he made a suggestion. He had the impression, he said, that an old friend of his from Agency days was still in charge of the Agency infirmary at Langley, Virginia. He gestured to Lou Ivon, who had been sitting in on our long initial interview. Why not, he suggested, have Ivon call the C.I.A., get the doctor on the phone, and then listen in on the conversation between Wood and the doctor?

When the doctor was on the phone and Wood responded, it became obvious that they knew each other well. Wood told the doctor that his drinking days were over, and while he missed the Agency, he had been doing well in the newspaper business. The doctor wished him good luck. Satisfied that Wood had a genuine Agency background, we welcomed him to the team.

Because of the curiosity of the news media about our activity, we decided it would be best to keep it quiet that we had a former Agency man aboard. So from that time on we used the name “Boxley” instead of Wood. Bill Boxley became a familiar figure in and out of the office. He always carried a loaded .45 automatic pistol, which he kept in a holster under his armpit. This indicated to me that his original intelligence service had been in the U.S. Army, because all of the other American intelligence services used the .38 caliber revolver. He also always carried with him a large rectangular black briefcase. He was an indefatigable worker, and it was apparent that he was dedicated to our effort.

Additional volunteers helped handle the burgeoning leads coming in. One was an urbane, very bright young man who had grown up in Latin America and spoke Spanish like a native; he was useful in interviews with Cuban exiles. Jim Rose, another former C.I.A. employee, was accepted after a strong recommendation from Boxley, who had known him back in his Agency days. Rose had a number of photographs showing himself instructing anti-Castro guerrilla trainees at the No Name Key training camp in Florida back in the early 1960s. Another volunteer was a private detective whose substantial business offered us access to technical equipment we needed. Another volunteer from the west coast had family money which provided him with plenty of free time and a useful travel capability.

With the enthusiasm and the fertile minds of the volunteers, the outlook appeared excellent for a real increase in our productivity. The only problem, as we would learn later, was that many of the volunteers were with us at the behest of the C.I.A. In fact, during one period there were almost as many men on our special team working for the federal government as were working for the New Orleans D.A.’s office. As time passed, however, one would make a mis-step, and I would winnow that one out.

At the beginning of the investigation I had only a hunch that the federal intelligence community had somehow been involved in the assassination, but I did not know which branch or branches. As time passed and more leads turned up, however, the evidence began pointing more and more to the C.I.A.

For example, one of the key players, Guy Banister, had past ties to the O.N.I. and the F.B.I., but his work in New Orleans with the Cuban guerrillas had to be C.I.A. David Ferrie, of course, had trained guerrillas for the Bay of Pigs invasion, a C.I.A. operation. And Jules Ricco Kimble, who had flown on a strange mission to Montreal with Shaw and Ferrie, admitted to getting assignments from C.I.A. case officers. (See Chapter 9.)

The impersonation of Oswald in January 1961 at Bolton Ford, where trucks were being purchased for the Bay of Pigs invasion, smelled of the C.I.A., as did the involvement of George de Mohrenschildt with Lee Oswald. The last-minute change in the parade route in Dallas was highly suspicious and raised serious questions about the mayor of Dallas, Earle Cabell, and his brother, former Deputy Director of the C.I.A. Charles Cabell, who had been fired over the Bay of Pigs fiasco. The parade route change, along with other leads pointing to the C.I.A., had been covered up neatly by the Warren Commission and its point man for intelligence issues, former C.I.A. Director Allen Dulles. Everything kept coming back to Cuba and the Bay of Pigs and the C.I.A.

But why, I kept asking myself, would the C.I.A., entrusted with protecting national security, want to assassinate its own President? All the evidence kept pointing to that, but it just did not make sense. To try to get some handle on it, I began reading everything I could get my hands on concerning the Cold War, the Kennedy presidency, and the intelligence community. With the whole house dark except for a circle of light around my desk, I would stay up until the early hours of the morning, engrossed in books. Somewhere I hoped to find a clue about what might have motivated the C.I.A.—or parts of it—to want to get rid of Kennedy. As I gained more knowledge over a period of months, a possible reason for the assassination started to emerge.

