17

SOME OF THE BEST WITNESSES to the assassination found their way to us after it became apparent to them that the federal agents and the Dallas police really were not interested in what they saw. Julia Ann Mercer was just such a witness. In fact, no other witness so completely illuminated for me the extent of the cover-up.

Mercer had been but a few feet away when one of the riflemen was unloaded at the grassy knoll shortly before the arrival of the presidential motorcade. Consequently, she was a witness not only to the preparation of President Kennedy’s murder but also to the conspiracy involved.

She gave statements to the F.B.I. and the Dallas Sheriff’s office, and then returned to the F.B.I. and provided additional statements, but she was never called by the Warren Commission—not even to provide an affidavit.

Much earlier, I had read Julia Ann Mercer’s statements in the Warren Commission exhibits, but I had never had a chance to talk to her. Then one day in early 1968 her husband called me at the office. He said that he and his wife were in New Orleans on business and had some things to tell me. I agreed to meet them at the Fairmont Hotel, where they were staying.

Arriving at their suite, I found a most impressive couple. A middle-aged man of obvious substance, he had been a Republican member of Congress from Illinois. Equally impressive, she was intelligent and well-dressed, the kind of witness any lawyer would love to have testifying on his side in front of a jury. After he had departed on business, I handed her copies of her statements as they had been printed in the Warren Commission exhibits. She read them carefully and then shook her head.

“These all have been altered,” she said. “They have me saying just the opposite of what I really told them.”

About an hour before the assassination she had been driving west on Elm Street and had been stopped—just past the grassy knoll—by traffic congestion. To her surprise (because she recalled that the President’s parade was coming soon), she saw a young man in the pickup truck to her right dismount, carrying a rifle, not too well concealed in a covering of some sort. She then observed him walk up “the grassy hill which forms part of the overpass.” She looked at the driver several times, got a good look at his round face and brown eyes, and he looked right back at her.

Mercer also observed that three police officers were standing near a motorcycle on the overpass bridge above her and just ahead. She recalled that they showed no curiosity about the young man climbing the side of the grassy knoll with the rifle.

After the assassination, when Mercer sought to make this information available to law enforcement authorities, their response was almost frenzied. At the F.B.I. office—where she went the day after the assassination—she was shown a number of mug shots. Among the several she selected as resembling the driver was a photograph of Jack Ruby. On Sunday, when she saw Ruby kill Oswald on television, she positively recognized him as the driver of the pickup truck and promptly notified the local Bureau office. Nevertheless, the F.B.I. altered her statement so it did not note that she had made a positive identification.

She laughed when she pointed this out to me. “See,” she said, “the F.B.I. made it just the opposite of what I really told them.” Then she added, “He was only a few feet away from me. How could I not recognize Jack Ruby when I saw him shoot Oswald on television?”

The Dallas Sheriff’s office went through the same laborious fraud and added an imaginative touch of its own. Although Mercer had never been brought before any notary, the Sheriff’s office filed a sworn affidavit stating that she did not identify the driver, although she might, “if I see him again,” and significantly changing other facts.

“See that notarized signature?” she asked me. “That’s not my signature either. I sign my name with a big like this.” She produced a pen and wrote her name for me. It was clear that the signature the Dallas Sheriff’s Office had on its altered statement was not even close to hers.

Julia Ann Mercer then wrote on the side of my copies of the F.B.I. and the Dallas Sheriff fabrications the correct version of what she had seen then. That version had not been acceptable in Dallas, but it was more than welcome to me. Conscious of the sudden deaths of some witnesses who appeared to have seen too much for their own survival, I thought that she should sign her maiden name as she had back in Dallas right after the assassination. At my suggestion she did so.

When I got back to my office, I thought about Julia Ann Mercer. She had been only a few feet away from one of the most crucial incidents of the assassination and had tried in vain to tell the federal and Dallas law enforcement authorities the simple truth. The implications of her experience were profound. First of all, Mercer’s observations provided further evidence that there was another rifleman on the knoll ahead of the President.

But to me the responses to her statements were even more chilling. They proved that law enforcement officials recognized early on that a conspiracy existed to kill the President. Both local and federal authorities had altered Mercer’s statements precisely to conceal that fact.