Beginning with his refusal to make air support available to help rescue the C.I.A.’s disastrous invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, President Kennedy had adopted a highly distrustful stance toward the cold warriors at the C.I.A. More important, he had taken significant steps toward a detente with the Soviet Union. Over the initial protests of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he had authorized Secretary of State Dean Rusk to sign a nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviet Union in 1963. During the Cuban missile crisis he had rejected his advisers’ recommendations to bomb and invade Castro’s Cuba. Instead, using a naval blockade, he had reached a private understanding with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, which included Kennedy’s commitment that the United States would abandon any plans to invade Cuba. The F.B.I. raid in the summer of 1963 shutting down the C.I.A.’s anti-Castro guerrilla training camp north of Lake Pontchartrain was part of the implementation of that understanding.

All of this defied more than a decade of Cold War foreign policy engineered largely by John Foster Dulles, President Eisenhower’s secretary of state, and his brother, C.I.A. Director Allen Dulles. By June of 1963 President Kennedy had directly and eloquently renounced the Cold War in a landmark speech at American University in Washington, D.C., underscoring that the United States and the Soviet Union had to live together peacefully on one small planet.

But none of these policy changes was as significant, in retrospect, as Kennedy’s intention to withdraw all American military personnel from Vietnam. Why this decision so horrified the foreign policy establishment could be understood only by going back to the beginnings of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

The American cold warriors’ view since the end of World War II, I learned, was that under no circumstances could the U.S. lose control of Vietnam and its valuable natural resources. As early as 1952 a secret National Security Council memo stated bluntly:

In 1954, after French troops surrendered to Ho Chi Minh’s forces at Dien Bien Phu, all the relevant powers, except the United States, signed the Geneva Accords temporarily separating the country along the 17th parallel until unification elections could be held. To rescue the American investment, Secretary of State Dulles, General Nathan Twining, and Admiral Arthur Radford initiated a plan for the American military to invade Vietnam, but President Eisenhower blocked it. Instead, Eisenhower, in effect, approved a permanent division of the country by canceling the scheduled elections and creating a separate government in South Vietnam. Under C.I.A. control, military advisers were used to prop up a puppet dictatorship against Ho Chi Minh’s forces from the North and the Viet Cong forces in the South, both seeking unification of the country.

This was the situation John Kennedy inherited as incoming President. At first he went along with C.I.A. pressure and authorized an increase in the number of U.S. military advisers. However, he refused to send combat troops. At the time of his death, observed his adviser Kenneth O’Donnell, he was determined to limit American assistance to Vietnam to technicians, helicopter pilots and Green Beret advisers, saying, “I’ll never send draftees over there to fight.”

In October 1963, seeing the U.S. bogged down in a no-win situation, Kennedy instructed Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to withdraw immediately 1,000 American military advisers from Vietnam—“an order that was quietly rescinded after his death”—and he planned to withdraw all American forces by the end of 1965.

This decision, on top of the new Cuba policy and the signing of the nuclear test ban treaty, added up to nothing less than a fundamental break with Cold War foreign policy, which had been the lifeblood of the C.I.A. Here, it seemed to me, was a plausible motive for the assassination. Though my thinking at this stage was not very developed, at least I could see that the C.I.A.’s vested interest as well as its ideological commitment were to the continuation of the Cold War. John Kennedy had not only threatened to end that but had also, as recalled by Senator George Smathers, threatened to strip the C.I.A. of its “exorbitant power.” Along the way he had made implacable enemies—from top-level C.I.A. cold warriors like Allen Dulles, General Charles Cabell, and Richard Helms (then deputy director in charge of covert operations) down to anti-Castro Cuban exiles who felt betrayed at the Bay of Pigs.

While it was difficult for me to accept that an entire agency as enormous as the C.I.A. could have sanctioned and carried out a plan to assassinate the President, it did not seem unreasonable that rogue elements within the Agency or contract agents who had been working with them on other projects might well have. That encompassed a lot of people, among them Clay Shaw, Guy Banister, David Ferrie, and a plenitude of Cuban guerrillas who had been trained north of Lake Pontchartrain.

Although none of the evidence we had gathered definitively implicated the C.I.A., I realized that sophisticated intelligence agencies rarely left smoking guns lying around. Amazingly, though, leads pointing to the Agency continued to come in. This must have worried somebody at Langley because my staff was infiltrated and gradually, over time, I learned that the Agency was actually attempting to obstruct our investigation. This only added to my suspicions that the C.I.A.—or some part of it—had been deeply involved in the assassination.

The Agency’s attempted obstruction of our investigation became increasingly perceptible when we tried to extradite Gordon Novel from Ohio. This legal maneuver grew out of the clandestine visit by some of Guy Banister’s associates to the blimp base at Houma, Louisiana. (See Chapter 3.) They had removed munitions from the Schlumberger bunker in the middle of the night and brought them into New Orleans.

Sometime after we learned about this jaunt, an informant advised us that Novel had taken a photograph of the truck used in picking up the munitions. Subsequently, Novel had sold the photograph to Walter Sheridan of N.B.C. I discussed this unusual case with the D.A. of Houma, and he insisted that as far as his jurisdiction was concerned, the removal of the munitions from the Schlumberger bunker had been a burglary. In my judgment, the transport of the burglarized material into New Orleans had been a felony, and the disposal of evidence relating to the offense (sale of the photograph to N.B.C.) also was a crime committed in New Orleans.

However, before I could question Novel about this latest adventure involving Guy Banister and his personal war against Cuba, Novel picked up word that I was looking for him (probably from one of the half dozen C.I.A. men I had naively embraced as associates) and hit the road.

We located Novel in Ohio and moved for his extradition in April 1967. We wanted to know why the ammunition had been taken from the Schlumberger bunker, why it had been brought into New Orleans, and why the photograph of the truck had been sold to Walter Sheridan.

In the following weeks, Gordon Novel, through interviews and press conferences in Ohio, began providing the public with more enlightenment about some of the C.I.A.’s activities than we had been able to develop in the previous several months. Among other things, he announced that the Schlumberger bunker business had been a C.I.A. enterprise all the way.

Even the New Orleans States-Item, which had shown no great interest in our investigation, headlined an article “Evidence Links C.I.A. to D.A. Probe.” The article stated that “the strongest C.I.A. ties lead to Gordon Novel.” It went on to say that Novel had informed a number of acquaintances that he had been a C.I.A. operative and would use this fact to clear himself of charges that he had participated in the burglary of the Schlumberger bunker.[54]

“To polygraph operators and to friends and associates,” the paper wrote, “Novel has said the munitions burglary was no burglary at all—but a war materiel pickup made at the direction of his C.I.A. contact.” Novel indicated that the Schlumberger bunker at the blimp base was in actuality “a C.I.A. staging point for munitions destined to be used as part of the abortive Bay of Pigs attack on Castro’s Cuba.”

Novel identified the other men present at the removal of the munitions from the bunker as all working for the C.I.A., among them David Ferrie, Sergio Arcacha Smith (former head of the Cuban Revolutionary Front in New Orleans, who moved to Dallas, Texas, following this incident) and a number of anti-Castro Cubans whom he did not know.

Approximately one month later, new evidence indicated more strongly Novel’s apparent linkage to the Central Intelligence Agency. A few weeks after Novel had departed the New Orleans scene, two young ladies moved into his apartment in the French Quarter. While cleaning the apartment, they found a penciled draft of a letter wedged under a plastic cover alongside the kitchen sink. The note came to the attention of Hoke May, a States-Item reporter, and May subsequently showed the letter to me. When he asked me for permission to publish it, I told him to go ahead.