I already had concluded that parts of the local Dallas law enforcement establishment were probably implicated in the assassination or its cover-up. But now I saw that the highly respected F.B.I. was implicated as well. After all, the Bureau had to have known on Saturday, November 23, when it showed Jack Ruby’s photo to Mercer, that Ruby might have been involved in a conspiracy.[63] This was the day before Ruby shot Oswald.

The Bureau’s failure to locate Ruby immediately for questioning, along with its rewrite job on Mercer’s statements,[64] made me uncomfortable. Just how deeply, I wondered, was my former employer involved in this assassination?

The answer to my question began to emerge quite soon. Mark Lane had been working temporarily in New Orleans on his book A Citizen’s Dissent and helping me with the investigation. One night he gave a talk on the assassination at Tulane University. Afterwards he happened to meet a former F.B.I. employee named William S. Walter. During their conversation Walter mentioned that on November 17, 1963—five days before the assassination—he had been the night clerk on duty at the Bureau’s New Orleans office when a warning about a possible presidential assassination attempt came chattering through on the teletype machine. Walter immediately called five agents who handled the relevant local investigatory units, and considered his duty done. When he heard this, Lane promptly pulled Walter off to the side, interviewed him, and made out a statement concerning the substance of their conversation. Sometime later I located Walter and followed up, talking to him at length a number of times.[65]

In 1976, Walter gave a copy of the text of the F.B.I. telex to the Senate Intelligence Committee chaired by Senator Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania. After the Freedom of Information Act was passed, Lane also obtained a copy of the warning telex and made it available to me. This is what it said:

We learned from Walter that when the assassination occurred, he was eating lunch but immediately ran back to the New Orleans Bureau office. In the file he found the warning telex along with a duplicate which had soon followed it. At the time he copied the exact phraseology of the telex warning and kept it. Shortly afterwards he checked the file again to see if the warning was still there. It had been removed. No sign of it, nor any reference to it, remained.

The telex had been most explicit, naming both a place and dates for the attempt to assassinate the President. It was addressed to all special agents in charge, which meant every one in the country, including Dallas. And yet the F.B.I. did nothing. There is no record that it notified anyone—not even the Secret Service, which as the President’s bodyguard should have been informed immediately.

Had the November 17 warning been distributed to all concerned agencies, I realized, the last-minute change in the parade route could have been scrutinized more closely, spotted as a trap, and the parade might have been canceled. Even if the parade had been held, the limousine’s movable plastic bubble, which might have saved the President, could have been used. And the iron-clad rules of keeping windows closed and rooftops empty along the motorcade route could have been enforced by the Secret Service. Instead, as the parade approached the Dal-Tex Building and the Book Depository on the substituted route, the proliferation of open windows and the open limousine left no doubt that security for President Kennedy had been abandoned.[66]

When I learned of the telex warning from William Walter, nearly five years had passed since the assassination. But in that time none of the five agents Walter had called the morning of November 17 ever hinted to the American people or to the Warren Commission that the F.B.I. had received a specific warning about the assassination five days before it occurred. Nor had any of the special agents in charge across the country, to whom the warning had been addressed. Nor had the F.B.I. itself, or its director, J. Edgar Hoover, under whose name the warning had gone out in the first place. If such conspicuous silence did not smell of cover-up, I did not know what did.

The five-day warning telex soon took on added significance when I belatedly learned of some remarkable information made public years before by C.A. Hamblen, the early night manager of Western Union’s Dallas office. A week or so following the assassination, I discovered, Hamblen had stated to a number of individuals that approximately ten days before the assassination, Lee Oswald had been in the Western Union office and had sent a telegram to Washington, D.C. It was his impression that Oswald’s telegram had been directed to the secretary of the Navy. I already knew that Oswald, although relatively mild-mannered, was assertive enough to have sent other complaints to the secretary of the Navy—a fact which Hamblen could not be expected to have known.[67]

Hamblen also recalled that on several occasions Oswald had come to the Western Union office to collect modest money orders which had been sent to him. According to Hamblen, for identification Oswald showed him a library card and a Navy I.D. card. This was very close to what Oswald routinely carried for identification: a library card and Marine I.D. card.