The authenticity of the letter was confirmed by Novel’s attorney, Steven Plotkin, who stated, “Everything in the letter as far as Novel is concerned is actually the truth.” Gilbert Fortier, a leading New Orleans handwriting expert, concluded after comparing the letter with other samples of Novel’s handwriting that it indeed had been written by Novel.

The letter was addressed to Novel’s apparent New Orleans C.I.A. contact, a man identified only as “Mr. Weiss.” It should be added that this letter was written in January 1967, before our investigation had surfaced. In his letter Novel stated: 

Novel’s letter went on to say that the Agency should take “appropriate counteraction relative to Garrison’s inquisition concerning us.” He suggested that this could “best be handled through military channels vis-a-vis D.I.A. [Defense Intelligence Agency] man. Garrison is presently colonel in Louisiana Army National Guard and has ready reserve status.”

Here we had Gordon Novel suggesting to the C.I.A. that it have the military assign me to active duty as a way to get me off his back. In the end, I was not called for active duty. Nonetheless, we were unable to extradite Novel from Ohio. Even a personal call by Governor John McKeithen of Louisiana to Governor James Rhodes of Ohio, requesting him to extradite Novel, resulted only in Novel’s continued protection as a fugitive. Ohio returned Novel’s extradition papers to us, stating that they contained “technicalities which do not comply with the law.”

This was the first time our office had ever failed in an extradition case, but unfortunately, as we continued to investigate the J.F.K. assassination, it would not be the last. Most of the extraditions I sought in this case were blocked as if a giant foot had stepped on my office. These included an attempt to extradite from Nebraska Perry Russo’s ex-girlfriend Sandra Moffett, who had been at the party at David Ferrie’s about which Russo had testified.

We received even less cooperation from the federal government than from the states. We tried, for instance, to subpoena F.B.I. Agent Warren DeBrueys, who we believed could enlighten us on a number of issues. An informant had told us that DeBrueys was so involved with Guy Banister, David Ferrie, and the anti-Castro Cubans that instead of operating out of local Bureau headquarters, he had a special office at the Customs House on Canal Street, close to the scene of anti-Castro activity. DeBrueys was summoned by the Parish Grand Jury, but on instructions of the Justice Department, he pleaded executive privilege and refused to testify.

Later I felt it was time for the Grand Jury to hear from Allen Dulles. I wanted to know many things from him, specifically whether or not Clay Shaw, Lee Oswald, David Ferrie, Gordon Novel, and Guy Banister had been associated with the C.I.A., and why his former deputy, General Cabell, had not been questioned by the Warren Commission.

I sent off a subpoena to our nation’s capital. A brisk letter from the United States Attorney in Washington, D.C., came back shortly. It informed me that he “declined” to serve the subpoena on Mr. Dulles.

Meanwhile, relatives of Richard Case Nagell, a federal intelligence agent, had been in touch with me. They said that in mid-1963 he had discovered an operation to assassinate President Kennedy. His attempt to warn the government of this, they explained, had resulted in his being sent to the federal penitentiary for three years. He was in the process of being released and wanted to meet with me in another city. If I could not go see him, the family would visit me.

I agreed, and two members of his family flew from New York down to New Orleans to set up the meeting. Their confirmation of the story—although lacking in the background which only he could provide—was convincing. However, he refused to travel outside of New York City, where he recently had arrived following his release from federal prison. I agreed with his family to discuss the matter further the next day.

At home that night I went through the Warren Commission material. According to the hearings index, the name of Nagell had never come up. It did not seem to be in the Commission exhibits either. Nevertheless, I was curious about this unusual story and determined to find whatever I could about Nagell. If he had been close enough to the assassination planning to have learned about it in advance, I reasoned, then the federal bureaucracy would have produced a report on Nagell. Even if it had been altered to point in the wrong direction, somewhere there had to be a report.

Then, in the Commission documents, I finally stumbled across it. The F.B.I. report said, in full:

Nagell indeed had been on the fringe of things, at least, or he would not have been in the Bureau’s report. It was evident, however, that it had been heavily sanitized. It was one of the shortest reports produced in the entire F.B.I. investigation. There was no reference to Nagell’s occupation. There was no hint of why the F.B.I. had questioned him. There was no reference to the federal charge against him at the time the report had been written. Yet the charge had been real enough that he only now—three years later—was getting out of prison.

The next morning I met with Nagell’s family again at my office, and in a few minutes I was talking to him on the phone. He was explicit in his requirements for a rendezvous. It had to be in New York City. I had to be the one to go there; he would not talk to anyone simply representing me. The meeting had to be in the open air, not in a hotel or other enclosed building.

A very uptight guy, I thought, but I assumed he had his reasons. I described a spot in South Central Park, just across 59th Street from the Plaza Hotel, near the great pond. It was an area of light trees and scattered shrubbery and benches. He was agreeable to our meeting there.

So I flew to New York.[55] A few minutes before the appointed time, I stepped out of the Plaza Hotel and walked across the crowded street into the park. The area was deserted except for a tall, lean man who was standing there with his hands in his pockets. His blondish hair was thinning. He studied me as I approached him.

We shook hands and sat down on a bench together. It was hard to believe that we were in the heart of New York. There was no one nearby. It was a sunny day, with a light breeze riffling through the small trees. There followed, as I recall it, one of the most provocative and frustrating conversations I have ever had. I cannot say he did not warn me at the outset.

“I am not going to identify the organization I worked for in 1963,” he said. “You simply will have to draw your own conclusions about that. Nor will I say exactly what I was working on. I am bound by some laws in this area, and I’ve already had enough problems from the government without having any new ones.”

Nevertheless, I could not withhold the query. “Were you with the Company?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I cannot answer that question.”

“Then just what information can you give me?” I asked. I had not come all the way to New York to hear him recite the standard secrecy agreement that all agents in the intelligence community are required to sign.

“I am already on record about my learning that the assassination was scheduled and about my effort to contact the Bureau and warn them about it. As far as I am concerned, I have a right to go into that because I have already done so before. I just thought that you should know firsthand what I have to say. Is this of any interest to you?”

I nodded.

In mid-1963 he had been working for the United States government, so Nagell’s story began, in an agency which he would not identify. The people for whom he worked, a vagueness from which he never departed, were curious about a project involving a fellow named Lee Oswald and some other men. Consequently, Nagell was assigned to spend some time establishing the necessary relationships and observing. In late August or early September of 1963, for reasons he would not spell out, it became apparent that an exceedingly large—he emphasized the word “large”—operation, pointing toward the assassination of President Kennedy, was under way. At just about the time of this discovery, for reasons he would not explain, the individual who had given him his assignment was moved to another part of the country, and Nagell suddenly found himself without a direct contact.

It was a strange tale, Nagell being “frozen out” by the very government agency which had assigned him to conduct a penetration of the ongoing activity. I can only say that Nagell impressed me as being utterly honest and sincere in his account.

Knowing what was going to happen, he went on, but having no way of knowing when, he decided that the best solution was to notify J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the F.B.I. He wrote Hoover a letter spelling out all that he had been able to learn about the proposed assassination. He sent the letter registered, return receipt requested. Then, as the days and weeks passed with no answer from the F.B.I. chief, he concluded that his attempt to warn of what was approaching had been in vain. Worse, he sensed from the silence which his letter had met that there was a very real danger of his being drawn into a trap. After all, he had been in the company of Oswald, and others with him, during much of the summer of 1963.

Finally, in what he admitted was an act of desperation, he decided that his one safe course was to insure that he was in a federal institution on the day the assassination occurred. He would rather be charged, he reasoned, with malicious mischief than be drawn into a giant trap involving the assassination of a President. He walked into a federal bank in El Paso, fired several shots in the ceiling, then waited outside sitting on the curb until the guard came running by. He had to call back the guard, who in his haste had rushed past him.