With Hamblen’s recollection an intriguing situation arose: About ten days before the assassination Lee Oswald had sent a telegram to the secretary of the Navy. Then, five days before the assassination F.B.I. headquarters had sent a detailed telex warning of the impending attempt to kill the President to all Bureau offices. Might the two messages, I wondered, somehow be related?

My earlier research about Oswald’s relationship to the F.B.I. seemed relevant to this question. I had learned long before that Oswald’s address book contained the name of F.B.I. Agent James Hosty of the Dallas Bureau office. Immediately following Hosty’s name, Oswald had written a telephone number. I obtained a Dallas phone directory for the year 1963 and found that this was not the phone number of the local F.B.I. Yet, as I discovered, Hosty’s home phone number was not in the directory. It was apparent, then, that Oswald had written down Hosty’s unlisted home number or some message center. Hosty himself, I presumed, had given the number to Oswald.

I also knew that when the F.B.I. gave the Warren Commission a list of the contents of Oswald’s address book, it omitted Special Agent Hosty’s name and unlisted number, as noted down by Oswald. Even the Warren Commission was disturbed when it found out about this oversight. The F.B.I. explained that the omission had been made because the person who transcribed the list was only interested in “lead information.”

Then, years after the Warren Commission inquiry, an item appeared in the press describing Oswald’s visit to the Dallas F.B.I. office shortly before the assassination. The news story said that Oswald had left a note addressed to Agent Hosty. The woman at the Bureau office who first received the message stated that it contained a threat by Oswald to blow up the F.B.I. office. On the other hand, Hosty explained that it was merely a warning to him to stop questioning Oswald’s wife at their home while Oswald was not present. If the note was a threat to blow up the F.B.I. Dallas headquarters, then Oswald should have been placed immediately on the “Dangerous Character” list for special attention prior to the President’s arrival in Dallas. Even if the note was a much milder threat than that, Oswald ordinarily should have been given a prompt evaluation interview, if not confined outright to his residence during the President’s visit to the city. However, in this case the Dallas F.B.I. took no action whatsoever.

What the note actually said will never be known for sure. Hosty claims that Special Agent in Charge Gordon Shanklin ordered him to destroy it, which he promptly did. Interestingly, Hosty said that he had never mentioned the note to the Warren Commission because “he had been instructed by the F.B.I. not to volunteer information.”

This was not unlike the earlier incident in New Orleans when F.B.I. Agent John Quigley destroyed the notes of his interview with Oswald at the police department’s First District Precinct Station following Oswald’s arrest for his Canal Street imbroglio with the anti-Castro Cubans. (See Chapter 2.) What was it, I found myself wondering, that so consistently compelled the F.B.I.—traditionally compulsive about hanging on to notes and records—to cremate or tear up anything describing an encounter between the seemingly innocuous Lee Harvey Oswald and any special agent of the Bureau?

The image of Oswald bringing a note for Hosty to the Bureau office and leaving it at the front desk is compelling. I recall the way that the confidential informants often communicated with their contact agents during my brief tour with the F.B.I. in Seattle and Tacoma. Most of the informants would leave messages or information concerning an assignment at the front desk in a sealed envelope addressed to their contact agent. The informants were paid moderately, but regularly, for the secret information they provided on a variety of projects. And their identity was carefully protected. Even in Bureau files the informant was always identified by code.

In any event, I began to wonder if, in the weeks before the assassination, Lee Oswald was a confidential informant for the F.B.I., reporting to Special Agent James Hosty.

This possibility had been raised early in 1964 by Waggoner Carr, then attorney general of Texas. A man of high integrity and repute, Carr had told the Warren Commission in a secret session on January 22, 1964, that evidence he had acquired from Allan Sweatt, the chief of the criminal division of the Dallas Sheriff’s Office, indicated that Lee Oswald had been an undercover informant. More specifically, Oswald had been employed by the F.B.I. as confidential agent number 179 at a salary of $200 a month, beginning more than a year prior to and continuing up to the very day of the murder of President Kennedy.

This shocking news leaked into the media, appearing in articles by Joe Goulden in the Philadelphia Inquirer on December 8, 1963; by Lonnie Hudkins in the Houston Post of January 1, 1964; and by Harold Feldman in The Nation on January 27, 1964. After considerable debate, the Warren Commission agreed that it was necessary to conduct thorough hearings on this matter. Unfortunately, no such hearings were held. Of the three bylined writers just mentioned, not one was called as a witness by the Commission. Nor was the original source, the chief of the Sheriffs criminal division, ever called.

Over the years Waggoner Carr’s allegations had been lost in the tidal wave of information, theories, and speculation about the assassination. But now the idea that Oswald had been a confidential informant for the F.B.I., which I had discarded at first as a strained premise, began to make sense to me.[68] It could explain the presence of Hosty’s name and unlisted number in Oswald’s address book, Oswald’s visit to the Dallas Bureau office, and his threatening note to Hosty.

And the confidential informant possibility threw a most intriguing light on another curious fact: The F.B.I. did not mention Lee Oswald as a suspect in the assassination until two and a half hours after the shooting, shortly after Air Force One had departed for Washington with new President Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy’s body aboard.

According to Dallas Police Lieutenant Jack Revill, an F.B.I. agent came up to him at Dallas police headquarters at 2:50 P.M. and said that the Bureau had “information that this suspect was capable of committing the assassination.” The agent who brought this welcome news and was the first to mention the name of Lee Harvey Oswald was none other than James Hosty.

Was Hosty merely an innocent messenger, or had he and possibly others in the Bureau been involved in a plot to set up Oswald as the patsy? If F.B.I. employees had been part of the conspiracy, then that might explain why the Bureau had mysteriously failed to act on the warning sent over its telex system five days before the assassination and why no one responded to the letter of warning that Richard Case Nagell claimed to have sent to J. Edgar Hoover. (See Chapter 14.) It also might explain why Oswald, who evidently did not get along with Hosty and may have sensed that he was being set up, had sent a telegram to the secretary of the Navy ten days before the assassination.

I began to formulate a possible scenario. Long in advance, the engineers of the assassination had selected the idealistic and gullible Oswald as a patsy. His close-mouthed intelligence background helped assure not only success in the venture but subsequent support from the government, which would not want to admit that the assassination originated in its own intelligence community.

If Oswald was on the government payroll as a confidential informant in Dallas and New Orleans, he might well have believed that his job was to penetrate subversive organizations, including Fair Play for Cuba and perhaps Guy Banister’s apparatus, in order to report back to the F.B.I. about them. Along the way, he was allowed to penetrate a marginal part of the assassination project, again with the idea that he was engaged in an officially sponsored effort to obtain information about it. He may even have filed reports on the plot to kill the President with his contact agent, James Hosty. When Oswald sensed that Hosty was not responsive, he may have gone over his head and telegraphed some kind of warning to the secretary of the Navy, who in turn may have informed the F.B.I.’s Washington headquarters, which then sent out its warning telex.

But it was equally possible that Oswald had been acting as an informant for some other branch of the intelligence community as well, such as the O.N.I. or the C.I.A. represented by Guy Banister, and was withholding relevant information about the conspiracy from Hosty and the F.B.I. Then, when Hosty had innocently begun to harass Oswald and his wife to get more information, Oswald had responded with his threatening note and a telegram to the secretary of the Navy.

It was impossible to know what was in Lee Harvey Oswald’s mind. But whatever he thought he was doing, he had clearly acquired more information than the assassination’s engineers could tolerate. That is why he had to die so suddenly in Dallas less than 72 hours after John Kennedy.

I knew I could never take any of this into the courtroom. It offered no real link to Clay Shaw, and it was only conjecture. But it did seem to me that there was no better way to draw in and set up a scapegoat like Oswald than to persuade him that he had penetrated the planning for a great public murder and was in a position to give an eleventh-hour warning about it to the proper authorities.

The question that troubled me, and may well have troubled Oswald, was: If the Dallas police, the Sheriff’s office, the Secret Service, the F.B.I., and the C.I.A. were all potentially involved in the plot, who were the proper authorities?