But Nagell was not charged with malicious mischief. The government charged him with armed robbery. Moreover, at his trial he was convicted, and the judge sentenced him to ten years imprisonment.[56]

Nagell answered a few questions. Had he actually been in physical association with Lee Oswald? Right there with him? Yes, he replied. And with other men connected with Oswald? The answer was yes. Where did this occur? In New Orleans and in Texas.

I asked him whether these other men and Oswald all were working together on the project or whether the others were manipulating Oswald. He thought this question through at some length. Then he said that he did not pretend to have been close enough to know for sure, but his intuition was that the others had manipulated Oswald from the outset.

I asked him the names of the other men. He hesitated, but when the answer came, it was specific: Guy Banister, Clay Shaw, and David Ferrie.

With what organization were these men connected? Now he looked at me with a half-smile and shook his head slowly. I pressed. Were they connected with the C.I.A.? “I cannot discuss or name any government organization,” he replied. In spite of the troubles he had been through, he would not say a word about the intelligence community at large, with the single exception of the F.B.I.’s having ignored his warning letter about President Kennedy’s murder. And that was the sum of Nagell’s story. Beyond the precise parameters he had established he would not be budged a centimeter.

During most of my flight home I reflected long and hard on my Central Park meeting with Richard Case Nagell. I had studied him closely for all of the three hours or so we were together, and I was satisfied that weaving a fabricated tale was not in this man’s makeup. On the other hand, there seemed to be no getting around the fact that his account was not easy to digest. I concluded that I would probably have to chalk up the Central Park scene to experience.

Many years down the road I found myself reading an account of Nagell’s arrest by East German police as he attempted to cross back into West Germany. Richard Case Nagell definitely was not your basic insurance salesman.

Whether Nagell had come to me on his own or had been sent by some intelligence apparatus to set me up in some unknown way I never learned. But another incident that followed made me realize that I could be entrapped and discredited at any time.

Increasingly I had begun making speeches at various universities, hoping that by communicating with students throughout the country I could offset the hysterical assault of the plainly unified mass media. Equally important, I had fast been using up my savings from the National Guard, and the fees from these talks were becoming helpful in continuing to finance our investigation.

So here I was about to go on the road again. This time I had a speech coming up at New Mexico University, and it was on this trip that our domestic intelligence structure made its first attempt to entrap me. I arrived at the university in Albuquerque in the afternoon and that evening spoke for several hours to the students. I received a heartwarming and encouraging response, as I usually did at universities.

Almost immediately after the talk Bill Boxley, the former C.I.A. man who had become one of my volunteer investigators, appeared in the lobby of my motel. I was surprised to see him because I thought he was back in New Orleans.

Pulling me off to the side, he told me with great concern that word had been received that an attempt was going to be made to kill me. He had been left with no alternative but to fly to New Mexico where he could act as my bodyguard. He expressed relief at having made it there in time.

I had always had a high regard for Boxley’s intelligence and ability. For once, however, I was furious. I found an empty table and led him to it. “I notice,” I said, “that you always carry a forty-five.” He nodded, patting his shoulder holster. “What branch of the Army were you in before you went into the C.I.A.?” I asked.

He paused, uncertain where I was headed. “The infantry. I was a dogface for years. Then the Army Counter-Intelligence Corps. Then into the Agency. What’s the problem?”

“When you were in the Army,” I asked, “did you have a chance to find out what an order meant?” He nodded. “Do you happen to remember,” I continued, “my ordering everyone on my staff not to participate in passing on these horror stories, these endless rumors about how somebody is going to be killed?”

“Yes, but—” he began.

“There is no but,” I said. “I don’t appreciate your dumping this paranoid garbage on me. And I don’t appreciate your inability to follow a simple order. Especially,” I added, “when it means that I personally am going to end up paying for your flight out here and back.” The last I growled at him almost savagely because Boxley was always out of money, and I continually had to write checks for him.

Over my angry objections, still adamantly protesting that I needed protection, Boxley shared my suite at the motel that night. Placing his large .45 automatic pistol on the table beside him, he slept on the sofa. The next morning he went with me to the airport and saw me off to Los Angeles, where I had some people to meet in connection with our investigation.

When I arrived at the Los Angeles airport, I went straight to the magazine rack to buy something to read. There were no seats at the Los Angeles airport baggage claim area, and I have always been allergic to standing around wasting time. Consequently, as I had remarked to Boxley a month or so earlier when the flight to Los Angeles had been mentioned, at the L.A. airport I always went to the men’s room, sat down in a toilet booth, and read a magazine for about ten minutes until my luggage arrived. Then I would pick it up, hail a cab, and be on my way.

This time something unusual happened. After buying a copy of Life, I went into the men’s room to read it. I opened to an article by General James Gavin recommending that we adopt new techniques of defense in the Vietnam War. At just that moment, I heard the door in the booth right next to me open and close. I had taken the first in a long line of empty booths. When someone almost immediately entered the very next booth, I knew that something was wrong. I closed the magazine on my lap and listened.

Then I heard low whispering voices at the door. I did not wait a second longer. Since all I had intended to do was read, I was already fully dressed and thus was able to open the door of the booth quickly. Two fat uniformed airport policemen were stuck momentarily in the exit door of the men’s room as they sought to rush out of it simultaneously, apparently in response to my unexpected emergence. The three of us left together.

Then I saw a ring of at least half a dozen additional airport police in uniforms, gathered in a semi-circle around the entrance to the men’s room. Even as it was dawning on me that I had been set up, the sergeant in charge of them addressed me sharply. “Hey, mister!” he said in an accusatory tone. “How long were you in that men’s room?” The answer, of course, was two or three minutes at the outside. However, under the circumstances, that hardly was the point.

Even as he addressed me, I noticed that two women assistants working at the counter for one of the rent-a-car services were staring at me and had recognized me. As a by-product of the intensive media assault, I had been receiving almost continual television coverage. This was one occasion when it was useful.

“That’s none of your goddamn business,” I yelled at him. I turned and, as I walked past the other policemen toward the luggage ramp, I saw the sergeant in charge shake his head. The other policemen, who had been standing in my way, moved apart and let me through.

Climbing into a cab, I knew how lucky I had been to get away. As I had a chance to reflect, I realized that there was more to the snare than had then been visible. I remembered a curious phone call I had received about three weeks earlier from Los Angeles. The call had come to my house in New Orleans, where I had an unlisted telephone number. The caller was a man I had not seen in many years. I had once represented him briefly on a federal case. I recalled him as a grimy, furtive, and disheveled homosexual who sold pornographic photographs for a living. Such a client was hardly to my choosing, but at the time I was in the business of representing criminal as well as civil cases, and so I had accepted his case. But this man failed to pay me, and I notified the court that I was no longer his attorney.

Years later, only three weeks before the bizarre incident at the airport, this character had called me out of the blue. After he identified himself, I asked him how he had obtained my unlisted number. He responded vaguely that he had connections. I then asked him why he was calling me, and he launched into a weird explanation. He was thinking of visiting New Orleans during the next Mardi Gras, he said, and he thought perhaps we could get together. I told him that I had no intention of getting together with him anytime or anywhere and slammed down the phone.

Now, I suddenly realized who had been placed in the booth next to me just prior to my intended arrest at the Los Angeles airport. As an experienced prosecutor, it was not difficult for me to envision what would have happened had I not shot out of the men’s room so quickly, emerging along with the two policemen. One way or the other, my seedy former client would have arranged to come out of his stall at about the same time as I emerged from mine. Any of a variety of eminently prosecutable scenes would have been created. The airport police would have responded, and at my subsequent trial for violating some obscenity misdemeanor under California law, I would have found myself as the defendant under cross-examination. At the appropriate moment a prosecutor would have asked me if I still had any relationship with my former client, who would have just finished testifying for the prosecution. I would have responded, of course, that I did not. Then the prosecutor would have produced the man’s Los Angeles telephone bill. It would have on it a long distance call to me at my unlisted home number in New Orleans. That would have been the end of the ballgame.

My conviction of the sex misdemeanor charge would have made headlines across the nation, the Louisiana legislature would have been left with no alternative but to remove me from office, and the C.I.A. would have accomplished one more dirty trick in the name of national security.

I analyzed the whole affair repeatedly during my visit in Los Angeles and my flight home. But I could not figure out how the Los Angeles airport police knew exactly what flight I would be on.

The answer came much later when Vincent Salandria, a distinguished Philadelphia attorney who was the most prominent critic of the Warren Commission’s explanation of President Kennedy’s bullet wounds, came down to see our investigative team in action. On the day Salandria arrived, Bill Boxley was presenting to the special team some evidence he had tracked down in Dallas on a recent trip.

After the meeting broke up, Salandria asked me if he could look at other material—memos, notes—from Boxley. I picked out some samples from the files, and Salandria spent the rest of the day going through the folders. When we got home, he suggested we go into the living room and talk.

“You once mentioned your concern about your office being penetrated,” he said almost idly as he turned over the papers on his lap. Salandria had an unusually soft, unruffled voice, suggestive of silk sliding across silk.

“That’s right,” I said. “Perhaps you get paranoid in this sort of thing. It’s just a feeling I’ve had.”

“Jim,” he said softly, “I’m afraid your friend, Bill Boxley, works for the federal government.”

I had a cold feeling over my entire body.

And then Salandria methodically showed me why that had to be the case. Boxley’s memos and summaries—each impressive in its own right—did not add up when evaluated as a whole. It was embarrassingly apparent that Boxley’s material had been designed, first, to intrigue me and, second, to lead nowhere at all.

Salandria picked up the phone and called Boxley. “Bill,” he said, “Jim and I have been having a conversation. We’re over at his place. We wondered if you could come by.”

Two hours later I looked at my watch. “He’s not coming over,” I said.

“I think you’ll find that Mr. Boxley has gone,” he replied.

I got Lou Ivon on the phone and told him to come over. Then we drove to Boxley’s rented room on Canal Boulevard. I had never been in it. The landlady let us in the front door. “No,” she said, “I haven’t seen the man since he rented the room earlier this year. He just sends me a check every month.”

She showed me Boxley’s room. A shirt, folded from the cleaners, had been tossed on the bed. “He left that shirt here six months ago,” she said. I showed her Boxley’s home number in my address book. She shook her head. “There’s no phone with that number here.”

“Somewhere around here,” Salandria purred, “the government has to have a very comfortable safe house. But I doubt if we’ll ever see it.”

I did not reply. I was thinking about the incident at the L.A. airport. It finally hit me. It was Boxley who had told the airport police which flight I would be on. He had called them from New Mexico after seeing me get on the plane. The story about an attempt to kill me was concocted. His real mission had been not to protect me but to set me up.

I was disgusted with myself. I had been so blind. In contrast, Vincent Salandria had taken a single day away from his law practice in Philadelphia, flown down, and had pegged Boxley virtually in one sharp-eyed glance.

The next day we learned that Boxley had traveled to Beaumont, Texas, following Salandria’s phone call. From there, using the name of Wood, he sent telegrams to the editors of the Times-Picayune newspaper and each of the local television stations stating that he had resigned as an office investigator upon learning that I was addicted to drugs.

A reporter from one of the TV stations gave a copy of the telegram to Lou Ivon and asked him curiously who this man Wood was, but that’s as far as the story got; Boxley’s eleventh-hour riposte disappeared like a stone dropped in the center of Lake Pontchartrain, leaving not a ripple.

Still, the man had been sitting in on our innermost meetings for months. With his big briefcase always in his hand, he had been in and out of our file room a hundred times. I had to admit that I had been badly fooled. And worse, every one of our files now had to be considered duplicated by the federal government.